It’s almost a year since Isca, Raphael’s and my second mother, died. At her house last night, amidst the sadness of teacups no longer set out for visitors and books no longer read, I found a small wooden case, perhaps originally a jewellery box, except that it was full of letters. Curiosity overcame me. I took them out and was immediately struck by the dates: 1915, 1917, 1923.

The Nazis stole virtually all my grandparents’ possessions. But the only items over which I ever heard them lament were the love letters they sent each other during the First World War. They became engaged shortly before hostilities commenced, (after a long philosophical discussion as to whether their love was objektif or subjektif.) Soon afterwards my grandfather volunteered to serve as Feldrabbiner, army chaplain, and was stationed at Verdun on the Western Front for the duration.

But the Nazis can’t have stolen all the letters, for there in that small box I found tens of them. I spent the late hours staring at them, thick paper, thin paper, poems, mere scraps, dispatched from the front by my grandfather to his beloved.

They’re written in tiny writing, many in faint pencil, in Suetterlin script, so I’m struggling to decipher more than the odd word. But here and there I can make out a phrase. ‘My dear bride,’ one of them begins. It’s headed Traurede, Wedding Speech, and dated 31^st May, 1917. My grandfather had finally given up waiting for the war to end, and obtained a furlough to marry his beloved.

A letter dated March 1918 begins ‘Maigloeckchen, Lilies of the valley’. Those were my grandmother’s favourite flowers; she had their wedding tables decorated with them. My grandfather nostalgically recalls their beauty and sweet scent. By then he was back at the front, aware that Germany was losing the war. ‘When I returned to Frankfurt,’ he said, ‘all my best students were dead.’ The local authorities recently rediscovered rows of Jewish war graves, which the Nazis had smothered away behind thick hedges.

I’m asking myself why I’m writing about these matters in the week of Remembrance Day, when Sunday brings the Whitehall parade of AJEX, the Association of Jewish ex-Servicemen and Women; when we’re constantly worried about what’s being done to Israel, and what Israel is doing, and about Gaza; when there’s been a vicious orchestrated attack on Jewish football fans in Amsterdam; when the future of the world is at stake at COP 29, with its untrustworthy hosts in Azerbaijan… Aren’t there more important things to say? Why bother with love letters from a hundred years ago?

This is my reason. Amidst all the strife, hatreds and calumnies, (‘the perfidious English,’ even my grandfather wrote, little knowing that one day Britain would save his life); amidst the bombs and brutality, people are still struggling to keep going, find love, make a home. Thus it was then, and thus it is now and we, who watch horrors happen in fear and dismay, don’t have the power to make the violence stop. But we do have the capacity to side with life and care for those who care for life, whoever they are, because they, and we, are human too.

Among the letters in that small box was a tiny diary, scarcely the size of a thumb, miniature pencil still attached. It was for 1915 and had only one entry, by my grandmother, Nanny Caro. I’m far from confident that I’ve made out the words correctly, but it went something like this:

Let not our grudges and hatreds

Rule over us.

It’s so little time that life has to give us,

Yet every day has so much to offer us.

Better then to grasp

The love that it proffers us.

15 January, 1915

‘Choose life,’ says the Torah; that’s all we can do, and what we must do.

The need to cry surged up in me as I left the polling booth yesterday.

It wasn’t about who would win. It was about the act of voting itself, the opportunity to choose freely what cross I marked on my ballot paper. It was about the process of true democracy at work.

I thought of my grandfather. I envisaged him emerging weak and sick from Dachau concentration camp. Then I imagined what he would say about the freedom we enjoy here today.

In how many countries of the world are there genuinely fair and honest elections? Don’t the women, and men, of Iran, and so many other states across the world, long for just this? It’s a matter of deep principle, pride and commitment that, despite all its problems, Israel was founded as, and continues to be, a democracy.

Indeed, writing as a Jew, in how few generations, in how few times and places, have we had the equal right to vote, men and women? In how many lands have we been able to stand for election and represent our constituencies and country? Even when he wrote in Frankfurt in the late eighteenth century about the importance of participating in newly won civic opportunities, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch could only dare to hope for this.  

I have been moved, too, over the last weeks to see so many young people, in support of whichever party, volunteering, knocking on doors, engaging in the process of democracy, motivated by the belief, the hope and trust, that one can stand up for one’s values and make a difference to how one’s country is run. 

