Some days one goes to bed tired, and wakes up the same. But on others something gentle seems to touch us in one’s sleep or in our dreams. The dawn, suggests the Zohar, belongs to Abraham, whose quality is loving-kindness, for then the angel Raphael goes forth ‘who possesses all kinds of healing’, and the birds ‘thank and praise the Holy One’. Maybe that’s why this morning when I woke up these small scenes were in my mind.
 
Last week Mitzpah, my dog, ended up with an embarrassing circle of red lipstick on his head. I blame it all on Margaret, and her ninetieth birthday. I first met Margaret when she came to our home for the Kol Nidrei service which we conduct together with the Holocaust Survivors Centre. I’m always on my way out to synagogue as the small congregation arrives, and I’m never sure if it’s appreciated that I leave the dog behind. So I was relieved when Margaret said to me one year with her customary charm, ‘He’s such a mensch, your dog, and welcomes us so nicely’. And Margaret, who survived the Holocaust, including Auschwitz, insisted, although I don’t think she’s a traditionally observant person, that what she would most of all like to do to mark her ninetieth birthday was to come to the morning service, at 7.00am on a Tuesday, and of course the dog had to be there. Deborah brought a cake, and Margaret, and the dog came too (though we didn’t count him in the minyan) and received a kiss.
 
And still of dogs, Noach Braun, whose personal vision and determination created the Israel Guide Dog Centre for the Blind, was at my home yesterday. ‘Let’s do a walk together in aid of guide dog training,’ I suggested. ‘Let’s see if we could start at the Israeli Embassy and meet David Blunkett and then Clare Balding on the way’, I continued without, of course, having consulted any of the people concerned. ‘Great idea’, Noach replied, ‘Let’s do the walk on Israel Independence Day’. Seeing me look puzzled at this choice of such an eminent date, he added ‘After all, guide dogs bring people back their independence and that’s what it’s all about.’ At once images of canines faded from my mind and instead came pictures of freedom, – freedom to live, to move unhindered and unafraid; and the whole concept of independence, and the whole importance of Israel, and liberty, rethought themselves in my mind.
 
These little moments move me, for in them I feel, in small but in close up, the spirit and the courage which propel Jewish history itself.
 
One more incident. Some weeks ago as I was walking on Shabbat, I saw a young woman sitting on a park bench, her head in her hands, and realised that she was weeping. One cannot just go past. ‘Can I help you?’ I asked. She looked up. ‘Has something bad happened?’ She nodded. ‘Can I sit with you for a moment?’ One worries as a man if one’s unintentionally being threatening, but mercifully a kind lady from our community came walking up. ‘Let me sit with you for a little’, she said, and did so, and afterwards I learned that she had sat and listened and they had spoken for a good hour.
 
The Talmud says that when we meet God on the other side we’ll be asked if we’ve dealt with our fellow human beings in good faith. I think we’ll also be asked ‘Have you been kind?’ In fact, I think we’re asked that question all the time. I hate to think how often I’ve failed to notice.
 
Kindness alone can mitigate, at least partially, the injustices of fate and unwind the coiled springs of cruelty.

I’ve never forgotten the moment, over ten years ago now, when I entered the ward and they stopped me at the desk. ‘They’re waiting for you, rabbi. The young man is dying and wants you to say a prayer.’ I’d never even met him before: what prayer should I be saying? In the event, I didn’t have to decide. The man was weak, but smiled warmly first at me then at his wife: ‘Say a prayer about life’s beauty because we’ve loved it together’.
 
Tomorrow we read how Moses prays for his sister’s health. It’s the shortest recorded prayer in Judaism, ‘God, please, heal her, please’. In a week of violence, when in America a hurricane has crushed the lives of young children, when here murderous hands still covered in a young man’s blood have been held up with no shame, that prayer marks the opposite intention, the desire to make whole again, to bring goodness and restoration to the world.
 
How many have spoken or lived this prayer since! Who is the ‘her’ of our prayers? It is someone we love, our parent, partner, child; it is our friend, neighbour, colleague. To the mystics it is also our own troubled heart, longing for peace and God. It is our society, the very world itself, in its need for wholeness and repair, and the prayer becomes the expression of an inner longing that needless hurt and cruelty should not exist, but only respect and compassion for all our fellow creatures on our journey across this earth, and for the earth itself. That is the heart of religion, and acting accordingly is the body of the faithful life.
 
