Community | HEART AND MIND

22 Jan 2026

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What the dog has to say

Sticky Post By admin On January 22, 2026

Our first dog Safi used to sing. There were many variants, but two basic melodies, though it would take either a considerable amount of generosity, or a canine ear, to call it that, and what other dogs thought of his music we were never able to ascertain. The first was performed by him whenever we travelled by car and left the motorway to slow down along some country lane. Realising we were close to our destination and that he was about to be set free among the trees and streams, he would, well, there’s not really any other word for it, lift up his voice and sing. It wasn’t exactly harmonious, but it was definitely joyous, and we all enjoyed it. It touched something visceral in us all, a place of freedom, release from the city, liberation from the human equivalent of being kept on the lead. We loved it. Years later, we still say to each other as we drive up to Nicky’s parents’ home among the apple orchards in Kent, or stop by some favourite New Forest glade: ‘Remember how Safi used to sing when we got here.’

If that was his Beethoven, his second kind of melody was, without wishing to insult them, his Rolling Stones. He loved to hang on to those tough long ropes tied from thick boughs in woods or over streams for children to swing on. The moment he caught sight of one he would be off. With a flying leap he would catch on to the rope with his teeth and sway backwards and forwards, his paws waving like a hyper, but not very good, dancer at a pop concert, while something between a yowl and a whine emerged from his mouth so loudly that on several excruciating occasions the unrepeatable sound drew a small crowd to the sight. The only way to get him back was to grasp his collar, prize his teeth apart and keep holding on to him until we were at least a hundred yards away. This was especially embarrassing if the rope hung over water and a group of teenage spectators had gathered to watch.

Our other dogs have, thank goodness, been more circumspect. Well, that’s not exactly true. Our second dog, Mitzpah, reputedly a pure-bred Welsh border collie whose relatives sorted sheep in the valleys, would bark at anything, except when someone came to the door or when he himself wanted to come back in from the garden. We loved him dearly, but ‘annoying’ would be too mild a term to describe his choice of when and where to be vocal. He could bark and bark, then bark and bark some more. He had his favourite places, like outside the bathroom or on the stone steps into the garden. We did sometimes wonder, though, if he could see into a dimension we could not and had taken it upon himself to frighten off ghosts hidden behind the walls or stuck for ages in our toilet, the door to which soon bore scratch-markings from his frustration at being unable to enter and chase away whatever spirit he seemed to be convinced abided there. But should a burglar have attempted to enter, we were convinced that Mitzvah would have greeted him with eager-eared silence.

Nessie, our third and current dog, as much loved or, arguably, even more than her predecessors, generally prefers paw language. Her choice of vocabulary is not always subtle. Stop stroking her and you are liable first to be tapped, then scratched and finally all but spanked by her front paw. She has a different tactic at nighttime. If she gets too cold sleeping on our bed, (our determination not to let her do so lasted less than twenty-four hours) she creeps up to you, whether you are awake or asleep, and licks your ear. We don’t need google translate to understand that this meant ‘lift up the covers because I want to crawl into bed next to you.’

However, if we are brazen enough to leave her anywhere even for a few moments, she goes vocal to a degree which makes up for all her previous reticence. If I dare to tie her lead to the post outside the shop, which I do only when we are seriously short of basics, before almost literally running round the store so as not to abandon her for more than sixty seconds, I can be certain that nobody has nabbed her because her yelps and yowls are audible down every aisle. If I’m ever in a dog-friendly café and need the loo, she follows me to outside the door where she whines so pitifully that I can’t help but embarrass myself, and probably everyone else in the establishment, by keeping up a steady ‘I won’t be long; yes I do love you; no I haven’t forgotten you,’ from inside my cubicle where I can’t complete my essential business fast enough.

If each of our three dogs had their preferred mode of self-expression, one means of communication has nevertheless been shared by them all. It has nothing to do with their vocal cords and everything to do with their eyes. It’s how they stare at you while you’re eating. Squatting motionless next to you, except for an occasional hopeful wag of the tail, totally focussed, with a pitiful and pleading look you would be forgiven for thinking they had perfected in the mirror for months, they gaze up at you unflinchingly as if to say: ‘How can you stuff your face like that when I haven’t eaten a morsel for weeks? Plea-ea-ea-se!’ Bad listener as I sometimes am, how can I fail to hearken then?

