Shabbat Emor
I feel a bit apprehensive about talking today, sharing some thoughts with you. I never used to feel this: I have always enjoyed the opportunity, the privilege, it’s an honour really bestowed by the community, the space given to speak about things that matter to me - and I have spent a career hoping that what I find myself speaking about might be stuff that can stimulate reflection, that might be of interest to the community, that might entertain, that might inspire, or console or provoke thought, yes it might sometimes disturb or probe beneath the surface, but not I hope be intolerable to hear, or provoke fury or outrage.
So over many decades I have never felt apprehension – until recently. Because something has changed in the community, and it is not just this community of course, it is in the wider Anglo-Jewish community, and it is happening in Israel too. You see we are in the middle of a particular kind of war – I am not talking about the external war being fought on the ground and in the skies of the Middle East, but another kind of war that has broken out, an internal war that has emerged in tandem with the external one. It is a civil war - or rather, very often, an uncivil war - a war of words (and sometimes more) within the Jewish community that circles around what one can and cannot say about how the government of the State of Israel (and its military) has responded to, and is responding to, the horrendous crimes and savagery of October 7th, that landmark day in the long arc of Jewish history. What we in the Diaspora are allowed to say has became a fraught issue – even if what we are saying is being said by, and echoing, the disquiet of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of Israelis, on the streets in demonstrations, or in the pages of commentators in Ha’aretz, which has become the moral conscience of the country.
But let me root what I want to talk about within something we all share, the Hebrew Bible and what it teaches. So let’s think about the Haftarah we read, it was from the very first prophetic book in the Bible, the book of Isaiah, from the very first chapter, it’s how this whole genre of prophecy begins - and it was surely a daring and radical act of religious faith to decide to open this new form of religious thinking, teaching, with a text that was deeply subversive of all that the Israelite community held dear.
The visionary rhetoric of the language is powerful, uncompromising, the ethical perspective very clear: as the prophet merges his consciousness with God’s perspective he spells it out: the sacrifices and supplications and prayers of the Israelite community are useless: ‘“What need have I of all your sacrifices”, says the Eternal One’ (v.11). And then he asks – he has God ask - in a really chutzpadik question: “Who asked you to come and do that?”(v.12). (To which one could reply: ‘Well actually it’s in the Torah - wasn’t it You, God, who commanded us to do all the sacrifices?’).
But Isaiah’s invective, his torrent of impassioned feeling, isn’t going to be stemmed. He turns from the sacrificial system with its blood and guts of slaughtered animals, its incense, its visits to the Temple, he moves on from all that ritual life run by the priests, the religious authorities, and he switches his focus to the celebration of festivals and the new moon, and - channeling the divine voice - he doesn’t hold back. ‘They fill Me with loathing, they have become a burden to Me, I cannot endure them’ (v.14). And we might wonder why this attack on the religion of the people, their rites and practices and prayers, why this disdain for them, why the vehemence, why is it so strong? This is a very different kind of religious authority from the priests with their rules and regulations. It’s a disruptive and disturbing voice we hear from Isaiah. There’s no attempt to make people feel good here. There’s no place for consensus, no nuance, no attempt at inclusivity. Divine disquiet, outrage, goes way beyond all those liberal pieties.
The prophet has no time for anything that passes for everyday religious practice. And he goes straight for the jugular. He’s attacking, God’s attacking, what the people think matters religiously because “Your hands are stained with crime…and evil deeds” (vv.15-16). And, says God, says the prophet in the name of God, “This evil has to stop” (v.16). Instead you must “Learn to do good; devote yourself to justice, aid the wronged, uphold the rights of bereaved children, defend the cause of women who have lost their menfolk’ (v.17)
These are God’s priorities. The God of Israel is a humanist, a humanitarian, who tells his people that their sacrifices and prayers and festivals are not what their Israelite identity is about. What is wanted of them as a people isn’t piety but action, ethical action: justice, compassion, goodness.
Goodness is real, it’s what’s required. But it has to be learnt, says Isaiah, says God, it has to be learned and practiced and enacted. If you are going to be devoted as a people to anything, then devote yourself to justice: this is the essence of prophetic Judaism. It’s what’s spelt out in this opening chapter of the opening book of prophetic literature. And it’s this prophetic Judaism that I was brought up to understand was the basis of Reform Judaism. The raison dêtre of progressive Judaism is to keep on insisting that ethical Judaism is foundational for Jewish life.
Betray that, says the prophet, and you not only betray your Israelite identity and heritage, the consequences will not only be to your souls, but – the text goes on to say - there will be external consequences too :”You will be devoured by the sword” (v.20). This is serious stuff: betray the moral underpinnings of your identity as a people and there will be bitter consequences. It will end in disaster.
Do we take any of this seriously? Do we see ourselves as having a living connection to this kind of Judaic consciousness, this kind of perspective on life? For me this material is a touchstone, a lodestone – or one of them - when I speak about being Jewish, the Jewish vision, this is the perspective I use when I think about current events, when I think about what happens in this county or abroad or what is being done in the name of the Jewish state.
And it means it’s impossible to stay silent when a generation of children in Gaza are starving to death. Seen through the lens of prophetic Judaism it’s impossible to make an accommodation with that or to countenance activities that are displacing a whole people from their land; just as it’s impossible to turn a blind eye to the racist violence and hostility of West Bank settlers. “Your hands are stained with crime…and evil deeds”. Yes, we know that is true of Hamas as well; “Your hands are stained with crime…and evil deeds” but that is not a justification for what is happening in Gaza. Jews are supposed to have seikel, and menschlichkeit – and if I stretch back into the past to find the language to talk about this, it may be because we have a long heritage of wisdom and compassion and goodness welded to our souls and it makes us ask: where has it gone? where is it hiding? why is it hiding?
So I am apprehensive about talking about this because I know that some people don’t want to hear about this, don’t want to face the way the extraordinary life-affirming heritage of Jewishness is being dragged through the dirt, how the soul of Jewishness is being sullied and scarred, and it’s going to take generations to recover from this, because what is happening is of course unconscionable: deeply traumatic, devastating, for the Palestinians of course - but it’s traumatic in a different way for us, who witness this, who know what is happening, even if we can’t bear to look any more, and switch off our TVs, and social media feeds and stop reading the papers, and the impulse is very strong to do that, I understand it. Not to know, or to rationalize, or excuse, or to attack the messenger. I do get it, I do understand how our psychological defenses against pain operate.
And am I allowed to say any of this? I don’t know – I do know of course – but in a way it’s outrageous that I should be apprehensive about speaking of this, just reminding us about the Jewish ethical tradition we have inherited. But someone needs to speak about it. Those dead old white guys, the prophets, still pack a punch – they probably weren’t white, but you get the point. Their poetry, their vision, their passion are the beating heart of living Judaism - the question is, do they have a place in our hearts?
