The Jewish Year | HEART AND MIND

13 Dec 2024

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

Finding the Light

Sticky Post By admin On December 13, 2024

‘She always saw the best in people.’ ‘He had a gift for finding the good in every situation.’ How I admire people like that!

I’m speaking on the phone to Matthew Biggs, of Gardener’s Question Time Fame. He’s not been well. He tells me that when he’s having treatment, he stares out of the hospital window and sees where daffodils could be planted and thinks what it would mean to others to have a truly beautiful space to look at while waiting anxiously for therapies or results. Then he describes exactly what he’s doing to make this happen.

That’s the essence of Chanukah, which now draws near. It’s about finding the light in any situation. When the Maccabees re-entered the Temple precincts after a long and bitter war, they must have encountered an utterly dispiriting sight: everything in ruins, everything holy contaminated and broken. But, in the Talmud’s words, ‘they searched and found one single vial of inviolate oil’ with which they lit the Menorah so that it burnt for a week and a day with a wondrous, sacred light.

We commemorate this miracle ritually by lighting our Chanukah candles. But we live it through how we see the world. Time and again our eyes are drawn to destruction; media and social media thrive on disaster, anger and hate. But there are other ways of looking.

For example, during Covid there were nature-lovers who wrote in chalk the names of the wildflowers that grew through the gaps in the paving stones and walls. There were nurses who, helpless to do more in the loneliness of lock-down and knowing what love means, sent their patient’s family their own mobile number, put their phone to the ear of a sick husband and father, and enabled those who loved him to say goodbye.

Such people manage to see midst the bleakness life’s sacred light. Today, in these tough times, with the world so full of destruction, it matters that we do likewise. God’s light resides in all that lives; it’s up to us to see it.

But seeing it is not enough. The Talmud has a motto: Ma’alin bakodesh: in sacred matters we go up, not down. That’s why on Chanukah we don’t start with eight candles and descend, night by night, to just one, even though this makes sense since the quantity of oil in the Menorah lit by the Maccabees must have got less and less. Instead, we follow the School of Hillel and start with one light, ascending, night by night, to eight.

Ma’alin is a causative verb: it means not just ‘go up’ but ‘raise up’ and applies not just to Chanukah, or religious rituals, but to all of life. When we encounter what’s holy, we must try to raise it up, and, as the Hasidic Master taught, however hidden, repressed and neglected, an inextinguishable spark of holiness resides in all life. The challenge is first to see it, then to nurture it, cup our hands around it and let its flame rise up.

This applies even to little Iggle, the tiny baby hedgehog carefully nursed back towards its survival weight by my wife Nicky. It applies, too, to the ancient chestnut tree for which a friend campaigned until the council relented from cutting it down. Nothing living is so small that it doesn’t matter.

It applies all the more to children, orphaned, hungry and heart-broken, in terrible wars in which their only role has been to suffer. Can we do something, anything, that brings, food, healing, hope even to just one of them, wherever they are in the world?

Chanukah is not just about the miracle of the light that was. It’s about the light within all life that waits for us to find it and raise it up. That’s how we create hope, and the hope we bring always illumines hope in others too.

11 Oct 2024

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

Yom Kippur 5785/ 2024

Sticky Post By admin On October 11, 2024

We gather on Yom Kippur in painful, cruel and uncertain times. I wish each of us individually, and all of us collectively, the strength, compassion, courage, faith and wisdom we need as we strive to follow God’s will according to the teachings of Judaism.

We stand before our God and the God of our ancestors. The traumas of October 7, the murders and rape committed by Hamas with vaunted brutality, and our losses since, are deeply felt across Israel, the Jewish community worldwide, and beyond. This is our people. We are bound together in solidarity with the grieving, the wounded and the families of the hostages, for whose swift return we long. We pray for the wellbeing of Israel and everyone who lives there, and for the safety of all who risk their lives to protect their loved ones and their land. May we work together for healing to all our wounds to body, heart and soul.

We stand before the God of compassion. We acknowledge, with pain, not just our own suffering but the suffering and deaths of thousands of innocent people, including many children, in Gaza and elsewhere. We pray for an end to terror and bloodshed. We pray that we will find better paths forward than war.

