Rabbi Natasha Mann

  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 few weeks ago, I spent the day with my sister walking along the route of the London Wall. There’s not a lot left of the London Wall, as it turns out - but it’s a kind of scavenger hunt to find the points at which the wall is standing and exposed. From when this wall was built, around the year 200 of the common era, it defined the shape of London - or Londinium, as it was then known. Jasmine and I are both Londoners, but neither of us have ever lived within the tiny area that the wall once surrounded. I commented to her along the way that it felt like London just burst forth from its walls, that it got too big to be contained and spilled forth across the land. At the time I was being facetious, but as we continued our adventure around the perimeter of Londinium, I learned that I wasn’t entirely wrong: large areas of the wall were demolished specifically to allow for traffic and building. Maybe it wasn’t quite the dramatic bursting ...

We are about to delve into a prayer of confession. And our confessional prayer is molded in the plural, in the communal - we have sinned, we have abused. I’ve long thought of this in terms of what it means to be a people who bear one another’s transgressions. But this year, I’m thinking about it a little differently. Step one of the teshuvah process - of repentance and self-betterment - is to know what we’re doing teshuvah for. We take an accounting of the soul. But this leaves in charge the mind - the mind looks at the soul and takes an account, decides where we need to strengthen and where we need to soften. But the mind is not always honest with us. I know that my mind likes to convince me ‘oh, it wasn’t really that bad’ or ‘oh, that wasn’t really your fault’. How much do I trust my mind to take account of my soul? But I’m not despairing. Let me tell you why. I’ve been thinking a lot this year about the visions of the Prophet Zechariah. Zechariah is prophesying when the Israelites h...

Background of Zechariah Time:  Persian Period (Post-Exile): 520BCE Place: Yehud Kings:  None. Ruled by High Priest (Joshua) + Governor (Zerubavel) Political Backdrop: ·        Same timing/backdrop as Haggai ·        We’re back from exile! Step 1: Assyrians are the Big Bad: Northern Kingdom falls (722BCE) Step 2: Babylonians take over as the Big Bad: Southern Kingdom goes into exile (586BCE)             Exile period… 539BCE: Neo-Babylonian Empire falls to Cyrus the Great (Perisan Empire) Step 3: The Persian Empire sends us home! (538BCE) Primary Themes of Zechariah: ·        The necessity to rebuild the Temple – and to do better than the previous generations so that it won’t be destroyed again ·        Strong messianic themes ·     ...