Rabbi Joseph Dweck
Why are the Days of Awe so Awesome?

Rabbi Joseph Dweck - Why Are the Days of Awe so Awesome?

- I’m absolutely delighted that you have joined us. Rabbi Dweck has got an extraordinary CV. He is the senior rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese community in London. He’s actually American-born. He’s studied at the Yeshiva under Ovadia Yosef. That was led in Jerusalem. But what is, I think fabulous about Rabbi Dweck, he combines the religiosity and religious studies. He’s also got qualifications in psychology, philosophy, an MA in Jewish education, which I think is incredibly important. He has run a community in Brooklyn. He’s run a school in Brooklyn. He’s now deputy president of the London School of Jewish Studies, which is the foremost, really, school in England in terms of Jewish scholarship. He’s president of the CCJ, and he is on the Ecclesiastical Commission for the Board of Deputies, and this evening, the challenge, when we were discussing what he would speak about, I think it was such a brilliant idea he came up with. Why are the Days of Awe so awesome? So welcome. It’s wonderful for your first visit to lockdown.

• It’s an honour and pleasure. Thank you for having me on, Trudy, and thank you to Wendy, and to Judy, and all of the prep, and to everyone who’s coming on. It’s really an honour and I’ve been looking forward to this. I’m very grateful that Trudy asked me to share with everyone. You know, I know that in general, the theme of the talks that are offered on this phenomenal lockdown university, which is really just a testament to the fact at our tremendous ability through technology to be able to connect with each other, no matter where it is that we are, that the tenor usually is not deeply religious. And Trudy kind of said, you know, this is, we are during, you know, finding ourselves in the Days of Awe. And this is a time where many Jews around the world are thinking about, in some capacity or another, their religious lives. Perhaps we might speak on the issues at hand. So what I would like to do is to, in the time that we have, I guess it’s about 40 some-odd minutes, and then of course I’ll open up for questions, is to present to you the Days of Awe, namely what we call the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which literally mean the new year, Rosh Hashanah.

Yom Kippur is the Day of atonement. What those days really are for us, what they are meant to be for us, and to frame them in a fashion that brings them, if possible, closer to our hearts and to our everyday lives, and how it is that we live and think. The title of the lecture is, “Why are the Days of Awe so Awesome?” And of course, you know, in the proper sense of the word, awesome should be something that is filled with awe. But in our vernacular, pretty much everywhere in the English speaking world, we talk about something being awesome as just being tremendously great or something really good. And so I’d like to kind of look at how the awe of these days, and what is that awe, really when we think about it, is so important to us, and what it is we might really take from it, what we’re able to draw from it for ourselves and our lives, because I do think that the Jewish year, with all of its festivals, and what we might call appointments in time that we have are so enriching, or at least they were meant to be enriching for our human lives, that each one of our festivals brings to us something about the nature of life that helps us meditate, and through action, and thought, and speech, engage in building ourselves from year to year around the same kinds of signposts.

And so if we were to speak a bit more concretely about that idea, we could think essentially about the year, the Jewish year, as a spiral staircase, right? So that we are going through the year in a circular fashion, and we keep hitting these points in time over and over again, so we hit our Rosh Hashanah, our Yom Kippur, our Sukkot, our Pesach, our Passover, and so on around the year. But each year we do it on a different level, right? So we keep moving through these very familiar times, but as we grow, and as we mature, and as we develop in our lives, we do them on different levels. And so I’d like to look at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in that fashion. How do these days come into our lives, and what are we meant to draw from them? How are we meant to interact with them? And why do we consider them indeed to be Days of Awe? So what I will do is I will start with Rosh Hashanah, and I will end with Yom Kippur. I hope to give equal time to both, and give a sense of what it is that we, you know, these days mean to us, and how it is that we relate to them. So more often than not, we tend to hear of these days as Days of Awe, because we, in a religious sense, are told that God is kind of coming down to judge us. And in addition to judging us, he’s there judging whether we should be written in the Book of Life or in the Book of Death, and which, in and of itself, is terribly foreboding, and that there is this imminence about it. that there is this, almost this sense where our lives are hanging in the balance. And while I think that there is value to that, I think that it is often offered without the more robust aspects of the day, that it is offered without the more foundational aspects of the day, and most important, I believe, it is offered oftentimes without the humanistic aspect of the day.

