Rabbi Richard Jacobi, Woodford Liberal Synagogue, 27th July 2011

Two news stories dominated the weekend just gone. The horrendous killings in Norway have shocked us all; the death of Amy Winehouse is the tragic conclusion of an all-too-short, hugely talented life.

Amy Winehouse was a year ahead of my eldest at Sunday morning cheder. She was a talented person, yet did not stand out from the group of which she was part. Her family will have much to cherish from her short life and our thoughts are with them at this time of their great sadness.

The story that unfolded in Oslo and Utoeya Island is still hard to understand. Instead of trying to ‘normalise’ the behaviour, values, and beliefs of Anders Behring Breivik, we should actually take solace in the fact that what he did is not comprehensible to us. We ought perhaps to be grateful that our norms do not enable or allow us to understand how someone could do this. We should be comforted that our society does not, and we hope will never ever, see such actions as in any way ‘normal’.

Our Liberal Jewish values encourage us to recognise the validity of other truths. Our teacher, Rabbi John Rayner (z”l), wrote that our beliefs and laws “must always admit the legitimacy of conscientiously held divergent views, and they must always remain open to revision". (Jewish Religious Law, 1998)

Yet, even this statement hides the truth that there is a range of ‘normal’ beliefs and actions that we consider acceptable in civilized society. Terrorism and vigilante actions, especially those that end innocent lives, will always be outside that range.

One common link between both these news stories is that a reality of life is our struggle to respond to and cope with our own inventiveness and creativity. We invent technologies for killing, for artificial highs and lows, for relaxation, for social contact, for farming, for every aspect of life.

Once we’ve invented something, it cannot be ‘un-invented’. We have to nurture and strengthen the values frameworks that help us respond to such inventions. Such nurturing takes time, and we all need to invest, if we are to avoid ‘knee-jerk’ reactions and allow ourselves to respond wisely. Our world will never get rid of semi-automatic guns, explosives made from fertilizers, drugs or alcohol. Our faiths, our value systems, our capacity to seek wisdom, can help us to minimise their destructive impact and to maximise the opportunity for meaningful, open, pluralist, multi-cultural, happy and long lives.