This is how it starts: ‘Purpose of visit?’ ‘A study tour with British Friends of Rabbis for Human Rights. Here’s the itinerary.’ ‘How long?’ ‘You can see on the itinerary – Sunday to Sunday.’ ‘What are you doing on the tour?’
Hesitation. I think of the ambiguity within the Security guy's question. English is not his first language. Is he asking what the tour will include? The details are all there, it’s laid out in black and white, a daily schedule, hour by hour: Jerusalem, South Hebron Hills, Tel Sheva, Sederot, Hadera, West Bank, meetings with NGOs, studying with rabbis, meetings with Bedouin and Palestinians and workers for RHR. Does he want me to repeat to him the itinerary? Or is the question more personal – ‘what are you doing on this tour?’ - how is it that I have decided to go and see for myself some of the human rights, civil rights and humanitarian projects that my rabbinic colleagues in Israel and Palestine are engaged with?
As I hesitate about what will be the simplest response at the El Al check-in at Heathrow – i.e. the response he wants to hear so that I can be processed through security and on to my flight – I realise that it has already started: the encounter with a country that is in a state of heightened suspicion and fear. Where everyone is a potential enemy. Where everyone who is ‘Other’ is threatening. And – as I learnt during an exhausting and revelatory week in Israel – the ‘Other’ is also within.
For Israel is in a state of undeclared war within itself, and with itself. And the battle lines are becoming clearer and clearer. Will Israel become a racist and theocratic state where the rule of law is continually over-ridden by interest groups like religious settlers and nationalists; or will it retain its original democratic ethos as inscribed in its Declaration of Independence? A Declaration that says that the State ‘will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants...it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture...’
But I am still at the airport. ‘Why is there Arabic here?’ – he’s pointing to the paper that I’d hope would save a lot of time and tedious explanation but now has become a focus of scrutiny and concern. The organisation’s name, ‘Rabbis for Human Rights’, is in English, Hebrew and Arabic on the letterhead of the itinerary. And while I pause and consider what to say, another question arrives, or maybe it is a statement, I am not really listening any longer: ‘You are meeting Palestinians...’
What I want to say is that Arabic is still, the last time I checked, one of the official languages of the State of Israel, so it has a right to figure in the letterhead of an Israeli human rights organisation. But I don’t want to be sarcastic, or provocative, because I want to catch my flight - but I am aware of how easily aggression can be generated by the fraught and dense emotionality that is wrapped up in this beleaguered country.
So that was how it started. And that was how it continued. As several of the rabbis we met on the trip said, in a manner so casual that one could easily miss its significance, there is a battle going on ‘for the soul of Israel’, and that ‘the Jewish soul is threatened’ – but most Israelis are living in denial. Denial of the moral and spiritual costs of the Occupation, denial of discrimination and inequalities that are systemic in Israel itself, denial of how a critique of the government or the army can come out of love of Zion rather than anti-semitism or Jewish self-hatred.
Rabbis for Human Rights was established in Israel in 1988 by the American-born Reform Rabbi David Forman in order to give voice in the contemporary Israeli setting to the Judaism’s traditional concern for the ‘stranger’, the ‘outsider’ and the disadvantaged. Their initial focus was primarily on protecting the human rights of Palestinians in areas controlled by Israel; but they rapidly expanded their work to embrace the rights of vulnerable and minority groups throughout Israeli society.
During the week we met, studied with and travelled with a series of inspirational and charismatic RHR rabbis (from across the religious spectrum, including Rabbi Gideon Sylvester an ex-United Synagogue rabbi who now runs the RHR Human Rights Yeshiva) as well as hearing from and seeing in action their professional colleagues trained in law, education and civil rights.
Based in Jerusalem, we spent the first day gaining an insight into some of the grotesque consequences of the Separation Wall that now scars the landscape of Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside. Although the wall – built, ironically, by Palestinian workers with concrete bought from factories owned by President Mahmoud Abbas - has given Jewish Jerusalemites a much greater sense of security, its ugly presence is a constant reminder that Jewish security has been bought in exchange for increased hardship for east Jerusalem Arabs: hospitals that were once ten minutes away by car now require a 2 hour circuitous trip, around Jerusalem and through two checkpoints; livelihoods have been ruined, and families divided.
The shock of the aesthetic desecration of Jerusalem – and Bethlehem, now surrounded by a ‘sleeve’ of brutal concrete that enables pious Jews access to Rachel’s Tomb, but denies access to Muslims, for whom it is also a site of prayer - is mirrored in the moral collapse at the heart of the government’s policy: although Israel has the right and duty to protect its citizens from attacks, the Wall was the most extreme solution available. We witnessed the ways in which its route was designed more for future political purposes – to make territory easier to annex in any future settlement – than for security purposes.
Although one reads about these issues, it is not until one sees the reality on the ground that something of the human dimension to these actions becomes clearer. And it is the human costs that the RHR workers and rabbis are focussed on and helped us understand in some depth. Many of the projects we visited are working at grass-roots level on inequities that ordinary Israelis suffer: single mothers in Hadera who need help with economic and legal problems or domestic violence; Bedouin in the Negev whose civil amenities are far inferior to the Jewish neighbours, or whose land is appropriated for reforestation by the JNF; Orthodox women who suffer discrimination in their communities...the work of RHR embraces a bewildering variety of causes, often in partnership with other NGOs, some of whom – like the New Israel Fund, Yisrael Hofshit, and Citizens for Equality - we were also able to meet.
Bringing specific human rights grievances to the attention of the Israeli public while pressuring the appropriate authorities – from local courts to the Knesset - is an endless job. Visiting the RHR website – www.rhr.org.il/eng - is an experience both exhilarating and maddening: as I read it I am in awe of the dedication of those who are fighting injustices but enraged at the ways in which the State of Israel acts in ways contrary to humanitarian and ethical principles.
As a group we moved from being depressed, angry and perplexed at some of the glaring injustices – particularly on the West Bank where Orthodox settlers are currently engaged in a series or random attacks on Palestinian homes as well as the fire-bombing of mosques – to feeling stirred and inspired by some of the RHR workers who are battling for the soul of Israel, case by case, family by family.
One of the comments that struck me most was that of a lawyer for RHR who said that this work offers you a ‘one way ticket’ – once you have opened your eyes to the reality of the suffering and discrimination that the State and the army (and the two are entwined in a fatal embrace) inflict on people who are seen as ‘Other’ – like Palestinians in the territories, or Bedouin in the Negev, or Arab-Israeli citizens in east Jerusalem – there is no going back. It isn’t possible to un-know what one knows – or it isn’t possible to do so and keeps one’s soul alive (my words, not hers).
It so happened that while I was there I came across an article in Ha’aretz written by Amira Hass, a continual thorn in the side of the government for her exposure of injustices. After detailing some cases in the Territories in Israel proper where ‘the right to memory is presented as a security risk’, she went on to talk about the work of Rabbis for Human Rights in this way:
‘This organisation...takes part in dozens of campaigns, most of them Sisyphean, to rescue people from the civil jaws of the regime of Jewish privilege. They are, unintentionally, bold and painful attempts to save “Jewish” from being a synonym in Israel for racist, lordly, hard-hearted, hypocritical, shortsighted.’
And so it continues, day after day. Let nobody in the future say : ‘We didn’t know...we didn’t know what is being done in our name’.
