Community | HEART AND MIND

24 May 2019

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

How can we hurt this earth as little as possible?

Sticky Post By admin On May 24, 2019

I look out of the windows of the train. (I’m travelling to Berlin for my termly teaching there, determined to go at least one way by train and cut my use of planes). We enter the flat lands of Brandenburg. In the fields are many horses. I glimpse a foal, an eager shake of mane and tail, then it’s gone. Or rather I’m gone, in this ridiculous way we speed across the world.

Ki li ha’aretz, ‘for the land is mine’: I often think about this short sentence which we read in the Torah tomorrow. It’s the explanation for the sabbatical year. The land is not left to rest to increase its yield in the six other years of the cycle. Its not left fallow for humans to have time off. It’s left, – left for the benefit of all that lives including wild animals and domestic, foreigners and citizens, home-owners and homeless – because it belongs to God. In the sabbatical year there’s no place for ‘No trespassers’ signs, except in so far as we are all tres-passers, passers through, passers across, God’s world.

God’s world? I’m more of a mystic than a Maimonidean. For the latter, the world is God’s work. To know God, study it and its very structure will lead you from the physical to the metaphysical, from what you see to what lies beyond what can be seen, the invisible, unknowable, unchanging, unbounded creator.

But to the mystic God is within as well as beyond. They love to quote the Zohar: ‘No space is free of the wonder of God’. There’s nowhere it isn’t possible to wake up and say with Jacob after his dream of the angels ascending and descending between earth and heaven: ‘There’s God is in this place – and I hadn’t realised’

Around midnight in Berlin, a city I now love but by which I feel haunted, I go running. I pass the statue of Frederick the First at the entrance to 17 June Avenue, its towering victory column in the central circle and the Brandenburg Gate at its close. I pass too the Russian tanks, survivors of the final battle for Berlin in 1945, at the Red Army memorial and see half a kilometre away the outline of the Reichstag.

God isn’t the only one who ever said, ‘The land is mine’. In the Bible, the prophet Ezekiel puts these words in the mouth of the archetypal tyrant, Pharaoh: ‘It’s my Nile and I made it’. What did he think he was saying? Rashi explains: ‘By my might and through my wisdom I increased my greatness and my power’. Small bronze plaques to more recent victims of this monstrous tyranny are set amidst the Berlin cobbles. I almost tread on a group of them: ‘Deported; murdered; deported’.

I see myself back on the train, looking out of the window. We exit the forests and pass once again through farmland: fields to a distant tree line, a huddle of calves. I think of Blake’s poem:

Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o’er the mead…

Okay, they’re not lambs – to whom the verses are addressed. But they’re no less innocent. They’re lucky calves. Their air and earth is as clean as it comes in Europe. ‘Dost thou know’, I wonder, what awaits you after this field?

I’ve always loved the vistas of this earth. In my earliest memory I’m looking out from the upstairs room my father built alongside the carpenter to extend our bungalow outside Glasgow. I can see a field and horses. I think I’ve always felt somewhere in my soul that it’s God’s earth, though I’ve often failed to realise: there’s always been wonder in the leaves, the fallen rhododendron flowers from next door’s garden, which I put on the ends of my fingers.

I can reach only one conclusion. Yes, we may live off the land. But it’s God’s. How, then, can I hurt it, and the creatures who live with us on it, as little as possible?

17 May 2019

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community Permalink

Mental Health Awareness Week: We can ask; we can care

Sticky Post By admin On May 17, 2019

This Monday to Sunday is Mental Health Awareness Week. Nicky and I stayed up past midnight watching Horizon’s Stopping Male Suicide:

I walked the Golden Gate Bridge for forty minutes. I’d made up my mind that if anyone, just one single person, asked me ‘Are you OK?’ I wouldn’t do it. Joggers, drivers, police, walkers all went passed. A tourist gave me her camera to take snaps. I did. Then she went without a word. At that moment a voice said ‘Jump’. I jumped…

It’s one of many outstanding programmes featured this week, including Nadia Hussain on how she suffers from anxiety and Alastair Campbell about depression. What emerges is that there is something we can do: notice, ask, care. It may not be enough, but it’s better than not caring, or, more likely, being held back by nervousness about showing we care. (And sometimes caring means respecting people’s boundaries, their space, their quiet.)

