We respond to the appalling terror attacks in Paris with deep sorrow for the families of all those murdered, and with prayers for the wounded and traumatised.

Our thoughts are especially with Professor David Ruzie, a member of one of our Paris communities, who lost his grand-daughter Justine in the Bataclan theatre, and with all his family. May the All-Present God bring them strength and comfort.

Our spiritual response to terror is a profound affirmation of the value and sanctity of life as affirmed throughout Judaism, in every true expression of faith, and it the hearts of all who genuinely trust in God.

Living in frightening and dangerous times, we seek our strength in solidarity with all people of good will, in prayer, in the study of Torah, and in working for compassion, justice and peace.

Every gathering and event we hold will be an affirmation of these values.

In these dangerous times it matters more than ever to live by our values.

I would rather not write most of this email. I would have preferred to focus on the strawberries and cauliflowers in the synagogue garden.
 
The Torah says clearly and simply: ‘Lo ta’amod al dam re’echa – You shall not stand idly by the blood of your neighbour.’ How are we to live that commandment?
 
It’s been a week of memorials, with the 75^th commemoration of the Battle of Britain beginning today, the date when the Luftwaffe began to attack the South East of England just as Sir Winston Churchill had predicted when he spoke to the nation on 18 June 1940: ‘The battle of France is over. The battle of Britain is about to begin.’ I remember well the gratitude with which my grandparents and parents spoke of the courageous pilots and crew of the RAF.
 
On Monday I was at Westminster Abbey for A Solemn Commemoration For Srebrenica Memorial Day, marking 20 years since the massacre of 8372 men and boys, after the United Nations troops abandoned its so-called ‘Safe Haven’ and left those who had sought shelter there to the mercilessness of their killers.
 
I shan’t forget the words of Munira Sybasic, President of the Mothers of Srebrenica Association. She spoke with a passion obvious even to those who, like me, understood not a word of what I think was Serbo-Croat. Her speech was not translated. Whoever arranged this powerful service understood that it was not right to require everyone to speak in English. The vast majority followed Ms Sybasic by reading the translation provided:
       Although it has been twenty years since this inhuman atrocity, some mothers are still searching for the bones of their children…I doubt all of you can understand the pain and suffering we must endure, but I am certain that any mother can. Help us find the bones of our children!
 
The next day, we stood in Tavistock Square outside the British Medical Association in the silence at 9.47, ten years after the Number 30 bus was blown up by a terrorist murderer. Maybe it’s because I know Mavis Hyman and her family so well, whose daughter Miriam died here, that I found myself noticing the mothers. I saw Mrs Fatayi-Williams, whose son Anthony was killed:
         Oh, how I miss you sorely, such that the rose is not red and the violets are not blue any more for me…He lived for humanity and radiated joy and peace from childhood to adulthood.
 
On Wednesday evening at my home I listened as Tongomo Okito, leader of the Congolese community in Britain and long-standing friend of our community, describe how under the brutal regime of Joseph Kabila, who has outstayed as President the terms allowed him by the constitution, ‘young people are vanishing off the streets; university students disappear; their parents do not know what has happened to them…A mass grave has been discovered. The regime scorns the United Nations and the West. I feel powerless. I don’t know what to do’. His words are all too familiar from Jewish history. We must arrange another shared event with Okito’s community; it’s the least we can do by way of solidarity.
 
Last Shabbat at lunch in the small Czech town of Holesov I met Mrs Frelichova, the daughter of the lady who persistently sent food parcels to try to save members of my father’s family who’d been deported to Terezin, although she herself had little to eat and she never received a single sign that any of her gifts arrived. ‘I didn’t think this history would come alive again after seventy years’, she said, and she wept, and so did most of us there.
 
Commemorations are profoundly important. But, as was said at Westminster Abbey, ‘It’s not enough to remember. We also have to act’.
 

I’ve been especially moved this week by two  entirely different matters. Yet on reflection, they have, at depth, much in common.
 
I was in Stuttgart as a guest of the Kirchentag. It’s to the German Protestant Church what Limmud is for the Jewish community, a festival of learning, music, prayer, people, encounter, joy and the debate of every conceivable issue. Only it’s somewhat bigger, with over 100,000 people. The entire centre of the city was closed to traffic for four days and given over to crowds of people, mostly young, singing, talking, attending street lectures.
 
