I’ve spent the last several weeks, off and on, writing a series of reviews for various journals (the Jewish Quarterly and the weekly Catholic journal, the Tablet). I’ve been able to look at the extraordinary life and work of Abraham Joshua Heschel, the relationship between Jewish philosophy and western culture, as well as consider a Jungian analyst’s views on Israel’s problematic psyche and recent history.
Reviewing is always fun, whatever the content (or even the quality) of the book under review. It gives me an opportunity to immerse myself in another person’s world-view - and this often help cast new light on my own inevitably restricted thinking and subjective perspectives. (This of course is particularly true of fiction). Reviewing also provides an opportunity to discover what I actually think about a topic - because writing requires a self-mining into areas of thinking and feeling that are not necessarily immediately available within the conversations and demands of everyday life. To have to describe and comment on someone else’s thinking and writing helps me sharpen my own wits and refine my own thoughts. Reviewing allows me the space to craft my own vision in response to someone else’s. It is an opportunity for discovery and self-discovery.
But I am always aware when reviewing that someone else has sweated blood to get their thoughts down on paper. So I try to be generous in my responses – or at least not too savage. This is not always easy. Authors are often lazy, incompetent, careless or muddled – and as a reviewer I try to find ways of saying this without being too cruel. I know full well from my own attempts to place words next to each other , one after another - in sentences that make what we like to think of as ‘sense’ – how easy it is to write in ways that are lazy, incompetent, careless and muddled. So I try to temper my judgments with a modicum of compassion for the struggling author.
Since I started writing this blog I’ve appreciated the Comments that (sometimes) appear below – whether they correct me about factual errors I’ve made, or upbraid me for misguided judgments or opinions. This vigour of debate is life-affirming. It is also very Jewish, the culture of argument – not argument for argument sake, which is wearying and dispiriting – but arguing ‘for the sake of heaven’ (l’shem shamayim, as the Mishnah says, 1800 years ago). I was reminded of this while reading Brian Klug’s ‘Offence: The Jewish Case’ (Seagull Books, published in collaboration with Index on Censorship), an essay-length text that speaks forcefully of how ‘Judaism in its depths cries out for outspokenness’.
He defines an ‘argument for the sake of heaven’ succinctly, as one ‘conducted not for its own sake or for the sake of winning but with a view to a higher purpose, such as truth, justice or peace.’ And he links this ethic of truth-disclosing outspokenness with the prophets of Israel, who ‘gave offence to ruler and people alike, discomforting them to the core.’
This sets the bar pretty high, but he is right to do so. We are the heirs to the prophets. It is my view (and I say this as someone who has occasionally caused a degree of passing discomfort to readers or listeners) that we have a moral and religious responsibility to speak out with as much discriminating passion as we can muster on those subjects that come to our attention and demand a response - ‘discriminating’ in the dictionary sense of ‘to use good judgment or discernment’, in other words to have a commitment to attempt to separate out what is true and just from all the compromises, fudges, and hypocrisies that we all fall into, knowingly and unknowingly.
Truth can be frightening (as well as complex) and it is not always welcome - because it can expose us to our own moral shortcomings, or emotional inadequacies, or our own failures to think things through fully and carefully and dispassionately. Truth may well cause discomfort – because it reveals to us what can feel unbearable: our emotional or mental dishonesty, our helplessness, all the ways we hide from facing how things are.
This is one of the reasons why a Jewish culture of debate and discussion would always be in opposition to censorship of words and ideas (and images). Holocaust-deniers may be absurd or odious or deluded figures, their views may even feel threatening or dangerous, but I wouldn’t want to censor their words. Just rigorously expose them – through facts or ridicule (and both if possible).
But the urge to censor comes hand in hand with the wish of all authorities – political, religious, professional – to present themselves in the most favourable manner to a wider public and often to themselves. ‘We would never censor – we just want to shape opinions and avoid controversy and present ourselves in a winning manner by selecting what we tell and what we withhold. Surely there’s no harm in that?’
No harm, except to the truth of things – which is rarely simple and sometimes uncomfortable. Particularly for those in power, or with vested interests in controlling their image in the eyes of others.
Of course there is an innate tension between outspokenness and nuance. And truth is often multiple and nuanced. Situations are rarely black-and-white, as a couple of you pointed out in response to my last blog on the Jewish Chronicle and Michal Kaminski. But what I enjoy about writing a blog (and I hope the reader can tolerate) is that unlike a review – where I think one has a duty to offer a personal response that is informed, thoughtful and measured rather than a bulimic rant – I allow this blog to be a genre where I don’t have to be too protective of my audience, where I don’t have to hold back from feelings and thoughts that I might otherwise hesitate to share. (You can always skip it, or unsubscribe).
I do try to be accurate when it comes to facts, and nuanced when it comes to opinion, but I also enjoy the freedom of self-expressiveness that comes from knowing this isn’t scholarship or academic research. It’s writing as an art form, like composing a piece of music, or sculpting a living form out of inert matter. In other words, it has aesthetic and spiritual designs on its audience. And if ‘designs’ seems too consciously knowing, or even manipulative, let’s just say that this form of writing is more about offering fresh angles of vision, or lifting one’s spirits, or inspiring simple pleasure, than anything else.
Which doesn’t mean that the subject matter is not sometimes about issues of real seriousness. Unlike a sermon, or a book review, the blog (as I think of it) offers the opportunity for discursive outspokenness about what happens to stir my heart or soul or conscience – whether it is about Israel, or politics, people or poetry. And although I find myself still engaging, inevitably, in acts of self-censorship as I write - which is perhaps cowardly, but is probably wise – I feel myself to be writing within a tradition of Jewish self-expressiveness, the Jewish love affair with language and the word, the Jewish knowledge that according to the Kabbalistic mystical tradition, God created the world with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and that we are all combinations of letters in the mind of God, endless outpourings of divine articulation - ‘and God says...and God says...’ - and that our words can have a power and an intelligence that derive from a source we cannot control.
We are spoken, and spoken through.
Tuesday, 27 October 2009
Friday, 16 October 2009
A Small Scandal at the Jewish Chronicle
So, after all the moral self-examination of the High Holy Days, the recognition of ‘our’ failures, individually and as a people, it’s back to business as usual. There is a small scandal afoot in the pages of the Jewish Chronicle and I want to offer some thoughts about it.
Let me share with you a letter I have sent to the paper, which (rather surprisingly perhaps) they have published, albeit in a slightly edited version. It outlines the story so far.
So now we know where we stand. The editor of the JC has been recruited to defend [ that phrase was of course edited out by the JC] the Conservative Party’s alliance with the Polish nationalist MEP Michal Kaminski. Critics of this alliance, including the Labour Party, are ‘Eurofanatics…resorting to the smear tactic’ (October9th).
Martin Bright, the JC’s recently appointed political editor, after an extended interview with Kaminski is clear that ‘Dismissing concerns raised about Mr Kaminski as Labour smears is just not good enough.’ Oh, to have been a fly-on-the-wall at this week’s Editorial meeting.
On 20 March 2001 Kaminski gave an interview to the nationalist Nasza Polska newspaper in which he stated that Poland should not apologise for the murder of the Jews of Jedwabne until Jews apologised for ‘murdering Poles’ during the Soviet wartime occupation of Poland. If Mr Kaminski and his supporters choose to forget, deny or misrepresent his stated views - and are dulled to the moral vacuity of his words – that is one thing, sadly unexceptional when political ambition makes such sleight-of-hand commonplace. But for the editor of this distinguished newspaper actively to collude with and promote this chicanery marks a new moral low for the JC and represents a disservice to Anglo-Jewry.
Let me sketch out some of the background to this surly complaint of mine. The leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, will soon be this country’s Prime Minister. (This is barring some last minute intervention from the Holy One, Blessed Be He, on behalf of the Labour Party – which one has to admit is unlikely, as God has not previously been known to be a Labour supporter (despite rumours to the contrary), although He does, it is said, have a concern for the poor, and an interest in the education of children). Cameron has recently switched his party’s allegiances in the European Parliament, so that British Conservatives now sit within the ‘European Conservatives and Reformists Group’, a collection of far-right nationalists and xenophobes.
These include Roberts Zile of Latvia’s Freedom and Fatherland party, who support the annual (unofficial) parade in Riga honouring the conscripts and volunteers who fought for the Latvian Waffen-SS - among them men who’d already participated in massacres of Jews. An equally unsavoury colleague of the British Conservatives in Europe is Michal Kaminski of Poland’s Law and Order party (motto: ‘Poland for Poles’), who is now head of the grouping in which Cameron’s 25 European colleagues sit.
On July 10th 1941, the 300 Jewish men, woman and children of the Polish town of Jedwabne were herded into a barn by their Polish neighbours - not by the occupying Nazis – and then burned alive. A mini-holocaust within the larger genocidal savagery. When Poland’s president formally apologised for this crime in 2001, on its 60th anniversary, Kaminski was amongst those Poles who disagreed with the apology, a position he defended last week: ‘If you are asking the Polish nation to apologise for the crime...you would require from the whole Jewish nation to apologise for what some Jewish communists did in eastern Poland.’
In last week’s Jewish Chronicle Kaminski also says in his interview with the JC’s political editor that in regard to the Jedwabne pogrom: ‘I think it is unfair comparing it with Nazi crimes...’
So, the small scandal? This is the politician - lacking in moral insight and ethical reflectiveness, and with a previous history of anti-Semitic connections that he now denies - who is being defended by the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, who has been recruited by the Conservatives to help dig them out of the hole, the moral abyss, into which they have fallen. And the editor is using Anglo-Jewry’s leading newspaper as a mini-fiefdom for this personal and political crusade.
How do you rehabilitate Kaminski’s public image? Pollard’s tactics are crude. Although the facts are incontrovertible, you have a job to do – so you defend your Tory friends’ friend by crying out ‘Smears!’ and then smearing those who express their concerns, be they Labour MPs or the President of the Board of Deputies. And Pollard’s trump card? Kaminski is a ‘friend of the Jews’ – and, in particular, a staunch ‘supporter of Israel’. So that’s all right then - and we can all breathe a sigh of relief. And sweep Kaminski’s moral juggling and Cameron’s error of judgment under the table.
This is so pathetic that I appal myself to be writing about it. And yet it does seem to matter to me that Anglo-Jewry’s representative newspaper - for all its faults and inadequacies - is being recruited for this disreputable campaign. In olden days one might have concluded by saying, in dramatic fashion, ‘The Editor Should Resign!’. But of course things don’t work like that any more. For isn’t it all just the cut and thrust of corrupted politics and the selling of newspapers and the unashamed self-promotion of the power-hungry?
It seems absurd in the face of this ‘business as usual’ political and journalistic mess to juxtapose it with this Shabbat’s prophetic reading, from the Book of Isaiah, where the Jewish community is reminded of its role as a ‘light for the nations’, representatives of a particular vision of justice and truth-telling:
‘All the nations assemble together, the peoples gather:
Who amongst them can speak about this, pay attention to what has happened?
Let them produce their witnesses and be proved just,
So that those who hear them can say: “Yes, this is true”.
Actually, you are My witnesses, says the Eternal One...’
(Isaiah 43: 9-10)
But then I suppose the prophetic voice always did seem absurd when brought to bear on the opportunism, power politics and moral delinquency of the day. It was always judged to be out of touch with what is ‘real’, for it offers a different perspective, a radical vision of truth far-removed from the delusional versions of ‘truth’ that we habitually construct. Meanwhile, Kaminski’s and Pollard’s versions of truth are self-serving and self-deceiving. And they need to be exposed.
Let me share with you a letter I have sent to the paper, which (rather surprisingly perhaps) they have published, albeit in a slightly edited version. It outlines the story so far.
So now we know where we stand. The editor of the JC has been recruited to defend [ that phrase was of course edited out by the JC] the Conservative Party’s alliance with the Polish nationalist MEP Michal Kaminski. Critics of this alliance, including the Labour Party, are ‘Eurofanatics…resorting to the smear tactic’ (October9th).
Martin Bright, the JC’s recently appointed political editor, after an extended interview with Kaminski is clear that ‘Dismissing concerns raised about Mr Kaminski as Labour smears is just not good enough.’ Oh, to have been a fly-on-the-wall at this week’s Editorial meeting.
On 20 March 2001 Kaminski gave an interview to the nationalist Nasza Polska newspaper in which he stated that Poland should not apologise for the murder of the Jews of Jedwabne until Jews apologised for ‘murdering Poles’ during the Soviet wartime occupation of Poland. If Mr Kaminski and his supporters choose to forget, deny or misrepresent his stated views - and are dulled to the moral vacuity of his words – that is one thing, sadly unexceptional when political ambition makes such sleight-of-hand commonplace. But for the editor of this distinguished newspaper actively to collude with and promote this chicanery marks a new moral low for the JC and represents a disservice to Anglo-Jewry.
Let me sketch out some of the background to this surly complaint of mine. The leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, will soon be this country’s Prime Minister. (This is barring some last minute intervention from the Holy One, Blessed Be He, on behalf of the Labour Party – which one has to admit is unlikely, as God has not previously been known to be a Labour supporter (despite rumours to the contrary), although He does, it is said, have a concern for the poor, and an interest in the education of children). Cameron has recently switched his party’s allegiances in the European Parliament, so that British Conservatives now sit within the ‘European Conservatives and Reformists Group’, a collection of far-right nationalists and xenophobes.
