Community | HEART AND MIND

27 Feb 2026

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Two Reasons Why I am Passionate About Masorti Judaism

Sticky Post By admin On February 27, 2026

The Installation in Oldenburg

Last Sunday I was privileged to officiate alongside Rabbi Bea Weiler at the installation of two outstanding rabbis, Rabbi Levi Ufferfilge and Rabbi Netanel Olhoeft, in Oldenburg, North Germany, where once Samson Raphael Hirsch wrote his famous Nineteen Letters, encouraging in the warmest of terms return to Jewish practice.

This open-hearted community, which covers 9,000 square kilometres, embraces people from Israel, Russia, Ukraine, survivors of the Shoah, and children who grew up in DP camps. The rabbis bring together pupils who are often the only Jewish students in their class, offering essential support and solidarity in these cruel times of rising antisemitism. And, added Rabbi Levi, All the municipalities, religious communities, schools, parties etc. in this huge area approach them for interreligious and memorial events.

But he and Rabbi Netanel rightly want Judaism to be about far more than remembering the Shoah, essential as that is, and combatting antisemitism. It must be filled with simchah shel mitzvah and simchat chaim, joy in the commandments and joy in life. That is certainly what I experienced as a guest of the community.

Masorti Judaism, led by committed rabbis and practised in warm-hearted communities which combine deep engagement in Judaism together with a humanist vision embracing the dignity of people of all faiths, is essential today. From within our ancient tradition, which teaches love of God, neighbour and stranger, we must challenge the pernicious narrowness of unconstrained nationalism and resurgent populism. We are committed, in the words of last week’s Torah portion, to creating a dwelling place for God, sanctified through offering a safe, respectful and restorative spiritual home for people of all faiths and for all life together.

To Whom the Kotel Belongs

When he dedicated the Temple in Jerusalem, Solomon prayed that God would hear the supplications of all Israel in times of trouble, that God would listen to the outpourings of the soul of every Jew and respond to the petitions ‘of the stranger who comes from afar.’ ‘God,’ he prayed, ‘Hear from Your dwelling place in the Heavens, forgive, and grant to each person according to their ways, for You know their heart.’ (1 Kings 8)

Isaiah spoke similarly two-and-a-half centuries later, in words we say to this day: ‘My House [says God] shall be a place of prayer for all peoples.

Yet men and women who wish to pray together today, who do not want to be divided by the partition that separates the sexes in the huge plaza in front of the Kotel, currently have to locate a different entrance and follow a path with many steps and turns down to a remote and broken corner of the wall. In truth, I have never resented this, but much preferred that quiet space among the huge stones, many still lying where they fell during the Roman destructions in 70 CE. Here, you can listen to the birds calling out like the music of an India raga, piercing the heart, accompanying and deepening our human prayers.

But now the motion has been put before the Knesset that orthodox bodies alone should have complete authority over the entire area, which would make freedom of worship at this most iconic of places impossible. What would King Solomon, what might Isaiah, think of this? Those who seek total domination over God space, generally seek control over everything else as well, justice, dignity and who is, or is not, worthy of consideration and compassion.

Given the current balance of powers, there is every chance that the process before the Knesset might succeed, though from across the world we must oppose it in every peaceful way we can.

But we should also remember this: that, in truth, God’s spaces can never be governed by partisan and discriminatory human authority. God’s breath gives life to in every person; it breathes in every heart and every living being. This was the Psalmist’s conclusion, at the close of 150 poems: ‘Let every breath praise God!’ Who is going to manage to control that? No one. For the sacred breath of life remains holy, whatever life it inhabits. It will not be strangled, and its songs and prayers cannot and shall not be suppressed.

06 Feb 2026

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In the week when we read the Ten Commandments in the Torah

Sticky Post By admin On February 6, 2026

In that moment when the words ‘I am your God’ were spoken, the whole world fell silent, all creation stood still and listened. Every living being felt: ‘These words are spoken to me.’ Everything in nature realised: ‘This is my inner essence; this is who I truly am.’

