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02 Jun 2023

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Ethics, Spirituality Permalink

Blessing: the wonder and oneness of life

Sticky Post By admin On June 2, 2023

Dod Werner, Uncle Werner, as everyone called him, has not been alive for many years now. I believe he made it to 102. Whenever I was in Jerusalem, I would visit him and ask him to bless me. I don’t entirely know why, since he wasn’t actually my uncle, but that of a friend and colleague. It was something about him, his wisdom, his presence.

Dod Werner wasn’t a cohen, a priest, to whom as we read tomorrow, the Torah entrusts the privilege of bestowing the blessing beloved of people of all faiths:

May God bless you and keep you.

May God’s face shine upon you and give you grace.

May God’s face be turned toward you and grant you peace.

But there’s something greater than saying a blessing. It’s what God tells Abraham: ‘heyeh berachah, be a blessing.’ A much-quoted Midrash has God say to him: ‘until now the blessings were in my hands, henceforth they are in yours.’ Since Abraham is ‘the father of many nations’ this instruction is the prerogative of all humanity. More than that: it’s a commandment; it’s what we are here for, it’s life’s purpose.

According to the Shulchan Aruch, the sixteenth century definitive code of Jewish law, we should say at least one hundred blessings every day: ‘Bless you for opening the eyes of the blind, for clothing the naked, for enabling people to walk…’ It’s hard to avoid reciting them by rote.

But they remain a bulwark against taking life for granted. And suddenly, when one’s back goes and one can hardly walk, one realises that nothing should be taken as given. The Talmud recounts how two rabbis pay their respects to a blind scholar in a village through which they happen to be passing. Moved by their kindness, the man thanks them, saying: ‘May the One who sees but cannot be seen bless you who visited one who can be seen but cannot see.’ There’s grace and gratitude in those words.

But blessing is more than words, more even, writes Rachel Remen in her wonderful book My Grandfather’s Blessings, than ‘something that one person gives another.’ When we bless, we ‘touch the unborn goodness’ in each other: ‘A blessing is a moment of meeting…in which both people involved remember and acknowledge their true nature and worth.’

Last Tuesday night, unable to sleep, I read Adam Kirsch’s ‘Can humans ever understand how animals think?’ Then I dreamt of how important it is to bless and feel blessed not just by humans, but by animals too. When the time comes, I’d like to spend some of my old age in their company, humbled, simplified, blessed by their presence.

Looking deeper at God’s instruction to Abraham, heyeh berachah, I realise that heyeh is composed of three of the letters in God’s name, Yod Heh Vav Heh, letters which also form havayah, the Hebrew word for ‘being’. When we bless truly, God is present, the being at the heart of all being. In blessing, life touches life in a moment of togetherness deeper than all the accidents, differences and injuries of this world.

The mystics relate berachah, blessing, with berechah, pool, the hidden reservoir from which life flows down through all existence. We cannot bless while we harbour arrogance or anger. Life won’t flow through us then.

Blessing is a moment of trust and entrusting, of fidelity and companionship with life. Words of blessing are important; we need to tell people how much we cherish and care for them. But blessing at its deepest has no words. It is known in the heart: a silent shared acknowledgement of the wonder and oneness of life.

25 May 2023

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Environment, Ethics Permalink

What God says

Sticky Post By admin On May 25, 2023

A dreamer’s Shavuot message for a troubled world.

We say every day in the morning prayers that the world is illumined berachamim, by mercy and love. Wendell Berry, writer, devoted Christian, farmer and environmentalist so committed that, on principle, he ploughs his land only with horses, puts it like this:

I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, in so far as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.

I so much want to agree. But the world doesn’t appear to be like that. To take just one example, (alongside so many issues about which we justly worry) the displaced family from Kharkiv have just marked one year since they fled Ukraine and came to live with us. With no sign of the war abating, we wondered how to mark the day. (The region was bombed the night before.) I made them their favourite cheese scones, small compensation, and we commiserated.

