Month: November 2017

29 Nov 2017
Sticky Post By Posted in Uncategorized Permalink

Light up a Life

Sticky Post By On November 29, 2017

‘God revives the dead – mechayei hametim’ – Among the many challenging phrases in the prayers, this is probably one of the most difficult. Do we or don’t we believe in life after death?

 

I often reflect on how many possible meanings the sentence contains. Does it refer to literal resurrection? Or does it express how we hold precious in our hearts the love of those no longer with us in this world, so that they, their goodness, their wisdom and their foibles continue to live within us?

 

Are the words rather a metaphor for the whole rhythm of dying and living, of lives ending and new lives being born? Or might they even be a description of the flow of the years as the seasonal leaf fall, the annual dying of autumn, is succeeded by the unfurling leaves and germinating seeds of spring?

 

But this morning a different thought passed through my mind. On Sunday I participated in the moving Light up a Life ceremony at the North London Hospice. It opened with the ancient Hindu right of kindling a flame and meditating on the light of compassion. Later, a father spoke with gratitude, as well as pain, about how his son’s final weeks at the hospice were made bright and full of life by the care and love of staff, friends and family.

 

‘Mechayei hametim: you revive the dead’ – The words are in the present continuous tense; a more unusual, but no less literal, translation might be ‘you bring life to those who are dying’. I thought about the tenderness, love, sorrow, gratitude, humility and gentleness; about the deep sense of service and reverence I have witnessed at the hospice so many times; about how the value of each life and its unique relationships has been protected, and even enhanced, there during so many people’s final days.

 

Perhaps this, too, is what those words mean.

 

And I thought also of so many families and their loved ones who parted in that precious, special place.

24 Nov 2017
Sticky Post By Posted in Ethics Permalink

For the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women

Sticky Post By On November 24, 2017

Often, it’s the little words which do the damage. Or it’s the words not said, like the unspoken ‘but’ after an insincere ‘I love you’. It’s absent in the semantics but all too evident in the intonation, undermining what’s being professed, hurting the hearer to the heart.

It’s with words that we do most of our wounding, – and blessing. That’s partly why the rabbis who studied the Hebrew Bible discounted not one word, ignoring not a single syllable or even a seemingly superfluous letter. It all had to have meaning. Rabbi Akiva was famous for interpreting every particle, every ‘and’ and ‘also’ in the Torah.

There’s a challenging example in these week’s portion. Jacob has just been deceived by his father-in-law Laban into marrying Leah, when it is her younger sister Rachel with whom he is in love. Now, just one week later, Laban ‘gives’ him the latter too in marriage:

And Jacob slept also with Rachel and loved also Rachel than Leah (Genesis 29:30)

That second ‘also’ – it comes twice in six words – is like the laceration of Leah’s wound. That she knows to her core that she isn’t loved is apparent from the name she gives her first son, whom she calls Re’u-ven, ‘Look, a son’, saying, ‘For God has seen my affliction and now my husband will love me’. Thus, the innocent baby imbibes with his first milk the life-long burden of being the son of the one who wasn’t loved.

One wonders: with whom would Leah be most angry, her father, her husband, her hapless, no less wounded sister? Which one of them has betrayed her most? (Yet she still manages to be sister, wife, and eventually mother of six sons and a daughter.)

Leah’s poignant cry, ‘Surely now he’ll love me’, has ached in countless hearts in every generation. It still does.

Decades later, children carry the wounds of homes where love went wrong. Sometimes it’s the after-shock of homes full of violent anger; sometimes it’s the cold absence of affection; sometimes it’s contempt; sometimes it’s abuse, made even worse if others knew but turned a blind eye.

These are hurts which damage not just the body but the soul. They invade a child’s, a woman’s, a person’s, sense of self-respect. They attack the essential inner feeling of being lovable, worthy of another’s love. They penetrate into places to which it is extremely hard to bring healing. Even the memory of such afflictions may be deeply, overwhelmingly humiliating.

Maybe that is, partly, what leads many women to suffer in silence verbal contempt, emotional belittling and bullying, physical violence, threats to their very lives. Sometimes, even amidst the cruelty, the hope in Leah’s desperate words still echoes in the heart, ‘Maybe now he’ll love me???’

Jewish Women’s Aid, similar organisations in other faiths, and national agencies are calling on us not to ignore such suffering. If we glimpse such cruelty within ourselves, we must take ourselves to therapy. If there are victims within our families, or among those we know, we need to think carefully, and maybe seek confidential advice, about how to help. What we must not do is condone; that aligns us with the perpetrator.

We have seen in the Jimmy Saville scandal, and many since, (not exactly the same issue, but closely connected) is not only that there are people whose behaviour is vile, but that there are far more who turn a blind eye, as if the prevailing culture considered it ‘OK’ to treat women, and children, in such ways. It is most definitely not OK.

Leah, we are told, has einayim racot; a kind translation would be that her eyes are ‘gentle’ but the usual rendition is that they are ‘weak’. Maybe, though, the true weakness resides in the eyes of those around her, and all those since, who look but refuse to see.

