Something Practical – On the Seder table

It’s such a beautiful day, in the middle of the beautiful springtime. We shouldn’t forget: Pesach is named ‘the Feast of Unleavened Bread’ and ‘the Season of our Freedom’, but it is also called ‘the Festival of Spring’ – short as that brief season may be in the Middle East. For all our preoccupation with history and its politics at the Seder, we should remember that this is also a celebration of the earth, its gifts and its beauty.

At least four of the special foods on the Seder table are products which grow, and which, with little more than a single green finger we could grow for ourselves. I had my best lesson ever in this regard last Monday. Leslie Lyndon and I, who work the synagogue garden together as a rabbi-and-cantor-team, were digging away. I was plastered in soil and manure from top to toe, when out came the children from our pre-school: ‘Can we do some?’ they begged when they saw us planting herbs. ‘Rabbi Jonathan, Rabbi Jonathan, can I have a go!’ I’ve rarely felt so proud and happy to be called ‘rabbi’.

Karpas, or ‘greens’ can be any vegetable eaten raw, except what we use for the bitter herbs. Parsley, celery, tomatoes, or a mixture of them all: why not grow them ourselves? It’s not just that I’m a gardening fanatic; far more importantly, the blessing feels different when you’ve grown something yourself. You appreciate the world more deeply when you say ‘Blessed are you, God…who creates the fruit of the earth’. For some of these herbs, even a pot on a window-ledge will do.

The Maror must be bitter, but it need not be horseradish. It turns out that horseradish, which is hot and fierce rather than bitter, is a mediaeval introduction which has had its detractors: ‘Many people eat less than the required minimum of an olive’s size because of the pungent flavour of the horseradish’, wrote the Chacham Tzvi, Rabbi Tzvi Ashkenazi (1658 – 1718), ‘Thus they neglect the mitzvah of maror. And the meticulously observant Jews who do eat an olive’s size of the horseradish are endangering their health’. Endives, chicory, bitter lettuce, – they may all be a better choice for the bitter herbs. What about a pre-Pesach tasting, to decide which one really represents bitterness? ‘Sweetish at first, but with a bitter aftertaste’ say the rabbis, because initially being in Egypt was a boon for the Children of Israel. Don’t have so much as to detract from the commandment to eat maror at the Seder, just enough to determine which is best, or rather worst.

The charoset should be thick and sticky to represent mortar, and with bits in it to look like straw. Thus runs the familiar tradition. But a deeper interpretation tells us that it should be made of fruits, drinks and nuts mentioned in the Song of Songs, for the charoset also symbolises the love which bound the Children of Israel together despite their slavery, the solidarity which so often unites the oppressed. If you don’t have a family recipe (which usually expresses just that kind of intergenerational bond, sweet but sometimes sticky) look on the internet and see the amazing range of possibilities, or choose with your family and friends three ingredients which you feel have to be included. Or, best of all if you can, use something from your own garden!

Matzah is most often made from wheat, water and absolutely nothing else. But I’m going to leave that for tomorrow, when we’ll be making our own in the synagogue kitchen.

Something about the Haggadah – on the symbols of the Seder

‘Seder’ means order, and the Haggadah has a clear and ancient structure and order. It is usually printed on the first page, even before the Kiddush with which the celebration commences. It lists the fifteen traditional parts of the ceremony and is itself considered part of the ritual. Unlike the contents pages of most books, it is customary to sing or recite it.

It’s interesting to consider the role and importance of order in a story. Order is neither boring nor ‘uncool’. After all, try convincing a small child that this night their bedtime story is Goldilocks and the Two Bears or Snow White and the Eight Dwarves. They’ll soon put you right. Order is part of the ritual of how we form and celebrate memory and identity. Jews, argued Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in his remarkable book Zakhor, wrote little history until the modern period. Instead, we live it through our rituals and celebrations. We re-enact it in the story of the Haggadah; we taste it in the unleavened bread and bitter herbs.

