The Jewish Year | HEART AND MIND

21 Apr 2026

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

Yom HaZikaron

Sticky Post By admin On April 21, 2026

Today is Yom HaZikaron, the Memorial Day for the dead in Israel’s wars.

No family is unaffected. My father’s uncle, Alfred Freimann, was among those murdered in the shayarah, the convey of academics on its way to the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus, when it was ambushed on 13 April 1948 and everyone was killed. (https://honorisraelsfallen.com/fallen/freiman-dr-avraham-chaim-alfred/) He was a leading jurist, involved in preparations for Israel’s independence. I cannot imagine the impact this had on my father, who was in the Haganah in the siege of Jerusalem, in that grim, courageous year. ‘I lost many friends in the Old City,’ he would say. His Yahrzeit falls on Yom ha’Atzmaut.

I’m thinking today of many friends: Raba Tamar, whose brother lost his life in Tsahal; Aaron Barnea, who lost his son in Lebanon; Rami Elchanan and Bassam Aramin, fellow leaders of the Parents Circle, who each lost a daughter to terror; Sharone Lifschitz, whose father was murdered in Gaza; Steve Brisley, whose sister Lianne was murdered with her daughters on October 7; the Hathaleen family whose brother Awad was killed by violent settlers.

That is why I have lit a candle here at home and have made a list of friends to call during the day. It is also why, last night, I joined the members of our synagogue watching together the 21st Israeli Palestinian Joint Memorial Ceremony, ‘We Are the Day After.’ (https://www.familiesforum.co.uk/21-st-joint-memorial-day-ceremony)

What can I say, but the silence of an aching heart?

Women and men, Israeli and Palestinian, spoke of how violent death took away their loved ones, children, brothers, cousins; of how the horror of loss and the destruction of their homes shook their families. Unable to travel, most of the Palestinian participants testified by video.

Each person, every circumstance, was unique. But key feelings were not:

‘I was brought up to respect all life;’

‘I asked myself, “What do I do with my grief?”

‘I joined the Parents Circle, because here I can speak of my loved one, and people understand.’

‘We have the same grief in our hearts;’

‘Here is where I feel hope: in the end, we will find a way to live together in peace.’

As the organisers bravely wrote:

This year we gather in a burning reality – war, death, rockets, oppression and injustice on all sides. Despite everything and in fact because of everything we choose to look forward. The joint ceremony does not seek to compare losses or measure pain but to recognize that every life taken was a whole life with dreams, with family and with a future cut short. Together we chart a path that acknowledges pain but refuses to surrender to it. A path of humanity, solidarity and hope.

What can one add, but the silence of an aching – yet somewhere hopeful? – heart?

16 Apr 2026

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

As we read about healing

Sticky Post By admin On April 16, 2026

The painful nature of these days between Yom HaShoah, Yom haZikaron and Yom ha’Atzamut has been brought home by the appalling antisemitic attack against Finchley Reform Synagogue, down the road from my own community. I feel for their clergy, lay leaders, and all the congregation, and have written to them in solidarity.

It can’t be by chance that this week’s Torah reading concerns healing. The descriptions of the diseases may seem abstruse and dated: red, green and white creeping sores eating away at living flesh, infected clothing and even the walls of buildings. But the hurts across the body of humanity, and of life itself, are real and rife, and the need for healing is as urgent now as ever.

selective focus photography of woman holding yellow petaled flowers — Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash

Such healing must be threefold. What can I say about personal pain? It wouldn’t be right for me to record the details of the conversation at our shabbat table last week between a Ukrainian couple and an Israeli family devastatingly affected by October 7. I only note that they found plenty to share in heartfelt words, and in fellow feeling that words will never capture. What can I say about when I went to thank the man who prayed with me for his family in Beirut and mine in Israel? ‘What do you hear about your dear ones?’ ‘Lost,’ he whispered. Unsure if I heard right, I asked again: ‘Just lost,’ he said, ‘Lost.’ In the Torah, the Cohen who inspects diseased persons requires them to go into isolation for a period of potential incubation, before bringing them back into the community. In our day the isolation, the inexpressibility of pain and trauma, the inner loneliness, is all too real. The question is whether we can we create community with enough sensitivity and heart to include those who bear these deep wounds and, without inflicting further pain, embrace them in our lives.

