Ethics | HEART AND MIND

21 May 2026

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Ethics Permalink

The Struggle for the Soul of Judaism

Sticky Post By admin On May 21, 2026

‘Like one single person:’ that is how Rashi explained the Torah’s use of the singular verb to describe the Children of Israel when they pitch camp before Mount Sinai. They were ‘of one heart and mind;’ their differences disappeared as they prepared to hear God’s word.

It’s not like that today. These are difficult times. We are conflicted, and our differences matter. While we do our best to stand together against antisemitism and hatred from without, we also face a struggle for the soul of Judaism from within.

We are not at liberty to be silent in that struggle because it concerns the very essence of our Judaism. The issues could not be greater: what kind of Torah do are we receiving at Sinai? What do we believe God is telling us?

This is how Raoul Wootliff, who grew up in our UK Masorti community but has been living in Israel for many years, answered these questions. He had not long beforehand been beaten up by thugs at a rally in support of Tommy Robinson for protesting against his racist values. On this occasion Raoul was addressing a crowd outside the police station in Modi’in where Alex Sinclair (also brought up in our congregation and also for decades in Israel) was detained for wearing a kippah embroidered with both the Israeli and Palestinian flags. This, said Raoul, is what it meant to be a free Jew in Israel:

The right to think. The right to believe. The right to express who we are – even when it is complex, even when it is uncomfortable…especially when it is uncomfortable.

That, he said, ‘is not the struggle of one kind of Jew – It is the struggle of all of us,’ and it shows not weakness but strength.

Alex himself, discharged unceremoniously from the station with the Palestinian flag cut from his kippah, spoke on Israel’s national media: ‘I am a Zionist, a Jewish educator; I have been for years.’ He is also an observant Jew. The two flags represented his hope for a better future.

I’m proud of Alex and Raoul; I admire their courage and commitment whether or not I share all their views. Immersed in Jewish practice, devoted to Israel, guided by Torah, they are dedicated to the dignity of all persons, Jews and non-Jews, to the rule of just, impartial law, to democracy and to hope. These values are as essential for the Judaism of the Diaspora as they are critical for Israel.

This Shavuot I’m taking their words with me to Sinai.

Sadly, I’m also taking the response of former Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, who said when he witnessed the lawless anarchy underway in the West Bank: “I feel ashamed to be a Jew.” I’ve seen similar scenes for myself and felt likewise. Others, too, have spoken to me about their feelings of shame. I never thought I would hear such words about our compassionate, just, life-affirming, wise and beautiful Jewish heritage.

We can’t push all this aside as ‘not religion but politics.’ We can’t say, either, that this has nothing to do with us in the UK because it’s only about Israel. It impacts us profoundly. It provides ammunition for the constant media and social media fixation on the ethics of parts of Israeli society and some of its leadership. It’s manipulated and twisted into vicious antisemitic hate speech and murderous attacks aimed evilly at any and all Jews. It divides our communities and hearts, and challenges our loyalties.

Painful and severe as these impacts are, they are not my focus here. My concern is that what’s happening is being done in the name of Judaism and that it profanes our religion and our God.

So what then is the Torah I hope to hear at Sinai? There is, of course, no single answer because ‘the Torah has seventy faces,’ and seventy times seventy voices. But here is what I’m listening for, not just at the foot of the mountain, but always.

I seek to hear God’s voice as Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib Alter of Ger (1847 -1905) described it, when he wrote that, at the words ‘I am your God,’ all creation grew still. Every living being felt: ‘God is speaking to me,’ because God’s spirit is the sacred essence of all life. For all life bears God’s image and is sustained by God’s spirit.

I seek to hear the commandment ‘Don’t take my name in vain’ in the way Maimonides understood it when he wrote, in the Laws of the Foundations of Torah, that sanctifying God’s name means endeavouring to conduct ourselves with empathy, compassion, fairness and humility before everyone.

I want to understand ‘Don’t steal’ and ‘Don’t covet’ not just as the condemnation of robbery and theft, but also through what they imply about the need to work for societies which care for the needs of everyone, as Isaiah proclaimed: ‘If you see the hungry, feed them; the naked, clothe them; the dejected and homeless, give them shelter.’

