Readers’ Letters: “My poem for a better new year for us all”
Please keep Reuben over rabbi Schochet!
I write to ask if it is at all possible to not bring Rabbi Schochet back to your otherwise lovely newspaper following his summer break. It has been so wonderful to have Rabbi Reuben Livingstone answering questions from readers on your Ask the Rabbi page. He is so civil, sensible, really knowledgeable, understanding, articulate, wise and pleasant. Not to mention respectful and caring. Everything Rabbi Schochet is not! Rabbi Schochet is miserable, cocky and completely disrespectful; not to mention offensive. He is uncouth and not deserving of the title he flouts. He is insensitive and uncaring with a touch of superiority complex. And always offensive! Please do us all a great favour and don’t bring him back. I know I’m not the only one to feel this way. Please keep that mensch Rabbi Livingstone!
David Levy
Stamford Hill
Rabbi is ignorant of the big bang theory
I was fascinated to read Rabbi Reuben Livingstone’s answer to the question posed in his Ask The Rabbi column about the Big Bang (Jewish News, 6 August). He seems far more expert on religion than the theory. The Big Bang was not the moment when the universe was ‘created’, merely the point at which it expanded from very, very, very tiny to enormous. How long it had remained infinitesimally small before that expansion we not only do not know, but quite probably will never know, as many physicists think the Big Bang was the point at which ‘time’ started. The Big Bang theory, therefore, has nothing to say about the creation of whatever was there before it expanded, merely that it was there, just very tiny. As a result, the Big Bang theory does not in and of itself contradict the existence of a creator, and those who suggest otherwise are ignorant of religious belief, or of the theory, or both.
M Franklin
Edgware
Future King may well choose to visit Israel
I write regarding the Israeli President’s invite to Queen Elizabeth to visit Israel. All this inviting and declining has been going on since time immemorial. Let’s face it – to invite with open arms is always good, but one does not want to upset the neighbours. Maybe, with hope, the future monarch will be happy to accept Israel’s invitation.
Leatrice Prince
By email
Biography help on leopold trepper
I’m researching the biography of Leopold Trepper, the Polish master-spy who was the ‘Grand Chef’ of a Communist espionage ring in occupied France, and moved in 1974 to Jerusalem, where he died in 1982. I would like to invite any of your readers who knew Trepper or his relatives, friends or acquaintances, to contact me at sianrees99@yahoo.co.uk
Sian Rees
By email
Tory government gave iran best deal I’m a Labour Party member and put Jeremy Corbyn last in the vote for leader. I could not believe what I read in the 20 August edition of Jewish News: the letter from Martin Greenberg that criticised Mr Corbyn’s character simply because he doesn’t drive like Adolf Hitler! I wonder if Jeremy Corbyn has a partner called Eva Braun! Jews and Israel should be more worried that the Tory government is a signatory to a nuclear agreement with Iran. Most independent observers agree the Iranians got the best of that deal. How humiliating to see a Tory minister grovelling to ayatollahs in Tehran.
Stanley Crause
By email
My poem for a better new year for us all
The end is very near Of 5775,
the current year
A year in which peace has once again eluded
The Middle East, but sadly included
The continuing spread of a violent Islamist Ideology
Which seeks to redraw existing boundaries
And carve up existing countries
Directly threatening the state of Israel
Which does not augur well
For her and the whole civilised world
That is already caught up in the swirl
Of widespread death and displacement
Of countless people, affecting every continent
Please God in the new year, 5776
We can all witness, the eclipse
Of all such terrorist activity
Benefiting all of humanity
I pray that the men and women of violence
Will in 5776, finally be silenced
J D Milaric
By email
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