Jewish Women’s Aid, is the only specialist organisation in the UK supporting Jewish women and children affected by domestic abuse. Their free phone confidential helpline is 0808 801 0500

17 Nov 2017
Sticky Post By Posted in Spirituality Permalink

The pool beneath the heart

Sticky Post By On November 17, 2017

Since as long as I can remember I’ve always loved the sound of flowing water, the fall from the rock ledge of steep mountain streams, the call of small rivers descending through the valleys, the stillness of deep pools among the rocks. It’s as if they sing not only of the physical element of life-giving water but of the spirit which nourishes all life.

The Hebrew Bible is replete with images of water, from ‘the voices of mighty waters, the breakers of the sea’, in the 91st Psalm, to the beloved mei menuchot, ‘the waters of tranquillity’ in the 23rd.

But in the Torah itself it is the be’er, the well, which is most prominent. Abraham’s servant waits by the well for the daughters of the village to draw water; Jacob falls in love with Rachel by the local well. It is at the well that Moses rescues Jethro’s seven daughters from the shepherds who habitually bully them, and a well of flowing water accompanies the Children of Israel through the desert, on account, explain the rabbis, of the merit of Moses’s sister Miriam.

In this week’s Torah portion, Isaac strives to re-open the wells which his father Abraham had dug but which the Philistines had filled in. Clearly, struggles over water resources are as old as civilisation.

The Zohar, the Book of Splendour, the central text of Jewish mysticism, offers this description of the last of those wells:

Come and see: the fount of water and that well are one… For the source which flows into that well never ceases, and the well is constantly filled and replenished. Whoever beholds that well beholds the high mystery of faith itself… Zohar, Bereshit 141

I often wonder what is the secret of inner strength. What enabled Kalonymus Kalman Shapiro, the Piazetsner Rebbe, to continue teaching not just Torah, but a Torah of piercing wisdom and sometimes radiant beauty, week after week in the Warsaw ghetto until 1943? Through what resources of the spirit did so many Tibetan monks resist not only the brutality of their Chinese jailors, but also the temptation to become contaminated internally by hate? What enabled Terry Waite not only to survive 1763 days in captivity near Beirut, but to gain such insight into the nature of resilience itself?

Such gifts belong not only to heroes, but to many people much closer to us. It is far from rare that I witness people struggling in physical or emotional pain, who yet find the capacity, not always but at least some of the time, to draw from some inner source of spirit tranquillity, generosity and a graceful self-possession which leaves those around them humbled and moved.

When people ask me in a time of acute to distress where they should go to find strength, I often ask them what it is which nurtures their spirit. Whatever their answer – music, nature, yoga, a quiet hour with a friend, a walk with the dog, – I say ‘However great the pressure, make sure you don’t deprive yourself of this’.

I believe in that inner well of which the Zohar speaks. I believe there is a space inside each of us, often hidden, a secret in the depths within or beneath the heart, which silently fills with living water. If we pay faithful attention, we can almost hear the slow flow and fall of this secret stream of vitality as it replenishes the pool of pure water from which our spirit drinks.

The fact that, as in the story of Isaac, the well inside us so often gets blocked up doesn’t mean that it has ceased to exist. In our case it’s not Philistines who fill it in with dry earth, but too much noise, inattention, lack of spiritual care.

But when we need it, when we seek to heed it, the well is there inside us with a pool of clear waters in its depths in which to bathe our thought and be refreshed with purity, humility, generosity and grace.

 

10 Nov 2017
Sticky Post By Posted in Community Permalink

Whom we fail to notice

Sticky Post By On November 10, 2017

I’m writing on Thursday evening 9th November, shortly before dark on the night which 79 years ago became Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. In her outstanding book Between Dignity and Despair, Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, Marion Kaplan documents unsparingly the anguish which followed. Thus, Lisa Brauer was forced to sell her home for a pittance:

It was so terribly difficult to destroy… what one had created with so much love. My children had played and laughed here and romped in the grass with the dogs…

Others suffered worse… as we well know.

What is less familiar is Kaplan’s frequent reference to what so many (though not all) non-Jewish Germans increasingly did not, or chose not, to see. Jews became invisible to former friends; children were ignored by their playmates, as if they had never existed. This was of course better than the attention of the Gestapo and their many supporters. But it hurt.

The issue of what people fail to see, of how oblivious they are capable of being to the realities which define the lives of those next door, disturbs Kaplan deeply.

It should disturb us too, and not solely because of the past. I am profoundly troubled by what we manage not to know about those around us today and what we choose not to see.

Many of the reasons are as ordinary as everyday life itself.

We don’t see because we’re too preoccupied with our own lives. If we turned to look too often at the challenging realities facing so many others, who knows if we would complete one single day’s worth of our plans for ourselves and our families.

We don’t see because we simply lack the relevant experience to have the insight.

We don’t see because we’re afraid to look. I often think of George Elliot’s remarkable observation that ‘if we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence’. Were all the anguish within a single square mile from our home suddenly to become audible, we would scarcely be able to bear the onslaught.

