admin | HEART AND MIND

16 Dec 2022

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

About hope and courage: why Chanukkah is truly a big festival

Sticky Post By admin On December 16, 2022

‘It’s the biggest Jewish festival,’ said the twins I was teaching for their Bar Mitzvah. ‘A big festival,’ said our Ukrainian guests, who’d evidently been reading up about Chanukkah just as we had about how Christmas is celebrated in Ukraine.

The truth is that, no, Chanukkah is fairly minor in the scale of Jewish festivals. But it felt mean to say this, so I replied that it had ‘become big.’ ‘Why?’ the boys, who recognise a half-hearted answer when they hear one, promptly asked. ‘Because of competing with Christmas, and because the Maccabees were important role models,’ I responded.

But there’s a better reason why Chanukkah is, and should be, big today: Chanukkah is about hope and courage and we need large doses of both. Our hearts go out to so many people in so many directions in these difficult times that we need reinforcements in our core.

Chanukkah begins on Sunday night with just one light, except for the servant-candle shammes. These days, everybody follows the School of Hillel whose principle is that ‘in matters of holiness we go up, not down,’ adding one further candle every night, culminating with eight. Eight is the Jewish number of the natural cycle of seven, plus one: plus wonder, faith and hope.

As everyone knows, we light the candles in honour of the pure olive oil the Maccabees found in the ruined precincts of the recaptured temple, which, sufficient for just one day, burnt on the menorah for eight.

But there’s a kashe, a logical problem. Why do we bless God for a miracle on the first night? One day’s oil ought to last for one day! A practical answer could be that the Maccabees saw immediately that something unusual was happening because the oil was burning very, very slowly. But they surely wouldn’t have noticed this phenomenon until at least part way through the day.

Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib of Ger (1847 – 1905) offers a better explanation: The miracle began because on that first night because the Maccabees lit the menorah with a whole heart despite having so little oil. In other words, miracles don’t begin in heaven, but here on earth, with what we do.

The Maccabees could have said: What when the oil runs out? Wouldn’t it be wiser to wait for more supplies? But they found the courage, took the risk and the flame they lit burnt not for one, nor even for eight days, but for generations, illumining innumerable dark and difficult years in countless lands and lives. Its light burns yet.

I’ve met many people who do like those Maccabees. They say: I don’t know where this’ll lead, but I’m starting a food bank. I’ll create a warm space. I’ll start Cook for Good, to bring whole communities together.

Perhaps almost everyone who has an idea is like that first contingent, who, looking round the war-ravaged temple precincts, asked themselves: What can we do? Where can we find some light?

They search, not in the rubble but in their hearts, and find their symbolic jar of oil, the fuel for a plan: Maybe this could work. Maybe this will bring some hope. Then they ask themselves: But will it take on? What about resources? Will it all go nowhere? Will the flame go out? But they find the courage; they make something happen.

Then, as so often when something good is initiated, others join in, bringing their own energy and inspiration. Further and further circles are drawn to the light. People ask how to help, what to contribute. They too feed the flame until its light lasts longer and spreads far wider than those who first lit it thought possible.

That’s what hope and courage can achieve.

Is the story of the Maccabees and the oil historically true? Probably not. But does it express and eternal truth? Yes definitely! That’s why Chanukkah is, and should be, truly a big festival.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Urim Sameach, Happy Chanukkah

09 Dec 2022

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Environment, Spirituality Permalink

COP 15 and the jasmine in the porch

Sticky Post By admin On December 9, 2022

A tendril of jasmine has made its way through the tiny gap between the windowpanes and its small white blooms have brought their perfume into the porch where our guinea pigs live. Tiny, star-shaped, the flowers glow at night like nature’s own Chanukkah candles.

I write from love of this world of plants and animals. ‘You shall love your God with all your heart,’ teaches the Torah in Judaism’s best-known meditation. Part of that love is to love what God has created. I’m far from being a creationist; I embrace the science of evolution. But I’m with the mystics when they feel the divine presence both in people and nature, something holy that should not be hurt or harmed.

