Rabbi Natasha Mann

  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...

  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...

The same ethical rule turns up in almost all religious traditions throughout the world. In our tradition, it comes from the teaching of the great sage Hillel. When asked to summarise the Torah while standing on one leg, he said: דַּעֲלָךְ סְנֵי לְחַבְרָךְ לָא תַּעֲבֵיד - that which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. When asked to summarise his ethics, the Chinese philosopher Confucius said: Gay- so pat- yo , ma -seee yu yan . Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire. There we have it. Two great sages of the ancient world on one foot. The same phrase, more or less, in Classical Chinese and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. This is what is referred to as the Golden Rule.  Confucius was born in a world of unethical behaviour and political corruption, in the late Spring and Autumn Period of Chinese history - in the 6th Century BCE. He attempted to bring peace to this era of political upheaval by teaching people to act ethically. That context is clear from his teachin...

I think that the word of this year behind us is ‘resilience’. Resilience is not only the ability to work through a difficult time, it’s the ability to maintain something in ourselves while doing so. Of course this year has changed us. It’s changed the way that we pray, the way that we learn, the way that we interact with one another. But I have been astounded and moved time and time again by experiencing the great care that is at the heart of this community.  We are of course not the first generation to live and worship through a tumultuous situation. Our history is filled with these kinds of stories. To the ancestors of our deep past, before the building of the Temple in Jerusalem, worship occurred on the road. Our forefathers built their own altars as they travelled. The generation of the Wilderness built a mishkan , a tabernacle, a portable temple for their experiences of wandering. And after we had built and experienced the Temple as a centre of Jewish worship, we found our...