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The God Who Cries (Rosh Hashanah II 5785)

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  Philip Mantofa's " Shofar " The God Who Cries When did we start crying in private? When we were infants, you and I, we cried out because we wanted something. We cried out on the expectation that a caregiver would hear us and respond to our cries. We cried to be held and cared for. Crying out was intended to draw someone near to us.  For most of us, thank God, care was closeby. It is a heartbreaking fact of the human condition that infants without caregivers will stop crying. Crying out is about drawing near.  Moses cries out as an infant in a basket, and is found by a princess who will become his adoptive mother. She names him Moshe from Mashah, to draw out. He cries; she draws him near.  Even more precisely, to “draw close” in Hebrew is karav - the same root as the word korban, a sacrifice in the Temple. The Temple service was about drawing closer to God. It is no wonder, then, that the service of the Temple could be replaced with the service of the heart.  W...
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Look Up and See the Miracle

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  Monet's Morning on the Seine in the Rain Look Up and See the Miracle I remember once, in a village in India, watching old men playing cards together on the street. It was an impossibly sweet visual until I was told they were the farmers, and the rain had not come that year. No water meant no work, and no work meant no crops, and no crops meant no money and no food. But the horror of the future was folded into the calmness of the moment, of sitting together and playing cards while waiting for something terrible.  I’m a little obsessed with water.  I’m convinced that something buried in the human consciousness knows that we came from the water. Water is not only the sustaining force in religious myth - it is at the heart of creation narratives. Genesis starts out with a watery abyss, with God splitting the waters to create the sea and the sky. This is a common theme in Middle Eastern creation stories - in Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth, it is the god Marduk who...
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Cities of Refuge, Cities of Sanctuary

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  Picture from Charles Foster, The Story of the Bible, 1884 Cities of Refuge, Cities of Sanctuary           More headlines are coming in about arrests and charges made for the far-right, anti-immigrant riots. And peppered between those headlines in the “asylum and immigration” sections of news websites, between the pictures of fires and angry crowds, are the occasional haunting stories which sound something like this:            Boat on which at least eight died in Channel was ‘wholly unsuitable’           Two people die attempting to cross Channel in dinghy                       UK ‘stop the boats’ policy raising risk of deadly crushes on dinghies             As we know, places housing refugees were targeted in those riots. It doesn’t make the land seem so much safer than the chan...
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