These are the words of God from Sinai which I seek to follow and understand. From them, I believe, all the commandments, observances and teachings of our religion can be derived. This is my Judaism, by which, with all my failings, I endeavour to live. I believe it is true to, and in line with, the long, faithful, resilient, tradition of Jewish practice, discourse and commitment.

I believe, too, that we urgently need to teach, live by and stand up for this Judaism. The times are fraught and frightening. All the more, therefore, must we not allow this Judaism to be side-lined, delegitimised and silenced.

I believe, further, that this Judaism offers an essential voice not just within, but beyond, our own Jewish communities, out there in this world of growing uncertainly, fear, and indirection, where other, more dangerous, voices are busy seizing the space.

10 Apr 2026

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Strength in Compassion, and Compassion within Strength

Sticky Post By admin On April 10, 2026

It’s hard to find hope and resilience in difficult days. That’s true, whether times are tough because of personal struggles, because of what’s happening in the world around us, or because of both at the same time. ‘Where’s the hope?’ is not just a question others ask me almost daily, but one I ask myself when inspiration seems as elusive as an alchemist’s search for the magic stone. The prayers put it bluntly: ‘What is our life? Our kindness? Our fairness? Our strength?’ Basically, what’s the point?

I get help from the mystical interpretation of the Counting of the Omer. To explain, the Omer is a dry measure, in this case of barley, and the ‘Counting of the Omer’ is the enumeration, day by day and week by week, of the seven weeks of harvest connecting Pesach with Shavuot. This represents the journey from Egypt to Sinai, from ‘freedom from’ to what that freedom is for. The period includes the grief of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day; the heartache of Yom HaZikaron, the Memorial Day for the dead in Israel’s wars and conflicts; and the hopes, fears, and anguish connected with Yom Ha’Atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day. It’s not a simple stretch of time.

But what engaged the mystics was neither harvest nor history. Rather, they understood the Omer as a journey of the spirit ever deeper into the heart of the sacred. They devoted each of the seven weeks to one of the sacred qualities with which they understood all creation to be imbued. They dedicated the first week to Hesed, lovingkindness, and the second to Gevurah, strength. Within each week, they attributed a special quality to each day. Thus, the second day of week one is Gevurah shebaHesed, strength within love, while the first day of week two is Hesed shebiGevurah, love within strength.

Strength within love, love within strength: these challenging combinations grip me. How does one retain compassion in a brutal world? When power and force dominate, how does one still find space for kindness and love? What’s it worth, in a bombed-up world?

Then I remember: I’m writing at a cafe two doors down from where a man from Beirut, who asked not to be named, prayed with me not just for his own family, but “for everyone, whoever they are, whichever side of the border they are, that we may live together in peace.”

That’s loving kindness, despite power and conflict.

I remember, too, the carer who told me how she keeps going while looking after an elderly woman who constantly tells her exactly what to do, criticises her loudly if she fails to comply to the letter but never saying ‘thank you.’ ‘I go far down into myself. I find the inner pool of love. It’s hard to go deep enough sometimes, but the stream that feeds it never runs completely dry. Even when I can’t feel it, I know it’s flowing into my heart.’ That’s strength within love.

I remember, also, how when I opened my emails there was a video about the power of music: wildlife wardens were singing to orphaned elephants to comfort them after poachers killed their mothers and the ‘little ones’ came and let themselves be stroked.

Then I look out into the garden and recall the blessing we said over fruit trees earlier in this month of Nissan. I think of the Ukrainian family whose orchard was bombed, but who’ve planted a plum and a cherry tree in pots on their London balcony. It’s a small but significant fight back: ‘We may be uprooted, but our faith in life will be replanted.’

I realise that all around are people who find strength within love and the love to remain strong and I’m moved, inspired and restored.

12 Mar 2026

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Where is God in these wars?

Sticky Post By admin On March 12, 2026

‘Where is God in these cruel times?’ I don’t need others to ask me; I ask the question myself, frequently. I don’t forget that time in Kyiv in the winter of 2024, a mere year into that ever more bitter war, when a senior priest in the Greek Orthodox Church asked a group of us of different faiths: ‘Where do you think God is in this conflict?’ It was not a rhetorical question, and he himself did not answer.

