‘Deep calls to deep to the roar of your cataracts.’ Psalm 42:8

Yesterday, 8 June, was World Ocean Day. Time and again the Tenach, the Hebrew Bible, expresses wonder at the vast mystery of the oceans and the creatures who live in their depths. ‘Were you there when I made the earth?’ God challenges Job. Do you know who instructed the seas: ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed.’ (Job 38:11) The seas have aways been a source of wonder, danger, might and beauty.

When I was a teacher, we took the whole primary school of two hundred children from Neasden and Harlesden to the coast so that none of them should grow up without ever having seen the sea. For those of us privileged to walk along the cliffs and beaches, the crashing tides battering the rocks below with their high spurting spume, and the song of the small waves as they draw shells and crabs and seaweed back into the tide, are as exhilarating and as mesmerising and as if the current was also within us, storming, cleansing and calming the mind.

Keats’ sonnet Bright Star is inspired by the mysteries of the ocean, as he hears

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.

But those waters sadly no longer offer such purity. Even in the remotest coasts of Scotland, I’ve seen bags and bottles, ropes and rubbish washed ashore in ugly heaps. Meanwhile, trawlers plough the ocean bed, ripping up everything, destroying seascapes and bio-domains as yet unexplored. Hence Secretary General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres’ urgent challenge: ‘Humanity can count on the ocean, but can the ocean count on us?’

That is why World Ocean Day is so important. On January 17^th of this year, the Global Ocean Treaty was finally established. Ratified by over 60 countries, it is hopefully in the process of being implemented by the UK through the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Bill, which recently received Royal Assent. The treaty will enable the creation of vast sanctuaries covering as much as a third of the world’s seas.

It’s an opportunity to reimagine, says the UN website

The ocean has always flowed through us, in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the climate that makes our lives possible. Now we are being called to reimagine that relationship. For the first time in a generation, humanity has chosen to govern a significant part of our shared ocean together.

In his masterly Ocean, Earth’s Last Wilderness, Sir David Attenborough references a key moment of such reimagination, when in 1970 Roger Payne first shared his recording of the songs of humpbacked whales, 90% of which had by then been slaughtered:

‘For the first 30 seconds there is mumbling and giggling as the audiences get used to the deep rumbling groans and high-pitched squeaks. But leave it longer and the audience would go totally silent as if in a trance.’

Listen to the whale song here:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/sjkxUA041nM?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

The songs transformed public attitudes, leading to a widespread ban on whale hunting. Today the deep seas hold many further mysteries, some of which we have glimpsed, and others of which remain as yet undiscovered. Maybe that is why, in a conclusion which has always puzzled me, Isaiah looked forward to the day ‘when the earth would be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.’ (11:9) Perhaps he was likening wonder at what the seas conceal to nothing less than awe before the divine. The Zohar, the Book of Splendour, likens the call of the deep-sea cataracts to the flow of sacred energy as it descends from the ineffable to give life to everything that is. (Tikkunei Zohar 39a)

Our family has a favourite shore, the rocks and beaches of Gairloch in the Highlands. I have stood there with Nicky and the children many times, staring west at the setting sun, listening to the fall of the waves, partly frightened, partly overwhelmed, and partly carried into another dimension, somewhere infinite and timeless, by the vastness of the ocean and the sparkling glory of the reddening light.

World Ocean Day Online

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ohcnAsXYPZY?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

– with EcoJudaism CEO Naomi Verber

https://unworldoceansday.org/calendar/the-ocean-gala-onboard-peace-boat-june-10

I love the sound of the first rains that break the hot drought, the heavy drops that crack hard against the windowpanes. I love the fine rain that one scarcely hears from indoors, so that one runs outside full of hope and spreads out one’s hands to test for wet and smells the earth’s freshness in the cool air. I love the drip, drip, drip of steady rain onto the dimpled surface of the pond, while the drops tumble down from the leaves of the overhanging branches and the small birds hop onto the lily pads to drink, then dart back into the bushes. I love the photo my wife brought home of the young Vietnamese boy dancing with joy in the street as the rain pours and down. I love the up-splash of the puddles on the paths where I run; I love to know that the desiccated land is drinking, that the thirst of the grasses will be quenched.

I love how the rabbis saw the fall of plentiful rain in its due season as one of three secrets to which only God holds the keys: the mystery of conception, the miracle of resurrection, and the renewal of the earth through the blessings of sweet rains. Rain brings back green to the yellowing fields, makes the weary leaves stretch out strong once again and soaks away the liminal fear of desertification and disaster. Now the small rivers won’t soon run dry, their fish will survive and the deer and the foxes will have somewhere to drink. Of course, there’s the danger of flooding, but that’s not uppermost in the south of England after two months of almost rainless weather.

How we squander precious water, as if the supply were guaranteed and infinite! ‘You know how precious water is,’ a Muslim colleague told me, ‘When you’ve lived in a country where the women walk twelve kilometres to the well and twelve back with full pitchers on their shoulder, then share the water they’ve carried with their neighbours.’

Therefore, the rabbis taught, go outside when the long awaited rains finally come and be thankful and say, ‘Blessed be the One who is good and does good.’ Amen, and amen again.