So it doesn’t exactly feel as if the world in its current state ‘subsists and coheres’ through love. But about this there can be no doubt: that the world, each of us, all of us, everything alive, has much need of love.

Therefore, that’s how I want to hear God’s voice in the Ten Commandments, which we will read tomorrow in all synagogues in every land and across all denominations. A beautiful Mishnah teaches that God didn’t just say ‘I am’ once long ago on Mount Sinai. God says this every day, calling out for us to attend. And God’s ‘I am’ is more than just a pronoun followed by a verb. The words are an appeal: ‘Hear me, care for me, love me.’

But where do we hear those words? To the mystics, the Kabbalists and Hasidim, the answer is simple: in everything. The voice of the living God is the essence of life in all its forms, the very heart of existence.

Therefore, when we think of children, especially perhaps children faced with extra struggles, such as finding a safe country, being given a safe home, having the right teachers who understand their gifts as well as their needs, we can hear within them the voice which says ‘Look after me, cherish me, love me.’

When we consider people facing the hard years toward the close of a long life’s journey, the physical limitations, the indignities which age can bring, the loss of friends, we can feel in their presence the voice which says, ‘Be gently with me, respect me, care for me.’ And so often we can see that voice embodied in those precious, remarkable carers who, day in and day out, night in and night out, truly care.

When we read the statistics of declining species, yet learn of the work of those determined groups who restore habitats, clean rivers, watch nests, save toads from busy A-roads, and know how to discern the music of one small songbird from another; there, too, we can hear God’s voice saying ‘I am’ in all the innumerable languages of creation.

But isn’t this all mere sentiment, when we’re told that God’s voice is commandment, a firm ‘Thou shalt’?

Not so! What greater commandment can there be than to live with love of creation, in whatever sphere of life we can best express it?

Therefore, may this be a year of listening, and responding, to God’s great commandment, God’s patient, enduring, long-suffering, pleading ‘I am.’

19 May 2023

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Ethics, Spirituality Permalink

Be on the side of life

Sticky Post By admin On May 19, 2023

These two times ‘I’ may be all the world needs. The first is ‘I am’ and the second is ‘I shall.’ But beyond them waits a third, the terrible sentence of Cain.

The first anochi, ‘I am,’ is the opening word of the Ten Commandments, which we will read next Friday morning on Shavuot, the Festival of the Giving of the Torah. The description of the scene at Sinai moves me greatly, the cloud over the mountain, the rising cry of the shofar, the voice of God from nowhere and everywhere, saying Anochi, ‘I’.

When they heard that ‘I am,’ wrote Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib of Ger, (1847 – 1905) when they experienced that ‘I am your God’, not just the Children of Israel but every living being felt it was addressed directly to them. More than that, they felt it was them, the voice at the very core of them, the holiness in the essence of all life.

Those simple words ‘I am your God’ say something deeper than the divine equivalent of ‘Look, this is me!’ They are not really words at all, but the translation into human language of a truth at the centre of all existence. They are vitality itself, the very articulation of the sacred energy which flows through all organic beings, giving them form, life, consciousness and the gift of time.

Therefore, the presence of God, – perhaps it’s less daunting to call it the sacred, the special, -can be felt in all things, in our fellow human beings, in our companion creatures on this earth, in the trees, in meadows, in a tiny flowering plant, even an insect.

This is the first, and most definitive, ‘I am,’ the life of all life.

The second anochi, ‘I’, is what Judah says to his father Jacob to persuade him to entrust Benjamin to his care and allow him to go with his brothers back down to Egypt to buy grain and stave off starvation. Anochi e’ervenu, he says, ‘I shall stand surety for him.’ (Bereshit 43:9) Send the boy with me; I’ll look after him.

