This week we launched our Tikkun Olam initiative to encourage social action, both local and global, at the synagogue.

Tikkun Olam literally means ‘repair of the world’. But the phrase is ancient and its implications have changed over the ages. Its most familiar usage comes in the Alenu prayer, attributed to the second to third century scholar called Rav, but research may suggest that it dates as far back asTemple times. In it we ask that ‘the world be perfected [letakken olam] beneath the sovereignty of God’. The prayer sees this as God’s task; today’s usage views it as our own: we are co-responsible with God for the world.

In the Talmud, the phrase mipnei tikkun olam means ‘for the better functioning of society’, like the instrument created by Hillel to stop the rich from refusing to give the poor interest-free loans. But the society referred to was basically Jewish society. Though Jews did have much contact, sometimes friendly and sometimes hostile, with Romans and Persians, they mainly lived parallel but separate lives. Today Tikkun Olam refers to the entire world, from India to Israel, and from the Horn of Africa to Alaska. Today, almost for the first time in history, we as Jews have the privilege, and challenge, of being able to participate as equals in a multi-ethnic global society. For many the chance to express our values by teaching in rural India or taking medical skills learnt at the Hebrew University into the most impoverished regions of Africa is not an escape from, but a profound fulfilment of, Jewish identity. For many young people it’s a chance to take their Judaism away from what can seem like too great a focus on petty squabbling, materialistic concerns and anti-Semitism, out into the issues which really matter: poverty, illness, racism and the protection of the earth.

Ruth Messinger spoke at our launch; no one has done more than she in this domain. President of the American Jewish World Service, she oversees its involvement in some 450 projects. What we do is always locally determined, she explained; local needs and leadership determine our response. Maybe that’s what led to the most remarkable anecdote of the evening, when she recalled a conversation between her hosts during a recent visit to Africa. ‘You don’t understand’, said one of them to another, ‘Jews give with humility’.

In our shul we’re starting small, with micro-grants from fifty to (the not so minimal) one thousand pounds, to encourage people, especially teenagers; we want them to know that if they come up with an idea to help change the world, whether it’s in their street or across the globe, we will offer mentorship, guidance and seed money. Collectively, we want to be thinking Tikkun Olam, that God wants us to care for and heal God’s world.

This is no alternative to other core Jewish values and principles. Chesed, loving-kindness, should guide our daily actions, whether at home, in the shops or on another continent. Talmud Torah, the study of Torah, guides and sharpens our values to give our life moral direction and open our heart to wisdom. Tefilah, prayer, brings the deepest resources of grace, beauty and inner strength back into our spirits when we feel jaded or disillusioned. Tikkun Olam leads us back out, to change the world. Together these values form a blessed circle, inspiring us to live full and dedicated lives.

It was one of those moments of grace which reminds the soul of wonder and makes one see once more God’s glory in the world.

It was only a little thing; I turned onto a small path which climbed into the forest and, looking upwards into the hill, saw a young deer grazing in the long grass. It raised its head and looked at me but I swiftly froze and it did not run away. I curbed my wish to draw closer and took only the smallest, quietest steps before stopping altogether. It returned to feed among the grasses.

Mal’ah ha’aretz kinyanecha – The world is full of your wonders, O God! I don’t why I love deer so much, especially fawns. Maybe it’s because of their innocence; they kill no other sentient beings. Or maybe it’s because of their timidity; one sees them only relatively rarely, just as wonder and beauty only rarely overwhelm the heart. But for those few minutes they absolutely did, and for once the world of enmities and angers, politics and conflicts, was not the reality at all. It was wiped in a moment right out of my brain. Instead came this heaven on earth, this precious, beautiful, tender life. A further movement caught my attention and on the other side of the footpath I saw another deer behind the pine trees; she seemed a little larger, perhaps the mother of this young one or perhaps a slightly older companion. They continued to graze, unperturbed.

