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13 Sep 2024
Sticky Post By Posted in Environment, Israel Permalink

Maybe healing is possible?

Sticky Post By On September 13, 2024

I was privileged to be part of four special evenings this week. They’ve left me feeling that maybe, maybe in this torn world, healing is possible.

Sunday was a fund-raising night for Shaarei Tzedek, one of Jerusalem’s biggest hospitals. The subject was Antisemitism in Sport. But it was something different that I took away. Before we got to fouling in football and crossing boundaries in cricket, an elderly man stood up and spoke of being taken to the hospital as an emergency case. ‘Everyone, from teenage volunteers to medical and office teams, was kind. They worked together, orthodox, secular, in hijab or snood. Whoever the patient, any age, from anywhere, – they came first.’ That’s the message I took away.

On Tuesday I was at St John’s, Waterloo, sharing a book-reading with Father Giles Goddard, founder of Faiths for the Climate. His book is a brave spiritual autobiography about his journey to the ministry as a gay man before there was acceptance in the C. of E. Interwoven with his own story is the history of St John’s, his two-hundred-year-old church in the heart of the city, where once on nearby mudflats curlews called freely and now people of all backgrounds seek solace and communion. Muslim scholar Julie Saddiqi facilitated the conversation, opening with a silence in which our unspoken fears and anguish for our peoples was somehow shared. A grace of togetherness embraced us all. ‘You three together. Who’d have thought? In times like these. Wonderful!’ That feedback carried me home with a warm heart. (By the way, the church has a great parting line: ‘Before you go, talk to two people you don’t know.’)

On Wednesday we were online with Rachel Korazim. Clear, compassionate, astute and knowledgeable, she’s the most brilliant teacher of Hebrew poetry. She’s just edited the anthology Shiva, ‘Seven’, referring at once to 7th October and the traumatic mourning following. The poems are harrowing:

             … through the narrow cleft between night and day

The loss of life bleeds into the silent morning routine…(Rabbi Osnat Eldar)

Rachel teaches these poems because these voices must be heard and to raise funds to support care for traumatised people wherever they are. ‘We’re sending therapists to the beaches in Thailand where hundreds of Israelis have gone seeking, seeking… I believe in a different future, with land for all.’

On Thursday we were among the birds, fishes, amphibians and mammals with the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI). ‘Green spaces, quiet water, – nature heals,’ said Faygle Train**, manager of Gazelle Valley in Jerusalem. ‘In their hours off, soldiers come and just sit among the animals.’ (The occasional rabbi stops by too.) ‘Thousands find regained calm in forest hikes. Five hundred million birds pass through the great rift valley here, the last food-and- water stop on their thousands-of-miles migrations.’ Professor Nathalie Pettorelli of the Zoologcal Society of London spoke of rewilding cities, and Ben Goldsmith about the joy this brings: ‘Who’d have thought beavers would breed in Ealing!’ (He knows how to fund it all too.)

‘What about people who don’t get it?’ I asked the panel, ‘guys who replace everything with concrete and plastic grass?’ ‘Don’t argue,’ Nathalie explained. ‘Show them what they’re missing, the birds alighting on the leaves…’

Am I being idealistic, ignoring 75% or more of reality? Probably! But the Talmud says that ‘Return and repentance are great because they bring healing to the world.’ Maybe it’s also true the other way round. By practising healing we can bring return, to our best selves, each other, God, and life.

06 Sep 2024
Sticky Post By Posted in Israel Permalink

In sorrow and pain

Sticky Post By On September 6, 2024

In this terrible week, with grief in our hearts, despite the feelings of futility that frustrate us and the hundreds of thousands who have taken to the streets of Israel in pain and protest, – despite all this, we must stay resolute in our faith and deeds.

We must continue to believe that our prayers, actions and intercessions will be heard, somewhere; that the remaining hostages will come home alive; that there will be an end to this terrible killing and destruction; that evil will be brought to account; that a better future is possible; that life, every life, is of value, that dignity, justice and compassion are possible; that Hativkah, hope, has meaning, for Israel, for the Jewish People, for all humanity, for the world… May there be an end to this war and the hatreds it has sprung from and engendered, an end to the destruction, hunger, killings, suffering, grief.