I hear about that second anochi almost every day, and often witnessed with my own eyes: ‘I’ll commit to that,’ ‘I’ll take care.’ They’re simple words, but what they represent is not so easy, a combination of awareness, kindness, and the readiness to take responsibility.

I saw only part of the film Mo Farah is making about his life. Alongside those who trafficked him to the UK and enslaved him in domestic service were those who heard him, listened and strove to protect and love him. ‘I’ll stand surety for him,’ they said.

We hold innumerable lives in our hands. The great question, the issue which will define the future of humanity, is whether we can say ‘I’ll stand up for you,’ and mean it truly. That ‘you’ may be a child. But it may also be an orphaned or mal-treated animal, a local park, a meadow. I’ve met people who treasure the tiniest creatures, looking after with wonder. What matters is that we are on the side of life, engaged in heart, practical in our care.

These two words, God’s ‘I am’ and our answer ‘I shall’, may be all we need to find our path through life.

But against them, louring, is a third anochi, the ‘Am I?’ of Cain: ‘Hashomer achi anochi? Am I my brother’s keeper?’ He’s the prototype of those treacherous perpetrators who stalk our future with their byline: Why should I care who I hurt or kill?

That’s why it matters absolutely, always to be on the side of life.

12 May 2023

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Interfaith Permalink

Who’s heard of Rainbow Day?

Sticky Post By admin On May 12, 2023

If you have never heard of Rainbow Day, you’re not alone. I learn of it for the first time just this week, in a note from Rabbi David Seidenberg. He describes himself as a neo-hasid, a modern mystic, and is passionately concerned for nature, attitudes I 100% share.

There are more than 365 (or even 366) ‘days’ in the year. There are days devoted to almost every area of human concern, and to numerous species of animals, birds and even insects. So what is Rainbow Day and how did it begin?

I’d assumed it must have secular origins, like so many ‘societies for the protection of…’ (even one, I’m told, for the appreciation of dandelions, though this may be a tease.) But I would be wrong. In fact, the source is in the Torah: ‘In the 2^nd month, on the 27^th day, the earth dried out,’ and Noah, his family and all the animals were finally able to leave the ark and re-establish life on earth. (Bereshit 8:14)

This year the 27^th of Iyyar, (the 2^nd month in the Hebrew calendar) falls next week, on the night of the 17^th / 18^th May.

I’ll certainly be marking the date. For, as Rabbi Seidenberg writes, it’s ‘a chance to reflect on the deep spiritual and religious meaning of diversity, creation, and our role as part of creation and partners with God.’ This matters urgently, both in human society and nature.

It’s not just because I’m Jewish that I understand viscerally the importance of societies which don’t just tolerate but respect and celebrate diversity. But being a Jew has made me skin-thin sensitive to this essential concern. Additionally, hosting refugees from Iran, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Somalia has made me look at the world in new and challenging ways. It’s brought the truths of injustice, hatred and cruelty closer. It’s made me realise what a proper meal, a bottle of water, a hand in friendship can mean.

I agree with the government that the merciless exploitation of refugees by traffickers is a vicious wrong. But I admire the Archbishop of Canterbury for bluntly speaking truth to power in calling the proposed immigration bill morally unacceptable, a slur on Britain’s reputation and a threat to international cooperation in supporting refugees from war, famine, and persecution. We need safe, legal and justly administered routes for people seeking asylum. That’s fundamental to being a decent country in a rainbow world.

As a rabbi I have the privilege of listening to many people: this has sensitised me to the importance of Rainbow Day in other ways too. If the doors of our community spaces, homes and hearts are open only to those who are so-called ‘normative’, be that gender-normative, neuro-normative, or indeed physical body ‘normative,’ (I use these words with trepidation) we leave a lot of people outside and cause much pain.

Talking about ‘outside’ takes me to the other half of Rainbow Day: anxiety, hope and care for the natural world. When I think of this my heart, like Wordsworth’s, ‘leaps up’.

