I’ve always loved the trees in winter, their branches reaching into the mist, the glimmering of the damp against the bark, though it’s terrible for the woodpeckers when there’s a long freeze and ice seals the access to their food.
 
Actually, I love trees in every season. The movement of the invisible sap is like the living God silently flowing through all things. Sometimes one can feel it speaking, without words but audible, palpable to the heart. That’s why there are so many people who simply like to stand and listen among the trees. Each one, especially the old trees, tall and deeply rooted, might be, or maybe really is, the tree of life.
 
That tree has its roots in heaven, teaches the Zohar, and its gardener is eternal life itself:
         This world to come cares for this tree all the time, watering it and preparing it through its work, crowning it with crowns, never at any time withholding its streams….(Zohar III 239a –b)
To the mystics, that tree nourishes all the earth.
 
In life one really has just one decision, a decision beyond or within all the small decisions which busy one’s every day, like what to eat and where to go and who to call and what to do and to which charities to give money. It’s a decision one has never finally or irrevocable made, because one’s bound up with it all one’s life long, and the options repeat themselves again and again in all life’s changing circumstances, fortune and misfortune, health and illness, mortality and joy. It’s the decision to be on the side of life.
 
Sometimes this decision calls for singing and celebration; sometimes the deepest silence is not deep enough to intuit the unspoken flow of life’s currents in the heart. People live their decision in innumerable different ways; by becoming a care-worker, or a teacher; by creating a hospitable home, whether it has one room or ten; by trying as often as possible to offer a kind word. Some people show immense courage, like doctors working in Syria, and aid workers among refugees; some people express, year in, year out, that ordinary kindness without which the world would be dismal, a smile at the counter, helping the children over the road.
 
But there is something all this has in common: the understanding that there is no living being that is not part of life’s sacred tree; no person, whether he or she belongs to a group we know or don’t know, whether he or she carries the label of enemy or friend; no animal, no bird, not even a branch or flower which one is entitled simply to hurt for hurt’s sake, or out of carelessness crush.
 
The mystics had a strange phrase to describe sin, or at any rate the one great sin which they felt mattered most: kotsets banetiyot, breaking the growing shoots, as if to say ‘this person or creature isn’t part of life’s tree’. It’s a phrase which makes sense to any gardener, and we are all the gardeners of that tree of life.
 
One doesn’t go through life breaking nothing; that’s just too much to ask. Sometimes, or perhaps always, it’s really oneself which one breaks off. One can’t always help it; life is also cruel and harsh. One struggles, depressed and feeling as if one’s lost one’s purpose, until one finds that, no, in the heart of hearts one is still connected to the tree.
 
The spirit flows back and one thinks once again, ‘Life, precious and wonderful life’.
 
I love the trees in winter, and at any season.

When their father Jacob dies, the brothers are afraid: what is there now to hold Joseph back from exercising his right to revenge? He has the means, he has the cause, and they have guilt in their hearts. ‘Now he will hate us’, they think as they prostrate themselves and beg for his pardon.  But Joseph responds quite differently from how they had imagined: ‘You thought to do me harm’, he says, ‘But God intended it for good’. (Bereshit 50:20)
 
Last Tuesday, in an extraordinary speech to honour an extraordinarily great man’s life, President Obama spoke of Nelson Mandela, like Joseph a man who came out of jail to save the country which had imprisoned him, in terms of an equal, or even deeper, generosity of spirit: 
                  we remember the gestures, large and small – introducing his jailers as honored guests at his inauguration; taking the pitch in a springbok uniform; turning his family’s heartbreak into a call to confront HIV/AIDS – that revealed the depth of his empathy and understanding… It took a man like Madiba to free not just the prisoner, but the jailer as well; to show that you must trust others so that they may trust you; to teach that reconciliation is not a matter of ignoring a cruel past, but a means of confronting it with inclusion, generosity and truth.
 
It is not just the good and great who are called upon to develop the qualities of understanding and forgiveness, but all of us. For we interact with one another, not as perfect people, not as the ideal human beings we may dream of becoming, but with our faults and weaknesses and the wounds we bear, known or unbeknown to ourselves, as the result of our personal histories and the histories of our families. Maybe it is precisely in this truth that one of the secrets of understanding lies.
 
