Rabbi Charley Baginsky is Co-Lead of The Movement for Progressive Judaism. This sermon was delivered at Alyth on Rosh Hashanah morning. You can watch it here.
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Every rabbi standing in a particularly full synagogue on Rosh Hashanah must resist the temptation to begin with Dolly Parton: “Here You Come Again.” Whether you have been here every week, barely been away all summer, or are trying to remember which page opens from which direction, here you come again.
I am not neutral about Dolly Parton. I once drove all the way to Cardiff and back in one night to see her, and still consider it one of the best concerts of my life.
“Tumble outta bed and stumble to the kitchen” may be one of the most Jewish lines Dolly ever wrote. In Judaism, sooner or later, everything important happens around a table.
There are kitchen tables where families conduct three conversations at once; board tables where everyone agrees until somebody asks what has been decided; dinner tables where the person about whom we had confidently formed an opinion becomes more complicated when sitting opposite us. And, recently, the Cabinet table, with new people sitting down in an old place heavy with history, with seats still warm from those who sat in them minutes before, hoping to begin a new conversation.
Perhaps that is the Rosh Hashanah image. The Jewish new year never pretends that we begin from nothing. We bring the year as it was to an ancient table and ask whether a different conversation might still be possible.
At the end of Eichah (The Book of Lamentations) we say:
Hashiveinu Adonai eilecha venashuvah; chadesh yameinu kekedem.
Return us to You and we will return; renew our days as of old.
How can something be both renewed and “as of old”? Do we want to go back, or begin again? The Hebrew refuses to choose. What has been need not exhaust what might yet be.
The Talmud makes an astonishing claim about where that renewal happens. In Berakhot, Rabbi Yochanan and Rabbi Elazar teach that while the Temple stood, the altar brought atonement for a person. Now, a person’s table brings atonement.
The rabbis take the sacred work of the Temple and place it where we eat, disagree, interrupt, apologise and sometimes listen. The table becomes an altar because human beings encounter one another there.
But tables can reproduce power as easily as challenge it. Who is invited? Who speaks? Who made the gathering possible, only to discover that somebody else is chairing the important conversation? Women have long known that being present is not the same as having authority.
Nor is staying at the table always comfortable. We are tempted to retreat to tables where everybody agrees with us, or to overturn this one when we do not get our way. Meanwhile, the same people are left standing. Adding a chair may change who speaks and what the rest of us are able to hear.
For as long as we remain willing to sit together, we have not conceded that the relationship is beyond repair. For as long as we are still making room, we have not decided that the community is complete.
That matters particularly this year.
This has been a painful year, in which many British Jews have felt bruised and exposed; in which people hesitate before wearing something Jewish, entering a public conversation, or sending their children out into the world. Our identities want to sing, argue and be expansive. Yet many have narrowed into a defensive crouch.
The Psalmist knows that place: Min hameitzar karati Yah; anani vamerchav Yah. From the narrow place I called to God; God answered me with expansiveness.
The verse begins with narrowness. Jewish hope begins there too. It takes fear and pain seriously, but does not allow them to prophesy the future.
Narrowness changes how we sit together. We pull in our elbows. We guard our place. We begin to believe there is room only for those whose words reassure us, whose loyalties look like ours, whose Jewishness we immediately recognise. The table becomes smaller just when we most need it to grow.
We see that in our arguments about Israel. Settlement expansion, settler violence, Palestinian dispossession and threats to Israeli democracy demand moral seriousness. So do the fears of British Jews who worry that action against Israel will deepen antisemitism here. Antisemitism is real and never our responsibility to prevent by behaving “correctly”. But we cannot allow fear to become our theology or loyalty to require silence. Israel’s future and security matter. So do Palestinian freedom, democracy and equality. We betray something essential when we imagine that one can be purchased at the expense of the other.
The task is not to find a sentence that makes everyone comfortable. It is to keep a table at which difficult truths can be spoken because the relationship matters, where criticism is not automatically betrayal, attachment does not require denial, and disagreement does not cancel belonging.
That is the hameitzar of this moment: the policing of which words may be spoken, which people may be grieved and which questions may even be asked. Hope begins when we refuse that narrowing and make room for Jews to say what is difficult, and sometimes painful, without being pushed outside the conversation.
That is not blind optimism. Optimism predicts improvement; hope lives without that certainty. It says: I cannot promise that things will change, but I will not live as though they cannot.
Gloria Steinem, one of the extraordinary voices we lost as this year drew to its close, thought not only about who holds power, but about the shapes power takes. In India, she encountered talking circles: people seeing one another and speaking without one person permanently possessing the head of the table. The circle admitted more women and changed what could be known.
There is a similar image in the Mishnah. In Sanhedrin, the judges sit ka-chatzi goren agulah, like half of a circular threshing floor, so they can see one another. The shape of the gathering matters.
