Rosh Hashanah Erev
Sermon – 26 September 2006
This
evening, a new year begins in the dark of the new moon of Tishri.
We have gathered here in our synagogue to mark that sacred moment
by participating in a service – or to be more precise,
a religious service. As we stand on the threshold of the New
Year and look ahead to an unknown future, we also look back
on the year that is now past – indeed, we can’t
really move forwards without taking stock of the journey we
have taken to reach this day. Each one of us will have our own
store of experiences and memories, but as we gather for our
Erev Rosh Hashanah service, the time has arrived for us to reflect
together on the past year. So much has happened, in our congregation,
in Liberal Judaism, in the Jewish people, in this country, in
Israel, in the world. It would take hours simply to compile
a list of all the significant events! In the short time available,
I would like to focus on the world – or rather, to examine
one aspect of the life of the world during the past year that
has implications not only for the world, but also for Britain,
for the Jewish people, for Liberal Judaism, and for Brighton
and Hove Progressive Synagogue.
During the past year I have often felt very uncomfortable –
even a little embarrassed on occasion – about being a
religious leader. Sometimes, I’ve felt like I should apologise
as a religious professional for the hate-fuelled religious bigotry
and for all the murderous deeds perpetrated in the name of religion
and condoned by extremist religious leaders. But it’s
not just the fanatics who make me squirm; those who abuse their
positions of authority to incite their followers to kill in
the name of God; it is also those religious leaders of all religions
– including Christianity, Islam, Hinduism – and,
yes, Judaism, too – who continue to insist on narrow,
literalist interpretations of their sacred teachings at the
expense of the lives and the well-being of the women, men and
children who are governed by their leadership.
I would like to say a few words about Catholicism because,
with religious leadership vested in the singular authority of
one man, and one and a half billion adherents’ world wide,
the Catholic Church has the most monolithic and the most extensive
influence on its followers of all the major religions. Of course,
from a Jewish point of view, contemporary Catholicism, cleansed
of its anti-Semitic theology, has become quite benign. After
all, it is now forty years since the Second Vatican Council
convened by Pope John XXIII transformed Catholic teaching concerning
the Jewish people, declaring with the document Nostra Aetate
that it was wrong to present the Jews as rejected by God, that
the Jewish people was not guilty for the death of Jesus and
that the Divine Covenant with the Jewish people had not only
not been broken, but was eternal. This was a radical development,
a complete break from hundreds of years of teaching, and as
we have all been reminded this year, Pope John Paul II, who
died at the age of eighty-five on April 2nd, built enthusiastically
on Nostra Aetate, describing anti-Semitism as ‘a sin against
God and man’. What is more, the late Pope put theory into
practice, not only by receiving Jewish groups at the Vatican,
but by visiting the central Rome synagogue in 1986, and Israel
in 2000, where he prayed briefly at the western wall in Jerusalem
– perhaps the most powerful signal to Catholics the world
over that the traditional view, over-turned by Nostra Aetate,
that the Jewish people had been exiled from the land for their
failure to accept Christianity, was well and truly null and
void.
Pope John Paul II’s contribution to dialogue with the
Jewish people was so significant that, writing in the Jewish
Chronicle on the Friday following his death (08.09.05, p.30),
Rabbi David Rosen, a member of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel’s
committee for dialogue with the Vatican, who had met Pope John
Paul fourteen times, heralded the late Pope as ‘A hero
of reconciliation’. And yet… Not only was the anti-Semitic
war-time leader of the Catholic church, Pope Pius XII, beatified
during Pope John Paul’s reign, and the role of the Catholic
Church during the Shoah, never directly addressed, but a supporter
of ‘Solidarity’, and the Polish nationalist freedom
movement that challenged the Communist regime, Pope John Paul’s
social radicalism did not extend to the vital issue of birth
control. We should judge the late Pope’s legacy not only
on how he dealt with the Jewish people, but more importantly,
on how his own people fared under his leadership. For example
– and it’s a chilling one: there is no doubt that
hundreds of thousands of African Catholics have died of Aids
as a direct result of Pope John Paul’s prohibitive dictates
on contraception.
