Sermons

Sermon FRS 26 July 2025 – Sedrah Mattot-Masei

A Place In The Sun

The Book of Numbers comes to an end with a chapter listing the stopping-off places of the Children of Israel on their legendary 40-year journey through the wilderness. More than forty places are mentioned – we read the first ten today (Numbers 33:1-10), ending with the Sea of Reeds, south of where they began. That first year, they hadn’t travelled in a circle exactly – but they were still hugging the shore of the Sea, a constant reminder of that miraculous escape from their Egyptian pursuers. 

As the people come to the end of their wilderness wanderings, the text portrays Moses writing down these names, with a historian’s meticulous attention to detail: each place they set up camp is to be remembered, stages of what must have felt like an interminable journey (33:2). Writing down the names, and the chronology of the journey, points to the importance of having a record for the future. As if guarding against any complacency, the Biblical storytellers seem to be saying:  you will need to remember this when – if - you find a homeland: homes can be temporary, and no home lasts forever.  Be prepared to be “a pilgrim tribe housed not in place but in time, not rooted but millennially equipped with legs” (George Steiner).

In tension with this, part of Moses’ role during those desert wanderings was to keep alive for the people that ancestral hope for an end to unrootedness.  He carried the wish, generations-old, that the  people of Israel might feel a sense of belonging, belonging somewhere. Those ancient storytellers crafted their narratives around this hope – they wove into their texts the poetic vision of a chosen land for a chosen people. God’s people, God’s chosen land. What we don’t often appreciate is that those who composed the Torah created these powerful mythic national themes while in exile from the land of Judea:  the stories were written in Babylon in the 7^th and 6^th centuries BCE after the people had been displaced from what they had come to feel was their land, although it was a land that had always been shared with others who had lived there before them, the various tribal groups we know collectively as the ‘Canaanites’.

So these narratives that make up the Torah are a literature of exile. Something has already been lost, any settled feeling of belonging somewhere that belongs to ‘us’. 

Those writers of the Torah were living settled lives in Babylon, in what we now think of as the diaspora, but the question about where Jews really belong is threaded through their texts as an unsettled – and unsettling - question.

As they wove together the story of the Israelite people - its origins, its place in the world, its development -  the themes of exile and wandering became central: the Garden of Eden, Abraham, Joseph - Genesis is filled with characters that had to leave behind security or settledness to fulfil their destinies; and then the 40 years of desert wanderings after the long hardship-filled settledness of Egypt dominates the rest of the structure of the Torah, with the idea of settledness still unresolved. At the end of the Torah it hangs in the air – the fantasy, the wish, for an end to wandering. A place in the sun of our own.

So: how well has this turned out for us? For the Jewish people? The hope, the fantasy, of an end to dislocation, an end to exile and unsettledness?  We have been told that the State of Israel was supposed to have solved this problem for us. When it was founded it was felt to be a moral and a historical necessity – a homeland would give security and a sense of belonging and would finally see the end to Jewish dislocation and wandering and persecution. It would be the end of so-called exile, after 2000 years. And this has worked, up to a point. With many practical complications and moral dilemmas, we have a homeland for the Jewish people. 

So why does it feel, when we read the Torah, our foundational Jewish story, that we the children of Israel are still in the wilderness? That the promised land is still before us, still to be achieved? Still a hope for the future?

Nearly two years into our latest turn of the wheel of Jewish history it can feel as if we are going round in circles, there’s a disorientation akin to that of those Israelite slaves newly freed, uncertain, increasingly rebelliousness, the destination obscure, the leadership - the ones who say they know - increasingly doubted. The journey of this last couple of years has felt endless at times, dementing, frightening, repetitious:  trauma, hostages, deaths, rumours of ceasefire, no ceasefire, deaths, siege, hostages, trauma, threat, grief, rage, fear, shame, rage, grief, deaths, trauma, and on and on in this endless war in the service of a prime minister’s  own clinging on to power and out of prison. 

75% of Israelis want this war to end now, the military see no point in it, no strategic aims are being achieved, the IDF think there’s no need for more to be sacrificed, on either side. Increasingly, young Israeli reservists are refusing to serve in Gaza. Some are petitioning the High Court to rule on whether Israel’s actions there have become a violation of international law.