We stand before the God of justice. On this day of judgment, we are required to confront not just the wrongs done to us but also the wrongs we have done, the sins, hurts and betrayals which fall below the true values of Judaism and challenge its reputation. May we have the integrity to meet these issues honestly.

Amidst this anguish, we face rising antisemitism, unprecedented in most of our lifetimes. Many of us experience isolation, intimidation and abuse. Often in the public domain we encounter false accusations and both ignorant and calculated hatred.

Therefore, now more than ever, we must turn to our faith, to the tenacious resilience of the Jewish People throughout many centuries, in many lands; to the sustaining discipline of Jewish living, with its commandments and customs, and to the embrace of community, which both supports us and needs our support. We must affirm our commitment to moral responsibility, stay strong in our conviction that our actions make a difference, and hold firm in our determination to create a better world.

This is the source of our strength in adversity and our hope for the future, this and faith in God whose living breath embraces us all, who hears all tears, sustains all life, and whose presence abides not only in the heavens above, but in our hearts.

May the God of life guide us and bless us, all Israel and all the world, through the challenges of the coming year.

27 Sep 2024

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

Shanah Tovah – may this be a good year

Sticky Post By admin On September 27, 2024

I received an email: ‘Please suggest an alternative greeting: Happy New Year just doesn’t feel right this time round, especially with the anniversary of 7 October.’

Actually, Shanah Tovah doesn’t mean A Happy Year, but A Good Year.

But what does that look like in these cruel times? I have four wishes, hopes, prayers, conditions – I don’t know quite what to call them – for making this a truly good year.

Firstly, I pray for the safe return of the hostages, an end to war, bloodshed, terror, and the misery and grief of innocent people caught up in war. I pray for a political path forward which will ensure the security of Israel and bring safety, dignity and hope to all the people of the region. I write these words from Israel, where I’ve been listening to traumatised people struggling to carry on going and help others keep going, their resilience lacerated by months of ceaseless anguish. I’ve spent the last three evenings with families, each of whom has a child taken hostage. My heart goes out to them; I feel shaken and grief-stricken. I shall hold them in my prayers, together with supplications for everyone facing the horrors of war, and everyone striving, despite the rockets, bombs and rhetoric of violence, to bring healing and hope, even across impassable borders.

Secondly, I pray for a year of compassion and justice. Among my heroes is the imam who met the racism of the crowd outside his mosque not with fear, contempt or anger, but with friendship, food and an invitation to come and share. I’ve listened to so many people who’ve shunned and victimised, fellow Jews and others besides. There’s too much cruelty, hatred, incitement and indifference. I’m determined to join those work for proactive compassion, who reach out, hear and support others, within, between and beyond our communities, so that no one is left feeling unnoticed, unwanted or despised. Maybe we can prove Reverend Martin Luther King right, that the arc of history bends towards justice, and the will of humanity tends towards compassion.

Thirdly, I pray for a better year for our beautiful home, this earth. A truly good year must be a year of blessing for the land we depend on, and the waters, woodlands, fields, insects, birds and animals with which our lives are interdependent. This is a time of Teshuvah, return. The Torah’s first use of the word is when God tells Adam he will return to dust. I deliberately misinterpret this to mean that we must return to a just relationship with the soil and its season, the forests and the rivers. The rabbis distinguish between Teshuvah motivated by love and return based on fear. I long for the time when we, and all the world’s decision-makers, learn to love this earth truly, and cherish all the life that is sustains.

Fourthly, because the chances are minimal that these hopes will be adequately realised, I pray that we will find, and help each other discover, the resilience to face whatever may be coming with courage and creativity. ‘Whatever measure of fortune God metes out to you, acknowledge God most profoundly,’ taught the rabbis of the Mishnah (c. 200ce). It’s far from easy to accept our challenges, physical or emotional, individual or collective, with good grace and strength of spirit. The harder the times, the deeper we have to reach into ourselves, and the more generously we need to treat each other, just in order to keep going, keep hoping and keep working for a better world. And if we can’t do that, what are we?

