We pray for the safety of ordinary people who want to live their lives in peace, in Israel, in Gaza, wherever they are.
We pray for an end to the rockets and the attacks, for a truce, which will lead to a cease-fire, which may in the end turn one day into peace.
We pray for the opening of a road towards a safe, enduring and just resolution of the conflict.
We pray that hopelessness does not lead us to forget that peace, however far off it may seem, has always been our ideal.
 
May our prayers accompany the prayers of all who are anxious about the safety of those they love.
May our prayers accompany the prayers of everyone who wants to get on with daily life, free from hatred and violence.
May our prayers enter the hearts of those who are filled with anger and the desire for revenge and begin to change them.
 
May God, who makes peace in the high places, make peace for us, for all Israel and for all the world.

In 2009 the European Parliament determined that July 11th each year should be a day of Remembering Srebrenica, the site in 1995 of the worst genocide in Europe since the Holocaust.

The terrible war in the Balkans began in 1991. In 1993 the United Nations established ‘safe havens’ for the protection of some of the tens of thousands of civilians left at the mercy of the savage fighting. The most important of these was at Srebrenica, where Serb forces threatened to overrun 60,000 Bosnian Muslims. In July this ‘protection’ was provided by Dutch troupes, inadequately armed to carry out their mission. How the United Nations failed those who entrusted them with their lives constitutes a profoundly distressing account of lack of planning, conviction, responsibility and moral imagination. It implicates the humanity of us all.

On July 11 the ‘haven’ fell. That night General Mladic walked through the enclave assuring that everyone would receive transport, ‘women and children first’. Men, from the age of 12 upwards, were separated from their families and beaten to death or shot against walls, in warehouses and in the hills. Women were raped, systematically. Thousands who set out in a vast column towards the Muslim town of Tuzla sixty-three miles distant were ambushed and murdered en route:

• My husband kissed the children. He took the oldest in his arms, crying, and said, “My son, you might not see your father ever again.” The whole war, everything, was not as dreadful as that goodbye. He stood at the fence, crying. He left. (Testimony of Nermina Smajlovic)

What happened to him then? To this day many women do not know the precise fate of their fathers, husbands and sons. Bodies were often buried in parts in different locations. In a vast refrigerated hall outside Tuzla, run by the International Commission of Missing Persons, thousands of bags await identification. As well as bodies, pictures and items of clothing have been unearthed:

• Kadefa recognised a photograph of a man’s belt and a pair of torn trousers, stitched in the way she had once repaired Mirsad’s trousers. But she refused to accept his death until six years later when a DNA match identified his bones. (Missing Lives)

 
One of the most searing pictures in the haunting booklet published this year by Remembering Srebrenica is that of two hands; the hand of a living person, protected by a plastic glove, holding the earth-covered fingers of the dead.
 
Tens of thousands live with the gaps, the silence, the empty spaces of those who will never come home. In his Pale Diary, Mladen Vuksanovic recorded with dread what happened before the men were taken away. Pale is a small village overlooking Sarajevo. Muslims and Christians lived there together for generations, until Serb forces occupied it in order to shell the city below:

• A convoy of buses stands for hours on the main road. More people come to ask: ‘Are there any Muslim houses round here?’ My wife says to one fellow, raising her voice: ‘No, there aren’t! Neither Muslim nor Croat ones! There were only humanhouses here!’

Can we build, in spite of all that’s happened and still happens, ‘human houses here’?

May grief become hope!
May revenge become righteousness!
May the tears of the mothers become prayers
That Srebrenica never happens again.  (Imam Cekic, Memorial for Srebrenica, 2005)

There are three overwhelming reasons why we should care for the wellbeing of those seeking asylum from persecution. All of them are deeply rooted in basic and central Jewish teachings, as well, I’m sure, as in the teachings of other faiths, and in broad humanitarian values.

The first is loving-kindness. ‘Feed the hungry, clothe the naked and free the oppressed’, teaches the prophet Isaiah. This is what God wants of us. ‘Do not hide from your own flesh’, he concludes. Just as we are all made in the image of God and all life is sacred, so too we are all composed of blood and nerves; we all feel pain, need food, warmth and shelter. We are not allowed to ‘hide’; that is, to contrive to avoid noticing the suffering of other people, or to claim that it is not our business. It is our direct concern.

