Spirituality | HEART AND MIND

29 Nov 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Spirituality Permalink

Saying ‘thank you’

Sticky Post By admin On November 29, 2024

It’s the day after Thanksgiving. I apologise to my American friends for not sending greetings sooner.

‘Thank you’ makes the world go round. If every relationship was graced by the words ‘Please’, ‘Thank you’ and ‘I’m sorry’, not just mouthed but truly meant, humanity would be in a different place. How often I’ve heard it said, with a worn-down sigh: ‘If only he’d just showed some appreciation!’

I’d describe myself as ‘average’ at saying thank you. I admit, I have thought much about it of late. Worry interrupts the nights. There’s anxiety over what’s happening in Israel and around it, worry for friends and colleagues whose children are in combat, worry for the suffering, for what the grim present holds for the unfolding future. There’s anguish over the human sorrows I hear by day, which I’m powerless to relieve and go round and round in my head by night. There’s fear for our beautiful world. Our baby hedgehog Iggy, rescued two weeks ago, will it, please God, make it? It’s a personalised question, epitomising a universal angst.

So the words ‘thank you’ come as rescue. Notice what’s good! Appreciate everything! Don’t miss a chance to say so! I know people who, every night before bed, count five things they’ve been grateful for that day. It’s a good practice; it internalises the habit of gratitude.

Hebrew has at least two ways of saying ‘thank you’. The first is Todah, from the root indicating recognition. Hakkarat hatov, acknowledging the good, is a mitzvah. There’s a special blessing for it: ‘Blessed are you, God, hatov vehameitiv, who is good and does good.’ Setting theology aside, it’s a way of saying thank you to life. Thank you generates generosity; we want to give to others what life has gifted to us.

My second word is baruch, blessed. The rabbis teach that enjoying the fruits of this world without first saying a blessing is a form of theft. A blessing says: ‘This is special; I don’t take it for granted.’ Maybe it’s only an apple, but blessings stop us from thinking things are only or merely, and there are plenty of people for whom an apple, ‘a whole apple just for me,’ would be a miracle.

Judaism is a religion of blessings and thanksgivings. Each festival, over every new item of clothing, for each first seasonal fruit, we say Shehecheyanu: blessed be God who has kept us alive and brought us to this time.

Yet, paradoxically, perhaps the greatest moment of blessing I’ve witnessed was in a hospice. I was asked to see a couple in their thirties whom I’d never met before. The young man was dying and had requested a chaplain to pray with.

I slipped into the side-room with no idea what to say. But the man made it simple. ‘We’ve loved our time together. Tell us a prayer about the love of life.’ I stumbled quickly into a verse from Psalms. I think it was ‘How great, God, are your works.’

I got no further before the man took over. ‘Yes,’ he said, turning to his wife, ‘We’ve had wonderful walks, in the Lake District, the mountains. In London, too. We enjoy city-wandering, old churches, hidden paths.’ Thus they spoke together for two or three minutes, holding hands, smiling at each other.

Then, quite suddenly, the young man turned back to me, his face still calm: ‘Now say a prayer for life’s ending, because it’s over.’

In those grace-filled moments there was no ‘we didn’t have’; there was only thanksgiving.

This happened twenty-five years ago. It’s my teacher to this day.

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.

20 Sep 2024

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

The shofar and silence

Sticky Post By admin On September 20, 2024

‘Awake you slumberers from your slumber, you sleepers from your sleep’: with these words Maimonides explains the purpose of blowing the shofar each morning during the month of Elul, to herald Yom Terua, the great ‘Day of Blowing’, Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, when everyone who enters the world, and everything that happens in it, comes before God.

The mid-point of Elul has now passed; the full moon was huge and low, clear in the cloudless sky. As that circle of moon diminishes, so the shofar’s cry becomes more urgent.

I love the shofar. My grandfather was a shofar blower, as was my father; we had a shofar carved on his gravestone. We trawled every relevant shop in Jerusalem to find the right shofar for each of my children; they, too, are now shofar blowers.

On our family treks in the beautiful Scottish Highlands, we say to each other when we see sheep with long, curved horns: ‘that would make a fine shofar,’ – not that we would harm a hair on any of their woolly backs.

Maybe that’s why, to me, the shofar calls out for rock and water, hill and col, and everything that lives among them. It is animal cry, human outcry, a crying out to God, to the vastness beyond. It is mortality shouting into eternity, life into the infinite spaces.

