Perspective

As we approach Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, I've been thinking a lot about how our generation is dealing with the crisis we find ourselves in in contrast to the experiences of our parents, grandparents or even great-grandparents' generations.

My mother's early childhood was air raids on London, evacuation to various locations around England, often just her and her mother because for part of the war her father, grandmother and other relatives were interned on the Isle of Man because they were "enemy aliens" (mostly Jews with Austrian, German or Italian citizenship).

Meanwhile her uncle was risking his life nightly as an air raid warden and volunteer firefighter while her aunt was deemed essential personal running the family dressmaking business which throughout the war manufactured uniforms instead, located in the heart of London all through the bombing onslaught of the Blitz and later the rockets and flying bombs.

Twice my mother and her mother were evicted from the room they were renting as evacuees. My British educated grandmother with her blue eyes could pass for being a gentile during their evacuation to Oxford. But when my east European grandfather was finally released from detention and allowed to visit his wife and the daughter he had never met before, the landlady heard his foreign accent, saw his Jewish looking appearance and told my grandmother that Jews were not allowed. They had to leave, roaming from place to place trying to find refuge from the bombs.

A few months later my grandfather again received permission to visit his wife and daughter, this time in a rural area of northern England, and once again, when the landlord heard his foreign accent and saw his Jewish appearance the family were forced to leave.

Of course this doesn't compare with the ravages of the Holocaust that decimated most of the family who stayed in continental Europe, most of whom were murdered with by the Nazis or their anti-Semitic neighbours. My grandmother, in all other ways a British patriot, always said it terrified her to think of how people would have behaved towards British Jews had Hitler conquered Britain.

I grew up on the stories of the rationing, the make do and mend, the improvised bomb shelter my great-uncle and grandfather built in the garden of the house they shared in London.

Even as a child of the 70s and 80s I remember still walking past derelict bomb sites in some parts of London, the excitement at the Barbican project built on one such site. The shadow over the war hung over everything not in a depressing way, but just as perspective on how lucky I was to be a child in a Western country in my generation.

It was the same message I absorbed from the demonstrations we attended on behalf of Soviet Jewry and dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. There but for the grace of God go I. Know that what you have may be fleeting, know to be thankful, know that because you got lucky you have a responsibility to campaign for those trapped under the Soviet jackboot and elsewhere.

As an adult in Israel there have been times I've had to take my own children to the shelter because we have been targeted by rockets just as my mother and her family were in London in 1944-45. Times when we've had to stay home because of the risk of being caught in the open. Times when I was taking my life in my hands taking buses in to work or study in Jerusalem. Thankfully those times have been very rare, but they've happened and still it pales in comparison with what my mother and so many of her generation experienced in wartime England, especially London.

The situation now is maybe more complicated than a war against flesh and blood. We still don't know exactly what we are up against. Our post-war generations have mostly been lucky, living in some of the most prosperous and peaceful times in human history (yes, even with the awful events that the world has witnessed in the last 70 years). This virus is killing and maiming thousand around the world today, the Jewish community in many places is especially hard hit and we all know so many who are ill or who succumbed.

Being cooped up is hard. People have lost their jobs while others are in fear of joining the unemployed, struggling to work from home with kids underfoot or sick relatives to care for. Some began this situation in poverty, others have had it thrust upon them out of the blue. Some are essential workers forced to isolate from their families to keep them safe. So much hardship, so much tragedy, I am by no means making light of what is happening around us in this covid19 crisis.

But sometimes this is life. As we read in the Haggadah, in every generation someone tries to wipe us out, anti-Semitism, wars, pogroms and yes, sometimes faceless plagues. In some ways this is more normal than the level of comfort and safety even poorer parts of Western society have lived in in recent decades, in comparison with the privation of even many more affluent people in previous generations.

I seem to use this word a lot, but yes, so much depends on perspective. It's easy to cast aspersions on generations X, Y and Z, even the "boomers" as being spoilt, "soft" and self-centred, and I think that would be unfair. We are simply generations who got lucky, for the most part most of us did not need to call up those reserves that got our ancestors through cycles of famine, war, rationing, economic collapse, outbreaks of disease, persecution and privation.

We have those reserves though, it's in our DNA to know how to cope, to adapt, to innovate and work through this Twilight Zone situation we find ourselves in. Call it genetic memory hardwired in to our humanity. We can do this, whether it's finding ways to stay home and take precautions or creative solutions for a practical but safer new normal. It may take us time, it will require patience and a very solid dose of good humour and a sense of the ridiculous and of adventure.

Life throws us curve balls, it just does. Sometimes the shocks are annoying, sometimes they are life altering. The current one is of epic proportions. We aren't the first and assuming the aliens don't show up to harvest humans for their home planet, we won't be the last.

