September | 2024 | HEART AND MIND

27 Sep 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Israel, The Jewish Year Permalink

Shanah Tovah – may this be a good year

Sticky Post By admin On September 27, 2024

I received an email: ‘Please suggest an alternative greeting: Happy New Year just doesn’t feel right this time round, especially with the anniversary of 7 October.’

Actually, Shanah Tovah doesn’t mean A Happy Year, but A Good Year.

But what does that look like in these cruel times? I have four wishes, hopes, prayers, conditions – I don’t know quite what to call them – for making this a truly good year.

Firstly, I pray for the safe return of the hostages, an end to war, bloodshed, terror, and the misery and grief of innocent people caught up in war. I pray for a political path forward which will ensure the security of Israel and bring safety, dignity and hope to all the people of the region. I write these words from Israel, where I’ve been listening to traumatised people struggling to carry on going and help others keep going, their resilience lacerated by months of ceaseless anguish. I’ve spent the last three evenings with families, each of whom has a child taken hostage. My heart goes out to them; I feel shaken and grief-stricken. I shall hold them in my prayers, together with supplications for everyone facing the horrors of war, and everyone striving, despite the rockets, bombs and rhetoric of violence, to bring healing and hope, even across impassable borders.

Secondly, I pray for a year of compassion and justice. Among my heroes is the imam who met the racism of the crowd outside his mosque not with fear, contempt or anger, but with friendship, food and an invitation to come and share. I’ve listened to so many people who’ve shunned and victimised, fellow Jews and others besides. There’s too much cruelty, hatred, incitement and indifference. I’m determined to join those work for proactive compassion, who reach out, hear and support others, within, between and beyond our communities, so that no one is left feeling unnoticed, unwanted or despised. Maybe we can prove Reverend Martin Luther King right, that the arc of history bends towards justice, and the will of humanity tends towards compassion.

Thirdly, I pray for a better year for our beautiful home, this earth. A truly good year must be a year of blessing for the land we depend on, and the waters, woodlands, fields, insects, birds and animals with which our lives are interdependent. This is a time of Teshuvah, return. The Torah’s first use of the word is when God tells Adam he will return to dust. I deliberately misinterpret this to mean that we must return to a just relationship with the soil and its season, the forests and the rivers. The rabbis distinguish between Teshuvah motivated by love and return based on fear. I long for the time when we, and all the world’s decision-makers, learn to love this earth truly, and cherish all the life that is sustains.

Fourthly, because the chances are minimal that these hopes will be adequately realised, I pray that we will find, and help each other discover, the resilience to face whatever may be coming with courage and creativity. ‘Whatever measure of fortune God metes out to you, acknowledge God most profoundly,’ taught the rabbis of the Mishnah (c. 200ce). It’s far from easy to accept our challenges, physical or emotional, individual or collective, with good grace and strength of spirit. The harder the times, the deeper we have to reach into ourselves, and the more generously we need to treat each other, just in order to keep going, keep hoping and keep working for a better world. And if we can’t do that, what are we?

In all these ways, and more, I pray that this will be a true Shanah Tovah, a good year, a year of strength and hope.

20 Sep 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Spirituality, The Jewish Year Permalink

The shofar and silence

Sticky Post By admin On September 20, 2024

‘Awake you slumberers from your slumber, you sleepers from your sleep’: with these words Maimonides explains the purpose of blowing the shofar each morning during the month of Elul, to herald Yom Terua, the great ‘Day of Blowing’, Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, when everyone who enters the world, and everything that happens in it, comes before God.

The mid-point of Elul has now passed; the full moon was huge and low, clear in the cloudless sky. As that circle of moon diminishes, so the shofar’s cry becomes more urgent.

I love the shofar. My grandfather was a shofar blower, as was my father; we had a shofar carved on his gravestone. We trawled every relevant shop in Jerusalem to find the right shofar for each of my children; they, too, are now shofar blowers.

On our family treks in the beautiful Scottish Highlands, we say to each other when we see sheep with long, curved horns: ‘that would make a fine shofar,’ – not that we would harm a hair on any of their woolly backs.

Maybe that’s why, to me, the shofar calls out for rock and water, hill and col, and everything that lives among them. It is animal cry, human outcry, a crying out to God, to the vastness beyond. It is mortality shouting into eternity, life into the infinite spaces.

