Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

Good Morning. I recently spent my whole day waiting for someone to get home so that I could apologise. I’d said something thoughtless. When I realised how hurtful I’d been, I wished I could gather my words back from the air and lock them behind my teeth. There are many things which should never have been said. Whoever spoke the terrible sentence about bodies piling up rather than another lockdown, it has added insult to injury and brought tears, pain and well-warranted anger. It’s exactly what we don’t want in the public discourse. As we re-open after lockdown, there’s hope and joy in life renewed. Yet we carry wounds, unequally inflicted across our society: grief, exacerbated by isolation; the need to go to foodbanks for meals for the children; the impact on carers and medics of witnessing, sometimes helplessly, so much sickness and death. We’re aware, too, of the ongoing suffering, in India and elsewhere. Instead of insults, we need what Christie Watson called The Language of Kindness, the title of her book about nursing. Rachel Clarke, who wrote Breathtaking during the first wave, quotes a fellow doctor about the love and care he’s seen: ‘This is a beautiful thing and I hope we never lose it.’ That’s our challenge: to create and share not just that ‘language of kindness’, but communities of kindness, and an economics of kindness, too. Tonight is the Jewish Festival of Lag Be’Omer. According to tradition, on this date a plague which killed thousands in the Galilee in the second century ended and healing began. That’s exactly the juncture at which we hope we stand today. The Galilee has wonderful ancient olive groves. This inspired my community to buy such a tree from a UK nursery to mark the Covid period and our hopes for the future. The twisted trunks of old olives, sometimes with holes right through their middle, are wonderfully expressive. Yet the trees are remarkably persevering, so much so that a rabbinic legend records how the other plants were sharply critical: ‘The temple in Jerusalem is destroyed but you heedlessly flourish!’ they said accusingly. ‘Can’t you see?’ the olive replied, ‘I’m eating my heart out. But I keep on growing, because we need our hope and resilience. We could be like that olive tree. We need to carry the wounds of our society and world with a compassionate consciousness, while drawing strength from our roots to create new growth. That’s the attitude which should guide how we speak and act. That’s what we need at the heart of our country.