Environment | HEART AND MIND

25 Aug 2023

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

Be for life!

Sticky Post By admin On August 25, 2023

I dressed in haste this morning, trying not to lose track of an elusive voice. The Zohar teaches that when the darkness of night begins to wane, the spirit of hesed, lovingkindness, hovers over the world and whispers into our dreaming minds. On blessed mornings we wake up not with the shock of ‘Oh my God, another day!’ but touched by something gentle but compelling, urgent yet benign, some spirit or instruction from worlds beyond.

This voice had been strong in the half-dream from which the early light woke me. But it receded swiftly. It hovered at the corner of my consciousness before vanishing, taking with it something essential it wanted to tell me from some other realm.

All I could retain was that this was about caring for life. The half-dream was specific. But all I could retain was this generality, and the sensation that something had touched my heart which I didn’t know how to retrieve.

‘Be for life.’ It sounds so banal. But on a single-track road in Scotland we stopped the car because a toad was squatting on the tarmac. Nicky got out, took a photo, then gently moved the creature into the safety of the grass verge. The remarkable thing was that the driver in the car behind didn’t hoot. She waited, understood.

This reminded me of a scene from when I was seven or eight, next to my father in the car. He braked because a duck was leading her ducklings in slow procession across the busy Finchley Road up to the ponds in Golders Hill Park. ‘What if someone else won’t stop?’ I asked him. ‘Who would be so cruel?’ he replied.

I know I’m sentimental, but I don’t care for animals at the cost of caring for people. We’re all part of life together.

Maybe that voice, reduced to this generality ‘Be for life!’ came to me because of a conversation yesterday with our family from Ukraine. ‘I want to go home,’ said the grandmother, ‘but they’ve bombed the railway station.’ The mother gestured the outlines of a pincer movement: maybe the Russian Army will cut Kharkiv off. What is there left to say?

I sometimes fear we’re in a vehicle with some uncontrollable, manic driver who doesn’t know how, or maybe, I think in my worst moments, doesn’t really even try, to find the brakes.

But I know something else at least as well; that an immeasurable tenderness interpenetrates with life, despite its manifest cruelties and endless injustices; that this spirit of lovingkindness calls out constantly to the heart in the community of people and the ceaseless intercommunications of non-human life, and through the wordless communion of the spirit which hovers over the earth.

‘Be for life’ is the voice of our Rosh Hashanah prayers: ‘Remember us for life; Our father and mother, our sovereign, inscribe us for life.’

More importantly, it’s there in our prayers every day. The morning service opens with two short reflections I love. The first is a reminder: gemilut hasadim, acts of lovingkindness are of limitless value. The second is a recall: ‘My God, the soul you have given me is pure.’

We belong to a spirit whose ethos is profoundly other than ‘me and mine’, than ‘I don’t care who this hurts.’ Life flows into us from somewhere, some reservoir, some being or consciousness, which fills the heart with pity and love.

18 Aug 2023

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

Watching in sheer wonder

Sticky Post By admin On August 18, 2023

My words come from the northwest of Scotland where our family are on holiday. I wasn’t going to write, but I changed my mind, moved by the beauty, care, diligence and creativity of so much we’ve witnessed. We’ve visited projects of regeneration, replanting, reintroduction; we’ve seen what the impact not just on woodlands, insects, birds, and animals, but for people: the mental and spiritual restoration, the rehabilitation into the world of sacred wonder.

I’m writing, too, because today is the new moon of Elul, the month of Teshiuvah, repentance, return andreflection. It’s the date when we first hear the shofar calling us, in Maimonides’ words, ‘to wake from our sleep’ and return to God.

The first of Elul is also the ancient date for the tithing of cattle, when every tenth calf, lamb or kid born in the last year was taken to the temple. Turning this round, many contemporary rabbis honour this day as the New Year for Animals. This parallels how Tu Bishevat, originally a date for the taxation of their fruits, became the New Year for Trees, a time to celebrate orchards and forests.

These matters go together; there’s little more urgent to which we must wake up than how we treat the rest of creation. Over the last few days our family has been privileged to witness wonderful examples of such awakening and Teshuvah, return, to the physical and spiritual roots of our lives.

