The words we remember years afterwards often come in unexpected moments. We were just putting on our anoraks to go out, when my uncle Gabi (at least three times removed but close in heart!) said to me: ‘You know what strength is? It’s not being tough; it’s having compassionate values and trying to live by them whatever.’

Tomorrow we’ll complete the public reading of Bereshit, Genesis, the first book of the Torah. Most of us will follow the Ashkenazi custom of calling out:

Chazak, chazak, venitchazek: Be strong, be strong, and let us strengthen one another.

Jeffrey Tigay writes that the custom began in 19-century Germany where the briefer form ‘Be strong and let us summon our strength’ was used, building on the earlier, even shorter ‘Be strong’ called out to the person who read the last verses of one of the books of the Torah. In the Middle Ages poets and scribes would close their compositions with sentences like ‘Blessed be God who gives strength to the weary.’ Copying manuscripts was exhausting work. (See his essay in the Etz Hayim Torah and Commentary, p. 1504)

Now, as once again we enter cautious days with Covid infections rising fast, the full threefold greeting feels timely: we need our physical strength, our emotional and spiritual strength, and the strength we find through each other.

With regard to the first, all I have is a prayer. May we do our sensible best to stay healthy and keep others safe. May God give strength to everyone supporting us and the wellbeing of all our society. May we appreciate them and do our utmost to make our own contribution. May everyone who needs healing be met with kindness and skill. May our health and care services be sufficiently financed, personned and valued. May God, hanoten laya’ef koach, who gives strength to the weary, give us health, energy and endurance.

As for emotional and spiritual strength, each of us has our own special path to that inner reservoir of life-giving waters which is never sealed off but frequently hard to access. For some it’s music. For others it’s yoga, baking, dog walking, birdsong, tai chi, and dare it say, even prayer. ‘What’s the cure for a sore heart?’ asks the Talmud, before answering ‘Torah, the Tree of Life.’

People sometimes ask me: ‘I’m going through tough times. My mother, father, partner, child… is ill. Where can I get the strength to look after everybody?’ Maybe it’s not the right response but I find myself asking ‘What are the things you like to do which truly sustain you week by week?’ Whatever the answer, (and no one has so far told me it’s robbing the bank) I say, ‘However great the pressure, try to maintain time for that.’

So, today, if possible, please at least sometimes keep doing what leads you on the inner journey to that place from where living waters flow back into the weary, dehydrated spirit.

I’m unsure how to translate venitchazek: is it ‘Let’s strengthen one another’ or ‘Let’s find strength in each other’? But it amounts to the same. ‘What I miss most,’ a doctor told me, referring to the cumulative impact of lockdowns, isolation and social distancing, ‘Are those informal chats with colleagues. I’d get so much support from them.’

Thank goodness at this point in time we can gather, in small numbers in our homes and cafes, on walks, in places of prayer and, if not in person, at least online – though that’s never quite the same. But wherever and however, it’s the ordinary things which matter: kind words, a listening heart, a small gift, a phone call, an encouraging word, even a passing greeting in the street.

I’ve never understood this; I’ve always been troubled. The Torah opens with a magnificent poem, a paean to the glory of creation. That first chapter of Genesis is utterly beautiful; the dawn light shining through the division of the waters, the first green stalks above the soil, the fruit-bearing trees, the fish in the rivers, the birds of the air, and on land the animals and humankind, in harmony all together.

Yet within scarcely three columns Cain has murdered his brother and his great- great- grandson Lemech is busily boasting to his wives that he’s killed a child. By the end of column five even God acknowledges, shockingly, that it’s all been a terrible mistake and it would have been better if humans had never existed in the first place: ‘I’m sorry I made them.’

How can something so wonderful descend so quickly into disaster?

Then I realised: this is the world we live in every day.

It’s full of beauty. The magic may be greatest when one’s young, the first fallen leaves to stomp through, the first excitement of snow. But one doesn’t get over it. On the contrary, the older one gets the more precious it often all becomes: that view crossed by the sun’s low rays of the autumn woodlands, yellow and orange, down to the fields with the ponies above the lake:

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise. (Dylan Thomas: Fern Hill)

It’s true, at least it seems so in our moments of wonder: God renews the work of creation every day.