These include Roberts Zile of Latvia’s Freedom and Fatherland party, who support the annual (unofficial) parade in Riga honouring the conscripts and volunteers who fought for the Latvian Waffen-SS - among them men who’d already participated in massacres of Jews. An equally unsavoury colleague of the British Conservatives in Europe is Michal Kaminski of Poland’s Law and Order party (motto: ‘Poland for Poles’), who is now head of the grouping in which Cameron’s 25 European colleagues sit.
On July 10th 1941, the 300 Jewish men, woman and children of the Polish town of Jedwabne were herded into a barn by their Polish neighbours - not by the occupying Nazis – and then burned alive. A mini-holocaust within the larger genocidal savagery. When Poland’s president formally apologised for this crime in 2001, on its 60th anniversary, Kaminski was amongst those Poles who disagreed with the apology, a position he defended last week: ‘If you are asking the Polish nation to apologise for the crime...you would require from the whole Jewish nation to apologise for what some Jewish communists did in eastern Poland.’
In last week’s Jewish Chronicle Kaminski also says in his interview with the JC’s political editor that in regard to the Jedwabne pogrom: ‘I think it is unfair comparing it with Nazi crimes...’
So, the small scandal? This is the politician - lacking in moral insight and ethical reflectiveness, and with a previous history of anti-Semitic connections that he now denies - who is being defended by the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, who has been recruited by the Conservatives to help dig them out of the hole, the moral abyss, into which they have fallen. And the editor is using Anglo-Jewry’s leading newspaper as a mini-fiefdom for this personal and political crusade.
How do you rehabilitate Kaminski’s public image? Pollard’s tactics are crude. Although the facts are incontrovertible, you have a job to do – so you defend your Tory friends’ friend by crying out ‘Smears!’ and then smearing those who express their concerns, be they Labour MPs or the President of the Board of Deputies. And Pollard’s trump card? Kaminski is a ‘friend of the Jews’ – and, in particular, a staunch ‘supporter of Israel’. So that’s all right then - and we can all breathe a sigh of relief. And sweep Kaminski’s moral juggling and Cameron’s error of judgment under the table.
This is so pathetic that I appal myself to be writing about it. And yet it does seem to matter to me that Anglo-Jewry’s representative newspaper - for all its faults and inadequacies - is being recruited for this disreputable campaign. In olden days one might have concluded by saying, in dramatic fashion, ‘The Editor Should Resign!’. But of course things don’t work like that any more. For isn’t it all just the cut and thrust of corrupted politics and the selling of newspapers and the unashamed self-promotion of the power-hungry?
It seems absurd in the face of this ‘business as usual’ political and journalistic mess to juxtapose it with this Shabbat’s prophetic reading, from the Book of Isaiah, where the Jewish community is reminded of its role as a ‘light for the nations’, representatives of a particular vision of justice and truth-telling:
‘All the nations assemble together, the peoples gather:
Who amongst them can speak about this, pay attention to what has happened?
Let them produce their witnesses and be proved just,
So that those who hear them can say: “Yes, this is true”.
Actually, you are My witnesses, says the Eternal One...’
(Isaiah 43: 9-10)
But then I suppose the prophetic voice always did seem absurd when brought to bear on the opportunism, power politics and moral delinquency of the day. It was always judged to be out of touch with what is ‘real’, for it offers a different perspective, a radical vision of truth far-removed from the delusional versions of ‘truth’ that we habitually construct. Meanwhile, Kaminski’s and Pollard’s versions of truth are self-serving and self-deceiving. And they need to be exposed.
Saturday, 3 October 2009
When the Wind Blows
As I write the winds are blowing and there are gales sweeping in from the Atlantic. It is the first day of the festival of Sukkot, the festival of impermanence, the autumn festival where the desert wanderings of the Israelites, the arrhythmic rhythm of encampment and journeying, following the peripatetic divine Cloud-by-day-Fire-by-night, are remembered and mythologized.
The makeshift sukkah constructed next to one’s home is a reminder of fragility in the midst of what we fondly think of as the solidity of our lives and achievements. Franz Rosenzweig captured the essence of Sukkot’s symbolism when he writes about the sukkah that it ‘serves to remind the people that no matter how solid the house of today may seem, no matter how temptingly it beckons to rest and unimperilled living, it is but a tent which permits only a pause in the long wanderings through the wilderness of centuries’.
In a week that has seen a devastating earthquake in Indonesia and a tsunami hit Samoa, this festival brings with it – in spite of its other title, ‘the Festival of our Rejoicing’ – a harsh undertow of fear and awe. The extent to which we are at the mercy of the power of elemental forces is sobering. And the ways in which ‘nature’ is effected by human actions and choices is of course now a preoccupying concern. Our futures are blowing in the wind.
**
Yom Kippur has come and gone. The annual calling-to-accounts is over, and as in years gone by I found myself wanting to talk about both the futility and the possibilities encoded within it. My sermon at Finchley Reform (www.frsonline.org) was born out of magpie-like reading (particularly texts by the young American novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide earlier this year) and my own view that we need simultaneously on this day to take serious stock of ourselves yet not be too harsh on ourselves – a complex psychological task. We are capable of both massive denial about our blind-spots and failures to live well and honourably - and burdened by self-persecutory guilt about our perceived failures and inadequacies. How do we achieve anything like atonement (at-one-ment) when this is how we are?
Erev Yom Kippur 2009 - sermon
We are in trouble. Big and serious trouble. It might not feel like that at this moment, as you sit here, having left the comfort of your homes , maybe quite full after your pre-Yomtov meal, perhaps in a smart new outfit, and now you are here. And maybe you’re a bit less comfortable here, but it’s nevertheless not the worst of experiences you could imagine (I hope). You might be struggling a bit with the words of the book, you might even be thinking you’ll be glad when the whole thing is over and you can get back to what we undoubtedly think of as our ‘real’ lives come Tuesday morning. So the journey through these 24 hours might be meaningful or meaningless, it might be more an endurance test than a true soul-searching, but we can imagine that either way we’ll get through it, and over it, pretty much unscathed. And things will go on for us much as they were before this strange interruption in our busy lives.
We need to be honest this day, our tradition says, and so we should be honest and say, Yes, this is how it will probably be for us. By Tuesday morning the pious words will have dulled into a blur, and our pious (though possibly heart-felt) intentions will have dissolved like a dream that fades away.
And yet we will still be in trouble. Big and serious trouble. Because we know, in our hearts, that this life of ours, and this ’life-style’ – horrible phrase if you think about it, as if our lives are an extension of the fashion industry – we know in our more clear-sighted moments not only that our own individual lives are finite, and we will one day cease to be here (this is not news, though Yom Kippur perhaps brings it into focus; but we also know that our whole way of life – and this is the newer news – this way of life that we know and cling to and desperately want to see continue into the lives of our children and our children’s children, ‘to the third and fourth generation’, this way of life may also be coming to an end, towards an end.
In this last 12 months or so we have had a wake-up call. It’s been a shock to see the flimsiness of our economic well-being – turbo-capitalism in all its vast and energised magnificence quaking, collapsing in parts, like rows of dominoes, free-market fundamentalism falling in on itself, businesses going bankrupt, banks going bankrupt, jobs lost, work impossible to find, not just here but throughout what we fondly and maybe naively call the ‘developed’ world.
And yes we are hearing about recovery, and all the media are scanning the horizon for signs that life might be getting back to so-called ‘normal’; but it reminds me, this scanning the horizon, of those sailors in centuries gone by who crossed the perilous seas for weeks on end, months on end, and the provisions are running low, and fresh water is almost gone and they are desperate to see the shores of the new world, and they are anxiously scanning the horizon for landfall – and then, blessed relief! : ‘Land Ahoy’ – but when they finally touch shore it’s not the new world they have reached but some uncharted territory and they have been blown off course – thousands of miles off course and they are strangers in a strange land. And who will ever make it back? And it’s sickening, heart-sinking, after all that waiting and hoping. And so we await our return – to prosperity and consumption and these golden days of old, just a year or so ago. And maybe that’ll happen. Business as usual, with a few cuts here and there. But nothing you’d really notice. And if you believe that, or want to believe that, then I wish you well.
Because something in us knows (though we might resist this knowledge) that this mayhem we’ve witnessed is not just about the greed and irresponsibility of financiers or bankers – it is about a malaise in a basic philosophy of life in which we are all implicated. It is about a system of values that has come to place individual desires above the common good. It’s about a system of values that puts the private domain – what I want, what I think I need, what I feel I have a ‘right’ to – above the collective well-being.
In this country cheap credit and the housing boom made possible the private pursuit of self-expression and self-gratification as the content of a good life. Just think of the number of make-over programmes that you’ve been able to see on TV – you can transform your house, your garden, your career, your social skills, your intimate relationships, your body and physical looks... We’ve come to think of this kind of modern freedom of choice as liberating and empowering. We want to be authors of our own lives – and of course there are ways in which this kind of personal autonomy can be transformative and needs to be nurtured and supported.
But maybe we are discovering that unbridled individualism – disconnected from our sense of ourselves as part of a wider community to which we are responsible – such unchecked concentration on our own needs (or what we think are our needs) is actually isolating and disempowering and ends up being destructive. As the economic system that has sustained this model of individualism begins to totter, we see how brittle this way of life that we’ve bought into, literally and figuratively, how fragile and soulless it actually is. That it’s devoid of any real and substantial meaning.
We’ve caught a glimpse this last year of a truth that we probably can’t bear to look at for more than a moment. That what we consume will eat us alive. Consumption is now what we believe in – it’s where we put our faith. But whether it’s shopping our way to happiness, or investing in property, or the consumption of the earth’s resources, consumerism is not only a form of addiction, it is a form of idolatry, to use an old-fashioned word. (But on Yom Kippur we have a lot of old-fashioned words on display, so I might as well slip this one in as well).
Judaism has always maintained – and it’s a hard and demanding faith in this respect – but it is based on an idea that if you are putting your basic trust in what you own, what you can possess, what you can grab with your own two hands – if you put your faith in the material world, you’ve missed the point. That this way of thinking about our purpose here in the world is fundamentally askew. Yes, you can enjoy the material world, you can own and possess things of this world, you can and even should celebrate what you have, what you make, what you possess, be grateful for it – but don’t imagine it’s where your security comes from. Don’t believe in it.
That’s what that great Biblical line means - ‘You shall have no other gods before Me’ (Exodus 20:3) – it was a recognition very early on in our history, our faith, that the temptations of idolatry are always here and around us. But we never think it is idolatry. We just think it’s the way things are. Just how life is. ‘We aren’t idol worshippers’ we tell ourselves indignantly . ‘We are Jews – we don’t believe in idols’, that’s for primitive people, and we are sophisticated. We don’t worship new fashions, new looks, new cars, new technological gadgets, new holiday destinations, all the ‘just-haves’ that are dreamed up just for us ( and a million others) – this isn’t idolatry, it’s not cannibalism – it’s just personal choices, how our hunger gets satisfied. It’s how we want to live. ‘There’s no sin in it’, we say, colloquially, anxiously. Our anxiety betraying some deeper awareness in us.
It was the great Jewish teacher Franz Rosenzweig who described our modern dilemma – nearly a century ago now: ‘Names change, but polytheism continues. Culture and civilisation, people and state, nation and race, art and science, economy and class, ethos and religion – here you have what is certainly an incomplete list of the pantheon of our contemporary gods. Who will deny the reality of these powers?’ - and I think now we can add technology and the media – ‘No ‘idolater’ has ever worshipped his idols with greater devotion and faith’, he continues, ‘than that displayed by modern man towards his gods...a continual battle has been going on to this very day in the mind of man between the worship of the One and the many. Its outcome is never certain.’ (cf N. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig, p.277; also Sense of Belonging, p.207)
Eloquent words from a master teaching and thinker. But he’s got us in one paragraph.
You know, maybe we’re going to get lucky. Maybe this financial mayhem will prove manageable, maybe as the world leaders meet and deliberate in their G20 meetings and in Copenhagen in December they are going to be able to steer the huge super tanker we are on, steer it around divergent national interests and find ways of addressing climate change, and chronic poverty and disease, and ineffective global governance. Maybe they will overcome narrow agendas and populist temptations. Maybe.
Or maybe this wake-up call will be followed by falling deeper asleep. Maybe what we have glimpsed this past year will prove too frightening to face full on. Because we have seen how we collectively came to the brink of catastrophe - and found our way through this time. But has this been a warning? That when a tipping point is reached, and the dominoes begin to fall, the change is rapid and while it is going on, unstoppable. That things can get out of control very fast. And what if this last year’s collapse in the financial world is a pre-figuration of that other great drama of our times and our lives, the environmental and ecological problems we face?
Have we maybe had a picture of the way in which fissures and fractures that are in the system but undetected – perhaps know about by a few prescient souls (and there were some economists who clearly saw the dangers) but whose words were drowned out by the prevailing wisdom, the prevailing faith in the system, which was a pseudo-faith – have we had a warning picture of how climate change will one day tip over from slow and incremental into sudden and dramatic?
