Timely Words From Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks ztl

it's an enormous privilege to be addressing you the members of the rabbinical alliance of america and the good harabo name and i want to thank you three times over number one for your incredible work with your kihilo during these really but really difficult months you have been sustaining their spirits giving them personal guidance being there for them at a time that cannot have been easy for any of you and i want to thank you for that number two thank you for arranging this meeting of mine so that together we can inspire ourselves to hopefully inspire others and thirdly simply to say how important your work is devka at this time of social distancing of face masks of goodness knows i don't know if you have the same prohibitions in the states as we have in britain but there's no communal singing yet allowed in places of worship and all of these things make matters very very difficult indeed and it is our job your job our our job to do what we can to raise people's spirits so the first dvar i would like to share with you is the importance and the difference it makes when you raise people's spirits the terror is explicit about this when the banay israel had to fight against amalek in the minibar the terror tells us that kasha yarim moshe that yadav israel when moses lifted up his hands israel prevailed the cashe when he let his hands fall amalek prevailed the mishna says famously to the hands of moses have this magical property that they make or break war no says the mishna the explanation is simple when moses raised his hands the people looked up to heaven and were inspired and that filled them with strength and energy to beat their most difficult opponent but when israel looked down then they became demoralized and a demoralized people is easily defeated there is a wonderful story i don't know if you know but it's super and one worthy of telling your congregations at least i've found it fascinating um there was a spanish amateur archaeologist in the 19th century called machelino de soydola who in 1875 began investigating and examining the altamira caves in spain uh he was hoping to find you know it was kind of the age when uh international exhibitions were showing fossils and things like that and he thought that in these ancient caves you might find something of interest in the ground and for four years he examined the floor of these caves and found nothing in 1879 four years on invited his nine-year-old daughter maria to join him on one of his sunday outings to the caves well he was busy scrambling among the rubble of the cave when his daughter said daddy why are there cows on the roof and he looked up and there on the roof were paintings of bison this was the first ever discovery of an ancient cave painting so much so that once he made it known to the world people simply refused to believe they're aged they thought it must be a modern fraud but the fact is here this very distinguished amateur archaeologist had been in the cave studying it for four years and yet it was his nine-year-old daughter who made the discovery of all times why because he was looking down and she was looking up sometimes you really need to look up long time ago i used to teach philosophy and my hero indeed i lived in rooms just above these uh i mean the ones he used when he was alive my hero was wittgenstein somebody once asked wittgenstein what is your role your task in philosophy he replied to teach the fly the way out of the fly bottle let me explain what he means what he meant it's very easy to trap a fly in a fly bottle you have this bottle with a rather narrow top and you put something very sweet on the bottom the fly smells the sweetness flies into the bottle then when it's eaten all at once tries to get out and bangs its head against the bottle again and again and again until it flops down exhausted dead the fly never actually philosophizes that if there was a way in there must be a way out the one thing the fly fails to do is to look up so it seems to me that uh moshe rabbanu's greatness was that he lifted the spirits of the people so that they could win their first great battle that they had to fight on their own and the task of faith and this you have to explain to people is to teach us all to look up because if we look up i lift my eyes to the hills faith lifts our vision and when we are lifted we can defeat any adversary that is my first bracha to you and my first bar the second one has to do with what i personally learnt from the pandemic and i want to lead into this by way of a divad torah because there is a very very extraordinary gemara in rosh hashanah dead zion on um wants to know why when we have blown all those colloids um before the ahmeda we go back and blow further co-loads across the different she taught among the region and how many extra colored is it 12 according to the palette is it 30 is it as we do it now uh rounded up to 100 color but the fact is that laura wants to know once you have blown those first 30 notes you have fulfilled the mitzvah so why on earth once you have fulfilled the mitzvah you go ahead and do it all over again only the first time when people are sitting and the second time when people are standing during hazaratha shots the repetition of the music and the mother replies in an answer that is more enigmatic than the question in order to confuse satan well look you know the gemara you know the she thought of him as to what it means to confuse satan but it is nonetheless a difficult gemara is satan that easy to confuse um is it really surprised when people say or do something twice is it surprising when we say ashrae twice is it