As our community grows and evolves — with more provision

for both young people and adults, through learning at all ages,

services and expanding membership — an aspect that the NLJC

can really also support is our pastoral and welfare side. That is,

when one member is ill, or grieving, dealing with a mental or

physical health concern for themselves or their family, we believe

our community should be there.

 

This is a deep Jewish value, often referred to as chesed,

or lovingkindness, the care we show each other when,

inevitably, life becomes difficult. And what about when one of

us is celebrating a simcha, a happy occasion? That’s also a

time when the community should reach out and celebrate together.

 

To that end, in the last year we have re-instituted the Norwich

Liberal Jewish Community Care Group, a team of five members

of the community and myself — all who, in different

ways, have personal or professional experience with pastoral

support.

 

Through this team we endeavour to recognise more of our

community members’ difficult times and joys, through sending ‘get well’

and congratulatory cards, making calls, and being a group to funnel the

Norwich Liberal Jewish Community’s personal news to best effect.

 

We keep the news in strictest confidence as needed and reach out as

best we can and grow the chesed in our community. Thank you to all, who

in your different, individual ways give so much to this community.

 

With all best wishes,

Rabbi Leah Jordan

Pesach’s message of liberation
Pesach is zman cheiruteinu, the time of our freedom. For many
Jews, Pesach is the living moment when we annually re-enact
the story of the Exodus in order to recommit ourselves to the
values of liberation and justice that make it such a particular
and universal story.
We read at the seder that in every generation, we are obligated
to see ourselves as if we personally came out of Egypt. We read
also that it is our duty to retell that story of the Exodus and
whosoever expands upon the telling is ‘m’shubach,’ worthy of
praise.
On the first and second night we connect ourselves deeply to
the mission and purpose of the Pesach seder itself: to
intertwine our own story of oppression and liberation with the
experiences of others, in order to stand in solidarity and fight
alongside them.
For if we understand ourselves to have personally come out of
Egypt, then we know, as Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch writes,
“Any oppression of human rights opens the gate to the
indiscriminate use of power and abuse of human beings that is
the root of the entire abomination of [our experience in]
Egypt.”
As the Jewish tradition teaches us in Pesachim, the volume of
the Talmud devoted to Pesach itself, we should begin the Seder
in degradation and end in glory.
Why? Because we began as slaves, and now we are liberated.
This journey through the seder night, from oppression to
liberation, calls us to speak out against the oppression of
others.
Just as at the end of the seder, we say ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’
we mean symbolically ‘Next year in a world where all are free!’
We commit this year, and every year, to stand with others for
their liberation.
Rabbi Leah Jordan

We are currently in the middle of the American Presidential
primary season, where all voting-eligible Americans who want
to will get a chance to vote and caucus for their preferred
Presidential nominee for both the Democratic and Republican
parties. This even includes Americans living abroad, like me.

As of the time of writing, after ‘Super Tuesday’ and with around
20 to 30 per cent of delegates now pledged, the choices are
crystallising: likely Hillary Clinton for the Democrats and, it
grieves me to say his name, Donald Trump for the GOP.

As this general election shapes up, there is cause both for much
joy and much anxiety.

On the one hand, the Democratic nomination has been fought
out by two fascinating, strong candidates – Senator Bernie
Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

From a Jewish perspective, Sanders is an especially interesting
candidate. He is a self-identified ‘social democrat’ whose public
press package proudly and simply says “Jewish” under
“Religion”. His brand of radical Progressivism comes largely out
of the Saul Alinsky style of politics.

Alinsky was the great activist, and son of Russian Jewish
immigrants, known as the godfather of community organising.
His work seeded the ground for the civil rights movements of
the 60s and 70s in America.

Alinsky also inspired Sanders’ opponent, with his tactics, as
expressed in Rules for Radicals, the subject of Hillary Clinton’s
(then Rodham’s) undergraduate thesis. Hillary is also very
appealing to me, as a very experienced candidate who is
looking to become America’s first female President.

On the other side, the field, split between conservative and
establishment/moderate Republican candidates, has been swept
by Donald Trump, the son of a self-made real estate man.
From Trump’s rhetoric about banning Muslims, to his proposed
deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants, to his
most recent hesitation to disavow endorsements from white
supremacists… his road to the nomination is an ugly one.