I think God is where the suffering is. I think God is in the phone calls and WhatsApps to those we love, whether those calls are made in Hebrew, Ukrainian, Farsi, Russian, Arabic, English, or any other language. I think God is in the prayers spoken in existential fear, ‘God protect us! God, be “our shade on our right hand” – and on our left.’ God, we want to live, just live, with some freedom, some hope, and with the people we love.’ I think God is where this love is: ‘How can we care for, protect one another? How can we bandage the wounds of body and soul?’

On Tuesday, I caught Radio 4’s PM programme. They shared from the diary of a young woman in Tehran. On the day the Ayatollah was killed she wrote: I’d waited for this day for years. Now I’m numb. I didn’t want him to be a martyr. We wanted him to face ‘the blood he had squeezed into a bottle for years.’ She reminded me of my grandfather, furious that Hitler took his own life: ‘He should have been forced to face what he did.’ Days later, she wrote: Life is distilled into checking the members of our group. If the bomb is near, the windows shake, there’s smoke. With trembling hands and many typos, they post: ‘It was close. We’re safe.’ That’s all.

Like everyone I know, I contact friends and family in Israel. How are you managing, these frightening times? ‘Pretty much carrying on some sort of daily routine. Disrupted sleep. Exhausted. Families with young kids and elderly people have it worse.’ I write, too, to a colleague in Dubai.

It may seem stupid to some, but I can’t help also thinking of the animals, the ruination of nature. I recall an interview with a photographer which Svetlana Alexievich recorded in Chernobyl Prayer. He tells her: ‘I showed my work to some children… They asked all sorts of questions, but one in particular remains engraved in my memory. ‘Why couldn’t you help the animals that were left behind?’ And I couldn’t answer him.’ (p. 126)

One thinks of people who don’t have strong rooms, safe rooms, or shelters. And of the woman driving in Ukraine who said she could see on her smart phone the soldiers aiming the drone at her car.

It’s horrible, and who knows what the outcome of all this will be, who will be safe, and who will get the blame.

We pray to God: ‘God, you promised “I shall be with you in trouble.” “God will protect you, keep your life safe from all evil.” (Psalm 91; 121)

But I don’t think it’s enough just to pray to God; we have to pray with God as well. We need to find and cherish the presence of God in each other, and in ourselves. We have to be on the side of life alongside God who “loves life and lovingly sustains life.” We need to be on the side of hope together with God, on the side of justice together with God, on the side of compassion and healing together with God.

I believe in the God who is hurting in everyone’s hurts.

12 Sep 2025

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

The journey of Teshuvah

Sticky Post By admin On September 12, 2025

The full moon of Elul has passed. I missed the eclipse, but went outside late at night and stared for a few moments at the circle of red haze which surrounded that moon in the clear night sky. It was beautiful, but flushed, as if it wanted to illumine a whole and perfect world, but, looking down at our deeds on earth, felt shame. It struck me then that this moon was an emblem of Teshuvah.

Elul is the month of Teshuvah, repentance and return, an inner journey which becomes more intense through the Asseret Yemei HaTeshuvah, the Ten Days of Penitence from Rosh Hashanah until Yom Kippur which will soon be upon us.

Yesterday, strangely, I heard the same question posed in two entirely different context: Does one have to repent for actions one did not do out of choice but because one was forced? As Daniel Taub, formerly Israel’s ambassador to the Court of King James, pointed out in a deeply touching talk last night, the legal answer may be ‘no’, but the emotional and moral answer is ‘yes’.

That’s because teshuvah is motivated not just by ‘What have I done wrong?’ but also, or even more so, by the feeling: ‘If only the world wasn’t like this; if only it was better.’ For teshuvah is about looking up as much as looking down. We may think of it as driven by guilt, but in truth it’s motivated by love. It’s compassion and love of life that makes us feel in our heart, and not just think abstractly in our head, ‘This gift of life, this beautiful world! We must not damage it so!’

That’s why the Torah teaches that teshuvah is an opening of our heart and soul. It brings us back to God, and God back to us, because it restores our awareness of how precious and sacred, yet vulnerable, life us. It awakens our love and compassion.