Several times during lockdown an email arrived in my inbox: ‘Please put your guinea pigs out on the lawn and leave your side gate open. My children have asked to see them; they need this for their mental health.’

For my own mental – and physical and spiritual – health, I had to get out early in the morning or late at night and join the trees in prayer. I’d go where they surrounded me with their meditations, their patient sense of time. Among them, I sensed the steady decontamination of my thoughts, the restoration of the mind’s clarity, the renewal of that bond with the sacred beauty which exists within this world. In such moments we touch a deeper consciousness with the power to guide us even through our complex dealings in this confusing world.

I’m reading Guy Shrubsole’s wonderful book The Lost Rainforests of Britain (If you need a seasonal present, I give it five stars). Someone directs him to the notebooks left by Oliver Rackman, ecologist and ‘wise man’ of the forests:

Written in pencil and faded ink, their well-thumbed pages read like prayer books to the woods in which [he] worshipped.

I hadn’t actually known that Britain had rainforests, but it turns out I’ve walked in them, lush, full of oaks, birches, rowans, ferns, lichens and other epiphytes. (Nearby was a conifer plantation, the ground beneath the serried trees almost lifeless, dark.)

I’m writing about these matters because I love those woods, and because I don’t want my or anyone else’s children or grandchildren to have ‘loved and lost.’

We’re several days into COP 15, the UN’s biodiversity summit. I hesitate to quote Secretary General Antonio Guterres’s opening words: ‘We are treating nature like a toilet. This conference is our chance to stop this orgy of destruction. To move from discord to harmony.’

At the close of his life Moses tells the people: Don’t say this teaching is far away. It’s not in heaven or over the seas: it’s ‘in your mouth and heart, for you to do it.’

The same applies to caring for nature, and each other. There’s so much near to home we can do. ‘I work with everyone, farmers, landowners, crofters,’ a forester told me as I tried to keep the midges out of my eyes and look out across the hillsides they were restoring. ‘This’ll be two hundred thousand trees, with ponds and pathways,’ Nick told us, as our community team took up their spades and started planting less than ten miles from home. (See JTree’s website for planting opportunities this winter).

People probably think I’m crazy because I sometimes say hello to the jays and blackbirds when I walk to the synagogue. But they’re part of my prayer life.

It’s not a question of either nature or people. To my mind, it’s always ‘both and.’ If you love the world, you care about everything.

02 Dec 2022

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Interfaith, Israel, Refugees Permalink

Never think there’s nothing we can do

Sticky Post By admin On December 2, 2022

‘Queen Zelenska, Queen Zelenska:’ the boys were bursting with excitement after we got home. We’d been invited by Bishop Kenneth Nowakowski, who a few days earlier had been our guest in the synagogue, to the formal opening of the welcome centre for refugees from the war in Ukraine. ‘I never dreamt I’d be a refugee in London,’ said Halina who, with her daughter and grandsons, is living with us, ‘Nor that I’d meet the king.’ But King Charles meant little to her grandchildren; what impressed them was that their babushka had met Queen Zelenska.

The First Lady radiated presence and warmth. But what must have been on her mind! Over the previous days she’d addressed Parliament, then, with the Queen Consort, spoken to hundreds of women about the particular horrors, war-crimes, violence, abuse and misery to which the fighting left girls and women especially exposed. With all this on her heart, and with an agenda of summoning the maximum possible help, not least in prosecuting war-crimes, Mrs Zelenska nevertheless left an impression of dignity, courage and grace. What came across from King Charles was a quiet humanity; he cared. ‘After his first visit to us in the opening days of the war,’ Bishop Kenneth told me, ‘His office called every few days to ask what we needed.’

I believe all of us who were there left with similar thoughts: How can we help? What can we do, in whatever contexts or situations we can, to mitigate suffering in the world?

