In tomorrow’s Torah portion, Beha’alotecha, God commands Aaron to ‘cause the lights to go up’ on the seven-branched Menorah in the Tabernacle. Rashi, the great mediaeval commentator, explains: Kindle the lamps carefully, making sure that the flame takes hold on the wick so that the light can ascend freely.

It’s a specific instruction to Aaron in his role as High Priest. But it’s also a metaphor for life. As one of my favourite Hasidic teachers, the Maggid of Kozhenitz, observes: when we do what is good and right, we light the lamps of love and wonder in our hearts. Our first responsibility is to ourselves, to feed those flames. But then, through acts of kindness, we must try to nourish the spirits of others. Or perhaps it’s the other way round; by caring for others, we strengthen the light in our own hearts.

This goes to the core of the challenges so many of us are experiencing in these times of war and anguish. How do I stay human? How can I be loyal all at once to my own people, to humanity, to life, and to my God?

Here’s something small which happened to me yesterday. I’ll recount it not because of what I did, more or less by chance, but because of how it touched me, what it did for me.

I learnt that this Shabbat is Naama Levy’s twentieth birthday. She’s still held hostage by Hamas. May she be freed at once to return to her family. May this terrible war end, with plans for safer, better years for the people of Israel and Gaza.

I called the flower shop nearest to where Naama’s mother, Ayelet, lives and asked the florist, whom I’ve got to know a little over these grim months, to send a bunch of flowers. What else can one do, but these gestures?

The florist understood at once. ‘So painful,’ she said. ‘The war goes on and on…Everyday more death.’ She sounded so dejected that I asked her to add a bunch of flowers for herself, from my community. ‘I’m going to cry,’ she said. Minutes later, she messaged: ‘I don’t remember anyone sending me flowers since I opened my shop.’ What more can we do, we agreed, than try to care for each other?

Such things seem futile, even stupid, before the threats and horrors we face from Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, from Russia and North Korea, and underneath it all, from the changes to our climate, the nurturing water, earth and air.

But often this is all we can do, – keep each other’s hearts alive, help the flames of love and kindness ascend within us, even for a moment. It helps us stay human, and by the light of that humanity, we recognise the humanity of others.

That’s why the prayer, co-written by Raba Tamar Elad-Appelbaum and Sheikha Ibtisam Mahameed just weeks after October 7, touches me so deeply:

God of life, may it be your will to hear the prayer of mothers…

That we have mercy for each other,

That we have pity for each other,

That we have hope for each other,

… For your sake, God of Life.

That, too, is why I’m moved that World Jewish Relief, which has been financing trauma services in Israel, is now also ‘providing targeted support to the International Medical Corps, a trusted international partner, to provide emergency maternity, obstetric and newborn baby care services in Gaza.’ As CEO Paul Anticoni adds: This is in accord with ‘our own Jewish values, humanitarian principles and [has the] explicit encouragement and endorsement from the President of Israel’s office.’

Hatred and destruction have immense powers at their disposal. Goodness and kindness seem feeble beside them, their actions so local, so small. But, like the sacred light hidden within all life, compassion and kindness reside within us everywhere, waiting to be illumined. That is their deep, indestructible, inextinguishable strength.

Rashi, the great Torah and Talmud commentator, had eyes for every word, indeed for every syllable and letter.

He noted a seeming contradiction in the sentence which describes the arrival of the Children of Israel at Mount Sinai, the prologue to the giving and receiving of Torah which we celebrate tonight on Shavuot.

The verse reads ‘They came to the wilderness of Sinai and encamped there (plural verb); Israel encamped (singular verb) opposite the mountain.’ (Exodus 19:2) Why this difference between the two verbs?

The Israelites, Rashi explains, each came with their own opinions and different experiences.  But then, in order to hear God and receive Torah, they listened ‘with one heart, like one single person.’

No doubt, Rashi had his reasons back in the late eleventh century for stressing this point, as every generations of Jews have had before and since. We are a discursive, debating, not to say arguing people.

But when it comes to hearing God’s voice, the ‘life of all life’, the voice at the heart of creation and in the core of our souls, we listen all together.

When it comes to embracing the core values of Judaism, as expressed by Simon the Just over two millennia ago,  ‘Upon three things the world is established, upon Torah, upon loving kindness, and upon the service of God,’ we commit ourselves to transcending our differences, and to harnessing them for our collective good, so that we work together for the sake of God’s will.  

Chag Sameach and may Torah enter our hearts.

It’s the simple truth: ‘They died so that we can live.’

I’ve visited the Normandy landing beaches many times, showing the young people of Noam round Sword and Gold on peaceful, sunlit days, so very different from the murderous fighting of eighty years ago.

I’ve just re-read Antony Beevor’s D-Day: The Battle for Normandy.

Sometimes I had to put the book down struck to the core by the sheer courage of so many, or by sheer horror at the slaughter.

I’m smitten by the compassion shown in the midst of the fighting by so many (but not the SS): dressing comrades’ wounds, even tending the injuries of those who, minutes earlier, would have killed them.

Soldiers who’d been farmers milked the desperate cows who’d survived the strafing and shooting.

One infantryman noted how a foal refused to leave its dead mother, walking round her and round her so often that it had beaten a circular path through the grass.

I’ve visited the war cemeteries, now quiet, now peaceful, beautifully tended, with the names and units of the dead, the rows of crosses, among which are many Magen Davids.

I don’t know who decided that the words ‘Known unto God,’ should be inscribed on the gravestones of those whose deaths left their bodies so mangled that they could not be identified. They weren’t just left unnamed; they were people who mattered, mattered to God.

Yesterday I attended the lighting of the beacon by AJEX, The Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women, in the grounds of the Jewish Free School. I listened to the voices and accounts of veterans.

I was privileged to read out on behalf of us all the 23^rd Psalm: ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil for You are with me.’

Once again, we walk though that valley, witnesses as others traverse its dangerous, often fatal, depths.

Yesterday I got news from a friend whose relative in the north of Israel was killed by Hezbollah. What can one say? I hear with a sinking heart of more deaths in Gaza. Is this what you want from your creation, God, You whom we call ‘God of the spirits of all flesh’?

We believe in a God of life, Chei HaChaim, the very Life of Life, whose breath imparts consciousness to all life, who mechalkel chaim bechesed, who ‘nurtures all life with lovingkindness.’

That is the God whose presence abides in all living beings, including us, even though we so often struggle to feel it, and humanity so often behaves as if it did not know it.

This is the God whose voice within us, so frequently out-shouted by the endless noise around us and inside us, so often reduced to a whisper of a whisper, calls us to practice kindness and justice because that is God’s will towards life.

That is why we call God’s word Torat Chaim, the Torah of life, as we receive once again this coming week on the festival of Shavuot.

This is what we mean when we pray for our hearts to cleave to the Torah’s commandments: we pray that all the angers and fears, the injustice and cruelty, the frustration and despair across the world around us, and in our inner world inside us, will not extinguish your voice in us, God of life, your voice which commands justice and loving kindness.