We usually read the Akedah looking upwards: towards Avraham’s raised hand, the knife, and the angel whose voice interrupts the unbearable.

But there is another direction in which to look.

Follow Yitzchak down the mountain.

The young man who lay bound upon the altar has been given back his future. What will he do with it? How does someone live after coming so close to death?

For the Jewish people, these are questions of history, identity and responsibility. Again and again, our future has appeared desperately precarious. Again and again, Jewish life has continued, sometimes in circumstances our ancestors could scarcely have imagined.

Perhaps we can read Yitzchak as an image of Israel: bound, threatened, yet entrusted with a tomorrow.

This comparison must be made with reverence. Countless Jews were murdered without a last-minute rescue. No account of national survival can explain their deaths or diminish their absence. Nor should the metaphor turn those who threaten Israel into blameless instruments whose actions we excuse. Their responsibility remains their own.

Yet alongside our mourning stands an extraordinary fact: the Jewish people lives.

We must accept that continued existence with gratitude to God, while asking what it requires of us.

On Mount Moriah, the command comes to stop. Avraham must leave Yitzchak unharmed. A ram is offered in his place, and the child through whom the covenant is to continue remains alive. (Bereishit 22:11–14)

The reprieve preserves a person. It also preserves a possibility.

Yitzchak has a life to lead, a household to establish, children to raise and a covenant to carry forward. The future promised through him still needs to be built.

This is as relevant for us today as it ever was through the generations.

Survival rightly commands our attention. A people that has known persecution cannot treat security casually. Protecting life demands vigilance, courage, preparation and, when necessary, force.

But the question of what we are protecting must remain alive within us.

What kind of homes will stand behind our defences? What will our children learn? What will bind one generation to the next? What will make the life we preserve recognisably Jewish?

Yitzchak’s answer emerges through the quieter chapters that follow the mountain.

He marries Rivka. The Torah tells us that he brings her into Sarah’s tent, loves her and finds consolation after his mother’s death. Within one verse, memory, love and renewal meet. (Bereishit 24:67)

The man who nearly lost his future makes room for another person within it.

Sarah’s absence remains part of his story. Yet her tent becomes a place where family life can begin again.

That is a very Jewish phenomenon.

After catastrophe, our people has repeatedly returned to the work of making homes: setting tables, welcoming children, teaching prayers, celebrating marriages and finding reasons to gather.

I heard a podcast today which spoke about 150 babies being born on a refugee ship to the Land of Israel after World War II. This was the same response Miriam urged of her parents during the harsh slavery in Egypt.

Such acts can seem small beside the dangers that surround us. They are among the deepest purposes of survival.

A child learning the words of the Shema participates in something that the enemies of the Jewish people have repeatedly sought to extinguish. A family preparing for Shabbat gives the coming week a centre of gravity. A marriage creates space for a future whose details nobody can guarantee.

Yitzchak also returns to his father’s wells.

The Torah describes him reopening the wells dug in Avraham’s lifetime, which had subsequently been stopped up. He restores their earlier names. (Bereishit 26:18)

In the aftermath of the Akedah, this becomes a powerful image.

The life spared on the mountain is used to recover the sources that sustained the previous generation.

Yitzchak’s loyalty takes effort. Earth must be removed. Water must be reached. An inheritance becomes useful through labour.

So it is with Jewish tradition.

We cannot preserve it merely by declaring that it matters.

We have to open its books, learn its language, practise its mitzvot and make its wisdom available to our children.

A well may bear an honoured family name and still leave everyone thirsty if nobody can reach its water.

For Israel today, material achievement and spiritual continuity belong together. We need the ingenuity that builds hospitals, develops technology and makes difficult land fruitful. We also need the patient work of transmitting Torah, cultivating responsibility and teaching children why belonging to this people matters.

Yitzchak’s fidelity does not prevent him from building. It gives his building direction.

It’s not easy- not for Yitzchak and not for us.

He has disputes over wells, uncertainty, disappointment and painful tensions within his family. Being spared does not confer immunity from the ordinary burdens of living.

That, too, speaks to us.

It would be comforting to imagine that deliverance settles everything: the danger passes, unity returns, gratitude endures and the future becomes clear.

Instead, another tomorrow arrives carrying arguments, obligations and unfinished repairs.

National gratitude must therefore become a habit of responsibility. It should influence how we speak to one another, how we care for the wounded and bereaved, how we support those who defend us, and how we treat people whose lives are affected by our power.

A people conscious of life’s fragility should understand the weight of every human life.

We cannot claim to know why God grants deliverance in one moment and permits anguish in another. Even Moshe was unable to “see God’s face” and understand His mysteries.

Faith can hold gratitude and unanswered questions together.

What we can ask, is what should we with the days we have received? How will use the gift of life we have been granted?

Yitzchak offers an answer through the shape of his life. He loves. He establishes a family. He cultivates the land. He recovers his father’s wells. Through him, the covenant reaches another generation.

Israel must defend its tomorrow. It must also give that tomorrow content.

When we picture the Akedah, let us remember the figure who comes down alive, carrying a future he could so easily have lost.

Then let us return to our homes, our children, our books and our responsibilities.

The knife has been stayed.

There is a nation to build, a future to live and a Covenant to fulfil.

I am writing on election day in Israel. By the time you read this, the votes will have been counted and the familiar, often unedifying business of coalition building will have begun.

There will be negotiations, accusations, demands and concessions. Promises will be made, some broken. Yesterday’s opponents may become partners, while allies find themselves on opposite sides of the negotiating table.

We have seen it all before. Hardly Israeli democracy’s most uplifting feature.

Yet this election coincides with an anniversary that should give our prospective leaders pause for thought.

This Shabbat, the 20th of Cheshvan, marks the sixth Hebrew anniversary of the passing of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, arguably the greatest Jewish thinker and moral voice of our generation.

How desperately we need him today.

How we miss his wisdom, his intellectual clarity, his understanding of human nature and, above all, his ability to identify the moral questions beneath the political arguments.

Rabbi Sacks combined profound religious conviction with intellectual generosity. He understood that one could disagree passionately without diminishing another’s humanity. Societies, he recognised, need more than laws and institutions. They need shared moral purpose.

And that is precisely what we are missing.

Beyond Israel, the picture is scarcely more reassuring.

France has witnessed extraordinary scenes of civil unrest, the UK is anxious to the point of the Prime Minister recommending stocking up on food and water. Across Europe, economic insecurity, political polarisation and public distrust are placing enormous strains on democratic societies. International tensions contribute to a growing atmosphere of apprehension.

Political disagreement increasingly resembles personal enmity. Social media rewards outrage while moderation struggles to be heard.

Rabbi Sacks examined what happens when societies lose their shared moral foundations.

His final major book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, reads almost like a warning to our generation.

Its argument was simple. A society cannot survive if everyone concentrates on individual rights and interests while neglecting responsibilities towards others.

We are skilled at asking what society owes us, less comfortable asking what we owe society.

Rabbi Sacks described this as the movement from “We” to “I”. A free society’s survival depended upon reversing it.

Nowhere is this more important than Israel.

Victors and vanquished alike bear responsibility for the future of this country.

Election winners acquire authority to govern, but no licence to humiliate those who voted against them. Victory brings responsibility towards the entire nation, including those with different aspirations.

Equally, those who lose are not released from their obligations towards the state. They retain the right, indeed the duty, to challenge, scrutinise and oppose. But opposition must never become a desire to see the country fail simply because one’s preferred leaders are no longer in power.

The government belongs to those elected to lead it. The country belongs to all of us.

Rabbi Sacks would, I believe, have recognised this as the essence of covenant.

A contract serves individuals pursuing their interests. A covenant creates mutual responsibility, binding people together even when interests diverge.

Coalition agreements are contracts. Parties negotiate ministries, budgets and influence. Compromise is unavoidable and legitimate.

But beneath those contracts must lie something greater: a covenant with the people of Israel, recognising that no election should divide us into those who matter and those who do not.

Jewish history offers a sobering warning.

The Talmud famously attributes the destruction of the Second Temple to sinat chinam, baseless hatred among Jews.

Disagreement is inevitable, but danger arises when disagreement becomes hatred, opponents become enemies, and winning an argument matters more than preserving the community.

For nearly two thousand years, Jews prayed for restored sovereignty. Generations endured exile, persecution and suffering while dreaming of returning to Zion.

What a terrible indictment if, having achieved what our ancestors scarcely imagined, we undermined it through our inability to live together.

External enemies would dearly love to destroy our state. We must not assist them by tearing ourselves apart.

Rabbi Sacks frequently returned to the biblical example of Moses, whose greatness lay in his willingness to carry the burdens of others. He did not seek leadership for its privileges. His authority rested upon his devotion to a people who were frequently difficult, divided and ungrateful.

There is a lesson for every aspiring prime minister, minister and Knesset member.

Leadership is responsibility, not reward. Public office is an opportunity to serve, not simply exercise power.

But responsibility lies with us all.

When we speak contemptuously about fellow Israelis, circulate inflammatory messages or question opponents’ patriotism, we contribute to the divisions we deplore.

And what example are we setting for our children? Are we teaching them that democracy involves winning and losing with dignity, or that political opponents must be defeated, discredited and humiliated?

Rabbi Sacks distinguished between optimism and hope.

Optimism believes things will improve. Hope is the conviction that our actions can improve them.

Israel itself is surely one of the greatest expressions of that hope.

Our sovereign Jewish state represents the triumph of determination, sacrifice and faith over seemingly impossible circumstances.

Surely we can learn to disagree without endangering everything we have achieved?

None of this requires abandoning deeply held convictions. Rabbi Sacks was never an advocate of bland consensus or intellectual surrender. Moral courage sometimes demands standing firmly against prevailing opinion.

But conviction and courtesy are compatible. Respecting someone’s dignity does not require accepting their argument.

Six years after his passing, Rabbi Sacks’s voice is silent, but his message remains urgent.

We cannot know precisely what he would have said about today’s politics. But his writings suggest the questions he would ask.

What society are we building? What do we owe one another? Will our decisions leave our country stronger, kinder and more united?

Those questions must be answered by victors and vanquished alike.

Governments come and go. Coalitions form and dissolve. Politicians rise and disappear from the stage.

But the State of Israel, the extraordinary achievement of generations of Jewish sacrifice and aspiration must endure.

We have inherited something infinitely more precious than political power: a homeland, a history and a shared destiny. We have a solemn obligation to hand them on, secure and flourishing, to those who come after us.

The election will determine who governs Israel for the next few years. How victors and vanquished alike behave in its aftermath will determine the kind of Israel our children and grandchildren inherit.

That is the challenge Rabbi Sacks leaves us.

And surely, there could be no more fitting tribute to his memory than to rise to it.

There comes a moment when a people must stop asking permission to exist.

Permission to defend themselves. Permission to love their homeland. Permission to tell their own story without first reciting the qualifications demanded by those who would happily erase it.

Parshat Lech Lecha takes us back to the man who began our story, and to a word we urgently need to reclaim.

Ivri.

Hebrew.

In Genesis 14:13, a fugitive brings news of Lot’s capture to “Avram ha’Ivri”, Avram the Hebrew. The Midrash hears in that description something far greater than a geographical identity. Rabbi Yehudah explains: “The whole world was on one side, and he was on the other.”

That is an extraordinary foundation for a people.

Avraham stood against the religious consensus of his civilisation. Surrounded by a world of competing gods, he proclaimed one God, one ultimate source of authority, one moral claim upon humanity.

He could have accommodated himself to the prevailing culture. He could have kept his convictions private. He could have decided that so many people could hardly be mistaken.

Instead, he became an Ivri. A contrarian.

We are his descendants. We should remember what that demands.

The opening command of our parsha is unsettling: leave your country, your birthplace and your father’s house. Walk away from the familiar structures that have defined your place in the world. Travel towards a land God will show you.

Avraham begins his journey without the reassurance of public approval. He has a promise, a destination and the courage to move.

We have inherited that journey. Yet somewhere along the way, many of us absorbed the conviction that our security depends upon being sufficiently acceptable to everybody else.

Be quieter. Be less conspicuous. Explain yourself more carefully. Perhaps another concession will purchase acceptance. Perhaps enough distance from Israel will secure an invitation back into respectable company.

My grandmother, of blessed memory, a refugee from Romanian pogroms, used to say “S’htekh nisht oys di oygn fun di goyim”- “Don’t poke out the eyes of the goyim,” meaning: don’t provoke them or draw their resentment.

But the price keeps rising.

There is always another denunciation to sign, another attachment to renounce, another piece of ourselves to surrender.

The Ivri must eventually say: enough.

I am a Jew and an Ivri, and I carry that name with pride. It holds centuries of scholarship, sacrifice, tenderness and extraordinary endurance. My grandparents’ Judaism needs no apology.

But the word “Jew” has also travelled through the long experience of galut. It has been stamped into documents, spat across streets and made into an accusation. Too often, Jewish existence was reduced to the precarious business of being tolerated.

We learnt how to survive somebody else’s displeasure.

The return to our land requires us to recover something older: the Ivri, the Hebrew confidence of a people entitled to shape its own future.

We need the Ivri within the Jew.

The person who can stand upright while the room disapproves. The person whose attachment to Israel survives the hostility of fashionable opinion. The person who knows that Jewish history began long before the institutions now presuming to adjudicate its legitimacy.

