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Shabbat Shalom: To Those Who Give Us Reason to Sing
Alongside exposing the people who seek to diminish Jewish life, we must celebrate those who make it richer
There are weeks when writing about Jewish joy feels like an act of defiance before you have even begun. This has been one of them.
In Dublin, the Herbert Park Hotel cancelled a booking for 70 rooms intended for delegates attending a conference on combating antisemitism. According to Maurice Cohen, chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, the booking was withdrawn after he explained the purpose of the gathering.
A gathering of people coming together to discuss how to protect Jews from hatred, and they encountered hatred!
When Jewish community representatives and officials working to combat antisemitism cannot book accommodation without being interrogated and then banned, the conference has already been supplied with a rather devastating case study.
Then there was Oslo, where last week, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, a woman who has long campaigned for an end to the only Jewish state.
In September 2025, the UN commission she chaired concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza and accused senior Israeli leaders of incitement to genocide. These were findings by her commission, not a court judgement. Yet they supplied the authority of the United Nations to the gravest accusation that can be levelled against a nation.
The woman who had been entrusted with overseeing this supposedly impartial investigation had supported the BDS movement, called to sanction Israel and publicly characterised it as an apartheid state for years. Those prior positions should have precluded her involvement in such an investigation, let alone her position at its head.
An investigator should arrive with questions, she arrived with answers.
Then remember her defence of fellow commissioner Miloon Kothari after he stated that social media was controlled by the “Jewish lobby”. Pillay claimed his remarks had been taken out of context and deliberately misquoted. Kothari subsequently apologised. She defended language that even the man who used it acknowledged was wrong.
Her record also includes criticising American support for Iron Dome in 2014. Criticising a system that intercepts rockets aimed at Israeli civilians by a terrorist organisation is a revealing choice. Protecting Israeli children from being blown apart should never require an explanation, let alone an apology.
This is the record the Nobel Committee has chosen to honour. My objection is to an institution that looked at the prior campaigning, the defence of an antisemitic trope and the complete absence of impartiality, and decided that none of it disqualified her from receiving its highest recognition.
What are Jews supposed to understand from that decision? That prejudice becomes respectable when expressed through a commission? That defending an antisemitic remark matters less when the person doing so has the right credentials?
A hotel turns away Jews gathering to combat antisemitism. A celebrated institution honours a woman whose record is clear for all to see and Jews are expected, once again, to mistake institutional prestige for moral authority.
I refuse, but I also refuse to let those institutions decide what this week means to us. They have occupied enough of our attention, they will not take possession of our joy.
That is why I write these pieces, because alongside exposing the people who seek to diminish Jewish life, we must celebrate those who make it richer. We need their courage, their conviction, their stubborn insistence that being Jewish still contains extraordinary reasons for happiness.
If all we record is what is done to us, we leave out what we do for one another. We leave out the lives being built, the traditions being carried forward, the rooms filled with song.
This week, I want to remember those rooms too.
Shabbat Shalom to Adam Wagner KC.
A human rights barrister gives a lecture about his work on behalf of hostage families. Masked demonstrators force their way in, shouting abuse. “Settler.” “War criminal.” His offence? Working for the release of people kidnapped by murderous terrorists.
That is the scene described in the reporting you may have seen this week. Sit with it for a moment, because familiarity with this behaviour must never be allowed to dull its obscenity.
After 7 October, Adam Wagner devoted himself to representing British families whose loved ones had been taken into Gaza. Alongside solicitor Adam Rose, he worked on behalf of the families of a number of hostages, bringing legal expertise to people living through an almost unimaginable nightmare. People stolen from their homes, families waiting for proof of life, innocent civilians held by a terrorist organisation that had already demonstrated its capacity for murder, torture and sexual violence.
Helping them should be amongst the least controversial things a human rights lawyer could ever do. Yet apparently even that is too much for those whose professed compassion cannot stretch to the civilians Hamas took captive.
What exactly are they objecting to? That somebody represented those families? That somebody insisted their loved ones mattered? That somebody refused to allow the hostages to disappear beneath the political arguments being conducted over their heads? There is something profoundly revealing about directing your fury at the person trying to bring captives home.
Adam’s work required patience, expertise and a willingness to remain alongside families whose suffering could not be resolved by a speech or a social media post. Long after the initial horror, there was still work to do, calls to make, arguments to pursue, people who needed somebody in their corner.