surprised when we say creation twice during chakras is it surprised when we read the portion that we read for maf dear twice i mean how on earth does this confuse satan i want to suggest a very simple answer but actually a very deep answer the kyoto the mushaf the buying show for the first 30 notes we are fulfilling the mitzvah as yakidim as individuals in theory every single individual is commanded to listen to the shofar and indeed could be commanded it could as heche mitzvah to blow chauffeur indeed it is only that reason that we have in this case gizera durable that that we decree that you don't blow chauffeur on shabbos in case somebody carries it four qubits in a public domain that would only apply to a mitzvah that it devolves on individuals and it devolves on the community we're not worried that the community will forget that there you can't carry four qubits in the public domain so here we have a mitzvah that applies to everyone and that is how we fulfill it in the first 30 notes however what happens in the tequilas de mourmat and the techias that take place during the reader's repetition of music it's not a mitzvah of him at all the reader's repetition of any amidah is done on behalf of the community not on behalf of individuals now there's a shitab that says that uh is anyone but that's a different shita the fundamental is is for the sake of the community and in any case music is always but sibor that's why the mission says ain't philip musaffi an individual does not uh mussuf is not an obligation on individuals it's an obligation on the civil war and that is what confuses satan every single person in shul has heard chauffeur has signed and sobbed every single person in shul has cried out to god every single person without exception and yet they come back again not to do it again but to do it again as a sibor to say rabbano shalom look you have heard our cry but even if we as individuals do not merit your forgiveness forgive us as a community that is something that confuses satan because satan can mislead and tempt any one of us as individuals that cannot confront us as a community as a community we are more powerful than satan and that is why chuval but sibo is more effective than any other kind in fact the classic example of chuva but sibor according to ramban in his commentary on seven varim gathering the people together to renew the government to shaharma watergate in ancient jerusalem which took place as you know on rosh hashanah so that is the incredible thing that even if god doesn't forgive me he forgives us that even though i have prayed as an eye i am still going to go ahead and pray as a we there's a catholic historian paul johnson wrote a book a magnificent book called the history of the jews one of the finest of its kind i've ever wrote and i wanted to know how come a catholic spends that long studying jews and judaism what led him to do it what did he learn from it so he came to our home helene and i gave him dinner one one evening and i said paul what what did you learn about jews after all your study of them and he said well i'll tell you he said there have been two kinds of cultures in the world they've been individualistic cultures like contemporary britain and america they've been collectivist cultures like china like former soviet union he said very very few have managed both in fact nobody has managed both except jews they have managed both individual responsibility and collective responsibility they manage both the i and the we i was very moved by this because what paul johnson was doing in effect was restating in his own language what hillary zakin used to say anili mili if i i'm not for me who will be but kashani likes me melanie if i'm only for myself what am i and um that is the balance that we absolutely need in our lives and the balance that judaism gives us and people notice this two years ago i was doing a series with the bbc on morality one of the programs was on artificial intelligence i don't know if you this is subject you're interested in but the greatest artificial intelligence company in the world is called deep mind sport many years ago by google but it's the famous artificial intelligence group that have you know achieved all the great breakthroughs in ai and i was interviewed for the program uh the co-founder of deep mind called mustafa suleiman uh mustafa when was brought up in a muslim family at the age of 13 became an atheist we had a wonderful conversation which you can hear on the web and a few days later i was surprised to receive an email from him saying yeah rabbi sex do you think you could take me to show one one day i thought this is a new one for me taking a muslim atheist to sure anyway i did he came to show uh he came to us for sheldon's lunch it was great cafaldi and i said mustafa what did you think i loved the spirit of community he felt the we in judaism around the same time i traveled to harvard to the john f kennedy center where i interviewed man i think is the world's greatest sociologist robert putnam and we were sitting in his office again we did a conversation for an hour again it's on the web and uh he absolutely knocked me sideways because you can hear this he said and that's why i converted to judaism he said to me i was born a lutheran but lutheranism is all about i and judaism is all about us it's all about community thank you robert you're the world's expert on community and that's why you became jewish i i thought that was a great story so that is what tequila's the balance between the two the tikkun that we need through the pandemic is that for years now we've had too much i in america and britain and all too little we and the pandemic has emphasized