What Don't We Want to See? - Dysfunctional Families, Blindness and Blessing

What a story!  A story* filled with the drama and dysfunctionality of family life, any family; a story at once both ancient and mythic/archetypal, and also completely up-to-the minute, the stuff of modern fiction, soap opera even, with its portrait of intergenerational conflict, parental favouritism, sibling rivalry, deceit between wife and husband – and if you throw in the motif of characters in disguise, as well as how the story dramatizes the working out of a larger destiny through the interactions of the human characters, we could also recognise the narrative as Shakespearean in its ability to speak to some of the deepest and most complex aspects of the human condition.

*(Genesis 27 – the text appears at the end of this blog)

And the Torah - that text so easily dismissed by the misinformed or those too lazy or self-opinionated to actually read it with unblinkered eyes – the Torah revels in the intrigues and character flaws it lays bare for us to see. This is how we all are, it seems to say, in our flawed humanity, our moral blindness, our competitiveness, our aggression, our deceptiveness, our hiding the truth from others and ourselves, our confusion between wanting to do the right thing and wanting to gain the upper hand, or be proved right.

All of that is in the text of Genesis 27: the storytellers – and what great storytellers they were, we could almost call them inspired – they show it all; and they show it within the family life of Judaism’s foundational figures, the patriarchs, the matriarchs – who came to be revered over the generations, but who our narrators don’t blush from portraying in all their small-mindedness and self-preoccupation.

That’s a great gift they have left us with – narratives and characters who are just like us, sometimes like us at our worst, and yet who are bound up in a tale, a story, larger than themselves, about which they, the characters, know very little. But if we are like them, then we can ask: is there any larger story, a sacred story, that we might feel we are bound up with, knowingly or unknowingly?

When I say that the Torah story is ‘our’ story, I don’t just mean it’s our ancient text, the Torah, part of our Jewish heritage. It is that of course, but it’s also our story because it talks about us. It talks to us and about us. It’s like a mirror sometimes – if we look closely enough at the text, into the text, we see (with a shock of recognition sometimes), we see ourselves. As we engage with this chapter we see, uncomfortably, problematically: well yes, we can lie, we can hide the truth about things, we can deceive, we can harbour aggressive and hateful  feelings to others – sometimes (say it quietly) to others in  our own family, for heaven’s sake.

Aye, there’s the rub. In the Torah, all of this intrigue, the narrators suggest, is ‘for heaven’s sake’ – there is a divine plan, unfolding in the background, rumbling along, sort of hard-wired into the unfolding drama. But can we say the same? Would we want to say the same? That our lives are held inside a larger, holding, story, in which unwittingly - in our folly and in our grandeur - we are playing a part?

The Torah text implicitly opens up this question for us. Are these stories just about what has been, about the past, about our mythological roots, our mythic ancestors? Is our sacred history just that – history?   Or is this Tree of Life (as the Torah is called) still growing? – is our life one of the still growing multitudinous branches of the ever-renewing, ever-flourishing, Tree of Life?

What would it mean to see our own small lives as still part of an unfolding sacred drama, a drama of the enactment of holiness in everyday life, a drama where we are expected to enact holiness in everyday life? Would we even want to see our lives this way? Wouldn’t we prefer just to be left alone?  How often have Jews wanted to say to the Holy One of Israel: ‘leave us alone, choose someone else for a change’. How often we might wish not to be carriers of this sacred story, a story still being written. How we might wish for our character in the sacred drama  to be written out of the script – retired to the Costa Brava, or killed off by the divine storyteller. But like characters in a Beckett play we are trapped, no way out: “You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.”

The chapter we read this week opens with the focus on Isaac, and we hear that ”his eyes were dimmed, failing to be able to see” (27:1), and the whole drama revolves around this image, the old man who can’t see. And maybe we are happy to be literalists and read the text in a plain sense – this is about blindness, and so he really can’t tell the difference between Jacob and Esau except by touch and smell – he can hear that the voices are different, his ears don’t deceive him (27:22), but he doesn’t trust that, he keeps asking for reassurance from his sons, as if he doesn’t know what to do with his doubts.  This is painful, and poignant. We know what it’s like to deceive – and to be deceived.

 

But the text offers itself to us with a different question bound up in its telling. We can’t only read it literally: it invites us to read it (as the rabbis of old would have done) symbolically, metaphorically. What is this ‘failure in seeing’? How much is this a story about Isaac not wanting to see, refusing to see? Maybe he doesn’t want to see that his wife and son are prepared to trick him, maybe he doesn’t want to see that he does actually prefer Esau, a man after his own heart, earthy and straightforward - prefer him to his other son Jacob, who is not only a heel and a trickster but is also Rebecca’s beloved (thus, perhaps, keeping wife and husband apart). Maybe he doesn’t want to see that he’s the author of a fractured and fractious family. Not seeing, not wanting to see, wishing to avoid seeing what is going on within families, is a psychologically true reality that transcends time and place and culture. 

That Isaac couldn’t see, didn’t want to see, speaks to us all and makes us ask the question: and what do we not want to see? What can’t we see, or refuse to see, that’s unfolding in front of our turned-away eyes? 

Each of us will want to answer that question in our own way. If we can bear it. It can be a painful, troubling - certainly disquieting - question. What are you choosing not to see, ‘turning a blind eye to’, as we say?

This week I think I caught a glimpse of something that I maybe didn’t want to look at, at least not look at too closely. And it was about family - not personal family, but the collective family. The Jewish family in the larger sense:  Jewish peoplehood and our history and the passing on of the vision from generation to generation.

And what I saw that was an eye-opener – but disturbing to look at - was what’s happened to European Jewry in the last 50 years.

When I was a young man, thinking of training to become a rabbi, more than a quarter of the Jews in the world lived in Europe. That was already a huge drop compared to before the War, when Europe and the Soviet Union accounted for fully 60% of world Jewry. But in the early 1970s, a quarter of world Jewry was still a significant number of Jews, and the work of reconstructing a Jewish life in Europe was something being taken on by the generation of progressive rabbis who were already at, or had graduated from, the Leo Baeck College. This post-Shoah work felt a powerful, and historically-necessary, and in its way sacred, task. And I wanted to be a small part of it.

So the shock of what I saw last week, that I didn’t want to see, is that actually the Jewish population of Europe has fallen by 60% in the last 50 years. Only 9% of the global Jewish population now lives in Europe. The centre of gravity of Jewish life is now overwhelmingly  in Israel and in America.

