Howard Cooper's Blog

Hoban, Hitchens, Havel

2011-12-19T21:19:00.000Z

We can be sure that the three of them never met: Russell Hoban (born of Jewish parents, who died last Tuesday, 13th), Christopher Hitchens (born, he discovered late in life, to a Jewish mother, died on Thursday, 15th), Vaclav Havel (who died on Sunday, 18th). But they meet now, in the imagination – and wherever literary souls go after death. (That snort you hear is Hitchens’ derision – the author of God is Not Great who believed in neither gods nor an afterlife nor any journey of the human soul that wasn’t filled with opposition to the status quo, to false hopes and sentimental piety, to putting our trust in any authority other than our own hard-won, rigorous and sceptical intelligence).

The Grim Reaper has harvested a rich crop this week: Hoban, a writer whose visionary fictions lodge in the psyche - in Riddley Walker (1980) he created a fully-imagined post-apocalypse feral England where language itself had mutated into barely recognisable forms of self-expression; Hitchens, polemicist and contrarian, scourge of mediocrity and hypocrisy and all those enamoured of the certainty of their causes (Henry Kissinger; Mother Teresa; Islamic – and Jewish, and Christian – fundamentalists); and Havel, the Czech playwright, dissident and political prisoner who became President of his nation with a belief that the spiritual, moral and intellectual domain of human life was as significant for human well-being as our material and economic achievements.

All three knew how to live, to live well, that is to say to live fearlessly, open to the exploration of ideas -“Explorers have to be ready to die lost” (Hoban) - and language: what it can do to us and for us: “Language is an archaeological vehicle...the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history” (Hoban); “I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions” (Havel); “Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul”(Hitchens).

Part of living well for these three truth-seekers was knowing how to enjoy the ‘simple’ pleasures. They each knew how to drink, how to smoke - “when I don't smoke I scarcely feel as if I'm living. I don't feel as if I'm living unless I'm killing myself” (Hoban) – and how to make their personal relationships even more complicated; but also how not to take themselves too seriously: “Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not” (Havel), “Your favourite virtue? An appreciation for irony...The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind”(Hitchens).

Strange then that Hitchens saw religion in such a literal, Dawkinsesque way. In recent years he became more and more resolute in his implacable opposition to it, claiming that it was the 1989 fatwa against his friend Salman Rushdie following publication of The Satanic Verses that “completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humour, the individual, and the defence of free expression”. (How is it, I wonder, that for me religion belongs in the latter grouping?)

In the last decade Hitchens became a leading voice in the so-called ‘new atheism’: “The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.” I find myself in sympathy with the ethical and emotional heart of this, but as I read it I find myself thinking that Hitchens is failing to see that he is indeed articulating another kind of ‘creed’, although he explicitly denies this – “Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith”.

I find it curious that such a rigorous and often sophisticated thinker should hold to a picture of religion that is so naively literal-minded. His rigid stance suffers from an internal contradiction, for it fails to meet the definition of what he characterises as his own intellectually free approach: “We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.” And yet my own post-theistic religiosity is built upon, amongst other things, ‘science and reason...free inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake...’

I suppose that for Hitchens, religious radicalism would be a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless my soul (to use the metaphor that even Hitchens finds himself calling upon) is stirred over and over by the bracing clear-sightedness of much of Hitchens’ writing : “The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has — from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness...We have the same job we always had: to say that there are no final solutions; there is no absolute truth; there is no supreme leader; there is no totalitarian solution that says if you would just give up your freedom of inquiry, if you would just give up, if you would simply abandon your critical faculties, the world of idiotic bliss can be yours.”

Hitchens didn’t do humility – he had no time for it, there was too much else at stake. No holding back. Just a constant outpouring of sinuous prose and impassioned speech to convey as lucidly as he could his brilliant (and sometimes foolish) thoughts. So, at 62, an untimely loss – and yet for me, the death of Havel is the saddest of this week’s sad losses.

On one level, Havel’s philosophy of life overlapped with Hitchens’: “The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility” – though the word ‘meekness’ marks out Havel’s own distinctive spiritual territory. And Havel’s wisdom - “There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side” – serves as an implicit rebuke to Hitchens’ decision to align himself with the Iraq war and the American neo-conservative jihad (or in George W. Bush’s terms “crusade”) against what Hitchens termed, with typical rhetorical relish, “Islamo-fascism”.

Havel’s vision never succumbed to the instinct to make humanity the pinnacle of all creation: “As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it...The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.” There is both humility and grandeur here.

I first came across Havel’s thinking when I read the remarkable series of letters he wrote from prison in the early 1980s to his then wife Olga, written at a time when his country was suffering from the bleakness of Communist oppression, and he was gaining some prominence as a leading Czech dissident. “The noble title of "dissident" must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement” (Hitchens). Reading these texts from one of the founders of Charter 77 I found myself in the presence of someone who seemed to emanate great spiritual resourcefulness and insight. Encountering them helped me clarify my own thinking about the spiritual and religious necessity of ‘living with questions’ rather than too quickly attempting to offer answers.

Here - 6 September 1981 - is an example of what resonated with me then, and still speaks of a rare sensibility, the loss of which I mourn today:

“For me, the notion of some complete and finite knowledge, that explains everything and raises no further questions, relates clearly to the idea of an end – an end to the spirit, to life, to time and to being. However, anything meaningful ever said on the matter (including every religious gospel) is remarkable for its dramatic openness , its incompleteness” – it is this that shows Havel is a more subtle reader of texts than Hitchens – “It is not a conclusive statement so much as a challenge or an appeal...which never...attempts to settle unequivocally the unanswerable question of meaning. Instead, it tends to suggest how to live with the question...The question of the meaning of life is not a full stop at the end of life, but the beginning of a deeper experience of it. It is like a light whose source we cannot see, but in whose illumination we nevertheless live – whether we delight in its incomprehensible abundance or suffer from its incomprehensible paucity.

“Ultimately, being in constant touch with the mystery is what makes us genuinely human. Man is the only creature who is both a part of being (and thus a bearer of this mystery) and aware of that mystery as a mystery. He is both the question and the questioner, and cannot help being so...”

I know that my own life has been enriched, enlivened, in multiple ways by my contact over the years with all three of these wise men. And that - though the Festival of Lights is upon us - the world seems suddenly smaller, less luminous, without them.

Zichronam livracha: may their memory be a blessing.

“Auf Wiedersehen, England”

2011-12-15T11:31:00.000Z

Brentford Town Football Club have a German manager, Uwe Rösler. Last week they visited my local club and the match had the usual level of tedium and occasional drama and in the end ‘my’ team won (a penalty shoot-out). I should have left feeling suitably elated – but I didn’t. What I took away from the game was the shock of hearing the home supporters engage in a series of abusive comments at the opposition manager that ranged from the xenophobic to out-and-out racism.

Most of this invective was done under the habitual English guise of humour – ‘banter’ – but it seemed to me that the echo of those mock-German accents culled from decades of post-War UK cinema , TV and tabloid headlines – ‘ve have vays of making you play’ – and the crude barking of stereotypical phrases like ‘Jawohl’ when the manager shouted to his players, betrayed an ugly and unthinking anti-German malice that would not have been tolerated against players of any other ethnic origin, or indeed against managers of any other nation. Supporters can sometimes be rude – in a friendly or unfriendly manner – against opposition managers, but this was something else.

That it happened during the same week that Europeans – including the British - became even more aware that their collective economic fate now lies in the hands of Germany is probably just a co-incidence – anti-German feeling is a regular, sickening feature of populist English culture. But as I slowly digested the debacle of David Cameron’s performance in Brussels a few days later, my mind kept going back to that evening at Barnet Football Club where I witnessed this longstanding English prejudice in all its nakedness and shame.

I would suggest that this anti-German feeling is fuelled by deep unconscious envy. Germany’s post-War economic recovery and social transformation was impressive enough, and then in 1989 it took on the unprecedented financial, social and psychological task of integrating a divided nation. Its work ethic, its technological achievements, its ability to integrate several millions of immigrants with relative success, its capacity to make an honest accounting of, and restitution for, its national crimes – all this is evidence for the way in which Germany has become a stable, mature and self-reflective success as a nation and the dominant democracy in Europe. (And they are also rather good at football: much more successful over the years – in spite of 1966 – than England, and maybe it is this above all that, at least in the popular imagination, the English can’t stand, and leads to such crude mockery and contempt).

Contrast Germany’s success as a country with the UK story of post-War decline – the dissolution (and destruction) of our manufacturing industries, our loss of control over the old Empire, the contraction of our military capabilities, the perpetuation of class divisions and glaring inequalities, the coarsening of public discourse...add to the list yourself. It seems we have yet to make a true reckoning of our decreased stature and significance in the world. In place of this truth-telling (and generations of politicians of all parties have colluded in this) we have a distorted and false picture of our collective national identity.

Our relative impoverishment – materially and in the quality of life, in the capacity to devise integrated transport systems, in social and health care, in education – is palpable whenever one leaves these shores and travels or spends time in what we still quaintly think of as ‘the Continent’, or – more tellingly – we islanders still think of as ‘Europe’. We might have joined the European Union in myriad practical and beneficial ways – but the Brits still haven’t joined ‘Europe’ in their minds. David Cameron has just acted out years of this systemic psychological failure to re-configure ourselves as a European country.

I am – as might be evident from some of these remarks – passionately pro-European; and so I consider Cameron’s ineptitude a symbol of a basic fault-line that runs through the UK’s national psyche. The jokey tag that has become so popular in recent decades as a mark of this country’s pseudo self-assurance – ‘Two World Wars and One World Cup’ – has come home to roost. The fact is that, in spite of its current difficulties, ‘Europe’ will continue to thrive and prosper without us. But the UK won’t (can’t) thrive or prosper without ‘Europe’ – there is only so long that a nation can sustain itself with fantasies of past greatness, delusions of self-importance, and the unconscious omnipotence that in a transnational global economy we can steer and save one part of the ship while the other decks are overwhelmed by the tides of history.

Angela Merkel may not have the right formula for rescuing the European economy, but Cameron’s proud isolationism brings to mind George Orwell’s insight that ‘The insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time’.

Call me a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ if you like – the Soviet euphemism widely used during Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaigns in the 1950s as a way of accusing Jewish thinkers of lack of patriotism – but as a Jew whose soul is knitted to the historic vibrancy of life in Berlin and Vienna and Prague and Budapest, and all the rest of the countless places on ‘the Continent’ where Jews lived and thrived (and, yes, suffered) but contributed their unique intellectual heritage and giftedness to the general well-being of so many societies and nations, I have been hugely saddened by Cameron’s ‘little Englander’ stance. As a European British Jew in the second decade of the 21st century I still have a psychological and spiritual - existential - commitment to that transnational diasporic vision of the creative inter-connectedness of pan-European life.

And it is of course a rather extraordinary historical irony that it is Berlin (again) that must embrace its special destiny – this time round to lead Europe to a more hopeful future. But this time, if it fails, if the German-led European project fails, xenophobic nationalism (not just in the UK) is just itching to return. And who will history’s victims be, I wonder, the next time round?

Jacob's Dream

2011-11-30T19:49:00.002Z

The English poet Stephen Spender once remarked that “the language of a nation, embodied in its literature, is its spiritual life”. I think about these words each time we arrive - during the annual cycle of Torah readings - at the text that describes Jacob’s dream (Genesis 28:10-22). When it sometimes can feel that we live in an increasingly disordered and fragmented world, the twelve verses of this Hebrew text offer us a glimpse into another world: a world where meaning hovers within language, where we can rest for a moment secure in the knowledge that we are being held in the embrace of a consummate storyteller, a narrator who is able to conjure up a vision of eternity - of the ‘intersection of the timeless/ With time’ (T.S.Eliot) – just by placing one word artfully next to another. For me, it’s the jewel in the crown of Biblical storytelling.

It is of course – as are so many mythological narratives – a story about a journey. Our ‘hero’ – who we know is no hero - is seen setting out with purpose. He leaves Beersheva, and seems to have a destination in mind: Haran (verse 10). But we know – both because we have read our world’s mythic literature (Jason, Ulysses, Parsifal), and because we have lived long enough to discover that things rarely turn out as we intend – that geographical journeys can metamorphose into journeys of a different kind: inner journeys, that depend upon who – or what – we chance to meet along the way.

And no sooner has the journey begun than ‘chance’ does indeed turn up. ‘And he lighted upon/he happened upon/ he came upon by chance – va’yifgah – the place…’ (v.11). “Coincidence is not a kosher word”, that wily storyteller Isaac Bashevis Singer once remarked, intuiting that from a Jewish religious perspective ‘chance’ is never what it seems. Jacob chanced upon ‘the place’ – and three times in the verse our narrator emphasizes this ‘place’. It’s not just any place, but ‘the place’ where the Eternal will reveal itself.

Traditional commentators – being somewhat literal minded on occasions - wanted to identify the location of this ‘place’. Rashi suggests it was Mount Moriah - i.e. Jerusalem, the spiritual centre of the world, as it were. Others, basing themselves on the ‘chance’ equivalence in numerical value of the Hebrew letters for ‘ladder’ and ‘Sinai’, suggest that Jacob’s encounter with the divine occurs at that later-to-become-famous mountain of collective revelation. But a Hasidic interpretation moves us from geography to metaphysics: the thrice-repeated makom of verse 11 refers, it is suggested, to a meeting with Ha-Makom – which is one of the rabbinic names for God. ‘God is the place of the world’, said the rabbis, ‘but’ – and here’s a paradox – ‘the world is not God’s place.’ (Genesis Rabbah, Va’yetze, 68:9)

What this story hints at – no, more than hints at, what it quietly and subversively suggests – is that ‘happening upon’ God can take place anywhere, at any time. But what the story also dramatizes is that it happened to Jacob only when he moved away from home, from the familiar (and from his family), from the known, the secure, the everyday.

The text tells us that he lay down to sleep ‘because the sun had set’ (v.11). The detail seems superfluous - until we realize that when the sun next rises it is twenty years later, when Jacob wrestles with the stranger at the river Jabbok and we read ‘And the sun rose upon him at Penuel’ (32:32). So we know that are in the hands of a narrator who wants us to read symbolically and not only literally. Jacob spends 20 years ‘in the dark’ – he runs away from his brother’s anger, having stolen a blessing from Esau. He is the trickster, the ‘heel’ (it’s the root of his name, Ya’akov) – and he is running from the ‘dark’ side of himself, gaining much in the material world (along with two wives), but still on the run from much unfinished business at home and within himself.

We sense how the psychological is woven seamlessly into the narrative – and we sense too how impoverished we might be in separating out the strands of our own lives into ‘psychological’ and ‘spiritual’ and ‘emotional’ and ‘mental’, rather than marvelling at the boundryless superfluity of being that exists within us.

After the wrestling scene - where a blessing emerges and Jacob’s name is transformed to ‘ Yisrael’ , ‘the one who struggles with, and on behalf of, the divine’ - he re-meets Esau, and peace (of a sort) is made. But until then it’s one long night, during which he must struggle both with the deceiver in himself and with the meanings of the dream-vision he receives at the beginning of that long night of the soul.

And what a dream it is! Verbs in the past tense give way to participles and the immediacy of the present moment and we are in the dream:

‘And behold: a ladder standing towards the earth and its top reaching towards the heavens
And behold: the messengers of the divine ascending and descending on it
And behold: Adonai standing beside it…’ (verses12-13)

Inside the dream time stands still. The worlds of heaven and earth are held together in one numinous image: a ladder hovers between the two domains; it is – perhaps surprisingly - suspended between the two realms, it is standing not on the ground but towards the ground (artza) and its top is reaching towards heaven (hashamaima). It floats – like us – between earthboundedness and heavenly aspiration.

Then: all is in movement, in flux, the mal’akhim, messengers of divinity, ascending and descending, heaven and earth are interrelated, energy is moving constantly between them, the boundaries are fluid, between ‘here’ and ‘there’ there is ceaseless movement, a continuously flowing interchange: the medium of the mal’akhim represents the message, the spiritual (and psychological) truth - everything is connected to everything else.

And the third, consummating component presents itself in the dream space: the ladder which is standing, and the messengers of God which are moving, merge into the Eternal [YHVH] who is standing alav – ‘beside him’, ‘above him’. But also ‘beside it’ or ‘above it’ (the ladder). The Hebrew is delightfully ambiguous throughout these dream verses. We are being nudged away from literalism towards the multiplicity of being.

Similarly with v’rosho: is it the ‘top’ of the ladder reaching towards heaven? Or ‘his head’ reaching heavenwards? And the movement of the messengers/angels is described as ascending and descending bo – ‘on it’ (the ladder). But this pronoun also means ‘in him’ or ‘within him’. The language is both internally and externally referential. Like a Cubist painting that juxtaposes two competing perspectives of the same face to create a new possibility of perception, so our text keeps presenting this double perspective around which our attention must constantly hover.

Whether we think of the earthly and the divine, the material and the spiritual, inner and outer reality, consciousness and the unconscious – all those binary opposites with which we normally wrap/warp our minds – within this dream imagery our narrator subverts our normal dualistic thinking. And that’s before we even reach the verbal component of the dream…

No wonder Jacob is filled with awe when he awakes: what has been revealed to him is a spiritual truth that takes a lifetime to comprehend and explore and, hopefully, remain baffled by: the divine is always present – ‘I am with you’ (v.15).

St.Paul's and the Crisis in Capitalism

2011-10-30T16:31:00.000Z

The crisis is happening in a sort of slow-motion car-crash way. We all know it – and may feel powerless in relation to it. But it is a crisis.

I was down at St.Paul’s Cathedral early last week, spending some time there (mostly in the rain), trying to absorb what is going on, what this ‘Occupy London’ movement is about, trying not to let my mind be filled with how the media are representing it, but seeing for myself, talking to people, wandering round the site into the educational centre and the multi-faith centre and the media centre and the volunteer-run kitchens and the legal aid centre and the entertainment centre and the first-aid centre – I use the word ‘centre’ but actually I should say tent, because all of these centres of activity are under canvas, (well, polyurethane, to be accurate), but anyway, tents large and small, spread out higgledy-piggledy and yet in a curiously tidy way, around the Cathedral, with clear and safe access to and from the building for those who want to use it.

There seemed to be a lot of good-natured conversations going on that day, between camera-wielding visitors and those living there or just giving up time to be there – academics and lawyers, teachers and the unemployed, young and old, sober suits in earnest conversation with dreadlocks and grunge – discussions serious and jovial, with the great religious building providing a backdrop - and a silent commentary (apart from the bells) – on the social and political issues at stake for all of us, but being given specific attention by the inhabitants of these makeshift booths plastered with posters and quotations and lists of daily events, discussions and lectures and films on worthy issues like the dangers of deep-sea oil drilling or political oppression in South America or the implications of the savage cuts to legal aid in the UK.

It felt like a new hybrid, a cross between politics and street theatre, an on-going act of performance art that, like all art, wants to change the world – or perhaps, less grandiosely, just help us see the world differently.

Trying to see the world differently, trying to live out certain ethical values, is of course a Jewish preoccupation, a Jewish meshuggas, that stubborn refusal to accept the world as it is, a stubborn belief that we could live in better and more life-enhancing ways. During Sukkot there was a Jewish tent, a sukkah, offering hospitality; and on Simchat Torah dancing and song; and a Shabbat service is planned. Jews have been bringing their values into the mix – and they bring their humour.

‘Now is the Winter of our Discount Tents’ reads one banner [for my blog readers in other countries for whom English is not your first language, this is a rather delicious re-working of Shakespeare’s line from Richard III, ‘Now is the winter of our discontents’] - humour being one of the hallmarks of this gathering in the centre of London , along with civility and co-operation and a principled spirit of commitment not to inconvenience those who live in the area or work in the area or who have businesses in the area. It was all curiously tidy – not a scrap of litter and large recycling bins at the very centre of the encampment.

And the talk was of a range of issues – political and environmental and economic – and the commitment to try and create a particular form of community. And to my surprise there seemed a lot of respect, praise, for the church officials and workers who have been involved with them this last fortnight – this was even before Canon Giles Fraser’s principled resignation on Thursday – and, again surprisingly, what seemed a mutual respect (muted but apparent) between the police and the protesters. Though they say they are not protesters, but ‘resisters’.

And what they are resistant to is encapsulated in one of the largest banners on the site: ‘Capitalism is Crisis’ it reads; which as a slogan is rather simplistic, and makes it easy for us to be sceptical. But as propaganda for a cause it is quite effective, because it can provoke us to think more deeply, more rigorously, about what is going on in relation to the values we live by; and how we organise ourselves in societies; and the systemic failures we have to endure.

I don’t agree that ‘Capitalism is Crisis’: it might be in crisis but Judaism traditionally didn’t disparage wealth creation – it just insisted (regularly and rather boringly) that when wealth had been generated it needed to be distributed fairly, equitably, that spreading justice was a higher value than accumulating wealth, that charity was an obligation, that with wealth comes responsibility; that a society that neglected the poor, the widow, the orphan, the outsider, that deprived them of the means to live with dignity, that refused to listen to their cries for help, their needs, their well-being – that such a society where wealth was generated but not used for the good of all, that kind of society was – to use a traditional word – sinful. And, as both the Torah and the prophets intuited, such societies were doomed, would in the end be destroyed (from the outside), or destroy themselves.

I was very impressed by what I saw this week. More than impressed, I would say I was rather inspired. It is easy to poke fun at this gathering, it’s easy to be a bit scared (as I felt for moments) by the otherness of people, the way they look, the way they sound - you inevitably get people at these kind of open gatherings with a variety of mental health problems - but what was inspirational was the tolerance I saw, the kindness, the commitment to a laborious form of collective decision-making: meetings open to everyone at 1 pm and 7 pm each day with a slow process of listening and speaking and respecting different views until some coherent consensus was achieved – that’s a commitment to a particular kind of inter-personal respect; it’s a commitment that unites a secular belief in the dignity of the individual with a religious belief in the holiness of each human being.

And percolating through it all, what is inspirational is the passion on display for a different model of living together in community. And yes it is easy to be sceptical and dismissive of this as naive – or to condemn it, as a lot of the media and Tory MPs have done, as hypocritical because some of these people have a coffee at Starbucks, or charge their mobile phones there. But this smug moral point-scoring quite misses the point.

And the point is that all around the world this year, starting in Spain with the los indignados protests, there have been groups coming together, for one-off events or day after day – 400,000 in Tel Aviv in August on the streets demanding of the Israeli government a fairer ordering of society, prioritising jobs and homes and education and care of the elderly – people gathering in 900 cities world-wide this month, and they are not all saying ‘Capitalism is Crisis’ but they are all responding to global capitalism being in crisis.

This Shabbat we read the mythic Tower of Babel story, Genesis 11: 1-9. But a myth can contain powerful truth if you know how to read it right, if you listen in to its message, to what is hidden inside its fairytale-like exterior. And the Tower of Babel is a story that speaks about what is happening now, it tells us about a society that ‘had the same language and the same words’ and the people said ‘Come on, let’s all build a city with a tower that reaches to heaven’ – literally a skyscraper – ‘and let’s make a name for ourselves...’

And this is what we have done, more powerfully than ever before in the history of this planet – the same language, the same words, whether you in London or Berlin, New York or Brussels or Beijing: ‘globalisation, economic growth, free-market turbo-capitalism, deregulation, consumerism based on the manufacture of desire’ – this is what we have built over the last fifty years or so. This is the name of the game – and what a ‘name we have made for ourselves’.

You can go up to Hampstead Heath and look out over the city, this wonderful, awesome, awful city of ours, London, and you survey the thrusting Canary Wharf-Gherkin-Shardification of our skyline, all that glitter and glass and phallic cold steel – and you don’t have to be the God of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, to think: no good will come of all this, the omnipotent building and the idolisation of growth; and you don’t have to be the Holy One of Israel to think: who do these people think they are, playing god with people’s lives?

There is an extraordinary story in the Jewish tradition, a midrash about the Tower of Babel, where the rabbis said that the Tower had seven levels on its east side and seven on its west side: builders brought the bricks up one side and then came down the other. And if a person slipped and fell down and died, nobody paid any attention and the work went on. But if a brick fell down, everyone stopped working and wept: ‘OMG, they said – Woe is us! How, when, are we going to get another brick to replace it!’

So you don’t have to be a Marxist critic of capitalism to see what is going on in this story. Two thousand years ago the rabbis were aware that people were quite ready to put the projects of empire-building before care for people, for individuals. Building the brand becomes more important than the conditions of the workers. Profit margins take precedence over alleviating poverty. It’s a universal story and it has led us in our own times into a profound crisis.

But this time no God is going to look down and destroy the project and scatter the people and confound their language. We are the gods now – or think we are. Co-incidentally this Shabbat, because it was a new moon, we also read another part of our mythic narrative from the Book of Genesis, about the fourth day of creation, which describes the creation of the sun and the moon and the stars: it’s a story wrestling with the mystery of how did they come to be here, these celestial bodies, how did they come into existence? how is it that we live just the right distance from the sun – 93,000,000 miles – not too hot, not too cold, that we can live at all on the fragile surface of this tiny planet in the middle of nowhere? how can that be, how can that possibly be?

And we, who have become the gods now – or think we are – we have a universal language now, just like in the story of the Tower of Babel, and with this language of science and technology (on which of course the global markets now depend) we can measure the heat of the sun, and we can land a man on the moon, and we can see pictures in wonderful colour and awesome detail of stars being born and stars dying: we can do all this miraculous stuff, we have build a civilisation brick by brick, with information added to information, a world solid and towering and magnificent – and I don’t decry it, because I wouldn’t want to live in a world without penicillin or be operated on with a carving knife - so we have build this world with towers of knowledge and expertise; but we can’t yet care, we still don’t care, for those who fall off the edge, who depend for their homes and their well-being, and their very lives sometimes, who depend on the politicians and wealth-creators to devise ways of sharing it – more equally, more justly, more compassionately. If we can put men on the moon and capture the birth of stars, surely we can use our ingenuity to prevent one fifth of the children in this country living in poverty?

And those protestors, resisters, are saying: We can do this, if there is the will to do it, we can do things better, we can pay attention to those who fall off the project. And around the world there are many, many who fall off, who slip out of sight, who are exploited and abused and used for the sake of the Babel projects of profit and consumption. We can do it differently, we need to do it differently, and the challenge for the younger generation growing up in this world – and the majority of those I saw at St Paul’s were young (but then most people look young to me these days) – the challenge is to do it differently, to do it better. They are not going to have any choice – because the Tower is tottering, and when it falls, who will have the energy, the experience, the wisdom, to re-build on more secure foundations, on more deep-rooted human values?

Those people in those tents may be gone by Christmas, by choice or by eviction; this may be an ephemeral, a transient occupation of the space around St.Paul’s. But they will be back, in one form or another, here and abroad, they will be back because they represent something eternal, something very Jewish actually, a belief, a hopefulness – what use to be called messianic hopefulness - that we can do better than this. We can build a society, brick by brick: dignity, justice, generosity, compassion, care, companionship - these are the building blocks of real community and a good, a godly, society where people are more valued than profit margins, where sharing what we have is more important than share options. We can do it better.

[Extracted and adapted from a sermon given on October 29th at Finchley Reform Synagaogue]

Thoughts on Impermanence

2011-10-16T16:54:00.000+01:00

How much insecurity can you bear in your life? How much awareness of the randomness, the sheer contingency and unpredictability of life? How much do we want to be reminded of the fragility of our bodies, our minds, our social structures, the innate vulnerability grafted into the carefully-constructed fabric of our daily lives?

Religious traditions can seem to offer some respite from the unsettling reality of inhabiting bodies that gradually fail us, and societies where our sense of well-being is dependent on social, political and financial forces outside any individual’s control. Religions attempt to create – through a rich interweaving of communal and personal rituals, ethical practices, sanctioned behaviours and elaborate theological gymnastics – a meaningful world for believers to inhabit. They seek to keep existential terror at bay – the terrifying fear that life has no inherent meaning; is, in Thomas Hobbes’ words, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’; and that we avoid this fate more by luck than our own good judgement.

I offer these thoughts during this week-long festival of Sukkot. I find it hard to get excited by Sukkot when it is thought about solely as a late autumn ‘nature’ festival with the waving of the traditional lulav and etrog akin to an act of primitive ‘sympathetic magic’ where one asks ‘God’, as opposed to the gods, to bring rain in sufficient quantities to ensure the survival of your crops, and therefore of yourself. This might have given the festival a real existential edge two millennia ago; but it doesn’t justify it now.

However there are other customs which do speak to me. The questions that surround The central symbol – the temporary shelter, the sukkah, constructed next to one’s home, where one eats and sometimes sleeps for the duration of the festival – seems to me to be is an antidote to religious certainty: it opens us to a range of questions about our personal and collective need for security, and our fragmentary awareness that genuine security may not be achieved through attachment to the material world.

Made of organic materials, branches and leaves, the roof of the sukkah must be such that one can see through to the stars at night: as one looks up, and out, there is a dawning realisation of the impermanence and fragility of all we build and hold dear. We recall the origin of these ‘booths’ in the mythic narrative of the Israelites’ forty year journey through the wilderness towards a distant ‘promised land’. The Biblical story describes the temporary homes the people built – sometimes for months, sometimes for years – and their education into the reality of following the peripatetic divine force that always moved them on in ways they could never predict or control.

For me, Sukkot is a reminder that permanence and certainty are antithetical to a spiritual sensibility. The great German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, scribbling a new theology on postcards in the trenches of the First World War, saw the festival as symbolising something vital both for his diasporic people and, he intuited, something with a universal resonance: 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’ (from The Star of Redemption).

In sensitising us to our transience, the festival invites us to think of those for whom unsettledness and transient living are the norm, not merely an annual religious ritual. The invitation of guests, strangers, ‘outsiders’, into one’s home is a habitual part of Jewish social living that receives a special emphasis at this time of the year. Hospitality as an everyday virtue takes on a deeper religious significance. My own synagogue – Finchley Reform Synagogue (www.frsonline.org) - is making itself available this winter, along with local churches, as a host venue for Homeless Action in Barnet, offering a cooked meal, a warm place to sleep, washing and toilet facilities, fresh clothes, conversation and breakfast for the area’s homeless.

Our guests will help us understand what George Steiner has called ‘an arduous truth’ that emerges from the mystery of Jewish resilience: ‘that human beings must learn to be each other’s guests on this small planet.’

[This is an expanded version of an article that first appeared in The Guardian on October 15th: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/oct/14/sukkot-festival-transient-living-guests?INTCMP=SRCH]

What's 'Appropriate' Supposed To Mean? - some thoughts on Yom Kippur

2011-10-10T22:29:00.001+01:00

The New Yorker is a magazine famous, amongst other things, for its cartoons. They often manage to illuminate an aspect of contemporary life with just an image and a caption. Memorable cartoons do this – they are better than my blogs and sermons because they have pictures, and very few words.

One cartoon that caught my attention recently portrays the Devil – in whom, of course, we moderns don’t believe: ‘It’s getting much harder for me to distinguish good from evil’, laments the Devil, ‘All I’m certain about is what’s appropriate and what’s inappropriate’.

This isn’t hilarious, but it strikes me as having a sly profundity. I’ve been struck for a long time now by how often those two weasel-words – ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ - come up in conversations. And not only in everyday informal conversations. You hear this language from politicians, from social workers and the police, from doctors, therapists, businessmen, teachers, TV interviewers, even the military. And yes, you hear it from liberal-minded clergy, those who might fight shy of offending congregants with the traditional Biblical distinction, basic to all monotheism (as even the Devil knows), the distinction between good and evil.

Why am I so disparaging about these words? It’s not because I don’t think it is important to think carefully about these terms ‘good’ and ‘evil’, but because almost every time I hear the words used what I really hear is someone using ‘inappropriate’ to mean “this is something I happen not to like”; and ‘appropriate’ to mean “that’s something we happen to approve of”. The word is invariably used in a deeply subjective way, while trying to give the impression of objectivity.

For example, when discussing how the synagogue to which I belong will be offering hospitality and a bed and meal to local homeless people one evening a week this winter (alongside local churches), someone complained to me: ‘But a synagogue is not an appropriate place for people to sleep’. When I expressed my puzzlement about this, it soon became clear that what they meant was ‘I personally feel uncomfortable about this, I feel a bit frightened, I would really rather not think about the fact that there are people living within a half mile of me who don’t have a home.’ But this mass of subjective feelings got covered up by the immediate use of the word ‘inappropriate’.