So now the UK has a new government. 

When Rishi Sunak called the election, he probably didn’t know that the Torah reading for the following Shabbat would contain the story of Korach. There are of course alternative readings, but the classic understanding is that Korach challenged Moses’ leadership not because he cared more deeply for his people, or had a greater commitment to justice, but because he wanted power for power’s sake. His arguments were not ‘for the sake of heaven,’ true ideological difference which deserve to be debated because truth is multi-faceted, but merely cantankerous personal attacks. 

The great majority of those who stood for election in this country are not like Korach. In the early hours of the night, I heard moving speeches, both by winning candidates and former MPs who lost their seats, about the privilege of caring for their cities and their people. That is public service in the true sense of the words. In the classic Hebrew phrase, such individuals intend ‘to occupy themselves betsorchei tsibbur be’emunah, with the concerns of the community in good faith.’

In these challenging times, those entering or re-entering Parliament carry profound responsibilities. I pray for their safety and wellbeing. It’s horrifying to learn of the vile abuse, the online bullying, the threats, including death threats and threats to their families, to which MPs, especially and particularly women, are now so often subject. May God, and we as a society, keep our elected representatives safe from harm, free in person and in spirit, to serve our country.

I pray that our MPs, civil servants and all who work with them, will govern for the sake of tsedek and tsadakah, justice and social justice, chesed veshalom, compassion and peace. May they, and we, work for the national and international good, and for the wellbeing not just of humankind but of our planet and all the intricately interdependent life upon it. 

May they, and we, take forward the sacred task of letakken olam, making the world a safer, fairer and better place for everyone, as is God’s will.

In tomorrow’s Torah portion, Beha’alotecha, God commands Aaron to ‘cause the lights to go up’ on the seven-branched Menorah in the Tabernacle. Rashi, the great mediaeval commentator, explains: Kindle the lamps carefully, making sure that the flame takes hold on the wick so that the light can ascend freely.

It’s a specific instruction to Aaron in his role as High Priest. But it’s also a metaphor for life. As one of my favourite Hasidic teachers, the Maggid of Kozhenitz, observes: when we do what is good and right, we light the lamps of love and wonder in our hearts. Our first responsibility is to ourselves, to feed those flames. But then, through acts of kindness, we must try to nourish the spirits of others. Or perhaps it’s the other way round; by caring for others, we strengthen the light in our own hearts.

This goes to the core of the challenges so many of us are experiencing in these times of war and anguish. How do I stay human? How can I be loyal all at once to my own people, to humanity, to life, and to my God?

Here’s something small which happened to me yesterday. I’ll recount it not because of what I did, more or less by chance, but because of how it touched me, what it did for me.

I learnt that this Shabbat is Naama Levy’s twentieth birthday. She’s still held hostage by Hamas. May she be freed at once to return to her family. May this terrible war end, with plans for safer, better years for the people of Israel and Gaza.

I called the flower shop nearest to where Naama’s mother, Ayelet, lives and asked the florist, whom I’ve got to know a little over these grim months, to send a bunch of flowers. What else can one do, but these gestures?

The florist understood at once. ‘So painful,’ she said. ‘The war goes on and on…Everyday more death.’ She sounded so dejected that I asked her to add a bunch of flowers for herself, from my community. ‘I’m going to cry,’ she said. Minutes later, she messaged: ‘I don’t remember anyone sending me flowers since I opened my shop.’ What more can we do, we agreed, than try to care for each other?

Such things seem futile, even stupid, before the threats and horrors we face from Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, from Russia and North Korea, and underneath it all, from the changes to our climate, the nurturing water, earth and air.

But often this is all we can do, – keep each other’s hearts alive, help the flames of love and kindness ascend within us, even for a moment. It helps us stay human, and by the light of that humanity, we recognise the humanity of others.

That’s why the prayer, co-written by Raba Tamar Elad-Appelbaum and Sheikha Ibtisam Mahameed just weeks after October 7, touches me so deeply:

God of life, may it be your will to hear the prayer of mothers…

That we have mercy for each other,

That we have pity for each other,

That we have hope for each other,

… For your sake, God of Life.

