Somehow, we have found ourselves in December, nearing the end of what for many has been the longest year ever. This evening the festival of Chanukah begins, Judaism’s contribution to the lights that many traditions bring through their festivals in winter.

Whilst Chanukah is a minor festival it’s often said that the commercialised nature of Christmas heightened Chanukah’s importance by comparison. While I’m sure this holds some truth, I wonder if part of the appeal is the light from the candles and the joy of the traditions that bring lightness to such a dark season. This week, thousands of people around the UK started to receive their Corona Virus vaccine; it feels miraculous to see the images and know that my grandparents will be getting theirs tomorrow. Suddenly the end to all of this is feeling possible, real, and not too far.

Chanukah celebrates the return to and dedication of a destructed temple, destroyed through civil war. Whenever the world is free of the hold coronavirus has on us, we will be allowed to return to something that looks like normal life. Many have spoken of ‘the new normal’, yet we have learned many lessons from this pandemic and seen inequalities highlighted. We have a chance to rededicate our society and community and be a part of making a world that we would be proud to live in and pass to future generations.

As the days count down to 21st December, the darkest day of the year, we light a candle counteracting the everfalling darkness. With each candle, we bring our own small light into the darkness and, as a difficult year draws to a close, we see a little light at the end of the tunnel.

Happy Chanukah.

Rabbi Anna Posner

Sometimes a radical shift in circumstances presents an opportunity. In Numbers 20:1 we read that Miriam dies. Immediately after in Numbers 20:2 we are told that the Israelites were without water. Rashi comments that from this we learn that the Israelites had the well through Miriam’s merit and therefore her death caused the Israelites to no longer have water. Without Miriam’s well the Israelites need to find water by different means and so follows one of the Torah’s most well-known stories, Moses trying to get water from the rock. Here, in the same parasha, parashat Chukkat, Moses hits the rock rather than talking to it as God had said for him to do and so is punished. Moses is told that he will not be able to enter Israel, the promised land, with the rest of the Israelites that he has been leading for all those decades.

Shortly after the incident with the Rock, in the same parasha, Aaron dies. All in one parasha we see the death of Miriam, the death of Aaron and Moses being excluded from entering Israel. This sequence of events leaves the Israelite people without their leaders who have carried them through from their freedom from slavery to their development as a people and nation.

Just two parashiot before this we read of how no-one over the age of 20 will not be able to enter Israel. The Israelites must wander the desert for forty years and the new generation, who have not known slavery, will be the ones to enter Israel. How can a people be totally free and independent if they are so reliant on their leaders? Now the Israelites lose their core leadership in one fell swoop and they must learn to trust new leadership and gain their own independence.

The sequence of events in parashat Chukkat teaches us that sometimes we need radical change or to be pushed away from what we have always known and relied on to be able to find that independence and be truly free.

Rabbi Anna Posner

So often in Jewish tradition, we are asked to recall human suffering in times of great joy. At a wedding ceremony, when the glass is smashed, we are reminded of the destruction of the Temple. We also pour wine from our cups in remembrance of the suffering of the Egyptians during the Pessach service. The Talmud teaches that if a wedding party meets a funeral procession, the funeral procession must step aside to allow the wedding pass. This tradition — to carry pain in times of joy — teaches us a lesson about the multifaceted nature of the emotions and how we can bring to any moment or experience.

Sukkot is no stranger to this balance. As we build, decorate and dwell in temporary structures for Sukkot during ‘zman simchateinu’ – the time of our happiness — we are reminded of our nomadic ancestors and asked to be mindful of how temporary all living structures can be. During the time of Sukkot, I think of those people who are homeless, particularly as the days get darker and colder. Accommodation was found for those in need during lockdown, but now many people find themselves back on the streets with little or no support. I also think of the tens of thousands of refugees who have been forced from their homes, to take terrifying journeys in search of safety often to find themselves turned away or left to survive in camps.

The incredible West End Musical, Come From Away, tells the story of how a small Canadian Province, Newfoundland, welcomed thousands of stranded travellers whose planes were redirected during 9/11. With no questions and very few resources, the people of Newfoundland opened their homes, schools, pubs and hearts to those travellers.

