Rabbi Dr. Rachel Adler, my teacher in Los Angeles, told us that, when she we would sit at her computer to write (and we knew that what she wrote in her case was very beautiful, exquisite, liberationist, deeply astute, feminist Jewish theology) – when Rabbi Dr. Rachel Adler would sit at her desk to begin to write such things, she told us: she would shoo away the demons from around the desk – the demons of critique, of lack of self-faith, of non-compassion, of non-empathy.

I have found myself having to shoo away many such demons to come to this moment – because it is a difficult thing – precisely because it is a grave responsibility – to speak in the one spot on Kol Nidre.

Because the whole structure in this time of year is one of dread and awe. I said to another mentor and friend recently, “I wish Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur didn’t fill me with such dread and awe.” I wish I could swipe left, swipe “Nope!”, on feeling the individual responsibilities we each have on this day.

And my friend listened and he paused – and then he said, “Would you rather Yom Kippur be like every other day?” 

So thank God for ritual, for this ritual – that we are told we are obligated in every year. And some years I’ve tried to dodge it more than others. That is, the obligation to try to get things right, to repair what is broken, to have hope where this despair, to choose life, to choose life over death, to hold oneself to account, to hold ourselves collectively to account, to meditate on ‘who by fire,’ to say Hineini – the prayer we say the High Priest used to say in the Temple when it stood in Jerusalem – “Here I am, I am fully, morally present.”

So. I will shoo away the demons of self-critique and self-doubt, and try to show up. As shall we all!

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There were three Jews at the Shabbos table. 

This is a story my grandmother, known as Pessie Piata-Gorsky in her native Yiddish, used to tell about her childhood in northern California

There were often, she told us, three Jews at the Shabbos table in her household growing up in the 1930s Depression, in the Roosevelt-era New Deal, pre-Shoah America of then, three Jews: the Communist, the Zionist, and the Religious.

The Communist. The Zionist. And The Religious. 

These three would all be locals in my grandmother’s Yiddish-speaking, socialist chicken farmer community of Eastern European Jews in rural northern California, just outside the Bay Area of San Francisco, almost a century ago. 

And our family were the Religious.

Perhaps this shall come as no surprise to you! As I stand here today before you a Rabbi. I cannot deny it. 

Even if our closest thing as a family to religious yichus, religious lineage, that I know of, was my grandmother’s uncle, Jack Tyger – who was the local shochet, the local kosher butcherer, who was the village authority on matters of kashrus – dietary law.

But my grandmother, in my memory of it, would say that being the Religious also meant keeping the home fires burning, literally tending the Ner Tamid, the eternal light in the little unattended synagogue in Yiddish-speaking California, Petaluma, in case, as she wryly put it, “The Communists and Marxists and Zionists came back.”

But they all had different choirs already, my grandmother said, and wouldn’t need to return to the Shul Choir to get to sing their partisan hearts out. …So it was unlikely that everyone would be reunited this side of the redeemed world.

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We of course had Communists in the family. Our grandmother’s wry comment on this was that we had a cousin who was a Communist, who would come through after the war and before that and stay with the family, and for someone who lived by, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” he certainly was quite the schnorrer – that is, he asked them for a lot!

And there were the Zionists in our family too – a set of her cousins that emigrated to Mandate Palestine, and who believed that that was where ultimate Jewish safety would be realised. 

But by and large, the Piata-Gorskys were the religious, and we kept the shul fire’s burning. And you’re all here to experience this ‘religous’ space tonight – it’s not such a bad job to have, in its own way, in an age of isolation, racial capitalism, austerity– in some ways, arguably, really, religious Judaism is doing the same things it has always been – in the context of a broken world, amazed as we are at the way we can be cruel to each other, the Jewish tradition says “choose life, that you and your children may live.”

Isaiah, the prophet, in our Haftarah reading tomorrow, will rail against us and demand: “You, all of you in your sackcloth and ashes” – your dour faces and attempts at penitence – “you who oppress the poor and don’t keep faith with those who sleep in the dust,” is this really the Yom Kippur the Divine asks of you?

Or, in Isaiah’s exact words, he will say–

“Is such the fast I desire,

A day for people to starve their bodies?

Is it bowing the head like a bulrush

And lying in sackcloth and ashes?

Do you call that a fast,

A day when God is [made] favorable [to you]?

No, this is the fast I desire:

To unlock the fetters of wickedness,

And untie the cords of the yoke

To let the oppressed go free;

To break off every yoke.

[Then]… 

you shall be called

‘Repairer of the breach,

Restorer of streets to dwell in.'”

Isaiah. 

Perhaps you can see why I do think this might be worth keeping the home fires burning for?

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But let us move on to the Zionists at the Shabbos table.

I have spent three years of my adult life living in Jerusalem. 

