1st Day Rosh Hashanah Morning 5785
You can listen to Rabbi Deborah's sermon here or read it below.
On my first day of university classes I woke up late, skipped breakfast, grabbed a book and rushed out of my hall of residence alongside a steady stream of fellow students heading in to start the term.
As we reached the corner of the road, everyone turned right to cross towards the main campus buildings.
I didn’t. I carried on, turned left to go to the tube station and travelled up to The Sternberg Centre to take my seat in a giant marquee. My first day of university was also Yom Kippur.
Returning to halls after sundown, one of my friends commented ‘we didn’t see you today, where were you?’.
I weighed up the options:
1.) Brush it off. There were lots of people there, it was a busy day, next time let's try and sit together.
Pros: It’s plausible.
Cons: It's a lie.
2.) The non-committal reply. ‘Yea i didn't go in the end’. Offer no explanation, move on, hope everyone is still too new or too awkward to probe.
Pros: It avoids the Judaism conversation.
Cons: It’s still hiding.
3.) Tell them. ‘Well it's Yom Kippur and it's the holiest day of the Jewish year and well, I’m sort of very Jewish.’
Pros: It’s honest.
Cons: Did I really want to be known as ‘the Jew’ before they know anything else about me? What conclusions might they draw from this about who I am? About what I believe? About how I see them?
I found myself sharing this experience with one of our FRS university students last week after he shared his own similar thought process around coming home for these chaggim.
In my struggle to answer my new friend's question, there was a fear. Did I trust that others could hear or understand the complex identity jigsaw of a modern progressive Jew, still allowing us to be ourselves with all of our distinct components, instead of being defined solely by our Jewishness?
Was I ready for them to make me responsible for ‘the Israel stuff’ during a tumultuous time on campus, as I grappled with my connection to there, while living here? I was afraid- who would they think I was, what would they assume about my values? The way I saw or related to them, their faith, their values? Could we do it? Could we make space for each other’s multitudes, when it felt like the rest of the world was falling short of the same challenge?
I’d fallen in love with the Jewish people, at a time when it would have been in every way easier to disconnect.
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When the poet and essayist Adrienne Rich started at Harvard university in 1948 her mother criticised her daughter’s largely Jewish choice of friends, writing to her- ‘some of them will be the most brilliant, fascinating you’ll ever meet but don’t get taken up by any clique trying to claim you’.
As it ever was.
In an essay called ‘Split at the Root’ (a number of members have asked for the full text, you can click here to read) where she reflects on her Jewish identity and her struggle to claim it, Rich describes the fear of entering the Jewish world from one where she could pass as simply one of the masses, a fear that once other Jews knew she was Jewish, knew she was one of them, they would be ‘after’ her, to enter a world that she describes as being perceived as ‘messy, noisy, unpredictable’. She was afraid that she would lose what she calls ‘the precious chance of passing, of token existence’.
In ‘Split at the Root’ she describes an experience that could have been written in 1948, 1998, or, I fear, 2028. She explains her fear that if she allowed herself to be known as Jewish, she would experience something she saw unfolding for others, where in order to belong while being known as Jewish, Jews were required to ‘effectively deny family and community’ because ‘there would always be a remote cousin claiming kinship with you who was the wrong kind of Jew’. It was ok to be Jewish, as long as you removed all the bits that might be complicated for others- disconnected yourself from any of the people who someone else deemed as the wrong kind of Jew for them.
Young Adrienne Rich was drawn to embrace her Jewishness, she went home and asked her dad why he refused to be known as a Jewish professor, why he insisted on emphasising all of his other qualities but not the one she’d become so interested in. I guess she could be me.
Two women emerging into the wider world, decades apart, a whole political reality away, but also the same.
Adrienne Rich asks a question, she talks of the price of belonging for Jews, she asks ‘What happens when survival seems to mean closing off one emotional artery after another?’
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You can be Jew-ish- be all the things that people love about Jews, just not too JEWish. Acceptable only when apart from, and not a part of your people.
I find it deeply helpful that she chooses this metaphor of an emotional artery. A highly pressurised channel of life sustaining force.
There’s something in the demands that are made of Jews in society that require us to figure out how human we are allowed to be. How complicated. Are we allowed family with all the inexplicableness that comes from it?
To make it personal for a moment- am I allowed to have a niece and nephew in Israel? Or do I have to tell you more about their parents' politics or history before you decide if they deserve safety or if I need to renounce my family? The question Jews have faced throughout history, whether it has taken the guise of accusations of dual loyalty pre-state, or now has the added complication of our connection to Israel, is are we required to be atomistic? To be relics of an ancient tradition but unmoored from anything that places demands on today’s world.
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We used to give our bnei mitzvah students and helpers a book given its title by the last words of the journalist Daniel Pearl- ‘I am Jewish’. It was full of passages by Jews of all stripes, each of them wrestling with what it means to define ourselves as one of us, to understand what that means for how others see us, or what that means for our task in this world.
