Ethics | HEART AND MIND

10 Jan 2025

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

In the Footsteps of My Great-grandmother

Sticky Post By admin On January 10, 2025

‘Why is this important?’ my nephew Danny asks me. We’re standing at the ruins of crematorium three in Birkenau, recording for the BBC for which Danny works, in preparation for the 80th commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz. My son Mossy is here too. We’re aware that this may be the exact place where my great-, their great-great-, grandmother took her final breaths.

Late the previous night we visited the 16^th century Shach Synagogue in Holesov. Here my great-grandfather Rabbi Dr Yakov Freimann taught for twenty years. Half-hidden down steps below the street, it survived the Holocaust, unlike the New Synagogue which was burnt and smashed to pieces by the Nazis and the Vlajka.

It’s here that my great-grandmother Regina prayed on the New Year of 1941. On 29 September she wrote to her son in New York: ‘The solemn spirit of the service in the 800-year-old synagogue was especially dignified and in accord with our mood.’

Beautiful murals adorn the walls with the words of communal prayers: ‘Yitgadal veyitkaddash; Magnified and sanctified be Your holy name…’ Mossy sang Adam yesodo me’afar: ‘Humankind is made from dust and unto dust shall return.’ We were not just moved, but transfixed.

‘And what difference will it make when the last living survivors are gone?’ Danny continues.

Standing where they stood in their last moments, we felt close to the dead, trying in the icy rain to catch the echoes of their last words, mental farewells to mothers, children, loved ones, final prayers. As the last survivors go, it’s on us to testify about the lives of those, mostly fellow Jews, also Roma, homosexuals, socialists, who were murdered. And it’s our responsibility to affirm the courage of those who survived, creating new lives, so often without bitterness or hate. In so doing, we bear witness not just to the past, but to the irreducible value of every life.

Yet there’s something further, something critical at this dangerous juncture in today’s world: we must testify to the truth of what happened here for the sake of truth itself. Our western civilisation is in danger of leaving behind the age of empiricism, where fact and evidence matter, and entering the age of untethered myth, when all that counts is who tells the best-selling story. Powerful figures want to promulgate a post-fact, why-check-facts, facts-don’t matter culture. Empowered by many who live more in virtual than in physical reality, they seek to peddle manipulative falsehoods, appealing to the fears and bigotry which, if we’re honest, most of us harbour deep down. Their aim is not the suppression of truths. I fear it’s worse than that: true and false are not even relevant categories for them. All that matter is that their story sticks.

Therefore, our duty to testify is all the more essential. Judaism requires us to speak truth in the heart, bear honest witness, and know that God is not the God of our favourite prejudices but the God of all truth. We are commanded to pursue truth, whether or not it suits us. Inconvenient truths must also be acknowledged.

‘And what about the perpetrators, who also stood here?’ Danny asks.

I could have said: ‘They were nazis; our families were the victims.’ That’s true. But there’s a further, more difficult truth: ordinary people, some with doctorates and religious convictions, groups, parties, national governments, both through acting and through failing to act, became complicit in mass murder. What made that possible? What were the steps on those individual and collective paths? Societies that won’t ask that question may find that they’re already on it.

My answer to Danny is: We’re here to testify: to honour the lives of those murdered, to appreciate the lives of those who survived, and for the sake of truth, to protect all life in the future.

22 Nov 2024

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

Why Small Things Matter

Sticky Post By admin On November 22, 2024

We have a new resident in our house, a temporary visitor I hope. It’s a hedgehog, whom Nicky has called Iggle; we don’t know its pronouns. We hope we can return Iggle to the gardens and hedgerows as soon as we safely can.

It happened like this: I was walking down East End Road towards Fairacres where we were preparing a Friday night dinner when something drew my attention to the pavement. There, half hiding among the amber leaves, was the tiniest baby hedgehog I have ever seen.

I saw at once that it was nowhere near the minimum 650 grams these much-loved creatures need to survive the winter. So what to do? I slipped the loaf of bread I’d just purchased under my arm, put the hedgehog in the paper bag, where at least it would be protected and contained, and took it home as soon as I could. Nicky had the scales at the ready: the little fellow weighed a mere 220 grams. Since then, it’s put on another 35. It’s a busy young creature, and we’ve been careful to keep the dogs away from its scratching and snuffling.

