A freshly broken heart each day…
The beginning of 2024, much like the close of 2023, has been excruciating to live in Jewish community. I don’t want to over-egg the pudding but I cannot remember a time in my lifetime when the Jewish community has lived with so much collective pain, sadness and gloom.
Tuesday morning of this week, 21 more soldiers killed in Gaza. It is here that I must explain why this matters to the Jewish people. We are a tiny nation, everyone connected to Jewish community has immediate relatives, cousins, friends who are in Israel. A significant chunk of the Israeli population has been called up to fight this war and many families are on shpilkes (that is stressed) round the clock that they might get a call that a loved one has been killed.
And then to our hostages…we are a tiny nation and the numbers taken captive inflict a daily toll on each and every citizen of Israel and the state’s political infrastructure.. The level of violence and destruction caused on October 7, 2023 is hard to quantify in its effect on the Israeli psyche. This damage has been compounded by a constant state of emotional confusion as we read reports that there are those out there that seek to cast doubt, belittle, or deny the rape, torture, brutality and kidnapping of that dark day.
It’s a weird time to be a Jew. Jews have always been quick to play the antisemitism card; it's in our collective make up since 6 million of us were murdered on these shores of Europe and subsequently cast out of the Middle East bar a small strip of land called Israel.
To me it is more clear than ever (bar the date of Israel’s independence in 1948), that the state of Israel is necessary, justified and should be permitted to persist and thrive!
The flip is also true, war is awful and should not be justified in our mind, the young lives lost, the children and families displaced. The horror that a whole generation in Gaza and parts of the West Bank must witness on a day-to-day basis. This pain also breaks the hearts of many in our community every single day. As a community we should not look away from this toll or this pain but for better or for worse it cannot singularly shape us.
I listened to Yonit Levi and Jonathan Freedland this week on their podcast ‘Unholy’. It has been a saving grace at this time - a source of analysis which successfully bridges the gap between Israel and the UK and makes me a feel a little more sane. Scott Galloway was their guest, talking about the TikTok generation and Gen Z, receiving all their ‘news’ on this platform and its manipulation as a tool of modern warfare to cast a polarised divide right down the middle of our society. We cannot be manipulated and polarised in this way.
We Jews are already scared about what we see on the news, but our broader society should also be worried. When people in the streets cry for intifada, when we hear shouts in support of Hamas and Houthi rebels in Yemen, it would seem our world is quite unwell. Planet earth has more problems to face off aside from a promotion of fundamentalist, murderous, violent extremism, but this problem too, we cannot shy away from.
No amount of explanation or articulation of the basic aspects of this fight ever seem sufficient, on both sides of my own community, let alone the broader UK community, I feel like as a moderate, I am stuck right in the middle. At the same time, it feels gratuitous and excessive to state and re-state some of the most basic parts of this story of Israel and the Jewish people.
And then there is our parsha, our parsha is Beshalach. Our Torah portion and one of the core questions of this week, as the Israelites take some of their first steps as free people leaving Egypt, is what do we take with us?
The children of Israel go up armed, ‘חֲמֻשִׁ֛ים עָל֥וּ’ [Ex 13:18] but here too, ‘chamushim’, can also mean spiritually equipped, with everything they needed for the journey ahead.
Another of the questions in the parsha is what breaks the chains of enslavement? There is a mentality that prevails in our story and beyond in which the Israelite people can be free but still live within the confines of their bondage.
This becomes an interesting thought experiment for the week ahead. The ‘Shem Mishmuel’, the second Sochatchover Rebbe, an early 20th century Hassidic master, speaks of the purchase that Egypt still has on the Israelite people as they leave Egypt. He draws on several key moments that might break those chains – leaving Egypt, crossing the sea, receiving mana from heaven, finding water, receiving Torah at Mount Sinai; there is a long list of formational moments of this fledgling people that might support their realising true spiritual emancipation once they have achieved physical liberation, and yet often, they are held back.
We too are the ‘free-enslaved’, we live in wealth and health, until we don’t. It is all relative and we can always pine for more and hope for things to be different but the story of this week, of the Exodus from Egypt, is that we have everything we could possibly desire, ‘חֲמֻשִׁ֛ים עָל֥וּ’, we are spiritually equipped - we are free, a free people and that our only confinement is in our mind. The work that lies ahead is to break our spiritual chains and to live our best lives, freely and fully. Even in a place where we see persecution, torture, enslavement and worse, our work is to be of service to the enslaved and persecuted, to break chains, but also to support those around us to live their best lives freely, fully and without limitation.
Shabbat shalom