It’s a hand-me-down word, an off-the-peg word we often reach for to avoid really thinking about an issue, or doing the necessary work to uncover what might be a whole mixed range of our emotional responses. I think it’s often used as a way of hiding feelings; or as a substitute for thinking.

But what that New Yorker cartoon intuits is that in some quarters there has been an apparent cultural shift in recent decades away from the old certainties, the clear moral judgments you find reflected, for example, in the liturgy of the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur . This liturgy presents a simple binary opposition between good and bad, righteousness and sinfulness, what God wants from us and what God condemns. The cartoon though is pointing to the way that those simple dichotomies of old have fallen away, that there’s been a sea-change in our culture, and that a form of moral relativism has overtaken the old moral certainties.

There may be a deep confusion when we are thinking about goodness, truth, personal conduct, a society’s values. Once the rigidity of those traditional distinctions between good and bad is called into question, we have nothing left except subjective feeling, or the transience of whatever is deemed fashionably correct. But to hide all this subjectivity from ourselves we reach for the pseudo-objectivity of describing everything as either ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’.

And yet at the same time, those old polar opposites which have been part of religious thinking for millennia haven’t disappeared. On the contrary: you just have to glance at tabloid headlines, or listen to Question Time on BBC TV, to discover that ‘evil’ is still a regular part of popular thinking - even when people no longer believe in the religious framework where the concept originated. Evil has become secularized. And we fall back on the laziness inherent in believing we really do exist in a world of black and white choices and values.

There may well be a deep wish for the world to be securely divided up in this way – it makes life much simpler. But we know in our hearts that life isn’t simple; and that the traditional religious mind-set of simple moral absolutes is over, the days when we can talk in a child-like way about ‘good’ people and ‘bad people’, as if the world is divided, George W. Bush-style, into ‘evil-doers’ and the rest of us.

Although many of the narratives of the Hebrew Bible (like all great literature) show a remarkably sophisticated awareness of moral complexity, there are parts of the Bible (and much of traditional Jewish liturgy) where the thinking reflects the belief that the world is split into simple opposites. And yet one of Judaism’s great insights evolved out of, and away from, this dualistic tendency within the Hebrew Bible.

Because Judaism was, and is, an evolving civilization - one that grew more and more aware of the emotional and psychological complexities of life – the realization emerged early on that there is a battle that goes in within each of us between what the Talmudic rabbis called our yetzer tov and our yetzer ha-ra, our inclination towards goodness and our inclination towards evil. These forces, these drives, are in constant tension with each other inside us, and being human means living with that tension, wrestling with ourselves in order that more of our innate goodness shows through than its opposite.

In other words Judaism does not believe in original sin, it doesn’t believe we are born one way, or fated to be one way. It believes in the struggle within each of us to allow our creative capacities - our capacities for love and kindness and compassion and justice - to win out over our destructive capacities, our capacities for hurting others, for contempt and hatred and jealousy and envy. And because we are struggling with this, knowingly or unknowingly, every day of our lives, those ancient rabbis, in their wisdom, built into the Jewish year a period of time when one can concentrate on that continual ebbing and flowing between our creativity and our destructiveness. They suggested that the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur offer this opportunity, the opportunity for teshuvah, which means change, return - return to our better selves.

It may be that we moderns are all, in William Blake’s immortal words, ‘of the Devil’s party without knowing it’ – because the Devil seems to have all the fun, and the freedom to wreak havoc, to be selfish, to be careless about what matters; and the Devil doesn’t have to feel guilty, or that he should try harder. But what Yom Kippur offers – for those who want it – is the devilishly difficult opportunity to assess if we are capable of changing this precarious balance between our capacity for goodness and our capacity for selfishness. Can we shift the balance between what is constructive and life-enhancing in us – and what is destructive and deadly?

David Brooks is a Jewish American author whose new book ‘The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens’, in spite of its rather slick and superficial title, has some important things to say about how our minds work, how we work, how our brains can take in 11 million pieces of information at any one moment - of which we are consciously aware of maybe 40, at most. And that most of the time there is a gap between the thoughts in or heads and the emotions and intuitions that actually guide how we experience the world. So we might have an idea like ‘More money – that’s what I need to be happy’ or ‘I need to work harder, earn a better living and then I’ll just feel happier and more fulfilled’. That’s what our heads might say. We might really believe it – or we might have been told we should believe it.

But inside us another voice we are less familiar with will be saying – and this is a voice nearer to the truth of how we really experience well-being – this quieter voice will be whispering: ‘Actually the relationship between money and happiness is very tenuous; it’s relationships, personal connections to other people that count - that’s what leads to real contentment’. And what David Brooks shows, with a mass of evidence drawn from neuroscience and related studies, is that joining a group that meets just once a month to do some activity produces the same increase in happiness as doubling your income. (And that is just as well – because none of us is going to be doubling our income any time soon, if ever again).

Beyond a certain minimum income, well-being is all about the number of people you associate with and how intimately you associate with them.

There are many ways to feel this kind of connectedness. I have a particular interest in synagogue communities, for all their problematic nature (they can drive you mad, if you let them). But community is also a place which can bring blessing to others, and into the world.

That might sound very grand, even grandiose. ‘We can bring blessing to others’ – but this is the promise encoded at the heart of Judaism, promised to Abraham in that mythic saga of chosenness, ‘through you all the peoples of the world will be blessed’ (Genesis 22:18). An absurd promise, an incredible promise, you’d have to be mad to believe it, it’s inflated and deluded – and yet Jews have believed it for generations, secretly in their hearts even when their minds wanted to reject it. Believed it and lived it. ‘We can bring blessing to others’, this is our purpose, our destiny, our mission, our rationale. We can be a blessing to others when the goodness within us emerges from the pain, the confusions, the doubts, the scepticism that is also part of what it means to be Jewish.

But first I think we have to learn to be a blessing to ourselves, to forgive ourselves our failings and inadequacies, our lack of moral vision, our lack of insight into what is truly important, our seduction by material values that don’t in the end make us happy. It can be hard to stop feeling guilty, feeling bad about our failures: we are often more cruel towards ourselves than to anyone else. Part of the work of Yom Kippur, as we ask for forgiveness, is to find a way to forgive ourselves.

These are difficult times we are living in. You don’t have to be told. You know it every day of your lives, every time you listen to the news, every time you lie awake at night worrying, every time you reach for your anti-depressants or the whisky bottle. Out there is the manic-depressive behaviour of stock-markets, the shortsightedness and greed of the financial sector, the growing unemployment, the growing gulf between rich and poor here and abroad, the endless impotent political game of blame and denial – our lives are bound up in a global system that is in deep trouble, on a planet that is itself in deep trouble.

So to talk about the role of forgiveness – of oneself, of others – might sound laughable. To talk of being a blessing, each of us developing our capacities to give and to love, might seem absurd and irrelevant in the face of the growing darkness around us.

Opening our hearts to family life and friendship and community - it doesn’t sound much, it might seem like lighting a candle in a storm; but our tradition suggests that this light we offer is how God becomes present in the world. Now, you don’t have to believe that - but it is an insight that has sustained our people for generations. Our goodness, our compassion, our acts of lovingkindness – these are fragments of divinity trapped within the chaotic, confused, messiness of our lives.

Our work on Yom Kippur is to consider how we can release and live out those divine fragments: can we return to the love we are capable of showing? can we renew our hope from amidst the wreckage of disillusioned lives? can we restore our confidence that random acts of kindness can lighten the darkness we see, can make a difference, can tip the scales, can help us inscribe our names in the Book of Life for the year ahead?

On Yom Kippur we open ourselves up, individually and collectively: we are reminded that we are flawed and fragile and yet have courage and strength grafted to our soul. We look around us and see other flawed and fragile and vulnerable human beings – we are all in this together. And we see how much we need each other, need each other’s help, need each other’s blessing.

[Extracted and adapted from a much longer (!) sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue on Kol Nidrei, the eve of Yom Kippur, October 7th 2011]

Random Acts of Kindness – some New Year Thoughts

2011-09-28T13:53:00.000+01:00

A few weeks ago when having supper with some friends the conversation turned, as it does at this time of the year (at least in my home), to sermons. I wondered aloud - slightly disingenuously – as to what was on people’s minds at the moment, what themes and issues were preoccupying them? What do we want – or need – to hear about as a New Year begins?

Are we wanting to be distracted from our concerns and worries and problems; or helped to find a different perspective on them? Do we want an escape from daily life -or do we want to confront things? Do we want to be challenged – or do we want to be entertained? Do we want to focus on celebration, on the ‘happy’ in the ‘happy New Year’ – or do we want to reflect on the question of ‘goodness’ (what it is, and what gets in the way of it) in the Hebrew greeting Shana Tova, ‘a good year’?

People offered various themes for me to consider. It was soon after the UK riots and everyone had a view about these; and I am sure there are some important things to say about the causal links that run between family dysfunction, economic deprivation, social impoverishment, and crime; and I suppose we could go on to reflect on how the lack of personal control involved in looting shops , and the breakdown of moral values it represents, is a mirror of recent scandals over MPs’ expenses, or the sanctioning of phone-hacking to steal information, or indeed the looting of public money by the banks. All that could make an interesting sermon, or blog, I’m sure.

As would an examination of related issues concerning the multiple and complex consequences of living in an age of feral capitalism, and how this whole deregulated free-market system has brought some of us much material security but has also led us to the edge of an abyss. I remember the morning of Rosh Hashanah three years ago, 2008, and coming to shul with the markets in turmoil and not knowing if there would be money in the ATM cash machines later in the day. We knew then - like in the Biblical dream - that the seven fat years, the golden years, were over ; and that the lean years were beginning.

Well,we are beginning to see how lean these years are going to be – and there can be few of us, Jewish or not, who aren’t starting this New Year without anxieties about money, or about employment, or about retirement pensions, or about the well-being of our children facing up to living in such crazy and anxiety-generating times. What makes this system feral is the wildness built into it, the naked greed and opportunism of a system that is out of control. And we know in our hearts that the politicians and the economists are whistling in the dark to keep their spirits up – and ours too, I suppose. So we begin this New Year with the savagery of the cuts in the UK beginning to bite into more and more lives.

We also talked that evening, inevitably, about environmental and ecological concerns and how hard it is to really engage with any substantial changes in our cherished lifestyles. Denial rules – I know it well from within myself: I also want my imported electronic goods; and to fly-off when I want to Europe and beyond. I don’t want my individualism thwarted by larger concerns – I want to be good and make moral choices about the food I buy, and the energy I consume, but sometimes the effort of it all is really daunting. And, I suggested that evening, sermons on this aren’t going to make any difference: I’ve been in the sermon business too long to retain any naive belief about the effectiveness of exhortations from any rabbi about how we are ‘supposed’ to live.

And that would be true too, I said, of a sermon on Israel and Palestine – another suggestion from a friend that evening. I think there are things to say about being Jewish at this time in the 21st century: what it means, how we express it, what the threats to it are - there are questions about anti-Semitism and whether this is a growing phenomenon or not (I have my doubts about this) and the way the on-going impasse in the Israel/Palestine conflict impacts on our feelings about being Jewish, as well as other people’s views about Jews.

So we had a stimulating conversation that evening and it helped me clarify what I wasn’t going to talk about in the synagogue community this New Year. And that left some space to think about where we do find ourselves.

Or how we find ourselves. Our selves. Because with all these preoccupations with what is going on in the outer world, the world around us, we can lose touch with our selves. There are hidden parts of us, all of us, secret parts, private parts – the feelings and thoughts we have that we may never share with anyone; or that we don’t even really know about, but may only glimpse for a moment, during the night, or on a country walk, or when talking to someone and something is illuminated that we might never have thought about before. We do lose touch with our deeper selves, our inner selves – what used to be called the soul, the essence of who we are. On Rosh Hashanah it is probably good to be reminded of the soul: that we have one, that we are one. The traditional Jewish liturgy takes it for granted that we have a soul - but we shouldn’t take it for granted. Because we forget – we forget to nurture it, to listen in to it, to pay attention to what it prompts in us, what it stirs us to do.

In Jewish tradition the soul, our soul, is an aspect of God. Our souls are how God is incarnated in the world. In Jewish thinking , the divine is in the human. How easy it is to forget this. How easy it is to be baffled by this. How easy it is to deride this. We have so many problems, we have so many distractions, we are so busy , that we lose sight of the essence, the essence of what it is to be a human being, to be alive here and now, on the cusp of a New Year. We have our worries, our troubles – our health, the health of others we love, the health of our finances, our relationships or lack of relationships; we worry about our children, or our parents, we worry about being too busy or not busy enough, there is loneliness, depression, multiple frustrations – and these are real and we need to work with these realities.

But on Rosh Hashanah and for the traditional Ten Days that follow, we become aware - we can become aware - of another reality. Because we have a soul, because we are a unique being, because we are each an unprecedented fragment of creation – that spark of divine Being that we are, is also a reality. We have eternity grafted into us. And on Rosh Hashanah we are invited to remember this, we are cajoled into glimpsing the eternity within us, as individuals and as a people.

Jews are the people who carry eternity in their souls, who have wrestled for millennia, for generations, with that eternity. What does it mean, we ask? How can we believe in an Eternal One, when we can’t even sense that spark of eternity in ourselves? Or – how can we believe in that spark of Eternity in our selves when we doubt there is an Eternal One who animates all of being?

But Rosh Hashanah challenges us to address this mystery once again. In the tradition this day has several names and descriptions. In the liturgy we read that today is Yom Harat Olam, ‘a day which is the birthday of the world’ - though that is a rather tame translation (or maybe I mean lame?) because it makes us think of this mythic, poetic picture of the world as 5772 years old when we know that it is 13.7 billion years old (plus or minus 0.13 billion, apparently – we now have a very precise age for the universe: ‘precise’, that is, to the nearest 10 million years or so).

But this phrase, idea, Yom Harat Olam, that we celebrate on Rosh Hashanah, means something much more profound. It isn’t talking cosmology, science, it isn’t talking literally – and it doesn’t really mean ‘birthday’ at all. Harat comes from the verb, then the noun, ‘to be pregnant, to conceive’, so a better translation of this traditional phrase for the New Year would be ‘today is a day the world is pregnant ‘– it is a day when something new is about to be born, to come into being, through us. ‘Yom Harat Olam’ – ‘today is a day for the conception of a world’. In these 10 days leading up to Yom Kippur we are being asked: what kind of a world do you want to conceive, what do you want to carry into this year ahead, what is waiting to be newly born and conceived of by you, by us?

We will each have a different answer to that question, but I’d like to suggest one thing we could conceive during these 10 days, one aspect of our souls we could express, and give birth to. I am going to suggest an experiment – I suggested it to my congregation on the eve of the New Year, Wednesday evening - that you conceive of yourself as being able to generate random acts of kindness.

So on each of these days, as an experiment, give birth to some act of kindness that you might not have otherwise done – something random, that just occurs to you to do. It may be planned but it might also be spontaneous: make that phone-call you have been putting off; take out that gift aid covenant you have been meaning to give to that charity; buy a copy of the Big Issue from the man you’d rather avoid outside Tesco; empty the dishwasher without having to be told to; put your hand on someone’s shoulder who needs it; give your seat up in the tube even though you are tired; open that door to the woman with the pushchair even though your hands are full and you are rushed and she looks a bit chavvy anyway. Random acts of kindness. The opportunities will present themselves, they always do. One random act of kindness a day – give birth to it. (It’s a symbolic birth - I promise you it won’t be painful). And I promise you too - it is the promise of the High Holy Days – that something will happen to you, in you, by the end of Yom Kippur.

This is what these days are for – to return to who we are, in essence, and what we are capable of: compassion, love, generosity, kindness, a passion for justice. The traditional liturgy keeps asking God to act this way towards us. What the texts rarely do is remind us that these qualities are the divine within us. Yom Harat Olam – today let us give birth to a world, a world of random acts of kindness. They will transform us as we do them - and they do transform our world.

[based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue on the evening of 28th September 2011]

Prophecy in the 'Silly Season'

2011-09-07T20:05:00.000+01:00

No-one knows who first came up with the phrase the ‘silly season’ to describe the month of August, that supposedly quiet month when nothing very newsworthy is supposed to happen and the papers are filled with even more frivolous items than usual. Punch magazine - of blessed memory - commented on the existence of the phrase in 1871 and the OED has a reference to it from ten years before that. But I think this year we can safely consign it to the realm of the no-longer-usable-except-ironically phrases that once evoked a sincerely-held belief but have long since ceased to be taken seriously, ideas like “children should be seen and not heard”, or “manners maketh the man”, or “saving for a rainy day”, or “workers’ paradise”, or “compassionate Conservatism”. (Anyone can play this game. Feel free to join in).

This summer one only had to go away for a few days and you came back to mayhem: the UK riots and looting, the global financial meltdown and your pension worth 20% less than before, mass murder in Norway - and that was on the back of the still on-going revelations about the hacking scandals and police collusion and the schadenfreude attached to the humbling of Murdoch & Son. England becoming world number one in cricket didn’t really compensate for August’s avalanche of events that were far from ‘silly’ – events that in different ways may touch, or disturb, or confuse us, with their brutality and randomness, their relentless assault on our senses, their savage mockery of any wishes we may retain of living in an ordered and controllable and meaningful world, a world of harmony and peace-of-mind.

So, in the midst of this constant state of chaos and transformation it was a kind of relief to immerse myself again in a text from a different place and a different time, a Biblical text, and see what meaning could be wrestled from it to give any fresh perspective on all this daily uncertainty. Giving a sermon in community forces me to do that, to take seriously these ancient texts and see what can be salvaged for our times and our own contemporary states of mind.

When people come to synagogue I imagine that, amongst other things, they are looking to find some solace, or some sense of community, to find some sense of well-being, or comfort, or companionship, to find some respite or meaning, or some stillness of sprit - and I don’t know if they get that or not. What you are normally given in the service, in the liturgy, are a lot of words, words that seem to speak with such certainty – and yet we know how much uncertainty we have to live with, every day: every moment of our lives, really.

But if we probe underneath all that liturgical certainty – and this is particularly true of the Biblical texts we hear within our annual cycle of readings – we find some large questions being addressed that might intersect in interesting ways with all those uncertainties we live with.

Last Shabbat we read from the prophet Isaiah. The allocated text started at chapter 51 verse 12. And we know that these words from the prophetic school of Isaiah were words originally composed to comfort the community of Israel after its great loss – the destruction of Jerusalem and their exile to a foreign land. They are words which referred to a specific time and context – but, like all great poetry, the words speak beyond their original setting. They are words that transcend the situation of their original audience and relate to us too, speak to us in our situations, personal and collective. They are words that reverberate, that are pregnant with new possibilities.

The text opens : Anochi, anochi, hu m’nachemchem – “I, I, am He who comforts you all” – we hear into God’s soliloquy; or maybe it is a dialogue, because it immediately asks for a response: Mi at va’tiri mai’enosh yamut – “who are you, so frightened at the fact that people have to die? that each individual is made to fade like grass?”(51:12)

There is an ‘I’ - anochi - and it is so close to a ‘you’ – at – and between the I and the you there is the comfort, the possibility of comfort, m’nachemchem. So what stops us feeling the comfort, the comfort that bridges the gap between I and Thou? The text goes on to tell us. “You have forgotten Adonai osecha, the Ground of all Being who forms you” (51:13) – the verb is a participle, so better to render it “You have forgotten the One who is forming you now, at this moment” – you have forgotten this, that the Being of the Universe is in you, “noteh shamayim v’yosayd aretz” – “while at the same time is stretching out the skies and making firm the earth beneath your feet”. Suddenly we realise what an extraordinary piece of text this is! (Some might call it inspired).

Being unfolds itself moment by moment, within us and around us. This knowledge could comfort us. But we forget it. So is this why we come into community, back to the synagogue, on this first Shabbat in September? To be reminded? To be reminded that we are part of that great chain of Being, we are not cut off from each other, or from the natural world around us; nor are we cut off from that sense that our being alive here and now is a mystery, that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, that the divine is an aspect of our being.

“But you are terrified” – our text goes on - va’t’fached tamid kol ha’yom, “you are always terrified, all the time” – “because of rage and feeling oppressed and feeling life is out to get you”. (All translations are interpretations, but I am trying to translate the text’s imagery into something which allows the metaphors to be accessible to our experience yet remain true to the essence of the original).

When we get into these states of mind – feeling frightened, oppressed, persecuted – this is because, the text intuits, we have forgotten who we are, how fragile and dependent we are. We have forgotten to look up to the awesome nature of the stars at night, forgotten to pay attention to the planet we inhabit. Forgotten that we stand poised, precariously, midway between the largest aspects of creation, universes without end, and the smallest particles of being, subatomic particles. We look out and we look in and we wonder what it all means.

And as we wonder, and as we remember, we hear the words of comfort: Anochi, anochi, hu m’nachemchem – “I, I am the One who comforts you” – ‘when you acknowledge your mortality, when you stop avoiding what it means to be human - that you will one day die - when you can face this without fear, without falling to pieces, the gap between us will disappear’.

August is never the silly season in the annual Jewish cycle – in August we are always reading from a particular selection of prophetic readings: the ‘seven Haftarot of consolation’ that come after Tisha B’av, when the destruction of the Temple is remembered. Last Shabbat was the fourth one in the cycle.

Destruction, exile, pain and loss – Judaism recognises that these are part of the very fabric of being, collective and personal. They occur over and over again. But comfort is still possible, consolation, a soothing and healing of our woundedness: this is also part of the very fabric of being.

This is Jewish realism, a prophetic hopefulness grounded in the vision of an I speaking to a You, a soliloquy we listen into - and as we listen, soliloquy is transformed into dialogue.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue on September 3rd 2011]

On the Edge of an Abyss?

2011-07-20T15:23:00.001+01:00

A brief blog on – not to be too apocalyptic about things – peering into the abyss. Perhaps I'm being alarmist, but am I alone in feeling a bit lemming-like as the days go on and the implosion of the world's financial regimes edges closer?

Is the battle that is being played out between Obama and the Republicans over America’ s debt ceiling just another wearisome round of political bargaining and macho posturing? Or is it for real this time? (It's easy to get jaded with the constant talk of financial insecurity and switch off). But with the Republicans refusing to allow Obama to reduce the budget deficit by a combination of raising taxes on a wealthy minority plus spending cuts – the Republicans want the axe to fall only on spending – the risk is that, in effect, the US will run out of money. I simplify, but (unfortunately) not a lot.

How do we know when what we read signifies something that really will impact on us – and when it is speculation, media-talk, or hyperbole? After the 2007 crash everyone was suddenly an expert, having known all long that the bubble would burst, that it was "inevitable". Yet although leading up to it there had been a few straws in the wind, very few understood that we were building palaces on a swamp.

But doesn’t it feel – or is it only me, maybe projecting some inner state of mind onto the outer world? – that a perfect storm is brewing?

We know the euro is in crisis, with a Greek debt default on the cards. I detect a degree of UK smugness here as we watch other European countries’ finances in perilous straits, as if our banks and national debt is somehow insulated from these transnational forces and the plucky British pound will ride out the storm. And if we add to that the suicidal intransigence of the Republican/Tea Party/Fox News triad, we face the prospect of the US defaulting on its debts – which will mean the collapse of the dollar and a global slump. This is the 'perfect storm' scenario in which we will all be swept up.

Too alarmist? I hope so. Though I fear not. Yet we can never know till later whether our intimations are pure fantasy, unconscious projections of split-off parts of the psyche – or whether our intuitions are grounded in another mode of knowing where thinking and feeling and a modicum of historical knowledge link up within us and offer up their semi-opaque understanding.

While we here in the UK remain transfixed by the criminality and obfuscations of Murdoch and Son, and the investigations into the knotted relations between police, press, NewsCorp and senior politicians, the bigger drama being played out in the financial world is just flickering at the edge of our vision. Yet who wants to look into an abyss when an old man’s dynasty is crumbling, Lear-like, and we can enjoy the Schadenfreude of the drama being played out live on our screens?

“How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle!” (2 Samuel 1.25) - this week it is Murdoch et al. And some of us may rejoice – not only that corporate ruthlessness sometimes gets its comeuppance, but also glad that it’s not us being examined, probed, called to account. Yesterday was Murdoch's false-humble Day of Atonement. But the news from the God-intoxicated delusionists in the US, and the news from our reigning gods, the all-powerful, omnipresent financial markets, suggests that, sooner than we expect, it might be our turn to lament, like King David of old: “How are the mighty fallen!”

Puzzling over 'The Tree of Life'

2011-07-12T08:55:00.000+01:00

What makes a film religious? Does it need an overtly ‘religious’ theme – like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ or Pier Paolo Pasolini’s far superior The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)? What about Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments? Or the animated musical cartoon film The Prince of Egypt? Is Monty Python’s Life of Brian a religious film? Barbra Streisand’s Yentl? What about Fiddler on the Roof? We could play this game forever, but it seems to me that the category of ‘religious’ as a description of a film’s content or mood is such a broad-brush term that eventually it loses all meaning.

I am temperamentally more interested, anyway, in films whose ‘mood’ seems to be ‘religious’ rather than ones where religious themes in a traditional sense are the overt content. I think of a film like Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue (1993), bathed in the numinous, which explores in a deeply satisfying way the profoundest questions about love, loss and grief. And the marvellous meditative Korean film Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring (2003), suffused with the ethos of Buddhism, about the relationship between an old monk and a young boy.

These thoughts are prompted by Terrence Malick’s new film The Tree of Life, which has recently won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival and seems to have divided viewers (and critics) into those who think it is a religious masterpiece and those who think it is an over-long, pretentious and self-indulgent spectacle. Although one might think that it can hardly be both a visionary work of spiritual grandeur and a somewhat boring and incoherent failure, I found myself inclined towards both views at different moments during the 139 minutes Malick takes to offer us what is in essence an extended visual and poetic midrash on the Book of Job’s famous question: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations...?” (Job 38:4) – God’s response out of the whirlwind to a Job bereft of answers to the questions of human suffering.

Malick opens his film with this text – the second time in the last few years that a major US film has used the Book of Job as a reference point when exploring why bad things happen to ‘good’ people, with the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man (2009) being an oblique commentary on this universal theme. But where the Coen brothers used humour to explore these unanswerable questions, there is not a single light-hearted moment in Malick’s film. There is light aplenty – including extended sequences evoking the creation of the universe and the evolution of life on earth, with growing prominence given to sunlight and trees as pointing beyond themselves to some overarching meaning inscribed in creation – a meaning which is supposed to set individual human tragedy within a larger picture of grace and harmony. If this sounds abstract, it reflects Malick’s aspiration towards creating a visual and aural hymn to spiritual transcendence – a hymn embracing a counterpoint narrative threaded around an American family of mother, father and three boys, one of whom dies.

The narrative arc of the film is fragmentary, confusing, sometimes unsettling in its emotional brutality – one of Malick’s aims seems to be to offer a critique of the cruelty encoded within human nature and juxtapose this with the potential to experience life as a gift of divine grace. There were times watching this film when I glimpsed strands of Christian theology underpinning the narrative; and when I wondered if Malick was also playing visually, and through the storyline (such as it is), with the imaginative links between sons, sun, and Son (of God).

The Tree of Life – the reference is of course to the Garden of Eden, where the etz hayyim in the middle of the garden is linked to the idea of immortality – is a film about mortality and how any of us can bear the knowledge that we will not live forever. It is a film about loss and lost souls and lost innocence. It’s a film that harks back to the Biblical myth’s ‘first family’ – man, woman, three sons, one of whom dies. It is a bold, brave and (for me) rather baffling film. I’ve never seen anything like it – and I’m not sure I’d want to again. Though I’d love to see a Jewish filmmaker take on the great themes: ‘Why are we here? Is there any overarching meaning to life on earth? What is the point of suffering? And why are Jewish men so useless at DIY?’

I would imagine that - pace the Coen brothers - a Jewishly-imagined ‘Tree of Life’ would inevitably be darker in tone: our theology, although it has messianic hopefulness incarnated within it, doesn’t offer too-easy reassurance about pain, suffering and death. But such a film might also be leavened with humour, that precious spiritual resource lacking in Malick’s hugely ambitious film.

Would I recommend The Tree of Life? It has fine acting, is beautiful shot, has a wonderful soundtrack, and is filled with visual metaphor and arresting images. You don’t want to take your eyes off the screen for a moment – and yet I left feeling unsatisfied and slightly annoyed, as if I’d been taken for a ride by a cinematic master who’d promised me the world in all its deep and tangy mystery but left me chewing on a mouthful of pious fudge.

“For the sake of Heaven”?

2011-06-26T17:58:00.001+01:00

It is a truism to say that Judaism is a religion of debate and argument – and that Jews have an almost genetic predisposition to dissent, disputatiousness and disagreement. There’s an almost stubborn pride in our capacity for argument, and a grim humour in our acknowledgment of ourselves as, in the Biblical image, a ‘stiff-necked people’ (Exodus 32:9).

In a famous text from the ethical treatise in the Talmud known in English as the ‘Ethics of the Fathers’ we find an attempt to distinguish between different kinds of argument:

“Every controversy which is for the sake of heaven will in the end lead to a lasting result. But one which is not for the sake of heaven will not in the end lead to a lasting result. What was a dispute for the sake of heaven? The dispute of Hillel and Shammai. And one which was not for the sake of heaven? The dispute of Korach and all his company” (5:20)

On the weekend in the Jewish calendar on which we read the story of Korach’s rebellion against the leadership of Moses and Aaron (Numbers 16), I want to share some thoughts on what I see is the problematic distinction this Talmudic text outlines.

First some background. Hillel and Shammai were early first century rabbis teaching during the Roman occupation of Palestine before the Temple was destroyed in the year 70. Although the Talmud records only five differences of opinion between the two of them as individuals, they founded schools of thought and eventually there are more than 300 recorded issues on which the schools disagreed.

A few examples, the first about ritual law. How are we to light the Hanukah candles? Eight on the first night, decreasing to one on the last? Or the other way round? The school of Shammai said it was the former way, the school of Hillel ruled we build up the light over successive nights. Hillel’s argument won the day.

When it came to moral and ethical questions, Shammai’s position was usually stricter than Hillel’s: so the followers of Shammai believed only worthy students should be admitted to study Torah while the House of Hillel believed that Torah may be taught to anyone, in the expectation that Torah study makes a person worthy. Or in regard to the question of so-called ‘white lies’, the question was asked whether one could tell an unattractive bride that she is beautiful. (The rabbis were nothing if not sexist). Shammai said it was wrong to lie, but Hillel said that all brides are beautiful on their wedding day, which has become a kind of Jewish folk-saying.

In relation to divorce, the House of Shammai said that a man may only divorce his wife for a serious transgression, but the House of Hillel allowed divorce for even trivial offenses, such as burning a meal. That’s an example of where Hillel’s position might seem more lax in relation to law, more open, but only if you are male. For women, that apparent leniency of view was much more problematic. But the inherent patriarchal bias isn’t addressed in the sources.

Anyway, the point is that all of these kinds of disputes about moral and ritual law were seen by the rabbis of the succeeding generations as being, in the famous phrase, l’shem shamayim: ‘for the sake of heaven’. Disputes had a higher purpose than power or prestige or popularity. The rabbis knew that they were arguing about how to live their Judaism in times and circumstances very different from the past: they had the Torah, but they had to use their own creativity and imagination to interpret it and respond to it as if God had a stake in their decisions, as if God’s presence in the world depended on how they interpreted the tradition. This made it all ‘for the sake of heaven’ – they were trying to uphold the essential values of the tradition for new generations. They were trying to make holiness part of everyday life, and in that task questions of rabbinic ego or personality or rivalry were quite irrelevant.

Of course that Talmudic view – that Hillel and Shammai’s disagreements were ‘for the sake of heaven’ – is a wish, a pious hope. We know that on the ground things were as bloody and rivalrous then as the rabbinic world still is in some quarters.

One of their major areas of fierce confrontation was in their views about what Judaism taught about the relationship to the non-Jewish world, particularly about the Romans when they were occupying the land. The school of Shammai took up a stance in alliance with the Zealots, who were militantly opposed to occupation, and they decreed that all commerce and communication with the occupiers and those in surrounding countries who supported them should be prohibited. (Think Hamas). Whereas the School of Hillel was conciliatory and opposed violence. So contentious was this split that followers of Hillel were barred by the House of Shammai from praying with them. So much for arguments being ‘for the sake of heaven’.