We have ‘Humanitarian’ zones where people starve, ‘Humanitarian’ aid centres where people are shot: the Orwellian language masks forced displacement, forced transfer, ‘concentration’ of Palestinians into ‘camps’ – can we bear to bring these two words together in our minds, ‘concentration’ and ‘camps’? - it’s maddening, dementing for those going through it; and its maddening and dementing that we in the diaspora – or in this community - should even be in a situation where we worry about speaking about it.

Jews around the world are being tarnished with the bloody consequences of the political machinations of the particular government that has power in Israel. And we are supposed to say nothing? We are supposed to defend the indefensible? How is this possible, nearly two years on now from that terrible and traumatic crime that was perpetuated against citizens in Israel, how is it possible that we can’t mourn the losses, keep the hostages in mind, acknowledge that the Hamas pogrom awakened deep atavistic fears in the psyche of those who live in Israel – and also in some in the diaspora reliant on Israel for their Jewish identity – how is it possible that we can’t acknowledge all that grief and suffering that Israelis and diaspora Jews have felt and acknowledge that the punitive collective retribution visited upon the people of Gaza, and their homes and culture and entire infrastructure of life has gone far beyond the bounds of what a thoughtful, ethical Jewish response could have been, a Jewish response congruent with the way we have always valued and promoted, with pride, our belief in the sanctity of life, all life, not just our lives but the lives of the stranger, the outsider, the other, the lives of those who are not us, our family, but are part of the human family? Why is it so difficult to hold two truths together in our minds, in our hearts? And to talk about that?

And how has this been possible, that the image of a Jewishness that values compassion and principles of justice, this image that we hold dear and that justifies our existence, and an image that the non-Jewish world has in the past often admired (and sometimes envied), how has it been possible that we have allowed this to be blotted out, squandered  – along with the moral high ground that we occupied after the Shoah? How has it been possible to surrender all this in less than a couple of years – and how has it become possible that we aren’t supposed to talk about it? It’s maddening, dementing, truly.

And I am sorry to come back to this theme, but if some Israelis and some Diaspora Jews feel they are under existential threat, their very existence and raison d’etre is somehow at stake – though in reality they have extraordinary technical resources and military power and capabilities to defend themselves – if in spite of all that, the sense of existential threat is still felt (or believed in), there is another kind of existential threat that is at stake here, the one I feel as a religious leader in the Jewish community at this savage and fraught point in Jewish  history. And it’s this threat that compels me to talk about it, even though there is so much else one could talk about that is life-enhancing about living in the world.

But the threat is to how Jews are being seen in the world, and the threat is to how Judaism is being seen in the world, and the threat is to how the manipulation and weaponisation in some quarters of our tragic Shoah experiences is being seen in the world. And the threat is to our purpose as Jews in the world - not our survival but our purpose - a threat to the very purpose of our stubborn survival as a people over the generations: a survival not for its own sake but to carry into the world a blessing, a set of values. “I will make your name great and you will be a blessing” (Genesis 12:2). “And all the peoples of the world will bless themselves through you” (Genesis 22:18). Our Torah story tellers defined the purpose of Jewish existence and continuity through their depiction of  Abraham, and it is this purpose of ‘being a blessing’ that is under existential threat in these times, and that’s the greatest threat of all to Jews around the world – it’s not Hamas or Iran – it’s that our purpose is being hollowed out, sacrificed, rendered a meaningless dead mantra, rather than a living reality. The existential threat is that we are all – not just the State of Israel – becoming pariahs again.

It isn’t possible to be silent when this is happening. And if that sounds a bit grandiose of me, then so be it. I take my strength – such as it is – from our tradition, from prophets like Isaiah:

“For the sake of Zion, I will not be still; for the sake of Jerusalem I will not be silent” (62:2).

But although I might draw my inspiration from our heritage, I am more than aware that I am only a small Diasporic voice standing in – and trying to withstand – the maelstrom around us.  You are free of course to disagree with my way of thinking about these things, but I am not free of the burden of responsibility I feel to keep on talking about these things. In the long arc of Jewish history there is so much at stake right now.

Moses wrote down the stages of the journey, wrote it for the future so that there would be a record of the journey taken. This last two years has been a different kind of journey for all of us, and these words are part of my record of the journey taken, as we face the wilderness and all the uncertainties about where it will end