‘Lecha amar libbi – On Your part my heart speaks:’ these words from Psalm 27, which accompanies us from now until the end of the High Holydays, capture my feelings. I’m not full of hope just now, but You, God, are telling me to remain resolute and hold hope in my heart.

The horrible news of the murder of six of the hostages has possessed many of us this week.

My soul goes out to the families of all the other hostages. What can they be thinking? We have a special connection with Naama Levy. At the protests in Beersheva, her grandfather Shaul said: The situation makes the hostages’ families feel hopeless. “When Netanyahu says he wants to destroy Hamas, it won’t happen. What is really happening is that he’s destroying us,” he said.

‘Protesters turn on Netanyahu,’ was Monday’s headline in a major British newspaper. That’s true. But it must not be forgotten that it was Hamas who took the hostages and Hamas who murdered them.

The words of Hersch Goldberg-Polin’s parents go round in my heart: ‘We tried so very hard, so deeply and desperately…Finally, you are free…’ But it’s not the freedom they did everything possible to obtain for their only son. As Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, said:

There is no door in the world on which your beloved family did not knock for you, for your rescue and well-being. There is no stone they left unturned, no prayer or plea they did not cry out – from one end of the world to the other – in the ears of God and man.

We’re preoccupied with how these hostages died. But what can we learn from how they lived? Alex Labanov’s friends knew him as “the guy who worries about everyone else.” He was a carer for his parents, who have physical disabilities.

Eden Yerushalmi was very close to her sisters, on the phone to them while trying to hide at the Nova festival, until she cried out ‘They got me.’ Or Danino escaped in his car, rescuing others, then went back to try to save more. Carmel Gat did yoga, in captivity, with children. Almog Sarusi was a guitar player, captured helping his girlfriend, who was murdered.

I take comfort that you were together with such people when you were killed, Hersch’s mother said.

Such people: they were carers, loved their families, were ready to lose their lives saving others, managed to do yoga with children even there, in the tunnels. Let them be remembered not just for how they died, but for how they lived.

As I recited the memorial prayer at the special service we held on Sunday, I was conscious that we know their names, and, tragically, the names of hundreds more. But what of those who have perished in this terrible year whose names we do not know, Jewish, Muslim, Druze, Christian, visitors from distant lands trapped in Israel or Gaza? Did they, too, not deserve life, have families, bear God’s image, hope for a future?

May the powers in heaven above, and the powerful on earth below, bring an end to these horrors.

Shabbat Shalom

Jonathan Wittenberg

30 Aug 2024
Sticky Post By Posted in Community, Environment, Uncategorized Permalink

Listening for God north of the border

Sticky Post By On August 30, 2024

Yehudah Halevi’s stirring lines about his longing for the Land of Israel are much quoted:

Libbi ba’mizrach – My heart is in the East

But I am in the farthermost West.

Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but my heart is not just in the East, but also in the North. I find God in the ancient alleyways and jasmine-scented courtyards of Jerusalem.  I find God, too, among the pines and rowans, mountains and waterfalls of Scotland, my ‘wee bit hill and glen,’ where I meet the highland cattle, wild deer and red squirrels and, on a clear day, hear the cry of eagles. Perhaps it’s because the smells of damp grass and woodlands and the fall of the rain remind me of when my brother and I were small, before we moved to London and left this wonder behind.

East or West, North or South, – we discover different manifestations of divinity in different places, but it’s still the same God. Arthur Green describes how the letters Yud, Heh, Vav, Heh which spell God’s mysterious name ‘I shall be that I shall be’, can be rearranged as Heh, Vav, Yud, Heh, forming the word havayah, which means ‘existence.’ God’s being is present in everything that is, and everything that is expresses God’s presence, each in its distinctive manner.