While the Temple still stood, the belligerent view of the schol of Shammai was the majority view - and those that followed Hillel were as derided in Israel as are ‘Peace Now’ today. It wasn’t until a few generations after the catastrophe of the Temple’s destruction that the views of the school of Hillel gained the upper hand. Whereupon we find in the Talmud the view that whenever the House of Shammai had disputed the opinion of the House of Hillel, the House of Shammai's opinion was now null and void.

From that time on, the Jewish world evolved its view that Hillel’s opinions – often tolerant, open-minded, inclusive – took precedence over Shammai’s often narrower or harsher views.

Well, so much for the first part of our text, the arguments between Hillel and Shammai ‘for the sake of heaven’. We can see that beneath the smooth surface of the Pirke Avot picture, there is a maelstrom of factionalism and Jewish dividedness. It was as vicious as that which sometimes occurs between Orthodoxy and Reform in the diaspora today, or the Hasidim and Mitnagdim in the 18th century, or that which is poisoning the Jewish soul in Israel in the conflict between West Bank fundamentalists and Israeli doves. And there are echoes of that Jewish intolerance of what other Jews do all over the place, not least in the pages of the Jewish Chronicle. ‘For the sake of Heaven’ can cover a multitude of sins.

And so what about Korach and his rebellion? He’s the character the rabbis use to talk about an argument not ‘for the sake of heaven’. But just as the Hillel-and-Shammai side of the equation is not straightforward, neither is the disdain the tradition has for Korach. You see, I do have a sneaky admiration for Korach: he was prepared, after all, to stand up against the unelected leadership of Moses and Aaron and argue with their assumptions that they alone had access to holiness and to interpreting God’s will and mediating God for the community.

Korach’s rebuke has its own power: ‘You’ve aggrandized yourself’, he says, ‘you have set yourself up above us, but all of us here in the community are holy and God is as available and present to any one of us as he is to you two’(Numbers 16:3). Well, we might wonder on an initial reading, what is the problem with that? Korach is arguing that holiness is integral to the people, and the divine energy that the tradition calls God doesn’t need specialists to make itself present. It doesn’t need an Aaron and a priesthood. It doesn’t need a Moses with his moods and his solitary inwardness and his constant cozying-up to the Holy One of Israel. Isn’t Korach’s argument the argument of democracy, and of ‘people power’, isn’t it anti-totalitarian, isn’t it Aung San Suu Kyi’s stance against the Burmese junta?

In her Reith lectures which you can hear this week on BBC Radio 4, she quotes the sociologist Max Weber’s analysis of the three essential qualities for politicians: ‘passion, a sense of responsibility, and a sense of proportion’. Passion, she will say, means a passionate dedication to a cause, particularly if that involves a politics of dissent, dissent from the dominant power. Well, wasn’t Korach engaging in a politics of dissent?

He was certainly taking responsibility for the major disaffection that the Israelites felt, and that kept welling up in them as they schlepped endlessly through the wilderness.

I don’t know about Korach’s ‘sense of proportion’ – but then the Bible rarely does a sense of proportion in any of its characters: they are often slightly larger than life, as characters in literary sagas frequently are.

But the point I am making is that the rebel Korach’s complaint does have a seductive logic to it. Yet Jewish tradition is unreservedly hostile to him and what he represents. Let a former Chief Rabbi, Joseph Hertz, in his great commentary on the Torah, represent this traditional attitude. He comments on Numbers 16:3 as follows: ‘With the instinct of the true demagogue, Korach posed as the champion of the People against the alleged dictatorship of Moses and Aaron, the two brothers who usurped all power and authority in Israel’(p.639). So no room for doubt there. Commentaries of course try to keep their own dictatorial instincts firmly out of sight. And you don’t get to be Chief Rabbi by doing nuance, or deconstructing the authority of the authoritative and sometimes authoritarian texts.

But the bottom line is – according to Pirke Avot – that an argument like Korach’s is ‘not for the sake of heaven’. In other words, the rabbis believed it was an argument to further his own desire for power or prestige or glory. It was – to use contemporary language – ‘ego-driven’. It wasn’t about holiness. He was just using the language of holiness as a cover story for personal ambition. He was using religion – as so many have done through the ages and continue to do – as a stepping stone for personal gain and power. Passionate he might have been, but the Torah is unequivocal that passion alone is not enough. Korach might use the language of heaven – ‘all the community are holy’ – but his wasn’t an argument ‘for the sake of heaven’, it was for the sake of himself.

Yet that still leaves us with a basic question. How are we ever to know - in our own arguments, our own dissent from authority, our own disputes and disagreements (whether in our families, or at work, or in our synagogue communities, or in our communal Jewish politics, or in relation to Israel) – whether we are being like Hillel or like Korach? How do we refine our awareness, our awareness of our true motives - not our rationalized motives - when we are in disagreement? How do we learn to become self-reflective, and honest, about our deeper motives? This is a psychological task, a spiritual task, a religious task: discerning inside ourselves the strands of dispassionate wisdom worthy of a Hillel, and unraveling them from the passionate selfishness of our inner Korach.

‘All the community are holy’ – what a seductive phrase that is! It’s flawed only in the light of the Jewish understanding that holiness is never an achieved state. It’s always an aim, a goal, something to work towards in a lifetime’s dedication and struggle. The moment you think you have it, that you possess it – that you are it, ‘holy’ – you’ve lost it, lost sight of it. Yes, the potential for holiness is always here, it animates our lives; but it is always elusive – for an individual or a community or a nation.

This is the great Jewish adventure, the great Jewish paradox – the movement towards holiness, and the guarding ourselves from the hubris of ever believing we have achieved it.

[adapted from a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue on June 25th 2011]

Torah Dreamers: a story for Shavuot

2011-06-08T21:00:00.000+01:00

No-one knew what was happening. The old man had gone, up the mountain, up into the clouds. Someone said it would make no difference, he'd always had his head in the clouds. We were a sceptical people, even then. And time has not mellowed us. Neither time nor history. If anything we have become even more stiff-necked, because of our history and over time, more cynical about leaders who think they have the answers, think they have a hot-line to holiness, a route-map to the promised land.

Nowadays, don’t we always know better, we chosen people? Who needs the Law laid down from on high when, with our yiddische kop, we know so much already?

But on that day, no-one knew what was happening. He’d disappeared, up into the mountain, to meet old El himself, or newer gods, or trim his beard and think his lofty thoughts, or - who knows? – just to get away from us unruly rabble. Six hundred thousand of us, they said – but, nu, who’s counting? We’re storytellers, no? Mythographers, with license to tell it as we want, embroider here and there, true to the imagination - not like those number-crunching Levite accountants, pestering the old man with their worries about a desert journey without relief or benefits that anyone could see. About one thing though, we were sure: nothing good would come of this. The sun smote us by day, the moon chilled us by night, and death sung lullabies of Egypt in our ear.

The rumours began as soon as he’d gone, flashing through the camp like lightning, yet illuminating nothing except our fears: some said his heart was weak and he’d gone off like a wounded goat to die...others said he wanted to enslave us yet again, to a different god... then there were stories that he’d left in a huff after quarrelling with his brother...even that he’d been killed by the riffraff who’d joined our great escape...we had stories aplenty, but as usual we knew nothing.

The boldest amongst us predicted something else - ‘a moment of destiny’, the scribes insisted, ‘when the future will be revealed’. That was too glib for me, too pious: how could a nation’s fate be transformed through words alone, words narrated from on high by some unseen author(ity) dictating how things have to be? What chutzpah we possess to tell the tale that way, that we alone were called, that we must live the story to the end of days. But so it turned out - though at the time we only glimpsed the script in shadow, as if through a glass, darkly.

Actually, what remains in the mind’s eye is the weather. We'd left in a hurry, remember, in the springtime - overcoats discarded and umbrellas not yet invented - and here we were, six weeks out of Egypt, in the desert, high summer, and there was thunder and lightning and torrents of rain as if Shaddai himself was storming the heavens and then from out of nowhere a whirling and rumbling in our ears like the grinding of a titanic battle and on the third day trembling storms of dust, clouds of dust and sand, thick clouds of sand and smoke, in your eyes so they could not see, in your mouth so you dared not speak, in your ears so you couldn't hear yourself think, dust ascending as in a flaming furnace, the earth shuddering beneath our feet, our world afire, tumult in our hearts, and from all around a sound, reverberating, a sound pounding us, bonding us, a sound finding us, founding us...

But wait, we are not ready for that...

We who were left at the foot of the mountain - a great multitude of disparate souls yet bound together as if one family - for us, heaven assaulting our senses, there was a single desire, overwhelming, all-consuming: survival. How to protect ourselves from the quaking storm of the flaming furnace of unendurable heat? How to resist the looming mountain - seemingly alive and inescapable - held over our heads as if to crush us with its awesome gravity? How to endure the unendurable? The people waited, cowering, submissive, while the unbearable went on unbearably - as it does – the people waiting for something else to happen: waiting for death, or revelation, or someone to appear from offstage and - deus ex machina, as it were – restore some hope to our bewildered hearts.

Where was Moses? When would he return? Would he ever return? It was then that we realised how much we needed him. We were lost without him. Lost in the desert of course - some said we were at Sinai, others said Horeb, while a few refused to give the place a name at all, for we could have been anywhere – but we were also lost in another, graver sense. We were lost psychologically - a word we did not even know then, but have become familiar with since, during the long journey away from there to distant lands and cooler climes.

On that day we needed our leader more than we'd ever realised. But if we're honest, we can see how we've always needed a leader to follow, to obey, to tell us what to do, to take away the unbearable responsibility of personal decision. In this, we chosen people are no different from the rest. Moses or Mao, Vladimir Ilyich or Golda, in our hearts we crave a leader, strong and with vision, man or woman, someone who will protect us and inspire us, give us a sense of purpose and belonging. In all of us there is still the child, vulnerable, defenceless, who looks outside for help, for salvation, for security and answers. We were well-named in our saga - 'the children of Israel'. That’s us, still emotional orphans, still looking outside ourselves for someone to tell us how to live. But on that day he had gone - up the mountain, into the clouds.

It may be hard now, looking back, to appreciate what his shepherding had meant to us. You see, we owed him everything: our freedom, obviously; but more than that he was teaching us stuff, revealing new laws for new times, he was changing the way we thought. Everything was his doing, his inspiration, his creation. Remember that it was Moses who had broken our bondage to the status quo by challenging the all-controlling god-like rulers of our land - in the name of freedom, and justice. “Let my people go!” – the slogan captured our hearts and minds. The excitement of those days is impossible to convey. So long oppressed and now participating in what, even as it was happening, we knew was one of the great events in recorded time: the rise of a downtrodden people, a total break with a dishonourable past, and the promise - oh, so seductive - the promise of a new and enlightened society where a daily life of decency, compassion and comradeship would at last prevail. What a vision he had! Sheer inspiration. True, he could be frightening to behold – but he taught us how to live with one another in ways unenslaved by the past. No wonder some call him Rabbenu. We will never see his like again.

And the miracle of it is how, in different lands, in different ages, our story recurs: the myth humanity craves is re-created, the impulse towards justice and freedom keeps being renewed, as if it were an eternal spirit always alive within the human soul, a divine spark waiting to flare into being. The contemporaneity of the past: the vision of a society based on cooperation rather than competition. That’s what he gave us. That’s what we were given.

But on that day, the first time, there was only the huddled masses, and the storm within us and around us. And then we heard it. Each man, each woman, each child, alone, heard that sound. 600,000 and more, together, we heard that sound that pierced us and stilled us and silenced the storm around us and the quaking within us.

We had never heard that sound before - and yet we knew it, as you know it still. It was a call, a summons - primeval, insistent, yearning - a cry from deep within time, hidden in our memories, there from the very beginning, before the beginning, waiting to be heard, a sound primitive and immediate, stripping us bare, hollowing us out, hallowing us into peoplehood.

The sound of the shofar - though we only learnt its name later on, when we tamed its call and used it to proclaim our new moons and holy days, or rally the troops. A sound like no other sound. An unearthly sound. A terrible, forlorn sound, wrenching the heart out of us, wrenching the heart back into us, it went on and on, reverberating inside our skulls, beating against our eyes, forcing them to open, to open and see that this moment was destined to go on for as long as time endures, so that in every place this sound was heard, in every community the shofar sounded, it was but an echo, a memory, of that first time, at Sinai - or wherever - when God spoke (in a ‘voice’, the texts later said) but to us it was a sound, the sound of eternity vocalising the Eternal One - ‘I AM, Eternal, divine...’ - God’s shofar voice echoing ceaselessly within each human being: hear, return, remember, pay attention - this is the purpose of your life, your origin, your destiny. This is your Torah. I plant it within you.

This is what we heard. I was there at the beginning and I will be there at the end, alpha and omega, aleph and tav. I AM what I AM.

We all heard it. It came to shake our certainties, to unsettle our complacency, our too-comfortable understandings, our easy answers, our lazy presumptions. Farewell to surefootedness. That divine voice, carrying its message of liberation and hope into a world scared to receive it, scared because the voice seemed to promise so much. Who could allow themselves to hope such sacred promises could ever be fulfilled? We have carried this message of hope like a yoke around our necks – burdened by a revelation in which we also rejoice. It weighs us down, we try to shake ourselves free, but we are bound for life, bound to live in its shadow. Bondsmen yet again.

We received a vision in those days the like of which has, perhaps, never been seen since. It was a challenge to perfection, of a sort, a utopian dream of a society ordered under the rule of God, where human beings would overcome their egotism and vanity, their greed, their pettiness, their inability to see beyond the next milestone, and would create communities bounded in trust. The Torah - God's dream for us, and the embodiment of our dream of God. Its idealism has never been surpassed. And its idealism has never been achieved. The Torah announced an extraordinary experiment in human community: the earth is God's property which has been made available for all of us; it is not to be exploited for the enrichment of some to the detriment of others. And as servants of God we should not remain enslaved to any other human being or social system.

What an unattainable vision that was. Yet it reverberated through the prophetic books and echoes inside Western consciousness until this very day. That corrosive pressure to surpass ourselves, to ensure that the prophetic passion for justice and the absence of oppression is not only an ideal but is transformed into action here and now. The Torah dream remains magnetic. The Torah dream still summons us to renounce selfishness, worldly comfort and unbridled individualism, and merge our personal being into that larger vision of community.

It is said that at Sinai, God's voice split into 70 voices and 70 languages, so that all the nations should hear and understand. A universal message. And it spoke to each of us who was there - and were we not all there? - to each of us in our own private language, intimate and knowing, searching us through and through, claiming us for itself, inscribing within us an indelible hopefulness about what we might become. A terrible and blessed burden, that memory, that hope.

Some say that God’s voice at Sinai never ceased, never ceases. That if we stop a while and listen, really listen (shema, Yisrael), we can hear its echo still. That if we find a way of being still, we can hear its echo still. Well, that’s what they say, those storytellers of old, those dreamers - and who are we to disagree?

[Sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, June 8th 2011]

The J.Street Project

2011-05-05T11:53:00.000+01:00

How do you represent an absence? When something has disappeared, how do you portray its non-existence? When people have ceased to be, how do you remind yourself of their former presence?

The U.S-born, British-based artist Susan Hiller found herself in Berlin in 2002. Walking around the city she came across a street named Judenstrasse: Jews’ Street. This led her on into a three-year project - a kind of pilgrimage - to photograph and film all the street signs in Germany that incorporate the word Jude. She found 303 signs in streets, lanes, alleys and avenues scattered throughout the country. These were the reminders, still present, of an absence.

Her 67 minute film, The J.Street Project, is showing at Tate Britain until May 15. If you haven’t had the opportunity to see this extraordinary work, I urge you to visit the Tate and have a look for yourself. In this week when the Jewish world has marked Yom HaShoah – the memorial day that commemorates the deaths associated with the Holocaust – I would suggest that this piece by Hiller is one of the profoundest meditations on the Shoah that has yet been produced.

What makes her documentary record - 303 scenes long - so extraordinary? As the film unfolds we see a series of static camera shots, each of which contains somewhere on screen one street sign containing the word Jude: Judendorf, Judenhof, Judenweg, Judengass, Judenberg, Judennam...

Each shot records - for a few seconds or for a minute and more - life going on. Everyday life. ‘Ordinary’ life. Sleepy villages, noisy urban centres, rural locations. Children play, church bells ring – the sounds are mesmerisingly enmeshed with the visual images - lorries thunder past and an old man loses his hat, and his balance (so, there’s almost an ‘accident’, someone almost dies, you can see it about to happen) - birds sing, the sun sets over empty fields, a road-drilling punctures silence, rain drips from closed shutters, businessmen hurry, shoppers wander, tourists point, the wind picks up, a graveyard is in the background, lovers embrace, trees rustle: and slowly you see the artfulness with which Susah Hiller has composed this threnody for a disappeared people. The ‘Jew’ is always present - in the street sign. And the signs signal an absence. This is Germany, and life is going on, everyday life, and the past haunts the present.

The film does not offer any ‘meaning’ to the events of the Holocaust – no ‘meaning’ can ever be generated, only a reflection on the limitations of ascribing ‘meaning’ to events – but the cumulative effect of watching these images unfold in real time is to create a disturbing, poignant sense of loss: it is like watching a story unfold, a story without words - except the reiterated Jude – a story that seems random and discontinuous but that one senses is built up in phases, in sections and selections of images and sounds, like a visual poem that flows into stanzas, that echoes and re-echoes. The piece is like a meditation, it is slow and reflective, and you think nothing is ‘happening’. But there is an underlying plan, a purpose, a shaping, controlling hand at work – hidden, but in open view.

In the blurb outside the room where this film is shown, the Tate suggests that ‘For this factual, indexical project Hiller employed a neutral seriality in her approach’. But there is nothing ‘neutral’ about this collage of 303 clips of film: each one is loaded, each one triggers thoughts, feelings, associations in the viewer. Each one is a meditation on death, and life, and how closely they are woven together, and how life always goes on and how wondrous and how desolate that experience can be.

Thoughts on freedom

2011-04-24T18:00:00.000+01:00

They say that satire died the day they gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger. (For those too young - or maybe too old - to remember, Kissinger was responsible for the secret carpet-bombing of Cambodia in 1969-70 during the Vietnam War). Well, for me, irony died a little death the other week when I read that prior to his recent concert in China, Bob Dylan had been asked to submit a list of songs he intended to sing; and the government had vetted this list and agreed to the concert as long as he didn’t sing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘The Times They Are A’ Changing’. He also, apparently, had to sign a pledge promising "not to hurt the feelings of the Chinese people" during his performances.

We all make compromises, I suppose, in regard to our own freedom to speak our mind, express ourselves, speak truth to power...that Dylan did so in the very week that the Chinese government arrested and ‘disappeared’ the activist and artist Ai WeiWei – he of the million porcelain seeds in the Tate Modern exhibition – that just compounded my sense of the demise of irony. I suddenly, and rather inexplicably, felt very old.

It’s not that I felt critical of Dylan – I recognize that compromises on our independent-mindedness for the sake of some greater good are sometimes necessary. Or at least that’s how we like to think of it. After all, we say, isn’t it part of our freedom that we accept that there are limits to our freedom? In order to do his job, Dylan agreed to a limitation on his repertoire. And he didn’t mention Ai WeiWei, even though he had the freedom once there on stage to do that. He could have said no at any point but he didn’t.

Like one of my rabbinic colleagues who was invited to write an article for the Jewish Chronicle on Pesach and freedom - but on condition she didn’t mention the Palestinians. Or like me, who signed an agreement a few years ago that if I was going to work for a particular congregation I would “respect all the decisions” of Council, colleagues but also all members of the community “at all times” – whatever that was supposed to mean.

We all have to make these choices at some stage in our lives. Maybe we grow used to making these compromises to our higher values, to our understanding of what is right and true and godly, because if we didn’t…well, that’s an interesting question: we figure we’d probably end up an outcast, or out of a job; either that, or we’d end up a saint or a zaddik - and who could bear that for very long?

These thoughts on freedom and its limitations arise of course out of the Pesach/Passover season – and in particular out of the Torah text read in Reform synagogues this Shabbat: Exodus, chapter 13. The text contains a striking play-on-words, a transparent piece of punning. ‘You have come out of Egypt, which was your beit avadim, house of slavery/servitude...’, it says (13:3). And then it goes on to describe how the people will journey towards a promised land, flowing with milk and honey, and that when they arrive there, ‘v’avadata et ha-avodah ha-zot : you shall serve this service...seven days of unleavened bread...’ (13: 5).

Slavery is behind you, the text says - so you have a kind of freedom. But this is a freedom in which one kind of avodah is to be replaced with another. Slavery to Egypt is to be replaced with servitude to something else – the laws of Pesach, the laws surrounding hametz, leaned bread. You may no longer be slaves, the text says, you may be freed from avodah , but a new kind of avodah, of service, will be required of you: service of God, service of God’s laws, service in order to remember your story, your history. The paradox around the word avodah (slavery/service) is precise, fine-tuned: you are to submit to a new kind of servitude in order to remember that you are not slaves.

So on Pesach we celebrate our freedom from servitude, yes – but this freedom is seen in the Biblical narrative, and in subsequent Jewish thinking, in a very particular way. Freedom from bondage to Pharaoh does not mean you are free to do whatever you want. That kind of freedom is an illusion. The only freedom you have is about who and what you are going to serve: are you going to serve Egypt, the state; and Pharaoh, the powers that be? Or are you going to serve God, the divine, the highest ideals and values that exist? It’s a stark choice, maybe an unwelcome choice. Do you serve man, human authority – or do you serve God, the Holy One of Israel? Do you serve the cause of oppression - or the cause of holiness?

Freedom is such a simple word – it’s a bit like ‘love’: everyone’s for it, it’s just that the devil is in the detail.

One of the 20th century’s leading thinkers about the complexities of the theme of freedom was Sir Isaiah Berlin, the Russian-born but echt-British Jewish writer, social and political theorist and philosopher who taught how freedoms are inevitably plural and often incompatible. He accepted that ‘the fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement to others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor...’ This was the base-line of his thinking, but it quickly developed into the basic paradox that ‘Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted’.

And this recognition became a refrain in his thinking and writing: ‘Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep. The bloodstained story of economic individualism and unrestrained capitalist competition does not today need stressing...’ Well, he died in 1997 - more than a decade before the current debacle - so perhaps it still, and always, needs stressing.

Freedom from ‘beit avadim, house of slavery/servitude’ led straight to Sinai and the revelation that if you are not going to be a slave to the material world and its values and hardships and oppressive character, what’s left is the freedom to submit to another kind of value system, which we called holiness, the sacred, the sense of the divine presence that permeates existence and leads to the prioritising of certain vales: compassion, justice, righteousness, generosity, self-sacrifice, the capacity to care for and value others not only one’s self.

That freedom to submit is an act, a choice – it turns what is in essence an abstract concept, ‘freedom’, into something alive and personal. This week I freely submit to the tradition of avoiding hametz – for seven days, as the text dictates. I am avoiding those foods that symbolise leavening, swelling, puffing up. I do it as an act of freedom that reminds me: try not to puff yourself up - with pride, with your so-called achievements, with your abilities and accomplishments, don’t get bigger than you are, remember your limitations, remember your fragility, you are like matza, easily broken, easily fragmented – and perhaps not always easy to digest.

This is part of what freedom from slavery means – the freedom to say no, to set limitations on desires, the freedom to embrace a tradition that sets limits on freedom. And the freedom to fail: ‘There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail’ (Erich Fromm). We are like the children of Israel, who had experienced what the texts call ‘the hand of God’, a liberating power that released them from oppression, but that they could never quite trust, not back then in the desert, nor when they came to the land: ‘Take us back to Egypt. It was safe there. Leave us alone – whoever you are...’

That is the Jewish story, to this very day: the failure to trust, the failure to be humble in the presence of the divine energy that animates the universe, the failure to listen in to the divine voice as it speaks. This too is what it means to be free : that we are free to respond to (or ignore) the miracle, the blessing, that Torat Adonai b’ficha (13:9), God’s teaching is in your mouth, it’s inside of you, it’s in what you say, and how you say it; and it’s in what you don’t say, and why you won’t say it.

If you are God’s hands, if you are God’s mouth – that’s an awesome responsibility, but it’s what our freedom is really all about.

[Freely adapted from a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, April 23rd 2011]

Apocalypse Now

2011-03-17T18:23:00.001Z

‘Apocalyptic’ – adjective: ‘forecasting the ultimate destiny of the world; foreboding immanent disaster; terrible’. Words bow to images. The scenes from Japan – waves of black sea, mud, debris, pouring ships onto houses, piling roads onto cars, crushing offices, shops, homes into a montage of mangled metal, a tohu va’vohu of destruction, devastation and loss – these scenes are both mesmeric and unbearable to look at for too long. They seem to both foretell a future and evoke a past.

Where have we seen pictures like these before? Towns flattened out into rubble and detritus, nothing standing, denuded of the familiar signs of collective life. A woman sitting alone by what was once a road, howling, only the ruins of a village for company. Where is this lodged in our memories? The association is too obvious, and yet it is impossible to avoid. Look at the photos taken in the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the same desolation, the same erasure of buildings, homes, roads, trees, everything crushed as if by a giant fist.

And as if the elemental activity of earth and sea in violent assault upon a nation’s lives is not enough, the radiation leak from the Fukushima nuclear plant makes the grim historical analogy with 1945 even more imaginatively compelling, and moves us beyond irony into the realm of existential helplessness – no wonder the voices coming from Japan are asking, with growing insistence, the timeless question: ‘What have we done to deserve this?’

Of course they have done nothing to deserve it – and so far we have been saved from religious fundamentalists (of different faiths) who jump on any such disaster to delight in ‘interpreting’ tragedies like this as the victims’ failures to live the ‘right’ way. I’ve not heard anything of this kind yet - but it is still early days. This sadistic picture of a controlling ‘God’ punishing so-called ‘sinners’ for religious failings is a regular feature of fundamentalist thinking.(Perhaps ‘thinking’ is too elevated a word for this kind of response). But it is the standard, off-the-peg, historical answer to that ever-present human question - which seeks meaning when there is no meaning - ‘What have we done to deserve this?’ Needless to say, I find the fundamentalist response nauseating. From a psychological perspective, it would have to be called psychotic. And, to use religious language for a moment, it is also blasphemous.

It so happens that my colleague Rabbi Jonathan Magonet is living and teaching in Japan at the moment, in the south of the country, far from the devastation we see on our TV screens. I asked him earlier in the week how he was experiencing the events and he responded with these thoughts, which I have his permission to share with you:

I asked my colleague here about how he viewed the reactions of the Japanese public. He said that at the moment we are all simply overwhelmed by the horror of the thing. Earthquakes are a given here, though never on such a scale and with such consequences. He thought people showed a remarkable calmness and stoicism, combined with a considerable practical approach to dealing precisely with the matters. He quoted a proverb to the effect that now was not the time for emotions but for practicalities, the emotional would have to be addressed later. Clearly, except for those who have immediate friends and family involved, this is felt to be best approach alongside collective efforts to provide funds and volunteers to help. What is missing, I suppose, is any theological evaluation - it simply does not belong to the Japanese 'religions'.

It may be that in the last 24 hours we are seeing more emotions being expressed. But whatever the feelings in Japan – and we have to remember that ‘What are you feeling?’ has become the default question of supposed interest for us Westerners in the last thirty or so years, as if our feelings define who we are - whatever the Japanese are ‘feeling’, the practical responses have been, for the most part, rather remarkable and indeed admirable. (Compare the response to Hurricane Katrina). I include here those battling within the Fukushima power stations to prevent a nuclear meltdown. One day the heroes of these hours will, one hopes, be named and honoured.

As for theology, I find myself more and more drawn to the religious humanism of those who turn such questions about meaning into an inquiry about how we construct meaning for ourselves. Rather than ponder on the purposes, or lack of purpose, of an abstract or absent deity, it seems more useful to think about our own fragility and our own fantasies of omnipotence – that we own and can exploit and control the earth and the seas – and to reflect on our own capacities to offer help and support and, if need be, self-sacrifice in the face of the often savage, and frequently unjust, phenomenon we call ‘life’.

Rather than seeing the sphere of religion as a vertical domain – God in His heavens set apart from us on earth – I find it more compelling, life-enhancing, and intellectually credible to think through the implications of Judaism being a human creation inhabiting the horizontal domain: religion is the sphere of our own human activity and invention and need and responsiveness; it is the place we can go to explore the mysteries of how life has evolved as it has, where we struggle for meaning in the face of meaninglessness, where we don’t know - can’t know - what we ‘deserve’, where we can experience moments of awe at the wonders and harmonies of nature and then collapse in fear and trembling in the face of those same natural forces; where we can celebrate what creativity and compassion human beings are capable of, but also despair at the cruelty and destructiveness that human beings are also capable of.

We don’t need a ‘God’ outside us to teach us about the double-sidedness of life – about our potential and our limitations, about our capacity to create worlds and our capacity to destroy them - but we may need to contact the godliness within us (our spiritual resources) to help us face our own mortality and to give strength to others when facing theirs.

The world is precarious and we are tightrope walkers always about to topple over. In Japan we see how disaster is always imminent, how apocalypse is part of the fabric of life: we glimpse what might lie ahead for any of us in our towns and cities, and we glimpse how apocalypse is also always now.

Egypt’s Revolution

2011-02-13T13:53:00.003Z

‘In Egypt it was the moral force of nonviolence, not terrorism, not mindless killing...that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.’ Whoever writes Obama ‘s speeches is a maestro. Maybe Obama writes his own speeches, but whoever composes them, I find it remarkable that he so often manages to find a language that resonates in the imagination, that one wants to savour and reflect on. And how often do politicians manage to do that?

The notion of bending ‘the arc of history toward justice’ is of course part of a Judaic vision too. Perhaps that’s why it resonated so strongly with me when I heard the phrase. I imagine that few of us can have been following these last few weeks’ events in Egypt without at some point being moved by the sight of a people finding its voice to protest against decades of dictatorship, corruption, brutality and repression. Protests that were remarkably peaceful given the suppressed fury that must reside in the hearts of so many at the conditions they have had to endure.

As we know, Mubarak’s 30 year grip on his people was sponsored (financially and militarily) by the United States, who’ve been guided – as they so often are, as is the British government – by President Roosevelt’s famous comment in 1939 about the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza, that ‘he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch.’ So I’ve been stirred and heartened, as I was in 1989, by the tide of history that seems to be moving another part of our world away from brutality and impoverishment towards something more life-enhancing. And yet I’ve been disheartened - dispirited hugely, if truth be told – by so much of the response I’ve heard and read from the Jewish community, here and in Israel.

Because this response has been dictated - loaded word, I know – not by a recognition of the power of the human spirit to overcome oppression. It’s been dictated by fear. This fear has focused on the Muslim Brotherhood, who’ve been keeping a low profile over these last weeks, and the fear of a fundamentalist form of Islamism taking over in the region. As if Egypt is another Iran. Which for many reasons – historical and cultural and demographic and geographic – it isn’t. But the spectre of Israel once again surrounded by implacable annihilatory enemies haunts the Jewish imagination. It’s as if fear is soldered to our soul. And I find that hugely saddening, and actually rather ugly.

For our response to these events to be dictated by our fears rather than our hopefulness about the human spirit is a betrayal, I would suggest, of the religious vision of our Judaic tradition. In secular terms, it puts us as Jews on the wrong side of history – it puts us on the side of repression and brutality. It puts us on the side of Pharaoh rather than Moses.

In religious terms, it fails to understand that the phrase from Exodus we return to and cherish each year “Let my people go...” is the voice of the divine, of God, of the sacred principle that freedom from oppression is the right of every people. That’s the vision at the heart of Judaism: freedom from oppression, each person to have the opportunity to sit under their vine and their fig-tree where no-one shall make them afraid. Isn’t that what the people of Egypt want too?

In his response to Mubarak’s departure, Obama also quoted Martin Luther King: 'There's something in the soul that cries out for freedom.' Fear is a great dictator – when will we be able to overthrow its tyranny within us? When will we be able to rejoice – beyond our fears –wherever we see the ‘arc of history’ bending towards justice? Yes, Egypt has a long way to go – the transition from military to civilian rule will no doubt be bumpy. But as a Jew I celebrate, as Obama was celebrating, the movement of the human spirit towards freedom. All that those crowds possessed was, as the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif put it, ‘words and music and legitimacy and hope’. We see what powerful weapons these can be when wielded with determination, courage and vision.