I stood still and watched, fearful lest I make the animals afraid. I regret this fear we humans carry with us like our own shadow, ineluctably, like the sorrow which followed after Eden. Why do we of necessity cause so many other living beings to be frightened of us? Why, at the very smell of us, do they flee? Often I’m ashamed of our species.

Here, I thought, was the proper place to pray. ‘Consider, as you do so, that the Shechinah, the presence of God, is immediately before you’, teaches the Shulchan Aruch, the sixteenth century standard code of Jewish law. But this time I did not have to imagine. Surely this was God’s very world right before me and, if the name Shechinah, (from the root shachan, ‘to dwell’) meant God’s indwelling presence, then at this moment it dwelt right here in this forest and within these gentle animals. So I prayed with them, and my companionship with them was my prayer and God was all around us, and infinitely beyond.

When I finished I did not turn round to walk away but took small steps backwards as I do when I withdraw from before the open Ark, finding it a slight, and shameful, to turn one’s back on holiness.

I realise that what I’ve written has nothing to do with anything, except that without such moments would we really want, or be able, to live? They sustain us in secret for days and months and decades, like a subterranean well within the depths of the heart. They are the wonder, the song and the glory which the soul has always longed for and which it recognises at once when it sees: ‘This is my God, whose beauty I shall tell’.    

Here is something I’m struggling with; I’m not alone in so doing.

I spent the early hours of Monday morning sitting in Ben Gurion Airport (I’m not a fan of airports, but somehow I like being there: all night coffee, the chance to write…) I’m translating letters I just received from my father’s cousin, and one telegram. The letters were sent by my great-uncle Alfred to his brother in New York. Alfred was one of the founders of the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University. Note the dates:

19 February 1948   You’re no doubt reading about our life and the goings on here in the papers. We’ve become so used to the war and the siege that we’re surprised when we hear no gunfire, especially at night. These horrors too will pass over us. In the meantime we’re already working hard at the preparations for the Jewish state. I’m involved in religious jurisprudence, and family and inheritance law. There are many difficult issues which could be resolved if only our rabbis were of the right calibre.

18 March 1948   The streets are as busy as in normal times; the buses run regularly; the shops are open; only what’s for sale gets less and less, especially foodstuffs and fuel. Jerusalem is to all practical purposes already divided into a Jewish and an Arab zone. The borders are carefully guarded… The entire population is divided into its duties. The younger age ranges, from 17 – 35, are properly mobilised, the streets are full of our soldiers; they have handsome uniforms and are well trained. We older people too are back in service, in so far as we are still capable of it. University activity is s sharply curtailed because most of the students have been called up. Sadly many students have fallen in the fighting…

The telegram, dated 16 April 1948, reads simply

‘Alfred fatally wounded burial took place yesterday letter follows’.

He was killed in the Arab attack on the convoy to Mount Scopus, in sight of the British.

Side by side with thoughts engendered by these letters are impressions from my current visit. I always leave Israel inspired by the courage, ideals, values and dedication of the people I encounter: the fight against human trafficking lead by Atzum and Rabbi Levi Lauer, the struggle to help the poor, led by Israel’s food bank  Leket Yisrael; the courageous (and fun) educational work with Israeli and Palestinian led by Simon Lichman and CCECH…

But gnawing at my mind is also what I saw the Friday before, when I spent the day with a remarkable Israeli, Ezra, in the South Hebron Hills and the Negev: Bedouin who’ve been attacked by settlers; homes (really shacks) with demolition orders (‘we just don’t know when’); villages, if you can call them that, with no running water and no connection to the national grid, overlooked by settlements with proper houses and trees; grinding poverty and the absence of hope. Worst was the Bedouin village near Beer Sheva, which has papers from the Ottoman, Mandate and Israeli periods, and which was demolished so that Keren Kayyemet could plant a forest. I spent almost an hour with the Sheikh in the remaining encampment around the cemetery, and watched video footage of the bulldozers smashing down the homes and uprooting the trees, the children staring bewildered at the ruins of their possessions. Ezra and the Sheikh talked about justice: ‘I’m ashamed as a Jew’, he said. ‘Help us’, the Sheikh said.

