Sermon: Shavuot “Things must change for them to remain the same”

Written by Rabbi Colin Eimer — 2 June 2025

Netflix has been showing an Italian TV production of Giuseppe de Lampedusa’s marvellous novel ‘The Leopard.’ Set in the 1860s, the ‘Leopard’ of the title is Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina in Sicily at the time when Garibaldi and his forces have landed on the island, bringing revolution and democracy. Don Fabrizio has to decide how he is going to respond to these forces of change. His catchphrase becomes: “things must change for them to remain the same.”

Responding to forces of change is, of course, one of the reasons behind the creation of ‘Progressive Judaism,’ bringing Reform and Liberal Judaism under one umbrella.

And how we respond to change is one of the questions that this festival of Shavuot asks us to consider.

The Chatam Sofer, who died in 1839, was one of the leaders of traditional Judaism of his generation. The Chabad website describes him as a “bulwark of faith and fealty to tradition.” He was an arch-enemy of the developing Reform movement. As support for his argument, he quoted a phrase from the Talmud, chadash assur min haTorah meaning “the new is forbidden by the Torah.” In the Talmud, ‘the new’ referred specifically to eating “new grain” before bringing the offering for the Omer. But he, and certainly his followers, used it as a rallying cry, a slogan to oppose any suggested change to customary traditional practice.

Basically it’s saying that change is dangerous.

That literalist stance means that you can end up in difficult positions. I still remember hearing a Lubavitch Chassid arguing that the earth is only five thousand and something years old. Somebody asked him about the evidence of geology, of fossils, Carbon14 testing and the like. God created the world, he replied, with fossils already in it. Technically I suppose there’s no reason why God couldn’t have done that. But then I would want to know why God should have wanted to bamboozle us, leading us to believe the world is millions of years old, when it is, in fact, just a few thousand years old?

Is there some way we can talk, then, of Torah miSinai without having to perform mental gymnastics or affirm that which our knowledge, even if imperfect, tells us is unacceptable?

The answer is of course ‘yes,’ because the authority of the Torah, the role it plays in our lives, is not ultimately dependent on whether we believe that God dictated every word to Moses on Mount Sinai or not.

Some are fearful, like the Chatam Sofer, that Judaism will fall apart. For them, belief in Torah mi’Sinai seems like the keystone of an arch – that stone at the top which holds the structure together. Remove it and the arch collapses. So they’re concerned about what will happen to Judaism.

But you don’t need to be a disciple of the Chatam Sofer to be concerned about what will become of Judaism. We all share that concern. It’s an argument which has little to do with the truth but a lot to do with power: “don’t ask questions, don’t rock the boat because you’ll destroy Judaism. Is that what you want?” It’s a sort of moral blackmail.

But if something is true it must be acknowledged as such, whatever the consequences. There might be times when we might have to temper the question by saying “is this the best time to ask it?” But it is, at best, only an argument for putting questions on hold, not for dismissing them altogether.

It’s a position which starts off with the premise that the Torah is perfect. Therefore, if you have questions, there must be something wrong with you, the questioner. Maybe, you don’t have enough faith, or you are just plain ignorant. If you had purer faith or deeper knowledge, you would realise you are wrong and recognise your questions as invalid.

But we have serious questions and we ask them, not to destroy, but for enlightenment and understanding. They’re asked by those who are used to using their critical faculties in the world out there and find it unacceptable to be told that those critical faculties cannot be applied to Judaism.

In the end, if Judaism somehow stands or falls on the basis of suppressing truth, or not confronting difficult questions, then what sort of Judaism is it anyway?

Many years ago, when my synagogue was grappling with the question of women wearing tallit, a member contacted me. He was upset and worried, he said, because his wife was caught up in this whole business and he didn’t know how to respond. I suggested I come over and we talk. Over a cup of tea, in the midst of discussion, he blurted out, “But where will it all end?” implying that this was the top of a slippery slope – and the bottom mujst inevitably be the disappearance of Judaism as we know. It’s an argument one hears often. “The short answer,” I said, “was that we don’t know where it will end.” The longer response is what I call the ‘orange squash argument.’

If I want some orange squash. I take a bottle of the concentrate, pour some in a glass and add water the point where I’m happy with the taste. The dilution argument suggests I just keep adding water until it’s no longer recognisable as orange squash. In other words, we dilute Jewish life to the point where it’s no longer recognisable as Jewish life. “Where will it all end?” only makes sense if we don’t care what happens to Jewish life and change it beyond recognition.

“Things must change for them to remain the same.”

Perhaps a more-compelling analogy might be that of a rose bush in your garden which has grown all over the place and is just a mess. You can deal with it simply by chopping it down at the stem. Effective, albeit somewhat drastic, and a disaster for the rose bush. With my lack of green fingers, it’s the sort of thing I might do.

But Dee, the ‘Monty Don of Enfield’ as I like to call her, would take her secateurs and carefully trim away the dead wood. Judicious, loving and careful pruning, removing dead wood, actually encourages new growth and, ultimately, restores the bush to its original shape. It ends up more, not less, beautiful than it was before. “Things must change for them to remain the same.”

So what is Torah? Not for us, I don’t think, the literal word-for-word account of God’s dialogue with Moses. But, rather, the record of how Jewish human beings experienced God in their world and how they expressed that encounter through the written word. We can see God’s revelation in it, but not all of it is God’s revelation.

In a great midrash, Moses wants to see what people have done with the Torah he transmitted. So he finds himself at the back of Akiva’s classroom listening to his teaching. A student asks Akiva where that idea comes from. Akiva tells him it’s in the Torah of Moses. Moses returns to God rather disturbed. “I didn’t recognise anything of what Akiva was teaching.” “Be quiet!” is God’s answer. “This is Torah, even if you don’t recognise it.” (Menachot 28b)

In other words, Torah is with us, with each generation to interpret and understand it in the light of that generation’s particular circumstances.

Shavuot puts the choice before us. Follow the Chatam Sofer’s chadash assur min hatorah and all it implies or the fictional ‘Leopard,’ the Prince of Salina. He recognises that things can’t stand still. The world as he knows it, however much he loves it, however much it runs according to its own logic, cannot stay the same. “Things must change,” he recognises, “for them to remain the same.”