Rashi, the great Torah and Talmud commentator, had eyes for every word, indeed for every syllable and letter.

He noted a seeming contradiction in the sentence which describes the arrival of the Children of Israel at Mount Sinai, the prologue to the giving and receiving of Torah which we celebrate tonight on Shavuot.

The verse reads ‘They came to the wilderness of Sinai and encamped there (plural verb); Israel encamped (singular verb) opposite the mountain.’ (Exodus 19:2) Why this difference between the two verbs?

The Israelites, Rashi explains, each came with their own opinions and different experiences.  But then, in order to hear God and receive Torah, they listened ‘with one heart, like one single person.’

No doubt, Rashi had his reasons back in the late eleventh century for stressing this point, as every generations of Jews have had before and since. We are a discursive, debating, not to say arguing people.

But when it comes to hearing God’s voice, the ‘life of all life’, the voice at the heart of creation and in the core of our souls, we listen all together.

When it comes to embracing the core values of Judaism, as expressed by Simon the Just over two millennia ago,  ‘Upon three things the world is established, upon Torah, upon loving kindness, and upon the service of God,’ we commit ourselves to transcending our differences, and to harnessing them for our collective good, so that we work together for the sake of God’s will.  

Chag Sameach and may Torah enter our hearts.

It’s the simple truth: ‘They died so that we can live.’

I’ve visited the Normandy landing beaches many times, showing the young people of Noam round Sword and Gold on peaceful, sunlit days, so very different from the murderous fighting of eighty years ago.

I’ve just re-read Antony Beevor’s D-Day: The Battle for Normandy.

Sometimes I had to put the book down struck to the core by the sheer courage of so many, or by sheer horror at the slaughter.

I’m smitten by the compassion shown in the midst of the fighting by so many (but not the SS): dressing comrades’ wounds, even tending the injuries of those who, minutes earlier, would have killed them.

Soldiers who’d been farmers milked the desperate cows who’d survived the strafing and shooting.

One infantryman noted how a foal refused to leave its dead mother, walking round her and round her so often that it had beaten a circular path through the grass.

I’ve visited the war cemeteries, now quiet, now peaceful, beautifully tended, with the names and units of the dead, the rows of crosses, among which are many Magen Davids.

I don’t know who decided that the words ‘Known unto God,’ should be inscribed on the gravestones of those whose deaths left their bodies so mangled that they could not be identified. They weren’t just left unnamed; they were people who mattered, mattered to God.

Yesterday I attended the lighting of the beacon by AJEX, The Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women, in the grounds of the Jewish Free School. I listened to the voices and accounts of veterans.

I was privileged to read out on behalf of us all the 23^rd Psalm: ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil for You are with me.’

Once again, we walk though that valley, witnesses as others traverse its dangerous, often fatal, depths.

Yesterday I got news from a friend whose relative in the north of Israel was killed by Hezbollah. What can one say? I hear with a sinking heart of more deaths in Gaza. Is this what you want from your creation, God, You whom we call ‘God of the spirits of all flesh’?

We believe in a God of life, Chei HaChaim, the very Life of Life, whose breath imparts consciousness to all life, who mechalkel chaim bechesed, who ‘nurtures all life with lovingkindness.’

That is the God whose presence abides in all living beings, including us, even though we so often struggle to feel it, and humanity so often behaves as if it did not know it.

This is the God whose voice within us, so frequently out-shouted by the endless noise around us and inside us, so often reduced to a whisper of a whisper, calls us to practice kindness and justice because that is God’s will towards life.

That is why we call God’s word Torat Chaim, the Torah of life, as we receive once again this coming week on the festival of Shavuot.

This is what we mean when we pray for our hearts to cleave to the Torah’s commandments: we pray that all the angers and fears, the injustice and cruelty, the frustration and despair across the world around us, and in our inner world inside us, will not extinguish your voice in us, God of life, your voice which commands justice and loving kindness.

