Sermon: Re’eh – Climbing the Right Mountains
Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 8 September 2016
The summer is nearly over in England. Schools are on their way back. Young people in our community who have taken advantage of the wonderful opportunities offered by RSY-Netzer and the Alyth Youth and Education Department have now finished the enriching experiences of the camps they joined.
It’s a very organised system nowadays with a summer day camp for young children then a structure of Shemesh camps for each year group called Briyah, Shachar, Emunah and Atid culminating in the three week Israel Tour at age 16 and then the experience of learning to be a leader, a Madrich at one of the camps.
The Jewish summer camp experience has been alive for a long time, building young people and giving us all a future and a hope. This year we celebrate the 70th anniversary of the foundation the YASGB, the precursor of RSY-Netzer. Black and white photos of the summer camps of the past are circulating around Facebook with people encouraged to try to remember who was who. Friendships from these camps have lasted for decade after decade.
I grew up in the Liberal Jewish Youth Movement, then called ULPSYNC, now LJY-Netzer. We also had our structure of summer camps, though because Liberal Judaism was smaller it was not split down into year groups. Our main camp was called Kadimah and it has been running every year for over forty five years now creating friendship and Jewish depth for two generations. When I got to 16 Israel Tour had not yet been invented. So instead it was on to Senior Kadimah, which took place in Castlton in Derbyshire.
This camp was led by Rabbi Alan Mann and his then wife Joy and Rabbi Clifford Cohen. Rather than a genteel boarding school in the south of England with manicured playing fields occupied by Junior Kadimah, Senior Kadimah took place in a field centre in Castleton Derbyshire.
The holiday began at Kings Cross station taking the train up to Sheffield then a single carriage train to the quaint Hope station – as in abandon hope all who enter here. Off the train we went to the field centre for two weeks of canoeing, rock climbing, hiking, caving, Shabbat, havdalah, late night chats and, I probably should admit it at this Elul season of honesty – trying vainly to get served in the local pubs when we were let loose in Castleton.
The highlight of Senior Kadimah was a full day hike up the highest mountain nearby – this was the fearsome – to us at least – Kinder Scout – 631 metres or 2000 feet in old money of mountainous challenge in the high peak district. Why should it be fearsome? Well you must remember that this was a group of mostly North West London Jewish teenagers – even in the late 1970’s we were barely used to walking to school let alone climbing great mountains with the hardy Rabbis Mann and Cohen.
Anyway my strongest memory of Senior Kadimah is sheltering under a rock near the summit of Kinder Scout fining temporary relief from the driving August rain whilst sharing soggy sandwiches with Ann Brichto – Rabbi Sidney’s daughter – essentially a happy memory.
Why the mountain? What we didn’t realise at the time was how significant it was that we young Jews should find ourselves challenged by one. The mountain is very important in Jewish iconography.
It is to the top of a mountain the Abraham will lead his son Isaac when we hear the Rosh Hashanah Torah portion of the binding of Isaac one month from now. It is on a mountain, there called Horeb but later called Sinai, that Moses will pause to hear the voice of God from a burning bush and then later lead the Israelites to receive the Ten Commandments and Torah. Moses will draw his last breath on the summit of Mount Nebo in the closing words of the Torah. Biblical historians suggest that one of the names for God in the Torah, El Shaddai, which we tend to translate “The Almighty” may, given a similar word in Akkadaian, mean God of the Mountain. Something in early Judaism clearly held the mountain as highly significant.
Our portion today is the one which tries to keep the mountain idea within limits. It begins with a mountain ceremony, not developed in full but presumably a relic of something that was once much more important to the Israelite religion. The ceremony takes place at Mount Gerezim and Ebal – two mountains of nearly 3000 foot height, nearly 900 meters. The valley between them is now the site of the West Bank city of Nablus, and the site of the Biblical city of Shechem.