Returning to Maimonides, there may be less need for his warning this year. Many of us have nerves worn thin like over-scratched skin, while our hearts sink at the news from the world.

But still the shofar retains the power to stir us, reaching inward, awakening in us something other. Paradoxically, it may not be in the shofar’s sounds, raw and strident as they are, but in the attentiveness with which we await them and the silence that vibrates between them that we go down into ourselves:

‘The great shofar shall be sounded, and the voice of fine silence shall be heard.’

It is this silence that Elijah intuited on God’s Mountain after the tumult of the earthquakes, fire and thunder.

‘Never ask what’s in that silence,’ I was told. It’s different for each person and we ourselves don’t truly know what lies in the depths of our own selves.

Elijah hears that silence as interrogation, ‘What are you doing here?’ I’ve often tried to explore what that simple but penetrating question means.

But this year I want to stay with the silence. I’ve been gripped by a sentence I read in Abbot Christopher Jamison’s book, Finding Sanctuary:

‘If we are faithful, there will gradually be born within us of our silence something that will draw us on to still greater silence.’

This is not the silence of emptiness or despair. It is the silence of fullness, of the richness of life that lies deeper than any language, word or articulate sound. Perhaps it’s what the Bible means by nishmat chaim, the breath of life, or by ruach merachefet, the hovering spirit of God.

Just as this fine silence sounded for Elijah deeper than fire and thunder, so it can sustain our spirit today, whoever we are, beneath and beyond the terrible noise of bombs, rockets and verbal bombardments. May we all be kept safe; may there be a swift end to these dreadful wars.

I believe that silence can be, for each of us in our own ways, the source of inner strength, resilience and hope, imparting a stalwart sense of purpose and inspiring in us a compassionate commitment to life.

13 Sep 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Environment, Israel Permalink

Maybe healing is possible?

Sticky Post By admin On September 13, 2024

I was privileged to be part of four special evenings this week. They’ve left me feeling that maybe, maybe in this torn world, healing is possible.

Sunday was a fund-raising night for Shaarei Tzedek, one of Jerusalem’s biggest hospitals. The subject was Antisemitism in Sport. But it was something different that I took away. Before we got to fouling in football and crossing boundaries in cricket, an elderly man stood up and spoke of being taken to the hospital as an emergency case. ‘Everyone, from teenage volunteers to medical and office teams, was kind. They worked together, orthodox, secular, in hijab or snood. Whoever the patient, any age, from anywhere, – they came first.’ That’s the message I took away.

On Tuesday I was at St John’s, Waterloo, sharing a book-reading with Father Giles Goddard, founder of Faiths for the Climate. His book is a brave spiritual autobiography about his journey to the ministry as a gay man before there was acceptance in the C. of E. Interwoven with his own story is the history of St John’s, his two-hundred-year-old church in the heart of the city, where once on nearby mudflats curlews called freely and now people of all backgrounds seek solace and communion. Muslim scholar Julie Saddiqi facilitated the conversation, opening with a silence in which our unspoken fears and anguish for our peoples was somehow shared. A grace of togetherness embraced us all. ‘You three together. Who’d have thought? In times like these. Wonderful!’ That feedback carried me home with a warm heart. (By the way, the church has a great parting line: ‘Before you go, talk to two people you don’t know.’)

On Wednesday we were online with Rachel Korazim. Clear, compassionate, astute and knowledgeable, she’s the most brilliant teacher of Hebrew poetry. She’s just edited the anthology Shiva, ‘Seven’, referring at once to 7^th October and the traumatic mourning following. The poems are harrowing:

… through the narrow cleft between night and day

The loss of life bleeds into the silent morning routine…(Rabbi Osnat Eldar)

Rachel teaches these poems because these voices must be heard and to raise funds to support care for traumatised people wherever they are. ‘We’re sending therapists to the beaches in Thailand where hundreds of Israelis have gone seeking, seeking… I believe in a different future, with land for all.’

