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Learning From the Rhythm and Qualities of Yom Kippur 5787

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The ten-day journey that began on Rosh Ha-Shanah has reached its destination. We have arrived at Yom Kippur. We have stepped out of the insistent rush of our 24/7 existence in order to embark on an otherworldly journey; one that we take slowly, prayer by prayer, reflection by reflection, confession by confession, nourishing our souls with the wise teachings that infuse our day-long sojourn in eternity.

Of course, we have a lot of work to do today; the work of self-interrogation is demanding, and potentially exhausting. And yet, what a blessing to have this gift of a day, when we can set aside the preoccupations and tasks that consume our days, day after day, and immerse ourselves in this sacred moment.

But then, it is only one day. As we approach the concluding hours, and the sun sets, what will we take with us? What spiritual nourishment? What insights about ourselves and our relationships with others? What might we learn from this day out of the routine of our daily lives that might make a difference to the days, weeks, and months that lie ahead?

Before we turn to the concluding prayers of our Kol Nidrei service, here are three suggestions, drawn from the unique atmosphere of this unique day.

My first suggestion is about developing our capacity for attention. On Yom Kippur we are called to pay attention, to focus our attention on what really matters, on how we go about our daily lives, on our values, and how we practice them, on how we take care of ourselves and our relationships, on how we relate to those around us in our community and in the wider society, on how we take responsibility for making a contribution to the repair of the world.

So, how do we cultivate our capacity for attention? In order to be able to become more attentive, we need to practice pausing before we go onto the next thing. One of the principal functions of reciting a blessing before we eat, for example, is to pause and appreciate what we are about to enjoy; to take a moment to reflect on the blessing of food. Pausing also helps to inhibit the inclination to multitask. If I can’t pay attention to the one thing I’m doing, how can I possibly pay attention when I’m doing several things at once?

When we pause to pay attention, we interrupt the ceaseless rush and repetition of every day and create the possibility of making a discovery that might take us in a new direction. Let me share an example of a familiar story recounted in the Torah in the Book of Exodus, chapter 3. The whole epic tale of the liberation of our ancestors from slavery may never have been told and written down had it not been that Moses paid attention to the bush that was burning in the scorching heat of the desert. Imagine if Moses had not turned aside to look (Ex. 3:3), but rather, had just walked on, and continued with his shepherding duties: no encounter with the ineffable presence that called him to return to Egypt and demand that Pharaoh free the slaves. No Exodus. No Sinai. No transformation of a rabble of ex-slaves into a people, who would journey with the ineffable presence for millennia. No Torah. No festivals. No descendants to gather together as we are doing this evening on Erev Yom Kippur.

My second suggestion is intrinsically connected to paying attention and pausing: slowing down. We drive ourselves on day after day. We are also driven on day after day. I’m 71 years old now, and as I look back, I’m so aware of how life has got faster and faster. This is particularly noticeable in our communications. People used to write letters, and an exchange of letters could take days. Then fax machines came along, and with it the demand to deal with the communication on the same day. Then email, and a ceaseless supply of emails into our inboxes, forcing us to respond as quickly as we can to ensure that the list of the ‘unread’ doesn’t get longer and longer. And alongside email, texting, recently superseded by the incessant flow of WhatsApp messages. Personally, one of the ways I’m trying to cultivate slowness is by setting my own pace, rather than being driven on by the continuing flow of communications.

There are other ways of slowing ourselves down. Whatever activity we are engaging in, we can do it at a slower rhythm. Rather than being driven by the need to get a job done, and being outcome-oriented, we can enter into it, and derive meaning and even enjoyment from doing it. Following this intensively hot summer, an obvious example is watering gardens and plants. In many regions of the country, there have been hosepipe bans, so gardeners have had to resort to using watering cans. They have also had to be selective about which plants to water. One thing that my spouse, Jess, has tried, is using a smaller watering can. This involves making more frequent trips to the diminishing water-butts, and so takes much longer, but also means she can pay more attention to the individual plants as she waters them. Mindfulness, originally a Buddhist concept, has become popular in recent years. Some of us may have already adopted a mindful approach to how we live. For those who haven’t, being mindful about what we do, is a good way of cultivating our ability to pay attention, pause, and slow down.

We can find a wonderful example of the gift of slowing down, and inhabiting slowness with focused effort, in the account of the building of the mishkan, the Tabernacle in the wilderness. The immense detail we find when we read the accounts in the concluding chapters of Exodus, beginning at Exodus 25, give us a sense of how absorbing the construction task was for B’tzalel, the chief craftsman, and all the other craftspeople involved (Exodus 31:1-11). All those glorious materials (Exodus 25:3-7), carefully measured, crafted, and arranged, for the tent itself and its different compartments, for every single utensil and item of furniture, not least for the m’norah, the two altars, and the table, and also for the priestly garments. And apart from the painstaking care required for all these tasks, since the mishkan and everything in it was portable, the Levites, who had the responsibility for the porterage of the mishkan, and all its special utensils and furnishings, also had to take great care to ensure its safe transportation through the wilderness (Numbers 1:50-51; 3:6-37). If it’s hard to imagine how difficult a task that was, just think of the lengths taken in the summer to transport the Bayeux tapestry safely from Normandy to the British Museum in London[1].

Cultivating slowness enables us to craft our own lives with patience and care. Cultivating slowness may also be necessary as an antidote to the hyper-speed AI revolution. Of course, the development of artificial intelligence is already making a huge difference to medical diagnosis and treatment, and also has a host of other benefits, not least the ability to speed up the process of analysing huge volumes of data.[2] But the exponential growth of AI, forces us to ask: what do we lose on a personal level when we resort to using AI? My own answer is that we forfeit, not only our special human capacity for creativity, but our own individual and unique voice. My new book, Breaking Binaries,[3] is the product of my thought, research, creative endeavour, and almost five years of labour at my desk. Certainly, AI can summon up information, and write a coherent article, or even book, on any topic, but the creative spark that is generated when an individual writes is completely lost. And it’s not only an issue that is confined to writing. AI is being used to create art?[4] Can art created by AI be called art? Similarly, AI music offerings ‘are flooding streaming platforms’.[5] Do we want this?

During a breakout group at a rabbinic meeting in the summer, one of my colleagues commented that ‘unlike human beings, AI has no history, and no vision of the future’. Yes, AI can do things at stupendous speed that no human being, however brilliant, could ever accomplish. AI has its place. But at this juncture, when AI is speeding away exponentially, perhaps, we should devote some thought to putting AI in its place, while simultaneously advocating for being limited mortals and embracing our human limitations. That’s my third suggestion of a possible outcome we could develop out of our experience of this unique day. Alongside paying attention, pausing, and cultivating slowness, let’s reflect on what it is about our human limitations that we want to hold onto.

I can think of a few. The capacity to be overtaken by a sense of awe and wonder when we are in nature, and immerse ourselves in that moment. The capacity to appreciate ‘small joys’, even in the midst of difficult or painful circumstances. The capacity for acceptance in the face of terminal illness. The effort involved in doing a time-consuming task, like preparing a special meal, making a birthday card for a loved one, cleaning the oven, or weeding; the list of possible time-consuming tasks is endless.

Significantly, we can find in the two accounts of creation at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, contrasting models for how to be human. In the first account in Genesis chapter 1, the human is at the pinnacle of creation with a license to dominate and subdue every other creature and form of life (Gen. 1:26-28). In the second account, in Genesis chapter 2, the human has the more modest responsibility of working and maintaining a garden (Gen. 2:15). Interestingly, as I demonstrate in the last chapter of Breaking Binaries, both accounts offer hints that for all our distinctiveness as humans vis-à-vis other forms of life, we share essential qualities with all that lives. In the first account that inextricable connection is expressed in the description of each creature as nefesh chayyah, a ‘living being’ (Gen. 1:20-21). In the second account, that inextricable connection is expressed in the very formation of the human – ha-adam – from the dust of the ground – ha-adamah (Gen.2:7). The AI Revolution demonstrates that for all our powers, humans are not all-powerful. Perhaps, we would do better to remind ourselves of what we share with all that lives, and limit our aspirations, so that we can devote our time and energies to taking care of our beautiful blue planet, our only home.

I hope that we all find meaning and purpose in this unique day. I also hope that we can draw on what it teaches us as we re-enter the world the day after Yom Kippur, and the New Year begins in earnest. The world, after all, is in turmoil on every level – economic, political, ecological, spiritual. In the face of all these challenges, it is easy to give in to despair. It is also easy to get caught up in social media representations that feed despair, that make us desperate to escape, shut out the world and hibernate as much as we can. But these are urges that for the sake of our lives, our communities, our humanity, our world, we need to try to resist. Thinking about the qualities I’ve talked about this evening as resources, can help us cultivate such resistance because they help to build resilience; they enable us to develop patience and the determination needed to commit to the struggle of repairing the world; they foster a spirit of Hope so that we can envision a better future, and feel that it is possible to make it happen. There are no instant fixes and solutions; there is only patient and persistent effort. May this unique day nourish us, and inspire all our efforts to renew our lives and the life of the world in the days that lie ahead.

And let us say: Amen.

Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah

Leicester Progressive Jewish Congregation

Erev Yom Kippur, 20 September 2026 / 10 Tishri 5787

  1. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/bayeux-tapestry-return-england-british-museum ↑

  2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394379604_The_AI_Revolution_in_Healthcare ↑

  3. https://unusualpublications.com/ ↑

  4. https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/ai-and-creativity-can-machines-create-art-music-and-literature ↑

  5. https://audioengine.com/explore/ai-music-is-flooding-streaming-platforms-artists-and-listeners-are-pushing-back/ ↑

The Day of Justice Rosh Ha-Shanah

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In my Erev Rosh Ha-Shanah sermon I mentioned that the Jewish New Year has many names. Yesterday evening, as we paused in the twilight, my focus was on the New Year as harat olam, the ‘birthday of the world’. This morning, I invite us to think about this day by considering another of its names: Yom Ha-Din, ‘The Day of Judgement’. This name reminds us that the first day of Tishri, the seventh month of the cycle of months that begins with Nisan in the spring, is also the first day of aseret y’mei t’shuvah, the ‘ten days of returning’ that conclude on Yom Kippur, the tenth day of Tishri. Today we begin a process of self-reflection and self-examination, in which we look back at our actions and inactions of the past year, everything we did and failed to do, the errors and wrongs we committed, the hurts we inflicted on others; all of this in the knowledge that we face a judgement. Perhaps, we don’t acknowledge a Divine Judge, who is weighing our deeds and misdeeds in the balance during these ten days, which are also known as yamim nora’im, literally, ‘awed days’. But even if the notion of Divine Judgement feels alien or meaningless, we know that our actions have consequences on others, as well as on ourselves, and that judgement lies in these consequences; we can weigh our own deeds on the scale, and reach our own conclusions.

I’ve translated Yom Ha-Din as ‘The Day of Judgement’, which is the usual translation. But Hebrew, unlike English, which has a huge vocabulary, and so uses individual words very precisely, has a more concise vocabulary, and so words can have a range of meaning. Yes, Rosh Ha-Shanah is Yom Ha-Din, in the sense of being ‘The Day of Judgement’. But it is also Yom Ha-Din, in the sense of being ‘The Day of Justice’.

So, what are the implications of thinking of Rosh Ha-Shanah as ‘The Day of Justice’? Before we can answer this question, we need to examine the word, din, in the sense of its meaning as ‘justice’. In the first chapter of Pirkei Avot, the ‘Chapters of the Sages’, which is appended to the Mishnah, the first code of rabbinic law, edited around the year 200, we find this statement (1:18):

Rabban Simeon ben Gamliel used to say: ‘The world stands on three things [d’varim]: on justice [al ha-din]; and on truth [v’al ha-emet]; and on peace [v’al ha-shalom]’.

