Sermons Archive 2022

Rosh Hashanah 5783/2022

Happy Birthday! 

According to Jewish tradition, Rosh Hashanah is the day on which God created Adam and Eve. In other words, Rosh Hashanah is the birthday of humanity. So, happy birthday to all of us!

Birthdays are supposed to be happy occasions, but many people feel sad. Birthdays can be overwhelming. This phenomenon has the name - ‘birthday depression’ - feeling unhappy when you are supposed to celebrate your big day.

Here are just a few things that people say to describe their feelings: being upset about getting older, being upset about not being old enough, being disappointed for not having enough gifts, being upset for other people spending too much money, being unsatisfied with your accomplishments since your last birthday, being upset about accomplishing too much and not spending enough time with family and friends, being scared that you might not have enough people who remember you, and being upset about being the centre of attention for too many people. There is something fundamentally wrong with planning the day to be joyful but achieving the opposite result.

 A similar phenomenon happens in other areas of life. George Orwell introduced the term ‘doublethink’ in his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. It describes an authoritarian regime which forces people to accept two conflicting realities simultaneously. The three slogans of the Party in the book’s narrative are good examples of doublethink — War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.

The book is full of such examples. The Ministry of Truth is really concerned with lies, the Ministry of Peace is concerned with war, the Ministry of Love is concerned with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty is concerned with starvation. 

Doublethink is not just fictional. You do not need to look far for examples in our world. Some people today seriously try to achieve peace by launching a war, people try to achieve coexistence by building fences and walls. Others try to look after refugees by sending them away or supporting the poor in time of economic crisis by cutting taxes, that mainly help the rich.

One form of doublethink is to believe in the power of people and gradual social change, and at the same time, look for a strong leader to come and solve all our problems. Life should not be defined only by milestones, strong leaders, and big days; life happens every day. Even if it is a regular day with nothing special in it, it is still life.

Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotzk once asked his students: What was the hardest part of the Akedah for Abraham? Some said it was the initial call or the long walk to Moriah, knowing what was coming next. Others said it was the binding. The Rabbi said that the hardest part was coming down the mountain. In peak moments of our lives, the immediacy, the rush of adrenaline, often carries us through. What happens afterwards is the true test of sincerity, for we must live with the consequences of our actions. 

The hardest part of Rosh Hashanah, and indeed life, is not the prayers and New Year resolutions we make. The hardest part is six months later when we are supposed to live by our promises. The hardest test of life does not happen in the moment of crisis but after the crisis has passed.

In a Rosh Hashanah address, a Rabbi once asked his community an important question - Why does God need so much praise from people? Is The Almighty unsure of His own powers?… God does not need praise by people, but God knows that when people cease to praise God, they begin to praise one another too much…. 

The main purpose of religion is not to praise or please God, but to remind people that they are not gods. We cannot perform miracles and make all problems disappear, and neither can God. The main purpose of this season in Judaism is to confront doublethink and make sure that we do what we promised and stop pretending. 

Liberal Judaism’s promise to its members is to create a religion where people believe in what they say and practice what they believe. Religion without sincerity is empty, prayer without action is deception. It does not mean we can solve all problems in the world, but at least we can try.

This year almost 100 million people had to leave their homes. 100 million people were forcibly displaced because of conflict, violence and human rights violations.  The data shows that this number will only grow. We have to accept this reality and say to ourselves - we can do better! We must build a better system of helping refugees. One day it can be you.
This year the world is experiencing the highest number of violent conflicts and wars since the end of World War II – almost 30 wars are happening right now  – we can do better. Human life is too high a price to pay for any ideology and disagreement. Pretending that it does not exist is doublethink.
In London alone, over 8000 people slept rough on the street in the last year.  –This number is too high for such a rich, inclusive, and diverse city. We can do better.

We might not be able to solve all the problems in the world, but it does not mean we should do nothing. Even if we know that we cannot make this world perfect during this year, we can still look back and reflect on the past year and see where we can make a small step toward a better future for us and generations after us. Sometimes you do something good not to solve the problem, but because without you, it will be even worse.

‘It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.’ This is what Viktor Frankl said in his timeless ‘Man's Search for Meaning.’ 

In the words of Prophet Micah:

הִגִּ֥יד לְךָ֛ אָדָ֖ם מַה־טּ֑וֹב וּמָֽה־יְהֹוָ֞ה דּוֹרֵ֣שׁ מִמְּךָ֗ 
כִּ֣י אִם־עֲשׂ֤וֹת מִשְׁפָּט֙ וְאַ֣הֲבַת חֶ֔סֶד וְהַצְנֵ֥עַ לֶ֖כֶת עִם־אֱלֹהֶֽיךָ׃

People tell you what [they think] is good… But [remember] what God requires of you: do justice, love compassion, and walk humbly with your God.