We need deep healing both across the Jewish Diaspora and in Israel. The Torah speaks of breaking apart those buildings which show ongoing signs of disease across their walls. We are in an opposite position. How can we rebuild after the devastation of war, in Beer Sheva, Haifa, Tel Aviv? I recently officiated at the wedding of a couple whose flat was largely destroyed. How sorely relevant were the traditional words about building ‘a faithful home in Israel.’ Harder is the question of how we can rebuild destroyed houses in the West Bank, like the homes in the village of Khallet a-Sidra, destroyed by Jewish extremists, which the army is preventing the families who lived there for years from rebuilding. This has to be wrong. Harder still is how trust, hope and belief in our shared humanity and future can be restored, for Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and non-Jews alike, not just in Israel but wherever we are in the world. There is too much hurt, and too much hate, plenty of it directed at us too. Every word, every deed that expresses and deepens our shared humanity matters immensely. I hardly dare call this healing, but at least it may mitigate the hurt.

As humanity, as life on earth, we desperately need healing. I think of the Torah’s words ‘I am God, your healer,’ and ask myself, ‘Who is that “you”?’ It’s not just people; it is all life. ‘The earth is God’s’ said the poet of Psalm 24. That includes the rainfall and rivers, the soil and all that it sustains, the tall trees of the forests and their vital underbelly of shrub and scrub, ground nesting birds, beetles and even ants. The Torah instructs us to rip the diseased fabric from an infected garment if the rest of it can be saved. But we are here altogether on this earth, interwoven in one web of destiny, and no single part of life can be isolated and torn away from the rest. If we poison one domain, we allow that poison to seep slowly into us all. Time and again the Torah repeats the word ‘tahor,’ pure; the role of the priest is letaher, to help the ill and inured back to a state of health and purity. I used to think tahor was merely an outdated term for an ideal ritual state. Now I understand the word more truly and see little more urgent that the cleansing of our way of life to allow the very earth to become pure and wholesome once again.

The task of healing is immense. The Torah delegates it to the priests, the Cohanim. Contemporary reality demands it of us all.

May this Yom ha’Atzmaut, on which we celebrate all the many positive achievements of Israel and our People, mark a significant turn on the path to true healing.

01 Apr 2026

Sticky Post By admin Posted in The Jewish Year Permalink

Thought for the Day on the Eve of Pesach

Sticky Post By admin On April 1, 2026

Tonight is Seder night, the start of Passover, the Jewish Festival of Freedom, when we recall the Exodus from Egypt, our people’s journey from slavery to freedom. It’s a story which embraces all our stories. My mother, aged a hundred, tells how she escaped Nazi Europe. A woman whose husband is imprisoned in the Congo says, ‘May God who freed your people, free him.’ A Muslim guest who fled for his life stands up and exclaims: ‘Your story is my story too.’

For, far from free, so much of the world suffers beneath oppression and war.

Maybe that’s why the Seder ends with a song, Chad Gadya, which means ‘one little goat’ in Aramaic. It’s a ditty in the style of The House That Jack Built: a cat eats the goat, dog bites cat, stick hits dog, fire burns stick, water quenches fire, cow drinks water, butcher kills cow, the angel of death despatches the butcher. But then comes God and slays the angel of death.

I have a vivid memory of my grandfather, aged and weak, catching my eye and whispering at what he knew would be his final Seder, ‘after death comes God.’ That was his faith, his hope.

But does God have the last word in our violent world? It hardly feels that way today. I phone family in Jerusalem: we’re in and out of bomb shelters. My heart goes out to them. I call an Iranian friend: ‘No word from my sisters in Tehran.’ ‘My hometown’s just been bombed,’ a Ukrainian acquaintance texts me.

So that Chad Gadya song feels like a metaphor for history, only it’s not goats and cats, but humanity who’s the victim. In their heart-rending shared memorial service, bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families sing that song in Hebrew and Arabic together.

Yet, I still see my grandfather’s face and hear his whisper: after the angel of death comes God; life is greater than death.

But I hear those words as a question: What world is this? What do we want it to be? Of death, or life; oppression or freedom; cruelty or compassion?

