On marking time

Tonight is the last chance to count the Omer. Since Pesach, we’ve been counting for 49 days. Ideally you would say it at 9.30 tonight when the sun has set, but the old Ashkenazi custom has long tolerated counting the Omer before sunset. Sephardi custom is stricter about waiting until full nightfall.

Rabbi Chaim Weiner is a champion of old Ashkenazi traditions, and he insists he does not want the Mitzvah of counting the Omer to disappear. He wants people in our community in London to see it done and how to do it after the Kabbalat Shabbat services that fall between Pesach and Shavuot.

Recently, while visiting Zikhron Ya'akov, Rabbi Chaim found himself thinking about what the Vilna Gaon would say on the subject. The central synagogue in Zichron, Ohel Yaakov, is so popular with Jews of all kinds on Kabbalat Shabbat, that it can be difficult for the smaller neighbourhood shuls to gather a minyan. It is so popular that Rabbi Chaim couldn’t find a siddur to use when he was there a few weeks ago. He scratched around to the back of the shelf and found an old Siddur with a faded blue cover.

Inside was a footnote listing the customs of the Vilna Gaon. The footnote in the old siddur explained that the Vilna Gaon (The Gra) would go home after the service and repeat the Shema after dark, but did not repeat the counting of the Omer. This suggests that the Gra was happy with counting the Omer before nightfall. The note referenced the Mishnah Berurah and its accompanying Biur Halachah on counting the Omer. The Biur Halachah notes an important dispute, including a version introduced with the phrase yesh omrim, “there are some who say.” Some authorities argue that today the mitzvah of counting the Omer is only, זכר למקדש, a remembrance of the Temple service, rather than a full Torah obligation, because the original biblical mitzvah depended on the bringing of the Omer offering in the Temple itself. According to those opinions, the obligation today is a custom rather than a full obligation, and therefore there is more room for flexibility about exactly when one counts.

This makes the old Ashkenazi practice especially striking. Communities in northern Europe were already praying Maariv and reciting the evening Shema before full nightfall during the long summer evenings, even though Shema is itself a Torah obligation. In northern Europe it was simply too difficult to wait until sunset to pray.

Why become more exacting about the timing of the Omer than about the timing of Shema?

The Shema, after all, is a Torah obligation. If communities are prepared to rely on early times for Shema, why become suddenly strict about the Omer, which many authorities regard as rabbinic today?

This debate about when we say the evening Shema goes back centuries.

In the second Rashi comment on the first Massechet of the Talmud, Rashi explains that the Shema recited in synagogue before nightfall does not fully discharge the Torah level obligation. One should recite the Shema again later at night before going to sleep. Tosafot challenge Rashi and defend the widespread Ashkenazi practice of praying Maariv early. They bring several arguments, including the idea that halakhic time is not only astronomical.

One of the Tosafists, Ri Hazeken, points out that Jewish law sometimes follows social rhythms rather than pure celestial calculation. In fact, it’s mandated that way in the Torah itself where the times for Shema are “when you lie down and when you rise up."

That is social time, time as lived by human behaviour, not just counted by a clock.

In northern Europe, where summer sunsets come extremely late, Ashkenazi communities adapted. People could not realistically wait until very late at night every evening for communal prayer. So, communities developed around an earlier social definition of evening. The Vilna Gaon was famously uncomfortable with some of these leniencies and preferred astronomical timings to human ones. In general, he showed discomfort with ordinary communal life and preferred to study alone. Still, Rabbi Chaim likes to joke that perhaps even the Gra himself, might have found room for the old Ashkenazi custom here.

But we will never know.

A few days later, Rabbi Chaim went back to Ohel Yaakov hoping to find the old blue siddur again.

But this time he couldn’t find it.

Dvar Torah Pesach Day 7 2026

Rabbis, friends. That was a beautiful Hallel wasn’t it. I’m going to talk now about the less than beautiful part of our tradition. Some might even call it the yicky part, blood. But I want to convince you that not everything essential is pretty. Sometimes the hard part is the best part.

Today we read in the Maftir from Bamidbar (Numbers) Chapter 28:18 ‘You must offer up a fire-offering, an ascent-offering to God: two young bulls, one ram, and seven one-year-old lambs.’ (In English you miss that ascent offering is the Orlah sacrifice) וְהִקְרַבְתֶּ֨ם אִשֶּׁ֤ה עֹלָה֙ לַֽיהֹוָ֔ה פָּרִ֧ים בְּנֵי־בָקָ֛ר שְׁנַ֖יִם וְאַ֣יִל אֶחָ֑ד וְשִׁבְעָ֤ה כְבָשִׂים֙ בְּנֵ֣י שָׁנָ֔ה תְּמִימִ֖ם יִהְי֥וּ לָכֶֽם׃

Honestly before I started doing Daf Yomi, my eyes would glaze over at this stuff. For the last few months in the Daf Yomi world, the subject has been the sacrifices in the Temple. Much ink and time has been spent on working out the details of this system. You might have thought I would have preferred to skip to something more relevant to my life as the sacrifices are all Temple related and since 70 ACE, we no longer have a Temple. In the Shacharit I went to last year, here at NNLS, we would leave out the Mishnah on how the sacrifices work. And honestly, I was grateful for less praying that time in the morning. But actually, through Daf Yomi, I’ve learned a few things that have enriched my understanding of our long and winding tradition.

I learned that there are lots of different types of sacrifices and they all function slightly differently. Bear with me here while I share some details.

For example, in the Olah sacrifice that we read about this morning – the whole thing goes to God. It’s all burned up. While in the Shelamim sacrifice, some gets burned up, some goes to the Priest, and some goes to the one who brought it.

The other thing I learned was that in all Temple sacrifices, the blood goes through a precise ritual, and each stage counts.

First the animal is first slaughtered (shechitah), then a priest receives the blood (kabbalat ha-dam), carries it to the altar (holachat ha-dam), and finally dashes or sprinkles it on the altar (zerikah), with any remainder poured at the base.

To summarise, the steps related to blood are Shechitah → Kabbalah → Holachah → Zerikah.

It’s Pesach now so let’s look at the Korban Pesach in the Temple...

The animal is slaughtered (shechita) by a member of a registered group of Israelites. A kohen receives (kabbalah) the blood in a vessel. The blood is passed hand-to-hand in lines of kohanim to the altar. That’s Holachah. It is then dashed (zerikah) on the altar in a highly coordinated, public ritual done by many priests at once. It is then roasted and eaten by the registered group.

Let’s not be squeamish about blood. Dam as it is known in Hebrew. Dam as my friend Pam pointed out is the root of Adama, Adom and Adam. In our tradition, blood is essential and according to the laws of Kashrut, we don’t eat blood because blood is the root of life.

We don’t eat it, but we have to deal with it. We can’t pretend it isn’t there. Let’s follow the blood. A man has 5 to 6 litres of blood in his body coursing about in his veins and arteries. A woman has 4–5 litres. Unless she is pregnant or breast feeding or post-menopausal, she is reminded monthly of the blood in her body.

If you’re a man, you’re reminded of the blood in your body less frequently, but we really are basar v’ dam.

There are two acts involving visible blood that make us distinctly Jewish. I experienced them both recently. One was a bris and one was a Pesach Seder. Both are connected by the verse “בדמייך חיי / בְּדָמַיִךְ חֲיִי — b’damayich chayi” which comes from Book of Ezekiel 16:6

“..and I said to you: In your bloods, live. And I said to you: In your bloods, live.”

It appears twice in the verse, and the word for blood is in the plural damayich which give the rabbis lots to work with.

The original context in Ezekiel 16 is a shocking allegory. God describes Israel as an abandoned newborn, cast into a field, still covered in blood from birth. No one washes her, salts her, or dresses her. She is left to die naked and alone. God passes by and says: “In your bloods — live.”

This is a terrible scene and still has the power to shock if you read it today. The image is not spiritualised. It is about vulnerability, nakedness and survival. Israel’s life begins not in purity, but in blood.

I heard the reference to b’damayich chayi” in the prayers at Yonathan and Melissa’s baby’s brit recently. But in the hagaddah, it was a lot harder to find. It’s left out of some Hagaddot. But it’s there if you dig deep enough in the Magid section, it’s there in some Haggadot.

Rashi looks at the part of the quote that says: ‘you were naked and bare” and says this verse is proof‑text to teach that: When the time came for God to redeem Israel from Egypt, they had no mitzvot yet to engage in because they were spiritually “naked.” They were naked of Mitzvot (It was pre-Sinai) So God gave them two proto mitzvot of Brit Milah and Korban Pesach.

Why these two? Because these are the two moments when the Jewish people enter particular Jewish covenantal life. Both say: Jewish life begins here. Both involve action before redemption. Parents must be willing to risk their child’s life to be circumcised, a high price of entry.

In Egypt, the Israelites had to mark themselves out with a sign in blood on their houses. I imagine quite a risky business at the time. Interestingly, the two most practised Jewish mitzvot today are brit milah and attending a Pesach Seder, which survive long after any other mitzvot are abandoned.

In constructing the Liturgy of the brit Milah and the words of the Haggadah, by including the verse from Ezekiel, b’damayich chayei, rabbis are saying something deeply counter-modern. Jewish life does not begin in comfort, ideas, or belief. It begins in vulnerability, risk, and embodied commitment. Before Torah at Sinai. Before law. Before theology. Well before the Jewish Enlightenment in Western Europe… There is blood.

The covenant is not abstract. It is physical and costly. It challenges modern sensibilities. We like to think Jewish life is about ethics, ideas, justice, universalism. But this verse from Ezekiel says: Jewish life begins in particularity. And while blood is where life is for everyone, our tradition turns it into a particular sign for us.

Our tradition is not all pretty and all beautiful and all relatable, but we need to retain those weird, gory and sometimes boring parts, that can turn out to be the essential parts.

בדמייך חיי In your bloods, live

So next year wherever you are for your Pesach seder, if your Haggadah leaves out this section, you’ll have something to say about it.

Chag Sameach ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sources

Pesach Haggadah, Magid, First Fruits Declaration 6 “AND GREAT” – As it is said: “I let you grow wild like meadow plants, and you grew and matured and came forth in all your glory, your breasts full and your hair grown, and you were naked and exposed.” “And I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your own blood – and I said to you, ‘In your blood, live!’ and I said, ‘In your blood, live!’”

Ezekiel 16

Rashi says on ‘you were naked and bare’ in Ezekiel 16.