That’s why the Psalmist hears the trees clap their hands and the mighty waters call out, depth unto depth. (We saw plenty of water in Scotland, the light rain, the storm-driven rain, the rain that drenches you in moments, and the rain that yields to the most amazing rainbows for which we’ve ever had the privilege of blessing God.

God can be heard in ‘the tree of life’ which is Torah, in the living trees of the Caledonian forests, and, with a different fragrance, in the warm pine woods of Mount Carmel. Perhaps it’s no accident that one of Scotland’s great nature restoration organisations is called Trees for Life. We visited its welcoming centre at Dundreggan, where the team, helped by volunteers (who wants to join me one day?) raise one hundred thousand saplings each year from rare seed gathered on the steep montane slopes of the Cuillins and Cairngorms.

I was heartened when Mossy and I traversed a mountain glen through which we’d walked years ago as a family. Back then we had to clamber for hundreds of metres through the dead stumps and broken debris, the desolate remains of a harvested pine plantation. But now the whole area was replanted with broad-leaved trees, oak, rowan and birch. The young growth was thriving; soon it will be home to that rich biodiversity Britain so urgently needs to restore.

Next week brings the 1st of Elul, in ancient times the Hebrew date for tithing cattle, but increasingly celebrated today as the Jewish New Year for Animals. Judaism understands all creation to be God’s work. Our civilisation has become increasingly, and dangerously, anthropocentric. But humans don’t, and can’t, exist in isolation. We are a sympoesis, a ‘making together’, in which we and innumerable other lives are interdependent.

That’s why, while I’m always glad to pray with a quorum of ten people, I was happy over the last few days to put on my tefillin, be sung to by waterfalls, joined in my blessings by the baaing of sheep, and accompanied in my standing prayer by a stock-still fellowship of deer.

I haven’t forgotten ‘the real world’ (see below). It’s only that I’ve been listening, with gratitude, to another part of it.

Shabbat Shalom

Jonathan Wittenberg

Please click here to listen to my Radio 4 Thought for the Day from last Tuesday, concerning Hezbollah.

02 Aug 2024
Sticky Post By Posted in Community, Israel Permalink

Enough of violence and grief

Sticky Post By On August 2, 2024
I apologise for this blunt letter. It befits the times. (Next week I plan to write about defying destruction to create what’s hopeful, uplifting and inspiring.)

Monday brings the new moon of Av, and ‘When Av commences, joy diminishes’, at least until after the bitter fast of Tisha B’Av when we remember all the calamities which have befallen the Jewish People. This year, especially, we feel the painful mood.

If only for the sake of the children, it’s enough. As everyone waits in high tension for what will happen next between Iran and Israel, I pray for no more escalation, a cessation to this war, the return of the hostages, an end to destruction, the restoration of hope.

‘Although I knew no one there’, writes Shoshana Keats Jaskoll, ‘I felt I had to go to the Druze town of Magdal Sams and mourn there with the bereaved’:

Mahmud led us to the soccer field. The scene of the massacre. It was quiet, even serene. But the people were shattered, broken… Twelve wreaths, 12 pictures of beautiful children… Mahmud introduced us to a few older women who wore the traditional religious white headscarf of the Druze. I cried with them. The women spoke only of wanting no more dead. No more suffering. Of ending war and living in peace.
(The Times of Israel)

Talya Danzyg, just 18, felt similarly. Her grandfather Alexander, a remarkable Holocaust educator honoured in Israel and Poland, had won awards from the Polish Ministry of Education and the President. He was a heroic figure who encouraged others, even while held hostage by Hamas: ‘Captive prisoners say that he strengthened their spirit through the history lessons that he taught.’ He was killed in Gaza last week. Talya spoke bluntly on Israel’s Channel 13, addressing her own Prime Minister:

What total victory are you talking about? How is spilled blood total victory? How much longer will our soldiers die? How much longer will the hostages continue to die? How long will people be displaced from their homes? The longer it takes, the longer it will be before we can heal all these things! What total victory? Come down to the people. Look them in the eyes… Stop the destruction and devastation, and bring the hostages home.

