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| Home » Writings, Speeches, Broadcasts » Diary of a Chief Rabbi » 2001 |
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| Learning to Create a Dialogue Between Civilisations |
| 1/6/2001 |
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Diary of a Chief Rabbi
A journey to Hampstead took Elaine and I back seven hundred years in time. We had gone to see Hyam Maccoby's brilliant play, The Disputation. For those unfamiliar with it, this is a dramatisation of one of the great moments of the Middle Ages, the Christian-Jewish disputation held in Barcelona in 1263. For a few hours, mesmerised by the spell of theatre, we were drawn into the world of our ancestors in a dark and dangerous age.
It began with the First C... |
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| Why Pesach is Not the End, But The Start |
| 1/5/2001 |
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Diary of a Chief Rabbi
It's not what you would call one of Judaism's most dramatic moments - counting the 49 days between Pesach and Shavuot. The counting of the Omer is rarely accorded a leading place in accounts of Judaism as a way of life, nor does it figure among the great ideas that shaped the Western imagination. But it deserves all this and more. It really is significant - more than significant, fundamental.
We sometimes forget that the story of the exodus - the subject of Pe... |
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| The Extraordinary Resurgence of Anglo-Jewry |
| 1/4/2001 |
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Diary of a Chief Rabbi
Something is happening in Anglo-Jewry, and whatever it is, it's exciting.
The scene: a bitterly cold, windswept site on the North Wales Coast in March. Nine hundred young people with their parents have gathered for a Bnei Akiva national weekend. The setting is unpropitious. Who in their right mind would come here at this time of the year for a break? Yet the mood is electric. The Friday night service is charged with energy. And in the dining room, as we begin ... |
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| Shared Memories of Genocide is Shared Humanity |
| 1/2/2001 |
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Diary of a Chief Rabbi
What a moving occasion it was. The first ever National Holocaust Memorial Day could have gone so wrong. In the event it went magnificently right, and marks a new stage in the place of the Holocaust in collective memory.
For more than half a century the Shoah has been kept alive in Jewish consciousness. How could it not have done? It was, in human terms, the worst tragedy ever to have befallen our people, and we are no strangers to suffering or persecution. Ove... |
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