‘i. e. bare of all merit earned through the fulfilment of God’s commands. God therefore gave them two commands, relating respectively to the blood of the paschal-lamb and the blood of the circumcision, for that night they circumcised themselves, as it is said (Ezekiel 16:6) “[When I passed over thee] I saw thee wallowing in thy bloods (בְּדָמַיִךְ is plural)” i. e. in two kinds of blood.’

Mechilta deRabbi Yishmael (Bo Parasha 5) Attributed to: Rabbi Yishmael (2nd century ACE), a Tanna of the early rabbinic period.

When I passed over thee I saw thee wallowing in thy bloods (בְּדָמַיִךְ is plural)” i. e. in two kinds of blood. In Parasha 5, the Mechilta says: “בְּדָמַיִךְ חֲיִי — בְּדַם פֶּסַח וּבְדַם מִילָה” “In your blood, live — in the blood of the Pesach and in the blood of circumcision.”

Bechor shor This is Joseph ben Isaac of Orleans, a prominent 12th-century North French rabbi who says about Genesis 17:11:1 "And it will be a sign of the covenant between Me and you". A symbol for men And the blood of niddah [menstrual blood] that women guard, and tell their openings to their husbands, this is to them the blood of the covenant.

Nizzahon Vetus Anonymous Jewish apologetic text that originated in 13th-century Germany. Based on a Hebrew document written in the Middle Ages recording Jewish arguments against Christianity as expressed at that time. The Nizzahon Vetus starts from the position of Jewish weakness. Bitter fate, being reviled, accused of eating Christian children and their blood.

And they shall take of the blood" [Exod. 12:7] refers to three drops: "Put it on the lintel" refers to one, "and on the two side-posts" refers to two more. Thus, the passage refers to three types of blood - [the blood of the pascal lamb], of circumcision, and of the menstruant woman.

Ephod Bad – 19th century commentary by Lithuanian rabbi Binyamin David Rabinowitz

‘These positive commandments were an expression of absolute love for and loyalty toward God. They were also a proof that Israel’s repentance was repentance out of love rather than repentance out of fear of God. It also proved that they were now worthy of participating in the service of the divine.

We can now understand why Moses commands the people to set aside and also to take the Passover lamb. It wasn't simply enough for the people to have a lamb. They had to publicly take the lamb so that people would witness their repudiation of idolatry. The lamb would make much noise and it would be apparent to everyone that they had taken it for a sacrifice. This would arouse the Egyptians to kill the Israelites and, therefore, the Israelites actions would truly be self-sacrifice. Also the smell of the roasting meat would waft through the neighborhood so everyone would know what the Israelites were doing. The Israelites would have been convinced that the Egyptians would certainly want to kill them. Their willingness to risk martyrdom would certainly make them worthy of redemption. This also explains why the circumcision was also necessary. Without recovering from their circumcision, the Israelites might have believed they could defend themselves. Now that they were in a weakened state, they realized that they were totally dependent upon God. Prior to their circumcision they might have reasoned that the Egyptians had been weakened by the plagues – now they were weakened by the circumcision so that they were dependent upon God.’ ------------------------

Mishapatim dvar torah

Why did you come to shul this morning? I usually tell people disingenuously that it’s to hear the next chapter in the parasha, or to be part of the davening or to hopefully hear Rabbi Chaim speak or to chat with my friends at the kiddish. It’s handy seeing everyone at one time, isn’t it?

But what I don’t usually tell people because it’s too personal perhaps, is this idea expressed in the Talmud in Berachot 6a and b, that God is found between. Between two people studying and between three judges judging and between ten people in a minyan praying. What I mean by this is that on a desert island, I can experience God and transcendence, but only in community do I experience the joys of a system with a particular calendar, language and tradition. So, God is in-between us in a minyan, here today. No one person owns it alone. It’s a lot to explain to someone who asks me casually why I come to shul every week.

Last week, we read the ten commandments in the parasha. The moment of the encounter at Sinai. There was thunder, lightning, and a peak moment of connection with God. Moses was up the mountain. Today we are down to earth with a thud, in the parasha called Mishpatim. The laws or mitzvot. We are in between, in between the peak of Sinai and the everyday laws of Mishpatim.

Mishpatim is the parsha with the second most number of laws among all the 54 parashot. Most of the laws of Mishpatim are ethical living spelled out, and there are also laws that are purely ritual laws mixed in too. Those laws are sometimes called cultic regulations, or they are dismissed as ceremonial laws. In Mishpatim, all these laws are included. It’s not either or, it’s both.

For example, right in the middle of civil legislation, Mishpatim mentions: 1. the laws of Shabbat. 2. three pilgrimage festivals. 3. Bringing first fruits to the Temple, 4. Not boiling a kid in its mother’s milk 5. How to do sacrifices properly.

What is the point of the torah’s particularist rituals here? I want to make a case that this is an essential part of our story.

Those strange Torah cultic laws are what make us Jewish today. Those laws are later refined and changed and sometimes squeezed out entirely through the process of the Mishnah, the Talmud, the Shulchan Aruch and responsa until today. Today we are rabbinic Jews within a living system that still breathes life into all of us in some way. That’s what I love about our tradition. It’s the part that makes us different to everyone else. The weirdness of being Jewish in a non-Jewish world. That we go to shul on Saturday, or that we light candles and eat challah on Friday night or that we refuse to eat a cheeseburger or still celebrate Pesach despite the Temple being long gone. We can feel it in our kishkes. We do it and then we think of why we do it.

So what actually makes us Jewish now, what puts that feeling in our kishkes, or in our children’s kishkes? Many Jews might answer, we ca ne proud of our glorious ethical laws. Care for the vulnerable. Protection of the stranger. Justice in the courts. Mishpatim certainly teaches that. In fact, over and over, the Torah reminds us: You shall love the ger or stranger as you love yourself. But ethics alone does not make us uniquely Jewish.

Ethics, Justice and Compassion are universal, or at least I wish they were. And if Judaism was only a moral message, we could/should insist on it loudly. We might sometimes think if we say it loud enough, maybe the world would give us a seat at the table, when they see how good we are. ‘We are just like you’ we cry. ‘In fact, our rule is we love the stranger as we love ourselves.’ But if that was truly our only rule, we would also gradually dissolve into the wider moral culture around us. Maybe that’s because we as Jews don’t love ourselves enough as Jews. Ethics are necessary. But they are not enough to sustain us past one generation. How do we love being Jewish, and teach our children to love being Jewish?

Have you heard the question asked by many post Holocaust theologians: ‘is Jewish life centred around Sinai or Auschwitz?’ Today the question would be: is Jewish identity centred around Gaza or Sinai? But if that’s the central organising event of Jewish life, then Jewish life is defined by antisemitism and fear, and not love of being Jewish, of Jewish joy and of pride.

I think there’s another orientation, and that’s in the parasha today. It’s in the in between space, between the transcendence of Sinai and the everyday rules of Mishpatim, and more than that, between the ethically grounded laws of mishpatim and the particular ritual ones. Mishpatim suggests that what sustains Jewish life is not choosing between ethics and ritual but binding them together. What makes us Jewish now is not just that we imagine our ancestors once shared a moment at Sinai. It’s a way of understanding our shared practise today and loving what makes us different.

Here are some examples. We have all come to shul this particular day that we call Shabbat. Our homes that have mezuzot on our doors, look different to the homes of our neighbours. We all give tzedakah, feeling automatically obligated. We know many of the words to the same tefillot today, and we know when to bounce three times on our heels even when we’re not sure why. We feel like we ourselves were liberated from Egypt. We plan our Pesach seders and sing Chad Gadya to the tunes of our childhood. We taste the bitter maror, and the sweet haroset that our hands can make without looking up the recipe on the internet. I particularly love Friday nights when I bless my particular children, and I know they love that moment too.

Yes, transcendence is wonderful, but it is by nature universal and can be felt lots of places like in Mozart’s requiem and in the poems of Mary Oliver. But there is also wonder and love of ourselves to be felt, in the particular in between small moments of Jewish life.

Jewish life today is not sustained by catastrophe. Not Auschwitz. Not Gaza. Not antisemitism, and not even Sinai alone. People can’t build a future on trauma. And it can’t live forever at the peak of revelation.

So where is Jewish life actually centred? Perhaps it is here, in Mishpatim. It is not either/or. It is in the inbetween. In between the universal and the particular. In between the lovely stories and the strange laws. In the shared structures we understand that make community possible. It is not dramatic and big, it’s small and particular.

We are heirs to a tradition that refused to choose between ethics and ritual, between personal transcendence and group responsibility. We obeyed and then we understood.

Here we are together, living in that in-between space between what’s going on in our own heads and in each other’s heads... Shema Israel Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad.

Never mind encountering God at Sinai, this is why I come to shul. Together between ten of us showing up to pray on this particular Shabbat morning and listening to each other is where God is always now.

Conversation on a long plane journey

This is my Instagram post from 8 June 2024.

I was on the beach in Sardinia with friends on the 8th of June 2024, when we heard the news that four hostages were rescued by the IDF from Gaza. Although we had never met the four hostages, we were so happy that they were free. I know there were four because we held up four fingers in the pictures that we took of ourselves just feeling happy in the midst of a year of very little good news for our people.

For ages I watched the video of two of the hostages, in t-shirts and very short, cropped hair, looking out of the open helicopter at Israel below. There was something so beautiful about it. When thanked by one of the hostages, the soldier in charge of the operation said to him: This is the most important job we can do’

I used to watch that video over and over again imagining what it must feel like to look out at Israel - after being held hostage for so long in Gaza, and to feel free and safe and human again.

Today I flew back from Israel, where I had spent a week meeting wonderful, intelligent, thoughtful, generous people. My head and heart were full. I had decided not to pay to choose my seat and so Whizz-air allocated me a middle seat one row before the last row of the plane.

As I walked down the plane to find my seat counting the rows as I went, I recognized the person on the aisle seat in my row. He saw I looked.

As I sat down in my seat, I introduced myself. He said his name was Andrei. I took out the book I was reading - Hostages by Eli Sharabi. He said ‘ah he wrote a book. I’m writing one too and drawing it.’ When I looked back at him slightly quizzically, he said: ‘Yes, it’s me. You recognised me.’

It was Andrei Kozlov, whose face I had seen on a thousand posters and whose fate was once important to me. He was a hostage and now he was a person.

We talked. I was hesitant to ask him questions He said the day he was rescued was the happiest day of his life. They were fed the very bare minimum. There were three of them kept together. All three are doing ok. He’s doing ok too / he has his trauma and depression but even in bad moments - it’s part of a bigger understanding.