We should not romanticise that ancient semicircle. The rabbis arranged the judges so that they could see one another, but all the people they imagined seeing were men.
Progressive Judaism receives the wisdom of the circle, but cannot end there. We must ask who was missing; whose testimony was discounted; whose experience could not shape the law because nobody carrying it was recognised as an authority. It is not enough to ordain women and ask them to inhabit models of authority created without them; or to welcome LGBTQI+ Jews, mixed-faith families, disabled Jews, Jews of colour, or Jews who arrive without confidence, while leaving all our assumptions untouched.
Inclusion worthy of the name changes more than the people at the table. It changes the conversation, the menu, who knows where everything is kept, and who gets to decide when the meal is over. Sometimes it may require exchanging the long table, with its fixed head and carefully ranked places, for a circle in which we can see one another.
Changing the table is an act of hope. Experience tells us how readily families, communities and nations repeat themselves. Hope insists that repetition need not have the final word.
Rosh Hashanah arrives anyway. Year after year, it insists on the outrageous possibility that repetition is not destiny.
None of this requires us to abandon our inheritance. Progressive Judaism takes Judaism seriously enough to believe it can still speak and create. Every generation must discover what fidelity demands now.
That requires learning, but also unlearning. Steinem observed that our first problem is not to learn, but to unlearn. Perhaps that is another name for teshuva: loosening assumptions so familiar that we mistake them for truth. Whom do we instinctively trust? Whose anger frightens us, and whom do we dignify as leadership? Who must understand the vocabulary before being allowed into the conversation?
Progressive Judaism cannot be a conversation only for those who know the vocabulary. Nor can it be Judaism emptied of vocabulary so nobody feels excluded. Our harder task is to open the conversation widely while taking everyone in more deeply. If you come every week, Progressive Judaism should still unsettle you. If you come once a year, it still belongs to you, and perhaps it might make you curious about what else is waiting.
Alyth has a particular part to play. A community of this history, confidence and scale does not simply receive Progressive Judaism’s future once somebody else has worked it out. You create it in how you pray and learn, the questions you permit, the voices to which you give authority, and the way you honour what has been while making room for what is becoming.
This community is entering a new chapter in its rabbinic life. It need not forget the earlier ones or pretend the story begins from a blank page. It is the space that can carry forward the wisdom and sacred work already here, while remaining open to what new leadership and the whole rabbinic team may make possible.
There it is again, possibility. Perhaps that is what religious life protects when the world has become too painful or too certain, the space in which something else can still happen.
And so we come to the words that the machzor gives us for this day: Hayom harat olam. We usually translate them as “Today is the birthday of the world.” But harat is the language of conception and pregnancy.
Today the world is pregnant.
That is a less tidy image. A birthday celebrates something safely born. Pregnancy holds expectation and vulnerability, bodily labour and no guarantee about what will emerge. And we should notice the gendered audacity of it. A liturgy largely composed by men takes the experience of the female body and makes it universal theology. We may receive that image, but we should not sentimentalise it. Something new comes into the world because somebody’s body does the work.
The religious audacity is to stand inside a world that has disappointed, frightened and bereaved us; to carry the failures of communities we love and the failures within ourselves and nevertheless to say: harat.
Not born. Not fixed. Not finished.
Something else may yet come into being. We cannot prove it or promise it. But we can refuse to close the space in which it might be born.
And suddenly that strange prayer from Eichah makes sense.
Chadesh yameinu kekedem. Renew our days as of old. Do not take us backwards or erase what has happened. Take all that has brought us here – inheritance, injury, memory, failure, love and grief – and make from it something that has not existed before.
That is Rosh Hashanah: we do not receive a clean page, but we can turn to the next one. We call from inside the narrow place towards expansiveness.
In these weeks we have lost three distinctive people who, in very different registers, taught something about that work. Gloria Steinem insisted that dreaming is itself a form of planning. Dolly Parton told us to find out who we are and do it on purpose. And Tim Curry gave unforgettable voice, magnificently, outrageously and in a corset to Richard O’Brien’s instruction: “Don’t dream it, be it.”
Dream what might be. Know who you are. Then become it.
Not when the world is safer or the argument resolved. Not when Israel is the Israel we wish it to be, not when our communities are less bruised, or when we have finally become the people we intended to become.
Today.
So here you come again, carrying the year as it actually was, what hurt, what frightened us, what we regret, what we love too much to abandon. We come because somewhere beneath all of that is the stubborn Jewish intuition that the story is not over.
Min hameitzar karati Yah; anani vamerchav Yah. From the narrow place, towards expansiveness.
Hayom harat olam. Today the world is not finished.
Neither are we.
Here we come again, carrying all that has been and making room at the table for all that might yet be.
