Sermon: Bo – Mental Health Shabbat – Holocaust Memorial Day

Written by Rabbi Colin Eimer — 21 January 2026

In the 1970s, I was rabbi at Southgate Reform Synagogue, a mile or so from Colney Hatch in Friern Barnet. I occasionally made pastoral visits to members or family of members who were there. An amazing place, it was opened in 1851 as the “Middlesex County Pauper Lunatic Asylum,” which, I guess, says everything about attitudes to mental health then. Closed in 1993, part was converted into Princess Park Manor luxury housing. An amazing building, it had, reputedly, the longest corridor in this country, could house 2500 patients and had enough Jews among them for it to have a custom-built synagogue and a kosher kitchen. Sadly, all too many of the Jews I visited had been there for years and years; often having been put there by their families because they were in some way difficult, an embarrassment, didn’t fit the mould of what was expected of them.

For a change I thought I would try using Microsoft Dictate to write this sermon. You just speak into your laptop microphone and your words magically appear on the screen. So I started by saying that 50 years ago the two words ‘Colney Hatch’ were another way of saying “loony bin” The Dictate facility dutifully typed L-O-O-N-Y but scarcely had it appeared on the screen than it was immediately replaced with 5 asterisks. Absolutely correctly, that’s not an acceptable way of referring to an institution dealing with Mental Health issues. But had word processors existed 50 years ago, I don’t imagine their inbuilt dictionary would have found anything unacceptable in that word. Thank goodness that our vocabulary referring to mental health has changed!

That change in acceptable vocabulary obviously reflects how attitudes to mental health have changed. The fact of a designated Shabbat is one indication; the fact that we speak much more about Mental Health than about Mental Illness is another. Positive though all that might be, the fact that there needs to be a designated Shabbat like this still speaks volumes, for we don’t, after all, have a Diabetes Shabbat, an MS Shabbat nor, even, a Cancer Shabbat. Taboo and accompanying shame still exist around talking about illness which isn’t physical, can’t be ‘blamed’ on, or ascribed to some external source.

Clearly attitudes have changed and the vocabulary we use reflects a deeper understanding of mental health issues, an awareness that it is not “us” the quote/unquote ‘normal’ ones and “them” – all those with mental problems. Very few, if any, of us are likely not to have to confront some mental health issue or other in the course of our lives. Those changed attitudes reflect a different way of understanding the value of a human being.

Looking for some sort of metaphor for this Shabbat and its proximity to Holocaust Memorial Day, I turned, paradoxically you might think, to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. The people, fearing dispersion all over the place, decide that building a tower up to the heavens is the way to allay that anxiety. Of course it’s a myth, but myths have a way of saying something about the human condition. It’s a mere 11 verses near the beginning of Genesis. But it’s what midrash does with this episode that is so insightful and powerful, relevant to this Shabbat. Written the best part of two millennia ago, midrash paints this picture of the tower with people shlepping the bricks and mortar to the top. As it got higher and higher it must have happened that people would fall. A great lament would go up. But, says the midrash, the lament was not because somebody had fallen to their death but because the load of bricks they were carrying had fallen with them, were lost to the enterprise and just meant further delay replacing that load of bricks.

Already 2000 years ago, then, midrash established what I like to call the “Babel principle”: the idea that the value of a human being should have nothing to do with how useful or useless they are.

And that, of course, was part of the poison that the Nazis unleashed on humanity. Only if you were useful did you deserve to live. It can’t be any coincidence that the first group in society that the Nazis actually started systematically killing were those with mental or physical disabilities. It is estimated some 300,000 children and adults were killed in the so-called Euthanasia programme.

Hugo Gryn related how, when he got out of the cattle truck on arrival at Auschwitz, one of the prisoners whispered to him “You’re 16 and you’re a carpenter.” Only later, he said, did he understand why the man told him to say that: he was sent to a work-detail, but his younger brother went straight to the gas chamber – too young, too useless.

And that raises issues around power and how you exercise it. For how you exercise it depends so much on how you see yourself in relation to others.

Why the constant reminder in the Torah not to forget that we were slaves in the land of Egypt? Together with the injunction about not mistreating the stranger, it’s one of the most repeated commands in the Torah. At an obvious level, because we were strangers in the land of Egypt, we know the heart of the stranger, we know what it is to be on the receiving end of cruelty and mistreatment. Now the tables are turned, and we’re in the superior position vis-à-vis somebody else, don’t treat them the way we were.

Don’t mistreat others weaker than you for all the right reasons: you know from your experience that that’s not the way one human being should treat another. But if you can’t do that because beyond all the distracting ‘externals’ – wealth, colour, class, race, religion, whatever – you are unable to recognise that you and the stranger, the ‘other,’ are equal human beings, then do it out of self-interest.

And how might self-interest be a motivating factor in treating the stranger decently? Last Shabbat and this the Torah readings have been full of the Ten Plagues. Pharaoh was a man who thought he was all powerful and could do as he wished. He was given the opportunity to learn from the plagues but he didn’t. So if you can’t treat the stranger as another human being for the right reasons, remember what happened to Pharaoh: how are the mighty fallen!

And that is why the Torah so often brackets together ger, yatom and almanah “the stranger, the orphan and the widow.” Three very different types of individual in society – what can they possibly have in common? In ancient times, they were three groups of people in society who were defenceless, who had nobody around to protect them and who were, therefore, easy to exploit and take advantage of. And while it’s better now than in the past, they are still among the most vulnerable groups in society, especially if you are a ‘stranger.’

Earlier this week I was talking with a friend, the daughter of two Auschwitz survivors who had gone to America in 1947. She spoke about how her parents and fellow survivors had rebuilt their lives. People had suggested that those who survived the camps needed to sit with therapists and counsellors to talk out the trauma they had experienced. But Bruno Bettelheim, a psychologist who had been in a concentration camp himself before the war, said they don‘t need that but their children – the Second Generation – most probably will. My friend said that her parents and fellow survivors would get together and talk, not about what they had experienced in the camps, but about their lives before the war. That. She suggested, was their therapy. She said her father would wake up every night, screaming with his nightmares – an experience that so many survivors relate. But the talking together is what ‘healed them somehow’ – they created a sort of community.

I was writing this yesterday as news spread of what Trump said about British soldiers in Afghanistan not being on the front line. The news was full of families of those killed or injured expressing their outrage. We hear many stories of those veterans suffering from PTSD. They suffered that having been in the army, doing something they had volunteered for, which must have made some sense to them. How much worse must it have been, continue to be, for those who went through the Shoah with no sense of “why is this happening?” Primo Levi wrote that he once asked a guard in Auschwitz “Warum?” “Why?” To which the guard replied “Hier ist kein ‘warum?’” “There is no ‘why?’ here.”

Being part of a community, my friend suggested, gave those survivors a strength, the strength of a sort of normality, of seeing others going through what they went through and knowing that they not freaks in some way.

Comparisons between Mental Health and the Shoah are inappropriate and invidious. To attempt such comparisons is insulting.

But my friend’s contention about the strength of community as a healing element is interesting and may be a thread that does connect them, albeit in very different ways. ‘Care in the community’ was the catchphrase bandied about as institutions like Colney Hatch were, thankfully, being phased out.

But the existence of Mental Health Shabbat and its proximity to Holocaust Memorial Day remind us of the way things need to change in the world, in society and in ourselves.