The most difficult time to be Jewish

I ought to be writing about the Song of Songs, the most beautiful book in the Hebrew Bible, with gardens and love at its heart; the book Rabbi Akiva described as its ‘Holy of Holies’.

I can’t. The only flowers on my mind right now are whether I can send any to Ayelet, mother of 19-year-old Naama, still hostage to Hamas, because last time we sent some, Ayelet sent a WhatsApp message back: “Good to have something nice come through my door.”

It’s more than 200 days since October 7 and this terrible war goes on, in the north and south of Israel and in Gaza literally, and across the world by proxy. In a different way, it’s also being fought out, or about, in our own communities and minds.

Here is David Horovitz on what’s happening on American campuses, his piece interspersed with shocking footage:‘The initial goal of this inexcusably tolerated murderous hostility is to aid in Israel’s demise — by establishing our country as a pariah state, and rendering it untenable to be associated with, defended or protected. Protected, that is, from the amoral, rapacious, misogynistic, homophobic, and potent enemies who, as I write, fire rockets from the north (Hezbollah), try to do so from the south (Hamas), and advance toward obtaining nuclear weapons in the east (Iran). But if those enemy states, terrorist armies and their facilitators get done with Israel, they’ll be coming for Jews everywhere.’ (The Times of Israel, 24 April, 2024)

It’s terrifying, and it’s not just about Israel, or Jews. The world is in conflict, directly or indirectly, with Iran, Russia and their allies. It’s horrible to acknowledge. That’s why so many of us, whatever our politics, fear and feel for Israel, its hostages, bereaved families, soldiers, whole communities dislocated, living in and out of bomb shelters.

But that’s not all we’re seeing. Day after day we face pictures of the destruction of Gaza. Fellow Jews with whom I speak all acknowledge the horrible suffering of ordinary Palestinians caught between Hamas and Israel in the misery, destruction and death into which Hamas has, cynically and calculatedly, lured Israel into co-responsibility.

That’s still not all. There’s Israel’s government – a coalition despised by many Israelis, according to repeated opinion polls – with hardened extremists in its ranks. There are the vicious actions of West Bank settlers who are not only taking advantage of this war, with everyone looking the other way, but who have for years, through bullying acts of aggression towards local Palestinians, sapped the life blood of Israel’s moral credibility.

So where are we left? In the Passover Haggadah we’re victims: ‘They rise up to destroy us in every generation.’ Maybe not everywhere in every generation, but it’s a broad, sad truth.

Now, though, are we in any way, to any extent, perpetrators too? Has the poison of hatred seeped into our souls? If so, do we, should we, speak such an uncomfortable truth? Add to this the huge sweep of antisemitism, leaving us anxious in places where, until recently, we felt secure.

All that makes this the most difficult, painful period in my lifetime to be Jewish. Jonathan Freedland puts it so well: these issues ‘don’t only rage around the family table: they also rage within us. Indeed, I think that’s one reason why this last half-year has been so hard for so many. We’re having to hold multiple and conflicting thoughts and feelings in our heads and hearts all the time.’ (The Jewish Chronicle April 10, 2024)

All this is even harder because we each, depending on numerous factors including our age, hold these conflicting feelings in different proportions.

We would do well to acknowledge this, with forbearance and generosity. Otherwise, it will be yet one more way in which we become victims of what Hamas did on October 7.

I wonder what God thinks about all of this. Maybe God’s feeling: Why is humanity abandoning my beautiful Song of Songs garden and destroying my world instead?

Celebrating Pesach in this wonderful, terrible world

This Shabbat finds us on the threshold of a difficult Pesach. Our rabbis called the festival Zeman Cheiruteinu, the Season of our Freedom, so I will write about four kinds of freedom (I know there are others), for each of which we struggle. Please forgive me for writing at more length than usual.

The first is obvious and in all our hearts: it’s summed up in the slogan, the demand, the words of hope one sees all over Israel: ‘Bring them home now.’ Let our hostages go. I cannot even begin to imagine the feelings of their mothers and fathers, sons, daughters, family, close friends.

These are the names,’ writes contemporary Israeli poet Yael Lifschitz, paraphrasing the opening words of Exodus:

And these are the names of those covered by darkness…
And these are the names of the children of Israel whose cry
Rises from the depth of the tunnels of darkness… 

(trans. Rachel Korazim et. al.)

Tomorrow’s prophetic reading from Malachi closes with the words: ‘Return the hearts of the parents to the children and the hearts of the children to their parents.’ God, set those words constantly before the eyes and in the souls of those who hold the power to make it happen!

There are many, too, separated by other wars, like the mother and children we hosted who still cannot return to Kharkiv and join their father. Countless innocent people are locked in the dungeons of tyrannies, like Alexei Navalny until they murdered him. May God protect them.

I think, too, of those whose loved ones will never come home, because they died on October 7 or fighting in the war against Hamas. In Malachi’s words, May God’s presence comfort their hearts, ‘with healing on its wings.’

