Month: August 2019

30 Aug 2019
Sticky Post By Posted in Community, Environment, The Jewish Year Permalink

The Jewish New Year For Animals

Sticky Post By On August 30, 2019

The new moon of Elul is approaching, the month of wakefulness. Every morning the shofar calls, ‘Awake, you slumberers; rouse yourselves, all you who are asleep’ (Maimonides). For soon all life will pass before God, in judgment tempered by love.

But the new moon of Elul is not merely the herald of Rosh Hashanah, the New Year par excellence. According to the majority view in the Mishnah, it is also a distinct new year in its own right:

The first of Elul is the new year for tithing cattle. (Mishnah: Rosh Hashanah 1:1)

Something of the kind must have been going on at the farm next to where we stayed last week for five wonderful days on the Isle of Mull (maybe it’s because the farmer almost certainly wasn’t Jewish that he got the date slightly wrong). Most mornings only a few highland cattle were in the yard. But on this particular day there were tens of them, cows and calves, with shovings and mooings, while the farmers with their crooks looked about as successful in trying to direct them as secondary-school teachers on a challenging day. No, it wasn’t an entirely bucolic scene; in the loud and frequent lowings were the indisputable tones of fear. The abattoir was just a dozen miles down the road.

The truth is that this is all too close to what the first of Elul originally was, the date on which all calves born in that year were counted and every tenth delivered to the Temple to await its turn to be sacrificed.

That was two thousand years ago. In recent times the first of Elul has been re-invented as The New Year for Animals, in exactly the same way as Tu Bishevat was re-created as The New Year for Trees. (See Hazon.org)

It is far from insignificant that this is the very date when the shofar first calls to us to account for our lives before God, ourselves, each other, and nature itself. The shofar is fashioned from the horn of an animal. It has always sounded in my spirit as the cry of all life, of the animals, forest, mountains, rivers, rain and mists; as a plea for life from the depths of the heart of all living being.

It’s not just because I love animals, because I find companionship and consolation in the presence of those animals who have been humankind’s partners for hundreds of generations. It’s also because I cannot bear the thought of the cruelty with which we habitually treat them, the disregard, the wilful ignorance, the contempt for their suffering. It’s also because I am terrified that we have spread so many poisons in the very elements of air, soil and water, and so trivially and thoughtlessly scattered the detritus of our carelessness and self-regard, that we will kill the birds, fish and bees, the invisible insects and the great wild animals. It’s because I fear, too, that only in the eleven-and-a-halfth hour will we truly understand how deeply interconnected we are, that our physical, moral and spiritual wellbeing is interdependent with all life. It is for all these reasons that I believe that a day demarcated in the calendar for honouring and respecting animal life is so important.

But a sole and single day is insufficient. The most urgent issue for humanity in our time is the rebalancing of our relationship with all life, the reconsideration of how we consume, travel and waste. For certain, there are sacrifices to be made. But the gains are greater: a deeper awakening to wonder, respect, awe and kinship; a renewed integrity and wholeness to our moral and spiritual being; the knowledge that what we bequeath to our children’s generation will not be a wasteland but somewhere beautiful, nourishing and inspiring.

I am horrified by the behaviour of my own species. I cannot say I am not guilty. But I want and intend to do all I can to make atonement with nature, and in so doing, with God.

 

09 Aug 2019
Sticky Post By Posted in Spirituality, The Jewish Year Permalink

Building the Temple in a riding centre in Toxteth and a crocheting commune in Tel Aviv

Sticky Post By On August 9, 2019

There is no such thing as neutrality, wrote the Hasidic teacher Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib of Ger, known after his work as the Sefat Emet. He was quoting the ancient rabbinic saying that ‘any generation in which the Temple is not built is a generation in which it is destroyed’. On Tisha Be’Av, the bleak fast which begins this Saturday towards the close of Shabbat and continues until dark on Sunday, we remember the destruction and commit ourselves to rebuilding.

In referring to the Temple, the Sefat Emet didn’t only have in mind a physical construction on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. His was the temple of the spirit, a fourth dimension in which we live according to what God asks for us. If we did so, this physical earth too would be transformed into a world of loving-kindness, justice and peace. It would finally become the sacred space God dreamed of at creation.

I have watched the Temple being built – and destroyed – in many places; so, I’m sure, have you.

I’ve seen its foundation stone set in the Drop-in for Destitute Asylum-Seekers. Bearing the wounds of trauma, yet all too often unwanted, unheard, un-helped and rejected, here people find an island of humanity. If someone were to ask: ‘What’s that got to do with Tisha Be’Av?’ I would answer: on this date our people were made homeless by the sacking of our sacred city and our land; this is the day our people became refugees:

Judah was exiled through poverty and hard labour;
her pursuers trapped her in the narrow passes…(Lamentations 1:3)

I’ve seen another keystone at Kuchinate in south Tel Aviv. Here Eritrean women, who’ve undergone horrors of which they do not speak, can earn enough money to avoid having to live on the streets and resort to prostitution to save their young children from hunger. They weave beautiful baskets to the sound of Eritrean music; they cook familiar dishes and find solidarity in working together.

