admin | HEART AND MIND

10 Jan 2025

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

In the Footsteps of My Great-grandmother

Sticky Post By admin On January 10, 2025

‘Why is this important?’ my nephew Danny asks me. We’re standing at the ruins of crematorium three in Birkenau, recording for the BBC for which Danny works, in preparation for the 80th commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz. My son Mossy is here too. We’re aware that this may be the exact place where my great-, their great-great-, grandmother took her final breaths.

Late the previous night we visited the 16^th century Shach Synagogue in Holesov. Here my great-grandfather Rabbi Dr Yakov Freimann taught for twenty years. Half-hidden down steps below the street, it survived the Holocaust, unlike the New Synagogue which was burnt and smashed to pieces by the Nazis and the Vlajka.

It’s here that my great-grandmother Regina prayed on the New Year of 1941. On 29 September she wrote to her son in New York: ‘The solemn spirit of the service in the 800-year-old synagogue was especially dignified and in accord with our mood.’

Beautiful murals adorn the walls with the words of communal prayers: ‘Yitgadal veyitkaddash; Magnified and sanctified be Your holy name…’ Mossy sang Adam yesodo me’afar: ‘Humankind is made from dust and unto dust shall return.’ We were not just moved, but transfixed.

‘And what difference will it make when the last living survivors are gone?’ Danny continues.

Standing where they stood in their last moments, we felt close to the dead, trying in the icy rain to catch the echoes of their last words, mental farewells to mothers, children, loved ones, final prayers. As the last survivors go, it’s on us to testify about the lives of those, mostly fellow Jews, also Roma, homosexuals, socialists, who were murdered. And it’s our responsibility to affirm the courage of those who survived, creating new lives, so often without bitterness or hate. In so doing, we bear witness not just to the past, but to the irreducible value of every life.

Yet there’s something further, something critical at this dangerous juncture in today’s world: we must testify to the truth of what happened here for the sake of truth itself. Our western civilisation is in danger of leaving behind the age of empiricism, where fact and evidence matter, and entering the age of untethered myth, when all that counts is who tells the best-selling story. Powerful figures want to promulgate a post-fact, why-check-facts, facts-don’t matter culture. Empowered by many who live more in virtual than in physical reality, they seek to peddle manipulative falsehoods, appealing to the fears and bigotry which, if we’re honest, most of us harbour deep down. Their aim is not the suppression of truths. I fear it’s worse than that: true and false are not even relevant categories for them. All that matter is that their story sticks.

Therefore, our duty to testify is all the more essential. Judaism requires us to speak truth in the heart, bear honest witness, and know that God is not the God of our favourite prejudices but the God of all truth. We are commanded to pursue truth, whether or not it suits us. Inconvenient truths must also be acknowledged.

‘And what about the perpetrators, who also stood here?’ Danny asks.

I could have said: ‘They were nazis; our families were the victims.’ That’s true. But there’s a further, more difficult truth: ordinary people, some with doctorates and religious convictions, groups, parties, national governments, both through acting and through failing to act, became complicit in mass murder. What made that possible? What were the steps on those individual and collective paths? Societies that won’t ask that question may find that they’re already on it.

My answer to Danny is: We’re here to testify: to honour the lives of those murdered, to appreciate the lives of those who survived, and for the sake of truth, to protect all life in the future.

13 Dec 2024

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

Finding the Light

Sticky Post By admin On December 13, 2024

‘She always saw the best in people.’ ‘He had a gift for finding the good in every situation.’ How I admire people like that!

I’m speaking on the phone to Matthew Biggs, of Gardener’s Question Time Fame. He’s not been well. He tells me that when he’s having treatment, he stares out of the hospital window and sees where daffodils could be planted and thinks what it would mean to others to have a truly beautiful space to look at while waiting anxiously for therapies or results. Then he describes exactly what he’s doing to make this happen.

That’s the essence of Chanukah, which now draws near. It’s about finding the light in any situation. When the Maccabees re-entered the Temple precincts after a long and bitter war, they must have encountered an utterly dispiriting sight: everything in ruins, everything holy contaminated and broken. But, in the Talmud’s words, ‘they searched and found one single vial of inviolate oil’ with which they lit the Menorah so that it burnt for a week and a day with a wondrous, sacred light.

We commemorate this miracle ritually by lighting our Chanukah candles. But we live it through how we see the world. Time and again our eyes are drawn to destruction; media and social media thrive on disaster, anger and hate. But there are other ways of looking.

For example, during Covid there were nature-lovers who wrote in chalk the names of the wildflowers that grew through the gaps in the paving stones and walls. There were nurses who, helpless to do more in the loneliness of lock-down and knowing what love means, sent their patient’s family their own mobile number, put their phone to the ear of a sick husband and father, and enabled those who loved him to say goodbye.

Such people manage to see midst the bleakness life’s sacred light. Today, in these tough times, with the world so full of destruction, it matters that we do likewise. God’s light resides in all that lives; it’s up to us to see it.

But seeing it is not enough. The Talmud has a motto: Ma’alin bakodesh: in sacred matters we go up, not down. That’s why on Chanukah we don’t start with eight candles and descend, night by night, to just one, even though this makes sense since the quantity of oil in the Menorah lit by the Maccabees must have got less and less. Instead, we follow the School of Hillel and start with one light, ascending, night by night, to eight.

Ma’alin is a causative verb: it means not just ‘go up’ but ‘raise up’ and applies not just to Chanukah, or religious rituals, but to all of life. When we encounter what’s holy, we must try to raise it up, and, as the Hasidic Master taught, however hidden, repressed and neglected, an inextinguishable spark of holiness resides in all life. The challenge is first to see it, then to nurture it, cup our hands around it and let its flame rise up.

This applies even to little Iggle, the tiny baby hedgehog carefully nursed back towards its survival weight by my wife Nicky. It applies, too, to the ancient chestnut tree for which a friend campaigned until the council relented from cutting it down. Nothing living is so small that it doesn’t matter.

It applies all the more to children, orphaned, hungry and heart-broken, in terrible wars in which their only role has been to suffer. Can we do something, anything, that brings, food, healing, hope even to just one of them, wherever they are in the world?

Chanukah is not just about the miracle of the light that was. It’s about the light within all life that waits for us to find it and raise it up. That’s how we create hope, and the hope we bring always illumines hope in others too.

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.

HEART AND MIND

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