This is a very minor matter. But I take comfort in just such small matters in these cruel times. They prevent me from feeling utterly overwhelmed. Here is something I can do, one small life I can maybe help save, and anything we can on the side of life and healing is, perhaps, not quite so little after all.

COP 29 is coming to a close. Though the stakes could not be higher, expectations have been low. Results haven’t made the headlines in the way the election of Donald Trump, the escalation of fighting between Ukraine and Russia, and the ICC’s warrant against Netanyahu have. But COP is an international endeavour to manage the greatest threat of all, climate chaos and the devastation of nature. The future of our children depends on tough, courageous decisions and the willingness to fund them.

Part of the challenge is spiritual: we, humankind, need to re-imagine and re-feel our relationship with all other life. Judaism doesn’t promote domination, superiority and entitlement, despite those verses from Genesis 1, ‘Fill the earth, subdue it, have dominion.’ Rather, it teaches partnership, care and respect. This is God’s world, and God’s sacred vitality flows through every human person, and, in different manifestations, through every living being.

The Judaism I believe in does not condone the degradation and dispossession of innocent people, be the victims fellow Jews, Israelis, Palestinians or anyone else. It does not accept wilful or negligent cruelty towards any form of life. Such behaviours cannot be condoned in the name of Judaism. Judaism is a religion of protest against oppression, destruction and indifference.

Consider this caution, attributed to Rebbe Shneur Zalman of Liadi, founder of Chabad, who chided his son for idly tearing leaves of a bush:

‘Who says the ‘I’ of you is more important to God than the ‘I’ of that plant. True, you belong to the world of humans and it belongs to the world of vegetation. But how do you know which is more precious to God?’

It would be hard to put matters more radically.

The older I get, the less I want my life to be evaluated by what it costs the earth: what I’ve consumed, squandered, chucked away; whom I’ve failed, hurt, or been implicated in hurting. I want my scales to balance on the side of life: what I’ve planted, nurtured, for whom I’ve cared, to whom shown compassion, for whom spoken up.

If we want to be true to our God and our faith, we must set ourselves with passion against the immense cruelties and injustices of this world.

Trying to save a baby hedgehog isn’t much, but it’s better than leaving it to die.

01 Nov 2024

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Ethics, Israel Permalink

Be on the side of life. Speak out for life!

Sticky Post By admin On November 1, 2024

I’m worrying about silence: the silencing of what we don’t want to hear, the silences because we don’t speak up. Judaism is a ‘Don’t be silent before wrong’ religion. Jewish history is a long testament to the horrors which silence can permit.

Professor Paul Mendes-Flohr of the Hebrew University, the great scholar of German Jewry, died in Jerusalem this week. He was brilliant, gentle and kind. He had heart trouble, of two kinds. Physically, his heart was weak; spiritually, his heart was broken by what was happening to his country. When we first met, fourteen years ago, he took me to a hummus place, not for falafels but to enquire of an Arab employee if he was alright. He cared.

The last thing Paul sent me was about silence. He quoted Paul Simon’s lyrics:
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening

He referenced the Jewish writer Isaac Babel’s silence when he was arrested by Stalin on fabricated charges of espionage and challenged for his failure to conform to Soviet ‘socialist realism’. Babel explained, under duress, that he’d mastered ‘a new literary genre, the genre of silence.’ He was executed in 1940.

Paul understood the voices that ‘make no sound but are nonetheless heard – if one chooses to listen to them.’ Now he, too, has joined the great silence.

Silence troubles me, not of the dead, but of the living, not the deep silences of communion, but the silences because we fail to hear, the silences because we fail to say.

Noah, about whom we read tomorrow, was famously silent. Why didn’t he shout at God? Why didn’t he scream: ‘How can You! How dare You destroy the world that You’ve only just created!’ But he says not a word. ‘Devastating,’ bible-scholar Aviva Zornberg calls it.

‘Speak up for life!’ is Judaism’s great message. ‘Speak up while you can, before free and honest discourse is shut down,’ is history’s great warning.

So I ask myself what I’m failing to say in these brutal times.

I am a Zionist, an anguished, troubled Zionist.