What does it mean to pray for a person who is ill? In the first instance it is to be mindful, to not forget. That sounds like a small matter: who, after all, would forget? Yet we do. There’s much which generally escapes our sensitivity when we take our health for granted. Time itself is different when the phases of the day are marked not by meetings and meals, but by when one has to take one’s next medication. Prayer makes us pause; it restores our awareness of the wholeness of life and invites us into a deeper bond of solidarity. Conscious then of each other’s journeys and travails, in illness or in health, we think of one another with greater fellowship, humility and compassion.
 
Perhaps this is what Rabbi Lionel Blue meant when he wrote that ‘prayer boomerangs’. The supplication to God as healer returns to us as a question: ‘What am I doing to be faithful to life?’ and we sense more acutely not only our responsibilities towards one another, but our opportunities to share, in kindness and thoughtfulness, the privileges and challenges of being.
 
We may pray for one another, thinking of the other person, asking for windows of blessing to open both for them and within them. Perhaps it isn’t so different, but we may also pray with one another, allowing our consciousnesses to be companions, and inviting the presence of all living being into this fellowship, this bond with God and loving-kindness, which leaves us, if only for a moment, touched and blessed.

I’ve always enjoyed saying hello to the station master at Finchley Central. At least I think he’s the station master; he’s the gentleman who does the garden alongside the platform for the south-bound trains. I wouldn’t have known him, were it not for those months, now sadly over, when I used to go up to Manchester for the day to see my aunt and get the very first tube at 5.30am to catch the train from Euston. We’d exchange a word about this plant or that and I’d say that I hoped he’d win this year, because he’d come second so many times in the competition for the best tube station gardens in the city. The short encounter always felt like an early morning blessing.

Tomorrow we read in the Torah about the most famous blessing of all: ‘May God bless you and keep you; may God’s face shine upon you and be gracious to you…’ But what actually is a blessing?

There’s a huge mystical literature on the subject, but I just want to reflect on the saying in the Talmud that the ordinary everyday blessings of ordinary everyday people like us should not be taken lightly.

To give another example, one of the things I like about going to Tesco’s is the huge smile I generally get from the supervisor who stands near the front entrance. I think he knows me by now because of my habit of doing the shopping somewhere between half-past-ten and midnight on Wednesdays or Thursdays (I’m far from the only one in our community). That smile lifts the whole experience, makes it human, gives it warmth, when so often we pass each other in blank indifference, each plugged into his or her earphones, other people reduced to inconvenient objects to be avoided on the over-crowded pavement.

A blessing doesn’t actually need the words ‘Bless you!’ to have its effect. It’s the kindness in the way an ordinary interaction is conducted, the way one asks for a challah at the bakers and how it’s given, how one waves to a person one knows on the opposite side of the street. It restores the human image in us, which according to the Bible is also God’s image, the part of us which notices, cares and wants life to be gracious and rich.

A blessing is a pointer, guiding us more deeply into the world. It’s amazing how much one doesn’t see. When one sees a beautiful tree, one’s supposed to say, or maybe even just to think, ‘Baruch shecacha lo be’olamo, – Blessings be to God whose world is like this’. ‘This’ means beautiful and precious. A few more days and the wind will have blown the last of the petals from the crab-apple trees; another fortnight and the season of the apple blossom will have passed. How many such times does one have, that one can afford not to notice?

Sometimes the pointer guides us outwards into the world about us, but sometimes it directs us deeper within. That lady who gave that cheerful ‘good morning’, – do I greet people like that? That person who just did something so simple but so kind, – am I a human like that? Other peoples’ blessings guide us towards the person we could become.

I’m sitting in the Palmengarten in Frankfurt-am-Main. Usually I go to gardens to see the plants, but today I came here mainly today to sit and think.

