Episode details

Radio 4,2 mins
'Tonight brings the Jewish festival of Shavuot.' Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg - 28/05/2020
Thought for the DayAvailable for over a year
Good Morning. There’s a first time for everything. I’d never bought chocolates for undertakers before. But they too, I realised as we stood socially distanced from the weeping mourners, were risking their health to bury our dead with dignity and compassion. It's not as if I’d never met them before. My role as rabbi takes me to the cemetery too often. But I’d never properly appreciated them, until now. Tonight brings the Jewish festival of Shavuot, marking the giving of the Torah, when we re-imagine ourselves at Mount Sinai, listening to God’s voice and receiving the Ten Commandments. Lockdown will make Shavuot, like all our faith celebrations, less communal but more personal. The Jewish mystics would see this as good. For them, God did not speak once only, in history. God speaks to each of us personally, through all life. The rabbi of Ger taught that we can hear ‘I am your God’ anywhere and everywhere, because life’s sacred spirit dwells in all things. The challenge is to listen. During lockdown, many of us have become more attentive. We’ve seen the holy, the special, in the ordinary. I doubt we call it God’s voice when a recently fledged robin sings. I don’t imagine we invoke religion when the man checking our shopping asks how we are, not casually but carefully, because he cares, which happened to me this week. People were rude in the initial panic, but now they thank us, a woman stocking supermarket shelves commented. They’re in the front line too. For me, listening to ‘I am your God’ isn’t about dogmas but the attentiveness we show each other and the natural world, because I believe all life is sacred. Despite the loneliness and fear, during these lockdown weeks our society has noticed and appreciated more: not only the NHS, but bus drivers, parents who simultaneously manage young children and work, delivery and refuse personnel, birds and trees. As we return to free movement, I worry I’ll listen less when I re-join the rush. There’s much to put behind us. But we mustn’t lose the good we’ve learnt. Interestingly, the rabbis didn’t call the festival ‘Shavuot’. They renamed it ‘Atzeret’, meaning ‘closing’, because listening to God at Sinai marked the close and culmination of the Passover journey from slavery to freedom. What mattered was not liberty alone, but how we use it to hear what’s truly important. We too must use our renewed freedom to listen, and shape a more attentive, appreciative and compassionate reality.
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