Jeremy Rosen
Do You Want to be Forgiven? Does God Really Care?

Jeremy Rosen - Do You Want to be Forgiven? Does God Really Care

- So, everybody, some of you might have recognised Kol Nidrei composed this version, composed by a composer by the name of Bruch, who is not Jewish. His father was a Protestant pastor. And he took this traditional tune and turned it into a beautiful cello piece that I find very moving. And, in a sense, it creates or sets the tone for this period of time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur that are commonly described as the Ten Days of Penitence, which is an awful term, because I think of penitence as almost self-destructive. And really, they are not called the Days of Penitence so much as the Days Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, the Ten Days of Coming Back. And there’s a fascinating debate between two great rabbis. One of them, Rabbi Soloveitchik, says it’s coming back to God, and the other, called Rabbi Kook, says, no, it’s coming back to yourself, to who you could be and should be. So, as those of you who have heard me before will know, I approach all religious issues, in a sense, through three different spectrums. There is the rational, the historical, and the rational, and the logical. And I regard myself as a logical person. I have no time for nonsense. But, on the other hand, there is something that is what we call mystical. And the mystical is not rational.

And, like anything emotional, it is very much a different way of looking at everything within religion from an experience point of view, not from a rational, philosophical, intellectual point of view. And thirdly, there is what, for want of a better term, I would call the aesthetic, that is to say calling on one’s artistic musical imagination. And that plays a very important part, and an underestimated part, and an often overlooked part of the Jewish experience. The most obvious example of this is when it comes to Passover. And when it comes to Passover, we are told to imagine, pretend, play act, what was it like to be a slave, and to suddenly find you are free? And some customs even go to the extent of people carrying burdens around the table and being lashed with leeks or whips in order to recreate the atmosphere. But it’s an atmosphere in which we are asked to imagine. And the same thing goes with regard to Yom Kippur. We have this image in our minds that was fed to us in our youth, and reiterated, of it being a time when God sits on high, rather like a Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, grey hair, surrounded by little cherubs and angels floating around the place. And He reaches down beneath His golden throne, and He brings out this heavy book, the Book of Life. And then He takes a quill, and with a quill, He writes in every one of us, either for life or for death in the year to come, as if things have not been decided beforehand. And nowadays, we will probably imagine that He pulls out a laptop or some tablet and deals with it that way.

And we are then expected to imagine, imagine what it’s like standing before somebody, or a screen, or artificial intelligence, that knows absolutely everything about us, everything we’ve done in this past year, the good, and the bad, and the ugly. And it’s there, and it’s showing on a screen before us, and we’re seeing it. And there’s a jury and a judge, and there’s God, sitting there, looking at us and saying, “Do you deserve to have another year, or do you not?” Now this is play acting. We play act that we are in fear and that we are worried and we are desperate for a possible solution. And this kind of aesthetic side is a side that, in one way, we all have within ourselves. You’ve heard the famous phrase that nobody’s an atheist when they’re in a foxhole. When we’re in periods of danger or suffering or depression, we naturally look either for a way out or for some kind of support. And therefore, in that context, the idea of God becomes not a theological concept, not even a mystical concept, but a concept of support, something to turn to and to express our regrets to. And so, this period is a period that we know as Teshuvah. And teshuvah, from the word to repent, is fascinating because, actually, in the Torah, it is only used of God coming back to us after we have abandoned God.

So the idea of returning, of reaching a stage of equilibrium, of coming back to where we were at some stage, raises the question of, where were we? Were we in a position where we had abandoned God, and now we’re coming back to God? Or, rather, were we in a position where we were so locked up in ourselves, in our selfishness, that we really didn’t give sufficient regard to what is going around us, the people who are suffering, the amount of good that we are doing to help ameliorate the pain. And particularly, at this moment, when wherever we look around the world, we see disasters, and problems, and human suffering, and financial suffering, and disagreement, and fighting, and conflict, and people who are unable to get on with each other, who are unable to negotiate a reasonable peace and a reasonable resolution. We look around at the outside world, and it is hell. And what can our response be? There’s nothing we can do about it. We don’t control politics. We don’t control the nasty people in the world. The only thing, in the end, that we do control is ourselves. And so, we then have to look to ourselves to find some way of coping, even if not resolving. Now, I always like going back to Hebrew words in the Bible to explain what lies beneath the superficial myth of standing before God and this awful fear that we have of being rejected. And we come back, inevitably, to the idea of sin, that awesome thing. We are sinners, we are bad. We are bad from birth, original sin. And the truth of the matter is I do not see that at all as I look at the Torah.