That, too, is why I’m moved that World Jewish Relief, which has been financing trauma services in Israel, is now also ‘providing targeted support to the International Medical Corps, a trusted international partner, to provide emergency maternity, obstetric and newborn baby care services in Gaza.’ As CEO Paul Anticoni adds: This is in accord with ‘our own Jewish values, humanitarian principles and [has the] explicit encouragement and endorsement from the President of Israel’s office.’

Hatred and destruction have immense powers at their disposal. Goodness and kindness seem feeble beside them, their actions so local, so small. But, like the sacred light hidden within all life, compassion and kindness reside within us everywhere, waiting to be illumined. That is their deep, indestructible, inextinguishable strength.

Rashi, the great Torah and Talmud commentator, had eyes for every word, indeed for every syllable and letter.

He noted a seeming contradiction in the sentence which describes the arrival of the Children of Israel at Mount Sinai, the prologue to the giving and receiving of Torah which we celebrate tonight on Shavuot.

The verse reads ‘They came to the wilderness of Sinai and encamped there (plural verb); Israel encamped (singular verb) opposite the mountain.’ (Exodus 19:2) Why this difference between the two verbs?

The Israelites, Rashi explains, each came with their own opinions and different experiences.  But then, in order to hear God and receive Torah, they listened ‘with one heart, like one single person.’

No doubt, Rashi had his reasons back in the late eleventh century for stressing this point, as every generations of Jews have had before and since. We are a discursive, debating, not to say arguing people.

But when it comes to hearing God’s voice, the ‘life of all life’, the voice at the heart of creation and in the core of our souls, we listen all together.

When it comes to embracing the core values of Judaism, as expressed by Simon the Just over two millennia ago,  ‘Upon three things the world is established, upon Torah, upon loving kindness, and upon the service of God,’ we commit ourselves to transcending our differences, and to harnessing them for our collective good, so that we work together for the sake of God’s will.  

Chag Sameach and may Torah enter our hearts.

It’s the simple truth: ‘They died so that we can live.’

I’ve visited the Normandy landing beaches many times, showing the young people of Noam round Sword and Gold on peaceful, sunlit days, so very different from the murderous fighting of eighty years ago.

I’ve just re-read Antony Beevor’s D-Day: The Battle for Normandy.

Sometimes I had to put the book down struck to the core by the sheer courage of so many, or by sheer horror at the slaughter.

I’m smitten by the compassion shown in the midst of the fighting by so many (but not the SS): dressing comrades’ wounds, even tending the injuries of those who, minutes earlier, would have killed them.

Soldiers who’d been farmers milked the desperate cows who’d survived the strafing and shooting.

One infantryman noted how a foal refused to leave its dead mother, walking round her and round her so often that it had beaten a circular path through the grass.

I’ve visited the war cemeteries, now quiet, now peaceful, beautifully tended, with the names and units of the dead, the rows of crosses, among which are many Magen Davids.

I don’t know who decided that the words ‘Known unto God,’ should be inscribed on the gravestones of those whose deaths left their bodies so mangled that they could not be identified. They weren’t just left unnamed; they were people who mattered, mattered to God.

Yesterday I attended the lighting of the beacon by AJEX, The Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women, in the grounds of the Jewish Free School. I listened to the voices and accounts of veterans.

I was privileged to read out on behalf of us all the 23^rd Psalm: ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil for You are with me.’

Once again, we walk though that valley, witnesses as others traverse its dangerous, often fatal, depths.

Yesterday I got news from a friend whose relative in the north of Israel was killed by Hezbollah. What can one say? I hear with a sinking heart of more deaths in Gaza. Is this what you want from your creation, God, You whom we call ‘God of the spirits of all flesh’?

We believe in a God of life, Chei HaChaim, the very Life of Life, whose breath imparts consciousness to all life, who mechalkel chaim bechesed, who ‘nurtures all life with lovingkindness.’

That is the God whose presence abides in all living beings, including us, even though we so often struggle to feel it, and humanity so often behaves as if it did not know it.

This is the God whose voice within us, so frequently out-shouted by the endless noise around us and inside us, so often reduced to a whisper of a whisper, calls us to practice kindness and justice because that is God’s will towards life.

That is why we call God’s word Torat Chaim, the Torah of life, as we receive once again this coming week on the festival of Shavuot.