This must have been where my grandparents went for walks when they were dating in the 1910s. It’s where they took their three little girls for promenades in the best of the Weimar years. It’s also where my grandfather met with the well-known Protestant theologian Rudolph Otto, who came specially to meet him during the Nazi years to tell him that Goebbels was a terrible liar, that faith and truth would survive, and to support him so that and his community could find courage. My grandfather brought him here so that they could talk in some green corner unobserved. ‘Was it here?’ I found myself wondering, ‘Or was it there that they held their whispered conversation?’

This morning a plaque was unveiled opposite the former site of the British Consulate in Frankfurt to honour Robert Smallbones, Arthur Dowden and all their staff who in 1938-9 worked ceaselessly to enable thousands of Jews flee Nazi Germany. After an eighteen hour day, Smallbones wrote, he felt guilty getting some sleep while there were Jews in camps whom he might be able to help.

It was Smallbones who persuaded the British Government to allow Jewish refugees into Britain on temporary visas and who wrung from the Gestapo the agreement that the promise of such a visa should be sufficient to obtain freedom from the concentration camps. I have a copy of the letter sent from the Consulate to my father’s uncle, a Frankfurt doctor, on the strength of which he was released from Sachsenhausen. The signature clearly reads R Smallbones.

Smallbones’s grandchildren and Arthur Dowden’s nephew and niece were at the ceremony. They want to create a book about those whose stories were woven together around that building at 62 Guillottstrasse. The plaque describes what happened here: crowds of deeply anxious Jewish people filled every inch of the waiting room and queued out into the street. Bewildered and frightened, scorned and reviled in the land which had been home, here they were treated like human beings once again. Here they were given back dignity and hope. They were offered kind words, tea and the promise of decisive intervention. Smallbones’s young daughter would greet them as they stood anxiously in the queue: ‘Tell me your story and I’ll tell Daddy; maybe he can help’. Arthur Dowden regularly drove round the streets, seeking out terrified people who dared not go back to their homes for fear of arrest and bringing them food.

Beneath the description is a quotation from my grandfather:

It was moving to meet the families of helpers and helped together, and a privilege to be allowed to address the gathering. It was no less moving when I came back later after everyone had gone and watched passers-by stop and read the sign. It’s large, almost a metre square, and so placed on the street corner that it cannot easily be missed. Afterwards I wandered through the streets to these gardens, gripped by a sudden and bleak inner emptiness.

I know I should have written about Shavuot, which begins next Tuesday night. After all, it’s Zeman Mattan Toratenu, the time of the giving of the Torah, when we bring God’s laws down to earth.

If we really and truly want to bring them to earth and make them real, we must strive to behave as these good, brave, kind, imaginative and indefatigable people did.

‘It’s the cyclamen; it won by a narrow margin over the anemone’, Ori told us. ‘Before the Beijing Olympics the Chinese asked every country to submit the names of their national flower and their national bird. We didn’t have either. There was lots of discussion and a huge ballot over email.’ It’s amazing it didn’t end in a coalition, with some pious herb like the horseradish holding the balance of power.
 
Ori Fragman-Sapir is the head botanist at the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens; he was speaking at a remarkable event at the home of the Israeli Ambassador, where his talk was partnered by an equally excellent presentation about Kew’s Seed Bank. 
 
I’ve always loved cyclamen, or rakefet in Hebrew. It flourishes in Britain too, growing in clumps underneath the pine trees in our garden. But it invariably reminds me of the Galilee, where, half-hidden in the clefts of the rocks, with its broad leaves of dark and milky green and its pink and purple, flowers it brings life and joy to the whole hillside.
 
We saw pictures of the bright Sternbergia too, (of special interest to those of us who inhabit the Sternberg Centre for Judaism, and which I’ve tried, but failed, to grow here in London.) It’s rare now in Jerusalem, but safe within the gardens where its yellow trumpet flowers spread in ever-widening circles beneath the trees.
 
But you can never get away from security. That’s how the prophets of Israel saw gardens. Some of them, like Amos who was a sycamore-dresser, were in fact horticulturalists, but the growth of Israel’s plants and trees was always also an image of something greater, of how justice, goodness and peace were to flourish in the land. Then, and only then, would it be God’s garden indeed, meriting the early and the latter rains in plenty, and the dew in the months of drought. Would that this could be so, and all the citizens of Israel, and of its neighbouring countries, could inhabit their lands in peace!
 
