Selichot…Is change possible? Rabbi Shulamit Ambalu 5779

Introductory note This sermon is written, as always for me, as accessibly as possible, so please do forgive the informality of the language. I am exploring here a question of real importance and significance…can we change and do we really have free will? I am also proposing a new theological approach, inspired by the thinking of the medieval philosopher Hasidai Crescas, that God’s intervention in our lives can be thought of as an attempt to increase our human freedom.

I am a creature of habit. Perhaps we all are? Perhaps the same sorts of thoughts go through our heads each season as the light starts to fade the days grow shorter, the leaves fall from the trees. This season approaches. And for reasons that even I find a bit of a mystery even for myself, I find myself reaching every year for the same book. Except this year I couldn’t! A leak in our rabbi’s office meant that one of the precious books of mine that we destroyed was this volume.1 (Show the book) this is a book by Maimonides, Moshe ben Maimon, Rambam who lived in 12th century Spain, Egypt and in many places in the world.

In this volume or rather in a section of this, he talks about how we should learn to face up to who we are, and how we should repent, in this season and throughout the year. It’s hard for me to explain to you how…it seems like very kind of dry way of writing, how sorting and categorising different kinds of human behaviours and most especially sin can be quite so powerfully touching. I don’t know why. But what Maimonides or Rambam says, is that in this time when there is no temple in Jerusalem and no way of offering sacrifice, and in fact that there is nothing there, ain sham kapparah,2 there is a complete absence…. there is only teshuvah, repentance. This is no longer a time for repairing the world with things, with priests, and with animals and sacrifice. Now there are only words.

But they are life changing words. The words that he describes, and that you sing and recite in this service and that we will repeat over Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. And although he seems like some kind of and powerful and traditional model of historic

1 Rambam, Yad, Volume 2 Hilchot Teshuvah, Mosad ha Rav kook 2 A summary of his explanation in Yad Hilchot Teshuvah 1:1 [Type here] Selichot…Is change Possible? Rabbi Shulamit Ambalu 5779 thinking, actually in his time his writing was revolutionary. Because he said that the key act was confession, saying aloud things that we’ve done and in a public space. Scary!

I believe that every religious movement has given some sort of transforming gift to humanity, a way of living and understanding the world. I also think that one of the most significand world changing Jewish gifts, a radical inventing of thought, is the belief that God creates us to have freedom. Freedom of act, and freedom of will. The Torah is the first place to think of it. God creates us with inherent freedom, and this freedom means that if we wish it, the potential to incline towards actions which are good and productive or actions which are harmful and destructive. I don’t know what you think of this. It’s a real question.

But Rambam or Maimonides is crystal clear. 3 We could not be human without freedom, and he is extremely rude about people who think that God fixes or preordains who you are before your birth, because this would mean that you cannot be free, and you cannot be responsible for who you are. And if you are just a sort of pre-packaged set of actions driven by your inherent nature, then what kind of sense would the Torah make? If God, or genetics, decides everything we do, then we must be living under some sort of lifelong compulsion. And if you are not free to follow Torah, if you do not exercise choice, then you must be doing it through force, and that would make the Torah an instrument of our oppression.

And if we were not free, what sense would it make for us to be told not to do evil, because if we have no choice then wouldn’t be cruel to tell us not to do the wrong thing? No. Here is the interesting thing, we must be free, because if we weren’t playing there would be no meaning for the Torah in our lives!

But is this true, and is it true always? I’m going to talk about people who have had a real impact in my life, real people, but of course, I am going to change any identifying information, such as names, gender, and the exact details of these people’s lives.

Imagine this. When Hannah died, her family found packets and packets of prescription drugs, including tranquillizers and mood changing medicine in her home. The cupboards were full of them. And they were stuffed under the mattress and even in the fridge. For her whole life, Hannah had had difficult relationships with everyone in her family. She had fallen out with nearly everybody. And because she pushed everyone away, nobody understood how much she was suffering. When her family

3 See H. Teshuvah 5 [Type here] Selichot…Is change Possible? Rabbi Shulamit Ambalu 5779 went through her things, they also found a very sad little collection of letters in a small wooden box. Nobody knew about the letters that she had written home to her own parents and her sister, from the boarding school that they sent her to from the age of five until she left school at 16. The letters paint a picture of a lonely little girl who wonders where her parents are and when she’s going to see them again. Why did her parents send away the little girl from their own mental health problems? It was only after she died that her brokenhearted family could see that Hannah never had the chance to develop real proper meaningful relationships with other people, and had very little real experience of family life. Is it right to say that Hannah had true freedom? That the way she left her life really came from her own free will?

What about Sonja, whose mother was hidden as a child during the war in Germany? Whose mother never really recovered? What about Sonja, like so many of the second generation, who wonders what other sort of life she might have had?

And let’s talk about Sammy? Sammy has just finished his third year his final year at Oxford. We were all amazed to know that he was going to be studying history, because he never seemed to be very academic. But his mum and dad felt so strongly that they wanted him to take that path that they chose for him to school that specializes in getting its sixth formers into Oxford and Cambridge. I don’t know what Sammy really wanted. Is Sammy free?

And what would my friend Rambam, Maimonides, say? Because I think although Sammy is pretty happy with how things have turned out, I believe that Hannah didn’t feel that she was living a life shaped by her own freedom.

