On God the Lover's love for Israel, and on that "Israel" too.

Sermon. 03/08/2025. St John the Evangelist, Ovington,

Trinity 7 (Year C. OT: Continuous Track)

 

Hosea 11:1-11

 

You may remember that I said that in this long season of Green, this year the Old Testament readings follow a cycle of their own. We make our way through some edited highlights of some Old Testament books. So there’ s a good reason to concentrate, at least from time to time, on the Old Testament reading. This I shall do today.

 

Hosea hears God proclaim:

“When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.”

Moving stuff.

 

One thing I have learned over the years, and all the more so over recent weeks, is that many people struggle with that very word, “Israel”. It’s not that people are “against”, or simply “for”. Rather it’s a word people don’t always know what to do with. In truth, it is a word which means a whole string of things. So I think it does make sense to pause, and spell out the range of meanings of the very word, “Israel”. These are preliminaries, but – as I know what I am going to say, I may as well warn you – the preliminaries will take up the greater part of what I have to say. If you are going to lay something out, you have to lay it all out.

 

1.    Israel is firstly a proper noun. It is the name of a person. Genesis is dominated by the stories of Abraham, his son Isaac, and his son Jacob. And another name for Jacob is Israel. “Israel” does mean something like “he struggles with God”, which is intriguing in itself. But that intrigue is for another time.

2.     Secondly, Israel is the name for a whole people. When Hosea has God say: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son”, the “son” in question is not the person, Jacob-Israel. Jacob is long deceased. Here he is referring to the whole people, afflicted by slavery in Egypt, who are led by Moses through the Red Sea into the wilderness and freedom. They are the distant descendants of the person Jacob-Israel. We see this especially in that they are in twelve tribes. And (with some complications) the twelve tribes are named after the twelve sons of Joseph, and Joseph was the son of… (who else?) Jacob-Israel.

3.    Thirdly, when the people freed from slavery finally do settle in the Promised Land, things – we can be blunt about it – things, by and large, do not go well. For a while, a united kingdom does emerge, and it’s name is Israel. But it’s not too long before the united kingdom divides into two. The Northern kingdom goes by different names. But the most usual name is, yes, “Israel”. Israel then stands for one of the two Kingdoms of the divided People. (The Southern Kingdom is called Judah.)

4.    Fourthly, when times are good in the land, and when times are hard in the land, we come close to having to say that the Land itself is a character in the story of the People Israel. In the story as we have it, it is a land promised to Abraham and Sarah, and, once the promise is made, it changes everything. It changes the land. So Israel can be a shorthand for “the Land of Israel”. Think of Land with a capital L; it’s Eretz Yisrael in Hebrew. I say again: it is a character in its own right. For example, if the People are unfaithful, God does at times say he will send them into exile. But at other times it is expressed differently: the Land itself will spew them out (e.g. Leviticus 18.28).

It isn’t hard to say why this is the case. It is because it is stressed over and over that the Land is God’s gift to the People, a living gift as it were. It is not the People’s natural right. God chooses to give it to them – to “gift” it to them – so that God, People, and Land can form a virtuous circle. So every time a member of the People of Israel plucks grain, or eats a grape, or works the fields, or enjoys a feast, it’s as if the Land itself encourages them to remember God and give thanks.

 

These are the biblical uses of the word “Israel”. You can see that already it is pretty complicated. Whenever we read in the Bible “Israel”, we may do well to ask: is this the person; is this the whole people; is this the nation united; is this the Northern kingdom over against the Southern; is this Land itself (whatever is happening to the People)?

 

But we are not done with the preliminaries yet. For, on top of all that I have said, we know that we of course live many centuries later. And, for us ,“Israel” has yet other meanings.

 

5.    So, fifthly, Israel today means a nation state. The State of Israel (Medinat Yisrael in Hebrew; Medinat Yisrael not Eretz Yisrael). It was founded in 1948, by decisions of the United Nations. It was one of, well, any number of nations formed in the second half of the 20^th century – the decades when the Empires came to an end. (For comparison, India became an independent republic in 1950; Nigeria became independent in 1960.)

6.    Sixthly, it has to be said that when newsreaders and commentators today say “Israel”, they typically don’t exactly mean “the State of Israel”. They really mean more concretely: “the current government of the State of Israel”. The State of Israel is a democracy. Some would want to qualify that. But the point is that its government changes. (In fact, governments change an awful lot in Israel; they have more elections than most other nations.) This confusion - this conflation - between the fifth and the sixth meanings of Israel (the State of Israel, and the current government of the State of Israel) is a common one. To be honest, it is the kind of thing that happens all the time in commentary. If we say “the UK has improved its relations with Japan, but China has become more critical of Belgium” (I’m deliberately inventing an example, so that we don’t get distracted), each time we don’t really mean the sovereign states in question, in all their glorious and pristine abstraction, we mean the current governments of the UK, Japan, China, and France. So really a handful of powerful people. There is nothing suspicious or dishonourable about conflating these two meanings. But it can lead to misunderstandings, and mis-steps in conversations and debates.