***
For more information on – and details of how to join – the British Friends of Rabbis for Human Rights see www.rhruk.co.uk
Thursday, 16 February 2012
Tuesday, 31 January 2012
Two Artists
You may know the work of Anselm Kiefer. You are unlikely to know the work of Gitl Braun.
Kiefer is the internationally-renowned painter-sculptor (born 1945) who has spent the several decades working on, and working through, themes embedded in, and provoked by, the land and history of his native Germany, producing monumental canvases and instillations layered with lead, plaster, acrylic, resin, terracotta, paint, charcoal, rubber, copper piping , ash, hair, bark, oil, steel wire...the dense physicality and materiality of his work evoking and interrogating what Germany has been and done and suffered and perpetrated over the centuries, and in particular, of course, (and like the writer W.G.Sebald, born 1944), what came to pass in the decade before his birth.
And Gitl Braun, born to Holocaust survivors in 1950 in Haifa and now a ultra-Orthodox mother-of-eight in Stamford Hill, north London, is an artist whose subject matter is informed by her parents’ experiences and silences, and by the stories and layered histories she finds in discarded photos and prayer-books, manuscripts and religious artefacts. A very different kind of artist to Kiefer – and yet her photography and sculpture mirror Kiefer’s preoccupations. And form a kind of midrashic commentary on his themes of loss, decay, memory and silence.
Their work is currently on display a few hundred metres from each other, Kiefer occupying an acreage of space in the new White Cube gallery in Bermondsey (www.whitecube.com) and Braun occupying a corner of a nearby bookshop-gallery (www.woolfsonandtay.com). The contrast in scale between the two exhibitions is enormous – the surface space of all of Braun’s work would fit comfortably (but uncomfortably) within a corner of one of Kiefer’s vast canvases. But the scale of their vision is comparable – and to visit one after the other is a revelation.
Braun’s photographs show sacred books and texts now discarded, yet retaining their numinous aura, their sense of a depth of knowledge and tradition that once lived and inspired the faithful – while Kiefer‘s work continually harks back to figures and motifs from Europe’s religious and spiritual heritage: the Golem of Prague, the alchemical tradition, Paracelsus, the philosopher’s stone, Rabbi Loew and the Jewish mystical tradition, the Knights Templar, Thor’s hammer, the description of God’s chariot in Ezekiel – this latter conceived of humorously as a four-seat bicycle with wheels within wheels, while at the same time being a wry comment on the way in which mystery today has become commodified, and reduced in imaginative scale...
The geographical proximity and juxtaposition of these two contrasting – but complementary – exhibitions is of course coincidental. But ‘coincidence’, as we know, is another way of talking – a secular way of talking – about what the religious adherents alluded to in both artists’ work always understood: that everything is connected to everything else, for all is One. And that meaning is grafted into Creation.
Kiefer is the internationally-renowned painter-sculptor (born 1945) who has spent the several decades working on, and working through, themes embedded in, and provoked by, the land and history of his native Germany, producing monumental canvases and instillations layered with lead, plaster, acrylic, resin, terracotta, paint, charcoal, rubber, copper piping , ash, hair, bark, oil, steel wire...the dense physicality and materiality of his work evoking and interrogating what Germany has been and done and suffered and perpetrated over the centuries, and in particular, of course, (and like the writer W.G.Sebald, born 1944), what came to pass in the decade before his birth.
And Gitl Braun, born to Holocaust survivors in 1950 in Haifa and now a ultra-Orthodox mother-of-eight in Stamford Hill, north London, is an artist whose subject matter is informed by her parents’ experiences and silences, and by the stories and layered histories she finds in discarded photos and prayer-books, manuscripts and religious artefacts. A very different kind of artist to Kiefer – and yet her photography and sculpture mirror Kiefer’s preoccupations. And form a kind of midrashic commentary on his themes of loss, decay, memory and silence.
Their work is currently on display a few hundred metres from each other, Kiefer occupying an acreage of space in the new White Cube gallery in Bermondsey (www.whitecube.com) and Braun occupying a corner of a nearby bookshop-gallery (www.woolfsonandtay.com). The contrast in scale between the two exhibitions is enormous – the surface space of all of Braun’s work would fit comfortably (but uncomfortably) within a corner of one of Kiefer’s vast canvases. But the scale of their vision is comparable – and to visit one after the other is a revelation.
Braun’s photographs show sacred books and texts now discarded, yet retaining their numinous aura, their sense of a depth of knowledge and tradition that once lived and inspired the faithful – while Kiefer‘s work continually harks back to figures and motifs from Europe’s religious and spiritual heritage: the Golem of Prague, the alchemical tradition, Paracelsus, the philosopher’s stone, Rabbi Loew and the Jewish mystical tradition, the Knights Templar, Thor’s hammer, the description of God’s chariot in Ezekiel – this latter conceived of humorously as a four-seat bicycle with wheels within wheels, while at the same time being a wry comment on the way in which mystery today has become commodified, and reduced in imaginative scale...
The geographical proximity and juxtaposition of these two contrasting – but complementary – exhibitions is of course coincidental. But ‘coincidence’, as we know, is another way of talking – a secular way of talking – about what the religious adherents alluded to in both artists’ work always understood: that everything is connected to everything else, for all is One. And that meaning is grafted into Creation.
Monday, 19 December 2011
Hoban, Hitchens, Havel
We can be sure that the three of them never met: Russell Hoban (born of Jewish parents, who died last Tuesday, 13th), Christopher Hitchens (born, he discovered late in life, to a Jewish mother, died on Thursday, 15th), Vaclav Havel (who died on Sunday, 18th). But they meet now, in the imagination – and wherever literary souls go after death. (That snort you hear is Hitchens’ derision – the author of God is Not Great who believed in neither gods nor an afterlife nor any journey of the human soul that wasn’t filled with opposition to the status quo, to false hopes and sentimental piety, to putting our trust in any authority other than our own hard-won, rigorous and sceptical intelligence).
The Grim Reaper has harvested a rich crop this week: Hoban, a writer whose visionary fictions lodge in the psyche - in Riddley Walker (1980) he created a fully-imagined post-apocalypse feral England where language itself had mutated into barely recognisable forms of self-expression; Hitchens, polemicist and contrarian, scourge of mediocrity and hypocrisy and all those enamoured of the certainty of their causes (Henry Kissinger; Mother Teresa; Islamic – and Jewish, and Christian – fundamentalists); and Havel, the Czech playwright, dissident and political prisoner who became President of his nation with a belief that the spiritual, moral and intellectual domain of human life was as significant for human well-being as our material and economic achievements.
All three knew how to live, to live well, that is to say to live fearlessly, open to the exploration of ideas -“Explorers have to be ready to die lost” (Hoban) - and language: what it can do to us and for us: “Language is an archaeological vehicle...the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history” (Hoban); “I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions” (Havel); “Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul”(Hitchens).
Part of living well for these three truth-seekers was knowing how to enjoy the ‘simple’ pleasures. They each knew how to drink, how to smoke - “when I don't smoke I scarcely feel as if I'm living. I don't feel as if I'm living unless I'm killing myself” (Hoban) – and how to make their personal relationships even more complicated; but also how not to take themselves too seriously: “Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not” (Havel), “Your favourite virtue? An appreciation for irony...The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind”(Hitchens).
