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15 Dec 2023
Sticky Post By Posted in Spirituality, The Jewish Year Permalink

Hope in the darkness

Sticky Post By On December 15, 2023

Something I love about Chanukkah is reflections.

When I was small, we often used to light the candles in my grandparents’ house. They had a ‘through room’ with bay windows looking onto the road in front and out into their large, half-wild garden at the back.

I used to stare not just at the candles but at their reflections, and the reflections of their reflections as the lights were mirrored back and forth from window to window. I would watch them receding, over the street and out into the city on the one side, and through the dark garden on the other, until they were caught in the branches of a huge oak tree, the venerable marker of some ancient boundary.

I saw those lights then, and still see them now, as fragile illuminations, flickering markers of hope and warmth, small fingers of humanity reaching out into the night. How desperately we need them now at the close of this year of hatred and war!

Those lights are to me the true miracle of Chanukkah. As Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib of Ger wrote, ‘For this the human being was created, to give light in the darkness.’

Can those lights, stretched out like hands of greeting, be us, become humanity, seeking each other, calling to one another in a world grown dark with cruelty and fury?

Beha’alotecha et hanerot, says the Torah. Don’t read those words, insist the mystics, as if all they mean is ‘When you light the menorah.’ Take them according to their literal meaning: ‘When you raise yourself up with the lights.’ For God’s light burns within us all, though it’s often hidden even from ourselves.

Can we find that light in our own hearts? Can others help us? Can we, even if only occasionally, rekindle that light in each other, through kindness, attentiveness, listening to one another’s stories, aspirations and griefs? Might we, then, by means of this heart-light, look beyond the frustrations and festering resentments, the ignorance and wilful disinformation, that so often set us apart? Can we hope?

As Jews we have often hoped in vain. But we have never submitted to the notion that hope itself is in vain. ‘Od lo avdah tikvateinu, our hope has never ceased’: that is the true anthem of the Jewish People.

But yesterday, watching the reflections of all eight candles on the final night of Chanukkah, and the reflections of their reflections now stretching out from my own home, I felt a sense of loss. ‘Farewell, light and hope of Chanukkah!’ I felt I was saying. ‘Farewell! Don’t get lost in the darkness!’

It was then that it struck me for the first time that those flames might be travelling in the opposite direction. Maybe they weren’t going out into the darkness but seeking to come in from it. Maybe they were saying to me: ‘Let me in!’

There passed through my mind the beautiful lines from Yehudah Halevi’s sea poem, when the waters, finally calm after a terrifying storm, once again peacefully mirror the night sky

‘And the stars are astray in the heart of the sea
Like exiles driven from their homes.’

So I ask myself now, ‘Whom can I let in to my heart-space, to my home? What light might they bring with them, and what might I see differently, or entirely anew, by its flames?’

That is my hope for this year ahead, that, whoever we are, we may see further, more widely and more deeply, that we have seen before.

08 Dec 2023
Sticky Post By Posted in Community Permalink

Chanukah 5784: trying to find light in this darkness

Sticky Post By On December 8, 2023

Please, do you have a light?

I haven’t become a smoker. But I keep asking this question, not in words but in spirit.

I’m only trying to copy what the Maccabees did twenty-two centuries ago. How bleak it must have been when they re-entered the ruined Temple, the shattered masonry, the broken sanctity, the war against the Seleucid powers far from over. Yet, so the Talmud teaches, they didn’t despair. Instead, they looked for oil to light the Menorah:

They searched and discovered just one vial, intact with the High Priest’s seal.

That they found it, lit it, and that its flame still burns today: this is the miracle of Chanukah.

We, too, need light in these cruel months of war. The unbearable details of 7 October continue to emerge. Israel’s military casualties mount, this family’s child, that family’s son. The hapless civilian population of Gaza suffers unimaginably; the huge death toll rises. Hamas fights on, merciless; hostages remain in its bleak tunnels. Grief spreads. Hatred thrives.

Near home someone chants ‘Kill the Jews’. ‘Why say that?’ I challenge, ‘They did in Sobibor and Auschwitz. God’s abandoned me. God’s abandoned the Jews. God’s…’ Realising the man’s drunk, I move on. But his words show how the refrain is out there.

‘How are you celebrating Chanukah this year?’ I’m asked by the BBC. With muted joy, but with great depth, I answer. For I’ve never felt closer to the Maccabees, searching for something to light in the darkness.

