09 May 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Spirituality Permalink

Beautiful Prayers from the Talmud

Sticky Post By admin On May 9, 2025

My Talmud class has been going for almost 40 years; it’s been a stable feature throughout my rabbinate, ‘Thursday mornings at 9.30,’ and I love it. Luckily, many of the participants love it too, and some have been there for all, or almost all, that time.

As anyone who studies Talmud knows, some passages are difficult, some are intense with a logic hard to unpick, some are morally inspiring, some are ethically challenging, lots are full of issues we still struggle with today, some spring straight from the page to the heart, and some are simply beautiful.

It was such a section that we hit upon yesterday, Berachot 16b – 17a, a daf, or page, about peace and hope which we fortuitously arrived at on the anniversary of VE Day, and amidst the troubles that beset our people and our world. The passage consists of the supplications that rabbis of the Talmud would add after they had completed their amidah, their obligatory communal prayer. Their words reach out to us across almost two millennia because what they longed for then, we long for too today.

Rabbi Elazar used to say: ‘Our God, may it be your will to cause love, fellowship, peace and friendship to dwell wherever we are apportioned.’ Perhaps even then communities were known for their fractiousness. Or maybe, as I prefer to believe, Rabbi Elazar was only reflecting back to God the comradely reality he experienced around him, together with the wish that it should continue thus.

He adds a stirring thought which none of the other rabbis include in quite the same way: ‘May our heart, when we rise in the morning, be filled with longing to experience awe before your name [and presence].’ Sometimes, when the alarm goes off, one gets up still weary, with a headache, not quite all there, or anxious. But on certain mornings, as dawn breaks a deep sense of wonder fills one’s spirit, as if, as the Zohar puts it, one’s soul had been taken by God on a visit to the Garden of Eden in the night.

Rabbi Yochanan’s prayer is more down to earth. He beseeches heaven to take note of how grim human life and the lot of the Jewish People can be, and calls on God ‘to clothe yourself in your mercy, garb yourself in your might, cover yourself in your loving kindness, gird yourself with your graciousness, and summon your qualities of goodness and humility.’ It’s as if there’s a conflict even within God: be tough with the world, or gentle and forbearing? Be kind to us, God, Rabbi Yochanan pleads, just as one’s partner might say during a bad patch: ‘I just need you to be nice to me today.’

Rabbi Chiya’s prayer is different again: ‘May it be your will, God, that your Torah be our occupation and that our hearts don’t become depressed or our vision darkened.’ Those words are so simple, and so close to the bone: Down here on earth it’s hard to keep our spirits up, so help us maintain a sense of hope and purpose and guide us in your Torah’s laws of justice and compassion.

‘What’s the take-away?’ one of the participants asked me after we had studied those prayers. Part of me wanted to answer, ‘Plus ca change! It was the same old world back then as it is now.’

But there’s a better response. Those teachers, immersed in Torah, well understood the challenges of the human condition and faced their difficulties with honesty, courage, and the hope that, somehow, the world would be guided by God in the direction of harmony and compassion.

That’s why their supplications speak to us today, not just as if they were, but because they truly are, our own.

25 Apr 2025

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

In memory of my father, who died on Israel’s Independence Day, 18 years ago

Sticky Post By admin On April 25, 2025

It was my brother, Raphael, who thought to move our father’s bed in his dying days so that, if he was able to lift his head from his pillow, he would be able to see his beloved garden. Twice I saw him raise himself up, semi-conscious, and say the words of the daily prayer ‘mekayyem emunato – God keeps faith with those who sleep in the dust,’ before slipping back into sleep. Perhaps he meant the restorative powers of nature, perhaps his hope in his maker.

I think of our father in these days between Yom haShaoh, the Hebrew date established by the Knesset for remembering the Holocaust, its horror and the valour of resistance, and Yom Ha’Atzma’ut, Israel’s Independence Day with its longing for a different future. Aged just sixteen, our father fled Nazi Germany with his immediate family, fought in the British Army repairing tanks behind the lines at El Alamein, and served in the Hagganah during the siege of Jerusalem.

