Happy new year

My dear Friends

It has been a very rich period again since the concert. A week past on Monday saw the beginning of the new Jewish year and I was invited to a service at the Guildhall for Beth Shalom, the Reform Jewish group in Cambridge. I stayed for the first two hours and was able to join in the singing of the Avinu Malkaynu, Our Father, Our King, a moving entreaty to grant favour and bless us, hear us and save us. It is especially moving to realise that this is being sung by Jews all over the world at this time.

I sang it again in a different context on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which was celebrated two days ago. I was leading the prayers for the Wesley prayer group, a small group of Methodist Christians who meet every Wednesday for prayer. I quoted from the Rabbis about prayer and repentance, the theme of the day, and joined all the prayers of intercession with a rendering of the last verse of Avinu Malkaynu:

'Make in us charity and righteousness, and save us. Our Father Our King.'

Yom Kippur is a day of fasting, repentance and asking for mercy and forgiveness and this year, with the Jewish community, I decided to keep a little fast.I did not do the whole twenty five hours, but ended my little fast in the Friends' Meeting House. that is the Quakers, over some bread and a bowl of soup. I shared with them about Yom Kippur. Afterwards we had their traditional meeting for worship in silence.

I wish you all a good and sweet year
Shalom from Gila

Concert for Peace and Reconciliation

My dear Friends

I am delighted to tell you that my little Concert for Peace and Reconciliation went very well. It took place last tuesday, on the anniversary of 9/11. The venue was Michaelhouse, a cafe and ancient church right in the heart of Cambridge.

Annabel, the Anglican priest in charge, set the tone when she asked for a short pause to honour the day. Then I told the story of how something was going on at Ground Zero,a few days after 9/11 and when the people drew closer to see what was going on they saw a group of people-dancing for the joy of living.

The music unfolded-I started with an anti-war song by Ed McCurdy called Last night I had the strangest dream: 'I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war.' Psalm 23 in Hebrew followed, dedicated to a sweet American man I had recently met and who had just lost his wife. Then There but for Fortune, written by Phil Ochs but made famous by Joan Baez.'There but for Fortune go you or I.'

The audience (and it was a full house) really started singing when i struck up with 'We shall overcome' , the last verse of which is 'The Truth shall set you free.' Then there was a lyrical break with Are you going to Scarborough Fair, followed by the totally transcendent Blowing in the wind.

Hannah Senesh, a young Hungarian Jewess wrote a beautiful song calleld Eli, Eli, my God about the God of all creation-she perished at the hands of the Nazis but in one of her letters before she died she wrote'The souls of those who have gone before us light up the way for the rest of mankind.'

I finished with a couple of rambling songs by Tom Paxton. The second was Rambling Boy and, after retelling the death of the hero, the song finishes as follows:'If when we die, we go somewhere, you can bet a dollar he's ramblin there!'

Power to your elbow
Love and shalom
Gila

November in Glasgow

My dear Friends

November in Glasgow will be gloomy, but only from the weather perspective. Although I have been here in Cambridge for thirty years, Scotland remains part of my inner landscape, especially as my mother, Dorothea, was born there.  All my formative years were in Glasgow, although I spent the first eleven years of my life in London, where I went to a Jewish primary school.

Glasgow changed me and shaped me. I discovered Christianity there, although it was not until twenty years later, in an English landscape, that it was to flower and I entered the Catholic church, as you know.

Glasgow has a real grit to it, and the friendliness is tangible. It has a rough reputation, with the gangs and the Gorbals (now thankfully gone) but in realty it as a sophisticated city, rich in art, music and culture, with many fine museums and, at least in 1972 when i left, 72 parks. I think its cloisters in the University rival some of the buildings in Cambridge and there is a sweeping boulevard up to the university, named University Avenue.

I didn't complete my degree there, although I got most of it, because I was a rebel in the sixties and was making a statement, but I don't regret the four years I spent there. I had some wonderful lecturers, particularly in German, and I am still in touch with one of them . Looking back, it was amazing that not only did they tolerate me but gave me references which were the gateway to my entering the University in Cambridge twenty years later.

More of the story next time!
Shalom from Gila

I belong to Glasgow

My dear Friends

Thirty years ago I would have been singing the following: I belong to Glasgow, dear old Glasgow town, there's nothing the matter with Glasgow, for it's going round and round!' Except of course it would have been in a Glasgow accent!

The reason for all this preamble is that I am going to Glasgow for a week in mid November, dreich and all as that will be weatherwise. I left Glasgow thirty years ago to come to Cambridge. I had all my formative years there, from an eleven year old child, through my wild (and it was wild) youth, out the other end, taking singing lessons and coming to Cambridge, where I have been ever since, give or take a yearning or two to go to Toronto or Jerusalem.

But Scotland, and especially Glasgow, forms part of my inner landscape. My mother was born there, my maternal grandfather founded the oldest Synagogue there and I went to school there. I love my life in Cambridge, I am able to feel really free here, but I will never forget those years when a close friend and I walked for fifteen years in the Highland landscape, with those amazing remote deer forests.

