Three Minutes of Hope: Hugo Gryn on the God Slot

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THREE MINUTES OF HOPE HUGO GRYN ON THE GOD SLOT

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THREE MINUTES OF HOPE Hugo Gryn on The God Slot

Edited by

Naomi Gryn

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com Copyright © The Estate of Hugo Gryn, 2010 Introduction copyright © Naomi Gryn, 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Scripture quotations taken from the New American Standard Bible ®, copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. Extracts from the Authorized Version of the Bible (The King James Bible), the rights in which are vested in the Crown, are reproduced by permission of the Crown’s Patentee, Cambridge University Press. Extracts from New English Bible © Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press 1961, 1970. Quotations from Plaut, W.G. (1981) The Torah: A Modern Commentary. New York: UAHC were reprinted from The Torah: The Five Books of Moses, A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text © 1962 by The Jewish Publication Society, with the permission of the publisher. ‘Blessed is the Match’ by Hannah Senesh, translated by Marie Syrkin, reprinted from Blessed is the Match: The Story of Jewish Resistance © 1947 by Marie Syrkin, published by The Jewish Publication Society, with the permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:

PB: 978-1-4411-4035-7

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group

IN MEMORY OF RABBI HUGO GABRIEL GRYN ‫זצ״ל‬ 25 June 1930–18 August 1996

Photograph by Judy Goldhill.


CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FOREWORD INTRODUCTION

xii xv 1

Tribute: Al Matthews

13

HUGO’S ANECDOTAGE 1. Bar Mitzvah 2. Abandonment: Yom Kippur in Lieberose 3. Three Minutes of Hope: Chanukah in Lieberose, 1944 4. Géza Gryn: Generosity 5. Liberation 6. Chasing Shadows: Return to Berehovo 7. Chasing Shadows: Brick Factory 8. Immigration 9. Jasper, Alabama: George Mitnick 10. Hugo’s Sixty-fifth Birthday

15 17 19 21 23 25 28 30 32 34

Tribute: Canon Roger Royle

37

JEWISH CALENDAR 1. Selichot

39

viii

THREE MINUTES OF HOPE

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Rosh Hashana Yom Kippur Succot Simchat Torah Chanukah Shabbat Tu b’Shevat Purim Passover Yom HaShoah Yom Ha’atzmaut Lag b’Omer Shavuot Tisha b’Av Rosh Chodesh

41 43 45 47 49 51 53 54 56 57 59 62 63 64 66

Tribute: Rabbi Lionel Blue

69

FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES 1. Abraham and Lot 2. Cave of Machpelah 3. Jacob and Esau 4. Joseph’s Coat of Many Colours 5. Joseph Reconciles with his Brothers 6. Moses 7. The Ten Commandments i. I am the Lord your God ii. You shall have no other gods beside Me iii. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain iv. Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy v. Honour your father and your mother vi. You shall not murder vii. You shall not commit adultery

71 73 75 77 79 81 83 84 86 88 91 92 94

CONTENTS

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

ix

viii. You shall not steal 97 ix. You shall not give false witness against your neighbour 98 x. You shall not covet your neighbour’s house, etc. 100 Korach: leadership 102 Moses and Joshua 103 Moses’ Farewell 105 Blessing and Curse 107 You May Not Hide Yourself 109

Tribute: Maureen Lipman

113

THE PROPHETS AND OTHER BOOKS OF THE BIBLE 1. Hannah 2. Elijah 3. Elisha 4. Deborah 5. Samuel 6. Abigail 7. Job 8. Book of Psalms i. Psalm 90 ii. Psalm 133 iii. Psalm 139 9. Ecclesiastes/Kohelet 10. Isaiah 11. Second Isaiah 12. Jeremiah 13. Hosea 14. Jonah 15. Micah

125 126 127 129 131 132 134 136 137 139

Tribute: Oliver McTernan

143

115 117 118 120 121 122 124

x


LOVING YOUR NEIGHBOUR AND THE STRANGER 1. George Orwell and 1984 2. Mahatma Gandhi: Man’s Greed 3. Martin Luther King Jr 4. Marc Chagall 5. Winston Churchill 6. Community 7. Westminster Pastoral Foundation 8. Kurt Hahn and Atlantic College 9. Southall Riots 10. Tolerance 11. Assassination of Anwar Sadat 12. Shalom: Northern Ireland 13. Inter Faith Network: Dialogue 14. Religious Broadcasting: Prague Conference 15. Mission and Dialogue in Inter Religious Encounters 16. Woman of Valour: Reform Synagogues of Great Britain 17. Religious Education 18. Standing Conference on Inter Faith Dialogue in Education

145 147 148 150 152 153 154 156 159 160 162 163 165 168 169 172 173 175

Tribute: Rabbi Julia Neuberger

179

HUGO’S SPIRITUAL HEROES AND THE JEWISH WORLD 1. Hillel 2. Rabbi Tarfon 3. Jews of England: Exile and Return 4. Moses Maimonides 5. Expulsion of Jews of Spain: 1492 6. Solomon Alkabez: The Sabbath Bride 7. Jews of Prague: Legend of the Golem 8. Menachem de Lonzano 9. Baal Shem Tov 10. Jews of India: Bene Israel 11. Jews of India: Sha’ar Harachamim Synagogue

181 182 183 185 188 190 191 194 195 197 199

CONTENTS

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Jews of India: Cochin Jews of India: Passover 1958 Hong Kong: Lawrence and Horace Kadoorie Jews and Japan: The Fugu Plan Russian Refuseniks I Russian Refuseniks II Operation Solomon: Jews of Ethiopia

xi

202 204 207 209 211 213 215

Tribute: Sir Martin Gilbert

219

SECOND WORLD WAR AND THE HOLOCAUST 1. Songs of the Holocaust 2. Maladie de Famine 3. Faith in the Camps: Victor Frankl 4. Martin Gilbert’s Second World War 5. Bystanders 6. Raoul Wallenberg 7. The Diary of Anne Frank 8. Janusz Korczak 9. Primo Levi: The Drowned and the Saved 10. Auschwitz: Fiftieth Anniversary of Liberation 11. The Lingfield Children 12. ’45 Aid Society 13. Trial of John Demjanjuk 14. Rabbi Leo Baeck

221 223 225 226 228 230 233 234 236 238 240 243 244 245

Tribute: Erich Segal

249

GLOSSARY AND BIOGRAPHIES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

253 262 264 269

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

p. v Hugo in his office at the West London Synagogue where he served as rabbi from 1964 until his death in 1996. This was the table at which he led his weekly shiurim, or Torah study sessions. Photograph by Judy Goldhill. p. xvi Moral Maze: Hugo with Michael Buerk, Edward Pearce and Janet Daly. p. 3 Filming Chasing Shadows. On location in Berehovo, 1989. p. 8 Hugo at his desk. Photograph by Michael Wallach. p. 11 Hugo and Naomi Gryn. New York, 1960. p. 14 Filming Chasing Shadows. 1989. Hugo re-enacts his bar mitzvah in the only remaining synagogue in Berehovo. Photograph by Naomi Gryn. p. 16 Bella, Hugo, Gabi and Géza Gryn. p. 22 Hugo and David Gryn, 25 June 1990. Photograph by Naomi Gryn. p. 24 Hugo soon after his liberation in 1945. p. 27 Hugo and his mother, Bella. 1945. p. 28 Filming Chasing Shadows. Berehovo, 1989. Photograph by Naomi Gryn. p. 30 Outside the brick factory. Berehovo, 1989. Photograph by Naomi Gryn. p. 35 Back row: Naomi Gryn, Jackie Gryn, Sadie Selby, Eva Mitchell,

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

xiii

Marian Massey, John Selby, Hugo Gryn. Front row: Gaby Massey, Adam Massey, Rachelle Gryn Brettler, Jane Gryn, David Gryn, Clio Massey, David Massey. 25 June 1995. p. 38 Rabbi Hugo Gryn conducting service at Rodef Shalom Synagogue. Bombay, 1959. Photograph by P.H. Talwar. p. 42 Clio and Adam Massey, 1993. Photograph by Naomi Gryn. p. 44 Hugo shows some of his younger congregants how to blow the shofar. Photograph by Harry Philipps. p. 46 Hugo in the succah at West London Synagogue. p. 50 Hugo lights his own father’s chanukiah with the children of the Jewish Religious Union in Bombay, 1957. p. 52 Hugo sings kiddush. Photograph by Sharon Chazan. © Naomi Gryn. p. 61 Hugo with David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), first prime minister of Israel. p. 70 The Torah service at West London Synagogue. Photograph by Stephanie Colasanti. p. 90 Friday night at home. Hugo with his children: (left to right) Naomi, Rachelle, Gaby and David. p. 114 Hugo at Atlantic College. © Atlantic College. p. 144 Hugo Gryn. Date, location and photographer unknown. p. 158 Hugo introduces Sheikh Gamal Solaiman, imam of the London Central Mosque, at the 1988 Religious Conference, Atlantic College. © Atlantic College. p. 167 Left to right: Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits, Bishop Jim Thompson, Sir Sigmund Sternberg, Rabbi Hugo Gryn, Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie. In recognition of their work for ‘cooperation between people of many faiths’ Hugo and Bishop Jim, co-chairmen of the Inter Faith Network, receive the Sir Sigmund Sternberg Award, 20 October 1987. Photograph by Henry Jacobs. p. 176 Hugo with Dean of Westminster, Edward Carpenter (1910–98). p. 180 Ordination service, 1971. Hugo was vice-president and lecturer at Leo Baeck College in London, which trains Reform and Liberal rabbis. © Harrow Observer.

xiv


p. 187 Statue of Maimonides in the Jewish Quarter of Cordoba, Spain. Photograph by Naomi Gryn. p. 193 Ladislav Šaloun’s Statue of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel outside the new town hall, Prague, 1989. Photograph by Naomi Gryn. p. 204 Hugo with Satu Koder, leader of the Jews in Cochin, India, 1958. p. 206 Bombay, August 1957: Hugo and Jackie Gryn meet Dr Jerusha Jhirad (1890–1984), founder of the Jewish Religious Union, India’s only liberal Jewish congregation. p. 220 Hugo and Martin Gilbert in Jerusalem. Photograph by Susie Gilbert. p. 231 Philip Jackson’s statute of Raoul Wallenberg in Great Cumberland Place, unveiled by the Queen on 26 February 1997. A copy of the statue, dedicated to Hugo’s memory, is on display next to the exit of the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Exhibition. p. 241 West London Synagogue has held its bazaar every November since 1945. p. 250 Hugo and Jackie on their wedding day. West London Synagogue, 1 January 1957. p. 250 Hugo and Jackie with Gaby. Bombay, 1958. p. 250 Behind the sofa (left to right): Naomi Gryn, David Gryn, Jackie Gryn, John Selby, Sadie Selby, Rachelle Gryn. Sitting: David Massey, Adam Massey, Gaby Massey, Hugo Gryn. 1990. p. 250 Rabbi Hugo Gryn, February, 1993. Photograph by Mark Gerson. p. 251 Hugo and Jackie Gryn. India, 1950s p. 251 Hugo’s sixty-fifth birthday. 25 June 1995. Photograph by Naomi Gryn. p. 251 Hugo Gryn, 1961. Photograph by Barbara and Justin Kerr.

FOREWORD by Michael Buerk

My last memory of Hugo is his final appearance on the Moral Maze, the programme I chaired, and he adorned, from the start. He was very ill, desperately weak. We were worried that he might not make much sense, or be very coherent, so great a toll had the disease and his treatment had upon him. Yet, when the red light came on, it was the old Hugo, sharp, a little mischievous, very warm, connecting with everybody involved, trying to draw out what was best about them, rather than, as sometimes happens with other contributors, ridiculing that with which they do not agree. The gravelly voice, only slightly dimmed, had its unmistakeable sound of wisdom and humanity. A week or so later, he was gone. He was a child, a victim, and a triumph of the twentieth century. More than a decade into the twenty-first he is still a presence in the room when we gather to do the Moral Maze. I can see him now, bustling on his little legs into the studio, often with an onion-sellers beret over one eye, full of banter and purpose. ‘You know, what we really must do today . . . ’ Morality was not an abstract academic theory for Hugo, though he had been an academic. He saw it as one who had stood among those who were being murdered, in Auschwitz, in Sachsenhausen. He, himself, had killed, he told us once, and felt the emotional vacuum of vengeance. Good and evil were realities to him, not theories. He had

xvi


Moral Maze: Hugo with Michael Buerk, Edward Pearce and Janet Daly.

been there, suffered, and not just survived, but won a personal victory for the human spirit. He was almost obsessed by reconciliation. So many times, sitting just next to me around that table, he would cut across the questioning of a witness about how bad things were to ask how they could be made better. He was warm without being soft. He could be angry but never hurtful. He hated only two things – prejudice and bigotry – though, truth to tell, he was not fond of the drivers of white vans. He would drop me off on the way home. He was not a good driver and as fearless about the breathalyser as he was about everything else. How I loved having him to myself. He made me feel important and valuable; his special friend. Since he died, I have met a hundred people, maybe more, who felt exactly the same way. No matter that a discussion about the hereafter in the car with Hugo driving might easily turn from theory to reality. No matter that some of his wonderful stories and rabbinical homilies were so good we

FOREWORD

xvii

heard them more than once. He was always funny, touching, human and wise. His death left a Hugo-shaped hole in our lives that nobody else can fill. The memories are marvellous, but we miss him still.


INTRODUCTION by Naomi Gryn

My father, Hugo, was a guest on Desert Island Discs in 1994.1 The producer was unable to find in the BBC collection a recording of one of his requested tracks, ‘Kol Ha’Olam’ (‘The Whole World’), played by klezmer clarinettist Israel Zohar. My father remembered that I’d said I had a copy and called me from the studio. I jumped on my bicycle with the quarter-inch tape, joined him at Broadcasting House in Portland Place and sat with the sound engineer while the presenter, Sue Lawley, and my father recorded the rest of the show. It was his eighth and final music choice, the disc that he would have taken with him to the desert island if he could only take one. ‘The words come from Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, a remarkable teacher and mystic thinker,’ said my father. ‘Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar me’od, v’ha’ikar lo lefahed klal, the whole world is a narrow bridge and the important thing – the ikar – is not to be afraid.’ On a dark and stormy night seventeen years before, sitting in the car, he had asked me about my plans. Yet to sit A-levels, I rarely planned much beyond breakfast, but on this occasion, surprising even myself, I blurted out: ‘I want to go into religious broadcasting!’ I didn’t yet know exactly what that might entail, but to encourage this newfound ambition, my father invited me to come with him to the BBC’s television studios in White City, where he was recording an episode of The Light of Experience.2 I watched from the gallery as he gave an account

2


of how he and his family were deported to Auschwitz in 1944 when he was just thirteen years old. It was the first time I had heard him speak about the Holocaust in such a public forum. He was dignified and eloquent and, like everyone else in the studio that day, I was profoundly moved. In between these two memorable occasions, I realized some of my teenage aspirations as a filmmaker and my father became a well-known public figure. We collaborated on several television documentaries with Jewish themes. He refers to these in some of his radio talks, in particular to the making of Chasing Shadows, a film I produced for Channel 4 Television in 1989, chronicling his first return since 1945 to his hometown, Berehovo, in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains and close to what are currently Ukraine’s borders with Hungary and Slovakia. It was an epic undertaking for both of us and for my sister Rachelle, a key member of the production team. While we were editing the film, I encouraged my father to start writing his memoirs, but he never found time to finish them. After he died, I edited his recollections into a book that I also called Chasing Shadows.3 Apart from this, little of his writings have previously been made public. He wrote the foreword to an edition of The Diary of Anne Frank,4 contributed to some academic journals and two prayer books for the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain. And yet, split between the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies where we, his four children, have deposited much of his archive, and my mother’s spare bedroom in Marylebone where we store the rest, there are dozens of boxes crammed with lectures, addresses, sermons and eulogies. Among them are more than 400 scripts for various radio God Slots, written and broadcast between 1976 and 1996. And it is probably for this ministry of the airwaves that my father was best known. He preferred to speak from notes, often scrawled onto white 6" × 4" cards that he always carried with him. Some of these radio scripts were handwritten on pads of yellow lined paper, but mostly they were typed with double-spacing onto paper cut into 8" × 6 7⁄8", just over half a sheet of foolscap.

INTRODUCTION

3

Filming Chasing Shadows. On location in Berehovo, 1989.

Although a firm believer in equality of the sexes – at least as a theory – my father was born into a generation of men that left to their women cooking, housework, raising children and secretarial duties, and he never got the hang of loading a dishwasher or using a keyboard. I spent the summer between A-levels and university working as his secretary and I recognize some of the typescripts as my own handiwork. He dictated sermons and talks without much attention to punctuation or transliteration of Hebrew or Yiddish terms so I’ve made some editorial tweaks to facilitate readers, in particular conforming spellings and decimating my father’s most ubiquitous punctuation mark – the dash – as well as many of the ellipses, brackets, inverted commas and exclamation marks that guided his pauses, emphases and intonations. The round brackets are my father’s; to indicate my own interventions, I’ve used square brackets. Where corrections were necessary I have tried to keep the tone as close as I could to my father’s voice. For dates, I have followed the convention that my father always used: BCE (before the Common Era) and CE (Common Era) rather than BC and AD with

4


which Christian readers might be more familiar. He drew inspiration from sources ranging from the five books of Moses to George Orwell and Mahatma Gandhi. I’ve tried to figure out the origin of the quotes he cited and have given references wherever possible, but he had a large library and my skills as a literary detective have been challenged, especially by translations of biblical and Talmudic passages, many of which my father would have adapted himself from the original Hebrew or Aramaic. For my twenty-sixth birthday I requested a Chumash, the printed text of the Torah with English translation and commentary which is used to accompany the weekly reading from the Torah scroll; my father gave me his own. When I have managed to match texts successfully with passages in this Chumash,5 it has been like holding hands across Time, knowing that my father once turned this page or that, maybe for these very scripts as he read out the verses into his dictation machine. Where known I have included the date of transmission, the radio station, and the name of the slot or programme for which the script was intended, but mostly I’ve deleted his opening greeting to the programme’s host. Confusingly, both BBC World Service and Capital Radio called their respective God Slots Reflections. These radio talks are about the values that mattered most to my father: taking care of the needy and the vulnerable, devotion to learning, and his lifelong quest for shalom, or peace. Some are in the style of a meditation or miniature sermon, others are personal recollections or potted histories of his spiritual heroes; nearly always there’s a good story at the core. The scripts were not originally intended for a compilation such as this; we all have our favourite turns of phrase and inevitably there is some repetition. For instance, there are two ‘rabbinic honeymoons’ (one in Jasper, Alabama, the other in Bombay), three ‘red-lettered days’ (5 May, Shavuot and Mothering Sunday), three references to biblical injunctions to love neighbours and strangers, and three times he uses as a punchline ‘l’chayim’ – the Jewish toast ‘to life!’ There are also numerous invocations of ‘the rabbis of two thousand years ago’, my father’s euphemism for the sages of the Talmud.

INTRODUCTION

5

I have grouped the scripts by subject rather than chronological order. When asked to record a series of broadcasts, he sometimes chose specific themes, such as the Prophets or Ten Commandments or Jews of India, and I have included as many scripts as possible in each of these batches. We didn’t always see things exactly the same way and I have made my selection based not on my own preferences, but rather on what I hope best reflects my father’s perspective. However, I chose a script about Psalm 139 for purely sentimental reasons: every Yom Kippur my father would invite me to read this psalm in the synagogue service. Its closing stanza, ‘Search me, God, and know my heart, test me, and know my thoughts. See if the path to despair is within me, and lead me in the path of eternity,’6 was his special gift to me. My father was uncommonly charismatic but he wasn’t a saint. He was, in fact, very human. And his faith in humanity was as unshakeable as his faith in God. While never losing sight of his role as a congregational rabbi – preaching and teaching and leading worship, celebrating rites of passage like brit milah (circumcision), bar/bat mitzvah and marriage, or supporting congregants through sickness, death and spiritual crises – as the years passed, my father became ever more dedicated to dialogue with people of other backgrounds and faiths. He was a born leader. He accumulated responsibilities until his days were drowning in committee meetings and conferences and raising funds for causes he held dear, his evenings littered with lecture dates; yet his office door was open to anyone who needed him and he bent Time like a wizard to fit in family and friends. But he paid a high cost for his stressful life: apart from a slight stutter that used to manifest itself as he searched for the best way to put across the point he wanted to make, he also chain-smoked for fifty years. When polyps developed in his throat, the doctor warned that if he didn’t give up, he could lose his voice. Overnight my father stopped smoking and put on loads of weight, but it wasn’t just his throat that had been damaged. Two years later, in June 1996, he was diagnosed with brain cancer and within two months, he was dead.

6


My father had a knack for public speaking. His voice – chocolate stained with nicotine – was warm and engaging even when challenging people’s complacency, questioning society’s values, demanding more rigorous attention to our individual and collective morality. His command of English was excellent and – despite the stutter – perfectly fluent, but my father’s accent and syntax, both forged in the central European crucible in which he had been raised, included hints of Hungarian, German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Czech and Scottish,7 as well as a mid-Atlantic seasoning he had acquired during his years as a student rabbi in Ohio, and later when he lived in New York. This lent him a certain authority: he knew about life from many different vantage points and he knew about suffering first-hand. If there is such a place as Hell, then my father had been there, like the hero of a Greek epic who has returned from Hades. After seeing for the first time examples of Holocaust-denial literature, he devoted a year of speaking engagements to talking about the horrors of the Nazi death camps. And when that year was over, he continued to bear witness, aware that his personal connection to the Holocaust made a powerful impression. He hadn’t been able to protect his 10-year-old brother Gabi and his grandparents, who were gassed on arrival at Auschwitz, nor his father, Géza, who died from starvation and typhoid a few days after their liberation from Mauthausen in May 1945, but, by giving testimony to the murderous ambitions of the Nazis, their gas chambers and crematoria, he could protect the memory of his family and community from being wiped out with them. And yet, despite the tragic and traumatic circumstances of his teenage years, he rarely mislaid his sense of fun, collecting jokes like other people might collect autographs or garden gnomes. Once, as a prank, DJ Chris Evans called my father from his radio studio and asked him to say on-air, in a sandpapery, double-bass imitation of Orson Welles’ long-running Carlsberg advert, ‘Probably the best beer in the world’, which he did. Later Evans brought my father onto his morning television show Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush to give viewers his favourite tip (‘How to remember people’s names’). He

INTRODUCTION

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was a guest on an unforgettable episode of Channel 4 Television’s After Dark,8 narrated a production of Verdi’s Nabucco for BBC Wales, discussed the Sunday papers on Breakfast with Frost and was often on You Don’t Have to be Jewish, Michael Freedland’s weekly programme for Radio London. He was the first non-Christian appointed to the Central Religious Advisory Committee of the BBC and IBA,9 Songs of Praise was broadcast twice from his synagogue in London’s West End and, during what we now know as the First Gulf War, he appeared on television with his friend, Sheikh Zaki Badawi, an imam and principal of the Muslim College, as they prayed together for peace in the Middle East.10 Another close friend, Oliver McTernan – then a Catholic priest, now a specialist in conflict resolution – was, with my father, one of the regular contributors to Capital Radio’s Reflections. For a long time, these pre-recorded inserts went out during When the Spirit Moves, Al Matthew’s Sunday morning gospel music show. But as the years went by, the station scheduled its Reflections slot earlier and earlier until it was better suited to insomniacs than to morning listeners, reducing the duration of the broadcasts to what my father used to say was not so much a sound-bite as a sound-lick. (Once, after recording a batch of Reflections, my father reflected that the engineer had shown so little interest in the carefully honed pieces he had prepared, that he might as well have been reading a page from the telephone directory.) Fortunately Oliver convinced my father that it was worth the effort of writing and recording their respective offerings to keep alive on Capital a spark of the transcendent and more than a quarter of the scripts reproduced in this book come from those sessions. By contrast, millions heard my father’s contributions to the God Slot on Radio 2’s breakfast show and through the BBC’s World Service he reached tens of millions, from Antigua to Zambia. It didn’t go to his head. ‘The media chews you up,’ he used to say, ‘and then it spits you out.’ Yet despite periodic attempts to freshen-up the panel, for seven years – right up until two weeks before he died – his was the voice of reason on Moral Maze, BBC Radio 4’s weekly debate on ethical issues. Asylum, censorship, euthanasia, terrorism, public

8


order, personal freedom, who regulates the regulators? He was like a footballer preparing for match day as he anticipated the arrival each Tuesday of a package of newspaper clippings that preceded the live broadcast on Thursday mornings; sometimes there was an extra flurry of excitement when an important news item prompted Moral Maze’s producer to change the topic under discussion and dispatch a different set of clippings. My father loved his involvement with this programme – the stimulating Wednesday evening team dinners at Covent Garden’s Mon Plaisir and, most of all, his friendship with Michael Buerk, Moral Maze’s masterly host. At the end of each show, Michael gave my father the honour of having the last word. It was a kind of a rabbinic benediction, usually in the form of an anecdote or parable, with which he would try to sum up the studio discussion and restore equanimity for listeners, fellow panellists and the programme’s guests after what often spun into verbal brawls.11

I’m sitting at what was once my father’s desk, a relic from the 1960s, spaciously proportioned but with a slight curve so that visitors to his synagogue office wouldn’t feel alienated and it was at this desk that my father wrote most of these scripts.

INTRODUCTION

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Often he spoke from personal experience, referring to organizations with which he was involved and the kindred spirits with whom he collaborated, offering a window onto his extraordinary life. Other scripts used current affairs as a springboard: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the formation of a ‘new Europe’, race riots, the Israel–Arab conflict, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the Balkans. Some of these struggles sound like distant thunder, others rumble on and on. My father would have wrestled with the fallout from 9/11 and agonized over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Iran’s growing nuclear capability. He would have applauded the Good Friday Agreement and the people of Ulster for their courageous leap into the unknown and despaired at the failure of Israelis and Palestinians to do the same. Naturalized as an American citizen in the 1950s and a Democrat to his core, he would have cheered Barack Obama all the way to the White House. And when President Obama’s detractors started muttering expressions of disappointment, I bet he would have quoted the wise cynic who noted: ‘You ain’t a rabbi unless they try to run you out of town, and you ain’t a rabbi if you let ’em!’12 On the same night in 1986 that BBC News reported that President Ronald Reagan had described as ‘phoney’ Soviet plans to withdraw from Afghanistan, my father presented for BBC World Service a programme about Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals.13 To introduce the thirteenth movement, The Swan – a piece of music famously associated with Anna Pavlova’s ballet solo – he told a story from his native Czechoslovakia about another swan. A river flooded and swelled and the only way the still-weak cygnets could be saved would be if the father swan carried them on his back to a distant and safer bank. Halfway across he asked the first one, ‘How will you treat me when you grow up?’ ‘Oh, I’ll be the best son in the world to you! I’ll obey you, care for you, love you . . . ’ ‘You little hypocrite,’ said the father, and dropped him. He asked the same question of the second fledgling. ‘What’s the difference?’ he replied.

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‘You just get me to the other side.’ ‘You are no good,’ said the father and dropped him. The third cygnet thought a while and said: ‘I’m not sure how I will act, but I can tell you this: I shall treat my young the way you treat me.’ And in the story that one got saved.

‘Well, I have been a father for some time now,’ he continued, ‘and I am certainly curious about the way my grandchildren will turn out.’ This year my father would have turned eighty. He’d probably have wanted to celebrate his birthday without much fuss, surrounded by his loud but loving family, now grown to include six grandchildren. You’ll meet Adam and Clio in these pages; he delighted in them as small children and would have marvelled at their transformation into promising young adults. Isaac, Joe, Zac and Jacob were born after he died, but they each appreciate how much respect the name of their grandfather Hugo still evokes. He would have had such pleasure watching them grow up, flexing their different talents, and he would have been particularly amused by the boys’ Shofar Quartet, conducted every Rosh Hashana by my brother, David. The hole he left in the heart of my family still aches, but sometimes when we gather on Friday evenings in my parents’ mansion flat and sit around the dining table, scene of so many happy shared memories, my father looking down at us from a photograph on the mantelpiece, it’s as if he’s still here. And then my mother, Jackie, lights the Shabbat candles in the same silver candlesticks that my father’s mother, Bella, buried in the garden as she and my father and all the Jews of Berehovo were being rounded up to be deported to Auschwitz – poignant symbols of survival and of hope – and I recall what my grandmother said when she and my father were eventually reunited: ‘Well, life has to go on.’

In Britain today religion is regarded more or less as a private affair and it is passing from the national agenda. Many people argue that the God Slot is a dodo. But I can still hear my father’s voice making the

INTRODUCTION

11

Hugo and Naomi Gryn. New York, 1960.

case that in this multicultural, multi-faith society, religious education and interfaith dialogue are important avenues by which we can get a measure of insight into each other’s beliefs and values and learn how to respect and trust one another. The radio and television producers with whom he worked understood the impact of a religious leader who had survived the Holocaust and could still see above the trees. His call for tolerance and harmony and the celebration of difference is as urgent in this century as it was in the last. What remains of my father’s God Slot legacy – apart from a handful of studio tapes digitized for posterity by the BBC and some home recordings on audio cassette – is a cardboard box of scripts, each illustrating from a different perspective the point that he most wanted to make, that life – all life – is a blessing, and a gift from God.

1 BBC Radio 4, 10 July 1994.


12

2 3 4 5

6 7

8

9 10 11

12

13

BBC TV, 4 January 1978. Gryn, H. with Gryn, N. (2000), Chasing Shadows. London: Viking. Frank, A. (1995), The Diary of Anne Frank. London: Macmillan. Plaut, W. G. (1981), The Torah: A Modern Commentary. New York: UAHC. Copyright in the English translation in this edition is owned by the Jewish Publication Society of America, the only copyright owners to ask for payment to use their material in this book. When I came to fill out their online application form for permission, it was worth every cent to write under ‘Author’: Moses + God. Ps. 139.23–24. Magonet, J. and Blue, L. (eds) (1985), Forms of Prayer for Jewish Worship III. London: RSGB, p. 541. See Gilbert, M. (1996), The Boys: Triumph Over Adversity. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, p. 326. When he first came to Britain in 1946, Hugo stayed in Polton House, a Midlothian farm school, and took English lessons in Edinburgh. He milked 56 cows a day in exchange for these lessons, but later, to his chagrin, discovered that his English teacher, Miss Harris, had not charged the school for her tuition. Channel 4 Television, After Dark: Survival – At What Cost? 19 January 1991. At first Hugo and another guest, Karma Nabulsi, a representative of the PLO, seemed hostile towards each other, but before long they were giggling like old friends. Independent Broadcasting Authority, disbanded by the Broadcasting Act, 1990. BBC TV, Gulf Vigil. 30 January 1991. ‘In its early years the Moral Maze was a sensation. This was where David Starkey took his first steps onto the national stage, quickly becoming the Rudest Man in Britain and thereafter its best-known historian. This was where Rabbi Hugo Gryn clashed so electrifyingly with Richard Edmonds of the National Front, who had sought to argue that the Holocaust was a myth: “My family, me included, were taken to a place called BirkenauAuschwitz and my grandparents, my brother, my aunts and uncles were gassed there, I saw it with my own eyes. Now are you going to sit there and tell me this didn’t happen? Look at me!”’ Paul Donovan, Sunday Times. 15 February 2009. Hugo’s favoured variation of a quote attributed to Rabbi Israel Salanter (1810–83): ‘A rabbi whose community does not disagree with him is not really a rabbi. And a rabbi who fears his community is not really a man.’ BBC World Service, Record of the Week. 1 November 1986.

I had just received the news from Capital Radio. I was informed that after five years, they no longer had a slot for me, in other words ‘No show’. After a good cry, I began to look around my office to what kind of music was not being played, after all Capital had the whole music scene covered, or so they thought. I created a gospel music programme called When the Spirit Moves. Of course I was given the worst time you could get, Sunday morning, between six and seven. I took over the classic music show, which had an audience of 2,000. Hugo and I took the show to 100,000 listeners. When The Spirit Moves won the Voice’s 1 award for best gospel music in Europe, five years running. Thank you Hugo for giving us more than ‘Three Minutes Of Hope’. By the way, when you meet the Big Man, tell him that the devil made me a better offer. Hey Hugo, I’m a business man.

—Al Matthews, actor

Filming Chasing Shadows. 1989. Hugo re-enacts his bar mitzvah in the only remaining synagogue in Berehovo.

HUGO’S ANECDOTAGE

Hugo had a penchant for personal anecdotes; they were, perhaps, his most compelling weapons of expression. A master of self-deprecation, he often referred to advancing age as his ‘anecdotage’. But this was cut short, just when he was getting into his stride.

1. Bar Mitzvah 20 June 1993. BBC Radio 2, Good Morning Sunday If I sound a bit nostalgic already it is because this week also marks the fiftieth anniversary of my bar mitzvah – that memorable and magic moment when a 13-year-old Jewish boy formally leaves childhood behind and begins to move towards manhood, though in my own case things did not quite turn out the way they were planned. It was wartime. In fact, we were not to know that it was the last time my own large family were ever together and my preparation took place at the Jewish boarding school in the Hungarian city of Debrecen, a long way from my home. I had a special tutor for

16


Bella, Hugo, Gabi and Géza Gryn.

additional religious studies and my parents left all the arrangements in his capable hands. My Hebrew was quite good so the chanting of the Torah portion and the prophetic reading were no problem. The big thing was to be my speech! About three months before the bar mitzvah my teacher gave me four typewritten pages of a sophisticated and closely argued speech.

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My job was to learn it by heart and to declaim it clearly, sincerely and word perfect. But I did not like it. So I conceived a plan: to please him, I did learn the speech, but I also prepared one of my own, based on Psalm 114, ‘When Israel came out of Egypt . . . ’, and my hope how we might yet survive the dreadful times we were living in and witness the defeat of evil all around us, naïve perhaps, but from the heart. I arrived home the day before the bar mitzvah Shabbat, collected my new suit, though I failed to get long trousers. In the synagogue all went well. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbours all gathered in our home for the party afterward. Then my great moment: the speech. And as I was giving it, I saw my mother’s face getting darker and darker. Something was wrong. And when I ended and everyone shouted yasher koach, well done, she hissed: ‘That was not the speech we paid for!’ It seems my teacher had sent a carbon copy of his painstaking work to my parents and my mother also learnt it by heart. I also got from my aunt Viola one of the most eccentric presents ever given to a bar mitzvah boy: a bottle of cherry brandy. And while everyone was enjoying lunch, two of my loyal friends and my little brother Gabi slipped to the far end of our garden [with me] and finished the bottle. Two big cousins had to carry me back to cut my favourite cake and fifty years later I can still recall not only my speech, but the love that filled that synagogue and home that day.

2. Abandonment: Yom Kippur in Lieberose 21 September 1990. BBC TV, Stop and Think A personal experience gave me lasting understanding of what it means to be abandoned. It was in a concentration camp called Lieberose, which means

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‘lovely rose’, an obscure and miserable place in Silesia. I was fourteen years old but already a seasoned prisoner. We were slave labourers who had to be up before dawn and work until dusk six and a half days [a week], rain or shine, hot or cold. Only on Sunday afternoons did we have a few hours of rest. On one of these Sunday afternoons there was a surprise announcement: everyone could send a postcard – anywhere in the world – courtesy of the Red Cross! Quickly and with much excitement, long lines formed around some trestle tables and soon I was given a blank card together with one of those indelible pencils that you had to lick before use. The prospect of contact with the outside world was exciting. That world, beyond the electrified barbed wire fence, which was so near and yet so far. I found a quiet corner, began to lick my pencil, and the painful question: to whom was I to write? All my family were gone. Those much older than me – grandparents, uncles, aunts – had already perished at Auschwitz and certainly all those who were younger than me. If by chance any members of my family were still alive, they were imprisoned themselves. Nor were there any friends or neighbours left in my hometown because our entire community was rounded up many months earlier and taken to Auschwitz. We did have some relatives in America and a few in Palestine but neither my father, who was then still alive and imprisoned with me, nor I, had any idea of their addresses. Gradually, the realization came that as far as I could see there was no one anywhere in the world to whom it mattered whether I was alive or not. After a while I returned to the trestle table and handed back the pencil and the blank card. And so did hundreds of others. We were silent and dispirited and our feeling of being abandoned was complete. The only thing I had to show for this experience was a purple stain on my tongue and around my lips which took many days to wear off. A few months later it was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. A

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day we had spent in the synagogue as far back as I could remember. On that day in 1944, I was at my place of work, a construction site where we were building a resort town for Nazi officers and their families, a bit like Pitom and Ramses which the Children of Israel had to build when they were slaves in Egypt. I made a hiding place for myself and spent most of the day in it, not even emerging for the thin soup given to us at midday. I tried to remember as many of the prayers as I could and recited them. But after a while I could only cry; and I cried with an intensity that I had never experienced before or since. I also felt that God was crying with me. That although all around me had abandoned me, God was right there with me. And it was that knowledge, which only grew in certainty in the days and months that followed, that enabled me to survive as a person who cherishes the gifts of life and family and friendship. People sometimes ask me ‘Where was God in Auschwitz?’ I believe that God was there Himself, violated and blasphemed. The real question is ‘Where was man in Auschwitz?’

3. Three Minutes of Hope: Chanukah in Lieberose, 1944 3 January 1987. BBC World Service, Reflections Because the Jewish festival of Chanukah began last Sabbath, and because it lasts eight days, today marks its conclusion, and somewhat unusually there are two Shabbatot within the same festival. The prescribed readings today from the book of Numbers and from the first book of Kings deal with the special candlesticks and light that were such powerful symbols in our places of religious worship, the Tent of Meeting in the wilderness and later in the Temple in Jerusalem. It was the rekindling of this light in 165 BCE and the clearing of the Temple from Hellenistic Syrian defilement that we celebrate as we kindle, night after night, our Chanukah lights.

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There are so many levels on which festivals are celebrated. With Chanukah there is technology – light as the symbol of the presence of God; history – the victory of the Maccabeans which saved Judaism itself; family – for the lighting takes place at home. And not surprisingly there are special foods associated with it: potato pancakes or latkes, which over the years I have come to make as well as possible – and if you don’t believe me ask my children or students!2 And there is also the personal level. Experiences over the years that give unique perspectives to special moments in the repeating cycle of the year. As I light the menorah in my comfortable London home, surrounded by our children, the oldest of whom3 is getting married tomorrow, I go back to Chanukah forty-two years ago, the bitter, cold winter of 1944, to a miserable Nazi concentration camp called Lieberose in Silesia. From our less-than-meagre rations we saved our margarine, from bits of wood carved out bowls for oil lamps, and out of blanket and uniform threads fashioned wicks of a sort. Then on the first night of Chanukah, in our crowded barrack-room (Block 4 it was), the melted fat in its place, we sang the blessings about God’s miraculous saving power. And then disaster! Margarine does not burn! It just fizzled out. And my anger over precious and seemingly wasted calories, and the less than good-natured teasing of non-Jewish fellow prisoners. Though I was then a middle-aged 14-year-old, I burst into tears. My father, who also saved his rations, and whose idea the celebration was in the first place, and without whose support I would certainly not be alive to tell this tale, tried to comfort me. ‘You and I,’ he said, ‘have seen that it is possible to live as long as three weeks without food. We once lived almost three days without water. But you cannot live properly for three minutes without hope!’ Sadly, my father did not survive. He died of starvation and typhoid a few days after our liberation the following May. But my life was blessed by his life and you will understand why, to this day,

HUGO’S ANECDOTAGE

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beyond the theology and the history of the Chanukah lights, there shines for me an image of love, and always the inextinguishable rays of hope.

4. Géza Gryn: Generosity 11 May 1977. BBC Radio 4, Thought for the Day My father was dead by the age of forty-five, caused by starvation and a typhoid epidemic rampant in the Nazi concentration camp of Mauthausen. It was at the end of the war, almost exactly thirty-two years ago. He and I were together through those dreadful years of degradation and imprisonment and I suppose I got to know him in a way that is very different from the way in which sons generally perceive their fathers. In speaking about him today, I pay tribute to his memory and want to share with you how, through him, I came to understand something of a very basic Jewish concept: tzedakah in Hebrew, and broadly translated as ‘generosity’. Most of the time in the camps we were tired and hungry. I mean hungry all the time. It was a condition of our existence. If ever a fellow prisoner said that he no longer felt its pangs, we knew that he was already slipping away from life. And the daily routine was not designed to help us: a cup of warm, brownish water in the morning called coffee; a small bowl of warm, grey water given to us at noon in our place of work called soup; and the main meal of the day, two hundred grammes of soggy but solid bread in the evening. The natural temptation was to eat it all up at once. The life-saving method was to divide the meagre portion and save some for the next day. The risk was that no matter where you hid it, the bread was likely to be stolen overnight. My father suggested that he keep my portion and I readily agreed. At night I would cut a slice for myself. In the morning he would give

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Hugo and David Gryn, 25 June 1990.

me a generous slice and again at midday. Or often, when we worked in different places, he would wrap some bread in a piece of cloth which I would keep inside my shirt until we got our soup. For many months my gratitude and relative well-being blinded me to the fact that my three thick slices of bread were far more than two hundred grammes. When, at last, I refused to take more than my share, he assured me that he was only doing what any father would do. And so our routine continued. Then, one day, in the winter of 1944, during a long forced march from Silesia to Berlin, we were allowed to rest for a few minutes and as we sat on the slushy roadside, a large yellow lorry drove past us. By bitter and ironic coincidence it had my father’s name still painted on its side and back. He had been a timber merchant and somehow a part of his confiscated transport fleet and we were on the same road. It was a pathetic moment and to break the silence I said, ‘Just you wait. One day you’ll have it back again!’ ‘No’ he said, ‘I

HUGO’S ANECDOTAGE

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think this was yours anyway!’ And then he explained that whenever he acquired a forest or lorries or suchlike, he rotated the acquisitions: something for my brother, something for me, something for my mother and something for himself. It seemed that everything I thought he owned was already a quarter mine. Though it was academic, I was both touched and impressed. Finally, I asked him ‘Why did you do it that way?’ ‘Well’, he said, ‘I made up my mind long ago that anything I have to give I want to give with a warm hand, and not wait until I have to give with a cold one.’ And if I, his son, am a giving person to any degree, it is because I have never forgotten that while my hand is alive and warm, its noblest occupation is when it is engaged in giving.

5. Liberation 4 May 1989. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought

Hugo always commemorated 5 May as his liberation day, but his American liberators actually reached Gunskirchen on the afternoon of 4 May 1945. Tomorrow, forty-four years ago, became a red-letter day in my personal calendar. On 5 May 1945, just three days before the formal end of World War II in Europe, was my own liberation from a miserable KZ [Konzentrationslager] in Austria, called Gunskirchen,4 to which we had been forced to march a few weeks earlier from the notorious Mauthausen camp. I shall not depress you with a description of conditions there, but the events of that day are as sharp as if they happened yesterday. It was sunny. Distant gunfire coming closer, the rumbling of tanks. Suddenly our guards, the most sadistic bunch of kids and old men,

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Hugo soon after his liberation in 1945.

literally the dregs of the SS, dropped their guns and started to run. And on the tanks the five-pointed United States stars, and crouching behind them soldiers who took one look at us and began to throw their food rations in our direction before moving on. By the time they passed we were free! All of us hungry, behind barbed wire, most of us with typhoid. You can imagine what we looked like. And for the first time in years, despite so many odds, we were free. And my father, by then barely alive but still conscious, motioned to sit next to him and together we said the familiar blessing, praising God who sustained us, kept us in life and brought us to that day.

HUGO’S ANECDOTAGE

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The rest of that day and many of the ones that followed are blurred in my memory, but not the blessed taste of liberty, nor will it ever leave me. To be able to come and go as you please, to think and speak without fear, to decide what you want to eat or wear or read or do, and then be able to do it, or not do it! To pray as you like, and with the community of your choice. Or to be quiet and be quiet alone. I still remember the excitement when I was learning English and discovered the word ‘spontaneous’ from the Latin sponte, which literally means to do something ‘of one’s free will’. I mustn’t run away with myself. The truth is that forty-four years later, most of my life is ruled by my diary, which I often call ‘a rabbi killer’, but I still love being spontaneous! And I also think today of all those men and women and children who are not free. There are still so many prisons: of poverty and of ignorance, of loneliness and being abandoned, of political tyrannies and religious fanaticism. Bars around people made of racism, wounds inflicted by the barbs of intolerance and bigotry, all of them betrayals of humanity, denials of the image of God that is the mark of humanity. At the end of that first week in May of 1945, this 15-year-old prophet would have told you that such things could never happen again. Definitely. And so mistakenly. But so hopefully. And I will not give up on the hope, and wanting to be spontaneous!

6. Chasing Shadows: Return to Berehovo 11 May 1989. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought

In 1989 my father, my sister Rachelle and I joined forces to make Chasing Shadows5, a documentary film for Channel 4 Television about Jewish life in my father’s hometown, Berehovo.

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My greeting comes to you this morning even as I am on the way to my hometown in Carpathia to make a documentary film about this once-Jewish town, better known in England since the days of Mary Shelley as the birthplace of Frankenstein than for its beautiful and productive vineyards and forests. The last time I was there was forty-four years ago, soon after the war, my liberation in Austria and the death of my father. It took a while to recover from a bout of typhoid and to regain strength. I had no idea if any other members of my family survived, but realized that if any of them did, that is where we would wait and meet. It was a strange and never-to-be-forgotten journey. From Linz, the American army arranged for a group of us to board a ship on the Danube. As things went in those days I was relatively rich. I was well dressed. In my rucksack I had three cartons of Lucky Strike cigarettes and as I did not smoke in those days, they were worth a fortune. I had several dozen packs of chewing gum – an unexpected status symbol – which could be readily bartered for food and drink, and even a handful of dollar bills. What more could anyone have wanted? The boat left, for Budapest we believed, but a few hours later it stopped, still in Austria, because the captain believed that there were still some unexploded mines in the river and refused to go on. Off we had to get, and life being what it was, three new friends and I waited until dark, ‘borrowed’ a horse and cart from a sleeping farmer and headed for the Slovakian capital of Bratislava whence, we were told, there was a regular train service east. Three days later, dusty and hot, we got there. Found the hostel for refugees, parked and thanked the horse, got a welcome and a bed, and minutes later I was singing under the shower. But when I returned to the dormitory, gone were my clothes, gone my rucksack, and even gone the horse! More kind people, but less well-provided, helped, and that night I got on the train dressed in a pair of black shorts, a Belgian prisonerof-war jacket with big brass buttons and a pair of canvass-topped

HUGO’S ANECDOTAGE

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Hugo and his mother, Bella. 1945.

clogs. And no problems with luggage! By luck, I got into a carriage reserved for Russian soldiers going home, and such was their generosity and the result of pickings off farmers taking poultry and produce to assorted black markets, that when I got off the mainline to change for the local train to my home town of Berehovo, I was dressed as a Russian soldier, had six wrist-watches, two wallets, three bottles of slivovitz6 and a pistol. And just before reaching our town, a neighbour told me that indeed my mother had survived and was waiting for me! Suddenly, big boy that I was, I was afraid to get off the train. They held it at the station for ages, coaxed me off it, and the reunion more sad and glad than I can say. Soon I shall arrive there again with two of my daughters, part of the film crew making a documentary of life in my childhood. Its

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working title is Chasing Shadows – but grandfathers are never scared of getting off trains – are they?

7. Chasing Shadows: Brick Factory 2 July 1989. Capital Radio, Reflections Glad to be with you again after a long time, partly because I was away myself, on a trip which I never thought I’d make. It was the return to my hometown in Carpathia, called Beregovo,7 and not very easy to explain just where it is. In fact when people ask me, ‘Just exactly where are you from?’ I cannot do better than to tell the story of the man of Beregovo who arrives in heaven, but before they let him in, he has to tell his life story. ‘Well’, he says, ‘I was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, educated in Czechoslovakia, started work in Hungary, did a stint in Nazi Germany and then lived, worked and raised my family in the Soviet Union.’ ‘My!’ they say, ‘You must

Filming Chasing Shadows. Berehovo,1989.

