Shabbat Vaera 5785
You can listen to Rabbi Deborah's sermon here or read it below.
There’s a Vicar of Dibley end of credits scene that particularly amuses me. Geraldine (the vicar), and Alice (her congregant, confidant, and friend) are discussing football. Geraldine makes a comment along the lines of ‘how good is it that we won the match’, and Alice says to her, ‘oh, i didn't realise you played football’. The vicar, confused, says that she doesn’t, but she's just so glad that we won. Alice is fixated. But it’s not really we then? Because you weren’t there muddy on the pitch kicking the ball, were you?
It was observed to me by a member of this community, how freely we (and here I mean we the clergy primarily) feel able to speak in the we. Particularly when it comes to perceived shared Jewish experiences and feelings. So I had a look at the past year’s worth of sermons and emails from us, and extended my perusal to other synagogue’s clergy, and it’s true. There’s an awful lot of ‘we’ going on.
Like the football conversation, the question of who ‘we’, and ‘us’ are, leads to a whole load of other questions about belonging, identification, and solidarity. Speaking in the ‘we’ requires a certain sense of license, and that also gives it a power to assert a kind of tyranny.
If I state something in the voice of the ‘we’ then what does it say to those who feel something other than that? More’s the point, where do ‘we’ up here, gauge our sense of how and when using the language of the collective is appropriate or ethical?
The other reason the use of the ‘we’ is challenging, is because for every ‘we’, ‘us’, or ‘our’, there is a ‘they’, ‘theirs’ or ‘them’. And sometimes when we speak of ourselves, our experience and emotions, it can read like a commentary on those groups too.
So let me be a bit less abstract, and a bit more grounded in the here and now of this weekend.
‘We’, and here I mean a very particular we, the Jewish people- in all our diversity- are in the middle of a challenging, to put it mildly, period.
And ‘we’, the family of Israel, saw the release this morning of four young women after 477 days of captivity, one of whom is Karina Ariev, the cousin of the Anna, the community director at our sister congregation Kol Haneshama.
‘We’ are absolutely in this with the hostage families, just like on October 7th and throughout the traditional Jewish mourning period of a shana, a year, we mourned the relatives, friends and colleagues of members of this shul.
And there are voices inside and outside the Jewish community wondering and asking of us, if that’s the ‘us’, is it somehow also a statement about ‘them’. Are we tuned out from the other suffering that surrounds the hostages, focused only on the Jewish victims of this war?
Let’s travel to start of this week’s Torah portion, which contains some of the most foundational ideas in the Jewish psyche. The Israelites are slaves in Egypt, Moses has been to Pharoah and said ‘let my people go’ and it didn’t go so well. And God makes a promise:
I have now heard the moaning of the Israelites because the Egyptians are holding them in bondage, and I have remembered My covenant.
Say, therefore, to the Israelite people: I am יהוה. I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary chastisements.
And I will take you to be My people, and I will be your God. And you shall know that I, יהוה, am your God who freed you from the labors of the Egyptians.
This is the most extraordinary promise based on a truly sacred notion- one of covenant. Covenant is the essential glue between the Jewish people and God, an absolute commitment in love and through time, it’s what makes us who we are, it’s what we pass down through our generations, it’s a guarantee.
It’s also absolutely in every sense what anyone suffering wants to know, that there is someone who feels direct and absolute responsibility for you and your fate, and will see and meet your needs. God says ‘you’re mine’, I care about you, you are mine and I am yours.
The philosophical notion that covenant evokes is one that is beyond responsibility, it’s something called partiality. Crucially, that’s not the same as being partisan. Let’s explore.
The easiest way to do so in some way is to think about the purest example we might have of legitimate partiality, the parent child relationship, incidentally it’s one of the images we have for thinking about the relationship between the Children of israel and God too.
My child is my child. He is utterly and totally dependent on me knowing what that requires of me. It’s unquestionably my job and my responsibility alongside his father to make sure he is cared for, nurtured and grown. So much so that we invest the state with the power to intervene should I fail him in this regard. Parental partiality is a good thing. As the philosophers Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift write ‘Parent-child relationships ... are so central to human flourishing that, did they not exist, it would be necessary to invent them’. I am supposed to be in his corner, it would be worrying if I wasn’t.
It’s important to understand what partiality does and doesn’t say. It doesn’t say my son has more rights than someone else’s child, it doesn’t say he is better, more worthy, more valuable or anything else. What it does say is that he’s my child. So it’s my job to advocate for and care for him, but that isn’t a commentary on any other child, just an understanding of the moral responsibility to him that my partiality gives me. If I was to be so distressed by the plight of other children in the world who were hungry that I allowed my own child to starve in order to feed others, I would be morally negligent.
Partiality is important. It’s part of how we create social guarantees of safety and wellbeing, and it acknowledges that almost everyone is in some way partial. It’s not an argument for inequality, but it is an explanation of relationships. And it extends wider than the unit of the parent child relationship. Family bonds are a form of partiality too, an important one. Siblings, cousins, parents, grandparents, and so on.
Many have also argued that the duty we have to our compatriots is an obvious logical follow on from this notion of legitimate partiality. It’s why it’s not weird when the British government evacuates British citizens from a disaster zone and brings them home, and we don’t worry that doing so means we don’t also care about French citizens. Even though not all aspects of nationality are so easily articulated, when it comes to acts of care and love, we - and I think I can use we as a term relatively safely here - generally have a fairly intrinsic idea that these ways of caring and taking responsibility for each other are good and fine and normal and ethical.
Jewishly, I don’t think we can get away from the fact that our close family relationships, and the covenant that binds us theologically to each other and to God, creates a partiality akin to that of family partiality. Again, not a comment on the value of any other life, simply an observation about the Jewish family. I think it’s why the ‘we’ ‘us’ and ‘our’ are such strong terms within synagogue life, and I think it’s why even if it’s hard to articulate or leads to uncomfortable or confusing conversations, for the past 15 months we’ve all been saying things like ‘we’re’ praying for ‘our’ hostages.
I feel it's important to articulate it in this way because I know that many here are struggling with the way that friends, colleagues, and the internet commentariat, are observing our community’s relationship with the hostages in particular. It feels like we need a bit more language, to be able to be firmer and more able to say that when I talk about the fate of the hostages I’m not saying anything about how I feel about the value of Gazan life, any more than when I say that my son needs feeding I’m making a comment about other people’s children and whether they deserve food.
We have to be able to talk unequivocally and unapologetically about the places where our immediate relationships and connections create a moral duty.
This isn’t to say it’s the only moral duty we have, but just like if I allow the hunger in the world to prevent me from feeding my own child I’m morally negligent, so too are we if we find ourselves confronted by what might seem like louder or bigger moral demands in numerical terms and we neglect our responsibility to our fellow Jews as a result.
Hillel spoke words 2000 years ago that we call upon often but are helpful today especially.
"If I am not for myself, who will be for me, but if I am only for myself, who am I?"
It’s morally and religiously impossible to make the argument that we can turn away from the needs of others who are not like us, but there are two parts to this saying. We can’t lose sight of the question, ‘who will be for me?’ It is incumbent upon us to be those who bring the voice of the divine as spoken to the israelites in this week’s sedra into the world, I have seen the suffering of my people and I will do whatever I can to end it.
We conclude with words of prayer that are spoken in the collective, a prayer for our siblings in the house of Israel. Written in the 11th century they use the same language of family that we explored this morning. May our prayers find voice and action speedily in our days.