And what of the new pontiff: Pope Benedict XVI? No, the Cardinals
gathered in Rome decided not to create a historic moment and
choose a Pope for the 21st century. Rather, John Paul devotees,
almost to a man, they opted for the late Pope’s theological
Advisor-In-Chief, his Doctrinal policeman; the Catholic official,
who, had been principally responsible, for squashing dissent
and keeping the Catholic clergy in line with traditional Catholic
doctrine during Pope John Paul’s reign. But the new Pope
isn’t just a chip off the old block; he’s a completely
conservative all-rounder: while Pope John Paul had championed
the cause of the poor and the persecuted, the new Pope believes
that the poor and the persecuted should wait for their reward
in the after-life. His shocking record of disciplining radical
South American priests, who tried to live out a theology of
liberation, and work to improve the conditions of life for the
most deprived, speaks for itself.
So, things don’t look too good for Catholics in the new
era of Pope Benedict XVI – or, rather, we should say for
a quarter of the world population. Conservatism on that scale
and with that kind of scope is rather scary, isn’t it?
And yet most people today feel that radical Islam – which
accounts for less than 10% of one and a quarter billion Muslim
followers world-wide – is the only religious menace. Of
course, Catholics aren’t engaging in terrorism –
but while we focus on the extremist Islamist militants, we forget,
not only that they do not represent Muslims as a whole, but
that the problem of bad religion isn’t confined to those
who commit murderous acts of violence in the name of God. During
the past year, while the terrorists carried out their deadly
deeds, bad religion also reared its ugly head in other guises:
What about the Evangelical Christian ministers in the United
States, who preach hell-fire and damnation for single mothers
and other ‘sinners’, burn down abortion clinics,
and are intent on curing or banishing their lesbian and gay
parishioners? What about the Dayanim – the rabbinic Judges
– who preside over the London Beit Din – who refuse
to recognise a mother’s Orthodox conversion under Israeli
auspices, and so, prohibit her child from attending the Jewish
Free School?
So what is bad religion? Bad religion preaches hatred and condones
persecution and violence in the name of God. Bad religion transforms
God into a Divine Dictator, and dictates to people how they
should live, without negotiation and any reference to their
needs. Bad religion asserts the authority of the religious establishment
at the expense of the people those in authority are supposed
to minister to. Bad religion threatens and condemns those who
are different. Bad religion is hypocritical and self-serving.
Bad religion hurts people instead of supporting them. Bad religion
protects the powerful and neglects the powerless. I could go
on – but I think you get the point.
By speaking of ‘bad’ religion, I’m implying
that there is something else, another alternative, that we might
call ‘good’ religion: The late Rabbi John Rayner,
zichrono livrachah, may his memory be for blessing, Honorary
Life President of Liberal Judaism, who died peacefully at home
on September 19th at the age of 80, after a two year long illness,
was an exemplar of ‘good’ religion. Born Hans Sigismund
Rahmer in Berlin on May 30th 1924, the young Hans came to England
in August 1939 with one of the last of the Kindertransports.
Brought up in a secular family, prior to leaving Germany, he
had studied at a Zionist school that he was forced to attend
after the 1935 Nuremberg Laws barred Jews from state education.
When he arrived in England, as a young refugee, he then spent
the next few years living in two clergy homes and studying at
Durham School, and emerged, not only a brilliant student, winning
an Open Scholarship to Emmanuel College Cambridge, but a committed
liberal Jew. After serving for four years in the Durham Light
Infantry and attaining the rank of Captain, John Rayner, as
he was now called, went up to Cambridge in 1947, and spent the
next six years, reading Modern Languages, Philosophy, Hebrew
and Aramaic, and gaining a First Class honours degree. When
he left, he was ordained as a rabbi, and took up his first pulpit
at the South London Liberal Synagogue. Here is an extract from
his ordination address of June 21st 1953 (Rayner, 1998, p. 39):
To fulfil the task of Liberal Judaism in our time we must, in
many ways, resist the tendencies, and swim against the currents,
of our time. In an age of materialism we must proclaim the supremacy
of the spiritual; in an age of irrationalism, reason; in an
age of skepticism, faith; in an age of despair, hope; in an
age of arrogance, humility; in an age of hatred, love; in an
age of strife, peace; in an age of nationalism, universalism;
in an age of authoritarianism, the possibility and the grandeur
of a liberal faith.
