A-Z OF JEWISH VALUES -

M FOR MEMORY & MOTIVATION

"Come ye not here to sleep or slumber" (Rosh Hashana 5766)

Arresting words, found, guess where, scrawled on the walls of a country toilet.

True here and now too - this is not a day to sleep or slumber.

This is a day, a season for looking backward and forward.

The shofar bids us wake up and remember: Yom Hazikaron, the Day of Memory, was the original name for the day and in our machzor it retains this name alongside Rosh Hashanah.

Yom Hazikaron: the Day of Memory – in Israel there’s another Yom Hazikaron in the calendar- the day for all the fallen in battle.

But today is not for memorialising the dead. It’s for the living, personal memory. To be sure, you can’t help but reflect on world events. If I do that, how does it all affect me, how am I influenced by the changing world? The Tsunami tidal wave, New Orleans, the genocide in Dafur, Sharm el Sheikh, (first the peace conference then the bomb) the July attack on London, Baghdad, Bali… the withdrawal from Gaza. How have all these events affected you and I?

Am I any more sensitive to the word around me? How has our country been affected? So much is changing so quickly you daren’t blink, let alone sleep or slumber.

We commemorated the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. Have you been yet to the new Yad Vashem in Jerusalem? If not, it’s well worth a visit when you get the chance. There’s a sense of living memory. In the videos, in the visitors… After having spent the best part of a profoundly sad day there in the newly re-opened building this year, my final impression was of uplift. Uplift coming from the attention given to the righteous gentiles as they’re called. (Hassidei Umot haOlam) The stand taken by the Danes and the Dutch is well known. The heroic stand taken by the Bulgarians is less well known.

The lesson you come away with is not to discount the positive. A general lesson for life.

Recovering what has been forgotten in the next 10 days, brings the promise of Teshuvah and forgiveness, Old injuries to the soul can leave permanent scars, it’s true. New hope can overcome the scars. Or in Hebraic thinking, to cover them up – Kippur means to cover up wrongs. Impossible to forget perhaps; yet possible to forgive or at least achieve some sort of reconciliation.

This also a day for thinking about what we did right! In some households you have a pomegranate on the table (usually 2nd night Rosh Hashanah). Layers of symbolism in this: the sweet seeds are our good deeds, our wisdom, our productiveness. Try drawing up a balance sheet of what you are sorry for on the one side and what you are pleased and proud of having done on the other. Which list is easier to remember? The debit side or the credit? Do the minuses outnumber the plusses?

Let me tell you a story. It’s a true success story which began as a near disaster. And it’s all to do with memory.

There was a young boy, a Dutch boy, playing with his toys in the living room of his home. He had in his hands a model fire engine which sprayed water. He sprayed water in the living room, as little boys do, and at the best table lamp. Running around making the noise of a siren he bumped into the table lamp, which toppled off the table. The boy grabbed it. He never forgot what happened next. An uncontrollable shaking took over his entire body. He’d been electrocuted. Fortunately his mother understood electricity and did not touch him but instead pulled the plug from the socket. His hand was burned to the bone. The surgeon said amputate, his mother fought, and nineteen operations later and a year and a half of pain, he had a rebuilt hand. He had to exercise by moulding plasticine in his fist. And his mother gave him a dinky toy after every operation. What remained with him were traumatic memories tempered with a good mothering experience.

The boy’s name was Tim Smit. He went on to study archaeology at university, then became a pop musician, record impresario , and didn’t really settle in any of these areas.

What really made the man was his becoming involved in a gardening project - of extraordinary dimensions. It was Tim Smit who uncovered the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall and, in the process, discovered himself. Heligan was little more than a memory. He made it live again.

During the restoration of these vast Victorian forgotten gardens, including jungles where you could imagine yourself anywhere in the world except Cornwall, he developed skills of management and team-building which led on to an even more outstanding undertaking – the Eden Project. Called Eden because it’s a symbol of mankind in harmony with bounteous nature; and because, as he says, human beings were thrown out of Paradise for eating of the Tree of Knowledge, perhaps only now through the gathering of greater knowledge, can we return.

The Eden Project turned a derelict area of clay pits into a conservationist Paradise. The Eden Project is a ‘Living Theatre of the Natural World’. Its vast transparent bubble greenhouse domes (Biomes), and its vast outdoor gardens preserve flora from every conceivable habitat and climate.

When Tim Smit saw the clay pits in Cornwall it reminded him of the injured hand of his childhood. A very disturbing picture. But a memory associated with creativity. Just as his rebuilt hand could have become phenomenally supple and mobile to the point where he was able later to make his living as a piano player, could not something be made of the clay pit wasteland? – in itself a symbol of our ravaged and endangered global environment.