Those dust storms in Australia last week are an almost too convenient metaphor for a hellish vision of a society at the mercy of a sudden irruption of choking chaos into daily lives. And if we reach that point, no amount of ‘quantative easing’ is going to push back the rising tides or get us out of the mess. There will be no second chance to get it right.
And this is where we switch off. This is where we feel the need to fall asleep. We know all this, we say. Climate change, blah blah blah. The politicians will sort it out. Technology will sort it out. Well Barack Obama is only human (in spite of rumours to the contrary). Nor am I sure that faith in the great god ‘technology’ will sort this one for us.
So where does that lead us, today on Yom Kippur? This is a day that strips away our pretensions. Where can we hide? We are naked before the truth of things (‘Truth’ is one of the names of God in our tradition). If we worship money and possessions – if this is where we put our faith and what we think give our life real meaning and value - we will never feel we have enough. If we worship our body and looks – we will always feel ugly. If we worship power, like to dominate and be in charge – we will always secretly feel weak and afraid. If we worship our intellects, like to feel smart, be seen as clever – we will end up feeling stupid and fraudulent, always waiting to be found out and exposed. These are the kinds of worship, idolatry, that we just slip into, they become default settings in the psyche. And change is really, really difficult.
I do think though that Yom Kippur can easily make us feel more guilty, by heaping on us expectations beyond our human capabilities. Perhaps we have to start by acknowledging how little we can do, and sometimes how little we care about how little we can do. Perhaps what is needed of us today is a little honesty: about our smallness of vision, our limited compassion, our threadbare belief that any of these pious words we say today will make any difference to how we think and live, let alone how the world is. Perhaps the best we can do is struggle to expose lies when we hear them, and then strive for the preservation of some human values, if only in ourselves.
It’s so easy to hide. We have busy lives, lots of responsibilities – for family, colleagues; to friends or the community – how much time can we give to the great moral demands of our times? And yet maybe it is here, in the midst of our busy lives, that we have to begin. Perhaps we have to be quite modest in our expectations. Take the pressure off us so that we do not live so freighted by guilt, so burdened by all we fail to do. If we aren’t going to live completely swamped by the dominant, bullying ethos of our time, the ethos of individualism and personal autonomy, maybe we have to come back to our daily lives, and work at our attention and awareness , with discipline and effort, and find ways to truly care for other people, to make sacrifices, to have less so that we can be more. More compassionate, more altruistic, more self-limiting in what we consume and imagine we ‘must-have’.
In a myriad petty little unsexy ways every day there are small choices to make – and maybe that doesn’t sound grandly inspirational. Look after the people around you: in your family, at work, neighbours, our own community here. Look after yourself by giving more and taking less. Perhaps it sounds pretty humble stuff, small scale rather than grand gestures and noble ideals. Perhaps it is rather down-to-earth and humbling. No headlines in it. No 15 minutes of fame. But perhaps it’s where we start, today, tomorrow, and Tuesday morning. Perhaps. Samuel Beckett once said that his favourite word was ‘perhaps’.
Perhaps our salvation begins by recognising our smallness and our limitations. But better honest doubt and small gestures (of love and care, when we can) than grandiose schemes and crazed self-assuring noises about how things ‘have’ to be and ‘must’ be done...
We want to live in a world with simple answers and predictable consequences, a rule-bound universe where we are clear about cause and effect, right and wrong, ‘good’ and ‘evil’. We want pills to solve complex problems – personal or societal. We want magic and over-the-rainbow happy endings. (The decline of traditional religious belief has seen our human need for stories replaced with devotion to J.R.R.Tolkein and J.K.Rowling). We want to live in a re-enchanted world not a disenchanted world.
Jewish tradition – from the Bible through to the liturgy we read today – sometimes seems to offer simple narratives and clear and stark choices – ‘See, today, I offer you life and good, death and evil...I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse... Choose life! ’(Deuteronomy 30: 15/19) . We read this text on Yom Kippur morning. Yet only when we read these texts and listen to these stories with impoverished imaginations do we believe these words are simple, their meanings straightforward. Words are never transparent. They are like signposts, pointing the way forwards.
Our tradition does give us clues about how to live, clues but not solutions. The clue is ‘Choose life’ – but the solution, that’s to be found only in your heart. Today, Yom Kippur, we have the time and space to listen in to our hearts. We know the trouble we are in – and we know what we need to do. We know, we know. There is no magic – there is just mystery, and the adventure of doing what we know to be true.
The makeshift sukkah constructed next to one’s home is a reminder of fragility in the midst of what we fondly think of as the solidity of our lives and achievements. Franz Rosenzweig captured the essence of Sukkot’s symbolism when he writes about the sukkah that it ‘serves to remind the people that no matter how solid the house of today may seem, no matter how temptingly it beckons to rest and unimperilled living, it is but a tent which permits only a pause in the long wanderings through the wilderness of centuries’.
In a week that has seen a devastating earthquake in Indonesia and a tsunami hit Samoa, this festival brings with it – in spite of its other title, ‘the Festival of our Rejoicing’ – a harsh undertow of fear and awe. The extent to which we are at the mercy of the power of elemental forces is sobering. And the ways in which ‘nature’ is effected by human actions and choices is of course now a preoccupying concern. Our futures are blowing in the wind.
**
Yom Kippur has come and gone. The annual calling-to-accounts is over, and as in years gone by I found myself wanting to talk about both the futility and the possibilities encoded within it. My sermon at Finchley Reform (www.frsonline.org) was born out of magpie-like reading (particularly texts by the young American novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide earlier this year) and my own view that we need simultaneously on this day to take serious stock of ourselves yet not be too harsh on ourselves – a complex psychological task. We are capable of both massive denial about our blind-spots and failures to live well and honourably - and burdened by self-persecutory guilt about our perceived failures and inadequacies. How do we achieve anything like atonement (at-one-ment) when this is how we are?
Erev Yom Kippur 2009 - sermon
We are in trouble. Big and serious trouble. It might not feel like that at this moment, as you sit here, having left the comfort of your homes , maybe quite full after your pre-Yomtov meal, perhaps in a smart new outfit, and now you are here. And maybe you’re a bit less comfortable here, but it’s nevertheless not the worst of experiences you could imagine (I hope). You might be struggling a bit with the words of the book, you might even be thinking you’ll be glad when the whole thing is over and you can get back to what we undoubtedly think of as our ‘real’ lives come Tuesday morning. So the journey through these 24 hours might be meaningful or meaningless, it might be more an endurance test than a true soul-searching, but we can imagine that either way we’ll get through it, and over it, pretty much unscathed. And things will go on for us much as they were before this strange interruption in our busy lives.
We need to be honest this day, our tradition says, and so we should be honest and say, Yes, this is how it will probably be for us. By Tuesday morning the pious words will have dulled into a blur, and our pious (though possibly heart-felt) intentions will have dissolved like a dream that fades away.
And yet we will still be in trouble. Big and serious trouble. Because we know, in our hearts, that this life of ours, and this ’life-style’ – horrible phrase if you think about it, as if our lives are an extension of the fashion industry – we know in our more clear-sighted moments not only that our own individual lives are finite, and we will one day cease to be here (this is not news, though Yom Kippur perhaps brings it into focus; but we also know that our whole way of life – and this is the newer news – this way of life that we know and cling to and desperately want to see continue into the lives of our children and our children’s children, ‘to the third and fourth generation’, this way of life may also be coming to an end, towards an end.
In this last 12 months or so we have had a wake-up call. It’s been a shock to see the flimsiness of our economic well-being – turbo-capitalism in all its vast and energised magnificence quaking, collapsing in parts, like rows of dominoes, free-market fundamentalism falling in on itself, businesses going bankrupt, banks going bankrupt, jobs lost, work impossible to find, not just here but throughout what we fondly and maybe naively call the ‘developed’ world.
And yes we are hearing about recovery, and all the media are scanning the horizon for signs that life might be getting back to so-called ‘normal’; but it reminds me, this scanning the horizon, of those sailors in centuries gone by who crossed the perilous seas for weeks on end, months on end, and the provisions are running low, and fresh water is almost gone and they are desperate to see the shores of the new world, and they are anxiously scanning the horizon for landfall – and then, blessed relief! : ‘Land Ahoy’ – but when they finally touch shore it’s not the new world they have reached but some uncharted territory and they have been blown off course – thousands of miles off course and they are strangers in a strange land. And who will ever make it back? And it’s sickening, heart-sinking, after all that waiting and hoping. And so we await our return – to prosperity and consumption and these golden days of old, just a year or so ago. And maybe that’ll happen. Business as usual, with a few cuts here and there. But nothing you’d really notice. And if you believe that, or want to believe that, then I wish you well.
Because something in us knows (though we might resist this knowledge) that this mayhem we’ve witnessed is not just about the greed and irresponsibility of financiers or bankers – it is about a malaise in a basic philosophy of life in which we are all implicated. It is about a system of values that has come to place individual desires above the common good. It’s about a system of values that puts the private domain – what I want, what I think I need, what I feel I have a ‘right’ to – above the collective well-being.
In this country cheap credit and the housing boom made possible the private pursuit of self-expression and self-gratification as the content of a good life. Just think of the number of make-over programmes that you’ve been able to see on TV – you can transform your house, your garden, your career, your social skills, your intimate relationships, your body and physical looks... We’ve come to think of this kind of modern freedom of choice as liberating and empowering. We want to be authors of our own lives – and of course there are ways in which this kind of personal autonomy can be transformative and needs to be nurtured and supported.
But maybe we are discovering that unbridled individualism – disconnected from our sense of ourselves as part of a wider community to which we are responsible – such unchecked concentration on our own needs (or what we think are our needs) is actually isolating and disempowering and ends up being destructive. As the economic system that has sustained this model of individualism begins to totter, we see how brittle this way of life that we’ve bought into, literally and figuratively, how fragile and soulless it actually is. That it’s devoid of any real and substantial meaning.
We’ve caught a glimpse this last year of a truth that we probably can’t bear to look at for more than a moment. That what we consume will eat us alive. Consumption is now what we believe in – it’s where we put our faith. But whether it’s shopping our way to happiness, or investing in property, or the consumption of the earth’s resources, consumerism is not only a form of addiction, it is a form of idolatry, to use an old-fashioned word. (But on Yom Kippur we have a lot of old-fashioned words on display, so I might as well slip this one in as well).
Judaism has always maintained – and it’s a hard and demanding faith in this respect – but it is based on an idea that if you are putting your basic trust in what you own, what you can possess, what you can grab with your own two hands – if you put your faith in the material world, you’ve missed the point. That this way of thinking about our purpose here in the world is fundamentally askew. Yes, you can enjoy the material world, you can own and possess things of this world, you can and even should celebrate what you have, what you make, what you possess, be grateful for it – but don’t imagine it’s where your security comes from. Don’t believe in it.
That’s what that great Biblical line means - ‘You shall have no other gods before Me’ (Exodus 20:3) – it was a recognition very early on in our history, our faith, that the temptations of idolatry are always here and around us. But we never think it is idolatry. We just think it’s the way things are. Just how life is. ‘We aren’t idol worshippers’ we tell ourselves indignantly . ‘We are Jews – we don’t believe in idols’, that’s for primitive people, and we are sophisticated. We don’t worship new fashions, new looks, new cars, new technological gadgets, new holiday destinations, all the ‘just-haves’ that are dreamed up just for us ( and a million others) – this isn’t idolatry, it’s not cannibalism – it’s just personal choices, how our hunger gets satisfied. It’s how we want to live. ‘There’s no sin in it’, we say, colloquially, anxiously. Our anxiety betraying some deeper awareness in us.
It was the great Jewish teacher Franz Rosenzweig who described our modern dilemma – nearly a century ago now: ‘Names change, but polytheism continues. Culture and civilisation, people and state, nation and race, art and science, economy and class, ethos and religion – here you have what is certainly an incomplete list of the pantheon of our contemporary gods. Who will deny the reality of these powers?’ - and I think now we can add technology and the media – ‘No ‘idolater’ has ever worshipped his idols with greater devotion and faith’, he continues, ‘than that displayed by modern man towards his gods...a continual battle has been going on to this very day in the mind of man between the worship of the One and the many. Its outcome is never certain.’ (cf N. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig, p.277; also Sense of Belonging, p.207)
Eloquent words from a master teaching and thinker. But he’s got us in one paragraph.
You know, maybe we’re going to get lucky. Maybe this financial mayhem will prove manageable, maybe as the world leaders meet and deliberate in their G20 meetings and in Copenhagen in December they are going to be able to steer the huge super tanker we are on, steer it around divergent national interests and find ways of addressing climate change, and chronic poverty and disease, and ineffective global governance. Maybe they will overcome narrow agendas and populist temptations. Maybe.
Or maybe this wake-up call will be followed by falling deeper asleep. Maybe what we have glimpsed this past year will prove too frightening to face full on. Because we have seen how we collectively came to the brink of catastrophe - and found our way through this time. But has this been a warning? That when a tipping point is reached, and the dominoes begin to fall, the change is rapid and while it is going on, unstoppable. That things can get out of control very fast. And what if this last year’s collapse in the financial world is a pre-figuration of that other great drama of our times and our lives, the environmental and ecological problems we face?
