In memory of my father, who died on Israel’s Independence Day, 18 years ago

It was my brother, Raphael, who thought to move our father’s bed in his dying days so that, if he was able to lift his head from his pillow, he would be able to see his beloved garden. Twice I saw him raise himself up, semi-conscious, and say the words of the daily prayer ‘mekayyem emunato – God keeps faith with those who sleep in the dust,’ before slipping back into sleep. Perhaps he meant the restorative powers of nature, perhaps his hope in his maker. 

I think of our father in these days between Yom haShaoh, the Hebrew date established by the Knesset for remembering the Holocaust, its horror and the valour of resistance, and Yom Ha’Atzma’ut, Israel’s Independence Day with its longing for a different future. Aged just sixteen, our father fled Nazi Germany with his immediate family, fought in the British Army repairing tanks behind the lines at El Alamein, and served in the Hagganah during the siege of Jerusalem.

He had a tough life. By the time he was 42 he had lost two of his aunts and his grandmother, murdered by the Nazis, his sister Eva who suffered heart failure in Jerusalem in 1944, his favourite uncle Alfred, killed in 1948 in the convoy ambushed on its way to Mount Scopus, and his beloved first wife Lore, Raphael’s and my mother, who died of cancer in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Looked after by Isca, our second mother, our father lived to see the Bnei Mitzvah of his two eldest grandchildren, and died, aged 86, on Yom Ha’Atzma’ut 18 years ago.

I can’t speak about God’s side of the matter, but for his part our father definitely kept faith. I remember him coming up to our bedroom after Lore’s death to continue where she had been forced to leave off in teaching us the Shema: ‘If you’re good, I’ll tell you a few more words each night.’ I remember how, when I was sixteen, he came into my room and asked me, ‘Are you still saying the Shema every night?’ I fear my answer ‘Yes’ was less than a half-truth. But since then, I have never, unless overtaken suddenly by sleep, omitted to say those words, which define the Jewish faith.

I remember our father telling me one night, unexpectedly, out of nowhere it seemed to me, ‘Do your homework, because they can take away from you everything except what’s in your mind.’

Our father was a craftsperson, skilled with his hands; we did many house and garden jobs together. I recall how I was once rude to him; it was about some tool, perhaps a pair of pliers. I saw his face and realised: I must never speak like that to anyone, ever again.

I think of our father now when saying the words of the morning service: ‘For the sake of our ancestors who trusted in you, put it into our hearts to understand, listen, learn and practise all the words of your Torah and teaching in love.’ Our father loved his Judaism and felt especially close to Rabbi Louis Jacobs. They even both (under pressure from their wives) gave up cigars at the same time.

I think of our father in these cruel, uncertain and frightening times, his deep resilience, his love of gardens and nature, and the history about which, though a great raconteur when he got going, he rarely volunteered to speak: ‘We told aunt Sophie when she visited us in Jerusalem in 1938, “Don’t go back to Czechoslovakia,” but her husband was an ardent Czech patriot and she wouldn’t listen.’ I have Sophie’s last letter before deportation, written in January 1943 and smuggled to the family: ‘In this manner, we take our farewell.’

But our forebears don’t make their departure, at least not entirely. Our beloved dead stay with us in our hearts, and, through memories and stories and the places, foods, music and pursuits they enjoyed, continue to impart their love and strength.

What freedom is

At the second Seder, the second night of our journey mei’avdut lecheirut, ‘from slavery to freedom,’ I asked the company what freedom means to them. I gave no one any warning, so the responses were immediate and unpremeditated. Here is some of what followed.

‘Being here, that’s freedom:’ That was the first response, and those words have stayed with me. Life is easily taken for granted, health, mobility, the ability to attend a Seder. I think of the words one says each morning: ‘Modeh ani – Thank you, God, for giving me back my life and soul in mercy.’ I thought, too, of Naama Levy’s comment in The Haggadah of Freedom, on what enabled her to keep going while held hostage in Gaza:

‘I yearned for “the little pleasures of life”… food, a hot shower, time to spend with friends and family, enjoy the warmth of sunlight, to breathe fresh air and just stroll outside…’

‘Freedom is being together,’ said someone else, focussing us on those who long desperately to be reunited with loved ones still held hostage. The words reminded me too of Elsa, a refugee who lived with us for a few weeks, whose mother was murdered before her eyes. ‘And your father?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know if he’s dead, or alive somewhere in prison. I’ve heard nothing for twelve years.’

