Environment | HEART AND MIND

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.

12 Apr 2024

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

Celebrating Pesach in this wonderful, terrible world

Sticky Post By admin On April 12, 2024

I’m bewildered by our world today, and struggling. I’m not alone. ‘Can I talk to you?’ people ask. I listen; I care about listening. But what shall I say?

It’s dawn and the garden birds are starting to visit the feeders. They’re singing: great tits, blue tits, goldfinches, wrens. I worry about the blackbirds. I don’t see them for weeks, but yesterday, there they were. I’m lucky; I was raised to notice such things.

My faith as a Jew teaches me that God is in all life. If I listen deeply enough, if I let the other voices in my head fall silent, the ‘I have’ and ‘I haven’t’, the ‘I want’ and ‘I ought’, I will feel the sacred stream of life flow from pool to pool in everything that exists, filling, too, the inner well beneath my heart. For long, dry months I may not be able to access the place, but this current of life does not fail.

But what kind of world is this really?

I think of Romi, a dancer just 23 years old, still hostage to Hamas after almost two hundred days. ‘I’ve switched off everything,’ her father tells me. ‘There’s only one message I’m waiting for, the call that she’s free.’ Daily we pray, ‘Our brothers and sisters from the whole House of Israel, in suffering and captivity…’

Every day, too, I see pictures from Gaza, desperate people. Are they not also made in God’s image? To what future is this hunger and ruin giving birth, irrespective of who’s to blame?

I’ve seen videos made by Nasrullah and Hezbollah, the nefarious protegees of Iran’s murderous regime, how they plan to destroy…

So it’s a terrible world. Yet it’s a wonderful world. It’s a beautiful, cruel, bounteous, unjust, wretched, glorious world. I want to believe with Martin Luther King that ‘the arc of history bends towards justice.’ I wish! Perhaps he, too, was afraid, and spoke not in certainty, but hope.

Into all of this now comes Pesach, festival of freedom. We’re preparing our kitchens, buying matzah, eyeing our bitter herbs, and worrying. So, in line with all the ‘fours’ of the Seder, I’m telling myself four things:

Freedom: Recommit to the struggle for liberty, for Jews, Israel and everyone. Freedom only for some is freedom compromised. Nelson Mandela wrote A Long Walk to Freedom. In truth, that walk is unending, traversing the same tough ground over and again, while the promise of the messianic dream remains many wildernesses away. But that’s no reason not to put on our boots.

Story: Seder is the night of the story. We recount our people’s story and weave into it our own. It’s our past, our present, and our hope for what must be. We need a world that respects and welcomes our stories, Jews or Hindus, refugees, farmers, students, venerable elderly with the wisdom of ninety years. Silence our stories with hate, and liberty is silenced for all. Without stories there’s no freedom.

Earth: The Seder plate is Judaism’s earth-plate, – and this year Seder Night coincides with Earth Day. The field’s crops, wheat, barley, oats, spelt, rye, are matzah’s only ingredient, bar water. The karpas, greens, are anything blessed as ‘fruit of the ground.’ Maror is the soil’s bitter yield. Sweet charoset is an offering of fruits and spices lauded in The Song of Songs. It’s the ‘food of love’ the Jewish way, Earth’s love. Without cherishing the Earth there’s no freedom, because nobody will thrive.

Hope: the Seder journeys upward, from slavery to freedom, from a land of tyranny to a country of justice, dignity, liberty and loving kindness. The BBC’s Radio 4 just launched a new programme, Café Hope, where people share how they’re making the world a little bit better and fairer. The Seder table is Judaism’s Hope Café.

So may this be a year of courage, determination, commitment, vision – and hope!

02 Feb 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Environment, Spirituality Permalink

God, and the geese by Loch Lomond

Sticky Post By admin On February 2, 2024

We need to nurture our sense of wonder. Otherwise, we take the world for granted, forget the privilege of being alive and allow our souls to become eclipsed.

My own sense of wonder has worn cobweb thin over these cruel, bitter times: the hostages still captive after 120 terrible days for them and their families, the dreadful war with its appalling cost in Israeli and Palestinian grief, the lack of well-founded hope.

So I did something crazy, because I understood that to keep going and caring I had to renew my spirit. Wonder nourishes the love of life, love of life makes us more aware, awareness makes us more compassionate, and without compassion, what are we?

I found myself with an entire day unexpectedly free. Open before me was the winter magazine of The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds:

Join us at Loch Lomond; watch thousands of geese rise over the water at first light.

I couldn’t make the dates for their guided walks, but what was to stop me going on my own? ‘Head torch, boots, warm clothing, that’s all you need,’ the charming staff at the RSPB lodge told me.