But all this is only the tip of the tale. This is merely the dog vocabulary we humans can readily understand, the equivalent of ‘bon jour means good morning’ in an old-fashioned guidebook for first-time tourists in Paris. See two dogs together, as when our children and their resident hounds join us, and there is a sophisticated language of interactions which we can only guess at by inter- or misinter- preting their behaviours. The old notion that what distinguishes homo sapiens from all other species is that we alone have language needs to be taken back to its kennel and left there. The actual truth is that there are innumerable languages among countless species; only we just don’t understand. ‘That’s right,’ I mentally hear my dogs assenting, ‘You just don’t understand!’

Can I please add – if you do love animals:

I have been working with two dear colleagues, Rabbi Charles Middleburg and Rabbi David Mitchell, on a prayer book for animal companions. This has been in the making for several years and we are now in a position to publish. We’re are officially launching a pet companion’s prayerbook to support us and our beloved fur-balls through every moment of joy and sorrow. 150+ pages of prayers, readings and meditations for every magical and heartbreaking stage of loving a pet, as well as appreciating the animal world.

However, we need your support to sponsor a small (or even large) section in memory or celebration of your beloved animal companion. The crowdfunding is live. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/izzun/an-animal-siddur

Please be in touch if you would like to sponsor a line, a pawragraph or a page

02 Jan 2026

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A Prayer for the New Gregorian Year

Sticky Post By admin On January 2, 2026

Dear Friends,

Happy New Year.

It’s a big New Year for me, stepping back as rabbi of my beloved community at the New North London Synagogue, but continuing with an increased role as Senior Rabbi of Masorti Judaism and with a greater commitment to interfaith and environment work. It’s a chance, and a challenge, to reflect, rethink, and learn new ways to appreciate and care for the sanctity of life.

I listened with mixed feelings to the fireworks as 2025 ended and 2026 began. If they mark true hope, may the sky sparkle with their stars. But I feel more at home welcoming the secular year, as we do the Jewish New Year, with prayer.

May this be a year of compassion and generosity.

May our common humanity unite us, more than our differences divide us.

May justice and law protect everyone against hatred and violence.

May all rhetoric of racism, supremacism, hatred and contempt yield before the understanding that those we ‘other’ are human too.

May our societies and communities come together in concern and kindness for those who have no home, no food, no access to healing, no hope.

May we recognise our kinship and interdependence with all life and cease from all needless destruction.

May we listen to our companions on earth, the rivers, trees, insects, birds and animals.

May we learn from all life and bring healing, not hurt.

May we live from our heart and conscience. May we be guided by the God-given spirit that breathes in us all.

May this be a year in which we appreciate the fragile, vulnerable beauty of life, a year in which we are moved to wonder and respect.

May this we a year of wisdom and compassion.

This my prayer for 2026 and after. Do I believe it will all come true? Sadly, no. But it marks the path I am sure we must pursue, the path of true, active, committed hope.

May we be blessed with inspiration, determination, courage and companionship as we strive to follow it into the perilous future.

Shabbat Shalom and Happy New – Gregorian – Year

Jonathan Wittenberg

26 Dec 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Interfaith, The Jewish Year Permalink

My last Shalom NNLS is a big ‘Thank You’

Sticky Post By admin On December 26, 2025

I’m writing this, my last Shalom NNLS, on the closing day of Chanukah – some days early so that it can be scheduled to go out while the shul office is closed over the holidays. As I hand over to my colleagues, I feel accompanied by the afterglow of the eight candles burning on the full Chanukiah.I’m drawn once again to the Talmudic discussion about whether one may light one Chanukah candle from another. The answer is affirmative, so long as the flame is passed directly, with no intermediary. I see that response not just as a legal decision, but as about how life works. It’s how we learn to see, feel and be, more deeply.

As I close my time at the New North London, I want to give thanks for the light I’ve been given and open my heart to the new lights I will be shown in the future. So many people in our beloved community have shared their light and guided me.

