I’m worrying about silence: the silencing of what we don’t want to hear, the silences because we don’t speak up. Judaism is a ‘Don’t be silent before wrong’ religion. Jewish history is a long testament to the horrors which silence can permit.

Professor Paul Mendes-Flohr of the Hebrew University, the great scholar of German Jewry, died in Jerusalem this week. He was brilliant, gentle and kind. He had heart trouble, of two kinds. Physically, his heart was weak; spiritually, his heart was broken by what was happening to his country. When we first met, fourteen years ago, he took me to a hummus place, not for falafels but to enquire of an Arab employee if he was alright. He cared.

The last thing Paul sent me was about silence. He quoted Paul Simon’s lyrics:
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening

He referenced the Jewish writer Isaac Babel’s silence when he was arrested by Stalin on fabricated charges of espionage and challenged for his failure to conform to Soviet ‘socialist realism’. Babel explained, under duress, that he’d mastered ‘a new literary genre, the genre of silence.’ He was executed in 1940.

Paul understood the voices that ‘make no sound but are nonetheless heard – if one chooses to listen to them.’ Now he, too, has joined the great silence.

Silence troubles me, not of the dead, but of the living, not the deep silences of communion, but the silences because we fail to hear, the silences because we fail to say.

Noah, about whom we read tomorrow, was famously silent. Why didn’t he shout at God? Why didn’t he scream: ‘How can You! How dare You destroy the world that You’ve only just created!’ But he says not a word. ‘Devastating,’ bible-scholar Aviva Zornberg calls it.

‘Speak up for life!’ is Judaism’s great message. ‘Speak up while you can, before free and honest discourse is shut down,’ is history’s great warning.

So I ask myself what I’m failing to say in these brutal times.

I am a Zionist, an anguished, troubled Zionist.

By Zionist I mean that I believe in the right of the State of Israel to exist, de jure and de facto. I believe that as a Jew I have a responsibility to care about the wellbeing of those who live in Israel, Jewish and not Jewish. I believe in the overriding values of justice, equality, freedom and democracy as proclaimed in Israel’s courageous Declaration of Independence.

I am a Zionist. I reclaim that word from those who hurl ‘Zio’, like ‘Yiddo’, as an insult at all and any Jews. I reclaim it from those who brutalise it by destroying West Bank Palestinian villages in its name, who defile the reputation of Israel and Judaism, and profane God, with outrageous racist words and actions, who have no compunction for Palestinian deaths and treat human dignity with contempt.

Therefore, as a Jew and Zionist, I must speak out against those who delegitimise Israel as a colonial entity, who ignorantly or wilfully refuse to name Hamas and Hezbollah as the terrorist organisations they are, who ignore the deeds of Iran’s regime. I must speak up for those who courageously defend Israel against them.

I join those who speak up for the hostages, their voices stifled in deep tunnels, and for their families, desperate to be heard, including by their own government.

I also join those, especially Jews and Israelis who, despite their own trauma and grief, like Magen Inon whose parents were murdered on October 7, call for an urgent end to the massive civilian suffering in Gaza and beyond, provoked by Hamas and Hezbollah, but also inflicted by Israel, and protest for proper supplies of food, water and medication, with a better path forward than yet more violence.

In the Torah we’re at the intersection of creation and destruction. ‘Create, fashion, bless,’ are the key words of its opening chapters. ‘Violence, perversion, destruction,’ are the key words of the stories that follow.

The message is ‘Be on the side of life. Speak out for life!’