Time for Reflection
To lead our time for reflection today, we welcome Mr Ephraim Borowski, who is the honorary secretary of the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities.
Mr Ephraim Borowski (Scottish Council of Jewish Communities):
Thank you, Sir David.
It is an immense privilege to be invited to lead time for reflection, and all the more to be the first lay member of the Jewish community to do so. It is a privilege that would have been unimaginable to my parents—my late father was a refugee from the Holocaust, and my late mother's family were refugees from tsarist pogroms. In contrast, the fact that I stand here today is evidence of the rich mix of threads in the tartan of Scottish society—threads of faith, ethnicity, language, origin, history and geography—so that each of us is at the junction of so many intersecting minorities. Just as the strongest rope is made up of myriad overlapping fragile strands, we do well to remind ourselves that the strength of any society lies not in its homogeneity, but in its common purpose.
It is that consensus that the atrocity that engulfed Manhattan both shattered and—paradoxically—reinforced. When I was in the chamber only three days later to mark the jubilee of the Race Relations Act 1976, I remarked on the continuity of hatred—from racial discrimination, through murder and terrorism and ultimately to genocide. All depend on the objectification and demonisation of the other, which could be a whole nation or a whole people. Those who now blame the Arabs or the Muslims are no different from those who demonise the Americans or the Jews. To strive effectively against that mindset, we must realise how instinctive it is. As our sage Maimonides teaches, the first step to repentance is to recognise our faults; only then can we overcome them.
Last week, the Jewish world entered our 5762nd new year—a time for sober reflection on the year behind and fervent prayer for the year ahead. Tradition regards the new year as the birthday of the world. If the creation narrative of Genesis teaches us anything, it is that we are, all of us, whatever our colour, culture, or creed, made in the image of God. Remarkably, the Hebrew word translated here as God is used elsewhere to refer to a human judge. It is our capacity for judgment that is in the image of God—our capacity to distinguish right from wrong and our capacity to make moral choices, together with the obligation to create institutions that uphold and respect the rule of law.
As we reach the end of our annual circuit of the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, we read Moses's final address to the Jewish people as they prepare to enter the promised land:
"See, I have placed before you today life and good, and death and evil … And you shall choose life."
To be able to choose good, the possibility of evil must exist. That freedom to choose is perhaps, as the existentialists taught, the curse of the human condition, for the price of that choice may be a rain of terror upon Manhattan. If the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, it is vigilance against the unimaginable consequences of other people's choices.
Truly, we saw on that terrible, terror-filled day, the consequences
"if your heart strays, and you … worship false gods";
not, that is, the worship of our one God by a different name, or in a different edifice, or with a different ritual, but the elevation of some human goal above God himself and above the common humanity symbolised by our common ancestry in Adam and Eve.
We are reminded, in the words of one of the most moving prayers that we will recite tomorrow on Yom Kippur, that humanity—in every sense of that word—is merely
"like withering grass, like a fading flower, like a flitting shadow, like a passing cloud … and like a fleeting dream."
So long as the human capacity for evil survives, it falls to you, members of the newest democratic Parliament in the world, to choose life—to shape a society that is based upon the principles of equal worth, mutual respect and the rule of law, and in which all may live in understanding, peace, and harmony.
To adapt another figure from our liturgy, which is appropriate to this momentous time: may the old year end along with its curses, and may a new year of blessings begin.