Thank you to the teenage leaders, madrichot and madrichim, whom I’ve seen calmly lead a shy child, frightened by the charming behaviour all around, to a still corner to read the Shema. It’s like watching kindness itself smooth down a tiny, safe patch of calm amidst the screaming chaos of contemporary life. There’s godliness in the way those teens do that.

I respect and appreciate those who’ve said, but not in words: ‘Take this candle and accompany me.’ They’ve lead me to places in the heart, chambers deep underneath, safe from the depredations of time, where love abides despite the death of the beloved years ago. Here, they listen to them still, commune with them, and, although they cannot hold them in their arms, or bless them as one blesses one’s child on Friday night, they are still strengthened, hurt, and made more deeply human by that love which can never be extinguished.

How susceptible to pain the heart is. How important, therefore, is every moment of kindness, thoughtfulness, generosity and tenderness in a world which so often proves unspeakably cruel.

Thank you to those who’ve said ‘Haven’t you seen?’ and showed me a plant, shared a line from a poem, illumined words of Torah. During lock-down I received as many photographs of nature as questions about Jewish law. ‘What bird is that?’ ‘Have you noticed how the Judas trees have begun to flower!’ (In Hebrew they’re called clil hachoresh, the crown of the forest.) How poorer we would be if people didn’t hold out a candle and say, ‘Look there! See this beautiful world!’

I honour everyone who’s said: ‘Contribute more!’ People dedicate themselves to so many essential concerns: ‘We do therapy with horses and dogs for people who lost family in the fighting in Israel and Gaza.’ ‘We’re training local women to support victims of rape after the war in the Balkans.’ ‘Will you join us planting hedgerows and mini forests in Barnet?’ ‘Help me support these refugees who’ve nowhere to sleep but the streets.’ What can I say? You light pathways into worlds that desperately need our care. You illumine the road of conscience.

I’m thankful to colleagues of all faiths with whom we’ve stood against the hatreds that distort religion and cut deep wounds of violence into our world. Together we have striven to affirm the true oneness of God, whose spirit flows through everything making all life sacred.

I’m grateful for the prayers, music, poetry and Torah, which have led us to the hidden, holy core of life and held us there, even momentarily, so that we may know it and be at one.
All these are lights which kindle my, and your, inner light.
I shall try, as we all do, to stay faithful to the light with which I have been entrusted.

May God’s light, present in all life, illumine the path of goodness and compassion for us all.

24 Dec 2025

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Chanukah: the lights of hope in a time of darkness

Sticky Post By admin On December 24, 2025

I see the lights of Chanukah reaching out into the darkness. Chanukah is a festival of hope, courage and inspiration and we, and the world, urgently need them all.

But now, not only after Bondi Beach but at the close of a cruel year, that darkness feels deep indeed. My Christian friends speak similarly as they approach the celebration of Christmas. We, and the Muslim colleagues who sent words of sorrow and solidarity, share the simple prayer: ‘May the light prove stronger than the darkness.’

It’s a prayer addressed to each other, ourselves and our governments, as much as to God. We need light.
That doesn’t mean that we can ignore the hatred, cruelty and contempt abroad in our world. But I won’t detail them here. I will focus on the light, because we need it so badly.

On a personal note, the second day of Chanukah is the Yahrzeit for Raphael’s and my mother, Lore. She left us a collection of stories, Maerchen in German, fables in poetic prose. One of them concerns a little boy who is terrified of the dark and gets lost in the forest in the pitch-black night. Yet coming, panic-stricken and exhausted, upon a clearing, he sees the bright moon and stars and hears the swaying of the trees. He stops, breathes in, and stands still in wonder: ‘I always knew it,’ he says to himself, ‘beyond the darkness there is light.’ I think now that, knowing she was dying, our mother wrote this story as a message to her two young boys, and to herself.

Returning to Chanukah, the date marks the repossession of the Temple by the Maccabees. Who knows what they actually thought as they contemplated the ruined precincts? Their battles weren’t over. Right next door stood a fortress still in enemy hands.
Yet the Talmud chooses to tell us that the first thing they did was look for light. Whoever the editors of the Talmud were, they wanted this to be the message of Chanukah for future generations: Seek light! Whatever the darkness around you, seek it out! And when you find it, even if it’s just one tiny jar, even if you think, ‘This won’t last. It’s a mere nothing! It’ll be out before it’s lit!’ – go ahead and light it.