In all these ways, and more, I pray that this will be a true Shanah Tovah, a good year, a year of strength and hope.

20 Sep 2024

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

The shofar and silence

Sticky Post By admin On September 20, 2024

‘Awake you slumberers from your slumber, you sleepers from your sleep’: with these words Maimonides explains the purpose of blowing the shofar each morning during the month of Elul, to herald Yom Terua, the great ‘Day of Blowing’, Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, when everyone who enters the world, and everything that happens in it, comes before God.

The mid-point of Elul has now passed; the full moon was huge and low, clear in the cloudless sky. As that circle of moon diminishes, so the shofar’s cry becomes more urgent.

I love the shofar. My grandfather was a shofar blower, as was my father; we had a shofar carved on his gravestone. We trawled every relevant shop in Jerusalem to find the right shofar for each of my children; they, too, are now shofar blowers.

On our family treks in the beautiful Scottish Highlands, we say to each other when we see sheep with long, curved horns: ‘that would make a fine shofar,’ – not that we would harm a hair on any of their woolly backs.

Maybe that’s why, to me, the shofar calls out for rock and water, hill and col, and everything that lives among them. It is animal cry, human outcry, a crying out to God, to the vastness beyond. It is mortality shouting into eternity, life into the infinite spaces.

Returning to Maimonides, there may be less need for his warning this year. Many of us have nerves worn thin like over-scratched skin, while our hearts sink at the news from the world.

But still the shofar retains the power to stir us, reaching inward, awakening in us something other. Paradoxically, it may not be in the shofar’s sounds, raw and strident as they are, but in the attentiveness with which we await them and the silence that vibrates between them that we go down into ourselves:

‘The great shofar shall be sounded, and the voice of fine silence shall be heard.’

It is this silence that Elijah intuited on God’s Mountain after the tumult of the earthquakes, fire and thunder.

‘Never ask what’s in that silence,’ I was told. It’s different for each person and we ourselves don’t truly know what lies in the depths of our own selves.

Elijah hears that silence as interrogation, ‘What are you doing here?’ I’ve often tried to explore what that simple but penetrating question means.

But this year I want to stay with the silence. I’ve been gripped by a sentence I read in Abbot Christopher Jamison’s book, Finding Sanctuary:

‘If we are faithful, there will gradually be born within us of our silence something that will draw us on to still greater silence.’

This is not the silence of emptiness or despair. It is the silence of fullness, of the richness of life that lies deeper than any language, word or articulate sound. Perhaps it’s what the Bible means by nishmat chaim, the breath of life, or by ruach merachefet, the hovering spirit of God.

Just as this fine silence sounded for Elijah deeper than fire and thunder, so it can sustain our spirit today, whoever we are, beneath and beyond the terrible noise of bombs, rockets and verbal bombardments. May we all be kept safe; may there be a swift end to these dreadful wars.

I believe that silence can be, for each of us in our own ways, the source of inner strength, resilience and hope, imparting a stalwart sense of purpose and inspiring in us a compassionate commitment to life.

14 Jun 2024

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

The heartbeat of our faith

Sticky Post By admin On June 14, 2024

It was minutes before the festival, and I hadn’t decided which prayer book to take. Of course, it would have to be the correct machzor for Shavuot, Zeman Mattan Toratenu, the Season of the Giving of our Torah. Machzor means cycle, a lovely, simple word with which to refer to the beauty of Judaism’s liturgy for the annual rhythm of our festivals.

I didn’t have a copy of the most recent Koren edition, with its thoughtful, practical notes. But what about the Artscroll, with its excellent layout, but super-pious commentary? Or the classic British Routledge, the translations archaic but the Hebrew large and clear?

No, none of these would do.

Instead, I sought out my grandmother’s old Machzor. I first saw it, and its companion volumes, on the bookshelf in the flat on Ramban Street in Jerusalem, where the family fled from Nazi Europe in 1937. When my grandmother had gone to her eternal rest, and her daughters and son-in-law who had lived there with her were dead too, and my one-and-only cousin and I were clearing the flat, I asked if I could have those books. They now live in my study.

