PERTH, Western AUSTRALIA
Friday 18th March 2016
It’s nice to
say Hello again after 43 years since I was here last. I'm
here now with Isobel at an international conference on Medical Education.
Isobel holds the chair in Medical Education at Manchester University. I hold
her bags for her when she travels to conventions like this one. We're also
celebrating our Ruby Wedding year.
It’s great
to be sharing the Friday evening service with Ken Arkwright. Isobel and I have had the pleasure a number of times of Ken and
Judith’s company in Manchester over the years, during their son Peter’s presidency of our shul
and the bar and bat mitzvahs of their grandchildren, and it’s wonderful
to be with them in your natural habitat.
I was last
here in 1973. I took part in a service
on Friday evening 11 October that year. It was Shabbat Succot. I had come over
that morning from Melbourne where I spent the beginning of Succot with Rabbi
Brian Fox and family after a 4 month spell in Sydney holding the
fort there whilst Rabbi Brasch was on sabbatical. There was only one subject to talk about on
that occasion. The Yom Kippur War had just begun. I came to Perth on my way
home – I was invited to Temple David; Rabbi Uri Themal was finishing his
contract and they were on the point of looking for another rabbi. The following evening I had been scheduled to speak at the community centre about
my experiences in the Caribbean where my first congregation was (on the Dutch island of Curaçao) They got it wrong in the publicity
and billed me as speaking on the Jews of Croatia! In the event, there was only one
subject: Israel. I think the whole of the Perth Jewish community
turned out for that evening. It was a different mood from the 6 Day War which
in the length of time it took me to get from Sydney to Perth via a weekend in
Melbourne, was over, this time we were caught unawares and didn’t know we would
be facing a long drawn out traumatic war of attrition over many months. Since the 6 Day
War only 6 years previously we had been in a state of euphoria. The higher you
fly the further you fall.
We also
could not have imagined that within 4 years the President of
Egypt would be standing before the Knesset and concluding a peace treaty with
Israel which has lasted to this day. But we
shouldn't get blasé about that either. So much water under the
bridge….Peace also with Jordan. but then the
2 Lebanon wars, the 3 Gaza wars, the 2 Intifadas and with the stabbings all around
Israel now, they are saying that they’re going through a 3rd. Or should I say 'we'.
We now have a son, daughter-in-law and grandson living in Jerusalem. The Middle
East is not the same Middle East. The
world is a drastically altered world. Autocratic regimes have toppled to be replaced in some cases by worse regimes. The Shah followed by the Atatollas, Saddam and
Ghaddafi, followed by the chaos of Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria and so-called
Islamic State.
And there's been Camp David, Oslo and Taba with high hopes and dashed
opportunities.
On the wider
world scene we have witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the downsides of that in the Balkans, Chechnya and
the Ukraine. The
massive Exodus of our people from the FSU and the beginnings of what is likely to
turn the 21st into the Century of the Refugee from Afghanistan, from
Syria and if climate change continues to worsen, what Israel has been seeing
from African countries will become the experience of Europe too. We can’t cope
and if the rest of the world will not
help what we are seeing now could be a storm in a teacup to what might come.
The world
has been going through a midbar, a wilderness. Hopefully there will be a Promised
Land on the horizon but we don’t see it yet. Certainly there are warnings to be
heeded and imperatives which Wandering Jews receive from our history. The high
point, Sinai came in the midst of the wilderness experience. But after that high came the Golden Calf, and civil war
among the tribes. And after the miraculous manna came mutiny against Moses.
Today is
Shabbat Zachor, the Shabbat of Remembering. We remember how we were attacked in
the wilderness by the cowardly Amalekites,
ancestors of Haman. It’s
the prelude to Purim (coming in on Wednesday night) The serious prelude to the
crazy festival.
Festivals can be like markers of our
lifetime events. On some phones when you type in Purim it autocorrects to
Putin! There's a message in that.
Casting my
mind back to 1973.It was still Yom Kippur even though it was Succot. The Yom Kippur War cast its shadow over the whole year. Curiously, there’s a rabbinic
play on the name – in the Torah it’s called Yom Kippurim, and the word play is
that it could be read to mean a day like Purim (just by changing one vowel –
yom kepurim). How so? Well, they say that on Yom Kippur we starve our bodies and feed our souls, whereas on Purim we feed our
bodies and starve our souls. On Purim
with fancy dress and fressing and boozing, good Jews masquerade as bad Jews,
whereas on Yom Kippur bad Jews masquerade as good Jews.
One rabbi,
Eliezer Kitov, actually went as far as to say that Purim is greater than
YK! (Rabbis love turning things upside down!) How could Purim be greater than Yom Kippur? Because Yom Kippur is a hard day of affliction whereas
Purim is a day of fun. And it’s easier to turn to God during a tough time than
it is during a fun time, in the troughs rather than
on the crest of the wave.
The world
has gone through so much turmoil, as well as good things since I was last here.
My personal world changed when I came back from Perth too – going through
changes of all sorts family-wise and as a young
bachelor I come back happier and more fulfilled as a
husband, father and grandfather-todah la'El.