Secondly, the central story of the Jewish People is the journey from slavery to freedom. We were slaves to Pharaoh; God delivered us from the house of bondage and guided us on the path to liberty. You shall love the stranger, teaches the Torah, because you yourselves were strangers in the Land of Egypt and you therefore know what the life of an outcast is like. There is no day in the entire year when we don’t repeat that story; it is the moral touchstone of Jewish values. Out of the experience of injustice, cruelty and the stripping away of our dignity, we must come to learn the essential importance of justice, loving-kindness and respect for all humanity. Just as we longed for the protection of justice when we were outcasts, so we must show justice and kindness to those who are ‘outcasts’ today.

Thirdly, history, down to recent decades, has made Jewish people all too aware of what it means to be marginalised, alienated, and scapegoated. Jewish people know what it feels like to be society’s ‘other’, to be the victim of racism, religiously motivated contempt, suspicion, prejudice and hatred. The experience of trying desperately to escape from encircling death is vivid in Jewish memory. Those who were fortunate reached a foreign land, were fearful about the fate of their family, uncertain of the future and usually destitute. They had to begin from nothing, far from those they knew and loved. Sometimes hands reached out in kindness; it is our desire to be such hands towards others now.

But the Drop-In is not an exercise in doing what we’ve been taught. My experience is that it is rooted in human warmth and solidarity, in being together to do what we can for one another. Volunteers have come forward, Jews, Christians, Muslims, people of no particular faith, people of all ages from their teens to their eighties, because they like being together with those who come to this centre, because we feel human contact and understanding and that, by God’s grace, we are able to help each other. Together, we help each other to see and share a wider and deeper humanity. One of the great achievements of the Drop-In is that it has brought together so many people from different backgrounds to find one another and work together in a common cause valued by all.

I am extremely grateful to those whose brain-child this Drop-In was, those who turned it into a reality and those who have worked at it ever since, to ensure that there are enough volunteers, that it runs smoothly and appropriately, that sufficient funding is available, that people who come here receive food, clothing, medical and above all legal help and that the atmosphere is cheerful and kind. But the most important appreciation lies in what one lady whom I had never met before said to me last September: ‘I thank God, whose grace has enabled your communities to serve Him by helping us’. 

This a sad and serious time for Israel, the Middle East, and the Jewish People.

I took a cab to get to the other side of Jerusalem and the radio was, of course, on. So I asked the driver whether there had been any more news about Muhammad Abu-Chadyar, the poor boy who was taken from his home two days ago and found murdered in the Jerusalem forest. It is not known who was responsible, but no one I spoke to thought it entirely impossible that it might be a revenge killing, God forbid.

The cab driver answered: ‘The world responded to us differently after the murder of our three boys. It felt towards us differently. Now this has happened and it’s turned everything on its head. Unless there are absolutely clear proofs to the contrary, the world will think it was an act of revenge’. He continued, ‘After everything the Jewish People has been through, we wanted this to be a Jewish State, a state with true Jewish values.’ I looked across and saw the pain on his face.

The eight o’clock news began and he turned up the radio. The opening item was a speech by President Shimon Peres: ‘I call upon all citizens of the country’, he declared. ‘Two things are needed at this time: respect for the law, and restraint in our speech. We must not be drawn into incitement to wrongdoing. Whoever incites brings about the most perilous state of hatred and enmity. This is not our purpose. We aspire to live in peace and to allow our neighbours to live in peace.’ He said, categorically and unambiguously, what every leader needs to say. He was speaking to Israel’s Jewish community; he was also speaking to its Christian and Muslim communities.

But most powerful was the statement by Avraham and Rachel Fraenkel, just a day after they had buried their own son. Because they were in mourning, Avraham’s brother Yishai spoke on their behalf: ‘We don’t know for certain what exactly happened last night in East Jerusalem. However, if the young Arab boy was killed on nationalist grounds, this is the most terrible and shocking act. There is no difference between blood and blood. Murder is murder, whatever the nationality or age of the victim. There is no justification and no excuse for any murder whatsoever.’ They no doubt also recognised the grief of Muhammad’s family through the depth of their own.