At Dundreggan, home to Trees For Life, we met Nick Barnes, a psychiatrist who works between the NHS, University College London and Scottish rewilding projects. We engage with schools and across Scotland, he explained. The connection with nature, trees and soil de-stresses and re-centres us, restoring mental health.

We walk round with a guide: his knowledge, not just of every insect, bird and tree, but also of centuries of local history, of Gaelic names and what can be learnt from what used to be, is amazing, and carried with good-humoured humility.

Days later we’re in Knappdale Forest, meeting a ranger in a tiny chalet full of books. ‘Wait at the hide at the far end of the loch; listen, watch.’ For once, we resolve to leave the dog in the car, safe in the evening cold. But she cries so loudly that we take pity on her, realising also that our chances of seeing any wildlife within a mile of such a pitiful racket are zero. Nessie comes with, behaving impeccably thereafter.

We walk round the loch, uncomfortably conscious of our family’s talent for failing to spot the animals we’ve come to observe. Finding the hide, we watch the light change over the small waves, glowing red as the sun sinks low. Three ducks, a fourth lagging behind, swim slowly across the water. I can recall no other time when I’ve listened like this, motionless, just listening to the wind and the bird cries for an entire hour.

Then we see the beaver, swimming across the loch, then towards us, nearer, nearer, diving down, resurfacing just feet from where we watch. These are moments of pure wonder.

But behind them are decades of dedication: consultations, negotiations with farmers, bureaucracy. Finally the first permits for reintroduction are granted, since beavers improve wetlands, prevent flooding and help water conservation in drought-prone regions, including London.

Judaism knows two kinds of motivation: fear and love. We need fear to motivate international leadership to mitigate and reverse the disintegration of our biosphere.

But, as our family have witnessed, it’s love, patient, knowledgeable, determined love, which is needed to repair nature for the sake of humanity and all life. Mercifully, the work we saw is being replicated all across the world. It’s very far from enough. But it represents true Teshuvah, repentance and restoration.

28 Jul 2023

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

Can Anger be Consoling?

Sticky Post By admin On July 28, 2023

Yesterday was the fast of The Ninth of Av, the bleak commemoration of disaster. Tonight begins Shabbat Nachamu, the Shabbat of Consolation. I wish there was a little more space between these days, because I’m still struggling with the tell-tale signs of a hangover from the fast, backache and tiredness, and need a little longer to shift my thoughts. According to tradition, the morning after, the first half of the tenth of Av, retains a lingering subdued mood because the fires in Jerusalem still raged – as do the fires today across Europe’s forests.

Yet the immediate proximity of these two dates, not rare in the Jewish calendar, has challenged my understanding of what consolation means. We can find solace in wonder. Can we also find it in anger?

Wonder is the theme of this coming Shabbat. Its readings are filled with beauty. Isaiah’s call to consolation is among the most stirring passages in the entire Hebrew Bible. He begins, ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people…Speak to the heart of Jerusalem…’ and ends, ‘Lift up your eyes on high and see who created all these, who brought them forth in all their hosts.’

The story is told of a hasid who said to his rabbi: ‘I’ve read thirty-six interpretations of that verse, but it was only when I looked up and saw, really saw, the magnificence of the stars that I understood.’ ‘You must write your explanation down,’ the rabbi insisted. ‘No,’ the hasid replied; ‘that would merely turn it into explanation thirty-seven.’

The world is full of wonder, in skyscapes, landscapes, music and poetry and in the grace of so many human interactions. We need that beauty to restore our soul and enable us to go on living.

But maybe we also need our anger. ‘I’m so furious,’ a friend said to me at the close of yesterday’s prayers. He was referring to the all too frequently heartless treatment of refugees. ‘Indignant’ might be a better term, but it feels too weak to describe the fire in the bones that refuses to let us be passive in the face of cruelty.

Yesterday I came across astonishing lines by the German-speaking poet of the Holocaust, Gershon ben David. He sees himself standing in silent fields, ‘pregnant’ with ashes of the slaughtered:

And I asked myself: am I
The keeper
Of my brother Cain

It’s a startling inversion. In Genesis, God challenges Cain to explain the whereabouts of his brother Abel whom he’s just murdered. ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Cain notoriously retorts. But in the poem, it’s not the guilty party who’s challenged about his responsibility toward the innocent, but the innocent brother who’s questioned about his responsibility toward the guilty.

