| 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. |
Community
At Noam pre-camp: a space for listening
| 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 |
We all need our moments of hope and reprieve
We need our bursts of joy and relief. That’s what Watkins’ great goal in the 90th 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.
Celebrating Pesach in this wonderful, terrible world
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!
For these things I pray in these terrible times
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?
Hope and purpose: not a dream but a duty
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.
If only the Megillah were less relevant
Two verses from the Megillah, the Scroll of Esther, which we read this Saturday night and Sunday, give me strength and hope.
But first to the story. How I wish it was irrelevant. But beneath its smiling surface, Esther’s charm and King Achashverosh’s fickle favour, it’s vicious.
In two verses Haman, the villain, encapsulates antisemitism’s every trope: the Jews are everywhere, follow rules of their own, won’t mix and have lots of money.
He carries a long history of hating. He’s an Agagite, from the royal line of Amalek who ambushed the Israelites in the desert, slaughtering the weary and weak. In the Torah, Amalek is the embodiment of cruelty, against which God is eternally at war. But, it’s essential to understand this, the Talmud makes it clear that Amalek long ago ceased to exist. No one today is literally Amalek.
Haman’s hatred doesn’t come from nowhere. His ancestor, the first Amalek, is Esau’s grandchild. A shrewd legend has grandfather tell grandson: ‘I couldn’t take revenge on Jacob for cheating me; killing him would have made my father Isaac die of grief. I bequeath to you the duty of vengeance.’ Mordechai’s ‘great and bitter cry’ when he hears Haman’s plan to kill the Jews echoes exactly Esau’s ‘bitter cry’ a thousand years earlier, when he finds Jacob has taken his blessing. Haman no doubt sees himself as the true victim. Hurts don’t go nowhere.
But the Jews of Persia are victims indeed, exiled from their land when Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem, forced to court favour, subject to both royal and popular whim.
So the story depicts a horrible ‘concurrence victimaire’ , in the recently coined French phrase. No one feels secure, even King Achashverosh, who amorally plays Agagite and Jew against each other, with the sole aim of self-preservation.
The tables turn and the Jews forcefully defend themselves, killing thousands, egged on by Achashverosh who wants all Haman’s followers dealt with, but in such a way that he can lay the blame, should it subsequently prove necessary, on those Jews. Here the Megillah ends. But we can guess the next turn of the screw.
So much of today’s pain is here. What was done to Israel by Hamas with such calculated brutality is unspeakably horrific. The ongoing trauma, especially of the families of hostages and those wounded or killed, is shattering. The hatred unleashed against Jews worldwide is appalling. The starving misery of hundreds of thousands of Gazan civilians, into whose wretched fate Hamas has cynically drawn us, so that we too are implicated, is utterly terrible.
Thus heavy in heart, I turn to my two verses for guidance.
The first is Mordechai’s message when he begs Esther to petition the king to save their people: ‘If you stay silent now…’ I hear those words whenever the world confronts us with cruelty and wrong. They’re not an invitation to join the social media racket. They’re a command to do what we can, whatever our capacity, to make life better for someone somewhere. We’re not allowed to do nothing, and that imbues us with purpose.
The second is Mordechai and Esther’s instruction: ‘Each to their neighbour and gifts to the needy.’ It’s why we send presents of food on Purim. But the words mean more: ‘Be there for your fellow human beings.’ We need the companionship of our own people. But we must also go further, reach out hands, whenever we can, with members of other faiths. We must listen to their pain, and they to ours, so that together we can uphold each other’s humanity and re-open doors and hearts.
Only thus will we move beyond prejudice and hatred toward ‘the words of peace’ with which the Megillah closes.
With light feet, but a heavy heart
I hope to run the Jerusalem Marathon with light feet today. But I won’t be running with a light heart; my heart is full and heavy. I can’t add up the feelings or experiences which fill it. Some are contradictory. I make no comparison and suggest no equivalence between them. Some of the people who moved me hold radically different views. But they’re all people, and what they had to tell has left me, in every case, with two similar feelings.
The first is deep, anguished sorrow. In a noisy café at Tel Aviv Savidor Station I had a long conversation with two psychotherapists: ‘The need is huge,’ they told me. ‘The immediate circle of family members traumatised on 7 October is 20,000.’ And the circles beyond? ‘Tens of thousands more, the families of soldiers killed and wounded…’
At the previous station I’d met Aaron Seitler who’s walking the Israel Trail (the sections which aren’t too dangerous) to raise money for The Society For The Protection of Nature In Israel’s project Nature Heals which takes relatives into the gentle consolation of green spaces.
I travelled on north, and sat with x – I’m not sure she wants to be named. ‘I need a shoulder to cry on again,’ she wrote to me after we met the first time, last November. ‘I’m still in touch with my friend in Gaza. I’m so worried; he hasn’t replied to my last message. I don’t know if he’s still alive.’ She showed me a video of him holding the hands of a circle of children, then another of him cooking a vat of soup, the children running up to him while he turns aside and weeps. ‘I’m careful whom I talk to. Many here would be furious with me.’ Actually, I’m seeing more indications of deep concern for the children of Gaza.
