Rabbi Natasha Mann

Walking Through Time (Re’eh/Elul)           I would like to spend some time, today, thinking about time.  We are standing here at a meeting-point of two cyclical, calendrical moments. The first is our Torah portion, Parashat Re’eh, with all its anticipation for the Israelites entering into the Promised Land, and its call into its own future to return, again and again, to the Temple. The other is the moment of the year we are in. We are about to begin the Month of Elul, the month leading up to Rosh HaShanah, which has its own particular obligations. It is another kind of anticipation. With the High Holy Days and the sense of looming judgment, we are invited to spend the Month of Elul preparing ourselves: to reflect on the year we’ve had, the lives we’ve had - the decisions we’ve made along the way - and to do “teshuvah” with one another. Teshuvah is repentance - it is making up for ways we might have wronged one another - but the language we use, tesh...

                        A photograph I took of the lapidarium at the destroyed Jewish Cemetery outside Kazimierz Dolny, Poland Revelation and Relationship (in Bethlehem and Warsaw) We have days to go until Shavuot is upon us – Z’man Matan Torateinu, the Time of the Giving of Our Torah. In celebration of the giving of the Torah, our tradition mandates two special readings - one, we’ll read as our Torah portion on the first day, and the other, as the megillah, the special scroll, for the second.  The first is of course the story of Sinai. There is thunder and lightning. A great shofar is sounded. The people of Israel stand, terrified, at the foot of the mountain. And law is given. Ten specific sayings, in fact, which are displayed in synagogues in the likeness of the tablets on which they were written. And in contrast with Sinai’s drama and commandments, we also read Megillat Rut, the Book of Ruth. This is a soft k...

  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...

  Sacred Pain and Chicken Soup I’ve mentioned before on this bimah, I think, that since October 7, I’ve been meeting semi-regularly with a small group of Jewish and Muslim leadership. We’ve mostly been speaking about what’s happening within our communities and how our communities relate, or don’t relate, to one another. A few weeks ago, I joined some of those friends at a local mosque. It was our first time meeting outside of a living room, which always felt a little quiet and maybe even secretive - but there were no issues with inviting us into their sacred space. Some weeks before that, I invited a group of Muslim student imams and future leaders from Indonesia into New London Synagogue for a tour and some learning, too. I don’t want to shy away from it - there were some awkward questions. But there was also meaningful conversation and I think we all left understanding each other better.  The truth is, I don’t do enough interfaith work. There’s always too many other things t...

  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....

Dare to See God Here New London Synagogue exists because of a rather exciting theological scandal. It included important questions about the authorship of the Torah, how to be a religiously devoted Jew without being a fundamentalist, and the politics of institutional orthodoxy. Less screen-time is given to the fact that Rabbi Louis Jacobs of blessed memory had clashed with the ultra-orthodox on many occasions before, perhaps because the subjects of disagreement were not quite so juicy and the outcome was not quite so dramatic, but, as I’m sure some people in the room will remember, the Jacobs Affair did not come out of nowhere. One such example of this tension occurred in the 1950s, wherein some of the orthodox rabbis of Manchester were discussing ways to improve the decorum in the shuls for the upcoming High Holy Days. The suggestions were, I must say, marvelously inoffensive. And yet, somehow, offense there was. Suggestions such as “maybe there are a few of these pages upon pages of...

  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...

  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...