 

The State of Israel is of course the national home of the Jewish People, though/and it has always had a substantial minority who are not Jewish. The United Nations planned it that way, based on earlier understandings emanating from our governments in the UK. In that sense, then, there is a link between the modern meanings of Israel and the biblical meanings. And that link is the Jewish People. But! But the links are at each point very complicated, multisided, and disputed.

 

This is important. If someone says: “I defend the right of the State of Israel to exist”, it is vital that we don’t hear that in itself as saying: “God promised this Land to the Jews as descendants of Abraham, and that is all there is to it”. That’s collapsing almost all the meanings of “Israel” into one. Now, such people do exist – people that will say they defend the right of the State of Israel to exist because of promises in the Bible. But many and most people who want to defend that right of Israel’s existence don’t believe that in that simple way, if they believe it at all. By the way, the name for someone who defends the right of the State of Israel to exist, because of a belief in the right of the Jewish people to self-determination, is “Zionist”. That is what a “Zionist” is. That is all that “Zionism” means. It does not mean someone who supports the current policies of the government of the State of Israel.

 

Another thing is just as important. It is this: criticism of the current government if the State of Israel is allowed, and can be timely and necessary. Many of us say it is timely and necessary. Such criticism is not anti-Jewish or antisemitic. It’s just better to be clear that you are criticising the current government, and not the State as such. And there would be an exception: if you use unequal scales. If, for example, you say that the nations of the world have to get involved in messy compromises and even militarism as they protect their people (as that is how life is), and you also say that the regime of the State of Israel must be perfect, or it forfeits the right to exist, then you are using unequal scales, and that would be anti-Jewish. But if you criticise the current government of the State of Israel as you would and do criticise other nations, then you need have no anxiety that you are being anti-Jewish.  

 

We are nearly done with the preliminaries(!) To sum up: if you read “Israel” in the Bible, ask which meaning applies on this occasion (person, People, united kingdom, Northern kingdom, Land itself), and if you speak of “Israel”, the modern nation, be clear if you really mean the current government of the modern nation (and don’t be afraid to repeat that phrase ad nauseum to avoid misunderstanding).

 

“When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.”

 

I hope we can now both understand, and be even more moved by these words.

 

Hosea is prophesying against the Northern Kingdom (which is “Israel” of course!). He says that God says that they have gone after other gods. They have lost themselves to idolatry. And for this Hosea has God speak words of judgement, and (we may as well say it) of condemnation. The Kingdom of Israel is like an unfaithful spouse. The Kingdom of Israel has failed. The message of Hosea is of divorce. It’s over between God and God’s People.

 

Except of course it isn’t.

 

In truth, this claim – this judgement, this condemnation – is also part of the preliminaries. It is a preliminary that the People have gone after other gods dead gods, who are not the Living God, and that some sort of lust for dead gods has taken over. It’s a preliminary that, because of this, God would be within God’s rights to disown them. Preliminary, because… it turns out… that is not God’s will. God says – and it’s there in the text; it is not hidden –

 

“I can’t help myself. I still love my People. I am still going to stick with them, and help them, and guide them.”

 

Just listen to God. This is God speaking to the people of the covenant in the 8^th century before Christ, and this is God speaking to the Church in 2025, and this is God speaking to you:

 

“How can I give you up…?
    How can I hand you over…?...
My heart recoils within me;
    my compassion grows warm and tender.
I will not execute my fierce anger…
for I am God and no mortal,
    the Holy One in your midst,
    and I will not come in wrath.”

 

In other words:

“I can’t help myself.

I love you.

I am devoted to you.

I stick with you.

I can’t help myself.”

 

Now, this – this - is the Word of the Lord.

Amen.

 

Commentary on Torah Portion Vayechi (Genesis 47:28-end)

Our parasha brings to a close the story of Joseph with his death. This narrative is truly a unique genre within Torah; it has been called its one "novella". In this, it also concludes the whole book of Genesis/Bereshit. It is short, but packs a punch. There is never any doubt who is centre-stage. Not Joseph, but his father, Jacob/Israel. 
 