As I look at the Torah, I see there are a various number of words, five altogether, that refer to what we call sin. The first one is this Hebrew word hhatah, cheit. Now, those of you who are familiar with modern Hebrew will know that means “to miss the mark.” So, in other words, you try to get the mark, you try to hit the bullseye, but you fail. And the response to that, therefore, is, “Okay, well, next time try a bit better.” Not only that, but the word cheit, which is used to describe sin, is also used in the Bible, , and to cleanse the altar. So it’s a process of cleansing, it’s a process of catharsis, of cleansing yourself, not carrying a heavy burden of guilt, which I shall come back to shortly. The second word is aveira. Aveira literally means “to go off the path,” you’ve lost your way. So get back on the path, no big deal. The answer is not necessarily to lacerate, and to feel guilt, and to feel bad, it’s just put it right, rectification. Then you have another term, which is pesha, basically to fail to do something, you should have done something. And a word, avon, is I have, in a sense, betrayed. I have again failed to live up to what was expected of me. All these things are not judgmental in the sense that they’re supposed to cause us pain and guilt. In addition, the Bible uses several responses, several processes of having stepped off the path.

And having done some things, and some things that I can rectify, there are some things that I cannot. According to Jewish law, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur has nothing to do with when you’ve mistreated another human being. There are two kinds of actions within Judaism: actions between human beings and actions between us and God, between a person and his friend, his other human being, and between man and God. Yom Kippur does not atone for anything you’ve done wrong to another person. That has to be rectified directly by you to that person anytime during the year. But if you haven’t done it by Yom Kippur, you definitely should have done it by then. And this idea of forgiveness is one of the biggest areas of misunderstanding, mainly between Christianity, but not only, but between other ways people look at Judaism. And so, how often have we heard this request for Jews to forgive and forget the Holocaust, the anti-Semitism? Forgive and forget, why not? Because the answer in Judaism is, you can only sort something out between the offender and the offendee. You can only ask somebody who you have wronged to forgive you. You can’t ask somebody else, a church, or a synagogue, or a rabbi to forgive you on their behalf. You can only put these things right by yourself. So all these kinds of misdeeds, we are, in a sense, constantly on the lookout to put right and to appease the other person, to repay the other person, to make up any loss that you have caused.

These things, important as they are, are not what Rosh Hashanah is ultimately about. And, similarly, we have the idea of mechilah. So with the idea of selichah, selichah is to recognise I’ve done something wrong, either to a person or to God. Secondly, that’s followed by a process called mechilah, “I forgive you.” And again, this is only something that a human can give to somebody else, to make up and ask for forgiveness. And then you have something called kapparah. And kapparah is often termed atonement, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. But, basically, kapparah means actually doing something to show that you take it seriously, and trying, in a sense, to rectify. Now, these three terms, these three terms are understood rationally in Judaism, mystically, and in a sense, experientially. So Selah can mean the process of forgiving, but it also can mean a process of feeling, feeling something towards somebody. And it can also, in a sense, in the mystical tradition, mean , to send something to, sorry, selichah is to send something away, when you say, “So long, farewell,” and you’re casting out the old and bringing in the new. So then they’ve got three levels of understanding what we mean by selichah. And then the term mechilah, which is normally translated as pardon, “I pardon you, I forgive you,” can also have a judicial meaning.

You have been pardoned by the court, by others. And, in addition, mechilah, in mystical terms, means you become a more complete person. Either something was missing that led you to do this wrong thing, and now you become a complete person. And then, finally, the word kapparah, which is often atonement, which is often considered making up in some way, means “to elevate yourself,” to rise to a level that you were not there before. And that is what Yom Kippur is, a day of elevation, which is why the mood of Yom Kippur is so important. And then, finally, there’s a word in the Torah called asham. And asham is what we call guilt, if we have to translate it. You admit your guilt. But really, it comes from the Hebrew word of Sham being a location. You are in one location, get out and go into another location. You are in one space, get into another space. Now, if what I’m saying to you is that, really, Yom Kippur should not be seen as a terrible, awesome day, but a day of elevating oneself. You would turn around to me and say, “Hold on, what’s your basis for saying this?” And my basis, number one, for saying it is that in the Mishna, the Mishna, the oral law 2,000 years ago, actually says that Yom Kippur was one of the two happiest days in the year, when the children of Jerusalem were gathered in the temple, would attend the early morning ceremonials and the ceremonial of forgiveness, and this feeling that God was happy with them, and they were happy with God.

