On a drizzly morning in February 1952, a group of strangers spent 11 hours slowly making their way down Whitehall. They were queuing to view the body of the recently-departed King George VI, lying in state in Westminster Hall.
The group included “a local council official and his wife, a 70-year-old working-class woman, a 16-year-old boy, and his 40-year-old aunt, who seemed to be a woman eking out a living as a part-time charlady”. As the historian Philip Ziegler put it: “The group were strangers at first, but tea and coffee broke down the barriers.” They were overheard to have made remarks to each other such as: “I don’t quite know why I’m here,” and, most tellingly of all, “We couldn’t just let him go like he was anyone else.”
The fact is, we all have – had – a special relationship with the Queen, whether or not we ever got the chance to meet her. Rabbi Israel Mattuck compared that relationship to our relationship with God: it’s not just an abstract awareness-of-existence – there’s an emotional component. We have memories of her family’s simchahs (and non-simchahs). We eagerly awaited pocket money with her likeness on it. We licked a stamp bearing her face every time we posted a letter. We heard her name invoked at football matches. Senior lawyers proudly sought and used the title Queen’s Counsel. Even writing this, I had to go back and correct all my sentences into the past tense. The Queen was simply part of our lives.
This morning, we read the commandment against separating a mother hen from her chicks. The commentator Rabbi Zalman Sorotzkin suggests that the reason the Torah shows such remarkable concern for birds’ family relationships is because of the unique nature of their eggs: “Other species,” he wrote, “give birth to live young who resemble them. Not so for birds. Instead, God implanted in them a powerful love for their young, even though they appear as eggs, inert and without any real signs of life. Thus her anguish would be deep and painful if she saw her eggs being taken from her. This is why the Torah refers to eggs twice in our passage: because they demonstrate mother hen’s powerful love for her eggs even though they look different to her.”
Could there be a better description of Queen Elizabeth’s decades of service, on behalf of 70 million subjects who, like eggs, do not resemble her, yet in whom she took a deep interest and with whom she built a deep connection?
This is the Queen who broadcast a message of succour and perseverance on BBC Children’s Hour in the dark days of 1940; who shed tears with survivors of the Dunblane massacre; who brought hope to the nation with her promise, “We will meet again,” at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
The commandment in our Torah reading this morning concludes with a promise that honouring a mother hen’s powerful love will lengthen our days. The motley crew of strangers – working-class and middle-class, teenager and pensioner – who gathered on Whitehall to pay their respects to George VI bonded over a common humanity. They brought life to a dreary, gloomy, windswept occasion. So too, all of us – monarchist or republican, British citizen or newcomer to these shores – can do likewise by respectfully and reverently marking the demise of Queen Elizabeth II. Since 1952, she has been our nation’s mother-hen, and when we honour the love she held for all of us, her subjects, we will bring life.
Zichronah livrachah: may her memory be for a blessing.
Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber 