Month: August 2018

31 Aug 2018
Sticky Post By Posted in Environment, The Jewish Year Permalink

The fate of the earth: God and our children will hold us to account

Sticky Post By On August 31, 2018

Birthdays aren’t always simple experiences.

I remember as a child looking forward with impatient excitement to my birthday, then agreeing with my older brother that the day after was a low point, ‘because it’s now ‘364 days until your next birthday’. Those were the times!

As we get older we don’t necessarily want our friends to clock the passing of our life. I’ll never forget how we made a card for a relative’s ninetieth and were asked in no uncertain terms to alter the ‘9’. Few of us truly believe we’re getting older at the rate we actually are.

From time to time I’m asked questions trickier than such foibles: Do I send greetings to X? I hurt her, but want to make up, – is it OK to get in touch?

I feel like that about Rosh Hashanah, the ‘birthday of the world’. I love the world, yet know I mistreat it. What greeting should I send?

No-one attends a friend’s birthday, then stays behind to trash his home. But that’s what we do with the earth. It’s not ours. It belongs to God, to all the lives it sustains, and to our children’s children.

Yesterday I met with Michael, Gove, Secretary of State for the Environment. I spoke to many activists beforehand and read their papers: the net-zero carbon emissions target must urgently be brought forward to 2050; air pollution costs lives; intensive farming hurts wildlife and poisons the soil; eating little or, better, no meat would have a huge impact on global warming.

I had a pre-meeting with the editor of the government report: A Green Future: Our 25 Year Plan to Improve the Environment. I asked what legal teeth the good intentions in the paper would have in the forthcoming Environment Act and how urgent the timelines would be. ‘The Secretary of State and the Treasury need to hear these concerns from people like you’, he replied. (I’d been clear to the point of shameless about how many environmental groups I was in touch with.)

I believe the conversation with Michael Gove went well. ‘We need your pressure; hold us to account’, he stressed. ‘The timing is good, as we draft the Act’. ‘Will it comply with the net-zero emissions by 2050 target?’ I asked.

There was one email I received from a Christian activist which had no briefing papers attached. She simply wrote: ‘He’s meeting you because you’re a spiritual leader: you should say something about that’.

I did. Michael Gove was aware that Rosh Hashanah was near. At New Year we all stand before God. We can think of this also as standing before the world’s yet unborn generations. ‘Today is the birthday of the world’, we will say. Then what? What are we intending to do if we don’t want to continue trashing the celebrant’s home? God and our children’s children will hold us all to account, ministers of religion and state alike.

A beautiful, challenging Mishnah (2nd century) insists that every person must say, ‘For me the world was created’, because we each have a unique contribution to make.

‘For me’: what am I going to do about it?

 

24 Aug 2018
Sticky Post By Posted in Environment, Spirituality, The Jewish Year Permalink

The sound of the shofar and the breath of creation

Sticky Post By On August 24, 2018

It is the custom to blow the shofar every day (except Shabbat) during the month of Elul at the close of the morning prayers. So I picked up my shofar early this morning, then remembered the tacit agreement in our household, tacit being the word, that none was to blow the shofar before 9.00 am.

Instead, I simply breathed into the shofar, with no pressure, as I would breathe an ordinary breath. To my surprise, the shofar wasn’t silent, though I’m sure it wasn’t so loud that anybody else could hear it. It made a sound like a gentle breeze across fields or through a grove of trees on a still, calm day. Very quietly, the shofar sang.

It reminded me of a passage by the Hasidic teacher Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Piazetsner Rebbe:

The fundamental reason all beings are created is so that they should sing, for in this way they reveal the greatness of God. Every single created being sings, as we know from The Chapter of Song. Thus, each and every being reveals a spark of the glory of the God of blessings.                      (Derech Hamelech to Rosh Hashanah)

The Chapter to which he refers ascribes words from the Bible to all existence, from the seas and rivers to the eagle and the swallow, whose lyrics are: ‘So that my soul may sing to you and not be silent’.