Returning to Maimonides, there may be less need for his warning this year. Many of us have nerves worn thin like over-scratched skin, while our hearts sink at the news from the world.

But still the shofar retains the power to stir us, reaching inward, awakening in us something other. Paradoxically, it may not be in the shofar’s sounds, raw and strident as they are, but in the attentiveness with which we await them and the silence that vibrates between them that we go down into ourselves:

‘The great shofar shall be sounded, and the voice of fine silence shall be heard.’

It is this silence that Elijah intuited on God’s Mountain after the tumult of the earthquakes, fire and thunder.

‘Never ask what’s in that silence,’ I was told. It’s different for each person and we ourselves don’t truly know what lies in the depths of our own selves.

Elijah hears that silence as interrogation, ‘What are you doing here?’ I’ve often tried to explore what that simple but penetrating question means.

But this year I want to stay with the silence. I’ve been gripped by a sentence I read in Abbot Christopher Jamison’s book, Finding Sanctuary:

‘If we are faithful, there will gradually be born within us of our silence something that will draw us on to still greater silence.’

This is not the silence of emptiness or despair. It is the silence of fullness, of the richness of life that lies deeper than any language, word or articulate sound. Perhaps it’s what the Bible means by nishmat chaim, the breath of life, or by ruach merachefet, the hovering spirit of God.

Just as this fine silence sounded for Elijah deeper than fire and thunder, so it can sustain our spirit today, whoever we are, beneath and beyond the terrible noise of bombs, rockets and verbal bombardments. May we all be kept safe; may there be a swift end to these dreadful wars.

I believe that silence can be, for each of us in our own ways, the source of inner strength, resilience and hope, imparting a stalwart sense of purpose and inspiring in us a compassionate commitment to life.

17 May 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Spirituality Permalink

Seeking inner strength in cruel times

Sticky Post By admin On May 17, 2024

Yesterday someone asked me the million-dollar question, ‘How do you find strength in times of personal and collective suffering?’ Only, ‘a million dollars’ is not enough: this is a matter beyond all price, at the very core of life.

I had no chance to ask, ‘Why are you asking?’ no opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of what pain lay behind the request, and no way to escape responding.

Which of us knows the answer to such a raw and penetrating question in these cruel times (to which I make no specific reference in what follows)? What can one say? One can only speak from one’s heart and pray that one’s words will be true, that, in the unknown heart-space where they land, they will, at least, not cause further hurt.

There’s deep strength in our ancient prayers. I say Shema, Listen! – the opening of Judaism’s twice daily meditation. It’s not about what I mean when I cover my eyes and utter the words. It’s the presences which meet me. I enter a timeless soul-space; without speech or gesture they greet me, our ancestors, generation before generation, who’ve lived through all the travails and tribulations of history. They take my consciousness into their custodianship. For a blessed moment, I am a drop of water drawn into a great pool of spirit, and all the anxious thoughts of my ‘I’ are obliterated, washed clean. This happens for me only rarely. But that’s enough, because I know that this can be, that this is so.

There’s another way to follow the path of Listen. Kalonymus Kalman Shapiro, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto, taught that God speaks in two ways in our world. One is Torah, the language of Judaism’s, and humanity’s, great spiritual traditions. The other is creation, life itself. These two modes are in truth one, because through both, if we are aware, we can hear the ceaseless flow of sacred life, ‘in the chirping of the birds, the lowing of cows and the tumult of human discourse.’ (Esh Kodesh, Warsaw Ghetto, July 1942) Therefore I tell myself: Stop and listen. I say in my heart, ‘You there, goldfinch, squirrel, beech-leaf,’ and, recognising that they belong to the source of all life, am calmed and strengthened in the knowledge that I belong there too.

Sometimes, it’s nothing at all; no effort, no intention. It’s simply what the beloved speaks in The Song of Songs: ‘I sleep, but my heart wakes.’ For precious moments I live from my heart, not my head, and know the Psalmist’s truth: ‘To You, God, silence is praise.’

Therefore, my most urgent prayer to God, people, all the life around me is simply: don’t shut yourself off when I seek you.

But the challenge does not lie elsewhere. It’s in myself. No passport or permission is required to visit the places where God’s spirit flows. Access, the only access, is through our own consciousness and heart.