What can I find in the ruins? I’m not looking for a physical vial of oil. Instead, I’m mentally saying to everyone I meet: have you got some oil, some goodness, just a drop, to put in my jar?

I visit Isca, my and my brother’s second mother, at the Royal Free Hospital. Her days seem near their close. A nurse brings a small brush to moisten her lips. It’s not just the action, it’s the kindness and the smile. Where does the staff find the patience and gentleness? They put oil in the jar.

In the supermarket a woman stops every shopper, ‘Buy two cans of soup for the foodbank.’ How many of us, without her reminder, would have walked straight past that box labelled ‘Help Your Community’? That’s more oil in the jar.

I join Together for Humanity opposite Downing Street. Two men, one Palestinian, one Israeli, recount their losses, not to wound each other but to embrace the hope that a better way is possible, that we can live side by side. The crowd’s candles shine through the rainy dark.

In the same London drizzle, I speak at a gathering outside Liverpool Street Station to commemorate the arrival of the first Kindertransport train exactly eighty-five years ago. The girls and boys it carried were the light and hope of their parents, before the darkness asphyxiated them. What selfless love, to send your beloved child to an unknown land. What courage, to begin again alone in an unknown language.

Gradually the jar fills up. My vial of oil has no High Priest’s seal. But what it contains is holy nevertheless, because every drop derives from kindness and there’s nothing more sacred than compassion.

I shall take that oil and try to light it, not just on my Chanukiah but in my life. Through its flames I see innumerable other lights. They don’t extinguish the darkness, but they illumine a path through it. We may not get to the other side; there may even be no other side. But by our lights we shall remain human, caretakers of God’s holy light.

01 Dec 2023
Sticky Post By Posted in Environment, Israel Permalink

For Eco Shabbat: between shame and compassion

Sticky Post By On December 1, 2023

This is Eco Shabbat, timed to coincide with COP 28.

I don’t love the name ‘Eco’, apt as it is. I’d rather describe the day in spiritual terms: the Shabbat dedicated to reverence before the beauty of creation, the subtle and wondrous interconnectedness of all life; the Shabbat in which we determine to honour and protect it.    

Yet I’m struggling with a feeling I hesitate to name, a deep sense of shame.

This is due, partly, to the war between Israel and Hamas. But the causes lie wider.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. This is in no way, heaven forbid, shame at being Jewish. I joined the rally against antisemitism last Sunday, profoundly moved by the historic companionship of tens of thousands proud of our identity. No, I reverence our millennial tradition of devotion to God and Torah which demands of us everything. I know myself an unworthy heir to its depth and wisdom.

It’s not shame for my strong connection to Israel, my bonds with precious friends and colleagues there, my prayers for those confronting Hamas, my joy at the release of tens of hostages and my hopes, and fears, for those still left in the tunnels of Hamas.

Nor is it shame that I listen with sorrow to the distress and desperation, anger and tears, of families of Palestinian civilians caught in the horrors of Gaza, or pursued by settlers on the West Bank who profane the name of God and Judaism.

No; it’s more than that. Sometimes I’m simply ashamed of being a human.

It’s the shame described by Dante when, overcome in the presence of his beloved Beatrice, he lowers his gaze and, seeing his own reflection in the waters of a stream, looks instantly away ‘filled with shame unspeakable.’

It’s akin, despite the utterly different circumstances, to the shame Primo Levi perceives in the faces of the first Russian horsemen when they come into sight of Auschwitz-Buna in January 1945, the shame ‘a just man experiences at another man’s crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defence.’ (The Truce, p. 188)

I keep thinking of the unanswerable Biblical question, Eichah? How? Why? How has humanity descended into such destruction? Where are those evil ideologies conceived that long to hurt and kill? How have we reached the state where, across the globe, homes, cities and landscapes are laid waste? Why are we ruining our sweet air and beneficent earth? Why do we continue to do so, when we know the price our grandchildren will pay for our actions?

All this, which daily confronts us, fills me with shame. How can humanity look itself in the face? If God were a person, God would be tearing out so much hair that the Godhead had none left.

Yet maybe something else, something better, can emerge from the pain.

I joined a vigil for the children of Israel and Gaza in St James’ Church, Piccadilly. Every quarter of an hour, a participant from a different faith spoke for just two minutes. The rest was silence.

