As I near the end of my time as Senior Rabbi of my Synagogue I feel complex emotions. I am deeply grateful for the wonderful New North London community and the hundreds of people who have enriched my life. I feel loss, bewilderment, and uncertainty about my future. But I don’t doubt my decision to retire, and have every confidence in the congregation’s future, with its caring and committed membership, dedicated lay leadership, devoted professional team and excellent rabbis.

I also have plenty of fight still in me, and will continue to work with energy and love for everything I care about through my continuing role as Senior Rabbi of Masorti Judaism and in the worlds of climate, nature and interfaith.

After more than a thousand contributions to Shalom NNLS, these are some of my last. I am glad my colleagues are taking over these weekly messages and am moved by their thoughtful words. I will continue to write regularly for Masorti Judaism; you can follow me at https://jonathanwittenberg.substack.com/, or you may have had enough. For me, this writing has been a kind of listening to my conscience and heart, a conversation with the many people who inhabit them, whose words and deeds have moved me.

After 38 years full time, and several as youth worker and student rabbi before that, I find myself reflecting back on how I felt all those decades ago. I was hesitant and afraid: Would being a rabbi eat me up? Would I cope? Would I love committees? Underneath it all was the deepest question: did I honestly believe in God?

Reality has answered those questions, but not in ways I’d foreseen. The privilege of rabbinical work has deepened me. People, with their joy, tears, griefs, fears and loneliness, have shown me inner spaces, both in themselves and in me, that I didn’t know were there. Listening has unlocked chambers of the heart I had never before entered. I hold there echoes of countless people’s words, resonances of love, wonder, anguish and sorrow, which I will garner carefully until I die.

As for God, I have found not answers but moments of response. Actually, that’s not true:  they have found me. I haven’t seen the light and had all my doubts resolved. You won’t find me preaching God at Speaker’s Corner.
I dislike dogmatic certainties and have little time for knock-down theological arguments. They frighten me. I have no answer to why there’s so much injustice, cruelty and destructiveness in the world, other than feeling sorrow and grief. But I somehow sense that God is sorrowing too, just as God takes joy in the trees, birds and animals, is present in every form of consciousness and resides in the human heart.

I’ve heard no great voices from heaven, and I’d be locked away if I claimed I had. But I have, just sometimes, overheard the still small voice of wonder and been chastened by awe. Such moments have evoked in me, as they do in others, a feeling of relationship and responsibility. I don’t question them; they question me: Are you there? Do you care? They tell me that I am answerable to something infinitely resilient yet infinitely vulnerable. They put in my heart the knowledge that I must not hurt, must never drive this sacred presence away.

I don’t need any more than this.

As for my question about loving committees, the committee making the decision is still out.