This beautiful explanation, by Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh-Leib Alter of Ger, takes us far beyond the understanding of the first of the Ten Commandments as a statement of religious dogma. Rather, it is the truth at the heart of all life: whoever I am, in whatever way I frame my identity, – Jew, continental, American, Russian, gardener, teacher, parent, teen – there is a deeper reality to me. That truth flows through me and through all things constantly, almost always unrecognised and unnamed, but without it I would have no breath and my heart would not beat. That truth is the sacred vitality, the divine energy, which imparts life to all that is. In that moment when God spoke, not just down from Mount Sinai but upwards from the depths of all being, this truth surged to the fore and, for one inerasable moment, united all consciousness in the one awareness: this is my God, the ‘I’ which is the core of all being and is the deepest reality of all that exists.

That moment of revelation at Sinai may or may not be historical, but it certainly is eternal, universal and all-encompassing. Only, it flows deep down and concealed, well below the loud, unceasing, constantly chafing, frequently brutal, experience of our everyday world. Noise and violence drown it out. But they cannot negate it or render it untrue. We continue to hear it, if only rarely; we to intuit it in those moments when we fall silent and not just our mind but our heart comprehends: we belong to one life you and I, fellow traveller, fellow human, fellow being, bird, sheep, tree.

Yet, despite this teaching, I find myself thinking over and again of a very different commentary on the Ten Commandments, by my much-missed teacher Rabbi Hugo Gryn. In Chasing Shadows he writes of his experience in concentration camps:

‘In the intervening years I have often thought how Auschwitz-Birkenau was the denial and the perversion of all the Ten Commandments. In that Nazi empire…it was clear that:

I. God was replaced by a Fuehrer and his minions who claimed for themselves the power of life and death.

II. They fashioned for themselves idols of silver and gold and filled their world with the sigh of swastikas, the sound of Heil Hitler and the smell of burning corpses.

VI. Murder was at the heart of that culture, and killers were promoted and honoured.’

This is what can happen when we forget the sacred ‘I’ which is the heart of all life and by virtue of which all life is precious and must, in all its individuality and diversity, be recognised and respected. How different that ‘I’ is from the ‘I, not you’; the ‘I have no place for you,’ the ‘ego-nationalism,’ exclusionism and racism at the core of the worst of populist politics. How different from those tyrannical ‘I’s’ in our current world, eager to take up weapons and kill.

I fear this rise of violence and contempt, whoever it is directed against: refugees, fellow Jews, Muslims, non-Brits, nature, life itself. That is why it is so important, essential beyond anything words can convey, to listen to that voice which speaks from Sinai and, as Rabbi Yehaudah Aryeh-Leib taught, to recognise it, be silent, and know.

02 Feb 2026

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5786 Shabbat Shirah – The Shabbat of Song

Sticky Post By admin On February 2, 2026

Singing abides deep in the intrinsic nature of existence. It cannot be alienated.

In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
~ Bertold Brecht

That is why the authors, whoever they were, who composed Perek Shirah, ‘The Chapter of Song,’ were not satisfied that the ancient Mishnaic texts which reached them should speak only of law and ethics. For beneath even the basic, essential truths that address the will and conscience, they sensed a further depth of consciousness, an awareness of the sacred, and that consciousness sings. Not only, therefore, did they compose their chapter in its honour, but it seems they backdated pseudepigraphically it to that core creative rabbinic period of the first and second centuries of our epoch, as if to say: This is not only equally as valid and as holy, as necessary to the life of the spirit as keeping the Sabbath, or proclaiming ‘God is one’: it is, in fact, the true meaning of ‘God is one,’ the truth that nourishes all subsequent truth, the essence of being itself. Hence, they understood that not an orb, nor a whale in the ocean, nor a bird, nor a human soul in its journey across the span of life, but will, sometimes even unknown to itself, be susceptible to song.

Song may be bleak and painful. The other prisoners, tortured by the Apartheid regime in South Africa’s jails, would sing, whether from horror, fear or solidarity, while their fellow victims of the regime, innocent as they themselves were except for protesting the tyranny of their government, were taken for execution. And today, the priests, rabbis, imams and population of Minnesota and elsewhere who stand against the extra-judicial murders of their townsfolk, sing. Song is indefatigable in its protest.

The poets and musicians may themselves be killed; those who hate freedom will continue to seek them out and murder them, but their poetry and songs cannot be put to death:

You took away all the oceans and all the room.
You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it.
Where did it get you? Nowhere.
You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.
~ Osip Mandelstam

And even when those lips can no longer make words, – Stalin had Mandelstam exiled and he died in transit – the words they shaped continued to be learnt by heart, whispered while tyranny reigns, but sung when freedom returns.