‘Freedom is remembering, sharing our story.’  There’s that sentence in Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines: the culture of the campfire faces that of the pyramids. Our strength has always been the stories we tell, from the Torah onwards, which unite us and imbue in us our values, community, dignity, justice, compassion.

Freedom is what the RAF did for us in the war’: ‘Having lived through one war,’ said Nicky’s aunt Chelle, ‘freedom is those who protect you and save you from bombing and air raids.’  Think of what’s going on today…

One special guest did not respond. Seven years ago, his wife begged us at our Seder to pray for her husband, a political prisoner in Belgian Congo: ‘I believe in prayer,’ she said. People get murdered in those prisons; I doubted she’d see her husband alive. But here he was, a free man, at our Seder. His commentary was his presence.

With us, too, was Okito, leader of the DCR’s community in exile. He wrote to me afterwards:

‘For us freedom is deeply tied to justice and human dignity. We are profoundly affected by the ongoing human rights crisis in our country of origin…The silence of the international community is heartbreaking… We see freedom not as something to enjoy in isolation, but as a recognition of others’ suffering. Today in Israel, families are in deep pain, grieving and waiting for loved ones taken hostage. True freedom cannot exist while others remain in chains. To fully experience our own liberation, we must acknowledge and respond to the suffering of others.’

The last comment went to our daughter Kadya, who read from Maya Angelou’s wonderful tribute to the mother, Love Liberates:

It doesn’t just hold you, that’s ego,
Love liberates…

She [her mother] released me, she freed me…
That’s love…

Here’s to a world of freedom, dignity, justice, love and hope!

Our Synagogue’s Golden Shabbat

Tonight and tomorrow our community of the New North London Synagogue,  בית חדשBayit Chadash, celebrates its Golden Shabbat.

I wasn’t there at the beginning. But I heard many times how Rabbi Dr Jacobs, the inspiration behind this new congregation, stood on a chair and declared, ‘Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.’

What is that idea, or ideal? It was, and remains, the creation of a community deeply rooted in Jewish tradition and practice, engaged with learning, liturgy and halakhah, Jewish law, yet open-minded, open to the world, and open-hearted, ready to face truths from wherever they come and to struggle honestly with the challenges of contemporary life.   

We have never finished working at what that ideal means and at how to make it real, and we never shall. The moment we finish, we will cease to be true to what it demands of us.
I remember, I remember!

I have many treasured memories from the last 40+ years, moments which touched my soul. But I can’t share most of them, because they were heart-to-heart and private.

Yet two stand out. The first happened about thirty years ago on Rosh Hashanah, the New Year. Leslie Lyndon, his memory is a blessing, had just concluded the long Mussaf service which he led year by year with depth and grace. He was taking the traditional three steps back with which one symbolically parts from the presence of God, when he became aware of a baby who had crawled up right behind him. I will never forget the laughing smile with which he looked down at the child as, singing the concluding words Oseh Shalom, ‘Maker of peace,’ he carefully side-stepped to avoid her. It was a sweet moment of meeting between the holy and the human, – and that’s what religion and community is all about.

The second moment is the Shabbat when we first prayed in our new synagogue building. We decided to move in as a congregation halfway through our Sabbath prayers. From each service people of all ages came singing as they carried our Torah scrolls from the much-loved premises where we had gathered for so long, into the new spaces which we were determined to fill with the same spirit and affection. Everything was master-planned by Claire Mandel, our then CEO, to whom I say on behalf of us all, ‘We owe you so much.’ I can’t remember the words, but the feeling of that singing still feeds my soul.

So we’ve reached our Golden Shabbat. I think of gold as the precious filament which the Torah describes as running through the garments of the High Priest, shining amidst the other strong colours of scarlet, blue and purple.

Today we have neither High Priest not sacred garments. We each approach God as equals, and our garments are own experiences and spirit, which, like the High Priest’s clothes, are composed of many threads. Some have the radiant colours of joy; others are knotted with pain and hurt as life draws them through our heart. But I hope that, even in tough times, we can keep sight of the filament of gold running through them. It’s composed of Torah, neshamah – soul music, hesed – loving-kindness, kehillah -community, and tsedek – the aspiration to do what is just and right. I hope we never lose sight of that gold thread.

The New North London community has shaped my life. I am deeply grateful for the fellowship, challenge, guidance, trust and inspiration.