I opened the machzor for Shavuot; it was dated 1838. The title page read: ninth edition, arranged and translated into German by Wolf Heidenheim (1757 -1832, a renowned liturgical scholar). The books were printed in Roedelheim, in Frankfurt.

On the back page was a solemn admonition, threatening with the rabbinic ban anyone who reprinted the volume unlawfully before 25 years had elapsed since its publication.. It was an early, probably unenforceable, version of copyright protection.

I kissed the machzor, as one does. It’s not that I needed a two-hundred-year-old book. What I wanted were the two hundred years of prayer which its pages, thin and yellowing yet untorn and clear, breathed out. I needed their strength, resilience and piety. I wanted the love instilled into their words and melodies by at least eight generations of family. I wanted the hope and faith, even the tears and fears, of everyone who’d prayer through those pages to slip into my heart. For ancient books carry within them the devotion of centuries.

With the Jewish world in profound trouble, I sought refuge in two hundred years of prayer. With Israel under attack, with so many still held hostage, so many killed and grieving, I needed the yearning and hope of two centuries of prayer. With so many dead in Gaza through Israel’s response, and page after page of condemnation of Israel, I sought the integrity, depth and truth of two hundred years of prayer. With so many people telling me how they feel shunned at work, isolated, proud, ashamed, distressed, resolute, I needed the resilience of two centuries of prayer. With the Jewish world torn in its heart, I sought the faith and faithfulness of two hundred years of prayer.

To whom had those prayerbooks originally belonged, with their poetry and piety? In whose hands did they survive the 1848 revolution, the rise of political antisemitism, the horror of the First World War and its disastrous aftermath for Germany and Austro-Hungary, the hunger of 1919, the great inflation and the great depression? How did they escape the Holocaust? How did they get to Jerusalem? Did my great-grandmother Regina, widowed in 1937, send them ahead to her son and daughters in the land that she herself was destined never to reach, murdered at Birkenau in 1944? I’ll never know.

But of this I am certain: those prayer books were a most treasured possession. They were loved and cherished. They were our family’s pathway upwards to God and down into the soul. They were their truth and strength.

On that path I strive to follow them, hearing in them, as we all need to hear, the heartbeat of our deep and resilient faith.

26 Apr 2024

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

The most difficult time to be Jewish

Sticky Post By admin On April 26, 2024

I ought to be writing about the Song of Songs, the most beautiful book in the Hebrew Bible, with gardens and love at its heart; the book Rabbi Akiva described as its ‘Holy of Holies’.

I can’t. The only flowers on my mind right now are whether I can send any to Ayelet, mother of 19-year-old Naama, still hostage to Hamas, because last time we sent some, Ayelet sent a WhatsApp message back: “Good to have something nice come through my door.”

It’s more than 200 days since October 7 and this terrible war goes on, in the north and south of Israel and in Gaza literally, and across the world by proxy. In a different way, it’s also being fought out, or about, in our own communities and minds.

Here is David Horovitz on what’s happening on American campuses, his piece interspersed with shocking footage:‘The initial goal of this inexcusably tolerated murderous hostility is to aid in Israel’s demise — by establishing our country as a pariah state, and rendering it untenable to be associated with, defended or protected. Protected, that is, from the amoral, rapacious, misogynistic, homophobic, and potent enemies who, as I write, fire rockets from the north (Hezbollah), try to do so from the south (Hamas), and advance toward obtaining nuclear weapons in the east (Iran). But if those enemy states, terrorist armies and their facilitators get done with Israel, they’ll be coming for Jews everywhere.’ (The Times of Israel, 24 April, 2024)

It’s terrifying, and it’s not just about Israel, or Jews. The world is in conflict, directly or indirectly, with Iran, Russia and their allies. It’s horrible to acknowledge. That’s why so many of us, whatever our politics, fear and feel for Israel, its hostages, bereaved families, soldiers, whole communities dislocated, living in and out of bomb shelters.