I would argue the very structure and ritual of the Seder are at the heart of its theme of freedom. Going through the whole Haggadah in every detail can indeed be made a burden, if we feel enslaved by it and do it by rote, without spirit. We may, or may not, decide to shorten several sections, but we should certainly enliven and personalise them all. That’s the point: having a structure gives us the freedom to improvise; having an identity in the world gives us the liberty to discover ourselves within it; having a shared narrative allows us to make it our own by weaving our own experience into and around it. As we tell the Pesach story we speak of ourselves; as we debate its values we ponder, discuss and determine who we are and for what it is that we stand.

Something Practical – On Pesach cleaning

I’m sure it’s not cool to say it, but no, I don’t hate Pesach cleaning. This is not because I’m male and have spent my life watching others do the work. I wasn’t brought up that way and am happy to get my hands dirty, wrinkled with hot water, in short anything except burnt (again) by the boiling water used in kashering the cutlery.

There are two reasons why I actually like Pesach cleaning, at least much of the time. I’m not suggesting it’s the most important aspect of the festival or that it should become a form of slavery to every speck and spot which, unlikely as it may seem, could just possibly be a time-hardened crumb from some long forgotten slice of toast. (For the due processes of Pesach cleaning and kashering please see the relevant sections of The Pesach Companion which we hope to scan and attach tomorrow).

The first reason is that there is no learning like doing. I think I know why I know what to do at Pesach. My grandmother grew up in a devoted rabbinical household. She was by all accounts a brilliant cook; not just her recipes but her understanding of how a Jewish kitchen works must have come from observing her parents. My father learnt from her, especially from the war years in Palestine when she eked out a living for the family by providing rooms and meals for British officers stationed in Jerusalem. I in turn would watch my father and mother. This was our best companionship, dipping the cutlery in boiling water, making the bottom of the old pots gleam. We laughed, we felt close and we made the kitchen kosher. It’s not just that what we don’t do, we can’t teach. It’s that we lose the bond of generations, or of friendships, which are often sealed most deeply over the most basic matters, the sink, the stove and the spoons.

The second reason is about mess. All year stuff accumulates which one never quite musters the will to throw into the recycling bin. All year the shelves and corners fill. It is a strange joy to clear them out, to strip them bare, and to watch the steam rise from the hot water as it penetrates and cleanses every nook. And this itself becomes an important principle for the Seder; we regroup around the base of things, around the basis of our values.
 
Something about the Haggadah – on the story

As we simplify and reorganise our home, so we clarify to ourselves what really matters. We do so by telling the story of the Haggadah. We can shorten it (for the children, or for anyone who is unwell) or we can lengthen it (‘the more the better’ the Haggadah itself enjoins us). But we have to tell the story of the Exodus on Seder night. We must begin at the beginning and travel in the right direction, me’avdut lecherut, from slavery to freedom. Why is this story the story, the essential narrative of Judaism itself?

I often think of the moment right at the opening of the Book of Exodus when Pharaoh addresses his fellow Egyptians: ‘Look’, he says, ‘The Children of Israel are a nation’ before warning them that these foreigners now constitute a threat. It’s the first time anywhere that we are defined in such terms. We’re no longer just a family, but a people, a nation. This moment is therefore the start of our national history, the very moment we become slaves. Why? Why not begin with conquest and glory, or at least when God gave us the Ten Commandments?

I believe the answer takes us to the very essence of being Jewish. The first and defining experience of our people is the struggle for equality, dignity and justice. Time and again the Torah takes us back to this touchstone of our values. Shabbat, Judaism’s single most important institution, is not about remembering the creation, but also zecher le’yetziat Mitzrayim, in memory of going out of Egypt. For what would make a person value rest, free time and autonomy more than awareness of what it’s like to be a slave? Likewise, the memory of slavery is at the heart of Judaism’s concern with justice: ‘Don’t oppress the stranger’ we are taught, ‘because you’ve known what an outsider’s life is like’. ‘Don’t take a widow’s garment as a pledge…But remember that you were slaves in Egypt’.
We tell the story of the Exodus both to confirm our historical identity and continuity and to affirm our moral identity as Jews.

Dignity, justice, freedom, hope and faith: as we clean our kitchens and make them shine, we recall our essential values so that they should glow in our lives.

