Maidenhead Synagogue
20 September 2026 / 10 Tishrei 5787
A few weeks ago, at the end of the summer, I was standing barefoot at the top of a short flight of stone steps of a 18th century mikveh in Chania, on the island of Crete. It was a Friday afternoon, and the heat had not lifted all day. I had walked there through the old town, through the narrow streets and the smell of the city, and by the time I arrived I was warm all the way through.
The steps led down into water. I left everything at the side of the pool, and I went down, I went under, and the cold went through me like a shock.
I try to do this once a year, in the weeks leading to the High Holy Days, when I can. I go because it is a moment of awareness. There is nothing between me and the water, and for a short time there is nothing much between me and the year that is coming, naked in the physical and spiritual sense.
I had no particular expectation. I had reached no conclusion about the year behind me, and I had made no resolution about the year ahead. My body reacted to the cold before my mind did. It gasped and tightened and brought me back up, and only afterwards did I begin to ask what had happened to me.
The pool I stepped into is called a mikveh.
It is not a bath, and immersing in the mikveh has nothing to do with being made clean. A person washes thoroughly before going in, so that the water is never doing that work. A mikveh marks a passage. We immerse before a conversion, before a wedding, in some communities before Shabbat and the festivals, after childbirth, after contact with the dead, in short, before any transformative moment in our life. Of course, childbirth and bereavement are not failures, and nobody in those situations has done anything wrong. What those moments have in common is that a person is moving from one state to another, and the water marks the move, as an act that raises awareness of a transformation.
A mikveh has specific requirements. The water must be living water (mayyim chayyim), which in our tradition means water that is connected to its source and is moving, rain or a spring, water that has not been drawn and carried in buckets. The water must be held in a structure, and that structure has to contain a certain minimum amount. Water running loose across a courtyard is not a mikveh, however fresh it is. A river, the sea will do though. It has to be alive, and it has to be contained, and if either is missing, it is not kosher, not fit for purpose.
What struck me that afternoon in Chania, as it does every year when I go into these living waters, is that the body registers the experience before the mind does. We tend to assume that we must understand a thing first and perform it afterwards, that belief comes before practice and gives practice its meaning. Our tradition has rarely worked in that order. When our ancestors stood at Sinai, when asked what they were intending to do, our Torah tells us they answered na’aseh v’nishma, we will do and we will hear (Exodus 24:7). The doing, the experience, comes first in their answer. A ritual does not wait for us to be ready for it. It reaches us through the body, through a gesture, through cold water, or through a melody that begins before we have worked out what we think, and whatever understanding follows comes later, if it comes at all. Sometimes an experience stays transformative even if we don’t have words to name it.
Something of that kind has already happened here this evening.
We began with Kol Nidre, a declaration in Aramaic, chanted three times, which releases us from the vows and promises we will make in the coming year and fail to keep. And immediately after it our machzor gives us a verse from the Torah, sung three times as well, from the moment when Moses pleads for a frightened and failing people. ‘Salach’ti kid’varekha, I pardon, as you have asked’ (Numbers 14:20). Before we have confessed anything, the liturgy has already told us how this concludes. During these twenty-five hours, we will confess together, out loud, in the plural, in a long list that covers far more than any one of us has done, so that nobody has to arrive with a list of their own and nobody stands up alone. And tomorrow evening the day will close with Ne’ilah, which means the closing of a gate, and the shofar will sound one last time, and it will be over. This ending is a sort of closure, a collective awareness that the process is done for this year, that it may not have worked entirely as well as we wished, but there will be another year. There will be another year, because none of this is ever finished.
Which brings me back to that mikveh in Crete, because the synagogue it belongs to has a history that is at the same time fascinating and tragic. Cretan Jews belonged to a group of Jews called Romaniotes. They were Greek-speaking Jews who went into diaspora in Hellenistic times, roughly the time of Alexander the Great and the Maccabees. They are neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi, but they developed a particular Jewishness with its language and its traditions.