The second freedom is freedom from the horror of war, the hatred that feeds it, the fear it arouses, the destruction it causes, and the grief to which it leads. Judaism is not a pacifist religion; war in defence of one’s right to exist is sometimes unavoidable. But it’s still a disaster, a failure of humanity to find a way to co-exist. It’s far from God’s dream for humankind.

I saw burnt out homes in the south of Israel, and evacuated villages in the north. I’ve seen the charred remains of flats in the suburbs outside Kyiv, people queueing for essentials in freezing February at an improvised market.

I can’t not think of the devastation of Gaza, people sitting dazed in the rubble of smashed up streets. Whatever our understanding of the cause, it’s utter wretchedness. And brooding amidst such misery, and elsewhere in other conflicts, in grief-stricken, anger-filled hearts, may be plans, even hopes, for the next round of war, because violence is liable to feed revenge, which feeds revenge.

So I pray that, ‘the sword shall not pass anymore through the land,’ (Leviticus). I will say Isaiah’s words at the Seder, which he wrote when Jerusalem was under siege, ‘May they learn war no more.’ I pray for a better way, for Israel, the whole Middle East, this war-torn world. I pray for leaders, and the collective will, to guide us toward paths of peace. I pray that no one will have to sit in safe-rooms, unsafe rooms or bomb shelters, but that we shall all one day sit, in the beautiful Biblical image, ‘each beneath their fig-tree and their vine.’

The third freedom is freedom from prejudice, the inability to see the human in the other. Antisemitism has soared manyfold since October 7, hate against Muslims has more than doubled; racism is rife. It blinds us and makes us slaves to the pedlars of hate.

I don’t start from the premise that ‘I’m not racist.’ I don’t trust myself. What Alexander Pope wrote about hope may also be true of racism: it too ‘springs eternal in the human breast.’ We must therefore be vigilant, starting with ourselves, including our communities, society, language, collective assumptions.

Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib Alter of Ger taught that the commandment of ‘being seen before the presence of God’ on festivals doesn’t mean visiting the Jerusalem Temple. It’s closer to home. ‘Don’t read “being seen” he wrote. Instead, read “see” (the words look identical in the Torah). See God’s presence in the place where God dwells, that is, within every human being.’ This is beautiful and true – but hard, especially in a season of anger.

Yet it’s not impossible. My friend the Jerusalem rabbi Tamar Elad-Applebaum said the first person to reach out to her on October 7 was an Imam. I’m trying to learn that I, and all of us, need to reach out more.

I pray that, without being naïve or stupid, we can free ourselves from ‘the mind-forged manacles’ that lock each other into the stereotypes of bigotry and contempt.

The fourth freedom is freedom from deep complicity in a culture which commodifies and monetises everything, nature and all its resources, treading down its wonder, and destroying the very powers it holds to heal us, body and soul. Isaiah proclaimed the whole earth to be ‘full of God’s glory’. All of creation, not just humankind, bears God’s image, argues David Seidenberg in his magnificent Kabbalah and Ecology.

None of us wants to be like Oscar Wilde’s cynic who ‘knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.’ But that’s the way much of our collective civilisation has been going, inflicting injustice on each other and disaster on nature. We gravely risk being consumed by our habits of consumption.

We can’t just break free. We’re part of it; we’re implicated. But we can, and must, create islands of freedom, for humanity and nature together. This year, Seder night falls on Earth Day. Can we respect, cherish, and help preserve all the rich forms of life around us, so that our hearts and souls are enriched by them in turn?

God, in these cruel and painful times, guide us along these paths of freedom, mei’avdut lecheirut, from slavery to liberty.

Celebrating Pesach in this wonderful, terrible world

I’m bewildered by our world today, and struggling. I’m not alone. ‘Can I talk to you?’ people ask. I listen; I care about listening. But what shall I say?

It’s dawn and the garden birds are starting to visit the feeders. They’re singing: great tits, blue tits, goldfinches, wrens. I worry about the blackbirds. I don’t see them for weeks, but yesterday, there they were. I’m lucky; I was raised to notice such things.

My faith as a Jew teaches me that God is in all life. If I listen deeply enough, if I let the other voices in my head fall silent, the ‘I have’ and ‘I haven’t’, the ‘I want’ and ‘I ought’, I will feel the sacred stream of life flow from pool to pool in everything that exists, filling, too, the inner well beneath my heart. For long, dry months I may not be able to access the place, but this current of life does not fail.

But what kind of world is this really?

I think of Romi, a dancer just 23 years old, still hostage to Hamas after almost two hundred days. ‘I’ve switched off everything,’ her father tells me. ‘There’s only one message I’m waiting for, the call that she’s free.’ Daily we pray, ‘Our brothers and sisters from the whole House of Israel, in suffering and captivity…’

Every day, too, I see pictures from Gaza, desperate people. Are they not also made in God’s image? To what future is this hunger and ruin giving birth, irrespective of who’s to blame?

