Rabbi Leah’s Sermon for Shabbat Chazon 5786, 18th July 2026

This morning feels like one of those moments that Judaism seems to specialise in: standing on a threshold.

In a fortnight's time, I'll be leaving for maternity leave, as Benji and I prepare to welcome our second child into the world. This is my last sermon before I am away for much of the next ten months. It is also our last Shabbat morning service together before Kehillah pauses for August. Jewishly, too, we find ourselves at a threshold. We have just welcomed the new month of Av. We are in the Three Weeks, approaching Tisha B'Av. This is Shabbat Chazon, the Shabbat of vision, named after Isaiah's vision of Jerusalem, which we will read shortly. We begin Sefer Devarim, the fifth and final book of the Torah. And somehow, astonishingly, we are already entering the final fifth of the Jewish year. Before we know it, we will have walked through the seven weeks of consolation, into Elul, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and once again find ourselves dancing with the Torah on Simchat Torah.

Judaism has an extraordinary way of reminding us that we are almost never simply arriving or departing. More often than not, we are in between. Between one chapter and the next. Between memory and hope. Between what has been and what has not yet become.

Perhaps that is why I have found myself thinking so much this week about these past six years I’ve been at Kehillah.

When I arrived at Kehillah, we were a much smaller community than we are now. We have grown—not just in numbers, although thank God we have—but in confidence, in friendship, in Torah, in music, in our willingness to ask difficult questions, and in our capacity to hold one another through life's joys and sorrows.

These six years have contained so much life. You have watched me become a mother.

You held us through the birth of our first daughter. You sent me away for nine months to immerse myself in Torah learning in Jerusalem. You welcomed me home only seven weeks ago. And now, with extraordinary generosity, you are preparing to send me away once again, this time to welcome another child.

One of the things I wrote to you while I was away was that one of the great gifts of Jewish communal life is the possibility of raising children not only within a family, but within a kehillah. I believe that even more deeply now than I did when I wrote it.

There is something profoundly Jewish about the conviction that children belong not only to their parents but to a whole community of teachers, elders, friends, aunties and honorary grandparents. I think often of our Emerita Rabbi Shulamit Ambalu, raising her children within this community, and I find myself quietly hoping that perhaps, if we are blessed, Benji and I might do the same. That our children will grow up knowing not only that they have parents who love them, but that they belong to a community that delights in them, challenges them, teaches them Torah, feeds them cake at kiddush, and reminds them who they are.

That is a remarkable gift. And it is one that I do not take for granted.

In this morning's Torah reading, Moses looks out at the people and says something rather surprising.

"May the Eternal, the God of your ancestors, increase your numbers a thousandfold and bless you as God has promised you."

It is a beautiful blessing. But what comes next is perhaps even more interesting.

"How can I bear unaided the trouble of you, and the burden, and the bickering?"

It's wonderfully human.

Moses looks around and says, in effect: You have become too much for one person to carry. And that is not a complaint. It is a blessing.

Because communities that grow cannot be sustained by one person. Growth means shared leadership. Growth means trusting one another. Growth means that Torah belongs to all of us.

One of the quiet joys of returning these past seven weeks has been seeing just how much has flourished while I have been away.

Cantor Rachel has led with extraordinary wisdom and care. Holly and our Trustees have carried enormous responsibility. Our service leaders have continued to make Torah come alive week after week. So many of you have stepped forward, organised events, welcomed newcomers, cooked, sung, learned, fundraised, visited one another, argued with one another, laughed together, and continued building the kind of community we have always hoped Kehillah could become.

That is exactly what Moses hopes for. Not a people dependent on one leader. A people capable of carrying covenant together.

And perhaps that, too, is one of the gifts of maternity leave. It reminds us that a rabbi is not the community. A rabbi belongs to the community. Just as each one of us belongs to one another.

Over the past nine months, I had the privilege of returning to Jerusalem to study full-time at Pardes.

People have asked me what I learned. And the honest answer is: so much that I am still discovering it.

I spent long days in the Beit Midrash immersed in Mishnah, Talmud, halakhah and Tanakh. I wanted to become more literate—to read more Gemara in the original, to strengthen my Hebrew, to deepen my understanding of halakhic reasoning, to become more at home in the conversations that have shaped Jewish life for centuries.