For there exists a deeper music to which the human soul, and the spirit of every being, responds. This music belongs to no one, which is why it cannot be locked away. It is the vibrancy, the rhythm and resonance of life itself, of infinity, of God if you will, of the sacred energy as it flows through all creation, through everything that exists. Only the hard heart cannot hear it; that is why the cruel in spirit persecute those who can.

It is this song, taught Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh-Leib of Ger, that the Children of Israel sang when Pharaoh was defeated, not on account of his death, but from the joy of liberty. And in their own song of freedom, they sung the freedom song of all creation. For the Torah says: ‘They sung this song,’ but to what does this refer? he asks, rejecting the obvious answer that it refers to the words which follow in the text. No, he insists, this points to the song that has existed from the moment of creation, the music which is present but concealed in all things, and which although so often unheard, is the invisible essence and source of energy of all that exists. It is the song of the earth ‘from whose corners we hear music;’ of the trees of the forest which clap their hands and dance, and of the wild geese, pulsing forth in honks and powerful wingbeats as they traverse the sky: ‘A voice calls out in desolate places: make straight the pathway through the wilderness for God.’ It is the song which shall be sung in the time to come, when the world is redeemed.

Is this true? One doesn’t hear such music in the headlines about brutality, murder, injustice, contempt and incitement to hatred that fill the virtual realms of social media and the press. There is little if any testament to such music in the reports from witnesses to mass killing, secret murder, torture, sadism, lying, deceit and pretence, a literature so vast and horrible that it’s unbearable to contemplate for long, but which must also be heard and heeded. Song, or sob, which is the deeper reality? The answer must be both, or else we too will join the heartless throng.

But the singing remains, inalienable, even when inaudible. For it derives from a source which flows deeper and sustains life more truly than the selfishness, fear, envy and anger, the failure of compassion and imagination, which shrink the heart.

And were it not for this singing, humanity would have no hope.

22 Jan 2026

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What the dog has to say

Sticky Post By admin On January 22, 2026

Our first dog Safi used to sing. There were many variants, but two basic melodies, though it would take either a considerable amount of generosity, or a canine ear, to call it that, and what other dogs thought of his music we were never able to ascertain. The first was performed by him whenever we travelled by car and left the motorway to slow down along some country lane. Realising we were close to our destination and that he was about to be set free among the trees and streams, he would, well, there’s not really any other word for it, lift up his voice and sing. It wasn’t exactly harmonious, but it was definitely joyous, and we all enjoyed it. It touched something visceral in us all, a place of freedom, release from the city, liberation from the human equivalent of being kept on the lead. We loved it. Years later, we still say to each other as we drive up to Nicky’s parents’ home among the apple orchards in Kent, or stop by some favourite New Forest glade: ‘Remember how Safi used to sing when we got here.’

If that was his Beethoven, his second kind of melody was, without wishing to insult them, his Rolling Stones. He loved to hang on to those tough long ropes tied from thick boughs in woods or over streams for children to swing on. The moment he caught sight of one he would be off. With a flying leap he would catch on to the rope with his teeth and sway backwards and forwards, his paws waving like a hyper, but not very good, dancer at a pop concert, while something between a yowl and a whine emerged from his mouth so loudly that on several excruciating occasions the unrepeatable sound drew a small crowd to the sight. The only way to get him back was to grasp his collar, prize his teeth apart and keep holding on to him until we were at least a hundred yards away. This was especially embarrassing if the rope hung over water and a group of teenage spectators had gathered to watch.

Our other dogs have, thank goodness, been more circumspect. Well, that’s not exactly true. Our second dog, Mitzpah, reputedly a pure-bred Welsh border collie whose relatives sorted sheep in the valleys, would bark at anything, except when someone came to the door or when he himself wanted to come back in from the garden. We loved him dearly, but ‘annoying’ would be too mild a term to describe his choice of when and where to be vocal. He could bark and bark, then bark and bark some more. He had his favourite places, like outside the bathroom or on the stone steps into the garden. We did sometimes wonder, though, if he could see into a dimension we could not and had taken it upon himself to frighten off ghosts hidden behind the walls or stuck for ages in our toilet, the door to which soon bore scratch-markings from his frustration at being unable to enter and chase away whatever spirit he seemed to be convinced abided there. But should a burglar have attempted to enter, we were convinced that Mitzvah would have greeted him with eager-eared silence.