I pray this Passover will truly mark our journey towards freedom, so that we can celebrate God’s world together, knowing that the same sacred spirit flows through us all, whatever our faith or nationality, giving life to all that breathes.

We’ve had too much of cat eating goat, human devouring human. May this Festival of Freedom mark our liberation from hatred, violence and fear, for my people, and every people.

01 Apr 2026

Sticky Post By admin Posted in The Jewish Year Permalink

Night

Sticky Post By admin On April 1, 2026

The Seder must be conducted at night.

The Haggadah makes repeated reference to night, most famously in the four questions: ‘How is this night different from all other nights?’

This is not just about timing. Night is a metaphor for the darkness of the challenges through which we have to struggle. Yet, like the five rabbis who debated the Exodus until their pupils came to tell them that it was time for the morning prayers, we do not give up until a new dawn has broken.

This symbolises the deep resilience of Judaism and the human spirit. We need that resilience now as much as ever, in these frightening times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-QsVUPF2XY

26 Dec 2025

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

My last Shalom NNLS is a big ‘Thank You’

Sticky Post By admin On December 26, 2025

I’m writing this, my last Shalom NNLS, on the closing day of Chanukah – some days early so that it can be scheduled to go out while the shul office is closed over the holidays. As I hand over to my colleagues, I feel accompanied by the afterglow of the eight candles burning on the full Chanukiah.I’m drawn once again to the Talmudic discussion about whether one may light one Chanukah candle from another. The answer is affirmative, so long as the flame is passed directly, with no intermediary. I see that response not just as a legal decision, but as about how life works. It’s how we learn to see, feel and be, more deeply.

As I close my time at the New North London, I want to give thanks for the light I’ve been given and open my heart to the new lights I will be shown in the future. So many people in our beloved community have shared their light and guided me.

Thank you to the teenage leaders, madrichot and madrichim, whom I’ve seen calmly lead a shy child, frightened by the charming behaviour all around, to a still corner to read the Shema. It’s like watching kindness itself smooth down a tiny, safe patch of calm amidst the screaming chaos of contemporary life. There’s godliness in the way those teens do that.

I respect and appreciate those who’ve said, but not in words: ‘Take this candle and accompany me.’ They’ve lead me to places in the heart, chambers deep underneath, safe from the depredations of time, where love abides despite the death of the beloved years ago. Here, they listen to them still, commune with them, and, although they cannot hold them in their arms, or bless them as one blesses one’s child on Friday night, they are still strengthened, hurt, and made more deeply human by that love which can never be extinguished.

How susceptible to pain the heart is. How important, therefore, is every moment of kindness, thoughtfulness, generosity and tenderness in a world which so often proves unspeakably cruel.

Thank you to those who’ve said ‘Haven’t you seen?’ and showed me a plant, shared a line from a poem, illumined words of Torah. During lock-down I received as many photographs of nature as questions about Jewish law. ‘What bird is that?’ ‘Have you noticed how the Judas trees have begun to flower!’ (In Hebrew they’re called clil hachoresh, the crown of the forest.) How poorer we would be if people didn’t hold out a candle and say, ‘Look there! See this beautiful world!’

I honour everyone who’s said: ‘Contribute more!’ People dedicate themselves to so many essential concerns: ‘We do therapy with horses and dogs for people who lost family in the fighting in Israel and Gaza.’ ‘We’re training local women to support victims of rape after the war in the Balkans.’ ‘Will you join us planting hedgerows and mini forests in Barnet?’ ‘Help me support these refugees who’ve nowhere to sleep but the streets.’ What can I say? You light pathways into worlds that desperately need our care. You illumine the road of conscience.

I’m thankful to colleagues of all faiths with whom we’ve stood against the hatreds that distort religion and cut deep wounds of violence into our world. Together we have striven to affirm the true oneness of God, whose spirit flows through everything making all life sacred.

I’m grateful for the prayers, music, poetry and Torah, which have led us to the hidden, holy core of life and held us there, even momentarily, so that we may know it and be at one.
All these are lights which kindle my, and your, inner light.
I shall try, as we all do, to stay faithful to the light with which I have been entrusted.

May God’s light, present in all life, illumine the path of goodness and compassion for us all.

