Monotheism means the indivisibility of God. This is not just the basis of Jewish theology, but of universal humanity.

When the Torah, in chapter one, teaches that every human being is created in God’s image, it leaves no place for the notion of ‘children of a lesser God’. There exists no one who doesn’t matter, whose life is less important than anyone else’s. Black lives matter; God is the ‘life of all life’, ‘God of all flesh’.

The shocking and cruel death of George Floyd at the hands of a policeman, and the racism, contempt and injustice it has highlighted, shock our societies and souls. The violence which has followed is frightening. But the vast majority of protesters and protests have been peaceful and courageous, and how and by whom the destruction has been manipulated remains complex, sinister and opaque. The record of disdain from the highest office has inflamed the land and disgraces the history of often brave American leadership.

Reverend Anthony Jackson, whose grandfather founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference together with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, addressed the Jewish community in the columns of The Forward. What we need from you, he wrote, is to help us put an end the murder of innocent Blacks with the exact same fervor, dedication and commitment that you show towards preserving and defending your own families, that you show for Israel…. We need you to understand that Blacks and Jews are in this together; white racists view you as the N-word, too. We need you to embrace Blacks as absolute equals. Jews have used their influence to make a difference in society… We need you to use it again. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel once said, “The Black church is the salvation of Judaism.” We need each other.

Rev Jackson’s words remind me of the line I’ve italicised line in Dan Pagis’s searing Holocaust poem

No. no, they were created in the image

Uniforms, jackboots…

As for me, I had a different creator…

Judaism knows of no such entity as a ‘different creator’ and no such human being as someone with lesser rights. There are no geographical, racial, religious or gender limits to our equality before God as understood, and as should be practised, in Judaism.

But that is not the reality we witness in our societies. We are not at liberty to do nothing about it. We cannot limit ourselves to idle outrage. Examining prejudice in our own minds, communities and conduct is not comfortable, but, as was said in our synagogue just before lockdown, acknowledging and entering the zone of our discomfort is an essential first step.

Just as God’s oneness underlies the equality of all human beings, so it informs the interconnection of all of nature. If God is within all life, if Ruach Elokim, God’s spirit, breathes in all creation, then no species, forest or river is merely dispensable.

Here again, whatever this may say to us theologically, it means everything practically. The very future of life on our planet depends on the realisation that we and all of nature are interconnected. Today is World Environment Day, instituted by the United Nations in 1974. Interestingly, the date has a second name, ‘People’s Day’, because our own future, our children’s lives, depend on how we now act.

Indifference is no option: we must waste less, plant more, cherish this earth. For me, this concern, this passion, migrated long ago from my head to my soul; it’s a terror, a hope, a split vision: the world as arid and bleak, the world as wonder and beauty.

Though seemingly separate issues, how we behave to each other and how we treat nature are united within the prophetic call for justice and humility. We have no right to conduct ourselves as superior, neither to one another whatever our colour, nor towards nature, nor towards God, who weeps in our soul at every outrage and abuse.

This is written in haste on the eve of an exceptionally different night, at a bewildering and frightening time.

First and foremost, I wish everyone a good and safe festival.

Pesach means gratitude for deliverance. Words are insufficient to express our thankfulness to the NHS, to everyone caring, filling shop shelves, delivering food and medicines, helping the nation keep fit, supporting our morale and giving us strength in adversity. In the words of the Psalm, ‘May the work of your hands be blessed.’ Thank you, and thank you again!

When we sit at the table for the Seder tonight, when we open the Haggadah, however few we may be, even it is just me, or you, we must not think that we are alone. With us is Moses, leading the Children of Israel to freedom. Nearer us on our table sits Rabbi Akiva with his colleagues, debating liberty, dignity and justice until break of day. Yet nearer are our grand- or great-grandparents, who fled Nazism, escaped tyranny and fought for freedom across the earth. Surrounding us are women and men of all peoples who have found in this great story of liberty their hope, inspiration and courage. All of you, invisible as you are, are close by and with us, holding our hands, strong inside our hearts.