By Zionist I mean that I believe in the right of the State of Israel to exist, de jure and de facto. I believe that as a Jew I have a responsibility to care about the wellbeing of those who live in Israel, Jewish and not Jewish. I believe in the overriding values of justice, equality, freedom and democracy as proclaimed in Israel’s courageous Declaration of Independence.

I am a Zionist. I reclaim that word from those who hurl ‘Zio’, like ‘Yiddo’, as an insult at all and any Jews. I reclaim it from those who brutalise it by destroying West Bank Palestinian villages in its name, who defile the reputation of Israel and Judaism, and profane God, with outrageous racist words and actions, who have no compunction for Palestinian deaths and treat human dignity with contempt.

Therefore, as a Jew and Zionist, I must speak out against those who delegitimise Israel as a colonial entity, who ignorantly or wilfully refuse to name Hamas and Hezbollah as the terrorist organisations they are, who ignore the deeds of Iran’s regime. I must speak up for those who courageously defend Israel against them.

I join those who speak up for the hostages, their voices stifled in deep tunnels, and for their families, desperate to be heard, including by their own government.

I also join those, especially Jews and Israelis who, despite their own trauma and grief, like Magen Inon whose parents were murdered on October 7, call for an urgent end to the massive civilian suffering in Gaza and beyond, provoked by Hamas and Hezbollah, but also inflicted by Israel, and protest for proper supplies of food, water and medication, with a better path forward than yet more violence.

In the Torah we’re at the intersection of creation and destruction. ‘Create, fashion, bless,’ are the key words of its opening chapters. ‘Violence, perversion, destruction,’ are the key words of the stories that follow.

The message is ‘Be on the side of life. Speak out for life!’

12 Apr 2024

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

Celebrating Pesach in this wonderful, terrible world

Sticky Post By admin On April 12, 2024

I’m bewildered by our world today, and struggling. I’m not alone. ‘Can I talk to you?’ people ask. I listen; I care about listening. But what shall I say?

It’s dawn and the garden birds are starting to visit the feeders. They’re singing: great tits, blue tits, goldfinches, wrens. I worry about the blackbirds. I don’t see them for weeks, but yesterday, there they were. I’m lucky; I was raised to notice such things.

My faith as a Jew teaches me that God is in all life. If I listen deeply enough, if I let the other voices in my head fall silent, the ‘I have’ and ‘I haven’t’, the ‘I want’ and ‘I ought’, I will feel the sacred stream of life flow from pool to pool in everything that exists, filling, too, the inner well beneath my heart. For long, dry months I may not be able to access the place, but this current of life does not fail.

But what kind of world is this really?

I think of Romi, a dancer just 23 years old, still hostage to Hamas after almost two hundred days. ‘I’ve switched off everything,’ her father tells me. ‘There’s only one message I’m waiting for, the call that she’s free.’ Daily we pray, ‘Our brothers and sisters from the whole House of Israel, in suffering and captivity…’

Every day, too, I see pictures from Gaza, desperate people. Are they not also made in God’s image? To what future is this hunger and ruin giving birth, irrespective of who’s to blame?

I’ve seen videos made by Nasrullah and Hezbollah, the nefarious protegees of Iran’s murderous regime, how they plan to destroy…

So it’s a terrible world. Yet it’s a wonderful world. It’s a beautiful, cruel, bounteous, unjust, wretched, glorious world. I want to believe with Martin Luther King that ‘the arc of history bends towards justice.’ I wish! Perhaps he, too, was afraid, and spoke not in certainty, but hope.

Into all of this now comes Pesach, festival of freedom. We’re preparing our kitchens, buying matzah, eyeing our bitter herbs, and worrying. So, in line with all the ‘fours’ of the Seder, I’m telling myself four things:

Freedom: Recommit to the struggle for liberty, for Jews, Israel and everyone. Freedom only for some is freedom compromised. Nelson Mandela wrote A Long Walk to Freedom. In truth, that walk is unending, traversing the same tough ground over and again, while the promise of the messianic dream remains many wildernesses away. But that’s no reason not to put on our boots.