From the bubble of northwest London, where Jewish life is flourishing, and I am involved in a synagogue that is about to invest major funds and energy in rebuilding and renewing our own community building for the next 50 years – as if we are in some way isolated from larger historical currents -  maybe these figures and the bigger picture, the larger narrative that is unfolding around us, doesn’t matter. Maybe, like Isaac, we have to turn a blind eye to what’s happened to the European Jewish family of which we are a part. After all, life has to go on where we live it.

Maybe blindness to certain realities is a necessary attribute within an unfolding sacred drama. Is that the lesson of Isaac’s so-called blindness that I need to learn in our current context? The role of a strategic ‘failure to see’  in the service of a larger story? Maybe it is.  Indeed, maybe that is what the Torah text itself shows us in its own subversive way.

Because this whole drama we read of who will receive the blessing from Isaac - all the shenanigans and psychologically-fraught tension of the story between the brothers and involving the parents, is both addressing real human dilemmas and it’s a kind of charade, an elaborate piece of play-acting in which Isaac, the inheritor of the special Abrahamic blessing about the destiny of the people, is complicit.

If we read the text carefully - as I have tried to learn to do from my Bible teacher Rabbi Jonathan Magonet, whose understanding I am following here - what we discover as we read on into the next chapter of Torah, is that all the rivalry and battles over who will get the blessing in chapter 27, with all the frenzy and distress it stirs up in the protagonists, is in the end completely beside the point. They are squabbling over an ordinary patriarchal family blessing, a blessing of material prosperity and well-being. And that matters on a human level. It’s a life and death matter, yes, on a personal level.

But the next chapter opens with what is actually important, in terms of scared history, in terms of the larger divine drama that is being played out. For after the deception of Isaac by Jacob, and as Jacob is about to flee from his brother’s murderous rage, Isaac quietly calls Jacob and gives him another blessing - the Abrahamic blessing, the transgenerational blessing of fertility and inheritance of the land, the pre-destined land.

This is the real deal, the blessing of the God of Abraham - the spiritual blessing one might call it -  passed by Abraham to Isaac, and now passed on to Jacob as he leaves home; it’s the blessing that binds the carrier into the burden and promise of sacred history rather than personal family drama. And Jacob, the heel, the deceiver, the fraudster - he gets this blessing gratis. It’s his destiny. And Isaac has to turn a blind eye to the here-and-now personal intrigues and family dysfunctionality because he’s got his eyes focused on what can’t be seen, what can only be known about, intuited - maybe with an inner eye, maybe only in rare glimpses, when his eyes catch sight of eternity and the Eternal One.

So maybe European Jewry is down to only 9%, and maybe it is destined to fall even lower, but maybe – I console myself – it’s not about the numbers: that’s about material blessings so to speak; maybe we should keep our eyes (if we can bear it) on the larger drama: that we – and this can be Jew and non-Jew alike, anyone who cares about justice and righteousness) are characters in a sacred history, like holy letters inscribed in a holy text that we may never read; for the text is still being written, it’s still unfolding, and we may not be here for the next chapter, we may never have the larger vision of how the story will turn out. Just the knowledge that the text in which we appear is indispensable.  

A single letter missing in a Torah scroll makes the text possul, null and void. Each letter counts, each letter is precious, each letter in the holy story, our sacred story, is significant, beyond words. 

 [Based on a sermon given via Zoom for  Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on November 21st 2020] 

Genesis 27

King James Version

1 And it came to pass, that when Isaac was old, and his eyes were dim, so that he could not see, he called Esau his eldest son, and said unto him, My son: and he said unto him, Behold, here am I.

² And he said, Behold now, I am old, I know not the day of my death:

³ Now therefore take, I pray thee, thy weapons, thy quiver and thy bow, and go out to the field, and take me some venison;

⁴ And make me savoury meat, such as I love, and bring it to me, that I may eat; that my soul may bless thee before I die.

⁵ And Rebekah heard when Isaac spake to Esau his son. And Esau went to the field to hunt for venison, and to bring it.

⁶ And Rebekah spake unto Jacob her son, saying, Behold, I heard thy father speak unto Esau thy brother, saying,

⁷ Bring me venison, and make me savoury meat, that I may eat, and bless thee before the Lord before my death.

⁸ Now therefore, my son, obey my voice according to that which I command thee.

⁹ Go now to the flock, and fetch me from thence two good kids of the goats; and I will make them savoury meat for thy father, such as he loveth:

¹⁰ And thou shalt bring it to thy father, that he may eat, and that he may bless thee before his death.

¹¹ And Jacob said to Rebekah his mother, Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man:

¹² My father peradventure will feel me, and I shall seem to him as a deceiver; and I shall bring a curse upon me, and not a blessing.

¹³ And his mother said unto him, Upon me be thy curse, my son: only obey my voice, and go fetch me them.

¹⁴ And he went, and fetched, and brought them to his mother: and his mother made savoury meat, such as his father loved.

¹⁵ And Rebekah took goodly raiment of her eldest son Esau, which were with her in the house, and put them upon Jacob her younger son:

¹⁶ And she put the skins of the kids of the goats upon his hands, and upon the smooth of his neck:

¹⁷ And she gave the savoury meat and the bread, which she had prepared, into the hand of her son Jacob.

¹⁸ And he came unto his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I; who art thou, my son?

¹⁹ And Jacob said unto his father, I am Esau thy first born; I have done according as thou badest me: arise, I pray thee, sit and eat of my venison, that thy soul may bless me.

²⁰ And Isaac said unto his son, How is it that thou hast found it so quickly, my son? And he said, Because the Lord thy God brought it to me.

²¹ And Isaac said unto Jacob, Come near, I pray thee, that I may feel thee, my son, whether thou be my very son Esau or not.

²² And Jacob went near unto Isaac his father; and he felt him, and said, The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.

²³ And he discerned him not, because his hands were hairy, as his brother Esau's hands: so he blessed him.

²⁴ And he said, Art thou my very son Esau? And he said, I am.

²⁵ And he said, Bring it near to me, and I will eat of my son's venison, that my soul may bless thee. And he brought it near to him, and he did eat: and he brought him wine and he drank.

²⁶ And his father Isaac said unto him, Come near now, and kiss me, my son.