And I think it is important for us to understand, at least certainly in the Sephardic tradition, and the classical Sephardic tradition, all of our Torah, everything about our Torah is meant to be seen through humanistic eyes, that we should be able to recognise our Torah as something that is a framework for our lives, rather than something that we have to put up with in our lives, that it should be something that is nourishing to us, enhancing to us, that helps us to grow, rather than something that impinges upon us, or imposes itself on our lives, and where we have to sacrifice in order to be able to live it. So let’s look first at Rosh Hashanah, and I’d like, like I said, to look at the more robust foundational human aspect of Rosh Hashanah, and in order to do that, we really do need to look at its origins, because the truth of the matter is, is that Rosh Hashanah is not ever the term anyway. Rosh Hashanah, which literally means the first of the year, is not used in the Torah, in the actual text that discusses it. It simply says that it’s supposed to be a special day that we treat it as a Yom Tov, so it’s a day similar to Shabbat. And the only other thing that it says about it is that we are meant to sound the shofar on this day, that we’re supposed to sound this trumpet, right? And the only reason that it’s the shofar is because when you get very ancient, those were the trumpets that they had in that time. You know, I mean, so this was something that everybody had at hand. And so they say sound the trumpets, on this day, what is it meant to mean for us?

The one thing that it does say is that it is meant to be a day of trumpet sounding. And it is meant to be a day of what we call zikaron. Zikaron in Hebrew means memory. And in that word is the crux of the day, so interestingly, the whole nature of judgement is not something that is spoken about, neither in the Torah, or for that matter, in the early rabbinic writings, like in the Mishnah, when we’re going, when we’re looking about 2000 years ago. What is spoken about with regards to Rosh Hashanah is the fact that it is a day that we are meant to sound this horn, this shofar, but that it is a day of zikaron, that it is a day of memory. And if we are to pay attention to our prayer books, although there is mention of God sitting in judgement with us, and we’ll speak about that, what it is called over and over again, whenever we name the day in our prayers, we call it Yom HaZikaron. We call it literally a day of memory. And it is important to recognise the day through that name, because that name, the Yom HaZikaron, is the fundamental name of the day. And what that means is we have to think about what memory is for us. We have to think about what would it mean to have a day of memory. So what I would like to suggest is that a day of memory is very much a day of identity. It’s a day of considering who I am, and what it means to be who I am in this world. And I will explain why it is that I’m suggesting that. But I will say first that in that, we can begin to understand that if I’m questioning my identity on this day, if I’m looking at, and I’m examining who I am in this world, and if I am doing that in normative Judaism in front of God, right? This is a day that I’m supposed to be engaging in my relationship with God, then it means that I am looking at it mutually with him. I am looking at myself as he looks at me, and we are both, for all intents and purposes, questioning, “Who are you, who am I, and what would I like to be?

How do I see myself in this world?” That is one of the reasons why we begin to look at it as a day of judgement , not in terms of judgement with regards to God sitting on this throne as a judge, and looking down and deciding whether I’m a good boy or a bad boy, but rather judgement in the sense of assessing what the nature of this reality is that I call my life. And that is something that is extremely important for all of us. And it is also something that is not necessarily easy for us to do. So let’s have a think about why it is that memory would have something to do, or a great deal to do, for that matter, with identity. If I think about my identity, you know, who I am, what it is that it means to be me in this life, in this world, think about what it would mean not to have memory around that question. If I did not have a recall of the people that I have met in my life, the events that have occurred to me in my life, the deeds that I have done in my life, the information that I have learned in my life, the relationships that I have formed, or broken, or have been influenced by, or hurt by, or lifted by in my life. If I didn’t have that repository in memory, if it was not only something that I could recall, but genuinely something that is woven together as a whole entity that I call me, if my memory did not facilitate that meta-consciousness that I then play into without even paying real attention to it, that I then overlay into what I call my identity, would I still be me if that memory wasn’t functioning? Very long ago, now, I saw a documentary on an individual who was suffering with a lack of short-term memory. So the individual would speak to someone, have a conversation, turn away from the conversation, and completely forget that the conversation was even had, not remember what was spoken about, but that it even had taken place.

A person would have breakfast in the morning, forget having eaten, to the point that this person recognised that he needed to form an external memory for himself. And so he got used to writing down the things that he did so that he would be able to refer back to them. And soon he had a recorder that he would speak into that would kind of mark the things that he did. And they had a scene in which he was going to visit his grandmother in Liverpool, and he was in London, and he found himself at the station, and he had no idea why he was there. And he had to listen to his recording to remind him regularly that he was on his way to visit his grandmother. Terrible circumstance, terrible condition. But if, God forbid, we were to even think for a moment that that might be the nature of our minds, that we would not retain all of these bits of information, these detailed elements of life that are, for all intents and purposes, isolated in themselves, the people that we speak to, the moments that we have with other people, the moments that we have with ourselves, the conversations that we have, the lectures that we attend, that if we were to turn from them, we would forget them. The question is, would we still be us? Would I still be me without that memory? So much of identity is embedded in our memory. And so when we talk about a day of memory, we are, in essence, speaking about the day of identity. Because when I think about who I am, I must bring in to working my identity, excuse me, my memory.

