The question is prompted by the appearance within the weekly cycle of readings from the Torah of the familiar three-part blessing:
“May the Eternal bless you and keep you; may the presence of the Eternal be with you and be gracious to you; may the Eternal bestow favour upon you and give you peace” (Numbers 6: 24-26).
In its context this is a blessing originally bestowed by the Israelite priests on the people, and it has entered Jewish liturgical contexts in a variety of ways. And it is also present in Christian worship. So this wish for ‘peace’ – shalom in the Hebrew – has been repeated, uninterruptedly, in one context or another, for more than two and half millennia.
Clearly, it’s a longstanding wish, this hope for shalom, peace. And Jews wish for it so fervently, pray for it so insistently, repeat it so frequently – it comes a dozen or so times in every service – we bring it into our consciousness so often (more than any other wish or hope we give voice to), we keep on coming back to it over and over again – but why?
Why this emphasis, this hypnotic vehemence? Could our preoccupation with it perhaps be connected with its absence? As if because we are missing out on it, we have the fantasy that by repeating it enough times we can make it happen? As If speech can conjure up what remains stubbornly, forlornly, elusive?
Shalom, peace. And this is not just peace as an absence of war. The Hebrew word contains much more than that. Something more personal. When one says the traditional Sabbath greeting Shabbat shalom, for example, one is saying more than ‘let today be a day without war, without violence’. We are using shalom in its deeper Hebraic sense of harmony, integration, the healing of feelings of fragmentation and dividedness. We sense that we may be divided from others, as well as suffering from an inner dividedness, estranged from our deeper, truer selves. So this is shalom as – to use our current jargon – wholeness, wellbeing; shalom as connectedness with our selves, our souls. It is about an inner state of being at one with ourselves – which is so easy to say, so difficult to feel, or achieve, except perhaps in moments.
Maybe shalom is more a destination than an achieved state; more a signpost on the journey towards a deeper intimacy with ourselves and others – if only for a moment. As if shalom contains a profound wish to be in tune with who we really are, and in tune with others in all their profuse and wondrous individuality. For we know hard it can feel to be at peace with ourselves, let alone with others. (Although we also intuit that the latter might depend upon the former).
But to speak in this way about shalom and what it might mean for us – to speak about it as a subjective experience we might desire, wish for, hope for, pray for – shalom as an end to feeling in conflict with ourselves, with others, shalom as pointing to feelings of wholeness, harmony, shalom as a spiritual or psychological state – yes, shalom is all that, of course it is. But to speak of it as only that, to focus only on that, is (I think) a kind of avoidance, however much we might want to focus on its inner meaning.
Because what it avoids – and this is what makes it an unavoidable topic at the moment – is that shalom also does mean literal peace. Not just inner peace but outer peace as well. And can we really experience deep inner peace when there is such an absence of shalom in the world? Maybe we can – we are narcissistic enough. We are self-preoccupied enough. Our horizons might be narrow enough.
This is ‘Zone of Interest’ territory: as Jonathan Glazer’s profound mediation on denialism suggests, we can seal ourselves off from what is happening beyond the wall, over the seas, in other places and lands, or just along the road from where we live; we can focus on our own personal shalom, and maybe there are times when we need to do that. Maybe for Jewish communities, Shabbat morning is one of those times. When we can allow cognitive dissonance to do its work, and just focus on the world which is ourselves.
But all the time we know – a part of us knows, and this can disturb our sense of our own shalom – all the time we know we are living in a world that is so lacking in shalom, so far from being healed, whole. All the time we can hear a voice, insistent, unrelenting: ‘How can one speak about shalom, peace, in a time of war?’ Isn’t it a sort of obscenity? At the very least, isn’t it a huge failure of imagination? A kind of fundamental dishonesty?
Maybe there is so much insistence on shalom in Jewish liturgy because we want to drown out the cries of war, the pain, the deaths, the suffering, the losses, the grief, the horrors, the senselessness of it all. Maybe shalom becomes the mantra we repeat to try to blot out the images, and the knowledge, of human aggression and human hatred and human savagery. These have always been part of the human condition but I sense a new urgency in some parts of the Jewish community to find an emotion distance from all the war crimes and ‘collateral damage’ and self-justifying belligerence, all the agony of conflict. This pain can be too much to bear.
This is not just about Israel and Hamas. Do you know how many wars and situations of armed violence are taking place right now? I’m talking about situations of armed violence that meet the definition of armed conflict under international humanitarian law. The Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law is currently monitoring and recording casualties in more than 110 conflicts around the world. Can you imagine doing that for a living – monitoring human aggression from continent to continent, keeping a tally of the dead and the injured, mapping out the malign patterns of human destructiveness? I take off my hat to them and wonder how they sleep at night, where they get their shalom within the demonic inferno. It’s endless – as it always has been.
But to return to Jewish prayers at this time, Jewish hopes, all the self-soothing involved in Jewish liturgy’s bright-eyed wishfulness: at its best I suppose the repetition of shalom is a reminder that something else is possible, even if it is so hard to achieve. It does keep hope alive, which – if it works – is no small achievement. Because the sparks of hope can get extinguished – for any of us – faced with the maelstroms of daily life. Hope does get snuffed out – sometimes for moments, sometimes for long hours or even days – hope is a very fragile inner experience. Almost like a gift. Almost like it comes to us, rather than we find it by grasping after it. As if it arrives, sometimes unexpectedly, from elsewhere.
Although Jewish liturgy occasionally gestures towards an awareness that peace is something that is in our own hands to make, to fashion, to allow to come into being – in other words that we have the responsibility to bring it into being – most of Jewish liturgy, along with the texts of Torah, is quietly insistent that if peace comes, if it does arrive, it’s as if it comes from the outside.
We recall the verse we started with: ‘Yisa Adonai panav el’echa ve’ asem l’cha shalom’ – literally “May the Eternal turn to you/face you, and give you peace/set up peace for you/cause you to have the experience of peace”. In the Talmud, Shalom is one of God’s names – as if the rabbis intuited that our experience of peace is like glimpsing something divine and beyond our power to control. As if it’s there all the time but we have to wait for it to arrive, we wait for it to be granted, as if it is indeed a gift. A gift we receive – and which we can then bestow.
Unsettlingly, this is a picture of dependence. We can be open to receive shalom but we can’t control it. Like babies waiting to be picked up and soothed, like children waiting to be comforted, like adults waiting to be embraced. We are dependent. ‘May God’s face be turned to you’, ‘May the One who is Peace let this peace settle on you, settle into you’ – the Torah pictures moments when we are the recipients of a kind of grace.
We have all experienced moments of reverie, moments when the world around us holds us, nourishes us, comforts us. Gives us ‘peace’. No wonder we repeat it so often: the longing for the creation of these moments, the re-creation of these moments, is deep within us. Balm for the soul.
So if we are foolhardy enough to speak of peace in a time of war, maybe the humbling recognition of how limited are our capacities to enact this desired way of being is one place to start. We need so much help. And yet we are stranded – in a world where the traditional religious picture of a ‘bestower of peace’ may no longer speak to us, where do we turn?
Maybe we return to the familiar, words worn smooth as pebbles over the centuries, words which may help, sometimes, to keep our fragile hopes alive: “May the Source of peace in the highest bring this peace to us, to all Israel, and to all the world.”
[loosely based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, 15th June, 2024]
“What do I have in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself, and really ought to go stand myself perfectly still in a corner, grateful to be able to breathe.” (Diary, January 8th, 1914)
One hundred years ago this week, Franz Kafka, just shy of his 41st birthday, lay dying in a “small, friendly sanitorium” (his words) near Vienna. I say ‘his words’, but he could hardly speak – he wrote about the sanatorium in a letter to his parents in Prague. He was suffering from tuberculosis of the larynx, was finding it to difficult to eat, to drink, to swallow, to breathe. “Grateful to be able to breathe” was not, it turned out, just a turn of phrase.
Perhaps he already knew in 1914, proleptically, something in him already saw the future – about this, as about so much else. Kafka teaches us, amongst many other things, to pay close attention to our intuitions. They contain a special kind of knowledge about ourselves – which is to say they can contain a special kind of knowledge about the human condition.
“Grateful to be able to breathe “ – not only an intuition about his future, maybe our common future, but teaching us not to take the everyday for granted. For that is where the miraculous lies. The everyday miracles in a world where the old pieties of religion no longer hold sway. “The ordinary is itself a miracle”, he once said, in conversation, “All I do is record it. Possibly I also illuminate matters a little, like the lighting of a half dark stage. And yet that is not true! In fact the stage is not dark at all. It is filled with daylight. Therefore people close their eyes and see so little” (CWK 44/5)
As we listen in to Kafka’s words we hear a mind at work, a consciousness shifting moment by moment as new thoughts arise. The quotation offers a luminous insight into Kafka’s thinking as it unfolds. First the spark of an idea, simple but profound, maybe even verging on a cliche: “The ordinary is itself a miracle”. And then his relationship to it, slightly self-deprecating: “All I do is record it”. As if that were completely straightforward – as if writing, finding the right words, is as natural as – well, as breathing.
And then an elaboration of the thought, hedged with characteristic caution, hesitancy, maybe self-deprecation again: “Possibly I also illuminate matters a little”. Followed by a simile that brings alive the idea in our mind’s eye: “like the lighting of a half dark stage”.
That would have been sufficient – the point is made, illustrated, we feel we can grasp the simple grandeur of Kafka’s thought: “The ordinary is itself a miracle. All I do is record it. Possibly I also illuminate matters a little, like the lighting of a half dark stage”. Many writers, thinkers, would have been happy to leave it at that.
But then – and this illustrates Kafka’s fidelity both to emotional truth-telling, and to the complex zigzagging of his mind at work moment by moment, revising, editing, amplifying – he then doubles back on himself as a new, contradictory thought arises: “And yet that is not true! In fact the stage is not dark at all. It is filled with daylight”. What he thought was the case – that his writing was recording the ‘ordinary miracle’ of living, to which he added some extra illumination, while leaving some things in the shadows as if on a half-lit stage – that thought is itself only one provisional version of what he does, just a momentary grasping after what feels like a truth. But there is another completely opposite truth, he now realises: that the stage is filled with light but people just don’t see what’s there in front of their eyes – i.e. he doesn’t see what’s there – indeed the problem is there’s just too much to see: “Therefore people close their eyes and see so little”.
Such a familiar move, this, in so much of Kafka’s work, in his parables and longer fiction: the working through of an idea, and images that comes to mind about it – and then the ending on a down-beat note. (One exception is his magisterial parable ‘My Destination’ which ends with the hope-filled paradox that that in spite of their being no provisions available for the journey ‘Away From Here’, “…it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey”). But here it’s the resigned realisation that although there is so much to be seen, we nevertheless end up seeing so little – as if we are dazzled by the superfluity of what the world reveals to us, as if we can’t quite bear to see and know the full glory (but sometimes horror) of what is present at every moment.
Implicit in what I am doing here, spending this time unpacking a few words of his, is sharing with you, illustrating for you, why for me Kafka remains an indispensable companion. He both illuminates the human condition and makes it strange – or, rather, he reveals to us the strangeness hidden in plain sight. He shows how the familiar, the everyday, is often more quirky, idiosyncratic, than we at first realise, or more packed with potential meaning, or more puzzling, or more disturbing.
And, as we know, (and don’t want to know), the everyday can be very disturbing. The benign nestles so uncomfortably close to the sinister. A sense of estrangement is always lurking, just around the corner:
“Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”
The opening of Kafka’s ‘The Trial’, written in 1914, pre-empts our daily news. It not only points towards Nazi and Stalinist times, but speaks to own benighted land where asylum seekers are scooped up from their lodgings, just as it describes a reality for Covid scientists in China, for poets and journalists in Russia, for Palestinian shopkeepers and academics in the West Bank. Arbitrary unwarranted arrests on fine mornings. Impossible for Kafka to see into the future – and yet the words came, the stories emerged, a literature of scrupulous sensitivity, sometimes humorous, sometimes tortured, but always pregnant with meaning.
So ‘The Trial’ is also a narrative of a psychological state, that strange condition in our inner world where we can be captured by feelings of being in the wrong, or feelings of being misunderstood, or feelings of guilt – even if we aren’t sure what we have done wrong, or even whether we have done anything wrong at all.
The critical and persecutory forces within the human psyche are real – even if we have very little insight into them. It’s as if our psyches were a dimly lit stage (which they are): shadowy forces can emerge, can haunt us, can arrest us ‘one fine morning’. Arrest us, derail us, lay siege to us. Kafka knew this only too well in his own life; and yet managed to transform, to give literary shape, to what he experienced in ways that compel our attention. For example, he knew that sometimes these inner forces can distort the image we have of ourselves: they can make us grander than we are, more self-important, but they can also make us seem more monstrous than we are.
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect”.
This is no longer ‘one fine morning’ but just an ordinary morning following ‘uneasy dreams’ – already a ominous note, foreshadowing the waking realisation that all is far from well. Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ (written in 1912, published in 1915) is not a novella about body dysmorphia, although it might give as a particular angle of vision into that state of mind, but it does speak about how alienated someone can feel from themselves and the world around them.
Generations of readers have recognised in the story – in Gregor’s feelings about no longer belonging to the respectable everyday world he is accustomed to, and being treated by his parents and others with prejudice, dismissiveness and emotional cruelty – they have recognised themselves in this disturbing portrait of feeling like an unwanted outsider. Yet although the drama allows for multiple interpretations, no single interpretation ever fits, for as so often with Kafka’s enigmatic creativity, the text hovers in front of us, just out of our grasp. His texts, his images, don’t ‘stand for’ something else, they are not symbols of something that need to be, or can be, deciphered, decoded – they are just what they are (like God’s enigmatic self-description – ehyeh asher ehyeh, “I am what I am, I will be what I will be”).
But for a Jewish reader it is hard to ignore the fact that Kafka – writing as he always did in German – describes Gregor in that first sentence (in spite of our translations) not as ‘an insect’ but as ‘Ungezeifer’, which means ‘vermin’ – a word that of course was to take on a darker, annihilatory dimension within a generation. That people could turn into ‘vermin’ overnight was not only a dystopian literary fantasy, or drama of personal alienation, but just another example of Kafka’s uncanny, unsettling gift for seeing further, seeing deeper, sensing the as yet unthought about emerging contours of contemporary life. He had intimations of the ‘unthought known’: he saw what he saw, and recorded it, without knowing fully what he was seeing, and how it would speak into our lives.
So often I find that Kafka’s texts reverberate like a shofar blast summoning us into greater awareness of life’s double-sideness, how heaven and hell are always here and always now and always within us, and always just beyond our understanding. “There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe…but not for us”was one of his more memorable paradoxes.
This was recorded by his longstanding friend (and literary executor) Max Brod, from a conversation in 1920, and captures the way Kafka’s optimism and his ability to gain pleasure from the world – he was a natty dresser, enjoyed the theatre, the cinema, European literature, swimming, vegetarianism, Yiddish theatre, Hebrew scholarship (he attended lectures at the Berlin Hochshule and corresponded for many years with Martin Buber) – all of this enjoyment of life and its opportunities was real for him; and yet in the end, we hear that familiar note of loss, of incompleteness, of the elusive nature of what is wished for. It’s not despair that has the last word, but a rueful recognition that life’s pleasures are transient, and something darker (or maybe just sadder) must inevitably be reckoned with: “There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe…but not for us”.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know Kafka, I think I started reading him in my mid-teens and he has accompanied me ever since. But you can know his work – his novels, diaries, parables, aphorisms, letters – you can know all this, feel close to his soul, his spirit, his very special consciousness – and yet one still never knows him; you can come close to the biography of the man but his texts retain an elusiveness, however often you read them. They offer themselves up, but like the canonical scriptures of old they are endlessly suggestive, tantalising, seductive, enigmatic. They ask to be interpreted, but in the end they defy interpretation. They are what they are.
My own sense is that if one wants to live with a developed Jewish sensibility in our own times one has to live alongside Kafka, in dialogue with Kafka, in the illuminating shadows of Kafka: his texts have become – for me – part of the very fabric of my understanding of what it is to be Jewish, they are a sort of secular Torah, a holy literature that will be read for as long as humanity survives on this planet, offering us intimations of immortality although we know immortality is only another fable, another story to live by. Kafka made storytelling a sacred act, a spiritual discipline: “Writing as a form of prayer” he once said.
In the Austrian sanatorium where he lay one hundred years ago this week, this relatively unknown and mostly unpublished Czech-speaking, German-writing, Jewish accident insurance investigator was looked after by the medical staff along with Dora Diamant, his final girlfriend/lover – Kafka had never married. She was 25 and they had known each other for a year. In that last week or so, he could talk only in whispers, so he communicated mostly in written notes. He was a writer, after all. A completely secular writer with the Jewish spiritual sensitivity of the Hebrew poets of old. “Writing as a form of prayer”.
