From The President
Sophie Green will be celebrating her Bat Mitzvah this Shabbat and we look forward to hearing her D’var Torah. We wish Mazal Tov to Carla, Roni, Sadie, Harry and Ruby, great-grandmother Rhoda Green, grandparents Yvonne Spiegel, Sharon & Stephen Green and aunt & Uncle Lee & Eli Green and family. We thank the Green family for sponsoring the Kiddush.
We had a delightful Summer Shmooze evening last Shabbat at the Feldman’s where guest speaker, Rob Samuel, related some interesting aspects of the various religious and cultural communities he has engaged with during his time as a councillor on Willoughby City Council. He also gave some insights into the recent Australian Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism held on the Gold Coast in September. Rob was recently appointed CEO at Shalom College and Collective and we value the work he does on Council and for our community. Our thanks to Rabbi Menachem and Mushki Feldman for their hospitality and delicious food.
On a sadder note, Rob’s dad, Andrew, passed away early Wednesday morning. We wish long life to Gill, Rob and Ellie, Douglas and Jo, Jeremy and Ilana and Colin and Michelle and all the extended family.
Last Sunday we joined 51 other “buildings of interest" in the city and re-opened our doors for Sydney Open 2025. Nearly 1000 visitors were welcomed into the sanctuary in small groups by our enthusiastic team. They were given a short talk on the history, architecture and religious life of the Shule by one of our 10 guides. The event was expertly coordinated by Toby Hammerman with support from Larry Dorfan (GM) and Curator Dr Jana Vytrhlik along with a dedicated team of volunteer ushers and guides and staff from Museums of History NSW. Thank you to all who made the day an outstanding success.
I thought I would share one of the comments we received during the week.
"To the Staff, Great Women and Rabbis,
Thank you so much for opening the Synagogue today to Sydney Open guests.
When I entered the Synagogue, I felt such a wonderful energy and was deeply moved. As a Sephardi with an Israeli father but Christian mother, I have not visited a synagogue before, but I really felt a strong connection to both the building and the volunteers.
Todah raba"
Upcoming Calendar Events
Join us Shabbat evening, 8th November for another summer schmooze at the home of Susie and Stephen Kopp, 129 Harrington St, The Rocks. Guest speaker is board member, Soraya Calavassy who will talk about My Life In PR – All the stories I am allowed to tell!
The next Coffee & Connection will be Monday 10th November.
We wish Mazal Tov to members marking Wedding and Bar Mitzvah anniversaries and birthdays this Shabbat. (WA) Immanuel Chakkravarthi & Yamini Immanuel, Henry & Judy Newman, Paul & Yvonne Kinney. (BMA) Allan Robinson and Alexander Sperling. (B) Barbara Freedman, Allan Robinson, Peter Engel and Stephen Green.
To any member who has been unwell, we wish you Refua Sh’lema and members marking a Yahrzeit, we wish you Long Life.
Shabbat Shalom
From the Rabbi
DEVAR TORAH - Vayera 5786
It is a great pleasure to wish Sophie Green mazal tov on her Bat Mitzvah this week. Mazal tov to her parents Carla and Roni, grandparents Sharon and Stephen and Yvonne, great-grandmother Rhoda, siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins, family and friends.
This Shabbat afternoon, Susie and Stephen Kopp are kindly hosting the Shabbat Schmooze at their home, which is at 129 Harrington Street in the Rocks. We can meet in the lobby at 7pm and the concierge will send us up to their apartment. I am delighted that the speaker after Mincha and over refreshments will be our Board member, and PR guru Soraya Calavassy, who will be sharing the best (repeatable) stories from the world of public relations.
My Devar Torah this week is inspired by an article written by a member who joined recently, the psychiatrist Dr Bruce Lachter. In 2012 Australasian Psychiatry published his thoughts of the Binding of Isaac (Akedat Yitzchak), called ‘On the crisis of conscience’ [Australasian Psychiatry 20(2) 148-152]. A crisis of conscience arises when a person is asked to do something they feel is wrong, and as such Abraham being asked to sacrifice his son, Isaac, is a classic crisis of conscience. This naturally creates a very stressful experience for the person going through it, in this case Abraham. Bruce points out that under the influence of severe stress there can be a breakdown of the barrier between external command and internal thought, and what is experienced as coming from the outside is actually coming from within. Bruce then takes his argument forward in a particular way which you can read in his paper. On the basis of the foundations that Bruce has laid I want to make my own suggestion.
When God spoke to Abraham (as Bruce observes, following many commentators) He told him to ‘lift him [Isaac] up’. This implies a sacrifice but does not exactly specify it, and as we know from the end of the story, God did not actually desire Abraham to kill Isaac. Nevertheless, on a conscious level, that is what Abraham understood God was asking of him, and he dutifully obeyed. But subconsciously there was more going on for Abraham. First, he detected that God had not actually asked him to kill Isaac. Secondly, Abraham’s conscience revolted at the thought of doing so.
When it came to the moment of crisis, when Abraham was about to kill his son, he heard not God, but an angel saying to him ‘do not raise your hand against the boy’, and Abraham sacrificed a ram instead. Building on the concepts that Bruce set out, I suggest that the ‘angel’ was an auditory hallucination expressing the feelings of Abraham’s conscience. Abraham’s inner voice dared not impersonate God, but it could take on the persona of an angel. Under stress, the internal voice became, in Abraham’s experience, an external voice.
Where does this take us in our understanding of Akedat Yitzchak, and especially how it operated as a test of Abraham. Perhaps we can say that the test was this: God gave an ambiguous instruction which might be taken to mean kill Isaac, but He wanted Abraham’s conscience to register that this was a moral impossibility and to understand that this did not mean sacrificing his son. Initially, Abraham did not pass the test, because he made all the preparations for the sacrifice, but when the moment of truth came, his conscience did kick in, as God had hoped it would, albeit ventriloquised under the impact of stress, through the voice of an angel. In the end Abraham passed the test, which was to follow what his conscience told him God must want (and not want), and which was always hiding in plain sight in the ambiguity of the initial Divine command.
This ambiguity is repeated in the second message from the angel (perhaps in this case an authentic message from God), which bestows a blessing on Abraham ‘because you have done this and not held back (chashachta) your son’ What is ‘this’ and what is the correct way to translate the Hebrew word ‘chashachta’. ‘This’ is often understood to be Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, and ‘chashachta’ to mean that Abraham did not withhold Isaac from death at God’s command. But what if it is the opposite? What if ‘this’ means Abraham’s decision to let Isaac go, and chashachta means that Abraham didn’t hold back Isaac to the point of killing him, but instead decided to let him go?
In this way the text continues to test us. What way will we read it, what will our conscience demand of us, and how can we discern what God truly wants of us? Our precedent is to follow Abraham, the victor of the test, and understand that God wants life and not death.
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