This is what we mean when we pray for our hearts to cleave to the Torah’s commandments: we pray that all the angers and fears, the injustice and cruelty, the frustration and despair across the world around us, and in our inner world inside us, will not extinguish your voice in us, God of life, your voice which commands justice and loving kindness.

Dear Community,

I write – somewhat in haste so as not to miss my train – from Frankfurt-am-Main, the city with which my grandfather, Dr Salzberger, fell in love when he came in 1910 to be interviewed for the post of rabbi. (It’s a relief to be in a town where the Israeli flag hangs among others from the city hall [on the Roemer, the square where the SA paraded 90 years ago])

I was invited by John Schlapobersky to speak about my family’s Frankfurt roots at a conference of group analysts. And, John adjoined me, address the question: ‘Where’s the light now?’

For it was from here, from my grandfather’s former community at the Westendsynagoge, that I had symbolically lit a flame from the Eternal Light, which all the devastation of Kristallnacht had not succeeded in extinguishing, and walked home with it to kindle the Ner Tamid at the dedication of our own new building, thirteen years ago.

I recalled, as I struggled what to say, how on some village street, somewhere on that 400k walk along the Rhine, an old man had stopped me, saying: ‘D’you realise the torch in your backpack is still on?’ ‘Yes,’ I’d explained, ‘I’m carrying the light.’

So, said John, tell us where that light is now. It’s an apposite question for the Shabbat before Yom Hashoah, the Hebrew date for remembering the Nazi Holocaust.

But first I must write about darkness, and those very different flames, of fire. ‘Quickly! Out of here!’ my great-aunt Jenny recalled; they’d been living in a flat in the great Boerneplatz Synagogue when it was torched on Kristallnacht. ‘I saw through an open door the burnt-out cupola, before it was quickly shut and I was whisked away.’To this day, she told me, she can’t bear railway stations; the anguish of being sent away from her family still pierces her heart.

On the same date my grandfather was arrested by the Gestapo. They’d been waiting for him in the family home. He was taken to a great hall where Jews were made to crawl across the floor, their ‘exercises’ strangely interrupted by a Mozart aria: ‘In diesen heiligen Hallen / kennt man die Rache nicht – In these sacred halls we know not revenge.’ A Jewish musician had, with that cruel and quirky absurdity which characterised certain Nazi behaviours, been offered his freedom if he could prove he was indeed an opera singer.

Reflecting back, I recall how, on entering the Westendsynagoge to light my torch and ‘take’ the light, I’d been struck to the heart by the verse which adorned it: ‘Lo amut ve’echyeh – I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of God.’

So here we were now, together in Frankfurt, German and British therapists, Israelis too, all dedicated to caring for that greatest abode of God’s light here on earth: the human heart.
Yet darkness was close about us. One of the conveners lost his son-in-law on October 7. All of us mourned the loss of life of Israelis, Palestinians caught between Hamas and the IDF. We all feared the antisemitism, the racism, and what horrors might come next.

I have no great answers, just two rabbinic sayings to guide me. The first is from Nachmanides, the thirteenth-century rabbi with the deepest heart: God’s light is with all who weep amidst oppression, God sees their tears. I believe God is with all those, too, who weep for others in their anguish, who weep with all who suffer.

The second consists of just four Hebrew words: ‘“Neri beyadecha, venerecha beyadi – My light is in your hands; your light is in mine,” say God.’ God’s light is within us, if only we can find it. Not only that, – the holy light of each other’s lives is in our hands too, if only we can see amidst the gloom, and cherish it despite the contagious hate that fills our streets.

Shabbat Shalom

Jonathan Wittenberg

This Shabbat finds us on the threshold of a difficult Pesach. Our rabbis called the festival Zeman Cheiruteinu, the Season of our Freedom, so I will write about four kinds of freedom (I know there are others), for each of which we struggle. Please forgive me for writing at more length than usual.

The first is obvious and in all our hearts: it’s summed up in the slogan, the demand, the words of hope one sees all over Israel: ‘Bring them home now.’ Let our hostages go. I cannot even begin to imagine the feelings of their mothers and fathers, sons, daughters, family, close friends.

These are the names,’ writes contemporary Israeli poet Yael Lifschitz, paraphrasing the opening words of Exodus:

And these are the names of those covered by darkness…
And these are the names of the children of Israel whose cry
Rises from the depth of the tunnels of darkness… 
(trans. Rachel Korazim et. al.)