²⁷ And he came near, and kissed him: and he smelled the smell of his raiment, and blessed him, and said, See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the Lord hath blessed:

²⁸ Therefore God give thee of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine:

²⁹ Let people serve thee, and nations bow down to thee: be lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother's sons bow down to thee: cursed be every one that curseth thee, and blessed be he that blesseth thee.

³⁰ And it came to pass, as soon as Isaac had made an end of blessing Jacob, and Jacob was yet scarce gone out from the presence of Isaac his father, that Esau his brother came in from his hunting.

³¹ And he also had made savoury meat, and brought it unto his father, and said unto his father, Let my father arise, and eat of his son's venison, that thy soul may bless me.

³² And Isaac his father said unto him, Who art thou? And he said, I am thy son, thy firstborn Esau.

³³ And Isaac trembled very exceedingly, and said, Who? where is he that hath taken venison, and brought it me, and I have eaten of all before thou camest, and have blessed him? yea, and he shall be blessed.

³⁴ And when Esau heard the words of his father, he cried with a great and exceeding bitter cry, and said unto his father, Bless me, even me also, O my father.

³⁵ And he said, Thy brother came with subtilty, and hath taken away thy blessing.

³⁶ And he said, Is not he rightly named Jacob? for he hath supplanted me these two times: he took away my birthright; and, behold, now he hath taken away my blessing. And he said, Hast thou not reserved a blessing for me?

³⁷ And Isaac answered and said unto Esau, Behold, I have made him thy lord, and all his brethren have I given to him for servants; and with corn and wine have I sustained him: and what shall I do now unto thee, my son?

³⁸ And Esau said unto his father, Hast thou but one blessing, my father? bless me, even me also, O my father. And Esau lifted up his voice, and wept.

³⁹ And Isaac his father answered and said unto him, Behold, thy dwelling shall be the fatness of the earth, and of the dew of heaven from above;

⁴⁰ And by thy sword shalt thou live, and shalt serve thy brother; and it shall come to pass when thou shalt have the dominion, that thou shalt break his yoke from off thy neck.

⁴¹ And Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing wherewith his father blessed him: and Esau said in his heart, The days of mourning for my father are at hand; then will I slay my brother Jacob.

 

Finding Hope in Unsettling Times

 It’s a truism to say that these are strange times, disturbing times, vexing times: if you are not feeling destabilised in some fundamental part of yourself - somehow on edge, unable to fully relax, fully let go and enjoy life in all its abundant richness - if you are feeling you have lost some essential inner calmness of spirit, or hopefulness about life, if you are finding yourself unable to get to sleep at night, or waking unnaturally early and then unable to get back to sleep – if you are feeling any of that, or just unaccountably ill-at-ease, if this is how it is for you at the moment, I have two things to say.

First: you are not alone. You may not have a context in which you can talk about this, or get to grips with it,  you may not even have the words to pin down these unsettled and unsettling feelings: you just know things aren’t right. But I know that you are not alone in responding like this to what we are living with, and living through.

Secondly: I think this unsettledness you might be feeling, the edginess, the unpindownable sense of being ill-at-ease is entirely congruent with the external circumstances we are living through. What is going on is like a psychic – psychological and spiritual -  earthquake; for the tectonic plates beneath our feet are shifting. Things which have been stable in our lives are becoming – more rapidly than we can adjust to – unstable. Things feel out of control, we feel out of control – because things are out of control.

Let’s look at just a few areas where this is true. Obviously, close to home, there is Covid-19, with all its ongoing uncertainties and disruptions and questions. We are having to wonder not only about whether we and our loved ones will survive this next 12 months, but about what aspects of our lives will ever return to some semblance of – that dread word – normality. Nobody’s in control of this disease, anywhere in the world; and there’s no need for me to describe the UK government’s shambolic attempts to get a grip on the situation. We are having to manage daily anxieties about our own health, while at the same time adapt to how our everyday lives have been altered: in small, and sometimes large, ways we’ve had to leave behind a world with which we were familiar. 

How we met people , how we greeted people, where we travelled, how we travelled, where we prayed, where we played bridge, how we saw the doctor, how we planned for the future - so confidently, with such lightness of being – it’s all gone. We’ve had to leave it all behind, though we keep hoping we are going back. But we are not.  We can never re-set the  time button, however profoundly we might wish we could.  

In the annual cycle of readings from the Torah, we have reached the beginning of the Abraham saga (Genesis12). Abraham – not in the prime of his life, but in the second half of his life, and after a settled life in one territory - is told/commanded to leave behind his land, his birth community, his family roots, all the security of his life, and move on.

And our Torah text dramatizes how he seems to have been able to do this: he submits his own will, his own needs, his own ties of affection and rootedness in what was familiar and secure, he lets go of all that everyday human clutching at what he had, and submits to a call he hears, experiences:  an inner voice, urgent, insistent, unwelcome: Lech – Go. Lech – Let go. L’cha – it’s for you, for your own sake (12:1).

How are we think about that? We who can’t bear to let go, we who are feeling so destabilised, so ill-at-ease in our souls, as the ground shifts beneath our feet. I said back in March, when Covid first came over the horizon and we were preparing for the UK’s first national lockdown – just as we are now preparing for the second one  - I said that we already had the virus, all of us. It was in our heads, it was infiltrating into how we saw what was going on, how we felt about everything. And we still have that virus inside us. All those symptoms I described earlier are part of the virus we are still carrying.

And none of us have Abraham’s gift, or courage, or madness, to just ‘let go’, move on, leave behind what gives us our security and stability. But the tectonic plates are shifting and they are forcing us to let go and move on from the world we have grown accustomed to, and believed would last forever.

For example: who thought that American democracy might come to an end before our eyes?  These last four years have exposed - and in the weeks to come I fear we will see it confirmed – how thin is the fabric of America’s rootedness in democratic norms and conventions. And although that’s taking place 3000 miles from us, we are destabilised by what we see: the stoking of paranoid conspiracy theories, the assaults on truth, the championing  of hatred and divisiveness, the undermining of a scientific worldview, the undermining of public trust in the election itself. All of these spill over in one form or another into our own body politic: in our globalised world, the medical virus and the virus that corrodes social wellbeing are transnational.

When the word ‘fake’ is used as a code for ‘something I don’t like to hear’, where ‘reality’ becomes ‘what I decide it is’, where the dictatorship of feeling trumps rational thinking, we are in the world of psychosis. How can we remain unaffected by being witness to this? Even to say ‘witness’ is a distortion: we aren’t only witnesses; we are, willingly or unwillingly, participants in the world’s unfolding. The world’s unravelling.

