CTJC Bulletin Chanukah 2013

CTJC Bulletin Chanukah 2013

Welcome to the CTJC Chanukah Bulletin Bulletin Number 109.

Cover image: ‘Old Jerusalem, 1 Ha-Ugav street, numerous Hanukiot at door and window during Hanukkah festival (8th day)’ by Djampa. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_Jerusalem_Hanukiot_at_door_and_window.jpg

Welcome to our bumper Chanukah issue! For those of you (like me) who missed Theo Dunkelgrun’s excellent Kol Nidre address, it is here in all its glory. Rabbi Reuven Leigh looks back on what was a fantastic month of Chagim in Cambridge, and looks forward to an uplifting Chanukah. We have a timely article from Dr Daniel Weiss, as well as items from our regular contributors Barry Landy and Mark Harris.

Simon Goldhill reviews the recent Cambridge Day Limmud, and if that puts you in the mood for learning, be sure to read all about the newly opened Lehrhaus (and sign up for some classes!) Plus, you’ll find all the regular items you’ve come to expect – recipes, news, calendar and much more.

We are always looking for new contributors to the bulletin, and would be delighted to hear from you with your articles or ideas. To submit material for the Pesach issue, please email bulletin@ctjc.org.uk The bulletin, like all aspects of CTJC, is produced entirely by volunteers. If you would like to get involved with any aspect of CTJC, please contact our Chairman Ros by emailing chair@ctjc.org.uk You can read the bulletin online in full colour at http://issuu.com/ctjc/docs/chanukah_2013 Wishing you and yours a Chanukah Sameach, from all at the Bulletin.

Small print…

Views expressed in the bulletin are the views of the individual authors, and do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or of the committee of the CTJC.

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In this issue…

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Welcome to the CTJC Chanukah Bulletin

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Communal information

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Chairman’s message

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Community news

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The month of Tishrei – by Rabbi Reuven Leigh

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Kol Nidrei Address – by Theo Dunkelgrun

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Religious calendar

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The Ghost of Chanukah Past – by Rabbi Reuven Leigh

17 Chanukah, the Talmud, and the Radicality of the Home - by Daniel Weiss 19

From Russia with Hope – by Mark Harris

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More on Genesis 1-3 – by Barry Landy

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Cambridge Day Limmud – by Simon Goldhill

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Launch of a radical new institution for Jewish learning

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Spiced olive oil cupcakes – by Helen Goldrein

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Chanukah wordsearch

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Chanukah colouring

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Country House Shabbat

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Communal Information Shul services Friday evening In term: In vacations:

Winter, Ma’ariv at 6pm Summer, Minchah and Ma’ariv at 7:30pm Winter, Minchah and Ma’ariv just before Shabbat June-August, Minchah and Ma’ariv at 7:30pm September, Minchah and Ma’ariv just before Shabbat

Shabbat morning 9:30am.

Sunday morning 8:00am (most weeks).

You can also consult our online calendar at www.ctjc.org.uk/calendar Learning Rabbi Reuven Leigh holds a Talmud Shiur at Chabad House, 37A Castle Street, Cambridge CB3 0AH, every Tuesday. For more details email rl324@cam.ac.uk A Talmud Shiur led by Prof. Stefan Reif is held on a convenient evening in those weeks when Prof. Reif is in Cambridge. For more information email chevra@ctjc.org.uk Mikvah To book an appointment at the Cambridge Mikvah, please call Mrs. Rochel Leigh on 07825 126724 at least 48 hours in advance. For more information about the Mikvah please call Rochel or email at rochel@cuchabad.org.

Hospital Visiting Contact Sarah Schechter, Tirzah Bleehen or Barry Landy if you need to organise visits, or would like to volunteer to help.

Rabbi Reuven Leigh (354603) and Barry Landy can attend hospitals to read prayers.

Due to concerns for personal privacy the hospital no longer informs us when Jewish patients are admitted, so if you or someone you know would like to be visited, please contact us.

Chevra Kadisha Contact Barry Landy, Brendel Lang or Trevor Marcuson in the first instance.

Bar Mitzvahs, Weddings, Brit Milah and other religious services Contact Rabbi Reuven Leigh or Barry Landy to organise.

Children’s activities For information about Cambridge Hebrew School, the After School Club, or Ganeinu Child Care Service, contact Rochel Leigh at rochel@cuchabad.org CTJC email list CTJC has an email list. To join and receive regular updates about services, events, Shabbat times etc, please email Barry Landy at bl10@cam.ac.uk or Jonathan Allin at jonathan.allin@nokia.com CTJC Officers Rabbi Chairman Treasurer Secretary Synagogue officer

Reuven Leigh Rosalind Landy Jonathan Allin Barry Landy Barry Landy

Education officer Welfare officer Bulletin/website Helen Goldrein Board of Deputies Jonathan Goldman

Anyone wishing to volunteer for the vacant posts of Education and Welfare officers, or just wanting to find out more about the roles, should contact Ros Landy by emailing chair@ctjc.org.uk

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Chairman’s message This year we have an early Chanukah bulletin because Chanukah itself occurs at the end of November.

As many of you will already know, this year, uniquely, Chanukah falls on Thanksgiving. It will never happen again, or at least it will next be in 77,798 years. It could have happened in 1861, but Thanksgiving was only established by President Lincoln in 1863. Apparently until 1942 Thanksgiving was the last Thursday in November instead of the fourth so Thanksgivukah technically happened once before, in 1888, writes Jonathan Mizrahi.

In addition, this year also, the Jewish people will be celebrating their winter festival at a completely different time from the Christian festival, Xmas. It is odd how the Jewish calendar moves about. At some stage there will have to be adjustments but that is far in the future.

We have always been an individual, independent people. We are still in that mould. We run a lunar calendar, not a solar calendar. Jewish values are the ones we follow.

Let us continue to show individuality and quality. Let us light the Chanukiah with pleasure and sing Maoz Tzur with joy.

Chag Sameach, Ros Landy

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Community news Mazal Tov To the Chaplains Yisrael and Elisheva Malkiel on the birth of their third son, Berachya.

To the Schechter family on the marriage of Eyal Schechter to Deborah Ezra To Julian Landy and Jo ???? on their engagement.

To Barry and Ros Landy on the promotion of their son Joshua to a full professorship at Stanford University To Ohad Kammar on passing his viva for his Ph D. Refua Sheleima to Sue Pearl on her recent illness.

The month of Tishrei

By Rabbi Reuven Leigh There is no other month in the Jewish year with as many festivals and as much celebrating as the month of Tishrei. Due to the earliness of Tishrei this year, the CTJC was able to arrange the entire month's festivities prior to the start of the academic year.

Our guest chazanim for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur set the tone for a spiritually uplifting experience that was further enhanced with an apple and honey cake kiddush and a much appreciated post fast refreshments.

A well prepared children's programme at the nearby park and a well stocked play area for the little ones ensured there was decorum throughout, and the newly purchased Chief Rabbi's machzor provided insight and clarity to the liturgy.

From the seriousness of the Yamim Noraim we changed gear for the happiness of Sukkot culminating in a fantastic Simchat Torah. Besides for the joyful dancing with the Torah and the traditional L'chaims we also enjoyed a sumptuous meal prepared by Simon Goldhill that people are still talking about.

Tishrei is just the beginning of year, however, we hope it will be a sign of good things to come. Â

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Kol Nidrei Address

By Theo Dunkelgrun A year has come and gone, and here we are again. The time has come, another summer has passed. Shadows fall on the sundials in the college courts and gardens, a crisp chill is in the air again, and the autumn winds are beginning to blow across the fields. Once again, it is the month of Tishrei, once more it is Erev Yom Kippur, and again we have come together as Jews in a Jewish house of gathering, a beit-knesset, a shul.