His family don’t understand what he lives with now. His mother is forever changed. They all are. He spent a year in America painting. He slept badly last night. He thought he could sleep a bit on the plane. When he woke up, he wondered if they had offered snacks in the plane. I insisted he take my northern Israel salad that I had bought at the airport. He looked at the sun setting out of the window and at Israel below as the plane took off. Before he lived in Israel, he was from St Petersburg. I said I had always wanted to see the art in the Hermitage, he said he had visited the Hermitage at least 20 times. He had studied marketing and advertising. We had that in common. He was going to London to visit some galleries. He showed me a painting of his on his phone. It was of men trapped in a globe, with people staring at them. It was painted from the wound and not the scar. He said he had homework to do before starting to work again or building a life.

He said he had been working at the Nova festival on October 07, and by 9.30 he had already been taken hostage and was in Gaza. He had visited the Nova site three times since then.

I tried not to talk to him like he was a hostage. I tried to talk like he was a 29-year-old man around the age of my son. I showed him some of my portfolio and we talked advertising. I had also tried to read the book he was reading by Rick Ruben, and I saw he was also struggling to finish it. But sometimes when I said I was impatient to land already, and it was another three hours to wait. I realised how ridiculous it sounded. He asked me if I really wanted to make Aliyah. I said it was a fantasy. We talked. He was a good listener. I tried to explain how some Jews in my community are very concerned with the pain of Palestinians in Gaza, it felt uncomfortable. I thought I shouldn’t have told him that part of the story. He said it was war. He said he didn’t believe peace in the Middle East was possible.

I noticed my own discomfort and wondered why. Because he was famous? Because I wanted to really talk as humans, but didn’t want to just put him in the Hostage box? I kicked myself for telling him about those in my community who were not as concerned for the hostages in Gaza as they are for the people of Gaza. We didn’t talk for a while after that.

He offered me the packet of chewy sweets he went to buy on the flight. I accepted them. It became easier to talk again.

I finished the Eli Sharabi book and offered it to him. He didn’t want to read it or any Frankl book he said, because he had his own experience. I said I understood because when he was explaining his experience, I could understand it but couldn’t put words to it accurately. It was completely new. I said I hoped the world would hear his new perspective, and that’s what I meant when I said he was intelligent, educated, thoughtful and creative. He said he understood.

I showed him the pictures of us celebrating and holding up four fingers in Sardinia, for the four hostages who were released. He was delighted to see that some people in the world shared his delight of the day he called the best day of his life.

Books referred to:

The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin

Hostage by Eli Sharabi

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

You can see Andrei's art here

Dvar Torah: Parashat Devarim Shabbat Devarim / Erev Tisha B’Av

I’ve been thinking of getting a tattoo. Not something trendy or artistic—but a line in Yiddish: ס׳איז שווער צו זײַן אַ ייִד “It’s hard to be a Jew.”

I don’t really want to get a tattoo, but those words are starting to feel truer today than ever before. Even here, in the UK, in the 21st century, where we live with safety and freedom, it’s starting to feel, once again, a little hard to be a Jew.

Not hard in the way it was for our great grandparents, surviving pogroms or murdered in the Holocaust. Not even like it was for our family and friends in Israel reeling from the massacre of October 07, and more recently sitting in bomb shelters under ballistic missile fire. Yes, social media is an annoying sewer of antisemitism, and yes, Jews are not welcome at Pride events or at some comedy clubs. That pain is real, but it’s not what I’m talking about.

Here’s what I mean. It’s hard to be a Jew when you see other Jews as enemies. It’s hard when the community you love doesn’t recognize the Jew you are as fully valid. It’s hard when the threads that bind us start to fray—not because of outside pressure, but because of what we do to one another.

I come from a South African, shtetl-rooted background. Some of you grew up here in the German Liberal or British Reform world. Different accents. Different worldviews. And sometimes, we find it hard to understand one another. We speak the same language—but we don’t always hear each other. That’s the pain I feel the most. <> And it’s exactly the pain that this week’s Torah portion, and this moment in our Jewish calendar, dares us to face. This week, we begin the final book of the Torah: Sefer Devarim. In Parashat Devarim, Moses tells the Jewish people how they got to this moment, before their entry into the land of Canaan. It opens softly: “These are the words that Moshe spoke to all Israel…” (Devarim 1:1) These are the words of Moshe’s parting speeches—his final testimony to a people on the cusp of a new beginning. After forty years of wandering, they are about to enter the Land. And Moshe, who will not go with them, gathers his people and speaks to them.

After 40 years in the desert, there’s now a lot of them, and Moses says: ‘How can I bear unaided the trouble of you, and the burden, and the bickering!’ (Devarim 1:12). Let’s look at each of these qualities – through Rashi’s commentary that he takes lock stock and barrel from Sifrei devarim 12.1, a book of commentary that was compiled around 220 ACE.

Rashi says the trouble of you means the Israelites were troublesome. ‘If one perceived that an opponent in a lawsuit was about to be a victor in the case, he would say I have more witnesses to bring and further proof to introduce or I will add more judges to the judges who are already sitting.’

On the burden, Rashi says ‘the Israelites were like apikorsim. If Moses went to work early, they would say what problems is he having at home. And if he went to work late, they would say, what do you think, He is sitting and devising evil schemes against you and is plotting against you.’

The third description the bickering means they were contentious or combative. In summary the people were a pain in the neck, they suspected Moshe of corruption, and of bias. They didn’t give him the benefit of the doubt. They would just go on and on. And that wore Moses down. It exhausted him.

I know these people. I am these people. We haven’t changed much, have we?

So, from Parashat Devarim – the difficulties before we enter the Promised land, to Tisha B’Av, the tragedies while losing the Promised Land till today

Tonight is the start of Tisha B’Av, the day we mourn our greatest communal traumas. It started as a day of mourning for the destructions of the first and second Temple, the Beitar massacre, and the banning of Jews from Jerusalem and now it includes mourning for the massacres of the Crusades, the expulsions from Spain and from England, and it is also the day Charedi Jews mark the Holocaust. Tishah b’Av addresses the pain of the Jewish people, as Yiddin.

Tonight, we’ll sit on the floor and read Eikhah, the Book of Lamentations written in response to the destruction of the first Temple. We’ll dim the lights, set aside comfort, and lean into grief. No greetings. No Torah study, except for texts about destruction. For extra pain, I highly recommend the Talmud in Gittin from daf 55b to 58a, that describes the failure of leadership and Zealots burning their own food supplies. It describes what happens when judgement fails, when kindness to each other and humility and accountability fails.

Tisha B’Av is not only about destruction done to us by our enemies. The rabbis of the Talmud ask: Why was the Second Temple destroyed? The answer they give is that it wasn’t because of Roman military might. The answer is sinat chinam— our baseless hatred for each other. Mistrust. Division. The erosion of the bonds of community from within. We are not just grieving what was done to us – our Jewish bodies. We are grieving what we have done—and still do—to each other.

The rabbis of the Talmud recognize that the Temple was not lost in a single moment of military defeat, but through countless small failures of heart, and lack of judgement, each one a missed opportunity to choose compassion over pride. At least that version of events gives us some agency. If only we were nicer to each other, maybe that would protect us from those who seek to kill us and take us hostage. I used to scoff at the idea that we can make that naïve exchange of please don’t hurt me, look how nice I am. Or how German Jews were surprised about how they were treated by the Germans from 1933 onwards considering how German, they saw themselves compared to Ost-Juden. Now, sitting in the hotseat of history, I’m starting to think that maybe that’s actually true. The less fractured we are, the more we can work together to protect ourselves from the agony that is done to us, over and over and over again.

So maybe I’ll get that tattoo on one arm: ס׳איז שווער צו זײַן אַ ייִד — It’s hard to be a Jew.

But on the other? I can imagine a different tattoo: אַהֲבַת חִנָּם — Love freely given.

If sinat chinam destroyed the centre of our Jewish world, maybe ahavat chinam can help rebuild a better Jewish world. And it starts with me feeling my pain and making space for your pain too. We’re all hurting.

This Shabbat, and this Tisha B’Av, I want to ask…Eicha How can we build trust back? What words have we spoken, or withheld, that have hurt others? Where have we assumed the worst instead of believing the best? Where can we listen with more curiosity, and speak with more compassion?

Tisha B’Av doesn’t let us skip to the happy ending. We first have to sit with the pain. We have to name what’s been lost. We have to mourn what was done to us and feel the pain where it hurts. We have to sit in the discomfort, because that’s where the healing could potentially happen.

At the end of Eikhah, after all the pain, comes my favourite line in the service, where we return the Torah to the ark on Shabbat morning. After all the pain described in the book of Eikhah, we beseech God. We hark back to the innocent days before any damage was done to us. We say: we’ll come back to you God but first you come back to us.

We say: “Hashivenu Hashem eilecha v’nashuvah, chadeish yameinu k’kedem.” “Return us to You, God—and we shall return. Renew our days as of old.” (Eikhah 5:21)

Alevei

Shabbat Parah

Today is shabbat Parah which is one of the special shabbatot to get us to start thinking about an upcoming festival. Yes, Purim is now in our rear-view mirror and Pesach is coming towards us at full speed. It’s time to get ready… Today we read the first section of Chukkat which is about the red heifer preparation.

In Numbers 19:1-22, the Israelites are commanded to sacrifice a red heifer without blemish, burning it entirely outside the camp. Its ashes, mixed with water, are used for ceremonial cleansing. Anyone who touches a corpse becomes unclean for seven days and must undergo purification using this mixture of water and ashes from the red heifer.

The connection with Pesach is that the Talmud, in Pesachim, discusses the necessity of ritual purity before sharing in the Passover meal, emphasizing that those who are impure cannot eat the korban Pesach. Pesachim 92a -clarifies that someone who can become pure through the Parah Adumah (red heifer) ritual must do so in time to participate in the Passover meal.

In preparing for this dvar torah, I saw many opinions about this red heifer purity ritual from people far, far wiser than me. Starting with King Solomon the wisest of them all… Where King Solomon, traditionally the author of Kohellet says “All this have I tested in wisdom. I said, "I will be wise", but it was far from me. Yoma 14a teaches that he is referring specifically to the Red Heifer.

Rambam categorized this mitzvah as a chok—a divine decree beyond full human comprehension. He acknowledged its paradoxical nature: the ashes purified the impure but rendered the pure impure. It is the realm of the supra-rational. Rambam explains that a chok—a divine law without an apparent rational explanation—teaches humility. He says that while some commandments have clear reasons, others, like the Red Heifer ritual, transcend human understanding. Accepting chukim demonstrate that divine wisdom surpasses human intellect.