That, taught Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib Alter of Ger, is where the miracle of Chanukah’s eight days begins, not in heaven, but on earth. Eight, he wrote, represents transcendence, seeing beyond. In kabbalah, the eighth sacred quality if we count upwards, is binah, intuition. It’s the insight that beyond, and within, everything, even in the heart of darkness, resides God’s spirit. There is an inalienable holiness, and inextinguishable point of light, at life’s core.

On Chanukah that or haganuz, that hidden flame, is kindled on our Menorah and placed not in secret, but overlooking the highway, in the public square. Hope and light must be ‘out there,’ a call to courage and the strength of collective goodness.

The Talmud asks, and then confirms, that ‘we may light one candle from another’ directly, flame to flame. This represents the truth that one person’s light, creativity, kindness, bravery inspires others, who inspire yet others about whom the individual who lit the first flame will never know.

So we must never say: ‘It’s too little. The darkness is too thick.’ Despite everything, let the lights of courage, inspiration, creativity, companionship, goodness, kindness, determination and hope shine forth into the coming year.

17 Dec 2025

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The Massacre at Bondi Beach

Sticky Post By admin On December 17, 2025

My article from The Observer, Monday 15 December 2025:

Shocked and horrified, but not surprised: these words of Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, after Sunday’s attack on Bondi beach, were almost identical to those of chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis in response to the killings at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur.

Both attacks targeted the community as we honoured the sacred festivals of our Jewish year. The annual gathering on Bondi Beach to celebrate “Hanukah by the Sea” is a great event in the calendar of Sydney Jewry, taking place in the heart of the community. It marks the lighting of the first candle in the eight-day festival which celebrates hope and courage. It’s a time of light and joy; there was a petting zoo, face-painting and fun activities for all the family.

Instead, this open and welcoming celebration was destroyed by fifty rounds of gunfire, leaving 16 dead, some 40 seriously injured, thousands traumatised, a country feeling shattered and Jewry round the world in grief and anguish.

The Jewish community is closely connected. It wasn’t long before I began receiving messages: “My niece was there. She had to run; she’s distraught.”

“My sister lives in Sydney, I was so worried, but for some reason she didn’t go to the beach.”

“My relative is about to have his second operation.”

Once again, I find myself thinking of Yehudah Amichai’s poem The Diameter of the Bomb: those killed are at the epicentre, but the shockwaves spread ever wider, reaching those who weep on distant shores at the other side of the globe.

Even if nobody we know was there, the horror reaches home: “It feels like it’s encircling us,” a congregant tells me. He means the pervasive ether of anti-semitism. Some of it poses as anti-the State of Israel.

There is indeed legitimate criticism of the Israeli government. Such criticism is shared by many Jews who passionately care about Israel and pray for the wellbeing of all its citizens. But the pervasive rhetoric of cult-like hatred directed against the whole country of Israel effectively targets all Jews. It slides all too readily from murderous words to graffiti, murderous threats and murderous acts.

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry logged 1,600 antisemitic incidents in the year to September 2025.

The massacre on Bondi Beach, said Alex Ryvchin, was “the logical conclusion to what’s been simmering in this country for two years.” His own home was fire-bombed earlier this year.

As communities round the world lit their first Chanukah candle last night there was a spirit of solemnity and sorrow. At a gathering of hundreds in my synagogue we prayed for the wounded and expressed our heartfelt solidarity with the grief-stricken.

But there is also a spirit of resolute determination. Chanukah celebrates resilience and courage. As Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal, CEO of the Rabbinical Assembly wrote: “the act of bringing light into a very dark world is one of defiance, faith, and hope. We trust that, with God’s help, we will see light prevail over darkness, and righteousness overcome evil.”

We take strength from the amazing intervention by Ahmed al-Ahmad who showed unimaginable bravery in overpowering one of the gunmen, and who was himself wounded. As Imam Qari Muhammad Asim wrote in a moving message to the British Muslim Network, his courage “shows the true values of Islam”. Both Jewish and Muslim sacred writings teach that whoever saves a single life is as if they had saved the entire world. Ahmed al-Ahmad saved many lives.