But that’s not all we’re seeing. Day after day we face pictures of the destruction of Gaza. Fellow Jews with whom I speak all acknowledge the horrible suffering of ordinary Palestinians caught between Hamas and Israel in the misery, destruction and death into which Hamas has, cynically and calculatedly, lured Israel into co-responsibility.

That’s still not all. There’s Israel’s government – a coalition despised by many Israelis, according to repeated opinion polls – with hardened extremists in its ranks. There are the vicious actions of West Bank settlers who are not only taking advantage of this war, with everyone looking the other way, but who have for years, through bullying acts of aggression towards local Palestinians, sapped the life blood of Israel’s moral credibility.

So where are we left? In the Passover Haggadah we’re victims: ‘They rise up to destroy us in every generation.’ Maybe not everywhere in every generation, but it’s a broad, sad truth.

Now, though, are we in any way, to any extent, perpetrators too? Has the poison of hatred seeped into our souls? If so, do we, should we, speak such an uncomfortable truth? Add to this the huge sweep of antisemitism, leaving us anxious in places where, until recently, we felt secure.

All that makes this the most difficult, painful period in my lifetime to be Jewish. Jonathan Freedland puts it so well: these issues ‘don’t only rage around the family table: they also rage within us. Indeed, I think that’s one reason why this last half-year has been so hard for so many. We’re having to hold multiple and conflicting thoughts and feelings in our heads and hearts all the time.’ (The Jewish Chronicle April 10, 2024)

All this is even harder because we each, depending on numerous factors including our age, hold these conflicting feelings in different proportions.

We would do well to acknowledge this, with forbearance and generosity. Otherwise, it will be yet one more way in which we become victims of what Hamas did on October 7.

I wonder what God thinks about all of this. Maybe God’s feeling: Why is humanity abandoning my beautiful Song of Songs garden and destroying my world instead?

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!

22 Mar 2024

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

If only the Megillah were less relevant

Sticky Post By admin On March 22, 2024

Two verses from the Megillah, the Scroll of Esther, which we read this Saturday night and Sunday, give me strength and hope.

But first to the story. How I wish it was irrelevant. But beneath its smiling surface, Esther’s charm and King Achashverosh’s fickle favour, it’s vicious.

In two verses Haman, the villain, encapsulates antisemitism’s every trope: the Jews are everywhere, follow rules of their own, won’t mix and have lots of money.

He carries a long history of hating. He’s an Agagite, from the royal line of Amalek who ambushed the Israelites in the desert, slaughtering the weary and weak. In the Torah, Amalek is the embodiment of cruelty, against which God is eternally at war. But, it’s essential to understand this, the Talmud makes it clear that Amalek long ago ceased to exist. No one today is literally Amalek.

Haman’s hatred doesn’t come from nowhere. His ancestor, the first Amalek, is Esau’s grandchild. A shrewd legend has grandfather tell grandson: ‘I couldn’t take revenge on Jacob for cheating me; killing him would have made my father Isaac die of grief. I bequeath to you the duty of vengeance.’ Mordechai’s ‘great and bitter cry’ when he hears Haman’s plan to kill the Jews echoes exactly Esau’s ‘bitter cry’ a thousand years earlier, when he finds Jacob has taken his blessing. Haman no doubt sees himself as the true victim. Hurts don’t go nowhere.

But the Jews of Persia are victims indeed, exiled from their land when Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem, forced to court favour, subject to both royal and popular whim.

So the story depicts a horrible ‘concurrence victimaire’ , in the recently coined French phrase. No one feels secure, even King Achashverosh, who amorally plays Agagite and Jew against each other, with the sole aim of self-preservation.

The tables turn and the Jews forcefully defend themselves, killing thousands, egged on by Achashverosh who wants all Haman’s followers dealt with, but in such a way that he can lay the blame, should it subsequently prove necessary, on those Jews. Here the Megillah ends. But we can guess the next turn of the screw.

So much of today’s pain is here. What was done to Israel by Hamas with such calculated brutality is unspeakably horrific. The ongoing trauma, especially of the families of hostages and those wounded or killed, is shattering. The hatred unleashed against Jews worldwide is appalling. The starving misery of hundreds of thousands of Gazan civilians, into whose wretched fate Hamas has cynically drawn us, so that we too are implicated, is utterly terrible.