Has Israel Become Morally Bankrupt?

2011-01-25T14:40:00.005Z

So now we know. Confirmation of what our pessimism has been telling us for over two decades. The State of Israel has no real (that is, sincere) intention of reaching a peace settlement with the Palestinians.

The 1600 confidential Palestinian documents leaked to the al-Jazeera TV station – the details of which are being published this week in the Guardian newspaper (www.guardian.co.uk) – offer a forlorn portrait of increasing Palestinian desperation (more and more concessions, a preparedness to make do with less and less) and steadfast Israeli intransigence. The long-term game plan of the powerful – both cynical and humiliating – is laid bare: ‘The more settlements we build, and the more we drag out this process, the more impossible a Palestinian state will become.’ As one lead negotiator, Tzipi Livni, is quoted as saying (in 2007), this has been “the policy of the government for a really long time”.

The Guardian’s lead columnist Jonathan Freedland, commenting on these newly available (and truly sensational) documents, makes the depressingly telling point that they “blow apart what has been a staple of Israeli public diplomacy: the claim that there is no Palestinian partner. That theme, a refrain of Israeli spokesmen on and off for years, is undone by transcripts that show that there is not only a Palestinian partner but one more accommodating than will surely ever appear again.”

What were the Palestinian negotiators prepared to concede? Details are still emerging but so far we have been told that concessions include: that Israel be allowed to annex all Jewish settlements in Jerusalem (except Har Homa); also part of the predominantly Arab East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah (in exchange for an equivalent area somewhere else); a joint international committee could oversee the Temple Mount/ Dome of the Rock/Al-Aqsa holy sites; and - perhaps the most emotionally laden of all the issues of historical disagreement - a limit of a “symbolic” 10,000 over ten years to the number of refugees (out of 5 million) who would be permitted to return. (As well as being enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and UN resolution 194, this ‘right of return’ had a status in the Palestinian psyche of an almost sacred principle – to surrender it in this way would have been extraordinary. And yet it was offered as part of a negotiated settlement).

The Palestinian people may themselves have rejected these concessions as too far-reaching - but my concern here is on Israel's responsibilities and commitment to justice. And these documents offer up a damning indictment of a generation of so-called Israeli ‘leaders’. No doubt in the days and weeks to come these revelations will be fought over and disputed by all sides. But to anyone with a dispassionate eye, the willingness of those without power to surrender their land and their dreams, and the unwillingness of the Israeli negotiators to negotiate in good faith, is heartbreaking. Some of us long suspected it, but now we know what we hate to admit: the enthronement of injustice represented by the State of Israel’s stance towards the Palestinians renders Israel morally bankrupt.

How are we Jews going to be able to read the Torah text that we are due to read this Shabbat, a text enshrined in our hearts by dint of repetition through the generations: ‘You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt’ (Exodus 22:18)? How can we be so brazen as to say it with no shame in our voice?

Maybe this week , in the midst of our reading, in the midst of our proud evocation of our sacred story, when we come in synagogues to this verse we should drop our voices, mute our reading, whisper it sotto voce, open up a silence in the midst of our holy text, a space for reflection, a space to hear the words in our hearts that we are unable to live out in our land.

A space for our hearts to be pierced - so that as a people we may begin the long, long journey back towards truth and righteousness.

We know this won’t happen. But it should, it should, it should...

"On or about December 1910..." - Some New Year's Day Reflections

2011-01-02T18:54:00.009Z

I’ve been wondering recently how to think – 100 years on – about Virginia Woolf’s attention-grabbing remark (from an essay written in 1923) that ''On or about December 1910 human character changed.''

Before we have time even to reflect on the apparent waywardness of her grammar – what is that curious ‘on’ doing, shouldn’t it be ‘in’? – Woolf goes on to explain as follows: “I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.”

So ‘on or about’ December 1910 slides quickly from suspicious precision into the ‘arbitrary’ choosing of a date ‘about the year 1910.’ It inevitably makes us wonder: what is Woolf up to here? What is she pointing towards? And what is this alleged ‘change’ in ‘human character’? She roots this change in human relationships, personal relationships. Relations changed between ''masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children, and when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.'' (Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 1923)

It is of course notoriously difficult - maybe impossible - to catch hold of deep and fundamental changes in our collective lives as they are happening. We know when something personal touches us that our lives can change, do change: a child is born, or a new relationship blossoms or a relationship breaks down, you lose your job or receive a diagnosis of cancer, or someone you love dies – all these mark changes in our lives, and may even have an impact on our character, sometimes in the short term (we may become more cheerful for a while, or more morose), and sometimes a life event can leave a deeper mark on our character, we might realize over time we have shifted from being sad or anxious towards becoming more reflective, or more at peace with life; or the change in our character may have been the other way round: we might have lived the first half of our life with cheerful optimism only for later years to cast a shadow on our hopes and moods. So we are use to thinking about changes in human character in a personal setting.

But Woolf was speaking of something else, something more elusive, something collective that she detected. Writing in 1923, she is of course looking back in time and trying to track something that she located – both precisely and yet ‘arbitrarily’ - at the end of the first decade of the century. She is looking back after the cataclysm of the Great War, and seeing that on or about December 1910, a definable world of Victorian followed by Edwardian morality and certainties was ending (Edward VII died in 1910), and a new, more chaotic era was emerging. In 1910 there were two General Elections in the UK and a Liberal government came to power as part of a decline in political consensus and the shared assumptions of the previous decades. There was violence on the streets – this was the era of the suffragettes and workers’ unrest – and the world was becoming more fragmented and anarchic. The smug certainties of the Edwardian era were giving way to something else.

In 1910 Stravinsky's ballet ‘The Firebird’ opened in Paris, and in London the critic Roger Fry assembled a controversial exhibition called ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ introducing to England what was already electrifying the Continent. The show included works by Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso – the radicalism of Cubism was about to call into question the popular bourgeois idea of realism. As Woolf put it in her 1923 essay, the ‘change in human character’ that she was pinning on this arbitrary date of December 1910 – 100 years ago, from us – meant amongst other things that people were being forced to learn to “tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure.”

These were the years when Einstein dissolved the traditional notions of fixed time and space, Picasso deconstructed visual perceptions and James Joyce in Ulysses undermined the traditional narrative order and sense of the novel. In a word, Woolf is talking about the birth of modernism.

1923 also saw the publication of a book in German that I can’t imagine Woolf knew about - but represents for the Jewish world a work that radically subverted all the traditional pieties and assumptions of the time about Jewish religiosity. It was Martin Buber’s Ich und Du (I and Thou), which put personal relationships at the centre of Judaism rather than halachah (Jewish law). How one relates to other people, and to the environment around you – with care and attention and openness, or with manipulation and the treating of people as objects – this became for Buber the essence of Judaism.

To relate to the divine through the everyday, not merely through the traditional rites and practices – this was a radical message, and seen now through the lens of Virginia Woolf we can recognise that Buber was the first mystic modernist of 20th century Judaism.

When we look around us at the beginning of 2011 it might feel too early to say that ‘human character’ has again changed, or is in the process of changing; it may only be in another decade or so that we will be able to, like Woolf, look back and recognise a fundamental shift in consciousness that is happening. But I do sense it more and more - that something is shifting within us, within our minds and psyches, within our consciousness.

I think it has been brought on by the great technological revolution we are still living through, which combines this extraordinary inter-connectability and instantaneousness, where time and space are eliminated, when you can Skype across the world, and read a million books without leaving your house, and have the knowledge of the world literally at your fingertips - which includes following your children’s lives without them knowing it (just look on Facebook) – so there are all these possibilities opening up for us while at the same time there is a sense of out-of-controlness, a sense of unrest on the streets, a great surge of discontent about the ordering of society yet a sense of helplessness to effect real change.

Old economic ‘certainties’ have been exposed as fraudulent, but no new sustainable model is yet emerging; and there is a growing sense (or is it just me?) that we – as in 1910 – stand at the possible edge of a cataclysm and that our Great War might still be to come, a war this time against want and deprivation and lack of resources, in which the underlying ethnic tensions in Europe might still end up with blood being shed as people fight for survival. Who knows? But not knowing doesn’t mean we should give up looking hard at what is going on and scanning the ether for what is happening.

As so often, the Torah texts that we read in the Jewish cycle of weekly readings offer a partial illumination. Exodus chapter 6, that we have read this Shabbat, dramatises the way in which oppression makes a people metaphorically blind and deaf, unable to hear and respond to something new that could free them from their enslavement to the status quo. Moses receives a radical message about the divine - but when he goes to the Israelites to tell them that there is a power in the universe that will free them from Egyptian slavery, the people’s spirits are so crushed that they can’t take it in. They can’t hear what is being said to them. And the message Moses brings them is so remarkable that it is no wonder they can’t take it to heart: because the message includes the statement that ‘God’ changes through the generations; or rather, that the way that we experience the divine changes from generation to generation.

Moses comes to understand (Exodus 6:3) how the ancestral generations – Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - had their own understanding of the divine (El Shaddai – ‘God who bestows benefits’), but that something else was now present, Adonai – ‘the One who was, is, will be...’

And it is this Presence, active in each moment, who in a sense is each moment, that has the capacity to free the Israelites from their toil and their misery. This Presence links history, past promises, with the security of a grounded future. But for this to happen, the people have to be open to listening in to this voice of hope – but because they are immersed in their present misery they don’t have the emotional or mental space to bear this radical alternative voice, a voice which says, ‘Don’t think of Me as I used to be in the past, in tradition - think of Me metamorphosing in response to what is needed now’.

How do you think about an evolving God? How do you live with the idea that God-images are constantly evolving? That the divine isn’t static and fixed - but is fluid and provisional?

So in one sense the plagues were not just for the Egyptians and Pharaoh to have a change of heart, but they were for the Israelites, who would see them and wonder about them: 'If these things happen, what can it mean for us?’ is the question the plagues pose for the Israelites. ‘If these irruptions into the natural order are possible, what does that mean for our ways of thinking about what is possible? Perhaps our image of God - and God’s possibilities, and the possibility of God - needs to change’. Isn’t this the sense that underlies our narrative? That this whole saga of the Exodus involves an education into a different reality, the reality of the divine as a Presence that unsettles the status quo on behalf of the liberation of the human spirit.

How is our human spirit liberated in our times? How is the divine manifesting within our troubled times? The Jewish task is to live and think in the spirit of Moses, keeping our antennae tuned, listening out for what is going on, listening in to what is going on: what is changing? what new possibilities for the human spirit are there? How do we liberate ourselves, and each other? Perhaps we have to learn again to tolerate, in Woolf’s words, ‘the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure’?

In a culture that worships success, and is mistrustful of complexity, and enslaves us to consumption and materialism, we are going to have to work hard to avoid having our spirits crushed by what we are exposed to each day. The dominant narratives of our time – about what makes for happiness, about what doing well in life consists of – these narratives may need to be called into question by the spirit of Adonai that lives in us. We all have a part of us that doesn’t want to hear, that can’t hear, an oppressed part of our selves that keeps our noses to the grindstone and our minds enslaved to fixed ways of thinking. But we also have a Moses within us, that is open to the Voice, the eternal voice that speaks always, and yet whose words can be hard to hear, hard to decipher, hard to translate.

In 2011 let’s listen out for the Voice, let’s find the Moses within who is open to the new, who can hear the spirit of the divine hovering, never settling, never capturable, never already understood, (or never already dismissed) - but whose truth is revealed in fragments, in obscure intuitions, in glimpses half-seen, in whisperings and echoes.

Revelation is no longer through ‘outstretched arms and terrible chastisements’ (Exodus 6:6). It’s through the still small voice within, half heard, half-remembered, wholly mystifying. That is our homeland, our security - let’s listen out for it, listen in to it.

I wish you all a good year.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue on New Year’s Day, January 1st, 2011]

‘Any Human Heart’

2010-12-16T18:34:00.003Z

“Never say you know the last word about any human heart”. The words belong to Henry James, and that last glowing phrase was borrowed by the novelist William Boyd for the title of his 2002 novel, ‘Any Human Heart’. I haven’t read the book but I have been watching the TV adaptation of it over the last few weeks (it’s out on DVD later this month if you missed it).

I won’t spoil the story for those who don’t know it, but its interweaving of the themes of memory and desire, regret and appreciation, betrayal and commitment, through seventy years and more of the protagonist’s life was portrayed with great delicacy, pathos and humour in the TV adaptation. It’s rare to see a work that manages to capture visually the way in which fragments of our life from childhood onwards are still alive and resonant as our lives move on - how memories from decades ago can be as vivid as (or even sometimes overlay) our experiences in the present, how past and present can merge as we look out at the world. And the drama of the central character negotiating his way through the vicissitudes of history and chance, love and loss, had something profound too to say about the role of luck in our lives – good luck and bad luck.

But essentially the story speaks of the mysterious, unanalysable nature of what it means to be a human being. Thus the simple, complex, power of Henry James’ words “Never say you know the last word about any human heart”. That sentence is the antidote to any tendency we might have to think we can really know other people, that we can sum them up, define them, be certain about who or what they are. They are always more than we know. Just as we are always more than we know. For we are more than our means to know gives us to know.

I love Walt Whitman’s great burst of sentiment, wonderment, and pride (perhaps arrogance) in his triumphant poem ‘Song of Myself’ when he cries out at one point ‘I am large. I contain multitudes.’ This notion of a plural self, a self of multiple parts and attributes, a self of internal dissention and concatenation and creative interplay between the strands of thinking and feeling and physical liveliness that we all contain – this is an idea central to my understanding of why working in depth with people as a psychotherapist is one of the most privileged professions that exists. The possibility of discovery of hidden parts of the self we didn’t know about, or the freeing up of trapped parts of our self that have got stuck, or the rescuing of discarded or abandoned threads of our lives – all this emerges from the notion of the ‘human heart’ being large, capacious, multiple.

Just as it emerges too from the Jewish and Christian notion of us being made b’tzelem Elohim ‘in the likeness of God’ – for what does that mean other than that we (like ‘God’) are multiple and made up of countless aspects of ‘what is’? From compassion to rage, from a sense of justice to outbursts of hatred, from a capacity for deep love to a silent withdrawal from any more involvement, and so on and so on...we mirror the divine Being with the multiplicity of our human Being.

The WikiLeaks saga has reminded us of what we already intuitively knew: there’s always another story going on that we don’t get to hear about. But what’s true in the world at large, the world of politics and global events, is also true more personally, of our own lives. “Never say you know the last word about any human heart” – not your own, not another person’s. Until our last breath, there may still be surprises in store...

On Being (Feeling) Posthumous

2010-11-25T10:05:00.001Z

In a recent conversation I suddenly heard myself say that I was feeling ‘posthumous’. It just came out – as words do – and it puzzled me, surprised me, and in a way upset me. I’m not sure what I meant – though that isn’t an unusual experience – but it did feel on the one hand a bit melodramatic and maudlin, and on the other hand somewhat understated.

‘Posthumous’ – ‘occurring after death’; ‘published after the author’s death’; ‘born after the father’s death’. None of these three definitions seems to fit what I was thinking, feeling, intuiting. And yet I won’t give it up, this glancing knowledge of something I don’t yet fully know - as if glimpsed through the corner of my eye, or at the edge of a mirror, or in a dream. You try to look, to see it full on, but it’s already gone. Do we dismiss that moment of elusive knowing – put it down to imagination, or tiredness, or melancholia, or however we are accustomed to rationalise away our intuitions – or do we pursue it, track it, let it lead us where it wants us to go?

I pull down a few books from my shelves and find that the Roman lyric poet Horace has the line Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume,/ labuntur anni in Book 2 of his Odes: speaking of the futility of hoarding up treasure, he has his narrator lament ‘Alas, Postumus, Postumus, the fleeting years are slipping by...’

So this - it appears - is what is going on, alas. It’s about growing older. (And I seem to have needed a two-thousand year old poem to help me understand it.) And together with this now immediately mundane bit of self-knowledge, there’s the suggestion that it’s time to distribute the treasure – or at least not to save it up for some mythical future...

Feeling posthumous is about having lived a certain number of years and having had a certain range of experiences and having gained a certain amount of understanding – and yet recognising that the world has moved on, is moving on, will move on, and all that treasure inside becomes redundant (or I fear it will) in the light of what that transformed world seems to value. I don’t watch all those popular TV shows with dancing celebrities and avaricious home-improvers and super-chefs and royal weddings and aspiring wannabes competing for fame. That’s not the ‘reality’ (so-called) that moves or intrigues me. And I don’t do Facebook or Twitter or own an iPad (or even an iPod) and my mobile phone doesn’t let me go online or pick up my emails on the go. I still use a camera with the sort of film inside that needs to be sent away to be processed. I can’t keep up, in other words, with the 21st century.

I seem to be more interested in what went on a century ago than what happened last week. For example Kafka’s Diary entry for ‘10 o’clock, 15 November [1910]’ which reads, in its entirety, ‘I will not let myself become tired. I’ll jump into my story even though it should cut my face to pieces.’

I suppose that blogs have replaced diaries in the 21st century. But ‘jumping into my story’ is still an aspiration for any writer. Kafka’s self-lacerating prose is heart-rending, arresting, unsurpassed in its precision of feeling and its capacity for observation and self-observation.

16 December [1910]. I won’t give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can. I would gladly explain the feeling of happiness which, like now, I have within me from time to time. It is really something effervescent that fills me completely with a light, pleasant quiver and that persuades me of the existence of abilities of whose non-existence I can convince myself with complete certainty at any moment, even now.

All the energy and glow and dizzy speediness of youth, all the media-driven drawing-to-our-attention of the ephemeral and superficial, all that ersatz immediacy and manufactured relevance – it leaves me far behind in its breathless rush away from what is deeper, truer about our human situation: our personal fragility, our inner richness, our only-ever-partial self-knowledge, our lack of control over our destinies, our dependence on each other – in other words, the stuff of poetry, and literature, the stuff of the Bible, all that wisdom that can only be gleaned, if at all, over time and with experience.

All that stuff the irrelevance of which I can convince myself with complete certainty at any moment, even now. A conviction that leads me to feel posthumous.

“And she looked back...” (Genesis 19: 26) – A Woman’s Story

2010-10-24T19:35:00.003+01:00

He was a good man, my husband, even if he did like a drink or two. He wasn’t a religious man – not like his uncle, Abraham (though , admittedly, Uncle Abraham was a one off) - but he cared about people, particularly outsiders, like himself. We’d come to the city years before - even though it had a terrible reputation (Genesis13:12-13). Everyone in the Valley knew about Sodom – it was violent, corrupt, lawless. There were no-go areas at night, and even during the day it wasn’t safe, certainly not for a woman – it was bad, like New York in the 70s, or parts of Jo’burg or Mexico City today...there always have been places that bring Sodom to mind, godless, fear-filled cities where men and women struggle to survive with their humanity intact. God knows, an impossible project it feels sometimes: to live the right way when you are surrounded by greed and trickery and the violence simmering on the streets, in cities that lack compassion, where hope is all burnt out.

Our city was brutal, life was brutal – but did it deserve what happened? Did Hiroshima? Or Dresden? Were there not 10 good people to save it from itself? Not even a minyan of innocence, of uncorrupted souls ready - like my husband – to offer hospitality to strangers, to take in the immigrant, to protect those seeking temporary shelter, asylum, for whatever reason? There must have been ten – or do the guiltless always suffer with the guilty? Is this the iron law of life, that suffering comes to all, that a tipping point is reached in every society when the Messiah can no longer come, when the forces of brutality (or indifference) overwhelm the good there is, sweep away the hope for better things? How much brave, careless rhetoric does it take for a society to implode under the weight of its own contradictions? The powerful flaunt their might with cold calculation, the blameless are trampled underfoot, the poor scatter like dust, and quiet lives of misery grow silent like the grave: is Sodom always our future, as well as the past? God knows, I certainly don’t.

I told him it was no place to bring up a family, but Lot wouldn’t listen. My husband was a good man, but he was a stubborn man. He’d chosen this place, his uncle had been very generous, had let him choose west or east, Canaan or the fertile Jordan valley (Genesis 13:10-11). And Lot – yes, a good man, but a man of simple tastes who saw only what was in front of his eyes - my husband Lot saw the well-watered plains of the Jordan valley and thought ‘Head east young man’, not having seen all those old movies that knew that west was best, west was the future – is always the future - over the horizon, beyond the vision of the moment. So – though I told him I was scared, for us, for the family – he landed up there, in god-forsaken Sodom, “Twin-town: Gomorrah” (which was worse, if truth be told, a real hell-hole if ever there was one).

So Sodom it was, and we settled there and lived as people live, doing business, raising a family, struggling to make ends meet, helping each other out. We were close-knit as a family – we had children and they grew and they married young and then my two youngest came along, girls: I loved them more than words can tell, they came so late, you see. And it was a moment of madness I’m sure - but he could be impulsive like that, any of us can, but what with his stubbornness , his impetuous belief that he knew what’s right while others are always blind, and what with the strain of those hours when we were under siege in our own home and the mob at the door, baying for blood - those two men whom we’d taken in, given shelter to, they were under our roof, our protection, and that is a sacred responsibility, to protect the stranger and Lot believed in that, he really did, even though he wasn’t pious and certainly didn’t hear voices telling him what to do like his Uncle did, but he believed in certain values, that he thought of as unconditional, and I believed in him believing in that - so that when they came to drag out the two visitors – and there was something strange, hallucinatory, about them that I can’t put my finger on, but that doesn’t really matter because they were our guests, you know, our guests – whoever they were, whatever they were – so my husband in that moment of madness told the crowd: take my girls, but don’t take my guests. As if that wasn’t also a sacred bond – his loyalty to the family.

And I can’t forgive him for that moment, that gesture, that offering, I really can’t – though I can see how he felt he had to do something to keep the mob at bay, to keep them from entering our home – they would have raped us, killed us, it had happened before, it’ll happen again – so we were at their mercy and none of us would be here to tell this tale, I think my husband figured, if he didn’t do something, offer them something - but the girls, how could he do that? You see - you do see, don’t you? - in times of war and insurrection, in times of terror, in times when chaos is the only law – people, sometimes, have to make terrible choices, terrifying choices: pray you will never have to make such choices. And don’t judge him for it, for you were not in his place and the rabbis said ‘Do not judge a person until you have been in their place’ (Pirke Avot 2:5) – or that’s what I have been told those rabbis said, later, much later. Only I can judge him, my husband Lot, because I was in his place, I was there, petrified with fear.

I was cowering behind my sons’-in-law - they were salt-of-the-earth types but useless lumps in a crisis - and somehow the moment passed when the two strangers whom we were holding in sacred trust as our guests, they did something - I couldn’t see what, they had this strange calm in their eyes, like the moment when all goes still before the storm breaks - and the crowd backed away, blind to how vulnerable we all were – and Lot realised the end was near and that we had to flee because no good would come of this, it had all gone too far: this city had reached its point of no return. Zero hour. Lot just knew, or maybe the two strangers told him – I’ll never know for sure – but the next thing I know we were packed and running, Lot and me and the two girls – and we left the rest of the family there, they wanted to stay they said, and it all happened so quickly, there was no time to think and we had to leave them , it tore me apart, I had to leave the others, but I had the girls and we went, that night we went, in a rush, a panic, we just left, and the tears were burning my eyes and I couldn’t bear to go on, and I knew I had to go on – as women in war have always gone on, beyond the pain, beyond the calculations, into the fear, into the animal instinct to survive, to live while others die, you see others die and you have to go on, because there is breath in you still, and you can’t go on, but you must go on, and you want to die, but you want to live – and I had to turn and look, I had to see what I was leaving behind, I had to see if I could see the rest of my family, the fruit of my womb, my other children, grown up now, but still my children, and their partners, my family, whom I loved: how could anyone bear to leave without looking back, looking to see what was happening even though I knew what was happening - because I knew what was happening – how the city was aflame, how the sulphurous lawless hearts of the inhabitants of Sodom had exploded into a raging inferno of destruction, that they were being destroyed, all of them, they had destroyed themselves really and now the city was aflame, and the fire and the smoke consumed them all, a conflagration like no other – though I see there have been others. It was a holocaust of suffering like no other – though I’m told there have been others.

Wouldn’t you have looked too? A last glance, a last chance to see what has been, and how it all went wrong, how it all got lost.

It’s legendary, this epic place of terror and violence. ‘The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah’ – how easily it rolls off the tongue, but it should make our mouths bitter in the burnt-out telling, we should taste the dust and the ashes, our tongues should shrivel in the heat of our fuming rage that it ends like this. I stood rooted to the spot, watching, the end of my family, the end of an era, the end of my hopes for the future. Dust and ashes, and there I was – motionless, transfixed by all the suffering that we are heir to, motionless, like a pillar, all hope abandoned, emptied out like a salt-cellar bled of salt, a grieving heap of salt, spilled out, lifeless, no movement, no movement ever again, my eyes fixed on the devastation, long gone, still here, still to come. God knows when it will ever end.

That’s it. That’s my story. What you waiting for? You don’t need to know anything else. You don’t even need to know my name. I am Lot’s wife, that’s all. I am no-one. And I am every woman who has ever suffered the loss of what was once treasured but is forever gone. The girls understood, they knew what they had to do, they knew that they had to carry some hope into the future, that they had to give birth to the future, that it was about survival. They didn’t look back, they looked forward. You call it incest, and look askance. But they called it getting on with life, rebuilding, renewing hope, giving birth to hope. And they did it with wisdom and they did it with love and I bless them for it, for out of Moab there came Ruth; and out of Ruth there came David; and out David will come our salvation - but only God knows how it will ever end.

(Sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, October 23rd)

"Should we ban the Rabbi?"

2010-10-11T20:29:00.002+01:00

I recently attended a wedding where I was seated next to a seemingly mild-mannered older member of the Jewish community who – as the evening wore on – became increasingly keen to convince me that Islam was a dire threat to my existence: that the Qur’an was a hate-filled toxic book, that Islamic texts indoctrinate Muslims to despise Jews, that Muslims in the UK and in Europe will not rest until everyone is living under sharia law. You may find it hard to believe, but I didn’t find this diatribe entirely convincing.

I have learnt long ago that once someone has fixed in their mind a particular prejudice or irrational piece of thinking, rational counter-argument and the deployment of logic cannot dislodge it. And as someone who isn’t interested in ‘argument for argument sake’ I rarely bother to engage in these kind of conversations. Judaism might historically have been rooted in a culture of debate and disagreement, but ad hoc discussions with those whose minds are already made-up are a waste of time: I don’t find them in any way enjoyable or life-enhancing.

I was reminded of this recent encounter after reading about the antics of a certain Rabbi Nachum Shifren, who – according to the Observer newspaper - will be visiting the UK later this month to address the right-wing proto-fascist group, the English Defence League. It seems that the EDL are positioning themselves to take over from the British National Party as the voice of white English protest – with Muslims and Islam as their main focus of hatred. The BNP may well be a spent force – I happened to see Nick Griffin on the tube on a couple of occasions recently, and each time there was certainly a glum, hangdog look about him as he sat there staring vacantly into space, then taking a shifty look around him before returning to whatever passes for introspection in a man who has seen his dreams of power evaporate over this last year.

But the EDL are a growing force and are forging connections with the right-wing American Tea Party organisation - who seem as filled with paranoia and craziness as their Christian fundamentalist counterparts. The EDL’s invitation to Rabbi Shifren comes out of these contacts. (Although he does have a rabbinic title, I note from his scary but illuminatingly titled website surfingrabbi.com that his ordination comes from Kfar Chabad in Israel, a detail omitted from his more recent public website – yes, seriously – rabbiforsenate.com).

His overblown and paranoid rhetorical approach to issues is evident in the Observer article, where he is quoted as saying: ‘The Jewish community is paralysed with fear, exactly what most radical Muslim agitators want. The people of England are in the forefront of this war – and it is a war. One of the purposes of this visit is to put the kibosh on the notion in the Jewish community that they cannot co-operate with the EDL, which is rubbish.’

Well, I for one am not ‘paralysed with fear’ – but I am concerned that Shifren is coming to this country to stir up trouble in a Jewish community that does have (as my wedding companion illustrates) its ambivalences about Islam and its anxieties about Muslims. I cannot honestly believe that Shifren will find much sympathy amongst Jews here for his wish that they seek common cause with the thugs and hooligans of the English Defence League. But he could do a lot of damage to Muslim perceptions of Jews in this country. His blatant Islamophobia is abhorrent and racist – and it won’t perhaps surprise us (though again this isn’t mentioned on his website promoting his run for the US Senate) that he is a member of the West Bank settlement Kfar Tapuach, which has a reputation for extreme anti-government militancy and where Israeli police recently arrested a member for allegedly killing Palestinians.

In a recent article he offered an example of his discerning rabbinic wisdom as follows:

“The rule that we in the West refuse to acknowledge is simply that to the muslim, whoever is perceived as strong, will be feared and will survive; and whoever is seen as weak, irresolute, or wavering, will be despised and will be vanquished... This will be a hard bullet for America to bite, but we are at war with Islam! Those who deny this are quislings or fifth-columnists — and very often, university professors and chancellors... The muslim onslaught is at the gates; they are weary of our self-indulgence and they abhor our eroding social mores and valueless culture. They are sharpening the long knives, knowing that their time will come shortly.”

Ah yes, those long Muslim knives – close kin of the Jewish ones we use to kill Christian children for the blood we need to bake matzot.

And on his website designed for his attempt to gain a seat in the US Senate we find a xenophobic anti-Muslim invective that makes it understandable why the English Defence League will be welcoming him with open arms:

“Here's something to think about the next time you are watching some American institution being obliterated by suicide bombers or some other assault designed to vanquish our nation:
Where were you when
• Taxi drivers in San Diego blocked an entire sidewalk while they rolled out carpets and bowed down to Mecca?
• Dearborne, Michigan is forced to endure the horrific blasts from ubiquitous mosques dotting the city, FIVE TIMES DAILY?
• Harvard University spends public money on foot baths for use before Muslim prayers?”

There is much more in this nauseating vein in his published remarks – and it is hard to believe that all of this is not an incitement to hatred. I normally find myself passionately defending the principle of free speech – even for views which appal me. But in this case I have begun to ask myself the question: if this surfing rabbi is headed in our direction on a tide of noxious effluent that is promoting hatred towards Muslims, shouldn’t the Board of Deputies be petitioning the Home Secretary to ban Rabbi Shifren from entering the UK just as they have petitioned on other occasions for the banning of certain extremist Islamic hate-mongers?

You can’t ban someone for the shame they will bring on the bruised good name of Judaism – but incitement to hatred is something else.

The Invisible Gorilla and the Jewish Question

2010-09-13T12:43:00.003+01:00

Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris were two Harvard psychologists who in 1999 devised a very simple experiment. They asked students to watch a video of 6 students , three dressed in black, three dressed in white, passing a basketball to each other. The task was simply to count the number of times the players in white passed the ball. So not too complicated (even George Bush could have done this) – how many times was the ball passed by players dressed in white?

During the video a person in a full-body gorilla suit walked into the centre of the frame, pounded their chest and then walked off. They showed this video first in the US, then to people all round the world. The results were uniform. Fully half the people who took the test, in every country, when asked details about the video did not notice the person in the gorilla suit. Many of those, when shown the video again, protested that the video must have been rigged, doctored, faked, this second time. People who had seen the gorilla first-time round were incredulous – how could so many viewers miss something so obvious?

We of course fondly imagine that we would have been in that 50% who would have seen what was in front of our eyes. But Simons and Chabris – in their now famous ‘invisible gorilla’ experiment – had stumbled upon a basic lapse in human attentiveness. They called it ‘inattention blindness’ – the failure to see something obvious, in front of our eyes, when we have our minds elsewhere. (You can see this experiment on YouTube if you are interested – though you will, naturally, see the gorilla because you have been told it is there).

In their new book ‘The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways our Intuitions Deceive Us’ the authors describe a whole range of experiments to illustrate what they call our ‘illusion of attention’ – that is that we are often unaware of the limitations of what we perceive, not just visually (through our eyes) but in relation to memory, knowledge and perception. We think we see and experience the world as it is – but we are often distorting it, misapprehending it, or in various ways misinterpreting it. That we are subject to powerful illusions about how our mind works isn’t about stupidity, or arrogance – it is about something in us that is so immersed in our own subjective worlds, our own personal way of seeing and thinking, that we often just can’t look reality in the eye. And once we have an idea lodged in us it becomes very difficult to shift it.

