Sermons

Shabbat Lech L'cha 5784

You can listen to Rabbi Deborah's sermon here or read it below.

I’m going to be honest, I’m not trained for this. Actually, I suspect almost none of us are. I studied medicine, education, Jewish law, ethics and pastoral care. I know about grief, about listening, and about learning. 

I never took the module in military strategy, or the advanced diploma in open source intelligence, or the class on how to inoculate yourself against traumatic imagery, or any of the other things that feel like they would have been quite useful about now. 

I feel like everyone is suddenly an expert in middle eastern affairs. The interior designer who I follow on instagram for nursery inspiration suddenly knows a lot more than the weapons expert on the BBC about missile trajectories. My friend from primary school is an expert in Shi'ite theology and its role in the Hamas charter. Even the man in the pharmacy wants to tell me what an awful thing my people are doing, well, not my people, but the people who are like me enough for him to tell me as if I can pass the message on, if I get what he means. He hopes I know he doesn’t really mean me, he just needed to tell someone who felt less far away than he does. 

And I do feel far away, very far away. In my warm home in my own bed I can't help but think of those whose beds lie empty, their families desperate for news, or whose sheets feel like the flimsiest protection from a ceiling that might fall on their head any moment. 

And I don’t, I don’t feel far away because my day to day means listening to you all share what it’s like at the moment on campus, at school and sixth form, at work, online, on the streets. And it means knowing that it’s hard wherever you sit on the political map. It’s hard if you’re a Jew who feels your voice isn’t represented by community leaders, it’s hard if you’re someone at work who feels your employer is ignoring your experience of discrimination, it’s hard if you’re just trying to live your life while feeling like if you don’t explicitly state something that someone is demanding of you then they will accuse you of thinking something awful. 

So I get it, if you’re here this Shabbat and feeling tired and the last thing you want is more Jewish space being taken up by these conversations, or if you’re sitting here and you’re waiting to hear something, or if you’re feeling on edge wondering if I’m going to say something that upsets you, or whether I’m going to say something that affirms you. And chances are if I did one of those things for someone I’d be doing the opposite for someone else.

And actually the only thing I really wanted to talk about on this Shabbat when Abraham sets out on his own journey to an unknown promised land was how the words that have been ringing in my ears all week are the words of one of my, and many others, favourite parables that we read over the Chaggim. ‘Away from here, away from here’. All I know is how desperately I want to be away from here- away from wondering where the police car speeding down the Finchley road is going, away from a place where people are mourning, away from my phone that keeps showing me images of smiling children that fade into the horrific sight of their blood spattered bedrooms. Away from another late night watching the news unfold, away from the fear and the uncertainty that comes with it.

In Kafka’s parable he speaks of a man who gave orders for his horse to be brought around from the stables:

He writes:

It is truly an immense journey. That feels like quite an understatement. How we get from the mess of war, from the geopolitics of regional proxies, underground tunnel networks, confused leadership and civilians caught in the crossfire to the peace and dignity that everyone deserves. How we, us, here  in the UK stop a satellite of the conflict further erupting in our society. Splitting our communities into us and them. The children of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael, whose birth is told of in this week’s Sedra, competing for oxygen, and for love.

It’s immense, and none of us really know how this will turn out. We might have our favourite military experts, the people whose words make sense and whose opinions resonate, the people who help us feel a sense of security because they know, and they can tell us the right thing to do. Their analysis seems sage, and when we find it its so tempting to want to share it with everyone- I FOUND IT, I FOUND THE ANSWER, THE PERSON WHO KNOWS, THE RIGHT THING TO DO, THIS WILL FIX EVERYTHING, THIS PERSON GETS IT. Being sure is safe. 

I envy that certainty. I want it. I don’t have it. 

I only know away from here- and my training doesn’t teach me the language of military strategy and the tactics of urban warfare. I can tell you that Judaism has a strong notion of just war, I can’t tell you how to convert your emotional reaction into a measurement of that justice. I can’t tell you how much pain to stomach, or not to be upset, I can’t make the unhappy reality any more palatable. I can’t tell you how history will judge us, or how we’ll judge ourselves. 

I, we, all any of us can tell each other is how we feel, and how those feelings guide our thinking. But let’s be honest for a minute- even the most well-read of us, all we’re doing is approximating a guess about what should happen. We’re all in the world of ‘away from here’. And that matters, because there are substantial and substantive differences of view within the community, and they’re coming from good people’s best attempts at trying to get ‘away from here’ in the best way possible. 

I can’t tell you what should happen- that’s not what this bimah is for anyway. Instead I want to talk about provisions. Because it's a long journey, and though we may have opinions, we have relatively little control over where it will go. What we have much more control of is how we travel it, and how we care for each other on the way, and who it makes us into. How we hold the fact that we need to arrive at the promised land, at our destination, together and in one piece. And while I don’t know much about armies and their decisions, I do have some things to say about communities, and about us. 

What will sustain us on the way? 

Each other- time together, empathetic and open listening, creating spaces where we are safe to talk to and with each other about how it feels to be Jewish and part of a global people. We have to be able to create safe space to talk about the personal and particular, especially as the news cycle necessarily moves on, and it might feel like there is less time in general society for the things we are still processing. That’s why we’ll continue to create space in shul, and continue to signpost to other ways of caring for ourselves. Because this is home, this is family, and so I know it might seem to some like we’re overly focused on the Jewish experience when we come to shul. But that’s because it’s our job, if we can’t talk about the Jewish experience unapologetically here, where can we process? It isn’t because we aren’t thinking about others too, but this is family, and our mourners are in the Shloshim.

