How Can We Sing In A Sad World? – Purim 2024
1: None of us are in the mood for an “ordinary” Purim this year. The events since Shemini Atzeres continue to shed their legacy of casualties, captivity and nothing but misery and destruction everywhere. Our sisters and brothers are still held captive in underground dungeons; so many of our sisters and brothers have died or been left injured, or are mourning fresh and untimely bereavements; and the destruction and death continues every day, particularly among the innocent civilians of Gaza who are living a hell on earth that I cannot even properly imagine. And the general mood of antagonism between communities and nations around the world is pretty toxic.
2: So how are we meant to dress up, feast, sing and dance? How do we get in the Purim mood?
3: Well, we could start by asking ourselves, what is the Purim mood? Put another way, what was the mood in Shushan and the surrounding areas at the time of the Purim events?
4: Summarising the events described in the Megillah, the Jewish communities came under an existential threat which they overcame by defending themselves diplomatically and militarily. The Megillah does not recount Jewish casualties during the war of self-defence, but it stands to reason that given the numbers of enemies killed there must have been heavy losses and injuries on both sides; and presumably the atmosphere of antisemitism before, during and even after the events was every bit as depressing and oppressive as at other times in our history and possibly far more than today.
5: But the enduring theme of Purim is not the military victory, but of unreasonable hope and determined reconciliation even in the middle of the worst troubles. Starting with Esther, who says that the way out of her predicament is for the community to fast and pray for her while she and her companions fast and pray for the community. In other words, the Jewish world that at the start of the Megillah is “scattered and divided” starts to pull together and look after each other. And the theme continues all the way through, culminating in the religious legacy of our annual commemoration being a day of looking after others first with food for friends and money for all who need it, before we sit down to show our gratitude to God for our many blessings. In other words, a time of enjoying and sharing our blessings – coming close to God by being close to each other in a sensitive and caring way.
6: The dressing up adds the idea that at the darkest of times when we think there is no real reason for hope, deliverance comes in unlikely ways from improbable sources, reminding us that “God’s deliverance comes in the twinkling of an eye”. Or, as my daughter Shira put it when naming their son “Afik” a few weeks ago, God’s deliverance is like the “afikei mayim” – the water channels in the desert that look dry and desolate beyond hope one moment and fill up instantly as if by magic when the rains come. Nature suddenly turns upside down and the normal order of things is changed beyond recognition.
7: So I will be dressing up today, sharing a Purim seudah of song and delicious food with good friends later, and celebrating with family now, with a real belief that by focusing on each other, looking after each other’s needs before we settle down to enjoy the blessings God has given us, we are doing a great deal to help those in pain and suffering on all sides and for all reasons, by helping to usher in a world where enemies become friends and nobody is left desolate, and where the bounds of practical possibility are overturned into a magical world of Divine deliverance.
8: Building bridges across divisions of all kinds is the real message of Purim – and it has never been more urgently needed than it is today. Purim Sameyach to us all, and b’soros tovos lonu ul’chol Yisroel u’lchol ha’olam.
Armistice Day Shabbos 11 November 2023
The message of today’s Armistice Day really speaks to the mood of the Jewish people around the world this year.
It is a matter of enormous pride to me as a British Jew that after the First World War the United Kingdom did not build a victory memorial. We built a Cenotaph of remembrance, where year after year human beings would come to reflect on the senseless destruction of the First World War and mourn the annihilation of a whole generation of youth and vigour in a pointless war.
There were no winners in war then and there are no winners in war now.
Wars sometimes have to be fought. World War Two had to be fought by the allies of the free world against an authoritarian threat that if left unchecked would have extinguished freedom in every corner of the globe.
Today, Israel is fighting a war for its survival, against a merciless enemy that has committed atrocities that will haunt our collective memory forever.
So we have to fight – but even as we fight we mourn. Every child’s cry pierces to our heart. Every sob of the dispossessed, the bereft, the dying and the disabled fills our hearts and our prayers.
And we hear the cries of the hostages of all ages held by Hamas in Gaza and they pierce our hearts until we hardly know how to carry on.
Avrohom Ovinu cried for Soroh in this week’s parashah with a small chaf, one reason for which was because she lived such a full and wonderful life and there was so little to mourn and so much to celebrate.
