Community | HEART AND MIND

21 Feb 2025

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

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

Sticky Post By admin On February 21, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

14 Feb 2025

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

Moments of Hope

Sticky Post By admin On February 14, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

07 Feb 2025

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

Trees are healers: a message for Tu Bishevat

Sticky Post By admin On February 7, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10 Jan 2025

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

In the Footsteps of My Great-grandmother

Sticky Post By admin On January 10, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13 Dec 2024

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

Finding the Light

Sticky Post By admin On December 13, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

22 Nov 2024

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

Why Small Things Matter

Sticky Post By admin On November 22, 2024

We have a new resident in our house, a temporary visitor I hope. It’s a hedgehog, whom Nicky has called Iggle; we don’t know its pronouns. We hope we can return Iggle to the gardens and hedgerows as soon as we safely can.

It happened like this: I was walking down East End Road towards Fairacres where we were preparing a Friday night dinner when something drew my attention to the pavement. There, half hiding among the amber leaves, was the tiniest baby hedgehog I have ever seen.

I saw at once that it was nowhere near the minimum 650 grams these much-loved creatures need to survive the winter. So what to do? I slipped the loaf of bread I’d just purchased under my arm, put the hedgehog in the paper bag, where at least it would be protected and contained, and took it home as soon as I could. Nicky had the scales at the ready: the little fellow weighed a mere 220 grams. Since then, it’s put on another 35. It’s a busy young creature, and we’ve been careful to keep the dogs away from its scratching and snuffling.

This is a very minor matter. But I take comfort in just such small matters in these cruel times. They prevent me from feeling utterly overwhelmed. Here is something I can do, one small life I can maybe help save, and anything we can on the side of life and healing is, perhaps, not quite so little after all.

COP 29 is coming to a close. Though the stakes could not be higher, expectations have been low. Results haven’t made the headlines in the way the election of Donald Trump, the escalation of fighting between Ukraine and Russia, and the ICC’s warrant against Netanyahu have. But COP is an international endeavour to manage the greatest threat of all, climate chaos and the devastation of nature. The future of our children depends on tough, courageous decisions and the willingness to fund them.

Part of the challenge is spiritual: we, humankind, need to re-imagine and re-feel our relationship with all other life. Judaism doesn’t promote domination, superiority and entitlement, despite those verses from Genesis 1, ‘Fill the earth, subdue it, have dominion.’ Rather, it teaches partnership, care and respect. This is God’s world, and God’s sacred vitality flows through every human person, and, in different manifestations, through every living being.

The Judaism I believe in does not condone the degradation and dispossession of innocent people, be the victims fellow Jews, Israelis, Palestinians or anyone else. It does not accept wilful or negligent cruelty towards any form of life. Such behaviours cannot be condoned in the name of Judaism. Judaism is a religion of protest against oppression, destruction and indifference.

Consider this caution, attributed to Rebbe Shneur Zalman of Liadi, founder of Chabad, who chided his son for idly tearing leaves of a bush:

‘Who says the ‘I’ of you is more important to God than the ‘I’ of that plant. True, you belong to the world of humans and it belongs to the world of vegetation. But how do you know which is more precious to God?’

It would be hard to put matters more radically.

The older I get, the less I want my life to be evaluated by what it costs the earth: what I’ve consumed, squandered, chucked away; whom I’ve failed, hurt, or been implicated in hurting. I want my scales to balance on the side of life: what I’ve planted, nurtured, for whom I’ve cared, to whom shown compassion, for whom spoken up.

If we want to be true to our God and our faith, we must set ourselves with passion against the immense cruelties and injustices of this world.

Trying to save a baby hedgehog isn’t much, but it’s better than leaving it to die.

08 Nov 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Environment, Holocaust, Refugees Permalink

Hope in dark times: the light shall not go out!

Sticky Post By admin On November 8, 2024

‘But the light has not gone out, and that is a sign from God:’ these are the words my grandfather, Rabbi Salzberger, overheard, when, summoned by the Gestapo to the burning wreckage of the great synagogue in Frankfurt’s Boerneplatz, he passed through the whispering crowds of German onlookers on the morning after Kristallnacht, in November 1938.Tomorrow is the eighty-sixth anniversary of that terrible date. Monday, Remembrance Day, Veteran’s Day in the States, reminds us of the terrible human costs of the war that preceded it and the war against evil which followed.

The light the onlookers in Frankfurter were referring to was the Ner Tamid, the Eternal Lamp, of the Westendsynagoge, where my grandfather served for thirty years until forced by the Nazis to flee the country he once loved. That Ner Tamid is the parent lamp from which a flame was kindled, and carefully carried for hundreds of miles, to light the Eternal Lamp of my community’s synagogue, here in London.

Thus the light still burns, through tough days and dark nights, embodying the truth that, however much the world assails our hopes, our hearts and our deep beliefs in justice and compassion, we must not let the lights of our faith go out.