Something Practical – On Pesach Shopping

 
I visited one of the large ‘Everything you could possibly need for Pesach’ shops last week and found the experience sociologically interesting. Next year I want to write a feature on how couples talk to each other while they shop:
      Wife: ‘No, not that one! I said “The Telma soup”!
     Husband: aside ‘Who does she think I am? A prophet? How’m I supposed to know which variety is which? He finds the product. Lucky I’m not short-sighted.

Another couple in the next aisle:
     ‘We’ll have two of those kind’ ‘Yes, darling’. ‘And three of those’. ‘Yes darling’.
 
Shopping for Pesach can be stressful and very expensive. The only connection with the subject of freedom may be the sense that it liberates one of a fair amount of money. So here are two thoughts:

• People often worry about what they really have to buy specially for the festival. The guide at this link lists which products absolutely require a Kosher lePesach label and which do not. Please note that there is greater leniency regarding what we buy before the festival commences.
• Pesach is about difference. We don’t need three kinds of breakfast cereal and five kinds of cake or chocolate. Yes, Pesach is a festival and the tradition is to celebrate with special recipes. But the most important food is the matzah, which represents simplicity. It’s a chastening reminder, a counter-balance to profligacy. Traditionally the most important food we pay for is the ‘Pesach flour’ we give to those who would otherwise be unable to afford a Seder.

Something about the Haggadah – on the imagination

 
‘Everyone is obliged to see themselves as if they in person had gone out of Egypt’: this line from the Haggadah goes to the heart of the Seder. ‘”As if” belongs to the imagination, that wild terrain governed by no obvious rules’, writes Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in The New American Haggadah. ‘Tonight we are asked to take this faculty of the mind, so beloved by children and novelists, extremely seriously’.
 
The art and essence of the Seder is to read the story of the Exodus not as what happened to others long ago, but as what matters to us now. What kinds of tyranny do I struggle with in my world, in the inner world of my own being, in the society, country, continent in which I live? What the Egypt we left long ago was really like is a less important concern than the metaphorical Egypt of an unredeemed world in which many suffer vast injustice and indignity this very day.
 
For that reason it’s not enough to think only of ourselves as leaving Egypt. What about others? It’s remarkable how much of other peoples’ realities we don’t notice, even when we live alongside them. I often read about events in Germany, or Jerusalem, which my father lived through and in which he was closely involved, and say to myself ‘I never even thought about what that must have been like for him’. How much more true may must be of people in our community and neighbourhood, of people whose names and moral struggles we may have heard about but on which we have never reflected. And what of those whom we may have seen or passed in the street, or heard about generically, who belong like the last of the four children to those who lack the know-how to ask, whose questions never reach us?
 
The Seder is the great goad, to care about human dignity, and suffering, and to commit ourselves to some corner of the struggle for greater justice and compassion. It is also the night of hope, that we will succeed in travelling together from slavery to freedom, to a world which is redeemed. For commitment to the journey is the beginning of redemption. 

‘No’, he said, ‘I’d rather have the meeting in the synagogue,’ before adding, ‘You see, I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve never yet been inside one’. It was a privilege to host scientist, author and campaigner Colin Tudge last night. And, no, the above admission isn’t proof positive that he’s not Jewish.
 
Colin Tudge, who was features editor for The New Scientist, then a presenter for the BBC and who now lectures across the world, writes, and runs the Campaign for Real Farming, describes himself as ‘a friend of religion’. In the most urgent task of changing our attitude towards the earth, religious communities are key allies.
 
At school, Tudge remembered, the nature table was a shrine. He soon discovered it wasn’t true that most birds looked alike: ‘There was a glossy magazine with a picture of shorebirds mysteriously called “Oystercatchers and Knots”. I was hooked.’ Who cared about colds and flu when you could explore the ponds and mud? ‘I never wanted to be a professional scientist. I just liked being with the creatures’. He was shocked when he found that not everyone felt likewise. The Secret Life of Birds was written in answer to a friend’s questions:
           ‘What I really want to know about is birds. They keep coming into the garden. They fiddle about. What are they? What are they up to?’
 
