Refugees | HEART AND MIND

09 Feb 2017

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Refugees Permalink

The Dubs Amendment

Sticky Post By admin On February 9, 2017

‘The Dubs Amendment’ was agreed by Parliament last year as a gesture of humanity and hospitality in the face of an immense crisis in which child refugees are the most vulnerable of all. It was supported by public opinion, the widespread feeling that, with its tradition of compassion and hospitality, this country should and could do more.

To close the doors now, when only a fraction of the three thousand children due to come here have been enabled to do so, is cruel. Barbara Winton, daughter of Nicholas Winton whose actions saved the lives of over 600 children in 1938/9 told me: ‘It’s tragedy if the hopes of these young people are dashed. Even 3,000 is just a drop in the ocean, but each drop is a life…’

We need to work together to hold the government to its commitments. We must also play our part as communities and individuals in receiving and welcoming the children who do arrive here, and in helping them to establish new lives.

13 Jan 2017

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

Why we are here on earth

Sticky Post By admin On January 13, 2017

It has been for me a week of heartfelt conversations. In such reflection, in such endeavour to find words which are gentle, honest, encouraging, and which do not infringe upon the shared attentiveness of listening, it becomes clear how much of life is about recognition. Sometimes this recognition concerns acknowledgement of sorrow, sometimes the wondrousness of beauty, but always it deepens our awareness both of each other’s humanity and of our own.

Biblical Hebrew has a profound vocabulary for such realisation. The verb yada is generally translated simply as ‘know’. Though it is used casually in modern conversation – ‘I don’t know’; ‘Who knows?’ – it often expresses in its biblical context the deepest possible dimension of knowing: ‘And you shall know this day and lay it to your heart that God is God’.

This knowledge may be experienced in little things, in the small winter flowers which perfume even the coldest day, in the red fruit of the crab-apple tree, offering January nourishment to the hungry birds. It may be felt in life’s great moments, of birth, love or death, when we perceive even in the mundane, a candle, a tree, a sense of mystery and wonder. It is discovered in moments of awe, in that reverence for life which motivated Isaiah to proclaim his great ideal as if it were the simplest, most obvious truth: ‘They shall not hurt or destroy in all God’s holy mountain’. Isn’t it our failure to feel it as holy which leads us to wound and damage so much of life? That is why it’s so important to pray, since the essence of prayer is to listen, to be cleansed, quietened, simplified, re-centred from all our distractions, so that we know.

The verb Hikir means ‘to recognise’. It means perceiving and understanding what is in front of our eyes. This is not always as easy as it may sound. Jacob, for example, did recognise the multi-coloured coat of his son Joseph when the brothers brought it to him dipped in goat’s blood. But he failed to perceive those betrayals of which the manner of its appearance might have made him aware. In its deepest sense, hikir involves sensing the unseen; the needs, sensitivities and vulnerabilities, the unspoken stories held in the heart.

Most beautifully, Ruth, the foreign girl from Moab, turns in deep appreciation to Boaz who has just welcomed her as a gleaner in his fields and says: ‘How come I’ve found favour in your eyes that you should recognise me, a stranger’. Such recognition is what so many refugees await from us: an appreciation of their humanity, losses, hopes. It expresses the understanding we need in order to breech the barriers of prejudice, between faiths, nationalities, ethnic groups. It’s what we need from each other in ordinary, everyday life, and even more so in times of stress and pain: to feel heard, included, valued, encouraged. What needs hearing is never only that which we succeed in putting into words but what eludes them in the silence of the heart.

Such knowledge and recognition leads us, simply and clearly, towards life’s purpose, a purpose we may express through our family, friendships, work, community, volunteering, activism, religion, faith, or simply through the way we interact with one another: We are here in this world to bring our humanity together in loving kindness, so that we can act to mitigate the cruelty of things, and we are here to appreciate and celebrate life’s blessings.

That’s what our lives, families, friendships, communities and faith are for.

These causes helping child refugees need our support urgently

World Jewish Relief
Mobile School Programme
For more information and to donate, click here

JCORE
Child refugee support co-ordinator
For more information and to donate, click here

JUMP (matches young asylum seekers and refugees who arrive alone in the UK with trained, adult befrienders)
To donate, click here

19 Dec 2016

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Refugees Permalink

Interviewing Lord Dubs

Sticky Post By admin On December 19, 2016

As the horrors perpetrated in Aleppo intensify even further, as winter deepens across millions of refugees, tens of thousands of them in inadequate camps in northern Greece and elsewhere in Europe, it is a relief to listen to a voice of committed compassion.

