Dr Rachel Mann

Good Morning. The Government recently published its draft Bill to ban abusive conversion practices that aim to change someone sexual orientation or trans gender identity. Parliament will debate the detail, as it should. Laws matter. They define the standards by which we choose to live together and, at their best, they protect those who have too often been left vulnerable. Just a few days later, I found myself walking through central London at Pride as one of the Co-Leads of the Movement for Progressive Judaism. It was the first time our new Movement had marched together, and the first visible Jewish presence in the parade since the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023. The new law and Pride belong together. One asks what a society will protect, the other asks what kind of society we hope to become. After the parade, someone sent me a message. They wrote that, growing up as a gay Jew, they could never have imagined their rabbis marching at Pride. They said seeing rabbis there would make it easier for people to believe they don’t have to choose between their faith and who they are. I’ve carried those words with me all week. As a student at rabbinic college, I had the privilege of being taught by Rabbi Lionel Blue, whose warm, wise voice became so familiar to generations of Radio 4 listeners through Thought for the Day. He was the first openly gay British rabbi. Long before inclusion became part of our public vocabulary, Lionel simply lived his life with humour, honesty and deep faith. In doing so, he quietly expanded people’s imagination of who could speak with religious authority. Perhaps that is how change really happens. Laws matter because they protect people from harm. They draw a line around what a society will no longer tolerate. But communities have a different responsibility. The law tells us what is unacceptable. Communities show us what is possible. The Torah repeatedly tells us to “walk” in God’s ways. Faith is not simply about believing the right things. It is about choosing where we stand and alongside whom we walk. That may be why Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, after marching for civil rights alongside Martin Luther King, that he felt as though he was “praying with my feet.” Sometimes our feet say something our words cannot. Perhaps somewhere on the streets of London last Saturday, someone looked up and saw something they had never imagined before: rabbis walking at Pride, openly and joyfully. If so, then perhaps they also caught a glimpse of something else. That while the law can protect us from harm, a community, at its best, can help us imagine a future in which we truly belong.

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Good Morning. Last Wednesday I conducted Annabel’s funeral. Diagnosed with cancer five years ago, Annabel took the attitude: ‘Whatever time I’ve got left, I’m going to use to make the world more beautiful.’ I’m taking her resolve with me as we enter a bleak period in the Jewish year, three weeks of mourning, culminating in the Fast of the Ninth of Av. We remember the sacking of the Jerusalem Temple, the destruction of Jewish life across history, and all the destructiveness in our world today. I love people, animals, birds and trees. When I see how we kill each other and treat nature with contempt, how forests burn and waters are poisoned, my heart aches with fear and grief. That’s when I remember Annabel, and the wonderful Matt Biggs of Gardener’s Question Time. Looking out on a piece of wasteland during chemo, he redesigned it into a gorgeous garden so that others would find solace while having their infusions. ‘Every cloud has a silver lining,’ he said in his final broadcast, ‘but if it doesn’t have one, make it!’ He saw nature as God’s home, and understood its healing powers. There’s a rabbinic maxim: When your heart is broken, try to cling to creativity, not destruction. So many people do just that. There’s Gabrielle, who breeds turtle doves, a lovely bird with rust-and-black wing feathers, almost extinct in Britain. She’s inspired twenty-eight local farms to grow hedgerows with the seeds these doves need. Now hundreds are flying and nesting free. Across our faiths, EcoJudaism, Eco Church, Eco Sikh, Eco Mosque and Eco Temple, we’re working together to plant and restore. It’s the opposite of climate crisis denial, and we’re doing it with love. Malini Mehra, of London Climate Action Week, which just ended, writes how ‘in the big story of climate, love is underrated…[T]hat’s a mistake. People protect what they love. It’s the single most powerful driver of action.’ ‘I don’t love only hedgehogs,’ says Hugh Warwick, trustee of the British Hedgehog Society and author of A Prickly Affair. But you start with what you love. The love that drives us is fierce. It’s deep love for people, nature, the whole interdependent community of life and above all for the children, to whom we’re determined to leave a thriving, wonderful world. Destructiveness, taught the rabbis, comes from causeless hatred. It’s causeless because it brings only more hate. Creativity comes from causeless love, love whose only purpose is to make the world more caring, just and beautiful.

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