It should be said that forgiveness and generosity of spirit do not and must not render the strictures of justice insignificant. They don’t turn right into wrong, or make cruelty acceptable. They don’t alleviate the conscience of the need for inner accounting. We are known, whether we consider the repository of that knowledge to be God who ‘sees to the heart’; or to be the sum of all the memories of us in all the hearts we have touched either for blessing or for hurt; or whether, in the words of Stephen Duncan, it is in some mysterious way the world itself which knows us:
           Because even the breeze is your companion
           And the sun sees every hand that moves wrongly…
 
Yet there is an attitude which transcends and transforms the desire to hit back, to see the person who has hurt us hurt in turn.
 
Partly, that attitude is rooted in empathy and imagination, the capacity to see the other person not as our antagonist but in the wholeness of his or her life, as one who has also been fashioned by circumstances not of their choosing, by suffering as well as love, and by the angers and acts of unfairness, alongside the blessings, which have impacted upon their spirit.

Partly that attitude is rooted in humility and the capacity for self-retraction. If it is really me with whom the other person is angry, then I need to search myself, consider if I am in the wrong, partly or completely, and make good. But maybe it is not mainly about me. If so, then the anger is itself a symptom of deeper hurt. Do I then respond in kind, angry and hurtful in turn? Or is it possible to seek to understand and endeavor to bring healing?
 
Partly that attitude is rooted in a greater vision: you and I, can we see each other not as antagonists, but as participants and beneficiaries together in life’s struggles and life’s blessings?
 
‘God intended it for good’; the issue is how we can make our lives a part of that intention.

Life feels different this morning. One of the most deeply loved and most universally respected leaders of all time has gone to rest with his ancestors.
 
For as long as there is recorded history Nelson Mandela will be remembered for his deeds: for his courage and defiance at the Rivonia Trial; for his unyielding dignity during twenty-seven years of imprisonment on Robben Island; for his generosity and forbearance on his release; for his determination and wisdom in leadership, and for his vision and humanity in statesmanship.
 
More than this, he is and will be loved, both by all who knew him and by the incomparably greater number of people who felt as if they knew him because he embodied, with a humility and understanding which disarmed and encompassed even those who were once his fiercest antagonists, everything which is most true about what being human can and ought to mean.
 
People will no doubt debate and disagree with some of his political decisions. But it is unlikely that many will ever doubt his intentions, because they were not motivated by self and pride, but by the lights of dignity, justice, integrity and wisdom. By these he was guided through the unlit and criss-crossing paths of destiny, at the risk of his life and amidst severe privations, ready to die for them, but far happier to live and see them illuminate new freedoms.
 
Unlike many great leaders, he was not, thank God, assassinated; he did not die young; he brought his vision to a measure of fulfilment; his guidance has not been marred by overwhelming contention, and he has left a further legacy in lucid writings which include some of the most compelling moral prophecies of our age:
                It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black… A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.
                 When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both.
 
I don’t know if there is anyone else in the world about whose death I’ll find myself joining in conversation in deep shared sorrow with the staff of the supermarket close to midnight and feeling comforted by their words: ‘He fulfilled his destiny’.
 
Many Jewish teachings have been going through my mind, but especially that of Shimon ben Zoma in the 2^nd century: ‘Who is strong?’ he asks, and answers: ‘The person who overcomes his selfish inclination’.
 
I believe the root of Nelson Mandela’s greatness lies not in how his personality conquered the world, how his vision won over South Africa, or how his courage made him leader of his own people. It begins in his soul. At Mandela’s core was a personhood which had learnt to be motivated not by self, with all the pride, demands and defensiveness which so complicate human life, but by the steady awareness of what is right and the good. It is this which guided him not to succumb either to the humiliations or to the inducements of proffered privilege in prison, or to the prerogatives of power in government, but to be the unbending servant of his just, compassionate and universal vision.
 
He is the teacher of us all.

Everyone knows: Chanukkah is about the miracle of the oil which should have burnt for just one day but lasted instead for eight. Truly, though, there’s not just one miracle of Chanukkah; there are two.
 