Here lies the challenge: how do I find the way to myself? How do I still myself enough to listen when I say Listen. That’s why I often say when people ask me about inner strength: What brings a touch of calm into your day? Yoga, prayer, dog-walk, coffee, friends, music, park-walk, crossword, swimming, moments of pure nothing? Do it! Because that’s what takes you to your unique entrance to the pathway to the infinite, the inexhaustible and unfathomable, the source of strength and life.

This all sounds very private. But it’s about community and friendship too because they give us the space, support and encouragement to seek to what lies beyond all space, the spirit from which we draw the strength to live, to care and love.

12 Apr 2024

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

Celebrating Pesach in this wonderful, terrible world

Sticky Post By admin On April 12, 2024

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

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

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

But what kind of world is this really?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

02 Feb 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Environment, Spirituality Permalink

God, and the geese by Loch Lomond

Sticky Post By admin On February 2, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

19 Jan 2024

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

For the love of trees – in honour of Tu Bishevat

Sticky Post By admin On January 19, 2024

‘No. You’re not buying another tree!’ the family protests as I eye up an apple, plum or rowan which, though discounted at the garden centre, looks good enough to me.

How many trees can you fit in the back of car – alongside two or three (grown up) children, at least one dog, walking boots, etcetera, etcetera? You’d be amazed! Though for the children, I admit, it’s not always a pleasant surprise.

But I love trees – as well as my family.

Thirty-three years ago, Nicky and I planned to marry on Tu Bishevat, the New Year for Trees, (which begins this Wednesday evening.) But the synagogue had already been booked so we settled for a week later. ‘What shall I say about the two of you?’ our friend Ronnie enquired, whom we’d asked to speak on the Shabbat before our wedding. ‘That we both love plants and animals,’ we replied, and all these years later it’s even more true.

Trees make excellent gifts, so long as the recipient has a garden, or space for a large tub. Years later one looks back and reflects: ‘We got that tree when our baby was born’, ‘when our daughter was Bat Mitzvah’, or ‘in memory of our father’.

We measure time in the passing of years; trees measure time by the passing of generations. Trees humble us. The Psalmist is right: trees clap their hands, dance with their leaves and sing with the winds. But most of all they stand steadfast and, with their stillness, call us into quiet. Listen, they say. Listen first with your ears, and you’ll hear a leaf fall, a crow cry, maybe an owl call. Listen next with your spirit, and maybe you’ll hear the slow, steady flow of life itself. Then rest against the bark and know, even if only for a moment, that you’re safe despite all the world’s cruelty, for God is in this place.

But if we’re safe among the trees, are the trees safe among us? In Jewish law it’s a crime wilfully to cut down a fruit tree. How much more important a wider prohibition would be now, when we know that trees sustain us not just with food but through the very air we breathe.

We need to live, to eat, travel and build, in ways which don’t destroy the great forests of the Amazon, Congo and Indonesia. Here at home, we must replant. We must let the remnants of our rainforests spread, which cling to the west of England, Wales and Scotland, and leave the bright-coloured jays, those acorn-burying birds, to plant their oaks. (See Guy Shrubsole’s amazing The Lost Rainforests of Britain.)

Earth science is challenging us with new phrases, like ‘Climate change velocity,’ and ‘Adapt, move or die.’ But, asks Ben Lawrence in his brilliant, disturbing The Treeline, ‘What if you are a tree?’

Yet trees, too, are on the move, not individual specimens, but species. Larch, birch, poplar and rowan are on the march north. What, then, do you plant to future-proof your woodlands? It’s a question with which foresters struggle. For we must do our utmost to bequeath to our children breathable air, a life-sustaining natural world and the wonder and spirit of the trees.

So let’s go plant!

If this seems fatuous in times of war, we should remember the Midrash of the old man and the emperor:

‘What are you doing?’ the latter asked.
‘Planting saplings.’
The emperor was scornful.

But what were his thoughts when, years later, on his return from many battles, the old man offered him fruits from those same trees?

05 Jan 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Holocaust, Spirituality Permalink

They still speak to us, the dead we have loved

Sticky Post By admin On January 5, 2024

Sometimes a verse jumps out from the weekly Torah portion, chimes with what we’re living through, meets a spark in our own spirit. That’s how those words from the start of Exodus speak to me now: ‘And Joseph died, and all his brothers, and all that generation.’