I don’t have words from the children in Gaza, or their parents, except for the crying of a bereaved mother which goes round in my head. Except for the sight of the boy I saw years ago, covered in bandages in an East Jerusalem Hospital, and the elderly man bent over him who explained through an interpreter that he was the child’s uncle: ‘Eighteen of the family are dead.’ 

The rabbis asked themselves why God allowed the Second Temple to be burned and Jerusalem to be sacked. Because of sinat chinam, they said, causeless hatred. I’m cautious about the word ‘causeless.’ Hate finds its pretexts, vindicates its rages. No doubt Hamas and Hezbollah, cruel agents as they are, will profess to having ‘reasons’. Instead, I read the words as ‘pointless hate’, anger that gets us nowhere, except to engender more anger, more pain, more grief.

Now in the UK we also mourn the deaths of children, murdered as they enjoyed a holiday dance class in the peaceful town of Southport: ‘How can it happen here?’ local people ask. Why does it happen anywhere? Already the horrible crime is exploited, to vent more rage and fear. 

One line from the Scroll of Lamentations, which we read on Tisha B’Av, haunts me above all: ‘“Where is corn and wine?”’ the children ask, as they faint in their mothers’ laps.’ 

I pray for Israel. I pray for children, wherever on earth they are. I pray for us all, that we find the right ways to bequeath them a world of joy, not misery; of wonder, not horror. 

May God give us, and especially our leaders, the vision, strength and courage to give the world’s children what they deserve. 
26 Jul 2024
Sticky Post By Posted in Community, Israel Permalink

At Noam pre-camp: a space for listening

Sticky Post By On July 26, 2024
Dear Community,

Here’s my consolation, in a week of listening to so many heart-rending stories. I’m at Noam pre-camp.

Noam, just in case anyone doesn’t know, is our youth movement. Actually, that’s not true. It’s more than that. It’s where tens, hundreds, of young people make friendships which last lifetimes, eagerly take on responsibilities for each other, initially for younger groups, then for the whole movement. It’s where they form their identity as Jews, absorbing the values of community, companionship, caring and compassion. It’s where Torah becomes real, in learning, listening, arguing and absorbing.

Reuben Green, recently appointed head of the movement, gives me a lift from Port Talbot Parkway to the site. His heart is in Israel, he tells me, but he cares deeply about the Jewish community here in the UK, ‘which is why I’ve taken this job.’ He wants Noam to engage more deeply with their Judaism and their rabbis. He wants to strengthen the bonds with Torah, and, whatever political views Noamniks hold, with Israel, in all its strengths, weaknesses, challenges and dilemmas. 

Pre-camp is where the madrichim and roshim, leaders and heads, prepare their activities before camp itself begins, with all its frenetic energies.

We rabbis are guests here. We are so used to young people being in our ‘adult’ spaces – when they come. But at pre-camp we are in their space, so an invitation to pre-camp is a privilege which to be respected and honoured. After all, at my age of 66, there are 45 years between me and the average age of the 140 Noamniks all around. It’s extremely touching to be welcomed so warmly.

It’s a beautiful location, wooden buildings, ecologically designed, in the middle of fields and wooded hills. There’s a small zoo, where I watch a wily young alpaca fail to charm an alarmed two-year-old boy. Deer graze in the nearby fields, my favourite animals. There’s respite simply in breathing.

There’s a different kind of beauty here too. Actually, a more fitting term is chen, good grace. It comes across in the friendship with which people treat each other. There’s fun and banter, but underneath, there’s a palpable spirit of kinship and concern. This has been an extraordinarily and exceptionally tough year to be Jewish, especially at many schools and campuses.

I’m asked to facilitate a conversation for the whole camp on how to hold spaces so that they are able to accommodate difference. I listened, humbled:‘I had to represent the Jewish community at my university…’‘I wore my Magen David out…’‘When October 7 happened, I was far from home and the people with whom I could process it…’‘I feel so moved to belong to a faith which can hold complex emotions, solidarity, pain, anger at the same time…’‘I felt deep loneliness. The Jewish community around me didn’t encompass my views and feelings…’‘What I value here at Noam is not that everyone shares my mindset. I didn’t expect or want that. It’s the spirit of friendship in which we can hold these conversations…’Anguish sits deep in our souls. We are often far from people who understand us. We need to hear each other. It’s not about arguing who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s the healing that comes from being allowed to say what’s in our hearts, the healing that being listened to brings.