this and accentuated it because we can't govern with dominion we weddings have been postponed funerals uh have only a handful of people going to the minamitsa you know we felt the confinement and we cried out to hashem but we found ourselves far far far too much on our own we have to bring back as soon as it's safe to do so the we back into jewish life we have to do the biku lim we have to do the we have as soon as it's safe to do so to reach out to the elderly the isolated the infirm the people who felt really badly cut off from others because we needed tequilas to um not just the mayu chef judaism is about us as a community not just us as a discreet collection of individuals and that is the second thing bring back the we as soon as we can and then finally let me just say this binding of isaac that we read about on the second day the hardest episode of all in the torah as far as i'm concerned we all know the long history of interpretation of this from ghazal to the mufashim all the way to rav soloveitchik and his dialogue with with with kierkegaard and so on i want to suggest a completely completely different explanation and again because of the pandemic and here it is under the rubric of shivimpanimlattura that there are 70 faces to tara i want to tell you a very personal story a rather painful story just this summer during the pandemic elena and i had the privilege of joy of celebrating our golden wedding anniversary which brought back memories of 50 years ago and one of those is a very pointed memory indeed we were on our honeymoon this little italian town called pasteum which has roman ruins a very nice beach and a lovely glittering sea it was the most gorgeous day imaginable and i wanted to go out into the sea because it looked so lovely and there was only one problem that my parents alain shalom never read the gemara that said you should teach your child how to swim so i couldn't swim and then i looked and i could see that actually people were 100 yards out into the sea but the water was only up to their knees as i said to elaine i'm going to paddle out there and you can see i'll be out there 100 yards in the sea and the water will be only up to my knees so i did it and it was i turned around and started walking back to elaine and after about a minute i found myself out of my depth i can't swim and there was no one near and as i went down under for the fifth time i knew that was the end and i remember thinking two things number one what a way to begin our honeymoon and number two what's the italian for help well as you can probably guess somebody did see me and did rescue me otherwise i wouldn't be here and carry me pretty much unconscious to deposit me at elaine's feet i never discovered who it was uh someone somewhere out there is someone who saved my life but this i can tell you that after that experience every single day for 50 years i know what it is to say because for giving me back my life what you have almost lost you never ever again take for granted isaac was the first jewish child alex burke wanted jews to become the world's most child caring child-centered civilization he wanted us never ever to take our children for granted and so he brought it about that avraham nearly lost his child he was never going to lose him but he didn't know that he nearly lost his child and the end result was that not abraham nor any jew since took their children for granted there's um an american israeli call you'll see kleiner levy who i don't know 10 15 years ago wrote a book called at the entrance to the garden of eden trying to find some common ground between jews christians and muslims in the middle east i have to say he didn't really find it but there is one passage there that i will never forget there is a lady nun head of a convent in israel who clearly doesn't like jews very much but who said seeing israelis with their children is a lesson to the whole world everyone should watch how they do it she actually said every jewish child has two mothers because every jewish father is as caring as every jewish mother and she's just blown away by that phenomenon and that is the continuing effect of the fact that we nearly lost the first jewish child we nearly lost the state of israel why did god tell abraham his children would have to go into exile and suffer it why because they nearly lost their land and therefore they never took it for granted ever again and the end result is jews remain more attached to the land despite the fact that they were separated from it for two thousand years than any people has ever been attached to a land and that is why it happens and this is what we should take from the coronavirus pandemic every one of us was in some kind of the fashion every one of us was in some kind of danger and didn't go into the details you know this and what we risk losing we never take for granted any of us if we're honest know that we stood in risk of losing our lives rahman al-islam and therefore the lesson we take from this is never take life for granted that concept is essential to rosh hashanah everything we talk about and pray for is life at the end of uh we remind ourselves how fragile our life is like a fleeting cloud of flying dreamer sharda that god gives us only one thing but it's everything god gives us life what i hope we will take away certainly what i took away from this very difficult brush with pandemic and with danger is how precious life is how holy life is how every breath of life that we take is in some sense potentially a praise of god every single day in the coming year we should feel thanks for life wonder at life an inward sense of the beauty of life and may hashem write us all in the book of life amen