They’re all gone now, my parent’s generation, all the relatives amidst whose conversations, half German, half English, half refugee, half British, but always deeply Jewish, I grew up. They lie at peace in Hoop Lane cemetery, or rest, like my father’s sisters, on the Mount of Olives.

But they’re not silent, at least not in this world. They speak to us, our dead, they talk inside us. ‘Live!’ they say, ‘Live!’ They put resilience in our bones; they set their playlist in our soul. There’s nothing morbid or spooky about it; the dead who were close to us in life stay near and dear when they’re gone. The loss of them hurts deeply. But they urge us on. ‘Have courage,’ they say, ‘We’re with you all the way. Love life; live it well.’

Two moments come to my mind whenever I say the prayer carved in stone in every Jewish cemetery, ‘Umekayyem emounato lisheinei afar – Keeping faith with those who sleep in the dust.’ Twice my father, deeply asleep in his last hours, raised himself from his pillows, spoke those words into the ether and collapsed back into the semi-consciousness of his final journey.

It never occurred to me otherwise than that he was speaking to God: ‘Be with me in this boundaryless time-space where you’re taking me.’ They were words of trust and fear in equal measure.

But now it strikes me that I was partly wrong; my father was also talking to me: ‘Keep faith,’ he was saying, ‘keep faith through everything.’

So here, at the beginning of 2024, I walk among them in my mind, the departed, who lived through the Holocaust and the war. I try to listen, to draw courage for this current time of troubles, when Israel, Judaism and so much else seem on the line.

Here by the pathway is Jacqueline du Pre. I played a recording of her Kol Nidrei to Isca, my second mother, in her last hour. Isca adored the cello. The melody descends into the soul, says without words like the Psalmist, ‘From the depths I have called unto you,’ then rises, declaring ‘Seek beauty, aspire; always aspire.’ That’s why Isca loved such music.

Here, in the same row as my mother and father, lies Leo Baeck, leader of German Jewry in the terrible years, teacher of Theresienstadt. Nothing crushed his spirit, his faith not just in God but in humanity. Not rarely, he recalled, even in Berlin under the Nazis in ’40 or ’41, there would be an egg or apple secretly left by his door. He taught that God is mystery become commandment: what we know from life’s depths must teach us how to act.

And, Adi, my father, who by the age of forty-one had lost his own father, oldest sister, first wife, and three of his favourite aunts and uncles? He still comes into my room late at night, unexpectedly, as he did when I was in my teens, saying ‘Remember: only what’s in your mind can never be taken from you.’ And, since he was a practical person, I hear him say when a chair creaks or a shelf breaks, ‘Repair it, don’t throw it away.’ And, seeing he lived through the cruel years of Israel’s struggle for independence, ‘Be loyal; always stand by your friends.’

These are the secret ingredients of their strength, which, like the unique recipes for cheesecakes and strudels that they refuse to disclose while they’re alive, our forebears bequeath to us after they’re gone.

With them, we turn with gritty faith, resilient hope, and love of life, to face the year ahead.

15 Dec 2023

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

Hope in the darkness

Sticky Post By admin On December 15, 2023

Something I love about Chanukkah is reflections.

When I was small, we often used to light the candles in my grandparents’ house. They had a ‘through room’ with bay windows looking onto the road in front and out into their large, half-wild garden at the back.

I used to stare not just at the candles but at their reflections, and the reflections of their reflections as the lights were mirrored back and forth from window to window. I would watch them receding, over the street and out into the city on the one side, and through the dark garden on the other, until they were caught in the branches of a huge oak tree, the venerable marker of some ancient boundary.

I saw those lights then, and still see them now, as fragile illuminations, flickering markers of hope and warmth, small fingers of humanity reaching out into the night. How desperately we need them now at the close of this year of hatred and war!

Those lights are to me the true miracle of Chanukkah. As Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib of Ger wrote, ‘For this the human being was created, to give light in the darkness.’

Can those lights, stretched out like hands of greeting, be us, become humanity, seeking each other, calling to one another in a world grown dark with cruelty and fury?

Beha’alotecha et hanerot, says the Torah. Don’t read those words, insist the mystics, as if all they mean is ‘When you light the menorah.’ Take them according to their literal meaning: ‘When you raise yourself up with the lights.’ For God’s light burns within us all, though it’s often hidden even from ourselves.

