February | 2026 | HEART AND MIND

27 Feb 2026

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community Permalink

Two Reasons Why I am Passionate About Masorti Judaism

Sticky Post By admin On February 27, 2026

The Installation in Oldenburg

Last Sunday I was privileged to officiate alongside Rabbi Bea Weiler at the installation of two outstanding rabbis, Rabbi Levi Ufferfilge and Rabbi Netanel Olhoeft, in Oldenburg, North Germany, where once Samson Raphael Hirsch wrote his famous Nineteen Letters, encouraging in the warmest of terms return to Jewish practice.

This open-hearted community, which covers 9,000 square kilometres, embraces people from Israel, Russia, Ukraine, survivors of the Shoah, and children who grew up in DP camps. The rabbis bring together pupils who are often the only Jewish students in their class, offering essential support and solidarity in these cruel times of rising antisemitism. And, added Rabbi Levi, All the municipalities, religious communities, schools, parties etc. in this huge area approach them for interreligious and memorial events.

But he and Rabbi Netanel rightly want Judaism to be about far more than remembering the Shoah, essential as that is, and combatting antisemitism. It must be filled with simchah shel mitzvah and simchat chaim, joy in the commandments and joy in life. That is certainly what I experienced as a guest of the community.

Masorti Judaism, led by committed rabbis and practised in warm-hearted communities which combine deep engagement in Judaism together with a humanist vision embracing the dignity of people of all faiths, is essential today. From within our ancient tradition, which teaches love of God, neighbour and stranger, we must challenge the pernicious narrowness of unconstrained nationalism and resurgent populism. We are committed, in the words of last week’s Torah portion, to creating a dwelling place for God, sanctified through offering a safe, respectful and restorative spiritual home for people of all faiths and for all life together.

To Whom the Kotel Belongs

When he dedicated the Temple in Jerusalem, Solomon prayed that God would hear the supplications of all Israel in times of trouble, that God would listen to the outpourings of the soul of every Jew and respond to the petitions ‘of the stranger who comes from afar.’ ‘God,’ he prayed, ‘Hear from Your dwelling place in the Heavens, forgive, and grant to each person according to their ways, for You know their heart.’ (1 Kings 8)

Isaiah spoke similarly two-and-a-half centuries later, in words we say to this day: ‘My House [says God] shall be a place of prayer for all peoples.

Yet men and women who wish to pray together today, who do not want to be divided by the partition that separates the sexes in the huge plaza in front of the Kotel, currently have to locate a different entrance and follow a path with many steps and turns down to a remote and broken corner of the wall. In truth, I have never resented this, but much preferred that quiet space among the huge stones, many still lying where they fell during the Roman destructions in 70 CE. Here, you can listen to the birds calling out like the music of an India raga, piercing the heart, accompanying and deepening our human prayers.

But now the motion has been put before the Knesset that orthodox bodies alone should have complete authority over the entire area, which would make freedom of worship at this most iconic of places impossible. What would King Solomon, what might Isaiah, think of this? Those who seek total domination over God space, generally seek control over everything else as well, justice, dignity and who is, or is not, worthy of consideration and compassion.

Given the current balance of powers, there is every chance that the process before the Knesset might succeed, though from across the world we must oppose it in every peaceful way we can.

But we should also remember this: that, in truth, God’s spaces can never be governed by partisan and discriminatory human authority. God’s breath gives life to in every person; it breathes in every heart and every living being. This was the Psalmist’s conclusion, at the close of 150 poems: ‘Let every breath praise God!’ Who is going to manage to control that? No one. For the sacred breath of life remains holy, whatever life it inhabits. It will not be strangled, and its songs and prayers cannot and shall not be suppressed.

