Ethics | HEART AND MIND

12 Sep 2025

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

The journey of Teshuvah

Sticky Post By admin On September 12, 2025

The full moon of Elul has passed. I missed the eclipse, but went outside late at night and stared for a few moments at the circle of red haze which surrounded that moon in the clear night sky. It was beautiful, but flushed, as if it wanted to illumine a whole and perfect world, but, looking down at our deeds on earth, felt shame. It struck me then that this moon was an emblem of Teshuvah.

Elul is the month of Teshuvah, repentance and return, an inner journey which becomes more intense through the Asseret Yemei HaTeshuvah, the Ten Days of Penitence from Rosh Hashanah until Yom Kippur which will soon be upon us.

Yesterday, strangely, I heard the same question posed in two entirely different context: Does one have to repent for actions one did not do out of choice but because one was forced? As Daniel Taub, formerly Israel’s ambassador to the Court of King James, pointed out in a deeply touching talk last night, the legal answer may be ‘no’, but the emotional and moral answer is ‘yes’.

That’s because teshuvah is motivated not just by ‘What have I done wrong?’ but also, or even more so, by the feeling: ‘If only the world wasn’t like this; if only it was better.’ For teshuvah is about looking up as much as looking down. We may think of it as driven by guilt, but in truth it’s motivated by love. It’s compassion and love of life that makes us feel in our heart, and not just think abstractly in our head, ‘This gift of life, this beautiful world! We must not damage it so!’

That’s why the Torah teaches that teshuvah is an opening of our heart and soul. It brings us back to God, and God back to us, because it restores our awareness of how precious and sacred, yet vulnerable, life us. It awakens our love and compassion.

It’s that very love that makes us feel pain that the world is so wounded when it could, and should, be so wonderful. That’s what Primo Levi described, recalling the expressions of the first young Russian horsemen to approach the fences of Auschwitz, as ‘the shame a just person experiences… that evil should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that [our] will for good should have proved too weak…’

Several times this year people have told me they feel ashamed. I won’t go into details. But I recognise the feeling. It bothers me sometimes in the supermarket, when I throw things into my trolley knowing that I’ve no idea out of what poverty or labour these products may have reached the shelves. It pains me when I see a smashed-up badger by the roadside. It sticks in me when a refugee, standing in my kitchen, tells me how and where his family were murdered. What horrors have we inflicted on innocent life? There are times I’m ashamed of being a human.

But teshuvah must not stop with shame. It must lead us to tikkun, healing and reparation. It must bring us to the question: ‘What can I do? What is the particular contribution I can make in this world full of wonder, and wounds?’ So many people answer in ways I deeply admire: ‘I’m helping with food rescue.’ ‘I’m baking challah for friends who’re having a tough time.’ ‘I’m in a group taking children who’ve faced trauma on therapeutic nature trails.’ ‘I play in a volunteer band, for displaced people, and in bomb shelters when the sirens go off.’

The love, the sorrow, the desire to make reparation, the commitment ‘This is what I’m determined to do’ – that is the journey of teshuvah.

25 Jul 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Ethics, Spirituality Permalink

Why small things matter

Sticky Post By admin On July 25, 2025

Tomorrow is the first of the month of Av. I’m never sure how to call it because, to the best of my knowledge, it’s the only Hebrew month which has two obvious names: simply Av, and Menachem Av – ‘Av the Comforter.’ I’ve often wondered which name to use when.

The Talmud says that when Av begins, our joy is diminished, (in contrast to the spring month of Adar, when our joy increases.) I remember saying to Gabi, my beloved Israeli uncle x-times-removed who always has a melody under his breath and wise words on his lips:

‘A sad month, this Av, isn’t it?’
‘Only until the 9th, the fast of Tisha Be’Av,’ he quickly replied, ‘After that, it’s Menachem Av, all about consolation.’

So the ‘comforter’ aspect is from the 10th of the month onwards.

But this year I’m starting early. That’s because we need consolation in order to keep going; we urgently need to be people of healing and repair, and there’s no time to waste.

