Rosh Hashanah 2003 / 5764

This year our prayers on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur will have a more than usual urgency. Israel is under attack. Its citizens live in fear. Tragedy continues to strike, killing the innocent, leaving thousands injured, families bereaved, and lives shattered. The very legitimacy of the State - brought into being by a vote of the United Nations, itself the most belated righting of some of the most sustained injustices ever suffered by a people - is being called into question - and this not only by religious extremists but by academics, journalists and others who ought to know the danger of giving support to terror. Since 9/11 the very future of freedom has been at stake, and once again Jews find themselves on the front line.

At such times, spiritual responses become exceptionally important. Yes, the headlines we read and the news bulletins we see are about politics and power. But the prophets of Israel always knew that the fate of nations depended on other things: the ideals to which they aspire, the rules by which they live, and the God or gods to whom they pray. They were right. News is about now but destiny is about the far horizon. Politicians think about tomorrow's headlines. Mosheh Rabbenu taught us to think about generations not yet born. That is why the keywords of the Days of Awe - teshuvah, tefillah and tzedakah - are central to the future of Israel and the Jewish people.

Teshuvah is usually translated as "repentance". What it means, though, is "return". Behind it is the idea that a sin is an act in the wrong place (the English word "transgression" has the same sense: it means straying across a moral boundary into forbidden territory). That is why the punishment for sin is exile, which means being removed from the place where we belong. It is also why teshuvah in both a spiritual and geographical sense means "coming home". The State of Israel is the Jewish people's collective act of coming home.

Journalists and politicians sometimes forget that the United Nations vote in 1947 to bring Israel into being was a belated attempt to right the most sustained series of injustices ever suffered by a people. Driven from their land by successive empires, for almost two thousand years Jews were thrown at the mercy of the nations, who often showed it only when it was in their interest to do so. As catastrophe threatened the Jews of Europe an international conference was held in Evian in July 1938. Nation after nation closed its doors. Jews discovered that there was not one place on earth they could call home in the sense defined by the poet Robert Frost as the place where "when you have to go there, they have to let you in." If any nation has a right to be, it is Israel, whose connection with the Jewish people goes back millennia before there were English in England or Frenchmen in France.

Tefillah means prayer, but more than prayer as a dialogue between the individual soul and God. In Judaism tefillah is a choral symphony scored for the voices of Jews across centuries and continents, a scattered people yet one that saw itself united by its covenant with God in a distant desert, long ago yet never revoked. We pray in the words our ancestors used from Manchester to Minsk, San Francisco to Smolensk, Birmingham to Bratslav. Jewish prayer is an expression of our belief that Kol Yisrael arevin zeh bazeh, "All Israelites are responsible for one another."

Right now Israel needs our prayers. Was it not the prayers of a hundred generations that kept the hope alive that one day Jews would return to their land? And will it not be the prayers of Jews throughout the world that will tell our families and friends in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that they are not alone? Pascal, Rousseau and Tolstoy, three makers of the modern mind, saw as they studied Jewish history the unmistakable signs of a Divine hand shaping its script. Can we do less? Let us pray with every fibre of our being for peace in Israel, and for it to spread from there to the world.

And lastly tzedakah. This is a word almost impossible to translate, since it means both "charity" and "justice" - two words that in English are very different. It testifies to one of the deepest reflexes of the Jewish spirit, that to be true to God is to seek to be a blessing to other human beings, to bring help to the needy, comfort to the afflicted, healing to the sick, and peace to a world too often scarred by violence, terror and war.

Abraham and Sarah did not teach the existence of God by bloodshed and the sword. They did so by giving food and drink, shelter and shade, to passers-by. When their visitors were about to thank their hosts, they said, "Don't thank us, thank God who gave us what we have shared with you." That is how you bring the Divine presence into the world, and their message is more powerful now than it was four thousand years ago.

Above all in the 21st century the world needs to hear the message of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: "Remember us for life, O King who delights in life, and write us in the book of life for Your sake, for You are the God of life." As I said on the BBC on the second anniversary of 9/11: "One who dies for the sake of faith is called a martyr. But one who kills for the sake of faith is a blasphemer, because he or she desecrates the one thing on which God has set his image, life itself." A religion of tzedakah honours life, not death.

Please, therefore, join with me this Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in saying this prayer:

Ribbon ha-olamim, Sovereign of the universe,
Send peace to Your people Israel in Your holy land,
Who week by week live in fear,
And day by day shed tears of grief -
For the young and old
Parents and children
The innocent and uninvolved
Whom terror has taken as its target
And violence as its victims.
Melech she-hashalom shelo,
O King to whom peace belongs:
Your people in Your holy land
Seek peace, not war
The right to live as other nations live
And to be a blessing to others.
Bring, we pray you, comfort to those who mourn
Healing to the injured
And hope where there is despair.
May He who brought His people back to the land
Grant them safety in the land
And may He who makes peace in high places
Teach us and all humanity to make peace on earth.

May the Almighty send you, your families and the Jewish people throughout the world, a year of blessing, health and peace, and may He write us all in the Book of Life.

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