He had a tough life. By the time he was 42 he had lost two of his aunts and his grandmother, murdered by the Nazis, his sister Eva who suffered heart failure in Jerusalem in 1944, his favourite uncle Alfred, killed in 1948 in the convoy ambushed on its way to Mount Scopus, and his beloved first wife Lore, Raphael’s and my mother, who died of cancer in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Looked after by Isca, our second mother, our father lived to see the Bnei Mitzvah of his two eldest grandchildren, and died, aged 86, on Yom Ha’Atzma’ut 18 years ago.

I can’t speak about God’s side of the matter, but for his part our father definitely kept faith. I remember him coming up to our bedroom after Lore’s death to continue where she had been forced to leave off in teaching us the Shema: ‘If you’re good, I’ll tell you a few more words each night.’ I remember how, when I was sixteen, he came into my room and asked me, ‘Are you still saying the Shema every night?’ I fear my answer ‘Yes’ was less than a half-truth. But since then, I have never, unless overtaken suddenly by sleep, omitted to say those words, which define the Jewish faith.

I remember our father telling me one night, unexpectedly, out of nowhere it seemed to me, ‘Do your homework, because they can take away from you everything except what’s in your mind.’

Our father was a craftsperson, skilled with his hands; we did many house and garden jobs together. I recall how I was once rude to him; it was about some tool, perhaps a pair of pliers. I saw his face and realised: I must never speak like that to anyone, ever again.

I think of our father now when saying the words of the morning service: ‘For the sake of our ancestors who trusted in you, put it into our hearts to understand, listen, learn and practise all the words of your Torah and teaching in love.’ Our father loved his Judaism and felt especially close to Rabbi Louis Jacobs. They even both (under pressure from their wives) gave up cigars at the same time.

I think of our father in these cruel, uncertain and frightening times, his deep resilience, his love of gardens and nature, and the history about which, though a great raconteur when he got going, he rarely volunteered to speak: ‘We told aunt Sophie when she visited us in Jerusalem in 1938, “Don’t go back to Czechoslovakia,” but her husband was an ardent Czech patriot and she wouldn’t listen.’ I have Sophie’s last letter before deportation, written in January 1943 and smuggled to the family: ‘In this manner, we take our farewell.’

But our forebears don’t make their departure, at least not entirely. Our beloved dead stay with us in our hearts, and, through memories and stories and the places, foods, music and pursuits they enjoyed, continue to impart their love and strength.

18 Apr 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community Permalink

What freedom is

Sticky Post By admin On April 18, 2025

At the second Seder, the second night of our journey mei’avdut lecheirut, ‘from slavery to freedom,’ I asked the company what freedom means to them. I gave no one any warning, so the responses were immediate and unpremeditated. Here is some of what followed.

‘Being here, that’s freedom:’ That was the first response, and those words have stayed with me. Life is easily taken for granted, health, mobility, the ability to attend a Seder. I think of the words one says each morning: ‘Modeh ani – Thank you, God, for giving me back my life and soul in mercy.’ I thought, too, of Naama Levy’s comment in The Haggadah of Freedom, on what enabled her to keep going while held hostage in Gaza:

‘I yearned for “the little pleasures of life”… food, a hot shower, time to spend with friends and family, enjoy the warmth of sunlight, to breathe fresh air and just stroll outside…’

‘Freedom is being together,’ said someone else, focussing us on those who long desperately to be reunited with loved ones still held hostage. The words reminded me too of Elsa, a refugee who lived with us for a few weeks, whose mother was murdered before her eyes. ‘And your father?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know if he’s dead, or alive somewhere in prison. I’ve heard nothing for twelve years.’

‘Freedom is remembering, sharing our story.’ There’s that sentence in Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines: the culture of the campfire faces that of the pyramids. Our strength has always been the stories we tell, from the Torah onwards, which unite us and imbue in us our values, community, dignity, justice, compassion.