Life is not about reflecting God’s glory in your life and looking for a messiah who will come and save the world; it’s about looking at your reflection in the mirror without thinking that you are god and without being ashamed.
It’s not about saying ‘I don’t do enough;’ it’s about saying, ‘We can do better.’
It’s not about achieving power; it’s about what you achieve with your power,
It’s not about presenting yourself; it’s about being present with yourself.
It’s not about the years in your life; it’s about the life in your years. 

So far, the months preceding the new year did not give us many reasons to hope; let’s prove it wrong. The power of community is stronger than every one of us. There are many people in the UK and around the world who need us.  Together we can do it. 

Shanah Tovah! And Happy Birthday!

Rabbi Igor Zinkov

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5783/2022

Last week, sitting at a dinner following a wedding blessing, a fellow guest turned to me and asked, ‘What keeps you awake at night?’ Anxious about the future of Leo Baeck College, the progressive rabbinical seminary, where Rabbi Igor and I and over 170 Liberal and Reform Rabbis have been ordained since it was founded in 1956, I was bending the ear of my neighbour, an art historian and trustee of a significant academic library collection of Judaica and hoping he might offer some pointers for the precarious future of the College.

But I have been reflecting on his question all week. What keeps me awake at night? And wondering, too, what is it that might keep many of us awake at night?

Since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, when we closed the synagogue and conducted services from our homes, gradually returning to the Sanctuary over the succeeding months, speaking to a virtual congregation, introducing recorded music from loyal and devoted musicians who stayed with us throughout Covid-19, hoping, praying that as things became a little easier, people would be encouraged to return to live worship rather than livestream, I have felt discomfited repeatedly by the close-to-the-bone words of one of the evening prayers that forms part of our daily, Shabbat and festival liturgy. It touches on what keeps me awake at night.

The prayer is formulated as a blessing - the second blessing following the Shema and immediately preceding the Amidah.  It begins with these words, sung so beautifully just a few moments ago to a Sephardi tune: 

Hashkiveinu, Adonai Eloheynu, l’shalom, v’ha’amideynu Malkeinu, l’chayyim - ‘Grant, Eternal God, that we may lie down in peace, and let us rise up to life renewed’ (Machzor Ruach Chadashah, p. 61)

The blessing is part of what the Talmud calls ge’ulah arichta - ‘a long Redemption’, implying that this blessing is an extension of the previous blessing, in which we refer to the Exodus from Egypt:

‘You have freed us from oppressors and delivered us from tyrants; You led us out of Egypt for ever to serve You in freedom’ (MRC, p. 60).

But merging these two blessings into one long blessing is to misunderstand their full import: one is a blessing of praise for redemption in the past – a reference to coming out of Egypt, the crossing of the Sea of Reeds - God’s redemptive activities with Israel. While the second blessing, known simply by its opening word Hashkiveinu – ‘Cause us to lie down’ is a supplication to guard us from those things that keep us awake at night and to help us fall into a deep and undisturbed sleep, free from anxiety.

[The precise origin of all our prayers is something of a mystery, but we can discern a biblical reference that might have been the inspiration for this longer prayer.  It is a single verse in Psalm 4, which perhaps served as a simple prayer on going to bed at night:
B’shalom yachdav esh’k’vah v’ishan, ki-attah Adonai l’vadad la-vetach toshiveyni -‘Safe and sound, I lie down and sleep, For You alone, O Eternal One keep me secure’ (Psalm 4:9).]

The blessing is mentioned in the Mishnah of Rabbi Judah the Prince, edited at the beginning of the 3rd century (m.Berakhot 1:4), and again in the Talmud, yet scarcely merits any kind of discussion or analysis. And this is surprising, because unlike the blessings of praise, thanksgiving and acknowledgement of God as Creator, Giver of Torah and Redeemer that are recited either side of the Shema, this blessing is a prayer of petition.

As its opening words indicate, we ask God to protect us through the night, to ‘spread over us the shelter of [God’s] peace’ and to ‘be our help.’  But it is the middle of the blessing that makes us tremble; and I am grateful to Rabbi Tony Bayfield who, in a recent talk, articulated exactly what this part of the prayer means to him and what I have long felt about its words.  The blessing continues with this entreaty: V’haseir mé-aleynu oyeiv dever v’cherev v’ra’av v’yagon.  The translation in our Machzor says simply: ‘Shield us from sickness and war, from famine and distress…’ But the literal translation gives us a little more: ‘Remove from us [the] enemy, [the] plague, [the] sword, hunger and sorrow.’