The synagogue in Chania is called Etz Hayyim (Tree of Life), and it is the last synagogue left on the island. At the end of May 1944, the German occupiers rounded up and arrested the remaining members of the Jewish community of Crete, two hundred and sixty-five souls. They were taken across the island to be sent to Auschwitz and put aboard a cargo ship called the Tanais, and in the early hours of the ninth of June the ship was sunk by a British submarine which didn’t know who was onboard. There were no survivors. That brought to an end a Jewish presence on Crete going back more than two thousand years.
The building of the synagogue in Chania stood derelict for about fifty years afterwards. The roof fell in. It was used as a dump. The mikveh, the same pool I stepped into a few weeks ago, was full of filth. In 1996 a scholar called Nikos Stavroulakis began to restore it, and in October 1999 the synagogue was rededicated. Today, in Chania, Rabbi Nicholas de Lange, a British Rabbi and Cambridge scholar, is leading the Yom Kippur services, as we speak.
There is no direct descendants of the original community in Chania. Nobody inherited that synagogue. The people who look after it now are people who arrived afterwards, from elsewhere, and they hold Kabbalat Shabbat there every Friday evening. It is a house that has no inherited members and is still functioning, still being built, and the water in its mikveh still runs.
Here, at Maidenhead Synagogue, we are also a house in the making. It is simply what a community is. A synagogue is never finished. People arrive and people leave, and every generation has to decide again what it is doing here and why.
And because a house is being built rather than merely maintained, it needs pillars to maintain it, in the way that living water needs a vessel. I want to name two of ours.
The first is the dignity of every person. Our Torah says that the human being is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), and in this building that is a working rule that knows no compromise. Everyone here is entitled to come as they are, to believe what they honestly believe, to be whoever they are, to explore their understanding of the Jewish tradition, and to be treated with care while they work everything out. The same freedom and respect are owed by each of us to everyone else in the room. That is not negotiable, and it is the condition on which the rest depends.
The second is that we keep reading and living our tradition together. It is what makes this a synagogue rather than a social club. We may read our tradition in many different ways, and we will disagree, and that is healthy. Disagreement in itself is beneficial, because it helps to move on. How we agree to disagree is a bigger challenge, particularly in a world that has lost nuance and the capacity to listen. That is a pitfall we must avoid. However, what we do not get to do is close the book and declare ourselves finished with it. We would become complacent and lazy, the first signs of stagnation and decay.
I have been your rabbi for two years now, and I have spent most of that time observing and listening, because I thought I needed time to truly understand you as a community. I have listened carefully. I think I can say now what I believe this house is for, and I intend to spend this year building it with you: a place where people are held, where they can explore what it means to them to be Jewish without being judged, and a place where the Jewish conversation carries on and nourishes us.
Let us go back to that synagogue courtyard in Crete.
In Chania, a community that once thrived has disappeared, and yet the water still runs, every Friday evening people come and gather to welcome Shabbat. Nobody there inherited anything. They turned up, and they built. They picked up right where the work was left off.
Our law says that when a person immerses, nothing may come between the body and the water. Not a ring, not a watch, not a thread. The word for such a barrier is chatzitzah, an ‘interruption’, ‘something in the way’. If anything is between you and the water, the immersion has not happened, the ritual hasn’t transformed you.
There is nothing that needs to come between any of us and this night of Yom Kippur, and nothing that needs to come between any person and this house we are building together. Whatever any of us has brought through the doors this evening, none of it is a barrier between you and the transformative power of Yom Kippur. Every person in this room tonight, whether you come every Shabbat or once a year, is one of the builders of this house in the making and will be transformed by the power of our rituals.
May we go into these hours of Yom Kippur as we are, with nothing in the way. May we let this day do its work on us, in the body first and in the understanding later. And may we stand here together tomorrow evening when the gate closes, lighter than we came, and ready to build.
G’mar chatimah tovah.