What is being shaken – in the US, in India, in Turkey, in Brazil, in Poland and Hungary – is democratic solidity, and the rule of law; and the reverberations of this penetrate our psyches too. Around the world, autocratic governments, authoritarian  governments, xenophobic governments, are on the rise – and I guess if you are Andy Burnham or another  civic leader in the North of England, you might have a thing or two to say about autocratic government closer to home.  

So we know some of the factors causing us to feel destabilised. Along with Covid and this forthcoming inescapable collision between fantasy-based politics and democracy  in America, we know about the third huge tectonic plate that is shifting beneath our feet: the environmental crisis, and how we are no longer rooted in a secure way, in the way we all grew up, our homeland belief, that the natural world around us would somehow go on unfolding in all its David Attenborough-tinged wondrous profusion, its miraculous multiplicity, for ever and ever. As the planet chokes and microplastic particles enter our lungs and the brains of unborn infants, how can we not feel ill-at-ease? We are porous – physically, emotionally, psychically.

So: I’ve just named three of the tectonic plates shifting – and I haven’t even mentioned the economy here in the UK, or our imminent falling off the Brexit cliff, or the toxic levels of collusion between government and private companies to the detriment of social wellbeing. How do we find our feet in it all? Where is the solid ground?

Where do we find our hope?

Of course there are many places we can find it – though we may each have to construct our own anthology of sources of hopefulness. Many in the UK have been stirred by the campaigning vigour of our unofficial ‘leader of the opposition’, the footballer Marcus Rashford, in his battle to end food poverty in a country where 1.4 million children qualify for free school meals. Thousands of local businesses and many hundreds of thousands of individuals have marshalled their generosity and compassion and scarce financial resources in the face of the moral abyss of government cruelty, and have joined his campaign to ensure that Britain’s disadvantaged children have food to eat. There is hope in the deep wellsprings of  empathy and goodwill still alive in a nation battered by austerity and pandemic and government indifference.    

For those who belong to a religious community – like Finchley Reform Synagogue, where I speak from time to time – hope has arrived this week following a historic decision to move on, like Abraham: to create (after 60 years in one building) a brand-new synagogue/community centre/ multi-functional, environmentally-sustainable building. On Shabbat Lech l’cha – when we read of our mythic ancestor’s journey of moving on, following the divine call to leave behind the old and bring a blessing into the wider world - this communal decision was a celebration of hopefulness.

Yes, it’s in the time of Covid and we have no idea how long it’ll be before we can ever meet together in that new space; yes, it’s in a time of huge economic chaos and worldwide political uncertainty, and we have no real idea what the challenges of tomorrow will be for religious communities – we might have to become a neighbourhood food bank for the next 60 years or more; and yes, we don’t know whether the very air we breath will make life in the cities liveable for our children and grandchildren. But in spite of all these uncertainties - and they are real uncertainties - a decision of hopefulness was made this week.

And it takes religious courage to make that kind of decision. Religious courage, spiritual courage, Abrahamic courage even: leaving the old behind in order to bring the Judaic blessing on into a new era.

Yet I doubt that this kind of symbolic and practical adventure will make us sleep any more easily at night.  Jews have learnt to distrust the material world as a source of hope. A Judaic sense of hopefulness comes – (if it comes at all) – from our rootedness in another realm. A Jewish sense of hopefulness comes from an engagement with other dimensions of reality.

So when I engage with the language and themes of Torah - for example, exploring the dramas of Abraham’s life - I am provoked by the words, stirred by the dilemmas, inspired by the hope that is incarnated in the text. When God changes Abram’s name (Genesis 17:5) and then Sarai’s name (17:15), they aren’t asked if it was okay, they weren’t asked how they ‘felt’ about it. Our storyteller portrays these mythic progenitors of the Jewish people being  renamed by a divine force. Something is added to each of their names. This symbol of transformation acknowledges that change is possible.

Abram left behind his certainties and opened himself to following and listening to the divine – that gives me hope, it gives me inspiration that listening in, as deeply as is possible amidst all the distractions, listening in to what is going on around and within, listening in to the unfolding spirit of all being (otherwise known as Adonai), this kind of listening opens us to a reality that can guide and underpin - and provoke and sometimes, yes, destabilise - our lives. But it is filled with hope, that reality: to be the bearer of blessing is real. We can add something to someone else’s life – like God added a letter to Abram’s name - and it’s a blessing. Change is possible.

The poetry of Torah endures from generation to generation: it is our strength, it offers hope, over and over; we can bear the vicissitudes of life because we are caught up in a drama that is bigger than ourselves. It’s the only thing that is unchanging, that endures, as solid as rock in our lives, even though it is also as fluid as water, for it flows and ripples and is never still: we dip into it and it is never the same from moment to moment, for we are never the same from moment to moment, and yet we can always draw upon it, endlessly deep, ever-flowing, feeding the spirit, nurturing our souls, which are thirsty for meaning and for hope.

[loosely based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, October 31^st, 2020]

 

Yom Kippur: On Tears, Brokenness, Repair

I remember around 20 years ago reading about an American rabbi who was also a member of the Society of American Magicians. It’s a ‘kosher’ organization – founded in 1902 by Harry Houdini, the Budapest-born illusionist and escapologist, son of a rabbi as it happens, who found fame and fortune in America (once he’d changed his name from Erik Weisz).

And what interested me about this rabbi – I think he was Reform, not that it matters – was his sermons, which would always be accompanied by stage magic, tricks he’d learnt: I suppose he did them to keep the congregation entertained – or at least awake. So if he was speaking about Moses and the burning bush, he’d suddenly create a fire on the bimah, spontaneous combustion, I am sure it was very dramatic; or if he was talking about the 10 plagues he’d go round the congregation and get frogs to appear from out of people’s pockets – you get the idea.

So, why’s this been on my mind? Well, I’ve got a lot of competition now in the congregation in which I work. The High Holy Day services and events this year have been real multi-media extravaganzas: there’s been big-screen drive-in services, beautiful videos on Zoom, amazing music (live and pre-recorded), we’ve had ongoing interactive participation during services through Zoom’s ‘Chat’ facility, the Finchley Reform Synagogue building was turned into a walk-through site for Yom Kippur contemplation and immersive experience. So what’s been created is multi-dimensional and filled with innovative ways for people to engage with what’s going on. This kind of creativity speaks to head and heart, body and soul. It’s been pretty amazing for people, far exceeding any expectations about what might be possible in these reduced times.