We may be fortunate not to suffer severely, but the evidence is that most of us have had bleak days, frightened days, days when even walking down the street is a challenge (I need to pass the tree on that side, not this), days when our mind has rolled around the thought of ending it all.

Over the last years I’ve had many conversations with family members of people who have taken their own lives. My heart aches for them, left in unchartered territories, grief-stricken, maybe helpless, angry, regretful; wondering if it could have been possible to reach with greater love, understanding or vigilance into the inner spaces where consciousness had felt so painful that it was impossible to bear. (Sometimes the answer is no; it was not possible to access those bleak and suffering places, encased in some membrane impenetrable even to love.)

It’s well known that Judaism, like Christianity, understands suicide to be wrong. Our body is not our own to harm or destroy, but on loan to us by God for the duration of our lifetime, to be used in good deeds of kindness and justice. That’s the theory.

But the following passage in the Talmud, though puzzling, is more compassionate:

For two and a half years, the Schools of Shammai and Hillel debated: These said: It would have been better for a person not to have been created than created. Those said: It is better for a person to have been created than not created. (Eruvin 13b)

They put the matter to the vote and decided that it was better not to have been created.

The Talmud sadly omits to tell us the contents of the argument. Did the rabbis regard life as too complex, too full of temptation, too painful, too great a trial? We don’t know. But they certainly understood the harsh grind of daily existence: ‘You’re born, you live, you die whether you like it or not’.

After the vote the rabbis agreed that, since we have been created, we need to consider our actions. This doesn’t initially sound helpful. But what I think they mean is that we are all responsible for creating societies in which each and every person, and each of every person’s actions, matters. We may not leave anyone feeling meaningless, disconnected, unwanted, thinking that their life, their day, is pointless. In our communities, each person is to be respected and welcomed for his or her human dignity and unique contribution, and treated with hesed, thoughtful and attentive kindness.

That’s not enough to heal all inner pain. But it’s where we have to start from, and just to get to that starting place would be an achievement requiring the participation of us all.

03 May 2019

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

Yom Hashoah: memory and what we do with it

Sticky Post By admin On May 3, 2019

We carry them with us, those who loved us and whom we have loved. We don’t know what unexpected sound, smell, touch will suddenly bring their memory to consciousness. In such matters the passage of time is irrelevant. A month, twenty years: the dead speak in our hearts as if eternity were a single everlasting yesterday:

And pricking himself on a needle
Still stuck in a piece of sewing,
Suddenly he sees her
And cries quietly. (Boris Pasternak: The Zhivago Poems)

Yesterday was Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day according to the Jewish date. My yellow candle has now burnt out. I lit it, as did tens of thousands of others, for a child, family unknown. Aleksandr Derevicher was 5 when he was murdered at Mariupol in 1941. I shall put the little card with his name in one of my prayer books; there I shall find it again, amidst the songs and prayers.

Zochrenu lechayyim, remember us for life: it’s the simplest, most poignant phrase from the High Holyday liturgy. We take those who loved us with us into the life they gave us, the life they enriched for us with their faith and wisdom, and no doubt also complicated with their foibles, their meshugaas. We also carry with us those they loved, and who loved them, and even the communities who nurtured them. Somehow, little Aleksandr Derevicher walks with us too, his own life, his childhood eagerness, so utterly and cruelly destroyed.

On the day before Pesach I was putting jars of the charoset my son had just made into parcels of food and wine for the Seder night to send as small ‘thinking-of-you’ tokens to families where there was illness or grief, when I recalled the letter my great-aunt Sophie sent to her brother in New York from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia on April 8, 1941:

We finished our preparations for Easter. The house is in order. Dear Mama did a lot of work on the Easter gifts; we sent eight parcels…

Presumably she wrote ‘Easter’ instead of ‘Passover’ to bypass the censor.

Tomorrow I shall take down one of the sealed jars of fruit which I bottled in memory of Sophie because that’s what she used to do with her garden produce, and because my father taught me how to do it too. Nicky and I will serve it to our guests for Shabbat lunch.

