Sermon: Shabbat Vayeira

Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 8 November 2020

I want to begin this morning with the words of Caroline, aged 44, from Leeds, in an article she wrote for The Guardian a few years ago, about her experience of homelessness:

‘I had been working part-time in a shop but ended up leaving. So I had no job and rent to pay. I applied for benefits but the money got sent to the wrong account. Eventually it got sorted out but I then became ill. I withdrew from the benefits system because I found it too complicated to handle in my confused state. I soon couldn’t afford the rent and had to leave my property.

‘A few friends tried to help me, and one tried to help me access benefits. I stayed at people’s houses for a few nights. My relationship with my family became strained and I was taken into a local mental health hospital. Thankfully, I never slept rough or on the streets but I was close to sleeping in a park.

‘The whole experience was terrifying, not knowing where I was going to spend the night. I felt abandoned and alone. At times I had no one to turn to. I would ask friends if I could sleep on their floor. They came through for me at first but then the help ran out.

‘I was warned off hostels so I didn’t want to go there. I remember all my belongings being stuffed into a few bags I carried around with me. Eventually things got better and I clawed my way back to sanity and got a good job.

‘Mental illness, poverty and homelessness were interlinked in my case – I’m sure that’s the situation for a lot of people. Safety nets can fall apart and I went into a downward spiral. I would like to see an end to the stigma attached to homelessness. It can be a terrifying and devastating experience that no one should go through.’ (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/aug/15/how-i-became-homeless-three-peoples-stories)

If parts of Caroline’s story sound familiar, it is because we hear echoes of the Torah portion Amelie read today: of Abraham putting Hagar and Ishmael out into the wilderness. And as Amelie reminded us, this was both selfish and unfair. The terror and devastation that Caroline describes in not knowing where she would sleep night to night, is palpable in Hagar’s story, compounded by the fact that she also has a young son to look after.

We hear of how Hagar gives up hope when their skin of water runs dry – how she places Ishmael under a bush and removes herself so as not to have to watch him die. The intervention of an angel gives her hope of survival, but that relief is preceded by a moment in which Hagar reaches a nadir of emotion:

Vateshev mineged vatisa et kolah vatev’k.

She sat opposite and she raised her voice and she wept.

Most of us can only imagine what it must be like to find ourselves in such a situation; to understand what it means not to know where you will sleep tonight, or where your next meal will come from.

With Remembrance Sunday coming up tomorrow, I think of those who serve in the armed forces, who find a home there, and often have a feeling of homelessness when they leave the army, and often end up on the streets. And on Monday we commemorate Kristallnacht, an event that saw the Jews of Germany lose their sense of being at home, their sense of security.

The Torah has a strong message – that we must have compassion for those whose narratives and life experiences are different from our own, those who are strangers to us, for we ourselves were strangers in the Land of Egypt. There is disagreement in the Talmud as to whether we are reminded of this 36 times or 46 times – anyway, it’s a lot.

And this concept is not unfamiliar to us here at Alyth. For those who aren’t aware, Alyth is part of Together in Barnet, the only night shelter in the borough, a coalition of churches, synagogues and mosques that provide dinner, bed, and breakfast for up to 17 people over the coldest months of the year. We ally with Golders Green Parish Church to do this, and have done so for nearly a decade. I was there on the final morning of the shelter before the lockdown, and am in awe of the heroic efforts of our own Alyth members for continuing to turn up and do their bit, when other venues were closing their doors.

Now, we cannot run the shelter as we used to. The latest government guidance is that shelters can only run where clients are able to have their own rooms, because of the risk of virus transmission in shared spaces.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the government funded an ‘everybody in’ scheme, whereby they paid for hotel rooms, student dorms, and other temporary accommodation for those who were sleeping rough across the country, and including in our own borough. A few of the most hardened rough sleepers refused to go into temporary accommodation, but the vast majority of Barnet’s homeless have now been housed, at least temporarily. For some, this is just the lifeline they needed to get themselves back into housing and stability which will (hopefully) continue even after the exigency of the pandemic.

For those from places outside the UK, the situation is more precarious. After December, unless there is a deal, it will become more difficult for homeless people from EU countries to gain access to government help. For many others, that is already the case. The technical term is that they have ‘no recourse to public funds’ – they do not qualify from help from the government – they are effectively being told they have no right to a home. Our homelessness charities in Barnet are doing what they can to plan for what happens when landlords and the council start to evict those people from their temporary accommodation.

Jewish history is full of examples of having to find new homes. Whether it’s Abraham leaving Haran and heading to Canaan, or the Israelites leaving Canaan two generations later to escape famine and settling in Egypt, or escaping slavery in Egypt and wandering for forty years in the wilderness, before finding a home in Israel – the promised land. And yet, even the promised land proves temporary.

Since the Jews were sent into exile by the Romans in 70 CE, we have found ourselves dispersed, moving from land to land, sometimes finding ourselves welcomed, sometimes not so welcomed. In the last few years, we have been reminded of the pain and the destabilizing effects of anti-Semitism here in the UK,  a country we thought had moved past such stereotypes, and beyond falling into the trap of suspicion of difference. And yet we hold that feeling in tension with a sense of comfort and safety. Would Jews in the past have had the confidence to stand up in protest against anti-Semitism in the way that many of us have in the UK over the last three years? Does that not mean that we might continue to be at home here?

In early synagogues, the ark was not the permanent kind that we have in most of our synagogues today. In fact, it would be something like a big chest on wheels. Part of the reason for this was, perhaps, to ensure that, if the Torah scrolls had to be removed with very little notice, they could simply be wheeled out of the building and away. But it also serves to make a bigger point – that Jewish tradition is grounded in mobility and movement; that the journey is in fact the most significant part, and not the destination. Indeed, the Torah itself was given to the people of Israel in the middle of their journey out of Egypt, en route to the Land of Israel. Imagine how different our Jewish identity would be if the Torah had been given at the end of the journey.

We are reminded over and over again in Jewish tradition of our origins as a wandering people – a people that is constantly on a journey, perhaps without end. In her Dvar Torah, Amelie spoke about taking on Jewish tradition as a responsibility. And, not only do we have a responsibility to constantly seek ways in which to make ourselves feel more at home, but we also have a responsibility that is born from the knowledge that everyone else is on a parallel journey. Maybe that is what the prophet Isaiah meant when he referred to yod’ei tzedek  – ‘knowers of justice’ – in our haftarah this morning. Let us therefore remember that, although we might experience our own struggles, and although we might be aiming for a different ultimate destination, we also have a responsibility towards our fellow travellers to make sure they are able to experience that sense of security and home. May that be the lesson of Hagar and Ishmael, of Caroline, and for all those homeless in our borough, for us today.