Posts Tagged ‘peace’
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.
Nobel games and noble aspirations
- Professor Robert Aumann deserves warm congratulations from the world-wide Jewish community, not least for the wonderful kiddush hashem created by the international media coverage of his smile beaming out from under his kippah.
- That apart, like other practical social sciences applied games theory clearly has enormous benefits for society in all kinds of ways.
- Also like other sciences, it is important to understand its limitations, which Professor Aumann clearly does. In particular, asked about the application of games theory to the Israel-Palestine conflict, he is reported as having said “It’s been going on for more than 80 years and … it’s going to go on for at least another 80. I don’t see any end to it.”
- Without knowing the precise context of the question to which these remarks responded, it is impossible to be sure exactly what Professor Aumann meant. But knowing him to be a Torah Jew we can be sure what he did not mean: he may have meant that his particular science has nothing to offer for the acceleration of the resolution of conflict in Israel, but he certainly did not mean that there is therefore no hope for peace.
- Professor Aumann himself has witnessed miracles: a miraculous escape from the inferno and a miraculous rebuilding, in other lands in general and in Israel in particular, of so much of what was lost. Therefore he is better-placed than many to know that the cry of the believing Jew through the ages when confronted with the limits of science and human endeavour is not the cry of despair but the cry of hope beyond reason but within faith.
- Standing at the brink of the sea with the Egyptian armies massing behind them, Moses turns to the Jewish people and says not “my political, diplomatic and military strategies have reached the end of their potential and we may as well give up” but rather “my political, diplomatic and military strategies have come to the limit of their potential and we can therefore, all human effort having been expended and failed, confidently expect immediate divine intervention” (see Shemos 14:13-14).
- We are all deeply indebted to Professor Aumann and all other scientists, social and other, for their discoveries that enable us to work faster and more effectively towards the goal of a perfect world under the Kingship of God. But we never forget that the human effort can only succeed in accordance with the God’s blessings, and that ultimate success, personally, communally and universally, owes more to faith in God’s mercies and kindness than to our own efforts. And so the more impossible the task that we confront seems, the more confidently we trust in God to achieve it for us once we have deserved it.
The Sceptic Blog 