‘Freedom is what the RAF did for us in the war’: ‘Having lived through one war,’ said Nicky’s aunt Chelle, ‘freedom is those who protect you and save you from bombing and air raids.’ Think of what’s going on today…

One special guest did not respond. Seven years ago, his wife begged us at our Seder to pray for her husband, a political prisoner in Belgian Congo: ‘I believe in prayer,’ she said. People get murdered in those prisons; I doubted she’d see her husband alive. But here he was, a free man, at our Seder. His commentary was his presence.

With us, too, was Okito, leader of the DCR’s community in exile. He wrote to me afterwards:

‘For us freedom is deeply tied to justice and human dignity. We are profoundly affected by the ongoing human rights crisis in our country of origin…The silence of the international community is heartbreaking… We see freedom not as something to enjoy in isolation, but as a recognition of others’ suffering. Today in Israel, families are in deep pain, grieving and waiting for loved ones taken hostage. True freedom cannot exist while others remain in chains. To fully experience our own liberation, we must acknowledge and respond to the suffering of others.’

The last comment went to our daughter Kadya, who read from Maya Angelou’s wonderful tribute to the mother, Love Liberates:

It doesn’t just hold you, that’s ego,
Love liberates…

She [her mother] released me, she freed me…
That’s love…

Here’s to a world of freedom, dignity, justice, love and hope!

07 Apr 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community Permalink

Our Synagogue’s Golden Shabbat

Sticky Post By admin On April 7, 2025

Tonight and tomorrow our community of the New North London Synagogue, בית חדש– Bayit Chadash, celebrates its Golden Shabbat.

I wasn’t there at the beginning. But I heard many times how Rabbi Dr Jacobs, the inspiration behind this new congregation, stood on a chair and declared, ‘Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.’

What is that idea, or ideal? It was, and remains, the creation of a community deeply rooted in Jewish tradition and practice, engaged with learning, liturgy and halakhah, Jewish law, yet open-minded, open to the world, and open-hearted, ready to face truths from wherever they come and to struggle honestly with the challenges of contemporary life.

We have never finished working at what that ideal means and at how to make it real, and we never shall. The moment we finish, we will cease to be true to what it demands of us.
I remember, I remember!

I have many treasured memories from the last 40+ years, moments which touched my soul. But I can’t share most of them, because they were heart-to-heart and private.

Yet two stand out. The first happened about thirty years ago on Rosh Hashanah, the New Year. Leslie Lyndon, his memory is a blessing, had just concluded the long Mussaf service which he led year by year with depth and grace. He was taking the traditional three steps back with which one symbolically parts from the presence of God, when he became aware of a baby who had crawled up right behind him. I will never forget the laughing smile with which he looked down at the child as, singing the concluding words Oseh Shalom, ‘Maker of peace,’ he carefully side-stepped to avoid her. It was a sweet moment of meeting between the holy and the human, – and that’s what religion and community is all about.

The second moment is the Shabbat when we first prayed in our new synagogue building. We decided to move in as a congregation halfway through our Sabbath prayers. From each service people of all ages came singing as they carried our Torah scrolls from the much-loved premises where we had gathered for so long, into the new spaces which we were determined to fill with the same spirit and affection. Everything was master-planned by Claire Mandel, our then CEO, to whom I say on behalf of us all, ‘We owe you so much.’ I can’t remember the words, but the feeling of that singing still feeds my soul.

So we’ve reached our Golden Shabbat. I think of gold as the precious filament which the Torah describes as running through the garments of the High Priest, shining amidst the other strong colours of scarlet, blue and purple.

Today we have neither High Priest not sacred garments. We each approach God as equals, and our garments are own experiences and spirit, which, like the High Priest’s clothes, are composed of many threads. Some have the radiant colours of joy; others are knotted with pain and hurt as life draws them through our heart. But I hope that, even in tough times, we can keep sight of the filament of gold running through them. It’s composed of Torah, neshamah – soul music, hesed – loving-kindness, kehillah -community, and tsedek – the aspiration to do what is just and right. I hope we never lose sight of that gold thread.