HUGO’S ANECDOTAGE

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have travelled a great deal.’ ‘Not at all!’ he says, ‘I never left Beregovo!’ But when I last left it, in the late summer of 1945, there was nothing to stay for. Almost all my family perished, as did most of the rest of the Jews of the area, some 15,000 of us. The place was filled with ghosts, and young boy that I was, I could not go far enough! And I never thought I would ever return. But there I was, together with two of my daughters and part of a film crew, making a TV programme about the Jewish life of the region, its decency and loveliness, before race hatred destroyed it. But what impressed and troubled me was to realize how quickly the sands of time can cover up history and events. If you didn’t know it, you could never guess that half of the town’s population was rounded up, deceived into believing that they were being resettled in ‘the East’, and then taken to the death factory of Auschwitz. The many synagogues have been turned into cultural centres or workshops, or just taken down. All the signs above shops were removed long ago and I was more hurt than I thought I would be when I asked some younger people, ‘Tell me, what happened to the Jews of the town?’ And their reply: ‘Oh, they all went to Palestine!’ ‘All of them?’ I asked. ‘Yes, all of them!’ ‘Why did they do that?’ I pressed. ‘I guess, they didn’t like it here!’ And when I spoke about what really happened, I could sense a feeling verging on disbelief. And it was almost with relief that we got into conversation with one of the nicest women there, a manager now of the local brick factory, who wanted to describe everything she saw when she was seventeen, not Jewish but living next to that factory which was used as a ghetto and from where the trains left for their final journey. Her tears were genuine as she recalled those events, and her Jewish friends she was never to see again, and how the Nazis and many local people looted the Jewish homes. Then I asked her: ‘Tell me, what did you think and feel after we were taken away?’ ‘Well’, she said, ‘we were afraid that they will also take away the gypsies, and then us, the Ukranians’.

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Outside the brick factory. Berehovo, 1989.

And I thought of a great German theologian, Pastor Martin Niemöller, who eventually opposed the Nazis and paid dearly for it, and left a warning for all generations. ‘First they came for the Jews and I said nothing because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I still said nothing because I was not in a trade union. And then they came for me. And there was no one to speak out for me . . . ’8

8. Immigration 25 January 1993. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought

Despite Hugo’s call for compassion, the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993 entered the United Kingdom’s statute books on 1 July, six months after this broadcast.

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I often think that future historians will term our age as the Century of the Refugee. I say this today with special feeling as I recall a night forty-seven years ago almost to the day, when I landed with a group of 25 teenagers at Prestwick Airport in Scotland, all of us lonely, traumatized by the war and scarred by unspeakable experiences, and excited at the prospect of building normal and productive lives. And the Immigration Officer, tired but smiling, reaching out to us. And when he asked my name, ‘Hugo Gryn,’ I said. ‘G-R-E-E-N’ he wrote. I protested ‘Ypsilon, ypsilon,’ which is the name for the letter ‘y’ in all my then-known languages, but he just took me by the arm and led me to the men’s room! It was funny, it was human, and in the years since, much has happened to make me appreciate this country, and an enthusiast for its life and future. Which is why I hope that tomorrow’s second reading of the Asylum and Immigration Bill in Parliament will not result in a hardening of this nation’s humane arteries. That those who come here, mainly and legitimately from the British Commonwealth to join families, and those who flee from terror or torture, be not made to feel like unwanted interlopers, finger-printed and cross-examined like criminals, but shown compassion and welcome. And all of us mindful of the prophet Isaiah’s sense of what pleases God: ‘Is it not sharing your food with the hungry, and bringing the homeless into your home . . . Never hiding from your own flesh and blood.’9 And should our political leaders or anyone else wonder, ‘What’s in it for us?’ then take to heart God’s promise which follows: ‘You shall (then) be a watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail . . . ’10

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9. Jasper, Alabama: George Mitnick Transmission date and station unknown My first High Holy Day congregation as a rabbinic student was in Jasper, Alabama. I had never been further south than Cincinnati on the Ohio River where my seminary, the Hebrew Union College, was located. The two or three small towns in Kentucky just across the river hardly counted; to all intents and purposes they were Cincinnati’s suburbs. I was both curious and apprehensive. The correspondence I had with the president of the Jasper community was cordial and welcoming. The 24 Jewish families were looking forward to the once-a-year visit of a rabbinic student. They hoped that I would be able to spend there not only the New Year and the Day of Atonement but the ten days in between the festivals as well. It would be best if I took the overnight Humming Bird train to Birmingham, Alabama; by all means travel in ‘roomette’ class for which they would gladly reimburse, then change to a local train and the new president would meet me at 9 a.m. in Jasper station.11 As I was the only passenger to get off the train in Jasper, my host had no difficulty in meeting me. ‘My name is George Mitnick,’ he said, ‘and as the new President of the congregation I shall be glad to look after you all.’12 I must have looked as tired as I felt because he drove straight to the one and only hotel in the town and suggested that I have some rest before he would call for me and take me to lunch. Just before getting out of the car, he asked: ‘Rabbi, did you write your sermons yourself ?’ A bit nonplussed, I assured him that I did. ‘That’s good!’ he said. ‘See you at one.’ The name ‘George Mitnick’ was familiar. Not his face, nor his voice, but I knew the name. As I unpacked my clothes, and even more carefully laid out my tallit and a borrowed gown as well as my prayer books and the carefully typed pages of my virgin sermons, I also went through my personal papers. I was still a stateless person, and such were my fantasies about the Southern States that I took

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with me my Nansen passport13 and whatever other documents I possessed. My memory was correct. When George returned I was shaved, showered and rested and could barely conceal my excitement. ‘This is not the first time that our paths have crossed,’ I announced. ‘I have a very good memory, Rabbi,’ he said, ‘and I never forget a face. You must be mistaking me for someone else.’ I loved him for calling me ‘Rabbi’ – as only a second-year rabbinic student could do – but I persevered. ‘I did not say that we met, only that our paths have crossed.’ Then I showed him my liberation certificate from Mauthausen concentration camp, dated May 1945, and signed by Captain J. George Mitnick of the United States Army. I think it is fair to say that no rabbinic student or rabbi ever had a better and more affectionate relationship with any congregational president. The warmth of this small community, their open and generous hospitality, their devotion to Judaism and the enthusiastic response to my fledgling religious leadership, was nothing short of a rabbinic honeymoon.14 For a long time now I have realized that my sense of comfort in congregational life and the fact that I am quite happy in my rabbinic role is due in no small measure to the Jasper experience. Indeed soon after the Rosh Hashana services George and I began to think about ways in which such rabbinic visits could be more frequent. Perhaps for all the festivals of the Jewish calendar. Or even monthly, which is, in fact, what happened, and the 500-plus miles between Cincinatti and Jasper soon became effortless and an always enjoyable journey. But before I left Jasper, I had to know why I was asked that peculiar question about the authorship of my sermon. As George walked with me to the hotel after the Yom Kippur Eve service, I asked him point-blank. And by then such was our bond of friendship and trust, that he told me the reason. Virtually every family in the Jasper community subscribed to

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a certain publication programme designed for Jews in military service and those who lived in relatively isolated areas. It included a quarterly magazine and a yearly pamphlet which consisted of sermons for the cycle of festivals by some of America’s best-known preachers. The year before me, as the student rabbi got into his New Year’s Eve sermonic stride, Mrs Newmark, one of the oldest members and the faithful piano accompanist and leader of the congregational singing – as well as an avid reader of religious literature – felt that the sermon had a familiar ring to it. Later that night she looked through her collection of pamphlets and ‘sure enough’ found the original sermon. In all innocence she took it with her to the synagogue the next morning, opened it on the music stand of her piano as the sermon started. She followed the preacher closely and was deeply engrossed in the text when she exclaimed: ‘Rabbi, you missed out a paragraph!’ It seems that it was not possible to regain the solemnity of those Holy High Days and George just wanted to know where they stood with me.

10. Hugo’s Sixty-fifth Birthday 26 June 1995. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought Glad to pause and think about yesterday. It was that ‘significant’ birthday which makes me a Senior Citizen, and filled with gratitude to God. All day I was conscious of the fact that in the official way of the Nazi empire which it was my misfortune to inhabit for a time, I should have been killed in Auschwitz soon after my bar mitzvah and definitely before the war ended when I was not yet fifteen, and that thanks mainly to chance, I had certainly been granted a fifty-year extension of my lease on life. And by and large, how wonderful these years have been . . . I could train as a rabbi, which took me into so many fascinating

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Back row: Naomi Gryn, Jackie Gryn, Sadie Selby, Eva Mitchell, Marian Massey, John Selby, Hugo Gryn. Front row: Gaby Massey, Adam Massey, Rachelle Gryn Brettler, Jane Gryn, David Gryn, Clio Massey, David Massey. 25 June 1995.

parts of the world I have come to love, and to this day I love the work I do. I have a few friends I trust and enjoy completely. I was able to celebrate last night in the company of family, my remarkable parents-in-law who will soon mark their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary, our four grown-up children and a son-in-law and a daughter-in-law, each of them likeable and decent and, as my definition of a genius is that it is a nice child with Jewish grandparents, we had two of those with us as well. And I felt that the psalmist had me in mind when he said, ‘My cup runneth over . . . ’15 And all the well-wishing cards with wonderful suggestions about how much more interesting and relaxed and enjoyable and productive life can be after sixty-five. Well, if by any chance any of those

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things should prove to be true, I will faithfully report them to you. But, for the moment, uppermost is this prayer reserved for special moments: ‘Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has kept me in life, sustained me, and brought me to this season.’

1 Britain’s biggest selling Black newspaper. 2 Twice a year Hugo took over the kitchen: on Passover when he combined the nuts and grated apple with just the right quantity of wine and cinnamon to make charoset – an essential item on the Seder plate – and during Chanukah when he would invite the rabbinic students from Leo Baeck College to our home and make latkes, the potato pancakes associated with this festival. 3 Gaby. Hugo officiated at her wedding to David Massey on 4 January 1987. 4 Gunskirchen was a sub-camp of Mauthausen. 5 Chasing Shadows (1990) produced by See More Productions for Channel 4 Television. 6 Czech plum brandy. 7 Beregovo is the Ukrainian name for Berehovo; Beregszasz in Hungarian. 8 Other versions of Niemöller’s poem include communists, socialists, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses and ‘so-called incurables’. 9 Isa. 58.7. 10 Isa. 58.11. 11 See also ‘Martin Luther King Jr’, p. 148. 12 As in ‘y’all’. 13 Internationally recognized identity cards issued to stateless refugees. Named after Dr Fridtjof Nansen, the League of Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees. 14 See p. 205 for Hugo’s other rabbinic honeymoon spent in Bombay, India. 15 Ps. 23.5.

To hold the attention of 250 16-year-olds is never easy, even at the best of times. When they are Etonians and have been herded together for first-year Sixth-Form Divinity – Religious Knowledge – it is well nigh impossible. But not when the speaker was Holocaust survivor and broadcaster Rabbi Hugo Gryn. He spoke about how he, as a Jew, saw the person of Jesus. Hearing about Jesus’ role as a rabbi proved fascinating to staff and student alike. Building bridges between people of differing faiths had always been an essential part of Hugo’s life and ministry. This he showed again when he accepted my invitation to take part in a dialogue on Remembrance Sunday during the Eucharist at Southwark Cathedral. The topic this time was the importance of ‘Remembrance’. As you can imagine with Hugo’s experience this was moving, disturbing, and thought-provoking. Remembrance became real. However it was as a broadcaster that I really got to know, love and respect Hugo. I was presenting Radio 2’s Sunday morning breakfast show. Hugo was one of the regular contributors to what we called ‘the prayer slot’. Here he was a rabbi par excellence, a brilliant teacher and storyteller. It was never necessary to ask Hugo to illustrate the point he was making. He always had a story ready and waiting. Some religious broadcasters look down on or won’t give a listening ear to Radio 2’s religious output. Fortunately Hugo wasn’t one of them. Wherever there were people who could learn, Hugo was ready to teach.

—Canon Roger Royle, priest and broadcaster

Rabbi Hugo Gryn conducting service at Rodef Shalom Synagogue. Bombay, 1959. Photograph by P. H. Talwar.

JEWISH CALENDAR

1. Selichot 29 August 1987. BBC World Service, Reflections If you are anything like the chronic star- and moon-gazer that I am, you would have seen last Tuesday night the tiniest sliver of the new moon, Elul in the Jewish calendar, and a signal that when it will have waxed full and waned again it will be Rosh Hashana, our New Year, and the season of repentance and, hopefully, pardon from God. And this month is already one of spiritual preparation. Some of it takes place in the form of special pre-dawn penitential services called selichot, filled with meditations, poems, and especially melodies that seem to come from and go to the deepest parts of the soul. And I am taken back to my first full-time rabbinic post in Bombay, where I arrived exactly thirty years ago, young and eager and the only rabbi in town, indeed the only one from that part of India all the way to Tokyo! While I came to serve the Jewish Religious Union, one of six congregations, just before Elul, the president of another congregation invited me to attend their first selichot service.

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I was flattered and accepted. A friend collected me soon after three o’clock in the still dark morning and the service was beautiful and moving. Halfway through I was asked to ‘say a few words’ and I simply told a story about a village rabbi in my native Carpathia, which was translated into Marathi. By the time I returned to our small hotel room, the word was out and there was a delegation of five other presidents waiting for me [to invite me to visit their synagogues’ early morning selichot services too]. And before I could say ‘Pardon me, Lord, for my vanity,’ I became the hollowest-eyed preacher in the entire subcontinent! The story that brought me such honour and so little sleep was, in fact, written in Yiddish by Isaac Leib Peretz about a hundred years ago. How a stranger came to this village, went to the selichot services but, not seeing the rabbi there, suggested that perhaps he just slept while his flock prayed. ‘Oh no!’ protested the locals, ‘he is not at home.’ ‘Well,’ the stranger pressed, ‘if he is not there and not here, where is he?’ A bit sheepishly they said, ‘Actually, during this time our rabbi goes up to heaven!’ You can imagine the derision of the stranger. And to expose this foolish community, the next night he hid himself under the rabbi’s bed. And as his household got up in the dark and left for the synagogue, the rabbi got up as well, put on peasant’s clothes, took an axe and a length of rope, out through the back door and hurried to a nearby forest. The stranger, a bit scared, followed and watched. Quickly the rabbi chopped some wood, carried the bundle to a miserable cottage, and barged in on an old woman living there. The stranger heard her protest that she had no money and the rabbi’s gruff, ‘Your God will pay me!’ and saw him light a fire, prepare some food, and by the time the other people returned from their prayers, the rabbi was sitting in his chair, looking every inch the rabbi. And the stranger? He never left the village. He became a hassid, or follower of the rabbi, and when, a few years later, another stranger came, asked the same questions about the absence of the rabbi, he

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was told that he went up as high as heaven and the former sceptic added quietly, ‘If not higher!’

2. Rosh Hashana 4 September 1994. Capital Radio, Reflections At sundown tomorrow Jews all over the world will mark and celebrate the New Year – in Hebrew, Rosh Hashana – and while there is joy in the fact that all of us have actually survived another year, the mood is serious and it is the most spiritually intense time in our calendar. There is a very powerful as well as popular legend of what happens in this period. There is a heavenly Book of Life and for each person alive there is a page or a ledger in it. On Rosh Hashana, God opens this volume and begins to write in it, and by the time this season concludes with the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur, ten days later, the fate of all who are entered there is sealed. In one of the prayers whose words and melody always move me to tears, God is pictured as deciding, ‘Who will live and who will die . . . who perish by fire or water . . . by violence of man or the beast . . . who by hunger or thirst or disaster . . . who will have rest and who will have to wander . . . who will become poor and who become rich . . . who will fail and who will succeed . . .?’ Alternatives that pretty well cover all of our concerns, much as they did seven centuries ago, when it was first composed by Rabbi Amnon in the German city of Mainz. And if it were only a matter of God deciding arbitrarily between these life-and-death alternatives, our prospect would be helpless indeed. But the prayer ends with an unshakable conviction, ‘Yet repentance and prayer and good deeds have the power to transform the harshness in our destiny!’ Which is to say that what we do and how we behave and conduct ourselves can make a real difference not only in the quality of our

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Clio and Adam Massey, 1993.

lives but also in the way God can come to form a judgement about us. Indeed the period between New Year and Atonement Day is called the Ten Days of Repentance, or of Returning, for repentance more than anything else is a conscious decision to leave off those ways which lead away from godly living and distance us from God and from all those who matter to us – family, friends, society itself – ‘alienation’ in today’s language, and to return, to start again, and to find ways in which a man or woman can be as serviceable and decent and caring as he or she has the capacity to be. Most Jews will make their way to a synagogue or wherever people will be praying in community. It is very difficult to form the right mood and atmosphere on one’s own. Just last week my 3-year-old granddaughter, Clio, taught me a deep lesson about this season. We were getting ready for an outing to a new playground in Regent’s Park. As I offered to put on her shoes she insisted: ‘I can do it by myself.’ When she was about to go up a tall climbing frame and I was ready to lift her, she protested:

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‘I want to do it myself!’ But when she did get to the top and could not reach a rung on the way down and was dangling by her hands, quickly she called, ‘Grandpa. Now I need some help!’

3. Yom Kippur 30 September 1990. BBC Radio 2, Good Morning Sunday If I sound ‘spiritually refreshed’, which I certainly feel even if I feel a bit physically exhausted as well, it is because this is the morning after Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and the many hours spent fasting and in prayer and meditation with the community have a cumulative and cleansing effect. The very last sound of this Sabbath of Sabbaths, as darkness descended last night, was the long and plaintive sound of the shofar, the simple ram’s horn which reminds us of the near-sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham, of how easy it is to mishear the call of God, which is always to life and never, I believe, to violence or destruction. So often we project our desires and ambitions onto God and then convince ourselves that this or that action or speed was God’s will in the first place. That we delude ourselves into believing that what we want, or have, has to be the best possible. There is a story about a young king who came to the throne in Jerusalem and was delighted to find in one of the large storerooms in his palace a fabulous shofar collection. Long ones and short, straight and curly, each of the horns had a kind of personality. Differing hues and sounds, and a wise keeper who knew their history and could sound them to fit the mood of every occasion. When the king asked what was their value, all the experts told him that his collection was priceless. But the king was not satisfied. Surely, he thought, if I have them all covered with gold they will be more valuable than ever. And so it was done. The precious metal was melted down, scores of

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Hugo shows some of his younger congregants how to blow the shofar.

craftsmen worked day and night, and at last there they were lined up and gleaming, the pride of his kingdom. The experts were called in again and the king asked: ‘Now – tell me their value!’ One after another picked up the instruments, heavy and awkward, each making the same metallic sound, and their verdict: ‘Your Majesty, we have to tell you that other than the gold, these shofar horns are now worthless!’ I don’t know what the king made of this, probably fired the lot of them. But I do know that one of my prayers is that God keep me from that arrogance which is born of greed and which can tempt us to say: ‘Look what the power of my hands has gotten for me’.

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And not to turn those natural things with which our life and world is blessed into unnatural vanities.

4. Succot 18 September 1983. Capital Radio, Reflections No sooner do the Jewish High Holy Days – the New Year and the Day of Atonement – end, as they did last night, but that we get busy preparing for the next and, in mood, entirely joyful, festival. Because five days after Yom Kippur starts the week-long celebration of Succot. It is the plural of the Hebrew word succah, meaning booth or tent, and that is just what we are doing, busy putting up small or large tabernacles in back gardens or flat roofs, even on tiny balconies. Using branches of trees for walls and roofs, decorating the interiors with fruit, vegetables and flowers, Jews will symbolically (and some literally) live in them for seven days. And the purpose? To express some of the most important and basic religious feelings. First and foremost to thank God for the bounty of nature. It is a festival of thanksgiving, when fields and trees have yielded their produce, and to be consciously grateful keeps us from becoming arrogant people. In the second place, because the succah is put up quickly, and once the festival is over, it is taken down again, it connects with that part of our history when our ancestors wandered about the desert for forty long years, the slavery of Egypt behind them, and the Promised Land ahead of them. In that period of uncertainty, when they stopped and moved, pitched their tents and folded them again, when they experienced hardship and hostility, they learned to trust the guiding hand of God. So it is today. Because we live in solid houses and walk on concrete streets and so much of what we use in daily life is even advertised as ‘hard-wearing’ and ‘durable’, it is easy and tempting to fall for the illusion of permanence. When I

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Hugo in the succah at West London Synagogue.

am in our succah, I am conscious of the fact that actually all things are perishable and only God endures from eternity to eternity. So I cherish my small segment of time and see it in the context of God’s eternal plan. And standing in the succah, I am aware of another kind of dependence as well: of the other people in our own community who helped to build it, and of farmers and lorry drivers and market porters, in this country as well as in distant places. People I shall never meet and who will never know me, and yet we depend on

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each other. I could not have and enjoy all the things I need and delight in without the work and effort of others, nor could they do without mine. This feeling makes for humility, not the abject sort but the kind that reminds us that we are all parts, and necessary parts, of a common humanity. Our own congregational succah will also remind me this year of the need to do the right things at the right time. Last year we delayed in removing the massive framework of our succah. And one rainy night, there came a violent gust of wind and demolished it for good! Masses of air that had the power to twist steel into ribbons and turn canvas into rags. So we have a new one this year and will take better care!

5. Simchat Torah 9 October 1988. Capital Radio, Reflections

At the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was stripped of his 100m gold medal after testing positive for anabolic steroids. Initially Johnson denied the charge and claimed that someone must have spiked the herbal tea he drank before the race. Good morning, Al!1 I hope today will be a good one for you and for all our listeners. That those who spent so many nights watching the Olympics have caught up with your sleep. I know one effect these games have had on me: I now read very carefully all the small print on tea-bags, food packages and even cough drops, though I still have no full idea what the properties of some ingredients are! And I did need throat lozenges during the past few days because by the time our season of High Holy Days and festivals was over, last Tuesday, and in the wake of many sermons, explanatory talks and

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welcomes to visitors, I plumb ran out of voice! For many reasons – some good, some much less than good – it was a time of stress as well as an opportunity to lead my community in prayer, and my great hope is that our petitions for a year of life and good health, for decent living and livelihood, and for shalom, that they were heard ‘on high’ and that God will grant them to us in the coming time. The last festival was called Simchat Torah, or Rejoicing in the Torah, when in synagogues everywhere the Torah scrolls, with their handwritten texts of the first five books of the Bible, are paraded around by the congregation, a celebration that is happy and a touch chaotic, and then there is the public reading of the final chapter of Deuteronomy, which describes the death of Moses, and as that reading is completed the congregation calls out: ‘Be strong, be strong and let us strengthen each other!’ And then, almost in the same breath, we begin to read the first chapter of Genesis, the story of Creation, and week by week, Sabbath after Sabbath, we shall go on learning the story of God’s encounter with humanity and with the Family of Israel. As if to say: begin again! Start with Adam and see where it leads. And if we get it right, it should not be too difficult to find that both our own history and destiny unroll as well. The rabbis of two thousand years ago were fond of a legend which I recall myself whenever I read the Creation story. About God’s ministering angels who in the hour when God was about to create Adam got into a sharp argument among themselves. Some urged God, ‘Don’t create Adam’ – which in Hebrew simply means ‘man’ – ‘because he will be destructive!’ Some insisted: ‘Let him be created because he will do loving deeds!’ But Truth said: ‘Let him not be created because he will be all falsity!’ And Righteousness said: ‘Let him be created because he will do righteous acts!’ Peace said: ‘Let him not be created – for he will be full of strife!’ and so the debate went on. In the event, according to this legend, God had to combine the quality of truth with the quality of mercy and only then could God

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go with the creation of Adam. From the beginning God, in a way, had to turn a blind eye, because in strict justice we would not endure. There is also a question about why Adam and Eve were created singly. Why not a whole lot of humanity altogether? Our sages concluded that this was done for the sake of peace and harmony among men and women. So that no one can say to another human being: ‘My ancestor was greater than yours!’ That in the most basic religious sense, we literally are each other’s brothers and sisters!

6. Chanukah December 1979. BBC Radio 4, Thought for the Day The festival of Chanukah and its miracle,2 which Jews celebrate this week throughout the world, has its origins in the confrontation between Hellenism and Judaism. At the time of this confrontation, in the period of 168–165 BCE, Hellenism was no longer at its best. The conquerors of Judea were rapacious and oppressive. Antiochus Epiphanes, the Emperor of Hellenized Syria, had at his command the most up-to-date technology – the things that we would call ‘modern’ – and for that reason it was glamorous and attractive. It was ‘pop’ culture. The ‘in’ thing. As for the Jews, a relatively small handful of them had unshakeable faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the anxious knowledge that unless they did something, their way of living and thinking would be swallowed up. Whatever else they were, they were not fashionable. One aspect of the miracle of Chanukah is that the predictable did not happen! The forces of Antiochus were defeated; the Temple in Jerusalem was liberated and cleansed, and its lovely symbol, the menorah, a perpetually burning oil lamp, was re-lit. But in the aftermath, Jews had to think very hard about what happens when cultures and attitudes to life clash. They understood that

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Hugo lights his own father’s chanukiah with the children of the Jewish Religious Union in Bombay, 1957.

not everything in Hellenism was bad. Nor was the level of Jewish life perfect. For example, the Greek notion of paideia, the idea that human perfection can be achieved through education, struck a very sensitive core. So did the recognition of the power and importance of popular literature. Before long, no Jewish child was uneducated, and Jewish tradition went so far as to assert that an ignorant person could not be truly pious. It strikes me that the lesson the Jews eventually learned from the Chanukah story is of great contemporary relevance for all of us. There seems to be a false and dangerous equation that you are somehow more religious if you reject the new or, that to be really pious you have to be reactionary, and that assimilation of every sort is a bad thing. It is our conviction that God renews daily the work of creation. Faith in God must therefore give a welcoming attitude to new truths and insights. And not be automatically fearful and rejecting. Spiritually aware people need to find ways in which to sanctify the

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new – in the technology of our time and in the mood of our generation – and so add to the sum total of light in our world.

7. Shabbat3 20 January 1980. Capital Radio, Reflections During these Sunday morning talks I want to introduce to you some high points of religious observances and celebrations which provide a kind of spiritual rhythm for the Jewish people, but it so happens that this month there are no major or minor festivals. Here, I thought, is my chance to tell you something about the weekly Sabbath. The fact is that the way in which Jews observe the Sabbath puts them in touch with some of the most important teachings of the Jewish faith. It begins at sundown on Fridays and lasts until the first three stars appear in the evening sky of Saturday. In between we are to have rest and not only we ourselves but also our families and community and all those who depend on us. The idea is that for six days we labour and we work, we build and are busy, but then we take a break from the material demands of our existence and pay attention to the needs of our spirits. Part of the Sabbath is observed in the synagogue, where the community comes together for prayer and for study, especially the Torah, or the first five books of the Bible, and some of the teachings of the Prophets. But just as important is the way we celebrate it at home. Friday nights the family is together. Sabbath candles are lit, usually by the woman of the house, and over a cup of wine the Sabbath itself is blessed, usually by the man of the house, and Sabbath bread and salt are shared. The Hebrew term for this is kiddush, literally, sanctification. It is to change and to transform something as ordinary and commonplace as time itself into holy time.

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Hugo sings kiddush.4

We do this ourselves by an act of will and its purpose is so that we can come closer to those who are near and dear to us; to get in touch with ourselves because in the course of the week when we count and measure, we tend to be so concerned with all the bits and pieces of life outside ourselves that we are in danger of becoming lost and very much like those bits and pieces and, above all, to come close to God who is the Creator of the world and whose work of creation goes on all the time. When the Sabbath leaves we have another lovely celebration: the havdalah, or separation, and, just as we began with candles and wine, so we recite blessings over them again, but we also add an extra blessing over some fragrant spices, which symbolizes something of the sweetness of the Sabbath itself. As if we were reluctant to let it go. And we sing a song about Elijah the Prophet, who, in Jewish thought, is associated with the time of redemption to come. In a way the Sabbath, which underlines the beauty of the harmony between Creator, creation and creature, also gives us a taste

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of the Messianic time to come, when, finally, all creation will be at harmony. That is the time for which we wait and work. Our greeting to each other for the Sabbath is, simply, ‘shabbat shalom’, have a peaceful Sabbath.

8. Tu b’Shevat 18 January 1989. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought

Fifteen million trees were destroyed in the hurricane that swept through southern England on 15 October 1987, to which Hugo refers in this broadcast fifteen months later. My special greeting and appreciation today goes to all the trees in the world, because this coming Saturday is designated in the Jewish calendar as Tu b’Shevat, the New Year for trees. Indeed if you look carefully in your garden or in the park, you will note that the little brown buds are taking on a special shine and that despite their seeming lifelessness, life surges inside them and soon they will bud and flower and put on their glorious green robes. The fact is that I am ‘green’ by nature and temperament as well as by name, probably because my father was a developer of forests and so many of my earliest and happiest memories have to do with trees and the deeper meaning and value of trees. Nor will I ever forget my first lesson about what is nowadays called ‘ecology’, but when I learnt it, I thought of it as simply ‘taking care of the world’. I was standing with my father, watching the last of some huge pines pulled away from a clearing and impatient to get to the bottom of the hill where the logs were marked with his initials, assembled in rafts and floated to our sawmill. ‘When can we go?’ I urged. And his reply: ‘Just as soon as we make arrangements to plant new saplings for every one of the trees we took out!’

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And when I stood in London’s Hyde Park just over a year ago and saw so many huge and beautiful trees literally uprooted by that freak hurricane, lying on their side like beached and dying whales, I could not control my tears. Nor could I control my distress when terrorists set fire to forests in Israel last year5 or my anger over the clearing of tropical rainforests in so many parts of the world and their dire implications for the health and future of our planet. There is a teaching in the Talmud to the effect that if a man is planting a tree and people call out to him, ‘Come quickly, the Messiah has arrived!’ he should first complete the planting and then go to greet the Messiah. There’s a story about an old man busy planting a carob tree. Another man passing by asks him: ‘How many years before this tree will come into fruit?’ ‘About seventy,’ says the planter. ‘And do you expect to live that long?’ he asks again. ‘Well,’ says the old man, ‘I found a fruitful world because my ancestors planted for me and I do the same for my children!’ And preacher that I am, I see that just as trees grow upward, so should men and women. They seek the light and so should we. Their roots nourish them and so do ours. I now look forward to actually seeing the first tree in blossom when I shall recite a blessing first composed by Rabbi Judah almost two thousand years ago: ‘Blessed be God who has caused nothing to be lacking in His creation and formed in it beautiful sights and beautiful trees from which we derive pleasure.’

9. Purim 7 March 1982. Capital Radio, Reflections Imagine the following mix: a beautiful queen, a slightly dotty and capricious king, an evil prime minister or vizier and a wise hero who saves the day and on the way even manages to get a ride on the proverbial white horse! It is, you will agree, the stuff of fairy tales or of

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broad comedy or, as is so often the case, they may mask a tragedy. Something of all this is present in one of the small books of the Bible named after its heroine, Esther. It is hardly ever featured in Christian churches but it is taken out, as it were, once every year by Jews all over the world, and read from cover to cover, or better still, because our tradition prefers the use of a handwritten, parchment scroll, it is read from one end to the other. The occasion for this reading is our festival of Purim and it will begin tomorrow night. Young and old will come, some wearing masks, some in funny costumes, and will listen to this story, about King Ahashuerus and how he sheds one wife, called Vashti, and as a result of an advertising campaign, finds and marries the beautiful Jewish orphan, Esther; about her uncle Mordechai whose loyalty to the king at one time saves his majesty’s life but because he annoys the power- and status-hungry Haman by refusing to bow down before him, Haman is filled with a passionate hatred for Mordechai and can only think about revenge for his wounded vanity; about Haman’s plot, cunning and vicious, so designed that as a result not only Mordechai but all his people scattered in the 127 provinces of an empire that stretched from India to Ethiopia would perish. All of them, young and old, and in one day picked out by purim, which is the Hebrew word for random lots; and about the way in which Esther, prodded by her uncle, unmasks Haman’s wicked plans and manages to get the king to have Haman and his followers hanged. And the king and his queen as well as Mordechai and his people live happy ever after. Interestingly, it is the only book of the Bible in which God’s name is never mentioned, as if to say: here is a problem for humans to work out! For along the way, and almost as an aside, the story reveals something about that most chronic of social diseases: race hatred. It comes when Haman argues his case: we know that Mordechai’s so-called crime is slight but in Haman’s sick mind it becomes vast, and then he points the finger no longer just at the individual but at all his people and says to the king: ‘There is a certain people . . .

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dispersed among the people . . . of your Kingdom and . . . their religion is different . . .!’6 And because it suits him, or because he didn’t listen carefully, or perhaps because he simply has no decency or compassion, the king buys the argument. And so many have bought it before and since. That ‘different’ is somehow bad. Even a crime! We, the Jewish people, have celebrated this festival for the best part of two and a half thousand years because, for a change, in this story irrationality and cruelty fail to win the day.

10. Passover 16 April 1989. BBC Radio 2, Good Morning Sunday Between today and Wednesday night when we begin a week of celebrating the Exodus from Egypt, there is activity in Jewish households that gives ‘spring cleaning’ a whole new definition. Indeed by Tuesday night at the latest all foods and drinks as well as cooking utensils – anything that contains or had contact with leaven – is to be put away and special kosher l’pesach or ‘fit and proper for Passover’ edibles and dishes are to be in place. We also dust off the haggadot, the special orders of service, that tell the story of Israel’s liberation from slavery in Egypt. Children practise the Four Questions with which the special Passover meal or Seder begins, adults revise the text, begin to hum the melodies and make sure that there is an adequate supply of essential symbols: the bitter herb – usually raw horseradish – that actually tastes of slavery; a shank bone that will be roasted and helps to recall the ritual when Jews still celebrated in the Temple in Jerusalem; matza, of course, the unleavened bread, first baked in haste three and a half millennia ago, now produced in Leeds7 or in Israel. And as I was trundling my supermarket trolley a couple of days ago, stacked with matza boxes, I thought that if I were the manager, for a few days I’d change the

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sign beyond the cashier to read not ‘Exit’ but ‘Exodus’! In my own family, ever since earliest childhood there was also the custom of new clothes for Passover and my treat this year will be a new shirt, which I have kept unopened since the January sales. In other words it is a time of intense preparation and I have long held to a conviction that any kind of celebration, especially of the religious sort, is as enjoyable – or as the Americans would say, as ‘meaningful’ – as the preparation that precedes it. Or as a Hungarian proverb has it: ‘The roast pigeon does not fly into your mouth!’ And with Passover it has to be on two levels: physical preparation, but also spiritual and intellectual readiness. Because the purpose is to retell the great story of the Jewish people. How slavery by tyrants gave way to freedom and how, in time, another kind of slavery – to idolatry – can and might give way to spiritual emancipation, for this story is about the healing and the life-affirming power of God and if we get this celebration right, every one of us, and especially every child, ought to feel as if he or she personally came out of Egypt. To bridge the gap of the centuries and to be able to sense in the heart and in the gut how bitter and corrosive is oppression and how good and enjoyable and how truly human it is to be free, to be able to plan and live your life creatively and responsibly, both as a child and as a partner of God.

11. Yom HaShoah 24 April 1994. Capital Radio, Reflections A few days ago hundreds of us of London’s Jewish community gathered in Hyde Park to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. In a section of the park called The Dell there is a simple, rather stark rock that is a permanent monument to this tragedy. And the gathering itself consisted of survivors like myself, now an ageing group of men and women, our families, and people of all ages who

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did not suffer themselves but identify powerfully with what we call in Hebrew the shoah, and all of us involved in a move that is meant to introduce a new date into the Jewish religious calendar: Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Of course, it is impossible to say whether it will ‘take’. It may be that, once my generation dies out, the memories of our experience will fade and the sands of time cover all trace of us. But it is also possible that the coming generation will identify so strongly with what happened in our lifetime, realize that the six million men, women and children who perished for no other reason than they were Jews and have no one to remember them, that these coming generations will make their memory as their own, and that just as we mark every year with a special service, and indeed with a day of fasting, the date of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem – an event that took place two thousand years ago, in 70 CE – so for centuries to come I hope that people I shall never know will find it in their hearts and in their will to put aside some time, and to remember. And not just to remember, but to use this experience to strengthen their resolve never to have any truck with any form of racism, that they would always wish to purge themselves of any temptation to prejudice. And that such a commemoration would always teach that to be a Jew must mean that you automatically make it your business to be the defender of the vulnerable and that part of the belief in the one God is to be personally responsible for the well-being of all of God’s creation and creatures. It seems to me that any other attitude would be a betrayal of our history. I took part in the Hyde Park gathering myself and my contribution was to recall a young woman who is one of the heroines of the Holocaust period. Her name was Hannah Szenes8 and when the Fascist clouds were gathering over her native Hungary, she moved to what was then Palestine, became a farmer and a poet, and when she heard of the persecution of the Jews, she volunteered to be a parachutist and

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asked to be sent on a mission to help rescue her people. It was exactly fifty years ago that she was dropped into Yugoslavia, and from there crossed into Hungary. Sadly she was betrayed, arrested and eventually executed. But the night before she left, when one of her partners in the mission, Reuben Dafni, who did survive and is a dear friend, when he asked her, ‘What if the mission fails?’ Hannah, who was not yet twenty-three, told him: ‘If I do get caught, I know that word will get out and reach the people in the concentration camps and they will know that there was at least one person who tried to help them.’ She also wrote a poem, which Reuben brought back with him and which is today read and sung by every Israeli child and adult, and I end with it as my tribute to a great spirit: Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame. Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart. Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honour’s sake. Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.9

12. Yom Ha’atzmaut 17 April 1983. Capital Radio, Reflections

Peace between Israel and its Arab neighbours – for which Hugo always longed – still seems tragically beyond reach. Later today, to be precise at three o’clock this afternoon, members of my congregation will combine with three other congregations to celebrate a service of thanksgiving at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John’s Wood. There will be similar services and other celebrations all over London and many others parts of the country because today is the eve of Israel’s Independence Day, making thirty-five

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years since the formal re-establishment of the Jewish state, after a gap of almost two thousand years. I am old enough to remember very vividly our mood and the events when this happened and this is as good a time as any to share some of these recollections with you. It was just three years after the Second World War and Jews were still shocked almost to a point of being numb as we were reckoning up the unprecedented toll of casualties we suffered in that war. The large Jewish communities of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Holland, France, Belgium and Greece – not to speak of Germany and Austria – and the many smaller communities were devastated. It looked at that time as if there was no future at all for Jews and Judaism in Europe. As it happens, in such places as France and Holland this turned out to be not quite so, but in most other countries the prediction was not incorrect. To give you an example: my own hometown in eastern Czechoslovakia had a population of 25,000 and more than half the inhabitants – 15,000 of us – were Jews. By 1945 not more than 1,000 of us were alive. The town itself had become part of the Soviet Union and all we could think of doing was to get as fast and as far from there as we could. But where to go? Immigration rules and quotas were harsh and there grew up in 1946 and 1947 large displaced persons camps, ironically mainly in Germany and in Italy. The only place that was welcoming so far as the 600,000 Jews living in these camps were concerned was Palestine. But you couldn’t get there because the British Mandate wouldn’t have it. Those who tried to enter illegally were often caught and put into yet other camps on Cyprus. It was a bizarre situation. Large chunks of land in a national homeland which were empty, and so many stateless and mainly chance survivors in crowded camps anxious to get there, and the civilized world as represented then at the United Nations having to decide. Which they did by voting to partition Palestine and, in effect, to establish a Jewish State to be called Israel, and a Palestinian Arab

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Hugo with David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), first prime minister of Israel.

State which never actually happened because that part became a part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. And I still remember that day, 5 Iyar in the Hebrew calendar, a Friday in 1948 when I heard the crackling radio report live from Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion reading the Declaration of Independence, and the lines: ‘We extend the hand of peace and good-neighbourliness to all the states around us and to their peoples . . . and we call upon the Jewish people . . . to be at our right hand in the . . . longing for the redemption of Israel . . . ’ Thirty-five years later the State is a reality, more than three million Jews and one and a half million Arabs live there,10 not yet at peace with all their neighbours, but cause enough for thanksgiving and for me, the hope that independence may soon be matched by interdependence as well!

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13. Lag b’Omer 17 May 1987. BBC Radio 2, Good Morning Sunday Today is Lag b’Omer, meaning the thirty-third day of counting the omer, or sheaves of grain, as the Bible requires the Family of Israel to do during the fifty days that link the festivals of Passover and Pentecost. It is a minor holiday, interesting rather than deeply significant. And whereas traditional Jews refrain from merry-making during this period, on this, the thirty-third day, marriages can be celebrated, music and dancing enjoyed, hair (as you shall hear) can literally be let down! According to a rabbinic legend, today is the anniversary of when the manna started to fall from heaven. Alas this delicacy stopped when Israel reached the Promised Land though, on my way here today, I did look extra hard, especially around Regent’s Park, just in case, for old times’ sake, but only ice cream wrappers and empty tins! Another legend holds that a dreadful plague, which carried off some 24,000 disciples of Rabbi Akiva in the second century, ceased on this day and, incidentally, the rabbis believed that the reason for this disaster was due to the fact that they did not honour each other sufficiently. Yet another reason, specially dear to Jewish mystics, is that Lag b’Omer marks the anniversary of the death of Simeon bar Yochai, and around his grave near Israel’s Galilee there are celebrations to this day. He was one of Rabbi Akiva’s students and when his master was imprisoned by the Roman occupiers of Judea, Simeon continued to serve him and to study with him. Indeed after the execution of his teacher he carried on giving lessons, was reported to the authorities, sentenced in absentia to be executed as well, but together with his son he fled and survived in a cave for twelve years. Obviously, he had deep knowledge of Torah, or holy writ. He was one of the forerunners of the mystic tradition in Judaism and he also developed extraordinary sensitivity. For example, he taught: ‘It

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is better for a man to cast himself into the fiery furnace than to put his fellow to shame in public!’ One of the customs on Lag b’Omer has children playing with bows and arrows. The reason: during Simeon bar Yochai’s lifetime, no rainbow (a symbol of peace) ever appeared because he was such a saintly man, as if he had been a living rainbow. And an even more curious custom – this is the day when 3-year-old little boys have their first haircut – and if you ask me why, I don’t know. It’s tradition!

14. Shavuot 25 May 1993. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought If the words we speak could be coloured, my account of the Jewish festival of Shavuot should turn the air in this studio crimson, because tonight and tomorrow we shall celebrate the traditional anniversary of one of the great moments in human as well as in Jewish experience: the revelation of the Ten Commandments at Sinai. You cannot have a more ‘red-letter’ day than that! The literal meaning of shavuot is ‘weeks’ because it took ‘a week of weeks’ for the newly liberated slaves to reach this mountain after the Exodus from Egypt, in the wilderness and in no-man’s land and it was on this fiftieth day – Pentecost in Greek – that all the tribes of Israel stood around Mount Sinai. And then, according to legend, a thick cloud covered the mountain top, its sides burst into flowers, a silence descended on the world, even the birds stopped their song. And when the Voice came, it penetrated not only the ears, but the very being of that expectant throng. It announced that God is One, unique, merciful and just, that God’s Name demands truthfulness, that one day in seven – the Sabbath – is to be set aside not for work of hands and minds but for the cultivation of the human spirit and communion with God. That life is sacred and spiritual civilization means honouring parents,

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that murder, adultery, theft, perverting justice and coveting – which means greed! – offend God. I often wonder how that generation felt afterwards. As the cloud lifted and the world resumed its way, were they fearful or just relieved and glad? Could they imagine that on that day standards of morality were set, and that belief in God could never again be separated from ethical behaviour? I like to think that those who will celebrate Shavuot or Pentecost – with prayer, poetry and song – will appreciate that what really happened at Sinai was that ‘the thick silence which fills the endless distance between God and the human mind was pierced.’11 That men and women were told that it does matter to God what they do and how they behave and that it is not only that human beings need God, God is also in need of them. It is a thought that keeps us free from despair and puts genuine value on the life of each of us.

15. Tisha b’Av 9 August 1989. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought Tonight and tomorrow mark one of the very ‘minor-key’ dates in the Jewish calendar. I am ‘pausing to think’ about some of the complicated and always unhappy ways in which destructiveness is encountered in our world. Tisha b’Av, or the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, commemorates, by bizarre coincidence, the two destructions of the Temple in Jerusalem. First by the Chaldeans in 586 BCE, who also deported the surviving leadership and masses of able-bodied men, women and children into Babylonian captivity. The second time it was the Romans, 484 years later in 70 CE, after a long and murderous siege, leaving only the charred ruins of its Western Wall, which is still a place of pilgrimage in the heart of Jerusalem. The advisors of Ferdinand and Isabella, schooled in the fine art

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of the Inquisition, picked the same date in 1492 for the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and it is all of these events that give special poignancy to the opening line of the book of Lamentations, which will be read in synagogues everywhere tonight: ‘How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people! How is she become as a widow!’12 Historians explain that the shifting weight of empires do this to small nations. Therefore perhaps the only thing you can safely predict about the violence-marked rise of any mighty empire is that sooner or later it will also have its violence-filled fall. Nor do power politics respect treaties of friendship or protestations of loyalty. But behind these large ‘headline-style’ events, individual behaviour has its own peculiar role to play. And I am both impressed and depressed by this self-critical and cautionary tale: while the Romans were encamped and waiting outside Jerusalem, a rich man in the city was giving a banquet. He had a friend called Kamza and an enemy, Bar Kamza. He sent his servant to invite his friend, but the simple fellow made a mistake and Bar Kamza showed up at the party. He thought: no doubt the host wants reconciliation. But he was wrong. ‘Get out of my house!’ hissed the host. Bar Kamza was appalled. He asked to be spared humiliation. In desperation he said: ‘Look, I will pay for the entire banquet but don’t shame me in front of all your other guests.’ But the host could not be moved. The enraged Bar Kamza went straight to the Roman general, denounced the host and his friends as plotting to a revolt and that gave the general just the excuse to order his troops into action. And when the rabbis reflected on the pain of the Ninth of Av, they were told this story and added that part of the reason for the destruction of Jerusalem was ‘causeless hate’. And I have the feeling that wherever there is massive conflict, if you look hard you will find this ‘causeless hate’. And today there is extra feeling for me in the words of one of our daily prayers: ‘O my God, guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking guile. To them that wrong me let my soul be silent and lowly as the dust to everyone.’13

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16. Rosh Chodesh 22 August 1993. Capital Radio, Reflections This past Wednesday marked the Jewish month of Elul. I kept my little grandson14 up late enough to show him just the tiniest slice of the new moon, because our religious calendar is a lunar one and all the dates of our festivals are based on the moon rather than the sun. Indeed the first day of the new moon is a festival of minor sort with special psalms added to that day’s service in the synagogue and at home, and in the days of the Bible it was quite special – people would visit the prophets, women would abstain from work – and perhaps because of the symbolism of the moon, the way it waxes and wanes, it was considered a women’s festival, and is again becoming special to Jewish women all over the world. I also fascinated my grandson with an account of how important it was to get the date absolutely right, how during the time of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem there would be a special court set up in its precincts for the sole purpose of receiving witnesses who could testify that they personally saw the new moon in the sky. At least two of them were carefully cross-examined and when the judges were satisfied that the new moon was, in fact, what they saw, they made it official. Within seconds a ram’s horn was sounded and bonfires were lit on top of a series of mountains whose smoke signalled Rosh Chodesh, Hebrew for the new moon festival, to all the towns and villages in Israel, and another chain of bonfires sent the same signals to the very large Jewish communities in Babylonia. Even when the Roman legions surrounded Jerusalem for the best part of two years the custom continued, but when they finally entered the city and burnt down its Temple, it came to end. And since that day in August in the year 70 CE, we have had to rely on mathematical calculations. They are, of course, quite accurate but nowhere as exciting or even romantic as the old-fashioned way. But this month of Elul is special for another reason, because it

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precedes the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement and it is already a time for spiritual preparation. In my own community we have a special calendar of readings and as it happens today’s is a very touching and indeed sobering story about Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, who lived through that final siege of Jerusalem but was lucky enough to escape death or slavery. When he was on his deathbed his disciples came to visit him and before leaving they said: ‘Master, give us a farewell blessing.’ He said to them, ‘I pray that fearing God may be as important to you as fearing man.’ His disciples were astonished and asked: ‘But should we not fear God more than man?’ He replied, ‘If only you can attain this! When a man thinks of committing a transgression, he says: ‘I hope no man sees me! If the fear of God is no more than this, it will be enough to keep you from many sins.’

