Rabbi Richard Jacobi is Rabbi of East London and Essex Liberal Synagogue (ELELS). This sermon was delivered at ELELS on Erev Rosh Hashanah.
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It was on 25 September 2016 that the two former Liberal synagogues of Bet Tikvah and Woodford voted to come together to form our East London and Essex Liberal Synagogue. Fittingly, we shall be building our sukkah – please bring plenty of foliage – a fortnight today on the tenth anniversary of the votes.
I am hopeful that we shall celebrate the tenth anniversary of our formation while we are, so to speak, in exile. The path to having a redevelopment plan that gained unanimous approval by Redbridge’s Planning Committee was a longer one than anticipated. Since that approval, much work has been done, but there are always twists and turns on such a journey. The lessons of the Torah’s accounts of the journeys of the Israelites from Egypt still serve well to teach us to expect the unexpected and to allow for detours and distractions. Hopefully, we won’t have a full-scale rebellion like that of Korach!
Reflecting on not just the past year, but the past decade, I feel great pride in how the community of ELELS has developed and matured. In a discussion around the Council table at the start of this week, members touched on the culture and character of this community, noting that it is not filled with big egos or a fawning to wealth. Nor is it one that indulges in politicking or factional fighting. Instead, it is a community where all are valued in the best version of b’tzelem Elohim – each and every person, whatever their age, however they define themselves, is valued equally. I hope we will cherish that defining character and hold fast to it in months and years to come.
We have also been a community that has been forged by events, with two contrasting major crises being the Covid pandemic and October 7th, with last Yom Kippur’s attack on the Heaton Park Synagogue and the deaths of Adrian Daulby and Melvin Cravitz also warranting a mention.
Each of these provides evidence to support the maxim that what happens is not as important as how you respond to it. We responded in line with our values to each event – so many became involved in the response to the Covid pandemic, and we reached all our members and provided support wherever they were. After October 7th, we shared in the grief, and supported those who were most affected by the awful pogrom that day. Subsequently, we sustained a balance of concern for all those affected, refusing to be pulled to any polarised extreme.
Beyond our community, I feel that it is appropriate to acknowledge today as the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. That day, when nearly 3,000 people lost their lives through carefully planned acts of terrorism, remains etched in the mind and heart of everyone who witnessed it, even when several thousand miles away.
Radicalised terrorism, whoever is perpetrating it, cannot be met by an equivalent response from an opposite extreme. Retaliation, especially if it includes escalation, is rarely successful. We have seen this, and we have lived, indeed are living, through the direct and indirect effects of such anger-fuelled counter-attacks.
One of the consequences of everything that we’ve experienced in the last few years is that I know many of you are arriving here feeling fatigued. Just how many times do we have to respond to malign events? How many times must we dip into the well labelled “resilience”? How many times do we have to get up, after we’ve been knocked down physically, mentally or emotionally?
It is hard to remember in the midst of a year like that just completed that there are many more people of good will than there are people of ill will. When attacks on Jewish organisations and individuals – the Hatzola ambulances, one synagogue after another, a shop, and two men stabbed in Golders Green – were regular news stories, it was easy to succumb to the idea that everyone was against us. But they weren’t and they aren’t.
At each and every stage, we have received messages and acts of support that remind us of the sheer number of good, kind people in amongst whom we live. Visits, like that of the Deputy Mayor this evening, letters, bunches of flowers or a box of home-made biscuits handed to us, all have been heart-warming. Just under a fortnight ago, some of the ELELS community gathered with over 100 others from Chinese, Albanian, Muslim, Christian, and Caribbean groups for a Loved & Wanted Garden Party in Chingford amid great enjoyment of all the different cultures present and sharing the space.
One message I take from events like this is that if we succumb to a bunker mentality and hide away, we miss out on the joy and the good in the world, and we also fail to contribute to that.
So, for me, the season that is upon us offers the opportunity for us to refill the well of resilience, to remember the responses to evil acts as much, if not more, than the acts themselves, and to remind ourselves that the Jewish people have been here before and emerged from those times.
Each year, Jews arrive at this evening with the traditional hope:
תכלה השנה וקללותיה תחל שנה וברכותיה
Let the year end and its curses, let the year begin and its blessings.
Incidentally, the 16th century religious poem by Abraham Hazzan, which originated that idea, forms part of tonight’s closing prayers on page 82 of our Machzor.
We might ask, is this a naïve hope that 5787 will be perfect, when 5786 had so much distress? And how can we express this year after year? Similarly, we come into this season each year reflecting on our sins and wrongdoings and promising to be better in the new year. Is that also a kind of groundhog day experience?
Maybe, we have to see the poetic statement and our talk of repentance and improvement differently. This season always presents us with the opportunity to return and to restart, as if fresh again. It is a Jewish reset button, long before any tech used that idea.
Maybe, this year, we have to reset slightly differently. Maybe each one of us can take the idea of focussing on blessings, by resolving to be a blessing more often this year to relatives and friends, or to wider society, or to the environment.
If we can concentrate a little more on what we can do to be a blessing, then maybe we will bring a little more goodness into the world, and have a better year ourselves. It won’t be perfect, because nothing human can be. But, if we take back our own agency and focus on what we say and do, and if enough of us do the same thing, then perhaps the combined impact will be significant. One part of this reset might be summarised as ‘scroll less, do more!’ Or, using Micah Shapiro’s first person singular version of the Hashiveinu that we sing when returning the Torah scroll to the Ark, we will ask God:
הֲשִׁיבֵנִי וְאָשׁוּבָה חַדֵּשׁ יָמֵינוּ כְּקֶדֶם
“Receive me back so I may return to my true self, renew our days to their essence.”
If we encourage and support each other enough, then perhaps we will feel that we have returned to our true, best selves a little more of the time. On Erev Rosh Hashanah 5788, when we review the year that has ended, maybe we will feel we did indeed do a little better. Wouldn’t that be good?