The rabbi, the poet - and the castle of flames

On Seamus Heaney and my first service in a synagogue

Ciaran Hinds reading Seamus Heaney’s letters at the Southbank Centre yesterday

On Saturday, I went to my first ever service in a synagogue. I thought security would be tight, and it was. As soon as I’d got past the guards, a woman flashed me a smile of great warmth. There was coffee and tea here, she said, and the Shabbat morning service was upstairs.

In a big room flooded with light, there were two blocks of chairs. The first, it turned out, was for the regular worshippers. The other was for the guests of the couple whose 20^th wedding anniversary I was there to mark. The men wore skull caps and prayer shawls. I wore my new dress from Saint and Sofia. (I had never heard of it until the dress started flashing up on my Instagram feed. It’s midnight blue. I clicked on it. I thought it sounded vaguely holy and appropriate.)

I had no idea what happened in a Jewish service. I had a vague sense that scrolls were involved in some way, and it turned out they were. I am not sure whether the scroll that was carried carefully out of the cupboard with a curtain, and laid to rest on a kind of altar, was one of the ones that was brought to the synagogue from Prague. Those scrolls include a Torah from 1564 that was brought to London for the Jewish community here, because there was still a Jewish community here. At the start of World War II, there were more than 92000 Jews in Prague. By the end of it, at least two thirds of that community had been wiped out.

The service was in a mix of Hebrew and English. The cantor led the songs and prayers. I didn’t understand the Hebrew or the chanting, but the English translation, of psalms and Genesis and Isaiah and other extracts of books from what I knew as the Old Testament, were familiar to me from my C of E childhood and had the resonance of the King James Bible. The service lasted about two hours. There were moments of humour, and particularly when my friend talked about how he and his wife had learnt to fight better, but for most of it I was fighting to hold back the tears.

At one point the rabbi talked about a “bira doleket”, a castle that could be full of light, or could be in flames. I could feel the anguish in the room: the people who know people whose loved ones have been taken hostage, the people whose nephews or nieces or children or friends or brothers or sisters have now been called up. And, of course, the people who see what’s happening to women and children in Gaza who have never wished violence on anyone, and whose hearts break.

After the service, there was food and conversation and wine, because we all have to eat and because it was a day of celebration as well as of sadness. The rabbi had told us that in the “listening circles” the chair of the synagogue had founded, to help members of the community give voice to their anguish, she had encouraged people to follow their expressions of pain with a statement about what gives them joy. When I heard that, I wanted to cheer. I wanted to say that what had kept me going through the ups and downs of my life, which now feels like a very lucky and luxurious life, has been beauty and joy.

I wasn’t surprised to discover afterwards that the chair of the synagogue is a psychotherapist who used to be a theatre director or that the rabbi is the son of an artist and a poet. The biographical note on the synagogue’s website talks about the “joy and vitality” of his culture and faith.

I don’t know if the rabbi, or the chair of the synagogue, is a fan of Seamus Heaney. I can’t help thinking they would both have loved the event I went to at the Southbank Centre yesterday, to mark the publication of some of Heaney’s letters. The letters have been edited by the poet Christopher Reid, former poetry editor at Faber, who knew Heaney and his work extremely well. I first met Christopher when I worked at Faber in 1988. It must have been around the time I also first met Heaney. Christopher is an excellent editor and an excellent poet, but Heaney was a giant. I don’t think anyone was surprised when he won the Nobel Prize.

It was, for me, an afternoon full of memories and ghosts. After I left Faber, I worked at the Southbank Centre for eight years. As I walked through the bar in the Festival Hall, I had flashes of the evenings I spent there with writers and poets. As part of the literature programme, we used to run about 120 events a year, so it must have been nearly 1000 evenings by the time I left. I met Seamus Heaney many times.

I wrote a tribute to him when he died. I quoted his poem “Personal Helicon”, which explained why he wrote poetry. It was, he said, “To see myself/to set the darkness echoing”. There is certainly plenty of darkness to “set echoing” and there was plenty in the place where he grew up. Heaney was a Catholic from Northern Ireland. He couldn’t avoid the realities of sectarian conflict because no one could. Even as a child growing up in Guildford, I couldn’t. I remember hearing about the IRA bombs in the Horse and Groom and the Seven Stars, which killed five people and injured sixty-five. At one point my sister, who was later diagnosed with schizophrenia, thought she had planted them.

Heaney made his own allegiance clear. “Be advised my passport’s green,” he wrote in his poem “Open Letter”, but he kept away from the politicking and squabbles. “Compose in darkness,” he wrote in his poem “North”. “Expect aurora borealis in the long foray but no cascade of light.” He was clear that poetry can do many things, but that it can’t solve wars.

What emerged in the letters, as they were read, brilliantly, by the actor Ciaran Hinds, was the brilliance, the wit, the kindness of the man. What emerged was the humanity. This was a man who would take the trouble to write scores of letters a week to complete strangers, who was a wonderful father, husband and friend, and still managed to produce a body of work that will stand the test of time.

As I listened to the letters, and to a panel of poets and writers talk about the role Heaney had played in their lives, I was struck, once again, by how rare it is for someone to be both a great artist and a great human. Heaney’s work was full of compassion and light, and so was his life. His letters are a reminder that compassion and light - like friendship, like kindness, like encouragement, like art and like good work of any kind - takes effort.

Seamus Heaney was not a man for false hope. And still, yesterday, I felt hope. The hope I felt was in the reminder to strain every sinew to make poetry, in whatever form it takes for us, out of pain. It was what I felt at the Shabbat service, too. I think we can all see the castle of flames at the moment, but we can also all try to seek and spread the light.