Nessie, our third and current dog, as much loved or, arguably, even more than her predecessors, generally prefers paw language. Her choice of vocabulary is not always subtle. Stop stroking her and you are liable first to be tapped, then scratched and finally all but spanked by her front paw. She has a different tactic at nighttime. If she gets too cold sleeping on our bed, (our determination not to let her do so lasted less than twenty-four hours) she creeps up to you, whether you are awake or asleep, and licks your ear. We don’t need google translate to understand that this meant ‘lift up the covers because I want to crawl into bed next to you.’

However, if we are brazen enough to leave her anywhere even for a few moments, she goes vocal to a degree which makes up for all her previous reticence. If I dare to tie her lead to the post outside the shop, which I do only when we are seriously short of basics, before almost literally running round the store so as not to abandon her for more than sixty seconds, I can be certain that nobody has nabbed her because her yelps and yowls are audible down every aisle. If I’m ever in a dog-friendly café and need the loo, she follows me to outside the door where she whines so pitifully that I can’t help but embarrass myself, and probably everyone else in the establishment, by keeping up a steady ‘I won’t be long; yes I do love you; no I haven’t forgotten you,’ from inside my cubicle where I can’t complete my essential business fast enough.

If each of our three dogs had their preferred mode of self-expression, one means of communication has nevertheless been shared by them all. It has nothing to do with their vocal cords and everything to do with their eyes. It’s how they stare at you while you’re eating. Squatting motionless next to you, except for an occasional hopeful wag of the tail, totally focussed, with a pitiful and pleading look you would be forgiven for thinking they had perfected in the mirror for months, they gaze up at you unflinchingly as if to say: ‘How can you stuff your face like that when I haven’t eaten a morsel for weeks? Plea-ea-ea-se!’ Bad listener as I sometimes am, how can I fail to hearken then?

But all this is only the tip of the tale. This is merely the dog vocabulary we humans can readily understand, the equivalent of ‘bon jour means good morning’ in an old-fashioned guidebook for first-time tourists in Paris. See two dogs together, as when our children and their resident hounds join us, and there is a sophisticated language of interactions which we can only guess at by inter- or misinter- preting their behaviours. The old notion that what distinguishes homo sapiens from all other species is that we alone have language needs to be taken back to its kennel and left there. The actual truth is that there are innumerable languages among countless species; only we just don’t understand. ‘That’s right,’ I mentally hear my dogs assenting, ‘You just don’t understand!’

Can I please add – if you do love animals:

I have been working with two dear colleagues, Rabbi Charles Middleburg and Rabbi David Mitchell, on a prayer book for animal companions. This has been in the making for several years and we are now in a position to publish. We’re are officially launching a pet companion’s prayerbook to support us and our beloved fur-balls through every moment of joy and sorrow. 150+ pages of prayers, readings and meditations for every magical and heartbreaking stage of loving a pet, as well as appreciating the animal world.

However, we need your support to sponsor a small (or even large) section in memory or celebration of your beloved animal companion. The crowdfunding is live. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/izzun/an-animal-siddur

Please be in touch if you would like to sponsor a line, a pawragraph or a page

02 Jan 2026

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A Prayer for the New Gregorian Year

Sticky Post By admin On January 2, 2026

Dear Friends,

Happy New Year.

It’s a big New Year for me, stepping back as rabbi of my beloved community at the New North London Synagogue, but continuing with an increased role as Senior Rabbi of Masorti Judaism and with a greater commitment to interfaith and environment work. It’s a chance, and a challenge, to reflect, rethink, and learn new ways to appreciate and care for the sanctity of life.

I listened with mixed feelings to the fireworks as 2025 ended and 2026 began. If they mark true hope, may the sky sparkle with their stars. But I feel more at home welcoming the secular year, as we do the Jewish New Year, with prayer.

May this be a year of compassion and generosity.

May our common humanity unite us, more than our differences divide us.

May justice and law protect everyone against hatred and violence.