‘Do I give up?’ people have been asking me, directly or by inference, this week. Do I despair of my fight for the environment, for the dignity, equality and rights of women, for refugees, for an end to race hate and hate speech? Of course, we already know the answer. But we must hear it from each other, because we need each other in the fight:

However many rings of pain
The night winds round me,
The opposing pull is stronger… (Boris Pasternak, the Zhivago poems)

During these challenging days, I’ve looked backward to last week’s Torah portion, Noach, in which God and humanity embark, as it were, on their second term. The first ended in disaster, ‘violence and corruption’, recrimination and destruction. (Genesis 8) But God determines not to give up and binds us, by the sign of the arching rainbow, in an everlasting bond: ‘We are bound together, you and I, you and all living beings, all the birds and all the animals, in a covenant of life.’ That contract still holds, obligating each and every one of us. The harder it is to honour it, the more compelling our obligation.

I look forward to this week’s Torah portion, Lech Lecha, the start of Abraham’s journey: ‘Go,’ God tells him, ‘Go to the land I’ll show you,’ the land where My will for goodness, freedom and reverence for life shall be done. Go, and don’t ever stop going, because that’s how you become a blessing. Never give up.

In a brilliant Midrash Abraham sees God, Master of the World, calling out from a burning building. ‘Help me,’ God cries, ‘My world is on fire and I need you.’ God’s world needs our most urgent help.

That is the very same voice which my grandfather heard crying out from a burning synagogue eighty-six years ago on the Boerneplatz: ‘My light still shines despite the flames. Save it! Save my world!’

The fires of hatred may make threaten it, but they cannot extinguish God’s light, the inner light of humanity, the light within the soul. We must preserve it always. We must bear it with us and nurture its flame, wherever we may go.

20 Sep 2024

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

The shofar and silence

Sticky Post By admin On September 20, 2024

‘Awake you slumberers from your slumber, you sleepers from your sleep’: with these words Maimonides explains the purpose of blowing the shofar each morning during the month of Elul, to herald Yom Terua, the great ‘Day of Blowing’, Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, when everyone who enters the world, and everything that happens in it, comes before God.

The mid-point of Elul has now passed; the full moon was huge and low, clear in the cloudless sky. As that circle of moon diminishes, so the shofar’s cry becomes more urgent.

I love the shofar. My grandfather was a shofar blower, as was my father; we had a shofar carved on his gravestone. We trawled every relevant shop in Jerusalem to find the right shofar for each of my children; they, too, are now shofar blowers.

On our family treks in the beautiful Scottish Highlands, we say to each other when we see sheep with long, curved horns: ‘that would make a fine shofar,’ – not that we would harm a hair on any of their woolly backs.

Maybe that’s why, to me, the shofar calls out for rock and water, hill and col, and everything that lives among them. It is animal cry, human outcry, a crying out to God, to the vastness beyond. It is mortality shouting into eternity, life into the infinite spaces.

Returning to Maimonides, there may be less need for his warning this year. Many of us have nerves worn thin like over-scratched skin, while our hearts sink at the news from the world.

But still the shofar retains the power to stir us, reaching inward, awakening in us something other. Paradoxically, it may not be in the shofar’s sounds, raw and strident as they are, but in the attentiveness with which we await them and the silence that vibrates between them that we go down into ourselves:

‘The great shofar shall be sounded, and the voice of fine silence shall be heard.’

It is this silence that Elijah intuited on God’s Mountain after the tumult of the earthquakes, fire and thunder.

‘Never ask what’s in that silence,’ I was told. It’s different for each person and we ourselves don’t truly know what lies in the depths of our own selves.

Elijah hears that silence as interrogation, ‘What are you doing here?’ I’ve often tried to explore what that simple but penetrating question means.

But this year I want to stay with the silence. I’ve been gripped by a sentence I read in Abbot Christopher Jamison’s book, Finding Sanctuary:

‘If we are faithful, there will gradually be born within us of our silence something that will draw us on to still greater silence.’

This is not the silence of emptiness or despair. It is the silence of fullness, of the richness of life that lies deeper than any language, word or articulate sound. Perhaps it’s what the Bible means by nishmat chaim, the breath of life, or by ruach merachefet, the hovering spirit of God.

Just as this fine silence sounded for Elijah deeper than fire and thunder, so it can sustain our spirit today, whoever we are, beneath and beyond the terrible noise of bombs, rockets and verbal bombardments. May we all be kept safe; may there be a swift end to these dreadful wars.

I believe that silence can be, for each of us in our own ways, the source of inner strength, resilience and hope, imparting a stalwart sense of purpose and inspiring in us a compassionate commitment to life.

30 Aug 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Environment, Uncategorized Permalink

Listening for God north of the border

Sticky Post By admin 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 1^st 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 admin Posted in Community, Israel Permalink

Enough of violence and grief

Sticky Post By admin 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.