“This day the Eternal One your God commands you to observe all these statutes and laws” (Deut. 26:16).

This day is an auspicious one for me, my last public service for our sacred community before a few months of recuperation and, I hope, inspiration. It is a regular service in its worship of God and its celebration of life, welcoming Andre into our community and celebrating the 65th wedding anniversary of founder congregants, Renee and Dave Simmons. Yet, I want to suggest, through three readings from a few of my favourite sources of inspiration, that there is a direct relationship between the regular and the special.

Let us begin with the modern Israeli poet, Lea Goldberg (1911–1970), who died a few months before, in the same year I was born. This is perhaps one of the biographical facts that draws me to her, being born in Königsberg, the surname of our President Mimi being another. Her relationship with God is a secular one and she asks relevant questions, particularly in the following poem.

God once commanded us to stand strong and steadfast
under the terrible Tree of Life.

And we stood, stricken with expectations, in a black wind of years –
perhaps the fruit would drop at our feet?

And nothing happened.

And on the day of secret reckoning between God and us
we saw a bent landscape and brown leaves falling
and the wind still blowing in our faces.

Then, a small voice said: this is your Day of Liberation.
That’s all. And it is good.

Now I walk alone toward the blade of cutting cold
just a few paces
to that fading light
in the dark angle of the street.

Lea Goldberg had personally experienced much and, of course, lived in spectre years through and after the Holocaust and the foundational years of the State of Israel. Her poem, ‘God once commanded us’, understands God’s command to live as a duty. Our life is one of existential responsibility. Lea Goldberg, a secular person, remote or alienated from any higher power, explores an inescapable, sacred sense of responsibility to honour the fact of our being.

Lea Goldberg also expresses in other poems the sense that if living life is not merely to survive it, then the duty is also to find meaning, or, as Albert Einstein suggests, “to divine a purpose.” A secularist and a scientist both suggesting that the question cannot avoid an exploration of that which is beyond ourselves.

As I begin the sabbatical time that this congregation has gifted me, it is an opportunity to consider seriously such questions. Poetry will most certainly be a tool I turn to, and also a theology that provides a framework to consider my life lived in Judaism and my relationship with God. It is Compelling Commitments: A New Approach to Living as a Liberal Jew, by my teacher and colleague, Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah.

Rabbi Tikvah Sarah extends the previously adopted notion in Liberal Judaism of ‘informed choice’, and enshrines it within three Compelling Commitments that, if I may take the liberty to paraphrase, are:

A commitment to lifelong learning of Judaism and the wider world, to anchor our choices on considered and solid foundations; to embrace both the particular and universal, a sense of identity with the Jewish People and a concern for the welfare of the earth and its people; and finally a commitment to the Eternal, One God, through which our lives, our struggles, our actions and our relationships are sanctified.

Whilst this might not sound to seasoned Liberal Jews as particularly radical, what was radical is the feminist articulation of being drawn towards mitzvot, sacred actions and relationships, not pushed by a Commander. The sense of duty that Lea Goldberg expresses, through the lens of Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah’s expression of Compelling Commitments, provides the contemporary framework for expressing purpose in the everyday and the unique, the secular and religious, the mundane and the holy.

I love the sense of structure, the palette that Compelling Commitments provides and its embellishment through the colour of poetry, exploring the breadth of experience and the human mind, heart and soul.

And I find meaning in that which is imbued with awe. A sense of not knowing that demands one either explore it or just experience it. My favourite Hasidic Rebbe is the Gerer Rebbe, Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter. He had yichus, go research, and his own style. His homiletic writing, especially recorded in the book that he would be best known by, the Sefat Emet – Language of Truth – often grates when its particularism, informed by the brutality of usually Church-fuelled pogroms and the general 18th–19th-century milieu of Eastern Europe, dominates. Its beauty is in the moments of mysticism and expression of awe that are on a few occasions applied universally and more often for the Jewish People.

Relevant to this week’s sidrah, Torah reading, Ki Tavo, which, as we heard, describes rituals relating to the ancient Israelites’ entry into the Land and the tithing of the produce of the Land that would ensue, a question arises from the use of the phrase in verses 3 and 16, ‘this day’. In the latter:

“This day the Eternal One your God commands you to observe all these statutes and laws” (Deut. 26:16).

The question: When we read in Torah, ‘this day’, does it mean ‘that day’ as we read it today, in other words only relevant for the day being referred to; or ‘this day’, this and every relevant day after the event? The Sefat Emet notes that the commandments of our sidrah are accompanied by liturgy, prayers or statements.

“My grandfather of blessed memory said that prayer, too, was a way of giving the first of each day to God, another sort of first fruits.”

He continues:

“But the meaning of ‘this day’ in the verse still needs to be clarified. The Midrash and Rashi both say: ‘Each day these should be like new in your eyes.’ [Why ‘like new’?] Is someone out there trying to fool the person, giving them something that isn’t really new, but is ‘like new’? God forbid! It is really within human power to renew each thing. The renewal is there within everything, since God ‘renews each day, constantly, the work of Creation.’ ‘Constantly’ means in each moment.”

The Sefat Emet dances playfully between the traditional and modern worlds, the demand that all is created by God and that we indeed have power over our lives.

He continues:

“Nothing exists without the divine life-force, and the Point in each thing that comes from God never grows old, since God’s words are constantly alive and flowing. However, ‘darkness covers the earth’ (Is. 60:2). The outward ‘shell’ hides that flowing point. Thus Scripture says: ‘Nothing is new under the sun’ (Eccles. 1:9). That is the natural world that hides the renewal. But it is within the power of a human being to light up that point within the darkness; ‘This day the Eternal your God commands you....’ God commands you to find [or ‘to make’!] ‘this day,’ the revelation of light, the shining speculum, within the very deed that hides the point.”

There is such power in the glory of sanctifying ‘this day’ and indeed our actions as we illuminate the mundane with a spotlight on the divine.

What an incredible notion to elevate the regular and, when it comes to the exceptional, to articulate our sense of awe and wonder. As on ‘this day’ we celebrate what is marvellous and wondrous about our regular practice and unique personal moments, may we have been inspired and satisfied, each one of us in our own ways and collectively as a sacred community. May the days of our life be blessed by human action and a sense of the Divine Presence in our lives.

Oh, and may I conclude with my favourite blessing, a Ladino short version of the grace after meals:

Ya comimos y bevimos, y al Dio santo Barukh Hu u-Barukh Shemo bendishimos; que mos dió y mos dara pan para comer y panyos para vestir, y anyos para bivir. Siempre mejor, nunca peor, nunca mos manke la meza del Criador.