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Sermons 5785/2024

Erev Rosh Hashanah Sermon 5785
Rabbi Alexandra Wright

 

Last Motz’ei Shabbat, as the last Shabbat of the year ended, some of us gathered here in the Sanctuary to listen to a remarkable recital of pieces by women composers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Judith Valerie Engel, a member of our community, a virtuoso pianist and academic, shared with us the genius and creativity of four women, bringing their compositions, hitherto unacknowledged, to the attention of a world largely unaware of their contribution to the canon of classical music. Judith played two Fantasiestücke by Maria Theresia Paradis and by Helene Liebman. These, and two other pieces, provided an uplifting musical prelude to the Selichot service, the gateway to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, our festivals of repentance and atonement.

Listening to Judith play these pieces reminded me of a masterclass conducted by the pianist András Schiff at the Wigmore Hall, some years ago, with a young American-Hungarian pianist called Julia Hamos. She played the first movement of Schumann’s Fantaisie in C, written in 1836. I ask you to indulge me for a few moments because it is this piece and Schiff’s evocative interpretation that has helped me, not to make sense of the unprecedented tragic and ongoing events of the past year, events that have forced us to ask searching and painful questions, but rather how to approach these Yamim Nora’im – these Days of Awe. How do we find words to tell the story of this most recent chapter of our people?  How do we speak truthfully of events that remain so terrifying and immediate. And how do we find a place for this past year that may or may not fit comfortably into the ways we see ourselves as Jews?

And so, imagine the young pianist on the stage of the Wigmore Hall, seated at a grand piano plunging into this deeply emotional and turbulent piece, with its moments of transcendent and poignant beauty, a love song to Clara Wieck, whom Schumann longs to be with.  And behind the pianist, seated on the piano stool at a second piano, is the maestro, András Schiff, motionless, his hands resting gently on his lap, his face almost expressionless. Only towards the end of her playing, does he move his head to one side, as the first movement, having traversed multiple landscapes, far away from its stated key of C major, quietens and ends.

Schiff stands and walks over to where the pianist is sitting and says quietly in his heavily accented voice, ‘Very good. Thank you so much.’ Then he begins to speak about the music, helping the pianist to bring out the narrative of the piece with an accented note here, a soaring phrase there, showing her how to use her fingers as though they are bowing a violin, and gradually embedding in the music a story, a timeless tale that reaches back into the distant past and yet speaks to us of the present.

This is a tempestuous, breathless piece of inner agitation, punctuated by the motif of a falling interval of a fifth symbolising Schumann’s love for Clara, soon to become his wife.  It is a piece that veers between furious excitement, and profound lyrical and gentle beauty, and because of these contrasts, the pianist must create connections and bridges between the lover’s expression of intimacy and love, and moments of fearful hostility and dissonance.

It was listening to András Schiff speak about the middle part of this movement that held my attention especially. Amid the turbulence and agitation, and what he calls the ‘insecurity of the tonality’, the music changes suddenly; the romantic, liquescent notes become mysterious and dark as we hear the message of an ancient chant, what he calls the ‘legend.’ It is as though we hear the composer is addressing the listener, saying, ‘I want to tell you a story, a story that goes back centuries into the past, a story that evokes fear and trembling, a story that is still unfolding into the present.’

And it is this ‘legend’, this chant, interrupting the emotional and unsettled world around it that provides the questions about what it means to enter the High Holy Days this year.  How should we express our hopes and dreams for the new year, when our hearts quiver with anxiety and distress, with fear and horror? How can we even begin to taste the sweetness of the apple and honey and celebrate the renewal of life, when hostages languish in dark tunnels, when families in Israel and abroad are mourning the loss of loved ones – young and old - when soldiers, barely out of their teenage years, return from war traumatised and exhausted? And what can we say when so many have been killed and displaced in Gaza over this past year, and when open warfare is declared in the north of the country and a regional escalation of war is already taking place? 

Yehuda Amichai, the Israeli poet wrote:

 

‘The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams

like the air over industrial cities. It’s hard to breathe. 

And from time to time a new shipment of history arrives

and the houses and towers are its packing materials.

Later these are discarded and piled up on dumps’

(Yehuda Amichai, ‘Ecology of Jerusalem’).

This Sanctuary, too, is saturated with our prayers for peace, expressions of hope and our longing for glimmers of light. But this year arrived like a ‘new shipment of history’ and the only way we have been able to make sense of the brutality, the killing, the hostage taking, the assassinations and the endless hunger for war in place of diplomacy and political solutions, has been to turn to ancient forms of lamentation and mourning:

              ‘Zion’s roads are in mourning,

              Empty of festival pilgrims;

              All her gates are deserted…

              She is utterly disconsolate’ (Lamentations 1:3-4).