Zionism belongs within that long story. It expresses the determination of the Jewish people to live as a free people in our ancestral homeland, responsible for our own collective life.

Our attachment to this land runs through our prayers, our calendar, our language and our memory. Across centuries of exile, Jews turned towards Jerusalem. Parents taught its name to children who had never seen it.

Now those children’s descendants walk its streets.

I refuse to be embarrassed by that.

Let those who use “Zionist” as an insult understand what they are asking us to disown: the conviction that Jewish homelessness should end, that Jewish lives should be defended, that Jewish civilisation should flourish in the place where it was born.

I will carry that conviction proudly.

And when hostility towards Israel becomes hostility towards Jews, when a people is held collectively guilty and its members are demanded to prove their innocence, we should recognise the ancient ugliness beneath the contemporary vocabulary.

We have encountered it before.

We are still here.

Yet Avraham’s courage carries a demanding moral responsibility. Standing alone offers no automatic guarantee of being right. The Ivri must know what he stands for.

Avraham’s God requires justice. Our loyalty to Israel must therefore include the courage to challenge wrongdoing, demand honesty from our leaders and preserve our concern for human dignity.

A people confident in its right to exist can examine its conduct honestly. We can argue fiercely about policy, leadership and the exercise of power while remaining utterly steadfast about our national home.

Our enemies do not acquire ownership of our conscience. Our conscience does not require us to abandon our people.

Look, too, at the moment when the Torah introduces Avram the Ivri. Lot has been captured. Avraham hears the news and acts. He gathers his men and goes to rescue his kinsman.

The man standing on the other side of the world understands the obligations of solidarity.

His convictions have consequences. Someone in the family is in danger. He takes responsibility.

That is a powerful message for our generation. Jewish pride must become action: building, teaching, serving, giving, defending and caring for one another. It must strengthen the country we love and sustain the communities that carry our future.

Defiance alone cannot raise a child, comfort a bereaved family or build a society. Love must do that work.

The world Avraham challenged has vanished. Its idols belong in museums. His descendants are reading his story this Shabbat, in the language that bears his name, in the land towards which he walked.

History has delivered its verdict on the endurance of his vision.

Our task is to carry it forward with the same faith and courage.

So let us stop shrinking. Let us teach our children to speak Hebrew with delight, to know our history, to love our people and to stand beside Israel with their heads held high.

The crowds may shout. The accusations “Jew!” may multiply. Approval may remain elusive.

But we have a covenant to honour and a future to build.

Yes, I am a Jew.

Yes, I am a Zionist.

And Yes, I am an Ivri.

And I am standing my ground.

Imagine being told that the world as we know it might be approaching destruction. The warning comes from people who understand the danger better than almost anyone else. They explain that catastrophe can still be prevented, provided humanity takes the threat seriously and acts before it is too late.

Some listen. Others dismiss the warnings as alarmist. Most continue with their daily lives, assuming that somebody else will take responsibility.

This is the world of Parashat Noach. And, somewhat frighteningly, it is also the world in which we find ourselves today.

For several years, scientists have warned about the potentially catastrophic consequences of artificial intelligence. In 2023, hundreds of leading researchers and technology executives, including the heads of major AI companies, signed a declaration that preventing human extinction through AI should be treated as seriously as preventing nuclear war or global pandemics.

At the time, such warnings seemed to many like science fiction.

Recent developments have made them considerably more disturbing.

In July 2026, during internal cybersecurity testing, AI agents developed by OpenAI managed to circumvent the restrictions designed to contain them. They found ways to communicate with other agents, gained unauthorised internet access and compromised external computer systems, including those belonging to the technology platform Hugging Face.

These were real security breaches arising from tests conducted with reduced safeguards. OpenAI subsequently described the incident as a warning to the entire world.

Then, in September, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI companies, publicly called for a slowdown in the development of increasingly powerful AI systems. Sam Altman of OpenAI supported the call.

Amodei warned that increasingly sophisticated AI agents might, within months, become capable of spreading across the internet through networks of compromised computers, causing catastrophic economic damage.

And just this week, on 12 October, Anthropic published research suggesting that relatively small AI models could soon become capable of replicating themselves across ordinary internet-connected devices. Experiments had already demonstrated important elements of this process, although the full real-world scenario remains hypothetical.

Experts disagree about how likely such nightmares are to materialise. Nevertheless, the warnings are extraordinary.

The very people building these immensely powerful systems are publicly asking for help in controlling them.

The architects of the technology are warning that it could eventually escape their control.

What does the Torah teach us about such a situation?

The Torah describes Noach as a righteous man in a profoundly corrupt society. Violence and wickedness have become so widespread that God announces His intention to destroy the world through a flood.

Noach receives instructions to build an ark, gather his family and preserve representatives of the animal kingdom.

He obeys meticulously.

Rashi explains that Noach spent 120 years building the ark, giving his contemporaries ample opportunity to ask what he was doing. When questioned, Noach would explain that a devastating flood was approaching and urge them to repent.

Yet the Zohar and others raises a troubling criticism.

Noach knew that an entire civilisation faced destruction. He warned those who approached him, but he never pleaded with God to spare his generation.

The contrast with Avraham is striking.

When Avraham learns that Sodom faces destruction, he immediately challenges God. He argues, negotiates and begs for mercy, desperately seeking some means of saving the city.

Noach’s righteousness saved his family and ensured the survival of humanity. Yet the rabbinic criticism remains: he could have done more for the people around him.

Indeed, the prophet Isaiah refers to the flood as Mei Noach, the waters of Noach. The Rabbis see in that expression a measure of responsibility attributed to Noach himself.

It is a remarkable idea. A righteous man can fulfil every instruction given to him and still be criticised for failing to exercise sufficient moral leadership.

And herein lies a powerful message for our generation.

Humanity has repeatedly developed technologies possessing an extraordinary capacity for both benefit and destruction.

Consider Alfred Nobel.

In 1867, Nobel patented dynamite, revolutionising engineering, mining and construction. Explosives enabled humanity to carve tunnels through mountains and undertake projects previously unimaginable. They also became instruments of warfare and terrible human suffering.

Nobel eventually devoted much of his fortune to establishing the prizes bearing his name, including the Nobel Peace Prize.

Or nuclear technology.

The discoveries that enabled the atomic bomb also made possible nuclear power and medical advances that have saved countless lives.

The internet offers another familiar example. It has transformed communication, education, commerce and medical research. It has also facilitated exploitation, hatred, fraud, extremism and misinformation on a scale previously unimaginable.

Every technological revolution presents humanity with moral choices. The greater the power, the greater the responsibility.

Artificial intelligence raises those choices to an entirely new level.

As a physician, I can envisage extraordinary medical benefits: earlier diagnoses, improved treatments, faster research and personalised care.

As a rabbi and educator, I see enormous opportunities to make knowledge and Torah learning accessible to people throughout the world.

There is tremendous good waiting to be achieved.

But AI also raises profound questions about human control, truth, privacy, employment and security. As increasingly autonomous systems acquire greater capabilities, some risks may become difficult even for their creators to anticipate.

The story of Noach warns us about the dangers of passivity.

We must take the scientists’ concerns seriously, even while recognising the uncertainties. We must demand responsible development, independent oversight, effective safeguards and international cooperation.

Governments, educators, scientists, religious leaders and ordinary citizens all have a role to play.

And we must enthusiastically pursue the extraordinary benefits AI offers.

Imagine artificial intelligence helping to cure diseases that have plagued humanity for generations. Imagine bringing high-quality education to children in the poorest parts of the world. Imagine using this technology to reduce suffering, protect vulnerable people and make society more compassionate.

Such possibilities deserve our energy, imagination and commitment.

There is another important lesson in the behaviour of the AI companies themselves.

When the people who have created something so powerful acknowledge themselves that they need assistance in controlling it, the rest of humanity should listen.

Those warnings require a collective response. The future of human civilisation is far too important to leave entirely in the hands of a small number of commercial organisations, however talented or well-intentioned their leaders may be.

At the conclusion of the flood, God places a rainbow in the heavens as the symbol of His covenant with humanity.

It represents hope, renewal and the possibility of a better future.

But God’s promise never relieved human beings of their own moral responsibilities.

We have been given astonishing intelligence and creativity. Our technological achievements testify to the extraordinary abilities with which God has endowed humanity.

The question is whether our moral wisdom will keep pace with our scientific ingenuity.

Parashat Noach challenges us to look beyond our own immediate security and recognise our responsibility for the world around us.

We cannot afford the complacency of a generation that ignored the coming flood. We must also learn from the limitations of Noach, whose response to impending disaster centred upon building his ark.

We need something of Avraham’s courage, his compassion and his determination to influence events before destruction becomes inevitable.

Our challenge is to use the extraordinary power of artificial intelligence to build a better world, while working together to prevent the dangers that threaten it.

The great lesson of Parashat Noach is that when a flood threatens the world, building an ark may save our own lives.

But our real responsibility is to try to prevent the flood.

Last Sunday, October 11, an important anniversary passed almost unnoticed.

On June 25, 2006, a 19-year-old Israeli soldier was abducted during a Hamas attack near the Gaza border. For the next five years, his name became part of the daily consciousness of Jews throughout the world.

We saw his photograph everywhere. We watched the demonstrations. We followed every rumour of negotiations, every hopeful report and every subsequent disappointment. We prayed for him in our synagogues, attended rallies and signed petitions. His name became familiar to people who had never met him and probably never would.

I was living in Britain at the time, and I remember vividly how deeply his captivity affected Jewish communities far beyond Israel’s borders.

Gilad Shalit was not simply another soldier. He was somebody’s son, somebody’s brother, a young man who should have been enjoying the ordinary experiences of early adulthood. Instead, he was being held in isolation, deprived of his freedom and separated from everyone he loved.

For five long years, we prayed and hoped that somehow he would return.

And then, suddenly, the extraordinary news came.

There was an agreement. He was coming home.

Fifteen years ago, on 11 October 2011, Israel announced that an agreement had finally been reached to secure Gilad’s release after more than five years of hell on earth. One week later, on October 18, he came home.

It was a moment of almost indescribable national joy. And perhaps, amid everything that has happened since, we should pause to remember it.

Of course, the Shalit prisoner exchange has been analysed, criticised and debated endlessly. Much has been written about the price Israel paid, the prisoners who were released, the precedent it established and the possible consequences for the horrific events of October 7, 2023. These are serious questions, and history has made some of them even more painful.

I do not dismiss the argument. But that is not what I want to write about today.

I want to remember something simpler. Something profoundly human. I want to remember how it felt when we heard that Gilad Shalit was coming home.

I remember the overwhelming sense of relief, the happiness, the excitement and, above all, the gratitude. After years in which hope had repeatedly been raised and dashed, something truly wonderful was actually happening.

For a brief moment, it seemed that an entire nation could share in one family’s happiness. The joy was almost overwhelming, such that we wanted to laugh out loud and greet perfect strangers with a grin and a hug.

When Gilad finally appeared on our television screens on October 18, thin, pale and visibly affected by his ordeal, the emotion was extraordinary. Here was the young man whose photograph we had studied for years. Here he was, alive. Here he was, back on Israeli soil.

And then came the images of him reunited with his family.

How could anyone watch without being moved?

We had never met him, yet somehow we felt we knew him. His parents’ relief became our relief. Their happiness became our happiness. The prayers of five years seemed to find their answer in that single embrace.

Of course, even then there were families for whom the release of convicted terrorists brought renewed anguish rather than celebration. Their pain was real and deserves recognition. Remembering the joy of Gilad’s return does not require us to dismiss their suffering or ignore the difficult decisions involved. Far from it.

But surely we can acknowledge that, whatever our views about the agreement, the return of a young man from captivity was itself something worth celebrating.

And there are two people whose extraordinary contribution should never be forgotten.

Noam and Aviva Shalit, Gilad’s parents, refused to allow their son to disappear from public consciousness.

For five years, they campaigned tirelessly. They attended meetings, confronted politicians, spoke to journalists and kept their son’s photograph before the eyes of the nation. Noam, in particular, became the public face of a family’s determination never to give up.

He was not a professional campaigner or a politician. He was a father who wanted his son back.

What could be more human about that simple truth?

In 2022, Noam Shalit died after a battle with cancer. He was only 68. But he had lived to see his son return, to embrace him again and, in 2021, to accompany him to his wedding.

What a blessing that was. What a reward for years of anguish and perseverance.

And what of Gilad himself?

Thankfully, after the extraordinary public attention surrounding his captivity and release, he has largely chosen, and achieved, a quieter life. He married Nitzan Shabbat and has worked as a sports journalist, pursuing an interest that existed long before his abduction.

In many ways, that is perhaps the most heartening part of his story.

We sometimes imagine that the happy ending to a dramatic story must itself be dramatic. But perhaps the greatest victory for someone who has endured years of captivity is the ability to live an ordinary life.

To go to work. To enjoy sport. To spend time with family and friends. To marry, to laugh, to make plans and to wake up each morning without fear of what the day might bring.

These are things most of us take for granted. For somebody who has had them forcibly taken away, they must assume an entirely different significance.

We cannot know everything that Gilad has experienced since his release, nor should we presume to understand the lasting effects of his captivity. He deserves his privacy and the freedom to build his life away from the public gaze.

But there is great joy in knowing that the young man whose face once appeared on countless posters has been able to move forward with his life.