Plants have their security needs too: habitat, climate range, the insects often unknown to us which enable them to grow. Twenty percent of the world’s species are under threat. A rare campanula was recently saved from extinction in Israel by the Gardens, after a flash flood washed it away from the only site where it’s known to grow. Fortunately, seeds were gathered and the plants were propagated at the gardens. Kew’s seed bank aims to collect and preserve for generations thousands of samples of every kind of seed on earth. It’s the largest such project in the world, – a horticulturalists Noah’s Ark in which our future is treasured up – just in case.
 
We tend to think of the land as ours; it’s we who decide what to plant and what to uproot. But that’s not the ultimate truth. ‘For mine is the land’, says God, as we read in the Torah tomorrow, ‘and you are strangers and sojourners with me’. Poor God, I sometimes think, who has had to entrust all this beauty to us, who often pay it far too little heed.  
 
Yesterday was a wonderful reminder, both of the beauty of this world, and of our dependence on its plants and trees for our very lives, the food we eat, the clothes we wear and the joy which makes life worthwhile.

‘I can’t possibly ask him that’, I said quietly to Guy in English. ‘Go on’, he insisted, ‘Of course you can. Say it in German’. So I did; and Guy was right.
 
It wasn’t exactly a familiar situation. It happened two and a half years ago, on my walk through Germany, as I was having dinner with the prior of the ancient and famous monastery of Maria Laach. My dog Mitzpah, who had accompanied me everywhere, was invited too. I tried to explain to him as we walked down the long corridor lined with crosses that, unlike most Jewish people, monks often ate in silence and that this wasn’t the time to bark. In the event he curled up on the carpet and slept for the duration of the meal.
 
‘Ask him’, said Guy, who was filming the whole enterprise, including this repast, ‘what he thinks your dog adds to your adventure’. So I did.
 
The dog, the prior explained, reminds us that we humans are not the sole centre of God’s world, which we share with all of God’s creatures. It’s a lesson in humility, and compassion.
 
I thought of the prior’s words yesterday when, down in the New Forest on my way to teach in Bournemouth, I watched a car pull out of Tesco’s and stop for a donkey to cross the road. It’s not a sight I often see in Finchley. There were a whole group of grey donkeys at the entrance to the village, enjoying the sunlight and fresh grass which they badly needed to put some flesh around the ribs which showed sharply beneath their coats after a lean and bitter winter.

Maybe it was the view from the upstairs room in our childhood home in Glasgow which did it. I remember how my brother and I would sit and stare out at the golf course, the green hillside beyond it and the two beautiful horses which grazed there on bright days.

I’ve always loved animals, (though I used to be frightened of dogs). But love isn’t quite the right word, though I admit I’m sentimental. I often find companionship and solace in being with domestic animals. In their presence and in the sound of their breathing I’m reminded at a level which isn’t merely notional or intellectual that I belong together with them in this world of changing seasons, light and dark, cold and warm, rain-driven wind and stall spread with hay. Here is a relationship without complexity or guile. Something within me unfurls and I rediscover the God I share with the horses and the sheep.

When I can, I like to pray among the animals too. Admittedly it’s a different kind of congregation or communion, more continuous perhaps with some great evolution and community of life and it almost always draws me into the calm of contemplation.

I hate to see cruelty or to recognise myself as, even unintentionally, a contributor to it. This is not only because animals suffer both physical and emotional pain. It’s because wanton cruelty to animals is a form of contempt for life itself, life which we are taught to treat with reverence and respect in all its forms.

As I write we are, almost to the minute, half way through the forty-nine day period of the counting of the Omer. Jewish art has always been closely associated with objects connected with observing the commandments, Kiddush cups, Challah covers, Shabbat candlesticks, Chanukkiot, – and Omer counters. I have always loved our simple counter, made of olive wood, with a small window in which you can see the relevant date on a little scroll turned by two rollers. Beneath the weeks and days, which must both be counted, is inscribed their kabbalistic quality. I’m a little behind the times because it was last week’s feature, but a whole seven days are devoted to different aspects of Tiferet. 
 
