Yehudah Halevi’s stirring lines about his longing for the Land of Israel are much quoted:
Libbi ba’mizrach – My heart is in the East
But I am in the farthermost West.
Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but my heart is not just in the East, but also in the North. I find God in the ancient alleyways and jasmine-scented courtyards of Jerusalem. I find God, too, among the pines and rowans, mountains and waterfalls of Scotland, my ‘wee bit hill and glen,’ where I meet the highland cattle, wild deer and red squirrels and, on a clear day, hear the cry of eagles. Perhaps it’s because the smells of damp grass and woodlands and the fall of the rain remind me of when my brother and I were small, before we moved to London and left this wonder behind.
East or West, North or South, – we discover different manifestations of divinity in different places, but it’s still the same God. Arthur Green describes how the letters Yud, Heh, Vav, Heh which spell God’s mysterious name ‘I shall be that I shall be’, can be rearranged as Heh, Vav, Yud, Heh, forming the word havayah, which means ‘existence.’ God’s being is present in everything that is, and everything that is expresses God’s presence, each in its distinctive manner.
That’s why the Psalmist hears the trees clap their hands and the mighty waters call out, depth unto depth. (We saw plenty of water in Scotland, the light rain, the storm-driven rain, the rain that drenches you in moments, and the rain that yields to the most amazing rainbows for which we’ve ever had the privilege of blessing God.
God can be heard in ‘the tree of life’ which is Torah, in the living trees of the Caledonian forests, and, with a different fragrance, in the warm pine woods of Mount Carmel. Perhaps it’s no accident that one of Scotland’s great nature restoration organisations is called Trees for Life. We visited its welcoming centre at Dundreggan, where the team, helped by volunteers (who wants to join me one day?) raise one hundred thousand saplings each year from rare seed gathered on the steep montane slopes of the Cuillins and Cairngorms.
I was heartened when Mossy and I traversed a mountain glen through which we’d walked years ago as a family. Back then we had to clamber for hundreds of metres through the dead stumps and broken debris, the desolate remains of a harvested pine plantation. But now the whole area was replanted with broad-leaved trees, oak, rowan and birch. The young growth was thriving; soon it will be home to that rich biodiversity Britain so urgently needs to restore.
Next week brings the 1st of Elul, in ancient times the Hebrew date for tithing cattle, but increasingly celebrated today as the Jewish New Year for Animals. Judaism understands all creation to be God’s work. Our civilisation has become increasingly, and dangerously, anthropocentric. But humans don’t, and can’t, exist in isolation. We are a sympoesis, a ‘making together’, in which we and innumerable other lives are interdependent.
That’s why, while I’m always glad to pray with a quorum of ten people, I was happy over the last few days to put on my tefillin, be sung to by waterfalls, joined in my blessings by the baaing of sheep, and accompanied in my standing prayer by a stock-still fellowship of deer.
I haven’t forgotten ‘the real world’ (see below). It’s only that I’ve been listening, with gratitude, to another part of it.
Shabbat Shalom
Jonathan Wittenberg
Please click here to listen to my Radio 4 Thought for the Day from last Tuesday, concerning Hezbollah.