And the whole earth spoke one language and were united in deeds and actions.
It sounds paradisiacal doesn’t it? Yet this tiny moment of our Torah portion describes God confusing language (balal) within the tower of Bavel. It’s a great story, teaching that unity and sameness is not always as good as it sounds – and diversity is 
better and safer. The Tower of Babel signifies the strength and challenge of diversity and I am leaning in this year to that.
With that in mind, I am so delighted that we are packing up to return to FPS and launch our renewed tower of FPS. We want to be using the beautiful building not only on Shabbat, so the new Education Hub begins on Wednesday evening, 29th October. There will be a choice of different courses and endeavours but to be together.
We launch with a superb event hosted by FPS Mosaic group for Black History month, welcoming the writer and journalist Nadine Bachelor Hunt, who celebrates Black Jewish heritage in our complicated world, in conversation with the Mosaic team. I cannot recommend this enough. Choir will be launched that night too, meeting at 6.30pm and then joining our conversation with Nadine at 7.30pm.
6.30pm FPS Choir
7.00pm Welcome snacks and drinks for the Non Singers
7.30pm Mosaic Team in conversation with Nadine Bachelor Hunt
Shabbat shalom as we return home and properly settle into this brave new year.
Rebecca
They are back – and what a full heart of relief, hope and trepidation has accompanied us this week! A moment of redemption.
Our prayers on Shabbat for peace will be rewritten, our kavannah – our spiritual intention when we pray for the hostages coming home – will be transformed.
Kohelet was wrong, wrote Israel’s poet laureate Yehuda Amichai z’l. I love this. During the week of Sukkot we read Ecclesiastes (Kohelet) chapter 3:
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
Yet truthfully we, and so many others, have experienced all these things at once: celebration, relief, fear, sadness at who hasn’t returned alive. We have witnessed the devastation that is Gaza for the families that have survived these 2 years and the grief they hold. Our friend, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, said the same. Hope has accompanied us all. Rabbi Michael Marmur taught that hope – tikveh in Hebrew – has the root KAV, meaning cord. That cord binds and pulls forward and connects us back (just like the Torah scroll we unrolled on Simchat Torah). So this verse from Bereshit, the beginning of our story calls out to us:
וַיִּבְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים | אֶת־הָֽאָדָם֙ בְּצַלְמ֔וֹ בְּצֶ֥לֶם אֱלֹהִ֖ים בָּרָ֣א אֹת֑וֹ …
And God made human beings in the divine image. Creating it in the image of God…
This being human is complicated, large and heavy, full of fear, sadness and joy – but what a blessing it is.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rebecca
It’s always been so challenging to me that Sukkot literally commands joy. It doesn’t suggest it. It’s actually called zman simchateinu – season of our joy. What an interesting tension to hold this week. Today, the second anniversary of 7th October and in the aftermath of the attack on Heaton Park Congregation.
Yet it’s right here in our tradition. We lean in to joy when we may least feel like it. And we invite guests into the sukkah when our instinct might be to close down a little.
But neither option is available to us because we will continue to reach for joy and gratitude and connections.
I feel bereft without our synagogue sukkah this year but last night we had a magical and very packed Sukkot service and celebration chez Katz and this morning such a meaningful service with our friends at SPS.
Wishing you a joyful Sukkot, even if it’s moments in your garden and Shabbat Shalom. I’ll be in Stockholm celebrating the 20th anniversary of the community I helped to build there, which is going from strength to strength. There is joy in that.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rebecca
A few years ago, Rabbi Robert Nosanchuk suggested to his community of Anshe Chesed Fairmount Temple that, every night of the liminal ten days that float between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, one should do this:
I encourage you: before each nightfall of the ten days of repentance, prepare your testimony. Ask yourself in your heart: are you a person who defaults to truth, or do you greet most of what of what you hear people say with suspicion? Don’t judge your answer. You are who you are, and you will not have a perfect record of judgment and being judged. The mistakes we all make often lead to grudges, vendettas and long-held bad feelings. In my experience, and in keeping with Jewish tradition, it is best to scrutinise the grudges we hold and ask ourselves what they yield that is more fruitful than forgiveness and understanding of oneself and others.
We are told again and again. Yom Kippur, which begins this year on Wednesday evening, is just for us. In order to smooth things with others, we need to pick up the phone, drop a note or just open our hearts a little wider, so that we cope better with those in our lives whose ‘person tax’ gets a little high – and I suppose we would do well to imagine how our ‘tax’ might be onerous for others. Sometimes.
This is the balancing of what matters most to us and the people we live amongst. What matters is when we forget the essence of us, we can now effect some kind of teshuvah (turning) that allows us to return to ourself, to the root of our soul.
I am so looking forward to seeing you over Yom Kippur. We are back at FPS, Hutton Grove.
I wish you a meaningful day. Gmar Chatimah Tovah.
Rebecca
It was exceedingly special in so many ways being back at FPS. Please see this clip that includes Alex Kinchin-Smith’s words about being in the building and our part in it.
These ten days are opportunities to reflect and connect. We are told not to arrive at synagogue for prayer until we’ve connected with those in our lives where there’s friction and fracture. That’s not always easy but it’s an interesting challenge. These days are heightened emotionally: use this time wisely. I try, and don’t always succeed, every year. But what I do manage is to love these days and this season, a time where introspection isn’t just accepted; it’s encouraged.