At eleven Tudge started his first tree nursery. ‘A tree is a big plant with a stick up the middle’, he explains in The Secret Life of Trees. But why be a tree? ‘The advantages of treedom are both manifold and manifest’, he explains. ‘But being big is…  risky, because all the time a tree is growing, time and chance and other creatures are working on its downfall.’ One of those creatures is us.
 
‘What needs to change?’ I asked him. ‘The most important thing is attitude’, he replied. ‘The goal of all the world’s most powerful governments is “economic growth”. Other creatures hardly get a look in.’
 
To express this in religious terms would be to speak about idolatry, the setting of profit and advantage before reverence, respect for nature, stewardship and the service of God. A young woman recently spent a Shabbat in our community before travelling to Bhutan to study one of the only countries in the world which defines its national goals not in terms of GDP but of collective happiness. It would be good to hear what she discovered.
 
‘If you took a train across Britain what kind of farms would you like to see?’ I asked him. ‘Thick strips of trees, lots of fruit trees, coppiced hazel, also large hardwoods like oak and hornbeam, with fields of grain in between. Livestock too; most prefer the shade of trees and suffer in the heat. You need small, highly skilled farms. They’re just as profitable, but sustainable.’ Could our community become an outlet for them? ‘Certainly!’
 
Tudge attacked the prevalent Dawkinsian notion of ‘the selfish gene’. Genes, he argues in his latest book, are not selfish. Life is often ruthlessly competitive, but the best way to survive is co-operation. The misplaced concept of the selfish gene feeds a selfish ideology.
 
Why host such a talk in a synagogue? Because it goes to the heart of religion, which concerns how we respect the world, including how we consume; because this autumn brings the Sabbatical year, when the land’s produce is shared between poor and rich, animals and humans; because that should not be treated with utilitarian contempt which we are taught to view with reverence as filled with the presence of God.  

I remember as a small boy listening to my mother telling me about the first English policeman she saw. She was in her teens when she escaped Nazi Germany, with its SA, SD, SS and Gestapo. The family landed at Croydon Airport on 9 April 1939 and it was there that she saw British Bobbys for the first time. They smiled.
 
My values have also been formed above all by the rigorous Jewish moral and legal traditions which place justice and loving-kindness together at the pinnacle of all values. ‘Justice, justice shall you pursue’ demands the famous verse from Deuteronomy (16:20). If, as was axiomatic for the rabbis of the Talmud, the Torah uses no term in vain, why is the word ‘justice’ repeated? It is to teach us, explains the third century Resh Lakish, that we must pursue the goal of justice not only when the path towards it is clear and open, but also when it is obstructed and occluded by corruption and deceit.
 
The findings of the review by Mark Ellison QC into the undercover activities of the police in the investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence come as an appalling indictment. The lack of clarity, integrity and honesty, not to mention the lack of the most basic respect and humanity towards the Lawrence family, are an affront to justice and human dignity. David Winnick MP was right when he said, following the Home Secretary’s statement to the House: ‘May I simply say that a society based on the rule of law should feel thoroughly ashamed of what has been revealed…’
 
Jewish jurisprudence addresses itself rigorously to every aspect of the legal process, but quite particularly to the integrity of witnesses. What is known and seen must be disclosed; once adjured as a witness, a person who ‘has seen or known, but does not tell it, shall bear his guilt’. (Leviticus 5:1) We read those words in the Torah tomorrow.
 
That law provides the basis for one of the most famous passages in the entire Mishnah, the earliest rabbinic code of Jewish law, compiled at the close of the second century. It concerns the adjuration of witnesses. First, they are warned to say only what they know directly, not by hearsay. Then they are warned that in capital cases, – which carried the death penalty in theory, though not in rabbinic practise, – they are answerable not only for the blood of the accused, should dishonesty on their part lead to a false conviction, but also for the blood of the wrongly condemned person’s unborn descendants. It is here that we find the remarkable declaration that ‘whoever saves a single life is as if they had saved the entire world; while whoever destroys a single life is as if they had destroyed an entire world’.
 
Finally the Mishnah addresses itself to anyone who might decide that it would be easier to avoid testifying at all: ‘If you say “Why should I get involved in all this trouble?” then know that ‘he who has seen or known and does not tell shall bear his guilt’.
 
