| Dear Community, Here’s my consolation, in a week of listening to so many heart-rending stories. I’m at Noam pre-camp. Noam, just in case anyone doesn’t know, is our youth movement. Actually, that’s not true. It’s more than that. It’s where tens, hundreds, of young people make friendships which last lifetimes, eagerly take on responsibilities for each other, initially for younger groups, then for the whole movement. It’s where they form their identity as Jews, absorbing the values of community, companionship, caring and compassion. It’s where Torah becomes real, in learning, listening, arguing and absorbing. Reuben Green, recently appointed head of the movement, gives me a lift from Port Talbot Parkway to the site. His heart is in Israel, he tells me, but he cares deeply about the Jewish community here in the UK, ‘which is why I’ve taken this job.’ He wants Noam to engage more deeply with their Judaism and their rabbis. He wants to strengthen the bonds with Torah, and, whatever political views Noamniks hold, with Israel, in all its strengths, weaknesses, challenges and dilemmas. Pre-camp is where the madrichim and roshim, leaders and heads, prepare their activities before camp itself begins, with all its frenetic energies. We rabbis are guests here. We are so used to young people being in our ‘adult’ spaces – when they come. But at pre-camp we are in their space, so an invitation to pre-camp is a privilege which to be respected and honoured. After all, at my age of 66, there are 45 years between me and the average age of the 140 Noamniks all around. It’s extremely touching to be welcomed so warmly. It’s a beautiful location, wooden buildings, ecologically designed, in the middle of fields and wooded hills. There’s a small zoo, where I watch a wily young alpaca fail to charm an alarmed two-year-old boy. Deer graze in the nearby fields, my favourite animals. There’s respite simply in breathing. There’s a different kind of beauty here too. Actually, a more fitting term is chen, good grace. It comes across in the friendship with which people treat each other. There’s fun and banter, but underneath, there’s a palpable spirit of kinship and concern. This has been an extraordinarily and exceptionally tough year to be Jewish, especially at many schools and campuses. I’m asked to facilitate a conversation for the whole camp on how to hold spaces so that they are able to accommodate difference. I listened, humbled:‘I had to represent the Jewish community at my university…’‘I wore my Magen David out…’‘When October 7 happened, I was far from home and the people with whom I could process it…’‘I feel so moved to belong to a faith which can hold complex emotions, solidarity, pain, anger at the same time…’‘I felt deep loneliness. The Jewish community around me didn’t encompass my views and feelings…’‘What I value here at Noam is not that everyone shares my mindset. I didn’t expect or want that. It’s the spirit of friendship in which we can hold these conversations…’Anguish sits deep in our souls. We are often far from people who understand us. We need to hear each other. It’s not about arguing who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s the healing that comes from being allowed to say what’s in our hearts, the healing that being listened to brings. I leave pre-camp filled with affection and respect. Shabbat Shalom Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg |
Month: July 2024
Ne’eman – holding each other in our hearts
| Ever since meeting the families of hostages, both here and in Israel, I feel connected. The families made two requests. Do everything you can to secure my relative’s freedom. Hold us in your heart. With regard to the first I feel powerless; regarding the second, yes, I try to hold you in my heart. Indeed, life is about how we hold each other in our hearts, how we honour our connection with each other and even with the very earth itself. Let me explain, and then return to the tears, and hopes, of now. A key word for me is the Hebrew word ne’eman; it stems from the same roots as the familiar amen. Ne’eman means faithful, true and trustworthy in all our relationships, to each other, all creatures and life itself. There aren’t many words we can use both about our dog’s behaviour towards us and our attitude to God. But it works for ne’eman, because it describes how we hold each other in our hearts. I admire people who are ne’eman, who are not just honest, truthful and kind, but reliably so with whomever they are engaged, without prejudice or contempt towards anyone. I bought a wonderful book this week. I came across it by happy accident, while searching for another work by the same author. It’s a slim volume, less than one hundred pages: The Democracy of Species by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I want to order a whole pile, to give a copy to everyone I care for. Kimmerer writes about her efforts to learn her native American language, Potawatomi, from the few remaining elders who know it. It’s a language of relationship, of far more verbs than nouns, because it’s a language ‘for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things.’ It’s the language she absorbs when she sits and listens, simply listens, her back against a pine tree in the woods. It’s the speech ‘of our kinship with all the animate world’. Translating this into Hebrew, I hear the deep truth of ne’eman, faithfulness to life and the God of life. In fact, the most intimate name we have for God, Yud Heh Vav Heh, is a verb. It means being, or coming-into-being, or was-is-and shall-be. It eludes translation. As contemporary theologian Arthur Green points out, the letters, re-arranged, form ha-va-ya-h, ‘existence’. God’s name is the heart of being. To be ne’eman is thus to be faithful to the sacred essence of life. It’s the converse of a careless, contemptuous or exploitative attitude to anyone or anything. It expresses a way of being rooted in awareness and respect. It challenges our contemporary world and leads me to conclusions which often leave me ashamed. The horrors we witness in this times of wars call on us for profound ne’emanut, faithfulness. I feel this first towards my own people, the father I met whose daughter is held in Gaza, the mother whose girl is still a hostage deep in some grim tunnel, the parents whose son was killed on October 7. I feel it too towards Yael, an Israeli committed, despite everything, to action for peace, who wept as she showed me pictures of her friend in Gaza making soup for hungry children. Unless we’re on the side of cruelty, forfeiting our own humanity, we must, somewhere within us, feel kinship with all hurt, all hunger, all suffering. Ne’emanut is deeper than all politics. It reaches down into that kinship with each other and life itself, in which, despite everything, we must not give up hope. In striving to be ne’eman we hold each other, and humanity itself, including our own, in our hearts. We testify against cruelty, hatred and destruction. We live in solidarity with life. |
We all need our moments of hope and reprieve
We need our bursts of joy and relief. That’s what Watkins’ great goal in the 90th minute of the Euro semi-final did for England on Wednesday, – though it may have felt different in Holland. It doesn’t spell an everlasting end to war, or no more human misery, but we all need such moments of reprieve.
‘Write about hope and resilience,’ my agent told me, ‘That’s what people want to hear.’ So that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’ve ditched the serious piece I just drafted in favour of what follows, especially as I’ve been lucky enough to have wonderful moments of positivity this week.
‘For those few seconds we were eye to eye,’ said Hugh Warwick, in a delightful talk he gave at my home last Sunday, during EcoJudaism’s awards ceremony at which our synagogue got gold. He was speaking about close encounters with hedgehogs. After all, he’s the author of A Prickly Affair (as well as many other books, including a recent best-seller).
He’s also the champion of the British Hedgehog Society. I cold called him a couple of years ago. As I struggled to explain precisely why a rabbi wanted a lecture on hedgehogs, he took the initiative by listing every single context in which the charming creatures are – arguably, very arguably indeed – mentioned in the Hebrew Bible.
Why hedgehogs? Because, Hugh Warwick answered, ‘I love them.’ It was that eye-to-eye, creature to creature, moment that sealed it. And, he added, you can only truly fight for what you love.
Others love hedgehogs too, he continued. ‘Groups won’t invite me to talk about climate disaster, or biodiversity loss. But champion Britain’s favourite animal and they’ll ask you gladly. And once on the platform, I can talk about everything.’
It’s what the great environmentalist Wendell Berry wrote: ‘Maybe the answer is to fight always for what you particularly love, not for abstraction, and not against anything.’
The following day I attended an event for Tree Aid. It focussed on their work in helping local groups in Ghana, particularly women, plant food-bearing trees as part of the Great Green Wall, the 8,000 kilometre long, 20 kilometre wide, tree belt intended to stop the southward creep of the Sahara. It was an evening of music, joy and love for what everyone was achieving. We felt we were watching the young trees and the strengthened communities grow together.