Have we maybe had a picture of the way in which fissures and fractures that are in the system but undetected – perhaps know about by a few prescient souls (and there were some economists who clearly saw the dangers) but whose words were drowned out by the prevailing wisdom, the prevailing faith in the system, which was a pseudo-faith – have we had a warning picture of how climate change will one day tip over from slow and incremental into sudden and dramatic?
Those dust storms in Australia last week are an almost too convenient metaphor for a hellish vision of a society at the mercy of a sudden irruption of choking chaos into daily lives. And if we reach that point, no amount of ‘quantative easing’ is going to push back the rising tides or get us out of the mess. There will be no second chance to get it right.
And this is where we switch off. This is where we feel the need to fall asleep. We know all this, we say. Climate change, blah blah blah. The politicians will sort it out. Technology will sort it out. Well Barack Obama is only human (in spite of rumours to the contrary). Nor am I sure that faith in the great god ‘technology’ will sort this one for us.
So where does that lead us, today on Yom Kippur? This is a day that strips away our pretensions. Where can we hide? We are naked before the truth of things (‘Truth’ is one of the names of God in our tradition). If we worship money and possessions – if this is where we put our faith and what we think give our life real meaning and value - we will never feel we have enough. If we worship our body and looks – we will always feel ugly. If we worship power, like to dominate and be in charge – we will always secretly feel weak and afraid. If we worship our intellects, like to feel smart, be seen as clever – we will end up feeling stupid and fraudulent, always waiting to be found out and exposed. These are the kinds of worship, idolatry, that we just slip into, they become default settings in the psyche. And change is really, really difficult.
I do think though that Yom Kippur can easily make us feel more guilty, by heaping on us expectations beyond our human capabilities. Perhaps we have to start by acknowledging how little we can do, and sometimes how little we care about how little we can do. Perhaps what is needed of us today is a little honesty: about our smallness of vision, our limited compassion, our threadbare belief that any of these pious words we say today will make any difference to how we think and live, let alone how the world is. Perhaps the best we can do is struggle to expose lies when we hear them, and then strive for the preservation of some human values, if only in ourselves.
It’s so easy to hide. We have busy lives, lots of responsibilities – for family, colleagues; to friends or the community – how much time can we give to the great moral demands of our times? And yet maybe it is here, in the midst of our busy lives, that we have to begin. Perhaps we have to be quite modest in our expectations. Take the pressure off us so that we do not live so freighted by guilt, so burdened by all we fail to do. If we aren’t going to live completely swamped by the dominant, bullying ethos of our time, the ethos of individualism and personal autonomy, maybe we have to come back to our daily lives, and work at our attention and awareness , with discipline and effort, and find ways to truly care for other people, to make sacrifices, to have less so that we can be more. More compassionate, more altruistic, more self-limiting in what we consume and imagine we ‘must-have’.
In a myriad petty little unsexy ways every day there are small choices to make – and maybe that doesn’t sound grandly inspirational. Look after the people around you: in your family, at work, neighbours, our own community here. Look after yourself by giving more and taking less. Perhaps it sounds pretty humble stuff, small scale rather than grand gestures and noble ideals. Perhaps it is rather down-to-earth and humbling. No headlines in it. No 15 minutes of fame. But perhaps it’s where we start, today, tomorrow, and Tuesday morning. Perhaps. Samuel Beckett once said that his favourite word was ‘perhaps’.
Perhaps our salvation begins by recognising our smallness and our limitations. But better honest doubt and small gestures (of love and care, when we can) than grandiose schemes and crazed self-assuring noises about how things ‘have’ to be and ‘must’ be done...
We want to live in a world with simple answers and predictable consequences, a rule-bound universe where we are clear about cause and effect, right and wrong, ‘good’ and ‘evil’. We want pills to solve complex problems – personal or societal. We want magic and over-the-rainbow happy endings. (The decline of traditional religious belief has seen our human need for stories replaced with devotion to J.R.R.Tolkein and J.K.Rowling). We want to live in a re-enchanted world not a disenchanted world.
Jewish tradition – from the Bible through to the liturgy we read today – sometimes seems to offer simple narratives and clear and stark choices – ‘See, today, I offer you life and good, death and evil...I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse... Choose life! ’(Deuteronomy 30: 15/19) . We read this text on Yom Kippur morning. Yet only when we read these texts and listen to these stories with impoverished imaginations do we believe these words are simple, their meanings straightforward. Words are never transparent. They are like signposts, pointing the way forwards.
Our tradition does give us clues about how to live, clues but not solutions. The clue is ‘Choose life’ – but the solution, that’s to be found only in your heart. Today, Yom Kippur, we have the time and space to listen in to our hearts. We know the trouble we are in – and we know what we need to do. We know, we know. There is no magic – there is just mystery, and the adventure of doing what we know to be true.
Friday, 25 September 2009
Rosh Hashanah - the New Year
A man is walking on a tightrope. From below, he looks like a speck of moving dust, or perhaps a bird hovering over the city. He can hardly be seen. But someone is there. A man is walking on a tightrope – and he is a quarter of a mile off the ground. It has become an iconic image. Step by step, smiling, he moves, attentive and graceful, between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre on a wire an inch thick, less than the width of this book in my hand. Back and forward, step by step, with a sensation of limitless freedom. It is 1974.
The French tightrope walker Philippe Petit wrote a book about his art, A Walk In The Clouds. And you may well have seen the wonderful documentary about him, Man On Wire. And when in the film you see this person, alone on the wire, balanced between movement and stillness, defenceless against sudden gusts of wind, one step away from death – strangely, you do not think of death. You think of life – how fragile it is, how precious it is, and how wonderful it might be to walk through life like Philippe Petit on his high-wire, taking hold of his life and living it ‘in all its exhilarating immediacy, in all its joy’, moment by moment. (cf. Paul Auster, The Red Notebook, Faber & Faber, p. 98).
This evening we pause on our journey, our high wire act – though we don’t usually think of it like that as we make our way through the world, striding along confidently , but every step just a heartbeat away from death. Or worse. We think the ground is solid beneath our feet. We like to feel secure, to avoid too many risks, or at least to take what we think of as manageable, insurable risks. We like to feel in control. But this evening as we pause, as the old year dies and the new year comes into being, comes to life; as we pause at the cusp between what’s past and what’s to come, our unknown (and unknowable) future, we can stop for a few moments and ask ourselves: How do we live our lives: fearless – or fearful ? one step at a time, paying attention to the moment, or in a headlong rush?
Rosh Hashanah is known by many names. Yom Ha-Zikkaron, the day of Remembering; Yom Teruah, the Day of waking up; Yom Ha-Din – the Day of Judgement, with the scales balancing our deeds, weighing up our lives, what has substance and what is ephemeral. And although we stride resolutely through these days together, in community, they are still here for each one of us, individually.
And they are called, these ten days, the Yomim Noraim – The Days of Awe, because they are about the most wondrous and poignant realities: what it means to be a human being, fragile, dependent, fallible – Man On Wire, Woman On Wire - so insignificant in the vast scheme of things and yet so significant. For no-one like us, like me or like you, has ever existed before, or ever will. And does this have any meaning, this uniqueness that each of us is with our own special amalgam of doubts and insecurities, our worries, our foibles and guilt, our sadnesses and failures, our frustrations, our loneliness and secret sorrows as well as our great need for connectedness and belonging and security and hope. What does it mean to be a human being, full of astonishing consciousness and creativity, alive on a small precious, precarious planet on the edge of the universe? What does it mean to be suspended over the void, like Philippe Petit, our bare and naked mortal selves, flesh and blood and mind and heart and spirit, and we have to make the best of it we can, moment by moment? On our own, and sometimes with each other. Huddled against the darkness, the abyss. Is this it? Is this all there is? The gravity-defying high wire act we can life?
Or is there something else as well, something we can turn to, turn towards? After all, we began this service with the words ‘In the twilight of the vanishing year we turn to You...We come into Your presence together with all other holy congregations of Your people’ (Machzor p.131). Are we on this dizzying journey through life alone? Or is there some kind of presence, or energy, or awareness that we can become aware of, attune ourselves to, a presence that we can come into, or let come into us? Something that sustains us, nurtures us, keeps us going when all seems lost, when we feel we are going to fall (into a depression or a bad mood, or feelings of hopelessness or resentment or inadequacy) – is there something that holds us up, that keeps us alive and breathing, breathing moment by moment, literally inspires us? Is there something else? Can we feel the wire, as thin as a finger as broad as an ocean? Can we trust it will support us as we inch our way forward? Impossible to believe in and yet we’ve come this evening seeking it – tentatively, maybe reluctantly, quizzically, shyly – we have come here this evening for something that helps us touch the mystery, helps us touch, and be touched by, that which supports us all in this perilous adventure we call life.
We Jews have this extraordinary mythology, story, a way of seeing the world: we have created a period of time to reflect on these questions, questions about our lives that we know are short and fleeting and without significance until we fill them with significance. We’ve created this New Year and along with all the other names we give it, we say that it celebrates ‘the birthday of the world’ – yom harat olam - not the birthday of the Jewish people mind you, nothing so small-scale and ethnocentric as that. No, we take it upon ourselves to celebrate ‘the birthday of the world’ - which means a day, two days, to remember that we live on a planet that has a history, a past, that started in unimaginably powerful explosions of densities of matter and energy, unimaginable heat and chaos and eons of cooling and congealing and forming itself into rock and water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen and hydrogen and oxygen and all the rest in multitudes of combinations and re-combinations, and the slow, slow evolution of a planet, with a special state-of-the-art air-conditioning system that allowed the slow, slow evolution of microscopic life forms and photosynthesis and the slow, slow evolution out of the seas, onto the land, millennia after millennia, primitive life, evolving – Richard Dawkins is of course right to emphasise, over and over again, this is what happened, this is how it happened, the infinitely slow evolution of slime into life, sea creatures, land creatures, apes, creatures that had hands and legs and fingers that could hold objects – what a glory! – and millennia pass and then – and it is like a miracle, we can describe it without understanding what it means - like a miracle there is us, tribes of us with our migraines and our iPods, us, able to reflect on it all, tell stories about it all, create a new year to celebrate it all, wonder about it all, wonder about our part in it all, our role in it all. Our responsibility in it all.
Because we gather here this evening for many reasons – Rosh Hashanah is about many things, it’s about getting the honey cake recipe right, and making sure the kneidlach aren’t like cannonballs, it is about family recipes and family gatherings and remembering those who are no longer with us; and it’s about friendship and community, and tradition. It’s maybe also about duty or habit – but underneath all these there is something else that brings us here, I think, brings us together: a sense of gratitude and feeling of responsibility. If we are here and have what we call life, and everything is not just random, it must have a purpose.
And there must be something that sustains it all, that keeps the whole show going. We have come to call this something God, Adonai, The One who is, That which Is, and this is what we turn to in these days of Awe. ‘We come into Your presence’, we let this presence come into us, the awareness of life, mysterious, unfolding moment by moment, as we breathe, in and out, and sense there is a spirit that animates us and all of being, that keeps us on the wire. This is the daily miracle, that we daily forget. And what it means – and this is the great Jewish contribution to human development – it means that we carry a sense of responsibility: that how we live, with each other and in the world, makes a difference. A difference to this unfolding drama of life on earth. By the way, this doesn’t mean you have to believe in a Creator, or a Designer, and I’m not speaking about ‘intelligent design’, because there is nothing intelligent about nature ‘red in tooth and claw’(Tennyson), or supernovae, or tsunamis or cancer.
But I’m talking about the ways in which we are drawn here this evening, in spite of our doubts and confusion, because we sense and want to sense the sustaining power that underlies and animates the universe and us within it, and this sense (which doesn’t necessarily make rational sense and doesn’t need to) this deeper sense in us blossoms into a sense of responsibility for what happens in this complex, inexplicable turmoil of a life on planet earth.
We sense that we aren’t in charge - but we can make a difference. And we come because, in spite of all our unbelief, we still believe, as Jews, that we have a job to do. That we Jews have a purpose and a destiny. Life can be crushingly unjust but we are capable of acting justly. Life can be unspeakably cruel but we are capable of acting with compassion and generosity. Life can be harsh and meaningless but we are capable of relieving hardship and creating meaning. That’s our purpose, our destiny, what we are doing here.
On Rosh Hashanah we remember – Yom Ha-Zikkaron – that it is all up to us. Remember from this last year, Obama’s presidential words – ‘Yes, we can’. You can’t get more Jewish than that. It is possible to balance on the wire, amidst the storms around us – whether it is illness, or loss, financial uncertainty, environmental uncertainty – and know, in the words of Gregory Solomon in Arthur Miller’s ‘The Price’: ‘Jews been acrobats since the beginning of the world’. We’ve learnt the high wire act of survival, of faith in our ourselves and our responsibilities, and we’ve learnt too – however daunting the task may appear, however unstable we feel in ourselves, or insecure as a people - we’ve learnt with Nachman of Bratslav : “Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar mo’ed , the whole world is a very narrow bridge, a very narrow wire, v’haikkar lo lefached klal, but the main thing is not to feel afraid”.