So what is Zionism today? It certainly isn’t what Rabbi Hugo Gryn called ‘Joining the dogs baying at Israel’. It is to assert that Israel is not just a legitimate but a remarkable country, necessary to the Jewish People, precious, and full of extraordinary achievements, and to ally ourselves with its struggles and achievements through our actions. But it is also not to ignore actions by Israel which are morally wrong. It is precisely Judaism and the love of Israel which require us to speak out about them, judiciously, – while at the same time condemning, and distinguishing ourselves from, the chorus of hate.

There are those who believe that force creates reality. Judaism has always taught that outcomes are ultimately founded on values, especially justice and respect for human dignity.

Scenes from a week in Israel: I go into the barber’s near the centre of Jerusalem; I’ve had no time until now since Shavuot to get a haircut and even I’m ashamed to appear at a wedding looking such a mess. The young hairdresser has just finished cutting the hair of a teenage girl. ‘For Zichron Menachem’, he asks, and, as the girl nods, picks up a pony tail some eighteen inches long and putting it in a special bag. ‘How often does that happen?’ I ask him; ‘Sometimes almost every day’, he answers. Libbi gave her long childhood locks there too.

Later, as it happens, I visit Zichron Menachem, a centre for children with cancer and their families. Rabbi Baruch Levy, who has devoted his life to the cause since the death of his son, (and who has several times visited our shul) shows me round. He points to a carpeted hall full of cars, tractors and amazing toys, ‘Sometimes brothers and sisters feel that all the love in the family goes to the child who is ill. So we bring them here too. We help them with their homework and when they’ve done it they get tokens to play with those toys; it’s very popular’. There’s a music room, a computer room, a room for teenagers who, surprise surprise, don’t find it cool to be in the same space as three-year-olds. Outside is a pond, a greenhouse (‘the children can say “that’s the one I planted!”’) and a shady area set aside as a future pet’s corner (I see the guinea pigs there already and offer to send over half a dozen). Rabbi Levy takes me upstairs, ‘And here we have group therapy sessions for parents. People who would never otherwise meet become close friends, Charedi parents, parents who have only a fuzzy idea of what Judaism is, non-Jews. The sessions end at 10.00pm; sometimes at 11.30 we have to say “I’m sorry, we need to lock up the building now”.’

I get a phone-call from my friend Rabbi Arik Aschermann of Rabbis for Human Rights, ‘Join us tomorrow at the High Court; it’s a critical case between Arab farmers and settlers at Sussya, about demolitions and land ownership’. I go along. The building is justly described as beautiful; the courtroom is hushed, by synagogue standards. In the event the case is adjourned; the judges are considering what other actions to take alongside it. I’ll know more about the issues themselves by tonight, as I’m spending much of the day in the South Hebron hills. On the way back into town I fall into step with a young woman who asks me, ‘Were you just at the court?’  She is a journalist from Poland; ‘I love being in Israel’, she says. ‘I understand Israeli fears, but is anything going to change here? I feel such a sense of hopelessness. I took a week out in Cairo; there was so much more of an atmosphere of hope there.’ I turned off into the city, thinking about Hatikvah.

At Machon Schechter, prior to seeing the Principal to talk about rabbinic training, I spend an hour with David Broda from Leket Yisrael, the National Food Bank. ‘It began with one man picking up food wasted after Simchas in the back of his car and taking it to where people are hungry’, he explains. Now they save 700, 000 meals a year, which would simply have been leftovers thrown into the rubbish bin. ‘The volunteer calls the catering manager at about 10.00pm and she says “come along, I’ve a lot left over”. The volunteer has the keys to our refrigerated store-rooms, or takes the food straight to one of the organisations which will distribute it to the hungry the next morning’. Sixty thousand people below the hunger line are fed in this way. Leket Yisrael gleans the unpicked crops from farms too, – the true meaning of the word ‘leket’). We’ll be supporting them these High Holydays, but that’s not enough: couldn’t we learn to do likewise in London too?

