Environment | HEART AND MIND

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.’

31 Oct 2025

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

Jews and Halloween???

Sticky Post By admin On October 31, 2025

Walking past spooks, spiders, cobwebs (bird traps – please don’t!), skulls, crossbones and pumpkins with my dog Nessie yesterday, I thought I’d research what Jews have to say about Halloween. More fool me! I’d no notion how much there’s out there.

First a caution: anything about spirits touches deep places. Judaism teaches that the soul survives death. We pray for our dead to be ‘bound in the bond of eternal life.’ We’re admonished to leave them in peace. I’ve a memory, strange, vivid, of the spirit of Lore, my mother, just after she died in hospital, appearing for a half-second, less even than a moment, in the corridor of our house in Douglas Park Crescent, and gesturing goodbye before vanishing forever. So I’ve deep respect for everything concerning our beloved dead.

But about Jews and Halloween I knew nothing. As a Scot, I should have realised the date derives from the Celtic festival of Samhain. Pronounce this if you can: “Oidhche Shamhna theirear gamhna ris na laoigh.” It means that on Samhain night, calves become stirks, (beast aged six to twelve months). Samhain’s when summer turns to winter. The harvest’s in, the long indoor hours have begun, food will have to be rationed. The veil between our world and the spirit world is thin, and souls revisit their erstwhile homes.

Later, Halloween became Christian, just as in Judaism ancient dates are overlaid with Jewish history. But if Halloween’s origins are agricultural and pagan, does Judaism forbid participation?

‘Definitely!’ writes Rabbi Michael Broyde: Halakhah, Jewish law prohibits both “idolatrous customs” and “foolish” practices. Halloween may be foolish, but it’s not idolatrous, argue others: it’s just American, like Thanksgiving. It’s “harmless fun.” (See Kveller Magazine for more)

No doubt that’s why there’s so much kosher Halloween candy: “Creepy Peepers —each wrapped in a cartoonishly bloodshot eyeball foil wrapper; Dr. Scab’s Monster Lab Chocolate Body Parts, bags of fingers, ears, eyeballs and mouths, strangely milchig, rather than fleishig. There’s even a line in Halloween Fair Trade Kosher. (See Edmon Rothman in JTA for more)

So what does the rabbi say? You certainly wouldn’t have found me sending my children out tricking and treating. But would I inveigh against others? There’s a rabbinic tradition as old as the Talmud about not wasting your breath when people aren’t going to listen anyway. And there are worse things to object to.

Yet here’s some Jewish advice.

Pumpkins: next year, grow them for the Succah. Let’s have a ‘best pumpkin for the shul Succah’ competition.

Trick-and-treat: Hang on until Purim, when you can be treated with halakhah on your side. And remember: ‘trick’ doesn’t mean threatening to throw eggs at someone’s window if they don’t give you Quality Street or Heroes. It means ‘party-trick’, like offering a short song or performance. If you can’t wait until Purim, Chanukkah geld is a respectable interim.

Spirits: As Sam Glazer beautifully writes, we have our own harvest festival, called Succot, when we too welcome spirits in the form of the Ushpizin, the souls of honoured guests like Abraham and Sarah. So from now on keep a nook for your spook in your Tabernacle. (See The San Diego Jewish World for more)

As for me, will I stock up on kosher sweets in case gangs of kids come knocking on the door (some might even be from my own community!)? Probably. Because I hate seeming mean, and even the mere thought that someone might think ‘Mean Jew’ cuts horribly deep.

But you won’t catch me lighting my Shabbes candles inside a pumpkin when Shabbat comes in tonight.

PS: My excuse for writing this? I live with heavy themes week after week and sometimes it’s too much.

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?

14 Feb 2025

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

Moments of Hope

Sticky Post By admin On February 14, 2025

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.

13 Dec 2024

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

Finding the Light

Sticky Post By admin On December 13, 2024

‘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.

22 Nov 2024

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

Why Small Things Matter

Sticky Post By admin On November 22, 2024

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.

08 Nov 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Environment, Holocaust, Refugees Permalink

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

Sticky Post By admin On November 8, 2024

‘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.

13 Sep 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Environment, Israel Permalink

Maybe healing is possible?

Sticky Post By admin On September 13, 2024

I was privileged to be part of four special evenings this week. They’ve left me feeling that maybe, maybe in this torn world, healing is possible.

Sunday was a fund-raising night for Shaarei Tzedek, one of Jerusalem’s biggest hospitals. The subject was Antisemitism in Sport. But it was something different that I took away. Before we got to fouling in football and crossing boundaries in cricket, an elderly man stood up and spoke of being taken to the hospital as an emergency case. ‘Everyone, from teenage volunteers to medical and office teams, was kind. They worked together, orthodox, secular, in hijab or snood. Whoever the patient, any age, from anywhere, – they came first.’ That’s the message I took away.