Some of us were in this sanctuary last year, some of us were elsewhere. For some of you – and we warmly welcome you – it’s your first Yom Kippur in Cambridge, as last year it was for me and as this year it is for my wife Kathryn. For some younger ones among you, whose joyful Anim Zemirot has perked me up on many a shabbat, this shul will one day, please G-d, be a place of warm childhood memories. Others, slightly older, might be thinking of a shul elsewhere, far away, long ago, a shul filled with familiar faces and memories of Kol Nidreis past.

But from wherever we have come here this evening, the most important thing is not from which shul, but that we are in shul at all, that we are part of the unbroken chain in which each shul, and each and every one of us, is a link. We have come together, on the eve of the most exalted day in the Jewish year, as our ancestors before us, in Kiev and Cairo and Capetown, in Warsaw and Essaouira and Whitechapel, back through the generations in an unbroken chain of Days of Atonement. As Jews gather around the world this evening, the important thing is not the specific shuls among which we are distributed, but that we are here, that we are still here, and that we are together.

Friends, the sight of familiar faces warms the heart, and the sight of unfamiliar faces warms the heart even more. But Yom Kol Nidrei, from the machzor of Worms (1272-1280) Kippur is not about the proximity or familiarity of others, because unlike Rosh HaShanah, Yom Kippur is not about our relationships with our fellow human beings. It is about our awareness of the source of all being. Transgressions against others, Maimonides tells us in his Mishneh Torah, we should be open and public about. It is not enough to repay what is owed, we must apologise publicly and ascertain that the other has accepted our apology and that her or his heart is appeased. If relations are to be restored, it’s not enough to cancel the debt; one must

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remove the grudge. And if our apology is not accepted we must return, and ask again for forgiveness, in the company of witnesses, up to three times (and if we have wronged our teacher, even a thousand times will not suffice). But our transgressions against G-d? They are nobody else’s business. In fact, the Rambam considers it of particular arrogance to share them with others. And so while this evening we embrace each other and wish each other ketiva ve-chatima tova, that we may all be written and sealed into the Book of Life, and while we naturally miss our loved ones, Yom Kippur is not about the familiarity of other faces, but rather about the sudden familiarity of our own face as we see it in the private mirror of our prayers, as we make up the balance of our souls, the cheshbon ha-nefesh, that the month of Elul, that the past nine days and that this coming tenth day of repentance demand from us. It is, I believe, one of the deep consolations of this awesome day: that we say our most private prayers with and in a community. On Yom Kippur, our solitude is public. We come to shul to be alone together. And what matters is not in which specific shul.

This small and unimposing shul has taught me a great and important lesson. I came to Cambridge from the University of Chicago, and one of Chicago’s great (Jewish) writers – not Saul Bellow for once, but Nelson Algren – described his love for the city like this: ‘Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose. You may find lovelier lovelies, but never a lovely so real.’ Parts of Cambridge – the weeping willows behind the Wren Library, the Bridge of Sighs at my college seen from a punt, King’s College seen from the Backs or indeed from any other angle – are so lovely they define loveliness. But this shul? Loving this shul is like loving someone with a broken nose.

We may know lovelier, grander, more breathtaking shuls. I’m spoiled: I grew up in the baroque Spanish-Portuguese Esnoga of The Hague, completed in 1703 by the wealthy, cultured court Jews of the Dutch Republic. But sheker ha-chen ve-hevel ha-yofi (Prov. 31:30). When we cover our eyes for the Shema, when we close them in prayer or cover our heads with our tallit for spiritual concentration, this shul becomes every shul, and Thompson’s Lane becomes an alleyway in Tsfat or Tehran or Krakow or Brooklyn. If we spend the coming day with the right kavanah, the right intentions and attunement, then as Yom Kippur draws to a close tomorrow evening, when the day

Le somnambule ("Sleepwalker") by Marc Chagall.

Gouache, pencil, paper. 1911-1912.

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turns and the hour of ne’ilah nears, you can feel this shul levitate ever so slightly, like a kloyz of chasidim in a story by Reb Nachman or a painting by Chagall.

Because, friends, this shul is every shul in the world. Let me tell you why. The Rabbis teach us that ever since the destruction of the Temple, and since Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai chose life and fled the besieged city of Jerusalem on the eve of its destruction and established the yeshiva at Yavne, the Divine Presence, which in Hebrew is the feminine Shekhinah, is no longer in the Temple, but in Yavne, and by extension in every place where we study Torah and pray together in a liturgy that recalls and mirrors the Temple Service.

And ever since, not only we but the Shekhinah itself is in exile. And exile, galut, golus, is therefore not our geographic location vis-à-vis the earthly Jerusalem, Yerushalaim shel mata, but exile describes our existential condition as imperfect human beings in a broken world, a world so broken that, as the Mishnah tells us in Pirkei Avot, it would fall apart if not for Torah, Avodah and Gemilut Hasadim; if not for Torah, our awareness and worship of the source of all being, and acts of loving kindness and compassion. This is why books – rabbinic literature, musar, homiletics, philosophy, and novels and poetry and music and the arts, that make sense of that broken world and help us to live in it – have provided us with a portable homeland across the centuries. In this exile, the avodah in the beit ha-miqdash, the worship in the Temple, has become the avodah she-ba-lev, the worship in the heart. The Kadosh Kodashim, the Holy of Holies, is now here, in Thompson’s Lane, in our hearts. Each shul is every shul, and so this is the loveliest shul in the world.

And a wonderful shul it is, where I have been welcomed so warmly, a shul as fun as it is friendly, as tolerant as it is traditional, where you’ll meet the smartest Jewish students of their generation and where an Chabad rabbi with a degree in philosophy and a Hasidic chaplain with a degree in Islamic studies debate over their kiddush whiskey with the world’s leading scholars about the Judaism of Saul of Tarsus or the comparative nigunim of this and that nusach; about mathematics and Maimonides and about Maimonides’ favorite philosophers, Aristotle and Abu Nasr al-Farabi. Unapologetically Cambridge, unapologetically Jewish. A small community, where we count on each other to make a minyan, to sponsor a kiddush, and to keep an eye on the kids, and therefore feel ever so deeply our shared responsibility for the survival of Judaism. And speaking of survival: I am delighted to tell you that our wonderful chaplains, Yisrael and Elisheva, were blessed last night with the birth of a healthy and beautiful baby boy.

But when I say we have returned to shul this evening, I am talking about a kind of return that has little to do with how often you come to shul. For in a sense, not just students back after summer but all for whom this is not our childhood shul, and all who have not been in shul for weeks, months or even years: you, too, have returned. And by that I mean a kind of return that, just like our exile, has nothing to do with our geographic location.

Now one might be tempted, especially in Cambridge, this city of science and classics, to say with Heraclitus that one simply cannot visit the same shul twice. Panta rhei, ‘everything flows’, turns, changes, said that great presocratic philosopher, who is making his début tonight in a Yom Kippur sermon. Nothing endures forever. Everything comes and goes. All that remains, Heraclitus believed, is change itself, and his legacy is wired into a powerful tradition of Western thought. There is no such thing as return; what’s done is done and cannot be changed; you can never go back. And in a real and sad sense, it is true,

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corroborated by experience, borne out by our fleeting lives. Another year has passed. It was, and it will never be again. If we were to go to the same shul where we were last year, it would not be today the same place it was then, for only last year some of our loved ones were still alive and with us, and they were not written and sealed into the Book of Life. The meaning of life, Kafka is said to have said, is that it ends. Tov shem mi-shemen tov, ve-yom hamavet mi-yom hivaledo, says Qoheleth (7:1). ‘A good name is better than good oil, and the day we die than the day we were born.’ Our mortality is the vanishing point that puts our lives into meaningful perspective.

