Be a missionary: Va-Yishlach [5786] GKW Serm 10

Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 6 December 2025¹

1. In the late 1990s, there were only two Jews left in Afghanistan: just to prove that they were Jewish, their names were Yitzchak Levi and Zabulon Simentov.² They both lived in the remains of the synagogue in Kabul.³ And, of course, they hated each other’s guts. When the Taliban had one of its regular purges of non-Islamic elements throughout the country, both Levi and Simentov were imprisoned… only to be released shortly afterwards because the jailers couldn’t stand their bickering.⁴ Get that: they managed to be so annoying that they compelled the Taliban to let them go. Goodness me, but how Jewish can you be!
2. After the American invasion in 2001, one of Levi and Simentov’s captors was himself detained by the US. On his release from Guantanamo Bay 12 years later, he was asked by a journalist about the pair of Jews, gave a wry grin, and said: “Yes, I remember them, they caused me a lot of problems.”⁵
3. More seriously, though, think about the lives of these two men, living in a society about as hostile to Judaism as it’s possible to imagine. Taliban-era Afghanistan was even more hostile to Judaism than The Jewish Chronicle would claim Brighton is!⁶ What must it have been like for Levi and Simentov to feel the responsibility, bear the burden, of representing Jewishness in a malignant land?
4. In today’s parashah, we have a hint of another such character who kept the flame of monotheism burning in difficult circumstances. We read: וַתָּמׇת דְּבֹרָה מֵינֶקֶת רִבְקָה וַתִּקָּבֵר, Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, died, and was buried.⁷
5. This Deborah – not to be confused with the more famous Deborah The Warrior Princess who appears in the Book of Judges – is such an incredibly minor character that it seems bizarre to dedicate a whole verse to her. Professor Karla Bohmbach has calculated that there are approximately 3,000 characters named in the entire Bible (including the New Testament), of whom only 170 are women.⁸ So to have a named woman’s childhood nurse herself named, is extraordinary.
6. The 20th-century Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik had a fascinating stab at explaining the prominence of Deborah the nurse. How, he asked, was Rebekah a monotheist – a believer in the One God – despite having been brought up in the idolatrous commune of Haran? “There must,” he theorised, “have been an ‘underground community’ in Haran, preaching … justice and righteousness. Who was the leader of this underground community? Deborah!”⁹
7. This is an amazing image. Rather like the last two Jews squatting in the Kabul synagogue, Deborah was an emissary of and for Jewish values. In the poetic words of Rabbi John D Rayner z”l, she had the duty to go “out into the world, freely [or] under duress, to face its perils and meet its challenges, to establish in pagan lands enclaves of godliness, to proclaim God’s unity and sovereignty, and the demand that humans shall be humane”.¹⁰
8. But if we take the drama out of it, if we forget the involvement of the Taliban or the idols, and just think of what it was like to be a Jew living amongst non-Jews, we get a picture of lives not a million miles away from our own.
9. ‘Mission’ is not a word we use very much in Judaism, mainly because it ‘sounds a bit Christian’. But, actually, we do have a mission and we should be – are – missionaries. The words from Rabbi Rayner about demanding that humans be humane… he wasn’t writing about Deborah specifically, still less Levi and Simentov in Afghanistan. He was writing of our ancestors and of us.
10. So what does ‘mission’ mean for us? How are we to be modern-day Deborahs? We’re incredibly fortunate not to have to exist “underground” (whatever The Jewish Chronicle might suggest). Nor do we need to go door-knocking offering our neighbours ‘the good news’.
11. What it means is that we have to be proud ambassadors for our Judaism and our values. Care for the planet is a Jewish mission. Care for refugees and asylum seekers is a Jewish mission. Campaigning for trans rights, for enhanced paternity leave, for free school meals and funded nursery places is a Jewish mission. Welcoming schools into our building to learn that we’re lovely people just like them is a Jewish mission. Being open with work colleagues and friends about our Judaism, reminding them that, for all our normalcy, we’re also a bit different, that’s a Jewish mission. All of the work that the Brighton and Hove Jewish community did, and is still doing, to promote awareness of the hostages, that is a Jewish mission.
12. And doing it because we’re Jewish is vital. We don’t just do eco-work because we’re vaguely lefty Brightonians. We do it because we’re Jewish. We don’t just donate to the Voices in Exile box in the hallway because we’re nice. We do it because of our ancestral experience of minoritisation and oppression.
13. We should each act as if we’re the last Jew in Kabul, each feel as if the future of our people depends on us personally, and make our presence felt – although perhaps not exactly like them.
14. One of my teachers at Leo Baeck College said that a sermon should always, without exception, contain a call to action. If it doesn’t, he said, it’s ‘just words’. That’s not advice I’ve ever really kept to. A sermon can be just words – or, putting it differently, being ‘just words’ and being a call to action are not mutually exclusive.
15. But today I am going to make a call to action. I’m going to ask you to do something. Think of one thing you can do, going forwards, to be even more of an ambassador for Judaism, to be even more of a Deborah. Come up with one arena of your life where you could inject a tiny bit more Judaism into something you already do, where you can be Jewish a little more showily or articulate Jewish values a little more prominently.
16. Underground movements like Deborah’s may start underground, but here we are today, in the open, streaming online, because of her original act of courage. Let us all take her example. כן יהי רצון, may this be God’s will.

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Shavua tov!

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Notes

1. Genesis 35:1-12 ↩︎
2. Richard Spencer, “Only Jew in Kabul keeps a lonely vigil at his synagogue“, The Times (18 August 2021). ↩︎
3. Jon Levine, “Last Jew in Afghanistan will stay put in Kabul – despite efforts to rescue him“, New York Post (21 August 2021). ↩︎
4. Spencer, ibid. ↩︎
5. Emran Feroz, “Afghanistan’s last Jew gets ready for the Taliban – again“, Foreign Policy (29 October 2019). ↩︎
6. Jane Prinsley, “Waves of antisemitism hit the south coast community“, The Jewish Chronicle (28 April 2024). ↩︎
7. Genesis 35:8 ↩︎
8. Karla Bohmbach, “Names and naming in the biblical world” in Carol Meyers (ed), Women in Scripture: a dictionary of named and unnamed women in the Hebrew Bible, the aprocyphal/ deuteronomical books and the New Testament (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 33-39: 33. ↩︎
9. Saul Weiss, Insights of Rabbi Joseph B Soloveitchik: discourses on fundamental theological issues in Judaism (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005): 85. ↩︎
10. Machzor Ruach Chadashah p 310. ↩︎