By being here today, I realise you’re in that camp, and that means living with, in some way big or small, the reality of what it means to set yourself apart, to identify as something other than others. In my dream world, that’s something that is exciting, it’s a gateway to beauty, to joy, to connection and to purpose. In my understanding of what its like for many of us, it involves a messiness, an emotional load that is difficult to parse. It’s deeply personal.
It’s amazing to be Jewish, but it’s also difficult to be Jewish- and in the run up to the chaggim I found myself pacing in front of an empty page, my head is full of a year of listening- turns out there’s not much else you can do when you’ve got a small baby sleeping in your arms, and time that has no other demands on it. Long walks with friends, colleagues and students, long chats in Finchley’s parks with FRS members we bumped into, stories from school, university, work, wrestling, angst, frustration, passion.
I wanted to be able to stand up here and to make sense of the nonsensical, to make you comfortable, I want to soothe, I want to make this easier, desperately. And also the more I think, the more I listen, the more I read, the more I feel that it’s listening to our own disquiet, our own turmoil, to the blood rushing in our ears and the things that make our hearts beat faster, to our own pain that we find ourselves, that we come to know.
It’s the things that we find awful and painful that we come to know shape of our core, it’s down in those dark places that we can to find what’s at our centre, what we’re built on.
It’s in every way messier, more confusing. It involves giving difficult feelings space, instead of closing a part of ourselves down.
Why do others disappoint us?
How do we experience our vulnerability ?
How do we not let our Judaism become only a conversation with those who hate us for who we are, but how can we ignore it when it’s such a dominant force?
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Here’s what I know. When the ask of you is to be less human, less of yourself, to shut down your emotional and physical arteries of connection, you fight it by opening them up. When distress comes from another’s inability to hold the totality of your humanity in their heart, you cannot cut yourself down to a size that will fit. And when we know the pain caused to us by the inability to feel or see multitudes, we can strive to do exactly that, to feel more, to open up those channels of empathy and compassion, to become more and not less alive to the terrifying task of figuring out how to share this world.
I get that this is so hard because of what is happening in Israel at the moment. And I’m reminded by Adrienne Rich’s writing in 1948, and the words of Rabbi Dr Leo Baeck that I’m about to share who was writing in 1905, that this is bigger than that, that Israel is one frame through which we’re experiencing some of the biggest questions of Jewish existence, identity, and morality.
I keep thinking about a new year, the images that our liturgy gives us of the book of life, of the birthday of the world. They’re all so vital, we ask to be sealed for life. We confront in the arc of the next 10 days the most existential of questions- how do we want to be known, how do we want to be remembered? How can we break free from the things that hold us back, do we have the ability to take charge of our lives in the ways that we want?
I think I want to ask you- is your Jewishness an enabler of living in the way that you want to, or does it feel like it holds you back from life in its fullest sense? I think I need to acknowledge that for many of us here, it’s both.
Each of us is going to have to figure this out for ourselves now, during war, and again, during a future peace. If we believe that a day after will come, we still need to acknowledge that even in the before, there were these challenges, and that even in the after we’ll have to understand what it means to be of a people that has a history and identity that is confusing to both us and others.
Writing in 1905, Rabbi Dr Leo Baeck wrote:
Often it seems that the special task of Judaism is to express the idea of the community standing alone, the ethical principle of the minority. Judaism bears witness to the power of the idea as against the power of mere numbers and worldly success; it stands for the enduring protest of those who seek to be true to their own selves, who assert their right to be different against the crushing pressure of the vicious and the leveling. This too is a way of constant preaching to the world. By its mere existence Judaism is a never silent protest against the assumption of the multitude that force is superior to truth… The mere fact that Judaism exists proves the invincibility of the spirit… With regard to this fact alone one is often tempted to adapt a well-known phrase by saying: “If Judaism did not exist, we should have to invent it.” Without minorities there can be no world-historic goal.
I feel a certain kind of permission from Leo Baeck’s words. He reminds me that there is strength to be found in understanding who we are, not in who others might need us to be.
It’s not, to be clear, a victimhood narrative. It’s about something else. It’s about existence and life and the inalienable right to both in their richness regardless of qualifying details. When we refuse to be cut down to a manageable size, our stories, families, and histories made palatable for the assailing norms of today, we require others to expand their imagination, to be capable of building a world that accommodates more of what makes us- and to be clear also makes others- human. A world that is richer, more diverse, braver, more vulnerable, more attuned.
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Rabbi Sheila Shulman of blessed memory, who once served this congregation, wrote this glorious meditation on what she called ‘reading whole’- approaching the world of ideas as full beings. She talks about being open to the world without violating our own core. For me, this is central to the task of sealing ourselves for life this year. Sheila asked us about reading whole, I guess I’m wondering about living whole.
Emotional arteries open, blood flowing, full pressure, feeling more, caring more, daring more.
Taking up space, being visible, remembering we don’t owe the world an easier to understand story of ourselves to deserve the right to live in it.
We’re complicated, Jews are complicated. We’re human, we’re here.
May we be sealed this year for a full life, a safe life, a rich life, a diverse life, a peaceful life, and a life lived in a way that gives permission to others to see themselves in the whole as well.