We are given the immeasurable, miraculous gift of life, but no sooner do we come into the world or we are sent into exile from our childhood, from our past. A storm blows from paradise that fills the wings of the backward-facing angel of history. But even Walter Benjamin at his most mystical, almost chasidic moments, knew that Jewish time is not strictly linear. Ein mukdam ume’uchar ba-Torah, say the Rabbis. ‘There is no before and after in the Torah.’ We know this not only because on a daf of the Talmud sages from completely different centuries converse, converge and argue, with each other, and with us, their readers, transcending historical time. We know this also from our hectic daily lives. Every shabbat, we press pause, and step outside of time, as it were, to spend a day with each other in eternity. And Yom Kippur, the Torah tells us (Lev. 16:31), shabat shabaton hu lachem, should be a sabbath of sabbaths, a shabbat so holy it is the only fast day that is not postponed when it falls on a shabbat, as it does this year. It is as if on Yom Kippur, historical time itself, and our mortality with it, were momentarily suspended.

To Jews, then, to us, Heraclitus was wrong.

We can step into the same shul twice, because each shul is every shul. Jewish time is such that we can even return to a shul that we have never seen before. Even if there is someone here tonight who has never been to shul, not even on the most exalted day of the Jewish year: you, too, have returned, returned to K’lal Yisrael, to the community of the extended The Parma Psalter, 13th Century.

Psalm 126 - Two human figures are looking up, one with parted lips and the other with his left arm stretched out. To the left of the word are two more human figures, with eyes closed and inclined heads resting on their right hands. The latter illustrate v.1, 'When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream', and the former, either the word shir (song) of the superscription, or v.2, 'Then our mouth was filled with... shouts of joy'.

family of the Jewish people. The kind of nongeographical, non-temporal return I am speaking of is what is called teshuvah.

Friends, Yom Kippur is about nothing if it is not about teshuvah. It is such a fundamental concept in Jewish life, that it merits a moment or two of reflection as we devote the coming day to it.

Teshuvah can mean many different things. The root of the word, the shoresh shin-vav-bet

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covers a large semantic range. Its primary, literal meaning is ‘to turn’. Va-yashuvu hamayim me’al ha’aretz haloch vashov (Gen. 8:3) when the waters of the great flood had receded, and Noah finally opened a window of the ark and sent out a raven, it flew to and fro, yatzo vashov (Gen. 8:7) And when he sent out a dove, it first returned to him: va-tashav eilav el hateivah (Gen. 8:9), the repetitions of the word throughout the story of Noah evoke the swelling and receding of the waters (and perhaps the sea-sickness of the passengers).

Shuv also carries the literal meaning ‘to return’. When Abraham comes down from mount Moriah after Akedat Yitzchak, the Binding of Isaac, which according to an ancient tradition occurred on Yom Kippur, the Torah says in a passage to which we return with each morning prayer and that we read last week on the second day of Rosh HaShana, va-yashav Avraham el ne’arav (Gen. 22:19) and Avraham returned to the those he had left waiting, as, in a sense, he returns every day to the person saying shacharit.

Shuv is also attested in a transitive sense, ‘to return something’, as we sing before we bensh (Ps. 126:1): Shir ha-ma’alot, beshuv ha-Shem et shivat Tsion. ‘When HaShem brought back the returnees to Zion.’ In construct with another verb, shuv can mean to return to an activity, to repeat, to do once more. Zechor ki ruach chayai. Lo tashuv eyni lir’ot tov, reads a pasuq in Job (7:7), ‘remember that my life is a mere breath. My eye will not see this goodness again.’

But shuv has deeper meanings. It can mean ‘to turn to’ in an inward, non-spatial sense, ‘to turn our attention’, often with reference to G-d, to turn towards Him after having turned away from Him. Shuvu banim shovavim, erpah meshuvoteichem, reads Jeremiah 3:22, which the King James translators, some of them working here in Cambridge, rendered ‘Return, ye backsliding children, and I will heal your backslidings’ (apparently scholars in 17th-century Cambridge knew a thing or two about backsliding). And so shuv can mean to turn back from having slid back, often in combination with the command to remember after having forgotten. Yizkeru ve-yashuvu el ha-Shem kol afsei arets, reads a pasuq in Tehilim (Ps. 22:28).

‘All the ends of the world shall remember and turn to HaShem.’

Shuv at all its pitches is pivotal to the complex relationship between G-d and Moses. When HaShem wants Moshe, a stutterer, to go and confront the most powerful man on earth, he curtly commands, shuv mitsraim, ‘return to Egypt’. And later Moshe will use it when he, in turn, addresses G-d at that critical moment when the people’s building of the golden calf evokes a destructive Divine fury (Ex. 32:12). Shuv me-charon apecha. ‘Turn from Thy fury.’

Remember your promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. (As if G-d needs to be reminded of something, of anything.) Shuv, G-d says to Moshe. Shuv, Moshe says to G-d. Turn, return, remember. And Moshe will turn and return, and do one enormous thing again: he will climb Mt. Sinai once more, according to tradition on the first of Elul, and come down again after forty days with two stone tablets like the broken first ones. And this time, the stiff-necked people have not built a golden calf. This time, they repent. Forty days after the first of Elul is the tenth of Tishrei: when Moshe came down the second time, it was Yom Kippur.

And so in the sense of ‘turning to G-d’, lashuv comes to mean ‘to repent’, ‘to make repentance.’ And in this sense we find it in the first word of the haftorah reading of last shabbat, which Yoav layned for us with Itamar at his feet: shuva yisrael ad ha-Shem elokeicha, khashalta ba’avonekha. ‘Return, O Israel, to the Lord your G-d, for you have fallen because of your sin.’ (Hos. 14:2) And it is in this double sense that that shabbat is called Shabbat

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Shuva: because of the admonition in the haftorah, and because of the commandment of teshuvah, on the shabbat that falls in the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, the Ten Days of Repentance between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.

From turning, returning, bringing back, repeating and repenting, the root shuv comes to mean ‘to replenish’ and ‘to restore’. Torat ha-Shem temimah, meshivat nafesh. ‘G-d’s Torah is pure, it restores the soul’, says the Psalmist (Ps. 19:8), a pasuq which will be taken up by Braslover Hasidim for a wonderful collection of Reb Nachman’s teachings on teshuvah, the Sefer Meshivas Nefesh. The pilel form of the verb, leshovev, emphasises this sense of restoration and renewal, as in the Psalm traditionally sung at shabbat meals, Nafshi yeshovev, ‘He makes me lie down in green pastures, He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul, renews my life.’

Finally, lashuv denotes the full cycle of our lives, as when Qohelet says of even the richest person, Ka’asher yatza mi-beten imo, arom yashuv lalechet keshe-ba, ‘as he came forth from his mother’s womb, so naked as he came will he return’ (Ecc. 5:15). And in the closing verses of that timeless book (12:7), veyashov he-afar al ha-aretz keshe-hayah; ve-ha-ruach tashuv el haelokim she-natnah. ‘And the dust shall return to the earth, as it was, and the breath will return to G-d who gave it.’

To turn, to return, to repeat, to repent, to replenish, to restore, to renew: teshuvah is all of these. The commandment of teshuvah, a mitsva asei mi-de-oraita, one of the 613 commandments in the Torah, comprises the commandment to turn our hearts, to remember that our lives are a mere breath, to reconnect to our source, to restore our connection to the source of all life by repenting for breaking it in the rush of our daily lives, and thereby to be restored and replenished ourselves, our lives renewed.