And they would pour out of the temple, and they would go dancing in the vineyards. Yes, dancing in the vineyards on Rosh Hashanah, it’s there in the Mishna. We can find our dancing nowadays to the parties after Yom Kippur goes out, but in those days, on that particular day, they regarded it as a happy day to be in a position where we can be made to feel better. We can made to be feel better by God or by something else, however you want to understand God. But it’s a process of healing and reconciliation. But where did this all disappear? And why do we now have this quite awesome day, this day in which we start enumerating all our sins? But the truth of the matter is, if you look carefully at the text, the text is not saying, “My sin.” It’s not , “I have sinned,” it says , “We have.” It’s talking about human nature, about the problem with humanity out there. And, you know, if I just read out a list in some of the liturgy that repeats itself on the Day of Atonement for the sins we have carried out, knowingly and unknowingly, for the things we’ve done verbally, for the things we’ve done in private and in public, for our sexual aberrations, for the things we’ve done consciously or deceptively. We’ve oppressed our neighbours, we’ve been loose in public, we’ve been insincere, we’ve disrespected our parents, we’ve been violent, we’ve been aggressive, we’ve been stupid, we’ve taken bribes. We have lied, we have gossiped, we have humiliated other people in our business.

We’ve eaten in a vulgar way, we have taken interest and we haven’t given charity. We’ve been arrogant, we’ve been stubborn, we’ve been lying, and we’ve been hating other people unnecessarily, we. It’s not saying that every one of us has done that, but we’re saying these are the sort of things that go wrong in society. The society we’re in has an influence on us, we get dragged down by it. And so, on Yom Kippur, we are praying, in a sense, for society, for society in general, and for our own society specifically because our own society is just as corrupt as any other and just as problematic as any other, maybe in a different way, and maybe we might say to a lesser degree, but nevertheless, the faults are there everywhere, and we are reminded of them all the time. And nobody is a saint, and as King Solomon said, no human being on Earth only does good and doesn’t do bad. So I need to add another dimension here, and that is the historical dimension. The historical dimension is that, after the temple was destroyed, the Second Temple in 70 AD, in general, there was a ban on music, on public enjoyment, even on lavish weddings. There was a mood of deep, deep depression, and it took time for this depression to begin to lift. But just as this depression was beginning to lift, we were then smitten in Europe, a thousand years ago, by the horrific Crusades in which the whole of the Rhineland Jewish community, the east of France and the west of Germany, was attacked over a period of years by Crusaders who believed that they had to regain Jerusalem for Christendom, and that way, get rid of the pagans and the infidels.

And if there were any infidels on the way to Jerusalem, we had to either kill them or forcibly convert them to Judaism. And almost half the Jewish population of northern Europe was either murdered or forcibly converted to Christianity. And when you have, as so many rabbis of that era did, see their wives raped, their children murdered before their eyes, and were lucky to escape, as a few did, the awesomeness of this disaster struck them that they began to put into writing this constant horror of what they’d gone through. And some of this horror is reflected in the liturgy on the Day of Atonement, in the martyrology that comes into the prayer book. But this then led to a mood of increasingly sombre introspection. And locked as many of them were in synagogues, and very often could only get there when they had support from those few local people and local bishops who did support them, they were constantly in fear of what was coming next. They began to write these poems of mourning, of suffering, of pain, of agony, in an attempt to implore God to relieve their suffering, and, similarly, in the Islamic world, although the Crusades only touched a part of the Jerusalem area of the Crusader Kingdom. Nevertheless, the changes of dynasty that took place under Islam, some, like the Umayyad, were supportive, some, like the Abbasid, were supportive, but others were horrifically oppressive in the same way that the Crusades were. “Either convert or we kill you, confiscate your property, turn you into poor people, suffering people, second, third-rate citizens.”

And that followed with the horrific expulsion from Spain, where, again, almost half the community was decimated, and those who were able to escape, escaped to the east and brought their suffering with them to the Sephardi community, so that by the time you get to the second millennium, you have this tradition of suffering, and of pain, and of not knowing what’s going to come where, not to mention the Holocaust, and indeed, not to mention it’s not in the same category at all, but of the horrific Jew-hatred that is resurgent in our universities across the world, and no attempt, on any level, to see that there may be another way of looking at problems. And there are never innocent parties when there’s a conflict, and both parties may be both right and wrong at the same time. And so, I, personally, I feel, and particularly, you know, having watched, as I’m sure, and I hope most of you have, Ken Burns’s three-part documentary on the Holocaust, the attitude of the Holocaust in the United States of America, the absolutely unbelievable anti-Semitism that existed across the country in almost every level of society, the refusal to let in Jews because they didn’t want them to degrade the purity of the American state, the number of Jews who were forbidden to land on a boat, the St. Louis, that arrived, and then they were turned back to die, as most of them did, or many of them did, in Germany. And the refusal at every level of local government, state government, even presidential government, to allow immigration, when suffering from pain of death, into the country. There was no such notion of allowing people to come in, ignoring the laws in those days.