Here is how Rabbi Bayfield interprets these ‘close-to-the-bone’ words using another translation:

‘“Disease” simply screams pandemics: the Black Death, the Great Plague, the ‘Spanish’ flu pandemic that carried off my great-grandfather in 1918 and COVID 19 which carried off my own father in 2020. 

‘“Violence” howls equally loudly war - not just the war in Ukraine but the appalling cloud of terminal weaponry hanging over Taiwan, China and the West.

‘“Famine”, equally loudly and equally insistently, points to the terrifying crop failures and devastating floods resulting from climate change’ (Talk on Personal Theology, given at a joint meeting of the Liberal Conference and Reform Assembly of Rabbis on 13 September 2022).

Each time we recite these words – ‘sickness and war…famine and distress’, it is as though the prayer holds up a mirror to our own world. And even now, with the threat of Covid less acute than it was one and certainly two years ago, the mirror frightens me yet again.

Hilary Mantel, whose premature death just last week, has left us bereft of a highly intelligent, imaginative artist of words, writes this on loss:

‘The pattern of all losses mirrors the pattern of the gravest losses. Disbelief is followed by numbness, numbness by distraction, despair, exhaustion. Your former life still seems to exist, but you can’t get back to it; there is a glimpse in dreams of those peacock lawns and fountains, but you’re fenced out, and each morning you wake up to the loss over again’ (‘Rereading C.S. Lewis,’ The Guardian, 27 December, 2014).

Here Mantel is speaking of grief in her rereading of C.S. Lewis’s slim volume A Grief Observed, written after the death his wife. But as Lewis observes in his opening line, ‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.’

Covid-19 left us both grief-stricken and fearful, grieving the loss of loved ones, mourning our own lost pre-pandemic lives, those former lives that Mantel says, ‘you can’t get back to’. Even before we can process those lost years and what they meant to us personally, we find ourselves confronted repeatedly with an absence in our world of imagination, compassion, empathy, understanding, a deficiency of justice and equity. And in their place: there is war, famine, hunger and the appalling wedge of inequality that has been driven further between rich and poor in our own country. 

These are the things that keep me awake at night, that sicken me and paralyse all good intentions, all ambition to reclaim a world that might bring peace, blessings and hope for those most in need.

I said that this is the blessing that discomfits and holds up a mirror of dark reality to our moral sickness, to the war waged by Russia, to hunger, food banks, homelessness, and the wretchedness of people’s desperation and sorrow.

And yet, it is also a blessing that offers us comfort. It asks that we may lie down in peace, but also that we may rise up to life renewed. For each day is a new day, and each year, like this year whose threshold we have just crossed, a new year. It is this prayer, more than any other in our daily, Shabbat and festival liturgy, that also gives us a quiet hope.  It is a blessing that nurtures faith in a Presence that is gracious and merciful; it makes us believe that our existence matters, that we must look forward to ‘life renewed’, it stills our anxious spirits and steers us away from wrongdoing. It is a blessing of spiritual comfort and moral responsibility. 

As we enter this New Year of 5783, may we open ourselves to the discomfiting purpose of prayer when we are too complacent, to prayers that will inspire us to use our gifts for the good of all humanity. May we derive comfort and hope from this act of coming together as a community in prayer, reflection, and determination not to lose hope in the future. Let us place our trust in God’s presence ha-poreis sukkat shalom aleynu v’al-kol-yoshvey tevel – ‘whose sheltering peace descends on us and all who dwell on earth.’ Amen.

Rabbi Alexandra Wright

Oxford Three Faiths Conference on Climate Change. God, Creation and Us: From Theology to Action. Sermon by Rabbi Dr Michael Hilton, delivered at the LJS on 25 March 2022

It is a very particular pleasure to be part of a service led by my friend and colleague Rabbi Igor Zinkov, who has been putting his Russian language skills to such good use in our currently unfolding European crisis. It’s just five weeks ago tonight that, led by Igor, LJS hosted a solidarity service with the Ukrainian Jewish community, featuring our colleague Rabbi Julia Gris from Odessa. The trauma Ukrainians have been going through is utterly horrendous. But if the Jewish community is anything to go by, it does seem that in a Europe at war faith groups are able to reach across national divides, to gather in and understand different perspectives, and to begin the grasp the enormity of the issues – death, flight, exile, and environmental and economic consequences which are going to affect us all for many years to come.

In addition to our members and visitors tonight, it is a special pleasure to welcome online those gathered at Wycliffe Hall Oxford for our Three Faiths Conference this week on climate change, an event which has brought together Jews, Christians and Muslims to consider a theological and practical approach to making the world a sustainable place for future generations. Most of the world’s population identify with a religion, and we started planning the conference with the thought that faith leaders have to be on board if we are to get the world’s population on board with the issue. As Leo Baeck College student Shulamit Morris Evans put it so well yesterday, “Having a faith identity enables you to speak more directly to your community, because you speak from within. Worldwide this is huge.”