Strange then that Hitchens saw religion in such a literal, Dawkinsesque way. In recent years he became more and more resolute in his implacable opposition to it, claiming that it was the 1989 fatwa against his friend Salman Rushdie following publication of The Satanic Verses that “completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humour, the individual, and the defence of free expression”. (How is it, I wonder, that for me religion belongs in the latter grouping?)
In the last decade Hitchens became a leading voice in the so-called ‘new atheism’: “The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.” I find myself in sympathy with the ethical and emotional heart of this, but as I read it I find myself thinking that Hitchens is failing to see that he is indeed articulating another kind of ‘creed’, although he explicitly denies this – “Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith”.
I find it curious that such a rigorous and often sophisticated thinker should hold to a picture of religion that is so naively literal-minded. His rigid stance suffers from an internal contradiction, for it fails to meet the definition of what he characterises as his own intellectually free approach: “We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.” And yet my own post-theistic religiosity is built upon, amongst other things, ‘science and reason...free inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake...’
I suppose that for Hitchens, religious radicalism would be a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless my soul (to use the metaphor that even Hitchens finds himself calling upon) is stirred over and over by the bracing clear-sightedness of much of Hitchens’ writing : “The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has — from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness...We have the same job we always had: to say that there are no final solutions; there is no absolute truth; there is no supreme leader; there is no totalitarian solution that says if you would just give up your freedom of inquiry, if you would just give up, if you would simply abandon your critical faculties, the world of idiotic bliss can be yours.”
Hitchens didn’t do humility – he had no time for it, there was too much else at stake. No holding back. Just a constant outpouring of sinuous prose and impassioned speech to convey as lucidly as he could his brilliant (and sometimes foolish) thoughts. So, at 62, an untimely loss – and yet for me, the death of Havel is the saddest of this week’s sad losses.
On one level, Havel’s philosophy of life overlapped with Hitchens’: “The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility” – though the word ‘meekness’ marks out Havel’s own distinctive spiritual territory. And Havel’s wisdom - “There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side” – serves as an implicit rebuke to Hitchens’ decision to align himself with the Iraq war and the American neo-conservative jihad (or in George W. Bush’s terms “crusade”) against what Hitchens termed, with typical rhetorical relish, “Islamo-fascism”.
Havel’s vision never succumbed to the instinct to make humanity the pinnacle of all creation: “As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it...The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.” There is both humility and grandeur here.
I first came across Havel’s thinking when I read the remarkable series of letters he wrote from prison in the early 1980s to his then wife Olga, written at a time when his country was suffering from the bleakness of Communist oppression, and he was gaining some prominence as a leading Czech dissident. “The noble title of "dissident" must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement” (Hitchens). Reading these texts from one of the founders of Charter 77 I found myself in the presence of someone who seemed to emanate great spiritual resourcefulness and insight. Encountering them helped me clarify my own thinking about the spiritual and religious necessity of ‘living with questions’ rather than too quickly attempting to offer answers.
Here - 6 September 1981 - is an example of what resonated with me then, and still speaks of a rare sensibility, the loss of which I mourn today:
“For me, the notion of some complete and finite knowledge, that explains everything and raises no further questions, relates clearly to the idea of an end – an end to the spirit, to life, to time and to being. However, anything meaningful ever said on the matter (including every religious gospel) is remarkable for its dramatic openness , its incompleteness” – it is this that shows Havel is a more subtle reader of texts than Hitchens – “It is not a conclusive statement so much as a challenge or an appeal...which never...attempts to settle unequivocally the unanswerable question of meaning. Instead, it tends to suggest how to live with the question...The question of the meaning of life is not a full stop at the end of life, but the beginning of a deeper experience of it. It is like a light whose source we cannot see, but in whose illumination we nevertheless live – whether we delight in its incomprehensible abundance or suffer from its incomprehensible paucity.
“Ultimately, being in constant touch with the mystery is what makes us genuinely human. Man is the only creature who is both a part of being (and thus a bearer of this mystery) and aware of that mystery as a mystery. He is both the question and the questioner, and cannot help being so...”
I know that my own life has been enriched, enlivened, in multiple ways by my contact over the years with all three of these wise men. And that - though the Festival of Lights is upon us - the world seems suddenly smaller, less luminous, without them.
Zichronam livracha: may their memory be a blessing.
The Grim Reaper has harvested a rich crop this week: Hoban, a writer whose visionary fictions lodge in the psyche - in Riddley Walker (1980) he created a fully-imagined post-apocalypse feral England where language itself had mutated into barely recognisable forms of self-expression; Hitchens, polemicist and contrarian, scourge of mediocrity and hypocrisy and all those enamoured of the certainty of their causes (Henry Kissinger; Mother Teresa; Islamic – and Jewish, and Christian – fundamentalists); and Havel, the Czech playwright, dissident and political prisoner who became President of his nation with a belief that the spiritual, moral and intellectual domain of human life was as significant for human well-being as our material and economic achievements.
All three knew how to live, to live well, that is to say to live fearlessly, open to the exploration of ideas -“Explorers have to be ready to die lost” (Hoban) - and language: what it can do to us and for us: “Language is an archaeological vehicle...the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history” (Hoban); “I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions” (Havel); “Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul”(Hitchens).
Part of living well for these three truth-seekers was knowing how to enjoy the ‘simple’ pleasures. They each knew how to drink, how to smoke - “when I don't smoke I scarcely feel as if I'm living. I don't feel as if I'm living unless I'm killing myself” (Hoban) – and how to make their personal relationships even more complicated; but also how not to take themselves too seriously: “Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not” (Havel), “Your favourite virtue? An appreciation for irony...The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind”(Hitchens).
Strange then that Hitchens saw religion in such a literal, Dawkinsesque way. In recent years he became more and more resolute in his implacable opposition to it, claiming that it was the 1989 fatwa against his friend Salman Rushdie following publication of The Satanic Verses that “completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humour, the individual, and the defence of free expression”. (How is it, I wonder, that for me religion belongs in the latter grouping?)
In the last decade Hitchens became a leading voice in the so-called ‘new atheism’: “The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.” I find myself in sympathy with the ethical and emotional heart of this, but as I read it I find myself thinking that Hitchens is failing to see that he is indeed articulating another kind of ‘creed’, although he explicitly denies this – “Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith”.
I find it curious that such a rigorous and often sophisticated thinker should hold to a picture of religion that is so naively literal-minded. His rigid stance suffers from an internal contradiction, for it fails to meet the definition of what he characterises as his own intellectually free approach: “We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.” And yet my own post-theistic religiosity is built upon, amongst other things, ‘science and reason...free inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake...’
I suppose that for Hitchens, religious radicalism would be a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless my soul (to use the metaphor that even Hitchens finds himself calling upon) is stirred over and over by the bracing clear-sightedness of much of Hitchens’ writing : “The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has — from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness...We have the same job we always had: to say that there are no final solutions; there is no absolute truth; there is no supreme leader; there is no totalitarian solution that says if you would just give up your freedom of inquiry, if you would just give up, if you would simply abandon your critical faculties, the world of idiotic bliss can be yours.”