Story: Seder is the night of the story. We recount our people’s story and weave into it our own. It’s our past, our present, and our hope for what must be. We need a world that respects and welcomes our stories, Jews or Hindus, refugees, farmers, students, venerable elderly with the wisdom of ninety years. Silence our stories with hate, and liberty is silenced for all. Without stories there’s no freedom.

Earth: The Seder plate is Judaism’s earth-plate, – and this year Seder Night coincides with Earth Day. The field’s crops, wheat, barley, oats, spelt, rye, are matzah’s only ingredient, bar water. The karpas, greens, are anything blessed as ‘fruit of the ground.’ Maror is the soil’s bitter yield. Sweet charoset is an offering of fruits and spices lauded in The Song of Songs. It’s the ‘food of love’ the Jewish way, Earth’s love. Without cherishing the Earth there’s no freedom, because nobody will thrive.

Hope: the Seder journeys upward, from slavery to freedom, from a land of tyranny to a country of justice, dignity, liberty and loving kindness. The BBC’s Radio 4 just launched a new programme, Café Hope, where people share how they’re making the world a little bit better and fairer. The Seder table is Judaism’s Hope Café.

So may this be a year of courage, determination, commitment, vision – and hope!

28 Mar 2024

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

Hope and purpose: not a dream but a duty

Sticky Post By admin On March 28, 2024

From bitter years and cruel times, from far-off exile in Babylon, the prophet Ezekiel bequeathed us beautiful verses proffering purpose and hope. We read them on this Shabbat Parah, with its focus on purification and renewal.

They concern our humanity:

‘I will give you a new heart and put into you a new spirit. I will remove the heart of stone from your body, give you a heart of flesh, and put my spirit in you.’ (36:26-7)

And they’re about our land, perhaps, by extension, about the very earth itself:

‘The desolate land, after lying waste in sight of every passerby, shall again be tilled. It shall be said, “That land, once desolate, is become like the Garden of Eden.’ (36:34-5)

As this is a leap year, we will recite these verses over Easter. They offer an apt shared context of hope in life’s renewal from which to wish Christian colleagues, friends and communities thoughtful and inspiring holy days.

We desperately need this hope. The great scholar of Jewish mysticism, Art Green, sends out apposite Hasidic teachings every week. Today he added a heartsore note: (The red heifer he refers to is the cow whose ashes, mixed with burnt cedar, hyssop and living water, confer ritual purification.)

I’ve never felt such a need for that ash of the red heifer as I do this year. Not, God forbid, from those cows that the Temple Mount crazies are trying to raise! I’m talking about some magical powder that might cleanse us of the constant contact with the dead and the subject of violent death that has so filled this year for us. Yes, I mean the horrid events of October 7, the deaths of so many young soldiers in the IDF, but also the deaths of many innocent Palestinians, both in Gaza and the West Bank, including far too many children.

I couldn’t agree more, except to add our terrible fear for the lives and wellbeing of the hostages held for so long deep underground by Hamas.

So where are the hope and purpose?

They lie firstly in becoming partners with God, with everything good, insightful, patient, and determined in humanity, in removing the hearts of stone from humankind. I hate to write this, but it seems there exist people whose hearts, through cruelty or despair, have ossified, and who are, in Shakespeare’s blunt words, ‘absolute for death.’

Yet it’s not the case that it’s always ‘us or them’. How many human, humane, beings, ourselves included, have hearts without a single calcified corner? How much of our own ‘heart of flesh’ are we prepared to expose in the endeavour to find, and maybe even melt, other hearts? It is this task, painful, demanding, unending, Sisyphean as it may be, at which we need to work if we want to create a world of understanding, compassion and peace.

Secondly, hope and purpose lie in the endeavour to transform ‘desolate land’ into God’s gardens. Ezekiel’s Hebrew suggests a remarkable wordplay: remove the double letter from neshammah, ‘desolate’, and it becomes neshamah, ‘soul’. Can we restore the soul and spirit of our beleaguered earth, war-torn, pollutant poisoned, plastic-ridden, so that the forests thrive, more birds sing and our hearts soother and softened, beneath this growing canopy, are opened once again to God and to each other?

On a large scale it’s beyond our capacity. But, in the words of Rebbe Nachman of Breslav, assur lehitya’esh, ‘it’s forbidden to despair’, and we each have our own selves with whom to work to begin to make these tasks happen. They’re not a dream but a duty.

