The Movement for Reform Judaism

King’s Cross is not known for the beauty of its open spaces. An ugly concrete corner at the Eastern end of the front of the main line station serves as a shrine to the victims of last week’s bombings. I was there in the noonday sun on the Thursday after the bombs went off, to observe the two minutes silence, along with relatives of the injured and bereaved, representatives from London Underground and the emergency services, many members of the public and hordes of press reporters and photographers.

During the silence relatives cried and photographers clicked away immediately behind my head, for the space was small. Then, wreaths were laid, one of them on behalf of people of all faiths. The large display of yellow flowers was jointly held by the Bishop of London, by Rabbi Martin Van den Berg of Wembley Synagogue and a Hindu representative. In contrast to the gathering in Trafalgar Square on Thursday, there was at King’s Cross no Muslim representative.

This news that the bombers included British Muslims from Leeds has sent shockwaves through the interfaith dialogue world. For years, Leeds has been at the forefront of good community relations in Britain. The Concord dialogue group established in the 1980s was a model for multi-faith dialogue across the country. More recently the Leeds Faith Communities Liaison Forum has focussed on regeneration and faith-based social action.

Only recently I had the privilege of attending a private briefing by John Battle - one of the Leeds MPs - on the work being done to bring together young Christians and Muslims who live in different parts of the city. Schools which once taught only Christianity, now teach a detailed knowledge of other faiths.

Today, it seems as if all that hard work, all that building of bridges, has been like throwing straws into the wind. Too many interfaith initiatives are too small and attended by all the same people who went to the last one. Inevitably, they are attended by wonderfully liberal-minded people from different faiths, but do not reach those who have more hardline views. So where does the dialogue world go from here?

Rabbi Larry Tabick has pointed out that last week’s terrorist attacks were a direct assault on the British Muslim community. Reporting a meeting held by Camden Council, he wrote this:

“Many Muslims spoke, both men and women. They all seemed to be making two main points: First, what had been done is contrary to every teaching of authentic Islam. Secondly, they were fearful of a backlash, especially against Muslim women, who are often immediately recognisable because of the head-covering, or hijab. It made me
realise, more than before, that the target of the bombers was not just the British public, but also British Muslims. Their plan seems to be to force the rest of us to isolate and stigmatise the Muslims who live among us, in order to radicalise them, to swell the tiny ranks of those who feel that Islam is under threat from everything the democratic West stands for.

We should be praying for peace, of course, but we also need to reach out, in whatever smaller or larger ways present themselves, to Muslims we may meet, for we Jews know what it is to be isolated from and fearful of the rest of society.”

In this week’s Torah reading, Balak King of Moab hires the prophet Bilaam all the way from a place called Pethor, thought to be in Mesopatamia, modern Iraq. He is asked to operate his secret weapon against the Israelites, the weapon of cursing.

Today’s weapons of terror are also planned deliberately by shadowy foreign organisations in the Middle East who send out their knowledge of such warfare and their propaganda to hire young people here to do their evil work for them.

But when the prophet Bilaam came among the Israelites God turned his words of cursing to blessing: “How can I curse whom God has not cursed? How can I denounce those that God has not denounced?”

If we want today’s curse of terror to be turned to blessing, we have a lot of work to do. We have to convince every young person in Britain and Europe that our kind of society is a blessing, that our dwelling places are good dwelling places.

Bilaam’s description of Israel turns to poetry: “he crouched, he lay down like a lioness: who will rise him up?” When the British lion is roused, as Churchill once did, there is no stopping it.

This week, for the first time in my life, I feel really proud to be a Londoner, proud of the calm that has descended on our city, the lack of panic the lack of desire for revenge. Proud of the good community relations we have built where religious leaders and their followers can stand shoulder to shoulder at a time of national mourning, and proud that the people of London carry on regardless.

The truth is, we are blessed. We are blessed with a society that is wealthy, compassionate, calm, multi-faith, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, tolerant and caring.

Standing at the King’s Cross memorial when you look up you see the two clocks on the two station towers, the King’s Cross clock on the amazingly functional Victorian building and the soaring splendour of Sir Gilbert Scott’s St Pancras Hotel clock tower surmounted by the slenderest of spires. It was Victorian competitiveness at its finest, the new St Pancras deliberately designed to overshadow and outdo the older lower station. Until 1880 when standard time was introduced, it is possible that those two clocks from different railway companies showed different times.

The competition between the two stations has long gone and St Pancras will soon be reinvented as London’s Victorian gateway to Europe - a giant project for the future of the capital. And the clocks indeed showed the same time, and we stood together as no doubt many of you did too, as the whole of London streamed out of shops and offices to stand in the sunlight as if to say “We are London. We stand together. We ill not be daunted. We will not be cowed. We will build peace in our town.”

A prayer for the people of London.

El Male rachamim , God who is full of mercy, grant comfort to those who mourn, succour to the wounded, and hope to those who wait. Give courage to those who work with them and for our emergency services. Give hope to this vast city in which can be found every nation on earth. Bind up their wounds and heal the broken hearted, so that the nations of the world can continue to gather here in peace. May the one who makes peace on high make peace for us and for the people of London.

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