May all rhetoric of racism, supremacism, hatred and contempt yield before the understanding that those we ‘other’ are human too.

May our societies and communities come together in concern and kindness for those who have no home, no food, no access to healing, no hope.

May we recognise our kinship and interdependence with all life and cease from all needless destruction.

May we listen to our companions on earth, the rivers, trees, insects, birds and animals.

May we learn from all life and bring healing, not hurt.

May we live from our heart and conscience. May we be guided by the God-given spirit that breathes in us all.

May this be a year in which we appreciate the fragile, vulnerable beauty of life, a year in which we are moved to wonder and respect.

May this we a year of wisdom and compassion.

This my prayer for 2026 and after. Do I believe it will all come true? Sadly, no. But it marks the path I am sure we must pursue, the path of true, active, committed hope.

May we be blessed with inspiration, determination, courage and companionship as we strive to follow it into the perilous future.

Shabbat Shalom and Happy New – Gregorian – Year

Jonathan Wittenberg

26 Dec 2025

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My last Shalom NNLS is a big ‘Thank You’

Sticky Post By admin On December 26, 2025

I’m writing this, my last Shalom NNLS, on the closing day of Chanukah – some days early so that it can be scheduled to go out while the shul office is closed over the holidays. As I hand over to my colleagues, I feel accompanied by the afterglow of the eight candles burning on the full Chanukiah.I’m drawn once again to the Talmudic discussion about whether one may light one Chanukah candle from another. The answer is affirmative, so long as the flame is passed directly, with no intermediary. I see that response not just as a legal decision, but as about how life works. It’s how we learn to see, feel and be, more deeply.

As I close my time at the New North London, I want to give thanks for the light I’ve been given and open my heart to the new lights I will be shown in the future. So many people in our beloved community have shared their light and guided me.

Thank you to the teenage leaders, madrichot and madrichim, whom I’ve seen calmly lead a shy child, frightened by the charming behaviour all around, to a still corner to read the Shema. It’s like watching kindness itself smooth down a tiny, safe patch of calm amidst the screaming chaos of contemporary life. There’s godliness in the way those teens do that.

I respect and appreciate those who’ve said, but not in words: ‘Take this candle and accompany me.’ They’ve lead me to places in the heart, chambers deep underneath, safe from the depredations of time, where love abides despite the death of the beloved years ago. Here, they listen to them still, commune with them, and, although they cannot hold them in their arms, or bless them as one blesses one’s child on Friday night, they are still strengthened, hurt, and made more deeply human by that love which can never be extinguished.

How susceptible to pain the heart is. How important, therefore, is every moment of kindness, thoughtfulness, generosity and tenderness in a world which so often proves unspeakably cruel.

Thank you to those who’ve said ‘Haven’t you seen?’ and showed me a plant, shared a line from a poem, illumined words of Torah. During lock-down I received as many photographs of nature as questions about Jewish law. ‘What bird is that?’ ‘Have you noticed how the Judas trees have begun to flower!’ (In Hebrew they’re called clil hachoresh, the crown of the forest.) How poorer we would be if people didn’t hold out a candle and say, ‘Look there! See this beautiful world!’

I honour everyone who’s said: ‘Contribute more!’ People dedicate themselves to so many essential concerns: ‘We do therapy with horses and dogs for people who lost family in the fighting in Israel and Gaza.’ ‘We’re training local women to support victims of rape after the war in the Balkans.’ ‘Will you join us planting hedgerows and mini forests in Barnet?’ ‘Help me support these refugees who’ve nowhere to sleep but the streets.’ What can I say? You light pathways into worlds that desperately need our care. You illumine the road of conscience.

I’m thankful to colleagues of all faiths with whom we’ve stood against the hatreds that distort religion and cut deep wounds of violence into our world. Together we have striven to affirm the true oneness of God, whose spirit flows through everything making all life sacred.

I’m grateful for the prayers, music, poetry and Torah, which have led us to the hidden, holy core of life and held us there, even momentarily, so that we may know it and be at one.
All these are lights which kindle my, and your, inner light.
I shall try, as we all do, to stay faithful to the light with which I have been entrusted.

May God’s light, present in all life, illumine the path of goodness and compassion for us all.

