On Monday, hugging will be allowed beyond your immediate bubble. I’m a hugger. Not hugging has been very strange. And very important. At times it has been painful, like standing with sobbing mourners unable to embrace them. We are warned that we still need to be mindful when hugging, but this does feel like an enormous leap back towards normality.
This morning Lottie leyned with such skill and beauty from the first portion of the book of Bamidbar – known in English as the book of Numbers. Bamidbar, doesn’t mean numbers, it means ‘In the Desert’. The root of the word desert in Hebrew is daled, vet, reish – davar – a word. What has the desert got to do with a word? Well tomorrow night we will celebrate the giving of Torah – revelation, the words of God according to traditional understanding, at mount Sinai, in the Desert.
Davar and bamidbar are thus spiritually connected. They teach us that there are times we need the quiet, awesome expanse of the desert to be able to quieten down enough to hear God’s word, or what our souls need to say to us. The noise and bustle of our daily lives block out too much that we might hear in the quiet.
This week in particular I have craved the quiet of the desert. There has been so much anger, violence, shouting of justifications from all sides. And meanwhile rockets and bombs fly over the desert where we should be able to find the quiet and the peace that allows us to hear God’s word. Local citizens have rioted. Many of us have friends and family who have spent nights running back and forth to their safe rooms. I also have Palestinian friends who are scared and hurt, grieving and in pain.
One of my teachers once suggested that being in community is learning to live with people with whom we profoundly disagree. When it comes to issues around Israel and Palestine, I think this is particularly challenging. The internet has turned us all into what Jenni Frazer in the Jewish News this week described as ‘Keyboard Warriors’. I have struggled in the last days with what it is worth saying on social media – whilst having real life conversations, which are often healing and meaningful, if painful at times. Colleagues have been bombarded with abuse whatever they have said. It seems our online communities have lost the ability to discuss, listen, learn, hear one another. And while there is such huge anguish I find myself wondering what difference it can really make on the ground to endlessly debate the ins and outs of a situation from afar, and particularly online.
So let me instead share the words of a group of Head Teachers living in and around Haifa. This was published by Rabbi Ofek Meir of the Leo Baeck Centre, with whom we have a wonderful community connection, along with his local colleagues Yasrin Dakwar, Principal of Al Carma Science School, Lilach Shani Romano, Principal Ironi Gimel High School and Mendi Rabinowitz, Principal of the Hebrew Reali School,
The last few days has brought deep challenges upon us. We are dealing with the many conflicts, and voices of racism, harassment and violence.
The role of education in our eyes is to remind students and communities of our shared destiny, and the power and beauty of living together.
We in Haifa know how to live together in our schools and in the city’s neighborhoods. This should be remembered even now as the flames increase. Soon the flames will be forgotten and we will all remain, to continue our lives together.
Our role as educators is to raise the younger generation to be independent, critical thinkers, with values; and to be a generation who will create knowledge, opinions, narratives and culture; and who respect the other’s opinion, and who believe in the values of equality and human rights. This is true anytime, anywhere, but especially now and in Haifa in particular.
These words, filled with pain and with hope, reminded me of a sermon given on Shabbat Bamidbar, this Shabbat, 11 years ago, at a Reform Judaism conference held in Manchester. The sermon was delivered by Rabbi Gilad Kariv, who a few weeks ago became the first Reform Rabbi to ever be elected to the Israeli Parliament, a fact that gave many of us huge hope at the time.
Rabbi Kariv explained that in parashat bamidbar, we are presented with a fascinating model of how to build a community that can live with differences. There were over 600,000 people encamped together. We all know that if you take 3 Jews you’ll have 5 opinions, so how on earth did that many wandering Hebrews manage to live together? According to the parashah, it was all to do with how the camp was set up. Each tribe had their own section of the camp, with their own flag flying, so that their sense of identity and belonging was celebrated within their tribes. Furthermore, midrash tells us that each tent was set up so that no door faced another, meaning that every family within the encampment could preserve its privacy and identity as a family unit. The structure of the encampment honoured families, created a sense of community in tribes, and co-existed as one whole, the coming together of different tribes with competing needs. The need to celebrate each, different part of the community was built into the structure of the camp. We are not great at celebrating or even sitting comfortably with a multiplicity of voices at the moment, but it is what it means to be a community.
When I work with trainee Christian ministers on Jewish Christian relations, one of my colleagues always reminds me of the importance of telling them I am a Zionist. The word has become so toxic in some places outside the Jewish community that he wants to make sure that his students hear someone they relate to and understand the humanity of, explain why the state of Israel has a right to exist, even if they don’t always agree with what happens on the ground there. Questions around Israel and Palestine are almost always raised in these classes, and when they are not I worry – it means the students are too scared to ask the question for fear of causing offence. At our Young Adults Beer and Shiur this week one of our members suggested it was really urgent for us to reclaim the word Zionist. It should not be seen to belong to those who would dance and sing while the Al Aqsa compound is on fire, or who would set up armchairs to watch the shelling of Gaza. It absolutely can belong to those of us who want to see a secure and safe Israel living at peace with her neighbours, without seeing their destruction.
Lottie spoke to us earlier about the census in Bamidbar. Right at the start of the portion we are told this should be a census of names. Individuals were not just counted as numbers, but recognized as individual lives, each with a story to tell, with dreams to be fulfilled. When we forget this essential humanity of those with whom we disagree we begin to lose the ability to form a community.
When the estranged biblical brothers Jacob (by then renamed Yisrael) and Esau see one another after years apart, we are told that Esau ran towards his brother, and enwrapped him in an embrace. The singing notes above the embrace suggest the shape of a row of teeth, making commentators wonder if in fact there was a mixture of embrace and of biting – a continuing of the wrestling with what it means to be brothers, and to find a way through their differences.
There are many individuals I am looking forward to hugging in the coming weeks. But hugging can also involve struggle. We struggle with our differences as a community, we may also struggle to return to a world of physical contact after training ourselves in caution. But perhaps as we re-enter the world of physical contact, we can continue to remind ourselves of the basic humanity of all we meet, whatever wrestling may go along with our encounter, focusing on the importance of the humanity in all might be the key to the way forward.
May we live in less interesting times!
Cain Yehi Ratzon Venomar, Amen.
