Shabbat Noach 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Deborah's sermon here or read it below.
In the October half term before the pandemic, exactly 4 years ago this weekend, I was in Israel. Along with other leaders in our Reform movement we spent a remarkable morning at kibbutz Nachal Oz, sitting and listening to residents and local leaders talking about their lives right on the border with Gaza, why they’d chosen to live there despite the dangers, why their communities were growing as young families chose to come and be part of what they were building.
They were optimists and activists, people who prided themselves on their volunteer work driving Gazans to hospitals in Israel, people who had a vision for shared society, who maintained relationships on both sides of the fence. Board members of human rights NGOs. Many of their neighbours all across the otef, as we’ve been hearing in the past fortnight, were the same, maybe it’s why the reform movement has found such natural partnership in the Sha’ar Hanegev region. It’s a place full of kibbutzim and moshavim with deeply rooted sense of community, with hope in the face of the daily fears they faced of rocket attacks and infiltrations. In a place where you might expect to find battle hardened hearts and emotional fences there was, there is still, so much empathy, so much hope.
Two weeks ago, my Shabbat morning began with a WhatsApp that one of the people who was with us that day, the mayor of Sha’ar Hanegev, a man who cultivated this vision of a shared industrial centre for Israelis and Gazans to work together in, had been killed in the early stages of the attack- at that stage all we knew was that he had been involved in a gunfight defending the kibbutz.
He was a close friend of many in the reform movement, and the news of his death became just a sliver of a foreshadowing of the horror that was to come. Yesterday we learnt his son had been found murdered too. With every name, with every story, the reality of what had happened and the extent of the violation of humanity has hit Israelis and the global Jewish family in a crushing way.
There’s this particularly gutting component to it, because the more we know about the victims, their kindness, their humanity, their dreams, their aspirations, their hopes for peace, their volunteering, all of these things, the more aware we are of the magnitude of what has been taken from us with their murder, or has been stolen from their families as they are held hostage.
And the more something very difficult becomes clear. Many of them were people who believed deeply in peace, in human rights, in the dignity of those on the other side of the Gaza fence.
But that doesn’t matter, not to a terrorist.
The pain many in our community are carrying is a raw grief compounded by ‘something else’. That ‘something else’ is a feeling that suffering can be relativised, humanity can be relativized, that someone can hear of a person’s awful fate and respond that because of a decision their government made, or because of an interpretation of history, or because of what happened next, something utterly beyond the suffering person’s control, that somehow it matters less. It’s the workplace comment when someone says in response to what they’ve heard ‘of course it’s sad but…’, or ‘yes but consider the context’ and it's really cutting.
In their inhumanity and in their absolute inability to see beyond violent hatred, terrorists and extremists put out into the world the message that civilians, children, elderly, people going about their ordinary lives, are legitimate targets. That there are some people whose lives are not worth living just because of how they have been born or because of where they live. It’s absolutely and emphatically and unreservedly wrong. The taunts, time taken in torture, and the glee that arises from making others suffer is bone-shuddering.
And when something shakes us to the core, it also tells us what that core is made of.
When Noah, our sedra’s namesake, is told that God is going to destroy everyone on earth except for him and his family, he gets on with doing what he is told. Rabbinic teachings tell us that Noah was described as righteous in his generation, but he would have been considered as nothing in the age of Abraham. Next week we are given a taste of what that means, when God tells Abraham that the city of sodom is condemned. Abraham argues on behalf of the people, desperate to find even one righteous soul.
When Noah hears that God is going to destroy the world, we are simply told that ‘Noah did as God had commanded him’. He didn’t stop, he didn’t wonder about the people who were to be swept away in the flood, he just built the ark, saved his family. He’s not considered a prophet in Jewish tradition, his lack of righteousness becoming apparent in the eyes of history.
In next week’s sedra Abraham, our first prophet, shines a light on Noah’s lack of righteousness. When he learns that God is to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah he reacts angrily to God, “Will You sweep away the innocent along with the guilty?” He bargains with God “What if there should be fifty innocent within the city; will You then wipe out the place and not forgive it for the sake of the innocent fifty who are in it?” He reprimands God “Far be it from You to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, so that innocent and guilty fare alike. Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?”.
Judy Klitzner writes that:
Abraham's extraordinary exertions attest to his faith in the abundant human potential for change. In addition, they convey his belief that human beings bear responsibility toward one another.
Though his own survival is never in question, he refuses to submit to a complacent acceptance of God's decree to kill others. Instead he risks bringing God's wrath upon himself as he tirelessly pleads on behalf of the citizens of Sodom (Gen. 18:30, 32).
Abraham is shocked, shocked that the God of creation, the God of promise and love, can turn on God’s own creation in this way. What is just about sweeping away whole cities? Abraham shows he is capable of something that Noah wasn’t. His expectation is not about whether he is saved, it’s about his belief in others, and in their right to life too. He might have failed in his quest to save Sodom and Gomorrah, but in the eyes of our tradition and from that point on in Jewish tradition his argument with God stands.
You cannot sweep away the innocent along with the wicked, and God has learnt that too. By the time there is the potential destruction of another city, this time the city of Nineveh, it is God who makes the argument to Jonah- reminding him and us of what his forefather once knew.
Then the Lord said, "You cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow, which appeared overnight and perished overnight. And should I not care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, (Jonah 4:10-11)
How can I not care? How can I not fight for people? God asks Jonah. Ours isn’t a pacifist tradition, but it is a moral one, it doesn’t say we can’t fight wickedness, but it does emphasise the importance of how we go about that fight.
Grief is instructive, it tells us something really fundamental about where our humanity lies. Pain comes from somewhere, somewhere foundational, and when we feel it we have an opportunity to choose how to honour it, or to cope by finding a way to silence it.
Our pain can make us like Noah, frightened at the prospect of destruction, clear about how to try and save ourselves and our families, and disconnected from the consequences for others.
But it doesn’t have to. Pain can also direct us to our humanity, to our core, it can give us a framework for resistance to the very ideas that enable the hatred and suffering we’ve witnessed or experienced.
When callous disregard for human life hurts us, rather than shutting us off, suffering can attune us to the needs and pain of others, help us to feel in such a way that demands us to find a voice that resists more hurt and more pain flooding the world.
It’s in every way the harder option- the ark is perhaps a more honest reflection of how emotions hit us, the urge to gather up those we love and to keep them safe no matter what happens to anyone else. But it matters for who we become in this next stage of the conflict. Who are we, as neighbours, colleagues, Jews? How do we not turn the hurt that we’ve felt as posters of kidnapped children have been torn down into the same kind of disconnection and victim blaming that has wounded us? How do we allow ourselves to look at the footage and hear stories from Gaza, and to grieve and mourn and lament the death and suffering of others? How do we stop the shockwaves of terror infecting us and heaping more pain and grief upon people? Part of resisting the dehumanisation around us is to know that that compassion is a human statement, not a political one.
How the next stage of war unfolds in Israel and Gaza is beyond any of us here in Finchley this morning. How the next stage of war changes us, changes our social and professional and interfaith relationships, is not. The brutality of others can brutalise us too, lead us to crass and inhumane comments, or to close our hearts to the pain of others. Or it can lead us to the root of our humanity, to listen and care and love deeply and to resist doing to others what people have hatefully and hurtfully done to us.
