Rabbi Sacks: The Jewish New Year is a time of high spiritual drama. We come together and stand before God, facing our faults and trying to put them right. It's the act we call Teshuva, repentance.
Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, are days when Jews everywhere come to the synagogue and open their hearts in prayer.
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Long ago, when the Temple stood, the drama took place in Jerusalem. There, the holiest person, the High Priest, entered the most sacred place, the Holy of Holies, and on Yom Kippur, the holiest of days, confessed the sins of all Israel.
For nearly 2,000 years we've had no Temple, and Jews have been scattered and dispersed throughout the world. But still, on these holy days, we join together in our many communities, trusting that our prayers will meet and merge and find their way collectively to heaven.
The Bible says that when God created the universe, He said, “It's not good for man to be alone.”
And so, as Jews, we believe that our holiest moments are times when we come together to form communities. From the very beginning of the covenant, when Moses assembled the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai, we faced God together. It's as if we long ago realised that the real moral challenge was not what we do in private, but how we live together.
Alone, we hear God as a still, small voice. But collectively, we sense God as a mighty presence, something real and public and shared. Coming together, we grant God a place in our relationships, the life we share with others. We make a home for the Divine Presence.
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[chatting to father and child] Today, today, almost three. Great, great.
Jews tend to be gregarious. We like each other's company. A great rabbi once wrote an essay called “The Lonely Man of Faith.” But we've never celebrated loneliness. We believe in finding God together. So, wherever one Jew came, another followed, and they built communities like this one in St. Anne's in Lancashire.
Today is a special moment in the life of the community, the induction of a new rabbi. I like to be able to join congregations at moments like this, because they're times of collective celebration.
The new rabbi, Rabbi Mendel Lew, knows that his task is going to be to relate individually to each member of his congregation, but at the same time to shape them into something bigger, to make each of them feel that they are a part of a community.
In its traditions and its way of life, its shared hopes and dreams. That sense of community has always been the strongest force in Jewish life.
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Often, Jews arrived in Britain as refugees. There'd been Jews in Britain in the Middle Ages, and they began to return in the time of Cromwell in the 1650s. But many of them came between 1880 and 1920, as antisemitism shook Eastern Europe, and there were pogroms throughout Russia. Some of them settled here in Manchester, where the Museum of Jewish Life tells the story of those early days.
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New immigrants were poor. They found a living in small workshops, making coats, trousers, boots, cigarettes, caps and furniture. Their conditions were terrible. Sweated labour, crowded housing, conditions that might have made for hopelessness. But their communal instincts survived. Together they created chevrot and kehillot, societies and congregations.
They came together spiritually and socially, knowing that the worst thing for a stranger, the worst thing for a human being, is to be alone.
They built synagogues and unions and schools and welfare institutions and houses of study. They gained strength from one another and gave strength to one another.
Today, Manchester is a thriving centre of Jewish life, and the great-grandchildren of those who came here a century ago now play a significant part in the life of the city, helping to give back to it what it once gave them - freedom and a chance to build a new life.
Jews have always believed that we serve God most effectively in the lives we lead together, starting with the family and then moving outward to the neighbourhood and to society as a whole. As a result, we have always tried to create institutions that reflect the idea of a caring community.
This is one, the Delamere Forest School, where children with special needs can learn together in an environment that respects their individuality and dignity.
Long ago, the prophets taught us that a society is judged by how it cares for its most vulnerable members - the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor. And so for many centuries, the Jewish community has created its own educational and welfare structures where their needs could be respected.
I like to think that if Amos or Hosea were here today, they'd visit schools like this and say, ‘Yes, you've understood what we were saying and made it real.’
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A French philosopher once said that ‘Hell is other people.’ Jews have always believed the opposite.
Hell is me, the first person singular, living for myself alone. The bad we do, we do for ourself. The good we do, we do for others.
God lives in other people. That's why when we return to God, on these holiest days of the Jewish year, we do so by coming together, collectively as communities. When we repent and confess our sins, we do so in the plural, as if to say, ‘God, please don't look at me. Look at us. Look at what we've tried to do together. Together, we've done something none of us could do alone. We formed communities where we rescued people from loneliness. We've built schools and charities and welfare institutions where we gave back to others something of what You gave us. We looked upon the face of a stranger and saw You, the image of God. As individuals, we know how small we are, but collectively, we're part of something great.
Therefore, God, I don't ask You to forgive me, but forgive us. And grant us the strength wherever we gather together in Your name to give to others and thereby bring You out from the secret places of the soul into the public places of our common life.’