24 Dec 2025

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

Chanukah: the lights of hope in a time of darkness

Sticky Post By admin On December 24, 2025

I see the lights of Chanukah reaching out into the darkness. Chanukah is a festival of hope, courage and inspiration and we, and the world, urgently need them all.

But now, not only after Bondi Beach but at the close of a cruel year, that darkness feels deep indeed. My Christian friends speak similarly as they approach the celebration of Christmas. We, and the Muslim colleagues who sent words of sorrow and solidarity, share the simple prayer: ‘May the light prove stronger than the darkness.’

It’s a prayer addressed to each other, ourselves and our governments, as much as to God. We need light.
That doesn’t mean that we can ignore the hatred, cruelty and contempt abroad in our world. But I won’t detail them here. I will focus on the light, because we need it so badly.

On a personal note, the second day of Chanukah is the Yahrzeit for Raphael’s and my mother, Lore. She left us a collection of stories, Maerchen in German, fables in poetic prose. One of them concerns a little boy who is terrified of the dark and gets lost in the forest in the pitch-black night. Yet coming, panic-stricken and exhausted, upon a clearing, he sees the bright moon and stars and hears the swaying of the trees. He stops, breathes in, and stands still in wonder: ‘I always knew it,’ he says to himself, ‘beyond the darkness there is light.’ I think now that, knowing she was dying, our mother wrote this story as a message to her two young boys, and to herself.

Returning to Chanukah, the date marks the repossession of the Temple by the Maccabees. Who knows what they actually thought as they contemplated the ruined precincts? Their battles weren’t over. Right next door stood a fortress still in enemy hands.
Yet the Talmud chooses to tell us that the first thing they did was look for light. Whoever the editors of the Talmud were, they wanted this to be the message of Chanukah for future generations: Seek light! Whatever the darkness around you, seek it out! And when you find it, even if it’s just one tiny jar, even if you think, ‘This won’t last. It’s a mere nothing! It’ll be out before it’s lit!’ – go ahead and light it.

That, taught Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib Alter of Ger, is where the miracle of Chanukah’s eight days begins, not in heaven, but on earth. Eight, he wrote, represents transcendence, seeing beyond. In kabbalah, the eighth sacred quality if we count upwards, is binah, intuition. It’s the insight that beyond, and within, everything, even in the heart of darkness, resides God’s spirit. There is an inalienable holiness, and inextinguishable point of light, at life’s core.

On Chanukah that or haganuz, that hidden flame, is kindled on our Menorah and placed not in secret, but overlooking the highway, in the public square. Hope and light must be ‘out there,’ a call to courage and the strength of collective goodness.

The Talmud asks, and then confirms, that ‘we may light one candle from another’ directly, flame to flame. This represents the truth that one person’s light, creativity, kindness, bravery inspires others, who inspire yet others about whom the individual who lit the first flame will never know.

So we must never say: ‘It’s too little. The darkness is too thick.’ Despite everything, let the lights of courage, inspiration, creativity, companionship, goodness, kindness, determination and hope shine forth into the coming year.

31 Oct 2025

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

Jews and Halloween???

Sticky Post By admin On October 31, 2025

Walking past spooks, spiders, cobwebs (bird traps – please don’t!), skulls, crossbones and pumpkins with my dog Nessie yesterday, I thought I’d research what Jews have to say about Halloween. More fool me! I’d no notion how much there’s out there.

First a caution: anything about spirits touches deep places. Judaism teaches that the soul survives death. We pray for our dead to be ‘bound in the bond of eternal life.’ We’re admonished to leave them in peace. I’ve a memory, strange, vivid, of the spirit of Lore, my mother, just after she died in hospital, appearing for a half-second, less even than a moment, in the corridor of our house in Douglas Park Crescent, and gesturing goodbye before vanishing forever. So I’ve deep respect for everything concerning our beloved dead.

But about Jews and Halloween I knew nothing. As a Scot, I should have realised the date derives from the Celtic festival of Samhain. Pronounce this if you can: “Oidhche Shamhna theirear gamhna ris na laoigh.” It means that on Samhain night, calves become stirks, (beast aged six to twelve months). Samhain’s when summer turns to winter. The harvest’s in, the long indoor hours have begun, food will have to be rationed. The veil between our world and the spirit world is thin, and souls revisit their erstwhile homes.

