I’ve often been troubled by the Talmudic teaching from tractate Shabbat:

The person who can stop the members of their household from sinning, but does not do so, is held accountable for the sins of their household. The person who can stop the people of their city from sinning, but does not do so, is held responsible for the sins of their city’ (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 54b)

It reminds me of the Reverend Martin Luther King’s letter from Birmingham City Jail. Accused of involving himself in local matters which were none of his business, he wrote: ‘I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.’

Jewish ethics are rooted in a sense of ultimate accountability. ‘But you shall fear your God’ says the Torah in several key locations in the book of Leviticus. ‘Why does it say those words in precisely those places?’ asks Rashi, before answering that the context refers to wrongdoings which might never be found out by human claimants. Therefore, the Torah reminds us, know that there is One who knows. But here I feel in more familiar, if still uncomfortable, territory: I know what it is like to pace up and down, or lie awake at night, with my conscience burning, my memory yielding uncomfortable after-thoughts, thinking, ‘Did I do that? Did I really, actually say that?’

That, however, concerns only what I myself did.  ‘The person who could stop the people of their city from sinning…’- that concerns what I might have done, everything which I too allowed to happen, because I didn’t see, or didn’t hear, or simply don’t care. Accountability is not just about what we do; it is often also about what we fail to do.

I haven’t followed the many stories about Jimmy Savile in great detail. But beyond what key figures in the media did or didn’t know about his conduct, it seems that there must have been a lot of people in different places who realised something wasn’t right, and who turned a blind eye or gave a nod, ‘That’s just the way some men are; it’s what can happen if you’re a young girl’. This I find shocking and disgusting. It’s part of the same evil as trafficking. I hope it truly is the case that attitudes have changed.

But it’s easy to write about an issue in which I’m not involved. How many things nearer home have I seen with my own eyes which I know to be wrong, with which I yet find within myself the capacity to live on unperturbed? How many more matters am I associated with indirectly, – inequities, cruelties, – even if they happen half way across the world, from which I yet draw benefits and don’t care to know the history of how I came to do so?

It seems clear that if some human being was made to do a slave’s work in any part of the production or transport of the food on my table, then that person’s suffering is on my table too. If an animal spent its life in suffering to give the milk on my cereal, then that creature’s pain is also in my plate. And the tears of both, person and animal, are in God’s heart.

I often worry about what to do. The people I admire don’t try to do everything. They resolve to not do nothing and root their motivation not only in justice but also in love.

It’s the sixth day of Chanukkah and the light burns ever stronger. I’m a fan of the School of Hillel, whose view we follow, that each day we should light one more candle, because, as the Talmud expresses it, ‘In matters of holiness we go up’ not down.

I think I’ve become more of a ‘yes’ and less of a ‘no’ person as I’ve got older. I partly attribute this to the good influence of Nicky. I also ascribe it to the privilege of working as a rabbi, where I witness so many people striving to use their days with creativity, courage, generosity and kindness, that it feels like a dishonour to life itself not to try to do likewise. Conversely, I see at close hand what we all know, that fate can be harsh and cruel. All the more should we appreciate the opportunities we have to respect, serve and cherish life.

Furthermore, the light does grow stronger. Or perhaps the hidden light, as the mystics call it, is always the same, always equally present, only there are times when we notice it more.

For a hidden light does glows within all life; it is life’s essence. It is there in the winter trees, their branches shining, the bark almost like white silk in the frost, the last amber leaves frozen and transfixed. It greets the dawn in the song of the birds, and sings again in their swooping flight as they seek shelter before the twilight. It is present in all consciousness. It is known in joy, in beauty, also sometimes in sadness, and in the silence of the contemplating heart. It is a kind of love, experienced not as the romantic desire to embrace the entire world but rather as a quiet sense of kinship with life, of solidarity, of feeling for life’s suffering and respect and veneration for its integrity, together with a sense of hurt and shame in the hurt and shame to which any part of life may have become exposed.

We realise in our best moments that such awareness can and should be the most significant motivating force in the way we live our days and years. It is the impact of God’s unceasing ‘I am’ in this world,  from which flow all the commandments regarding how we should behave towards each other, towards all feeling beings and all things.

Of course, at times, even for long periods, we scarcely perceive that light or inner life or voice at all. Yet, as Yehudah Halevi wrote, 

Who can say they have not seen you?
Behold the heavens and their hosts declare the awe of you
And their voice isn’t heard at all.

Sometimes we don’t hear or see. Perhaps that’s the inevitable result of all the distractions and preoccupations to which we are constantly exposed. Sometimes we perceive only our own wants and needs and those of the people immediately connected to us. But then we catch once more a glimpse of the hidden light and, becoming aware of it once again, know what it is that we have to do with our lives.

Gay people have long been subject to misjudgment, humiliation and exclusion, especially in religious life. A key Conservative responsum advocates full inclusion of gay people in all areas of Jewish life and leadership.

We believe in marriage as an ideally lifelong, loving, unique and faithful commitment made before God. We supported civil partnerships between gay people. We are in discussion on how such bonds of loving commitment can best be expressed in traditional religious ceremonies.