24 Feb 2026

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Interfaith Permalink

4 Years Since the Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine by Russia

Sticky Post By admin On February 24, 2026

It is hard to comprehend that it is four whole years since the brutal attack by Russia on Ukraine. I remember visiting Kyiv and a town near Bucha in 2024, and learning from witnesses of the horrors perpetrated there. I recall many visits to the Ukrainian Cathedral and Welcome Centre in London, including the formal opening by King Charles and Lady Zelenska. I cannot fathom the horrors the people of Ukraine are going through, why this cruel war against them is still being prosecuted, or the barbarity of the deliberate, carefully targeted and calibrated attacks on civilian infrastructure and personnel. The courage and resilience of the country, its people, its leaders and its military is astounding.

This morning an Inter-Faith Prayer Service for Peace in Ukraine was held at the cathedral. Ten of us, faith leaders from across many denominations, were asked to compose a prayer on a particular theme and share it at this solemn gathering, which was attended by Ministers of Parliament, diplomats, media and many, many displaced people from Ukraine. Bishop Kenneth Nowakowski guided us with few words and much feeling. The Prayerful Reflection sung by the Ukraine Choir was utterly beautiful, and totally heart-rending.

But I was most moved by Bishop Kenneth’s closing request: that we pray quietly after the formal event ended next to three candles lit by the UK Minister of Defence and a senior Ukrainian official early in the morning to correspond with the hour when the first Russian missiles landed. ‘Pray,’ he said, ‘for the grieving, the wounded, the exiled, the children, and especially for those who have no one to pray for them.’

Below is the formal prayer I was asked to write, following the brief given to me, and recite during the formal service. It is written (partly) in anger:

A prayer for justice and peace – addressed to leaders who do not practise them

God of life,

Whose sacred spirit flows through all life,

Who gives life to all creation, and breath to every human being,

Whoever and wherever they are, and to whatever nation they belong:

God who loves, like us, to live with justice, mercy and peace.

Aim this prayer at the hard hearts of those who use their power

To kill and wound and dispossess,

To make cities and landscapes desolate,

To drive thousands from their homes

And divide millions from those they love:

Make this prayer detonate in their hearts

Breaking apart their cruelty and vainglorious conceit.

May their hearts be exposed, raw and defenceless, to the raw and bleeding suffering

Of those to whom they have brought cold, fear, injury, loneliness, exile and grief.

May their eyes see and their minds comprehend

The devastation they have wrought and the destruction they sow

Like landmines across the future

By unjust, pointless, merciless war.

Then may they, and we, see too the strength

Of those who, in resisting them, uphold the love of life,

Love of their dearest, mercy for the wounded,

Love of their homeland, compassion for the homeless,

Care for the exiled, the children, even the animals and trees,

The courage of those who will not let goodness

Be bombed out of their spirit or driven from their soul.

Then may their hearts be opened; may they be moved

To use the powers they have wielded for death and devastation,

To bring justice and restoration, hope and peace.

We know, God, that this is your will.

May it be our will, too, here on this disputed earth.

19 Feb 2026

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Holocaust, Spirituality Permalink

Make Me a Sanctuary

Sticky Post By admin On February 19, 2026

I’m here in Berlin, leading a week of intensive study for rabbinical students on the subject of our environment, God’s world. But how, in this city, could I not be thinking about my grandparents and what they endured?

My mother’s father studied here for the rabbinate at the liberal Hochschule fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums, graduating in 1909. My father’s grandfather Jacob Freimann studied some decades earlier at the orthodox Hildesheimer Seminar. Both colleges stood on the same street, the Artilleriestrasse. Apparently, they were known respectively as ‘the light artillery’ and ‘the heavy artillery’. The institutions remained separate (though no shots were fired) until Hitler forced them to combine, before closing them both down and sending to his concentration and death camps all alumni unable to escape his murderous grasp.

My grandfather managed to flee Nazi Germany in April 1939. My great-grandfather died suddenly in 1937 on his way to celebrate his eldest daughter’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in Holleschau. There he lies at peace in the town’s Jewish cemetery, mercifully untouched by the horrors that decimated his family, killing half and sending the others into exile.

But these are not the associations uppermost in my mind as I study the Torah I’m preparing to share. Rather, I find myself meditating on the deep resilience of Judaism, persistent survivor of exiles, wars, and the dragnets of numerous tyrannies.