Wrongs and hurts assail us from every side. Some are caused by life itself with its illnesses and ill-fortunes: I’m mindful that yesterday was World AIDS Day. Other wounds are the result of human cruelty: this Shabbat is devoted to publicising the essential work of Jewish Women’s Aid, JWA. It’s shocking to realise the huge numbers of women, and sometimes, though more rarely, men, who suffer verbal, financial and physical abuse, very often in enforced or lonely secrecy, for years and even decades.

There are further home truths we also need to face. I’m troubled by the betrayal of what I consider Judaism’s core Torah-based values and of what history has taught us as a people, by the rise to positions in Israel’s government of Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who incite race-hate and homophobia. Not just they but those who appointed them must be challenged and held to account. We can, and should, support Israel by supporting those who truly uphold the just and democratic principles on which it was founded.

Trapped in Europe in the 1930s, Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that we humans have two faces: the image of God and the visage of Cain. Later, a refugee in America saved at the last moment, he wrote in The Meaning of This War

The mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God.

But, he continued, we have a choice:

There can be no neutrality. Either we are ministers of the sacred or slaves of evil… God is waiting for us to redeem the world. We should not spend our life hunting for trivial satisfactions while God is waiting….

I’m moved that the motto for this year’s World AIDS Day is ‘To Our World With Love.’ What, can we do to foster that love and bring healing, safety, joy and hope to our world?

I feel greatly challenged virtually every day, yet deeply inspired almost every day. So I want to include with another beautiful moment I, with Nicky, was privileged to share this week, and which I determine to carry in my heart through thick and thin.

We stood near the top of Skirrid, a sacred mountain in South Wales, a small group of Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders, and prayed together:

Eternal Spirit, Earth-Maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver…

We hold brothers and sisters who suffer from storms and droughts…We hold all species that suffer…

We pray that love and wisdom might inspire our actions…so that we may, with integrity, look into the eyes of brothers and sisters and all beings and truthfully say, we are doing our part to care for them and the future of the children.

May love transform us and our world with new steps toward life.

Then we joined local farmers and volunteers, and, as the sun set, planted trees to form windbreaks to protect the land.

We must try never to think that there’s nothing we can do.

25 Nov 2022

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Interfaith, Spirituality Permalink

The Lights of Chanukah

Sticky Post By admin On November 25, 2022

I don’t know whether I was half awake or asleep, but during the night of this new moon of Kislev I felt the lights of Chanukkah reaching out to me like a warm guiding hand.

It was two years ago, when the long winter lockdown was beginning and we’d been obliged to close the synagogue for a second time. I spoke over Zoom of how as a boy I used to see in my grandparent’s house the Chanukkah candles reflected in the windowpanes, and the reflection of the reflection in the bay windows opposite. The lights seemed like sentinels, like welcomers to wayfarers half-lost as they traversed the night, reaching out to them in the darkness with their hope and warmth.

Last night I saw those candles again and felt them draw me towards them. ‘Join us’, they seemed to say, ‘be part of our light.’ That’s what Chanukkah does: it warms the darkness of the spirit; it brings light to the community.

‘What do you do?’ I asked Cormac Hollingsworth, our guest at our forthcoming event Such a Thing as Society? ‘By profession I’m a banker,’ he said, ‘But for ten years I was chair of Hope Not Hate; now I’m on the steering group of Warm Welcome.’ ‘What’s that?’ I enquired. ‘It’s creating thousands of spaces across the country which will be kept warm and open for children, and for people in general, who can’t afford the bills.’

‘It’ll be a hard winter’: the words ring ominously, like the ‘hard rain’s a-gonna fall’ in Bob Dylan’s famous song.

So how we can make it lighter and warmer for someone, for anyone?