Tisha Be’Av is about destruction: the Temples, the communities destroyed in the Crusades, the expulsions, book-burnings, slaughters. It’s not because there’s no devastation in today’s world that I’m thinking, ‘we’d better start the healing now.’ It’s because there’s so much destruction, done to us, done around us, some done by us, that it’s unbearable, and I can scarcely face thinking about it. Nobody needs me to go into details. It’s because it’s all too much, that’s why I’m stressing: ‘Menachem – Be a comforter – now.’

Don’t think: ‘I can’t stop the wars, so what can I do?’ Don’t be disempowered. ‘Little’ things count. If you can send a kind message to the family of a hostage, do. If you can contribute to get food to Gazan children, or anyone hungry anywhere, do. If you can cook a meal for a friend who’s sick, do it. If there’s a parched tree nearby and you can nurse with water through the summer heat, do it. If you can say a thoughtful word to someone you’ve had a disagreement with, do it. There’s no such thing as ‘too small to matter.’

The ‘little’ things we do can inspire others. ‘I asked my Palestinian doctor how his family were in these horrible times,’ a Jerusalem friend told me. ‘You’re the first Jewish patient to ask,’ he replied, and went on to relate how, in a North American street, he saw some teenagers humiliate an elderly Jew while hundreds stood around, and he, a Palestinian, intervened.

‘The British Lady’s Slipper Orchid survived in only one location,’ two leaders of the charity Plantlife told us. ‘But forty people helped germinate seeds and now it’s back in the meadows.’ You could say, ‘What’s that do for the troubles of the world!’ But plants are part of God’s creation, and who knows what comfort their beauty may bring. Heather Jones, an NHS nurse, writes in Plantlife’s magazine how her colleagues spend long hours in high-tech environments where mental and physical depletion can lead to burnout. But nature lifts the spirits and restores hope, so she’s rolling out healing in nature to all the healthcare professionals in her region.

I’m not writing about these ‘small’ acts out of romantic unrealism, to deny the devastation in the world, but in order to keep myself going, to keep on the side of healing and consolation.

I often think of TS Eliot’s line in The Wasteland: ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins.’ Those fragments are my Menachem Av, my comforters. They’re the acts which sustain us daily, bring us closer to each other and give hope. They’re what we’re here on earth to do. At the end of each day, and, I believe, at the close of our life, they will gather round us, look us in the heart, and say, ‘You tried.’

20 Jun 2025

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

On our anguish and on healing

Sticky Post By admin On June 20, 2025

In these deeply frightening times, I pray that everyone we love and care for should be safe. Like us all, I’m calling Israel, messaging, worrying about what last night brought and what today will bring. Magen David Adom, the Herzog, other trauma hospitals and numerous organisations are calling on us and we must help as best we can. Meanwhile, the hostages remain in the grip of Hamas and the sufferings in Gaza continue.

We rightly reach out to our own people first. But I was touched by what happened when I went to my favourite vegetable stores:
Your family in Israel, are they OK?
Yours in Iran, are they alright?

The London borough of Barnet has both the largest Jewish and Iranian communities in the UK. We’re all human, desperate for those we love. A synagogue member of Iranian origin sent me this verse by the Persian poet Saadi (c. 13):
Human beings are like parts of one body,
For in creation they come from one gem.
If one part is in pain,
Other parts cannot in comfort remain…

Israel is not at war with the Iranian people, but with its evil regime and terrorist proteges, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthi and others, because of the unbearable risk that Iran will develop nuclear weapons. But it’s always ordinary people who bear most of the suffering.

Meanwhile, I’m acutely aware that our community is torn by different opinions. Deep anxiety leads us each to our allegiances, fears and hurts. So, as we come together for our Annual General Meeting, my fortieth + and my last as senior rabbi, I want to stress what I understand to be core Jewish values, for at heart we are a religious community.

Chesed, faithful lovingkindness, means being here for each other in joy and anguish, from birth to death, with care and consolation, through companionship, food, and the wisdom of ledabber al lev, listening and speaking to the heart.

Tesedek means commitment to doing and promoting justice. Tzedakah requires supporting social justice, giving where there is hunger, poverty, homelessness and medical and mental need, in the Jewish community, Israel, our local community, and the world.