Alf Dubs was born in Czechoslovakia in 1932. His departure as a small boy on the Kindertransport had a profound effect on him. To this day, he said, he still finds partings searingly painful. That’s no doubt an essential part of why he feels so strongly about the plight of refugees, especially unaccompanied children.

He entered politics to turn values into actions, to make a difference. ‘The vast majority of politicians are public servants with a genuine desire to do good’, he reminded us. He recalled the impact Joe Cox had on him, listening to her speaking in The Commons.

Concern for refugees has been central to his career, both in and outside of Parliament. Between 1988 and 1995 he was director of the Refugee Council. This work and his own life story made him determined to persuade the government to allow more children into this country in the shocking current crisis. At the second attempt ‘The Dubs Amendment’ was passed.

‘What did it’, Lord Dubs said, ‘Was public opinion. This country has a long history of welcoming refugees’. But at the same time he was well aware of the opposite trend, especially after Brexit, toward increased racism and xenophobia. ‘I spent hour after hour knocking on doors, campaigning for Remain,’ he told us.

He was impressed by the quotations from the Torah on either side of the ark in the New North London Synagogue: ‘Love your neighbour’ and ‘Love the stranger’.

Lord Dubs was given a prolonged standing ovation, a tribute to his determination to fight for values which we all share.

Masorti Judaism was key in raising £200,000 across the community to bring children to this country who had legal rights under Dublin 3 to enter the UK.

I have recently launched a further appeal, through the New North London Synagogue and beyond, to support key NGOs in their essential work of supporting refugee children in Europe and once they have reached this country. Please see click here. Please be generous.

16 Dec 2016

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Refugees Permalink

The power of music; the power of evil

Sticky Post By admin On December 16, 2016

Yesterday we accompanied Leslie Lyndon to his final resting place. He was a founding member of our community, leader, cantor, teacher, for over a decade at the heart of our ministerial team, and a close friend. I shall miss him.

He had three especially great gifts: an unfailing smile which expressed a warm, calm and unfailingly kind presence; a beautiful and gracious voice in leading and facilitating prayer; and an unshakeably positive spirit. He was a man who welcomed, enabled, encouraged, included, and wanted no one to be hurt.

When I came home from the funeral and returned, reluctantly, to my computer, I found the following message* from the team who run our Drop-In for asylum seekers. It has no connection with Leslie, and is yet most deeply connected:

We’d like to share this inspiring version of “We Shall Overcome” sung by asylum seekers and refugees. You can watch at http://bit.ly/2h09hFJ

Do listen. ‘We shall overcome…We shall all be friends…’: are these convictions not what lies at the heart of the very power of music itself? For music expresses the strength, tenacity and joy of spirit which tyranny, with all its ever more brutal weapons, its cruelty and its contempt for humanity and God, cannot extinguish, so long as life itself remains, so long as there is a heart to feel and a tongue to sing?

And there is so much to overcome, in the Congo, from where so many of those who attend our asylum seekers drop-in have fled; in Syria, about where the UN humanitarian advisor for, Jan Egeland, just tweeted:

For 3000 years #Aleppo gave so much to world civilisations. How come, when Aleppo’s people needed us the most, we gave so little back?’

I thought of Leslie and his music when I joined the tribute at Westminster Abbey’s Martyr’s Memorial to the men, women and children murdered and wounded in the vile attack on the Coptic Cathedral in Cairo. They went there to celebrate the miracle of life, said Bishop Angaelos, who only two weeks ago was a guest in our community. But, he continued, evil cannot and shall not put out the light of compassion which has come into the world. He may have meant the words in a different theological context from mine, but it’s the same light and the same compassion.

It’s precisely the meaning of the miracle we celebrate at Chanukkah through the story of the one flask of incorruptible oil which the Maccabees found and lit when they re-entered the devastated precincts of the Temple in Jerusalem. It is the inextinguishable light of the human spirit, which always burns longer and deeper than we might have thought possible. By the time one of its flames eventually goes out, another and then yet another has been inspired and ignited.