Hitchens didn’t do humility – he had no time for it, there was too much else at stake. No holding back. Just a constant outpouring of sinuous prose and impassioned speech to convey as lucidly as he could his brilliant (and sometimes foolish) thoughts. So, at 62, an untimely loss – and yet for me, the death of Havel is the saddest of this week’s sad losses.
On one level, Havel’s philosophy of life overlapped with Hitchens’: “The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility” – though the word ‘meekness’ marks out Havel’s own distinctive spiritual territory. And Havel’s wisdom - “There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side” – serves as an implicit rebuke to Hitchens’ decision to align himself with the Iraq war and the American neo-conservative jihad (or in George W. Bush’s terms “crusade”) against what Hitchens termed, with typical rhetorical relish, “Islamo-fascism”.
Havel’s vision never succumbed to the instinct to make humanity the pinnacle of all creation: “As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it...The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.” There is both humility and grandeur here.
I first came across Havel’s thinking when I read the remarkable series of letters he wrote from prison in the early 1980s to his then wife Olga, written at a time when his country was suffering from the bleakness of Communist oppression, and he was gaining some prominence as a leading Czech dissident. “The noble title of "dissident" must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement” (Hitchens). Reading these texts from one of the founders of Charter 77 I found myself in the presence of someone who seemed to emanate great spiritual resourcefulness and insight. Encountering them helped me clarify my own thinking about the spiritual and religious necessity of ‘living with questions’ rather than too quickly attempting to offer answers.
Here - 6 September 1981 - is an example of what resonated with me then, and still speaks of a rare sensibility, the loss of which I mourn today:
“For me, the notion of some complete and finite knowledge, that explains everything and raises no further questions, relates clearly to the idea of an end – an end to the spirit, to life, to time and to being. However, anything meaningful ever said on the matter (including every religious gospel) is remarkable for its dramatic openness , its incompleteness” – it is this that shows Havel is a more subtle reader of texts than Hitchens – “It is not a conclusive statement so much as a challenge or an appeal...which never...attempts to settle unequivocally the unanswerable question of meaning. Instead, it tends to suggest how to live with the question...The question of the meaning of life is not a full stop at the end of life, but the beginning of a deeper experience of it. It is like a light whose source we cannot see, but in whose illumination we nevertheless live – whether we delight in its incomprehensible abundance or suffer from its incomprehensible paucity.
“Ultimately, being in constant touch with the mystery is what makes us genuinely human. Man is the only creature who is both a part of being (and thus a bearer of this mystery) and aware of that mystery as a mystery. He is both the question and the questioner, and cannot help being so...”
I know that my own life has been enriched, enlivened, in multiple ways by my contact over the years with all three of these wise men. And that - though the Festival of Lights is upon us - the world seems suddenly smaller, less luminous, without them.
Zichronam livracha: may their memory be a blessing.
Thursday, 15 December 2011
“Auf Wiedersehen, England”
Brentford Town Football Club have a German manager, Uwe Rösler. Last week they visited my local club and the match had the usual level of tedium and occasional drama and in the end ‘my’ team won (a penalty shoot-out). I should have left feeling suitably elated – but I didn’t. What I took away from the game was the shock of hearing the home supporters engage in a series of abusive comments at the opposition manager that ranged from the xenophobic to out-and-out racism.
Most of this invective was done under the habitual English guise of humour – ‘banter’ – but it seemed to me that the echo of those mock-German accents culled from decades of post-War UK cinema , TV and tabloid headlines – ‘ve have vays of making you play’ – and the crude barking of stereotypical phrases like ‘Jawohl’ when the manager shouted to his players, betrayed an ugly and unthinking anti-German malice that would not have been tolerated against players of any other ethnic origin, or indeed against managers of any other nation. Supporters can sometimes be rude – in a friendly or unfriendly manner – against opposition managers, but this was something else.
That it happened during the same week that Europeans – including the British - became even more aware that their collective economic fate now lies in the hands of Germany is probably just a co-incidence – anti-German feeling is a regular, sickening feature of populist English culture. But as I slowly digested the debacle of David Cameron’s performance in Brussels a few days later, my mind kept going back to that evening at Barnet Football Club where I witnessed this longstanding English prejudice in all its nakedness and shame.
I would suggest that this anti-German feeling is fuelled by deep unconscious envy. Germany’s post-War economic recovery and social transformation was impressive enough, and then in 1989 it took on the unprecedented financial, social and psychological task of integrating a divided nation. Its work ethic, its technological achievements, its ability to integrate several millions of immigrants with relative success, its capacity to make an honest accounting of, and restitution for, its national crimes – all this is evidence for the way in which Germany has become a stable, mature and self-reflective success as a nation and the dominant democracy in Europe. (And they are also rather good at football: much more successful over the years – in spite of 1966 – than England, and maybe it is this above all that, at least in the popular imagination, the English can’t stand, and leads to such crude mockery and contempt).
Contrast Germany’s success as a country with the UK story of post-War decline – the dissolution (and destruction) of our manufacturing industries, our loss of control over the old Empire, the contraction of our military capabilities, the perpetuation of class divisions and glaring inequalities, the coarsening of public discourse...add to the list yourself. It seems we have yet to make a true reckoning of our decreased stature and significance in the world. In place of this truth-telling (and generations of politicians of all parties have colluded in this) we have a distorted and false picture of our collective national identity.
Our relative impoverishment – materially and in the quality of life, in the capacity to devise integrated transport systems, in social and health care, in education – is palpable whenever one leaves these shores and travels or spends time in what we still quaintly think of as ‘the Continent’, or – more tellingly – we islanders still think of as ‘Europe’. We might have joined the European Union in myriad practical and beneficial ways – but the Brits still haven’t joined ‘Europe’ in their minds. David Cameron has just acted out years of this systemic psychological failure to re-configure ourselves as a European country.
I am – as might be evident from some of these remarks – passionately pro-European; and so I consider Cameron’s ineptitude a symbol of a basic fault-line that runs through the UK’s national psyche. The jokey tag that has become so popular in recent decades as a mark of this country’s pseudo self-assurance – ‘Two World Wars and One World Cup’ – has come home to roost. The fact is that, in spite of its current difficulties, ‘Europe’ will continue to thrive and prosper without us. But the UK won’t (can’t) thrive or prosper without ‘Europe’ – there is only so long that a nation can sustain itself with fantasies of past greatness, delusions of self-importance, and the unconscious omnipotence that in a transnational global economy we can steer and save one part of the ship while the other decks are overwhelmed by the tides of history.
Angela Merkel may not have the right formula for rescuing the European economy, but Cameron’s proud isolationism brings to mind George Orwell’s insight that ‘The insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time’.
Call me a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ if you like – the Soviet euphemism widely used during Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaigns in the 1950s as a way of accusing Jewish thinkers of lack of patriotism – but as a Jew whose soul is knitted to the historic vibrancy of life in Berlin and Vienna and Prague and Budapest, and all the rest of the countless places on ‘the Continent’ where Jews lived and thrived (and, yes, suffered) but contributed their unique intellectual heritage and giftedness to the general well-being of so many societies and nations, I have been hugely saddened by Cameron’s ‘little Englander’ stance. As a European British Jew in the second decade of the 21st century I still have a psychological and spiritual - existential - commitment to that transnational diasporic vision of the creative inter-connectedness of pan-European life.