Thus heavy in heart, I turn to my two verses for guidance.

The first is Mordechai’s message when he begs Esther to petition the king to save their people: ‘If you stay silent now…’ I hear those words whenever the world confronts us with cruelty and wrong. They’re not an invitation to join the social media racket. They’re a command to do what we can, whatever our capacity, to make life better for someone somewhere. We’re not allowed to do nothing, and that imbues us with purpose.

The second is Mordechai and Esther’s instruction: ‘Each to their neighbour and gifts to the needy.’ It’s why we send presents of food on Purim. But the words mean more: ‘Be there for your fellow human beings.’ We need the companionship of our own people. But we must also go further, reach out hands, whenever we can, with members of other faiths. We must listen to their pain, and they to ours, so that together we can uphold each other’s humanity and re-open doors and hearts.

Only thus will we move beyond prejudice and hatred toward ‘the words of peace’ with which the Megillah closes.

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.

19 Jan 2024

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

For the love of trees – in honour of Tu Bishevat

Sticky Post By admin On January 19, 2024

‘No. You’re not buying another tree!’ the family protests as I eye up an apple, plum or rowan which, though discounted at the garden centre, looks good enough to me.

How many trees can you fit in the back of car – alongside two or three (grown up) children, at least one dog, walking boots, etcetera, etcetera? You’d be amazed! Though for the children, I admit, it’s not always a pleasant surprise.

But I love trees – as well as my family.

Thirty-three years ago, Nicky and I planned to marry on Tu Bishevat, the New Year for Trees, (which begins this Wednesday evening.) But the synagogue had already been booked so we settled for a week later. ‘What shall I say about the two of you?’ our friend Ronnie enquired, whom we’d asked to speak on the Shabbat before our wedding. ‘That we both love plants and animals,’ we replied, and all these years later it’s even more true.

Trees make excellent gifts, so long as the recipient has a garden, or space for a large tub. Years later one looks back and reflects: ‘We got that tree when our baby was born’, ‘when our daughter was Bat Mitzvah’, or ‘in memory of our father’.

We measure time in the passing of years; trees measure time by the passing of generations. Trees humble us. The Psalmist is right: trees clap their hands, dance with their leaves and sing with the winds. But most of all they stand steadfast and, with their stillness, call us into quiet. Listen, they say. Listen first with your ears, and you’ll hear a leaf fall, a crow cry, maybe an owl call. Listen next with your spirit, and maybe you’ll hear the slow, steady flow of life itself. Then rest against the bark and know, even if only for a moment, that you’re safe despite all the world’s cruelty, for God is in this place.

But if we’re safe among the trees, are the trees safe among us? In Jewish law it’s a crime wilfully to cut down a fruit tree. How much more important a wider prohibition would be now, when we know that trees sustain us not just with food but through the very air we breathe.

We need to live, to eat, travel and build, in ways which don’t destroy the great forests of the Amazon, Congo and Indonesia. Here at home, we must replant. We must let the remnants of our rainforests spread, which cling to the west of England, Wales and Scotland, and leave the bright-coloured jays, those acorn-burying birds, to plant their oaks. (See Guy Shrubsole’s amazing The Lost Rainforests of Britain.)

Earth science is challenging us with new phrases, like ‘Climate change velocity,’ and ‘Adapt, move or die.’ But, asks Ben Lawrence in his brilliant, disturbing The Treeline, ‘What if you are a tree?’

Yet trees, too, are on the move, not individual specimens, but species. Larch, birch, poplar and rowan are on the march north. What, then, do you plant to future-proof your woodlands? It’s a question with which foresters struggle. For we must do our utmost to bequeath to our children breathable air, a life-sustaining natural world and the wonder and spirit of the trees.

So let’s go plant!

If this seems fatuous in times of war, we should remember the Midrash of the old man and the emperor:

‘What are you doing?’ the latter asked.
‘Planting saplings.’
The emperor was scornful.

But what were his thoughts when, years later, on his return from many battles, the old man offered him fruits from those same trees?