For Refugee Week: God sees the tears of the oppressed

While Nicky’s not been well, I’ve slept in our spare room, where we’ve often hosted guests through the excellent organisation Refugees at Home. This is Refugee Week, and Tuesday was World Refugee Day. I found a small note in that spare room last night. It was post-it size, stuck to the bedside bookshelf so that you could only see

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Kabbalah and Counting: the mystical qualities of the Omer

I remember walking across Jerusalem looking for an Omer-counter. I wanted something both beautiful and mystical. ‘Omer’ is a measure of quantity, apparently equivalent to 2.2 litres, and refers to the offering of barley harvested on the night after the first day of Passover. But it’s come to mean the period of forty-nine days which links Pesach to Shavuot,

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Beautiful Prayers from the Talmud

My Talmud class has been going for almost 40 years; it’s been a stable feature throughout my rabbinate, ‘Thursday mornings at 9.30,’ and I love it. Luckily, many of the participants love it too, and some have been there for all, or almost all, that time. As anyone who studies Talmud knows, some passages are difficult, some are intense

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