What can we say today of young lives extinguished at their very outset in unimaginably inhuman conditions? What can we say of young men full of vigour and promise cut down in the service of their country and defence of their people? What can we say of young mothers left widowed, young children left orphans? All the thousands and thousands of innocent lives destroyed or damaged in a war not of their making and due to a hatred they never felt or fomented.
So we stand in silence because there is simply nothing to be said.
We resolve to fight evil, but never to feel triumph in our hearts. When the Mishneh in Pirkei Ovos counsels us not to rejoice in the downfall of our enemy it speaks not only to the need to show human compassion even to those whose ways and choices have forced us to do battle against them, but also to the stark reality that the defeat of evil rarely leaves us much if anything to be happy about, and its bequests are usually – as today – human misery, suffering, death and disability.
With the help of the Ribono Shel Oilom the Defence Forces of Israel will be successful in restoring peace and security to the land that we dreamed about inhabiting through thousands of years of exile. And when once more b’ezras Hashem we are all able to walk in calm and comfort through our land, we will stand, as we stand today on Armistice Day, hand in hand with all humanity – with all who know how to shed a tear for the victims of senseless violence. And we will whisper the words of the poet Robert Binyon in 1914 that have become the essence of remembrance the whole world over as we remember the victims:
“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.”
And we will pray for a time when in the words of the Novi “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation”, a time when the whole world is receptive to the description of the Torah we give every time we return the sefer to the Oron HaKoidesh: “Her ways are the ways of pleasantness and her every path is peace”. A time when sense and decency will have prevailed, and we will have played our full part in reawakening the ruchniyus of our people, and through our people the whole world, ad sheyovo Melech, Goel u’Moishia, bimheiro b’yomeinu omein v’omein.
Zochreinu L’chayim – Remember Us For Life – Three Weeks Later
1: It feels almost impossible that just three weeks ago we were in the middle of Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement – intensifying our prayers that God would write us into the book of life this year.
2: As it happens, I led a discussion in shul on Yom Kippur afternoon this year on the theme of the Book of Jonah and the concept of collective punishment. I focused in particular on the sailors who were put in danger because of Jonah embarking on their ship and on the inhabitants of Nineveh.
3: I drew on the commentaries of Rashi and the Malbim in relation to the sailors, and on the Midrash Pirkei d’Rebbe Eliezer in relation to the King of Nineveh and its inhabitants. In particular, the sailors go to particularly impressive lengths to avoid exposing Jonah to danger until they are absolutely sure that keeping him on board would expose them all to undeserved and serious risks and that expelling him would not add to his own danger. And the King of Nineveh (a reincarnation of Pharoah, according to the Midrash) shows his lack of understanding of moral principle by staging a repentance program that inflicts suffering on children and animals (demonstrating a lack of true moral understanding as a result of which, according to the Midrash, the “salvation” of Nineveh was only ephemeral).
4: I tried to develop some thoughts about the Jewish attitude to the death of innocent bystanders out of these incidents: but I had not prepared sufficiently carefully for my thoughts to be properly articulated and I failed in the discussion to express them coherently.
5: Unhappily, since then we have all had the need to think more deeply about the Jewish attitude to the death of innocents, whether as targeted victims or as “collateral” deaths. And I think I now know what I should have said on Yom Kippur afternoon.
6: The starting point is that Abraham established in his debate with God at Sodom that is axiomatic to Jewish theology that God does not permit the deliberate killing of the innocent with the guilty. The episode of the sacrifice of Isaac can be understood as God’s final challenge to Abraham, seeing if he was prepared to challenge God by saying, in effect, “yes, if You command me to kill an innocent child I will do that, but after that I will no longer believe that you are a God worth following”. My understanding is that if God had not prevented Abraham from complying with the command to kill Isaac, Abraham would have ceased to see God as espousing values of decency and justice and would, so to speak, have abandoned the religion. (I have discussed this elsewhere (https://thescepticblog.com/2014/09/ – and What If God’s A Christian, Chapter 46 – https://www.danielgreenberg.co.uk/product/what-if-gods-a-christian/), and I am told that a similar thesis is found in respectable orthodox Jewish sources.)
7: We are therefore required to emulate the sailors in the book of Jonah to do everything we possibly can to avoid punishing a person for things for which they are not responsible.