I booked my train tickets; I’d be in Scotland for less than twenty-four hours, but what’s long or short when you nourish the soul? I arrived at night and set out at once to savour the darkness, breathing with the stately trees, watching the moon between the bare branches of the beeches.

Six next morning found me on the well-laid paths by Loch Lomond. The woodlands were a realm of wordless prayer, each tree a sentinel at the border of an invisible world. What’s a year, ten years, or a century to an oak? They humble us, these trees; they liberate us from the siege of endless thought, the battering of depression and frustration. They embrace us in their silent meditations and windswept songs; they simplify us inside.

The waters, when I reach them, are, like the cloud above them, still depths of grey. But the first birds are waking, and the cold air carries their brief songs over the water. Then the geese begin to call, at first just individual birds. The early shift has awoken and alerts the others: dawn is rising, dawn is rising, prepare for flight. The night slowly pales.

The honking and crying grow louder. I turn to face the direction from where the swelling chorus seems to come and suddenly I see them, skeins of ten, thirty, fifty birds, too many to count. They fly like a great arrowhead, each goose in the slipstream of those in front, only the leader alone at the sharp point, its neck stretched into the wind. One bird, fallen behind, strives to resume its place upon the wing. Their cries mellow and soften as they grow smaller over the water; I cannot see where they land. The loch resumes its silence, and the small birds’ songs become audible once again.

Soon I’m back by the A road, roaring with rush-hour lorries. I promise myself not to let them, or all angers of this cruel world, crush this glimpse of wonder out of my soul.

Tomorrow, we will read the Ten Commandments, the account of God’s great revelation.

I’ve been privileged to have my own small moment at my personal Mount Sinai and, in my own way, I believe I’ve overheard God speaking.

Now the challenge is to keep listening, to stay faithful to that voice, in a world where people do murder, steal, dispossess, lie and commit subtle cruelties.

So I pray, for myself and for everyone: God, may the wonder and beauty of your world protect us, sustain us and guide us through these cruel and brutal times.

26 Jan 2024

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

Between life and death, future and past

Sticky Post By admin On January 26, 2024

Here we are, caught between creation and destruction. Yesterday was Tu Bishevat, the New Year for Trees; tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day.

Tu Bishevat is a day of planting and celebration, when we’re partners with the God of creation who set the tree of life in the midst of the Garden of Eden.

Many of us were out there yesterday in the bright afternoon, placing rich mulch round the young crab apples and field maples we’d just planted. Trees mean future, long-term thinking, life, hope and joy. ‘We’ve a two-hundred-year management plan,’ explained Craig Harrison, head of Forestry England south.

Tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day. I read compulsively about the Shoah and listen to the testament of survivors. I love their company. I admire how they have established new lives, brought up children and go into schools to speak against antisemitism and every form of prejudice. I find it remarkable how little bitterness so many of them bear, how much compassion they embody, how widely they spread warmth and hope.

But the most terrible testimony has no voice: that of the innumerable dead, across Europe, Rwanda, Cambodia, robbed of their homes, loved ones and lives; robbed of their voices which would tell us, if they could, of the sophisticated deceitfulness and cruel cunning of the murderers alongside their drunken brutality.

In the words of the searing Yom Kippur meditation, ‘Eleh Ezkerah – these things I bring to memory before God, who’s supposed to conduct the world in mercy, venaphshi alai eshpecha, and I pour out my soul, I don’t know what to do with myself.’

The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is the fragility of freedom. It could not be more apposite in this time of war in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, the Middle East. Whatever ‘side’ we’re on, whatever political views we hold, we must not harden our hearts to the horror faced by the hostages and their families after 115 days of cruel captivity, the fear of parents for the lives of their children on the front lines, the desperate suffering of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians caught amidst the fighting.

To what pain will all this give birth, to what new fears and hatreds, to what hopes, longings and dreams? Beyond whatever particular loyalties we hold, say the Israeli and Palestinian parents of the Bereaved Families Forum, we need to remember that we should all ultimately be on the side of humanity.

So what do we do?

‘Choose life,’ teaches the Torah, be on the side of life!

These, then, are some of the questions which should preoccupy us: How can I find the courage to be truly human? What kindness can I do? Whose life can I make a bit better and not worse? What can I plant for our children’s children’s futures?

This sounds frail; it feels very small scale. But I put my hopes in a minor, often overlooked scene from the Torah. The Children of Israel are thirsty in the desert, but the waters before them are too bitter to drink. Therefore, God instructs Moses to throw into them the branches of a tree and when he does so the waters become sweet.

So let’s plant our trees, figurative trees of compassion, decency, humanity and hope, as well as real trees, maples, rowans, birch and oak. May they sweeten our own lives with a deep sense of purpose and bring a little sweetness to the future of the world.