Can we find that light in our own hearts? Can others help us? Can we, even if only occasionally, rekindle that light in each other, through kindness, attentiveness, listening to one another’s stories, aspirations and griefs? Might we, then, by means of this heart-light, look beyond the frustrations and festering resentments, the ignorance and wilful disinformation, that so often set us apart? Can we hope?

As Jews we have often hoped in vain. But we have never submitted to the notion that hope itself is in vain. ‘Od lo avdah tikvateinu, our hope has never ceased’: that is the true anthem of the Jewish People.

But yesterday, watching the reflections of all eight candles on the final night of Chanukkah, and the reflections of their reflections now stretching out from my own home, I felt a sense of loss. ‘Farewell, light and hope of Chanukkah!’ I felt I was saying. ‘Farewell! Don’t get lost in the darkness!’

It was then that it struck me for the first time that those flames might be travelling in the opposite direction. Maybe they weren’t going out into the darkness but seeking to come in from it. Maybe they were saying to me: ‘Let me in!’

There passed through my mind the beautiful lines from Yehudah Halevi’s sea poem, when the waters, finally calm after a terrifying storm, once again peacefully mirror the night sky

‘And the stars are astray in the heart of the sea
Like exiles driven from their homes.’

So I ask myself now, ‘Whom can I let in to my heart-space, to my home? What light might they bring with them, and what might I see differently, or entirely anew, by its flames?’

That is my hope for this year ahead, that, whoever we are, we may see further, more widely and more deeply, that we have seen before.

06 Oct 2023

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

Hoshana Rabba – Who Saves?

Sticky Post By admin On October 6, 2023

Once again today, as on Yom Kippur, the greeting is Gmar Tov, ‘A good ending’: May we, our communities, our country and the world be sealed for a good destiny. In rabbinic tradition Hoshana Rabba is the day of the final closing of the books, when the blessings and challenges, the rainfall and drought, for the year ahead are determined. Once again, the leader wears white and for one last time we hear the deep melodies of the High Holydays.

I do not take these concepts literally, but they express the deep reverence I have for this day, and the respect and love I feel for its powerful, unusual prayers. As long as he lived, I would go to synagogue with my father on Hoshana Rabba: it was our special time together before God.

I was up early, as one has to be on Hoshana Rabba. I woke with the rabbis’ ancient question in my mind, ‘What was God doing before creating this earth?’ The answer they give is: ‘God was busy creating and destroying other worlds.’ In my head, too, was that line from the liturgy which predates astrophysics by millennia: ‘Toleh erets al blimah, – God suspends the earth over nothingness.’ A similar thought must have gripped the scientist and poet Rachel Elson, who wrote the marvellous line: ‘We astronomers honour our responsibility to awe.’

So where is our world going? Toward what destiny are we headed?

One word and one line are repeated over and again in the ancient litany of today. The word is ‘Hoshana, Save!’ It’s as plain a cry to God as language can produce. The line is only slightly longer: Ani Vaho Hoshi’ana, – I and God, let us save.’ The single word places all the burden on the divine; the line understands that responsibility as shared: What can you and I, what can God and we, do together to save our world?

There is nothing banal or generalised about the pleas which follow. They are the beseeching of people who know their vulnerability, the pleas of subsistence growers, tenant farmers, viticulturists, pilgrims all, who well understand the perils which beset them:

Save sinew, bone and skin; save the winepress and the standing corn; save with strong, healing rains that give life to forsaken lands…

The prayers are the petitions, too, of a nation which knows persecution, of communities who ‘understand the soul of the refugee,’ They are the cries of the asylum-seekers of previous centuries, small-boat people of all generations:

Save the exiled and cast out; save those scattered among those who hate them…

Though each brief prayer is punctuated by the cry Hoshana, the final line is Ani vaHo, We and God: what can we and the divine, what can each of us, inspired and chastened by the presence of God in each other and all life, achieve together? What can we do for our beautiful, joyous world, beleaguered by suffering and injustice. What can we save?

Just as Neil’ah holds the paradox that at the closing of Yom Kippur we pray for the opening of the gates, so, despite the greeting ‘a good ending’, Hoshana Rabba calls us not to a fate already sealed but to a new beginning. It tasks us with the fashioning of a different and better collective destiny, to which we, all humanity together with God, must devote our grit, determination, inspiration, body, mind and soul.