Saturday night brings the first candle of Chanukkah, a festival I have always loved. I remember sitting in my grandparents’ living room, watching the reflection of the small flames on their olive-wood Chanukkiah in the dark panes of the window onto the garden, where earlier in the year my brother and I had scrambled through the thickets to pick the blackberries. ‘How still they burn’, my grandmother would say. In our house now, where the windows of the dining room and those of the living room are opposite each other, I can even watch the reflections of the reflections of the candles, sometimes two or three levels deep, burning as if they were only the most recent in the lines of generations of Jews, bearing that same flame through the mysterious darkness of the world.

For, teaches the Sefat Emet, the Hasidic sage Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib Alter of Ger, the soul of every human being is God’s light, created to shine in this world like the stars by night. And if, in times of difficulty, we wonder, like those Maccabees searching the ruins of the Templefor a flask of unsullied oil, ‘Have I anything left inside to illumine? Is there any music, or poetry, or dance in me still left?’ – Then, he answers, we should remember that there’s never not enough spirit within the human heart to burn for at least one day. When that flame begins to give light, others gather round and their soul too is illumined and, like some secret samizdat, even in the most oppressive circumstances, the song continues to travel from mouth to mouth and generation to generation and the spirit is never extinguished.

Saturday night brings the first candle of Chanukkah, a festival I have always loved. I remember sitting in my grandparents’ living room, watching the reflection of the small flames on their olive-wood Chanukkiah in the dark panes of the window onto the garden, where earlier in the year my brother and I had scrambled through the thickets to pick the blackberries. ‘How still they burn’, my grandmother would say. In our house now, where the windows of the dining room and those of the living room are opposite each other, I can even watch the reflections of the reflections of the candles, sometimes two or three levels deep, burning as if they were only the most recent in the lines of generations of Jews, bearing that same flame through the mysterious darkness of the world.

For, teaches the Sefat Emet, the Hasidic sage Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib Alter of Ger, the soul of every human being is God’s light, created to shine in this world like the stars by night. And if, in times of difficulty, we wonder, like those Maccabees searching the ruins of the Templefor a flask of unsullied oil, ‘Have I anything left inside to illumine? Is there any music, or poetry, or dance in me still left?’ – Then, he answers, we should remember that there’s never not enough spirit within the human heart to burn for at least one day. When that flame begins to give light, others gather round and their soul too is illumined and, like some secret samizdat, even in the most oppressive circumstances, the song continues to travel from mouth to mouth and generation to generation and the spirit is never extinguished.

Never? I’m drawn to Chanukkah for more personal reasons as well. The second night is the Yahrzeit for my mother, Lore Shulamith. This will be the fiftieth year since she died. My brother and I owe our upbringing to Isca, our second mother, who lovingly brought us with our father from childhood through the charms of adolescence to our marriage canopies and is with us, thank God, now. But one remembers. It’s not only that one doesn’t forget. As everyone who carries such a loss well knows, one seeks – amidst other peoples’ recollections, in places and pages identified by the tug of some intimation – echoes and glimpses of light.

The light of a life does not go out. It rejoins the source of all light, the consciousness from which it came. Yet it is reflected on earth too, in the love engendered in those whom that person loved, and in the love which they in turn discover and bestow. Or, if love is too sentimental a term to refer to the daily responses to life’s struggles and troubles, the core and personality of a person is transmitted in how they used to talk over a cup of coffee, in some sudden glimpse of their inner dignity, in the irrepressible comradeship of laughter.

If a life ends and there’s no known circle of kith and kin, none to say Kaddish, still somewhere in the world are those who remember, who helped her with their shopping, sold her flowers, and who on hearing will say, ‘She? Gone? No!’ and who in ten years time will see before them as if it was yesterday the look on a face, the way a hand took a cake.

We are each a portion of the light which burns in one another’s hearts.

Shabbat Shalom and Good Chanukkah – Chag Urim Sameach

Never? I’m drawn to Chanukkah for more personal reasons as well. The second night is the Yahrzeit for my mother, Lore Shulamith. This will be the fiftieth year since she died. My brother and I owe our upbringing to Isca, our second mother, who lovingly brought us with our father from childhood through the charms of adolescence to our marriage canopies and is with us, thank God, now. But one remembers. It’s not only that one doesn’t forget. As everyone who carries such a loss well knows, one seeks – amidst other peoples’ recollections, in places and pages identified by the tug of some intimation – echoes and glimpses of light.

The light of a life does not go out. It rejoins the source of all light, the consciousness from which it came. Yet it is reflected on earth too, in the love engendered in those whom that person loved, and in the love which they in turn discover and bestow. Or, if love is too sentimental a term to refer to the daily responses to life’s struggles and troubles, the core and personality of a person is transmitted in how they used to talk over a cup of coffee, in some sudden glimpse of their inner dignity, in the irrepressible comradeship of laughter.

If a life ends and there’s no known circle of kith and kin, none to say Kaddish, still somewhere in the world are those who remember, who helped her with their shopping, sold her flowers, and who on hearing will say, ‘She? Gone? No!’ and who in ten years time will see before them as if it was yesterday the look on a face, the way a hand took a cake.

We are each a portion of the light which burns in one another’s hearts.

Shabbat Shalom and Good Chanukkah – Chag Urim Sameach