1 Al Matthews. 2 When the Maccabees liberated the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BCE they found just one jar of ritually pure oil that had not been contaminated by the Syrians, enough to keep alight the menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum, for only one night. The miracle celebrated on Chanukah is that this oil lasted eight nights, until more could be fetched from the north of Israel. 3 See also ‘Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy’, p. 88. 4 Still from The Sabbath Bride (1988) produced by See More Productions for Channel 4 Television. 5 In Israel, between May and June 1988, Palestinian terrorists set fire to and destroyed 400,000 acres of land. See www.wnd.com/news/article. asp?ARTICLE_ID=37938 6 Est. 3.8. 7 Rakusen’s, one of Britain’s biggest producers of kosher food, is based in Leeds. 8 Also spelled Senesh. 9 Sardice, Yugoslavia, 2 May 1944. Translated from the Hebrew by Marie Syrkin. 10 There are now approximately five and a half million Jews in Israel, and one and a half million Israeli Arabs. Hugo’s 1983 statistics must have included the Arab population of Israeli-occupied territories as

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11 12 13 14


well – in 1983 the Jewish population of Israel was 3,412,500 and the Arab population, 706,100. Source www.israelipalestinian.procon.org/ viewresource.asp?resourceID=000636&print=true#graph1 Heschel, A. J. (1976), God In Search Of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism. New York: Octagon Books, p. 196. Lam. 1.1. Forms of Prayer for Jewish Worship I (6th edn, 1931). Oxford: West London Synagogue of British Jews, p. 24. Adam Massey.

Hugo was a wonderful communicator. I always felt, when listening to him, that he was talking to me directly, and millions of other radio listeners thought so too. His liking for us, his audience, was patently genuine, and we all felt it. He was down to earth, concerned with life as it is and as we experienced it, and not some theologian’s or ideologue’s artefact. He was a guide whom we trusted to lead us through the Moral Maze of this world. He combined traditional Jewish humour and wisdom with a genuine ecumenism, and the God of all of us was in what he said. This ecumenism and liberalism was not trendy but deep. He had learned it in the most difficult of schools: in concentration camp. He never sentimentalized his experience and only with time did I begin to discover the profound effect of this part of his life. He turned horror into hope we could believe in, and for this above all I bless him. After the nightmare of the Hitler time and the Second World War, his contribution was precious.

—Rabbi Lionel Blue, author and broadcaster

The Torah service at West London Synagogue.

FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES

1. Abraham and Lot 20 October 1991. Radio 2, Good Morning Sunday

In October 1991, Kurdistan and Kuwait were still recovering from the First Gulf War, full-scale war had erupted in former Yugoslavia and there had been violent clashes between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria. Television images of Palestinians standing on their roofs to cheer Iraq’s scud attacks on Israel had been a PR disaster for the PLO and for Yasser Arafat, then still based in Tunis, while the Provisional IRA’s attacks in Northern Ireland and on government and civilian targets in London were also fresh in British minds. At this time of the year in my synagogue and indeed in synagogues all over the world we begin to read the Torah – the first five books of the Bible – and there last week was the story of the Flood and Noah’s remarkable escape from that watery destruction. So despite its solid weight and mass, it is also a fragile and exceedingly vulnerable world. And the spoilers of it are almost always the very creatures who are best placed to tend it and enhance it. Today in Yugoslavia and Nigeria, yesterday it was in Kurdistan and Kuwait,

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which is still blanketed with oily smoke. Blood is shed in Israel and in Ulster. And so often I can almost hear God wondering, ‘When, oh when, will these creatures of Mine grow up?’ Just yesterday our Torah story suggested a model strategy of what we call today ‘conflict resolution’. Abraham, who was the first Jew, and with whom our history begins, was still a nomad. He and his nephew Lot had done very well. They had a vast herd of cattle. You might say that God and the world was good to them. Enter greed! And all those things which can bring out the worst in us. Let me quote the Bible itself: ‘And there was a strife between the herdsmen of Abram’s cattle and the herdsmen of Lot’s cattle . . . ’1 How to resolve it? The conventional way was to fight it out. One group or another was bound to win. Instead – and how I love this passage! – ‘Abram said unto Lot: Let there be no strife . . . between me and you and between my herdsmen and your herdsmen; for we are brothers! Is not the whole land before you? Let us separate. If you take the left hand, then I will go to the right. Or if you turn to the right, then I will go to the left.’2 And as it turned out, Lot went east toward the plain of Jordan and Abraham went and settled in Canaan. I like this story because it does not deny differences, nor does it suggest that conflicts are imaginary, but instead it is concerned with coping with them, without violence. Not rubbishing each other. It was civilized, spiritually mature. It was – and is – a philosophy of live and let live. Just last week, too, a group of Jews and Christians and Muslims met in Malta. They unanimously declared that ‘the basic texts of our three religions – the Torah, the Gospel, the Koran – constantly invite us to build peace within ourselves and around us. Peace is one of the names of God . . . (and to achieve this peace) is a mission entrusted to each believer.’

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2. Cave of Machpelah 10 November 1991. Capital Radio, Reflections

The Madrid Conference opened on 30 October 1991 and lasted for three days. In his concluding remarks, Dr Haider Abdul Shafi, head of the Palestinian Delegation, pleaded: ‘We have already wasted enough time, energy, and resources locked in this violent embrace of mutual destruction and defensiveness. We urge you to take this opportunity and rise to meet the challenge of peace.’ But despite many good intentions, the peace process that began in Madrid would receive a fatal blow two and a half years later when Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish settler, massacred 29 Muslims at prayer in the Cave of Machpelah, in Hebron.3 Every now and then one experiences a scene which will leave a set of lasting impressions. It is the sort of thing that gets imprinted upon the memory and, as it were, on the soul itself. Like the gathering at the Cenotaph later today and the meaning of sacrifice and heroism that Remembrance Sunday always suggests. Not many days ago I experienced just this kind of imprinting. The scene was the Royal Palace in Madrid and as I watched the arrival of delegation after delegation, Israel and all of its Arab neighbours, taking their places around a large conference table, I found myself moved almost to the point of tears. Indeed, I did have tears as Yizhak Shamir concluded his address with the call of the Hebrew prophet: ‘Shalom. Peace, peace to him that is far and to him that is near.’4 What moved me was not so much the complicated set of signals that this Prime Minister of Israel was conveying to the other political leaders but the fact that the words of this prophet, first spoken more than twenty-five centuries ago, were still so relevant. And, of course, I prayed that on this occasion they would also hear it as an invitation and that it would be heard and understood as well as echoed and reciprocated.

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As it happens, the reading in the synagogue on the following Sabbath told an even older story, which again took on for me remarkable topicality. About Abraham, who was the first Jew, almost four thousand years ago, and who wanted to find a burial place for his greatly loved wife Sarah. In fact she was not the only wife he had. Some time before, he and Hagar had a child whose name was Ishmael and in one of these tragic stories which the Bible does not whitewash, Sarah, once she too had a child, whose name was Isaac, persuades Abraham to send Hagar and Ishmael away. You and I can only guess at how the husband and the father in Abraham must have felt. But now Abraham negotiates with Ephron, the chief of the Hittites, in whose territory he was living and the Bible recounts a truly ironic conversation between them. Abraham: ‘I would like to buy the cave of Machpelah from you.’ Ephron: ‘Have it as a token of our friendship.’ Abraham: ‘I insist, let me buy it.’ Ephron: ‘No, no, take it as a gift. What is 400 shekels between you and me?’

Abraham understands very well. He pays and he buries his wife.5 In a rabbinic legend there is speculation, why Abraham was so insistent that he should pay for what was offered to him free and gratis and their conclusion was that Abraham was already concerned that no one should ever claim that the land was taken under any false pretences or stolen. I cannot help thinking that it is a paradox and an irony of history or perhaps it is something that we simply cannot fully understand that this same area, this cave of Machpelah which is still in the city of Hebron, is also still at the heart of such a fearful dispute. Indeed in the last few days I found myself reading and re-reading a poem by Shin Shalom. His real name was Shalom Joseph Shapiro. He and his family came from Poland to what was Palestine when he

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was still a small child at the turn of the century and as the relationship between Jews and Arabs deteriorated, he had a dream and a vision, which is just like my dream and my vision, and how I wish that these lines with which I end this reflection be also shared and heard and reciprocated. Ishmael, my brother, How long shall we fight each other? My brother from times bygone, My brother – Hagar’s son, My brother, the wandering one One angel was sent to us both, One angel watched over our growth – There in the wilderness, death threatening through thirst, I a sacrifice on the altar, Sarah’s first. Ishmael, my brother, hear my plea: It was the angel who tied thee to me . . . Time is running out, put hatred to sleep. Shoulder to shoulder, let’s water our sheep.6

3. Jacob and Esau 1 December 1990. BBC World Service, Reflections The Torah reading today7 focuses on that episode in the life of Jacob which resulted in a new name for him and, indeed, in a new concept and definition of his descendants, the Jewish people. For that name was Israel and it is still a kind of surname that we bear. It came to Jacob in the course of a life-and-death encounter, which I see as a universal struggle as well, the kind that sensitive men and women in all ages and of every creed may recognize as their own. The story in the book of Genesis describes how Jacob makes preparation to meet his twin brother Esau after many years of

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separation and estrangement. Their last time together was both painful and angry. Jacob had tricked his brother into selling him the birthright of the oldest son and his father into giving him a special blessing. The very name Jacob, in Hebrew Ya’akov, means ‘a supplanter’, not exactly a nice thing to be called. Indeed, Jacob had to run for his life. Relatives, far away, gave him shelter. There he married, prospered, and now, together with his wives and children and all his possessions, he was going home again, but fearful of having to face Esau. The night before this meeting he put his family in a safe place and, as the Torah describes it, ‘Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of dawn.’8 There he was, detached from family and possessions, solitary and scared. Let me read on a bit more: ‘When (this man) saw that he had not prevailed against him, he wrenched Jacob’s hip at its socket. Then he said, ‘Let me go, for dawn is breaking.’ But (Jacob) answered, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me’.9 Said the other, ‘What is your name?’ He replied, ‘Jacob’. Said he, ‘Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven (sarita in Hebrew) with beings divine (el in Hebrew) and human, and have prevailed.’10 I often wonder who or what was this ‘man’. Hardly a flesh-andblood creature! There are rabbinic suggestions that he represents three sorts of obstacles that kept Jacob, a man touched by uncertainty and guilt, from becoming not just a fully grown but also a spiritual person. One notion is that this ‘opponent’ was an idolater and that there is in every one of us a pull to idolatry. Not just to images and statutes but to inner idolatry – of power and wealth – and if you want to be a true servant of the One God, you are not to make a god of self-interest. More surprising is the idea that the opponent was a scholar or a sage. It is a warning of the rabbis against a dangerous sort of wisdom, of learning devoid of humility, the kind of person who may know everything but understand nothing. It is a description that fits

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so many religious fanatics, past and present. And to achieve genuine wisdom Jacob had to be humble in spirit first. The third suggestion is that Jacob’s wrestling partner was a highwayman, a man of violence. It is a rabbinic way of saying that hidden within each of us there are bits of violence and layers of aggression, and if they are left unchecked they can so easily break out and then wound and hurt. History is only too full of such individuals and societies. Hate and godliness cannot go together. So as the rabbis see this story, Jacob’s great enemy was not Esau but the idolater who goes after false values, arrogance that stops true knowledge and resentments that boil up and scorch the hater as much as the hated. And they were all within him. It was only when he came to grips with them and conquered them that Jacob (who could be you or me) could become Israel.

4. Joseph’s Coat of Many Colours 8 December 1990. BBC World Service, Reflections Today Jews everywhere begin the annual reading of the story of Joseph,11 by far the longest and best-rounded portrait of all the biblical personalities. It is full of incidents and anecdotes, written with a mastery of storytelling that few novelists have surpassed. It not only has a beginning, a middle and an end, but along the way and in the course of three more Shabbatot when these final 13 chapters of the book of Genesis will be recited or chanted in the synagogue, there will be the unfolding of his character, lots of play on the emotions and, as befits a good novel, it is rich in elements of suspense, descriptions of interesting local customs, and subtle hints that a unique destiny is being played out. When it ends, it is simply not possible to forget it! By now you will have gathered that I am an enthusiastic fan and I am in good company. Thinkers and artists of every sort have

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been fascinated by Joseph all the way from rabbinic preachers two thousand years ago – the Koran calls it ‘one of the most beautiful narratives’ – up to the great German writer Thomas Mann, whose Joseph trilogy12 is one of the masterpieces of our century. And certainly not forgetting that most popular of musicals created by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber here in Britain, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, which will enchant generations of children from the age of three to ninety-three for a very long time to come. This is how our story begins in the Torah: Now Jacob was settled in the land where his father had resided, the land of Canaan. This, then, is the line of Jacob: At seventeen years of age, Joseph tended the flocks with his brothers. And Joseph brought bad reports of them to their father. Now Israel loved Joseph best of all his sons, for he was the child of his old age; and he had made him a coat of many colours (an ornamented tunic). And when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of his brothers, they hated him so that they could not speak a friendly word to him. Once Joseph had a dream, which he told to his brothers; and they hated him even more . . . 13

As I was re-reading it the other day, I became more conscious than ever before that unlike most of the Bible stories this one has very little of the supernatural about it. God does not intervene directly in Joseph’s life as God does in the case of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And considering how it leads to the greatest drama in Israel’s history, of oppression and redemption – deep theology indeed – it begins in such an ordinary, even petty way. With a father’s favouritism, with gossip and the jealousy of brothers, with childish dreams of grandeur in which eleven sheaves and stars who are clearly his brothers and even the sun and the moon – his parents – bow down to Joseph, in other words it is a family mess. And how Providence uses and shapes these elements for such spiritual purposes.

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In a rabbinic legend Joseph’s childish nastiness is spelled out: in the tales he was bearing to their father he accused his brothers of cutting up animals (accusing them of eating treifah, non-kosher food), of calling their half-brothers slaves (especially the sons of the two ‘handmaidens’, Bilhah and Zilpah), and that they were immoral (when away from home). There is thus a touch of poetic justice in that before long those brothers sprinkle the blood of a goat on Joseph’s famous tunic when they pretend to their father that he was killed by a wild beast. In fact, they just sold him into slavery, and just as he begins to settle into his Egyptian master’s household, he is put in prison, himself charged with immorality. The charge is false, but the punishment real. Ultimately we hear as the story unfolds that Joseph emerges with a noble character but, like precious metals, not without painful purification.

5. Joseph Reconciles with his Brothers 22 December 1990. BBC World Service, Reflections There is a scene in this Shabbat’s biblical reading of the cycle of Joseph stories14 which never fails to move me. Indeed on one occasion, as I was bending over the Torah scroll and while I was chanting this section, I started to weep, forgetting completely the admonition that ‘big boys don’t cry’ and the people in the congregation were so taken aback that for weeks afterwards no one asked me ‘How are you?’ but only ‘Are you feeling better?’ Let me set the scene as economically as I can. Joseph’s brothers had sold him into slavery in Egypt when he was seventeen and because of their jealous hatred of him. To their father they lied that a wild beast had devoured him. But such were Joseph’s talents as well as lucky breaks that eventually he was second only to the Pharaoh in power and authority. Because he predicted a great famine and

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was able to make life-saving provisions for it, he was also in charge of food sales and distribution. Natural disasters like that know no borders and in due course those same ten brothers are sent by their father from Canaan to buy provisions for their hungry families. When they first appear before Joseph, he, of course, recognizes them. But the others see only a forbidding official. As the Torah tells us: ‘When Joseph saw his brothers, he recognized them; but he acted like a stranger towards them and spoke harshly to them’.15 He also plays a cat-and-mouse game with them, aiming to get their youngest – and Joseph’s favourite – brother, Benjamin, into his presence and now threatens to keep as a hostage. All of them know that this would break their father’s heart. In this confrontation all sorts of deep feelings come into play. There is guilt and fear on the part of the brothers and it is not difficult to sense Joseph’s hurt and the desire to see justice done. There is in that palatial reception room a kind of emotional ‘point of no return’. He can have his full revenge (said by many to taste quite sweet!) or else an emotion of equal or greater power must come into play. Our reading begins with the Hebrew word vayigash, which means to ‘draw near’, ‘to go up to’, and the most responsible of the brothers, Judah, does just that. It is body language that goes hand-in-hand with words that come tumbling from the heart, about vulnerability and the love of family. And then the one with the power breaks down, cries aloud, and can only say: ‘I am Joseph! Is my father still alive?’16 And in this act of self-revelation I can hear and feel that love has conquered revenge. He, who must have brooded for so long on his betrayal, cannot only forgive, but even comforts his shocked brothers. ‘Now, do not be distressed . . . because you sold me . . . It was to save life that God sent me ahead of you . . . ’17 Only someone who understands that there is a deeper design to his life can speak in this way.

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When I think about our condition, be it in our political life or the rivalries and hatreds in so many parts of our world and even among those very near to us, I also see this story as a parable about the moral life and how ‘relations of justice’ which are so often excuses for self-serving purposes can be converted into ‘relations of life’, summed up in another Hebrew word meaning reconciliation, harmony and peace, and that word is shalom.

6. Moses 14 January 1996. BBC Radio 2, Good Morning Sunday

In January 1996 Human Rights Watch reported that thousands of children in Chinese orphanages had died of starvation and medical neglect. In the weekly Torah readings that cover each year the first five books of the Bible, we have just reached the book of Exodus. And how quickly Joseph’s great contributions are forgotten and his people, the Children of Israel, enslaved by the tyrant rulers of Egypt. And we meet Moses, destined to be their liberator, but now still young, his life miraculously saved by a princess and enjoying the comforts of the royal palace. And it struck me again that in the opening sentence about his adult life there are three verbs that reveal the essence of his life. ‘And it came to pass in those days that Moses grew and went out among his brothers and saw their affliction . . . ’18 In the biblical tradition, verbs, which denote action, are the most important parts of language. And I find that it is safest to judge a person by his or her actions rather than by what they say or think. In the case of Moses, he grew, he went out, he saw. And it seems to me this morning, more than three thousand years

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later, that these are still qualities that make for good leadership, and, indeed, for decent and responsible humanity. For growth is not just for the young: we live as long as we grow in mind and heart. And when people stop learning and have no time for new ideas and fresh experiences, spiritually they come to an end. When Moses ‘went out’, he recognized that everything worthwhile was not confined to that palace, and how easily people can become almost prisoners to their little patch or to their social class or religious grouping. They do not feel the pain of the world nor the need to help heal it. There is such thing as a ‘ghetto mentality’ and it is spiritually destructive. And how important to get into the world and make it a touch safer and more habitable. And, finally, Moses ‘saw’! He saw the suffering of his people and it changed his life. But I know that it is possible to have eyes and not see. I know people who travel the world and can only speak about hotels and restaurants, and fail to see the people. At least a dozen adult men and women told me this past week that the sight of those emaciated Chinese orphans and their suffering so upset them that they had to switch off their TV sets or change channels! As if to say, ‘Look how sensitive I am!’ And the reason why Moses is one of my great heroes, and why to this day Jews call him Moshe Rabbenu, ‘Moses, our teacher’, is because he never stopped growing and because when he went out into his world and saw its misery, he didn’t run back or turn away but set about changing and remedying it, leaving us an example of the great and good things an individual can achieve when he or she has vision and will.

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7. The Ten Commandments Ten-part series, dates of transmission unknown. BBC World Service, Reflections

i. I am the Lord your God My aim in this series of Reflections will be to share with you some of the ways in which Jewish tradition, through its prophets and teachers and through the centuries, understood, interpreted and put into living practice the divine revelation that took place at Sinai some thirty-four centuries ago, and which was destined to change or to modify the moral climate for much of humanity. The rabbis of two thousand years ago speculated why this great event took place on the obscure Mount Sinai in what was then, and for a long, long time afterwards, very much a no-man’s land. In a Talmudic legend the mountains of the region actually quarrelled, each extolling its own height and importance. But God chose Sinai precisely because it was the smallest and least significant, resembling the leader and God’s spokesman to Israel – Moses – the most humble of men, who did not even want the mantle of leadership in the first place. It was not given in Israel nor in Egypt, but in the desert, in open and in public, in a place that belonged to no one, so that no tribe or nation could argue against the acceptance of this moral teaching in the time to come. And then the Voice spoke forth: ‘I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.’19 This is the first of the Commandments and at first sight it does not so much ‘command’ as it asserts. The Hebrew anochi adonai elohecha, ‘I am the Lord your God . . . ’ is in the second person singular, the old-fashioned ‘thine’, to suggest that God is a ‘personal’ God. A rabbinic interpretation, known as a midrash, literally ‘a searching out’, gives a helpful analogy: just as thousands of people can look at a great portrait and each one feels that it looks at her or him, so everyone who stood at Sinai felt that

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the Divine Voice was addressing him or her directly. As the medieval commentator Moses Nachmanides explained, it means that each individual is responsible and accountable to God. He also teaches us why this seeming ‘non-commandment’ is the basis for all the others, by offering a parable of a king who enters a lawless and chaotic country. The people around him urge, ‘Issue decrees!’ But the king refuses. ‘Not yet!’ he tells them. ‘When you have accepted my sovereignty, then I will issue decrees.’ Which is to say that God’s authority must be firmly established. Indeed, what God demands is that Israel recognizes and accepts no other divine being because He liberated Israel from Egypt. That alone, insist the rabbis, justifies that we subject ourselves to God. And for Jews that God is not only Creator but also Revealer and ever-present in history as Redeemer became and remained a firm article of faith ever since. In a sense this commandment is addressed to the human heart. In a profoundly spiritual way, all depends on it. A daring midrash goes even further when it paraphrases its opening words: ‘I am the Lord, if I am your God!’ That God can be God if (and, we wonder, is it ‘only if ’?) men and women acknowledge Him as God. Not surprisingly, and to this day, at the centre of Jewish prayers, morning and evening, we proclaim that watchword of our faith: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One!’ ii. You shall have no other gods beside Me I want to reflect on the second of the Ten Commandments in the Hebrew Bible (a little different from the Christian version20) and the powerful effect it has had on Jewish thought and practice. The words are clear and uncompromising: You shall have no other gods beside me. You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I, the Lord

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your God, am an impassioned (or jealous) God, visiting the guilt of the fathers upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generations of those who reject (or hate) Me, but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep My commandments.21

It is clear that this commandment is addressed to the human mind. And it asks that men and women abandon all notions and images that would, as it were, limit or contain the infinity and eternity of God. It is a difficult commandment to keep and if you are familiar with the biblical account in the book of Exodus, you will know that only a few weeks after the Children of Israel enthusiastically accepted the commandments, in a moment of insecurity they fashioned and began to worship a golden calf. Indeed, I have often felt that one of the longest and spiritually most demanding struggles in the history of my religion – and in Christianity and Islam – has been the one against idolatry, which I can best define as becoming enslaved to the material things of this world. Clearly that struggle is still going on and I have the conviction that true and universal freedom will only be achieved when we shall free ourselves of the domination of the many and man-made false gods that we follow and worship. Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, or Nachmanides, who lived in thirteenth-century Spain, gave a surprisingly modern analysis of the stages and degrees of idolatry. At first they were likened to angels and what he terms ‘separate intelligences’, seeing the powers that rule the world as opposing forces of good and evil and of light and darkness, and people following now this one and then the other. Then came the worship of heavenly bodies, of constellations and of certain human beings who thus maintained power, and Nachmanides adds with a touch of realism: ‘they were wicked but they were no absolute fools!’ Third came the worship of demons, through necromancy, the deep desire to communicate with the dead and the certainties vulnerable people derive from that.

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A nineteenth-century leader of the Hassidim, or somewhat mystical-oriented Jews in Eastern Europe, Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, considered that this prohibition includes making idols of the commandments themselves. So many of the fanaticisms of our time, in the name of religion and ideologies, do just this, and so betray them. He taught that, ‘we should never imagine that the chief purpose (of the Ten Commandments) is the outer form, that is to say just the doing; rather it is the inward meaning, the devotion with which it is done.’ Virtually all the sages of Judaism agree that the ideal men and women are ‘those who love Me’, those who worship God without expecting reward. There is a hint, too, in this commandment that the relationship between God and individual human beings is somewhat like marriage and that both faithfulness and unfaithfulness will have their own consequences. Love creates more love. And rejection and hate breed violence and dissention. To this day in synagogues (as in mosques) everywhere there are no graven or sculpted images and those who worship in them try hard to keep in mind the warning of the psalmist against all sorts of idols: ‘they that make them shall become like them!’22 iii. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain The third of the Ten Commandments must put me very much on my mettle since it is concerned with the right and wrong use of human speech itself. The original Hebrew text is quite terse and can best be rendered in English as follows: ‘You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain; for the Lord will not clear (or hold guiltless) one who takes His name in vain!’23 It would be just as correct to translate the key Hebrew word lashav as ‘You shall not swear falsely by the name of the Lord’, and clearly this divine utterance at Sinai is a natural continuation of the second commandment. That not only do ‘graven images’ diminish the reality and majesty of God, but so do ‘isms’ and slogans and ideologies if we, as it were, make gods out of them.

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You and I live in an age of written contracts and many important things we promise or agree to do need signed, even witnessed, documents, but in our early history and even in my grandfather’s time, the word of a man or woman was quite enough. It was truly his or her bond. Traditionally this commandment was understood to forbid false oaths as well as the frivolous use of God’s name no matter what the occasion, be it in a court of law or a place of work or in the home. In the period of the rabbis of the Talmud two thousand years ago, even unnecessary blessings using God’s name came into this prohibition. That they may sound pious does not make them appropriate or acceptable. A twelfth-century biblical commentator, Abraham ibn Ezra, who lived in Spain but was much travelled, including London and Oxford in 1140 (and, incidentally, is celebrated in Robert Browning’s famous poem ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’, taught that people can get used to taking oaths in vain and that this leads to the coarsening of the human personality. It is certainly my own experience that people who are given to a great deal of swearing are generally insensitive and vulgar in more than just speech. A great Jewish teacher of our time was Martin Buber. He believed that this commandment concerned loyalty to God’s name and to God’s essence and that nothing should be done to tamper with the essential character of the Divine. Let it be itself. I completely share Buber’s conviction that it is of great spiritual importance to acknowledge God as God is, and not as we would like God to be. This commandment is also expressed in practical reverence for all forms in which we may find God’s name depicted. Any scroll or book or pamphlet, whether it is religious or secular, when it becomes damaged or worn out or simply no longer in use, if it has God’s name on it, is generally and formally buried in consecrated ground. In my own congregation in London we are about to introduce a new prayer book for the High Holy Days24 and right now we are in the process of arranging for the burial of some four thousand old volumes. It will

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illustrate more powerfully than any sermon both our connection and attachment to the revelation on Sinai and our respect for God, whom our ancestors met there. And you may also appreciate why it was so unspeakably painful when Jews had to witness the burning of holy scrolls and books on many occasions during the past thousand years, most recently by the Nazis. As it turned out, it was but a short step from burning human beings. One of my favourite psalms, the twenty-fourth, was called by one of my teachers ‘a portrait of the Lord’s gentleman’. It asks: Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord, And who may stand in the place of His holiness? Whose heart is pure, Who has not given up his soul to vain things, Nor sworn deceitfully.25

iv. Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy26 The fourth commandment in the Hebrew Bible is the only one of the ten which deals with what was originally a purely Jewish observance, namely the Sabbath, but in time it also affected the social history of mankind through its influence on Christianity and Islam. The commandment itself spells out its aim and reason: Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God: you shall not do any work; you, your son or daughter, your male or female servant, or your cattle, or the stranger who lives in your home. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy!27

Unusually, there are two versions of this commandment. The one I just recited is from the book of Exodus. The other is in the fifth book of the Bible, Deuteronomy, where the reason for the Sabbath

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is not so much creation (and therefore theological) but ethical and derived from Israel’s recent history: Remember you served as slaves in the land of Egypt and from there the Lord brought you out with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore, the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day!28

It was part of the miracle of the revelation at Sinai, argued the rabbis of two thousand years ago, that both versions were uttered at the same time. There is, in fact, an entire tractate or volume in the Talmud in which the many implications of the Sabbath – for individuals, families and communities – are fully discussed. What constitutes the ‘work’ you shall not do? Eventually 39 main categories were agreed, derived from the construction of the Tabernacle and, on the principle of ‘erecting a fence around the Torah’, to keep as far as humanly possible from violating a teaching in the Bible, there are scores of prohibitions, all of them designed to make the Sabbath entirely different from the six working days that precede it. Indeed, the only day with a specific name in Hebrew is the Sabbath. All the others are simply first, second, third days, up to six. One of the most respected commentators on the Bible, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, better known through his initials as Rashi, who lived in France in the eleventh century, stressed that remembering the Sabbath was a constant task. If you come across a desirable piece of food any time during the week, put it aside, he urged, so that you can enjoy it on the Sabbath. And when the Sabbath does come, consider as if all your work were completed, so that you shouldn’t even think about it. I often wish that Rashi had a set of instructions how to do this, but I keep trying . . . In fact, the Sabbath was to be set aside for rest and for prayer and study, and for family and friends. Some Jewish mystics believed (and I am one who still does) that on this day we receive an added soul, which makes us receptive to the joys of body and spirit.

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Friday night at home. Hugo with his children: (left to right) Naomi, Rachelle, Gaby and David.

A poetic and profound teacher in our century, Abraham Joshua Heschel, held that what was unique about the Sabbath is that it celebrates time rather than space. For six days we live under the tyranny of things of space, but on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time, turning from the results of creation to the mystery of creation.29 To this day, and in the home even more than in synagogue, after sundown on Friday special candles are lit, a prayer sanctifying the next twenty-four hours is recited over a cup of wine, children are blessed and human beings imitate God and make something as ordinary as time – holy!

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v. Honour your father and your mother The first four commandments in the Hebrew Bible deal with the relationship between men and women and God. The remaining six shift to the relationship between human beings and quite naturally the bridge that, as it were, harmonizes them is the fifth commandment, which speaks about family life: ‘Honour your father and your mother that you may long endure on the land which the Lord your God is giving you!’30 The connection is made quite clear by a rabbinic teaching31 which held that there are three partners in the creation of every human being: God and a father and a mother! And while the text in the Bible does not elaborate on how to ‘honour’ our parents, we can derive this from the honour due to the first Father, blessed be He. As in the first three commandments, it means acknowledge your parents, do not serve them because of expectations from their estate, and do not swear ‘by the life of my father or mother’ falsely or in vain. A more practical and quite moving answer is offered in the Talmud to the question: ‘What is honouring one’s parents? It means providing them with food and drink, clothing and warmth, and guiding their footsteps when they are old and weak.’32 The rabbis also noted that there are only two instances in the Bible where long life is promised as a reward for human action. One is for honouring parents, as we already know, and the other, in the book of Deuteronomy, is: ‘If along the road you chance upon a bird’s nest . . . and the mother sits over her fledglings or on the eggs, do not take the mother with her young. Let the mother go . . . ’33 This may be very easy to do, and the other often complicated and may demand sacrifices of time and means, but both aim to educate men and women in the art and practice of kindness. More than twenty-two centuries ago, a wise Jew, Jesus son of Sirach, in the apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus, elaborated on this commandment. He taught:

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A man is honoured if his father is honoured, and neglect of a mother is a disgrace to children. My son, look after your father in his old age; do nothing to vex him as long as he lives. Even if his mind fails, make allowances for him, And do not despise him because you are in your prime. If you support your father, it will never be forgotten but be put to credit against your sins; When you are in trouble, it will be remembered in your favour, and your sins will melt away like frost in the sunshine. To leave your father in the lurch is like blasphemy, and to provoke your mother’s anger is to call down the Lord’s curse.34

The rabbis were fond of telling stories about honouring parents, and as a father of children I am always happy to repeat them. One of my favourites concerns a pagan young man, Dama ben Natina, who was once visited by emissaries from the Temple in Jerusalem to buy from him a precious jewel for the breastplate of the high priest. Dama, however, refused to sell because the key to the jewel box was under the pillow of his sleeping father. When the would-be buyers returned some time later and offered more money, the young man sold it for the original price. He explained: ‘I do not wish to profit from honouring my father!’ A tenth-century Babylonian teacher, Saadia Gaon, insisted that, ‘the commandment to honour father and mother is greater than all the other nine commandments.’ And he added with heart-warming candour: ‘If you honour your parents, your children will honour you!’ vi. You shall not murder The sixth commandment in the Hebrew Bible states simply: lo tirzach, ‘You shall not murder’,35 and while the formulation is in the negative, it actually affirms the sanctity of human life. Indeed, throughout the Bible and the centuries, killing is the primeval sin and the most reprehensible of offences. The very first act

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of murder, when Cain kills Abel, is not just homicide (or the taking of human life by another human being), but fratricide. It is the shedding of the blood of a brother, and since it is a fundamental biblical teaching that all human beings are created by the One God and that God’s image is in all of us, murder – by this definition – is always the killing of a sister or a brother. And with it, the haunting image that such unlawfully shed blood cries out to God from the ground itself.36 Because the world was filled with violence, it was all but destroyed. This is the point and background to the story of the great Flood in the book of Genesis. That the world, as it were, got off to a false start. Only Noah and his family were its human survivors. The world was again given in human charge, but with it the admonition: ‘Who so sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made He man!’37 I see this connection as taking us to a higher ethical and, indeed, spiritual level. Rabbi Akiva, who lived in second-century Palestine and who was himself burnt at the stake by the Roman authorities for refusing to give up religious study and teaching, insisted that ‘whoever sheds blood destroys the divine image!’38 In Jewish teaching life is so precious that to preserve it virtually everything else takes second place to it. You may set aside or transgress all the mitzvot or religious commandments to save your own life, except three: murder, incest and public idolatry. In these cases it is better to die than to commit these offences. One of my favourite stories in the Talmud concerns a man who came to the teacher Rava, and said: ‘The prefect of my town has ordered me to kill a certain man and if I refuse, he will kill me.’ Rava replied: ‘Let him kill you, you do not commit murder, why should you think that your blood is redder than his, perhaps his is redder than yours!’39 In Jewish law murder is a capital offence and the punishment is death. Yet, it always required two eyewitnesses to convict and only one to find the accused ‘not guilty’ and if a court agreed to the

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carrying out of a death sentence even once in its lifetime, it was branded a ‘cruel court’. I also like the rabbis’ sensitive extension of the notion of killing. If someone embarrasses his or her fellow – and therefore they blush, or gives unnecessary fright – making them pale, thus causing blood to rush in or out of the face, it is reckoned to be shedding of blood. Self-defence and the defence of the weak are positive values and to be killed is never a virtue, and while there is a concept of the ‘just war’ in Judaism, there is no term or notion of a ‘holy war’. Even martyrdom has never been encouraged, much less sought after, in Jewish tradition. The Hebrew term for it, kiddush ha-shem, is literally ‘the sanctification of God’s name’ and in my own youth when I lived through the tragic period of the Holocaust, I recall debates even in the concentration camps and was strengthened by those who held that kiddish ha-chayim, ‘the sanctification of life’ and, therefore, survival, was an even higher obligation. In a century that has witnessed more killing than any other that I can think of, and in a time when terrorism has so devalued human existence, I cherish the Jewish toast we offer on all possible occasions. It is simply l’chayim, ‘to life!’ vii. You shall not commit adultery Today’s Reflection is about the seventh commandment: in Hebrew lo tin’af, ‘You shall not commit adultery’,40 and because it deals with the somewhat taboo subject of sex, it has given rise to many a lighthearted comment. You do not have to be a Sigmund Freud to realize that for that very reason it masks deeper than average concerns. One anecdote, cast in the present-day formulation of such stories, has Moses come down from Sinai and he announces: ‘I have good news and bad news. Which do you want first?’ ‘The good news!’ say the people. ‘Well, I got them down to ten!’ Satisfaction. ‘What then is the bad news?’ ‘Seven stays!’

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The fact is that adultery is an ugly word and the commandment intends to raise family life to the highest level of importance, and to keep it there. It complements honour to parents and intends to impart a sense of responsibility for all members of the family. With a slight touch of embarrassment I ought to explain that in its biblical context, this commandment was addressed chiefly to the situation of the married women. It was important in a maledominated or patrilineal society, where adultery was the violation of the husband’s exclusive right to his wife but not the other way round. As you will know in the period of the Bible, a man could have more than one wife. Jacob had two and some concubines and King Solomon – would you believe it? – had 1,000! Jews living in Muslim lands continued this practice up to the modern period (though not in such numbers, I hasten to add); while those living in Christian societies adopted the custom of monogamy. Indeed, in the year 1000 CE, Rabbi Gershom [of Mainz] and 100 of his colleagues in Europe enacted a legal prohibition against polygamy, which remains in force and by now pretty well everywhere [in the Jewish world]. For the biblical writers both the adulterous man and the woman were objects of contempt. One famous episode concerns King David, who so desired Bathsheba that he sent her unsuspecting husband Uriah the Hittite into a battle and to his certain death. Then David married her. But God sent the prophet Nathan to the King and he told the story of a poor man who had a single lamb which he loved and how a rich neighbour forced him to give it up so that a guest could be entertained. David became angry at this gross injustice and wanted to punish the rich man. Then the prophet pointed at the King: ‘You are that man!’41 Perhaps it is appropriate that the severest warnings against adultery should be found in what we call Wisdom Literature. In the book of Proverbs there is a tactful admonition to men: ‘drink waters from your own cisterns’42 and the sensitive advice: ‘ . . . rejoice with the wife of your youth. Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant

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deer. Let her breasts satisfy you at all times and be content always with her love’.43 There is a false sense to security in the thought expressed by Job, ‘the eye of the adulterer waits for twilight saying: “No eye shall see me!”’44 But the wise author of Proverbs knows that ‘the ways of man are before the eyes of the Lord and He considers all his goings!’45 By the time of the rabbis some two thousand years ago, the biblical law which called for the death penalty for adultery was modified. To be convicted it had to be proved that the woman knew the law relating to it and in any case by the year 40 CE the death penalty itself was abolished. What remained were public censure and the right of her husband to divorce her. The man involved was likewise to be punished. But adultery was a powerful image for all kinds of faithlessness and it is a frequent metaphor for idolatry. In both biblical and the rabbinic tradition, God and Israel are, as it were, married to each other. But the prophet Ezekiel who lived in Babylonia likened Israel to a wayward young woman, Aholibah, who falls for the dashing glamour of a succession of lovers – Assyrians, Chaldeans, Babylonians and their pagan ways – betraying their loyalty to God. And the tragedy: that they will cast her off and humiliate her and she will have no one to blame, except herself. And so to my favourite: another prophet, Hosea, whose own wife Gomer deserted him for other men, yet his love was so great that when she was cast off by her lovers, he tenderly welcomed her back and in the process understood something of the accepting nature of God’s love for His creatures. And to this day, traditional Jews, as they strap on their arms in preparation for prayer each weekday morning the leather phylacteries which contain the teaching about God’s Oneness and the duty to love Him, recite Hosea’s version of God’s promise: ‘I betroth you to Me forever, I betroth you to Me with integrity and justice, with tenderness and love. I betroth you to Me with faithfulness and you will know the Lord!’46

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viii. You shall not steal The eighth commandment asserts without any ifs or buts in Hebrew: lo tignov, ‘You shall not steal’.47 There is a tradition that in the context of the Ten Commandments, whose violation deserves capital punishment, it refers to the stealing of persons, but most people take this to mean a prohibition against all kinds of theft and that property rights are important. The rabbis of the Talmud some two thousand years ago considered that it belongs to those laws which people know even without a divine command. I therefore ask myself: what then is the new or special element? The fact is that the content of several commandments was not particularly original, after all, the Code of Hammurabi48 – centuries earlier – legislated against theft as it did against murder, adultery and false witnessing. Jewish tradition itself speaks about a basic and universal morality, the so-called seven Noachide laws which also include these crimes. The novelty is that it is no longer possible to separate individual morality from public morality. To be just and honest is the rightful expectation of all men and women, but it is also the responsibility of the whole community. Stealing is a fairly common way through which unsuspecting, or even suspecting, people fall into the despair and trap of poverty. To guard against poverty or to lessen its destructive effects is one of the great biblical, and indeed Jewish preoccupations. The widow, the orphan and the stranger – which is to say, the vulnerable members of society – are the concerns of God and because human beings are seen to be God’s partners in the task of perfecting creation, they should be ours as well. Anything that would give them less than they need for a dignified life, is robbing them of their due. In the same way, every seventh year is a sabbatical year in which the land was allowed to rest (I sometimes think so that it should not be robbed of its vitality) and just as importantly, slaves were to be freed, and in the fiftieth or Jubilee year, all lands and properties were to be restored to the original owners, no matter how or why

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they left their possession, so that a new chance could be enjoyed by everyone. While these commandments make stealing an offence against God as well as the victim, the only way it can be forgiven is when what is stolen is first restored in full to its rightful owner, and only then may God be asked for pardon. The rabbis also taught that theft includes deceit and fraud, for it is like stealing another person’s mind, and they add, it is forbidden to deceive anyone, whether Jew or non-Jew.49 Just weights and just measures are also hallmarks of all God-fearing people. I warm to the ethical sensitivity of a story about Rabbi Shimon ben Shetech,50 who one day sent his students to buy him a camel from an Arab merchant. They returned full of beans and showed their master not only the camel but also a precious jewel they found hidden in its bridle. ‘Did the Arab know it was there when he sold you the animal,’ he asked. ‘Of course not!’ they said. ‘Then return the stone at once!’ and when they did, the merchant exclaimed: ‘Blessed be the God of Rabbi Shimon!’ ix. You shall not give false witness against your neighbour The ninth commandment focuses on one of the two ingredients without which neither societies nor the world could endure, namely justice. The other is love. The commandment states: ‘You shall not give false witness against your neighbour!’51 The immediate image that comes to mind is, obviously, a law court, where the chief concern is to correct human relationships and where those accused of wrongdoing are either found guilty or, just as important, declared innocent; where the vulnerable receive protection and the powerful made to keep within the bounds of what is decent and legal. Above all, it is where justice is seen to be done. In this realm, truth is everything and falsehood has the power to undermine creation itself. Hence justice is not only vital for the interests of men and women, it is a value for the Creator Himself!

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When the great teacher Rabbi Akiva had a group of men before him in a lawsuit he admonished them: ‘Know before whom you stand. Not before me, Akiva, but before the Creator of the world!’52 Such is the reverence for the truth that the rabbis of two thousand years ago insisted that ‘Everything in the world was created by God, except the art of lying!’ I am not always sure whether it is cynicism or realism that ascribes to us humans falsehood as our only completely original invention. In a somewhat fanciful but profound homily the rabbis ‘paired’ the Ten Commandments with the ten plagues that befell Egypt. Noting that the ninth plague was darkness, they have God saying: ‘If your testimony is not as clear to you as the light, do not give it!’ But this commandment goes far beyond the formal confines of the courtroom. It speaks about the character of men and women, and the corrupting influence of telling lies. The liar infects himself as well as the social fabric. Honesty is a requirement for home and family life; for confidence in our fellow creatures and a sense of security, it needs to be reflected in the market place as well as in the courts. I cherish the thought expressed in the daily prayers of my tradition: ‘Man should always be in awe of heaven, in private as well as in public. He should tell the truth and speak it in his heart.’53 But what if men and women don’t? A famous second-century teacher, Rabbi Simeon (who was Akiva’s student) declared: ‘The punishment of the liar is that he is not believed even when he speaks the truth!’54 I suppose this is a truism, but worth repeating and bearing in mind just the same. A more practical, indeed stark way to discourage false-witnessing, has to do with the origins of the well-known phrase, ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone!’55 If the penalty for a crime was stoning, the witness responsible for the verdict was obliged to throw the first stone. This had the double purpose of underlining that life itself depended on truth-telling and that if it turned out later that the witness lied, he was not only guilty of swearing falsely, but of murder itself!

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If I am an enthusiast for the biblical ideal for human life – and I am! – it is because justice is consistently coupled with compassion. And when the prophet Isaiah declares that, ‘the Lord of hosts is exalted through justice and God – the Holy One – is sanctified through righteousness,’56 justice and holiness become one as well. Perhaps I can best sum up the desired effect of this commandment with the opening line of one of my favourite psalms: ‘I will take heed to my ways that I sin not with my tongue.’57 x. You shall not covet your neighbour’s house, etc. This Reflection is my final contribution to the present series devoted to the Ten Commandments and not surprisingly it concerns the tenth and, I sometimes think, the most difficult of the commandments revealed at Sinai. ‘You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is your neighbour’s.’58 Difficult, because unlike the other commandments, it is not about any kind of action but it addresses itself to human emotions. And how can feelings be commanded? Certainly it is the most inward of commandments and its aim is to deal with our greedy impulses. It is the least ‘culpable’. Virtually impossible to prove in one way or another and I see it as ethically the most sensitive. Indeed it helps to ‘protect’ all the other commands. The prophet Micah gives a graphic description of how thoughts, base ones at that, give rise to destructive action: Woe to them that devise iniquity and work evil upon their beds! When the morning is light, they practise it, because it is in the power of their hand. And they covet fields and take them by violence; and houses and take them away; so they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage . . . 59

And when this happens, the prophet adds, ‘this time is evil.’

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The medieval commentator Moses Nachmanides is confident that ‘he who does not covet will never harm his neighbour’ and perhaps to make us feel better, a fourteenth-century French rabbi and physician, Levi ben Gershon, explains that ‘this prohibition is not violated until something is done to obtain the object.’ Personally I warm to the insight of Abraham ibn Ezra, who lived in twelfth-century Spain. He tells a parable about a peasant who doesn’t covet a princess, nor desires to have wings like a bird, because he knows it is impossible, so human desires are controllable and they are not to overpower reason. In a democratic age, the parable about the princess may not be appealing, but the idea holds: that we can train ourselves not to be preoccupied with destructive emotions. There is a profound postscript to the version of the Ten Commandments in the book of Deuteronomy with which I, too, want to conclude. After the revelation the people are fearful: perhaps mortal men and women are not meant to encounter God? But God reassures Moses: ‘I have heard the plea that this people made to you, they did well to speak thus. May they always be of such mind, to revere Me and follow all My commandments, that it may go well with them and their children forever!’60 I read this as an expression of hope on the part of God because we have freedom of will. God can guide, even cajole us, but He cannot force us to walk in the right path. Human beings are free to make ethical choices, or as the Talmud has it: ‘Everything is in the hands of Heaven, except the fear of Heaven.’61 At the end there is not only revelation but also mystery, and beyond both the inscrutable will and ways of God. Perhaps the best we can do is to reflect with the world-wise Preacher of Ecclesiastes: ‘The end of the matter, all having been heard: fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the great duty of humanity!’62

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8. Korach: Leadership 12 July 1986. BBC World Service, Reflections

Good leadership, the subject of the following two broadcasts, was one of Hugo’s recurrent themes. Part of the Sabbath service consists of the public reading and exposition of a portion of the Torah. In the synagogue, this is no ordinary book but a hand-written parchment scroll kept in a special ark and decorated as beautifully as possible. It is ceremonially paraded around the sanctuary, carefully undressed and proudly elevated, and then a section is chanted to read. In some communities the Torah is read in the course of a year; some follow a three-yearly cycle, but the actual sections are the same everywhere and they all have a specific title. This Shabbat the Torah portion is called Korach from the book of Numbers – chapters 16 to 18 – and includes, as you may expect, the story of Korach’s rebellion against the leadership of Moses. In the event the rebellion fails and in cryptic fashion we are told that Korach and his followers were simply swallowed up into the ground. Not a happy story, but it raises a lot of questions about leadership and the importance of character in human society. It begins with two complaints that Korach, who was part of Israel’s broader leadership himself, brings against Moses and his brother Aaron, who was the high priest. ‘Why’ he demands, ‘do you exalt yourselves above the rest of the people?’63 And an accusation: ‘You have not brought us into a land flowing with milk and honey . . .!’64 The complaints appear to be valid: Moses and Aaron were neither average nor successful and it seems to me that the problem is not just a biblical one, but an urgent and pressing one for us and for our time as well. Who are the true leaders? An easy answer: obviously those

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whom men and women and nations follow! Generally the large and dominating personalities. History is full of them: Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler. But this is not the biblical answer. Korach has followers – two hundred and fifty important leaders – yet Moses is the true leader because Moses recognizes the real problems of his people (that they must recover from the destructive effects of slavery in Egypt) and has solutions for them (to accept God’s revelation of the moral code at Sinai and move slowly towards the Promised Land). And throughout, his personal needs are secondary and those of his people – and his ideals for them – have first importance. As the Torah sees it, true leadership is not following, not personality, but human needs and ideal goals. Throughout history we can see both kinds of leadership, often side by side: the great religious reformer Buddha and the mighty King Ashoka; the philosopher Aristotle and the world conqueror Alexander; the educator Rousseau and General Napoleon; the humanitarian Albert Einstein and the unspeakable Hitler. For me, the true leaders are clearly Buddha, Aristotle, Rousseau, Einstein. By accepted standards, they failed. None of them attained his goal. Moses failed as well: he never entered the Promised Land. But the point of the Bible is that the real test of leadership is whether the life of the people is made better, and by this test Moses was the true leader, not Korach. His heritage is still the heritage of Israel. Today’s Torah lesson is a healthy reminder that good leadership must strive after peace and health and education – that will not be deflected even if the going is rough and ideal not yet attained.