Remarkably, in the Mishneh Torah, his great systematic code of Jewish Law, Maimonides’s discussion of the laws of teshuvah on Yom Kippur is not in the Shevitat Asor section of Sefer Zemanim, which deals primarily with the laws of fasting and other kinds of abstinence on Yom Kippur, nor in the Avodat Yom ha-Kippurim section of Sefer Avodah, where one might expect it, which deals instead with the sacrifice of fifteen animals in the Temple and all the responsibilities of the Cohen Gadol. Rather, long before he ever gets into those discussions, the Rambam composes a special section of the Sefer Madah, the Book of Knowledge, the very first book of the code which contains the foundations of Judaism, a section titled Hilchot Teshuvah, the Laws of Teshuvah, a category which does not correspond to any specific book in the Talmud. Why? One reason might be that the commandment of teshuvah is not limited to Yom Kippur.

After all, we pray for teshuvah every day. In the daily amidah, the prayer for teshuvah comes after the prayer for binah but before the prayer for selichah. There is human wisdom in this arrangement: for selichah, forgiveness, we need teshuvah, repentance. But in order to repent, in order to be mindful moral human beings, we need binah, understanding, intelligence, thoughtfulness. As Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz puts it, we must deepen and refine our inner sensibilities. Lionel Trilling spoke of ‘the moral obligation to be intelligent’. On ne peut pas être juif sans le savoir, wrote Emmanuel Lévinas, ‘one cannot be a Jew without knowing it.’ Judaisme est une extrême conscience. Judaism is an extreme kind of moral conscience and existential consciousness. A belief in the fundamental equality and dignity of each human

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being, and in the necessity of liberty and justice, a belief Jews have carried forth throughout the centuries, to all corners of the earth, as a light unto the Nations. To love our neighbor as ourselves. Our religious neighbor and our secular neighbor; our straight neighbor and our gay neighbor; our Jewish neighbor and our Arab neighbor.

We all have our own heroes of yiddishkeit and menschlichkeit, some famous, many largely anonymous. Since we have just said farewell to a Chief Rabbi who has been both those things for many people, let me pay tribute to him by remembering a man to whose work Rabbi Sacks devoted last year’s selichot services: Dr Ludwig Guttman, the leading neurosurgeon in pre-war Germany who fled to England in 1939, led the rehabilitation of the most seriously wounded, and after the war, with a small army of physical therapists, founded what would become the Paralympic Games, in the conviction that just because we are broken human beings, it does not mean that we cannot live rich, fulfilling, exemplary lives.

Such is the gemilut hasadim, the loving kindness and compassion, the physical therapy which is at once a spiritual therapy, which helps to heal our broken world.

‘There is a crack in everything’, sings Leonard Cohen. ‘That’s how the light gets in.’ And the amidah seems structured to emphasize that this existential and moral mindfulness of the brokenness of our world and our part in its healing is a necessary condition, a prerequisite for teshuvah, which in turn is a necessary condition for the selichah and kaparah of Yom Kippur. The Rambam says teshuvah brings us closer to the Shekhinah. The Midrash tells us that teshuva preceded the creation of the universe, by which our sages of blessed memory might have meant that our very ability to experience historical time is predicated on our capacity for regret and hope. The Talmud mirrors the thought when it says (Sanh. 97B) that the redemption of the world depends on our teshuvah. But Maimonides, the rationalist philosopher, isn’t mystical about it at all. In fact, he’s entirely practical: it’s up to us. The possibility of teshuvah presupposes human freedom of choice, which is perhaps why the Rambam places his philosophical defense of the freedom of human agency in this very chapter on Hilchot Teshuvah. If we weren’t free to choose different ways of life, why would the Prophets have warned and admonished us? And Maimonides asks, at his most provocative: Ve-ma makom haya lekol ha-Torah kula? ‘What would be the place of the entire Torah?’ We need the Torah precisely because we are free, and because we are free, we can make teshuvah. Perhaps we are even at our most free when we make teshuvah.

Tomorrow we pray for teshuvah, as we do every shabbos, when we return the Sefer Torah to the ark and sing together the closing lines of Eichah, Lamentations (5:21): hashivenu hashem eleikha venashuva, chadesh yamenu kekedem. ‘Take us back, O Lord, return us to Yourself, and we shall be turned and return. Renew our days as of old.’ Chadesh yamenu kekedem. ‘Renew our days as of old’: a prayer which runs against every linear conception of historical time. But teshuvah is an ability to change what appears unchangeable, to realize we have been wrong, to apologise, the change our ways, to change our hearts, to open the hearts of others, and thereby to repair the past such that our lives are renewed, restored.

And so the Rambam, who elsewhere in the Mishneh Torah will go on to describe the Yom Kippur Temple Sacrifices in immense detail, tells us in Hilchot Teshuvah that be-zman haze, she’eyn bet ha-miqdash kayam ve-eyn lanu mizbe’ach kaparah, eyn sham ela teshuvah. ‘In this time, in which we have no Temple or altar for sacrifices of atonement, all we have is teshuvah.’ In our exile in this broken world, our only avodah is the avodah she-ba-lev, our

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only worship the worship of the heart, our only atonement is to lachzor bi-teshuvah, to remember that we are dust, our life a breath, and to return to the source of all being.

And so in the prayer Avinu Malkeinu, that we have said and repeated these past days, and that because it is shabbat we will only say again at ne’ilah tomorrow evening, we pray: avinu malkenu, zechor ki-afar anachnu. ‘Remember that we are dust’. Avinu Malkeinu, hachazirenu biteshuvah shelema lefanecha. ‘Turn us, return us, restore us, bring us back, bring us to complete repentance before You.’ A year has come and gone. The season has turned. Again it is the month of Tishrei, it is Kol Nidrei once more. Es ist Zeit, dass es Zeit wird, writes Paul Celan. It is time for it to be time.

We have come back, we have returned to shul, on Yom Kippur, the awesome Yoma, the yom tov that makes ba’alei teshuvah of all of us. Hashivenu haShem eleikha venashuva, chadesh yamenu kekedem. ‘Take us back, O Lord, return us to Yourself, and we shall be turned and return. Renew our days as of old.’ May HaShem bless us, and may we all be written and sealed into the Book of Life. Ketiva ve-chatima tova. Shabbat Shalom.

Left: Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur, Maurycy Gottleib, 1878. Painted in Vienna. The artist's self portrait is standing to the right of the seated rabbi, looking outwards. The inscription on the Torah scroll says "Donated in memory of our late honored teacher and rabbi Moshe Gottlieb of blessed memory 1878"; it is an epitaph for the artist. All figures depict people from Gottlieb's early life in Drohobycz. The artist himself appears three times: as an adult wearing a pendant standing to the right of the Torah, as a child at lower left wearing the same pendant, and as a boy at the far right. The woman he courted, Laura Rosenfeld, appears twice: at the top left, standing and holding a closed prayer book, and second from the right on the top row, next to her mother.

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Religious Calendar CHANUKAH 2013 The first night of Chanukah is Wednesday 27 November.

PURIM 2014 Saturday 15 March 2014 Shabbat ends at 6.49 pm, Maariv will be at 7.15pm immediately followed by Megillah Reading, Sunday 16 March 2014 Shacharit at 8 am, immediately followed by Megillah Reading.

PESACH 2014 Anyone who would like to attend a Seder, or who knows someone who would like to attend a Seder is invited to consult Mr Barry Landy (C. 570417) who will try to arrange a suitable host.

Derby Stores (Cambridge 354931) will take Pesach orders.

Monday April 14 Fast of the Firstborn Shacharit 7:00 am Finish all Chametz by 10:20 am; Burning of Chametz by 11:42 am Festival starts 7.41 pm; Minchah/Maariv 7:20 pm Tuesday April 15 Shacharit 9:30 am Wednesday April 16 Shacharit 9:30 am Festival ends 8:48 pm Sunday April 20 Festival starts 7:51 pm; Minchah/Maariv 7:30 pm Monday April 21 Shacharit 9:30am Tuesday April 22 Shacharit 9:30 am Festival ends 9:00pm SHAVUOT 2014 Shavuot is in University term, so the services are organised by the students.