The ‘legend’ takes us back to Abraham, the ‘knight of faith’ as Kierkegaard called him, summoned, not by the god of his father, but by a mysterious disembodied Voice and Presence, commanded to leave his family and homeland, and journey to a land that this God would show him.  Again and again, there were promises – this land will be yours, you will be the father of many nations, your seed as numerous as the stars in the heavens. But the promises were long in coming, for as soon as Abraham arrived in the land with his retinue, he encountered a famine and was compelled to flee to Egypt, where his wife was abducted. And before long, there was a regional war and his nephew Lot and the women and children of his household were taken hostage. Abraham, here a man of war, musters his retainers, deploying his forces against the enemy to defeat them, going as far as Damascus to liberate Lot and all the women and children who have been taken into captivity.  

And when a son finally arrives, the child of the Egyptian maidservant, Hagar, the family threatens to be broken up and he is forced to take Hagar and Ishmael into the desert and leave them there.

This legend continues with the story of the birth of Isaac, the child of Abraham and Sarah’s old age, the child that brought joy and wonder, laughter and disbelief for Sarah: ‘God has brought me laughter; all who hear will laugh with me’ (Genesis 21:6). But the darkest part of this story is reserved for the paradox of Abraham’s response to the ultimate test – a lonely journey of three days with Isaac to offer him up as a burnt-offering on Mount Moriah.

Kierkegaard imagines these three days as days of a dangerous transformation. A loving, kind father, concealing from Isaac where he is leading him, laying his hand on Isaac’s head in benediction, is transformed in something different. And this father, this man of nobility and moral grandeur, of profound faith, patience and goodness, is no longer the mild, encouraging, fatherly figure, but the source of a world, which for Isaac, suddenly becomes unsafe. All comfort and exhortation have gone, all understanding disappears, the world darkens, and the father becomes a source of terror. ‘Stupid boy, do you then suppose that I am your father,’ says Kierkegaard’s Abraham.  I am an idolater. Do you suppose that this is God’s bidding? No, it is my desire.’

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard’s meditation on the Akedah, God’s test of Abraham’s faith is Abraham’s test of Isaac’s faith:

‘Then Isaac trembled and cried out in his terror, "O God in heaven, have compassion upon me. God of Abraham, have compassion upon me. If I have no father upon earth, be Thou my father!" But Abraham in a low voice said to himself, "O God in heaven, I thank You. After all it is better for him to believe that I am a monster, rather than that he should lose faith in Thee."’

The legend expresses our human paradox. That we have the capacity for moral understanding and goodness, but that we are also deeply flawed and can lose our humanity in a brief moment. We are loving, kind, full of good deeds, closeness, gratitude and truthfulness, but we are also impatient, unkind, selfish, distant, ungrateful and dishonest. We live by honest values; we live by dishonest inconsequentiality.

This is the world we inhabit, and Abraham embodies its painful paradox – a man who is faithful and honest, but also deceitful; a man who is a warrior for war, but who is also willing to risk his life to rescue his hostage nephew and family. A man who loves his sons, but is willing to martyr them for an incomprehensible and impossible cause.

And this is the ‘legend’ that lies at the heart of our turbulent and emotional Jewish narrative. During this past year, we rollercoasted our way from pride in what Judaism teaches us about ethics and morality, about justice and compassion, in the struggles of our people to maintain those values, to a terrible sense of shame and an aching hurt that so many have lost lives and limbs, are bereaved of families and friends on all sides of this overwhelming and frenzied war between enemies.

Each year as the High Holy Days approach, we ask one of our members to design a Rosh Hashanah card to be sent to all our volunteers to thank them for everything they do on behalf of this community. (If you haven’t received your card yet, please do tell us). This year, the card was designed by a young graduate, Ariel Galimard, who is a freelance illustrator and has just completed his MA.

The card defied everything around us: destruction, despair, despondency, darkness. It defied the terror and confusion that so many of us have experienced over this past year, both about what is happening in the Middle East and here in the West. And as I reflected on its colours and form, its beauty and the feelings it evoked in me, the words of Keats’ poem, Endymion, came immediately to mind:

              ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.’

Like Schumann in his Fantaisie piece, Keats writes of despondence, ‘of the inhuman dearth/

Of noble natures, of the gloomy days, /Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways/

Made for our searching..’ and yet in spite of all this, some ‘shape of beauty moves away the pall/ from our dark spirits.’

I cannot offer you a profound message of meaning this Rosh Hashanah. I cannot find it in me to explain, rationalise, speak of politics or diplomacy. I don’t want to darken spirits but to celebrate beauty – whether in art or music, whether in the people we meet who give so much goodness to the world, little acts of kindness and beauty, whether in ‘the sun, the moon/Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon/For simple sheep.’ Whether in the loving faithfulness of a wife of fifty years sitting by the side of her dying husband, praying for him not to suffer, or the single damask rose that has poked its way wildly from the neighbouring allotments and appeared outside his window. Or whether it is in the nobility beauty and depth of these rituals, prayers and hopes that we express now at the beginning of our New Year.

I pray that we can find that loveliness and nobility in our own lives and that the fears and sadness of the old year will be diminished by the light and hope of the new year.  Amen.

Fri, 14 February 2025 16 Sh'vat 5785