In the dimension of sight, the spirit is expressed through light; in that of sound, through music. Leslie and I once discussed the Torah’s puzzling words

God is my strength and my song

Is song, a mere sequence of notes, really strength? After all, it can’t prevent bombs from killing innocent people. It can’t often stay the ruthless power of disease. But it keeps the heart of humanity alive, the heart of goodness, kindness and compassion, and it is with that heart that we shall overcome.

*From the team at the Drop-In for Asylum Seekers:

We hope the video will raise money for the Drop-in to purchase supermarket vouchers and travel money for our clients. If you would like to make a donation, you can do so here. The project provides support to hundreds of asylum seekers. It offers food, clothing, consultations with doctors, lawyers and therapists, supermarket vouchers and travel money. It is run entirely by volunteers.

Please also give generously to these urgent causes

Please click here for links to charities helping refugees in the UK and in Greece.

21 Nov 2016

Sticky Post By admin Posted in Community, Refugees Permalink

An impassioned plea for refugees

Sticky Post By admin On November 21, 2016

Refugee Children – How We Can Help

Refugees from Nazi Germany, new to London, twice bombed out in 1940, my mother and her family were taken in by a devout Christian couple, the Micklems. These good people welcomed them into their home in Boxmoor, where they stayed until the end of the war. When they were leaving, my mother said to Mrs Micklem:
How can I ever thank you enough?
She answered:
One day you’ll help others who are refugees as you once were. That’s how you’ll thank us.

I was brought up on the values implicit in that response. I have been privileged to watch my mother, now in her nineties, put them into practice towards both Jewish and non-Jewish refugees. Today, we speak often about the refugee children and how she wants to help.

I am lucky to be part of a generous and open-hearted congregation. At times over the last year I have received daily phone calls. The question is always the same: ‘What can I do to help?’ People feel triply motivated: by compassion for the horrors refugees, especially children, are passing through; by family memories of how our families were once refugees; and by the teachings of the Torah that we must love the stranger, that is, seek for them the physical and emotional security and hope for the future which we want for ourselves and our own children. This is why so many were so generous in helping bring unaccompanied children to the UK via the Safe Passage appeal.

Across the globe the fate of refugees and the numbers involved are so overwhelming that one can be left feeling paralysed. The Talmud teaches: Take on too much and you haven’t taken anything in; take on a little and succeed’. So, what difference can we make?

Over the last weeks I have met several times with the leaders of helping organisations and key members of our community. We agreed to forward specific projects for the New North London and its friends to make happen. They are described below, showing why each matters, what difference our support will make, how to find out more, and how to donate.

All the projects are run by well governed charities with strong reputations. It is un-rabbinic to tell people how to choose between them; the idea is that everyone will find something with which they can identify. Almost all the projects focus on the needs of unaccompanied children.

Tens, if not hundreds, of us are involved in supporting our Drop-In; many have registered with Refugees at Home to offer accommodation; others are engaged in all kinds of different ways. Please continue! But please also help as below. Each organisation is recording our NNLS contributions, so that we can tell you the difference we make.

I’m well aware that I have not been able to consult across the whole community, so I make this appeal in my own name, and as an expression of personal commitment, but in the knowledge that there is substantial support.

