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A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg

Good morning,

On this day in 1939 Hitler’s troops invaded Poland. Two days later Chamberlain informed the nation that we were at war with Nazi Germany.

Since March there is once again a major war in eastern Europe. The stubborn brutality of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has shocked virtually every European country and shattered the hope that we’re on the path to a more peaceful world.

Like thousands of others, we’re hosting a Ukrainian family: grandmother, mother and young boys. The language barrier makes it hard for us to learn what they’re truly feeling. But some moments require no Russian, such as when the grandmother, whose husband is stuck in Kharkhiv, came into the kitchen crying and saying ‘bombi’.

Or when a Russian-speaking relative told us the family loved English suburban houses. ‘Why?’ I asked, knowing they had an allotment in the countryside and thinking it was the gardens they liked. I couldn’t have been more wrong. ‘When you bomb a single house,’ their relative translated, ‘You kill just one family, but bomb a block of flats and lots of people die.’

Such a thought would have been only too familiar to those who lived through the blitz. But to me it was a shock. I’ve not had to live on such terrible terms.

The world desperately needs our positive input. Struggling to recover from Covid, threatened with environmental disaster, all our collective imagination and energy is urgently required to plan and plant together.

In my silent prayers I ache with dismay at the violence unleashed against this fragile world and beg God to help turn our power to destroy into the will to protect and create.

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