And then the traditional sermon slot arrives, and what had I got to offer? No magic, no tricks - just words. That’s all I ever have – words. And sometimes words feel like the poor relative, a bit down-at-heel compared to all the multi-media stuff. I wondered how words alone could reach into where people were in their own lives? So many lives, so many faces and people on screens, rows and rows of them – apparently, over 1000 people joined the services remotely, from the UK and all round the world - so many souls waiting to be touched, to be spoken to; and all I have, amidst all the razzamatazz, is words.

But words do have a power – or they can have a power. That renowned and complex American Jewish novelist Norman Mailer once said that as a writer, “the real task was to enter your times and write your heart out and never settle for having the correct opinions.” As a Jew he was the inheritor of a tradition that took words very seriously and knew that words had power; and I take inspiration from that, along with his commitment to use words to reach in to where we are in our times, in our historical moment. I once asked him about being a Jewish writer and he was very diffident about acknowledging that - but that’s another story, for another time.

He knew, ‘Reb’ Norman, that words can stimulate the imagination – or send you to sleep. Words can provoke, they can inspire, they can soothe you, words can make you laugh – or make you cry, bring out the tears deep inside. Words can speak to the hurt we carry - that we all carry to a greater or lesser extent - and on Yom Kippur one of the themes of the day (although it’s never quite expressed in our liturgy like this) is: what are we to do with all the hurts and scars inside us, the pain we have had to endure in our lives, that we still live with? The personal upsets and broiguses and disappointments and losses, and sometimes despair, that sit nestled away in the crevices of our souls, hidden from sight; or sometimes visible on the surface for all to see.

I have seen quite a few tears on the screen of my laptop, over these High Holy Days, and before: and sometimes showing tears is okay for people, though sometimes I know people feel embarrassed  - as if it’s not okay to cry, or be seen to cry. Which is a bizarre idea when you think about it, because tears are an essential aspect of our humanity, our humaneness (only psychopaths can’t cry, don’t cry).

In reality our tears span a huge spectrum of emotions – we have tears of sadness of course, but also tears of rage, tears of laughter and tears of relief, tears of triumph or tears of regret; we can be moved to tears by something we see on a screen, whether it is a romantic comedy on TV, a dance routine, a piece of music, an old film; we can be moved to tears by a memory of something long gone from our pasts, or when experiencing an injustice in the present, or being part of an occasion that matters to us more than we realised, like a religious service; we can cry at other people’s tears, we can cry and we don’t know why we are crying, or what kind of tears they are, hot tears, icy tears, we just cry. To cry is have unmediated access to our inner lives. It is a wondrous part of what it means to be alive.

Too often people have been told, growing up, or in adult life, “Don’t cry”, “You mustn’t cry”, and maybe sometimes we worry that others might judge us critically - as if crying is a character flaw, a weakness, rather than a gift and a resource. And yes, sometimes other people see your tears and feel concerned for you or worried about you - but that’s okay: inevitably tears evoke a lot in the one who cries, and the one who witnesses the crying. Our vulnerability is part of our shared humanity.

But on Yom Kippur I wanted to focus on feelings (and maybe tears) of upset and hurt - because even if we don’t show it or share it, no life is without its suffering, its distress, its failures – in love, or work, or with our plans, or our relationships (or our failures in relationships); and Yom Kippur exposes us and our sadness like no other time of the year. Part of the catharsis of the 10 days between the New Year and the Day of Atonement is that it offers a time to reflect on our lives: yes, with all the joys and the successes, but also with our disappointments and mistakes and our hurt.

These 10 days are called, traditionally, the Days of Awe – and while our first association with ‘awe’ is maybe with majesty and power, and experiences that are ‘awesome’ (which often contain reminders of how small we are in the scheme of things), the word awe in Hebrew - Yirah - combines, as it does in English, ‘awesome’ and ‘awful’.

And sometimes things for us are awful – events in the past we carry for years, decades; or events in the present that bear down on us, drag us down; we can carry a sense of guilt, or dread, or loneliness, or fearfulness – particularly in our current Covid times with all the limitations we face, and the losses (not just people who have gone but a life that has gone), and the worries about the future, maybe cut off from family members, or having to let go of hopes we had; or maybe we lose a sense of purpose. We can and do feel ‘awful’ sometimes, and how is Yom Kippur supposed to help us with that? Don’t we have to just grin and bear it – alone -our grief and sadness and hurt? Yes, we might reveal it on the screen, but who really knows, who can look into our hearts and know us as we need or want to be known? 

Well, the mystery of Yom Kippur – maybe I should say the magic of Yom Kippur, or the trick of it – is that if we are honest with ourselves, with our true feeling life – and that means everything from our loving feelings to our hateful and aggressive feelings; our gratitude at life along with our upset feelings (for example with those who have hurt us and we want to forgive, but can’t forgive, and then feel bad that we can’t); if we are honest with ourselves on Yom Kippur about who we are with all our limitations and failures (they used to be called ‘sins’ and still are in the liturgy, but we don’t need to get hung up with that word), if we are able to face those feelings in ourselves and feel regret for our inability to overcome our pettiness and jealousies and narrowmindedness and grudges, if we are true to what lies unsettled inside us, (including our lies, our lies to others and our lies to ourselves), if we have the courage to be vulnerable and own up to our failures, if we have the honesty to do this inner work, inside ourselves - which is psychological and spiritual and mental, and is the heart of the religious journey of Yom Kippur - if we can do this (and nobody else can do it for us and nobody else can see us doing it), then the promise of Yom Kippur, the mystery of Yom Kippur, the trick, the magic, is that we end the day forgiven, vayomer Adonai: s’lachti kidvarecha: ‘that which is Eternal  enables us to feel forgiven and understood’, and we end the day inscribed in the ‘Book of Life’, so called.

Through our honest self-assessment and self-judgment we will have written ourselves into the fabric of Life itself. Our own ‘Book of Life’ may be filled with tear-stained pages that nobody else can read - and nobody else need to read - but it is our route, through our work this day, to something new happening in ourselves. When at the end of the day we go through the gates of Neilah, into Life, we go forgiven: forgiven for what we have done - and what we have failed to be able to do.