It is Jacob who gives his farewell discourse (Gen 49:1ff), blessing his sons (albeit sometimes entirely negatively), in poetry both beautiful and at times impossible to translate (as one may expect, if the impression of archaic origins is desired). It is Jacob who is expressly mourned by the Egyptians for seventy days (50.3). It is Jacob whose dying wish is fulfilled, as his remains are taken, with pomp and ceremony, to his chosen resting-place, with his ancestors in Canaan (50.7ff). What is more, in the only disagreement between Jacob and Joseph, Jacob prevails. Jacob blesses Joseph’s sons as his own, but, in doing so, privileges the second-born Ephraim over the first-born Manasseh, against Joseph’s wishes. Jacob is clear that, whatever the failings of his eyesight, he knows what he is doing (48:19f). It is Jacob’s agency which counts.
 
There is something instructive here, for any who would make plans to shape their own legacy: it can never wholly be in your control; any effort to steer others may fail, on many levels.  
 
What of Joseph’s own death – without poetic farewells, without explicit mourning, without a journey home? He dies at 110 (50.26). Robert Alter, in his notes to his translation, tells us this is the Egyptian ideal age, over against the 120 years of Hebrew understanding. Joseph is placed in a coffin – an entirely Egyptian contraption within the Bible. Is there bathos here? The story that begins with the expanses of the heavens and the earth ends with its focus reduced to a mummified corpse in a box, a box alien to the corpse, as alien as the land into which the box is laid. Is this a warning against assimilation? Is the stage being set for the Pharoah “which knew not Joseph” (Ex 1.8 KJV), and the wretchedness of slavery?
 
Something may be lost if this is our only reading of the brief account of Joseph’s death. Perhaps there is another character in this passage whose legacy is not fully honoured. I refer to Egypt itself. If we limit ourselves to Genesis, it is only fair to describe Egypt as wholly benign, a place of refuge, of rescue, for Abraham, as for Jacob and his children. We hear Joseph say of his own travails: “God intended it for good, so as to bring about the… survival of many people” (50.20, NJPS). The Hebrew is strong: lehachayot: “to cause to live/to make alive”. That giving of life was brought about by the synergies of wise Joseph, and (let it be said) attentive and responsive Pharoah, and the fertility of Egypt itself. We who know the fuller story may miss here the absence of any strictly religious animosity between Pharaohs and patriarchs. In Christian language, this has been called the time of “ecumenical bonhomie” (Gordon Wenham). So Joseph’s coffin, which is called an “aron”, may in fact be a type of the ark (“aron”) of the covenant to come; it houses a memory of divine providence.
 
Biblical Egypt, like every nation since, is not one thing, neither simply refuge, nor simply oppressor. Just as it is folly to hope – or to fear – that our own legacy will be entirely one predictable and predicted thing. This is to the good!

Written for Limmud on One Leg, 2025. 

Sermon. Jacob, Israel, and Your Own Name(s)

Sermon. 20 October 2019. St Mary’s, Great Ilford.

Trinity 18 (Year C)

·       Genesis 32.22-31.

What’s in a name? For example, how does the name “St Mary’s Little Ilford?” (where I am from) relate to the name “St Mary’s Great Ilford?”… Is the former small and of no account, while the latter is grand and stands tall in the world? You’re right to offer no answer. These are of course rhetorical questions.

What’s in a name? Does it matter, for example, that I go by my middle name (I’ll leave you to guess my actual first name)? What of people who have alternative names? I’m confident that you, like me, know people of African heritage (for example), who have an English and an African name. Surely something to rejoice in there, that there is such richness of diversity in the world.

What’s in a name? Some of us were given new names at baptism or confirmation or on taking vows, the name of a saint we are aiming to follow and whose help we are seeking. Do we make the most of this?

What’s in a name? What do we make of the really quite common biblical practice, which begins in Genesis and goes forward into the New Testament, whereby Gd or a hero of faith re-names someone, gives them a new name (whether as replacement or addition), after some significant encounter or crisis.

The Bible says that life can change things for you, change things for you so radically that you come away from an experience with nothing less than a new name.

What’s in a name? You know why I am asking this now. It’s because in today’s first reading from the Hebrew Bible (from the Old, the Original Testament) Jacob is given a new name.

Jacob becomes Israel.

If I say Jacob-who-becomes-Israel is an interesting character, that is an understatement. Let us refresh our memory of what has brought him to this place, the place he finds himself in, in our reading.

Jacob is a twin. His mother, Rebecca, has a difficult pregnancy. The two brothers fight in her womb. Esau is born first, but Jacob is holding onto his heal. He wrestles, then, even at the very point of birth. The Bible says that his name, Jacob, itself means “he grasps the heel”. And indeed that is a good translation. There is a related noun (aqev) which means “a heel”. And there is a related noun (aqav), which means “to be at the heel of” – and not without menace [acted out]– and so to struggle with, to beat, to supplant.