It’s that very love that makes us feel pain that the world is so wounded when it could, and should, be so wonderful. That’s what Primo Levi described, recalling the expressions of the first young Russian horsemen to approach the fences of Auschwitz, as ‘the shame a just person experiences… that evil should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that [our] will for good should have proved too weak…’

Several times this year people have told me they feel ashamed. I won’t go into details. But I recognise the feeling. It bothers me sometimes in the supermarket, when I throw things into my trolley knowing that I’ve no idea out of what poverty or labour these products may have reached the shelves. It pains me when I see a smashed-up badger by the roadside. It sticks in me when a refugee, standing in my kitchen, tells me how and where his family were murdered. What horrors have we inflicted on innocent life? There are times I’m ashamed of being a human.

But teshuvah must not stop with shame. It must lead us to tikkun, healing and reparation. It must bring us to the question: ‘What can I do? What is the particular contribution I can make in this world full of wonder, and wounds?’ So many people answer in ways I deeply admire: ‘I’m helping with food rescue.’ ‘I’m baking challah for friends who’re having a tough time.’ ‘I’m in a group taking children who’ve faced trauma on therapeutic nature trails.’ ‘I play in a volunteer band, for displaced people, and in bomb shelters when the sirens go off.’

The love, the sorrow, the desire to make reparation, the commitment ‘This is what I’m determined to do’ – that is the journey of teshuvah.

25 Jul 2025

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Why small things matter

Sticky Post By admin On July 25, 2025

Tomorrow is the first of the month of Av. I’m never sure how to call it because, to the best of my knowledge, it’s the only Hebrew month which has two obvious names: simply Av, and Menachem Av – ‘Av the Comforter.’ I’ve often wondered which name to use when.

The Talmud says that when Av begins, our joy is diminished, (in contrast to the spring month of Adar, when our joy increases.) I remember saying to Gabi, my beloved Israeli uncle x-times-removed who always has a melody under his breath and wise words on his lips:

‘A sad month, this Av, isn’t it?’
‘Only until the 9th, the fast of Tisha Be’Av,’ he quickly replied, ‘After that, it’s Menachem Av, all about consolation.’

So the ‘comforter’ aspect is from the 10th of the month onwards.

But this year I’m starting early. That’s because we need consolation in order to keep going; we urgently need to be people of healing and repair, and there’s no time to waste.

Tisha Be’Av is about destruction: the Temples, the communities destroyed in the Crusades, the expulsions, book-burnings, slaughters. It’s not because there’s no devastation in today’s world that I’m thinking, ‘we’d better start the healing now.’ It’s because there’s so much destruction, done to us, done around us, some done by us, that it’s unbearable, and I can scarcely face thinking about it. Nobody needs me to go into details. It’s because it’s all too much, that’s why I’m stressing: ‘Menachem – Be a comforter – now.’

Don’t think: ‘I can’t stop the wars, so what can I do?’ Don’t be disempowered. ‘Little’ things count. If you can send a kind message to the family of a hostage, do. If you can contribute to get food to Gazan children, or anyone hungry anywhere, do. If you can cook a meal for a friend who’s sick, do it. If there’s a parched tree nearby and you can nurse with water through the summer heat, do it. If you can say a thoughtful word to someone you’ve had a disagreement with, do it. There’s no such thing as ‘too small to matter.’

The ‘little’ things we do can inspire others. ‘I asked my Palestinian doctor how his family were in these horrible times,’ a Jerusalem friend told me. ‘You’re the first Jewish patient to ask,’ he replied, and went on to relate how, in a North American street, he saw some teenagers humiliate an elderly Jew while hundreds stood around, and he, a Palestinian, intervened.

‘The British Lady’s Slipper Orchid survived in only one location,’ two leaders of the charity Plantlife told us. ‘But forty people helped germinate seeds and now it’s back in the meadows.’ You could say, ‘What’s that do for the troubles of the world!’ But plants are part of God’s creation, and who knows what comfort their beauty may bring. Heather Jones, an NHS nurse, writes in Plantlife’s magazine how her colleagues spend long hours in high-tech environments where mental and physical depletion can lead to burnout. But nature lifts the spirits and restores hope, so she’s rolling out healing in nature to all the healthcare professionals in her region.

I’m not writing about these ‘small’ acts out of romantic unrealism, to deny the devastation in the world, but in order to keep myself going, to keep on the side of healing and consolation.

I often think of TS Eliot’s line in The Wasteland: ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins.’ Those fragments are my Menachem Av, my comforters. They’re the acts which sustain us daily, bring us closer to each other and give hope. They’re what we’re here on earth to do. At the end of each day, and, I believe, at the close of our life, they will gather round us, look us in the heart, and say, ‘You tried.’