I ask God’s blessing for all my companions on this voyage, and especially for my wonderful, gifted and dedicated colleagues who are taking this journey forward into the future.

May God bless us and care for us. May God’s grace enlighten us and God’s presence guide us. May God bring us, all Israel and all the world, to a place of peace.

The Return of the Bodies of the Hostages – yet even then we must find hope

There are two people I wanted to be close to yesterday. The first is Sharone Lifschitz, whose father Oded’s body was brought home from captivity in Gaza. I have Oded’s picture, with his warm, wise, deeply humane smile, near where I pray when at home.

The terrible date of October 7 was cut even more deeply yesterday into Israel’s heart.

As soon as I heard the news, I messaged Sharone, who lives in London, has spoken in our synagogue, and whose strong, thoughtful, quiet but firm words have often been heard on the BBC. ‘What prayers, what verses do I say?’ she replied. ‘My father loved the Hebrew Prophets,’ she added, ‘justice, wisdom and ahavat adam, love for humanity.’

Her mother, Yocheved, was among the first hostages to be released. ‘I went through hell,’ she said. Yet, Sharone told me, ‘She has a nickname: They call her Mezuzah.’ ‘Why?’ I asked in surprise. ‘Because everyone who sees her kisses her.’

The couple, founders of Kibbutz Nir Oz, ‘were lifelong peace activists and would regularly transport patients from Gaza to receive medical care in hospitals across Israel. Oded, a great-grandfather, was a journalist and a passionate advocate for human rights.’ (Times of Israel)

What a contrast the deep humanity of this family makes with the mocking brutality of Hamas as it handed over Oded’s body, and those of the young children, deliberately murdered, Kfir and Ariel Bibas and, purportedly, of their murdered mother Shiri, to the International Red Cross.

How badly that humanity is needed in a region seared with grief, trauma, pain, and the rubble of war. I wish I could have been in Israel yesterday, with the families I have come to know, and, in a tiny way, feel part of.

But, here in London, I was able to stand next to the second person I needed to be close to, Bishop Kenneth Nowakowski, head of Ukrainian communities across the UK and a faithful friend. I’ve witnessed the devastation of the suburbs just a few miles from the heart of Kiev. I’ve followed the bishop’s work in creating a centre to support the tens of thousands of displaced Ukrainians here in Britain. I’ve heard him speak of the kinship he feels with the Jewish People. The first time he came to our synagogue, he was speechless; at the pulpit, he wept.

‘You don’t have to come,’ he texted me, ‘Your own people’s heartache is enough.’ But Bishop Kenneth has heartache too, as President Trump lies about President Zelensky, and seeks to sell out Ukraine rather like Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia in 1938. (Ironically, this week’s Torah portion is Mishpatim, just laws’. ‘The world stands upon truth, justice and peace,’ taught Rabbi Shimeon ben Gamliel, under Roman occupation 1900 years ago. If only!)

I had one further stirring meeting yesterday. I visited Marika Henriques, to thank for her remarkable film Chaos Dragon and the Light which we screened on Holocaust Memorial Day. It follows her struggles with the trauma she experienced after surviving as a hidden child in Hungary. Never able to draw anything (her own words), she found herself pouring out her feelings years later in paintings which flowed straight from her unconscious.  However fierce she portrayed the dragons with which she battled, her pictures always included a red dot. She came to understand afterwards that this dot represented hope: ‘There has to be hope.’

‘We’re commanded to hope,’ Bishop Kenneth said, scarcely an hour later. Hope, we agreed across our multifaith gathering, is a religious obligation.

My hope is that the values which guided Oded Lifschitz’s life, – wisdom, justice, compassion and a commitment to our collective humanity – and which Sharone carries forward, will prove stronger and resonate more deeply in everyone’s hearts than all the hatreds which besiege them.

Moments of Hope

In my Talmud class, which has been running each Thursday morning for almost 40 years, we have reached the word echad, ‘one’ (Berachot 13a). It’s such a simple word that every child knows it. Yet it’s so demanding that the world can’t understand it.

Say the word ‘one’ very carefully, insists the Talmud. Say it not just with kavvanah, attention, but with kavvanat halev, concentration of the heart. Draw out the letters for long enough to acknowledge that God is above, below, and everywhere in all directions. For ‘Hear, O Israel, our God…is one’ is Judaism’s creed, its soul, and the spirit of all life.