Rabbi John Rayner said it all over fifty years ago! By the
time he left Cambridge and went to South London – that
is, four years before he was invited to become Associate Minister
at LJS – the Liberal Jewish Synagogue – and then
Senior Rabbi in 1961, at the very young age of thirty seven,
John Rayner had not only proved himself to be a brilliant Jewish
scholar, but also an eloquent exponent of Liberal Judaism, in
the great tradition of the first Rabbi of LJS, American-born
Israel Mattuck, and the other founders of Liberal Judaism in
this country, Lily Montagu and Claude Montefiore. And so, dedicating
himself to the task of proclaiming ‘the possibility and
the grandeur of a liberal faith’, Rabbi Rayner devoted
his Rabbinate to teaching Liberal Jewish values and putting
them into practice.
To illustrate the enormous gulf of understanding between Rabbi
Rayner’s approach to living a religious life, and that
of conservative religious leaders, a sermon he gave just over
forty years after his ordination, on October 29th 1994, is very
telling (Rayner, 1998, pp.52-54). Apparently the late Pope’s
book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, a re-assertion of the
authority of traditional religion in a rationalist, secular
age, had just been published and had already sold 250,000 copies.
So, Rabbi Rayner took the opportunity to remind his congregation,
not only that our people ‘owe their Emancipation to the
Enlightenment’ (p.53), but also, that without the Age
of Reason’s challenge to traditional ways of thought and
practice (pp.53-54):
… there would be no democracy, no universal education,
no welfare state; no abolition of slavery, no humane treatment
of animals, no equal rights for women; there would still be
capital punishment; there would be no legislation against child
labour, and the poor would still be begging at the church door.
For Rabbi Rayner, Religion and Reason were not opposites. For
him, there was ‘another way… the way of Liberal
Religion’ (p.54) – a way that involves recognizing
that, as he put it: ‘the values of the Enlightenment are
also religious values… [and] that reason and conscience
are a divine gift through which God speaks to us in our time
no less than through the pages of Scripture.’ And he concluded
his sermon with these words:
Yes, it is true that where there is Enlightenment there is little
Traditional religion, and where there is Traditional Religion
there is little Enlightenment. But only because Liberal Religion
is weak. And our task is to make Liberal Religion strong. When
we have achieved that – then we shall have crossed ‘the
threshold of hope’.
Sadly, Rabbi Rayner is no longer in our midst. And Liberal religion
is still weak – and our task remains: to make it strong.
Fortunately, we have much reason to feel hopeful – despite
the fact that bad religion remains a powerful force in the world
today. With the appointment of Danny Rich, a third generation
Liberal Jew, as Chief Executive, we may be assured that the
promotion of ‘Liberal religion’ will be a top priority
of our movement – which is neither to suggest that Rabbi
Danny Rich is the successor to Rabbi Rayner – nor that
either he or Rabbi Rayner are the Liberal Jewish equivalents
of the new Pope and the late one! On the contrary, we are all
responsible for developing Liberal Judaism – and many
of us are taking that responsibility very seriously. And so,
while conservative forms of religion are busy subjecting their
followers to their authoritarian dictates, Liberal Jews can
be proud not only of our Liberal Jewish values, but also of
the way we are putting them into practice – at the LJS
and the Montagu Centre, throughout our movement, and at this
centre of Liberal Judaism. BHPS may be small and under-resourced,
but we are a Liberal congregation in every sense: We have full
gender equality; members are treated on an equal basis, whether
they have one Jewish parent or two – regardless of whether
that parent is the mother or the father; couples in mixed relationships,
couples in same-sex relationships, and single people are welcomed
and included; and our ethical action extends beyond our own
concerns to the needs of the homeless, refugees, the poor and
the persecuted in other countries, and indeed, to the welfare
of the entire planet.