Today’s rabbinical college, named after Abraham Joshua Heschel (who also studied here but hated the place), is situated in the nearby town of Potsdam, the military capital constructed for the Kaisers. As I walk past the stolid stately buildings and the huge grey archway, I see the stone footprints of power. Here the German army’s records were held, including the undisclosed results of the infamous 1916 Judenzaehlung, the census intended to prove that Jews were shirkers, avoiding service in the Kaiser’s front lines. The conclusions were never published because, it is widely presumed, they proved the opposite. The truth will never be known because the archives were destroyed by allied bombing in World War ll.

Throughout those violent decades years my grandparents in their rabbinates were trying to establish something very different, – less tangible, incomparably more fragile, yet ultimately more enduring: a Mikdash, a sacred tabernacle for the presence of God.

The Torah describes this structure in minute detail: acacia wood, curtains of scarlet and purple, clasps of gold and copper. But in truth it has no fixed footprint and occupies no single place. It is created and recreated, as it has been for millennia, wherever people come together to pray to God, care for each other, seek blessing and try to make the world more compassionate and less cruel. Any and every place where this is attempted is truly holy, not because the ground is sanctified but because space has been made for what transcends time and space: humility and service, kindness and blessing, and consciousness of the spirit that flows through all life, instructing us in our heart and soul not to hate, or hurt, or harm.

I look around me and see the huge stone contradiction of this ephemeral structure, this ideal, this idea. Yet which has proved the stronger, which has endured?

I discuss with my fellow students what it means to perceive the world as God’s creation and everything that breathes as precious, and to recognise that in this volatile and violent age we are here to try to protect and honour the holiness of fragile, vulnerable, transient life.

12 Feb 2026

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Refugees Permalink

Refugee!

Sticky Post By admin On February 12, 2026

Refugees

I guess it’s the wrong kind of love I’m writing about on the eve of Valentine’s Day (though note: the equivalent Jewish date is Tu Be’Av, the 15^th of the month of Menachem Av). I’m focussing with deep concern on the love most frequently mentioned in the Torah: love for the ger, the stranger, the outsider, the refugee. A better word than ‘love’ might be compassion, empathy, concern.

I will never forget being taken on Lesbos, at the peak of the small boat crossings from Turkey, to a half-hidden cemetery where a compassionate Muslim carer had, of his own initiative, laid to rest the bodies of the drowned. Many of the graves were of children, mostly nameless. Who was left to cradle them to their last resting place, who had known their names and loved them?

The injunction is this week’s Torah portion does not include the word ‘love’ though it is employed in this context numerous times elsewhere:

You shall not wrong or oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Exodus 22:20)

Don’t attribute to others the injuries from which you yourself suffer,’ insists Rashi. This may mean: Don’t maltreat outsiders, because not long ago you were an outsider yourself, and why draw attention to your own vulnerability? Alternatively, he may mean: You know how it hurts to be a refugee, so don’t go hurting others. That’s why Jewish communities have been deeply committed to the fate of those who, like our parents, had to flee for their lives.

We’ve hosted many people through the excellent NGO Refugees at Home. You hear it differently when it’s the person opposite you at your kitchen table who says: ‘They gave me one bottle of water to cross the Sahara; I saw many dead.’ ‘The tiny boat drifted to Greece; I walked until I couldn’t move.’ ‘I clung underneath the lorry.’ ‘Where would you sleep if we hadn’t had a room?’ ‘On the bus; I buy a ticket for the longest journey, then buy another back.’ When you hear such stories, you don’t use words like ‘swarms.’ You don’t build your true British identity on contempt for others, especially if you are a Jew, or, for that matter, a Muslim, Hindu or Sikh.

No country can, or should, accept everyone. Rashi’s fellow commentator, Abraham ibn Ezra, has a caution: before being accepted, refugees must reject idolatry. This is a fundamental rule applicable to all children of Noah: idol worship must be foresworn. The equivalent precondition today might be commitment to equality and democracy. But given that stipulation, ibn Ezra continues, not only is a society which oppresses refugees culpable, but any individual within it who witnesses such maltreatment and remains silent is held responsible for their community’s wrongdoing. There’s a duty to speak out against cruelty and contempt.

But no commentator could be more forthright than Samson Raphael Hirsch:

As strangers you were without rights in Egypt; out of that grew your slavery and suffering. Beware therefore, so runs the warning, lest in your state you make the rights of anyone dependent on anything other than the simple fact of their humanity, which every human being possesses by virtue of being human.

His words chime painfully with those of Ali Smith, president of the remarkable organisation Refugee Tales, in which, based on the precedent of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, people from all areas of life walk, eat and share their stories together. The group, she writes,

is a small bright spot in a decade of tortuous pressure – legally, politically and in terms of public rhetoric – on the people forced by war, environmental ruin, poverty and fear into exile and crossing the world with something like hope in humanity.

That ‘something like hope in humanity’ is what the Torah enjoins us to uphold.

06 Feb 2026

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Holocaust, Spirituality Permalink

In the week when we read the Ten Commandments in the Torah

Sticky Post By admin On February 6, 2026

In that moment when the words ‘I am your God’ were spoken, the whole world fell silent, all creation stood still and listened. Every living being felt: ‘These words are spoken to me.’ Everything in nature realised: ‘This is my inner essence; this is who I truly am.’

This beautiful explanation, by Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh-Leib Alter of Ger, takes us far beyond the understanding of the first of the Ten Commandments as a statement of religious dogma. Rather, it is the truth at the heart of all life: whoever I am, in whatever way I frame my identity, – Jew, continental, American, Russian, gardener, teacher, parent, teen – there is a deeper reality to me. That truth flows through me and through all things constantly, almost always unrecognised and unnamed, but without it I would have no breath and my heart would not beat. That truth is the sacred vitality, the divine energy, which imparts life to all that is. In that moment when God spoke, not just down from Mount Sinai but upwards from the depths of all being, this truth surged to the fore and, for one inerasable moment, united all consciousness in the one awareness: this is my God, the ‘I’ which is the core of all being and is the deepest reality of all that exists.

That moment of revelation at Sinai may or may not be historical, but it certainly is eternal, universal and all-encompassing. Only, it flows deep down and concealed, well below the loud, unceasing, constantly chafing, frequently brutal, experience of our everyday world. Noise and violence drown it out. But they cannot negate it or render it untrue. We continue to hear it, if only rarely; we to intuit it in those moments when we fall silent and not just our mind but our heart comprehends: we belong to one life you and I, fellow traveller, fellow human, fellow being, bird, sheep, tree.

Yet, despite this teaching, I find myself thinking over and again of a very different commentary on the Ten Commandments, by my much-missed teacher Rabbi Hugo Gryn. In Chasing Shadows he writes of his experience in concentration camps:

‘In the intervening years I have often thought how Auschwitz-Birkenau was the denial and the perversion of all the Ten Commandments. In that Nazi empire…it was clear that:

I. God was replaced by a Fuehrer and his minions who claimed for themselves the power of life and death.

II. They fashioned for themselves idols of silver and gold and filled their world with the sigh of swastikas, the sound of Heil Hitler and the smell of burning corpses.

VI. Murder was at the heart of that culture, and killers were promoted and honoured.’

This is what can happen when we forget the sacred ‘I’ which is the heart of all life and by virtue of which all life is precious and must, in all its individuality and diversity, be recognised and respected. How different that ‘I’ is from the ‘I, not you’; the ‘I have no place for you,’ the ‘ego-nationalism,’ exclusionism and racism at the core of the worst of populist politics. How different from those tyrannical ‘I’s’ in our current world, eager to take up weapons and kill.

I fear this rise of violence and contempt, whoever it is directed against: refugees, fellow Jews, Muslims, non-Brits, nature, life itself. That is why it is so important, essential beyond anything words can convey, to listen to that voice which speaks from Sinai and, as Rabbi Yehaudah Aryeh-Leib taught, to recognise it, be silent, and know.

