admin | HEART AND MIND

29 Nov 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Spirituality Permalink

Saying ‘thank you’

Sticky Post By admin On November 29, 2024

It’s the day after Thanksgiving. I apologise to my American friends for not sending greetings sooner.

‘Thank you’ makes the world go round. If every relationship was graced by the words ‘Please’, ‘Thank you’ and ‘I’m sorry’, not just mouthed but truly meant, humanity would be in a different place. How often I’ve heard it said, with a worn-down sigh: ‘If only he’d just showed some appreciation!’

I’d describe myself as ‘average’ at saying thank you. I admit, I have thought much about it of late. Worry interrupts the nights. There’s anxiety over what’s happening in Israel and around it, worry for friends and colleagues whose children are in combat, worry for the suffering, for what the grim present holds for the unfolding future. There’s anguish over the human sorrows I hear by day, which I’m powerless to relieve and go round and round in my head by night. There’s fear for our beautiful world. Our baby hedgehog Iggy, rescued two weeks ago, will it, please God, make it? It’s a personalised question, epitomising a universal angst.

So the words ‘thank you’ come as rescue. Notice what’s good! Appreciate everything! Don’t miss a chance to say so! I know people who, every night before bed, count five things they’ve been grateful for that day. It’s a good practice; it internalises the habit of gratitude.

Hebrew has at least two ways of saying ‘thank you’. The first is Todah, from the root indicating recognition. Hakkarat hatov, acknowledging the good, is a mitzvah. There’s a special blessing for it: ‘Blessed are you, God, hatov vehameitiv, who is good and does good.’ Setting theology aside, it’s a way of saying thank you to life. Thank you generates generosity; we want to give to others what life has gifted to us.

My second word is baruch, blessed. The rabbis teach that enjoying the fruits of this world without first saying a blessing is a form of theft. A blessing says: ‘This is special; I don’t take it for granted.’ Maybe it’s only an apple, but blessings stop us from thinking things are only or merely, and there are plenty of people for whom an apple, ‘a whole apple just for me,’ would be a miracle.

Judaism is a religion of blessings and thanksgivings. Each festival, over every new item of clothing, for each first seasonal fruit, we say Shehecheyanu: blessed be God who has kept us alive and brought us to this time.

Yet, paradoxically, perhaps the greatest moment of blessing I’ve witnessed was in a hospice. I was asked to see a couple in their thirties whom I’d never met before. The young man was dying and had requested a chaplain to pray with.

I slipped into the side-room with no idea what to say. But the man made it simple. ‘We’ve loved our time together. Tell us a prayer about the love of life.’ I stumbled quickly into a verse from Psalms. I think it was ‘How great, God, are your works.’

I got no further before the man took over. ‘Yes,’ he said, turning to his wife, ‘We’ve had wonderful walks, in the Lake District, the mountains. In London, too. We enjoy city-wandering, old churches, hidden paths.’ Thus they spoke together for two or three minutes, holding hands, smiling at each other.

Then, quite suddenly, the young man turned back to me, his face still calm: ‘Now say a prayer for life’s ending, because it’s over.’

In those grace-filled moments there was no ‘we didn’t have’; there was only thanksgiving.

This happened twenty-five years ago. It’s my teacher to this day.

22 Nov 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Environment, Ethics, Israel Permalink

Why Small Things Matter

Sticky Post By admin On November 22, 2024

We have a new resident in our house, a temporary visitor I hope. It’s a hedgehog, whom Nicky has called Iggle; we don’t know its pronouns. We hope we can return Iggle to the gardens and hedgerows as soon as we safely can.

It happened like this: I was walking down East End Road towards Fairacres where we were preparing a Friday night dinner when something drew my attention to the pavement. There, half hiding among the amber leaves, was the tiniest baby hedgehog I have ever seen.

I saw at once that it was nowhere near the minimum 650 grams these much-loved creatures need to survive the winter. So what to do? I slipped the loaf of bread I’d just purchased under my arm, put the hedgehog in the paper bag, where at least it would be protected and contained, and took it home as soon as I could. Nicky had the scales at the ready: the little fellow weighed a mere 220 grams. Since then, it’s put on another 35. It’s a busy young creature, and we’ve been careful to keep the dogs away from its scratching and snuffling.

This is a very minor matter. But I take comfort in just such small matters in these cruel times. They prevent me from feeling utterly overwhelmed. Here is something I can do, one small life I can maybe help save, and anything we can on the side of life and healing is, perhaps, not quite so little after all.