To my mind the first miracle is the greater, even though there’s nothing supernatural about it at all. It’s simply that the Maccabees took the vial of pure olive oil which they discovered amidst the ruins of the Temple, poured it into the lamps of the Menorah, and lit it.
 
Why should they have bothered? The war was far from over; they hadn’t yet captured all of Jerusalem; the Temple was a tip, the Holy of Holies a desecrated ruin. Was this a scene to light up? ‘Yes, it is’, they decided. ‘No’, they determined, ‘We’re not going to wait until the situation is better, until everything’s perfect, until we’ve got plenty of oil and everything else which people think we need. We’re going to light that Menorah right now’.
 
Of course, the story of the oil is only a legend; it’s found just once, in the Talmud. But that’s its strength. The power of legends lies not in the literal, but in the deeper, truths they convey.
 
I’ve experienced that first miracle of the oil countless times. I see it every time I meet one of those people whose smile, or posture, or words, say, ‘Life is not a burden but a blessing; let’s make the most of this day!’ A moment before the world seemed like a week of November clouds; now it’s the red and gold of those glorious autumn leaves, and the spring in the new buds beneath them.
 
I’ve met people like that in hospital wards, both among those who are ill and those who care for them; I’ve met people like that in classrooms, among both teachers and pupils. I’ve met people like that who’re over a hundred (‘Bored by life? Bored? I don’t know the meaning of the word!’) and people like that who’re eleven. I’ve met people like that among the cleaners outside the synagogue at 7.00am when it’s dark and cold, ‘Good morning, rabbi; enjoy your prayers!’ I’ve met people like that among priests, rabbis and imams. I count them all my teachers.
 
‘When I struggle’, said a lady to me at a conference on Ageing and Spirituality, ‘I remember what a monk taught me: “Don’t let any day end without reminding yourself of five good things which happened”.’ I recalled the story of Jacob who, after fighting all night with an angel, refused to let his opponent go ‘unless you bless me’.
 
Sometimes we have to wrestle to turn life’s difficulties into blessings; then even a brief victory is a victory. Sometimes joy and gratitude just flow. E E Cummings was right:
I thank You God for this most amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
That’s where Thanksgiving and Chanukkah really meet.
 
The second miracle of Chanukkah is that oil sufficient for just one day ignited a flame which lasted for eight. (Eight represents transcendence: the week plus one; the natural cycle and more.)
 
I’ve witnessed this miracle too. One person inspires another; one person’s courage illumines another person’s hope; together they bring light to a whole new group of people whom, usually without even knowing it, they enable to find their own strength and creativity.
 
True light is never completely extinguished. Even when everything seems dark, a spark of light will have travelled underground, secretly and unseen. Somewhere it will shine out and yield its inspiration.
 
In igniting the Chanukkah lights, we connect our lives to this unquenchable flame of hope, faith and illumination.

‘It was in 1901 that my parents brought me from my home town of Erfurt to study in Berlin’; wrote my grandfather in his autobiography, prefacing the chapter on his student years with lines by the 19^th century poet Friedrich Rueckert:
From the days of my youth, from the days of my youth
A song sings constantly within me;
Oh, how can it be so far away – what once was mine?
 
There were – of course – two rabbinical schools in Berlin, the orthodox Hildesheimer Seminar, based on the philosophy of Samson Raphael Hirsch that one could be both strictly Torah observant and at the same a full and equal participant in the life of one’s country, and the Hochschule fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the College for the Science of Judaism, which embraced the critical-historical method of scholarship. Both were situated on the same street, the Artilleriestrasse. Apparently, the more liberal establishment was referred to as ‘the light artillery’ and the more orthodox as the ‘heavy artillery’. I have good reason to argue for balance; whereas my maternal grandfather studied at the former, my father’s grandfather both studied and taught at the latter institution. It wasn’t until forced to do so by the Nazis that the two establishments amalgamated their resources in the same building. In 1942 the doors were shut for the last time and the remaining faculty and students were sent to those places where all Jews went.
 