Actually, Hannah was so stuck in her pattern of addiction that she never agreed to go for treatment. It is fascinating to think that programmes that enable people to deal with addiction, which are based on the 12 steps, such as an Alcoholics Anonymous, begin this statement that “we admit we were powerless over particular drug or alcohol, that our lives have become unmanageable.“ In other words, recovery begins with knowing that you are not in control. The first four steps explore this idea of powerlessness. The next seven steps of the Alcoholics Anonymous program talk about a relationship with God or higher power and what they call a fearless moral inventory. This is where they really do cross paths with Rambam, because both say that it is essential to confess the exact nature of our actions and to make a list of all the people we have harmed and to make amends to them all. Quite a lot of those ideas might have been taken from those book.

[Type here] Selichot…Is change Possible? Rabbi Shulamit Ambalu 5779

It is almost as if the first step to claiming back the life of freedom begins with recognising our own powerlessness.

And this brings me to my other learning moment, one that finally came about from me this year because of my own precious destroyed lovable book. My soggy moldy book, my sense of loss related to this, gave me the push to finally learn about Hasidei Crescas. Another great Muslim inspired philosopher from the Spanish-speaking world. Who lives in Catalan region in the 14th and early 15th centuries.

I downloaded his book!4 And I am so glad that I did. Because in his words we hear this eternal difficult human struggle. Crescas says5 that there are things inside and outside of that compel us and drive us. That are not in our control. But there is also the reality of the conscious willing human mind. Take the example of Celia. Actually, Crescas doesn’t give her a name, but I will. Crescas tells us of someone, let’s call her Celia, who is told that she was destined to be rich. So she spends her life pursuing wealth and in buying more things than she could ever need. It works. Celia is very very rich. But why, asks Crescas does she do it? What drives her? Is it because she wants to acquire loads and loads of things? Or is it because it’s the status and the experience of wealth? And how free is she? Living some 400 years before the birth of psychotherapy no psychoanalysis, my new friend, Hasidei Crescas, suggests to me the possibility of an unconscious mind. But more than that he was living in an area when people believed in astrology. People who thought that human actions are fixed in the stars.

At the same time he was dealing with a very deep theological problem, about the extent to which God can affect us, can see who will be, and can determine what you and I will choose. He also struggles with the idea that there might be such a thing an essential nature and inborn nature that predisposes us to behave in certain ways. This man is thinking in 1300s! But you and I are thinking the same way today, even more so, as we live in a world surrounded by thoughts about our genetic and environmental influences. How free are we? In this new way of thinking about ourselves in the world, we now ask yourself how free are we?

I must be honest with you and tell you it’s quite difficult ploughing through these thinkers and I can’t guarantee that I have even understood him correctly. But it seems to me that Crescas is saying that Jewish world view, the rightness of punishment for

4 The most comprehensive website for serious study of original editions is hebrewbook.org 5 Or Ha Shem Ma’amar 2, Section 5, ch.5 [Type here] Selichot…Is change Possible? Rabbi Shulamit Ambalu 5779 actions that come from our own free will. The same holds for rewards for positive actions, these should come when they are only actions from our own free will.

That means that the sorts of things that we come from a sense of inner compulsion, from force, like Hannah, who struggles with an addiction to prescription drugs that feels like an inescapable part of who she is; we cannot think of them in the very same way.

Torah cannot be forced upon you. It must be something that you accept with freedom and out of will, alone, out of ratson. This is how Crescas thinks of the sufferings that he believes that God sends to us. He reminds us that a parent loving punishes their child not out of vengeance or wish to harm or to humiliate them, but the desire to see them develop. And in one of the most breathtaking and moving philosophical moves, he says that God, like a parent wishes to bring punishment on those who sin,6 but it is not an act of vengeance. This is an action to teach every human being to take conscious control. In other words the goal of God, is to foster own our own potential for genuine freedom.

Because it is this freedom that creates the power for living truthfully in deep and proper nourishing relationship other human beings, and in a full awareness that we are able to strive to overcome our own imperfections. Because if we’re not conscious of them, how will we ever overcome them?

This means that for poor Hannah, without a programme like some sort of 12 step or other addiction program that enabled her to see that she wasn’t in control of her life, she never would be able to take begin to take control over her own actions. And so her relationships never recovered. Sammy has just finished his degree and I’m not sure what he’s going to do next. But I do hope that he recognizes that his success is very largely down to his enormous luck and his enormous privilege in being able to have such a wonderful and life affirming education. I hope that this will be the foundation of his living ethical life.

And for the rest of us, who are somewhere in between, I hope that we will learn that when we come here tonight and we do what Rambam says is so essential now that there is no Temple, now that there are no sacrifice. We have only this service, and only our actions for atonement, for repentance, for teshuvah. Because repentance, selichot

6 Proverbs 3:12, the source texts for the concept of chastisement from God [Type here] Selichot…Is change Possible? Rabbi Shulamit Ambalu 5779 is not just wasted air and empty words, but the creation of real potential, real freedom. A real freedom for a genuine, life changing, and world changing beginning.

[Type here] Selichot…Is change Possible? Rabbi Shulamit Ambalu 5779