COP 29 is coming to a close. Though the stakes could not be higher, expectations have been low. Results haven’t made the headlines in the way the election of Donald Trump, the escalation of fighting between Ukraine and Russia, and the ICC’s warrant against Netanyahu have. But COP is an international endeavour to manage the greatest threat of all, climate chaos and the devastation of nature. The future of our children depends on tough, courageous decisions and the willingness to fund them.

Part of the challenge is spiritual: we, humankind, need to re-imagine and re-feel our relationship with all other life. Judaism doesn’t promote domination, superiority and entitlement, despite those verses from Genesis 1, ‘Fill the earth, subdue it, have dominion.’ Rather, it teaches partnership, care and respect. This is God’s world, and God’s sacred vitality flows through every human person, and, in different manifestations, through every living being.

The Judaism I believe in does not condone the degradation and dispossession of innocent people, be the victims fellow Jews, Israelis, Palestinians or anyone else. It does not accept wilful or negligent cruelty towards any form of life. Such behaviours cannot be condoned in the name of Judaism. Judaism is a religion of protest against oppression, destruction and indifference.

Consider this caution, attributed to Rebbe Shneur Zalman of Liadi, founder of Chabad, who chided his son for idly tearing leaves of a bush:

‘Who says the ‘I’ of you is more important to God than the ‘I’ of that plant. True, you belong to the world of humans and it belongs to the world of vegetation. But how do you know which is more precious to God?’

It would be hard to put matters more radically.

The older I get, the less I want my life to be evaluated by what it costs the earth: what I’ve consumed, squandered, chucked away; whom I’ve failed, hurt, or been implicated in hurting. I want my scales to balance on the side of life: what I’ve planted, nurtured, for whom I’ve cared, to whom shown compassion, for whom spoken up.

If we want to be true to our God and our faith, we must set ourselves with passion against the immense cruelties and injustices of this world.

Trying to save a baby hedgehog isn’t much, but it’s better than leaving it to die.

15 Nov 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Uncategorized Permalink

A trove of love letters from World War I

Sticky Post By admin On November 15, 2024

It’s almost a year since Isca, Raphael’s and my second mother, died. At her house last night, amidst the sadness of teacups no longer set out for visitors and books no longer read, I found a small wooden case, perhaps originally a jewellery box, except that it was full of letters. Curiosity overcame me. I took them out and was immediately struck by the dates: 1915, 1917, 1923.

The Nazis stole virtually all my grandparents’ possessions. But the only items over which I ever heard them lament were the love letters they sent each other during the First World War. They became engaged shortly before hostilities commenced, (after a long philosophical discussion as to whether their love was objektif or subjektif.) Soon afterwards my grandfather volunteered to serve as Feldrabbiner, army chaplain, and was stationed at Verdun on the Western Front for the duration.

But the Nazis can’t have stolen all the letters, for there in that small box I found tens of them. I spent the late hours staring at them, thick paper, thin paper, poems, mere scraps, dispatched from the front by my grandfather to his beloved.

They’re written in tiny writing, many in faint pencil, in Suetterlin script, so I’m struggling to decipher more than the odd word. But here and there I can make out a phrase. ‘My dear bride,’ one of them begins. It’s headed Traurede, Wedding Speech, and dated 31^st May, 1917. My grandfather had finally given up waiting for the war to end, and obtained a furlough to marry his beloved.

A letter dated March 1918 begins ‘Maigloeckchen, Lilies of the valley’. Those were my grandmother’s favourite flowers; she had their wedding tables decorated with them. My grandfather nostalgically recalls their beauty and sweet scent. By then he was back at the front, aware that Germany was losing the war. ‘When I returned to Frankfurt,’ he said, ‘all my best students were dead.’ The local authorities recently rediscovered rows of Jewish war graves, which the Nazis had smothered away behind thick hedges.

I’m asking myself why I’m writing about these matters in the week of Remembrance Day, when Sunday brings the Whitehall parade of AJEX, the Association of Jewish ex-Servicemen and Women; when we’re constantly worried about what’s being done to Israel, and what Israel is doing, and about Gaza; when there’s been a vicious orchestrated attack on Jewish football fans in Amsterdam; when the future of the world is at stake at COP 29, with its untrustworthy hosts in Azerbaijan… Aren’t there more important things to say? Why bother with love letters from a hundred years ago?

This is my reason. Amidst all the strife, hatreds and calumnies, (‘the perfidious English,’ even my grandfather wrote, little knowing that one day Britain would save his life); amidst the bombs and brutality, people are still struggling to keep going, find love, make a home. Thus it was then, and thus it is now and we, who watch horrors happen in fear and dismay, don’t have the power to make the violence stop. But we do have the capacity to side with life and care for those who care for life, whoever they are, because they, and we, are human too.