Maybe during the day of Yom Kippur we do come to see our limitations about what can change and we say: I can’t do it, I can’t forgive, I haven’t the strength, the hurt is too much. In the end it’s the honesty with ourselves that counts, that helps transform guilt into forgiveness and acceptance - and a new lightness of being. But it can be a hard journey.

Yet the promise of Yom Kippur is that our failures, our fractures, our brokenness – sometimes we can feel in pieces – all of this is being held within something greater than ourselves. The jagged, disjointed pieces of our lives, the fragments, when honestly laid out inside us, allows something new to happen, even if we feel underserving: so we emerge more whole than we started.  And it is a mystery, and it is like magic, but it’s not an illusion: it has a reality beyond our understanding.

And what I want to compare this journey of Yom Kippur to, is something from a different tradition, a different process of repairing. It’s the Japanese practice of kintsugi, which is the craft of repairing pottery and ceramics. 

Let’s look at some examples:

When a piece of pottery breaks, the kintsugi artists put powdered gold into each crack, so they don’t hide the cracks, they do they opposite, they emphasise where the breaks occurred. You can see that the fractures are exposed rather than concealed, the fault-lines are laid bare, the repair occupies a central place in what the object has become.

It is made whole, and more beautiful,  and actually more valuable, because the damage is made visible. Made visible and integrated into the whole. 

"Kintsugi art courtesy of Morty Bachar www.lakesidepottery.com" 

 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/110ojuepKmUXvyGQBpEnJXlC8MGVlEQENKmr2H81efbA/edit

There is an extraordinary line repeated in our Yom Kippur liturgy where we ask God to “pierce / cut into our hearts, so that we can feel love…then we shall return to You with a new sense of our truth and with a lev shalem – a repaired heart, a whole heart, a heart at peace” . That’s our Jewish equivalent of the art of kintsugi: we pierce our pretensions, we face up to our brokenness, we raise it to the surface: we make it visible, our heartache, the hurts, the fissures, the  cracks in our being, our woundedness, our psychological scars, all we have failed to do, all that we can’t fix, all that we can’t get right, all the falsity and disappointments, the times we were disappointed and times we disappointed others . On Yom Kippur we expose it all and we let the language and music of the day act like the gold powder and do its work on our broken-heartedness; and the mystery, the magic of the day, as we reach the end of the day, and emerge from Neilah, is that we do return to our lives with a lev shalem. A more whole heart.

That’s the work of Yom Kippur, and we do it alone, inside ourselves; and we do it with each other, in community, in solidarity with each other. Each of us is like a fractured vessel and we need delicate handling. We need to be kind to ourselves as we undertake this spiritual journey, and we need to be kind to each other. We are sureties for each other.

And we do this work in endangered times. And I didn’t speak about that at all during the day of Yom Kippur. I just reminded people that they already knew about these times we are living in, and struggling through, and sometimes barely surviving. On the day of Yom Kippur itself the focus is on something else. We are trying to save our own souls, because to save the soul of the world we have to start with, and in, our own souls. 

We know what threatens us – our lack of national solidarity and any commitment to the value of transnational community; we know the precarious nature of modern life – yes, with Covid, but also larger than Covid, we know about the hollowing out and selling off of essential services, the costs of globalization, the pollution  in the air and on social media, we know all this, along with the poverty, the injustices, the inequalities, we are complicit with all this, whatever our politics, and on Yom Kippur we need the honesty to say that the whole system we are held in is creaking, groaning, breaking up; some of it has already broken and gone forever, but there’s such a lot left still, and we can play our part in repairing it. And making something new out of it. But we can only play our part in tikkun, the bigger repair, by starting inside ourselves to repair who we are, each of us, precious; each of us, loveable; each of us with the capacity for compassion and kindness. Each of us. 

We can change ourselves and we can change how things are. We can choose empathy over anger, we can choose to be humane and caring rather than callous and tribal. Through brokenness to wholeness, through hurt to healing, we can escape – Houdini-like – from what might seem a lost cause, weighed down by anxieties and helplessness and fearfulness, we can – through the work of Yom Kippur and what comes after it - create something new from the wrecked hopes within us and around us. We can turn our disjointedness into wholeness. We can discover our lev shalem:  our hearts don’t have to stay broken, they can become whole again.

[based on a Yom Kippur sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, September 28th, 2020]

"I told you life is uncertain" - 3 Rs for the Jewish New Year

 I’ve been thinking a lot over this last week about the English comedian Spike Milligan (1918-2002) – who else would you think about at the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah? He chose his own epitaph, to be written on his tombstone after he died. It reads : “I told you I was ill”.

Maybe this is just how my mind works, making this connection, but it feels like every time I speak during this period of the Jewish year - the ten days  between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement - there’s one theme I return to each year, a touchstone for what’s at the heart of this seasonal pilgrimage, this voyage of reflection and return and hopefulness for new beginnings.

And that touchstone of mine doesn’t read “I told you I was ill” but “I told you life is uncertain”. Because what we learn each day of our lives - but this annual period of reflection gives us the opportunity to think about in a concentrated way - is just how much uncertainty is built into the fabric of life: we have so little control over our futures, which rarely unfold as we would like them to – ill-health arrives, relationships fail, we suffer job losses, financial worries, our children don’t do what we want them to (or our parents, or our partners), those we love die on us; also our bodies are vulnerable, our minds too, our emotions can oscillate wildly, as if we are on a roller-coaster.

And the transience of life can feel unbearable. “Like a cup so easily broken, like grass that withers, like flowers that fade… like a dream that fades away”. Our liturgy offers us these words each year - and we glimpse into the reality of this as we say it, and then we forget it; we embrace it - and then we shut it away until next year. It’s hard to keep this in consciousness: human beings are fragile creatures; and everything can change, or end, in the twinkling of an eye.

So: “I told you life is uncertain.” And that’s all before reflecting on what it means to be bound up in a larger world in which the dramas of history, and societal discontents and environmental crises and, yes, pandemics, force us to recognise how little we are in control of our destinies, our fate – and how desperately we want to be in control. How much we wish we could stem the tide of uncertainty - which is life. And yet our only certainty is uncertainty – and what kind of consolation is that?