Later, Halloween became Christian, just as in Judaism ancient dates are overlaid with Jewish history. But if Halloween’s origins are agricultural and pagan, does Judaism forbid participation?

‘Definitely!’ writes Rabbi Michael Broyde: Halakhah, Jewish law prohibits both “idolatrous customs” and “foolish” practices. Halloween may be foolish, but it’s not idolatrous, argue others: it’s just American, like Thanksgiving. It’s “harmless fun.” (See Kveller Magazine for more)

No doubt that’s why there’s so much kosher Halloween candy: “Creepy Peepers —each wrapped in a cartoonishly bloodshot eyeball foil wrapper; Dr. Scab’s Monster Lab Chocolate Body Parts, bags of fingers, ears, eyeballs and mouths, strangely milchig, rather than fleishig. There’s even a line in Halloween Fair Trade Kosher. (See Edmon Rothman in JTA for more)

So what does the rabbi say? You certainly wouldn’t have found me sending my children out tricking and treating. But would I inveigh against others? There’s a rabbinic tradition as old as the Talmud about not wasting your breath when people aren’t going to listen anyway. And there are worse things to object to.

Yet here’s some Jewish advice.

Pumpkins: next year, grow them for the Succah. Let’s have a ‘best pumpkin for the shul Succah’ competition.

Trick-and-treat: Hang on until Purim, when you can be treated with halakhah on your side. And remember: ‘trick’ doesn’t mean threatening to throw eggs at someone’s window if they don’t give you Quality Street or Heroes. It means ‘party-trick’, like offering a short song or performance. If you can’t wait until Purim, Chanukkah geld is a respectable interim.

Spirits: As Sam Glazer beautifully writes, we have our own harvest festival, called Succot, when we too welcome spirits in the form of the Ushpizin, the souls of honoured guests like Abraham and Sarah. So from now on keep a nook for your spook in your Tabernacle. (See The San Diego Jewish World for more)

As for me, will I stock up on kosher sweets in case gangs of kids come knocking on the door (some might even be from my own community!)? Probably. Because I hate seeming mean, and even the mere thought that someone might think ‘Mean Jew’ cuts horribly deep.

But you won’t catch me lighting my Shabbes candles inside a pumpkin when Shabbat comes in tonight.

PS: My excuse for writing this? I live with heavy themes week after week and sometimes it’s too much.

17 Oct 2025

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

In our hands – the glory of creation

Sticky Post By admin On October 17, 2025

How wonderful it is to begin once again the cycle of the Torah. I hold the yad, the pointer hand, over the Torah’s opening word, Bereishit, ‘In the beginning,’ and feel at once a sense of mystery. What lies unknown and unknowable in the blank margins of the parchment before the first letters inscribe themselves in firm black ink upon the imagination, before ‘And God says, “Let there be…”’? The world begins in wonder.

And in the joy of creative beauty. ‘Look!’ says the Torah: the waters, grasses, fruit-bearing trees, fishes, amphibians, birds and animals, and even you and I. God’s sacred energy courses through them all, and says, ‘Behold! This is good!’ Still today, that same life-force flows through the earth, sustaining everything that lives.

‘Look!’ says Maimonides, study the world and you will at once be filled with wonder at the majesty of God’s works. That is the secret of the love of God. Then take a step back, humbled by how small you are before such glory, intricacy, beauty. That is the secret of the reverence for God.

But don’t look too far, says Sean Ronayne, who recorded the songs of every bird in Ireland, natives and visitors alike: ‘The beauty is everywhere. Stop searching for the big show – there’s no need. Open your mind and let it come to you.’

That’s how my wife told me with excitement: ‘I realised it was different kind of song, that I hadn’t heard before. So I looked up and there was a flock of long-tailed tits.’ Gorgeous, they are, with their pink breast-feathers, chatterers, like a community at Kiddush.

Or maybe you prefer to keep your eyes close to the ground. ‘I’m looking for hedgehogs,’ I explain to a fellow midnight dog walker on the Heath, on the night of Simchat Torah, the Joy of Torah, the joy of God’s creation. ‘In the next field, two or three of them,’ she answers. I never did find them. But closer to home there’s that pair of rescue hedgehogs we’ve just released in the woodlands behind the synagogue. May they fulfil the blessing God gave all the creatures: ‘Go forth and multiply.’

