Rabbi Miriam Berger is Rabbi Emerita of Finchley Reform Synagogue (FRS). This sermon was delivered at FRS on the second day of Rosh Hashanah. You can watch it here.
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I know some of you are worried about what’s happened to me. For 18 years I was your rabbi never without a stash close to hand of sweets, chocolate or crisps and almost always for my own consumption and not just to bribe reluctant Bnei Mitzvah students or over-tired colleagues. I promise I haven’t gone all oat milk, chia seeds and kale smoothies, even though what’s driving me forward each day is to open a centre of well-being which, to the uninitiated, might sound more granola than Coco Pops.
But, I can assure you, the thought of plunging into the freezing cold water of Hampstead Ponds still fills me with dread every time and yet each new Hebrew month, each Rosh Chodesh since before Pesach in what felt much more like late winter than early spring, I’ve taken a group to do exactly that. Why? Because we notice things more when we mark time and when you show up time after time with the same people on a regular basis it’s hard not to see how conversations, feelings, priorities shift and when you are outside it’s all heightened by nature’s own time-moving signals.
What I’ve observed is it’s easy to see what the big concerns are each month, how significant in that moment a fear or a sadness or a frustration can feel. Yet what I have also noticed is how quickly a month passes and yet how often those significant fears, that sadness or frustration has already shifted into that which is being endured, put up with, coped with and then in a blink of an eye it has become the new normal, an unspoken new reality, no longer discussion worthy. The alarming thing for me is how quickly the cycle keeps shifting. You could see it as resilience, isn’t that what we are all striving for in this modern world, but sadly I think this is a strange type of acceptance which is not the same as resilience and although I think both have their very important place in our emotional wellbeing, I fear when the shift to acceptance is too speedy, we are simply ignoring the signals, our alarm bells urging us to seek change.
As a group, we were focusing on bringing about change in our personal lives, but it was the external world and societal hot potatoes that were so often our big issues: anxiety for friends and family threatened by drones or missiles, the shock of the arson attack on the shul, the worry of elections and what different results might mean and yet what was ‘all we could talk about’ one month, by the next month the horror of the immediacy had subsided and so had our anxiety or at least the anxiety we were presenting externally and I don’t think it’s because we were so effective at leaving our concerns in the water.
On one of these months, I had invited a wellbeing expert, Philippa Carr, to treat us to a 5-minute exercise as we dried off and enjoyed a snack in the sun by the water. I didn’t know what to expect in more ways than one. Now for this, you have to remember I am still the person you always knew me to be, so I knew I’d need to take part in the exercise to show good “dugma,” be a good role-model, but I was obviously full of my usual cynicism and so was a reluctant participant. I’d brought my pen and paper along as instructed, because I’m a rule-follower and I followed her simple request. “I want you to write a letter to a friend,” Phillippa instructed, “you are somewhere they or you wouldn’t have necessarily expected you to be, perhaps you’ve moved and you are explaining how you are feeling.”
I sighed and started writing in case we had to share, I am and always have been a teacher’s pet. Yet what I wrote startled me because I’d never even thought this thought and didn’t know where the idea had come from.
Dear Neil – Well Rabbi Neil Janes and I are in constant WhatsApp contact; he was the obvious person to be writing to in any medium.
“Dear Neil. I have secured funding to purchase a large cruise-ship which I am currently taking a tour of, in case the time should come that we need not to be here. I knew I couldn’t and wouldn’t move however bad things got without family, friends and community so I have decided this is the only way. We will interview everyone who wants to apply to join us on the boat. Everyone will need to have a role in our floating society, our kibbutz on the sea of 4000. We will need a team to negotiate with ports to get them to allow us to dock so that we can refuel and restock – and that need will still leave us vulnerable – but I’m excited that we can create a community based on the joy of our Jewish values without having to be part of a wider society who vilify us. Come and make it happen with me, I could do with a wise rabbi on board!!”