On Thursday we were among the birds, fishes, amphibians and mammals with the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI). ‘Green spaces, quiet water, – nature heals,’ said Faygle Train**, manager of Gazelle Valley in Jerusalem. ‘In their hours off, soldiers come and just sit among the animals.’ (The occasional rabbi stops by too.) ‘Thousands find regained calm in forest hikes. Five hundred million birds pass through the great rift valley here, the last food-and- water stop on their thousands-of-miles migrations.’ Professor Nathalie Pettorelli of the Zoologcal Society of London spoke of rewilding cities, and Ben Goldsmith about the joy this brings: ‘Who’d have thought beavers would breed in Ealing!’ (He knows how to fund it all too.)

‘What about people who don’t get it?’ I asked the panel, ‘guys who replace everything with concrete and plastic grass?’ ‘Don’t argue,’ Nathalie explained. ‘Show them what they’re missing, the birds alighting on the leaves…’

Am I being idealistic, ignoring 75% or more of reality? Probably! But the Talmud says that ‘Return and repentance are great because they bring healing to the world.’ Maybe it’s also true the other way round. By practising healing we can bring return, to our best selves, each other, God, and life.

06 Sep 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Israel Permalink

In sorrow and pain

Sticky Post By admin On September 6, 2024

In this terrible week, with grief in our hearts, despite the feelings of futility that frustrate us and the hundreds of thousands who have taken to the streets of Israel in pain and protest, – despite all this, we must stay resolute in our faith and deeds.

We must continue to believe that our prayers, actions and intercessions will be heard, somewhere; that the remaining hostages will come home alive; that there will be an end to this terrible killing and destruction; that evil will be brought to account; that a better future is possible; that life, every life, is of value, that dignity, justice and compassion are possible; that Hativkah, hope, has meaning, for Israel, for the Jewish People, for all humanity, for the world… May there be an end to this war and the hatreds it has sprung from and engendered, an end to the destruction, hunger, killings, suffering, grief.

‘Lecha amar libbi – On Your part my heart speaks:’ these words from Psalm 27, which accompanies us from now until the end of the High Holydays, capture my feelings. I’m not full of hope just now, but You, God, are telling me to remain resolute and hold hope in my heart.

The horrible news of the murder of six of the hostages has possessed many of us this week.

My soul goes out to the families of all the other hostages. What can they be thinking? We have a special connection with Naama Levy. At the protests in Beersheva, her grandfather Shaul said: The situation makes the hostages’ families feel hopeless. “When Netanyahu says he wants to destroy Hamas, it won’t happen. What is really happening is that he’s destroying us,” he said.

‘Protesters turn on Netanyahu,’ was Monday’s headline in a major British newspaper. That’s true. But it must not be forgotten that it was Hamas who took the hostages and Hamas who murdered them.

The words of Hersch Goldberg-Polin’s parents go round in my heart: ‘We tried so very hard, so deeply and desperately…Finally, you are free…’ But it’s not the freedom they did everything possible to obtain for their only son. As Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, said:

There is no door in the world on which your beloved family did not knock for you, for your rescue and well-being. There is no stone they left unturned, no prayer or plea they did not cry out – from one end of the world to the other – in the ears of God and man.

We’re preoccupied with how these hostages died. But what can we learn from how they lived? Alex Labanov’s friends knew him as “the guy who worries about everyone else.” He was a carer for his parents, who have physical disabilities.

Eden Yerushalmi was very close to her sisters, on the phone to them while trying to hide at the Nova festival, until she cried out ‘They got me.’ Or Danino escaped in his car, rescuing others, then went back to try to save more. Carmel Gat did yoga, in captivity, with children. Almog Sarusi was a guitar player, captured helping his girlfriend, who was murdered.

I take comfort that you were together with such people when you were killed, Hersch’s mother said.

Such people: they were carers, loved their families, were ready to lose their lives saving others, managed to do yoga with children even there, in the tunnels. Let them be remembered not just for how they died, but for how they lived.

As I recited the memorial prayer at the special service we held on Sunday, I was conscious that we know their names, and, tragically, the names of hundreds more. But what of those who have perished in this terrible year whose names we do not know, Jewish, Muslim, Druze, Christian, visitors from distant lands trapped in Israel or Gaza? Did they, too, not deserve life, have families, bear God’s image, hope for a future?

May the powers in heaven above, and the powerful on earth below, bring an end to these horrors.

Shabbat Shalom

Jonathan Wittenberg

HEART AND MIND

Month: September 2024

Shanah Tovah – may this be a good year

The shofar and silence

Maybe healing is possible?

In sorrow and pain

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