Thought for the Week

Shabbat Pekudey/Ha-Chodesh

Dear Members and Friends,

Last weekend, the Members’ Choir – a group of eighteen LJS members from across the generations – visited Paris. Our primary mission was to join with two communities and sing a handful of songs and liturgical pieces in their Kabbalat Shabbat and Shabbat morning services.

Our first destination was the Communauté Juive Libérale, founded by Rabbi Pauline Bebe, the first woman rabbi in France -– situated in the XIe Arrondissement, on the edge of the historic and cultural neighbourhood of Le Marais. The service was led by Rabbi Bebe, together with Rabbi Etienne Kerber and a rabbinic student from L’École Rabbinique de Paris. Jerome will be the first rabbi to be ordained from the seminary this coming September.

The Sanctuary was packed, the singing lively and participative, Rabbi Pauline reflecting on a recent visit to Israel in her D’var Torah. Under French law, sermons in places of worship cannot be political but her words addressed concerns as she shared her conversations with Israelis, who had expressed their fears about antisemitism in Europe, and her own community’s perceptions of what it must be like for Israelis living during a war in Israel. On the surface everything was fine, but nothing was fine, she said.

As we sat around tables after the service, the community’s hospitality extending to dinner, we sang some of our additional songs with the congregation and I witnessed the musicality of our choir, the subtle signs from the LJS’s Director of Music, Cathy Heller Jones, ensuring we sang musically, at the right tempo, enhancing the warmth and friendship we all felt in this congregation.

The following morning, we made our way on the métro to Kehillat Gesher in the XVIIe Arrondissement, where Rabbi Tom Cohen, Pauline’s husband is the Conservative trained American Rabbi. The prayers and blessings of the siddur are in Hebrew, French and English, the service conducted mostly in Hebrew, but also in the other two languages, accommodating the Francophone and Anglophone speakers in the congregation.

We were welcomed again with warm-heartedness and offered generous hospitality after the service. Our own singing of a few liturgical pieces during the service provided a gentle contrast to the neo-Hasidic, elated chanting of the prayers by Rabbi Cohen.

With our duties fulfilled at both communities, the rain on Sunday morning did not encourage extensive walking and I took myself to the Picasso Museum and an exhibition on Entartete Kunst (‘Degenerate Art’), art that the Nazi regime deemed to be unacceptable to German culture. Over one hundred artists were blacklisted, and thousands of modern artworks were confiscated from German museums and displayed in the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition in Munich in 1937. Several thousand were destroyed, others were sold, the funds enriching the regime and helping it prepare for war. The artists were German, Polish,

communists and Jewish, their art considered a distortion of the imaginary Nazi ideal of Aryan purity.

In a letter to Einhard Piper on 11 April 1933, the German expressionist sculptor, Ernst Barlach, whose anti-war sculptures drew condemnation and the false accusation that he was Jewish and a Bolshevik, wrote:

‘This age doesn’t agree with me, […] I’m not to its liking, […] I’m not decked out in the nationalist fashion, my mode is un-racist, noise frightens me, instead of cheering when the ‘Heil’ sounds roar, instead of making arm gestures in the Roman style, I draw my hat down over my brow.’

There are surely occasions when we would all like to draw our hats down over our brows and retreat from the racist and strident expressions of populism in our own times. But our Judaism calls for irrepressible hope and our faith in what the French author, Bernard Lazare, described as ‘le meilleur’ – ‘the best’.

Perhaps it is because Judaism is a religious culture and Jews the ‘people of the Book’, embracing more than a creed, but also art, music, literature, poetry and film, that we are schooled in an optimistic faith and hope that the strength of everything a liberal expression of Judaism represents will sweep away harm and evil, so that goodness and truth can prevail soon and in our time.

Shabbat Shalom,

Alexandra Wright