Fired by this belief, Tim Smit became the mastermind behind the Eden Project just as he had masterminded the recovery of the Lost Gardens of Heligan nearby. A restoration of a memory that was making it live again.

The gardens , created mainly in the 19th century but going back to the 16th, were among of the finest gardens in England, - 57 acres of planted gardens, - 100 acres of ornamental woodlands –peppered with follies and temples. The Tremayne family, noted botanists and horticulturists, created and planted the gardens and ornamental woodlands with their walks and rides. By 1900 they had amassed an outstanding collection of trees and shrubs from all over the globe.

When World War I started in 1914, the male staff all signed up with the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, with whom they served in the mud and trenches of the Western Front. Only a handful of them survived and the gardens were sold and went into decline.

Heligan House was commandeered by the War Office and became a convalescent home for officers. In the gardeners’ toilet or "thunderbox room" a message had been scratched into the plaster on the day that World War I broke out, "Come ye not here to sleep or slumber" and underneath it all the garden staff had signed their names.

This was the discovery that led Tim Smit and hid team to turn the Lost Gardens from a mere memory into a living reality.

Sometimes our remembrance of experiences holds us back, prevents us progressing, sometimes they stimulate us to be creative. Tim Smit took part in one of the radio programmes in the Devout Skeptics series recently. (Did you hear it maybe?) It happened to come on the week of our holiday visits to Eden and Heligan. It’s an outstanding series; I know so many of our chevrah that might deserve the title devout sceptics. I believe I’m one myself. He said that his projects were planned with people he knew who were over 60, in semiretirement. He managed to convince them that their best days were not behind them as they had believed – and it came true. Their memories of how things had been for them were not allowed to get in their way. As far as the actual execution of the projects were concerned they gave all that to ‘youngsters’ in their twenties, even teens. Their rationale was these were people who had no experience or memories to rely on, and since they don’t know it can’t be done it gets done!

Memory is not always helpful; sometimes it’s a hindrance. As one small child I remember put it: I wish I had a good forgettery. Marcel Proust observed in his 'Remembrance of Times Past' (A la Recherche du Temps Perdu):

“Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them”.

Sometimes the past has to be forgotten for a new future to be born. To let bygones be bygones. This new Jewish year will include the 350th anniversary of the Resettlement of the Jewish community in England under Oliver Cromwell. There had been no Jewish community here since the expulsion by Edward I in 1290 (350 years earlier). If memory had held sway, if they had not been able to forget how they had been treated at the time of the Expulsion, the chances are, there would have been no return of a community of Jews to these shores. Fortunately the scars had healed.

These Yamim Noraim are opportunities for such healing. For reconciliation to take place between myself and others it has to take place first of all within myself. It’s being able to draw a line under what has gone before and move on. Not to let it fester:

"Come not here to sleep or slumber"

Not to forget it, only not to let it stand in the way.

As Jews we are keen conservers of memory. That is what tradition does. As Reform Jews were are selective conservers of memory. You only have to compare Yom Tov machzorim to see that.

The Orthodox additional service which comes at this point on Rosh Hashanah can last over an hour (we should count ourselves lucky!) It contains pages of piyyutim, opportunities for the chazzan to demonstrate his prowess. They are artfully written and mostly require a good deal of scholarship to fathom their sophisticated allusiveness. The Reform criteria of comprehensibility and accessibility ruled them out of our services.

Much of the appeal that the chazzan exerts is pure nostalgia, for a Jewish world one hankers after, or even one which one wishes one had had.

Nostalgia, like any other ‘algia is a sickness. It actually means homesickness. Not being happy where you are.

I searched for something in the Orthodox musaph that could be relevant. I found one line:

‘Peney Elohim beyoshvey ganim’

Turn O God to those who sit in the gardens.

‘Kenenu shenit ki shikachnu mizikaron’

Receive us once again for we have lapsed from memory.’

Those who sit in the gardens – who are they ?– I looked it up– it means the gardens of Torah, these are the students, who keep Torah going. And ‘receive us because we have lapsed from memory’, this is the whole community, all of us. This piyyut bears the constant refrain, zikaron, zikaron, zikaron…(memory, memory, memory- a lament that for our sins we are being forgotten. But it’s balanced by the hope that learning can save us.

It’s a lament based on the belief that the ancients were far superior to every generation which followed them. Indeed, the deeply ingrained belief that Jewish history is one of intractable spiritual decline. That the past is always better than the present. That the rabbis and teachers of yore can never be surpassed. This kind of idealization is a very convenient defence. You can never match up to your parents and grandparents and so on, so it’s not your fault if you don’t succeed. So you make choices in school and in career and in relationships which are bound to get you nowhere- and you can’t be blamed if you fail, because you can never equal the greats that came before you.