See you over Shabbat Shuvah (the Shabbat of return or repentance). If you prefer nature to shul, come for Tashlich walk at Dollis Brook and let me know via Caroline () you’re joining.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rebecca
Robert Pirsig wrote in his novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, “We’re in such a hurry most of the time, we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went, and sorry it’s all gone.”
I love this sentiment. It’s so right for this season.
Having real conversations is something we care deeply about at FPS.
In the Summer, we completed our Listening Campaign, where we talked and listened to each other about what matters.
What matters to each of us and what matters in the world is what keeps us up at night and what helps us rise in the morning. Our friend, Rabbi Larry Hoffman, loves to say Jewish conversations are as important as Jewish learning and Jewish prayer. Conversations over the dinner table, however fractious, are exactly this. One of my favourite lines of Torah falls in this week’s portion, Parashat Netzavim.
‘This Jewishness, this commandment, is not too miraculous for you. It is not up in heaven…it is not across the sea that you’d need someone to go and get it and do it for you. No, it is close to your mouth and your heart to do it.”
It’s as close and easy as a conversation. That’s what the High Holy Days remind us. It is all ours, this Jewishness to which we can recommit. And amazingly, we will be back at Hutton Grove, reunited with each other and our building.
I cannot wait to see you then.
WE WILL BE HOME IN HUTTON GROVE FOR ROSH HASHANAH & YOM KIPPUR.
These weeks call on us to imagine our communities as ‘Agudat Echat’. One body, united and together. It’s good to see the Board offers such thoughtful protection. We are in anguish right now, so these weeks of consolation and comfort are needed pretty desperately.
We are in the six weeks before Rosh Hashanah now. Monday 25th will be the start of Elul. We are invited to let the walls of our souls crumble and the first glimmers of opening and breaking apart, necessary for the pre Rosh Hashanah cycle, begin. I began such a process in the most unlikely of places, on a tiny island in Finland’s archipelago, while on a meditation and yoga retreat designed to stretch our hearts wide open. And I did in anticipation of these 6 weeks – the journey which our calendar takes us to try to let the unsolved elements of our lives be solved.
This week’s portion, Eikev, reminds us that suffering accompanies us. Apparently, our clothes didn’t wear out and our feet didn’t swell during those 40 years in the desert and from that we know that times can be incredibly hard and we can access resilience. We show up even when it’s hard. I am so aware that many of you are navigating great loss and illness right now and I hope the softness of this moment in our calendar lends itself to comfort.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rebecca
This week, a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu, written by Sir Mick David (formerly UJIA) and Mike Prashker, traditional Jews, is circulating, asking for members of communities to read and consider signing. I share it here for you.
A couple of weeks ago, I signed one written by Masorti Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg. It prayed for this war and untold suffering to end; for young IDF soldiers not to die in a war many Israelis no longer support; for the hope that diplomacy is used once again to bring home the remaining hostages. (The appalling videos last Thursday of Rom Braslavski, thin and crying, and of an emaciated Evyatar David on Saturday only highlight this further.) Of course, the letter also prayed for the suffering, humiliation and death in Gaza to cease – and for us to bear witness to this all. There is so much suffering. I signed it because I, who love Judaism so deeply, felt it essential to protect. I feel deeply the mourning of families in Israel, anguished by the precarious safety and loss of every Israeli soldier following orders. And I am deeply distressed by all that is happening in Gaza and the West Bank. Along with Phil Rosenberg, President of the Board of Deputies, as he said only last week as he visited us, I pray for this to end.
Being rabbi to all our congregation and finding ways to include us all in our distress is so important. Remember those pockets I talked about us carrying – the balance of concerns for everyone at this time?
This week’s portion includes a repetition of the Ten Commandments and introduces the words of the Shema, that would become central to Jewish practice, to teach this love to our children and others’ children. That is what we are doing every day at FPS. We are building a future and hope that holds all our Jewish sensibilities.
Last Rosh Hashanah, I recalled the nineteenth century Jewish bibliographer, Moritz Steinschneider, who died in 1907, thirty years before the Holocaust. Yet when asked why he dedicated his life to cataloguing Jewish books, he offered that devastating answer, ‘to give Judaism a decent burial. He didn’t and nothing has and the glorious pictures of our beloved and restored synagogue on Hutton Grove affirm this love and commitment to the future that we have in our wide ranging congregation. Our return is in sight.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rebecca
Ivri, is one of the names used to describe the Israelite community in Torah. It means “Hebrew.” It also refers to ‘crossing over,’ journeying. They do that a lot but they are tiring now. The tribes of Reuben and Gad see that the land on this side of the Jordan is good for grazing cattle and ask if they can settle here, saying, al ta’avirenu, “Do not make us cross over!” (Numbers 32:5). They are tired of conquest. This last double portion of Numbers includes a great deal of journeying from A to B to C and onwards. Indeed, it’s so dry that even the prolific Rashi doesn’t comment!
For me these quieter narratives offer an opportunity to read between the lines. Moving requires an energy that is not always in great supply.
We are in a moment right now, where the Jewish community is watching and waiting for movement. Both here in the diaspora and in Israel, things are as distressing as I recall them being. Helping us talk, move positions, empathise with one another is all phenomenally difficult. The British institutions that hold us are critical for this. Progressive Judaism, newly formed, and of course, the Board of Deputies, established in 1765 by a group of Sephardi Jews, is the oldest Jewish institution we have. There has been much dissent and conversation there and this Friday night we will welcome its president, Phil Rosenberg, to our Shabbat service, where he will speak and be in conversation with us all as we navigate our ways forward as Ivri.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rebecca
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