Sermon: 14 September 2015 Rosh Hashanah Morning
Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 17 September 2015
Anyone looking at us leaving Alyth Gardens on July 8th would have seen a small group of retired doctors, social workers, teachers and accountants, getting onto a minibus to travel up to London. Any Jew in Britain would have heard the slight German and Austrian accents just detectable within the voices of the people. They may have put little more down to this than the fact that when a service at Alyth is advertised as starting at 10:30am it really does start at 10:30am. This we owe to that part of our Synagogue’s heritage we gain from the Central European Jews in our midst.
As we journeyed the passengers on the minibus shared their own experiences and trauma of having been child refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria. Despite the time that had passed, their recollections of realising, as children, that there was something terrible and wrong happening in their home countries, were still raw.
It not because they were more deserving of a future than those left behind that meant that Eva, Hanna, Catherine, Alec and Ralph lived whilst other members of their families died back in Germany and Austria. Rather it was through lucky chances. It was being a girl guide so that a Scottish Quaker troop would sponsor your arrival in the UK. It was the fourth desperate application to a country from asylum as a refugee that happened to succeed in Britain once America, Canada and Brazil had rejected you. It was having a cousin here in London who would sponsor you. Even so one of our Alyth members on the bus had been interned in the Isle of Man for two years with her parents as a potential enemy of Britain – German Jews locked in a camp with German Nazi sympathisers.
Our minibus took us to the Houses of Parliament. There Alyth’s child refugees from the 1930’s shared stories and experiences with today’s refugees from Syria. The organisational skills of Citizens UK, of which Alyth is a member, meant we were heard by our local Conservative and Labour MPs Mike Freer and Tulip Sidiq, SNP MP Angus Robertson who was MP for the constituency in which our originally Viennese teenager was brought by the Scottish Girl Guides and Baroness Hamwee from the Lib Dems who was herself from a Syrian family.
Alyth has been helping with the needs of refugees ever since our earliest years in the 1930’s, through the War years, as a haven for refugees from Hungary in the 1950’s, through the welcome extended to refugees from Bosnia in the 1990’s. Most recently our Alyth Drop in for Recent Refugees has been welcoming refugees from Congo, Somalia, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere to our Synagogue for several years. This meeting was just another in the tradition of our Synagogue. It felt very appropriate to make the link between these German and Austrian refugee children now in their late 70’s to early 90’s and the Syrians in their early 20’s whom we met.
Professor Norman Bentwich was the President of Alyth from 1958-1971, succeeding German refugee Rabbi Leo Baeck, Alyth’s first President. He wrote the authoritative book on the British acceptance of Jewish refugees from mainland Europe, “They Found Refuge”. He begins the book with these words – “From the beginning of the resettlement in the seventeenth century the Jewish community in Britain has been in large part composed of refugees from persecution in Europe.” He writes of British Jewry raising its voice in protest wherever and whenever Jews were attacked and persecuted. In 1774 British Jews successfully petitioned King Geroge II to take in Moravian Jews who had been expelled from Prague. In 1840 Sir Moses Montefiore worked with the British government to free nine Jews imprisoned in Damascus, Syria on blood libel charges. Bentwich documents that close to 100,000 Jewish refugees made it to this country between 1933 and 1956. The organised and well documented effort of the Kindertransport was responsible for around a tenth of that number.
We are truly a refugee people who know, or are supposed to know, in the words of the Torah “the heart of the stranger, for we were once strangers in the Land of Egypt.” (Exodus 23:9) Our spiritual parents, Abraham and Sarah were themselves lifelong migrants and sometimes refugees. They walked from Ur in modern day Iraq where Abraham was born, to Haran in modern day Turkey, 20km from the border with modern day Syria. They walked to Canaan, modern day Israel where they were made less than welcome, to Egypt at a time of famine and then back to various locations in Canaan. They were on the move many times in their lives, sometimes by choice, often by force.
Their family was treated particularly badly by the people of Sodom, near the Dead Sea. Even so Abraham argued with God that this people must be saved from impending destruction if there is even one good person among them, sadly rather different from the rhetoric I have occasionally heard recently where a few have suggested that we should question saving Syrian or Afghani refugees in case there are among them people who wish us ill. Incidentally today there are 14,000 refugees from Syria living in hastily converted shipping containers in Harran refugee camp, Abraham’s first destination, many have been there since it opened in 2012 – are they today’s Abraham and Sarah?