This is not a mere concept, a mathematical proposition like ‘God isn’t two.’ It’s how we’re called upon to live in this fractured and brutal, yet wondrous and beautiful, world. It means what the mystics taught, that one vital spirit flows through all life, and that all life, in its manifold manifestations, is bound in one sacred kinship.

This is not to deny the cruel realities around us. On Sunday, leaders of the Congolese community in exile poured out their hearts around my dinner table: ‘Rwanda’s invaded, taken Goma. Our relatives are slaughtered, my nephew was killed last week. We need help!’ What can one do? We prayed, for each other’s anguish, for Israel, the hostages, the Middle East, the DRC.

Oneness, togetherness, seems a feeble notion, a mere fiction, set against such violence. Nevertheless, it remains the most comprehensive truth we know. This week I witnessed three glimpses what that might mean oneness, three moments of hope.

The first was the signing of the Drumlanrig Accords between leaders of the Jewish and Muslim communities of this country. The outcome of long and detailed debate, the accords open by affirming that we ‘share a profound spiritual heritage…  rooted in monotheism, the sanctity of life and a commitment to justice.’ They conclude with the commitment to ‘work tirelessly to enable future generations to inherit our legacy of friendship, mutual respect, and solidarity.’ No doubt, some will mock this. It’s far from the reality on our streets. Yet it’s nothing more or less than what we proclaim in our creed, that God is one.

Then came Tu Bishevat, the New Year of the Trees. Back around my table, we spoke of our love of trees, of the tree of life at the centre not just of Eden, but of the gardens of our childhood: ‘It’s still there, that oak I climbed as a little girl.’ ‘I’ve had that handkerchief tree planted, not in my garden but in the square, so that the village children can enjoy it for generations after I’m gone.’ Trees and nature are not wholly other; we need them, materially, mentally and spiritually. We belong together, in the vital oneness of life; we cannot survive apart.

Last but not least, I spoke with a close relative of a hostage in Gaza. I didn’t ask permission, so shan’t share their name. ‘I’m not made for hate,’ they said. ‘I do feel it sometimes,’ they acknowledged, ‘I sense it inside me. But I don’t follow it, because we’re here to do hesed, to live by compassion.’ These humbling words fill me with the deepest respect.

‘Say ‘God is one’ slowly, insists the Talmud: meditate on God’s oneness above, below, and in all directions.’ Saying the words is important. But the real challenge is to live by them in this unjust, violent world.

That’s the task to which we are called by our faiths to be faithful.

Trees are healers: a message for Tu Bishevat

I have always loved the festival of Tu Bishevat, Chag Ha’ilanot, The New Year of the Trees, because trees are beautiful and trees mean life. From a young age I was taught to treasure them and have childhood memories of the woodlands near our home, the red berries on the rowans and the autumn scents of fallen leaves on damp but sunlit mornings.

In my gap year in Israel, I worked for a fortnight alongside a forester who’d survived the Nazi camps. His experiences had left him wizened and taciturn, but as we drove through the forests of the Galilee his wonder overflowed: ‘How marvellous are the works of the Holy One,’ he would say. Perhaps those woodlands offered some modicum of living compensation for the deaths he had witnessed.

Throughout the burning Mediterranean summer that followed, I felt a personal responsibility for a young sapling struggling to survive in the hot pavement below the Jerusalem Theatre and took it water and prayed with it whenever I could.

For trees are healers. In the Garden of Eden, there was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the tree of life. But there was no tree of death. On the contrary, that Tree of Life became the living symbol of Judaism and Torah: from its roots God’s sacred spirit flows into every leaf, every living soul and every prayer.

When your heart is troubled, teaches the Talmud, when you long for good to happen but it won’t materialise, turn to Torah for ‘it is a tree of life to those who grasp it.’ It’s the nearest to tree-hugging the Talmud goes.

That’s why I hope that trees can become our healers once again today, in these times of war in Somalia, Ukraine, the Middle East. So many lives have been destroyed: the traditional image on the gravestones of those who’ve been cut down young is a broken tree, the trunk snapped in half. Nothing can replace these people or take away the heartache of those who love them. At the same time, nature suffers too; virtually all forms of life perish in the bombed-out moonscapes of war.

So on Tu Bishevat, hand on heart and spade, I set our hope in the healing power of trees. The prophet Ezekiel offers a beautiful verse: ‘The desolate land shall be like the Garden of Eden…the desolate and devastated places shall be restored.’ (36:35) The word for ‘desolate’ is neshammah; take away one ‘m’, represented by a mere dot in the Hebrew, and you have neshamah, breath or soul. Wherever on earth there has been war, may the land live again, may its spirit be restored!