24 Dec 2025

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Chanukah: the lights of hope in a time of darkness

Sticky Post By admin On December 24, 2025

I see the lights of Chanukah reaching out into the darkness. Chanukah is a festival of hope, courage and inspiration and we, and the world, urgently need them all.

But now, not only after Bondi Beach but at the close of a cruel year, that darkness feels deep indeed. My Christian friends speak similarly as they approach the celebration of Christmas. We, and the Muslim colleagues who sent words of sorrow and solidarity, share the simple prayer: ‘May the light prove stronger than the darkness.’

It’s a prayer addressed to each other, ourselves and our governments, as much as to God. We need light.
That doesn’t mean that we can ignore the hatred, cruelty and contempt abroad in our world. But I won’t detail them here. I will focus on the light, because we need it so badly.

On a personal note, the second day of Chanukah is the Yahrzeit for Raphael’s and my mother, Lore. She left us a collection of stories, Maerchen in German, fables in poetic prose. One of them concerns a little boy who is terrified of the dark and gets lost in the forest in the pitch-black night. Yet coming, panic-stricken and exhausted, upon a clearing, he sees the bright moon and stars and hears the swaying of the trees. He stops, breathes in, and stands still in wonder: ‘I always knew it,’ he says to himself, ‘beyond the darkness there is light.’ I think now that, knowing she was dying, our mother wrote this story as a message to her two young boys, and to herself.

Returning to Chanukah, the date marks the repossession of the Temple by the Maccabees. Who knows what they actually thought as they contemplated the ruined precincts? Their battles weren’t over. Right next door stood a fortress still in enemy hands.
Yet the Talmud chooses to tell us that the first thing they did was look for light. Whoever the editors of the Talmud were, they wanted this to be the message of Chanukah for future generations: Seek light! Whatever the darkness around you, seek it out! And when you find it, even if it’s just one tiny jar, even if you think, ‘This won’t last. It’s a mere nothing! It’ll be out before it’s lit!’ – go ahead and light it.

That, taught Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib Alter of Ger, is where the miracle of Chanukah’s eight days begins, not in heaven, but on earth. Eight, he wrote, represents transcendence, seeing beyond. In kabbalah, the eighth sacred quality if we count upwards, is binah, intuition. It’s the insight that beyond, and within, everything, even in the heart of darkness, resides God’s spirit. There is an inalienable holiness, and inextinguishable point of light, at life’s core.

On Chanukah that or haganuz, that hidden flame, is kindled on our Menorah and placed not in secret, but overlooking the highway, in the public square. Hope and light must be ‘out there,’ a call to courage and the strength of collective goodness.

The Talmud asks, and then confirms, that ‘we may light one candle from another’ directly, flame to flame. This represents the truth that one person’s light, creativity, kindness, bravery inspires others, who inspire yet others about whom the individual who lit the first flame will never know.

So we must never say: ‘It’s too little. The darkness is too thick.’ Despite everything, let the lights of courage, inspiration, creativity, companionship, goodness, kindness, determination and hope shine forth into the coming year.

17 Dec 2025

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The Massacre at Bondi Beach

Sticky Post By admin On December 17, 2025

My article from The Observer, Monday 15 December 2025:

Shocked and horrified, but not surprised: these words of Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, after Sunday’s attack on Bondi beach, were almost identical to those of chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis in response to the killings at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur.

Both attacks targeted the community as we honoured the sacred festivals of our Jewish year. The annual gathering on Bondi Beach to celebrate “Hanukah by the Sea” is a great event in the calendar of Sydney Jewry, taking place in the heart of the community. It marks the lighting of the first candle in the eight-day festival which celebrates hope and courage. It’s a time of light and joy; there was a petting zoo, face-painting and fun activities for all the family.

Instead, this open and welcoming celebration was destroyed by fifty rounds of gunfire, leaving 16 dead, some 40 seriously injured, thousands traumatised, a country feeling shattered and Jewry round the world in grief and anguish.

The Jewish community is closely connected. It wasn’t long before I began receiving messages: “My niece was there. She had to run; she’s distraught.”

“My sister lives in Sydney, I was so worried, but for some reason she didn’t go to the beach.”

“My relative is about to have his second operation.”

Once again, I find myself thinking of Yehudah Amichai’s poem The Diameter of the Bomb: those killed are at the epicentre, but the shockwaves spread ever wider, reaching those who weep on distant shores at the other side of the globe.

