Rabbi Natasha Mann

Dare to See God Here New London Synagogue exists because of a rather exciting theological scandal. It included important questions about the authorship of the Torah, how to be a religiously devoted Jew without being a fundamentalist, and the politics of institutional orthodoxy. Less screen-time is given to the fact that Rabbi Louis Jacobs of blessed memory had clashed with the ultra-orthodox on many occasions before, perhaps because the subjects of disagreement were not quite so juicy and the outcome was not quite so dramatic, but, as I’m sure some people in the room will remember, the Jacobs Affair did not come out of nowhere. One such example of this tension occurred in the 1950s, wherein some of the orthodox rabbis of Manchester were discussing ways to improve the decorum in the shuls for the upcoming High Holy Days. The suggestions were, I must say, marvelously inoffensive. And yet, somehow, offense there was. Suggestions such as “maybe there are a few of these pages upon pages of...

  Philip Mantofa's " Shofar " The God Who Cries When did we start crying in private? When we were infants, you and I, we cried out because we wanted something. We cried out on the expectation that a caregiver would hear us and respond to our cries. We cried to be held and cared for. Crying out was intended to draw someone near to us.  For most of us, thank God, care was closeby. It is a heartbreaking fact of the human condition that infants without caregivers will stop crying. Crying out is about drawing near.  Moses cries out as an infant in a basket, and is found by a princess who will become his adoptive mother. She names him Moshe from Mashah, to draw out. He cries; she draws him near.  Even more precisely, to “draw close” in Hebrew is karav - the same root as the word korban, a sacrifice in the Temple. The Temple service was about drawing closer to God. It is no wonder, then, that the service of the Temple could be replaced with the service of the heart.  W...

  Monet's Morning on the Seine in the Rain Look Up and See the Miracle I remember once, in a village in India, watching old men playing cards together on the street. It was an impossibly sweet visual until I was told they were the farmers, and the rain had not come that year. No water meant no work, and no work meant no crops, and no crops meant no money and no food. But the horror of the future was folded into the calmness of the moment, of sitting together and playing cards while waiting for something terrible.  I’m a little obsessed with water.  I’m convinced that something buried in the human consciousness knows that we came from the water. Water is not only the sustaining force in religious myth - it is at the heart of creation narratives. Genesis starts out with a watery abyss, with God splitting the waters to create the sea and the sky. This is a common theme in Middle Eastern creation stories - in Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth, it is the god Marduk who...

  Picture from Charles Foster, The Story of the Bible, 1884 Cities of Refuge, Cities of Sanctuary           More headlines are coming in about arrests and charges made for the far-right, anti-immigrant riots. And peppered between those headlines in the “asylum and immigration” sections of news websites, between the pictures of fires and angry crowds, are the occasional haunting stories which sound something like this:            Boat on which at least eight died in Channel was ‘wholly unsuitable’           Two people die attempting to cross Channel in dinghy                       UK ‘stop the boats’ policy raising risk of deadly crushes on dinghies             As we know, places housing refugees were targeted in those riots. It doesn’t make the land seem so much safer than the chan...

  Passover is almost upon us - and the cleaning season is beginning!   Mishnah Pesachim begins, as our season does, with the removal of chametz (leavened product) from the house. Just before Pesach begins, it tells us, we engage with the process of b'dikat chametz (checking for chametz). Mishnah 1:1 assures us that places we would never take chametz do not need to be checked.   Mishnah 1:2 poses a problem. Okay, sure, you might not take toast into the shower, but you're not in complete control of the world. What if there's a crumb on the floor, and the cat picks it up and takes it into the shower?   . אֵין חוֹשְׁשִׁין שֶׁמָּא גָרְרָה חֻלְדָּה מִבַּיִת לְבַיִת וּמִמָּקוֹם לְמָקוֹם, דְּאִם כֵּן, מֵחָצֵר לְחָצֵר וּמֵעִיר לְעִיר, אֵין לַדָּבָר סוֹף   They need not fear that a weasel may have dragged [chametz] from one room to another or from one place to another, for i...

Shabbat shalom - and happy International Women’s Day.  On a usual year, International Women's Day falls in an excellent week in the Jewish calendar. It usually sits just on top of Purim, or between Purim and Pesach. Purim, with its hero as a beautiful young woman, rags-to-riches-to-courageous-hero Queen Esther. And Pesach, where the beginning of the narrative - the story of saving the children, which eventually leads to the redemption of the Israelites from slavery - is all about women. Mothers, sisters, midwives, princesses, all conspiring to resist Pharaoh’s most terrible of decrees, and in doing so, securing salvation. This year, the Gregorian calendar and the Hebrew calendar are aligned slightly differently. We have a few weeks to go before we reach Purim. We are instead at Shabbat Shekalim, the Shabbat before we enter Purim’s month of Adar - this year, Adar Sheini.  We don’t really have much in the way of female characters in our readings tomorrow, but there is a woman wh...

The View From the Ziggurat           Imagine that we’re in a Temple.            Sorry, that wasn’t clear. We’re not in that Temple. Take your mind away from Jerusalem and picture, instead, a temple in ancient Mesopotamia. In this part of the world, a temple might be found perched atop a ziggurat - or, in Akkadian, ziqquratum , meaning “to build high”. You can guess from the name that it’s a high place. To get into the temple structure, we need to ascend an incredible staircase. The temple is made of layers and sections, and there are places we mere peasants cannot go. While not all ancient holy spaces were completely identical in all time periods, common features would appear in temple design among Israel's neighbours: courtyards outside, likely for the public; basins of water; altars for animal sacrifice; a structure of multiple layers, and - most importantly of all - a holy chamber that housed the god. You and I cannot e...