They have interesting things to say about a range of issues like the MMR vaccine scare and hedge-fund meltdowns, where many of those involved were unable (not just unwilling) to change their way of thinking once they had decided how they viewed the situation. Although the authors don’t mention this, I think that climate change sceptics may fall into this category, although in relation to the environment a better guide to denial may be the poet T.S. Eliot’s words from Four Quartets: ‘human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality’.

I think that the ‘invisible gorilla’ experiment gives us plenty to think about. It can teach us the value of being more modest, more humble, less sure of the rightness of our thinking, more open to doubts about what we think we definitely know, perhaps more able to tolerate uncertainty. Perhaps it can point us towards appreciating the provisional rather than the definitive, the ‘maybe’ and the ‘perhaps’ of life rather than the ‘definitely’ and the ‘undoubtedly’. And the relevance of all this to our Jewish New Year should be obvious, for questions about attention and attentiveness takes us close to heart of what the High Holy Days are all about.

‘Give us courage to be honest with ourselves’ our liturgy says (p.131, Reform machzor) – and that simple statement encapsulates the major religious theme of these 10 days : honesty with our selves. And it is the most difficult work of our lives because ‘inattention blindness’ isn’t just a physical phenomenon it is also a psychological and spiritual one.

The call to be attentive, to pay attention to what is real and not illusory is, after all, at the heart of Judaism – and not just during these Ten Days. This is what the Shema is all about: Shema Yisrael, 'Hear, Israel' ... ‘Shema’ does mean ‘Hear’ but in the sense of ‘Pay attention’, ‘Pay very close attention’... And what are we to pay attention to? ‘Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad’ - ‘divinity permeates all of being, and everything is connected to everything else’ (I’m translating loosely - but trying to tease out the inner core of this verse, this belief, this affirmation of Jewish purpose).

Morning and evening, day in day out, we are called to be attentive to what is really happening – in us, to us, between us, around us - and not retreat into lives of illusion and delusion. And it is a very demanding call, this call to hear and listen and respond to what is happening within us and in front of us: the injustices that need addressing, the people who need helping, the support that needs to be offered, to our children, our parents, our friends, our colleagues, our neighbours, and the strangers in our midst, who are everywhere, in every land. The world could die through lack of compassion, through lack of sustained attentiveness to what is real and what is really happening.

And I think that this question of paying attention to what is in front of us is getting more and more difficult. Because something is changing in our consciousness as we become more and more dependent upon and embedded within this huge world wide web of inter-related technology and electronic networking that has grown up around us, and between us, over this last decade. What does paying attention really mean now when at the same moment you can be online ordering tickets, and checking your email, and Facebooking, and talking on the phone, while also maybe watching some TV or listening to music?

How do you pay attention in a sustained way In the midst of this transformation in what is possible? What are you paying attention to? Although I’m a bit of a techno-phobe, and somewhat resistant temperamentally to this fragmentation of attentiveness, I am fascinated by what is happening. And yet at the same time I’m sometimes rather scared at the implications of this ‘continuous partial attention’ [cf S.Craig Watkins: The Young and the Digital: what the Migration to social Network Sites, Games and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means For Our Future] which is required if we buy in, literally and metaphorically, to this world. We might joke that ‘continuous partial attention’ is just multi-tasking, and that’s what the world demands now, and women might smile wryly and say, well you are just describing what it’s like to be an ordinary mother – who has to pay attention to the children, and write her reports and cook supper all at the same time... ‘and it didn’t do me any harm’. Well, maybe, maybe not.

Perhaps this latest technology-driven manifestation of ‘continuous partial attention’ is nothing very new and my concerns about what it is doing to the quality of our lives and our human capacities for attention, concern and empathy are misplaced. I may be wrong about what it is doing to our psyches and indeed the very structure of our brains (there’s growing evidence for these changes in our neural wiring) – I may be wrong about what is happening but I do know that it is addictive, it is the drug of choice of millions who wouldn’t touch cocaine. They don’t call Blackberrys ‘Crackberrys’ for no reason.

There is a drive, powerful and increasingly irresistible, to be always ‘on’, anywhere, anytime, any place – like the old Bacardi ad, but for real: go online, stay connected, sense that constant unfolding newness, the potential to be filled with new news. We can’t miss anything - and everything must have our so-called attention: so we skim and surf, and search, and become twitchier, and more pressurised and irritable, yet also more distracted, less able to concentrate for very long on anything (like a sermon of more than 10 minutes, or a blog that keeps on going), and less able to listen – really listen – to another person. Which is actually part of the essence of being human.

We are more focused on the present moment because more involved in what is happening now – but, paradoxically, less connected to each other in deep and satisfying ways. It is a thrill to be able to be in touch with the world in all its wondrous density and complexity – but does it lead us into ways of honesty and charity, does it support us in our weakness and fragility, does it hold us in our fears of illness and loss, does it protect us from despair and anxiety?

This Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Twittering online world is not going to go away very soon and of course there are many benign aspects of this inter-connectedness – but it is infiltrating our consciousness in ways we can’t see, and that I suspect are not benign for our fundamental well-being. (So for those who attend synagogue services, for example, it’s probably harder to sit there for extended periods where there are few distractions and no hyperlinks).

But what Jews have over these Ten Days is an opportunity for a different way of seeing, a different way of connecting: it’s a call to slow down from our somewhat manic lives, and to start to pay attention again to what really matters – what used to be called ‘the soul’, some essence of us that needs time and space, that needs to be nurtured, that needs attention, real devoted, devotional, attention.

These thoughts have been based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue as the New Year began. It wasn’t a sermon on the ‘elephant and the Jewish question’ (as the old joke has it), but ‘the invisible gorilla and the Jewish question’. And it puts me in mind of the 19th century Hasidic story about the disciple who approached his Rebbe and asked, "Rebbe, every time I turn around, I hear about new, modern devices in the world. So, nu, tell me, are they good for us or bad for us?"

"What kind of devices?" asked the Rebbe.

"Well, there's the telegraph, there's the telephone, and there's the locomotive."

The Rebbe stroked his beard for a while, then replied, "All of them can be good - if we learn the right lessons from them. From the telegraph, we can learn to measure our words: if used carelessly, we will have to pay dearly. From the telephone, we can learn that whatever you say here is heard there. From the locomotive, we learn that every second counts - and if we don’t use each one wisely, we may not reach our destination in life.”

And from the internet we learn what the mystics of old already knew: that Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad – that everything is connected to everything else, that we have the divine within us and that we are held within God's own Going-On-Being, so to speak.

***

Some people asked me later about the 'elephant joke'. Here it is: Four doctoral students — a German, a Frenchman, a Russian and a Jew — took a seminar requiring a paper about elephants. The German wrote about authority in elephant society. The Frenchman wrote about the love life of the elephant. The Russian wrote about sharing among elephants. And the Jew, naturally, wrote about the elephant and the Jewish question.

Why the Jewish New Year is frightening

2010-09-06T22:43:00.003+01:00

So here we are again. The summer holidays are rapidly receding from memory and suddenly we are on the cusp of a New Year. I love and hate this time of the year, the Jewish New Year with its services and rituals and expectations and demands.

On one level it is all very familiar : the words of the liturgy, the music, the motifs, the heavy language of sin and judgment, guilt and forgiveness, it doesn’t change, year after year it challenges and provokes and I fight it and then submit to it, wrestle meaning out of it then avoid the meaning within it, I defy it and judge it then acknowledge its power, I question it, reject it, search it, listen in to it, turn it this way then that, while I am turned this way and that, turned and returned. Return – ‘Teshuvah’ – all this love and hate, probing and being probed, is – I suppose – what it is all about, returning to the hard truths and hard questions about my life, our life, our lives.

So it is familiar, yes, but also each year there’s the shock of encountering again a religious world that is so unfamiliar, so distant from our daily lives: a world that believes that these things truly matter. That how he live, what we do, what we fail to do – all the tiny decisions of our everyday lives and the larger choices we make, thoughtfully or carelessly, that they all count, and that they all matter not just for us but in a larger scheme of things. It can be a shock to hear again these traditional words and the belief system they contain. We are drawn in – but maybe a part of us always wants to flee from it, as just too strange, or too demanding, or too guilt-inducing...

Because in our hearts we aren’t sure that we really believe in all this anymore – that the world is ordered and governed as the traditional liturgy says it is. We might intuit that some of these things do matter, we may have an inkling that that there are truths buried deep inside these traditional words, but we aren’t sure any more. We may not know what we believe, what we really think and feel, about God and mercy and repentance and forgiveness of sins. We know that life is more complex, and more random, than the sometimes simple pieties we hear about in the pages of this book, as wondrous as I think this book is, our Reform High Holy Day machzor.

But we still come - with our uncertainties, our doubts, our questions - because we also know that if we engage in this stuff something happens to us, in us – that some combination of the music and liturgy and the experience of community and the words the congregation exchanges with each other before or after the service, and even the words you hear from the rabbi (maybe), all these strands come together and we know that something about engaging in this annual journey does make a difference. Though we might be hard pressed to say what.

If these Ten Days do make a difference, maybe it is because during them we are – whether we want it or not – engaging with what is real in life, and a lot of the time during the year we might find ourselves running away from what is real. The High Holy Days asks us to spend time with what is really happening in our own lives – and that can be a scary thing to do. It is there right at the beginning of the preparatory Selichot our service: ‘Help me...to be at one with myself, so that these precious days are not lost in pretence and self-deception. Give me the strength...to know myself as I am, a human being, sinned against and sinning...’ (p95). Self-deception is ingrained in human nature – that’s part of what it means to have an unconscious – and one of the manifestations of self-deception is that moment we all experience when we imagine that we don’t deceive ourselves.

What can be frightening about this time – and why so many Jews can no longer bear it, want to avoid it, or want to treat it dismissively – is that these High Holy Days expose us. We can’t escape the fact that we are asked to think about our lives, our successes and our failures, our creativity and our crookedness. These services can make us feel very vulnerable: because when we think about our lives we are aware of what goes well, yes, we are aware of our blessings – children, grandchildren, friendship, satisfying work, activities we enjoy, achievements – but we also become aware, maybe even more aware, of what might not be right in our lives: problems with our health, illness, the frailty of our bodies, problems about money, savings, how to pay the mortgage, anxieties about work or job security; we may become aware of the losses we suffer, friends who die, the death of parents, or a spouse; we may be experiencing loneliness, or the breakdown of a relationship, or the fragility of our emotional lives or insecurities in our mental state.

We may feel our lives are lacking in something – even if we don’t know what it is. We may feel that life is passing us by too quickly. We may be very frightened deep down, about dying alone, or dying in pain, we may be frightened about anti-Semitism, or the future of Israel as a democratic state we can be proud of, and as we read about 100 square mile chunks of ice breaking off the Greenland ice mass we may be frightened about the planet itself dying. Our fears may be focused on us, or out there. But you can’t go through these High Holy Days without at some moment or another – and maybe for longer – becoming aware of personal fears and insecurities, as well as collective ones. That’s why I say it can be scary to engage with – because these things are real – and the liturgy keeps bringing us back to what is real : ‘Help me...to be at one with myself, so that these precious days are not lost in pretence and self-deception’.

Now of course it is possible to go through these days untouched by any of this – the paradox of the liturgy is that it can block access to what is real just as effectively as it can open us up to what is real. Although strictly speaking it isn’t the liturgy that blocks us, or prevents us going deeper, but something inside of us. Because you can say all the words and sing all the melodies and use them as a quite effective barrier against the reality of your life: you can perform them, like a ritual, and keep their essence far away from your heart and soul – or you can whisper them in awe and trembling, listen in to them, pay attention to where they are pointing, the reality of your own life, your unique and fragile and precious life.

But the promise embedded in the liturgy is that if you do allow yourself to be vulnerable and open to where the words lead you – the promise is that it is safe to do this. Our services are places where it is possible to be vulnerable safely – because they offer that private space, in the midst of the community. You are not alone in struggling with what is real, you are not alone as you reflect on what works in your life, and what doesn’t, you are not alone as you reflect on your values and the decisions you make. We are all in this together, even though we are each in it in our own way. But the value of community is that we are supporting each other in these personal journeys that the person sitting next to you might know nothing about, your family may know nothing about. We are not alone – even though it might often feel that we are.

And we are not alone not only because we are all in this together – but because the promise of these days is that if we do listen in to the words and we do follow where they are pointing there is a presence with us on the journey, that we are being held like a baby in the womb that has no knowledge of itself being held, that we are being held in what our tradition calls, rachamim: divine mercy. The Hebrew word for mercy, compassion, is - I’m sure you know - from the word rechem, womb. And it is one of the names for God.

And part of our work during these Ten Days is to listen in to this rachamim within us, this divine quality of care and acceptance and holding that says:

‘Yes, you fail to live up to what you know is best and you know is right; yes, you have done things that are wrong; yes, you compromise and you cheat (yourself and others), yes, you turn away from truth – but in spite of all this you are not alone, you have not been abandoned, because I who am rachamim live in you - in your capacity to have compassion on yourself. Don’t berate yourself for your failures; don’t hate yourself for your pathetic inability to live lives congruent with the values you give lip-service to, don’t hate yourself for what you do wrong. Have compassion for yourself – you are just another weak, struggling human being, trying to find the way in a confusing world. Find compassion for your suffering – because you do suffer. Find your compassion. Find Ha-Rachaman, the One who is Compassion. Find your compassion during these days – I give you ten days – you will find it, you will find Me. Find your compassion and you find Me.’

That is the promise of these days. And the work – and it is work - begins this week.

I wish you all a Shana Tova – a good New Year – and much strength for the journey ahead.

[Based on a text delivered at Finchley Reform Synagogue on Saturday night, September 4th]

Dialogue in Germany

2010-08-03T16:52:00.004+01:00

I’ve just returned from a week reading Psalms with German Christians. (How exciting my life can get!). But you’d be surprised what can happen when a group of 130 Protestants, Catholics and Jews -the Jews always in the minority - gather together annually to share study and prayer, good wine and good conversation, jokes, dialogue, creativity and the aspiration to live out Martin Buber’s belief that “All real living is meeting/encounter – Begegnung “.

The 42nd Jewish-Christian Bible Week took place in its regular venue of a Catholic centre in Osnabruck – it migrated some years ago from its original home in Bendorf, on the Rhine – and it has become a regular place of pilgrimage in my working year. Bible Week was the brainchild of Rabbi Jonathan Magonet - amongst others , including Rabbi Lionel Blue - and has always striven to find ways of bringing together Jews and Christians around the Biblical texts these two traditions believe, in different ways, they share.

The genius of the creators of this event was to recognise that dialogue between faiths can take place on many levels. There are many national and international conferences and seminars dedicated to the exchange of academic and theological understandings of different religious traditions, where set positions are debated and defended, information is exchanged, truth-claims are made or refuted...and people return home perhaps a little more knowledgeable but relatively unaffected by the discussion and exchange of ideas. But this Bible Week is rather different, for it places the shared text at the centre and helps people meet it and each other as equals, as partners in a process of personal discovery of what the Biblical texts mean to us today - as well as what they have meant to each faith in the past, and what directions they might point us towards for the future.

In the many years I have been going I have seen a transformation in what takes place in the daily study groups. When I first started to attend, at the end of the 1970s, the Jews (some of them at least) had access to the original Hebrew of the texts, but the German participants could only rely on translations. This meant that dialogue was an asymmetrical process. There had been a post-Shoah revolution in Germany in the Protestant Church’s attitude to Jews and Judaism - and this dovetailed with the final abandonment (in Vatican II) of the Catholic teaching that the Jews were guilty of being Christ-killers. This meant that Christians came to the conferences filled with shame and guilt, and seeking forgiveness from Jews on a personal level, as well as seeking to understand the traditions and texts of those whom they had persecuted for centuries. In those days the Jews would ‘explain’ the texts to the Christians, who had to learn to cast aside a range of prejudiced views about both Jews and the so-called ‘Old Testament’ texts.

But gradually this atmosphere changed and by the end of the 1980s - and it was even more striking when I returned at the end of the 1990s after a gap of several years - there was a whole generation of participants from Germany, young and old (i.e. those who had been around before and during the War and those born in the decades after it), who had patiently learn Biblical Hebrew and now came with their annotated Hebrew texts of the Bible alongside their German translations. This meant they were able to participate in conversations about the texts with a historically unprecedented knowledge of, and respect for, the Hebrew Bible. This was an extraordinarily moving development – and one that I think few Jews, particularly in the UK, have any understanding of even today.

And it was no longer the ‘Old Testament’ we were studying – for that description is of course a Christian one (though one often hears Jews using it too), because ‘Old’ assumes ‘New’, and the phrase ‘New Testament’ has a clear theological message encoded within it: that the Christian scriptures of the Gospels and Acts had come to complete God’s revelation; that the ‘New’ revelation had superseded the ‘Old’ one that was no longer relevant in its own right; that the ‘Old’ was just a stepping stone towards a ‘New’ and higher Truth. But by the turn of the millennium we were studying the ‘First Testament’ – and not only the pastors and theologians but many of the non-professional Christian participants, ‘ordinary’ Church-goers, had a knowledge of Hebrew that would be the envy of many congregational Jews.

The Bible Week has worked, somewhat systematically, through the Bible, and this year we reached Psalms 58-72. It is now a rather thrilling adventure to wrestle together, Jews and Christians on a much more equal basis, with texts that are foundational to both living faiths. Though sometimes the texts can be very challenging.

How do we now understand a psalm such as the one we read together, Jews and Christians, on our opening morning this year, that contains the lines:

The wicked are estranged from the womb onwards,
They go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies.
Their poison is like the poison of the serpent,
They are like a deaf adder [what a magnificently strange image!]...
Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth...
The righteous person shall rejoice when they see vengeance,
They shall wash their feet in the blood of the wicked
(Psalm 58: verses 3-6, 10).

I won’t reveal here the multiple ways we grappled with this problematic emotional outpouring by the poet-psalmist. But the sharing of thoughts and feelings that this text provoked, the sharing of perspectives on the all-too-human but universal and omnipresent urge for vengeance – this sharing was done by young pastors and teachers working in Church settings, and those in middle age brought up under Marxism in the former East Germany, as well as older group members such as the woman who recalled (as if it was yesterday) her childhood memory of the way a neighbour had been led away during the War in the dead of night, never to return, and the silence around this event. And to take part in this sharing and offer my own perspectives, rabbinic and psychological, is a rare privilege – and it takes me back (and takes me aback with its power) each year.

Anyone can come and all are welcome – you can get further information about the Bible Week at www.haus-ohrbeck.de which has an English-language section under the tab for ‘Jewish-Christian Bible Forum’.

This is my last blog for the moment – I will be resuming, inshallah, in September. Thank you for reading this year’s postings - and for your Comments, posted or spoken.

Torah Today

2010-07-09T14:58:00.003+01:00

Sometimes I use a sermon to explore themes that trouble me, religious themes. Here is something I offered today, at Finchley Reform Synagogue:

How are we to read the Torah today? What is our relationship to it? What role does it play in our thinking about ourselves as Jews?

For 1800 years the texts of Torah were at the centre of Jewish life: they were seen as holy, inspired, having come to the Jewish people directly from Ha-Kadosh Baruch Hu, the ‘Holy One of Israel, Blessed be He’. Jewish lives were guided by the words of Torah, controlled by their teachings, regulated by the instructions they contained and the concentric circles of commentary upon them that radiated outwards, endlessly, through the generations, interpreting, expanding, amplifying the godly purposes inscribed in the original holy words. For 1800 years these texts we read every Shabbat morning were at the epicentre of Jewish consciousness – and Jewish lives were lived, as Franz Rosenzweig suggests, as enacted commentaries upon the Torah, that ever-beating heart of Judaism.

The teachings of the Torah pulsed through the daily, the hourly, lives of Jews, wherever they lived, from Asia to the Yemen, from Bialystock to Berlin to Baltimore, for Torah min-Hashamayim meant Torah that was divinely inspired - and therefore had a commanding presence at all times, in every era and in every place where Jews found themselves in their long wanderings across the world and through the generations.

But can we say the same today, for us? Even to ask the question brings in its wake its own answer: I don’t think we can say the same is true for us. Nor has it been true for most Jews for several generations now. Our relationship to the Torah (if indeed we have a relationship at all) has surely become, I would suggest, radically different – and has become so because of what we think of as modernity, those multiple ways of thinking that have transformed our consciousness over and again during the last two centuries. Secularism with its distinctive ways of describing and interpreting our everyday realities has taken hold in our hearts and minds, and affects everything we do and are. The ways of thinking about human relationships and history, psychology and language and law, the ways of thinking about our planet and its evolution, about nature and human nature, the centrality of scientific and critical modes of thinking and the place of reason and rationality in how we think about ourselves and our society – our mental world view now is irrevocably different from 200 years ago, let alone 2000 years ago. And this of course includes the ways we think about religion and so-called ‘holy’ texts.

And all this – and obviously I’m only offering here an almost cartoonishly abbreviated, shorthand version of this process of modernity – all this huge transformation in thinking has profound implications for those opening questions: ‘How are we to read the Torah today? What is our relationship to it? What role does it play in our thinking about ourselves as Jews?’

I’ve been prompted to pose these questions today for two reasons. The first is historical: next weekend is the 200th anniversary of the beginnings of what was, in 1810, a new, progressive approach to Judaism. Next Shabbat commemorates the first progressive Jewish Shabbat service. It was held in Seesen, Westphalia – in present-day Germany. There was an organ and a boys' choir, and texts in German as well as Hebrew. The service was led by Israel Jacobson, the so-called ‘father of Reform Judaism’.

But of course questions about Jews’ changing relationship to Torah had been around for decades before that: they’d surfaced in the previous century’s Enlightenment era and a century before that Baruch Spinoza in Holland was already offering a philosophical critique of contemporary views about God and Torah. So that first progressive service 200 years ago was a milestone – but within a larger unfolding challenge to traditional thinking. And whether we know it or not, in the midst of the multiple transformations in Jewish life that have happened since then, we are the inheritors of that impetus that started in Germany to look for new directions in Jewish life, congruent with the times and the thinking of the times.

And the second direction from which I am asking how we are supposed to relate to Torah today comes from having to wrestle directly with the kind of text we heard today. For example, what do we do with a sentence like ‘Adonai spoke to Moses saying...Tell the children of Israel: When you cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan you shall dispossess/uproot all the inhabitants of the land; you shall destroy all their images, and all the images of their images, and you shall destroy all their religious sites, and you will take possession of the land and settle in it...’ (Numbers 33:51-3).

When in March 2001 the Taliban dynamited the two great 6th century Buddhas of Bamyan in Afghanistan there was, justifiably, international outrage at the desecration and destruction of a religious site, and it was seen as evidence for the atavistic medievalism of their form of Islam. But as we see, that kind of religio-cultural destructiveness is not rooted in medievalism but in Biblical texts such as the ones we still read today from our Torah.

And here you will probably want to protest that this is a bit unfair of me. That we are not responsible for the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam; and that we are not of a mind-set that would read these holy texts of ours literally, as telling us what to do today; that we are part of a tradition that always read our texts through the eyes of commentators - who would read the texts figuratively, or allegorically, or symbolically. So that, for example, when we read – in several passages in the Torah, in Exodus and Leviticus and Deuteronomy - that we should take ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, we understand this as the Talmudic rabbis understood it: that this principle is there to provide equitable financial compensation for an offended party, indeed that it restricts acts of retribution. Because in ancient times the punishment often far exceeded the crime, the Torah – says the rabbis – is not instructing us in retribution, but in mercy. It is asking us to transmute our natural aggression and wish for revenge into a passion of a different kind, a passion for justice.

So is this the approach we need to take when reading the Torah today – not to take it literally, but maybe symbolically or metaphorically or in some other way that goes against the grain of its plain meaning? So that when we read about dispossessing and uprooting inhabitants from the land, and acts of cultural desecration and religious contempt, are we supposed to interpret that as teaching the importance today of Jewish cultural distinctiveness, of taking pride in one’s own traditions and values, or the importance of uprooting alien ideas and values from one’s own Jewish world view? Or do we concentrate on thinking of it as a text to justify Zionism as a divine enterprise? I suppose if you were a certain kind of rabbi, or a certain kind of Jew, you might feel attracted to these kinds of interpretation. But even as I suggest these possibilities, I recognize how inadequate these kinds of interpretations are, how fraught with difficulties they are. That kind of interpretative approach towards a problematic text involves a reading against the grain of the text that’s going to leave some very nasty splinters of aggression in one’s soul, and possibly in other people’s lives.

Or maybe we moderns would prefer to see the text merely as a document that reflects its historical context, as a product of its own time and place in which life was nasty, brutish and short, and a tribe’s survival did require the utmost ruthlessness? Are we supposed to rationalize it like that? And in doing so insist that it in no way offers religious or spiritual guidance to us today – in Israel or the West Bank for example? But if we do that, what do we say to those who do want to read the texts more literally and less symbolically – that still want to settle and dispossess, and still despise others with the same vehemence as the God-figure portrayed here, still despise the other inhabitants of the land?

A new report out this week from the leading Israeli human rights group B’Tselem says that more than 42% of the West Bank is now under the control of Israeli settlers. Settlements take over private Palestinian land far beyond the settlements’ notional boundaries, in breach of an Israeli supreme court ruling that is blatantly ignored by those who will be reading these same texts today with, no doubt, a self-justifying smile on their faces. (I know that not all the settlers are religious, but I am making the point about how these texts still resonate today in powerful ways in certain parts of the Jewish world).

But to come back to us: can we still read these texts today in our progressive communities, in any non-literal, non-fundamentalist way, and feel content with our reading? Feel that we retain our integrity - and our humanity – by reading the texts psychologically or homiletically as I tried to do before? Or by contextualizing them, placing them in an ancient historical framework, and thereby de-fanging them of their poisonous and (let’s be honest) genocidal invective? Does that work for us?

How do we stay open to these texts – open in our hearts and minds? How can we stay open to hear the Holy One of Israel speaking still through these texts? That’s our challenge, our religious and spiritual challenge. This is what Judaism has always done, always tried to do, to stay faithful to a tradition of reading that says : through these texts, through these stories and narratives and laws, through the poetry and prose and legislation, through every sentence, every word, every letter, the divine Voice speaks to us if we have ears to hear and a soul attuned to eternity. Can we still do that, with texts like these?

I suppose we do have a choice.

We could just discard these texts, edit them out of our tradition, or out of our minds, and say: these are just human documents that betray the primitive mentality of their human authors, the limited moral and ethical imagination of their times, but we now have far outgrown these writers in moral and ethical imagination and the refinement of our sense of how to be human with each other - and particularly with those who are different to ‘us’. We can do that, turn our backs on all this uncomfortable invective and discard these texts as damaged goods and irrelevant to our lives.

But if we don’t want to do that, if we want to keep faith in some way with our history of engagement with Torah as containing inspiration and direction for our own lives, then we have to hold ourselves open, still, to these disquieting texts. Hold ourselves still and open.

And that might be a very uncomfortable, and a very unfashionable, thing to do. To stay open to listening in to the potential wisdom to be learnt and received from texts that on the surface strike us as utterly repellant. This is deeply unsettling – it means we have to dispossess ourselves of our prejudices, uproot our initial emotional responses. And it means we have to face something deeply paradoxical.

It is paradoxical to say on the one hand ‘These texts are hateful to me for what they seem to say and seem to imply, and hateful because there are those of my Jewish brothers and sisters who insist on reading them in ways that I find abhorrent; so yes, these texts seem to me truly noxious’ - to say that, and also to say ‘and I will still read them, and listen to them, listen in to them, await what they have to reveal to me, to us, in our days, await what the divine speaks through them, what the Holy One of Israel wishes to disclose now about land and possessiveness and images and otherness and uprooting and destructiveness ...’

To say both these things – 'these words are hateful to me and I need to keep on listening to them' – is, I would suggest, one of the central Jewish religious paradoxes of our times. But Jews have always loved paradox. And in wrestling in this way with these texts we remain true to the vision of old, the vision of Israel, Yisrael, the ‘one who struggles with and against and on behalf of the divine’. That is our job, our task, our destiny: the wrestling and the yielding and the resisting and the never-letting-go until the blessing arrives.

And then we limp away, carrying the woundedness within us.

The Great Distraction

2010-06-20T15:28:00.002+01:00

Here we go again. And by ‘we’ I mean ‘we English’ – but also ‘we citizens of a planet whose most unifying creative passion revolves around semi-controlled tribal kicking of spherical objects’. Here we are again in our four-year cycle of collective mania about an event that has no meaning - other than the one we attribute to it. Like art or music – and religion – football can move some of us to tears (of exaltation or despair, wonder or rage), while leaving others indifferent, or puzzling over what all the fuss is about.

The World Cup is of course a great distraction from other slightly more pressing concerns: poverty, malnutrition, totalitarian oppression, environmental concerns, the fragility of the world’s economy. (As Professor Terry Eagleton says of the global obsession with football: ‘No finer way of resolving the problems of capitalism has been dreamed up, bar socialism’). It is perhaps the most obvious example of Juvenal’s famous maxim in his Satires that rulers can distract the populace from pressing issues of public policy – and the populace long, it seems, to be distracted in this manner – if it can offer them ‘bread and circuses’: ... duas tantum res anxius optat, / panem et circenses. As a recent translation puts it: ‘...only two things does the modern citizen anxiously wish for: bread and the big match.’ No doubt we will have the same again here in two years time with the Olympics.

But – before I get carried away with my awareness of football’s essential triviality in the scheme of things – let me state unequivocally that football can offer us, at its best, moments of transcendence and intimations of immortality. This has been expressed most eloquently by a player whose club used to sell replica shirts combining his playing number, ‘7’, and the single word ‘Dieu’. Eric Cantona was able to do things on a football field that nobody else had done, could do, or would do. So he knew whereof he spoke when he once said:

‘An artist, in my eyes, is someone who can lighten up a dark room. I have never and will never find any difference between the pass from Pele to Carlos Alberto in the final of the World Cup in 1970 and the poetry of the young Rimbaud, who stretches “cords from steeple to steeple and garlands from window to window”. There is in each of these human manifestations an expression of beauty which touches us and gives us a feeling of eternity’.

(He was also, as this quotation illustrates – and rather unusually for a footballer, need it be said – a rather cultured individual. But then of course he was French).

‘We English’ have to make do with rather less thoughtfulness from our players, and – sadly, inevitably, repeatedly - rather less culture on the pitch. Hopes are raised, hopes are dashed, as the English propensity to transmute dreams of glory into nightmares of farce plays itself out in its recurring cycle. But – looking for ‘the positives’, as modern-day managers are taught to say - our national game (and especially our national team) does offer fans the possibility of experiencing (repeatedly) some important psychological truths about human imperfection and fallibility and the inevitability of confronting loss. (We should thank them for that, if nothing else).

The catharsis we experience when we are finally released from the inner tension generated in some games between the excitement and hope for victory and the fear of imminent defeat is salutary. And defeat is, naturally, by far the most common experience for players and fans alike. Defeat is built into the structure of competitive sports in a particular way: only one team can win the Cup, only one player can win the gold medal. The rest have to face the poignancy of loss, the pain of mourning, of waking up the next morning knowing what might have been, but isn’t. It’s gone. Like a death, like the failed dreams in our lives, defeat scars the soul over and over again with the awareness that failure and loss are unavoidable aspects of our shared human condition.

And yet the football fan – even ‘we English’ – lives with a resilient hopefulness that we might experience moments that can give us what Cantona called that ‘feeling of eternity’. If not from our players and our team then another team and other players. The goal from the impossible angle, the visionary pass that opens up the opposition’s defence, the goalkeeper’s agile athleticism where the body twists and flies through the air, the fragile moments of individual skill on the ball – the co-ordinated movement of body and eye and mind – all these offer up the grandeur of the human spirit incarnated in spontaneous action. The human body becomes – as it does in ballet or sex or yoga – a vehicle for transcendence. We glimpse the recurring mystery of our being human. And we give thanks for what we receive. For such giftedness transcends race or nation and gives us a living image of the numinous to inspire our daily lives.