Are we, too, all keepers of those potential Cains who inhabit our world? I’m not thinking of murderers, but of those who exhibit the cruelty, or heedlessness, which seems to come so frequently to the fore across our societies these days? What, too, about the small part of Cain which may be present in ourselves, waiting for us to loosen our guard? Are we responsible towards these ‘brother’ Cains? What might that entail? Can we awaken in them a better self, someone, beneath all appearances, potentially merciful? If not, how can we best challenge and overcome them?

I fear we are indeed the keepers of our brothers Cain, external and internal. To fight them we need the energy of anger; we might call this ‘the anger of compassion’. How otherwise can we confront the destructive forces in our world? The art is not just to challenge them but, if and when possible, to turn them about so that they too become part of the work of nurturing life.

We need the solace of wonder to nourish our heart and spirit, and the energy of indignation to give courage to our conscience so that we join the struggle for what is just and right. In so doing, we gain the consolation of contributing whatever we can towards life and hope.

25 May 2023

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

What God says

Sticky Post By admin On May 25, 2023

A dreamer’s Shavuot message for a troubled world.

We say every day in the morning prayers that the world is illumined berachamim, by mercy and love. Wendell Berry, writer, devoted Christian, farmer and environmentalist so committed that, on principle, he ploughs his land only with horses, puts it like this:

I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, in so far as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.

I so much want to agree. But the world doesn’t appear to be like that. To take just one example, (alongside so many issues about which we justly worry) the displaced family from Kharkiv have just marked one year since they fled Ukraine and came to live with us. With no sign of the war abating, we wondered how to mark the day. (The region was bombed the night before.) I made them their favourite cheese scones, small compensation, and we commiserated.

So it doesn’t exactly feel as if the world in its current state ‘subsists and coheres’ through love. But about this there can be no doubt: that the world, each of us, all of us, everything alive, has much need of love.

Therefore, that’s how I want to hear God’s voice in the Ten Commandments, which we will read tomorrow in all synagogues in every land and across all denominations. A beautiful Mishnah teaches that God didn’t just say ‘I am’ once long ago on Mount Sinai. God says this every day, calling out for us to attend. And God’s ‘I am’ is more than just a pronoun followed by a verb. The words are an appeal: ‘Hear me, care for me, love me.’

But where do we hear those words? To the mystics, the Kabbalists and Hasidim, the answer is simple: in everything. The voice of the living God is the essence of life in all its forms, the very heart of existence.

Therefore, when we think of children, especially perhaps children faced with extra struggles, such as finding a safe country, being given a safe home, having the right teachers who understand their gifts as well as their needs, we can hear within them the voice which says ‘Look after me, cherish me, love me.’

When we consider people facing the hard years toward the close of a long life’s journey, the physical limitations, the indignities which age can bring, the loss of friends, we can feel in their presence the voice which says, ‘Be gently with me, respect me, care for me.’ And so often we can see that voice embodied in those precious, remarkable carers who, day in and day out, night in and night out, truly care.

When we read the statistics of declining species, yet learn of the work of those determined groups who restore habitats, clean rivers, watch nests, save toads from busy A-roads, and know how to discern the music of one small songbird from another; there, too, we can hear God’s voice saying ‘I am’ in all the innumerable languages of creation.

But isn’t this all mere sentiment, when we’re told that God’s voice is commandment, a firm ‘Thou shalt’?

Not so! What greater commandment can there be than to live with love of creation, in whatever sphere of life we can best express it?

Therefore, may this be a year of listening, and responding, to God’s great commandment, God’s patient, enduring, long-suffering, pleading ‘I am.’

28 Apr 2023

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Environment, Ethics Permalink

Is there a commandment to love our planet?

Sticky Post By admin On April 28, 2023

Last Wednesday I had the privilege of making a small contribution to ‘Loving the Planet.’ It wasn’t a tree-hugging session, a team effort to prepare a hedgehog highway underneath a road, or a hedgerow planting day, but a seminar at Regents Park College, Oxford. I was asked to respond to a lecture by Professor Melissa Raphael as part of an interfaith seminar on Ecology, Love and Theology.