Who would have thought there would ever again be a rabbinical seminary in Berlin, and even – something Willhelminan and Weimar Germany rejected – a department of Jewish theology? Hadn’t the leader of German Jewry, Leo Baeck, declared upon Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship in 1933 that the thousand-year-old history of German Jewry was over?
 
And yet…I was there this Tuesday at the opening of the School of Jewish Theology in Potsdam University, just twenty minutes from Berlin. It followed the celebration two days earlier of the creation of the Zecharias Frankel campus, a Masorti track at the Geiger College for the training of rabbis. My grandfather would have wept, then rejoiced. He would have quoted Isaiah: ‘Grass withers, flowers fade; but the word of our God endures forever’.
 
‘This is the day God has made’, declared my friend Rabbi Brad Artson, who, alongside Professor Rabbi Homolka and Jewish, academic and political leaders in Germany, had put so much work into the creation of these institutions. For what stood out was not the effort but the joy. We were witnessing something not entirely dissimilar to the discovery by the Maccabees in the ruins of the Second Temple 2,000 years ago of a vial of oil which had survived the desecration and despoliation of the bitter years of war and persecution, and which could now be illumined to give light to the sacred for centuries to come.
 
‘We need theology’, insisted guest lecturer Professor Margot Kaessman, ‘We need debate, encounter, knowledge, scholarship, questioning, argument, reason alongside faith’. Who, besides an entrenched fundamentalist, would disagree?
 
Of course, there were the questions of guilt and reparation. It was rightly said that nothing could ever make good, or undo the evils, which were committed here. But does that make it wrong to work for the sake of the future?
 
My grandfather died in 1975. But I felt his presence this week, and not ‘so far away’. I could see him, crossing the street just a century ago between the horse-drawn cabs, on his way to the lecture halls. A hundred years is nothing, in the margins of Torah.

Limmud, the word means simply ‘study’ or ‘learning’, probably deserves more credit than any other organisation for the revitalisation of British Jewry over the last twenty years. It is also a wonderful export, reaching Istanbul, Colorado, the Galilee, and now even the pages of the Jewish Tribune. Limmud is a marvellous celebration of Jewish life and learning. It facilitates every form of Jewish expression, or almost; it puts its stamp of exclusive approval on none, except to include them loosely within the complex, contradictory, and inspiring currents of contemporary Jewish life.
 
I’ve kept out of the debate concerning the Chief Rabbi’s decision to attend. There are two obvious reasons. I don’t think I represent a useful ally for him, though when I next see him I will certainly tell him how warmly I respect his stance. Secondly, it’s hard for me to wax lyrical about how courageous it is not to refuse to talk to people like me. But patiently to face out criticism from within one’s own community, criticism which may be intellectually unfounded but which is nonetheless liable to creep under one’s skin and hurt, – that does indeed represent not just courage but strength of character, conviction and, I imagine, a gift for equanimity. I am glad Rabbi Mirvis is coming to Limmud; though I don’t think this should completely over-shadow the efforts and achievements of those who have worked for decades, almost all as volunteers, to inspire and fashion what Limmud has become, from patient helpers at the long queues for lunch (also a test of character) to teachers, musicians, and those who come promptly to the aid of incompetent presenters who can’t get their own Power Points to work.
 
Many from within Orthodox Judaism have come to Rabbi Mirvis’s defence. It’s always chastening to recall, if tempted from the outside to think that other peoples’ arguments are out-of-touch or petty, that few of us don’t have our own absurd contretemps. They are usually about fear, power or insecurity. To stand above them is easier said than done.
 
More important is the reference made to the dictum ‘These and also these are the words of the living God’. With this conciliatory sentence the Talmud determines that the views of both the School of Hillel and the School of Shammai are to be validated. Wherever the final legal decision may lie, both Schools are credited with the sincere endeavour to understand God’s will. The Talmud itself may therefore be hailed as ‘pluralist’, a constant discord of competing arguments united by the respect for the search for truth through Torah. It’s a great model for Limmud.
 
Actually, I’m not sure how embracing the ‘pluralism’ of the Talmud really is. There aren’t many women’s voices for a start. Also, it’s well known, and they themselves admit it, that the scholars had little respect for the unlettered. Sometimes I wonder if ‘These and also these’ is little more than the equivalent of the concession by a university don that, though a Cambridge degree is to be preferred, a good 2:1 from Oxford might also be acceptable.
 
