A time for tears of sadness and joy
So, at long last… I went to shul. It’s the first time I’ve been back in person since Covid, like Putin, invaded our lives and crushed our daily joys without so much as a by-your-leave. I have attended the occasional Zoom service, but for me — as I suspect for most people — being there with others is a key part of the experience.
Our Friday night service starts at 6.30pm, so Larry and I sit down to watch part of the news at 6pm before we leave. I used to be a news junkie, getting regular fixes via newspapers, radio, the BBC app and the political reporters I follow on Twitter as well as watching TV news. But a while ago, the Teen asked if we could stop watching breakfast news because it was hard to start his day with a side order of anxiety and gloom alongside his scrambled eggs on toast. Once Putin’s army invaded Ukraine, I had to stop watching the news at 10pm because otherwise I would lie awake at night, fretting and feeling useless.
For Jews all over the world, what’s happening in Ukraine has a profound resonance, of course, so that we watch those fleeing not just with compassion but with a visceral feeling of urgency and dread. For so many, our parents or grandparents (or earlier) left their homelands in a hurry, in fear of what would happen to them if they didn’t, more than in hope of building a life in a new land. Many, like my grandparents, spoke little or no English when they arrived. My grandfather, Calman Liebovich Israelevich, left Lozova (in eastern Ukraine, south of Kharkiv) in 1912, aged 21. Once in England, he changed his name, taking his first name as his new surname.
At the moment, it is rare for me to make it through the news without crying. It is not just that what is happening in Ukraine is so unbearable — bombing a maternity hospital, shooting people queuing up at a bakery to buy bread — but that it is so clearly unjustifiable, unnecessary. It feels as if Putin is playing his own personal game, regarding his own troops as dispensable as if they were no more than toy tin soldiers. Only the fact that he continues to label it a ‘special military operation’ flags up his own consciousness that he should not admit that it’s an invasion to the Russian people.
So, freshly emotionally flayed from watching the news, we go to shul. Our shul is not beautiful — that is, the building is not, to my eye, aesthetically pleasing. Yet it is a place of beauty to me. I am not religious and I frequently tie myself in mental knots, trying to work out why I like to go sometimes.
It’s the first time I’ve been back to shul in person since Covid, like Putin, invaded our lives and crushed our daily joys’
Why does it hold meaning for me if I am not a believer (God and I parted ways when I was nine or ten; now, He never calls, He never writes…)? But sometimes there is something just so right — peaceful, communal, uplifting — about going on a Friday night, a feeling of setting the stresses and trivia of the week aside and stepping into what, even to me, feels like a sacred place, a sanctuary.
I take two steps into the lobby and there, just inside the entrance, is our rabbi and another of the leadership team, both masked, talking to each other but ready to greet congregants too. At once, tears spring to my eyes — completely unexpectedly. I feel embarrassed and absurd as if I, non-believer and poor attendee at the best of times, have no right to feel overcome, but they say don’t worry, everyone has been through it the first time they come back.
The service begins and each return to the loveliness of Friday night feels laden with significance: the simplicity of our rabbi playing his guitar to accompany us as we sing; our voices uplifted in unison for my favourite, L’chah dodi; the turning of the entire congregation towards the open rear doors of the sanctuary to greet Shabbat.
Inevitably, much of the service focuses on the war in Ukraine and it is profoundly moving. The service sheet includes information for anyone willing to offer a room to Ukrainian refugees.
Afterwards, back at home eating supper, we talk about hosting a refugee family and all agree we would like to do it. Larry emails the liaison contact at the shul and gets an email back, saying the response has been overwhelming; she stopped counting once she’d received 500 offers. We tell Leo that we’ve registered an interest and he looks at us very seriously. He’s an only child and I suddenly worry he might feel weird about having to share what has been his sole domain, possibly with another teenager, but that’s not what’s bothering him, not at all. Or perhaps he’s worried what it would be like to live with people who might be traumatised by the war and by their hasty departure?
He fixes us with a beady stare, and looks pointedly towards the unsorted piles of paperwork:
“You will have to tidy up,” he says.