But it’s not just a matter of language. In Genesis, Jacob really does supplant the first-born. Remember: he buys Esau’s birthright, for a bowl of lentil soup. Later, in a wholly different story, he tricks his father Isaac into giving him (Jacob) the blessing due the first-born (Esau). Esau accepts this, but is enraged. Jacob has to flee. He flees on the pretext of finding a wife from among his own people. That leads to yet another turbulent story, and Jacob finds himself not with one wife but two. He succeeds as a farmer, however, and has children with his wives, eleven of them, at this point.  

This, then, is the Jacob whom we meet today. He is coming home. Home to his father, Isaac, but also to his brother, Esau. So he is afraid. He sends his family and his possessions off the beaten track, so that he can think things through, deal with his anxiety, come to terms with things, pray things through. And he is met by another, a stranger (we are not actually told who this stranger is). They wrestle, and Jacob is judged the winner. The other blesses him, and gives him his new name, Israel. Israel is held to mean something like “He prevails against Gd”. He beats Gd. Interestingly, though, as good a translation is “Gd prevails”. Gd wins. This echoes the fact that it is not altogether clear who won the fight.

So what? What to make of this? I’d like to draw attention to a few things.

Firstly, many of us can take great hope from Jacob-Israel, who is a great hero of faith, indeed a saint. Sometimes, some of us somehow get the impression that to be a saint means to spend the morning looking like this [pious expression], and the afternoon looking like this [pious expression mirrored]. Or, more seriously, we may have a sense that a saint is someone who is always calm, placid, peaceful, unshakeable and unflustered. Some saints undoubtedly are like this. But not all. There are as many ways of being a saint as there are human beings in the world.  

Saint Jacob-become-Israel is difficult. He is fiery. He seems compelled to fight, and obsessed with rivalry. And… all is well. Not despite these things but through these things (through working these things through) he comes to be a great hero of faith, one we can rightly name our children after, whether as Israel, or Jacob, or in the fully “Anglicised” (English) form of Jacob, namely… James. If you’re fiery like Jacob-Israel, take heart!

Secondly, notice that Jacob has to be alone to be given his blessing, and to be given his vocation, that of being Israel in the world. He sends away his family, his nearest and dearest. He sends away his possessions, all that might make him comfortable during the night, or for that matter safe. There is a lesson for us here, too.

•        Some matters can only be sorted, if we choose solitude.
•        Some encounters with Gd can only come about, if we choose solitude.
•        Some discoveries about ourselves, can only come to light, if we choose solitude.

Note my emphasis on choosing. It is not just that we find ourselves alone. It’s that we set out to spend some sustained time – maybe indeed a whole night – contending with Gd in prayer. I don’t need to remind you that this was Jesus’ own practice, again and again. So let us take heart, and take note!

Thirdly, there is something you don’t see in today’s text but can find in Genesis if you read on. It is that this encounter, this wrestling match, bears fruit. To be fair, even after it, Jacob-Israel is still frightened of Esau. After all Esau comes to meet him with 400 men. Jacob-Israel arranges his family carefully for their own protection.

But! But the two brothers show no hostility. Esau actually welcomes Jacob-Israel, and Jacob-Israel says these remarkable words to his brother: “Seeing your face is like seeing the face of Gd” (Gen 33.10).

Seeing your face is like seeing the face of Gd. The interpreters debate precisely what he meant, and it is genuinely open. But we are free to choose to see these words in their full sense. Seeing your face is like seeing the face of Gd.

So we may say that Jacob-Israel,

• fiery though he be,
• sought out solitude,
•  to wrestle and wrestle and wrestle with Gd – or just perhaps with his own fieriness,
• and so he comes through to the most profound biblical truth:
•  in seeing the other, yes, in seeing the rival, yes, in seeing the difficult person, yes, in seeing the enemy, we truly do see the image of Gd?

This is a core truth, one, frankly, we cannot be reminded of enough.

I will say one more thing. What if Gd were saying to you:

“Come away, and I will tell you your new name. It is not a name for your passport, or even for your neighbours to call you by. It is a secret name. It is between you and me. It tells you what your truest vocation is.”

Would you come away?

What would Gd tell you?

I invite you to seek to find out.

Amen.  

How to Fail at Jewish-Christian Relations

HOW TO FAIL AT JEWISH-CHRISTIAN RELATIONS

TALK TO THE WOODROFFE SOCIETY 

OF WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD,

6 NOVEMBER 2017

For reasons which will become only too obvious, I’d like to speak on how to Fail at Jewish-Christian Relations (JCR), this from the Christian side of things. 

