The Jewish Year | HEART AND MIND

26 Dec 2025

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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

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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.

31 Oct 2025

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Jews and Halloween???

Sticky Post By admin On October 31, 2025

Walking past spooks, spiders, cobwebs (bird traps – please don’t!), skulls, crossbones and pumpkins with my dog Nessie yesterday, I thought I’d research what Jews have to say about Halloween. More fool me! I’d no notion how much there’s out there.

First a caution: anything about spirits touches deep places. Judaism teaches that the soul survives death. We pray for our dead to be ‘bound in the bond of eternal life.’ We’re admonished to leave them in peace. I’ve a memory, strange, vivid, of the spirit of Lore, my mother, just after she died in hospital, appearing for a half-second, less even than a moment, in the corridor of our house in Douglas Park Crescent, and gesturing goodbye before vanishing forever. So I’ve deep respect for everything concerning our beloved dead.

But about Jews and Halloween I knew nothing. As a Scot, I should have realised the date derives from the Celtic festival of Samhain. Pronounce this if you can: “Oidhche Shamhna theirear gamhna ris na laoigh.” It means that on Samhain night, calves become stirks, (beast aged six to twelve months). Samhain’s when summer turns to winter. The harvest’s in, the long indoor hours have begun, food will have to be rationed. The veil between our world and the spirit world is thin, and souls revisit their erstwhile homes.

Later, Halloween became Christian, just as in Judaism ancient dates are overlaid with Jewish history. But if Halloween’s origins are agricultural and pagan, does Judaism forbid participation?

‘Definitely!’ writes Rabbi Michael Broyde: Halakhah, Jewish law prohibits both “idolatrous customs” and “foolish” practices. Halloween may be foolish, but it’s not idolatrous, argue others: it’s just American, like Thanksgiving. It’s “harmless fun.” (See Kveller Magazine for more)

No doubt that’s why there’s so much kosher Halloween candy: “Creepy Peepers —each wrapped in a cartoonishly bloodshot eyeball foil wrapper; Dr. Scab’s Monster Lab Chocolate Body Parts, bags of fingers, ears, eyeballs and mouths, strangely milchig, rather than fleishig. There’s even a line in Halloween Fair Trade Kosher. (See Edmon Rothman in JTA for more)

So what does the rabbi say? You certainly wouldn’t have found me sending my children out tricking and treating. But would I inveigh against others? There’s a rabbinic tradition as old as the Talmud about not wasting your breath when people aren’t going to listen anyway. And there are worse things to object to.

Yet here’s some Jewish advice.

Pumpkins: next year, grow them for the Succah. Let’s have a ‘best pumpkin for the shul Succah’ competition.

Trick-and-treat: Hang on until Purim, when you can be treated with halakhah on your side. And remember: ‘trick’ doesn’t mean threatening to throw eggs at someone’s window if they don’t give you Quality Street or Heroes. It means ‘party-trick’, like offering a short song or performance. If you can’t wait until Purim, Chanukkah geld is a respectable interim.

Spirits: As Sam Glazer beautifully writes, we have our own harvest festival, called Succot, when we too welcome spirits in the form of the Ushpizin, the souls of honoured guests like Abraham and Sarah. So from now on keep a nook for your spook in your Tabernacle. (See The San Diego Jewish World for more)

As for me, will I stock up on kosher sweets in case gangs of kids come knocking on the door (some might even be from my own community!)? Probably. Because I hate seeming mean, and even the mere thought that someone might think ‘Mean Jew’ cuts horribly deep.

But you won’t catch me lighting my Shabbes candles inside a pumpkin when Shabbat comes in tonight.

PS: My excuse for writing this? I live with heavy themes week after week and sometimes it’s too much.

17 Oct 2025

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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?

12 Sep 2025

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The journey of Teshuvah

Sticky Post By admin On September 12, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

29 Aug 2025

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The summons of the Shofar

Sticky Post By admin On August 29, 2025

Elul is the month of preparation, of awakening, when the shofar is sounded succinctly each morning, before it cries out in one hundred protestations on Rosh Hashanah:

Even though it is sounded simply by decree of the Torah, there is an implied meaning in the shofar’s call: ‘Wake up, you sleepers, from your sleep, you who slumber from your slumbers. Search your deeds… Remember your Creator.’ (Maimonides: Laws of Repentance 3:4)

The first note of the shofar is Tekia, a sustained and aspiring outpouring, as if to say, ‘Listen! This is an amazing world. Consider that tree, sustaining the lives of so many birds, giving shade through scorching days. Hear the sound of the longed-for rain as it falls on the leaves. Watch the moon fade away as the dawn sun brightens. Pay attention as the birds sing out their homage at twilight, while the orange horizon deepens into red. Melo chol ha’arets kevodo – All the earth is full of God’s glory.