The New North London community has shaped my life. I am deeply grateful for the fellowship, challenge, guidance, trust and inspiration.

I ask God’s blessing for all my companions on this voyage, and especially for my wonderful, gifted and dedicated colleagues who are taking this journey forward into the future.

May God bless us and care for us. May God’s grace enlighten us and God’s presence guide us. May God bring us, all Israel and all the world, to a place of peace.

14 Mar 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in The Jewish Year Permalink

Sticky Post By admin On March 14, 2025

Purim Sameach, Happy Purim! We need simchah, joy, in our lives and on Purim it’s a Mitzvah. We share food and drink with friends, (ish lere’ehu) and give generously where there is need (mattanot la’evyonim).

Joy is not always easy in our often troubled world, or in our sometimes troubled lives, when our ‘downs’ may feel deeper and last longer than our ‘ups’. But that’s why we need it. Simchah is ‘a religious precept,’ writes Art Green in Judaism’s 10 Best Ideas, his compelling summary of Judaism which I recommend to everybody. Joy is a spiritual matter: ‘Seeking God itself is an act that is to fill the heart with joy,’ he writes, quoting Chronicles 16:10: ‘May the God-seeker’s heart rejoice.’ But simchah is also practical, in the cooking and baking, blessing and eating, sharing and caring and community.

That’s why simchah shel mitzvah, the joy of practising the commandments, is a building brick, a cornerstone, of Judaism. We all have our favourite moments: challah on Friday night, the Seder, making the Sukkah, a ‘le’chaim, to life’ with friends.

But what about when we feel down? Talking about joy can seem like moral negligence, ignoring the suffering which permeates our realities. On a personal level, when one’s low, it can feel like soaking the heart in vinegar. ‘I said of simchah,’ wrote Koheleth, the Preacher, “What’s the point of that?”’ He had a gift for multiplying everything by zero, with predictable results. But even he acknowledged, in the end, that the best of life lies in its basic joys: eating, drinking and companionship, and, I would add, in appreciating the world around us.

That’s why I love small moments; they make up more than ‘a few of my favourite things:’ a glimpse of the moon before dawn, the dog stretching out to have its tummy scratched; feeding the birds first thing; seeking a woodpecker or a starling pecking at the seeds. As William Blake wrote:

He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

And sometimes the joy flies away very quickly.

Simchah is not the same as indulgence. It’s not turning our back on the misery in the world. In essence, simchah is about nourishing our sense of wonder, nurturing a Baruch shecachah lo be’olama, a ‘Blessed be God in whose world it is thus,’ consciousness whenever we experience anything beautiful or uplifting. It’s about deepening our comradeship with each other and with life itself. We do so precisely because this is our internal resource, our inner storehouse for when the seasons of famine come over us. It’s the root of our resilience, for ourselves and others, when the brutality and cruelty of what’s done in our world, when the wrongs committed and the hurts inflicted, besiege our consciousness.

Writing these words, I’m conscious that I’m talking to myself as much as to anyone else. I’m not great at seizing the moments, at never missing the chance to bless what’s generous, kind, beautiful or good. Very different thoughts often take hold of me, particularly over the last period of time.

But that’s precisely why we need to ‘kiss the joy as it flies.’ That’s why it’s so important to remember Ben Zoma’s answer to his rhetorical question, ‘Who is rich?’ – ‘The person who find joy in their portion.’

May we all, despite whatever challenges we face, find moments of true wealth.

21 Feb 2025

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

The Return of the Bodies of the Hostages – yet even then we must find hope

Sticky Post By admin On February 21, 2025

There are two people I wanted to be close to yesterday. The first is Sharone Lifschitz, whose father Oded’s body was brought home from captivity in Gaza. I have Oded’s picture, with his warm, wise, deeply humane smile, near where I pray when at home.

The terrible date of October 7 was cut even more deeply yesterday into Israel’s heart.