But the sentence itself is remarkable. What are the ‘words of the living God’? In the first instance, they include the expression of all those who with heart, soul, mind and conscience sincerely try to apprehend the sacred and what it demands of us on earth. The labels attached to such persons mean almost nothing; the integrity of their quest is everything.
 
Where are the words, where is the voice of the ‘living God’ right now? In the pleas for help from the Philippines; in the streets in our world similar to those which made Isaiah proclaim two and a half thousand years ago that piety was vapid unless it fed the hungry and freed the bound, – the trafficked child, the woman sold into the power of thugs; in what Hans Jonas called ‘The outcry of mute things’, those forms of life which do not have the power of articulate speech and which in so many places our civilisation torments and kills.
 
In my view, anyone who sensitises us more deeply to these ‘words of the living God’ and helps us change our lives accordingly has a place at Limmud.

‘I went once more to the Westend-Synagogue to take my leave of the House of God which, almost a generation earlier, I had helped to consecrate. From the outside, no sign of destruction could be seen. But inside there presented itself a picture of terrifying devastation. The great chandelier lay on the floor in a thousand fragments. The pews, the prayer desk and the pulpit at which I had so often stood…were burnt. The Holy Ark was broken and the Torah Scrolls stolen’…

Thus wrote my grandfather in a deposition after the war about life in Germany under Nazi rule. It was a sight which haunted him until, eleven years later, he was invited to return to the Synagogue and offer the address at its rededication. 

Kristallnacht, the night of 9th November 1938, seventy-five years ago tomorrow, was decisive in the lives of German and Austrian Jews, and for others branded as political enemies or as genetically undesirable according to the Nazi myth of the superiority of the Aryan race. After Kristallnacht the violence was out. It had always been there, but half-masked by lies and pretences at legality. It had been kept in check by the top Nazi leadership until the German economy was on a sufficiently strong a war footing that the Jewish contribution no longer mattered, and until it was scarcely relevant any more what foreign governments might think. Anyway, hadn’t they all recently said at the conference convened that summer in Evian by President Roosevelt that they didn’t want any more Jews either?

From now on one could no longer entertain the weak hope that maybe things would get better, that perhaps it would all pass. It was evident that there were only two options, escape or the tightening noose which would deprive its victims of breath in ways even the regime had probably not at this point imagined. But where could one go? Earlier that year Jews had been required to hand in their passports. Travel documents would only be issued to those about to emigrate. The queues of desperate people at foreign embassies and consulates grew longer. They were composed mainly of women, courageous wives, daughters and mothers; the men in their thousands were now in Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen.

Kristallnacht engendered great evil. Hitler and Goebbels removed the bounds of law that prevent so many of us, perhaps even virtually everybody, from committing evil, and then incited and intimidated them into doing the worst of which they were capable. Alas for the land ungoverned by law, or where law-making is in the hands of the wicked.

Kristallnacht also inspired great courage. Pastor Karl Immer in Wuppertal read out the Ten Commandments in Hebrew and invited his congregants to help him offer help. The British Consul in Frankfurt, Robert Smallbones, persuaded his Government to issue temporary visas and cajoled the Gestapo into accepting them. Letters of promise of such visas could obtain release from the concentration camps. He and his staff worked night and day to prepare them. There were small, but courageous, acts of kindness and defiance by Christians and Jews, Germans and peoples of many nationalities, about which we shall never know. Britain offered homes to indefinite numbers of refugee children, and parents across Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia sent their children alone across the seas to safety and went back home to their thin hopes and their heartbreak.

But the seventy-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht is not just about memory. It is also about now. How can we be aware of and care for those for whom these and similar events were formative not just of their youth, but of their yesterday and today?

What other such days is humanity even now brewing for its minorities, its victims, in our great capacity both for good and also for evil?

