On Sunday 1. November 2015 our community will join Christians and Muslims, to mark the 50th Anniversary celebration of Nostra Aetate. At the time it was, on the face of it, a minor theological gesture, yet it brought about one of the greatest revolutions in religious history. Nostra Aetate, the Catholic Church’s 1965 statement of relationships with non-Christian faiths, declared that “the Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed”. Today as a result, Jews and Catholics meet not as enemies but as cherished and respected friends, and this is certainly evident within our own community, where we are blessed to have established close and meaningful ties with the Roman Catholic Bishop, Rev. Alan Hopes, as well as with the membership of his locally based Roman Catholic Cathedral. Sadly though, religiously-motivated violence continues to bring chaos and destruction to the world around us. Christians are suffering the religious equivalent of ethnic NORWICH HEBREW CONGREGATION NEWSLETTER September/October 2015 Volume 29 No.5 2 NORWICH HEBREW CONGREGATION NEWSLETTER NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015 cleansing in countries where they have been a presence for centuries. Meanwhile antisemitism has returned in full force within living memory of the Holocaust. Whilst we may not be able to change the past or even present, there is certainly some scope available to us to shape our very own future. We don’t predict the future; we make the future. Ours is the world’s most compelling faith in free will. In an age when the world moves at such a fast pace people don’t have time during the week to stop and to take stock of their relationships with others, with their families, with themselves, and above all with God. The advent of mass media and mobile technology means that we are all constantly switched on. The whole family sitting together in silence everyone tapping away on their phone lost in their own world has become an all familiar scene. We are so connected, that at times we do not realize how disconnected we actually are, When Abraham was given his instructions to leave his native land, his birth place, and his father’s home to go to a place which he was to be shown, he surely did so in act of total faith. Just like Abraham, most of us are hard wired to the comforts of that which is familiar to us, and we do not submit ourselves easily to change. For those of us however, who took part in the Chief Rabbis’s Shabbat UK initiative last weekend, we were able to appreciate the serene benefits of Shabbat, which were brought about by change. Just as Abraham did, there are moments when we need to engage in acts of faith and disconnect from the routine manner in which we go about living our day to day life in order to bring about positive change. The almighty promised Abraham that his own journey and departure from that which was familiar to him, would be for his own good and his own benefit. So too, last Shabbat we enjoyed the benefits and the good which we shared together as a community during a meaningful and delightful Shabbat UK experience. I wish to thank our President Marian Prinsley and all those who contributed to making last Shabbat a special weekend for us all. Shabbat is what tells us that “man does not live by bread alone but everything that comes from the mouth of God”. Welcoming the Shabbat is an integral part of Judaism, and to do so as part of a community adds value and a sense of connection to the observance itself. Let us join together in an act of faith and continue to switch of the week, and switch on the Shabbat!!
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