I’ve always loved animal. Once scared of birds, I’ve learnt to love them too. I watch eagerly for the jays and woodpeckers, the long-tailed tits and occasional grey-blue nuthatch. I’ve understood that insects matter and treasure log-piles for beetles. Life on earth starts here.

But then my heart shrinks back, confronted with what we humans do to our diverse world. As Rabbi Seidenberg writes, ‘The Torah teaches that God has promised never to flood the Earth again. But that doesn’t mean humanity can’t’ – and won’t.

Therefore I want to remain a tree-planter, meadow-lover, and carer for both people and animals to my dying day. That’s why I’ll say my first-timer shehecheyanu thanksgiving blessing this Rainbow Day and henceforth mark it always.

05 May 2023

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Interfaith Permalink

On the Coronation as King Charles III and Queen Camilla

Sticky Post By admin On May 5, 2023

On this day of their coronation, we ask God to bless King Charles III and Queen Camilla.

Through the millennia Jews have lived under many rulers. The Hebrew Bible and rabbinic writings in the Mishnah and Talmud testify to the experiences of being subject to Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. Through the Middle Ages and into the modern era we have suffered oppression under many cruel leaders and been blessed by the enlightened policies of some who were benign. But scarcely ever have we been settled in a country which has offered such deep equality, opportunity, justice and protection as Britain, ruled by a democratically elected government, under the constitutional monarchy of the House of Windsor.

Queen Elizabeth II was greatly admired for her unfailing dedication to service, her self-discipline and dignity and, despite the wealth and privilege of royalty, her personal humility. Many in the long queues to pay tribute commented that her heir would continue in the same manner.

During his years as Prince of Wales, King Charles showed a deep commitment to core values: to the environment, following his father the Duke of Edinburgh; in the welfare of refugees, exemplified in his sustained support for the welcome centre for Ukrainian people displaced by the war; and to the wellbeing of the different faith groups of this multi-cultural country.

Influenced, perhaps, by the example of his grandmother Princess Alice, who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, King Charles has been constant in his support of the Jewish community as this message to him and Queen Camilla from World Jewish Relief testifies:

We are grateful for Their Majesties’ remarkable friendship to the Jewish community, and particularly for the 8 years the former Prince of Wales has spent as [our] committed and actively engaged Royal Patron.

King Charles will say the following words, with their universal vision, within the Christian context of his coronation service at Westminster Abbey:

Grant that I may be a blessing to all thy children, of every faith and conviction, that together we may discover the ways of gentleness and be led into the paths of peace.

We are fortunate to live in a country whose King and Queen aspire to live by such a creed. We are grateful for this privilege and pray that these should be the values at the heart of all leadership.

From Psalm 72 (Verses which will be read at the Abbey)

אֱֽ-לֹקים מִ֭שְׁפָּטֶיךָ לְמֶ֣לֶךְ תֵּ֑ן וְצִדְקָתְךָ֥ לְבֶן־מֶֽלֶךְ׃

יָדִ֣ין עַמְּךָ֣ בְצֶ֑דֶק וַעֲנִיֶּ֥יךָ בְמִשְׁפָּֽט׃

יִשְׂא֤וּ הָרִ֓ים שָׁ֘ל֥וֹם לָעָ֑ם וּ֝גְבָע֗וֹת בִּצְדָקָֽה׃

יִשְׁפֹּ֤ט עֲֽנִיֵּי־עָ֗ם י֭וֹשִׁיעַ לִבְנֵ֣י אֶבְי֑וֹן וִ֖ידַכֵּ֣א עוֹשֵֽׁק׃

יִֽפְרַח־בְּיָמָ֥יו צַדִּ֑יק וְרֹ֥ב שָׁ֝ל֗וֹם עַד־בְּלִ֥י יָרֵֽחַ׃

Give the king your judgements, O God, and your righteousness to princes. Then shall he judge your people righteously and your poor with justice. Let the mountains produce well-being for the people, the hills, the reward of justice. May he defend the poor among the people, deliver the children of the needy and crush the oppressor. In his time shall righteousness flourish, and abundance of peace till the moon shall be no more.