I leave pre-camp filled with affection and respect.

Shabbat Shalom

Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg
19 Jul 2024
Sticky Post By Posted in Uncategorized Permalink

Ne’eman – holding each other in our hearts

Sticky Post By On July 19, 2024
Ever since meeting the families of hostages, both here and in Israel, I feel connected. The families made two requests. Do everything you can to secure my relative’s freedom. Hold us in your heart. With regard to the first I feel powerless; regarding the second, yes, I try to hold you in my heart. 

Indeed, life is about how we hold each other in our hearts, how we honour our connection with each other and even with the very earth itself. Let me explain, and then return to the tears, and hopes, of now.

A key word for me is the Hebrew word ne’eman; it stems from the same roots as the familiar amen. Ne’eman means faithful, true and trustworthy in all our relationships, to each other, all creatures and life itself. There aren’t many words we can use both about our dog’s behaviour towards us and our attitude to God. But it works for ne’eman, because it describes how we hold each other in our hearts.

I admire people who are ne’eman, who are not just honest, truthful and kind, but reliably so with whomever they are engaged, without prejudice or contempt towards anyone.

I bought a wonderful book this week. I came across it by happy accident, while searching for another work by the same author. It’s a slim volume, less than one hundred pages: The Democracy of Species by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I want to order a whole pile, to give a copy to everyone I care for.

Kimmerer writes about her efforts to learn her native American language, Potawatomi, from the few remaining elders who know it. It’s a language of relationship, of far more verbs than nouns, because it’s a language ‘for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things.’ It’s the language she absorbs when she sits and listens, simply listens, her back against a pine tree in the woods. It’s the speech ‘of our kinship with all the animate world’.

Translating this into Hebrew, I hear the deep truth of ne’eman, faithfulness to life and the God of life. In fact, the most intimate name we have for God, Yud Heh Vav Heh, is a verb. It means being, or coming-into-being, or was-is-and shall-be. It eludes translation. As contemporary theologian Arthur Green points out, the letters, re-arranged, form ha-va-ya-h, ‘existence’. God’s name is the heart of being.

To be ne’eman is thus to be faithful to the sacred essence of life. It’s the converse of a careless, contemptuous or exploitative attitude to anyone or anything. It expresses a way of being rooted in awareness and respect. It challenges our contemporary world and leads me to conclusions which often leave me ashamed.

The horrors we witness in this times of wars call on us for profound ne’emanut, faithfulness. I feel this first towards my own people, the father I met whose daughter is held in Gaza, the mother whose girl is still a hostage deep in some grim tunnel, the parents whose son was killed on October 7. I feel it too towards Yael, an Israeli committed, despite everything, to action for peace, who wept as she showed me pictures of her friend in Gaza making soup for hungry children. Unless we’re on the side of cruelty, forfeiting our own humanity, we must, somewhere within us, feel kinship with all hurt, all hunger, all suffering.

Ne’emanut is deeper than all politics. It reaches down into that kinship with each other and life itself, in which, despite everything, we must not give up hope.

In striving to be ne’eman we hold each other, and humanity itself, including our own, in our hearts. We testify against cruelty, hatred and destruction. We live in solidarity with life.
12 Jul 2024
Sticky Post By Posted in Community, Environment Permalink

We all need our moments of hope and reprieve

Sticky Post By On July 12, 2024

We need our bursts of joy and relief. That’s what Watkins’ great goal in the 90th minute of the Euro semi-final did for England on Wednesday, – though it may have felt different in Holland. It doesn’t spell an everlasting end to war, or no more human misery, but we all need such moments of reprieve.

‘Write about hope and resilience,’ my agent told me, ‘That’s what people want to hear.’ So that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’ve ditched the serious piece I just drafted in favour of what follows, especially as I’ve been lucky enough to have wonderful moments of positivity this week.

