I am going to begin this sermon with hope- with Tikvah for the future and end with hope, but on the way there will inevitably be horror. On Shabbat Zachor, the Shabbat when we remember our darkest times along with anticipating the happiest time of Purim that journey is inevitable.
Yesterday we received an e-mail from Maira Aisaeva the President of the UK Uighur community, the Muslim refugees from Chinese state oppression in the state of Xianjiang living in the UK, thanking us for the EHRS Interfaith Group’s invitation to the Iftar here at our Synagogue on Thursday night.
An Iftar is the meal to break the Muslim fast held each day throughout the month. There are already nearly 80 people coming to this very special event – about half Muslim and half our members. Our Muslim guests are local and London wide and from many groups within that community. Maira told us that many members of the Uighur community would love to join us to break their fast and meet our community and she was concerned that too many may book in so asked how many places were OK to book. At a time when you might have thought the interfaith work was impossible between Jews and Muslims as the war between Israel and Hamas rages, the opposite seems to be true here.
Then another thing happened this week. Members of the Edgware Mosque on Deansbrook got together with St Margaret’s Church on the Edgware Broadway and the One Stonegrove Centre which includes St Peter’s church. They contacted us at EHRS to ask if we would be willing to join what they are calling a Faith Walk on June 20th – starting at Edgware station and all of us visiting the Mosque, both churches, the community centre and our Synagogue. The aim is to demonstrate that whatever is happening in the world we must be one mutually supportive community making links so that we can talk with each other. The answer yes is, of course, a no-brainer for a Synagogue with our values of inclusion, peace finding and involvement in the local community.
We must never let these expressions of hope be blotted out by the horror that is also around us. But Shabbat Zachor tells us that we must also never forget the troubles that our people experience. Over the past two weeks I heard of two horrible incidents that happened to students I know. One, a Jewish student in Edinburgh, felt utterly compromised when the Photography Society in his university insisted that all members should sign a document condemning Israel for not only its actions but its existence due to the harms suffered by photojournalists in this war. He felt he had no choice but to leave this group if he was to be true to his values as a Jew who cares about Israel.
The second, two Jewish students at Exeter University, one a member of EHRS contacted me following the near riot at the university when a stall was set up in the main foyer of the campus for those curious to understand the situation from an Israeli perspective. A large group of students had during a protest against Israel started chanting at one of these Jewish students passing that she, a 20 year old Jewish woman in Exeter was in their chants ‘complicit in genocide of Palestinians because she is Jewish’. The two students contacted me to help them to find support from the CST which would be sensitive to how threatened they felt and help to push the university authorities into action to protect all of its students.
The horror though continues when you hear what is happening in Gaza. Under Hamas’s control and with it seems the largest part of investment and aid having been channeled into building perhaps three to four hundred miles of tunnels under the territory, Gaza had, before the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7th been deeply dependent on food aid for survival. According to Gisha, an Israeli human rights organisation committed to the free movement of Palestinians, between January and August 2023 the monthly average of aid trucks coming into Gaza was nearly 11,000. From a low of just 200 in October right after the attacks there are now around 4000 food aid trucks coming in per month. This huge reduction, though it is not the complete cutting off that you might think, nevertheless has huge effects, with estimates from the Unicef Global Nutrition Cluster that this means 90% of young children and pregnant women will be facing significant malnutrition.
Shabbat Zachor tells us that our Jewish values will not allow us to simply forget that we have been attacked. Indeed the special prayer which will be part of the Purim Shacharit tomorrow morning, Al Ha Nissim reminds us of the aims of the Amalakites of past times including Haman and of today, which Hamas surely is. ‘The rose up to destroy, kill and exterminate all the Jews, both young and old little children and women on one day and plunder their possessions.’ We know that this is exactly what happened in the Kibbutzim and the music festival in the Gaza envelope. It could have been even worse had Hezbollah in the North and terrorist groups in the West Bank joined in as had it seems been the aim of Hamas.
The Jewish people has had to prevent this kind of slaughter many many times. But now comes the largest challenge. How can our Jewish State do so without utterly compromising our Jewish values? Our Torah portion Vayikra this morning was all about remedies for unconscious sin – what you do when you realise that what you have done was wrong, has harmful consequences.
Shabbat Zachor tells us that Jews in Israel and worldwide absolutely have the right and responsibility to defend themselves and to call upon each other’s support to do so. We are right to support Israel in her hour of need. But we are also right to call upon Israel to do what she has to do in accord with our Jewish values of love for the stranger, tzedakah, seeking ways of peace and repair of the world.
Whenever I stand up to speak about Israel I know that I must speak as someone who is not living there, who did not live under the shadow of the more than 20,000 rockets which Hamas sent into Israel aiming with each one to take life. But I must also speak as a Zionist who believes in the future of the State of Israel, about the right of my friends and family to live secure lives there and so who cares deeply about what Israel is and is becoming.
Our colleagues in the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism share our values. They desperately want the hostages released, they want to live in safety, they want Israel to be a country to be proud of and never to descend into cruelty. They are as unimpressed by this Israeli government as so many of us are because they see the Jewish values of the State as under grave threat by its policies.
Purim every year comes to remind us that we can build hope even in the most desperate of situations. Our Muslim neighbours are asking us to do so locally and we are responding. Our Students are asking for support and we try to be with them. Supporting Israel remaining true to Jewish values which include reducing the human suffering in Gaza in this awful but inevitable conflict is surely the right thing to do.
