A-Z OF JEWISH VALUES -

O FOR OUTWARDNESS

Yom Kippur 5766, Neilah

Imagine looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope.

Imagine seeing a world the size of a small village of only 100 people (about the size of a Shabbat morning attendance on a reasonably good day!).

And these hundred people are representative of our whole world.

This microcosm is described on the wall of the entrance hall to the Eden Project which I spoke to you about on Rosh Hashanah. I was so impressed I copied down every word.

It reads as follows:

If we could shrink the world into a rainbow village of 100 people,

57 would be Asian

21 would be European

6 would be North American

8 would be African

8 would be South American

15 including 10 women would be illiterate

20 of the richest people would consume 90% of the wealth

20 would be of the poorest 1%, with 14 having no right to basic health services

17 would have no proper shelter

15 including 3 children would be undernourished

22 would have no access to drinking water

13 will die before the age of 40

33 will have no electricity

5 would have access to the Internet

24 would have a TV

(Then it goes on)

In a village of 100, some problems seem quite small but try this for size:

A girl born in Japan today may have a 50% chance of seeing the 22nd century.

A newborn in Afghanistan has a 1-in-4 chance of dying before the age of 5

18 thousand children under 5 starve to death every day.

And then the punch-line: There is enough food in the world to feed everyone, plus a further 3 billion people.

There are surely Yom Kippur messages here. We can’t possibly go through this day without thinking of the earthquake-torn places in South Asia, and what we can do to help relieve the misery there.

The broad challenge it raises which I would like to address, is the final one of my trilogy for these services all based on the letter O continuing my alphabetical series on Reform Jewish Values I began in January. On Kol Nidrey it was Ownership; Shachrit, Openness; and now the value I am going to call Outwardness.

For all its inwardness Yom Kippur holds lessons of outwardness.

It’s a paradox of Yom Kippur that is there is no festival which is so much concerned with the individual person’s inner life and yet no festival which succeeds so much in bringing so many of us together en masse.

As much as we are bidden to reflect on ourselves, so on this day, we cannot help being aware of others.

Outwardness in some ways is not a popular value traditionally. Spiritualists shun outwardness – Chitzoniyut, in Hebrew, the opposite of p’nimiyut - inwardness. Jewish moralists tend to regard outwardness as trivial, petty, and inwardness as the orientation worth cultivating.

Not only moralists. There’s a strong tendency especially in Reform, to deprecate outward show. Whether it’s the fashion show parade which takes place – in certain shuls, we know. Or whether it’s outward show of religiosity, payas down to your shoulders, tsitsis down to your ankles, sheitls, snoods….

All this is very much disliked by many of us.

There’s a little custom that when you say the al chet confession, or ashamnu,

For each sin, you knock yourself on your chest. Not too hard, just a tap, don’t overdo it. Well, not many of us go in for that. It might remind you in a small way of the Muslim Shi’ite’s beating themselves. It has value though, it’s to remind myself that this isn’t an academic exercise – it really is me who has done wrong. But still there is a tendency amongst us to look down on such outward displays of religiosity.

If we are going to be true to our inwardness, it’s worth asking ourselves why these extreme reactions of ours? Our reasons have got little or nothing to do with the people whose custom it is to live the way they choose, and everything to do with our attitudes. Everything we say on these sort of subjects is a boomerang. It’s a comment on ourselves.

Yom Kippur is a day of outward expression. Coming to shul in large numbers is in itself an outward expression.

The taking out of all the scrolls on Kol Nidrey evening

The predominant colour – white – to me, it’s the promise of starting again with a clean sheet.

I’ve chosen to wear this special white yarmulke kindly given to me by one of you; I’m pleased to see another one amongst you too.

It reads ‘Make Poverty History’.

The Reform Movement have been deeply involved in the Make Poverty History Jewish Coalition this year - organising educational leaflets and packs (all available on their website), and taking a delegation to the Edinburgh rally on that theme.

Several of our shul communities are aiming to meet the requirements set by the Fairtrade Foundation (originally set up for churches) encouraging the purchase of fair-trade products.