As soon as I heard the news, I messaged Sharone, who lives in London, has spoken in our synagogue, and whose strong, thoughtful, quiet but firm words have often been heard on the BBC. ‘What prayers, what verses do I say?’ she replied. ‘My father loved the Hebrew Prophets,’ she added, ‘justice, wisdom and ahavat adam, love for humanity.’

Her mother, Yocheved, was among the first hostages to be released. ‘I went through hell,’ she said. Yet, Sharone told me, ‘She has a nickname: They call her Mezuzah.’ ‘Why?’ I asked in surprise. ‘Because everyone who sees her kisses her.’

The couple, founders of Kibbutz Nir Oz, ‘were lifelong peace activists and would regularly transport patients from Gaza to receive medical care in hospitals across Israel. Oded, a great-grandfather, was a journalist and a passionate advocate for human rights.’ (Times of Israel)

What a contrast the deep humanity of this family makes with the mocking brutality of Hamas as it handed over Oded’s body, and those of the young children, deliberately murdered, Kfir and Ariel Bibas and, purportedly, of their murdered mother Shiri, to the International Red Cross.

How badly that humanity is needed in a region seared with grief, trauma, pain, and the rubble of war. I wish I could have been in Israel yesterday, with the families I have come to know, and, in a tiny way, feel part of.

But, here in London, I was able to stand next to the second person I needed to be close to, Bishop Kenneth Nowakowski, head of Ukrainian communities across the UK and a faithful friend. I’ve witnessed the devastation of the suburbs just a few miles from the heart of Kiev. I’ve followed the bishop’s work in creating a centre to support the tens of thousands of displaced Ukrainians here in Britain. I’ve heard him speak of the kinship he feels with the Jewish People. The first time he came to our synagogue, he was speechless; at the pulpit, he wept.

‘You don’t have to come,’ he texted me, ‘Your own people’s heartache is enough.’ But Bishop Kenneth has heartache too, as President Trump lies about President Zelensky, and seeks to sell out Ukraine rather like Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia in 1938. (Ironically, this week’s Torah portion is Mishpatim, ‘just laws’. ‘The world stands upon truth, justice and peace,’ taught Rabbi Shimeon ben Gamliel, under Roman occupation 1900 years ago. If only!)

I had one further stirring meeting yesterday. I visited Marika Henriques, to thank for her remarkable film Chaos Dragon and the Light which we screened on Holocaust Memorial Day. It follows her struggles with the trauma she experienced after surviving as a hidden child in Hungary. Never able to draw anything (her own words), she found herself pouring out her feelings years later in paintings which flowed straight from her unconscious. However fierce she portrayed the dragons with which she battled, her pictures always included a red dot. She came to understand afterwards that this dot represented hope: ‘There has to be hope.’

‘We’re commanded to hope,’ Bishop Kenneth said, scarcely an hour later. Hope, we agreed across our multifaith gathering, is a religious obligation.

My hope is that the values which guided Oded Lifschitz’s life, – wisdom, justice, compassion and a commitment to our collective humanity – and which Sharone carries forward, will prove stronger and resonate more deeply in everyone’s hearts than all the hatreds which besiege them.

14 Feb 2025

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

Moments of Hope

Sticky Post By admin On February 14, 2025

In my Talmud class, which has been running each Thursday morning for almost 40 years, we have reached the word echad, ‘one’ (Berachot 13a). It’s such a simple word that every child knows it. Yet it’s so demanding that the world can’t understand it.

Say the word ‘one’ very carefully, insists the Talmud. Say it not just with kavvanah, attention, but with kavvanat halev, concentration of the heart. Draw out the letters for long enough to acknowledge that God is above, below, and everywhere in all directions. For ‘Hear, O Israel, our God…is one’ is Judaism’s creed, its soul, and the spirit of all life.

This is not a mere concept, a mathematical proposition like ‘God isn’t two.’ It’s how we’re called upon to live in this fractured and brutal, yet wondrous and beautiful, world. It means what the mystics taught, that one vital spirit flows through all life, and that all life, in its manifold manifestations, is bound in one sacred kinship.