15 Mar 2024

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

‘The world is built on loving kindness:’ is it really so?

Sticky Post By admin On March 15, 2024

Since long before dawn, a verse has been going round and round in my mind like a tune which won’t let go: ‘Olam chesed yibaneh; the world is built on loving kindness.’ Those words are inscribed on the cornerstone of our synagogue. Maybe they’re pursuing me because tomorrow we read in the Torah about the completion of God’s sanctuary. Where chesed, kindness, is absent, God is half absent too. Places are only holy if God is welcome too.

But is the world really so? Is it anything more than a placatory wish, a delusive fiction, that, amidst war, destruction, cruelty, hatred, broken cities, broken trust and broken lives, ‘the world is built on loving kindness’?

Yet through these pre-dawn hours – hours when, the mystics tell us, the archangel Raphael traverses the heavens with healing on his wings – those words have accumulated details and restored memories which give them solid substance.

Last year in Kyiv, in a dim hall scarcely two miles from Babin Yar, I listen as Jewish women tell their stories. ‘I lost so many of my family in that place. Now I’m left here in this city. I used to care for children with disabilities, but they’ve all evacuated now. So I look after abandoned dogs and other animals. What’s life worth, if there’s no other life to care for?’

Last week, in the north of Israel, I hear how every morning at 6.00am volunteers prepare 500 breakfast rolls for displaced families and soldiers guarding against Hezbollah. ‘They come, day in, day out. All the ingredients are donated. They organise it all, shopping, preparing, distribution, everything.’

Last Shabbat I was at the table of my colleague Raba Tamar Elad-Appelbaum in Jerusalem. I asked her about inter-faith relations in the city. ‘They reach out to me, Christians, Muslims, fellow Jews, and I reach out to them. We need each other more than ever now.’

Yesterday, I was invited to offer a prayer in a multi-faith Iftar at Brent Mosque, commemorating five years since the massacre of Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand. I learnt that the Mosque’s kitchen doesn’t close at lunchtime during Ramadan. They continue to offer free meals for local non-Muslim people, the cooks preparing foods they themselves can’t eat for many more slow hours.

Kindness is no bomb shelter. But it builds deep, deeper than the seductive reach of collective hate. Kindness has special chambers of its own, most importantly at this bleak time, the chamber of hope. I mean hope in human nature, hope in the hard-won ability to transform anger and transcend borders, hope in life itself.

Yet still the question returns: ‘Olam chesed yibanei’ – is it really so? Our world doesn’t look that way just now. Then I remember: the root of the word ‘olam’ means ‘hidden’. Underneath everything, half concealed, in ways we often cannot see because they look so small, so fragile, so feebly person-to-person in this age of the mass and crass, it will be kindness, if anything, which rebuilds our broken world.

To the kabbalists, kindness is a holy quality. The divine vitality pours forth from its deep, unknowable heights into binah, intuition and understanding, out of which is formed the awareness that all life is precious and holy. From there, this sacred energy flows into chesed, calling on each of us from within our heart to nurture and sustain the life around us with care and loving kindness.

The question isn’t ‘Is this true?’ but, in these bleak and aggressive times, ‘Can we make it so?’

08 Mar 2024

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

With light feet, but a heavy heart

Sticky Post By admin On March 8, 2024

I hope to run the Jerusalem Marathon with light feet today. But I won’t be running with a light heart; my heart is full and heavy. I can’t add up the feelings or experiences which fill it. Some are contradictory. I make no comparison and suggest no equivalence between them. Some of the people who moved me hold radically different views. But they’re all people, and what they had to tell has left me, in every case, with two similar feelings.

The first is deep, anguished sorrow. In a noisy café at Tel Aviv Savidor Station I had a long conversation with two psychotherapists: ‘The need is huge,’ they told me. ‘The immediate circle of family members traumatised on 7 October is 20,000.’ And the circles beyond? ‘Tens of thousands more, the families of soldiers killed and wounded…’

At the previous station I’d met Aaron Seitler who’s walking the Israel Trail (the sections which aren’t too dangerous) to raise money for The Society For The Protection of Nature In Israel’s project Nature Heals which takes relatives into the gentle consolation of green spaces.