Decades ago, when the American philosopher George Santayana was asked what he meant by the word ‘religion’, he replied ‘another world to live in’. But when he said that he could not have anticipated how, for hundreds of millions of men and women throughout the world, what he meant by ‘religion’ would one day be displaced in the most immediate sense by organised spectator sports, and football in particular. The gods of old have been reincarnated in a new form, and from the slums of Rio de Janeiro to the steppes of Siberia via the pubs and sitting rooms of towns across the UK, the contemporary fan (from the Latin fanaticus, worshipper, of course) pays homage to his and her divine representatives on earth - as remote and yet omnipresent as they ever were.

(If they play any sport in heaven it must be football - though cricket is another possibility: if you have an eternity to spend, then five-day Test match cricket is a perfect time-filler, with angels and seraphim always on hand to fetch the ball when it is hit over the boundary ropes into the ether, and God himself the all-watchful Umpire whose omniscient judgement cannot be overruled).

Football is ‘another world to live in’. Let’s enjoy it while - if - we can. It will invigorate us for what really matters: the struggles - and inevitable defeats – we still have to face.

“Another Fine Mess...”

2010-06-03T10:04:00.002+01:00

Israel used to pride itself on its saikhel – that special combination of ingenuity, wily intelligence, common sense and low cunning that is a hallmark of what used to be called a yiddisher kopf. Honed through the generations as Jews learnt to defend themselves in an inhospitable world, it was the display of this kind of native intelligence that used to gain the admiration of Jews around the world when they saw it demonstrated by the State of Israel. Even Israel’s enemies were grudging admirers of Israeli saikhel .

Those days are long gone. Certainly for Israel’s enemies. But also for many of Israel’s supporters, as we see over and again the ways in which the State seems to keep making choices to its own detriment. The latest fiasco over the Gaza flotilla has caused upset and disquiet not only in the Diaspora but in Israel too: ‘If [defence minister] Ehud Barak does not resign, Israel will be perceived in international public opinion as a country in which not only does no one ever resign from his ministerial post, but also a country...that ought to be given collective punishment as a sovereign entity.’ Not some left-wing fringe view but that of Yedioth Ahronot, Israel’s best-selling, populist paper.

Intercepting an aid convoy in international waters...failing to ensure sufficient numbers were on hand to deal with what they should have known would be stern, and potentially violent, resistance...the lack of proportionality in defending themselves, using lethal force so that at least 10 passengers died and scores were injured: whatever the hostile intent of a minority of those on the lead ship the Mavi Marmara (and that there was malign intent from some seems clear), this catalogue of Israeli errors lead to a catastrophe. Obviously so for those dead and injured. But it’s also another catastrophic failure of Israel’s capacity to react to provocations with anything approaching saikhel.

Of course the flotilla was provocative, with its shrewd combination of humanitarian relief and PR opportunity. But what did they expect Israel to do in response to the flotilla after such a tight 3 year blockade of Gaza’s waters? ‘Oh, look: Turkish boats, Irish boats, mothers and babies, film-makers, Nobel prize-winners, the author of Wallander noch! ... how can we say No to these good souls? Do please go ahead and deliver your largesse...’ The organizers of the flotilla must have known it was never going to be plain sailing – and that quite likely it would end in tears.

The situation in Gaza is dire. Aid is of course desperately needed and Israel’s intransigence in relation to what it allows in and what it refuses is part of their ill-considered game-plan of retaining a major stranglehold on the territory combined with minor concessions – though to what end it all is for, who knows? What we do know is the bitterness of blighted lives, the hatreds stored up year-by-year, and the maddening emotional and mental turmoil of those who once loved Israel with an almost religious passion – but now feel dismay at what Israel wreaks, and despair at what Israel has become.

As so often the Book of Proverbs seems to capture - sadly,aptly - the mood of the moment: “A person is commended for their saikhel – but a twisted mind is held in contempt” (Proverbs 12:8).

The Poetry of Revelation

2010-05-18T18:29:00.003+01:00

In 1880 Matthew Arnold published an essay - The Study of Poetry - in which he wrote: ‘Most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry...’

Although in one way I find this statement rather absurd – with its grandiose assumption that the traditional truths incarnated in religious and philosophical ways of thinking would somehow fade away to be replaced by newly-revealed truths born of the human imagination in play with language – I nevertheless find Arnold’s thought quite seductive. It chimes with my own gradual religious and spiritual evolution from someone interested in the truth-claims of religion - the objectivity of religious ideas about God and goodness and sin and redemption and so on – into someone who is now far less interested in doctrines and dogmas and so-called ‘religious identity’ , and far more interested in the subjective nature of spirituality and personal religious experience.

This week we celebrate the fleeting early-summer festival of Shavuot – the day in the Jewish calendar when we recall the revelation of Torah to the assembled Israelites at Sinai. I admire and enjoy the narrative power of the Exodus texts which describe this ‘event’ – even though I don’t think of it as an ‘event’. For me this is not about history, not about facts. It is about the mythic dimensions of saga, a way of speaking about certain abiding truths understood by a particular people over time.

I appreciate the symbolic resonances, images and metaphors of a story that describes Moses separating himself from everyone, ascending a mountain and receiving new understanding, new ways of thinking about how to live and act, individually and collectively: how to be in the world. He receives ‘Torah’ – teaching, direction – ‘min Ha’shamayim’ – from out of the “heavens”, out of the ether, from that eternal Voice that reveals what is to be revealed.

And I have always cherished those teachings from later in the Jewish tradition that move us away from literalism about this ‘event’ towards an existential appreciation that revelation is always available, if we are prepared to listen (Shema, Yisrael...’listen, pay attention people!’). Martin Buber offers us the Hasidic thought : ‘Everyone of Israel is told to think of themselves as standing at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. For us there are past and future events, but not so for God: day in, day out, God gives the Torah’ (from Ten Rungs: Hasidic Sayings). In other words: revelation is ongoing and always happening now.

And part of the way in which I believe we can listen into revelation now is - back to Arnold - through poetry. As the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney has said: ‘Poetry...is a ratification of the impulse towards transcendence’. My heart sings to hear that – how often as a congregant in a service I find my thoughts moving away from the traditional language of devotion and towards the anthologised material (and particularly the poetry) that we are so fortunate to have in our various books of Reform liturgy, for Shabbat and Festivals and High Holy Days.

What a good poem does, for me, is offer a space to explore ideas, to play, to wrestle with the fullness and plasticity of words, a place to discover new ways of thinking, new forms of truth-telling. As the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has put it: ‘A poem...is a place where language is most truthful. In the poem, more than any other literary form, you can’t lie.’ And we know that in the Rabbinic tradition one of God’s many names is Emet – Truth.

So, as I reflect on revelation, on where in the world truth is to be found, discovered, fashioned, re-fashioned – where on earth, or in heaven, we are now to listen in to the revelation of what is and can be – I find myself turning to a poet I have only recently discovered, Samuel Menashe, born in New York in 1925 to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, and still mining a rich seam of spiritual ore/awe.

He offers us miniature poems, polished diamonds to treasure and handle and turn over in our minds. ‘Turn it and turn it’ - as the Rabbis once said of the Torah – ‘for everything is within it’:

Reeds Rise From Water

rippling under my eyes
Bulrushes tuft the shore

At every instant I expect
what is hidden everywhere

Election Blues

2010-05-07T02:35:00.003+01:00

Rabbinic cynicism is as old as the hills. There’s a maxim from the second century text Pirke Avot – the ‘Sayings of the Fathers’ – that runs: ‘Be careful of those in power! For they do not draw anybody near to them except in their own interest: they seem like friends when it is to their own advantage, but they do not stand by a person in their hour of need’ (P.Avot 2:3).

So is this rabbinic warning cynicism – or realism? I’ve found myself – somewhat to my own surprise – rather gripped by the lead-up to this week’s General Election here in the UK. I haven’t followed in detail all the acres of newspaper coverage, nor have I watched much of the commentary on TV. But I tuned into the three live TV debates, and while lamenting the Americanisation of our culture (and the triumph of style over substance) that they represented, found them fascinating events as political spectacle – mini dramas of personal ambition and competitiveness masquerading as caring, compassionate expressions of concern for the collective well-being of the nation.

What confidence these men needed to display! Confidence that they alone can lead the country into a brighter, fairer, more prosperous future. Confidence that they alone have the answers to the complex problems besetting the country. Confidence that we will not think about the inevitable gap between rhetoric and the harsh realities of the policy choices that any party will need to make in these next few years.

These men depend upon what the social psychologist Leon Festinger (1919-1989) termed ‘cognitive dissonance’: our inability to tolerate inside us conflicting beliefs, thoughts or feelings so that we end up rejecting or devaluing one or more of these perceptions. So we may know in our heads that crime rates have fallen dramatically over the last decade – but if someone we know has been burgled, or we feel unsafe for any other reason, we will insist that the Government hasn’t done enough to cut crime. Or we may know that immigration has huge economic benefits to the county, and fills a variety of essential skilled and unskilled jobs in the UK, but if we resent the way the Polish shop on the high street has displaced our favourite cafe, then we will insist the Government must do something to stop immigrants ‘flocking’ here in unlimited numbers.

Yet a moment or two of sustained thinking will help us acknowledge that whoever is in power will face problems the magnitude of which daunts the imagination. The two most serious are environmental (about which we have heard almost nothing in the run-up to this election) and economic. Although we are not in the euro zone we see in Greece a society whose social cohesion is unravelling because the ‘financial markets’ – like the unseen amoral gods of old, indifferent to the suffering of real human beings – continue to determine our destinies wherever we live. And no major party has the courage to tell us that the only way we are going to reduce carbon emissions as a nation is through the draconian introduction of individual carbon rationing.

As the results still come in this morning it is possible that the tectonic plates beneath British politics are shifting – and a new era where co-operation and compromise prevail will have to emerge. Meanwhile it is going to be messy and fractious and somewhat inconclusive. Both major parties will claim the moral high ground and that they have a mandate to rule - and no doubt we will now be told by those parts of the media that like the pseudo-clarity of clear storylines (and obvious winners and losers) that Britain cannot tolerate such uncertainty.

But what I fear more than uncertainty is the self-righteousness of certainty. The rabbis of the Talmud knew that what really counts is who will ‘stand by a person in their hour of need’. What I fear is that as we teeter on the brink of further financial meltdown, we might be entering into another period of Government when entrenched ideology damns a further generation to economic and social despair, and that those in need – and it could be any one of us – are again neglected or abandoned.

Ashes and Dust, Dust and Ashes

2010-04-23T08:34:00.004+01:00

Once again we see how fragile it all is. A volcano erupts in a far-off land – and the disruption to our well-ordered lives is immediate. Hundreds of thousands of UK citizens are stranded away from home, the skies of Europe empty, anxieties take off about the toxicity of the air we are breathing, schools and hospitals are unable to function, families are separated and lives are inconvenienced, there is annoyance and sometimes distress – and the vulnerability of our casual dependence on air travel is revealed in stark and discomforting ways. But nobody has died – this is not a tragedy.

The fantasy of omnipotence that modern life promotes – that it’s possible (within reason) to do anything we want, any time we want it – has been challenged over this last week. Through air travel and the internet and satellite communications technology we come to rely on the experience of inter-connectivity: that we live within a vast web of being in which we can be anywhere at any time, connecting to anyone, that goods and ideas and news and we ourselves can transcend the boundaries of locality and space. That we can (in effect) be like the gods of old - all-knowing, all-seeing, ever-present, not restricted by inhabiting a physical body that sets limits to what is possible. (Yet simultaneously we also become more and more dependent on basic resources like oil and electricity to keep the whole illusion going).

These last 20-30 years of extraordinary technological development is affecting our psyche in ways we still barely comprehend. As ‘virtual reality’ becomes integrated into our everyday down-to-earth reality, the boundaries of who we and what the limits are on what we can do are become blurred. This leads to deep inner confusion and disorientation – for our consciousness of what it means to be a human being is changing, subtly, indefinably.

Yet in the midst of this rapid transformation into new ways of living, old ways of thinking remain. I’ve been fascinated by the language used to describe the volcano’s activity. A few days into these events, I heard the journalist for Channel 4 News – usually the most solid and unmelodramatic of news outlets – open his report of the still-erupting volcano with a description of how "angry" the volcano still was; and then immediately his voiceover went on to talk about the effects this "act of God" was having on stranded tourists. And in the Observer this past weekend one commentator who had recently visited the volcano wrote of the privilege on a recent visit to Iceland of being in the presence of the volcano where he could "feel the breath of the beast and hear it stir".

Now of course all this anthropomorphism is on one level just journalistic colour – a reaching for a familiar metaphorical language to describe what is happening or being experienced. And yet it harks back to a way of thinking that suggests to me how thin is the carapace of rationality in which we wrap our consciousness.

We know volcanoes are not angry beasts and we know that they aren’t controlled by a vengeful (or playful )‘God’ – but perhaps we turn so quickly to this atavistic language because when a volcano does erupt, and the smooth ordering of our lives is radically disrupted, we glimpse how little control we have over the deep life of the planet; that the movement of mountains and seas and tectonic plates defies all our collective ingenuity as a species, that all our conquering of time and space and all our great civilisational achievements in science and technology fade into insignificance (and impotence) in relation to the random and meaningless activity of the planet’s own continual going-on-being.

At an unconscious level an event like this eruption puts us back in touch with an infantile helplessness that exists dormant within us all. And our language starts to reflect that mode of thinking – that our deep wishes for a safe and well-ordered, well-contained life are somehow under threat from powerful but arbitrary forces around us.

***
One of the unexpected consequences of the suspension of air travel was that many world leaders were unable to attend the funerals in Poland of those who had died in the catastrophic plane crash - this was a tragedy – near Smolensk on April 12th. The terrible echoing irony of the disaster hardly needs spelling out: the Polish President and nearly 100 senior figures in Polish society were on their way to Katyn to commemorate the Soviet massacre there of 22,000 Polish military officers and intellectual leaders during the Second World War. (The Soviets hid the crimes of Stalin’s secret police by blaming the Nazis for the murders, a lie that British and American governments colluded with after the War).

One of the deaths that I found particularly haunting to hear about was that of the sculptor Wojciech Seweryn who had campaigned for years for increased official awareness of Russian responsibility: his father had been murdered at Katyn in 1940 and he had joined this flight alongside the other Polish dignitaries in order to pay homage to his dead father’s memory.

Only silence is a suitable response to this. Or maybe - in extremis – Shakespeare’s extraordinary words from King Lear; ‘As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport'.

Let me finish by sharing with you parts of a letter sent by Rabbi Burt Schuman from the Progressive Jewish community in Warsaw, which offers a personal perspective on what this tragedy has meant:

Not only did we lose President Kaczynski and his wife on that fateful plane crash yesterday … but much of Poland’s political, economic, military, and diplomatic and religious leadership, including the chiefs of all branches of the military, the presidential chaplain and army chaplain, the deputy foreign minister and other foreign ministry staff, the president of the National Bank, the head of the National Security office, leaders of the Institute for National Memory, the head of the Olympic Committee, the civil rights commissioner, officials of the Ministry of Culture, the Deputy Speaker of the parliament, several presidential aides and former three members of parliament. In addition, the leaders of veterans’ groups, the last President of the Polish Government in Exile and several heroes of the Polish resistance also perished in that flight. Many of these individuals were people that I either I had met and conversed with or had seen at official functions, adding to my own personal sense of shock and grief.

… these leaders were en route to the Katyn forest at the invitation of the Russian government to observe the 70th anniversary of the hideous massacre of tens of thousands of Polish officers, among them approximately 900 Jewish officers … As Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has eloquently stated this is the greatest tragedy t o befall post-war Poland… Many in our community lost close personal friends. Moreover, the Jews of Poland have lost a great friend and advocate in President Kaczynski’s who not only spoke often and eloquently about the Jewish contribution to Polish history, on many occasions, including commemorations at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial and this past summer at the 65thanniversary of the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto this past summer… Moreover, he demonstrated that support in deeds as well as words as in his financial support for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews and his visit to Israel on the heels of the Second Lebanon War…

A bit of perspective on evennts does not, I suppose, do us much harm.

'Crisis? What Crisis?'

2010-04-06T09:20:00.002+01:00

It is obvious that the Catholic Church is currently immersed in controversy and soul-searching. Accusations that a small number of clergy, in several countries, have in the past been guilty of sexual abusing children and other vulnerable young people are serious sources of shame for the Church. And the extent of the cover-up of these crimes is also coming to light. But this material is hardly new. It joins a larger body of evidence that within hierarchical, authority-laden institutions – be they religious or secular, be it staff in care homes or teachers in public schools or adults in that supposedly benign institution we call ‘the family’ – violence and cruelty can be (and always has been) perpetrated by authority figures against the weak and the powerless.

Priests and nuns may have a vocation, or may be seen by others as having some special ‘sanctity’ attached to them – but they are (of course) as psychologically complex as any of the rest of us. In my experience, the battle in the human soul between our creative and destructive impulses, our loving and hateful feelings, is never over for anyone. And in spite of what people might want from their clergy, ‘religious’ figures are not exempt from instinctual human desires and conflicts.

So on the one hand this latest furore about the Catholic Church is part of a much wider picture about the corrupting nature of institutions where authority becomes authoritarian. And this is as relevant to Orthodox Jewish institutions and families as to Catholic ones. And I dare say there are Muslim equivalents. But abuse of power in religious settings seems to shock us more – perhaps because the rhetoric of monotheism is full of words like love and compassion and justice.

Yet we really shouldn’t be shocked. When a religion has at its centre an authority figure – otherwise known as ‘God’ – who Himself doesn’t like challenges to his authority – "You shall have no other gods before Me" – then we can predict trouble ahead. Those who see themselves as speaking in God’s name have a potent image to draw upon when they say ‘Do what I tell you’. To think you are speaking in the name of an all-powerful deity is a dangerous belief to hold. It can justify any action you take. If God is always right and I am acting as God’s representative here on earth then it is easy to find oneself caught up in an (unconscious) omnipotent fantasy that I am always right.

So this identification with a divine power who is uncompromising in saying what is right and what is wrong – and in dictating what is forbidden and what has to happen – this unconscious identification will be used to ‘justify’ cruelty and terror and transgression. Whether it is sexual violence or domestic violence or institutional violence, this enactment by individuals of their own instinctual need to exercise power mirrors – and draws upon - monotheism’s own strands of hostility, aggression, and intolerance of dissent . And all monotheisms contain plenty of that kind of stuff, mixed in with the more benign strands of faith that believers love to quote.

So I’m never shocked by evidence of crimes by so-called ‘religious’ people. It so happens that in his career the present Pope, Benedict XVI, has been rigorous in investigating cases of clergy who have been accused of sexual abuse. But what is new on this occasion is the way in which these current accusations – of crimes and the cover-up of crimes – has been taken up by the world’s press. They now have a perfect weapon with which to beat an institution that ‘preaches love but practices abuse’ – as if all priests are secret perverts. This is never stated openly but is the subtext to much of the reporting I have read. It’s as if there is almost a kind of schadenfreude at work: ‘You claim to be so holy and good, but look at what you are really like...now (about time!) it’s our turn to hold you responsible, to make you feel guilty ...’

Is this the revenge of the secular press (whose own authority is fading in the internet era) on the enviable religious authority of the Church? Is a secret, maybe unconscious, battle taking place – can the power of the print media bring down the power of the Church?

Take, for example, a recent article headlined ‘Pope’s preacher says attacks on Catholics are like antisemitism’(the Guardian, April 3rd) At an Easter service at St.Peter’s - attended by the Pope and other Catholic leaders - Father Raniero Cantalamessa had quoted a letter he’d received from a Jewish friend – note this, from a Jewish friend – which contained the remark that ‘The passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt reminds me of the more shameful aspects of antisemitism.’ This had caused, so it was reported, a storm of further controversy amongst Abuse Victims’ groups and Jewish representatives, particularly in Germany, whose shock and horror at this remark were duly recorded.

Now I may have some lack of moral imagination here, or a real failure of moral intelligence, but I am rather puzzled by this reported outrage. What the ‘Jewish friend’ seems to have been pointing out was that just as antisemitism is stereotyping and prejudice expressed against a whole group, so the current antagonism being expressed in the media towards the collective authority of Catholic priests and the hierarchy of the Church and the person of Benedict himself and the institutional practice of celibacy, etc , etc, is a form of prejudice - for it condemns the group, the collective institution and its ways of life, for the crimes (and sins) of some individuals.

So isn’t the analogy of antisemitism rather a useful one? Yes, it might be rather ironic from a historical perspective for a leading Catholic to use this particular analogy. But isn’t Father Cantalamessa’s inference a legitimate, benign and even illuminating perspective? - that a form of collective scapegoating is happening in the attacks on the Catholic Church that is similar in its psychological mechanism to attacks on Judaism as a religion or Jews as a collective group?

Sadly, a Catholic spokesman felt the need to issue a statement afterwards saying that the preacher wasn’t speaking as a Vatican official and that such comparisons ‘lead to misunderstandings and is not an official position of the Catholic Church.’ The problem is that for those who are so minded – the intolerant, the insecure, the paranoid, the self-regarding narcissist - anything someone else says can ‘lead to misunderstandings’.

Maybe silence is, after all, a virtue to be cultivated.

Pesach: Memories Are Made Of This...

2010-03-23T14:18:00.004Z

It’s that time of year again. No matter how distant a Jew is from their heritage, no matter how secularised or alienated or acculturated, can there be anyone who does not recall, from the deepest recesses of their mind, those words of tradition that are sung or chanted, mumbled or muttered on this night: Ma nishtana ha-layla ha-ze - ‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’

Something about this festival of Pesach - Passover – has lodged itself in the Jewish psyche. Deeper than questions of religious belief or unbelief – did the exodus from Egypt really happen as the Bible says it did? does a God who is concerned with the fate of a group of immigrant slaves really exist? does any kind of divine force exist or is it all legend and superstition and infantile yearning? – deeper than these doubts and questions something else stirs up at this season. Family memories begin to arise from the hidden recesses of our consciousness.

Memories of grandfathers chanting the prayers in an alien tongue, white tablecloths and dishes brought out only for this night, the bitter-sweet taste of haroset, arguments round the table, benign bedlam, everybody with a different Haggadah, the over-excitedness of tired children, the gaps at the table of relatives no longer here, the displaced seders during the War, the silence about the Shoah in the post-War seders, celebrating the seder communally on Kibbutz at long tables with hundreds of others, the search for the afikoman, the rewards and treats and shushing, the waiting for the songs, the disputes over the tunes, opening the door for Elijah and the cat walks in, or a relative home from distant parts. Memories - sentimental or enraging, tear-laden or embittered – wrap themselves round the seder night.

This is the night when we tell our story, our history, our great mythic narrative of liberation from slavery – and this is the night when, in the midst of telling a collective story, our own personal link in the chain comes alive, as we recall seders gone by. Seder night is when Judaism comes home, literally.

At no other time of the year does Jewish tradition so take over our personal lives, as individuals and families. The New Year and Yom Kippur do have their home dimensions (as of course does Shabbat) but the High Holy Days are largely celebrated (if that's the word) in the synagogue – if they are marked at all: primarily inner and reflective, they are easy to avoid, to dip into, or opt out of altogether. But Pesach seems to resonate in a different way - partly because for those of us born Jewish it is part of our earliest layers of memory in a way that Rosh Hashanah and the Day of Atonement are probably not.

If this is so, it is a small victory for the tradition – because so much of the seder ceremony and Haggadah narration focuses on the need to instruct the next generation, to tell it to the children, to induct the younger generation into the collective mythic history of the tribe. The seder is in effect a psychodrama : you eat the symbolic foods which link you to the ancient tales, you drink the ritual four cups of wine, you keep hearing the motif of four (the Four Questions, the Four Sons/Children, the Four Cups) – as if even ordinary numbers have a deeper meaning, a deeper link to history and tradition – there is communal singing of songs that might not make much sense but cause laughter in the adults...It all adds up to an evening that enacts a group mystery into which the children are to be inducted, whether they want it or not, whether they understand it or not.

The story contained in the Haggadah tells of the survival of a tribe, a people – the ‘miraculous’ survival of a people, through the generations, through history, a people who chose to gather each year to tell of their miraculous survival as a people. The Haggadah tells of a group of rabbis in Bnei Brack – five of them, so before the number symbolism was developed! - gathering in secret to tell the story two millennia ago. So far away in time - and yet already the need to tell the story, the miraculous story of liberation and survival. And we join with them on Seder night – telling the story of their telling the story – passing on to the next generation this story about storytelling, and the vital role of storytelling in the survival of the people.

It is a night when thankfulness is possible – and when other questions emerge. What is this survival for? Is it survival for its own sake - are we like the Armenians, or the Aborigines, with a collective identity and history and set of cultural traditions? - or does Jewish survival have a further purpose? The story we tell suggests that the answer, perhaps disquietingly, is yes: survival in and of itself is fine, we can appreciate what it means, but it is not the end of the story.

The story of our liberation from past oppression points towards a task, a responsibility. We know what this is. On this night we remember that we have a destiny as well as a history. Slavery and oppression are always with us – whether it is women and children sold into degradation and bondage or Palestinians oppressed by policies that humiliate and dehumanise, we live in a benighted world where the work of liberation is as urgent as ever.

May this Pesach help us recover our awareness that we belong to a people whose story only has meaning if it leads to action, to renewed commitment to others who still await their own liberation.

‘Colourless green ideas...’

2010-03-10T19:16:00.002Z

Some fifty years or so ago the linguist Noam Chomsky famously conjured up a way of illustrating how language can be constructed into grammatically correct sentences – and yet be quite meaningless. ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ was the example he dreamed up. This is both funny and clever – and once you get the hang of it you could probably come up with your own examples.

I think often of this sentence. I think of it particularly when I listen to people speaking in public: politicians, economists, psychologists, religious leaders – anyone who puts themselves forward claiming to be able to tell us a truth, the truth, about how the world works, how human beings work, how God works, how high finance works...note how often someone is introduced as an ‘expert’ when real expertise may consist in knowing how little we know, how little we understand, how little sense there is in the unfolding and uncontrollable outpouring of life within which we are swept along like fallen leaves within a flooding stream.

There will be three 90-minute live televised debates in the next few months in the UK, featuring the three main political leaders who will be contesting the forthcoming General Election. I don’t know if I will be giving my attention to all - or any - of that torrent of words that will cascade over us. But I can tell you now that the one sentence you are most unlikely to hear within those debates is the simple and honest sentence ‘I don’t know’. Although most of us know that they don’t know – and they know we know they don’t know - they are not allowed to admit this. It would be (so we are told) political suicide.

Of course we can recognise in ourselves the deep wish for our self-styled ‘experts’ to ‘know’: it can make us feel secure that someone, somewhere , is in charge, that decisions taken in the political and economic realms will produce well-being and a sense of order, a sense that life is controllable, that randomness and chaos are not the forces that rule our unruly lives. This same regressed wish is part of what attracts people to certain dogmatic forms of religious belief – it can be comforting to believe that Someone is In Charge of the cosmos, and cares about us within it. Often no evidence to the contrary will shift this belief, so deeply embedded within us is the need to feel part of an ordered universe, one that does make ultimate sense – even if that sense is hidden from view.

I know from my own experience how easy it is – how seductive, and self-seducing it is – to construct sentences that seem to offer a glimpse of what is abidingly true. One can fall in love with one’s own rhetoric. And maybe there is no harm in such a love affair – as long as one holds in mind that it is but an arbitrary and subjective arrangement of words, spoken or written. A speech, a sermon, an article, a review – whatever the genre that my words take – I try to bear in mind that one’s artfully constructed philosophy or theology or psychology, however elegant, however becoming (and maybe particularly when it is elegant and becoming) is, in essence, a fiction, an artifice. Remembering this about myself helps me remember it when I listen to, or read, others. Call it benign distrust.

There is something quintessentially odd about language. It is our glory as a species – think of all the 5,000 and more languages we have concocted for ourselves over time. And at the same time – in a world in which if you could squeeze all the space out of atoms, the whole of the human race would fit into a sugar cube (see Marcus Chown’s Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You) – there is, alongside the glory of it all, the absurdity and indecipherability of it all.

‘If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction’ (Twelfth Night).

Our experts – be they political, economic or religious – make it up as they go along. Filled with passionate intensity they offer us their fictions as true beliefs, true descriptions of how the world operates. It may though be better for us – better for our well-being, our mental health – to turn to those who at least acknowledge that they are crafting fictions and who aren’t fooled into thinking (or fool us into thinking) that they are offering their audience anything but subjective narratives born out of the human imagination. As the Nobel prize winning novelist Orhan Pamuk put it in a recent essay:

It is by reading novels, stories, myths that we come to understand the ideas that govern the world in which we live; it is fiction that gives us access to truths kept veiled by our families, our schools, and our society; it is the art of the novel that allows us to ask who we really are’ (from ‘Other Colors: Essays and a Story’, 2007).

Note that key verb ‘ask’. For Pamuk, asking ‘who we really are’ - not answering the question - is what the artist does. Because answers have a deadening tendency – so often they shut things down – what we need (pace our political leaders) are stories that help us ask questions. Good questions can open us up to, maybe take us closer to, the heart of the mystery of being human. And that mystery may, in the end, defy language itself. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it: ‘Things aren’t so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered.’

Or as Samuel Beckett expresses it, with the poignancy of a secular mystic struggling towards the construction of what he called a ‘literature of the non-word’: ‘More and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it...’

Of course in that great mythic narrative we call the Kabbalah, ‘nothingness’ (Ayin) is the innermost ‘name’ of the divine. The rabbis of old knew both the power of language – and its limitations.

'Assassinations Inc.'

2010-02-21T14:24:00.003Z

‘The machine’s on? Make sure it’s on. Tov Me’od. Good, now it’s on. Now I’ll talk. I’ll tell you what you want to know...

‘It’s 20 years ago, more, but I remember everything: the planning, the operation, the hotel, the room, we went up to the fourth floor, we knew the layout, he was in the shower – have you ever killed a man? – no? - of course not, tipesh, stupid to ask. We always did your dirty work for you. Every country needs its operatives, those of us who do the things no government ever talks about – the removal of those in the way, quickly, efficiently – that’s the skill, the training. And we were the best, everyone knew it then, even you Brits admitted it, Mossad, we had the intelligence, the know-how – my God, we trained half the world: in surveillance techniques, infiltration, intercepts, how to use informers, how to leave no marks...

‘Do you know how to kill a man and make it look like he’s had a heart attack? It’s an art, like a surgeon’s – it needs precision, delicacy, the hood and the rope – we call it the ‘golem’, it’s our joke, how to snuff out life till the body becomes inert and all breathe is gone, Yossi and Hagai held his arms, he had no chance, he was naked from the shower, he struggled but they forced him down, and I slipped the hood over his head, like a tallit, like I’d seen my grandfather do, and you take the ends and you pull, and he thrashed around because he knew – what was his name? I forget, it’s a long time ago...What? al-Mabhouh? Are you sure? The one in Dubai? Well he wasn’t the first...

‘It doesn’t take long. We were in the room, what, ten minutes? Less. It’s like a dream. You imagine it all – in advance, you do the work so there are no surprises. Like you have seen it all in a film. There was a mirror on the wall, bronze frame, heavy, cracked, flecks of shaving foam smeared across, an empty bottle of mineral water on the table, papers, a passport. Two passports. I had his head cradled in my hands as he struggled for breathe, he was strong but we were stronger, and you grip like this, see?, and you put pressure here, and here, like this, can you see?, and there’s pleasure in knowing you are doing a good job – it’s professional pleasure, pride, sure, why not? – and in the back of your mind you know he has killed and will do it again, and then there’s the cause, that justifies all things, the sacred duty, Am Yisrael Chai, the people of Israel will live...

‘What you Brits never understood was that we were at war. You think ‘Never Again’ was just another slogan? They murdered us then, and they’d do it again. We knew that. We knew it in our kishkes. And nobody would care. They may even be glad. Killing Jews is what goyim do. No? You look shocked. But you don’t know your history, you youngsters. Jews are the bad conscience of the world – we gave them ideals, we dreamed up dreams of justice, of caring for the oppressed, of loving even those who didn’t love us. Impossible dreams. They go against the grain of human nature, human selfishness. But we insisted on those ideals, that killing was wrong, that coveting was wrong, that there’s a duty of compassion. Who can live like that? That’s why they hate us. Always have, always will. We said we were chosen - and expected them not to envy us? That we had a special destiny – and expected the goyim to kiss our feet? We expected too much – and now we have finally learnt our lesson: expect nothing, except contempt and more contempt...