9. Moses and Joshua 26 July 1992. Capital Radio, Reflections In the course of the last few weeks I have spent many an evening as guest speaker or as a participant at the Annual General Meetings

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of at least half a dozen communal and charitable institutions. It is remarkable how similar their problems were: financial worries, which come as no surprise given the recession and the tightening of financial belts everywhere; and the other common theme was the need and the search for willing and able leadership. How to find men and women who care enough about their community or society that they are ready to give time, talent, energy, and who also have vision and drive, the knack of energizing others. And at the same time can get their organization or institution to do its job, be it to care for the vulnerable, educate the young, keep a church or synagogue or mosque functioning or even, as was the case in our recent election,65 to run the country. What is difficult to define is the crucial ingredient for this important but illusive thing called leadership. Imagine for example a candidate who declares: ‘Unfortunately, I have the wrong image. I am unattractive, I stammer, I get easily angry and I have fits of temper. I am one-sided and I can never compromise.’ It’s doubtful whether such a person would ever find favour with an electorate and yet this was precisely the platform for the finest leader in the history of my people, namely Moses. Fortunately he has a message rather than just an image or the kind of thing that public relations officers like to distribute about their clients. Only the other day in synagogues everywhere we read the story in the Bible of a time when Moses was old and worried about succession.66 He pleads with God that his people be not left ‘as sheep that have no shepherd’67 and he more or less puts the burden on God to appoint his successor. God’s response says a great deal about this critical ingredient. He instructs Moses to appoint Joshua, the son of Nun, to be the leader of the people because, as God points out, he is ‘a man in whom there is spirit’.68 Not because he is a great military leader or because he is a fine orator and certainly not because he can project a favourable image, but because he has spirit. And whenever I look around within our community or when it comes to any kind of important election, I

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always wonder whether this or that candidate has spirit. Clearly it is not a physical quality nor is it an intellectual one, but a moral quality. And happy as well as lucky is the society that can find such people. But a note of caution: a very good friend of mine used to be a children’s summer camp director. It was his custom not only to interview the children who were to be in his charge, but also their parents. He would ask every parent the same question: ‘Is your son or daughter a leader or a follower?’ One day a father replied, ‘My son, he is absolutely a leader. What his mother and I can’t understand is why no one is following him!’

10. Moses’ Farewell69 15 August 1987. BBC World Service, Reflections This Shabbat will find worshippers following that part of the book of Deuteronomy which contains the second farewell address given by Moses to his people.70 The aged leader knows that while the people are about to enter the Promised Land, he will not go with them, and it is a mark of his greatness that instead of voicing regret (which he most certainly felt), he gives them spiritual preparation for the future. In the section from chapters 7 to 11, he reminds his hearers of their past mistakes, especially their dramatic reversion to idolatry, when their frustrations made them build and worship a golden calf. ‘And now, O Israel,’ he asks, ‘what does the Lord your God demand of you?’71 First and foremost that they be true to the covenant or the promise of loyalty to God with which the Jewish experience began. And in graphic language, Moses urges the Jews who were faithful in circumcising all male babies as a sign of the covenant with Abraham to go a big step further. ‘Circumcise your hearts,’ he pleads, ‘and be stiff-necked no more!’72 Which is to say, express

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your faithfulness on emotional and spiritual levels, as well as on the ritual one. And the way to do this is to imitate certain divine qualities. ‘For the Lord your God is God Supreme,’ he insists, ‘ . . . great, mighty, awesome, who shows no favour and takes no bribe, but upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow and loves the stranger, providing him with food and clothing. You, too, must love the stranger’.73 Integrity and caring for widows and orphans, readily understandable and, indeed, many ethical codes of antiquity share these concerns, but to love the stranger is unique. In fact, a careful reading of the Torah will show that this commandment is repeated 36 times. Almost as often as ‘Love the Lord your God’. I can only conclude that in antiquity, as in the time and world in which you and I live, strangers did not have an easy time of it. Just as in those days, as in these days, Israel was surrounded by many forms of tempting idolatries. By way of contrast, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself,’74 is commanded only once, presumably because it is easier, although there are days – and now that summer is here and windows are open – there are nights as well, when I wonder . . . In the Torah there are two reasons for ‘loving the stranger’. One ‘because you know the heart of the stranger, having been strangers in Egypt’;75 as if to say, you, Children of Israel, can identify, you can put yourself in his or her place, because you shared that experience. It is a psychological reason. The other is historical: you were strangers, you were treated badly. Don’t do it to others! It was a thirteenth-century Spanish Jew, Moses Nachmanides, who understood the ‘religious’ reason. When Israel were slaves and oppressed in Egypt, what did they do? They cried to God! And God hears the cry of the persecuted and saves them. Therefore, acting kindly towards those who have no claim on you is a form of imitating God. It is, in fact, a way of expressing love of God. And that in the ‘stranger’ we are directed to discover the presence

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of the redeeming God. But let me confess partiality to a sixteenthcentury ancestor of mine, Rabbi Loew of Prague,76 who taught, simply: ‘Love the stranger because it is the right thing to do!’

11. Blessing and Curse 22 August 1987. BBC World Service, Reflections I don’t know how intimately familiar William Shakespeare was with the Hebrew Bible. The Merchant of Venice is a reminder that of Jews themselves he had only a painful stereotype, but Hamlet’s famous ‘To be or not to be . . . ’ echoes perfectly a key-thought of the Torah lesson for this Shabbat.77 It is a section in the book of Deuteronomy which begins with the Hebrew word, r’eh, which means ‘See!’ in the singular, as if to say that every individual can see for himself or herself God’s lifeserving commandments, and choose to obey or to disobey. ‘See, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse. The blessing, if you shall hearken unto the commandments of the Lord your God . . . and the curse, if . . . you . . . turn aside . . . to go after other gods’.78 And the imagery is both concrete and dramatic. The Children of Israel are led to a valley between two actual mountains. One of them, Mount Gerizim, was identified with blessing and life; the other, Mount Ebal, represented death and the curse. And those ancestors of mine who stood there almost three and a half thousand years ago were told that they had a choice about the direction and quality of their individual and collective life. The mountains are still there. Gerizim is also known as Jebel alTur in Arabic and I happen to know that it is 855 metres high, while Ebal or Jebel Islamiya measures 923 metres, both in the vicinity of the town of Shechem or Nablus, a controversial region in those days, as it is again in our generation. But the two mountains are quite unlike each other. Although both

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rise from the same soil, both are watered by the same rain and the same atmosphere covers them both, the reaction on them is not the same. Ebal is steep, forbidding and barren, while Gerizim sprouts a number of springs, it is fertile and in springtime covered with flowers and green. Indeed the small Samaritan community celebrates its Passover among its peaks to this day and consider it the holiest of places in Israel. A nineteenth-century German rabbi, Samson Rafael Hirsch, knew about the region and understood so well why they were such perfect symbols for the blessing and the curse. Because, he taught, they ‘are not conditional on external circumstances, but on our own inner receptivity for the one or the other.’79 That there is a kind of spiritual chemistry that can pull us in this direction or in that. What is fundamental to biblical teaching is that men and women have a choice and not unexpectedly the thrust of the Torah is that in every way possible they should choose the blessing and life so that ‘you and your descendants may live’.80 The only thing you cannot do is to move towards Gerizim and Ebal at the same time. And as I reflect on this story, I can say that its message has not been lost on us because to this day Jews have an astonishing love affair with life. Whatever the occasion, the toast is always l’chayim, which means ‘to life’. Let me end with the special prayer echoed in synagogues everywhere for the New Moon this coming Tuesday night and, of course, it is for life. May the new month being us a life of fulfilment and peace, of goodness and blessing; a life filled with awe of God and fear of sin . . . Without self-reproach and shame . . . marked by love of Your teaching; when the desires of our hearts may be fulfilled for good.

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12. You May Not Hide Yourself 15 September 1992. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought

On 24 August 1992, gangs of neo-Nazis set fire to a hostel for asylum-seekers in Rostock in eastern Germany and a number of similarly violent attacks against refugees followed in other parts of Germany, including Cottbus, a town just thirty-two kilometres from the site of Lieberose, the Nazi slave labour camp where Hugo and his father were once imprisoned. I am sure we all have this experience from time to time: a melody gets into our head and it will just keep buzzing about. With me, it is sometimes a word or an expression as well. This morning that ‘bee’ in my brain is in Hebrew, lo tuchal l’hitalem, from the Torah lesson in the synagogue this past Sabbath,81 and it means ‘You may not hide yourself!’82 You see your neighbour’s ox or ass roaming lost, or in trouble because its burden is too heavy and a host of other complicated situations, and you are busy getting on with your own work and life and the temptation is really to look the other way. But no, you must stop. Do something to help, even if it is inconvenient. To have a measure of moral excellence, you have to overcome the natural selfish instincts – ‘finders, keepers,’ we say – and develop the habit of returning what is not yours, responding to the needs and fears of others. It is no bad thing to be a touch altruistic. When I saw those unspeakable skinheads firebombing refugee hostels in Rostock and Cottbus, it was the large crowds of cheering and even silent onlookers that troubled me most. As it happens I was in prison in that area when I was a teenager and it was there that ‘bystander’ became a dirty word in my vocabulary. Not to be able to ‘hide’ yourself, but to wade in, even if a bit risky, must be the mark of spiritual civilization.

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Gen. 13.7. Gen. 13.8–9. Cave of the Patriarchs Massacre, 25 February 1994. Isa. 57.19. Genesis 23. Magonet, J. and Blue, L. (eds) (1985), Forms of Prayer for Jewish Worship III. London: RSGB, p. 891. Gen. 32.3–36. Gen. 32.24. Gen. 32.25–6. Gen. 32.27–8. Genesis 37–40. Joseph und seine Brüder (Joseph and his Brothers) (1933–42). A fourth volume, Joseph der Ernährer (Joseph, the Provider) was published in 1943. Gen. 37.1–5. Plaut, W. G. (1981), The Torah: A Modern Commentary. New York: UAHC, p. 244. Gen. 44.18–47:27. Gen. 42.7. Plaut, W. G. (1981), The Torah: A Modern Commentary. New York: UAHC, p. 268. Gen. 45.3. Plaut, W. G. (1981), The Torah: A Modern Commentary. New York: UAHC, p. 282. Gen. 45.5. Plaut, W. G. (1981), The Torah: A Modern Commentary. New York: UAHC, p. 282. Exod. 2.11. Exod. 20.2. Plaut, W. G. (1981). The Torah: A Modern Commentary. New York: UAHC, p. 539. The Anglican version of the Ten Commandments has ‘I am the Lord your God’ as a preface rather than as the first commandment, with ‘You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image’ as the second commandment, while the Jewish version of the Decalogue includes ‘You shall have no other gods beside me’ as part of the second commandment. It is different again for Orthodox, Catholic and Lutheran Christians. Exod. 20.3–6. Plaut, W. G. (1981), The Torah: A Modern Commentary. New York: UAHC, p. 539. Ps. 115.8. Exod. 20.7. Magonet, J. and Blue, L. (eds) (1985), Forms of Prayer for Jewish Worship III. London: RSGB. Ps. 24.3–4. See also ‘Shabbat’, p. 51. Exod. 20.8–11. Plaut, W. G. (1981), The Torah: A Modern Commentary. New York: UAHC, p. 547. Deut. 5.15.

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29 See A. J. Heschel’s 1951 essay, The Sabbath: Its Meaning For Modern Man. 30 Exod. 20.12. Plaut, W. G. (1981), The Torah: A Modern Commentary. New York: UAHC, p. 554. 31 Nachmanides. 32 Kiddushin 31b. 33 Deut. 22.6–7. 34 Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 3:11–16. 35 Exod. 20.13. 36 Gen. 4.10. 37 Gen. 9.6. 38 Tosefta Yevamot 8.4. 39 Pesachim 25b. 40 Exod. 20.13. 41 2 Sam. 12.7. 42 Prov. 5.15. 43 Prov. 5.19. 44 Job 24.15. 45 Prov. 5.21. 46 Hos. 2.21–22. See also p. 137. 47 Exod. 20.13. 48 Hammurabi was the ruler of Babylon in about 1780 BCE. 49 Hullin 94A. 50 120–40 BCE. 51 Exod. 20.13. 52 T. Jer. Sanh. 1.1. 53 Magonet, J. and Blue, L. (eds) (1977), Forms of Prayer for Jewish Worship I. London: RSGB, p. 217. 54 Avot d’Rabbi Natan 30. 55 John 8.7. 56 Isa. 5.16. 57 Ps. 39.1. 58 Exod. 20.14. 59 Mic. 2.1–2. 60 Deut. 5.25–26. Plaut, W. G. (1981), The Torah: A Modern Commentary. New York: UAHC, pp. 1358–9. 61 Berachot 33b. 62 Eccles. 12.13. 63 Num. 16.3. 64 Num. 16.14. 65 The UK general election was held on 9 April 1992. To the surprise of pollsters, the Conservative Party was re-elected, under the leadership of John Major. 66 Numbers 27. 67 Num. 27.17. 68 Num. 27.18.

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69 See also ‘Tolerance’, p. 160; ‘Assassination of Anwar Sadat’, p. 162; and ‘Inter Faith Network: Dialogue’, p. 165. 70 Deuteronomy 7–11. 71 Deut. 10.12. Plaut, W. G. (1981), The Torah: A Modern Commentary. New York: UAHC, p. 1405. 72 Deut. 10.16. 73 Deut. 10.17–19. Plaut, W. G. (1981), The Torah: A Modern Commentary. New York: UAHC, p. 1405. 74 Lev. 19.18. 75 Exod. 23.19. 76 See ‘Jews of Prague: Legend of the Golem’, p. 191. 77 Deuteronomy 11. 78 Deut. 11.26–8. 79 Hirsch, S. R. (1962), The Pentateuch – with Translation and Commentary, Gateshead: Judaica Press. 80 Deut. 30.19. 81 Deuteronomy 22. 82 Deut. 22.3.

Hugo was my rabbi, my teacher, my friend. Hugo brought me back to Judaism as a worshipper and a practitioner after years of lip service brought about by the distant rabbis of my childhood. ‘Let us practise tolerance, cherish harmony and celebrate difference,’ said Hugo, and what he preached, he practised. His public profile was high. He was loved by Jew and nonJew. He was the totally acceptable face of the Diaspora Jew. He was both haimishe 1 and intellectual, warm, witty and wise. He was not without faults. He was a man, not a deity. That’s why we all responded to both the man and the message. He’s buried next door to my late husband2 so I ‘see’ and talk to him often. In fact, only yesterday I took him a tulip. Spring can make a girl feel a little wistful.

—Maureen Lipman, actress

THE PROPHETS AND OTHER BOOKS OF THE BIBLE

1. Hannah 11 January 1987. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought According to a rabbinic tradition there were seven women prophets in the Bible and I would like to tell you a little about one of my favourites, Hannah. Not only the story of how she became the mother of another prophet – Samuel – but also how appearances can be misleading, and how unwise it is to jump to conclusions. Hannah lived just a little over three thousand years ago. She married a nice enough man called Elkanah, but to their great regret she was childless. There is a suggestion that it was Hannah herself who urged her husband to take a second wife, which he did. Her name was Peninah and she did have children. But the plan did not work. Instead of happiness and fulfilment, Peninah taunted Hannah and only added to her frustration and misery. Hannah herself was a religious woman. She visited the Temple at Shiloh regularly – there was as yet no great Temple in Jerusalem – and on one occasion she just poured out her heart in prayer, but only her lips moved. The High Priest Eli watched Hannah for a while, put two and

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two together and accused her of drunkenness! ‘Oh no, my lord!’ she protested, ‘I am a woman of sorrowful spirit. I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but have poured out my very soul before the Lord . . . Out of the abundance of my grief have I spoken.’3 Now Eli was sorry himself. He added his prayers to hers and Hannah returned to her husband and home comforted and consoled. Better still, and the right time later, she gave birth to a baby boy and named him Shmuel or Samuel, Hebrew for ‘God heard’. And she made a promise that when the child will be weaned, he will be given into permanent service in God’s Temple. In time, the boy Samuel was taken to Shiloh and that is where he grew up, but more about that on another occasion.4 The rabbis of two thousand years ago, who also loved this story, note that when Hannah prayed, she was the first to use the expression ‘Lord of Hosts’,5 meaning the Creator and Ruler of the universe, and in a number of legends they elaborated on her prayer. Indeed they pre-echo a line from a song in Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye prays: ‘Would it spoil some vast eternal plan if I were a wealthy man?’6 Because it was Hannah who first used that argument: ‘O Lord of Hosts, of all the stars and constellations and the universe You created, is it so hard to give me a son?’7 And she challenged God still further: ‘To which host do I belong? If to the heavenly, I should never die! But if to the mortal, then I should be able to give birth!’8 There are many reasons why I cherish this story. To be sure it has charm, but the charm cannot conceal the powerful reality of frustration. Certainly it is this story which has warned me time and again not to jump to conclusions. When I see eccentric behaviour or people muttering, not only in my synagogue but in the streets of London as well, I don’t just think of breathalyzers but of Hannah, and who of us knows all of reality?


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2. Elijah 19 January 1987. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought During the last few days while walking through the streets of London, normally so full of movement and noise but now snowcovered, deceptively soft and almost unnaturally quiet and still, I was reminded time and again of the experience of the prophet Elijah who is not only one of my favourite characters in Bible but also a persistent and ever-present ‘hero’ of the Jewish people through the ages and in all places. ‘Elijah,’ or ‘Eliyahu’ in Hebrew, may not have been his real name but one he assumed. Its meaning is that ‘God is my God’ and in his time, about twenty-eight centuries ago, Elijah was God’s champion-extraordinary. So much so that the Queen of Israel of his day – Jezebel – a tough lady by all accounts and a devotee of Baal worship, became his lifelong enemy. What probably upset her more than anything else was the great religious showdown on top of Mount Carmel in the heart of the present city of Haifa. It was a contest between a large group of priests of Baal who stood on one side of a specially built altar and the lone figure of Elijah on the other, and masses of people all around them looking on. Elijah’s call to them is still part of our language: ‘How long will you halt between two opinions?’ he asked. ‘If the Lord is God, follow Him. If Baal, follow him!’9 And then a miracle: after the priests of Baal tried and failed to ignite the fire on the altar, when Elijah prayed, a fire from heaven came down and consumed the sacrifice. Now the people believed. They set upon the priests and, as the Bible has it, ‘discomfited’ them, and a furious Jezebel put Elijah on top of her ‘wanted dead or alive’ list. Like any sensible person, Elijah fled to the desert, but on the long and lonely journey he became – for the only time in his life – so dispirited and demoralized that when he stopped near Beersheba, he just wanted to curl up and die. Then another miracle: an angel

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appeared with food and drink and urged him to continue to Mount Horeb where Moses received the Ten Commandments and where, he was told, God would appear to him as well. It was an offer no one could refuse. And after forty days of hard walking and climbing, Elijah was ready for the great experience. First came a tempest, but God was not in the tempest. Then came a fire, then thunder, but God was not in them either. And finally, the real revelation, which I understood so well in the snowy streets of London, for God was in ‘a still, small voice’! It also became clear to Elijah and after him to the prophets of many religious traditions that the role of the prophet is to listen to the voice of God, and to pass on the message to the people. Strangest of all, he did not die, but a fiery chariot with horses of fire came down from heaven and carried him away, the ‘sweet chariot’ that sways low in the song. And in Jewish legends Elijah keeps popping up in all sorts of disguises, mostly to help people in distress and it is said that when the final, messianic redemption will be at hand, it will be announced by none other than Elijah!

3. Elisha 26 January 1987. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought Elijah’s mantle slipped off and fell on his closest disciple, Elisha (Hebrew for ‘God is salvation’) and those who witnessed this had no doubts: ‘The spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha!’ 10 they exclaimed. There was, in fact, real, indeed, dramatic continuity in the ministry of these charismatic religious leaders. The story started much earlier and in an enigmatic way. One day when the young Elisha was ploughing his father’s extensive fields, the already famous Elijah walked past, recognized something special in the young man and without a word simply ‘cast his mantle upon him’11 and went on his way. Elisha ran after the prophet, eager to


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follow him, but Elijah was nonchalant: ‘Go back, for what have I done to you?’ as if to say, ‘Don’t be so eager to be a prophet’. But the experience was profound and before long the two men were inseparable companions. Mind you, Elisha – once, as it were, he had the field to himself – had his own style. He liked the company of others, even requested musical accompaniment to help ‘the hands of God resting on him’, and when he had some dire or unhappy warnings to deliver, be it to the rulers of Israel or Judah, or to neighbouring Syria, his own grief and tears were part of the message. He knew with a terrible certainty that cruelty and bloodshed will only generate more suffering and tragedy. One of my favourite stories about Elisha concerns a Syrian general, Naaman, who had leprosy, heard about the prophet’s healing powers and came for help. ‘Go and bathe in the River Jordan’,12 was Elisha’s advice. Naaman was annoyed. ‘I didn’t come all this way from Damascus for such a simple remedy’, and went off in a huff. His own attendants remonstrated: ‘If the prophet had bid you to do some great thing,’ they asked, ‘wouldn’t you have done it?’ So he dipped himself in the Jordan seven times and he was healed. Grateful, he offered payment, but Elisha refused. A sour postscript: the prophet’s servant, Gehazi, ran after the general, asked and got silver and clothing, and in his anger Elisha put the leprosy on his greedy servant. A personal note: one of my rabbinic gowns I inherited from a dear and wise friend, Bruno Italiener – a refugee from Hamburg – long dead.13 As mantles go, it’s a bit tatty and ill-fitting, but when I have a difficult task, I put it on and it helps!

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4. Deborah 2 February 1987. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought I know that there is a popular image of the prophet as a kind of fortune-teller, but the navi, Hebrew for the prophets in the Bible, is nothing of the sort. If there is pattern, it is of people who feel an intense relationship with God and their fellow creatures. They also have an almost painfully sharp awareness of the world around them. And because they see their situation so clearly, and because their aim is to move people to build a just society, they so often speak about alternatives. Different actions will have different consequences and if you can change your ways you can change your lives. They believed, as I believe, that human beings and even societies have free will. Jews never call themselves the Chosen People. There isn’t even a Hebrew term for it.14 But I believe that the prophets wanted us to be a choosing people and that the choice should always be a godly one, and the option be for a just and compassionate life. The other characteristic that all prophets have in common is a passionate love of their people. That was certainly true in the case of Deborah, one of the relatively few women prophets in the Bible. In her time, about thirty-one centuries ago, she was so moved by the oppression of the Canaanites and the wretched condition of the tribes of Israel that she led a rebellion. Her spirited leadership, and especially her choice of an able warrior called Barak, did lead to victory and a period of tranquillity for her people. She also had an earthy kind of wisdom. Barak refused to go into battle without her. Deborah was very reluctant at first: she wants the general to be aware that if she does go, victory will belong to a woman and would he and the other men be able to live with that? We don’t get too many details about her personal life in the book of Judges, but in rabbinic tradition, a thousand years later, it is pointed out that her name, Deborah, Hebrew for ‘bee’, is not very complimentary because she was not quite a lady; in fact she was imperious. Barak is always sent for, she never goes to him, and


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when she proclaims, ‘I arose! A mother in Israel!’15 the rabbis judge her conceited. Another women prophet was called Hulda, which means ‘weasel’ and you can imagine what the rabbis made of that. I warm much more to the rabbis noting that Deborah was appointed by God to be a judge and a prophet as evidence that the spirit of God rests alike on Jew and gentile, free or enslaved, man or woman, and that what matters is what you make of that spirit.

5. Samuel 9 February 1987. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought There is a saying to the effect that some people achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them. My subject for today is Samuel, a remarkable prophet in the history of Israel, who had spiritual greatness both thrust upon him and then he took it to still greater heights. The thrusting was actually done by his mother, Hannah, herself considered a prophet, married but desperate for a child. And when her prayer was answered and she gave birth to a baby boy, she called him Samuel, Hebrew for ‘God heard’ and as soon as the child was weaned, she gave him to the priest at the Temple in Shiloh for permanent religious service.16 And there he grew up, his mother visiting him and bringing a new little coat every year, but even before he could properly understand it, God visited him as well and used him as a moral messenger to the people. By the time he was a young man, as the text of the Bible has it: ‘all Israel knew . . . that Samuel was established to be a prophet of the Lord.’17 In that time, just over three thousand years ago, the disunited tribes of Israel were particularly vulnerable to the constant and violent harassment of the Philistines, and Samuel played a crucial role in shaping his people’s destiny. He insisted that if his

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people reformed their religious life, abandoned once and for all their idolatrous ways, and if they united in prayer and in purpose, they could shake off the Philistine yoke once and for all as well. And in a famous battle at a place called Mizpeh that is exactly what happened. But Samuel’s ideal, of a free people living and building a just society under God’s rule, was frustrated. Though he travelled up and down the country as a kind of circuit judge, settling disputes and with a reputation for being incorruptible, increasingly people demanded of him: ‘Give us a king.’ He argued with them that kings of flesh and blood will want to rule in a very material way; they will want armies and weapons and taxes. They will want power and some may be tyrants! But it was of no avail. The people wanted to be ‘like all the nations’.18 Only God comforted him in a bittersweet way: ‘They have not rejected you, Samuel. They rejected me!’19 It is, in fact, this story which began to convince me that one of the strongest instincts in human affairs is the urge to make a mistake. I see it happen with individuals and in groups and I don’t think I have ever been able to stop it. And the irony: it was Samuel himself who had the job of appointing Saul as Israel’s first king, anointing him by pouring oil upon his head, because when all is said and done his role was to serve the needs of his people as well as the will of God. And as for greatness, a thousand years after he died, the rabbis gave him five terms of praise. He was faithful, honoured, prophet, seer, and a man of God.

6. Abigail 16 February 1987. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought Abigail lived three thousand years ago but her memory was still exciting to the rabbis of the Talmud a thousand years later. And that


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goes – in a respectable sort of way – for me as well. The Bible describes her as ‘a woman of good understanding and of beautiful countenance’20 and she was married to a rich landowner called Nabal, characterized as ‘churlish and evil in his doings’. Not, you might say, a marriage made in heaven. We are told only one story about her but, to coin a phrase, it’s worth a thousand pictures! One day David, whose men protected Nabal’s property, sends a polite request for provisions, but his messenger is given a rude reception and point-blank refusal. David, driven by anger and the hunger of his men, decides to take what they need by force. So far, standard tough-guy stuff! But now Abigail, who knows very well what is going on, steps in. Without a word to her husband, she organizes food and drink, takes it to David and begs him not to fight. In the course of her peace-making speech she also hints that David himself will one day rule over Israel, which is why the rabbis ascribe to her the gift of prophecy. David is touched, blesses God for sending Abigail to him, and to Abigail he says: ‘and blessed be your advice . . . which kept me from shedding blood.’21 Meanwhile – and literally – back at the ranch, Nabal gets dreadfully drunk, and whether it was the shock of learning how near to disaster he was or the effects of alcohol, ten days later he dies. David, of course, has fallen in love and before long marries the lovely widow. And the two of them, as well as David’s other wives, do live happily ever after for quite a long time. Abigail remains at his side through thick and thin, and I imagine she felt fully vindicated when David was crowned King of Israel. My own enthusiasm for Abigail has also to do with an eccentric conviction that most men and women, past and present, are either polarizers – forever arguing, scoring points, creating tensions and in a perverse way showing how wrong everyone else is – or they are harmonizers, looking for ways in which gaps can be bridged,

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differences reconciled, dignities strengthened, serving what my tradition terms shalom, wholeness and peace. And if your actions do just that, as Abigail’s did, you are well within the prophetic tradition. Try it, and see if I am right!

7. Job 1985. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought One of my favourite prayers, in Hebrew: oseh shalom bimromav hu ya’aseh shalom, alenu v’al kol yisrael, v’imru, amen, ‘May He who makes peace in the highest, bring this peace upon us and upon all Israel, and say you: Amen!’ Now, if you are a Bible scholar, you may just recognize that the first part of this prayer comes, unexpectedly, from the book of Job. Job, who may or may not have been a Jew, who is also known as Ayyub in the Holy Koran, and who was canonized in the medieval Christian church, but best known for his proverbial patience, wasn’t even that! In one of the greatest religious and poetic dramas, the unknown author asks the most difficult question: ‘How is it that in a world created and ruled by a loving and just God, the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer?’ Job, a man of great faith, is put to a dramatic test by God, who is making a kind of celestial bet with Satan. In a single day he loses his great wealth, his large and loving family, yet his response is: ‘The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord!’22 Even when he suffers physically, he clings to his faith. Eventually three of his friends arrive to comfort him – they think – but their platitudes, that’ll be all right in the end, or that he must have done something wrong, or that he is being punished for his ancestors’ sins, they are all dismissed by Job and in the end more questions remain than answers! But Job also understands that to


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question is part of the glory of being a sensitive and intelligent human being. And what remains, too, is prayer, the first part spoken by Bildad the Shuhite, one of the three friends, that ‘He who makes shalom, or harmonies, in the highest’23 may – as my tradition added – duplicate this harmony (I believe, with our help) here on earth, in our homes and streets and among the nations, and I’ll say ‘Amen’ to that!

8. Book of Psalms i.

Psalm 90 3 May 1987. BBC Radio 2, Good Morning Sunday Later today there will be a pilgrimage. Not of long walks, but of hands across Britain, literally stretching from Liverpool to London, hands touching other hands, but many of them otherwise idle, and all of them engaged in calling attention to one of the most serious problems of our society and of our time which is unemployment. One of the teachers in the Talmud, Rabbi Judah bar Ilai, asserted almost two thousand years ago, ‘Great is labour for it confers honour on the labourer’,24 and from what I have observed it is a fact that one of the most terrible things about unemployment is the destruction of pride and self-respect, the crushing of a person’s spirit, the revelation of himself or herself as a seeming failure in the eyes of those we wish to impress most: of wife or husband, of children, and in the case of so many young people, of would-be-proud parents and increasingly frustrated teachers. A teacher of mine, the late Erich Fromm,25 taught that in addition to food and drink, clothing and shelter, an essential part of human happiness is to be a productive man or woman. I believe this to be true not only in economic and social terms – they are quite obvious – but in spiritual terms as well. For it is through productive work that men and women can act out our partnership with God, add

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something or renew something in creation, contribute in whatever large or small ways to the task of perfecting the world. Any kind of work! Just last week I had to lecture in North Wales and took a few hours to visit a large slate mine. After touring the huge and dark underground caves, I met a memorable splitter. His is a highly skilled yet repetitive job, separating large slabs into ever thinning and, finally, perfect slates. I asked if he wasn’t bored. ‘Oh no!’ he enthused, ‘Never. Just think, I am the first human to bring to light and to see this material after millions of years underground.’ That kind of excitement and sense of being of value is what we want for all the people in our land. It has to be a national priority, for every sort of leadership – political, industrial, trade unions, educational and religious – as well as for ordinary men and women who at three o’clock this afternoon can give a hand in this enterprise. Just make your way to the main roads from Liverpool to Leeds to Nottingham to Birmingham, through north-west London to the Highbury Fields – I hope 375,000 of us – for it seems that it takes 1,000 people to link one mile. And I shall be praying in the words of Psalm 90, ascribed to ‘Moses the man of God,’ that God may, ‘teach us to number our days, that we may get us a heart of wisdom’26 and the plea: And let the grace of the Lord our God be upon us; And establish Thou the work of our hands upon us; Yea, the work of our hands – establish Thou it!27

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Psalm 133 Jerusalem, City of Peace. 9 May 1985. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought I’d like to [share with you] a legend about my favourite city – Jerusalem – and why, long before Philadelphia, this was to be the ‘city of brotherly love.’ Before King David bought its hills and valleys and before his son


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Solomon built the magnificent Temple there, long, long ago, much of that area belonged to two brothers. We don’t know their names, but one was married and had lots of children and lived at one end of the property, while the other, a bachelor, lived in his house at the other end. It was just after the final harvest, when all the produce was evenly divided and stored, and late at night, the married brother started to think: ‘How lucky I am and how rich in love, while my poor brother lives all alone. Let him at least have more worldly goods!’ So he loaded up a cart with sacks of wheat and barley and skins of oil and wine, and in the dark began to push it across fields and up the hill. At the same time, the other brother was reflecting as well: ‘Here I am, all alone, with more produce than I can ever use, and there is my poor brother who has so many mouths to feed. Why don’t I just sneak a little extra into his storehouse!’ Quickly he loaded a cart and started with it across the field and slowly up the darkness of the hill. And as luck would have it, when the two reached the top of the hill – Mount Moriah – they bumped into each other and as each realized the purpose of the other, they embraced and kissed one another. God saw the actions of the brothers and determined that this would be the right place for Abraham to be tested and for him to learn to spare his son, and a thousand years later for the Temple to be built there by Solomon as well. And for centuries after that, when pilgrims would come to Jerusalem, one of the psalms they sang as they climbed toward this holy shrine began with an echo of this story: ‘Behold, how good and how pleasant it is when brothers live in unity together’28 And the end of the psalm insists that this is, ‘Where the Lord proclaimed His blessing – life forever!’29 iii. Psalm 139 12 September 1991. BBC Radio Ulster During this period in the Jewish calendar which bridges the New

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Year that began this past Monday and the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur next Tuesday night and all of Wednesday, I read and re-read one of my favourite psalms – 139 to be precise – because it puts this season and its purpose in such perfect perspective: Search me, O God, and know my heart: Try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me And lead me in the way everlasting . . . 30

I often wonder about the kind of person who wrote this psalm. He seems to be a normal, well-balanced human being, free of selfrighteousness and equally free of self-abasement. Almost average, except for one thing: aware that God knows his every thought and action, he does not ask for his sins to be forgiven but to bring to light whatever wickedness and nastiness that lurks in the dark caverns of his soul. He understands that to be led ‘in the way everlasting’ he must see himself as he really is, as God sees him. And that does make him different! For one thing, nothing is so difficult as to see one’s self. And for another, who really wants to wade through the jungle of the soul to discover his or her thoughts and actions and be sure that they found them? And suppose we did look, would we admit what we saw? I mean, if we saw avarice and envy would most of us say, ‘As a matter of fact I am avaricious and envious and it is doing dreadful things to my character’? Hardly! We are much more likely to say, ‘Well I am ambitious!’ If we see duplicity, we will say diplomacy. If we see vanity, we will say self-respect. If we see trickery, we will say astuteness. If we see arrogance, we will say self-confident. If we see rudeness, we will say ruggedness. If we see meanness, we will say economical. If we see pettiness, we will say, ‘Well, details are important!’


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Should our actions be unprincipled? We might confess to being adaptable. Suspicious of everyone? Or prejudiced and intolerant? Not at all. Just a bit careful. And if we see hate, we will say anything, except that hateful word, ‘hate’! The truth is that the greatest block to self-discovery is self, which is why I so welcome the Day of Atonement. Forget about eating and drinking for twenty-four hours, at any rate, put aside these basic needs, and in the kinship of the community where I can admit failure, focus on the equally basic spiritual need to come clean, and invite God to search us and know our hearts, and with much prayer – and a bit of luck – bring conscience into greater harmony with the rest of our being.

9. Ecclesiastes/Kohelet 17 June 1984. Capital Radio, Reflections My birthday is in a few days time and not unnaturally this is the time of the year when I am almost forced to think about the passage of time. The years add up and work their change. Outwardly, surprisingly, certain things about me are growing: the bald patch at the back of my head – and my forehead as well – my shirts need to be a half-inch bigger and, sadly, my trousers by even more. I am even discovering that ‘getting long in the tooth’ is not just a way of speaking. The only bits of me that seem to be shrinking are my arms because no matter how far out I hold my books, I still can’t see the print clearly. Of course, it may be that my eyes are not what they used to be, but I don’t want to think about that! There is, in my tradition, a more poetic way of describing the process of ageing. It is in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes. Its authorship is ascribed to King Solomon when he was already old himself, but whoever wrote it, he speaks to a younger audience and I just want to share a few quotations with you:

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Remember then thy Creator in the days of thy youth Before the evil days come, And the years draw night, when thou shalt say: ‘I have no pleasure in them!’ Before the sun, and the light, and the moon, And the stars are darkened, And the clouds return after the rain.31

It is an allegorical way of describing the human face and the cheeks, and as one of my favourite commentators – Abraham ibn Ezra – observed, ‘For the old man, the world grows dark; and even after a rain it is not the sun but the clouds that appear.’ The wise poet goes on with his description: In the day when the Keepers of the house shall tremble And the strong ones shall bow themselves And the grinders cease because they are few And those that look out shall be darkened in the windows . . . 32

It is not difficult to see that he means the knees and the arms and the teeth and the eyes and he notes the gradual failing of these and the other parts of the body. Inevitably he reaches the end of life, which, like ‘the pitcher is broken at the fountain and the wheel falleth shattered into the pit.’33 But at this point Ecclesiastes – or Kohelet as he is known in Hebrew – reminds us that life itself comes from God: ‘And the dust returneth to the earth as it was, but the spirit returneth to God who gave it.’34 Before the mystery of life and death, only the language of religion is adequate. For all this, and perhaps because of this, what the old preacher Kohelet keeps advising, ‘Go thy way. Eat thy bread with joy. And drink thy wine with a merry heart!’35 Which is to say, enjoy life while you can. I know that I am conscious every day of the gift of life, and grateful to God for it.


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10. Isaiah December 1990. BBC Radio 2 As I think about the great events of our time – the sudden eruption of violent power struggle in the Middle East, the recent collapse of communism and the empire that went with it, or the terror that festers so much nearer to us in Ulster – I get a measure of understanding from the Prophet Isaiah. He lived seven hundred years before the Common Era – or the birth of Jesus – and one of his strongest convictions was that God controls history and therefore, the decision of what happens to people and nations rests with God. At the same time, there was and there still is plenty of evidence and experience that human beings do wicked things. Now comes the problem: if God is responsible for what men and women do, then they are excused from wrongdoing. And if you say that men and women do have a choice between good and evil, then the implication is that God does not have complete control. I wish that I could tell you that Isaiah was able to solve this ageold question about divine providence and freewill, but I cannot. Like other biblical writers (including another hero of mine, the author of the book of Job36) he raises it, indeed agonizes over it, but in the end he cannot satisfactorily resolve it. In his time, too, there was great turbulence. Large and powerful empires – Assyria and Egypt – were on the move. His own Jewish people were divided into two small countries – Israel in the north, Judea in the south with Jerusalem its capital – and they were in the way of these massive movements. When you come to think of it, not all that different from the situation in our time. The kings were busy making alliances, now with this emperor, now with that king. And all the time Isaiah protests. For three years, he tells us, he went about naked and barefoot warning against this folly, insisting to his people: ‘If you will not trust (i.e. trust in God absolutely), you will not endure.’37

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When Israel fell to the Assyrians he urged the remaining Judeans that they concentrate on the inner state of their society if they were to be saved. Fight corruption and poverty. ‘Seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow!’38 And if they could set right their moral and spiritual condition, they would survive. Symbolically he called one of his children Sha’ar Yishuv, Hebrew for ‘a remnant will return’, and I believe that the miracle of Jewish survival to this day owes much to Isaiah’s saving influence.

11. Second Isaiah 25 November 1991. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought

On 18 November 1991, the Islamic Jihad Organisation in Lebanon released Terry Waite, an envoy for the Church of England held hostage since January 1987 and Tom Sutherland, former Dean of Agriculture at the American University in Beirut. Five hostages were still held captive. On 23 November, in return for the unfreezing of blocked funds in London, the Iraqi Government released British businessman Ian Richter who had served five and a half years of a life sentence on charges of bribery. In common with most people in the country I found myself caught up in the drama and the relief that surrounded the release of Terry Waite and Tom Sutherland and the return of Ian Richter this weekend. More than that, in some ways, I identified with them and re-lived my own and almost unbelieving sensation of being liberated, and that surge of gratitude that comes of realizing that you have somehow cheated death. There hasn’t been a day in my life in which I haven’t said or sung – or sometimes only whispered – that prayer in my tradition


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which thanks God for keeping me in life, sustaining me, and letting me reach and enjoy another day. It is actually a blessing reserved for festivals and special occasions when you do something new or unexpected but I am confident that God does not think that my daily routine is over-doing things since I do consider every evening and morning and noon a special gift, a kind of bonus, that I haven’t earned in any particular way, but given as a blessing and a gift. I am very fond of quoting Will Rogers, an American who was both funny and profound, a kind of stand-up comedian who, when he sat down, left you not only laughing but thinking as well. One day he was asked: ‘Mr Rogers, if you only had forty-eight hours to live, how would you live them?’ He paused a while, and then said: ‘One at a time. One at a time!’ By one of those coincidences that I no longer question, last Sunday – only hours before the release of the first two hostages – I was guest-preaching at St Bride’s, the journalists’ church in London’s Fleet Street. It was a special service sponsored by International PEN39 to mark Writers in Prison Day. There is such a depressingly long list of men and women – the culture-makers of our world – who are shorn of liberty and torn from their families and their work, and in so many parts of the world. And their crime? That those in power are uneasy with them, feel threatened by their ideas, want to shut them up by locking them up. And how they must depend on people like you and me not to forget them, speak for them, and protest for them. And for those of us who have life, liberty, and a bit of spare cash – and real courts of justice as well as a free press and, yes, radio too! – that we don’t give up until those who are victims of tyrannies and a host of ideologies that want to make us less than we can be until all those are free. I also kept thinking of a Jewish prophet we only know as the ‘Second Isaiah’40 who was also in captivity in Babylonia almost twenty-five centuries ago. He saw that people prayed and fasted and that is how they were ‘religious’. Instead, he urged, in the name of God:

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Is not this the fast that I have chosen? To loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free and that you break every yoke?41

And a bit more, as if specially composed for our time and place: Is it not to deal your bread to the hungry And that you bring the poor that are cast out to your house? When you see the naked, that you cover him; And that you hide not yourself from your own flesh?42

12. Jeremiah Transmission date unknown. BBC Radio 2, Night Time Pause for Thought I understand perfectly why so many painters and poets have been attracted by the prophet Jeremiah. His ‘book’ in the Bible runs for 52 chapters, much of it written by himself and some dictated to his friend and secretary whose name was Baruch. It is thus possible to know both the message and the man. And what a man he was! As for the Jewish people, we owe some of the most valuable elements in our ‘survival kit’ in history to the insights and teaching of Jeremiah. He was born in the village of Anatot, near Jerusalem, around the year 645 BCE, and his career as a prophet started when he was still a very young man. Serving God and his people so obsessed him that he never married, and probably never took a holiday either. Perhaps he had a premonition of the disaster that was to overtake the events of his long life. As Jeremiah himself reports, it began with a direct call from God: ‘Before I formed you in the belly I knew you . . . I have appointed you a prophet unto the nations.’43 And at once he responded: ‘Ah, Lord God, I cannot speak; for I am


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a child!’ Like almost all the prophets he was certainly no volunteer. And back came God’s insistence: ‘Say not: I am a child; for to whomsoever I command you, you shall speak. Be not afraid of them.’44 And so it was. He was to witness the battle of great empires: Babylonia destroying Nineveh and defeating Egypt and his own country caught right in the middle of this power-struggle. His, too, was the agony of witnessing Nebuchadnezzar laying siege to Jerusalem, taking thousands of its finest people into captivity and exile, and eventually razing its magnificent Temple to the ground. Perhaps most painful was the fact that he saw it all coming, understood that God was the shaper of human history, but he could not persuade his people and their leaders that they should have confidence in God. Instead, they made a series of disastrous alliances, used appalling judgement, and paid a dreadful price. But instead of being angry with his people, he felt that his mission was to comfort them. Let me cite just two examples. One was a promise that God would never abandon the people themselves: [T]his is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel . . . says the Lord, I will put My teaching in their inward parts, and in their heart will I write it; and I will be their God and they shall be My people.45

It is a fact that for the Jewish people, in all places and circumstances, this sense of God in the heart has always helped to go on. A confidence born of faith. And in a practical way, when the first exiles got to Babylonia, they wrote to Jeremiah still in Jerusalem, pleading for advice on how they might be able to retain their religion and identity, and this was his God response: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat the fruit of them; take wives and have sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons and give you daughters to husband . . . and multiply there and be not

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diminished. And seek the peace of the city to which you have been carried . . . for in its welfare shall you have welfare!46

Good advice to this day: responsible citizenship, quiet faith, and a sense that you can build God’s Kingdom wherever you are.

13. Hosea Transmission date unknown. BBC Radio 2, Night Time Pause for Thought One of the most powerful and, as the Americans would say, most meaningful words in Bible is the Hebrew term chesed. It is translated as ‘compassion’ or ‘mercy’ or ‘steadfast love’. Whenever I think about God it is combined with chesed, and so are my feelings about family, close friends and community. And the man who put this word into its unforgettable context was the prophet Hosea. His time – in the mid-seventh century BCE – like ours, was politically and spiritually turbulent. Many of his people Israel had forsaken their covenant with the God of Israel. They worshipped fashionable idols, indulged in many immoral practices, and it was clear to Hosea that his country, the Northern Kingdom of Israel, would soon be so weak and corrupt that it would disintegrate, that God and Israel would part forever and Israel punished with perpetual exile. Which is more or less what happened when the Assyrians invaded it in 722 BCE. But not quite. First, God teaches Hosea, through a most painful personal experience, something of God’s own nature, and then something about true religion. He is directed to marry a woman called Gomer, who is – not to put too fine a word on it – a harlot. Hosea does so; they have children, and despite all of his care and affection and pleading, Gomer plays the field, shamelessly betrays him and leaves him. Soon her


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lovers abandon her and when she reaches the bottom, and almost against his will, Hosea finds her, brings her home and, perhaps to his own surprise, he finds that he loves her. Now he understands how God feels about Israel. One of the most tender verses in the Bible, and perhaps in all religious literature, is the promise God speaks about His relationship with His people: ‘I betroth you to Me forever. I betroth you to Me with integrity and justice, with (chesed ) tenderness and love. I betroth you to Me with faithfulness and you will know the Lord!’47 Despite the infidelity of Israel, God will not abandon them. He will follow and care and will always be ready to receive them, if only they will return. Indeed, the most healing ideal of my religious tradition is Hosea’s call: ‘Return, O Israel, unto the Lord your God, for you have stumbled in your iniquity.’48 It is process we call ‘repentance’ and when a man or a woman or an entire nation does this, God promises, ‘I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely; for My anger is turned away’.49 And as for true religion, forget the popular and flashy practices, for Hosea and for all those who understand his message it comes in God’s simple plea: ‘For I desire chesed – mercy – and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God rather than burnt-offerings.’50

14. Jonah Transmission date unknown. BBC Radio 2, Night Time Pause for Thought Virtually everyone agrees that the book of Jonah is a work of fiction, yet there it is in the Hebrew Bible among the real and historical prophets, read out aloud on the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish year. It is also one of my favourite books in the Bible, but then I say this about most of them. The fact is that Jonah’s story touches on some of the deepest

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and most complicated issues in spiritual life. Quickly, let me remind you of it: God asks Jonah to go to Nineveh – the sophisticated but heathenish capital city of Assyria – and to warn its king and people that unless they repent of their wickedness, they will be destroyed. Jonah, who couldn’t care less about what happens to Israel’s archenemies, goes down to the port of Jaffa, buys a ticket, and boards a ship heading for Tarshish which is in the opposite direction! But when they are in the open sea, a violent storm hits them. The sailors pray. Jonah does his best to sleep in his cabin, and soon they realize that this unnatural tempest must have something to do with him. He agrees, suggests that they cast him overboard, and with some reluctance they do just that. At once, the sea is calm again and Jonah is swallowed by a huge fish. In the bizarre safety of the belly of the fish, he prays and promises to repent and, miraculously, he is safe and on dry land again. Now he does go to Nineveh, delivers God’s message to the people and then sits on a hill waiting for God’s wrath to descend. But the king and his people took the warning seriously. They quickly mend their ways and as the Bible has it: ‘And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, which He said He would do them.’51 Jonah is angry. ‘I knew all the time that you are such a gracious and merciful God,’ he fumes, ‘that’s why I ran away in the first place. Now just leave me alone and let me die!’ Then God causes a gourd to come up to shelter Jonah from the heat, but by the next morning it withers away. Jonah is furious. ‘Are you angry because of the gourd?’ God asks and Jonah replies, ‘I am greatly angry even unto death!’52 ‘If you have such pity on a gourd,’ God asks him, ‘shall I not have pity on all these people?’ And as the story ends we do not know whether Jonah understood his own parable or not: that God is a universal God and that the people of Nineveh are every bit as important as the people of Israel. That a prophet cannot escape his mission, nor can any one of us, and that it is childish to think that you can play hide-and-seek with


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God. That men and women need to accept the word of God and that flying in the face of it courts spiritual and moral disaster. And that human life is impossible without God’s mercy. Perhaps Jonah was enlightened by his experience, but then again, it is possible that he sailed back to Jaffa none the wiser. Which is why I feel that Jonah is also about ‘every man’ and ‘every woman’. But is it just the luck of the draw whether you and I can become sensitive and attuned to God, or do we have to go on being thick?