And it is of course a rather extraordinary historical irony that it is Berlin (again) that must embrace its special destiny – this time round to lead Europe to a more hopeful future. But this time, if it fails, if the German-led European project fails, xenophobic nationalism (not just in the UK) is just itching to return. And who will history’s victims be, I wonder, the next time round?
Most of this invective was done under the habitual English guise of humour – ‘banter’ – but it seemed to me that the echo of those mock-German accents culled from decades of post-War UK cinema , TV and tabloid headlines – ‘ve have vays of making you play’ – and the crude barking of stereotypical phrases like ‘Jawohl’ when the manager shouted to his players, betrayed an ugly and unthinking anti-German malice that would not have been tolerated against players of any other ethnic origin, or indeed against managers of any other nation. Supporters can sometimes be rude – in a friendly or unfriendly manner – against opposition managers, but this was something else.
That it happened during the same week that Europeans – including the British - became even more aware that their collective economic fate now lies in the hands of Germany is probably just a co-incidence – anti-German feeling is a regular, sickening feature of populist English culture. But as I slowly digested the debacle of David Cameron’s performance in Brussels a few days later, my mind kept going back to that evening at Barnet Football Club where I witnessed this longstanding English prejudice in all its nakedness and shame.
I would suggest that this anti-German feeling is fuelled by deep unconscious envy. Germany’s post-War economic recovery and social transformation was impressive enough, and then in 1989 it took on the unprecedented financial, social and psychological task of integrating a divided nation. Its work ethic, its technological achievements, its ability to integrate several millions of immigrants with relative success, its capacity to make an honest accounting of, and restitution for, its national crimes – all this is evidence for the way in which Germany has become a stable, mature and self-reflective success as a nation and the dominant democracy in Europe. (And they are also rather good at football: much more successful over the years – in spite of 1966 – than England, and maybe it is this above all that, at least in the popular imagination, the English can’t stand, and leads to such crude mockery and contempt).
Contrast Germany’s success as a country with the UK story of post-War decline – the dissolution (and destruction) of our manufacturing industries, our loss of control over the old Empire, the contraction of our military capabilities, the perpetuation of class divisions and glaring inequalities, the coarsening of public discourse...add to the list yourself. It seems we have yet to make a true reckoning of our decreased stature and significance in the world. In place of this truth-telling (and generations of politicians of all parties have colluded in this) we have a distorted and false picture of our collective national identity.
Our relative impoverishment – materially and in the quality of life, in the capacity to devise integrated transport systems, in social and health care, in education – is palpable whenever one leaves these shores and travels or spends time in what we still quaintly think of as ‘the Continent’, or – more tellingly – we islanders still think of as ‘Europe’. We might have joined the European Union in myriad practical and beneficial ways – but the Brits still haven’t joined ‘Europe’ in their minds. David Cameron has just acted out years of this systemic psychological failure to re-configure ourselves as a European country.
I am – as might be evident from some of these remarks – passionately pro-European; and so I consider Cameron’s ineptitude a symbol of a basic fault-line that runs through the UK’s national psyche. The jokey tag that has become so popular in recent decades as a mark of this country’s pseudo self-assurance – ‘Two World Wars and One World Cup’ – has come home to roost. The fact is that, in spite of its current difficulties, ‘Europe’ will continue to thrive and prosper without us. But the UK won’t (can’t) thrive or prosper without ‘Europe’ – there is only so long that a nation can sustain itself with fantasies of past greatness, delusions of self-importance, and the unconscious omnipotence that in a transnational global economy we can steer and save one part of the ship while the other decks are overwhelmed by the tides of history.
Angela Merkel may not have the right formula for rescuing the European economy, but Cameron’s proud isolationism brings to mind George Orwell’s insight that ‘The insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time’.
Call me a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ if you like – the Soviet euphemism widely used during Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaigns in the 1950s as a way of accusing Jewish thinkers of lack of patriotism – but as a Jew whose soul is knitted to the historic vibrancy of life in Berlin and Vienna and Prague and Budapest, and all the rest of the countless places on ‘the Continent’ where Jews lived and thrived (and, yes, suffered) but contributed their unique intellectual heritage and giftedness to the general well-being of so many societies and nations, I have been hugely saddened by Cameron’s ‘little Englander’ stance. As a European British Jew in the second decade of the 21st century I still have a psychological and spiritual - existential - commitment to that transnational diasporic vision of the creative inter-connectedness of pan-European life.
And it is of course a rather extraordinary historical irony that it is Berlin (again) that must embrace its special destiny – this time round to lead Europe to a more hopeful future. But this time, if it fails, if the German-led European project fails, xenophobic nationalism (not just in the UK) is just itching to return. And who will history’s victims be, I wonder, the next time round?
Wednesday, 30 November 2011
Jacob's Dream
The English poet Stephen Spender once remarked that “the language of a nation, embodied in its literature, is its spiritual life”. I think about these words each time we arrive - during the annual cycle of Torah readings - at the text that describes Jacob’s dream (Genesis 28:10-22). When it sometimes can feel that we live in an increasingly disordered and fragmented world, the twelve verses of this Hebrew text offer us a glimpse into another world: a world where meaning hovers within language, where we can rest for a moment secure in the knowledge that we are being held in the embrace of a consummate storyteller, a narrator who is able to conjure up a vision of eternity - of the ‘intersection of the timeless/ With time’ (T.S.Eliot) – just by placing one word artfully next to another. For me, it’s the jewel in the crown of Biblical storytelling.
It is of course – as are so many mythological narratives – a story about a journey. Our ‘hero’ – who we know is no hero - is seen setting out with purpose. He leaves Beersheva, and seems to have a destination in mind: Haran (verse 10). But we know – both because we have read our world’s mythic literature (Jason, Ulysses, Parsifal), and because we have lived long enough to discover that things rarely turn out as we intend – that geographical journeys can metamorphose into journeys of a different kind: inner journeys, that depend upon who – or what – we chance to meet along the way.
And no sooner has the journey begun than ‘chance’ does indeed turn up. ‘And he lighted upon/he happened upon/ he came upon by chance – va’yifgah – the place…’ (v.11). “Coincidence is not a kosher word”, that wily storyteller Isaac Bashevis Singer once remarked, intuiting that from a Jewish religious perspective ‘chance’ is never what it seems. Jacob chanced upon ‘the place’ – and three times in the verse our narrator emphasizes this ‘place’. It’s not just any place, but ‘the place’ where the Eternal will reveal itself.
Traditional commentators – being somewhat literal minded on occasions - wanted to identify the location of this ‘place’. Rashi suggests it was Mount Moriah - i.e. Jerusalem, the spiritual centre of the world, as it were. Others, basing themselves on the ‘chance’ equivalence in numerical value of the Hebrew letters for ‘ladder’ and ‘Sinai’, suggest that Jacob’s encounter with the divine occurs at that later-to-become-famous mountain of collective revelation. But a Hasidic interpretation moves us from geography to metaphysics: the thrice-repeated makom of verse 11 refers, it is suggested, to a meeting with Ha-Makom – which is one of the rabbinic names for God. ‘God is the place of the world’, said the rabbis, ‘but’ – and here’s a paradox – ‘the world is not God’s place.’ (Genesis Rabbah, Va’yetze, 68:9)
What this story hints at – no, more than hints at, what it quietly and subversively suggests – is that ‘happening upon’ God can take place anywhere, at any time. But what the story also dramatizes is that it happened to Jacob only when he moved away from home, from the familiar (and from his family), from the known, the secure, the everyday.
