EVENT: Annual Selichot Service
VENUE: Hampstead Synagogue, London
AS THE Chief Rabbi notes in today’s Credo, this is the time for repentance in the Jewish calendar. So it seems appropriate to start this column with a confession. I was on my way to the Selichot service at Hampstead Synagogue, to recite the prayers for forgiveness said every year in the run-up to the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah.
I allowed an hour for a journey that on the North Circular usually takes me much less. It was just gone 11pm on a Saturday night and surely all sensible people would be getting ready for bed. But no, they were all on the North Circular, stuck in the same inexplicable traffic jam as me. For the first time in nearly ten years of writing At Your Service, I failed to make it.
Rosh Hashanah, which took place yesterday and Thursday, is a time of judgment, when Jewish people believe that God weighs their good deeds during the previous year against their bad deeds, decides what the next year will be like for them and records the judgment in the Book of Life. Next Saturday, the Day of Atonement, the book will be sealed for another year. Desiring to live another happy year, I decided to go ahead and write this piece anyway, in the hope that it will persuade God to give me a good write-up too — even though I’m not Jewish.
More than 1,000 people did manage to make it to Hampstead Synagogue, one of the most beautiful in London, dating from 1892. The service was led by Chazan Lionel Rosenfeld accompanied by the Shabbaton Choir.
Advertisement
Chazan Rosenfeld explained: “The midnight Selichot service is for me the liturgical highlight of the year. The beautiful poetry of the prayers, the crowded synagogue and the darkness of the night all fill me with a heightened sense of kavanah — devotion and concentration — which reaches a spiritual high with the traditional melody of Shema Koleinu — Hear our voice. At that moment we know for sure that the high holydays are close at hand.”
As is traditional, Dr Jonathan Sacks opened the proceedings with an address. He described two recent visits with the Shabbaton Choir to Israel on choral missions to bring music to the lives of people there and, above all, the victims of terror.
Dr Sacks said: “I can’t tell you how moving it was to be with the parents, the bereaved parents who lost children in these last years, to dance with people in wheelchairs who will never walk again, to sing with children who in a moment lost parents and siblings and who themselves will be scarred for life.”
In his sermon (e-mailed to me the following day), he pleaded that before every action, we should not think how this act will affect us individually but how it will affect our children and grandchildren and children of the world.
“Let us think how what we do today will affect their lives tomorrow. Let us teach our children to be proud of who they are and at the same time generous to those who are different . . . Let us teach them to love. Let us teach them to know that one who loves cannot be threatened. One who loves cannot be defeated. One who loves cannot repay evil with evil. One who loves knows how to sanctify life.”
Advertisement
A simple but not necessarily an easy message to impart and, as Dr Sacks said, a powerful one.