15. Micah Transmission date unknown. BBC Radio 2, Night Time Pause for Thought

Just a few weeks before my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I asked him what he would want as his epitaph. Without hesitation he quoted the prophet Micah, ‘Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God.’ This is the verse now written on his gravestone. Long ago and far away, when I was a rabbinic student and stayed up much of the night and slept far too late many a morning, I once spent one of those nights making a long list of people whom I wished I could have met. Fairly near the top was the prophet Micah. It must have been when my class was studying his text in the Bible and because his short book tells very little about the man himself. But what he taught and wrote is so memorable, and so often in my heart and on my lips, that I would just like to have a clearer image of his personality and learn a bit more about his experiences. All we do know about him is that he came from Moreshet-Gath, a provincial village in Judea, that he was a younger contemporary of Isaiah, which places him around the year 700 BCE, and to tell

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the truth, I wish that I could write just once or twice in my life as perfectly as Micah seemed to do at the drop of a quill. There is a Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times!’ and as a product of mid-twentieth century, I understand this only too well. Micah’s time was also ‘interesting’. The Northern Kingdom of Israel or Samaria had recently fallen, never to emerge again; there were revolutions in the great Assyrian empire which were put down with scorching violence and no one in Judea could be certain when he or she went to sleep whether they would still have a country or liberty – or even life – when morning came. It was against this background that Micah had a vision not only of his world as it was – with the powerful exploiting the vulnerable, with priests and prophets corrupt, and far too many ‘who hate the good, and love the evil’ – but as it might become! More than that – would become. In the last days the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be set firm on the top of the mountains, and raised up above the hills. All the nations shall flow towards it and many peoples shall go there, saying: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, so that He may teach us about His ways and we may walk in His paths, For Torah shall come out of Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.’ Then He shall judge between many nations and decide for great powers. Then they shall hammer their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up their swords against nation, never again shall they train for war.


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But each man shall sit under his vine and under his fig tree and no one shall terrorise him. For the mouth of the Lord of creation has spoken.53

So often, when I think of the evil that I have witnessed or when the headlines of the day only reflect doom and gloom, this vision gives me heart and keeps from despair. And if ever you need a definition of what a religious person should be like, and what religion is about, you could not find anything better than Micah’s: ‘It has been told you what is good and what the Lord requires of you: only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.’54

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Yiddish slang for ‘cosy’, ‘unpretentious’. Jack Rosenthal (1931–2004), playwright and comic genius. 1 Sam. 1.15. See ‘Samuel’, p. 121. 1 Sam. 1.11. ‘If I Were a Rich Man’ from Fiddler on the Roof, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, music by Jerry Bock. Berachot 31b. Pesikta Rabbati 43, 179b. 1 Kgs 18.21. 2 Kgs 2.15. 1 Kgs 19.19. 2 Kings 5. Rabbi Bruno Italiener (1881–1956). The phrase am segula (Deut. 7.6) is often mistakenly translated as ‘chosen people’, however the meaning of segula is best translated as ‘treasured’, as in ‘You shall be My treasured possession among all the peoples’ (Exod. 19.5). Judg 5.7. See ‘Hannah’, p. 115. 1 Sam. 3.20. 1 Sam. 8.20. 1 Sam. 8.7. 1 Sam. 25.3. 1 Sam. 25.33. Job 1. 21.

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23 Job 25.2. 24 Nedarim 49b. 25 Erich Fromm (1900–1980), German-born psychoanalyst and social philosopher. Left Nazi Germany for the USA in 1933. 26 Ps. 90.12. 27 Ps. 90.17. 28 Ps. 133.1. 29 Ps. 133.3. 30 Ps. 139.23–24. 31 Eccles. 12.12. 32 Eccles. 12.3. 33 Eccles. 12.6. 34 Eccles. 12.7. 35 Eccles. 9.7. 36 See ‘Job’, p. 124. 37 Isa. 7.9. 38 Isa. 1.17. 39 See www.internationalpen.org.uk. 40 Also known as Deutero-Isaiah. 41 Isa. 58.6. 42 Isa. 58.7. 43 Jer. 1.5. 44 Jer. 1.6,7. 45 Jer. 31.32. 46 Jer. 29.5–7. 47 Hos. 2.21–22. See also p. 96. 48 Hos. 14.1. 49 Hos. 14.4. 50 Hos. 6.6. 51 Jon. 3.10. 52 Jon. 4.9. 53 Mic. 4.14. 54 Mic. 6.8.

When Hugo was around I always felt more secure, less vulnerable, because I knew this man had, in the words of the psalmist, walked through ‘the valley of the shadow of death’, he had looked evil in the eye, and yet he remained spiritually alive. He was a reassuring and inspirational presence in my life. Even to this day the memory of Hugo inspires me especially when faced with what may seem impossible. I miss him as a person but I miss especially his wonderful sense of humour. Once, on a trip to Moscow, in the days when the Soviets were still in power, Hugo and I had arranged to meet with the Minister for Religious Affairs. We wanted to discuss with him our fears that antisemitism was still a problem in Russia and to encourage him, therefore, to support our efforts to initiate an interfaith dialogue. As the Soviet officials were entering the room, Hugo whispered to me ‘It’s your turn to play the bad guy; I’ll be “Mr Nice” this time round.’ Hugo Gryn was a man who allowed God plenty of scope in his life. He allowed God to have full use of his talents, his humour, his innate sense of compassion and even at times his anger. He was a truly human person who had to grapple like the rest of us with life’s contradictions and yet he was a saintly man in the sense that he helped so many to discover a glimpse of God in their lives.

—Oliver McTernan, writer, broadcaster and specialist in conflict resolution

LOVING YOUR NEIGHBOUR AND THE STRANGER

1. George Orwell and 1984 1 January 1984. Capital Radio, Reflections Certainly we shall all have to work extra hard during the coming year to confound its depressing symbolism. Indeed, until this year I never quite understood the customs of attaching to the years a particular animal symbol – which will be the case of Yuan Tan, the Chinese New Year, on February 2nd – but I do appreciate it more today, because 1984 is 1984! As you and I will be reminded more than many times in the coming weeks and months. As a Jew whose religious new year started last autumn with Rosh Hashana, with a numerical symbol for 5744 (which is what this Jewish year is) that spells ‘destruction’ in Hebrew, I am already on my toes, as it were, but 1984 puts all of us in the same boat. Here is why: George Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, wrote a kind of political science fiction during 1948, just three years after the Second World War which showed how Nazi totalitarianism corrupted an enlightened and civilized society and then unleashed years of terror and destruction on the entire continent of Europe,

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warning about the dangers that lay ahead for all nations and societies if the totalitarian temptation is not registered. In the novel, whose title just turned around a couple of numbers – 1984 – England is no more than Airstrip One. It is ruled by Big Brother, who is never seen, but through two-way TV screens everyone else is. It is a system which allows no freedom of speech or movement or even thought, when the entire world is divided into three power groups who are constantly at war, or at least they believe that they are, because everything except misery is in short supply. When even language, called Newspeak, means the opposite of what it says, and truth has vanished from the world. The hero, Winston Smith, tries to swim against the tide and you can imagine that, in that environment the odds were pretty heavily against him. If you haven’t read the novel, you could do a lot worse than to pick it up and follow his adventures. It will be pretty topical for at least another 364 days. Because I was reared on the Hebrew Bible and because its prophets are my spiritual heroes, I do see a prophetic strain in George Orwell who seems to speak and offer alternatives. If you don’t prize individual freedom – the right of every woman and man to live and speak and think freely, and each of us respecting the dignity and value of others – then we do not only endanger the rights of others, but eventually our own as well. Which is why I see 1984 as an extra challenge: let’s confound the gloomy predictions of Orwell. Most of us are not in positions of power, so we can only start with ourselves. So be yourself and help those nearest to you to be themselves. Keep in front of you a vision of a better society, one that is more just and at peace, and work for it. And I suspect that that is exactly what George Orwell had in mind for us.


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2. Mahatma Gandhi: Man’s Greed 11 January 1993. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought

On 5 January 1993 an oil tanker, the Braer, carrying 85,000 tonnes of crude oil, ran aground off the Shetland Islands. This morning I am still haunted by the images from the Shetlands. Of stormy waves, that crippled oil-tanker slowly sinking, of children locked into schoolrooms to escape dangerous fumes, but most powerfully – and for days now even in my dreams and nightmares – I see oil-covered birds dying or dead, seals struggling to survive, so much life already extinguished, and such natural beauty and innocence tarnished. I realize that all this is not the result of a deliberate act of destruction, but is not a so-called act of God either. And I am wondering, who is responsible? The oil companies who want to be ‘keenly competitive’? The owners of the ship, more concerned with cost-control than extra safety? The officers and the crew who were literally taking a shortcut? Could it also be the likes of you and I who have developed such an insatiable appetite for petrol and energy, and have become less than squeamish about how we get them, as long as we have them? Everyone has an alibi. But I am thinking of Mahatma Gandhi, the great Indian leader who insisted that ‘there is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need, but not for man’s greed!’ And of a parable in my tradition about a group of people travelling in a boat. One of the passengers starts to drill a hole under his seat. When the others object, he protests: ‘This is my seat and I paid for it!’ ‘Yes,’ they say, ‘but when the water comes in, we shall all drown!’ With this appalling pollution in mind I also recall the legend of God saying to the first couple, Adam and Eve: ‘See what a beautiful

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world I have given you, now take good care of it, because if you spoil it, there may be no one after you to set it right.’1

3. Martin Luther King Jr 24 August 1986. BBC Radio 2, Good Morning Sunday

In Montgomery, Alabama, on 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress, refused to give up her bus seat for a white passenger. Black leaders created the Montgomery Improvement Association and selected as their spokesman Rev Martin Luther King Jr. They called for a bus boycott that ran from 5 December 1955 to 21 December 1956. Roger Royle, presenter of Good Morning Sunday, inter viewed Luther King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, on the programme that included the following ‘prayer slot’. This time of the year – summer fading, autumn coming – for rabbis like me, preparation for the High Holy Days, and the touching coincidence of sharing today’s programme with Mrs King, they all put me into a reminiscing mood about my own first encounters with the black community in America. And so, around this season, I was on a night train called the Humming Bird on my first journey south. The first stop was Louisville, Kentucky. Curiosity and excitement made me get down, and then the two signs: ‘Men’s Room – White’ and ‘Men’s Room – Negro’. I had never seen such things before, nor shall I ever forget the feeling of sickness and shame I experienced. I was not only from Europe but also a survivor of murderous race hatred and on that platform I knew that I had an added cause I would want to – and have to – work for. I was a very junior rabbinic student in Cincinnati in the early 1950s, right on the Mason-Dixon line. Just cross the Ohio River was


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the State of Kentucky and then the Deep South, and coming as I did from Europe, it seemed like an ominous part of the world. My college gave me as a first congregational assignment to minister to a tiny congregation for the High Holy Days in Jasper, Alabama.2 The 24 Jewish families in Jasper couldn’t have been more friendly and welcoming. For two years I served them on a monthly basis, but I also got to know the preacher of a black Baptist church and our friendship was sealed when he took me with him to demonstrate in what became the Montgomery Bus Strike. It was simple and courageous: the black population of the city of Montgomery refused to ride the buses until the company was forced – by moral and economic pressure – to desegregate them. One of the leaders in that campaign was the young Martin Luther King. Years later, another great friend of mine called Kivie Kaplan3 explained to me that as a Jew who believed passionately in the teachings of the prophets, he felt it imperative that he join the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People – or the NAACP – and in time this marvellous Jew became its president. And I shall never forget travelling with him once from Paris to New York, and while over the Atlantic he solicited practically every passenger for membership for the NAACP, and a surprising number joined up right then and there! It taught me a lot about the importance of organization and co-operation. My final recollection today is of a morning session at a rabbinic convention in Atlantic City and the announcement that the Rev Martin Luther King had asked for support in a march he was planning later that day in Florida. Would any rabbis care to join him and his friends? Sixteen of us were on our way an hour later. By 4 or 5 p.m. there we were, arms linked, black and Jews, singing ‘We shall overcome’, and a short time after that, inside a police station being charged with unlawful assembly. Ministers and rabbis. Surely, I thought, we’d be admonished and let go, and so we were, but not until the next morning! We didn’t sleep that night and didn’t eat much either, but we talked and planned and became one in purpose.

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I did not see Martin Luther King again. Soon after that I came to my London congregation, but the purpose – for races and creeds to cherish each other in deeds as well as words – is still part of my purpose, and I often think of what he said a short time before his death: ‘We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes but we have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth like brothers and sisters.’

4. Marc Chagall 24 March 1985. Capital Radio, Reflections

Marc Chagall died on 28 March 1985, four days after this broadcast. I want to share with you an experience I had three days ago when I saw the work of a remarkable man which reflects most powerfully the spirit that moved him, but in the language of shapes – textures and colours – which is to say, his drawings, paintings, even stainedglass windows. The artist is Marc Chagall, and a fascinating cross-section of his work is now on show at the Royal Academy in Piccadilly, and will remain there until the end of this month. He is undoubtedly one of the best known contemporary painters, now aged 98, still at work, still producing fresh – indeed youthful – works of art, that give pleasure to the eye and more often than not, food for the spirit and the mind as well. Born in a small Russian town, Vitebsk, his family were cattledealers and butchers, devout Jews, anxious to give him a good education in Bible, in keeping with the tradition of the family name which was Segal, Hebrew initials signifying ‘of the tribe of Levi’, but they recognized his great talent and encouraged his education in the


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art of painting as well. He studied in his hometown first, then moved to St Petersburg and almost inevitably he finished his studies and began an independent career in Paris. And for the next seventy-five years or so, or so it seems to me, he has been reflecting, analysing, and above all expressing all the influences and impressions which made him the kind of man he became. His pictures not only show the beauties of creation: flowers, trees, portraits, lovers and landscapes (like most painters, he does that, too!), but calves on wagons with eyes so sad that they still haunt me, pious Jews at prayer or study, synagogues and onion-domed Russian orthodox churches, so near and yet so far from each other. And above all Chagall is a religious painter, not only because he quotes scenes and even better texts from the Bible, or even because he is fond of using the theme of the crucifixion in many of his canvasses (and this comes as quite a surprise to his fellow Jews). Indeed I have felt this ever since I first saw the twelve stained-glass windows after the twelve tribes of Israel which now decorate and make unique the small Hadassah Hospital synagogue in Jerusalem. And I understand it even better now as I noticed how often he uses the symbol of the ladder and rays of light indicating, I feel, the striving of man to move toward God, and the way in which God shows the way and waits for His creatures. One more thought: many Chagall paintings include a kind of freefloating human being. Sometimes he plays the violin – your original Fiddler on the Roof image. Sometimes he carries a bundle. But who is this figure? Some say it is the Wandering Jew, ‘the man without a home, tossed into the air, to fall down somewhere . . . ’,4 but I feel it is the figure of the prophet Elijah who, according to Jewish legends, is present in the world and who, when men and women will deserve it by right living, and God will will it, will announce the coming of the Messianic Age, and redemption from all pain and suffering. It is their expression of faith in the future and in God that makes Marc Chagall so special and worth getting to know better.

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5. Winston Churchill 22 January 1992. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought

Apart from the Bible and the complete works of William Shakespeare, the book that Hugo would have wanted to take with him to a desert island was Martin Gilbert’s biography of Churchill. ‘Churchill,’ said Hugo, ‘was a man in our century who had vision, character. And he was the right man at the right time.’5 I am looking forward to watching the second instalment of Winston Churchill’s life on television tonight.6 He remains one of my heroes and I shall never forget another cold January morning twenty-seven years ago, almost to the day, when my 8-year-old daughter Gaby and I got to the Palace of Westminster, still in the dark, and joined the huge queue that was to walk in tribute past his coffin. It was to say thank you to a man whose vision and moral courage helped to save the world from a tyranny that I knew all too well and because the Nazis were defeated when they were, saved my own life as well. Since then I have read and thought a great deal about him, perhaps because his biographer, Martin Gilbert, is a close personal friend. I am touched by the development of his character, from lonely child into the heart of world affairs, who so loved his country and society that he spared no effort to make it and keep it a decent one. I also believe that the prophets of the Bible would have recognized him as one of their own: when his people were complacent, he chastised them; when they were troubled and suffering, he encouraged and comforted. He also illustrates a teaching of Rabbi Judah – another of my heroes – who asked, eighteen centuries ago: ‘Which is the right way that a man or woman should choose?’7 And his answer: ‘That which is an honour to the one that does it, and an honour to them in the sight of others!’ A good ideal that – self-respect and the respect of your world. God surely smiles on such women and men.


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6. Community 2 December 1984. Capital Radio, Reflections This is a busy time of the year, filled with routine activities. ‘Hatch, match and dispatch’ may be a somewhat crude expression for what most rabbis and indeed clergy of all denominations do, but there is a great deal of truth in it. It does more than keep you busy, it also keeps you in touch with men, women and children. Being involved with people at important turning points in their lives enables you to see growth and development, not only of bodies but of minds and spirits as well and I, for one, find this one of the real satisfactions of my work. To be sure there are services, there is formal teaching of the young and the adults, and meetings of councils, committees, working parties. On a bad day I am tempted to think that it is my diary rather than the Bible which determines the shape of my life, but on a good day I realize that this is how a healthy community has to function. Jews are very community-conscious. The Hebrew word for it is kehilla and actually every congregation of Jews, whether they meet in purpose-built synagogues with fine social and educational facilities, or in a small rented or borrowed room, but wherever and whenever we come together for the purpose of prayer or study or giving support to each other, such a community is called kehilla kedosha, ‘a holy congregation’. Which is to say that in this fashion men and women give something of themselves to others, and in this way they do God’s work. A human partnership which then becomes a partnership with God, and its purpose – to build nothing less than God’s Kingdom here on earth. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that all of our society is divided into those who are ‘doers’ and those who in some ways are ‘done for’. Just exactly why this man or woman is prepared not only to care but also to work and sacrifice for the good of others, while that man or woman is self-enclosed and content to receive but not be moved to give, is a bit of a mystery to me.

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A friend of mine who is a cinema manager told me about a young man who applied to be an usher. To test his attitude, my friend asked him what would he do if ever a fire broke out. ‘Don’t worry,’ the young man assured him, ‘I’d get out all right!’ Psychologists use the terms ‘alienation’ to describe those who are, as it were, strangers in the midst of family and community. They cannot see or feel that there is room and need for them. It is a kind of self-imposed exile. It worries me because their attitude soon becomes ‘I don’t care’, and it won’t be long before they are the ‘done for’. Which is why I value the kehilla and the Jewish notion that for public prayer at least ten people have to be present. Perhaps today I don’t feel like engaging in a spiritual or communal activity, but my friends and neighbours do, so I have to support them. Tomorrow I may need their support. I am sure of this: in most important situations ‘together’ is better than ‘alone’.

7. Westminster Pastoral Foundation 1 May 1991. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought

Westminster Pastoral Foundation Therapy, established in 1969, is still going strong. How conscious I am today of the swift passage of time. It seems like yesterday, but in fact it was twenty-one years ago that a remarkable Methodist minister friend of mine, the late Bill Kyle, invited me to be one of the sponsors of what became the Westminster Pastoral Foundation. He began his work in a tiny room in the basement of Central Hall Westminster, driven by the spectre of the immense suffering that can come from emotional distress. If you and I see a man with plaster around an arm or a leg, we know that he had a broken bone. And if we meet a woman in a


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wheelchair, we know that there is something seriously the matter. But if a spirit is bruised, or a heart broken, there are no outward signs, yet the pain is just as great. And, yes, you can be emotionally crippled. ‘Pastoral counselling’ is aware that not all pain can be removed, but if men and women – trained and skilled and understanding – can meet and listen and respond to the one who suffers, and slowly help to find hope in place of despair, or gradually locate self-respect in human beings tempted to write themselves off, that is surely a ministry of healing! The fact that today there are over 50 affiliated centres and more being created all the time and all over the country, and that 1,500 men, women and children make their way to them every week, is proof that Bill – and the people he helped to train and those who support them – were and are on the right track. When you help a troubled person, you help more than that person: there are families, friends, fellow workers and neighbours who also benefit. Even the future may benefit, for as one experienced counsellor remarked: ‘Help given to a depressed mother today may save her child from delinquency tomorrow.’ There will be a Service of Thanksgiving tomorrow in Westminster Abbey and the Foundation honoured me with an invitation to preach there. I am sure that the presence of the helpers and the helped will make for a moving experience. In truth there is no clear line of demarcation between them and in the final analysis, all of us are in the hand of God. An old Hassidic story comes to mind. It has made its way into many traditions and has justly become popular because there is such a great truth at the heart of it. About a man who dreams that he is walking in the snow with God and sees two sets of footprints, his and God’s, and many scenes from his life flash by. But he notices that just when things were at their lowest and saddest, there was only one set of footprints. ‘Dear God’ he said, ‘you promised that once I decided to follow you, you would walk with me all the way. But just

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when I was in greatest trouble there is only one set of footprints. Where were you when I needed you most?’ And God said: ‘My dear child, I never left you, but where you see only one set of footprints, I was carrying you!’

8. Kurt Hahn and Atlantic College 13 August 1989. Capital Radio, Reflections My hope is that this extraordinary sunny, almost Mediterranean or Caribbean kind of summer will just go on and on. It certainly brightens up the spirit, and I am sure that I have been more cheerful and perhaps even better company because of the brightness that starts soon after dawn, and continues, cloudless, until these gentle twilights. I was particularly conscious of this weather-assisted well-being last weekend during my annual stay at Atlantic College in South Wales. The College is a particular favourite of mine. I have been one of its governors for many years. A sixth form college really, but several features make it quite unique. For one thing, it is located in a medieval castle right on the Bristol Channel, on a hill that seems to rise right out of the sea. Built originally by Normans, eventually it became quite derelict until William Randolph Hearst, an eccentric American newspaper tycoon, bought it in 1925, had it not only restored, but brought to it whole sections from all kinds of other castles. He stayed there only five or six times in as many years, ran out of spending money, and there this magnificent place languished until a small group of people bought it for the College a little over twenty-five years ago. The idea originated from the conviction of Kurt Hahn, a Germanborn educator who was driven out by Hitler, started a remarkable public school in Scotland (Gordonstoun) together with Lord Louis Mountbatten and a few other friends, convinced that much of the


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conflict in the world had its roots in the fact that people of various nationalities and cultures who had only stereotypes were suspicious about each other. If only enough people, from the earliest age possible, could live, study and work together, become personal friends, people you could trust, why that would have to have a good effect on the future shape and mood of the world. And so it was, and is. Three hundred and fifty boys and girls from sixty-three countries – mostly on scholarships – study there each year. By now there are other such schools in Italy, Canada, the United States, Venezuela, Singapore and Swaziland, and still others are being planned.8 What impresses me most is the quality of the students and the teachers: serious, open to each other’s ideas, busy each day not only studying but also training in socially useful skills such as mountain rescue, operating lifeboats, farming, community service. The word ‘service’ becomes a reality and part of the students’ character. And there I have the pleasure at the beginning of every August to lead a religious conference for the 175 second-year students. A group of guest speakers come – Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, humanist and Jew – and, of course, most of these traditions are reflected by the young people themselves. This year we had seminars and discussions that focussed not only on the religious tensions, which are behind so many news headlines, but on their true teachings which, without exception, are also about building a better and safer world, and lives of usefulness and service. For me the most dramatic moment came almost at the very end of this conference. Two speakers – a Christian professor and a humanist biologist – had spoken about medical ethics. Both of them were in agreement about the great advances in science and in medicine. And wasn’t it wonderful that so much progress should have been made in such short time, implying how clever and adept the human race has become. And then a 17-year-old girl called Ivy who comes from a hardworking family in Uganda brought all of us to our senses. I shall

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Hugo introduces Sheikh Gamal Solaiman, imam of the London Central Mosque at the 1988 Religious Conference, Atlantic College.

long remember her passion in speaking about lack of clean water, the death of millions of babies in Africa and Asia, the lack of even the most basic medical care, and the obscene way in which rich countries produce too much food which is destroyed to keep the prices at a high level. And suddenly we realized that progress was not all that it seemed to be, that ethics and morality were a long way behind scientific and technological progress, that to be truly civilized we had such a long way to go. And I was not only moved but grateful to that young girl who understood so well that without practical compassion that affects the well-being of all of God’s creatures, we have no right to any kind of rest or self-satisfaction. Outside the bright sunshine and the shimmering sea were still cheerful enough, but Ivy’s moral cloud made it a much more real day for me.


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9. Southall Riots9 7 July 1981. BBC Radio 4, Thought for the Day Although I am at an age when the combination of the years and of life experience should make for a certain calmness of mind and spirit as well as body, there are nevertheless events which shatter this calm and I become aware of a tightening in the pit of my stomach and, as was the case with me this past weekend, I become frustrated and angry and sad. Like other Jews we began to celebrate the Sabbath on Friday night. Service in the synagogue, family and friends at a leisurely meal, sang our Sabbath hymns at the table and chanted our grace after meals. And while the line which thanks God that we depend only on His hand ‘which is full, open, holy and ample’ was still echoing in my ears, together with the prayer which follows it, that we may ‘never lose our self-respect nor be put to shame’, 10 my son who cherishes the radio as well as the Sabbath quietly whispered to me: ‘There’s a race riot in Southall!’11 The peace of the Sabbath was shattered and, as the story unfolded over the weekend, my mood – in common, I am sure, with many of yours – deepened, and this morning I want to share with you the thought that to a degree all of us are residents of Southall and that those of our society who actually live there require from the rest of us not only sympathy and a general sort of support, but serious soulsearching and the abandonment of neutrality. As men and women who must care deeply about the kind of society in which we live, we must make it abundantly clear to those who would divide and separate us and set one group or neighbourhood against another that we will not be manipulated and give up our birthright which is the right to live in freedom and with dignity. And that this is an absolute right, not subject to ‘ifs and buts’. In my own language, it is God-given and, therefore, sacred. It is precisely because I am a Jew and because of our spiritual and historic experiences that I recognize in the Hindu and the Sikh and Muslim in Southall my brothers and sisters. And it must also

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follow that those who profess Christianity as their faith or humanism as their creed would also join in expressing their sense of unity. Not only in our hearts and thoughts, we must also speak and act it out. I hope that the men and women and especially the young in Southall and wherever any minorities are vulnerable that they will understand and receive and share this feeling. A profound story by the legendary Muslim Mullah, Nasrudin, highlights the urgency of this. A lady once brought her little boy to the Mullah’s school. ‘He is very badly behaved’ she said ‘and I want you to frighten him!’ The Mullah made threatening gestures, eyes flaming, face working, jumping up and down, and then ran out of the building. The woman fainted and when she came to she said to the slowly returning Mullah, ‘I asked you to frighten the boy, not me!’ ‘Dear lady,’ said the teacher, ‘didn’t you see how afraid I was of myself as well? When danger threatens, it threatens all alike!’

10. Tolerance 9 July 1981. BBC Radio 4, Thought for the Day

The theme of loving your neighbour comes up several times in these scripts,12 perhaps because it was so central to Hugo’s creed. As one who believes in God and daily worships God the Creator of the universe and of all that lives in this part and era of creation, I believe that creation is not yet complete but that men and women, in partnership with God, are completing it. Some of what we are creating is external and we utilize material things which are finite (and increasingly in short supply) together with our gifts of mind and imagination, which are likewise limited. They are the stuff of our technology and of our science, and when we find the wisdom to use them well, we enhance the conditions of our living.


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How to get there? I wish I knew an easy or a simple way! Neither prophet nor sage ever suggested that there is or can be one. The commandment we invoke most frequently in the Jewish as well as in the Christian tradition is the climax of the Holiness Code in the book of Leviticus: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself!’13 But how to do that? Again I am no wiser than any of you, but my feeling is that we can best express our love for our neighbours when, as the late Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman put it, ‘we achieve an inner tolerance for the uniqueness of others, when we resist the temptation to private imperialism.’14 An odd phrase this, but when you think about it, the great obstacle to spiritual progress is not so much the conquest of territories – few of us have the capacity for that anyway – but the desire of one human being to impose his or her will or wishes on another. Real tolerance is not only a matter of respecting the opinions of others, but to appreciate the uniqueness of others! To have a philosophy of life which holds that every individual has a sacred personality. That just as no two stars are alike out of the countless host of the heavens, so no two individuals have the same needs or fears or dreams. The infinite God did not create a universe of robots but a wonderfully pluralistic world and mankind. It seems to me therefore, that the first stage in being civilized or a spiritual person is to be tolerant or understanding of another’s beliefs or habits without necessarily sharing or accepting them. To say ‘one opinion is as good as another’ is not being tolerant: that is just being lazy. But to move away from bigotry or race hatred is to take a step towards love. In the Hindu religious classic, the Sri Isopanisad, the sixth mantra puts it this way: ‘A person who sees everything in relation to the Supreme Lord, and sees all entities as part and parcel of Him, and who sees the Supreme Lord within everything, never hates anything, nor any being!’

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11. Assassination of Anwar Sadat 25 October 1981. Capital Radio, Reflections

In 1979, after signing the Camp David Accords that led to the 1979 Israel–Egypt Peace Treaty, Anwar al-Sadat, President of Egypt, and Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin shared the Nobel Peace Prize. Two years later, on 6 October 1981, members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad assassinated President Sadat. Ironically, it was at the annual victory parade for Egypt’s 1973 war against Israel, which both countries claimed to have won. Last week marked the end of the Jewish High Holy Day festivals and to those of you who were good enough to send greetings and good wishes, I want to say thank you. I was particularly touched by a phone call the day after Yom Kipper from a young man who heard the special Reflection on that day. He just wanted to say that he could imagine how sad we must have been in our synagogues over ‘the sinful crime’, as he called it, which resulted in the tragic death of President Sadat of Egypt. He was right, of course, and his name was not only in our minds but on our lips as well, as we mentioned him in our prayers. By now this remarkable and courageous leader of the Egyptian people is buried and his name is taking its place in the annals of history. Not only in that of Egypt and of Israel, but in the history of the twentieth century, which does not have too long a list of men and women who were or are prepared to risk office and reputation – indeed life itself – in the service of an ideal. President Sadat did just that. It is a formidable thought that on Yom Kippur in 1973, just eight years ago, this man planned and executed a bitter war against Israel, whom he considered an enemy. He reflected on the loss of life and the suffering and the misery as well as the humiliation which wars inevitably generate, and concluded first in his heart and mind, and then in a series of unprecedented visits and public speeches


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and prolonged meetings that this was not the way, and that salaam or sulh in Arabic, shalom in Hebrew, peace and harmony in our language, was better and wiser and, indeed, more godly than violence and strife. And by the time he was betrayed and assassinated by a handful of barbarians, those who were his erstwhile enemies were in the forefront of those who wept and mourned for him. I must tell you that as a Jew I find it difficult to understand much less to follow the New Testament’s revolutionary teaching ‘Love your enemies’.15 I understand and try to practise my tradition’s teaching to love my neighbour and the even more challenging religious commandment, to love the stranger.16 But the one who declares enmity, be it woman or man, terrorist group or nation, such declarations fill me with apprehension and fear, and my instinct is to defend rather than love. But the example of Anwar Sadat points a direction which I find helpful, and if you share my dilemma, so may you. He first changed the relationship. By means of wisdom and moral courage and, I believe, by means of coming in touch with his religious faith, he first converted the enemy into a friend and a neighbour. It entailed giving and taking, risking and trusting, but he showed that it could be done and how it could be done. And the result was peace, and the possibility to love. And my hope today is that what he began, we shall carry on. For when hatred and suspicion can be banished from the human heart, love can enter and take its blessed place.

12. Shalom: Northern Ireland 22 November 1981. Capital Radio, Reflections

In 1981 Bobby Sands and nine other Irish paramilitaries in the Maze prison died as a result of a hunger strike in protest against the removal of Special Category Status for convicted terrorists.

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In response to Sands’ death, there was a surge of recruitment to the Provisional IRA. In November 1981, IRA terrorists murdered Robert Bradford, Ulster Unionist MP for Belfast South. One of the most frequently used words in my religious tradition is the Hebrew word shalom. It has many meanings – related to each other – even though in English they have differences in emphasis. Shalom means ‘peace’, but its root meaning is ‘wholeness’ or ‘completeness’. It has the sense of ‘harmony’; it is as if the function of shalom is to bring together separate bits and pieces and to make out of them something that is united. Or ‘perfect’, which is shalom as well. It is not difficult to see why this is such an important religious idea. In Jewish teaching as well as in Christian and Muslim traditions, God who is One, when creating this world of ours, created it as One. Not completed or perfected, but as a beginning. So, too, men and women and, indeed, all created beings began their existence as one, so that, as a Jewish legend has it, in time to come no one should claim ‘my ancestor was greater than yours’ because all descend from Adam and Eve, which in Hebrew simply means ‘from man and his beloved.’ And the point of the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, where this first couple lived, is that they were in a state of harmony there. Adam and Eve, and the men and women who came after them, also had free will and appetites and passions. Human beings have creative powers as well, so that they can go on with the work of creation. And its purpose: to perfect the world. To replicate here on earth what our religious tradition calls ‘the kingdom of God’, whose main characteristic is shalom, filled, if you like, with a great harmony in which there is no hurt or destruction. But human beings also have destructive powers – passions, as you and I know, which can lead us in either direction. And the purpose of religion, as I see it, is to move and urge towards the loving and the healing and the constructive. Anyone who professes faith in


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the One God, who understands the meaning of creation and wants to be part of those who build God’s Kingdom, indeed any woman or man who does not only look in the mirror but has seen other humans and is aware, therefore, of the profound kinship that unites us, how can they be anything else but ‘lovers of shalom and its pursuers’? I say all this today, because like most people in the range of Capital Radio, and indeed in this entire country, and as a religious Jew, I cannot help but be hurt and appalled by what is happening in Northern Ireland, by the havoc that people are creating in the name of religion in Ulster which I have visited and found beautiful, whose effects are increasing fear and enmity in its streets and homes and in ours. There is something so false in the way they use the name of God, and ominously hollow in the quotes from the Bible. I know that Christians cherish the concept of shalom as does my community, and I only hope that those who share a vision of harmony and perfection will not only think and pray for it, but in every way work for it!

13. Inter Faith Network: Dialogue 22 March 1987. BBC Radio 2, Good Morning Sunday One of my abiding interests is good interfaith relations and I am pleased to be able to report some very promising progress in this area. It is the creation of a new body called Inter Faith Network for the UK, and before you groan ‘Not another new religious organization!’ let me hasten to assure you that there really is not, nor has there as yet been, this kind of co-operative enterprise in this country. For the first time there is now a platform which brings together all those religious communities and their official representatives, as well as local groups up and down the country, together with educational groups who are interested and committed to dialogue with other, and not just different but also differing faith communities, and

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in that way seek to add greater understanding and new harmonies to our society. A week ago – last Monday – I found it not only enjoyable but also spiritually satisfying to be part of a gathering of Jews, Christians and Muslims, of Hindus, Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs, and of Baha’is willing to trust each other, and not only to speak to each other about our lofty ideals and teachings, but perhaps more importantly about our aspirations and frustrations, about what hurts as well as what pleases, and perhaps even more importantly not just to speak but also to listen, and to take note and, in time, to respond – as friends – not just as mildly interested bystanders. Let me try to explain how I came to be an enthusiast about interfaith dialogue. When I was a young boy I saw and experienced the worst that race hatred can do: murder on a scale that decent imagination cannot even follow, slavery and being reduced to a number. The deliberate wiping out of the divine image that is part of our humanity. Its finest part. And as I grew a bit older, and as my own scars started to heal, like many of my friends and fellow students, I wanted to love humankind. It was noble, admirable, and certainly correct. But as I was getting older still (I sometimes kid myself and call it ‘maturing’), I concluded that ‘loving mankind’ is both easy and impossible. And the realization – that the commandment in the book of Leviticus so central to Jewish and to Christian spiritual teaching and social life, namely ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself ’,17 is not a simple thing. For when it comes to your ‘neighbour’, that’s different from ‘humanity’ or ‘mankind’. There you do have proximity and opportunity and ‘loving’ becomes more complicated. With an actual neighbour many things are thrown into relief: differences, strong likes, also dislikes and prejudices. Snap judgements. Different sounds. Smells and peculiar sensitivities. And then came the real rub. We don’t actually know our neighbour. And until you know him or her, you cannot really understand, accept, like, never mind ‘love’! And it seems to me that dialogue is the way towards the


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Left to right: Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits, Bishop Jim Thompson, Sir Sigmund Sternberg, Rabbi Hugo Gryn, Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie. In recognition of their work for ‘co-operation between people of many faiths’ Hugo and Bishop Jim, co-chairmen of the Inter Faith Network, receive the Sir Sigmund Sternberg Award, 20 October 1987.

commandment. It may not be everyone’s bowl of rice or cup of tea, but how good and pleasant that after many months of patient and hard groundwork, mostly done by a devoted Christian friend – Brian Pearce18 – this Inter Faith Network did come into being, with Bishop Jim Thompson19 and myself as its joint chairmen to launch it, and when Jim lit a single candle to mark this event, I whispered my prayer: ‘May the light of the Lord’s countenance shine upon us and give us shalom!’

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14. Religious Broadcasting: Prague Conference 18 November 1991. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought

In May 1989 my father and I were in Prague to shoot The Star, The Castle & The Butterfly, a documentary film about the city’s Jewish Quarter. Our Czech friends and relatives were fearful that there might be another clamp-down by the communist authorities, but only six months later the Iron Curtain crumbled and Czechoslovakia’s ‘Velvet Revolution’ ushered in a new era of freedom. My grandfather used to say that if you live long enough, you will get to know and see everything! And when I was last in Czechoslovakia some two and a half years ago I would certainly not have dared to predict the dramatic and exciting changes that have taken place there. If anyone would have suggested that I would be there as a guest speaker at an international conference on religious broadcasting20 with Czech and Slovak and Hungarian and Polish colleagues – as well as west European ones, of course – and that they were busy making and transmitting radio and television programmes from churches and synagogues, sharing, as it were, the gospel of the Bible instead of the doctrines of Karl Marx which were so relentlessly pumped out day after day – if anyone had predicted this – I would have considered them meshugga – Yiddish for hopelessly crazy! As it happens it was exactly and only two years ago, on 18 November 1989, that a group of Czech students took to the streets of Prague to protest against the brutality of their police and demanding freedom of conscience, and of speech and movement. Sure enough the police also came, injured 592 of the students, and by the next day what has come to be known as the Velvet Revolution was in full swing, and almost overnight almost everything had changed. Visas, which used to be so hard to get, are not needed at all. Officials actually smiled and even tried to joke. The only police I


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saw were just busy directing traffic. Gone are the larger-than-life statues of Marx and the many lesser gods of yesterday, and there is both trust and affection for President Vaclav Havel who continues to live in the modest flat where he spent much time under house arrest when he wasn’t actually in prison. And almost everyone to whom I spoke felt that they were once again Europeans, and western Europeans at that. But they were also Czechs and Slovaks and Catholics and Protestants and Orthodox, as well as Jews and gypsies. And many without any roots or knowledge of a spiritual tradition, and worried that nationalist rivalries and religious and racial tensions may raise their ugly or shaven heads as they do in Germany or Yugoslavia, or for that matter in Ulster, and how I hope and pray that in the coming time they can heal and become whole. My own talk at the broadcasting conference was not a solo effort, but a symbol of this hope, because I was partnered by a Muslim friend – Dr Zaki Badawi21 – but the two of us gave one speech. And our point was not that we have no differences – for in truth we have many – but because we take our belief in the one God seriously, and the teachings of our religions about the values of love and human harmonies, that we can trust each other and celebrate our differences.

15. Mission and Dialogue in Inter Religious Encounters 18 July 1993. Capital Radio, Reflections A few days ago I enjoyed an experience which took two and a half years to prepare. It was the public launch of two documents by the Inter Faith Network for the United Kingdom – one entitled ‘Mission and Dialogue in Inter Religious Encounters’,22 which puts the finger on one of the truly sensitive issues that are bound to arise when

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people of different religions get down to the business of talking seriously with each other and doing their best to understand one another. ‘Mission’ is really a kind of code word which presupposes that ‘my tradition’ – whatever that may mean – is so wonderful and so true that I want you to share it and embrace it, and become part of it. In Christianity it goes under the name of evangelism, which means making known ‘the good news’ to everyone. In Islam it is da‘wah, which is an invitation to everyone to respond to the message of the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him. The Buddha also invited his followers to spread his teachings as widely as possible, though he did make the sensitive point that it should only be taken to those who want to hear it. There are other traditions, my own Jewish tradition among them – and so for that matter the Sikh and Hindu communities as well – who don’t exactly missionize, but if anyone is interested to find out more about them and have a sincere desire to join them, they are certainly accepted and even welcomed with open arms. So mission is there in most of the main religions. But it is also a fact that when a man or woman, and especially a young man or young woman, changes his or her religious identity, their own communities and often their own families experience a measure of sorrow. It can feel like being abandoned, even betrayed, and inevitably there are questions such as ‘How did we go wrong?’ ‘What is wrong with a tradition that served our parents and grandparents and the generations before them so well?’ To those of us concerned with the best possible relationships in our multi-faith and multicultural society, we believe that dialogue, which is an expression of mutual respect and equality, is a necessary ingredient for harmony. It requires first of all the opportunity for people of different traditions to come together and when they are together, a willingness to speak and perhaps, most importantly, the ability to listen. The document which we launched at the Islamic Cultural Centre


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in London’s Regent’s Park makes these points very effectively. A group of people who included representatives of all the major religions spent two and a half years working on it, and what is most important is that the national bodies as well as the many local interfaith groups that have come into being in all parts of the country in the last few years, have all approved it, together with a set of guidelines which we also launched in this very beautiful Muslim place of worship. Its very title says something about our vision and hope, ‘building good relations with people of different faiths and beliefs’ and some of the key words in it are ones that I would so like to see and hear reflected throughout our society. The notion that we are all part of a human ‘family’ as well as loyal members of our particular religious sub-groups and words like respect, learning, avoiding violence, preventing conflict, the very important notion ‘the right to disagree’ and the right ‘to be left alone’. We also note the temptation to compare our own tradition’s highest and most noble ideals with other people’s worst kind of practices. This is not only unfair but it also leads to stereotyping and rubbishing. I am satisfied that the heart of these documents is in the right place – but I would say that as the co-chairman of the Inter Faith Network, wouldn’t I? Yet I hope these short and well-written publications will not only be pious words and hopes but that they will find their way into schools and youth groups as well as into all those places where religion is taken seriously and that their effect will be to multiply harmonies in a society which urgently needs them.

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16. Woman of Valour: Reform Synagogues of Great Britain 29 March 1992. BBC Radio 2, Good Morning Sunday Today ought to have a doubly red marking in the calendar. Mothering Sunday in the Churches, which is more than just sending greeting cards or even flowers, but rather a time of appreciation and thanksgiving because virtually every one of us owes a debt of gratitude to the one who not only brought us into this world, but also cared, comforted and nurtured; and there is no other relationship quite like it. As it happens this past week would have been my own mother’s birthday and though she has been dead for almost thirty years,23 there isn’t a day that I do not think of her. And because she was such a life-loving woman, I always try to live a little for her as well. I wonder whether it is enough to have just one day in the year set aside, as it were, for honouring our mothers. In my tradition, a high point of every week is sitting around the Sabbath table with husbands and children reciting the closing lines of the book of Proverbs in the Bible: A woman of valour who can find? For her price is far above rubies. She looks well to the ways of her household And eats not the bread of idleness. Many daughters have done valiantly But thou excellest them all. Grace is deceitful and beauty is vain, But a woman that fears the Lord Shall be praised. Give her of the fruit of her hands And let her works praise her in the gates.24

And I am thinking, too, of an insight of the rabbis in the Ethics Of The Fathers: ‘if love depends on some selfish cause, when the


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cause disappears, love disappears. But if love (and I would say all the great values we cherish) does not depend on a selfish cause, it will never disappear.’25 For me the other ‘red marking’ for today has to do with a special service later this afternoon, also of thanksgiving, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of my own national religious organization, the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain26. It will be a splendid occasion, with a choir of 120 drawn from many parts of the country, newly composed musical settings for ancient prayers and psalms, a parade of banners by our young people, celebrating the fact that our communities also nurture us and help make us a touch more sensitive, caring and compassionate, more godly, and less ‘Me first!’ And the way it started: in 1942 in the darkest hours of the war, when a group of rabbis and lay leaders made their way to a hotel in Manchester – from London and Bradford and Glasgow – chiefly to co-ordinate ways of giving religious education to their evacuated children. They couldn’t meet in the synagogue because it had just been demolished by Nazi bombs, but they went because they cared, and saw beyond the horrors of their day and because that kind of care also had no selfish cause, I just know that it will endure. So let me end with a Hebrew toast to all who help fashion and bring out the best in us – mothers and families and caring communities: l’chayim! To life!

17. Religious Education 9 October 1983. Capital Radio, Reflections

A round-up of the state of world affairs in 1983. Most of the conflicts to which Hugo refers now seem curiously distant, and yet the song remains the same . . .

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Earlier this past week I had the enjoyable experience of having lunch at the Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church. Every Tuesday a group of men and women get together in the basement of this wellknown building – now turned into an attractive cafeteria – both to eat together and to have a guest speaker. I understand that this has been going on for about twenty years and for many of the regulars it has become part of their way of life. I know that in my own congregation, too, people come to a variety of activities – some purely social, some a bit more cultural or intellectual – and some to the various club-type activities and yes, there seems to be a spiritual dimension in this kind of participation and who am I to tell them otherwise? Perhaps it is ‘fair-do’s’ that buildings with a religious purpose should serve and be used in different ways. I was not only a guest in Bloomsbury but the speaker as well, and I had been given just ten minutes to make the case I wanted to make for the teaching in our schools of ‘multi-faith religious education’. It is a subject close to my heart and as a teacher of Judaism (which is what the title ‘Rabbi’ really means) I have strong views about it. My case was very straightforward: I unfolded one of the Sunday papers and a newspaper of that very day. And with a brightly coloured pen I marked those reports and stories which had a religious dimension. You may or may not be surprised to hear that there was not a page in the news sections without one or more markings. Whether it was about the eruption of tensions and violence in Ulster, demands for Muslim schools in Bradford, Orthodox Jewish reservations about test-tube babies or the many speeches about the vision of our society expressed at the Labour Party Conference. Then going further afield, the ongoing and tragic civil war between Christians and Druze in Lebanon, the three-year war between Iraq and Iran which has already claimed more than 200,000 victims, the violence in Pakistan’s Sind province and the ongoing struggle in Afghanistan; the pressure for autonomy of Sikhs in India and the painful statement of the Dalai Lama about executions in Tibet;


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the debate about Chinese rights and sensitivities over the future of Hong Kong and ideological strife in so many parts of Africa. Add to this already long list the difficulties Israel is experiencing about forming a new government, the controversy over the ‘moral majority’ fundamentalists in the United States and the impact of liberation theology in Latin America, not to mention the complex reactions to the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Lech Wałesa in Poland, and is this not a very strong case? That unless we – and especially our young – understand something of Buddhism and Sikhism, of the Hindu history and of Islam, of Judaism and Christianity, of the ideology of Marxism, both about their basic teachings and beliefs as well as the way they have developed in different ages and places, we simply do not understand as well as we ought the world in which you and I are living today, and the possible direction of our children’s world tomorrow. My hope is that those of you who are still at school will find your way to this kind of approach in religious education and that those of us who care about education will want to make sure that it is available and well taught.