These matters are facts of daily life. The truth is that, while it is wrong to be persistently indifferent, we cannot possibly respond to everything which hurts those around us. We have to filter out most suffering if we are to respond in a meaningful way to any of it. That’s the best, often a very good best, which all but the most exceptional individuals can manage. And we need the resources of music, joy, friendship, and beauty to enable us to achieve that much.

What worries me more deeply, terrifies me at times, is the wilful incitement not to care. It’s what hatemongers do with such success.

It generally becomes evident first in the abuse of language. It is through words that we begin to ‘other’ the other, diminishing their dignity, marginalising and then deriding their right to our concern. Contempt for refugees, attacks on ‘foreigners’, resurgent white supremacism in the USA, anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim rhetoric and literature, – these are all key phases in process by which we become blind to the lives, and, in the worst case, eventually deaths, of those around us.

Spreading contempt for others is often the beginning of a profound crime, not only against those whose dignity and rights we thus deny, but also against ourselves. It’s betrayal of our own humanity too.

I’m writing these words partly because I love life and aspire to care about people, yet am increasingly aware of my ignorance of the realities of what so many not far from me, refugees, people who stop you in the street to ask for 20p towards a sandwich, face.

I’m writing them, too, because fear and hatred are on the rise in our world and on this inauspicious date history provides us with a severe and searching warning.

 

03 Nov 2017
Sticky Post By Posted in Israel Permalink

The Balfour Declaration: 100 Years On

Sticky Post By On November 3, 2017

Balfour-Yiddish-Pamphlet

The person who casually commented to me that ‘the Balfour Declaration was a mistake as it made the British have blood on their hands’ was not prepared for the strength of my reaction. As Prime Minister Teresa May rightly said last night, the Declaration is ‘one of the most significant letters in history’, opening the doors to making the Jewish homeland a reality.

To me, and so many others, this is not simply an objective fact. It saved my father’s life. He and his family might have perished in Nazi Germany, had they not been able to emigrate to Palestine. How many in the late 1930s wished they could have followed that same route!

The Balfour Declaration emerged out of The First World War. In the bleak months of 1917, with the Ottoman Empire on the German side, the British sought the support of world Jewry, and, separately, that of Arab groups prepared to rebel against the Turks. Chaim Weizmann, a man of charm, charisma and a diplomatic brilliance sorely lacking in the globe today, turned this belief in Jewish power to advantage. The Declaration was also motivated by Christian feeling for Jews, founded on respect for the Biblical vision of an ancient and courageous people returning to the land from which it was cruelly expelled.

Thirty-one years later, years which contained the terrors of the Russian Revolution, the persecution of Jews in the area known as the Pale of Settlement, the incomprehensible cruelty and slaughter of the Holocaust, and the horrors of World War II, Israel’s Declaration of Independence expressed the aims of the newly proclaimed state in terms closely consonant with Lord Balfour’s letter:

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew Prophets; will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex…

Last night, the current Lord Rothschild, great nephew of the recipient of the letter, referred to these words with careful wisdom, noting, as did Teresa May, that the second clause of Lord Balfour’s note, referring to the rights of the ‘existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’ awaited fulfilment. To that end, he said, the same vision, courage, faith and tenacity had to be devoted by all sides, and the international community, as the realisation of the seemingly far-fetched dream of a Jewish state had itself not so long ago required.

As a lover of Israel, opposed to the boycott, with Israeli Jewish and Palestinian friends, having stood on both sides of the wall, having listened (though only little compared to many others) to pain, fear and the terrible anguish of grief from both sides, I pray for the enduring fulfilment of every one of the 67 words in that remarkable letter. I pray that, as we look back now on Israel’s many and remarkable achievements, we will one day in the not too far future be able to look back on what seems so far from attainment today: peace, security, justice, and the collaboration in the common interest of us all of those who are so often forced to see each other as enemies.

Lord Balfour’s letter also has a third clause, often overlooked, stating that nothing must be done to diminish the ‘rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country’. (The Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws just 18 years later). This touches upon the charter by which we all hope to live in open, plural democracies: freedom of conscience, speech and movement, and the right to live in equality as citizens protected by the impartiality of the law. In far too few places in the world is this truly the reality.

Today we need to do more than defend the right of Israel to exist (a challenge no other country has to face). I believe we must to do our utmost to make whatever personal and collective contribution we can for the peace, well-being, safety, and dignity of life for all the country’s inhabitants, – exactly as Israel’s Declaration of Independence states.

The image is taken from Jonathan Fishburn’s catalogue at www.fishburnbooks.com. The heading reads: Patshegen Hadekliratziah. Pathshegen is borrowed from the Persian and found in the Megillah, where it refers to the letters sent out first by Haman, then countered by Mordechai and Esther, in which the destiny of all the Jews in the Empire is at stake. It makes a telling, partner with the transliterated ‘Dekliratziah’ promulgated by a different empire millennia later.

Get in touch...

Please get in touch via New North London Synagogue, or using the contact form.

Address: Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, New North London Synagogue, 80 East End Road, 
Finchley, 
London N3 2SY

Phone: +44 208 346 8560

 

Your Name (required)

Your Email (required)

Subject

Your Message

To prove you're not a robot, please answer this question: What is the capital of Israel?