Rabbi Natasha Mann

  Disposable People The Torah speaks of slavery in two ways: the Israelite slave and the Canaanite (or, really, non-Israelite) slave. The Israelite slave had many previously unheard-of protections, such as the mandated release after six years. The non-Israelite slave in the Torah was given some protections, such as not being returned to the master after escaping, but was ultimately treated similarly to any ancient slave.  Moving forward through history, a thousand years or so, and the rabbis of our tradition found themselves uncomfortable with the state of the written law. And through a truly masterful legal framework, they gave all slaves the protections of the Israelite slave.  Another thousand years, more than a thousand years, and the question of abolition of slavery came to be. Some rabbis saw the trajectory of our narrative, with its reminder that we were once slaves and its growth of protections around the enslaved person, and became abolitionists. I’m sorry to say...

  Before Whom Pharaoh Stands I find power fascinating.  There are constructs of power within Jewish tradition which are by their nature uneasy. Social stratification might be necessary in some ways, but it also causes unending issues. God, in the early days of our existence in the Holy Land, does not want there to be a king. God seems to think, throughout the Book of Judges, that God can be the ruling social authority. There are prophets, after all; the divine message can be delivered, so why would the people need a king?  It turns out - heresy alert - God is wrong. The people need a king, not because of anything lacking in God, but due to something lacking in themselves. Everyone else has a king. Kings are great cultural symbols. Never mind all of the issues that come with handing power over one man - the people demand a king, and so eventually God gives in and tells the Prophet Samuel to anoint Saul as their new sovereign.  It goes, I hate to tell you, quite badly....

  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...

  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...

Shabbat shalom - and happy International Women’s Day.  On a usual year, International Women's Day falls in an excellent week in the Jewish calendar. It usually sits just on top of Purim, or between Purim and Pesach. Purim, with its hero as a beautiful young woman, rags-to-riches-to-courageous-hero Queen Esther. And Pesach, where the beginning of the narrative - the story of saving the children, which eventually leads to the redemption of the Israelites from slavery - is all about women. Mothers, sisters, midwives, princesses, all conspiring to resist Pharaoh’s most terrible of decrees, and in doing so, securing salvation. This year, the Gregorian calendar and the Hebrew calendar are aligned slightly differently. We have a few weeks to go before we reach Purim. We are instead at Shabbat Shekalim, the Shabbat before we enter Purim’s month of Adar - this year, Adar Sheini.  We don’t really have much in the way of female characters in our readings tomorrow, but there is a woman wh...

  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...

     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 theologic...

  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...

  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 thousa...

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 classifi...