| Ever since meeting the families of hostages, both here and in Israel, I feel connected. The families made two requests. Do everything you can to secure my relative’s freedom. Hold us in your heart. With regard to the first I feel powerless; regarding the second, yes, I try to hold you in my heart. Indeed, life is about how we hold each other in our hearts, how we honour our connection with each other and even with the very earth itself. Let me explain, and then return to the tears, and hopes, of now. A key word for me is the Hebrew word ne’eman; it stems from the same roots as the familiar amen. Ne’eman means faithful, true and trustworthy in all our relationships, to each other, all creatures and life itself. There aren’t many words we can use both about our dog’s behaviour towards us and our attitude to God. But it works for ne’eman, because it describes how we hold each other in our hearts. I admire people who are ne’eman, who are not just honest, truthful and kind, but reliably so with whomever they are engaged, without prejudice or contempt towards anyone. I bought a wonderful book this week. I came across it by happy accident, while searching for another work by the same author. It’s a slim volume, less than one hundred pages: The Democracy of Species by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I want to order a whole pile, to give a copy to everyone I care for. Kimmerer writes about her efforts to learn her native American language, Potawatomi, from the few remaining elders who know it. It’s a language of relationship, of far more verbs than nouns, because it’s a language ‘for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things.’ It’s the language she absorbs when she sits and listens, simply listens, her back against a pine tree in the woods. It’s the speech ‘of our kinship with all the animate world’. Translating this into Hebrew, I hear the deep truth of ne’eman, faithfulness to life and the God of life. In fact, the most intimate name we have for God, Yud Heh Vav Heh, is a verb. It means being, or coming-into-being, or was-is-and shall-be. It eludes translation. As contemporary theologian Arthur Green points out, the letters, re-arranged, form ha-va-ya-h, ‘existence’. God’s name is the heart of being. To be ne’eman is thus to be faithful to the sacred essence of life. It’s the converse of a careless, contemptuous or exploitative attitude to anyone or anything. It expresses a way of being rooted in awareness and respect. It challenges our contemporary world and leads me to conclusions which often leave me ashamed. The horrors we witness in this times of wars call on us for profound ne’emanut, faithfulness. I feel this first towards my own people, the father I met whose daughter is held in Gaza, the mother whose girl is still a hostage deep in some grim tunnel, the parents whose son was killed on October 7. I feel it too towards Yael, an Israeli committed, despite everything, to action for peace, who wept as she showed me pictures of her friend in Gaza making soup for hungry children. Unless we’re on the side of cruelty, forfeiting our own humanity, we must, somewhere within us, feel kinship with all hurt, all hunger, all suffering. Ne’emanut is deeper than all politics. It reaches down into that kinship with each other and life itself, in which, despite everything, we must not give up hope. In striving to be ne’eman we hold each other, and humanity itself, including our own, in our hearts. We testify against cruelty, hatred and destruction. We live in solidarity with life. |