I’ve been having many conversations about hope, mostly with other people, though some, if I’m honest, in the depths of my own heart. One of the best lines I’ve heard is: ‘Never think, or let anyone else think, that simple good deeds are too small to matter.’ To paraphrase the famous Mishnah: Whoever makes life warmer for one single person is as if they do so for the entire world. (Sanhedrin 4:5, 2^nd century)

That’s why I’ll be out planting trees this Sunday with clergy of all faiths on a hillside by Abergavenny. Who knows what may grow from our actions? We have to keep our sense of purpose alive and strong.

This week our study group reaches Pslam 40. Two antithetical phrases have stayed with me from the text: the grim libbi azavani, ‘my heart deserted me,’ and the all-important ‘God, I hope and hope again.’ Appreciating those latter words, I researched them in the world of Midrash, rabbinic homily, where I found the following:

Should you say [with Jeremiah] ‘Harvest-time’s over, the summer’s gone and we’ve still not been saved,’ then remember [with the Psalmist] to ‘hope in God, be strong and fill your heart with courage.’ If you say, ‘I’ve already done that!’ go and do it again. If you ask, ‘How long should I stay hopeful?’ the answer is ‘always and forever.’

I never met my Tante Rosel, great-aunt Rose; I think she died before I was born. To my grandparents she was a legend. Through all times, thick and thin, she’d be up before dawn, down in the kitchen singing as she baked the morning’s bread. ‘That’s the way to be!’ my grandparents would say.

So I was happy when last night I saw those same candles which I’d spoken about two years ago and felt them reach out to me as if they were saying, ‘Come join us, you and your community. Be part of our light!’

18 Nov 2022

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

AJEX Shabbat and Mitzvah Day

Sticky Post By admin On November 18, 2022

This week is AJEX Shabbat, followed on Sunday by the Jewish Military Association’s solemn commemoration. Whitehall is closed, service and ex-service men and women march by, as do their children wearing their parent’s medals in their honour. Over 120,000 Jews have served in the country’s armed forces.

But Sunday is also Mitzvah Day, a wonderful, creative and constructive response to the memory, and reality, of war.

Over the last years I’ve had the privilege of reciting the memorial prayer at the Cenotaph. I’ve found this humbling and intensely moving. Like so many of us, my grandfather and my father served, though in different armed forces. My wife’s uncle Sonny was killed supplying arms with the RAF to the French resistance. Jews, alongside other faith groups and minorities, have made immense contributions to this country, in war as well as in peace.

For those of us who’ve grown up since WW2, war in Europe had seemed a long way off. Not so now. Like others hosting families from Ukraine, Nicky and I wonder: do we leave the daily paper open, with the latest grim, or somewhat better, news? What immediate fears will the pictures bring when they come down for breakfast? It’s probably an idle question, as they speak to the men back in Kharkiv every day.

Here in the UK we are not faced with the constant threat of sudden death from bombs deliberately targeted at civilian infrastructures, something all too familiar to the generation who remember the V1s and V2s. We aren’t about to find on the outskirts of our towns and villages the half-concealed evidence of atrocities.

But war’s effects are all too clear. It wrecks the all-important works of peace. Farmlands are destroyed (We had eleven apricot trees, three produced really large fruits, all bombed, all bombed, ‘our’ grandmother said.) Grain from Ukraine’s rich black earth doesn’t reach the world’s poorest. Even in wealthy countries, rising prices push millions over the edge into destitution. Teachers in Birmingham say one child in three now lives in poverty. Richer nations are saying they can’t or won’t make the payments essential to help the planet’s most vulnerable nations minimise and adapt to climate change.

I’m sorry to write such horrible things but they weigh on the heart.

But they made me notice what I hadn’t properly taken in before: how, in the small siddurim, the grey-covered prayerbooks issues to His Majesty’s Armed Forces, the memorial prayers are followed immediately by verses full of longing for ‘the works of peace.’ They remind me that every Amidah, every single one of Judaism’s thrice-daily petitions, concludes with a prayer for peace. We must never take it for granted; it’s the most immeasurable blessing.