I first met Matt Biggs when we hosted Gardener’s Question Time at my synagogue, a highlight of my career and he was on the panel. A deeply religious Christian, he subsequently visited the synagogue for services several times, shared with us the remarkable role Christadelphians had played rescuing Jews from Nazi Europe, went round our garden with us, brought us two special camelias, commented when we showed him the greenhouse kit we’d just bought ‘Putting that up together will test your marriage’ and became a good friend.

I was deeply saddened to learn of his diagnosis with cancer. We kept in touch and I was shocked to hear from him recently that he might have only months left to live. ‘Keep me in your prayers,’ said, and I do. So I hadn’t expected him still to be working and was thrilled to hear him when I turned on the radio during a long drive home and caught the latest episode of GQT. I can’t remember a propos what gardener’s question the chair turned to Matt and invited him to speak about his cancer journey. (Matt has been courageously open about his illness from early on.)

What follows is not a transcription of what he said, but of what I took from it, and the impact his words have had on me.

‘You’ve just been given a special honour Matt; tell us about it.’

‘Yes; I’ve been awarded the VMH (I had to look this up afterwards; it stands for the Victoria Medal of Honour ‘awarded to British horticulturists resident in the United Kingdom whom the Royal Horticultural Society Council considers deserving of special honour.’)

‘I’ve been honoured just for doing what I love.’ (He was clearly thrilled!)

‘I did one of those routine screenings for bowel cancer. If they send one to you, do it. Don’t leave it. It’s so important. They called me in and said I had such a tiny bit of cancer it wasn’t a worry. But a year later it had gone to my liver. You can imagine how that went down. But then, an amazing thing. They took away two thirds of my liver, but it regrows. I had a spring pruning.

‘I had chemo. That’s not easy. (I remembered the conversations we’d had about how he sat looking out of the hospital window and thinking how a piece of semi-wasteland could be turned into a garden, how on his next chemo he had begun to design the space in his head, and how after his third he’d taken steps to make it happen.)

‘We all know the power of green therapy. So I thought: restore the garden as a gift for cancer patients. I gathered amazing people – I love them all to bits. They never say no. Why are they making a garden? Because we know how beauty matters, how beauty can heal. So we’re going to wrap that hospital space round with beauty. It’s an antidote to the world of terrors and despair.

‘I say: “Every cloud has a silver lining,” but, if there isn’t one, make it. So I’m trying to get on with everything while I can. I hate the thought of not being able to communicate.

‘I’m just being Matt as long as I can, and I’m loving it.

Halfway through the programme my phone went.

‘Sorry. I can’t talk now. I’ll call you back in ten.’

I just had to listen. I had to capture every word. I had to lay it to my soul. Nothing was going to stop me hearing the rest of that programme.

Back home with my wife, we tuned in to the programme all over again. But I don’t need iPlayer; I can hear Matt’s words in my heart.

God bless you, Matt. God be with you and send you Refuah Shelemah, as much strength and healing as possible.

Listen at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2026/matthew-biggs-final-gardeners-question-time-bbc-radio-4

Bringing Joy to the Heart and Soul

Yesterday, May 3rd, was International Dawn Chorus Day. It may be too late to do as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds advises and set our alarm 30 minutes (or an hour-and-a-half) earlier than usual and be up as the lark starts to sing. But tomorrow, or the day after, we still won’t heave missed it.

Or, though it’s not the same as being out there ourselves, we can enjoy the recordings on the RSPB website or with The Wildlife Trusts. I’ve been to the exact place where the RSPB made its You Tube, on ‘the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond.’ I listened to the geese coming in to land and it was wonderful. I said my morning prayers there with the trees as my minyan and the birds as my leaders.

For once, at least, we can listen to something deeper, older and a million times more beautiful than the noise of all the angry, hate-filled words and murderous missiles of this crazy human world at war. For once, we can hear the whole world sing, and remember, and lay it to our hearts, that this is what we, and all creatures, truly live for.

Here is the Zohar on the subject of dawn, though the focus is less on the music of the birds, than of the spirit. But isn’t it, in the end, the same song?

Rabbi Elazar and Rabbi Jose were on a journey together, and they arose early to walk by the light of the dawn. Rabbi Elazar said: ‘The time has now come for the morning stars to praise their Master and sing to Him. This is the meaning of “When the morning stars sang together and all the children of God shouted for joy,” (Job 38:7) for they all praise God together.’

Pre-dawn, says the Zohar elsewhere, is the hour of healing, when the archangel Raphael (whose name means “God heals”) is abroad in the world. I imagine the birds as his companions, singing to bring healing to a wounded world, singing to bring hope and joy to the over-tense mind and help us unfold the wings of our stymied souls.

And all we have to do is listen.

The dawn chorus is the symphony of song performed by birds looking for love, and to defend their patch. In spring, as the days lengthen, wildlife starts to think about the need to breed. For many male birds, this means belting out the well-worn but wonderful classics to try and attract females. Some species sing throughout the day, but it’s at dawn, as the morning light begins to break, that many different birds join together to perform. https://www.rspb.org.uk/whats-happening/news/the-dawn-chorus-all-you-need-to-know-about-natures-big-show