I begin with an anecdote that doesn’t involve me, but which is true. Rabbi Julia Neuberger tells of giving a talk at a Christian seminary. At the end, a seminarian said: “I myself have no problem with woman rabbis.” Rabbi Neuberger smiled, and thought: “That’s nice, but what’s it to you?” “But,” the young man continued: “What about the sacrifices? Are you physically strong enough to perform the sacrifices.” The good rabbi confided: “I came very close to saying: ‘It’s alright unless they struggle’”. But instead she explained to the Christian at necessary length how rabbinic Judaism is different from the religion of the Old Testament, that home and synagogue (or shul) had well and truly replaced the Temple, and prayer and learning had replaced sacrifice. 

That seminarian has done us all a favour. For we will all fail at JCR if we allow ourselves to think that Judaism is the religion of the Old Testament. One powerful introduction which both your chaplain and I once heard, from an Orthodox rabbi, [Rabbi Norman Solomon) began with the Mishnah, the first rabbinic document, compiled around 200 CE, consisting largely of legal details absent from the Scriptures themselves. And increasingly one is encouraged to think of Judaism and Christianity as sibling religions. After all, after the Mishnah (200 CE) there were a good three centuries before the Talmud (in two versions, Babylonian and Palestinian) was itself completed, and it is on the Talmud that much later Judaism rests. In other words, the rabbis (or, within the family, Chazal, chachamim zikhronam livrekhah - our Sages, may their memory be blessed) were giving definitive shape to Judaism as we know it - in precisely those days when the Church Fathers were giving shape to Christianity, through councils and creeds. In Roman Catholic circles, it is now commonplace to speak of the Jewish People as “our elder brother”. Precisely how much older is not the point. That is more a nod to the understanding that Judaism has a more direct link at least to aspects of the Hebrew tradition which is our common ancestor. [It is not a term without its own difficulties. Jews, knowing the biblical stories, know that the elder brother often loses out to the younger.]

In saying that Judaism is not the religion of the Old Testament, I have brought us into another way to fail at this relationship. I was once speaking to a Jewish audience about modern Catholic approaches to Judaism. (Does Pope Francis think that Jews are “Anonymous Christians”? was the title, with more than a nod to Karl Rahner.) As I was outlining some of the recent texts, I mentioned, with heavy, heavy scare-marks “the Old Testament”, as that is the language both used and defended in the Catholic documents. Still, in questions, someone - an extremely gentle, gentleman who I consider a friend - gently insisted that that language was offensive. This because for Jews it is the only Testament, and is in no sense old, in the sense of needing modernising, replacing, or fading away. 

There are ironies here. What I have just been saying about Judaism and Christianity as sibling religions can be reframed thus: neither faith treats the Hebrew Scriptures as complete in themselves. For Christians, they are completed by the New Testament. For Jews, they are complemented by the later Mishnah and Talmud and stories in the form of midrash. This latter set is called “the Oral Law” or “the Oral Torah” (Torah she-be-al-peh) alongside the Written Torah (Torah bikhtav). Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner speaks of rabbinic religion as being the Judaism of the Dual Torah, on this basis. Another point: one thing orthodox Christians certainly do not mean by calling the First Testament “Old” is that it is worn out or passing away. In orthodoxy it is axiomatic that it remains Revelation. And that one Gd is revealed from Genesis to Revelation. That the “God of the Old Testament” is war-like and judgemental is one of the earliest Christian heresies (Marcionism) even though it is a popular trope in wider culture. I sometimes make the point this way: it would be better if we spoke of “the Original Testament”, that would convey more about the interaction between the two Testaments.

But we must turn from these lighter matters to more weighty ones. I have to say you will fail at JCR if you think you can say anything wholly right about Jewish belief. There is a book, author Menachem Kellner, entitled Must a Jew Believe Anything? The majority report is No. A Jew is one who identifies as belonging to the Jewish People and typically does, or tries to do, Jewish things, around circumcision, diet, the day of rest, and of course ethics and compassion. If you go to shul (synagogue) and try to speak of Gd, it is not at all unlikely that you will meet someone who says, “But I don’t believe in Gd”. Again, if you were to try to convert, it is likely you will be asked all kinds of questions about your kitchen, and how you spend your Saturdays. But it is unlikely you will be asked about your belief in Gd. 

There are different layers here. For some, in synagogue as in college, only the Dawkins’ definition of Gd counts. That is: Gd as an item within the universe, who, if he existed, could be examined and analysed like any other item in the universe, so that the statement “that there exists at least one supernatural being” is the one to be tested. Well, that is as far from the orthodox Christian understanding of what “belief in God” is as it is the traditional Jewish one. For others, it is quite specifically the Holocaust, or the Shoah which destroyed faith in Gd, Gd as benign. Before the Shoah, the mainstream idea was that Gd would indeed allow the Jewish people to suffer and even endure persecution for the sake of Gd, but would never abandon them or let them be destroyed. That kind of “covenant” seemed to burn in the ovens of Auschwitz, to many. But, over and above these points, it is the case that faith or belief play a different role in Judaism than in most forms of Christianity. 

