Community | HEART AND MIND

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.

26 Jul 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Israel Permalink

At Noam pre-camp: a space for listening

Sticky Post By admin On July 26, 2024

Dear Community,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I leave pre-camp filled with affection and respect.

Shabbat Shalom

Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg

12 Jul 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Environment Permalink

We all need our moments of hope and reprieve

Sticky Post By admin On July 12, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12 Apr 2024

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

Celebrating Pesach in this wonderful, terrible world

Sticky Post By admin On April 12, 2024

I’m bewildered by our world today, and struggling. I’m not alone. ‘Can I talk to you?’ people ask. I listen; I care about listening. But what shall I say?

It’s dawn and the garden birds are starting to visit the feeders. They’re singing: great tits, blue tits, goldfinches, wrens. I worry about the blackbirds. I don’t see them for weeks, but yesterday, there they were. I’m lucky; I was raised to notice such things.

My faith as a Jew teaches me that God is in all life. If I listen deeply enough, if I let the other voices in my head fall silent, the ‘I have’ and ‘I haven’t’, the ‘I want’ and ‘I ought’, I will feel the sacred stream of life flow from pool to pool in everything that exists, filling, too, the inner well beneath my heart. For long, dry months I may not be able to access the place, but this current of life does not fail.

But what kind of world is this really?

I think of Romi, a dancer just 23 years old, still hostage to Hamas after almost two hundred days. ‘I’ve switched off everything,’ her father tells me. ‘There’s only one message I’m waiting for, the call that she’s free.’ Daily we pray, ‘Our brothers and sisters from the whole House of Israel, in suffering and captivity…’

Every day, too, I see pictures from Gaza, desperate people. Are they not also made in God’s image? To what future is this hunger and ruin giving birth, irrespective of who’s to blame?

I’ve seen videos made by Nasrullah and Hezbollah, the nefarious protegees of Iran’s murderous regime, how they plan to destroy…

So it’s a terrible world. Yet it’s a wonderful world. It’s a beautiful, cruel, bounteous, unjust, wretched, glorious world. I want to believe with Martin Luther King that ‘the arc of history bends towards justice.’ I wish! Perhaps he, too, was afraid, and spoke not in certainty, but hope.

Into all of this now comes Pesach, festival of freedom. We’re preparing our kitchens, buying matzah, eyeing our bitter herbs, and worrying. So, in line with all the ‘fours’ of the Seder, I’m telling myself four things:

Freedom: Recommit to the struggle for liberty, for Jews, Israel and everyone. Freedom only for some is freedom compromised. Nelson Mandela wrote A Long Walk to Freedom. In truth, that walk is unending, traversing the same tough ground over and again, while the promise of the messianic dream remains many wildernesses away. But that’s no reason not to put on our boots.

Story: Seder is the night of the story. We recount our people’s story and weave into it our own. It’s our past, our present, and our hope for what must be. We need a world that respects and welcomes our stories, Jews or Hindus, refugees, farmers, students, venerable elderly with the wisdom of ninety years. Silence our stories with hate, and liberty is silenced for all. Without stories there’s no freedom.

Earth: The Seder plate is Judaism’s earth-plate, – and this year Seder Night coincides with Earth Day. The field’s crops, wheat, barley, oats, spelt, rye, are matzah’s only ingredient, bar water. The karpas, greens, are anything blessed as ‘fruit of the ground.’ Maror is the soil’s bitter yield. Sweet charoset is an offering of fruits and spices lauded in The Song of Songs. It’s the ‘food of love’ the Jewish way, Earth’s love. Without cherishing the Earth there’s no freedom, because nobody will thrive.

Hope: the Seder journeys upward, from slavery to freedom, from a land of tyranny to a country of justice, dignity, liberty and loving kindness. The BBC’s Radio 4 just launched a new programme, Café Hope, where people share how they’re making the world a little bit better and fairer. The Seder table is Judaism’s Hope Café.

So may this be a year of courage, determination, commitment, vision – and hope!

05 Apr 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Interfaith, Israel, Uncategorized Permalink

For these things I pray in these terrible times

Sticky Post By admin On April 5, 2024

Eighteen in Hebrew is signified by the word חי chai, which means life. So I want to write about life. For ten times chai makes one hundred and eighty, the exact number of days today since October 7, six months ago on Sunday, the date on which Hamas, the enemies of life, perpetrated their evil against Israel and ultimately their own people too.

I want to write about life, but I’m struggling, drafting sentences, then deleting them, because my head and heart are full of the horrors that have ensued since.

So all I can manage is a prayer, a prayer for hope and life as we approach the month of Nisan, the season of freedom, the beginning of our journey to redemption, the springtime when we bless the fruitful beauty of God’s world. How frail all these things seem! How much it therefore matters to care for them all the more.

So I pray for life, for everyone in Israel, for the women, men and children still held hostage by Hamas, for the safe return of all the soldiers.

I pray for the tens of thousands of ordinary people in Gaza, caught homeless, helpless and desperate in the middle.

I pray that this war will swiftly end with a cessation of all the bloodshed, the return home of all the hostages, and a viable plan bringing hope for a dignified future for everyone, across Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, so that hatred has no leverage anymore.