The text tells us that he lay down to sleep ‘because the sun had set’ (v.11). The detail seems superfluous - until we realize that when the sun next rises it is twenty years later, when Jacob wrestles with the stranger at the river Jabbok and we read ‘And the sun rose upon him at Penuel’ (32:32). So we know that are in the hands of a narrator who wants us to read symbolically and not only literally. Jacob spends 20 years ‘in the dark’ – he runs away from his brother’s anger, having stolen a blessing from Esau. He is the trickster, the ‘heel’ (it’s the root of his name, Ya’akov) – and he is running from the ‘dark’ side of himself, gaining much in the material world (along with two wives), but still on the run from much unfinished business at home and within himself.
We sense how the psychological is woven seamlessly into the narrative – and we sense too how impoverished we might be in separating out the strands of our own lives into ‘psychological’ and ‘spiritual’ and ‘emotional’ and ‘mental’, rather than marvelling at the boundryless superfluity of being that exists within us.
After the wrestling scene - where a blessing emerges and Jacob’s name is transformed to ‘ Yisrael’ , ‘the one who struggles with, and on behalf of, the divine’ - he re-meets Esau, and peace (of a sort) is made. But until then it’s one long night, during which he must struggle both with the deceiver in himself and with the meanings of the dream-vision he receives at the beginning of that long night of the soul.
And what a dream it is! Verbs in the past tense give way to participles and the immediacy of the present moment and we are in the dream:
‘And behold: a ladder standing towards the earth and its top reaching towards the heavens
And behold: the messengers of the divine ascending and descending on it
And behold: Adonai standing beside it…’ (verses12-13)
Inside the dream time stands still. The worlds of heaven and earth are held together in one numinous image: a ladder hovers between the two domains; it is – perhaps surprisingly - suspended between the two realms, it is standing not on the ground but towards the ground (artza) and its top is reaching towards heaven (hashamaima). It floats – like us – between earthboundedness and heavenly aspiration.
Then: all is in movement, in flux, the mal’akhim, messengers of divinity, ascending and descending, heaven and earth are interrelated, energy is moving constantly between them, the boundaries are fluid, between ‘here’ and ‘there’ there is ceaseless movement, a continuously flowing interchange: the medium of the mal’akhim represents the message, the spiritual (and psychological) truth - everything is connected to everything else.
And the third, consummating component presents itself in the dream space: the ladder which is standing, and the messengers of God which are moving, merge into the Eternal [YHVH] who is standing alav – ‘beside him’, ‘above him’. But also ‘beside it’ or ‘above it’ (the ladder). The Hebrew is delightfully ambiguous throughout these dream verses. We are being nudged away from literalism towards the multiplicity of being.
Similarly with v’rosho: is it the ‘top’ of the ladder reaching towards heaven? Or ‘his head’ reaching heavenwards? And the movement of the messengers/angels is described as ascending and descending bo – ‘on it’ (the ladder). But this pronoun also means ‘in him’ or ‘within him’. The language is both internally and externally referential. Like a Cubist painting that juxtaposes two competing perspectives of the same face to create a new possibility of perception, so our text keeps presenting this double perspective around which our attention must constantly hover.
Whether we think of the earthly and the divine, the material and the spiritual, inner and outer reality, consciousness and the unconscious – all those binary opposites with which we normally wrap/warp our minds – within this dream imagery our narrator subverts our normal dualistic thinking. And that’s before we even reach the verbal component of the dream…
No wonder Jacob is filled with awe when he awakes: what has been revealed to him is a spiritual truth that takes a lifetime to comprehend and explore and, hopefully, remain baffled by: the divine is always present – ‘I am with you’ (v.15).
It is of course – as are so many mythological narratives – a story about a journey. Our ‘hero’ – who we know is no hero - is seen setting out with purpose. He leaves Beersheva, and seems to have a destination in mind: Haran (verse 10). But we know – both because we have read our world’s mythic literature (Jason, Ulysses, Parsifal), and because we have lived long enough to discover that things rarely turn out as we intend – that geographical journeys can metamorphose into journeys of a different kind: inner journeys, that depend upon who – or what – we chance to meet along the way.
And no sooner has the journey begun than ‘chance’ does indeed turn up. ‘And he lighted upon/he happened upon/ he came upon by chance – va’yifgah – the place…’ (v.11). “Coincidence is not a kosher word”, that wily storyteller Isaac Bashevis Singer once remarked, intuiting that from a Jewish religious perspective ‘chance’ is never what it seems. Jacob chanced upon ‘the place’ – and three times in the verse our narrator emphasizes this ‘place’. It’s not just any place, but ‘the place’ where the Eternal will reveal itself.
Traditional commentators – being somewhat literal minded on occasions - wanted to identify the location of this ‘place’. Rashi suggests it was Mount Moriah - i.e. Jerusalem, the spiritual centre of the world, as it were. Others, basing themselves on the ‘chance’ equivalence in numerical value of the Hebrew letters for ‘ladder’ and ‘Sinai’, suggest that Jacob’s encounter with the divine occurs at that later-to-become-famous mountain of collective revelation. But a Hasidic interpretation moves us from geography to metaphysics: the thrice-repeated makom of verse 11 refers, it is suggested, to a meeting with Ha-Makom – which is one of the rabbinic names for God. ‘God is the place of the world’, said the rabbis, ‘but’ – and here’s a paradox – ‘the world is not God’s place.’ (Genesis Rabbah, Va’yetze, 68:9)
What this story hints at – no, more than hints at, what it quietly and subversively suggests – is that ‘happening upon’ God can take place anywhere, at any time. But what the story also dramatizes is that it happened to Jacob only when he moved away from home, from the familiar (and from his family), from the known, the secure, the everyday.
The text tells us that he lay down to sleep ‘because the sun had set’ (v.11). The detail seems superfluous - until we realize that when the sun next rises it is twenty years later, when Jacob wrestles with the stranger at the river Jabbok and we read ‘And the sun rose upon him at Penuel’ (32:32). So we know that are in the hands of a narrator who wants us to read symbolically and not only literally. Jacob spends 20 years ‘in the dark’ – he runs away from his brother’s anger, having stolen a blessing from Esau. He is the trickster, the ‘heel’ (it’s the root of his name, Ya’akov) – and he is running from the ‘dark’ side of himself, gaining much in the material world (along with two wives), but still on the run from much unfinished business at home and within himself.
We sense how the psychological is woven seamlessly into the narrative – and we sense too how impoverished we might be in separating out the strands of our own lives into ‘psychological’ and ‘spiritual’ and ‘emotional’ and ‘mental’, rather than marvelling at the boundryless superfluity of being that exists within us.
After the wrestling scene - where a blessing emerges and Jacob’s name is transformed to ‘ Yisrael’ , ‘the one who struggles with, and on behalf of, the divine’ - he re-meets Esau, and peace (of a sort) is made. But until then it’s one long night, during which he must struggle both with the deceiver in himself and with the meanings of the dream-vision he receives at the beginning of that long night of the soul.