Having said that Hebrew is more concise than English, there are four words for ‘justice’ in the Bible and rabbinic literature. The passage speaks of ‘din’. In biblical Hebrew din means ‘judgement’, but the early rabbis extended this meaning of the word by using it to denote ‘law’, a ‘law-suit’ and a ‘claim’, as well as ‘justice’. Din conveys ‘justice’ in the sense of the legal system for executing justice. A rabbinic court is a Beit Din, ‘House of Judgement’, and several tractates of the Mishnah and the Talmud are devoted to different aspects of the rabbinic legal system.[1] In the Torah, another word connotes the system of justice, mishpat, based on the three consonants, Shin Pei Tet, meaning to judge. The ‘judges’ of the Bible were the shof’tim.[2]

The Torah also uses two other related words for justice, tzedek and tz’dakah, which are both based on the three-letter root: Tzadi Dalet Kuf. We read in Deuteronomy 16:20, in the context of a passage dealing with how the system of justice is to be administered: Tzedek, tzedek, tirdof , ‘Justice, justice, you shall pursue’. In Hebrew, nouns, adjectives, and verbs are all derived from three-letter roots, that is, each word is rooted in three consonants. The word ‘pursue’ in Hebrew, indicated by the three consonants, Reish Dalet Pei, conveys a sense of urgency, as it does in English. In Hebrew syntax, it is usual for the verb to come first, and in the verse, Tzedek, tzedek, tirdof, ‘Justice, justice, you shall pursue’, the tone of urgency is heightened, not only by the repetition of the word, tzedek, ‘justice’, but also by the word order: ‘Justice, justice, you shall pursue’. Meanwhile, the repetition of ‘justice’ suggests impartiality, where two parties are involved, pursuing justice for the one also necessitates pursuing justice for the other.

Justice also has an economic component. In another chapter in Deuteronomy, in a section dealing with economic justice, we read that, when giving a loan to someone, returning their garment that has been taken as a pledge before sunset is an act of tz’dakah, ‘justice’ (24:13). The pursuit of justice, tzedek, involves what we now call ‘redistributive justice’. Similarly, tz’dakah, connotes an act of justice that we are obligated to perform in favour of the poor and the needy. Although tz’dakah is often translated as ‘charity’, the word charity has a very different meaning. From the Latin word caritas, charity suggests an act of kindness that expresses our loving feelings towards others. The point about tz’dakah is that we are obligated to do it, even when we do you not feel charitable.

While the words tzedek and tz’dakah relate to the individual’s responsibility to act justly, the words din and mishpat focus on the legal system. The legal system is governed by rules that regulate the conduct of individuals and treat parties to the dispute on the basis of impartiality. As we read in Deuteronomy 16:19:

You shall not pervert justice [mishpat]; you shall not show partiality; neither shall you take a bribe; for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the words of the righteous [tzadikim].

The legal system also attempts to ensure that the stronger members of the society come to the aid of the more vulnerable and dependent members of the society, designated in the Torah, in particular, as ‘the sojourner [ha-geir], the orphan [ha-yatom] – literally, the “fatherless” – and the widow [ha-almanah]’ (Deut. 24:17) (in that order). The sojourner is dependent on the generosity of the host society. In the case of the fatherless and the widow, having lost the male breadwinner in the family, they both become dependent on the wider community.

Having examined the different words for and applications of ‘justice’ in Jewish teaching, let me return to the question I posed a few minutes ago: what are the implications of thinking of Rosh Ha-Shanah as ‘The Day of Justice’? During the Rosh Ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur services, we recite a mediaeval poem, known by its opening words, u’n’tanneh tokef. In this poem which addresses God as a Dayyan, a ‘Judge’, we proclaim in response that we can avert the negative judgement of the Divine Judge by engaging in three related actions: t’shuvah, t’fillah, and tz’dakah; by ‘returning’ to the true path of our lives; through ‘prayer’, which in the essential meaning of t’fillah, implies self-interrogation, and through acts of ‘justice’. We can see these three actions as a process that involves the decision to change our ways, the self-examination that enables us to do this, and the acts of justice that put intention into practice.

So, today is the Day of Judgement which calls us, starting from now, to practice Justice every day of our lives. How do we go about doing this? We will all have different responses to this question. For those who are concerned about tackling all forms of injustice, social, economic, and political, in our communities, society, and throughout the world, there are multiple demands on our commitment to justice. But whatever we decide to do and wherever we direct our energies, I think it’s important that we take guidance from a core feature of justice in both its legal and activist dimensions, and that is equity. Again and again, I return to the key Torah verse that I quoted earlier: ‘Tzedek, Tzedek tirdof’, ‘Justice, Justice, you shall pursue’ (Deut. 16:20). If our passionate pursuit of justice rests on a binary approach in which, we see only heroes and villains, in which we feel justice can only be served if the ‘good’ side we support defeats the ‘evil’ side we deplore, then the outcome is likely to fuel conflict, rather than establish justice.

As I say this, of course, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the forefront of my mind. With its roots in the unilateral establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, and then firmly entrenched following Israel’s victory in the Six Day War of June 1967 and the subsequent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become even more catastrophic for both peoples since the horrific Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel in October 7, 2023, and Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, with it devastating consequences for the people of Gaza. Justice demands that the dispossessed and displaced Palestinian people achieve liberation and self-determination. In order for the conditions to be created to make this outcome possible, justice also demands that both peoples can live alongside one another in peace and security.

With social media dominated by binary narratives, I have drawn strength and inspiration from those projects and organisations in which Israelis and Palestinians are working together to secure a just peace. This morning, I want to share an example of an organisation, ‘Roots-Judar–Shorashim’, founded in 2014, a ‘bi-national initiative’ for Palestinians and Israelis living in the West Bank, which engages in educational and dialogue activities, with a view to building trust between the two peoples.[3] Given the daily horrors inflicted by extremist settlers against West Bank Palestinian communities, Roots provides the most powerful evidence I’ve come across that when protagonists begin to acknowledge each other’s narratives, it is possible to break the cycle of hatred and violence.

I’ve attended a number of Roots online zoom events. The one I joined in February, took the form of an interview. The interviewer was Rabbi Daniel Rowe, who immigrated to Israel from England just two years ago, and has since that time been making contacts with Palestinians. As Rabbi Rowe put it before he began the interview, ‘If you only have one side of a story, you haven’t got half the story, you’ve got fiction’. His interviewee was Ali Abu Awwad, who was born in 1948 to a refugee family, and whose mother was one of the leaders of the PLO. Like his mother, Ali spent several years in prison, during which time he said that he learned about nonviolent resistance. Released four years after the Oslo peace initiative, during the second intifada, Ali’s brother was killed by an Israel soldier. ‘By that time’, he said, he ‘had enough anger to take revenge’. But one day, he met a group of Israelis who asked permission to visit him at his home. As Ali talked with them, he began to realise that ‘the price I paid was also being paid by Israelis’. He also saw himself as ‘equal to Israelis for the first time’. That experience changed Ali, making everything, as he put it, ‘more complex’. Since then, Ali feels that ‘I carry Israelis in my heart and on my shoulders, as well as my own pain’.

As he spoke, Ali Abu Awaad shared his vision of a different future in which ‘from the river to the sea, everyone will be free’; a vision rooted in his continuing conversations with Israelis. Ali argued that both sides have to ‘learn to change behaviour, rather than change identity’. That ‘no solution is possible if we don’t respect that both sides belong to this land’. He argued that on each side, ‘leaders have failed’, commenting that, ‘politicians manage a situation, leaders manage the journey to a different future’. Ali also stressed that ‘dialogue isn’t a solution, it’s a tool’, and that together they need to find ‘a solution that recognises the dignity and identity of both peoples’. Ali went on: ‘We need to find a political solution that allows these identities to thrive in their own countries and to thrive together’, and ‘we have to understand what conditions have to be created on the ground for there to be a solution’. In his concluding remarks, Ali Abu Awaad said, ‘we peacemakers are the active minority who speak for the silent majority’.

Of course, Ali Abu Awaad and Rabbi Daniel Rowe are just two individuals; two voices of sanity. The social media echo-chamber cacophony that now dominates the public discourse shrieks hatred and drowns out such voices. Nevertheless, they are two individuals, who are participating in an Israeli-Palestinian coexistence initiative, that is among one hundred and eighty such projects and organisations.[4] Today, on this ‘Day of Justice’, when we are called to act for justice, let us demonstrate our commitment to justice by, at the very least, amplifying the voices of the peace-and- justice makers in Israel-Palestine, and in every place. And let us say: Amen.

Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah

Edinburgh Liberal Jewish Congregation

Rosh Ha-Shanah Shacharit

12th September 2026 / 1st Tishri 5787

  1. The legal tractates of the Mishnah (and Talmud) are: Bava Kamma, Bava Metzia, and Bava Batra (the three ‘gates’), Sanhedrin, Makkot, Shevuot, Eiduyyot, Avodah Zarah, and Horayot – all in Nezikin, (‘Damages’), the Fourth Order of the Mishnah, which deals with the laws of private and civil wrongs, capital penalities, homicide, courts of justice, and evidence (Pirkei Avot, the ‘Chapters of the Sages’ is appended to Nezikin). See Blackman, Philip. Ed. (1983). Mishnayoth, Vol. 4 Order Nezikin. Gateshead: Judaica Press. ↑

  2. See for example, the Book of Judges 4.4, concerning the prophet [n’vi’ah] Deborah ‘who was judging (shof’tah) Israel at that time’. ↑

  3. https://b8ofhope.org/grantees/roots-shorashim-judur/ (Accessed: 3 November 2025). ↑

  4. The Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP) ‘represents a network of over 180 organizations engaged in civil society peacebuilding between Israelis and Palestinians’. https://www.allmep.org/about-us-allmep/members/ (Accessed: 10 April 2026). Meanwhile, ‘It’s Time’ is ‘a coalition of over 60 peacebuilding and shared society organizations, working together with determination and courage to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a political agreement that will ensure both peoples’ right to self-determination and secure lives’. https://www.timeisnow.co.il/english (Accessed: 10 April 2026). ↑

Learning from Twighlight Erev Rosh Ha-Shanah

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The old year has just ended, and the new year has barely begun. Hinneinu, here we are, on Erev Rosh Ha-Shanah in a liminal, in-between space that is, like twilight, a realm of indistinctness in which hard edges blur, and the sharp colours of the day give way to shades of grey. 

The Hebrew word, erev, which is translated in English as ‘eve’, and denotes ‘evening’, is derived from the Hebrew verb, to ‘mix’, represented by three Hebrew consonants, Ayin – Reish – Shin. Logically, evening is an in-between time that is a mixture of day and night. The word erev is connected with another word with the same root: ma’arav, ‘west’. The sun sets in the west, and after sunset, the sky is a mixture of light and dark.

Rather than simply accept that night will soon descend, and that in a few hours, a new day will dawn, I would like to invite us to pause in this in-between moment, and reflect on what it teaches us – about life and the journey of life, about Jewish time, about our nature as humans, and about ourselves.

In March, my latest book was published, Breaking Binaries. A progressive rabbi engages in contemporary issues. In my book I challenge either/or assumptions, and the ways in which we force life into binary, and often oppositional, categories. The binary of ‘day and night’ is an example of this phenomenon, and one which we experience in every twenty-four period, 365 days-and-nights of the year.

Rosh Ha-Shanah, literally, ‘the head of the year’, which falls on the first day of the seventh month, Tishri, is known by a number of different names. One of these is harat olam, the ‘birthday of the world’. And so, the Jewish year begins not with our first Jewish ancestors, Abraham and Sarah, but rather with the beginning of everything. If we turn to the beginning of the Torah, we find that each of the initial six days set out in the first Creation narrative, concludes with the phrase, ‘And it was evening and it was morning …’ – Va-y’hi erev, va-y’hi voker …[1] Meanwhile, the narrative, through a series of declamations, establishes a number of binaries: heaven and Earth; light and dark; day and night; seas and dry land; humanity and the rest of creation. Nevertheless, at the same time it reiterates a statement about the liminal ‘in between’ dimension, between one day and another. Erev, ‘evening’, begins after sunset, when the light begins to fade until the night darkness takes over. In the Babylonian Talmud tractate Shabbat 34b, in the context of determining the beginning of Shabbat, there is a fascinating discussion concerning the uncertainty – the word used is sapheik, ‘doubt’ – involved in the period when it is neither completely ‘day’, nor completely ‘night’ – that is, twilight, although this word is not used.

In the phrase, Va-y’hi erev, va-y’hi voker, ‘And it was evening and it was morning’, it is not only the word erev that draws attention to the liminal arena between sunset and sunrise. The noun, boker, ‘morning’, is derived from the root Beit Kuf Reish, meaning to ‘seek’, but originally, to ‘divide’, to ‘discern’, corresponding to the Arabic root to ‘slit’, ‘rip’, ‘split’. And so it is that the noun, bakar, meaning cattle, herd or ox, points to the role of these domestic animals in ploughing the land. Similarly, boker suggests the penetration of the light of day into the darkness of night.

