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 is his reality, the world they grew up in, is completely different to mine. I don’t mean the fact that he can watch whatever he wants whenever he wants on a screen that fits in his pocket or that sushi was never some exotic foreign food but rather it’s always been just excellently presented rice. I realise the world has changed in all sorts of ways, whether it’s that neither Yugoslavia nor the Soviet Union has never been a place in his lifetime or that he’s never witnessed an argument over map reading from the backseat of our car. Yet it’s in the Jewish world that I feel it so profoundly and maybe because it’s hard not to see my world through his eyes when he allows it to make so much sense without the baggage of the past.
I grew up at Alyth with Rabbi Emanuel as my childhood rabbi. Viv led the choir and sung solos and mostly you listened. Music in services was used to create a majestic nature often written in complicated 4-part harmonies and gave a backdrop to very prescriptive choreography; services in the 1980s were something I loved but something we experienced rather than created. At shivas there would have been little to no singing and children’s services would have involved us taking our turns with readings and poems about Shabbat. I only had one model of Jewish leadership and it was the rabbi. A model that I loved enough to become one myself, but it was all I knew in terms of creating Jewish community and leading people in prayer.
Daniel, Ben and all their contemporaries have grown up with a very different model of Jewish leadership. The Rabbi and the Cantor. Together, but most importantly independently as well, we have both led services, taught them at different stages of their lives whether it’s Kochavim assemblies or Chanukah candle lighting for Daniel at Akiva, helping B’nei Mitzvah write Divrei Torah or running adult study sessions, leading baby blessings, weddings, funerals and shivas. Our teenagers have seen that our role as clergy at FRS is completely interchangeable - well except for one big factor which as my own son he (and only he) can point out brutally, “a Cantor can do everything that a Rabbi can do but they also do the important thing of getting the whole community praying together with songs they can join in with, they give prayer a depth of emotion, while the Rabbi’s equivalent is giving a page number and hoping for the best.” When Cantor Zöe came to FRS 15 years ago she shaped the Cantorate in this country in her image, she wasn’t forced into any preconceptions of the Cantor’s role and nor were we. What that means is that we understand the Cantor to be all that a Rabbi is and so much more. It’s why it has been such a privilege working in this extraordinary team for so long.
The reality of understanding our religious leadership is so different for a generation who has only known the Rabbi/Cantor partnership from those who remember the groundbreaking decision FRS took 15 years ago to appoint a Cantor rather than a second Rabbi. A decision that seemed so radical then but which we have never looked back on for a second. It’s why, that which will again feel like a radical and innovative move for FRS to the outside world, and one that we will of course celebrate for its religious advancements in showing other communities the way, to me (and I suspect to those who have grown up only knowing this partnership) doesn’t feel in any way radical it just feels obvious. I’ve almost felt like I haven’t been celebratory enough this last week because it just felt so natural, it could easily be taken for granted. But it shouldn’t because yet again FRS is going to need to teach other people a new vocabulary, we’ve got used to the term clergy rather than rabbinic team, we will get used to our principal clergy being called Cantor. The hard work will only be to get more hands on deck so that Zöe can still be the Cantor while taking on these extra management responsibilities and a more junior Rabbi or two can come in and alongside Rabbis Deborah and Howard to ensure we have the full complement of religious leadership to accompany us at all the different times we need.
But I was really struck that this decision was filtering out to the community during the week of Parashat Tzav - a parasha which comes after weeks and weeks of defining the new formal style of worship eventually ordains the people who will carry out the practices. After so many months of talking about the community we want to be, in this new chapter we elevate the person who understands and embodies it best, to be the high priest, with as fancy a wardrobe, I hope, but perhaps less blood and raw meat to deal with.
Yet it was two things in the ordination of the priests that struck me particularly through the lens of our own community’s moment of elevating our leadership. Firstly, that the first thing Moses does to Aaron is dress him in the clothes that the community have made for him. A symbol to remind the people they made him, and their observance made this role. I’m sure just like there is a generation of children who only know Jewish communal life to be led by a Rabbi/Cantor partnership, so there is a different generation who think of Zöe as the little girl who grew up at FRS. Zöe’s Jewish life was made here, influenced by her time away at Kutz camps and HUC but very much, like Aaron, is a product of the community she serves. Her priestly robes were made by her own experience of Bat Mitzvah here, being a Friday Group helper, leading services and being celebrated by the community for what she brings here. Just as her name is sown into the Torah mantel from her teenage years, so each member of the community and their stamp of personality is sown into what makes Zöe the Cantor she is for this community.
The other moment is right at the end of the parasha when all the work is done to establish the priests in their new role but they step out of the camp for a week before they can re-enter in their new role. It made me understand that it will be more obvious when I step away at the end of June all that Zöe does. That sometimes it takes exits to truly experience entrances and smooth slick handovers have their place but so does enabling someone to arrive who is already there. I love sharing this bimah with Cantor Zöe Jacobs but I am looking forward to stepping off the bimah so that Principal Cantor Zöe Jacobs can step into her new role.
No entrails and burning flesh are needed to create this new phase of FRS life but I hope as Zöe dons something as close to a sparkly ephod as possible, the community will know that being the leaders in innovation may look radical to the outside world but it will feel incredibly comfortable and familiar for all of us. While this moment will be opening the doors for all the potential we saw in our future, the fulfilment of all those conversations we started in the community consultation, she will lead us into our new chapter which most certainly will not be Bamidbar in the wilderness!
Our experiences determine what we think possible and what we have language for but we always need to remember when it constrains us from thinking as big and imaginatively as possible. Sometimes we need to create new language to create new possibilities but may that always be the biggest of our challenges.