And we see the horror of immigration problems that we have now, and these were compounded, but they underlined to us the challenge that we face now, as Jews living at this moment, forgetting about what we’ve gone through, the Holocaust and everything else. So all these features have brought about a state where this period of the year, this Days of Atonement, Yom Kippur, have taken on this extremely sombre mood and this sombre atmosphere. And yet, nevertheless, one has to focus on the positive. Because we can’t change other people, much as we try. We mustn’t give up, but we can’t. And our response has to be not to be dragged down into the hatred and the mess that surrounds us, and to focus on ourselves and our being better people, and to be joyful and grateful for what we have, because we do have so much, and we’ve come through such a period of peace and wellbeing. And so many of us are well-off and happy, more than any other time, I would say, in Jewish history. And, therefore, we must retain the idea of joy. We must underplay the awesomeness of sin and focus on trying to be better people, focus on ourselves being better rather than being dragged down to feel bad, to feel guilty. Guilt is the most useless of all emotions because it is not creative in any way, it is not logical in any way, it pulls us into depression.

And we have to do whatever we can to serve God with joy. Those of you who followed the reading of the Torah, and this is my last point, the reading of the Torah the last couple of weeks, will know that, on the one hand, they have been filled with Moses telling the Children of Israel, “Look, I know you’re going to let me down. I know you’re going to go off the tracks. I know you’re going to abandon your people, and you’re going to abandon God, and only a small remnant is going to return.” And he said that 3,000 years ago, if not more. But what he also said is, the thing that is going to cause you to lose your pride, and to lose your land, and to lose your sense of yourself, is if you do not worship God with joy. You have to worship God with joy. And, to me, if religion is not a matter of increasing and inspiring joy, if it’s a matter of inhibiting and making people feel bad, then I believe it’s failing in what the Torah and what God asked of us, which is to be happy, and to rejoice, and to serve God with joy. So there I will leave my preparation and turn to see if there’s any discussion or any debate that anybody wants to get involved with.

Q&A and Comments:

First of all, I have all these nice people who have wished me a very happy new year. And I wish the same to you with all my heart. But I do have an interesting question here.

Rose says, “I think if we believe we want to be forgiven, and we need to recognise that to be good is extremely difficult, and that is the burden that we humans carry, we, in a sense, have to cope with it.” And I think that’s a very, very important point to make. And the important point to make is that we are, in a sense, imperfect. And being imperfect, we have to recognise it and try again to do a slightly better job. But this idea of forgiveness works on two levels: from outside us and within us. And I think we also have to focus on forgiving ourselves and not feeling too bad about ourselves.

Alfred Anyana says, “The meaning to miss the mark is analogous to the ancient Greek word, hamartia, which also means ‘to miss the mark,’ the classical tragedy word for sin.” So there you see the cross influence that religions have. And I think all religions, at root, share certain fundamentals, but all religions also have different sects, different moods, different ways of expressing their religious truths. And it’s up to us to make sure that we find an expression of religion that resonates with us.

Q: “Is there a way or a ritual to ask for forgiveness,” Jennifer asks, “from loved ones who have died?”

A: Well, that’s a very interesting question. The answer is, once somebody has died, no, there isn’t. And yet, and yet there is a tradition, going back to the Talmud, which does say that you can and should go to the grave of somebody who has died and ask for forgiveness of their soul. Now, that doesn’t mean to say that you have to go to the grave. And if you can’t find a grave, where’s the grave? And is that a problem? But the ritual is of a living person to ask for up to three times for forgiveness, obviously to rectify anything. But if, after having tried for three times to ask for forgiveness, and you still haven’t been forgiven, then there is nothing more that you can do. And so the law is that there’s nothing more you can do when somebody dies. But if you feel that it is cathartic for you, if you feel it is beneficial for you, then that, rather like prayer, is a very important existential expression, and it can be of great benefit. So if you feel like doing it, then it’s entirely up to you to do it.

Q: Shelly asks, “Why is Yom Kippurim called in the plural and not in the single?”

A: It’s called Yom Kippur, but it’s also called Yom Kippurim. And the main answer for that is that there was, in the Torah, the process of atonement of the public, which was done in the temple through the symbolic ceremonies of the temple. And this was the official public atonement for the community, but every individual still had to atone for that person’s limitations. And that’s why the term Yom Ha-Kippurim applies, because it’s for every one of us as an individual, even if we’re not in the temple, or even if we’re not in the synagogue. Even if we’re sitting at home, it still applies to us.

