It is many years since I heard Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, sung. But the haunting sound of British Jews singing it inside a synagogue at the weekend stopped me in my tracks. Not everyone on the video clip that popped up on my phone seemed to know all the words. But perhaps that partly reflects who is seeking the comfort of collective worship in these frightened days.
Secular Jewish friends who once barely thought about their Jewish identity talk of feeling jolted into doing so now, while profound differences of opinion over the current Israeli government are momentarily bridged. The terrorists who murdered and abducted teenagers at a peace rave, or idealists drawn to live in kibbutzim near Gaza because of their support for cross-border peace projects, didn’t care after all how they voted or what they believed.
