At just after 8.30pm on Wednesday, after listening to the description of a father listening to his daughter’s last moments as her killers closed in, the congregation assembled at New North London synagogue heard a poem.
The Diameter of the Bomb, written in 1976 by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, describes concentric circles of “of pain and time” after a deadly explosion, ending with the bleak lines: “And I won’t speak at all about the crying of orphans that reaches to the seat of God and from there onward, making the circle without end and without God.”
