‘Min hameitsar karati – From this narrow space I call out to you, God.’ As we speak these words of the Hallel, the short selection of Psalms read on the new moon and festivals, we hear them cried out loud from friends, colleagues, fighters, children, in bunkers in Kyiv, Kharkiv, across the Ukraine.

If you’re like me, you too probably feel useless, powerless to help. For now, the message from humanitarian agencies remains clear: what’s needed is funds, funds, funds (click here). When refugees do arrive here in the UK it’ll be different; we, like millions of people in East and Central Europe, will greet them with signs of welcome. (Meanwhile there are so many refugees and victims from other vicious conflicts, calling out from Afghanistan, Xinjiang, or as asylum-seekers nearby, needing help. Down the road are people struggling because of the pandemic, rising prices, the cost of heating, queuing at food banks.)

‘From the straits I call to you, answer me with the freedom of broad spaces:’ That you is not just God; it’s us. It’s not within our individual power to respond militarily. But we can and must offer the ‘broad spaces’ of our humanity, heart, solidarity. Here is an extract from emails between John in our community, and his colleague Taras, trapped in Kyiv:

John: We see what extraordinary resilience you show in the maintenance of your own state… The courage of the Ukrainian people is inspiring the world. I have been listening to your MP, Leseya Vasilenko, talking about taking up arms as a woman to stand in defence of her town, her children and her society.  She is lucid, clear-headed, purposeful, determined.

Taras: I want you to know that your letters… are very, very important to me and to everyone here. I may not be able to respond quickly, or at all, but the feeling of your presence, your sympathy and support is extremely valuable. In the current catastrophe not only sympathy, but also the most active actions are vital from you and from all our friends in Europe and beyond. I beg you, shout at all corners, tell everyone you know, use whatever leverage you have at your disposal to stop this madness immediately, so that the invaders cease fire and get out of our land…

We must not be silent. This was President Zelensky’s explicit message to Jews around the world: ‘Do not be silent now.’ Consciously or not, he was repeating Mordechai’s words to Esther as their entire people stood in danger of annihilation: ‘If you keep silence now…’ This in turn echoed the Torah’s injunction, ‘Don’t stand idly by your fellow’s blood…’

Without making their existence even harder, keep contact with friends and colleagues in Ukraine, fleeing Ukraine, who have relatives there or nearby, or who are supporting refugees. Be in touch with those in Russia too. Write to your MP for us to do more; (See the advice from World Jewish Relief) Share poetry, music, art from the Ukraine; say out loud what you are doing.

The bombing of Babi Yar by the Russian air force re-opens the graves of the victims of the worst outrages perpetrated by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen on the body of the Jewish People. This reveals to the whole world the wretched sum of what dictatorship, brutality and mercilessness achieve. We can all see. It shows, written in bones, what we must never allow.

This is existential, for the physical lives of many, and for the moral and spiritual lives of all. It goes straight to the core of the Jewish and universal values learned in the crucible of slavery long ago: human dignity, freedom, justice and the infinite value of life.

Today is the first of the true month of Adar when, the Talmud teaches, ‘joy increases.’ I doubt any of us feels that way. But behind true joy lie courage, generosity, faith, care for others, and freedom in body, heart and soul. Let these increase, now.

How horribly apposite the words of the Psalm for Wednesday are: ‘For how long will the wicked rejoice? They tell lies. They kill widows, refugees and orphans. They say, “God isn’t looking.” (Psalm 94)

We ask ourselves what we can do to help as we feel helpless, watching the brutal invasion of the Ukraine. We must not do nothing. If you have friends with family in the Ukraine or nearby, be appropriately in touch; don’t let people feel alone. If you can, donate (see our appeals below; there are many others too). For the present, the most useful thing most of us can give is money. The organisations we support are helping neighbouring countries cope, too, as refugees arrive in hundreds of thousands in Poland, Moldova, Hungary and beyond. ‘You can see the trauma in their faces,’ a colleague in Budapest told me.

The Prime Minister has referred to as many as 200,000 refugees been allowed into the UK. There’s been mention of individual and corporate sponsorships; as soon as details become available, we will share them with the community. Please join tonight’s briefing, organised for all our communities by Rabbi Jeremy Gordon. Please join tomorrow’s session on refugees, focussed both on Jewish values and practical ways of helping. We mustn’t forget at this time that refugees from Afghanistan are still – refugees from Afghanistan. If we feel powerless to affect events across the world, there are many close to home, like local food banks, who need our help.