RSY-Netzer introduced a Fairtrade policy last year. Our Youth Movement as a whole is very much involved in these campaigns. They represent a deep concern to apply Jewish values ‘out there’ in the world at large.

This yarmulke makes a statement: we’re no longer living in the ghetto, we all belong to one world; we’ve got to get out there.

If there’s one part of Yom Kippur which teaches this lesson most powerfully it’s the afternoon Haftarah: the Book of Jonah which we read earlier.

The story of Jonah, exemplifies perfectly the shift from inwardness to outwardness. Jonah was completely wrapped up in himself. His response to go and speak to that evil city Nineveh was consistently to retreat - not just to run away, but to withdraw into himself. Deep in the hold of the ship he hides, then tumbles into a profound sleep. As more than one commentator point out, Jonah cannot flee from the ubiquitous Creator of Heaven and Earth. Jonah is ultimately trying to escape from himself. Indeed, at the height of his crisis he wishes he had never been born. His penalty is to be thrown deeper than imaginable into the depths of the sea and then into the belly of a huge fish, only to be vomited out onto dry land.

Jonah has to face the world out there. There is no choice.

Jonah is of course no real personage, but representative of the human, and more specifically, the Jewish predicament.

Persecuted by the sailors who throw him overboard, chosen to pursue a mission which he never asked for, and which he sees as mission impossible, he is exiled and impelled to go and speak to Nineveh, the city which was the very embodiment of evil, having swallowed up the northern kingdom of Israel just like the fish swallowed Jonah. Nineveh’s city emblem was a fish.

And what happened? The Ninevites repented. An astonishing twist in the story this must have been for the original listeners. The arch enemy repents of its evil, and is forgiven. Jonah can’t believe it. He had been told to forecast their utter destruction within 3 days.

I don’t know which is more difficult to accept as a Yom Kippur lesson: the belief that we can change – we, you and I, the community we live in with all its faults, the Jewish people at large, or the belief that others can change.

I want to quote again Marcel Proust’s observation which I mentioned on Rosh Hashanah:

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

If the world out there can change for the better, why can’t the world in here?

Let me tell you a joke. It’s an old joke I’m afraid; I first heard it in the early 60’s, told exactly this way, I haven’t altered it significantly.

The planet suffers a natural disaster of astronomical proportions. A brush with an asteroid, like a billiard ball being clipped, as a result of which the earth was tilted slightly off its axis. The north polar ice cap picks up too much solar heat and begins to melt. Scientists sent out a warning that the sea levels would rise to such an extent and so quickly, that every inhabitable place on earth would be wiped out by floods within three days. There was nothing that could be done to stem the tide.

Governments were desperate, so desperate that they handed it over to world religious leaders to address their populations.

The Pope comes on world wide TV – and calls upon the faithful: give charity, go to confession, say your Hail Mary’s and prepare to meet your Maker.

The Dalai Lama comes on and said: practice good deeds, meditate on the lotus flower and on the One in all, and wish each other a good incarnation in another world.

A Muslim leader next, says: read the Koran, act rightly, say your prayers 5 times a day in the direction of Mecca, or better still make a final pilgrimage there if you are able to and submit yourself to the will of Allah.

They have trouble finding a rabbi to represent world Jewry. The phone lines are jammed with rabbis from all over the globe demanding to speak. Eventually one is chosen. This rabbi comes on and says: friends – you have 72 hours to learn how to live under water!

This somewhat triumphalist joke, suddenly isn’t so much of a fantasy as it was in the early 60’s. There haven’t been any brushes with asteroids but the polar ice caps are melting. I always thought it was only a joke.

Despite what the joke would imply, we are not the only faith which gives a pragmatic outward response to crises. Look at what Christian Aid does world-wide, for example. Nor, as the joke implies, is it characteristic of Judaism not to offer spiritual guidance.

But there is some grain of truth in it, to which I think you and I resonate. Adaptation to drastically changed external circumstances, typifies Judaism. The dynamism and at least from a Reform perspective, the flexibility of halachah, has the capacity to achieve that. It is the belief that out of a near catastrophe we can, relying very much on our own efforts, save ourselves. This, of course, is exemplified by Israel.

