Sermon: Vayikra / Shabbat Zachor
Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 23 March 2016
I came to Izzy’s Bat Mitzvah a bit late in the party because I had the opportunity of three month’s Sabbatical leave from Alyth which ended last Tuesday. Though a lot of members of the Synagogue have kindly asked me if I had a good holiday, which is the best way of winding up a Rabbi fresh from Sabbatical, of course that’s not really what it was.
The greatest part of my Sabbatical was devoted to working with other Rabbis to create the new Rosh Hashanah Machzor for the Reform Movement. And we got it done. It means that this Rosh Hashanah we will be using a new prayer book which is a draft ready for us to work out whether we have got right a way of prayer for our coming generation.
Among my happiest tasks over my Sabbatical was gathering in creative writing which can help us to make Rosh Hashanah mean more in the coming years. Much of this will be placed on pages facing the key liturgy of the festival. One of my favourite pieces so far, written for the Machzor is this one, by the German Jewish scholar Beruriah Weigand.
איך בין די כלה
פונעם אנהייב
פון דער באשאפונג,
די זינגערין פון גראזן.
I am the bride
of the beginning
of Creation,
the singer of blades of grass.
The first lines of a poem in Yiddish newly written to celebrate Rosh Hashanah as the Birthday of the world.
If my grandparents Lionel and Phoebe (z’’l) had their way a Yiddish poem in a 21st Century Machzor would have been an impossibility. They were both brought up able to speak Yiddish and with Yiddish expressions peppering their speech. But they made sure that my father, his brother and sister were not Yiddish speakers.
They were here in England, this was where there life was to be lived and Yiddish was the language of the past, of Poland which the family had left a generation before and was never going back to. But Jewish memories do not fade so fast. So to recognise that Yiddish is part of Jewish memory there it will be in a Machzor for the coming generation, in the richness of its language and sound.
In 1947, David Ben-Gurion appeared before the United Nations Commission weighing Jewish and Arab claims as the Mandate period was ending. Ben Gurion’s remarks focused on Jewish history, with Pesach at the centre: “Three hundred years ago, a ship called the Mayflower left for the New World… Is there a single Englishman who knows the exact date and hour of the Mayflower’s launch? …Do they know how many people were in the boat? Their names? What they wore? What they ate?”
He contrasted this record with that of the Jewish people. “More than 3,300 years before the Mayflower set sail, the Jews left Egypt. Any Jewish child, whether in America or Russia, Yemen or Germany, knows that his forefathers left Egypt at dawn on the 15th of Nisan. …Their belts were tied and their staffs were in their hands. They ate matzot, and arrived at the Red Sea after seven days…”
Judaism and Jewish culture retains its power and compellingness through strong memory. When the artist of Alyth’s stained glass windows, Roman Halter, Z’’l, was commissioned to create a way of recognising the Shoah, the Holocaust, on the grounds of the Sternberg Centre in Finchley he took one word Zachor, remember, and forged it out of indestructible metal, mounting it on a plinth three metres high. Remember. Do not forget it says to anyone who visits the Sternberg Centre.
Our people is a people of remembrance. We never forget. We keep traces of our past, and we commemorate the dark times of our history.
This is Shabbat Zachor. The annual special Shabbat just before Purim where we read the brief verses of Torah reminding us to remember an awful incident on the journey from slavery in Egypt to freedom in Israel, when the tribe of Amalek attacked the Israelites from behind, not squaring up to their warriors but rather attacking the weak and the stragglers of this column of escaped slaves.
It is a piece of ritual remembrance because there no longer is an identifiable people of Amalek. Its ritual is incorporated into the very writing of every Torah scroll and even mezuzah claf, as scribes test the accuracy and smoothness of each of their quills by writing the word Amalek and then crossing it out, literally blotting out the name.
Why does it happen before Purim? It is because the Book of Esther is truly the end of the line for Amalek. This desert tribe begins in the struggle between Jacob and Esau. The original Amalek, the founder of the tribe was the grandson of Esau, through his son Eliphaz (Genesis 36:12). In classical Jewish literature Esau is always held up as the archetypal threat to the Jews, as he was to his brother, Jacob. Esau is used in Midrash and Talmud as a code word for the Roman Empire and its brutalities.
In the next Book after Amalek the person is introduced we have the story of the shameful attack on the Israelites by the Amalek tribe in the early days of the Exodus, the first attack since they left Egypt. (Exodus 17:8ff). Outside of the Torah Amalek returns as a tribe headed by King Agag who is defeated by King Saul (1 Samuel 15) but lives on to fight another day.
Agag the Amelekite King’s descendant many generations later in Persian Shushan is the man promoted by King Ahasuerus to be his right hand man, the one who says these paradigmatic words of anti-Semitism: “There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the people in all the provinces of your kingdom; their laws are different from those of every other people; and they do not keep the king’s laws; therefore it is not for the king’s profit to tolerate them” (Esther 3:8). Haman. (Come on I gave you a long enough run up!)
Now most of us lovely, tolerant ,open minded Reform Jews can cope with chapters 1-8 of the Book of Esther, the story of Ahasuerus and Vashti, Esther and Mordechai, court intrigue, feasting, and multiple mentions of the name Haman. But the penultimate Chapter 9 rather turns the stomach. It is full of destruction, violence and brutal, unsparing revenge. The Jews take their licence granted by the King to utterly wipe out Haman’s family. They truly do remove the name of Amalek from the earth. It is horrible, even the names of Haman’s nine sons are mentioned by name as they are executed. Awful – but then it’s over – Amalek truly is no more.
So why do we keep remembering Amalek? Every Shabbat Zachor.
It is because by remembering we achieve two things. We recognise that the people who were the victims of the Amelekites mattered. The weak and the stragglers whom their tribe attacked were just as important as the King Sauls and the heroes Mordechai and Esther – they are not irrelevant for their suffering is remembered every year. Secondly we remember to be vigilant for the next Amalek, whichever regime might persecute its people, whichever powerful group might abuse its power.
For this reason we remember the Shoah and must always do. This is not so that we have eternal enmity for Germany or anything like that. This is so that we remember the everyday people who were the victims of the Nazis and their collaborators. We do not let their suffering fade away. And also we stay vigilant against those who seek to resurrect the Nazi way of thinking where you consider another group of people as being below you, and we are called to put ourselves in the forefront of campaigns against racism.
My colleague Rabbi David Meyer, who was Rabbi of the Reform Community in Brussels and student Rabbi in this Synagogue, has worked for ten years with the people of Rwanda to help them to build memorials to the dreadful genocide of up to a million Tutsi people twenty years ago. He has worked with many others to share the Jewish experience of remembering the Shoah in order to move beyond it. These memorials make sure that the people who died are validated in their existence. We know that memory alone will not prevent another people from committing these awful crimes sometime in the future but forgetting surely would be even worse.
Remembrance is really about the future. It tells us that what happened mattered. That those who suffered are worth something – so that anyone who suffers in the future will be recognised and perhaps their suffering will be prevented.
It tells us that the worst can happen if we do not nip evil in the bud before it grows and prevails.
As we commemorate Shabbat Zachor today, may we the people of memory always hear the call from our memories to be the protectors of the weak and vulnerable in the future and the campaigners against victimisation in our own times.