There’s no obvious commandment to love the earth, Professor Raphael argued, undoubtedly correctly. Judaism offers plenty of pragmatic direction: don’t destroy, don’t be cruel, allow your animals to rest each seventh day and the land each seventh year, repair the world. But love the planet? The Torah contains no such injunction.

She then proceeded to make a moving argument that, since we have become estranged from the land, its fauna and flora, seasons and smells, needs and yields, perhaps the earth itself is now, too, one of those strangers which the Torah instructs us to love in no less than thirty-six places. Is our degraded planet calling out to us: ‘Love me.’

Imanuel Levinas teaches that we must hear God’s command in ‘the face of the other’, calling on us to take responsibility for one another, so the earth too has a visage, ‘pnei tehom, the face of the deep’ over whose darkness God spread the first mantle of light. This face of the earth also commands us. Commandment is ‘interruptive’: it insists on a response, demands our ‘Hinenni – Here am I.’

It was a beautiful paper. It put me in mind of the Torah’s other love commandments, especially the love of our neighbour. Could we understand the earth not just as stranger, but also as neighbour, I wondered in response? After all, it’s never far away.

Like so many rabbis, Samson Raphael Hirsch loved word associations. In his Torah commentary he links Re’acha, ‘your neighbour’, with mir’eh, ‘pasture’. From a strictly semantic perspective this is most unlikely, but it’s an evocative connection, nonetheless. Destroy our neighbours’ ‘pastures’, he argues, their rights, place in society, sources of sustenance, the earth on which they and we depend, and we break the commandment to love our neighbour like our self.

“And it’s not just ‘like us’,” someone in the room added; “it is us, for our very bodies are of the earth.” So, should ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ include the meadows, woods and wheatfields too – without devaluing our special responsibilities to our fellow humans?

Yesterday Deborah Golend and I opened the fourth conversation Jewish and Emotional on the subject of gratitude. It led me to think of the closing lines of a poem by Rachel, the pioneer Hebrew poet whose life was cut short by tuberculosis:

Let me not be bitter, lest I cloud with my bitterness

the pure blue of the sky, my friend of old.

Her term for ‘my friend’ is re’i, the same word as ‘neighbour’ in the Torah.

Perhaps, them the earth is both stranger and neighbour, calling, in different ways, for our care?

The Torah has, of course, a third love commandment: Love God. Judaism rejects the deification of nature, the pantheistic worship of hilltops, moons and stars. Yet, together with the mystics, the panentheists, we may see God not as nature, but within, as well as beyond, it. The spirit which hovered over the deep, lives within all breathing things, for God is Chei hachaim, the Life of all life.

How then can we treat any creature with wanton cruelty, or cause needless destruction, when in so doing we hurt not only its particular life, but something infinitely precious at the same time, a tiny portion of God’s presence? The very thought makes the heart ache, and isn’t that a symptom of love?

21 Apr 2023

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Environment, Holocaust Permalink

Between Yom HaShoah and Yom Ha’Atzmaut

Sticky Post By admin On April 21, 2023

I never know what to write on this Shabbat between Yom Hashoah, Yom Hazikaron, Remembrance Day for the dead in Israel’s wars, and Yom Ha’Atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day. Seventy-five years have passed since the bitter battle for Jerusalem so vividly recalled by my father, whose Yahrzeit falls this week.

And this weekend also brings Earth Day, founded in 1970 to inspire love and protection for our planet, which will involve a billion people in thousands of local and global activities. I get notices about it from all around the world, from organisations Jewish, religious, secular and practical every day.

I’ve written my share of difficult things this week (links below). So instead, I’m going to write about love, – love of the earth and its beauty, but as felt by holocaust survivors, and those who’ve struggled for Israel’s land and soul, then and now.