18. Standing Conference on Inter Faith Dialogue in Education 24 July 1983. Capital Radio, Reflections SCIFDE is short for the Standing Conference on Inter Faith Dialogue in Education and consists of a group of people – by profession mostly teachers – who are joined by students, ministers, community workers, and ordinary but caring members of our society. By religion we come from Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions, as well as from the Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh and Baha’i communities together with humanists. By colour we are black, brown, yellow and pink, and having met and discussed as well as worked and relaxed together for

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Hugo with Dean of Westminster, Edward Carpenter (1910–98).

the past twelve years, we are also friends who have come to respect and to trust each other. Our purpose is to search and to find ways in which young people in British schools can best develop their own spiritual potential and in the process to get a measure of understanding and insight into the religious and cultural traditions of other – and different – people in and out of our schools. In other words, to be better, by which I mean more sensitive and appreciative neighbours. One of our most valuable activities is the annual residential conference when, for two or three days, we live as a community, and together explore a particular theme or issue. And even as I am speaking now, I am still warmed by last week’s experience of the SCIFDE conference which I helped to lead in Cardiff. Our theme was ‘Work, Rest and Play’ and I need hardly tell you just how urgent this topic is. To give you an example: on what turned out to be the


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hottest day so far this summer, when Cardiff was the hottest place in Britain, we hired what had to be the hottest bus on either side of the equator for an afternoon visit to the Llanwern Steel Mill in Newport. There, led by a dedicated industrial chaplain, I not only saw the way in which iron ore and coal combine to make endless miles of steel, but also came to understand how, with the help of automation and computers, just over 4,000 people produce as much steel today as it took almost 10,000 people to do a mere five years ago.27 Which is to say how 5,000 people became redundant! And why young people will find it difficult to get jobs when they leave school. And if you accept my definition that we, human beings, are not only rational and social animals, but also producing creatures, capable of transforming the materials that are at hand through the use of reason and imagination, and add to this the conviction in my religious tradition, and in many others, that not only can we produce, but we must produce in order to live fully and happily, you see the nature of the problem! We also had time to reflect on the nature of rest: sabbaths and festivals, holy days and holidays, times of meditation and prayer, being alone and spending time with family and community. They enable the spirit to grow, precisely by not using hands and brains for productive work. And the need to play, to let the imagination and the body find fun and enjoyment. In one group a Christian minister encouraged me to work with clay sculpture and in another, three very talented young Hindu girls actually got me to learn an Indian dance. And to my surprise, I not only enjoyed these activities but was greatly refreshed by them. As I reflect on these hot Cardiff days in the cool of this Capital [Radio] studio, I am convinced that education has to be not only about what to do, but even more about how to be: to be sharing and caring people, able to value rest and able to have wholesome fun. To be nothing less than partners of God in the unending work of creation. And a good society must make this a high priority!

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1 Midrash Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7.13. 2 See ‘Jasper, Alabama: George Mitnick’, p. 32. 3 Kivie Kaplan (1904–75), an executive of Boston’s Colonial Tanning Company, was president of the NAACP from 1966–75. He became friends with Martin Luther King Jr when King was a student in Boston. 4 See Kloomok, I. (1951), Marc Chagall, His Life and Work, New York: Philosophical Library. 5 Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 10 July 1994. 6 The Complete Churchill (1991), BBC four-part documentary series, written and presented by Sir Martin Gilbert. 7 Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), ch. 2. 8 United World College, of which Atlantic College is part, has since expanded to include schools and colleges in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, India, the Netherlands, Norway and Venezuela. 9 See also ‘Bystanders’, p. 228. 10 Magonet, J. and Blue, L. (eds) (1977), Forms of Prayer for Jewish Worship, I. London: RSGB, p. 333. 11 On 4 July 1981 more than 120 people, including 60 police officers, were injured during five hours of street fighting between Asians and white skinheads after busloads of skinheads arrived in Southall for a punk rock concert at the Hambrough Tavern on the Broadway. 12 See also ‘Moses’ Farewell’, p. 105; ‘Assassination of Anwar Sadat’, p. 162; and ‘Inter Faith Network: Dialogue’, p. 165. 13 Lev. 19.18. 14 Liebman, J. L. (1946), Peace of Mind. New York: Bantam. p. 74. 15 Matt. 5.44. 16 See also ‘Moses’ Farewell’, p. 105 and ‘Inter Faith Network: Dialogue’, p. 165. 17 Lev. 19.18. 18 Brian Pearce OBE was director of the Inter Faith Network from 1987 until he retired in 2007. 19 James ( Jim) Thompson (1936–2003) was Bishop of Stepney from 1978–91 and then Bishop of Bath and Wells until he retired in 2001. 20 European Broadcasting Union’s 1991 conference on religion. 21 Sheikh Mohammed Aboulkhair Zaki Badawi, K.B.E. (1922–2006). Chairman of the Imams and Mosques Council of the United Kingdom and principal of the Muslim College in London. 22 See www.interfaith.org.uk/publications/index.htm. 23 Hugo’s mother, Bella, died in 1964. 24 From Proverbs 31. 25 Pirkei Avot ch. 5, Mishnah 19. 26 Now known as the Movement for Reform Judaism. 27 In 2009, there remained just 850 members of staff at what is now Tata’s Corus hot strip mill. See news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/8210546.stm

Hugo Gryn was our family rabbi, a close friend of my father’s, and a great teacher to me. In all his many great works, and all the small kindnesses, and great ones, he performed for people, there are three I want to recall to pay tribute to a remarkable man. First, Hugo the teacher, who arranged for our class of rabbinic students to visit St Christopher’s Hospice in Sydenham and therefore, indirectly, inspired in me a lifelong concern for the care of the dying, and challenged me to make it ‘my’ cause to get Jews to treat the dying better, and match that care to the care we Jews, at best, show to the bereaved. Second, Hugo the friend, who travelled through rain and fog and snow and hail – literally – to visit my father when he was very sick in Papworth Hospital in Cambridgeshire, at a time when coronary bypass grafts were new and no one knew how they would pan out. Third, Hugo who never forgot his past, who, on meeting (at my bat mitzvah party) my mother’s close friend Betty Duchin, ran up to her and nearly knocked her off her feet, because Betty had cared for him and some of the other ‘boys’ when he first came to England as a young man after getting out of the camps, and he had lost touch with her, but never forgotten. In later years, and after Edgar Duchin’s death, Betty converted to Judaism – and it was Hugo who welcomed her and made her feel at home. Hugo’s public face was well known and hugely admired. But it is the private Hugo I miss so much, and whose gentle presence, and great devotion, changed people’s lives.

—Rabbi Julia Neuberger, DBE, President of the Liberal Judaism movement and Member of House of Lords

Ordination service, 1971. Hugo was vice-president and lecturer at Leo Baeck College in London, which trains Reform and Liberal rabbis.

HUGO’S SPIRITUAL HEROES AND THE JEWISH WORLD

1. Hillel 2 July 1987. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought ‘If I am not for myself, who is for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?’1 Three questions about self-interest and unselfishness and about timing, posed by one of the greatest Jewish teachers in the first century. His name was Hillel. He emigrated from Babylonia to Jerusalem to complete his education, but such was his brilliance that before long he was the undisputed spiritual and intellectual leader of his generation. But in addition, he also earned a lasting reputation for humility and tolerance. We don’t know if he suffered fools and knaves gladly, but he did put up with them. One of my favourite stories about him concerns a pagan who one day interrupted Hillel while he was having a bath and challenged the rabbi to tell him all there is to know about Judaism while standing on one leg. I know how most of us would have reacted. But not Hillel. He perched on one leg and said: ‘What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour!’ He then lowered his

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other leg and stopped. ‘Is that it?’ asked the pagan. ‘Yes. The rest is commentary. Go and study it!’2 You may recognize this as the negative version of the Golden Rule,3 and personally I believe that Hillel got it right. After all, which of us can be sure what other people may like ‘to have done to them’ but we can be on much safer ground by avoiding what we know to be hurtful or hateful to ourselves. Something of the same realism and same balance comes through Hillel’s questions. Not to have any concern for ourselves is almost lacking self-respect. But to be only concerned for the ‘me’ and the ‘mine’ is narrow, mean and just unworthy. The advice is not about saintliness – in any case, the saints of which I have known won’t permit any generalization – but it is about decency, and the time to be decent is always ‘now’. The kind of preoccupation with one’s self that troubled Hillel often reminds me of the starlet who was taken out for dinner by a middle-aged admirer. After two hours of non-stop chatter, she paused. ‘Goodness me, I have only been speaking about myself,’ then she said ‘Let’s talk about you now. How did you like my latest picture?’

2. Rabbi Tarfon 19 February 1992. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought

This was the last in Hugo’s series of Wednesday morning talks about the rabbis of the Talmud. For the past few weeks I set myself a kind of assignment to bring together a topical issue and an insight by one of the early rabbis in a favourite book of my tradition called the Ethics of the Fathers.4 Their time, like ours, was one of great change and their world was


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traumatized by a series of Roman wars and tyrannies, just as ours is still scarred by the two World Wars and the confusing legacy of Nazi and communist ideologies. But they also had a deep and instinctive desire to build God’s Kingdom here on earth, and I believe that so do we, despite recessions, terrorisms and fanaticisms and a kind of hardening of our society’s arteries. Among the things that most worry me is the attitude that makes people feel and say that they don’t matter, and a cynicism that I detect in young people as well as in men and women of my vintage, that what we are and do is irrelevant, so we might as well not bother. Which is why I am thinking of Rabbi Tarfon, one of the last priests in the Temple in Jerusalem, who lived through its devastation in the year 70 CE. He was convinced that religious values had a saving power and that in a civilized society everyone has importance. That what you do does matter. He was a realist and an idealist at the same time. ‘The day is short,’ he taught, ‘and the work is great, and the labourers are sluggish, and the reward is much, and the Master is urgent.’5 And let me end with Tarfon’s civilizing conclusion: ‘It is not your duty to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it!’6

3. Jews of England: Exile and Return 4 November 1990. Capital Radio, Reflections Since last Thursday, which was All Souls’ Day, I have had the curious sensation of living in a kind of time warp. I have been imagining what it might have been like to be a Jew seven hundred years ago and how I might have felt on Halloween in 1290, which was the last night when Jews could officially live in England because King Edward I had concluded that the Jews no longer served any useful purpose for him and that they were to be expelled. I am sure I would

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have been sad, fearful of an uncertain future, and felt well and truly betrayed. It is also a fact that just thinking about those events makes me feel both regretful and angry. Jews have a very long history in this country. Although the records are sparse, they were here during the Roman period; some because they were captured when Jerusalem fell to the Romans in the year 70 CE and attached to their legions virtually as slaves, and some were part of the administration and gradually became settlers. A much larger number of Jews came to Britain with the Normans in and soon after 1066. They settled in London and throughout the provinces, as far as Devon and Cornwall in the west and York in the north. They included craftsmen and merchants and as they prospered, they attracted scholars and physicians. But increasingly they were placed – indeed forced – into the role of moneylenders and bankers, jobs that Christians were forbidden to do, but the kings as well as great landowners and even the Church needed them for great building projects and for adding wealth to the country. The Jews were popular when they gave loans, but greatly disliked when it was time to pay back. When a 12-year-old boy, William, was found dead just before Easter in a forest near Norwich – most likely the victim of a sex maniac – a Jew who had recently converted to Christianity suggested it was a Jewish crime and soon those blood libels spread to many parts of the country. It wasn’t long before the carefully fanned hatreds burst into riots, arson and murder. This was also the time of the Crusades, when religious fanaticism coupled with greed moved masses of men to leave their homes and family and march all the way to the Holy Land in order to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslim infidels. But before leaving their own towns, it became almost fashionable to show their zeal and love of Jesus by violating the local Jewish community. Exactly eight hundred years ago – in 1190 – there was such an attack on the Jews in York. Those who could fled to the Castle Tower in that city, but when they realized that even the sheriff and the king’s soldiers had joined their enemies, they committed mass suicide. Ironically, the


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next day these would-be Crusaders first burnt the notes of debt in York Minster itself and then set off for the Continent, taking with them a mass of Jewish books which they later sold in Cologne to the unsuspecting Jews living there. It wasn’t long before the Jews had become dispirited and poor. The kings and their nobles had big appetites and very few scruples. Edward I made them wear yellow badges – accused all the Jews of coin-clipping and, of the 600 who were arrested, half were actually hanged in the Tower of London. The order to expel the survivors was almost an anticlimax. It was almost four hundred years later that Jews returned to England, built new communities and started another chapter in their history. There is something of poetic justice about the fact that later this morning I will be opening our synagogue’s bazaar and that one of its major beneficiaries will be the homeless people of Bayswater. It may well be a case of ‘it takes one to know one’, but if you have ever tasted the insecurity of being dispossessed, you can never be indifferent to the pain of others. Or to racism, or any of the things that demean other people, or make little of human dignity. At any rate I can’t, and I hope neither can you . . .

4. Moses Maimonides 1985. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought

‘One of the sharpest brains the Jews ever produced’7 said Hugo of the twelfth-century philosopher and physician Moses Maimonides. I’d like to invite you to celebrate an unusual birthday, and to learn a little about one of the greatest intellects in Jewish history. The man

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was Moses Maimonides. The birthday exactly eight hundred and fifty years ago, and if there were a Maimonides fan club, I’d gladly run for its chairmanship! His life is like an adventure story. Born in Cordoba, but after Spain was invaded by a fanatical Muslim sect – the Almohades – he and his family fled to Fez in Morocco, Moses disguised as a Muslim woman. There he studied medicine, but when a leader of the Jewish community was executed, they fled again to Palestine. Unfortunately he chose to live in Akko, or Acre, dominated by Christian Crusaders who quite enjoyed bashing anyone unlike them, so another move, this time to Alexandria in Egypt. What savings he had, he invested with his brother David’s jewellery business. All he wanted to do was to immerse himself in religious studies and writing. There he formulated the Thirteen Principles of Faith, which traditional Jews still recite every day. He moved to Fostat – now Cairo – became famous for his learning and just when all was going so well, his brother died in a shipwreck and all the family’s fortunes sank with him. It was back to medicine again, eventually physician to the vizier, or prime minister of the great King Saladin, and in a letter he describes how he saw his paying patients – mainly in harems – in the morning, the sick but poor in the afternoons, in the evening he taught and counselled, and when most people went to sleep he studied and wrote. Among his many books my favourite is The Guide for the Perplexed, indeed, my own doctorate8 was a slight study of it. But why take my praise when you can have a poem by a great Muslim friend of his, al-Said ibn Sena al-Mulk? Called simply ‘In Honour of Maimonides’ – or Abu Amrun in Arabic: ‘Abu Amrun’s knowledge made him physician of the century. He could heal with his wisdom the sickness of ignorance. If the moon would submit to his art, he would deliver her of her spots . . . ’ And a few lines from Maimonides’ own oath: Your eternal providence has appointed me to watch over the life and health of Your creatures. May neither avarice nor miserliness, nor


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Statue of Maimonides in the Jewish Quarter of Cordoba, Spain.

the thirst for glory or for a great reputation engage my mind, for the enemies of truth and philanthropy could easily deceive me and make me forgetful of my lofty aim of doing good to Your children. May I never see in a patient anything but a fellow creature in pain. Grant me strength, time and opportunity always to correct what I have acquired, always to extend its domain, for knowledge is immense and the spirit of man can extend indefinitely to enrich itself daily with new requirements. Today he can discover his errors of yesterday and

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tomorrow he may obtain new light on what he thinks himself sure of today. O God, You have appointed me to watch over the life and death of Your creatures. Here I am, ready for my vocation.

5. Expulsion of Jews of Spain: 1492 5 January 1991. Capital Radio, Reflections This first week of January is always a complicated time. It takes a while to get used to writing ‘1992’, to replace calendar pages, to sort out various subscription dues, and for me, the realization too that somehow, and in one way or another, I seem to have spent more than I have earned and wonder how will I manage to muddle through the year ahead. It will happen because it always has in the past; I just don’t know how! But over and above these petty personal preoccupations, I am also conscious of some powerful historical memories and of great expectations in the shaping of the world around us. And in my own prayers I have been echoing a line from a very old Jewish meditation, that God may fulfil the desires of our hearts for our good. The memories have to do with the events of 1492, when ‘Columbus sailed the ocean blue’9 and the discovery of America five hundred years ago. I am sure much will be made of it on both sides of the Atlantic and there is much to celebrate because in so many ways Europe and Europeans have gained so much from that discovery. I am not sure that the descendants of the Native Americans – those decimated Indian tribes and nations – will have the same warm feelings about this anniversary, nor can the AfroAmericans think of this event as an unmixed blessing, but that it was a historical turning point, none can deny. And that same year of 1492 has a special set of memories for the Jewish people. Almost overnight, the large and seemingly very stable Jewish community in Spain was faced with one of the most


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painful choices imaginable: they could abandon their religious faith and traditions and convert to Christianity or, decreed Ferdinand and Isabella, the capricious and greedy rulers of Spain, they would have to face expulsion from Spain, and soon after from Portugal as well. The majority chose to leave rather than betray their faith and the term ‘Wandering Jew’ became a long and bitter reality. Some went to Turkey and Greece, some to North Africa and what was then Palestine. In time quite a few reached Holland and from there came back to England as well.10 As for the rulers of Spain, they watched their conversos – those Jews who did become Christians – like hawks. If anyone was found or even suspected of observing any Jewish customs, or refusing to eat forbidden foods, they were soon brought to the Inquisition and if the charges were proved, the victims were sentenced to be burned at the stake. There will be many commemorative events about this as well in 1992 – in Spain itself and in Turkey and right here in London as well – but the accent will be on healing and repenting and forgiving. And I like to think that healing will also be the theme as the new Europe will take shape this year.11 It is hard to think of a century more violent and bloodstained than this one. Two world wars, tyrannies of communist and the Nazi varieties, divisions with names like the Maginot Line,12 the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall, and now the dismantling and the demise of ideologies and, indeed, of idolatries, and still so much unfinished business . . . Hence my hope: that people who take their religion seriously may see that the notion of One God is also about one Creation, and that the correct relationship between individuals and even nations has to be of brothers and sisters. And therefore my ambition and prayer: we have eight more years left in which to try to repair the damage that was done to our century. I’d love nothing more than people looking back a hundred or five hundred years later and saying that 1992 was a good and blessed year.13

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6. Solomon Alkabez: The Sabbath Bride 5 July 1986. BBC World Service, Reflections Safed or Tzvat is a charming, small town in Galilee, a favourite for painters, sculptors and musicians, not very far from Kinneret, Israel’s inland Sea of Galilee, but for me and, I suspect, for the artists who live and work there, and for a multitude of Jews who go there to visit – more as pilgrims than tourists – Safed is special because generations of religious mystics lived, reflected, wrote and prayed there. Somehow they filled its very atmosphere with their longing for a closeness with God, and something of their ‘music of the spheres’ lives on, and in no time at all the sensitive visitor can tune in and leave refreshed and spiritually a touch more whole if not exactly more holy. Of my many ‘spiritual heroes’ of Safed, Solomon Alkabez comes powerfully to mind every Shabbat, for the onset of this precious day of rest, when Friday’s sun touches the horizon and the holiness of time itself emerges from the twilight, it is the poem of Alkabez that is sung and chanted in synagogues all over the world. L’cha dodi, likrat kallah . . . ‘Come, my friend (we call to each other) to greet the bride, to welcome in the Sabbath Eve.’ Solomon Alkabez was born in Salonica in 1505, a city to which his family were forced to flee thirteen years earlier when the Jews were expelled from Spain. His grandfather and namesake was one of the earliest printers in Guadalajara and young Solomon grew up in a world of learning and piety, but his own inclinations took him deeper and deeper into the study of Kabbalah and the works of the mystic masters. Soon he was an acknowledged teacher himself and popular preacher. By the time he was thirty he had migrated to Palestine, become head of a rabbinic college, and more or less gravitated to Safed, where he officiated as a rabbi. For him, as for most Jews throughout the ages, the Sabbath was the focal point of time. So powerful was his attachment to the holiness of this time that it had a kind of physical reality for him. It is


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believed that he started the custom of calling together his friends and students late on Friday afternoons, but instead of going with them to the synagogue for the eve of Sabbath service, he would lead them into the fields on the outskirts of the town, recite joyful psalms while waiting, and at the moment when the secular workaday week melted into the seventh day of rest and spiritual healing, they would sing Solomon’s special poem about the Sabbath being the aim of creation, and hope of rebuilding Jerusalem, the coming of the Messiah and the redemption of the world. And singing, they would now walk to the synagogue, much as a wedding party might receive a beautiful bride and happily escort her to the marriage chamber of the groom. Nowadays we don’t go outside the synagogue, but the poem of Alkabez is still sung. A musicologist – clearly with time on his hands – listed some 2,000 different melodies that this poem attracted in the course of the generations. And when we reach the last verse, the congregation rise and turn towards the entrance, still singing: Come in peace and come in joy, God, your husband; you, His pride; among His own and faithful people, Come, my bride, come my bride! l’cha dodi Come, my friend, to greet the bride, to welcome in the Sabbath Eve.14

7. Jews of Prague: Legend of the Golem 23 May 1982. Capital Radio, Reflections A few days ago I revisited Prague, which is not only the capital of Czechoslovakia and a cultural centre of the former AustroHungarian Empire, but it is also one of the few places which we call

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in Hebrew ir vaem b’yisrael, literally ‘a city and a mother in Israel’ that is to say, where Jewish life flourished and countless generations were nourished. In the heart of the city, practically on the bank of the river Vltava (or Moldau) Jews first lived there in the sixth century, about two hundred years before missionaries arrived and converted the pagan Celtic population to Christianity. There, too, I visited a remarkable gothic-style synagogue, the oldest one in Europe still in regular use – ever since it was first built in the twelfth century. It is called the Altneushul, ‘Old-New Synagogue’, most likely because the heavy but elegant stonework replaced an earlier wooden structure. And, to be sure, even after eight hundred years it still has a freshness about it, as well as a kind of mystical atmosphere. As does the old cemetery nearby. Filled to a depth of ten to twelve burial places, and a multitude of tombstones, some still erect with clear inscriptions in Hebrew, others leaning towards each other, looking, I thought, like a congregation of people in prayer stilled into eternity. And among them, ancestors of mine, including Rabbi Loew, who was one of the many outstanding spiritual leaders of Prague. So great was his reputation as a teacher and a mystic that the legend of the Golem is for all times associated with his name. And well you may ask who or what was the Golem? None other than the forerunner of the Frankensteins of yesterday and the humanoids of science fiction in our days. It is said that just four hundred years ago when the Jews in the ghetto were harassed and vulnerable, one day Rabbi Loew went down to the river, dug up large chunks of clay and moulded them into a giant human shape. He then imprinted the three Hebrew letters into its forehead, spelling emet, the word for ‘truth’, and the Golem came to life, became the rabbi’s faithful servant, protected the people in the ghetto, even ran errands for the rabbi’s wife, who one day – just before the Sabbath on a Friday – found that she had no fish for dinner. ‘Get some fish,’ she ordered the Golem. When she came into her kitchen a few hours later, it was filled with hundreds


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Ladislav Šaloun’s statue of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel outside the new town hall, Prague.

of them! She forgot to say: ‘Enough!’ Indeed, there was some danger that the Golem was running out of control. With heavy heart, and thinking that perhaps it was a mistake, Rabbi Loew climbed into the attic of the old synagogue with the Golem, erased the first letter from his forehead, leaving met, which now spelled ‘dead’, and the giant servant became a heap of clay again. As a child I half-wanted and was half-terrified to climb up there, but the attic was sealed, and the other day I sat in the tiny park next to the Altneushul, looked

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up at the attic and the unique Hebrew-lettered clock beyond it, its hands still turning anti-clockwise, and wondered if the moral of the story isn’t that even great people should not tinker with God’s work.

8. Menachem de Lonzano 28 June 1992. BBC Radio 2, Good Morning Sunday Because this is National Music Day I have been thinking both about that wonderfully irresistible line in Psalms, ‘Sing to the Lord a new song . . .!’15 but resisting the temptation to do my piece in the form of a song for the simple reason that I seem to be the only one who enjoys my singing and thinking, too, about the nature of music and music-making itself. Note the necessary ingredients: you need carefully crafted instruments, though they come in all sizes and shapes, and you have to look after them, use them sensitively and wisely and keep them in good tune. You have to know how to play an instrument. This requires not only talent but also a good teacher, willingness to listen, giving it time and effort as well as a measure of enthusiasm. And I recall the story of a young woman who asked an elderly man just outside the Broadcasting House, ‘How do I get to the Wigmore Street concert hall?’ and the man, who was carrying a well-worn violin case muttered, ‘Practise, practise . . .!’ And when you do learn and practise and begin to be able to make music, you realize how important it is to be in tune with others. That to create harmonies any melody must blend – not clash or drown out – with the melody that you play. To be in time as well as in tune, and to listen and to respond and to pay attention to the conductor, to know the score, and how helpful if you love the music itself. And if this is true of music – and it is! – isn’t this also a parable for family and community life? To look after our bodies and spirits and to keep them in the best condition possible. To have open minds,


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get good teachers in life and to practise and practise the values and lessons that parents, teaches and spiritual traditions hand down to us. And as we go through life, to try to be in harmony with others, and to liken our homes and towns and places of work to symphonies rather than random noise in which every player and every note has a place and a worth, and aware that the conductor is the one who not only puts us in our various places and circumstances in this vast human orchestra of ours, but wants to bring out the best and most serviceable and pleasing in us. One of my life’s regrets is that I actually cannot play any instruments. But I love music and I guess that being a good audience has some value too. And when it comes to singing in synagogue services, I just ignore the looks of congregants and choir alike and take comfort from Menachem de Lonzano, a sixteenth-century Jewish mystic, whose advice I insisted that we printed in the song section of our prayer book: ‘He whose voice is bad and unpleasant, and who cannot perform hymns and songs according to their tunes and who cannot remember melodies, even to a man like him, it is allotted to praise his voice.’16

9. Baal Shem Tov November 1982. BBC Radio 4, Prayer for the Day Like most religious people I regularly engage in prayer and I believe in the value and effectiveness of prayer. The Hebrew term for prayer is l’hitpallel, literally ‘to judge one’s self ’. It suggests that when a man or woman turns from the rest of creation towards the Creator and offers praise or thanksgiving for what she or he enjoys, or confesses shortcomings or offers petitions for a fuller and more complete life, that act and that attitude is a self-judgement and the response of God to that prayer is, in fact, the verdict. The answer is not always as we may wish them to be. Sometimes it is a ‘no!’ but I go on praying

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because I believe that even when God is silent, prayer is the means by which we human beings can keep the dialogue going. This is true of private and intensely personal prayer as well as collective and communal worship. Because when we engage in this spiritual activity we do what Rabbi Kook – a late and wonderfully wise chief rabbi of Israel – once called ‘lifting ourselves to a world of perfection’. But every now and then I wonder what does happen to our prayers? During the recent High Holy Days when our synagogues were filled to overflowing with people and when, especially towards the end of Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement – I felt the almost physical intensity and great unity of our congregation and I expected that the world outside – also physical but far from united – would somehow be affected by our devotions. But there were few signs of change. Traffic was thick, and I was soon splashed by passing cars. Crossing the street, someone shouted at me: ‘Can’t you keep your eyes on the road!’ I remembered Isaiah: ‘For my ways are not your ways’,17 and felt sufficiently serene that I smiled, but I knew that I was down to earth again. And I also remembered a story about the legendary eighteenthcentury rabbi, the Baal Shem Tov – ‘the master of the good name’ – though it makes me a little uneasy. One day he came to a village where he was greeted with honour and escorted to the synagogue where all the people were awaiting his presence. But at the doors of the synagogue he stopped, started in and stopped again. It’s too full,’ he said, ‘I can’t get in!’ ‘No, no,’ the leaders said, ‘we have a special seat for you!’ ‘I don’t mean the seat,’ said the rabbi, ‘your synagogue is too full with prayers! You say and chant them here, but they don’t go with you to your homes, your streets, your places of work. You leave them behind and the place is too full. There is no room left in it for me!’ So I wonder – and perhaps you may as well – when you next pray, will the prayer go with us? And I offer this petition taken from our daily service:


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Hear our voice, Lord our God, Father of Mercy. Spare us and have pity on us, and receive our prayer with love and favour. For you are a God who listens to our prayers and needs. Our King, do not turn us away empty from your presence, for you hear the prayers of all lips. Blessed are you Lord, who listens to prayers.18

10. Jews of India: Bene Israel March 1993. BBC World Service, Reflections

This was the first of Hugo’s four-part series about the Jews of India. It has to be ‘Once upon a time . . . ’ because so much of the life and times of the Jews in India is not so much shrouded in mystery, but simply not recorded in conventional ways. There are legends passed down from generation to generation, and if you are a historian, you more or less just ‘pays your money and takes your choice’, and if you love the community – as I do – you enjoy the stories, suspend critical faculties, and may well find yourself deeply moved by the religious faith and loyalty that made for Jewish continuity despite centuries of isolation from other communities, and driven – as it were – by the determination to survive and to keep trust with the covenant God made with Abraham, the first Jew, and his descendants to this day. I am thinking about the Jews of India and their stories and particularly about the Bene Israel, literally ‘Children of Israel’ but also a term specifically applied to the oldest of India’s Jewish communities, many of whom still live in Bombay and surrounding small towns and villages, and whom I served as a rabbi when I was first ordained, and, with whom, despite the distance and the years, I still have a love affair.

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The first story is about a ship filled with men and women fleeing from their native Judea about the year 175 BCE when the Syrian tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes ruled so harshly over that land and forbade the practice of the Jewish religion. And as they passed to Konkan coast, near the Cheul Creek, a violent storm wrecked the boat and only seven men and seven women managed to reach the safety of its shores. There are other stories as well. Among them, that the unhappy shipwrecks were members of the Banu Israel group expelled from Hejaz in Arabia soon after the time of the Prophet Mohammed; that they sailed directly from Persia, before the rise of Islam but in a period of intolerance; that they were not refugees at all, but simply ill-fated travellers and merchants who left their comfortable homes in Yemen in the sixth century and fully expected to return there. Where all the stories are in agreement is that those seven couples settled in Navgaon and produced large families, that they themselves were, in time, buried in two large mounds which are still venerated in the well-kept cemetery of this village and that their descendants established communities in scores of other neighbouring villages. Because they had no sacred literature, knowledge of religious teachings and customs faded, but not entirely, and I often have the sense that they waited to be discovered and reunited with the rest of the Family of Israel. Which is exactly what did happen! Some say that it was a thousand years ago, some that it was five hundred, and some that it was only about two hundred and fifty years ago. That David Rahabi, a Jew from Cochin in South India, visited the Konkan and in one of its markets noticed that a group of women were unusually meticulous about the kind of fish they were buying. They insisted that the fish had to have fins and scales; else they could not eat them. They also told him that they could eat only meat of animals that had split hoofs and chewed their cud, that though they were neither Muslim nor Hindu, they refrained from eating beef out of respect for Hindu sensitivity about cows. By now Rahabi was more than intrigued:


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these were precisely the biblical Jewish laws of diet! The local name for their community or caste was shanwar teli, Marathi for ‘Saturday Oilmen’, because their traditional occupation was that of oil pressers, but from Friday sundown until the first stars appear Saturday night, they observed the Sabbath as a day of rest. They venerated the memory of the prophet Elijah and it was soon clear to David Rahabi, and even more excitingly to the thousands of Marathi-speaking men, women and children, that they were indeed Bene Israel, part of the Family of Israel, about to be reunited – in heart, spirit and history – with the rest of that Family. And so it was. I often think that this miracle of survival illustrates the powerful adage, ‘More than Israel has kept the Sabbath, it is the Sabbath that kept Israel!’19

11. Jews of India: Sha’ar Harachamim Synagogue March 1993. BBC World Service, Reflections

My father and I were supposed to go to Bombay in December 1992 to make a documentary film for Channel 4, but our trip was cancelled when race riots broke out between Muslims and Hindus. Under the cover of these riots, Hindu militants firebombed the Rodef Shalom synagogue, which my father had helped his community establish in the 1950s, perhaps to settle a score with a Muslim gangster living in the same building. The synagogue was so badly damaged that, since then, his congregation – the Jewish Religious Union – has been without a meeting place of its own. Whenever I think about the Jewish community in India, the biblical Hebrew phrase springs to my lips, eshet neurayich, ‘the wife of your

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youth’, the partner and companion who can never be forgotten nor ceased to be loved, because there I served my first community and its synagogues are landmarks deeper etched in my heart than on the various tourists’ maps of that country. I am thinking today about the Jews of India and, not surprisingly and in common with all those who are devoted to India, its history, its culture, its many religious traditions, and especially its people. I was distressed – more than any words of mine can adequately express – during the recent communal riots and the unspeakable shedding of so much innocent blood. Part of the tragedy was the betrayal of history itself, and the deeply spiritual as well as the practical and life-serving vision of Mahatma Gandhi. I think of his teaching – ahimsa is not simply non-injury to others, it means love for all that lives – and of his ambition, ‘the only virtue I want to claim is truth and non-violence’, and how he wanted differences of language and caste and religion to be tolerated and never a source of conflict or strife. I was also worried about the well-being of the small Jewish community, so many of whom have lived for so many generations in parts of Bombay that prided themselves on being multi-religious, and about their synagogues and schools where I used to teach and preach. Sadly, the centre where I was most active, and where I helped to develop youth groups, a family planning clinic and a daycentre for old people, was devastated. But the oldest synagogue in the city remained safe, and the remarkable story of its origins ought to have a healing purpose. It was the fulfilment of a promise made to God and to himself by Samuel Ezekiel Divekar, a member of the Bene Israel community, the oldest Jewish group in India. His family moved to Bombay from the nearby village of Dev, hence his surname Divekar, as is the pattern of names of all Jews in this part of Maharashtra state. But the traditional village occupations were useless in the big city. A bit unusually for Jews, a very popular new occupation became that of soldiering. And at age twenty, in 1750, Samuel Ezekiel, who


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was also known as Samaji Hasaji, joined the Bombay Army of the British East India Company and before very long, rose to the rank of Sudebar Major, the highest rank a native Indian could reach. Unfortunately he was taken prisoner in the Mysore Wars and he vowed that if he survived his ordeal, he would personally build a house of God. Eventually he found himself interrogated by the then ruler of Mysore – Tippoo Sultan – himself. When asked about his religion, Samaji said simply: ‘Bene Israel’. The Sultan was unimpressed and about to have him sentenced to death, but the Sultan’s mother was listening behind the purdah screen, reminded her son that Bene Israel were kindly spoken about in the Koran – and so his life was saved. In time Samaji’s full freedom was secured by a delegation of Jews from Cochin – where he saw and became greatly impressed by their synagogue – resumed his military career and retired from it with full honours in 1792, and four years later led the prayers at the dedication service of Sha’ar Harachamim synagogue, Hebrew for ‘Gate of Mercy’. Perfect in every detail except for one thing: a Torah scroll. So he returned to Cochin to commission personally the writing of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, but sadly he died and was buried there. But the scroll was completed and is still read in his synagogue every Sabbath, and when I was last in Cochin I put a little stone marker on his grave as a tribute of admiration and affection. And how I hope and pray that India’s temples and mosques, gurdwaras and synagogues, which must all have similarly moving stories, and embody so many ideals, may go on doing their builders’ hopes, to praise the name of God and to serve God’s creatures.

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12. Jews of India: Cochin March 1993. BBC World Service, Reflections When visiting or thinking about Kerala, that most beautiful and endlessly fascinating part of southern India, one does not automatically think of it an ancient Jewish homeland. But when you recall that its rich variety of spices and fine seaports have linked it since the days of King Solomon with the coasts of Africa, Persia and Arabia, attracted traders and travellers, among them Greeks and Romans, Arabs and Venetians, as well as the Portuguese, the Dutch and the French, and, of course, the British, the presence of Jewish communities is no more surprising than the fact that Kerala is also home to one of the oldest Christian groups outside Judea and its immediate neighbourhood. I was about ten years old when I learnt in the book of Kings that Solomon’s navy managed to bring to Israel once every three years a cargo not only of precious metals but also of ‘ivory and apes and peacocks’,20 in Hebrew shenhabim v’kofim v’tookiyim, and imagine my delight when I discovered during my stay and studies in India that these were the Sanskrit and Tamil terms as well for these valuable and unusual royal luxuries. Long before I first visited Cochin – Kerala’s biggest and constantly pulsating city – I knew that its Jewish community traces its origins to the time right after the year 70 CE when Rome devastated Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem and ended the sovereignty of Judea for the next nineteen centuries. They settled in the port cities of Quilon and Cranganore as well as in the capital Tiruvanchikkulam – and having just pronounced it, I don’t blame the people who popularly refer to it as Shingly! But it was in Shingly that the Maharajah, or Great King, of the whole area had arranged for the engraving of copper-plates giving a small but thriving kingdom to the Jew Joseph Rabban and his people. It is the oldest surviving native document in Kerala, written in a script that was popular in the eighth or ninth century (called Vattelluttu), though which some date quite precisely


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to the year 379 CE, and important enough to have had it witnessed by seven other native rulers in the region. I still keep a photograph of these plates in my desk together with a translation granting Joseph Rabban the territory of Anjuvannam, together with 72 personal privileges which include ‘saluting by the firing of guns, to ride on animals . . . a cloth spread in front to walk on . . . a parasol . . . a drum, a trumpet’ and not least ‘the land tax and weight tax’, and best of all, exemption from paying ‘the dues which the inhabitants of the other cities pay to the Royal palace so that he may enjoy the benefits . . . ’ The document ends with a promise that these rights and privileges belong to Joseph Rabban and his descendants ‘in natural succession so long as the world and moon exist . . . ’ Well, for quite a long time the Rabban family and their fellow Jews did enjoy prosperity, autonomy and great religious freedom. A fourteenth-century Hebrew poet and traveller, Rabbi Nissim, was moved to write: I travelled from Spain. I had heard of the city of Shingly I had longed to see an Israeli King, Him I saw with my own eyes.

Neither the Maharajah nor Joseph Rabban could foresee that in time two brothers would fight a bitter war for the succession, fresh invaders came from the north, and before long all those who could, fled to the safety of Cochin. How that community developed, with its Black Jews and White Jews, from Arabia and Europe, prospered and now declined numerically through mass-migration to Israel to fewer than 50 souls21 is another story. But if you make your way to its Jew Town, you will find at the end of Synagogue Lane one of the most beautiful synagogues in the world. There, God’s name is still praised day after day and Sabbath after Sabbath. And if you can charm its leader, Satu Koder,22 or its

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Hugo with Satu Koder, leader of the Jews in Cochin, India, 1958.

sexton, Jackie Cohen23, they might well open a special safe, and with great pride show you the copper plates.

13. Jews of India: Passover 1958 March 1993. BBC World Service, Reflections Soon Jewish people everywhere will be celebrating the festival of Pesach or Passover. Homes will be cleaned from top to bottom and


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carefully cleared of everything that contains or had contact with leaven. Because the Children of Israel left their slavery of Egypt in such great hurry that there was no time even to bake bread for their dramatic and God-directed journey, to this day, and for a whole week, only unleavened bread or matza is eaten, and on the first night of this festival, the whole story of the Exodus will be told with prayers and stories and song. Its aim is to go on thanking God for the miracle of redemption, to reflect on the blessing and joy that comes from freedom and, if we get it right, to feel as if we personally suffered the indignity and pain of slavery and then tasted the exciting and spirit-lifting liberty. Much of the Seder – as this evening’s celebration is called – is designed to engage the imagination as well as the interest and loyalty of the children. The youngest ask the ritual Four Questions about the significance of Passover and its customs, a matza is broken into two at the start of the service, half of it is named the afikomen and hidden, and the child who finds it and returns it to the leader of the Seder at the end of the meal, is rewarded with a special gift. You do not need a degree in child psychology to see that the ploy is to keep them interested and, hopefully, awake. It is with a mixture of emotions that I recall today a Seder in Bombay when I was not only the leader of a memorable communal Seder, but also its victim! My wife and I came to serve its Jewish community immediately after my ordination, and not very long after we were married. It was to be a one-year assignment, and the prospect of being the community’s first full-time rabbi in living memory was as exciting as it was daunting. Very soon it was only exciting. Without exception – well, almost without exception – the people were welcoming, affectionate and hospitable. Adults and children were eager to study, my initial mistakes were generously forgiven and, if you are looking for a rabbinic ‘honeymoon’,24 you cannot do better than Bombay. I am still warmed by the memory of it. That I could not speak Marathi was a bit of a problem, but

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Bombay, August 1957: Hugo and Jackie Gryn meet Dr Jerusha Jhirad (1890–1984), founder of the Jewish Religious Union, India’s only liberal Jewish congregation.

Abraham Chincholkar, an elderly solicitor whose English was far more elegant than mine could ever be, and who had many strong religious opinions, gladly accompanied me to the more outlying villages to act as translator. I did not think it too odd that his translations were much longer than my sermons and lectures, but as I was picking up more and more Marathi, I finally insisted that he must not use my presence as licence for his pet theories and totally ignore mine. But the Seder . . . Not long before Passover that year, the head of the American Reform Jewish Movement, Rabbi Maurice N. Eisendrath,25 came for a short holiday visit. Unfortunately his wife, Rose, took ill and, instead of three days, they had to stay six weeks until she recovered. Naturally he was to be our guest of honour at the big communal event I organized. There we were in the hall of the Sir Elly Kadoorie High School, a Jewish school, more than 400 of us, all the men in their finest suits and the women in the most beautiful saris, children everywhere and attentive, and as we came to hide the afikomen, the


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visiting rabbi announced that he personally would reward its finder with anything he or she wanted. All went well. Eventually a young boy – Amizur Penkar – found the half-matza, and when asked what he wanted for it, came the clearly rehearsed request: ‘You, sir, are a great rabbi. Please arrange for Rabbi Gryn to stay in Bombay two more years!’ Which is how I came to serve there for three years, learnt a lot, and made many lifelong friendships, but ever since then I buy the afikomen presents myself and they are not subject to negotiation!

14. Hong Kong: Lawrence and Horace Kadoorie 5 June 1985. BBC World Service, Reflections I am aware that for most people in Europe, Hong Kong seems to represent limitless duty-free shopping, and for many tourists it is a gateway to the Republic of China. But for me, a recent visit to this Crown colony proved an exciting and unexpected illustration that the ancient Jewish notion of charity, which is tzedakah, a combination of justice and compassion, is alive and well. As you may know, forty years ago, and as a result of the war and the Japanese occupation, Hong Kong’s population had become severely depleted. In August 1945 it had just about 600,000 people, but there was such a rapid return of former inhabitants – and soon of refugees arriving – that only four years later, by 1949, almost two million more women, men and children were to be found there. And in the next thirty years that number was to double as well. When you see today the gleaming skyscrapers and the busy factory and shopping districts, as well as the well-cultivated farms of Hong Kong Island and of Kowloon and the New Territories, it is hard to imagine the poverty and the problems that existed there. But exist they did, and among the people who arrived in those difficult years were the brothers Kadoorie – Lawrence and Horace – sons of

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Sir Elly Kadoorie, who came to China before the turn of the century from the ancient and distinguished Jewish community of Baghdad, who achieved much in the way of business but lost virtually everything in war-torn and occupied Shanghai. Like so many others, they started again, and soon they prospered again as well. But the two brothers, who, despite their many and extensive business ventures, never had separate bank accounts, and certainly no differences of opinion on issues that really mattered, developed what they call an obsession. And I am prepared to add the adjective ‘holy’ to it! It was, ‘to help the less fortunate and friendless to become self-supporting, to restore their self-respect and sense of security’. These are noble, almost prophetic words, written by Horace or perhaps Lawrence – or both! – but what makes them remarkable is the way they gave them reality. Since the majority of the people were peasants – rooted yet uprooted from the soil – the plan was to enable them to become farmers again. So they established the Kadoorie Agricultural Aid Association thirty-four years ago, and its purpose is to turn ‘havenots’ into ‘haves’, by offering knowledge, means and the visual satisfaction that comes from growing things that support life. I know that statistics can be boring, but not these: since 1951 more than 350,000 people and some 1,200 villages have directly benefited from the activities of the Association by being given land, seeds, poultry and – dare this rabbi say it? – even pigs. In the process, two hundred miles of road were built and over fifty miles of irrigation channels, together with dams, wells and floodgates. A loan fund for basic needs assisted almost 70,000 applicants with virtually no bad debts in all this time. And when I visited the Kadoorie Experimental Farm in the environs of the appropriately named Goddess of Mercy Hill, I met a number of Gurkha soldiers, part of the British army responsible for Hong Kong’s security, being readied for retirement in Nepal but first trained in growing food and poultry and continuing to be assisted by Nepal itself.


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I came across a ‘letter to the editor’ from a man whose house was destroyed by a storm, and annoyed by an article which denied miracles. He described his plight and how a man he had never seen or heard of appeared, built him a new home, gave him pigs and helped him to start a new life. In the light of this evidence, he asked, how could anyone deny miracles? I am still warmed by the words of Horace Kadoorie – or Ka Dao Lei, as the Chinese call him – ‘there is more enjoyment from showing one man how to stand on his own feet, than creating a dozen successful businesses!’26 Which is not very different from the teaching of Moses Maimonides, one of Judaism’s greatest teachers born eight hundred and fifty years ago, who constructed eight steps on a golden ladder of charity, the highest being: ‘He who helps a fellow man to support himself by a gift, or a loan or by finding employment for him – thus helping him to become self-supporting.’27

15. Jews and Japan: The Fugu Plan 6 June 1985. BBC World Service, Reflections At this time of the year, especially on a Sabbath afternoon, I enjoy visiting Regent’s Park, near my home in London. And one of my favourite spots there is a little island filled with mainly Japaneseoriginating miniature trees and shrubs, which may explain why I had a silly fantasy that Japan must be small! And my surprise when I actually visited Japan recently, for the first time, and found that it was anything than that! Indeed I found Tokyo so big that I gave up the idea of renting a car for fear of getting lost, and as I could not read the signs nor strike up conversations anywhere except places that cater for tourists, I soon developed the sense of being a gaijin, the Japanese terms for an outsider. And since returning home, I have an altogether new sympathy for Japanese visitors who like to move in groups. I even escorted such a group to an address written on a

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piece of paper because I now know how they must feel. Yet Japan is fascinating and enjoyable and a place where upto-date technology is not only in evidence, but it also works. In as many seconds as it takes for me to tell you this, the travel agency and computer in our hotel established that yes, we can have seats on the 8 a.m. ‘bullet train’ to Kyoto, and no, that we cannot sit on the side best for viewing Mount Fuji, but that yes, we can have both on the 8.15 a.m. train. And so it actually was. I was also interested in what is undoubtedly a miniature, namely the very small Jewish community in Japan. And this for several reasons. First, there was my reading – many years ago – of an odd study by a Scottish missionary, the Reverend McLeod. A hundred and ten years ago he wrote that ‘his researches in Japan have satisfied him that the people of this country are of Jewish family . . . ’28 Further readings and discussions with experts have satisfied me that such romantic notions have no basis in fact, and yet . . . I did meet members of the Makuya sect, led by Professor Teshima, who keep this possibility alive, that somehow some of the so-called Ten Lost Tribes found their way to Japan. Certainly the Makuyas visit Israel regularly and about five years ago they erected a statue of Anne Frank in the garden of one of their churches in Nishinomiya. There is also my interest in one of the great might-have-beens in recent Jewish history. In the 1930s when Japan ruled over much of Manchuria, a group of industrialists and political leaders had the idea of attracting Jews from East Europe, and when Nazi persecutions started from Germany as well, to settle there. They were to bring with them industrial as well as shoe and clothes-making skills, and possibly lead to improved international relations, especially with the United States of America. This project was codenamed the Fugu Plan after a species of hard-to-catch and dangerous fish (but apparently delicious to eat) and described in a fascinating book by a former rabbi of Tokyo,


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Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz.29 In the event nothing came of it, for many reasons: changed political conditions, anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda, American suspicions. But it had one life-saving side effect: as late as September 1940, the Japanese Consul in Kovno in Lithuania, Senpo Sugihara, vaguely aware of this plan and by nature a humanitarian, issued some 6,000 transit visas to Jewish men and women, despite instructions to the contrary. And many of them – including the teachers and students of an entire rabbinic college – managed to cross the whole of the Soviet Union and find temporary shelter in Japan. I also enjoyed celebrating the Sabbath in the small but splendid synagogue in Tokyo. Fortunately the signs were in English as well as in Japanese and the prayers in Hebrew, so I could feel at home on all levels, and you will not be surprised to learn (though as a congregational rabbi in central London, I am profoundly envious) that the synagogue also has first class underground parking facilities!

