Becoming: Individuation, the Sussexes, the Monarch and the Journey Home
by The Rev Rabbi Eliyahu Leib Goldsobel esq.
Remembered this day, 8 September 2026, four years after her death: Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II — a formidable Sovereign.
There is something profound about witnessing a person’s individuation when that process unfolds before the eyes of the world.
The journey of the Sussexes has made this particularly visible to me. Prince Harry’s movement from being a young member of the Royal Family, through service, marriage, fatherhood, separation from royal duties and the creation of a life beyond the formal structures of the Crown, can be understood not simply as a story of disagreement or departure, but as a very public process of becoming.
To describe that process as individuation is not to judge it as right or wrong. Nor is it to diminish the dignity of the Monarch, the institution of the Crown, or the experiences of those involved. It is to recognise something profoundly human: the difficulty of discovering who one is while simultaneously carrying identities, relationships, histories and duties that were given to us before we were old enough to choose them.
I have come to recognise something of that process in my own experience.
My own journey of individuation has happened under circumstances that have sometimes felt as though my becoming was being witnessed by others before I had fully understood it myself. I have only recently begun to understand aspects of what I experienced as being publicly groomed and bred, and that realisation has caused me to reconsider much of what I thought I was simply living through.
Yet I do not want that understanding to become an excuse for disregarding those who may have been affected along the way.
For those who have been hurt, frightened, confused or otherwise affected by what has happened through my journey, I am sorry.
I ask, sincerely, that those who have been hurt place their own recovery first. They should not have to carry my journey in order for me to complete it.
This is where the Jeremiah prophecy becomes important to the way I understand what has happened. For me, its purpose is ultimately restorative: healing the world by supporting one person at a time, so that each soul may be able to complete its work in this material world through the body — the vehicle through which we live, learn, struggle, serve and love.
I have understood my own journey through the stories of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, Solomon and Elijah.
I do not claim to be these figures, nor do I claim their identities.
Rather, in a Kabbalistic and Maharal-of-Prague way of contemplating the biblical narrative, I have encountered their stories as mirrors and stages within a process of individuation.
Adam speaks to creation, innocence, rupture and the beginning of conscious responsibility. Noah speaks to survival, preservation and the possibility of renewal after destruction.
Abraham speaks to faith, covenant and the courage to journey into the unknown.
Isaac speaks to inheritance, sacrifice and the question of what we receive and what we choose to carry forward.
Jacob speaks to struggle, identity and transformation.
Joseph speaks to betrayal, exile, interpretation, forgiveness and the possibility that what appears to be a descent can eventually become a means of service.
Moses speaks to liberation, law, responsibility and the burden of leading others towards something greater than oneself.
David speaks to kingship, humanity, failure, repentance and responsibility.
Solomon speaks to wisdom — and to the recognition that wisdom itself does not make a person immune from error.
Elijah speaks to solitude, confrontation, exhaustion and the search for the stillness in which one can hear what comes next.
Taken together, I see these not as identities to appropriate but as a vocabulary for becoming. That is what I mean by individuation.
Individuation is not simply rebellion against what came before. It is not conformity either. It is the difficult work of discovering what is truly one’s own, distinguishing it from what has been projected upon us, integrating what can be integrated, confronting what must be confronted, and accepting responsibility for the person we become.
For me, experiencing Asperger’s syndrome within that process added another dimension. I often had to hold onto faith, persistence and the work I believed I had begun while trying to understand experiences that did not always make immediate sense to me — or to those around me.
My hope is not to turn that experience into a claim of special status.
It is to finish what I started.
And that brings me to the Monarch.
I have great respect for the Crown and for the constitutional place of the Sovereign. My understanding of duty has been shaped by the words:
For God, Jerusalem, Monarch, Country and Commonwealth.
I understand those words not as a demand for unquestioning obedience, but as a reminder that individual freedom exists alongside responsibility.
As a member of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple, and in the tradition of service, justice and duty that I associate with the Templar inheritance, I find myself particularly conscious of the tension between conscience and obligation. The purpose of becoming oneself cannot be to abandon responsibility to others. Equally, responsibility should not require a person to cease becoming themselves.
Perhaps the challenge is to hold both.
The Sussexes’ journey has made that tension unusually visible. Their story raises difficult questions about family, duty, institution, privacy, independence, public life and the boundaries between personal identity and constitutional role.