As the New Year comes into life, we treasure our being alive in it. And we look to the future, the next steps on the way, with hope, with confidence, with and even with a spring in our steps.
Sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London: September 18th 2009
The French tightrope walker Philippe Petit wrote a book about his art, A Walk In The Clouds. And you may well have seen the wonderful documentary about him, Man On Wire. And when in the film you see this person, alone on the wire, balanced between movement and stillness, defenceless against sudden gusts of wind, one step away from death – strangely, you do not think of death. You think of life – how fragile it is, how precious it is, and how wonderful it might be to walk through life like Philippe Petit on his high-wire, taking hold of his life and living it ‘in all its exhilarating immediacy, in all its joy’, moment by moment. (cf. Paul Auster, The Red Notebook, Faber & Faber, p. 98).
This evening we pause on our journey, our high wire act – though we don’t usually think of it like that as we make our way through the world, striding along confidently , but every step just a heartbeat away from death. Or worse. We think the ground is solid beneath our feet. We like to feel secure, to avoid too many risks, or at least to take what we think of as manageable, insurable risks. We like to feel in control. But this evening as we pause, as the old year dies and the new year comes into being, comes to life; as we pause at the cusp between what’s past and what’s to come, our unknown (and unknowable) future, we can stop for a few moments and ask ourselves: How do we live our lives: fearless – or fearful ? one step at a time, paying attention to the moment, or in a headlong rush?
Rosh Hashanah is known by many names. Yom Ha-Zikkaron, the day of Remembering; Yom Teruah, the Day of waking up; Yom Ha-Din – the Day of Judgement, with the scales balancing our deeds, weighing up our lives, what has substance and what is ephemeral. And although we stride resolutely through these days together, in community, they are still here for each one of us, individually.
And they are called, these ten days, the Yomim Noraim – The Days of Awe, because they are about the most wondrous and poignant realities: what it means to be a human being, fragile, dependent, fallible – Man On Wire, Woman On Wire - so insignificant in the vast scheme of things and yet so significant. For no-one like us, like me or like you, has ever existed before, or ever will. And does this have any meaning, this uniqueness that each of us is with our own special amalgam of doubts and insecurities, our worries, our foibles and guilt, our sadnesses and failures, our frustrations, our loneliness and secret sorrows as well as our great need for connectedness and belonging and security and hope. What does it mean to be a human being, full of astonishing consciousness and creativity, alive on a small precious, precarious planet on the edge of the universe? What does it mean to be suspended over the void, like Philippe Petit, our bare and naked mortal selves, flesh and blood and mind and heart and spirit, and we have to make the best of it we can, moment by moment? On our own, and sometimes with each other. Huddled against the darkness, the abyss. Is this it? Is this all there is? The gravity-defying high wire act we can life?
Or is there something else as well, something we can turn to, turn towards? After all, we began this service with the words ‘In the twilight of the vanishing year we turn to You...We come into Your presence together with all other holy congregations of Your people’ (Machzor p.131). Are we on this dizzying journey through life alone? Or is there some kind of presence, or energy, or awareness that we can become aware of, attune ourselves to, a presence that we can come into, or let come into us? Something that sustains us, nurtures us, keeps us going when all seems lost, when we feel we are going to fall (into a depression or a bad mood, or feelings of hopelessness or resentment or inadequacy) – is there something that holds us up, that keeps us alive and breathing, breathing moment by moment, literally inspires us? Is there something else? Can we feel the wire, as thin as a finger as broad as an ocean? Can we trust it will support us as we inch our way forward? Impossible to believe in and yet we’ve come this evening seeking it – tentatively, maybe reluctantly, quizzically, shyly – we have come here this evening for something that helps us touch the mystery, helps us touch, and be touched by, that which supports us all in this perilous adventure we call life.
We Jews have this extraordinary mythology, story, a way of seeing the world: we have created a period of time to reflect on these questions, questions about our lives that we know are short and fleeting and without significance until we fill them with significance. We’ve created this New Year and along with all the other names we give it, we say that it celebrates ‘the birthday of the world’ – yom harat olam - not the birthday of the Jewish people mind you, nothing so small-scale and ethnocentric as that. No, we take it upon ourselves to celebrate ‘the birthday of the world’ - which means a day, two days, to remember that we live on a planet that has a history, a past, that started in unimaginably powerful explosions of densities of matter and energy, unimaginable heat and chaos and eons of cooling and congealing and forming itself into rock and water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen and hydrogen and oxygen and all the rest in multitudes of combinations and re-combinations, and the slow, slow evolution of a planet, with a special state-of-the-art air-conditioning system that allowed the slow, slow evolution of microscopic life forms and photosynthesis and the slow, slow evolution out of the seas, onto the land, millennia after millennia, primitive life, evolving – Richard Dawkins is of course right to emphasise, over and over again, this is what happened, this is how it happened, the infinitely slow evolution of slime into life, sea creatures, land creatures, apes, creatures that had hands and legs and fingers that could hold objects – what a glory! – and millennia pass and then – and it is like a miracle, we can describe it without understanding what it means - like a miracle there is us, tribes of us with our migraines and our iPods, us, able to reflect on it all, tell stories about it all, create a new year to celebrate it all, wonder about it all, wonder about our part in it all, our role in it all. Our responsibility in it all.
Because we gather here this evening for many reasons – Rosh Hashanah is about many things, it’s about getting the honey cake recipe right, and making sure the kneidlach aren’t like cannonballs, it is about family recipes and family gatherings and remembering those who are no longer with us; and it’s about friendship and community, and tradition. It’s maybe also about duty or habit – but underneath all these there is something else that brings us here, I think, brings us together: a sense of gratitude and feeling of responsibility. If we are here and have what we call life, and everything is not just random, it must have a purpose.
And there must be something that sustains it all, that keeps the whole show going. We have come to call this something God, Adonai, The One who is, That which Is, and this is what we turn to in these days of Awe. ‘We come into Your presence’, we let this presence come into us, the awareness of life, mysterious, unfolding moment by moment, as we breathe, in and out, and sense there is a spirit that animates us and all of being, that keeps us on the wire. This is the daily miracle, that we daily forget. And what it means – and this is the great Jewish contribution to human development – it means that we carry a sense of responsibility: that how we live, with each other and in the world, makes a difference. A difference to this unfolding drama of life on earth. By the way, this doesn’t mean you have to believe in a Creator, or a Designer, and I’m not speaking about ‘intelligent design’, because there is nothing intelligent about nature ‘red in tooth and claw’(Tennyson), or supernovae, or tsunamis or cancer.
But I’m talking about the ways in which we are drawn here this evening, in spite of our doubts and confusion, because we sense and want to sense the sustaining power that underlies and animates the universe and us within it, and this sense (which doesn’t necessarily make rational sense and doesn’t need to) this deeper sense in us blossoms into a sense of responsibility for what happens in this complex, inexplicable turmoil of a life on planet earth.
We sense that we aren’t in charge - but we can make a difference. And we come because, in spite of all our unbelief, we still believe, as Jews, that we have a job to do. That we Jews have a purpose and a destiny. Life can be crushingly unjust but we are capable of acting justly. Life can be unspeakably cruel but we are capable of acting with compassion and generosity. Life can be harsh and meaningless but we are capable of relieving hardship and creating meaning. That’s our purpose, our destiny, what we are doing here.
On Rosh Hashanah we remember – Yom Ha-Zikkaron – that it is all up to us. Remember from this last year, Obama’s presidential words – ‘Yes, we can’. You can’t get more Jewish than that. It is possible to balance on the wire, amidst the storms around us – whether it is illness, or loss, financial uncertainty, environmental uncertainty – and know, in the words of Gregory Solomon in Arthur Miller’s ‘The Price’: ‘Jews been acrobats since the beginning of the world’. We’ve learnt the high wire act of survival, of faith in our ourselves and our responsibilities, and we’ve learnt too – however daunting the task may appear, however unstable we feel in ourselves, or insecure as a people - we’ve learnt with Nachman of Bratslav : “Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar mo’ed , the whole world is a very narrow bridge, a very narrow wire, v’haikkar lo lefached klal, but the main thing is not to feel afraid”.
As the New Year comes into life, we treasure our being alive in it. And we look to the future, the next steps on the way, with hope, with confidence, with and even with a spring in our steps.
Sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London: September 18th 2009
Wednesday, 16 September 2009
Approaching the New Year
Last Saturday night my community, Finchley Reform Synagogue, held its annual late night Selichot service. This is always held the Saturday evening before the New Year, and I’d forgotten just what a peculiar service it is. It’s like a mini-version of the High Holy Days, or a dream-version, that passes in less than an hour. Ten days worth of - and several hundreds of pages of - liturgy and melodies and introspection compressed into 25 pages. It’s the Edited Highlights version – the one that cuts out all the boring bits and gets to the action. And yet it’s really just an overture, a prelude to the main thing. I suspect that I can’t be the only one who has a tucked-away thought that wishes it was the main event: that we could look into ourselves just for that one evening, assess the state of our souls – what we do well and what we fail in – and then move on, back to our lives, our ‘real’ lives (as we like to think of it).
I had an allocated slot in the evening , and when I spoke (and this blog mostly contains a slightly adapted version of my ‘sermonette’), I acknowledged the way in which those gathered for the service probably were there because they wanted to use the event as part of their own religious journey - an opportunity for religious reflection, or spiritual deepening, or just a space in the year when they had the luxury of concentrating uninterruptedly for an hour on their life: their priorities, values, strengths and limitations.
And I mused about the work of Teshuvah, of ‘turning and returning’, that is the focus of this period of the year. Who knows how that work is to be done? And how can we know what will work for us? Maybe by the end of that evening the inner work might have been accomplished. Or maybe, I went on,
‘your teshuvah will be done slowly and in an a cumulative way over the next weeks. Or maybe the whole elaborate process will all leave you cold or irritated until you get to Neilah – and then a word or a phrase in the book (or from a rabbi, halevei) will suddenly hit home, will suddenly illuminate something, or stir something in you, right at the end – and only then you will know that the High Holy Days still retain their power, their mystery...
‘None of knows, can know in advance, what will make the difference this year – what will speak to us, what will be helpful in this annual process of turning, returning, Teshuvah, turning our lives over and looking at them again. None of us knows, because if this process is going to be real for us it can’t be controlled – we can’t decide beforehand what prayers will speak to us, what words of wisdom, what melodies. We can’t know in advance, we can only open ourselves to the moment, each moment, and wait and listen and try to catch what effect that moment is having on us...
‘According to Martin Buber, God, ‘the divine’, never stops addressing us, never stops speaking to us (though when he uses the word speaking, he’s using a metaphor – as the Hebrew Bible does). To say that God never stops speaking, is a way of saying that the divine is present all the time, like a great ocean of being in which we are tiny waves. The wave can’t see the ocean but can only exist because of the ocean. To say that God never stops speaking puts the responsibility on us to attend, (shema, “listen” Israel), pay attention – don’t switch off, don’t put your fingers in your ears because you can’t bear the roar and rushing of your life as it sweeps by: stop and listen. Be still and listen. And you may be amazed at what you hear. Parts of yourself you didn’t know were there: courage, honesty, a capacity to sacrifice or let go of something, a calm knowledge of your own worth, a realisation of what you really value, what’s really important to you. Who knows what might be in there if you really listened in , as the Shema suggests? It could change your life – radically; or by just a millimetre - some new spark of understanding or feeling that didn’t exist before, or you didn’t think existed before. That’s how God speaks – in these perceptions, these insights, these fragments of knowledge and self-knowledge that we may never speak about, never even have the words to describe. But that just happen in us, to us, if we are quiet and listen....
‘The liturgy is supposed to help us with this process of listening. Though I know that often the liturgy does a very good job in stopping us listen. So many words, so much repetition, so much language that isn’t our natural language. A difficult theology and a sometimes alienating text. The liturgy can be a stumbling block to this real listening. And I say that knowing, and having often said, that I also think this book, this machzor, is the jewel in the crown of post-War liturgical creativity. But it isn’t going to work for everyone, or not every year. If you find that happening – that the language of the prayers isn’t helping you - then just leave it alone. Use something else – the study passages or the poetry. Or bring your own poetry to the service. There is no one way of doing these days...
‘But there is, I’d suggest, one aim, one overall aim – to listen in to the voice of God in whatever form it is speaking to you. And the music too can help us with this. Sometimes, like the traditional words, it may get in the way but it’s there to help us on the journey, to get at something in us that isn’t verbal, that is pre-verbal or beyond words, that bypasses the mind and all our clever thinking, all the ways we use our minds to protect us from deeper perceptions, to protect ourselves from the divine within us and around us, the music of the spheres. Music can percolate down through all that mental activity in us and seep into our souls, move us nearer to our true selves...’
And then I took a slight risk in a Reform synagogue – one never knows what one will say that can lead to a broygus – I mentioned something I’d come across from another Anglo-Jewish religious grouping, the Masorti movement. Of course we aren’t rivals or competitors, but colleagues - though I know not everyone sees things this way.