How We Can Help

Charity	What we do	Why it matters	Goal	How to donate
In Northern Greece
Refugee Trauma Initiative An Arabic-speaking therapist	We take therapists to refugees in Northern Greece to support their psychosocial needs. We wish to recruit an Arabic-speaking therapist for this project. Language knowledge is crucial.	Refugees in Northern Greece have had, and continue to have experiences, which will in many cases require long-term psychotherapeutic support.	£14,000 for a six-month role, to include salary, flights and accommodation.	For more information, please click here
Women’s knitting groups		To address their growing despair, powerlessness and boredom, we run knitting groups, which are proving highly popular, productive and cathartic.	£6000 will fund a knitting group for 40 women, train facilitators and supply wool to each woman in their weekly group for 6 months	For how to donate, click here.
World Jewish Relief Mobile School Programme	We wish to run a mobile school project in Patras for unaccompanied minors in Northern Greece. We would educate 200 children.	Children are missing out on an education, and working with our local partner the mobile school van would offer maths and language tuition as well as health and hygiene education.	£15,000 is sought towards the overall cost of £51,845	For more information and to donate, click here.
In the UK
JCORE – Jewish council for Racial Equality‘Jump’	We provide befrienders for unaccompanied minors who have made it to the UK. We wish to extend this programme by recruiting more volunteer befrienders.	JUMP matches young asylum seekers and refugees who arrive alone in the UK with trained, adult befrienders to support these isolated youngsters and aid their integration into society.	£1000 will fund a befriending pair for a year.Volunteering as a befriender for a year will help make a real difference to a young person’s life.	For more information click here and to donate, click here
Child refugee support co-ordinator	We want to create a new post of coordinator of services provided by the Jewish community to young asylum seekers.	This role is to help identify needs and match them with helping organisations; to liaise with other communities’ activities and statutory provision and co-ordinate the supply of and demand for help.	£28,000 for a full-time post for a year, to be launched part-time once £10,000 is raised	For more information and to donate, click here
Help RefugeesMEENA	Based in Birmingham & run by Liz Clegg, MEENA provides unique psychological and legal support to unaccompanied minors. With its personal relationships and experience with the children, it is in a unique position to give close support to local authority and social services.	Unaccompanied minors arrive in the UK traumatised and often totally alone. Liz Clegg has a unique and trusted position, having been primary care provider to hundreds of these children living for over a year in the Calais Jungle. She understands the complexity of their needs once they arrive here.	£15,000 to employ Liz Clegg full time for 6 months.	For more information, click here To donate, click here
Winter Clothing	Few of the camps in Greece have been fully ‘winterised’,meaning that most residents are still living in tents only appropriate for the heat of summer, either outside or in large, open warehouses which lack even basic heating. Many have already had flooding.	Softex is a military-run refugee camp in an abandoned industrial warehouse with 900 residents. The need here is absolutely critical.There is a particular urgency for winter coats and jackets	£30 per raincoat to protect people while they are outside; £30 x 332 residents = approx. £10,000.	To donate, please go the Help Refugees website

09 Nov 2016

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

Thoughts on the Anniversary of Kristallnacht 2016

Sticky Post By admin On November 9, 2016

It’s seventy-eight years since the Night of Broken Glass, when Goebbels unleashed upon the Jews of Germany the full of violence of Nazi hate. Though he described the subsequent horrors as the unpremeditated and spontaneous expression of the Kochende Volkseele, the boiling public mood, the smashing, burning and killing were co-ordinated across Germany and beyond. Nor was the timing incidental. It’s widely thought that the failure that summer of the rest of the world to increase their quotas for refugees from Nazism gave Goebbels a moral victory, enabling him to claim that nobody else wanted the Jews either, and gave Hitler the green light to act against them as he pleased.

I was in Frankfurt yesterday, where the Jewish Museum hosts an annual evening of study on the day before Kristallnacht. The subject was the rabbis of Frankfurt who fled the Nazis, and their legacy, focusing on my grandfather and his close colleagues. I re-visited his testimony of those terrible years. I read how he preached of his pride in the appellation ‘Israel’ after the Nazis forced all Jews to add it to their name. I stood where the great Boerneplatz Synagogue was burnt to a ruin. My grandfather was outside, summoned by the Gestapo. My father’s uncle’s family were inside; they lived in a flat adjacent to the lady’s gallery. He was arrested and taken to Buchenwald. His pregnant wife and their four children were hastily taken away by relatives, haunted by the sight of the blackened cupola, now visible through the burnt-out doors, of the great house of prayer. The baby died at birth.

Outside, many thousands of memorial tiles line the walls of the ancient Jewish cemetery.

I was shown pictures of the 1930’s, a Sabena aeroplane like that on which my family escaped, the airfield at Croydon where they landed – the very part of London where refugee children have now been arriving.

I sat at length with the director of the Jewish Museum discussing Frankfurt’s Jewish legacy: Ludwig Boerne, ‘the father of modern journalism’, born in the Judengasse, exiled, like Heinrich Heine, to Paris; and Samson Raphael Hirsch the great neo-orthodox rabbi who taught that ‘love your neighbour’ means seeking the same rights and opportunities for every citizen as you want for yourself, irrespective of religion or race. He taught, too, that the moment you abrogate in any way the rights of the stranger, or make the rights we owe each other conditional on any other attributes than the very fact of being human, created in the image of God, you re-open the gates to ‘all the horror of the slavery in Egypt’.

On the train home I passed through the Ardennes, the landscape of Hitler’s bitter last offensive, mercifully thwarted by Allied courage. The route went not far east of the terrible graveyards of the First World War, which we remember this Sunday on Armistice Day.