That deserves our gratitude and when a mob attempts to make that work shameful, our gratitude should become louder.
Shabbat Shalom to Adam Wagner, and to those who understand that human rights mean very little unless they belong to the people it has become fashionable to forget.
Shabbat Shalom to the Jewish community of Manchester.
Last Sunday, thousands welcomed a new Sefer Torah dedicated to Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby, the two men killed in the Yom Kippur terror attack at Heaton Park Synagogue.
People lined the streets, they sang, they danced, they accompanied the scroll to the synagogue where, a year earlier, a terrorist had attacked Jews gathered on the holiest day of our year.
The families still carry their loss, the congregation still carries the memory. A celebration cannot remove either, nor should we ask it to. But a Torah scroll is written to be read. It will be opened on Shabbat mornings, carried through the congregation, read by children preparing for their bar mitzvahs. Years from now, people will hear the names of Melvin and Adrian and learn why this scroll was dedicated. Their memory will travel into lives they never had the chance to meet.
That is Jewish continuity in its most tangible form. Parchment, ink, voices, children, something held in the arms of one generation and entrusted to the next. The terrorist came to a synagogue to destroy Jewish life and in response, a year later, the community brought a new Torah through its doors.
There is an answer in that procession which no statement could improve upon.
We will mourn our dead we will remember their names and we will keep teaching our children how to live as Jews.
Shabbat Shalom to the families of Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby, to Heaton Park Synagogue and to every person who helped carry Jewish life forward through streets that had witnessed such terrible loss.
Shabbat Shalom to Bishnat, and to everyone who helped us be the light.
I wrote about this event last week, normally, that would suffice. In around a year of writing these Shabbat Shalom pieces, I have never returned to a subject quite so quickly.
Then I went and I understood that telling you an event was going to happen was entirely different from telling you what it felt like to be there.
Bishnat’s “Be the Light” concert filled St John’s Wood Synagogue with around a thousand people, with Shulem Lemmer and Choni G providing the music. An evening organised around a simple, beautiful ambition: Jewish joy.
I am not remotely ashamed to admit that I was already in tears before the first song had finished.
Perhaps that tells you something about what the past three years have taken out of us. How much we carry into every room, even when we think we are managing perfectly well. The anger, the anxiety, the grief, the constant awareness of what has happened and what might happen next.
Then you find yourself surrounded by Jews singing, loudly, proudly, with their whole hearts and something gives.
For once, we were gathered to enjoy the inheritance we spend so much time defending. The music, the words, the memories, the feeling of recognising something in the people around you that reaches far beyond the room.
By the end, I was in the midst of a thousand people dancing, singing and celebrating their history, their culture and their heritage. I left inspired and invigorated in a way I have rarely experienced over these past three years.
I needed that evening more than I knew, I suspect I was far from alone.
To everyone who made it possible, understand what you gave us. You gave people somewhere to put down the weight for a few hours. You reminded us how good it feels to belong to this extraordinary people and you sent us home with more strength than we brought through the door.
Shabbat Shalom to Bishnat, to the organisers, musicians, supporters and everyone who filled that synagogue with song. Thank you for reminding us that Jewish joy is something we can create for one another, even now. Especially now.
A lawyer standing with hostage families, a community carrying a Torah through Manchester, a synagogue in London overflowing with music.
These are the stories I want to carry into Shabbat.
We will still demand answers from the hotel in Dublin. We will still challenge the judgement of the Nobel Committee. We will still call out those who believe a mask and a shouted accusation give them the right to intimidate a Jewish lawyer.
But we have responsibilities to one another too. To thank the people doing difficult work, to stand alongside the bereaved, to fill the seats, join the procession, learn the words and sing.
Our children hear us talk about antisemitism, they see the security outside their schools and synagogues. They know more about the people who hate them than any child should have to know.
They must also see what I saw on Tuesday night. A room full of Jews who loved being Jewish.
Let that be part of what we hand down. Alongside the vigilance, the history and the determination to defend ourselves, let there be music, let there be pride, let there be the memory of their parents on their feet, singing.
Those who hate us would like our children to inherit our fear.
Let them inherit our joy, and the courage it took to keep it.
Shabbat Shalom.
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