Now, Shelly asks about the scapegoats. This is part of the temple ceremonial. Many of the ceremonials of the temple were taken from earlier traditions and adapted to a monotheistic tradition. The ceremony of the scapegoat, number one, was a ceremony in the temple in which, amongst the different animals that were sacrifices, there were goats. And the goats were considered the sacrifice of atonement. Whereas other sacrifices very often were celebrations, they were shared with the community, shared with the priesthood, and they were opportunities for people to eat, and to be merry and come together. The goats were considered less of, if you like, a holy animal or an animal of wealth and happiness, important as they were. One of the goats was slaughtered. I don’t like the idea of slaughter, I don’t like the idea of these temples, but they still go on in the world today, and still, people are killing animals for food. And it was a normal thing to do then, so we look at it through the lens of history. The other one, the other goat, was sent out to get lost into the wilderness. And this goat was called the , the goat that was sent out. And it’s very interesting that the Torah just says that he goes and is sent out, and is lost and disappears, maybe from thirst or what have you, but disappears into the desert beyond Jerusalem.

The Talmud recalls the fact that the Babylonians, who used to come to Jerusalem during the Second Temple, were very, very, if you like, in a sense, superstitious, the way many of us are. And as this goat was being taken through the crowd, they plucked it to take some of its hair, as if to, you know, “Throw! Take our sins, throw it away!” And the rabbis didn’t like this sense of cruelty, and so what they did is they built a special passage above the crowd, which took the goat out of the temple and into the wilderness, where it was let go. And there, it was freed from having everybody on the way, and thousands and thousands, plucking at the poor little thing as it went. The fact that it came to a sad end and, to one version, was pushed off the rock in the end and fell down to the bottom is another sort of, if you like, reference to ways of looking at things in a different era. But then, we come to a more modern era, to certain customs that we have that many of us find difficult to cope with. The obvious one is what is called kapparot. And kapparot is the idea of taking a chicken, and waving it around your head, and saying, “May this chicken take all my sins.” And then you slaughter the chicken, or send it to the poor, or find some other way of making use, which is what we tend to do anyway when we kill chickens for food. We slit their throats, and they are on some sort of machine that takes them through the process of dealing with it in something quite horrible that most of us don’t see, and that’s why we don’t have a problem when we eat chicken, and if we do see it, we’re unlikely to want to eat chicken again. Now, this idea of kapparot is highly controversial. It is something that, in fact, is not part of the Talmudic tradition.

It is something that developed in Eastern Europe. And it was taken up, very much mystically, by the Kabbalists. But really, the people who took it very seriously tended to be the Hasidim. The non-Hasidim tended, as in my family, as in the Lithuanian tradition in those days, to give charity, to give charity as a kapparah, and not to go and slaughter a chicken. Apart from the fact there was a question of cruelty to animals, swinging a chicken around, and most of us who have seen what goes on in Hasidic circles at marketplaces where they do do kapparot, it’s not a very pleasant experience. And I remember once, when I was in yeshiva, commenting on the fact that I thought it was cruel, cruelty to animals, and I didn’t know why it was allowed. And the head of my yeshiva, who was a great Lithuanian rabbi, said to me, “You know, back in Lithuania, we didn’t do it. But this is something that the Hasidim have brought in. It’s an important part of their tradition and heritage, and we must let them and respect their traditions, and that’s why we don’t say anything about it.” The other aspect of this is Tashlich, of throwing our sins into the river, something that is not found before the late mediaeval period. And obviously, this is something, that we know from other sources, actually was borrowed from non-Jewish superstitions, and from the Church and the idea of baptism washing away your sins. But the idea of washing away your sins then became part of the Jewish tradition. And they allied it to a quote from Michah in which the prophet Micah says, “The day will come when God will throw, will get rid of, throw into the depths of the sea, all your sins.” So God throws the sins into the sea, and the sea washes them away.

Now, somewhere in late mediaeval times came another feature, which is only mentioned in few sources, not in most sources, that you should go to the water, the running water, and there’ve got to be fish in it. Why fish in the water? Well, one tradition that’s written down is because fish are under the water. Like sins, they’re beneath the surface, they don’t always come to the surface, but also because they have fins and scales that protect them from view, from people seeing what goes wrong. And then there’s the idea that fish don’t have eyelids, and therefore see everything, and we should know that other people see all of our sins, and they will take our sins away. The idea of fish taking sins away, of course, is, if you like, also tied up with the idea of sins having to do with the evil eye. Because the evil eye can’t go down into the water where the fish are, and so fish protect us from the evil eye. And so they, again, evil eye, although it’s mentioned in the Talmud, is very much a mediaeval, and even a current, superstition that many people have. So here, then, you have another problem cropping up. Somewhere in the last century, somewhere in the last century, the custom developed to take bread and throw bread into the water. Now, this is a problem from a religious point of view. A, you’re not supposed to be carrying bread on Yom Kippur.

Secondly, you’re not supposed to feed animals on Yom Kippur that are not dependent on you for food. And so many authorities say it’s forbidden to do this sort of thing, but that doesn’t stop people ignoring. Superstitious goes beyond Jewish law. And there are so many superstitions in Jewish law, and they’ve got more and more, and are getting more and more to this very, very day. And all one can do is say, “Look, fine, if that works for you, it works for you.” And if you’re like me, it’ll say it doesn’t work for me. And if you want to hand over any of your superstitions to me, I’ll be very happy to take your curses, your evil eyes, and everything else, and get rid of them for you or absorb them into my very poor human body.

