The Bedrock: a Poem for the Days of Awe
More valuable than gold,
More nourishing than the finest food,
More beautiful than the Mona Lisa,
More inspirational than the greatest poetry,
More hopeful than even the rising sun,
Those tablets of stone,
That ancient message emerging from a windswept mountaintop:
Thou shalt not covet.
Thou shalt not lie.
Thou shalt not steal.
And thou shalt not murder.
That is the eternal bedrock of our faith,
A divine gift from that which is the essence of everything,
An infinite treasure given to us in a desert wilderness,
Our sacred task is to protect and nurture it,
Our eternal duty is to call out all those who would betray it,
Our repentance is for our failures to do that,
Our atonement is to speak out, persuasively and with compassion – not arrogantly but fearlessly,
As the Almighty said in the Vision of Isaiah:
“Children have I raised but they have rebelled against me”.
So as the prophet says, we must “seek justice and correct the oppressor”,
“Cry aloud. Do not hold back, let your voices resound like a shofar”,
“Unlock the shackles of injustice”.
Those timeless tablets of stone, the bedrock of our faith, must not be betrayed.
And the message given on that ancient mountaintop had a sequel:
Under the desert sun, our ancestors heard the desert wind, felt the sands of Sinai carve furrows in their brows and heard a warning from their maker:
“If you bow down to other gods, you will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess”.
That was an eternal warning to all Israel – and to all mankind:
Respect the divine essence of all that is,
Heed the commandments of the Almighty,
Do not supplant the Eternal One by worshipping the false gods of land, of nation, of tribe, of conquest, of greed, of theft and of domination.
For, as the Proverb says, “hearts that make wicked plans and hands that shed innocent blood are an abomination” to that eternal force that created and inspired the bedrock of our faith.
So, in these troubled times and for ever, we must be the guardians of those ancient tablets:
Thou shalt have no other Gods.
Thou shalt not covet.
Thou shalt not lie.
Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not murder.
Let us therefore now not commit the sin of silence,
Let us speak truth to those who would betray the message of the stones,
Let us all cry aloud like an army of shofars,
To stop the “abomination” and to “unlock the shackles of injustice”
For Peace
As the fever of day calms towards twilight
May all that is strained in us come to ease.
We pray for all who suffered violence today,
May an unexpected serenity surprise them.
For those who risk their lives each day for peace,
May their hearts glimpse providence at the heart of history.
That those who make riches from violence and war
Might hear in their dreams the cries of the lost.
That we might see through our fear of each other
A new vision to heal our fatal attraction to aggression.
That those who enjoy the privilege of peace
Might not forget their tormented brothers and sisters.
That the wolf might lie down with the lamb,
That our swords be beaten into ploughshares
And no hurt or harm be done
Anywhere along the holy mountain.
John O’Donohue
Reflection on the Yom Kippur Additional Service
When we reach the Additional Service in the Machzor, Yom Kippur takes on a different rhythm. It winds through time, revisiting our history in all its light and darkness, carrying us along in a stream of poems, prayers and stories.
Pages turn. We see autocracies, theocracies, ethnocracies rise and fall, abetted or undone by natural and human-made disasters.
The people we encounter along the way seem forever on the move—invading armies and land-hungry colonisers in one direction, involuntary exiles in another, “ farmers and herdsmen”.driven far from their fields into the weed-choked waste ground where “the sewers of Babylon empty”….
Once we see them, how can we not see their present-day counterparts across the planet—pushed out by the fanatical agendas of heartless neighbours, forgotten in refugee camps, dumped into the cold comfort of an asylum-seekers’ hostel in a country that declares it doesn’t want them?
Among these wanderers, we meet “a shipload of Jewish exiles from Spain… compelled to land on a desolate coast”. As they disembark, one of the women among them dies. Her devastated husband struggles on alone, carrying their two sick children through the wilderness. He collapses from exhaustion, then opens his eyes to see the pair of them dead at his side.
Could this really be 15th century Iberia? It feels somewhere much closer to us in time and space, maybe not far along the Channel coast from Dover.
But suddenly the devastated father staggers to his feet, looks up to Heaven and roars at Ha-Shem: “Know for a certainty that nothing you have brought, or may still bring, upon me will make me change. In spite of it all, a Jew I am and a Jew I shall remain.”
We can empathise with his determination. Right now our own Jewish world is being shaken to its core. But, unlike medieval Sefarad, the threat to its survival doesn’t come entirely from elsewhere.
The Days of Awe have been given to us as the time for looking into our own hearts and asking ourselves hard questions. But this year, for reasons that need no explanation, we need to find a constructive way to direct these questions not only to ourselves but to our whole community— even to those who treat us with contempt, dismiss us as “naïve”, call us names and wish us to keep silent or vanish altogether.
But they’re not the ones we have to answer to. This year we need to follow our Sephardic precursor’s example, and shout our own very Jewish truths into the sky.