In the first rabbinic code of law, the Mishnah, in the tractate, B’rakhot, ‘Blessings’, we find a very interesting discussion that interrogates the time period between night and day. Opening with the theme of when the Sh’ma,[2] should be recited in the evening – and connecting the times of prayer with the times when offerings were presented by the priests in the Temple (Mishnah B’rakhot 1:1) – the second paragraph turns to the recitation of the morning Sh’ma. The paragraph begins (1:2):

At what time does one begin to recite the Sh’ma in the morning? When one can distinguish between blue and white. Rabbi Eliezer says, between blue and green (and concludes it) by sunrise.

It is important to note that the noun for ‘morning’ used here, which is also used for ‘morning prayer’, is shacharit, not boker. Shacharit, related to the biblical noun, shachar, means ‘dawn’. The issue for the rabbis is when does dawn begin? The first two statements provide answers to that question. The word for ‘green’, karti, means ‘leek-green’. The word for ‘blue’, t’kheilet, is the same word used for the ‘blue’ thread amongst the white tzitzit, ‘fringes’, worn on the four-cornered garment mentioned in the third paragraph of the Sh’ma (Numbers 15:37 ff.).

In the commentary on the Mishnah that we find in the G’mara, which documents the discussions of the amoraim, literally, ‘speakers’, the later generations of scholars, who explicated the Mishnah, the second comment relates directly to the tzitzit (Babylonian Talmud B’rakhot 9b):

What is the meaning of ‘between blue [t’kheilet] and white’? Shall I say: between a lump of white wool and a lump of blue wool? This one may also distinguish in the night! It means rather: between the blue [thread] in it [i.e., the fringe] and the white in it.

The purpose of the thread of t’kheilet, which was later not included in the tzitzit because of the problem of identifying the exact t’kheilet-blue, was to be visible to the individual.[3] As it says in what became the second paragraph of the Sh’ma (Num. 15:37-39a):

The Eternal said to Moses: / Speak to the Israelites and say to them that they should make themselves fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations; let them attach a thread of blue to the fringe at each corner. / And it will be for you as a fringe and you will see it [my emphasis] and you will remember all the commandments of the Eternal and do them…

While morning clearly begins at sunrise, there is a period between the night and the day, which commences with the dawn, when the increasing light, enabling the individual to distinguish between the blue and white of the fringe, indicates that the time of reciting the morning Sh’ma has begun, even though the sun has not yet risen.

From evening, erev, which corresponds to the fading of the light of the previous day, until morning, boker, which follows the night, there is a liminal region: between night and day. Further, as Rabbi Howard Cooper reflects, the first use of the word yom, ‘day’, in the Torah (Genesis 1:5) demonstrates that:[4]

there is an immediate subversion built into the text of the binary opposition between Day/yom and Night/laylah. Although ‘yom’ is the name given to the ‘Day’ alone, the text concludes, ‘and there was evening and there was morning, one YOM’. You could probably construe this in different ways, but at a minimum it subverts/confounds our innate wish to separate into simple binary pairs/opposites.

The tradition of Jewish teaching is all about interrogating texts and words, and drawing out nuances and meanings. So, what are the implications for us of the awareness that we spend so much of our lives in between day and night, night and day? What sense are we making right now, of this twilight moment?

I would like to think that inhabiting twilight fully and consciously would nudge us towards reflection on how we might find ways of getting between the other binaries that characterise our lives. The most obvious one of these is gender. The majority of people are born biologically female or biologically male, and until recently, the one in two-thousand born intersex in various ways, were invariably surgically readjusted to conform with the male/female binary.[5]

In recent years, in the context of new thinking about sex and gender, increasing numbers of people beyond those who are intersex have been identifying themselves as gender queer or non-binary. Personally, I have done this because, despite the efforts of lesbian feminists like me, who participated in the Women’s Liberation Movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s in order to challenge male domination, most societies the world over are still invested in a male/female power dynamic that forces every person from the moment of birth into a binary gender straitjacket. So, how would it be if we allowed our experience of twilight at this moment of the turning of the year to enter our beings and influence our sense of ourselves, so that we could emerge with the consciousness of ourselves, not as female or male, but rather, primarily, as humans?

Significantly, the Creation narratives at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, challenge more than our assumptions about day and night, light and dark. Significantly, although the first Creation story places the human at the pinnacle of creation, it also teaches that every creature, like the human is nefesh chayyah, a ‘living being’ (Gen. 1:20;21;24). Meanwhile, the second Creation story, rather than commanding the human, both male and female, to subdue and dominate the rest of creation (Gen. 1:28), situates the undifferentiated human – who, in this version is ‘formed from the dust of the ground’ (Gen. 2:7) – in the circumscribed space of a garden, with the humble task of working it and maintaining it (Gen. 2:15).

‘The human’, ha-adam, intimately connected with ‘the ground’, ha-adamah. One of my favourite T-shirts bears the slogan, ‘Human Beings 100% Organic Colours Vary’. Returning to the question I put a few moments ago, but revising it slightly: How would it be if we allowed our experience of twilight at this moment of the turning of the year to enter our beings and influence our sense of ourselves, so that we could emerge with the consciousness of ourselves, primarily, as earthlings, organic creatures, living beings, intrinsically connected to Life in all its gloriously variegated forms?

And what would be the implications of such a consciousness? Surely, the reality of our organic nature, shared with all life, is that, as Genesis puts it in chapter 3, ‘for dust you are, and to dust you shall return’, Ki-afar attah, v’el-afar tashuv (3:19). Like all organic matter from the microscopic amoeba to the magnificent elephant, it is in our nature to grow, blossom, and finally, disintegrate, and return to the earth. How would it be if we embraced, not only life around us, but our own organic selves, and accepted our mortality? What difference might that make to our experience of life? To our experience of every day? To our appreciation of being alive? Of course, unlike all other life-forms on this beautiful blue planet, humans have, both, the capacity to be aware of our mortality, and the capacity to look back into the past and gaze forward into the future. These capacities may be understood as our special gifts as humans, but they may also have negative consequences for our ability, both, to experience deeply, spiritually, intellectually, sensuously, the present moment, and to relate to the other forms of life that inhabit the present with us. How would it be if we could find ways to, both, to accept our mortality and be fully present in the present?

This evening, I have invited you to be present in this twilight moment. As I draw to a conclusion, I’m going to recite the Twilight People Prayer written by Rabbi Reuben Zelman, the first openly transgender person to be accepted for rabbinic training at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in the United States.[6] We recite it at the beginning of our Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue annual eve of Brighton Pride Seder. This Erev Rosh Ha-Shanah, I’m offering it as a prayer for all of us, as we stand on the threshold of the New Year:

As the sun sinks and the colours of the day turn, we offer a blessing for the twilight,

For twilight is neither day nor night, but in-between.

We are all twilight people. We can never be fully labelled or defined.

We are many identities and loves, many genders and none.

We are in between roles, at the intersection of histories, or between place and place.

We are crisscrossed parts of memory and destination, streaks of light swirled together.

We are neither day nor night.

We are both, neither, and all.

May this in-between light illuminate our way to the God who transcends all categories and definitions.

May the in-between people who have come to pray be lifted up into this twilight.

We cannot always define; we can always say a blessing.

Blessed are you, God of all, who brings on the twilight. And let us say: Amen.

Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah

Edinburgh Liberal Jewish Congregation

Erev Rosh Ha-Shanah

11th September 2026 / 1st Tishri 5787

  1. See: Genesis 1.5; 8; 13; 19; 23; 31. The ‘v’ of ‘voker’, ‘morning’, is the consonant, Beit. As a result of a grammatical rule, the Beit loses its dageish, ‘dot’, following a vowel in the previous syllable (or a vowel at the end of the previous word, where two words are connected together), and so is pronounced, ‘v’. ↑

  2. The liturgical text of the Sh’ma is composed of three paragraphs from the Torah: Deut. 6.4-9; 11.13-21; Num. 15.37-41. ↑

  3. See the Babylonian Talmud Menachot 42b-44a for discussions of the testing required to ensure that a ‘blue’ was t’kheilet [my choice of transliteration of the Hebrew]. For an exploration of t’kheilet, see: Navon, Mois. (Undated). Threads of Reason. A Collection of Essays on Tekheilet. https://www.divreinavon.com/pdf/ThreadsOfReason.pdf. (Accessed: 7 November 2025). ↑

  4. Private email correspondence with the author, MumFourI’m coming down to make tea11.03.14. ↑

  5. With very few exceptions, as soon as a baby is born that tiny bundle of life is instantly identified as ‘female’ or ‘male’, and the one in two thousand births where there is some doubt, were, until recently, unilaterally processed for surgical adjustment, so that they could be fitted into the binary gender regime. See the following sources (all accessed: 9 November 2025): the Intersex Society of North America: http://www.isna.org/faq/ten_myths/rare; IGLHRC, MULABI and Jimenez, Natasha. (2011). Intersex Shadow Report to the 5th and 6th National Report of the Republic of Costa Rica on the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), 27.06.2011. http://intersex.shadowreport.org/post/2012/10/26/Shadow-Report-CEDAW-2011; Jones, Tiffany. (2018). ‘Intersex Studies: A Systematic Review of International Health Literature’, Sage Open, 8(2), May. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244017745577; Monro, S., Carpenter, M., Crocetti, D., Davis, G., Garland, F., Griffiths, D., and Aggleton, P. (2021). ‘Intersex: cultural and social perspectives’, Culture, Health & Sexuality, 23(4), pp.431–440. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2021.1899529; Guo, J., Marsh, H.W., and Parker, P.D., et al. (2024). ’Cross-Cultural Patterns of Gender Differences in STEM: Gender Stratification, Gender Equality and Gender-Equality Paradoxes’, Educational Psychology Review, 36(37). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-024-09872-3. ↑

  6. https://www.keshetonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Twilight-People.pdf

    https://reformjudaism.org/blog/gender-expression-isnt-purim-costume ↑

Yom Kippur Shacharit Choose Life ELJC

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Hinneinu – here we are on Yom Kippur, Shabbat Shabbaton, ‘the Sabbath of Sabbaths’. Whatever our individual motivations for participating in this most sacred day of the Jewish year, in addition to reciting prayers and making collective confession in the first-person plural, one of the most important things we will do together as a congregation today is listen to the words of the Torah. The focal point of every Shabbat and festival morning service, is the reading of the seifer Torah, the scroll made of parchment taken from a kosher animal, on which the Five books of Moses – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy – have been written in black ink with a turkey-feather quill by a sofeir or soferet, a ‘scribe’. In Orthodox communities, two portions are read from the Torah on Yom Kippur morning from two separate scrolls. The reading from the first scroll is Leviticus 16, which relates the ritual for the Day of Atonement presided over by the High Priest at the time of the second Temple. The reading from the second scroll is Numbers 29, verses 7 to 11, which sets out the sacrificial offerings on ‘the tenth day of the seventh month’ that were conducted until the last Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE.

Those who attend the morning Torah service in orthodox congregations are reminded about how Yom Kippur was observed in Temple times. It is important to be reminded of the history of Jewish worship. Meanwhile, in progressive congregations we are reminded of the Torah teachings that are at the heart of the meaning of the day. This morning, we will be reading two passages from the Book of Deuteronomy, a book written seven-hundred years after the events it describes during the reign of King Josiah of Judah, as a reminder to his subjects of their heritage. The first passage in chapter 29 (29:9-14) gives an account of the remaking of the covenant with our ancestors in the wilderness at the end of their forty-year journey; the generation who had stood at the foot of Mount Sinai having passed away. The second passage in chapter 30 (30:11-20), placed in that same wilderness setting, presents us with a resounding challenge that defies the gulf in time and place between past and present (30:19). We read:

I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you, life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore, choose in life – u’va-charta ba-chayyim – that you may live, you and your descendants.

We are not that wilderness-wandering generation. Neither are we the backsliding people of Judah whose evil ways, King Josiah was trying to reform. We are this generation. But the message still speaks to us because in every generation, both individuals and communities face the same stark choices, and this is the time in the annual cycle when we acknowledge them.

