Dear colleagues

I trust you had an Easter that was blessed and restful, or an anticipated activity-packed break from work, either here or overseas. Ours was very foodie-focused.

With a week off work and lots of gatherings of family and friends over the most significant festival in our Christian calendar, I took the opportunity to offer the annual gift to those who visited & those who were visited, the range of our home-made mix of chick peas, tahini paste and, various preferences including red pepper, lemon and wide-ranging flavourings…………………………. You’ll recognise this as Hummus. Yum!  A most appropriate accompaniment at this time of year, as this Festival party-favourite food is Middle Eastern; it was, it is and it will be, easily available in Jerusalem from years gone, days present and years to-be.

Award-winning Michelin-Star chef Yotam Ottolenghi suggests that we imagine ‘it takes a giant leap of faith, but we are happy to take it, to imagine that hummus will eventually bring Jerusalemites together, if nothing else will’. This, he offers, in the context of food being the unifying factor in such a range of differences and fractured relationships, with limited interaction by neighbours, politicians and faith-groups in the city where currently three of the world’s major faiths hold areas and places as significant in their history.  Like our own country, Jerusalem is a beautifully and historically based multi-cultural, multi-faith and centuries old mixed-coloured, mixed-cultured, mixed-race and mixed-nations country. Jerusalem is our cousin in so many ways. Internationally acclaimed Chef Ottolenghi, a Jew, and Chef Sami Tamini, a Muslim, lived in blissful isolation as children, in the Jewish West and Muslim East of 1970s and 80s Jerusalem. However, they became business partners in the multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-faith London of the 1990s when they discovered and shared their parallel histories.

Enjoy this description of Jerusalem, while perhaps inserting British-relevant contexts as you read:

‘………..there are Greek-Orthodox monks on this city; Russian-Orthodox priests; Hasidic Jews originating from Poland; non-Orthodox Jews from Tunisia, from Libya, from Fance and from Britain; there are Sephardic Jews that have been here for generations; there are Palestinians from the West Bank; there re Ashkenazi Jews from Romania, Germany and Lithuania and more recently arrived Sephardim from Morocco, Iraq, Iran or Turkey; there are Christian Arabs and Armenian Orthodox; there are Yemeni and Ethiopian Jews but there are also Ethiopian Copts; there are Jews from Argentina and others from Southern India; there are Russian nuns looking after monasteries and a whole neighbourhood from Uzbekistan.  All of these, and many more, create and immense tapestry of cuisines.’ 

As we continue to face uncertainties in Europe, The Middle East and further afield, there is hope, that the interconnectedness and common histories of us as people, will triumph over factionalism, ‘othering’ and creating divides rather than bridges.  In this Easter season, may Christian Hope, which is far deeper and wider than hope in the sense of ‘wishful thinking’, prevail.

Thank you for your presence and service in our communities

Jeff