Tomorrow’s prophetic reading from Malachi closes with the words: ‘Return the hearts of the parents to the children and the hearts of the children to their parents.’ God, set those words constantly before the eyes and in the souls of those who hold the power to make it happen!

There are many, too, separated by other wars, like the mother and children we hosted who still cannot return to Kharkiv and join their father. Countless innocent people are locked in the dungeons of tyrannies, like Alexei Navalny until they murdered him. May God protect them.

I think, too, of those whose loved ones will never come home, because they died on October 7 or fighting in the war against Hamas. In Malachi’s words, May God’s presence comfort their hearts, ‘with healing on its wings.’

The second freedom is freedom from the horror of war, the hatred that feeds it, the fear it arouses, the destruction it causes, and the grief to which it leads. Judaism is not a pacifist religion; war in defence of one’s right to exist is sometimes unavoidable. But it’s still a disaster, a failure of humanity to find a way to co-exist. It’s far from God’s dream for humankind.

I saw burnt out homes in the south of Israel, and evacuated villages in the north. I’ve seen the charred remains of flats in the suburbs outside Kyiv, people queueing for essentials in freezing February at an improvised market.

I can’t not think of the devastation of Gaza, people sitting dazed in the rubble of smashed up streets. Whatever our understanding of the cause, it’s utter wretchedness. And brooding amidst such misery, and elsewhere in other conflicts, in grief-stricken, anger-filled hearts, may be plans, even hopes, for the next round of war, because violence is liable to feed revenge, which feeds revenge.

So I pray that, ‘the sword shall not pass anymore through the land,’ (Leviticus). I will say Isaiah’s words at the Seder, which he wrote when Jerusalem was under siege, ‘May they learn war no more.’ I pray for a better way, for Israel, the whole Middle East, this war-torn world. I pray for leaders, and the collective will, to guide us toward paths of peace. I pray that no one will have to sit in safe-rooms, unsafe rooms or bomb shelters, but that we shall all one day sit, in the beautiful Biblical image, ‘each beneath their fig-tree and their vine.’

The third freedom is freedom from prejudice, the inability to see the human in the other. Antisemitism has soared manyfold since October 7, hate against Muslims has more than doubled; racism is rife. It blinds us and makes us slaves to the pedlars of hate.

I don’t start from the premise that ‘I’m not racist.’ I don’t trust myself. What Alexander Pope wrote about hope may also be true of racism: it too ‘springs eternal in the human breast.’ We must therefore be vigilant, starting with ourselves, including our communities, society, language, collective assumptions.

Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib Alter of Ger taught that the commandment of ‘being seen before the presence of God’ on festivals doesn’t mean visiting the Jerusalem Temple. It’s closer to home. ‘Don’t read “being seen” he wrote. Instead, read “see” (the words look identical in the Torah). See God’s presence in the place where God dwells, that is, within every human being.’ This is beautiful and true – but hard, especially in a season of anger.

Yet it’s not impossible. My friend the Jerusalem rabbi Tamar Elad-Applebaum said the first person to reach out to her on October 7 was an Imam. I’m trying to learn that I, and all of us, need to reach out more.

I pray that, without being naïve or stupid, we can free ourselves from ‘the mind-forged manacles’ that lock each other into the stereotypes of bigotry and contempt.

The fourth freedom is freedom from deep complicity in a culture which commodifies and monetises everything, nature and all its resources, treading down its wonder, and destroying the very powers it holds to heal us, body and soul. Isaiah proclaimed the whole earth to be ‘full of God’s glory’. All of creation, not just humankind, bears God’s image, argues David Seidenberg in his magnificent Kabbalah and Ecology.

None of us wants to be like Oscar Wilde’s cynic who ‘knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.’ But that’s the way much of our collective civilisation has been going, inflicting injustice on each other and disaster on nature. We gravely risk being consumed by our habits of consumption.

We can’t just break free. We’re part of it; we’re implicated. But we can, and must, create islands of freedom, for humanity and nature together. This year, Seder night falls on Earth Day. Can we respect, cherish, and help preserve all the rich forms of life around us, so that our hearts and souls are enriched by them in turn?

God, in these cruel and painful times, guide us along these paths of freedom, mei’avdut lecheirut, from slavery to liberty.