This is prayer as devotion and – as the Hebrew for prayer, tefillah, literally means – prayer as self-judgement, self-reflection. Kafka’s devotion to writing – and to writing as a form of devotion – have been indispensable, foundational, for my own religious/spiritual sensibility. And I don’t imagine I am alone in this. I’ll finish with one short numinous text that I return to over and over again. It returns me to myself and to an awareness of living in a world where revelation happens at each moment, if we can allow ourselves to remain open to it.
“It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.”
Franz Kafka died on June 3rd 1924. Zichrono Livracha: may his memory continue to be a blessing.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, May 25th 2024]
The seder nights with which Pesach (Passover) starts commemorate an ancestral exodus from slavery: the Biblical saga tells of oppression, a hard-hearted Pharoah and a series of plagues that strike the Egyptians but miraculously spare the Hebrew people. The end of the seven day festival focuses on the drama at the Sea of Reeds, with the hosts of Pharoah’s armies pursuing the Israelites and the people having to trust that the way to freedom lay through the waters.
Between the oppression of Egypt and thoughts of drowning in the sea, the narrative sets up a scene crafted with much literary skill. The waters open up – but only by dint of what the text describes (from the participants’ point of view) as a “strong east wind” and the omniscient narrator’s point of view as “caused by Adonai, the Eternal One” at the behest of Moses, whose role – “stretching out his hand” – is also seen to be a vital element (Exodus 14:21). The natural event is the vehicle for the miraculous. A strip of dry land appears, a very narrow ridge of dry land – but for how long would it last? And who would venture in when all was so uncertain?
The middle days of this festival – the in-between days – set us up as inheritors of the textual drama. Those that left Egypt were ‘in-betweeners’ too. They were in between slavery and death, between slavery and the desert, between slavery and the possibility of a new kind of life. But first they had to go in between the walls of water. The story dramatizes in-between-ness.
And for Jews following the traditions of old, this in-between-ness sees us between the beginning of Pesach and its end, between that renewed experience of the taste of the matza with all its associated memories of seders of the past, and matza of the past – in between the experience of that, and the waiting for the festival to be over. I mean how much matza can you eat? Don’t you get fed up with it quite soon and long for the taste of a good bit of sourdough, or a bagel, or just a Pret a Manger sandwich (other makes of sandwiches are also available)?
Like the children of Israel we are also in between – when the appreciation of the tastes of the seder and what they represent gives way to the feeling of deprivation, when we begin to have a heightened awareness that part of the way we celebrate this journey from slavery to freedom includes relinquishing the pleasures of the foods we normally eat. It is not exactly oppression, but we are still choosing to be bound up with servitude to an idea, a tradition.
Why is this notion of being in-between resonating for me this year? Maybe because I sense that this year we are also in-between in other more intangible or hard to articulate ways.
There can’t have been many sederim this year when the historical moment we find ourselves in wasn’t present, perhaps very present. And it is a moment when I would suggest this experience of being ‘in-between’ may have been very emotionally demanding. Emotionally and spiritually challenging.
Because, most obviously, we are living In between a profound concern for the citizens of Israel, with sons and daughters at war, with hostages still unredeemed, with the traumas of the last six months tearing at the heart – in between those feelings of identification (and even if you don’t have family there or friends, your Jewish heart might beat in time with the hearts of those going through this tragedy) – so, many have told me of feeling in between those feelings, and other feelings about what has been happening in Gaza: other sons and daughters lost, other children killed, and not just firstborns, feelings that the Jewish heart might also respond to about the victims of famine and displacement and loss of homes and fear for one’s survival every moment of the day. If Pesach teaches anything it teaches us sensitivity towards all those who experience oppression, ‘because you were subject to oppression in Egypt’.
So this is also an experience, a painful existential experience, of being in-between : of being pulled by a concern for the Jewish people who have chosen a homeland as a solution to the so-called ‘Jewish problem’ – and a concern for the cost of this for other people, citizens of Gaza, and for those terrorized, killed, displaced, in the West Bank by Jewish vigilantes. This is a concern that one might also have been sensitive to for decades, a concern about the lack of justice that has been ongoing for 75 years or so. We are pulled in between contrasting, conflicting realities. Between ethnic identification and concern and compassion – and a larger human connectedness and concern and compassion.
And here in London, we might also be in an additional and strange psychological state of in betweenness. On one level we just get on with our lives, our own important and mundane everyday living – family, community, friends, holidays, shopping, work, studying, dealing with illnesses and losses, celebrating the good stuff, having to manage the difficult stuff, all the stuff of everyday life. We live between that and something else that over this last 6 months or so has threatened to destabilise our everyday lives: an awareness of antisemitism, both real and imagined, both anecdotal and exaggerated, both experienced and feared. We have been living between getting on with our lives and an awareness that something intimidating is happening around us, and not only here in the UK, but around the world.
We might be feeling our own feet are, amazingly, on dry land, but out of the corner of our eyes we might also glimpse (or wonder if we see, maybe it is all a mirage) the walls of water that could come crashing down on us at any moment. Though miraculously they don’t.
And being in between means the Egyptian armies haven’t caught up with us, but when we turn back towards where we have come from we glimpse those who seek our harm. Or we think we do – because the antagonists we fear in the present are always overlaid in our mind’s eye by the antagonists of the past, who are always behind us, so to speak, pursuing us. Traumas of the past will always effect, distort, what we see in the present. It’s a problem. How does one learn to see clearly what is going on? Or is that a fantasy – a wished for state of clear-sightedness?
So we are always in between – between Egypt and the wilderness ahead; between the pursuers who seek our harm and the freedom to live without fear; between the giant waves that could drown us – no longer only a long-rehearsed metaphor from an ancient saga – and the powerful natural forces flowing through the world that sustain us. We are always in between.
‘Leaving Egypt’ is a powerful image, metaphor. The story of the Jewish people, whether you read it as history, or literary saga, folk memory or myth, the story we have inherited uses Egypt as the symbol of oppression, of narrowness. I imagine you know that the root meaning of Mitzrayim in Hebrew is tzr – narrow, constrained. It is as if the Biblical writers were already inviting us to be midrashists, to relate imaginatively to their language, to hear that the question of the liberation from Egypt is not just a national saga, but a personal one.
We know this story is not just about our forerunners, the Israelites, but a saga relevant to all oppressed people – in the 19th century and into the 20th it inspired generations of African-Americans (we listened to Paul Robeson’s ‘Go Down Moses’ at our seder); it fed into 1960s and 1970s Catholic liberation theology in South America, and was used in the Protestant churches leading up to 1989 and the resistance to communist oppression in Europe. Yes, it has been part of many strands of collective history, Jewish and non-Jewish. But its potency also resides in the way that it talks to each individual about personal liberation.
‘Egypt’ is what keeps us narrowed down in our life, it’s about old habits, destructive guilt, small-minded thinking, false certainties we use to mange our helplessness, fears from the past that constrain our choices in the present, all the ways we stop ourselves having more life-enhancing, fulfilling, generous lives, more loving lives. So ‘to come out of Egypt’ is to come out of whatever confines me, traps me, shuts me in. Pesach also speaks about a personal, existential drama, psychological, spiritual. We long to be freer, but we oppress ourselves. There’s a Pharoah within everyone, who won’t let us go, won’t let us live a fuller life.
And it is a struggle to leave Egypt. We are always caught in between: in between a wish to escape the burden and inhibitions and haunted memories of the past – and the regressive urge in the human psyche to stay in Egypt, because it is safe and familiar, it is the womb, it is home, it is a place of psychic retreat. We want to leave Egypt – and we don’t.
The Biblical text acknowledges this when the children of Israel, even before they have reached the Reed Sea, see the pursuing Egyptians and cry out to Moses: ‘why have you done this to us? Didn’t we already tell you, leave us alone, let us serve the Egyptians, better that than to die here in the wilderness’ (Exodus 14: 11-12). There it is, incarnated within the saga, the wish to get back to something familiar, to stick with what we are used to, however much it diminishes our potential rather than face the daunting challenges of opening ourselves towards the unknown future.
Maybe that casts light on a strange midrash I came across recently:
‘Only one out of five of the children of Israel went out from Egypt. Some say one out of fifty. And some say only one out of five hundred. Rabbi Nehorai says: Not even one out of five hundred’ (Mechilta, Massekta de Piska 12).
It is as if the rabbis of old already intuited that within their ancestral story there was a recognition of just how difficult it is to leave the familiarity of what is known, safe and secure – even when what is known safe and secure is oppressive and constricting. Maybe leaving Egypt is only for the bravehearted, or the reckless, for the visionaries or for those who have got nothing left to lose. Would we have left Egypt? Can we leave it now?
You need a special kind of energy to keep going, to break through the waters in that symbolic birth into the new, the unexplored, the uncharted daunting territory ahead. And you need a special kind of energy to keep going in this in-between place we find ourselves in today, in all the ways I have been outlining.
Do we ever leave Egypt? Maybe not.
Even if we have left Egypt, do we have the courage, the resources, the faith, to take the first step into the sea, which has not yet opened up a way through it. Again, the rabbis intuited that being ‘in between’ is a place where we can end up stranded, frozen by fear.
They created the midrash about the children of Israel standing at the edge of the sea, each person rooted to the spot saying ‘I won’t be the first one to go into the water’ and it wasn’t until Nachshon ben Aminadav stepped in to the sea that it began to part for the people. And actually, continues the midrash, they had to wade in up to their noses before the sea became dry land (Sotah, 37a).
That took faith, that took a capacity for risk taking, that took bravery, which often looks like foolhardiness.
I sometimes think the Jewish people now have lost that faith, and particularly they have lost leaders with the courage to make that move – too much oppression, too much trauma in the soul, too much frozen fear, too much looking backwards.
The State of Israel needs new leadership, self-evidently – preferably with some form of Jewish moral compass; and the Jewish people need leaders with the courage to be guided by the ancestral vision that the community of Israel has a destiny (as Isaiah puts it in a passage we read on Pesach) of living where “Nothing evil or vile will be done/ for the land shall be filled with devotion to Adonai, the Eternal One of Justice, as waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11:9)
In these in between days – when we are far from the enactment of that vision – we still have to keep it in mind. That’s the goal, that’s the aim, beyond Egypt, beyond the wilderness, the creation of a space where the values of justice and compassion flood the land. Unless we keep this vision alive, unless we keep telling our story this way, unless we keep faith with the humanistic and universal wisdom of our tradition, we will remain in Egypt, suffering from what the text describes the children of Israel suffering: ‘kotzer ruach’ (Exodus 6:9) – “anguish of spirit”.
Leaving Egypt means following the vision, leaving behind that ‘kotzer ruach’ – ‘shortness of breath’ and ‘narrowness of spirit’ – that we have been living with all these months. Only that vision will redeem us, only that vision will take us out of our narrowness, through our Sea of Reeds, through our fears and doubts and stiff-neckedness, through the wilderness. The destination is not in our hands – but, meanwhile, we can make this journey together, supporting ourselves, in the knowledge (as Rebbe Franz of Prague once said) “that it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.’
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, April 27th, 2024]
The festival of Purim is the Jewish Mardi gras. A time for carnival, fancy dress, masks, revelry. This is a strange, paradoxical turn of events: Jews recall an ancient story of survival in the face of persecution – the story is told in the Biblical Book of Esther, where Jews in Persia fall victim to the annihilatory antisemitic rage of the king’s minister, Haman – and retell the story each year by turning darkness into light-heartedness, and fear into frivolity. The celebration of Purim is an opportunity for fun, for the mocking of sacred cows, for the subversion of the pieties of Jewish life.
One could say this is about using humour as a psychological defence against pain – Jews do a lot of that – but I suspect that the way Purim is celebrated has a deeper purpose at its heart. Take the role of alcohol in promoting the mood of levity, of ‘taking the piss’, that accompanies the celebrations. As early as the 4th century, rabbi Rava decreed that the mitzvah, the religious obligation, is to drink until you cannot distinguish between the phrases ‘Blessed is Mordechai’ [the hero] and ‘Cursed is Haman’ [the villain].
Later rabbis weren’t happy with this invitation to drunkenness. They interpreted Rava’s injunction to mean: well, you should drink more than usual so that you fall asleep – because then you won’t/can’t know the difference between these opposite sentiments.
But I wonder if there is some deeper rabbinic intuition in play in Rava’s thinking. Is not this blurring of the distinction between saviour/hero and destroyer/aggressor asking us to question the nature of good and evil? On every other day of the year the rabbis were keen to keep these impulses very separate: the whole of Jewish ethical life depended on keeping them apart. We were to engage in acts of goodness – and keep far from evil and evil-doers, as the liturgy tells us. That’s the Jewish project every day of the year: finding ways for human goodness, our goodness, to outweigh the forces of destructiveness that lurk in the human heart.
Both the rabbis of old and the psychologists of today acknowledge that this is an ongoing human struggle – this work (inner and outer) of ensuring ‘good’ triumphs over ‘evil’. And it is a struggle because the lived boundaries between the two are not as obvious as we might wish them to be. Once a year, on Purim, the simple splitting of life into absolute realms of good and evil seems to be called into question. On Purim you are encouraged to engage in an experiment – it is elevated to the realm of a mitzvah – the task is to find a way of blurring, slurring, subverting, the boundaries. And you find out how easy it is: a couple of drinks and good and bad are not so clear cut, nor so far apart.
We might wish this were the case but in the so-called real world – not in some religious fantasy picture of the real world – the dynamics around good and evil can be very disturbing. Evil can arise out of good intentions, as Einstein and Oppenheimer and others realised about splitting the atom. And sometimes good can arise from, or emerge from, evil: from the ashes of the Holocaust, the State of Israel was born – from the utter tragedy of victimhood to the miracle of continuity and self-determination. But, on the other side of the coin, because complexity is more true to life than the narratives we like to tell, when the Jewish state came into being, the Palestinian Nakba also came to pass. Life is much more complex, the boundaries between good and evil can often be more complex, than is comfortable.
We know it is always much more psychologically comforting for us to split the world into simple opposites – heaven and hell, right and wrong, goodies and baddies, the civilised (us) and the barbarians (them), heroes and villains, Mordecai and Haman. We feel we know where we are, how to orientate ourselves emotionally, if we can rely on these simple dichotomies. And we do this both consciously and unconsciously. But I think Purim – beneath the froth and the frivolity – opens us up to something quite disquieting.
Not only is it a story in which, notoriously, God does not appear (the only Biblical book in which this is so) but survival depends only on trickery and deceit. In the fable, Mordecai uses his niece’s sexuality (he weaponizes it, as the saying goes now) to manipulate the king; and Esther’ capacity to deceive – she hides her identity until the right moment – is seen as worthy of praise. The people are saved because of this subverting of simple boundaries between good and bad behaviour. Seduction and subterfuge not only make the story tick along quite nicely – they underpin the moral ambiguities of the tale.
And the moral ambiguities in the story are compounded by the way in which Jewish survival is accompanied by the death of those who wish to destroy them. The story tells it as an act of self-defence – 500 Jews are killed in Shushan on the 13th and 14th of Adar, and another 75,000 in the rest of the Persian empire. You may hear uncomfortable echoes here in current events, which I won’t go into.
Does this dark side of the Biblical tale – which we narrate in the midst of the accompanying jollity – give us pause? How many deaths are acceptable? How many deaths are inevitable? How many are rationalised as – in that ugly phrase – ‘collateral damage’? How many deaths are necessary that we survive and those who abhor us don’t? Maybe God was wise to steer well clear of this story. He gets compromised enough by those on all sides who call on him to this day to vindicate their murderousness. Or use him to justify it.
Liberal Judaism 50 years ago also steered well clear of this part of the story – they cut the reading of the megillah [the Biblical story of Esther] so that congregants didn’t have to hear about all this blood shed by Jews. They have stopped this censorship in more recent years – maybe because it doesn’t really do anyone any favours, to collude with our wish to avoid the darkness in the human heart, to avoid attending to the moral complexities that attend our humanity.
Although many people want their religion to help them feel more comfortable in life, honest religion can – hopefully – also provoke us into feeling less comfortable in ourselves.
But I can understand why those who edited the Biblical text did it. Because who really wants to think about all this? Maybe drunkenness has its value, lest we feel the full horror, the shock, the confusion, the disgust, the triumphalism, that such battles for group survival seem to produce; blurring with drink the distinction between blessing our heroes and cursing our enemies means we don’t have to think for too long about what people are capable of doing to each other. It means we don’t have to reflect too much on the truth of the poet W.H.Auden’s words that “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return”.
Drunkenness is one of the ways humanity has found whereby we don’t have to know what is really going on. (In the Bible it goes back to Noah, that survivor of the destructiveness and trauma of the Flood). But there are other ways too, not just alcohol, ways to ensure we don’t know – don’t have to feel, or think about – some of the horrors that go on around us.
Which takes me to The Zone Of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s extraordinary double Oscar-winning film.
