Welcome to IFCG Interfaith Service
SHALOM Chant.
Shalom, everybody: Warm greetings to our special guests and to everyone, who has come here this afternoon for the annual Brighton and Hove Interfaith Service. Shalom means ‘peace’ in the sense of wholeness. We greet people by wishing them peace and well-being. It gives me great pleasure to welcome you all to Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue to share together the gift of peace.
When the synagogue embarked on the redevelopment project that led to the construction of this new building, completed in December 2015, we were inspired by the vision of an accessible, beautiful space, a place of welcome and hospitality, open to the wider community. If you are here for the first time, please come again – and not just for a special occasion!
The theme of this afternoon’s service is compassion. We read in the Sayings of the Sages, appended to the first rabbinic code of law, the Mishnah, edited around the year 200 (Pirkey Avot 1:2):
The world stands on three pillars: Upon the Torah, and upon worship, and upon deeds of loving kindness.
This is a wonderful teaching. The problem is that the world is not standing – it is falling: it is being broken by hatred and division right now in Syria and in Iraq and in so many places around the globe. The world is being blasted into shards. Of course, we need deeds of loving kindness – g’milut chasadim – but we also need to use everything we have at our disposal – every charred chunk of debris, every shattered hope and betrayal – in order to repair our broken world. We also need to use the darkness that is responsible for all the chaos: the darkness that is in us, too – alongside the love. The account of the first 15 years of his life by Israeli writer, Amos Oz ends with the suicide of his mother, the last but one survivor of her home-town in Poland – all murdered by the Nazis. The book is entitled, A Tale of Love and Darkness.[1] Each one of us has our own tale to tell of love and darkness.
There is a Jewish song on YouTube written by American Rabbi Menachem Creditor, Olam Chesed Yibaneh that calls us to ‘build this world from love’, chesed.[2] I think we need to build this world from darkness, choschech, too, so I have added choshech to the Hebrew: Olam chesed v’choshech yibaneh – and also added ‘darkness’ to the English: ‘I will build this world from love and darkness / And you can build this world from love and darkness / And if we build this world from love and darkness / Then God will build this world from love and darkness’[3] – which is, after all, how the world began. The song includes a wordless chant. Please join with me:
Yai dai, yai dai, yai dai, dai dai dai, yai dai dai dai dai ya da dai dai x 2 + x 2
Olam chesed v’choshech yibaneh, yai dai dai dai dai ya da dai dai x 2 + x 2
I will build this world from love and darkness, yai dai dai dai dai ya da dai dai
And you can build this world from love and darkness, yai dai dai dai dai ya da dai dai
And if we build this world from love and darkness, yai dai dai dai dai ya da dai dai
Then God will build this world from love and darkness, yai dai dai dai dai ya da dai dai
Yai dai, yai dai, yai dai, dai dai dai, yai dai dai dai dai ya da dai dai x 2 + x 2