The painful nature of these days between Yom HaShoah, Yom haZikaron and Yom ha’Atzamut has been brought home by the appalling antisemitic attack against Finchley Reform Synagogue, down the road from my own community. I feel for their clergy, lay leaders, and all the congregation, and have written to them in solidarity.
It can’t be by chance that this week’s Torah reading concerns healing. The descriptions of the diseases may seem abstruse and dated: red, green and white creeping sores eating away at living flesh, infected clothing and even the walls of buildings. But the hurts across the body of humanity, and of life itself, are real and rife, and the need for healing is as urgent now as ever.
Such healing must be threefold. What can I say about personal pain? It wouldn’t be right for me to record the details of the conversation at our shabbat table last week between a Ukrainian couple and an Israeli family devastatingly affected by October 7. I only note that they found plenty to share in heartfelt words, and in fellow feeling that words will never capture. What can I say about when I went to thank the man who prayed with me for his family in Beirut and mine in Israel? ‘What do you hear about your dear ones?’ ‘Lost,’ he whispered. Unsure if I heard right, I asked again: ‘Just lost,’ he said, ‘Lost.’ In the Torah, the Cohen who inspects diseased persons requires them to go into isolation for a period of potential incubation, before bringing them back into the community. In our day the isolation, the inexpressibility of pain and trauma, the inner loneliness, is all too real. The question is whether we can we create community with enough sensitivity and heart to include those who bear these deep wounds and, without inflicting further pain, embrace them in our lives.
We need deep healing both across the Jewish Diaspora and in Israel. The Torah speaks of breaking apart those buildings which show ongoing signs of disease across their walls. We are in an opposite position. How can we rebuild after the devastation of war, in Beer Sheva, Haifa, Tel Aviv? I recently officiated at the wedding of a couple whose flat was largely destroyed. How sorely relevant were the traditional words about building ‘a faithful home in Israel.’ Harder is the question of how we can rebuild destroyed houses in the West Bank, like the homes in the village of Khallet a-Sidra, destroyed by Jewish extremists, which the army is preventing the families who lived there for years from rebuilding. This has to be wrong. Harder still is how trust, hope and belief in our shared humanity and future can be restored, for Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and non-Jews alike, not just in Israel but wherever we are in the world. There is too much hurt, and too much hate, plenty of it directed at us too. Every word, every deed that expresses and deepens our shared humanity matters immensely. I hardly dare call this healing, but at least it may mitigate the hurt.
As humanity, as life on earth, we desperately need healing. I think of the Torah’s words ‘I am God, your healer,’ and ask myself, ‘Who is that “you”?’ It’s not just people; it is all life. ‘The earth is God’s’ said the poet of Psalm 24. That includes the rainfall and rivers, the soil and all that it sustains, the tall trees of the forests and their vital underbelly of shrub and scrub, ground nesting birds, beetles and even ants. The Torah instructs us to rip the diseased fabric from an infected garment if the rest of it can be saved. But we are here altogether on this earth, interwoven in one web of destiny, and no single part of life can be isolated and torn away from the rest. If we poison one domain, we allow that poison to seep slowly into us all. Time and again the Torah repeats the word ‘tahor,’ pure; the role of the priest is letaher, to help the ill and inured back to a state of health and purity. I used to think tahor was merely an outdated term for an ideal ritual state. Now I understand the word more truly and see little more urgent that the cleansing of our way of life to allow the very earth to become pure and wholesome once again.
The task of healing is immense. The Torah delegates it to the priests, the Cohanim. Contemporary reality demands it of us all.
May this Yom ha’Atzmaut, on which we celebrate all the many positive achievements of Israel and our People, mark a significant turn on the path to true healing.