I have to be able to have a sense of where it is that I’ve come from, and what it is that I am doing, and what my plans are for that matter, for the future, which plays together with my memory into the projections of what things might be, because I have a sense of their past, and how things develop. And if that is the case, I also recognise that I will tend to think farther into the past than even I can remember. Because the truth is that we have surrogate memories, do we not? I mean, the way that I met Trudy was having the tremendous privilege of sitting in her history, her intimate history lectures, with a few close people and friends. And I was enamoured by her command of the history of our people, how deeply she holds in her mind the identity of the Jewish people, simply by way of knowing what it is that happened to us, how it is that history treated us. It’s why it is that we, one of the reasons why we love her, but why we seek her wisdom, because in a sense, we have a better understanding of who we are by listening to her. We have a better understanding of who I am. I have a better understanding of who I am by hearing it. And so we not only rely on our own memory, but we rely on the treasuries of memory for those that was given to us, or held in trust by those who either came before us, or who are with us, or who write them down for us, and pass them through generations. But it is in that that we find ourselves. And so it is interesting that the centrepiece of Rosh Hashanah is the Musaf prayer, which is the afternoon prayer. I mean, when I say afternoon, I mean late morning, essentially. So we have the Shacharit Prayer, which is the morning prayer.

Then we have the Musaf prayer, which comes around the time of the blowing of the shofar. And one of the major aspect of that prayer is a section of the silent prayer that we then repeat out loud that we call Zikhronot. We call it the memories. And what we turn to God and say is . You remember everything that anyone has ever forgotten. And in a sense, what we are saying to God is, “You hold our identity and trust.” And in doing so, we look at ourselves in terms of our own identity. So think about this day. This I’m saying to you is the fundamental nature of the day. It is the early element of the day. It is the most foundational part of the day. Everything else that we know about the day, everything else that we speak on regarding the day, whether it’s apples and honey, or days of judgement , emerge from that fundamental core idea.

And therefore, the shofar, we can certainly understand as being an awakening call, which is precisely what it is that it’s meant to be. This is a call that is meant to awaken us to our primal roots. It’s meant to awaken us to recognise that this is a day that we are meant to be conscious, not just about one thing or end issue, but to be conscious about the whole of our lives, which, in truth, is a tall order, isn’t it? How am I supposed to be aware of the entirety of my life? And Rosh Hashanah prompts us towards that. Rosh Hashanah is a day in which we are genuinely meant to think about not just what it is that I am doing at this point, or what it is that I’m engaged in now, but what is the trajectory of my life? How has it been lived thus far, and how do I wish it to continue? And ultimately to ask myself, if I continue on this trajectory, will I be content or happy with where it is that I see it ending? And so, for all intents and purposes, the work of Rosh Hashanah is an assessment. It’s a question of, if I were to scan my life while I hear that sound of the shofar, what does it look like to me? So on that level, I question the meaning of this day. And when I say question, I don’t mean in the sense of challenging it.

I mean in the sense of contemplating it. Think about what it means to have, for 3000 years, a day marked in our calendar that prompts us to consider the entirety of our lives, to consider the trajectory of our lives, to consider our identity, to consider who I am. And when I do it this year, am I seeing the same self as I saw last year? And that may be so, for many of us, for all of us on a certain level. I mean, you know, there’s this meta-sense that’s always been with us from day one, isn’t there? But how many differences have we gone through? How many iterations have we gone through in our lives? How many different mindsets have we been through in our lives, and what are we looking forward to? Think about what it means to have a day like that in a national calendar. Think about what it means to have a day like that for an entire people. It changes the people. It prompts an entire nation of people to self-examine, to be self-aware, to consider the nature of their lives. And that, in and of itself, sets the people apart, very much goes to the milieu of what it is to be the Jewish people. So a Day of Awe perhaps. And when we talk about God judging on that day, well, it is certainly our tradition, but not in the sense of, you know, sitting on high and looking down at us measly humans.

It is much more mutual than that. At least it is meant to be. In our belief system, when we include God, as we tend to in normative Judaism, include God in our belief system, we look at him as our maker. We look at him as the one who made us. And therefore, it is only appropriate to look at him as the one who roots for us most. Because if we are the work of his hands, then his desire for us is to be the best that we possibly can be, and that he is in support of his creations succeeding. And so it is a mutual sense of judgement in the sense of assessment. You know, judgement has its negative connotations for us, because usually, we will think of it in terms of judgmentalism, rather than judgement . But is judgement not simply a mode of discernment? Is it not simply a way of defining, telling what something is from what it isn’t, determining what something is from what it isn’t? We all use our judgement regularly, and it is what helps us in our conscious lives to be able to live unique and conscious lives. To have a day like that in our calendar is extremely meaningful, and it has been for us for some time.