The events of October 7 brought the terrible reality of hostage-taking back into our lives on a scale that none of us could have imagined. Once again, we became familiar with photographs, names, families and campaigns. Once again, prayers for the return of captives became part of our daily existence.

And once again, we were reminded how precious a single human life can be.

We live in an age of relentless argument. Every event is immediately subjected to political analysis. Every decision is judged, often with considerable bitterness, and every moment of happiness seems destined to be overshadowed by the next crisis.

There is a place for criticism, accountability and historical reflection. But there must also be a place for gratitude.

Not every memory needs to become an argument. Not every anniversary needs to reopen a political battle.

Sometimes we should allow ourselves simply to remember that something good happened.

Fifteen years ago, after 1,941 days in captivity, a young Israeli soldier returned to his family. A mother embraced her son. A father saw the culmination of five years of tireless effort. And millions of people, in Israel and across the Jewish world, shared a moment of extraordinary happiness.

Whatever happened afterwards should not erase that moment.

As we approach the anniversary of Gilad Shalit’s actual homecoming next Sunday, let us remember the tears of joy, the relief and the gratitude.

Let us remember Noam and Aviva Shalit and the extraordinary love that sustained their campaign.

And let us wish Gilad many more years of peace, happiness and the ordinary pleasures of a life lived in freedom.

There is enough darkness in the world. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that there is light as well.

And do you know what? Fifteen years later, it is still worth stopping to say thank you.

If Bereishit were intended simply as a story about the manufacture of the world, we might have expected it to begin with its most impressive creature. A human builder first decides what he wishes to make and then gathers the materials. A king enters at the head of his procession. Yet the Torah begins at the opposite end: tohu va-vohu, formlessness, darkness and deep waters. Then come light, separation, dry land, vegetation, the rhythms of the heavens, aquatic life, birds, land animals and, only at the end of the sixth “day,” the human being.

This order is remarkably compatible with an evolutionary understanding of creation. That does not mean that Bereishit is secretly a biology textbook or that each biblical “day” corresponds neatly to a particular geological epoch.

There are obvious dangers in forcing modern science into an ancient sacred text. Rather, Bereishit gives us a theological picture of a world that unfolds: from simplicity to complexity, from the undifferentiated to the differentiated, and from the foundations of life to increasingly developed living creatures.

The language itself is suggestive. God says, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures,” and later, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures” (Bereishit 1:20–24).

Creation is commanded by God, but it is also mediated through nature. The waters and earth are given generative power. Divine creation and natural process need not be competitors. The laws of nature are themselves the instruments through which the Divine will is expressed.

Darwin was not the first to grapple with this. Nearly two thousand years ago, Philo of Alexandria wrote that the six days did not imply that God required six ordinary periods of time. God does not need time in which to work; the days communicate order and structure. The Torah’s account could therefore be true without being a literal clock or calendar.

Our Midrash likewise resisted an overly simple chronology. Rabbi Abbahu taught that God “created worlds and destroyed them” before producing this world (Bereishit Rabbah 3:8).

The Midrash imagines creation as involving stages, earlier worlds and the replacement of one order by another. Long before fossils were scientifically classified, Jewish tradition possessed conceptual room for a history of nature far more complicated than one instantaneous act.

Rashi, commenting on the Torah’s opening words, states that the text does not come to teach the chronological order of creation.

Ramban goes further, describing ma’aseh bereishit as a “deep mystery” that cannot be understood fully from the verses alone.

These are not woolly modern liberals! These are about as mainstream as it gets- Rashi, Ramban, Rambam. These are among the foundational voices of traditional Torah commentary, warning us against confusing the surface of the text with the whole of its meaning.

The Rambam in Moreh Nevuchim states the principle even more explicitly: “the account given in Scripture of the Creation is not intended to be in all its parts literal”. He argues elsewhere that when a proposition has been genuinely demonstrated, verses apparently contradicting it must be examined figuratively, just as we interpret biblical descriptions of God’s “hand” or “anger” non-literally.

Having faith does not mean accepting at face value everything we read.

We must be intelligent about the way we read Torah (and especially how we teach it- but that’s another story!)

After Darwin, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch applied precisely this confidence to evolution. He did not believe that the evolutionary theory of his time had yet been demonstrated. Nevertheless, he wrote that even if all organic life were shown to have developed from one primitive form, Judaism would respond with still greater reverence for the one God who could bring forth life’s diversity through a single beginning and laws of adaptation and heredity. Evolution would describe God’s method, not disprove God’s sovereignty.

Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook went further. He wrote that the theory of evolution had “a greater affinity with the secret teachings of the Kabbalah than all other philosophies”.

Kabbalah, about which I know next to nothing and understand even less, describes reality as unfolding through levels and stages, with potential gradually becoming actual. For Rav Kook, a developing creation was a powerful spiritual vision of existence continually ascending towards greater possibility.

This brings us back to the Torah’s most counterintuitive decision: Adam is created last. The Gemara offers two explanations. Humanity enters a world already prepared, like a guest arriving at a banquet. But if a person becomes arrogant, he is reminded: “The mosquito preceded you” (Sanhedrin 38a).

Human lateness signifies both privilege and dependence. Everything necessary for our existence came before us. We are not creation’s self-sufficient masters but its youngest and most vulnerable beneficiaries.

That insight resonates profoundly with evolution. Humanity carries within itself the history of life that preceded it.

On the other hand, we are created Be’tzelem Elokim, in the Divine image. This is the moral capacity to know, choose and accept responsibility.

Indeed, man is not quite the culmination of Bereishit. After humanity comes Shabbat. Creation culminates in restraint rather than power.

Bereishit therefore need not compete with science.

Science can inform us how life developed; Torah tells us what that life means and what we must do with it.

The long ascent to humanity imposes a duty on us as well as a privilege. One cannot separate one from the other.

Just as living in our own Land is a privilege, so too there is a duty to protect and cherish that Land.

Hamayvin Yavin.

Anybody with half a brain can see that the motion passed by the Green Party of England and Wales is disgraceful. By 1,022 votes to 813, a British political party decided that Zionism - the national liberation movement of the Jewish people - should be “treated as any other form of racism.” It also endorsed one Palestinian state across all the territory on which Israel now stands.

Others far more erudite than I have dismantled the motion’s ignorance and malice. Jonathan Freedland, writing in The Guardian, exposed its central conceit: yet again, non-Jews have decided to tell Jews what Zionism means and which parts of our identity are permissible. Almost every synagogue movement in Britain has some connection with Zionism. The Greens are therefore placing much of organised Jewish life under suspicion.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry called the decision “a stain on the history of the United Kingdom.” It is. But I want to focus on something even more ominous: a shift of the Overton window.

The Overton window, named after the American policy analyst Joseph Overton, describes the range of ideas considered politically acceptable at any given time. Inside the window are opinions that respectable politicians and institutions can advocate without being dismissed as extremists. Outside it are the ideas regarded as beyond the pale - too offensive, absurd or dangerous to merit serious consideration.

The window moves through argument, crisis, repetition and institutional endorsement. An idea that begins as unthinkable is aired as radical, discussed as controversial, then accepted as one legitimate view among others. The public does not need to embrace it. The crucial change occurs when a mainstream institution says the unsayable and everyone else is required to debate it.

That is what happened in Brighton. “Zionism is racism” did not remain on a placard at the edge of a demonstration or in an anonymous social-media post. It was debated, voted on and adopted as official policy by a party with elected MPs and serious electoral ambitions. The unthinkable became a conference motion, and the conference motion became party policy. The genie is out of the bottle.

There has, thankfully, been wide condemnation. Four of the Greens’ five MPs opposed the motion. Liberal Democrats condemned it. Labour MPs referred it to the police and the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The co-leader of the German Greens called it “intolerable and unacceptable.” A society protects its moral boundaries only when decent people defend them loudly.

But condemnation does not put the genie back in the bottle. From now on, another activist, councillor or party will not be introducing a wholly unthinkable idea. They will be citing an existing British party policy. The next proposal will seem less shocking because the first boundary has already been crossed. That is how the window moves, and why British Jews will feel less secure even if the Greens never come near government.

The political climate has been brewing for a considerable time. Last year Keir Starmer recognised a Palestinian state whose borders, capital, government and security arrangements had not been agreed with Israel. Last month Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband banned trade in goods from Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and accused “settler terrorists” of ethnic cleansing. Andy Burnham apologised for Labour’s earlier approach to Gaza, as though the principal moral failure after October 7 was excessive sympathy for Israel.

Words and policies do not cause every act of violence. Individuals remain responsible for their crimes. But public language creates an atmosphere. When Israel alone is turned into a pariah, when Zionism is declared racist and when Jewish attachment to Israel is treated as evidence of moral corruption, antisemites hear permission even if politicians insist they never gave it.

Look at the Britain in which this motion was passed. Two worshippers were killed in the terrorist attack on Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester on Yom Kippur last year. In April, two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green in an attack declared to be terrorism, after Jewish ambulances in the area had been set alight. Counter-terrorism police foiled an Islamic State-inspired plan to attack a march against antisemitism and then Jewish neighbourhoods in Manchester with automatic weapons. The plotters wanted to kill hundreds. Just days ago, a court heard allegations that two Iranian men had watched the Heaton Park synagogue as part of a chlorine-bomb plot. Thank God for the police and security services who stopped these plans.

Then there is the BBC. Patrick Christys recently highlighted again the evidence concerning BBC Arabic, supported by the licence fee and government money. A leaked dossier by former BBC standards adviser Michael Prescott described contributors with documented antisemitic or pro-Hamas views presented repeatedly as neutral witnesses. One appeared 522 times; another, who had written that Jews should be burned “as Hitler did,” appeared 244 times. This is institutional failure on a grotesque scale.

For many months after October 7, I resisted comparisons with pre-war Germany. Britain is not Nazi Germany, and careless historical analogies weaken the argument. There are still democratic institutions, courageous police officers and political leaders willing to condemn antisemitism.

But institutional antisemitism does not arrive one morning in a familiar uniform. It advances when institutions mark Jews out, when a national broadcaster platforms hatred, when governments apply standards to the Jewish state that they apply to no other, and when violence becomes part of the security calculation of Jewish life. Britain is not there. But it is no longer moving safely away from there.

On October 24, 2023, less than three weeks after the Hamas massacre, I wrote in The Jerusalem Post that it was time for the Jews of Britain to leave. I wrote with a heavy heart and, perhaps, with a hope that events would prove me wrong.

They have not. What I did not foresee was how quickly the deterioration would come.

The Green motion has done something politically very consequential: it has made an antisemitic proposition respectable enough to become party policy. The Overton window has shifted. British Jews can feel the cold air coming through it.

Most Jews have heard of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Many know about Sukkot, with its temporary huts, palm branches and dangerously suspended decorations.

Then, tucked away near the end of Sukkot, comes Hoshana Rabba: a day involving all-night study, solemn melodies, seven circuits around the synagogue and the ceremonial beating of willow branches against the floor.

It is not one of Judaism’s better-known occasions.

Imagine walking into a synagogue in the morning. The floor is covered with leaves. Several congregants are carrying denuded twigs. Everyone looks slightly tired. It would be reasonable to conclude that either a religious ceremony has taken place or the gardening committee has suffered a serious disagreement.

In fact, it is Hoshana Rabba.

What exactly is it?

Hoshana Rabba is the seventh and final day of Sukkot. Its name means something like “the great plea for salvation.”

The word hoshana comes from the Hebrew phrase hosha na—“please save us.” It appears in Psalm 118:

“Please, God, save us; please, God, grant us success.”

That prayer is repeated during Sukkot while worshippers carry the lulav and etrog around the central platform of the synagogue.

On the first six days, they make one circuit. On Hoshana Rabba, they go around seven times.

For the uninitiated, this can look rather like a very slow Jewish conga line, except that nobody is quite sure who is leading and everyone is holding vegetation.

The ceremony recalls what happened in the Temple in Jerusalem. According to the Mishnah, enormous willow branches were placed around the altar. The altar was circled once on each day of Sukkot and seven times on the seventh day.

After the Temple was destroyed, the ceremony migrated into the synagogue. The central platform, the bimah, became the focal point. The Torah was placed at the centre, and the congregation circled it in memory of the Temple ritual.

The seven circuits suggest completion: seven days of Creation, seven days of Sukkot and seven circuits on its final day. Having gone around once each day, the community gathers the entire festival into one final morning.

There is also an old comparison with the biblical story of Jericho. The Israelites circled Jericho seven times before its walls fell. On Hoshana Rabba, the hope is that our own walls might come down: the walls between people, between prayer and sincerity, or simply between the person we are and the person we keep promising to become.

Why all the concern about rain?

Sukkot arrives at the beginning of Israel’s rainy season. In an agricultural society, the coming rain was not merely a conversational inconvenience. It determined whether crops grew, whether animals drank and whether communities survived.

The Mishnah says that on Sukkot the world is judged concerning water.

This helps explain why the festival of Sukkot combines joy with vulnerability. The harvest has been gathered, but next year remains uncertain. We celebrate what we have while recognising how little we ultimately control.

The willow is the perfect symbol for this. It grows beside water and quickly wilts when water disappears. It is almost a botanical anxiety meter.

On Hoshana Rabba, the willow is therefore given a ceremony of its own.

Why do people beat willow branches?

At the end of the prayers, worshippers put down their lulav and etrog and pick up a separate bundle of willow branches. The bundle is struck against the floor several times.