On Tuesday I was at St John’s, Waterloo, sharing a book-reading with Father Giles Goddard, founder of Faiths for the Climate. His book is a brave spiritual autobiography about his journey to the ministry as a gay man before there was acceptance in the C. of E. Interwoven with his own story is the history of St John’s, his two-hundred-year-old church in the heart of the city, where once on nearby mudflats curlews called freely and now people of all backgrounds seek solace and communion. Muslim scholar Julie Saddiqi facilitated the conversation, opening with a silence in which our unspoken fears and anguish for our peoples was somehow shared. A grace of togetherness embraced us all. ‘You three together. Who’d have thought? In times like these. Wonderful!’ That feedback carried me home with a warm heart. (By the way, the church has a great parting line: ‘Before you go, talk to two people you don’t know.’)

On Wednesday we were online with Rachel Korazim. Clear, compassionate, astute and knowledgeable, she’s the most brilliant teacher of Hebrew poetry. She’s just edited the anthology Shiva, ‘Seven’, referring at once to 7^th October and the traumatic mourning following. The poems are harrowing:

… through the narrow cleft between night and day

The loss of life bleeds into the silent morning routine…(Rabbi Osnat Eldar)

Rachel teaches these poems because these voices must be heard and to raise funds to support care for traumatised people wherever they are. ‘We’re sending therapists to the beaches in Thailand where hundreds of Israelis have gone seeking, seeking… I believe in a different future, with land for all.’

On Thursday we were among the birds, fishes, amphibians and mammals with the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI). ‘Green spaces, quiet water, – nature heals,’ said Faygle Train**, manager of Gazelle Valley in Jerusalem. ‘In their hours off, soldiers come and just sit among the animals.’ (The occasional rabbi stops by too.) ‘Thousands find regained calm in forest hikes. Five hundred million birds pass through the great rift valley here, the last food-and- water stop on their thousands-of-miles migrations.’ Professor Nathalie Pettorelli of the Zoologcal Society of London spoke of rewilding cities, and Ben Goldsmith about the joy this brings: ‘Who’d have thought beavers would breed in Ealing!’ (He knows how to fund it all too.)

‘What about people who don’t get it?’ I asked the panel, ‘guys who replace everything with concrete and plastic grass?’ ‘Don’t argue,’ Nathalie explained. ‘Show them what they’re missing, the birds alighting on the leaves…’

Am I being idealistic, ignoring 75% or more of reality? Probably! But the Talmud says that ‘Return and repentance are great because they bring healing to the world.’ Maybe it’s also true the other way round. By practising healing we can bring return, to our best selves, each other, God, and life.

30 Aug 2024

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

Listening for God north of the border

Sticky Post By admin On August 30, 2024

Yehudah Halevi’s stirring lines about his longing for the Land of Israel are much quoted:

Libbi ba’mizrach – My heart is in the East

But I am in the farthermost West.

Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but my heart is not just in the East, but also in the North. I find God in the ancient alleyways and jasmine-scented courtyards of Jerusalem. I find God, too, among the pines and rowans, mountains and waterfalls of Scotland, my ‘wee bit hill and glen,’ where I meet the highland cattle, wild deer and red squirrels and, on a clear day, hear the cry of eagles. Perhaps it’s because the smells of damp grass and woodlands and the fall of the rain remind me of when my brother and I were small, before we moved to London and left this wonder behind.

East or West, North or South, – we discover different manifestations of divinity in different places, but it’s still the same God. Arthur Green describes how the letters Yud, Heh, Vav, Heh which spell God’s mysterious name ‘I shall be that I shall be’, can be rearranged as Heh, Vav, Yud, Heh, forming the word havayah, which means ‘existence.’ God’s being is present in everything that is, and everything that is expresses God’s presence, each in its distinctive manner.

That’s why the Psalmist hears the trees clap their hands and the mighty waters call out, depth unto depth. (We saw plenty of water in Scotland, the light rain, the storm-driven rain, the rain that drenches you in moments, and the rain that yields to the most amazing rainbows for which we’ve ever had the privilege of blessing God.

God can be heard in ‘the tree of life’ which is Torah, in the living trees of the Caledonian forests, and, with a different fragrance, in the warm pine woods of Mount Carmel. Perhaps it’s no accident that one of Scotland’s great nature restoration organisations is called Trees for Life. We visited its welcoming centre at Dundreggan, where the team, helped by volunteers (who wants to join me one day?) raise one hundred thousand saplings each year from rare seed gathered on the steep montane slopes of the Cuillins and Cairngorms.