Q: Now we go on to Philip. “What’s your view on the usefulness of repetitioning the Shacharit six to eight times, including the chazzan’s repetition of the Shemoneh Esreh?”

A: Philip, I’m not in favour of repetition, in general. In general, I would like services to be much, much shorter. I believe in quality and not in quantity. However, again, historically, there is a reason as to why the services, increasingly over time, got larger and larger. ‘Cause originally, if you go back to the Talmudic Period, the services were basically saying the Shema, saying the Shema with a blessing beforehand, and the Amidah, the standup prayer. That is the only part that was called prayer. In addition, occasionally reading from the Torah, that was educational. But over the years, people added on. They added on in Spain. It became fashionable to add poetry. And then, in Europe, it became fashionable to add dirges because of all the massacres and the oppression that went on. And slowly, people added on more and more and repetition of the Amidah for people who didn’t hear it or couldn’t say it themselves. And then the repetitions came more for another reason, for practical purposes. For most, until relatively recently, the synagogue was, for most people, the only reasonable building. They lived in hovels, majority were very, very poor. The number of people who were rich was very, very small. And because of this, they wanted to spend more time in the synagogue. And other people also, from a different angle, said, “We want to show that we care about this.” And because the synagogue is the community and the community together, they wanted to give it more significance. Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, both of them extended the services with lots more.

And if you think there’s a lot more in the average service at the moment, when you look at most of the prayer books at the back, there are lots more prayers to be said and lots more poems which are optional and extras. And so it became a way of showing your faith, of showing your loyalty. It was also a question of keeping people together, so for protection and only going out together in groups. And for all these reasons, repetition became significant. And, again, my advice to people is don’t feel that you have to say everything, but pay attention. If it helps to repeat, it helps. And particularly on Yom Kippur, when you’ve got nothing else to do, and you’re in the synagogue anyway, and most people spend their time talking, I would argue use your time to study, to translate, to look at the words, to look at the parts of the Torah that you normally don’t pay attention to, if you have a Bible. It amazes me. You know, if I had to be in prison, I would use my time as positively as I could. I would study, I’d take a degree, I’d read books, I’d do things. Many people feel, in synagogue, they’re in a kind of a prison. “Oh, I have to be here. I don’t really want to be here.” And instead of using that time productively to study something more, and to learn more, and to appreciate the poetry, they just spend their time either dozing, or sleeping, or talking, or gossiping, and wasting their time. That’s certainly true, I’m afraid, in the synagogues I’ve been a rabbi of. People waste their time instead of using it well. So I don’t like the need of repetition, I don’t think it’s necessary. But sometimes a little repetition is helpful. It helps you learn the words, and repeat the words, and memorise. So there are benefits, but if you don’t like it, my answer is don’t do it.

“Dear Rabbi, can I only follow the lecture and not the question and answer because I have to go to Hebrew class? Many thanks.” Ah, “Sorry you couldn’t answer,” but anyway, thank you, Clara.

Thank you, Sharon. Miriam, thank you. Renee Danzinger, thank you.

Q: Ari: “Why was Job punished despite following all of God’s demands?”

A: Ah, Ari, you are asking this fundamental question of, “Why are people punished?” And the Book of Job is one example, one example of trying to explain. People come up with all kinds of answers. “You did something wrong, you’re getting your comeuppance,” or, “Society did something wrong, society’s getting comeuppance.” There is no satisfactory answer. There’s a famous, famous story, told in two parts in the Talmud, about a father who sends his son up a tower to send away a mother bird. These are two laws given in the Torah that guarantee you will be rewarded with good life, as well as honouring your father and your mother. Honour your father and your mother, send the mother bird away, and you will have long life. And coming down, the child fell and broke his neck and died. And there were three rabbis standing around there. And these rabbis said to themselves, “Wow, the Torah says long life. How come we’re not getting long life?” One rabbi, Elisha ben Abuyah, said, “You know, I can’t stand this. Religion comes up with these crazy answers. I much prefer Greek rational logic.” Other rabbi said, “No, it doesn’t mean in this world, it means in a spiritual world, a different world.” Another rabbi said, “Maybe this guy didn’t check the ladder beforehand. And if you don’t check the ladder beforehand, of course you’re going to fall down, and there’s going to be trouble.” So they were aware of the fact.