I travelled on north, and sat with x – I’m not sure she wants to be named. ‘I need a shoulder to cry on again,’ she wrote to me after we met the first time, last November. ‘I’m still in touch with my friend in Gaza. I’m so worried; he hasn’t replied to my last message. I don’t know if he’s still alive.’ She showed me a video of him holding the hands of a circle of children, then another of him cooking a vat of soup, the children running up to him while he turns aside and weeps. ‘I’m careful whom I talk to. Many here would be furious with me.’ Actually, I’m seeing more indications of deep concern for the children of Gaza.

I spent Wednesday in Kfar Veradim with my amazing colleague Rabbi Nathalie Lastreger. (The warning there when Hizbollah send missiles is zero seconds.) Lastreger means ‘bearer of burdens,’ and she carries the burdens of countless people with courage and love. She introduces me to Eitan Gonen, father of Romi, who’s still held hostage. ‘Tell us about her.’ ‘She loves animals, people, life, connects with everyone instantly. She’s a dancer in six different styles. She’s my sunshine, positive energy always. It’s 150 days; even one is unimaginable. She’s strong.’ All over Kfar Veradim are pictures of her, with her beautiful smile. ‘Every day I say: “This is the day she’ll be home.” Make a deal, any price; get them back.’

I ask what we can do to help. He answers with the same words as Ayelet, Naama’s mother, whom I met last week: Send good energy, prayers, heart’s warmth. I believe, I know, it’ll reach her, however deep the tunnels.’

We hear a terrifying army briefing about the threats posed by Hizbollah – another of Iran’s vicious proxies. Then Nathalie takes me to the homes of two bereaved families. Salman Habaka was a high-ranking Druse officer: ‘They had their eyes on him to be the IDF’s first Druse Commander-in-Chief,’ his father says. ‘Ani rishon; I go first,’ was his motto. He inspired everybody, gave his soldiers confidence and courage. He rescued many people.’ His father gives me a keyring with his picture. His mother cries quietly.

Uria Bayer belonged to a Christian family, originally German, whose lives have been devoted over three generations to caring for Holocaust survivors in Israel. Uria received a bullet through the head in Gaza. ‘“Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people,” his father said. ‘These words have an even greater meaning for me now. For four days we witnessed the care at Saroka Hospital. Unbelievable!’ The family draw great comfort from their faith. As Uria’s father speaks, the family dog looks up and holds out her paw.

Yesterday I went to the South Hebron Hills with Joel Carmel and a team from Breaking the Silence. Seemingly unimpeded by the army, settlers are exploiting the aftermath of October 7, violently intimidating and driving away villagers across the West Bank. We wander round the ruins of the ancient Palestinian village of Khirbet Zanuta; the whole population of 250 fled after repeated threats. One settler drove his bulldozer into the small, abandoned school; books and broken desks lie across the ruined floor. These are different kinds of injuries, deep and terrible wounds.

Today when we gather at Gan Sacher for the start of the races, I will see on countless running shirts the names of loves ones, taken hostage, tortured, murdered on Shabbat Shechorah, killed in the fighting. I will carry the memory of Martin Segal, for many years head of The British Friends of Israel Guide Dogs, who died this year, young, courageous, gentle.

That takes me to the second group of emotions that all these experiences – which I can’t add up and can’t compare, except to say that they overwhelm me, every one of them – have in common. All of them evoke a powerful determination to see justice and compassion, to care, support, and create a safer, fairer, better, kinder world.

That’s what I’m running my marathon for. I want to join those who, whoever and wherever they are, devote their lives to compassion.

23 Feb 2024

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

Whom we carry in our hearts

Sticky Post By admin On February 23, 2024

Whose names do we carry on our shoulders and bear in our hearts?

My sartorial interests have always been minimal. Aware of their environmental cost, I shop for new clothes as rarely as possible. If I do have to visit a shopping centre like Brent Cross, the less time I have there, the more likely I am to buy what I need.

But the High Priest’s garments, described in this week’s Torah reading, fascinate me. The very names of the precious stones sewn onto them seem to glow in the text: sappir veyahalom, sapphire and diamond, shevo ve’achlamah, agate and amethyst.