Among the letters in that small box was a tiny diary, scarcely the size of a thumb, miniature pencil still attached. It was for 1915 and had only one entry, by my grandmother, Nanny Caro. I’m far from confident that I’ve made out the words correctly, but it went something like this:

Let not our grudges and hatreds

Rule over us.

It’s so little time that life has to give us,

Yet every day has so much to offer us.

Better then to grasp

The love that it proffers us.

15 January, 1915

‘Choose life,’ says the Torah; that’s all we can do, and what we must do.

08 Nov 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Environment, Holocaust, Refugees Permalink

Hope in dark times: the light shall not go out!

Sticky Post By admin On November 8, 2024

‘But the light has not gone out, and that is a sign from God:’ these are the words my grandfather, Rabbi Salzberger, overheard, when, summoned by the Gestapo to the burning wreckage of the great synagogue in Frankfurt’s Boerneplatz, he passed through the whispering crowds of German onlookers on the morning after Kristallnacht, in November 1938.Tomorrow is the eighty-sixth anniversary of that terrible date. Monday, Remembrance Day, Veteran’s Day in the States, reminds us of the terrible human costs of the war that preceded it and the war against evil which followed.

The light the onlookers in Frankfurter were referring to was the Ner Tamid, the Eternal Lamp, of the Westendsynagoge, where my grandfather served for thirty years until forced by the Nazis to flee the country he once loved. That Ner Tamid is the parent lamp from which a flame was kindled, and carefully carried for hundreds of miles, to light the Eternal Lamp of my community’s synagogue, here in London.

Thus the light still burns, through tough days and dark nights, embodying the truth that, however much the world assails our hopes, our hearts and our deep beliefs in justice and compassion, we must not let the lights of our faith go out.

‘Do I give up?’ people have been asking me, directly or by inference, this week. Do I despair of my fight for the environment, for the dignity, equality and rights of women, for refugees, for an end to race hate and hate speech? Of course, we already know the answer. But we must hear it from each other, because we need each other in the fight:

However many rings of pain
The night winds round me,
The opposing pull is stronger… (Boris Pasternak, the Zhivago poems)

During these challenging days, I’ve looked backward to last week’s Torah portion, Noach, in which God and humanity embark, as it were, on their second term. The first ended in disaster, ‘violence and corruption’, recrimination and destruction. (Genesis 8) But God determines not to give up and binds us, by the sign of the arching rainbow, in an everlasting bond: ‘We are bound together, you and I, you and all living beings, all the birds and all the animals, in a covenant of life.’ That contract still holds, obligating each and every one of us. The harder it is to honour it, the more compelling our obligation.

I look forward to this week’s Torah portion, Lech Lecha, the start of Abraham’s journey: ‘Go,’ God tells him, ‘Go to the land I’ll show you,’ the land where My will for goodness, freedom and reverence for life shall be done. Go, and don’t ever stop going, because that’s how you become a blessing. Never give up.

In a brilliant Midrash Abraham sees God, Master of the World, calling out from a burning building. ‘Help me,’ God cries, ‘My world is on fire and I need you.’ God’s world needs our most urgent help.

That is the very same voice which my grandfather heard crying out from a burning synagogue eighty-six years ago on the Boerneplatz: ‘My light still shines despite the flames. Save it! Save my world!’

The fires of hatred may make threaten it, but they cannot extinguish God’s light, the inner light of humanity, the light within the soul. We must preserve it always. We must bear it with us and nurture its flame, wherever we may go.

01 Nov 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Ethics, Israel Permalink

Be on the side of life. Speak out for life!

Sticky Post By admin On November 1, 2024

I’m worrying about silence: the silencing of what we don’t want to hear, the silences because we don’t speak up. Judaism is a ‘Don’t be silent before wrong’ religion. Jewish history is a long testament to the horrors which silence can permit.

Professor Paul Mendes-Flohr of the Hebrew University, the great scholar of German Jewry, died in Jerusalem this week. He was brilliant, gentle and kind. He had heart trouble, of two kinds. Physically, his heart was weak; spiritually, his heart was broken by what was happening to his country. When we first met, fourteen years ago, he took me to a hummus place, not for falafels but to enquire of an Arab employee if he was alright. He cared.

The last thing Paul sent me was about silence. He quoted Paul Simon’s lyrics:
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening

He referenced the Jewish writer Isaac Babel’s silence when he was arrested by Stalin on fabricated charges of espionage and challenged for his failure to conform to Soviet ‘socialist realism’. Babel explained, under duress, that he’d mastered ‘a new literary genre, the genre of silence.’ He was executed in 1940.

