A-Z OF JEWISH VALUES -

O FOR OPENNESS

Yom Kippur 5766, Shachrit

This is a true story about an embarrassing experience which actually happened to my wife and I many years ago when we were just married and living in London. I would not want to tell the story were it not for the fact that it is highly relevant to my message this Yom Kippur morning.

One evening there was a knock on our door. We opened it to a friendly looking well-dressed man who asked if this was the home of Rabbi Silverman. He said he had a problem. We invited him in. He apologised for the out-of- the-blue approach and explained that he had found our address in the Jewish Year Book. He was Jewish. He had a very hard luck story. He had no money, no job and nowhere to stay. He had rented a flat and had just been turned out on the street for failing to pay the rent. He was expecting some money to come through in the next few days from a relative, or some source or other, (I forget exactly), could he just stay the night?

I have to confess I was rather doubtful about him not to say suspicious. My father alav hashalom had a social work background in what was then the Jewish Board of Guardians and had taught me very early on to be circumspect, of people with hard luck stories that could not be corroborated, especially Jewish people! I asked the guy for credentials, I think he showed me some identification which looked reasonable, but he was unable to give much more. He had no family, his wife had left him. And – something which alarmed me – he said he had recently come out of prison, and he gave me a way of checking that if I wanted to. I forget what he had been in for, it didn’t seem relevant at the time.

I might have shown him the door there and then were it not for a Talmudic principle which I was reminded of, the principle of Hazakah. It means presumption. In essence it means that in a case where a person is claiming something which is difficult to believe because of insufficient evidence, if they make a statement that is enough to incriminate themselves, which they do not need to make, there is a strong presumption, a hazakah in their favour.

So we let him stay the night. In the morning he had breakfast and was on his way. We gave him some hospitality, bed and breakfast. We didn’t give him any money. He didn’t ask for any. There were no problems for us at all.

The embarrassment came later that week when we received a phone call from the Chairman of our shul. It emerged that this visitor of ours had been in touch with him and told him that he had stayed with us. He had, moreover, managed to find out the addresses of every member of the shul Council and within a few days visited every one of them and persuaded them either to part with some money or promised him financial help. In all it amounted to quite a tidy sum. By the time he was getting to the last member of Council, others had got wise to his game, and they cornered him. When he got to the last house on his list he found they’d arranged a surprise reception committee for him.

On condition that he returned the money, they were kind to him and did not report him to the police. It later emerged in the Jewish Chronicle that he had done the rounds of several shuls and a warning was issued. Eventually he did end up serving another prison sentence – that part of his story had been true.

It was a learning experience which made one wary. In retrospect and with hindsight I don’t know how we could have been so naïve. I also think that it was a different world in the mid-70’s. The atmosphere today is much less free and trusting. In those days, far fewer homes and hardly any cars were alarmed. Closed-Circuit TV on so many public buildings would have been considered Orwelllian.

Today, even if there were no terrorist threat at all, it is taken for granted as part of our way of life,

I well remember the day in the 80’s when padlocks were placed on the inner doors of the shul. It was a turning point. Up to then anyone could come in at any time of the week and pray quietly (anyone still can, as they just have to ask for the shul to be unlocked first).

The problem can be extrapolated to apply to issues of asylum and immigration. I am not suggesting we can or should change it, or that our gates should be flung open to all and sundry. Just that it is a sad reflection on what has happened to us and our society, and how we can all be worn down by the unscrupulous. And being aware of how we are affected is important.

Against this background words of the Haftarah from Isaiah may seem hollow:

Is not this the fast I have chosen? Is it not to deal your bread to the hungry

And that you bring the poor that are cast out into your house…

Yom Kippur is about Openness in other senses too. There are so many ways we can understand this value. Not merely being physically hospitable and generous. Let me widen out the issue.

Openness connotes honesty. Disclosure. And this requires letting down your guard. Laying yourself bare. Opening the doors of your heart.

It is order of the day on Yom Kippur. We can kid everybody but ourselves. And the One we call on this day ‘Bohen levavot’ – Examiner of the heart.

Openness in the sense of not being closed-minded. About change. Personal change. Open to new experiences. To new possibilities. Openness as opposed to dogmatism.

Here Reform Judaism has a different angle on what we are doing in services.

Mitzvah is such a strongly duty-orientated concept that to suggest its purpose might include self-improvement actually goes against the grain in much of Orthodox thinking. Even the liberal-minded great Israeli Orthodox scholar the late Yeshayahu Leibowitz upheld that there is no purpose to the mitzvoth other than to do the will of the Creator. To claim that we derive any benefit at all from it is tantamount to putting man in the place of God.

OK, you can say in an Orthodox context that it makes you a better Jew. But what does that mean? All it can mean is that you are a better servant of the God of Israel.

Reform takes the view that the mitzvoth are a gift to us to do us good, and to do the world good. Which implies that you perform them to the extent that they are helpful, valuable. The value of Openness encourages us not to be too quick to judge but to entertain the possibility that a given mitzvah might do us good if we try it out.

Openness is a big issue in our current world. What are the limits of openness? Open borders opening up risks. The Gaza issue is in there somewhere.

What are the answers?

I want to quote to you a former rabbi of this congregation, my immediate predecessor Rabbi Tovia ben Chorin, who is retiring this year as rabbi of Zurich. I met Tovia and Adina in London the other week and they send you their fond regards.

As is so characteristic of him, Tovia gave me a little derashah as we were standing in the entrance hall to the Sternberg Centre.

It was simple and categorical. He said the objective of religious leadership is trust-building. Understanding the Other [another big O!] - Openness to the Other. That is our world purpose, and something, said Tovia, which politicians don’t do. But it is our offering to politicians, for them to translate into action, to turn it into a contract. The solutions are not for us religious people to achieve. The trust building is.

I don’t know how you take to that: I am open to your views!

We can debate it as an issue, concerning the world out there. But that’s not the purpose of Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur is about the world in here. OK, and how our personal internal world, is affected by the external world.

And the Other, to whom my colleague refers can be any other in my life, and the chief issue is not what I don’t like about them but what it is within me that makes me not like them.

This is almost universally true, that the people we conflict with most are not those who are radically different from us but those with whom we have most in common, but with whom we cannot be open nor they with us.

This a day for discerning when are our grievances are justified.

And when we are making excuses for ourselves.

And whether we have the courage, without ignoring realities and indulging in unnecessary self-castigation, to be genuinely honest and open.