They not only gave them a place to sleep and food to eat but comfort and community during their traumatic experience. As much as we may want to, it is not up to us to solve the refugee and homelessness crisis by opening our homes (although there are charities that allow us to do that). The mitzvah of hospitality during Sukkot is a further reminder of the value of welcoming people in, rather than putting up barriers and pushing them away. Sukkot can move us to be part of the solution in any way we can.

This year, more than ever, we feel the impact of not being able to host in our Sukkot. With the law limiting social gathering to a maximum of six people, and the wind and rain compromising the structures of most Sukkot that were built, the mitzvah of hosting and gathering was hard to achieve. However, despite the reminders of suffering that surround us, and while we miss being together as a community, we can still experience ‘zman simchateinu’ — times of happiness.

During our service last week it was wonderful to hear how NLJC have enjoyed multicultural Sukkot services in years gone by. We also shared thoughts on who we would invite to our Sukkah if we ignored all laws of nature, science and society. It was lovely to hear of the people each of you would invite and to learn a little more about who is important to you.

This Sukkot and Simchat Torah, we tread that line between joy and happiness as we celebrate the changing of the seasons and the re-rolling of Torah. From death to creation, Deuteronomy to Genesis, great sadness and great joy

Rabbi Anna Posner

As I write, the calendar of our people is approaching its most sombre moment, the observance of Tisha b’Av, the 9^th of Av. It is the paradigm of lament in our tradition, and indeed, the book that is chanted to mark the observance is called Lamentations in English. Progressive Jews have been uncomfortable with observance of Tisha b’Av, at least in part because it laments the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Progressive Jews do not desire the restoration of the sacrificial cult in a rebuilt Temple, so Tisha b’Av has played a minor part in our calendar. But, like so many traditions of our ancestors, it is there, waiting for us to need it. And suddenly, unpredictably, we do.

Over the last few decades, we have become increasingly aware of “Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome,” and we have begun to learn how to deal with it. We are less familiar with the situation we are collectively experiencing these days, which was the subject of a recent webinar sponsored by the CCJ, the Council of Christians and Jews, entitled: Living with Lament: Resources for Faith Leaders in Time of Reconstruction. This is not just a trauma, which would certainly be challenging enough. It is a collective trauma – when a community or group is traumatised; in this case, the entire world. The Revd Dr. Carla A. Grosch-Miller taught that collective trauma can happen in two ways: a group contains a significant number of traumatised individuals and their pain radiates outwards; or something happens that impacts some individuals directly but primarily impacts the ways of relating of the group and the the group’s worldview in ways that threaten the lives of individuals. A group can also be traumatised by the response of others to events. There are a number of aspects of collective trauma, including feelings of powerlessness and helplessness, acute disruption of daily existence, extreme discomfort, and shattering of assumptions. These all sounded familiar to me, as I imagine they do to you as well.

Recent studies, cited by The Revd Dr. Grosch-Miller, have analysed the response to disasters into the following phases, without suggesting that they will or must occur, but recognising them when they do: the heroic phase, the disillusionment phase, the rebuilding and restoration phase, and the wiser living phase. I think we are just moving out of the heroic phase, when people do amazing things, powered by the fight/flight physiological response. This burst of activity helps the body to metabolise the flood of stress hormones. It might be followed by the disillusionment phase, which is characterised by exhaustion, low energy, tensions in the community that may become outright conflicts, hopelessness and the utter unpredictability of yours and everyone else’s emotions. We are most in need of supervision and support at this time and least likely to seek it out. The restoration and rebuilding phase is characterised by a general sense of moving forward, in a “two steps forward, three steps back” sort of way. And finally, what we may hope to see, though probably not soon: wiser living, when the grief of what has happened has been individually and collectively lived with and lamented, the struggle has been integrated into the story of the community and is no longer avoided, and the faithful remnant has settled into a new normal.