Tuesday June 3 Festival Starts 8:58 pm; Minchah/Maariv to be announced Wednesday June 4 Shacharit 9:30 am; Minchah/Maariv to be announced Thursday June 5 Shacharit 9:30 am Festival Ends 10:20 pm TISHA B’AV Monday August 4 Fast Commences 8:45pm; Maariv and Eichah at 9:30 pm Tuesday August 5 Shacharit at 8:00 am (expected to finish about 10:00 am) Minchah 1:45pm or 6:00pm (to be decided on the day) Fast ends at 9:35pm

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The Ghost of Chanukah Past

By Rabbi Reuven Leigh

Recently, there was a student from London who was visiting her friend in Cambridge for Shabbat and they joined us for lunch. During the meal, she related how there is a study programme in London for religious students to remain involved in learning even after they have left yeshiva or seminary. In the week prior, she had attended a class that was discussing the influence of Christmas on Chanukah. The perspective of the lecturer was that Chanukah was always a minor Rabbinic festival that did not compete with the importance of the biblically mandated festivals. The recent centrality of Chanukah in Jewish life and identity, she argued, was a result of the influence of Christmas and the need for secular Jews to carve out a part in the winter festivities. I was heartened to hear that my guest didn't buy any of it.

This argument has three parts: That Chanukah is a minor festival, the current excitement about Chanukah is a reaction to Christmas, and this is a bad thing. Let's deal with them one by one.

Why is it necessary to create a hierarchy of importance? If one views our religious obligations primarily from the impact it has on our own personal lives, then it is understandable to see the obligations of Chanukah as minor in contrast to Pesach or Yom Kippur. However, if one adopts a more theocentric view of Mitzvot then the terms minor and major become redundant, for surely they all in their own way are a fulfilment of the Divine

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will. Some may wish to still argue that even were we to see things from Gd's perspective we could still apply a minority status on Chanukah, since it is not a fulfilment of His will in the same way as the Divinely revealed commandments, being a 'mere' rabbinic enactment.

This line of thinking triggers in me the Yiddish expression – Aha, so here is where the dog is buried (it works better in Yiddish). I sense that the underlying assumption that fuels the denigration of the Rabbinic festival of Chanukah and which similarly finds its expression in the downplaying of the Rabbinic second day of Yom Tov or the turning up of people's noses to the custom of Hakafot on Simchat Torah is that human creativity and resourcefulness is inferior and less valued than human obedience to a Divine order. Or more directly, that human creativity is not part of the Divine order of things.

From the Moses-made second tablets to the daughters of Zelaphad to the institution of the second Pesach, the Tanach is replete with examples of the importance and efficacy of human ingenuity. The decision to keep the Torah short and cryptic so as to afford generations to come with the task of studying the Oral Torah and enhancing it with new dimensions and additions, reminds us of our central and valued role as not only guardians but also producers of the Torah. In the words of the Talmud (Avodah Zarah 35a), 'It is sweeter for me the words of the Sages, more than the words of the Torah.'

There is nothing minor or secondary about the festival of Chanukah, in fact, its status as a Rabbinic festival should lead us to afford it a privileged and elevated place in our religious life.

The fact that Chanukah may have previously been under-celebrated is not an indicator necessarily of how things are supposed to be. Maybe in previous generations they failed to grasp the profundity of the festival and if the over the top celebrations of Christmas have jolted us into a renewed passion for all things Chanukah then I say to our neighbours thank you. If only all the influences of non-Jewish culture were so positive and led to enhanced Jewish identity and engagement with Jewish practice.

So don't hold back and let the scrooges diminish your fun and excitement.

The flames of Chanukah are strong and bright enough to withstand the peculiar views of some of our brethren.

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Chanukah, the Talmud, and the Radicality of the Home

By Daniel Weiss

This year, as every year, Jews in Cambridge and around the world will gather in their homes to light the candles of the Chanukah menorah. While it might seem a minor ritual of a minor holiday, a closer examination of the treatment and representation of Chanukah in the Babylonian Talmud points to ways in which rabbinic tradition transforms and elevates the significance of the home and the domestic sphere.

Particularly in comparison to the way the story and message of Chanukah is often presented in our 21st-century context, one is immediately struck by what is not present in the Talmudic account. The Talmud (Shabbat 21b) asks, ‘What is Chanukah?’ but the answer that it gives makes no mention of the figure of Judah Maccabee. Moreover, while alluding briefly to the victory of ‘the Hasmoneans’ over ‘the Greeks’, no mention is made of the reasons for the battle, whether a quest for national liberation or a desire for freedom of worship. Instead the focus is placed on the miracle in which the sole jug of undefiled oil in the Temple lasted for eight days rather than one. While one might be inclined to say ‘the well-known’ miracle, it is notable that no mention of the eight-day miracle is made in the Books of 1 and 2 Maccabees (preserved in the Christian deuterocanonical tradition but not in Jewish rabbinic tradition), nor is it found in Josephus’s account. Those texts, by contrast, do place emphasis on national liberation and freedom of worship. In the Talmud, therefore, the fact that the miraculous element is a jug of oil and not a military victory is by no means an inherently obvious stance to take.

Thus, that which the Talmud emphasizes is not found in those other texts from late Antiquity, and that which those other texts emphasize is not found in the Talmud. While there could be multiple ways of accounting for this difference, I want to posit here that the Talmud may be seeking to tell the story of Chanukah in a way that ends up turning each family home into a ‘miraculous Temple.’

If the main point of Chanukah were a military victory, this would not be quite as feasible to re-enact in the comfort of one’s own home. Swords, shields, elephants and Seleucid Greeks are certainly not so easy to find in the aisles of your local supermarket, at least not in the ones that I’ve been to. By contrast,

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Jews today can essentially do everything that the human agents did in the context of the Talmud’s miracle of the oil: just as they lit an oil lamp in the Temple, so too we can light oil lamps (or candles) in our homes. In other words, the wonder of ritual performance allows us not merely to commemorate something that others did in the past (as would be the case with commemorations of battles or other large-scale events), but actually to do now what the others did then, in those days, at this time. In this way, the home itself becomes the centre of the miracle.

It is thus precisely the ‘smallness’ of the Chanukah miracle – no city walls tumbling down to the blast of the shofar, no seas parting and then crashing onto pursuing chariots – that enables it to be transferred to the home. For the Talmud’s approach to Chanukah, therefore, it would seem that God is most present not with those who ‘make history’ on the grand scale, but with those who light the candles in their homes and with their family, thus championing the domestic over the crushing crowd. Just as it was a small, seemingly insignificant jug of oil that brought about the miracle of Chanukah, so too the humble home now turns out to be the place where the miracle is to be found.

Thus, as we light the Chanukah Chanukah lamp unearthed near Jerusalem, c. 1900. candles this year, we can remember (From the 1901-1906 Jewish Encyclopaedia,) that, at least for the Talmud, we are enacting a radical resistance to the idea that something must be grand and global in order to ‘make a difference.’ Instead, we are affirming that small can be not only beautiful but also holy.

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From Russia with hope

By Mark Harris 2013 is the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Mark Harris meets with Jewish “comrades” in a German spa town.

On the morning of 10 November 1938, about 60 men, some of the remaining Jews (including community leaders) in the picturesque, famed and fashionable spa town of Baden-Baden nestling in the Schwartzwald (Black Forest) region of southwest Germany, were rounded up and taken to the main police station.

This was the day after Kristallnacht (the “night of broken glass”) when Nazi mobs rampaged across Hitler’s Reich, setting synagogues ablaze, destroying Jewish businesses and beating to death almost 100 Jews on the streets of Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and other cities.

