25 Apr 2025

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

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

Sticky Post By admin On April 25, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

24 Jan 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Holocaust, Israel Permalink

Before Holocaust Memorial Day and the 80th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz

Sticky Post By admin On January 24, 2025

To these images I cling in these hopeful, hopeless times: Romi Gonen embracing her mother after 471 days as a hostage; Emily Damari telling her beloved Spurs, and the world, to ‘rock on’; Mariann Edgar Budde, Bishop of Washington, pleading with President Trump: ‘In the name of our God, I asked you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared;’ and, on a much smaller scale, to the sight of fifteen of our community planting an orchard near the entrance to our cemetery as an enduring commitment to life.

I pray there will be more such pictures of hostages returning, joyful embraces, deep relief, courage and the vindication of goodness.

For there are other images: families of hostages who haven’t come back alive; Palestinian people returning to homes where nothing remains but rubble; Los Angeles in flames while the President says ‘drill, baby, drill’; Elon Musk making his quasi-Nazi salute.

In these perilous times, as humanity crawls across a narrow ridge with the precipices of cruelty and ruin on either side, I hold hard to our faith, not just in God, for God will always be, but in the triumph of hope, life and love. For that is why we are here on earth, to fight for hope, life and love.

Monday, 27 January, marks eighty years since the first outriders of the Red Army reached Auschwitz-Birkenau. King Charles III, long a compassionate listener to survivors of the Holocaust, will participate in the commemorations.

I saw the preparations when I was there with my son and nephew two weeks ago, the huge marquees, soon to be buzzing, in strange contrast to the broken concrete of the crematoria, sunk in a silence beneath which, if one listens hard, there echo the voices of the murdered, with their hopes, longings and asphyxiated farewells.

This weekend and on Monday billions will be attentive.

But attentive to what? Rabbi Rodney Mariner, of blessed memory, spoke not of the liberation but of the revelation of Auschwitz. ‘And when the gates of Auschwitz were opened,’ wrote his colleague Rabbi Hugo Gryn, ‘and the world was able to take in and to react to what [the Nazis] could perpetrate and to the pain of the remnant of my people… both the image of God and the image of men and women were desecrated and besmirched.’

No event in the history of brutality has made it more blatant that we inherit that choice: to desecrate or hold sacred, to besmirch or help heal. Judaism defines this as the decision either to follow the mitzvah of Kiddush Hashem, thesanctification of God’s name, or to commit the sin of Hillul Hashem, voiding that name, treating the world as if everything is godless and it simply doesn’t matter how cruel, vindictive and exploitative we are.

This commemoration sets that choice starkly before all humanity once again.

We stand commanded, by God, Torah, history and present experience to care for each other, for all human – and non-human – life. Whatever our talents, capacities and opportunities, we exist to help each other, practise kindness and forbearance and treat this earth with respect. There is no such thing as neutrality. We aren’t here to be bystanders; we are not entitled to indifference.

The crueller the world, the more determined, proactive, faithful and compassionate we must dare to be. There is no other way to live.

There is a very great prayer in very small print in the daily section of my favourite siddur: ‘For the sake of God’s name, I commit, in deed, word and thought, from now until precisely this time tomorrow, to motivating myself, all the Children of Israel and the whole world to do what is just and good.’

Therefore, in the words of the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, ‘May God grant us the strength and courage to honour the dignity of every human being’ and to care for all life.

17 Jan 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Holocaust, Interfaith, Israel, Refugees Permalink

On the Ceasefire and Hostages Deal

Sticky Post By admin On January 17, 2025

I sent Ayelet, mother of Naama who’s still held hostage, a message of prayer the moment I heard about the ceasefire deal. She sent back an emoji of a butterfly. We hold our breath. May this hell for Israel and Gaza end. May the killing and dying stop. May the slow, tough work of healing start. Dear God, let nothing prevent this deal!

A Message to the World from Glasgow

Meanwhile, something very different moved me this week. Actually, I nearly missed it; I almost said no. But my wife changed my mind: ‘Seeing we’re in Scotland the day before anyway, why not go? After all, it’s where you were born.’ That’s how Nicky and I found ourselves heading for Glasgow Cathedral last Sunday night for an interfaith celebration of the 850^th year since King William I of Scotland granted ‘the privilege of having a Burgh at Glasgow’.

On our way there I was startled to notice that we passed the Royal Infirmary. That’s where Raphael’s and my mother Lore died in December ’62. Thirty years ago, I went in to ask if they still held patient records from that time. The chaplain, who happened to be passing, overheard and took the trouble to check. ‘Sadly no,’ he reported back, ‘Records are only kept for twenty-five years.’ Like many who were very young when things happened, I’ve wanted to know, to have something to fill in the gaps.

In the cathedral were Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Druids, and others. The spirit of the service was ‘to show the world how communities can come together, live together and flourish together for generations.’

The date was 15 January, the Feast Day of St Mungo, the city’s patron saint. ‘Mungo’, the minister explained, means ‘Dear One’ in Scots. According to Wikipedia it may derive ‘from the Cumbric equivalent of the Welsh: fy nghu.’ But for me, it evoked my great-grandmother greeting in all her letters during the terrible years of 1938 – 43: ‘Meine Lieben, My Dear Ones.’