Rabbi Alexandra Wright of The Liberal Jewish Synagogue spoke about the Three Weeks and Tisha  B’Av: From Lament to Consolation. The Three Weeks is the period of mourning commemorating the destruction of the first and second Temples. The Three Weeks start on the seventeenth day of Tammuz and end on the ninth day of the month of Av. The ways in which our people have contextualised and institutionalised the impact of the destruction of the Temple can be revisited in the light of the losses we are suffering today, and this is particularly useful because, like today’s trauma, the destruction of the Temple was a tectonic shift in our people’s existence; to this day, all modern Judaism lives in the wake of that event. It is in our collective Jewish memory. The webinar noted that we are in this for the long haul. I think the “long haul” is what our traditions specialises in. Two thousand years of rituals, traditions and emotions attached to that ancient loss may help to guide us through this modern one, to a time of better, wiser living.

Rabbi Cantor Gershon Sillins

The Credibility Bookshelf

The Credibility Bookshelf is an artefact of the lock down. It is the bookshelf you see casually, perhaps inadvertently, arrayed behind someone who is speaking from an accustomed place at home, so the bookshelf is a glimpse of what he or she has read, is reading, will read. A few weeks ago, I recorded a reading with my phone in front of a bookshelf, and soon I got an email with the comment “I am sure that you have seen all the commentary about the new habit of looking at books behind Zoom speakers and crafted arrangements. Well, I am afraid I did look behind you at your books during your sermon. I didn’t recognise many of them, but I did spot Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. … I think he would have been delighted to know that his work could be spotted during a religious sermon.” This was a little embarrassing for me because, as I noted in reply, “I have to admit that, although I have some familiarity with the concepts, I have not read the book.”

Of course, I removed the Kant from my “credibility bookshelf” and now the books that can be seen on it are books I have read. And the process of looking through them has been like encountering old friends from whom you haven’t heard in some time. You remember that there was a wedding, but was it his? Or his brother’s?

When I leafed through some of the books I was struck by how unfamiliar they turned out to be – my memories of them were reduced to a few high points. I will have to read them again.

What were these books? There are too many to discuss in this article, but here are a few:

Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 3 volumes. I was singing with a touring opera company out of San Francisco in 1980, and we spent as much as seven hours a day on a bus. It was a great opportunity to read things that I would never ordinarily have had the patience for. I remember virtually nothing of the book, except that I came to a gradual halt somewhere in the middle of the second volume. It’s still waiting for me to finish it.

The Collected Essays of George Orwell. I love the essay form, and I have every volume of the annual Best American Essays series, from 1986, on another bookshelf in the house. I enjoyed the Orwell essays a lot. What I remember most is the sense of the man himself that comes through each essay; I wanted to meet him.

Shirei Yerushalayim, by Yehuda Amichai. Amichai is my favourite poet, and I had the pleasure of seeing him present his work in person a few times. I also happened to sit near him at a concert in Washington DC. He was a formidable presence, and his poetry is well worth exploring. This collection, Shirei Yerushalayim, or Poems of Jerusalem, is a way to experience the amazing and unique city of Jerusalem, seen through Amichai’s powerful poetry.

Does God Have a Big Toe? Stories about Stories in the Bible, by Marc Gellman is a wonderful collection of modern midrash, stories that perhaps should have been in the Hebrew Bible but aren’t to be found there. These stories are great for young people, and adults can enjoy them as well. I wanted to use them for story-telling and couldn’t find my copy, so I bought another one. The copy I already had was, of course, sitting on the credibility bookshelf right behind me. So now I have two.

Life is with People, by Zborowski and Herzog, a sociological study of the shtetl, the little Jewish villages of Eastern Europe, which of course are now completely gone, having been erased along with their inhabitants in the Shoah. My mother came from one, from which she and her family left for the United States when she was a child.

Although the scholarship of this book has been superseded, it is a moving portrayal of a culture that informs much of what we think of as Jewish, and is for me a connection to my mother.

My credibility bookshelf is more than just a collection of books. I have described only a few of the books on it. Each one is a story, and each is also part of the story of my life. It is in some ways my autobiography, as I am sure your own book collections are for you.

Rabbi Cantor Gershon Silins