Month: August 2025

29 Aug 2025
Sticky Post By Posted in Community, Interfaith, Israel, Refugees, The Jewish Year Permalink

Hearing God In Our Heart

Sticky Post By On August 29, 2025

This week brings the new moon of Elul, the month of Teshuvah, return. From its first day until Shemini Atzeret we recite Psalm 27 every evening and morning. I know one shouldn’t have favourites, but I love this Psalm. It’s filled with the longing to find God, to feel God’s presence in the world and the gift of God’s breath in our hearts.

The Psalms begins: ‘God is my light.’ The rabbis differentiated between the outer light of the sun which brings dawn and dusk, and the inner light of the sacred, hidden within all creation, which only the eye of the spirit can see. The Psalm invites us to look at the world through such eyes.

Sometimes this is gifted to us in moments of wonder. Nicky and I were standing on the slate-rock shores of the Isle of Seil at twilight when we saw an otter climb out of the sea onto the deck of a small fishing boat, walk slowly along it, pausing twice to look cautiously in our direction, before sliding back into the water. With it slipped away the last orange band of sunlight behind the black outline of Mull. For a few gracious minutes we saw into the world’s secret life.

At other times, we have to earn deeper vision by looking with eyes of compassion. I’m at the supermarket cash desk, someone annoyingly slow is in front of me and the cashier’s taking too much time. I look again and see differently: here’s a man who’s grown frail, struggling to manage with just one functioning hand. The woman at the till, knowing she’ll get complaints from the queue, gets up from her seat, speaks cheerfully, helps the man pack and place his card on the reader.

The incident may be trivial. But if we looked more often with compassionate eyes, we might be less impatient, less frustrated, and notice more often the sacred dignity in lives we might otherwise have ignored or even despised.

The Psalm continues: ‘God is my light and my salvation.’ Sometimes this is an urgent prayer. Bishop Nowakowski texted me yesterday:

I’m in Ukraine for several days… last night was especially challenging with the bombs of death and destruction… With prayerful best wishes, Kenneth.

It’s a supplication Israelis, and Palestinians, know only too well.
But, hopefully more often, God is our salvation in a different sense. Seeing into the inner life of the world, becoming more aware of people’s dignity and struggles, and the fragile beauty of non-human life around us, we appreciate more deeply that we’re here to care for all being, because God’s presence resides in it all. We are saved from hopelessness, aimlessness and depression, and find new strength and purpose.

‘For you my heart speaks,’ says the Psalm, meaning that God is present in our hearts and speak to us there. If, amidst our fears and distractions, we can nevertheless listen with our heart, with attentiveness and humility, we will perceive life with deeper wonder and compassion and find our purpose in caring for it in whatever ways we can. That is a great secret of the path of Teshuvah, return.

In these harsh times, may God be our light and our salvation on this road.

29 Aug 2025
Sticky Post By Posted in Spirituality, The Jewish Year Permalink

The summons of the Shofar

Sticky Post By On August 29, 2025

Elul is the month of preparation, of awakening, when the shofar is sounded succinctly each morning, before it cries out in one hundred protestations on Rosh Hashanah:

Even though it is sounded simply by decree of the Torah, there is an implied meaning in the shofar’s call: ‘Wake up, you sleepers, from your sleep, you who slumber from your slumbers. Search your deeds… Remember your Creator.’ (Maimonides: Laws of Repentance 3:4)

The first note of the shofar is Tekia, a sustained and aspiring outpouring, as if to say, ‘Listen! This is an amazing world. Consider that tree, sustaining the lives of so many birds, giving shade through scorching days. Hear the sound of the longed-for rain as it falls on the leaves. Watch the moon fade away as the dawn sun brightens. Pay attention as the birds sing out their homage at twilight, while the orange horizon deepens into red. Melo chol ha’arets kevodo – All the earth is full of God’s glory.

But how this world is broken. ‘Shevarim, fractured, in pieces,’ observes the shofar. ‘Why did you have to flee?’ we ask our guest from Afghanistan. ‘Because they murdered my brother.’ I switch off the news; I can’t bear hearing any more about drone attacks and bombed-out buildings. I don’t want to know that yet again a climate target has been missed. I go down the street to the nearby woods for solace: who dumped that pile of cans and plastic bottles, as if the world was our rubbish heap?

‘Teru’a; weep!’ cries the shofar. ‘Yelulei yalel,’ explains the Talmud: ‘sustained sobbing.’ We must go deeper than anger and frustration; we must open our heart to the hurts and the tears. That young woman, she’s crying for her husband who won’t be returning, won’t open the front door and lift up their youngest, who comes running towards him, in a great hug. But not now, don’t cry now; she must hide her grief from the children. ‘All our tears are gathered at the New Year, all our anguish, all our pain,’ wrote Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, known subsequently as the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. ‘They become disembodied,’ pure outrage, pure weeping. They ascend to the throne of God, who hears because the anguish of the world is close to God’s heart.

Therefore no, don’t despair! Teki’a, calls the shofar: take strength! Remember the sacred spirit that flows through all life! Remember life’s wonder! Listen; that bird, it’s a cuckoo come back from a three-thousand-mile journey. It’s here again. And we’re still here. We shall regroup, repair, rebuild our faith, our spirits, our world. We shall find the energy. We shall never surrender our souls, our vision, our determination, our hope. We shall heal the world, and if not the whole world, if not even this country, then at least this small corner, this tiny portion of infinite, sacred life with which we are entrusted, for which we are responsible, right now.  

Thus, day by day the shofar calls to us, cajoles us, summons us, inspires us, until its great outpouring on Rosh Hashanah, the renewal of creation.

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Address: Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, New North London Synagogue, 80 East End Road, 
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