Avodah means serving God by serving human life created in God’s image, and by caring for all life in its multiple manifestations of God’s presence, wonder and glory.

Kehilah, community, means being together in good times and bad, in prayer, study and action. It means solidarity with our Jewish community here, in Israel and worldwide, as well as with people of different faiths, with refugees, with those who need us and whom we need, and ultimately with the community of all life.

These values lead me to ask, especially now in wartime when we are constantly anxious for our people, that we place ourselves in solidarity with life and healing in whatever ways we can, whatever our political views and affiliations.

I received from Israel yesterday:
While death and destruction, chaos and fear exist all around, I took a sweet girl and her mother from Tarkumia checkpoint to Sheba Hospital near Tel Aviv. We drove on roads usually packed at this time of the day. They were empty. We laughed, we talked a little English, a little Arabic, a little Hebrew. When we arrived at the entrance to the Pediatric Department, this sweet girl put her arms around my legs. I got a hug. I wish I could show you a photo of her.
I’ve been criticized for just about everything – for being naive, for being patronizing, for paying lip service, for not taking a firm stand one way or another.
This IS my stand. This is my answer to what has been happening all over this region, a small tikkun olam, a small act of reparation, in a broken world.

There are many ways of taking our stand. Wherever possible, can we take it on the side of healing, in whatever ways we understand. For there is no end to the wounds in our bleeding world, and no limit to the healing that’s needed.

23 May 2025

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

The Horror and the Hope

Sticky Post By admin On May 23, 2025

I have so wished to write today about the beautiful vision in our Torah of the Sabbatical year, when the fences come down, the fruits of the earth are shared, and citizen and stranger, farm-owner and refugee, rich and poor, wild beasts and domestic animals, appreciate them together.

But how can I do so, when we mourn the murder in an act of terrorist antisemitic hatred of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lichinsky, officials working for Israel’s Embassy, outside the Jewish Museum in Washington, after an event about peace-making and on the threshold of their marriage? Yaron, who grew up in Germany, was known to my colleague Rabbi Levi as a gifted, talented and very likeable young man. He and Sarah were dedicated longtime peacebuilders – Sarah wrote her graduate thesis on “the role of friendships in the Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding process.” (The Jerusalem Youth Chorus Newsletter)

Our hearts go out to their families and friends, and we pray for the safety of all our communities.

This has also been a week of powerful international outcry, including from within Israel, at the lack of adequate humanitarian aid reaching Palestinian children in Gaza, trapped between the cynical nihilism of Hamas and Israel’s attacks. I stand with those Jewish, Israeli and international organisations who urge that sufficient aid be let in, with all due and essential safeguards to prevent it from falling into the vicious and merciless hands of Hamas. I don’t know the names or characters of the children who may be hungry, or have been killed, but their parents for sure do. Judaism teaches that an innocent life is a life, that every life matters, that we try to protect innocent life even amidst the horrors of war, and that we all carry within us, whether we honour it or desecrate it, the image of God.

Amidst these terrors, it would be wrong, un-Jewish and lacking in faith and hope to lose sight entirely of the vision held out in our Torah. ‘Ukeratem dror: Proclaim freedom,’ the Torah commands: ‘Let everyone return to their inheritance and their family.’ If only it were so! Dror, which here means freedom, is also the name of a bird, probably the swallow, that dips and rises over the fields. So do our hopes fall, – and must rise again. So must we cherish what gifts, friendships and solidarity we can gather.

In that vein, I received the following messages yesterday. Lord Kahn’s office called, sharing deep concern and offering support for our community. Julie Siddiqi, an eloquent Muslim leader who’s worked for Nisa-Nashim and Hope Not Hate, sent a what’s-app: ‘Senseless, heartbreaking, the young couple killed in Washington. Sending love to you and your community.’ Judith Baker emailed on behalf of The Quakers: ‘We send our condolences to you and the Jewish community and hold the victims and their families and friends in our prayers.’ Our rabbinic colleagues in the States shared verses from Psalms: ‘God stays close to the broken-hearted, providing salvation to those crushed in spirit.’