8: But sometimes entirely innocent people will suffer, and may even die, as a result of circumstances over which they have no control and for which they bear no responsibility of any kind. There will be all kinds of reasons for this: innocents will sometimes be targeted deliberately, carelessly or otherwise wrongly; or they may be used by murderers or others as human shields; and there are so many other dreadful circumstances in which innocent adults or children die every day all around the world as victims of natural or human events over which they have no control and for which they have no shred of responsibility.
9: How do I continue to reconcile this with a just God? At what point should we consider, like Abraham at the akeida, walking away from our faith on the grounds that it no longer appears to make any sense or to produce anything useful?
10: The critical point here is my belief in life after death. One of the fundamental principles of the Jewish religion is that this world is a physical corridor to a spiritual existence. The purpose of this world is to use its opportunities – and in particular the opportunities for kindness and sensitivity that arise from our interactions with each other – for me to build something in my essence that will survive after my physical death.
11: This is what Rabbinic literature generally refers to as The World To Come – Olom Habo. Critically, in Jewish theology, almost everyone who dies receives a place in the World to Come. Put another way, virtually everyone, irrespective of religion, race or any other characteristic, acquires spiritual merit in myriad ways every day, and that merit becomes their spiritual identity after death. The Talmud lists some classes of person who are thought not to survive into the next world – and the common denomination is the kind of arrogance and depravity that leads them to deny the value of moral or spiritual behaviour. “Ordinary” failings of the kind that amount simply to giving in to normal human temptations do not according to Rabbinic tradition debar a person from acquiring the spiritual merit that amounts to a place in the World to Come.
12: In essence, everybody remotely “normal” receives a life after death, however shallow and flawed their life may have appeared to them to be, in the way that most of us tend to think of our own lives. I have discussed elsewhere how I suspect that the failings we are most shamed of may turn out to be dismissed by the “Recording Angel” as merely human and irrelevant to the final spiritual reckoning, while many of our greatest merits may turn out to be things we thought too commonplace to be worth noticing.
13: And it is fundamental Jewish doctrine that nobody and nothing can take my World To Come away from me. We have not even the vaguest inkling of an idea why God permits wicked people to murder and destroy: but we have a clear faith that their victims rise straight to the World To Come and enter a phase of eternal spiritual life that the rest of us will reach in God’s own inscrutable time.
14: On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur we are not really asking for physical life at all: we all know how fragile all human life is and how uncertain it is for any person whether they will survive physically for another day or not, let alone for another year or not. In so far as we are asking to be kept alive at all it is “l’maanchoh – for God’s own sake” in the sense that through self-improvement, introspection and kindness (teshuvah, tefiloh u’tzedoko) we will prepare ourselves for eventual death and what comes beyond it. Yom Kippur is more about the unimportance of physical death than the importance of preserving physical life.
15: (None of this is in any sense a theological excuse for murderers. The Talmud has a lengthy passage in Tractate Rosh Hashanah about the treatment of murderers who argue in the afterlife that they must have been “doing God’s will” or otherwise it couldn’t have happened – the bottom line is that the fact that God “wants” something to happen, whatever that means, does not relieve the perpetrator from the spiritual consequences of the moral decision to be the person who makes that thing happen. And those who murder and destroy out of arrogant belief in their own righteousness, or in the righteousness of their own religious or other ideology, fall within the classes of person who according to the Talmud lack the spiritual qualities to endure after death.)
16: Nor does any of this purport to make sense of any of the madness in the world today.
17: But it does mean that I can – just – remain a committed practising Jew despite the innocent lives that are lost or blighted in so many places around the world everyday.
18: Like us all, I am praying for peace for everyone everywhere as soon as possible; and hoping against hope that the decent human instincts and values that are an emanation of the Divine in whose image we were all created will prevail. And for those innocents who lose their lives every day in so many places around the world, I join the collective and continuous Jewish prayer that they all should be “bound in eternal life”.
Blackmail and Divorce
In the last few months I have heard some appalling histories of get refusal. A recurring theme is of women being told by the Beth Din that there are “minor matters outstanding”, generally the payment of money or the relinquishment of a financial claim, before the get can be arranged.
Unless an extraordinary number of women are telling remarkably consistent lies, a number of Botei Din appear to regard this as part of diplomatic negotiation.
The criminal law of the United Kingdom has a different word for it: blackmail.