Dear Community,

I write – somewhat in haste so as not to miss my train – from Frankfurt-am-Main, the city with which my grandfather, Dr Salzberger, fell in love when he came in 1910 to be interviewed for the post of rabbi. (It’s a relief to be in a town where the Israeli flag hangs among others from the city hall [on the Roemer, the square where the SA paraded 90 years ago])

I was invited by John Schlapobersky to speak about my family’s Frankfurt roots at a conference of group analysts. And, John adjoined me, address the question: ‘Where’s the light now?’

For it was from here, from my grandfather’s former community at the Westendsynagoge, that I had symbolically lit a flame from the Eternal Light, which all the devastation of Kristallnacht had not succeeded in extinguishing, and walked home with it to kindle the Ner Tamid at the dedication of our own new building, thirteen years ago.

I recalled, as I struggled what to say, how on some village street, somewhere on that 400k walk along the Rhine, an old man had stopped me, saying: ‘D’you realise the torch in your backpack is still on?’ ‘Yes,’ I’d explained, ‘I’m carrying the light.’

So, said John, tell us where that light is now. It’s an apposite question for the Shabbat before Yom Hashoah, the Hebrew date for remembering the Nazi Holocaust.

But first I must write about darkness, and those very different flames, of fire. ‘Quickly! Out of here!’ my great-aunt Jenny recalled; they’d been living in a flat in the great Boerneplatz Synagogue when it was torched on Kristallnacht. ‘I saw through an open door the burnt-out cupola, before it was quickly shut and I was whisked away.’To this day, she told me, she can’t bear railway stations; the anguish of being sent away from her family still pierces her heart.

On the same date my grandfather was arrested by the Gestapo. They’d been waiting for him in the family home. He was taken to a great hall where Jews were made to crawl across the floor, their ‘exercises’ strangely interrupted by a Mozart aria: ‘In diesen heiligen Hallen / kennt man die Rache nicht – In these sacred halls we know not revenge.’ A Jewish musician had, with that cruel and quirky absurdity which characterised certain Nazi behaviours, been offered his freedom if he could prove he was indeed an opera singer.

Reflecting back, I recall how, on entering the Westendsynagoge to light my torch and ‘take’ the light, I’d been struck to the heart by the verse which adorned it: ‘Lo amut ve’echyeh – I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of God.’

So here we were now, together in Frankfurt, German and British therapists, Israelis too, all dedicated to caring for that greatest abode of God’s light here on earth: the human heart.
Yet darkness was close about us. One of the conveners lost his son-in-law on October 7. All of us mourned the loss of life of Israelis, Palestinians caught between Hamas and the IDF. We all feared the antisemitism, the racism, and what horrors might come next.

I have no great answers, just two rabbinic sayings to guide me. The first is from Nachmanides, the thirteenth-century rabbi with the deepest heart: God’s light is with all who weep amidst oppression, God sees their tears. I believe God is with all those, too, who weep for others in their anguish, who weep with all who suffer.

The second consists of just four Hebrew words: ‘“Neri beyadecha, venerecha beyadi – My light is in your hands; your light is in mine,” say God.’ God’s light is within us, if only we can find it. Not only that, – the holy light of each other’s lives is in our hands too, if only we can see amidst the gloom, and cherish it despite the contagious hate that fills our streets.

Shabbat Shalom

Jonathan Wittenberg

This Shabbat finds us on the threshold of a difficult Pesach. Our rabbis called the festival Zeman Cheiruteinu, the Season of our Freedom, so I will write about four kinds of freedom (I know there are others), for each of which we struggle. Please forgive me for writing at more length than usual.

The first is obvious and in all our hearts: it’s summed up in the slogan, the demand, the words of hope one sees all over Israel: ‘Bring them home now.’ Let our hostages go. I cannot even begin to imagine the feelings of their mothers and fathers, sons, daughters, family, close friends.

These are the names,’ writes contemporary Israeli poet Yael Lifschitz, paraphrasing the opening words of Exodus:

And these are the names of those covered by darkness…
And these are the names of the children of Israel whose cry
Rises from the depth of the tunnels of darkness… 
(trans. Rachel Korazim et. al.)

Tomorrow’s prophetic reading from Malachi closes with the words: ‘Return the hearts of the parents to the children and the hearts of the children to their parents.’ God, set those words constantly before the eyes and in the souls of those who hold the power to make it happen!