‘You know what Sharon said about our chief, Meir Dagan? “Meir’s speciality is in separating the head of an Arab from his body.” He knew his job, inside out. And he taught us well. And we had a tradition to maintain, a reputation. Remember Munich? For years we tracked down the murderers of our children. A debt of honour. And if we made a few mistakes on the way, so what? Life is cheap. If you don’t die one day, you die the next. We learnt that in Auschwitz. So we hunted them down, across Europe. It took years, but we have long memories. And we did it well. And don’t think we are the only ones. Your country has its hit squads, and the Americans, the Russians, the Germans, they all do – and whether you kill by drones from the air, by poison at night, a bullet to the head, or a car bomb as your target sips his cappuccino in a sunlit cafe, assassinations happen as they must. The law of revenge. The law of retribution. The law of elimination. We all have enemies. And Israel has more than most...

‘And don’t tell me you didn’t feel a twinge of pride as we went about our business. Don’t tell me you just held up your hands in horror at what we did with such intelligence and efficiency. Such prowess – like David against the Philistines. Outnumbered but devastating. You admired us, secretly, didn’t you? - our ruthlessness, our determination, our ingenuity, our refusal to be intimidated by our enemies. Your mouths said it was wrong, but in the hidden crevices of your soul you cheered us on...

‘Yes, enemies come and enemies go. Now we’re friends with Iran - you now the story, how we engineered regime change there, after we got the green light to bomb their nuclear facilities - but then, back in ’10 or whenever it was, they were supplying arms and rockets to Hezbollah and Hamas, and the guy we took out, al-Mabhouh, he was in the middle of it all, so it’s a long game we’ve been playing and we don’t play by the rules – there are no rules, rules are for losers, and you Jews who sit on the side and profess your shock, your moral qualms, you’re hypocrites, you’re worse than them, the goyim who hate us...

‘Remember our old motto? “Through deception we make war”. You liberals always think peace will come through compromise. Yes, we talk to Hamas now, we’ve done it for years, we always knew we would – some of our best agents are in Hamas – but what has it brought us? It’s bought us time, that’s all. But that’s enough. Peace is a dream for the innocent. And we are not innocent. No more Jewish innocence...Are we out of time? Is the machine still on? Good. They are coming soon to take me back... They’ve let me talk to you – it’s rare, I’m kept here against my will, you know. The nurses hate me, you know? - they give me medication but I don’t take it, it’s easy to hide the pills, the blue ones, the white ones, it’s all in a day’s work for someone like me, they forget who I was, who I worked for, how we learnt to deceive. A way of life. Deception...

'What? Self-deception? No, no. It’s reality. Enemies. They’re real. Aren’t they? There are others here who are paranoid. I keep away from them...Thank you for listening. Time’s up. Better keep quiet now. Switch off the machine. You never know who is listening. Thank you for listening. Thank you.’

First anniversary: Listening to what’s there...

2010-02-11T10:43:00.003Z

This blog is now a year old. A baby blog, crawling its way - I find I’ve just written ‘scrawling’ - into homes near and far. I hope the scrawling - ‘to write awkwardly, hastily or carelessly’ my dictionary says, so some truth there from my unconscious - has nevertheless been enlivening for you who read it.

I’m told these postings go on too long, sometimes: we are not used to reading at length on the screen. I can only empathise, and apologise. Thought is discursive – my thought is discursive – it seems not to like straight lines with neat building blocks of well-honed ideas that assemble themselves into definitive statements. I can write like that, if need be. But I prefer the organic, associative, free-floating form of narrative, that unfolds idiosyncratically and ‘By indirections find directions out’ (Hamlet, act2, scene1). Expansiveness of narrative discourse as a metaphor for the rich inner world – ever-expanding, bifurcating, alive to the impulses of the moment – that each one of us contains.

From Obama to Samuel Beckett, from Israel to Haiti by way of Berlin and Prague, the blog has led a peripatetic life these last 12 months, wandering from sermons to poetry to politics via films and plays, anti-semitism and climate change – and looking back I see no unifying theme or abiding preoccupation. No more than a wish to let you eavesdrop into one man’s confusion about how to make sense of life when there is a superabundance of stimuli straining to make themselves heard within the din of daily living.

I hope you keep posting your Comments where there is space at the bottom of each blog. Other views lend vitality to the enterprise. Emails too are welcome. We are, or have become, a kind of ‘virtual’ community – by courtesy of Google, and by virtue of your shared interest in (or passing curiosity about) my stumbling attempts at crafting sentences which try to offer a personal perspective on stuff that comes into my line of vision.

And in that attempt to generate meaning from amidst chaos and randomness, there has been (from time to time) the wish to bring in a Jewish angle of vision. I see the Judaic tradition as containing certain resources that offer another point of view, another perspective on events in the present. ‘Unless one has the past in the present, one can’t understand oneself’ the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris has said. That resonates for me: I think that’s true individually and collectively.

And I feel fortunate in having access to a way of seeing that is rooted in that ancient mode of knowing that suggests we are held within a form of being, a form of life, that unfolds moment by moment within us and around us, an immanent ‘presence’ (for want of a better word) that both sustains us and cajoles us towards ways of being human in which our creativity, our compassion, our sense of justice and mercy can outweigh our destructiveness.

In the language of the tradition, this is the realm of the ‘divine’, of ‘God’ – the force that generates all that is and sustains it in being, that is being. Jewish tradition personifies this as a Being. As if ‘being’ is a personality, a character in a cosmic drama being played out here on earth. But once we start to think of it in this way – the numinosity of being as, in essence, a personality - we are falling away from the tradition’s own revelatory understanding of ehyeh asher ehyeh – the words that the storytellers in the book of Exodus put into the mouth of the character they call Adonai. This ‘God’ character says that ‘His’ name is ehyeh asher ehyeh : ‘I will be what I will be’. So if you have to have a name for the unnameable fluidity of being and becoming in which we are all bound up – and Moses is portrayed as saying, astutely, ‘Look, the people need a name, they think concretely not abstractly!’ – then ‘I am what I am and I will be what I will be’ is as good a ‘name’ as you are ever likely to get.

The prophets of Israel tried to articulate their hopes for the people from this perspective: a vision of how people should treat each other, grounded in the seemingly impossible-to-enact hope that one’s care for others should become as important to you as one’s care for oneself. It is not out of arrogance that one places oneself in that line of tradition. For me, it feels that developing this perspective on life is almost an existential necessity, a grounding in something more substantial than my own passing whimsy or the latest modish intellectual fad or theory. It may mean a life of constant failure – but at least it has the consolation of being a failure rooted in a vision that matters, that offers a stay of execution from nihilism and meaninglessness.

The Hebrew Bible is (for me) a unique repository of fragments of wisdom, often contradictory, often baffling, often disagreeable, but still texts filled with insights into the nature of being human – and ways of telling the story of being human, with all its vicissitudes – that I value above all other texts. It allows me to listen in to contemporary events with ears attuned to eternity (as Abraham Joshua Heschel might express it).

And it allows me to read the most supposedly ‘secular’ of modern texts – poetry, prose, sociology, psychology, anthropology, scientific literature – and trace connections between the angles of vision of the Jewish tradition and the angles of vision of the present. One can read Samuel Beckett - ‘Fail. Fail Again. Fail Better’ - with eyes thousands of years old. Moses was not allowed to finish his task. His was an education in failure: leading a ‘stiff-necked’ and constantly complaining people on a journey into the unknown. The promised land is always over the horizon – utopia is endlessly deferred - and life has to be experienced and lived now, attuned to the present moment. And the Judaic task came to be understood as listening to the present moment with ears attuned to eternity.

This last Shabbat I spoke in my community about a verse from Exodus we’d just read:

‘Now! If you listen very carefully, really listen, attend to My voice (V’ata, im shamo’a tish’m’u b’koli ) and keep my covenant, then you will be a treasured possession to Me... and a kingdom of priests and a holy people’ (Exodus 19:5-6). Jewish distinctiveness, purpose, destiny - it all depends upon learning to pay attention to the Divine Voice. (The Hebrew uses the verb shema, in a doubled, intensified form). That kind of listening is, as they say, a big ask. First inwardness – then action. First reflection, mindfulness – then outer behaviour. First attentiveness - then the covenant of practice and the commitment to holy living.

And to do this knowing that no promised lands are achievable. But the journey - ah, the journey, that ‘fortunately, is a truly immense journey’ (Kafka) - that’s where our all our consolations and satisfactions are to be found, and where our innate rebelliousness is played out: the journey in the wilderness, and the stories we tell about it. Or the journey in Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’:

They spent the day there, sitting among boxes and crates. You have to talk to me he said.
I’m talking.
Are you sure?
I’m talking now.
Do you want me to tell you a story?
No.
Why not?
The boy looked at him and looked away.
Why not?
Those stories are not true.
They don’t have to be true. They’re stories.

Haiti and Hypocrisy

2010-01-27T12:32:00.003Z

Could you have located Haiti on a map two weeks ago? No, neither could I. I knew where it was vaguely, but had no knowledge of it other than it being one of those desperately poor nations of which our world has an abundance: one of those places that comes to mind occasionally when I say or sing that familiar repeated line in the Jewish liturgy: Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom... – ‘May the One who makes peace/wholeness on high bring this peace/wholeness to us, to all of the community of Israel...’ – Then we sometimes add - in a spirit of all-embracing tolerance, optimism and naive hopefulness that allows us to feel good about ourselves as having a universalist dimension to our faith rather than a narrow ethnic particularism – ‘and to the whole world.’

Well there is no peace in Haiti. No wholeness. And no prayers of ours that can help (can they ever?). Of course the notion that these kind of natural events – like earthquakes and tsunamis - are so-called ‘acts of God’ is an absurd left-over from a pre-modern form of fear-based religious thinking. That ‘God’ is some kind of capricious external entity whose ‘hand’ intervenes wilfully in our history and in our natural world – like a child who builds a palace of toy bricks then sweeps them away with a tearful swipe of its angry hand – this image of ‘God’ is the one that Richard Dawkins so relentlessly and humourlessly dismisses. And in that respect I am with Dawkins – though I find that a sprinkling of humour as one demolishes the worn-out pieties of old usually does no harm. You can be an assassin with a smile on your face.

A smile not of mockery, or glee, but of camaraderie: ‘We are in this together – these questions of faith and doubt – let’s not pretend we believe when we don’t, let’s abandon worn-out thinking and what we are told we should believe, let’s grow up and explore these questions in a spirit of lightness of being, not heaviness of heart, let’s enjoy the adventure, the venturing into new ways of thinking, new ways of connecting to faith, new ways of exploring the profoundest questions about what we are doing here in the world, how it all hangs together, if it all hangs together in some way always beyond our comprehension: maybe there are ways we can glimpse the underlying mystery, maybe not – but it is the journey that counts, the journey wrestling with faith and doubt in a spirit of intoxicated gravity, good-humoured seriousness, where it matters infinitely, and it matters not a jot...’

So: no 'act of God' then. But a combination of how this planet is made – geology, and how it operates, neutrally, impersonally – and what we make in the human realm: economically, politically, socially. For what I have discovered in these last two weeks, between the tears at the torn-off limbs and my naive astonishment at the lack of basic resources – how could it be that Haiti had a grand total of just two fire stations in the whole island? – is that the island contains a people so poor (living on $2 a day on average), so lacking in leadership and basic infrastructure and material resources, that when a catastrophe like this occurs the society simply ceases to function - but that it needn’t have been like this.

I’ve learnt about – I’ve finally understood the context of – the decades of dictatorship (remember the Duvaliers, sponsored by the US?), the foreign-backed coups and American invasions to undermine leaders like the former Catholic priest Jean-Baptiste Aristide who, inspired by liberation theology, tried to bring in social justice and economic development that wasn’t beholden to the International Monetary Fund’s own dictatorial neo-liberalism.

I’ve learnt that in 1980 Haiti was self-sufficient in its staple crop, rice, but once America dumped its surplus on the island the rice-farmers had to move from the countryside to the flimsy slums of Port-au-Prince (we know, tragically, what that means for them now) and that in the last decade Haiti has been forced to import rice to feed itself.

It is surely a human outrage - a human-constructed tragedy of a different dimension – when we realise what has gone on over these last decades. As we send our money to help now - as we appreciate that whatever the history of the island, targeted donations are still vital - we can nevertheless still feel the outrage : that it need not have been as devastating as this, the earthquake. How many deaths there have been we will never know. How many deaths there would have been if different principles of economics and governance had been in place we will never know. But it would have been far less: in last year’s hurricane Haiti lost 800 people while neighbouring Cuba lost four. (Haiti’s infant mortality rate is around 80 per 1,000; Cuba’s is 5.8 – makes you think, doesn’t it?).

Anyway it makes me think that when one hears the old question ‘How could God allow such a tragedy?’ that the questioner is looking in the wrong place, and that the question itself is a symptom of a profound avoidance. Questioning ‘God’ is a child-like mistake. It is a category error. But questioning the greed and destructiveness immured in the human heart, questioning the way the human mind constructs abstract and inhuman theories of what is ‘best’ for other people, questioning the ways certain versions of the capitalist ethic can be destructive of human well-being, questioning our multiple collusions with the structures of Western geopolitics where they are false to the values of justice and compassion – this is where the questioning needs to be.

Compassion after the tragic event is all very well, but it's the easy option, sad to say. The response is wonderful, this generosity of the human heart - and yet, secretly, we know that the hypocrisy stinks to the heavens. We are our own worst enemies.

Kafka, the snow, the decade to come

2010-01-10T12:58:00.004Z

So, the new decade has begun with a northern Europe-wide breakdown of the rhythms and routines of everyday life: snow, ice, abandoned vehicles, frozen fields, panic buying, power cuts, a threat to gas supplies – and in Germany, co-incidentally, a quarter of credit/debit cards malfunctioning, unable to adjust to the numbers ‘2010’, so unable to let people take money from ATMs. One way or another, a renewed awareness of our vulnerabilities, how much we are dependent on those weather gods and the vast hidden infrastructure of technology, as powerful and omnipresent as any of the invisible deities of old.

The weather might have a certain harsh beauty to it, even moments of inhospitable grandeur – dazzling modernist white on white, blurred edges of field and sky blending into each other, puffy laden hedges, careful wrapped-up walkers, carefree sledding children out of Breughel, defamilarised paths that are suddenly no-paths. Yet these, for me, are passing wonders. I’d already been musing on what this decade ahead might bring – so this week’s chaos seems almost too convenient a metaphor for thoughts about the decade to come, almost too apt a symbol with which to speak about my deeper concerns about these coming years.

Of course this notion of a ‘decade’ is a kind of fiction – a construct we use to stop time past dissolving into an undifferentiated pile of slush. We use the concept of a ‘decade’ to try to impose order on events, to generate meaning and gain perspective. And yet as artificial as it is to divide up history into chunks, as if it were a bar of chocolate, as long as we are aware of the artifice involved then the ‘decade’ can be a useful prism through which we can look back (or forward) as we try to create a narrative out of the confusion of events that slip by us, hour by hour, then suddenly year by year...

I’ve been reflecting on what it was like a century ago, in 1910 – and how unimaginable it would have been in Edwardian England, or Germany, or czarist Russia, in any part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, or the United States, to imagine what their new decade would bring to pass. Technological excitement was growing by the day: the aeroplane was still in its infancy, with Charles Rolls - he of Rolls Royce - making the first return flight over the Channel in April 1910 (and crashing to his death a few months later); then the first ascent to over 1000 metres that same year; and the first female aviator. On the roads, Henry Ford was producing 10,000 cars a day as the automobile industry began its imperious colonisation of the planet. The ‘kinema’ was still a relatively new wonder, still in the infancy of a revolution in mass entertainment and collective entrancement. And the 15 million European dead of the ‘Great War’ – the so-called ‘War To End All Wars’ – were youngsters dreaming of all these new possibilities of a world transforming itself in front of their hungry, eager eyes...

A truism to remember that the future is ever unknowable. Though still we scan the skies for what might come to pass. But the history of a whole decade is too much to imagine. Better to focus on the individual, an individual.

This year, 2010, I have decided on a project of my own devising: my own act of homage to slow reading ; and to the value of seeing the world through another’s eyes. I have decided to re-read - my first reading was as a teenager – my falling-to-pieces Penguin paperback edition of The Diaries of Franz Kafka (edited by Max Brod). The Diaries begin in 1910 and end with his death in 1923. But I intend to read them, and reflect on them a century on, in parallel to the date they were written, month by month, year by year. So, a thirteen year project - inshallah, deo volente, b’ezrat HaShem.

Why bother with such a quixotic meshuggeneh venture? Who can ever really say? Maybe I will find out as it proceeds...I am not so wedded to the notion of having to understand things beforehand.

Meanwhile, the beginning of the journey is easy: I can see that 1910 occupies only 25 paperback pages out of 487. So, lots of gaps, plenty of time to get into the journey of accompanying this singular and extra-ordinary man.

The early pages are undated, which is a bit disorientating for my project. How many do I read at a time? The first dated entry, some pages in, is May 1910. So I have a few months grace, some time to burrow into the text and see what is there to be uncovered.

The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past. First sentence in the diary. A line drawn beneath it. (This pattern is repeated throughout this first page, later pages have entries accompanied by squiggled line-drawings).

‘If he should forever ahsk me.’ The ah, released from the sentence, flew off like a ball on the meadow. Second sentence. A line drawn beneath it.

What are these sentences? Observations, apparently at random: things that Kafka has seen, or heard, that have struck him as worthy of recording (and thinking about). Why these in particular? (And not those, over there?) What strikes us each day that we then ignore? What does it mean to pay attention to what we see, or hear? The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past. Why? What is frightening? Is it the speed? The technology? We think about our response when a speeding train hurtles through the station. Do we go ‘rigid’? Kafka seems to observe the contrast between the movement of the train and the frozen response of the onlookers. He shows us this scene through his own onlooker’s eyes. Vision is refracted: we see him seeing them seeing the train. Does this sentence, this word picture, have any other meaning than the literal? I turn it over in my mind. I'm looking at the world through his eyes. Yes, it’s an everyday observation - but as so often in Kafka, the words hint at something beyond themselves, something hidden and unsaid.

The decade begins with a moment of fear. Yet there is no reason to be afraid. Or is there? The train goes past, time moves on - and we, watching and waiting, our bodies are tense, motionless, as if something might happen. What might happen? No choice but to wait, and watch - onlookers ourselves - wait and see what comes to pass...

Listen to how people talk. The inflections of their words. ‘If he should forever ahsk me.’ The ah, released from the sentence, flew off like a ball on the meadow. Language seems to have a life of its own, as solid as a ball flying through the air. Words have their own autonomy, they move beyond us as we speak. Writers know this, fleetingly – but Kafka catches it. The tiny moment that speaks a larger truth.

As 1910 progresses through the mind and pen of Franz Kafka, I will look forward to reporting back from time to time. As 2010 progresses, beyond the frozen now, I am hoping its opening weeks symbolise nothing, augur nothing, hint at nothing. The shelves of the shops this morning were almost empty, the newsagent did not look up as I left my money: I could have been a ghost, from the past, or even the future.

Jews and Christmas

2009-12-28T12:49:00.003Z

I find this is a strange time of the year if you are Jewish. What are we Jews to do on Christmas Day and Boxing Day? As Diaspora Jews we are obviously a minority within a larger culture: a culture which is nominally Christian but is also devoutly secular and devoted (with a fundamentalist’s fervour) to our dominating belief-system, the cult of consumerism.

So what stance do we take up to what is going on around us? Is it Christmas lunch with kosher turkey? Is it a day to be with family, like any other yomtov of our own? Is it a day to be one of the millions going on-line to buy a little happiness in the sales? Do we have a tree, for decorative purposes, and tell ourselves that it is after all just a Victorian invention? Is it a day to volunteer to help others, eg ‘Crisis at Christmas’, helping out so that others can have a break? Perhaps we flee the country, to get away from it all? Or do we just ignore it? How do we locate ourselves on these days?

Inevitably our response to this is personal, and it may change from year to year. We discussed this on Shabbat morning during the service at Finchley Reform Synagogue, and it was interesting to hear that , with a couple of exceptions, there was a general feeling of rather laid-back good cheer about these north London Jews’ response to Christmas. Almost as if it was the most natural thing in the world that Jews should feel at home in this celebratory holiday period.

It may be that Christmas time for Jews illustrates just how much we are fused into the larger culture of our native land: Christmas lunch has become as little to do with Christianity as Santa Claus - so if we do have some kind of gathering we are illustrating that our identity is mixed, complex, mongrel. This now is who we are: Jews who are far removed from the intolerance of those in the yeshivah world of Jerusalem whom I studied with many years ago who were very denigratory of Christmas day – they had a contemptuous and derogatory phrase for it (yoshkie’s birthday), and they wouldn’t even say the word ‘Christmas’; in that world it’s the custom to study specific extra texts on December 25th as a kind of psychic counterweight to the alien religious forces at work. So it was clear from our discussion on Shabbat morning that we aren’t like that.

But nor are we so secularised that we partake of all the jollity and celebrations without a second thought: we probably don’t see ourselves, in Jonathan Miller’s celebrated phrase, just as ‘Jew-ish’ and able to join in with it all like the millions of non-Christian secularists.

It is a curious vocation being Jewish. It is made up of so many strands of feeling and memory, of choices made and choices rejected, and whether it is something we were born into or have freely adopted, our sense of Jewishness in each of us is, I’m sure, large and capacious, filled with conscious and unconscious material, some of it rich and nurturing, some of it probably shabby and worn-out. We are, in Walt Whitman’s wonderful phrase, ‘stuffed with the stuff that is coarse and stuff with the stuff that is fine’ (from Song of Myself). And we can enjoy that, our multifaceted, hybrid Jewish identity.

This multi-layeredness is, after all, rooted in our history. Just think of our many names. Our Biblical texts illustrate how we started off as ‘Ivri/m – Hebrew/s – a word meaning ‘outsiders, nomads, strangers, wanderers’. The root is the word avar, meaning ‘to cross over’ – Abraham the first Hebrew in our mythic tales (Gen 14:13) crossed over the Jordan (and the Euphrates) on his way from Nahor to Canaan, impelled by his divine mission. And this is who we became: wanderers though history, through countries; and crossers of boundaries, not just geographical, but also cultural and intellectual. Jewish creativity and innovation, in the sciences and social sciences, in economics and psychology, in art and music and literature, is a testimony to some almost innate psychological capacity for thinking ‘outside the box’, as we say it now - crossing over and beyond the established thinking into new areas of thought and discovery. This is Jews as ‘Ivrim’- boundary-crossers.

But we are also bnei Yisrael – the children of Israel – and we know the folk etymology of that word Yisrael: the patriarch Jacob renamed as a ‘wrestler with God’, a ‘struggler with the divine and for the divine’. And we carry this name in our soul as well. The spiritual struggle to enact the values of our tradition and faith – this is also who and what we are.

And then we are Yehudim, Jews, named after the character we focused on in this week’s Torah sedrah, Judah (Yehudah). (Genesis 44:18 – 45:14, from sedrah Va’yigash). We aren’t called ‘Josephites’ – in spite of Joseph being the key character who carries the story of the people from Canaan into Egypt, linking the patriarchs with the Exodus narratives where the group of families become a real people. Without Joseph the divine mission would have reached a dead-end. And Joseph would have been the perfect character to give us a collective name because it is Joseph who is the first real Diaspora Jew, living as a stranger in a strange land yet achieving great prominence in the secular world – second only to Pharaoh in power and influence, he was chancellor of the exchequer, prime minister and minister for agriculture all rolled into one. He could have taught how to remain true to one’s religious roots yet integrated into one’s adopted culture. I’d have been happy to be called a ‘Josephite’.

But it’s Judah, the fourth oldest of the brothers, who becomes the one to give his name to our people. His older brothers are written out of the picture, de-legitimizing themselves from taking on the mantle of peoplehood. Reuben sleeps with his father’s concubine; Simeon and Levi commit a massacre at Shechem – the text is unsparing in showing how incestuous desire and murderous revenge are endemic human qualities. Jacob’s offspring are an unruly and unbecoming bunch.

And it is left to Judah, the one who was originally averse to killing Joseph and suggested he was sold into slavery instead, to redeem the situation. He becomes the brother who is prepared to sacrifice himself for Benjamin – in order to protect his aging father from the devastation of losing Benjamin as well as Joseph. ‘It’ll kill him’ says Judah, several times over – a statement of real imagination and empathy. This transformation in the character of Judah is an extraordinary piece of storytelling. "Callousness is replaced with concern. Indifference is replaced with courage and self-sacrifice." (Rabbi Jonathan Sacks)

And so he takes his place in the psychic structure of our people when we are later named Yehudim – ‘Judahites’, as it were. Historically, it was the tribe of Judah that dominated the southern Kingdom after the Assyrians conquered the north of Israel, and they who survived the Babylonian exile. We get our other name, after Ivrim and Yisrael from him: Yehudim, Jews.

So we are multiple in our Jewishness, even in our names. And it is this multiplicity that we bring to these strange days in our calendar, our calendar which is not our calendar. During these days it is as if we are suspended between two worlds, or rather have a foot in two worlds. Maybe that is true the rest of the year as well, but at Christmas time it can really come home to us as we negotiate a pathway through the sentimentality and inanity of the festivities and all that bullying bonhomie that is forced upon us through the airwaves and the newspapers and the shops.

I feel sorry for real Christians in a way – they have their noble and rather wondrous story colonised by all the kitsch and the consumerism. But that assault on the real spiritual core of a religious festival is something I recognise too at Jewish festivals: do multiple presents for the children and scoffing doughnuts really sum up the essence of Hanukkah? Are the new hats and outfits really the spiritual meaning of Rosh Hashanah? Are the debates on the correct consistency of the matza balls what Pesach now symbolises? Silly examples, I know, but they point towards a more serious issue: how to find a language with which we can now talk about the things that matter in our own religious tradition.

'Whose Oil Is It Anyway?'

2009-12-13T15:00:00.004Z

It started as an old soldiers’ holiday. They’d gather year after year, at the darkest time of the year, winter solstice time, and tell their stories, speak of their heroism. They were a group of religious zealots, fiercely nationalistic – and they had waged a guerrilla campaign against their enemies, the Graeco-Syrians, who were occupying their land. Much blood was spilt, on both sides, but they were tough, ruthless – they’d had a cause, a cause they were prepared to kill and die for. Eventually they took the Temple in Jerusalem back into their own hands and re-dedicated it to their God, the God of Israel.

And even though their victory was short-lived and the land was eventually re-occupied - this time by the Romans - the memory of that famous victory against the odds lived on. The stories were told and re-told, passed on, elaborated and embellished along the way. And the message was clear, passed on from generation to generation in those early years, 22 centuries ago: with enough faith and guile and bloody-mindedness – anything is possible.

And this is Hanukah, which of course we celebrate now in a way that goes to some lengths to suppress its original message. Because we aren’t going to be very comfortable with a holiday that commemorates an uprising by a bunch of religious terrorists who refused to accept the dominant assimilated culture of the day, with all its decadent values, its worship of the body and the material world, all those naked statues and philosophic discourses about how to build democracy. We aren’t keen to glorify religious fanatics who are prepared to kill in the name of their faith.

We’d rather think of Hanukah as basically a children’s festival, a time for jollity and presents and greasy foods, a rather sentimental festival of candle-lighting and dreidels and doughnuts. A bit like Christmas but spread out over 8 days and with baby latkes rather than baby Jesus.

But it isn’t only us who might want to downplay the origins of the festival. The rabbis in the Talmud were exactly the same. We are in an honourable tradition of repressing the truth. They too were deeply uncomfortable with celebrating a short-lived military victory – even if it was done in the name of God. They were so uncomfortable with it that they showed their own ruthlessness by suppressing in their writings any mention of the fighting and the force of arms. We reconstruct the history from external sources and the historian Josephus not from mainstream Jewish religious texts.

The Talmud has almost nothing to say about the festival. It just asks – in a tractate about Shabbat observance - the slightly anxious question: ‘Mai Hanukah? What is Hanukah?’ – as if there is some doubt or confusion about it: which indeed there was, if only in their own minds about how to talk about it. And they answer the question by recounting the story which we are familiar with – about the re-dedication of the Temple after it had been defiled by the Greeks, with the single cruise of oil lasting miraculously for 8 days.

This was ‘creative’ of them. It takes a kind of brilliant imaginative chutzpah to turn a military victory into a Festival of Lights based on a fable; and then link the celebration to the prophetic text from Zechariah that we still read, with its key refrain, the declaration in the name of God that the Jewish nation, the Jewish people, will succeed ‘Not by might, nor by power – but by My spirit..’ (Zech 4:7).

And in a parallel kind of sleight-of-hand the rabbis of old eventually instituted the prayer that we read after the candle-lighting: ‘Hanerot hallallu...’ . See if you can spot the subtle revisionist spin: ‘We kindle these lights to commemorate the wonders, the heroic acts, the victories, and the marvellous and consoling deeds which You performed for our ancestors through Your holy priests in those days at this season...’ (Soferim 20:6, mid-8th century). Do you hear the manipulation of history here? It is classic PR spin. (Alistair Campbell, eat your heart out).

The rabbis here are doing two interlinked things: the first is familiar from Seder night, where Moses is never mentioned throughout the whole story of the exodus from Egypt. It is all done by God. So here too it says that these were marvellous deeds ‘which You performed for our ancestors...’ – how? – ‘through Your holy priests’. And this is the other aspect of their creativity. The phrase ‘Your holy priests’ might be correct in a narrow sense – Matthathias was a priest, which means that his sons were also priests, so Judah the Maccabee (who led the guerrilla forces with his brothers and is the main Hanukah hero) was also technically a priest too, all of them were - even though they couldn’t act as priests because the Temple wasn’t in Jewish hands. They were a priestly family – but without a Temple to practice in. Like the titled English landed gentry who lost their country estates and ended up living on relatives' handouts.

So when our liturgy praises this victory in high-flown language as one that was achieved by God through his ‘holy priests’, it’s a bit like saying that peace came to Northern Ireland through the democratic endeavours of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. (It puts me in mind of the American satirist and songwriter Tom Lehrer’s comment that political satire was made obsolete the day they gave the Nobel Peace prize to Henry Kissinger).

But still, this is a kind of inspired genius, this eternal Jewish creativity to reformulate the past in the light of current needs and preoccupations. And Hanukah has become a festival where the symbolic and metaphorical resonances now dominate the imagination. It has become a time to focus on the faith needed, individually and collectively, to persevere against the odds; a time to reflect on the motif of light in our lives (an archetypal theme) as we hope for the victory of ‘light’ over the forces of ‘darkness’.

The problem of course is that we always think our cause represents the ‘light’ – and those opposed to us are the forces of ‘darkness’.

As the world leaders gather during these fateful days in Copenhagen we can see this being played out powerfully in front of our eyes. The facts of climate-change as a human-made catastrophe in the making – like watching a deadly car-crash in slow motion – these facts have achieved an overwhelming scientific consensus. But the forces ranged against this ‘inconvenient truth’ are very powerful: the climate denial industry, which has no interest in establishing the truth about global warming, comes in many guises. PR companies and hired experts, representing the business interests of oil and coal, can and do co-opt scientists and politicians – mainly in the States but also here – to systematically cast doubt on the scientific consensus (see, for example, www.exxonsecrets.org).

This consensus – and I hear people every day hedging their bets about it under pressure from the media onslaught of the deniers - this consensus is as clear in its evidence-based view that global warming is man-made as is the scientific consensus on the link between smoking and lung cancer. Or HIV and Aids. Yet each side see themselves as representing the light – and the others as dwelling in darkness.

In Copenhagen they aren’t arguing the facts – they are arguing like Joseph and his brothers in this week's sedrah (Genesis 37): arguing over who will rule over whom, ‘we’re not going to bow down to you’, arguing over how much they have to gain and how much they have to lose. Copenhagen reveals the global sibling rivalry, all the envy and jealousy writ large, these never-changing human attributes. Will effective action be agreed? We don’t know. We can hope so – even if our hopes are shadowed by the knowledge that it all might be too little, too late.

But I think we can understand psychologically the arguments we hear in our newspapers and TV and radio, casting doubt on the evidence. Although behind the scenes these doubts are promoted for sound business reasons ('sound' in their own terms), they can touch a chord in us because - well, because the facts are all too painful to contemplate, too frightening to think about, too potentially disturbing of our settled and relatively comfortable lifestyles to come to terms with. Things will have to change. We will have to change. And we will need a kind of miracle to see us through. A miracle that this time round we hold in our own hands, a miracle we will have to nurture in our own hearts.