Demanding money (whether under the pretence of a debt or not) with the threat of withholding a get unless it is paid is a simple case of blackmail. And a dayan or Beth Din registrar who facilitates a demand of this kind may be committing the inchoate offence of encouraging or assisting an offence believing it will be committed, contrary to section 45 of the Serious Crime Act 2007.
Another relevant offence, section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 (controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relationship), has recently been extended to former relationships by section 68 of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. From the way in which the Federation Beth Din and the London Beth Din have reacted to the responses to their original statements about this development, it seems that they may have begun to realise that there are potential personal criminal consequences of continuing to connive at or collaborate in the use of the get as a tool of mental cruelty and extortion.
But they still assert that halachah ties their hands. It does not. They need to understand that prosecution for criminal blackmail or for coercive behaviour is not something a woman “does” to coerce her husband into giving the get: it is simply a consequence of his refusal to do the right thing. It is the State that prosecutes, not the victim. It is of course true that halachic coercion can only be applied by halachic authorities; but that does not permit those authorities to shelter people from the criminal consequences of their actions.
And applying halachah so as to deter a victim of crime from reporting an offence for the State to prosecute is likely to amount to an additional criminal offence of perverting the course of justice.
The community must seize the moment and make clear to dayonim and rabbis that this is not going to go away, and that they are likely to find themselves imprisoned if they continue to facilitate blackmail and coercion as part of their “negotiating strategy” over divorces. If we fail to do this, we as a community will remain complicit in the abuse that women, and some men, are suffering in this respect every single day.
BBC Radio 4 Thought For The Day – Contract Law and Morality
I used my Radio 4 Today Programme Thought For the Day slot this morning to discuss the ethical implications of relying on contractual cancellation rights, with a brief nod to Lord Atkin’s famous religion-to-law translation in Donoghue v Stevenson. Link below.
Kulam Kedoshim? The Status of Those Who Died at Meron.
- As we approach the end of the shiva period for those who died at Meron last week, I was asked this morning whether it is correct or incorrect to refer to them as kedoshim.
- It is true that they were not martyred for remaining true to their belief in God in the face of persecution, and that at least in recent decades the phrase kedoshim has at least largely been reserved for people who suffered martyrdom of one kind or another.
- On the other hand, they were each engaged at the time in an expression of personal spiritual commitment by attending an event which was for them an expression of religious devotion and belief.
- So if it can bring any shred of comfort to those they left behind to commemorate them as kedoshim, I cannot see that it is in any sense an unfitting dignity for people who died in the course of what was for them an act of spiritual dedication, and I can imagine that as a source of comfort to their mourners it could be helpful.
- But there is also a danger associated with the term, which we must be careful to avoid. Already this week I have seen references along the lines of “Hashem wanted him in Shomayim so the world had to let him go”, as though this is all an act of God and their death is almost more to be celebrated than it is to be mourned. Clearly for the families this is a very real and pure expression of their own feelings about their lost child or relative, and as such it must be respected and cherished: but it is not the take-away message for the rest of us.
- While preserving the purity and dignity of the memory of those sweet souls who died, we need to be very clear: this was not an act of God, except in as much as everything that happens in the world is permitted to happen by God.
- The second of this week’s parashiyos makes it very clear in the Tochachah that God permits many things to take place in the world that are consequences of our own actions, and that are not to be construed as leaving us blameless on account of their being God’s will in the sense that everything that happens must be the will of the Master of the Universe. Bad consequences of bad actions must be taken to heart, not explained away as “God’s will”.
- This accident did not occur “because” God wanted these 45 pure souls to die before their time: it occurred “because” of a disgraceful and tragic failure on our part to take health and safety sufficiently seriously.
- Who is “our part” for these purposes? Well I don’t know, and nor does anybody else. And in seeking to determine it we can approach it in one of two ways.
- We can try to narrow it down, by seeking to point the finger of blame at particular individuals. In doing so we are very unlikely to do more than increase division, attribute blame unfairly to scapegoats, and lead to the general issue of health and safety being taken less seriously by those who consider themselves exculpated, rather than by being taken more seriously by us all.
- So in this week of the Tochachah I suggest that everyone who has any kind of connection with Israel or the Jewish community, or even who feels empathy with what happened simply by virtue of being a human being, might usefully consider ourselves all responsible, not in the sense of having been to blame for what happened, but as being obliged to take away from it the message that we need to redouble our efforts to look after each other, and show each other practical care and sensitivity by guarding each other’s safety as well as in other aspects.
