“Behold, My word is like fire” – Jeremiah 23:29

Musings from a Melbourne Jew

One doesn’t have to be a scholar to hear the echoes of history that filled the air this week. In fact, maybe they were not even echoes, maybe they were voices, quite close, loud and clear, telling us “We are here again, pay attention!”. Our senses have been heightened to the patterns of history over the past 14 months but last Friday, a Friday of fire, the patten was almost too much to bear. Seeing the images of the blackened interior of the Adass shul, a result of a hateful arson attack, felt like we were seeing images from a bygone era in Europe, not from the past week in Melbourne.

The Adass shul; a sanctuary in the Melbourne suburb of Ripponlea, built by Holocaust survivors, is a place of worship, study and community for a minority within a minority. The ultra-orthodox Adass community in Melbourne keeps to itself mostly. A secular Jew like me will see the shtreimel wearing papas walking with hurried purpose, and the stockinged mamas wearing their children like strings of pearls falling from their necks, stomping the pavement of Glen Eira road. I gaze at them with a simultaneous sense of connection and distance, familiarity and foreignness. Because this enclave, however distant, is also so very close. Their loss this week is our loss. Their pain is our pain. This feeling was most apparent when photos emerged of the Torah scrolls being carried out of the shul, cradled like children in the arms of the Robbonim. Some were singed, dusted with ash, others had noticeable burns. Later we discovered that still others were water damaged, this fact explained alongside scenes of unfurled scrolls being examined by the learned men of the community. I cannot escape these images, they are stubbornly affixed to my mind. And they make me weep. When I told my husband and daughter of this, I couldn’t finish my sentence. I choked. My family is used to me crying over the drop of a hat, but this was different. They were silent too. We sat together inside the unfinished sentence, inside history, inside the present moment.

Time can be great healer but time can also be an enemy. The time between the devastation of this attack and the acknowledgement by our current government that this was indeed a terrorist attack felt too long. Too long to see the completely obvious. But we are no longer surprised. This is the same government which, only days before broke from a precedent set by past governments, both left and right wing, in abstaining on a UN vote recognising Palestinian sovereignty and calling for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. This government voted for the motion. Even for a left-wing Jew like myself, who also wishes to see a two-state solution one day, the vote for this resolution, at this time, seems like an appeasement, rewarding Hamas’ violence on October 7. This is the same government who, only weeks ago gave its nod to the ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, and days before that refused a visa to Australia for former MK Aylet Shaked (bundling her with others who have been refused including neo Nazis, Holocaust deniers and convicted rapists). So, the acknowledgment, and the more-than-one statements from our Prime Minister criticising the arson attack, fell on deaf ears, a learned deafness, a reluctant deafness, a deafness born of frustration and anger. We are fed up. We have heard enough and seen enough from our government. Their empty rhetoric and their booming silence. You see, they might know, but are not fully aware, that we are people of the book, a people of words. So many words. We read words in a very particular way. We read what is there and also what is not there. We read through sound and silence. That is our tradition. We see the empty space between as deeply significant. In fact, our holiest source, the words of Torah, were created with this in mind (if I can be so bold as to imagine God’s mind). According to Rabbi Shimon Ben Lakish, the words of Torah a black fire, the parchment they are written on, white fire. Both holy. Both essential. Both must be explored, scrutinised, questioned and interpreted. And both emerge from fire.

Fire is an element we share a long history with. From fire God revealed Godself to Moses. Fire guided us through the desert during our forty year wandering, keeping God close, like a holy compass. And of course, every week the flickering flames of the Shabbat candles tether us, to family, to our story and tradition and to each other. It is no coincidence that that this fire, that consumed the Addas shul, didn’t consume us, but once again connected us, to our story, to our history and to each other. A revelation of a different kind. Flames intended to destroy, revealed to us our kinship.

It is also no coincidence that this fire served as a reminder of a kinship of another kind. For on that day, December 6th, 86 years ago, prompted by the harrowing scenes of Kristallnacht – more flames – William Cooper (an Aboriginal man of the Yorta Yorta people) led a delegation of the Australian Aborigines’ League from Footscray to the German Consulate in Melbourne. The group delivered a letter protesting the Nazi government’s persecution of the Jewish people. When the whole world was silent, we found kinship in this great man. So, the auspicious time of this fire, while devastating, served as a reminder that we have each other and we have our allies, who also have the capacity to see the words and the space in between.

Fire has never destroyed us. Not the fires that twice burned the Beit Hamikdash, not the fires of Kishinev or of Auschwitz. Not the fires of a suburb in Melbourne either. They do not consume us; we are transformed by them. This was made abundantly clear to me when, on Friday morning, I was talking with a colleague and friend at work, a member of the Addas community, about it all. She was not a shattered mess, not at all. She was almost energised. Her focus; continuity. Her community WhatsApp groups were busy organising. Where will services be held? What about the mikveh? Her community (and by extension our entire community) was not overwhelmed by fire and grief, but with moving forward. Planning and organising how Jewish life for the Adass Yisrael community will be sustained without their centre. A kind of laser focus on Jewish continuity in the face of grave challenges, is something all Jews, no matter our level of observance, are familiar with. It has been a crimson thread woven through every era and every community. This thread is one of survival. And this moment is just that. Again.

As I drove home from the vigil held in the park across the road from the Adass shul, I played, for the millionth time, songs from a song list I have complied, Hebrew songs that I love, and new ones I have discovered. The Spotify playlist is perpetually in shuffle-mode and so the song that came on was not chosen by me, but by some other power – “Ein Li Eretz Acheret” by Gali Atari. Her sweet voice sung the words:

“I have no other country even if my land is aflame                                                                Just a word in Hebrew pierces my veins and my soul –                                                                With a painful body, with a hungry heart,                                                                                    Here is my home.”