Practical stuff- feeling impotent is not easy, that’s the seductive power of the share button online, it makes us feel like we’re doing something. We’re focusing on ways that we can practically do, whether by volunteering at the drop in for Israeli families on Thursdays, sharing resources and necessities with people who need them, other kinds of volunteering, or creating together. Inter-communal dialogue, interfaith activities, stuff that gives people at FRS the chance to act on our values and to take the compassion, empathy, fear, and all of the things we are holding in us, and use them for the good of others and for society. 

Solidarity- it’s 5 years this weekend since the deadly shootings at the tree of life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The Shabbat afterwards, people were encouraged to come to shul to ‘show up for Shabbat’ and I’ll never forget arriving to lead the Friday night service and seeing three rows of people already sitting at 6pm- that’s how I knew they were visitors! I’m not sure many will forget the human chains around shuls, the visits from our non-Jewish neighbours, and how powerful it felt to be held. We need to hold each other, to show up for each other and to find ways to decrease the sense of distance and loneliness. We need to show up for other faith communities, particularly our local Muslim community, who are also experiencing an increase in hate crime, find ways to connect and dispel the narratives of division- help them know how to show up for us too. To hold each other, to help each other feel safe. We’ve done it before, we can do it again. 

Jewish joy- We’re going to keep celebrating life- even and especially when things are dark. We’re going to keep rolling the scroll onwards, lifting each other up, remembering who we are and why we are. We’re going to be proud, proud of our tradition, proud of our people, and proud of our values. We’re going to talk about why we love being Jewish, we’re going to invite friends in to share Friday night meals, and  we’re going to resist any attempts to destroy our tradition. The hatred of others won’t set the benchmark for us, we’ll continue to let the call God gives to Abraham - and you shall be a blessing, be the thing that drives us forward. We will stand up for ourselves, but that won’t be the thing that defines our Jewish lives.

Humility- I want to return to the words I begun with. Away from here. Being attacked puts us on the defensive, of course it does. It makes us need to make decisions we don’t want to have to even consider- like how safe we feel eating in a kosher restaurant, or sending our kids to school in their uniforms. There are places we have to have our walls up, things we can’t negotiate on, there can be no room for hatred of any kind. There can be no space for justification of callous murder. But there are spaces for humility too, places which require us to accept that we’re all just guessing, we’re all just making our best guesses about what’s going to get us away from here, places where we need to let our grief and our humanity lead and our certainty slip away. Places where we need to be kinder to each other, to listen deeply to others, and to be more honest about the limitations of any of our understanding. We are subjects in this in so many ways, and it means we speak subjectively, that’s ok, we’re part of a picture bigger than any of us. Big slogans, petitions, banners and capital letters belong to a very small world of absolute clarity. There are very few areas where such clarity truly exists. We respect the situation better by humbly acknowledging that than by building the straw men up further.

Cantor Zöe shared with me a teaching by Rabbi Eli Kaunfer, it’s about a prayer that gives voice to many of the provisions we might need on the journey ahead. He writes this:

“There is an old prayer: it appears in Mahzor Vitry, a 12th century prayerbook from the school of Rashi. In the prayer, we ask God to take captives from “trouble to blessing, and from darkness to light, and from oppression to redemption.”  This echoes the language we recite on Seder night, that remembers the original moment of our liberation from captivity:

As slaves in Egypt, our ancestors’ original moment of desperation, their cries were answered and God delivered them.  Significantly, the Haggadah tells us that God not only did this for our ancestors, but also for “us.”  That is why we have to imagine in each and every generation (בכל דור ודור) as if we ourselves went out from Egypt.  In this moment, that is not a theoretical exercise, but a desperate, daily plea.”

As much as strategic clarity might be evasive, the emotional clarity of this prayer feels deeply resonant. It’s a call for ‘away from here’ for those in trouble or captivity. It doesn’t give voice to the how, but it gives voice to the yearning that underpins our search for solutions. We pray these words this Shabbat knowing that we speak them at a time when it feels like we’re on the brink of something scary, scarier perhaps. And we hold onto each other, and all of the family of Israel, traveling through this together. May they, may all who suffer in this moment feel the light of redemption speedily and soon in their, in all of our days.

אַחֵינוּ כָּל בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל, הַנְּתוּנִים בְּצָרָה וּבַשִּׁבְיָה, הָעוֹמְדִים בֵּין בַּיָּם וּבֵין בַּיַּבָּשָׁה, הַמָּקוֹם יְרַחֵם עֲלֵיהֶם, וְיוֹצִיאֵם מִצָּרָה לִרְוָחָה, וּמֵאֲפֵלָה לְאוֹרָה, וּמִשִּׁעְבּוּד לִגְאֻלָּה, הַשְׁתָּא בַּעֲגָלָא וּבִזְמַן קָרִיב
 

Acheinu kol beit yisrael, Acheinu kol beit yisrael, han'tunim b'tzara, b'tzara uvashivyah, haomdim bein bayam uvein bayabasha. Hamakom Y'racheim, Y'racheim Aleihem v'yotziem mitzara lirvacha, um'afaila l'orah umishiabud lig'ulah, hashta ba'agala uvizman kariv.

As for our brothers,​ the whole house of Israel, who are given over to trouble or captivity​, whether they abide on the sea or on the dry land:

May the All-prese​nt have mercy upon them, and bring them forth from trouble to enlargeme​nt, from darkness to light, and from subjectio​n to redemptio​n, now speedily and at a near time.

Based​ on The Standard Prayer book by Simeon Singer (1915)