Dear Community,

I write – somewhat in haste so as not to miss my train – from Frankfurt-am-Main, the city with which my grandfather, Dr Salzberger, fell in love when he came in 1910 to be interviewed for the post of rabbi. (It’s a relief to be in a town where the Israeli flag hangs among others from the city hall [on the Roemer, the square where the SA paraded 90 years ago])

I was invited by John Schlapobersky to speak about my family’s Frankfurt roots at a conference of group analysts. And, John adjoined me, address the question: ‘Where’s the light now?’

For it was from here, from my grandfather’s former community at the Westendsynagoge, that I had symbolically lit a flame from the Eternal Light, which all the devastation of Kristallnacht had not succeeded in extinguishing, and walked home with it to kindle the Ner Tamid at the dedication of our own new building, thirteen years ago.

I recalled, as I struggled what to say, how on some village street, somewhere on that 400k walk along the Rhine, an old man had stopped me, saying: ‘D’you realise the torch in your backpack is still on?’ ‘Yes,’ I’d explained, ‘I’m carrying the light.’

So, said John, tell us where that light is now. It’s an apposite question for the Shabbat before Yom Hashoah, the Hebrew date for remembering the Nazi Holocaust.

But first I must write about darkness, and those very different flames, of fire. ‘Quickly! Out of here!’ my great-aunt Jenny recalled; they’d been living in a flat in the great Boerneplatz Synagogue when it was torched on Kristallnacht. ‘I saw through an open door the burnt-out cupola, before it was quickly shut and I was whisked away.’To this day, she told me, she can’t bear railway stations; the anguish of being sent away from her family still pierces her heart.

On the same date my grandfather was arrested by the Gestapo. They’d been waiting for him in the family home. He was taken to a great hall where Jews were made to crawl across the floor, their ‘exercises’ strangely interrupted by a Mozart aria: ‘In diesen heiligen Hallen / kennt man die Rache nicht – In these sacred halls we know not revenge.’ A Jewish musician had, with that cruel and quirky absurdity which characterised certain Nazi behaviours, been offered his freedom if he could prove he was indeed an opera singer.

Reflecting back, I recall how, on entering the Westendsynagoge to light my torch and ‘take’ the light, I’d been struck to the heart by the verse which adorned it: ‘Lo amut ve’echyeh – I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of God.’

So here we were now, together in Frankfurt, German and British therapists, Israelis too, all dedicated to caring for that greatest abode of God’s light here on earth: the human heart.
Yet darkness was close about us. One of the conveners lost his son-in-law on October 7. All of us mourned the loss of life of Israelis, Palestinians caught between Hamas and the IDF. We all feared the antisemitism, the racism, and what horrors might come next.

I have no great answers, just two rabbinic sayings to guide me. The first is from Nachmanides, the thirteenth-century rabbi with the deepest heart: God’s light is with all who weep amidst oppression, God sees their tears. I believe God is with all those, too, who weep for others in their anguish, who weep with all who suffer.

The second consists of just four Hebrew words: ‘“Neri beyadecha, venerecha beyadi – My light is in your hands; your light is in mine,” say God.’ God’s light is within us, if only we can find it. Not only that, – the holy light of each other’s lives is in our hands too, if only we can see amidst the gloom, and cherish it despite the contagious hate that fills our streets.

Shabbat Shalom

Jonathan Wittenberg

This Shabbat finds us on the threshold of a difficult Pesach. Our rabbis called the festival Zeman Cheiruteinu, the Season of our Freedom, so I will write about four kinds of freedom (I know there are others), for each of which we struggle. Please forgive me for writing at more length than usual.

The first is obvious and in all our hearts: it’s summed up in the slogan, the demand, the words of hope one sees all over Israel: ‘Bring them home now.’ Let our hostages go. I cannot even begin to imagine the feelings of their mothers and fathers, sons, daughters, family, close friends.

These are the names,’ writes contemporary Israeli poet Yael Lifschitz, paraphrasing the opening words of Exodus:

And these are the names of those covered by darkness…
And these are the names of the children of Israel whose cry
Rises from the depth of the tunnels of darkness… 
(trans. Rachel Korazim et. al.)