I spent Wednesday in Kfar Veradim with my amazing colleague Rabbi Nathalie Lastreger. (The warning there when Hizbollah send missiles is zero seconds.) Lastreger means ‘bearer of burdens,’ and she carries the burdens of countless people with courage and love. She introduces me to Eitan Gonen, father of Romi, who’s still held hostage. ‘Tell us about her.’ ‘She loves animals, people, life, connects with everyone instantly. She’s a dancer in six different styles. She’s my sunshine, positive energy always. It’s 150 days; even one is unimaginable. She’s strong.’ All over Kfar Veradim are pictures of her, with her beautiful smile. ‘Every day I say: “This is the day she’ll be home.” Make a deal, any price; get them back.’
I ask what we can do to help. He answers with the same words as Ayelet, Naama’s mother, whom I met last week: Send good energy, prayers, heart’s warmth. I believe, I know, it’ll reach her, however deep the tunnels.’
We hear a terrifying army briefing about the threats posed by Hizbollah – another of Iran’s vicious proxies. Then Nathalie takes me to the homes of two bereaved families. Salman Habaka was a high-ranking Druse officer: ‘They had their eyes on him to be the IDF’s first Druse Commander-in-Chief,’ his father says. ‘Ani rishon; I go first,’ was his motto. He inspired everybody, gave his soldiers confidence and courage. He rescued many people.’ His father gives me a keyring with his picture. His mother cries quietly.
Uria Bayer belonged to a Christian family, originally German, whose lives have been devoted over three generations to caring for Holocaust survivors in Israel. Uria received a bullet through the head in Gaza. ‘“Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people,” his father said. ‘These words have an even greater meaning for me now. For four days we witnessed the care at Saroka Hospital. Unbelievable!’ The family draw great comfort from their faith. As Uria’s father speaks, the family dog looks up and holds out her paw.
Yesterday I went to the South Hebron Hills with Joel Carmel and a team from Breaking the Silence. Seemingly unimpeded by the army, settlers are exploiting the aftermath of October 7, violently intimidating and driving away villagers across the West Bank. We wander round the ruins of the ancient Palestinian village of Khirbet Zanuta; the whole population of 250 fled after repeated threats. One settler drove his bulldozer into the small, abandoned school; books and broken desks lie across the ruined floor. These are different kinds of injuries, deep and terrible wounds.
Today when we gather at Gan Sacher for the start of the races, I will see on countless running shirts the names of loves ones, taken hostage, tortured, murdered on Shabbat Shechorah, killed in the fighting. I will carry the memory of Martin Segal, for many years head of The British Friends of Israel Guide Dogs, who died this year, young, courageous, gentle.
That takes me to the second group of emotions that all these experiences – which I can’t add up and can’t compare, except to say that they overwhelm me, every one of them – have in common. All of them evoke a powerful determination to see justice and compassion, to care, support, and create a safer, fairer, better, kinder world.
That’s what I’m running my marathon for. I want to join those who, whoever and wherever they are, devote their lives to compassion.
Naama Levy, the hostage we’ve adopted
I spent yesterday evening in Raanana with Ayelet, mother of Naama Levy, and Naama’s Noam (youth movement) friends. Naama is the hostage our synagogue has adopted.
Only, I don’t want to write ‘hostage’ because Naama is – Naama. She’s a girl of nineteen. If I understood the swift, warm Hebrew conversation, she joined Noam in eleventh grade but fitted in at once: ‘We’d go to the beach before maths tests to study. We’d talk for hours, not on our phones (after I asked), we’re local, we’re the Raananot, the Raanana girls, always together. We meet: tea and cake, our last-school-day trip to the sea; five days together in Prague…’ Bafi the dog barks, nervous of men. But I’m good at making friends with dogs. This feels like family now.
But Naama is a hostage. She was seen being taken into Gaza on October 7. That’s 150 days ago. ‘There’s no commandment greater than redeeming captives;’ ‘Bring them home now;’ ‘Lead them from darkness and death’s shadow to freedom and light;’ so run the posters, prayers, pictures, on every building, every wall, here in Israel.
‘What can we do?’ I asked. ‘That’s the question we keep asking too,’ Naama’s friends reply. ‘Don’t let her be forgotten,’ says Ayelet. ‘Keep her story in your hearts: I believe in thought- waves; goodwill energy somehow travels.’ I agree. ‘Talk about her beyond your community, at work, among friends. I’m worried life will just go on, – it has to – and Naama and the other hostages will be forgotten. I hope a deal will soon free her and them all.’
We don’t talk about the calculated, nihilistic brutality of Hamas, killers of their own people too.
