Let me start with a teaser: can you work out who I am talking about? An unpublished author – a schoolteacher by profession, in their 40s – who wrote a novel with a strong religious theme, but had their book rejected by seven UK publishers. Success did come eventually – this was in the 1950s – and the route taken became the stuff of literary legend. (An encouragement for budding authors everywhere).
The publisher was Faber & Faber but when the book was first submitted – under the title ‘Strangers from Within’ – it had been rejected by Faber’s in-house readers as ‘rubbish and dull’ and also ‘absurd and uninteresting Fantasy’. It was eventually plucked from oblivion by a new reader there, Charles Monteith, who suggested major revisions to the text including dropping much of its overtly religious imagery.
Eventually – this was 1954 – the book saw the light of day under a new title, ‘Lord of the Flies’, and William Golding’s text has now sold around 25 million copies around the world, in various languages.
For those who haven’t read the book, the basic outline of the story is easily told: it’s about a group of schoolboys stranded on an island after their plane crashes; there are no adult survivors (and no girls), and the story is about what happens to this group, left to their own devices.
But why talk about this text during the festival Jews are celebrating at the moment, Passover/Pesach? How might one connect this narrative about a group of Catholic-educated youngsters descending into savagery, brutality and murder – or resisting these impulses, and finding the inner spiritual and emotional resources to maintain certain moral and humane values – to our own seasonal narrative of liberation from slavery? How might one connect this fable – Golding preferred to call his story a ‘myth’ – with the ‘myth’ the Jewish people live in, and with?
One reason for why addressing this theme today is circumstantial – it has just been dramatized in four parts by the BBC : you can still get to see it (in the UK) on iPlayer if you can bear it, it is gruelling viewing, stunningly acted, beautifully visualised and produced, but painful and disturbing to watch, yet entirely believable if you know anything about pre-teen and early adolescent males; and about the power of groups, particularly when led by a charismatic individual, to bring out the worst elements in human nature. And as we know only too well, the universal story of male aggression is writ large every day in the news, at home and abroad.
So visceral was the drama, I could barely watch it; yet I was also captivated by its telling, and its themes began to cross-fertilise in my mind with the drama of Passover – a festival so distant in many ways from Golding and yet perhaps not so distant as we might first imagine. Or might be comfortable with.
A tiny bit of background on Golding: born in 1911, he served in the Royal Navy during the War, and later said he was haunted by an incident when the ship under his command received faulty intelligence and – along with the RAF – bombed the civilian population of the Dutch island of Walcheren on the North Sea. Hundreds died, unnecessarily in Golding’s opinion, and he carried this experience – and the guilt – with him through his life.
But even more significantly for the subsequent themes of his books, he carried the knowledge, as did so many others, of the Nazi death camps. This understanding of, in his words, “what human beings were capable of” – not a very original formulation but speaking to the way in which once something horrific is seen and known about, it cannot be unknown again (we do have contemporary parallels that I am not going to spell out here) – this unwished-for knowledge of brutality fed into the exploration of the themes of good and evil that underpin many of Golding’s novels from ‘Lord of the Flies’ onwards.
In Golding’s ‘fable’, the central characters of the novel point us towards various aspects of the human condition – Ralph, unwillingly (like Moses) chosen as leader who tries to be a civilising influence on the others; Piggy, thoughtful, rational, but mocked – in a way the conscience of the novel; Jack the cruel, dictatorial figure, his bravado hiding his inner insecurity; and Simon the innocent sacrificial victim who recognises that the ‘Beast’ feared by the other children doesn’t stalk the island as an external reality but is alive within them all. For Golding ‘the ‘beast within’ is always waiting to leap out, or be projected. This fable captures one’s imagination because its themes are mythic, archetypal. They speak to the human condition. Our grandeur, our folly, our degradation.
And at the heart of the book are the great religious and spiritual and moral questions about good and evil – and specifically: is evil (that is cruelty, destructiveness, the urge towards sadism and savagery) – is this innate in every human being? As a Christian, believing in ‘original sin’, some fatal God-given design flaw in the human personality, Golding did believe in the bestial within the human psyche, the human soul. He certainly recognized it within himself, alongside his Nobel prize-winning sophistication.
Judaism’s traditional understanding of the human personality rejected the notion of ‘original sin’. “The soul you have given us is pure” we say at the start of every morning service: “You created it, you formed it, you make it live within me…” That seems definitive, a belief in a kind of original purity or innocence. Yet a moment later, the rabbis who constructed and composed the liturgy complicate the picture, and we find ourselves praying “let no evil within us control us…help us hold fast to the good within us…” This picks up the rabbinic understanding that the soul, our selves, our psyches, contain two impulses, two forms of energy: the impulse towards goodness and the impulse towards evil. We are plural.
For the rabbis who created the Judaism we have inherited, this is the daily battle: evil is a potential, it is latent, just as goodness is a potential. Neither are the essence of who we are, but they are qualities of being, of feeling and inclination that are fluid, that flow within us, and out of us, and between us. Our souls are, in that sense, embattled. We are under siege, as Freud recognised, from conscious and unconscious forces, that release in us kindness and compassion and love – but also pull us towards aggression and hatred in all their many guises.
