The Music of the “Lost Generation

By the time you read this, the celebrations and services for the Jewish New Year 5781 will be but a distant memory. If you can remember that far back, you’ll recall that these services took place entirely online, led and presented by a quartet of Liberal rabbis. For several of these services, the four rabbis, Charley Baginsky, Rachel Benjamin, Neil Janes and I, combined to offer a creative approach to the mornings of Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur. At the risk of sounding like I am blowing my own shofar, I’d also like to remind people of the Yom Kippur Additional Service. Many of you know that I consider this to be the most meaningful service of the High Holydays – indeed, the most meaningful service I have ever experienced. I took it upon myself to turn it into an hour-long audio-visual presentation. This can be found on the TLSE YouTube channel, at this address https://youtu.be/TuVsNd1O18s. If you run out of box sets to watch during the long evenings of winter, please take an hour to try this. I think it has many important things to say about Judaism and our relationship with it. Because there are going to be some long evenings ahead. From the solitude of an empty synagogue, I concluded the Ne’ilah service and made Havdalah just before 7.00pm on Monday 28th September. At that point, those who were watching the service on Zoom wished one another a Happy New Year and we looked forward with hope and anticipation to the future. Despite the challenges of lockdown and the threat of Covid-19, perhaps we believed that things would improve and that life would return to some kind of normality. But at the time of writing, in the middle of October, the pandemic is returning and great swathes of the UK – indeed the world – are being placed once more into lockdown. Perhaps by the time you read this, we will once again be confined to our homes, permitted only to leave for essential supplies or urgent matters. It was hard enough earlier in the year when we first went into lockdown. But the weather was good, the evenings were light and somehow we managed to get through it. It’s going to be much tougher this time round. It’s going to be colder and darker than last time. But if the High Holydays have taught us anything this year, it’s that we can reach out to one another online. The TLSE Evening Gatherings, which began the very day we went into lockdown in March, touched the lives of many TLSE congregants. And they’re back. Every evening at 6.30pm, starting on the 1st November. And as well as being on Facebook, they will also be on Zoom. Synagogue is all about community. Community is all about supporting one another. And we can do that by gathering virtually every evening at 6.30pm. So I look forward to ‘seeing’ as many of you as are able to be there at 6.30pm every night through what threatens to be a long and difficult winter. Let’s do what we can to keep one another safe and sane in the weeks ahead.