In that rich quiet, I felt once more the compelling power of pity. In that heart-space of grief, wordlessly there grew a resolute, implacable commitment to compassion, to caring for life more fiercely than before, for this vulnerable world, its tenderness, beauty and wonder, its undressed wounds and inconsolable sorrows. We must lay it upon our hearts that, despite everything, humanity is commanded, ceaselessly and irrevocably, by compassion

24 Nov 2023
Sticky Post By Posted in Community, Interfaith, Israel Permalink

Crossing the silence: the healing power of listening

Sticky Post By On November 24, 2023

‘We came today to tell, to listen, to remember,’ said David Grossman at the mourning gathering of the Kibbutz movement. He knows what it’s like to lose a child.

I believe in the power of listening. It’s limited; it takes away from life’s sorrows nothing except the loneliness, the fear, the frustration that no one hears or cares. But that itself is solidarity and solace.

Since I came back from Israel, people have asked me ‘Why did you go?’ I went to listen. I want to listen to those who suffer the anguish inflicted on them since October 7, grief, shock, and waiting, waiting, waiting for news of relatives taken hostage, news which may or may not come even today. As the Torah says in tomorrow’s reading: ‘Give me my wives and my children.’

I want to listen, too, to those who uphold the human spirit, bringing reprieve, strength and joy. And, as Grossman says, I also want to tell, so that there’s less aloneness and miscomprehension in the world.

What’s more challenging, I feel the need to listen, too, to those who inhabit the other side of silence, those to whom a Jew like me may not be thought to want to talk, and who may not want to talk to me, in these cruel and divisive days. I want to try, at least try, to listen to those whom the appalling death tolls and the relentless rhetoric of hate push apart:

If we don’t find ways to listen across the divide between factions and acknowledge each other’s pain, the current conflict… will remain embedded in patterns of trauma for generations to come, almost certainly birthing even more violence. This task is more urgent than ever. (Quoted by Solutions Not Sides)

There are so many reasons for avoiding listening, (and they aren’t always wrong): don’t legitimise their point of view; stay with your own; have no time; change the subject; argue back; don’t expose yourself to what you don’t want to know. I’m as guilty as anyone.

Yet I believe in listening. It’s not always possible; there can be too much division, too much hardness of heart, too much hate. Yet I believe, want to believe, in listening’s healing power.

So how do we enter those silences, those spaces filled with the unspoken, with suspicion, with hostility real or perceived, that separate us, Jews and Muslims, colleagues with whom we used to chat over coffee at work, friends, even members of our own family? Where does listening begin?

It’s a question as old as the Mishnah. ‘Listen,’ says Rabbi Yossei, means ‘hear the words your own mouth is speaking.’ He’s addressing an entirely different question: the import of the first word of the Shema, (‘Hear!’) which opens Judaism’s most familiar meditation.

Nevertheless, his explanation is acutely relevant. If we want to listen across the silence, we need to consider what we ourselves are putting into it. Have I said hate-filled words? Is my posture saying, ‘I don’t want to know you’? Can I articulate instead, in word or gesture, ‘I’m ready to hear’?

‘Hear’ isn’t the same as ‘agree’. ‘Hear’ means ‘hold your story’, have a place in my heart for your humanity too.

This takes courage, not the daring of a fighter, but the readiness to step off the ledge and abseil into the abyss of human troubles and sorrows, cruelties and injustice, held safe only by the thin rope of faith. This is not exactly faith in God. It’s the faith that somewhere in the rawness of our consciousness, across our different journeys between life and death, we can take heartfelt cognisance of each other’s humanity.

Then maybe, just maybe, we can nurture from there small shoots of hope and trust, vulnerable, subject to hail and drought, but slowly, slowly, capable of growth.

How else are we to rebuild, out of our griefs, our enmities, our fears?

17 Nov 2023
Sticky Post By Posted in Community, Israel Permalink

Trying to be human at an inhuman time

Sticky Post By On November 17, 2023

Last week I accompanied a friend to the Knesset to mark the sheloshim, thirty days since the terrorist atrocities committed by Hamas. We joined a thousand people, families of the hostages and the murdered among them, gathered in the raw solidarity of trauma, pain and anger.

As we walked through the deserted artist’s quarter of Mishkenot Sha’ananim towards Israel’s parliament, I recalled a party held there forty years ago. Our host asked us to state in a single sentence what we wanted from life. Someone said simply, ‘I want to be a human being.’ I don’t recollect his name, but I haven’t forgotten his words.

People ask, ‘How are you coping these impossible days?’ It’s the wrong question, wrote Lital Kaplan in a poem composed just days ago:

‘What’s up?’ is disallowed. Instead ask:
‘What’s lost?’
‘What’s broken?’
‘What’s left?’

My only answer is that what remains is trying to be human. I’m hoping that’s sufficient to enable me to put one foot in front of the other, reject hatred, not yield to fear, not look away from pain and not shut my heart. I’m hoping it’ll help me stay loyal to who I am: a Jew, part of the family of Israel, a human being striving to live by that most universal appellation, ‘made in the image of God.’

I’m not finding it easy. There’s no guidebook to say precisely where that leads just now. I’m troubled and pained, and I’m far from alone. On just one day four groups approached me: ‘How do we cope with the silence, the hostility, the brazen hatred, at work, on campus, among colleagues?

It’s the cruellest time I’ve lived through.

There are so many dead. ‘I’ve seen wars,’ a journalist told me, ‘They’re disgusting, indescribable.’ ‘People we know are losing their sons,’ said an Israeli colleague. ‘My uncle died in Gaza City,’ said MP Layla Moran, before hundreds gathered opposite Downing Street under the banner Humanity Not Hate. ‘My parents were murdered on 7 October,’ said Ido at the same vigil. ‘More deaths won’t bring them back.’

There are huge demonstrations everywhere. ‘When Russia invaded Ukraine,’ an international analyst told me, ‘Colleagues in India said it was a regional conflict and not their concern. Suddenly they’re all worked up about Israel. I knew there was European antisemitism, but I never thought it would burst out like this worldwide.’

Yet the marches are complex. Some people flock to banners of hate. Many more are ignorant, driven by disinformation. But thousands, Jews included, are deeply distressed by what’s happening to innocent people in Gaza, can’t understand how this will bring the hostages home and fear that violence must breed more violence.

What horrors Hamas has released, knowingly, cunningly, upon Israel, Jewry, the world, and, not least, the Palestinian people, for whose lives they care not at all! I ask myself how and by whom such deep, heart-destroying hatred has been promulgated. I shudder to think how much more contagious it may yet prove to be.

On top of everything are the terrible wrongs perpetrated by West Bank settlers driving out Palestinian villagers while the world, mostly, looks the other way. They undermine both Israel and the moral standing of Judaism.

What, then, does trying to be human mean at this time, loyal as a Jew and loyal to the image of God?

It calls me into solidarity with suffering, firstly among my own people, but also with whoever feels anguish and grief. It teaches me to rejoice in nobody’s pain. It demands my commitment to chesed and tsedek, loving kindness and justice. It requires me to do everything I can for the hostages, for life, for the future.

Most days that’s enough to help me put one foot in front of the other and find companions to walk together.

10 Nov 2023
Sticky Post By Posted in Community, Israel Permalink

Just back from Israel: this isn’t post-trauma; it’s trauma

Sticky Post By On November 10, 2023

‘This is the life of:’ thus begins tomorrow’s Torah reading. How many families are staring, half numb, at what those words conceal: ‘This is the death of…’ But, unlike our biblical mother Sarah, their loved ones didn’t reach the ripe age of one hundred and twenty-seven. They were scarcely twenty; maybe they weren’t even seven.

Yesterday Ilana Kaminka sent me pictures of the sheloshim, the thirtieth day of mourning, for her son Yannai. He was one of seven soldiers, men and women, boys and girls really, killed as they courageously defended their army base at Zikim, protecting their ninety new recruits against Hamas. ‘He missed out on his life,’ said my friend who’d been one of Yanai’s teachers.

‘I’ll continue taking Palestinian patients to hospital appointments in Israel,’ said Ilana, gently but firmly. as we left. ‘With Road to Recovery?’ I asked. ‘No,’ she said, with Humans Beyond Borders.

The same day I got a whatsapp from Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish – my brother found me his number. ‘Your family in Gaza?’ I’d asked him. ‘Tens dead. When will this horror and violence end?’ He’s the author of I Shall Not Hate. Just now he’s sent me the You Tube of his interview with Piers Morgan: Palestinians Are Not Numbers, They’re Human. 