‘I noticed that the Masorti movement this year in their advertisements have come up with an advertising headline that says : ‘The High Holy Days should open our hearts, challenge our values and extend our moral imagination’. And I reckon that’s pretty good as a framework to help us think about our work over these days. I take it as a kind of imaginative re-working of the traditional ideas of teshuvah, u’tephillah u’tzedakah being the key themes of this period : that teshuvah , our returning, is towards an open-heartedness that we know we are capable of but that gets battered and bruised in us, because we endure so many hurts along the way, so many disappointments, so many experiences of being let down or rejected, that our hearts shrivel, atrophy – without our being aware of it – and we lose our open-heartedness. So these days are an opportunity to discover again how to open our hearts...
‘And tephillah, prayer, is a challenge to our values because the language of prayer talks about the highest values to which we can aspire. It talks of a God who is just and compassionate with the power to transform - and this language challenges our de-valued values, our compromises and deceits and failures to live up to what we could and can be, it reminds us that these values we attribute to God are our values too – and that we are capable of being like God, of catalysing the divine in ourselves – our compassion and our capacity to fight for justice and our capacity to transform what is into what ought to be. This is who we are – and our tephillah can remind us about that...
‘And finally, ‘to extend our moral imagination’. That’s a great phrase. Tzedakah means ‘righteousness’, but here we can see the expanded horizon of what that could mean. Our moral imagination is the part of us that can embrace what it might be like to be another person, someone who is suffering or in need, whose situation may be very remote from us – and I don’t need to list the countless causes and world-wide issues (from poverty to oppression) where our money, our time, our letter-writing, can make a difference to the quality of life of another human being....
And I concluded by reflecting that
‘I’m sure there is more in this notion– ‘to extend our moral imagination’ - than what I’ve just outlined. But that’s the point of these days ahead: we have the time to reflect on all this, explore individually and in each other’s company, the power of these words and themes. I wish you a good journey over the next few weeks and look forward to sharing some of it with you in one place or another’.
And so, to all who have read this far (and even to those who haven’t , for it does no harm) I wish one and all a Shana Tova, a good New Year. I will be offering some more New Year thoughts, I hope, in the days to come.
I had an allocated slot in the evening , and when I spoke (and this blog mostly contains a slightly adapted version of my ‘sermonette’), I acknowledged the way in which those gathered for the service probably were there because they wanted to use the event as part of their own religious journey - an opportunity for religious reflection, or spiritual deepening, or just a space in the year when they had the luxury of concentrating uninterruptedly for an hour on their life: their priorities, values, strengths and limitations.
And I mused about the work of Teshuvah, of ‘turning and returning’, that is the focus of this period of the year. Who knows how that work is to be done? And how can we know what will work for us? Maybe by the end of that evening the inner work might have been accomplished. Or maybe, I went on,
‘your teshuvah will be done slowly and in an a cumulative way over the next weeks. Or maybe the whole elaborate process will all leave you cold or irritated until you get to Neilah – and then a word or a phrase in the book (or from a rabbi, halevei) will suddenly hit home, will suddenly illuminate something, or stir something in you, right at the end – and only then you will know that the High Holy Days still retain their power, their mystery...
‘None of knows, can know in advance, what will make the difference this year – what will speak to us, what will be helpful in this annual process of turning, returning, Teshuvah, turning our lives over and looking at them again. None of us knows, because if this process is going to be real for us it can’t be controlled – we can’t decide beforehand what prayers will speak to us, what words of wisdom, what melodies. We can’t know in advance, we can only open ourselves to the moment, each moment, and wait and listen and try to catch what effect that moment is having on us...
‘According to Martin Buber, God, ‘the divine’, never stops addressing us, never stops speaking to us (though when he uses the word speaking, he’s using a metaphor – as the Hebrew Bible does). To say that God never stops speaking, is a way of saying that the divine is present all the time, like a great ocean of being in which we are tiny waves. The wave can’t see the ocean but can only exist because of the ocean. To say that God never stops speaking puts the responsibility on us to attend, (shema, “listen” Israel), pay attention – don’t switch off, don’t put your fingers in your ears because you can’t bear the roar and rushing of your life as it sweeps by: stop and listen. Be still and listen. And you may be amazed at what you hear. Parts of yourself you didn’t know were there: courage, honesty, a capacity to sacrifice or let go of something, a calm knowledge of your own worth, a realisation of what you really value, what’s really important to you. Who knows what might be in there if you really listened in , as the Shema suggests? It could change your life – radically; or by just a millimetre - some new spark of understanding or feeling that didn’t exist before, or you didn’t think existed before. That’s how God speaks – in these perceptions, these insights, these fragments of knowledge and self-knowledge that we may never speak about, never even have the words to describe. But that just happen in us, to us, if we are quiet and listen....
‘The liturgy is supposed to help us with this process of listening. Though I know that often the liturgy does a very good job in stopping us listen. So many words, so much repetition, so much language that isn’t our natural language. A difficult theology and a sometimes alienating text. The liturgy can be a stumbling block to this real listening. And I say that knowing, and having often said, that I also think this book, this machzor, is the jewel in the crown of post-War liturgical creativity. But it isn’t going to work for everyone, or not every year. If you find that happening – that the language of the prayers isn’t helping you - then just leave it alone. Use something else – the study passages or the poetry. Or bring your own poetry to the service. There is no one way of doing these days...
‘But there is, I’d suggest, one aim, one overall aim – to listen in to the voice of God in whatever form it is speaking to you. And the music too can help us with this. Sometimes, like the traditional words, it may get in the way but it’s there to help us on the journey, to get at something in us that isn’t verbal, that is pre-verbal or beyond words, that bypasses the mind and all our clever thinking, all the ways we use our minds to protect us from deeper perceptions, to protect ourselves from the divine within us and around us, the music of the spheres. Music can percolate down through all that mental activity in us and seep into our souls, move us nearer to our true selves...’
And then I took a slight risk in a Reform synagogue – one never knows what one will say that can lead to a broygus – I mentioned something I’d come across from another Anglo-Jewish religious grouping, the Masorti movement. Of course we aren’t rivals or competitors, but colleagues - though I know not everyone sees things this way.
‘I noticed that the Masorti movement this year in their advertisements have come up with an advertising headline that says : ‘The High Holy Days should open our hearts, challenge our values and extend our moral imagination’. And I reckon that’s pretty good as a framework to help us think about our work over these days. I take it as a kind of imaginative re-working of the traditional ideas of teshuvah, u’tephillah u’tzedakah being the key themes of this period : that teshuvah , our returning, is towards an open-heartedness that we know we are capable of but that gets battered and bruised in us, because we endure so many hurts along the way, so many disappointments, so many experiences of being let down or rejected, that our hearts shrivel, atrophy – without our being aware of it – and we lose our open-heartedness. So these days are an opportunity to discover again how to open our hearts...
‘And tephillah, prayer, is a challenge to our values because the language of prayer talks about the highest values to which we can aspire. It talks of a God who is just and compassionate with the power to transform - and this language challenges our de-valued values, our compromises and deceits and failures to live up to what we could and can be, it reminds us that these values we attribute to God are our values too – and that we are capable of being like God, of catalysing the divine in ourselves – our compassion and our capacity to fight for justice and our capacity to transform what is into what ought to be. This is who we are – and our tephillah can remind us about that...
‘And finally, ‘to extend our moral imagination’. That’s a great phrase. Tzedakah means ‘righteousness’, but here we can see the expanded horizon of what that could mean. Our moral imagination is the part of us that can embrace what it might be like to be another person, someone who is suffering or in need, whose situation may be very remote from us – and I don’t need to list the countless causes and world-wide issues (from poverty to oppression) where our money, our time, our letter-writing, can make a difference to the quality of life of another human being....
And I concluded by reflecting that
‘I’m sure there is more in this notion– ‘to extend our moral imagination’ - than what I’ve just outlined. But that’s the point of these days ahead: we have the time to reflect on all this, explore individually and in each other’s company, the power of these words and themes. I wish you a good journey over the next few weeks and look forward to sharing some of it with you in one place or another’.
And so, to all who have read this far (and even to those who haven’t , for it does no harm) I wish one and all a Shana Tova, a good New Year. I will be offering some more New Year thoughts, I hope, in the days to come.
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
24 hours in Prague, 70 Years On
I am writing this on the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. On September 1st 1939 Germany invaded Poland on three fronts and two days later Britain and France declared war. It is a truism to say that nothing was ever the same again - with approximately 60 million dead by the end of the war, how could it be? - and a cliché to reflect that we all still live in the long shadows of those devastating events: Jewish history, British history, European history recognises that the experiences of those war years, and their aftermath, are permanently fused into our consciousness.
As I grow older I find myself more and more aware of how decisively those six years in the midst of the last century have woven themselves into the fabric of my conscious and unconscious life: given time, I could trace the multiple ways in which the contours of my life - its intellectual, emotional and religious preoccupations and affinities, the professional work I do, the literature I’m drawn to, the art and cinema I value, the imagery of my dreams, the countries I visit – have lines of continuity with events that pre-date my birth by nearly a decade.
But I’m not going to indulge that autobiographical impulse here. Just offer one experience from this last Bank Holiday weekend, when I found myself in Prague conducting a tombstone consecration ceremony for a lady named Hana Kvardova , whom I’d never met.
In 1942, as a 12 year old girl, Hana had been incarcerated in Terezin (Theresienstadt), where she remained until the camp’s liberation in 1945. She was from the small town of Uhříněves, just south of Prague – and out of the several hundred Jews who’d lived in the town before the War, she was one of only five who survived the War to return home. (At the cemetery on Sunday was an elderly, stoutly-built woman, dressed in grey and holding a forlorn bunch of yellow carnations, who tearfully recalled the moment she waved goodbye to Hana as she was taken away on 12th September that year – the first day of Rosh Hashanah, as it happens).
As it happens.
During the late 1990s my community, Finchley Reform Synagogue – led by Rabbi Jeffrey Newman and some dedicated members of FRS - had established links with the town of Uhříněves. Some 30 years previously, a Torah scroll that had belonged to the pre-War Uhříněves Jewish community had been given to Finchley Reform, who had applied for a scroll to the Czech Memorial Scrolls Trust (see www.czechmemorialscrollstrust.org) at the Westminster Synagogue. (After the war, the Trust had rescued more than 1500 Torah scrolls from the Jewish Museum in Prague where they had been deposited by the Nazis during their occupation of Czechoslovakia. The obsessional rigour with which the Nazis set about collecting and preserving for the future Jewish artefacts while simultaneously pursuing their annihilatory project in relation to real existing Jews involves an unassimilable irony that assaults the imagination).
Following the end of the communist era, some of the devoted non-Jewish citizens of Uhříněves had worked with astonishing determination to find ways of keeping alive the memory of their pre-War Jewish fellow townsmen and women. In October 2000 a group of FRS members visited the Czech Republic at the invitation of the Uhříněves Town Council. While there, they attended the unveiling of a memorial plaque - the result of close collaboration between FRS members and Uhrineves - on the exterior of the former synagogue building (now a double-glazing showroom).
Friendships and connections were forged, including with Hana, and contact has been maintained – I was asked to join an FRS group in June 2008 as an accompanying rabbinic presence, and had the humbling privilege of leading a Shabbat morning service for the group, who were joined by invited guests from the town and the Prague Jewish community. The service was held in the office-cum-showroom, which still retains the pre-War architecture of a shul, with alcoves clearly visible as well as the space where the Ark once was (and ‘our’ scroll once rested). Desks and computers were pushed aside, a rough oval of ill-matched chairs was formed, and after a gap of sixty-six years the old melodies and prayers filled the unfillable space. “Blessed are You, Adonai, who chooses His people in love...”
I did not meet Hana Kvardova on that occasion, but did meet her childhood friend, Libuse Votavova, who had been instrumental in searching out her old Jewish friend, who was living in impoverished circumstances. Libuse had then contacted the Jewish community in Prague on her behalf and helped her find refuge in the Jewish Old Age Home in Prague. She had also been deeply involved in Uhříněves’s work of reparation for the crimes committed against its Jews during the Nazi times. These bare facts fail to convey the emotional resonance of this history: one human story that stands in for a collective story of loss, the death of thriving communities, the struggle of survivors for decades afterwards – and the integrity of some non-Jews in recognising the need to make restitution, to honour those who lived and those who died, and to keep memories and stories alive.
Last Sunday, as we gathered in the beautiful tree-shaded Jewish cemetery in Prague – not the old cemetery in the city centre that all the tourists visit, but the late 19th century one slightly further out in the Zizkov district – I made my way to the far end of the cemetery, past the 40,000 gravestones and the monumental slabs of ivy-strewn marble inscribed with assimilated Germanic names of bourgeois Czech Jewish families who must have imagined that their art deco tombstones and mini-mausoleums would be visited by family members for generations to come.
So much for our capacity to imagine what the future holds, for any of us.
Passing reverently by the grave of Franz Kafka, buried with his parents, (and his three sisters who died in the Shoah), I came to the spot where Hana Kvardova was buried last year. We had a simple ceremony in English, Hebrew and Czech, with my words of introduction and explanation ably translated by Libushe’s grand-daughter Klara. (Last year, Klara’s friend Iva had translated for me at our Shabbat service – and both had the gift of conveying to those assembled the spirit of my words as well as their outer meaning. Thus - as it happens - the Jew is dependent on the non-Jew to help bring fully into being what the Jewish soul carries. There is a mystery and paradox here that would need a Kafka to describe).