I shocked myself that this is what I came out with. I am not someone who is thinking the end is nigh for the Jewish community or that we should all be packing our things. I have had countless conversations over these last couple of years that I won’t be swapping the graffiti and protests of London for bomb shelters in Tel Aviv, so where had this come from? It comes not from an anxiety of feeling we need to be planning for our escape but much more what I perceive to be a lack of strategic leadership coming from the organisations said to speak for all of us, to use the plateau moments for the big, long-term planning for how we prepare ourselves or even better how we prevent the next troughs and create more peaks.
When people are living with long-term health conditions they keep going on a plateau, things don’t get worse every day. They keep functioning on the plateau until an episode, a something, a fall or a scan or an infection may be the moment where we see a downturn. After the anxiety or horror of that moment a new plateau is found, and the person keeps going with their new normal. The difference is in that case society, their doctors, families and they themselves are able to plan. They may not want to engage with the ‘what ifs’ but care at home, hospital admissions, long-term residential care, hospices are all frameworks that provide safety nets. You may not want to even say the words when you are going through it, but you know when the next trough on the graph hits there are possibilities.
I definitely have more questions than answers at the moment, but when I see communal leaders with photos outside Number 10 or excitedly from the Cabinet Office, I want to know if the setting gives more reassurance than the reality of what those meetings can achieve? Political leaders in temporary roles, and we have seen quite how temporary those roles can be recently, helping us to feel reassured with soundbites and security funding. Is that the same as the Jewish community ourselves strategising over our long-term future in this country, and ensuring we can continue to thrive in the same way as we were taking for granted before October 2023.
We have learnt it doesn’t matter if you are Charedi or Reform, a passionate Zionist or a vocal critic of Israel, Jew hate is Jew hate and though you can argue after Tuesday’s announcement whether we are on a plateau this week, we cannot make this our new normal. That means as British Jews we have to do something we aren’t very good at. We have to build a single strategy, speak with one voice, accept that our differences are felt keenly between us but not felt by the outside world. We don’t need to and don’t want to build an ark and despite my Noah-like musings, I am definitely not thinking that is the answer. I feel the conversation about fleeing to the ark that was built in 1948 to be our refuge at such times is one being entertained very seriously by those the other side of the Great North Way, in Hendon while many of us are shrugging it off as unnecessary or even absurd. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t recognise the fact that we are on a plateau and have no idea how many weeks, years or generations this plateau may last before the next significant trough. But we are definitely living in a time in which we have been made aware that the strategy needs to be there.
The shvitizing summer might be over, the wildfires truly extinguished but we have to still plan for rising temperatures next summer.
The headstones may be set for those who tragically lost their lives at Heaton Park last Yom Kippur, our fences have been made higher and yet we as British Jews, who have no intention of going anywhere, need to ask the question, how do we put the polarisation of views between us to one side and hold those who represent us to account, to ensure a future us is being suitably planned for.
I have never known a time when the JLC and the Board of Deputies have such a vital role to play for British Jewry. Their ability to really strategise with every single British Jewish institution, together with the British government and Israeli Government would enable wonderful local leaders to continue to keep building community resources to help us thrive, keep synagogues like this flourishing, that give us a vibrant joy of our Jewish identity and a community to make us feel deeply rooted and connected to. The JLC and Board need to be the ones who help work together to understand the threats we face and work as one to counter their influence.
Security subsidies are not the answer. We don’t want to have to protect ourselves better, we want to feel safe and secure as we have every expectation to feel and just because we get further away from the last unsettling event at best or devastating event at worst, we can’t keep accepting the reality as we now find it, we have to remember it’s just a plateau.
Acknowledging that plateaus are temporary is not the same as living in a permanent state of despair, it’s just about living the fullest lives while planning for and preventing the next challenging experience.
May this year be a year of calm in which our leadership, both of the cross communal Jewish organisations and our political leadership, can spend less time fire-fighting, less time refereeing and more time putting a strategy in place so that our children and grandchildren can accuse us of being neurotic, having a chip on our shoulders from those past unsettling times, while they live only as British Jews who thrive and flourish and don’t know why we would hold on to any concerns, for isn’t that the diaspora Judaism model we have always known and come to expect.
Ken yehi ratzon – may this be God’s will.