Prayer for the King and Queen

God of all life, Sovereign over all sovereigns, bless King Charles III and Queen Camilla on their coronation. Give them wisdom, compassion and insight, health, fortitude and resilience. Strengthen in them the spirit of service and commitment to all that is just. Grant them length of days and the happiness which comes from dedication to what is right and good.

May their hearts be open to the many and different needs of all the peoples of these lands. May they continue to support all those who seek to do good for human society and for all life. May they uphold the values of justice, freedom, equality and democracy according to which this country has been and must be governed.

May they, in the spirit of Aaron, love and seek peace. May they be guided, as the Torah commands, by awe and humility before God and by the love of God’s creation.

And let us say ‘Amen.’

The Prayer for the Country

המנוןאנגליה - The National Anthem

By Yoav Oved and David Djemal – New London Synagogue

מֶלֶךְחֵןשְׁמוֹר-נָאאֵ’

מֶלֶךְהוֹדנְצֹרהָ-אֵ’

שָׁמְרֵהוּאֵ’.

הַמַּשִּׁילָהגְּבוּרָתוֹ

וְנֶצַחתִּפְאַרְתּוֹ

הַאֲרֵךְמַלְכוּתוֹ

שָׁמְרֵהוּאֵ’:

Melekh khen sh’mor-na El

Melekh hod n’tsor haEl

Shom’rehu El.

Hamshila g’vurato

V’netsakh tifarto

Ha’arekh malchuto

Shom’rehu El:

28 Apr 2023

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Environment, Ethics Permalink

Is there a commandment to love our planet?

Sticky Post By admin On April 28, 2023

Last Wednesday I had the privilege of making a small contribution to ‘Loving the Planet.’ It wasn’t a tree-hugging session, a team effort to prepare a hedgehog highway underneath a road, or a hedgerow planting day, but a seminar at Regents Park College, Oxford. I was asked to respond to a lecture by Professor Melissa Raphael as part of an interfaith seminar on Ecology, Love and Theology.

There’s no obvious commandment to love the earth, Professor Raphael argued, undoubtedly correctly. Judaism offers plenty of pragmatic direction: don’t destroy, don’t be cruel, allow your animals to rest each seventh day and the land each seventh year, repair the world. But love the planet? The Torah contains no such injunction.

She then proceeded to make a moving argument that, since we have become estranged from the land, its fauna and flora, seasons and smells, needs and yields, perhaps the earth itself is now, too, one of those strangers which the Torah instructs us to love in no less than thirty-six places. Is our degraded planet calling out to us: ‘Love me.’

Imanuel Levinas teaches that we must hear God’s command in ‘the face of the other’, calling on us to take responsibility for one another, so the earth too has a visage, ‘pnei tehom, the face of the deep’ over whose darkness God spread the first mantle of light. This face of the earth also commands us. Commandment is ‘interruptive’: it insists on a response, demands our ‘Hinenni – Here am I.’

It was a beautiful paper. It put me in mind of the Torah’s other love commandments, especially the love of our neighbour. Could we understand the earth not just as stranger, but also as neighbour, I wondered in response? After all, it’s never far away.

Like so many rabbis, Samson Raphael Hirsch loved word associations. In his Torah commentary he links Re’acha, ‘your neighbour’, with mir’eh, ‘pasture’. From a strictly semantic perspective this is most unlikely, but it’s an evocative connection, nonetheless. Destroy our neighbours’ ‘pastures’, he argues, their rights, place in society, sources of sustenance, the earth on which they and we depend, and we break the commandment to love our neighbour like our self.

“And it’s not just ‘like us’,” someone in the room added; “it is us, for our very bodies are of the earth.” So, should ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ include the meadows, woods and wheatfields too – without devaluing our special responsibilities to our fellow humans?