This is not to deny the cruel realities around us. On Sunday, leaders of the Congolese community in exile poured out their hearts around my dinner table: ‘Rwanda’s invaded, taken Goma. Our relatives are slaughtered, my nephew was killed last week. We need help!’ What can one do? We prayed, for each other’s anguish, for Israel, the hostages, the Middle East, the DRC.

Oneness, togetherness, seems a feeble notion, a mere fiction, set against such violence. Nevertheless, it remains the most comprehensive truth we know. This week I witnessed three glimpses what that might mean oneness, three moments of hope.

The first was the signing of the Drumlanrig Accords between leaders of the Jewish and Muslim communities of this country. The outcome of long and detailed debate, the accords open by affirming that we ‘share a profound spiritual heritage… rooted in monotheism, the sanctity of life and a commitment to justice.’ They conclude with the commitment to ‘work tirelessly to enable future generations to inherit our legacy of friendship, mutual respect, and solidarity.’ No doubt, some will mock this. It’s far from the reality on our streets. Yet it’s nothing more or less than what we proclaim in our creed, that God is one.

Then came Tu Bishevat, the New Year of the Trees. Back around my table, we spoke of our love of trees, of the tree of life at the centre not just of Eden, but of the gardens of our childhood: ‘It’s still there, that oak I climbed as a little girl.’ ‘I’ve had that handkerchief tree planted, not in my garden but in the square, so that the village children can enjoy it for generations after I’m gone.’ Trees and nature are not wholly other; we need them, materially, mentally and spiritually. We belong together, in the vital oneness of life; we cannot survive apart.

Last but not least, I spoke with a close relative of a hostage in Gaza. I didn’t ask permission, so shan’t share their name. ‘I’m not made for hate,’ they said. ‘I do feel it sometimes,’ they acknowledged, ‘I sense it inside me. But I don’t follow it, because we’re here to do hesed, to live by compassion.’ These humbling words fill me with the deepest respect.

‘Say ‘God is one’ slowly, insists the Talmud: meditate on God’s oneness above, below, and in all directions.’ Saying the words is important. But the real challenge is to live by them in this unjust, violent world.

That’s the task to which we are called by our faiths to be faithful.

07 Feb 2025

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

Trees are healers: a message for Tu Bishevat

Sticky Post By admin On February 7, 2025

I have always loved the festival of Tu Bishevat, Chag Ha’ilanot, The New Year of the Trees, because trees are beautiful and trees mean life. From a young age I was taught to treasure them and have childhood memories of the woodlands near our home, the red berries on the rowans and the autumn scents of fallen leaves on damp but sunlit mornings.

In my gap year in Israel, I worked for a fortnight alongside a forester who’d survived the Nazi camps. His experiences had left him wizened and taciturn, but as we drove through the forests of the Galilee his wonder overflowed: ‘How marvellous are the works of the Holy One,’ he would say. Perhaps those woodlands offered some modicum of living compensation for the deaths he had witnessed.

Throughout the burning Mediterranean summer that followed, I felt a personal responsibility for a young sapling struggling to survive in the hot pavement below the Jerusalem Theatre and took it water and prayed with it whenever I could.

For trees are healers. In the Garden of Eden, there was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the tree of life. But there was no tree of death. On the contrary, that Tree of Life became the living symbol of Judaism and Torah: from its roots God’s sacred spirit flows into every leaf, every living soul and every prayer.

When your heart is troubled, teaches the Talmud, when you long for good to happen but it won’t materialise, turn to Torah for ‘it is a tree of life to those who grasp it.’ It’s the nearest to tree-hugging the Talmud goes.

That’s why I hope that trees can become our healers once again today, in these times of war in Somalia, Ukraine, the Middle East. So many lives have been destroyed: the traditional image on the gravestones of those who’ve been cut down young is a broken tree, the trunk snapped in half. Nothing can replace these people or take away the heartache of those who love them. At the same time, nature suffers too; virtually all forms of life perish in the bombed-out moonscapes of war.

