Rabbi Natasha Mann

  I’ve been thinking about loneliness.  I think it’s on my mind because the only thing I can compare these last two weeks to is the experience of Covid. And for many of us, especially those of us who live on our own, it was an experience of profound loneliness, and of looking for places of connection to fill a sudden void.  There’s a profound loneliness in this week’s Torah portion, for Noah, who’s called upon to build this ark and save this sliver of humanity and the animal world from the oncoming flood. His experience is like the experience of the prophets of our tradition - of being the only one who sees the truth of what is happening.  I want to say that both those lonelinesses feel relevant to these past few weeks. There’s a profound distance I think many of us feel from loved ones in Israel, a distance which is physical in nature. That physical distance was there before, but it’s so much more apparent now. But there’s also that kind of prophetic loneliness, the sense that we can

  The Golem, the Virgin Bride, and the Beautiful Captive  Parashat Ki Teitzei           In the early 1970s, when she was still identifying as an Orthodox Jew, now-Rabbi Rachel Adler published a trailblazing article entitled: “The Jew Who Wasn’t There: Halacha and the Jewish Woman”. I was inspired to reread this recently, after going to see the Barbie Movie, which is a very normal reaction, thank you.           Rachel Adler’s article was about how halakhah, the Jewish legal framework, has largely been enacted upon women throughout history; that many mitzvot aimed at women were really about their relationships with men and children rather than their relationships with God. It’s a good article and well worth reading if you haven’t come across it. She was clearly thirsty for a halakhic framework that really saw her as a full member of the Jewish community and participant in the Jewish story. And she concludes the article by invoking the folk tale of the golem, the creature made of clay who

     This might come as a surprise to anyone I’ve spoken with about my enjoyment of bungee jumping, but… I am actually afraid of heights. I haven’t let that fear stop me from bungee jumping, or hiking up what Israel calls mountains, or walking on ramparts - but there is always a moment, just as I’m about to begin, that I think to myself: why and how have I done this again? That thought arrives just as I become overwhelmed with an emotion I can only call unpleasantly religious. I do not mean that I feel unsafe and start asking God to save me. I think, at that point, God might be inclined to point out that I did this to myself. I’m referring to an emotion that perhaps you’ll recognise, too: an acute awareness of the grandeur of all things, filtered through a sense of dread and awe, all while being far too present in the moment. Unpleasantly religious.            That is the feeling I associate with moments in the Torah and in our theological metaphors that involve heights, especially mou

  Detailing the Unknown: Dante and Zechariah Hermione, you spoke just a few minutes ago about some of my favourite texts: Zechariah, which you chanted beautifully from for your Haftarah, and the Book of Job. They’re not easy books. They’re tricky, difficult, emotionally-wrought texts dealing with some of the most difficult aspects of being human. And you spoke about them, and Satan - the cynical, duplicitous character, as you said - with remarkable maturity. With your permission, I want to continue to explore the world you led us into.  See, these kinds of books - books like Zechariah and Job, with their complications and their emotional depth - change as we read them. As we grow and learn, they reveal new concepts that we haven’t seen before. At least, that’s my experience, and I hope it will be yours, too. And I’ve been reading another book, another book about the cynical and duplicitous character of Satan, which has in some sense re-coloured parts of your Haftarah for me.  I

  Memory as Empathy - Pesach VIII The Seder is a fascinating exercise in telling stories. It is almost easier to talk about what the Seder is not. It is not an exercise in engaging with history as a historian. When a historian engages with history, she does it in a manner closer to the scientist than the Jew at the Seder; she finds data points and weaves a narrative around them, a narrative which is always on unsteady ground, because the threads of it may unspool with the discovery of new data altogether. When we sat at the Seder last week, we were not historians. But we were also not the tellers of fiction. Even the most outlandish of midrashim are not really fiction, not in the plain meaning of the word. Even if I were speaking with someone who believes that not a single element of the story was a historical reality - a statement I would disagree with, but nonetheless - I do not think I could support the view that we were just, well, telling stories.  This is the fundamental

  A Tale of (More Than) Two Cities There is an ongoing joke about the British that football is our religion. I happen to be a football atheist; I don't spend much time thinking about football or its value. However, we seem to be discovering in recent years that this parallel unfortunately extends to some of the less savoury elements of religion, too - such as the overlooking of abuse when it threatens to topple organisations and authorities.  I am thinking, of course, of a building project. I am thinking of a society rife with abuses of human rights, where individuality and expression are punished financially and violently, whose streets I would personally be afraid to walk.  Actually, I am thinking of two societies.  One is Qatar, where the World Cup is due to begin tomorrow, drawing over a million international visitors. Where migrant workers have been building the infrastructure, under conditions described as slavery, with a truly shocking death toll in the thousands. Where homo

It is easy to assume that words are just labels for objects and movements and ideas. That to translate from one language to another is just to find the series of sounds we make that parallel the exact same concept. That is to say: New London Synagogue is a synagogue, from the Greek συναγωγή, meaning “place of gathering”. We can translate that back and forth from the Hebrew Beit Knesset, “house of gathering”. Different sounds, but essentially the same meaning. So surely it doesn’t matter which language we are using.  Except within the field of linguistics, there are long arguments on whether and how the language of the speaker affects the mind of the speaker. We can all agree that culture shapes language, but maybe, some hypothesise, language affects cognition, too. The most famous example of this is regarding the colour spectrum. Speakers of languages like Zuni, a Native American language, have a harder time distinguishing between blues and greens because the Zuni language classifies b