Imam Qari rightly called the attack at Bondi Beach “an assault on the fundamental values of dignity, freedom of worship and coexistence that bind us together. Such acts of terror are a betrayal of our common humanity.” That common humanity needs common defence by us all.

We therefore also take strength from similar messages from many Muslim and Christian leaders. We stand together not only against antisemitism but in determined opposition to all forms of hatred and racism. It is essential that across our societies, in Australia, Britain and worldwide, we affirm our shared humanity not just in words but actively, by working together for the good of our whole society.

Above all, we find strength in the deep resilience of Judaism which sees in the human spirit an inexhaustible and unquenchable source of light. As we celebrate the next seven days of Chanukah, we kindle that light in the public domain, sharing our determination that understanding will conquer hatred, that goodness will overcome evil and that cruelty will be vanquished by compassion.

28 Nov 2025

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Facing my retirement with complex feelings

Sticky Post By admin On November 28, 2025

As I near the end of my time as Senior Rabbi of my Synagogue I feel complex emotions. I am deeply grateful for the wonderful New North London community and the hundreds of people who have enriched my life. I feel loss, bewilderment, and uncertainty about my future. But I don’t doubt my decision to retire, and have every confidence in the congregation’s future, with its caring and committed membership, dedicated lay leadership, devoted professional team and excellent rabbis.

I also have plenty of fight still in me, and will continue to work with energy and love for everything I care about through my continuing role as Senior Rabbi of Masorti Judaism and in the worlds of climate, nature and interfaith.

After more than a thousand contributions to Shalom NNLS, these are some of my last. I am glad my colleagues are taking over these weekly messages and am moved by their thoughtful words. I will continue to write regularly for Masorti Judaism; you can follow me at https://jonathanwittenberg.substack.com/, or you may have had enough. For me, this writing has been a kind of listening to my conscience and heart, a conversation with the many people who inhabit them, whose words and deeds have moved me.

After 38 years full time, and several as youth worker and student rabbi before that, I find myself reflecting back on how I felt all those decades ago. I was hesitant and afraid: Would being a rabbi eat me up? Would I cope? Would I love committees? Underneath it all was the deepest question: did I honestly believe in God?

Reality has answered those questions, but not in ways I’d foreseen. The privilege of rabbinical work has deepened me. People, with their joy, tears, griefs, fears and loneliness, have shown me inner spaces, both in themselves and in me, that I didn’t know were there. Listening has unlocked chambers of the heart I had never before entered. I hold there echoes of countless people’s words, resonances of love, wonder, anguish and sorrow, which I will garner carefully until I die.

As for God, I have found not answers but moments of response. Actually, that’s not true: they have found me. I haven’t seen the light and had all my doubts resolved. You won’t find me preaching God at Speaker’s Corner.
I dislike dogmatic certainties and have little time for knock-down theological arguments. They frighten me. I have no answer to why there’s so much injustice, cruelty and destructiveness in the world, other than feeling sorrow and grief. But I somehow sense that God is sorrowing too, just as God takes joy in the trees, birds and animals, is present in every form of consciousness and resides in the human heart.

I’ve heard no great voices from heaven, and I’d be locked away if I claimed I had. But I have, just sometimes, overheard the still small voice of wonder and been chastened by awe. Such moments have evoked in me, as they do in others, a feeling of relationship and responsibility. I don’t question them; they question me: Are you there? Do you care? They tell me that I am answerable to something infinitely resilient yet infinitely vulnerable. They put in my heart the knowledge that I must not hurt, must never drive this sacred presence away.

I don’t need any more than this.

As for my question about loving committees, the committee making the decision is still out.

14 Nov 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Environment Permalink

EcoShabbat 2025: The love and the fear

Sticky Post By admin On November 14, 2025

I went to bed on Wednesday night unable to get the chorus from Beethoven’s Ninth out of my head.

We’d just held our EcoJudaism vigil in Parliament Square, timed for the start of COP 30. Rabbis from every denomination, including the Chief Rabbi, were there (you don’t often see us all together) and children from Alma school. Nearby, a group of anti-Brexiteers blared out music, with frequent repetition of that Ninth – but they couldn’t drown us out.