So on Tu Bishevat, hand on heart and spade, I set our hope in the healing power of trees. The prophet Ezekiel offers a beautiful verse: ‘The desolate land shall be like the Garden of Eden…the desolate and devastated places shall be restored.’ (36:35) The word for ‘desolate’ is neshammah; take away one ‘m’, represented by a mere dot in the Hebrew, and you have neshamah, breath or soul. Wherever on earth there has been war, may the land live again, may its spirit be restored!

In the Negev, The Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel is creating a Living Trail which ‘will symbolize the area’s rebirth and enduring resilience.’ It will become ‘a symbolic bridge commemorating the October 7 attacks while highlighting the communal and ecological recovery of the region and its people.’ It will model how, throughout the world, where there has been destruction, we can replant, re-green and recreate life and hope.

For trees are the harbingers of peace. They don’t say, ‘we breath out oxygen and restore the land only for Jews, or Christians, or Muslims.’ The vine and the fig tree are the biblical emblems of tranquillity and safety. And ever since the dove brought back its twig to Noah, the olive tree too has been a living messenger of hope. ‘I eat my heart out for all our anguish,’ the ancient olive says, ‘But I grow back, even from a mere bare stump, and my green and silver leaves bend once more in the wind.’

24 Jan 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Holocaust, Israel Permalink

Before Holocaust Memorial Day and the 80th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz

Sticky Post By admin On January 24, 2025

To these images I cling in these hopeful, hopeless times: Romi Gonen embracing her mother after 471 days as a hostage; Emily Damari telling her beloved Spurs, and the world, to ‘rock on’; Mariann Edgar Budde, Bishop of Washington, pleading with President Trump: ‘In the name of our God, I asked you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared;’ and, on a much smaller scale, to the sight of fifteen of our community planting an orchard near the entrance to our cemetery as an enduring commitment to life.

I pray there will be more such pictures of hostages returning, joyful embraces, deep relief, courage and the vindication of goodness.

For there are other images: families of hostages who haven’t come back alive; Palestinian people returning to homes where nothing remains but rubble; Los Angeles in flames while the President says ‘drill, baby, drill’; Elon Musk making his quasi-Nazi salute.

In these perilous times, as humanity crawls across a narrow ridge with the precipices of cruelty and ruin on either side, I hold hard to our faith, not just in God, for God will always be, but in the triumph of hope, life and love. For that is why we are here on earth, to fight for hope, life and love.

Monday, 27 January, marks eighty years since the first outriders of the Red Army reached Auschwitz-Birkenau. King Charles III, long a compassionate listener to survivors of the Holocaust, will participate in the commemorations.

I saw the preparations when I was there with my son and nephew two weeks ago, the huge marquees, soon to be buzzing, in strange contrast to the broken concrete of the crematoria, sunk in a silence beneath which, if one listens hard, there echo the voices of the murdered, with their hopes, longings and asphyxiated farewells.

This weekend and on Monday billions will be attentive.

But attentive to what? Rabbi Rodney Mariner, of blessed memory, spoke not of the liberation but of the revelation of Auschwitz. ‘And when the gates of Auschwitz were opened,’ wrote his colleague Rabbi Hugo Gryn, ‘and the world was able to take in and to react to what [the Nazis] could perpetrate and to the pain of the remnant of my people… both the image of God and the image of men and women were desecrated and besmirched.’

No event in the history of brutality has made it more blatant that we inherit that choice: to desecrate or hold sacred, to besmirch or help heal. Judaism defines this as the decision either to follow the mitzvah of Kiddush Hashem, thesanctification of God’s name, or to commit the sin of Hillul Hashem, voiding that name, treating the world as if everything is godless and it simply doesn’t matter how cruel, vindictive and exploitative we are.

This commemoration sets that choice starkly before all humanity once again.