And this takes us to the heart of the Passover/Pesach story. Slavery (ancient and modern) is a manifestation of the yetzer ha’ra, that inclination towards the destructive that is rooted in us. Slavery is the subjugation, the brutalisation, of human beings by other human beings. It can be in personal or family relationships; or systemic, like the Egyptian treatment of the Hebrew people. And in the Biblical myth, this is symbolised by Pharoah’s hard-heartedness, his refusal – his inability – to lose power, or to be seen to be losing power, in the face of Moses’s request, plea, demand, that the Israelites’ ancestral God was addressing the injustice, the inhumanity, of slavery, with a counter-force, a force on the side of life: “Let My people go…”
I will resist bringing in at this point the stubbornness and equivocations and self-mythologising of Mr Trump, and Mr Netanyahu’s triumphalism entwined with the fear of losing power – it’s almost too easy to draw parallels between the character of Pharoah and what we see being enacted at the moment in the Middle East. Far be it for me to be polemical about these things.
I will just stick to the old story, the ever-new old story. Because the story is complex enough. And that’s due to two elements at least. The first is how the story presents servitude – not in opposition to liberation and freedom, but as an inevitable part of the fabric of life. Within the Biblical drama, the narrators highlight that the choice the people of Israel have is between two kinds of servitude. The Hebrew word avodah conveys slavery, servitude, and service. “Let My people go”, says Adonai, “to serve Me” (Exodus 7:26). That’s the choice the Biblical narrative offers throughout the book of Exodus: you serve human masters, or you serve God.
No wonder the Israelites, once they were freed from Egypt, kept rebelling against Moses’ leadership and saying, as it were: ‘Take us back to Egypt: we knew where we were with that servitude. But serving an enigmatic, peripatetic, divine energy shlepping us hither and thither through a barren desert, an endless journey towards God-knows-where, who needs that?’
One often hears a person say that they want to ‘serve God’ . But what does that mean? One also hears that people ‘want to be free’. But what does that mean? So many forces and pressures around us and within us keep us enslaved – to conventions and habits and beliefs and ways of being. Do we really experience freedom? Or just new forms of servitude? Maybe serving God might begin to seem attractive – if we had any idea what it meant.
So this is one complexity of the old, ever-new story. Questions about what we find ourselves enslaved to. And the security such servitude might provide. Consciously and unconsciously.
And the other complexity is just as difficult. Maybe more so. It is about the part of the story, the part of our myth, that even the rabbis of old felt uncomfortable with. That in order for the Hebrew people to leave Egypt, a huge range of destructive energy had to flow against the Egyptian people.
As the Torah tells it – and the haggadah text we read at seder night rehearses in pointed, poignant detail – the ten plagues created a series of catastrophes for the Egyptians, culminating in that awful final plague, striking at the firstborn of the land, from the household of Pharoah down to the captives in the dungeons of Egypt: a curious detail, a death sentence on the innocent that affected everyone from the Enslaver-in-Chief to the enslaved of the enslavers (Exodus 12:29).
God the liberator is also God the destroyer – a theological dilemma that the rabbis of old wrestled with, just as we wrestle with it. They created the (self-comforting) tradition of diminishing our wine as we count out the plagues at the seder table, and they created the homiletic story that accompanies the Torah narrative describing the drowning of the Egyptian army as it pursues the children of Israel into the Sea of Reeds:
‘At that time’, says the midrash, ‘the ministering angels wanted to sing a song of praise to the Holy One, blessed be He; but He restrained them, saying: “My creatures are drowning in the sea, and you would sing before me!”’ (Babylonian Talmud: Megillah 10b)
Does that do it? Does that address sufficiently the conundrum of belonging to a tradition that celebrates the impassioned energy of a compassionate God who is also dispassionate enough to deal out death to those who stand in the way of the divine plan? That’s our story, our fable, our myth. That our God is always on the side of life, and the sacredness of life, of every life, Jew and non-Jew, God is always that – except when God is not that: when whatever is the divine equivalent of the ‘Beast within’ breaks through, when the destructiveness of being breaks out.
In the presence of this destructiveness we may well choose silence. Silence or protest. Human evil, human aggression and destructiveness, is hard enough to bear. But all the monotheistic religions also attribute this aggression to God as well. As we celebrate Passover/Pesach – and there is a lot to celebrate – we wrestle with this conundrum. And what I have outlined here becomes a spiritual challenge: how can we take on and integrate the life-enhancing dimensions of the God of our tradition, that asks us to inhabit compassion and justice and kindness and forgiveness -while at the same time distancing ourselves from the aspects of God that are present in the texts, and in us, but that we don’t want to dominate us or control us? The wish to punish, the seeking of revenge, the hostility we feel to those who are different, the hatred of those who might seek our harm.
How do we ensure that ‘no evil within us controls us’? How do we ‘hold fast to the good within us’? The Passover/Pesach story highlights these questions. It doesn’t give us answers but it tries to make sure we don’t take these questions lightly. The perennial questions about the God of our tradition will never go away. But they are matched by the questions we might ask about ourselves, questions about – in Golding’s words – “what human beings were capable of”. And still are.
Meanwhile, we celebrate the freedoms we have, while recognising how circumscribed are those freedoms for so many. And we celebrate the freedoms we have because – faced by the aggressions let loose in the world – we don’t know how long we will have them.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, April 4th,2026. Some of the details about Golding and ‘Lord of the Flies’ are from a review by Alan Jenkins (of Golding’s Letters) in the Times Literary Supplement, 20/3/26]