Location location location

Does place matter? I find myself returning to this question often in the last weeks, as we wade through the journeys and meanderings of the beginning of our Torah. Does it matter where we are?

I am about to embark on a trip next week to Israel. I will do my best to keep y’all up-to-date on this journey. I will be delighted to be in contact on social media, messages of all description trying to relay to you a little of my own experience while I am there. I will attend a conference for rabbis worldwide with the Masorti Rabbinical Assembly; there will be a lot of shmooze but more importantly, I will meet friends and colleagues from across Israel and hear some of their stories from the year gone by.

It is hard to step into this space, I feel such a range of emotions travelling back. Israel is a place in which I feel comfortable, a place which has called me this year, day to day, hour to hour. 

Since the attacks of October 7, 2023 and the start of this war, this period has been the longest stretch in the last 20 years that I have not visited. Israel is home, a place I lived for five years, a place to which I feel part of my spirit is tied. Hebrew has become my second language and coursing through every aspect of our tradition is conversation with this ancient land.

The great upheaval of the last year comes in at least two layers of great corruption, the first, the attacks on Israel and the second, a strong segment of the world that have poured their hearts out in favour of this war against Israel. A war which in part stems from a desire to wipe Israel off the map. This has been painful for Jewish people to comprehend. The greatest struggle, a false dichotomy, is choosing a side in support of security and safety for Israelis or for Palestinian human rights. 

The second great grievance for many Israelis and a strong corner of our Jewish community is the execution of this war against Hamas in a form that is corrupt. A corruption that serves the interests of a tiny segment of Israel and focused on the power base of one man. The war has raged for too long, taken the lives of too many and ultimately not resulted in the return of our hostages, the return of displaced peoples and ceasefire. 

Many hundreds of column inches have been written about this wretched war. When I travel next week to Israel it will be with a mission to hear more, to understand where our Jewish home is at. 

This week’s Parsha also deals in questions of place, ‘וַיִּפְגַּע בַּמָּקוֹם וַיָּלֶן שָׁם’, our father Jacob ‘came to a certain place and slept there for the night’. In that place he dreams, a dream which shapes the future of Judaism. He dreams of angels climbing up and down a ladder. At an elemental level, his dream frames the possibility of a spiritual life that exists beyond the physical confines of our day-to-day existence. What would our lives be without our hopes and aspirations, without our dreams and fantasies? At moments of devastation and deprivation, they are sometimes all we have. When life is good, it is our dreams, if we are to embrace them, that spur us on, that can lift us to new heights. It is Jacob’s dream, the first in our Torah, which draws attention to the myriad possibilities of our spiritual lives - watch this wonder, nurture this space!

There is another part of this special story between heaven and earth. In the same dream, Jacob hears the words of the God of Y-K-V-K: ‘וּפָרַצְתָּ יָמָּה וָקֵדְמָה וְצָפֹנָה וָנֶגְבָּה’, ‘you shall spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south’. The story here is a description of our future – our aspirations of national identity and nationhood. We are a people that grew and became dispersed among many nations. But this call (which is also a cute Jewish song) is not only a shout to our sense of peoplehood, it describes a very Jewish compass, a Judean compass. You will spread out, ‘yama’ towards the sea, ‘west’, ‘kadma’ east. ‘Tzfona’, north, and ‘negbah’ referring to desert, in the south of Israel. In this tiny snippet of Jewish geography we read an active description of the way in which the Land is at the epicentre of the Jewish tradition - the geographic four corners of our world are the four corners of this ancient place.

The human spirit is shaped by a sense of belonging, we both yearn for the familiar and dream of adventure. Our sense of belonging in 2024 is a hard burden to carry; Israel is our strongest asset and our greatest liability, but we must not forfeit our need to be grounded, for connection to one place. At the same moment, our Parsha calls out: “we are not our physical confinement”, the human mind is a super power to ascend to great heights. Here too, we must dream big for our people, for all peoples and not be confined to politics or religion, which is reduced to identity and place, we are so much more. 

Shabbat shalom

Interested in the above? 

LECHTECHA, ‘your journey’, is a weekly online class. Get included in to this 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). 

This week we will be discussing - 

JUDAISM: SPIRITUAL ASPIRATION AND DREAMWORLDS

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.