‘Is he family?’ I asked a woman at the huge, quiet gathering for the sheloshim outside the Knesset. She was holding a picture of a young man killed on October 7. ‘My son,’ she said, simply. ‘My son Tom,’ said his bereaved father, addressing the crowd. There was deep pain, and anger at Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government who left the south defenceless.

Tom’s father is encamped outside the Knesset with other families of those murdered and taken hostage. There’ll be even more fury if it proves true that a significant deal involving the release of many of the latter wasn’t followed through.

Our group met President Herzog and the First Lady. ‘The date in Israel is still October 7,’ she said. ‘This isn’t post-trauma; it’s trauma.’

The shock to the country is immense. The breach of confidence is multiple: political, military, economic, personal (can my children ever feel safe here?); spiritual (where was God?); societal (how long will unity last when blame has already begun? Can we trust Palestinians after what Hamas did? Can Palestinians, also fearful, trust Israelis after what the West Bank settlers are doing? Can we ever co-exist?) The unaskable question is: if not, then what?

Leaving Israel yesterday felt treacherous. Walking down the long slope at Tel Aviv airport you pass large pictures of each and every one of the hostages. It feels like betrayal, like leaving them behind. We shan’t.

So where do we who live outside Israel place ourselves right now? I’m not speaking politically, but as a Jew, a human being, someone for whom those two loyalties are inseparable because true faith and true humanity must be one.

Since we’re not immediate combatants in the horror of the front lines, we can, and should, be in places of healing. To be clear, this involves no compromise whatsoever with the indescribable hatefulness of what Hamas did on October 7.

There are innumerable options. We can give money for hospitals, orphans, displaced people. We can volunteer to pick crops, pack food. We can ‘adopt’ specific people who need us. We can draw into our communities, homes and hearts, Israelis, fellow Jews, and, importantly, others too, who feel broken and alone. We can, and should, speak frequently to Israeli friends, and, more importantly, listen.

Where possible we can dare the silence and suspicion and try to share with Muslim colleagues, ‘I hurt; you hurt too.’ A Palestinian student at Israel’s Arava Institute wrote of the ‘implied consensus to act from a place of compassion and not from a place of anger.’ If a bereaved mother can commit to Humans Beyond Borders, we can too.

What we can’t allow to be broken are courage, compassion, determination and hope.

03 Nov 2023
Sticky Post By Posted in Community, Ethics, Israel Permalink

Hineni: being there with each other at this cruel time

Sticky Post By On November 3, 2023

In these cruel times I keep thinking of Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker and hearing in my head that unique low voice which goes straight to the soul:

Hineni, hineni,
I’m ready, my lord…

These are the words Abraham speaks, as we read in the Torah tomorrow. He says them no less than three times, when God commands him to offer up his son and he tries, impossibly, to be present not just for his God but also for his beloved child.

Leonard Cohen follows Rashi in his lyrics, that great eleventh century commentator who explains that hineni means humility, readiness. But the most basic translation of hineni is simply ‘I’m here.’ It’s the answer we try throughout our life to give to God’s first, and everlasting, question: ‘Ayeka: Where are you?’

In these distressing weeks, there are so many for whom we are called to be here, not just in body but in heart. Almost everyone reading these words will have loved ones for whom they are deeply concerned, in Israel, perhaps in Gaza, around the world. Saying hineni, being together, gives us strength.

Hineni is the coming together of two words, ‘Hineh, Behold!’ and ‘Ani, I’. But it signifies the very opposite of ‘Look at me!’ On the contrary, it means that I dedicate my self to being present with you: ‘I’m here, I’m listening, “I’m ready, my Lord.”

I feel for so many people. Yesterday I found myself helping facilitate three different groups about Israel and Gaza, for colleagues, a multi-faith team, and an online gathering wanting to understand what’s happening and what it all might mean. I imagine that, in different contexts, that’s been other people’s week too.

‘I’m here and my heart is here:’ how do we say that truly? We must do our best to be there for our own people, family, friends, here, in Israel, anywhere. We must do our best to be there for those who’re afraid, or grieving, or worrying because their children have been called up, or desperate for relatives taken hostage.

Being there is not just about doing, though often there’s much we can and should do. Being there is not about having the right words, though sometimes there are things to say. But often there are no great words. There’s only the heart’s language, the unspoken, the hug, real or virtual, the tears.

