I’m writing on the night train home from Scotland, trying to garner in my mind’s eye and in my heart the wonderful sights of mountains and eagles, mist and rain, waterfalls and sea shores, and the sunset quenched in the flaming red water; and to preserve in the soles of my feet the sensations of scrambling on grass, rock and heather; of walking, running and climbing through the thick highland mud.

I had no shofar with me to blow on the first day of Elul, but instead stood and prayed next to the hill-wise sheep with their impressive curled horns. It is of them and their glens that I will think on Rosh Hashanah when I say the blessing and endeavour to listen as deeply as I can to the sound of the shofar. Their hills are my personal Sinai, my place of revelation, where the wordless utterance of God says simply and constantly, ‘I am’.

I haven’t forgotten during this fortnight in the Highlands that the world is complex, full of violence, pain, alienation, unresolved conflicts and millions of innocent people who suffer for what they have not done. I spend most of my life inside the circumference of such concerns.

But all of us need to charge our heart and soul, to fill them with beauty, grace and inspiration so that we have the strength of spirit and the resilience to negotiate with courage and loving kindness the struggles of our own life and those of others. I often ask people when they turn to me in times of distress: ‘What nourishes your spirit?’ Perhaps it is music, prayer, poetry, nature, walking the dog, the companionship of those friends to whom you don’t have to tell everything because they know and understand. Then I say to them, ‘Whatever happens, take the time to restore your soul’.

Elul and Tishrei are the months of the beautiful 27^th Psalm, ‘On your part does my heart say: “Seek my Face.”’ The heart, teaches the Zohar, is God’s temple within each person, God’s sacred abode in each and every life. It longs for its home with God, and, like a satnav to a different dimension, tries to help us locate it here on earth.

Libbi, our elder daughter has always loved otters. The Isle of Mull has at least one otter family for every mile of its 360 miles of coastline, so at dusk we went down to the shore to see if we could find one of their havens. We sat in silence as the twilight deepened in to darkness. We listened to the washing of the waves against the rocks, the constant variations in the movement of the ripples of the water, the seaweed, the boats moored a small distance from the shore. We found not a single otter.

Instead a deeper presence found us, calmed and silenced us, and without words reminded us that the world is full of the presence of God. For a moment, we were privileged to enter malchut shamayim, the sovereign domain of heaven.

I am always glad when Shabbat Nachamu, the Sabbath of Consolation, arrives. The bleak fast of the Ninth of Av has passed and we move from contemplating destruction to hope and comfort.

Comfort, O comfort my people; speak to the heart of Jerusalem   Isaiah 40:1

But where does comfort come from? Experience as a community rabbi has made me wary of trite comments like ‘time is a healer’. Time pushes us by the shoulder into the bewildering future. But it rarely fills in the holes in the heart through which, mercifully, painfully, those we have lost make unpredictable reappearances in our consciousness. No one lives only in the present.

In the wider frame of history, what is destroyed is rarely speedily rebuilt. The impact of persecutions, wars, disasters, marks those affected forever, and often defines the lives of their children, even their children’s children. Violence hasn’t vanished from the world, or racism, anti-Semitism and hatred gone away.

So where is comfort?

I saw a sign stuck on a lamppost ‘Ich liebe mein Leben’, ‘I love my life,’ with a small red heart underneath. Thank God, the love of life has tenacious powers. Like the pale leaves emerging in April from the thick, sticky buds of a chestnut tree after a winter of dormancy, the will to live reawakens in the human heart.

Like the wild flowers that grew in the bomb craters of London after the war, life has extraordinary resilience. It finds a foothold once again, not the same as it once was, but life nonetheless.

Destruction is powerful. But creation and creativity have – so far – found the subtle, visceral, tenacious resources to fight back:

However many rings of pain the night welds around me,
The opposing pull is stronger, the passion to break away.   Boris Pasternak

Yet, as life rushes on, what about the wounds left behind?

The issue takes me to the story of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi and his desire to question the Messiah. But where should he find him? ‘Among the poor at the gates of the great city’, Elijah informs him, referring to Rome, recently responsible for the sacking of Jerusalem. The rabbi promptly travels to the great metropolis, where he sees a host of destitute people taking off their bandages and gazing at their injuries. The Messiah, however, removes only one bandage at a time before hastily replacing it, saying ‘Maybe I am needed’.

I’ve met a lot of people like that. Sometimes they come up to me and say, ‘Remember me when you hear about someone else going through what I’ve been through’. It may be grief, depression, illness, the sudden loss of their job. They have turned their wounds into ‘Maybe I am needed’.

Nervous before the start of the Royal Parks half marathon last year, I asked the runners waiting next to me why they were doing the race:

‘For the Alzheimer’s Society, in memory of my mum’
‘For Cancer Research, because of what happened to my brother’

They too have turned their sorrow into ‘Maybe I am needed’.

Such people are my heroes, healers, redeemers, the rebuilders of Jerusalem.

Much as I sometimes wish to, I don’t think I believe in a single personal magical Messiah who’ll descend from heaven on a long rope into the maelstrom of history and solve all its ills.

But I believe in the redemptive spirit in humanity, within each of us, and in our capacity, with each other’s help, to try to turn pain into healing, destruction into rebuilding, grief into consolation, mourning into hope.