And what a dream it is! Verbs in the past tense give way to participles and the immediacy of the present moment and we are in the dream:
‘And behold: a ladder standing towards the earth and its top reaching towards the heavens
And behold: the messengers of the divine ascending and descending on it
And behold: Adonai standing beside it…’ (verses12-13)
Inside the dream time stands still. The worlds of heaven and earth are held together in one numinous image: a ladder hovers between the two domains; it is – perhaps surprisingly - suspended between the two realms, it is standing not on the ground but towards the ground (artza) and its top is reaching towards heaven (hashamaima). It floats – like us – between earthboundedness and heavenly aspiration.
Then: all is in movement, in flux, the mal’akhim, messengers of divinity, ascending and descending, heaven and earth are interrelated, energy is moving constantly between them, the boundaries are fluid, between ‘here’ and ‘there’ there is ceaseless movement, a continuously flowing interchange: the medium of the mal’akhim represents the message, the spiritual (and psychological) truth - everything is connected to everything else.
And the third, consummating component presents itself in the dream space: the ladder which is standing, and the messengers of God which are moving, merge into the Eternal [YHVH] who is standing alav – ‘beside him’, ‘above him’. But also ‘beside it’ or ‘above it’ (the ladder). The Hebrew is delightfully ambiguous throughout these dream verses. We are being nudged away from literalism towards the multiplicity of being.
Similarly with v’rosho: is it the ‘top’ of the ladder reaching towards heaven? Or ‘his head’ reaching heavenwards? And the movement of the messengers/angels is described as ascending and descending bo – ‘on it’ (the ladder). But this pronoun also means ‘in him’ or ‘within him’. The language is both internally and externally referential. Like a Cubist painting that juxtaposes two competing perspectives of the same face to create a new possibility of perception, so our text keeps presenting this double perspective around which our attention must constantly hover.
Whether we think of the earthly and the divine, the material and the spiritual, inner and outer reality, consciousness and the unconscious – all those binary opposites with which we normally wrap/warp our minds – within this dream imagery our narrator subverts our normal dualistic thinking. And that’s before we even reach the verbal component of the dream…
No wonder Jacob is filled with awe when he awakes: what has been revealed to him is a spiritual truth that takes a lifetime to comprehend and explore and, hopefully, remain baffled by: the divine is always present – ‘I am with you’ (v.15).
Sunday, 30 October 2011
St.Paul's and the Crisis in Capitalism
The crisis is happening in a sort of slow-motion car-crash way. We all know it – and may feel powerless in relation to it. But it is a crisis.
I was down at St.Paul’s Cathedral early last week, spending some time there (mostly in the rain), trying to absorb what is going on, what this ‘Occupy London’ movement is about, trying not to let my mind be filled with how the media are representing it, but seeing for myself, talking to people, wandering round the site into the educational centre and the multi-faith centre and the media centre and the volunteer-run kitchens and the legal aid centre and the entertainment centre and the first-aid centre – I use the word ‘centre’ but actually I should say tent, because all of these centres of activity are under canvas, (well, polyurethane, to be accurate), but anyway, tents large and small, spread out higgledy-piggledy and yet in a curiously tidy way, around the Cathedral, with clear and safe access to and from the building for those who want to use it.
There seemed to be a lot of good-natured conversations going on that day, between camera-wielding visitors and those living there or just giving up time to be there – academics and lawyers, teachers and the unemployed, young and old, sober suits in earnest conversation with dreadlocks and grunge – discussions serious and jovial, with the great religious building providing a backdrop - and a silent commentary (apart from the bells) – on the social and political issues at stake for all of us, but being given specific attention by the inhabitants of these makeshift booths plastered with posters and quotations and lists of daily events, discussions and lectures and films on worthy issues like the dangers of deep-sea oil drilling or political oppression in South America or the implications of the savage cuts to legal aid in the UK.
It felt like a new hybrid, a cross between politics and street theatre, an on-going act of performance art that, like all art, wants to change the world – or perhaps, less grandiosely, just help us see the world differently.
Trying to see the world differently, trying to live out certain ethical values, is of course a Jewish preoccupation, a Jewish meshuggas, that stubborn refusal to accept the world as it is, a stubborn belief that we could live in better and more life-enhancing ways. During Sukkot there was a Jewish tent, a sukkah, offering hospitality; and on Simchat Torah dancing and song; and a Shabbat service is planned. Jews have been bringing their values into the mix – and they bring their humour.
‘Now is the Winter of our Discount Tents’ reads one banner [for my blog readers in other countries for whom English is not your first language, this is a rather delicious re-working of Shakespeare’s line from Richard III, ‘Now is the winter of our discontents’] - humour being one of the hallmarks of this gathering in the centre of London , along with civility and co-operation and a principled spirit of commitment not to inconvenience those who live in the area or work in the area or who have businesses in the area. It was all curiously tidy – not a scrap of litter and large recycling bins at the very centre of the encampment.
And the talk was of a range of issues – political and environmental and economic – and the commitment to try and create a particular form of community. And to my surprise there seemed a lot of respect, praise, for the church officials and workers who have been involved with them this last fortnight – this was even before Canon Giles Fraser’s principled resignation on Thursday – and, again surprisingly, what seemed a mutual respect (muted but apparent) between the police and the protesters. Though they say they are not protesters, but ‘resisters’.
And what they are resistant to is encapsulated in one of the largest banners on the site: ‘Capitalism is Crisis’ it reads; which as a slogan is rather simplistic, and makes it easy for us to be sceptical. But as propaganda for a cause it is quite effective, because it can provoke us to think more deeply, more rigorously, about what is going on in relation to the values we live by; and how we organise ourselves in societies; and the systemic failures we have to endure.
I don’t agree that ‘Capitalism is Crisis’: it might be in crisis but Judaism traditionally didn’t disparage wealth creation – it just insisted (regularly and rather boringly) that when wealth had been generated it needed to be distributed fairly, equitably, that spreading justice was a higher value than accumulating wealth, that charity was an obligation, that with wealth comes responsibility; that a society that neglected the poor, the widow, the orphan, the outsider, that deprived them of the means to live with dignity, that refused to listen to their cries for help, their needs, their well-being – that such a society where wealth was generated but not used for the good of all, that kind of society was – to use a traditional word – sinful. And, as both the Torah and the prophets intuited, such societies were doomed, would in the end be destroyed (from the outside), or destroy themselves.
I was very impressed by what I saw this week. More than impressed, I would say I was rather inspired. It is easy to poke fun at this gathering, it’s easy to be a bit scared (as I felt for moments) by the otherness of people, the way they look, the way they sound - you inevitably get people at these kind of open gatherings with a variety of mental health problems - but what was inspirational was the tolerance I saw, the kindness, the commitment to a laborious form of collective decision-making: meetings open to everyone at 1 pm and 7 pm each day with a slow process of listening and speaking and respecting different views until some coherent consensus was achieved – that’s a commitment to a particular kind of inter-personal respect; it’s a commitment that unites a secular belief in the dignity of the individual with a religious belief in the holiness of each human being.
And percolating through it all, what is inspirational is the passion on display for a different model of living together in community. And yes it is easy to be sceptical and dismissive of this as naive – or to condemn it, as a lot of the media and Tory MPs have done, as hypocritical because some of these people have a coffee at Starbucks, or charge their mobile phones there. But this smug moral point-scoring quite misses the point.