Your strength is our strength; your resilience and faith is our faith and resilience. Together we partake of, and dedicate ourselves to, the unfailing spirit of humanity in our struggle against illness, in our fight against injustice, in our respect for God’s world, and in the inexhaustible capacity to turn to each other in times of need with generosity, understanding, kindness, healing and love.

Therefore, let this Seder be a night of affirmation and celebration.

We affirm and celebrate life itself, the precious gift of breathing, the ability to stand, stretch out, take steps, may God protect it in every one of us.

We celebrate, even as we treasure it more deeply in its absence, the freedom to move, to walk in whichever direction, to seek liberty and to work for that same liberty for those who suffer under persecution, until, in Isaiah’s words, we ‘Give food to the hungry, clothe the naked and break the bonds of oppression.’

We celebrate love and friendship, even as in their absence we are more intensely aware than ever of those we love, those for whose companionship we long, and those whose listening heart we need, as the beloved says in the Song of Songs: O my companions, listen to me; let me hear your voice.’

We celebrate the value and dignity of life, all life together, in this wondrous, interdependent, fragile, precious world. We honour the life and dignity of every human being, and the lives, may God protect them, of those we love.

Do not imagine you are utterly alone. Thought, with its secret powers, knows how to navigate heart-space. Our words and songs join with the voices of our ancestors of three thousand years, and with those of many peoples. Together we shall speak and we shall sing, we shall pray and we shall learn, until the birdsong heralds the new dawn – of life and hope and joy.

Chag Sameach

Jonathan Wittenberg.

“We stand with you in solidarity and sorrow.

Wherever we are in the world, whatever our faith and beliefs, we stand together with you as pilgrims on this earth, as fellow human beings striving to do what is compassionate and just, hoping to share with our loved ones, friends and fellow citizens the privileges and responsibilities of life.

We have no place for racism, hatred and supremacism.

We are appalled and disgusted at the premeditated racist murder of Muslim people, made even more brutal, blasphemous, hurtful and despicable because it was carried out in the sacred precincts of prayer, during the peaceful hour of worship.

We mourn the victims alongside you, children, teenagers, healers and teachers, heroes who tried to save others, people from different parts of the world, contributing to the civic life of Christchurch and New Zealand.

Our hearts are with the bereaved. Our prayers are with the wounded and traumatised, and with all those striving to heal and support them. Our anguished thoughts are with all whose family members are still missing.

We feel for Muslim communities across the world.

The oneness of God and the fellowship of our common humanity unite us. We must stand as surety for each other in times of threat and danger. We must act collectively against all forms of hatred and bigotry. We must foster friendship and understanding between us and all people. We must work together for the safety and good of all life everywhere.”

Written in sorrow

Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg

Senior Rabbi, Masorti Judaism

by Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg

Today marks the first anniversary of the multiple attacks by Isil in Paris in which 130 people were murdered, 89 of them at the Bataclan theatre.

The beautiful building opened in 1865 and became famous as a home for music and entertainment. From the 1970s it became an important venue for rock, comedy and café-theatre. Those who attended the concert on Friday 13 November last year went to celebrate life.

I remember looking at the pictures printed in affectionate memory to honour the lives of those who were murdered there that night. They were mostly young, and happy. For those of us in our forties and fifties, they could have been our children on a night out. They had gone to enjoy life, when slaughter stole it from them.

When the three gunmen began to fire, people were mown down ‘like a gust of wind through wheat’. Many were shot as they tried to flee; others pretended to be dead. With supreme cynicism, the gunmen went round kicking bodies; if any moved, they were killed instantly.

On the eve of the anniversary the theatre has re-opened with a concert by Sting to ‘remember and honour those who lost their lives in the attack and to celebrate the life and the music that this historic theatre represents”. The opening song Fragile contains the words: ‘Nothing comes from violence and nothing will’.