Among these greetings, which cannot be taken for granted, I am especially moved by these words from The Jerusalem Youth Chorus:

It is precisely in these darkest moments that [our] work becomes not just important, but urgent—. Our Palestinian and Israeli singers know intimately the weight of this violence; each of them has been touched by loss, fear, and grief. Yet they continue to choose each other. They continue to choose the radical act of singing together…of refusing to let the loudest voices around them define their future. (https://www.jerusalemyouthchorus.org/ )
Time and again I’m asked to focus on hope, on what we can do to take a sad world and make it better. Therefore, I try to pray and work, alongside so many others, for my own Jewish People, for all people across our countries, faiths and communities who simply seek to live a good, honest and happy life, and for this very earth, with all its species of life, that we must cherish and nurture, so that it continues to sustain us all.

16 May 2025

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

Kabbalah and Counting: the mystical qualities of the Omer

Sticky Post By admin On May 16, 2025

I remember walking across Jerusalem looking for an Omer-counter. I wanted something both beautiful and mystical.

‘Omer’ is a measure of quantity, apparently equivalent to 2.2 litres, and refers to the offering of barley harvested on the night after the first day of Passover. But it’s come to mean the period of forty-nine days which links Pesach to Shavuot, the festival which marks freedom from Egypt, to the festival which celebrates the freedom to receive and follow the Torah.

I found what I wanted not in a boutique for religious artefacts but in an olivewood workshop. Olivewood has age and depth, resilience and beauty. My counter showed not just each date from ‘one’ to ‘forty-nine’ but, in tiny writing in the bottom corner, the kabbalistic quality of each day.

Today is the thirty-third day, Lag Be’Omer, celebrated as the date when the plague afflicting Rabbi Akiva’s pupils in the first or second century ceased. Mourning is suspended, music is permitted, bonfires are lit, and, most practically, if I have a free moment, I can finally get a haircut – so long as the barbers in this very Jewish borough of Barnet aren’t all booked out.

But what about that small writing in the corner of the counter? It’s hard to explain briefly, but each week of the Omer is dedicated to a kabbalistic quality: first hesed, loving kindness; then gevurah, strength; tiferet, truth or beauty; netzach, triumph or endurance; hod, humility; yesod, foundation; and malchut, sovereignty. Each separate day focusses on a specific quality within its week, guiding a detailed emotional and spiritual journey towards trying to hear God’s words now as once they were heard at Sinai.

Today’s quality is hod she’ba’ hod, humility within humility.

My teacher, Rabbi Louis Jacobs, liked to share the Hasidic teaching that everyone should have two pebbles, one in each pocket. On the first should be inscribed the Mishnah’s words, ‘The world was created for my sake.’ On the second should be the verse, ‘I am but dust and ashes.’ Wisdom is knowing when to take out which pebble.

I used to think that ‘dust and ashes’ was about humility, while seeing the world as ‘all for me’ was the opposite. But that’s wrong. Wonder is also humility: ‘Notice this magnificence, this intricacy, diversity.’ Nicky says her day is made if she sees a kingfisher.

In such moments, ‘for me’ doesn’t mean ‘aren’t I special,’ but rather, ‘what a privilege to be alive and see such beauty.’ ‘Dust and ashes’ doesn’t mean ‘I’m rubbish,’ but rather, ‘I know I’m mortal, so how treasured this brief privilege should be.’ Together the pebbles lead us neither to pride nor self-deprecation, but to the question: ‘How can I best care for life, my life, other’s lives, any life, in all its fragile vulnerability?’

As Arthur Green writes in A Kabbalah for Tomorrow: ‘Hod is the other side of wisdom, the self that bows before the mystery of what is as it is, the self who submits to reality and rejoices in doing so.’

I witnessed this when I served in the chaplaincy at the local hospice. After complex emotional journeys, perhaps through hope, anger, grief, regret, many people reached, in dying, places of appreciation. I’ll never forget the man and his wife to whose room I was called to share a prayer even though I’d never met them. ‘Tell us a verse about life’s wonder,’ they requested, ‘because together we have loved it.’