Even if nobody we know was there, the horror reaches home: “It feels like it’s encircling us,” a congregant tells me. He means the pervasive ether of anti-semitism. Some of it poses as anti-the State of Israel.

There is indeed legitimate criticism of the Israeli government. Such criticism is shared by many Jews who passionately care about Israel and pray for the wellbeing of all its citizens. But the pervasive rhetoric of cult-like hatred directed against the whole country of Israel effectively targets all Jews. It slides all too readily from murderous words to graffiti, murderous threats and murderous acts.

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry logged 1,600 antisemitic incidents in the year to September 2025.

The massacre on Bondi Beach, said Alex Ryvchin, was “the logical conclusion to what’s been simmering in this country for two years.” His own home was fire-bombed earlier this year.

As communities round the world lit their first Chanukah candle last night there was a spirit of solemnity and sorrow. At a gathering of hundreds in my synagogue we prayed for the wounded and expressed our heartfelt solidarity with the grief-stricken.

But there is also a spirit of resolute determination. Chanukah celebrates resilience and courage. As Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal, CEO of the Rabbinical Assembly wrote: “the act of bringing light into a very dark world is one of defiance, faith, and hope. We trust that, with God’s help, we will see light prevail over darkness, and righteousness overcome evil.”

We take strength from the amazing intervention by Ahmed al-Ahmad who showed unimaginable bravery in overpowering one of the gunmen, and who was himself wounded. As Imam Qari Muhammad Asim wrote in a moving message to the British Muslim Network, his courage “shows the true values of Islam”. Both Jewish and Muslim sacred writings teach that whoever saves a single life is as if they had saved the entire world. Ahmed al-Ahmad saved many lives.

Imam Qari rightly called the attack at Bondi Beach “an assault on the fundamental values of dignity, freedom of worship and coexistence that bind us together. Such acts of terror are a betrayal of our common humanity.” That common humanity needs common defence by us all.

We therefore also take strength from similar messages from many Muslim and Christian leaders. We stand together not only against antisemitism but in determined opposition to all forms of hatred and racism. It is essential that across our societies, in Australia, Britain and worldwide, we affirm our shared humanity not just in words but actively, by working together for the good of our whole society.

Above all, we find strength in the deep resilience of Judaism which sees in the human spirit an inexhaustible and unquenchable source of light. As we celebrate the next seven days of Chanukah, we kindle that light in the public domain, sharing our determination that understanding will conquer hatred, that goodness will overcome evil and that cruelty will be vanquished by compassion.

28 Nov 2025

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Facing my retirement with complex feelings

Sticky Post By admin On November 28, 2025

As I near the end of my time as Senior Rabbi of my Synagogue I feel complex emotions. I am deeply grateful for the wonderful New North London community and the hundreds of people who have enriched my life. I feel loss, bewilderment, and uncertainty about my future. But I don’t doubt my decision to retire, and have every confidence in the congregation’s future, with its caring and committed membership, dedicated lay leadership, devoted professional team and excellent rabbis.

I also have plenty of fight still in me, and will continue to work with energy and love for everything I care about through my continuing role as Senior Rabbi of Masorti Judaism and in the worlds of climate, nature and interfaith.

After more than a thousand contributions to Shalom NNLS, these are some of my last. I am glad my colleagues are taking over these weekly messages and am moved by their thoughtful words. I will continue to write regularly for Masorti Judaism; you can follow me at https://jonathanwittenberg.substack.com/, or you may have had enough. For me, this writing has been a kind of listening to my conscience and heart, a conversation with the many people who inhabit them, whose words and deeds have moved me.

After 38 years full time, and several as youth worker and student rabbi before that, I find myself reflecting back on how I felt all those decades ago. I was hesitant and afraid: Would being a rabbi eat me up? Would I cope? Would I love committees? Underneath it all was the deepest question: did I honestly believe in God?

Reality has answered those questions, but not in ways I’d foreseen. The privilege of rabbinical work has deepened me. People, with their joy, tears, griefs, fears and loneliness, have shown me inner spaces, both in themselves and in me, that I didn’t know were there. Listening has unlocked chambers of the heart I had never before entered. I hold there echoes of countless people’s words, resonances of love, wonder, anguish and sorrow, which I will garner carefully until I die.