I never knew Sophie. Yet she’s in my life, her memory for a blessing.

In his powerful book Who Will Write Our History, Samuel Kassow records the words of David Graber, a member of the Oyneg Shabbes group who hid documents, diaries, testaments in milk cans beneath houses in the Warsaw Ghetto:

What we were unable to cry and shriek out to the world we buried in the ground…We would be the fathers, the teachers and educators of the future. But no, we shall certainly not live to see it…May the treasure fall into good hands, may it last into better times, may it alarm and alert the world to what happened…

The truth, the facts, must be known; every piece of testament is significant. Deceit and denial will only arm other hatreds. They already do.

But there is also something else, something no less important: zochrenu lechayyim, remembering for life, in the small, ordinary things we do, the foods we cook, the melodies we sing, the long and ancient tradition of compassion and community, mitzvot and learning, which is in reality a mosaic of the loves, fears and values of millions of lives, some lived into venerable age, some cut short by terrors.

To be faithful to those who perished, we must try to turn memory not only into warning, but also into wisdom.

28 Apr 2019

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Interfaith Permalink

After the Attack on the Chabad Synagogue in San Diego

Sticky Post By admin On April 28, 2019

It is with deep dismay that I’m writing once again following a murderous, racist attack on a synagogue during Shabbat services. Our hearts go out to the family of the woman who was killed, and our prayers are for the wounded, who include a child.

The age-old stereotypes of anti-Jewish hatred have once again expressed themselves in murder and outrage.

We stand in solidarity with the rabbi of the Chabad community in Poway, who called for peace and unity even after he himself was injured, and with all the congregation.

In recent weeks Muslims, Christians and Jews have all been targeted and murdered while at prayer.

Whatever our faith or philosophy, we must together declare our shared abhorrence at these vicious crimes against the sanctity of life, and at the brutal desecration of places dedicated to worship, humility and peace.

Those responsible for such abominations must be brought to justice.

Though they alone are fully answerable for what they have done, their actions cannot be taken in isolation from the rising rhetoric of racism in all its manifestations. All those who promulgate hatred of others, individually, collectively and on social media, whether their targets are Jews, Muslims, Christians, blacks, whites or ‘those foreigners’, must constantly be called to account.

In these cruel and frightening times we must not merely talk solidarity but live it in our actions, by deepening our relations with people of other faiths, people whose culture may be different from ours, people who, like us all, are left feeling vulnerable and afraid by the deeds we are once again seeing perpetrated against life itself.

On the very date the attack in San Diego took place, we read in Isaiah of the day when ‘they shall not hurt nor destroy in all God’s mountain, because the earth shall be full of the awareness of God, as the waters cover the sea’.

However far we may be from such a time, we must not desist from working towards it with courage and determination.

12 Apr 2019

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

Never Give Up

Sticky Post By admin On April 12, 2019

Picking up the newspaper, following election days and Brexit dates, I find Milton’s lines echoing in my head: ‘On evil times though fallen, and evil days’. How, in the UK, Israel, so much of the world, have we allowed ourselves to get into such a mess?

Pesach, the festival of freedom, Spring and hope is scarcely a week away. I was studying a Hasidic commentary on its core text, the Haggadah, when I came across the Rebbe of Slonim’s interpretation of the second-century teacher ben Zoma’s analysis of the commandment to recall the Exodus from Egypt ‘All the days of your life’. Ben Zoma says:

‘The days of your life’ refers to the days.
‘All the days of your life’ includes the nights.

The Rebbe explains:

There are those who take strength only when it is day; that is, when they see light. But there are also those who take strength even in the hour of darkness, when all is as night, so that the nights, too, may become like ‘the days of your life’.

I went to bed connecting in my mind this spirit of courage and determination with the scores of people I know on either side of the Atlantic and Mediterranean who fight cruelty, devote their lives to healing pain, talk to homeless people, ensure hungry children have breakfast, lunch and dinner, speak out on behalf of the wordless world of nature, feed the birds, plant trees, give beds to those fleeing persecution, challenge racism, inspire the soul with words and music, and refuse to give up.