And in the “Ethics of the Fathers,” there is a famous statement, which says we do not know. At least this guy had the honesty to say, “I don’t know, and I cannot explain why good people suffer and why bad people prosper.” The Book of Job is an attempt to explain and say, “Listen, there are things just beyond our control.” There are things beyond our control, and that is part of life. Bad things happen. And it’s not because you did something to deserve it, it’s way things go. You didn’t deserve to die, you don’t deserve to die, but we all die at some stage. We all catch diseases, illnesses at some stage. Did we deserve it? Well, maybe if we didn’t use our masks. But the fact is that all these attempts to answer, as far as I’m concerned, miss the point. The point is we have to cope with life. Life is imperfect, the world is imperfect, and we have to do our best. And the function of religion is to help us, either by giving us a structure, and a structure that gives us a sense of who we are and where we come from, and something to help tide us through the difficult periods, or, alternatively, to use God as a kind of an outlet for our anxiety, and an expression of what we want, and to get the sort of comfort of feeling that, somehow or other, we are not alone. And different people respond differently to the idea of God, but there is no answer, either to what God is, how God works, any more than there is to why people sin.

Esther says, “Growing up in a Sephardi community, a rabbi had to kill a chicken on behalf of everybody in the household. Mommy used to call it a kapparah.” Yes, a kapparah is an atonement, and this was done on behalf of everybody, which, very often in many customs, the rabbi does on behalf of the community. So it’s not just a Hasidic thing, not just an Ashkenazi thing, as I think I mentioned, it’s something that developed by the mystics. And most of the mystics were living in the Oriental-Sephardi world of the Middle East, and so it’s not surprising.

“Thank you,” says Marian, “for being a great educator.” “Simple explanation.” Thank you, too.

Q: Francine: “Why do we sing, 'Some will die by water, some by fire?’ Very scary prayer.”

A: Because that’s life. We don’t know who’s going to live tomorrow. So instead of somebody dying, who will be knocked over by a car? Who will slip and fall and bang their heads? Who will be mugged? Who will be robbed? We can take these old ideas and apply them to new. We don’t know what’s going to happen to us in this year. And we hope that we’re going to have a good year, but we know we might not. We know bad things are going to happen. Somebody might be in a plane that crashes, or somebody might be in Ukraine and a missile’s going to hit you. So this is a poetic way of saying we don’t know. We are, in a sense, in the lap of the gods. We are, in a sense, almost helpless. We do our best, but there are no guarantees. Like parents, we do our best for our kids, but no guarantee how they’re going to turn out. So it does sound scary, and I’m moved by it. I’m very moved by this idea, do I know if I’m going to live? Do I know if I’m going to have enough to eat this year? Do I know if I’m going to have somewhere to live this year? I don’t know, and therefore, I have to be grateful for what I’ve got.

“The Burns doc is devastating. It happened so recently. Hard to go on living today and acknowledge our minds of feeling joy.” Sheila, that’s right. But if you know what’s going on in the universities today, in Harvard University, total condemnation of Zionism as an evil, wicked, colonial hoax. And that means attacking Jews directly because it’s denying Jews a right to their own. In the universities around this country, whether it is in the Congress or in the Senate, you are hearing hatred of Jews, directly or indirectly. And even this game, “I’m not an anti-Semite, I am just an anti-Zionist,” in some cases that may be true, but in most cases it is not.

Because BDS is saying, “From the river to the sea, that’s Palestine that’s got to be free,” which means getting rid of Jews. That’s what it means, getting rid of Jews. Who’s going to take them? Where are they’re going to go? What do Hamas want to do? Make it judenrein. And so, the fact is we’ve always had this problem. There’ve been quieter times and worse times, but now it’s coming back. It is definitely coming back. And anybody who thinks it’s not coming back is fooling themselves. Whether it’s in Harvard or whether it’s in Sunni, most Jews cannot show in public that they are Jewish. Thank God not all universities are that bad, but most of them are.

Q: Olga, Olga Weiss: “The title of your lecture, ‘Does God Care?’ Please explain.”

A: Every everything we have about God is explaining something which is not physical, which is not physical in physical terms. If God is not physical, how can we apply a term such as care, or indeed love, or indeed anger, or indeed hate? Something which is not physical cannot be described in physical terms. And so, for example, we say, “Does God care if we pray?” “Does God need our prayer?” Well, obviously not because need is a human emotion. Most of the time we ascribe human emotions to God because it’s the only way we have of talking about God. So sometimes the Kabbalists used the term of God as Ein Sof, something without end at all, which is eternity, eternal, which is infinite. Can you describe infinity? No, you cannot. You can only say that it is more than anything we know. So when we talk about God caring, the straight answer is that we don’t know if God cares. The only thing we do know is if we care. And we assume that if we care, we care within accordance to some rules of morality, and ethics, and good behaviour that have come down to us as the way God would like us to behave, metaphorically. It is a metaphor. And, therefore, I don’t think it helps to talk about God needing our repentance, God caring about whether we repent or not, but rather us being true to ourselves. And God is a tool to help us be true to ourselves, that, most of the time, we misuse.