Ellen Galford
When It Happens To You
When it happens to you, no longer the dreamer from afar. No longer the person that
looks at things, with the romantic hope and vision of a thirteen year old. When it
happens to you, sweetness is replaced with bitterness. How do you get back, to
being in that thirteen year old, frame of mind again.
Yom Kippur 5785
Yoma
‘The Day’
Out of the
Daylight of
Every day
A cave of a day
Glowing
In the white-blank
Glare
Of Eternity
Drawing us in
To its mysteries
Searching
Us out in its
Fierce gaze
A spotlight
Into our souls.
And yet
Even in the harsh
Light of scrutiny
Yoma
The Day
Shadowed
By the freight of
The past
The Day
Out of time
Burdened
By times
Furrowed in fear
And trembling
Trapped
In an attic
In a cellar
In a ghetto
Crammed with deportees
In a camp
Cloaked
With the soot
And stench
Of smoking chimneys
In bomb-shelters
Enemy attack
In the midst of
The sacred rites.And now
This past year
That began
In depravity
Massacre
Violation
On October 7
The call to
‘Choose Life!’
Hollowed out
By the
Howl of
Death
Destruction.And
In the rock of The Day
That has survived
With all its burdens
Preserved by our
Fidelity
To its hallowed
Purpose
Cracks
Fissures
That can only
Be sealed
By our commitment
To choose
Life
Once again.
Prayer for Peace between Israelis and Palestinians
As the New Year dawns, we are painfully aware of the horrific pogrom perpetrated by Hamas in Southern Israel a year ago, and the devasting impact on the people of Gaza of Israel’s retaliatory war. And yet, as we listen to the voice of the shofar today on Rosh Ha-Shanah, we dare to hope that the Jubilee call for d’ror, freedom, will be heard, drowning out the voices of despair and bitterness, cynicism and fear on both sides.
Despite our sufferings as a people over millennia, we have always been ‘captives of hope’ – asirey ha-tikvah (Zechariah 9:11). Moreover, as heirs of the prophets, committed to the prophetic call for justice, we cannot and will not cease to raise our voices against injustice, and to support those Israelis and Palestinians, who are working to establish a just peace for both peoples. And so, we continue to pray:
El Malei Rachamim, God Full of Compassion, who heals the broken-hearted and binds up their wounds, we ask You to show all Your children the way of love and compassion, so that hatred ceases to scar their lives.
Ein Ha-Chayyim, Source of Life, we call upon You to send Your abundant blessings into every home, Israeli and Palestinian, so that new hope may overcome old fears.
Adonai Tzadik, Righteous One, who exhorts us to pursue Justice, we fervently pray that a spirit of righteousness may prevail, so that both peoples find the courage to reach a just settlement of their differences.
Oseh Shalom, Maker of Peace, who teaches us to be seekers of peace, we entreat You now to spread Your tabernacle of shalom – salaam over all the inhabitants of Your land, and to support the peacemakers among both peoples in their efforts to walk the path of reconciliation, so that a just peace may reign supreme at last – bimheirah b’yameinu, speedily in our own day. And let us say: Amen.
Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah
Meditation before Kaddish
Judaism values life concretely, not as an abstraction. The well-known comment from the Talmud says ‘ A single person was created in the world in order to teach that if one had caused a single soul to perish, it is as if one had thereby destroyed an entire world; and if one saved a single life, it is as if one had thereby saved an entire world’ A phrase that summons up the meaning and entirety of each person’s life to them. Judaism values life in the ways it remembers the dead -personally and regularly, including with the recitation of the Mourners’ Kaddish.
Kaddish is not said alone – it is said in community with others. Before it’s said, we name aloud those whom we are remembering. This year, those who were killed on 7 October by Hamas and those who were taken captive and later died, have rightly been remembered each week. But in our Progressive communities there has not been the same – or in some cases, any – acknowledgement of the vast numbers of Palestinians who have lost their lives.
The original final verse of the Mourners’ Kaddish said ‘May the Most High, Source of perfect peace, grant peace to us, to all Israel and let us say: Amen’. Nearly 60 years ago Liberal Judaism added seven more words so that it said ‘…to all Israel and to all humanity’. Which is what we will do now when we honour in sorrow the sacredness of every life lost.
We mourn and remember:
- 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals killed at the Nova music festival and at the kibbutzim by Hamas on 7 October, including at least 282 women and 36 children.
- 70 at least of the 250 people taken hostage on 7 October who have since died or been killed.
- 41,000 at least Palestinians killed in Gaza – 6000 women and 11000 children – more children killed than in any other conflict in the last 18 years – with another estimated 20,000 people missing or buried under the rubble
- 346 Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza
- 700 at least Palestinians killed by the IDF and by violent settlers in the Occupied West Bank
- 24 Israelis (settlers and IDF) killed in the Occupied West Bank
- 2,000 people in Lebanon killed including 127 children and 261 women. Also 8 IDF soldiers
We remember among all of these the unprecedented number of journalists, humanitarian aid workers, and health workers who have been killed in the course of carrying out their duties. And we remember that all of these numbers have continued to climb in the 3 days since they were gathered.
I will now recite Kaddish.
Sue Bard