THREAD: As we approach #YomHaShoah, the day in the Jewish calendar when we remember the victims of the #Holocaust, we tragically continue to see levels of #antisemitism and antisemitic attacks rising in countries all over the world.
Over the past year or so, working with @White_Animation, I have produced a mini-series of three short animated videos which seek to explain several aspects of the worrying and dangerous return of #antisemitism. You can watch all three here: bit.ly/2VvWZfN.
@White_Animation The first video looks at why #antisemitism is a virus, how it has mutated over time and why its return today presents a danger not just for Jews, but for all who care about our common humanity. bit.ly/2VvWZfN
@White_Animation The second video explains what lies beneath the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (#BDS) campaign, why it is so dangerous, and why Jews, people of all faiths and of none and all those who value a free society must stand up against it. bit.ly/2VvWZfN
@White_Animation The third video explores the connection between #Jews as a people, #Judaism as a religion, & #Israel as a state. It shows how this connection is intrinsic to the link between antisemitism & anti-Zionism; something too often overlooked or misunderstood. bit.ly/2VvWZfN
@White_Animation You can watch and read the transcripts of these three videos here: bit.ly/2VvWZfN. Please help publicise them as widely as possible because these are messages the world needs to hear.
@White_Animation Whatever the threats we face, we are, and have always been, #proud to be #Jewish and to live as #Jews. Throughout history, many have tried to attack us or challenge our beliefs and way of life.
@White_Animation And yet, throughout the generations, no empire has ever defeated the #Jewish people, and no force, however dark, ever will. #AmYisraelChai. The Jewish people live.
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As we approach Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and the start of the Jewish year, here are ten short ideas from Rabbi Sacks zt"l which might help you focus your davening and ensure you have a meaningful and transformative experience.
(1) Life is short. However much life expectancy has risen, we will not, in one lifetime, be able to achieve everything we might wish to achieve. This life is all we have. So the question is: How shall we use it well?
(2) Life itself, every breath we take, is the gift of God. Life is not something we may take for granted. If we do, we will fail to celebrate it. Yes, we believe in life after death, but it is in life before death that we truly find human greatness.
THREAD -> #Succot is the festival of insecurity. It is the candid acknowledgment that there is no life without risk, yet we can face the future without fear when we know we are not alone.
God is with us, in the rain that brings blessings to the earth, in the love that brought the universe and us into being and in the resilience of spirit that allowed a small and vulnerable people to outlive the greatest empires the world has ever known.
Succot reminds us that God’s glory was present in the small, portable Tabernacle that Moses and the Israelites built in the desert even more emphatically than in Solomon’s Temple with all its grandeur. A temple can be destroyed. But a succah, broken, can be rebuilt tomorrow.
THREAD -> #Succot is the time we ask the most profound question of what makes a life worth living.
Having prayed on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to be written in the Book of Life, Kohelet (the book we read on Succot) forces us to remember how brief life actually is, and how vulnerable. “Teach us rightly to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12).
What matters is not how long we live, but how intensely we feel that life is a gift we repay by giving to others. Surely this is a message that resonates even more forcefully this year as we approach Succot in the midst of the global coronavirus pandemic.
THREAD -> More than any other festival, #Succot (which begins on Friday evening) represents the dual character of Jewish faith. We believe in the universality of God, together with the particularity of Jewish history and identity.
All nations need rain (which we pray for on Succot). We are all part of nature. We are all dependent on the complex ecology of the created world.
We are all threatened by climate change, global warming, the destruction of rain forests, the overexploitation of non-renewable energy sources and the mass extinction of species.
There is an old story that I find incredibly moving and powerful, particularly as we approach #YomKippur in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic (and which appears in my 'Ceremony & Celebration' educational resource for Yom Kippur -> rabbisacks.info/2E0XMhR).
One Yom Kippur, the Baal Shem Tov was praying together with his students, and he had a worrying sense that the prayers were not getting through, and the harsh heavenly decree against the Jewish people was not being overturned.
As Ne’ila approached, and with it the final opportunity for the Jewish people to avert this harsh judgement, he and his students increased their fervour and passion in their prayers, but to no avail.
“Wherever you find God's greatness,” said Rabbi Yohanan, “there you will find His humility.” And wherever you find true humility, there you will find greatness.
That is what #YomKippur is about: finding the courage to let go of the need for self-esteem that fuels our passion for self-justification, our blustering claim that we are in the right when in truth we know we are often in the wrong.
Most national literatures, ancient and modern, record a people's triumphs. Jewish literature records our failures, moral and spiritual. No people has been so laceratingly honest in charting its shortcomings. In Tanakh there is no one without sin.