The anonymous author of Sefer haChinuch understood to be a student of Rambam says he provided an explanation for many commandments but with this one, ‘his hand are weak and mouth scared to utter a word, as the depth of this commandment is too deep and filled with secrecy’.

In Bamidbar Rabbah 19:3, a 12th- century midrashic commentary on the Book of Numbers teaches that even wise King Solomon, who investigated the matter, in the end could not fully grasp it. The Midrash says only Moses is told the rationale for the red Heifer by God, which Moses doesn’t share with us.

Jay Schlesinger drew my attention to Dr Joseph Weinstein, who notes that to make soap, one needs three components: an alkali, from ash, water and fat, and he wonders if soap-making was a trade secret of the Kohanim.

So many attempts to reconcile this strange Mitzvah…

Another response to this mitzvah is to walk away from it entirely. To see it as further evidence that our tradition is arcane and irrelevant. Those that don’t walk away, have tried over the centuries to find reasons for the place of this ritual in our lives, including it in our torah reading cycle, and even re-reading it again today.

Moshe Halberthal, in one of my favourite books, called People of the Book, looks at how interpretation works. In particular, he looks at canon and the principle of charity. Canon is when we seal a text and say we are not changing it anymore. Charity here is not charity as we usually think of it, by giving money. This view of charity is a way of looking at another’s statements as a way to shed some light on them, to see that they have light to shed. Uncharitable readings see the text in the service of an unjust cause. I’ve seen that approach around antisemitic, out-of-context quotes from the Talmud that demonstrate how wicked Judaism is. It breaks my heart.

Moshe Halberthal says that when it comes to our canonical texts like the Torah and the Mishnah and the Talmud, charitable readings are more generous in showing the work in the best light. I’m in the charitable camp.

So maybe that’s why the need to make sense of Parah Adumah doesn’t bother me at all. There is so much in our tradition and in our liturgy that rubs me the wrong way, that makes no sense to me, that’s a stone in my shoe. But I love it all, the good and the bad and the confusing. My love is unconditional. I love being Jewish and being part of a long and wide tradition that I swim in. I don’t need to understand it all, to reconcile it all or to explain it all. Even more so when I discovered Rambam, the Talmud and NNLS. I belong here and it belongs to me.

So, I don’t believe we should all believe the same thing, or that I should cancel you if you don’t believe the same thing as me, or that we should eliminate or change the parts of our prayers and rituals that don’t agree with my beliefs. I believe in showing up and helping out. I believe in finding your community and sustaining it. I believe we are stronger together with all our differences.

Shabbat Parah reminds us that our tradition is not always about understanding every detail. Sometimes it’s about showing up with humility, embracing the mystery, and connecting to something larger than ourselves. I love being part of this community, and I hope that we can all continue to find strength in our shared practices and diverse beliefs.

Dvar torah Vayetzei

I saw a picture of a man from the Adat Israel community in Melbourne carefully carrying out the torah scroll from the burned-out synagogue building. I imagine they won’t be reading from it today, but we will… so we can for them.

Today’s parasha for millions of communities around the world is Vayetzei. Let’s see what we can learn from it. This is how it works. We learn our rules and values from the torah through what the Mishnah says the torah says, through what the Talmud says the it says and through what the Shulchan Aruch says it says. We read it through the eyes of rishonim, our first sages, and then though the eyes of achronim, our sages since the 1500s until finally we get to look at it ourselves in 2024. We turn it around and around and see it through the eyes of generations of sages before us. We take the Torah seriously, but we don’t take it literally. We get to decide if its prime directive is Tikkun Olam, fixing the whole world, or a more modest directive of family first. Today I choose family, and specifically sisters.

In the story of the sisters Rachel and Leah, who would want to be Leah, the less beautiful and less loved older sister? In the Torah, it looks like a story of two women fighting each other over one man. But the Talmud retells the story, reinterpreting the Torah, giving Rachel the power to change the destinies intended for her and her sister by two powerful men. For example – in the torah it just says: Leah’s eyes were weak, while Rachel was a woman of beautiful form and face. In the Talmud, in Bava Batra 123, Rav says: it literally means weak eyes but is meant as praise. As Leah would hear people at the crossroads, coming from the land of Canaan, who would say: Rebecca has two sons, and her brother Laban has two daughters; the older daughter will be married to the older son, and the younger daughter will be married to the younger son. And Leah would sit at the crossroads and ask: What are the deeds of the older son? (Esau) The passersby would answer: He is an evil man, and he robs people. She would ask: What are the deeds of the younger son? (Jacob) They would answer: He is “a quiet man, dwelling in tents” (Genesis 25:27). And because she was so distraught at the prospect of marrying the evil brother, she would cry and pray for mercy until her eyelashes fell out. That’s Leah, who through her wounded feelings has the power to reach God through שַׁ֥עַר הַשָּׁמָֽיִם The Talmud in many places says the ‘gates to heaven’ are a unique access point for the prayers of weeping people. Since the destruction of the Temple, the gate to heaven is closed, except for the gates of wounded feeling. now Rachel…

The Talmud gives Rachel the very prized Talmudic quality of humility. The quality is צְנִיעוּת. Not in the modern sense of wearing thick tights but in the Talmudic sense of ‘taking one for the team.’ The term also used is Ulibin (ועלובין). The Talmud transforms the relationship between the sisters as a collaboration rather than a competition. In a story of tricksters getting tricked, Rachel takes matters into her own hands and turns the last screw in the ultimate trickery.

Remember how last week, Jacob had tricked Esau for the birthright and the blessing? In the straight reading of the Torah today, now it’s Jacob’s turn to be tricked by Laban, his father-in-law to be. Jacob loves Rachel and has worked seven hard years to be allowed to marry her when Laban does a switcheroo, and Jacob ends up finding Leah in his marriage bed in the morning. And here’s where the Talmud gets interesting. It makes Rachel an active player rather than just an object in the story. In the Talmud, Rachel has the wisdom to warn Jacob of her father’s intended trickery. She knows her father wants to substitute her older sister in the marriage bed. Jakob thinks he knows better and that he can out-trick Laban, so he gives Rachel secret signs to give to him in the dark on the night, so he will know he is in bed with Rachel and not with Leah.

Still following me? Watch out…The ultimate switcheroo is still coming… This is from the Talmud: ‘When Laban’s associates were bringing Leah up to the wedding canopy to marry Jacob, Rachel thought: Now my sister will be humiliated when Jacob discovers that she is the one marrying him. Therefore, Rachel gave the signs to Leah her sister’ For that act of selflessness, of sisterhood, of compassion, she is rewarded by God.

Indeed, we don’t learn our values from the torah, we learn our values from how we read the Torah. We read the story through the eyes of sages who have highlighted the capacity of sisters to help each other in a cruel world. I too know the value of sisterhood. I would also do anything for my sisters. It’s comforting to know that this value is seen and rewarded in our tradition as well.

Parasha BEHA'ALOTEKHA

Parasha BEHA'ALOTEKHA

What can we learn from the parasha this week about journeys? Not the journey you look back on– in my case from Marais Road Shul in Cape Town to NNLS in London here today.

I want to rather look at journeys ahead of us. Because at that moment, between staying and moving forward, that’s a vulnerable place. You don’t know what’s ahead, but it’s probably difficult out there. Or maybe it’s just scary because you are currently living in the privileged, resting place that we call home. I think of my relative who moved from Latvia to Eretz Yisrael in 1934. She didn’t know anyone there and she went from a comfortable life in Europe with her family, to a hard life in the Middle East digging earth, draining swamps, laying water lines, building water towers and planting orchards. There were no guarantees for her when she left home in 1934. But her brother who stayed behind in Riga, was murdered seven years later. You try to read the writing on the wall, but the signs are never as clear as they are in the parasha this week…

We read that the people of Israel had clouds resting over the Mishkan, deciding for them when to go and when to stay…as it says: ‘Whether it was two days or a month or a year—however long the cloud lingered over the Mishkan—the Israelites remained encamped and did not set out; only when it lifted, did they break camp.’

They also had The Ark of the Covenant of יהוה which travelled in front of them on that three days’ journey to seek out a resting place for them.’ Plus, they had Moses’s excellent leadership and silver trumpets blowing. It’s all very easy for the people of Israel. They don’t have to decide for themselves. Between when to go and when to stay, they just go with the flow. But in terms of survival strategies, that’s not always a good move.

But at that moment between staying and going, between advancing and resting, comes one of my favourite parts of the whole Torah…neatly held together by two inverted nuns which we separate in the choreography of the Torah service on Shabbat. The lines are:

׆ וַיְהִ֛י בִּנְסֹ֥עַ הָאָרֹ֖ן וַיֹּ֣אמֶר מֹשֶׁ֑ה קוּמָ֣ה ׀ יְהֹוָ֗ה וְיָפֻ֙צוּ֙ אֹֽיְבֶ֔יךָ וְיָנֻ֥סוּ מְשַׂנְאֶ֖יךָ מִפָּנֶֽיךָ׃

When the Ark was to set out, Moses would say: Advance, God! May Your enemies be scattered and may Your foes flee before You!

וּבְנֻחֹ֖ה יֹאמַ֑ר שׁוּבָ֣ה יְהֹוָ֔ה רִֽבְב֖וֹת אַלְפֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃ ׆

‘And when it halted, he would say: Return, O יהוה, Israel’s myriads of thousands!’

These two lines are familiar because the first part is what we say when we take the Torah out of the Ark, and the second part is what we say when we return the Torah to the Ark. The two lines are like the arch though which we take the torah out, read it and parade it and then put it back again.

As the Torah is returned to the ark, but before the curtains or doors are closed, we sing the second sentence between the inverted nuns ... וּבְנֻחֹ֖ה יֹאמַ֑ר שׁוּבָ֣ה יְהֹוָ֔ה רִֽבְב֖וֹת אַלְפֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃ ׆

That’s a harder one to understand. The English in Sefaria says ‘And when it halted, he would say: Return, O יהוה, You who are Israel’s myriads of thousands!’

What does that mean?

Nechama Liebowitz points out the problem is with the Hebrew word shuva שׁוּבָ֣ה The Hebrew word shuv means ‘return’ but it’s a word that doesn’t take an object and yet here it is, awkwardly followed by a phrase ‘many thousands of Israel’ as a direct object.

Around the year 1,000, in Spain, the commentator Ibn Ezra says it means: Give the myriads of Israel rest that they may be no longer disturbed.

