Thought of the Week: 20 August 2015

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 20 August 2015

A few minutes ago (it’s Thursday morning as I write), Ron and Nadav, the young youth leaders from the Leo Baeck Center in Haifa who will join our Madrichim leading the Alyth summer camp Summer Madness next week, arrived here at Alyth straight from their flight from Israel.  They will be speaking to our congregation tomorrow Friday night at our Kabbalat Shabbat service.  The atmosphere in which they arrive here is so different from this time last year.  In August last year our Madrichim from the Leo Baeck Center, Tomer and Anat, arrived in the middle of the Gaza crisis, bravely leaving their homeland to come for two weeks in England to help our young people to understand and identify with Israel at one of its most difficult times in recent years.  Their D’var Torah on that Friday night last year was delivered in an atmosphere of uncertainty and empathy for their situation and that of their and our families in Israel as well as concern for the people of Gaza.

This Shabbat when we hear Ron and Nadav it will be in a time of peace.  An Alyth member who spends every summer in Israel spoke with me yesterday reflecting on the difference this year to last year. She said that we must remember that Israel dwells in the most volatile region of the world.  Even if there is peace and quiet in Haifa, only 60 miles away in Syria the violence of ISIS and the Assad regime is raging.

I often find it helpful before I jump to conclusions about Israel to ask myself what I would expect of the British government in London if full scale war was raging in Oxford or Cambridge, both of which are further from London than Damascus is from Haifa, let alone the towns on the Israeli borders.  I have spent much of this summer broadening my reading around Israel and its current situation with hard hitting books from various perspectives from such as Ari Shavit’s ‘My Promised Land’, Tuvia Tennenbom’s ‘Catch the Jew’ , Dervla Murphy’s ‘Between River and Sea’ and Caroline Glick’s ‘The Israeli Solution’– all of them tough reads as they push you to examine your perspective from the left or the right and all these four authors putting themselves out as dispassionate observers, but yet unable to be.  It’s the same for me, just not possible to be dispassionate about Israel and nor would I wish to be, yet as the member of the Synagogue I was speaking to this week said, whatever the challenges of this year, whatever the situation of the country, when there is a window of peace we should just appreciate it and hope and work for it remaining open for many years to come.

This Friday night and Saturday morning are also the final Shabbatot which Cantor Cheryl will be officiating before she returns to Canada at the beginning of September.   Cheryl has given Alyth so much over the past two years and we will miss her.  We will miss her care, her cantorial, teaching and other leadership skills and her enthusiasm for building the Jewish lives of our members. At the end of Shabbat morning’s service I will have the opportunity to honour her work with us and we will all be able to thank her and wish her well on her professional journey back in North America.

The month of Ellul begins for Alyth with a very different time in Israel than we were experiencing last year and for our Synagogue with development as our professional team changes.  We enter a time of growth and reflection as a congregation just as each of us personally is encouraged to review where we were last year and how we have grown and dealt with or been troubled by the challenges of the past year on our way to Rosh Hashanah.