I always think of the shofar as coming from the depths of creation. Formed from the horn of a ram or mountain goat, its rough, un-honed cry calls of the bond which unites all nature, animal and human. It speaks without words of our bare and basic togetherness in this world of cold and warmth, food and hunger, life and death. The breath which flows through the shofar resonates with the ruach, the breath or spirit which breathes through all life, the spirit of God which hovered over the face of the deep in the beginning and which creates and sustains all living being. It calls us home to the sacred within ourselves, and in all life.

More than in any other section, the Torah speaks this week of our responsibility towards animals: not to ignore a lost ox or sheep; not to turn a blind eye toward a donkey collapsing beneath its burden; not to take a mother bird from the nest with its young and so hasten the extinction of its species; not to harness an ox and ass together, making a mockery of their unequal strength. The Torah and Talmud understood well what Jeremy Bentham later expressed: that the issue is not whether animals are intelligent or able to talk, but that, like us, they are susceptible to suffering.

The shofar calls us back to the bond of life. For too long a utilitarian attitude to nature has prevailed: How much land can I make mine? How much milk can I squeeze from each cow? Farmers do have to make a living in extremely hard times. But if a solely exploitative attitude prevails, humankind will suffer and perhaps perish alongside the world we abuse.

The Mishnah considers whether the shofar blown on the New Year should be pashut – ‘simple’, or kafuf’- ‘curved round’. Tradition decided in favour of the latter, seeing in the shape of such a shofar the image of a person bowed in prayer: ‘The more one humbles oneself the better.’

We need that humility. It’s not the humility of passivity or resigned subservience. It’s the humility of understanding, of realising that the breath which flows through us is part of the same gift, the same song which sings in all creation.

 

17 Aug 2018
Sticky Post By Posted in Spirituality, The Jewish Year Permalink

Praying with the sea and the wild deer

Sticky Post By On August 17, 2018

I have always loved Psalm 27, the special Elul and High Holyday meditation. But yesterday I got no further than the first three words: ‘To David: God, you are my light…’

The light was indeed wonderful across the far north west of Scotland. With glorious disregard for the dismal weather forecast, the sun shone bright across the mountains and the sea. So I set out for an early run and soon found myself alone on the half-mile curve of orange sand where the ocean yields to the hills and glens at Gairloch, There weren’t even any footprints, save the paw marks of a lucky dog who’d been out at dawn to race the white-crested waves.

It hadn’t been my plan when I set out, but I stopped to say shacharit. True, there weren’t the requisite ten people for the quorum. But how often in a life does one have for one’s prayers the company of the sand and the sea, the mountains, the forests, the clear air, the wind and the brightness of sunlight over the bay?

And God was here amidst this simple beauty, and it felt as if in response to my Shema, ‘God, you are one’, God was answering, ‘Yes, I am here; this is my home amidst this wonder. Recognise me; remember me wherever you are, and don’t let all your other thoughts block me out of your heart and mind.’

Later that day, at a roundabout where two major routes through the Highlands meet, we saw two young stags, calmly chewing the grasses and sedge by the road verge, unperturbed, contemptuous almost of all these high-velocity human interlopers; knowing with the same instinct with which they skipped nonchalantly over the tall fences, who is at home in these wild and wet lands and who is not; beautiful.

Had there been time I would have made them my companions in prayer for the afternoon minchah meditation. Instead, I simply looked. I didn’t look with my frequent worried eyes of ‘what’s expected of me and what am I supposed to do?’ I didn’t look with the selfish eyes of ‘what’s in it for me and mine?’ I just looked.

For those moments God was my light.

Now, back home in this Elul month of preparation before Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, a simple prayer flows through me; I’d like it to sing inside me like a clear mountain stream as it tumbles over rocks and through pebbles: Tahareni; purify me.

Help me to see to the quick of life, its wonder, its beauty. Give me eyes of openness and appreciation. Then may my attitude, my words and deeds, reflect back gratitude and kindness. May my response be care and consideration, and courageous compassion for this precious world and this brief time in which to know and cherish it.

God, be my light, to see all life in your light. For, though that light seems brighter and your song clearer where the small birds swoop over the shallow river as it flows from the loch to the sea, you are the heart of everything, all human life, all life.

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

Phone: +44 208 346 8560

 

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