But the cruelty, misery and injustice are no less real.

Late last night I casually picked up The Guardian’s Long Read but paid careful attention when I saw that it was written by Zarlasht Halaimzai, whom I know. Her family were refugees from Afghanistan; now she devotes her life to helping others forced by violence and war to flee their homes:

Don’t leave the people in darkness, I pleaded. (The Long Read)

Most of her letters to officials across the globe received no reply at all.

Jewish leaders, she wrote, responded with heartfelt solidarity:

Many recognised their own family’s experiences in the images of parents handing their children over…

Several members of our community are desperately trying to get people out of the reaches of the Taliban. ‘And it’s only one family out of tens of thousands,’ a friend said as we sat last week in our Succah. ‘Whoever saves one life is as if they saved the world,’ we all replied.

Just that is our predicament: we stand at the interface between life’s wonders and its horrors. There, too, lies our responsibility. What can we do to help or save one person, one child, one living thing, one tiny corner of the earth?

The Torah does not state that God regrets making the world; God is sorry only because of the way human beings behave. But God, tradition tells us, longs to rejoice in creation once again. What can we do to make that happen in one more child, one more parent’s heart, even in the free flight of the birds? That’s the everlasting challenge those first five columns of the Torah bequeath to us.

I’m planning to run (slowly) the virtual London Marathon on Sunday 3^rd October 2021 to support World Jewish Relief and Israel Guide Dogs.

Please help them (and my stamina) by donating via these links:

Donate to World Jewish Relief
Donate to Israel Guide Dogs

Thank you!

Virtual London Marathon route plan (excluding various loops and pit-stop details)

I hope to start from home before 7.00, taking East End Road to East Finchley, then round the block and back via Long Lane, Squires Lane, Summers Lane, Ashurst Road, and on to the main road up to Whetstone; then via Friern Barnet Lane, Russel Lane and Gallants Park Road up Cat Hill and down Bramley Road to take a left opposite Oakwood Station into Trent Park; then out through the main entrance onto Cockfosters Road, across via Hadley Wood to High Barnet, along Wood Street, left at The Gate pub, across to Totteridge Lane, all the way along to Longland Drive, up to Nether Street, then, with any extra loop and circuits of Avenue Park, back to shul for Minchah. I hope to manage to run at least two thirds, and walk or crawl the rest!

Thank you for your support.

I knew that tomorrow would be 9/11, twenty years since the terror attack against America and the horrendous destruction of the twin towers. I knew it in my head. But seeing footage; listening to the voices of people who were there at the time, men, women, wives who took that last call from their husbands; watching the firemen; listening to them speak both then and now two decades later, – that brings 9/11 home at a very different depth. I remember the shock at the time; even three thousand miles away it felt as if the pavement was shaking. The shock remains even now.

Two years ago, in that age when one still travelled easily, Nicky and I visited the memorial at ground zero. What can one say? It’s heart-rending.

For some there has been healing. For others, like the woman filmed as she stared out to sea and said she was still mourning the man she loved most in all the world, the sorrow is scarcely diminished.

Suffering begets compassion. But it often also leads to more suffering, as so many desperate to escape Afghanistan know only too well.

I am sure I can say on behalf of my community that our hearts go out to everyone to whom 9/11 has brought, and still brings, grief and pain.

Tomorrow is also significant in the Jewish year. It’s Shabbat Shuvah, which mediates between the New Year and the Day of Atonement. Teshuvah is usually translated as ‘repentance’. Though accurate, this has, for me at least, a limited resonance, as if teshuvah were always about sin. Teshuvah is more comprehensive than that: it’s a rethinking of how we are in the world; it’s a questioning, a re-evaluation, of what matters.

During the shivah for my father – I can’t believe it’s fourteen years since he died – my teacher Rabbi Magonet came up to me after the prayers as I sat on the traditional low chair and said very quietly, ‘This is about teshuvah.’

At first I was puzzled: was he suggesting I’d done wrong? Then I understood that what he meant was something deeper: This is about what truly matters, why we’re here, what it’s all for.

The questions aren’t complicated. On the contrary, it’s the simplicity which makes them so searching: What am I doing with my life? How am I using the limited time I have here on this earth?