Jewish communities and leaders across Europe and beyond are finding ways of supporting each other, practically, with morale and in prayer. Adapting the words of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, known as the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto,

Mutual sharing and helping is not limited to giving charity. When one hears of the troubles of others and does all one can to help, if one’s heart s broken…then this too is a gift we receive from one another… (March 16, 1940)

Wishing all of us the strength to help wherever we can and to support one another.

Masorti Olami Ukraine Appeal

Masorti Olami, which supports Masorti congregations across the world, is appealing for our direct help. They write:

We are in close contact with our communities in Kyiv, Chernivtsi, Odessa, Kharkov and Dnipro who report that they are currently safe and at home, but are worried about the future and are in a state of uncertainty, not sure when an invasion could occur or how it would play out. They have conveyed to us their current fears and needs and we have created this campaign, calling on the assistance of our supporters around the world, to help them.

Click here to donate to their appeal via Masorti Judaism in the UK. Click here for further information.

World Jewish Relief Ukraine Appeal

World Jewish Relief has launched a special appeal:

For details and to donate click here.

‘I never thought we’d see this in our lifetimes:’ how many people have said those words in the last two days. Our hearts and prayers go out to the people of Kharkov, Kyiv, all the Ukraine, and to the world, to the children of now and the future, because once again tyranny and destruction have been let loose.

I think of Osip Mandelstam, the great Russian-Jewish poet who perished in transit to Stalin’s gulags. In January 1937 he wrote from exile in Voronezh

What shall we do with the plains’ beaten weight?…
And crawling across them
is that not the one whose name we shriek in our sleep –
the Judas of nations unborn?

People across the Ukraine, who are all on the front line facing this terrible betrayal of their humanity, hope and freedom, urgently need our help. Last night, at a service joined by hundreds across the world, Rabbi Reuven Stamov spoke from Czernowitz, explaining that people were gathering there in the west, currently the safest part of the country. They need food and shelter. There are already tens of thousands of refugees, and many elderly, unable to travel, left behind. There are hundreds of centres taking in people on the Polish border. Below are the details of our appeals and prayers.

Just now on Radio 4 a brave woman, speaking from the shelter where she spent the night, said ‘We need your help. We are your front line in Europe.’ She may well be right; this is war in Europe.

No doubt, in the coming years citizens of Russia too will pay miserably for this needless war, in money spent on armies and conquests instead of on their civic needs.

What in times like these, does Judaism teach us to do? One feels powerless and useless. The little good one tries to do seems like nothing, like dry earth disintegrating into dust in one’s hands. As the morning prayers say, ‘What can we tell you, God? The powerful are like nothing; the wise know nothing…’

Yet throughout the tribulations of history, Judaism has taught us to keep faith. There is a tried and tested resilience in the practices, prayers and values of Jewish life.

This faith is two-fold. In the first place it is faith writ large, the undying hope that one day the sun of righteousness and justice will shine forth, with healing on its wings; that one day all humanity will understand that this is God’s earth and behave towards each other and all life with integrity and respect.

In the second place, and this may be more important to us today, it is faith writ small. It is the faith which tells us never to succumb to the feeling that we make no difference or that our actions don’t matter. It’s the day-by-day faith of the ordinary mitzvah: keep going, keep helping whoever you can, keep giving, keep blessing God and life and for the small things, keep doing what’s good and fair, keep a hospitable heart and home, keep planting hope, keep validating what we and others can – and often succeed – in doing, take nothing for granted.

None of this everyday wisdom can withstand military might. But it takes shelter in billions of hearts and homes and will outlive the rockets and bombs and those who mastermind their unjust and cruel deployment.

Appeals and Prayers

World Jewish Relief have launched a special appeal. Paul Anticoni writes:

World Jewish Relief has been supporting Jewish communities across Ukraine for over 20 years. Our 29 partners are rooted within local communities. Our support provides daily help to almost 10,000 Jewish elderly, to those looking for work, to families living in poverty. We saw in 2014 the displacement of over a million Ukrainians who fled the conflict. World Jewish Relief and its partners in 2014 then helped provide emergency support, accommodation and longer-term assistance for thousands…

For details and to donate click here.

Masorti Olami, which supports Masorti congregations across the world, is also appealing for our direct help. They write:

We are in close contact with our communities in Kyiv, Chernivtsi, Odessa, Kharkov and Dnipro who report that they are currently safe and at home, but are worried about the future and are in a state of uncertainty, not sure when an invasion could occur or how it would play out. They have conveyed to us their current fears and needs and we have created this campaign, calling on the assistance of our supporters around the world, to help them.

