Kol Nidre Sermon, 5768

by Rabbi Neil Janes

On several occasions I have thought to myself that things have happened that I could not possibly have been prepared for at the Leo Baeck College.  But one occasion stands out as unique.  Probably because of the people concerned and the circumstances in which it happened.

Three years ago I was spending my birthday with a friend in Cardiff, those of you who do not know my birthday is on the 22nd August.  It was about three weeks before Rosh Hashanah, so I was grabbing a last few days of relaxation before preparing to lead services at Edgware and District Reform Synagogue. We had a nice meal out and had met up with friends from my university days.  The following morning was my birthday and as I went up stairs to my bedroom to begin packing to come home I noticed I had a missed call from one of my closest friends from school – he had left a message to say call him as soon as possible.

I got the feeling something was wrong, so I called straight away.  On the other end of the phone my friend was in floods of tears.  He said to me, “I’m really sorry, I don’t know if you remember my mate Tom.  He’s been stabbed to death just up the road from my house.  Could you pray for him when you take a service, or whatever it is that you do?”

I was distraught for my friend, horrified by what had happened and despairing at my helplessness.  There was no reasonable response, no words of comfort for the grief he was experiencing.  The murder had taken place not far from where he was living as Tom had walked home that night.  I said all I could and we hung up.

In my naivety, or perhaps because of my inability to formulate a suitable response for myself, or maybe as a result of a natural need to find strength in my tradition in times of distress, I turned to the psalm that it is customary to recite during the month of Elul (It was the fifth of Elul) and up to the end of Sukkot, Psalm 27.

In content the words of the Psalmist move from a kind of unswerving statement of trust in God that he will be protected, to a desire that God should not forsake him in times of danger.

When I had driven home, listening to the radio and trying again to contact my friend, the emotion overwhelmed me and I burst into tears.  I moved from selfish thoughts: How helpless I felt, what great responsibility and trust I had been given by my friend, how inadequate was I to deal with it, to thoughts of Tom’s family, his friends their grief and his pain and how senseless and utterly sad it was that his life had been taken in such a vicious way.

Psalm 27 was the psalm to which I had turned just two years before.  As I sat down with a group of youth leaders to help them prepare for summer camp I was told that Andreas Hinz, a student Rabbi at the Leo Baeck College, had gone missing.  That Shabbat I was leading services at my childhood synagogue, Radlett and Bushey Reform Synagogue, and I read an extract of the psalm as part of the community’s response to the news:

Eternal One, hear my voice when I call, take pity on me and answer me.

Come, my heart has said, seek God’s presence.  I will seek Your presence, Eternal One.

Do not hide Your face from me, do not turn away Your servant in anger, for You have been my help.

Do not cast me off or forsake me, O God my Saviour.

That week it was discovered that Andreas had been brutally murdered and the world was missing a piece to make it whole.

I have thought a great deal, since then, how to make sense of the loss of another human being through the violence inflicted by a fellow individual. It was only after these tragedies occurred so close to me that I understood the meaning of the mishnah in Sanhedrin:

“Whoever destroyed a life, scripture considers him to have destroyed the world.  Whoever saves a life, scripture considers him to have save the world.”

Without Andreas and without Tom, the world was no longer the same.  The world before had been destroyed, what was left was somewhere new, somewhere desolate, somewhere shattered.

When I was growing up as a child I never imagined that I would be someone affected by murder.  I was fortunate that the closest I ever came to a bereavement was the death of a pet or a best friend at primary school moving far away.  It was only when I was 14 that my grandmother, Isabelle Janes z’l, passed away.  I was already at an age when I could understand, at least, that people do grow old and that death was part of life.  I can even remember times as a child that friends of my parents had passed away due to illness, that too, tragic as it was, was not something inflicted by one person on another human being.

Murder was something that I saw on television, in films, and violence was glorified in the Die Hard movies of my adolescence.  Never, in my wildest nightmares, did I think people who I knew, people with whom I had friendships, would be viciously taken from this world. That was something that happened to families in war, something that happened to my family in the Shoah and tragedy that befell remote and distant communities today.