The mayor of Stuttgart addressed a special gathering for foreign visitors (a mere 6,000): ‘I’m the one who’s been asked to speak because I’m the quickest’, she began, making everyone warm to her. ‘We have guests here from 140 countries’, she explained. ‘Our city has many people with migration and refugee backgrounds and we are glad to live peacefully together. I am proud that in this town over 900 people are currently giving their time to the support of refugees’. It wasn’t a speech I’d expected to hear in today’s Europe; it was moving, and chastening.
 
Outside in the street I was hailed by a voice calling ‘Jonathan’; it was Nicholas Sagovsky, formerly canon theologian of Westminster Abbey. He currently works with church and government leaders in Britain on issue of good society in general and asylum in particular.
 
Between bouts of anxiety about my own session, a shared discussion of a Biblical text with a Christian Colleague (which went well in the end), I calmed myself by reading. Nicky had given me Field Notes From a Hidden City, by Esther Woolfson. It’s subtitled ‘An Urban Nature Diary’, with ‘urban’ referring specifically to Aberdeen, but the concerns of the book are far wider. Here is a lady who cares and knows. The fledgling jackdaw by the roadside, the declining sparrow and the beautiful sparrow hawk: she observes, studies and appreciates them and recognises fellow creatures following the integrity of their own lives.
 
This causes her to call into question the heedlessness, and prejudice, with which we ignore, judge and make assumptions. Observing a lone red squirrel, she recalls how the species was once killed by the thousand as a pest. Now they are endangered species. Instead the greys are persecuted today; there’s even a lady in the town who alerts trapping squads whenever she hears of a sighting. When she sees a grey squirrel in the garden she feels she’s harbouring a threatened fugitive. ‘As I watch it, it occurs to me that all that changes is human perception’.
 
But there is much that perception fails to perceive, the meaning of a city park turned into a mall, the loss of the great throngs of sparrows. Carrier pigeons were once so numerous in North America that it took three days for the flocks to fly over. She quotes the woman who made the last recorded sighting before the bird became extinct. ‘She listened to its call in which she heard a cry of bitter admonition, ‘See, see, see!’’ Twice she refers to John Locke, the philosopher to whom we are perhaps more indebted than any other for promoting the spirit of tolerance which came to embrace Jews too: ‘the killing of beasts will by degrees, harden [people’s] minds even towards men’.   
 
Stuttgart and the sparrows: what they have in common is this, the appeal to care, to extend the circle of what and whom we notice, to commit ourselves to life, compassion, hesed – ‘loving-kindness’ – among the most important words in the entire language of Judaism.
 
Religion which gets stuck as dogma in the head is sadly not just useless but often dangerous.  It must descend to the heart and touch there the flow of compassion which is the essence of the sacred gift of life.

‘It’s warm in here!’ That was my first reaction when together with some hundred and fifty Christians, Muslims and Jews of all ages I came out of the cold and wet London streets into the welcoming atmosphere of Great Portland Street Synagogue. (‘It’s the first time we’ve ever been in a synagogue, one family whispered to me on the way out. I’m sure they weren’t the only ones.) 
 
Rabbi Barry Marcus, recently knighted by the Polish government for his interfaith work, had encouraging words for the group. He referred to the famous verse from tomorrow’s Torah reading, ‘You shall build me a sacred place, and I shall dwell in their midst’ and commented on the apparent disjunction: we build a holy space for God, but it is among us that God wants to dwell. It is a society worthy of such presence which we must all try together to create.
 
I find myself pondering that verse. It reads like a description, ‘They shall make’; but it sounds like an imperative, ‘Make! Whoever you are and whenever and wherever you live your task is to make a place where I can dwell close to you’.
 
Where is that place?
 
Out in the February sunshine I watch an early bee fly into the small white bell of a snowdrop. Is that God’s house to the bees?
 
The poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, who obviously loved the forests of Russia and missed them badly when he came to Palestine, used the language of the temple to describe the paths through the wood, ‘There is a tranquil holy place, hidden away amidst the shade-giving trees’. He’s not the first to find God’s home in nature. It’s wonderful retreat.
 
But it’s not how the Torah defines our task. The verse doesn’t say ‘and I will dwell among the trees’.  ‘Amongst them’, it insists; God wants to be able to live among people like us.

