Footage and reports of the floods in Nepal have been heartbreaking. I’m proud to recommend and support personally World Jewish Relief‘s emergency appeal in response to this awful news. WJR partner with the Disasters Emergency Committee and I recommend them fully. My thoughts and prayers - and some money - are with all those needing emergency assistance as well as those mourning and in pain.
I’ve spent the last two week’s away, in Morocco my family drove past what looked like a hundred-year-old wreckage, only to be told the building was wiped out by a flash flood in 2024, 18 people were killed. A couple of days later, we wandered through the ancient Jewish quarter of Marrakech and witnessed the still present wreckage of the 2023 earthquake. There are single walls behind which lie rubble mounds.
“Who by fire and who by water” indeed. I’ve returned to work to reconnect with some of the pressing pastoral challenges in our community – there are many in need of comfort. Rosh Hashanah is coming and the religious mood is in keeping with my news feed, holiday memories and in-tray. Life feels fragile and insecure. But not, I think, Hobbesian. It’s not, at least not merely, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutal and short.”
There was an odd moment when my news feed flitted between the utter devastation in Nepal and a clip of Dolly Parton, of blessed memory, resplendent in rhinestones and silicon, yeehawing across a crowd of Glastonbury festival-goers. “I wrote a song a few years back and it’s going to be a perfect song to dedicate to you personally today” she shared intimately with a crowd of 300,000, “because I just want to know, I appreciate each and every one of you and ‘I will always love you.’”
And despite the fake hair and fake everything else, I believed her and I believed in love. Love works like that, even in the face of death, even in the face of earthquakes and floods.
The line, from the Rosh Hashanah liturgy, is that living well – Teshuvah, Tefillah and Tzedakah – strips away evil from the decree we face in our lives. It doesn’t promise an altered decree. To take every opportunity to share love, to live more carefully, to show an appreciation for our life in prayer and acts of justice, including financial justice, make us worthy of the blessing of our existence. These are worthy goals despite the fire and the water and the mortality that is coming for us all. That’s the essential message of the Rosh Hashanah season to come.
If a warm-up would help – and warming up definitely helps – please consider joining us at New London NEXT Saturday evening, 9:30pm in building and on the stream, for our annual Slichot curtain raiser with Yoav, Shir and others. Booking (no charge) here is warmly encouraged. It will be a service shared with love.
It’s good to be back.
Shabbat Shalom
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