At this time people feel deeply pained, saddened and vulnerable. There is plenty to be afraid of. People may naturally also be angry. The spiritual and moral struggle is to turn these raw  feelings not against Arabs, or against Jews, or against any other person, nation or religion, but into sorrow and indignation at the very existence of hatred, cruelty and injustice. This may be the greatest challenge an individual or a society may ever have to face. The capacity to do so may prove decisive for our future, not just in the Middle East, but in all our conflicts, across the entire globe.  

We therefore need each other’s humanity, solidarity and understanding, not each other’s threats, rejection and prejudice. Significantly, each day there have been demonstrations in Israel of just these values, Tag Meir (‘Light Tag’)  in Jerusalem yesterday and a rally in Tel Aviv tonight. I admire those who not only attended them, but strive to live by the qualities of universal respect, justice which they represent.

For those of us who live in the Diaspora this is a time to stand in solidarity with the words of Shimon Peres and Avraham and Rachel Fraenkel. Both in Israel and in our communities across the world, we are called upon to renew our commitment to live the true values of Judaism. This is not a moment to withdraw.

It is essential for us to reach out to our neighbours of other faiths, especially our neighbours who are Muslims. We need one another. We have no one else to stand surety for each other’s safety and humanity.

I will therefore conclude with the words of a Muslim friend and leader who attended the vigil outside the Israeli Embassy on Wednesday night:

‘I pray that the most recent losses will make communities of all creeds 
gather in solidarity to echo the message of NO to violence and YES to 
peace-building across the globe. I link arms with you all as one family mourning the loss of your  beloved and will be very pleased to assist in any way that I can.’

Everyone is deeply saddened by the murder of the three boys. Among the many statements which try to express the sorrow of this time, I’m especially moved by these words from Rabbis for Human Rights:

‘Words fail at this time. Nevertheless, at hearing the news of the murders of Naftali Frenkel z”l, Eyal Yifrach z”l and Gilad Shaer z”l, we wish to express the profound pain we feel along with all of Am Yisrael and those of all faiths who honour the Image of God in every human being. We send our most profound condolences to the families and we mourn alongside them. Baruch dayan ha’emet.’

The overwhelming feeling is of deep sorrow at three young, eager lives so cruelly and brutally ended. There is great sadness for their parents and families and for the grief which now engulfs them, a grief which so many people here tragically know so well. The families have been very dignified in their response. They have included Abu Mazen among those to whom they have expressed thanks for their support.

There is also a wider awareness of what violence means for everyone in the region. This brings to mind Yehudah Amichai’s remarkable poem about an Arab shepherd looking for his lost goat and a Jewish father looking for his son on Mount Zion. Both desperately want to find them before they enter ‘the dreadful Chad Gadya machine’. It seems, horribly, that there are some people, like those who abducted and killed the three boys, who with heartless brutality want to keep feeding that awful engine with its cycle of destruction in which one creature devours another.

Everyone here with whom I’ve spoken is anxious about the response to the murders, and the response to the response. This is a profound challenge: what can we do to bring the cycle of destruction to a stop?

I understand the mood here among the political leadership is deeply sad, and reflective and thoughtful.

As we mark the new moon of Tammuz this weekend, the Muslim community begins the month of Ramadan.
 
I spent much of last week following the third unit of a residential course for faith leaders in interfaith understanding. It was a rich and wonderful experience, organised by Cambridge Coexist, a title to which my computing skills cannot do justice because the ‘C’ represents the crescent moon of Islam, the ‘X’ Judaism’s Magen David, and the ‘E’ the form of the cross. Old friendships among us were deepened, new friendships made.
 
I asked one of my new friends, Remona Aly, what Ramadan meant to her. She sent me the following inspiring response:
     For me, Ramadan is a time for spiritual renewal, self-discipline, sincere gratitude and focused introspection. In one of my favourite verses in the Quran, Allah tells His servants: “I am closer to you than your jugular vein”. Just as God is intimately close to each one of us, Ramadan is an invitation and a beautiful reminder to me to draw closer to my Creator whose mercy envelops me like a warm embrace. 
 
Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic year, entails fasting daily from dawn until dusk. Especially when it falls over mid-summer, and particularly for Muslims living in latitudes far from the equator, this cannot be easy. As one of the participants on our course acknowledged, its challenges include struggling with feeling ‘hungry, thirsty and irritable’.
 
But, as on the Jewish fasts, fasting itself is not the whole and sole purpose. Ramadan, traditionally understood as the month when God’s revelation of the Quran commenced, is a time for intense prayer, deep study of its sacred text, and generosity in giving. My friend Shezad has often told me how warm-hearted crowds gather at the Mosque before and after the Iftar meal with which each day’s fast concludes, to pray and study together far into, and especially in the last ten days of the month, right through, the night. His words have always communicated to me a joyful and wonderful sense of spiritual community.
 
It would be foolish to deny that relations between the West and Islam contain painful difficulties and challenging concerns, in both directions. For Jews and Muslims especially, there often lies between us the unaddressed shadow of the politics of the Middle East. But if one googles ‘Ramadan and Jews’ one finds numerous U-Tube videos of Jews and Muslims celebrating the Iftar meal together, across the world.
 
My perception is that there exists a deep and widespread admiration for a community which adheres to the discipline demanded by Ramadan. Such commitment enables it to have an important counter-cultural voice amidst the individualistic ethos of societies where those very individuals often feel lonely and unhappy in the pursuit of happiness and self-fulfilment.
 
There is no such thing as a serious religious life, or spiritual path, without discipline. Judaism too makes its demands on us in how we pray, study, eat, conduct our personal and work lives, give charity, commit ourselves to our community and dedicate ourselves to fostering an inclusive society founded on justice, compassion, human dignity, freedom and peace.
 
Ramadan therefore offers an opportunity for us, Jews and Muslims, to test out what might lie beyond fear and mistrust so that we can begin to find in each other a fellowship of culture and values, and share, in Remona Aly’s words, ‘a beautiful reminder’ of our longing to be servants of God within the embrace of God’s compassion.
 

We will pray in our communities this Shabbat for the three kidnapped boys Ya’akov Frenkel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach. I’m sure many of us are already doing so.
 
Our prayers must go out in circles around them too. First of all these circles must include their parents and families. “This is a very difficult time for us, but we feel the nation’s embrace and the strength of your thoughts and prayers I hope are reaching Gilad’, said his mother on Israeli television. There can be no greater nightmare for a parent than what is happening to her.
 
Our prayers should also include the brave Israeli-Arab teenager who posted on Facebook: ‘I call for the return of the abducted teens. This is not the way to reach peace.’ Following death threats he added: ‘I’m afraid to go to school’. We should pray too for the Israeli Arab boy who subsequently posted a picture of himself holding an Israeli flag with the words “Bring Back Our Boys”. “I am against kidnappings, and there are a lot of Israeli-Arabs who support Israel and the peace process,” he said. They are surely very far from alone, and give us faith that in spite of everything there exists a basic solidarity for the sake of the values of life and family.
 
We should pray too for all the soldiers, police and civilians involved in the vast search operations for the boys and that they should be successful in two ways. First of all, may the boys be found alive and safe and soon. Secondly, may as little harm and violence as possible ensue from the search operations themselves. Tragically, it is almost always the case that violence leads to more violence, anger to more anger. However bleak we may feel, we must pray that the ultimate end of these operations will not be even more hatred and resentment, but greater understanding. Such a thought may seem foolish and naïve, but we must on no account relinquish it from our prayers, hopes and goals and it must govern our words and actions.
 
The vast cruelties of the politics of the Middle East have become even more frightening with the unfolding of this week’s events in Iraq. One fears for Israel; one fears simply for people, human beings, parents, children, Jewish, Arab, whoever they may be, who want to do what people want to do: love their family and get on with making a living. Only when we remember that we are all people, someone’s child, someone’s sister, someone’s parent, will there be less hatred and more humanity and understanding. Only when we stand up for that humanity, whoever’s it is, will we bring safety and peace nearer.
 
