If I had to pick one word from the long liturgy of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, it would be chaim, life: ‘Remember us for life; write us in the book of life, God who loves life.’
If I had to choose one word from the rich litany of Succot it would be Hoshana, Save! Save your people! Save humankind and beast! Save the breath-giving trees!’
Yet last year has brought indescribable cruelty, misery and death. As Rachel Sharansky Danziger wrote, after October 7:
By day one can invest in life
But at night
There is no way to silence the dead.
Deep wounds pierce the hearts of the grief-stricken, the injured, and those traumatised across the whole of Israel. Only God knows what the hostages and their desperate families are feeling, or how they carry on day upon day. Their anguish reaches us too, in our solidarity, leaving us anxious in an often bleak and isolating world, where many experience antisemitism, ostracism and hate.
The death, devastation and misery which has overtaken so many thousands of Palestinian people in Gaza in Israel’s bitter war against the nihilistic terrorism of Hamas, pains and disturbs us too. What sorrows and angers are sown amidst the ruins? What hatreds, and what hopes, does the future hold?
Many of us personally, and many communities, are torn apart as we face our different worries and fears and turn in prayer to the God of justice and compassion. May God protect those risking their lives to defend others, and every innocent person exposed to the horrors of war.
In these cruel times, we hold tight to our faith, our Torah and the sustaining discipline of Jewish living. We take strength from the stalwart resilience of the Jewish People across many lands and centuries, and from the embrace of our communities, which both support us and need our support. We hold firm to our belief in moral responsibility and our determination to create a better world. We abjure triumphalist racism and dehumanising hatred, from whoever they come. We commit ourselves to serve the God of life, whose sacred spirit flows through all living being.
This is our Judaism, the source of our strength in adversity and our hope for the future.
In this spirit we turn to the God of life: save our people, save humanity, save life, and help us bring healing to our war-torn world.