‘For those few seconds we were eye to eye,’ said Hugh Warwick, in a delightful talk he gave at my home last Sunday, during EcoJudaism’s awards ceremony at which our synagogue got gold. He was speaking about close encounters with hedgehogs. After all, he’s the author of A Prickly Affair (as well as many other books, including a recent best-seller).

He’s also the champion of the British Hedgehog Society. I cold called him a couple of years ago. As I struggled to explain precisely why a rabbi wanted a lecture on hedgehogs, he took the initiative by listing every single context in which the charming creatures are – arguably, very arguably indeed – mentioned in the Hebrew Bible.

Why hedgehogs? Because, Hugh Warwick answered, ‘I love them.’ It was that eye-to-eye, creature to creature, moment that sealed it. And, he added, you can only truly fight for what you love.

Others love hedgehogs too, he continued. ‘Groups won’t invite me to talk about climate disaster, or biodiversity loss. But champion Britain’s favourite animal and they’ll ask you gladly. And once on the platform, I can talk about everything.’

It’s what the great environmentalist Wendell Berry wrote: ‘Maybe the answer is to fight always for what you particularly love, not for abstraction, and not against anything.’

The following day I attended an event for Tree Aid. It focussed on their work in helping local groups in Ghana, particularly women, plant food-bearing trees as part of the Great Green Wall, the 8,000 kilometre long, 20 kilometre wide, tree belt intended to stop the southward creep of the Sahara. It was an evening of music, joy and love for what everyone was achieving. We felt we were watching the young trees and the strengthened communities grow together.

This may all sound stupid when there are wars on, when Bishop Kenneth Nowakowski, a good friend, sends me a picture from Kiev of his Cathedral with smoke rising from a bombsite in the background, and when there’s fighting in Gaza and the north of Israel, and the hostages still remain captive after nine bitter months.

But Ayelet, mother of Naama who’s still held by Hamas in Gaza, sent me a video of their dog. So I sent back a photo of Nessie. Stupid? Yes, I felt foolish taking that photo. But it’s a moment of reprieve, of closeness, and we need them in order to survive. There are times, and parts of the world, which are so cruel that minutes, even seconds, like that are almost unattainable. But when they’re possible they must be seized and relished. If we can, we should share them others.

Every morning we say in our prayers, ‘With great love, God, you have loved us.’ That love may take the micro form of a close encounter with a hedgehog, sharing a film of our dog, a kind word posted, a WhatsApp, or whatever. These may be small things in the global scale, but without them neither we nor the world can survive. 

05 Jul 2024
Sticky Post By Posted in Uncategorized Permalink

Democracy and Service

Sticky Post By On July 5, 2024

The need to cry surged up in me as I left the polling booth yesterday.

It wasn’t about who would win. It was about the act of voting itself, the opportunity to choose freely what cross I marked on my ballot paper. It was about the process of true democracy at work.

I thought of my grandfather. I envisaged him emerging weak and sick from Dachau concentration camp. Then I imagined what he would say about the freedom we enjoy here today.

In how many countries of the world are there genuinely fair and honest elections? Don’t the women, and men, of Iran, and so many other states across the world, long for just this? It’s a matter of deep principle, pride and commitment that, despite all its problems, Israel was founded as, and continues to be, a democracy.

Indeed, writing as a Jew, in how few generations, in how few times and places, have we had the equal right to vote, men and women? In how many lands have we been able to stand for election and represent our constituencies and country? Even when he wrote in Frankfurt in the late eighteenth century about the importance of participating in newly won civic opportunities, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch could only dare to hope for this.  

I have been moved, too, over the last weeks to see so many young people, in support of whichever party, volunteering, knocking on doors, engaging in the process of democracy, motivated by the belief, the hope and trust, that one can stand up for one’s values and make a difference to how one’s country is run. 

So now the UK has a new government. 