Take care, be sensible, don't lose sight of the big picture, vent to your friends over social media or the old fashioned telephone when you need to get out your frustrations, listen to your friends and family who need a sounding board to hear those tirades. Reach out to lend a helping hand to those worse of then you. When you are feeling so down and suffocated by this crisis look around and find someone else you can do a favour for. When you need help don't be afraid to ask. Love, support and keep looking out for that light at the end of the tunnel. There are so many capable good people out there working on finding it.

Telling the time in blossoms

You can just make out the swings in the park in the valley below us. This playground is usually busy, even with rain clouds threatening it should be crowded with children enjoying the Passover vacation.

It has been empty for weeks now.

On the first night of Passover people came out on to their balconies at 20:30 to sing holiday songs together. Across the valley we could hear people shouting festive greetings and someone was twirling a rainbow LED hula hoop.

I'm glad my neighbour's trees partly obscure the view so that we can enjoy nature even while stuck at home. We do a lot of birdwatching from our window. This spring we have seen magnificent flocks of cranes, storks and assorted raptors migrating between Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

The trees help us to tell time. We began isolating when the neighbours' peach tree was starting to bloom, watching it reach peak pink blossoms which as the weeks passed have turned to tiny baby peaches.

Today I noticed that the olive tree you see in the photo has just begun to sport some tiny olive fruitlets. We wonder what the world will be like by the late autumn when the olives start to ripen.

None of you shall exit the door of their home until morning.

On the one hand it is ironic that here in Israel the entire country will spend Pesah, the festival of freedom, on lockdown, forbidden even to leave our homes as a precaution to prevent those who despite the situation might otherwise try to gather with family and friends for the festive seder meal on the first night.

And yet staying put in our homes with our immediate families is exactly what God commanded our ancestors on the very first Passover before He led them out of slavery in Egypt, as it is described in the book of Exodus:

וּלְקַחְתֶּ֞ם אֲגֻדַּ֣ת אֵז֗וֹב וּטְבַלְתֶּם֮ בַּדָּ֣ם אֲשֶׁר־בַּסַּף֒ וְהִגַּעְתֶּ֤ם אֶל־הַמַּשְׁקוֹף֙ וְאֶל־שְׁתֵּ֣י הַמְּזוּזֹ֔ת מִן־הַדָּ֖ם אֲשֶׁ֣ר בַּסָּ֑ף וְאַתֶּ֗ם לֹ֥א תֵצְא֛וּ אִ֥ישׁ מִפֶּֽתַח־בֵּית֖וֹ עַד־בֹּֽקֶר׃

And you shall take a bunch of hyssop, and dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and strike the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood that is in the basin; and none of you shall exit the door of their home until morning.

Of all the Jewish holidays, Pesah is the one most focused on the home and the family. The key commemoration is not a public event like the Yom Kippur service, not a public declaration of the miracle, like the lighting of the Hannukiah in the window, not building a hut in our gardens or parading with the lulav in shul or loudly blowing the shofar.

Even in the time of the Temple in Jerusalem, the pascal lamb sacrifice, a key Pesah mitzva at that time, was something to be done as a family unit, maximum a large extended family or a few families together, but at its heart it was a commemoration celebrated in private, at home or in the temporary lodgings where pilgrims to Jerusalem were staying.

Of all the Jewish festivals to have to fall during this time of isolation and lockdown there is something fitting about this crisis happening over Pesah.

The pandemic is forcing us to go back to basics, to focus on one of the fundamental messages of Pesah, the strength of family in the face of a tyrannical regime, the strength of family during times of extreme hardship and fear. The family drawing in on itself behind closed doors to find solace and inspiration while plague and uncertainty rage outside.

Today of course most of us live in nuclear family units rather than with or even close to our extended families. The dangers of this contagion mean that we are forced to hunker down without our parents or grandparents, to keep them sequestered alone for their own safety. It runs counter to everything in our culture, but we have no choice. This seder will truly be different from all other seder nights.

Pesah is a festival on which we not only remember the suffering of our ancestors, remembering the commandment that we must all consider ourselves as actually having gone from slavery to freedom, to tell the story not just as a fable or an episode of history, but with profound empathy as though we ourselves had experienced those horrific times, to feel as though we were slaves in ancient Egypt, just as our ancestors were, facing their trials and tribulations.

It is also a holiday on which we remember many miracles within nature, the plagues which Hashem brought down on Egypt and the splitting of the Red Sea. In modern times we try to understand these through science, how a certain wind blowing could cause the sea to part, or a volanic eruption might have caused clouds of dust and ash which plunged the region in to darkness.

Explaining miracles through science does nothing to diminish them, we believe that Hashem created the world and all that is in it, including the laws of nature.

This Pesah we pray that Hashem will guide our dedicated scientists, doctors and researchers to find a cure for the plague now sweeping the globe. We hope that there will be a new life saving Passover miracle this year that will enable the whole world to go from fear to freedom, from sickness to health, from isolation to togetherness.