I hope to return to this film at a later date. This is just to commend it to you if you haven’t yet seen it. It is not untrue to describe it as a ‘Holocaust film’ – as you may know, it is set in the family home and garden of Rudolph Hӧss and his wife Hedwig who lived literally next door to Auschwitz. Hӧss was the commandant of the camp – and the wall of their back garden was the wall of the death camp.
I hope to return to this film at a later date. This is just to commend it to you if you haven’t yet seen it. It is not untrue to describe it as a ‘Holocaust film’ – as you may know, it is set in the family home and garden of Rudolph Höss and his wife Hedwig who lived literally next door to Auschwitz. Höss was the commandant of the camp – and the wall of their back garden was the wall of the death camp.
So this is a film about the Holocaust, about evil. You never see into the camp, you only hear it – the soundtrack is remarkable, uncanny, unheimlich: the ominous dull grinding as of a huge industrial machine (which it was), that you hear throughout the film, off stage as it were – it is literally obscene, from the Greek, ob-skeen (‘offstage/out of sight’); you hear shots ringing out and shouts and human cries, and on the horizon you see smoke arising from tall thin chimneys, but this is all behind the wall, ob-skeen. So this is of course a Holocaust film – about how ordinary people, who come home to read their children a bedtime story, who tend their gardens lovingly and teach their children the names of the flowers and plants, ordinary people like you and me, who have goodness grafted to their hearts can also have evil grafted to their souls.
But it is, as the director has asserted, not only a Holocaust film, a film about the past, but a film about the present, about now. And that now can be any ‘now’, not only a now that contains the knowing and not wanting to know around the ongoing traumas of both Israelis and the people of Gaza. The film was conceived and made, long before October 7th. In every age it would be a film that challenges one’s complacency, the ways in which we all live walled off from terrible things that we hear about and sometimes see, things we know about and don’t want to know about. Because if we did face them it would be too unbearable.
“Too long a sacrifice/ can make a stone of the heart/ Oh when may it suffice?” – W.B.Yeats (Easter, 1916).
I hope to return at some stage to The Zone of Interest. Because it is a piece of art, like the Biblical stories of old, that is timeless, that raises profound moral questions, that provokes us into reflections about our lives, our compromises, our shadiness, our capacity for goodness and our capacity for evil. Each scene is worthy of attention – each scene asks questions, each scene demands a commentary: such a Jewish film!
Meanwhile Purim allows us to appreciate that gift for the paradoxical that Judaism relishes – in this case getting us to reflect on questions of survival in a world where God might seem out of the picture and we are left to our own all-too-human resources, where the Mordecai and the Haman within us battle it out for the upper hand. Who will bow down to whom? Will evil bow to good? Or good to evil?
Is life all in the end ‘Purim’ – a lottery? When Haman casts lots – purim in Hebrew – to find the date to kill the Jews, the story gestures to the elements of chance, randomness, the vagaries of fate. It is as if Haman is disavowing his own evil by pretending that what is to happen is guided by chance – that he is ‘just following orders’, as it were, just following how the lots fall. But we know that this isn’t the whole picture – that he is the active perpetrator undermined in the end by his own vanity as much as by Mordecai’s wiliness.
On this occasion, in the Purim story, Jewish saichel defeated goyische arrogance – and maybe that’s why the story made it into the sacred canon. And we can drink to that while knowing, as The Zone of Interest testifies, that life for Jews does not always turn out like that. Saichel can only take you so far – but perhaps goodness can take you further. Let’s hope so.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, March 23rd 2024]
Let me sketch out a cartoon-like version of two kinds of Jews – or rather two forms of feeling life within contemporary Diaspora Jews, two stances towards Jewishness that animates or motivates (consciously or unconsciously) our everyday lives as Jews.
There is the ‘Pesach Jew’ and the ‘Purim Jew’.
If you are a ‘Pesach Jew’ you will be stirred by the central themes of the story of liberation as described in the book of Exodus: that an oppressed people were freed from slavery and then went on to receive a moral vision about how to live in the world.
The ‘Pesach Jew’ will have imbibed the idea that the revelation at Sinai taught a traumatised people that justice, compassion and lovingkindness were qualities that resided in the human heart; and that the Jewish role in the world was to enact these attributes and qualities both within their own community and in relation to those who lived beyond their own tribe or nation.
In other words, the ’Pesach Jew’ has internalised the symbolism of the Torah story, a story that highlights and values freedom from oppression, and links it directly to an ethical vision: that the Jewish people are to be a “light to the nations”. The ‘Pesach Jew’ recognises that the oft-repeated Biblical idea that ‘you shall love the stranger and the outsider because you were strangers in the land of Egypt’ is at the moral core of what it means to be Jewish. The Jewish soul is one that is sensitive to the sufferings of others and is determined that a central part of being Jewish involves reaching out to express care for Jews and non-Jews alike.
For the ‘Pesach Jew’ this stance depends on memory – sometimes unconsciously inherited memory – the long arc of Jewish memory that links the mythic past of the people with their continued existence now. We tell the story over and over to keep alive the memory of where we came from; and to keep alive the ethical commitment stemming from that memory. Inherited memory becomes a motivator for ethical and social action.
And the ‘Purim Jew’? What moves the heart of the ‘Purim Jew’? The Purim story – based on the Biblical Book of Esther – contains one aspect of the Jewish story that has never left us: that there exist in the world people who dislike us, hate us, want to persecute us. In the story, the anti-hero Haman foments a plan, backed by royal decree, to rid the Persian kingdom of its Jews. Over the generations, Haman’s animus against the Jews, as outsiders in Persia, has been enacted time and again. Although the narrative is historically unreliable, the anti-Jewish legislation that it describes has a powerful historical resonance. The story is an archetype of antisemitic hatred. It is a strand of Biblical literature that still reverberates in the heart of our Jewish community. For the ‘Purim Jew’, the experience of anti-Jewish antipathy – or the fear of it – is at the heart of one’s Jewish identity.
Remaining Jewish becomes an act of defiance towards the antisemite. What the ‘Purim Jew’ learns from Jewish history is a stubborn refusal to leave the world stage. For the ‘Purim Jew’ the Jewish soul is marinated in feelings of victimhood and in the bloody-minded determination not to let Jewry’s enemies have the last word. Survival is all.
Of course the ‘Purim Jew’ is also keeping alive memory – memory of historical antipathy to Jews, aggression towards Jews, persecution of Jews – but this is selective memory. This is memory only able to – or only wanting to – hear this motif, this melody, within the symphony played out over centuries of interactions between Jews and non-Jews. For the ‘Purim Jew’ there is no creative or mutually beneficial social and cultural intercourse between Jews and the inhabitants of the lands in which they have resided – there is merely suspicion and worse.
This is the kind of memory which is operating when Jews say they feel ‘existentially threatened’ by the current upsurge in reported antisemitism in the UK and abroad. That upsurge is shocking and disturbing and needs to be monitored and prosecuted – and vigilance is absolutely necessary for us Diaspora Jews. One can feel saddened by this, or angry – or both – but it may be useful to try to keep a sense of proportion about it. We aren’t in the 1930s Germany of antisemitic state legislation and institutional persecution – we are dealing with small groups, and lone individuals, emboldened to enact their prejudices online, sometimes in person, and as horrible and frightening as this can be, in the UK we have the backing of a legal system and police to help us contain this unpleasantness and these threats when they come.
It can be difficult to keep a sense of perspective about this here in London because the kind of memory that gets triggered in us is the memory at the heart of the ‘Purim Jew’: the selective memory of Jews as the ones who are eternally hated and persecuted. And of course it is this kind of memory that is particularly operative in Israel when people are saying they feel ‘existentially threatened’.
The October 7th barbarism has powerfully triggered this deeply-lodged strand of feeling in the Jewish-Israeli psyche and one can see how traumatic the events of that day have been, how they are resonating still in the psyches of the people, and indeed how the excruciating pain connected with the hostage situation is truly dementing. Our hearts do go out to those who are going through this: there is no family in Israel unaffected by either the immediate connection with hostages and their families, or those who lost loved ones on October 7th, or those who have lost loved ones in the fighting that has ensued, or those still displaced from their homes. All of these need support and solidarity in whatever way it can be shown.
Even if I have over these months offered a critique of certain aspects of Israel’s Zionist story or its current political responses, I have tried never to lose sight of the human drama that is ongoing for the people going through this. It has sometimes been difficult to balance my empathy for those who are going through this embattled saga, with my other concerns about the meaning of these events within the longer arc of Jewish history and its meaning for us Jews who sit here in the Diaspora, who are realising that what happens over there is having a direct impact on us over here. This ongoing drama can also feel dementing in the suburbs of London – not least in the attempt to hold in mind and take to heart the anguish of Palestinian suffering alongside that of Jewish suffering.
The categories of ‘Purim Jew’ and ‘Pesach Jew’ are inevitably a bit simplistic – I said they were cartoon-like, they are a kind of shorthand – because we can recognise that the ‘Pesach Jew’ might value the themes of liberation and a commitment to justice and equality and compassion, but the story – like the Purim story – is also rooted in victimisation, that ancient antipathy towards us. It wasn’t called antisemitism then, in Egypt, but the Biblical saga is about the oppression of an alien people living in the midst of a majority culture. That’s the strand of ‘Purim’ in the Pesach story, and it lives inside even the most secular or humanitarian-minded ‘Pesach Jew’: the archaic memory, intergenerational memory, of being strangers in strange lands, is still alive however securely integrated one now feels, however culturally assimilated one is.
I have no doubt we will get through this period of doubt, darkness, inner dividedness – it’s going to take time for the external situation to be resolved, and of course there are different pictures of what ‘resolved’ might look like. So we here in the UK are going to have to live with heightened feelings of insecurity for a while longer – this, one intuits, is going to be a long journey.
[partially based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, February 17th, 2024]
The Jewish mystics of old believed that everything in the world was connected to everything else, that we are all caught up in an immense web of being, with the energy of the universe flowing uninterruptedly through everything that lives. The breath of all life animating us, moment by moment, is part of the divine flow of energy animating existence. Everything is connected, in a constantly unfolding chain of being, with everything else.
Four hundred years or so after Rabbi Isaac Luria developed these mythopoeic ideas about the nature of reality (as he saw it), Professor Edward Lorenz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a paper entitled Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas? and thus, in 1972, so-called Chaos Theory was born. This was a paradigm leap in scientific understanding about how the universe works, how everything is indeed connected to everything else in a vast web of being – and a small action here (the so-called ‘butterfly effect’) ripples out in a way that is ungraspable but real, and effects something else on the other side of the planet.
And so the mystic’s understanding is mirrored in the advanced mathematical models of the scientist’s understanding. For us ordinary mortals – well, for me, anyway – there is almost no way to make sense of this ‘butterfly effect’. It is so outrageously beyond rational understanding. Because it’s not just about butterflies of course. To feel that every word you utter, every action you make, reverberates out into the ether, has consequences beyond our reach, beyond our understanding, beyond our control. Surely it would be paralysing to think like that? Nobody could live like that, with that degree of awareness. We would go mad.
And yet there’s something about that notion that things are connected to each other in ways that we can never know, never understand, never track, never discover, there’s something about that sense of being held within this great mystery of a web of interconnected energy, there’s something about that, about the poetry of it, that is beautiful and inspiring and humbling, at least for me.
One thing that this sense of interconnectedness allows me to do, encourages me to do, gives me permission to do, is play with ideas, play with connections, trace connections, follow lines of inquiry, of imagination, of intuition, to see how things could be connected. For example this week I have been playing with three themes – themes which at first glance might not seem particularly connected but that I feel can be productively connected.
Idea one: I have been thinking a lot recently about Stalinism. I ‘ve just finally finished the Soviet-Jewish writer Vassily Grossman’s monumental novel ‘Life and Fate’: it was banned in his homeland, but it’s one of the most significant novels of the 20th century. It is our era’s equivalent of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’, offering a vast panorama of life in central Europe, Russia and Germany, in the 1930s and 1940s. Set during the Nazi siege of Stalingrad during World War 2, Grossman compares the different kinds of horrors of two totalitarian states. He takes us into the concentration camps and the gulags and is unsparing in his portrait of the paranoia and cruelty of the Soviet system under Stalin, how it infiltrated family life and everyone’s mental life, how one word out of place, reported by a colleague, or neighbour, or family member could lead to persecution, torture, exile.
And reading this extraordinary book – about life and death and the randomness of history – led me reflect on how Soviet communism, and the ideology of socialism the Soviet Union said it was enacting, captured the imagination of two, three, generations, world wide in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s and beyond. I have been to a fair number of funerals for an older generation (often parents of friends) who were members of the Communist party in the old East End of London. They were just part of a whole cohort of folk who became enamoured of the experiment that was taking place in the Soviet Union to create a new kind of society that was to enact in a secular form the messianic dream of the ages, a society of equality and justice.
It was a noble, aspirational vision but it was a vision corrupted by Stalin and his henchmen and notions of ideological purity, and a gap opened up between the reality on the ground and the rhetoric of the state – and that gap was filled from the 1930s until Stalin’s death in 1953 with the execution of a million Soviet citizens, deliberate mass starvation in Ukraine, forced labour camps, deportations, detentions, interrogations, bloody massacres, show trails, antisemitic purges against Jewish doctors and writers…and all the while not only impoverished Jews in the East End but some of the great minds of European thought were fellow travellers with the communist vision, defenders of it, promoters of it.
And what fascinates me, and horrifies me, and makes be anxious (though I will come to that) is the question about when followers of this vision finally abandoned it. When did they realise they had been seduced into a huge error of judgment by the rhetoric and propaganda of the Soviet State, and its emissaries, an error that was intellectual, emotional, spiritual? How long did it take for them to let go of their wishful thinking in the face of evidence of the evils of the actual system they were supporting?
HG Wells, George Orwell, Camus, Sartre, John Steinbeck, Simone de Beauvoir – I am not going to name too many names – they gradually became disenchanted, but often it took decades for that disenchantment to really sink in, in spite of abundant evidence from very early on that this was an experiment that was not only persecuting its own people but was involved in what we would now describe as crimes against humanity.
So was it the show trials of 1937-8 that did it? Was it the annihilation of Jewish intellectuals in 1952? For many communist fellow-travellers it was the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. For some it wasn’t until the crushing of the Prague spring in 1968. People held on to their commitment to this ideology for decades, and nothing could force them to disconnect from their younger decades of enthusiasm. There is a real psychological issue here at the heart of this historical question. When we have become fixated on an ideology that gives us some kind of emotional satisfaction, some kind of vision of hope, what does it take to let it go and acknowledge our mistake, our naivety, our false thinking? It is actually very hard to do. If we are holding fast to an ideology, how long do we keep silent about crimes done in its name – or even find a way of justifying them? The story of the Soviet Union is a text case for this.
Second idea: from our Torah portion this week, which contains the famous phrase na’aseh ve’nishma [‘we will do and we will listen’]: this is the children of Israel’s response to Moses when he brings down from Sinai God’s teachings, God’s laws. “And all the people answered with one voice”, says our storyteller, “saying: Everything that the Eternal has commanded we will do” (Exodus 24:4). And then a few verses later, after Moses is described recording the obligations of the covenant and reading it aloud to the people, we hear “And they said: Everything that the Eternal has spoken na’aseh ve’nishma, we will do it and we will listen to it, we will obey it, we will try to understand it” (24:7).
There is an almost unanimous tradition of reading this text that praises the faithfulness of the Israelite people in saying na’aseh ve’nishma. It is seen as an acceptance of their role as God’s chosen people. ‘We will do what is required’. And the commentators point out that it is particularly worthy of praise that the people say they’d do whatever was required before they had understood what it meant, before they had heard (shema) what they were agreeing to. It is not clear if the Biblical phrase does mean a sequence or whether it is a combined ‘doing and hearing’ activity. But the traditional commentators tend to stress this was an unquestioning commitment to action – that was followed by thinking, reflecting on what it meant.
That’s how this phrase is always read nowadays by rabbis and Jewish teachers: ‘look how devoted the Jewish people were/are in following God, they agreed to do it even before they knew what was involved’. The only dissenting view I could find belongs to the Sadducees, the group who had religious and political power during the Second Temple period – but lost their authority once the Temple was destroyed in 70CE. Their opponents, the Pharisees, evolved into the rabbis who wrote the Talmud and developed Judaism into the forms that we have inherited. The Talmud is uniformly hostile to the Sadducees, and as not a single line of Sadducean writing has survived, we are dependent on their adversaries to see into their thinking. A great example of how history is written by the victors.
So there’s one passage in the Talmud discussing this phrase na’aseh ve’nishma in which the Sadducees are recorded as being critical of the Jewish people, calling them ama paziza – “a rash people, for whom the mouth precedes the ears …you should have listened in order to know whether you were able to accept”’ [cf. Aviva Zornberg, ‘The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus’, p.303). And this is the essence of my second theme: I am becoming more and more sympathetic to the dissident view of the Sadducees here, against the overwhelming weight of the tradition.