‘[we]spoke softly about disasters,
about what lay ahead, the coming fear,
and someone said this was the best
we could do now –
to talk of darkness in that bright shadow
(from Adam Zagajewski’s ‘At the Cathedral’s Foot’)

It is perhaps ironical that our festival of Hanukah is about oil. And how long it lasts. As if in a completely unconscious way, in an almost uncanny way, the rabbis of old had a revelation that even they did not understand the significance of. We have to learn to make do with less, they intuited. And they found a symbolic way to express this. We think we need a lot to survive - but we can manage with an eighth of what we imagine we need. That does require faith, and trust: what we truly need is with us already. It’s in us, this precious gift, ‘the light of God’ our tradition calls it, in the human soul, the spark of the divine in us, and generated between us in community.

It gives us the courage to face the darkness, to face the truth about our world, to see its fragility – our planet is like a flickering candle in the slipstream of time. Less is going to have to mean more. Less comfort, less security, less recklessness, less denial, less waste, less holding on to what we have, less accumulating what we don’t need. Hanukah teaches the lesson of less – one day’s worth of oil is enough to last. The miracle is not that it lasts. The miracle is when we believe that it can last, what we have. The miracle is that we can depend not on might or power but on the Spirit - and that we are given what we need day by day.

(Sermon FRS , Hanukah, 11 December 2009)

Bearing the unbearable beyond Copenhagen

2009-12-03T19:10:00.009Z

The topic is well nigh unbearable. It is omnipresent, unavoidable, inescapable. Except I suspect we do everything we can to avoid it. Even to write these words – or read them? – grips one with dread. Or boredom – the defence against the dread. A curious dread that slides away. I want to distract myself, with anything. With anything that will take me away from the headlines, nestling next to each other on the inside page of the Sunday paper like spiteful twin embryos wrestling in the womb of our future: ‘Western lifestyle unsustainable, says world’s top climate expert’ and ‘Warning over faster fall into new Ice Age’.

The chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that we need a radical change in values if we are to avoid the worst effects of climate change. ‘Yes, yes', we think, ‘so tell us something new’. Well how about this? My eyes scan left on the page. The latest discovery by a team from Saskatchewan University that the last great disruption to the Gulf Stream - 12,800 years ago – took less than three months to trigger a massive plunge in temperatures across Europe. Melted Arctic glaciers from the end of the last Ice Age overflowed into the north Atlantic, blocking the Gulf Stream which regulates our temperatures - and Europe froze, suddenly.

Well it may be new but it’s probably not enough to convince climate change sceptics; or wipe the smirk off the face of Melanie Phillips on a recent BBC Question Time as she showed her contempt for the audience and their sheepish acceptance of the scientific consensus, which for her is just a huge scam, a secret conspiracy against us perpetrated by thousands of scientists around the world all falsely analysing their miniscule packages of data, all bound up in some fantasy world they have constructed, a science fiction world in which they are networking together to peddle us a story that has no basis in the evidence. So there we have it: it’s a mirror image of the Jewish World Conspiracy – this one is the Scientists’ World Conspiracy.

But this latest reported work from Canada reminds me of something I discussed as the financial meltdown was taking place last year: that maybe we were seeing - in the rapidity of the unravelling of the economic consensus, the speed with which banks went from secure institutions to toxic repositories of unregulated loans – maybe we were experiencing a foretaste, in this sudden global economic collapse, of what is to come in relation to climate change. That the foundations on which we build our daily lives and that seem so secure can be swept away in the twinkling of an eye. That transformations that shatter our accepted ‘reality’ can take place in weeks and days – not just in decades. And who can bear to live with that thought?

And we know that with climate change there is nobody inside or outside the system who can bail us out if that were to happen. Money can be printed and loaned. Temperature can’t.

But if you have read this far you will also know that there is nothing revelatory here. And nothing much new to say. We’ll all muddle along as best we can.
Meanwhile I want to share with you – hesitantly – something I wrote in 1988. I recently retrieved it from an old floppy disc (remember them?) and was shocked (and, perversely, sadly amused) to re-read it now. It is a sermon I gave that year at Finchley Reform Synagogue for the New Year. (I feel sorry for the community sometimes, having to bear with this kind of thing – so much easier for all concerned to be bland, anaemic , unthreatening).

The title was borrowed from Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ which had come out earlier that year. And the idea for a ‘fictional’ mode of story-telling sermon had been growing in me for a while - I was beginning to realise then (and I still think it), that ‘fiction’ can tell us truths in revealing and challenging ways that are both enlivening and memorable. They can lodge in us in ways that even the best-crafted 'normal' sermon cannot.

I offer you the sermon unadulterated, copied off my disc, complete with the bits that I now find a bit gauche. It draws on various sources, biblical, rabbinic and literary – and it is my commentary, my midrash as it were, on the events around Copenhagen.

Sometimes a commentary can precede a text, awaiting its occasion.

The Last Temptation of Noah
(Second Day Rosh Hashanah sermon, Finchley Reform Synagogue, September 1988)

Even before the Disaster I felt misunderstood. I only wanted a quiet life: to come home after work and relax and rest. After all - and this used to be my private joke, though it feels pretty grim now - that's what my name Noah means: rest.

Apart from my work and my family I couldn't really be bothered with anything else. I didn't have many interests, not even much ambition. I used to sit in the office during the day and dream of the journey home, opening the door, playing with the kids (when they were smaller), later on helping them with their homework. In the evening I'd switch on the TV in order to switch off my thoughts, those terrible thoughts that kept coming, waves of them, more and more insistently over the years. All I ever really wanted was a rest - from the pressures that we all suffered. Just a rest from it all: the bills, the relatives, the dinner parties. Rest: it was all I wanted. Honestly.

Oh yes, I was known for my honesty. Even those who didn't like me said I had integrity. They used other words too, which sounded good, words like 'upright', 'blameless', even (God help me) 'righteous'. But I never trusted them - not the words, not the people. Words had lost their solidity, their truthfulness, long before. In those days words meant their opposite.

When that TV presenter interviewed me (near the end this was, after I'd made all the fuss), he was the one who called me 'righteous'. But I could hear in the tone of his voice how he really meant 'self-righteous', how the compliment disguised the attack. And who knows, maybe he was right, maybe I did begin to feel a bit self-righteous. Because I did know what was going to happen. I wasn't taken in by all those words: freedom of opportunity, economic growth, individual choice...I could see what was going on, all that heartbreak beneath the surface, and what was going to happen if we didn't change. I did know it would end in disaster; but I didn't know just how bad it would turn out. I didn't, honestly...I can tell you don't believe me. It's all right - I'm used to that. Nobody ever believed me then, either. Before.

You see, I worked in industry, middle-management. Yes, of course I was a professional - all our friends were. Agricultural and forestry equipment the firm made. When it expanded we went into animal feed, fertilisers, that sort of thing - quite a broad spread - even livestock eventually. We were successful too: public company, safe investment, high annual returns, particularly good Third World market, what with all the problems they kept having. I was responsible for overseas sales. Quite an irony really when you think about it, considering what happened.

I was able to laugh more in those days too. Earlier on that was. I used to enjoy having fun: a good party, that sort of thing. I don't think I ever entirely lost my sense of humour - but I kept noticing things I'd prefer not to have known about.

I'd read a report here, hear a programme there, bits and pieces of knowledge on the periphery of my consciousness. I tried to keep the knowledge at a distance, but it became harder. Things kept happening, kept forcing themselves on my attention.

First we had that string of warm years: '80, '81, '83, '87, '88 - the hottest since records began they said. It didn't bother me really: I was only worried about getting a bit of sun on our holidays. And where I went it rained anyway. But the statistics were global ones: it was beginning to warm up rather dramatically. Only a few degrees over a century didn't sound so much, but researchers in one country began to see the changes in plants and trees, and then another group at the other side of the world discovered that the world's beaches were eroding. These were just a couple of the warnings of the impending crisis.

I did mention it to a few people at work - after all it could have had implications for our sales - but they just shrugged and said that these kinds of reports are not reliable, they come and go, you know how it is...

And although I didn't really know how it was, it was easier at the beginning to change the subject and ask what home computer they thought I should buy. It felt safer ground.

But then the dreams started. All that water imagery, all that flooding, swimming, drowning, seas and swimming pools, struggling to keep afloat - every night a new variation on the theme. My analyst told me that this was archetypal symbolism: the struggle of the Self to emerge from the Sea of Consciousness. I changed my analyst. The next one told me it was about separation from mother.

And all the time I knew that something else was going on. It's not that they were wrong - but something else was going on, much bigger than me. Everyone had heard about the 'greenhouse effect', how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere acts like glass in a greenhouse, letting the sun's rays through to the earth but also trapping some of the heat that would otherwise be radiated back into space. We were burning all that coal and oil and gas, more and more of it, year after year - and the planet was heating up. Then there were those other gases: like the ones in those take-away cartons. Some firms changed them, others said the evidence was inconclusive (though of course ‘it merited further study’). But that still left aerosol sprays and even fridges - and I liked ice in my gin and tonic.

I really didn't know what to do. I soon knew though all the responses I'd get. The Chairman of the Board put it to me with his usual delicacy: what do you want us to do - grow our own vegetables? bicycle to work? light the office with candles?

The problem was that I didn't have any answers. I only had fears and questions and intuitions - and they wouldn't go away. But it was that presentation I did at the shareholders meeting that finally wrecked me. I spoke about the rainforests we were destroying (indirectly of course: our firm only sold the equipment); I gave them all the facts and figures, how the earth was such a fragile interconnected ecosystem (oh yes, by then I'd learnt the jargon), that what the inhabitants of planet earth were doing was quietly conducting a giant environmental experiment. Were it to be brought before any responsible local council for approval it would be firmly rejected as having potentially disastrous consequences.

At the meeting all this earned a variety of responses: anger, boredom, though a few people seemed rather subdued afterwards. Perhaps it was naive to expect anything more - after all I'd just bought a new car as well. I didn't want to change my lifestyle either. I was comfortable, I admit it. But we all were then - at least in the circles I mixed in.

Getting the push after that speech was actually a blessing in disguise. I devoted myself more and more to trying to get people to see what was going on around them all the time. I got involved with political groups, environmental groups. I started writing letters to The Guardian. I even spoke to religious groups (strange: the Christians were always more interested than the Jews).

I gave the same speech wherever I went. 'The climate that has allowed the growth of civilisation and agriculture - and to which all our crops, customs and structures are adapted - is virtually certain to disappear. The world will become warmer than at any time since the emergence of humanity on earth. This threatens to take place over the next forty years. Humanity will find it hard to adapt, particularly in a world fragmented by national boundaries and competing interests. Harvests will fail more drastically. the cities we live in will go under water.'

People began to hate me for what I was saying. They used to avoid me, fear me: fear what I was saying, I suppose. A poet had written 'Human kind cannot bear very much reality' and it was true. I didn't blame people - I couldn't bear it either. My wife began to catch me talking to myself. I was trying to keep myself sane, keep myself from the madness of knowing that something was inevitable - that was the word the experts used - unless we worked together. Funnily enough, I did have faith in humanity then. I believed that people could change, with help and encouragement. And groups of people working together - communities - could do a lot. But first we had to realise we'd taken a wrong direction, we had to turn from what's best only for ourselves, our family, our community, our nation.

Near the end I realised that we needed to pray too - though at first I was more sceptical about that. Religion had always felt a bit too cosy and comfortable: too much security was on offer. And I certainly had no security to offer anyone. I used to take myself off for long walks and look at the mess around me - the squalor, the poverty, the drugged ones, the violence, the neglect, the corruption, the decay.

I saw the goodness too, in people I met, the beauty in small things. I could see infinity in a grain of sand and feel eternity in an hour. But over all, on these walks, I felt the inferno, the 'moronic inferno' one of those clever Jewish novelists called it: the levelling down of contemporary life where people found themselves in that chaotic state, overwhelmed by all kinds of outer forces - political, technological, military, economic - which carry everything before them with a kind of disorder in which we were supposed to survive with all our human qualities. Who really had sufficient internal organisation to resist, let alone to flourish?

It wasn't possible to go on that way. And in their hearts and souls, people knew it. It wasn't just me: I really was just an ordinary person. In my generation I was nothing special. I knew it. Later on, long after the Disaster, when they told those stories about me, things got changed somehow. It was true that I became wholeheartedly committed to speaking the truth I experienced, sharing my vision of what I knew was going to happen. But if I'd lived in a less corrupt time, nobody would ever have heard of me. Even the rabbis acknowledged that, later.

I could never explain properly those intuitions I'd have when I was off walking. I just knew in the end that I had changed and that others could change too. It was very simple. I had an inner voice I just had to trust. Everyone had that voice deep inside them. It was obvious. But in those days so many temptations drowned out that knowing voice, so many possibilities of seduction away from our still and silent truth.

I once made a list, half-jokingly, of what I thought we needed to remember to be fully human, to be what we ought to be in this world. I jotted down seven things - it surprised me there were so few. I sent them on a postcard to a friend and she wrote back saying I sounded like some kind of religious nut. It sounded, she said - she was very cynical though - as if I was walking with God when I went off on my expeditions round town. I wasn't hurt by this. Well, not really. It stayed in my mind though, that phrase, 'walking with God'.

Later on, when they told those stories about me, they seemed to think it was a compliment: that somehow this was an uplifting, desirable experience for a person to have. Actually it was hell.

I'll tell you the list, but before I do I want to say that I've gone against most of them in my time. There were so many temptations then, not even a saint could have resisted them. And I was no saint. But I do know there are some things that just have to be. If we're going to make it through this time. And call it walking with God if you like.

First, there has to be a system of justice. Real justice allows a society to function and the individual to retain dignity. And a system of political and legal justice means that the disadvantaged are protected from abuse - the abuse from power, money or class.

Secondly: murder - it's not on. We have to deal with our violent feelings in some other way. And leading on from there, thirdly: robbery, theft, is out too. We have to find an alternative way of channelling our greed, and our envy of what others have.

Nor can incest be allowed. That wise professor from Vienna eventually uncovered just how much we do secretly want to express our sexuality inside our family. But we just can't have our mummy or daddy or children or siblings in that way. We've got to find someone else to do it with. And that reminds me of what happened after the Disaster. We were in such chaos. There was just our family, and my middle boy Ham did something to me which I can never forgive him for, that bugger, God damn him! But that's another story.

Yes, the fifth on the list is blasphemy. It's no use my letting rip like that. I still have to find a way of getting rid of this anger.

The sixth thing I listed I called idolatry. It was a handy word, it covered a lot of things. Actually I was thinking of all those adverts on TV, and all those colour supplements offering me happiness on every page. We were drowning in luxury in those days: so many divinely decadent choices. We knew it couldn't go on for ever but we worshipped production and consumption. I loved buying things - it made me feel so secure, so good about myself. Crazy, really, looking back.

Last on my list, number seven, sounds strange now, though at the time it made sense. I called it 'not eating flesh cut from a living animal'. You see I wanted something on my list that captured the essence of evil: that degraded the one who performed it and caused pain and terror to the victim. I suppose I could have chosen another image, another way to express this. Towards the end people came up with worse things, believe me.

Anyway, I thought out these seven things during my walks. Afterwards - after 'it' happened I mean - people saw them as the natural religious basis vital to the existence of any human society. I suppose I'm rather proud of that. They even called them after me: 'the seven laws given to the descendants of Noah'.

Right. I'm nearly finished now. I just want to tell you what happened in the end, when the Disaster came.

I saw it all so clearly: we'd reached the point where the rate of environmental change in my lifetime was going to be many times the maximum that our planet's eco-system could endure. There was no escaping this fate unless a radical transformation took place. One day I saw it all so clearly that I grew really desperate. I felt more hopeless than I'd ever done before. I felt closed in, with this great weight around me. I'd built it myself, this mental structure I'd constructed from all the evidence I'd gathered. It was like a vessel of doom I lived in. I was going crazy inside it. I was in complete despair.

I just wanted to be left alone. The understanding I had was too much for me. I felt hundreds of years old. It felt completely hopeless. I felt overwhelmed by...helplessness, that's the word: I was completely helpless, like a baby. I couldn't do anything more. I had no strength left.

And I started to cry. It'd never happened before. After all I was a man. But I did, I broke down, in front of my family: all of them were there - my wife and my sons and their wives. And I wept and wept. Tears of bitterness. Tears of remorse. Tears of anger. Tears of grief. I cried and I cried and I just...floated away.

It's hard to describe now. The sadness just flooded out of me. It went on and on, all those years and years of frustration and pain trapped inside - it all welled up and spilled out. The tears just seemed to pour out of me - it felt like days - for the sadness of it all, and the pity.

The rest you know of course. It's history - of a sort. It's in the books, though I know people argue over the details. Nothing ever was the same again.

Though there was one helpful moment: when I saw that rainbow. Yes, I know it's only the reflection of the sun in moist atmosphere, but I'd never really looked at one before. Really looked, I mean. That one time though, soon after the Disaster, I saw those seven colours arched above me, translucent and glorious and shimmering. And I suddenly remembered the seven laws I'd jotted down on that card, and it was my conceit, I know, but I felt there was some connection between those seven basic norms for how we are to live together and those seven basic colours in which the world is enveloped.

There was a harmony at that moment: seeing how the natural world and our human world reflected each other's inner grace. And at that moment I knew, I knew as clearly as if I heard a voice speak it in my ear, I knew that this disaster could never be again. Not ever. It felt like a promise. If I were a religious man I'd call it a blessing. Never again - such relief, I can't tell you.

'While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest and cold and heat and summer and winter and day and night shall not cease'. The words just formed themselves in my head. It would never happen again. That's all there is to say.

Oh, I almost forgot. The last temptation of Noah. You want to know the very last temptation? It was after it was all over and we had to pull ourselves together and start again. That was hard. We didn't know where we were, where we were going, what we were doing. Everything had gone. We survivors felt so helpless so much of the time. And the hardest part was that we kept remembering how it'd been before: so comfortable, so secure - you'll never know. That was the worst part: I couldn't help but remember it.

I became very morose, self-pitying. I just wanted to forget, to forget how it'd been. And, I admit it, I started to drink. They never tell the story this way, but this is how it was. They always make me out as the father of vineyards and winemaking, but I'm telling you: soon I was drinking all the time - I just wanted to blot it all out.

And that was the last temptation: the temptation to blot it all out, to forget the knowledge I carried, the understanding I had, the lonely experiences I'd been through, the intuitions I'd borne all these years. I tried to drown myself in drink: another flood.

But it wasn't to be of course. It seems that my destiny is to remember, to remain aware. I never did get my rest. I learnt that death is the only release from the burden of consciousness. And that while I lived, my work was just given to me to do. It was wherever I happened to be.

I even wrote a poem about it towards the end. Someone else later took the credit for it of course - but then none of us is perfect. Are we?

To open eyes when others close them
to hear when others do not wish to listen
to look when others turn away
to seek to understand when others give up
to rouse oneself when others accept
to continue the struggle even when one is not the strongest
to cry out when others keep silent
to be a Jew
it is that
it is first of all that
and further
to live when others are dead
and to remember when others have forgotten.

The White Ribbon

2009-11-20T18:03:00.001Z

This week I saw a masterpiece. And I’m writing to urge you to see it. The German director Michael Haneke’s latest film, The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band), is a cinematic midrash rooted in the problematic Biblical verse about God ‘visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generations’ (Exodus 34:7).

I won’t describe the plot of the film. Just to say the following. It is a mystery story. It is shot in stark black-and-white. It is set in 1913, in Germany. And it is an extraordinary exploration, through visual and verbal storytelling, of the history of Germany in the 20th century – a history that is both specific, and yet has moral and spiritual resonances for every society and every age. Including our own.

I have not seen a film like this since I first saw Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’ (1957). (1957 is not, I hasten to add, when I saw it). Haneke’s film bears comparison with his Swedish predecessor’s masterly oeuvre of psychological, historical and family dramas. And fifty years from now, this film will bear witness – if films are still being seen – to the mental world that led to the Shoah.

This is not a film about the Holocaust – but it is like a hologram where you see through the narrative into the future. I thought I saw Auschwitz in one scene – but maybe this was my imagination. This is a drama where – as in life – indeterminacy reigns. The narrator’s voice-over at the beginning talks of the way in which he “could perhaps clarify some things that happened in this country”. The “perhaps” - Samuel Beckett’s favourite word - is telling. Hearsay and conjecture, the fallibility of memory, the self-serving nature of memory – all are at stake, and in play, as the film progresses.

Like a Kafka parable, like a Biblical narrator, Haneke reveals and withholds. Meaning evolves, is disguised, and finally (if at all) is created by us the viewers. This is storytelling unlike anything you will see from Hollywood. It’s soul - filled with love and brutality and the way they become confused - is European. The film may have won this year’s Palme D’Or at Cannes – but that isn’t why you should try to find time to see it. You should see it because you will be stimulated, provoked, enlivened – great art does that to us.

I don’t want to say much more about it – I know that my own experience when someone raves about something I ‘must’ see is that I’m invariably a bit disappointed. It never lives up the fantasy created by someone else’s excitement.

Thoughts on Lying and Laughter

2009-11-11T20:56:00.000Z

In a week when our thoughts have been returning to those wondrous days of November 1989, when something that had not been foreseen suddenly came to pass – 'appeared' almost like a modern miracle, with the human spirit triumphing over the forces of oppression – it may seem strange to dwell not on our recent shared history but on an ancient tale.

I would like to share with you a sermon I gave last week at Finchley Reform Synagogue.

The congregation was quite small but I wanted to speak about the sedrah of the week, Va’yera (Genesis 18-22) - the word means 'and there appeared...'.

Traditionally one reads several chapters each week, working our way through the Torah on our annual journey through this most extraordinary text we call the Torah. As we read, we know that congregations around the world are all reading these same chapters. And that these narratives have been studied and chanted, read and remembered , for millennia. We are one small link in the chain. And what can we add to this awesome heritage? What can we learn today from these timeless texts?

I can never manage more than to think about a small section, a few verses, of the appointed chapters. I like to read slowly, carefully, and see what is there – on the surface and beneath the surface – and what these words of old have to say (if anything) today. They may not have the drama, the immediacy, of contemporary events. But sometimes they have their own drama, their own immediacy, their own capacity to open us up to the mystery and unpredictability of life.

**

Recently, the papers have been full of it. Would you lie to get your child into a better school? Of course you may not think of it as lying – just stretching the truth, or finding a loophole in the system. Or consider an accountant who offers you advice on creative ways of saving money, avoiding tax: it would not be suggested that you actively lie, just act in ways that gave you an advantage.

We teach (or taught) our children not to lie – that ‘honesty is the best policy’. (How often we reach for a handy, ready-made, off the peg, phrase like that when an issue is actually quite complex and our own thoughts are maybe a bit confused). But at the very moment that we become so insistent that our children must tell the truth, the very forcefulness of our insistence should give us a clue that something else is up, something else is at stake. When we insist that honesty is best and that lying is bad and always wrong, are we not perhaps lying to ourselves?

Because who can say, hand on heart, that they have never gained an advantage in a situation through dissembling the truth? That’s why we talk about ‘white lies’ – it lets us say that we have lied, but we make it excusable, we let ourselves off the hook. Whitewashing our lie allows us to feel a bit better about ourselves. We can admit to a white lie, because it is as if in our mind the word ‘white’ cancels out the word ‘lie’.

One of the things I love about my Jewish tradition – and particularly the texts of the Bible – is how the stories we read illustrate and illuminate themes like these, ordinary human situations, in interesting and subtle ways. We can see ourselves in the narratives. Our sedrah is called Va’yera – ‘and there appeared’: it is about what appears, what is seen, it is about sight, and insight. (The Hebrew does not distinguish between the two).

And one of the things we see in our text is that even God lies, sometimes. This is God whose name is synonymous with truth. Indeed one of God’s names is ‘Truth’ – Emet. So if ‘truth’ is one of God’s 13 attributes for the rabbis of the Talmud (Ex 34:3) and ‘The Seal of God is Truth’ (Shabbat 55), how come in our text God lies?

Let’s look at the story a bit closer. And let’s read it carefully. We are going to approach this divine lie in a circuitous way, as does the text. We read how these strangers arrive and Abraham greets them and feeds them and during the meal one of them says to their host: ‘When I come back next year, your wife Sara will have had a son’ (18:10). And Sara overhears this and the storyteller then reminds us that both Abraham and Sara were old and that Sara no longer was menstruating. And then the text says:

Va’tizchak Sara b’kirba – ‘and Sara laughed inside herself’

And then, parallel to her listening in to the conversation of the men, the storyteller lets us overhear the voice inside of her: ‘and she said to herself: ‘Now that I am so old and worn out (v’loti), am I to have such delight/pleasure (edna) ? – va’adoni zakayn, with my master, my husband, being so old, past it?’ (18:12). This is a very daring sentence from our narrator, first in showing us Sara eavesdropping on the conversation; then revealing this intimate detail from Abraham and Sara’s sex life. The more you think about it, the more remarkable it is, for the storyteller gets us the readers, the listeners, inside of Sara: the verse penetrates her , symbolically, and we find out what this news does to her inside of herself.

It’s the first time in the Torah that we find this key word, tzachak, a word which is to echo and re-echo through the texts and the generations – tzachak, to laugh. It will of course become the name of the son, Yitzchak, Isaac – ‘the one who laughs’.

Except that, as usual with Hebrew, words are never simple, they are layered, they can have more than one meaning. They can even (and this is one example) have meanings which point in different directions, perhaps in opposite directions. Because tzachak does mean ‘laughter’, but it also means ‘mockery’ – and how we think about the word and translate it will depend on the context in which it comes and the assumptions we bring to our reading.

Of course ‘laughter’ and ‘mockery’ are related. We’d make a distinction these days between ‘laughing with’ someone and ‘laughing at’ them. And we know there is a big difference between them - when we do it, and when we are on the receiving end of it. And we also know that laughter is a very complex emotion: sometimes it can be genuine pleasure, but it can also be defensive, a way of expressing embarrassment, or fear, or anxiety. It can be spontaneous or contrived, it can make us vulnerable (helpless with laughter), or it can be a way of expressing aggression. And, to make it even more complicated: we may consciously imagine it is one thing (a bit of fun) - but actually unconsciously it can be something else, its opposite. How many times have we heard someone say ‘Oh I was only joking’, and they want to dismiss something said as humorous, only for us to feel upset or wounded by it, not because we are too thin-skinned but because we have picked up the hostility hidden in the laughter, or the joke.

So when we read our text, our supposedly simple Torah story, we realise that there may be more going on here than meets the eye. Va’tizchak Sara b’kirba – ‘and Sara laughed inside herself, and she said: When I’m so old, so worn out, am I to have such enjoyment - when my husbands as old as that?’ Is this laughter with pleasure in the anticipation – or is this ironic laughter, scepticism, cynicism even? ‘Chance would be a fine thing!’

How do we read it? How are we meant to read it? Are we meant to read it just one way? Or are we meant to keep these different possibilities in mind as we read on? As if the storyteller’s art is to create in us a frisson of uncertainty. As if, at this moment of penetration into the character, this letting us overhear her thoughts, we the audience are being played with (tzachak also means ‘to play’ of course) – as if the narrator is saying, ‘I’m going to take you right inside my character and tell you, let you hear, what is going on – and you still won’t know for sure!’ And maybe this game the narrator is playing with us teaches us something profound: that we can never really know what goes on inside another human being. And even if we ask them, they might not know either, not really.

Indeed the story goes on to dramatise that maybe Sara does not know what she really feels and thinks. It goes on, in the next verse – and here we come back to the lie, in case you were wondering where that theme had gone – ‘And Adonai said to Abraham, lama ze tzachaka Sara, why did Sara laugh/mock, saying, “Shall I really bear a child, being as old as I am?”’ (18:13). See how our text makes God into a liar. She says ‘he is too old’. But our narrator has God changing this, when he speaks to Abraham, into Sara saying ‘I am too old’.

And why does God tell this lie to Abraham? Well, why would you do it? To protect Abraham’s feelings – this is what the midrashic commentators in the Talmud say (Baba Metzia 87a). God did it so that Abraham wouldn’t feel offended or hurt. And from this verse the Rabbis derived a maxim, a rule of thumb, that one is allowed to dissemble, to tell the white lie, to avoid the full truth (however you want to put it) if it will hurt someone’s feelings to tell the truth straightforwardly and honestly (Ketubot 16b-17a). Because to hurt someone’s feelings was equated by the Rabbis with the shedding of blood - an extraordinary Judaic sensitivity to the individual, to the other flesh-and-blood human being with feelings just as real and sensitive as your own.

And if that attitude isn’t bold enough, truly attentive to the importance of inter-personal relationships and feelings, the Talmudic rabbis went even further than that. ‘When is lying acceptable?’ they asked. ‘Lying is also permissible’, they said, ‘if it is for the sake of peace’ (Yevamot 65a).

So if your partner says ‘Do I look good in this?’ – the answer is ‘Yes’

But that just illustrates what a can of worms the Rabbis open up through this permissive attitude towards truth-telling. Because ‘for the sake of peace’ can cover a broad spectrum: from international politics to personal convenience: ‘anything for a peaceful life’. Jewish teaching does offer insight and guidance, and ways of thinking about all sorts of everyday situations - but it can’t give us an answer for a specific situation we find ourselves in. Only we are responsible for that. We have to judge and decide how to act, how to be, what to say, each time, every day, and the decision of today may not be relevant tomorrow. That’s part of the God-given burden of being human.

But God’s lie in the text is not the end of the story. We have one more verse. For our heroine Sara has somehow been listening in again - and this time, remarkably, she seems to have overheard another conversation, she’s eavesdropped on God’s conversation with Abraham, because the next thing we read it’s as if she’s heard God asking Abraham ‘Why did Sara laugh?’. Because we read :

Va’t’hachaysh Sara laymor, lo tzachaki – ‘And Sara lied, saying “I did not laugh/mock”...’ (18:15).

That’s how it is often translated. But actually the text uses a word that means ‘deceived’ or even ‘cringed’. And the storyteller withholds from us who was deceived or what she was cringing from. There is no object for the verb. So we can read this in all sorts of ways.

Is the text saying ‘And Sara deceived herself...’ She thought she was laughing – but actually it was mockery? Or the opposite – that she thought she was mocking, being sarcastic – but deeper down she had felt real pleasure at what she had heard?

Or does it suggest that she cringed when she realised that God was being so protective towards her husband, more protective than she’d been in her own thoughts. We don’t know. We don’t know what is inside that lo tzachaki, ‘I didn’t do that, I didn’t tzachak’.

But we do know one thing: that she was frightened: ki ya’raya. She was frightened of all this talk about another child, at her age, at her impossible age. And none of it made sense, not the arrival of these strangers, nor the conversations she’d heard, nor the complicated feelings inside her, nothing made sense anymore. And at the moment of maximum confusion, where nothing made sense and fear fills her soul, she hears for herself, for the first time in her life, the divine voice addressing her directly. The end of the verse says ‘And He said: lo - No, no, no – ki tzachaka - it is all right, because you did have that experience - laughter, mockery, whatever it was - it is all right to have your feelings, inside you. There is no need to lie to yourself. There is no need to deny your inner experience.‘

What a gift this. The divine voice reassuring Sara about the acceptability of her experience. What a gift from our storyteller – to give us a text, so simple and yet so layered, so compact and yet so open, so clear and yet so undecidable. And to give us a God who cares about an old man’s feelings and the confusion in a woman’s heart. To give us a text and a God for whom lies and deception are acknowledged as part of the very fabric of life, and yet which leaves us to work out in our own lives where truth matters and where it matters less, where deception makes sense and where self-deception does not. A story of the generation of meaning within each generation.

On Outspokenness

2009-10-27T15:00:00.000Z

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.

A Small Scandal at the Jewish Chronicle

2009-10-16T08:45:00.000+01:00

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.

When the Wind Blows

2009-10-03T12:10:00.000+01:00

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.

Rosh Hashanah - the New Year

2009-09-25T17:03:00.000+01:00

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

Approaching the New Year

2009-09-16T16:16:00.000+01:00

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.

24 hours in Prague, 70 Years On

2009-09-02T11:58:00.000+01:00

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)

‘Why Seamus Heaney? But not JFS?’

2009-07-23T21:02:00.000+01:00

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.