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Shabbat Shalom: To those who carry our grief and refuse to surrender our joy
This week’s Shabbat Shalom is dedicated to those who refuse to let anybody else decide where it ends
I chose not to publish anything on 7 October, that day belongs to the victims. Any argument about what the world has done since risked becoming another voice in the noise, another demand upon a day for remembrance. For the families slaughtered in their homes, the young people hunted at a music festival, the hostages dragged into Gaza. Those murdered in the attempted genocide against the Jewish people, and everyone whose life was shattered.
Their names, their faces, the lives they should have lived. For one day, I wanted to leave the space to them.
There is plenty I could write now. About those who chose the anniversary of the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust to march against the only Jewish state. About the targeting of Jewish organisations, the poison on campuses, the public figures whose statements somehow struggle to let murdered Jews remain the subject of their own remembrance. The equivocation, the appropriation, the people for whom even our grief must first pass a political test.
But they have taken enough. Enough of our attention, enough of our energy, enough of the space in which we should be able to live, remember, celebrate and simply be Jewish.
This week, I want to give that space to people who deserve it.
Students dancing through a university campus with a Torah above their heads. A captain and passengers whose courage prevented catastrophe. A son turning his father’s love of Jewish music into a source of communal pride. European Jews opening synagogue doors and welcoming a Torah into a community preparing for its future.
Across different countries, different generations and radically different circumstances, something familiar is happening. We are carrying our story forward. This week’s Shabbat Shalom is dedicated to those who refuse to let anybody else decide where it ends.
Shabbat Shalom to the Jewish students of Leeds University.
On Simchat Torah, Jewish students at Leeds sang, danced and celebrated publicly around their university campus, a Sefer Torah held above their heads. Young Jews, in Britain, carrying their inheritance through the place where they are building their futures.
Simchat Torah marks the completion of the annual reading of the Torah and the beginning of the cycle again. We reach the end, then return to the beginning. We lift the scrolls, we sing, we dance. We are a people carrying its story in its arms.
Three years ago, in Israel, that festival was torn apart by slaughter. A morning that should have belonged to celebration became a morning of murdered families, burning homes and desperate calls for help. Music became inseparable from the images of young people running for their lives.
That is part of what those students carry now, too. They belong to a generation whose Jewish adulthood is being shaped by 7 October and everything that followed. They have seen how quickly a campus can become a place where Jewish identity invites interrogation, where belonging comes with conditions and where other people presume the right to decide which parts of yourself you should conceal.
Yet still, they danced, with the Torah above their heads, their voices raised, their Jewishness unmistakable and this belongs to a wider story. Hillel International describes students responding to campus hostility by turning towards Jewish community, coming for Shabbat dinners and staying to build friendships and take on leadership. Its Jewish learning programmes reach thousands of students each year; this autumn, it is supporting expanded Shabbat experiences at more than 130 campus Hillels across the world.
Young Jews are gathering, learning, taking their places around Friday-night tables. Discovering, or rediscovering, what it means to belong to this people. There is something deeply powerful about that choice.
When the world makes your identity feel like a liability, you reach for the people who understand its value. You learn more about the inheritance others demand you disown, you find a community, then help make it stronger. Hatred has consequences, but sometimes, the young Jew they hoped to intimidate becomes the young Jew organising the next Shabbat dinner. Sometimes, the identity they hoped to weaken becomes the source of a person’s strength. Sometimes, our children lift a Torah above their heads and dance.
How many generations prayed that their descendants might do that freely? How many parents and grandparents carried those same words through places where being Jewish could cost them everything?
There they were, on a British university campus, our children, our future.
Shabbat Shalom to the Jewish students of Leeds University, and to young Jews everywhere choosing to gather, learn and celebrate. You are giving the rest of us reasons to stand a little taller.
Shabbat Shalom to Captain Smit Machchhar and the passengers and crew of Flight FlyDubai 1073.
I have not written a Shabbat Shalom since the attempted hijacking of flydubai Flight 1073, and I will not let the moment pass without recognising those whose bravery helped save everyone aboard.
Captain Smit Machchhar was attacked inside his cockpit on the flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv. Badly wounded, he fought back and managed to unlock the cockpit door. Israeli passengers overpowered the attacker; a passenger helped steady the aircraft before two off-duty pilots took over and landed it safely.
There are moments when the distance between life and death becomes unimaginably small. A movement, a decision, a few seconds in which somebody finds the strength to do something that the rest of us can barely comprehend from the safety of our chairs. Captain Machchhar found that strength and when the door opened, others found theirs.
Suddenly confronted with the possibility that somebody intends to kill you and everyone around you, there is no time to prepare yourself for that knowledge. Yet passengers moved towards the danger, towards the wounded captain, towards the place where their intervention could make the difference. Strangers became responsible for one another.
I will not name the attacker here. I want us to remember Smit Machchhar, I want us to remember the passengers who confronted the attacker, the crew who helped and the pilots who brought the aircraft down safely. An Indian captain and Israeli passengers, people with different backgrounds and different lives, brought together while on an ordinary journey and confronted with an extraordinary demand.
They met it.
We know what it means to take responsibility for one another when survival demands action and only because these people acted, families could be reunited, people could go home, lives could continue beyond that flight. Ordinary things, made extraordinary by how close they came to being lost.
