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.

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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

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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