500 years later in Italy, the commentator, Sforno sees it like this: Rest O lord among the myriads of Israel. Let thy presence rest in our midst.

500 years after Sforno, Nechama Liebowitz writing in Israel, describes it in context with the first part like this:

‘He who rose up to Scatter his enemies and remove wickedness from the earth would dwell once more amongst the tens of thousand of his children and followers from all people.’

She compares it to the Messianic time we read about in Zacharia in the Haftorah later. ‘In that day many nations will attach themselves to GOD and become God’s people, and God will dwell in your midst.’

The student of Nechama Liebowitz, Rabbi Chaim Weiner sees it like this: The two sentences between the inverted nuns have military relevance. This means the second sentence means God return our soldiers in peace. Israel’s myriads of thousands are the soldiers that we want God to bring back to us.

I can’t help thinking about the eight Israeli soldiers who died in battle this week. Benny Ganz described them as “the beautiful faces of the people of Israel, the best among us.” Would that all the soldiers and all the hostages be returned home.

For the meantime, in our very long journey from the midst of the wilderness in Sinai, to Israel, to Babylon, to North Africa to Europe and beyond, we are not there yet, and I’m grateful for that. I’m in no rush to get to the end of days, however painful and uncertain it is at the moment. I feel very at home here in New North London and secure in the liberal democracy of the UK. This is my privileged, resting place. I’ve done enough travelling and I’m grateful to be here. But I know that things can change…

There’s another way to read the line from the parasha that we say when we return the Torah to the ark when we ask God to come back to us. In our long journey through history, when we are resting or journeying, where ever we go and however it looks, God really hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s us that must return to God.

Shmini

This is from the parasha today. Nadav and Avihu, the sons of Aaron go into the Mishkan and offer Eish Zara to God, that they were not commanded to do, and God zaps them. And Moses says through those close to me I will be holy. And Aaron is silent.

I want to talk about Eish Zara or strange fire. In our tradition there are hundreds of commentaries on this because many in our tradition are uncomfortable with the pshat version of events. On the surface of it, two enthusiastic sons of Aaron want to get closer to God and are killed as a result and their father Aaron says nothing, while Moses tries to say nice, kind words.

It seems so unfair. Where is the Justice in God’s actions. Why are good people being made to suffer? The boys didn’t seem to do anything wrong and were killed by God for no good reason. In fact, they weren’t just killed, they were burned alive, incinerated. Ribono shel ha olam…And their father says nothing. (Of course, their mother’s response isn’t recorded in the Torah)

Thank God for our Rabbinic tradition to fill in the gaps. The Rabbis of the Talmud, the Midrash and beyond to our modern age, try to explain. They mostly work hard to suggest that the brothers must have done something wrong to merit this punishment.

The reasons vary from it was an improper offering or unsanctioned offering, to them wearing the wrong clothing, to them being naked, to them being drunk, to them being very stoned on the incense, to their arrogance, to them undermining the leadership of Moses and Aaron, to them refusing to marry and procreate. Or maybe it was just a tragic accident. Or maybe they dared to teach the law in the presence of Moses.

I bumped into Laliv yesterday on the high street and she said look at the Rashi on parashat Mishpatim chapter 24, on verses 10-11.

She was right. It was fascinating. For context, this is from parashat Mishpatim in Exodus, chapter 24, on verses 10-11 that we read weeks ago….

‘Then went up Moses, and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel; and they saw the God of Israel; and there was under His feet the like of a paved work of sapphire stone, and the like of the very heaven for clearness. And upon the nobles of the children of Israel He laid not His hand; and they beheld God and did eat and drink’

Rashi puts that together with what we read today – where they get burned up and he suggests:

‘They gazed and peered and [because of this] were doomed to die, but the Holy One, blessed is He, did not want to disturb the rejoicing of [this moment of the giving of] the Torah. So, He waited for Nadab and Abihu [i.e., to kill them,] until the day of the dedication of the Mishkan.

In other words, God didn’t want to spoil the party, but Nadav and Avihu tried to get too close to God, so they had to die. They believed that they could add to their love of God a greater love, in order to melt into His radiance and so God just helped them along with the melting.

That’s Rashi, but take your pick for the reasons why bad things happen to good people. It’s a very uncomfortable place to sit knowing we are powerless against deaths of children, against pogroms, and the pain and suffering we see all around us. Explanations make us feel better. I hear this a lot. Oh Israel deserved October 07 because of this and that reason. If only we did this and that, then we can escape that suffering. But ladies and gentlemen, I believe that isn’t so. We can be as good as gold and still…

This week I heard the mother of a hostage speak. Her name was Orli Shem Tov. It was on Zoom. Her son, Omer Shem Tov is still held hostage in Gaza and she has had to live with the excruciating pain of that for the last six months. Every morning when she opens her eyes, the pain begins again. She spoke to us from her home in Israel to us sitting safely in London, but her pain was palpable. She told us her son is like sunshine and everyone one wants to be in his company. He is a good kid who loves life and freedom, and he was kidnapped from the Nova festival where he went to party.

Because we were so far away, we could only respond with silence when really what we wanted to do was to be there with her and to give her a hug. I am impatient with people that comment from far away when they are not sitting under rocket fire themselves or have not experienced the pain of losing children themselves. People that don’t know the pain of loss that great. I hear Aaron’s silence and cringe at Moses’s explanations.

It’s easier to listen to people who really know. I was pleased to find a commentary from Elie Wiesel on the strange fire of Nadab and Abihu, and why they were killed for offering it. He says, we don’t know.

Elie Wiesel survived the Holocaust. The word Holocaust is derived from the Greek holokauston, a translation of the Hebrew word ʿolah, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God. His sister, father and mother were offered up in the strange fire of Auschwitz.

He says this: ‘it is to teach us that there are events in life -- in our national life, in our personal life -- events that transcend our understanding. God’s motives and ours are not necessarily the same. There is pain, and there may even be injustice, that we cannot understand. We may try to find answers, but we do not have the answers. We understand that we don’t understand.’

There is so much I don’t understand but am absolutely certain that I am grateful to be here with you all now, and for the wonderful tradition that we all share. We are the lucky ones. Shabbat Shalom.

Tzav

Tzav We all do bad things. We offend by accident and on purpose. We don’t mean to, but we hurt people close to us like our children and our parents, and sometimes we offend complete strangers. We frequently sin in big ways and small against our living planet. We try our best but none of us are perfect. What’s needed is a mechanism for repairing the fracture we have caused and will continue to cause. Otherwise, we will be paralysed by a need for impossible perfection. I believe if you aren’t making mistakes, you just aren’t trying hard enough. Or living in the real world.

When the Temple stood in Jerusalem, people would offer korbanot (sacrifices) for their misdeeds. Today in the parasha, we read about the different sacrifices, like korban hattat (the sin offering) and also Korban Asham (the guilt offering). Although administered by the priests, they were made for the benefit of everyone, rich or poor, powerful or unconnected. The sin offering in particular, allowed for a range of sacrifices, from a whole bull offered by the people at the top to just a handful of fine flour offered by the poorest.

Maimonides has something very interesting to say about the altar where these diverse sacrifices happened . He takes considerable historic licence to say that the altar in the Temple has always been in the same place. Going back in time, he says, the altar in both Temples was in exactly the same spot and it was in exactly the same place where Abraham built the altar for the sacrifice of Isaac all the way back to where Adam was created on that very same spot. He says: ‘Thus, the sages have said: Man was formed from the place of his atonement.’ אָמְרוּ חֲכָמִים אָדָם מִמְּקוֹם כַּפָּרָתוֹ נִבְרָא Quite a flight of fancy for the Great Eagle. But he does it, because he wants to say the potential for atonement is built into all people since the very first person was created. We are all created on that fault line. It is the crack through which the light gets in, some might say.

It’s true today, without a Temple, that people still need a way to repair their mistakes. They still need capara, teshuva, atonement. They still need another chance to do better.

The rabbis that created Rabbinic Judaism after the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 ACE needed to replace those essential processes that used to happen in the Temple. They stopped killing the animals in one large, centralised place and they went smaller, taking the processes into the synagogues, into the study halls and into the courts. The rabbis understood the value of us taking our court ordered punishment.

Take your pick from punishments available. It’s all going to a good cause. Judaism allows capital punishment, lashes or being cut off from your community. The best punishment in terms of getting a second chance is definitely lashes or flogging. Makot in Hebrew.

This brings me to what I really wanted to share with you today. I learned this bit of Talmud with R. Chaim Weiner three weeks ago and it’s a good one. We were learning Shevuot 20b. In it, the rabbis are trying to figure out the correct punishment for taking God’s name in vain when making a false oath. The ten commandments in Exodus are quoted where it says you should not take God’s name in vain because the Lord will not absolve him of his guilt.

Rav Pappa says maybe this means there’s no absolution for this crime at all. But Abaye can’t be having that. He says yes in the Torah it says that God will not absolve him. But there’s another way out. There has to be. God may not absolve him, but the earthly court flogs him and in so doing absolves him of guilt.

That’s why we don’t kill people who take God’s name in vain. Don’t tell anyone but blasphemy is not a big thing in Judaism. I don’t know for sure, but the God I stand before doesn’t need that from me or want me to kill people in his name. Who knows what happens in heavenly courts. We need creative law makers and just courts down here. We need social mechanisms to get people up and to try again, this next time a little better.

Va'era

Today is day 99, the length of time the hostages have been in captivity. Because the number 132 is too big to visualise, I’m thinking of just two men, Omri Miran and Tzahi Idan, who were abducted from Nahal Oz 99 days ago. This is a picture of Omri and his wife in better days.

In the Parasha today, Moses has a problem. No one is listening to him. Not Pharoah who doesn’t want his Israelites to leave, and not the Israelites themselves either. It’s not hard to understand why Pharaoh doesn’t want to lose his skilled slaves. But why don’t the Israelites listen to Moses? Hasn’t God just promised to take them out of Egypt with an outstretched arm? Don’t they want to leave their difficult lives under the cruel Pharoah? The reason given is that the slaves themselves are too downtrodden to see that they have options.

יְדַבֵּ֥ר מֹשֶׁ֛ה כֵּ֖ן אֶל־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וְלֹ֤א שָֽׁמְעוּ֙ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה מִקֹּ֣צֶר ר֔וּחַ וּמֵעֲבֹדָ֖ה קָשָֽׁה ‘But when Moses told this to the Israelites, they would not listen to Moses, their spirits crushed by cruel bondage.’