Representatives from every faith had warm words for this ‘city of hope and love.’ Rabbi Rubin spoke beautifully of the four symbols of Glasgow, a tree, a bird, a fish and a bell: the bird was to show how diverse kinds can co-exist, the bell was ‘to alert us to those in need.’ Contributions were collected for Glasgow’s club for refugees, ‘an interfaith response to intersecting disadvantages, including poverty, language barriers, discrimination and trauma.’

My mother was a refugee here in 1939 when she came to study, far from the home she knew. My father had it tough when he attended night school at Strathclyde University for seven years, to make up for the education stolen from him by the Nazis.

The Brahma Kumaris prayed for ‘Dear Glasgow to open our minds to silence and peace.’ The Buddhist prayer was simply: ‘May all beings flourish.’ If only the world were thus.

It was this lead-in, as well as her wonderful singing, that made Brodie Crawford’s rendition of Robert Burns’ A Man’s A Man For ‘A That so utterly moving. Written in 1795, the song reflects the ideals of the French Revolution. The language isn’t exactly egalitarian, but the point is that not wealth or station, but character, makes the person and we’re all brothers and sisters in the end:

For a’ that, and a’ that,
Their tinsel show, an’ a’ that;
The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,
Is king o’ men for a’ that.

Glasgow hasn’t always been a city of hope and love. I recall our doctor friend Maurice Gaba telling me, ‘My surgery after Saturday night was broken bones and blood.’

But this hour of togetherness touched our hearts and left us all with the aspiration to do better.

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!’

11 Oct 2024

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

Yom Kippur 5785/ 2024

Sticky Post By admin On October 11, 2024

We gather on Yom Kippur in painful, cruel and uncertain times. I wish each of us individually, and all of us collectively, the strength, compassion, courage, faith and wisdom we need as we strive to follow God’s will according to the teachings of Judaism.

We stand before our God and the God of our ancestors. The traumas of October 7, the murders and rape committed by Hamas with vaunted brutality, and our losses since, are deeply felt across Israel, the Jewish community worldwide, and beyond. This is our people. We are bound together in solidarity with the grieving, the wounded and the families of the hostages, for whose swift return we long. We pray for the wellbeing of Israel and everyone who lives there, and for the safety of all who risk their lives to protect their loved ones and their land. May we work together for healing to all our wounds to body, heart and soul.

We stand before the God of compassion. We acknowledge, with pain, not just our own suffering but the suffering and deaths of thousands of innocent people, including many children, in Gaza and elsewhere. We pray for an end to terror and bloodshed. We pray that we will find better paths forward than war.

We stand before the God of justice. On this day of judgment, we are required to confront not just the wrongs done to us but also the wrongs we have done, the sins, hurts and betrayals which fall below the true values of Judaism and challenge its reputation. May we have the integrity to meet these issues honestly.

Amidst this anguish, we face rising antisemitism, unprecedented in most of our lifetimes. Many of us experience isolation, intimidation and abuse. Often in the public domain we encounter false accusations and both ignorant and calculated hatred.

Therefore, now more than ever, we must turn to our faith, to the tenacious resilience of the Jewish People throughout many centuries, in many lands; to the sustaining discipline of Jewish living, with its commandments and customs, and to the embrace of community, which both supports us and needs our support. We must affirm our commitment to moral responsibility, stay strong in our conviction that our actions make a difference, and hold firm in our determination to create a better world.

This is the source of our strength in adversity and our hope for the future, this and faith in God whose living breath embraces us all, who hears all tears, sustains all life, and whose presence abides not only in the heavens above, but in our hearts.

May the God of life guide us and bless us, all Israel and all the world, through the challenges of the coming year.

27 Sep 2024

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

Shanah Tovah – may this be a good year

Sticky Post By admin On September 27, 2024

I received an email: ‘Please suggest an alternative greeting: Happy New Year just doesn’t feel right this time round, especially with the anniversary of 7 October.’

Actually, Shanah Tovah doesn’t mean A Happy Year, but A Good Year.

But what does that look like in these cruel times? I have four wishes, hopes, prayers, conditions – I don’t know quite what to call them – for making this a truly good year.

Firstly, I pray for the safe return of the hostages, an end to war, bloodshed, terror, and the misery and grief of innocent people caught up in war. I pray for a political path forward which will ensure the security of Israel and bring safety, dignity and hope to all the people of the region. I write these words from Israel, where I’ve been listening to traumatised people struggling to carry on going and help others keep going, their resilience lacerated by months of ceaseless anguish. I’ve spent the last three evenings with families, each of whom has a child taken hostage. My heart goes out to them; I feel shaken and grief-stricken. I shall hold them in my prayers, together with supplications for everyone facing the horrors of war, and everyone striving, despite the rockets, bombs and rhetoric of violence, to bring healing and hope, even across impassable borders.