That is why I was so moved to read about the prayers shared by Jewish and Muslim leaders from the Etzion block this Tuesday: “Our hearts are torn at this moment, and my heart goes out the mothers of these children,” said Sheikh Ibrahim Al-Hawa. “There is a wall between our two nations, and we hope to remove the wall separating the hearts of humans … we pray that God return these youngsters to their mothers as soon as possible, God willing,” he added, speaking in Arabic. (Times of Israel – click here for the full article)
 
Israel has called the search for our three boys ‘Operation Brother’s Keeper’. That is exactly what it is, because every Israeli, and many beyond, feel that these boys could be their children, their brothers. But the name also reminds us that both ‘brother’ and ‘keeper’ have the widest possible of meanings in the Bible, because we are all God’s children and one another’s keepers and protectors, whoever we may be.
 
May the boys be brought safely home. May the anguish of these dreadful events awaken our hearts to what truly matters in the world.

I looked down at the prayer book. Something had suddenly felt different; the melody had unexpectedly changed, alerting me to the fact that the words were no longer following the beaten path of this section of the service, familiar to me since my teens.
 
I found the place. Yes, here we were, in the middle of the blessing to which the rabbis gave the name ge’ulah, ‘redemption’, which links the Shema meditation on the oneness of God to the beginning of the daily Amidah prayer. But this version was decidedly different; something definitely didn’t feel quite right.
 
It was a Monday morning and we were gathered in the small synagogue of Lochem, in the east of Holland. Jews had first been recorded here in the fourteenth century, but continuous settlement dated only from the beginning of the eighteenth. The synagogue was dedicated on the 20^th October 1865. In many of the small towns of the Twente region, and all over Holland, such synagogues still stand, gracious in their Dutch brickwork, the former homes of communities which loved and cherished them. Before the war there had been two kosher butchers in Lochem and at least five kosher bakeries.
 
Outside on the wall were plaques with names; I counted more than eighty. The family name Fortuin appeared nine times, as did Vries; the name Heilbron was recorded eight times, Roos and Wijler five times each. These must have been grandparents and parents, brothers and sisters, little children. Between the four columns into which the list was subdivided was a dedication, beneath the heading 1940 – 1945.
 
I looked down at the prayer book and carefully followed the unfamiliar words:
In recent generations your enemies caused a great blow to fall upon your people, such as had never before been seen in the world. Yet, amidst the darkness of the years of the Holocaust, your people Israel survived, a very few, a remnant of a remnant, wretched and traumatised. To them you gave strength and they built new lives…
 
That new life was right here, in this singing which echoed off the stone walls and the beautiful geometric patterns of the ceiling and came back to encircle us from every side. What singing that was! And this was just an ordinary Monday morning, just a simple day in the liturgy like every other workaday Monday. Yet it was not an ordinary Monday. The community had gathered here, travelling from different towns in ones and twos, some from as far as a hundred kilometres away, to pray, to study, to express together their abiding love of this beautiful, painful, haunting heritage which would not left them alone but drew them back in spite of everything with immeasurable grace and power to dedicate themselves to it more deeply.
 
There was not a person here who did not have a story: ‘My mother was hidden in forty-seven different homes’. ‘They were going to pull that house down, when they found that it was full of hiding places…’
 
The melody changed again, to the music of the Hatikvah. I looked back down at the words:
You have drawn back together those who were scattered among the nations, and re-gathered from the four corners of the earth those who were dispersed, and the children have returned to their borders.
 
Not just in Israel, but across Holland, across Europe, people are returning to rediscover the borders, fields and rifts and rivers of their heritage and faith, and the music of their spirit.

Today, on the seventieth anniversary of D-Day, we honour the memory of all who contributed to the success of one of the most ambitious and courageous military operations ever mounted.

We are humbled and awed by the bravery of all who fought to bring freedom back to Europe. Though liberation came too late for many millions, the news of the Allied landings brought hope even to the concentration camps, to Jews in hiding across Europe and to all the countries who had suffered Nazi oppression for years.
 
We reflect with deep appreciation on the truth that tens of thousands gave their lives in the battle for Normandy and in the subsequent fighting, so that our parents, we and our children could enjoy the freedoms we so often take for granted.