Now it was the turn of Baden-Baden’s “Juden”. After registering at the police building, the Jewish men, in their heavy winter overcoats and brimmed hats, were lined up into a column of threes in its courtyard by SS and police squads and marched the short distance to the town’s magnificent twin-towered synagogue, which had been inaugurated in 1899 and stood imposingly on the Stephanienstraße. The 60 Jews were herded into the impressive edifice and forced to remove their headwear.

One of their number, Dr Artur Flehinger (a lecturer at the Gymnasium, a major secondary school), was the first to be dragged to the shul’s reading desk, required to face the standing “congregation” and compelled to read extracts from Mein Kampf, Hitler’s political credo. Flehinger and others who failed or refused to display the appropriate enthusiasm and respect in their recitation were pummelled brutally by their guards and tormentors. That traumatic ordeal persisted for some hours; afterwards, the maltreated men were intimidated into rehearsing continuously the Horst Wessel song, the anthem of National Socialism, until their enunciation was considered perfect.

At the end of these vile indignities and ruthless physical abuse, the Jews were driven out of the Gothic-style synagogue, loaded onto trucks and transported to Dachau concentration camp near Munich. The Baden-Baden community’s glorious temple was then put to the flame, and razed to the ground. The SS attempted to hurl its chazan into the roaring fire, but a brave fireman managed to rescue the terrified cantor.

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For some time, I stood contemplatively in front of the simple stone memorial, which was covered with pebbles laid by respectful visitors, and which commemorates the atrocity and tragic events of that horrific November day. The monument stands prominently on a grassy space directly opposite the former police station building, in a gently sloping parkland area of the ancient town largely occupied by some of its famous health spas (the Bäderviertel or “Bath Quarter”) such as the classically designed Caracalla Therme (named after the Roman emperor), Frederichsbad (housed in a palatial, neo-Renaissance building) and, further up the villa-flanked arboreal hill, Rheuma-Centrum (a modern structured, more medically inclined facility).

After settling my thoughts, I followed the route of the forced march on that cold winter’s day, 75 years ago, to the site of the erstwhile synagogue, now an open-air car park. Here, a hefty stone boulder bears a metal plaque recording the shul’s fiery destruction.

Manicured Baden-Baden straddles the narrow (and, during my hot and dry July visit, shallow) Oosbach river, circled with wooded hills backed by low mountains, shimmering hazy in the summer’s 30C-plus heat wave. This elegant and historic municipality sits comfortably towards the northern end of the Schwartzwald, not far from Karlsruhe, the River Rhine and the border with France (Strasburg being the closest French city).

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The town itself and its luxuriant rural environment boasts so much greenery and so many landscaped public gardens and fountainfilled parks, as well as such a huge variety of tree species and meticulously tended and colourful flower beds, baskets and tubs, that my overall impression was one of a botanical garden set within a botanical garden! But never far from my mind, even embedded within this cornucopia of natural beauty, was an underlying sadness about its Jewish tragedy at the hands of the Nazis.

The first documented evidence of Jews living in Baden-Baden dates back to 1267. Although I would not be surprised if Jewish merchants had resided in Roman Aquae Aureliae alongside its one-time occupying legions, the first to utilise systematically the vicinity’s therapeutic waters and to benefit from their proven healing properties.

Baden-Baden Jews obtained full citizenship rights in the mid-19th century, when the state of Baden-Württemberg had a Jewish population of 25,000. The Jewish community prospered in all fields: the professions, commerce and the arts.

Aggressive anti-Semitism, and Hitler’s acquisition of power in 1933, must have come as quite a shock to their well-ensconced and affluent lives in a cultured town like Baden-Baden, with its charming riverside gardens and meadows for de rigeur promenading, idyllic hill paths for hiking, international concerts, opera, ballet and drama at the neo-classical-styled Festpielhaus and Kurhaus and the neo-Baroque Theatre, mineral-rich waters for imbibing in the celebrated and 90-metre-colonnaded Trinkhalle, renowned health spas and hotels for pampering, restaurants and cafés for high-class dining, upmarket boutiques and smart horse-race meetings… all for seeing and being seen.

As a result of Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the State of Baden’s community shrunk from just over 20,000 to around 9,000 by the outbreak of war in 1939. And its Jews were the first to be deported by the

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Third Reich, in 1940. No fewer than 5,000 were sent to the Gurs concentration camp in France, where (from 1942) they were transported to Nazi death camps in Poland. Some 500 Baden Jews survived the Holocaust, and in 1956, a Baden-Baden Jewish community (“Israelitische Kultusgemeinde”) was re-established officially. In 1969, there were more than 1,000 Jews spread across six communities in the State (with 66 in Baden-Baden, where a new synagogue had been consecrated in 1957). Today, the town’s Jews number over 300 (in a population of some 50,000); the vast majority hail from Russia or the former USSR. The new synagogue (at Werderstrasse 2), somewhat smaller than the town’s spectacular 19th century temple, was designed externally in a neo-classical style and sited in a prestigious location virtually adjacent to the Kurhaus (with its lavish casino and superb concert halls, where I attended some “Baden-Baden Philharmonie” performances). The shul’s regular Shabbat morning services begin at 10:00, and it was only a 10-minute walk from my hotel. Arriving early I waited in the lobby of the 5-star Dorint Hotel and Spa, almost opposite the shul’s double-columned entrance. I soon spotted a couple of men entering the building and, hoping for a minyan, I negotiated a pathway through no less than a dozen Porsches ringing the hotel’s steps (with their German yuppie drivers conversing preparatory to a motor rally) and crossed the road.

There were 17 congregants in the synagogue that radiant Shabbat morning, including two women and me. More than two-thirds appeared to be over the age of 60, and all were apparently of Russian origin (on a par with most of the 200,000 Jews residing in Germany today). The fact that Baden-Baden restaurants’ menus, estate agents’ window details and other indicators are printed also in Cyrillic suggests that there may be more Russians than just

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Jewish Russians in well-heeled Baden-Baden! And as is usual in German synagogues nowadays, Siddurs and Chumashim have a Russian translation. My Siddur’s frontispiece (doubtless in common with others in the shul) was inscribed (oddly, in English): “A gift to our Russian Ohel from the Religious Affairs Ministry and the Friends of Israel in Germany”.

In contrast to the synagogue’s external classical appearance, the interior is contemporary, white-walled and well-illuminated, and boasts a small ladies’ gallery. I estimated that the shul could seat about 100 or so worshippers (and probably, its capacity is met only on the High Holydays). Attached to the high ceiling is a remarkably large, blue (seemingly Perspex) Star of David, from which is suspended a sparkling chandelier. A reading desk, flanked by metal menorahs, faces the curtain-draped Ark (which contained, so far as I could see, two Sifrei Torah). A young man led the service and leyning, and, called to the reading of the Law, I was delighted to be given the aliyah.

Arriving just before the 90-minute service started, I was welcomed with comradely handshakes by the handful of men then present. Unfortunately, there was no Kiddush – I had really been looking forward to some pickled herring and a few vodka shots! And the congregants seemed to disperse fairly swiftly.

So unusually, and a little disappointingly, I was unable to converse, even in my rudimentary German, with anyone who may have been able to do so.

Over the last 20 years, since the collapse of the religion-repressive Soviet Union, I have witnessed Russian Jewish immigrants to Germany, with the help of dedicated rabbonim and with varying degrees of enthusiasm and success, endeavouring gradually to renew their faith and heritage. And there are now (especially in the principal cities), and with the financial support of federal, state and city authorities, some vibrant, active and sophisticated communities with an amazing infrastructure of architecturally superb synagogues, community centres, museums, kosher restaurants and much more.