- This was not an act of God: it was an act of human beings. The lives that were lost were lost senselessly and pointlessly and unnecessarily. These deaths do not add in themselves to kiddush Hashem in any sense, and although those who died should definitely be dignified by the attribution kedoshim where that brings any feeling of comfort to their mourners and reminds us of their own sweet and holy natures, those of us who are left behind should not forget that this was a desecration of God’s name and not a sanctification, and that it requires to be expiated by our re-doubling our efforts to sanctify and protect human life wherever possible.
The Correct Brochoh On Being Vaccinated
- This is such an obvious point that I would not have troubled to blog about it, if I hadn’t heard someone questioning it.
- What brochoh does a person make on receiving the COVID-19 vaccine?
- There is no doubt that a brochoh requires to be made: any event that is life-changing has a brochoh – and being vaccinated against an illness that has killed hundreds of thousands of people world-wide, ruined hundreds of thousands of businesses and incarcerated millions of people for around a year, is clearly life-changing.
- It is also clearly one of the most profound achievements of medical science, in pursuance of their Divine commandment – v’rapoh y’rapeh – in living memory, to have produced and deployed vaccines against this plague in such an extraordinarily short time and with such impressive results. Again, how could that not require us to bless and thank HaShem for giving humans the wisdom to protect us in this way?
- Bewilderingly, I heard someone seriously suggest that the appropriate brochoh is shechechiyonu – but that is clearly wrong: we say shechechiyonu to thank God for preserving us to witness and enjoy an event that is important to us personally.
- But on an event which benefits me but also benefits others, the correct brochoh is HaTov v’Hameitiv.
- Receiving the vaccine helps and protects me, God willing; but it also protects anyone with whom I come into contact and to whom I might otherwise transmit the illness having contracted it asymptomatically.
- Iy’h I will receive the vaccine this coming Thursday, the local NHS having reached people of my age and summoned me accordingly; and when I receive it, I look forward to being mevoreich HaTov v’Hameitiv. Thursday will be Taanis Esther: it was Esther Hamalkah who turned the selfishness of the banquet of Achashveirosh at the beginning of the megillah (“la’asos k’rtzon ish v’ish”) into the concern for each other at the end of the megillah (“u’matonos ish l’rei’ehu”), by discovering and articulating the need to return to Avrohom Ovinu’s equating belief in God with chessed (kindness and sensitivity), when she says “you fast for me, and I and my maids will do the same” (which former Chief Rabbi Bakshi-Doron explains as meaning “we’ll stop worrying about ourselves and start worrying about you, and you stop worrying about yourselves and start worrying about us”) in a way that storms the gates of Heaven.
- Y’hi rotzon that once the vaccine has controlled the pandemic throughout the world, our lives will have changed irrevocably through our experiences having taught us greater sensitivity to those who are weak or vulnerable, and we will be zocheh to recreate a religious world which places sensitivity to others’ vulnerabilities and weaknesses at the heart of our worship and other religious practices in a way that revives the ruchnius of our people and through our people the whole world, ad she’yovo Melech Go’el u’Moishia bimheiro b’yomeinu omein v’omein.
Return to Shul – Women and Children First (or At Least Not Last)
- Synagogues in the United Kingdom are preparing to reopen after several months.
- It is clear that this will not mean – at least for the foreseeable future – doors opened wide again to all comers.
- Whether or not the 30 person limit applies to all services – which is not yet clear – it is certain that social distancing requirements will limit the numbers able to return.
- I have seen it suggested that we should prioritise men who need a minyan to say kaddish and other men who want to pray with a minyan; and I have seen suggestions that in order to maximise the number of adult men who can pray with a minyan, we should allow men into the women’s spaces, exclude children, and effectively open the synagogues only to adult males of 13 and above.
- That would be a disgrace and a disaster.
- I have no difficulty in perpetuating a Judaism that requires communal prayer to be focused on a minyan of ten adult males; it’s anachronistic, but so is much of my religion. I don’t find it distasteful (and yes, of course, I might if I weren’t a man) provided it accommodates the needs of women and children as much as the needs of men.
- I can belong to a religion where the community services build on a core of 10 men, so long as they build out from that to provide a service that helps everybody to pray and makes everyone feel that their prayers are nurtured and appreciated as much as anyone else’s.