And because it is a day that goes to the core of who we are, it’s a day that questions the very nature of our being. It is a Day of Awe. It is a Day of Awe, because it goes down to the core of what it means to be alive as a human being on this Earth. It doesn’t get more awesome than that when you think about it. I mean, think about the expense of the cosmos within which we live. As far as we know, I mean, there may be many more planets like ours out there in that great expanse. Likelihood is that there should be, and why wouldn’t there be, with conscious intelligent life? The odds are that they, you know, there are probably more than one. But as far as we know with the tools of our technologies, they are far too distant from us for us to know about them. In the expanse of the known universe, we are the only show in town. And as Dawkins said, it’s the greatest show on Earth. When you think about the expense of the cosmos, what have you got out there? A bunch of hydrogen bombs that we call stars that are relatively simple structures, compared to the human being that has sprouted on this arbitrary planet, revolving around an arbitrary star, of which there are hundreds of trillions all over.

And on this rock, this random rock, emerges a biped that is capable of being aware not only of itself, but of the universe in which it exists. It has a brain that is the most complex structure in the known universe by many orders of magnitude. Is that not awe? It is awesome. And to have a day for 3000 years that a certain people, a small Hebrew tribe, sets aside to consider the meaning of their lives before the Greeks came onto the scene, and examined life was something that we were consciously considering and aware of one day a year. And so it’s for that reason. It’s for that, the primal nature of it, that we look at this day also as being a day that commemorates the creation of the universe, even though it’s not an actual anniversary, because there were no days or time as we know it when the universe was created. But like the Queen’s birthday, that we celebrate when it isn’t, we celebrate the day of the time of the creation of the universe as a marker for it on Rosh Hashanah. And in that, we think about our own creation, about our own lives, and our own being in that time.

That is Rosh Hashanah. And that, to me, is a day that is so deeply human, and so deeply meaningful, that it is indeed a very awesome day, and that we have this time in the year that we stop, we recognise it as sacred, and we spend it thinking on our own lives and ourselves, and the trajectory of our past and our future. Now, recognising that that is Rosh Hashanah, we don’t stop there, because meaning is a thing for us. And so we can look at it as observers kind of, you know, like anthropologists looking at our lives, and thinking, hmm, how interesting. Or we can recognise that our lives mean something very real to us. We can also recognise that we are the creators of our lives, that there is no one else who will create our lives for us, that if we are creating anything in this world, the one thing that we have the greatest agency over is our own lives. And if that is the case, during an assessment of our lives, which occurs, or is meant to occur, on Rosh Hashanah, no matter how cursory or deep it happens, right? I mean, if a person really wants to get into Rosh Hashanah, get out the journal, start journaling, thinking about the relationships that one has, the deeds that one has done, and so on and so forth, most of us don’t go that deep into it. Most of us kind of have a bit of a contemplation at the time of the shofar, if that, and that’s okay, that’s fine.

Different ears have different ways of looking at ourselves. That too is true. But being that meaning is central to us, important to us. When we begin to think about our lives on Rosh Hashanah, a question comes up, and the question is, am I happy with its current status? Is this what I would like it to look like in the final edit? And so there’s another day that flanks Rosh Hashanah, or that is coupled with Rosh Hashanah, that we call the Second Day of Awe. And that day is the day of Yom Kippur, literally the day of atonement. And what that day is set aside for is simply a questioning of, is this how I would like my life to continue without any amendment or any edit? Or are there things that I recognise would best be edited or amended? And so a major part of Yom Kippur, which is a day set aside for amendments, yeah, is to make amends. It’s to make amends not only to God, although that is included, because if we are in relationship with God, as the Jewish people have believed we were for a very long time, well, then, in that relationship, amends are necessary. But the concept and nature of the day is one in which we look at our lives as a whole, and then questioning, what would I like to amend in my life? Are there past deeds that I would like to amend?

Are there behaviours that I would like to address? And so very much of Yom Kippur is this interesting thing that comes up over and over again, because on Yom Kippur, we spend a great deal, a large amount of time in synagogue, at least, you know, according to the strict rules. And there are five different prayers that we pray on Yom Kippur, and in each one of them, there is what we call a Viddui, right? There’s what we call a mea culpa. There is a confession that we make, or we articulate elements that we have done that we wish to address as being less than positive out loud. And that, interestingly, the articulating of our iniquities out loud, is the central aspect of the day. And the only reason why it is the central aspect of the day is because if we are going to genuinely address our lives in a realistic fashion, our ancestors recognise that an important part of it is speaking it out, and bringing it into the world, verbally, to say, “I have done X.” So on Rosh Hashanah, because we do that communally, because we do that as congregations, we speak in general terms, and in plural terms. So we say, , right, we have done this and that and the other. But Yom Kippur, of course, is also a time for us personally to be able to think in those terms. And that if I’m going to realistically look at my life, if I’m going to consider what might I wish to amend before the final edit, what might I wish to address? And the interesting thing is, and this, people get wrong, you’re not meant to know what to do about it on Yom Kippur. You’re not meant to know how to fix it on Yom Kippur.

