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Rosh Hashanah 5777 A good year?
Rabbi Lea Mühlstein 3 October 2016
Since I was a child, I have always loved annual reviews of the past year. In the 1980s, these would primarily be special December-‐edition magazines produced by newspaper and magazine publishers, with the odd book for those who were really committed, and one or two offerings on TV. These days the number of reviews on offer is so great that even a fan like myself has no chance of reading or watching them all. The New Yorker magazine alone featured 42 different reviews of the year 2015 ranging from “The Good News from 2015” to “The Year in Internet Memes and Social-‐Media Obsessions.” Hayom harat olam – with these words, we declare after the blowing of the shofar that today is the birthday of the world! Rather than waiting till December, for us Jews this is the day to review the past year. We are called upon to do this in a very personal way – to engage in cheshbon hanefesh "an accounting of the soul." We are asked to examine the credit and debit columns of our lives to determine where we've made a profit, so to speak, and where a loss, where we've built up capital, and where we've depleted it. The journey that our liturgy takes us on during the High Holy Day services can hopefully serve as both an anchor and a springboard for our own personal reflections. But there is also a communal task of reflection that we may wish to engage in together. What has the past year meant for us as a community? Are we in a better place this year than last year? Should we be looking towards the future with optimism or with pessimism? As the old joke goes “two Jews three opinions,” so my guess is that you would all give slightly different answers. Rabbi Aaron and our chair Mimi Konigsberg are eternal optimists so I’m sure they’d be telling you how great everything is and our synagogue’s annual review certainly backs up their view. But if we think beyond the confines of our own community and reflect on the status of the Jewish community in Britain more widely and of the community of human beings, I would guess that a number of you are not brimming with optimism. In yesterday’s sermon, Rabbi Aaron gave you plenty of material to back up a negative view of the past year. And the pessimists amongst us are certainly in good company -‐ a YouGov survey carried out at the beginning of the year found that only 4% of Britons thought that the world is getting better with a staggering 65% believing that the world is getting worse. But is it really true that the world is getting worse? The answer is a resounding NO. The feelings invoked by the negative headlines that we read every day simply cannot be backed up by hard facts. Rather, as the Swedish journalist Johan Norberg shows in his recent book “Progress: Ten Reasons to Look forward to the Future” the human race has never been richer, healthier, freer, safer, better-‐fed or educated.
Norberg reminds us that life used to be nasty, brutish and short. In 1820, a little under half of the British population lived in what we would now term extreme poverty; this is the kind of abject misery that today you only see in places such as Haiti or Zimbabwe. Of course, there are still plenty of poor people around the world and even in our neighbourhoods, but humanity is making great strides in eradicating poverty: in the time that we will have spent in the service this morning, over 15,000 people will have risen out of poverty. Fifteen thousand! Enlightenment values have civilised us, too. Norberg borrows from Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature to show that we are becoming less violent. The past century seems bloodsoaked until you consider that the An Lushan Rebellion in 8th-‐century China brought about the deaths of 13 million people — 5 per cent of the world’s population in a little more than seven years -‐ to quote just one of many examples. Norberg does not shy away from addressing the question of terrorism but he responds: “More Europeans drown in their own bathtubs, and ten times more die falling down stairs than die at the hands of terrorists. In fact, the risk of being caught up in a war, subjected to a dictatorship or of dying in a natural disaster is smaller than ever. The golden age is now.” If we look empirically at the health of the Jewish community, certainly our community in Britain, it is difficult to deny that we are living in a golden age. We can practise our religion freely and are not restricted in the choices for our personal and professional lives. While antisemitism still exists, it will only rarely touch us personally. We have truly come a long way: When the Munich Agreement of 1938 and the violence of the November pogroms, termed by the Nazis Reichskristallnacht, forced my grandparents to move from their hometown in the Sudetenland to Prague, they were not sufficiently alarmed to try and flee further away but instead considered it just another wave of antisemitism that would wash away and eventually allow them to return to their home. In contrast, the terror attacks in France in 2015 led to a doubling in the number of French Jews making Aliyah to Israel. In no way, do I want to belittle the fear that French Jews, and, more generally, Jews across the world feel in light of terror attacks in the West, but we should note that it is a sign of how good life is for us that our sensitivity threshold for tolerating antisemitism has decreased so significantly. So, if everything points to the fact that we are living in a golden age, why can’t we see it? Norberg explains that “We’ve evolved to be suspicious and fretful: fear and worry are tools for survival. The hunters and gatherers who survived sudden storms and predators were the ones who had a tendency to scan the horizon for new threats, rather than sit back and enjoy the view. They passed their stress genes on to us.”i Nostalgia, too, is biological: as we get older, it is easy to mistake changes in ourselves for changes in the world. Norberg describes how “when he ask people about their ideal era, the moment in world history when they think it was the most harmonious and happy, they say it was the era they grew up in. They describe a time before everything became confusing and dangerous, the young became rude, or listened to awful music, or stopped reading books in order to just play Pokémon Go.” So it seems that we are biologically hard-‐wired to be nostalgic pessimists. Yet our Jewish tradition tries to teach us otherwise.