In the Negev, The Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel is creating a Living Trail which ‘will symbolize the area’s rebirth and enduring resilience.’ It will become ‘a symbolic bridge commemorating the October 7 attacks while highlighting the communal and ecological recovery of the region and its people.’ It will model how, throughout the world, where there has been destruction, we can replant, re-green and recreate life and hope.

For trees are the harbingers of peace. They don’t say, ‘we breath out oxygen and restore the land only for Jews, or Christians, or Muslims.’ The vine and the fig tree are the biblical emblems of tranquillity and safety. And ever since the dove brought back its twig to Noah, the olive tree too has been a living messenger of hope. ‘I eat my heart out for all our anguish,’ the ancient olive says, ‘But I grow back, even from a mere bare stump, and my green and silver leaves bend once more in the wind.’

In the Footsteps of My Great-grandmother

‘Why is this important?’ my nephew Danny asks me. We’re standing at the ruins of crematorium three in Birkenau, recording for the BBC for which Danny works, in preparation for the 80th commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz. My son Mossy is here too. We’re aware that this may be the exact place where my great-, their great-great-, grandmother took her final breaths.

Late the previous night we visited the 16th century Shach Synagogue in Holesov. Here my great-grandfather Rabbi Dr Yakov Freimann taught for twenty years. Half-hidden down steps below the street, it survived the Holocaust, unlike the New Synagogue which was burnt and smashed to pieces by the Nazis and the Vlajka.

It’s here that my great-grandmother Regina prayed on the New Year of 1941. On 29 September she wrote to her son in New York: ‘The solemn spirit of the service in the 800-year-old synagogue was especially dignified and in accord with our mood.’

Beautiful murals adorn the walls with the words of communal prayers: ‘Yitgadal veyitkaddash; Magnified and sanctified be Your holy name…’ Mossy sang Adam yesodo me’afar: ‘Humankind is made from dust and unto dust shall return.’ We were not just moved, but transfixed.

‘And what difference will it make when the last living survivors are gone?’ Danny continues.

Standing where they stood in their last moments, we felt close to the dead, trying in the icy rain to catch the echoes of their last words, mental farewells to mothers, children, loved ones, final prayers. As the last survivors go, it’s on us to testify about the lives of those, mostly fellow Jews, also Roma, homosexuals, socialists, who were murdered. And it’s our responsibility to affirm the courage of those who survived, creating new lives, so often without bitterness or hate. In so doing, we bear witness not just to the past, but to the irreducible value of every life.

Yet there’s something further, something critical at this dangerous juncture in today’s world: we must testify to the truth of what happened here for the sake of truth itself. Our western civilisation is in danger of leaving behind the age of empiricism, where fact and evidence matter, and entering the age of untethered myth, when all that counts is who tells the best-selling story. Powerful figures want to promulgate a post-fact, why-check-facts, facts-don’t matter culture. Empowered by many who live more in virtual than in physical reality, they seek to peddle manipulative falsehoods, appealing to the fears and bigotry which, if we’re honest, most of us harbour deep down. Their aim is not the suppression of truths. I fear it’s worse than that: true and false are not even relevant categories for them. All that matter is that their story sticks.

Therefore, our duty to testify is all the more essential. Judaism requires us to speak truth in the heart, bear honest witness, and know that God is not the God of our favourite prejudices but the God of all truth. We are commanded to pursue truth, whether or not it suits us. Inconvenient truths must also be acknowledged.

‘And what about the perpetrators, who also stood here?’ Danny asks.

I could have said: ‘They were nazis; our families were the victims.’ That’s true. But there’s a further, more difficult truth: ordinary people, some with doctorates and religious convictions, groups, parties, national governments, both through acting and through failing to act, became complicit in mass murder. What made that possible? What were the steps on those individual and collective paths? Societies that won’t ask that question may find that they’re already on it.

My answer to Danny is: We’re here to testify: to honour the lives of those murdered, to appreciate the lives of those who survived, and for the sake of truth, to protect all life in the future.

Finding the Light

‘She always saw the best in people.’ ‘He had a gift for finding the good in every situation.’ How I admire people like that!