Mystics see them as metaphors for the radiance of the soul. But in our sore times, I’m interested in something more down to earth. Two stones are carved with the names of the tribes of Israel, six names on each, and attached to the high priest’s ephod so that ‘he wears them on his shoulders as a memorial before God.’

Today there is no temple, no sacrificial service and no high priest. Instead, we each come before God carrying the names, hopes, anguish and aspirations of everyone we care about, before God.

My first meeting here in Israel was with my colleague Rabbi Irina Gritsevskaya, responsible for supporting the Jewish communities of Ukraine. This Shabbat, 24 February, brings the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion. She writes:

‘Two years have passed but the war still remains. These days, every Shabbat service in Ukraine begins with the prayer for peace in Israel and ends with the prayer for Ukraine.’

Last year, I joined Bishop Kenneth Nowakowski at the Ukrainian Cathedral in London. He carries on his shoulders the anguish of hundreds of thousands of his people, exiled to Britain or fighting and struggling at home. There’s no end in sight to the war. I send him a big hug of solidarity from Jerusalem.

As well as the stones on his shoulders, the high priest wore over his heart four rows of jewels, three in each row, carved with the individual name of one of Israel’s twelve tribes. We, being no formal high priests, carry them not on, but in, our hearts.

I don’t know whom you carry in your heart: someone you love who’s in danger, a hostage, a friend whose hand you want to hold but they’re on the other side of some border, at the other end of the world. What I do know is that we all carry names in our hearts ‘as a memorial before God’: people we love, for whom we hope and pray. I think of Pasternak’s poem:

‘In me are people without names…
I am conquered by them all, and this is my only victory.’

May the God of life embrace them all.

The high priest wears one more piece of clothing bearing a name, God’s name carved on a gold band worn round his head. It was his special tefillin, the small leather boxes with scrolls bearing the commandment to love God, which we place daily next to our heart and on our forehead.

The other morning, I tentatively mentioned to a friend that his tefillin were askew; instead of at the centre they were way off to one side of his forehead. ‘No,’ he wittily replied, ‘My tefillin are in the right place. It’s my head which is facing the wrong way.’ Since then, I keep asking myself which way my thoughts are facing.

The Torah explains that the high priest wears his special garments ‘to make him holy to serve me.’

So may we, each our own high priest, be granted to stand with our head and thoughts facing the God of all life, our hearts filled with love to carry the names of the people who need our embrace, and our shoulders strong to share their burdens, in these cruel, challenging times.

26 Jan 2024

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

Between life and death, future and past

Sticky Post By admin On January 26, 2024

Here we are, caught between creation and destruction. Yesterday was Tu Bishevat, the New Year for Trees; tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day.

Tu Bishevat is a day of planting and celebration, when we’re partners with the God of creation who set the tree of life in the midst of the Garden of Eden.

Many of us were out there yesterday in the bright afternoon, placing rich mulch round the young crab apples and field maples we’d just planted. Trees mean future, long-term thinking, life, hope and joy. ‘We’ve a two-hundred-year management plan,’ explained Craig Harrison, head of Forestry England south.

Tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day. I read compulsively about the Shoah and listen to the testament of survivors. I love their company. I admire how they have established new lives, brought up children and go into schools to speak against antisemitism and every form of prejudice. I find it remarkable how little bitterness so many of them bear, how much compassion they embody, how widely they spread warmth and hope.

But the most terrible testimony has no voice: that of the innumerable dead, across Europe, Rwanda, Cambodia, robbed of their homes, loved ones and lives; robbed of their voices which would tell us, if they could, of the sophisticated deceitfulness and cruel cunning of the murderers alongside their drunken brutality.

In the words of the searing Yom Kippur meditation, ‘Eleh Ezkerah – these things I bring to memory before God, who’s supposed to conduct the world in mercy, venaphshi alai eshpecha, and I pour out my soul, I don’t know what to do with myself.’

The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is the fragility of freedom. It could not be more apposite in this time of war in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, the Middle East. Whatever ‘side’ we’re on, whatever political views we hold, we must not harden our hearts to the horror faced by the hostages and their families after 115 days of cruel captivity, the fear of parents for the lives of their children on the front lines, the desperate suffering of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians caught amidst the fighting.