And I leave feeling that those hopes were fulfilled beyond what I imagined.

One teacher in particular, Rabbi Rahel Berkovitz, transformed the way I read rabbinic literature. She has this extraordinary ability to uncover the humanity within the texts—to show that beneath the legal arguments are people wrestling with grief, love, fear, responsibility and hope.

Other teachers gave me a rigour that I know will stay with me for the rest of my rabbinate.

As a Progressive rabbi, one of the greatest gifts of learning in a traditional but pluralistic Beit Midrash was precisely that challenge. I have come home more convinced than ever that the liberal Jewish world desperately needs more Torah. More literacy. More confidence in our own inheritance. More rootedness in the extraordinary conversations our tradition has been having for two thousand years.

But perhaps the most important thing I learned was this:

Torah learning often felt less like an escape from the world than a way of remaining accountable to it.

I don't think I understood that as deeply before this year.

There can be a temptation to imagine the Beit Midrash as a refuge from politics, from violence, from suffering—from the relentless noise of the world outside. I found almost the opposite.

The deeper I entered Torah, the more responsible I felt for the world beyond its walls. Because Torah is not simply there to comfort us. It is there to ask something of us. It is there to make demands upon us. It is there to shape the kind of people we become.

And that meant that some of the most profound learning I did this year happened not only sitting opposite a chevruta with a page of Gemara between us, but also sitting around Shabbat tables with Jews whose politics were profoundly different from my own; listening to Palestinian and Israeli organisers; visiting communities working for a different future; and discovering that disagreement, when carried with seriousness and love, can itself become a form of Torah.

One of the phrases Pardes uses is machloket matters – disagreement matters. Not because disagreement is pleasant. Often it isn't. But because our tradition believes that relationships are capable of surviving disagreement.

Indeed, that is precisely what machloket l'shem shamayim means: argument for the sake of Heaven. Not argument in order to win. Argument in order to remain faithful to one another, and to truth.

And after these past years, I think our Jewish world needs that discipline more than ever.

And perhaps that is why some of the hardest and most important learning of this year was not about finding easy answers.

Because I came to Jerusalem carrying a lot of love. And I came carrying a lot of grief.

I have now spent almost four years of my adult life living in Israel-Palestine. I have built friendships there. I have studied there. I have prayed there. I have worked alongside people there. It is a place that has shaped me profoundly.

And after October 7th, and after the devastation that followed in Gaza, I found myself wondering whether I could go back.

I want to say that honestly.

Because I know many of us have experienced this past three years with a similar sense of rupture. Many people have felt grief, fear, anger, confusion, and sometimes even a sense of estrangement from places, people, or communities they once felt close to.

I was not sure I could return to Jerusalem. And yet, I opened that door.

Not because my questions had disappeared. Not because my political analysis had changed.

If anything, living there again deepened my conviction that the future of that land must be one rooted in dignity, equality, safety and freedom for everyone who lives there—Palestinians and Israelis alike.

I remain convinced that I do not want my own children to grow up in a society where their Jewish identity can be nurtured through a system that keeps them separated from Palestinian children, from Palestinian stories, and from Palestinian humanity. That is not the future I long for. And I think that question—what kind of society forms our children—is one that matters everywhere, including here in Britain, and including in my own country of origin, the United States, where we are seeing the rise of so many authoritarian and racist impulses.

We do not only fight for the world we want in one place. We fight for it wherever we are.

But returning to Jerusalem taught me something else, too. It taught me that refusing to look away is itself a religious practice.

During my time in the land, one of the most painful and meaningful parts of the year was continuing my relationship with Palestinian partners through the Center for Jewish Nonviolence.

Just before I left for Jerusalem, my two-year-old daughter received a small package.

Inside were prayer beads that my friend Awdah Hathaleen had sent her from his pilgrimage to Mecca.

Like so many of us, Awdah and I had known each other for years, almost a decade, through my repeated time in Masafer Yatta in the West Bank with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence. When the beads arrived, I was preparing to return to Jerusalem, and I remember feeling genuinely excited that, in just a few months, I would see him again.

But Awdah was murdered before I arrived. He was killed just weeks before I returned.

And so this year, alongside my Torah learning, there was also grief. There was sitting with his family and community. There was marking his arbaeen, the forty days after his death. There was harvesting olives alongside Palestinian communities under threat and surveillance.