In Christianity, the creed is recited solemnly in the middle of the eucharist and at other times. In Orthodoxy, according to the letter of the text, catechumens are sent out before it is recited, such is its mystery and power. We may insist that to say “We believe in Gd the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit,” the “believing” in question is more about trust, or even giving your heart to Gd-so-named, than it is about accepting a quasi-scientific proposition, but this only emphasises the importance of the creed. In Judaism, there is no creed as such. There are the 13 Principles of the Rambam (Maidonides) which have much of the feel of a creed. They refer to Gd as creator, as one, as eternal, as incorporeal, and to Moses as unequalled Prophet and Torah as revelation. But these are recited right at the end of the service, really as a jolly little tune. Certainly, one can be a very devout and observant Jew and take issue with many or most of the Principles. 

That said, it has happened time and again to me that I have heard a Jew say “we Jews don’t really do theology; that feels like abstraction and surmise to us” after they have actually just offered some truly beautiful theology, or interpretation of a Bible story. The joke is that to be Jewish you don't have to believe in Gd, you just have to obey Gd. But there is no doubt that that obedience involves worship, praising Gd, thanking Gd, asking for good things from Gd. And (a different point) the distinction between “Orthodox” and “Progressive” Judaism is theoretically at least a matter of doctrine, whether all of the Written Torah is direct revelation from heaven. So I would say that Judaism has to do with Gd as much as Christianity does, and so by extension with belief. But the framework for any reflecting on Gd is that one is not in a school of faith, but a school of interpretation, where all questions can constantly be asked.

If it is hard to know whether or how to speak of Gd in JCR, it is at least as hard to speak of Israel. A former director of the Council of Christians and Jews tells of giving a talk about the eucharist, and its resonances with Jewish practice. The first question was indeed on the bread and the wine. But the second was on the State of Israel and its actions. And this happened again and again. She ended up “biting the bullet” and setting up the Forum for the Discussion on Israel-Palestine, with Jews, Christians and Muslims integral to the task. The scope for misunderstanding is great. In the first place, it is always worth checking whether a Jewish person is speaking of the person, Jacob-Israel, the People Israel (Am Yisrael) or the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) or the State of Israel (Medinat Yisrael). 

When it comes to the State and its policies, there is no one position that is the Jewish one. Debate on all aspects is fierce and complex. It happens that a clear majority of Jews in this country do support “the two state solution” and are typically against the settlements. But the bigger picture and the smaller details are all disputed. 

By no means do all Jews identify as Zionist. Some indeed do say that they are anti-Zionist on religious grounds; they believe Jews cannot have full power in the land before Messiah comes. For others, the grounds would be that they are against all nationalisms. Others would be non-Zionist, simply believing that the heart of their Judaism lies elsewhere. 

However, the vast majority would want to insist that Zionism is not a dirty word; Zionism is an honourable position, even for Jews who do not share it. Zionism is simply the view that the Jews are a people like all all peoples, and that as such the Jewish people are as entitled to self-determination as any other people, and that, at least since 1948 this has meant self-determination in the form of the nation state of Israel. This is felt, as much as it is thought about. Amos Oz writes movingly about his father talking to him on the day independence was declared. His father says he should rejoice. They now lived in a country where no one (no fellow-citizen) would humiliate or attack them simply for being a Jew. They were, in the ordinary sense of the word, safe.  

Notice that in giving this account of Zionism I had no recourse to talk of Gd. Indeed, before the Second World War Zionism was secular in the main, and often expressly socialist. Think of the kibbutzim. But after the war, for obvious reasons, religious Jews were also as drawn to Zionism. So indeed often reference is made to the centrality of the Land in the Bible, and of the longing for Zion expressed time and again in the Jewish liturgy. Beyond that, some even think about the refounding of the nation in the Land as miracle, as the dawn of redemption, as messianic at least in embryo. But this is by no means the only way to be a religious Zionist.

I do believe it is true that in discussions with Jews one can indeed criticise any aspect of Israeli politics. Just be aware that Zionism to your partner does not mean “what Netanyahu and those to the right of him do” but an honourable and broad network of ideas. And also be aware that Christianity has a long and ignoble history of valorising Jewish powerlessness. Think of the wandering Jew of St Augustine’s thinking, destined to wander the earth without power or dignity, for killing Christ and rejecting Gd. This has played no small part in the ongoing relationship. So Jews will be suspicious if they pick up a sense that Jews or Israelis are being held to a standard no other people must keep, as if Jews are uniquely to be distrusted with power, always on probation as it were. But over and above all of that, just don’t approach any Jew (who is not already a friend), and expect them either to defend Israeli policies in the light of your objections, or for that matter to disassociate themselves from them, for your convenience. 