Click here for further information or here to donate to their appeal (select ‘special programme’ and specify ‘Ukraine Communities Campaign’).

A Prayer for the Ukraine can be found here.

In these dangerous times our hearts go out to all the people of the Ukraine, including our fellow Jewish communities there.

We pray that God who makes peace on high will make peace for us, all Israel and all the world. At the same time, we know from the history of Europe in the 1930s that cunning and deceit must be called by their true names and that tyranny cannot and must not be countered by propitiation.

Last Friday I spoke with Rabbi Reuven Stamov and his wife Lena. Leaders of the Masorti congregation in Kiev, they are also responsible for five major communities across the Ukraine. They explain that people are afraid, yet standing firm. They are preparing strongrooms in their homes, places of work and synagogues. Many from the east of the country are suffering from trauma after eight years of war, threats and intimidation. They ask us to think of, pray for and help them. To watch the video of our conversation click here.

World Jewish Relief yesterday launched a special appeal. Paul Anticoni writes:

World Jewish Relief has been supporting Jewish communities across Ukraine for over 20 years. Our 29 partners are rooted within local communities. Our support provides daily help to almost 10,000 Jewish elderly, to those looking for work, to families living in poverty. We saw in 2014 the displacement of over a million Ukrainians who fled the conflict. World Jewish Relief and its partners in 2014 then helped provide emergency support, accommodation and longer-term assistance for thousands…

For details and to donate click here.

Masorti Olami, which supports Masorti congregations across the world, is also appealing for our direct help. They write:

We are in close contact with our communities in Kyiv, Chernivtsi, Odessa, Kharkov and Dnipro who report that they are currently safe and at home, but are worried about the future and are in a state of uncertainty, not sure when an invasion could occur or how it would play out. They have conveyed to us their current fears and needs and we have created this campaign, calling on the assistance of our supporters around the world, to help them.

Click here for further information or here to donate to their appeal (select ‘special programme’ and specify ‘Ukraine Communities Campaign’).

Pesach is rapidly approaching, with its essential themes of justice and human dignity, and its timeless narrative of courageous opposition to tyranny. The world’s journey from slavery to freedom is long and hard; we pray that God will be with us as we strive to follow it.

On this Holocaust Memorial Day, a time for remembering and mourning, I feel deeply conscious of how important it is to focus on life.

As Jews we think first and foremost of the Nazi Holocaust; it touches very many of us personally. I only have to think of what my family might have been, had both my parents not had to flee Germany in their teens, had their relatives not been uprooted, and had so many of them not been murdered.

We are mindful also of the genocidal attacks by the powerful against minorities across the world and through the decades since, including the brutal persecution of the Uyghur People today. We must always stand up and speak out against such bigotry and savagery.

Humanity has proved itself capable of the most merciless cunning and heartless cruelty so often and on such a scale that it shames us as a species.

Therefore, now as much as ever, we must turn to life and do our utmost to support one another, across all faiths and nationalities, to live at peace with each other and in harmony with nature.

Those who perished would have longed to live out their days and enjoy the gift of life, of which they were so brutally robbed.

In their memory, may we dedicate ourselves to life.

My colleagues and I have been talking a lot about Rabbi Charles Cytron-Walker, familiar to everyone around him simply as Charlie. Today he’s known around the world for his courage, composure and astutely judged conduct when he and members of his congregation were taken hostage last Shabbat in the Beth Israel Synagogue in Colleyville. He’d received special training in how to respond, emotionally and practically, in just such a situation, but in the end it’s a person’s character which shines through. Thank God, and thanks to the skill of the security services, he and all the hostages were freed.

The rabbi’s friends said it was ironic, as well as tragic and shocking, that such an attack should have taken place in his community. He and his wife are known for their openness and their work with people of different faiths. As one of his teachers at rabbinic school said, he ‘could establish bonds with everybody. He is blessed with the ability to connect with people and become beloved.’ (The Forward)

Sadly, the necessity for security means that we have to patrol perimeters, carefully watch, and sometimes close and lock, entrances. It’s the last thing one truly wants to do in the house of God.

But there is one kind of door which, as a matter of ultimate security, we must not seal, – the door of the heart. We’ve read enough about Pharaoh’s hardened heart during the last weeks, the misery this caused The Children of Israel and the destruction it brought down on his own people.

One of my favourite verses in the Torah focusses on the very opposite:

God will open your hearts and the hearts of your children, to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul, so that you shall live. (Deuteronomy 30:6)

An ancient rabbinic teaching consists of just two words: lev yode’a – ‘the heart knows.’ The verb carries no object, so what is it that the heart can know? The meaning is that the heart has the capacity to know God, not in the abstract as a mere idea or dogma, but feelingly, in life, in nature and, most importantly, in other people.