I was heartened when Mossy and I traversed a mountain glen through which we’d walked years ago as a family. Back then we had to clamber for hundreds of metres through the dead stumps and broken debris, the desolate remains of a harvested pine plantation. But now the whole area was replanted with broad-leaved trees, oak, rowan and birch. The young growth was thriving; soon it will be home to that rich biodiversity Britain so urgently needs to restore.

Next week brings the 1^st of Elul, in ancient times the Hebrew date for tithing cattle, but increasingly celebrated today as the Jewish New Year for Animals. Judaism understands all creation to be God’s work. Our civilisation has become increasingly, and dangerously, anthropocentric. But humans don’t, and can’t, exist in isolation. We are a sympoesis, a ‘making together’, in which we and innumerable other lives are interdependent.

That’s why, while I’m always glad to pray with a quorum of ten people, I was happy over the last few days to put on my tefillin, be sung to by waterfalls, joined in my blessings by the baaing of sheep, and accompanied in my standing prayer by a stock-still fellowship of deer.

I haven’t forgotten ‘the real world’ (see below). It’s only that I’ve been listening, with gratitude, to another part of it.

Shabbat Shalom

Jonathan Wittenberg

Please click here to listen to my Radio 4 Thought for the Day from last Tuesday, concerning Hezbollah.

12 Jul 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Environment Permalink

We all need our moments of hope and reprieve

Sticky Post By admin On July 12, 2024

We need our bursts of joy and relief. That’s what Watkins’ great goal in the 90^th minute of the Euro semi-final did for England on Wednesday, – though it may have felt different in Holland. It doesn’t spell an everlasting end to war, or no more human misery, but we all need such moments of reprieve.

‘Write about hope and resilience,’ my agent told me, ‘That’s what people want to hear.’ So that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’ve ditched the serious piece I just drafted in favour of what follows, especially as I’ve been lucky enough to have wonderful moments of positivity this week.

‘For those few seconds we were eye to eye,’ said Hugh Warwick, in a delightful talk he gave at my home last Sunday, during EcoJudaism’s awards ceremony at which our synagogue got gold. He was speaking about close encounters with hedgehogs. After all, he’s the author of A Prickly Affair (as well as many other books, including a recent best-seller).

He’s also the champion of the British Hedgehog Society. I cold called him a couple of years ago. As I struggled to explain precisely why a rabbi wanted a lecture on hedgehogs, he took the initiative by listing every single context in which the charming creatures are – arguably, very arguably indeed – mentioned in the Hebrew Bible.

Why hedgehogs? Because, Hugh Warwick answered, ‘I love them.’ It was that eye-to-eye, creature to creature, moment that sealed it. And, he added, you can only truly fight for what you love.

Others love hedgehogs too, he continued. ‘Groups won’t invite me to talk about climate disaster, or biodiversity loss. But champion Britain’s favourite animal and they’ll ask you gladly. And once on the platform, I can talk about everything.’

It’s what the great environmentalist Wendell Berry wrote: ‘Maybe the answer is to fight always for what you particularly love, not for abstraction, and not against anything.’

The following day I attended an event for Tree Aid. It focussed on their work in helping local groups in Ghana, particularly women, plant food-bearing trees as part of the Great Green Wall, the 8,000 kilometre long, 20 kilometre wide, tree belt intended to stop the southward creep of the Sahara. It was an evening of music, joy and love for what everyone was achieving. We felt we were watching the young trees and the strengthened communities grow together.

This may all sound stupid when there are wars on, when Bishop Kenneth Nowakowski, a good friend, sends me a picture from Kiev of his Cathedral with smoke rising from a bombsite in the background, and when there’s fighting in Gaza and the north of Israel, and the hostages still remain captive after nine bitter months.

But Ayelet, mother of Naama who’s still held by Hamas in Gaza, sent me a video of their dog. So I sent back a photo of Nessie. Stupid? Yes, I felt foolish taking that photo. But it’s a moment of reprieve, of closeness, and we need them in order to survive. There are times, and parts of the world, which are so cruel that minutes, even seconds, like that are almost unattainable. But when they’re possible they must be seized and relished. If we can, we should share them others.

Every morning we say in our prayers, ‘With great love, God, you have loved us.’ That love may take the micro form of a close encounter with a hedgehog, sharing a film of our dog, a kind word posted, a WhatsApp, or whatever. These may be small things in the global scale, but without them neither we nor the world can survive.