Hineni is not just for those who see the world the same way as we do. What kind of humanity do I have if I withdraw into hostility or indifference when the person next to me says quietly that she’s had no news from family in Gaza, not for days or weeks, and a whole generation maybe gone?

Strangely, paradoxically perhaps, this is where we can meet, Jews and Muslims, people of other faiths and none, in our very anguish, our fear for those we love, our aloneness when we feel shunned because we’re a Jew, or a Muslim. The very pain that divides us may become the pain that unites us, at least here in the UK.

Only if we reach deeper than fear and hate can our world progress beyond hatred.

It’s not possible with people while they proclaim and act out antisemitism or any form of racist spite. It’s unthinkable with the brutal terrorists who commit wanton, indescribable acts of premeditated torture and murder.

But where it may be possible, there we must try.

How, though, can the heart find the strength? I believe that if we go down, down and down, we reach within ourselves the deep hidden river of life through which all spirit, all existence is sustained.

We make that journey each in our own way, through prayer or silence, music or nature, alone or touched by others.

It takes us to that place of mercy, hidden yet all around us and within us, where God, the unnameable, gives us strength and hope.

27 Oct 2023
Sticky Post By Posted in Interfaith Permalink

Solidarity in a time of fear

Sticky Post By On October 27, 2023

I’m still asking those fatuous question, ‘How are you? Are you alright?’ Most people say ‘yes,’ then add, ‘not really.’

We’re not OK. Cruelty, pain, fear and fury are at loose, and our hearts ache.

What do we do? We’re probably not the people making the big decisions. So how can we make a difference? Through solidarity, kindness and keeping on going.

I’ve no words to add about the cruelty of Hamas. It’s premeditated, beyond disgusting, indescribable, yet must, in truth’s name, be described.

The pain is what possesses me, the pain of the hostages and their families, the pain of the bereaved. I’ve been staring at the picture of a young Israeli couple, beautiful, in love, – now slaughtered, their children orphans. What can one say?

‘You can quantify many things,’ a sympathetic Muslim colleague told me, ‘but you can’t quantify pain.’ And one person’s pain doesn’t negate another person’s pain. The pain of a child in Gaza with nowhere to flee is its own distinctive pain. It all adds up to a vast, immeasurable hurt. Except that pain can’t be added up either. Pain is personal; it spears the heart.

There’s rage. Where there’s abominable hurt there’s bound to be vast anger. It’s inevitable, human, understandable. Not acceptable is how so many people, not connected with the pain, ignorant of the issues, jump on the bandwagon of hate and spit on other people’s wounds.

I fear what these furies, if ungoverned, will bring to birth, what new monstrosities are right now being conceived to savage future generations, what

…shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs… (Yeats)

There’s fear, for family and friends in Israel, for our community, for school and university students, for everyone alone. I wish it wasn’t needed, but thank God for the Community Security Trust, working 24/7 to protect us, and which even at this bitter time extends its work against racism to Muslim and other communities.

Antisemitic attacks have risen off the scales. Hate crimes against Muslims have doubled. ‘I’m afraid of using public transport,’ several fellow Jews have told me. So have Muslim women. Jewish pupils have said they feel frightened, shunned and alone. So, to my initial surprise, have some Muslim leaders. Maybe our very fear and pain can bring us together to call out against hatred, at least here in Britain.

So what can we do? We must show and live in solidarity. Thousands need us, and we need them. We must keep in frequent touch with Israeli family, colleagues, friends in the army, friends whose children have been called up. We must reach out with heart and hands across the Jewish world; we must give.

Solidarity begins with loyalty to our own people. But its roots lie even deeper, in what it means to be human. I’ve spoken to Muslim and Christian leaders who seek that solidarity too, the roots of which lie in the very depths of humanity and God, and from which, if it’s to come at all, healing must ultimately spring.

We must be kind. Chesed, loving, enduring kindness, sounds weak in response to terror. It’s not. It’s a way of life. It requires constancy, generosity, forbearance and the courage to stay present amidst pain. It demands our time, commitment and heart.

We must keep going. We mustn’t forsake the wells from which we draw strength. I find them in prayer, not because I expect heaven to send miracles, but because our ancestors speak through the words and music, telling of their unyielding resilience and the presence of God. I find strength in community, nature and keeping busy.