Yesterday Deborah Golend and I opened the fourth conversation Jewish and Emotional on the subject of gratitude. It led me to think of the closing lines of a poem by Rachel, the pioneer Hebrew poet whose life was cut short by tuberculosis:

Let me not be bitter, lest I cloud with my bitterness

the pure blue of the sky, my friend of old.

Her term for ‘my friend’ is re’i, the same word as ‘neighbour’ in the Torah.

Perhaps, them the earth is both stranger and neighbour, calling, in different ways, for our care?

The Torah has, of course, a third love commandment: Love God. Judaism rejects the deification of nature, the pantheistic worship of hilltops, moons and stars. Yet, together with the mystics, the panentheists, we may see God not as nature, but within, as well as beyond, it. The spirit which hovered over the deep, lives within all breathing things, for God is Chei hachaim, the Life of all life.

How then can we treat any creature with wanton cruelty, or cause needless destruction, when in so doing we hurt not only its particular life, but something infinitely precious at the same time, a tiny portion of God’s presence? The very thought makes the heart ache, and isn’t that a symptom of love?

21 Apr 2023

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Environment, Holocaust Permalink

Between Yom HaShoah and Yom Ha’Atzmaut

Sticky Post By admin On April 21, 2023

I never know what to write on this Shabbat between Yom Hashoah, Yom Hazikaron, Remembrance Day for the dead in Israel’s wars, and Yom Ha’Atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day. Seventy-five years have passed since the bitter battle for Jerusalem so vividly recalled by my father, whose Yahrzeit falls this week.

And this weekend also brings Earth Day, founded in 1970 to inspire love and protection for our planet, which will involve a billion people in thousands of local and global activities. I get notices about it from all around the world, from organisations Jewish, religious, secular and practical every day.

I’ve written my share of difficult things this week (links below). So instead, I’m going to write about love, – love of the earth and its beauty, but as felt by holocaust survivors, and those who’ve struggled for Israel’s land and soul, then and now.

These are novelist Aharon Appelfeld’s memories of his grandparents in rural Bukhovina, before all his family perished, and he, just a child, fled:

The walk to the synagogue is long and full of wonders. A horse stands in astonishment… Not far from them a foal is rolling on the grass. There is astonishment in the dozens of pairs of eyes of the horses, sheep, and goats who are all following the foal’s movements, happy that it’s back on its feet. Grandfather walks in silence, but his silence is not frightening. [In the synagogue] the prayers are conducted in whispers. This is the home of God and people come here in order to sense His presence… (The Story of a Life, p. 9 -10)

This is Gerda Weissman-Klein, writing of her hometown Bielitz in 1940, before she lost everything:

What a lovely sunny morning it was! The buttercups were out, and there were violets down in the moist part of the garden near the pond, along with lilies-of-the-valley. On the afternoon of my birthday a warm, scented rain, so typical of May, fell…(All But My Life, p. 43)

Meanwhile in Mandate Palestine my Great-Uncle Alfred, who would lose his life in ’48, wrote after a holiday in 1943:

We saw another part of our beautiful countryside, the whole strip of land along the coast is like one flowering, fertile garden. If they let us work in peace and quiet…we’d soon have one of the most beautiful countries in the world.

Evidently the trees, lovingly planted by early pioneers as described in the famous poem by Rachel, had taken root and offered shade:

I have not sung to you, my land / or glorified your name

With deeds of valour, the spoils of battle.

There’s just a tree my hands have planted / by the Jordan’s quiet banks,

A path my feet have trod / across your fields. (El Artsi)

Then here, in 2006, is David Shulman, originally from the States and drawn to Israel through love of the country, after numerous vigils in the hills alongside Palestinian shepherds:

What is real is this moment, these people, the sliver of moon in the summer sky, the Passsiflora tree in the courtyard, the crimson wine, the inevitable sweetness of confusion, the musical murmur of the words, and the profound, ironic happiness of doing what is right in circumstances of rooted, inherent, unresolvable ambiguity…(Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine, p. 212)

Whoever we are, whatever our views and allegiances, may we work for love of this world and love of life.