מִקֹּ֣צֶר ר֔וּחַ וּמֵעֲבֹדָ֖ה קָשָֽׁה Sforno (16th century Italy) says about kotzer ruach ‘for it did not appear believable to their present state of mind, so that their heart could not assimilate such a promise.’

As slaves for generations, fear of the unknown keep the Israelites paralysed. They keep their world small and (to their minds safe) because they are too traumatised to step out into anything else. They can’t see that the door is open if they just push it together.

I have great sympathy for the Israelites. I’m also scared. I know theoretically I can have what Viktor Frankl calls ‘the last freedom’. He says: ‘Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind even in terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.’ But honestly, I’m more in the Janis Joplin mindset where freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

Last year, on October 07, many of my assumptions were revealed and then shattered. I believed for example that all Jews of all ages and all denominations supported Israel. I believed that what Jews in the diaspora experience is the same as what Jews in Israel experience. I believed that I could change people’s minds through factual debate on Instagram. I believed God was only good.

For most of us, our paradigms are so ingrained that they are invisible to us.

This is mine – I’m a descendant of generations of pogrom and expulsion survivors. A sniff of danger and I’m back hiding in the basket. My suitcase is always packed. I just want to stay safe, keep my friends and keep my job. I’m not interested in resisting the established social order in order to be authentic. I just want to stay alive.

John, my Non-Jewish partner, had no such fear bred to his bones. He insisted we put rescue-the-hostages posters up outside our house. When I tucked in my Magen David on the train, he wouldn’t have dreamed of hiding his bring-them-home wristband.

But we all see things differently – I recently spoke to an American Jewish woman who was terrified lest anyone think she was not publicly 100% committed to the Palestinian cause before anything else. Her belief is tikkun olam, and that any resort to self-defence is a crime.

Another paradigm - On Wednesday I spoke to a 60-year-old Israeli man who picked up his revolver on October 07 and drove down to help the people of the Nachal Oz kibbutz. His belief is - if your friends are in trouble, do what it takes to help them.

I’ve found comfort in reading thinkers who allowed their minds to expand in response to catastrophe. People who experienced the Holocaust like Eliezer Berkowitz although he would have hated me as a non-pious or in his words, non- authentic Jew.

In With God in Hell, he writes that the majority of Jews suffered in the Holocaust because of what he calls ‘the naïve innocence regarding the limits of human degradation.’

I’m wondering about the thousands of Jews in Hungary who didn’t resist going to Auschwitz in May 1944 because despite the evidence, they couldn’t believe the certain fate awaiting them.

That’s also a form of Kotzer ruach.

Berkowitz says he says we need to change how we see ourselves, and also expand how we see our sources. He says for centuries our sources have been reinterpreted in the diaspora to teach that violence and resistance is not for Jews.

Sadly, the Israelites with their kotzer ruach never reached the promised land. Moses schlepped them around the dessert for 40 years and they moaned like bratty teenagers all the way.

If we want to merit our Promised Lands, we first need to see our own kotzer ruach, and occasionally see past it. We need to see the full picture, to know evil exists and feel entitled to resist it. We need to see how amazingly diverse and resourceful we are as a team. We need to have the courage to be comfortable with the unknown, and to wonder what is preventing us from asking what else is possible.

Let’s take a deep breath, hold hands with our friends, and step forward together.

Yom Kippur Shacharit Al Chet

We will soon be saying the Viddui again, the extraordinary words we say out loud to each other, to God and mostly to ourselves. It’s a profound part of the Yom Kippur service that we will be saying today often.

So strap yourselves in, because till Neilah tonight, we’ll be saying the Vidui over and over again. We’ll be saying the short version beginning with Ashamnu with 24 ways we went astray and we’ll also be saying the long version called Al Het Shehatanu which has forty-four ways we missed the mark, again listed alphabetically.

The Viddui is extraordinary because it is the only day of the year in which we make a full public confession like this, out loud and all together. It is also extraordinary because it concentrates on personal moral failures and shortcomings. It’s deeply personal and completely public. Among other things, we’ll be acknowledging our hardheartedness, our disrespect for parents and teachers, our arrogance and our baseless hatred. The list goes on and on.

It's so comprehensive that you may feel some of the list does not apply to you. But that’s not the point. You know it’s not all about you, and yet in a way it is.

The power of Vidui is that it enables Teshuva which is the point of the whole exercise. It’s a way of crafting our moral compass as Ismar Schorsch says. It makes us take accountability for ourselves, instead of blaming the outside world.

By knowing where we need to improve, the Viddui gives us a real opportunity. It gives us the chance to be aware of the places and times we didn’t do well before, and so to do it better the next time. To listen better, to be more reliable, to be more sensitive, to be less reactive, to be gentler, to be less distractable, to be more present, and I can only do those things without the burden of shame or the need to be perfect.

In the Talmud, Kiddushin daf 36, Rabbi Yehudah says that God’s love is conditional and that only when we follow the will of God are we called his children. I prefer how Rabbi Meir sees it. He says that we are always called God’s children even when we sin. Rabbi Meir goes onto to say in Yoma 86b: GREAT IS REPENTANCE BECAUSE THE ENTIRE WORLD IS FORGIVEN ON ACCOUNT OF ONE PERSON WHO REPENTS.

גְּדוֹלָה תְּשׁוּבָה, שֶׁבִּשְׁבִיל יָחִיד שֶׁעָשָׂה תְּשׁוּבָה — מוֹחֲלִין לְכׇל הָעוֹלָם כּוּלּוֹ,

In other words, you and me just have to do a bit better, one action, one relationship and one moment at a time, genuinely out of love and we can change the world.

Gmar Hatimah Tova ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lubavitcher Rebbe: ‘If you see what needs to be repaired and how to repair it, then you have found a piece of the world that God has left for you to complete. If you only see what is wrong and how ugly it is, then it is you yourself that needs repair. In either case, it is impossible that you should ever see something and there is nothing you can do

Beha'alotcha

Parsha Beha'alotcha (Numbers 8:1-12:16) <

> It was Rabbi Chaim Weiner who first brought the difference between liturgy and prayer to my attention. He said prayer and liturgy are two very different concepts. Each have their place but they shouldn’t be confused in either form or function. <

> Individual prayer can happen anywhere and at any time and in any language. This kind of prayer follows an emotional, personal impulse. Some people pray like this in a field at dawn hugging trees and others in a bunker at night ducking bullets. This prayer can be a moment of deep contemplation, appreciation or of urgent need. If you are lucky, they can be powerful moments of deep understanding more than was possible to be understood before. Prayers like this involve a shrivelling of the ego and complete humility before the one to whom you are praying. There’s a prime example of this kind of prayer in the parasha today where Moses beseeches God on behalf of his sister Miriam, who has been stricken with horrible white snowy leprosy. <

> Moses cries out to God saying: אֵ֕ל נָ֛א רְפָ֥א נָ֖א לָֽהּ Please God please heal her’ Ibn Ezra, a 12th century scholar says about the words: ‘and Moses cried’ וַיִּצְעַ֣ק מֹשֶׁ֔ה אֶל־יְהֹוָ֖ה ‘This shows that Moses was pained because of what happened to his sister.’ <

> Moses, we know is humble ‘Anav’ more so than any other human being on earth. And now the pain he feels on behalf of his beloved sister, evokes this deep prayer. Moses is partially successful in his prayer; in that she is healed a week later, but not immediately. Everyone must wait for her patiently until she continues along with the rest of the nation on their journey. Her slow recovery is a teaching moment for everyone. <

> This is Moses’s personal prayer - powerful, useful and meaningful, but it is not as popular in our tradition as liturgy. Liturgy is fixed, regular, mandatory and communal. It goes beyond the limitations of individual needs. Private prayer is about the I, and communal prayer or liturgy as about the us. We are all together in this and each person is just one part of the whole. One who is not ill is reminded of others who are ill. Saying the fixed words of the Kaddish in Aramaic, a mourner is heard and held by others. Liturgy restricts self-expression, but there is so much between the spaces of the words. <

> I like the process of saying the same words over and over with my congregation week after week, year after year. I like what it teaches us. Unlike as in other traditions, we don’t speak in tongues or when the spirit moves us. It’s poignant to think we’ve been saying these same, fixed words for so many centuries and in so many places. Some of those words don’t match my beliefs exactly but that’s not what they are for. <

> There are two beautiful examples of liturgy like this taken from the parasha we read today. When we remove the Torah from the Ark, we sing: <

> וַיְהִ֛י בִּנְסֹ֥עַ הָאָרֹ֖ן וַיֹּ֣אמֶר מֹשֶׁ֑ה קוּמָ֣ה ׀ יְהֹוָ֗ה וְיָפֻ֙צוּ֙ אֹֽיְבֶ֔יךָ וְיָנֻ֥סוּ מְשַׂנְאֶ֖יךָ מִפָּנֶֽיךָ׃ When the Ark was to set out, Moses would say: Advance, O יהוה ! May Your enemies be scattered, And may your foes flee before You! <

> And then when we return the Torah to the Aron, we sing: וּבְנֻחֹ֖ה יֹאמַ֑ר שׁוּבָ֣ה יְהֹוָ֔ה רִֽבְב֖וֹת אַלְפֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃ <

> And when it halted, he (Moses) would say: Return, O יהוה, You who are Israel’s myriads of thousands! <

> Ibn Ezra takes this to mean ‘Moses prayed that God would grant rest and quiet to all of Israel, though they be many.’ <

> Twentieth century Rav Meir Simchah of Dvinsk says it means: Come to rest, Hashem, among the myriads and thousands of Israel. He says: ‘The explanation is that the twenty-two thousand Levites who carried the Mikdash should rest from their labour.’ <

> In the Torah, Moses’s prayer that God goes out with the ark to scatter our enemies and then comes back with the ark so we can rest, are the last two lines 35 and 36 in chapter 10 in the book of Numbers. They are held together in the scroll by two inverted nuns. Line 35 and 36 are adjacent to each other in the torah but in the theatre of the liturgy, they are pushed far apart like gates. <

> The torah for us today is the Aron of old then. It’s a circle within a circle. The outside Aron has become the inside Torah. It’s quite mysterious and there’s a lot I don’t understand about it. But I know for sure that if our tradition was given a choice between public liturgy and private prayer what the preferred option would be… <

> In Berachot 6a it says: God is where there are ten people praying together. עֲשָׂרָה שֶׁמִּתְפַּלְּלִין שֶׁשְּׁכִינָה עִמָּהֶם <

> As tempting as it is to hear and feel godliness alone in a field, our tradition wants us to say our liturgy together, even when we don’t know what the words mean or where they come from. They are our inheritance and we carry them whole from one generation to another, as a precious burden. They teach us not to be so self-involved. <

> One last example of prayer in the parasha today… In the wake of still another complaint by the people, Moses tells God that he can’t any more. He says: ‘I cannot carry all this people by myself, for it is too much for me’ It is an experience of total surrender which I think is a condition of real prayer. And in response, God tells Moses to find 70 elders. God says: ‘I will draw upon the spirit that is on you and put it upon them; they shall share the burden of the people with you, and you shall not bear it alone.’ <

> That for me is the experience of being part of this community of prayer and liturgy here today. When it’s all too much for any of us, you can feel the support of everyone around you, and know you are not bearing it alone. I hope you hear it too. <

> Shabbat shalom.