Late last night, unable to sleep, I went downstairs to fetch Isaac Rosenberg’s collected works. In a poem of 1917 he wrote how, returning from action, he and his men suddenly hear

But hark! Joy – joy – strange joy,

Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks.

Music showering our upturned list’ning faces.

Death could drop from the dark / As easily as song –

But song only dropped

Our hearts go out to those like him who longed for peace but never lived to see it.

On their behalf, we must rededicate ourselves to the works of peace, to everything which Mitzvah Day upholds, caring across the boundaries of our communities, cooking, planting, giving, doing everything we can to make that peace as real, as lasting and as deep as we possibly can.

11 Nov 2022

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Environment, Refugees Permalink

Cop 27 and EcoShabbat

Sticky Post By admin On November 11, 2022

In an intense and complex week, one theme runs through everything, the preciousness of life. That’s what I’m focussing on this EcoShabbat.

But first I want to acknowledge that today brings the memorial to that fateful eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when in 1918 the Armistice was signed which finally ended The First World War. Since then, this date has been marked as Armistice Day in Europe and Veteran’s Day in The States. (AJEX, the Jewish Military Association, holds its ceremony at The Cenotaph one week later).

It’s terrible to know that, in the words of Wilfred Owen, there’s another old man in Europe today who, unlike Abraham when the angel told him to spare his child,

Would not so, but slew his son

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Tonight, therefore, I will miss the beautiful synagogue service which marks the beginning of Shabbat, so as to attend a concert at the Ukrainian Cathedral, ‘The Cry, a Requiem for the Lost Child,’ in memory of the thousand children killed in Ukraine. Kenneth Nowakowski, the Eparchial Bishop, wept when I asked him to speak in our synagogue. It’s basic solidarity to stand with him in return.

Children were the subject at the service led by the Association of Jewish Refugees last Wednesday to mark Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, the Night of Broken Glass. That was when my grandfather, rabbi in Frankfurt, went into hiding, only to give himself up because he learnt that the Gestapo were waiting in his home. He feared he might be putting his wife and daughters at even greater risk.

In the terror which followed, the cry went out across Britain ‘Get the children out!’ the title of Mike Levy’s remarkable book subtitled The Unsung Heroes of the Kindertransport. A note on the cover reminds us that these issues aren’t over: ‘In support of Safe Passage, legal routes to sanctuary.’ There are few, if any, such routes for children of war and terror today.

Meanwhile COP 27 struggles to find a safe passage forward for our entire planet, one-and-a-fifth hands tied behind its back by the world’s economic and fuel crises and the paucity of courageous political leadership.

Nevertheless, I’m buoyed up by a resilient hopefulness based on what so many people are doing, locally, persistently. I was privileged to hear Charlie Burrell, who established Knepp, describe the swift return of species unseen for decades. (See his wife Isabella Tree’s wonderful book Wilding) The glimpse of a butterfly once thought extinct is joy!

I participated in the conversations of the Elijah Interfaith Institute yesterday. (Please join us this Sunday). I carry with me the words of Hindu and Buddhist colleagues: All is oneness. God’s presence fills all creation; let it fill your consciousness too. Let it descend to the heart. Let its light guide your conscience and actions. Then you will seek not to hurt or harm any creature.

As we move into EcoShabbat, I take from this week the gritty hope which feeds determination. I tell myself (and others!) Notice; be aware! Be there to care! One life flows through all things: if we nourish it, it will nourish us.

We must work for life in whatever ways we can.

Our EcoShabbat focus– What’s Local To See:

Look out for the display in shul this Shabbat of our local wildlife.

Complete this survey to tell us which of these local animals, birds and trees you see over the next three weeks. Post your photos, stories, anecdotes in our Facebook group. Prizes will be awarded for the best responses.

