When I was little, I was known for hiding under the table. I felt safe among the shoes, hidden by the overhanging tablecloth, comforted by conversations drifting down without my needing to follow.
‘Make me a sanctuary,’ says the Torah this week. Sanctuary comes in many kinds and we all need our own, especially when days are difficult.
‘Tell me a lie and I’ll give you a dollar,’ said the rich man to Herschel Ostropolier, the wit of Yiddish tales. ‘What d’you mean one? You just said two!’ he answered instantly. I think laughter is a kind of sanctuary, so long as it’s not cruel. Humour can be a form of courage, giving the mind some breathing space from the world. We laugh at Haman on Purim; we’ve always laughed at our enemies. It’s very Jewish, – and very British too. (Next Friday is Purim, when I can talk rubbish with licence.)
‘Animal sanctuary,’ says the sign in the park. There are sanctuaries provided for animals, and animals who provide sanctuary. ‘My daughter tells the dog everything,’ is a not infrequent parental observation. For many of us grown-ups too, our canines are our confidants.
‘When can we come to your garden?’ I’m asked, ‘the children need your guinea pigs.’ Watching them watch them, I think that though it’s not what the holy book meant by ‘Make me a sanctuary,’ something is happening which I would call sacred.
Music is sanctuary. It’s no accident Beethoven chose Schiller’s Ode to Joy for the choral movement of his Ninth:
Joy, beautiful flame divine,
Daughter of Elysium!
Maybe all art doesn’t just ‘hold as t’were, the mirror up to nature,’ as Hamlet said. It’s also a magic mirror, an entrance to a domain of beauty which secretly co-exists within our daily world of challenge and self-doubt. Music, literature, art: they are soul-balm, reprieve, relief and restoration. What’s sanctuary, if not that?
(As for those people who, ears in headphones and eyes on phones, walk straight at you on the pavement, perhaps the charitable thing is to appreciate that they’re not in the street at all but in their private heaven. After all, plenty of those who think they own heaven like to push others away.)
Gardens are sacred. ‘Do you think of your garden as a sanctuary, with its hedges all around?’ I was asked on what remains a highlight of my career, when we hosted Gardener’s Question Time. I hadn’t, until then. But it’s true. Love and care are what till a garden, alongside schlepping manure. Perhaps the many kinds of snowdrop, beloved by Nicky, are our garden’s Menorah, illumining the long January / Tevet nights, and the tiny blue irises I stared at yesterday are the reflection of heaven.
Mountains, forests, small grass islands by a stream: these are sanctuary too and every tree is the tree of life.
Sanctuary isn’t just for joy; you don’t have to be happy to find it. Sorrow may be when we need it most. Isabel Allende describes the long nights watching over her sick daughter, wandering the house ‘adrift on a sea of pain,’
My daughter has given me the opportunity to look inside myself and discover interior spaces – empty, dark, strangely peaceful – I had never explored before. These are holy places… (Paula, p. 272)
Prayer may be sanctuary. Prayer isn’t really about knocking at heaven’s gates but pushing at the door of our heart. To my mind, whether prayer ‘works’ is less a question of ‘Did God say yes?’ than of whether we found our way to our spirit, God’s breath in us all.
What is there within sanctuary when we find it? ‘The ark of testimony,’ says the Torah. But testimony to what? To God, to life, to a quiet knowledge of unassailable belonging to which one doesn’t put words.