Whatever the source of our spirit, we mustn’t forsake it. From it we draw the deep strength to guide us beyond fear and panic to care for one another.

20 Oct 2023
Sticky Post By Posted in Community, Interfaith, Israel Permalink

Not alone: hopes and prayers in these times of deepest distress

Sticky Post By On October 20, 2023

Two people reached out to me unexpectedly last week. The first was Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra, who called me in the days after the horrors perpetrated by Hamas. Years ago, we’d walked together through the centre of London leading a protest against racist violence of all forms.

‘We need to do something he said.’ That was the start of conversations which led to his public condemnation of antisemitism and my response to him in the presence, and with the strong support, of Archbishop Justin Welby. ‘We’re all on the side of life,’ I concluded. (Click here to read the statements in full).

The second person was a woman walking behind me on Lambeth Palace Road. I’d paused to put my backpack down on a bench when she turned to me: ‘I’m so glad to see you wearing your kippah round here,’ she said, starting to cry. ‘I’m Jewish and I’m so afraid.’ My heart went out to her. My heart goes out the many who feel as she does.

I’ve thought repeatedly this week of those pictures one finds in old Haggadot of a man rowing a boat crossing a wide river. They’re illustrations of ‘Avram Ha’Ivri, Abraham the Hebrew.’ Ivri derives from ever, meaning bank or side. As the rabbis put it: ‘All the world on one side, and Abraham on the other.’

I feel for everyone who finds themselves alone at this extraordinarily difficult time, especially students, especially pupils in non-Jewish schools, especially those working in places where there are no fellow Jews. How many times I’ve heard: ‘There’s a wall of silence around me; even my friends don’t ask.’ Or those seeming friends post something vile on Instagram.

I feel, too, for everyone for whom the pogroms by Hamas have re-awoken the traumas of the Shoah and earlier ages.

We must reach out to each other; we must open our doors, our kitchens, our hearts. Over and again, I hear from friends in Israel: ‘What’s not let us down is our society. Everyone’s helping. Am Yisrael chai – the people of Israel lives.’ We, too, must be in sustained contact with our family, friends and colleagues in Israel, and with each other.

And we must try to reach further. Despite the mass rallies, the hatred and the disgusting social media, we do have friends. I’ve had many messages of solidarity, from Christian groups especially, but also from other faiths, and from acquaintances near and far.

Wherever possible we must build with these relationships. Cruel as the times are, we must not solely hunker down in distrust, fear and anger. We must find those with whom we can stand together in a deeper, more embracing humanity. I believe in God who is ‘Elohai haruchot lechol bassar, God of the spirits of all flesh.’

We must not lose our hope or our deepest Jewish, humanitarian values. Beyond war there has to be a different vision. All the people I’m close to feel deep pity for everyone across Israel and the Jewish world who is grief-stricken, traumatised, desperate for the release of family members taken hostage. At the same time, we also feel great pity for the poor people caught up in their thousands in Gaza, who want nothing to do with Hamas and who are, in a different way, also hostages, struggling to escape with their lives, their children.

We pray, for all our sakes, for a better outcome than the creation of the next generation of fear and hate. I think of Zechariah’s prophetic words, lo vechayil velo vecho’ach ki im beruchi. What they mean to me today is: Neither power nor force will help unless guided by My spirit, says our God.

My feelings were summed up when I listened to my colleague Nathalie Lastreger, rabbi of Kfar Veradim in the far north of Israel, as she struggled to keep singing the HaTikvah through her flowing tears: Od lo avdah tikvateinu, Our hope has not ceased.’

Hope itself must never cease.

A Prayer

In the midst of our own trauma, grief and anguish, we do not lose sight of Judaism’s supreme values of chesed and rachamim, loving kindness and mercy.

We protest and pray for the release of all the hostages and for their safe return to their longing and desperate families. We pray for a minimum of casualties in the IDF, and among all civilians, in Israel’s war against the terrorist organisation Hamas. We pray for strength for everyone, across the whole of Israel’s society and the Jewish world, who gives shelter and support to the tens of thousands evacuated from their homes and to everyone traumatised and grief-stricken by Hamas’ barbaric attack.

Our God is the God of all life. We pray, too, for the safety of all the many, many thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians caught up in this horror, who desperately need food, water and medical aid. Their plight is unimaginable. They desperately need a safe escape route from the fighting. We ask and pray for a humanitarian corridor to be established, maintained and safely supervised. We pray for a better future of life, hope and freedom for them too.