In me and you? It’s true; in moments of inner quietness, calmed by silence or humbled in the presence of tenderness, by illness borne courageously or by some delicate gesture of one person’s affection for another, I have felt that a hospital room, or even the bones of my own ribcage might temporarily constitute the walls of a temple, that God is here, in this place and this moment. I have sensed this too when a large group immerses itself in prayer and each person’s silent contemplations somehow touch each other, creating a world of collective quietness into which the presence of God has somehow entered, unobserved but felt and known to the heart. I’ve witnessed this wonder in people of the same faith, and in people of different faiths when they truly find themselves, together.       
 
Sadly, I also know what it means to desecrate such spaces. I’ve done it myself, through anger or ingratitude. (Twice last week people said to me, ‘I have such a good life; what contempt for God it would be if I were unthankful’, and neither of them had been through easy years.) 
 
Tragically, we’ve witnessed God’s temple destroyed many times in incomparably worse ways, in the wanton murder of human beings, the generous life of Dan Uzan protecting the community in Copenhagen, the good life of Deah Barakat, ‘my brother with the kindest heart,’ in Chapel Hill.*(see below for links to interviews)
 
Beyond such acts in scale and compass lies the devastation of war, the lives cut off, the homes destroyed, the landscapes laid waste. Even in a just war, to speak anthropomorphically, God’s heart must ache and God’s tears flow. In an unjust, pointless, vicious war how angry and frustrated God must also feel: ‘It’s such a beautiful world in which I gave them the privilege to live, and they do this to one another!’
 
‘You shall build me a sacred place, and I shall dwell in their midst.’ What task could be more challenging, yet more urgent?

* The dignified and loving responses of the elder sister of Deah Barakat, and the elder brother of his newly-wed wife and her sister, are more than inspiring.

From time to time I see again before me the scene I came across at a small street corner one summer afternoon. It looked innocuous enough; a group of teenagers were standing around in a circle. But in the centre, on the pavement, was a bleeding hedgehog and they were stoning it to death. Its back was already broken and the blood was seeping out beneath the crushed crust of spikes. The teens weren’t upset; they were laughing. The hedgehog was dying, slowly.

Of course it’s not the same when it’s people who are being killed. I don’t know if it’s true that we’re now living in a time of renewed barbarism. Perhaps it has always been there, only more out of sight. We are all guilty of letting others die, of hunger, from curable illness, as ‘collateral damage’ in conflict.

But the beheadings by Isis, the burning alive, the ‘suicide’ murders, the culture of killing, – these are terrifying demonstrations of calculated savagery, and they are not far away from us now. One can see in them, only writ far larger, the same the contempt for life, the same creation of comradeship through rituals of cruelty, the same disdain for anyone who might attempt to call the perpetrators to account, that I saw in embryo that summer afternoon.

This week we read from the Ten Commandments in the Torah. The sixth says simply ‘Thou shalt not murder’, – in Hebrew it’s just two words, Lo tirtsach. The great commentator Rashi, Rabbi Shlomo son of Isaac, (11th century France), has nothing to say about them: the meaning of the injunction is surely obvious.
 
Rabbi Moses son of Nachman (c13th Spain and Israel) does choose to elaborate:

• I have commanded you to acknowledge in thought and deed that I created all things. Take heed, therefore, lest you destroy the work of my hands and shed the blood of human beings whom I created…

His words, ‘the blood of human beings,’ offer an important indication. To the Nazis the Jews were first reclassified as sub-human then murdered. The Hutus said the same of the Tutsis in Rwanda: they were snakes. The ‘believers’ in Isis say the same of the ‘non- believers’, who therefore apparently deserve to die. Dan Pagis understood this issue well when he wrote of the Nazis in Testimony
         No, no: they definitely were / human beings: uniforms, boots.
         How to explain? They were / created in the image.
         I was a shade. / A different creator made me…
 
We all have our ‘others’, our potential ‘shades’. As Jacques Derrida wrote, identity cannot be established without alterity, without at the same time forming, if only by implication, the group of those who do not belong. Most of us seek identity; we see belonging as a great good and the stronger the group the better.
 