To what pain will all this give birth, to what new fears and hatreds, to what hopes, longings and dreams? Beyond whatever particular loyalties we hold, say the Israeli and Palestinian parents of the Bereaved Families Forum, we need to remember that we should all ultimately be on the side of humanity.

So what do we do?

‘Choose life,’ teaches the Torah, be on the side of life!

These, then, are some of the questions which should preoccupy us: How can I find the courage to be truly human? What kindness can I do? Whose life can I make a bit better and not worse? What can I plant for our children’s children’s futures?

This sounds frail; it feels very small scale. But I put my hopes in a minor, often overlooked scene from the Torah. The Children of Israel are thirsty in the desert, but the waters before them are too bitter to drink. Therefore, God instructs Moses to throw into them the branches of a tree and when he does so the waters become sweet.

So let’s plant our trees, figurative trees of compassion, decency, humanity and hope, as well as real trees, maples, rowans, birch and oak. May they sweeten our own lives with a deep sense of purpose and bring a little sweetness to the future of the world.

22 Dec 2023

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Ethics Permalink

What matters in the end

Sticky Post By admin On December 22, 2023

How small, how trivial the acts of love and kindness seem, with which we strive to counter the vast cruelties of the world. Yet the difference they make.

How selfless so many of the staff in hospital and hospice are, where our family have spent much time over these last days.

‘I’ll choose you the best bunch; they’re the sweetest,’ says the man at the fruit stall, holding up a large cluster of black grapes. ‘The nurses appreciate a bit of fruit. They get more chocolates than are good for them and more biscuits than they know what to do with.’

And those nurses and carers! ‘We’re just going to straighten you up and make you more comfortable, my darling.’ The sheets are folded back with scrupulous care, the injection inserted, the pillows made straight.

How civilised, how compassionate, how privileged this is, compared with the brutal, violent horrors of Ukraine, Yemen, the south of Israel, Gaza, ‘the monstrous anger of the guns,’ terrors which leave us all in profound and multiple distress.

Yet here too mortality, though it comes not in bomb blasts and shattered buildings but between clean sheets, remains implacable. What do we have, what’s left, when it all ends?

Or maybe they’re not the right questions. Instead, we should ask ‘What have we given? What is the love that abides?’ What remains when, in the biblical phrase, ‘the dust returns to the earth as it was’?

We cannot help but live as if the essence of our being is our own consciousness, what we feel and desire, our moods and sensations. But perhaps it is not so. Maybe the most important part of who we are exists not in ourselves but in the minds and hearts of others, in the memories and after-echoes of the care we showed them or the hurts we gave. Thus, the surviving core of me is not in me, at least not in me alone, but in every person, even every animal or tree, affected by my passing. In them our love, and hate, endures.

A beautiful phrase from this week’s Torah portion says it all: venafsho keshurah benafsho, ‘his soul is bound to his soul.’ It is these words, spoken by his half-brother Judah, which render Joseph unable to hide his tears or conceal his identity any longer. They refer neither to him nor even to Judah himself, but to the bond between Benjamin and their father Jacob. Jacob cannot live without his youngest, beloved child. The selfless understanding that this love is the most important thing, that it overcomes, that it simply must overcome, absolutely everything, finally breaks the barrier between the long-estranged brothers.

This is what we have in life to set against the hatreds, enmities, misunderstandings and misjudgements: the simple bonds of love, the appreciation that, even if they do not involve us directly, they are sacred and their sanctity commands us.

So I think, as the night advances and the corridor of the hospice grows quiet, not of the angers, (what family doesn’t have them?) but of how Isca, our second mother, sat with me decades ago during similar night hours when I couldn’t sleep after being taught Macbeth, because I was certain Banquo’s body with its ‘twenty trenched gashes on his head’ lay underneath my bed. Or of how, when we brought Mossy, our first child, home from hospital, Safi the dog, his rather large nose put slightly out of joint, sprung into her car to be spoiled by Isca for two whole days before she brought him back, reconciled to his new reality with its altered canine privilege.

These are the foolish things by which love endures, eluding death, to be passed on in the inscrutable future, in ways incapable of being fully known. These are the fragments we have to shore against our ruin.