For a long time, the synagogue felt to me like the safest place in the world, so much so that I thought I wouldn’t be frightened, even if I had a sudden heart attack during the service. I have not had that feeling of safety in the synagogue for some years although I have sometimes experienced it elsewhere, in Israel for example, or on a march in London, for the hostages or against antisemitism.

My synagogue is the denomination now called Progressive, formerly Reform. Ethics, Tikkun Olam, B’tzelem Elohim are the watchwords: the aspiration to do right, repair the world, stand up for humanity, every person created in the image of God. Universality counts for more than particularity: interfaith, outreach and diversity trump insularity, whether religious or social.

We still say a prayer for the release of captives, with the hostages in mind, but the terrible war which started after 7 October 2023 gnaws away at the spirit of the services and the clergy are troubled by the suffering of the enemy, whom they would not usually call ‘enemy,’ I think, because who is to say one side is us and the other, not us? In the liturgy, the words ‘and all the world’ are added to the English translations of prayers which particularize God’s relationship with Israel, as in, ‘Make peace upon Israel and upon all the world.’ Instead of saying ‘Give Israel peace,’ we say ‘Give Israel the strength to make peace.’ Would it be too much to petition the Almighty to give the Palestinians the strength to make peace? Is it only Israel which has the potency and the duty to make peace?

I am accustomed to the language of our translations; of referring to God with ungendered terms such as the Eternal in the translation of biblical texts, but I wonder, does anyone in prayer address God as ‘The Eternal’? It’s so cumbersome. If alone, I tend to say ‘Avinu shebashamayim,’ which exactly matches the opening words of the Christian Pater Noster prayer, ‘Our Father which art in Heaven.’

On this second day of Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, 2025, our elderly and experienced emeritus rabbi is leading the service. Over the years, he has been an intelligent and inspirational leader, as supportive in pastoral matters as anyone could wish but, in recent years, has been a regular signatory of letters protesting about Israel’s policies in the protracted age of Netanyahu. If I put my mind to it, I can recall his sermons from the time of Menachem Begin, being extremely dismissive of the Prime Minister, who was probably then Israel’s most conservative Prime Minister to date. Meanwhile, generations were growing up in the Reform and Liberal synagogues, as contemptuous of reactionary Israeli politicians as they were of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, if not more so.

Today, with homiletic brilliance, the rabbi begins his sermon by referring to the ‘Invisible Gorilla’ experiment conducted by psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. This experiment showed that viewers asked to concentrate on a video of students playing basketball tended to miss the fact that a person in a gorilla suit strolled past the players. With attention focused on the game, they missed something which seems unmissable, when you are prepared to see it. I suspect that the rabbi is hinting to the congregation that we fail to see the suffering in Gaza because our attention is on Israel’s plight, the rocket attacks from Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and Iran, the terrorist attacks and the massacre of 7 October. Eventually he becomes explicit in saying that we fail to see what is happening or to feel compassion for the Gazans. We care too much, too exclusively about our own people, is the message, and not enough about the agony of the enemy, although he would not use the word enemy.

When he speaks of Gaza, saying that human decency requires compassion from us, not indifference, I do not think this is wrong as a thought, but that it is inappropriate as a sermon. Why suppose that wanting Israel to win its wars means we are indifferent to the Palestinians?

At that moment, I removed my prayer shawl – which was exclusively a male garment until some of us women in Progressive synagogues started to wear them in the 1980s – and folded it into my tallit bag. I put on my jacket and, when the sermon was finished, I walked out. I would miss the mussaf service with the blowing of the shofar. All right, I heard it yesterday, on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, and will hear it again at the end of Yom Kippur. But still, it hurt me to leave and miss the additional prayers. I knew it would hurt me, but still I did it.

It was just too predictable that on this holy day, this holy congregation would be treated to a discourse similar to a report from BBC, Sky News or Channel 4; a front page of The Guardian, or a Parliamentary debate; Question Time , Any Questions, the Academy Awards, Glastonbury, the UN and any number of NGOs. So I walked. Somebody had to.