Did you know that Glasgow used to have trams? I am sure that I travelled on the last one through Sauchiehall Street when I was about twelve. I am really going to see my relatives, mainly cousins, to whom I am very close. One of them became a Christian before me and she prayed my way into the Church. The other one is the matriarch of a great tribe and many of those children I have never seen.

But I have good friends too -I have known Kelda, musician and artist for thirty five years and we have much in common. So lots to look forward to. More next time-have you ever been to Glasgow?

Shalom from Gila

On the mountain

My dear Friends
Today in the Church is the Feast of the Transfiguration, which has a special meaning for me and the work I am trying to do. It is reported in the Gospels that Jesus took some of the disciples up a high mountain, now commonly thought of as Mount Tabor, in the north of Galilee. Also on the mountain appeared Moses and Elijah,representing the law and the Prophets.. Suddenly the garments of Jesus shone with a brilliant light and he was transfigured before them, in a representation of His future glory. Suddenly a cloud enveloped them, and a voice came from the cloud:'This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to Him!' When the disciples looked round, they could see no-one but Jesus.


In 1989 I went to Israel, for the first time in twenty-one years, and three months after I became a Christian and was received into the Church.I was staying in a friend's flat in Jerusalem and was aware that it was this Feast. I prayed, and was shown that this Mystery of the Transfiguration was about Jewish-Christian reconciliation.My own Judaism and Christianity were like two perfect halves of an orange, which could be joined together in the perfect whole.


On one wall in the flat was an excerpt from a famous Robert Frost poem and the lines read:'Two paths converged in a wood.I have taken the path less travelled, and that has made all the difference.'


Today, 23 years later, I can say that the path has not been easy. but that it has been very rewarding, and that I wouldn't change it for any other.


Every blessing
Gila

Olympics

My dear Friends


I feel sure that all of you will be following the opening of the Olympic games this coming Friday. There is always intense competition and excitement, especially when someone from your own country wins a gold medal.


As a practising Christian, I have another take on it.My goal is to win eternal life and in order to pursue my goal I have to be in training like any athlete. I have to be strong and courageous, ready to take on any trials that God puts my way, and never to look behind but always to strain ahead for the prize-Jesus Christ. St Paul puts it much better:


''Do you not realise that, though all the runners in the stadium take part in the race, only one of them gets the prize? Run like that-to win. Every athlete concentrates completely on training, and this is to win a wreath that will wither, whereas ours will never wither.'(1 Corinthians 9:24-25)


So you see that the stakes are high but the journey, or race, is exciting. A bit like the tour de France, there are companions along the way. But if we look back, the penalties are great and we may not make the Kingdom.We can't let the past fetter us, although it is very tempting.


Cheer me on!
Shalom from Gila

Newsletter number 17 Summer 2012

My dear Friends

The Jewish people prays for rain at this time of year (as of old in Palestine) and it seems that their prayers have been answered! Rain can be both a sigh of blessing and a time of grace and since celebrating my 60th birthday last December I seem to have taken on a new lease of life.

The Concert for Peace and Reconciliation I gave in Wolfson College last February was the first evening recital I had done for a while.  The hall, bounded on one side by an English garden and on the other by a Chinese one, is a beautiful place in which to sing. The audience numbered about thirty and were from various backgrounds.

I was a little nervous at the start, but soon the audience was joining in with me in the songs of the 60's and 70's. When I stopped playing and let them sing unaccompanied, their voices rose up like a force for healing in a broken and troubled world. The Hebrew music was well received-I sang a selection of pieces from the Eve to the Close of the Sabbath with melodies that I learned in my childhood.

The simplest songs also struck home, like Plaisir d'Amour and John Riley;my own favourite was All my Trials, a traditional folk song made famous by Joan Baez. I quote:

'If living were a thing that money could buy, then the rich would live and the poor would die.'

April saw my return to Amsterdam after a long absence. Chava and Liesbeth are two of my closest friends. They were in their 20's when I met them on a summer programme at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1989. Now they are married with several children, some of whom I was meeting for the first time. I stayed in a little hostel right in the centre and enjoyed walking along the canals, looking at the buildings, tall and thin, which are such a hallmark of this beautiful city.

Amsterdam was where Etty Hillesum lived. Etty was a vibrant young Jewish woman, older than Anne Frank. She was a great teacher, reader and linguist and, above all, a writer of diaries.  She perished in the Holocaust also, but in her diaries talks about the time leading to her last days as a time of enormous internal and spiritual growth.

She stresses the need not to hate, but, rather as a mystic abandonning herself to the Divine Will, finds an inner meaning to those terrible dark days.

Was the Holocaust simply a tragic waste of human life, or should we see it as a universal act of salvation for the whole of humankind?

In Peace and Friendship
Have a wonderful summer
Your sister Gila