The answers aren’t complex either. The heart doesn’t always need sophisticated terminology: It has love at its core, and sorrow for all the hurt that has so wrongly come to exist in the world. It wants to heal, as a mother longs to protect her child. As the rabbis said: Lev mevin – the heart understands.

The heart is such a small and vulnerable organ to set against all the violence, injustice and pain in the world, planes flown with incomprehensible brutality into towers full of people, bombs, the injuries which cruelty and illness inflict every ordinary day.

Or is it? It has remarkable resilience. It often responds to the worst life can do with the best that it can offer in return. It has depth upon depth of strength. When, all but exhausted, it feels it has no resources left, it finds replenishment through the companionship of friends, in the kindness of others, in wonder, even within the smallest of things, and through that spirit which flows subliminally and invisibly and which communicates without words: I am with you; I am life.

If we can return to those depths, we will know what we have to do with our days and our years.

‘There are two reasons,’ my father used to explain, why the cat can’t say the Grace after Meals. Firstly, she can’t read; secondly she never thinks she’s had enough.’ He was referring specifically to the verse which, as it happens, we read in the Torah tomorrow: ‘You shall eat and be satisfied, and bless the Lord your God.’ Our dogs have since acquired a similar trait to Fluffy, the cat of my childhood.

Judaism is a culture of blessing. I didn’t know the phrase hakarat hatov until a friend from Glasgow days drew it to my attention. It means recognising and appreciating the good which has been done to us. She phoned unexpectedly from Israel to thank me for publicly acknowledging how much her family had helped my father, my brother and I after our mother died. ‘Thank you for the hakarat hatov,’ she said.

There was a lot to be grateful to them for. They, the Gaba family, took us into their home almost every Friday night for many months, taught us the Shabbat songs, made wonderful meals of which my favourite part was always the jelly with tiny air bubbles in it, then saw us safely home. The two daughters took me to play with zoo animals while the boys challenged my brother at chess. Sadly, neither of the girls is living anymore; Phyllis was knocked down by a car and Judith, who’d phoned me scarcely twelve months ago, died just weeks ago of cancer.

Whenever I think of hachnasat orchim, hospitality and welcome, I think of that family; they are my role model for what chesed, true kindness, means.

The textual basis of hakarat hatov is the Mishnah’s insistence that we bless life for the good we receive. The formula is simple: ‘Blessed are you God…who is good and does good.’ Strangely, I’ve only heard this blessing recited twice in my life – and once it was by me. The parallel blessing Baruch Dayan Ha’emet , the Job-like ‘what can we do but accept this’ acknowledgement of bad tidings which is said at funerals, I’ve heard a hundred times. These proportion are surely wrong.

The emotional and spiritual reasons for acknowledging the good are that this creates an environment of generosity and appreciation. It’s an antidote to our culture of entitlement, in which we don’t even notice privileges because we simply take them as given. The last eighteen months have made many of us more aware of many basic aspects of our lives to which we may have given little thought before: what it means to have flour to bake good bread; the importance of faithful friends and helpful neighbours; the loveliness of what we may previously have seen as just a park or only a tree.

A young woman training for the priesthood offered a beautiful Thought for the Day on Radio 4 in the middle of the first lockdown. ‘Behold the lilies of the field,’ she quoted, ‘They toil not neither do they spin.’ I can’t recall her exact words, but they amounted to this: I’d always thought about the theology, about trusting God and not worrying. But walking in the park with my immune-compromised husband, I said to myself: ‘No; just look at the flowers. Behold them; just look.’

This week has reminded me once again of hakarat hatov because I’ve had the privilege of officiating at three weddings. I always ask the couple to tell me about the values with which they’ve been brought up that they want to take with them into the home they hope to build together. In each case this week, the bride and groom wrote about their parents and grandparents with tender appreciation. Yesterday, as I repeated some of her words under the wedding canopy, I watched the bride’s parents reach for and tightly hold each other’s hands.

In our too-fast-moving, grab-and-eat consume culture, if we noticed and acknowledged life’s gifts and appreciated one another more, we would be a less hurting and less hurtful society and cherish the world with more care.