Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 6 June 2026

• In the more-than-1,500 pages of files released on Monday regarding the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to America,¹ not a single word was written by the Prime Minister.² And now we know why: Keir Starmer, when taking government decisions, uses the “disappearing messages” feature on his WhatsApp.³
• This is a serious barrier to accountability. How can we tell – in relation to incredibly important questions of public policy – who knew what, and when, if we don’t have the facts? Cassandra Somers-Joce, part of the law faculty at Oxford University, explains:⁴

Keeping proper documentation is absolutely vital to the effective running of any organisation, as anyone who has ever minuted a shul council meeting will tell you.

• And we might suppose, indeed, that the Jewish people is especially good at that sort of thing. After all, we write everything down. The medieval Cairo Genizah is basically the opposite of the disappearing WhatsApp: every single document, no matter how trivial, was preserved, from shopping lists⁵ to letters from a mother complaining that her son didn’t write to her often enough.⁶
• Yet actually, our most important record-book, the Torah, is kind of incomplete – or at least unclear. In this morning’s parashah, we heard an account of God commanding Moses to send twelve spies into the Promised Land.⁷ Yet in six weeks’ time, when we read Parashat D’varim, we’ll find Moses saying that it was his decision.⁸
• As the commentator Abarbanel says נאמר סותר לזה, “this appears to be a contradiction”.⁹ For him, even if we accept the classical way¹⁰ of getting round the ambiguity – God did command the spy mission, but did so at the request of Moses – that doesn’t explain why the ambiguity is there in the first place. For such an important matter, said Abarbanel, it is vital to be crystal clear who took what decision.
• The best answer that Abarbanel could come up with was that in the later text, in Deuteronomy, Moses was trying to spare God’s blushes. The spies’ scouting of the Promised Land had gone horribly wrong, the Israelites were sentenced to another 40 years in the wilderness,¹¹ and the whole episode was one great big omnishambles. To avoid the younger generation blaming God for the debacle, Moses took responsibility.
• The interpretation makes sense textually – the contradictory second reading is indeed in Moses’s own words – but it doesn’t reflect well on him at all. Throwing himself under the bus to protect God from criticism may appear noble on the surface, but let us not forget that the criticism was justified. God did command the spy mission: שְׁלַח־לְךָ אֲנָשִׁים וְיָתֻרוּ אֶת־אֶרֶץ, You should send men to scout out the land.¹²
• Theodicy, the putting of God on trial, the theological questioning of God’s judgement, is a legitimate and necessary part of religion. Faith has to encounter, and deal with, doubt. As Rabbi Charley Baginsky has said: “It is tempting to replace … complexity with certainty, but frankly that not only looks nothing like real leadership, it lacks humility too.”¹³ Moses took it upon himself to erase any possibility of the Israelites working through the complexity of their relationship with God. He was vain enough to intercede, to mess about with the truths and tensions of their theology, and in doing so he deprived them of the right to know the facts.
• On the day that the Mandelson files were released, the government minister Darren Jones was asked why there were no messages from Keir Starmer. He snapped back: “Prime Ministers do not sit at computers, sending emails from Outlook.”¹⁴ Then, the following day, it turned out that Prime Ministers do send messages, albeit using WhatsApp rather than Outlook.
• Jones’s motive was identical to that of Moses: protecting the boss from justified criticism, even at the cost of accuracy. If the public had taken his answer at face value – none of Starmer’s messages appeared because there were no such messages – we would never have got to the truth, which is that he sent plenty of messages but covered his tracks using an auto-delete function. As Abarbanel would say, נאמר סותר לזה, “this appears to be a contradiction”.
• We’re used to politicians being unreliable narrators. That’s why the press didn’t take no for an answer and pushed for more information about disappearing WhatsApps.
• We need to get used to the idea of the Torah being an unreliable narrator too. Abarbanel knew that he had to ask questions: in fact, his entire Torah commentary is framed around questions – question after question on every parashah, seeking out confusions, contradictions, complexities. In Judaism, confusion is to be welcomed. There’s a fantastic moment in a 2010 episode of Doctor Who in which Matt Smith says: “There’s something that doesn’t make sense, let’s go and poke it with a stick.”¹⁵
• Society’s drive to get to the truth about the machinations of political leaders should characterise our religious lives too. May we enjoy finding contradictions – and enjoy poking them with a stick. כן יהי רצון, may this be God’s will.

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. Henry Dyer, “What documents are missing from the new release of Mandelson files?“, The Guardian (1 June 2026). ↩︎
2. John Crace, “Mandelson files reveal a man for whom betrayal is a way of life“, The Guardian (1 June 2026). ↩︎
3. Peter Walker, “No 10 confirms Starmer’s WhatsApp messages automatically delete“, The Guardian (2 June 2026). ↩︎
4. Cassandra Somers-Joce, “Government by WhatsApp: a fetter on scrutiny?“, The Constitution Society (15 March 2024). ↩︎
5. Ro Oranim, “The strange connection between a medieval shopping list and a divorce contract“, The Librarians (18 September 2019). ↩︎
6. “What can you find in the world’s oldest Yiddish letter? Exactly what you would expect“, The Librarians (15 January 2018). ↩︎
7. Numbers 13:2 ↩︎
8. Deuteronomy 1:22-23 ↩︎
9. Abarbanel to Numbers 13 ↩︎
10. Ramban to Numbers 13:2 ↩︎
11. See eg K’li Yakar to Numbers 13:2 ↩︎
12. Numbers 13:2 ↩︎
13. Rabbi Charley Baginsky MA(Hons), “Saints and sinners” (27 May 2026). ↩︎
14. HC Deb 1 June 2026 c 860 ↩︎
15. Doctor Who, “Amy’s Choice”, BBC One (15 May 2010). ↩︎