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Welcome to Kolot, the podcast of The Ark Synagogue, a bold, experiential and caring Progressive Jewish community in Northwood, London.
Through sermons, reflections and conversations from across our community, Kolot explores Jewish life, learning and values in the world we live in today. Rooted in tradition and open to new perspectives, these episodes bring together voices that inspire thought, connection and belonging.
Whether you are Jewish, exploring Judaism, or simply looking for meaningful reflection, you are warmly welcome.
To learn more about The Ark Synagogue, visit arksynagogue.org.
The gates are open. For the next twenty-five hours, we stand inside Yom Kippur. We confess. We remember. We ask forgiveness. We face what we have done and what has been done to us.
And tomorrow evening, as the light begins to fade, we will reach Neilah. The locking of the gates. Then, precisely as the gates are closing, we will pray:
P’tach lanu sha’ar.
Open the gate for us.
But this year, I cannot stand before an open gate without thinking about the gates we closed. Because a year ago, on Yom Kippur morning, a locked door saved lives.
At Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester, a terrorist drove a car at people outside the synagogue and attacked worshippers with a knife. Two members of the Jewish community died. Inside, people barricaded the synagogue doors. The attacker tried to get in and could not.
A locked door helped keep a congregation alive.
We need doors. Strong doors. Security guards. Cameras. Training. People watching the entrance while the rest of us pray. Across Jewish life, security has become part of the architecture of being Jewish. And those doors are necessary.
But what happens when the gates we need for our protection begin to close inside us?
There is something about fear that has been present in my mind since I moved to Britain. I come from Brazil. I am used to thinking about safety, to being aware of where I am and who is around me. In many ways, I actually feel safer living in London.
But there is one kind of vulnerability here that is new to me. I have never before been so conscious that being visibly Jewish might itself make me vulnerable.
Some time ago, I was on a train wearing the rings I often wear, one with a Star of David and another with Hebrew writing. A man sitting in front of me kept looking angrily at me. At some point, he took a keffiyeh from his bag and put it on.
I don’t know whether he had noticed my rings. I don’t know whether what he did had anything to do with me. But I was frightened. For a moment, I thought about getting off the train. Then I thought: I am not going to let him dictate where I can or can’t go.
Elizabeth Strout writes: “Fears are very often private things. Part of being human is realizing how private our fears are.”
My fear was real. His intention was unknowable. But fear had already begun to redraw the boundaries of my life. I don’t want a stranger, or perhaps only my fear of a stranger, to have that much authority over my life.
Jewish tradition knows that fear is not one thing. Hebrew itself gives us different words for it.
There is pachad: fear, dread, the terror we feel in the presence of danger. And there is yirah: also fear, but a word that can carry something more. Awe. Reverence. The awareness that something matters deeply enough to demand our attention.
The difference is not that one fear is real and the other is not. Both are real. But they can move us in different directions.
Pachad can say: Get off the train.
Yirah can say: Pay attention.
One can make our world smaller. The other can make us more awake to the world we are in.
The psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi thought deeply about what living beings do when they encounter danger. Sometimes we act upon the environment. We confront the danger, change the conditions around us, protect ourselves.
We build a stronger door.
But sometimes the adaptation happens within us. We withdraw. We contract. We reorganise ourselves around the threat. Sometimes danger requires another lock on the door. That is wisdom.
But sometimes, without noticing, we begin putting doors inside ourselves. We close one because we are frightened of going somewhere. Another because we are frightened of saying something. Another because we have learned that visibility carries a price.
Eventually the danger outside may not even need to lock us in. We have learned to do it ourselves.
Carl Jung once wrote to a man struggling with fear:
“Where the fear, there is your task!”
Not: run towards danger recklessly. Not: fear is imaginary. But pay attention.
What is your fear asking you to protect? What is it asking you to surrender? What part of your life is it beginning to govern?
On Rosh Hashanah, I spoke about the knife Abraham lifted over Isaac. About wounds that can remain long after the knife itself has been put down. About trauma that travels. About fears we inherit from people who had very good reasons to be afraid.
Tonight I want to ask what happens when Isaac gets up from the altar and has to live. He did not choose the knife or what was done to him. But eventually he had to decide how to live with it.
And that is where Yom Kippur begins.
There are things that have been done to us for which we are not responsible. We are not responsible for antisemitism, for the hatred directed towards us, for the violence that made those doors necessary.
But Yom Kippur asks an uncomfortable question:
What are we responsible for now?
Yom Kippur gathers a people who have very good historical reasons to remember what others have done to us. And we do remember. But for twenty-five hours, the question our liturgy keeps bringing back to us is: what have we done?
Ashamnu. Bagadnu. Gazalnu.
We have done wrong. We have betrayed. We have stolen.
On Yom Kippur, we remember and confess our own sins. Not because what was done to us does not matter. Not because the dangers outside these doors are not real. But because Judaism refuses to allow victimhood to relieve us of moral agency.
What happened to us matters. What we do next matters too.
Perhaps that is one of the deepest meanings of teshuvah. I cannot always choose what happens to me. I cannot control whether someone hates me, threatens me or wounds me. But I am still responsible for the person I become in response.
And this matters not only for us as individuals. It matters for us as a Jewish community.
Research into British Jewish identity has found that remembering the Holocaust and combating antisemitism are among the things British Jews regard as deeply important to their Jewish identity. Of course they are important.
But there is a danger if the people who hate us become too important to the story we tell about who we are. If antisemitism becomes one of the main reasons we know that we are Jewish, we have handed part of the authorship of Jewish identity to antisemites.
Our enemies do not get to tell us what Judaism means. They do not get to decide where we go, whether we wear the Star of David, or what kind of Jews we become.
Rabbi Donniel Hartman has suggested that Jewish life needs to recover not only the question:
Who are we?
But:
Who do we want to become?
Who are we? asks where we came from, what we inherited, what happened to us. But Who do we want to become? opens a gate.
Perhaps that is also what hope means. Hope is not believing that there is nothing to fear. Hope is refusing to allow what we fear to determine the limits of what is possible.
It makes Jewish identity a project. Something we are responsible for creating.
What kind of Judaism are we building behind our locked doors? A Judaism primarily concerned with surviving? Or one worth surviving for?
A Judaism that teaches our children first whom they should fear? Or one so beautiful, joyful and alive that they understand why this people is worth protecting in the first place?
We need strong doors. After Manchester, I won’t tell you otherwise. Keep the guards. Keep the training. Keep the cameras. Keep the locks. A year ago, a locked door kept a congregation alive.
But we cannot spend our lives behind it.
A door that protects us must also be a door through which we eventually walk. There is a world outside in which we still have to live.
There are neighbours to meet. Friendships to make. Justice to pursue. People who need us. A society of which we are not merely frightened observers, but participants.
Some gates protect life precisely because they close.
But no gate is meant to contain our whole world.
Tomorrow evening, we will pray:
P’tach lanu sha’ar.
Open the gate for us.
Tonight, those words mean: let us in before the gate closes. After the next twenty-five hours, we might hear them differently.
When Yom Kippur is over, when the final shofar has sounded, we will have to open the doors and walk back into the world.
Still Jewish. Still visible. Still careful. Still vulnerable.
But also hopeful.
And still choosing where we will go.
P’tach lanu sha’ar.
Open the gate for us.
And give us the courage to walk through it.
G’mar chatimah tovah.