I followed responses to the US elections on twitter. And, not by any means solely for that reason, I feel afraid. I fear for my children; I fear for the earth. The world, it seems, is reverting to tribalism; maybe fear itself is part of the cause. I don’t know where or why this began, or if it is always thus. My next writing deadline is about the anniversary of the attack on the Bataclan theatre in Paris.

That is why it is essential to say ‘No’ to racism; ‘No’ to anti-Semitism; ‘No’ to the hatred of Muslims, ‘No’ to the denigration of women.; ‘No’ to xenophobia. That is why we must assert the centrality of the commandments, the very core of faith and humanity, to ‘do justly’, to ‘love compassion’, and never denigrate the image of God in anybody, or act with wanton destruction towards this beautiful world, God’s world, the world of which we must continue to say, conducting ourselves accordingly, ‘And God sees that it is good’.

28 Oct 2016

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

Rights, Responsibilities and Refugees

Sticky Post By admin On October 28, 2016

As I write there are two images before my eyes.

One is of the desperation of children and young people amidst the burning remains of the camp in Calais. That children should suffer mistreatment, especially after the horrors so many of them have passed through, is an indictment of our humanity.

The other picture is of the beautiful letters of the opening words of the Torah, the shining black ink of In the beginning God created, emerging from the blank spaces of the parchment.

Judaism does not have an overt charter of Human Rights. Instead, it speaks of our responsibilities, of doing right, rather than asserting rights.

What Judaism does have, indeed what to many people Judaism primarily is, is a charter of ethics, grounded in the sanctity and dignity with which life is endowed.

This is evident from the very beginning of the Torah. The world is God’s creation. The relevant issue here is not if and how God made the world. The point is rather that the earth itself and all life on it, land, sea, trees, birds, fishes and animals, are integral parts of a sacred whole. They are not ours to destroy but to respect; they are not for us to own, but to nurture and protect.

Most significantly, every human being is imbued with God’s image. It is partly irrelevant how this is interpreted; whether, as different scholars have explained it, the reference is to the capacity for reason, imagination, creativity or speech. In whatever way we understand the words ‘the image of God’, the essential point is that this image resides in every person; it is the sacred trust with which each human being is endowed. Hence, no life is worthless; no one may be treated with cruelty or contempt.

Therefore, a corresponding obligation to care extends across the entire network of humanity and creation. It is our responsibility to safeguard God’s image both in ourselves, through how we conduct our lives; and in each other, through how we treat our fellow human beings and nature itself.

It is an impossibly high demand. History could be summarised as the record of our failures. Yet it is also testament to constant and outstanding examples of justice, compassion, courage, generosity, selflessness, tenderness and devoted love.

The meaning of our moment in time lies partly within our own power. Is it a time of tenderness, or cruelty? Are we, or are we not, faithful to the endowment with which we have been created?

There is no such thing as neutrality.

People call me every day to ask how they can help refugees, especially children. I’ve been listening to discussion among the leaders of several key organisations and hope to put forward more detailed suggestions as to how, individually and collectively, we can try to assist.

In the meantime, here are a number of organisations we should support:

The NNLS Asylum Seekers Drop in

World Jewish Relief

Help Refugees

JCORE (The Jewish Council for Racial Equality)

14 Oct 2016

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

What’s a Succah for?

Sticky Post By admin On October 14, 2016

Shabbat Shalom, and Chag Sameach for the forthcoming festival of Succot.

And it’s a mitzvah (best practice) to fix up the succah immediately after Yom Kippur, since when you have the opportunity to perform a mitzvah (commandment) don’t waste it.

Thus the words of the Shulchan Aruch, the 16^th century, and still current, code of Jewish law composed by Joseph Caro. The commentary of the Mishnah Berurah is a little more generous towards those who may feel slightly fatigued by the 25 hour fast:

This refers to those who are exacting in their deeds; everyone else, and they too, should complete the job the following day.

I’ve a bad reputation as a succah-building fan. Over the years I’ve loved how the children have given me a meagre five minutes to down some food after the fast, before pressing me to start on the succah. I miss them, all mostly away from home, this year.

Not everyone has the space or opportunity to make a succah. That’s why we have a communal succah in the synagogue courtyard, for all to enjoy. Also, people who do have a succah are generally delighted to share, so ‘If you can’t build one, join one.’