The whole of Yom Kippur, that’s for later, that might be for the whole rest of the year. The point of Yom Kippur is simply to come to terms with its reality in our lives, and to speak it out, so that it is real before us. And it’s amazing, because you know, you think about, there are people that I work with that are involved in different and various aspects of addiction. And it’s remarkable, because the 12-step programmes have proven to be tremendously effective. I mean, there’s a lot of opinion on this, but they’ve proven to be tremendously effective in helping people manage, at least, addictive tendencies and behaviours. And one of the things that is central to the programme are these meetings that people go to, so you know, persons an alcoholic, they go to AA, and in the meeting they have to say, you know, “I’m Joe, and I’m an alcoholic.”

And for some reason, it’s extremely important to speak this out, whenever it is the person wants to speak. And then there is room given for a person to speak in a place that lacks shame, and lacks finger-pointing, a room of peers, and it where a person is simply able to say, “And this is what I’ve done, and this is what I experience being the challenge of my life.” And if they go every day, then they do it every day. But that creates something important in the person’s life. It creates among other things in the opportunity to be able to come into a reality that otherwise lives in a very foggy place in our minds. And one does not have to be an addict in order to be able to experience the reality of having fogginess around iniquity, because we are not programmed to do well with being wrong, or to do well with making mistakes. Our brains feel very insecure about those things. And so we become quite protective around them without us even knowing. Without us even consciously doing it, our brains are programmed to rationalise and create reasons for mistakes that we make. If we are honest, if we are truthful about us, our own nature and our own lives, admitting wrongs are among the most difficult things that human beings ever have to do. And so the ability to be able to speak out a particular truth around something that is wrong that can be made right is profoundly powerful.

Profoundly powerful. And if it’s difficult to relate to that, think about somebody who has wronged you, how much it means for that person to be able to say, “I have wronged you, and I am sorry.” If a person was genuinely able to acknowledge it, own it, speak it, how powerful is that for us human beings in our lives? How difficult is it for us to admit and speak? And how healing is it for us to hear if it is genuine and true? It’s fascinating, isn’t it? But it is the truth. And so on Yom Kippur, it is essentially a time in which all of us get together and speak out all of our difficulties, challenges, vices, what have you. And we are able to say, “I have done X.” And even if it is before no one else but God, if it is just me and God, and that’s one of the values of having God around, there’s someone to listen that you can speak to in confidence. And what’s important for us to know about our tradition with regards to that is that God is interested in hearing, not so that he can get us on it, but so that he can share a reality with us. Because if we come and simply say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’ve done nothing wrong,” we hold ourselves back into the world that exists only in our own minds, to be able to say to the world before God, or for that matter, in front of somebody that we have wronged, if we have the capacity to do it, that indeed I have done wrong, it brings us back into a shared reality with that person, with God, and for that matter, with the reality that we live in in ourselves.

Because otherwise there’s a dissonance between what we believe and what actually is. And so there’s something extremely healing about the ability to speak out, speak out verbally what it is that I have done wrong without having to worry about how I’m going to fix it yet. I’m telling you, Yom Kippur is not a day about fixing. Yom Kippur is a day about coming to truth, addressing genuinely, what do I not wish to have in the final edit of my life? What do I wish to address? Speak it. That’s Yom Kippur. And in that, it begins atonement, because as you well know, the word in English atonement is a beautiful one. It is two words, at-onement. And what atonement is meant to be is bringing ourselves back into unity, so that there isn’t some reality in my head and another reality in my life that I’m able to create an integrity of self that runs consistently with the nature of reality and the nature of my mind.

And is that not an amazing day, that a people should set aside a day to be able to do that, to refrain from the worldly engagements, no eating, no drinking, none of the physical pleasures that we are usually used to that distract us from these core elements of self, to spend time in meditation, and speech, and prayer, to come to those realities. Is that not an amazing day for a nation of people to hold as a national holiday? It’s staggering if you ask me. And it isn’t surprising that it is the one day, it is the one day that Jews, all through time, no matter the level of their religiosity, have made a point of attending, or coming to. There’s something about it. There’s something about the nature of the truth of the day that we may not know consciously, but somehow in our hearts know that it is not a day to be missed. So those are the Days of Awe. They are indeed filled with awe, because they deal with the most core fundamental elements of our humanity, of our health, integrity, wholeness, truth of life, more than any other festival that we celebrate. And they are awesome in that they are there for us, have always been there for us as a people. And because they have been there for us for 3000 years, they have changed us. They have changed the way that we think and see the world. They have changed the way that we relate to life. They have changed our people.