As the old Jewish year fades away and a New Year begins, there’s both so much to say about where we find ourselves right now and what these last six months have been like – but also I feel how little new there might be to say. Because we know we aren’t leaving the old behind and starting something fresh – for everything is overshadowed by the ongoing drama we are living through. And because we are in the midst of it, we really have no perspective to look at what is happening, what transformations are under way, what the shape of our society, our community,  our family, our own lives, will look like in a year’s time.

We’ve had to struggle this past six months, and the struggle is not over. We know this: the struggle is emotional, mental,  psychological, spiritual – maybe financial and practical too – and it’s an ongoing struggle with what Philip Roth once described as the “relentless unforeseen”. And it’s the reality of how that ‘relentless unforeseen’ – otherwise know as ‘life’ - has played out this past year that leaves us holding so much inside ourselves and with so much to talk about - and yet maybe with nothing to say. I do find myself tongue-tied and hesitant, struggling to make sense of what is going on. There’s so much we don’t know, and can’t know, about what our futures – personal, communal, national – are going to look like.

Maybe all we know is what our questions are – our tongue-tied and hesitant questions - as this New Year begins: How do we keep going? How do we maintain continuity in our lives? How do we keep connected with people? How do we make plans? How do we stay optimistic? How do we keep our sense of humour? How do we keep hope alive? How do we keep our dreams alive of a better future?

We are being tested - perhaps, for many of us, as never before. So how do we face this New Year, with its limitations (how will we manage another year of ‘glass life’? how will we face another year of masks, of constraints, of fears?); but also how do we face this new year with its possibilities? How might new avenues, new opportunities, open up for us from out of the chaos? What new paths through the wasteland will open up? What streams will bubble up amidst the barrenness of life? How should we prepare for this new year and its tests?  

Well, for once, I’m not just going to pose the questions - although I do think that questions can be more useful sometimes than answers. Because questions open things out for us, let our imaginations breathe, while so often answers can shut things down, can blunt the spirit and dull the mind. But having given voice to the questions I’m going to offer a route-map (of sorts) to suggest how we are going to get through this next period, how we are going to survive, maybe even thrive, how we’re going to keep our hopefulness alive as this New Year opens before us. 

We are going to do it, I would suggest, by sticking to the ‘3 Rs’. I’m not referring (obviously) to that old English joke-mantra ‘Reading, Riting and ’Rithmatic’ – they have their place, but that’s not what I’m talking about. My 3 Rs, our 3 Rs, are something else.

First is Resourcefulness: we individually, and we in the Jewish community, are going to be resourceful. You just have to look at what’s happened during this last six months to see that the community of which I am part, here in Finchley, are already A* students in that. New ideas have emerged, new ways of connecting, new possibilities for helping each other and supporting each other. New programmes and schemes and ideas have blossomed - and yes, Zoom has been crucial to a lot of this, and what would I have given to have bought shares in the company back in January. This is Resourcefulness and we have seen it writ large and it’s the first R we need, and we have it already within us, and it will see us through this crisis, this communal and national trauma we are living through. The human spirit, our spirits, are adaptable and inventive – what a Resource they are, what a Resource we have within us for creativity and imagination and adaptability.  

And that takes me to my second R: from Resourcefulness to Resilience. Yes, we are fragile, yes we are vulnerable, yes we can sometimes feel anxious or troubled or even defeated – but I have witnessed in many I have talked to and worked with, much Resilience, which is an inner quality that is universal. But I suppose Jews know something about this from a collective perspective: we have possessed Resilience for millennia, and have needed it for millennia, Resilience to persevere when life is difficult, when the odds seem stacked against us - and , heaven knows, the odds have so often been stacked against us as a people, but our collective resilience has carried us through.

We are the great survivors, defiant in our resilience - and it’s a mental quality, an imaginative quality, a spiritual quality, that we draw on now and it is rooted not just in our history and the deep knowledge that we have survived far worse that this pandemic, but that through our tradition, through our liturgy and our poetry, through Torah and storytelling, through our music, and humour, through our staying attuned to our Jewish vision in spite of adversity, we have Resilience built into our psyches; Resilience is in our psychic DNA. 

And that Resilience can be nurtured in countless way – though appreciating our gardens, through nurturing our friendships and connectedness (even remotely); through art and music and literature, through appreciating the natural world around us, through our faith traditions - through all these ways, and countless more (and you will each have your own anthology of what nurtures you) we have nurtured our Resilience and it will help us through this next period, with all the uncertainties. Our personal resilience is an unquenchable spirit within and we will work on it and support each other with it as this year goes on, into the winter darkness and out the other end into spring again. What a Resource we have, this Resilience, incarnated within us, within our souls. So, that’s the second R.

And the third R? What’s going to see us through this destabilising period alongside Resourcefulness and Resilience is – and I hesitate to say it, it’s disappointingly old-fashioned, it’s almost quaint, it’s not cutting edge, it’s definitely not new – it’s Righteousness. It’s what we already know: that to be a Jew means to be engaged in a life containing acts of Righteousness. It’s a difficult word to talk about because it’s often confused with self-righteousness, the smugness of thinking we are good people without having to actually back it up in relation to any other human being. Maybe I should use the Hebrew word – chesed – “acts of kindness motivated by love”. (Maybe that sounds better. But it doesn’t begin with R).

Perhaps though saying that Righteousness is the third R that we need, in order to see us through this next year, may be more radical than it at first sounds. Maybe I should double down on this third R – or double up – and call it Radical Righteousness: gratuitous acts of kindness, generosity, compassion, caring, love…no doubt it’s what you already do, or aspire to do. But a year is opening up in which I would suggest that Righteousness enacted in everyday life is transformative: it matters more than we know - to others who are recipients of what we give and do. And it matters to us - our souls are enriched and enlivened by the Righteousness we share.

I am not talking about being grandiose about this. When all around us in the culture there are endless examples of scepticism, cynicism, selfishness, bombast, contempt, fearfulness, injustice, discrimination, then a personal  commitment to being accountable for our moral and ethical choices, large and small, as best we can, can give us hope - because we know that this makes the world a better place. Who else is going to build an interpersonal world that is worth living in? We start with ourselves.

As Jews it doesn’t matter what your theology is, it never has, we don’t burn heretics – indeed progressive Jews assimilate them into our prayer books, the iconoclasts and atheists and doubters, whether Kafka or Phillip Roth, Nelly Sacks or Natalia Ginsburg, if they have something to say that helps us live well, and stay true to our vision then they have a place in our liturgy. If they help us towards chesed, righteous living, then that’s what matters, not their religious beliefs, or lack of them. And us too. It’s not through belief, but through action, through the good we do – that’s how we bring a blessing to each other and our communities and our society. Radical Righteousness.

