A place to rest

I hung out with some lovely people from the Holocaust Survivors Centre this week, a table full of the good and the great over the age of 80 years old. I thought my visit might be a walk in the park, it was not. My brief was to talk about prison chaplaincy. It turned into a pretty in-depth reflection on the nature of youth offending, the story of our local communities and neighbourhoods, how to punish crime and to reduce knife violence and the carrying of weapons. It was a great exchange of views with a broad array of politics, opinions and ethical perspectives on the table.

It got me thinking about place, a theme front and centre of this week’s Parsha. All the prisoners I meet have been uprooted from home and community to serve their prison sentences. For many in prison, they never had strong roots, always living with a sense of dislocation, for some, coming from communities that are first or second generation immigrants, never feeling quite at home. For some who have served multiple sentences in their young lives, prison is more comfortable than the tough streets. A common aspect of the people I meet in jail is a sense of dislocation or instability at home. These features are not universal, but common – homes which are unsafe or often with limited material provision, food, heat and limited or absent role models, particularly male role models.

It is through Noam that I became part of a community, a loving brotherhood of connection. It is through Noam that I learnt about leadership, learnt passion for Jewish life, for community and for nation. I learnt that through the nurture and dedicated care of each person, we were able to raise people up to find their best selves, to find empowerment, personal pride and each person’s passion. In the broad ark of modern Jewish history, this model has been replicated across the Jewish world, in youth movements for more than a hundred years.  

It is hard to overemphasise the great heights that graduates of our youth movements have climbed. Doctors, nurses, musicians, actors, politicians, civil servants, people in the charity sector, prison governors, rabbis and more - we are proud of you people! What is noticeable is how a great many of these graduates of the movement have consciously transferred the strengths and qualities they found in Noam into their chosen profession. 

So, what is OSH doing? OSH is creating a similar model for a disempowered community, that too can find their passion, capacity, pride and self-worth through activities of the youth movement and crucially through the leadership training they offer, as young people transition from spoon-fed participants to empowered leaders, showing the next generation how it is done. 

My challenge to OSH and beyond, is to tell our Jewish story! In the room at this lovely fundraiser, was a body of Jews and Muslims, in the same room – something that is not super common at this time. Each person there celebrated a common cause, championing the raising up and care of some our most vulnerable in society. My call is that we must in these spaces, tell our story of faith, tell the story of our own personal and communal journey to this day. 

In our parsha, Vayera, we have Abraham, our boy, just circumcised at the age of 99 years old, sitting in his desert tent recovering and welcoming three strangers from the wilderness. One of my favourite rabbinic tales that accompany the story of Abraham describes that the travellers in the desert are from three different tribes that are not Abraham’s (GENESIS RABA, 48:9). The quality of this tale is to frame the lengths of Abraham’s hospitality; not only was he offering welcome but he offered welcome to people who did not look like him. Here in this story Abraham represents two challenges laid before us; firstly, to accept and not to shy away from a life of challenge and struggle, the very essence of Abraham’s journey was as someone who was tested and persisted. Secondly, we are presented with a specific challenge, to stretch towards maximising our potential for human kindness and welcome. 

There is an additional challenge here inside our tradition, our understanding of destitution in corners of our community focuses classically on three categories of folk: ‘גֵּר, יָּתוֹם, אַלְמָנָה’, the stranger, the orphan and the widow. In ancient and modern society alike these are the most vulnerable people, people who are in need of a societal safety net to permit their survival. Yet, in our Jewish tradition, this is often understood to mean those within the borders of our community. Historically, charity in the Jewish community was given to those in proximity to Jewish people. In recent years, particularly in the progressive Jewish world, this norm has been turned on its head and you might find liberal communities are fundraising more for those outside the community. 

We could drash it out elsewhere, the merits of either position, but I would argue that we need to do both; to take care of our own and to present that model to the outside world, of a community that takes care to ensure that every last person is lifted up and cared for. In part, that is the youth movement model, to take care of the individual within our community. We have a great responsibility to show to other communities the path of our own story - once a disenfranchised community, a path to success and thriving. 

In a Jewish legal work, that I love, Peninei Halacha, by Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, he writes about giving charity, that when we give we are: ‘מתדבק במידתו של הקב"ה שמחייה ומפרנס את ברואיו’, ‘we connect to the essence of God who restores life and provides for all created beings’. In this way, when we give to a charity, when we lift others up, we mirror the work of the most High Creator and show our passion and belief that a better world is possible. 

This is my passion this week, telling my own story and finding new ways to support our community internally, and to share our story, mission, journey and generosity to the greater world as well. 

 SHABBAT SHALOM

Interested in the above? Get in touch, the new programme that I am running LECHTECHA is a travelling class, we want to visit you where you are, in your home or at your place of work or study, be in contact! Our mission is to share the Jewish story and use the words of our own story to lift up and empower other communities around us. 

LECHTECHA, ‘your journey’, is also a weekly online class. Be includehis big Jewish conversation, come with your big questions! Find us on Instagram Live and on zoom (message me for a link) every week, Wednesday 8:30pm (UK time, 9:30pm CET).