The point is that increasing numbers of émigrés from the East are making the learning and practical effort to forge a Jewish identity and continuity. So, whilst a few of my fellow Baden-Baden congregants did not follow the Shabbat service using the otherwise available prayer books, or needed to recite the Torah brachas on their aliyot from a card printed in Cyrillic phonetics (rather than in Hebrew), their firm and genuine desire to participate as fully as possible was abundantly clear to me.

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More on Genesis 1-3

By Barry Landy In this note I make two more comments about the Genesis story, the first sparked by a JC correspondence, and the second by a conversation with the Rabbi of Norrice Lea Shul, Rabbi Dov Kaplan.

A friend of mine had a correspondence in the JC letters page (foolish perhaps!) about science versus the Genesis account of creation. My friend made the point that rather than worrying about the lack of dinosaurs and evolution in the Genesis 1 account, how about worrying about something really fundamentally against the science, namely that the Earth was created (according to Genesis 1) before the Sun.

Adam and Eve, by Gila Stein, Herzliya. Photo by David Shay. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.

I must say at the outset that I follow http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adam_and_Eve,_He Rambam's view (also held by Ibn Ezra rzliya.jpg and others) who says explicitly (Guide for the Perplexed) that if science proves something which is different to the Torah account then the Torah account must be reinterpreted (and not vice versa); in essence the account in Genesis is a script which must be interpreted in the light of science, or even taken as allegorical. My friend said that this is a copout, which in some sense it is, but as Rabbi Kaplan said, "it is better to have a copout than to believe the science is wrong."

There is a very elaborate rewriting of Genesis 1 by Ramban (Nachmanides) in terms of the science he understood, namely spheres and essences, which begins as follows: "Through the Ten Sefirot, God created, from absolute nothingness, the prime matter of the heavens and all it would contain and the prime matter of the

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earth and all that it would contain. The lower prime matter, after its creation from nothingness, was completely prime matter, that is matter without substance. God then clothed it in four forms: fire was above the water-earth, and air was above the water."

I mention this simply to point out that we do not need to feel restricted by the text of the Torah in our understanding of the Universe.

The second point is about the Garden of Eden story. I have already made the point (see the last Bulletin) that it is inconceivable that God intended Adam and Eve to stay in the Garden as in that case there would be no history, no Jewish people, no Torah. So we could ask whether actually Adam or Eve really sinned.

I would say they did not.

What actually happened? God planted two special trees in the Garden and told Adam and Eve not to eat of the fruit. But what was the need for that? Surely if the fruit were not to be eaten God simply did not need to place them where they could be found. Still, even though they knew where the trees were, Adam and Eve were not ever going to eat them, so God created the Nachash to tempt Eve. But on thinking about this, surely if God did not want Eve to eat the fruit, all he had to do was leave well alone and not create the Nachash. We are forced to conclude that by eating the fruit Adam and Eve were doing God's will and thus enabling the history of mankind to start (within the confines of that particular story at least).

Since Eve was carrying out God's will there was no sin. Consequently, no Original Sin, and nothing for babies to atone for, as we have believed all along but contrary to mainstream Christianity.

Why then was the story written that way?

Basically to provide a narrative to answer the most difficult question of all – "Why". Why is it so hard to make a living? Why is it so hard to give birth to children?

I found the following illuminating comment online and think it provides an excellent coda: We should wonder why the creation story is even found in the Torah. As opposed to other, pagan, religions, the creation story presents neither a political picture nor a practical obligation: neither the land of Israel, nor the Holy Temple, nor the nation of Israel are referenced or even mentioned in the whole account. Its sole goal is to teach us about God's relationship to the world and mankind.

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Cambridge Day Limmud

By Simon Goldhill

Cambridge Day Limmud was a quite extraordinary occasion. It was to my mind the best Jewish educational event held in Cambridge – with nearly seven hundred people taking part and some absolutely outstanding speakers and sessions. There should be a special beracha: when was the last time that 690 Jews were gathered in Cambridge, or 300 Cambridge Jewish residents were seen studying at the same time?

Because of the nature of the day you can only hear six presentations.

Personally, I had a blast. I began with Stephen Grosz, the best-selling psychoanalyst. He was a tall, mesmeric American, who spoke with calm authority and a lovely sense of the midrashic quality of psychoanalytic case histories. He told a beautiful story of a patient, apparently dying, and his silences in sessions. It reminded me of some haunting Hassidic tales of silence. I was sorry to miss Levi Lauer in this first slot (Shoshana and I generally went to different things so we could swap notes afterwards).

Lauer is an Orthodox rabbi from Israel who is very actively involved with social issues and especially the dark-side of sexual trafficking in Israel. I loved meeting him at our shabbos dinner, and he was by all accounts a truly inspirational figure about the potential for a better world in Israel. I then went to Gershon Baskin. Baskin is the man who negotiated Gilad Shalit’s release, and is one of the few Israelis regularly to visit Gaza. He spoke with fire and passion, and although he was the hero of his own story, it was brilliantly told. And deeply, personally moving. He had become involved with negotiations when his own wife’s cousin was abducted and murdered. One of the saddest and most difficult twists of the Shalit story was that Baskin’s relative’s murderers were released in the deal. He described so movingly the tearful exchanges with the victim’s wife, who could not understand or forgive such a deal.

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I was in conversation myself with Philippe Sands in the next session. Philippe was riveting and you could have heard a pin drop in the whole hour. He talked of how he had met and befriended two men in their seventies, both of whom had high ranking Nazi fathers. One claimed to love the father he had actually never really known and forgave him everything, and seemed to live in a life of denial. The other broke ranks and declared that his father deserved to hang, and so hated him that he had a photo of his dead body, taken ten minutes after he was hanged at Nuremberg, and he looked at the photo every day to confirm his father’s death. The long-term psychological damage to the children of these hateful fathers was extraordinarily interesting, and Philippe uncovered the story and his own engagement with it with poise. It was hard not to come out feeling deeply uncomfortable and reflective.

I next chaired George Steiner. What an event! Two hundred people packed in to hear the grand old man of literary culture. George is 85 and frail now, and he sat to speak, and had trouble hearing any questions. But his rhetoric flowed as ever before, powerful, rhythmic, aggressive, brilliant. I disagreed with almost everything he said, but the process of disagreement was so stimulating. Afterwards there were groups of Israelis and others fiercely debating what he said, some in rage, some in agreement, all transfixed by the occasion.

Then some Talmud. Danny Boyarin is one of the great Talmudists of our generation, with forty years experience. His shiur was engaging, challenging and sparkling with wit and intelligence. He compared the Yerushalmi and the Babli and their registers of language to explore what ‘a language of diaspora’ might be. It was good to see a room half full with kippa-wearing Jews, half less demonstrative in their observance, all rapt, together. Finally, exhausted, I went to hear Jonathan Gillis performing his retelling of the Joseph story through the eyes of the baker in gaol – a Kafkaesque understanding of how baffled the characters in the narrative are.

There were many other wonderful sessions. The rabbi recommended Theo Dunkelgrun’s amazing history of a Jewish manuscript; the Regius Professor of Divinity was wowed by Naomi Schachter’s introduction to Shatil’s work in Israel; Jonathan Price was blown away by Jacqueline Nichols’ discussion of artwork on the Talmud. Meir Shalev was a big hit, of course. Every session had good audiences, and many were packed to the rafters.

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Was there any sadness? Only the sorry picture of the London charedim trying to stop people going to such an event. I quote an Orthodox rabbi from Jerusalem, Nathan Cardozo, who like so many people finds such an attitude baffling and dismaying: “It is a sad state of affairs when rabbis believe they can still hide behind high-walled citadels of exclusiveness. More than that, it indicates a total disconnect from reality… The fact that Orthodox rabbis stay away from conferences such as Limmud is downright embarrassing to all of us Orthodox teachers… All it does is convince people that Orthodox Jews are afraid of any confrontation with those who think differently. It turns Orthodox Judaism into a laughing stock and convinces intelligent young Jews that it is an outmoded form of Judaism, which no longer has anything to offer and is driven by nothing but fear.”