However, the message is more multifaceted than it seems. At first sight, it appears that we are being presented with binary choices, ‘life and death, the blessing and the curse’. Indeed, a few verses earlier on, the binary choice between life and death is elaborated: ‘See, I have set before you this day life and good, and death and evil’ (30:15). Nevertheless, on closer inspection, we see that as we are offered a choice between ‘life and death’, we are also summoned to choose in life – ba-chayyim. The Hebrew word for ‘life’, chayyim, is plural. In other words, rejecting the negation of life, represented by death, we are called to choose in life, with all its complexity; to make choices in the ways in which we live, recognising that ‘life’ is never straightforward.

A clue to the complexity of life as we make our choices, can be found in the first part of the passage from Deuteronomy chapter 30 (:11-14):

For this commandment, which I command you today is not too wonderful for you, nor too remote. / It is not in heaven that you need to say: ‘Who will go up to heaven for us, and fetch it for us, that we may hear it and do it?’ / Neither is it across the sea that you need to say: ‘Who will cross the sea for us and fetch it for us, that we may hear it and do it?’ For ha-davar is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart to do it.

 

Ha-davar may be translated as ‘the word’ or ‘the matter’. And so: ‘For the word is very near to you’, or, ‘For the matter is very near to you.’ More of that in a moment. First let us consider how the passage opens: ‘For this commandment – ha-mitzvah ha-zot’, which I command you today’. This commandment, singular – not ‘these commandments.’ So, what is this commandment? For the Spanish thirteenth century scholar, Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, known by the acronym RaMBaN,[1] ‘this commandment’ is a specific reference to the command to repent, since the previous section begins with the exhortation to return to God (Deut. 30:1-2). Reading these verses in the context of what follows, another interpretation might be that ‘this commandment’ refers to u’va-charta ba-chayyim – ‘therefore, choose in life’. But it is not just the verses that follow that suggest that this as a possible interpretation. Let us return to how the passage concludes: ‘For ha-davar is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart to do it.’

Ha-davar: As I have already pointed out, the Hebrew may be translated as ‘the word’ or ‘the matter’. Echoing the singularity of ‘this commandment’, ha-davar is singular, but also nonspecific. What is ‘the word’ or ‘the matter’? Whatever it is, it ‘is very near to you, in your mouth and your heart to do it.’ Today, of all days, as we spend hours reciting prayers, we are aware of our mouths, especially, those of us who are fasting, and also of our hearts, of negotiating a range of feelings. Engaging in a communal ritual, we are acutely conscious of our own personal turmoils and dilemmas. The challenge to choose in life is a challenge that is very near to us, to each one of us, individually. A challenge that begins with the words of our mouths articulating our sense of who we are as individuals and our personal values. But it does not end with our mouths and hearts: ‘For the ha-davar is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart to do it.’ The challenge of today is to prepare ourselves for the challenge of tomorrow: to act; to choose in life with our deeds.

The challenge to act is the most demanding of all. In the past two years since October 7, 2023, many of us have raised our voices in grief, in anger, in protest. But we have felt that there is so little we can do here to make a difference to what is happening over there. And yet, we are aware that despite the ongoing death and destruction, ordinary Israelis and Palestinians have been choosing in life day after day after day. The evidence can be seen daily on the streets, and also in the ongoing work of joint Israeli-Palestinian organisations such as the Parents Circle Families Forum,[2] Combatants for Peace,[3] Women Wage Peace,[4] and Standing Together.[5] Standing Together is organised, in particular, as a grassroots movement, with ‘chapters’ in cities and universities across Israel-Palestine.[6] It also has ‘Friends’ groups across the world, including here in Scotland,[7] making it possible for people of all religions and ethnicities wherever they live, to be engaged in fundraising and raising awareness through vigils and events. I became a Friend of Standing Together a year ago, and in the past few months have been involved in helping to get a local Brighton Friends of Standing Together group off the ground.

On the Standing Together website, in the ‘about us’ section, the vision of the movement is clear: [8]

We envision a society that serves all of us and treats every person with dignity. A society that chooses peace, justice, and independence for Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs. A society in which we all enjoy real security, adequate housing, quality education, good healthcare, a liveable climate, a decent salary, and the ability to age with dignity. 

Such a society is possible – we’re already building it.

Standing Together rejects divisive politics in favour of a life-affirming ‘theory of change’.[9] Involved in regular demonstrations together with a variety of different groups demanding a ceasefire, the return of the remaining hostages, and an end to the occupation, the movement focuses on grassroots campaigning and practical activities that make a difference to peoples’ lives,[10] like participating in a Humanitarian Guard ‘protective presence’ in the West Bank,[11] and helping to deliver aid to Gaza.[12] During the twelve-day Israel-Iran war in June (13-24.06.25), Standing Together activists organised temporary bomb shelters for Palestinians with no access to them.[13]

Why am I telling you all this? Because Standing Together not only has a vision of a different future, but through their day-by-day activism, they are making that future a real possibility. They are holding out the hope that Palestinian and Jewish Israelis need, that Palestinians need, that we all need. Despite the obstacles, despair is not an option for them, and it should not be an option for us.

One of the ways in which Standing Together manages to radiate such a spirit of hope is due to the large proportion of young people involved in their activities. At the first event of Brighton Friends of Standing Together on 13 July, hosted by Green Brighton MP, Sian Berry, with over seventy attendees, two young people spoke to us ‘live’ through an online connection: Aya Khatib, a Palestinian member who is active in the Jerusalem and Hebrew University Chapters, and Maya Dernell, a Jewish member in the Tel Aviv-Yafo chapter. Their commitment, clarity, and sense of optimism, despite the hurdles they are navigating was inspiring. At the end of August, I attended a zoom meeting focusing specifically on a series of activities directed at ‘disrupting business as usual’ and raising public awareness of the need for action. Shahar, age 26 who lives in Yaffo, and Ariel, age 23 who lives in Haifa, talked about their occupation of ‘Big Brother’, which went out ‘live’ to the millions of viewers who watched the programme,[14] and how they glued themselves to the floor of the departures terminal at Ben Gurion airport, as a way of letting passengers know that there was no escape from the challenge of taking action to generate change.[15]

Aya and Maya, Shahar and Ariel, and all the other Standing Together activists, are not giving into despair in the face of death and destruction, but rather choosing in life. Ha-davar, ‘the word’, ‘the matter’, ‘this commandment’ to choose in life is very near to them, in their mouths and in their hearts, and they are doing it every day. May their courage and determination inspire us from this sacred day forwards to ‘choose in life’, and whatever the challenges we face, to muster our own courage and determination to act.

Kein y’hi ratzon – May this be our will. And let us say: Amen.

Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah

Edinburgh Liberal Jewish Congregation

Yom Kippur Shacharit

2nd October 2025 – 10th Tishri 5786

  1. Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, was also known as Nachmanides, was born in Gerona in Spain in 1104. He was a Talmudic jurist, and also very interested in Kabbalah – the mystical dimension of Judaism – and so his Biblical interpretations frequently offer mystical insights. ↑

  2. https://www.theparentscircle.org/en/homepage-en/ ↑

  3. https://www.cfpeace.org/ ↑

  4. https://www.womenwagepeace.org.il/en/ ↑

  5. https://www.standing-together.org/en ↑

  6. https://www.standing-together.org/en-departments/local-chapter-department ↑

  7. https://www.instagram.com/standing.together.scotland/ ↑

  8. https://www.standing-together.org/en/about-en ↑

  9. https://www.standing-together.org/en/about-en ↑

  10. https://www.standing-together.org/en/2023war ↑

  11. https://ukfost.co.uk/humanitarian-guard-will-mobilise-to-confront-west-bank-settlers ↑

  12. https://ukfost.co.uk/aid-to-gaza ↑

  13. https://www.facebook.com/reel/1235255747820630

    https://ukfost.co.uk/anti-war-activists-in-gaza-and-israel-stand-in-solidarity ↑

  14. https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-08-12/ty-article-opinion/.premium/big-brother-interrupted-when-gazas-reality-crashes-reality-tv-in-israel/00000198-9d1a-d825-a39a-dfdaa14f0000 ↑

  15. https://www.instagram.com/reels/DNX1OsFI216/ ↑

Erev Yom Kippur: The Call to Prophetic Action

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We have arrived at the concluding day of Aseret Y’mei T’shuvah, the ‘ten days of return’ that began on Rosh Ha-Shanah. T’shuvah is often translated as ‘repentance’, but the Hebrew encompasses so much more. As we reflect on the past year, and in particular, on the hurts and wrongs we have inflicted, and take steps to make amends, we also embark on a process that involves returning to ourselves and to others, and returning to the path of our lives. Rather than take us back to where we were, the process enables us to move forwards. When we return to the path of our lives, we find that we are further along.

The concluding day of the ten-day t’shuvah process has just begun. Observance of Yom Kippur is not a substitute for our engagement in the process prior to Yom Kippur. Our sages taught:[1]

[For] transgressions between a person and God [Ha-Makom], Yom Kippur atones; [however, for] transgressions between one person and another, Yom Kippur does not atone until they appease the other person.

But what if we haven’t done what we were supposed to do for the past nine days? What then are we doing here? Many of us may ask those questions. But there is only really one question we have to ask and respond to on this final tenth day: Are we prepared to acknowledge our failures, confess our misdeeds, and resolve to change our ways? Yom Kippur is a day etched in humility and renunciation. We cannot do anything now to change the past, so we must let it go and with it the unfinished business of the year we have left behind. But before we begin again, we are summoned to immerse ourselves completely in a day that the sages referred to in Aramaic, simply, as Yoma, ‘The Day’. Yoma, ‘The Day’ that is set apart from all other days of the year. The singularity of ‘The Day’ is expressed in signs and rituals. Traditionally, everything is white, the blank colour of death: the ark cover, scroll covers, the cloth that covers the reading desk. And beyond the sacred accoutrements, it is customary for the congregation as well as the service leaders to wear white, in particular, to wear the kittle, the ‘night-dress’-like garment that clothes those who have died. In an important sense, Yom Kippur is a day out of life; devoid of all the usual signs of life, including nourishment.

But Yoma, ‘The Day’ is much more than a day marked by absences. Yom Kippur is a day of disruption; a day that disrupts the rhythm of our everyday lives. In some respects, it is like a major demonstration on the streets that blocks thoroughfares, halts traffic, and brings a city to a standstill. The comparison seems completely inappropriate, until we delve deeper. The purpose of a demonstration is to stop people in their tracks, to obstruct the usual comings and goings of business as usual. To what purpose? To deliver a message loud and clear. Yom Kippur is like that. The purpose of Yoma, ‘The Day’ that disrupts the usual pulse and flow of our lives is to deliver a core message.

What is that message? Fortunately, despite the blanket of whiteness that envelopes ‘the day’ and its apartness from all other days, Yoma broadcasts its message on every page of the machzor and in the Torah and haftarah readings. But the message is complex, expressed in so many different ways, it is difficult to discern. Is it about our individual weaknesses and frailties? Is it the reminder of our mortality? Is it the restatement of the covenant between the Eternal One and the people Israel? Is it the summons to make confession? Is it the promise of forgiveness? The message of Yoma is all these things and more. And ultimately, the ‘more’ concerns not so much ‘the day’ itself, but the day after. We are here today to make a difference to tomorrow. The core message of the day is to stop repeating our habitual tropes and mistakes, our excuses and prevarications, and recommit ourselves to the covenantal task of putting the ethical teachings of our sacred texts into practice.

The clearest statement of that message can be found in the Torah and haftarah portions that we will read in the morning and afternoon. The passages from Deuteronomy chapters 29 and 30, remind us that the covenant made with our ancestors is also made with us, and also that presented with stark choices, we have the power to choose how we will act, for good or ill. The passages from Leviticus 19 make it clear that our relationship with God is lived out in how we conduct our relationships with others, in particular, how we treat the vulnerable and the marginal in our midst. The morning and afternoon haftarot speak in very different voices. The morning haftarah from Isaiah 58 declares that our ritual observance of Yom Kippur is meaningless if we do not challenge slavery, persecution, destitution and poverty. The Book of Jonah read as the afternoon haftarah, tells the story of a reluctant prophet, and a tyrannical monarch who repents, offering the reassurance that Divine forgiveness is available to anyone who sincerely changes their ways, even if they have committed the most heinous crimes.

