Speaking to the Architect (Shabbat Shoftim) – 7 September 2024
Once Elul rolls around, the mere mention of honey or apples is enough to catch my ear, so it’s no surprise that I’ve found myself listening recently to a song called ‘The Architect,’ by Kacey Musgraves. It begins with a meditation on natural beauty, through the perfection of an apple, but it’s the second verse that confirmed this as part of my High Holy Day...Read more...
Shabbat Chazon (D’varim)
You can listen to Rabbi Eleanor's sermon here or read it below
Even if...Read more...
Shabbat Acharei Mot 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Tony's sermon here or read it below
Not, of course, for you but for the person sitting next to you: lachrymose means tear-filled, consisting only of tragedy. I’m going to begin this morning’s sermon in a lachrymose place in our...Read more...
Shabbat Parah 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below
My son Ben is a few weeks younger than Daniel and what I realise...Read more...
Shabbat Ki Tissa 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below.
Anecdotally, or at least according to the jokes people tell rabbis, it’s during the sermon that people fall asleep at shul but kids like Libby know it’s not in services that her parents sleep at the synagogue, but actually when hosting the winter shelter when this space becomes a...Read more...
Shabbat T'tzavveh 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below.
There are many aspects of my job which I completely love but a particular one is something many of you will have experienced about me but most wouldn’t know to be a thing. As the rabbi of a community of 1000 households I take an inordinate amount of pride in members doing extraordinary...Read more...
Shabbat Bo 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below.
It took a drama for me to get on board as well. I’d vaguely heard about the Post Office scandal. I’d read something about it years ago and knew it clearly wasn’t all that it seemed, but not knowing anyone personally affected, not knowing anyone who ran a Post Office at all and not...Read more...
Shabbat Va-y'chi 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Howard's sermon here or read it below.
There are some Biblical verses – well, many if truth be told - that lie dull and lifeless on the page for us modern readers. They no longer speak to us – if they ever did. That’s probably our limitation, not theirs. But over time we...Read more...
Shabbat Mikketz 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below.
I have spent the week lighting candles. When I say that, I don’t just mean it’s Chanukah and therefore each night I quietly lit the chanukiah, I mean that again and again and again each day I was telling the story of Chanukah or teaching a little message as I did so when...Read more...
Shabbat Hanukkah 5784
Numbers 7: 87-9
You can listen to Rabbi Tony's sermon here or read it below
As you’ll discover in about three and a half minutes, this second Torah reading for Shabbat Hanukkah is short but particularly obscure. Which is why Jo Ozin...Read more...
Shabbat Va'yishlach 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below.
Iryna is the Ukrainian lady who lives with her husband and 3 children in the family home my father-in-law vacated to give them a new chance in life when war broke out in Ukraine. They are doing brilliantly...Read more...
Shabbat Va-yeitzei 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below.
I usually write my sermon some time during the week. I know what I want to reflect on,...Read more...
Shabbat Vayera 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below.
I have an image from films, TV dramas, novels and sadly also the news, an image of the accused sex-offender, who knows he is innocent but is left skulking around town waiting for their trial. The local community have already found them guilty so as they walk down the road, collar up and...Read more...
Shabbat Lech L'cha 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Deborah's sermon here or read it below.
I’m going to be honest, I’m not trained for this. Actually, I suspect almost none of us are. I studied medicine, education, Jewish law, ethics and pastoral care. I know about grief, about listening, and about learning.
I never took the module in military strategy, or...Read more...
Shabbat Noach 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Deborah's sermon here or read it below.
In the October half term before the pandemic, exactly 4 years ago this weekend, I was in Israel. Along with other leaders in our Reform movement we spent a remarkable morning at kibbutz Nachal Oz, sitting and listening to residents and local leaders talking about their lives right...Read more...
Shabbat Bereishit 5784 – Israel at War
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below.
My knowledge of “secular music” as Cantor Zoe calls it, or at least current music, usually comes through the walls of an almost teenager’s bedroom or accompanies lifts to and from school; it even makes the sounds of guitar lessons a pleasure to have echoing around...Read more...
