I am struck – Having been on parental leave from Purim in March last year to Purim just this past month, for a whole YEAR, that I have missed a hard, hard year for the Jewish community… We came out of the pandemic proper – at least three years from 2020 to 2023 of limitation, social isolation, financial hardship, actual sickness and fear of sickness, all sorts of individual and collective pressures… – into a world irrevocably changed by the horrific massacres of October 7th in Israel-Palestine, and then the  ongoing horrific death toll in Gaza. And the rise in anti-Jewish hatred here in our own home, in Britain. And the rise in divisions between us, as Jews and non-Jewish friends and family, over what it all means and what is the right thing to do…

And I just want to tell a few stories about that, XX about members of our community, our Kehillah…

There are members of our community who have Palestinian friends and acquaintances, in the Occupied West Bank and in Gaza – whose family members have been killed in Gaza, whose livelihoods have been destroyed by the now-constant military lockdowns in the West Bank. We have members of our community who have brothers and sisters in the IDF, in the Israeli military, whose family moved to Israel years ago, and who are now doing tours of duty in Gaza, conscripted to fight in this war. We have members of this community who have been on marches here in London in solidarity with Palestinians, who understand and believe that none of us are free until all of us live in dignity and equality. And we have members of our community who, horrified and rightly frightened by the rise in antisemitism in this country, have gotten involved in their work lives in Jewish solidarity circles, to give one another solace and safety as Jews in a moment when parts of the non-Jewish world don’t seem to value Jewish life as much as other life… All of these are true stories. 

And we have community members who literally have multiple of these experiences all at the same time! I myself am one of those.

And all of us are in pain.

What to do??

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As always, for me, I place my faith in the Jewish tradition. That is what guides me. Perhaps, for those of us understandably more cynical about that idea, I ask that you bear with me, and listen to each other and to the voice of our tradition today… What does it tell us in this moment??

I have stood up here before and taught, several times in fact, that wonderfully wise and moving piece of Midrash (one of my partner Benji’s favorites, in fact!) – a bit of Midrash that goes – “the beginning and end of Torah is lovingkindness.” Is chesed. That is, both literally and figuratively, the heart of our tradition – our Jewish tradition – is Chesed, is lovingkindness, compassion, love – the fulcrum around which the levers of our lives are meant to rotate. 

This is both figuratively – and also literally true – as the Midrash points out. Because the Torah begins with God’s great act of chesed when They clothe Adam and Eve, literally making them garments in the Garden of Eden, and the Torah ends with a great act of Chesed when that same character, the Divine, God, buries Moses after his death in the last few verses of Deuteronomy in the Torah. And so, the Midrash famously teaches, we should learn from this that the most fundamental essence of the Jewish tradition’s teaching is that we, like God, must do acts of lovingkindness in the world, that we must, especially, be God’s human hands for compassion and love in the ongoing brokenness of the world as it is. 

Perhaps it’s fitting that I learned a different version of this Midrash just recently, from the great contemporary American novelist Marilynne Robinson – fitting because, in preparing to come back to Kehillah, after this year of parental leave away, I looked back with curiosity at my last sermon in this very place, last March, and I included a wonderful teaching there from the same Marilynne Robinson. 

In any case, Robinson just finished a new translation of the Book of Genesis – and although she is a liberal Christian thinker and theologian, she used Jewish scholarship very reverently in her text – in part, I think, because she also is a deep believer in this essential teaching, that the Torah’s essence is Chesed – XX and that belief, unfortunately, clashes with a mainstream Christian notion that we all run into here in Britain and in the Christian West in general, that the “Old Testament,” our Torah, has a “God of wrath” or vengeance, whereas somehow the New Testament, the Gospels of the Christian tradition, has a God of love or peace…

Robinson roundly rejects this idea and teaches another variation on our Midrash of “the Torah is chesed” in this way: NOT only is the whole Torah bookended by acts of lovingkindness, BUT, says Robinson, so too is the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Torah, itself – 

So how does the book of Genesis begin?? What is that infamous, first immortal criminal act by human beings?? QUESTION Yes, Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, the first murder in Creation. And Cain there says, “My punishment – or, perhaps, my crime – is too great to bear.” And then the Torah goes on to tell us about the great cities and descendants and creativity that come out of the line of Cain… God does not blot out Cain from the face of the Earth. We are taught that even someone who committed something as heinous as the first murder can also produce civilization and descendants whose names are worth noting… And the same thing at the end of Genesis – the book of Genesis ends, in its long line of the accounts of our spiritual ancestors, with the long, involved story of Joseph… Who is sold cruelly by his brothers into slavery. And who, at the climax of the story, confronts his brothers and, instead of enacting retribution on them – as we the audience would well understand his desire (and perhaps right) to do so! – he forgives them. He says, “What you intended for evil, God intended or turned to Good.” So the compassion that God shows Cain at the start, Joseph then, as a human being, emulates and brings down to Earth and enacts also at the end of the book.

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This is what Robinson teaches is the ‘strangeness’ of the Torah or the Jewish tradition – that is doesn’t teach in simple, easy, moral black and whites. That it retains an enigma, a mystery, that keeps the moral tension alive – a moral tension that maps on to the beauty and the tragedy of the world as we actually know it to be, a place that we know is both wonderful and terrible…

Because this is the same as the case of the deaths of Moses’s brother Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, in our Torah reading today! The sons do something that is ‘strange,’ literally they offer ‘STRANGE fire’ to the Divine, and God’s response is also strange, inexplicable. The brothers offer fire, and God consumes them in a corresponding fire… A terrible thing, seemingly. Or is it good? 

Moses, whose moral judgment we are meant to at least give some respect to, I’m sure, declares that the deaths of his nephews are how the Divine shows Themselves holy to those near to Them… And, interestingly, the division of the Torah text, according to the Jewish tradition, which begins (if you follow), with the aliyah, the Torah reading, as Benji read it today, with the last verse of the prior chapter, where fire does come forth from God and consume the burnt offering, in a show of God’s acceptance of said offering… gives some credence to Moses’ assertion – maybe this is how God shows acceptance of sacrifice?? And interestingly, the normative Christian tradition – perhaps in its insistence on an Old Testament God of wrath – starts the reading (as the chapters themselves are a Christian tradition) – with verse 1, which starts with the story of Nadav and Avihu themselves, and so doesn’t allow us even the thought that perhaps Moses is right in his assertion that God accepts sacrifices in this way.

In any case what is Aaron, Moses’ brother, Nadav and Avihu’s father’s response ?? Aaron … is SILENT. “Vah-yidom Aharon,” says the text, “And Aaron was silent,” using the verb for silence that is much stronger than sheket, just simple quiet, that is SOMBER, silent, no sound. Is Aaron angry at Moses’ saccharine, if sincere, explanation? Is he too grief-stricken to speak? 

Whatever the case, in Aaron’s silence, the strangeness of the Torah text allows us, the audience, our doubts about how just this act of killing by God really is… Here, too, strangely, is the compassion of the text. We are not given any perfect, ritualistic Divine moral certainties – we are left, in fact, with Aaron’s silence. 

And perhaps that is the start of the only humane response in the face of the brokenness of the world as it is. Of, as we started, with where we are after October 7th today. Perhaps that is a place from which to start. To be silent, only first, before action, and in that strange silence to open our hearts a bit more to one another. 

To listen.

Shabbat Shalom.