I admire those whose hearts are open in this way. I don’t think of them as ‘pious’ in any formal sense. I see them rather as deeply perceptive and kind in a sensitive, unobtrusive manner. The deputy head teacher at a school where I taught before becoming a rabbi was like that. She somehow communicated the sense that she felt the potential for life and joy, the dignity and uniqueness, the presence of God, in every child, and they responded to her with instinctive, smiling respect.

Last Monday, the same date news of the arrests in Manchester in connection with the Colleyville siege became the top headline, was Martin Luther King Day. Reverend King understood that freedom would come to America only on the ‘day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands.’ He kept his heart open in the face of constant threats, vilification and imprisonment and, in the end, paid with his life for his deep faith in the oneness of all peoples.

It was because of this shared vision of God and humanity that he and Abraham Joshua Heschel became close friends and spiritual allies, so that they walked together arm in arm in the front line of the march in Selma, Alabama.

Tomorrow we read in the third of the Ten Commandments, ‘Don’t take the name of the Lord your God in vain.’ The exact translation is ‘Don’t carry God’s name in vain.’ The negative implies a positive, that we do carry God’s name, each of us in a unique way.

The ultimate security of humanity lies in recognising that name and presence and honouring it, in ourselves, each other and all life.

This Shabbat, when we read of the plague of darkness, has been designated Mental Health Shabbat by Jami, the mental health service for the Jewish community.

I often think of Dr Maurice Gaba, who was good to us at a difficult time for my family when my brother and I were small boys in Glasgow. Much later, when I was in my twenties, I would visit him and his wife in Jerusalem, after they made Aliyah. We even planted a rose garden together. ‘Suffering is unequally distributed in the world,’ he used to say then; ‘I saw too much of it during the war.’

It’s as true of mental as it is of physical suffering. Each of us feels life differently; what’s easy for some is painful for others. There’s a moving midrash on the words of Psalm 29 ‘The voice of God is ba’koach, ‘with the strength.’ Why ‘the’, the midrash asks; why not just ‘with strength’? Because, it answers, God addresses all of us personally, and is experienced by each of us individually, according to our varying sensitivities and mental state.

We ourselves are not the same from day to day or even hour to hour. Sometimes life sings in the head. Sometimes it gets you in the heart. Sometimes some of us want to hide in a place where the light can’t find us, because just walking down the street feels raw and exposing and we don’t feel safe even in our own footsteps.

When something hurts in our body, we can sometimes use our consciousness to contain the pain, put it aside, focus on other matters. We’re lucky to live in a country where medication for physical injuries is often, though not always, accessible and effective.

But when it’s our consciousness itself which hurts, where do we go then? Sometimes even the voices of those we know we love, and whom we know love us, bounce off some invisible membrane which seems to enclose our mind and trap us in our thoughts.

What can we do, for ourselves and each other? Sometimes we need the help of people with professional training, counsellors, psychologists, psychiatrist, psychotherapists, to guide and help us heal from inside our own minds. During lockdown, when many of us have faced profound challenges of resilience and spiritual wellbeing they, like other health professionals, have been hugely challenged. I’m grateful to them for being there and keeping going.

But often what we need is a more understanding community, society, indeed world. When Pharaoh, in a moment of reprieve, asks Moses, ‘Who’re you planning to take with you out of Egypt?’ the answer is instant: ‘Everyone; we’re leaving nobody behind.’

In today’s harshly competitive, often brash world, focussed on success, which usually means work and financial success, we do sometimes leave people behind. It’s especially hard for young people to see how they’re going to pass all the exams, jump all the hurdles and make it through.

So, on this Shabbat dedicated to mental health, I want to appeal for kindness, patience, listening and imagination. This starts with how we treat ourselves and extends to our community, in fact to everyone we meet.

Imagination may sound like ‘the odd one out’ among these qualities. But I believe we need to re-imagine what qualities, and whom, we value. Perhaps it’s a phantasy, but some traditional societies were more generous and patient than our rushed world today. If this wasn’t true in the past, maybe we can make it so now.

Can we validate different sensitivities and needs, – the gift of really meaning a warm greeting, of simply listening, of being in touch with our child-soul, of relating to animals and nature, of doing a daily chore with care and pride, of seeing time as opportunity for kindness?

Maybe such attentiveness and openness would, at least in small ways, help to re-centre us and bring healing to our minds and souls.