The themes of all these texts concern not, how we have acted in the past, but how we will act in the future. Yoma, ‘the day’ apart from the every-day, devoid of the clutter and distractions of our day-to-day lives, offers an intensive training in ethical action. But of course, in the past two years, our day-to-day lives have not just followed the usual rhythms. For most of us, our consciousness has been dominated by events in Israel-Palestine, in particular, the horrors perpetrated by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s retaliatory war against Hamas, with its devastating impact on the people of Gaza. In the context of this ongoing catastrophe, Yom Kippur offers: an oasis away from the searing images that flash across our screens; a space to reflect; a framework of meaning; spiritual sustenance; and, above all, ethical teachings to guide us as we try to navigate a path ahead.

Back in January, overwhelmed by the horrors of the impact of ceaseless war in Gaza on the civilian population, and the continuing captivity of the remaining hostages, I felt completely powerless. What could I do? What could we do? The voices of our prophetic heritage were haunting me. I realised that we must reclaim Prophetic Judaism with its roots in the teachings of the prophets, those God-inspired individuals, who spoke ‘Truth to Power’,[2] and called out injustice; who addressed, not just the people, but very pointedly, the rulers of their day. The prophets demonstrated two key aspects of the prophetic task: to act on behalf of the poor, homeless, persecuted, vulnerable and marginal; and to call out one’s own people.

The first chapter of the Book of Isaiah could not be clearer. The opening verse sets the scene:

The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem, in the days of Uzzaiah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezikiah, Kings of Judah.

Isaiah goes on to present a searing critique of what he bewails as ‘a sinful nation, of people laden with iniquity. A seed of evil-doers that deal corruptly; they have forsaken the Eternal, they have spurned the Holy One of Israel, they have turned away backwards’ (1:4). And in the midst of his condemnation, the prophet makes it clear what is needed to put things right (1:17-18a):

Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean, put away your evil doings from before My eyes, cease to do evil. / Learn to do good; seek justice, defend the oppressed

Have these words ever rung as powerfully in our ears as they do today? The status quo across the world – politically, economically, ecologically – with compounded devastating impacts on the poor, the homeless, and the persecuted, on those who are trapped in conflict zones, on the vulnerable and the marginal, is leading the entire planet to disaster. We need to hold our leaders to account. We need to hold our communities to account. We need to hold ourselves to account.

Teachings of justice demanding the practice of justice are at the heart of the Torah. The entire rationale for the liberation of the slaves was that the people formed in the covenant at Sinai would serve the Eternal, and create a society rooted in those teachings.[3]

According to the Talmudic sages, a sage, chacham, literally, a ’wise one’ is ‘greater than a prophet’ and ‘wisdom is greater than prophecy’ (Bava Batra 12a 14). And so, in their view the age of prophecy had been replaced by their new age of learning. Nevertheless, when Progressive Judaism emerged in Germany in the wake of emancipation two-hundred years ago, the founders looked to the prophets for inspiration, and it is evident in our own day that prophetic voices are now speaking loud and clear across the Jewish world. The prophetic voices of Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel[4] and Israel’s Human Rights Watch, B’tselem.[5] The prophetic voices of all those Israelis, who work together with Palestinians for a better future for both peoples in projects such as the Parents Circle Families Forum,[6] Combatants for Peace,[7] Women Wage Peace,[8] and Standing Together, the grassroots organisation of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis committed to ‘peace, equality and social justice’.[9]

Beyond the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we can also see prophetic Jewish voices being raised here in Britain concerning other major humanitarian and global concerns, most notably in the work of the human rights project, René Cassin,[10] the social justice project, HIAS-JCORE,[11] and Eco-Judaism.[12]

Prophetic Jewish voices are also increasingly evident within Progressive Judaism in Britain. Since October 7, 2023, Progressive Jews for Justice in Israel/Palestine, a homegrown initiative led by members of this congregation and Leicester Progressive, has attracted more and more support from those who are members of Liberal and Reform synagogues.[13] More recently, at Shavu’ot, a group of Progressive clergy launched Voices for Prophetic Judaism with an online Tikkun Leil Shavu’ot, study programme.[14] We have started gathering materials on our website, where anyone interested can access resources to support prophetic thinking and action, including prophetic biblical, talmudic, mediaeval, modern and contemporary teachings, sermons and articles,[15] as well as sign-posting for organisations that act as pathways to prophetic action.[16] Just before Rosh Ha-Shanah, we released the PDF of a booklet for the Aseret Y’mei T’shuvah, the ‘ten days of return’, with contributions from nine rabbis and one cantor.[17] Perhaps, you have already seen it, and found thoughts and teachings that echo your concerns. We want to encourage everyone to find their prophetic voice, and to engage in prophetic action, so we can all contribute to the work of pursuing justice, peace, and equality, establishing human rights, and ensuring a sustainable future for the planet.


Yoma, The Day has only just begun. Long hours lie ahead of us. May the liturgy and the scriptural texts that guide us through this unique moment beyond the routine of our daily lives, help us to reflect on our misdeeds of the past year, acknowledge our failures, and inspire us for the prophetic tasks that lie ahead.

Kein y’hi ratzon – May this be our will. And let us say: Amen.

Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah

Edinburgh Liberal Jewish Congregation

Erev Yom Kippur

1st October 2025 – 10th Tishri 5786

  1. Mishnah Yoma 8:9. ↑

  2. https://grammarist.com/phrase/speak-truth-to-power/ ↑

  3. Exodus 19:3-6 ↑

  4. https://www.rhr.org.il/eng ↑

  5. https://statistics.btselem.org/en ↑

  6. https://www.theparentscircle.org/en/homepage-en/ ↑

  7. https://cfpeace.org/about-en/ ↑

  8. https://www.womenwagepeace.org.il/en/ ↑

  9. https://www.standing-together.org/en ↑

  10. https://renecassin.org/our-mission/ ↑

  11. https://hiasjcore.org/what/ ↑

  12. https://ecojudaism.org.uk/ ↑

  13. https://pjjip.org/ ↑

  14. https://voicesforpropheticjudaism.uk/ https://voicesforpropheticjudaism.uk/tikkun-leyl-2025/ ↑

  15. https://voicesforpropheticjudaism.uk/resources/ ↑

  16. https://voicesforpropheticjudaism.uk/partners/ ↑

  17. https://voicesforpropheticjudaism.uk/hhd2025/ ↑

Rosh Ha-Shanah Shacharit 5786

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The cycle turns, and here we are on Rosh Ha-Shanah morning, embarking on another New Year. We feel a complex mix of emotions as we reflect back on the past year, and as we look ahead. For now, we are together sharing this moment of beginning again.

Rosh Ha-Shanah marks the New Year for years (Mishnah Rosh Ha-Shanah 1:1), but it is so much more than that. Its various names teach us that ‘the head of the year’, which is a literal translation of Rosh Ha-Shanah, is ha-yom harat olam, the day which is the ‘birthday of the world’, yom ha-din, ‘the day of judgement’ and yom ha-zikaron, ‘the day of remembrance’. Throughout our service today, and in particular, during the musaf, the ‘additional’ service, when we will listen to the voice of the shofar, the ram’s horn, the messages these names proclaim will resound loud and clear. Today is the day when, acknowledging that the Eternal One is the Creator of all, Jews across the world are called to give an account of ourselves, individually and collectively, and to remember our deeds and misdeeds of the past year. The task before us is much too daunting for us to get to grips with it on one day. Rosh Ha-Shanah is the first day of aseret y’mei t’shuvah, the ‘ten days of return’ that conclude on Yom Kippur. Before the New Year begins in earnest the day after Yom Kippur, the shofar summons us to examine ourselves, take steps to make amends for the hurts we have inflicted, and the wrongs we have committed, whether unconsciously or consciously, and to repair our relationships.

It is a tall order. But although each one of us is summoned to interrogate our own life, we are not alone. We stand together in community. We are not even alone existentially; on this birthday of the world, we are reminded that we do not exist independently of one another; each one of us is woven into the web of Life. Hopefully, this reminder is reassuring. But it has its downside. It means that our responsibilities are not limited to our own lives, personal relationships, families, communities. Our responsibilities extend to ‘others’ whom we do not know.

In rabbinic literature the principle of responsibility for others is expressed in several references to the teaching that ‘All of Israel are responsible, one for the other – Kol Yisraeil areivim zeh ba-zeh’.[1] During the past almost two years since the massacres, atrocities and abductions orchestrated by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, engulfed by the depravity of that monstrous day, we also continue to be overwhelmed by the catastrophic impact on the civilian population of Gaza of Israel’s retaliatory war. We are thousands of miles away. And yet, as our screens transmit horrifying images of death and destruction day after devastating day, we are witnesses. We feel helpless, but we do what we can do. We join our voices to the calls for an end to the war, the release of the remaining hostages, sufficient aid and medical supplies for the people of Gaza. As progressive Jews, acknowledging the pain and suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians, we resist binary mind-sets that deepen divisions, by amplifying the voices of those Israelis and Palestinians who are working together for a better future, and by supporting organisations such as Standing Together, the Parents Circle Bereaved Families Forum, Combatants for Peace – and this congregation’s namesake village of Jews, Christians and Muslims, Neve Shalom – Wahat al-Salaam – Oasis of Peace.

Of course, we are not responsible for the ongoing catastrophe in Israel and Gaza – not forgetting, the West Bank, where the occupation is expanding, and, unchallenged by the military authorities, settler violence against Palestinians has become increasingly rampant. But we are not simply bystanders, either. Again: ‘Kol Yisraeil areivim zeh ba-zeh’ – ‘All of Israel are responsible, one for the other’. The reality is that in the war between extremists – death-cult Islamist terrorists bent on Israel’s destruction and an ultra-right Israeli government with a messianic vision of total Jewish domination – moderate Jews across the globe, like moderate Muslims across the globe, are challenged to call the extremists to account. As Jews, we are called, specifically, to speak up for ethical Jewish teaching and the practice of Jewish ethical values. Remembering, as the Torah points out, repeatedly, that we were oppressed and persecuted as slaves in Egypt, and that we ‘know the nefesh – the ‘inner being’ – of the stranger (Exodus 23:9), we are called to articulate a different Jewish narrative of compassion and respect for others, in particular, the vulnerable and the marginal.

That different Jewish narrative can be found both in the Torah’s legal codes and in its tales of our ancestors. Most of the Jewish world, including Israel, observes Rosh Ha-Shanah on two days. Today we will be reading the Torah portion that is traditionally set aside for the first day of Rosh Ha-Shanah, Genesis 21. The chapter relates the birth of Isaac. It also tells the story of the expulsion of Isaac’s older brother, Ishmael with his mother, Hagar, Sarah’s Egyptian maid-servant. An earlier story in Genesis 16 relates that finding herself barren, Sarah handed over Hagar to her husband Abraham in order to have a child through her. Genesis 21 relates that after Sarah has finally had a child of her own and weaned him, seeing Ishmael ‘playing around’ with his younger brother and protective of Isaac’s inheritance of the covenant, Sarah persuaded Abraham to ‘cast out that slave woman and her son’ (Gen. 21:9-10a). It is a shocking story. As shocking as the one that follows in Genesis 22, which is traditionally read on the second day of Rosh Ha-Shanah. Genesis 22 relates that having already abandoned his eldest son, instructed by God to sacrifice Isaac (22:2), Abraham does not demure, and his knife raised, it takes an insistent heavenly voice to stop him (22:11-13)

At the very beginning of the covenant narrative related in Genesis 17, when God told Abraham that he was making a covenant with him and his descendants, astonished that his barren wife, Sarah, was to bear a child, Abraham’s immediate concern was for the son he already had: ‘Oh that Ishmael might live before you’, he pleaded. God reassured him that although the particular covenant would be inherited by the son that Sarah would bear, God had heard him. We read (Gen. 17:20):

‘And as for Ishmael, I have heard you; behold, I have blessed him I will make him fruitful, and I will multiply him exceedingly; twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation.’

As we find, when we read the first Hagar narrative related in Genesis 16, God had already heard Hagar and given her a similar reassurance. When pregnant, Hagar ran away from Sarai’s harsh treatment into the wilderness, the Torah relates that a Messenger of God found her by a well of water and told her that her son would be called Yishma’eil, ‘because the Eternal One has heard your affliction’ (16:11). Yishma’eil means: ‘God will hear’.

