Rabbi Leah’s Parashat “Emor” Sermon

Rabbi Leah’s Parashat “Emor” Sermon

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18 May 2024

by Rabbi Leah

Before I went on parental leave over a year ago, I promised some Jewish uni students in Oxford, including a member of this community, that their campus would be the first one I would visit when I returned to work – as my other job outside of my time with Kehillah, as some of you know, is currently Progressive Jewish Chaplain for uni students…

Little could I have anticipated that returning to work over the past 6 weeks – and buying train tickets to Oxford to fulfill that promise – that that would coincide with the university student protest camps movement in solidarity with Gaza. 

So there I was last Thursday, a little over a week ago, headed up to Oxford Uni – to try to hopefully meet with the other Jewish chaplains for coffee, to sit with an American postgrad student who wasn’t involved in the protests nor the counterprotests, AND to attend the camp itself for lunch and the afternoon’s programming, invited by these students, including a Kehillah-nik, to fulfill my Chaplain’s promise.

Personally, I think the university encampments’ demands – that universities make transparent where they invest their money, not just as it relates to the Middle East, and divest themselves from war and weapons across the board, as well as to divest from supporting the war in Gaza, the military Occupation of the West Bank, and anything that upholds unequal systems and policies between Palestinians and Israeli Jews in the land between that famous river and that sea… I think that this is a just and moral demand.

You may disagree with me. You may agree with me. But my belief is at least based on my commitment to the Torah’s deepest, most ultimate teaching – that all human beings are created B’tselehm Elohim, in the Divine image, and to the Torah’s most repeated mitzvah (or commandment) to us as Jews (the one that our Liberal youth movement, LJY Netzer, has made one of their core Torah teachings for this year): “that you shall not oppress the stranger for you know the heart of the stranger, as you were strangers in the land of Egypt”…

And regardless of my personal opinion, I am a rabbi and chaplain who must represent all students. I was there, invited to meet with students who had been bullied and alienated by parts of the Jewish community on campus, for standing in solidarity with Gazans to build and maintain the encampment… and I was there, too, to listen to the students in the Jewish Society who said to me, like my mother says to me most days now! “My Zionism is inextricably tied up with my Judaism and my Jewish identity. I feel threatened by the protests because I am not welcome there for what I feel is my core identity, not for my political beliefs.” And I was there for those students who, like so many of us, sit in that ambivalent space in between their more certain peers to either side – or hold multiple, conflicting views within themselves…

This is the intra-Jewish bind of the moment. How do we live out our moral convictions, and also not cancel each other? How can we stand at kiddush with those with whom we DRASTICALLY, even sometimes contemptuously, disagree?

The more we go down this path, over 7 months post October 7th, the clearer to me it becomes that, actually, the goal for us as Jews is to be in community across these lines of disagreement. To build our muscle for compassion and listening and empathy. For those who think – well, that’s fine for you to say, your family isn’t being bombed in Gaza. Well, that’s fine for you to say – your brother in Tel Aviv hasn’t been called up to serve in this war–

I say to you and to us – Twitter and marches and those student camps are the time to organise around what we care about. Kiddush and synagogue, as much as they can be, should be a respite, a place where we can look at the person across the bagels and lox from us, and say to ourselves, ‘I know about your family, about your ailing child, about your aches and pains. Sure, if I saw you on the street at the protest tomorrow, and you were on the other side of the fence, I may deeply disagree with you – but here, we are breaking bread and letting the Sabbath abide, letting the world be complete as it is, just for today.’

And let me tell you something even more personal – I went to that student camp, and I went as Chaplain, to visit the students – whilst privately, personally feeling aligned with them, whilst knowing that other chaplainees of mine virulently disagreed, and that I would be meeting with them later too – but I was also afraid somewhere in myself that I would see confronting language, slogans, even antisemitic rhetoric. I did not. It was lovely and peaceful and full of happy, keen students eating curry donated from the local Indian restaurant across the road, and learning about the history of the Middle East from a PhD candidate who had come by to give a lecture on the post-1967 Israel-Palestine context…

But another thing that has stuck with me from this past week – I did 9 hours of Antisemitism training with L’Taken, an organisation founded by two progressive Jewish activists and campaigners – to train civil society organisations in how to do justice and solidarity work for our collective liberation without falling prey to Antisemitic tropes… And their main message to us was – You have to act in the world such that all Jews are safer, NOT just the Jews you like. (Now really let that sink in – you have to do and say things in the world that, in your doing and saying, you make Jews in Stamford Hill safer, and Jews at Orthodox shuls, and secular Jews in Colchester, and Jews in your family with whom you terribly disagree, and Jews in Baghdad, and Jews in Haifa… AND you have to act in the world such that what you do makes all minoritised communities safer – and let that sink in. You have to do both. It is a wonderful metric – and also, I have realised, a high bar, and one I sometimes fail. Because it’s more fun to feel right! – than to think about everyone, all the Jews and all the other communities, all at the same time.

AND the other charge of the training was – you have to accept, yes even as a Progressive London Jew, that cycles of antisemitism are real, and present, and have not yet gone away… For many of us, this is a hard tonic to swallow. For some – and I will include myself bashfully in this camp – it is because we think our purity of politics will save us. Like my sister’s great mentor at LSE, zichrono livracha, David Graeber, 3rd generation Jewish Communist, who believed that the Communists would save him if antisemitism arose again. Or those who align with the right for the same reasons… And actually, your politics is not a cure-all. We don’t know what the required conditions for Jewish safety are, because we have never, actually, yet experienced them…

And for some, like my friend’s great grandmother, survivor of the Shoah, who used to kiss her granddaughter’s UK passport, what is at stake – if we accept that antisemitism is real and has not gone away – is how much they have suffered… and how much they want to believe that the cycle is broken, and that their children will not have to suffer…

Or what is at stake for me – a middle-class white child of 1990s American suburbia, who grew up in Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ and was told all racisms were ended – because liberal capitalism had won! If I accept that antisemitism is still present, then my comfortable suburban idyll is over…

Some things to think about this Shabbat!

And with all of this, I return to my main injunctions – act upon your moral convictions and also don’t cancel each other. LISTEN with empathy and compassion. And act such that your whole people may be safer, and that all peoples may be safer.

Shabbat Shalom.