As for God, I have found not answers but moments of response. Actually, that’s not true: they have found me. I haven’t seen the light and had all my doubts resolved. You won’t find me preaching God at Speaker’s Corner.
I dislike dogmatic certainties and have little time for knock-down theological arguments. They frighten me. I have no answer to why there’s so much injustice, cruelty and destructiveness in the world, other than feeling sorrow and grief. But I somehow sense that God is sorrowing too, just as God takes joy in the trees, birds and animals, is present in every form of consciousness and resides in the human heart.

I’ve heard no great voices from heaven, and I’d be locked away if I claimed I had. But I have, just sometimes, overheard the still small voice of wonder and been chastened by awe. Such moments have evoked in me, as they do in others, a feeling of relationship and responsibility. I don’t question them; they question me: Are you there? Do you care? They tell me that I am answerable to something infinitely resilient yet infinitely vulnerable. They put in my heart the knowledge that I must not hurt, must never drive this sacred presence away.

I don’t need any more than this.

As for my question about loving committees, the committee making the decision is still out.

14 Nov 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Environment Permalink

EcoShabbat 2025: The love and the fear

Sticky Post By admin On November 14, 2025

I went to bed on Wednesday night unable to get the chorus from Beethoven’s Ninth out of my head.

We’d just held our EcoJudaism vigil in Parliament Square, timed for the start of COP 30. Rabbis from every denomination, including the Chief Rabbi, were there (you don’t often see us all together) and children from Alma school. Nearby, a group of anti-Brexiteers blared out music, with frequent repetition of that Ninth – but they couldn’t drown us out.

Standing there, holding the banner with ‘Tend and preserve God’s world’ writ large in Hebrew and English, I couldn’t help but think of Schiller’s Ode to Joy which Beethoven took for that chorus:

O joy, O wondrous sparks divine…
All humanity shall be brothers…
With your magic bind together
What we’re accustomed to divide

I’ve always had a love of nature, animals and trees. I was taught to get my hands in the soil, not pick apples before they’re ripe, reach between the thorns for gooseberries, enjoy the woods behind the house, hold my hand flat so that a horse could take the sugar lump. I love it all still, only more so.

For as I’ve got older, that love has deepened into an intuitive sense of kinship. It’s not just fellow humans whom we should treat as sisters and brothers. Must the ‘us and them’ divide between humans and all other life be quite so absolute? Doesn’t one vital energy flow through us all, one spirit from the one God, bestowing consciousness on every creature, each according to its nature? This is how kabbalah understands creation, the emanation of the divine from the unknowable depths of God into the heart of every life, where, enclosed within our bodies, it calls out to know it.

We humans have far greater intelligence and agency, and therefore mitzvot, God-given obligations, to use our powers well. But the same earth will wrap us round in the end, our spirit will rejoin the great oneness, and the roots of trees will carry what was once our body up into the branches and leaves.

Therefore, as the first commandment ‘Love God!’ requires, we must cherish our fellow creatures. I worry for them every day, foolish as it sounds, the green woodpecker that occasionally feeds on our lawn, the hedgehogs rarely seen now on the heath. As the second commandment, ‘Fear God!’ demands, me must prevent the earth’s ruin. I feel like a partner in treachery when fields are poisoned and seas throw up plastics and the creatures they choked.

‘If the Torah says, “Love God” why does it add, “Fear God”’? asks the Talmud before concluding ‘Do both!’ (Yerushalmi Sotah 8:5)
But love is better: ‘He prayeth best who loveth best / All creatures great and small,’ said Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. That’s the essence of both our moral and our spiritual lives.

Yet the fear is real. It’s not awe; awe humbles. It’s visceral fear, for the children, animals, life itself; for this beautiful world, God’s world. ‘Don’t destroy my world,’ God tells Adam and Eve, ‘Because no one can come after you to put it right.’ (Kohelet Rabba) This is summed up in the two-word commandment: ‘Bal Tashchit, Don’t destroy.’

We must act from both fear and love.

I’ll end with Sean Ronayne’s dedication to his unborn child Laia in his beautiful book Nature Boy: ‘You owe me nothing in life, but I do have just one wish. All that I ask from you is that, one day, you fly the flag for nature… love it as it so deserves…and give it the voice it needs.’