These are novelist Aharon Appelfeld’s memories of his grandparents in rural Bukhovina, before all his family perished, and he, just a child, fled:

The walk to the synagogue is long and full of wonders. A horse stands in astonishment… Not far from them a foal is rolling on the grass. There is astonishment in the dozens of pairs of eyes of the horses, sheep, and goats who are all following the foal’s movements, happy that it’s back on its feet. Grandfather walks in silence, but his silence is not frightening. [In the synagogue] the prayers are conducted in whispers. This is the home of God and people come here in order to sense His presence… (The Story of a Life, p. 9 -10)

This is Gerda Weissman-Klein, writing of her hometown Bielitz in 1940, before she lost everything:

What a lovely sunny morning it was! The buttercups were out, and there were violets down in the moist part of the garden near the pond, along with lilies-of-the-valley. On the afternoon of my birthday a warm, scented rain, so typical of May, fell…(All But My Life, p. 43)

Meanwhile in Mandate Palestine my Great-Uncle Alfred, who would lose his life in ’48, wrote after a holiday in 1943:

We saw another part of our beautiful countryside, the whole strip of land along the coast is like one flowering, fertile garden. If they let us work in peace and quiet…we’d soon have one of the most beautiful countries in the world.

Evidently the trees, lovingly planted by early pioneers as described in the famous poem by Rachel, had taken root and offered shade:

I have not sung to you, my land / or glorified your name

With deeds of valour, the spoils of battle.

There’s just a tree my hands have planted / by the Jordan’s quiet banks,

A path my feet have trod / across your fields. (El Artsi)

Then here, in 2006, is David Shulman, originally from the States and drawn to Israel through love of the country, after numerous vigils in the hills alongside Palestinian shepherds:

What is real is this moment, these people, the sliver of moon in the summer sky, the Passsiflora tree in the courtyard, the crimson wine, the inevitable sweetness of confusion, the musical murmur of the words, and the profound, ironic happiness of doing what is right in circumstances of rooted, inherent, unresolvable ambiguity…(Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine, p. 212)

Whoever we are, whatever our views and allegiances, may we work for love of this world and love of life.

17 Mar 2023

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Environment, Ethics, Interfaith, Israel Permalink

A frank and heartfelt report from Israel

Sticky Post By admin On March 17, 2023

My body is back from Israel, but not my head and heart. ‘Don’t turn away at this critical hour. Stay by us. Know that there are many Israels; decide with which you stand.’ That’s the key message I was given in this time of danger, when both Israel and the meaning of Judaism are at stake.

I’ll describe elsewhere the amazing UK-bound rabbinical students gathered at the Conservative Yeshivah to share their learning, spirit, values and devotion to each other.

I’ll say little of my half marathon, the guide dogs I met, and how in the last metres I looked the wrong way and carelessly, idiotically, ran into a road, was missed by a bus by 3 inches, am lucky to be alive and must say the blessing ‘for the unworthy to whom God does good.’

No: I’ll focus on what’s seared in my mind from meeting after meeting. Forgive me; I must write more than usual.

De-mo-crat-ya; the chant from the demonstrations doesn’t leave me. No one gave Israel’s present government the right to tread down those principles, which, beyond the word’s literal meaning of ‘power of the people,’ are the essence of democracy: the supremacy of justice and law, equality, freedom of conscience and expression, respect for minorities. ‘I’m terrified,’ a gay activist tells me. These values are at risk not just in Israel but in many lands.

Everyone I know is there, right, left and friends who don’t go to demonstrations. The speakers are well-chosen: leading women, an Arab Israeli, a senior academic, an ultra-orthodox rabbi. As they name the wrongs of the proposed legislation, the chant turns to ‘bushah, bushah, bushah, shame, shame, shame.’

There’s power and hope in these demonstrations, which keep going, growing, can’t be ignored.

I pick up the sticker ‘Democracy and Occupation cannot Coexist.’ ‘You can’t dissociate this from the occupation,’ says orthodox rabbi Alon Goschen-Gottstein, who created the Elijah Interfaith Institute, as we walk through the lanes of beautiful Yemin Moshe. Injustice knows no green lines and crosses back over separation walls.

I sit with scholar Dror Bondi, raised among settlers with the belief that ‘God is Jewish,’ until, spiritually troubled, he encountered Abraham Joshua Heschel’s ‘any God who’s my God and not your God isn’t God.’ Is it conceivable, he writes, that in a Jewish state the high court of justice should not be above and independent of the government, just as in times of monarchy the king was subject to the Torah’s law ‘Justice, justice shall you pursue?’

Israel’s crisis is political, but it’s also about the nature of Judaism. Now more than ever is the time to uphold the spiritually, morally, culturally, rich and courageous Judaism whose God is the God of all, against a nationalist, literalist narrowing down. For Judaism’s reputation is on the line.