The mystics have their own way. They don’t just say the seven-times repeated, ‘And God saw that it was good.’ It may not be strictly grammatical, but they also read the words backwards: ‘See God in all God’s works, and see that this is good.’ They understood that God’s sacred, life-giving energy is present not just in the heavens above, but in the first small oak leaves emerging from the acorn, and in the watchful eye of the robin that hops on to your garden spade.

‘I stopped on my way to synagogue,’ Michael S. told me years ago: ‘It was a cold, bright autumn morning and the drops of dew in a spider’s web were caught in the rays of the rising sun. After that, I was ready for prayer.’ ‘No, he added, ‘That was already my prayer.’

‘You owe me nothing in life,’ wrote Sean Ronayne, dedicating his book Nature Boy to his pregnant wife and their unborn child, Laia: ‘All that I ask from you is that, one day, you fly the flag for nature and love it as it so deserves, and give it the voice it needs.’

That’s what God wants of each of us. For, observed the moral philosopher Hans Jonas, the wondrous work of creation, marked with the image of God, has passed into ‘man’s precarious trust, to be completed, saved, or spoiled by what he will do to himself and the world.’

What, then, are we making of this trust, you and I? And those who hold power over creation? Shall we, as God enjoined on Adam and Eve, serve creation with reverence and preserve it with respect? Or… or… or what?

12 Sep 2025

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

The journey of Teshuvah

Sticky Post By admin On September 12, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

29 Aug 2025

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

Hearing God In Our Heart

Sticky Post By admin On August 29, 2025

This week brings the new moon of Elul, the month of Teshuvah, return. From its first day until Shemini Atzeret we recite Psalm 27 every evening and morning. I know one shouldn’t have favourites, but I love this Psalm. It’s filled with the longing to find God, to feel God’s presence in the world and the gift of God’s breath in our hearts.

The Psalms begins: ‘God is my light.’ The rabbis differentiated between the outer light of the sun which brings dawn and dusk, and the inner light of the sacred, hidden within all creation, which only the eye of the spirit can see. The Psalm invites us to look at the world through such eyes.

Sometimes this is gifted to us in moments of wonder. Nicky and I were standing on the slate-rock shores of the Isle of Seil at twilight when we saw an otter climb out of the sea onto the deck of a small fishing boat, walk slowly along it, pausing twice to look cautiously in our direction, before sliding back into the water. With it slipped away the last orange band of sunlight behind the black outline of Mull. For a few gracious minutes we saw into the world’s secret life.

At other times, we have to earn deeper vision by looking with eyes of compassion. I’m at the supermarket cash desk, someone annoyingly slow is in front of me and the cashier’s taking too much time. I look again and see differently: here’s a man who’s grown frail, struggling to manage with just one functioning hand. The woman at the till, knowing she’ll get complaints from the queue, gets up from her seat, speaks cheerfully, helps the man pack and place his card on the reader.

The incident may be trivial. But if we looked more often with compassionate eyes, we might be less impatient, less frustrated, and notice more often the sacred dignity in lives we might otherwise have ignored or even despised.

The Psalm continues: ‘God is my light and my salvation.’ Sometimes this is an urgent prayer. Bishop Nowakowski texted me yesterday:

I’m in Ukraine for several days… last night was especially challenging with the bombs of death and destruction… With prayerful best wishes, Kenneth.

It’s a supplication Israelis, and Palestinians, know only too well.
But, hopefully more often, God is our salvation in a different sense. Seeing into the inner life of the world, becoming more aware of people’s dignity and struggles, and the fragile beauty of non-human life around us, we appreciate more deeply that we’re here to care for all being, because God’s presence resides in it all. We are saved from hopelessness, aimlessness and depression, and find new strength and purpose.

‘For you my heart speaks,’ says the Psalm, meaning that God is present in our hearts and speak to us there. If, amidst our fears and distractions, we can nevertheless listen with our heart, with attentiveness and humility, we will perceive life with deeper wonder and compassion and find our purpose in caring for it in whatever ways we can. That is a great secret of the path of Teshuvah, return.

In these harsh times, may God be our light and our salvation on this road.