I don’t understand.

The world is so beautiful. The world is so full of horrors. Life is so precious, so treasured. Life is so cheap, so brutalised. I can’t be the only person who struggles, uncomprehending, with these contradictions.

Here’s a glimpse into our gorgeous garden: rhododendrons I’ve loved since childhood in Scotland, when I put the fallen trumpet flowers, full of rain, like thimbles on my fingers.

Here’s to the apricot which blossoms so early that the March frost sometimes ruins it. Could this be a glut year, with so much fruit that my jam-making friends can collect ten jars’ worth? If so, I’ll bottle some too, remembering my father’s aunt Sophie who loved her fruit garden but perished in Auschwitz.

See the pink flowers of the copper beech reaching into the sky. Soon they’ll be followed by red-brown leaves.

The birds are serenading the sunshine and its time to put out soft wool as additional lining for their nests. In a month we’ll say in The Song of Songs ‘The call of the turtle dove is heard in the land.’ That bird is almost extinct in Britain, but I met a small-holder who’s breeding them until they can be released and make their return, such love people have for life.

And such is the contempt for life: the hatred that makes its own leaders murder tens, hundreds, of thousands of their own people; the rhetoric of success that makes no place in its heart for the hundreds of innocent people who die as ‘collateral damage.’ Meanwhile millions spend their days and nights in resigned exhaustion in safe rooms and bomb-shelters, if they have any. My heart goes out to them, in Israel and everywhere.

And yet it’s not simple. Evil and cruelty cannot be ignored. They can’t be left to stockpile forever; stockpiles are never just for show. Might there be, or have been, better ways of confronting them? How can we truly know?

Then, too, there is the immense courage of those called to risk their lives in fighting. This, also, must be recognised, especially by those of us currently far from danger.

Who can see where all this will go? ‘Humanity must perforce prey on itself like monsters of the deep:’ those lines from Shakespeare stick in my head, – except that sea-monsters don’t cause so much damage or risk the lives of everything.

What does one take from all this? Cynicism? Hopelessness? No! That’s not the way of the human spirit, certainly not the Jewish way. Love of life is too strong; the need to care is too compelling; the roots of compassion go down too deep.

Even in wartime, we must honour and cherish life with as much respect and mercy, and in whatever situation and manner, we can. We must not let our heart be shrunk, our soul extinguished, our compassion exhausted, or our eyes be blinded to beauty and blessing.

Back in April I went to the Iranian supermarket where I sometimes shop. ‘Your friends in Tehran?’ I asked the women at the checkouts. ‘They’re OK. Yours in Tel Aviv?’ ‘OK,’ I answered. ‘Thank God,’ they said. ‘Thank God,’ I said. I must go there again. We long, together, for freedom, peace and life.