Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 28 March 2026¹ – bat mitzvah of Estelle

1. 31 October 1968 is, I’m sure, a day that you will all remember, because It was election day in Roseau, the capital city of Dominica.² Edward Scobie won with 587 votes; Arnold Active came a close second with 585 votes.³ And Arnold Active – whose name, incidentally, makes him sound like a superhero – went to court to try to overturn the election, because eight of Scobie’s votes were written in pen.⁴ Audible gasp!
2. The thing is, Dominican law did say that ballot papers had to be marked “with the pencil provided”.⁵ So we can see Mr Active’s point. But in the end, the court did the sensible thing, and told him to get a grip: people had voted in a free and fair election, Scobie had gained more votes than his opponents, and the fact that some people had used ink rather than graphite could not possibly justify overturning a democratic process. The pencil law, said Mr Justice Berridge, was “directory” rather than “mandatory”: a suggestion rather than an absolutely binding rule.⁶
3. The distinction between directory and mandatory laws was not something invented in the Caribbean, however. It’s something we find in Jewish law as well. In the Torah portion which Estelle read so beautifully, we saw that priests were instructed to burn guilt-offerings after they had been made. This is phrased very peremptorily: the priest shall turn the offering into smoke.⁷ Yet the Talmud says that it is valid even if not burned.⁸
4. In fact, all of the biblical laws of קדשים – holy matters – are considered to be directory, non-binding, unless explicitly stated otherwise.⁹ This is quite surprising. A priest can ignore a clearly-stated line of Torah, yet they’re still on the right side of the line. How can this be?
5. Rabbi Michael Abraham has a beautiful explanation.¹⁰ Holy acts, acts of devotion, have an innate, natural validity regardless of what the Torah said. People were praying long before the Torah was given, and they did it in ways that felt intuitive, right. “The detailed practical instructions in Jewish law,” he says, “did not come to uproot these natural, intuitive acts of worship, but to channel and direct them: at most to add to them, but not to replace them.”¹¹
6. Whenever anybody prays, regardless of how ‘imperfect’ their prayer appears according to the minutiae of the law – having driven to shul, using transliteration, whatever – it is still something real and something special. As Rabbi Abraham puts it: “If someone worships God, they are worshipping God. What matters is their intention, not their physical acts.”
7. This principle extends beyond prayer, though. Some things have an innate, natural sanctity which we can recognise without any law telling us about it. Take ambulances, for example. Saving life – providing medical care – is the most sacred of human activities. I often remark that rabbis train for five years: longer than paramedics, and considerably less socially useful. Nothing is more important than the delivery of lifesaving care. The priest who failed to burn an offering was still acting from the purest of motives, regardless of the letter of the law. The thugs who burned four ambulances funded by a Jewish charity acted from the worst of motives.¹²
8. The ambulances may have gone up in smoke. But the sanctity of that commitment to the preservation of life wasn’t stored in a yard in Golders Green. It cannot be burned. No physical disruption, still less mere imperfection, can turn the sacred into the worthless.
9. Rabbi Abraham’s interpretation is, for an Orthodox rabbi, startlingly generous. His point is that the default assumption in the domain of holy things is validity, not invalidity. This is not just a technical rule of sacrificial law. It is a whole new way of thinking about religious engagement. The person who prays imperfectly, who observes imperfectly, who – to use Rabbi Abraham’s example – says a heartfelt prayer at the wrong time of day, still gets credit for the worship they did. We might see this as a Liberal Jewish instinct buried inside Orthodox Jewish scholarship.
10. Ultimately, what needs to unite all Jews, especially in times of communal difficulty, is Jewish joy and fulfilment. In fact, the greater the difficulty, the more Judaism is needed. As Rabbi Beth Nichols has said: “Helping our community hone in on how Judaism can bring meaning to our lives … motivates us with a better understanding of what we are fighting for … and it comforts us with the strength of a caring community.”¹³
11. Now we come to you, Estelle. You’ve spent months preparing for your bat mitzvah, but you’ve also spent a lifetime preparing for it. You’ve done so against a backdrop of a time when being Jewish is sometimes scary, sometimes risky, always complicated. Nothing you’ve faced – not the practical difficulty of learning to read Biblical Hebrew, not the moral difficulty of seeing our community under attack – has daunted you, nor dented your innate, natural impulses to do Jewish.
12. More than that, though: you’ve done it your own way. You haven’t just gone through the motions. You’ve done it while stamping the entire process with your own personality. You have remained recognisably yourself throughout: your humour, your warmth, your (dare I say it) attempt to look nonchalant and aloof when we can all see how much this actually means to you. Your particular way of being Estelle has not been sacrificed on the altar of bat mitzvah preparation.
13. You are someone who would mark your ballot paper in pen if that’s what you wanted to do, even if the sign said to use pencil. And I mean that as a compliment! What makes your Judaism valid is not the fact that you’re Strictly Orthodox, but, actually, it’s the fact that you’re not Strictly Orthodox. What you’re doing is doing Judaism in the way most authentically yours, without a hint of concession or compromise. And that is the only way your Judaism can actually be valid. A performance of someone else’s Judaism, technically correct yet spiritually hollow, is like a ballot paper marked with a pencil but with no genuine intention behind it. Whereas your pen, Estelle – your own voice, your own relationship with this tradition, your own reasons for being here – is precisely what makes your Jewish vote count. And we wish you מזל טוב!

Comments are welcome at the bottom of the page. Please note that they are premoderated and anything abusive simply won’t be published.

Remember that all of my sermons, handouts and so on can be found here.

Shavua tov!

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to you by email:

Notes

1. Leviticus 7:1-10 ↩︎
2. Active v Scobie (1969) 13 WIR 189, 191 ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4. Ibid: 195. ↩︎
5. Ibid: 194. ↩︎
6. Ibid. ↩︎
7. Leviticus 7:5 ↩︎
8. b.Zevachim 7b ↩︎
9. See eg Atvan d’Oraita 12 ↩︎
10. Rabbi Michael Abraham, “On the meaning of the commandment in the law of holy things: regarding the principle of ‘we require that the text repeat it in order to make it binding’” [Hebrew], Ma’alin ba-Kodesh 14 (2007), 135-154 ↩︎
11. Ibid: 149. ↩︎
12. See eg Benjamin Lynch, “Hatzola saved my baby’s life – this arson attack is crazy“, The Standard (25 March 2026) ↩︎
13. Rabbi Beth Nichols, “Jewish continuity needs meaningful Jewish living” (2 October 2024) ↩︎