The Temple is not just a structure of stone; it is also made of trees and meadows, of harmony between nature and humankind. I’ve seen it destroyed in sweeping measure, but also, on a scale as yet too small, recreated. I’ve walked with the family amidst bare mountains in Scotland and, revisiting them years later, seen flourishing woodlands. I’ve planted trees myself to restore the forests of the Jerusalem Hills.

God’s Temple is being built in numerous and unimagined ways. Esther Sills, new on the staff of The Council of Christians and Jews, told me how she connected Park Palace Ponies, a riding centre in an abandoned cinema in Toxteth, with asylum-seeker children. They aren’t allowed to go to school, she told me; they’re stuck inside their accommodation, isolated and frightened. But when they met the ponies they relaxed, smiled for the first time, gained confidence.

This reminds me of a moment of holiness in a central London hospital, where, my friend Jane told me, they brought a horse up 14 stories in the lift because a dying girl wanted to say goodbye. A few weeks later, Jane married her long-time partner there, in the visitor’s room of the neighbouring ward. The nurses allowed flowers; they decorated the whole area; they helped bring Jane to her marriage in a wheelchair. Less than a week later, she died, wise, accepting and at peace.

As we fast on Tisha Be’Av we think of our people’s pain through history, of the suffering of many peoples, of the devastation of nature, – and we therefore resolve to be builders of the Temple and not its destroyers. According to tradition the Messiah is born on Tisha Be’Av afternoon; let the Messiah of hope and commitment be born inside each of us then.

It is essential, wrote Rebbe Shalom Noach of Slonim, that ‘a broken heart belong always to the world of building, not to the world of destruction’.

 

02 Aug 2019
Sticky Post By Posted in Community, Ethics, The Jewish Year Permalink

75 years since the Porajmos, the murder of the Roma in Auschwitz

Sticky Post By On August 2, 2019

Today is the first of Av, month of sorrow. As the rabbis taught, when the moon of Av waxes, joy and celebration wane. The sad mood of the three weeks bein hametsarim, ‘between the troubles’, which began on 17 Tammuz, the date when the walls of Jerusalem were breached, now intensifies. It will culminate in the fast of 9 Av, when we reflect on the destruction of the first and second temples in Jerusalem.

Yet this month is also called Menachem Av, ‘Av the Consoler’. Perhaps this is because of the tradition that the Messiah will be born on its ninth day. Or maybe this very belief is an expression of faith and determination: we can and shall move from destruction to creation, from mourning to the celebration of the world’s birthday on Rosh Hashanah, the New Year.

Consolation comes, in part, from companionship and solidarity. ‘My friends have betrayed me, passers-by laugh at me, nobody cares’, writes the author of the Scroll of Lamentations, which we read on the eve of the fast. Only when we care and notice, only when we uphold and protect each other’s humanity, will the world truly change.

Later today I will attend the memorial for the Roma and Sinti peoples in Hyde Park.

In 2015 the European Parliament declared 2 August European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day to commemorate the Porajmos, ‘The Devouring’, the murder of 500,000 Sinti and Roma in Nazi-occupied Europe. It was on this date that the prisoners in the so-called ‘gypsy family camp’ in Auschwitz-Birkenau were gassed.

I have a huge Holocaust library, hundreds of books. But I’m ashamed to acknowledge how little I knew about the history of the Roma under Nazism. Yet the fate that overtook them is close to that of my own family.

The Nuremberg laws, which deprived my father of citizenship, also applied to the Roma. In 1938 Himmler designated as ‘asocials’ ‘gypsies and persons travelling in gypsy fashion who have shown no desire for regular work or have violated the law.’ He also included ‘all male Jews with previous criminal records’; on Kristallnacht this expanded to include simply ‘all male Jews’.

On his visit to the site in July 1942, Himmler ordered the swift expansion of Auschwitz II: ‘See to it that you move ahead with the completion of Birkenau. The gypsies are to be exterminated. With the same relentlessness you will exterminate those Jews who are unable to work’ (Auschwitz: D. Dwork and R. Jan van Pelt, p. 320)

The ‘gypsy’ camp was situated near what later became the ‘family camp’ for Jews from Theresienstadt. Thus my great-grandmother Regina, imprisoned there until she was murdered a month before them, must have witnessed the fellow-suffering of the Roma from close by.

In fact, August 2 was not the date initially designated for the destruction of the Roma. This was scheduled for May 16, but the camp guards met with such resistance that they withdrew, – to devise a more deceitful plan. Hence May 16 is commemorated as Sinti, Romani and Roma resistance day. Similarly, to honour the courage of those Jews who resisted physically and spiritually, in establishing 27 Nissan as the appropriate date, the Knesset named it not Yom Hashoah, but Yom Hashoah veHagevurah, the day of devastation and courage.

I’ll go to Hyde Park on the 75th anniversary of the Porajmos, out of solidarity and to learn. I’ll go not just because of the past, but for the future, to join the call from today’s commemoration at Birkenau to end ‘racism, antigypsyism and antisemitism in Europe and worldwide and work consistently for the rule of law and democracy’.

Only if humanity stands together can we travel safely from loneliness and sorrow to creativity and hope.

 

 

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