Justice must be ‘pursued’; it may neither be avoided nor perverted. There are no exceptions to this principle. The notion, obviously racist, that there might be certain kinds of peoples who deserve a lesser justice, offends against the Torah’s rule that ‘You shall have one law’ and against its quintessential value, expressed in its very first chapter, that every human being is created in the image of God.
 
It should not be imagined either that in such contexts justice is somehow in contradistinction to mercy. Mercy and compassion should affect all our conduct. But there is no mercy in obstructing the pursuit of justice on behalf of the vulnerable and the grief-stricken. 

It all came out of staring at a patch of mud and weeds. Then I found I had a bag too much of horse manure in the back of the car. (There’s nothing quite like shovelling the stuff into sacks on a cold February day: the warmth of the hay, the sweet and acrid smell of life.) So I dug the contents, and that of twenty more bags, into the soil and ordered six kilos of seed potatoes.
 
It was after Pesach that this became Leslie Lyndon’s and my shared project; rabbi and chazzan digging the synagogue garden together, – there has to be something symbolic in that. The potatoes sprouted, the sunflowers grew tall, the courgettes produced green and yellow fruits. People stopped us to chat: ‘What’s that you’re growing there? How’s the corn doing?’ We put ourselves on the waiting list to host Gardener’s Question Time.
 
The children from the pre-school joined us to harvest the potatoes; I wondered how many had ever lifted a tuber out of the furrow before, or seen the secret of the growth of chips and crisps. We sold the courgettes for a donation to any charity which fed the hungry. Someone made a vegetable casserole and took it to the Drop-In for asylum seekers. People went home from the synagogue carrying the unanticipated burden of a sack of potatoes.
 
It was at a conference in Edinburgh that I met the lady who told me about her project. Every time she went to visit her husband, who sadly couldn’t be cared for at home, she’d find herself staring at the waste ground behind the hospital building. Slowly she turned it into a garden; gradually everyone joined her, patients, families, staff: ‘What’s that we’re growing over there?’ ‘It used to be a rubbish-heap’, she said, ‘and many of the patients used to feel that they were rubbish too. But aren’t we gardeners all?’
 
I hadn’t realised how many people had noticed the patch in front of our synagogue. A group of ten-year-olds accosted me: ‘We want them crysanthemums!’ I hadn’t thought plants were cool. I asked the children at Gan Alon nursery what they might like: ‘Sweet corn and strawberries’, they answered, so sweet corn and strawberries it shall be, (in addition to the potatoes, sunflowers and courgettes.) It’s all good news for the local blackbirds, thrushes and tits.
 
‘God planted a garden in Eden to the east’, says the Book of Genesis, describing God’s first horticultural venture. But there’s no such a thing as a garden which isn’t God’s garden, and isn’t the command to ‘tend it and look after it’ God’s everlasting instruction about loving and respecting this world? After all, to whom do the earth and the seasons belong? People know it, too. Those who might never step inside a temple, synagogue or church see wonder in the snowdrops, feel before the wild plum and the almond blossom the touch of a gentle heaven.
 
All that was last year’s affair. But this year’s labours have now begun. You’ll see as you walk towards the synagogue that we’re having two raised beds constructed. A person in a wheelchair will be able to circumnavigate them too, brush a hand against orange-scented thyme, plant crocuses, pick a strawberry or a courgette (with a little bit of luck).
 
We may never say the word aloud, but I hope that garden will put the feeling of baruch in our minds, baruch which means blessed, – blessed this world, blessed this life, blessed the vitality that makes the leaf unfurl, the flower open and the embryo fruits set. For a garden is the prayer before the prayers begin, God’s place in which is set God’s house.

I had thought of writing just about the snowdrops. In February the small lanes of South Wales and the South West are beautiful with snowdrops. They grow in clumps and clusters by the road side, even right under the hawthorn, and on the climbing riverbanks. They grow beside the hedgerows, on the other side of which two ewes call out to their tiny lambs, just born. They grow in the churchyards, alongside the paths and among the graves. They guide the way into the old village churches.
 