Shmini

Last weekend,Lucy Dee and her daughters Maia and Rina were murdered en-route to a hiking trail in the Jordan Valley. They were all shot and killed. Their surviving father and husband, Rabbi Leo Dee said in response that we need ‘to bring up our children with strong moral values: helping others, caring for others and building community’. I am in awe of his response to the loss he experienced. But that’s what he came up with. I imagine he came up with that response in the silence of his own experience.

Halachically that’s the way it goes too. When we enter a house of mourning, we wait to be spoken to first by the mourner. We follow their lead. We listen. We say the prescribed words of comfort and we don’t rush in there and impose our own stuff on them. It’s like we can’t stand their pain and we want it to go away so we say things when the better thing to do is to listen in silence. Seeing someone’s pain makes us uncomfortable and we want to explain it away. It can be difficult to be there in silence and mostly still thinking of ourselves. We’re chirping away in our head preoccupied with our own anxieties - Am I being comforting enough? Am I doing enough? Have I said the right thing? We want to be the people who say the thing that makes the difference. To explain why bad things happen to good people.

We’re not just saying it to out of a desire to comfort the mourner, we’re saying it to comfort ourselves too. We want to know we are safe and sound and protected from death because we keep shabbat or we live in the right country or in the right place in the right country. Or we join interfaith groups or we say 100 Berakhot a day. We want to imagine we have some sort of control. It’s easier than accepting that for some questions there are no answers, and there is so much that is not in our control.

Elie Wiesel who survived the Holocaust but lost his family, was once asked, “Is there a tradition of silence in Judaism?” “Yes,” he answered. “But we don’t talk about it.” The epicentre of the Jewish tradition of silence as a response to death is in the parasha today. Aaron’s two sons are killed by God in the line of duty in front of Moses and Aaron. Moses then says some words to Aaron where he tries to provide an answer about why Aaron’s sons were killed. Rashi comments that Moses was telling Aaron, ‘I knew that this Mishkan was going to be sanctified by those closest to God, and I thought it would be me or you. Now I see that they, your sons, are greater than both of us.’

And then comes the next line in the parasha that has generated a thousand words of explanation… וַיִּדֹּ֖ם אַֽהֲרֹֽן Va Yidom Aha’aron. Aaron was silent. Va Yidom means to be silent, be still, to grow dumb, to be mute along with the word Ve-shatik which is the Aramaic word often used in the Talmud. Like the word sheket.

And just like there are many words for silence, there are also many different kinds of silences. There’s the cold, empty uncomfortable silence. And there’s also the wordless place which holds enormous potential from which something unexpected and transcendent can emerge. The kol dmamah daka place. קוֹל דְּמָמָה דַקָּה the voice of silence thin which we only hear when we stop listening to the voices in our heads for a microsecond.

We don’t know which version of silence Aaron was experiencing or why he was silent. Commentators theorise that his silence means he was rejecting Moses’ words of explanation. Or that he was accepting them. Or that he had total faith in God’s actions. Or that he was in shock. I recently read another interesting exploration of Aaron’s silence from the Klausenberger Rebbe, Rabbi Halberstam. He was a camp survivor who experienced horrific grief when his wife, all his 11 children and his entire extended family were murdered by the Nazis. His response was to, in his own words ‘build a hospital in Eretz Yisrael where every human being would be cared for with dignity’

And so with no resources or experience, he took it upon himself to build that sort of hospital in Netanya. Today it has two medical centres, a children’s hospital, a geriatric hospital and a nursing school. And it has saved more lives than he had lost. He was once asked why so many of survivors like himself found the strength to rebuild, to re-start families, and to have faith in humanity after what they have experienced.

He answered with a phrase from Ezekiel 16:6 ‘b’damayich chayi’ which means you will live in your blood. We’ve just said it at our Pesach seders where we are redeemed with the blood of the Passover sacrifice. We also say it at a bris because of the blood of circumcision. Rabbi Halberstam made it very clear he wasn’t saying that through their bloody sacrifice they had earned the ability to go on. It wasn’t transactional. He was saying that the source of the ability of the survivors to continue was through silence. He rewrote the verse in Ezekiel as ‘we live in our silence.’ That is the power of silence.

Rabbi Halberstam says that Aaron’s silence in our parasha today allowed him to continue to do the work that he was given to do.

The challenge for us is to listen to someone grieving with love, with the faith that they know what they need and want. They don’t need our theories. They need our loving, comforting presence and also occasionally, they need a cup of tea and a sandwich.

Vaeira

Have you ever walked down the stairs with one eye closed? It’s very tricky to do because you need two eyes set apart from each other to give you accurate depth perception. Each eye tells a slightly different story and you need both to get the full picture you need. You see more when one story is told twice.

In today’s parasha of Vaeira ("And I made Myself seen") God talks to Moses and says: ‘I am YHVH. I made myself seen to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob, by the name of El Sha-dai, but my name YHWH I was not known to them.’ The problem there is that earlier in the torah, YHVH is used in association with the Fathers.

Rashi explains this apparent contradiction by saying that the promises made to the Fathers in the name of El Shadai is only going to be manifest to Moses in the name of YHVH. The Fathers didn’t yet grasp God’s quality of truthfulness where the promises made to them will be fulfilled by later generations who understand God’s quintessential truth. Rashi twice uses the term emet or truth. A thousand years after Rashi, Richard Elliot Friedman wrote Who Wrote the Bible. Friedman teases out different authors of the bible with different perspectives telling the same story twice or even three times. J, E and P he calls them.

He says that this opening in our Parasha today is first time in the P or Priestly text that God's personal name VHVH is introduced. He notices that in the J and E texts, God is merciful. God is Erech apayim. Whereas in the P texts God is seen as Emet or Truth. And that certainly fits with Rashi’s explanation where Rashi says כַּרְתִּי לָהֶם בְּמִדַת אֲמִתּוּת שֶׁלִּי,

There’s a lot more richness to be seen where the Torah itself is seeing the same story twice. On top of that, the interpreters of the Torah see things from their own perspectives too. On top of that, we see things from our own perspectives as well. Together, it’s as beautiful as seeing a prism of 70 colours refracted from a single undivided ray of light. We need J, E and P. We need the Rashi and the Richard Friedman and we need everyone here today. Nobody alone can see the whole story.

I was lucky enough to hear Dr Dror Bondi speak at New North London Synagogue just after kiddish last Shabbat morning. He had a great metaphor for what we see when we say the word God. He said it’s like the difference between a map and the topology the map describes. Us humans are mostly limited to describing the map but it’s essential to know it’s not the topology. The topology is the light, the map is the prism. The topology is what we point to. The map is made of language.

None of us really know what our friends see when they say the word God or any versions of that name, because that is the topology. But sometimes in rare moments in prayer, in love, in listening or in studying together, face to face or even over the internet, we catch a glimpse of something more transcendent. We need to look between the lines and between ourselves. We need to have modesty to see our single view is not the whole story. We need that multiplicity of vision when we walk down the stairs, and when we talk about God and what God wants from us. Because only in that shared gap is our capacity to glimpse the light.

Shabbat Shalom.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chabad website: G‑d also says: "By My name, Y-H-V-H, I did not make Myself known to them." This is understood by the commentaries as G‑d saying to Moses: "I did not reveal My quintessential truth," represented by the divine name Y-H-V-H, to the Patriarchs; they knew Me only by the name El Sha-dai which represents a more limited manifestation of My being. They accepted that they could never comprehend My infinite, unknowable essence. You, on the other hand, to whom I have revealed My truth, question My ways.

God had made a promise to the Patriarchs. He had promised them the land of Canaan but the time had not been ripe for its fulfilment. This is the meaning of the phrase that God had not yet appeared to them by His name. The attribute of Divine fulfilment implied in this name of God had not yet been realized in history (Nechama Liebowitz, New Studies in Shmot, 135)

Rashi- G‑d also says: "By My name, Y-H-V-H, I did not make Myself known to them." This is understood by the commentaries as G‑d saying to Moses: "I did not reveal My quintessential truth," represented by the divine name Y-H-V-H, to the Patriarchs; they knew Me only by the name El Sha-dai which represents a more limited manifestation of My being. They accepted that they could never comprehend My infinite, unknowable essence. You, on the other hand, to whom I have revealed My truth, question My ways.

Rabbi Ḥanina ben Gamla says: the reason why Moses fell to his face in front of God is that he saw the attribute of slow to anger; and the Rabbis say: He saw the attribute of truth. (Sanhedrin 111)

Who Wrote the Bible? Richard Elliot Friedman, Harper One, 1987

Ha'azinu

I don’t know about you, but on the days following Yom Yippur, the songs resonate in my head. I hum Avinu Malkeinu while I am brushing my teeth, making my breakfast and putting on my shoes.

It’s not surprising because Yom Kippur is a powerful day that imprints itself on us. Over and over, we resolve to be better people so that we might be be written in the book of life. We resolve to be better people so that ultimately, we will not just be written in the book, we will be sealed in the book. Gmar Chatimah tova we say. May you be well sealed. We sing a very different song today in Ha-azinu. In Ha’azinu, there is no is any Teshuva. There is no expectation that repentance by Israel will bring about a reconciliation with God.

Teshuva is a later development in Judaism and makes me once again so pleased to be a beneficiary of Rabbinic Judaism. I would rather believe that I have agency than believe that I am a victim of circumstances.

But let’s go back in time to listen to Moses’s final plea to Israel to hear his words. It is laid out as a 70-line poem. It is full of metaphors and the verses often rhyme. In it, Moses prophesies that despite all that God and Moses have said and done, Israel will abandon God, as they had in the past. God will punish Israel, as in the past, but never to the point of utter destruction. It warns that God will hide his face from Israel, and it contains these prophetic words:

‘The sword shall deal death without, As shall the terror within, To youth and maiden alike, The baby as well as the aged.’

