This week’s parsha begins the journey of our people, the journey of a lifetime.
Lech Lecha (literally, go into/to yourself) maps the journey that Abraham and Sarah, our forefather and mother began. It is a journey of adventure and intrigue but also a bumpy one! In this week’s Torah reading we read the original promise ‘אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ’, ’journey...to the land which I will show you’, ‘that land’, in the Jewish imagination is Israel.
This storytelling began our relationship with land of more than four thousand years, the last two thousand years of which, for the majority of Jewish people was a figment of our imagination. A place that we prayed towards, dreamt of, spoke of; a gravitational pull through which we imagined better days.
A place of dreamy hope.
And in the last 75 years, a real Jewish homeland, the only one we have. A place of safety, a place of regeneration, of mixing of peoples. A place of pride and growth, cultural and religious prosperity and proliferation.
But it’s been a rocky journey. It’s been a rocky journey between now and last week. It is hard to describe the impact this colossal attack has had on Jewish community.
Three images spring to mind -
The wedding organised for next week and one of the wedding guests is a hostage in Gaza. How do we carry on, how do our communities endure?
The community members whose whole families are dead and or captive in Gaza. There has not been a time in my lifetime when whole families have been wiped out, whole communities decimated for being Jewish. These tremors that are in our bones are of yesteryears, of pogroms, of genocidal massacres on scale.
And finally, my home; protected, warm, loving and me being wound up by kids and returning to the pictures, the gruesome images of unthinkable atrocities enacted against babies and tiny humans on the sacred soil of this same promised land. We are a people traumatised. For those in Europe we are one step removed but the blowback on our European communities is already being more than felt.
It’s been a rocky journey from ‘לֶךְ־לְךָ’, ‘go unto yourself’ …this original statement of intent for a journey of spirit and soul does not mention holy war, strife, conflict and bloodshed, it does not. Some days this week I feel like I want to get off the roller coaster, I want out of this community and to live a life more simple.
But all in the same moment, I share enormous pride in my community, our resolve, our dedication to one another, the small acts of kindness, of hospitality, of care for a stranger; these are some of the defining moments of this time.
The elephant in the room is this unthinkable bloodshed and suffering in Gaza. It is hard to imagine what life there looks like, the toll that this new round of violence will bring. For better and for worse, I believe in the humanity of our people, that there is a merciful God and merciful people who don’t wish for unceasing bloodshed. In all of the conversations I have had in community in the last ten days, the overwhelming desire is for peace and for an end to the violence. Please God may it come quickly.
I pray for a journey less painful, one shaped by spirit and soul, care and humanity and not one which knows violence and bloodshed. Let us keep in our mind our own journey of spirit and the journey of our people, the journey we wish for and desire as we walk into Shabbat.