Neilah 5784
There’s something about this time of the day on Yom Kippur. The emotion of Yizkor and our awareness of the preciousness of life, the feelings of love, the complicated feelings, the fragility of it all. It’s all sitting here in the room with us, tired, a bit hungry, aware of the dimming light, the sense that the day is fading, and we become more and more aware of how raw this can all be. A room full of people,...Read more...
Yom Kippur Morning 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Deborah's sermon here or read it below.
At night, it prowled the streets of Prague, defending the people of the ghetto from attack. The golem of Prague, a creature made from the clay of the Vltava river, animated by the Hebrew letters written on its forehead, a mythical creature of great stature and, depending on which story you read,...Read more...
Kol Nidre 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below.
It seems this moment to talk, Kol Nidre at FRS, can be rather more powerful than I ever imagined. When I convinced Jonni, a really very...Read more...
2nd day Rosh Hashanah 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Howard's sermon here or read it below
Let me start with a question: how do you, we, keep track of what we go through every passing hour, the dense profusion of thoughts, emotions, intuitions, anxieties, confusions, that add up to our lives? How do we keep track of, how do we chronicle, the hidden regions of our hearts? Our...Read more...
1st day Rosh Hashanah 5784
Challenged to produce a Rosh Hashanah morning service with no prayer book, I realised that Screen 5 at the Vue allowed me to integrate all the components: liturgy, music, study passages, Torah reading, Musaf responsive readings and sermon) around a coherent theme. The downside of this is that the sermon doesn’t stand alone and is dependent on its context. For the beginning of the service, I wrote a...Read more...
1st day Rosh Hashanah 5784
Are you in the mood at this point in our service for something a bit different? A bit of light relief maybe? I hope so. I want to try something out with you. The sermon slot is probably not normally associated with light relief but anyway I’m going to talk to you a bit about Rosh Hashanah, the New Year - but I’m going to ask you to do something, something participatory, if you can. (Don’t worry...Read more...
Erev Rosh Hashanah 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below.
We do a lot of our internal communications on a platform called “slack”. Whilst discussing the communication to the community around the announcement of my stepping down, I messaged back, “please can we remember I haven’t died!” Immediately an automated response from...Read more...
Selichot 5783
You can listen to Rabbi Deborah's sermon here or read it below.
This evening I wanted to tell you about a man named Dashrath Manjhi. He was from a village in the East Indian state of Bihar called Gehlaur. He fell in love with a woman named Falguni Devi and they were married. Like many villagers they had to climb mountains daily to get the water, food, medicines, and...Read more...
Sermon Nitzavim
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below
Government can’t be that different a place to work than any other offices. So, when big issues arise it’s so hard not to imagine the conversations going on behind the big imposing doors of Westminster being rather similar to a school staff room, a shul office or any major company.
“Well...Read more...
Shabbat Ki Tavo
You can listen to Rabbi Howard's sermon here or read it below
Cami’s outstanding introduction to her Torah portion homed in some key themes: the theological problems with reward and punishment in the text, then her psychologically acute description of how she saw Moses as attempting to encourage the Israelites to be the ‘best versions of themselves’ and this...Read more...
Shabbat Shemesh
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below
Shabbat Shemesh is a very quiet one in our house. While Jonni and I are left with our own memories of summers spent with RSY and the videos we can play in our memories, of life-long friends enjoying crazy, wholesome fun in boarding schools and run down activity...Read more...
Shabbat B’midbar
You can listen to Rabbi Howard's sermon here or read it below
When Susan shared her thoughts with us earlier, one of the themes that caught my attention was this question of whether as Jews we want to be counted - to stand up and be counted, recognised in our group identity by the powers that be; or whether we wanted to be quiet, to slip under the radar, as...Read more...
You can listen to Rabbi Deborah's sermon here or read it below
A number of years ago at the conference of the European Union for Progressive Judaism in London, a question was posed by (or in the name of) Jeremy Leigh. It was remarked that sitting in large fancy rooms eating dinner has been a hallmark of many moments in Jewish history. And so we were asked, if someone was...Read more...
73.6% of statistics are made up
Apparently
Or at least that’s what the internet told me- and it could be right, or at least it sounds about right, it makes the point I want it to make anyway, so I’ll use it.
I suppose it’s a bit like that thing that Einstein said about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Or maybe it was...Read more...