When Rishi Sunak called the election, he probably didn’t know that the Torah reading for the following Shabbat would contain the story of Korach. There are of course alternative readings, but the classic understanding is that Korach challenged Moses’ leadership not because he cared more deeply for his people, or had a greater commitment to justice, but because he wanted power for power’s sake. His arguments were not ‘for the sake of heaven,’ true ideological difference which deserve to be debated because truth is multi-faceted, but merely cantankerous personal attacks. 

The great majority of those who stood for election in this country are not like Korach. In the early hours of the night, I heard moving speeches, both by winning candidates and former MPs who lost their seats, about the privilege of caring for their cities and their people. That is public service in the true sense of the words. In the classic Hebrew phrase, such individuals intend ‘to occupy themselves betsorchei tsibbur be’emunah, with the concerns of the community in good faith.’

In these challenging times, those entering or re-entering Parliament carry profound responsibilities. I pray for their safety and wellbeing. It’s horrifying to learn of the vile abuse, the online bullying, the threats, including death threats and threats to their families, to which MPs, especially and particularly women, are now so often subject. May God, and we as a society, keep our elected representatives safe from harm, free in person and in spirit, to serve our country.

I pray that our MPs, civil servants and all who work with them, will govern for the sake of tsedek and tsadakah, justice and social justice, chesed veshalom, compassion and peace. May they, and we, work for the national and international good, and for the wellbeing not just of humankind but of our planet and all the intricately interdependent life upon it. 

May they, and we, take forward the sacred task of letakken olam, making the world a safer, fairer and better place for everyone, as is God’s will.

21 Jun 2024
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Keeping the Inner Flame Alive

Sticky Post By On June 21, 2024

In tomorrow’s Torah portion, Beha’alotecha, God commands Aaron to ‘cause the lights to go up’ on the seven-branched Menorah in the Tabernacle. Rashi, the great mediaeval commentator, explains: Kindle the lamps carefully, making sure that the flame takes hold on the wick so that the light can ascend freely.

It’s a specific instruction to Aaron in his role as High Priest. But it’s also a metaphor for life. As one of my favourite Hasidic teachers, the Maggid of Kozhenitz, observes: when we do what is good and right, we light the lamps of love and wonder in our hearts. Our first responsibility is to ourselves, to feed those flames. But then, through acts of kindness, we must try to nourish the spirits of others. Or perhaps it’s the other way round; by caring for others, we strengthen the light in our own hearts.

This goes to the core of the challenges so many of us are experiencing in these times of war and anguish. How do I stay human? How can I be loyal all at once to my own people, to humanity, to life, and to my God?

Here’s something small which happened to me yesterday. I’ll recount it not because of what I did, more or less by chance, but because of how it touched me, what it did for me.

I learnt that this Shabbat is Naama Levy’s twentieth birthday. She’s still held hostage by Hamas. May she be freed at once to return to her family. May this terrible war end, with plans for safer, better years for the people of Israel and Gaza.

I called the flower shop nearest to where Naama’s mother, Ayelet, lives and asked the florist, whom I’ve got to know a little over these grim months, to send a bunch of flowers. What else can one do, but these gestures?

The florist understood at once. ‘So painful,’ she said. ‘The war goes on and on…Everyday more death.’ She sounded so dejected that I asked her to add a bunch of flowers for herself, from my community. ‘I’m going to cry,’ she said. Minutes later, she messaged: ‘I don’t remember anyone sending me flowers since I opened my shop.’ What more can we do, we agreed, than try to care for each other?

Such things seem futile, even stupid, before the threats and horrors we face from Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, from Russia and North Korea, and underneath it all, from the changes to our climate, the nurturing water, earth and air.

But often this is all we can do, – keep each other’s hearts alive, help the flames of love and kindness ascend within us, even for a moment. It helps us stay human, and by the light of that humanity, we recognise the humanity of others.

That’s why the prayer, co-written by Raba Tamar Elad-Appelbaum and Sheikha Ibtisam Mahameed just weeks after October 7, touches me so deeply:

God of life, may it be your will to hear the prayer of mothers…

That we have mercy for each other,

That we have pity for each other,

That we have hope for each other,

… For your sake, God of Life.