David continues, ‘The single biggest amount of food left to waste is when the Friday markets close in Tel Aviv. It’s right before Shabbat, so we work with the local churches. They take it to Lewinsky park in the south of the city where there are thousands of African refugees. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, eat healthy, nutritious food, at least this once in the week’.

‘What about you, do you feel hope here?’ that Polish journalist had asked me. ‘Yes’, I’d replied, ‘because of the extraordinary numbers of people here who’re truly committed to their ideals, social justice, building bridges…’. ‘Does it turn into political change?’ she asked. I couldn’t answer, – but I do know that it does turn into daily hands-on commitment.

I remember my teacher Rabbi Louis Jacobs saying that one day they saw their Rosh Yeshivah scaling the roof of the building to put up a British flag. When his students asked him why he was risking his life in this apparently absurd manner, he answered that had they ever lived in Czarist Russia, as he had, they would understand immediately what he was doing.

It is both right and important that we as Jews should acknowledge and celebrate the diamond Jubilee of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second. We should be grateful not only for her reign, and her constant dedication to service, but for the long established democracy and the many freedoms for which Britain is famous. My parents, who both fled Nazi Germany in their teens, taught me that the privilege of living in a country which upholds, defends and deeply valued many freedoms, including those of speech and conscience, is never to be taken for granted.  It’s true, Isca told me, that when she landed at Croydon Airport on 9 April 1939 it was the first time in many years that she’d seen a policeman smile.

In a beautifully written and timely article Jonathan Fishburn traces the first recorded prayer for the monarch to the community of Worms in the 11^th century. But it is universally acknowledged that the tradition of praying for the welfare of the country in which we live goes back to the prophet Jeremiah’s instruction to the exiles in Babylon at the beginning of the 6^th century BCE to seek the peace of the city in which they dwell. Jonathan Fishburn traces the history of this practice through the three and a half centuries since the return of Jews to England, including a reference in the diary of Samuel Pepys. This is strange, since, as is well known, Pepys visited the synagogue on Simchat Torah, a date on which we no longer pray for the leaders of the realm just in case the congregation is drunk by this stage in the proceedings and the intercession should appear unseemly.

Menasseh ben Israel, whose petition to Cromwell led to the readmission of Jews to this country averred that: ‘As for Fidelity, this same affection is confirmed by the inviolable custome of all the Jews wheresoever they live: for on every Sabbath or festival Day, they every where are used to pray for the safety of all Kings, Princes and Common-wealths, under whose jurisdiction they live, of what profession-soever: unto which duty they are bound by the Prophets and the Talmudists.’ (1655)

The relation of Jews to the monarchy in this country was affected not only by appreciation for freedoms granted, but by a deep respect for the institution based on the Talmudic understanding that earthly royalty was a reflection or an echo of God’s sovereignty in heaven, – ‘me’eyn malchut shamayiim’. Imagine, says the Shulchan Aruch, preparing the words you want to say before a king of flesh and blood: would you not be over-awed and terrified lest you become confused? Now consider that you are standing before your God, the King of the king of kings. How careful should you be then in concentrating on what you say!

I had the privilege of meeting her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip at the 70^th anniversary of the creation of the Council of Christians and Jews. It was Prince Philip who most caught my attention. Seeing Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks, Rabbi Danny Rich (head of Liberal Judaism) and myself all chatting together, he called over as he walked past, ‘You’re not supposed to be talking to each other, are you’.

If we can be forgiven our foibles as a community, surely the Royal Family can be forgiven theirs, and celebrated and appreciated on this Diamond Jubilee which should inspire us all to value and work with renewed commitment for freedom, peace and justice.