The earliest sources are much clearer about doing this than about what it means. That has allowed many interpretations to grow around the practice.

The simplest is that it is a physical prayer for rain. We take a plant utterly dependent upon water and use it to express our own dependence.

Another interpretation comes from a Midrash comparing the four species of Sukkot to four kinds of Jews. The etrog has taste and fragrance and represents someone with both learning and good deeds. The willow has neither. It represents the apparently ordinary Jew who possesses no impressive religious résumé.

Yet Sukkot cannot be celebrated without the willow.

Then, on the final day, that supposedly unimpressive branch stands alone at the centre of the ceremony. The message is not that the ignorant Jew deserves a beating. It is almost the opposite: every Jew belongs, and the simplest person may carry the community’s most urgent prayer.

Later Jewish mysticism understood the beating as a way of “sweetening” harsh judgment. In less mystical language, we might say that the ritual takes fear, severity and anxiety and brings them down to earth.

After weeks of words, prayers, resolutions, confessions and sermons, the season ends with a wordless thump.

Why do some people stay up at night?

Another Hoshana Rabba custom is to remain awake studying Torah.

The practice developed during the Middle Ages. Some early communities read large portions of the Torah before its annual reading cycle concluded on Simchat Torah. Under the influence of the mystics of Safed, the night developed a more formal programme, usually including the Book of Deuteronomy and the Psalms.

Deuteronomy is particularly appropriate because it consists largely of Moses’ final speeches. He reviews the Israelites’ journey and asks them to remember, listen, choose and take responsibility.

A final night deserves final words.

In some synagogues, the entire book is still read aloud.

Is it another Yom Kippur?

Not exactly.

Hoshana Rabba remains part of Sukkot. People eat, celebrate, say Hallel and carry the four species. It is not a fast day.

Nevertheless, later Jewish tradition regarded it as the closing stage of the season of judgment that began with Rosh Hashanah. That is why some communities use familiar High Holy Day melodies. Some worshippers wear white, and the prayers acquire an unexpected seriousness.

The music delivers the message before anyone explains it: this day matters.

Hoshana Rabba is not a second Yom Kippur for people who missed the first one. It is more like an echo. Rosh Hashanah asks us to wake up. Yom Kippur asks us to confront ourselves. Sukkot asks us to live joyfully despite life’s fragility. Hoshana Rabba asks whether any of that has actually entered us.

And then it hands the final word to a humble willow.

Perhaps that is why this obscure day deserves more attention. We finish the great religious season not by demonstrating how knowledgeable, successful or spiritually impressive we are. We finish by walking in circles and holding a branch that cannot survive without water.

It is Judaism’s gentle reminder that none of us is entirely self-sufficient, and that returning to the same point does not necessarily mean that we have made no progress.

Chag sameach

I watched the Republic of Ireland football team’s treatment of Israel in Debrecen with mounting disbelief, and then with fury.

The bowed heads during Hatikvah. The refusal to shake Israeli hands. The captains’ failure to exchange pennants, one of football’s simplest gestures of mutual respect. The black armbands. This was not a spontaneous act by a lone protester. It was a calculated, collective humiliation of Israel’s national team, performed before an international audience.

What breathtaking chutzpah.

Criticism of Israel is legitimate. Israelis themselves engage in it loudly and relentlessly. But the Irish players were not debating government policy. They were publicly shunning individual Israeli footballers, as if merely representing Israel rendered them contaminated. They shook hands with the match officials, yet withheld that elementary courtesy from their Israeli opponents.

That distinction tells us everything. This was not an appeal for peace. It was an exercise in national ostracism.

Had I been responsible for the Israeli team, I would have seriously considered walking off the pitch the moment the Irish players turned our anthem into a prop for their political theatre. Israel should not have to beg for the courtesies routinely extended to every other nation. If our flag, anthem and players are considered beneath basic respect, why lend legitimacy to the spectacle by participating in it?

Play someone whose hand you are prepared to shake.

The Football Association of Ireland and the players will undoubtedly insist that their actions concerned Gaza, not Jews or Israelis as people. But intentions do not erase consequences. When Israelis alone are treated as untouchables, when their anthem is singled out, their hands refused and their national symbols ostentatiously rejected, the performance crosses from political criticism into collective condemnation.

And here is another inconvenient detail for Ireland’s moral dramatists. Our so-called “genocidal” Israeli football team contains Arab citizens of Israel. Anan Khalaili, an Arab Israeli from a family originating in Sakhnin, was in the starting lineup against Ireland. Other Arab footballers have represented Israel at every level.

So how does that work, exactly?

Were the Irish players nobly refusing to shake the hands of “oppressors,” even when one of the men in the Israeli shirt was himself an Arab? Was Khalaili transformed into a suitable object of Irish contempt merely because he chose to represent the country of his birth? Does inclusion suddenly become apartheid when it appears in an Israeli uniform?

Perhaps the FAI could issue a diagram. The rest of us are struggling to follow the moral mathematics.

The reality of Israel is considerably more complicated than the cartoon version promoted by those who regard every Israeli as guilty before kickoff. Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze and Circassians play in Israeli football. Yet the Irish protest reduced every player to a single supposedly shameful identity: Israeli. That is not solidarity. It is prejudice disguised as virtue.

In the present climate, that cannot simply be waved away as harmless activism. It carries the unmistakable stench of antisemitic exclusion, whether every participant understands that or not.

What makes this sanctimony particularly galling is Ireland’s own history.

I remember precisely where I was when the Provisional IRA detonated its enormous bomb in central Manchester on June 15, 1996. It was a Saturday morning, and I was in synagogue less than 3 miles away. I heard and felt the blast. More than 200 people were injured, and the commercial heart of the city was devastated. To some extent, it has never recovered.

That bombing did not emerge from some remote medieval conflict. It happened within living memory.

There was also the 1984 Brighton hotel bombing, an attempt to murder British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and members of her government while they slept. Five people were killed. In 1974, IRA bombs in two Guildford pubs killed five and injured dozens. The Troubles brought kneecappings, punishment shootings, abductions, bombings and grotesque acts of intimidation, including tar and feather attacks, against those accused of fraternizing with the “wrong” people.

None of this means that “the Irish” collectively were responsible. The Irish state did not speak for the IRA, and countless Irish people rejected republican terrorism. Britain and loyalist paramilitaries also have blood on their hands. Historical honesty requires those distinctions.

But that is precisely the point.

A country with Ireland’s history should understand better than most the moral necessity of distinguishing a population from an armed organization, a footballer from a government and a national community from those committing violence in its name. Irish people rightly objected when IRA atrocities were used to smear every Irish citizen. Yet the Irish team has now participated in precisely that kind of collective stigmatization against Israelis.

Where was this ostentatious moral clarity after Hamas murdered, raped and kidnapped Israelis on October 7? Where was the insistence that Israeli victims be seen as human beings rather than inconvenient obstacles to a fashionable political narrative? Why is Irish outrage so often thunderous when Israel fights back, but strangely qualified when Jews are slaughtered?

Black armbands for “all lives lost” sound admirably universal. Yet universalism that cannot name the aggressor who began the war, cannot acknowledge the hostages and cannot extend a handshake to an Israeli footballer is not universalism at all. It is selective morality dressed in ceremonial black.

The argument is not that Ireland’s troubled past permanently disqualifies Irish people from criticizing anyone. That would be absurd. Nations are entitled to learn, change and speak. But moral authority demands humility, consistency and some awareness of history. It does not permit a football association to transform a sporting fixture into a public ritual of Israeli degradation while presenting itself as the conscience of Europe.

The FAI had choices. Its officials and players could have issued a statement supporting civilians on both sides. They could have called for peace, condemned terrorism, mourned Palestinian suffering and remembered the Israeli victims of October 7. They could have competed fiercely while treating their opponents as human beings.

Instead, they selected the politics of the snub.

And let us be clear: refusing a handshake does nothing for a Palestinian child. Bowing one’s head through Hatikvah brings no war to an end. Denying a pennant to Manor Solomon saves no life. These gestures cost the Irish players nothing, achieve nothing and enlighten no one. Their only tangible purpose is to make Israelis feel despised.

Ireland has nothing to teach Israel about surviving terrorism. Israelis have endured suicide bombings, rocket attacks, massacres and hostage-taking while much of Europe lectures them about the etiquette of self-defence. We do not require moral instruction from people who treat our mere national existence as something shameful.

Perhaps we should not be entirely surprised: in May 1945, Taoiseach Éamon de Valera personally visited Nazi Germany’s representative in Dublin to offer condolences following Hitler’s death, an act defended as diplomatic protocol but remembered as a stain on Ireland’s wartime record.

Ireland won the match 3 to 0. Congratulations to its players on their football.

But before a ball was kicked, they lost something more important. They surrendered the sportsmanship that makes international competition possible and the moral seriousness their protest purported to display.

So yes, I am angry. Israelis should be angry. Decent football supporters should be angry.

If Irish football wants respect, it should begin by showing some. Until then, the FAI can keep its sanctimony, its theatrical gestures and its breathtaking chutzpah.

Israel should accept criticism. It should never accept humiliation.

There are weeks when Israel’s isolation feels almost physical.

We watched dozens of diplomats leave the United Nations General Assembly as Benjamin Netanyahu rose to speak. In Ireland, the national football association moved its home fixture against Israel to Serbia, behind closed doors, after formally requesting Israel’s suspension from UEFA competitions. Britain, meanwhile, announced further sanctions against organizations and an individual operating in what Israelis call Judea and Samaria and the international community calls the West Bank.

The details matter. The British measures targeted six entities and one person accused of facilitating violence, rather than Judea and Samaria as a whole. Ireland has not ultimately refused to play Israel. Yet the cumulative message received by many Israelis is unmistakable: you are not welcome. Not at the diplomatic table, not on the football pitch, and increasingly not in the respectable company of nations.

It can feel as though we have no friend in the world.

And then comes Sukkot.

Sukkot is the strangest possible festival for a people who feel besieged. At precisely the moment when our instincts tell us to build higher walls, reinforce the roof and lock the door, Judaism commands us to leave our solid homes and sit beneath a roof that cannot fully protect us. The sukkah must be temporary. Its covering must allow us to glimpse the sky. It reminds us that bricks, armies, alliances and diplomatic approval are never absolute guarantees of safety.

That is not a call to passivity. The Torah does not tell us to dismantle the Iron Dome and trust in miracles. Jewish tradition has never confused faith with helplessness. We must defend ourselves, cultivate alliances and make wise political choices. But the sukkah teaches that security is not the same as acceptance. A nation can receive a standing ovation at the United Nations and still be endangered. It can be booed, boycotted and abandoned, yet remain rooted and resilient.

Our existence has never depended on the room remaining full when a Jew begins to speak.

Sukkot does not, however, permit us to turn loneliness into self-righteousness. There is a dangerous comfort in saying that the whole world hates us and therefore nothing the world says can matter. If every criticism is dismissed as antisemitism, we lose the ability to distinguish malice from moral warning. If every sanction is treated as proof of our virtue, we may stop asking whether misconduct in our own society requires attention.

A sukkah is vulnerable, but it is not a bunker.

Its walls are open to guests. Each night we invite the ushpizin—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph and David—into our temporary dwelling. The festival imagines Jewish strength not as permanent suspicion, but as radical hospitality. Abraham, the first of those guests, built his life around an open tent. He understood that Jewish particularity was not meant to sever us from humanity, but to bring blessing into it.

Sukkot is also Judaism’s most universal festival. The seventy bulls traditionally offered during the festival were understood by the rabbis as corresponding to the seventy nations of the world. The prophet Zechariah imagines a future in which the nations come to Jerusalem specifically to celebrate Sukkot. The very festival that commemorates Israel’s lonely journey through the wilderness contains a vision of eventual human fellowship.

That tension is essential. We should neither surrender our convictions to win applause nor decide that we need nobody. Israel must be capable of standing alone, but it must never make aloneness its national aspiration.

How, then, do we overcome this moment?

First, by refusing despair. Diplomatic walkouts are painful, but they are not a verdict on Jewish history. The Jewish people have survived empires that possessed far more power than today’s international institutions. The sight of an emptying UN chamber should sober us, not define us.

Second, by strengthening the bonds within our own society. The four species of Sukkot—etrog, lulav, myrtle and willow—were understood as representing different kinds of Jews. The mitzvah can be performed only when they are held together. Israel cannot withstand external hostility while being consumed by internal contempt. Religious and secular, right and left, Jewish and non-Jewish citizens do not have to agree, but we must recover the discipline of belonging to one society.

Third, we must combine moral confidence with moral seriousness. We should challenge double standards, expose hatred and defend Israel’s right to protect its people. At the same time, when Israelis commit violence or injustice, confronting it strengthens our case; it does not weaken it. Accountability is not capitulation. It is what distinguishes national loyalty from tribal blindness.

Finally, we must continue looking for partners. Governments are not peoples, headlines are not history, and diplomatic fashions change. Israel still has friends, even when their voices are quieter than those of its opponents. Our task is to deepen those friendships, create new ones and speak honestly to people who have heard only a caricature of us.

The sukkah is called a sukkat shalom—a shelter of peace. That phrase contains a paradox. A sukkah is fragile, while peace is supposed to make us secure. Perhaps the point is that true peace does not begin with the fantasy of invulnerability. It begins when vulnerable people refuse both to disappear and to abandon hope in one another.