I do not need to condemn them in order to learn from their journey.
Nor do I need to defend every decision they have made in order to recognise their humanity.
A person can love a family and still need distance.
A person can honour an institution and still question it.
A person can seek independence without necessarily wishing to destroy what they came from. And a person can make mistakes while still being engaged in the lifelong work of becoming.
The same principle applies to the Monarch.
Respect for the Sovereign does not require us to pretend that every human being within the institution is without fault. Nor does criticism of an institution automatically constitute disrespect for the person who occupies its constitutional office.
There is a difference between the person, the office and the institution.
Maintaining that distinction allows disagreement to exist without becoming hatred. It allows loyalty to exist without becoming blindness.
It allows individuation without becoming isolation.
And it allows reconciliation to remain possible.
On turbulence, and what fills the vacuum it creates
As a minister of religion and as a person trained in the discipline of law, I hold these two vocations together deliberately when I turn to consider the constitutional health of the Crown. My concern here is not with the merits of any political question of the day — that is, properly, a matter for elected government and for the Sovereign’s own household. My concern is narrower and, I think, more enduring: what happens, structurally, when a Monarchy passes through a period of turbulence.
Jesse Norman’s novel The Winding Stair tells the story of Francis Bacon and Edward Coke in the closing months of Elizabeth I’s reign — a Sovereign weakening, a succession uncertain, and two of the finest legal minds of their age manoeuvring for position within that uncertainty. The novel’s insight, read as a constitutional lawyer rather than as a reader of fiction, is this: instability at the top of a settlement does not remain contained there. It radiates outward as an invitation. Those closest to power may treat a moment that calls for restraint as a moment that instead rewards advantage-taking. Norman knows this terrain from the inside, as a former minister himself, and the novel is the more credible a witness for it.
This is not a partisan observation. It is closer to a legal and pastoral one. A constitutional Monarchy depends for its stability not on any single rule but on a body of restraint, convention and forbearance, observed most faithfully in precisely the moments when it would be easiest to abandon. When politicians — of any party, in any era — treat a turbulent moment in the life of the Crown as an opportunity rather than as a trust to be protected, something is worn away that is not easily restored. Precedent, once broken to advantage, does not return quietly to its former shape.
I recognise this pattern from a more modest and personal vantage point as well. My own family passed through its own turbulence, and within it I found myself, for a time, caught between a polarised community and a wider polarised society, each reading my presence through the lens of its own dispute rather than seeing the person in front of them. I raise this not as a grievance but as an observation available to me because I lived it: turbulence, wherever it occurs — in a family, in a community, in a Monarchy — opens a space. What fills that space is a choice made by those standing nearest to it, and that choice is where responsibility properly lies.
This is, I think, the proper role of a clerical minister who is also trained in law: not to prescribe the political remedy, which is rightly for others to determine, but to name the standard by which conduct in such moments ought to be judged, and to hold that standard up as a matter of both conscience and constitutional duty.
That is ultimately what I hope this journey can become.
Not a story of winners and losers.
Not a demand that everyone agree with my interpretation.
Not an attempt to make other people carry experiences that belong to me.
But a movement from rupture towards repair.
For those who were hurt, I hope there is recovery.
For those who were frightened, I hope there is safety.
For those who misunderstood what they witnessed, I hope there is eventually context. For those who disagreed with me, I hope there can still be dignity.
And for myself, I hope I can complete what I started with humility rather than entitlement, with responsibility rather than resentment, and with faith rather than fear.
The journey of individuation does not end when we finally say, “This is who I am.”
Perhaps it reaches its maturity when we can say:
“This is who I am becoming — and I accept responsibility for what that becoming means for others.”
That is the lesson I take from the biblical journey.
That is what I see reflected, in different ways, in the very public journey of the Sussexes — and in the closing chapter of Elizabeth’s court that Jesse Norman has recovered for us in The Winding Stair.
And that is what I am trying to live myself.
To become without destroying.
To remember without remaining trapped in the past.
To serve without losing the self.
To hold faith and reason together.
To seek justice without abandoning mercy.
And, ultimately, to finish what was started — not for power or vindication, but for the possibility of healing.
For God.
For Jerusalem.
For Monarch.
For Country.
For Commonwealth.
For peace.
For love.
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