14 Apr 2023

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Holocaust Permalink

Towards Yom Hashoah: faith’s unyielding determination

Sticky Post By admin On April 14, 2023

As we say farewell to the Pesach dishes and pack away for another year the memories they evoke, I try to carry with me the words of Isaiah with which the festival readings conclude:

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea. (11:9)

It’s my favourite biblical verse. It concludes Isaiah’s vision of a time when nation no longer predates on nation and one sector of humanity no longer devours another, symbolised by the wolf lying down peacefully with the lamb. (But not, as my Bible teacher stressed, every night a different lamb).

If only the world were like that!

But Isaiah’s world wasn’t like that either. His vision is set in a city under siege; the all-powerful Assyrian armies have laid the land waste and are now so close to Jerusalem that he sees them shaking their fists at Zion from the tops of the surrounding mountains. Resistance is surely futile; logic dictates that defeat is imminent.

Yet it’s in precisely those circumstances that the prophet envisages a different reality. He doesn’t abandon hope; he doesn’t renege on the belief in a world governed by God’s spirit, with God-given wisdom, where the cause of the poor is upheld in righteousness.

‘You may say (he’s) a dreamer,’ but what motivates Isaiah is not phantasy but faith. His hope, moral courage and determination are utterly inspiring, and we need them desperately today.

And Isaiah’s ‘not the only one.’ Monday night brings Yom HaShoah, the date set by Israel’s parliament for remembering the Nazi Holocaust. Something made me reach for the writings of Etty Hillesum in preparation.

Born in Holland in 1914, she threw her last letter from a train to Auschwitz on September 7, 1943. She was cultured, perceptive, sensitive, sensuous, generous, life-loving, and, in her dairies, extraordinarily frank. I’d read many times her entry for 12 July 1942 entitled ‘Sunday morning prayer’, when she couldn’t sleep because she saw before her eyes ‘scene after scene of human suffering:’

One thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well.

What I hadn’t known was that Etty chose to go to Westerbork, the camp in northern Holland from where Jews were sent east, despite several offers to hide her. She refused to be parted from her people; she went willingly because she wanted ‘to give some of those parched thousands just one sip of water.’

‘I love people so much,’ she reflected at the close of one of her days there, telling her friend Jopie:

It all comes down to the same thing: life is beautiful. And I believe in God, And I want to be right there in the thick of what people call ‘horror’ and still be able to say: life is beautiful. (8 October 1942)

The horror was all too real, as her letters from Westerbork prove. But so was the humanity with which she refused to cede to the cruelty around her. So too was the kindness with which she affirmed the preciousness of life. If that counts as beauty, she achieved exactly what she intended.

She certainly lived out Isaiah’s creed of hope and faith, the very core of Judaism, even in what she couldn’t help but describe as ‘hell.’

Together she and he bequeath to us faith’s unyielding determination, the unceasing commitment to righteousness and compassion, the belief that the world should and can be different, and that you and I must help to make it so.

05 Apr 2023

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Spirituality, The Jewish Year Permalink

I wish everyone Chag Sameach

Sticky Post By admin On April 5, 2023

I wish everyone Chag Sameach.

In these difficult times we draw strength from the depth of our faith and tradition.

The Haggadah tells the story of me’avdut lecherut, the journey from slavery to freedom. Into its ancient account we weave our narratives of now and find solidarity across tens of generations.

The struggle to maintain freedom is taking place today in Ukraine, in very different ways on the streets of Israel, and wherever in the world people strive to act with justice, behave with decency, and honour God’s image in every human being.