This Sukkot, Israel may feel exposed beneath an unforgiving sky. Delegates may walk out. Football associations may seek distance. Governments may impose sanctions. Yet the Jewish answer is neither panic nor permanent bitterness.

We build the sukkah again. We sit together. We defend what must be defended, repair what must be repaired, and leave the entrance open.

Then we look through the fragile roof and remember: we have been lonely before, but we have never been alone.

There are moments in the Yom Kippur prayer book when a familiar line suddenly refuses to remain familiar.

This Yom Kippur, somewhere in the long hours of prayer, I found myself looking at the words:

Adam yesodo me’afar, v’sofo le’afar.

“Man is founded in dust and ends in dust.”

I have said those words many times. This year, however, it was the commentary alongside them, by the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, that stopped me.

He writes about the extraordinary brevity of human life. Against the history of the universe, even a long life is barely a microsecond. Therefore, perhaps the greatest decision we ever make is how we use our time.

It is an obvious thought, but sometimes the obvious thoughts are the ones we most successfully avoid.

Almost everything else we possess can, at least theoretically, be replaced.

Lose money and you may earn it again. Lose a possession and you may buy another. Lose a job and another opportunity may appear. Even damaged relationships can sometimes be repaired.

But an hour cannot be recovered. Yesterday cannot be bought back.

Time is the one currency we are all spending constantly, whether we realise it or not. Rich and poor spend it at precisely the same rate. And none of us knows the balance remaining in our account.

Perhaps that is why Judaism is so preoccupied with time.

We sanctify days. We count days and weeks. We welcome Shabbat and reluctantly escort it away. The first thing in the Torah that God declares holy is not a place or an object. It is a day.

Judaism asks us not merely to pass through time, but to sanctify it.

And that thought takes us directly from Yom Kippur to Sukkot.

On Yom Kippur we spend an entire day pleading for life. “Remember us for life. Write us in the Book of Life.”

There is a story I once heard about a man walking along a beach who saw a child struggling in the sea. The child was clearly drowning. Without hesitation, the man ran into the water, fought his way through the waves and dragged the child safely back to shore.

When the boy had recovered his breath, he looked at his rescuer and said, “Thank you. You saved my life.”

The man replied: “Then make sure it was a life worth saving.”

I have no idea whether the incident actually happened. Perhaps it is simply a parable. But its message has stayed with me.

On Yom Kippur we asked God to save our lives.

Sukkot begins only a few days later. Perhaps Sukkot is God’s answer: Now make sure the life was worth saving.

This Friday evening, Jews throughout the world will leave their solid houses and move into structures that are deliberately temporary.

The sukkah is a house that makes no pretence of permanence.

We spend enormous amounts of our lives building security. We acquire homes, pensions, investments, possessions and insurance policies. None of that is wrong. Responsibility requires us to plan for the future.

But then, once a year, the Torah says: leave the house. Go outside. Sit beneath a roof through which you can see the sky.

Remember that ultimately you are only passing through.

And strangely, the festival that forces us to confront impermanence is specifically described as a time of joy.

Perhaps that is because knowing that something will not last does not make it less precious. It can make it more precious.

A parent holding a newborn child may not appreciate quite how quickly those years will disappear. A grandparent does. We watch our grandchildren running around the table and know that these moments will not last forever. We sit with ageing parents and gradually realise that an ordinary cup of tea together is not ordinary at all.

Impermanence can teach us gratitude. It can also teach us urgency.

Perhaps the purpose of our brief stay on this earth is actually remarkably simple: to leave the world a little better than we found it.

Not necessarily to change the whole world. Very few of us will.

But perhaps to change our corner of it.

To have brought more kindness than cruelty into the world. To have healed rather than hurt. To have taught someone something they did not know before. To have helped someone who needed us. To have raised children with values. To have comforted someone who was lonely.

To be able to say that because I passed through this world, something, somewhere, is better than it would otherwise have been.

That seems to me an extraordinarily Jewish ambition.

We are not asked simply to believe. We are asked to act. To give charity. To visit the sick. To comfort mourners. To teach our children. To welcome strangers. To pursue justice. To repair what we can.

We cannot control how much time we are given. We can control what we do with it.

And perhaps this is where Yom Kippur and Sukkot, apparently such different festivals, meet.

On Yom Kippur we asked to be written and sealed in the Book of Life.

Sukkot asks the harder question:

What are you going to do with the life you have just prayed for?

Another argument that really does not matter? Another evening scrolling through things we will not remember tomorrow? Another year postponing the telephone call, the apology, the visit to an elderly relative? or the conversation with a child or grandchild because there will always be another opportunity?

Except that one day there will not.

There is a profound difference between filling time and using time. A full diary is not necessarily a full life.

This Friday night, when we enter the sukkah, perhaps we should look through its fragile roof at the sky and remember the message that caught my attention on Yom Kippur.

Our houses are temporary. Our possessions are temporary. We are temporary.

But the consequences of what we do need not be.

The kindness we show, the children we raise, the people we help, the wounds we heal, the love we give and the difference we make can remain long after we have returned to the dust from which we came.

Adam yesodo me’afar, v’sofo le’afar.

“Man is founded in dust and ends in dust.”

We prayed on Yom Kippur for another year of life.

Now comes the challenge. Make sure it is a life worth saving.

Hag Sameach

On the way to the Kotel for our community’s annual Selichot tour, we stopped at Jerusalem’s 9/11 Living Memorial Plaza.

It is an extraordinary site. At its centre rises a monumental American flag that gradually transforms into a flame. Embedded in its base is a piece of metal recovered from the ruins of the Twin Towers. Around the plaza are inscribed the names of the nearly 3,000 people murdered on September 11, 2001.

One inscription particularly caught my attention:

“This metal piece, like the entire monument, is a manifestation of the special relationship between New York and Jerusalem.”

Those words were presumably intended to be timeless. Yet standing before them today, they read almost like a message from another age.

A verse from Sefer Shemot came irresistibly to mind: “Vayakom melech chadash al Mitzrayim asher lo yada et Yosef” – “A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph.”

Our Sages debated whether this was literally a new king or the same ruler who adopted new policies. Either way, the message is unsettlingly familiar. Joseph had saved Egypt from famine, yet his contribution was forgotten when it became politically convenient to forget it. History had not changed; the leadership’s willingness to acknowledge that history had changed. Gratitude gave way to amnesia, and friendship to estrangement.

For decades, New York and Jerusalem seemed joined by far more than direct flights, diplomatic courtesies or municipal declarations. New York was home to the largest Jewish community outside Israel. Its Jews helped shape the city’s culture, commerce, philanthropy and public life. Support for Israel was woven into New York’s civic identity, shared by successive mayors across political and religious divides.

Following October 7, however, much of that certainty began to dissolve.

Israelis watched demonstrations in New York at which the massacre was rationalized, celebrated or rapidly pushed aside. Jewish students faced hostility on campuses. Zionism became a term of abuse in supposedly enlightened circles. Too often, sympathy for the victims of October 7 appeared to have an extraordinarily short shelf life.

The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor marked a dramatic political culmination of that change. Mamdani has accused Israel of genocide, declined to affirm its right to exist specifically as a Jewish state, stayed away from the city’s Israel parade and declared that Israel’s prime minister was unwelcome in New York.

Whatever one thinks of Israel’s government or its policies, this represents a profound departure. The mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel now speaks about the Jewish state in terms once confined to its most committed adversaries.

A new king has arisen in New York – not one who is unaware of the profound historical relationship between New York, its Jewish community and Jerusalem, but one whose politics appear unwilling to accord that relationship its former significance.

The inscription at the memorial therefore carries a new poignancy. The metal sent by the City of New York remains fixed in Jerusalem stone, but the political relationship it was meant to symbolize no longer appears nearly so solid.

The monument’s flame acquires another meaning. Something precious has, at least politically, gone up in smoke.

But our journey did not end at the memorial.

From there, we continued to the Old City for Selichot. Last year, after making the same pilgrimage, I wrote about the extraordinary sight that greeted us: Jerusalem’s streets filled with young Jews singing, dancing, praying and simply enjoying one another’s company. I came away convinced that, despite the darkness surrounding us, the future of our people was safe in their hands.

This year, the scene was even more powerful.

Hurva Square and the streets leading towards the Kotel were heaving with people. There were young men and women, families, yeshiva students, visitors from abroad and groups of soldiers. Some were religiously observant; others evidently were not. They wore black hats, knitted kippot, jeans, flowing skirts and IDF uniforms. Some hurried towards the prayers, while others stood talking, laughing, singing or eating.

Nobody was checking credentials. Nobody was asking precisely how each person defined his or her Judaism. They had come because it was Selichot, because this was Jerusalem and because, in ways that are sometimes difficult to articulate, they knew that they belonged.

At the Kotel Plaza, their voices rose together.

These were not the bowed heads of a defeated people. They were proud, confident and unafraid. Many of the soldiers among them had spent the past three years defending the country in conditions that young people should never have to experience. They have buried friends, left studies and careers, and carried responsibilities far beyond their years. Yet there they stood, singing with an energy that seemed capable of lifting the stones themselves.

The contrast with the memorial could hardly have been greater.

Political alliances are precious, and we must work hard to preserve them. We should not casually dismiss the pain of seeing New York’s leadership turn so sharply against Israel. Nor should we confuse a mayor with an entire city. New York still contains a vast, diverse and deeply committed Jewish community, together with many non-Jewish friends of Israel. They deserve our support and solidarity, particularly when they feel increasingly isolated.

Nevertheless, history teaches us not to entrust Jewish survival to the goodwill of others, however sincere that goodwill may appear at a particular moment. Governments change. Public opinion shifts. Yesterday’s unbreakable consensus becomes today’s contested proposition. New rulers arise who do not know Joseph – or who choose not to remember him.

Jerusalem has witnessed empires far greater than any modern political movement. They made grand declarations, minted coins and erected monuments. One after another, they disappeared. The Jewish people remained – sometimes scattered and persecuted, but still praying towards Jerusalem and still teaching their children that they would return.

Now those children and grandchildren crowd Jerusalem’s streets.

That is why the young people at the Kotel mattered so much. They were not merely attending a religious service. Their presence was an answer to those who believe that Jews can be intimidated into abandoning their identity, shamed into surrendering their national home or exhausted into relinquishing their future.

The relationship between New York and Jerusalem may have become strained. Political fashions may grow uglier. The flame sculpted from the American flag may now evoke not only remembrance but the burning away of old assumptions.

Yet a flame also gives light.

And the light I saw that night came from thousands of young Jewish faces in Jerusalem: singing, praying, dancing and standing together. They were proud Jews in their own land – neither bowed nor broken, neither apologetic nor afraid.

Hopefully, one day, the friendship between New York and Jerusalem will be repaired. But whatever politicians decide, our future will not be determined in City Hall.

It is being written in the streets of Jerusalem.

Gmar Hatima Tova

There is a danger hidden inside familiar prayers: the better we know them, the less we may hear them.

On Yom Kippur, we recite long lists of wrongs. We admit that we have lied, betrayed trust, spoken cruelly, acted selfishly and ignored what we knew was right.

The words come quickly.

We may read them fluently, strike our chest at the appropriate moments and reach the end without allowing a single sentence to touch our lives.

The prayer book itself recognises this danger. In the middle of the confession, we admit:

“For the wrong we have committed through a confession of the mouth.”

In other words, we confess that even our confession may be empty. We can say all the right words without paying attention to them. We can express regret without intending to change. We can mistake a powerful religious experience for the difficult work of putting something right.

The most unsettling possibility is not that we will refuse to say sorry. It is that we will say sorry beautifully and remain exactly as we were.

So what is confession meant to achieve?

Maimonides describes a confession with three parts:

I did something wrong.

I regret what I did.

I intend not to repeat it.

These three sentences move from the past, through the present, towards the future.

A real confession does not simply attach a negative label to us: “I am a terrible person.” It tells the truth about something we have done: “I did this. I understand the harm it caused. I want to respond differently next time.”

That distinction matters.

Shame tells us that we are beyond repair. Responsibility tells us that our actions belong to us—and because they belong to us, we can change them.

The best-known confession, Ashamnu, is arranged according to the Hebrew alphabet.

It is as though the prayer is moving from A to Z through human failure. Wrongdoing does not remain in one convenient corner of life. It enters our speech, money, relationships, ambitions and use of power. It includes what we choose deliberately and what we train ourselves not to notice.

Significantly, the prayer does not say, “I am guilty.” It says, “We are guilty.”

That “we” protects us from two opposite mistakes. It prevents us from looking down on other people, because none of us stands outside the imperfect society we have created together.

But it also prevents us from feeling completely alone. I am responsible, but I am not the only person who has struggled or failed.

A few words from the confession deserve to be taken out of the rush and heard slowly.

“Bagadnu - We have betrayed.” Betrayal is possible only where someone trusted us.

“Gazalnu - We have stolen.” That may mean money or property, but it can also make us think about credit, time, attention, privacy and dignity.

“Ya-atznu ra - We have given harmful advice.” Advice is not always offered for the benefit of the person receiving it. Sometimes it serves our own need to feel clever, important or in control.

“Kishinu Oref - We have been stubborn.” The Hebrew image is of a stiff neck,a neck that cannot turn. Stubbornness is not simply one more wrong on a list. It is the attitude that prevents us from changing direction even when we know we should.

