Grandma's army

  According to Moses, the real test of a nation is, not if it can survive a crisis, but if it can survive the lack of one. Can it remain strong in times of abundance and power? History teaches us that the nations that seemed impregnable in their times, all   eventually declined and lapsed into obscurity. All for the reasons which were foreseen by Moses. Moses did more than warn the people. He also showed how the danger could be averted. He spoke of the prime significance of memory for the moral health of a society. The word “Zakhor” ( remember ) is reiterated by Moses many times throughout the book of Deuteronomy. " Remember " is a "command delivered 197 times in the Bible. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote:   “It is possible to see Judaism itself as a technology of memory, a set of practices designed to make the past present.” Memory is essential to who we are as a people. It binds us to others. It helps us to know to whom we belong. And in Judaism, memory is not p...

We are at present almost at the end of   three weeks of mourning in which the Jewish people recall the many tragedies they suffered - culminating in the loss of the first and second Temples, and exile. The Temple was   the focus of national identity and the unifying   spiritual centre of the ancient Jewish nation.   It was the repository of the Holy Scriptures and other national literature and the meeting place of the Sanhedrin, the highest court of Jewish law during Roman times. When it was destroyed - and the people who were not killed were exiled and dispersed - what could possibly   sustain them as a Jewish nation? Altogether the Jews were exiled from their land for almost 2,000 years. Especially in this period of mourning, the parallels to another exiled people were brought to my mind. The Chinese have a lot to answer for. I am not talking about the coronavirus, but of the great national tragedy which befell Tibet. It began with the occu...

The purpose behind all wars is to capture as much enemy territory as possible. That is how all the world’s imperialistic Empires have been founded. The November 1947 United Nations vote to bring Israel into existence was a momentous reversal of imperialism. It gave back to the Jewish people the home taken from them by empire after empire. Judaism differs from the other monotheisms, Christianity and Islam, as it never created, or sought to create, an Empire. It was the imperialism of the Roman emperor Hadrian that led him in the 2 nd  century to change the country’s name to Palestine, one of the first - but certainly not the last – deliberate falsifications of history by those who seek to deny the Jewish people’s right to their land. There are 56 Islamic nations, and 159 in which Christians form the majority. There is, and only ever has been, one Jewish state, tiny and vulnerable though it is - and always was. That is why Anti-Zionism, denying Jews the right to their one an...

Pandora was the first human woman in Greek mythology. She was entrusted with a jar, on condition that it remained closed. When her curiosity got the better of her and she opened it, all the world’s sorrows, plagues, etc. escaped. When she managed to close it - only hope remained. Pandora was the first human woman in Greek mythology. She was entrusted with a jar on condition that it remained closed. When her curiosity got the better of her and she opened it, all the world’s sorrows, plagues, etc. escaped. When she managed to close it - only hope remained. Hope is an existential necessity in a life clouded by uncertainty. I believe hope is what enables the survival of the Jewish people. Without hope for a better future, how could a people suffer the unbearable “present” throughout the ages, whether it was programs, exile, persecution, genocide. The stories comprising the narrative of the Jewish people as written in the Pentateuch, invariably show an unforeseen futu...