That’s hod she’ba’hod, humility, gratitude and graciousness woven together. I hold on to their words in these cruel times like a rope to climb up the cliffs of anguish to the green plateau of hope.

21 Feb 2025

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

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

Sticky Post By admin On February 21, 2025

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.

14 Feb 2025

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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.

10 Jan 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Ethics, Holocaust Permalink

In the Footsteps of My Great-grandmother

Sticky Post By admin On January 10, 2025

‘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 16^th 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.

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.

01 Nov 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Ethics, Israel Permalink

Be on the side of life. Speak out for life!

Sticky Post By admin On November 1, 2024

I’m worrying about silence: the silencing of what we don’t want to hear, the silences because we don’t speak up. Judaism is a ‘Don’t be silent before wrong’ religion. Jewish history is a long testament to the horrors which silence can permit.

Professor Paul Mendes-Flohr of the Hebrew University, the great scholar of German Jewry, died in Jerusalem this week. He was brilliant, gentle and kind. He had heart trouble, of two kinds. Physically, his heart was weak; spiritually, his heart was broken by what was happening to his country. When we first met, fourteen years ago, he took me to a hummus place, not for falafels but to enquire of an Arab employee if he was alright. He cared.

The last thing Paul sent me was about silence. He quoted Paul Simon’s lyrics:
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening

He referenced the Jewish writer Isaac Babel’s silence when he was arrested by Stalin on fabricated charges of espionage and challenged for his failure to conform to Soviet ‘socialist realism’. Babel explained, under duress, that he’d mastered ‘a new literary genre, the genre of silence.’ He was executed in 1940.

Paul understood the voices that ‘make no sound but are nonetheless heard – if one chooses to listen to them.’ Now he, too, has joined the great silence.

Silence troubles me, not of the dead, but of the living, not the deep silences of communion, but the silences because we fail to hear, the silences because we fail to say.

Noah, about whom we read tomorrow, was famously silent. Why didn’t he shout at God? Why didn’t he scream: ‘How can You! How dare You destroy the world that You’ve only just created!’ But he says not a word. ‘Devastating,’ bible-scholar Aviva Zornberg calls it.

‘Speak up for life!’ is Judaism’s great message. ‘Speak up while you can, before free and honest discourse is shut down,’ is history’s great warning.

So I ask myself what I’m failing to say in these brutal times.

I am a Zionist, an anguished, troubled Zionist.

By Zionist I mean that I believe in the right of the State of Israel to exist, de jure and de facto. I believe that as a Jew I have a responsibility to care about the wellbeing of those who live in Israel, Jewish and not Jewish. I believe in the overriding values of justice, equality, freedom and democracy as proclaimed in Israel’s courageous Declaration of Independence.

I am a Zionist. I reclaim that word from those who hurl ‘Zio’, like ‘Yiddo’, as an insult at all and any Jews. I reclaim it from those who brutalise it by destroying West Bank Palestinian villages in its name, who defile the reputation of Israel and Judaism, and profane God, with outrageous racist words and actions, who have no compunction for Palestinian deaths and treat human dignity with contempt.

Therefore, as a Jew and Zionist, I must speak out against those who delegitimise Israel as a colonial entity, who ignorantly or wilfully refuse to name Hamas and Hezbollah as the terrorist organisations they are, who ignore the deeds of Iran’s regime. I must speak up for those who courageously defend Israel against them.

I join those who speak up for the hostages, their voices stifled in deep tunnels, and for their families, desperate to be heard, including by their own government.

I also join those, especially Jews and Israelis who, despite their own trauma and grief, like Magen Inon whose parents were murdered on October 7, call for an urgent end to the massive civilian suffering in Gaza and beyond, provoked by Hamas and Hezbollah, but also inflicted by Israel, and protest for proper supplies of food, water and medication, with a better path forward than yet more violence.

In the Torah we’re at the intersection of creation and destruction. ‘Create, fashion, bless,’ are the key words of its opening chapters. ‘Violence, perversion, destruction,’ are the key words of the stories that follow.

The message is ‘Be on the side of life. Speak out for life!’