Month: May 2025

23 May 2025
Sticky Post By Posted in Community, Ethics, Interfaith, Israel Permalink

The Horror and the Hope

Sticky Post By On May 23, 2025

I have so wished to write today about the beautiful vision in our Torah of the Sabbatical year, when the fences come down, the fruits of the earth are shared, and citizen and stranger, farm-owner and refugee, rich and poor, wild beasts and domestic animals, appreciate them together.

But how can I do so, when we mourn the murder in an act of terrorist antisemitic hatred of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lichinsky, officials working for Israel’s Embassy, outside the Jewish Museum in Washington, after an event about peace-making and on the threshold of their marriage? Yaron, who grew up in Germany, was known to my colleague Rabbi Levi as a gifted, talented and very likeable young man. He and Sarah were dedicated longtime peacebuilders – Sarah wrote her graduate thesis on “the role of friendships in the Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding process.” (The Jerusalem Youth Chorus Newsletter)

Our hearts go out to their families and friends, and we pray for the safety of all our communities.

This has also been a week of powerful international outcry, including from within Israel, at the lack of adequate humanitarian aid reaching Palestinian children in Gaza, trapped between the cynical nihilism of Hamas and Israel’s attacks. I stand with those Jewish, Israeli and international organisations who urge that sufficient aid be let in, with all due and essential safeguards to prevent it from falling into the vicious and merciless hands of Hamas. I don’t know the names or characters of the children who may be hungry, or have been killed, but their parents for sure do. Judaism teaches that an innocent life is a life, that every life matters, that we try to protect innocent life even amidst the horrors of war, and that we all carry within us, whether we honour it or desecrate it, the image of God.

Amidst these terrors, it would be wrong, un-Jewish and lacking in faith and hope to lose sight entirely of the vision held out in our Torah. ‘Ukeratem dror: Proclaim freedom,’ the Torah commands: ‘Let everyone return to their inheritance and their family.’ If only it were so! Dror, which here means freedom, is also the name of a bird, probably the swallow, that dips and rises over the fields. So do our hopes fall, – and must rise again. So must we cherish what gifts, friendships and solidarity we can gather.

In that vein, I received the following messages yesterday. Lord Kahn’s office called, sharing deep concern and offering support for our community. Julie Siddiqi, an eloquent Muslim leader who’s worked for Nisa-Nashim and Hope Not Hate, sent a what’s-app: ‘Senseless, heartbreaking, the young couple killed in Washington. Sending love to you and your community.’ Judith Baker emailed on behalf of The Quakers: ‘We send our condolences to you and the Jewish community and hold the victims and their families and friends in our prayers.’ Our rabbinic colleagues in the States shared verses from Psalms: ‘God stays close to the broken-hearted, providing salvation to those crushed in spirit.’ 

Among these greetings, which cannot be taken for granted, I am especially moved by these words from The Jerusalem Youth Chorus:
 

It is precisely in these darkest moments that [our] work becomes not just important, but urgent—. Our Palestinian and Israeli singers know intimately the weight of this violence; each of them has been touched by loss, fear, and grief. Yet they continue to choose each other. They continue to choose the radical act of singing together…of refusing to let the loudest voices around them define their future. (https://www.jerusalemyouthchorus.org/ )
Time and again I’m asked to focus on hope, on what we can do to take a sad world and make it better. Therefore, I try to pray and work, alongside so many others, for my own Jewish People, for all people across our countries, faiths and communities who simply seek to live a good, honest and happy life, and for this very earth, with all its species of life, that we must cherish and nurture, so that it continues to sustain us all.

16 May 2025
Sticky Post By Posted in Community, Ethics, Spirituality, The Jewish Year Permalink

Kabbalah and Counting: the mystical qualities of the Omer

Sticky Post By On May 16, 2025

I remember walking across Jerusalem looking for an Omer-counter. I wanted something both beautiful and mystical.

‘Omer’ is a measure of quantity, apparently equivalent to 2.2 litres, and refers to the offering of barley harvested on the night after the first day of Passover. But it’s come to mean the period of forty-nine days which links Pesach to Shavuot, the festival which marks freedom from Egypt, to the festival which celebrates the freedom to receive and follow the Torah.

I found what I wanted not in a boutique for religious artefacts but in an olivewood workshop. Olivewood has age and depth, resilience and beauty. My counter showed not just each date from ‘one’ to ‘forty-nine’ but, in tiny writing in the bottom corner, the kabbalistic quality of each day.

Today is the thirty-third day, Lag Be’Omer, celebrated as the date when the plague afflicting Rabbi Akiva’s pupils in the first or second century ceased. Mourning is suspended, music is permitted, bonfires are lit, and, most practically, if I have a free moment, I can finally get a haircut – so long as the barbers in this very Jewish borough of Barnet aren’t all booked out.

But what about that small writing in the corner of the counter? It’s hard to explain briefly, but each week of the Omer is dedicated to a kabbalistic quality: first hesed, loving kindness; then gevurah, strength; tiferet, truth or beauty; netzach, triumph or endurance; hod, humility; yesod, foundation; and malchut, sovereignty. Each separate day focusses on a specific quality within its week, guiding a detailed emotional and spiritual journey towards trying to hear God’s words now as once they were heard at Sinai.