Some of these churches are over a thousand years old, simple spaces filled with hearts’ lives, with the humility and prayer of generations. Opposite the entrance of one particular church, Nicky found two wooden panels on which was recorded the outcome of an ancient court case. It had involved the village priest; as a result it had been determined that for every measure of harvest, for each milch-cow born and for every lamb, a tithe was duly to be given. Nothing suggested greed or embezzlement. Rather, from what the land brought forth the poor, too, had to be fed.
 
I was reminded of Maimonides’ explanation, in that most moving section of his great 12th century code,  Hilchot Mattanot La’Evyonim, Laws concerning Gifts to the Poor, of the Torah’s rules on tithing. Ma’asrot, or tithes, provided for the landless servants of the community, the Priests and Levites. At certain points in the seven-year cycle they also benefited the local poor. More important for the itinerant destitute, who included orphans, the very old and the sick, were those parts of every harvest which the Torah declared theirs: the forgotten ears and sheaves, the second pickings from the ground crops and the orchards, and the corners of the fields.
 
But that was not sufficient. No Jewish community, ruled Maimonides, basing himself on the final chapter of the 2nd century Mishnaic tractate Pe’ah, was worthy of the title unless it had at least two regular collections: – the kuppah, or fund, from which the local poor were allocated money for their weekly needs, and the tamchu’i, or plate, on which surplus food was collected every day for the itinerant poor and the hungry. There is ample testament that these moneys, and various other funds, to support universal education, to marry off penniless young people, to provide for the sick and to care for the dead, have been the mark of Jewish community life throughout the ages. We are forbidden to eat in ease while our fellow human beings starve, suffer cold, and face homelessness and sickness.
 
‘Bishops cannot stay silent on political issues, because at the heart of religion is the question of how the community delivers justice’, wrote Ed West in today’s Times. He was referring to the claim, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury and twenty-seven other bishops, that cuts in welfare provision are driving more and more people to depend on food banks. Whether they are correct about the details of the causes is a matter of research and policy; but the bishops are certainly right to speak out. That is a question of values. Religion is not about God in heaven, but about God’s presence on earth, about the justice, compassion and kindness we strive to implement in our countries, cities and villages.
 
Only for Jews the unit of ultimate responsibility is not the state. Rather, it is the community, guided sometimes chided, by the vision of justice apprehended by the prophets, and the provisions of justice mandated by Jewish law. 

           The daughters of Jerusalem would go out and dance in the vineyards.
           What would they say? ‘Young man, lift up your eyes and consider what to choose.
           Don’t set your eyes on beauty but rather on family, “For grace is false and beauty
           is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised”. (Mishnah Ta’anit 4:8)

I was reading from the Torah recently when someone asked for something to be said on behalf of a relative who was ill. At once, before I could do anything about it, the traditionalMisheberach was intoned, the prayer which asks God to send ‘complete healing of the spirit and the body’. But, as I and many others knew, the person concerned was dying. What mattered now was not physical healing but comfort, companionship and peace. I thought of the simple words of a colleague in a similar situation: ‘May God be with her and her family on this journey’. That was so much more appropriate.
 
Today, the 7th of Adar, is traditionally regarded as the anniversary of Moses’ death. His brief, heartfelt supplication for his sister is still the heart of all our healing prayers: ‘Please, God, heal her, please’. Of the five Hebrew words, two are the same: ‘na – please’. Sometimes in our anxiety and helplessness next to the bed of the person we love, all language and all feeling contracts into just one single word: ‘Please!’ or maybe two words: ‘Please, God. Please, God. Please!’
 
Prayer is about how we engage our heart and consciousness with the greatest possible being. Sometimes it is a passionate, unrestrained outpouring of hope and need, as if we were flinging ourselves into the winds of the storm. Sometimes it is a stepping back, as if the breeze were entering us, breathing into unexplored chambers of the heart. Sometimes prayer is formed of words and song, sometimes silence. Sometimes we can ascribe to it no content, only the quiet awareness that we have been in partnership. If asked: ‘In partnership with what?’ we would find it hard to answer, but might say, tentatively, ‘With life, with my own spirit, with nature, with God’. But we would probably rather not answer.
 