I go with the New Israel Fund and Ir Amim to the valley flowing from the Old City to the Arab village of Silouan. Below, donkeys graze sweetly in a model biblical farmyard. But it’s part of a land grab led by El Ad who’re also behind the cable-car project and a bridge across the valley to dominate the neighbourhood. I’m reminded of a conversation years ago with the CEO of a nearby Palestinian hospital: ‘You’re an intelligent people,’ he said, ‘And I’ve been a peace activist for years. So what are you doing trying to force us out? What consequences will this have?’

I hadn’t thought of as animals as political. But next day I’m in the West Bank with Rabbi Arik Ascherman, director of Torat Tsedek (Torah of Justice). His car stuck in mud in the rainswept hills, he documents settlers calculatedly grazing their sheep on undisputedly Palestinian land. He phones the police and army; when we leave, they haven’t yet arrived: ‘By the time anything happens the sheep may have eaten all the produce…’

Arik, who has extraordinary physical and moral courage, has been attacked many times. At the trial of the seventeen-year-old who held a knife to his throat, he pleaded that the young man not go to prison, saying “We must honour God’s image in every human being.” About those words Professor David Shulman, author of Dark Hope, Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine, wrote: ‘Out of the 613 mitzvot the Jews are meant to perform, this one stands out. Its existential priority, in the awareness of a person like Arik, speaks to the old tradition of Jewish humanism that I knew from my grandfather and my parents.’

We love our country and look after it for everyone, say the leaders of The Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel when we meet to discuss partnership with Jtree over planting shrubs and trees round wetlands project. But the proposed legislation will remove all safeguards over nature, allowing virtually unlimited ‘development’.

‘Stand by your principles, but meet everyone,’ says my dear friend Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum. Day and night, she works to get people together: ‘Our society’s torn apart. We must hear each other if we’re to heal. She’s bringing women leaders, Jewish, Hasidic, Druse, Muslim, Palestinian, Christian, right-wing, left-wing, west bank, to listen to each other at Bet Hanasi, the President’s House. ‘I don’t compromise on principles,’ she says, ‘But we must hear one another; it changes hearts.’

‘I’m hopeful,’ says a friend who’s senior in Israel’s bank: all the financial institutions, at home and abroad, all the high tech, is telling this government to stop. So are high officers in the army and air force, whose lives are constantly on the line for our country.

The current government stands on three dangerous pillars: militant settlers, who don’t want to be held to justice by the courts; ultra-orthodox who don’t want equality for women or different branches of Judaism, or to serve in the army; and corrupt leadership at the highest level. It’s also supported by many who, often with reason, have long felt hurt and unheard.

Facing it are millions deeply devoted to Israel who seek to uphold the true meanings of democracy, groups from right and left, countless NGOs, people practising chesed, tzedek, ve’emet, lovingkindness, justice and truth, people who risk their own and their children’s lives for a country so often wrongly attacked, hated and defamed. Alongside them are millions of Jews and non-Jews abroad.

Time and again I’m told: Say to your community ‘Stand with us. Tell them there are many Israels; tell them to choose carefully which ones to support. Use your influence. We need you all.’

The demonstration in Jerusalem falls silent, then everyone sings Hatikvah together: ‘Our hope has not ceased, to be a free people,’ free for everyone. It is deeply moving.

09 Dec 2022

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Environment, Spirituality Permalink

COP 15 and the jasmine in the porch

Sticky Post By admin On December 9, 2022

A tendril of jasmine has made its way through the tiny gap between the windowpanes and its small white blooms have brought their perfume into the porch where our guinea pigs live. Tiny, star-shaped, the flowers glow at night like nature’s own Chanukkah candles.

I write from love of this world of plants and animals. ‘You shall love your God with all your heart,’ teaches the Torah in Judaism’s best-known meditation. Part of that love is to love what God has created. I’m far from being a creationist; I embrace the science of evolution. But I’m with the mystics when they feel the divine presence both in people and nature, something holy that should not be hurt or harmed.

Several times during lockdown an email arrived in my inbox: ‘Please put your guinea pigs out on the lawn and leave your side gate open. My children have asked to see them; they need this for their mental health.’