God heard Hagar. God heard Abraham. And in Genesis 21, our Torah portion today, we read that, although when Hagar was banished to the wilderness with her son, he is silent and she is crying (21:16), God ‘heard the voice of the lad’ (21:17). Completely desolate, Hagar was reassured with a Divine message. We read (21:17-18):

And God heard the voice of the lad; and the Messenger of God called to Hagar out of heaven, and said to her: ‘What is [going on] for you, Hagar. Do not fear; for God has heard the voice of the lad where he is. / Arise, lift up the lad and grasp him by the hand; for I will place him as a great nation.’ Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water; and she went, and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad drink. / And God was with the lad, and he grew; and he dwelt in the wilderness, and became an archer.

The thrice-repeated message that God has ‘heard’ reflected in Ishmael’s name could not be clearer. One family. Two sons. Two Divine inheritances.

What are we to make of this? We cannot simply embrace our particular covenant with God through Abraham and Sarah, without recognising the Divine promise made to the descendants of Abraham and Hagar. Given that the Torah includes stories written down centuries after the events they describe and that it became the first repository of teaching for the Jewish people, the inclusion of the tales of Hagar and Ishmael in the Torah teach us that their story is part of our story, and reminds us that although heir to a separate inheritance, Ishmael was the son of Abraham, just as Isaac was the son of Abraham. Indeed, Ishmael was his first-born. It also reminds us that Ishmael and Isaac were brothers; and that their descendants – the Jewish and Muslim peoples – are kin.

I have recently completed a book I have been working on since I retired called Breaking Binaries. It includes a chapter, entitled, ‘Beyond Israel verses Palestine’. In this chapter, in an effort to challenge the prevailing binary approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict, I investigate a little-known, but significant player in the history of Zionism, the bi-national Zionist movement that developed in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s before the establishment of the modern State of Israel on 14 May 1948. Passionate Zionists, the likes of Progressive Rabbi, Judah Magnes, who became the first President of the Hebrew University, and the philosopher and biblical commentator, Martin Buber, had a vision of the renewal of the Jewish people in our ancient homeland alongside the Arab people who lived there. For them, Zionism did not imply the denial of the rights of the Arab inhabitants to the land. Brit Shalom, ‘Covenant of Peace’, the first Zionist organisation exclusively dedicated to a bi-national objective was established in April 1925. On 14 August 1925, four days before the 14th Zionist Congress opened in Vienna, Robert Weltsch, one of the founder members of Brit Shalom, wrote an article in his journal Judische Rundeschau that expressed the approach of bi-national Zionism. In it, he made this statement:[2]

There may be a people without a country, but there is no country without a people. Palestine was not given to us as a national home but we are to build a national home in Palestine. Palestine has a population of 700,000 souls, a people who have lived in the country for centuries and rightfully consider this country their fatherland and homeland. That is a fact which you must take into account. Palestine will always be inhabited by two peoples, the Jewish and the Arab. Which of them represents 51% and which 49% is irrelevant. The future of Palestine, its peaceful development and welfare can only be maintained by giving it a political system in which both peoples may, with equal rights, live side-by-side, bound through the natural ties of communication, economic and cultural relations. We do not want a Jewish state, but a bi-national Palestinian community.

Again: that statement was written on 14 August 1925. One-hundred years ago. Needless to say, the bi-national Zionists did not win the argument. But their assessment of the need for Jewish-Arab cooperation in order for the Zionist dream of Jewish renewal in the land to be realised fruitfully and peacefully, was irrefutable then, and it is irrefutable now. On August 5, I attended a Zoom meeting organised by Combatants for Peace with CfP co-founders, and former combatants, Avner Wishnitzer and Souli Khatib. Souli told us that from the age of fourteen, he was in and out of Israeli jails. He went on several hunger strikes during the periods of his incarceration, and having been part of the armed resistance, Souli learned the power of peaceful resistance. ‘Violence breeds violence’, he said. Over the years, he ‘learned to be a bridge’. He learned to see things ‘holistically’, from ‘different points of view, rather than ‘good and bad’. His new awareness, Souli said, has ‘grounded’ him ‘during the hardest times’.

Combatants for Peace was founded twenty years ago during the second intifada. The past two years have been among the hardest of times, and yet the experience of the last two years has strengthened the resolution of Combatants for Peace that there is no other solution but non-violence. ‘Violence is not going to free anyone’, Souli told us. ‘I’m not losing hope.’

Souli’s co-founder, Avner, who has refused army service since 2004, was less hopeful. ‘I’m speaking to you from the heart of darkness’, he said. Avner also talked about the effort it took for Combatants for Peace to stay together after the horrors of October 7, 2023, and in the early months of Israel’s retaliatory war against Hamas because of the devastating impact on the people of Gaza. But after engaging in separate meetings, the former Israeli soldiers and former Palestinian militants met, and after ‘crying’ together over the fifty years that had passed since the Yom Kippur war, over the decades of ‘dead bodies, loss and pain’, they held more joint meetings, and over a period of weeks, decided to keep going.

For Avner, ‘hope is dependent’ – dependent on the reality on the ground changing in a positive direction. For him, ‘meaning is more important than hope.’ Being part of Combatants for Peace gives Avner meaning. Towards the end of the Zoom meeting, Avner mentioned the Arabic word, ‘sumad’, which means ‘clinging on to’, and is used to express the determination of the Palestinians to cling on to the land, and also in the context of Combatants for Peace, the determination to cling on to humanity. Souli then added that his sister’s name is Sumad. She was born when he and his brothers were in jail, and she was given that name as a way of expressing the family’s steadfastness and resilience.

Souli and Avner: the descendants of Abraham, bridging the gulf between their two peoples. Isaac and Ishmael, the sons of Abraham, were divided from one another, heirs to separate Divine promises. But the Torah records that the estranged brothers came together to bury their father, Abraham in the Cave of Machpelah (Gen. 25:9), where Abraham had buried Sarah, and which he had purchased from the Hittites as a burial site for the family (23:3-20). To this day the Cave of Machpelah, which is in the ancient city of Hebron, is sacred to both Jews and Muslims because Abraham is buried there.

As we have seen with the repeated references in the Torah to the meaning of Ishmael’s name, names are important signifiers. Combatants for Peace are demonstrating sumad, the steadfastness and resilience needed for former Israeli and Palestinian combatants to continue their commitment to nonviolent resistance, and to continue holding on to the vision of a different future for Palestinians and Israelis, a future in which both peoples acknowledge their shared antecedence. In these desperate, heart-breaking times, inspired both by their example, and by the reunion of Isaac and Ishmael as they mourned the loss of their father, let us recommit ourselves to supporting all those grief-stricken Israelis and Palestinians who are continuing to work together for a just peace.

And let us say: Amen.

Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah

Leicester Progressive Jewish Congregation

Rosh Ha-Shanah Shacharit

23rd September 2025 – 1st Tishri 5785

  1. Commenting on Leviticus 26:37: Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sh’vu’ot 39a; Sanhedrin 27b; Sifra, B’chukkotai 7:5; B’midbar Rabbah 10:5. ↑

  2. Hattis, Susan Lee. The Bi-National Idea in Palestine During Mandatory Times. Haifa: Shikmona Publications, 1970, pp.4-5 ↑

Erev Rosh-Hashanah 5786

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A moonless night has fallen, and a new year has begun. In the Jewish calendar, each Jewish day begins, not arbitrarily in the middle of the night, but rather, after sunset, and then, daylight receding minute by minute, proceeds into the darkness. If ‘Jewish time’ is part of our consciousness, when the sun sets, we will be conscious of the transition from one day to the next. As it is, most of us are aware of Jewish time only in moments; on Shabbat; at festivals; in particular, when a new year begins. Our lives regulated by the civil calendar we rarely live in Jewish time. This is most obvious when it comes to the changing months. Of course, we know when the first day of Tishri begins because it heralds the New Year, Rosh Ha-Shanah. But what about the other months of the year?

Moon-watchers, familiar with the phases of the moon, will have more of a sense of the changing Jewish months because each month follows the moon: beginning in darkness, day-by-day, the waxing moon becomes full between the 14th and 16th of each month, before waning, and ending in darkness. Significantly, the new year, alone of all the sacred days, dawns during the dark phase of the moon. The festival that marks the mid-point of the year, Pesach in the Spring, commences at the full-moon. Three other sacred days are also located around the full moon: the biblical late harvest festival of Sukkot, begins, like Pesach on the 15th of the month; similarly, the post-biblical New Year for Trees, Tu Bishvat; while Purim, is on the 14th.

Being conscious of the Jewish calendar does not indicate a preoccupation with Jewish concerns. On the contrary. Unlike the civil calendar, the Jewish calendar, governed by sunsets and moon phases, is moored in the natural world. According to Jewish tradition, ‘today is the birthday of the world’ – ha-yom harat olam.[1] The changing year-date, reflects a counting of the years based on the chronologies in the book of Genesis that take us back to yom echad, ‘day one’ of the planet, as recounted in Genesis chapter 1, verses 1-5; the world ushered into existence by the word of God. We read in verse 5:

Va-yikra Elohim la-or, ‘yom’, v’la-choscheh kara, ‘lailah’. Va-y’hi-erev, va-y’hi-voker, yom echad’.

Translated literally:

Then God called to the light, ‘Day’, and to the darkness, He called, ‘Night’. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.

‘One day’, not ‘first day’; there is no presumption in the verse about what is to follow: a ‘second day’ (1:8); ‘third day’ (1:13); and so on.

Of course, as progressive Jews we do not believe that the world came into existence by the word of God five thousand eight hundred and eighty-six years ago. But you don’t have to be a creationist to appreciate the importance of celebrating the birthday of the world, any more then you have to embrace the midrashic notion of God creating and destroying multiple worlds before creating this one to appreciate the imperative of tikkun olam, the repair of the world.[2] The significant point is that the Jewish calendar begins, not with the first ancestors of our people, but with the earth, and the wider universe. The Jewish year turns with the planet around the Sun, and measures time with the phases of the moon.

So, as the New Year begins in the darkness of this moonless night, we have the opportunity to pause and consider our responsibilities as citizens of this wondrous blue planet. As we do so, we can draw on the resources of our Jewish texts, not least, in the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis.

There are two creation narratives in B’reishit, Genesis. Genesis 1 presents a hierarchical account with humanity as the apex of creation empowered to dominate and subdue the other living creatures (Gen.1.28). Genesis 2 gives a more holistic account in which the human formed from the dust of the ground, has the more modest role of Gardener and Guardian (Gen.2.15).

Apart from the fact that humanity is created last, the apex of life, Creation in Genesis 1 is conjured up by words and the Creator creates by declamation: ‘And God said, “let there be light”. And there was light’ (Gen.1.3). In Genesis 2, on the other hand, Creation is so tangible, it is, quite literally, earthy. Rather than employing the abstract verb to ‘create’, bara (root: Beit Reish Aleph), here, like a potter, YHWH God ‘forms’ [va-yitzar] (root: Yud Tzadi Reish) the human out of the dust of the ground. Moreover, the human [ha-adam] is directly identified with the ground [ha-adamah].

An earthling, formed from the dust of the ground, the human also partakes of the Divine. In Genesis 1, the connection with the Divine is abstract: the human is created in the image of God (who has no image). In Genesis 2, the connection is visceral: ‘YHWH God … breathed into their nostrils [b’apav] the breath of life [nishmat chayyim]’ (Gen.2.7). The human is infused with the Divine.

Although the first and second narratives concerning the creation of humanity are distinguished by the emphasis on human domination in the first and guardianship in the second, both present unequal relationships: the unequal relationship between the human and the rest of Creation in Genesis 1, and the unequal relationship in Genesis 2 both between the human and the animals whom the human names (2.19-20), and between the man and the woman (2.23).

Nevertheless, there are also hints in both accounts of coexistence with the Earth and its creatures. Significantly, in Genesis 1, a feature shared in common by both humans and animals, is that they are vegetarian. As we read (Gen.1.30):

And to every land animal, and every bird of the sky, and all that creeps on the Earth which is a living being [nefesh chayyah], [I give] all green vegetation for food.

Later, after the flood which has destroyed all the vegetation, that shared bond between all living creatures is broken when humans are permitted to eat meat, albeit, not the blood, which is identified as the nefesh, the ‘being’ of the animal (Gen.9.3-4).