Shabbat Shalom to Captain Smit Machchhar, to the passengers and crew who helped save Flight 1073, and to everyone aboard carrying its memory. May you find healing, comfort and peace, and may our gratitude reach you.
Shabbat Shalom to Hilton Nathanson and Bishnat.
After his father died in 2021, Hilton Nathanson established Bishnat to pass on the Jewish pride his father had given him, bringing people together through Jewish music. Then, in the weeks after 7 October, he found that arranging a Jewish concert in Britain had become difficult.
A son wanted to honour his father through the music he loved. To fill a room with people, share something beautiful and send them home feeling closer to one another and somehow, in this country, that became difficult.
Hilton’s answer has been to keep bringing people together. Bishnat’s next concert, Be The Light, takes place in London on October 13th, with the hope that people will leave more confident in their Jewish identity and more willing to stand up for it.
There is something that happens when we sing together which no statement of solidarity can quite reproduce. You recognise a melody that belonged to your childhood, perhaps to a parent or grandparent who is no longer here. You hear the people around you singing it too, you watch your children discover it for themselves.
For a moment, the distance between generations closes. The people who gave us those songs are present in the way we sing them. The people who will carry them after us are learning their place in the story.
That matters particularly now, when so much of Jewish communal life is consumed by responding to what is done to us. The next incident, the next slur, the next institution that needs reminding of its responsibilities. We need places where our identity fills the room on its own terms. Where our children can see that being Jewish is a source of warmth, laughter, friendship and pride. Where the friends who stand beside us can share in the life they are helping us defend.
We cannot allow the entirety of our children’s Jewish inheritance to become an explanation of why other people hate them. Give them the songs, the joy, the experience of a room full of people who love being who they are.
Hilton has built something that makes those moments possible. A father’s love of music, carried forward by his son, becoming a gift to people that father never met. There is a beautiful Jewish continuity in that.
Shabbat Shalom to Hilton Nathanson and Bishnat. May every child in that room hear something they will one day want to pass on.
Shabbat Shalom to the Jewish communities rebuilding in Budapest and Leipzig.
In Budapest, the historic Rákospalota synagogue has returned to Jewish worship. Built a century ago, it served its community for only eighteen years before the Holocaust devastated that community. For decades afterwards, the building was used to store books and newspapers for Hungary’s national library. Now, restored and rededicated, it is once again a place of Jewish prayer.
A building made for Jewish voices, reduced to storage, but then those voices return. There is something about that which reaches far beyond architecture. The restoration of a synagogue carries a decision about the future, that there will be people here to pray, people here to gather, people here to teach their children what this place means.
The history stays with them, it must. The murdered cannot be restored, the generations that should have filled those rooms cannot be recovered. No ceremony, however moving, can repair that loss, but Jewish life can return.
While in Leipzig, Germany, a small Jewish learning and prayer group has received its first Torah scroll in community history. Fifteen members, meeting in private homes, now have a scroll on a ninety-nine-year loan from a congregation in Maryland, with its public dedication having taken place this week.
Fifteen people, ninety-nine years, look at the confidence contained within those two numbers. A community small enough to gather in somebody’s home, making provision for Jewish life almost a century into the future.
That is endurance with its sleeves rolled up. Somebody searching for a Torah, somebody answering the appeal, people across an ocean helping Jews in Germany build something that will outlast them.
The continent where Jewish communities were devastated by the Holocaust is still home to Jews who are restoring, learning, praying and preparing for the generations to come. There is no innocence in that hope. These communities know the history of the places in which they live, they know the challenges of the present and they build anyway.
In Budapest, a synagogue returns to its purpose. In Leipzig, a small community receives the Torah through which it will carry its story forward. We should honour the people who make that happen: the rabbis, donors, volunteers and community members whose work turns the language of Jewish continuity into something you can walk into, hold and hear.
Shabbat Shalom to the Jews of Budapest and Leipzig, and to those rebuilding Jewish life across Europe. May your communities grow, your doors remain open and your children know the strength of what you have renewed.
Four stories. Leeds, Flight 1073, music as a sense of pride, Budapest and Leipzig.
A Torah raised above young heads, a wounded captain opening a door, passengers acting to save lives, a son carrying his father’s music forward, a synagogue reclaimed, a small community making plans for ninety-nine years.
Look at what these people are giving us. Courage we can recognise, pride we can share, places to gather, reasons to believe in the generations ahead.
I kept 7 October for remembrance and that remembrance stays with me today. The families in their homes, the young people at the festival, those dragged into captivity. The people we knew, and those we came to know only through the terrible fact of their murder. Every one of them had a life beyond the way it was taken. People they loved, songs they knew, things that made them laugh, plans for the following week, the following year. Futures.
We owe them the dignity of remembering all of that and we owe the generations who come after them a Jewish life they can embrace with pride.
So thank the captain, honour the passengers, stand beside the students, fill the concert, support the communities opening their doors. Let our children see us doing it. Let them inherit the songs as well as the stories, the joy as well as the grief, the courage as well as the knowledge of what courage has cost.
Those who tried to end the Jewish story left us graves and ghosts, we remember every one, but they dd not get to write the final chapter.
Our children are already writing the next.
Shabbat Shalom.
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