I’ve seen videos made by Nasrullah and Hezbollah, the nefarious protegees of Iran’s murderous regime, how they plan to destroy…

So it’s a terrible world. Yet it’s a wonderful world. It’s a beautiful, cruel, bounteous, unjust, wretched, glorious world. I want to believe with Martin Luther King that ‘the arc of history bends towards justice.’ I wish! Perhaps he, too, was afraid, and spoke not in certainty, but hope.

Into all of this now comes Pesach, festival of freedom. We’re preparing our kitchens, buying matzah, eyeing our bitter herbs, and worrying. So, in line with all the ‘fours’ of the Seder, I’m telling myself four things:

Freedom: Recommit to the struggle for liberty, for Jews, Israel and everyone. Freedom only for some is freedom compromised. Nelson Mandela wrote A Long Walk to Freedom. In truth, that walk is unending, traversing the same tough ground over and again, while the promise of the messianic dream remains many wildernesses away. But that’s no reason not to put on our boots.

Story: Seder is the night of the story. We recount our people’s story and weave into it our own. It’s our past, our present, and our hope for what must be. We need a world that respects and welcomes our stories, Jews or Hindus, refugees, farmers, students, venerable elderly with the wisdom of ninety years. Silence our stories with hate, and liberty is silenced for all. Without stories there’s no freedom.

Earth: The Seder plate is Judaism’s earth-plate, – and this year Seder Night coincides with Earth Day. The field’s crops, wheat, barley, oats, spelt, rye, are matzah’s only ingredient, bar water. The karpas, greens, are anything blessed as ‘fruit of the ground.’ Maror is the soil’s bitter yield. Sweet charoset is an offering of fruits and spices lauded in The Song of Songs. It’s the ‘food of love’ the Jewish way, Earth’s love. Without cherishing the Earth there’s no freedom, because nobody will thrive.

Hope: the Seder journeys upward, from slavery to freedom, from a land of tyranny to a country of justice, dignity, liberty and loving kindness. The BBC’s Radio 4 just launched a new programme, Café Hope, where people share how they’re making the world a little bit better and fairer. The Seder table is Judaism’s Hope Café.

So may this be a year of courage, determination, commitment, vision – and hope!

For these things I pray in these terrible times

Eighteen in Hebrew is signified by the word חי chai, which means life. So I want to write about life. For ten times chai makes one hundred and eighty, the exact number of days today since October 7, six months ago on Sunday, the date on which Hamas, the enemies of life, perpetrated their evil against Israel and ultimately their own people too.

I want to write about life, but I’m struggling, drafting sentences, then deleting them, because my head and heart are full of the horrors that have ensued since.

So all I can manage is a prayer, a prayer for hope and life as we approach the month of Nisan, the season of freedom, the beginning of our journey to redemption, the springtime when we bless the fruitful beauty of God’s world. How frail all these things seem! How much it therefore matters to care for them all the more.

So I pray for life, for everyone in Israel, for the women, men and children still held hostage by Hamas, for the safe return of all the soldiers.

I pray for the tens of thousands of ordinary people in Gaza, caught homeless, helpless and desperate in the middle.

I pray that this war will swiftly end with a cessation of all the bloodshed, the return home of all the hostages, and a viable plan bringing hope for a dignified future for everyone, across Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, so that hatred has no leverage anymore.

I pray for food, drink, shelter and healing, everywhere in Israel and Gaza. How else can I say ‘Let all who are hungry come and eat’ at the Seder table in 18 days’ time?

I pray for everyone striving to heal wounds, work with the homeless and displaced and bring comfort to grief and trauma. May God give them resilience, strength and courage!

We are always allowed to hope and pray.

I want to pray especially for the hostages whose families I’ve met, whose names I know, whose faces I see before me.

Naama Levy, may you be safe in body and strong in spirit. May you soon be held once more in your mother’s and father’s arms. May your dog Bafi jump up at you, against all the rules, when you walk through the door. May you go to the seaside with the Ra’ananot girls, your school and Noam youth movement friends.

Romi, you should know – I hope the knowledge somehow reaches you – that the picture of your smiling face looks out everywhere across your hometown of Kfar Veradim, which longs to welcome you home. May you once more relish the music you love, and dance in each of the six styles of dancing (or more?) your father told me you enjoy. May you spread the joy of your life-loving spirit across everyone you meet.

Oded Lifschitz, may you hear in freedom the words of your remarkable daughter Sharone, who calls in her quiet, collected, courageous voice for Hamas to release you, who minces no words about their cruelties, and who yet can say that she has taught her heart to feel the pain of others. May the fields be replanted which you and your wife tended for decades; may your lifelong work for peace and co-existence resume. May you witness it bearing fruit.

I pray for all the grieving families I’ve met, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Druse. I don’t believe that deeply felt grief is different because it’s on the other side of a border.

I pray that hearts pierced by anguish and grief be filled not with hate, but with healing and compassion.

I know all this may sound stupid, amidst the fighting and dying. But I don’t know what else to say. I fear terribly the turning of our world, our beautiful world, God’s world, towards hatred and destruction.

So I pray for life.

Where there’s hope we’re not just permitted but required to pray. We’re commanded, too, to back up our words with commitments, solidarity and actions. And how anyone carry on without hope?

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