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Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber

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Time and darkness: B’reishit [5786] GKW Serm 6

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Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 18 October 20251 — bar mitzvah of Leo

  1. What is time? According to the 1920s sci-fi writer Ray Cummings, time is “what keeps everything from happening at once”.2
  2. So, then, time is what means that you, Leo, are having your bar mitzvah this morning, while your sisters have some years still to go. Time is what means that we all knew when to arrive, and that we, hopefully, got enough sleep overnight to prepare us for such a special day.
  3. Time is also key to the Torah portion which you read so beautifully for us: the first four days of Creation.
  4. On the first day, God created light. This had to happen on the first day: in fact, by definition, whenever it happened would be the first day. Abarbanel, a Torah commentator who lived in 15th-century Portugal, explains: “The blessed Creator realised that the light was good, in order that we could use it to measure out our days. When things were eternally dark, it is impossible to mark time or to distinguish one act from another. Yet God also saw that, if it were eternally light, we likewise could not mark time.”3
  5. In other words, until there was darkness – until it became possible to mark time – there could be no evening, there could be no morning, there could be no first day. Everything would, in the words of the Doctor, be “a big ball of wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey stuff”.4
  6. More to the point, if we lived in a world filled always and only with light, if our entire lives were like an endless Icelandic summer, we would be impoverished. We’re human beings and we need contrast.
  7. When you wrote to me, Leo, you told me that your two favourite subjects at school are science and art, because “they allow [you] to make [your] own decisions and choices”. Science and art are, in many ways, extremely contrasting subjects, but you’ve rightly noticed that they also have a lot in common.
  8. Similarly, the existence of light allows us to explore the world around us, but the existence of darkness allows us to explore the worlds around us. As the poet Diane Ackerman has said: “What we call ‘night’ is the time we spend facing the secret reaches of space, where other solar systems … dwell. Don’t think of night as the absence of day; think of it as a kind of freedom. Turned away from our sun, we see the dawning of far-flung galaxies. We are no longer sun-blind to the star-coated universe we inhabit.”5
  9. The Genesis narrative you read, Leo, doesn’t mention other planets, yet there they are in the sky, obviously created, uniquely visible to us thanks to the darkness God ordained on the first day. Conventionally, we might say that nighttime is simply a time to recharge our iPads and wait for the next morning. But we should also say that daytime is a time to count down until the next evening, until darkness falls and we can celebrate the beauty of the universe, and the beauty of the time which is being marked.
  10. A bar mitzvah is time-marking par excellence. 13 trips around the sun it took you to get to this moment. You’ve had to fit a huge amount of hard work on top of your science and art and all the other things you do with your life. Isn’t it lucky that not everything happens all at once! You’ve done your family proud, 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!

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Notes

  1. Genesis 1:1-19 ↩︎
  2. Ray Cummings, The Girl in the Golden Atom (1923; repr Westport, Connecticut: Hyperion Press, 1974): 46. ↩︎
  3. Abarbanel to Genesis 1 ↩︎
  4. Steven Moffat, “Blink”, Doctor Who (BBC One: 9 June 2007). ↩︎
  5. Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (New York: Vintage Books, 1990): 245. ↩︎

Our sukkah is made of people: Chol ha-Mo’ed Sukkot [5786] GKW Serm 7

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Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 11 October 2025

