Utter devastation and hope
I have a weird relationship with news, love and hate, I want to stay offline, I want peace and tranquillity and particularly over the last 15 months, I want space away from the turmoil and terror of this war in Israel and Gaza.
When Hamas first attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, I simply could not look at the images, I switched off social media for a month or more; some of the images that are now being shown as hostages are released, I must admit, I am seeing for the first time.
I am nevertheless a consumer of online content and a relentless scroller at my weaker, often more sleep-deprived moments. I read a newspaper on Shabbat, news magazines and am currently a devotee of some pretty great podcasts.
In all of this time, some key moments have totally consumed me…the murder of Hersh Goldberg-Polin with five other Hamas captives in August of this year was one of them. Hersh had been on our fridge, a small poster of him, for much of the year – he’s still there. I really believed that he would come home. I was hit again by this grief as I walked through his neighbourhood a few times around midnight in Jerusalem in December of last year with big red posters up that read ‘sorry we didn’t make it in time’. His brave parents Rachel and Jon, until this day, with a piece of masking tape on their lapels, humbly reminding us how many days the hostages have been in captivity. Hersh was a way-marker of hope destroyed, an innocent life, an angelic face taken away.
The other faces that Israelis and Jews around the world have struggled to part with are those of the Bibas family. This family of four, all taken into Gaza, above any other people captured, have been the faces of this awful war and of the devastation of October 7 more specifically. Two tiny redhead kids - Kfir Bibas, 10 months old, was the youngest child abducted into Gaza and his brother Ariel, a lover of Batman, was 4 years old. His mother Shiri, with Ariel and Kfir, arrived back into Israel last week in coffins. There were delays to the arrival of Shiri’s body, adding another layer to the devastation, but since this return I have felt a part of me stunned.
I have not reached out to Israeli friends and colleagues, once again, I feel like I have no words; the images from the Israeli street express a cruel groan: “how do we even begin to fathom this news – two babies taken from us? How do we go on?"
Over Shabbat this week I was in the park and across from where we were playing sat a small redhead boy on his dad’s lap. This imaginative leap of the year past, each time you see a redhead, each time I gazed at my children, I recall the horrors of this day and many days since.
‘וַיִּדֹּם אַהֲרֹן’
‘And Aaron was silent’ [LEVITICUS 10:3]
I am often drawn to these words of the Torah, the moment when Aaron's children are taken from him, killed - two words, ‘Aaron, silence’. Sometimes silence is all we can offer.
I also want to offer a glimmer of hope.
It is in this week’s Torah reading we read the ‘instruction manual’ for the Mishkan, the travelling sanctuary that the Israelites travel with in the desert. It is a mind-boggling, lengthy description.
It does however speak to hope; ultimately in the Jewish imagination there will be a time of rebuilding, a time of creative outlet and new growth. That is spring, the coming of new life back to the cold earth. The level of detail and the ornate decoration here is important. When life is overthrown and devastated, there is no building, only ruins, it is only when a people are in safety and security that you might think to build something majestic and ornate.
This is Terumah, Torah reframed by Rabbi Menachem Nochum Twersky [MEOR EINAYIM, CHERNOBYL, 1730-1787]: ‘וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָּשׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם׃’, ‘And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them’ [EXODUS 25:8]. The creative imagination of the Parsha is that the majesty and wonder of the universe, a power which is infinite is able to self-limit, in Hebrew ‘tzim-tzum’ and land in a particular spot, ‘שהקב״ה צמצם שכינתו לצורך תחתונים’ and that the physical world can bask in that divine energy.
I don’t know what you think about God, some days I don’t know what I think about God, in a world that can permit the gruesome murder of tiny humans, but what I do know, and what is framed in clear terms in our Parsha is that better days are possible and that we have great things to aim for and aspire to. As a people and as a human race, we must keep our eye on the prize that a better world is possible.
SHABBAT SHALOM
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