I am a Jewish man, I have spent my life dedicated to Jewish life and I am in it for the long term.
The darkness that I feel at this moment in relation to Jewish life is palpable and hard to deny.
This week I am on a Europe-wide mission, teaching in Germany and attending a Beit Din (rabbinic council) in Hungary. These should be joyous days, meeting students studying towards the rabbinate and welcoming new Jews to our community, formalising their status after a lengthy journey of learning. These days are not joyful but rather times of anxiety and strife.
In the communities I visit there are Israelis and Europeans with families in Israel. Berlin sometimes feels like a suburb of Tel Aviv and has a rich, bustling Jewish life, unique in many ways in Europe. How sad that much of that feels at stake here and under threat.
One of the great tragedies of this time is that Jewish life has become halting and hampered in many parts of Europe because of a sense of threat and intimidation of Jewish community.
The war in Israel is utterly tragic and for Israelis the trauma is extended and expanded every day that more that 200 men, women children and elderly are held hostage by Hamas in unknowable conditions.
And too the loss of life for the Palestinian community is hard to imagine and weighs heavily on the hearts of the Jewish community across the globe.
It is at this time that we need to also look after our own communities and there is here a European context and a reality for the global Jewish community. One of the train stops on my route in Berlin is Wannsee, the conference in which the Nazis decided on the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, during which Jews of German-occupied Europe were deported and murdered. This was 82 years ago in January.
Alongside this reality, the majority of Israel is not from Europe but from Morocco, Algeria, Iran and Iraq and other countries in the Middle East, forced out of those countries after the establishment of the State of Israel.
An aspect of this time, when the much debated chant of many protests is “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free”, is where are Jews to go? In all of the places Jewish people live, life feels precarious at this time and the chant suggests even in this tiny strip of land we call our Jewish state, our community is being called on to vacate or be killed.
The level of fear and terror is hard to describe, it is in our DNA, it relates to our various expulsions from the Middle East and Europe and it relates to a feeling we once held that we were safe, at the very least, in Israel.
On October 7, a massacre occurred, some 1,400 civilians were butchered and burnt, many more injured and in European cities across Europe we are feeling intimidation and the anger of the street against Israel and by association, the Jewish community.
So where now?
It is Parshat Chayei Sarah, this week’s Torah reading, just before which Abraham thinks it’s a good idea to sacrifice his son at God’s behest. Thank God this act of violence is prevented but many of the Rabbis consider that it is this trauma that causes Sarah’s death.
It is a week, another one, during which we need to process our trauma, take care of ourselves and those around us in order to continue to develop and re-acquire our resilience, bravery and pride for the weeks ahead. We cannot and will not be beaten down by these events, hatred and extremism directed towards our people is not ‘our fault’, this is an ancient trope of Jewish suffering, that we bear the responsibility for the hatred directed to us. It is a racist trope which we must oppose.
Our mission is to rise up, to survive and thrive.
It is also the week of Sarah’s burial in ancient Hebron; this is the link, one of many, of our people to the land. We need a just and progressive government to find ways forward to peace and security for all peoples in the land of Israel but we must never forfeit or surrender our rights and our connection to these holy places in favour of the claim of any other people. We must live.
Shabbat shalom x
