Being rabbi for 30 years of a community I love has brought many blessings. Everything I cared about when I started, I care about more now. Far from making me cynical, I have been invited into many situations which have opened my heart and deepened my sense of the presence of God within all life. During this time the congregation has grown, diversified, drawn in much rabbinic and non-rabbinic talent and provided me with headaches, worry, but most of all with inspiration.
 
I’ve been blessed with a close and happy marriage with Nicky and the opportunity for us to bring up our three children within the community.
 
I enjoy writing, at once an inner necessity and a creative challenge, and have published a number of books, including The Silence of Dark Water: An Inner Journey; and Walking with the Light, about my pilgrimage from my grandfather’s former shul in Frankfurt along the Rhine and home to England, accompanied by my dog, and bearing a symbolic flame with which to illumine the Ner Tammid of the new synagogue we built in North London.
 
I care greatly about interfaith work and have many close relationships within both the Christian and Muslim communities.
 
One of my greatest satisfactions is the synagogue vegetable garden, pastoral not only in the agricultural sense, but also because I often work there together with people struggling with different kinds of illness or challenge. The strawberries, tomatoes and potatoes symbolise everything I’ve been privileged to see grow and develop.
 
For the last 9 years I’ve been Senior Rabbi of Masorti Judaism in the UK and President of the RA’s European Region.
 
I am grateful to my parents, my brother, and my teachers in Judaism, especially to my grandfather Rabbi Dr Georg Salzberger and to Rabbi Dr Louis Jacobs, and to many others, for the inspiration they have given me.
 
I am most grateful to my community, The New North London Synagogue, for the trust, kindness and love shown to me, and for enabling me to learn and give and receive.