Speaking about Jesus Christ is a good way to fail at JCR. I am not thinking so much of the question: “why did you Jews not accept Jesus as the Messiah?” I assume we can all see how, within the Jewish framing of things, Jesus does not figure. Jews did not “reject” Jesus any more than Christians have “rejected” Muhammad, or Baha’ullah, or Joseph Smith. I am thinking of what really prompted my title today. In the (otherwise) excellent book edited by Rabbi Tony Bayfield, Deep Calls to Deep, I have a chapter seeking to set out the orthodox creedal position on Jesus Christ - the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity - in ways that made sense to Jews. I drew heavily on John Zizioulas’ work, Being as Communion. I said that rather than think of the classical creeds as the Hellenisation of Christianity, they can be thought of as the biblicisation of Hellenism, i.e. bringing Hebraic ideas right into the heart of Hellenistic religion. The core conviction being: whereas in Hellenism, Gd, or the Most Real, is always distant from us, and our point of contact can only be indirect, via emanation after emanation, the Biblical understanding, shared by Jews and Christians, is that when one meets with Gd, it really is Gd one meets, Gd as Gd is Gd. Gd is not distant, but with us as-it-were as Agent. Christians and Jews, then, disagree about where one meets with Gd most centrally (at Sinai or at Calvary), but still share more in common than is usually thought. I drew secondarily on the work of Daniel Boyarin, who insisted that in some strands of Second Temple Judaism, a heavenly messiah was already thinkable, as found in some interpretations of the Son of Man in Daniel. I did not win any of my Jewish readers round, at all. Maybe it was because of the difficulty of comparing Christian belief with Jewish “belief” at all. Maybe it was the Boyarin reference, where I was giving two much credibility to fringe or heretical Jewish texts. I don’t know. 

Much more could be said. For rabbinic Jews, the Pharisees are the forerunners of the rabbis, and are heroes, and liberal reformers. To criticise any view as “Pharisaical” will win you no friends. Jews also tend to reject any teaching of “original sin” and of “salvation”, if “salvation” is taken to mean rescue from damnation. But, over and above all such details, Jews are very much aware of the power-imbalance in the relationship. There are well over a billion Christians in the world, under 20 million Jews. About half this nation identifies as Christian, about 0.5% as Jewish. And Christians have, let me put this delicately, played to their numerical strength, in persecuting Jews, and not least in setting up false “disputations” where the Jew was always bound to lose to the Christian. 

But I leave you not on that note, but on this one. My sense is that JCR are bound to fail, if by success we imagine a state of being where each fully understands the other. I can describe my involvement only as an oscillation, where I move from thinking “we are at heart the same”, to “no, we are very different”, and back again. Cardinal Kasper has called Judaism “as a sacrament of every otherness”. [Address on the 37th Anniversary of Nostra Aetate, 2002] As such, it is a mystery we can never wholly understand. I say, with my best Hebrew, Amen. 

Sermon. When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion

Sermon. 25 October 2015.

St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford

Last Sunday after Trinity (Proper 25)

Jeremiah 31.7-9

Psalm 126

Mark 10.46-end

Here is a piece of information I hope you can do nothing with: one of today's readings I want at my funeral. And that reading is... the psalm. Yes, the psalm, as well as being music, a song, is of course also a Scriptural reading. It typically picks up a theme from the First Reading.

One reason I'd like this psalm, Psalm 126, at my funeral is that it's very popular in Judaism, to observant Jews. (You might have guessed that bit.) It's one of the psalms that is used to introduce Grace - the mealtime prayer of Grace. So it has to do with feasting. And I believe that one vital thing that Jews and Christians have in common is that, because we know Gd creates us as bodies, we look to meals as one of the best places for delight, joy, fellowship, collective remembering, celebration, hospitality, and reconciliation.

You might be thinking: if a psalm (or two) introduces Grace, that Grace must be an awful lot longer than our brief prayer. And you'd be right. It can take 10' or more to say Grace in Judaism. And/but you say it after the meal. (There is a short blessing before the meal too.)

It all goes back to these words from Deuteronomy [8:10]: When you have eaten and are satisfied, you shall bless the LORD your God for the good land which He gave you.

So grace is an extended blessing of Gd, by those who have eaten and are satisfied. And note that the blessing is not just for the food, but 'for the good land which Gd gave you'. You might think this just means we should remember the farmers and farms. But in fact that does not work in context. For the context of the whole of the Book of Deuteronomy is that the People of Israel are on the point of entering 'The Promised Land', the Land of Israel – the Land-with-a-capital-L, as it were. Deuteronomy begins with a recap of the journeys through the wilderness and ends with Moses overlooking the Promised Land he'll never set foot on. You see: they are on the point of entering the Promised Land. So by 'the Land' there is no doubt which is meant.

