TFTW Archive 2024 August

Dear Members and Friends,

There is bleak despair among colleagues in Israel. This week twelve children and young people were killed in an attack that hit a football pitch in the Druze town of Majdal Shams on the Golan Heights. Many more were wounded. These deaths intensify the conflict with Hezbollah on the northern border of Israel, where towns and villages lie empty, their inhabitants displaced since October 7^th.

This was the worst attack in Israel since then and it has triggered fear among our colleagues at Rabbis for Human Rights with whom we met this week. We heard about their work in the Jordan Valley, protecting shepherding Bedouin tribes, who are harassed daily and nightly by settlers in what has become a lawless and violent territory. The only thing that stops attacks, according to my colleague Rabbi Lev Taylor who has just returned from volunteering with RHR, is the ‘protective presence’ of Israelis and international activists who remain on guard for 24 hours a day.

But there was also another incident that had dragged our colleagues down to a new low: several hundred Israeli far right citizens, including Members of the Knesset, led by a minister, had rushed into S’de Teiman, a detention facility in southern Israel, after military police had arrested nine guard soldiers for allegedly sexually assaulting a Hamas terrorist.

‘We’re experiencing a convergence of external and internal threats,’ say Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi in their Hartman Institute podcast ‘For Heaven’s Sake’ this week. ‘When this happens, it is civil war, an assault on the army… they are tearing apart social solidarity, making sure the judiciary has no claim.’

These two sages, whose weekly conversations have tried to keep alive hope that morning will come, that liberal religious discourse will prevail over a coarsening of moral values, acknowledge the normalisation of an apocalyptic, messianic, destructive ideology – ‘a Jewish version of jihadism.’  The assault on S’de Teiman is not just an attack on an army detention centre, they say, it’s an assault on mamlachtiyut – the dignity of the state and its institutions.

On Monday evening 12 August, Progressive Judaism’s communities will come together to mark Tisha B’Av, the Fast of Av, the day on which our collective memories of tragedies in the past converge: the destruction of both Temples in Jerusalem, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the pogroms and oppression experienced by Jews in Eastern Europe, the Shoah. The 9 Av is a day of lamentation and mourning, a day of pain, pardon and forgiveness, a day on which all the evil, hatred and cruelty of the world is, so to speak, laid before God, as a sacrificial offering for God’s pity and forgiveness.

At the centre of the liturgy for the day is Eichah – the biblical book of Lamentations, a series of five elegiac laments, mourning the destruction of the first Temple and the exile of the people from Jerusalem.

Eichah speaks to us viscerally in our own time. Ravaged villages and desolate towns in Israel, empty of inhabitants, north and south, the anguish and tears of bereaved families; no vision from Israel’s leaders, enemies who hiss and jeer and gnash their teeth and cry: ‘We’ve ruined her! Ah, this is the day we hoped for; we have lived to see it.’

Eichah is the lament of a whole people mourning the ‘slaughter without pity.’ It is also an elegy by an individual shattered by grief, wrestling with his faith in a God who seems to ‘bring down His hand again and again, without cease,’ who weighs him down with chains, who shuts out his prayer, confuses him and has left him numb. Yet, this individual is not without hope. When morning comes, he is willing to sit patiently and to affirm his faith in God’s goodness and mercy.

Eichah immerses us in the grief of national mourning. It moves us through a process of trauma and despair; it spells out graphically the horrors of destruction, death and captivity.  But it is also penitential; it requires us to search and examine our ways, to confess transgression and rebellion, to seek forgiveness and to find a way back to moral purity, to goodness and hope.

It is for this we pray, not only on Tisha B’Av, but every time we return the Sefer Torah to the Ark at the end of our Torah service with the words from the end of Eichah:

              ‘Help us to return to You, O God;

              Then we shall return.

              Renew our days as in the past’ (Lamentations 5:21).

Can we do more than pray in our hearts, for restoration of a moral order, of penitence and forgiveness, for a renewal of purpose and hope?

May Shabbat bring you and your dear ones peace and hope.

Shabbat Shalom,

Alexandra Wright

Dear Members and Friends,

There is a moment towards the end of the first half of Fiddler on the Roof – playing at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre until September 28^th (!) – when the joy of Tzeitel’s wedding to Motel the tailor is brutally disrupted by the constable and his men as they carry out a ‘demonstration’ in the fictional shtetl of Anatevka. The tables and chairs are overturned, the villagers cower with fear, and the gladness of the marriage celebrations evaporates.

The open air stage which is partly covered by a sloping roof top, made to appear like a wheatfield, is lit up by what seem to be flares, as though the fields and houses of the village are burning against the dark sky.

In Tevye’s fiercely patriarchal world of unbroken tradition, his conversational faithfulness to an ancestral God, where men, women, and children should know their position and what to do in life, and horses do not fall lame, suddenly the world is on fire.

The problem with being a rabbi is that when you are part of a show that is so profoundly Jewish, there is rarely unalloyed enjoyment of the music, the acting, the willing suspension of disbelief. Because Fiddler on the Roof touches on all the themes that are ‘live’ in our own lives today: how long our traditions can last, faith in a God who seems to test us, persecution, patriarchy, chosenness, intermarriage, our relationship with ‘others’, and even Zionism.  (As the shtetl villagers, forced to evacuate the village at the end of the story, contemplate their futures, Yente, the matchmaker, makes plans to go to Jerusalem.)

Sitting in the open air on that warm night, watching the burning wheat fields, overturned tables and physical violence, made me think of the midrash on the verse from Bereshit 12:1. ‘Go forth from your land, your birthplace, your father’s house, to the land that I will show you,’ says God to Avram. And the midrash to the verse relates a parable: ‘This is like a man who was passing from place to place and saw a building on fire (doleket). He said, ‘Is it possible that this building has no one in charge of it?’ The owner of the building looked out at him and said: ‘I am the owner of the building.’ Similarly, Avraham, our father, said, ‘Is it possible that this world has no one in charge?’ (Bereshit Rabbah 39:1)

In other words, Avram on his journey, witnesses a chaotic world, a place that is burning, that is full of thuggery, war and violence. And he asks himself: ‘Is it possible that there is no one in charge?’  For the pious, this is a rhetorical question. Of course, there is an ‘Owner’ to the burning building. It is this that Avram recognises as he comes to reject the idolatry of his father and accept the Oneness of an invisible God who, looks out at his world and says ‘I am the Owner of this place.’

At that moment in the musical, with the wheat fields on fire, a small village of impoverished Jews threatened and attacked, I saw our burning planet, the oppression and persecution that exist in the world, and an image of millions on the move – whether in Sudan, Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, or elsewhere.

Tevye’s strength lies in the conversations he has with the Almighty – the internal reciting of verses of prayers, what the ‘Good Book’ has to say, and various rebukes against the unfair distribution of wealth, the troubles that are heaped on the Jews in the Russian Empire, and the domestic challenges  he faces in seeing his daughters marry for love – one to a poor tailor, one to a communist, and one to a non-Jew.

And I wondered at the end, whether the message of Jewish resilience and adaptability, the enduring strength of Jewish faith, and our ability somehow to sustain our identity, to change, but hold on to something central and vital in our Judaism, no matter what happens, is a message of Hollywood sentimentality, or whether there is an underlying truth that in a world that is burning and is in danger of collapsing in on itself, we might just be offered a glimpse of hope from the humanity of Sholom Aleichem’s characters found in his stories of Tevye the Milkman.

Shabbat Shalom,
Alexandra Wright