20 Jun 2025

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On our anguish and on healing

Sticky Post By admin On June 20, 2025

In these deeply frightening times, I pray that everyone we love and care for should be safe. Like us all, I’m calling Israel, messaging, worrying about what last night brought and what today will bring. Magen David Adom, the Herzog, other trauma hospitals and numerous organisations are calling on us and we must help as best we can. Meanwhile, the hostages remain in the grip of Hamas and the sufferings in Gaza continue.

We rightly reach out to our own people first. But I was touched by what happened when I went to my favourite vegetable stores:
Your family in Israel, are they OK?
Yours in Iran, are they alright?

The London borough of Barnet has both the largest Jewish and Iranian communities in the UK. We’re all human, desperate for those we love. A synagogue member of Iranian origin sent me this verse by the Persian poet Saadi (c. 13):
Human beings are like parts of one body,
For in creation they come from one gem.
If one part is in pain,
Other parts cannot in comfort remain…

Israel is not at war with the Iranian people, but with its evil regime and terrorist proteges, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthi and others, because of the unbearable risk that Iran will develop nuclear weapons. But it’s always ordinary people who bear most of the suffering.

Meanwhile, I’m acutely aware that our community is torn by different opinions. Deep anxiety leads us each to our allegiances, fears and hurts. So, as we come together for our Annual General Meeting, my fortieth + and my last as senior rabbi, I want to stress what I understand to be core Jewish values, for at heart we are a religious community.

Chesed, faithful lovingkindness, means being here for each other in joy and anguish, from birth to death, with care and consolation, through companionship, food, and the wisdom of ledabber al lev, listening and speaking to the heart.

Tesedek means commitment to doing and promoting justice. Tzedakah requires supporting social justice, giving where there is hunger, poverty, homelessness and medical and mental need, in the Jewish community, Israel, our local community, and the world.

Avodah means serving God by serving human life created in God’s image, and by caring for all life in its multiple manifestations of God’s presence, wonder and glory.

Kehilah, community, means being together in good times and bad, in prayer, study and action. It means solidarity with our Jewish community here, in Israel and worldwide, as well as with people of different faiths, with refugees, with those who need us and whom we need, and ultimately with the community of all life.

These values lead me to ask, especially now in wartime when we are constantly anxious for our people, that we place ourselves in solidarity with life and healing in whatever ways we can, whatever our political views and affiliations.

I received from Israel yesterday:
While death and destruction, chaos and fear exist all around, I took a sweet girl and her mother from Tarkumia checkpoint to Sheba Hospital near Tel Aviv. We drove on roads usually packed at this time of the day. They were empty. We laughed, we talked a little English, a little Arabic, a little Hebrew. When we arrived at the entrance to the Pediatric Department, this sweet girl put her arms around my legs. I got a hug. I wish I could show you a photo of her.
I’ve been criticized for just about everything – for being naive, for being patronizing, for paying lip service, for not taking a firm stand one way or another.
This IS my stand. This is my answer to what has been happening all over this region, a small tikkun olam, a small act of reparation, in a broken world.

There are many ways of taking our stand. Wherever possible, can we take it on the side of healing, in whatever ways we understand. For there is no end to the wounds in our bleeding world, and no limit to the healing that’s needed.

23 May 2025

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The Horror and the Hope

Sticky Post By admin On May 23, 2025

I have so wished to write today about the beautiful vision in our Torah of the Sabbatical year, when the fences come down, the fruits of the earth are shared, and citizen and stranger, farm-owner and refugee, rich and poor, wild beasts and domestic animals, appreciate them together.

But how can I do so, when we mourn the murder in an act of terrorist antisemitic hatred of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lichinsky, officials working for Israel’s Embassy, outside the Jewish Museum in Washington, after an event about peace-making and on the threshold of their marriage? Yaron, who grew up in Germany, was known to my colleague Rabbi Levi as a gifted, talented and very likeable young man. He and Sarah were dedicated longtime peacebuilders – Sarah wrote her graduate thesis on “the role of friendships in the Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding process.” (The Jerusalem Youth Chorus Newsletter)

Our hearts go out to their families and friends, and we pray for the safety of all our communities.