And the reason is – and maybe you can begin to see how everything is connected to everything else – I have real doubts, about the wisdom of subscribing to any ideology (and religious faith is an ideology) that requires one to submit to its thinking, that asks for a priori obedience, whether it is obedience to the programme of a Stalin or a God or a religious tradition. Because obedience so often has a persecutory shadow side, an under-edge, that involves punishing those who don’t follow the party line. Or – as in Catholic guilt and Jewish guilt – punishing oneself for not being obedient enough.
To accept any ideology (political or religious of cultural or social) and not be free to question it is foolhardy, ‘rash’. To have to submit to received opinion can be soul-destroying. But to call into question what one has accepted voluntarily, what one has followed perhaps enthusiastically for decades, to call into question a belief system that might have sustained you for years – that is very difficult, painful. To say I have seen what this ideology, this system, this vision actually does, and I can no longer go along with it – that requires a kind of intellectual and emotional and spiritual bravery (or is it honesty? or is it objectivity?) which not everyone can muster. Not least because it might leave a huge gap where that belief once sat – and what does one replace it with?
Third idea, everything being connected to everything else. What about the chaos of feelings we Jews might be having about Israel/Gaza right now? The ever-present elephant in the room. And I feel reluctant to speak about it. So let me just name it by saying that the questions I was asking earlier about the fellow-travellers of communism, those defenders of the system in spite of the evidence coming out of the Soviet Union – and at this distance it might seem hard to reconstruct just how powerful and seductive were the narratives woven by the defenders of the system – those questions I was raising are, I think, pertinent to the questions one might have about being a fellow-traveller and defender of the Zionist vision.
We each will have our own take on this – but although it is now relatively safe to talk about when the scales fell from one’s eyes about old-style Soviet communism, it can feel far from safe to talk about it in relation to contemporary Zionism. (Please note I am not comparing the problematic content of actions – but the process of how hard it is to question and then perhaps let go of the evocative vision that one might attach oneself to).
So at some stage we need to ask when did it happen to you? Has it happened to you? People like Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt drew attention to the fundamental problems of the Zionist endeavour in the 1940s, as the State was born; for others it wasn’t until after 1967 and the conquered territories were held on to rather than relinquished, and then gradually settled on, and it became clear that justice for the other inhabitants of the land, and the refugees, has being delayed, postponed, pushed out of the story. The mantra of na’aseh ve’nishma, we will do it and then reflect on it, was a powerful one in the Zionist story, and many Jews around the world became faithful followers of the ‘doing’, and set aside their misgivings, their ‘listening’ to the consequences. For some, those feelings of being enamoured by the original vision of a Jewish homeland began to sour with the Sabra and Shatillah massacres in 1982, or the Lebanon war in 2006, or the first Gaza war in 2012, or the declaration of ongoing Jewish supremacy in Israel codified in 2018 in the Nation State law. Or maybe it is this current chaos that is doing it, finally.
Everything being connected to everything, we can ask in relation to Israel: when was your 1956 Hungarian uprising moment? Or has it not happened yet? Are you with the Pharisees or with the Sadducees on this current tragedy? Is it ‘rash’ to be critical of Israel at a time like this when so many in the world are feeling hostile to both Israel and Jews? Or is it ‘rash’ to be uncritical, to be still enamoured of the ideology, the vision of Zionism as it defends its ‘we will do whatever it takes to prevail’ philosophy?
How many wings of how many butterflies will have to flutter, and how many will have to be torn apart, before the spirit of history declares a winner? Because at the moment there are no winners, just the cruelty of lives destroyed. And for that we weep, and have cause to weep.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, February 10th, 2024]
Let’s start with a question: which book saw a 1000% increase in sales in the 12 months following Donald Trump’s election as US president in 2016?
First (small) clue: it was published in 1951.
Second (larger) clue: a woman author.
Born in Hamburg in 1906, brought up in Berlin. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 for doing historical research in the archives (on programmatic state antisemitism in Germany) after eight days she was released and immediately fled the country, with her mother, crossing the border to Czechoslovakia and from there eventually to exile in Paris.
Let me put you out of your misery: I am talking about the political philosopher, historian, essayist, Hannah Arendt. And the book – the one that topped the Amazon lists for months – was the book that made her name in the United States: The Origins of Totalitarianism, her long, detailed exploration of 19th century antisemitism, imperialism and racism and how these strands of 19th and 20th century life had emerged into – woven themselves into – totalitarian systems like Nazism and Stalinism.
It’s probably not a book one would read for pleasure – not least because Arendt’s prose style has that clotted density characteristic of the academic tradition in which she grew up and was trained. She was a precocious youngster, the doted-on only child of assimilated, educated, secular-but- Jewishly-aware left-leaning parents. At 14 she was devouring the volumes of Immanuel Kant she found in her father’s library; later she was expelled from school for challenging a teacher; and at 18 she enrolled to study philosophy at the University of Marburg with Europe’s leading philosopher Martin Heidegger.
She later studied under the tutelage of both Edmund Husserl and Karl Jaspers – these names may not mean anything to you, but those three male teachers were the central figures of 20th century European humanist and existential philosophy. All of them (and Arendt followed in that tradition) wrote with that heavy, convoluted, abstract lyricism that was rooted in the German Romantic tradition. Anyone who has read Martin Buber’s work might have had a taste of that. They aren’t beach reading.
So if it wasn’t her fluid prose style that made The Origins of Totalitarianism such an unlikely must-read after sixty-odd years, what was it? Well, I’d suggest it was possibly the way in which readers discovered that Arendt had developed insights into political processes and human nature – and how politics moulds and manipulates human nature – that suddenly had a startling new relevance to what is going on in these early decades of the 21st century.
Readers discovered that within that demanding prose style there were some luminous jewels to be found, thoughts that helped one think about, for example, what was going on in the White House. And not only there. Sentences like :
“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” [OT, 1976, p.416]
That’s a sentence to keep close to hand when thinking about the recent American past – and what is yet to come; as well as when we get our next UK Cabinet reshuffle. A totalitarian mindset can exist separately from a totalitarian system.
But why am I focusing on Hannah Arendt now? It’s partly because I’ve become interested in her recently, and I’d like to share that enthusiasm with you. It’s partly because I’ve just been reviewing a new biography of her life and work – We Are Free To Change The World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience by Lyndsey Stonebridge – and it’s made me realise how little I have paid attention over the years to her work and the deep originality of her thinking. It’s never too late to discover a major thinker who has been hidden in plain sight all one’s life.
I’d always known about the mystique that surrounds Arendt – made up of all sorts of things about her life, her biography: she was not only Heidegger’s star student at Marburg but his lover for four years (he was twice her age, and married), and although their affair had ended well before the advent of Hitler, Heidegger later became – to Arendt’s horror – an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis and was a member of the Party until 1945. Despite this, Arendt renewed contact with him in 1949 and they remained close for twenty more years.
Arendt managed to escape Europe in 1941 in spite of having been incarcerated as an ‘enemy alien’ in Vichy France in the concentration camp at Gurs near the Spanish border: she walked out of the camp with forged papers provided by a group of Austrian communists operating within the camp – soon after this the camp became a transit point for Auschwitz. Survival was (is) so often a matter of luck or fortuitous timing or the sheer randomness of life.
When she boarded the boat to America she carried with her a suitcase of papers and writings – not her own but those of the great philosopher Walter Benjamin, who had entrusted them to Arendt when they met by chance days before he committed suicide on the French/Spanish border. You see what I mean by the mystique around her – but that’s around her life. What about her writing?
The text which really made her name – and promoted her to the status of leading public intellectual – came in the 1960s after she attended the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. She wrote up her experience for The New Yorker and it was in that context that the phrase with which Arendt is most often associated entered public consciousness – The New Yorker lifted one phrase out of her text to publicise the piece: that much misunderstood phrase ‘the banality of evil’.
When she wrote about the ‘banality of evil’ many Jewish readers felt she was minimizing the horrors and evil of the Holocaust – but, on the contrary, what she was emphasising was that in the flat, detached, bureaucratic verbiage that Eichmann spouted in the dock, with all its circumlocutions which avoided naming the crimes he was committing, a new form of banality was being laid bare, the banality of thoughtlessness, a moral and imaginative blindness that had invaded the human condition, Arendt thought, like a virus. He presented himself as a mediocre functionary with no awareness at all of the monstrous nature of what he had been involved with. That was the ‘banality of evil’.
Her essays reporting her observations over the many weeks of the trial generated a huge furore. She wrote with deeply etched irony and a kind of intellectual detachment that did not endear her to many survivors. It may be that irony was part of her emotional defence against the pain of what was being spoken about. At any rate, she lost friends over it – people like Saul Bellow.
But what also alienated her readers was how she reported Eichmann’s attempts to exonerate himself – he spoke in his defence about how he’d worked with Jewish leaders, in ghettoes and camps, and with a rabbi like Leo Baeck in Theresienstadt (who did to some extent attempt to protect his congregation within the camp by not spelling out everything he knew of their ultimate fate). This could be construed as collaboration with the enemy – and it was painful for Jews to hear her speaking about Jewish leadership in such fraught situations in those kind of terms. So she was shunned by those who felt that she was guilty of a lack of imaginative awareness of the impossible choices that had had to be made within such extreme situations.
So Arendt was a complex personality. She never toed the party line on any subject – she was dedicated to thinking for herself, and kept emphasising in her writing that thinking is a moral activity, it is about values, it needs to be done all the time and about every subject. She demands that you do the work for yourself and not rely on second-hand thinking.
But sometimes she just seems to put her finger on the pulse of something and her angle of vision just illuminates an issue or theme.
Let’s just take one example that speaks to where we are now in the midst of this horror show in Israel/Gaza – one of the other reasons I’m sharing thoughts about Arendt here is that she can help us think about what is going on in that painful and tragic land.
And if that doesn’t speak to what is going on in the minds of Netanyahu, his Knesset henchmen, and the fundamentalists on the West Bank, I don’t know what does.
So we need Arendt – and she is everywhere. Her image is on coffee mugs and postage stamps and T-Shirts: there are dozens of T-shirts for sale with photos of her, quotes from her – my favourite is the one that says in large bold letters:
WHAT WOULD
HANNAH ARENDT
DO?
I wouldn’t wear it myself (except perhaps on Purim) but I have been going round saying to myself ‘What would Hannah Arendt think?’
She was an early Zionist, she worked for Youth Aliyah in Paris in the second half of the 1930s, but she was a committed bi-nationalist like Martin Buber, Henrietta Szold, Judah Magnus who ran the Hebrew University, so when the Zionist Congress meeting in the Biltmore Hotel in New York broke with tradition in 1942 and demanded that “Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth” she was appalled, predicting – accurately, of course – that such a state would exist in endless tension with the other inhabitants of the land.
And she realised that it wouldn’t solve the underlying problem of human statelessness – she had been stateless from 1938 when she was stripped of her German citizenship until she became a US citizen in 1950. “On the contrary”, she wrote in The Origins Of Totalitarianism, “like virtually all other events of the 20th century, the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees…thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000-800,000people.” [OT, Schocken, 2004, p368
And what would Hannah Arendt think about this week’s turning of the wheel of history, and the opening of the case brought by South Africa (a rich historical irony there) at the International Court of Justice, the case against Israel’s so-called ‘genocidal intent’ in Gaza? The language is of course emotive, and Israel will plead its cause, but it is hard to hear some of the statements made by Israeli politicians and military leaders – I’m not talking about actions but language – it’s hard not to hear some of the vengeful and annihilatory language that has been used without feeling a moral revulsion at the dehumanised and dehumanising rhetoric that has been used.
So what would Hannah Arendt think? About the way, after various wrong turns, it has come to this, less than three generations after that? Would she remind us about one of her acidic but penetrating observations, that “evil comes from a failure to think”?
[[“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.” from Eichmann in Jerusalem]]
Well, we will not see her like again, but we still need thinkers of the calibre of Arendt to help us think in these fraught times. Not just to feel – Jews are very good at that – but to think, to gain a clarity, a moral clarity about how to act when all around are losing their heads. But thinking is hard work. To do it we need all the help we can get, from Hannah Arendt or anyone else.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, January 13th, 2024]
“The only reason to be an artist…is to bear witness” (Philip Guston)
There are some Biblical verses – well, many, if truth be told – that lie dull and lifeless on the page for us modern readers. They no longer speak to us – if they ever did. That’s probably our limitation, not theirs. But over time we might recognise that they are not lifeless, they are just dormant – as if they are biding their time, as if they’re awaiting their moment to reveal something to us, waiting patiently for their opportunity to illuminate an aspect of where we are now, what we might be wrestling with now.
So this week my eye was caught by a verse from our weekly sedrah [Torah reading] that describes a stage in the journey that Joseph took with the embalmed body of his father Jacob (Genesis 50). Jacob had spent his last years in Egypt, a bitter old man, an exile far away from his homeland; and before he dies, having given each of his sons their own blessing, Jacob requests that they bury him in the ancestral burial site back in der heim, in Mamre – today we call it Hebron (where Jews, assault rifles in one hand and siddurim in the other, will be reading this text in very different ways to me).
We read how Joseph calls his brothers together and gets permission from Pharoah to make the journey back to Canaan to bury their father. The brothers leave their children and their herds and possessions behind, and set off accompanied by a huge retinue of Egyptian dignitaries and chariots and horsemen – it’s like a state funeral, Joseph being second only in prestige and power to Pharoah himself.
And then our storytellers do something which has that quintessential Biblical narrative quirkiness one comes to recognise, and wonder over: they give us a short scene that disturbs the narrative flow, that seems superfluous to the story – yet it apparently has some significance for the authors, but a significance they don’t spell out. They leave it planted in the text – and there it waits for centuries, millennia, awaiting its moment.
I’m talking about verse 10 of chapter 50:
“When they came to Goren Ha-atad…they entered into a deep, heavy-hearted lamentation, and Joseph observed a seven day mourning period for his father” – this is the origin of the shiva tradition, by the way [the seven-day Jewish mourning period] – and then in the next verse the scene is described again from the outside, as it were, “And when the Canaanites living there saw this…they said: This is a grievous mourning time for the Egyptians”.
This is a form of literary Cubism by the way, two perspectives of the same thing fused together in the picture, one superimposed on the other. And we are left in no doubt by the storytellers that whether you are a participant in this collective mourning, or merely observers of it like the Canaanites who see everyone involved as Egyptians, what’s being portrayed is a time filled with deep grief.
And then the text picks up its narrative thread: “And his sons carried him to the land of Caanan and buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field near Mamre that Abraham had bought…”
So what was it about this that particularly caught my eye? Well, it might surprise you but it was the name of the place where the mourning takes place. It’s in a spot called Goren ha-Atad. ‘The threshing floor of/for thorns’. So what? The name adds nothing to the story being told. But this place of mourning is a real geographical location: it is identified as a site called Tell el-Adjull – which just happens to be in the southern sector of present day Gaza. Where, as I speak, grievous mourning is again taking place. As we know. Although we don’t want to know.
It is as if there is an aperture in time through which the past illuminates the present. The Torah takes us into Gaza. As this whole section of text makes clear, Jews are a people who know about mourning, about loss, about grief, about how close to the heart the death of a loved one can be – and Jews know too how significant it is to have time to honour the dead. I sometimes think there is a way in which we are a faith tradition more bound up with death and mourning our losses – personal and collective – than of being enamoured by life and its manifold and rich possibilities.
On Yom Kippur, for example, I am always amazed in my community how, after the Yizkor service in late afternoon [the annual memorialising roll-call of those who have died in the past year] – which is rightly significant and moving for so many, and people come especially for it – as soon as it is over, half the community disappears. Yes, I know that the Neilah service that follows it is another hour and we repeat a lot of the liturgy – but the conclusion of Yom Kippur is very much about life: it is about our future, our personal future, our collective future; yet it carries less weight – less emotional and spiritual value it seems – than our mourning, our sadness, our remembering our losses. This isn’t a criticism – it’s just an observation.
We are a strange, quixotic people, us Jews. We mourn our losses, we are good at that, we have had a lot of practice over the years as a people, and of course individually we have all lost loved ones. Maybe because we do, on the whole, love life, treasure life, we are, paradoxically, connoisseurs of loss. If life was not so precious, loss would not mean so much to us.
But back to the text. I want to ask a simple question. (No questions are of course simple, there is complexity at the heart of this question, but it is the question that jumps out of the text for me, jumps at me, won’t let me go). Are we able, when we read of this legendary mourning in Gaza, when we read these verses within our great mythic narrative of the Torah, are we able to really mourn the losses in Gaza? The losses now. Are we allowed even to ask this question? Too soon? But if not now, when?