With the identification of an animal’s blood as their nefesh, ‘being’, we have another significant connection between humanity and the animals. Although the second Creation narrative singles out the human for nishmat chayyim, the ‘breath of life’, each creature, according to the first account, is a living being, nefesh chayyah. I have translated the word nefesh as ‘being’. The more familiar and usual translation is ‘soul’. But the concept of soul – a consequence of the binary division between body and spirit – is not found in the Hebrew Bible. Nefesh has a much more material resonance in the biblical landscape, hence, the identification of the ‘blood’ of an animal as its nefesh. Significantly, all the words that have been spiritualised in post-biblical discourse – ru’ach, n’shamah and nefesh – have a materiality about them: ru’ach, ‘spirit’, that which moves unseen, is ‘wind’; n’shamah is ‘breath’, which by definition is a physical dynamic property, albeit invisible; nefesh; the inner ‘being’ is identified with blood, because that is the substance that flows around inside the body, not least, activating our beating hearts. Ru’ach, n’shamah and nefesh are all invisible, but they are all, nevertheless, tangible, physical forces.

The Creation narratives in B’reishit may be read as mythological stories about how things began, and also as cautionary tales about human arrogance. They may also be read for their teachings concerning the need for human beings to exercise responsibility in relation to the Earth and its myriad forms of life, and for their suggestions concerning the essential affinity between the human and the Earth – adam-adamah – and between the human and the other creatures that are also designated as nefesh chayyah, living beings. As earthlings, human beings are not just burdened with the role of being guardians, we are blessed with the same gift of existence as all the other forms of life. This blessing, experienced with every precious breath we take, is an invitation to coexistence.

This blessing also has practical implications for the treatment of other creatures, and for the harnessing of the green life of the planet to human needs. For example, from a Jewish perspective, the dietary laws which are rooted in binary teaching concerning what may or may not be eaten, initially set out in the Book of Leviticus chapter 11, have been reframed in some circles to reflect ecological considerations. Kashrut, a noun based on the Hebrew root Kaf Shin Reish, means that which is ‘fit’. In recent years Jewish definitions of food fitness have expanded to include our responsibility for animal welfare and the environment, with organic, local, and free-range food production, and the need to protect species diversity, becoming major priorities.[3]

The observance of Shabbat provides another opportunity for practising coexistence. Caught up in the 24/7 culture of contemporary life, it is hard to set aside a day of complete cessation. But perhaps, as we face ecological devastation and climate catastrophe, as we count the cost of near-global industrialisation and reckless consumerism, as we begin to acknowledge our domination of all other life forms on the planet, as we run out of breath, we may begin to see in Shabbat an invitation to take a breath and rediscover ourselves as earthlings, and equally important, to give the Earth a rest, too.

The root meaning of Shabbat is to ‘cease’. Shabbat is our weekly opportunity to cease our frenetic activity, at least for one day. Significantly, the biblical calendar in the Book of Leviticus chapter 23, places Shabbat at the head of the list of festivals that follow (Leviticus 23:2-3). This is because Shabbat is the model for all the sacred days of the biblical year, including the first day of the seventh month (Lev. 23:23-25), which became Rosh Ha-Shanah, literally ‘the head of the year’.[4] All the festivals are marked by ceasing from work and gathering in community.

The expression used throughout Leviticus 23 to indicate this gathering in community is mikra kodesh, literally, ‘a sacred calling together’. So, here we are this evening, on the birthday of the world, summoned to be part of this mikra kodesh, and to embark on our journeys of t’shuvah, of ‘return’, together and individually, towards renewal. We are called to repair our lives and our relationships. We are also called to contribute to the repair of the world, tikkun olam. If the repair of the world is to become a reality, it will entail recognising ourselves as earthlings and embracing a life of coexistence with all the life forms on this planet, our only home. Kein y’hi ratzon. May this be our will. And let us say: Amen.

Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah

Leicester Progressive Jewish Congregation

Erev Rosh-Hashanah 5786

22nd September 2025 – 1st Tishri 5786

  1. See Machzor Ruach Chadashah (London, Liberal Judaism, 2003, p.147) for the text of ‘Ha-Yom harat olam’, a text, usually sung that begins, ‘Today is the birthday of the world.’ Traditionally, it is recited after each set of shofar blasts during the Rosh Ha-Shanah Musaf, ‘Additional’ Service. It is found in the first published liturgy, Siddur Rav Amram, vol. II, p.114 (9th century) and is common to the rites of all denominations. ↑

  2. See, for example, Midrash B’reishit Rabbah 3:7 (c.300-500 CE), for commentary on Genesis 1 which speaks of previous worlds that God had created and destroyed. ↑

  3. See: The LJ leaflet Ethical Eating by Rabbi Janet Burden https://www.liberaljudaism.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Ethical-Eating-MAR-2020.pdf See also: https://evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org/eco-kashrut-a-kashrut-for-our-times/

    https://ecojudaism.org.uk/ The Eco Synagogue initiative Focuses on the practical application of ecological considerations to congregational life, including, synagogue food policies https://www.jvs.org.uk/2018/03/12/ecosynagogue-launches-london/ For an individual example of eco-agriculture in action in Britain: https://sadehfarm.co.uk/saveMidrash Tehillim (Psalms)sadeh ↑

  4. The first paragraph of Mishnah Rosh Ha-Shanah (1:1) lists the four days that are ‘new years’ the Jewish year: First of Nisan: the new year for Kings, and for the order of the festivals; first of Elul: the New Year for animal tithes; First Tishri: ‘The new year for years – rosh ha-shanah la-shanim’; Fifteenth of Sh’vat (Tu Bishvat): ‘the new year for the tree – rosh ha-shanah la-ilan. ↑

A People Forged in the Wilderness

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This Shabbat, we have opened the fourth book of the Torah. Its English name, ‘Numbers’, reflects its concern with numbering and ordering the tribes for their journey through the wilderness. The Hebrew name, taken from the first significant words that distinguish the book and its first portion, parashah, from all others, is B’midbar. We read (Numbers 1:1):

Va-y’dabbeir Adonai el-Moshe b’midbar Sinai.

The Eternal spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai.

The phrase ‘The Eternal spoke to Moses’ is ubiquitous in the Torah. It’s the words that follow – ‘in the wilderness of Sinai’ (b’midbar Sinai’) – that provide the signal for the new book and its first parashah.

This year, we are beginning to read B’midbar just two days before the festival of Shavuot, ‘Weeks’, which falls seven weeks after the first day of Pesach.[1] In biblical times, Shavuot, also known as ‘chag ha-katzir’, ‘the feast of harvest’, and ‘yom ha-bikkurim’, ‘the day of first fruits’ (Exodus 23:14-16) was the early summer harvest festival. In the century following the destruction of the last Temple by the Romans in 70 CE and the final conquest of the land, the sages transformed the meaning of Shavuot, from an agricultural celebration to z’man matan Torateinu, ‘the season of the giving of our Torah’.[2]

The transformation meant that the observance of the festival could continue, wherever Jews live in the world. And significantly, the change connected the festival to the narrative of the Exodus. Having been liberated from Egypt in the first month of the year – named Aviv, ‘Spring’ in the Torah (Exodus 12:2 and 13:4) – we learn in Exodus chapter 19, verse 1, that the ex-slaves entered the wilderness of Sinai on the first day of the third month – which in Talmudic times became known as Sivan, a word which is Babylonian in origin.

Just as significant as the linking of Shavuot with the Exodus narrative, is the location of the giving of the Torah: ba-midbar, ‘in the wilderness.’ Divine Revelation did not take place in the land beyond the Jordan, which was the destination of the ex-slaves. Rather, the Eternal spoke in thunder on a mountain top in no-one’s-land. Equally important, those who stood at the foot of the mountain were not just b’nei Yisraeil, ‘the children of Israel’ – that is Jacob (Genesis 32:29) – the descendants of the ancestors, the family, who were the first to journey with the one God. The rabble who huddled together as the mountain shook above them, included the erev rav, the ‘mixed multitude’ (Exodus 12:38), who went out of Egypt with them. Jews are not a race, defined by a shared biological inheritance. We are not a nation, defined by geography. We are a people whose identity was formed, when the Eternal made a covenant at Sinai with that diverse array of former slaves ba-midbar, ‘in the wilderness’.

We are a people whose identity was forged in the experience of oppression and liberation. And it is that experience that forms the bedrock to this day of our ethical values and practices. Significantly, laws concerning the treatment of the sojourner are repeated thirty-six times in the Torah – more than any other prescriptions. And the rationale is repeated again and again: ‘ki geirim heyyitem b’ertez Mitzrayim – for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt’.

And so, we read in the first code of law in the Torah, Mishpatim, in Exodus chapter 22, verse 20:

A sojourner you shall not wrong, neither shall you oppress them, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.

And then in the same code, at Exodus chapter 23, verse 9:

A sojourner you shall not oppress; because you know the nefesh – the inner being – of the sojourner, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.

A similar commandment in the Holiness Code, Leviticus 19, verse 34, stresses the implications of this commonality between the people of Israel and the sojourner:

The sojourner who sojourns with you in your land shall be as the home-born among you – k’ezrach mi-kem – and you shall love them as yourself; for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. I am the Eternal your God.

The implications remain for Jews today, wherever we live. A few years ago, I wrote a Prayer for Refugees that is recited in Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue on Shabbat mornings as part of the community prayers. It includes these words:

Eternal Teacher of Your people Israel, as the children and grandchildren and descendants of refugees, aware of your teachings of justice and our sacred obligations towards the stranger, we express our commitment before you now to open our hearts and our hands and our communities to welcome those in need of refuge, and to do what we can to contribute to the alleviation of their suffering.

How can we do otherwise? Just two weeks ago, Reform Judaism and Liberal Judaism voted to become one movement, Progressive Judaism. As the name of this congregation suggests, North West Surrey Synagogue, which is a constituent of MRJ, has not made the choice to broadcast its affiliation. I don’t know the reasons for this, but I would hazard a guess that one reason may be that for this shul, living Jewishly implies living ethically, without any need for an adjective. Teachings of justice demanding the practice of justice are at the heart of the Torah. The entire rationale for the liberation of the slaves was that the people formed in the covenant at Sinai would serve the Eternal, and create a society rooted in those teachings.

During the past twenty months since the horrific massacres and abductions orchestrated by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, we have witnessed the actions of a government in Israel dominated by ultraright politicians, which has abandoned the ethical teachings of the Torah, and which continues to ignore the obligations incumbent upon a state that claims to be ‘Jewish’. The modern State of Israel established on May 14, 1948 – 5th Iyyar in the Hebrew calendar – is the first sovereign Jewish state since the Hasmonean dynasty succumbed to Roman domination over two thousand years ago in 37 BCE.[3] Tragically, throughout the history of Jewish nationhood that goes back almost three thousand years, the adage that ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’[4] has been played out again and again. We are reminded of this when we read the haftarah, the portion from the books of the Prophets that concludes the reading from Scripture on Shabbat and festival mornings. The prophets, those God-inspired individuals, who spoke ‘Truth to Power’[5] and called out injustice, addressed, not just the people, but very pointedly, the rulers of their day. The prophets demonstrated two key aspects of the prophetic task: to act on behalf of the poor, homeless, persecuted, vulnerable and marginal; and to call out one’s own people.


The first chapter of the Book of Isaiah could not be clearer. The opening verse sets the scene:

The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem, in the days of Uzzaiah, Yotham, Ahaz, and Hezikiah, Kings of Judah.

Isaiah goes on to present a searing critique of what he bewails as ‘a sinful nation, of people laden with iniquity. A seed of evil-doers that deal corruptly; they have forsaken the Eternal, they have spurned the Holy One of Israel, they have turned away backwards’ (1:4). And in the midst of his condemnation, the prophet makes it clear what is needed to put things right (1:17-18a):

Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean, put away your evil doings from before My eyes, cease to do evil. / Learn to do good; seek justice, defend the oppressed.