Today’s quality is hod she’ba’ hod, humility within humility.

My teacher, Rabbi Louis Jacobs, liked to share the Hasidic teaching that everyone should have two pebbles, one in each pocket. On the first should be inscribed the Mishnah’s words, ‘The world was created for my sake.’ On the second should be the verse, ‘I am but dust and ashes.’ Wisdom is knowing when to take out which pebble.

I used to think that ‘dust and ashes’ was about humility, while seeing the world as ‘all for me’ was the opposite. But that’s wrong. Wonder is also humility: ‘Notice this magnificence, this intricacy, diversity.’ Nicky says her day is made if she sees a kingfisher.

In such moments, ‘for me’ doesn’t mean ‘aren’t I special,’ but rather, ‘what a privilege to be alive and see such beauty.’ ‘Dust and ashes’ doesn’t mean ‘I’m rubbish,’ but rather, ‘I know I’m mortal, so how treasured this brief privilege should be.’ Together the pebbles lead us neither to pride nor self-deprecation, but to the question: ‘How can I best care for life, my life, other’s lives, any life, in all its fragile vulnerability?’
 
As Arthur Green writes in A Kabbalah for Tomorrow: ‘Hod is the other side of wisdom, the self that bows before the mystery of what is as it is, the self who submits to reality and rejoices in doing so.’

I witnessed this when I served in the chaplaincy at the local hospice. After complex emotional journeys, perhaps through hope, anger, grief, regret, many people reached, in dying, places of appreciation. I’ll never forget the man and his wife to whose room I was called to share a prayer even though I’d never met them. ‘Tell us a verse about life’s wonder,’ they requested, ‘because together we have loved it.’

That’s hod she’ba’hod, humility, gratitude and graciousness woven together. I hold on to their words in these cruel times like a rope to climb up the cliffs of anguish to the green plateau of hope.

09 May 2025
Sticky Post By Posted in Spirituality Permalink

Beautiful Prayers from the Talmud

Sticky Post By On May 9, 2025

My Talmud class has been going for almost 40 years; it’s been a stable feature throughout my rabbinate, ‘Thursday mornings at 9.30,’ and I love it. Luckily, many of the participants love it too, and some have been there for all, or almost all, that time.

As anyone who studies Talmud knows, some passages are difficult, some are intense with a logic hard to unpick, some are morally inspiring, some are ethically challenging, lots are full of issues we still struggle with today, some spring straight from the page to the heart, and some are simply beautiful.

It was such a section that we hit upon yesterday, Berachot 16b – 17a, a daf, or page, about peace and hope which we fortuitously arrived at on the anniversary of VE Day, and amidst the troubles that beset our people and our world. The passage consists of the supplications that rabbis of the Talmud would add after they had completed their amidah, their obligatory communal prayer. Their words reach out to us across almost two millennia because what they longed for then, we long for too today.

Rabbi Elazar used to say: ‘Our God, may it be your will to cause love, fellowship, peace and friendship to dwell wherever we are apportioned.’ Perhaps even then communities were known for their fractiousness. Or maybe, as I prefer to believe, Rabbi Elazar was only reflecting back to God the comradely reality he experienced around him, together with the wish that it should continue thus.

He adds a stirring thought which none of the other rabbis include in quite the same way: ‘May our heart, when we rise in the morning, be filled with longing to experience awe before your name [and presence].’ Sometimes, when the alarm goes off, one gets up still weary, with a headache, not quite all there, or anxious. But on certain mornings, as dawn breaks a deep sense of wonder fills one’s spirit, as if, as the Zohar puts it, one’s soul had been taken by God on a visit to the Garden of Eden in the night.

Rabbi Yochanan’s prayer is more down to earth. He beseeches heaven to take note of how grim human life and the lot of the Jewish People can be, and calls on God ‘to clothe yourself in your mercy, garb yourself in your might, cover yourself in your loving kindness, gird yourself with your graciousness, and summon your qualities of goodness and humility.’ It’s as if there’s a conflict even within God: be tough with the world, or gentle and forbearing? Be kind to us, God, Rabbi Yochanan pleads, just as one’s partner might say during a bad patch: ‘I just need you to be nice to me today.’

Rabbi Chiya’s prayer is different again: ‘May it be your will, God, that your Torah be our occupation and that our hearts don’t become depressed or our vision darkened.’ Those words are so simple, and so close to the bone: Down here on earth it’s hard to keep our spirits up, so help us maintain a sense of hope and purpose and guide us in your Torah’s laws of justice and compassion.

‘What’s the take-away?’ one of the participants asked me after we had studied those prayers. Part of me wanted to answer, ‘Plus ca change! It was the same old world back then as it is now.’

But there’s a better response. Those teachers, immersed in Torah, well understood the challenges of the human condition and faced their difficulties with honesty, courage, and the hope that, somehow, the world would be guided by God in the direction of harmony and compassion.

That’s why their supplications speak to us today, not just as if they were, but because they truly are, our own.

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Address: Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, New North London Synagogue, 80 East End Road, 
Finchley, 
London N3 2SY

Phone: +44 208 346 8560

 

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