For my own mental – and physical and spiritual – health, I had to get out early in the morning or late at night and join the trees in prayer. I’d go where they surrounded me with their meditations, their patient sense of time. Among them, I sensed the steady decontamination of my thoughts, the restoration of the mind’s clarity, the renewal of that bond with the sacred beauty which exists within this world. In such moments we touch a deeper consciousness with the power to guide us even through our complex dealings in this confusing world.

I’m reading Guy Shrubsole’s wonderful book The Lost Rainforests of Britain (If you need a seasonal present, I give it five stars). Someone directs him to the notebooks left by Oliver Rackman, ecologist and ‘wise man’ of the forests:

Written in pencil and faded ink, their well-thumbed pages read like prayer books to the woods in which [he] worshipped.

I hadn’t actually known that Britain had rainforests, but it turns out I’ve walked in them, lush, full of oaks, birches, rowans, ferns, lichens and other epiphytes. (Nearby was a conifer plantation, the ground beneath the serried trees almost lifeless, dark.)

I’m writing about these matters because I love those woods, and because I don’t want my or anyone else’s children or grandchildren to have ‘loved and lost.’

We’re several days into COP 15, the UN’s biodiversity summit. I hesitate to quote Secretary General Antonio Guterres’s opening words: ‘We are treating nature like a toilet. This conference is our chance to stop this orgy of destruction. To move from discord to harmony.’

At the close of his life Moses tells the people: Don’t say this teaching is far away. It’s not in heaven or over the seas: it’s ‘in your mouth and heart, for you to do it.’

The same applies to caring for nature, and each other. There’s so much near to home we can do. ‘I work with everyone, farmers, landowners, crofters,’ a forester told me as I tried to keep the midges out of my eyes and look out across the hillsides they were restoring. ‘This’ll be two hundred thousand trees, with ponds and pathways,’ Nick told us, as our community team took up their spades and started planting less than ten miles from home. (See JTree’s website for planting opportunities this winter).

People probably think I’m crazy because I sometimes say hello to the jays and blackbirds when I walk to the synagogue. But they’re part of my prayer life.

It’s not a question of either nature or people. To my mind, it’s always ‘both and.’ If you love the world, you care about everything.

18 Nov 2022

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

AJEX Shabbat and Mitzvah Day

Sticky Post By admin On November 18, 2022

This week is AJEX Shabbat, followed on Sunday by the Jewish Military Association’s solemn commemoration. Whitehall is closed, service and ex-service men and women march by, as do their children wearing their parent’s medals in their honour. Over 120,000 Jews have served in the country’s armed forces.

But Sunday is also Mitzvah Day, a wonderful, creative and constructive response to the memory, and reality, of war.

Over the last years I’ve had the privilege of reciting the memorial prayer at the Cenotaph. I’ve found this humbling and intensely moving. Like so many of us, my grandfather and my father served, though in different armed forces. My wife’s uncle Sonny was killed supplying arms with the RAF to the French resistance. Jews, alongside other faith groups and minorities, have made immense contributions to this country, in war as well as in peace.

For those of us who’ve grown up since WW2, war in Europe had seemed a long way off. Not so now. Like others hosting families from Ukraine, Nicky and I wonder: do we leave the daily paper open, with the latest grim, or somewhat better, news? What immediate fears will the pictures bring when they come down for breakfast? It’s probably an idle question, as they speak to the men back in Kharkiv every day.

Here in the UK we are not faced with the constant threat of sudden death from bombs deliberately targeted at civilian infrastructures, something all too familiar to the generation who remember the V1s and V2s. We aren’t about to find on the outskirts of our towns and villages the half-concealed evidence of atrocities.

But war’s effects are all too clear. It wrecks the all-important works of peace. Farmlands are destroyed (We had eleven apricot trees, three produced really large fruits, all bombed, all bombed, ‘our’ grandmother said.) Grain from Ukraine’s rich black earth doesn’t reach the world’s poorest. Even in wealthy countries, rising prices push millions over the edge into destitution. Teachers in Birmingham say one child in three now lives in poverty. Richer nations are saying they can’t or won’t make the payments essential to help the planet’s most vulnerable nations minimise and adapt to climate change.

I’m sorry to write such horrible things but they weigh on the heart.