That, too, is why I’m moved that World Jewish Relief, which has been financing trauma services in Israel, is now also ‘providing targeted support to the International Medical Corps, a trusted international partner, to provide emergency maternity, obstetric and newborn baby care services in Gaza.’ As CEO Paul Anticoni adds: This is in accord with ‘our own Jewish values, humanitarian principles and [has the] explicit encouragement and endorsement from the President of Israel’s office.’

Hatred and destruction have immense powers at their disposal. Goodness and kindness seem feeble beside them, their actions so local, so small. But, like the sacred light hidden within all life, compassion and kindness reside within us everywhere, waiting to be illumined. That is their deep, indestructible, inextinguishable strength.

14 Jun 2024
Sticky Post By Posted in Israel, The Jewish Year Permalink

The heartbeat of our faith

Sticky Post By On June 14, 2024

It was minutes before the festival, and I hadn’t decided which prayer book to take. Of course, it would have to be the correct machzor for Shavuot, Zeman Mattan Toratenu, the Season of the Giving of our Torah. Machzor means cycle, a lovely, simple word with which to refer to the beauty of Judaism’s liturgy for the annual rhythm of our festivals.

I didn’t have a copy of the most recent Koren edition, with its thoughtful, practical notes. But what about the Artscroll, with its excellent layout, but super-pious commentary? Or the classic British Routledge, the translations archaic but the Hebrew large and clear?

No, none of these would do.

Instead, I sought out my grandmother’s old Machzor. I first saw it, and its companion volumes, on the bookshelf in the flat on Ramban Street in Jerusalem, where the family fled from Nazi Europe in 1937. When my grandmother had gone to her eternal rest, and her daughters and son-in-law who had lived there with her were dead too, and my one-and-only cousin and I were clearing the flat, I asked if I could have those books. They now live in my study.

I opened the machzor for Shavuot; it was dated 1838. The title page read: ninth edition, arranged and translated into German by Wolf Heidenheim (1757 -1832, a renowned liturgical scholar). The books were printed in Roedelheim, in Frankfurt.

On the back page was a solemn admonition, threatening with the rabbinic ban anyone who reprinted the volume unlawfully before 25 years had elapsed since its publication.. It was an early, probably unenforceable, version of copyright protection.

I kissed the machzor, as one does. It’s not that I needed a two-hundred-year-old book. What I wanted were the two hundred years of prayer which its pages, thin and yellowing yet untorn and clear, breathed out. I needed their strength, resilience and piety. I wanted the love instilled into their words and melodies by at least eight generations of family. I wanted the hope and faith, even the tears and fears, of everyone who’d prayer through those pages to slip into my heart. For ancient books carry within them the devotion of centuries.

With the Jewish world in profound trouble, I sought refuge in two hundred years of prayer. With Israel under attack, with so many still held hostage, so many killed and grieving, I needed the yearning and hope of two centuries of prayer. With so many dead in Gaza through Israel’s response, and page after page of condemnation of Israel, I sought the integrity, depth and truth of two hundred years of prayer. With so many people telling me how they feel shunned at work, isolated, proud, ashamed, distressed, resolute, I needed the resilience of two centuries of prayer. With the Jewish world torn in its heart, I sought the faith and faithfulness of two hundred years of prayer.

To whom had those prayerbooks originally belonged, with their poetry and piety? In whose hands did they survive the 1848 revolution, the rise of political antisemitism, the horror of the First World War and its disastrous aftermath for Germany and Austro-Hungary, the hunger of 1919, the great inflation and the great depression? How did they escape the Holocaust? How did they get to Jerusalem? Did my great-grandmother Regina, widowed in 1937, send them ahead to her son and daughters in the land that she herself was destined never to reach, murdered at Birkenau in 1944? I’ll never know.

But of this I am certain: those prayer books were a most treasured possession. They were loved and cherished. They were our family’s pathway upwards to God and down into the soul. They were their truth and strength.

On that path I strive to follow them, hearing in them, as we all need to hear, the heartbeat of our deep and resilient faith.

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