It’s the simple truth: ‘They died so that we can live.’
I’ve visited the Normandy landing beaches many times, showing the young people of Noam round Sword and Gold on peaceful, sunlit days, so very different from the murderous fighting of eighty years ago.
I’ve just re-read Antony Beevor’s D-Day: The Battle for Normandy.
Sometimes I had to put the book down struck to the core by the sheer courage of so many, or by sheer horror at the slaughter.
I’m smitten by the compassion shown in the midst of the fighting by so many (but not the SS): dressing comrades’ wounds, even tending the injuries of those who, minutes earlier, would have killed them.
Soldiers who’d been farmers milked the desperate cows who’d survived the strafing and shooting.
One infantryman noted how a foal refused to leave its dead mother, walking round her and round her so often that it had beaten a circular path through the grass.
I’ve visited the war cemeteries, now quiet, now peaceful, beautifully tended, with the names and units of the dead, the rows of crosses, among which are many Magen Davids.
I don’t know who decided that the words ‘Known unto God,’ should be inscribed on the gravestones of those whose deaths left their bodies so mangled that they could not be identified. They weren’t just left unnamed; they were people who mattered, mattered to God.
Yesterday I attended the lighting of the beacon by AJEX, The Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women, in the grounds of the Jewish Free School. I listened to the voices and accounts of veterans.
I was privileged to read out on behalf of us all the 23rd Psalm: ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil for You are with me.’
Once again, we walk though that valley, witnesses as others traverse its dangerous, often fatal, depths.
Yesterday I got news from a friend whose relative in the north of Israel was killed by Hezbollah. What can one say? I hear with a sinking heart of more deaths in Gaza. Is this what you want from your creation, God, You whom we call ‘God of the spirits of all flesh’?
We believe in a God of life, Chei HaChaim, the very Life of Life, whose breath imparts consciousness to all life, who mechalkel chaim bechesed, who ‘nurtures all life with lovingkindness.’
That is the God whose presence abides in all living beings, including us, even though we so often struggle to feel it, and humanity so often behaves as if it did not know it.
This is the God whose voice within us, so frequently out-shouted by the endless noise around us and inside us, so often reduced to a whisper of a whisper, calls us to practice kindness and justice because that is God’s will towards life.
That is why we call God’s word Torat Chaim, the Torah of life, as we receive once again this coming week on the festival of Shavuot.
This is what we mean when we pray for our hearts to cleave to the Torah’s commandments: we pray that all the angers and fears, the injustice and cruelty, the frustration and despair across the world around us, and in our inner world inside us, will not extinguish your voice in us, God of life, your voice which commands justice and loving kindness.