But they made me notice what I hadn’t properly taken in before: how, in the small siddurim, the grey-covered prayerbooks issues to His Majesty’s Armed Forces, the memorial prayers are followed immediately by verses full of longing for ‘the works of peace.’ They remind me that every Amidah, every single one of Judaism’s thrice-daily petitions, concludes with a prayer for peace. We must never take it for granted; it’s the most immeasurable blessing.

Late last night, unable to sleep, I went downstairs to fetch Isaac Rosenberg’s collected works. In a poem of 1917 he wrote how, returning from action, he and his men suddenly hear

But hark! Joy – joy – strange joy,

Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks.

Music showering our upturned list’ning faces.

Death could drop from the dark / As easily as song –

But song only dropped

Our hearts go out to those like him who longed for peace but never lived to see it.

On their behalf, we must rededicate ourselves to the works of peace, to everything which Mitzvah Day upholds, caring across the boundaries of our communities, cooking, planting, giving, doing everything we can to make that peace as real, as lasting and as deep as we possibly can.

11 Nov 2022

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Environment, Refugees Permalink

Cop 27 and EcoShabbat

Sticky Post By admin On November 11, 2022

In an intense and complex week, one theme runs through everything, the preciousness of life. That’s what I’m focussing on this EcoShabbat.

But first I want to acknowledge that today brings the memorial to that fateful eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when in 1918 the Armistice was signed which finally ended The First World War. Since then, this date has been marked as Armistice Day in Europe and Veteran’s Day in The States. (AJEX, the Jewish Military Association, holds its ceremony at The Cenotaph one week later).

It’s terrible to know that, in the words of Wilfred Owen, there’s another old man in Europe today who, unlike Abraham when the angel told him to spare his child,

Would not so, but slew his son

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Tonight, therefore, I will miss the beautiful synagogue service which marks the beginning of Shabbat, so as to attend a concert at the Ukrainian Cathedral, ‘The Cry, a Requiem for the Lost Child,’ in memory of the thousand children killed in Ukraine. Kenneth Nowakowski, the Eparchial Bishop, wept when I asked him to speak in our synagogue. It’s basic solidarity to stand with him in return.

Children were the subject at the service led by the Association of Jewish Refugees last Wednesday to mark Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, the Night of Broken Glass. That was when my grandfather, rabbi in Frankfurt, went into hiding, only to give himself up because he learnt that the Gestapo were waiting in his home. He feared he might be putting his wife and daughters at even greater risk.

In the terror which followed, the cry went out across Britain ‘Get the children out!’ the title of Mike Levy’s remarkable book subtitled The Unsung Heroes of the Kindertransport. A note on the cover reminds us that these issues aren’t over: ‘In support of Safe Passage, legal routes to sanctuary.’ There are few, if any, such routes for children of war and terror today.

Meanwhile COP 27 struggles to find a safe passage forward for our entire planet, one-and-a-fifth hands tied behind its back by the world’s economic and fuel crises and the paucity of courageous political leadership.

Nevertheless, I’m buoyed up by a resilient hopefulness based on what so many people are doing, locally, persistently. I was privileged to hear Charlie Burrell, who established Knepp, describe the swift return of species unseen for decades. (See his wife Isabella Tree’s wonderful book Wilding) The glimpse of a butterfly once thought extinct is joy!

I participated in the conversations of the Elijah Interfaith Institute yesterday. (Please join us this Sunday). I carry with me the words of Hindu and Buddhist colleagues: All is oneness. God’s presence fills all creation; let it fill your consciousness too. Let it descend to the heart. Let its light guide your conscience and actions. Then you will seek not to hurt or harm any creature.

As we move into EcoShabbat, I take from this week the gritty hope which feeds determination. I tell myself (and others!) Notice; be aware! Be there to care! One life flows through all things: if we nourish it, it will nourish us.

We must work for life in whatever ways we can.

Our EcoShabbat focus– What’s Local To See:

Look out for the display in shul this Shabbat of our local wildlife.

Complete this survey to tell us which of these local animals, birds and trees you see over the next three weeks. Post your photos, stories, anecdotes in our Facebook group. Prizes will be awarded for the best responses.

Hear my Thought for the Day from this Thursday – ‘On Hope’