The desert sun is setting and the winds are turning, while I’m staring blankly at the Dead Sea, trying to find the words relevant to this council of heroes whilst still keeping true to myself.

Slowly but surely, the moon creeps up and a little feeling of despair sets in. We’ve just come out of our dialogue with President Herzog and amongst the honour and joy to be taking part somehow it dawned on me that there’s a nonzero chance that our VoP project (our baby!) fades away.

That it doesn’t make a meaningful dent at polarisation in the Jewish world. That it joins the graveyard of Github repositories never to be maintained again.

On my phone, I see the feeling of despair amplified over the Iran deal, and as the conversation leaked into my Jewish WhatsApp group chats, I had to put my phone away again.

Another conversation searching for truth degenerating into a battle of ego. It’s pretty dark now and the moon is pretty faint. But I can just about see the outline of the Jordan valley, where my brother pointed out that 3,298 years ago, Yehoshua stood somewhere near here and mid-battle, with the sun dropping, the enemy about to slip away into the dark, he looked up and told the sun to stop.

Right over Givon, with the moon hanging over the valley just below.  I learnt that Yehoshua didn’t freeze the sky so that heaven would win the war for him, the verse is clear that more of the enemy fell from stones hurled down from above than from any sword.

Heaven could have just ended it. Instead the light went quiet and waited, so that the people would have the hours they needed to finish the fight with their own hands.

Tammuz is a dark month in Jewish history. Notably- the walls of Jerusalem were breached and the first tablets were shattered. But the light never actually set. It went quiet, and it is waiting on us.

Every project we are working on is a piece of that, including the one you’re quietly afraid won’t amount to anything. Some of them will end up dormant, and some of the conversations we start will collapse back into ego before they ever reach truth.

We must start them anyway. What matters is the light we add while we try, not whether the thing survives.
Be’ezrat Hashem tonight on Gimmel Tammuz there’s a brighter proof of that than anything I could ever build or fund: my dear brother, Emmanuel Moshe, is marrying the incredible Clara Liora.

I hope you can join me in wishing them a big mazal tov, please God may they bring more hands to carry the flame of our Jewish history, and for us in the room, let’s go out there and bring some light.

Shabbat shalom