According to the Talmudic sages, a sage, chacham, literally, a ’wise one’ is ‘greater than a prophet’ and ‘wisdom is greater than prophecy’ (Bava Batra 12a 14). And so, in their view the age of prophecy had been replaced by their new age of learning. Nevertheless, when Progressive Judaism emerged in Germany in the wake of emancipation two-hundred years ago, the founders looked to the prophets for inspiration, and it is evident in our own day that prophetic voices are now speaking loud and clear across the Jewish world. The prophetic voices of Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel[6] and Israel’s Human Rights Watch, B’tselem.[7] The prophetic voices of all those Israelis, who work together with Palestinians for a better future for both peoples in projects such as the Parents Circle Bereaved Families Forum,[8] Combatants for Peace,[9] and Standing Together, the grassroots organisation of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis committed to ‘peace, equality and social justice’.[10] Beyond the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we can also see prophetic Jewish voices being raised here in Britain concerning other major humanitarian and global concerns, most notably in the work of the human rights project, René Cassin,[11] the social justice project, HIAS-JCORE[12], and Eco-Judaism.[13]

Back in January, overwhelmed by the horrors of the impact of ceaseless war in Gaza on the civilian population, and the continuing captivity of the remaining hostages, I felt completely powerless. What could I do? What could we do? Like many of us, I was already supporting various Israeli- Palestinian coexistence and peace efforts. Meanwhile, the voices of our prophetic heritage were haunting me. I realised that we must reclaim prophetic Jewish teachings by establishing ‘a platform for prophetic voices and prophetic action, championing justice, peace, equality, human rights, and the planet.’[14]

Fortunately, a number of my colleagues agreed with me, and Voices for Prophetic Judaism will be launched tomorrow evening with an online Tikkun Leil Shavuot. We have started gathering materials for our new website, where anyone interested will be able to access resources to support prophetic thinking and action, including prophetic biblical, talmudic, mediaeval, modern and contemporary teachings, sermons, articles, pamphlets, and podcasts, as well as sign-posting for organisations that act as pathways to prophetic action. In the absence of an institutional structure, formal membership and official leadership, Voices for Prophetic Judaism is open to all those Jews and fellow-travellers, who want to contribute to the work of pursuing justice, peace, and equality, establishing human rights, and ensuring a sustainable future for the planet. Voices for Prophetic Judaism is open to you, to everyone gathered here today, and to this special congregation, which while rejecting labels remains, no doubt, wholly committed to the core ethical and sacred teachings of Judaism. And let us say: Amen.

Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah

North West Surrey Synagogue

31st May 2025 / 4th Sivan 5785

 

  1. The name, Shavuot, ‘Weeks’, derives from it falling on the fiftieth day, seven weeks after the first day of Pesach/Passover (in biblical times: seven weeks from the Shabbat, ‘Sabbath’ during Pesach – Leviticus 23:15-16). ↑

  2. We read in the midrash, Exodus Rabbah, chapter 31, in reference to the three pilgrim festivals ‘fixed by God’, that the second of these is, according to the second century sage, Rabbi Meir, ‘the festival of the harvest on which the Torah was given to Israel – chag ha-katzir shebo nit’nah Torah l’Yisraeil’. ↑

  3. https://cojs.org/the_hasmonean_dynasty_-142-37_bce/ ↑

  4. First articulated by Lord Acton on April 5, 1887 in a letter to Archbishop Mandell Creighton https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165acton.html ↑

  5. https://grammarist.com/phrase/speak-truth-to-power/ ↑

  6. https://www.rhr.org.il/eng ↑

  7. https://statistics.btselem.org/en ↑

  8. https://www.theparentscircle.org/en/homepage-en/ ↑

  9. https://cfpeace.org/about-en/ ↑

  10. https://www.standing-together.org/en ↑

  11. https://renecassin.org/our-mission/ ↑

  12. https://hiasjcore.org/what/ ↑

  13. https://ecojudaism.org.uk/ ↑

  14. From the strap-line of the Voices for Prophetic Judaism website: https://voicesforpropheticjudaism.uk/ ↑

DEDICATING THE FLAMES OF CHANUKKAH (5785-2024)

At Chanukkah, the Festival of ‘Dedication’, as we recall our ancestors’ struggle against tyranny by kindling light, we invite the gathering flames to inspire our own struggles against oppression and injustice.

This year, almost fifteen months since the horrors of October 7, 2023 and its aftermath, we dedicate our nightly kindling to all those whose lives have been devastated in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, in the hope that the violence will soon cease, and that all those who have been bereaved, injured, and traumatised, will be enabled to rebuild their lives in Peace and Freedom.

  • We dedicate the 1st flame of Chanukkah to the 251 people taken hostage and 1200 massacred by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. We think in particular of the 38 children, 364 young people murdered at the Nova Music festival, the kibbutzniks slaughtered in twenty-one kibbutzim – including 90 members on Kibbutz Be’eri alone – and the 71 foreign nationals.
  • We dedicate the 2nd flame of Chanukkah to the more than 35,000 Palestinian civilians killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023 during Israel’s retaliatory war against Hamas.
  • We dedicate the 3rd flame of Chanukkah to the almost 100 Israeli civilians killed since October 7, 2023, including fourteen hostages in Gaza, and thirty-three additional hostages thought to be dead.
  • We dedicate the 4th flame of Chanukkah to the 1.6 million Palestinians displaced in Gaza, living in tents, without sufficient food, and under constant threat of bombardment.
  • We dedicate the 5th flame of Chanukkah to the 135,000 people displaced in Israel, including 60,000 in the North.
  • We dedicate the 6th flame of Chanukkah to the more than 500 Palestinians killed in the West Bank by settlers and the IDF soldiers since October 7, 2023.
  • We dedicate the 7th flame of Chanukkah to the 3,960 Lebanese killed during Israel’s retaliatory war against Hezbollah during the autumn of 2024.
  • We dedicate the 8th flame of Chanukkah to the 101 Israeli hostages who remain in captivity in Gaza.

THE FESTIVAL OF CHANUKKAH: A CELEBRATION OF FREEDOM FROM OPPRESSION – Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah

Chanukkah, meaning ‘Dedication’, is an eight-day festival which celebrates freedom from oppression with the kindling of flames each night. The Hebrew date of Chanukkah is the 25th of the month of Kislev. This year, it begins after sunset on December 25th.

History

In 167 BCE, the Jews of Judea rose up in revolt against the oppressive regime of the Seleucid Emperor, King Antiochus IV. The revolt was led by Judah the Maccabee (‘Hammer’), the eldest son of Mattathias, the priest of Mod’in. In 164, Judah and his followers recaptured the Temple in Jerusalem, which had been turned into a pagan shrine, cleansed and rededicated it, and re-lit the seven-branched candle-stick, the M’norah. The event was marked by an eight-day celebration, resembling the Festival of Sukkot (‘Tabernacles’), which they had missed.

In later centuries, the early rabbis taught (Talmud: Shabbat 21b) about the miracle of a supply of Temple oil only sufficient for one day that lasted for eight days in order to emphasise that the triumph was ultimately spiritual: “Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit declares the God of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6).

How to Kindle the Flames of Chanukkah

The principal ritual of Chanukkah concerns the kindling of flames by a ‘servant’ candle (shamash) on a nine-branched Chanukkah M’norah, night after night for eight nights: one flame on the 1st night, two on the 2nd, three on the 3rd, and so on. The candles are placed from right to left, and lit from left to right to give pride of place to the candle for each day. Ideally, the lit Chanukkah M’norah should be put in the window, in order to proclaim the miracle. Whether or not one believes in ‘miracles’, the accumulating flames of Chanukkah celebrate the miracle of the triumph of the human spirit over the forces of tyranny and persecution.

Dedicating the Flames of Chanukkah

As we recall our ancestors’ struggle against tyranny by kindling light, we invite the gathering flames to inspire our own struggles against oppression and injustice.

This year, almost fifteen months since the horrors of October 7, 2023 and its aftermath, we dedicate our nightly kindling to all those whose lives have been devastated in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, in the hope that the violence will soon cease, and that all those who have been bereaved, injured, and traumatised, will be enabled to rebuild their lives in Peace and Freedom.

  • We dedicate the 1st flame of Chanukkah to the 251 people taken hostage and 1200 massacred by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. We think in particular of the 38 children, 364 young people murdered at the Nova Music festival, the kibbutzniks slaughtered in twenty-one kibbutzim – including 90 members on Kibbutz Be’eri alone – and the 71 foreign nationals.
  • We dedicate the 2nd flame of Chanukkah to the more than 35,000 Palestinian civilians killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023 during Israel’s retaliatory war against Hamas.
  • We dedicate the 3rd flame of Chanukkah to the almost 100 Israeli civilians killed since October 7, 2023, including fourteen hostages in Gaza, and thirty-three additional hostages thought to be dead.
  • We dedicate the 4th flame of Chanukkah to the 1.6 million Palestinians displaced in Gaza, living in tents, without sufficient food, and under constant threat of bombardment.
  • We dedicate the 5th flame of Chanukkah to the 135,000 people displaced in Israel, including 60,000 in the North.
  • We dedicate the 6th flame of Chanukkah to the more than 500 Palestinians killed in the West Bank by settlers and the IDF soldiers since October 7, 2023.
  • We dedicate the 7th flame of Chanukkah to the 3,960 Lebanese killed during Israel’s retaliatory war against Hezbollah during the autumn of 2024.
  • We dedicate the 8th flame of Chanukkah to the 101 Israeli hostages who remain in captivity in Gaza.

Blessings, Prayer & Song

Light the ‘servant’ candle, then recite:

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשָׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו וְצִוָּנוּ לְהַדְלִיק נֵר שֶׁל חֲנֻכָּה

Ba-ruch A-tah Ado-nai E-lo-hei-nu Me-lech ha-olam a-sher ki-d’-sha-nu b-mitz-vo-tav v-tzi-va-nu l-had-lik neir Cha-nu-kah.

Blessed are You, Eternal One, our God, Sovereign of the universe, who has sanctified us with commandments, and commanded us to kindle the light of Chanukkah.

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, שֶׁעָשָׂה נִסִּים לַאֲבוֹתֵינוּ וְאִמוֹתֵינוּ בַּיָּמִים הָהֵם בַּזְּמַן הַזֶּה

Ba-ruch A-tah Ado-nai E-lo-hei-nu Me-lech Ha-olam she-a-sa ni-sim la-avo-tei-nu v’i-mo-tei-nu ba-ya-mim ha-heim baz-man ha-zeh.

Blessed are You, Eternal One, our God, Sovereign of the universe, who performed miracles for our ancestors in those days, at this season.

Recite only on the first night:

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, שֶׁהֶחֱיָנוּ וְקִיְּמָנוּ וְהִגִּיעָנוּ לַזְּמַן הַזֶּה

Ba-ruch A-tah Ado-nai E-lo-hei-nu Me-lech Ha-olam she-heche-ya-nu v-ki-y-ma-nu v-hi-gi-a-nu laz-man ha-zeh.

Blessed are You, Eternal One, our God, Sovereign of the universe, who has kept us alive, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this season.

After the candles are lit, say:

Ha-nei-rot ha-la-lu a-nu mad-li-kin al ha-ni-sim, v-al ha-t-shu-ot, v-al ha-nif-la-ot, she-a-si-ta la-avo-tei-nu. V-chol sh-mo-nat y-mey cha-nu-kah ha-nei-rot ha-la-lu ko-desh; v-ein la-nu r-shut l-hish-ta-meish ba-hem, e-la lir-o-tan bil-vad, k-dey l-ho-dot l-shim-cha al ni-se-cha, v-al nif-l-o-te-cha, v-al y-shu-o-te-cha.

We kindle these lights in remembrance of the wonderful deliverance you performed for our ancestors. Throughout the eight days of Chanukkah, these lights are sacred, and we are not permitted to make use of them, but only to look at them, so that their glow may move us to give thanks for Your wonderful acts of deliverance.

Then, sing Ma’oz Tzur:

מָעוֹז צוּר יְשׁוּעָתִי לְךָ נָאֶה לְשַׁבֵּחַ

תִּכּוֹן בֵּית תְּפִלָּתִי וְשָׁם תּוֹדָה נְזַבֵּחַ

לְעֵת תָּכִין מַטְבֵּחַ מִצָּר הַמְנַבֵּח

אָז אֶגְמוֹר בְּשִׁיר מִזְמוֹר חֲנֻכַּת הַמִּזְבֵּחַ

Ma-oz tzur y-shu-a-ti, l-cha na-eh l-sha-bei-ach
Ti-kon beit t-fi-la-ti, v-sham to-dah n-za-bei-ach
L’eit ta-chin mat-bei-ach, v-tzar ha-m-na-bei-ach
Az eg-mor b-shir miz-mor Cha-nu-kat Ha-miz-bei-ach [X 2]

Refuge, Rock of my salvation, to You our praise is due.

Let Your house become a house of prayer and thanksgiving for all peoples.

When by Your will bloodshed ends and enemies cease to scream hate:

Then we will shall celebrate with joyful song the true dedication of Your altar.

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