But how this world is broken. ‘Shevarim, fractured, in pieces,’ observes the shofar. ‘Why did you have to flee?’ we ask our guest from Afghanistan. ‘Because they murdered my brother.’ I switch off the news; I can’t bear hearing any more about drone attacks and bombed-out buildings. I don’t want to know that yet again a climate target has been missed. I go down the street to the nearby woods for solace: who dumped that pile of cans and plastic bottles, as if the world was our rubbish heap?

‘Teru’a; weep!’ cries the shofar. ‘Yelulei yalel,’ explains the Talmud: ‘sustained sobbing.’ We must go deeper than anger and frustration; we must open our heart to the hurts and the tears. That young woman, she’s crying for her husband who won’t be returning, won’t open the front door and lift up their youngest, who comes running towards him, in a great hug. But not now, don’t cry now; she must hide her grief from the children. ‘All our tears are gathered at the New Year, all our anguish, all our pain,’ wrote Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, known subsequently as the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. ‘They become disembodied,’ pure outrage, pure weeping. They ascend to the throne of God, who hears because the anguish of the world is close to God’s heart.

Therefore no, don’t despair! Teki’a, calls the shofar: take strength! Remember the sacred spirit that flows through all life! Remember life’s wonder! Listen; that bird, it’s a cuckoo come back from a three-thousand-mile journey. It’s here again. And we’re still here. We shall regroup, repair, rebuild our faith, our spirits, our world. We shall find the energy. We shall never surrender our souls, our vision, our determination, our hope. We shall heal the world, and if not the whole world, if not even this country, then at least this small corner, this tiny portion of infinite, sacred life with which we are entrusted, for which we are responsible, right now.

Thus, day by day the shofar calls to us, cajoles us, summons us, inspires us, until its great outpouring on Rosh Hashanah, the renewal of creation.

16 May 2025

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Kabbalah and Counting: the mystical qualities of the Omer

Sticky Post By admin On May 16, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

14 Mar 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in The Jewish Year Permalink

Sticky Post By admin On March 14, 2025

Purim Sameach, Happy Purim! We need simchah, joy, in our lives and on Purim it’s a Mitzvah. We share food and drink with friends, (ish lere’ehu) and give generously where there is need (mattanot la’evyonim).

Joy is not always easy in our often troubled world, or in our sometimes troubled lives, when our ‘downs’ may feel deeper and last longer than our ‘ups’. But that’s why we need it. Simchah is ‘a religious precept,’ writes Art Green in Judaism’s 10 Best Ideas, his compelling summary of Judaism which I recommend to everybody. Joy is a spiritual matter: ‘Seeking God itself is an act that is to fill the heart with joy,’ he writes, quoting Chronicles 16:10: ‘May the God-seeker’s heart rejoice.’ But simchah is also practical, in the cooking and baking, blessing and eating, sharing and caring and community.

That’s why simchah shel mitzvah, the joy of practising the commandments, is a building brick, a cornerstone, of Judaism. We all have our favourite moments: challah on Friday night, the Seder, making the Sukkah, a ‘le’chaim, to life’ with friends.

But what about when we feel down? Talking about joy can seem like moral negligence, ignoring the suffering which permeates our realities. On a personal level, when one’s low, it can feel like soaking the heart in vinegar. ‘I said of simchah,’ wrote Koheleth, the Preacher, “What’s the point of that?”’ He had a gift for multiplying everything by zero, with predictable results. But even he acknowledged, in the end, that the best of life lies in its basic joys: eating, drinking and companionship, and, I would add, in appreciating the world around us.

That’s why I love small moments; they make up more than ‘a few of my favourite things:’ a glimpse of the moon before dawn, the dog stretching out to have its tummy scratched; feeding the birds first thing; seeking a woodpecker or a starling pecking at the seeds. As William Blake wrote:

He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

And sometimes the joy flies away very quickly.

Simchah is not the same as indulgence. It’s not turning our back on the misery in the world. In essence, simchah is about nourishing our sense of wonder, nurturing a Baruch shecachah lo be’olama, a ‘Blessed be God in whose world it is thus,’ consciousness whenever we experience anything beautiful or uplifting. It’s about deepening our comradeship with each other and with life itself. We do so precisely because this is our internal resource, our inner storehouse for when the seasons of famine come over us. It’s the root of our resilience, for ourselves and others, when the brutality and cruelty of what’s done in our world, when the wrongs committed and the hurts inflicted, besiege our consciousness.

Writing these words, I’m conscious that I’m talking to myself as much as to anyone else. I’m not great at seizing the moments, at never missing the chance to bless what’s generous, kind, beautiful or good. Very different thoughts often take hold of me, particularly over the last period of time.

But that’s precisely why we need to ‘kiss the joy as it flies.’ That’s why it’s so important to remember Ben Zoma’s answer to his rhetorical question, ‘Who is rich?’ – ‘The person who find joy in their portion.’

May we all, despite whatever challenges we face, find moments of true wealth.

07 Feb 2025

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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.’