This may all sound stupid when there are wars on, when Bishop Kenneth Nowakowski, a good friend, sends me a picture from Kiev of his Cathedral with smoke rising from a bombsite in the background, and when there’s fighting in Gaza and the north of Israel, and the hostages still remain captive after nine bitter months.
But Ayelet, mother of Naama who’s still held by Hamas in Gaza, sent me a video of their dog. So I sent back a photo of Nessie. Stupid? Yes, I felt foolish taking that photo. But it’s a moment of reprieve, of closeness, and we need them in order to survive. There are times, and parts of the world, which are so cruel that minutes, even seconds, like that are almost unattainable. But when they’re possible they must be seized and relished. If we can, we should share them others.
Every morning we say in our prayers, ‘With great love, God, you have loved us.’ That love may take the micro form of a close encounter with a hedgehog, sharing a film of our dog, a kind word posted, a WhatsApp, or whatever. These may be small things in the global scale, but without them neither we nor the world can survive.
Democracy and Service
The need to cry surged up in me as I left the polling booth yesterday.
It wasn’t about who would win. It was about the act of voting itself, the opportunity to choose freely what cross I marked on my ballot paper. It was about the process of true democracy at work.
I thought of my grandfather. I envisaged him emerging weak and sick from Dachau concentration camp. Then I imagined what he would say about the freedom we enjoy here today.
In how many countries of the world are there genuinely fair and honest elections? Don’t the women, and men, of Iran, and so many other states across the world, long for just this? It’s a matter of deep principle, pride and commitment that, despite all its problems, Israel was founded as, and continues to be, a democracy.
Indeed, writing as a Jew, in how few generations, in how few times and places, have we had the equal right to vote, men and women? In how many lands have we been able to stand for election and represent our constituencies and country? Even when he wrote in Frankfurt in the late eighteenth century about the importance of participating in newly won civic opportunities, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch could only dare to hope for this.
I have been moved, too, over the last weeks to see so many young people, in support of whichever party, volunteering, knocking on doors, engaging in the process of democracy, motivated by the belief, the hope and trust, that one can stand up for one’s values and make a difference to how one’s country is run.
So now the UK has a new government.
When Rishi Sunak called the election, he probably didn’t know that the Torah reading for the following Shabbat would contain the story of Korach. There are of course alternative readings, but the classic understanding is that Korach challenged Moses’ leadership not because he cared more deeply for his people, or had a greater commitment to justice, but because he wanted power for power’s sake. His arguments were not ‘for the sake of heaven,’ true ideological difference which deserve to be debated because truth is multi-faceted, but merely cantankerous personal attacks.
The great majority of those who stood for election in this country are not like Korach. In the early hours of the night, I heard moving speeches, both by winning candidates and former MPs who lost their seats, about the privilege of caring for their cities and their people. That is public service in the true sense of the words. In the classic Hebrew phrase, such individuals intend ‘to occupy themselves betsorchei tsibbur be’emunah, with the concerns of the community in good faith.’
In these challenging times, those entering or re-entering Parliament carry profound responsibilities. I pray for their safety and wellbeing. It’s horrifying to learn of the vile abuse, the online bullying, the threats, including death threats and threats to their families, to which MPs, especially and particularly women, are now so often subject. May God, and we as a society, keep our elected representatives safe from harm, free in person and in spirit, to serve our country.
I pray that our MPs, civil servants and all who work with them, will govern for the sake of tsedek and tsadakah, justice and social justice, chesed veshalom, compassion and peace. May they, and we, work for the national and international good, and for the wellbeing not just of humankind but of our planet and all the intricately interdependent life upon it.
May they, and we, take forward the sacred task of letakken olam, making the world a safer, fairer and better place for everyone, as is God’s will.