And that is on a national level, that is on a collective level. On an individual level, it’s an important for us sometimes to remember that, and to recognise the beauty of the legacy that we all have as Jewish people, that this is part of us, it’s part of our story, it’s part of our year. And indeed, it is very much part of the way that we live our lives. And it’s not a fluke that, you know, the ubiquitous Jewish cheers, l'chaim. It’s always to life. And that is the refrain of the days in our prayers nowadays, right, during these 10 days, put us down for life, God. Sure, we get up to funny things all throughout the year and we have our issues, and we are human beings, after all. But when you press us, when you ask us, “What say you about the nature of your life? there’s Rosh Hashanah, there’s Yom Kippur, day of Rosh Hashanah, in which we assess the meaning of our lives, and Yom Kippur, in which we address the elements of our lives that we wish to amend. And in that, we are lifted as a people. So they are pretty awesome.

And with that, I will open for questions, but I would like to wish everyone here who is attending a healthy, happy, sweet, and blessed year, given the difficult years that we have been through together, times that we’ve been alone when we would rather have not been, times that we’ve been challenged with things that we did not necessarily feel equipped to deal with, but how lovely it is that we can come together on platforms like this, and to share with each other, and to study, and learn, and grow with each other. And so with my truest and most heartfelt wishes, a good and happy year for everyone, and I thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to share with you. And thank you, Judy, and Trudy, and Wendy for your help and encouragement, and for the opportunity to share with you.

• Thank you, Rabbi Dweck, for the most outstanding presentation. Really. Yes.

• Shall we look at questions?

• [Wendy] Yes.

Q&A and Comments:

• Okay. All right. So I’m having a look here.

Q: From Audrey Travis.

A: During the Days of Awe, someone was wronged and cancelled me for having a different political opinion. What is my obligation to them regarding repentance?

A: That’s a wonderful question. I was thinking about my Yom Kippur sermon, and I was thinking about talking about cancel culture. And I’m sorry that somebody did that. My son was saying, my son who’s 14 years old, said, "Daddy, you have no idea. You think people cancelled you? You have no idea.” Gen Z is the worst cancelers that there are, you just cancel people right and left Your obligation to them regarding repentance, it’s as old as Maimonides in the Talmud, that question, really. They have wronged you, and they are required to ask for your forgiveness, and if they genuinely do, and they do it with a whole heart, then the appropriate thing, as the Torah teaches us, is indeed to forgive, but otherwise, if they have wronged you and do not address it, you are not obligated to forgive it. It’s not always good to harbour things, because that ends us up affecting us in negative ways beyond the negative act that a person has done for us, but otherwise, the obligation is on the person who is wronged to address the wrong. Yeah.

Q: If we are to understand that God is not to be thought of in human terms, then why is God spoken and written about in human terms?

A: That’s a fantastic question. It is true that Maimonides teaches this, right? That God is not to be thought of in human terms. But the reality is, is that he’s not to be thought of at all, if that’s the case, because he’s so removed from human reality that there’s really nothing that we could use in order to be able to find him. And so the reason why we use the terms that we do, indeed the Torah itself speaks about God interestingly as the character in the book, even though he’s the one that created everything, is because it’s the only way that we have to relate to him. So we relate to God on our terms, because it’s all we’ve got. And we use the cues of Torah to kind of guide us to how it is that we interact or relate with him as we can. But for all intents and purposes, it is simply stimuli for us. They are markers for us that help us in some capacity to be able to relate, because after all, we’re human beings, and how could we relate to anything outside of being human? ‘Cause all we’ve got is our humanity. We don’t have anything else. And so we have to do it in humanistic ways.

I do recognise that these questions, many of them could have a whole nother lecture. So you’ll forgive me for the brevity of the answers.

Q: Can human beings, from Rome, can human beings really change if they have a certain personality and a predisposition, like a short temper, and have had certain upbringing, religion?

A: Phenomenal question, Rome. I do think that people can change, but I do think that real change, especially with the issues that you are addressing, which have to do with, could involve childhood trauma, and could involve personality traits that are very hardwired, for lack of a better term, in the mind, requires a tremendous amount of work. It requires a great deal of focus and effort, and sometimes, it requires help. Sometimes it requires help from from other people. Sometimes it requires the adopting of various practises in a person’s life, but yes, I do believe that people can change significantly. But that’s not to say that it isn’t quite difficult to do, and it’s because of that difficulty that many of us just simply don’t. But yes, I do think that people can, and I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. If you believe as I do that God is internal and intimate, the judgement is ourselves assessing ourselves.