Trump has played into populist anger and anxiety around a
changing, more globalised, unstable, and more diverse world.
Trump wants a share of those votes. As news journalist Mika
Brzezinski recently asked, “How about a share of morality?”

If this Presidential election is a referendum between the
Progressive Jewish values represented by Saul Alinksy’s fight for
economic and racial justice on the one hand and the
reactionary, racist, nationalist dogma of an ideologue on the
other, it’s a bizarrely easy (but also important and urgent)
choice – for us and for the wider Jewish community.

Rabbi Leah Jordan

From the Rabbi Leah Jordan
Shana tova to NLJC and friends—
The High Holidays are always a season simultaneously both full of
the apple-honey sweetness of celebrating the New Year with
family and friends and of deep and solemn reflection leading up to
Yom Kippur and its demand upon us for tshuva and real change.
In that first vein of sweetness and simcha, we have many things to
celebrate in our community over this past year. In this last year’s
Jewish year, 5775, we marked a fabulous Community Open Day
with more people from the wider Norwich community in attendance
than NLJC members, a beautiful bar mitzvah, Kabbalat Torah for
three young people, a proselyte formally joining our community
after a long process of deep and committed learning, new
memberships each month, and an overflowing cheder.
We have new Council members, participants joining the Baalei
Tefilah course to lead in our community, several beautifully led lay
services and events, our annual Chanukah Fayre, the community
taking on two new social justice initiatives (one local and one in
Israel), NLJC members leading on community organising for
resettlement of Syrian refugees in Norfolk, and so much more I
haven’t even the space to mention here!
We have truly had a sweet past year, and we look forward to
bigger and better things in this new Jewish year to come. I’m sure
in our own individual lives we can also find sweet things to
celebrate.
But as I said, the High Holidays are also a time of serious
contemplation – on what went awry in this past year and what we
can do better in the next. To that end, I think many of our minds
are turned to what is likely the humanitarian crisis and test of our
time: the refugee and migrant emergency in Europe, Africa, and
the Middle East.
Raise your metaphorical hand if one of your parents,
grandparents, or great-grandparents was a refugee or economic
migrant to these shores?
As Jews, we have a special and urgent voice in this matter. History
will judge our morality based on our actions in response to the
ever-growing need for homes, safety, and resources for people
fleeing catastrophe and war in the world.
Based upon a teaching in our Torah in Numbers 35, Emmanuel
Levinas, the great post-Holocaust Jewish philosopher, himself a
refugee in Paris after the war, wrote that we are all, while innocent
perhaps of having directly caused the suffering of refugees, also
obligated, as members of free, relatively affluent, secure societies,
to confront and improve the dire need of other human beings.
It’s an obvious statement but one we should be especially aware of
and take action on as a Jewish community in this coming year.
Ketivah vaChatimah Tovah,
May we all be inscribed for a good new year,
Rabbi Leah

FROM THE RABBI

Dear NLJC,

Greetings in a gloomy February! We just celebrated Tu B’shvat, the Festival of the Trees, which in the land of Israel heralds the first glimmerings of spring… Here in Britain it’s still the heart of winter! With New Year’s and the hols properly behind us, though, we look toward the spring and quite a few rebirths – new Israeli elections in March, Pesach (sign of our people’s rebirth) in April, and the British General Election in May. All are openings for renewal and change, whether spiritual or material. After what for some in the Jewish community – because of Paris, talk of heightened security in the British Jewish community, etc. — has been a difficult winter, I’m concentrating on what to look forward to as the days lighten and grow longer again.

I’m very much looking forward to our February and March Shabbat services, Kabbalat Torah with a wonderful group of fourteen to sixteen year olds in our community, a packed-out cheder classroom, and those in our community whom I know are studying for conversion, bar mitzvah, or other goals. Our membership is growing what seems almost monthly, we’ll be having new Council elections in the spring, and we enter 2015 in a very good place, one that I hope will only get better as we enter the warmer months!

Wishing you good wishes, a warm February and see you soon,

Rabbi Leah