And there was the painful reminder that our relationships are not abstract.

People are not symbols. People are not political positions. People are people. And Judaism insists that we see them.

Our tradition teaches us that pidyon shvuyim, the freeing of captives, is among the greatest mitzvot. But our tradition also teaches that we cannot save some lives by destroying the moral fabric of society. We cannot allow fear or power to erase the humanity of others.

For me, that is not a political add-on to Judaism. It is Judaism.

The Torah we study in the Beit Midrash is the same Torah that asks us how we treat the stranger, how we respond to suffering, how we use power, and whether we can recognise the image of God in another human being.

That is why I came home from Jerusalem not with fewer questions, but with deeper commitment.

Commitment to Torah. Commitment to Jewish life. Commitment to human dignity. Commitment to the difficult work of building relationships across difference.

Because this, too, is part of our tradition.

And perhaps this brings us back to where we began: Shabbat Chazon.

The word chazon means vision. At first glance, that seems strange for this particular Shabbat.

This is the Shabbat before Tisha B'Av. We are preparing to remember destruction: the destruction of the Temples, the devastation of Jewish communities, the moments in history when hatred, violence and division tore apart what had been built.

And yet Jewish tradition calls this Shabbat "vision."

Perhaps because vision is not the same thing as optimism. Vision is not pretending that everything is fine. Vision is the ability to see what is possible even when we are surrounded by what is broken.

The prophet Isaiah saw a Jerusalem that was deeply wounded. And yet he also imagined a future in which people would beat swords into ploughshares, in which the city would become a place of justice and peace.

Our tradition does not ask us to move too quickly from grief to hope.

First comes Tisha B'Av. First we sit with what has been lost. Then come the seven weeks of consolation.

Jewish time understands something profound: healing cannot be forced. Hope that skips over grief is not real hope. But grief that cannot eventually make room for hope leaves us unable to move.

The Jewish calendar asks us to practise both.

And perhaps that is where we find ourselves as a community, too.

We know there are giants before us.

The Torah portion we read a few weeks ago, Parashat Sh'lach, reminded us of the spies who entered the Land and saw giants. Ten saw only fear. Two saw possibility. And the Torah's wisdom is not that the giants were imaginary.

The giants were real. The question was what else they could see.

We live in a world with real giants.

We know the pain of antisemitism. We know the devastation of war. We know the dangers of racism, authoritarianism and division. We know how easy it is to become overwhelmed by everything that feels broken.

But we also know another truth.

We know this community.

We know the joy of Marina's baby blessing a few weeks ago, with eighty people gathered around a family welcoming new life.

We know the joy of Pride Shabbat, when we affirmed that every person is created b'tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.

We know the joy of learning together, singing together, celebrating together, disagreeing together.

We know that communities are built not only in moments of certainty, but in moments of complexity.

And so, as I leave you for this next chapter, I don't leave with a sense of ending. I leave with gratitude.

Gratitude for six extraordinary years. Gratitude that you have allowed me to be your rabbi while also becoming a mother. Gratitude that you sent me away to learn and welcomed me home with open arms. Gratitude that you are the kind of community where Torah can be studied seriously, where questions can be asked honestly, where people can disagree and remain connected, and where every person is invited to bring their whole self.

In a fortnight, I will step away for a while.

A new season will begin. For me. For my family. For Kehillah.

But Jewish time teaches us that seasons are not endings. They are transformations.

Soon we will move from Av to consolation. From consolation to repentance. From repentance to celebration. From the old year to the new. From one reading of Torah to another.

We will finish Deuteronomy and immediately begin Genesis again.

The story continues.

And that is what I wish for us.

That we continue to be a community capable of holding complexity without losing compassion. A community rooted deeply enough in Torah to ask difficult questions. A community brave enough to face suffering without turning away. A community joyful enough to celebrate new life. A community committed enough to keep building a world where every person can flourish.

Because ultimately, that is the blessing Moses offers.

"May the Eternal increase you a thousandfold and bless you."

May Kehillah continue to grow—not only in numbers, but in wisdom. May we continue to become a place where people find belonging. May we continue to build a Judaism that is courageous, compassionate and alive.

And may my children, and all of our children, inherit a community—and a world—that is worthy of their dreams.

Shabbat shalom.