Tiferet is explained by the mystics as meaning either truth or beauty. I have often wondered about the relationship between these two domains. John Keats evidently had no doubt, concluding his Ode on a Grecian Urn with the striking lines:
    ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,- that is all
     Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
 
But is it really so? I had planned to write about a small but much loved manifestation of that beauty, one acclaimed by Keats’s fellow romantic poet William Wordsworth, – daffodils:
    Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
    Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
 
We don’t have quite so many in our garden, but a cold spring has its rewards and those best loved of all the season’s flowers have been kept in glory for longer this year, making these April days a joy.
 
But then I thought that I mustn’t focus on such irrelevant trivialities. This week has seen a mean and cruel attack on the Boston Marathon, a run which is such a vibrant expression of freedom, equality and civic peace. (I wrote at once in solidarity to colleagues in The States). This was followed by a lethal explosion in the small Texan town of West. Look wider, and we come to Syria: what kind of spring is it for that country’s children? Look back, and this week brings the commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Who cares about daffodils? They may be beautiful, but how can they also be truth? Isn’t truth bigger, bolder and, all too often, nastier? What’s true about beauty?
 
Murder, cruelty and disaster are not only dreadful because of the horror they leave in their wake. They are terrible because they take away from ordinary human beings the basic right, or maybe it’s not a right but a privilege, of enjoying the most free, ordinary and elemental of things, – a spring day, sunlight on green grass, daffodils. It’s even worse when these simple joys are stolen from children, who are just beginning their great adventure of encountering this wonderful, beautiful, and vicious, world.
 
That’s what’s true about beauty, about the uncontrived and inimitable grace of a flower, or of an impromptu act of kindness. They bespeak, without saying anything, wonder, joy, goodness and the bountifulness of life.
 
How dare we take away from anybody the days in which to live in reverence of these things!

I’m always moved by the Shabbat which falls between Yom Hashoah, the Jewish date for remembering the Holocaust, and Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day. I’ve only to think of my father’s family; three of the four of his mother’s siblings who managed to escape Nazi Europe were able to do so only because of the Yishuv, the growing Jewish settlement in what was then still Palestine. It’s my father’s Yahrzeit on Yom Ha’atzmaut; it feels a fitting date given the fate of his family, and his own destiny, repairing tanks behind the lines at El Alamein in the Royal Engineers, then joining the Hagganah and being responsible for the refrigeration of emergency blood supplies during the siege of Jerusalem.
 
Two scenes pass through my mind as I think about the connection between these two decisive dates for Jews in the modern world. One happened at Birkenau; the last several times I have led groups from our community to that terrible place, there have been units of Israeli soldiers gathered in commemoration. Some of the ceremonies have been modest, reflective; others more demonstrative, with singing and marching.
 
‘That’s redemptive’, said one of my group; others clearly agreed. I understand that response. No doubt it can only truly be appreciated by survivors, who know exactly what it means to be powerless in the face of depravity and watch helplessly the torments inflicted on those you love most. On this earth we often need force to defend our humanity, our very right to exist. Expressing his scepticism about the nation-state as an ultimate ideal, Amos Oz nevertheless writes that ‘existence without the tools of statehood is a matter of mortal danger’. This is an obvious, and painful, lesson both of Jewish history and, sadly, of the present Israeli reality.
 
Yet those ceremonies in that former death camp filled me with too many associations of what power alone can do for me to want to use a word like ‘redemptive’. Indeed I feel that any expression of power, even the most benign, even our own, in a place where power taunted and slaughtered so many, is open to question. One knows too much about what power can do.
 
The other scene was quieter. I was sitting outside a hut in downtown Tel Aviv with Nic Schlagman, who was showing me his work with refugees from Eritrea and Somalia who see Israel as their sole hope and haven. ‘My grandmother came on the Kindertransport’, he said, ‘I think she would be proud of me’. I believe there are innumerable others, throughout Israel, and Jewry, and across the world, motivated in a similar manner.
 
I was at a seminar yesterday led by the outstanding Israeli scholar and diplomat Dr Tal Becker. ‘A nation is as great as its great idea’, he said, and then challenged us: ‘After the creation of the state, what is Israel’s next great idea?’ The answer to my mind is that ancient Jewish response which begins when Abraham refuses to accept that injustice be done even to Sodom, and Moses cannot countenance a slave being taunted. It’s as simple as the words ‘Get involved and make it better’ and requires nothing less than that we commit to this our lives.
 