OK, that’s it. Our 3 Rs, our basic rubric for the year: Resourcefulness, Resilience, Righteousness. We are already doing it. Let this be a year when we keep on doing the basics – because when we do them with heart and soul they won’t just help us survive, they’ll help us thrive. Because when we bring them together  - Resourcefulness, Resilience, Righteousness - they aren’t any longer just basic, mundane, ordinary, they aren’t just perpetuating the status quo, when we bring them together in ourselves and enact them, they are not only transformative, they are actually Revolutionary. 

In a previous, more confident, era I might finish here with a rousing (even if somewhat tongue-in-cheek) ‘Viva La Revolucion’ – but in an era when some of us have learnt not to put too much faith in ideological conviction, I’ll just stick with a more down-to-earth Shana Tova : wishing you a good year…

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, on the evening of the New Year, Friday, September 18^th, 2020]

 

 

“Comfort, oh Comfort…”

Nachamu nachamu ami “Comfort, oh comfort, My people,”

yomar Elohaychem ‘says your God’,

dabru al-lev “speak tenderly/ to the heart…” (Isaiah 40: 1-2).

These must be some of the most powerful, the most poignant, the most – yes – tender, heartfelt, words in the whole of prophetic literature. But who, one might ask, would need to hear these words, these sentiments? Who would be needing such comfort, such tenderness?

What state of mind would we be in – of distress, or anxiety, or trauma - what kinds of hurt would be enduring – of deprivation or loss or pain – to be in need of such comfort, such tender-hearted care and attention?

The first audience for these words, this poetic balm to the soul, was of course the Hebrew people, in Babylonian exile, two and half millennia ago. But by the time the rabbis decided to integrate this material into the annual cycle of readings in the synagogue, more than half a millennium had passed, centuries in which the need to offer comfort to the Jewish people, a people oppressed  or in exile, had become a cyclical event.

And in the 1500 and more years since ‘Shabbat Nachamu’ became part of this Jewish calendar of post-Tisha  B’av readings [initiating the seven weeks between the commemoration of the destruction of the Temple and the New Year, with each week containing a prophetic reading of consolation and hope] the need for comfort, the need to be spoken to with tender-hearted concern, has rarely been redundant.

And even for us, in our relative security and with our relative sense of well-being, even if we don’t think that the Jewish people collectively need words of comfort and tenderness at this point in history – and that’s an open question, but I’m going to leave it aside right now – even if we distance ourselves from that view of collective need, who amongst us as individuals don’t hear these words “Comfort, oh comfort…speak tenderly to the heart”  and feel a keening sense, an ache of recognition, of some deep, maybe unspoken, sense of needing to receive comfort in our own lives, for our own lives?

And maybe that need for comfort – acknowledged or unacknowledged – is only more pressing in these Covid times, I don’t know…

So let’s ask a basic question: what is it that comforts us? How do we get comfort? Where from? What from? This elusive and precious experience - comfort, consolation – where do we find it?

Let’s start with what’s fundamental. And maybe obvious. Isn’t one thing that comforts us the knowledge, the experience, that we are loved? Whether that comes from family, or friends, we want to feel that we are loved - and loveable.  That comforts us.

This is closely followed by the need to feel cared for – that too gives comfort. And then close to that, we need to feel, I think, remembered: that can bring comfort as well.  And close to that, we probably need to feel well thought of -  in terms of who we are, what we are, our personal qualities, maybe our achievements too; we want to know that we are valued : this can be a source of deep comfort. To know that when people think about us – and when we think about ourselves as well – we can say that the world is a little better for our being in it, that we tip the scales, just a fraction, in the direction of life.

In many of these things – feeling loved, cared for, remembered, thought about, thought well of - we are dependent on others. And there’s a humility attached to realising how dependent we are on others – family, friends, community - to provide us with comfort. “Comfort, oh comfort, my people”.

But of course there are many other things that can offer us comfort, can speak tenderly to our hearts. We may have a favourite piece of music, or a painting, or a poem, or a story, or a garden, or a place in nature, or a memory, or a piece of liturgy, or a memento – a stone, a blanket, a letter – that we cherish, that offers comfort, that offers consolation, that speaks tenderly to our souls. Some might say that God speaks through all these things. Some might demur from that. It doesn’t matter in the end: our theology matters less than our lived experience.  

We all need comfort. Nachamu. That’s what makes this text from Isaiah so powerful, so pertinent in every age, and for all people, Jew and non-Jew alike. We all need comfort. Nachamu.

So far so good. This text speaks to us still. We can use it to think about what brings us comfort - including our tradition, our heritage. But is there something else  hidden in this text, something a bit more subversive of this conventional reading?  Not only do we all need comfort, to be the recipients of comfort, but what this text reminds us – and this reminder is encoded in the ambiguity of its poetry in the Hebrew, but you can get it in the translation as well – what it also points to is that it is not only that we all need comfort, but we ‘the people’ are also the addressees of the sentence. “’Comfort, oh comfort, my people’, says your God” is also addressed to the people - as a role, a task, a destiny even: they are the ones who are to bring comfort, to others. Listen to it again: “Comfort, comfort, my people…” – the prophet reminds the people that this is what they are here to do, to do the comforting, and not only to be those who need it.

We are always, and understandably - whatever our historical or personal circumstances - so much in need of comfort (wherever it comes from), that we have grown accustomed to read this text through this prism (sanctioned by rabbinic tradition) of a people’s need for comfort. But all the time this other dimension, this other way of reading, has been implicit in the text: that we can be the bearers of comfort for others, and that this is integral to what it means to be a people, the Jewish people. It’s not just a need, nachamu – it’s also the vision of our task, nachamu.

And maybe reading it this way can offer another source of comfort for us: that God has entrusted us, so to speak, with the capacity to do this work; and that the double verb has a deeper meaning - that in bringing comfort to others, we are ourselves comforted. We have a role, we have a value, we have a purpose. This is our life: to receive comfort and to give comfort. And to move, dance, between the two.

[based on a sermon, given through Zoom, for Finchley Reform Synagogue, London on August 1^st 2020 – Shabbat Nachamu]