I cannot fathom how in the 21st Century a nice sheltered Jewish boy from St Albans could have been connected to such brutality.  In fact, I cannot fathom how anyone in the 21st Century – regardless of age, religion or upbringing – should be exposed to the harsh treatment of one person at the hands of another.  It has been in the back of my mind for months and perhaps years.

What is wrong with our world and our society?  From where do we find comfort?  The words of the Psalmist certainly do not resolve the eternal dilemma of understanding why bad things happen.  For some they strengthen one’s faith and the majesty and mystery of God.

The Eternal One is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?

The Eternal One is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?

For others they formulate the cry of grief and fear:

Do not hide Your face from me, do not turn away Your servant in anger, for You have been my help.

Do not cast me off or forsake me, O God my Saviour.

Yet is it God who deliberately hides the Divine face from our presence, or is the face of Adonai hidden by another force – perhaps our own?  Afterall, the most unique tragedy to befall the Jewish people, the Shoah, has in some circles ceased to be a discussion of the absence of God, but rather an absence of humanity:

“The question about Auschwitz to be asked is not “Where was God?” but rather “Where was man?”  The God of Abraham has never promised always to hold back Cain’s hand from killing his brother.  To equate God and history is idolatry.  God is present when man’s heart is alive.  When the heart turns to stone, when man is absent, God is banished, and history, disengaged, is distress.”

(Abraham Joshua Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity p.291)

On this Erev Yom Kippur I find myself asking what seems a simple question, but riddled with challenges along the way.  How can we bring back the sanctity of life, respect for the basic humanity of every person?  Perhaps, the very idea of ‘betzelem Elohim’ becoming a universally held view, that every person is made in the image of God, is a false dream.  And the ‘klal gadol batorah’ the most basic principle of the Torah “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” a misguided and naïve utopia.  I cannot believe in such pessimism – it would make our very existence pointless.

In my opinion, in order to avoid handing ourselves over to this despair and pessimism we have a responsibility, we are not guilty but we can be responsible.  I do not feel it futile or worthless to feel responsible when the culprits lie in jail or in hiding.  They are guilty, they bear the sin of their crime and they alone. Yet, the Judaism with which I have grown up forces me to feel the pain and feel responsible.

And where does the responsibility start: I believe it starts with the need for each of us to perform a tikkun, a repair.  Bundled with the tikkun, part of its very fabric, are the very tensions I am struggling with, about the universality of all human beings and the God whom we challenge to act justly.  The tikkun must be made to stretch as far and wide as the threads will allow.  And the net we cast must not dissolve with a simple brush with different view points.  My neighbour and I must not be incapable of neighbourliness, of love for one another, because of a difference of opinion and even of ideological outlook.  As long as that difference leaves in tact the universal vision – the vision of ‘betzelem elohim’.  For when that is threatened so too is my particularism – my difference.

I view the world in a way that no other can.  That is the root of my individual particularism. I am, in truth, a total other from you and every person sitting here this evening.  None of us is alike and none of us can ever truly know the full depths of our souls.  And within my own otherliness I situate myself in a community. We share a particularism too – we are different, unique and have a common way of expressing that difference.  Yet, when I reach the borders of my world, when the boundaries of our communities are crossed we are once again reminded of our universal commonality – we are ‘betzelem elohim’, we are ‘Adam’ – humanity.

On this Yom Kippur let us think about our shattered world.  A world that is full of grief, of violence and of shame – that a human being can assault the universal vision.  Yom Kippur can be the start of our tikkun – our particular response, which begins in our hearts and our minds and must, if it is to mean anything, extend into our community.  We can launch a protest and beg for justice from the King of kings of kings – for shall not the judge of the earth deal justly?  And at the same time we can take responsibility, seeking to ignite the message of optimism in the darkness.  We can protest and take responsibility.  In the presence of God on Yom Kippur we can do both.

Rabbi Neil Janes

Finchley Progressive Synagogue