Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 2 May 2026¹

• Because God dictates, in our Torah portion this morning, the details of festivals “which you are to proclaim”, the rabbis understand that the details of the Jewish religious calendar are left up to us, the Jews. God said that Pesach is to be in the month of Nissan, but it was entirely our choice when in the year to place that month.
• And, says the 19th-century rabbi the Mashgiach of Mir, as soon as the Jewish community fixes those dates, “holiness rests upon them accordingly”.²
• This is quite a startling proposition: there’s nothing intrinsically holy about Pesach, but instead, its holiness derives from the fact that it’s the day on which we, mere mortals, decided to hold it. As the Mashgiach put it: “Such is the great power of [humans], reaching from earth all the way into the heavens!”³
• The idea that we humans create our own holiness isn’t exactly new. Sir Philip Pullman’s magisterial⁴ trilogy His Dark Materials revolves around an adventurer, Lord Asriel, who was disgusted with the all-powerful Church using supposed Divine authority to censor and oppress ordinary people. Asriel decided to travel to the Kingdom of Heaven, overthrow it, and establish, in its place, “the Republic of Heaven”.⁵ Ultimately, his plan failed, but for one very specific reason: “[W]e have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere.”⁶
• For Pullman, who identifies himself as a religious atheist,⁷ there is no supernatural way of finding meaning in life. We all have to do what the Mashgiach of Mir said, and construct a heaven around ourselves: generate our own holiness, imbue our own existence with Godliness. Only when we exercise our most divinely human faculties – imagination, love, interpersonal connection – do we truly experience what it means to be alive. When we do that, holiness “flows through [us] and fertilises [us] like pollen”.⁸
• His Dark Materials was an outlet for Pullman’s anticlericalism, his anger at those kings, bishops and priests who trampled on the rights and freedom of commoners.⁹ And in doing so, he echoed another, much earlier, radical theologian, Gerrard Winstanley.
• In the years leading up to the English Civil War, anyone who questioned the Church’s conception of God quickly found themselves branded a heretic… and the Church’s god just happened to be “the one who had given [the bishops] the keys of the kingdom”.¹⁰
• Risking heresy charges himself, Winstanley insisted that “God was not the property of the institutional church”.¹¹ Instead, he came up with a theology very close to that of Pullman.¹² People should stop looking for God in “a place of glory beyond the sun, moon and stars”, he said, but rather “see God ruling within you”.¹³ Angels did not exist except as “divine sparks of glory, planted in human nature”.¹⁴ For any given person, in Winstanley’s theology, their god is simply the temperament that governs their activity. “Pride, envy … hypocrisy … If all or any one of these rules and governs you, all or any one of these is your God.”¹⁵
• And, perhaps most radically of all, Winstanley declared that God was nothing but “pure Reason which … knits the whole [of] creation together into a one-ness of life […with] every creature sweetly in love lending their hands to preserve each other”.¹⁶
• What is striking about Pullman and Winstanley is that they aren’t atheists – or at least, in Pullman’s case, not an out-and-out atheist. They are completely reconstructing not only the image but the very concept of God, but what they end up with is still marinated in the idea that our world is bathed in a power that connects people to each other and has the potential to bring comfort, joy and kindness. Pullman can’t bring himself to label such a power ‘God’, and Winstanley rebrands it as ‘Reason’ with a capital R, but these are just semantic distinctions. Ultimately, James Luther Adams put it well: “The only person who is really an atheist is one who denies that there is any reality that sustains meaning and goodness in the human venture … It is very difficult to find this sort of atheist, perhaps impossible.”¹⁷
• And finally, to add to the line-up of Winstanley, Mir, Pullman and Adams, we have Dorothee Sölle, a 20th-century theologian who understands that “God … needs people in order to come into being”. When humans are barbarous, or even when humans are simply indifferent, “God’s spirit ha[s] no place to live”.¹⁸ God is what happens when we are “whole and flourishing […and take] responsibility for tending and preserving” our world.¹⁹
• I’ve thrown a bucketful of quotes at you today. It’s not because I’m trying to impress with you with how busy I’ve been with my research. It’s because these are all people far wiser and more eloquent than me and I can’t say this stuff any better than they have.
• But here’s a concrete example in my own words and about our own congregation. Later this morning, we’ll be consecrating a leaf on our Tree of Life in memory of Kevin Odell z”l. This is a perfect example of building the Republic of Heaven where we are. Nobody commanded us to have a Tree of Life. It isn’t part of the extremely detailed traditional Jewish structures for mourning. We’re doing it because it’s meaningful to know that there will be a small spot in this holy building which will forever be in Kevin’s holy memory. We’re making a connection between people. Not a connection between Kevin and his loving wife Barbara – that was there anyway and will always be there – but a connection between Kevin and Barbara and all of us. Every time anybody walks into our synagogue from now on, they will be walking past Kevin’s leaf. And whether or not they knew him, whether or not they even stop and read his name on the inscription, they will be close enough to soak up some of his goodness, and to feel some of the love that bound him and Barbara and the community.
• And that, ultimately, is holiness. That is God acting within us, not living beyond the stars. That is pure Reason: our heads and hearts working in tandem to pull together in moments of grief and moments of joy. God comes into being when we remember our loved ones. God comes into being when we gather in any way at all. כן יהי רצון, may this be God’s will.

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Shavua tov!

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Notes

1. Leviticus 23:1-14 ↩︎
2. Da’at Torah to Leviticus 23:2 ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4. Pun fully intended. ↩︎
5. Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (New York: Dell Yearling, 2000): 211. ↩︎
6. Ibid: 363. ↩︎
7. Peter Jukes, “All his materials“, Aeon (13 January 2014). ↩︎
8. Philip Pullman, The Rose Field (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2025): ch 36 (ebook edition). ↩︎
9. Pullman, The Amber Spyglass: 210. ↩︎
10. David Boulton, The Trouble with God: building the Republic of Heaven (Ropley, Hampshire: O Books, 2005): 121. ↩︎
11. Ibid: 124. ↩︎
12. Ibid: 226-227. ↩︎
13. Thomas N Corns et al (eds), The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) vol 1: 357. I have modernised Winstanley’s spelling, punctuation and thee-s and thou-s. ↩︎
14. Ibid: 349. ↩︎
15. Ibid: 415. ↩︎
16. Ibid: 416. ↩︎
17. George Kimmich Beach (ed), The Essential James Luther Adams: selected essays and addresses (Boston: Skinner House Books, 1998): 33. ↩︎
18. Dorothee Soelle, Theology for Skeptics: reflections on God, trans Joyce L Irwin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995): 15. ↩︎
19. Ibid: 112. ↩︎