That is what remains so inspiring about Israel, despite the wrongs done to it, and despite the wrongs it sometimes does, and despite the urgency of the hour to put an end to both. It is the number of people and organisations motivated by a profound vision of humanity, rooted in the wisdom and compassion of Jewish values, texts and community life at its best, and nurtured also by those particular sensitivities which derive from having been compelled to live for so long at the margins, who then go and put it into practice in innovative ways, whether towards Jews, or Arabs, or both, or in other countries all around the world.
 
It is to this idea that we must commit ourselves, as human beings, as Jews, and as those who care about Israel.

Pesach is the festival of our freedom, zeman cherutenu, not only because thousands of years ago we were liberated from slavery in Egypt, but so that we should dedicate ourselves to freedom ever after. This has always been a characteristic of Jewish ethics at their strongest, from the day Moses confronted Pharaoh to the date when Abraham Joshua Heschel marched next to Martin Luther King, and in numerous situations inbetween and since, in Israel and throughout the world.
 
There are two dimensions in which we are required to fight for freedom. They are quite distinct, yet ultimately connected.
 
The first is more obvious and concerns the world around us. The fact that most of us enjoy what may be the greatest measure of freedom of any generation of Jews in history, due both to the development of open democracies, and to the creation of the State of Israel as such a country, does not exempt us from the struggle to obtain those freedoms for others and to protect them for us all. Slavery, the trade in women, torture, violent abuse, the inability to be free of hunger, thirst and illnesses readily cured in other parts of the world, the maiming of innocent lives in the debris of war, the ravages of militias, the savagery of tyrannous governments, the repression of free speech, the crushing of creativity, the prevention of the right to practise one’s religion and follow one’s culture peacefully and with equal respect for others, – if our Seder has not touched on any of these concerns then what was the point?
 
To some, the requirement to be morally engaged is rooted in the Torah, in the dignity with which God invested every human being at creation through bestowing upon each and every one of us God’s own image, and in the commandments to pursue justice and practise compassion. To others the imperative calls out from Jewish history; the experience of having suffered persecution so much and so often engendering a sensibility and a responsibility which require us to cry out. Indifference is unthinkable, commitment an obligation.
 
At the same time, there is a different kind of freedom which the human experience summons us to seek. It is a profound inner freedom, and we are liable to need its resources at unpredicted moments. ‘At the still point of the turning world’, wrote T. S Eliot. Is there such a space within us? How do we find it? Is there a proven path by which to discover it? These questions come home to us most sharply precisely when our world is set turning by anguish or illness, when what we thought was safe and permanent proves as fragile as the certainty that we and those we love will be healthy and there for us for ever.
 
It is at such times in particular that we need an inner space, a place of quiet and calm, a place in the stillness of which we can listen like Elijah to the voice of fine silence and hear or feel the unspoken presence of God within all things and with us. It is a place of beauty and grace, a place of comfort and strength, a place of wisdom, in which we know that our consciousness belongs to something deeper than all the accidents which afflict mortality. Most of us merely and occasionally touch the edges of that space. But it is worth pursuing those paths which we sense can guide us there, paths of quietness, music, contemplation, prayer; paths which follow whatever ways bring us inner calm and spiritual composure, for when we need it we will want to be able to find that sacred place.
 
I sometimes wonder whether it is the knowledge of the existence of this space which gives to those who have campaigned most fearlessly for justice the courage and the dignity to do so.

Something practical
This may well seem severe to us, but the Torah reserves the penalty of ‘being cut off from one’s people’ for those who do not observe the festival of Pesach. I’d given this no thought until someone told me that, prevented by sheer distance from joining any Jewish community, cut off from his people was precisely how he had felt.
 
Preparations for Pesach naturally draw our attention to our own kitchens and homes, to our own family and dinner table. Yet it is no less important to be mindful of others, near and far, in the communities around us. We begin the Seder by saying ‘Let all who are hungry come and eat’; this inclusive invitation goes back to the Talmud, to Rav Huna, whose custom it was to open his door and say these words before every meal.
 
