Interfaith | HEART AND MIND

16 Jan 2026

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Interfaith Permalink

What Drives Us Apart; What Brings Us Together.

Sticky Post By admin On January 16, 2026

We watch and pray with deep concern for Iran, Israel and all the region. As we read in the Torah of how the Children of Israel rise up against slavery, we think of the courageous people across Iran who are risking their lives protesting for freedom and democracy, and we mourn with the families of the thousands who have been brutally killed.

I so didn’t expect it. It happened almost two years ago but I still feel it. I’d half walked, half run, to Whitehall after the Shabbat service to join the mass gathering of all Britain’s organisations that care about nature. Tens of thousands were there, from RSPB members dressed like birds, to Friends of the Earth, and you name it. We were showing the next government, whoever that might be, that people care about nature.

I was anxious, for reasons you’ll understand, about being visibly Jewish in such a crowd. As I stood there, two Imams rushed towards me: ‘My brother,’ they said, embracing me. ‘We care about this together.’

Those hugs kept my heart warm even when, a mile away on the route home, I walked round a small but noisy crowd of ‘From the River to the Sea’ drumbeaters.

I needn’t emphasise here how deeply disturbing and frightening a time this is to be Jewish, though I do want to stress the deep resilience and love of Judaism which, whatever our politics, sustains us and our communities.

I’m aware that many Muslim people have their own feelings of fear: “I guess most Muslims would say that they are perceived as either a security issue, a cohesion issue or an immigration issue.” Those words, from a Muslim leader, come from the 2025 report Questions of Hope Not Hate, launched this week.

It’s a highly important document. ‘We’re not just in an era of change, but in a change of era,’ said its co-author. The report notes the negative impacts of fatigue with democratic institutions, distrust in politics, growing populism, ‘identity-based mobilisation’, and a widespread sense of marginalisation, all of which drive people apart.

Where, then, does the report find hope? In local initiatives, where people meet, talk, share common concerns, drawn together by respected communal leaders, like clergy, mayors: – these groupings remain strong, and are ever more important.

I’m writing from Rose Castle, near Carlisle; it’s a centre for interfaith, reconciliation and conflict resolution. Tonight, Nicky and I are hosting a Shabbat dinner for the second week running, with Torah and prayers, and a table of almost entirely non-Jewish guests, who then share from their own spirituality.

My friend Andy Lester came last week; he’s head of conservation for A Rocha. He told me about his church in Carlisle: ‘This is messy space,’ the minister said on his first visit: ‘If you don’t like that, this isn’t for you.’ But he does like it. ‘It’s the most diverse community I’ve seen outside London,’ he explained: ‘people with African, Asian, East European backgrounds all together, and locals who walk miles to be there. ‘Come this Sunday. There’s the baptism of a man who’s been homeless.’ I missed it, but will go next time and I’m sure my heart will be opened. On the infrequent occasions I attend worship of other religions, I feel taken to the depths of my Judaism and strengthened both in my own faith and in the appreciation that the one God gives breath to us all.

Andy is in no way sentimental: ‘The forces are growing that want to drive us apart. That’s why we must deepen the bonds of togetherness now.’ He’s referring mainly, but not only, to humans: he can identify two-and-a-half thousand kinds of bird.

After the vile murders on Bondi beach, a Christian colleague, a Muslim colleague and I went with a small group of fellow-travellers first to a synagogue where we shared teaching from Islam and Christianity, then to a church where we learnt Torah. These things matter.

We can’t unmake the horrors or disregard the fears. But we can stand together as people who care about God, community, compassion, each other and our kinship with all life.

26 Dec 2025

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

My last Shalom NNLS is a big ‘Thank You’

Sticky Post By admin On December 26, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

24 Dec 2025

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

Chanukah: the lights of hope in a time of darkness

Sticky Post By admin On December 24, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

17 Oct 2025

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

In our hands – the glory of creation

Sticky Post By admin On October 17, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10 Oct 2025

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Fragile Hope

Sticky Post By admin On October 10, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here in the UK

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

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

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

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

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

29 Aug 2025

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

Hearing God In Our Heart

Sticky Post By admin On August 29, 2025

This week brings the new moon of Elul, the month of Teshuvah, return. From its first day until Shemini Atzeret we recite Psalm 27 every evening and morning. I know one shouldn’t have favourites, but I love this Psalm. It’s filled with the longing to find God, to feel God’s presence in the world and the gift of God’s breath in our hearts.

The Psalms begins: ‘God is my light.’ The rabbis differentiated between the outer light of the sun which brings dawn and dusk, and the inner light of the sacred, hidden within all creation, which only the eye of the spirit can see. The Psalm invites us to look at the world through such eyes.

Sometimes this is gifted to us in moments of wonder. Nicky and I were standing on the slate-rock shores of the Isle of Seil at twilight when we saw an otter climb out of the sea onto the deck of a small fishing boat, walk slowly along it, pausing twice to look cautiously in our direction, before sliding back into the water. With it slipped away the last orange band of sunlight behind the black outline of Mull. For a few gracious minutes we saw into the world’s secret life.

At other times, we have to earn deeper vision by looking with eyes of compassion. I’m at the supermarket cash desk, someone annoyingly slow is in front of me and the cashier’s taking too much time. I look again and see differently: here’s a man who’s grown frail, struggling to manage with just one functioning hand. The woman at the till, knowing she’ll get complaints from the queue, gets up from her seat, speaks cheerfully, helps the man pack and place his card on the reader.

The incident may be trivial. But if we looked more often with compassionate eyes, we might be less impatient, less frustrated, and notice more often the sacred dignity in lives we might otherwise have ignored or even despised.

The Psalm continues: ‘God is my light and my salvation.’ Sometimes this is an urgent prayer. Bishop Nowakowski texted me yesterday:

I’m in Ukraine for several days… last night was especially challenging with the bombs of death and destruction… With prayerful best wishes, Kenneth.

It’s a supplication Israelis, and Palestinians, know only too well.
But, hopefully more often, God is our salvation in a different sense. Seeing into the inner life of the world, becoming more aware of people’s dignity and struggles, and the fragile beauty of non-human life around us, we appreciate more deeply that we’re here to care for all being, because God’s presence resides in it all. We are saved from hopelessness, aimlessness and depression, and find new strength and purpose.

‘For you my heart speaks,’ says the Psalm, meaning that God is present in our hearts and speak to us there. If, amidst our fears and distractions, we can nevertheless listen with our heart, with attentiveness and humility, we will perceive life with deeper wonder and compassion and find our purpose in caring for it in whatever ways we can. That is a great secret of the path of Teshuvah, return.

In these harsh times, may God be our light and our salvation on this road.

23 May 2025

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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.

21 Feb 2025

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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.

07 Feb 2025

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

Trees are healers: a message for Tu Bishevat

Sticky Post By admin On February 7, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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