16. Russian Refuseniks I 4 November 1980. Capital Radio, Reflections

The Refusenik movement began in the 1960s when Soviet Jews began applying for exit visas to emigrate from the USSR, mostly to Israel. Although there was large-scale Jewish emigration in the 1970s, many Jews were refused permission. Of all the Refuseniks, Vladimir Slepak was one of the most vocal. The Russian authorities finally gave Slepak and his wife, Maria, permission to leave in 1987. Every now and then we meet people who can engage us in conversation, or who tell us of some experience, or share an idea with us, and after we part company, we find they have left behind an

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atmosphere and an impression that continues to speak to us long after the words have ended. A short time ago I received such a visitor. He came to London from Israel. A shortish, thin man, about my age, which is to say middle-aged, unable to speak English, but on a mission which was so powerful and so touching that his mixture of Hebrew and Russian, and my mixture of the same, were no obstacle in communication. He had taken a two-week holiday from his job as an engineer, and at his own expense, to travel non-stop in western Europe and to see as many people as he could, to enlist support and sympathy on behalf of his brother-in-law, Vladimir Slepak. Of course, I knew about Slepak, but it was one thing to read occasionally about him in the newspapers, and another to meet a member of his family who was clearly also his very close friend. And Vadim Orlofsky, the brother-in-law, told me the story again: of a man who eleven years ago gave up his job as a radio engineer in order that he could apply to the Russian authorities for permission to leave a country that he felt did not want him, to go to Israel, which did, and of repeated refusals to let him go. The image I had was like the one in the Bible. The more Moses and Aaron urged Pharoah to let their people go, the harder became the Pharaoh’s heart, and the more stubborn the refusal. No longer employed or employable, he was made a scapegoat, followed by the secret police wherever he went, branded as a traitor in newspaper articles and even on television. Somehow, one of his sons, Alexander, did get permission to leave and settle in Israel and when, in sheer desperation, Vladimir Slepak and his wife, Maria, painted on a white sheet the request, ‘Let us go to our son in Israel!’ and hung it on their small balcony outside their flat in Moscow, within minutes buckets of hot water were poured on them from above and, while still dripping and scalded, they were arrested and charged with malicious hooliganism. By the time they had their trial, three weeks later, Mrs Slepak was too ill to stand up but was given a suspended sentence of three


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years. Vladimir was tried in a closed court, condemned as a hooligan and for being insolent, and sentenced to five years exile in Siberia. He is there now. He has recurring pneumonia and his family and friends fear not only for his health, but also for his life. His brother-in-law also showed me family pictures and though I have never met him, I nevertheless feel I know him. A strong and courageous man, yet gentle. And because he can no longer do so, it must be up to people like me and, hopefully, you, never to be tired of guarding this very basic human right to be free and to be able to come and go in God’s world, which was given to us not to be made into a prison but into a world in which every man can sit under his vine and fig tree, and no one shall terrorize him.30

17. Russian Refuseniks II 6 March 1988. Capital Radio, Reflections I am glad to tell you this morning about an unusual and very delightful experience enjoyed both by our community and our family. From time to time I have been telling you about our interest in the safety and well-being of our fellow Jews in the Soviet Union, especially those who are called Refuseniks, that is to say, men and women who receive an invitation to join members of their families in Israel and who then apply for permission to leave the Soviet Union. The overwhelming majority of such applications are turned down, but not only are they refused the basic human right to leave, but almost invariably, they lose their jobs and are often made a butt of harassment. Sooner or later, they also contravene a Soviet law which calls for all able-bodied people to be in employment and, if you are not working, you may be classified as a parasite for which, in turn, you can be imprisoned or sent into exile in remote parts of this vast country. Sometimes people are refused on the grounds that when they

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were in the army or in some earlier employment, they became privy to secrets. I know of one man who spent his two years of military service as a hospital orderly and he has been in refusal for the past twelve years on the grounds that he had secrets! It is these people who are called Refuseniks and it is estimated that there are about 400,000 men and women who would like nothing more than to be reunited with their people. From time to time, permission to leave is given to individuals or families and those of us who support their struggle greet such permissions with a great deal of joy. Thus, during this past week, we were able to entertain three such couples in our community: Masha and Leonid Kelbert from Leningrad, Rosa and Alex Ioffe from Moscow, and Elena and Grigory Genusov, also from Leningrad. Leonid is a young filmmaker; Alex was a distinguished teacher of mathematics and the Genusovs are computer experts, and they, together with their two young children, have for many years been ‘adopted’ by my congregation. We have been in constant contact with them on the telephone, through letters and even visits. If you are a regular listener to these Reflections and if you have a good memory, you may recall that, about two years ago, I spoke of our planting a young tree outside our synagogue building in west London as a mark of our solidarity and support for the Genusov family. Well, these three couples arrived in Israel a few months ago and we invited them to be our guests in England for a week’s holiday. A special Sabbath dinner at which they were the guests of honour last Friday was filled to overflowing. We just could not get all the people who wanted to be with them into our large hall and our guests turned out to be lovely and caring and absolutely delighted that they can now lead a full Jewish life. Their children can be taught Jewish history, the Bible in Hebrew and they can celebrate festivals and Sabbaths and, in all important respects, they can now be true to themselves. You can imagine how much I enjoyed taking a photograph of the


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Genusov couple actually standing by the still-young tree out in the street with their names on a plaque, on the planting box. Part of the secret of their spirits’ survival must also have to do with their sense of humour and I particularly enjoyed Leonid Kelbert’s complaint: ‘All the time I was a Refusenik in Russia, I wanted to be abroad and to know what it is like to be in a strange place. So, we arrived in Israel and immediately we felt completely at home. And now, we came to London and look what happens, we feel completely at home here as well. It is like being in our very own family.’ And, that is exactly how we felt about them. As if we had always known each other. And now, together, we want to work for the freedom of all those they had to leave behind.

18. Operation Solomon: Jews of Ethiopia 30 June 1991. Capital Radio, Reflections There was great excitement in Israel a few weeks ago and Jews all over the world shared something of it when the remnant of the Ethiopian Jewish community arrived at Tel Aviv airport.31 In an operation codenamed ‘Solomon’ and in just under thirty hours [approximately] 14,500 men, women and children completed a journey they have been praying for and dreaming about for many, many generations. They were at last reunited with family and friends who came to Israel a few years earlier, but because of the ruthless politics in Ethiopia there was a most painful separation of parents and children, and of brothers and sisters, even husbands and wives. I know this, because from time to time I have been meeting some of them and was deeply moved by their story. There is something of a mystery about the origins of this community. There are many stories about the Queen of Sheba who ruled the vast area that is today’s Ethiopia – the biblical land of

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Kush – and King Solomon who was not only the wise king of Israel three thousand years ago, but also made a whole series of political alliances through a remarkably large number of marriages! There are so many legends which speak about the love of this energetic king and the beautiful black queen who was not only powerful but also every bit as clever as Solomon. And it is their descendants and the descendants of the officials whose job it was to make the alliance work smoothly who make up this community. It seems that through all these centuries they remained a separate group, worshipping the One God, strictly observing the laws of Sabbath on Saturday, eating only those foods which are permitted in the Hebrew Bible, and celebrating many of the festivals that Jews in other parts of the world also continued to observe. But their scriptures and their prayers were – and still are – in the Ge’ez language, old Ethiopian. And even after the rise of Christianity and, later on, the arrival of Islam, religions which gained millions of adherents in that region, their group remained deeply loyal to their beliefs and traditions. So much so that their neighbours called them Falashas, which means ‘strangers’ or ‘exiles’, despite the fact that they looked, lived and spoke just like all the other Ethiopians. Indeed, from time to time they were also isolated and persecuted for their religious difference and consider it very hurtful to be called Falashas! Their own name for their community is Beta Israel, which means ‘House of Israel’, and their greatest hope has been that one day they would be together and inseparable from the rest of the Family of Israel, no longer called and treated as lowly and despised ‘strangers’. Which is exactly what is happening right now! Just exactly what King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba might have thought of that Saturday a month ago when 35 airplanes came into Addis Ababa, quickly loaded up their passengers, even set a world record by taking 1,087 people32 in one aircraft, and incidentally had five33 babies born while they were airborne, and then watch 265 buses and quite a few ambulances take the new arrivals to hostels and hotels where they will learn Hebrew and be helped to enter the twentieth century


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as well as Israel, is something I can only guess at. But I like to think that the Queen and the King might have smiled at each other and whispered: ‘At long last – our children are together again!’ What I do know is what one of the immigrants, Kabad Okola, did say: ‘I feel as if I am taking part in the Exodus from Egypt. We love Israel and thank you for receiving us in this way.’

1 Pirkei Avot 1.14. 2 Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a. 3 ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ from Matt. 7.12 and Luke 6.31. 4 In Hebrew, Pirkei Avot. 5 Pirkei Avot 2.15. 6 Pirkei Avot 2.21. 7 Nabucco, BBC Wales (1996). 8 Gryn, H. G. (1957), The problem of theodicy in the philosophy of Maimonides Master of Arts (in Hebrew Letters), Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, Ohio. 9 Traditional rhyme. 10 Jews were expelled from England in 1290. See p. 183. 11 The Treaty of Maastricht was signed on 7 February 1992, creating the European Union. 12 Named after André Maginot, French Minister of Defence, a line of fortifications constructed along France’s border from Switzerland to Luxembourg during the 1920s but broken through by the Germans in 1940. 13 In a speech to the Guildhall on 24 November 1992, reflecting on a year of royal scandals and divorces and a fire at Windsor Castle, the Queen said: ‘1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure . . . it has turned out to be an Annus Horribilis.’ For Elizabeth II it was certainly not a vintage year. There were also violent race riots in Britain, Germany, LA and Bombay. On the upside, Bill Clinton was elected President of the USA, Yitzhak Rabin elected Prime Minister of Israel and South Africans voted to end apartheid. 14 Magonet, J. and Blue, L. (eds) (1985), Forms of Prayer for Jewish Worship I. London: RSGB, p. 29. 15 Ps. 96.1. 16 Magonet, J. and Blue, L. (eds) (1985), Forms of Prayer for Jewish Worship I. London: RSGB, p. 570.

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17 Isa. 55.8. 18 Magonet, J. and Blue, L. (eds) (1985), Forms of Prayer for Jewish Worship I. London: RSGB, p. 237. 19 Essayist Ahad Ha’am, pen name for Asher Ginsberg (1856–1927). 20 1 Kgs 10.22. 21 In November 2009 there were 47 Jews still living in Kerala: eleven Paradesi or White Jews in Fort Cochin, 36 Malabar or Black Jews in Ernakulum and the surrounding villages. 22 Shabdai Samuel Koder (1908–1994). 23 Jackie Cohen (1919–1996). 24 See p. 33 for Hugo’s other rabbinic honeymoon in Jasper, Alabama. 25 Rabbi Maurice N. Eisendrath (1902–1973), Executive Director and President of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations from 1943–73. 26 Archer, J. Kadoorie (1979), Experimental and Extension Farm and Botanical Gardens. Hong Kong: Eurasia Publishing Corporation, p. 6. 27 Maimonides, Hilchot Matnot Ani’im 10.7. 28 McLeod, N. (1879), Epitome of the Ancient History of Japan. Tokyo. 29 Tokayer, M. and Swartz, M. (1979), The Fugu Plan: The Untold Story of the Japanese and the Jews During World War II. New York: Paddington Press. 30 Mic. 4.4. 31 24–25 May 1991. 32 There were, in addition to this number, children who had been hidden under their mother’s dresses. 33 The number of babies born on board varies according to the source. Hugo claimed in his script that there were eleven, which is characteristically enthusiastic, but less plausible than the five births cited in The New York Times, 26 May 1991.

It was my good fortune to have known Hugo and his family for more than two decades. He was never judgmental; and always practical, clear and wise. When he entered a room, he did so on the run, his face vibrant, his eyes eager, the warmth of his friendship literally glowing. However low one might fall, Hugo was always there to help pick one up. The film that Hugo made about Prague, The Star, the Castle & the Butterfly,1 shows Hugo the storyteller at his best – affectionate, fun, and thoughtful. He had the power to bring back the moods and charms of the days of his youth in Central Europe. Then there was the terrible time, seemingly endless in its terror, of ghetto, deportation, concentration camps and death marches – of the death of his younger brother Gabi and of his father Géza – followed by the slow, steady, rebuilding of his life in Britain as one of ‘The Boys’ of the ’45 Aid Society, who loved him so. In 1948, Hugo was one of the Mahal volunteers who went to the newly created and besieged State of Israel, to fight in the War of Independence, when he played his part in Israel’s struggle to survive. His best friend, Jonathan Balter, was killed in action. Hugo was what we call today a ‘survivor’. This word hides the great qualities of mind, the great energy of spirit, that accompanied Hugo on his life’s journey – a journey whose premature ending was so saddening and so distressing to so many people. Hugo’s sermons and his hespeds,2 his humour and his homilies, will live in our memory. In 1978, when the Zionism equals Racism resolution at the United Nations was only three years old, Hugo reflected on his own experiences of

Hugo and Martin Gilbert in Jerusalem.

the Holocaust and the evils still in the world. ‘How urgent it is,’ he wrote, ‘that we know, and act, as decent people.’ In response to this sense of urgency, Hugo had no hesitation in becoming active in the long and arduous campaign to demand that the Soviet Union let out those Jews who wanted to leave, and allow Jewish religious and educational life for those who wished to remain. How joyous he was when those for whom he campaigned came to West London Synagogue and spoke of their experiences, and their release. A proud Jew, deeply versed in Jewish history from its biblical origins until our own time, Hugo understood as well as anybody the problems on our Jewish path, including those of our own making. In a postcard from Jerusalem in the early 1980s, he wrote: ‘Of course the tensions here are great, internal ones especially. Jews are wonderful. We don’t need enemies, we do it to each other.’ Hugo always sought to remedy that. He was a great facilitator, and a great enthusiast for sanity. Those of us who knew him, and who loved him, will cherish his memory until our own time is come.

—Sir Martin Gilbert, historian

SECOND WORLD WAR AND THE HOLOCAUST

1. Songs of the Holocaust 13 December 1976. BBC Radio 4, Thought for the Day

Zog Nit Keynmol (Song of the Partisans) was one of the eight songs Hugo requested on Desert Island Discs.3 A poem or a song is often a short cut through long history or a great deal of personal experience. The melody you heard and its text in the original Yiddish language bring back to me events of more than thirty years ago when I was one of the very young inmates in Nazi concentration camps. I was also one of the very few lucky ones. Through no virtue of mine, I survived, and this week I shall be telling you, not so much about myself but about some people and experiences and ideas which are still tremendously vivid in my mind and may give you food for thought as well. As a survivor you can’t help but to have a bit of a witness complex, and it is the job of a witness to testify! The ghettos of eastern Europe, as the Nazis marched from country

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to country, beginning in 1939 and, within two years, the extermination and forced labour camps that followed, they were hardly places known for their artistic creativity. Yet such is the spirit of man that while there is any breath of life, he instinctively wants to sing out. Now I can only remember two songs. There were others to be sure. Our SS guards loved their dogs and music, and in some of the bigger camps inmates were recruited into orchestras which performed Sunday afternoons to mark the end of our six-and-ahalf-day, fourteen-hours-per-day, working week. These concerts were grotesque. The shaven-headed musicians in their stripedpyjama uniforms on a rickety platform, facing an audience sitting on benches of off-duty guards and their dogs. Behind them, often on muddy ground, we sat, exhausted and hungry. And behind us, high in their turrets, the guards who were on duty, pointing machine guns on us. I remember the scene but none of the sounds. One of the songs which haunt me was in Hebrew, a line from the Thirteen Principles of Faith by Moses Maimonides, Ani Ma’amin, ‘I believe’. ‘I believe’ we used to sing, ‘with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, and though he tarry, yet will I believe!’ Pushing carts of refuse or carrying cement bags, we sang quietly, almost to ourselves. Once a Dutch Protestant fellow prisoner asked me what the words meant. I told him, but I am not sure that he believed me. Afterwards I would say that it was something my grandmother taught me. It was not too bad a lie: she was killed at Auschwitz, and I learned the song in Auschwitz. The other song was written by Hirsh Glick, who was born in Vilna in Lithuania. He was not yet twenty when he wrote it, and he was killed in 1944 when he was barely twenty-two. The melody is by a Russian-Jewish composer, Dimitri Pokrass. It was sung by Jewish partisans in Russian forests, doomed ghetto fighters in Polish towns, and by so many of us on long marches from camp to camp, with so few who made it back. Let me speak to you some of its words and then you will see why


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I love this song and – yes – owe so much to it. Zog nit Keynmol az du gest dem letzten weg Never say that you now walk the final way Because the darkened heavens hide the blue of day The time we long for will at last draw near And our steps, like drums, will say that we are here.4

2. Maladie de Famine 14 December 1976. BBC Radio 4, Thought For The Day At the end of the week Jews and Jewish communities will celebrate the festival of Chanukah. It’s our festival of light and recalls the heroism of the Maccabees. Was there any comparable heroism during World War II in the midst of the Nazi persecution of the Jews? If heroism can only be vindicated by victory – as the Maccabees’ was – the answer is ‘no’. But if you can agree with my definition of heroism, that it is achieved when the spirit of an individual or of a group of people triumphs over a surrounding barbarism and emerges, not so much triumphant, but civilized and with human dignity intact, then there were many such acts of heroism. Let me tell you about a book which is virtually unknown in our country and which illustrates most movingly what I mean. It is called Maladie de Famine, published in Warsaw in 1946, a few months after the war. It is a detailed, scientific study of starvation. In the autumn of 1940 the Nazis herded together half a million Jews into the Warsaw ghetto. A year later all food reserves were completely exhausted. The daily ration became about 800 calories and starvation had become one of the main killers in the ghetto. A poorly equipped hospital tried to cope but the doctors soon realized not only the extent, but also the hopelessness of their situation. At

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this point, in February 1942, a group of 33 Jewish doctors, scientists and medical students made a heroic decision: they would study and record the effects of starvation both on their patients and on themselves. They met every month to co-ordinate their work and knew that their work could come to a sudden end through their own, or their patients’, deportation to one of the extermination camps. In fact, not a single doctor survived. By the spring of 1943, when the population of the ghetto was reduced to 40,000 through starvation, epidemics and deportation, they decided to smuggle the manuscript – meticulously illustrated in graphs, charts and some haunting photographs – to a non-Jewish professor at Warsaw University. As soon as Poland was liberated, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a medical and welfare agency, had the Yiddish and Polish texts translated into French, considered the language of civilized Europe and printed on cheap brownish paper. I am looking at a much, much thumbed copy now – here in the studio – and I wonder about the purpose of its authors. Why did they work so hard? Three thousand, six hundred and fiftyeight autopsies and tens of thousands of examinations and tests, all in their off-duty hours. I am convinced that it was to give both their life and their death a measure of significance. They knew that there had not been in human experience destruction on such a vast scale. They also knew that starvation was a universal problem. Dr Emil Apfelbaum, in his study of the circulatory system in extreme hunger, wrote, ‘The organism which is destroyed by prolonged hunger is like a candle which burns out: life disappears gradually without a visible shock to the naked eye.’5 Why do I think of this book as heroic? Because it represents the triumph of the human spirit over human barbarism. Neither Hitler’s name nor the word ‘Nazi’ is ever mentioned in it. There is no note of self-pity. It is a legacy by scientists to fellow scientists, which has yet to be properly appreciated. Even more: it is a classic testament to human self-respect and dignity.


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3. Faith in the Camps: Victor Frankl 15 December 1976. BBC Radio 4, Thought for the Day You may think this is a strange thing to say, but when I was a teenager in Nazi concentration camps in Germany, I discovered God. Not the God of my childhood. I lost him – or lost sight of him – around the crematoria of Auschwitz. I prayed that he ‘do something’ and when he did not, I turned my back on him as well. But later – in the slave labour camps – and, I suppose, in retrospect too. When I saw more clearly the different ways the human spirit can respond to people and events. In the camps there was ‘a regression to primitiveness’, that is to say our interests became restricted to the most immediate and urgent needs. Food and water and sleep. Because there was hardly any food, and crowded conditions combined with vermin plus fourteen hours of work a day gave little chance for sleep, we were in the main apathetic and irritable. Not so much zombie-like, more tired animal-like. All thinking was concentrated on a simple and single point: to get through today, to survive another day! There was an important change in the meaning of some key values. Freedom is something you and I consider that we have, and if you are imprisoned, it is taken away. But in the camps freedom had become what you were, and this shaped the attitudes you formed to your situation and to your destiny. Apathy could only be overcome by force of spirit. Or you could give into it and so disintegrate from within. Irritability and brutalization could only be suppressed through intellectual and emotional effort. If you could not do this, you became less – considerably less – than a civilized human being. It became a choice: to fit into the surroundings and swim with the tide. This was towards primitiveness. Or to struggle against a dreadful environment and swim against a powerful tide. I began to see it then, and see it much more clearly now: it was a matter of spiritual effort.

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The worst handicap had to do with time. No one knew when the experience would end. It made for a sense of helplessness. Viktor Frankl is a psychiatrist who was in the camps himself. He wrote about a fellow prisoner he knew who dreamt that on 30 March 1945 the war would end and he would be liberated. No real news was possible and when nothing happened, this man developed high fever on 29 March and the next day he died of typhoid. Disillusionment, according to Dr Frankl, brought quick decline of bodily defence. My own experience bears this out. There was always a spate of rumours about – about food from the Red Cross, or the approach of the Russian Army, or the proximity of the Americans – and when events proved them false, morale dropped like a cement bag. Only an inner sensation, that in the end evil will be defeated, gave any kind of certainty. And afterwards, when I look back on my experiences and suffering, and it is purely good luck that I am alive, I realize that there is nothing left to fear in this world, except God. Many people lost their faith in God in the concentration camps. Many others – I among them – learnt to believe or believe again in God.

4. Martin Gilbert’s Second World War 16 August 1989. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought

This was broadcast on the forty-fourth anniversary of VJ Day, Victory over Japan. It is, unashamedly, a plug for a new book by Hugo’s best friend, Martin.6 I am particularly conscious today of how time flies because in a few days it will be half a century since the start of World War II and the fact is that I too remember it myself, not quite as if it were yesterday, but clearly enough and, therefore, feel almost ‘historical’.


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The publication this week of the historian Martin Gilbert’s latest book, simply titled Second World War, certainly assists my memory for it chronicles these 2,174 days of relentless violence and cruelty that began in 1939, and today happens to mark the first day of peace, because Japan finally surrendered on 15 August, six years later, in 1945. I would admire this book even if Martin Gilbert were not a cherished and close friend because an enormous amount of information is conveyed accurately, often passionately, and always readably. I find it almost bizarre that the first three days of the war actually signalled all that was to follow. It began with deception: a crude trick devised by Himmler, who took an unnamed prisoner from a concentration camp, dressed him in a Polish uniform, faked an attack on a radio station on the border, shot him, and the next morning – which was 1 September, when the Germans started their invasion of Poland – Hitler gave ‘the attack by regular Polish troops on the . . . transmitter’7 as one of his reasons for doing so. By the end of that day, 130 Poles were dead, all but 12 civilians. The next day a refugee train was bombed and some 24,000 Death Head regiments of the SS were moved with orders to ‘incarcerate or annihilate’. And on the 3rd of September, villages were already burning. In one of them, Truskolasy, 55 Polish peasants were rounded up and shot, including a 2-year-old. In another village nearby, Wieruszów, 20 Jews were lined up in the market place and executed. That day, too, Britain and France declared war on Germany, and the passenger liner Athenia, on her way from Liverpool to Montreal, was torpedoed. Twenty-two of the passengers who died were Americans and that night President Roosevelt announced on radio that he was preparing ‘a proclamation of American neutrality’! My own first memory is of scores of Polish refugees passing through our town in Carpathia. Tired and hungry and unnaturally quiet. Many of them tried to sell their bicycles for food or cash. I particularly liked their elongated seats and asked my mother if she could not make up a package to help these poor people. A little

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bread and sugar, and perhaps a tin of sardines. She made up three such packages, put them in a basket for me, and added as I started to run: ‘And don’t you dare come home with anything but your own bicycle!’ When the war did end, Martin calculated that over 46 million men, women and children had perished, and immeasurable ‘scars – physical, mental and spiritual’ remain. In a phrase generously attributed to me, the book concludes that ‘the greatest unfinished business of the Second World War is human pain’8.

5. Bystanders 8 July 1981. BBC Radio 4, Thought for the Day

1981 was a turbulent year for British cities. Tensions between black youth and the police, particularly over the ‘sus’ laws that empowered police officers to stop-and-search, led to the Brixton riots in April. On 3 July violent disturbances erupted in Southall between Asians and White skinheads, and in Toxteth, Liverpool on 4 July, following the arrest of 20-year-old Leroy Cooper. The Toxteth riots lasted for nine days. When I was a young boy, I lived through the destruction of my native Czechoslovakia. I realize now that this was the result of complicated political issues, of diplomatic gambles and games that went sour and was part of a process which unleashed evil forces which took years and more than twenty-five million human lives to bring under a measure of control again. But at the time – nearly forty-three years ago – all that happened at first was that the Czech officials, from judges to teachers and a small garrison of soldiers, left our town one day and the next, a new lot of soldiers, Hungarian and Fascist, elegantly dressed and with


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a brass band marching in front of them, came in their place. Most people in our town lined the streets, many cheered and waved new and strange flags, yet for reasons that I can only attribute to instinct, I was sad and I cried – so much that I was pushed into the back of the crowd by the bigger boys around me because I was clearly spoiling their fun. Perhaps I saw the hardness in their eyes and sensed the hardness in their hearts. And within a very short time our new rulers published the first set of their antisemitic regulations. Suddenly, in a town that was more than half Jewish, Jews were no longer full or equal citizens. Before long we could not work or live where we wanted to, or go to the school we wanted to. In time, too, because the diplomacy really didn’t work, there was war and Nazi German troops also arrived, some with the specific task of first robbing, then isolating and finally of herding our community into the trains that took us to Auschwitz. By the summer of 1945 when the war had ended, and Hitler’s as well as Horthy’s9 empires were a smouldering ruin, of the 15,000 Jews in our town no more than 500 or 600 survived alive. Now I am telling this dreadful story not to shock you, because most of you know it through your own experience or reading or through the recent spate of radio and TV programmes, nor to engage your sympathy or pity, because it is too early in the day and, in another sense, it is too late for that anyway. The victims cannot be brought back and those who perpetrated this crime are beyond our reach. But the part I find difficult to understand to this day is the part of the bystanders. The people in my town and in all the other cities and villages in Europe, the non-Jewish men and women who were not directly threatened or involved, and who let it happen, who did not protest or interrupt or show any significant anger. They were, it seemed to me then and still now, nice enough, ordinary people, but their moral sense had become blunted. Perhaps only for a time, but long enough to let wickedness have and rule the day. My thought today, still greatly affected by what I feel were a kind

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of pogrom in Southall and in Liverpool, and is festering in Ulster and in many other places in this – now my – country, is that so many of us are bystanders when we ought to be protesters. I commend to you the advice of Guru Nanak, one of mankind’s great reformers and the founder of Sikh faith, in his poem Var Sri Rag: ‘Evil-thinking, hardheartedness, slander, violence. These be the real untouchables!’

6. Raoul Wallenberg 2 April 1995. Capital Radio, Reflections Last Tuesday, at the Swedish Embassy, I had the privilege and opportunity to pay tribute to one of my great heroes. His name was Raoul Wallenberg and the occasion was the launch of a modest appeal to make it possible to erect a statue and a memorial to him near Marble Arch. That it has taken fifty years for such public recognition of this remarkable man is not surprising since there is a chance, admittedly a very small chance, that he may still be alive. What is beyond doubt is that as many as 70,000 Hungarian Jews – men, women and children – owe the saving of their lives to the compassion and courage and the ingenuity of this one man. Hungary was a Fascist state even before Germany turned Nazi, and its loyal ally throughout the war. And while there were many restrictions on its large Jewish minority – in education and at work and in the way they were taxed and held to ransom by the state – they were at least allowed to live, unlike most of the other Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. But on 19 March 1944, when the Germans formally occupied Hungary, all this changed. Overnight, Jews were herded into makeshift ghettos and by the time of Passover a few weeks later, when Jews celebrate the Exodus from Egypt, dozens of trains began to roll every day to the death camp of AuschwitzBirkenau, and there was no one and nothing that could save them from extermination.


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Philip Jackson’s statute of Raoul Wallenberg in Great Cumberland Place, unveiled by the Queen on 26 February 1997. A copy of the statue, dedicated to Hugo’s memory, is on display next to the exit of the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Exhibition.

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The largest ghetto was in Budapest, and just as the Jews were about to be deported from there as well, Raoul Wallenberg was assigned to the Swedish Diplomatic Mission, one of the few neutral countries in Europe, and his assignment was to help the Jews in any way he could. Very soon he was handing out ‘protective passports’,10 which gave their holders a bit of security. He rented houses all over the city, declared them Swedish diplomatic property and territory, and soon there were no less than 20,000 Jewish men, women and children living in them. Wallenberg had to find food and drink and medicine for them, and remarkably he did. He pleaded and cajoled and even bribed Hungarian and German military and officials, getting people off trains, personally leading children to safe houses. He was obsessed with the ideal of saving lives. Meanwhile the Soviet army was moving across Hungary and towards Germany and in January 1945 entered Budapest to the great joy of all those Jews still alive there. Wallenberg was anxious to make contact with the Russian High Command to secure food for his charges, and on 17 January, he and his driver Vilnos Langfelder and a Russian officer left Budapest, and Raoul Wallenerg was never seen again. He was thirty-three years old and I cannot think of a finer role model for the young of our country. A rabbinic teaching holds that he who saves a single life is as if he saved the whole world.11 Wallenberg has thousands of worlds to his credit and I hope that those who will pass by this monument will be kept from being bystanders whenever justice and compassion are needed.


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7. The Diary of Anne Frank 5 March 1995. Capital Radio, Reflections In a few days time – this coming Friday to be precise – there will see the publication of a new edition of The Diary of Anne Frank. Because it is studied in many schools and has become a memorable read for many generations of teenagers, you may well be familiar with the outline of her story. Of how Anne and her family, which consisted of her mother and father and sister Margot and four other people, went into hiding in the backrooms of an office building in Amsterdam when the Nazis invaded Holland and began to round up the Jews and imprison them and, as we know, eventually destroy most of them. They went into this literally sealed-off world and for two years they remained there relatively safe, fed by trusted friends, feeling that they might manage to survive this unspeakable ordeal. Soon after her thirteenth birthday – on 12 June 1942 – Anne began her diary, addressed to her imaginary friend, Kitty, and in a series of entries that moved me, sometimes to laughter and so often to tears, she shared her experiences, thoughts and feelings right up to 1 August 1944, which was just three days before somebody betrayed them to the Nazis, who then broke into the ‘secret annexe’, took all eight people to a transit camp called Westerbork in North Holland, and a month later they were shipped, like cattle, to Auschwitz-Birkenau where I had been a prisoner myself some months earlier. Anne and her sister managed to survive the selection there and were sent to Bergen-Belsen in Germany, but by then they were very weak from lack of food. Anne contracted typhus and, exactly fifty years ago, died there. Miraculously her diary survived as did her father, Otto Frank, and he made it his business to have it published, translated into many languages, and by now turned into plays, dances, exhibitions, even a full-length feature film. And the publishers of this new edition did me the honour to

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ask me to write the foreword to the book in which I recall how I once met Otto Frank in the home of a dear mutual friend, Rabbi Leo Baeck,12 himself a survivor of another camp, Theresienstadt. His home was in Hendon and as we enjoyed coffee and cake, we agreed that our survival had nothing to do with our goodness or being clever, or having a special religious faith. Many people who were much, much better and wiser and more pious did not survive. It was a chance thing. But survival gave us the painful responsibility to speak of our experiences. And I shall always be glad that on that summer afternoon I was able to say to Anne Frank’s father that because he spared no effort to have her diary see the light of day, he fulfilled that obligation most nobly and gave a measure of meaning not only to her life but also to her death. And need I say how touched I am that fifty years later I, too, had a chance to help continue her story.

8. Janusz Korczak 4 May 1980. Capital Radio, Reflections Jews pray three times a day and one of the first prayers in the morning service affirms the following: ‘The soul, O God, You have given me is pure, for You created it. You formed it and breathed it into me . . . and one day You will take it from me to everlasting life.’13 Which is to say that we believe that we are all born with a God-given purity and I often think that the purpose of decent and religious living is to keep our souls as free of corruption as is humanly possible. I will also say the obvious: some succeed more than others! Having just read the wartime diary of Janusz Korczak14 and seen a most powerful piece of sculpture at Israel’s Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, which features him, I realize that his soul was not only given in purity, it was also returned in purity. He was born in Poland and had a difficult childhood and


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adolescence. His father became mentally ill when Janusz was eleven. Perhaps this was the reason why, at the age of thirty-three – in 1912 – having qualified as a doctor (and a paediatrician at that) and already possessing a growing reputation as a writer, especially of children’s stories, he decided to devote his life to the most neglected and needy of Polish society: the orphans. He became the director of a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw and seven years later took on the co-directorship of an orphanage for Christian children as well. He began to keep a diary in 1940 after the Nazis conquered Poland and isolated all of Warsaw’s Jews into an overcrowded and dreadful ghetto. Hunger and disease were everywhere. With 200 children aged seven to seventeen to look after, Korczak went about the ghetto every day, begging for food and money for his children, and in the evenings, after feeding and tending his children in what had become a huge sickroom, he wrote down his experiences and thoughts. He often contemplated suicide. In the diary he notes: ‘When I was seventeen, I even started writing a novel entitled Suicide. The main character hated life out of fear of insanity. I used to be desperately afraid of the lunatic asylum. My father was sent there several times . . . More than forty years have gone by, and to this day, this thought is at times a torment to me.’15 Korczak could also have saved his own life. Many times. His last chance came in July 1942, by which time daily trainloads took the people of the ghetto to the death factory at Treblinka. His friends had prepared a German identity card for him, a false name, and enough money to escape. Igor Newerly, his friend who made the offer and who saved the diary by sealing it into a wall, tells us Korczak’s response: ‘You know, of course, why Zalewski was beaten up . . . ’ Piotr Zalewski was a Christian handyman at the orphanage for twenty years. When the Nazis ordered the move to the ghetto, he asked to go with them. The Nazis beat him up to remind him that

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he was not a Jew, but a so-called Aryan. If he – a simple caretaker – would not leave the children, how could Korczak abandon them? Eyewitnesses tell us that even on 5 August 1942, when he and the 200 children were ordered to march to the train, the Nazis offered him his life if he would leave his children. It was probably their final and sadistic attempt to discredit this man whom they could not understand. Instead he asked the children to sing as they climbed into the wagons and he went with them. A few days earlier, on 21 July, he wrote: ‘It is a difficult thing to be born and to learn to live. Ahead of me is a much easier task: to die.’16 The sculpture I was talking about at Yad Vashem portrays Janusz Korczak standing with a group of children. He has a greatly elongated arm which embraces them all. And don’t you agree with me that the soul which God gave him pure was also returned to God – bruised, it is true – but still very pure?

9. Primo Levi: The Drowned and the Saved 1 May 1988. Capital Radio, Reflections Much as I would like to fill my head with ‘pretty thoughts’ to match the mood of this May Day – originally very much a socialist and workers’ holiday, promising full rights and participation in the life of society, I am more conscious of the struggle and, indeed, the pain that is also in the background, probably because I am powerfully affected by a book I just read and simply cannot rid myself of the images it implanted in me. The Drowned and the Saved 17 is the title of this book, written in Italian by Primo Levi and it is a reflection of his experiences and feelings during the Nazi and Fascist period in Europe. He was a young research chemist living in Turin when the war broke out and joined the anti-Fascist underground who did what it could to resist and to fight the brutality all around them. As was the fate of so many


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such resistance fighters, Primo Levi was betrayed, arrested and handed over to the dreaded Gestapo, and because he was Jewish, transported to Auschwitz for extermination. His one piece of luck was his profession, and because a nearby chemical factory was short of skilled labour, his life was temporarily saved. Thus he was able to observe his fellow prisoners, their guards and torturers, and the civilian workers all around him. And even though there were plans not to allow any of the prisoners to survive, when the Russian armies approached Auschwitz in early 1945, the Nazi collapse was so swift that Primo Levi did survive! And soon after his return to the family home, he not only resumed normal life and work but felt that he also had to give evidence to the world about the hell he had witnessed. Thus he began to write a series of books – in my opinion, among the finest and most sensitive in recent European literature. In this last work he explains how it happened that seemingly civilized and technologically advanced people could systematically and deliberately round up millions of men, women and children – Jews, gypsies, Poles, Czechs – in fact whoever they wanted, rob them of all their possessions, transport them more or less openly across the continent and deliberately, indeed ‘scientifically’, kill them and take great pride in this unspeakable ‘achievement’! Levi argues that because this happened – and he actually saw it happen – it can happen again. So his mission became to warn people and nations. He calls Hitler a ‘buffoon’. To be sure an evil one, but the world still has such ‘buffoons’ and unless you are alert and resolutely refuse to compromise kindness, justice, indeed humanity, for political or economic or religious reasons, who is to say it cannot happen again? He also writes about the guilt of the survivor. So many people he met in what he calls that ‘concentrationary’ world were better educated, more noble, more worthy than himself. Why did he survive and not they? Much of this book is a tribute to their lives and their suffering as result of what Levi calls ‘useless cruelty’.

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The bit that haunts me is his statement that once you have been tortured, you remain tortured. Nothing can wipe out that hurt, nor restore confidence in the humanity of those who can hit innocent people. For many years Primo Levi was one of my heroes because he not only survived but also remained such a decent and civilized man. I used to think of him as one ‘who got away with it’ who, like Daniel, came out of the fiery furnace unharmed. But sadly, just a year ago, I was shocked to learn that he committed suicide. So this is his final book and my love for him is now tinged with regret. He was only ‘saved’ for a time and is now ‘drowned’ himself with the others. But his books will live, I am sure of that. And teach that the dignity of every man, woman and child is to be cherished, everywhere and at all times.

10. Auschwitz: Fiftieth Anniversary of Liberation 25 January 1995. BBC Radio 4, PM

Just as Yom HaShoah has entered the Jewish calendar to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, so Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January, introduced in 2001, now looks set to become an established date in the British calendar. I am conscious of a very mixed set of emotions on this eve of marking and commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I am glad that 26 and 27 January are seen as significant dates and that there will continue to be so much media attention given to it. One of the very few sustaining thoughts that I had when I was a prisoner there was that one day the world will see what was done there, the systematic, indeed ‘scientific’ murder of innocent men,


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women and children in the Birkenau part of Auschwitz to Jews from all parts of Europe, who for centuries did their best to cling to an ancient faith, never understood why anyone should want to revile them, raised families, built caring communities and worked and prayed daily to complete building God’s kingdom on earth. And not only to Jews, but to the equally innocent gypsies – especially of Germany – and Russian POWs. And in the nearby Auschwitz I camp, resisters of Nazism throughout occupied Europe. And who did it? Evil men and women who looked so much like ordinary men and women. Many of them were well educated, some had even taken the Hippocratic Oath of healing, all of them in elegant uniforms, well fed and, I imagine, devoted to their parents and children, and who – day in and day out, week after week and month after month – stood at the head of selection lines, personally and directly prodded and pushed people into gas chambers; measured and poured cyanide pellets; fuelled the crematoria, kept meticulous records and filed proud reports. And this was my thought: that one day these people who made murder a virtue and the death of innocents a cause for celebration, that they would be exposed and made accountable and brought before some bars of civilized justice. Yes – and be punished for it! There is also a sadness that will not go away. One way or another there is not a day that is without some personal reminder – of my brother, Gabi, who was ten when we arrived in Birkenau. And because one of the inmates collecting our baggage kept muttering in Yiddish, ‘Du bist achtsen yohr alt und du host a fach’, ‘you are eighteen and you have a trade’, by the time we came to the head of the line – aged not yet fourteen – I lied that I was nineteen and a ‘carpenter and joiner’ – tischler und zimmerman – and I was motioned to the right, while Gabi who said ‘achtsen’, ‘eighteen’, was just laughed at and pushed to the left with our grandparents, and I keep seeing them and so many aunts and uncles and cousins and friends and neighbours, indeed most of the Jewish community of my hometown in Carpathia slowly, unknowingly, walking to their death.

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I think of all the love and laughter that was extinguished with their lives, and often wonder how it was and is that I survived. Perhaps to give just this kind of testimony . . . There is a bit in me that would like to be anaesthetized and have all the memory of Auschwitz wiped out, but that cannot be because so much of what I am was forged there and so much that could have been perished there. My hope tonight: that the next two days will be a delayed act of mourning by a world that could not or would not save them, and go some way to remove bigotry and race hatred and terrorism of every sort out of human experience.

11. The Lingfield Children 7 November 1982. Capital Radio, Reflections There is a delightful line in the musical Fiddler on the Roof when the main character, Tevye, tries to explain why they do certain things in a certain way in the small Jewish community in his east European village but he gives up and finally says ‘It’s tradition!’ From time to time I also wonder about ‘traditions’ and especially about the way they arise. It happens that at midday today there will open at my own synagogue our bazaar, an event that takes place at this time every year, and if you asked the people who are in charge of the stalls, which will range from the useful and edible to the decorative and whimsical, how it started and why always early in November, I am sure that most of them would eventually tell you, ‘Well, it’s our tradition!’ But it also happens that I do know its story and it is, I think, worth sharing with you. Very soon after the Second World War, in the summer of 1945, and while people were still dazed by the destruction and devastation in Europe, and as the dreadful concentration camps were opened up, almost miraculously it was found that somehow a


West London Synagogue has held its bazaar every November since 1945.

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small handful of very young children, some still almost babies, had survived. They had no parents or family. Some were even without any personal history. Simply Jewish children who needed care – mothering and fathering – and the healing of some deep wounds of the spirit as well. An imaginative organization here in Britain,18 and with the support of the Home Office, arranged for about 30 of these children to come to this country and the congregation where I now serve as a rabbi made itself partly responsible for looking after them. One of the families made available their large house in Lingfield, Surrey. Another member of the synagogue, my friend, Alice [Goldberger], a wonderful woman and a trained therapist, gave up her job and became the housemother. Others, including many young people, formed committees: to look after the home, visit the little ones, arrange for birthday parties and other celebrations. As it further happens – and though I was very young myself – I acted as the escort when this group was flown to London from Prague where they were gathered in a noisy and very cold DC-3! The problem was how to find the funds necessary to bring up and educate the children. A partial answer that combined the practical with the socially enjoyable, and involved a large number of people was – as I am sure you have guessed – the bazaar! And for about the next fifteen years this event in the first week of November did its job very well indeed. Meanwhile the children grew up, moved from Surrey to Isleworth. Then, as some began to leave home, to a flat in West Hampstead. By the way, Alice still lives there,19 but her children and, indeed, grandchildren are now all over the world. Meanwhile the question arose: what to do with the bazaar? The answer was to go on with it. And so the community chooses every year one or two major beneficiaries, organizations or institutions which care for the needy or the vulnerable in our society. We find out what they do and need and despite our own leaking roof or peeling walls20 or deficit budgets, our help goes beyond and outside the synagogue.


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12. ’45 Aid Society 28 April 1985. Capital Radio, Reflections Later today I shall take part in a reunion, which, like so many gettogethers and commemorations that are taking place around this time, will be both bitter and sweet. Our group calls itself the ’45 Aid Society because all of us were among the few chance survivors who, in the course of April and May 1945, came out of Nazi concentration camps and eventually had an opportunity to come to this country and rebuild our lives. All of us were teenagers at that time and, no doubt, there will be a great deal of reminiscing. You may have seen photographs of those dreadful scenes of forty years ago and, in any case, you can still do so at an exhibition that is currently taking place at the Wiener Library in Devonshire Street21 here in London. We had, as you can imagine, many problems at that time. The first was to regain some physical strength. For years we had been kept literally at starvation level and, towards the end of the war there were massive typhoid epidemics to boot. But human bodies are more resilient than we sometimes think and the majority of us looked reasonably human after a few weeks. The next task was to look for families. None of us knew if there may have been, quite by chance, other survivors – perhaps a parent, brother or sister or cousins. The only thing to do was to go back to our hometowns and wait. Sadly most of us were disappointed and had to come to terms with the knowledge that we were on our own.22 It was also clear that there was simply no future for us in our former homes, but only the prospect of having to live with dreadful memories and, I guess, most of us wanted to get away from those. The problem was, where to go? We did not know it at the time, but there was an organization here in London called the Central British Fund23 which started to negotiate with the Home Office long before the war ended, to see if permission would be given to bring to this country children like

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us. It was the kind of thing that Jewish communities have done in and after times of crises. With difficulty, 1,000 children under the age of sixteen were agreed, and it will give you some idea of the devastation that took place when I tell you that, in the event, they could only find 732 boys and girls who qualified for this project. So, towards the autumn and the winter of 1945 and 1946, groups of us arrived and were given a warm welcome, shelter, food and, after a while, a chance to continue education and apprenticeships of various kinds. Some of us stayed in this country, some managed to find relatives in other parts of the world; quite a few of us went on to join other survivors in Israel, but as we were becoming more and more independent we made up our minds to stay in touch with each other, and if any of us fell on hard times, emotionally or materially, we would help one another. And so it has been to this day, and there will be about 500 of us together later this evening, some with their own families, and all of us with many memories and, as you can imagine, the kind of bond with each other that time can only strengthen, even as we strengthen each other.

13. Trial of John Demjanjuk 3 August 1993. BBC Radio 2, Pause for Thought You will not be surprised to hear that I have been following the bizarre case of John Demjanjuk with above-average interest. Was he ‘Ivan the Terrible’, the Ukranian volunteer for Nazi death squads who mercilessly butchered men, women and children in Treblinka fifty years ago? And when he was convicted, but doubts began to appear in his appeal, not about his miserable collaboration, but about his being at Treblinka, I began to worry about miscarriage of justice. It turns out that I was not the only one who squirmed. And my


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heroes of this week are the five judges of the Israeli Appeal Court who found Demjanjuk not guilty.24 Their decision may not be popular, but their respect for truth is a more important victory because justice – as Benjamin Disraeli once said – is truth in action! As it happens there are a number of men in this country who are also being investigated for having committed similar unspeakable crimes, and our Parliament decided – by no means unanimously – that if there is a strong case against them, they should be charged and tried. Some say why bother? Why not let bygones be bygones? It was such a long time ago . . . Personally, I hope that these trials will take place. For one thing, I have full confidence in the fairness of our judges and courts. And just as important, it will give a powerful signal to all those who commit atrocities or who toy with such ideas, and the systems that protect them, that one day they may be found, and found out, and that they will be accountable. The blood of too many victims – today in Bosnia, Somalia, South Africa and much nearer home, too – cries out not for vengeance, for that belongs to God only, but for justice.25 As one of my favourite teachers, Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel, taught almost two thousand years ago: ‘Civilization is preserved by three things: by truth, by justice and by peace’.26

14. Rabbi Leo Baeck 7 July 1996. BBC Radio 2, Good Morning Sunday

‘If the deed gave life its content, faith gave life its strength. Thereby the mystery of life, that road from God to man, and the clarity of life, that road from man to God, became one.’ 27 Hugo died on 18 August 1996, six weeks after the following broadcast on Radio 2. It was his last God Slot.

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This afternoon I shall be at the Ordination Service of the Leo Baeck College for seven new rabbis, four male and three female, and the fact is that this College is very close to my heart.28 As it happens Leo Baeck was one of my own teachers and spiritual heroes. He was head of the big seminary in Berlin and when the Nazis came to power he was also named the official leader of the German Jewish community. For years he was harassed, hunted, humiliated, and his great ambition became to get out of Germany his students, colleagues and all Jewish men, women and children.29 When he came to London just before the war to see that his young people were as okay as possible and was asked, ‘What will you do?’ he answered, ‘I return to Germany. I must be the last Jew to leave!’ In the event he didn’t leave. He was taken – in 1943 – to Theresenstadt – and in that prison he continued to teach, to comfort, even began to write a book. His survival was by grotesque chance. In late 1944 they paged Leo Baeck in the camp and another man, Leo Beck – B-e-c-k not B-a-e-c-k – came forward and was ordered to board what was the last train to Auschwitz. Our Rabbi Baeck knew nothing of this until weeks later when the Nazi Camp Commandant saw him and was surprised to see him alive. Soon after liberation he settled in England to be near his daughter and granddaughter, and I more or less apprenticed myself to him. Every Wednesday afternoon when he was in London and not at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, I had an hour of rabbinic text, followed by coffee and cake, and then I mounted my truly stupid hobby horse, how there was almost no one left who was seriously interested in Jewish religious study, except of course him and me! And I may have even implied doubts about him. He took this for a long time and then one day let me have it. ‘If you are really that concerned, then why not put your hand where your mouth is and train to be a rabbi.’ And the rest, as they say, is history.