Paul understood the voices that ‘make no sound but are nonetheless heard – if one chooses to listen to them.’ Now he, too, has joined the great silence.

Silence troubles me, not of the dead, but of the living, not the deep silences of communion, but the silences because we fail to hear, the silences because we fail to say.

Noah, about whom we read tomorrow, was famously silent. Why didn’t he shout at God? Why didn’t he scream: ‘How can You! How dare You destroy the world that You’ve only just created!’ But he says not a word. ‘Devastating,’ bible-scholar Aviva Zornberg calls it.

‘Speak up for life!’ is Judaism’s great message. ‘Speak up while you can, before free and honest discourse is shut down,’ is history’s great warning.

So I ask myself what I’m failing to say in these brutal times.

I am a Zionist, an anguished, troubled Zionist.

By Zionist I mean that I believe in the right of the State of Israel to exist, de jure and de facto. I believe that as a Jew I have a responsibility to care about the wellbeing of those who live in Israel, Jewish and not Jewish. I believe in the overriding values of justice, equality, freedom and democracy as proclaimed in Israel’s courageous Declaration of Independence.

I am a Zionist. I reclaim that word from those who hurl ‘Zio’, like ‘Yiddo’, as an insult at all and any Jews. I reclaim it from those who brutalise it by destroying West Bank Palestinian villages in its name, who defile the reputation of Israel and Judaism, and profane God, with outrageous racist words and actions, who have no compunction for Palestinian deaths and treat human dignity with contempt.

Therefore, as a Jew and Zionist, I must speak out against those who delegitimise Israel as a colonial entity, who ignorantly or wilfully refuse to name Hamas and Hezbollah as the terrorist organisations they are, who ignore the deeds of Iran’s regime. I must speak up for those who courageously defend Israel against them.

I join those who speak up for the hostages, their voices stifled in deep tunnels, and for their families, desperate to be heard, including by their own government.

I also join those, especially Jews and Israelis who, despite their own trauma and grief, like Magen Inon whose parents were murdered on October 7, call for an urgent end to the massive civilian suffering in Gaza and beyond, provoked by Hamas and Hezbollah, but also inflicted by Israel, and protest for proper supplies of food, water and medication, with a better path forward than yet more violence.

In the Torah we’re at the intersection of creation and destruction. ‘Create, fashion, bless,’ are the key words of its opening chapters. ‘Violence, perversion, destruction,’ are the key words of the stories that follow.

The message is ‘Be on the side of life. Speak out for life!’

11 Oct 2024

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

Yom Kippur 5785/ 2024

Sticky Post By admin On October 11, 2024

We gather on Yom Kippur in painful, cruel and uncertain times. I wish each of us individually, and all of us collectively, the strength, compassion, courage, faith and wisdom we need as we strive to follow God’s will according to the teachings of Judaism.

We stand before our God and the God of our ancestors. The traumas of October 7, the murders and rape committed by Hamas with vaunted brutality, and our losses since, are deeply felt across Israel, the Jewish community worldwide, and beyond. This is our people. We are bound together in solidarity with the grieving, the wounded and the families of the hostages, for whose swift return we long. We pray for the wellbeing of Israel and everyone who lives there, and for the safety of all who risk their lives to protect their loved ones and their land. May we work together for healing to all our wounds to body, heart and soul.

We stand before the God of compassion. We acknowledge, with pain, not just our own suffering but the suffering and deaths of thousands of innocent people, including many children, in Gaza and elsewhere. We pray for an end to terror and bloodshed. We pray that we will find better paths forward than war.

We stand before the God of justice. On this day of judgment, we are required to confront not just the wrongs done to us but also the wrongs we have done, the sins, hurts and betrayals which fall below the true values of Judaism and challenge its reputation. May we have the integrity to meet these issues honestly.

Amidst this anguish, we face rising antisemitism, unprecedented in most of our lifetimes. Many of us experience isolation, intimidation and abuse. Often in the public domain we encounter false accusations and both ignorant and calculated hatred.

Therefore, now more than ever, we must turn to our faith, to the tenacious resilience of the Jewish People throughout many centuries, in many lands; to the sustaining discipline of Jewish living, with its commandments and customs, and to the embrace of community, which both supports us and needs our support. We must affirm our commitment to moral responsibility, stay strong in our conviction that our actions make a difference, and hold firm in our determination to create a better world.

This is the source of our strength in adversity and our hope for the future, this and faith in God whose living breath embraces us all, who hears all tears, sustains all life, and whose presence abides not only in the heavens above, but in our hearts.

May the God of life guide us and bless us, all Israel and all the world, through the challenges of the coming year.

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

All posts by admin