A rabbi who surprises by saying “Yes!”

Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber

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

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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.

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!

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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. ↩︎

We reserve the right to refuse service: Tol’dot [5786] GKW Serm 9

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Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 22 November 20251

  1. You may have noticed that, for the last few weeks, I’ve been wincing a bit during the prayer for the royal family. The furore around the grand ex-Duke of York – the Andrew formerly known as Prince – has somewhat dulled my enthusiasm to pray for the welfare of the Windsors.
  2. And yet, praying for the welfare of the national government of the state in which we find ourselves is one of the oldest Jewish traditions, going back at least to the days of the Romans.2
  3. This morning’s Torah portion presents two models of how we might see our relationship to our leaders. The dying Isaac tells [the person he believes to be] his son Esau: “Peoples will serve you and nations will defer to you.”3 This raises the obvious question of, what is the difference between a people and a nation?
  4. The 19th-century commentator Malbim explains4 that עַמִּים, peoples, don’t have a religion, while לְאֻמִּים, nations, do. This, he says, accounts for the different verbs used for the two groups.
  5. Peoples, societies with no religion and no deity, will happily serve an earthly ruler. The word the Torah uses for “serve you”, יַעַבְדוּךָ, comes from the same root as עֶבֶד, slave, and עֲבוֹדָה, worship. A people which serves an earthly ruler has no autonomous will, no independence. They completely and without exception subjugate their own instincts to those of their leader, who possesses absolute power over them. As the Talmud says, a slave can’t be religious because their master is their god.5
  6. A nation, on the other hand, has a belief in God – or at least in a god. They cannot subjugate themselves to an earthly ruler. To do so would be to make the ruler a god. This does not mean that nations are completely lawless and beyond the reach of any human authority. We defer to our leaders and our governments, but without becoming their slaves. We recognise and respect them, but, like any good laundrette, we reserve the right to refuse service.
  7. Socrates argued that, just as we owe our fathers gratitude, respect and obedience, so do we owe our civic government gratitude, respect and obedience, and thus must comply with governmental instructions, under all circumstances, no matter what our personal feelings. The state, he asserts, brought us up, educated us and protected our welfare just as much as any parent, so we should honour and obey the state just as much as any parent. Many, many centuries later, the philosopher Professor Judith Shklar rejects this idea wholeheartedly: “Are adults obliged to obey their fathers unconditionally? … That is what a child may have to do, but surely that sort of obedience is the first thing that goes in adulthood … We may indeed owe our parents gratitude, and we show it by kindness, attention, and even deference, but not by unconditional obedience.”6
  8. In many ways, Socrates and Shklar are aligning themselves with the two models provided by our parashah. Socrates saw the inhabitants of Athens as an עַם, a people, who had a duty to serve the city council with a pure and unquestioning devotion. Shklar, however, prefers to think of her notional ancient Greek counterpart as part of a לְאֹם, a nation, of Athens, which held the city council in high regard but which was not quite ready to be enslaved to it.
  9. In a Jewish context, the reason why a לְאֹם cannot completely subordinate themselves to a political entity, is God; in Shklar’s world, although she was, unsurprisingly, Jewish, religion might instead have been replaced simply by “the unconditional primacy of conscience”.7 Whether the higher power on which a לְאֹם insists is a deity or a moral code, the vital point is that a לְאֹם does not sign away its autonomy, merging its identity with that of the master, in the same way that a slave does.
  10. In extreme cases, the supremacy of our Jewish moral code may indeed mandate acts of civil disobedience.
  11. In 1964, fifteen rabbis were arrested in Florida for unlawfully sharing a restaurant table with black people.8 Rabbis – and Jews more generally – living in such an atrocious society owed no fealty whatsoever to the law of the land,9 and anyone who did coöperate with such truly repugnant legislation was simply acting as a mindless slave of the state.
  12. Fortunately, there are no Jim Crow laws here and now, yet we must still be constantly alert to conflicts between law and right, between received instructions and moral imperatives. There are Jews in modern Britain who take on the legal system on matters of conscience: the arrest of my teacher Rabbi Jeffrey Newman at an Extinction Rebellion protest springs to mind.10 They are deserving of our respect whether or not one agrees with their actions and ideology, because the only alternative would be for these people to ignore the moral code of God calling them to action, filtering out their inner voice so as to heed only the voice of the state. And one who does that has not only ceased to act as an individual, they have ceased to act as a party to the covenant between the Jews and the Eternal, the covenant in which we pledged: נַעֲשֶׂה וְנִשְׁמָע, we will obey and we will listen…11 obey and listen to, that is, not the Florida state legislature, not the city council of ancient Athens, but to כֹּל אֲשֶׁר־דִּבֶּר יְהֹוָה, to all that God says.12
  13. Ultimately, then, that is why I’m still able to recite the prayer for the royal family. I know that I say it by choice as a free person, not meekly as a supplicant. Were our society to go seriously down the pan, I retain the right – indeed, I would have a duty – to stop praying for the welfare of its leadership; and at times like the present, when society is slightly down the pan, I can pray with a mental, and sometimes visible, smirk, through which I mean to exclude Kemi Badenoch or Jeremy Corbyn or Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, or whomever it may be, from my good wishes.
  14. This morning’s Torah reading was all about the gift which Isaac left Esau. And we know all about the ‘gift’ which Jacob stole from Isaac. But actually, I think the best legacy of all is one that isn’t directly mentioned in the parashah, and that is the legacy of having a God, having a higher power than any earthly entity. It’s because of that that we, the descendants of the principal actors in this week’s family psychodrama, have such a dominant sense of autonomy and independence. We can defer to the government, to Brighton and Hove City Council, to planning regulations, to tax return deadlines, without feeling ourselves belittled, without being enslaved to the principal actors in the royal family’s psychodrama. And that is because we know that we can critically evaluate every single directive and decide for ourselves what our consciences dictate. We reserve the right to refuse service.
  15. All of us here are citizens of some country or another; all of us here are part of the Jewish collective; but most importantly, all of us here are individuals, with noöne over us but God, subject to no ultimate authority save for the Divine voice of our consciences. כן יהי רצון, may this long 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. Genesis 27:37-45 ↩︎
  2. m.Avot 3:2 ↩︎
  3. Genesis 27:29 (“defer” is my, slightly loose, translation) ↩︎
  4. Ad loc ↩︎
  5. b.Chagigah 4a ↩︎
  6. Judith Shklar, On Political Obligation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019): 44-45. ↩︎
  7. Judith Shklar, Political Thought and Political Thinkers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998): 52. ↩︎
  8. Rabbi Eugene Borowitz et al, “Why we went: a joint letter from the rabbis arrested in St Augustine” (19 June 1964). ↩︎
  9. Even the traditional Jewish rule of דינא דמלכותא דינא – ‘the [secular] law of the land is the law’ – recognises an exception for laws which do not treat everyone equally: see eg h.G’zeilah va-Aveidah 5:14. ↩︎
  10. See eg Mathilde Frot, “Extinction Rebellion rabbi: ‘I’m elderly so I can afford to be arrested’”, The Jewish News (15 October 2019). ↩︎
  11. Exodus 24:7 ↩︎
  12. Ibid. ↩︎