Will there be a time? Will there ever be a time when we can enter into a period of deep mourning for what has transpired over these weeks? What continues to unfold in these days of trauma in Jewish history? And Palestinian history? Will mourning be allowed? Mourning for others, as well as ourselves? Because those who see this from the outside, as it were – like in the Torah text – they can see, they can acknowledge: “this is a grievous time of mourning”. The world – the non-Jewish world – can see this. But our Torah text encourages us to see it too, to have a dual perspective. To be moral Cubists. To see events not just from our subjective Jewish point of view, but to see suffering from the outside too, to look with a sense of empathy such as those Canaanites are described as showing: “this is a grievous time of mourning for them”.
Goren Ha-Atad: Gaza has become a threshing floor. And as Jews we can be in mourning for that too. Threshing, as you know, is about crushing, it is about separating the grain from the chaff, it is a demanding and, yes, brutal activity, necessary for grains – but when your threshing is of a people, the separating out the wheat from the chaff, as it were, becomes a crude operation – and we see the thorny, painful consequences that unfold.
Scholars tell us that the historical significance of this spot mentioned in the Torah, Tell el-Adjull, is that it was the ancient site of a burial ground for high-ranking Egyptian dignitaries. This helps explain why Joseph’s cortege stopped there for their seven days of mourning, en route to the family plot in Mamre. But the Torah is not primarily interested in that kind of background history. It is interested in moral history and emotional history and spiritual history, the kind of history that transcends its specific time and place and speaks into the future, that speaks to those open to hear it today.
So I share with you what I hear it saying to us, how this heavy-hearted mourning, this lamentation at the threshing floor for thorns, is calling out to us – to reflect on, to join with, however we might do that. We have been given this torat emet – this ‘teaching of truth’ as our Torah blessing calls our sacred literature – and sometimes the truth is very painful; actually truth is often too painful to bear, and maybe at the moment we feel we can’t bear it. Okay – but whether we like it or not, as Jews we are bound up with these texts, these teachings. It is who we are, for better or worse. We who know what it is to mourn – and are learning, tragically (and yes, unbearably), how much we cause mourning for others.
I want to dedicate what I am saying today to a group of people in this community who aren’t here today. I know that sounds strange but let me explain, just to finish. There is a cohort of younger people in and around our syangogue who have been feeling that since October 7th their views, their ways of seeing this current conflict, their moral and spiritual perspectives on this traumatic turn in Jewish history – well, there hasn’t been much space for a range of heartfelt views to be expressed. The dominant mantra of solidarity with Israel hasn’t left much space for dissent, or even nuance – this is what they have felt. I am reporting what I hear. So when I spoke a month ago , and what I’ve said today – I say for all those present, of course. But I also say it, for what it’s worth, for all those who are not here with us today.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, December 30th 2023]
“It is better to be wrong by killing no one rather than to be right with mass graves” (Albert Camus, December 1948)
You remember how it began. It began with an outrage, an act of terror, shocking, completely unexpected; and it provoked a cataclysm of death and destruction, slaughter and desecration, horror and folly. It’s engraved on our psyches and features as the deep background to our everyday lives.
As the fog of war descends, regional powers get involved, death tolls pile up, dementing, senseless, and the bloodshed is entwined with a propaganda battle, fierce, relentless, creating information and disinformation, the battle for hearts and minds, with each side convinced of the righteousness of its cause. For God and country. The same old idols that require the same old sacrifices. It never ends, and when it does seem to end – in defeat or so-called victory – it always turns out to be a temporary respite, a pause to lick wounds, mourn the dead, prepare for next time. Because it never ends. The grieving hearts, the necessary justifications, rationalisations, about why it ‘had to be this way’, ‘we had no choice’. When there are always choices.
But you know all this. I often find myself saying that these days: you know all this, there’s nothing I’m saying you don’t already know, in your head or in your heart. Ayn hadash tachat ha-shemesh – There is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes1:9).
This weekend in the UK includes Remembrance Sunday – and synagogues on Shabbat have Remembrance prayers, for those who died serving their country. So you may have understood what I am referring to when I speak about the outrage, the act of terror, that sparks deadly mayhem between nations. Gavrilo Princip assassinated Franz Ferdinand and a madness descended upon Europe, a nightmare, loss upon loss. And we remember it still.
And here we are more than a century later in a world utterly transformed – but a world not so transformed that another act of terror, shocking, unexpected, doesn’t generate more bloodshed, more self-righteousness, more pain, loss upon loss. Because it never ends.
I’m not naïve. Dictators, tyrants, fascists, murderous ideologues need to be resisted, forcefully. The defence of freedoms might sometimes require violence, war might be the unwished-for last resort for a group, a people, a nation, all other avenues having been explored before blood is again shed and the innocent again have to suffer. Because, tragically, the innocent always do suffer. ‘Collateral damage’ is a grim euphemism – because then those sanctioning the bloodshed don’t have to speak about grieving hearts and severed limbs and hope abandoned. No, it never ends – not just the urge for revenge, or retaliation, or tribal battles over land, or resources, or honour, but battles over security, or against injustice, battles where the perverse logic is that others have to die so that our lives can continue.
And meanwhile God looks down and weeps. My children have learnt nothing. My children have turned my teachings into weapons. I wanted ploughshares and fertility and human flourishing – and they made swords and instruments of death. I wanted pruning hooks and the blessings of peace – and they made spears and rockets and the machinery of war (Isaiah 2:4). They have learnt nothing.
Jews are the inheritors of a three thousand year old civilisation and culture rooted in a vision of how people might be able to construct societies for the good of all, societies of compassion and justice, of care for the strangers, the marginalised, the vulnerable, of care for each other. And here we are, worried to have a mezuzah on our doors, worried to send our children to school, worried about wearing a chai (or a Star of David) round our neck. Here we are, with historical fears stirring in our hearts as a worldwide tide of antipathy floods the polluted channels of social media, and Jewish communities around the world suffer the toxic consequences of what Jewish nationalism has brought down on our heads.
Can we bear the pain of this? On any level. On the level of our daily lives here in the UK and the need to keep constantly alert? Or on the level of seeing clearly into the heart of how we have arrived at this stage in our fraught history? Can we bear to see it? I can hardly bear to speak about it. I know it can be too painful to hear it. How Zionism, which was supposed to solve the problem of Jewish insecurity in the world, has resulted in this: endless bloodshed and oppression there, and endless anxieties here. One thing’s for sure: Jews are not in the world to increase the amount of suffering on the planet.
Understand me properly: I am not speaking about the historical and moral need for the Zionist project and the establishment of a State; I am referring to how it evolved, over time, and has ended up in this state of trauma that many people are feeling, I am referring to all the wrong turns on the journey from 1948 to today, that has led to antisemitic graffiti on local buildings round the corner and torn-down posters of the hostages, and Jews frightened to walk in the street, or sit on the tube wearing a kippah.
At some stage we need to ask: how has it come to this? Because it wasn’t inevitable. I don’t subscribe to the idea of the eternal hatred of Jews – that Jews always have been and always will be hated, collectively. We need to be able to look with clarity and with a degree of objectivity – however passionately we might feel about what is happening: we need to be able to look at the complex dynamics of cause and effect, of moral responsibility and choices made – and avoided – these last 75 years. There needs to a reckoning, an ethical audit.
Part of the task of the Jewish people has always been to use introspection and teshuvah (reflective self-judgment) to examine the choices made in life, personal and collective. To find ways to allow our better selves to dominate over our more corrosive impulses.
Of course I am aware that in saying this now, it probably feels much too early to start to think about it. We are in a state of feeling besieged, hurt, wounded, under attack, vulnerable, outraged; for five weeks now we have had to bear with the excruciating pain of Hamas’s hate-fuelled barbarism and the agonies that it wrought (not just for fellow Jews) and continues to evoke. The Jewish people are feeling existentially insecure – whether this is objectively true or not is not the point, it’s a dominant strand of feeling. And when you are feeling insecure, being able to stand back and reflect on questions about how he have reached this point is very hard to do. The feelings flood our capacity to think and reflect. We feel defensive, we feel aggressive, or we just feel numb.
But reflection will need to happen – and it will require emotional and intellectual bravery, and moral leadership, and a careful nurturing of wounded souls. It will require painful soul-searching and a capacity to look beyond simplistic distinctions like innocent victims and guilty persecutors; it will need to look at the psychological complexities of how those who have been or are persecuted become persecutors in turn, it will need to look at how inherited trauma is passed on and lived out, it will need to look at how injustices cannot be ignored for ever, it will need to look at how shame and anger and guilt get repressed or projected or acted out. This will be our Jewish work for years to come, decades to come. I am serving notice on it today.
Too early to start perhaps, but we also can’t afford to wait too long to engage in this work – work for the State of Israel, work for the Diaspora, work for the Jewish people. Let’s just hope that we gain some respite, and speedily, from our current traumas – so that we have the space to do this work, to do it together. Because we will need not just visionary leadership to do it but we will need each other, the support of each other, if we are ever to truly get to grips with the task of re-assessing what is required – what compassion and generosity and imagination and commitment to justice; what it really means to live out the Jewish vision of how things could be, should be.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, 11th November 2023]
I’d like to share a light-hearted experiment I conducted over this last weekend – light-hearted but aiming at something serious.
It was first day of Rosh Hashanah – the Jewish New Year – and I was given the opportunity of speaking to the community in what is known as the ‘sermon slot’.
I started by asking them: are you in the mood at this point in our service for something a bit different? A bit of light relief maybe? I hope so. I want to try something out with you. I’m going to talk to you a bit about Rosh Hashanah, the New Year – but I’m going to ask you to do something, something participatory, if you can.
What I want you to do as I talk is to stop me, interrupt me, if you think there’s something wrong with what I am saying – not factually wrong, I try to get that stuff right – but something strange about what I’m saying, or the way I’m saying it, or just how I’m talking to you. You’ll have to put your hand up, or call out, or get my attention somehow – I’ll try and keep attentive to what’s happening – so catch my attention and tell me what’s wrong. This is an experiment, go with me on it. Stop me when you are ready and tell me what’s wrong.
In the Jewish tradition, we greet the New Year with a mixture of joy and solemnity. Our joy stems from the knowledge that we are given the chance to begin anew, to mend relationships, to rekindle our spirits, and to aspire to be better versions of ourselves. Our solemnity comes from the recognition that the choices we make bear consequences, not only for our own lives but also for the world around us.
The shofar’s call pierces the air, and it is as if God’s own breath is reminding us to awaken from the slumber of routine, to awaken to our higher purpose. This is a time when we stand at the crossroads of the past and the future, contemplating the path we have walked and the journey that lies ahead.
As we dip apples in honey, we are reminded of the sweetness that life holds. Each apple slice becomes a metaphor for our aspirations: the hopes, dreams, and intentions we carry into the coming year. The honey, a symbol of abundance and delight, reminds us that even in times of challenge, there is sweetness to be found. Yet, just as we savour the sweetness of the honey, we are also aware of the underlying bitterness of life’s struggles. The two are intertwined, each enhancing the other…
…In this season of reflection, we engage in the spiritual practice of teshuvah – returning to our true selves and to our Divine Source. Teshuvah invites us to confront our mistakes with humility and to turn toward a path of growth and healing. It is a courageous act, acknowledging our imperfections while recognizing the boundless potential for change that resides within us.
As we stand on the threshold of a new year, let us remember that the journey of transformation is ongoing. It requires effort, intention, and the courage to face both our light and our shadow. May we embrace the teachings of our tradition, finding inspiration in the stories of our ancestors, and may we be guided by the values of compassion, justice, and love.
Let us use this sacred time to deepen our connections – with ourselves, with each other, and with the Divine. As we hear the shofar’s call, may we heed its message and step forward with purpose and hope. May this New Year be one of blessing, growth, and renewal for us all.
Shanah Tovah u’Metukah – a Good and Sweet Year to you all.”
This part of the service was interactive, to a degree, with people making suggestions, but nobody quite twigged what was going on.
So what was wrong with what I’ve been saying?, I asked. It was quite informative, thoughtful after a fashion, maybe a bit bland, innocuous, it had a smattering of the usual rabbinic cliches and platitudes, but on the whole it was pretty inoffensive. I’ve heard a lot worse sermons. For some reason it reminded me of custard, it had a certain warm glutinous smoothness, but how nourishing was it really?
It didn’t touch the heart or quicken the spirit, it lacked any real moment of illumination, it lacked the unpredictable, it certainly lacked humour – all of which is to say that it lacked ‘soul’ (for want of a better word). Why? Because it was a “500 word sermon in the style of Rabbi Howard Cooper, generated by ChatGPT”.
It wasn’t me: it was a simulacrum, a facsimile, of me, it was literally Artificial Intelligence, created to sound like me, to mimic me in a way, it was not human – it had no soul – it just bore a spooky resemblance to my living, breathing, human, idiosyncratic self.
ChatGPT – and there are others like it, programmes of information, misinformation and disinformation, programmes that blur the boundaries between truth and falsehood, programmes that can inform but can also fabricate, programmes that can assemble information but also dissemble and falsify – I think we need to talk about ChatGPT. There’s going to be a lot of it coming our way in the months and years to come – when we contact companies, when we seek health care, it’s going to be in schools and our homes and inside our lives – and it raises some real questions about what it means to be human, and how we connect to one another.
In the last twelve months it’s become omnipresent: it’s all around us, for good and for bad – it’s double-edged, as so many technological developments have been in our history. It’s going to do away with the core work of many professions – accountancy, law, financial planning, insurance, some forms of therapy; if you can get a half decent sermon from ChatGPT, maybe clergy can be phased out too.
Who knows? We are on the cusp of the new, and of dizzying changes in how we live: it’s not just technological of course, these changes – it’s in the weather we endure, it’s in the global financial insecurities, it’s the erosion of liberal democracies and the growth of racist and illiberal authoritarianism, it’s the continental war on our doorstep that enters our living rooms, it’s the mass migration of millions of peoples. The tectonic plates are shifting – and our small lives are caught up in this. It’s hard to keep up.
On the one hand, we carry around in our pockets a machine of immense power that gives us access to all the information in the world (useful and useless), it keeps us connected to others in ways both simple and outlandish, it’s been transformative in ways both benign and malign in how we live. It’s certainly expanded what is possible. On the other hand a lot of daily life seems for many to become more and more of a struggle: try getting a GP appointment, try contacting HMRC, try renewing a passport or a driving licence. Try changing your email address with companies. Try negotiating the scams and frauds directed at us. You can add your own experiences. How many hours of time, how much frustration, it’s daily, hourly, it’s endless.
First world problems, you might say – and they are. Yes, what a blessing it is to live in the relative security and relative comfort of the first world – but the shadow side of this technologically-saturated life is our immersion in the dense entanglement of just manging our lives on a daily basis. “I spend so much of my life just managing my life”, a friend said to me recently. Yes, it can be so demoralising, dementing – and it can take us away from what might be more productive and joyful ways of living.
But if we can’t get off this juggernaut, maybe the New Year gives us an opportunity to pause a while, just to look around us and reflect on what’s happening to us, where we are in life, where life is going, where our life is going? Time perhaps to recalibrate.
For Jews these are days of reflection, of introspection, these so-called ‘Days of Awe’ – here I worry about sounding like my Chat avatar – but nevertheless there’s no getting round the fact that these Days of Awe, Yomim Noraim, are a longstanding part of our tradition. And one of the reasons Jews gather at this season is that – as well any sense of duty or obligation, or in memory of parents, or out of a residual nostalgia, as well of course as seeing each other and celebrating together – is that as well as all that, Jews might also retain a residual faith, or an inkling, that this period has a potential for something new, in our personal life, our spiritual life, our emotional life, the life of our souls, what makes us human.
We’ve been given this gift, this opportunity, once a year, to look inwards as well as outwards, to remind ourselves that the state of our souls is significant: they do become atrophied, numbed, exhausted by life; and they need – we need – to be given attention. We need time to breathe, time for inspiration. Time to consider how we are living, and how we want to live.
And when we look inwards we know: we are not robots, though we might act automatically, even robotically. We are not automatons, but we are programmed – by our genetic makeup, our background, our education, our class, our parental environment, how we were brought up, how free we were to express ourselves growing up, how frightened we were of expressing emotions – anger, aggression, possessiveness, love, timidity, sexual feelings. Both nature and nurture have programmed us to an extent, and we can spend a lifetime trying to de-programme ourselves and discover and express our deepest, truest self, or selves, for we are incorrigibly plural, like the Torah, which tradition says has seventy faces, seventy aspects (B’midbar Rabba 13:15): we mirror that in our own unique multiplicity. As the poet Walt Whitman said “I am large, I contain multitudes”.
But however programmed we might be, or feel, we still know we are not machines – though we can break down, we can and do wear out, our souls get weary, bruised, battered; which is why it seems important to remind ourselves of what it means to have a soul, even if we aren’t sure what that is, or whether it exists. But if it does have any meaning, to speak of the soul, maybe it’s a way we have developed to talk about – a way Judaism has developed to speak about – our human individuality and the awesome way those tens of thousands of genes are coiled into every molecule of our DNA and we each are universes, multiverses, of consciousness, and all that rich and messy profusion of personal history and neurological complexity adds up to the unrepeatable wonder of who each of is. Nobody like us has ever been, or will ever be.