The longer confession, Al Chet, speaks about the whole person: the heart, mouth, eyes, neck, hands and feet.

That is because our choices begin before we formally decide to do something wrong. The heart can close. The eyes can look down on another person. The neck can resist correction. The feet can carry us quickly back towards a familiar pattern.

The prayer pays particular attention to speech. It mentions harmful words, gossip, mockery, dishonesty, careless promises and empty religious language. The mouth that caused harm must now become the instrument of truth.

But Judaism does not allow confession to remain safely between a person and God.

The Mishnah, one of Judaism’s foundational texts, teaches that Yom Kippur can bring forgiveness for wrongs committed against God. But when we have hurt another person, the day itself cannot replace the need to approach that person and try to make amends.

Maimonides goes further. If we have caused someone financial loss, returning the money is not necessarily enough. We must repay what is owed and address the human injury.

This is a profound distinction. We naturally prefer the kind of repair that does not require vulnerability. We return the object, transfer the money or correct the practical mistake. Yet the other person may still be carrying humiliation, betrayal or pain.

Repayment repairs the loss. An honest apology recognises the person who suffered it.

This is why a general message before Yom Kippur along the lines of “If I have hurt anyone this year, please forgive me” may not be enough.

The word “if” can protect us from responsibility. If I did something. If you were hurt. The problem quietly becomes the other person’s reaction rather than our behaviour.

A genuine apology sounds different:

“I spoke about you disrespectfully. It was wrong. I understand that it embarrassed you. I have tried to correct the damage, and I am asking you to forgive me.”

A good apology names the action without offering excuses. It recognises the effect on the other person. It includes an attempt to repair the damage and a commitment not to repeat it.

But even this must be guided by sensitivity. Sometimes repeating the details would cause the injured person further embarrassment or pain. The purpose of an apology is to help repair an injury, not to reopen it simply so that the offender can feel relieved.

We must also be careful about how we speak of forgiveness. Jewish tradition encourages an injured person not to hold on endlessly to resentment when faced with sincere remorse and genuine change.

But forgiveness does not automatically restore trust. It does not erase consequences, remove sensible boundaries or require a damaged relationship to return to what it was.

The person asking forgiveness cannot control the other person’s healing.

Confession before God and apology before another human being are therefore two forms of the same act: giving up the protection of vagueness.

God already knows what we have done. Our confession provides God with no new information. We are the ones who need to hear ourselves speak the truth.

As Yom Kippur approaches, perhaps we should not try to absorb every line at once. Instead, we might choose one phrase and ask:

What does this really mean?

Where does it appear in my life?

Whom has it affected?

What is one step I can take to put it right?

Confession is not the moment when we prove how bad we are. It is the moment when we stop hiding from our own lives.

And when one honest word leaves the prayer book and enters a relationship, real change has begun.

Shabbat Shuva Shalom and Gmar Hatima Tova

There was no band at Yigal Peikowitz’s bar mitzvah. No DJ, no lavish buffet and no photographer waiting to capture the moment.

There was simply his father, a grain storehouse………and a pistol.

Yigal grew up in Kfar Tavor, the small agricultural settlement then commonly known as Mes’ha. Life there was demanding and sometimes dangerous. The crops on which families depended had to be guarded, particularly at night, and every member of the household was expected to shoulder responsibility.

When Yigal turned thirteen, his father, Reuven, called him into the storehouse.

“Putting on tefillin does not fulfil all the mitzvot,” he told him. “You are becoming a man. From now on, you will have a weapon of your own.”

He handed his son a pistol. Yigal was thrilled. At last, he possessed a weapon like his father and older brothers. But the pistol was not a toy or an ornament marking his new status. It came with a duty.

That very evening, his father told him, he would go out alone to guard the remaining harvested grain in the family’s distant field.

As the sun set, the thirteen-year-old made his way towards the field. It was known as the Balut field, after the oak trees that grew there. Yigal positioned himself among the rocks and trees, looking into the darkness and listening to every rustle.

Sometime during the night, three horsemen entered the field and began filling their sacks with grain.

Yigal called out to them in Arabic: “Stop!”

They ignored him.

He called out again. Still they continued, and then began moving towards him.

Remembering his father’s instructions, Yigal raised his pistol and fired a warning shot into the air. But the men kept advancing. The boy now faced a danger far greater than he had imagined when he had proudly accepted the weapon that afternoon.

Suddenly, another voice shattered the darkness.

“Stop!”

More warning shots rang out. A rider emerged from the shadows, and the thieves abandoned their sacks, mounted their horses and fled.

In the moonlight, Yigal recognised the mysterious horseman.

It was his father.

Reuven had sent his son to guard the field alone…..but he had not left him alone.

Unseen by the boy, he had remained nearby throughout the night, watching him, protecting him and allowing him to discover his own courage. He did not prevent Yigal from facing responsibility. He did not stand visibly beside him or perform the task in his place. But when the danger became too great, the father emerged from the darkness.

That story offers us a way of understanding two of the most familiar and profound words of the Yamim Noraim:

Avinu Malkeinu.
Our Father, our King.

Rosh Hashanah is the day on which we proclaim Hashem as King. We speak of His sovereignty, His judgement and His authority over every corner of creation. The shofar is a coronation call. We stand before the King of Kings, knowing that nothing is hidden from Him and that our lives are being weighed.

Yet when we approach that King, the first word we utter is not Malkeinu.

It is Avinu.

Before He is our King, He is our Father.

A king gives commands. A father gives his child the strength to carry them out. A king expects responsibility. A father remains close, even when his child believes he is standing alone. A king judges our actions. A father knows the fear, confusion and longing concealed within them.

That does not mean a loving Father shields us from every difficult night. Sometimes He gives us a field to guard. Sometimes He places responsibility in our hands and asks us to stand our ground. There are moments when we call into the darkness and appear to receive no answer. We fire our warning shots, exhaust our courage and wonder whether anyone is watching.

But the silence does not mean that we have been abandoned.

Yigal could not see his father, but his father could see him. The boy thought he was alone beneath the oak tree, while all the time his father was following every movement, hearing every cry and measuring the danger.

So too, there are times when we cannot see Hashem’s protection. We recognise the danger but not the dangers from which we have already been spared. We see the challenges placed before us but not the watchful care surrounding us. We know the prayers that seemed unanswered, but not the unseen answers that quietly carried us through.

The Talmud relates that during a severe drought, Rabbi Akiva stood before the congregation and prayed: “Avinu Malkeinu, we have no King but You. Avinu Malkeinu, for Your sake, have mercy upon us.” Rain immediately began to fall.

Perhaps the power of Rabbi Akiva’s prayer lay in holding both truths at once. Hashem is Malkeinu: we owe Him loyalty, obedience and an honest accounting of our lives. But He is also Avinu: we may speak to Him not only with the trembling of subjects before a throne, but with the trust of children turning towards home.

During the War of Independence, David Ben-Gurion asked his commanders to replace their European surnames with Hebrew ones.

Yigal Peikowitz remembered the field in which he had first stood guard, the oak beneath which he had faced his first test, and the father who had watched over him from the darkness.

He chose the name Allon- an oak.

The experience of that night became part of his identity. The tree beneath which he had felt frightened and alone became the name by which he would be remembered.

Perhaps this is also part of the work of Rosh Hashanah.

We look back at the difficult fields through which we have travelled and ask whether they can be given a new name.

Can fear become faith?

Can failure become teshuvah?

Can the place where we once felt abandoned become the place where we finally recognise that our Father had been near us all along?

As we enter the new year, we do not know which fields we will be asked to guard. We do not know what responsibilities, blessings or dangers may await us. But we enter them with two words upon our lips.

Avinu Malkeinu.

Our King, who asks us to take responsibility for the lives we lead.

Our Father, who never ceases to watch over us.

And when we have reached the limit of our strength, we turn towards the darkness and pray:

Avinu Malkeinu, choneinu va’aneinu.

Our Father, our King, be gracious to us and answer us.

We are standing at our post.

But we know that we are never standing alone.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with British troops during the Falklands war 1982

So the gloves are off.

The British government has banned trade with Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, prohibited settlement goods and restricted related services. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband went further, accusing “settler terrorists” of carrying out “ethnic cleansing.”

Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis called it “a dark day for British Jews.” He is right.

The announcement came three days before Rosh Hashanah. Over the High Holy Days, synagogues across Britain will be packed. Their congregants will gather behind security guards, locked doors and barriers, conscious that simply attending Jewish worship can make them a target.

For me, this is personal. We are approaching the first anniversary of the horrific terrorist attack at Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation on Yom Kippur. Two worshippers were killed and others seriously injured, including a friend of my son. The synagogue is less than a mile from my former home. As another Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur approach, I fear for family and friends who will be especially vulnerable. God forbid that there should be another attack.

The British government will insist that its policy targets settlements, not Jews. But ministers cannot ignore the atmosphere in which their words are heard. At a moment of acute anxiety, branding Israelis as perpetrators of “ethnic cleansing” and turning Israel into a pariah makes British Jews feel less, not more, secure.

The timing is deplorable for another reason. Israel is weeks away from an election. President Isaac Herzog has called the move gross interference in Israel’s democratic process. Whatever London intended, sanctions imposed during an election campaign will inevitably influence it and may strengthen precisely the politicians Britain opposes.

Israel’s response was swift. It announced the closure of the British Consulate in east Jerusalem and barred 12 British politicians and activists from entering, including Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, Zarah Sultana and every Green Party MP.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich had demanded the expulsion of the British ambassador. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir suggested that Israel recognize Argentine sovereignty over the Malvinas – known in Britain as the Falkland Islands – and sanction Britain until its own “occupation” ends.

This sounds like political theatre, but it raises a fair question: When is an occupation not an occupation? Apparently, when Britain is doing the occupying.

London calls Judea and Samaria “occupied Palestinian territory.” Jewish communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines are treated as inherently illegal. Yet the Falklands, controlled by Britain since 1833 and claimed by Argentina ever since, are called a “British Overseas Territory.”

There are important differences. Falkland Islanders voted overwhelmingly to remain British, while Palestinians do not want Israeli rule. But the United Nations still recognizes a sovereignty dispute over the islands and calls for negotiations.

Britain says history, security and the wishes of the present population matter. That is a reasonable argument. It is simply one Britain rarely permits Israel to make.

The Chagos Islands are even more uncomfortable. Britain separated them from Mauritius, forcibly removed their inhabitants and retained Diego Garcia for a vital British-American military base. In 2019, the International Court of Justice said Britain’s administration was wrongful and should end rapidly.

Britain did not leave. It eventually agreed to recognize Mauritian sovereignty while leasing Diego Garcia back for 99 years. Then President Donald Trump reversed his support, called the deal an “act of GREAT STUPIDITY,” and Britain put it on indefinite hold.

London therefore understands that international rulings do not make security needs and strategic geography disappear. When British interests are involved, there can be delay, compromise and special arrangements. Israel is offered condemnation and sanctions.

Judea and Samaria were not the sovereign territory of a Palestinian state when Israel captured them from Jordan in 1967. The pre-1967 boundary was an armistice line, not a permanent border. The Jewish connection to Hebron, Shiloh and Beit El is thousands of years old.

None of that erases Palestinian rights or ends the legal argument over settlements. E1 is sensitive and its consequences deserve serious discussion. But this history cannot honestly be reduced to the single word “occupation,” and sanctions cannot substitute for negotiation.

Only last year, Britain recognized a Palestinian state whose final borders, capital, government and security arrangements had not been agreed with Israel. Now it is using economic punishment to advance its preferred territorial outcome.

There is also a widespread suspicion that this is partly about British politics. Labour is losing support on its left to the Green Party. The Greens immediately welcomed the sanctions and demanded more.

The measure looks less like peacemaking than political positioning designed to stem that flow of votes.

The result is a policy announced before the Jewish New Year, during an Israeli election campaign and against the warnings of British Jewish leaders. It has provoked retaliation, damaged diplomatic relations and increased the anxiety of a community already living behind guarded doors.

Closing the British Consulate is a serious escalation, and expelling the ambassador would sacrifice a useful diplomatic channel. Israel should instead keep him in Jerusalem and ask him a simple question.

Why are Britain’s territorial disputes historical, strategic and complicated, while Israel’s can be reduced to one condemnatory word?

Britain is entitled to defend its interests. It is not entitled to deny that Israel has history, interests and security needs of its own.

An occupation, it seems, is only not an occupation when Britain is doing the occupying.

There are two words at the start of Vayelech that have puzzled commentators for a very long time.

Vayelech Moshe. And Moshe went.

Went where? The Torah does not say. He has just assembled the entire nation. He is a hundred and twenty years old. It is the last day of his life. There is nowhere left to go.

The Ramban’s answer is that he went to them: tribe by tribe, tent by tent, walking out to each part of the nation to take his leave, to tell them himself that he was dying and that they should not be afraid.

That’s a rather strange use of a final morning. Moshe had just demonstrated, in the previous verse, that he could summon the entire people with a word. Convening power is more or less the definition of authority. And having proved he had it, he spent his last hours not summoning others but walking to them.

But the walking is not actually what Vayelech is about. Vayelech is about what happens the day after the walking, and it is, as far as I can tell, the only orderly transfer of power anywhere in the Torah.

“I can no longer go out and come in”

Moshe explains himself to the people in a single sentence: I am a hundred and twenty years old today; I can no longer go out and come in.