And sure enough in Jewish Grace after Meals there are extensive prayers for the Land of Israel, with a longing for the People to be gathered there, and for Jerusalem, with a longing for the Messiah to come and rebuild it, including the Temple. Let me give you a flavour:

Have mercy, LORD our God, upon Israel Your people, upon Jerusalem Your city, upon Zion the abode of Your glory, upon the kingship of the house of David Your anointed, and upon the great and holy House over which Your Name was proclaimed, Our God, our Father, our Shepherd...

Remember this is a prayer – or part of a longer prayer – said after every substantial meal.

So, you see, today's psalm, for all it is associated with mealtimes, really is a good fit for today's First Reading. For in that reading the usually miserable Jeremiah manages a cheerful note, and has Gd say this: 'I am going to bring [the People] back... with consolations I will lead them back... they shall not stumble, for I have become a father to Israel'. The Father's love brings the People back to the Land.

We can actually go further. We can say: the book we call the 'Old Testament' is in large part a series of stories of journeys in and out of the Land. Think of Abraham moving from Ur through the Land into Egypt and back to the Land. Think, of course, of the Exodus itself, from Egypt via the wilderness – a huge 'long cut' - to the Land. And then there's the exile of the Northern Kingdom to Assyria, the exile of the Southern Kingdom to Babylon... And, then, crucially (if often forgotten by Christians) the return to the Land.

It makes sense to say the Land is a character in its own right. Some Christian thinkers have put it this way: both within the Old Testament and for later Judaism, the Land of Israel is like a sacrament, is sacramental.

I am not suggesting we have to agree with that. I am suggesting, though, that it is good for us to know of this perspective, and to recognise that people as wise and prayerful and holy as us (or wiser, more prayerful and holier than us) do have this perspective, do believe the Land, and Jerusalem, and the Temple have religious, even divine significance.

All of this of course has contemporary relevance (to put it mildly). And I do appreciate that I am concentrating on Jewish understandings here, and so arguably on the Israeli case for Israel, because that case relates to our Scriptures. But I am emphatically not taking sides. The religious case for the State of Israel is but one of the strands. There are plenty of secular arguments. And it is not straightforward. For in fact the more the case for Israel takes biblical lines, the tougher it is for Israel actually. For the Bible (Leviticus this time [18.28]) promises that if the People are disobedient to Gd, the land will 'vomit' them out. Exile and landlessness are part of the promise.

I am suggesting that the latest horrors in Israel-Palestine are not 'mindless' acts of 'random' violence, in spite of how the media and politicians love such phrases. They've been the result of a clash of ideas of the holiness of the Land and Jerusalem and (in particular) the Temple. Both sides feel (differently, and with different degrees of justification) that both their access to the holy sites, and also their understanding of them were under threat. As people of faith ourselves, we should have – or we should find – some empathy with those who feel hurt and vulnerable. (But don't get me wrong: that's not at all to justify any violence other than self-defence.)

Find empathy. I think we might. Imagine: if the nation-state of the UK or England and our citizenship were both threatened, and on top of that, it looked like this Church, or St Mary's or Bradwell, or St Paul's Cathedral, or all of them and more were at risk of being closed or taken over or destroyed, we would, I think, feel something. We would feel some pain. Would that be rational? Maybe, maybe not. But it's worth remembering that no life-long life-enhancing bond is entirely rational, be it to your partner, to West Ham, to the All Blacks, to a nation, to whatever.

So when our media or politicians present the problem of violence in Israel-Palestine as being about reactionary and irrational religions which should by now have faded into the background as private affairs, I'd say they do us a disservice. They are not taking the relevant human beings seriously. And when Jews, Christians and Muslims trivialise or deny the heart-felt loyalties of the others, they are taking other people less seriously. But worse: they are also pushing peace further away. Many insist that peace, anywhere, can come only when all parties are willing to understand those they call their 'enemies'.

When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, then were we like dreamers.

It ill behoves any of us to tread on another's dreams, not least but not only when those dreams are embedded in our own Scriptures. But if we – Jews, Christians, Muslims and others - can really imaginatively feel the power of the others' dreams, then it may just become possible that there can be healing, even healing such as the blind beggar Bartimaeus in today's gospel knew.

We have to hope for it. I'd say we are commanded to hope for it. Certainly we are commanded to pray for it. We are commanded to dare to imagine that one united feast, in Israel-Palestine and beyond, with feasting as the best place for delight, joy, fellowship, collective remembering (yes, eventually), celebration, hospitality, and reconciliation. Amen.