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So I followed him to Cincinnati and indeed acted there as his private secretary, and to my delight another former pupil of his, Rabbi Werner Van der Zyl (and my predecessor at West London Synagogue) started a theological college in this country. Leo Baeck did not wish his name to go on it, but forty years ago, in November 1956, he died and there was no question: it had to be his memorial! And this afternoon I shall think of him, and of the 120 rabbis trained here since then, now serving communities all over the world. And I can hear him: ‘Yah, yah. You must go on . . . Learn and train and never give up on serving God and God’s creation.’ Which is what we try to do, Dr Baeck, and won’t give up.

1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Produced by See More Productions for Channel 4 Television (1990). Hesped – Heb. ‘eulogies’. BBC Radio 4, 10 July 1994. Zog Nit Keynmol (Song of the Partisans), Hirsh Glick/Dmitri Pokrass. ‘L’organisme périssant par suite de la famine prolongée ressemble à une bougie qui s’éteint: la vie disparait progressivement sans chocs visibles à l’oeil nu.’ Apfelbaum, E. (ed.) (1946), Maladie de Famine: Recherches Cliniques sur la Famine Exécutées dans le Ghetto de Varsovie en 1942. Warsaw: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, p. 190. See also ‘Winston Churchill’, p. 152. The staged attack was against the Sender Gleiwitz radio station, in Upper Silesia. Gilbert, M. (1989), Second World War. London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, p. 747. Admiral Miklós Horthy (1868–1957), Regent of Hungary (1920–44), allied with Nazi Germany. Schutz-Pass. Mishnah Sanhedrin 4.5. See ‘Rabbi Leo Baeck’, p. 245. Magonet, J. and Blue, L. (eds) (1985), Forms of Prayer for Jewish Worship I. London: RSGB, p. 49. Korczak, J. (1978), Ghetto Diary (Pamietnik z getta), trans. Bachrach, J. and Krzywicka, B. New York: Holocaust Library. ibid. ibid. First published in Italian as Levi, P. (1986), I Sommersi e i Salvati. Turin: Einaudi.

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18 Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief, now known as World Jewish Relief. 19 Alice Goldberger died on 22 February 1986, aged 88. 20 West London Synagogue’s ornate ceiling was bomb-damaged during the Second World War. Money was found for repairs but the community decided to repaint the ceiling in plain colours and to use some of these funds to help raise the Lingfield Children instead. 21 See www.wienerlibrary.co.uk 22 Hugo’s mother, Bella, also survived and they were reunited when he returned to his hometown, Berehovo, in the summer of 1945, but she encouraged him to leave for Britain. 23 See Endnote 18 above. 24 John Demjanjuk (b.1920) was tried and convicted in 1988. Later evidence suggested that he played another role in the camps and he was released. Trials for other alleged war crimes took place in 2001, and at the time of writing, remain ongoing. 25 The Rome Statute entered into force on 1 July 2002, establishing an International Criminal Court (ICC), with its seat at The Hague in the Netherlands. Its jurisdiction, on behalf of the international community, covers genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression (although, at the time of writing, this crime has still to be legally defined). 26 Pirkei Avot, ch. 1, Mishnah 18, based on Zech. 8.16. 27 Baeck, L. (1948), The Essence of Judaism. New York: Schocken Books, p. 58. Hugo’s copy is inscribed to him by both Rabbi Bruno Italiener and Rabbi Baeck. 28 For many years Hugo taught practical rabbinics at Leo Baeck College, where he was also Vice-President. 29 More than half of the 523,000 Jews living in Germany in January 1933 emigrated before the outbreak of war in September 1939, many facilitated by Rabbi Baeck.

On the eve of Chag HaMoledet (the Hebrew name for Christmas), I was somewhat guiltily enjoying a concert of carols on the radio when the music suddenly stopped. An erudite interviewer began to chat with a learned churchman about ‘angels’ in the Christian tradition. I listened with interest and said to myself: ‘If they were any good, the BBC could have invited somebody to talk about our angels too.’ At that moment – as if on cue – the host announced: ‘Earlier today we recorded some remarks on angels in the Jewish tradition – by Rabbi Hugo Gryn.’ Who better could they have found – Elijah the Prophet? I listened with delight to Hugo’s wonderful voice as he discoursed with charm and learning, beginning with the etymology of the Hebrew for ‘angel’, comparing it with the Greek ‘angelos’, which ultimately gave English its word. This was so typical of the man and his unique gift for opening dialogue between the peoples of the Old Testament and the New. An incident occurred at the cemetery, just after he had been laid to rest. A well-known figure walked over to me and said, profuse with sadness: ‘How come so many strangers are intruding on the burial of my best friend?’ That was Hugo’s special magic. He would talk to anyone who needed him and make him feel he was the most important person in the world. And at that moment, he was.

—Erich Segal (1937–2010), author and screenwriter

Rabbi H Hugo Gabriel Gryn, 25 June August 1996. J 1930–18 19

GLOSSARY AND BIOGRAPHIES

Abigail (c. eleventh century BCE) As wife to Nabal she saved her husband’s life by offering gifts to David, but Nabal was too drunk to be told about this virtue and died shortly after. On hearing this news David requested her hand in marriage, and she became his wife. Abraham (c. eighteenth to sixteenth centuries BCE) Formerly Abram, the patriarch travelled from his native Mesopotamia to Egypt and was promised the land of Canaan by God. After entering into the Abrahamic covenant he was circumcised and renamed. Had two sons: Ishmael and Isaac. Akiva ben Joseph (50–132 CE) Called ‘head of the sages’ in the Talmud, Akiva systemized the oral law and its many components. He was martyred for defying the Romans’ ban on Jewish teaching. Av Eleventh month of the Jewish calendar, occurs July–August. Baal Shem Tov (Heb. ‘Master of the Good Name’, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, also known as the Besht, 1698–1760) Mystical rabbi and the founder of the Hassidic movement. Numerous legends, stories and miracles are attributed to him, yet little is known about his actual life. Baeck, Leo (1873–1956) German Reform rabbi and leader of the German Jews during the Second World War. Stayed with his congregation until sent to Theresienstadt in 1943. Bar Mitzvah (Heb. ‘Son of the commandment’, pl. b’nei mitzvah)

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Celebrated when a boy reaches thirteen years and is deemed old enough to carry out the mitzvot, the 613 commandments listed in the Torah. Bat Mitzvah, ‘daughter of the commandment’, is for girls, although traditionally not all 613 commandments apply to women. Chagall, Marc (1887–1985) Russian-French Jewish artist. Many of his works deal with Jewish imagery, both biblical and contemporary. Chanukah (Heb. ‘dedication’) Eight-day winter festival of lights. Commemorates the victory of the Maccabees against the Syrians in 165 BCE and the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem. Churchill, Winston (1874–1965) British politician and twice prime minister (1940–45; 1951–55). Deborah (c. twelfth century BCE) Prophetess and Judge. Led a revolt against Canaan overlords in the north of the country. Deutero-Isaiah (also known as Second Isaiah, c. sixth century BCE) Author of Isaiah 40–66, which is set during the Babylonian exile, at a later date than Isaiah 1–39. Key themes include a call for the Jews to remain faithful to God and that it is God who controls all actions in the world. It is also one of the first Hebrew texts to explicitly refute the existence of any other gods. Elijah (c. ninth century BCE) Prophet mentioned in the book of Kings who fought against false gods, performed miracles such as raising the dead, and was taken up to heaven on a blazing chariot. His name is invoked as an emissary to God, and Jews believe he will return to usher in the messianic age. Elisha (c. ninth century BCE) As the disciple and successor to Elijah, Elisha prophesized and performed miracles in the Northern Kingdom of Israel and taught against the worship of false, particularly Phoenician, gods. Elul Twelfth month of the Jewish calendar, occurs August–September. Esau (c. seventeenth century BCE) Son of Isaac and Rebecca, elder twin of Jacob. Esau was famed for his hairiness and strength. Lost his birthright to his younger twin Jacob. Settled in the land of Seir, south of the Dead Sea.


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Frank, Anne (1929–45) German-Dutch Jewish author and victim of the Holocaust whose diary, published posthumously, details the life of a Jew hiding in Amsterdam. Frankl, Victor (1905–97) Austrian psychiatrist, author and Holocaust survivor. An established author in both scientific and social literature, best known for Man’s Search for Meaning, which describes his experiences in concentration camps from a psychiatric perspective. Gandhi, Mahatma (1869–1948) Political and spiritual leader of the Indian independence movement. Used civil disobedience through ahimsa (Sanskrit, ‘non violence’) in order to win India’s independence. Gilbert, Sir Martin (b. 1936) Historian and prolific author. Biographer of Winston Churchill, his works also include many books on Jewish history and the Holocaust. Hahn, Kurt (1886–1974) German Jewish-born educator. Founded Schule Schloss Salem in Germany, Gordonstoun in Scotland, the Atlantic (later the United World) Colleges, and the Duke of Edinburgh Award. Hannah (c. eleventh century BCE) Mother of Samuel who prayed with such fervour in order to conceive that the priest Eli thought she was drunk. When she did indeed bear a child, she dedicated the child to God. Hassid (pl. hassidim) (Heb. ‘pious’); member of the Hassidic movement, a religious and spiritual revival founded in the eighteenth century by the Baal Shem Tov. Heschel, Abraham Joshua (1907–72) Warsaw-born rabbi and professor of Jewish Ethics and Mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Hillel (first century BCE to first century CE) President of the Sanhedrin and, along with Shammai, the last of the zugot (Heb. ‘pairs’). Founded the most prominent school of the Second Temple period and highly influential in the development of the Pharisaic and rabbinic movements. Hosea (eighth century BCE) Prophet of the Northern Kingdom of

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Israel. Spoke out against idolatry and lapsed ways, threatening punishment if people did not heed his words. Preached that the correct way to serve God was love of the heart, not burnt offerings (Hos. 6.6), an idea that became a core element of Hebrew prophecy. Isaiah (eighth century BCE) Major prophet and author of Isaiah 1–39. Advisor to the kings of Judah, he helped fight off the Assyrian invasion with a divine miracle. Also famous for his messianic vision (chs 24–35) that features prominently in later Christian thought. See also Deutero-Isaiah. Jacob (also known as Israel, c. sixteenth century BCE) Son of Isaac and Rebecca, younger twin to Esau. Stole his elder twin’s birthright. Fearing retribution from Esau, Isaac travelled to Laban where he met his future wives, Rachel and Leah. Jacob had 12 sons from whom are descended the Children of Israel. Jeremiah (seventh to sixth century BCE) Major prophet. Preached against lapsed religion and social ills. Foresaw Babylonian conquest and warned against it only to suffer at the hands of his own people and false prophets. Found asylum in Egypt. His work is recorded in the books of Jeremiah and Lamentations. Job Popular biblical folklore figure from the patriarchal period and central character in the book of Job. Subject to a bet between God and Satan, Job’s faith was tested by losing all that was dear to him. Even when he had lost everything, he remained faithful to God and was richly rewarded and restored. Jonah (c. eighth century BCE) Hebrew prophet. Fled from God, only to be caught up in a storm and swallowed by a whale. Jonah was then called on a second time to turn Nineveh from its ways of wickedness, yet when the city repented Jonah became angry at God’s forgiving nature. Joseph (c. sixteenth century BCE) Eleventh and favourite son of Jacob. Sold into slavery by his brothers, rose to power in Egypt as a dream interpreter for Pharaoh. Later he met his brothers, forgave them and used his position to allow his brothers to settle in Egypt. Two tribes of Israel, Manasseh and Ephraim, are named after Joseph’s sons.


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Joshua (thirteenth century BCE) Moses’ successor. Led the Israelites during the conquest and early settlement of Canaan. Judah Ha-Nasi or Rabbi Judah (135–219 CE) Key leader of the Jewish community. Compiled, redacted and codified the Oral Law into the Mishnah. Kabbalah (Heb. ‘receiving’) Judaism’s mystical tradition. King Jr, Martin Luther (1929–68) American pastor, activist and leader of the African-American rights movement. Became famous for protesting through non-violent means. Assassinated in 1968. Kohelet (c. third century BCE) (Heb. ‘preacher’) Narrator of book of Ecclesiastes (also known as Kohelet), traditionally thought to be King Solomon. Read during the festival of Succot. Kook, Rav Abraham Isaac (1865–1935) First Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine and founder of religious Zionism. One of the most revered rabbis of the twentieth century. Korach (c. thirteenth century BCE) Led rebellion against Moses and was swallowed up by the earth along with 250 rebels as punishment by God. Korczak, Janusz (1877–1942) Polish author and paediatrician. Ran an orphanage that the Nazis forcibly moved into the Warsaw Ghetto. Korczak insisted on accompanying his children when they were deported to the extermination camp, Treblinka. Lag b’Omer Thirty-third day of counting the omer (measures of barley brought to the Temple each night for forty-nine nights, beginning on the second night of Passover). Levi, Primo (1919–87) Italian chemist and author. Auschwitz survivor. Loew, Rabbi Judah ben Bezalel (also known as the Maharal, c.1520–1609) Talmudist, kabbalist and mathematician. Associated with legends of the Golem. Lot (c. 18–16 centuries BCE) Abraham nephew. Lot travelled with him to Canaan and settled in Sodom. When Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, Lot fled with his wife and daughters to a cave. His wife looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt. Later his daughters, believing no one else to be alive, slept with their father, the biblical

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account for the origins of the Moabites and the Ammonites. Maccabees Jewish rebel army led by Judas Maccabeus ( Judah The Hammer) whose struggles against the Syrians (175–134 BCE) are chronicled in the first and second books of the Maccabees and included in the Apocrypha. Maimonides, Moses (also known as Rabbi Moses ben Maimon or Rambam, 1135–1204). Philosopher and physician, considered one of the greatest Jewish legal authorities of all time. Born in Spain, he worked as a physician in the royal court of Egypt and led the Jewish community of Fostat (modern day Cairo). Menachem de Lonzano (1550–c.1624) Poet, lexicographer, linguist and kabbalist. Menorah seven-branched oil lamp used in the Tabernacle and the Temple; also refers to the eight-branched chanukiah used during Chanukah. Micah (c. eighth century BCE) Prophet of the kingdom of Judah. Came from a rural background and worked as leader of the poor and exploited. Continued the message of Hosea and Amos that God requires service of the heart, not just sacrificial offerings. Midrash (Heb. ‘explanation’). Rabbinic interpretation, sometimes through parables. Mishnah Legal work consisting of rabbinic decisions and interpretations of the Torah, compiled by Judah Ha-Nasi in the second century CE. Moses (c. thirteenth century BCE) According to the book of Exodus, Moses escaped the killing of the Hebrew boys and was raised in the Egyptian court. Later became leader of the Hebrews and forced Pharoah to set free the Hebrew slaves. The Torah or five books of Moses are ascribed to him. Nachmanides, Moses (also known as Rabbi Moses ben Nahman Gerondi or Ramban, 1194–1270) Spanish-born rabbi, mystic philosopher and physician. Defended Judaism in a famous Disputation in Barcelona, 1263. King James I of Aragon awarded Nachmanides a prize but his Dominican opponents claimed victory


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and Nachmanides was exiled. Nathan (c. tenth century BCE) Prophet and adviser to King David featured in the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles. Niemöller, Martin (1892–1984) Lutheran pastor, poet and anti-Nazi theologian. Initially a supporter of Hitler, later Niemöller opposed the Nazis and was imprisoned during the war. After the collapse of Nazi Germany, he expressed regret at not doing more to help the Jews and devoted much of his life to pursuing peace. Orwell, George (1903–50) Pen name of Eric Arthur Blair. English author whose works contain an underlying sense of social injustice and a democratic socialist tendency. Passover (known in Hebrew as Pesach, or the festival of unleavened bread). Spring holiday which celebrates the Exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt and their liberation from slavery. Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) Collection of ethical sayings of the Talmudic rabbis. Purim (Heb. ‘Lots’) Also known as the Feast of Esther. Through reading the book of Esther, Purim celebrates the deliverance of the Jews of the Persian Empire after Esther and Mordechai foiled Haman’s plot to annihilate them. Customary to wear fancy dress and be rowdy and to get so drunk that you can’t tell the name ‘Haman’ from ‘Mordechai’. Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, 1040–1105) French rabbi. Rashi’s commentary on Talmud remains the basis for rabbinic scholarship. Rava (Rabbi Abba ben Joseph ben Chama, 229–352 CE) Founded Academy at Machuza. Talmudic references often relate to disputes between the Rava and his contemporary Abaye. Rosh Chodesh (Heb. ‘beginning of the month’) Minor holiday celebrating the start of a new month. In modern Judaism it has become associated with feminist rituals. Rosh Hashana (Heb. ‘beginning of the year’) Jewish New Year. Start of the Ten Days of Repentance. Sadat, Anwar El (1918–81) President of Egypt. Received global acclaim for making peace with Israel, an action that resulted in

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Egypt being thrown out of the Arab League and, ultimately, Sadat’s assassination. Samuel (c. eleventh century BCE) Last Judge of Israel who reluctantly became kingmaker. After turning against Saul he anointed and then supported the rise of David. The two books of Samuel depict his life and the reigns of Saul and David. Sarah Formerly Sarai, the wife of Abraham. Travelled with her husband from Mesopotamia to Egypt. At ninety, God lifted her barrenness and she gave birth to Isaac. Her demands for Hagar and Ishmael to be sent away resulted in Isaac alone inheriting his father’s line. Second Isaiah See Deutero-Isaiah. Seder (Heb. ‘order’) Ordered service or ritual meal, usually refers to the Passover Seder in which the Haggadah (Heb. ‘the telling’) is read, relating the story of the Exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt. Selichot (Heb. ‘forgiveness’) Prayers recited in the month of Elul and during the Ten Days of Repentance between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. Shabbat (pl. shabbatot) Sabbath, observed from dusk on Friday to darkness on Saturday; a day of rest. Shabbat HaGadol (Heb. ‘the Great Sabbath’) Shabbat prior to Passover during which the laws of leaven bread and the return of Elijah are discussed. Shavuot (Heb. ‘weeks’) Also known as Feast of Weeks or Pentecost. Originally an agricultural festival celebrating the wheat harvest. Recalls the giving of Torah on Mount Sinai. Simchat Torah (Heb. ‘rejoicing in the Law’) Festival occurring at the end of Succot signifying the end of the Torah cycle and its new beginning. Simeon bar Yochai (also known as Rabbi Shimon and Rashbi, second century CE) Leading student of Rabbi Akiva, his teachings are collected in the Mishnah. Spent thirteen years in hiding in the mountains of Galilee. Attributed with the authorship of the Zohar, the basis of Kabbalah.


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Solomon ben Moses Alkabez (c. 1505–80) Jewish mystic, poet and author who created many Kabbalistic prayers and practices, including ‘L’cha Dodi’. Succot (Heb. ‘booths’) Feast of Tabernacles. Week-long biblical pilgrim festival. Celebrates autumn harvest and recalls when the Children of Israel wandered in the wilderness, living in tents. Tallit Prayer shawl. Tarfon (first to second century CE) Mishnah sage, rabbi descended from a priestly family. Known to be bitter against Jews converting to other faiths, particularly Christianity. Tisha b’Av (Heb. 9th of Av) Fast day to mourn the loss of the first and second Temples in 586 BCE and 70 CE, as well as subsequent disasters such as the Spanish expulsion in 1492. Torah The five books of Moses, and by extension, all of Jewish tradition and teaching. Tu b’Shevat (Heb. 15th of Shevat) New Year for trees. In modern Israel the festival has become a general celebration of the fertility of the land. Shevat is the fifth month of the Jewish calendar and occurs January–February. Wallenberg, Raoul (1912–?) Swedish diplomat and humanitarian who worked in Hungary during the Second World War. Provided Jews with Schutz-Passes – protective passports – and saved many thousands of lives, estimates range from 30,000 to 100,000. Yom Ha’atzmaut (Heb. ‘Independence Day’) Marks the establishment of the State of Israel on 5 Iyar (March–April) in the Hebrew calendar. Yom HaShoah (Heb. Holocaust Day) Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day. The date, 27 Nisan, was chosen because is the closest day to the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising that would not clash with Passover. Yom Kippur (Heb. ‘Day of Atonement’) Holiest day of the Jewish calendar, observed ten days after Rosh Hashana. A solemn day of fasting and repentance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Apfelbaum, E. (ed.) (1946), Maladie de Famine: Recherches Cliniques sur la Famine Exécutées dans le Ghetto de Varsovie en 1942. Warsaw: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Archer, J. Kadoorie (1979), Experimental and Extension Farm and Botanical Gardens. Hong Kong: Eurasia Publishing Corporation. Baeck, L. (1948), The Essence of Judaism. New York: Schocken Books. Comay, J. (1971, repr. 1993), Who’s Who: The Old Testament. London: Dent. Forms of Prayer for Jewish Worship I (6th edn, 1931). Oxford: West London Synagogue of British Jews. Frank, A. (1995), The Diary of Anne Frank (Foreword by Rabbi Hugo Gryn). London: Macmillan. Frankl, V. E. (1946), Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager. Vienna: Jugend und Volk. Published in English (1959) as Man’s Search For Meaning: From Death-Camp to Existentialism (trans. Ilse Lasch). Boston: Beacon Press. Gilbert, M. (1986), The Holocaust: A Jewish Tragedy. London: Collins. ——(1989), Second World War. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ——(1996), The Boys: Triumph Over Adversity. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Gill, A. (1988), The Journey Back From Hell: Conversations with Concentration Camp Survivors. London: Grafton.


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Gryn, H. and Gryn, N. (2000), Chasing Shadows. London: Viking. Heschel, A. J. (1963), The Earth Is The Lord’s & The Sabbath. Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books. ——(1976). God In Search Of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism. New York: Octagon Books. Hirsch, S. R. (1962), The Pentateuch – with Translation and Commentary. Gateshead: Judaica Press. Kloomok, I. (1951), Marc Chagall, His Life and Work. New York: Philosophical Library. Korczak, J. (1978), Ghetto Diary (Pamietnik z getta). Tr. Bachrach, J. and Krzywicka, B. New York: Holocaust Library. Levi, P. (1988), The Drowned and the Saved. London: Michael Joseph. First published in Italian as Levi, P. (1986), I Sommersi e i Salvati. Turin: Einaudi. Liebman, J. L. (1948), Peace of Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster, Magonet, J. and Blue, L. (eds) (1977), Forms of Prayer for Jewish Worship, I. London: RSGB. ——(1985), Forms of Prayer for Jewish Worship, III. London: RSGB. Magonet, J. (ed.) (2008), Forms of Prayer, I. London: The Movement for Reform Judaism. Mission and Dialogue in Inter Religious Encounters (1993). London: Inter Faith Network. Orwell, G. (1949), Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: Harcourt. Plaut, W. G. (1981), The Torah: A Modern Commentary. New York: UAHC. Senesh, H. (1973), Her Life & Diary. New York: Schocken Books. Syrkin, Marie. (1947), Blessed is the Match: The Story of Jewish Resistance. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America. Tokayer, M. and Swartz, M. (1979), The Fugu Plan: The Untold Story of the Japanese and the Jews During World War II. New York: Paddington Press.

INDEX

Entries in bold type refer to photographs Aaron 102, 212 Abel 93 Abigail 122–4, 253 Abraham 253 buries Sarah 74 covenant with God 105, 197 and God’s intervention 78 and Lot 72 near-sacrifice of Isaac 43, 127 Abraham ibn Ezra 87, 101, 130 Abram see Abraham Adam 48–9, 147, 164 Addis Ababa 216 adultery 64, 94–6, 97 afikomen 205–7 Ahashuerus 55 ahimsa 200 Aholibah 96 Akiva 62, 93, 99, 253 Alexander the Great 103 Alkabez, Solomon 190–1, 261 All Souls’ Day 183 al-Said ibn Sena al-Mulk 186 Altneushul 192–4 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee ( JDC) 224 Amnon of Mainz 41 Ani Ma’amin 222 Anjuvannam 203 Antiochus IV 49, 198 Apfelbaum, Emil 224 Aristotle 103 Ashoka 103 Assyrians 96, 132, 136 Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993 30

SS Athenia 227 Atlantic College 156–8, 158 Atonement, Day of see Yom Kippur Auschwitz Anne Frank and 233 deportation to 2, 10, 29, 229 extermination 6, 18, 222, 230 Leo Baeck and 246 liberation of 238–40 Primo Levi and 237 survival of 34 ‘Where was God?’ 19, 225 Baal 117 Baal Shem Tov 196, 253 Babylonia, Babylonians 64, 66, 96, 133, 135, 181 exile in 135 Badawi, Zaki 7, 169 Baeck, Leo 234, 245–7, 253 Banu Israel 198 Barak 120 bar mitzvah 15–17, 34, 253–4 Baruch 134 Bathsheba 95 Beck, Leo 246 Bene Israel 197–201 Ben-Gurion, David 61, 61 Benjamin 80 Beregovo see Berehovo Berehovo 3, 14, 28–9, 28, 30 Jews of 6, 10, 18, 229, 239 return to 2, 25–8 Bergen-Belsen 233 Berlin Wall 189 Beta Israel 216 Big Brother 146 Bildad 125 Bilhah 79

Blair, Eric Arthur see Orwell, George Blessed is the Match (Hannah Senesh) 59 blood libel 184 Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church 174 Bombay 4, 38, 39, 50, 197, 199–200, 205–7, 206, 250 Bradford, Robert, MP 164 MV Braer 147 Bratislava 26 Brettler, Rachelle Gryn 2, 25, 27, 29, 35, 90, 250 British Mandate 60 Browning, Robert 87 Buber, Martin 87 Budapest 26, 232 Buddha 103, 170 bystanders 109, 166, 228–30, 232 Caesar, Julius 103 Cain 93 Cairo 186 Canaan, Canaanites 72, 78, 80, 120 Capital Radio 4, 7, 13, 165, 177 Cardiff 176–7 Central British Fund (CBF) 243 Chagall, Marc 150–1, 254 Chaldeans see Babylonians Chanukah 19–21, 49–51, 223, 254 Chasing Shadows 2, 3, 14, 25–8, 28 chesed 136–7 see also compassion Chincholkar, Abraham 206 Churchill, Winston 152, 254 Cincinnati 32, 148, 246–7 Cochin 198, 201, 202–4, 204

INDEX Cohen, Jackie 204 Columbus, Christopher 188 communism, communists 131, 168, 183, 189 community 194 see also kehilla compassion 30–1, 56, 136, 143, 158, 173, 230 and justice 100, 120, 207, 232 converso 189 Cordoba 186, 187 Cottbus 109 Cranganore 202 creation 48, 160, 165, 177, 189, 195 of Adam and Eve 49 and Chagall 151 God and 50, 52, 58, 247 and justice 98 partners with God in 91, 97, 126, 164 and prayer 195 and the Sabbath 52–3, 89–90, 191 Crusades 184–5, 186 Cyprus 60 Dafni, Reuben 59 Dalai Lama 174 Dama ben Natina 92 Daniel 238 David 95, 123, 126 da‘wah 170 Deborah 120–1, 254 Debrecen 15 Demjanjuk, John 244–5 Desert Island Discs 1, 152, 221 Deuteronomy, book of 48, 88, 91, 101, 105, 107 dialogue 5 with God 196 interfaith 11, 37, 143, 165–7, 169–71, 175–7, 249 Disraeli, Benjamin 245 Divekar, Samuel Ezekiel 200–1 Drowned and the Saved, The (Primo Levi) 236–8 Ecclesiastes book of 129–30, 257 Preacher of 101, 257 Ecclesiasticus, book of 91 ecology 53 education 50, 103, 230, 244 religious 11, 173–7 Edward I 183–5 Egypt Children of Israel slaves in 19, 81, 89, 106, 205 empire 131, 135 Exodus from 17, 45, 56–7, 63, 83, 84, 103, 205, 217, 230 Joseph in 79

Maimonides in 186 peace treaty with Israel 162 strangers in 106 ten plagues 99 war against Israel 162 Einstein, Albert 103 Eisendrath, Maurice 206–7 Eli 115–16 Elijah 117–19, 151, 199, 249, 254 Elisha 118–19, 254 Elkanah 115 Elul 39, 66, 254 England Jews exiled from 183–5 Jews return to 185, 189 in 1984 146 Ephron 74 Esau 75–7, 254 Esther 55 Ethics of the Fathers 172, 182, 259 Ethiopia 55, 215–16 Jews of 215–17 evangelism 170 Eve see Adam evil defeat of 17, 226 good and 85, 131 ‘guard my tongue from’ 65 Hugo and 141, 143, 220 exile 65, 183–5, 188–9 Falasha 216 Israel in 135–6 self-imposed 154 in Siberia 213 Exodus see Egypt Exodus, book of 81, 85, 88 Ezekiel 96 Falashas see Beta Israel falsehood 97, 98–100 Ferdinand II (of Aragon) 64, 189 Fez 186 Fiddler on the Roof 116, 151, 240 Flood, the 71, 93 Forty-five Aid Society (’45 Aid Society) 219, 243–4 Fostat see Cairo Four Questions, the 56, 205 Frank, Anne 255 Diary of Anne Frank, The 2, 233–4 statue 210 Frank, Margot 233 Frank, Otto 233–4 Frankenstein 26, 192 Frankl, Victor 226, 255 freedom 8, 57, 85, 146, 159 blessing and joy from 205 in concentration camps 225 of conscience 168

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in Czechoslovakia 168 as human right 213, 225 of Refuseniks 215 religious 203 of speech 133, 146 of will 25, 101, 120, 131, 164 Freud, Sigmund 94 Fromm, Erich 125 Fugu Plan 210–11 gaijin 209 Gandhi, Mahatma 4, 147, 200, 255 Gaon, Saadia 92 Garden of Eden 164 Gehazi 119 Genesis, book of 48, 75, 77, 93 Genusov, Elena and Grigory 214–15 Gershom (of Mainz) 95 Gershon, Levi ben 101 Gilbert, Martin 152, 220, 226–8, 255 Glick, Hirsch 222 Goldberger, Alice 242 golden calf 85, 105 Golden Rule 182 Golem 192–4 Gomer 96, 136 Gryn, Bella 10, 16, 17, 23, 27, 27, 172, 227–8 Gryn, David 10, 22, 35, 90, 250 Gryn, Gabriel 6, 16, 17, 23, 219, 239 Gryn, Géza 6, 16, 18, 20–4, 26, 53, 109, 219 Gryn, Jacqueline 10, 35, 206, 250, 251 Gryn, Naomi 11, 27, 29, 35, 90, 250 Gunskirchen 23 Gurkha 208 gypsies 29, 169, 237, 239 Hadassah Hospital 151 Hagar 74–5 haggadah, haggadot 56 Hahn, Kurt 156–7, 255 Haman 55 Hamlet 107 Hammurabi, Code of 97 Hannah 115–16, 121, 255 Hasaji, Samaji see Divekar, Samuel Ezekiel hassid, hassidim 40, 86, 255 hatred 77, 81, 86, 129, 163, 184 causeless hate 65 Isaac and Ishmael, 75 Joseph brothers’ 78–9 racism 25, 29, 55, 58, 148, 161, 166, 169, 185, 219, 240 ‘What is hateful to you’ 181–2 havdalah 52

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Havel, Vaclav 169 Hearst, William Randolph 156 Hebrew Union College 32, 246 Hebron 73–4 Hellenism 49–50 heroism 73, 223–4 Hugo’s spiritual heroes 4, 82, 117, 131, 146, 152, 190, 230, 238, 246 Heschel, Abraham Joshua 90, 255 High Holy Days 32, 45, 47, 148–9, 162, 196 see also Rosh Hashana; Yom Kippur Hillel 181–2, 255 Himmler, Heinrich 227 Hippocratic Oath 239 Hirsch, Samson Rafael 108 Hitler, Adolf 103, 156, 224, 227, 229 ‘a buffoon’ 237 Holocaust 2, 58, 94, 219–20 denial literature 6 heroes 58, 223–4 memorial 57, 234 Memorial Day 238 songs from 221–3 survivors 11, 27, 37, 57, 59, 60, 148, 219, 221, 234, 237–8, 240, 242, 243–4, 246 victims 57, 238 Yom HaShoah 57–8, 238, 261 see also Auschwitz honesty 97, 99 see also truth Hong Kong 175, 207–9 hope 10, 20–1, 69, 155 Horthy, Miklós 229 Hosea 96, 136–7, 255–6 Hulda 121 Humming Bird 32, 148 Hungary 28, 230–2 Hungarians 168, 228 Jews of 60, 230 hurricane 53–4 Hyde Park 54, 57–8 idolatry 57, 76–7, 85–6, 93, 96, 105–6, 122, 136, 189 India, Jews of 5, 197–207 Inter Faith Network 165–7, 167, 169–71 International PEN 133 Ioffe, Alex and Rosa 214 Iron Curtain 168, 189 ir va’em b’yisrael 192 Isaac 43, 74, 78 Isabella I (of Castile) see Ferdinand II Isaiah 31, 100, 131–2, 139, 196, 256 Second Isaiah 133–4, 254 Ishmael 74–5

Ishmael, my brother (Shin Shalom) 75 Islamic Cutural Centre 170 Israel conflict with Arabs 9, 54, 59, 71–3 Declaration of Independence 59–61 Israelites 19, 48, 56, 62, 63, 81, 84, 85, 96, 103, 105, 107, 120, 121, 151, 197–9, 205, 210, 216 migration to 203, 211–17 Northern Kingdom of 131–2, 136, 140 peace treaty with Egypt 162–3 Southern Kingdom see Judea War of Independence 219 see also Palestine Italiener, Bruno 119 Ivan the Terrible see Demjanjuk, John Jacob 75–7, 78, 95, 256 Japan 209–11 Jasper 4, 32–4, 149 Jebel al-Tur see Mount Gerizim Jebel Islamiya see Mount Ebal Jeremiah 134–6, 256 Jerusalem capital of Judea 131 city of peace 126–7 conquest by Babylonians 135 conquest by Romans 64–7, 184 see also Temple in Jerusalem Jesus 37, 184 Jesus son of Sirach 91 Jewish Religious Union 39, 50, 199, 206 Jezebel 117 Job 96, 124–5, 256 book of 131 Jonah 137–9, 256 Jordan 61, 72 Jordan River 119 Joseph 77–81, 256 Joshua 104, 257 Jubilee 97 Judah 80 Judah Ha-Nasi 54, 125, 152, 257 Judea 119, 131 conquerors of 49, 62, 202 Judeans 132, 140, 198 Judges, book of 120 justice 49, 64, 81, 97–8, 132, 137, 141, 237, 245 courts of 133, 239 just society 120, 122, 146 see also under compassion

Kabbalah 190, 257 Ka Dao Lei see Kadoorie, Horace Kadoorie Agricultural Aid Association 208 Kadoorie, Elly 208 Sir Elly Kadoorie High School 206 Kadoorie Experimental Farm 208 Kadoorie, Horace 207–9 Kadoorie, Lawrence 207–8 Kaplan, Kivie 149 kehilla 153–4 see also community Kelbert, Leonid 214–15 Kelbert, Masha 214 kiddush 51, 52, 90 kiddush ha-chayim 94 kiddush ha-shem 94 King, Coretta Scott 148 King Jr, Martin Luther 148–50, 257 Kings, book of 19, 202 Koder, Shabdai Samuel (Satu) 203, 204 Kohelet see Ecclesiastes Kook, Abraham Isaac 196, 257 Korach 102–3, 257 Koran 72, 78, 124, 201 Korczak, Janusz 234–6, 257 Kush see Ethiopia Kyle, William 154–5 Lag b’Omer 62–3, 257 Lamentations, book of 65 Langfelder, Vilnos 232 latkes 20 L’cha Dodi 190–1 l’chayim 4, 94, 108, 173 leadership 5, 33, 82, 102–5, 120, 126 Leo Baeck College 180, 246 Levi, Primo 236–8, 257 Leviticus, book of 161, 166 l’hitpallel see under prayer Liberal Jewish Synagogue 59 liberation 6, 20, 23–5, 26 Hugo’s liberation certificate 33 theology 175 see also under Auschwitz; Egypt, Exodus from Lieberose 109 Chanukah in 19–21 Yom Kippur in 17–19 Liebman, Joshua Loth 161 Lingfield children 240–2 Liverpool 125–6, 228, 230 Llanwern Steel Mill 177 Lloyd Webber, Andrew 78 Loew, Judah 107, 192–4, 193, 257

INDEX Lot 72, 257–8 Louisville 148 love 21, 80, 86, 96, 98, 169, 172–3, 240 your enemies 163 your neighbour 4, 161, 163, 166 peace 165 the stranger 106–7, 163, see also ahimsa Lucky Strike cigarettes 26 Maccabees 20, 223, 258 Machpelah, cave of, 74 Madrid Conference 73 Maginot Line 189 Maimonides, Moses 185–8, 187, 209, 222, 258 Guide for the Perplexed, The 186 Thirteen Principles of Faith 186 Makuya 210 Maladie de Famine (Emil Apfelbaum) 223–4 Mann, Thomas 78 manna 62 Marx, Karl 168–9 Marxism 175 Mason-Dixon Line 148 Massey, Adam 10, 35, 42, 66, 250 Massey, Clio 10, 35, 42, 42 Massey, Gabrielle 20, 35, 90, 152, 250 Matthews, Al 47 matza 56, 205 see also afikomen Mauthausen 6, 21, 23, 33 McLeod, N 210 Menachem de Lonzano 195, 258 Mendel, Menachem 86 menorah 20, 49, 258 messiah coming of 54, 191, 222 messianic age 53, 118, 151 see also redemption Micah 100, 139–41, 258 midrash 83–4, 258 missionizing 170 Mitnick, George 32–4 mitzvot 93 Mohammed 170, 198 Montgomery Bus Strike 148–9 Mordechai 55 Moses 4, 81–2, 83, 105–6, 258 and Aaron, 102, 212 death of 48 and Joshua 104–5 Korach’s rebellion against 102–3 and Sinai 94, 101 Mountbatten, Louis 156

Mount Carmel 117 Mount Ebal 107–8 Mount Fuji 210 Mount Gerizim 107–8 Mount Horeb 118 Mount Moriah 127 Mount Sinai 63–4, 83, 86, 88, 89, 94, 100, 103 see also revelation Naaman 119 Nachmanides, Moses 84, 85, 101, 106, 258–9 Nanak 230 Nansen passport 33 Napoleon Bonaparte 103 Nasrudin 160 Nathan 95, 259 National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) 149 Navgaon 198 Nazis, Nazism 6, 19, 29, 34, 88, 109, 145, 152, 183, 189, 210, 221, 223, 229, 230, 233, 235–6, 239, 244, 246 Nebuchadnezzar 135 Newerly, Igor 235 Newmark, Mrs 34 new moon 39, 66, 108, 259 New Year Chinese see Yuan Tan Jewish see Rosh Hashana for trees see Tu b’Shevat Niemöller, Martin 30, 259 Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell) 145–6 Nineveh 135, 138 Nissim of Gerona 203 Noachide Laws 97 Noah 71, 93 Northern Ireland 9, 163, 165 Numbers, book of 19, 102 Okola, Kabad 217 omer 62 see also Lag b’Omer Operation Solomon 215–17 Orlofsky, Vadim 212 Orwell, George 4, 145–6, 259 paideia 50 Palestine 29, 60 see also Israel Palestinians 71, 73 Parks, Rosa 148 Passover 56–7, 62, 204–7, 230, 259 Samaritan 108 Pearce, Brian 167 Peninah 115 Penkar, Amizur 207 Pentecost see Shavuot Peretz, Isaac Leib 40

267

Pesach see Passover Pharoah 212 Philistines 121 Pirkei Avot see Ethics of the Fathers Pokrass, Dimitri 222 Prague 168, 191–4, 219 prayer 19, 43, 48, 51, 64, 89, 115–16, 122, 129, 153–4, 177, 188, 195–7, 205 birkat hamazon (grace after meals)159 birkat kohanim (priestly blessing)167 elohai neshemah (‘The soul You have given me is pure’) 234 Ethiopian Jews 216 ‘Guard my tongue from evil’ 65 kiddush 90 l’hitpallel 195 ‘Man should always be in awe of heaven’ 99 for new moon 108 oseh shalom bimromav (‘May He who makes peace in the highest’) 124–5 shechehiyanu (‘Who has given us life’) 24, 36, 132–3 shema (‘Hear, O Israel’) 84 shema kolenu (‘Hear our voice’) 197 u’netaneh tokef (‘who will live and who will die’) 41 for wrapping tefillin 96 prayer book 2, 32, 87, 195 productivity 31, 125 prophets 5, 31, 51, 52, 66, 73, 83, 95, 96, 100, 115–25, 131–41, 146, 149, 151, 152, 170, 198, 199, 249 see also individual entries Promised Land 45, 62, 103, 105 see also Israel Proverbs, book of 95–6 ‘A woman of valour’ 172 psalm, psalmist 35, 66, 86, 100, 143, 191, 194 Psalm 24 88 Psalm 90 125–6 Psalm 114 17 Psalm 133 126–8 Psalm 139 5, 128–9 Purim 54–6, 259 Queen of Sheba 215–16 Quilon 202 Rabban, Joseph 202–3 Rabbi Ben Ezra (Robert Browning) 87

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racism see under hatred Rahabi, David 198–9 Rashi 89, 259 Rava 93, 259 Red Cross 18, 226 redemption 52, 61, 78, 84, 107, 118, 151, 191, 205 see also messiah Reform Synagogues of Great Britain 173 refugee 31, 109, 198, 207, 227 Refusenik 211–15 Regent’s Park 42, 62, 171, 209 repentance 39, 41, 137, 189 people of Nineveh 138 ten days of 32, 41–2, 127–8 see also Yom Kippur revelation 63, 80, 83, 101, 103, 118 see also Mount Sinai Rice, Tim 78 Richter, Ian 132 riots 9, 184 Bombay 199–200 Brixton 228 Southall 159–60, 228, 230 Toxteth 228, 230 Rodef Shalom Synagogue 38, 199–200 Rogers, Will 133 Romans 62, 64–5, 66, 183, 184 Roosevelt, Franklin D 227 Rosh Chodesh see new moon Rosh Hashana 10, 32–4, 39, 41–3, 67, 145, 259 Book of Life 41 Rostock 109 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 103 Royal Academy 150 Russian army 27, 226, 232, 237 Sabbath see Shabbat Sadat, Anwar 162–3, 259–60 Safed 190–1 St Bride’s Church 133 Saladin 186 Samaritans 108 Samuel 115–16, 121–2, 260 Sarah 74–5, 260 Satan 124 Saul 122 Second World War (Martin Gilbert) 226–8 Seder 56, 205–7, 260 Selby, John and Sadie 35, 35, 250 selichot 39–41, 260 Sha’ar Harachamim Synagogue 201 Sha’ar Yishuv 132 Shabbat 48, 51–3, 63, 88–90, 102, 159, 172, 177, 190–1, 199, 203, 214, 216, 260

Shakespeare, William 107, 152 shalom 4, 48, 53, 73, 81, 124–5, 163–5, 167 Shalom, Shin 74 Shamir, Yitzhak 73 shanwar teli 199 Shavuot 4, 63–4, 260 Shetland Islands 147 Shimon ben Gamliel 245 Shimon ben Shetech 98 Shingly 202–3 shoah see Holocaust shofar 10, 43–5, 44 Simchat Torah 48, 260 Simeon bar Yochai 62–3, 99, 260 slavery 57, 79, 166, 205 in Egypt 19, 45, 56, 81, 89, 103, 106 Nazi slave labour camps 18, 109, 225 Slepak, Alexander 212 Slepak, Maria 212 Slepak, Vladimir 211–13 Smith, Winston 146 Solomon 95, 127, 129, 202, 216 Soviet Union 9, 28, 211–13, 220 Spain, Jews of 65, 188–9, 190 Spanish Inquisition 65, 189 spontaneity 25 Sri Isopanisad 161 Standing Conference on Interfaith Dialogue in Education (SCIFDE) 175–7 Star, the Castle & The Butterfly, The 168, 219 succah 45–7, 46 Succot 45–7, 261 Sugihara, Senpo 211 Suicide ( Janusz Korczak) 235 Sutherland, Tom 132 Swartz, Mary 211 Szenes, Hannah 58–9 Tabernacle 19, 89 Talmud 4, 54, 83, 89, 91, 93, 101 Tarfon 183, 261 Tarshish 138 Temple in Jerusalem 19, 49, 56, 58, 64, 66, 92, 115, 127, 135, 183, 202 in Shiloh 115–16, 121 Ten Commandments 5, 63, 83–101, 118 ten plagues 99 Teshima, Abraham Ikuro 210 Tevye the Milkman 116, 240 Theresienstadt 234 Thompson, James 167, 167 Tippoo Sultan 201

Tiruvanchikkulam see Shingly Tisha b’Av 64–5, 261 Tokayer, Marvin 211 Tokyo 209–11 tolerance 11, 113, 160–1, 181, 200 Torah 4, 48, 51, 62, 70, 71–2, 79, 89, 106, 140, 201, 261 burning scrolls 88 lessons 16, 72, 75–6, 78, 80, 81, 102–3, 107–8, 109 Tower of London 185 Treblinka 235, 244 Truskolasy 227 truth 48, 63, 98–100, 146, 192, 200, 245 Tu b’Shevat 53–4, 261 tzedakah 21, 207 Ulster 9, 72, 131, 165, 169, 174, 230 unemployment 125 Uriah 95 Van der Zyl, Werner 247 Var Sri Rag (Guru Nanak) 230 Velvet Revolution 168 Waite, Terry 132 Wałesa, Lech 175 Wallenberg, Raoul 230–2, 231, 261 Wandering Jew 151, 189 Warsaw ghetto 223, 235 Western Wall 64 West London Synagogue 7, 8, 46, 70, 214, 220, 247, 250 annual bazaar 185, 240–2, 241 Westminster Abbey 155 Westminster Pastoral Foundation 154–5 Wiener Library 243 Wieruszów 227 Wigmore Hall 194 Yad Vashem 234, 236 Yochanan ben Zakkai 67 Yom Ha’atzmaut 59–61, 261 Yom Kippur 5, 41, 42, 43, 45, 67, 128, 129, 137, 196, 261 in Jasper 32–3 in Lieberose 17–19 War (1973) 162 see also High Holy Days York 184–5 Yuan Tan 145 Yugoslavia 71, 169 Zalewski, Piotr 235–6 Zilpah 79 Zog Nit Keynmol 221–3

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editor and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material. Atlantic College for three photographs of Hugo Gryn (date unknown) and for a photograph of Hugo Gryn with Sheikh Gamal Solaiman (1988); Mark Gerson for his photograph of Hugo Gryn (1993); Susie Gilbert for her photograph of Sir Martin Gilbert and Hugo Gryn in Jerusalem (date unknown); Judy Goldhill for her photograph of Hugo Gryn (date unknown); Henry Jacobs for his photograph of the 1987 Sir Sigmund Sternberg Award winners (1987); Philip Jackson for the photograph of his sculpture of Raoul Wallenberg (1997); Harrow Observer for the photograph of the ordination of Leo Baeck College’s rabbinic students (1971). Capital Radio and This Is Global for Hugo Gryn’s Capital Radio Reflections scripts; Rabbi Jonathan Magonet for quotations from Jonathan Magonet and Lionel Blue (eds) Forms of Prayer for Jewish Worship, I RSGB (1977) and Jonathan Magonet and Lionel Blue (eds), Forms of Prayer for Jewish Worship, III RSGB (1985). Every effort has been made to trace rights holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be pleased to hear from them at the earliest opportunity. With much appreciation to Rabbi Lionel Blue, Michael Buerk, Sir Martin Gilbert, Maureen Lipman, Al Matthews, Oliver McTernan,

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Rabbi Julia Neuberger and Canon Roger Royle for their thoughtful contributions, to Sir Tom Stoppard for permission to reprint his tribute and to Karen Segal for permission to reprint Erich Segal’s – both appeared first in the programme of A Celebration in Memory of Hugo Gryn held at the Barbican Hall on 8 December 1997. With thanks also to Amelia Allsop, David Craig, Vicky Mitchell at the BBC, Glen Sujo, Gwen Thomas and Stephen Whittle, who assisted efforts to trace copyright owners, Richard Rothschild-Pearson for helping to compile the glossary, to Sara-May Mallett, Jo Murphy, Nicola Rusk, and Andrew Walby for answering countless queries, to R. Geoffries for copy-editing and to Tessa King for proofreading. The editor is particularly grateful to Jonathan Cameron, Jackie Gryn and Peter Joy; Jeremy Crow and Kate Pool at the Society of Authors; Jeremy Robson who first encouraged Hugo Gryn to publish some of this work more than twenty years ago; Judy Goldhill for scanning photographs; Rachelle Gryn Brettler for picture research and sisterly support and to Caroline Chartres at Continuum Books with whom it has been a delight to work.

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