Among those who attended were courageous survivors of last year’s atrocity, some in tribute to loved ones they had lost. Kelly Le Guen, who survived by barricading herself inside a room with twenty-five others said that she couldn’t wait ‘to see life and joy fill the room and not just carnage. Music and culture must re-stake their claim.”

The message on this anniversary must be that terror will never defeat the tenacity and bravery of the human spirit or destroy the profound love which binds human hearts together. It will not transform innocence and goodness into its own likeness.

Antoine Leiris lost his wife on that appalling night. Days later he posted on facebook a remarkable letter to her killers and those who supported them:

On Friday night, you stole the life of an exceptional being, the love of my life, the mother of my son, but you will not have my hate.

His words are a profound and inspiring expression of devotion and defiance. He subsequently published a book with the same title: You will not have my hate. Among the responses he subsequently received was one which read simply: ‘I want to respond to blind hate with blind love.’ It is reminiscent of the Talmudic idea that the only way to defeat causeless hatred is through love beyond all cause.

Both the Quran and the second-century rabbinic text the Mishnah contain the teaching that ‘One who saves a single life is as if they had saved an entire world’, while, conversely, ‘one who destroys a single life is as if they had destroyed an entire world’.

Every life is sacred, the unique embodiment of God’s spirit. Every life is a distinctive unfolding of the divine and has a distinctive capacity for creativity and compassion. No life is simply replaceable. Therefore murder is always sacrilege, never sanctification.

We have a choice: to be healers, or haters. Terror teaches us to work together, across all faiths and nationalities, not only to be vigilant but, more deeply, to help each other to be healers through compassion, understanding and love beyond all cause.

Save

It’s seventy-eight years since the Night of Broken Glass, when Goebbels unleashed upon the Jews of Germany the full of violence of Nazi hate. Though he described the subsequent horrors as the unpremeditated and spontaneous expression of the Kochende Volkseele, the boiling public mood, the smashing, burning and killing were co-ordinated across Germany and beyond. Nor was the timing incidental. It’s widely thought that the failure that summer of the rest of the world to increase their quotas for refugees from Nazism gave Goebbels a moral victory, enabling him to claim that nobody else wanted the Jews either, and gave Hitler the green light to act against them as he pleased.

I was in Frankfurt yesterday, where the Jewish Museum hosts an annual evening of study on the day before Kristallnacht. This subject was the rabbis of Frankfurt who fled the Nazis, and their legacy, focussing on my grandfather and his close colleagues. I re-visited his testimony of those terrible years. I read how he preached of his pride in the appellation ‘Israel’ after the Nazis forced all Jews to add it to their name. I stood where the great Boerneplatz Synagogue was burnt to a ruin. My grandfather was outside, summoned by the Gestapo. My father’s uncle’s family were inside; they lived in a flat adjacent to the lady’s gallery. He was arrested and taken to Buchenwald. His pregnant wife and their four children were hastily taken away by relatives, haunted by the sight of the blackened cupola, now visible through the burnt-out doors, of the great house of prayer. The baby died at birth.

Outside, many thousands of memorial tiles line the walls of the ancient Jewish cemetery.
I was shown pictures of the 1930’s, a Sabena aeroplane like that on which my family escaped, the airfield at Croydon where they landed – the very part of London where refugee children have now been arriving.

I sat at length with the director of the Jewish Museum discussing Frankfurt’s Jewish legacy: Ludwig Boerne, ‘the father of modern journalism’, born in the Judengasse, exiled, like Heinrich Heine, to Paris; and Samson Raphael Hirsch the great neo-orthodox rabbi who taught that ‘love your neighbour’ means seeking the same rights and opportunities for every citizen as you want for yourself, irrespective of religion or race. He taught, too, that the moment you abrogate in any way the rights of the stranger, or make the rights we owe each other conditional on any other attributes than the very fact of being human, created in the image of God, you re-open the gates to ‘all the horror of the slavery in Egypt’.