Klara’s grandmother spoke powerfully about her old friend Hana and it felt like a chapter was closing – for the participants and Uhříněves itself. Those there to witness this small (but huge) event included old friends of Hana from the town, members of the progressive Prague Jewish community with which Finchley has links, and representatives of Finchley Reform who had helped organize (and pay for) this symbolic yet very real event. At the small reception after the consecration, I approached an elderly lady who had been resting with her stick on the arm of a young woman some distance away in the shade while the ceremony had been taking place. I wondered who she was and why she had kept her distance. She was Hana Fuchsova, and this was her grand-daughter. As a Prague Jew – and she proudly told me she was one of the last remaining of that pre-War German speaking Czech Jewish community to which Kafka also belonged - this Hana too had been in Terezin; and she’d been present at the unveiling of the plaque in 1990.
As we talked – with her grand-daughter Helena translating – she told me fragments of her story: about the boy she’d met before the War, then re-met and married in Terezin. Married? – I wanted to make sure I’d understood this – Yes, married, with a rabbi performing the ceremony. She couldn’t remember his name (in my imagination I wondered if it could have been Leo Baeck, who’d been sent from Berlin in Terezin in 1942). Her husband had been transported to Auschwitz but had survived and returned to Prague after the war. They picked up their life together, had a family – including Helena’s father, who inevitably married a non-Jew and of course together brought up children with no knowledge of Jewish life. A not unfamiliar story in central European post-War families.
As an aside, I asked Helena if she knew all this, and she acknowledged that some parts of it were new to her. So, as it happens, I found that I was facilitating a conversation that helped transmit a family story, a history, a life. So many gaps. So many absences. So much silence. But at that moment I knew why I was there.
So it is that the non-Jewish world needs the Jew - has always needed the Jew - in order to bring to light, to make known, the full richness and complexity of being. The paradox of mutual dependence, and inter-dependence – and all the passionate feelings of attraction and hatred and envy, on both sides, that this unconscious dependence generates.
And in that Prague cemetery, and during that brief ceremony that I’d travelled to Prague for, just for the day, I had a sense that although in so many ways in our own technologically-saturated age we are impossibly distant from those war years, in other ways they are with us still, haunting us still. Nothing is ever over.
...Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night...
...Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return...
...Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out
The music must always play...
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good...
...Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie...
...We must love one another or die...
(from W.H. Auden’s September 1, 1939)
As I grow older I find myself more and more aware of how decisively those six years in the midst of the last century have woven themselves into the fabric of my conscious and unconscious life: given time, I could trace the multiple ways in which the contours of my life - its intellectual, emotional and religious preoccupations and affinities, the professional work I do, the literature I’m drawn to, the art and cinema I value, the imagery of my dreams, the countries I visit – have lines of continuity with events that pre-date my birth by nearly a decade.
But I’m not going to indulge that autobiographical impulse here. Just offer one experience from this last Bank Holiday weekend, when I found myself in Prague conducting a tombstone consecration ceremony for a lady named Hana Kvardova , whom I’d never met.
In 1942, as a 12 year old girl, Hana had been incarcerated in Terezin (Theresienstadt), where she remained until the camp’s liberation in 1945. She was from the small town of Uhříněves, just south of Prague – and out of the several hundred Jews who’d lived in the town before the War, she was one of only five who survived the War to return home. (At the cemetery on Sunday was an elderly, stoutly-built woman, dressed in grey and holding a forlorn bunch of yellow carnations, who tearfully recalled the moment she waved goodbye to Hana as she was taken away on 12th September that year – the first day of Rosh Hashanah, as it happens).
As it happens.
During the late 1990s my community, Finchley Reform Synagogue – led by Rabbi Jeffrey Newman and some dedicated members of FRS - had established links with the town of Uhříněves. Some 30 years previously, a Torah scroll that had belonged to the pre-War Uhříněves Jewish community had been given to Finchley Reform, who had applied for a scroll to the Czech Memorial Scrolls Trust (see www.czechmemorialscrollstrust.org) at the Westminster Synagogue. (After the war, the Trust had rescued more than 1500 Torah scrolls from the Jewish Museum in Prague where they had been deposited by the Nazis during their occupation of Czechoslovakia. The obsessional rigour with which the Nazis set about collecting and preserving for the future Jewish artefacts while simultaneously pursuing their annihilatory project in relation to real existing Jews involves an unassimilable irony that assaults the imagination).
Following the end of the communist era, some of the devoted non-Jewish citizens of Uhříněves had worked with astonishing determination to find ways of keeping alive the memory of their pre-War Jewish fellow townsmen and women. In October 2000 a group of FRS members visited the Czech Republic at the invitation of the Uhříněves Town Council. While there, they attended the unveiling of a memorial plaque - the result of close collaboration between FRS members and Uhrineves - on the exterior of the former synagogue building (now a double-glazing showroom).
Friendships and connections were forged, including with Hana, and contact has been maintained – I was asked to join an FRS group in June 2008 as an accompanying rabbinic presence, and had the humbling privilege of leading a Shabbat morning service for the group, who were joined by invited guests from the town and the Prague Jewish community. The service was held in the office-cum-showroom, which still retains the pre-War architecture of a shul, with alcoves clearly visible as well as the space where the Ark once was (and ‘our’ scroll once rested). Desks and computers were pushed aside, a rough oval of ill-matched chairs was formed, and after a gap of sixty-six years the old melodies and prayers filled the unfillable space. “Blessed are You, Adonai, who chooses His people in love...”
I did not meet Hana Kvardova on that occasion, but did meet her childhood friend, Libuse Votavova, who had been instrumental in searching out her old Jewish friend, who was living in impoverished circumstances. Libuse had then contacted the Jewish community in Prague on her behalf and helped her find refuge in the Jewish Old Age Home in Prague. She had also been deeply involved in Uhříněves’s work of reparation for the crimes committed against its Jews during the Nazi times. These bare facts fail to convey the emotional resonance of this history: one human story that stands in for a collective story of loss, the death of thriving communities, the struggle of survivors for decades afterwards – and the integrity of some non-Jews in recognising the need to make restitution, to honour those who lived and those who died, and to keep memories and stories alive.
Last Sunday, as we gathered in the beautiful tree-shaded Jewish cemetery in Prague – not the old cemetery in the city centre that all the tourists visit, but the late 19th century one slightly further out in the Zizkov district – I made my way to the far end of the cemetery, past the 40,000 gravestones and the monumental slabs of ivy-strewn marble inscribed with assimilated Germanic names of bourgeois Czech Jewish families who must have imagined that their art deco tombstones and mini-mausoleums would be visited by family members for generations to come.
So much for our capacity to imagine what the future holds, for any of us.
Passing reverently by the grave of Franz Kafka, buried with his parents, (and his three sisters who died in the Shoah), I came to the spot where Hana Kvardova was buried last year. We had a simple ceremony in English, Hebrew and Czech, with my words of introduction and explanation ably translated by Libushe’s grand-daughter Klara. (Last year, Klara’s friend Iva had translated for me at our Shabbat service – and both had the gift of conveying to those assembled the spirit of my words as well as their outer meaning. Thus - as it happens - the Jew is dependent on the non-Jew to help bring fully into being what the Jewish soul carries. There is a mystery and paradox here that would need a Kafka to describe).
Klara’s grandmother spoke powerfully about her old friend Hana and it felt like a chapter was closing – for the participants and Uhříněves itself. Those there to witness this small (but huge) event included old friends of Hana from the town, members of the progressive Prague Jewish community with which Finchley has links, and representatives of Finchley Reform who had helped organize (and pay for) this symbolic yet very real event. At the small reception after the consecration, I approached an elderly lady who had been resting with her stick on the arm of a young woman some distance away in the shade while the ceremony had been taking place. I wondered who she was and why she had kept her distance. She was Hana Fuchsova, and this was her grand-daughter. As a Prague Jew – and she proudly told me she was one of the last remaining of that pre-War German speaking Czech Jewish community to which Kafka also belonged - this Hana too had been in Terezin; and she’d been present at the unveiling of the plaque in 1990.
As we talked – with her grand-daughter Helena translating – she told me fragments of her story: about the boy she’d met before the War, then re-met and married in Terezin. Married? – I wanted to make sure I’d understood this – Yes, married, with a rabbi performing the ceremony. She couldn’t remember his name (in my imagination I wondered if it could have been Leo Baeck, who’d been sent from Berlin in Terezin in 1942). Her husband had been transported to Auschwitz but had survived and returned to Prague after the war. They picked up their life together, had a family – including Helena’s father, who inevitably married a non-Jew and of course together brought up children with no knowledge of Jewish life. A not unfamiliar story in central European post-War families.
As an aside, I asked Helena if she knew all this, and she acknowledged that some parts of it were new to her. So, as it happens, I found that I was facilitating a conversation that helped transmit a family story, a history, a life. So many gaps. So many absences. So much silence. But at that moment I knew why I was there.
So it is that the non-Jewish world needs the Jew - has always needed the Jew - in order to bring to light, to make known, the full richness and complexity of being. The paradox of mutual dependence, and inter-dependence – and all the passionate feelings of attraction and hatred and envy, on both sides, that this unconscious dependence generates.
And in that Prague cemetery, and during that brief ceremony that I’d travelled to Prague for, just for the day, I had a sense that although in so many ways in our own technologically-saturated age we are impossibly distant from those war years, in other ways they are with us still, haunting us still. Nothing is ever over.
...Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night...
...Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return...
...Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out
The music must always play...
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good...
...Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie...
...We must love one another or die...
(from W.H. Auden’s September 1, 1939)
Thursday, 23 July 2009
‘Why Seamus Heaney? But not JFS?’
Over the last few weeks, several of you have asked me if I am going to blog about the recent Court of Appeal ruling that UK Jewish schools are in breach of the 1976 Race Relations Act when, as they currently do, they select children on the basis of ethnic descent (ie in relation to a mother or father’s Jewish status, either through birth or conversion).
My answer has been consistent : No, I’m not.
There have been plenty of thoughtful and eloquent rabbinic and lay responses, many of which express concern about the state’s involvement in - as Rabbi Tony Bayfield put it - an infringement of ‘the fundamental right of the Jewish community to decide for itself the criteria for being Jewish’. (See Tony Bayfield’s cogent analysis at http://news.reformjudaism.org.uk)
But I do want to say something about my disinclination to write about the issues this case has raised. And this means I have to start somewhere else.
At one point in his essay collection Preoccupations, the poet Seamus Heaney asks himself the following searching (and self-searching) questions:
‘How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice , his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world?’
When I read that I found myself reflecting on how similar those questions are to my own questions as a rabbi. Substitute the word ‘rabbi’ for the word ‘poet’ and you hear some of the big questions that preoccupy me.
What does it mean to live ‘properly’, as a Jew, as a rabbi? Is this about ethics and morality? Intellectual honesty? Emotional openness? Spiritual attentiveness? The search for existential meaning? The struggle for justice and righteousness in oneself, with others? The capacity to inspire? To care about others’ lives and struggles? It could be a thousand things - but it’s as if the ground shifts beneath my feet as I try to reflect on that question. It’s too big. I can’t hold on to it, it trickles through my hands like sand.
But whatever it means, Heaney connects it intimately, as a question, with writing. How should a poet properly live and write? As if the two are twin activities conjoined at the hip. And that linkage, I feel a deep affinity to. I suppose this blog, these last 6 months, has been testimony to that. I have found myself writing about many things I did not know I had any thoughts about – until I found out, through the act of writing for an unseen audience, that I did indeed have some thoughts, however haphazard (or hazardous) they might be.
And that leads to the question of ‘voice’. The quest to find a way of speaking – ie of writing – that is distinctive, and true to the deepest perceptions and intuitions that one finds lodged within oneself. A self-mining to discover what is there – be it gold-dust or fool’s gold. A dredging of the hidden knowledge and the quirky, idiosyncratic stuff of one’s life and preoccupations. Glimmers of meaning. Fragments of coherence from the midst of the chaos. If one is lucky.
There are writers one reads that one recognises instantly within a sentence or two. They have their ‘signature’, as Jacques Derrida put it, inscribed within their words, their cadences, their themes, their thought processes incarnated in language. I think – off the top of my head – of writers in different genres, such as Kafka, George Steiner, Paul Celan, Abraham Joshua Heschel. Nearer to home: Rabbi Jonathan Magonet and Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg and Rabbi Lionel Blue. All these ‘voices’ are unmistakable. A stance, an angle of vision, incarnated in prose, just words on the page, but breathing into being a distinctive, living, inimitable pattern of meaning and belief. This, I think, is what it means to have a ‘voice’.
Can one recognise one’s own ‘voice’? I know how shocked I always am to hear my voice, literally – on a recording, a tape, the radio, and so on. I don’t know it from the outside. I can’t hear it. And so it is with my writing ‘voice’ – I can’t hear it clearly, only (if at all) in snatches, like an overheard whisp of conversation floating in the wind; not even a conversation, more a phrase or two that suddenly becomes audible as one passes talking couples on Hampstead Heath.