02 Feb 2026

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Spirituality Permalink

5786 Shabbat Shirah – The Shabbat of Song

Sticky Post By admin On February 2, 2026

Singing abides deep in the intrinsic nature of existence. It cannot be alienated.

In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
~ Bertold Brecht

That is why the authors, whoever they were, who composed Perek Shirah, ‘The Chapter of Song,’ were not satisfied that the ancient Mishnaic texts which reached them should speak only of law and ethics. For beneath even the basic, essential truths that address the will and conscience, they sensed a further depth of consciousness, an awareness of the sacred, and that consciousness sings. Not only, therefore, did they compose their chapter in its honour, but it seems they backdated pseudepigraphically it to that core creative rabbinic period of the first and second centuries of our epoch, as if to say: This is not only equally as valid and as holy, as necessary to the life of the spirit as keeping the Sabbath, or proclaiming ‘God is one’: it is, in fact, the true meaning of ‘God is one,’ the truth that nourishes all subsequent truth, the essence of being itself. Hence, they understood that not an orb, nor a whale in the ocean, nor a bird, nor a human soul in its journey across the span of life, but will, sometimes even unknown to itself, be susceptible to song.

Song may be bleak and painful. The other prisoners, tortured by the Apartheid regime in South Africa’s jails, would sing, whether from horror, fear or solidarity, while their fellow victims of the regime, innocent as they themselves were except for protesting the tyranny of their government, were taken for execution. And today, the priests, rabbis, imams and population of Minnesota and elsewhere who stand against the extra-judicial murders of their townsfolk, sing. Song is indefatigable in its protest.

The poets and musicians may themselves be killed; those who hate freedom will continue to seek them out and murder them, but their poetry and songs cannot be put to death:

You took away all the oceans and all the room.
You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it.
Where did it get you? Nowhere.
You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.
~ Osip Mandelstam

And even when those lips can no longer make words, – Stalin had Mandelstam exiled and he died in transit – the words they shaped continued to be learnt by heart, whispered while tyranny reigns, but sung when freedom returns.

For there exists a deeper music to which the human soul, and the spirit of every being, responds. This music belongs to no one, which is why it cannot be locked away. It is the vibrancy, the rhythm and resonance of life itself, of infinity, of God if you will, of the sacred energy as it flows through all creation, through everything that exists. Only the hard heart cannot hear it; that is why the cruel in spirit persecute those who can.

It is this song, taught Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh-Leib of Ger, that the Children of Israel sang when Pharaoh was defeated, not on account of his death, but from the joy of liberty. And in their own song of freedom, they sung the freedom song of all creation. For the Torah says: ‘They sung this song,’ but to what does this refer? he asks, rejecting the obvious answer that it refers to the words which follow in the text. No, he insists, this points to the song that has existed from the moment of creation, the music which is present but concealed in all things, and which although so often unheard, is the invisible essence and source of energy of all that exists. It is the song of the earth ‘from whose corners we hear music;’ of the trees of the forest which clap their hands and dance, and of the wild geese, pulsing forth in honks and powerful wingbeats as they traverse the sky: ‘A voice calls out in desolate places: make straight the pathway through the wilderness for God.’ It is the song which shall be sung in the time to come, when the world is redeemed.

Is this true? One doesn’t hear such music in the headlines about brutality, murder, injustice, contempt and incitement to hatred that fill the virtual realms of social media and the press. There is little if any testament to such music in the reports from witnesses to mass killing, secret murder, torture, sadism, lying, deceit and pretence, a literature so vast and horrible that it’s unbearable to contemplate for long, but which must also be heard and heeded. Song, or sob, which is the deeper reality? The answer must be both, or else we too will join the heartless throng.

But the singing remains, inalienable, even when inaudible. For it derives from a source which flows deeper and sustains life more truly than the selfishness, fear, envy and anger, the failure of compassion and imagination, which shrink the heart.

And were it not for this singing, humanity would have no hope.

HEART AND MIND

Month: February 2026