A sermon for a Bar Mitzvah on Chayyei Sarah and #ShowUpForShabbat I’m delighted to welcome first and foremost all of Wylie’s family and friends to this special service when he becomes Bar Mitzvah. This is the moment of responsibility that every Jew is endowed with as they grow up – Read more…
It seems at the moment, on an almost weekly basis, we are celebrating or commemorating significant anniversaries – the founding of the NHS, beginning women’s suffrage, Windrush (marked this weekend), end of the first world war, founding of the State of Israel, and so on. Of course, it is no Read more…
“It’s ticking the boxes against the disabled, the aged, LGBT, the ethnic communities and the rest of it, and something gets lost along the way.” So was the quote about the National Trust that greeted me in the paper after I returned from a simply joyous few days in Devon Read more…
(Pentecost – St Marylebone 2017: This sermon kindly reproduced here by permission from The Revd Michael Redman curate at St Paul’s on Rossmore Road – who responded to the terror attacks on London Bridge) In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit Read more…
At our Melton class on Monday night with the Lyons Learning Project (which we are starting to recruit for a class next year – you should join me!), I was part of a recent discussion that focused on the question, why is it that the Jewish community is overwhelmingly engaged Read more…
What is clear more and more is that the popular case for saving the lives of children who are unaccompanied refugees has not been sustained. Lord Dubs spoke at West London Synagogue for Holocaust Memorial Day and said that the pressure needed to be kept on politicians. Now the Dubs Read more…
Dear Wonderful Future Colleagues, Rabbinic Students In the last semester of teaching at the Leo Baeck College, we spent several weeks learning together about the description of the ‘ger’ (the stranger – though probably more accurately, the convert) in Jewish texts of late antiquity. We read, that the Mekhilta de Read more…
In November 2016, I posted a sermon based on David Daube’s incredible assessment of a text in his book “Collaboration with Tyranny in Rabbinic Law”. My sermon is here. The book was written in 1965 and led him to comment: This tale, it is to be feared, shows what, under intolerable Read more…
My thought for the week for West London Synagogue written from a sukkah of annual leave! As we begin the cycle of Torah reading again with Simchat Torah, I am reminded once again of what I consider to be the stunning messages of the story of creation about humanity. Let Read more…
I told some of you a couple of weeks ago in my sermon about our family visit to Portsmouth, where we visited the historic dockyards and had the wonderful opportunity to see the Mary Rose, the tudor flagship and the HMS Victory and HMS Warrior flagships. It made me think Read more…