There are many, too, separated by other wars, like the mother and children we hosted who still cannot return to Kharkiv and join their father. Countless innocent people are locked in the dungeons of tyrannies, like Alexei Navalny until they murdered him. May God protect them.

I think, too, of those whose loved ones will never come home, because they died on October 7 or fighting in the war against Hamas. In Malachi’s words, May God’s presence comfort their hearts, ‘with healing on its wings.’

The second freedom is freedom from the horror of war, the hatred that feeds it, the fear it arouses, the destruction it causes, and the grief to which it leads. Judaism is not a pacifist religion; war in defence of one’s right to exist is sometimes unavoidable. But it’s still a disaster, a failure of humanity to find a way to co-exist. It’s far from God’s dream for humankind.

I saw burnt out homes in the south of Israel, and evacuated villages in the north. I’ve seen the charred remains of flats in the suburbs outside Kyiv, people queueing for essentials in freezing February at an improvised market.

I can’t not think of the devastation of Gaza, people sitting dazed in the rubble of smashed up streets. Whatever our understanding of the cause, it’s utter wretchedness. And brooding amidst such misery, and elsewhere in other conflicts, in grief-stricken, anger-filled hearts, may be plans, even hopes, for the next round of war, because violence is liable to feed revenge, which feeds revenge.

So I pray that, ‘the sword shall not pass anymore through the land,’ (Leviticus). I will say Isaiah’s words at the Seder, which he wrote when Jerusalem was under siege, ‘May they learn war no more.’ I pray for a better way, for Israel, the whole Middle East, this war-torn world. I pray for leaders, and the collective will, to guide us toward paths of peace. I pray that no one will have to sit in safe-rooms, unsafe rooms or bomb shelters, but that we shall all one day sit, in the beautiful Biblical image, ‘each beneath their fig-tree and their vine.’

The third freedom is freedom from prejudice, the inability to see the human in the other. Antisemitism has soared manyfold since October 7, hate against Muslims has more than doubled; racism is rife. It blinds us and makes us slaves to the pedlars of hate.

I don’t start from the premise that ‘I’m not racist.’ I don’t trust myself. What Alexander Pope wrote about hope may also be true of racism: it too ‘springs eternal in the human breast.’ We must therefore be vigilant, starting with ourselves, including our communities, society, language, collective assumptions.

Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib Alter of Ger taught that the commandment of ‘being seen before the presence of God’ on festivals doesn’t mean visiting the Jerusalem Temple. It’s closer to home. ‘Don’t read “being seen” he wrote. Instead, read “see” (the words look identical in the Torah). See God’s presence in the place where God dwells, that is, within every human being.’ This is beautiful and true – but hard, especially in a season of anger.

Yet it’s not impossible. My friend the Jerusalem rabbi Tamar Elad-Applebaum said the first person to reach out to her on October 7 was an Imam. I’m trying to learn that I, and all of us, need to reach out more.

I pray that, without being naïve or stupid, we can free ourselves from ‘the mind-forged manacles’ that lock each other into the stereotypes of bigotry and contempt.

The fourth freedom is freedom from deep complicity in a culture which commodifies and monetises everything, nature and all its resources, treading down its wonder, and destroying the very powers it holds to heal us, body and soul. Isaiah proclaimed the whole earth to be ‘full of God’s glory’. All of creation, not just humankind, bears God’s image, argues David Seidenberg in his magnificent Kabbalah and Ecology.

None of us wants to be like Oscar Wilde’s cynic who ‘knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.’ But that’s the way much of our collective civilisation has been going, inflicting injustice on each other and disaster on nature. We gravely risk being consumed by our habits of consumption.

We can’t just break free. We’re part of it; we’re implicated. But we can, and must, create islands of freedom, for humanity and nature together. This year, Seder night falls on Earth Day. Can we respect, cherish, and help preserve all the rich forms of life around us, so that our hearts and souls are enriched by them in turn?

God, in these cruel and painful times, guide us along these paths of freedom, mei’avdut lecheirut, from slavery to liberty.