It’s moving to read in the Torah how Abraham describes himself. When speaking with the Hittites, from whom he wants to purchase a burial ground, he refers to himself asger vetoshav ‘a stranger and sojourner with you’ – even though he has resided among them for almost a hundred years. When arguing with God about the fate of Sodom, he calls himself afar va’efer ‘dust and ashes’, a phrase used only once again in the entire Hebrew Bible, by Job, overwhelmed by the power and wonder of God’s creation. There is a great humility, coupled to a quiet assertiveness – ‘I’m not just a stranger but also a sojourner and live here’ – in how Abraham understands his place on earth.
 
Such an attitude should guide us in our relations to other groups, in how we regard our rights, and their rights, to be where we are.
 
The van sponsored by the Home Office and driven round several London boroughs, including Barnet, for a trial week in the summer urging illegal immigrants to ‘Go home or face arrest’ has been in the news again. The Advertising Standards Agency, which received many complaints, has determined that the message used misleading statistics, but, extraordinarily, cleared it of being offensive and irresponsible. I hope the van will not appear again on the streets of Britain. It seems the Home Office itself regrets using them.
 
The realities facing millions of people in their native countries are extraordinarily bitter. Countries blessed with prosperity and benign governments based on democracy, equality and freedom, are faced with extremely difficult decisions. There is a moral obligation, ratified through the United Nations, to offer asylum to those with a well-founded fear of persecution. Every country needs a just and humane system for responding to refugees. The idea behind the vans is to offer help to go home for those not allowed to stay in Britain, as an alternative to the horror of forcible repatriation. But there should be no place in our societies for incitement to xenophobia and racism. Jewish experience tells us that these are extremely easily aroused.
 
I hope none of the asylum-seekers who attend our centre saw those vans. How terrifying that would have been! There are many in our communities who well remember what it felt like to be informed by placards, shouted it at in the streets, or cold-shouldered by neighbours, with the message that ‘You don’t belong’.
 
 
In Israel the Knesset is about to debate the Prawer-Begin bill concerning the Beduoin population of the Negev. The Bedouin are recognised as full citizens of the country; many have land claims going back to the Mandate or pre-Mandate period. Many have served in the army. It has been acknowledged for decades that legislation is needed to resolve unsettled issues, and there have in the past been many discussions with Bedouin communities. But the present bill gives cause for worry. Rather than recognising key Bedouin villages, so that they can access the basic amenities of water and electricity from the national grid, it threatens to move as many as tens of thousands to settlement towns which have proved socially and economically unsuccessful. Polls suggest that most Israelis do not favour the plan. It does not seem like a way forward rooted in those Jewish values of universal equality and dignity so courageously described in Israel’s remarkable Declaration of Independence.
 
It’s chastening to remember, with Abraham, that we are all temporary residents before God on earth and that we have a primary obligation to treat each other with respect, understanding and kindness.

The phone has just gone and it’s made my day. I didn’t learn that I’d won the lottery, that David Grossman had agreed to speak in our Synagogue, or that another congregant was about to approach me for help in choosing a good Jewish name for their newly acquired hound.
 
I picked up the receiver and heard the deep voice of an old man; it took me a second to realise that he was speaking German. For a moment I was bewildered. He sounded exactly like my grandfather, or one of their friends, refugees from Germany almost to a person. They had always spoken with that same resonant timbre. That world came flooding back over me:  there I was, a little boy, then a teenager, offering tea and cakes, and the presence of these old people, their adherence to a culture swept away yet half-recreated in drawing rooms like these, filled me with a strange security, surrounded by those lives which had been so insecure.
 
The gentleman gave his name and added ‘From Mainz’. Then I realised; it was Magister Pfarrer Mayer. ‘I’ll be showing your group the Chagall windows when you visit’, he said. He didn’t do that so often anymore, he continued; at over ninety he was no longer such a young man, ‘But I hope I’ll make it’.
 
I had met him just once, a brief encounter which has often made me think of  T. S Eliot’s line ‘We had the experience but missed the meaning’. I’d just completed the first day of my walk from Frankfurt to London. It was late evening and I was exhausted. But I’d been taken off at once to a reception in the new synagogue. ‘This is the Magister’, my host said, steering me through the guests, ‘He was the man who persuaded Chagall to make the windows. He has a Jewish background himself’. I recall a kind face; I remember a surge of perplexity: Chagall, minister of the church, Jewish background? Before I could formulate a question he and I were moved in opposite directions by the crowd.
 