I’m speaking on the phone to Matthew Biggs, of Gardener’s Question Time Fame. He’s not been well. He tells me that when he’s having treatment, he stares out of the hospital window and sees where daffodils could be planted and thinks what it would mean to others to have a truly beautiful space to look at while waiting anxiously for therapies or results. Then he describes exactly what he’s doing to make this happen.

That’s the essence of Chanukah, which now draws near. It’s about finding the light in any situation. When the Maccabees re-entered the Temple precincts after a long and bitter war, they must have encountered an utterly dispiriting sight: everything in ruins, everything holy contaminated and broken. But, in the Talmud’s words, ‘they searched and found one single vial of inviolate oil’ with which they lit the Menorah so that it burnt for a week and a day with a wondrous, sacred light.

We commemorate this miracle ritually by lighting our Chanukah candles. But we live it through how we see the world. Time and again our eyes are drawn to destruction; media and social media thrive on disaster, anger and hate. But there are other ways of looking.

For example, during Covid there were nature-lovers who wrote in chalk the names of the wildflowers that grew through the gaps in the paving stones and walls. There were nurses who, helpless to do more in the loneliness of lock-down and knowing what love means, sent their patient’s family their own mobile number, put their phone to the ear of a sick husband and father, and enabled those who loved him to say goodbye.

Such people manage to see midst the bleakness life’s sacred light. Today, in these tough times, with the world so full of destruction, it matters that we do likewise. God’s light resides in all that lives; it’s up to us to see it.

But seeing it is not enough. The Talmud has a motto: Ma’alin bakodesh: in sacred matters we go up, not down. That’s why on Chanukah we don’t start with eight candles and descend, night by night, to just one, even though this makes sense since the quantity of oil in the Menorah lit by the Maccabees must have got less and less. Instead, we follow the School of Hillel and start with one light, ascending, night by night, to eight.

Ma’alin is a causative verb: it means not just ‘go up’ but ‘raise up’ and applies not just to Chanukah, or religious rituals, but to all of life. When we encounter what’s holy, we must try to raise it up, and, as the Hasidic Master taught, however hidden, repressed and neglected, an inextinguishable spark of holiness resides in all life. The challenge is first to see it, then to nurture it, cup our hands around it and let its flame rise up.

This applies even to little Iggle, the tiny baby hedgehog carefully nursed back towards its survival weight by my wife Nicky. It applies, too, to the ancient chestnut tree for which a friend campaigned until the council relented from cutting it down. Nothing living is so small that it doesn’t matter.

It applies all the more to children, orphaned, hungry and heart-broken, in terrible wars in which their only role has been to suffer. Can we do something, anything, that brings, food, healing, hope even to just one of them, wherever they are in the world?

Chanukah is not just about the miracle of the light that was. It’s about the light within all life that waits for us to find it and raise it up. That’s how we create hope, and the hope we bring always illumines hope in others too.

Why Small Things Matter

We have a new resident in our house, a temporary visitor I hope. It’s a hedgehog, whom Nicky has called Iggle; we don’t know its pronouns. We hope we can return Iggle to the gardens and hedgerows as soon as we safely can.

It happened like this: I was walking down East End Road towards Fairacres where we were preparing a Friday night dinner when something drew my attention to the pavement. There, half hiding among the amber leaves, was the tiniest baby hedgehog I have ever seen.

I saw at once that it was nowhere near the minimum 650 grams these much-loved creatures need to survive the winter. So what to do? I slipped the loaf of bread I’d just purchased under my arm, put the hedgehog in the paper bag, where at least it would be protected and contained, and took it home as soon as I could. Nicky had the scales at the ready: the little fellow weighed a mere 220 grams. Since then, it’s put on another 35. It’s a busy young creature, and we’ve been careful to keep the dogs away from its scratching and snuffling.

This is a very minor matter. But I take comfort in just such small matters in these cruel times. They prevent me from feeling utterly overwhelmed. Here is something I can do, one small life I can maybe help save, and anything we can on the side of life and healing is, perhaps, not quite so little after all.

COP 29 is coming to a close. Though the stakes could not be higher, expectations have been low. Results haven’t made the headlines in the way the election of Donald Trump, the escalation of fighting between Ukraine and Russia, and the ICC’s warrant against Netanyahu have. But COP is an international endeavour to manage the greatest threat of all, climate chaos and the devastation of nature. The future of our children depends on tough, courageous decisions and the willingness to fund them.