This has also been a week of powerful international outcry, including from within Israel, at the lack of adequate humanitarian aid reaching Palestinian children in Gaza, trapped between the cynical nihilism of Hamas and Israel’s attacks. I stand with those Jewish, Israeli and international organisations who urge that sufficient aid be let in, with all due and essential safeguards to prevent it from falling into the vicious and merciless hands of Hamas. I don’t know the names or characters of the children who may be hungry, or have been killed, but their parents for sure do. Judaism teaches that an innocent life is a life, that every life matters, that we try to protect innocent life even amidst the horrors of war, and that we all carry within us, whether we honour it or desecrate it, the image of God.

Amidst these terrors, it would be wrong, un-Jewish and lacking in faith and hope to lose sight entirely of the vision held out in our Torah. ‘Ukeratem dror: Proclaim freedom,’ the Torah commands: ‘Let everyone return to their inheritance and their family.’ If only it were so! Dror, which here means freedom, is also the name of a bird, probably the swallow, that dips and rises over the fields. So do our hopes fall, – and must rise again. So must we cherish what gifts, friendships and solidarity we can gather.

In that vein, I received the following messages yesterday. Lord Kahn’s office called, sharing deep concern and offering support for our community. Julie Siddiqi, an eloquent Muslim leader who’s worked for Nisa-Nashim and Hope Not Hate, sent a what’s-app: ‘Senseless, heartbreaking, the young couple killed in Washington. Sending love to you and your community.’ Judith Baker emailed on behalf of The Quakers: ‘We send our condolences to you and the Jewish community and hold the victims and their families and friends in our prayers.’ Our rabbinic colleagues in the States shared verses from Psalms: ‘God stays close to the broken-hearted, providing salvation to those crushed in spirit.’

Among these greetings, which cannot be taken for granted, I am especially moved by these words from The Jerusalem Youth Chorus:

It is precisely in these darkest moments that [our] work becomes not just important, but urgent—. Our Palestinian and Israeli singers know intimately the weight of this violence; each of them has been touched by loss, fear, and grief. Yet they continue to choose each other. They continue to choose the radical act of singing together…of refusing to let the loudest voices around them define their future. (https://www.jerusalemyouthchorus.org/ )
Time and again I’m asked to focus on hope, on what we can do to take a sad world and make it better. Therefore, I try to pray and work, alongside so many others, for my own Jewish People, for all people across our countries, faiths and communities who simply seek to live a good, honest and happy life, and for this very earth, with all its species of life, that we must cherish and nurture, so that it continues to sustain us all.

16 May 2025

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

Kabbalah and Counting: the mystical qualities of the Omer

Sticky Post By admin On May 16, 2025

I remember walking across Jerusalem looking for an Omer-counter. I wanted something both beautiful and mystical.

‘Omer’ is a measure of quantity, apparently equivalent to 2.2 litres, and refers to the offering of barley harvested on the night after the first day of Passover. But it’s come to mean the period of forty-nine days which links Pesach to Shavuot, the festival which marks freedom from Egypt, to the festival which celebrates the freedom to receive and follow the Torah.

I found what I wanted not in a boutique for religious artefacts but in an olivewood workshop. Olivewood has age and depth, resilience and beauty. My counter showed not just each date from ‘one’ to ‘forty-nine’ but, in tiny writing in the bottom corner, the kabbalistic quality of each day.

Today is the thirty-third day, Lag Be’Omer, celebrated as the date when the plague afflicting Rabbi Akiva’s pupils in the first or second century ceased. Mourning is suspended, music is permitted, bonfires are lit, and, most practically, if I have a free moment, I can finally get a haircut – so long as the barbers in this very Jewish borough of Barnet aren’t all booked out.

But what about that small writing in the corner of the counter? It’s hard to explain briefly, but each week of the Omer is dedicated to a kabbalistic quality: first hesed, loving kindness; then gevurah, strength; tiferet, truth or beauty; netzach, triumph or endurance; hod, humility; yesod, foundation; and malchut, sovereignty. Each separate day focusses on a specific quality within its week, guiding a detailed emotional and spiritual journey towards trying to hear God’s words now as once they were heard at Sinai.

Today’s quality is hod she’ba’ hod, humility within humility.