I learnt afterwards that the stained glass windows in St Stephan’s in Mainz were the last Chagall ever made. He was 94 at the time. Unwilling after the Holocaust to have any such connection with Germany, he had been persuaded to the task as a work of reconciliation.
‘It’s extremely good of you to agree to show us round’, I said on the phone. ‘No’, he replied, explaining that nothing brought him more happiness than bringing people together. ‘A hundred thousand visitors come to see those windows each year.’
 
I found my booklet on the history of St Stephan’s in Mainz, that town famous in the Middle Ages for its Jewish learning, where the community was destroyed once in the First Crusade and a second time in the Shoah. It fell open on a picture of the northern window: an angel reading and flying at the same time, a menorah, a man meditating on a book, – unmistakable Chagall. Beneath it were the words, ‘Your word is a light to guide my feet’, a favourite verse.
 
I tried to imagine the Germany of those years: on the one hand, wounds, the memories of murders, loss incalculable and irreparable, the slow telling of stories, silence; on the other, shame, humility, also denial, disavowal, also truth. What must have been the substance of the conversation between Magister Mayer and Chagall: ‘Let your art guide us; let it teach us how to be, together…’ When I meet Magister Mayer I shall certainly ask. I’ve been given a second chance.
 
‘I’ll speak in German’, he continued down the phone, ‘and you’ll translate’. I’ll do my best. One’s life, after all, is an effort at translation, from what the heart knows to what the mouth says and the hands do.

‘I never dared think I would see your face again’: how many people who have endured long years of enforced absence from those they love have echoed these words of Jacob to his son Joseph after twenty-two years of separation. How many more people who yearned for the sound of a beloved voice, whose memories sometimes comforted and sometimes taunted them, were never privileged to utter such a sentence because life’s cruelties afforded them no such opportunity.
 
Last Sunday we consecrated the tombstone of Greta Seligman. She came to this country on a domestic service visa, probably in 1938 or ’39, one of twenty thousand young women to do so before the war. Because she spent so many years in institutions and had been suffering from Alzheimers before she died, it’s proved impossible to ascertain from where she came or what her life story was. There were no relatives or friends at her funeral, only three charming people from Jewish Care, and myself and my son.
 
The notion that her grave would remain unmarked was unthinkable; I would have felt like an ally to those who, from Hitler down, forced her from her family and imposed upon the next seventy years of her life such trauma and such grief-filled loneliness. I took advice on what to have inscribed. No one knew her Hebrew name, so we wrote ‘Here lies buried Greta, daughter of Abraham and Sarah’, to include her in the parentage of her people. Below, we put ‘God is her portion’, because she inherited no parental home and no children inherited her and yet she belonged to the sacred family of all life. In between we wrote: ‘Fleeing the terrors of Nazi Europe, she came alone’. Below that we added:

 
Bloomsbury House, which helped ensure that the girls had placements, produced a leaflet called Mistress and Maid. It advised the latter to ‘adapt yourself as quickly as possible to your new surroundings’ but warned employers that ‘many of these girls are trying to forget their terrible experiences before they found shelter in this country’. What they were certainly not trying to forget were their families. Most spent whatever spare time they were able to extract from a twelve hour working day and what money they could save from their meagre allowance knocking on every door in the desperate hope of obtaining visas and saving their parents from the narrowing encirclement of persecution and death. Few were successful.
 
A year ago I was present at the unveiling of a monument in Hoek van Holland to commemorate the children of the Kindertransport, most of whom embarked here for their voyage to Britain. ‘It was such a mercy that England took us in’, said one of the Kinder, ‘and such a cruelty that parents and children were separated.
 
I was recently in touch with a man from the Congo who saw his mother for the first time after a quarter of a century, years which included many losses. Before meeting her he wrote that he was praying to God to give him the wisdom to bring courage to his mother, and that he hoped to see her happy once again.
 
What can we do, who are blessed to see each day at least some of those we love, to stop tyranny imposing such suffering upon so many people whose dreams are the same as ours?