The New Year reminds us that being human is a mystery. How can it be that we are capable of such joy and creativity in life and also be capable of such destructiveness as well? How can our capacity for delight co-exist simultaneously with our experience of pain and suffering? Because we are not machines, pre-programmed, we have to develop our own human intelligence – and by intelligence I’m not talking about A-level and PhD intelligence or smartphone intelligence – I’m talking about spiritual intelligence, for want of a better phrase. We have to develop and hone our own sensibility to what our unique purpose here in the world is. There’s no website for it. You can only find it inside yourself.
‘Today is the Birthday of the World’ – our liturgy offers us a poetic image, a symbol we can make use of, an invitation to celebration and to begin again to ask the most fundamental questions about who we are: what stops us becoming truer to our better selves, what blocks us, what prevents our enjoyment of life, our productivity, our capacity for generosity, compassion, our passion for justice? We aren’t machines but we might find that something in us keeps coming up like a ‘system error’ and prevents us living in ways more congruent with our values, our idealism, our hopes for the future. Because we do lose touch with our vision. With our idealism. We become cynical, we do get defeated by life. We do end up saying, feeling, ‘there’s nothing that can be done’. But that can’t be the end of the story. The end of the story for us individually, or for humanity.
Estragon: Nothing to be done.Vladimir: I’m beginning to come round to that opinion.
Yes, we may have moments when we might share Samuel Beckett’s bleak vision in Waiting for Godot – although the humanity of his characters, the humour in his characters, defy that bleakness. There is always ‘something to be done’. The symbolism of the New Year is a reminder that change is possible: our souls are still open enough to sense that through reflection or prayer or reaching out for help to others – or a combination of these things – change is possible. We aren’t machines. Machines might be efficient but they aren’t kind. They don’t care – only we can care, and only we are in need of that attention we call care.
We are vulnerable – and that means we can sense the vulnerability in others. We are dependent – and that means we need other people. Of course we have strength and courage too, a capacity for love, for self-sacrifice. But we need each other. In our fragility and in our fortitude, we enter these days sensing that the stakes are high. These are Days of Awe – ‘awesome’ has become bit of a buzzword, it’s used by people who’ve been colonised by watching too many reality TV shows or American movies. We need to redeem it, this notion of awe, because it is speaking of the power of teshuvah, of transformation, at this season: something new can open us for us, inside us.
What is awesome, awe-inspiring, is that as Jews we are bound up in cycles of time and history where we can discover that what we do matters: small acts of random kindness can change the world as much as large acts of fighting for justice, and struggling for societal change. Both the so-called ‘small’ and the so-called ‘large’ are radical investments in hope. We are a people who have been pounded and beaten down in the crucible of history, who have gone through innumerable traumas – yet on the whole we haven’t abandoned our tradition, our heritage. We come back time and again and say: we will not be defeated by the forces arraigned against us – by those who say that the crises we face, in the environment, or in our current European war, or in the vast structural injustices and deprivation in our own country, are too difficult to address, or are not our responsibility – we are not going to let cynicism have the last word.
Nor are we going to let those who feel antipathy to us daunt us. We are a people who travel in defiance of despair, who carry this absurd commitment towards hope, towards change. We carry it in our souls, our psyches. Because we are Jews and human and not machines we know that the future is not programmed, but radically open. It is still unwritten and we will join in writing the script of what will come to be. We do it not with omnipotence but with humility.
This is our destiny, we whose spiritual intelligence is uniquely sensitised to both pointing to what is false in society, what is unjust, what lacks compassion, what lacks a moral core, what lacks humanity – and my God there is plenty of that to point to, to call out – but whose spiritual intelligence is also attuned to what we can do, what role we can play, individually, collectively, what ways we can enact our Judaic vision of justice, compassion and wellbeing.
This is our agenda – let’s hope these Days of Awe give us the space and time to take the next tentative steps forward on this journey of the ages.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on the first day of the New Year, September 16th, 2023]
[On the second day of the New Year, September 17th, I shared the following thoughts]
Let me start with a question: how do you, we, keep track of what we go through every passing hour, the dense profusion of thoughts, emotions, intuitions, anxieties, confusions, that add up to our lives? How do we keep track of, how do we chronicle, the hidden regions of our hearts? Our secret fears and hopes and guilt, our inadequacies, our failures (real and imagined) -whatever it is we struggle with, that daily life throws at us? How do we manage life? As the poet said: “The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life” (Seamus Heaney).
And how do we keep track of, how do we chronicle, the dizzying complexity of our world, the events that cascade around us, that tsunami of news and images from across the globe, the ceaseless, relentless, overwhelming calls for our attention: earthquakes, floods, fires, Russian war crimes, political corruption, kisses that are not just kisses, civil wars, famines, bankruptcies of businesses, cities, ethnic nationalism stirring ancient hatreds, millions of people on the move – the reports inundate our waking hours, and maybe our sleep too, with every piece of unsettling news abruptly overtaken by another, creating narratives that have no end, storylines that have no plot and lose their focus in the presence of the next story, a tumult of stories that keep on exposing all the shades of human vulnerability? The vulnerability of others, the vulnerability of ourselves.
How do we keep track of both what we experience within the circumference of our own small lives – small, but of infinite significance to us – as well as what floods through us in our disordered times? How do we focus in and focus out at the same time? Just a small task that this period in the Jewish year sets before us. Looking within – what can we change? Looking outside – what can we change? This is the annual project of these days – an impossible project, of course. But Jews have always been drawn to impossible projects. Like working towards a Messianic age, like believing in an invisible God, like trusting that a small insignificant tribe in the ancient Middle East received a vision that was relevant for all time and for all humanity. Absurd projects, impossible projects – but they have drawn us in, these projects, these stories, they have seduced us for generations. The seductions of hope. We can look in – and we can look out. A dual focus. Our awesome, mind-bending project.
So how do we keep ourselves going? You can of course switch off from all that outer stuff, and focus, try to focus, just on getting though your own day relatively intact. That’s hard enough – the personal travails of the heart. With bodies and minds that let us down, with people around us who frustrate us or cause us grief, with personal disappointments and losses to manage, we might feel we have quite enough to be getting on with.
Why bother to add to it an awareness of the world around us and how it effects us? Yet we know that it does effect us: that the missile attacks on Kyiv are not unconnected with the price of food in our shops; that the exodus of a population in one war-torn part of the world effects the politics of our government; that the glass in your iPhone is made by Uigar Muslims forcibly transferred from their homes into concentration camps; that in London our non-Ulez compliant vehicles wreak havoc on children’s growing lungs and cause 4,000 premature deaths of year – of course we don’t know the actual children nor, probably, the actual people who die early, it’s just statistics, but we know about all this. Even if all this knowledge can feel unbearable, overwhelming, sometimes – we know that we live in a complex interconnected world where everything is connected to everything else.
So I do understand when people say they just don’t want to think about all that supposedly ‘outer’ stuff. One may just want to focus on what I called the hidden regions of our own hearts, and let the heart of the world succumb to its own arrythmia, it’s own deadly disorders.
This may be a matter of temperament, how much we want to focus inwards, on ourselves, and how much we want to engage with the vicissitudes of the world around us. And we may move – in a lifetime, or in a single day – from one position to another, and then back again. I know that I want to try to keep track of both, the hidden regions of the heart and the struggles of the world, the struggles in the world. I want to keep an eye on – and chronicle, report back on – the inner and outer world. I want a dual focus: it’s foolhardy in a way, omnipotent maybe, but I want to see everything simultaneously.
I’m reminded of those lines by the great Jewish-American poet Charles Reznikoff :
“If only I could write with four pens between five fingers
and with each pen a different sentence at the same time –
but the rabbis say it is a lost art, a lost art.
I well believe it.”
That speaks to me as we gather at the New Year, in pursuit of the lost arts. How do we hold all that comes at us? How do we find our bearings? Today, almost at random, I am thinking: how do we find our bearings within this European war that touches our lives in different ways; how do we find our bearings when Israel is going through such self-lacerating convulsions; how do we find our bearings with the waves of toxic nationalism and antisemitism and crazed conspiracy theories that swirl around the planet; how do we find our bearings and find some place of stillness within it all, to find some reassurance, or hopefulness, or comfort, or direction, within this life that sweeps us on relentlessly, remorselessly? How do you find your bearings when living in a maelstrom?
Decades ago the novelist Saul Bellow diagnosed our modern condition as living in what he called the ‘moronic inferno’. And he asked the key question – the religious question, the spiritual and psychological question – how are we supposed to live and remain fully human when all this goes on around us? And being fully human means being in touch with the good within us but also our capacity for destructiveness – and trying to ensure that the goodness within us wins out as it battles with the all the other stuff that lurks inside. So this is the question for the season we are in: how are we supposed to live now in our times? To live well, I would add. Not just to survive, but to thrive. How are we supposed to do it?
I don’t know. Yes, that’s disappointing, I know. Aren’t rabbis supposed to know? Even if they can’t write with four pens between five fingers, aren’t they, we, supposed to know how we can retain our full humanity, our potential to enact the better parts of our nature, our kindness and compassion, our generosity, our passion for justice? Aren’t we supposed to offer a road map of how we need to be, in our wondrous, wounded world?
The problem is my road map may not be the one that works for you or anyone else. I can share the contours of my map but the work of these days is to seek out your own. Maybe the liturgy can offer clues. Maybe conversations with friends and family can offer clues. Maybe something you read or see or just overhear on the tube can point you in a direction. Maybe an amalgam of all these can help sketch out a map to guide you through the maelstrom.
My road map of how I try and keep my finger on the pulse of life, the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, will probably, possibly, be rather different from many of you for one simple reason: I keep away from social media. I don’t use Twitter, Tiktok, Instagram, Snapchat, Telegram – I know the names and to a degree I know what they are – but I see them as distractions rather than opportunities for enhancing my life. You may feel very differently. But I am easily distracted and I don’t want my attention diffused in a thousand directions, or saturated with what other people want me to be interested in.
I know that for some people these things are a blessing, so yes, build them into, or keep them in, your roadmap. All I know is that I value the freedom non-engagement gives me to have my own thoughts, and develop my own direction, and pursue the richness in the world in other ways.
I’m not even on Facebook, though – somewhat reluctantly – I do use WhatsApp, which is of course owned by Meta/Facebook. And I say reluctantly not because I don’t want the connection to others it offers – I crave real connection, real intimacy – but for quite another reason. We use, maybe have to use, a huge amount of what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’ to get through our lives. There are things that we know, that we have to pretend to ourselves we don’t know, in order to get on with our lives.
So you must know, if you use Facebook, the ways in which Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has a malignancy curled inside its beating but sclerotic heart that is deeply problematic. I hear stories every day in my therapy consulting room in which it’s clear that social media is having a detrimental effect on people’s mental health – Instagram is toxic in the ways it promotes fantasies of beauty and body desirability and young women are particularly vulnerable here. And when you are immersed in images of what other people have, or are doing, or who they are doing it with, it generates envy, jealousy, feelings of missing out, worthlessness, unlovability. It draws out, and draws on, these feelings.
But these apps are addictive – who doesn’t want to be ‘liked’? And then I think a bit wider about the way Facebook fanned ethnic violence in Africa; was used by the military in Myanmar in their campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority, which led to murder, rape, and dispossession; we saw its poisonous role in the 2016 US presidential election leading to Trump’s election, as well as in feeding lies into the Brexit debates. Yes, I know it can be used for good as well – but the pernicious aspects of the Meta empire are transparent. You don’t have to dig deep to reveal the underbelly of the beast. And like the tobacco industry before it, there’s a deep denial of the evidence that its product can be detrimental to our health.
We use, maybe have to use, a huge amount of what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’ to get through our lives. There are things that we know, that we have to pretend to ourselves we don’t know, in order to get on with our lives.
I really don’t want to moralise all this, I just want to try and describe it, chronicle it, and say that I am caught up in this too. I might not use Facebook, or any social media, in my attempts to manage this maelstrom of a world but I do engage with – another huge distraction from what matters – I do watch a lot of sport. Sport can, along the way, teach us about dedication, endurance and how to mange disappointment and the inevitability of loss – but I know, all sports fans know, how often professional sport is now tainted by its association with human rights abuses, corruption, sexism. It hasn’t yet stopped me watching – that’s my cognitive dissonance – but In my heart I know it should. Aren’t we all complicit? As I say, I am trying not to be too moralistic about this – though there is a moral question at the heart of it – I’m just trying to describe it, where we are. One pen, two fingers.
So this is the question I am posing for these days of reflection: what does your road map look like, what changes might enhance your life, what could you do without, what do you want to add in? ‘Choose life’ is one of the great mantras of Judaism – we are a people enamoured of the possibilities of life, not just surviving in life, but sharing and enacting a vision of the possibilities of fulness of life, a life of compassion, kindness, justice, empathy, a life of caring for the wellbeing of those close to us and those far from us.
Some of us are going to be more drawn to focus in on our own lives, some of us are going to be more interested in that world out there. One artist who manages the trick, it’s a gift really, of keeping a dual focus is the writer Ian McEwan. His recent book ‘Lessons’ is a masterclass in dual focus: its hero, Roland, one of the so called ‘baby boomer’ generation, struggles to make sense of his life – he is in turns complacent and baffled, loving and lost, indecisive and engaged, his personal life is in many ways a mess, but he has – McEwan gives him – his moments of intimacy, his capacity to show love and to feel loved. In other words, in his complexity and uncertainties and mistakes, in his small triumphs and his disappointments – he is us.
But McEwan’s pre-eminence as a novelist is in showing us this life interacting with a wider backdrop: the Cuban Missile Crisis, Thatcherism, the Aids crisis, perestroika, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Europe, New Labour, the Iraq war, Brexit, the pandemic, the storming of the American Capitol – the book, and it is long, was finished just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, otherwise I am sure it would have included that. But if you want a text that illustrates, illuminates, the grandeur and complexity of living both looking in and looking out at the same time – which is our situation – McEwan is incomparable. Here he is:
The three [friends] spoke and listened easily, intimately. It often happened like this, Roland thought, the world was wobbling badly on its axis, ruled in too many places by shameless ignorant men, while freedom of expression was in retreat and digital spaces resounded with the shouts of delirious masses. Truth had no consensus… Parts of the world were burning or drowning. Simultaneously, in the old fashioned glow of close family, made more radiant by recent deprivation, he experienced happiness that could not be dispelled, even by rehearsing every looming disaster in the world. It made no sense.
And there you have it – that’s a truly great piece of writing, bringing to the surface what is deep inside. The outer world in all its messiness and threat, side by side with the inner world, that can still experience the joy of living. ‘It made no sense’, the author says. No, it makes no sense. And yet it’s true. Emet. True to how we live.
It’s another almost lost art: of making sense of what makes no sense.
This week I watched Melvyn Bragg’s Sky Arts programme on the life and work of David Hockney. Hockney’s 86 now – Bragg’s not far behind that, there were 170 years worth of experience on screen together as they talked in Hockney’s studio near the village of Beuvron-en-Auge. These last few years Hockney’s been living and working in Normandy, where the skies are open, the light intense, the colours rich and vivid, and he’s been painting what he sees each day and what he experiences through the seasons of the year – mostly the fields and trees around him.
His work is filled with a kind of luminous joy and a lightness of being that the landscape is evoking in him. ‘Yorkshire it ain’t’, as he ruefully acknowledged. This late stage of his work floats free of history, of politics, of environmental threats to the nature he paints – and just celebrates what is there, illuminates what is present in the natural world in the here and now. It has a simple and timeless quality. And he’s made hundreds of paintings there, including a 90 metre wall of a painting of springtime that has to be walked along to be seen and experienced. It’s art on a heroic scale, in the spirit of Monet, but entirely his own, it’s where his idiosyncratic evolution as an artist has taken him.
And when Melvyn Bragg asked him at the end of the interview: “what are the public responding to in your work, do you think?” he paused. “I don’t know” he said slowly – either with diffidence or feigned diffidence, hard to tell with a showman like Hockney – “I don’t know…but I like to think it might be…space”. “Space?” prompted Bragg, trying to coax out a bit more. “Yes, the depiction of space. These paintings all have space in them” – which sounded at first like a bit of a cliché; but then he continued (and I’d had this thought so I was taken aback when he went on): “My sister said she thought space was God – which I thought was an interesting notion”.
In the Talmud one of the names the rabbis gave to God was ‘Makom’ – space. Moving away from the Biblical and gendered picture of God as a personality that rewards and punishes, the rabbis of a later generation were developing a non-anthropomorphic understanding of God as an energy that animates the universe, that is the space of the universe, that God is what is present in each place, in each space, in the here and now – not an actor in the story but a dynamic within life itself. Divinity not as personality but as potentiality.