Tomorrow’s prophetic reading from Malachi closes with the words: ‘Return the hearts of the parents to the children and the hearts of the children to their parents.’ God, set those words constantly before the eyes and in the souls of those who hold the power to make it happen!

There are many, too, separated by other wars, like the mother and children we hosted who still cannot return to Kharkiv and join their father. Countless innocent people are locked in the dungeons of tyrannies, like Alexei Navalny until they murdered him. May God protect them.

I think, too, of those whose loved ones will never come home, because they died on October 7 or fighting in the war against Hamas. In Malachi’s words, May God’s presence comfort their hearts, ‘with healing on its wings.’

The second freedom is freedom from the horror of war, the hatred that feeds it, the fear it arouses, the destruction it causes, and the grief to which it leads. Judaism is not a pacifist religion; war in defence of one’s right to exist is sometimes unavoidable. But it’s still a disaster, a failure of humanity to find a way to co-exist. It’s far from God’s dream for humankind.

I saw burnt out homes in the south of Israel, and evacuated villages in the north. I’ve seen the charred remains of flats in the suburbs outside Kyiv, people queueing for essentials in freezing February at an improvised market.

I can’t not think of the devastation of Gaza, people sitting dazed in the rubble of smashed up streets. Whatever our understanding of the cause, it’s utter wretchedness. And brooding amidst such misery, and elsewhere in other conflicts, in grief-stricken, anger-filled hearts, may be plans, even hopes, for the next round of war, because violence is liable to feed revenge, which feeds revenge.

So I pray that, ‘the sword shall not pass anymore through the land,’ (Leviticus). I will say Isaiah’s words at the Seder, which he wrote when Jerusalem was under siege, ‘May they learn war no more.’ I pray for a better way, for Israel, the whole Middle East, this war-torn world. I pray for leaders, and the collective will, to guide us toward paths of peace. I pray that no one will have to sit in safe-rooms, unsafe rooms or bomb shelters, but that we shall all one day sit, in the beautiful Biblical image, ‘each beneath their fig-tree and their vine.’

The third freedom is freedom from prejudice, the inability to see the human in the other. Antisemitism has soared manyfold since October 7, hate against Muslims has more than doubled; racism is rife. It blinds us and makes us slaves to the pedlars of hate.

I don’t start from the premise that ‘I’m not racist.’ I don’t trust myself. What Alexander Pope wrote about hope may also be true of racism: it too ‘springs eternal in the human breast.’ We must therefore be vigilant, starting with ourselves, including our communities, society, language, collective assumptions.

Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib Alter of Ger taught that the commandment of ‘being seen before the presence of God’ on festivals doesn’t mean visiting the Jerusalem Temple. It’s closer to home. ‘Don’t read “being seen” he wrote. Instead, read “see” (the words look identical in the Torah). See God’s presence in the place where God dwells, that is, within every human being.’ This is beautiful and true – but hard, especially in a season of anger.

Yet it’s not impossible. My friend the Jerusalem rabbi Tamar Elad-Applebaum said the first person to reach out to her on October 7 was an Imam. I’m trying to learn that I, and all of us, need to reach out more.

I pray that, without being naïve or stupid, we can free ourselves from ‘the mind-forged manacles’ that lock each other into the stereotypes of bigotry and contempt.

The fourth freedom is freedom from deep complicity in a culture which commodifies and monetises everything, nature and all its resources, treading down its wonder, and destroying the very powers it holds to heal us, body and soul. Isaiah proclaimed the whole earth to be ‘full of God’s glory’. All of creation, not just humankind, bears God’s image, argues David Seidenberg in his magnificent Kabbalah and Ecology.

None of us wants to be like Oscar Wilde’s cynic who ‘knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.’ But that’s the way much of our collective civilisation has been going, inflicting injustice on each other and disaster on nature. We gravely risk being consumed by our habits of consumption.

We can’t just break free. We’re part of it; we’re implicated. But we can, and must, create islands of freedom, for humanity and nature together. This year, Seder night falls on Earth Day. Can we respect, cherish, and help preserve all the rich forms of life around us, so that our hearts and souls are enriched by them in turn?

God, in these cruel and painful times, guide us along these paths of freedom, mei’avdut lecheirut, from slavery to liberty.