Hear my Thought for the Day from this Thursday – ‘On Hope’

04 Nov 2022

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

Hope, and how to find it

Sticky Post By admin On November 4, 2022

The first I heard about the results of Israel’s elections was an email from the Freddie Krivine Initiative which brings children together from every background: We shall not give up on our work! That was enough to tell me all the rest.

That vote, and other world events besides, made me turn urgently to Emily Dickenson’s poem

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul –

We need hope; we need it to land like a familiar robin on our outstretched hand and hop down into our heart.

The stirring Psalm recited through the Hebrew month of Elul and the High Holydays concludes with the repeated instruction

Hope in God; be brave, make your heart strong, and hope in God (Ps. 27)

The rabbis taught that every repetition in the Bible has a purpose. The point here is that to have true hope we need to work at strengthening our heart with everything which inspires us.

So these are some of the things which motivate me. The first is people. Three secondary school boys came to my home for lessons yesterday. The first two said ‘COP 27 is going to be a disappointment, like COP 26.’ ‘Only partly,’ I replied, wishing I disagreed more. But the third said something different: ‘I’m in a local group which plants trees, clears weeds and improves paths. I go once a month with my father. The sustainability committee at my school has got rid of plastic bottles.’

So the first message I tell myself when I feel low is ‘Stick with people who’re doing good. Find them, follow them, keep them in sight.’ That’s how I felt at Parliament for a launch of the Walking Inquiry into Immigration Detention. Here were people, some who’d been detained themselves, who listen to asylum seekers, walk together, act together, and who’re determined to keep going until they right the wrongs of the system.

That’s why, regarding Israel, we must speak out for the dignity of all people, condemn racism clearly and specifically from wherever it originates and support everyone working for a respectful, pluralist society.

Fortunately, across the world there’s no shortage of people from every faith and walk of life whose purpose is to do what’s good, and who’re passionate about it. I try to go where I can learn from them. They strengthen my heart.

My second source of hope is the world’s beauty. This isn’t about aesthetics; it’s about love. My wife and I saw a deer trapped in a fence. She’d misjudged the height of the top wires and caught her hoof between the strands. She hung upside down, her head on the turf. I tried to speak gently as I wedged the wires apart and watched her limp off, her leg sprained but not broken. ‘She’ll rest in the woods. There’s food there, and water,’ Nicky said.

How can one not love our fellow creatures, our companions on this earth, especially when they don’t harm us? That’s my second source of hope: the sheer preciousness, the vulnerability and wonder of human life and all life, inspiring us to work for people, also animals, trees, nature itself which needs our urgent engagement.

‘Od lo avdah tikavetnu, Our hope has never ceased…’ runs Israel’s national anthem, expressing the secret of Jewish, of all human, resilience.

Our hope may never have ceased, but few of us can honestly say that it’s never even faltered. That’s when we need to nourish that hope and, fortunately, as Emily Dickenson concludes in her final verse

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –

And on the strangest Sea –

28 Oct 2022

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

Choose life!

Sticky Post By admin On October 28, 2022

Here we are back at the start of the Torah’s journey. Last week we read the magnificent poem with which the Torah opens, its hymn to creation, ‘In the beginning, God said “Let there be…”’ This week comes the sweeping flood, the terrible annihilation which life perilously survives, afloat in a tiny gene-pool, a wave-tossed ark of gopher wood.

Before us are creation and destruction, life and death, and we exist in the fragile interstice between them. Therefore, we must always be on the side of life, in our prayers, thought and deeds.

Prayer is not primarily the attempt to change God’s hidden mind through our petitions. It’s the art of connecting life with life. True prayer, wrote Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto, happens only when the presence of God within us and the presence of God beyond us meet. This isn’t magic; it’s not too far from, or too hard for any of us. It occurs whenever life touches us in moments of humility, wonder, love, or inner silence and our heart is opened and our awareness expands, filled by that all-present energy or spirit which flows through all things.