Part of the challenge is spiritual: we, humankind, need to re-imagine and re-feel our relationship with all other life. Judaism doesn’t promote domination, superiority and entitlement, despite those verses from Genesis 1, ‘Fill the earth, subdue it, have dominion.’ Rather, it teaches partnership, care and respect. This is God’s world, and God’s sacred vitality flows through every human person, and, in different manifestations, through every living being.

The Judaism I believe in does not condone the degradation and dispossession of innocent people, be the victims fellow Jews, Israelis, Palestinians or anyone else. It does not accept wilful or negligent cruelty towards any form of life. Such behaviours cannot be condoned in the name of Judaism. Judaism is a religion of protest against oppression, destruction and indifference.

Consider this caution, attributed to Rebbe Shneur Zalman of Liadi, founder of Chabad, who chided his son for idly tearing leaves of a bush:

‘Who says the ‘I’ of you is more important to God than the ‘I’ of that plant. True, you belong to the world of humans and it belongs to the world of vegetation. But how do you know which is more precious to God?’

It would be hard to put matters more radically.

The older I get, the less I want my life to be evaluated by what it costs the earth: what I’ve consumed, squandered, chucked away; whom I’ve failed, hurt, or been implicated in hurting. I want my scales to balance on the side of life: what I’ve planted, nurtured, for whom I’ve cared, to whom shown compassion, for whom spoken up.

If we want to be true to our God and our faith, we must set ourselves with passion against the immense cruelties and injustices of this world.

Trying to save a baby hedgehog isn’t much, but it’s better than leaving it to die.

Hope in dark times: the light shall not go out!

‘But the light has not gone out, and that is a sign from God:’ these are the words my grandfather, Rabbi Salzberger, overheard, when, summoned by the Gestapo to the burning wreckage of the great synagogue in Frankfurt’s Boerneplatz, he passed through the whispering crowds of German onlookers on the morning after Kristallnacht, in November 1938.Tomorrow is the eighty-sixth anniversary of that terrible date. Monday, Remembrance Day, Veteran’s Day in the States, reminds us of the terrible human costs of the war that preceded it and the war against evil which followed.

The light the onlookers in Frankfurter were referring to was the Ner Tamid, the Eternal Lamp, of the Westendsynagoge, where my grandfather served for thirty years until forced by the Nazis to flee the country he once loved. That Ner Tamid is the parent lamp from which a flame was kindled, and carefully carried for hundreds of miles, to light the Eternal Lamp of my community’s synagogue, here in London.

Thus the light still burns, through tough days and dark nights, embodying the truth that, however much the world assails our hopes, our hearts and our deep beliefs in justice and compassion, we must not let the lights of our faith go out.

‘Do I give up?’ people have been asking me, directly or by inference, this week. Do I despair of my fight for the environment, for the dignity, equality and rights of women, for refugees, for an end to race hate and hate speech? Of course, we already know the answer. But we must hear it from each other, because we need each other in the fight:

However many rings of pain
The night winds round me,
The opposing pull is stronger… (Boris Pasternak, the Zhivago poems)
 
During these challenging days, I’ve looked backward to last week’s Torah portion, Noach, in which God and humanity embark, as it were, on their second term. The first ended in disaster, ‘violence and corruption’, recrimination and destruction. (Genesis 8) But God determines not to give up and binds us, by the sign of the arching rainbow, in an everlasting bond: ‘We are bound together, you and I, you and all living beings, all the birds and all the animals, in a covenant of life.’ That contract still holds, obligating each and every one of us. The harder it is to honour it, the more compelling our obligation.
 
I look forward to this week’s Torah portion, Lech Lecha, the start of Abraham’s journey: ‘Go,’ God tells him, ‘Go to the land I’ll show you,’ the land where My will for goodness, freedom and reverence for life shall be done. Go, and don’t ever stop going, because that’s how you become a blessing. Never give up.
 
In a brilliant Midrash Abraham sees God, Master of the World, calling out from a burning building. ‘Help me,’ God cries, ‘My world is on fire and I need you.’ God’s world needs our most urgent help.
 
That is the very same voice which my grandfather heard crying out from a burning synagogue eighty-six years ago on the Boerneplatz: ‘My light still shines despite the flames. Save it!  Save my world!’
 
The fires of hatred may make threaten it, but they cannot extinguish God’s light, the inner light of humanity, the light within the soul. We must preserve it always. We must bear it with us and nurture its flame, wherever we may go.

Get in touch...