Why I so often harp on the theme of Israel and the wider world outside Jackson's Row is that I have a real anxiety that we are in danger of retreating inwardly. Like Jonah.

Inwardness was held up to be the great value of Reform Judaism in the early days. I want to quote to you Jeremy Leigh, who gave that wonderful teach-in here in Jan on what we can learn from Israeli film-making. He writes in Manna –

‘Historically, the Reform movement was always squeamish about Zionism since it made being Jewish just a little too ‘physical’. Judaism, it was argued, represented the moral idea, the spirit of Torah and the search for meaning.

And one should not express such a pure inner cause in the murky world of a state complete with politics, borders and armies.

Such a Reform Judaism looked askance at Zionism and Israel as being somehow vulgar or below the best aspirations of prophetic Judaism.

Officially the movement has been committed to Israel for many years now. But old antipathies are still alive and kicking.’

I don’t completely agree with him, since his article took as his evidence the missions that are sometimes organised to Israel which focus on visiting Palestinians on the West Bank shut out of harvesting their olive groves, the Separation Wall, rampant house demolitions which are nothing to do with terrorism and so on. I was on such a mission earlier this year.

We also saw the other side: the sterling work which our Reform communities are doing for families which had suffered from suicide bombings, what they were doing for migrant workers who flood the Tel Aviv area from all over the world and suffer all sorts of socio-economic problems, helping educate Arab-Israeli children in downtown Haifa to give them a better start in life, and supporting the numerous peace groups which organise social and cultural interaction between Israelis and Palestinians.

We took along with us a young Imam from the Regent's Park Mosque in London with whom I’ve built up a personal friendship and who has remained a firm friend of Israel, and an outspoken critic of Islamic fundamentalism as in a programme following the July London bombings.

Nevertheless Jeremy Leigh is right to draw attention to the lack of commitment to Israel – it’s apathy more than antipathy, in the category of what I would call de-concretization of Judaism. Making it cerebral, (all inside here) disconnected from the real world.

And I would add to what Jeremy says that it isn’t only Israel – there are many other examples of how we connect with the physical external world Jewishly that are either underemphasized, ignored or downplayed.

They are usually things which demand considerable effort from us. How we connect with other human beings in giving tzedakah. Our President Mark Levy referred to this last night in his appeal. Giving of our time to others – being outgoing, offering hospitality.

It’s instructive that the activity immediately following Yom Kippur is an entirely physical, outward one – building the Succah. I nearly always mention this at Neilah time. This year there is greater urgency than we’ve got precious little time to build it before Monday night. The Succah is the very epitome of Outwardness. It is built outside – our shuls, our homes.

It is an outhouse that reminds us of being outcasts in society – not just the wandering in the wilderness of Sinai, but every wilderness existence. It is – optimally - the place we make our temporary home, at least tokenly so.

A Succah is a real Succah if guests are invited into it. I think it’s a Reform value, (although I would be happy to know that others do it,) to invite people of other faiths, as we have done here, enthusiastically over the years. Heaven knows, if there is one value that is of the utmost urgency these days it is Outwardness, building bridges between communities.

This will be the theme of our Northern Regional Weekend in Ilkley in a month’s time, called Faith to Faith. Let me tell you a little about it. Exactly 4 weeks today I will be conducting a Shabbat morning discussion at Ilkley called FAQ’s, frequently asked questions, which Jews have of Muslims and vice versa. And I will be joined in that session by Shamim Miah, who has lectured at Jackson’s Row on Islam (who also appeared on the TV programme I mentioned following 7/7), and who is an expert on the different national Islamic cultures of the Middle and Far East and how they regard and are regarded by people of Western Culture. There will be other subjects on related themes, with a keynote talk by Rabbi Professor Jonathan Magonet.

This is sounding like announcements now – and so it is.

As we draw quickly to the close of a long, arduous day in here together, I begin to look ahead, into the future, and to opportunities for strengthening all that we are here for and stand for.

Yom Kippur, if it is to be fulfilling for us, will lift us out of our preoccupations with ourselves, bearing us back into our daily lives, renewed and revitalised, taking us ever onward and outward.