Such prayer can happen in communion with the words of the prayer book, in a conversation in a hospital corridor, in the glimpse of a wren or the solitude of a walk. It’s a moment of hearing with the heart, of connection with the sanctity of life. Even in the presence of death it’s almost always a timeless act of intuitive homage. It deepens our compassion, it nourishes our joy, it makes of us servants of life.

Because all life is sacred, because, in theological terms, God is present in all that exists, it is God’s commandment at the root of all commandments that we should harm life as little as possible and cause as little pain as we can even in our most mundane actions, in how we eat, dress, travel, interact with people, animals and nature. ‘Choose life,’ the Torah insists.

Therefore, whatever our tasks are amidst the complexity and sometimes misery of everyday life, they must always be rooted in respect, justice and compassion, even when life confounds us or makes us angry with good reason. Those tasks can be anything, baking a birthday cake, working out how to teach an obstreperous class, fighting the soullessness of some obstinate system, administering a life-saving vaccine. The question is: am I doing this as well as I can for the sake of life?

I’m not writing these words out of naivety, and certainly not because I find any of this easy. I attended the meeting in the Houses of Parliament on ending indefinite detention for asylum seekers. I’m preparing a declaration by faith leaders on climate justice for Cop 27. I read the headlines about climate change. I feel frustrated and powerless time and again. I worry that the waters are once again rising around Noah’s precious ark.

But I know that the source of life is infinite and everywhere, and that the commandment to care for life is expressed in numberless ways, in kind words, in the beauty of the autumn’s red and yellow leaves, in the song of a blackbird, through reaching out for help in difficult times, in the loneliness of sorrow, and in the joy which can flow into the silence of solitude. It is the voice of the God who says, “Let there be life,” and who calls on us to answer.

21 Oct 2022

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

The festivals are over, but we mustn’t leave them behind

Sticky Post By admin On October 21, 2022

The High Holydays have passed and the Jewish year has reverted to its weekly round of ‘six days shall you labour and, on the seventh, rest.’ The holidays may be over but, as we go out into this world with its numerous challenges, I don’t want to leave them behind. For they bring to our lives beauty and wonder, community and communion, responsibility and respect. Without these qualities I don’t know how we can face whatever time may bring.

So here are some of the experiences I want to stow away in my heart and carry with me through the year.

From Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, I want to take the sound of the shofar, that call of the ram’s horn which cries out on behalf of all life. For in its notes, the teki’a, shevarim and teru’a, are the tears, brokenness and yearning for freedom and joy of all existence. In them are the soul’s aspirations, the birdsong, the vastness of moors and the unheard voices of wrongly imprisoned victims of tyrannous suppression.

Before it is blown, we declare that we are commanded ‘to hear the call of the shofar.’ The assumption is that we comply by paying attention in those moments when it’s sounded. But maybe what’s required is that we retain the call in our soul and hear it over and again throughout the year, so that it re-awakens in us solicitude for suffering and solidarity with joy.

From Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, I want to take the opening prayer, Kol Nidrei, All Vows. More than the words, its deep, uplifting music tells us that though, despite our best intentions, we fell short; our failures must in no way prevent us from endeavouring all over again to be the best person we possibly can ‘from this time forth until next Yom Kippur.’ Yet even as we say those words we acknowledge that we’ll fall short once more, but continue undaunted to strive, hope and aspire.

And from Yom Kippur I want to take too those painful reminders, ‘We’ve betrayed; we’ve done wrong.’ This is not in order to indulge in feeling guilty, but rather so as never blithely to forget the world’s sore hurts and our responsibility to heal. For our hope as humanity lies in truth, accountability and the commitment to make reparation.

From Succot, Tabernacles, the harvest festival, I want to take the gratitude and the beauty. It’s time now to take down the fruits we hung in thanksgiving, and the flowers and leaves have begun to wither. But it’s never the time to forget our dependence on the land and the rainfall, on the flow of the seasons which, in the Torah, God promises Noah never again to disturb, but which in many land we have profoundly disrupted.