Indeed, when I read the rabbi of Leeds claiming that you shouldn’t go to Limmud because you might meet someone with a Jewish name who isn’t Jewish, it is hard not to laugh at such incredibly poor arguments. It was not so long ago that these same charedi rabbis were declaring that it was wrong for a Jew to go to university, that “any Jew who went to university would make a bottle of wine treif if he opened it,” as the Chatam Sofer put it. It was good to see that such nonsense did not infect the rabbonim of Cambridge, and any confused person who stayed away because of such pseudo-halachic reasons not only separated themselves from our university community, but also missed out on a great opportunity to learn a great deal of Jewish wisdom and torah.

A few words about Young Limmud

By Helen Goldrein

Young Limmud was also a fantastic event, with a range of sessions for children from age 3 to 17. The younger children were more than content with Hebrew songs, arts and crafts, stories and cooking activities, all lead by top class facilitators. Older children were treated to interactive sessions with top educators, including Daniel Weiss, the Polonsky-Coexist Lecturer in Jewish Studies at the University of Cambridge (and bulletin contributor!), Jude Williams, Chief Executive of Tzedek, Tamar Drukker, senior lecturer in Hebrew at SOAS, and Daniel Pearl, editor of Channel 4’s Dispatches.

Inspiring the next generation of Jewish thinkers, leaders and community members is a vital task, and it is fitting that here in Cambridge our “children’s programme” was as exciting, stimulating and informative as anything the ‘grown-ups’ enjoyed.

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Launch of a radical new institution for Jewish learning In its first week, over fifty young adults gathered to engage with the ancient texts of Tanakh, Mishna and Talmud at the newly founded Cambridge Lehrhaus.

The Lehrhaus is undertaking to empower individuals to develop a personal relationship with these texts, making them relevant and meaningful in our day.

The Lehrhaus' mission is based on that of renowned German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig. In the 1920s, Rosenzweig recognized that postemancipation Jewry had become detached from traditional Jewish learning, and pioneered a radical new institution for Jewish learning that would enable a wider audience to once again become acquainted, and ultimately skilled, in the classic Jewish texts. The Cambridge Lehrhaus adopts Rosenzweig’s vision and encourages students to become independent learners; learners who think for themselves and are capable of responding to the challenges posed by the texts.

This project is supported by a number of Cambridge alumni and has as its communal figurehead the well-respected and dynamic Rabbi Reuven Leigh. His intellectual rigour and broad-mindedness, along with his chassidic ideals, have led him to create an authentic Jewish environment in Cambridge that incorporates the spirit of academic inquiry lying at the heart of the University.

“More and more young adults do not understand the languages in which seminal Jewish texts are written. Consequently, worlds of profound meaning are rendered inaccessible to them,” said Rabbi Leigh, director and founder of the Lehrhaus. “I believe that until people can learn the classic Jewish texts by themselves, they won’t be able to fully achieve a personal understanding of Judaism.”

In founding the Lehrhaus, Leigh is taking a formidable step to ensure that the public are empowered to autonomously discover and engage with Jewish texts for generations to come. Under his leadership, the Lehrhaus will no doubt act as a beacon for profound Jewish learning.

Leading academics in Jewish Studies have taken a keen interest in the Lehrhaus, offering invaluable support and advice. The advisory board is comprised of the following distinguished scholars in Cambridge: Professor Nicholas de Lange, Professor Simon Goldhill, Professor Stefan Reif, Dr Ed Kessler MBE, Dr Daniel Weiss, Professor David Abulafia, and Dr Anna Abulafia.

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The Lehrhaus offers a wide range of intriguing courses and seminars in numerous areas of Jewish thought. Lehrhaus hopes to provide novice learners with skills that will enable them to access the texts by themselves through attaining linguistic proficiency in Hebrew and Aramaic, together with an understanding of the context in which these texts were written. In addition, seminars, stand-alone talks and events will serve as a window to the regular courses on offer and will draw on the considerable talent available in Cambridge.

The Lehrhaus is open to the public and is designed to appeal to people at all levels of Jewish knowledge, including those without any prior experience or background in Jewish learning. The following core courses will be offered during the first year: Biblical Hebrew, Biblical History, Talmud, Responsa, and Modern Jewish Philosophy.

Email admin@thelehrhaus. org or visit www.thelehrhaus.org for registration and other course-related information.

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Spiced olive oil cupcakes

By Helen Goldrein

Chanukah cooking is all about the OIL. And fair enough, it is pretty central to the story, after all. But, enough with the frying already! Surely there’s another way to incorporate oil into something delicious?

With this in mind, I set about creating these cupcakes. Olive oil cakes have been around for a while, but many recipes contain yogurt, fruit, or other extras that just didn’t feel right for Chanukah. After extensive research, I finally created the following recipe. The results are lightly spiced, with a crisp top, moist texture, and a subtle flavour of olive oil.

Yum. If you are feeling extra indulgent you can dust them with icing sugar or even rustle up a little icing to glaze the tops.

As you can see from the photo, I couldn’t resist lining them up, topping them with Chanukah candles, and making a delicious cupcake Chanukiah.

Feel free to try that at home! Alternatively, just tuck in. Chanukah sameach!

Ingredients 2 eggs 150ml extra virgin olive oil 200g golden caster sugar 1 tsp vanilla essence 225g plain flour 1½ tsp baking powder ¾ tsp bicarbonate of soda 1 tsp mixed spice 200ml hot water Preheat the oven to 180C/350F, and prepare 18-20 cupcake cases.

Beat together the eggs, olive oil, sugar and vanilla.

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Separately, mix the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and mixed spice.

Add half the dry ingredients and half the water to the egg mixture and beat well. Add the remaining ingredients and beat until thoroughly combined. The mixture will be warm, and very runny.

Divide the mixture evenly between the cake cases. They will be around half full. I found the easiest way to do this was to scoop the mixture using a small cup and pour it into the cases.

Bake for 20-25 minutes until risen and golden, and toothpick inserted into the cakes comes out clean.

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Chanukah wordsearch How many words can you find the grid below?

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P

A

C

A

P

M

A

L

W

F

Q U E R N M A O Z T T R F I L S H A M A

B O X F L Z U R N B U G R O G S H I N H

A U Y E

O I H A M O C A

L A T K

Y B L E

V E

F B

H G

A K

O N D U

J E

H O A P

E T

R V

L S I K F O S

H M C A L B H

L A I B A E E

I G C A M B R T T A L Y M G

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H

A

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R R

N D

L

E P

M L

V I

H T S P C I N P O D B E E S T G U R R T X O T F O H K E L E Y O N P R T I S A M R M O F Y D A E T P C V Y Q L A H N K L E L T E D Y O T V E

M O N

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BURN CANDLE CHANUKIAH DOUGHNUT DREIDLE EIGHT DAYS FLAME GELT HASMONEAN KISLEV LAMP

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LATKE LIGHTS MACABEES MAOZ TZUR MENORAH MIRACLE OIL SHAMASH STORY TEMPLE VICTORY

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Colour in the Chanukah picture below, so it looks great!

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CTJC requests the pleasure of your company at our first

Country House Shabbat

28 February – 1 March 2014 at ‘The Lodge’ on the Ickworth House Estate, Suffolk Enjoy a revitalising Shabbat in luxurious surroundings, with delicious food, uplifting services, and unique entertainments. Take invigorating walks around the Italianate gardens or acres of National Trust estate. With an adventure playground, books and boardgames provided, there’s plenty for the children too.

Save the date for this unforgettable weekend

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