Silence

I got a message a few months back: ‘I dare you to post a report from a Gazan journalist”. The message came from an old chanich, someone I looked after on one of our Noam summer camps. I responded immediately, asking what he meant by this message and if we could talk about it.

The challenge from the outside world is real, critique of Israel and the war in Gaza is relentless; as long as this war lasts, opposition to it will persist. 

Yesterday I started a new job, working a few days a week as a Chaplain on the Canary Wharf Estate - a sprawling project, part residential, part business and lots of shops. The Multifaith Chaplaincy team is responsible to care for the people on this estate. One of my first stops was to visit the ‘Easter Tree of Life’, which was an exhibition put up in the centre of one of the shopping malls. After just a few minutes of being there one of the priests, my colleague Mark, introduced me to a guy who approached us. We chatted for a while, he came from a Jewish and Catholic background but converted to Islam 10 years ago. He wanted to know about Gaza. I explained to the best of my ability the Jewish and Israeli take on the current conflict and how hard it was to conduct a ‘just’ war while fighting terrorists underground who held hostages.

The man had “marched for Palestine” as he described, worked for a charity and had even been assaulted in the street for wearing a Palestinian flag.

I don’t have such profound reflection on this exchange but it was civil and important, it is why I have been drawn towards this public-facing role of chaplaincy in the last years, working to represent our proud and ancient faith in a public sphere, standing up to have conversations in places where people often don’t meet Jewish people.

In our Parsha we find one of our most gut-wrenching lines of Torah, our Bible, it is the story of Nadav and Avihu, Aaron’s sons, who are killed by God for offering the wrong sacrifice to God. A strange biblical tale alongside Aaron’s response: ‘וַיִּדֹּם אַהֲרֹן’, Aaron was silent. There are different ways this verse is understood, is this Aaron’s reverence and profound trust in God, is Aaron lost for words, has he cried out and then is silenced? It is hard to read but each year I am moved by this two-word response to such profound agony.

In the Talmud [MENUCHOT, 29b] we have an overlaying rabbinic story which talks of the life of Rabbi Akiva and a time-travelling Moses, who is able to visit the famous Rabbi in his classroom and see him teach. In the same moment, he is transported to see Akiva at the moment of his death, being tortured at the hands of the Romans. Moses enquires: ‘זו תורה וזו שכרה’, this Akiva fella was such a Torah scholar and this was his reward? God answers: ‘שתוק כך עלה במחשבה’, be silent, some things are beyond understanding (literally: ‘this is how it appears in thought’).

What do we make of these two descriptions of silence? I don’t think we are to be silenced or not to speak out. I believe we should stand for Israeli democracy, to hold out hope for a Palestinian liberation, for an end to war and at the same time to state in clear terms that this tragedy and violence are not clearly explained away and certainly not solved by violence or shouting. We are embroiled in a decades-old conflict that our people must endure, and at the same moment our humanity is contingent on the humanity of the Palestinian people, our neighbours. In moments of utter violence this silence described invites spiritual and inward reflection. 

This week is Holocaust Memorial Day, Yom Hashoah in the Jewish calendar, a date chosen to remember acts of bravery in the utter devastation of the Warsaw Ghetto. It was this week too that we learned of the passing of one of our favourite, most compassionate and energetic, Holocaust survivor educators, Eve Kugler z”l. 

Viktor Frankl in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, writes about a woman in Auschwitz who is about to die, she tells Frankl from her death bed: “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness”, he asks her: “What does the tree say?”, she answers: “I am here, I am here, I am eternal life”. In moments of quiet, in connecting with a spirit which is unchanged and eternal, we are able to perhaps for one moment, take an alternate perspective on the world around us. 

SHABBAT SHALOM