Read plainly, that is an old man citing his age. Except that three parshiyot later the Torah goes out of its way to tell us that when Moshe died, his eye had not dimmed and his vigour had not fled. He was not diminished. The Torah says so explicitly.

So what exactly could he no longer do?

One reading in the Gemara is that nothing physical had failed at all. What had gone was permission. The authority had already moved to Yehoshua, quietly, before the ceremony and before anyone announced it, and a man cannot go out and come in at the head of a nation whose leadership is no longer his. The capacity was never invested in Moshe the person . It was in the office of Leader. When the office moved to someone else, the ability moved with it, and he felt it go in his own body.

This is one of the most bracing ideas in the Torah, and I would put it on the wall of every political office in this country. What you are able to do is not who you are. It’s not yours- it was lent to you. And it can be lent to somebody else on any particular day.

Going out in front

The phrase “go out and come in” is not incidental. It comes from Moshe’s own earlier request for a successor.

He asks God to appoint “a man over the congregation, who will go out before them and come in before them, so that the community not be as sheep without a shepherd.” Rashi is pointed about what that means: not like the kings of the nations, who sit at home and send their armies out to war, but a leader who goes out at the front, as I did.

Two things about that request should be noted, but often aren’t.

The first is that Moshe made it at all. He had just been told he would not enter the land. The natural human response to that news is not to spend the next moment worrying about the succession. A normal person would be licking his wounds and considering the consequences of the devastating news.

Not Moshe. He asked, immediately, for someone to replace him, which is to say that he treated the nation as something that would outlive his grievance about it.

The second is who he did not ask for. Moshe had sons. The midrashic tradition is candid that he hoped they might inherit, and that he was told, in effect, no: the successor is Yehoshua, the student who never left the tent. The most powerful leader in Jewish history asked for a dynasty and was refused one, and then went and laid his hands on somebody else’s son in front of the entire nation. That must have been tough.

What he did with the last of his credibility

Here is the part that I personally struggle with.

By this point in the parsha, God has already told Moshe how it ends. Not vaguely. Explicitly: after your death this people will rise up and stray, and evil will befall them. Moshe is handed, in advance, the failure of the thing he built his life on.

And what he does with that information is call Yehoshua forward in front of everybody and say chazak ve’ematz, be strong and resolute. He spends the last of his personal credibility on his successor’s legitimacy, in public, at the moment he has the most reason to be bitter and the least reason to believe it will work.

For normal people, the French expression après moi, le deluge would be in their mind. This is a French expression that literally translates to “After me, the flood“, meaning that a person does not care what happens to others or to the world after they are gone or have left power.

Moshe was actually told there would be a deluge after him. He handed over cleanly anyway, wrote the Torah down, taught them the song, and walked up the mountain.

That is what you call a Leader.

An election season

We are heading into an election, and I want to be explicit here, because what comes next could easily be read as being about one particular person. So let me be clear: It is not. The test below is uncomfortable in every direction, and if it only occurs to you to apply it to the people you were not going to vote for anyway, you have not applied it properly.

But it does give us a usable question, and it is not the question we normally ask.

We tend to evaluate leaders on what they can do while they hold office.

Vayelech evaluates a leader on what he does about the fact that he will not hold it forever.

Does he behave as though the nation is a thing that existed before him and will exist after him, or as though the state and his tenure are roughly the same object, and the deluge is what happens to everyone else once he is gone?

Does he go out in front, or send others out from a comfortable room?

Is there anybody he is actively making stronger than himself, and would he say so in public, with his own name attached, on a day when it cost him something?

Moshe’s answer to all three was given on the last day of his life, when there was no longer any advantage in giving it. That is what makes it credible. Most political generosity is a down payment on something. His was not. He was a true Leader.

And the walking

Which brings us back to those first two words, because they are, in the end, the same idea.

Vayelech Moshe. He went to them. He did not summon a nation that would have come. On the last morning he had, he spent his authority by declining to use it, walking out to people he was never going to convince of anything again, some of whom had spent forty years complaining about him, to tell them face to face that he was going and that they would be all right.

None of us are handing over a country this month. But a great many of us are holding something: a business, a shul committee, a family, a role that maybe somebody younger is quietly ready for.

The Yamim Noraim are about standing before a judgment that does not much care about our job titles, and one of the questions on the table is what we did with the small authority we were lent.

Vayelech Moshe. And Moshe went. Two words, and no destination given, because the destination was the people. It is the perfect but silent answer to the question of how to hold power and how to let go of it.
Oh what we would give for a Moshe today!

But - Lo Kam Be-yisrael ke-Moshe Od- There never again arose amongst Israel anyone like Moshe. Sadly.

On October 27, Israelis will once again choose a government.

We will spend the coming weeks arguing about Gaza, Iran, the haredi draft, the economy, judicial reform, the Palestinians and the consequences of October 7. We will scrutinise party platforms, coalition possibilities and opinion polls.

But perhaps there is another question we should be asking.

What sort of person wants to be Prime Minister in the first place?

It is, when you think about it, a peculiar ambition.

The hours are appalling. Privacy largely disappears. Every mistake becomes public property. Your appearance, your family, your finances and sometimes even your choice of lunch become legitimate subjects for discussion. Roughly half the country may regard you as the person uniquely qualified to save the nation, while much of the other half regards you as the person most likely to destroy it.

Why would anybody want the job?

Political psychologists have been asking versions of this question for years, and their findings are fascinating.

Research into “political ambition” suggests that politicians are not simply power-hungry egomaniacs, as the popular stereotype would have it. Many are strongly motivated by public service. Studies of political candidates have found genuine evidence of what psychologists call “self-transcendence”, the desire to improve society and help others.

That is worth remembering in an age when cynicism about politicians comes so easily.

But alongside the desire to serve sits something else: the desire to influence.

Political leaders tend to have a greater “need for power” than the rest of us. Again, that is not necessarily bad. If you are convinced that your country is heading in the wrong direction, it is perfectly reasonable to want the authority to change course.

And then there is a third characteristic: unusually strong self-belief.

Research has associated political ambition with traits including extraversion and grandiose narcissism. That does not mean that every politician is a narcissist, still less that we should diagnose politicians we dislike with psychiatric disorders.

It means something simpler.

To seek the premiership requires an extraordinary degree of confidence in yourself.

Israel has almost ten million inhabitants. To seriously aspire to become Prime Minister requires believing that, among all those people, you possess some combination of judgement, ability and vision that makes you particularly suited to lead them.

Most of us never have that thought.

Those who do are therefore, almost by definition, psychologically unusual.

Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers)understood the danger long before anyone invented political psychology.

Shmaya teaches: “Love work, hate authority, and do not become overly familiar with the government.”

Usna et harabbanut. Hate positions of power.

It is a striking instruction. Judaism clearly does not oppose leadership. The Torah is filled with leaders. Jewish communities cannot function without people willing to take responsibility.

The warning is not against exercising authority. It is against falling in love with it.

And that distinction ought to matter to us as voters.

Does a candidate want power because there is something he believes desperately needs doing, or has acquiring and retaining power become the objective itself?

How can we possibly know?

Not from campaign advertisements. Every candidate will assure us that he or she seeks office only out of devotion to Am Yisrael.

We have to watch behaviour.

How does this person react when contradicted?

Can he admit a mistake?

Can she tolerate talented people around her, or does everyone eventually have to demonstrate personal loyalty?

Does he distinguish between criticism and betrayal?

Does she listen to advice she does not want to hear?

When something goes badly wrong, is the first instinct to ask, “What did I get wrong?” or “Whom can I blame?”

And perhaps above all: can this person distinguish between what is good for the country and what is good for his or her political survival?

This is not an argument for timid leadership.

In fact, Pirkei Avot gives us the opposite warning as well.

Hillel says: “In a place where there are no people, strive to be a person.”

The traditional commentators understand this, among other things, as an instruction to step forward when nobody else is capable of taking responsibility.

Leadership sometimes requires enormous confidence.

Moses’s humility did not prevent him confronting Pharaoh. David’s greatness did not consist of avoiding difficult decisions. There are moments when standing back is not modesty but cowardice.

So Judaism presents us with a beautiful tension.

Do not crave leadership. But when leadership is needed, do not run away from it.

Perhaps that is exactly the personality we should be looking for in October.

Someone who wants the job enough to do it, but not so much that possessing the job becomes an end in itself.

Someone confident enough to make terrible decisions under pressure, but humble enough to wonder whether somebody else might know better.

Someone strong enough to withstand public hostility, but not so insulated from criticism that he stops hearing it.

Someone ambitious for Israel rather than merely ambitious for himself.

Our electoral system encourages us to think primarily about parties. Formally, we vote for lists rather than directly for a prime minister. In reality, personalities dominate Israeli elections. Faces stare at us from billboards. Campaigns revolve around leaders. Pollsters constantly ask which individual is “most suitable” to be Prime Minister.

If personality is already part of the election, we should examine it more seriously.

Not whether we like the candidate.

Not whether he gives a good speech.

Not whether she performed brilliantly in a television interview.

Character is revealed most clearly when things go wrong.

How did this person behave after failure? How did he treat an opponent once the cameras were switched off? Did she keep people around who disagreed with her? Has he ever publicly accepted responsibility for anything?

These questions matter in every election. In Israel in 2026 they matter enormously.

The next Prime Minister will inherit a country still carrying the wounds of October 7 and the war that followed it. Israeli society remains divided, bereaved and exhausted. Enormous decisions lie ahead concerning security, the economy, the haredi draft, our relationship with the Palestinians, our relationship with the wider world and, perhaps most difficult of all, our relationship with one another.

Policies matter enormously.

But policies do not make decisions. People do.

Eventually there is a room somewhere in Jerusalem, perhaps at three o’clock in the morning. The intelligence is incomplete. The advisers disagree. Every available option carries terrible risks.

At that moment, the manifesto is sitting on a shelf.

What remains is the person.

Judgement. Temperament. Humility. Courage. Ego. The capacity to listen. The ability to say, “I was wrong.”

So by all means, before October 27, let us ask our politicians what they intend to do.

But perhaps we should spend rather more time asking who they are.

Shmaya warned us to distrust the love of power.

Hillel reminded us that good people must sometimes step forward and exercise it.

Somewhere between those two teachings lies the leader Israel needs.

Last Sunday evening I went with my son and grandsons to my first Australian Rules football match. The West Coast Eagles, the local side, against Hawthorn, the visitors from Melbourne. Rain for most of the night, and forty-three thousand people who appeared not to notice it.

I will not pretend to have understood it completely. Eighteen men a side on a field the size of a small village, no offside, and an oval ball that bounces as it wishes with no attempt at consistency.

What I did understand immediately was the physicality. These men wear no helmets and no padding. They run at full pace into one another, are lifted and dropped onto wet turf, and get up.

Over the years, I have seen what trauma to a shoulder can look like. For twenty minutes I watched with a clinician’s flinch, quietly triaging the injuries in my mind. Then I stopped: the flinching was mine, and nobody out there had the slightest interest in it.

In the second quarter my grandson mentioned that this was the final match of the season. At the final siren the table freezes: the clubs above the line go through to the grand finals, everybody else goes home for six months.

I watched the field differently after that. It was late in the season, but not too late for one last push.

During the break, I checked my phone and saw the date. The eleventh of Elul.

The last round

We are, right now, in the last round.

Rosh Hashanah begins on the evening of Friday, 11 September. Between now and then sits Elul, and I think we misunderstand it almost entirely. We treat it as a corridor to a courtroom. The ledger is open, the pen already moving, only the sentencing is left. Dread, with a calendar attached.

That is not what Elul is meant to feel like. Elul is the last round of the season, and the entire point of a last round is that “it’s not over till it’s over”.

Everything about the month says so. The shofar sounds every weekday morning, not to frighten us but to wake us while there is still time on the clock. The name of the month is read as an acronym for ani l’dodi v’dodi li - I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine. This is not the language of a tribunal. And Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi gave us the image I keep returning to: in Elul the King leaves the palace and walks out into the field, where any farmer, still dressed for work, may go up and speak with Him. No appointment, and no queue.

In a lifetime of working with people, those who worried me most were never those who had done the most damage. They were the ones who had privately decided the final siren had already gone. The brother not spoken to in eleven years, by a man who had stopped imagining he ever would, over something he can’t even remember any more. The man in his late seventies who told me, with total conviction, that he was too old to become a different sort of husband. The woman who blamed nobody but herself for the harm she had done her family, and was certain that she was beyond forgiveness.

Not one of them was out of time. They believed they were, which is a different thing and far more dangerous, because a player who believes the season is over stops playing. A person who thinks he has nothing to live for, stops living.

The Jewish answer, in this month above all others, is that, yes it is late. But late is not all over.

Play the ball, not the man

Now the thing I had not expected.

Australian rules football is brutal. It was also, as far as I could see, entirely without malice.

The game’s most repeated instruction is play the ball, not the man. You may hit him , even hard, legally, repeatedly while contesting the ball. You may not hit him when he does not have the ball, just because he is him. In two and a half hours I did not see a punch thrown, or a man stand over an opponent he had just flattened. They hit each other with everything they had, and when the ball moved on they left it on the grass.

I have watched Jewish public life for a long time, and I am no longer confident we are playing the ball and not the man.

Contact was never our problem. Argument is our inheritance; the Talmud is a record of men going at one another for centuries, and the tradition calls it beautiful: machloket l’shem shamayim, dispute for the sake of Heaven.