Standing there, holding the banner with ‘Tend and preserve God’s world’ writ large in Hebrew and English, I couldn’t help but think of Schiller’s Ode to Joy which Beethoven took for that chorus:

O joy, O wondrous sparks divine…
All humanity shall be brothers…
With your magic bind together
What we’re accustomed to divide

I’ve always had a love of nature, animals and trees. I was taught to get my hands in the soil, not pick apples before they’re ripe, reach between the thorns for gooseberries, enjoy the woods behind the house, hold my hand flat so that a horse could take the sugar lump. I love it all still, only more so.

For as I’ve got older, that love has deepened into an intuitive sense of kinship. It’s not just fellow humans whom we should treat as sisters and brothers. Must the ‘us and them’ divide between humans and all other life be quite so absolute? Doesn’t one vital energy flow through us all, one spirit from the one God, bestowing consciousness on every creature, each according to its nature? This is how kabbalah understands creation, the emanation of the divine from the unknowable depths of God into the heart of every life, where, enclosed within our bodies, it calls out to know it.

We humans have far greater intelligence and agency, and therefore mitzvot, God-given obligations, to use our powers well. But the same earth will wrap us round in the end, our spirit will rejoin the great oneness, and the roots of trees will carry what was once our body up into the branches and leaves.

Therefore, as the first commandment ‘Love God!’ requires, we must cherish our fellow creatures. I worry for them every day, foolish as it sounds, the green woodpecker that occasionally feeds on our lawn, the hedgehogs rarely seen now on the heath. As the second commandment, ‘Fear God!’ demands, me must prevent the earth’s ruin. I feel like a partner in treachery when fields are poisoned and seas throw up plastics and the creatures they choked.

‘If the Torah says, “Love God” why does it add, “Fear God”’? asks the Talmud before concluding ‘Do both!’ (Yerushalmi Sotah 8:5)
But love is better: ‘He prayeth best who loveth best / All creatures great and small,’ said Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. That’s the essence of both our moral and our spiritual lives.

Yet the fear is real. It’s not awe; awe humbles. It’s visceral fear, for the children, animals, life itself; for this beautiful world, God’s world. ‘Don’t destroy my world,’ God tells Adam and Eve, ‘Because no one can come after you to put it right.’ (Kohelet Rabba) This is summed up in the two-word commandment: ‘Bal Tashchit, Don’t destroy.’

We must act from both fear and love.

I’ll end with Sean Ronayne’s dedication to his unborn child Laia in his beautiful book Nature Boy: ‘You owe me nothing in life, but I do have just one wish. All that I ask from you is that, one day, you fly the flag for nature… love it as it so deserves…and give it the voice it needs.’

07 Nov 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Holocaust Permalink

Remembrance Sunday and the AJEX Parade

Sticky Post By admin On November 7, 2025

This message is dedicated to those to whom we owe more than anything we can ever say.

Remembrance Sunday falls in two days’ time, followed one week later by the AJEX parade at the Cenotaph in Whitehall.

‘2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, a historic moment to reflect on the extraordinary service and sacrifice of Jewish men and women who fought for freedom. We are calling on the community to honour our pride in the significant British Jewish contribution to HM Armed Forces by stepping forward in Remembrance and solidarity.’ https://www.ajex.org.uk/ajex-annual-remembrance-parade-ceremony-2025-410

I am mindful, too, that this Sunday is November 9, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, when my grandfather was summoned by the Gestapo to Frankfurt’s Hauptsynagoge, which he had to watch burn. Days later he was sent to Dachau.

It is also exactly two years since I visited the Kaminka family as they prepared for the sheloshim of their son Yannai. He was one of seven soldiers, men and women, killed on October 7 as they courageously defended their army base at Zikim, saving their ninety new recruits from being murdered by Hamas. ‘He missed out on his life,’ said a friend.

So many ‘missed out on their lives.’ We owe them not just our freedom but our existence.

I watched, rivetted, the BBC 2 documentary: D-Day: The Unheard Tapes. These are recordings, made soon after the war, of Allied troops who survived D-Day and the slow, cruel Battle of Normandy. There are also tapes of German soldiers and members of the French resistance. Their words are spoken by actors, chosen to be the same age as those service personnel in June 1944. Interspersed are film clips and brief historical commentary.