I woke up to the following email, a translation by my colleague Gil Nativ of a letter by David Grossman:

In the footsteps of this election day…I promise to examine myself every day to make sure none of this evil spirit sticks to me: not the racism, exploitation, nastiness, belligerence, stupidity, or short-sightedness. I shall continue, like a child, to believe that there can be justice and equality here, tranquillity and peace between individuals and peoples. Even if my elected representatives do not believe in this and my government is not doing it, I will strive to achieve this here, in the small four cubits of my personal space.

Given the course of the last five years across the globe, the Israeli elections are hardly the only ones about which he could be writing, and there, at least, there are elections.

Grossman’s concluding phrase may require explanation. The Talmud observes that, since the destruction of the temple by the Romans in 70CE, all God has left in this world is ‘the four cubits of halakhah (Jewish law)’. Notably, four cubits is also the rabbinic definition of any individual’s personal space.

Can we, then, make our personal space into God’s sacred space by what we do and how we act? The story of the Exodus carries clear directions on how to achieve this: never exploit another human being; respect and uphold the dignity of every person; shun any nationalism and popularism which entails the degradation of other peoples; do nothing which brings environmental disaster upon your country; refuse to be compliant to cruelty and injustice; locate yourself, like Moses, in places where the sufferings of others are not invisible to you, because those who suffer from them are our brothers and sisters; dedicate your life to these values.

I watched a wren in the garden this morning. It’s Britain’s second smallest bird; it weighs little more than a 20p coin. But it’s doughty and determined. You can’t always see from where it sings, but it has, for such a tiny bird, the loudest, brightest, most sustained and heartening song.

05 Apr 2019

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Ethics Permalink

Don’t carry on the same as before

Sticky Post By admin On April 5, 2019

From time to time I think back to the old joke about the man who went to the doctor to sort out his aches and pains. Aware that initial appointments cost $100 while subsequent visits were only $50, he said with a smile as he entered the consulting room: ‘Here I am again doctor’. ‘Well’, said the latter, looking him over with a smile: ‘As for the treatment, just carry on the same as before’.

I’m lucky: I like most of my ‘same as before’. If I could have the time back when the children were small, the dog just a puppy, the light rain drying off the rowan trees and the sun shining back from the puddles on the path – I’d have it, please, right away.

But the world is not in a state where we can carry on just as before. The earth is too beautiful, life too precious, and the future of its children too great a responsibility. ‘Do something; change your ways’, they’re demanding as in their hundreds of thousands they strike about climate-change across the globe. Perhaps, in an oblique, disturbed and disturbing way, the gangs who do knife-crime are saying something similar: ‘We want a future: meaning, value, hope’.

Shabbat Hachodesh, ‘the Sabbath of the New Moon’, falls this year precisely on the new moon of Nissan. It opens the month of spring, the month of Passover, when we tell our ancient story: ‘We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt’….

‘Why?’ a teenager asked me: ‘Haven’t we got better experiences to talk about?’

My immediate answer was that one can’t be a healer unless one feels how the world hurts. Those hurts are urgent.

‘Help’, says my colleague Levi Lauer from Israel: There are 900 single asylum-seeker mothers here. Their problems are multiple: ‘PTSD; separation from friends and churches; extreme language and cultural estrangement; a propensity to resort to corporal discipline of their kids; long undertreated medical issues…’ I’m not going to not answer on behalf of our community.

‘Put a hot red pepper on your Passover plate’, say Jews supporting Extinction Rebellion: think what to do about the world heating up. (The first site which came up when I googled the group was ‘Synagogue of Satan – Jewish Supremacy’, with a Swastika in the middle. What vile abuse!)

Look through a turtle’s or an albatross’s eyes at the plastic you dump in the sea, says David Attenborough of Blue Planet. In the queue at the bakery I chatted with the woman behind me about how both of us had brought our own bags. ‘Anyone who says we need less plastic’, the lady behind her chimed in, ‘Is an anti-Semite. We need more plastic, not less’. (What folly. How foolish, too, to misapply and trivialize anti-Semitism.)