Our prayers are with the remarkable people who devote themselves to saving lives, wherever they are. We pray for all who, despite the fear and hostility, recognise the image of God in all the victims of this terrible conflict and who work for healing on all sides.

We pray, too, for our society here in Britain, that we should not be the targets of antisemitism, that all forms of race and religious hatred and prejudice be overcome, that we should work together in solidarity for a safe and harmonious future for all.

Even as continued fighting seems inevitable, we pray that a better way will swiftly be found than war with all its unspeakable horrors, so that Israel and its neighbours can live together in safety and peace, with life and hope for everyone.

13 Oct 2023
Sticky Post By Posted in Community, Israel Permalink

In These Terrible Times

Sticky Post By On October 13, 2023

Elohei haruchot lechol basar – Our God and God of the spirits of all flesh, send us, all Israel, our Jewish People across the world, and all humanity, strength, resilience, wisdom, courage, compassion, vision and hope in these terrible days.

I’m filled with horror, pain and disgust for what has been perpetrated by Hamas. I feel trepidation over what is now coming.

Last Shabbat was the worst day in Jewish history since the Shoah. There are no adequate words.

In their cunning and brutal mercilessness, Hamas’s terrorist mass murders were an attack on Israel, on Jews, on humanity itself, on every value and feeling that makes us truly human.

Yesterday I was on a call with a number of Israeli colleagues. ‘I’m safe,’ said a friend from Jerusalem, ‘But I’m not OK.’ How can one be? There is searing trauma across the country. Rabbis are conducting funeral after funeral. Their children have been called up, some to units whose task is to identify the dead.

Our hearts and prayers are with everyone grieving for murdered relatives and friends, in Israel, and across the world, including in our own community.

Our intense and heartfelt prayers are for the hostages, small children, old people, a woman who came on the Kindertransport, and for their desperate families. May God, who teaches that no one is more vulnerable than a hostage, and that pidyon shevu’im, the redemption of captives, takes precedence over every other cause, bring about their speedy release and safe return to their homes.

We pray for everyone wounded and traumatised, for the medical teams caring for them, for those arranging logistics and care, for everyone in Israel and across the world supporting others in their pain and anguish.

Our prayers are with Israel’s soldiers, for their safety in what will now ensue in the battle against Hamas, and for an absolute minimum of casualties.

Our prayers for human life have no political borders. We pray for the ordinary people of Gaza, helplessly caught up in this war, who want nothing to do with terrorism, but only safety, a future, life. May they find safe refuge, food and water. Israel is at war with Hamas, not with them.

We pray for safety for all our communities across the world.

We pray for a better future for everyone, one day, soon.

From where do we take strength at this time?

Firstly, from each other. ‘Zeh mechamem at halev – it warms the heart,’ said Rabbi Idit Lev, referring to how people are caring for each other, offering their homes to others forced to leave the south, bringing food to elderly people who cannot go far from their safe rooms. In a pause between sirens, said Rabbi Michael from Beer Sheva (who was formerly at Edgware Masorti) ‘I take food to Bedouin families.’ Here, too, our gathering both in person and on line, are a source of support to us all. We need to reach out to everyone isolated, whether geographically or emotionally, especially university students and children.

Our relationships with friends, leaders and communities of different faiths are also profoundly important at this time. Some people have told me of the support they have received. Others report that they have had none.

We draw strength from Torah, ‘a tree of life to those who hold fast to it.’ The Torah’s teachings, and the devotion of Jews across millennia to studying and following them, are the secret of the endurance, resilience and creativity of the Jewish People.

We draw strength from our values. Even, and especially, at this terrible time, we must not forget our core teachings: that every human being is created in God’s image; that we must try to honour and foster that sacred presence in each other (the very opposite of what terrorist and terrorising organisations seek to do); that justice and compassion are the supreme human qualities.

We draw strength from God’s world, its beauty, despite everything, its music, its call to us to love and protect it and not destroy it.

However deeply challenged, these remain the core of the Jewish faith and way of life.

I will conclude with the striking words from my colleague in the north of Israel, Raba Nathalie Lastreger: We need each other and we all need both oz va’anavah, both robust strength and inner humility at this terrible time.

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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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