Rabbi Natasha Mann

  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...

My favourite bakery in Los Angeles was a French bakery across the road from my apartment. It had a certain quirk that always made me smile. Somewhere on the display shelves of challah on a Friday, there could always be spotted a Chumash . This was, of course, a nod to a classic rabbinic text, from Pirkei Avot, which says the following: Ein Lechem, Ein Torah; Ein Torah, Ein Lechem . If there’s no bread, there’s no Torah; if there’s no Torah, there’s no bread.  I’ve been thinking about that bakery this week as we come to a rather famous quote in the Book of Deuteronomy. We read just a few moments ago as Moses reminded us of our travels in the Wilderness. While we wandered, we were fed with manna from heaven, which was to be collected every day. And Moses tells us in this week’s Torah portion that the purpose of the manna was to teach us: ‘כִּ֠י לֹ֣א עַל־הַלֶּ֤חֶם לְבַדּוֹ֙ יִחְיֶ֣ה הָֽאָדָ֔ם’ - that man does not live on bread alone. Bread is not enough.  I suspect that Mos...