‘Begin again’, teaches Rabbi Haim Haika of Amdur, in a penetrating re-reading of Hachodesh, ‘this month’, as ‘Heichadesh: Renew yourself’. Habits, he continues, have a way of imprinting themselves on your insides. (‘Habit’, teva, and ‘print’, matbia, are also from the same root in Hebrew). Don’t let that happen.

I don’t want to cheat life. I don’t want not to care. I don’t want the God who resides in all life to turn me away with a cheap answer because I wanted a cheap getaway. I need to say to God, to all life, to the spirit which lives within us all, to the ultimate healer, ‘I am here. Help me not to carry on the same as before.

29 Mar 2019

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

Prickly Subjects

Sticky Post By admin On March 29, 2019

11pm last night was a highlight of my week. ‘Come’, my daughter Libbi called from the garden, ‘Quickly. I’ve seen it.’

‘It’ was the baby hedgehog I’d brought home one damp November night. I’d been out late with the dog on the Heath when I noticed a tiny ball of prickles curled up in the wet grass. Sometimes hedgehogs are born too late in the year to make it through the winter; they have to reach a minimum weight to survive hibernation. Was this baby animal too small? If I took it home to feed it up, would I be removing it from its family, doing more harm than good? But then, we had a large garden with other hedgehogs present and, following professional advice, we’d taken the essential measures to make our garden hedgehog friendly.

The animal fitted snugly in my glove. I ran home, dog leash in one hand, baby hedgehog in the other. I called the hedgehog help-line (yes, Britain has such a thing), took advice from congregants (there’s expertise on everything), bought the right food, fed the animal nightly and invested in a deluxe hibernation home. (‘A fool and his money are easily parted’, says my wife – who would have done exactly the same for an animal, or human, in need).

So, when Libbi called out, and we saw the hedgehog, thin but definitely alive, emerge from its winter sleep, we were thrilled.

I’m writing about this not just because it brought our family joy, and not only because over and again I relive a horrid scene where at a crossroads I watched a gang of teenagers stone a hedgehog to death.

I’m writing because, in a world which leaves so many of us feeling so powerless so much of the time, I am passionate about ‘can do’. ‘You are not at liberty to desist from the work’, insisted Rabbi Tarfon 1900 years ago, words we put on the certificates of achievement awarded by Eco-Synagogue.

We don’t have to watch, like helpless bystanders, the decline of wildlife, or race and inter-faith relations, or teenager safety and wellbeing, or social justice, or compassion itself.

I’ve had a learning week. I met Leket Israel, Israel’s National Food Bank, which last year gleaned 30 million tons of produce from the fields and saved 2 million hot dinners from waste. I saw City Harvest, which has provided 5 million rescued meals in London (they bring food to our asylum seekers drop-in). They estimate that 9.2 million meals are missed each month by Londoners who can’t afford food, while 13.3 million meals are thrown away.

I met with parliamentarians, religious leaders and the heads of The Wildlife Trust to discuss their input into the forthcoming environment act, based on their amazing report Towards a Wilder Britain. Britain is among the most environmentally degraded countries in the world.

Our hedgehog, our garden, our synagogue and Eco-Synagogue will all play a part.

I went to Barnet House to express solidarity against racism and anti-Semitism with members of the Muslim community. I listened to how teenage boys and girls experience our local streets. Last Friday a group of us took gifts to the North London Mosque following the atrocities in Christchurch. In this populism age, with xenophobia on the rise, we need to stand, and be seen to stand, together.

In his excellent book To Do The Right And The Good, Elliot Dorff describes compellingly how Judaism understands the creation of a compassionate, just and sustainable world as the inescapable responsibility of every individual, household and community, – our part in our partnership with God.

When that young hedgehog emerged last night from its long sleep, I felt that it was shaking me awake too, and all of us, to do more for the sake of life.

Please find out more from:

https://www.britishhedgehogs.org.uk

https://www.leket.org/en

www.cityharvest.org.uk

https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wilder-future

https://jps.org/books/to-do-the-right-and-the-good/

22 Mar 2019

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community Permalink

People who bring heaven down to earth

Sticky Post By admin On March 22, 2019

‘How beautiful the world still is, how stunning life is’, Simon Lichman wrote to me this morning: nature ‘is not just beauty, it is the finely tuned essence of that which makes it all possible.’