Remember! Don’t forget! is the Torah’s unequivocal commandment about combatting evil.
We take pictures. Her friends plan to send stories, vignettes about Naama. We’ll put them in the synagogue. When we pray for the release of all the hostages, for the safety of all the victims of this horrible war, we’ll include Naama’s name.
‘We made challah with Rabbi Chaya Rowen-Baker, such a gentle ritual,’ Ayelet explained. I know Rabbi Chaya; she radiates chesed, loving-kindness.
I’ve had many other conversations, with more next week. I’m glad to be here among my people.
I’ve listened to two frank army briefings: the impossible challenges, freeing the hostages, ensuring protection, food and medical aid for the huge number of Palestinian civilians, without everything getting into the hands of Hamas, the thorough degrading of Hamas so that they can never do October 7 again, fears of what could happen in the north.
Three moments stand out from these conversations. I have a heart-to-heart with Dr Stephen Arnoff, executive director of the Conservative Yeshivah, where I’m part of an in-depth environment programme: ‘We want a spiritually engaged, committed, observant, deeply humanist Judaism.’
Friends take me to an Israeli-Arab family I’ve known for years. ‘We’re careful about talking about how we feel,’ says the woman, putting her finger to her lips. She volunteers at a hospital; she has the quiet smile of wisdom. We each see different suffering, different wounds and nightmares. But it’s suffering all the same. May the compassionate God hear our prayers for compassion.
I sit with Professor Paul Mendes-Flohr. He tells me colleagues, Palestinian, Jewish, call him, some several times a day, just to be human together. He points to his heart: ‘There’s more than one chamber here to teach us to have a place for many different people’s different pain.’
Back in Ayelet’s living room, it turns out I’ve heard her talk about Naama before, last November at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv. I may have even met her before that, before the horrors, when she was duty doctor at the Jerusalem Marathon and I was happy not to need her services.
Back in Ayelet’s living room, despite everything, the space is full of loving friendship.
Whom we carry in our hearts
Whose names do we carry on our shoulders and bear in our hearts?
My sartorial interests have always been minimal. Aware of their environmental cost, I shop for new clothes as rarely as possible. If I do have to visit a shopping centre like Brent Cross, the less time I have there, the more likely I am to buy what I need.
But the High Priest’s garments, described in this week’s Torah reading, fascinate me. The very names of the precious stones sewn onto them seem to glow in the text: sappir veyahalom, sapphire and diamond, shevo ve’achlamah, agate and amethyst.
Mystics see them as metaphors for the radiance of the soul. But in our sore times, I’m interested in something more down to earth. Two stones are carved with the names of the tribes of Israel, six names on each, and attached to the high priest’s ephod so that ‘he wears them on his shoulders as a memorial before God.’
Today there is no temple, no sacrificial service and no high priest. Instead, we each come before God carrying the names, hopes, anguish and aspirations of everyone we care about, before God.
My first meeting here in Israel was with my colleague Rabbi Irina Gritsevskaya, responsible for supporting the Jewish communities of Ukraine. This Shabbat, 24 February, brings the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion. She writes:
‘Two years have passed but the war still remains. These days, every Shabbat service in Ukraine begins with the prayer for peace in Israel and ends with the prayer for Ukraine.’
Last year, I joined Bishop Kenneth Nowakowski at the Ukrainian Cathedral in London. He carries on his shoulders the anguish of hundreds of thousands of his people, exiled to Britain or fighting and struggling at home. There’s no end in sight to the war. I send him a big hug of solidarity from Jerusalem.
As well as the stones on his shoulders, the high priest wore over his heart four rows of jewels, three in each row, carved with the individual name of one of Israel’s twelve tribes. We, being no formal high priests, carry them not on, but in, our hearts.
I don’t know whom you carry in your heart: someone you love who’s in danger, a hostage, a friend whose hand you want to hold but they’re on the other side of some border, at the other end of the world. What I do know is that we all carry names in our hearts ‘as a memorial before God’: people we love, for whom we hope and pray. I think of Pasternak’s poem:
‘In me are people without names…
I am conquered by them all, and this is my only victory.’
May the God of life embrace them all.
The high priest wears one more piece of clothing bearing a name, God’s name carved on a gold band worn round his head. It was his special tefillin, the small leather boxes with scrolls bearing the commandment to love God, which we place daily next to our heart and on our forehead.
The other morning, I tentatively mentioned to a friend that his tefillin were askew; instead of at the centre they were way off to one side of his forehead. ‘No,’ he wittily replied, ‘My tefillin are in the right place. It’s my head which is facing the wrong way.’ Since then, I keep asking myself which way my thoughts are facing.
The Torah explains that the high priest wears his special garments ‘to make him holy to serve me.’
So may we, each our own high priest, be granted to stand with our head and thoughts facing the God of all life, our hearts filled with love to carry the names of the people who need our embrace, and our shoulders strong to share their burdens, in these cruel, challenging times.