The tradition of Abraham and Sarah, the tradition we receive, is clear in Talmud Gittin (61a) ‘We support poor non-Jews along with the poor of Israel, and aid the sick non-Jews along with the sick of Israel, and bury poor non-Jews along with the dead of Israel, mipnei darchei ha-shalom for the sake of the ways of peace.” You would be amazed at how literally the modern state of Israel has taken this. There are currently 46,000 non-Jewish refugees from countries such as Eritrea, the Darfur regions of Sudan and elsewhere in Africa living in Israel. Scaled up proportionately to the population of Britain that has an impact on the country of more than half a million people. You may know that Israel has not coped easily at all as a home for these refugees and their children and how and whether to integrate them into Israeli society remains a vexed political issue, but it is the Jewish state in which they have so far found refuge and of that we can be proud.
How can this Jewish community join our fellow Britons in responding to the current refugee crisis in Europe? A Judaism that is blind to the issues that surround us in our country is barely worthy of the name. The crisis has become extreme at exactly the time of the Jewish year when it should imprint on our consciences.
The month of Elul which leads up to Rosh Hashanah has a number of traditions attached to it. One is the tradition of blowing the Shofar (Pirke d Rabbi Eliezer 46) every weekday morning right after prayer (tekiyah, shevarim, teruah, tekiyah). The reason given for it by Rabbi Jacob Ben Asher (the Tur) in the 13th Century is based in the timeline of Moses’s 120 days after the Israelites arrive at Mount Sinai. Moses went up the Mountain to receive the Ten Commandments and Torah on Shavuot. Forty days later he came down to be greeted on 17th Tamuz by the Golden Calf and he shattered the commandments. He then spent forty days pleading with God to save the Israelites from themselves. Our tradition has it that he returned up the mountain on first of Elul and was again given the commandments inscribed upon the Tablets. He returned with them forty days later on Yom Kippur. This time the Israelites agreed to actually observe what they say. That says the Tur is why we hear the Shofar on each week day of Elul – so that we can hear that we will need to commit to actually putting Torah into action from Yom Kippur onwards!
Maimonides famously says that what the sound of the Shofar tells us in Elul is this: Awake you sleepers, Awake, sleepers from your sleep! Get up from your slumber! Search your deeds and remember God who created you.” This year it was an image which we saw first on the 18th Elul, 2nd September –which visually rather than aurally woke us up – that of three year old Aylan Kurdi, drowned and washed up on a beach and the rescue worker who bore his body as if the whole world was carrying the horror of what we saw.
In Elul any of us who had been asleep to this situation woke up and realised that a religion or any human morality which sees all human beings as equal and that we are here to support and care for each other, and Judaism is that, must act now. Alyth joined our fellow shuls in the Reform Movement in organising a mass meeting last Monday to share knowledge and efforts and so that we could contribute to the whole community meeting organised by the Board of Deputies and World Jewish Relief on Thursday knowing what our Synagogues were doing.
The messages and appeal for what we can do were clear: For immediate needs give through organisations which are supporting those further away and more vulnerable – such as World Jewish Relief who are working in Turkey and Greece. Plenty of other organisations are working in Calais. For mid-term needs get ourselves ready to expand our welcome to the refugees who are here now and will be here in the future in the UK – support and volunteer in our Synagogue Drop Ins where refugees can find friendship, help and support to negotiate life in Britain. If you are in property be ready to rent your accommodation to refugees. For the long term we should be campaigning with all political parties to help us all to be proud of our countries’ welcome to refugees whilst opposing the regimes which oppress their own people so much that they have to flee.
If you looking for what you can do – just go to the Alyth website – act with us section and press Refugees Response https://www.alyth.org.uk/act-us/refugees-response/ – you will find many links through to what you can do.
Moses returned on Yom Kippur to present to us the Torah again. Not because there was something wrong with the ideas in it. There would always be the need to care for the stranger, the orphan and the widow. We would always need to open our hand to our poor and needy brother. We need to remember that Torah again because of what we should be doing in these ten days to Yom Kippur – in the words of Exekiel – gaining a ruach chadashah and a lev chadash – renewed spirit and heart to do the right thing (Ezekiel 18:31). Ezekiel says God hates the death of the innocent and loves those who turn around and live.