I pray for food, drink, shelter and healing, everywhere in Israel and Gaza. How else can I say ‘Let all who are hungry come and eat’ at the Seder table in 18 days’ time?

I pray for everyone striving to heal wounds, work with the homeless and displaced and bring comfort to grief and trauma. May God give them resilience, strength and courage!

We are always allowed to hope and pray.

I want to pray especially for the hostages whose families I’ve met, whose names I know, whose faces I see before me.

Naama Levy, may you be safe in body and strong in spirit. May you soon be held once more in your mother’s and father’s arms. May your dog Bafi jump up at you, against all the rules, when you walk through the door. May you go to the seaside with the Ra’ananot girls, your school and Noam youth movement friends.

Romi, you should know – I hope the knowledge somehow reaches you – that the picture of your smiling face looks out everywhere across your hometown of Kfar Veradim, which longs to welcome you home. May you once more relish the music you love, and dance in each of the six styles of dancing (or more?) your father told me you enjoy. May you spread the joy of your life-loving spirit across everyone you meet.

Oded Lifschitz, may you hear in freedom the words of your remarkable daughter Sharone, who calls in her quiet, collected, courageous voice for Hamas to release you, who minces no words about their cruelties, and who yet can say that she has taught her heart to feel the pain of others. May the fields be replanted which you and your wife tended for decades; may your lifelong work for peace and co-existence resume. May you witness it bearing fruit.

I pray for all the grieving families I’ve met, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Druse. I don’t believe that deeply felt grief is different because it’s on the other side of a border.

I pray that hearts pierced by anguish and grief be filled not with hate, but with healing and compassion.

I know all this may sound stupid, amidst the fighting and dying. But I don’t know what else to say. I fear terribly the turning of our world, our beautiful world, God’s world, towards hatred and destruction.

So I pray for life.

Where there’s hope we’re not just permitted but required to pray. We’re commanded, too, to back up our words with commitments, solidarity and actions. And how anyone carry on without hope?

28 Mar 2024

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

Hope and purpose: not a dream but a duty

Sticky Post By admin On March 28, 2024

From bitter years and cruel times, from far-off exile in Babylon, the prophet Ezekiel bequeathed us beautiful verses proffering purpose and hope. We read them on this Shabbat Parah, with its focus on purification and renewal.

They concern our humanity:

‘I will give you a new heart and put into you a new spirit. I will remove the heart of stone from your body, give you a heart of flesh, and put my spirit in you.’ (36:26-7)

And they’re about our land, perhaps, by extension, about the very earth itself:

‘The desolate land, after lying waste in sight of every passerby, shall again be tilled. It shall be said, “That land, once desolate, is become like the Garden of Eden.’ (36:34-5)

As this is a leap year, we will recite these verses over Easter. They offer an apt shared context of hope in life’s renewal from which to wish Christian colleagues, friends and communities thoughtful and inspiring holy days.

We desperately need this hope. The great scholar of Jewish mysticism, Art Green, sends out apposite Hasidic teachings every week. Today he added a heartsore note: (The red heifer he refers to is the cow whose ashes, mixed with burnt cedar, hyssop and living water, confer ritual purification.)

I’ve never felt such a need for that ash of the red heifer as I do this year. Not, God forbid, from those cows that the Temple Mount crazies are trying to raise! I’m talking about some magical powder that might cleanse us of the constant contact with the dead and the subject of violent death that has so filled this year for us. Yes, I mean the horrid events of October 7, the deaths of so many young soldiers in the IDF, but also the deaths of many innocent Palestinians, both in Gaza and the West Bank, including far too many children.

I couldn’t agree more, except to add our terrible fear for the lives and wellbeing of the hostages held for so long deep underground by Hamas.

So where are the hope and purpose?

They lie firstly in becoming partners with God, with everything good, insightful, patient, and determined in humanity, in removing the hearts of stone from humankind. I hate to write this, but it seems there exist people whose hearts, through cruelty or despair, have ossified, and who are, in Shakespeare’s blunt words, ‘absolute for death.’

Yet it’s not the case that it’s always ‘us or them’. How many human, humane, beings, ourselves included, have hearts without a single calcified corner? How much of our own ‘heart of flesh’ are we prepared to expose in the endeavour to find, and maybe even melt, other hearts? It is this task, painful, demanding, unending, Sisyphean as it may be, at which we need to work if we want to create a world of understanding, compassion and peace.

Secondly, hope and purpose lie in the endeavour to transform ‘desolate land’ into God’s gardens. Ezekiel’s Hebrew suggests a remarkable wordplay: remove the double letter from neshammah, ‘desolate’, and it becomes neshamah, ‘soul’. Can we restore the soul and spirit of our beleaguered earth, war-torn, pollutant poisoned, plastic-ridden, so that the forests thrive, more birds sing and our hearts soother and softened, beneath this growing canopy, are opened once again to God and to each other?

On a large scale it’s beyond our capacity. But, in the words of Rebbe Nachman of Breslav, assur lehitya’esh, ‘it’s forbidden to despair’, and we each have our own selves with whom to work to begin to make these tasks happen. They’re not a dream but a duty.