- I cannot belong to a religion that thinks that women’s prayers matter less than men’s; or that children’s prayers matter less than adults.
- Yes of course some women are as happy praying at home as in shul; or happier; and the same goes for some men.
- But some women find it easier to pray when supported by the prayers and songs of the community; and their rights and needs must be respected as much as mine.
- So once we have 10 men in the shul, remaining spaces must be allocated in a way that reflects the needs of women and children.
- (As to saying kaddish, there are women who wish to say kaddish in a communal context too.)
- We do not live in the eighteenth century. Prevailing moral sensitivities have refined since we were in the largely-mythically reverenced shtetl; the systematic belittling of women in ritual Judaism from those times owed more to our reflecting the surrounding culture than to any religious requirements. “You go and set out the kiddush while we pray musaph” is a cultural chauvinism, not a reflection of Jewish values; and it has no place in today’s world.
- Lockdown has hopefully taught us all to empathise more with those who are perpetually cut off from the kind of communal life that some of us – I for one – have previously taken for granted; it would be a disastrous end to lockdown if a handful of active and healthy adult men rushed back into the shul with relief and slammed the doors in the face of those who don’t “need a minyan” or who cannot get to a minyan whether they need it or not.
- Lockdown will have served a massively beneficial purpose if from now on our communities concentrate on including as many people as possible, in whatever ways possible; there is no excuse for ever having a shiur again on a weekday that does not offer a live-streamed version as well as catering for those who prefer to attend physically; the same for our weekday services (and hopefully it will not prove impossible in the reasonably medium-term to devise a halachically acceptable way of live-streaming shabbos services too); and similarly there would be no excuse for reopening shuls in a way that made women and children think that their prayers mattered less than men’s.
The Man Who Didn’t Have To
A rich man who had lived during the coronavirus pandemic died of natural causes years later and went towards Heaven.
The Angel in Charge asked him: “When you cancelled your house cleaners during the lockdown did you carry on paying them anyway?”
“No”.
“Why not”, asked the Angel?
“Because I didn’t have to”, the man said confidently; and he would have explained why he was quite in the right but the Angel was asking another question.
“Did you stay in your town home and resist the temptation to travel to your second home in the country where they didn’t yet have much COVID?”
“No.”
“Why not, asked the Angel?
“Because I didn’t have to”, said the man, and he would have carried on to explain why it was no real risk to the country and the law he was breaking was daft and didn’t really mean to apply to him but the Angel wasn’t listening and asked another question.
“Did you use your own money to pay the workers you couldn’t use in your factory during lockdown rather than the public money?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I didn’t have to”, said the man, and was about to give the Angel a lecture in free market economics; but the Angel had walked away and shut the gate. The man tried it but it was locked.
“Hold on”, shouted the man “Why have you locked me out? Why won’t you let me in?”
“Because I don’t have to.”
Kol Dichpin – A Seder Without Guests
- This year around the world for the first time in living memory almost every seder this Pesach will have to take place without guests.
- I have set out my general thoughts on how our Judaism can best flourish at a time when the community cannot function – see my post What’s The Derech and Who’s off It – A Discussion of Core Jewish Values (below and at https://www.danielgreenberg.co.uk/shiurim-and-lectures/).
- But a specific issue arises for the seder: we will begin as always with a ritual announcement that all who are hungry should come and join us – and we will know that we do not mean it: that we have not been able to invite guests, and that there will be people sitting alone whom we would have loved to have invited.
- So, simply, what kavono can we have in saying “kol dichpin” this year? Perhaps we should leave it out?
- It seems to me that we need to start now: there are many people for whom existing financial difficulties have been exacerbated by coronavirus; or whom the lockdown will have precipitated into new financial difficulties.
- There are also many wonderful charitable organisations which are doing their best to help.
- So if we make efforts to give to those organisations now a little bit more than we might otherwise have done (perhaps particularly where we have money that we might have spent on a large seder that is now available for other things) then we can sit at our seder table and in saying “kol dichpin” we can reflect that we have done our best to ensure that as many people as possible are joining our seder remotely, in the sense that we have shared with them before Pesach so that they can enjoy their seder in peace and comfort.
- L’shonoh ha’bo’oh b’Yerushalayim to us all – hoping that we can celebrate next year’s Pesach in a world that has been spiritually enriched by our collective experiences of a closer connection with God and Jewish values as a result of our enforced isolations.
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