One of the men was the major charged with capturing Pegasus Bridge. https://major-history.co.uk/2025/01/08/d-day-pegasus-bridge They landed at night just yards away in a glider. Like thousands of others, he lost his friend in the first minute: “All the years of training he’d put in to do a job … it only lasted 20 seconds.”

The tapes vividly communicate the fear and the courage, – and the slaughter of war. ‘They told us it would be hell,’ said a US quartermaster: ‘They didn’t lie about that.’

AJEX’s key line this year is ‘Carry them forward.’ This takes me to two locations. The first is the British war cemetery scarcely a mile inland from Sword Beach. The graves are carefully tended; there are Magen Davids among the Crosses. In the chapel, a book holds all the names. Next to the Jewish names is often a note, such as, ‘Changed from xxx.’ These soldiers were advised that, if taken prisoner, their chances were better as POWs than as Jews. On many graves the epitaph is simply: ‘Known unto God.’

The other place is a remote hilltop among the quiet Fairy Lochs near Gairloch in the Scottish Highlands. There, accessible only after a muddy climb, is a memorial where a USAAF Liberator carrying troops home from the war crashed into the rocks, killing everyone on board.

The wreckage, parts of motor, undercarriage, lie all around. A propeller sticks out of the shallow water among the lily leaves covering the loch. Those moments of fatal violence; this tranquil beauty all around.

We always read each name; try to imagine who these men were. Quietly, we say Kaddish.

17 Oct 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Environment, Interfaith, The Jewish Year Permalink

In our hands – the glory of creation

Sticky Post By admin On October 17, 2025

How wonderful it is to begin once again the cycle of the Torah. I hold the yad, the pointer hand, over the Torah’s opening word, Bereishit, ‘In the beginning,’ and feel at once a sense of mystery. What lies unknown and unknowable in the blank margins of the parchment before the first letters inscribe themselves in firm black ink upon the imagination, before ‘And God says, “Let there be…”’? The world begins in wonder.

And in the joy of creative beauty. ‘Look!’ says the Torah: the waters, grasses, fruit-bearing trees, fishes, amphibians, birds and animals, and even you and I. God’s sacred energy courses through them all, and says, ‘Behold! This is good!’ Still today, that same life-force flows through the earth, sustaining everything that lives.

‘Look!’ says Maimonides, study the world and you will at once be filled with wonder at the majesty of God’s works. That is the secret of the love of God. Then take a step back, humbled by how small you are before such glory, intricacy, beauty. That is the secret of the reverence for God.

But don’t look too far, says Sean Ronayne, who recorded the songs of every bird in Ireland, natives and visitors alike: ‘The beauty is everywhere. Stop searching for the big show – there’s no need. Open your mind and let it come to you.’

That’s how my wife told me with excitement: ‘I realised it was different kind of song, that I hadn’t heard before. So I looked up and there was a flock of long-tailed tits.’ Gorgeous, they are, with their pink breast-feathers, chatterers, like a community at Kiddush.

Or maybe you prefer to keep your eyes close to the ground. ‘I’m looking for hedgehogs,’ I explain to a fellow midnight dog walker on the Heath, on the night of Simchat Torah, the Joy of Torah, the joy of God’s creation. ‘In the next field, two or three of them,’ she answers. I never did find them. But closer to home there’s that pair of rescue hedgehogs we’ve just released in the woodlands behind the synagogue. May they fulfil the blessing God gave all the creatures: ‘Go forth and multiply.’

The mystics have their own way. They don’t just say the seven-times repeated, ‘And God saw that it was good.’ It may not be strictly grammatical, but they also read the words backwards: ‘See God in all God’s works, and see that this is good.’ They understood that God’s sacred, life-giving energy is present not just in the heavens above, but in the first small oak leaves emerging from the acorn, and in the watchful eye of the robin that hops on to your garden spade.

‘I stopped on my way to synagogue,’ Michael S. told me years ago: ‘It was a cold, bright autumn morning and the drops of dew in a spider’s web were caught in the rays of the rising sun. After that, I was ready for prayer.’ ‘No, he added, ‘That was already my prayer.’

‘You owe me nothing in life,’ wrote Sean Ronayne, dedicating his book Nature Boy to his pregnant wife and their unborn child, Laia: ‘All that I ask from you is that, one day, you fly the flag for nature and love it as it so deserves, and give it the voice it needs.’