My teacher, Rabbi Louis Jacobs, liked to share the Hasidic teaching that everyone should have two pebbles, one in each pocket. On the first should be inscribed the Mishnah’s words, ‘The world was created for my sake.’ On the second should be the verse, ‘I am but dust and ashes.’ Wisdom is knowing when to take out which pebble.

I used to think that ‘dust and ashes’ was about humility, while seeing the world as ‘all for me’ was the opposite. But that’s wrong. Wonder is also humility: ‘Notice this magnificence, this intricacy, diversity.’ Nicky says her day is made if she sees a kingfisher.

In such moments, ‘for me’ doesn’t mean ‘aren’t I special,’ but rather, ‘what a privilege to be alive and see such beauty.’ ‘Dust and ashes’ doesn’t mean ‘I’m rubbish,’ but rather, ‘I know I’m mortal, so how treasured this brief privilege should be.’ Together the pebbles lead us neither to pride nor self-deprecation, but to the question: ‘How can I best care for life, my life, other’s lives, any life, in all its fragile vulnerability?’

As Arthur Green writes in A Kabbalah for Tomorrow: ‘Hod is the other side of wisdom, the self that bows before the mystery of what is as it is, the self who submits to reality and rejoices in doing so.’

I witnessed this when I served in the chaplaincy at the local hospice. After complex emotional journeys, perhaps through hope, anger, grief, regret, many people reached, in dying, places of appreciation. I’ll never forget the man and his wife to whose room I was called to share a prayer even though I’d never met them. ‘Tell us a verse about life’s wonder,’ they requested, ‘because together we have loved it.’

That’s hod she’ba’hod, humility, gratitude and graciousness woven together. I hold on to their words in these cruel times like a rope to climb up the cliffs of anguish to the green plateau of hope.

21 Feb 2025

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Ethics, Interfaith, Israel, Refugees Permalink

The Return of the Bodies of the Hostages – yet even then we must find hope

Sticky Post By admin On February 21, 2025

There are two people I wanted to be close to yesterday. The first is Sharone Lifschitz, whose father Oded’s body was brought home from captivity in Gaza. I have Oded’s picture, with his warm, wise, deeply humane smile, near where I pray when at home.

The terrible date of October 7 was cut even more deeply yesterday into Israel’s heart.

As soon as I heard the news, I messaged Sharone, who lives in London, has spoken in our synagogue, and whose strong, thoughtful, quiet but firm words have often been heard on the BBC. ‘What prayers, what verses do I say?’ she replied. ‘My father loved the Hebrew Prophets,’ she added, ‘justice, wisdom and ahavat adam, love for humanity.’

Her mother, Yocheved, was among the first hostages to be released. ‘I went through hell,’ she said. Yet, Sharone told me, ‘She has a nickname: They call her Mezuzah.’ ‘Why?’ I asked in surprise. ‘Because everyone who sees her kisses her.’

The couple, founders of Kibbutz Nir Oz, ‘were lifelong peace activists and would regularly transport patients from Gaza to receive medical care in hospitals across Israel. Oded, a great-grandfather, was a journalist and a passionate advocate for human rights.’ (Times of Israel)

What a contrast the deep humanity of this family makes with the mocking brutality of Hamas as it handed over Oded’s body, and those of the young children, deliberately murdered, Kfir and Ariel Bibas and, purportedly, of their murdered mother Shiri, to the International Red Cross.

How badly that humanity is needed in a region seared with grief, trauma, pain, and the rubble of war. I wish I could have been in Israel yesterday, with the families I have come to know, and, in a tiny way, feel part of.

But, here in London, I was able to stand next to the second person I needed to be close to, Bishop Kenneth Nowakowski, head of Ukrainian communities across the UK and a faithful friend. I’ve witnessed the devastation of the suburbs just a few miles from the heart of Kiev. I’ve followed the bishop’s work in creating a centre to support the tens of thousands of displaced Ukrainians here in Britain. I’ve heard him speak of the kinship he feels with the Jewish People. The first time he came to our synagogue, he was speechless; at the pulpit, he wept.