The practice of praying in the congregation for those who are ill is Talmudic at the latest. The Shulchan Aruch (16th century) rules that we should include them in the community of those who are also ill, saying “May the All-Present One heal you amidst the sick of all Israel” Many of us add: ‘and all humankind’. The emphasis is that a person is not alone, both because there are many others who are ill too, and because we as a community now commit ourselves to supporting them and all who care for them.
 
I don’t think we manage these prayers well in our community, or in most others I have visited. People come to the synagogue with many anxieties and fears, about their own health, and about the wellbeing of family and friends. There are many kinds of illness too, and they all feel different at varying stages. The book Where Healing Resides, prepared by the Central Conference of American Rabbis, contains many thoughtful reflections, such as this prayer about chronic illness:
         Compassionate One, give me the strength and courage to face the daily challenges in my life…Be by my side…
or this meditation for people commencing treatment:
         Grant me strength to overcome any obstacles that lie ahead [and] hope to allow me to persevere in moments of darkness. Grant that those providing medical care may be gentle and compassionate.
 
I would like to prepare a card with a number of different healing prayers and make it available to whoever chooses for personal reflection. Each week, too, we should include a brief communal prayer from a selection touching on different aspects of healing. This will remind us to be aware of and compassionate towards each other through life’s many, exacting and often lonely challenges.

It would have been my father’s birthday today. He was born in 1921 in the small town of Rawitsch where his father owned a timber mill. Once he showed me the factory sign with ‘Wittenberg’ written large. The photograph was from the fifties or sixties; nobody had taken it down. It evidently never occurred to anyone that the family could have survived or that someone might return. His father also used to lead services, – partly, it was said, because he had the virtue of being extremely quick.
 
When my father was a small boy the family moved to nearby Breslau, now Wrotslaw; from there they fled to Palestine in 1937, leaving with just the bags in their hands after someone tipped off my grandfather that he was high on the Gestapo list. My father joined the British Army, then the Hagganah, experienced the siege of Jerusalem, and only moved to the UK in 1955. It seems fitting that his Yahrzeit falls on Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day.
 
Naturally I think about him on his birthday. He was far from being a moraliser, but one of his favourite sayings was ‘Ueberlegt sich der Chochem, ueberlegt sich der Narr’ – ‘While the person who thinks he’s so clever is thinking about it, so is the person he thinks is a fool’. On apt occasions he would remind me of these choice and invaluable words.
 
We live in a culture where much is at stake in not being wrong. ‘Don’t say sorry lest they think you’re admitting guilt’, is applied far more widely than in minor road accidents. We’re in danger of its becoming a proverb, a hallmark of our age.
 
It is hard to face not being right. Of course there are many situations in which it’s important to consider carefully and then find the courage to go ahead and do exactly what we believe to be correct. But sometimes we also need to be able to be mistaken. To do so we have to release ourselves from our pride, our defensiveness and, behind those shields, from a kind of shame which says ‘I just can’t bear myself if I’m wrong’. I find Shimon ben Zoma’s saying helpful here; he was a younger companion of Rabbi Akiva in the 2^nd century. He answered the question ‘Who is wise?’ by explaining, ‘The person who learns from everyone’. That’s about listening to life with one’s heart, and about humility.
 
But the Yiddish proverb my father loved concerns something more than, or a bit different from, being wrong. It’s about considering the other point of view, looking from the other side. What’s made the other person adopt that view, harbour such feelings? I may know where it hurts from inside me, but where does it hurt from inside him or her?
 
When we experience those questions we let go of more than the imbalanced prejudice ofChochem and Narr – wise person against fool. We probably never really thought like that anyway. We let go of a certain view of truth, – that it is always a matter of right against wrong. We cease to be simply defenders of our own position and become listeners to the feelings and perspectives of others. We stop being just protagonists in arguments and find the opportunity to become healers.
 
That may not mean that we were wrong in the first instance, though we won’t have had the whole truth. It may also remain correct that ‘He was unfair’, or ‘She hurt me’. But three things change once we ask what life feels like to the other person, once we begin to take steps towards him or her, at first perhaps just in the privacy of our own heart. We become more thoughtful; the other person becomes a companion, even if we cannot agree; and the world becomes richer and deeper.