It is a weird turn of affairs, but when you study for the rabbinate, in almost any program in the world – and it’s 4 to 5 years of post-grad study in all the movements – you end up studying in Jerusalem, simply because the diversity and depth and innovation of Torah learning centres there are so good …

And because 45% of world Jewry finds themselves there – everyone cheek by jowl in the Jerusalem street car with Chasids and Yemeni Jews – and Chasid Yeminis – and secular kibbutzniks, and scholars at the Hebrew University, and the janitor at your local community centre … – AND with Jerusalem a third Palestinian, in a very divided, Jim Crow-esque, apartheid way – there is a third of Jerusalem, most without Israeli citizenship, who are Christian and Muslim local Jerusalem Palestinian communities.

So the city is chaotic with the three Abrahamic faiths’ festivals. It’s constantly Ramadan or Pesach or Easter. 

And I spent my first year of those three years living in west Jewish Jerusalem, which is where I met my now life partner, Benji, who is a Londoner – which is what brought me here. Which is why Jerusalem will always be a city of love for me – though many Jerusalemites of any background have too much gallow’s humour about Jerusalem to find that idea very recognisable!

And then I spent the next two of my three years in Jerusalem living in Arabic-speaking East Jerusalem, commuting on the separate, segregated Palestinian bus system to my lovely, egalitarian, progressive yeshiva in West Jerusalem… And sometimes we’d be late to getting where we were going because there would be a flying checkpoint and armed gunmen from the Border Police would come on and ask for everyone’s ID.

And sometimes you couldn’t leave your neighbourhood because the same Border Police had declared a lockdown on the Palestinian neighbourhoods because it was one of the festivals – or Yom Yerushalyim, Jerusalem Day, when young 15-year-old yeshiva buchers waving Israeli flags would mob into the Muslim Quarter of the Old City in the neighbourhood and smash up shop windows and chant “Death to the Arabs!”

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This is all to say. 

All three of those Jews are of interest to me today at that Shabbos table – the Religious. The Socialist. The Zionist.

I loved living in Jerusalem in  many ways – because when I could block out the daily violence and segregation – and I had the privilege to do so – it was a beautiful city full of all different sorts of people: the Ethiopian Coptic Church Compound, and the Armenian Christian Quarter, and the different types of East African, Levantine and Ashkenazi foods… The church bells and the minaret’s call to prayer and the worshippers in their tallises going between shuls on Shabbat…

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I do miss it. I miss the Torah learning one can have there – on Tikkun Leyl Shavuot – the evening when we commemorate receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai, in late May or early June every year on Shavuot – every shul and beit midrash has its doors open and you go in and out of lecture and study session all through the night – going from the Glaswegian grand dame of Biblical studies, Aviva Zorenberg, to a lecture comparing Mahmoud Darwish – the great national poet of Palestine – and Yehuda Amichai – the great national poet of Israel – and on and on…

… And in that way, October 7th a year ago hit me hard – in that I have friends, Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian, in Jerusalem. And it was a horrific and bloody day – I was, as many of us, one or two degrees removed from people who were murdered or taken hostage that day. As are many members of our community.

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And having lived in Jerusalem prior to October 7th for three years – during two of which I voted three times in Israeli elections for the opposition – in my case for the socialist-Communist joint Jewish-Arab party… let me tell you, not too much avail …

My understanding going into October 7th was that we were already in a situation where those in power in Israel would use this as the excuse to go and destroy Gaza. 

And that, I am afraid to say to you, is what I have most been struggling with how to explain today – on Kol Nidre. About a place that some of us have very little connection to – and I totally get that; neither the Religious nor the Communists at my grandmother’s Shabbos table in 1930s California had much relationship to the Land either! – but it is a place that I happen to know quite well – for a Londoner and an American Midwesterner, which is mainly what I am by geography–

Ezra Klein, the quite thoughtful (if you’re a fan) or quite liberal (if you’re not) journalist in the New York Times wrote this past week – and it was not made out to be a surprising or controversial point when on the newspaper’s front page: “Gaza is leveled, the destruction immense, almost beyond what the human mind can comprehend.”

Gaza is leveled, the destruction immense.

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I have another rabbinic mentor, a smart, confident Liberal Zionist teacher – who I spend a lot of time disagreeing with – and he said to me recently, “Even if you are a Diasporist or a non-Zionist or not interested, Israel is inarguably something that has impacts for Jewish people.”

That is true.

When Ta-Nehisi Coates, the great Black American journalist and writer – who has come out with a book in part about Israel-Palestine that people say is in the school of James Baldwin, that is, someone who was deeply invested in the human experience, the experience of the Other, of Black history also as it intersects with other marginalised histories, like Jewish and Palestinian history – when Coates was interviewed, also by Ezra Klein last week, he said it looked very much like the Jim Crow South of his own expertise.

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That is what I come to Kol Nidre struggling with, in this year since the October 7th massacres and the war on Gaza. And I pray that we may merit a better next year – all of us here, in Kehillah, in London, in the wider world and there in Israel-Palestine – that we all may merit a better and more just 5785.

May all of us merit to be written in the Book of Life. Gmar chatima tova.