  1. The laws of sukkah construction are incredibly complex and detailed. But one of the most fundamental is that it must have at least two-and-a-bit walls.1 Anything less than that, it’s no longer remotely reminiscent of a dwelling-place, so the symbolism of our ancestors’ booths in the wilderness is gone.
  2. So what does one do if – and I know this is everyone’s worst nightmare – you’re ready to fulfil the mitzvah of eating in the sukkah, only to find that it’s a gazebo-like structure without the minimum number of walls?
  3. One option canvassed by Maimonides, pun fully intended, is to line up some people along the edge of the gazebo, to become a kind of informal wall.2
  4. But… there’s always a but…
  5. This only works legally, we’re told, if the people forming the wall don’t know that that’s what they’re doing. In other words, you can’t say to your friends: please line up here so you render this a kosher sukkah. No. You have to lure them into standing there with some ploy or another which leaves them ignorant of their true purpose. If, at any point, these poor patsies learn that they’re being used as a wall, the spell breaks and the sukkah becomes, at that precise moment, halachically invalid.
  6. Let’s just think about that for a moment. The person-wall we’ve built out of our friends only works so long as they live in ignorance. Rather like those scenes in Tom and Jerry where a cartoon character who runs off the edge of a cliff can keep running until they notice their predicament, and will only begin their fatal plummet once they realise there’s nothing but air beneath them, our person-sukkah functions just fine until the human beings forming its walls realise, at which point, however they feel about it, they no longer ‘work’.
  7. A 17th-century commentator called the Taz had a stab at coming up with a reason for this very strange rule:3 if, he says, the wall-people know that the sukkah relies on their positioning, they’ll be extra-sure to stay in place out of a spirit of helpfulness. The problem is, that would make the sukkah kind of permanent, rather than the temporary structure it’s supposed to be.
  8. In other words, a sukkah needs at least two-and-a-bit walls so that it’s somewhat like a dwelling-place, but it also can’t be too much like a dwelling-place.
  9. This makes the traditional conception of the sukkah something very rare indeed in Judaism: something that is supposed to be liminal. Something that is supposed to fall in-between categories.
  10. Generally speaking, Judaism is very keen on drawing clear, bold lines. Kosher and non-kosher, pure and impure, Jewish and non-Jewish, child and adult, man and woman. Sometimes the lines look a little contrived or arbitrary, but they’re always there. Those phenomena which don’t lend themselves to easy classification were deeply troubling to the rabbis of the Talmud. “Twilight is a period of uncertainty, kind of day and kind of night,” says the Talmud,4 before resolving that it should be treated strictly: the rules of Shabbat are in force throughout twilight on Friday evening and on Saturday evening. A line had to be drawn, and they drew it.
  11. As the writer Brittany Chaffee has said: “Brains crave predictability and liminal moments are like a trapeze. Once you jump off the platform, there is … momentum and no awareness of where you’ll land.” But she then goes on to say: “Although liminal spaces can be tough platforms to spring off of, if we instead think of them as a beautiful auditorium, the entryway of a museum, we can make the moment beautiful.”5
  12. We know that liminality is not something to be legislated out of existence. We’re entirely comfortable with the fact that there are people in the room whose Jewish identity is anything but straightforward. We’re entirely comfortable with the notion that human sexuality is a nuanced spectrum rather than a drop-down menu. BHPS is a constellation of people who don’t neatly into a box, and that’s what makes our shul so marvellous.
  13. And the sukkah, a box we definitely don’t all fit into, is a symbol of that marvel: a fantastical hybrid of the permanent and the temporary, the outdoor and the indoor.
  14. Although Maimonides’s ramblings about the law of a sukkah formed of people seems like one of those classic rabbinic excursuses which had no purpose other than debate for the sake of debate, in fact, we could say that every sukkah is formed of people.
  15. Perhaps not literally – our sukkah is frankly formed out of little more than gaffer tape and hope – but a sukkah without a community of Jews who formed it, tend it, bring it to life, is no sukkah. Maimonides can have as many regulations as he likes, but it’s only the existence of Jews to put them into practice which save his law books from being a dead letter.
  16. What, then, of the requirement of ignorance? If every sukkah is formed of people, am I saying we all need to be ignorant?
  17. Well… sort of, actually, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Maybe not ignorance exactly, but a lack of knowledge, or a willing suspension of disbelief. Objectively, we know that whatever shelters our ancestors built in the wilderness, they didn’t have Granny Smiths hanging in them and almost certainly no paper chains. Objectively, we know that, however much we wave palm fronds around, it won’t influence the weather.
  18. But we do these things anyway, in a spirit of simple complaisance and respect for tradition and, yes, even fun: just like the notional person who Maimonides lures to become a wall of his sukkah by saying, ‘Would you mind awfully just standing there for a moment?’, and who gamely complies without inquiring too deeply into the matter, we are shaking a lulav simply because that’s what we do at Sukkot.
  19. And by being game ourselves – by faithfully carrying out our rituals, one part of our brain knowing that it’s all a historical and meteorological nonsense, and the other thinking, ‘So what? We’re Jews and we shake the lulav!’, we enter the liminal space ourself. We keep one foot in the present, but also quite willingly set the other in the myths of the past.
  20. This festival, then, is a moment to celebrate everyone who, like the sukkah, is in some way in-between. And ultimately, that is all of us. חג שמח.

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. h.Shofar, Sukkah v’Lulav 4:2 ↩︎
  2. h.Shofar, Sukkah v’Lulav 4:16 ↩︎
  3. The Taz, Orach Chayyim 630:16, has a stab at coming up with a reason for this rule: ↩︎
  4. b.Shabbat 34b (adapted from Steinsaltz translation) ↩︎
  5. Brittany Chaffee, “How to cope with the liminal spaces in our lives“, Wit & Delight (13 May 2022). ↩︎