We have bucked that trend. Reform comes under the heading of Progressive Judaism. The name itself says it all. We too venerate tradition and the greats of the past – why? - because to borrow the motto on the £2 coin, long before Oasis used it was quoted by Sir Isaac Newton: we are standing on the shoulders of giants.

The value of memory for us is not nostalgia for a Golden Age or a perspective of history in which the further back tradition goes, the more authoritative it is. We’re in the business of recovering old traditions and endeavouring to breathe new life into them. Like gardeners pruning and pollarding, we investigate critically to try to disentangle from the overgrown accretions of the past to preserve what is meaningful, what speaks to us. That’s Reform Judaism, and how we balance tradition and change.

Memory sustains us all. Many of us have happy events to look back on over the past year. Looking back is so important. As we were nearing the end of the Hartington ramble this year, Adam said to me suddenly, turn round; look at the view.

It was a familiar landscape but in exquisite light the rolling hills bore a bucolic serenity which was refreshingly new. “We don’t do that often enough do we, he said, turn and look at where we’ve come from?”.

Our Shul history project is aimed at doing just that. We are painstakingly progressing with a project to produce an up to date history of our synagogue as part of our 150th celebrations. To leave a record, an example for others to follow. Hopefully it will come very much up to date and include the reflections of those who have joined us in the relatively recent past.

Its purposes: pride in our institution; so that the legacy of the past is carried on and appreciated. The process of producing it should be a reward in itself.

Then there is Shorashim (the Reform Movement’s ‘Roots’ Project). The youth of several of our shuls including our own Alex Cohen, researched family history (family trees if you like) and came up with fascinating results which have been set up as a travelling exhibition you can see it in the lobby and downstairs. It involves teenagers around the UK.

The Heritage Lottery funded the project. It was developed in order to enhance the young participants’ sense of Jewish identity; their commitment to their community and to a Reform Jewish way of life in Britain. It also brought into sharp focus issues around immigration and asylum.

They worked in a group spending a week touring Jewish sites around the UK including York, Manchester and London. There was also a cultural exchange with a Hindu temple and various social activities. They uncovered fascinating information about their forbears some they never knew they had.

Such a project is not merely for recording memories which sleep and slumber on a shelf but to build Jewish consciousness.

We are at a crossroads in our communal life. Our rebuilding project is still examining the best ways forward. Out in the general community there is an ever growing awareness of the urgent need to bring different faiths closer together for the sake of our very survival. Our role as a kehillah is to uphold religious liberalism in the face of fundamentalism.

Many faith groups, in Manchester, are getting involved in interfaith projects. The police are too, following 7/7. I shall remember the week of the London bombings as the week when the Manchester Jewish-Muslim Forum was founded involving Jewish Rep. Council leaders and our new Muslim Lord Mayor.

Among my personal memories I visited Israel and the Palestinian territories with other rabbis and an Imam of the Regents Park Mosque in London who was my roommate and with whom I’ve built up a friendship, he was among the first to condemn the July bombings on TV.

Rosh Hashanah bids us transport ourselves back to the beginning of time as portrayed by or ancients. Hayom Harat Olam – today recalls the birth of the world. From the very beginning according to our worldview we have been co-workers with the Creator in the work of Creation: meshutafim el Hakadosh Baruch Hu be’Ma’aseh Bereishit. Sometimes our very knowledge lets us down – this is the lesson of Eden. Sometimes our memories are too retentive, stifling our creativity.

"Come not here to sleep or slumber"

I personally believe that the only way we will thrive – you and I together is if we have a sense of purpose greater than ourselves. If we look back over the past year really try to grapple with the problems as a community.

-If we remember the Tsunami and New Orleans and support environmental campaigns.

-If we remember Dafur and join our movement’s contribution to the Make Poverty History Project.

-If we remember Gaza and act for Israel. There’s a plan to organise a shul Israel trip next year.

-If we encourage more of our youth to be involved in the Roots Project next time round. Before you leave the shul, look at the exhibition and see what a combined effort of Reform Synagogues can achieve with motivation of our children.

Let it generate enthusiasm in our own history project. And let our past generate enthusiasm in our present.

If we remember 7/7 and join one of the several initiatives in Manchester for inter-communal understanding.

If we look at how our services have changed and are changing and support our Living Judaism’s effort to move in more innovative directions, rediscovering traditions and imbuing them with new life.

If we do these kind of things, we will enhance our sense of purpose, and it will be the kind of community we’ll want to belong to - not only for the purpose of servicing our needs at certain times of our life, and no further, not only for the sake of saying prayers, even regularly, but for giving our whole sense of belonging and our prayers meaning – meaning beyond preserving memories. Meaning building upon memory to create renewed vitality.