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sixth report, published earlier this month, makes sobering reading. Climate, ecosystems, biodiversity and human societies are interdependent on each other: the big issues of our time all interlock. The nearly 4000 pages of the report give highly detailed evidence of what is happening to our world, and the ability of human and ecosystems to adapt. Climate change has caused substantial damage, and irreversible losses, on both land and water ecosystems, with the extent and depth being larger than estimated in previous assessments.

This incredibly long and detailed report has been drowned out by the drums of war. The global co-operation which is so vital for the future of our planet is not even on the agenda in Europe now. But ordinary people are still building peace. As they wait patiently to cross the border out of Ukraine, refugees have found food stations set up by local churches. For those who have managed to escape westwards, faith communities are helping across Europe. The work that we do, and the compassion that we show, are signs of hope. For centuries past, philosophers and theologians have debated the merits of the vita contemplativa, a life of thought, versus the vita activa, the life of action. Our conference is based around the idea that thought has to lead to action. Our Torah reading this week includes the familiar dietary laws which govern our kosher food, and it has often been said that the purpose is to teach us self-discipline, that we were not put into this world simply to take and grab all that we can.
 

Such a lesson is also taught by the idea of shabbat, the day of rest, when we stop working in the world and tilling the earth, and spend time walking in the world and enjoying its produce. In our tradition we have not just a seventh day of rest but a seventh year of rest, and this very year is counted as such a year, when the earth too has to take a breather. What’s more all our faith traditions, as Jews Christians and Muslims point out how we must replace what we take from the earth.

Three of our Muslim speakers independently quoted the same text. I looked it up and found it. Anas ibn Malik reported: The Messenger of God, peace be upon him, said, “Even if the last day the day Resurrection comes to one of you while he has in his hand a sapling, let him plant it.” (Source: Musnad Aḥmad 12902 Grade: Sahih (authentic) according to Al-Arna’ut)

إِنْ قَامَتْ عَلَى أَحَدِكُمْ الْقِيَامَةُ وَفِي يَدِهِ فَسْلَةٌ فَلْيَغْرِسْهَا

in qaamat ‘ala ahadikum alqiyaama wafee yadihi fasla, falyagh-ris-haa

There is a similar and probably older saying in the rabbinic work, Avot de Rabbi Natan, in the B text not known until published by Solomon Shechter in 1887:

אם היתה נטיעה בתוך ידך ויאמרו לך הרי לך המשיח. בוא ונטע את הנטיעה

im hay’tah netiah betokh yadekha, veyom’ru lakh harei lekha hamashiach, bo v’nata et hanetiah

Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai taught: “If you have a sapling in your hand, and someone says to you that the Messiah has come, stay and finish the planting, and then go to greet the Messiah.” If you listened to the Arabic and the Hebrew they even had the same sentence structure. Even the shift from “you” to “he” is in both the Muslim and the Jewish saying. And there is a similar quote attributed to Martin Luther: “If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would still plant my tree.” This afternoon, we have been hearing how Jews Christians and Muslims, mayors and governments work together across the middle East to increase the supply of fresh and safe water. Faith communities can work across divides on green issues in the Middle East, just as they work across divides helping refugees in Europe. Listening to the discussions at our conference yesterday and today, it is clear to me that there people of faith can be really good at bringing people of difference together. Many might point out that the world’s great faiths have historically not been good at preventing war. It’s true, but the world’s great faiths have also been in the lead at building peace and caring about our planet. as Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg put it at our conference yesterday: “Lobbying is an essential part of what faith communities have to do, and if we do it across faiths it is more powerful. We have to talk values to power and be persistent and courageous and outspoken.” Or as Rabbi Frank Dabba Smith put it this afternoon: “Encounters with strangers can be amazing gifts, moving from the tension to the exchange and the friendship.”

As those of you who attend our adult education programmes in this synagogue know, Dr Harith Ramli and I have been teaching a series called “Judaism and Islam: A Shared history.” I find it fascinating to discover the texts and traditions we have in common. But our conference this week is not about a shared history, but a shared future, inspired by our common tradition and those little sayings we didn’t even know we shared. I happen to believe that our Abrahamic faiths, Judaism Christianity and Islam, are only at the start of our journey together, and that our tangled and often tragic past can become an intertwined and harmonious future. We cannot solve the world’s problems overnight, but when day dawns we can plant a tree together. In that which we share, let us see the common prayer of humanity; where we differ, let us wonder at human freedom; in our unity and our differences let us know the uniqueness and unity that is God. May our meeting with past and present bring blessing for the future.