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It’s back in March and I’m with my plucky, hard-working rabbinic colleague Nathalie. She takes me to a viewpoint where we look north across the beautiful, wooded hills. ‘See there,’ she points. ‘That’s the Lebanese border.’

I think of the Psalms about the cedars of Lebanon, planted by God, as Nathalie explains: ‘That’s where Hezbollah fires at us from.’ The well-armed, Iran-backed terror organisation has occupied the region for decades.

‘My children haven’t visited for months,’ Nathalie tells me. "We're so close to the border that there are zero seconds warning when there’s a rocket attack.’ Beyond here, almost everywhere has been evacuated; people don’t know when they’ll return to their homes.

Nathalie and her community are in my daily prayers to ‘God who makes peace in the high places.’ Please also make peace on earth.
I’m mindful, too, of the villagers on the other side of the border. What protection do they have, utterly vulnerable, when Israel strikes back?

‘It’s not as much fun as when I’m with my classmates, testifies Zahra, a sixth-grader Lebanese school girl who’s had to flee her home in Aita Al Shaab and now studies online: ‘I won't forget the sound of the air raid that woke us up that night…I wait for the day when I can go back to my old room.’

Abu Mohammed has had to leave his farm in Aitaroun. No doubt he loves his land. But the conflict has turned it into a frontline zone. How long will it take to turn it back into farmland?

I pray that God ‘who protects refugees’ will look after them too, and everyone forced to flee their homes, whether Druze, Christian, Muslim or Jewish.
We visit a Christian couple from Germany who’ve devoted their lives to looking after Holocaust survivors. I ask them where the group meets. ‘Underground only; it takes too long to get them to the shelter.’

The couple lost their son in this war. I listen to them, brave, gentle, full of faith; I watch the family dog stretch. I think of the prayer Sheikha Ibtisam and Rabbi Tamar, two mothers, one Muslim, one Jewish, wrote together:

God of Life, who heals the broken hearted…May it be your will to hear the prayer of mothers. You did not create us to kill each other, but… to sanctify Your name of Life, your name of Peace in this world.

There are so many broken hearts; I hope they lead us not to bitterness, but to wisdom and mercy.

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