I was privileged to be part of four special evenings this week. They’ve left me feeling that maybe, maybe in this torn world, healing is possible.
Sunday was a fund-raising night for Shaarei Tzedek, one of Jerusalem’s biggest hospitals. The subject was Antisemitism in Sport. But it was something different that I took away. Before we got to fouling in football and crossing boundaries in cricket, an elderly man stood up and spoke of being taken to the hospital as an emergency case. ‘Everyone, from teenage volunteers to medical and office teams, was kind. They worked together, orthodox, secular, in hijab or snood. Whoever the patient, any age, from anywhere, – they came first.’ That’s the message I took away.
On Tuesday I was at St John’s, Waterloo, sharing a book-reading with Father Giles Goddard, founder of Faiths for the Climate. His book is a brave spiritual autobiography about his journey to the ministry as a gay man before there was acceptance in the C. of E. Interwoven with his own story is the history of St John’s, his two-hundred-year-old church in the heart of the city, where once on nearby mudflats curlews called freely and now people of all backgrounds seek solace and communion. Muslim scholar Julie Saddiqi facilitated the conversation, opening with a silence in which our unspoken fears and anguish for our peoples was somehow shared. A grace of togetherness embraced us all. ‘You three together. Who’d have thought? In times like these. Wonderful!’ That feedback carried me home with a warm heart. (By the way, the church has a great parting line: ‘Before you go, talk to two people you don’t know.’)
On Wednesday we were online with Rachel Korazim. Clear, compassionate, astute and knowledgeable, she’s the most brilliant teacher of Hebrew poetry. She’s just edited the anthology Shiva, ‘Seven’, referring at once to 7th October and the traumatic mourning following. The poems are harrowing:
… through the narrow cleft between night and day
The loss of life bleeds into the silent morning routine…(Rabbi Osnat Eldar)
Rachel teaches these poems because these voices must be heard and to raise funds to support care for traumatised people wherever they are. ‘We’re sending therapists to the beaches in Thailand where hundreds of Israelis have gone seeking, seeking… I believe in a different future, with land for all.’
On Thursday we were among the birds, fishes, amphibians and mammals with the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI). ‘Green spaces, quiet water, – nature heals,’ said Faygle Train**, manager of Gazelle Valley in Jerusalem. ‘In their hours off, soldiers come and just sit among the animals.’ (The occasional rabbi stops by too.) ‘Thousands find regained calm in forest hikes. Five hundred million birds pass through the great rift valley here, the last food-and- water stop on their thousands-of-miles migrations.’ Professor Nathalie Pettorelli of the Zoologcal Society of London spoke of rewilding cities, and Ben Goldsmith about the joy this brings: ‘Who’d have thought beavers would breed in Ealing!’ (He knows how to fund it all too.)
‘What about people who don’t get it?’ I asked the panel, ‘guys who replace everything with concrete and plastic grass?’ ‘Don’t argue,’ Nathalie explained. ‘Show them what they’re missing, the birds alighting on the leaves…’
Am I being idealistic, ignoring 75% or more of reality? Probably! But the Talmud says that ‘Return and repentance are great because they bring healing to the world.’ Maybe it’s also true the other way round. By practising healing we can bring return, to our best selves, each other, God, and life.