It therefore behoves us to be extremely careful to accord to our ‘others’, whoever they may, exactly and precisely the same dignity and prerogatives we claim for ourselves. Are we not all ‘created in the image’? Samson Raphael Hirsch, writing in mid-nineteenth century Germany just as Jews gained full citizenship, commented on the 6th commandment in precisely these terms:

• Your fellow human beings have been placed next to you by God. Their rights are sanctified by God, their life, their honour, their freedom, their happiness…

Without stating it explicitly, he was clearly addressing an essential feature of the emerging modern world: identity is multiple and complex. Though heritage and allegiances may differentiate us in some ways (she is Muslim; I am Jewish) deeper bonds unite us. If we’re British, or French, or Canadian, we’re all citizens of the same country. Wherever we are, we’re certainly all citizens of the same imperilled world. We all share the basic needs of flesh and blood. We are all live and breathe by grace of the one God, the one vitality, which animates all existence.

The shocking murder of the staff of Charlie Hebdo concerns us all. Martin Luther King wrote in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham City Jail that ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’. Similarly, an attack on liberty anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere.
 
To perpetrate such a crime in God’s name to avenge blasphemy is itself an incomparably greater blasphemy; there is no greater desecration than the unjustifiable taking of life.
 
As Ed Hussain wrote in yesterday’s Guardian, the act is ‘also an assault on Islam and the very freedoms that allow 30 million Muslims to prosper in the west’. Those same freedoms allow Jews to prosper too. We have here the same interests at heart.
 
The spontaneous vigils which filled the streets of Paris, Berlin and London on Wednesday night were important indications of the refusal to be intimidated, of a vigorous popular response, not only in solidarity with the victims of the crime and their families, but also with the essential values of democracy and freedom of expression. However, these powerful feelings must not be betrayed by letting them turn into collective hatred and xenophobia, but must remain focussed on what truly matters.
 
The modern world can be accused of many faults but post-Enlightenment civilisation has, at its best, created the safe spaces in which we currently thrive, spaces defined by democracy, equality, freedom of expression and access to justice. Though these are all imperfect, they are not feeble, and we owe them the openness which allows Jews to be Jewish, Muslims to be Muslim, Hindus to be Hindu and atheists to challenge the lot of us, all within the same civic space. It troubles me as a religious leader to know that the most significant attacks on this space come today from religion itself, albeit religion distorted and misused. 
 
What does Judaism say about freedom of speech? It has never been an explicitly central rabbinic theme. As Mathew Stone writes, ‘The clearest indication that the Talmud supports debate is the document itself’. It interrogates every proposition and consistently includes dissonant voices. It fearlessly challenges even God. Apologising with a stock phrase like ‘one mustn’t say it, but’, it accuses Heaven itself. ‘Moses threw words at God’, it declares. Jewish blasphemy law is scarcely applied; God can take care of God.
 
Jews are far more sensitive to attacks on fellow Jews and Judaism, knowing that verbal assault is often the precursors to physical attack. Even then, recourse is to protest and laws against incitement. Where Jews themselves are responsible for the curtailment of legitimate liberty of expression, be this in the domains of politics or theology, we must defend freedom of speech as a matter of urgency. We’ve known all too well what it means to live without it. My grandparents used to tell me how in Frankfurt in the 1930’s they stopped by a poster with an ugly caricature and the slogan ‘The Jews are our misfortune’. ‘I quickly nudged your grandmother “Shsh!”’ my grandfather recalled, ‘The Gestapo were watching’.
 
Judaism has a vibrant tradition of defiance, beginning with the midwives who ignored Pharaoh’s decree to kill the Hebrew boy-babies and continuing through such poets as Osip Mandelstam, whom Stalin deported twice in the 1930’s:
    You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it. 
    Where did it get you? Nowhere? 
    You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence
 
Yet the use of language has limits. ‘Freedom’ is not entitlement to say whatever we like, however hurtful. Judaism condemns heedless gossip, lashon hara; the exploitation of another person’s vulnerability, ona’at devarim; cruelty with words and unwarranted verbal assault. Careless or needless humiliation of another person or group, especially in public, is a serious wrong. But where there is cause to call conduct to account Judaism upholds the right to challenge anyone and anything in the name of integrity and justice.
 
A poet in exile was once asked in my home ‘Is there freedom of speech in Zimbabwe?’ ‘Well, there’s freedom before speech’, he answered. We want to live in a world where the way we use speech ensures that there is freedom before, during and after it.
 
Our thoughts are with the families and friends of all those who were murdered in Paris and in the hunt for the killers.