We stand commanded, by God, Torah, history and present experience to care for each other, for all human – and non-human – life. Whatever our talents, capacities and opportunities, we exist to help each other, practise kindness and forbearance and treat this earth with respect. There is no such thing as neutrality. We aren’t here to be bystanders; we are not entitled to indifference.

The crueller the world, the more determined, proactive, faithful and compassionate we must dare to be. There is no other way to live.

There is a very great prayer in very small print in the daily section of my favourite siddur: ‘For the sake of God’s name, I commit, in deed, word and thought, from now until precisely this time tomorrow, to motivating myself, all the Children of Israel and the whole world to do what is just and good.’

Therefore, in the words of the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, ‘May God grant us the strength and courage to honour the dignity of every human being’ and to care for all life.

17 Jan 2025

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

On the Ceasefire and Hostages Deal

Sticky Post By admin On January 17, 2025

I sent Ayelet, mother of Naama who’s still held hostage, a message of prayer the moment I heard about the ceasefire deal. She sent back an emoji of a butterfly. We hold our breath. May this hell for Israel and Gaza end. May the killing and dying stop. May the slow, tough work of healing start. Dear God, let nothing prevent this deal!

A Message to the World from Glasgow

Meanwhile, something very different moved me this week. Actually, I nearly missed it; I almost said no. But my wife changed my mind: ‘Seeing we’re in Scotland the day before anyway, why not go? After all, it’s where you were born.’ That’s how Nicky and I found ourselves heading for Glasgow Cathedral last Sunday night for an interfaith celebration of the 850^th year since King William I of Scotland granted ‘the privilege of having a Burgh at Glasgow’.

On our way there I was startled to notice that we passed the Royal Infirmary. That’s where Raphael’s and my mother Lore died in December ’62. Thirty years ago, I went in to ask if they still held patient records from that time. The chaplain, who happened to be passing, overheard and took the trouble to check. ‘Sadly no,’ he reported back, ‘Records are only kept for twenty-five years.’ Like many who were very young when things happened, I’ve wanted to know, to have something to fill in the gaps.

In the cathedral were Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Druids, and others. The spirit of the service was ‘to show the world how communities can come together, live together and flourish together for generations.’

The date was 15 January, the Feast Day of St Mungo, the city’s patron saint. ‘Mungo’, the minister explained, means ‘Dear One’ in Scots. According to Wikipedia it may derive ‘from the Cumbric equivalent of the Welsh: fy nghu.’ But for me, it evoked my great-grandmother greeting in all her letters during the terrible years of 1938 – 43: ‘Meine Lieben, My Dear Ones.’

Representatives from every faith had warm words for this ‘city of hope and love.’ Rabbi Rubin spoke beautifully of the four symbols of Glasgow, a tree, a bird, a fish and a bell: the bird was to show how diverse kinds can co-exist, the bell was ‘to alert us to those in need.’ Contributions were collected for Glasgow’s club for refugees, ‘an interfaith response to intersecting disadvantages, including poverty, language barriers, discrimination and trauma.’

My mother was a refugee here in 1939 when she came to study, far from the home she knew. My father had it tough when he attended night school at Strathclyde University for seven years, to make up for the education stolen from him by the Nazis.

The Brahma Kumaris prayed for ‘Dear Glasgow to open our minds to silence and peace.’ The Buddhist prayer was simply: ‘May all beings flourish.’ If only the world were thus.

It was this lead-in, as well as her wonderful singing, that made Brodie Crawford’s rendition of Robert Burns’ A Man’s A Man For ‘A That so utterly moving. Written in 1795, the song reflects the ideals of the French Revolution. The language isn’t exactly egalitarian, but the point is that not wealth or station, but character, makes the person and we’re all brothers and sisters in the end:

For a’ that, and a’ that,
Their tinsel show, an’ a’ that;
The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,
Is king o’ men for a’ that.

Glasgow hasn’t always been a city of hope and love. I recall our doctor friend Maurice Gaba telling me, ‘My surgery after Saturday night was broken bones and blood.’

But this hour of togetherness touched our hearts and left us all with the aspiration to do better.

HEART AND MIND

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