During 2005 we have been aware of another great Jewish luminary:
Not a religious leader; rather, a great physicist, who transformed
our understanding of the Universe with his incredible equation,
E=Mc squared, one hundred years ago in 1905, and died fifty
years ago at the age of 76 in 1955. Although Albert Einstein
was not Jewishly observant, he was also a passionate advocate
of what he saw as the essential contribution of the Jewish people
to humanity. Some time ago, someone gave me this quotation –
if anybody knows the source, please let me know!* During the
Age of Unreason that was the Nazi Third Reich, Albert Einstein
wrote:
Those who today rage against the ideals of reason and individual
freedom and who seek by means of brutal force to bring about
a vapid slave state are justified in perceiving us as their
implacable enemies. History has imposed on us a difficult struggle;
but as long as we remain devoted servants of truth, justice
and freedom we will not only persist as the oldest of living
peoples, but will also continue as before to achieve, through
productive labour, works that contribute to the ennoblement
of humanity.
As ‘devoted servants of truth, justice and freedom’,
we need to keep doing what we can to extend the sphere of influence
of Liberal religion. We owe it to the late John Rayner; we owe
it to the late Albert Einstein; we owe to ourselves; we owe
it to the wider community and to the world in which we live.
Significantly, this year, which has witnessed the escalation
of religiously-driven deeds of violence, Rosh Hashanah coincides
with the beginning of the Muslim month of Ramadan, a month of
fasting and repentance, when Muslims take no food or water after
dawn, until the sun has set each day. Ramadan is the fourth
of the Five Pillars of Islam. The first is the Confession of
Faith. The second is the obligation to pray five times a day.
The third is Tzakat – which, like Tz’dakah, is the
obligation to give to those in need. The fifth is the Haj –
the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, in memory of the first pilgrimage
made by the prophet Muhammad, which Muslims are supposed to
undertake at least once during their life-times.
Since Muslims follow a lunar calendar that is not regulated
by the sun, the ninth month of Ramadan can fall during any season
of the year. This year, Ramadan coincides with the seventh month
of the Jewish year, Tishri, and so begins at Rosh Hashanah,
the ‘Day of Judgement’, which ushers in the aseret
y’mey T’shuvah, the ‘ten days of Return’
that culminate in the twenty-five hour fast on Yom Kippur. It’s
only a coincidence – but one, nevertheless, that is, pregnant
with possibility. Perhaps as we reflect on our lives and re-commit
ourselves to Liberal Jewish values, faithful Muslims the world
over will reject the bigoted rantings of the extremists in their
midst, and re-commit themselves to the core values of Islam;
to Islam in its essential meaning as Salaam, a religion of peace.
As Jews the world over gather together at this season to examine
our deeds and renew our lives, and Muslims the world over embark
on a month of fasting and renewal, let us pray that the coincidence
of these sacred moments heralds a new time of mutual compassion,
justice, openness and peace for the whole world. And let us
say: Amen.
Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah
Brighton & Hove Progressive Synagogue – Adat Shalom
Verei’ut
Erev Rosh Hashanah, 3rd October 2005 – 1st Tishri 5766
Rayner, John D. 1998. A Jewish understanding of the World.
Berghaan Books, Providence and Oxford
* Many thanks to Brian Klug, who read this sermon after I gave
it and has supplied a reference for the quotation from Albert
Einstein. See: The World as I See It (part IV 'The Jews') by
Albert Einstein.
Available on line at http://lib.ru/FILOSOF/EJNSHTEJN/theworld_engl.txt
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