Because of this passage, where the blessing is pronounced on Mount Gerezim, the Israelite Samaritans made it the site of their Temple. It is still the primary place of worship for the 1000 or so Samaritans who continue their religious tradition. They continue to sacrifice there. Every Pesach to this day, the Samaritan community gathers on Mount Gerezim to sacrifice and eat a lamb per family, as close as they can to the ceremony as described in the Torah. Their Pesach is celebrated not at home with a hagaddah, that being the Jewish way, but in what the Samaritans would call the Israelite way, on what to them is the right mountain, according to Torah.
Contempt for different ways of mountain based worship seems to be at the root of our portion. As Abraham Joshua Heschel once said: “We are heirs to a long history of mutual contempt among religions and religious denominations, of religious coercion, strife and persecutions.” This portion is the Jewish version of this.
What we see here is a time when Judaism had the power to behave as badly as the worst of Christianity and the worst of Islam, showing that our religion is not immune to the danger of seeing our survival as requiring the destruction of others. (Abraham Joshua Heschel and Susannah Heschel, “No Religion Is an Island,” Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996), p. 238).
Our Rabbis worked out that Judaism would need to live alongside other faiths and learned to cope with this. In the Mishnah and Talmud Avodah Zarah (Chapter 1), the tractate which works out how this co-existence can take place, they rule for example that a Jew who is a builder can build a house for an idol worshipper which includes an area where a statue of an idol is to be placed as long as they themselves do not place the idol there. A Jew can set up in a market which exists because of the celebration of a festival day for another religion, but must refrain from selling the objects that would be needed for that worship – you can sell popcorn by not another religion’s holy water!
Later in Avodah Zarah (3:5 and 45a) the Rabbis did consider exactly our passage on the destruction of the worship sites of other religions. In typical Rabbinic fashion they hedged about the legislation, saying that it only applied to the Land of Israel at a particular time and did not apply to the Jewish life of their day They also ruled that even if you wished to you cannot destroy the worship objects of other religions, you might smash up the altar on top of the mountain but you cannot destroy the mountain itself.
We have to recognize that our Jewish religion, like all religions has within it texts which are totally intolerant of others. It is our God given faculty expressed in Rabbinic texts down the ages, to love our neighbour as we love ourselves and to live alongside other religious traditions for the sake of the ways of peace, mipnei darchei shalom which means that we make the choice to interpret these texts out of use. We read them though each year to remind ourselves that Judaism cannot be seen a religion of entirely clean hands while we criticise Crusader Christianity and Islamist Islam. All religions have a violent and intolerant tendency to overcome.
Returning to the mountain, our text does give us a mountain which matters. It is not mentioned by name in the text, but there will be a place asher yivchar Adonai – a place that God will choose. Because these are the same words used in the passage where God directs Abraham to a particular mountain with his son Isaac back in the Book of Genesis, this place becomes identified in Jewish tradition as Mount Moriah, or Mount Zion, the site in Jerusalem where the Jewish Temple was built. It became of course the worship centre of Judaism for a thousand years.
Still today two thousand years after its destruction Mount Zion stands at the top of the mountains around Jerusalem as a central place for Jews to gather and pray. Its very existence below a mosque and surrounded by churches tells you that Judaism has learned to live with other faiths.
This site, the site of the Cotel is at its best when Jews of all kinds, men and women, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, Progressive and Orthodox can look to it as a place to gather, to pray and to enjoy Jewish peoplehood.
At its worst it becomes a site of division where one Jewish group tries to stop the worship of another Jewish group, as has so sadly happened when women are prevented from worshipping in an equal way to men. When Jews stop each other worshipping they display the worst tendency in Judaism. Tomorrow on Rosh Chodesh Ellul, the women of the Wall will come to this mountain and will worship as it is their right to do. Let us support them in making this mountain the place where spirituality and a way to speak with God is accessible to all. We can worship God on the mountain – we don’t worship the site itself.