On the train home I passed through the Ardennes, the landscape of Hitler’s bitter last offensive, mercifully thwarted by Allied courage. The route went not far east of the terrible graveyards of the First World War, which we remember this Sunday on Armistice Day.
I followed responses to the US elections on twitter. And, not by any means solely for that reason, I feel afraid. I fear for my children; I fear for the earth. The world, it seems, is reverting to tribalism; maybe fear itself is part of the cause. I don’t know where or why this began, or if it is always thus. My next writing deadline is about the anniversary of the attack on the Bataclan theatre in Paris.

That is why it is essential to say ‘No’ to racism; ‘No’ to anti-Semitism; ‘No’ to the hatred of Muslims, ‘No’ to the denigration of women.; ‘No’ to xenophobia. That is why we must assert the centrality of the commandments, the very core of faith and humanity, to ‘do justly’, to ‘love compassion’, and never denigrate the image of God in anybody, or act with wanton destruction towards this beautiful world, God’s world, the world of which we must continue to say, conducting ourselves accordingly, ‘And God sees that it is good’.
Jonathan Wittenberg

Dear Community,

Our synagogue received three unusual Chanukkah cards last week. They each begin

Dear Jewish Community,

I send this message to you as a Muslim. I share with you the celebration of spiritual light that opposes the darkness of religious hatred.

Each concludes ‘Your Muslim neighbour’ and carries a personal signature.

The Joseph Interfaith Foundation, established by Mehri Niknam, describes the project as giving ‘the chance to individual Muslims who want to extend a hand of friendship towards the Jewish community through a safe forum’.

The adjective ‘safe’ stands in sorry contrast to the noun ‘friendship’; it’s a sad world where we need ‘safe’ ways to show friendship. But few would deny that such is the case. I just received an email from a friend which closed not with our customary ‘see you soon,’ but with ‘frightening world’. It’s true.

The less safe the world, the more it matters to work at the relationships between faiths. The Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ) began amidst the worst persecution of Jews in history. Its terms were agreed in March 1942 under the chairmanship of William Temple, then nominee for Archbishop of Canterbury. Its key objectives were ‘To check and combat religious and racial intolerance’ and ‘To promote mutual understanding and goodwill between Christians and Jews in all sections of the community’. This Shabbat we are welcoming Bishop Michael Ipgrave, the current Chairman of the CCJ, to our community.

Later in the war Archbishop Temple addressed the Hungarian people via the BBC World Service: ‘Do your utmost to save from persecution, it may be from massacre, those who are now threatened as a result of German occupation…Help them to hide from their tormentors, help them, if possible, to escape’. If only his words had been more widely hearkened! Are we today doing as much to support the victims of religious hatred, stop persecutors, and challenge bystanders, as he did then?

Is religion part of the problem of collective hatred, or part of its solution? Unsurprisingly, Richard Dawkins expressed strong view on the matter.

One of the voices in my head agrees with him. Religion, with its ready-made pulpits, communities, preachers, and its ancient appeal to obedience, is an easy way to peddle identity. One’s onto a popular brand when one can tell people what they’re for, whom they’re against, what’s right, what’s wrong, and, with the aid of a convenient quote from Scripture, that God says so. No tool is so useful in identity creation than an enemy other.

The other voice disagrees. For all its flaws and susceptibility to abuse, religion is ultimately the moral and spiritual commitment to the deepest, most embracing reality. My God is never a different God from your God, though I may express my devotion in different ways. To realize God’s presence on earth, my humanity needs your humanity, just as yours needs mine.

It therefore matters to extend the hand of friendship and open the heart to understanding, especially in a time of a danger.

Shabbat Shalom

Jonathan Wittenberg

Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg is Rabbi of the New North London Synagogue and Senior Rabbi of the Masorti Movement. He’s authored three books: The Three Pillars of Judaism, The Eternal Journey: Meditations on the Jewish Year, and The Silence of Dark Water. Rabbi Wittenberg has written for various publications including the Jewish Chronicle. His own blog explores a variety of topics that include the Jewish faith, nature, moral issues, and the transience of human life.