But whatever this rabbinic ‘voice’ of mine is, it is linked in my mind to those other words that Heaney uses: ‘place’ and ‘literary heritage’ and ‘contemporary world’.
And for ‘literary heritage’ let’s read, for me as a rabbi, ‘religious heritage’. Though of course there is a large overlap here, for such a major part of my ‘religious’ heritage is itself a distinctive ‘literary’ heritage: from the Hebrew Bible through the Talmudic literature (with its amalgam of law and lore), to the medieval poets and philosophers, and embracing the mystics of the Kabbalah, and the Hasidic masters, and the scholars and theologians and writers of modernity: concentric circles of ‘Torah’, teaching, a ‘literary heritage’ stretching from Genesis and Yochanan ben Zakkai to Spinoza and Kafka, Freud and Buber, Philip Roth and Yehudah Amichai. “Our homeland the text”, as George Steiner once expressed it. Thinking about my complex relationship to that ‘literary’ heritage helps me get close to the heart of what being a Jew means to me – and from there, to what I understand being a ‘rabbi’ is about.
Yet I know that my Jewish heritage is larger than the ‘literary’. For Judaism as I understand it is not only a civilisational heritage of textual and inter-textual learning, an intellectual and emotional and spiritual resource, but it’s also a heritage of living. For although the Judaic relationship to literature and language and ‘the word’ is fundamental, constitutive of who and what we are (who and what I am), I see myself too as an inheritor of a heritage that is not only about the texts in books but is also about the texts of people’s lives.
Jewish celebration and Jewish suffering, Jewish poverty and Jewish self-betterment, Jewish devotion to practice, and Jewish revolt against practice, generations of women and men struggling to keep the flame of identity alive, struggling to keep themselves alive (and their children, for that was always where hope lay, if not for us, then something better for the next generation), but meanwhile, in the absence of the always delayed, and maybe imaginary, Messianic age, struggling to create a society brimming with justice and compassion and righteousness : this was a multi-generational historical heritage lived out in faith and in escape from faith, springing from faith and sometimes in opposition to faith. My heritage is composed of the stories of countless lives, in many lands and many eras, an unbroken chain of 40 generations and more, living out the daily consequences of a destiny inscribed in the texts but incarnated in the fine-grained texture of personal lives like yours and mine.
And as for ‘contemporary world’: well, I look back on these last 6 months of blogs and see how much I have been trying to engage with what goes on here and now, the litany of the daily news, and how to bring a ‘rabbinic’ and/or a psychological perspective (and can there really be a difference between these two?) on what we experience happening around us: politics, Israel, the environment, anti-semitism...
And this takes me back to Heaney and an earlier statement by him that poetry should be ‘strong enough to help’. Which doesn’t mean ‘the kind of strength that is supposed to come from reading books of an uplifting nature’; but rather the potential help from poetry’s ‘response to conditions in the world at a moment when the world was in crisis’.
Heaney calls this ‘redress’, a state when ‘the poetic imagination seems to redress whatever is wrong or exacerbating in the prevailing conditions’, offering ‘a response to reality which has a liberating and verifying effect upon the individual spirit...tilting the scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium...This redressing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances.’
I’m not sure about transcendent ‘equilibrium’- maybe too static an image? - but that statement about the poetic imagination is as near as dammit to how I think about the rabbinic imagination; and I know how far and how often I fail to get anywhere near that perspective of ‘redress’, the ‘glimpsed alternative’, the ‘revelation of potential’. But that’s what this struggle for ‘voice’ involves, for me.
Which is all a long way from JFS, and the travails that attend this recent ruling. But this blog today has attempted to articulate the background as to why I can’t respond to this case with the same fluency or intelligence as others. My affinities lie elsewhere, and while I admire and support those who are taking up the cudgels, I find myself letting those who have the interest, the ability, and the knowledge get on with it. They will articulate the issues far more cogently than I ever could.
Besides, I’ve never felt comfortable with the way Jews pressed to be included in the 1976 Race Relations Act. We aren’t a race. Nor are we an ethnic group. We are a people. A civilisation. A culture. Or rather: we are the product of many cultures, and have taken from, and outlived, many civilisations. We are hybrid and heterogeneous. In the Bible we are called Ivrim, Hebrews – literally, ‘those who cross over’: ie. ‘boundary-crossers’. Jews are a form of ‘faith community’, but it is a multi-faceted faith: of believers and non-believers, talkers and doers, machers and crooks (and of course,occasionally, machers who are crooks), held together by an indefinable inner sense of shared history, if not shared vision.
But we wanted the protection of the law in the UK, so we agreed to dim our stellar identity, truncate our complex mosaic of uniqueness, our essential boundary-crossing nature – and become an ethnic group. And no doubt we have benefitted from this over the years. But now the dormant, repressed truth is pushing its way back into consciousness. We never really belonged within the ambit of that Race Relations Act. And now we are having to deal with the consequences.
I'm expecting this to be my last blog for the moment – summer (so-called) approaches, normal service will be resumed in September, inshallah. Thank you for bothering to read thus far.
My answer has been consistent : No, I’m not.
There have been plenty of thoughtful and eloquent rabbinic and lay responses, many of which express concern about the state’s involvement in - as Rabbi Tony Bayfield put it - an infringement of ‘the fundamental right of the Jewish community to decide for itself the criteria for being Jewish’. (See Tony Bayfield’s cogent analysis at http://news.reformjudaism.org.uk)
But I do want to say something about my disinclination to write about the issues this case has raised. And this means I have to start somewhere else.
At one point in his essay collection Preoccupations, the poet Seamus Heaney asks himself the following searching (and self-searching) questions:
‘How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice , his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world?’
When I read that I found myself reflecting on how similar those questions are to my own questions as a rabbi. Substitute the word ‘rabbi’ for the word ‘poet’ and you hear some of the big questions that preoccupy me.
What does it mean to live ‘properly’, as a Jew, as a rabbi? Is this about ethics and morality? Intellectual honesty? Emotional openness? Spiritual attentiveness? The search for existential meaning? The struggle for justice and righteousness in oneself, with others? The capacity to inspire? To care about others’ lives and struggles? It could be a thousand things - but it’s as if the ground shifts beneath my feet as I try to reflect on that question. It’s too big. I can’t hold on to it, it trickles through my hands like sand.
But whatever it means, Heaney connects it intimately, as a question, with writing. How should a poet properly live and write? As if the two are twin activities conjoined at the hip. And that linkage, I feel a deep affinity to. I suppose this blog, these last 6 months, has been testimony to that. I have found myself writing about many things I did not know I had any thoughts about – until I found out, through the act of writing for an unseen audience, that I did indeed have some thoughts, however haphazard (or hazardous) they might be.
And that leads to the question of ‘voice’. The quest to find a way of speaking – ie of writing – that is distinctive, and true to the deepest perceptions and intuitions that one finds lodged within oneself. A self-mining to discover what is there – be it gold-dust or fool’s gold. A dredging of the hidden knowledge and the quirky, idiosyncratic stuff of one’s life and preoccupations. Glimmers of meaning. Fragments of coherence from the midst of the chaos. If one is lucky.
There are writers one reads that one recognises instantly within a sentence or two. They have their ‘signature’, as Jacques Derrida put it, inscribed within their words, their cadences, their themes, their thought processes incarnated in language. I think – off the top of my head – of writers in different genres, such as Kafka, George Steiner, Paul Celan, Abraham Joshua Heschel. Nearer to home: Rabbi Jonathan Magonet and Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg and Rabbi Lionel Blue. All these ‘voices’ are unmistakable. A stance, an angle of vision, incarnated in prose, just words on the page, but breathing into being a distinctive, living, inimitable pattern of meaning and belief. This, I think, is what it means to have a ‘voice’.
Can one recognise one’s own ‘voice’? I know how shocked I always am to hear my voice, literally – on a recording, a tape, the radio, and so on. I don’t know it from the outside. I can’t hear it. And so it is with my writing ‘voice’ – I can’t hear it clearly, only (if at all) in snatches, like an overheard whisp of conversation floating in the wind; not even a conversation, more a phrase or two that suddenly becomes audible as one passes talking couples on Hampstead Heath.
But whatever this rabbinic ‘voice’ of mine is, it is linked in my mind to those other words that Heaney uses: ‘place’ and ‘literary heritage’ and ‘contemporary world’.
And for ‘literary heritage’ let’s read, for me as a rabbi, ‘religious heritage’. Though of course there is a large overlap here, for such a major part of my ‘religious’ heritage is itself a distinctive ‘literary’ heritage: from the Hebrew Bible through the Talmudic literature (with its amalgam of law and lore), to the medieval poets and philosophers, and embracing the mystics of the Kabbalah, and the Hasidic masters, and the scholars and theologians and writers of modernity: concentric circles of ‘Torah’, teaching, a ‘literary heritage’ stretching from Genesis and Yochanan ben Zakkai to Spinoza and Kafka, Freud and Buber, Philip Roth and Yehudah Amichai. “Our homeland the text”, as George Steiner once expressed it. Thinking about my complex relationship to that ‘literary’ heritage helps me get close to the heart of what being a Jew means to me – and from there, to what I understand being a ‘rabbi’ is about.
Yet I know that my Jewish heritage is larger than the ‘literary’. For Judaism as I understand it is not only a civilisational heritage of textual and inter-textual learning, an intellectual and emotional and spiritual resource, but it’s also a heritage of living. For although the Judaic relationship to literature and language and ‘the word’ is fundamental, constitutive of who and what we are (who and what I am), I see myself too as an inheritor of a heritage that is not only about the texts in books but is also about the texts of people’s lives.
Jewish celebration and Jewish suffering, Jewish poverty and Jewish self-betterment, Jewish devotion to practice, and Jewish revolt against practice, generations of women and men struggling to keep the flame of identity alive, struggling to keep themselves alive (and their children, for that was always where hope lay, if not for us, then something better for the next generation), but meanwhile, in the absence of the always delayed, and maybe imaginary, Messianic age, struggling to create a society brimming with justice and compassion and righteousness : this was a multi-generational historical heritage lived out in faith and in escape from faith, springing from faith and sometimes in opposition to faith. My heritage is composed of the stories of countless lives, in many lands and many eras, an unbroken chain of 40 generations and more, living out the daily consequences of a destiny inscribed in the texts but incarnated in the fine-grained texture of personal lives like yours and mine.
And as for ‘contemporary world’: well, I look back on these last 6 months of blogs and see how much I have been trying to engage with what goes on here and now, the litany of the daily news, and how to bring a ‘rabbinic’ and/or a psychological perspective (and can there really be a difference between these two?) on what we experience happening around us: politics, Israel, the environment, anti-semitism...
And this takes me back to Heaney and an earlier statement by him that poetry should be ‘strong enough to help’. Which doesn’t mean ‘the kind of strength that is supposed to come from reading books of an uplifting nature’; but rather the potential help from poetry’s ‘response to conditions in the world at a moment when the world was in crisis’.
Heaney calls this ‘redress’, a state when ‘the poetic imagination seems to redress whatever is wrong or exacerbating in the prevailing conditions’, offering ‘a response to reality which has a liberating and verifying effect upon the individual spirit...tilting the scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium...This redressing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances.’
I’m not sure about transcendent ‘equilibrium’- maybe too static an image? - but that statement about the poetic imagination is as near as dammit to how I think about the rabbinic imagination; and I know how far and how often I fail to get anywhere near that perspective of ‘redress’, the ‘glimpsed alternative’, the ‘revelation of potential’. But that’s what this struggle for ‘voice’ involves, for me.
Which is all a long way from JFS, and the travails that attend this recent ruling. But this blog today has attempted to articulate the background as to why I can’t respond to this case with the same fluency or intelligence as others. My affinities lie elsewhere, and while I admire and support those who are taking up the cudgels, I find myself letting those who have the interest, the ability, and the knowledge get on with it. They will articulate the issues far more cogently than I ever could.
Besides, I’ve never felt comfortable with the way Jews pressed to be included in the 1976 Race Relations Act. We aren’t a race. Nor are we an ethnic group. We are a people. A civilisation. A culture. Or rather: we are the product of many cultures, and have taken from, and outlived, many civilisations. We are hybrid and heterogeneous. In the Bible we are called Ivrim, Hebrews – literally, ‘those who cross over’: ie. ‘boundary-crossers’. Jews are a form of ‘faith community’, but it is a multi-faceted faith: of believers and non-believers, talkers and doers, machers and crooks (and of course,occasionally, machers who are crooks), held together by an indefinable inner sense of shared history, if not shared vision.
But we wanted the protection of the law in the UK, so we agreed to dim our stellar identity, truncate our complex mosaic of uniqueness, our essential boundary-crossing nature – and become an ethnic group. And no doubt we have benefitted from this over the years. But now the dormant, repressed truth is pushing its way back into consciousness. We never really belonged within the ambit of that Race Relations Act. And now we are having to deal with the consequences.
I'm expecting this to be my last blog for the moment – summer (so-called) approaches, normal service will be resumed in September, inshallah. Thank you for bothering to read thus far.
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