Thank you, Karen. That’s a good point to a certain degree, but it isn’t, I suppose, from the point of normative Judaism, where we do recognise God as being external to us, yes, that he is not only inside, but that he is not simply the making of our mind, but an external entity, that there is this duality in it, that there’s mutuality in it. Why he, vernacular, doesn’t need to be, but they do mean different things.

Q: In light of the length of the Orthodox prayer service, it’s terribly long, and the speed at which one must read and recite in order to keep up with the Bais Tefilah, where is the time to be introspective to the degree that you described?

A: That is a phenomenal question. The truth of the matter is, if I, what I do is I carve out time. I carve out time. I carve out time during sometimes the readings. I carve out time during, you know, when the hazzan or when the is leading things. It’s important to recognise that you do not need to say every single word that is said. There is an importance in the introspection of the day, and simply the time. Hopefully you also have a break, in which it might be time to take some personal quiet time, but I certainly encourage the personal quiet time.

Yeah, I’m rounding the 3000 years, forgive me for being inaccurate. Thank you, Arlene.

Q: Why are there two days of Rosh Hashanah?

A: Two days of Rosh Hashanah, I will explain. It’s a good thing it’s a member of my congregation asking that question. It was a later judgement of the people, of for two days of Rosh Hashanah, but it gets to be a bit intricate, so I’m going to get into, I’ll explain it to you next time that I see you, Arlene.

Yes. 10 days to consider. Yes, it’s, in other words, there is a process, right, where it begins from Rosh Hashanah, goes to Yom Kippur so that we get, we reach Yom Kippur after having spent these 10 days starting on Rosh Hashanah addressing ourselves.

You are a 92 year old man, God bless you, many more happy and healthy and good health. Some of the younger of the same parentage died of natural causes at the age of 36, leaving.

Q: Father Joe, why did that happen?

I wish I could say, but I can’t answer such a question, 'cause I do not know the nature of how it is that the world runs and things happen. But I do send my love and condolences and warmest wishes. That reality and truth that you live with is the world is a place filled, unfortunately, with tragedy, and hardship, and difficulty, because there is a randomness to it, which is interestingly tied to Yom Kippur. But that might be for another lecture.

Q: From my humanistic belief system, and thank you, appreciate that, how can we apologise to a person no longer living? How can we forgive a person who’s gone?

A: That’s a good question, Barbara. Maimonides actually deals with that question. He says that you should take 10 people to the person’s grave if it’s possible, and ask them for forgiveness in the presence of those people at the grave. And if it’s not possible, then at least to do so with 10 people, focusing on the person, if you can’t get to the grave.

Q: Are the Jewish people obliged to fight for the rights of suppressed and persecuted people because of the injustices heaped upon them?

A: Yes, absolutely they are. The Torah prompt us to do this, that we have a sense of what it means to be downtrodden, persecuted, and harmed, and that we should absolutely fight for that when we’re able to see it, when we see it, and are able to address it.

Thank you. Very much appreciated. Thank you. Personal memory stretches back a few years. In relative terms, our identity as a Jew relates to other persons’ memories and comments, communicated as Jewish history. Much of our personal identity is really determined by the stories. True, true, true. All true.

Trudy frequently reminds us recorded history is open to varying interpret. Absolutely true.

Q: So is our Jewish identity only circumstantial?

A: I wouldn’t say it’s only circumstantial, but it has a great deal to do with how it is we interpret, and what it means to us. There is a fantastic book by Eviatar Zerubavel called “Time Maps,” that I would suggest you read in relation to that question. Eviatar Zerubavel, “Time Maps.”

Q: What do we ask for or admit or do when someone has disconnected from us, and we have no idea why?

A: It’s a very good question, and it’s a terribly painful situation, and I’m sorry for that. I say, in that situation, it is where faith comes in, and I understand that others might not find that meaningful or valuable, but I say that it is where faith comes in for me because of this. There are certain things in our lives that we do not have control over. And one of the great elements of wisdom in life is to know the difference between what we can control and what we can’t. And when we cannot control, we give it to one who can. So I don’t deal with the plumbing in my house, because I know that I have zero knowledge or control over it, so I do that, I give it to a plumber. And in religious life, when we experience situations like that, Torah, we give it up to God, because it’s not in our hands to address, because we cannot control other people. It’s one of the things that we can’t control. And so we ask for guidance and help with it when it is not something that we can do on our own, in our own hands.

Shall I continue? Or how does it look, Trudy?

• If you don’t mind, can you give us another five minutes?

• Absolutely. Yeah.

• [Trudy] Fabulous.

Q: - All right. Have you considered that not only is atonement at-onement, and also at-ownment, a time when one openly takes ownership of the,

A: yes, beautiful. I appreciate that. Thank you very much for that. Thank you very much for that. Thank you.

Q: How do we honour those in our memory who are no longer with us?

A: We bring them into our memory, ‘cause that’s how they exist for us. And they are their whole, if we focus with all of our energies on the person, we bring that person up before us. We can do that. And if there is such a thing as a soul, then it has, that’s where the connection occurs. It’s in the mind. Because when we think about whatever spirituality that we can speak of, it’s always in our mind, it’s always in our consciousness. And so that’s, for me, how it is that I relate to it. I have a friend of mine, Mark Helprin, he’s a phenomenal author. He wrote a book, he writes fiction and non-fiction, but he wrote a book called “Winter’s Tale,” not Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale,” but simply “Winter’s Tale.” It’s one of his most famous books. And he wrote to me on this very beautifully that bringing people up in our mind with full consciousness and focus is a way that we bring them back to us in whatever way we can, and the strongest way that we can. So that’s a way that we can honour it.

Thank you for your kind words. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Q: Can people really change if they have a certain innate personality, like a short, oh, I was asked, yes, I think I answered it.

Q: Hmm, hmm. Niece who won’t get vaccinated. Should I forgive her for this?

A: Well, I don’t know if you could forgive her or not forgive her. I don’t know that she’s done something directly to you by not being vaccinated. It’s a choice that she’s made, and again, I will repeat, I think it is important for us to remember, we cannot control other people. We make a terrible mistake thinking that we can. And it causes us terrible anguish, anguish when we try, so I think that perhaps there is a certain understanding that one might look for in that. What is her perspective? Why is she not doing it? And for a moment, perhaps, try to stand in her place and in her space. That’s a remarkable thing that we can do as human beings. Because of the nature of how it is that our minds work, we can relate to being other people, be in their space. We can even relate to being animals and trees. That’s why fiction is filled with those kinds of things, anthropomorphizing everything. But I would suggest perhaps the attempt of trying to be her for a minute, to see her in her space while leaving your reality, and your thoughts and judgments behind, taking nothing with you but a passport to be there in her space.

Q: What if a person has wronged you, maligned you, as she doesn’t agree with my opinions. This person continues to do this in private texts, says she’s merely telling the truth. She will never say sorry or admit wrong. So I just want to deal with her going forward.

A: Unfortunately, Riva, there are people that are best for us to remove ourselves from. When that’s the case, it’s quite toxic. If a person is speaking negatively regularly, and is incessantly doing so, it creates a toxicity that is not necessary, and is certainly not helpful for us to be around. And so I don’t know who this person is to you in your life, she might be quite close, but boundaries are important in situations and relationships like that. Otherwise we allow ourselves to take on the toxicity. So I would suggest that, one, think very carefully about the boundaries of who it is that you let in and who it is that you let out, keep out. I see that it’s 6:30, and I do have to run to synagogue, interestingly.

• Rabbi Dweck.

• But it’s an honour and such wonderful questions. I wish I could sit and answer the lot.

• [Wendy] He deserves it now.

• But thank you.

• Yes. Rabbi? Oh, Wendy’s here.

• [Trudy] Where’s Wendy?

• So no, thank you, Judy, I’m going to hand back to you, Trudy, before, I just wanted to say to you, Rabbi Dweck, that was the most outstanding presentation. It was truly superb, and we would love to have you back. It would be my honour. Thank you. It’s my honour and pleasure truly, Wendy.

• Thank you.

• Thank you so much, and when I’m back in London in just two or three weeks, I’m looking forward to us getting together.

• Likewise. Likewise.

• With Denise, it’s Wendy.

• Yes, indeed.

• Well, thank you, and Trudy.

• [Rabbi Dweck] Indeed.

• Big hug to you. Thank you so much.

• Thanks to you, Wendy.

• , everybody, and thank you very much. Over to you, Trudes. Thank you.

• God bless.

• [Wendy] Thank you.

• Thank you. God bless, Wendy. Rabbi Dweck.

• [Rabbi Dweck] Yeah.

• I can’t see you now, but.

• Oh, I’m sorry. I’m there.

• It was absolutely astoundingly brilliant.

• [Rabbi Dweck] Oh, thank you.

• I think the questions showed you just how much people have appreciated it.

• [Rabbi Dweck] I’m so grateful.

• And I’ve just had a couple of texts from friends saying we need this for our children to listen to, so.

• Aw, thank you. Well, coming from you, Trudy, it means the world to me genuinely. Thank you.

• Well, you know what I think of you, and thank you, and Shanah tovah.

• Shanah tovah.

• And obviously we will ask you back. But I know you’re an incredibly busy person, but if you can.

• Whenever we can, we will. And I look forward to it, please, God.

• Be safe and keep well.

• [Rabbi Dweck] And you.

• God bless, everyone.

• Be well. Be well.

• Bye.

• Bye-bye.