‘You don’t have to come,’ he texted me, ‘Your own people’s heartache is enough.’ But Bishop Kenneth has heartache too, as President Trump lies about President Zelensky, and seeks to sell out Ukraine rather like Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia in 1938. (Ironically, this week’s Torah portion is Mishpatim, ‘just laws’. ‘The world stands upon truth, justice and peace,’ taught Rabbi Shimeon ben Gamliel, under Roman occupation 1900 years ago. If only!)

I had one further stirring meeting yesterday. I visited Marika Henriques, to thank for her remarkable film Chaos Dragon and the Light which we screened on Holocaust Memorial Day. It follows her struggles with the trauma she experienced after surviving as a hidden child in Hungary. Never able to draw anything (her own words), she found herself pouring out her feelings years later in paintings which flowed straight from her unconscious. However fierce she portrayed the dragons with which she battled, her pictures always included a red dot. She came to understand afterwards that this dot represented hope: ‘There has to be hope.’

‘We’re commanded to hope,’ Bishop Kenneth said, scarcely an hour later. Hope, we agreed across our multifaith gathering, is a religious obligation.

My hope is that the values which guided Oded Lifschitz’s life, – wisdom, justice, compassion and a commitment to our collective humanity – and which Sharone carries forward, will prove stronger and resonate more deeply in everyone’s hearts than all the hatreds which besiege them.

14 Feb 2025

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

Moments of Hope

Sticky Post By admin On February 14, 2025

In my Talmud class, which has been running each Thursday morning for almost 40 years, we have reached the word echad, ‘one’ (Berachot 13a). It’s such a simple word that every child knows it. Yet it’s so demanding that the world can’t understand it.

Say the word ‘one’ very carefully, insists the Talmud. Say it not just with kavvanah, attention, but with kavvanat halev, concentration of the heart. Draw out the letters for long enough to acknowledge that God is above, below, and everywhere in all directions. For ‘Hear, O Israel, our God…is one’ is Judaism’s creed, its soul, and the spirit of all life.

This is not a mere concept, a mathematical proposition like ‘God isn’t two.’ It’s how we’re called upon to live in this fractured and brutal, yet wondrous and beautiful, world. It means what the mystics taught, that one vital spirit flows through all life, and that all life, in its manifold manifestations, is bound in one sacred kinship.

This is not to deny the cruel realities around us. On Sunday, leaders of the Congolese community in exile poured out their hearts around my dinner table: ‘Rwanda’s invaded, taken Goma. Our relatives are slaughtered, my nephew was killed last week. We need help!’ What can one do? We prayed, for each other’s anguish, for Israel, the hostages, the Middle East, the DRC.

Oneness, togetherness, seems a feeble notion, a mere fiction, set against such violence. Nevertheless, it remains the most comprehensive truth we know. This week I witnessed three glimpses what that might mean oneness, three moments of hope.

The first was the signing of the Drumlanrig Accords between leaders of the Jewish and Muslim communities of this country. The outcome of long and detailed debate, the accords open by affirming that we ‘share a profound spiritual heritage… rooted in monotheism, the sanctity of life and a commitment to justice.’ They conclude with the commitment to ‘work tirelessly to enable future generations to inherit our legacy of friendship, mutual respect, and solidarity.’ No doubt, some will mock this. It’s far from the reality on our streets. Yet it’s nothing more or less than what we proclaim in our creed, that God is one.

Then came Tu Bishevat, the New Year of the Trees. Back around my table, we spoke of our love of trees, of the tree of life at the centre not just of Eden, but of the gardens of our childhood: ‘It’s still there, that oak I climbed as a little girl.’ ‘I’ve had that handkerchief tree planted, not in my garden but in the square, so that the village children can enjoy it for generations after I’m gone.’ Trees and nature are not wholly other; we need them, materially, mentally and spiritually. We belong together, in the vital oneness of life; we cannot survive apart.

Last but not least, I spoke with a close relative of a hostage in Gaza. I didn’t ask permission, so shan’t share their name. ‘I’m not made for hate,’ they said. ‘I do feel it sometimes,’ they acknowledged, ‘I sense it inside me. But I don’t follow it, because we’re here to do hesed, to live by compassion.’ These humbling words fill me with the deepest respect.

‘Say ‘God is one’ slowly, insists the Talmud: meditate on God’s oneness above, below, and in all directions.’ Saying the words is important. But the real challenge is to live by them in this unjust, violent world.

That’s the task to which we are called by our faiths to be faithful.