Here are some of the things which matter about a Succah:

A succah is a succah because of the sechach, the greenery used for the roof. The walls may be constructed out of anything, from brick walls to resident elephants. But the roof must be made of branches, or materials grown from the earth. These must be cut specially for the succah and placed there for the current, forthcoming festival. In England, the best branches are laurel and bay; one can also buy woven willow or reeds made solely for this purpose.

Succot is a harvest festival, chag ha’assif, the celebration of the gathering of the produce from the orchards and fields. It’s a way of saying ‘thank you’ for the season’s blessings, with grace and beauty. As a keen gardener, I like to choose what to grow with the succah in mind. If you have succeeded in growing something special, please bring a sample to hang in the synagogue succah!

A succah is essentially a temporary structure. It reminds us that life is beautiful but also fragile, full of wonder, but not to be taken for granted.

A succah is open to the elements. If the rain can’t penetrate the roof, then it isn’t truly a succah. This is an important reminder to those of us accustomed to warm houses that for many shelter is insecure, imperfect and uncertain and that we should not forget those who regularly endure wet and cold, by day and night.

The succah reminds us that we, too, were once refugees, with no other shelter than such frail huts. Europe, and the world, is full of millions of refugees*. For very many of them, a succah would be a great improvement on the cold, the wet, the homelessness and the hopelessness they have to endure all the time.

A succah is a place of hospitality; it’s a place not only of the gathering of the harvest, but of the gathering together of friends, strangers and community. It reminds us that strength lies in solidarity, a solidarity we should be ready to extend to those who have been forced to flee the places where they, like us, once felt at home.

The succah represents trust and peace; the mystics call it tsila dimeheimanuta ‘the canopy of faith’. It expresses our hope for a world in which such frail shelter will be sufficient because everyone can feel trust not only in God but in the goodwill of their neighbours and the neighbouring nations, so that there is no need for fortresses and border barriers because humankind is at peace with itself, with nature and with God.

And, back down to earth, a succah is fun to build!

*Two organizations helping Refugees:

Help Refugees is a grassroots humanitarian organisation providing emergency relief in more refugee camps in Europe than any other organisation.

Refugees at Home is a small UK based group aiming to connect those with a spare room in their home with asylum seekers and refugees in need of accommodation.

16 Sep 2016

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

What Love Is?

Sticky Post By admin On September 16, 2016

I’m not sure what the opposite of love is.

I don’t think it’s hate; hate seems to me more like love gone wrong, love’s failure. Perhaps the opposite of love is indifference, lack of care at all. It is against this, this seeming incapacity to be moved, this evident lack of will to be bothered, that Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, the great testifiers of the Holocaust, inveigh. Yet even indifference is a form of love’s failing.

For human life is defined by the fortunes of love. Love’s hopes and conquests, its frustrations and grief, form the secret history of every person, which we garner in our heart and bequeath, knowingly and unknowingly and in all its complexities, to the next generations.

As a rabbi I often stand as witness to love’s beginnings and love’s endings.

Except that the beginnings, under the wedding canopy, aren’t really beginnings any more. We don’t live in a context where parents arrange the marriages of their offspring, or when a man, smitten at the mere sight of the picture of a young woman sent him by some fussing, well-meaning aunt, commits his heart and fortunes all at once. (I know couples who ‘met’ that way and fifty years of happiness followed).

Perhaps love begins in some serendipitous encounter in line at the bus stop or airport, or simply on-line, full stop. As George Elliot wrote, somewhat wryly for my taste: ‘Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand”.

Or perhaps love begins when a mother receives her baby from the hands of the midwife. Then commences the joy and anguish of parenthood, the unfulfillable longing to protect from all harm and mischance, from every cold wind, cold teacher, cruelty, illness, accident and torment this swiftly growing and changing person, while striving to let go and not be hurt when he or she pushes you away and tells you firmly: ‘It’s absolutely none of your business’.

Inevitably, whether as parents, partners or children, we find ourselves asking, in those moments when we have the restraint to stand back from our misapprehensions and conflicts: Why didn’t I? Why couldn’t I? Why did it take me so long to understand? Then, if we are not too proud, and true care has softened our stubbornness, we seek to make apology and forgiveness a part of our love too. No one escapes such mistakes.