In our long history, we have seen this happen. But I don’t believe the innocent children and old people are killed in terrifying circumstances because they are Jews who forgot God. I can’t square that circle today.

It’s interesting that Moses’s final plea to the people and his prediction is a poem because poems can express what can’t be said any other way. Poems use metaphors, and we need those to evoke something in the listener.

For example, if I say the word ‘cattle car’ in a poem and it’s read by a person who has never heard of the holocaust, they might see just see a train and they might see cows in the train, but if I say it to a Jewish person, they’ll probably see something very different. They’ll probably recall every horrendous account they’ve ever read of desperate people squashed into freight cars, without water or space to sit on the three-day journey from their village to a death camp. I don’t have to say much to evoke that. Here is a famous six-line poem written originally in Hebrew, by Dan Pagis. It is called:

Written in pencil in the sealed freight car

Here in this carload

I am Eve

With my son Abel

If you see my older boy

Cain son of Adam

Tell him that I

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you don’t see the sealed freight car in your mind, you will miss the power of the poem. The effect is even stronger if you know that Pagis is playing with Yom Kippur liturgy, contrasting the writing (in the book of life) with the sealing in the freight car. The author of the poem knows that God hid his face from the sealed freight cars delivering millions of Jews to their death.

Eve and her son, Abel were alive then but on a journey to certain death. In our long Jewish story, we will soon take leave of the greatest prophet that ever lived. We will leave him standing on Mount Nebo and looking at the promised land from a distance. Moses is forbidden from entering it, but we are not. Soon we will continue to the next chapter in our long history of those who survived. Our story is not just written in pencil on a sealed freight cart, but also in ink on parchment and on our hearts with songs.

Yom Kippur - Viddui

We will shortly be saying the viddui or confession. We will beat our hearts with our right fists while we confess to our many sins together. Together, we will confess our sins from the general like wickedness and arrogance to more specific sins, like robbery, slander and contempt for teachers and parents. With each beat and confession, we will communally take that awareness of our errors to heart. We will be confessing our character flaws and our less than perfect behaviours, together.

As a child, I would consider whether or not I had done those sins or not. Extortion- not me, rude to parents- oh yes me. As an adult, I would like to think I’m wiser now. I know that it’s not about me and my sins, it’s about us and our sins. And together, we certainly cover off all of these sins as a group effort. But I still struggle with the list of sins with deep feelings of shame. I can think less of myself as I read the list. I often think less of myself anyway. And I know that’s not useful either.

So how do we let the Viddui liturgy help us? If Viddui or confession is the first chapter in process of Teshuva, how do I start this essential task? How do I get to end up serving God out of love rather than fear?

Here’s a possible clue. Before we say the Viddui prayers, we say something striking. It is from Deuteronomy 30 and it says ‘and God will circumcise your heart and the heart of all your descendants to love the Lord your God with all your heart’ וּמָ֨ל יְהֹוָ֧ה אֱלֹהֶ֛יךָ אֶת־לְבָבְךָ מוּל means to circumcise. Like a Brit Milah where a baby’s foreskin is cut way. It’s also in Deuteronomy 10 where it says מַלְתֶּ֕ם אֵ֖ת עׇרְלַ֣ת לְבַבְכֶ֑ם ‘You shall circumcise the foreskin of your heart’

What does it mean to cut away the bits of your heart? What are the superfluous bits? What is the process by which the heart becomes free of its tattered bits of extra skin? What is the unprotected pure heart underneath the heart’s foreskin?

I think the metaphor is pointing to something about the process of becoming our best selves. It’s not about more. It’s about less. It’s not about more effort and more resolutions to do better. It’s not about more covering up the fact that we are all cracked. It’s about less thinking about those personal stories that haunt us. It’s about letting go of our need to tell the same old story about ourselves over and over again and less desire to meet impossible standards. It’s about stripping back and returning to factory settings. By circumcising our hearts, we might see what we are part of, by default. The Ein Sof that includes us and is bigger and wiser than any of us, if we are down on our knees to see it.

Rav Kook describes repentance as returning to one’s true self. He believes the basic nature of each individual is good. For Rav Cook, when we sin, we are walking away from our better nature. By turning away from the wrong behaviours, we disown them and return to our self - the kinder and better nature that is truly us.

Perhaps. I prefer this framing from a friend of mine who is an artist. Avigail says: Teshuva is like peeling back the dirty masking tape on a painting to reveal the bright white paper underneath.

Unlike Rav kook who believes we peel away the sins and reveal the better state underneath, she says we get to a blank slate underneath. Because that is where the work happens in an endless process of self-re-creation. Beneath our vision of ourselves that we paint one way or another, good or bad, is a place perpetual opportunity. Un-encrusted by habits of thought, we are free to choose better again and again.

Viddui is a means to an end, and that end is to let the communal confessions of our sins circumcise our hearts.

Viddui strips us down to glimpse at the blank paper underneath.

It is the process by which we have to forget our perfect offering, and see our fault lines where the light can get in. We are cracked here and here and here, but at any moment, we can create a better picture.

Let’s get to work.

Pinchas

For Ha kol Olin Shabbat morning

Hello, Shabbat Shalom. I have volunteered to say a few words about our Parasha today. But before I say anything about Pinchas, I need to say a word about a word. The word is: ‘mutable’ and it’s flipside ‘immutable’.

Mutable does not mean what I do on Zoom when the speaker is boring, although sadly I must admit I do mute because I have a short attention span and thanks to modern technology, tedious people are now mutable. Unfortunately for you today, that option is not open to you. So if you have a nap for the next five minutes, I will understand. I will try to keep it interesting though.

This is what mutable means in the academic world – it’s the word for things that can change over time. The opposite of mutable is immutable which means unchanging over time or unable to be changed. I came across this concept a few years ago when I read a fascinating book called What’s Divine about Divine Law by Christine Hayes. In it, she shows that for the ancient Greeks, divine law has to be by definition- rational, true, universal, and immutable. Divine law doesn’t change for the ancient Greeks.

While in the Torah, on the other hand, divine law is divine because it is grounded in revelation with no presumption of rationality, conformity to truth, universality, or immutability. In our tradition, the law can change. And change it often does. There are three powerful examples of that capacity of the law to change in the parasha today. I’ll start with the most obvious one…

Machlah, Noah, Chaglah, Milkah and Tirtzah, the five daughters of Tzelophchad of the tribe of Menashe, want the existing divine law of inheritance to change. They ask Moses that they be granted the portion of the land intended for their father who died without sons. God accepts their claim, changes are made to the divine law and are incorporated into the Torah’s laws of inheritance. That is mutable divine law in action in the Torah itself.

But for me, the more interesting example of the mutability of divine law comes earlier in the parasha, with the very problematic story about a zealot called Pinchas who drives his spear though the belly of Zimri while he is having sex with Cozbi, the Midianite woman. Bravo! Lives are saved and Pinchas is blessed by God. I’m just guessing here that no-one here is comfortable with this story. Luckily, we are not the first Jews who need and want to rewrite the Torah precedent expressed here. The rabbis of the Talmud in Sanhedrin 81 and 82 are extremely critical of Pinchas and his zealous ways. They decide that halachically Pinchas acted on his own and without court sanction. Strangely for the rabbis of the Talmud, they don’t debate it. They say it categorically.

Specifically they say that if Zimri, the victim had turned around and killed Pinchas the Zealot in self-defence, Zimri would be declared innocent in a court of law. Secondly, the Talmud narrows down the permitted zone and rules that if Pinchas had killed Zimri and Cozbi just a moment before or after they had sex, he would have been guilty of murder.

Thirdly, the rabbis of the Talmud say that had Pinchas consulted a Bet Din and asked whether he was permitted to do what he was proposing to do, the answer would have been a clear no. Absolutely not. The permission for zealotry expressed in the torah today is withdrawn in the Gemara.

It clearly states, an individual cannot execute a death sentence without a duly constituted court of law, a trial, evidence and a judicial verdict. Killing without due process is murder. Halachically today, an individual cannot commit murder even to save lives. Don’t even think about it. With techniques like this, the rabbis of the Talmud change the divinely mandated law in many places in the Talmud, and God laughs. Times have moved on and the locus for law is not in the sky anymore but amongst the people. <

> The other change we can see in the Parasha today is that we no longer do the festival sacrifices described. Not the sheep or the rams or the cows with their roasted smell that is so pleasing to God. The last change is in leadership. Moses empowers Joshua to succeed him and lead the people into the promised land. <

> The parasha is about transitions in law, in leadership and in practice. Change in Jewish life is like a glacier, moving slowly and continually. Occasionally, you catch a glimpse and see the changes for yourself in your own lifetime. When I was growing up, there was a belief that women had to sit upstairs. The only time we ever came downstairs to the men’s section was for our en-masse bat mitzvah ceremony, where batches of girls wearing white were processed twenty at a time.

But change is sometimes maddeningly slow and there are still people today who believe women’s voices cause Erva or licentious or are an embarrassment to the community and as such they may not daven or leyn for the community. Strange I know, but I’m sympathetic because we’ve all experienced for ourselves how closely embedded habit is to justifications of what can’t ever possibly change. But habits become normal, and luckily today, due to the courage of a few people in the room here today to make the necessary changes, women are welcome to participate fully in Ha Kol Olin and Assif.

One final thought, the most fascinating part of our whole story is what doesn’t change. The immutable part that remains intact that has to be experienced rather than explained. Here we all are reading and discussing parashat Pinchas, saying the shmah, and davening Musaf, as we have for thousands of years. When we return the Torah we have to the Ark, we will sing and I will have a little catch in my throat, sometimes so much that I can’t say the words out loud…

עֵץ חַיִּים הִיא לַמַּחֲזִיקִים בָּהּ. וְתמְכֶיהָ מְאֻשָּׁר: דְּרָכֶיהָ דַרְכֵי נעַם וְכָל נְתִיבתֶיהָ שָׁלום: הֲשִׁיבֵנוּ ה' אֵלֶיךָ וְנָשׁוּבָה. חַדֵּשׁ יָמֵינוּ כְּקֶדֶם:

The last line comes from the end of Lamentations or Eicha where we say: ‘Take us back, O LORD, to Yourself, and let us come back; Renew our days as of old.’

Isn’t it extraordinary that we’re still grasping to that tree of life, we’re still yearning to return to the source of it all, we’re still wishing for good days like the old days. We still see ourselves as part of the Jewish journey that began so long ago and continues into an unknowable future. Shabbat shalom