The Torah acknowledges human nature: What is the first thing that the Jews do when they are liberated from slavery? They complain to Moses that the food was better in Egypt! But rather than passing on to us a set of stories of the good old days, our sacred scriptures are filled with real life stories, some of happy periods but many, if not most, are stories of misery – of famine, oppression, family feuds, rape and impossible choices, just think of today’s Torah reading. Our scriptures teach us that there is no such thing as “the good old days.” When we are instructed to look back, we are asked to recall the times when we faced oppression and persecution so that we shall be compassionate to the disadvantaged in our society. Ki gerim hayitem be’eretz mitzrayim – for you were strangers in the land of Egypt; Zachor et asher asah lecha Amalek ba-‐derech betzetchem mimitzrayim – Remember what Amalek did to you on your way out of Egypt! I believe Judaism from the onset has understood the power and value of hope and optimism for the future; because it can actually be dangerous if we are not able to see the progress that we have made. A society that believes everything is getting worse, will begin to search for scapegoats for the problems that remain. As Jews we understand all too well, how dangerous it can be for minorities in particular when a society decides to try its luck with demagogues who offer simple solutions to make our nations great again. Having hope is not simple – Isaiah and so many other prophets have to keep reminding us that the world could be a perfect place. Maybe one of the most positive effects of life getting better for everyone is that as we get healthier, richer and freer, our tolerance for not tackling curable diseases, for poverty and for social injustice actually diminishes. Appreciating how good our life is compared to the lives of our ancestors can help us to respond to the needs of others. In the past year, our community has given so generously in support of asylum seekers and refugees and there is still much work that can be done, especially locally. We have been supporting our local food bank as well as the local homelessness charity New Hope, and will do so again during Sukkot. But there are also other areas of social injustice that we should be concerned about. In the coming year, rabbis from across the denominational spectrum will work together under the umbrella of Tzelem – The Rabbinic Call for Social and Economic Justice to raise awareness of the fact that almost 12,000 people are trapped in modern slavery in the UK right now. The largest proportion of victims are from Albania followed by Nigeria and Vietnam, but many are British nationals, often teenage girls groomed and then forced into prostitution. ii The youngest of the women freed from a brothel in Harrow just over two weeks ago was only 10 years old! These women are counted in statistics but their lives don’t even count enough to make it into the local paper. Hayom harat olam – these words, which we have translated in our Machzor to mean “This is the birthday of the world” are actually not quite so easily translatable. They convey a poetic and profound view of Rosh Hashanah which is called here a “day of gestation.” In this sense Rosh Hashanah is considered to be not only, as the prayer later says, the Day of Judgment, but also the day of great potential. Let us look back at the past year and take note of how far we have come, as individuals, as a community, as a nation, as humanity. Let us use the energy of our successes to carry us through setbacks and times of pain and sorrow. Let us gain strength from the past year that we may exhaust
the full potential of the year ahead so that we will do our part to ensure that progress will continue; for this is the only way that we can bring the messianic age closer. Ken yehi ratzon – may this be God’s will.
i http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/08/why-‐cant-‐we-‐see-‐that-‐were-‐living-‐in-‐a-‐golden-‐age/ ii Read more at: https://inews.co.uk/essentials/news/uk/global-‐slavery-‐index-‐2016-‐europe/ and http://www.globalslaveryindex.org/index/