That ‘essence’ is what I mean by God; the better part of me tries to listen for it, everywhere.

I’ve been asked: ‘So what did you do in Israel besides run a marathon?’ The answer is: I heard that voice, many times – as I hear it also here, in London.

I heard it because I met so many people, different, the focus of their lives diverse, who yet had in common the determination to connect. I could list all their names and what they do, but I’m afraid I may leave someone out. So here are only a few:

There’s Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum, who created the community Tsion, and who, on Yom Yerushalayim, the date the city was united physically in the Six Day War, unites it spiritually by praying with imams, priests and rabbis together to ‘Seek the peace of Jerusalem’.

There’s Levy Lauer, who knows every detail of what it means to give a decent meal, a place to sleep, a safe roof, to a destitute refugee who would otherwise be homeless and hungry with nowhere for her children on the streets.

There’s Shaiya Rothberg, who teaches mysticism at the Conservative Yeshivah, but isn’t such a mystic as to be afraid to put himself on the line for poor families, Arab and Jewish, in East Jerusalem, so that they shouldn’t be forced from their homes.

There are the Eritrean women at Kuchinate (‘crochet’ in Tirgrinia) creating red and sky-blue baskets, weaving from a past of flight, beatings and rape a future of comradeship, hope and dignity.

There are Art Green and Mimi Faigelson, scholars of Hasidism, who through this language of spirit and feelings help their students discover the pathway between intellect and soul.

There’s Yonatan Neril, off to Kenya where Israeli and British initiatives produce non-polluting solar energy for developing African economies. He picked up a roll the café owners were throwing away: ‘May I give this to the beggar on the corner’. Waste is intolerable, he said.

There’s Simon himself, devoted to bringing schools together, Arab and Jewish, Israeli and Palestinian. It takes him an age to walk up the lane in Ein Rafa because every child greets him, everyone calls ‘Hey! Simon!’

And, and,…What these people and so many others across the world have in common is the commitment to deeper connections: between Jews, Christians and Muslims mind and heart; home and homelessness; humankind and nature. In affirming these links, they help us hear, despite the surrounding racket, the quiet pulse of the hidden life which flows through everything, ‘that finely tuned essence of what makes all possible’.

I respect such people. I honour their fellowship. We must strengthen each other in the bleak times at hand, as fear grows and across the world populism sharpens its weapons.

Such people live by a Torah which, like the fire on the altar in the Temple long ago, burns through the night until morning, ‘lighting the darkness until it is transformed into light.’ (Rebbe Menachem Mendel of Tschernobil)

Late one night in Jerusalem I spotted a light still burning in a ramshackle store. The old man owner turned and saw me: ‘Yes, I have a Tallit, a prayer shawl for you’. There and then he retied the eight-threaded fringes on each corner, humble, devoted, speaking no words of distraction until the skilful work was complete. Traditionally one thread in each fringe is blue, recalling the brilliance of the sky. Thus I bore silent witness to the binding of the knots, the tying together of heaven and earth.

There are many whose lives are devoted to the weaving of such bonds, who make noble the endeavour to be human.

18 Mar 2019

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Interfaith Permalink

After the murderous attacks on worshippers at Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand

Sticky Post By admin On March 18, 2019

We stand with you in solidarity and sorrow.

Wherever we are in the world, whatever our faith and beliefs, we stand together with you as pilgrims on this earth, as fellow human beings striving to do what is compassionate and just, hoping to share with our loved ones, friends and fellow citizens the privileges and responsibilities of life.

We have no place for racism, hatred and supremacism.

We are appalled and disgusted at the premeditated racist murder of Muslim people, made even more brutal, blasphemous, hurtful and despicable because it was carried out in the sacred precincts of prayer, during the peaceful hour of worship.

We mourn the victims alongside you, children, teenagers, healers and teachers, heroes who tried to save others, people from different parts of the world, contributing to the civic life of Christchurch and New Zealand.

Our hearts are with the bereaved. Our prayers are with the wounded and traumatised, and with all those striving to heal and support them. Our anguished thoughts are with all whose family members are still missing.