I want to take too the friendship and fellowship of the Succah and the promise that its shade means God’s protection, as expressed in this prayer on leaving it at the festival’s end:

May the angels of your presence accompany us from the Succah back into our homes, for life and peace. Guard us from doing wrong; protect us from all harm and from the evil times which afflict the world. Give us the energy and inspiration to serve you in truth, with love and respect. Help us repair whatever we have hurt. May we find safety and peace.

As we go out into a difficult world, may what we take with us in our hearts from these festivals guide us, console us, cajole us when we feel helpless, and give us courage and hope.

14 Oct 2022

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Holocaust, Spirituality Permalink

A time to keep silence and a time to speak

Sticky Post By admin On October 14, 2022

Standing as close to her as he could, my grandfather surreptitiously pushed his elbow into my grandmother’s ribs: ‘Say nothing; don’t react.’ He involuntarily imitated the action as he recounted the incident to me decades later. He’d seen the Gestapo officer watching them as they passed the poster with its typical Der Stuermer caricature of Jews.

That was Frankfurt in 1938. ‘There’s a time to keep silent,’ wrote Ecclesiastes. If ever there was such a time, that was it.

There are many kinds of silence and many different reasons for maintaining them. Mercifully, many have more to do with compassion than repression. Through life one tries to learn to discern when words are an impediment to communication, when it’s important not to interrupt, how to let listening deepen, how to avoid obscuring with words the heart’s intuitive alertness to the unspoken, when not to break the communicative silence.

But, as Ecclesiastes also says, there is also a time to speak out.

I’m mindful of Ecclesiastes, Kohelet, because we will read it in synagogue tomorrow, on the Shabbat of the festival of Succot. It has no obvious connection with the season, except perhaps for its ‘autumnal tone’ with its chorus line ‘vanity of vanities’, as if it were translating the leaf-fall of the forests into the world of human society: What’s left when all the paraphernalia of life is stripped away? What’s life’s heartwood?

But I’m also thinking of Ecclesiastes because of that line ‘There’s a time to speak.’ Of course, one has to be cautious, because words, once spoken, can never be dissolved back down into the expressionless ether.

But there’s a time when truths must be spoken and across the world it appears that this time is now.

I therefore respect Jonathan Freedland, the staff of the Royal Court Theatre and those who spoke out, in particular the members of my own community Luciana Berger and Dr Tammy Rothenberg, to create his play Jews In Their Own Words, naming and calling out often denied forms and foci of antisemitic hatred and abuse.

Across the world, it is impossible for those of us who have lived in freedom to come anywhere near to appreciating the defiant courage of hundreds of thousands of young people in Iran, especially women, who, despite knowing they may be beaten, shot, seized, and made to disappear, cry out against unbearable repression, impoverishment and degradation.

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize marks an essential moment in the moral history of humanity. It was a wise decision to award it to two organisations, Memorial and the Ukranian Centre for Civil Liberties, and one individual, Ales Bialiatski, who, despite imprisonment and all the armamentarium of totalitarian states, persist in telling truth to power. It expresses on behalf of us all our solidarity with those who refuse to succumb to the politics of lies and fabrications. It gives recognition, in a world in danger of becoming inured to fake news with its narratives of falsification and suppression, to the supreme importance of truth.

Memorial was established by Andrei Sakharov in 1987 to document the horrors of Stalin’s regime. In the recently published volume My Father’s Letters, Correspondence from the Soviet Gulag, Irina Scherbakova, a founding member of Memorial, concludes her preface by quoting from Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate:

Neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State…has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings… In this alone lies man’s eternal victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be.

‘The world stands upon three things, truth, justice and peace,’ Rabbi Shimeon ben Gamliel observed nineteen hundred years ago. Without truth, there can never be justice and without justice never ultimate peace.

Therefore, in Ecclesiastes’ words, we need, no less that the wisdom to understand when to keep silent, the courage to know when to speak out.

HEART AND MIND

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