Back to Hockney. Because he then developed this idea in a significant and quite poignant way. “I mean”, he said, “I’m going to have no space soon. I’m going to die…somewhere in the next five years or so…and that will end my experience of space – and time”. He smiled. “I think about this a bit – but then I stop, because it might drive me mad” and then with a wry smile he reached out beside him: “I’ll just have a cigarette”. And he lit up.
Space. We exist in space. And then we don’t. Many people say that if they do have any sense of the divine, or the numinous, or a sense of awe, it is connected with certain spaces and places linked to nature: parks, gardens, seas, open skies, rainbows, stars at night, deserts, wilderness, sunsets, spaces where we experience our lives in a different perspective perhaps, see our smallness, feel our transience, in the presence of places, spaces, that open us up to something bigger than ourselves – they might be fleeting moments but they link us to the timeless. “These paintings all have space in them” – we respond to space.
Where do we find space? Do our religious services offer us space? Do we have space for our selves? Where do we have inner space, space to be with our inner nature, the wonder of our particular being in the world, as unique, as distinctive as every tree that Hockney paints? “They are all different, trees, aren’t they?” he said. “Like people”. We need space, but it can be hard to find: our world is very cluttered, so much external stuff demanding our attention every day, every minute of every hour. The tyranny of the smartphone, of social media, of everyday life crammed with demands. You know how it is. Where is the space, outside us, inside us? We yearn for it – is this what people see when they look at Hockney’s late work : the space we crave? The blessing of space. A moment of godliness here and now. Makom. Space is God. God is space.
So far so good. We could leave it there. But I think there’s something missing. What about the randomness of the world? Because the space of the world gets filled with stuff that isn’t a blessing, that seems far from godly. Even nature is double-sided. We can stand in awe at the side of a waterfall or a Scottish loch, or on a seashore, but sometimes the power of nature is awful not awesome: tides can turn into tsunamis, the sun can wither the harvests, cause forests to burst into flames, rivers can flood, destroying land and people alike, avalanches and earthquakes can extinguish us in a moment. Nature is ruthless, amoral and we romanticise it at our peril. And this is even before we address our role in the destructiveness of climate change. These are the curses we live with.
The section of the Torah we read this week in synagogues addresses this double reality: Deuteronomy 28. It sets side by side what it calls blessings and curses. The promise of abundance and health and wellbeing if God’s commandments are followed; and the threat of disaster and hardships if they are not – the shadow side of life, the tragic darkness of what can unfold.
The latter 50 verses of the chapter show us images of the land blighted, of heat and drought and the death of animals and nature, images of disease and devastation, exile and death, madness, abuse, cannibalism, despair, helpless suffering, populations powerless to resist degradation, persecution, occupation. It’s a piece of extraordinary and terrifying apocalyptic literature, a brilliant and stunning piece of narrative art – Cormac McCarthy eat your heart out – but it’s unbearable to read. Yet we see it starkly unfolding in the daily news. I don’t share the Biblical view that this is God’s punishment for not following the set commandments. But the Torah does suggest that there are consequences we have to face collectively for failures to live ethically: consequences for individuals, for societies, for the planet.
So, as much as Hockney has to offer us, this divine space we need, and images to contemplate and enjoy, perhaps we need another contemporary artist to fill out the picture, an artist who speaks (to my mind incomparably) of consequences, who speaks not of the timeless wonders of nature, but the vicissitudes of history and the fraught impact of the 20th century on our psyches. His work is also awesome in scale, and if you are drawn to it, it’s not because it offers space for dreaming but because it offers a mirror in which we can see who we are in all our confusion and helplessness and moral darkness.
I am speaking of the great German artist Anselm Kiefer whose sculptural and painted work is filled with the detritus of civilisation, abandoned shopping trolleys, lead books devoid of writing, axe heads, giant wilting sunflowers, scorched earth, human hair and ash mixed into his canvases, scenes of devastated forests and deserted landscapes, broken branches, fragments of glass, weapons of war, skeletal outlines of people, ghosts haunting the present.
His work over the decades has been rooted in the apocalypse of German history – but he’s wrestled it into a body of work (also on a heroic scale) that speaks to universal themes: of loss and devastation and hubris and human destructiveness. He’s the antithesis of Hockney’s ahistorical evocation of the simple goodness and joyfulness of life around him.
And yet, in his latest exhibition – and you can still see it online though its just finished at the White Cube in Bermondsey https://www.whitecube.com/gallery-exhibitions/anselm-kiefer-finnegans-wake– his last room (after you walk through the wreckage of consumerism and the shadows and failures of modernity, arranged with artful randomness) is a room containing shimmering works of nature – rivers, woods, fields, golden light, a dense profusion of colour, giant canvases completely different from Hockney – the antithesis of Hockney – but also inducing in the viewer a sense of space, of timelessness, of something that we can appreciate and celebrate and feel blessed by. Life goes on, triumphantly. With us, or without us.
Kiefer’s work will never have the popular appeal of Hockney. But just as the Torah’s vision contains the juxtaposition of blessings and curses, each set of images recognisable, truthful, necessary, in order to invoke the messy, contradictory complexity of life, so we in our own lives are fortunate to be able to be inspired and taught by two such different artists. They each give us space – to think, to breathe, to reflect on life’s meaning, life’s preciousness, and our place within it.
[based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, September 2nd 2023]
It is often said – I have said it myself – that Judaism is an inherently patriarchal religion. The texts of tradition – the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, midrashim, medieval law codes, and so on – were written by men (as far as we know) and they often read as if they are addressed to men, with women as ‘other’. In the last fifty years some brilliant feminist scholarship has helped re-read these texts ‘against the grain’, as it were, but the patriarchal core remains. And yet there are also moments – or more than moments – when a very different sensibility in the Torah comes into play.
Take the text which occurs in the section of Deuteronomy we have reached in our annual cycle of readings: Deuteronomy chapter 24, verse 17
You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the fatherless; you shall not take a widow’s garment in pawn/as a pledge.
This is one of those texts that contains a Biblical theme so familiar that we hardly register how startling its message is – how radical it is not only for its time, but also how compelling its moral weight is even today, in our vastly different situation.
Stranger, orphan, widow – this trilogy of groups to be protected is repeated in the next verses. During harvesting, any grain that is left behind inadvertently must be left for “the stranger, the orphan, the widow” (verse19); and similarly with olives and grapes – what you don’t gather the first time is left for “the stranger, the orphan, the widow” (verses 20-21).
This legislation may emerge from a patriarchal culture, but there’s a clear recognition here that certain women are, potentially, particularly vulnerable: if they have been in a family unit with a husband, and that support system changes, and they are left on their own, then they need special provision. It is a very specific awareness of female vulnerability. The text links this with other non-gender-related examples of vulnerability: children/youngsters who have been orphaned (again, deprived of the security of a family unit, they are particularly vulnerable); and, alongside the widow and the orphan, there’s that existentially-present category of “the stranger”, the outsider, the immigrant, the one who is not part of ‘us’ but who arrives into, or joins themselves to, a community from the outside.
They are vulnerable too – because they don’t innately ‘belong’ to the collective. Either they don’t see themselves as belonging; or, more often perhaps, and more universally, they are not seen as belonging to ‘us’: our tribe, our group, our nation, our society. Now, as then, if you don’t belong to the majority – if you are an outsider – you are vulnerable.
It is remarkable that this injunction in the Torah is repeated so often: 36 times. A constant drumbeat is sustained, of keeping this reality in mind: that it is the ongoing responsibility of the Hebrew community, the Jewish community, to have this fine-tuned sensitivity to the stranger, the outsider. A sensitivity that isn’t just a vague fellow feeling of human connectedness – but involves a demand to translate the feeling into action. The vulnerable need something active from us. Not just sympathy.
And more often than not when we read about this demand, the text – as in our portion (verses 18 and 22) – reminds us that our alertness to human vulnerability is rooted in our historical experience. The foundational mythos of the community is the inherited memory of slavery in Egypt. This part of our story became an archetype in Judaic consciousness about one particular people’s vulnerability – but thereby it became the prototype of humanity’s innate vulnerability. The image of slavery speaks directly about the dynamic of who has power and who is powerless.
To be a slave is to be dependent and vulnerable, with radically reduced agency. And this is your history, the Torah says, this is at the heart of your story. The Jewish people’s story began in helplessness – you must never forget that trauma, the Torah insists. Is this why it is repeated so often – because there is an unconscious wish to forget, to repress, to ‘not know’ the pain of powerlessness?
It’s an extraordinary message, really, to give to a people. Your story doesn’t begin with glory, it begins with degradation, powerlessness.
And in many ways powerlessness and vulnerability have been integral to the whole of the Jewish story up until modernity, and even into it. I don’t want at all to suggest that Jewish history is a story only of eternal victimhood – what the historian Salo Baron called, disdainfully, “the lachrymose view of history”. Of course it isn’t: there was so much wit and wisdom, creativity and genius and joy along the way. But what I am focused on right now is the recognition that outsiderdom, vulnerability, and helplessness has been a transgenerational theme in our story for a very long time. All the way to the gates of Auschwitz.
Of course Zionism was supposed to have solved that problem for us. But one of the tragedies of Jewish contemporary life is that actually it hasn’t helped us collectively to feel less vulnerable. Perhaps controversially, I would say that because of the way the Zionist enterprise has turned out, it’s made our collective Jewish lives more vulnerable – or at least just as vulnerable as we have always been as Jews in the world. You can have the most high-tech army in the world and the most sophisticated surveillance systems and security services, but once your Jewish state forgets the moral vision of Judaism then, at a fundamental level, it just adds to the historic vulnerability that Jews have always felt. (Look no further than the grey gates that surround our synagogue buildings and the security set-up that everyone has to go through to get into any Jewish institution).
We are still slaves ‘up here’, in our minds – slaves to a skewed reading of our history, past and present. Vulnerability has become part of our psyches, unfortunately. Like a scar on the soul. But who knows – just a question – might that scar be a price worth paying if it keeps us alert to our shared vulnerability with others? That’s what the Torah seems to want us to do – keep remembering that vulnerability is built into the human condition and that we Jews have a special moral responsibility to remember this, to acknowledge this, and to act on it. The Torah texts even call it a ‘commandment’ that we remember and act on it.
In unstable times – socially, politically, financially, environmentally – we may feel our vulnerability more immediately. Each of us will feel this differently – feelings of vulnerability differ widely from person to person; and we might feel more or less vulnerable at different times of our lives.
How do we live with this vulnerability? One of the things that can sometimes help is community. Our individual vulnerability or fragility or insecurity can be held within the fabric of the collective, the experience that there is something we are (or can be) part of that is stronger than we ourselves may feel individually. And part of the fabric that makes the Jewish collective stronger is that we are rooted in a tradition that is sustained by its immersion in texts and traditions and spiritual themes that say there is a power in the universe that sustains us and nurtures us, that holds us and maintains us, even if we don’t see it, even if we can’t feel it, even if we don’t believe in it. That there is a source of strength and security underpinning our existence.
I would never suggest that the dynamics of this are simple. To feel a sense of security in life can be a hard business. But as the High Holy Days approach, Jews have the time to reflect on these themes, and see if strength can be derived by working on these rhemes collectively.
Yes, there’s our personal vulnerability, and our need to protect others who are vulnerable. But we are not on our own with this. That’s the value of community. Human solidarity is a powerful resource.
[based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, August 26th 2023]
Let’s start with an image, a picture – a celebrated, iconic image from March 1965.
There in the middle is Martin Luther King, Baptist minister and civil rights campaigner, on an interfaith civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery along with – to his left, our right – his colleague and friend Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (with his distinctive prophetic-looking white beard).
It’s a wonderful picture – I love the fact that they are all wearing the Hawaiian lei, symbol of friendship, honour, celebration. It was after this march for social justice and voting rights that Heschel is memorably quoted as saying that, “as we walked, I felt that my feet were praying”. So a wonderful moment in history captured – but the picture also feels that it belongs to a long lost era: a time when there was an active Black-Jewish interfaith alliance in the United States which brought together Black Americans suffering from continuing social and legal discrimination and Jews, both religious and secular, who as a people had only a couple of decades before that experienced in Europe the discriminatory, dehumanizing and murderous consequences of another form of racism.
In the early 1960s King came to see Jews as “the most consistent and trusted ally in the struggle for civil rights”: he came to value the friendship and support of, for example, a young Reform rabbi, Israel “Sy” Dresner, who recognised that, as he put it, “silence has become the unpardonable sin of our time”. Dresner’s activism frequently led to him being jailed for his non-violent anti-racism activities: four times between 1961 and 63, once together with MLK. But, as I said, it’s a long gone era because such solidarity between these two groups – whose histories contained parallel narratives of systemic denigration, oppression, and often deadly victimization – fractured in later decades.
Questions of identity politics came along with their competing hierarchies of victimhood; then after 1967 and the occupation of the West Bank the Israel-Palestinian conflict gradually loomed larger; and then what’s come to be known as ‘white privilege’ emerged as a theme: and all this came to overshadow what these two historically-victimised peoples might have had in common, and how they might have been able to support each other in the face of deep-rooted societal strands of anti-black and anti-Jewish prejudice.
That’s very much an American story, but there are parallels to it here in the UK, the fragmenting of shared solidarity into silos where every group starts to feel they have to look out for themselves in the face of institutionalized injustice. This is not the whole story of course – we now have London Citizens which brings different groupings together, there’s the Jewish Council for Racial Equality (JCORE), and there’s active Jewish-Muslim co-operation – but something has changed since those times when that inspirational picture was taken. A competitive embitterment has set in. And of course inspirational leadership is in short supply.
It takes a rare form of leadership to see what kind of pain those outside one’s own tribe might be suffering, one’s own group, one’s own class. To see what one might share as human beings with those who don’t belong to ‘us’. It’s always easier to focus on what differences there might be. It can be important to acknowledge differences, but a sense of solidarity with those who are different is one of the things that the Torah portion read today in our synagogue highlights.
The text of Numbers chapter 22 contains a comedy masterpiece – it’s straight out of Walt Disney. A man, Bilaam, is sent on a mission – but the success of the mission depends on a fantasy talking donkey who is able to see more clearly than the human character. Bilaam’s a kind of sorcerer, who is supposed to have this so-called prophetic gift – he can bless, he can curse. But the point is he’s for hire. He’s freelance. You pay him enough and he’ll cast a spell on your enemies, you pay him a bit more and he’ll praise you to the heavens, or promise you the earth. He’s smooth talking – he might not quote Latin or Greek like our late unlamented prime minister, but he’ll tell his audience what it pays for him to say. Or what he’s paid to say.
You might be surprised we have a comic sequence in the middle of the Torah, but that’s what the text gives us. You have sorcerer Bilaam, the PR guru, who knows how to use words, and you have the sorcerer’s apprentice, the donkey, who can see God’s messenger each time it appears. Yet Bilaam can’t see what’s in front of his eyes. The donkey first wanders off the path and has to be dragged back, then the donkey manages to crush Bilaam’s foot against a wall, then the third time the donkey just collapses in a heap – because Bilaam again refuses to see what’s staring him in the face. The Biblical storytellers invented this cartoon-like interlude as a counterpoint to the more serious themes. Just as Shakespeare did in his dramas: one recalls the doorkeeper in Macbeth, in the midst of the bloody mayhem: “Knock knock, who’s there?”. (The first ‘knock, knock’ joke). It is the storyteller’s art to juxtapose the lightness of being with its seriousness.
And the themes in this text not only highlight serious issues but they are surprisingly contemporary ones as well. Political ones.
The story shows how Balak, king of Moab, is worried about what the Israelites might do to his land as they continue on their journey through the desert. That’s why he hires Bilaam to curse them. You can see what’s going on here because it’s in the news every day. Balak sees all these potential immigrants on his border. He doesn’t know they are only passing through, that they are en route to a supposed better life. So he panics. He thinks “Stop the Boats!”, as it were. He thinks these foreigners are going to consume all his resources, his benefits, his hospital beds and houses: “this multitude will eat up everything around us as an ox devours the grass of the field” (Numbers 22:4). This is brilliant storytelling: the Torah describes these foreigners, through Balak’s eyes, as being like greedy animals – “as an ox devours the grass of the field” – the rhetoric is a classic case of dehumanizing strangers who arrive at our borders.
The Torah is haunted by the future.
So what does Balak do? He didn’t have the tabloid press to do his dirty work, but he did know a man who could make a good speech, Bilaam, who was always for hire. Balak hoped Bilaam could use his way with words against those threatening to ‘swamp’ the land, ‘flood’ over the borders. You see, that’s the power of words – that they can be used to denigrate and curse as well as support and bless. Words can be used to make people hate each other, or have compassion for one another. It’s the power of language.