What live in different circles of connection. They begin with family, neighbours and close friends. Is anyone not able to hold a Seder this year? Can we invite, help out, send a ‘Seder box’ – at least with some charoset – to the hospital where they are (and maybe some matzah, as the Jewish mystics do call it ‘the bread of health’!)?
 
Beyond are many Jewish people who do not have the wherewithal to celebrate the feast of freedom. It has always been the custom for Jews to contribute to kimcha depischa, a ‘matzah flour’ fund, as it is a slight upon the dignity of us all, if any of us lack the means to share in the festival.
 
Then come other circles. I was just contacted by a journalist from Ha’aretz to comment on the Refugees Seder being held in downtown Tel Aviv, and in which Nic Schlagman, Oliver Joseph and others from our community have long taken a leading role. Such events are a profound expression of the meaning of Jewish experience, using our own experience of being the victims of persecution and exclusion to change the world.
 
Something about the Seder
It sometimes seems to be that the way the Haggadah tells the story of the Exodus is also like a series of concentric circles. At their heart is the narrative from the Torah itself. The Haggadah quotes in full the brief potted history of the Jewish People from Deuteronomy ((26:1-9) which, while the temple still stood, was recited by grateful citizens of the Land of Israel when they brought their first fruits as offerings to Jerusalem. This core text is succinct, and would once have been known by virtually everyone.
 
Around each phrase the Haggadah weaves rabbinic interpretations. This is the second layer of the narrative. It presents what scholarship now calls ‘intersecting texts’; other verses which help to develop the meaning of the first, central passage. Thus, to explain the words ‘The Egyptians treated us badly’ it brings Pharaoh’s first words in the Book of Exodus, ‘Come let us deal wisely with them (the Hebrews) lest they grow many, and should there be a war, join with our enemies…’ Persecution, it seems, begins with fear. Or is it rather that there are ‘too many of these foreigners’ and that they’re ‘over here (taking over our country and our jobs)’. I sometimes think of Pharaoh’s speech is the earliest example of a Party Political Broadcast, in this case on behalf of the National Front of the time.
 
By now we’re already engaged in the third layer, when the text leaves the page and speaks directly into our own reality and we find ourselves commenting on it with stories of our own.
 
The Seder become most real when we’re on the page of the Haggadah and off it in the issues it provokes us to think about in our own realities at the same time.
 
Something to ponder
What about God in the story of the Exodus? It is often noted that Moses isn’t even mentioned once in the entire Haggadah. On the contrary, it is repeatedly stressed that God and God alone brought us out from Egypt: ‘Not by means of an angel, and not by means of a messenger’, but God brought us directly in God’s power and glory.
 
What then happened to this interventionist, reach-down-from-heaven, I get involved in history, deity? Was God like that once, before resolving to leave us to ourselves to get on with it here on earth, with all our wars and genocides. How, after all, does one answer the question: ‘If you intervened back then in Egypt, why did you fail to do so again in Germany in 1933?’
 
There are other questions too: did the Egyptians all deserve those ten plagues? Is it ‘collateral damage’, or collective punishment for the fact that not only Pharaoh but the whole of society benefited from the decades of efforts of the Hebrew slave-worker class? But is this fair? Couldn’t God have just killed Pharaoh? After all, he was chiefly responsible.
 
This drives some to the radical conclusion that God’s role is simply a fiction invented by those who set down the story. For myself, I prefer to think about the matter in the following terms. The ‘myth’, the collective narrative of the Jewish People, begins in the experience of injustice and slavery, in our liberation from which we affirm the fundamental values of the Jewish faith: dignity, justice, compassion, hope and faith. These are sacred values; in seeking them we seek the presence of God in this world, in all humanity and in all creation.
 
Did the Exodus happen just the way we tell it, with God doing everything we are told God did? This is not the most important question for me; the answer, I believe, is bound up with the way we tell our stories. Was God present back then in Egypt, and in the struggle for liberation? Is God on the side of the oppressed, of those who seek justice and practise compassion and find the courage to defy tyranny? These are to me the most important questions and the answers, affirmed repeatedly through the strength and endurance of the spirit, are ‘Yes’. However, they are answers we have not simply to declare, but to live.