And I witness love’s ending, the ineluctable moment when death says ‘Let go’, when a person must part from the body whose hand they held, whose love they craved, and turn with a broken heart to what looks like the endless bleakness of the future. Except that it is never the end because love is never over. It travels with us wherever we go, inextinguishable in our heart, and all our future love is always the branch and leaf of the love that has been.

And we are all witness to love’s longing, to the eyes of bewildered children which look at you from the street, or the screen, or the tent-flap: ‘Do not hurt me; do not forsake me’, they say. Thousands upon thousands of children, and adults too, look at us like that, refugees, or homeless, or with a house but not a home because there’s no companionship, no love. ‘Who are you?’ they ask us, ‘What are you?’ ‘Are you human?’ There are eyes, too, which have no more strength or hope to look up and meet us in the eye.

We say that God is love, surely not because empirical evidence points consistently in that direction, but perhaps in the trust that the infinite movement of life itself somehow retains whatever molecules of love we have contributed to love’s totality and brings them to fulfilment somewhere, some time, in its unbounded becoming.

02 Sep 2016

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

Elul – month of preparation

Sticky Post By admin On September 2, 2016

Next week the crescent moon of the Hebrew month of Elul will first appear in the sky. When that moon wanes it will be Rosh Hashanah, the New Year. Elul is therefore the month of preparation, of self-questioning, dreams and commitments to action.

There are two great motivators towards inner change, two great causes of Teshuvah, or return: longing, and shame.

To the mystics, longing is intrinsic to our deepest nature. It flows from the well of binah, the instinctive understanding, the intuition of oneness, which binds together all being in a profound and hidden connection. It is felt in the joy so many experience in the presence of nature, in the kinship of animals, in the awareness of beauty and mystery as the sun sets over the ocean, as the water glows orange, then red, then deep liquid black. For a brief but timeless interval, our thoughts are silenced, simplified into wonder.

In such moments of awareness, we appreciate that it is not our ultimate desire to be masters or controllers of creation, or oppressors of other people, or of other creatures, or of the earth itself. Rather, life is our common and great, but brief, privilege; an unearned and incomprehensible gift which we share with all existent being. We are life’s guests and life’s servants, and our companions are all living things. At such junctures we realise most deeply that we do not want to hurt them or cause injury, but only to be faithful to the greater life to which we all belong. We are here to be healers.

Yet, almost always without willing it, we do cause pain, individually and collectively. Countless people cry out to us in their suffering; the hungry, refugees, people in physical and mental torment. Many more have lost the opportunity, or the strength, or even the will, to cry out: enslaved children, the hopeless destitute. Many have no audible voice in the first place, the animals we hurt and kill, the earth itself and the wounds of nature.

Sometimes the voices we do not heed are very close at hand, among our friends, in our own family, our partner, our children. We may be hurtful without even noticing it, like the driver who, unaware of having caused a terrible accident, travelled twelve miles before the police caught up with him and told him, ‘Do you realise what you’ve done?’

Shame is not an emotion we often want to experience, but it has the power to be a great teacher, especially when feel it not as a result of the rebuke of others but instinctively, from within ourselves. It scours us with its questions: Why have I been thoughtless? Hurtful? Heedless?

Then a profound desire to be different grows inside us; it needs no outer prompting. We want to become the kind of person we know we truly are and can be. We want to live a life of generosity, purity, kindness and concern.

Such longing and such shame are the essence of true Teshuvah, repentance and return.

Every day in Elul (except on Shabbat) the shofar is blown. Maimonides explains its purpose: ‘Wake up’, it cries out; ‘Wake up, you sleepers’.

Elul is the month of preparation, the month of awakening.

P.S. I have just come back from listening to faith and civic leaders, and Juliette Stevenson and Vanessa Redgrave speaking outside the Home Office on our responsibility towards refugee children, especially those who have the legal right to be reunited with family in the UK but are stuck amidst the dangers of Calais. It was heart-rending, and deeply important. A delegation of faith leaders handed in a letter urging the Home Office to show moral leadership. The rally, organised by London citizens, emphasised the Jewish experience of the Kindertransport and the 1930’s. My mother, who came here aged 16 as a refugee from Nazi Germany, said to me this week: ‘I’m constantly aware that, were it not for the generosity of others who stood guarantor for us, neither I nor my family would be alive’.
We are not at liberty to be indifferent.
Some useful links: Jewish Community Campaign to fund bringing 150 child refugees to the UK; Help Refugees; Safe Passage