And as the Torah text unfolds it shows that Bilaam is a poet, a wordsmith, a conjurer with language: that was his gift, his power, the slippery arts of the soothsayer, the leader writer, the speechwriter, anyone paid to sow fear, spread distrust. And as the Torah text shows, that’s particularly easy to do against the stranger, the traveller, the immigrants arriving at a nation’s borders. Words slip, slide, they don’t stand still, they can be used – then or now – to curse, to manipulate, to denigrate; or they can be used to bless, to heal, to comfort.
And the power of this story – and it is a timeless narrative, up to the minute in its significance – is that it illustrates how the most gifted speakers can be more stupid than donkeys, just unable to see what is in front of them – whether it is divine messengers (as in this text) or fellow human beings (who are also, in the Jewish mystical tradition, agents of the divine, carriers of the divine spark).
In the end, Bilaam’s rhetorical gifts are used to benefit life – the life of the Israelite community – rather than to bring to fruition Balak’s fear-driven hatred of the outsider. And it is solidarity with the outsider that Bilaam gives voice to: “How good are your tents o Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel” (Numbers 24:5); and, amazingly, we begin every prayer service with just these words, which means we begin each service with a quietly crafted irony.
The Hebrew storytellers created a character who was not a Hebrew – he’s an outsider, he’s not one of ‘us’, the Hebrew people, the Jewish people – but we’re told he has access to God, to the divine dimension of life. And this outsider can see that there is something special about this people, our people. He’s not one of ‘us’ yet he can see something special about us – the storytellers make him into a character who blesses Israel. And then the rabbis came along and lifted those words out of the Bible and said: Yes, that’s how we will begin our services! Each service will start with a blessing, a quote from the Torah – but from someone the Torah says was outside our tribe, our group, our people.
Each service will be a reminder that although we are (or like to think we are) a special group, a distinctive group, we live in a world where not everyone is like us: we live in a world of difference – but let’s try and remember that difference is a blessing, can be a blessing, if we see each other as we really are, not as a threat, but from a perspective of solidarity.
In the end we are all outsiders. We are all outsiders to someone else, some other group, or nation or religion. Actually there is no central group, no core group: we are all spokes on the wheel of life. But our work – spiritual work, psychological work, political work – is to appreciate that what makes us different from each other is not a curse for humanity but a potential blessing.
As we journey on, in whatever community we belong to, as we journey on like Israelites through the desert, we can develop, practice, the art of bringing a blessing to each other, of seeing the best in others and not always fearing the worst. Is it a lost art? Let’s hope not. Let’s imagine we can be bearers of the prophetic spirit, like Bilaam in the end, like Martin Luther King, like Abraham Joshua Heschel: let’s imagine we can be carriers of hope not hate.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, July 1st, 2023]
I recently revisited some films about British Jewish identity that I was involved with thirty years ago: A Sense of Belonging, a four part series commissioned by Channel 4, dreamed up and directed by Paul Morrison.
Paul and I worked on the structure of the films, and the book that accompanied the series, and on re-watching the films now one theme struck me as still particularly relevant to the Anglo-Jewish community. This is the question of whether Jews want to be seen – to stand up and be counted, literally and figuratively – and recognised in our group identity by the powers that be. Or whether we wanted to be quiet, to slip under the radar as it were – not to be hidden from sight, but just not to draw attention to ourselves, individually as Jews (for example in the 2021 UK census) or collectively.
Obviously this is not a new theme in Jewish life. It’s probably as old as Jewish history, or at least Diaspora Jewish history, when Jews have been minorities in whichever countries they lived in. At the beginning of the 1990s, when the films were made, the question of putting one’s head over the parapet was still a live issue. There was an older generation who had been brought up to keep their heads down, assimilate outwardly – Jewish in private, English in public – a very deliberate post-War stance (though it was true pre-War as well) of not drawing attention to one’s Jewishness.
But alongside those traditional Anglo-Jewish attitudes, Paul interviewed a younger generation who were not feeling so constrained, who wanted to be able to be Jewish publicly, to campaign as Jews, to go on demonstrations as Jews – Jews against apartheid, Jews against Nuclear weapons – a generation who were feeling more confident that they belonged in the country of their birth, in the UK, and wanted the freedom to express their Jewishness wherever it was: at school, at work, at university, to feel free to wear a kippah on the street or on the tube; to show pride and openness about being Jewish.
One can see, looking back, that this was part of larger trends that were changing, in the UK and elsewhere, about identity: that in liberal democracies around the world, one was allowed to be, one could honour, who one felt oneself to be – whether it was gay or lesbian, or Black, or part of the woman’s movement, your experience of yourself, who you were, who you identified as, needed expressing; that you could be ‘out’, out and proud, and not have to shield yourself, hide yourself, when out in the world.
For a younger generation today this might all seem amazing, that Jews lived with a double identity, a private identity and a public persona: amazed because it might feel that these things are not even a question now – if you are transitioning, it you have autism, if you have a disability, if you are survivor of abuse, if you are an eco-warrior, a goth, a white witch – whatever is part of what makes you ‘you’ (your so-called ‘identity’) – of course it can be out there, it’s part of the rich tapestry of our collective life.
But for those of us with longer memories, we might recognise how much has changed in the last 30 years, often in some fundamental ways, around this recognition of difference in our society: that there’s an acceptance that there’s room for all sorts of differences from one another; and that both from a legal point of view and an emotional point of view contemporary society not only accepts diversity, but celebrates its diversity. This is social progress of a particular kind, and Jews have benefited from that wave of change – and quite often have been at the forefront of campaigns to ensure that such tolerance of difference has become the norm.
And yet, that impulse in liberal democracies to accept and celebrate diversity is not the only show in town. Jews are still carrying an anxiety – and you can call it paranoid or you can call it justified by two thousand years of history – anxiety about being Jewishly out, or Jewishly counted. The 2021 UK census, when people were invited to declare their ethnicity, brought this to the fore. Many Jews, anecdotally, are said to have declined to say they were Jewish on the forms. This anxiety about being on a list somewhere is part of Hitler’s grim legacy. Nazism may have been defeated 75 years ago, two or three generations ago, but many Jews still have persecutory anxieties inside them.
There’s two kinds of persecutory anxiety – one bit is that antisemitism is still real, and Jews can be on the receiving end of it. We recognise that strand of anxiety quite easily.
But less easy to get hold of is how sometimes internally – and it varies from Jew to Jew – we are also persecuted. That we are our own persecutors: always fearing the worst, never able to relax inwardly, always vigilant – we might suffer from a form of internal persecution that doesn’t allow us to relax and be ourselves in public, or at work, and sometimes still inhibits us in private. This is Hitler’s long term victory over us – he’s still up here, in our heads, whether we want it or not. So we become our own persecutors. (I think David Baddiel suffers from this a bit).
I would suggest though that we don’t have to be victims of this internal persecutor. We can push back against it. That’s a job of work, a psychological and spiritual piece of work, not to let our souls be haunted by our past, our history. It’s inner work we need to do – so that we don’t stay oppressed by our own thoughts, but are really free to be Jewish as openly and enjoyably as we’d like to.
But when I talk about this celebration of diversity not being the only show in town in liberal democracies, I’m not thinking just about Jews being relaxed about being Jewish, I am talking about the threats to that very notion of diversity – because there are some powerful countervailing forces around the world in so-called democracies. You better not be a Muslim in India under the current Hindu nationalist regime; you better not be part of the Traveller community in Hungary, or indeed anything other than conservative Christian; you better not be black, or Mexican, or a woman wanting an abortion, in many parts of the United States; you better not be Arab in parts of Israel, or – if current trends continue there – gay and Jewish, or a member of a NGO who gets funds from the Diaspora to monitor military and legal abuses, civil rights abuses.
Genuine pluralistic democracy is under threat in many places – and it is not just other nations who are suffering these attacks from within. In the UK we see attacks on the right to protest in public, the rights to assemble, the rights to roam, the rights to asylum, the rights to take collective action, the rights to having a private identity in public space without being tracked or filmed or being under surveillance, i.e. the right to live without being under suspicion for being a citizen within this allegedly democratic nation.
It is not just Jews who have worries about being seen, in other words – it is part of wider and deeper trends in modernity in societies that have political narratives of personal freedom, that on the one hand suggest that we have autonomy to express ourselves in all our complex diversity – but then find, across the globe, ways of monitoring, suppressing and persecuting those same sovereign rights.
As Jews we have learnt the art of being able to be both self-expressive about our Jewishness – and to self-regulate, hold back. We walk a kind of tightrope between these two experiences, expressing ourselves and being quiet, showing and hiding: I think there are ways each of us do this all the time, it has become maybe second nature to us. Perhaps this is what it now means to be Jewish in the world, to live with these two impulses inside us, it has become part of our Jewish identity. Proud of who we are – self-protective about who we are. Telling the world who we are – keeping shtum about who we are.
This is what it means to be in the wilderness, B’midbar: we began to read from the book of Numbers this week. This part of the Jewish saga begins with a census of the people. And then the people start their journey through the wilderness. ‘Wilderness’ is about being between two spaces. We are not in Egypt – we aren’t slaves. But we haven’t reached the Promised Land. We are in-between.
I would say we are always in between, in every generation: that what the Torah describes in the book of Numbers and the book of Deuteronomy, this journey through the wilderness, is existential. In other words it is an imaginative act of storytelling about what life is like in-between, what it feels like in-between complete oppression on the one hand, and promises of a transformed life on the other hand.
The children of Israel journeyed that mythic 40 years waking up every day with the miracle of manna, of having their lives sustained for them – but also with the uncertainty of what that day would bring. Would they stay camped around a watering hole, or would they have to move on? Where were they going, where were they headed? They had no idea, just vague rumours and stories that circulated, Moses was always too busy to ask and anyway he had his head in the clouds; and what was this promised land anyway, and how long would it take to get there? They didn’t know it would take forty years – it might be over next week – all they knew was that they were in the wilderness and they had to face the uncertainty of being on a journey into the unknown.
Well that’s us too, we Jews who don’t know where we are going, what will become of us as a people; we who have to wake up each day and decide: how do we express our Jewishness today, how ‘out’ are we going to be, how much do we hide, how much are we afraid to be ourselves?
So we wander and we wonder – and this is what it means to be Jewish. It’s our destiny: to wander and to wonder. The wilderness is where it’s at, where life is lived. Even if you live in Israel, it’s still the wilderness – the space between slavery and the imagined promised land. We are a wilderness people, wandering and wondering what will become of us all. And for me, that’s worth celebrating.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, May20th, 2023]
Two themes have been on my mind this week – trauma and holiness – and I’ve been wondering whether they are linked. On the surface they seem quite distinct. But what we discover in life, perhaps, is that everything is connected to everything else: that’s one of the meanings of the Biblical and liturgical phrase Adonai Echad – “God is One” – that there is a fundamental unity to existence in which everything is linked in myriad ways to everything else; that there is a unity even if we only experience fragmentation.
Trauma – we know what that is, or think we know. How best to define it? Severe emotional distress to psychologically shocking events? The kind of distress inside that lingers, over time – sometimes months, years, decades after the precipitating event or events. The kind of distress that causes a sense of fracture in our worlds, affecting how we think, how we sleep, how we form relationships, whether we can find enjoyment in life. I know that the word is used colloquially and loosely these days – anything can be described as a trauma (getting a bad haircut, missing a bus, being ignored by a waiter, somebody not texting you back) but these irritations – slights to our innate wish for the world to go the way we want it to – aren’t what I’m talking about.
The kind of thing I’m reflecting on – and this is what prompted me to start thinking about it this week – is the experience of a seven year old German boy called Frank, who in April 1939 was sent by his parents Max, a lawyer, and Charlotte, an artist, on a train from Hamburg to England. Where he’s lived ever since, living and working in one room, in Camden, painting and drawing, obsessionally, every day of the year, year in year out, decade after decade, painting what he sees out the window, or in the streets around him, or painting a few people who sit for him, often for years, the same people, and he sits and paints, then scrapes off the paint, and paints again, more layers, building a portrait of an external scene, or of a living person whose life is what the artist seeks to capture, to present, to re-present, to make come alive.
Frank Auerbach never saw his parents again – another victory for Auschwitz – and as he turns 92, one can only wonder about the relationship between the UK’s greatest living artist’s way of living and working – solitary, monastic almost, devoted to making things live on an easel, on a canvas, to hold them, capture that aliveness – one can only wonder about how that unswerving endeavour is connected to what we can accurately describe as the trauma of his early life. Everything is connected to everything else.
I started thinking about Auerbach this week because I read a recent interview with him in which he said “…it’s possibly true that our deepest experiences are other people. And it seems the only thing worth using for one’s art is one’s deepest experiences.”
“Our deepest experiences are other people” – is that the same as ‘Our deepest experiences are with other people’? I’m not sure. But the notion that “the only thing worth using for one’s art is one’s deepest experiences” touched me in different ways. It touched me personally because when I write, or speak, I do think of it as a form of artistic endeavour – and I hope that doesn’t sound too grandiose, but I’m sharing my experience right now, how I think and feel about what I do, what I am doing right now. So it touched me personally,
But what he said also touched me because of what it made me think about his deepest experiences – of loss, of disjuncture, of rupture, of disorientation, of bereavement, of not being able to hold on to the living presence of others, his parents. And it left me wondering, as you can hear, about those deep experiences of his – that trauma, for want of a better word (though it suddenly sounds like an impoverished word to describe losing a world) and how it is related to his way of making art.
And it was interesting that he went on to say, “People say they are expressing themselves – but I’m not expressing myself at all. I’m trying to make an image”. That’s the conscious wish of course: to make an image, to capture something and keep it alive, for itself, and for the one who looks at it. But of course something else is going on, is always going on, because he went on in the interview to add the comment that years later he might look at a work “and see how I felt at the time, but wasn’t aware of then”. So the unconscious is always in play. You think you are making an image – but you find later that in doing so you are revealing a feeling. But you don’t notice that at the time.
So here I am, adding layer on layer to this portrait – in homage to Auerbach, as it were – adding, reflecting, scraping away, all in the name of speaking about trauma – which is all around us, all the time. I’ve just read that the oceans have had a sudden unprecedented rise in temperature in recent months, and scientists are baffled and extremely concerned (I want to say traumatised), about what the consequences will be for sea levels and the marine ecosystems and flooding, and everything is connected to everything, so this will affect us all, is affecting us all, the low level trauma we have to mange somehow in our daily lives, though it isn’t manageable and just seeps into the crevices of our souls.
So much for my first theme: trauma.
So what about holiness? The sedrah this week was Kedoshim. “You shall be holy…” (Leviticus 19)– it feels almost absurd to speak about that in the same breath as trauma. Are they linked? Can we link them? We know the themes of holiness – they are well rehearsed. The injunction at the heart of the Torah for the Israelites to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy people”. This is the vision we have carried for millennia. In the midst of the Levitical chapters filled with all the details about ritual holiness, texts focused on the priests and the sacrificial cult, comes this startling code of moral and ethical conduct, a quite different definition and detailing of what holiness means.
For the Torah, of course, everything is connected to everything – so ritual purification (holiness) is integrated with, connected seamlessly to, the actions of every individual in everyday life (personal holiness): respect your parents; leave part of your harvest for the poor and the stranger (an early example of food banks); do not steal or embezzle or lie; don’t oppress each other (that one’s for Dominic Raab, amongst a million others); don’t delay payment to your employees and ensure they have reasonable hours; don’t curse the deaf or trip the blind; don’t pervert justice; don’t go around gossiping or bearing tales; don’t nurse a grievance, take revenge, or hold a grudge; respect your elders; protect the stranger; don’t cheat in business; and, a culminating way of being holy, almost a one line sound-bite to this guide to holiness: “you shall love your neighbour as yourself” (19:18) – that radical call to identify with the Other as if he or she is as valuable a human being as you are. And as deserving of care as you are.
And when we list these requirements, these imperatives, for holy living – the stuff of everyday life, valid for all people and for all societies, a timeless code that is millennia old, at the heart of our Jewish vision – maybe we can glimpse its relationship to trauma. Although some traumatic events are beyond human control, earthquakes for examples, many forms of trauma in the past and in the present are linked to failures to live attuned to this holiness code.
Whether it is the traumas of war, of rape, of slavery, of all the forms of abuse that people can inflict on each other, the psychological scars that are carried are a direct result of humanity’s inability to live in the light of holiness, to be guided personally, socially, nationally, by holiness. When holiness fails, trauma comes into being. When holiness goes into eclipse, trauma creeps into view. When holiness is abused or mocked, trauma seeps into the soul.
Kedoshim tihiyu says the Torah: ‘You will be holy’, ‘you must be holy’; but also we can hear in Kedoshim tihiyu : “you are made to be holy” – this is your purpose in life. Without that, expect only trauma, in all its endless varieties. If you spend seventy years in a room painting, drawing, sketching, you can make great art out of trauma. That is a kind of holy living, the holiness of the Zaddik, the saint, the mystic – but for the rest of us, we struggle towards holiness lest trauma overwhelms us.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, 29th April 2023]