Q: “How can a secular Jew gain most out of the High Holidays? Is there an aesthetic that can play a significant role?”

A: Yes, I think there is, Hal. I think there is. First of all, there is the atmosphere. Whatever atmosphere you’re in, whether you like the music or not. And remember, the music changes from place to place. The Sephardi music is different to the Ashkenazi music. And music is something that can appeal to us, but some people, of course, are tone deaf. So part of it is going for an experience. Just as, for example, I know many Jews, even some religious Jews, like to go to Midnight Mass because they like the experience. There’s an aesthetic to it. So one level is if you can relax and get something of the atmosphere. Secondly, another function is to be part of a community. Most of us have problems with our communities. Most of us lead quite solitary lives, and it’s necessary to get the community together on occasions. For many secular Jews, the only occasions will be Passover, or, shall we say, Yom Kippur. But at least that is something. And so that functions in terms of identity. It’s an idea of identity coming back. And, secondly, even if you don’t keep the traditions, even if you don’t believe in God, spending some time thinking within the context of a spiritual world, within the context of how people treat each other is so important. And the fact is that most of us pick up the paper, watch the TV, see the news, Passover, the suffering that human beings are having, and we don’t think too much. We’re struggling to make a living, we’re struggling to do good. We don’t often, therefore, have enough time to think about the world around us. So I would use this, and I do use this, as an opportunity to think about other people, the world around us, and what I can do to be a better person.

“The Persians throw lentils into the river the last day of Nowruz.” That’s very good, Hindy. And I’m sure that’s also a factor why it caught on in the Sephardi world.

Julian: “Surely the context of washing away sins was already present in the idea of the mikveh to cleanse impurity, and also conversion.” Yes, that’s quite true. That’s quite true when it comes to the idea of impurity and cleansing impurity, but that only applied to people who were impure. It didn’t apply to everybody in the community who has the option.

Hindy, continuing: “The Persians also have apple and honey on the Haft-sin table during Nowruz.” That’s quite right, but honey and apple can be found even in Occidental communities as well. But yes, you’re quite right, many of these communities’ customs span the Sephardi and the Ashkenazi world.

Q: “You seem to take an admirably logical and benign attitude toward Jewish tradition. Would you agree that this is, and is that conscious?”

A: It is conscious. I don’t believe in trying to pressurise people. I don’t believe in compulsion. I believe I enjoy my religious life. I’m religious because I want to be, because I enjoy it, because it appeals to me, because it gives me something. At the same time, I’m rational. And so I live with two worlds. I live with a rational world, and I live with, shall we say, a mystical world. And I enjoy it tremendously. And I want other people to enjoy it. And it hurts me when people don’t enjoy. It’s interesting, when people used to ask me as a young man, “Why did you choose a career in Jewish education and the Jewish rabbinate instead of all the other things you could have done?” And I said, “You know…” I’ll give you an example of how I explain it. Imagine you had a girlfriend, and you love this girlfriend, but everybody else thinks she’s a nasty piece of work and an ugly, mean person. Wouldn’t you want to try and convince them that she’s not as bad as they seem to think she is? Religion in my youth got a terrible… In university, everywhere, most Jews even, didn’t like religion, had something against it. And I decided that I wanted to try and do something about it. But I wanted to do something about showing how the passionate side, the committed side is important, not the theological. Brought up in England, the Church was theological. It was cold, unemotional. “You’ve got to believe, believe, believe.” How can you force people to believe? You can’t. You can encourage people to experience. And for that reason, I took the line that I took.

Q: “I attend Reform, and decided that the relation to the family is too diluted, yet it serves my child and grandchildren, thoughts?”

A: Look, if it serves, if it works for them, I’m happy it works for them. One chooses what works for them, and one can always up one’s game if one feels one isn’t getting enough. And a lot of people do. A lot of people become more religious over time, just a lot of people become less religious over time. Some people want to do more, and some people feel comfier with less.

“In the Kabbalah, the scapegoat symbolises a demon, a fallen angel, Azazel.” Yes, that’s an aspect, I must say, of the Kabbalah that I don’t like, this demonology, is I don’t like the angelology. It conjures up everything to do with dualism, Zoroastrianism, the force of evil as opposed to the force of God. And Satan, apart from the Book of job, he doesn’t exist as a person, in the Book of Job anyway, is one of those people subject to God. But generally, Satan simply means “to block somebody.” But the idea that there is a Satan, to me, is utter rubbish.

Nanette, thank you, I’m glad I was able to be of comfort. Thank you, Dawn. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Carol.

And that ends our session. Thank you, everybody.