Rabbi Natasha Mann

The King of the Forest  (And the Story of Everything) Rosh Hashanah 5787 I would like to tell you a story.      Once upon a time, the trees of the forest decided that they needed to appoint a king. First, the Tree Committee decided to approach the Olive Tree. “Rule over us,” said the trees. But the Olive Tree replied: “I am not finished with yielding my oil, through which even God is honoured. Why should I go and wave above the forest?” And so the trees said to the Fig Tree: “You come and rule over us!” But the Fig Tree replied, “Am I done with yielding sweet and delicious fruit? Why should I go and wave above the trees?”  And so next they tried the Vine - but the Vine was busy yielding grapes for wine; she too was unwilling to rule over the forest. And then the trees asked the Thornbush: “Will you come and rule over us?” And the Thornbush accepted: “If you want me to rule over you, then come and take shelter in my shade. But if not, then I will bring a great fi...

  The iron gates at the Crossbones Graveyard. What Makes Holy Ground  It is commonly understood amongst Jews that there are ritual items that we cannot simply throw away. A siddur, or a Torah scroll, or really anything that has the sacred name of God, must be dealt with in a special manner: we put it into a genizah for safe-keeping, and then we take those items and bury them. We do the same with certain ritual objects, even if they do not contain the name of God. It is logical, of course, that we are careful around objects that hold sanctity.  But what happens to something that's too big to put in a genizah , like a holy place itself? The Mishnah addresses this question directly, but I think the first thing that is useful to understand is the principle מַּעֲלִין בַּקּוֹדֶשׁ וְלֹא מוֹרִידִין - we go up in holiness, and we do not go down . We can make things more sacred, but something that is considered holy cannot then be used instead for mundane purposes. There is no ritu...

  Stained glass from the Or Torah Synagogue, Acre But Don’t Tell the Jews (A Sermon on Heretical Truths)           I’m going to share with you a strange piece of advice I was given once, by a very well-respected halakhic thinker on Kashrut. We were learning about materials of vessels - which materials receive the status of food, which don't, what happens with admixtures - and he had just said something that caught my classmates and I off-guard. We asked why everyone seemed to know a different, more strict version of that rule, and his response was this:           “This is the halakhah (the rule), but don’t tell the Jews.”  I think about that advice probably more than it warrants, certainly more than the actual halakhic question warrants. I understand what he was trying to say - that should we teach the more lenient-and-complex version, then people are more likely to end up doing it incorrectly. Sometimes, being stri...

  Helix by Godfrey Kurari The Great Helix of History           If I asked you to map out three Yom Kippur evenings – the earliest you can remember, last year, and next year – you would probably draw me a straight line. Back there lies the deep past, close to us lies the recent past, here we are right now – and over there somewhere is the uncertain future. That is the model of time that is the most apparent to us. Time, after all, is linear. There is a past, which is over, and a future, which has yet to begin, and we are perched in the ever-moving present, filtering the future into the past to be gone forever. However, this is not the model of time that was the most apparent to people in the ancient world. Many ancient cultures thought of the existence of time as a wheel. Everything that had happened would happen again, over and over, for all of eternity. This is a model that’s easy to see in nature: day becomes night becomes day, the tree gives a see...

  The God of Broken Spaces Rosh Hashanah 5786           I am searching, this year, for a God of the Gaps. Not those kinds of gaps. “God of the Gaps” is a phrase that usually refers to explaining gaps in scientific knowledge with miracles. That is not the gap I am looking to fill. I am seeking for something to hold together the fractures and great divides that exist between us in society, as they continue to broaden year by year, a continental shift in our understanding of one another.  It seems that the divides between us only keep growing, separating us from those whom we might otherwise love or at least respect. Our cultural environment encourages us to ignore the places of strength in our agreements. Instead, we are urged to peer ever more deeply for opportunities for disagreement, to look for reasons to push one another away, for ways to widen that gap. Too often, we create the cavern between us based on assumptions, on misuse and misunder...

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...