Secondly, I pray for a year of compassion and justice. Among my heroes is the imam who met the racism of the crowd outside his mosque not with fear, contempt or anger, but with friendship, food and an invitation to come and share. I’ve listened to so many people who’ve shunned and victimised, fellow Jews and others besides. There’s too much cruelty, hatred, incitement and indifference. I’m determined to join those work for proactive compassion, who reach out, hear and support others, within, between and beyond our communities, so that no one is left feeling unnoticed, unwanted or despised. Maybe we can prove Reverend Martin Luther King right, that the arc of history bends towards justice, and the will of humanity tends towards compassion.

Thirdly, I pray for a better year for our beautiful home, this earth. A truly good year must be a year of blessing for the land we depend on, and the waters, woodlands, fields, insects, birds and animals with which our lives are interdependent. This is a time of Teshuvah, return. The Torah’s first use of the word is when God tells Adam he will return to dust. I deliberately misinterpret this to mean that we must return to a just relationship with the soil and its season, the forests and the rivers. The rabbis distinguish between Teshuvah motivated by love and return based on fear. I long for the time when we, and all the world’s decision-makers, learn to love this earth truly, and cherish all the life that is sustains.

Fourthly, because the chances are minimal that these hopes will be adequately realised, I pray that we will find, and help each other discover, the resilience to face whatever may be coming with courage and creativity. ‘Whatever measure of fortune God metes out to you, acknowledge God most profoundly,’ taught the rabbis of the Mishnah (c. 200ce). It’s far from easy to accept our challenges, physical or emotional, individual or collective, with good grace and strength of spirit. The harder the times, the deeper we have to reach into ourselves, and the more generously we need to treat each other, just in order to keep going, keep hoping and keep working for a better world. And if we can’t do that, what are we?

In all these ways, and more, I pray that this will be a true Shanah Tovah, a good year, a year of strength and hope.

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.

06 Sep 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Israel Permalink

In sorrow and pain

Sticky Post By admin On September 6, 2024

In this terrible week, with grief in our hearts, despite the feelings of futility that frustrate us and the hundreds of thousands who have taken to the streets of Israel in pain and protest, – despite all this, we must stay resolute in our faith and deeds.

We must continue to believe that our prayers, actions and intercessions will be heard, somewhere; that the remaining hostages will come home alive; that there will be an end to this terrible killing and destruction; that evil will be brought to account; that a better future is possible; that life, every life, is of value, that dignity, justice and compassion are possible; that Hativkah, hope, has meaning, for Israel, for the Jewish People, for all humanity, for the world… May there be an end to this war and the hatreds it has sprung from and engendered, an end to the destruction, hunger, killings, suffering, grief.

‘Lecha amar libbi – On Your part my heart speaks:’ these words from Psalm 27, which accompanies us from now until the end of the High Holydays, capture my feelings. I’m not full of hope just now, but You, God, are telling me to remain resolute and hold hope in my heart.

The horrible news of the murder of six of the hostages has possessed many of us this week.

My soul goes out to the families of all the other hostages. What can they be thinking? We have a special connection with Naama Levy. At the protests in Beersheva, her grandfather Shaul said: The situation makes the hostages’ families feel hopeless. “When Netanyahu says he wants to destroy Hamas, it won’t happen. What is really happening is that he’s destroying us,” he said.

‘Protesters turn on Netanyahu,’ was Monday’s headline in a major British newspaper. That’s true. But it must not be forgotten that it was Hamas who took the hostages and Hamas who murdered them.

The words of Hersch Goldberg-Polin’s parents go round in my heart: ‘We tried so very hard, so deeply and desperately…Finally, you are free…’ But it’s not the freedom they did everything possible to obtain for their only son. As Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, said:

There is no door in the world on which your beloved family did not knock for you, for your rescue and well-being. There is no stone they left unturned, no prayer or plea they did not cry out – from one end of the world to the other – in the ears of God and man.

We’re preoccupied with how these hostages died. But what can we learn from how they lived? Alex Labanov’s friends knew him as “the guy who worries about everyone else.” He was a carer for his parents, who have physical disabilities.

Eden Yerushalmi was very close to her sisters, on the phone to them while trying to hide at the Nova festival, until she cried out ‘They got me.’ Or Danino escaped in his car, rescuing others, then went back to try to save more. Carmel Gat did yoga, in captivity, with children. Almog Sarusi was a guitar player, captured helping his girlfriend, who was murdered.

I take comfort that you were together with such people when you were killed, Hersch’s mother said.

Such people: they were carers, loved their families, were ready to lose their lives saving others, managed to do yoga with children even there, in the tunnels. Let them be remembered not just for how they died, but for how they lived.

As I recited the memorial prayer at the special service we held on Sunday, I was conscious that we know their names, and, tragically, the names of hundreds more. But what of those who have perished in this terrible year whose names we do not know, Jewish, Muslim, Druze, Christian, visitors from distant lands trapped in Israel or Gaza? Did they, too, not deserve life, have families, bear God’s image, hope for a future?

May the powers in heaven above, and the powerful on earth below, bring an end to these horrors.

Shabbat Shalom

Jonathan Wittenberg

HEART AND MIND

Israel