The values we affirm are simple: life matters, every person matters, justice matters, equality matters, kindness matters. We believe these to be the values God cares about because God is not the yes-man of tyrants, but weeps with all who suffer, whoever they are, and longs for redemption.

These are difficult times, but it is not difficult to know against what we must stand and be counted: tyranny, falsehood, injustice, cruelty, and the degradation of any human being anywhere.

These are difficult times, but it is not difficult to know for what we must stand: truth and integrity, Torat Tsedek – the rule of justice, Torat Chesed - the law of compassion, and the dignity of every person.

This Seder night we take courage from the generations who have gone before us and upheld these same values through other troubled years. We draw courage from the millions of fellow Jews and people of all faiths and nations who, at this very time, stand together with us in striving to live by these ancient, timeless and essential values.

May God give us strength and bless all the world with peace.

Chag Sameach

03 Apr 2023

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Spirituality, The Jewish Year Permalink

What the matzah says

Sticky Post By admin On April 3, 2023

‘Come in and mill it yourselves:’ Nicky and I were in Jerusalem’s Me’ah She’arim, in a courtyard so well hidden we had to ask three times before we found it. Everything was covered in white dust, except that this wasn’t dust but kosher-for-Passover matzah flour. ‘It’s a mitzvah to grind the wheat yourselves,’ said the Hasid in charge. Sadly, on this occasion we couldn’t stay, but, as the saying goes, ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’

I love it when I bake my own matzah; everyone else loves it when I refrain. This year, when I can neither bake nor mill, I can at least mull, and there’s much to consider about what the matzah at the Seder means.

Firstly, there’s the question of whether it’s the bread of slavery or freedom. At the start of the Seder we say, ‘This is the bread of affliction our ancestors ate in Egypt,’ yet later we describe it as the flatbread baked hastily in liberty’s first flush. Which is it? Both, explains Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib of Ger, because only by remembering the cruelties of slavery can we appreciate the significance of freedom. Otherwise we’re liable to take it for granted, forget the sufferings of others and squander our own privileges, – until we realise once again how precious freedom is and demonstrate in the streets in its defence.

Then there’s the Torah’s description of matzah as lechem oni, which intrigued the Talmudic rabbis. Oni sounds like oneh, ‘respond’, making matzah the bread of question-and-answer, the food of curiosity. ‘Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Take responsibility for what you communicate,’ wrote Timothy Snyder in his 2017 masterpiece On Tyranny. Don’t rely on social media. Shun the dominion of fake news, the totalitarianism of lies. This too is essential in the defence of liberty.

But oni might equally derive from ani, poor. The Talmud explains: society must work as a team to support the poor just as matzah needs teamwork to make it kosher. Matzah, then, is the bread of society. Therefore I need to know who provided me with it, alongside Rakusens, and God ‘who brings forth bread from the earth.’ Remember where the wealth of nations comes from, wrote David Olusoga in Cotton Capital. Consumer culture tends to forget those whose lives and homelands are consumed in its making. Let matzah, then, be our bread of tzedakah, social and environmental justice.

But no name for matzah is as unlikely as that of the Jewish mystics: lachma de’asvatah, the bread of health. Many stomachs strongly disagree. Maybe, though, this is what the mystics meant: matzah’s made of flour and water, nothing else. There’s no yeast, oil, egg or sugar, not even any salt. Matzah’s simple; simplicity brings clarity and clarity leads to healing. Perhaps there’s an answer to why we’re here on earth which cuts through the complication and confusion: to serve not tyranny but freedom, not tyrants but the presence of God in all persons and all life.

Finally, a thought about process. Matzah can only be made out of the same five kinds of flour from which bread is baked: wheat, barley, oats, spelt or rye. What’s different about matzah isn’t the ‘what’ but the ‘how’. It’s as if the matzah says ‘We can do this a different way.’ That’s a message desperately needed across our world today.

I wish us all a happy and worthwhile Pesach and a year in which we truly value freedom.

HEART AND MIND

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