We feel for Muslim communities across the world.

The oneness of God and the fellowship of our common humanity unite us. We must stand as surety for each other in times of threat and danger. We must act collectively against all forms of hatred and bigotry. We must foster friendship and understanding between us and all people. We must work together for the safety and good of all life everywhere.

Written in sorrow

Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg
Senior Rabbi, Masorti Judaism

15 Mar 2019

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community Permalink

Why I’m running for the guide dogs

Sticky Post By admin On March 15, 2019

I can’t fully explain why I’m crazy enough to start running marathons when I’m sixty. It’s partly to control my diabetes (a shorter distance would do!) it’s partly to make up for how useless I was at sport at school; it’s largely the pleasure of sharing, whenever possible, an activity with my son Mossy. And running in Jerusalem is a tribute to my father, who was here from 1937 – 55, in charge of keeping the blood banks cool during the siege in the War of Independence in 1948. It’s a tribute, too, to the history of our people, the Jewish People whose dreams and destiny have been intertwined with the fate and spirit of this extraordinary city for three thousand years.

Most importantly, I think of this as a marathon of hope, an HaTikvah marathon, that this remarkable civilisation of temple, synagogues, spires and minarets will one day be fully and completely Yeru-shalem, the abode of shalom, peace, the town shechubrah la yachdav, the city whose faiths and peoples are united all together. However grim the politics, I can neither count nor adequately appreciate the people I know whose lives are courageously and tenaciously devoted to just this vision.

However, I can explain why I’m running for Israel’s guide dogs. Yes, I am stupidly sentimental about animals. Yes, I love dogs. But it’s more than soppiness; it’s the feeling of oneness in their company, how the spirit of the God of life flows quietly through us all. It can’t be by chance that our black-and-white border collie came with his own tallit. We humans have to put it on as an extra garment; on occasion I’m foolish enough to feel – selectively of course – that animals and trees wear their spirituality naturally.

As for the ‘guide’ aspect, I’ve seen how these remarkable dogs, beautifully trained, can restore not only sight but independence, confidence and joy to their human partners. Today dogs guide blind people, assist those who have physical disabilities and become companions in trust, affection and resilience to civilians and soldiers with PTSD. It’s not just primary schools who have a resident hound to calm childrens’ – and teachers’ – nerves. In exam term certain universities have puppy corners too.

‘It’s not so much what he (Napal, a black Labrador) does for me physically – the assisting, the service,’ writes Jason Morgan in A Dog Called Hope, ‘so much as what he does for me socially and psychologically…he was my bridge to the outside world.’ Jason was severely wounded in an accident while on a mission with an elite US military unit. He would wake up at night screaming with physical pain and mental terror. But now ‘with Napal among us we feel like a family again.’ The children are once again ‘blessed with a dad who smiles.’

If I can contribute to at least one such canine-human partnership of faithfulness and love, I’ll be happy. Last year people privileged me to raise enough funds to sponsor half a dog, from the tip of the tail to the centre of the heart. This year I’m hoping to manage the other half; from the heart to the tip of the nose.

As for guide dogs in Israel (I support guide dogs in the UK as well, and wildlife projects in many places) I can do no better than echo what the young man said on the promotion film when asked why he didn’t import a ready-trained animal from America: ‘If my dog hadn’t been educated in Israel, how would he have known to go straight to the front of every queue?’

‘Be my eyes’ is not in fact the recommended greeting when owner and guide dog first meet. It’s a quote from the Torah. For there are many kinds of eyes and many ways of seeing. Animals, perhaps dogs especially, have often helped humans to see with the heart. I can’t count the number of people, animals, gardens, wild places and wild flowers which have enriched my sight and deepened my insight.

Today I’m stocking up on vitamin C to get rid of a cold and food for energy. Above all I’m storing in my thoughts the love and support so many people have given me. Thank you for your encouragement! When my stamina runs low (somewhere or everywhere between 18 and 35k – after when I hope I’ll feel that even if I have to crawl I’ll make the finish) I know that my friends and community are behind me, saying: ‘Treat as a sermon; just keep on going for four and a half hours.’