Our problem is that we have stopped playing the ball.

Haredi and secular. Government and hostage families. Israel and the Diaspora. Right and left, in Jerusalem, Melbourne and Manchester. Listen to almost any of it and you will hear people not contesting the ball at all. They have gone for the man, and gone high.

The Talmud tells us that the Second Temple fell to baseless hatred; we sat on the floor last month on Tisha B’Av and said so out loud… and then went back to it before the fast was even out.

Elul does not ask us to stop arguing. Elul asks us to go back to the ball. Argue and disagree by all means but keep it focussed on the topic- not the person.

As it happens, the local team were well beaten on Sunda

y night and the scoreboard made uncomfortable viewing.

We spend Elul auditing the scoreboard: the tally, the year weighed and found wanting. Nobody in that stadium was applauding the scoreboard. They were applauding the effort made by every one of those 36 players- win or lose.

I suspect that is nearer to what is actually being asked of us.

There is work that can still change the outcome, even this late in the season : a phone call not yet made, a rival not yet forgiven, an apology eleven years overdue and still, today, entirely possible. All of this can change what sort of person walks out at the beginning of next season on Rosh Hashanah.

Last Sunday night, the rain kept falling. But the lights stayed on. The final siren sounded and forty-three thousand people filed out into the night.

For us, though, the final siren is not until the shofar of Yom Kippur- we still have time to score more points.

The secular Israeli strategist Dan Schueftan made an observation recently that has nothing to do with Torah, and everything to do with it. The enemy of an idea is almost never its opposite. It is usually its own extreme.

Fascism is not the opposite of nationalism. It is nationalism with the brakes cut, and it has discredited the love a people has for itself more thoroughly than any opponent of nationalism ever managed.

The far left has done the same to liberalism. It did not arrive as liberalism’s opponent; it took liberalism’s own commitments, tolerance, equality, protection of the vulnerable, and pushed each one past the point where it still holds, until a movement built on free speech polices speech, and a movement built on refusing to judge people by their group judges almost nothing else. Liberalism has no more effective enemy today than its own furthest edge.

Schueftan’s conclusion is the part worth carrying into Elul: the goal is never to maximise one good, but to hold several genuine goods in balance.

This is not a new idea. It is straight out of the Rambam (Maimonides) and his Laws of Personal Development.

The straight path, not the middling one

The Rambam writes that the right way to live is ha-derech ha-yesharah, the straight path: the middle measure of every trait, standing equally far from both extremes (De’ot 1:4).

Notice what he does not call it. Not the middling path. The straight one. The middle is not a compromise between two honest positions. It is the only straight line, and both extremes are crooked and destructive.

Rambam’s examples make the point. The opposite of stinginess is not generosity: it is recklessness with money, and generosity sits between them. The man who gives away everything he owns is not more charitable than the steady giver. He is as culpable as the miser; he has simply left the path in the other direction.

The shape of the parasha

Ki Tavo gives this a landscape.

Six tribes climb Har Gerizim for the blessing; six climb Har Eival for the curse (Devarim 27:12-13). And the Kohanim, the Levi’im and the Aron? The Mishnah places them in the valley between the two mountains (Sotah 7:5). The blessing is called out from one height, the curse from the other. The Torah itself is read from the low ground in between.

The valley is not the safe place. It is the most exposed ground there is, catching the echo of both. But it is the only spot from which you can hear the blessing and the curse together and answer Amen to all of it. On a mountain you only ever hear one voice- your own.

Then comes the Tochacha, the great rebuke, in a register so severe we read it in an undertone. And what does the parasha give as its cause? Not idolatry. Not rebellion. “Because you did not serve God with joy and a glad heart, out of the abundance of everything” (28:47).

They served. They had everything. What failed was the proportion between the two. You can be doing all of it correctly and still be off the path, if the measure is wrong.

The temptation of Elul

Elul pulls us toward maximalism. The religious fervour grows more ambitious as Rosh Hashanah nears: more Tehillim, longer davening, a stricter standard we have never kept before. And the self-scrutiny can curdle, until honest stocktaking turns into a contempt for oneself that arrives dressed as humility.

The Rambam saw it coming. He takes on the man who reasons that since appetite and jealousy ruin a person, he will flee to the far end: no meat, no wine, no marriage, no decent home. The Rambam does not call this admirable but excessive.

He rules the path forbidden, and calls the man who walks it a sinner (De’ot 3:1). Think of the Nazirite, who takes a vow of extra abstinence and then, at the end of it, has to bring a sin offering. Holiness pushed to its extreme becomes the enemy of holiness.

And yet the Rambam does prescribe the extreme, temporarily, as medicine. A sick soul is treated like a sick body: not with the balanced diet of the healthy, but by swinging deliberately to the opposite extreme, staying there a while, and then returning to the centre (De’ot 2:2). The miser must give recklessly for a season to learn what it feels like to give- but then he must return to the shvil hazahav- the golden path of straddling the extremes.

That is what Elul is. The intensity is prescribed, and it is meant to work.

But medicine is not taken in order to be admired, and it is not taken in order to be abandoned either. It is taken to change the patient.

The man who swings to the far extreme is not meant to return to who he was; he returns to the middle as someone different, because the treatment has moved his centre.

So the real question on the other side of Yom Kippur is not whether we are still davening as long or giving as much. It’s whether our position has shifted at all from where it was before. Have we moved along the spectrum towards that golden straight path?

Nobody stays on the mountain. But nobody who has been up there should come back down to exactly the same ground that he left.

The hard part

If the enemy of every good idea is its own extreme, then this is true of religion too.

We are comfortable applying the rule to nationalism and to liberalism. We are much less comfortable admitting that religious devotion obeys the same law: it can also be taken past its measure until it turns into the enemy of the thing it was protecting.

And there is a reliable test for when that line has been crossed. Religious intensity becomes extremism at the exact moment it is turned against people.

The Ramban gave this a name eight hundred years ago. Commenting on the command to be holy, he describes what he calls Naval bi-reshut HaTorah - a scoundrel with the Torah’s permission, a man operating entirely within the letter of the law. Every technical rule observed, but at the same time a repellent human being. The Torah, he says, could not possibly have meant that.

So the question for these weeks is not how much more we can take on. It is whether what we have taken on has begun to cost other people.

The care over religious detail that has hardened into contempt for Jews who observe differently. The standard held so high that our own children measure themselves against it and quietly conclude they have failed. Or, increasingly, the baal teshuva demanding ever higher standards of kashrut or else they won’t eat in their parents’ home.

The certainty that leaves no room for the person across the Shabbat table. The communal loyalty so fierce that a family in trouble goes unhelped because they belong to the wrong shul.

None of this begins as a sin. Each begins as a virtue that stopped asking where its own limit was. And it is worth remembering that Yom Kippur, for all its power, does not touch what we have done to another person until we have gone to that person ourselves and sorted it out. The Torah built that asymmetry in deliberately. It knew which failures we would be most reluctant to see.

What the straight path actually looks like

All of this is easier to admire than to do, so let’s be concrete. Four suggestions, none of them heroic.

Before you take something on, work out who else pays for it. An extra hour in shul is a good thing. An extra hour in shul every night while someone else does bedtime alone is a different calculation. An addition is not free just because the thing added is holy.

Choose the commitment you can still keep in March. A heroic gesture you resent by Chanukah has taught you nothing. A modest one you are still keeping next summer has changed your life. Small and permanent beats large and temporary; that is the whole logic of the middle path.

Invite the person whose standards differ from yours, and then don’t inspect them. Hospitality that arrives with an audit is not hospitality. This runs both ways: neither the raised eyebrow at what someone doesn’t do, nor the raised eyebrow at what they do.

Make one repair, in person, before Yom Kippur. Not a general resolution to be better. One name, one phone call, one conversation you have been avoiding for a year. It is worth more than any amount of extra Tehillim, and most of us already know whose name it is.

Ani l’dodi

The watchword of this month is ani l’dodi v’dodi li ; I am my Beloved’s and my Beloved is mine. Not “I have conquered my Beloved.”

It is a relationship which is a balance held between two parties, adjusted constantly, never finally solved.

The Torah was read in the valley for a reason.

Standing there is harder than climbing either mountain, because on a mountain you feel you are higher than everyone else and you hear only your own voice and its echo. In the valley you have to keep listening to both sides.

Let’s choose a year of the straight path. Not the lukewarm one, and not the extreme one. The straight one.

I am currently in Perth, Australia, celebrating my granddaughter’s Bat Mitzvah.

When I arrived, I was shown a photograph.

It is not a picture of my family, or of Israel, or of anything a stranger would think worth saving.

It is a photograph of four loaves of challah, slightly lopsided, still steaming on a wire rack in a kitchen somewhere in Australia. It was sent by a young man I have never met to my son, whom he had known for precisely three weeks.

Let me explain how it got there.

My son is a rabbi. Recently, he spent three weeks on an intensive residential course in Australia - long days outdoors, very little sleep and a great deal of mud. The organisers made sure he had kosher food. This turned out to mean airline meals. Anyone who has eaten a long-life kosher airline meal will tell you it is less a lunch than an act of faith.

So there he sat one afternoon in the dining hall, with his tray of foil-sealed devotion in front of him and his kippah on his head.

Another participant sat down beside him. He mentioned, quietly, that he too was Jewish. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a kippah of his own.

He did not normally wear it. He had not felt comfortable to wear it there. But now that somebody else was wearing one, he said, he would wear his too.

He wore it for the rest of the course.

I have thought about that pocket a great deal since. A young Jewish man, capable and committed, carrying his Judaism folded up where nobody could see it. Waiting. Not for permission, exactly. Waiting for company.

The programme did not pause for Shabbat. There were activities on Saturday, as there had to be. My son kept Shabbat of course, but in somewhat difficult circumstances, as Jews have done in every generation. And as the two of them walked, they sang. “Lecha Dodi.” The song that welcomes the Shabbat. Two Jews walking through the Australian bush, welcoming the Shabbat bride in the only way available to them.

I cannot think of a purer act of Jewish defiance in a long time.

My son told me that something else extraordinary also happened. The non-Jewish participants noticed. They watched this young rabbi hold his line on Shabbat and, instead of mockery, they offered to lighten his load, to carry the bags he was not permitted to carry.

During the rest of the week, my son did the same for them. Christians, Muslims and people of no faith whatsoever quietly worked out between themselves how to make room for one man’s covenant.

The bond that formed among them was not built on anybody pretending to be less than they were. It was built on the opposite.

On the Friday after they came home, the young man baked challah. And he sent my son the photograph, with a message thanking him for giving him back his Jewish identity.

Nobody preached. Nobody argued. Nobody won a debate. One man simply ate his terrible airline schnitzel with his head covered, and the ripples reached a kitchen he will never stand in.

Now for the uncomfortable half of this article, because I am not writing a feel-good story. I am writing a warning wrapped in one.

We are living through the ugliest wave of open Jew-hatred most of us have known, and the Jewish response, in too many places, has been to get smaller.

The baseball cap over the kippah (I have to admit I did just that on my Emirates flight this week). The Magen David tucked inside the shirt on the train. The mezuzah taken down from the door of the flat. The Hebrew name shortened on the office directory. The hesitation before saying where you spent the summer.

I wrote recently about a worrying statistic: requests for kosher meals in some British hospitals have reportedly halved in two years. Not because British Jews stopped keeping kosher, but because at the moment they were most frightened and most dependent, they hesitated to tick a box that said, “I am Jewish.”

That is the same pocket. It is simply a different setting.

I understand the instinct completely. It is not cowardice; it is arithmetic, done quickly, by frightened people: why invite the risk? And in genuinely dangerous situations, discretion is no sin. Our tradition has never demanded martyrdom over a hat.

But we should be honest about the price. A kippah that goes into a pocket does not merely make one Jew invisible. It withdraws the permission that another Jew was waiting for.

That young man was not converted by an argument. He was released by an example. Had my son quietly accepted the standard meal and left his head bare - which might have been entirely understandable, even defensible - there would have been no conversation in that dining hall, no singing on that walk, no challah on that Friday.

The absence would have cost nothing anyone could measure, which is exactly what makes it so dangerous. We can never see the ripples we fail to make.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks put it with characteristic bluntness: non-Jews respect Jews who respect Judaism, and they are embarrassed by Jews who are embarrassed by Judaism.

Forty years in medicine have taught me he was right about something deeper still.

Patients, colleagues and strangers all take their cue from your posture.

Apologise for your existence and you invite others to audit it. Stand comfortably inside your own skin and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the world simply makes room. The people around my son did not respect him despite his Shabbat. They respected him because of it. Nobody is inspired by a person hiding.

Our oldest story says the same thing. The midrash teaches that our ancestors were redeemed from Egypt because they did not change their names, their language or their dress. Not because they out-argued Pharaoh, but because in the middle of an empire built to erase them, they remained visibly, stubbornly, unmistakably themselves.

I am not asking anyone to be reckless. I am asking us to notice what is at stake when we shrink.

Wear it, or don’t - that is between you and your own courage on any given morning. But understand what you are carrying.

Somewhere in your office, your ward, your lecture theatre or your neighbourhood, there is a Jew with something folded up in a pocket, waiting to find out whether it is safe to be who they are.

You may never meet them. You may never know it happened.

But three weeks later, somebody bakes challah.