Yom Kippur is a happy day. Ok, you don’t eat, but instead you’re elevated to a truly angelic plane, and you’ve never seen an angel in Burger King, have you, so for 25 hours, it ain’t gonna kill you to fast (STARVE!!!). And it’s happy because, if you take working and eating out of the equation, all that’s left is ‘rest’. And on a spiritual level (where you just KNOW is where I belong), I keep being told that the ‘atonement’ bit of the ‘day of atonement’ is not in the Christian/Catholic sense of the word with confessions and penalties and flagellation and crucifixion, but is about recognising your bad things and deciding to try harder next year. It’s an ‘internal’ thing. But the reality is that you do kind of ‘confess’ and ‘atone’, but all in one day. No need to go visit some pervy old priest in a little box every week. And then, at the end of the day, you get to eat. And it all tastes soooooo much better. And that’s Yom Kippur; starvation, absolution, feasting. What’s not happy about that?

But today was different. I was waiting my chance to absolve my sins when my mate The Legend came in. He’d just seen a video. Someone had attacked a synagogue in Manchester. Killed 2 people. Wounded others. Then shot by police. He was wearing what looked like a suicide vest. And that event, to say the least, took away a significant part of my happiness.

This… jihadi? Murdering fuckwit? Moronic extremist?, had not made a stance for Gaza. He wasn’t attacking the IDF. He didn’t take any action against Israel. He just set out to kill Jews. In this case, rather old (it’s that sort of synagogue, apparently) Mancunian Jews, on the holiest day of the Hebrew calendar. The fucker drove his car into the security guard at the gate, then stabbed him, and a few others. The synagogue had gone into ‘lockdown’ so he couldn’t enter. The police arrived very quickly and, because of the suicide vest, shot him dead. I’d have shot him slowly, but I wasn’t invited.

The security at my synagogue is always quite strict. When I went on my ‘shift’ they were on a different protocol from usual, even stricter. More people. Extra barriers. Regular police patrols. Armed?

But attacks on Jews concerns me. And concerns my children. And would concern my grandchildren but they’re more worried about watching YouTube and playing with Transformers at the moment. But what is their future like in this country? I know that sounds dramatic but there’s a horrible prevailing thought in our community (shared in Canada, France and probably many other countries) at the moment in light of the massive increase in antisemitism. As we sit in our comfortable homes with our lovely lifestyles, you can’t help but ponder: is this how the Jews in Berlin felt in 1933?

Not such a happy Thursday

A xxxx