That’s what God wants of each of us. For, observed the moral philosopher Hans Jonas, the wondrous work of creation, marked with the image of God, has passed into ‘man’s precarious trust, to be completed, saved, or spoiled by what he will do to himself and the world.’

What, then, are we making of this trust, you and I? And those who hold power over creation? Shall we, as God enjoined on Adam and Eve, serve creation with reverence and preserve it with respect? Or… or… or what?

10 Oct 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Interfaith, Israel Permalink

Fragile Hope

Sticky Post By admin On October 10, 2025

‘God of salvations,’ we prayed this morning, ‘Hasten and save us.’ Finally, finally, after more than two years, we pray that we may look to the coming days with hope.

May the hostages return home, those living to the love of their families, and the dead to a dignified burial in Israel. May there be an end to the fighting, deaths, homelessness, hunger and destruction in Gaza. May no more soldiers of the IDF be killed. May there be plans for a lasting peace!

Friends have suggested four possible berachot, four blessings, for this time of precarious hope:

Baruch matir assurim: Blessed be God who frees the bound.’ Eli Sharabi describes in his searing and courageous book ‘Hostage’, just published, how his hands were tied behind his back, how he and his comrades in captivity were shackled. May the hostages be free from captivity. May Israel and Gaza be free from war. May we all be free from the shackles of hatred.
‘Baruch Hatov Vehameitiv; Blessed be God who is good and does good:’ these words are recited on hearing good tidings, such as the first drumming of rainfall after long drought. We have had a prolonged dearth of positive news. Like many, I have found it hard to listen to more than a few moments at a time. Now at last, there’s something good, maybe, maybe, hopefully, please God, enduringly good. Yesterday I watched the crowds in Kikar Hachatufim, Hostage Square in Tel Aviv. I’ve been there several times in solidarity and sorrow. Now the place is on the verge of joy.
‘Baruch shehecheyanu; Blessed be God who has kept us alive, preserved us and brought us to this time:’ these familiar words were WhatsApped to me by the wonderful writer Osnat Eldar, whose poem of anguish ‘Mothers’ I have several times read out in our synagogue:
‘Mothers…They come to me at night
One by one
I hug them with compassion, with longing…’

Some, at least some, will once again hold their loved ones in their arms. Some will recite the shecheyanu with joy and tears, and unutterable relief.
‘Baruch mechayei hameitim; Blessed be God who revives the dead:’ one says this blessing on being reunited someone whom one has not seen for a very long time. The relevance is obvious. Yet I can’t help but think of those whose loved ones are gone forever, whose dead will not return.

I cherish these blessings. But, like many with whom I have spoken, I have not yet dared to say ‘Amen’ to any of them.
There’s a time for joy and a time for sorrow, writes Kohelet, Ecclesiastes, whose words we read tomorrow. But what when there’s a time for both at once?

May God let us rejoice with those whose loved ones, for whom they have yearned and over whom they have worried for so long, return to their embrace. May God open our hearts to the grief of those whose dear ones will never come back from the dark tunnels of Hamas, or from under the rubble of Gaza. May God guide us to help tend the wounds, physical and spiritual (today is World Mental health Day) of those who carry incurable hurts in their hearts.

But, above all, may God bring us hope for the future, and may God inspire our leaders to nurture that hope and make it real.

And here in the UK

Our hearts are with the community of Heaton Park in Manchester after the appalling terror attack and murders on Yom Kippur.

We appreciate the commitment of the CST, community volunteers and the police in their courageous, ongoing work to protect us.

Many rabbis, myself included, have been moved by the numerous messages of support from Imams, Muslim leaders and ministers of the Church.

Since last week there have been several attacks on Muslim places of worship, in particular, a vicious arson attack on Peacehaven Mosque. We stand together in solidarity against all racist, Islamophobic and Antisemitic outrages.

Last night, the Board of Deputies brought together the leaders of different faiths to hear excellent addresses, including from Miatta Farnbulleh, minister for faiths and communities. The focus was on finding light, despite these bleak times, through demonstrating our solidarity, protecting each other and deepening the cohesion of our society.