And the point is that all around the world this year, starting in Spain with the los indignados protests, there have been groups coming together, for one-off events or day after day – 400,000 in Tel Aviv in August on the streets demanding of the Israeli government a fairer ordering of society, prioritising jobs and homes and education and care of the elderly – people gathering in 900 cities world-wide this month, and they are not all saying ‘Capitalism is Crisis’ but they are all responding to global capitalism being in crisis.
This Shabbat we read the mythic Tower of Babel story, Genesis 11: 1-9. But a myth can contain powerful truth if you know how to read it right, if you listen in to its message, to what is hidden inside its fairytale-like exterior. And the Tower of Babel is a story that speaks about what is happening now, it tells us about a society that ‘had the same language and the same words’ and the people said ‘Come on, let’s all build a city with a tower that reaches to heaven’ – literally a skyscraper – ‘and let’s make a name for ourselves...’
And this is what we have done, more powerfully than ever before in the history of this planet – the same language, the same words, whether you in London or Berlin, New York or Brussels or Beijing: ‘globalisation, economic growth, free-market turbo-capitalism, deregulation, consumerism based on the manufacture of desire’ – this is what we have built over the last fifty years or so. This is the name of the game – and what a ‘name we have made for ourselves’.
You can go up to Hampstead Heath and look out over the city, this wonderful, awesome, awful city of ours, London, and you survey the thrusting Canary Wharf-Gherkin-Shardification of our skyline, all that glitter and glass and phallic cold steel – and you don’t have to be the God of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, to think: no good will come of all this, the omnipotent building and the idolisation of growth; and you don’t have to be the Holy One of Israel to think: who do these people think they are, playing god with people’s lives?
There is an extraordinary story in the Jewish tradition, a midrash about the Tower of Babel, where the rabbis said that the Tower had seven levels on its east side and seven on its west side: builders brought the bricks up one side and then came down the other. And if a person slipped and fell down and died, nobody paid any attention and the work went on. But if a brick fell down, everyone stopped working and wept: ‘OMG, they said – Woe is us! How, when, are we going to get another brick to replace it!’
So you don’t have to be a Marxist critic of capitalism to see what is going on in this story. Two thousand years ago the rabbis were aware that people were quite ready to put the projects of empire-building before care for people, for individuals. Building the brand becomes more important than the conditions of the workers. Profit margins take precedence over alleviating poverty. It’s a universal story and it has led us in our own times into a profound crisis.
But this time no God is going to look down and destroy the project and scatter the people and confound their language. We are the gods now – or think we are. Co-incidentally this Shabbat, because it was a new moon, we also read another part of our mythic narrative from the Book of Genesis, about the fourth day of creation, which describes the creation of the sun and the moon and the stars: it’s a story wrestling with the mystery of how did they come to be here, these celestial bodies, how did they come into existence? how is it that we live just the right distance from the sun – 93,000,000 miles – not too hot, not too cold, that we can live at all on the fragile surface of this tiny planet in the middle of nowhere? how can that be, how can that possibly be?
And we, who have become the gods now – or think we are – we have a universal language now, just like in the story of the Tower of Babel, and with this language of science and technology (on which of course the global markets now depend) we can measure the heat of the sun, and we can land a man on the moon, and we can see pictures in wonderful colour and awesome detail of stars being born and stars dying: we can do all this miraculous stuff, we have build a civilisation brick by brick, with information added to information, a world solid and towering and magnificent – and I don’t decry it, because I wouldn’t want to live in a world without penicillin or be operated on with a carving knife - so we have build this world with towers of knowledge and expertise; but we can’t yet care, we still don’t care, for those who fall off the edge, who depend for their homes and their well-being, and their very lives sometimes, who depend on the politicians and wealth-creators to devise ways of sharing it – more equally, more justly, more compassionately. If we can put men on the moon and capture the birth of stars, surely we can use our ingenuity to prevent one fifth of the children in this country living in poverty?
And those protestors, resisters, are saying: We can do this, if there is the will to do it, we can do things better, we can pay attention to those who fall off the project. And around the world there are many, many who fall off, who slip out of sight, who are exploited and abused and used for the sake of the Babel projects of profit and consumption. We can do it differently, we need to do it differently, and the challenge for the younger generation growing up in this world – and the majority of those I saw at St Paul’s were young (but then most people look young to me these days) – the challenge is to do it differently, to do it better. They are not going to have any choice – because the Tower is tottering, and when it falls, who will have the energy, the experience, the wisdom, to re-build on more secure foundations, on more deep-rooted human values?
Those people in those tents may be gone by Christmas, by choice or by eviction; this may be an ephemeral, a transient occupation of the space around St.Paul’s. But they will be back, in one form or another, here and abroad, they will be back because they represent something eternal, something very Jewish actually, a belief, a hopefulness – what use to be called messianic hopefulness - that we can do better than this. We can build a society, brick by brick: dignity, justice, generosity, compassion, care, companionship - these are the building blocks of real community and a good, a godly, society where people are more valued than profit margins, where sharing what we have is more important than share options. We can do it better.
[Extracted and adapted from a sermon given on October 29th at Finchley Reform Synagaogue]
I was down at St.Paul’s Cathedral early last week, spending some time there (mostly in the rain), trying to absorb what is going on, what this ‘Occupy London’ movement is about, trying not to let my mind be filled with how the media are representing it, but seeing for myself, talking to people, wandering round the site into the educational centre and the multi-faith centre and the media centre and the volunteer-run kitchens and the legal aid centre and the entertainment centre and the first-aid centre – I use the word ‘centre’ but actually I should say tent, because all of these centres of activity are under canvas, (well, polyurethane, to be accurate), but anyway, tents large and small, spread out higgledy-piggledy and yet in a curiously tidy way, around the Cathedral, with clear and safe access to and from the building for those who want to use it.
There seemed to be a lot of good-natured conversations going on that day, between camera-wielding visitors and those living there or just giving up time to be there – academics and lawyers, teachers and the unemployed, young and old, sober suits in earnest conversation with dreadlocks and grunge – discussions serious and jovial, with the great religious building providing a backdrop - and a silent commentary (apart from the bells) – on the social and political issues at stake for all of us, but being given specific attention by the inhabitants of these makeshift booths plastered with posters and quotations and lists of daily events, discussions and lectures and films on worthy issues like the dangers of deep-sea oil drilling or political oppression in South America or the implications of the savage cuts to legal aid in the UK.
It felt like a new hybrid, a cross between politics and street theatre, an on-going act of performance art that, like all art, wants to change the world – or perhaps, less grandiosely, just help us see the world differently.
Trying to see the world differently, trying to live out certain ethical values, is of course a Jewish preoccupation, a Jewish meshuggas, that stubborn refusal to accept the world as it is, a stubborn belief that we could live in better and more life-enhancing ways. During Sukkot there was a Jewish tent, a sukkah, offering hospitality; and on Simchat Torah dancing and song; and a Shabbat service is planned. Jews have been bringing their values into the mix – and they bring their humour.
‘Now is the Winter of our Discount Tents’ reads one banner [for my blog readers in other countries for whom English is not your first language, this is a rather delicious re-working of Shakespeare’s line from Richard III, ‘Now is the winter of our discontents’] - humour being one of the hallmarks of this gathering in the centre of London , along with civility and co-operation and a principled spirit of commitment not to inconvenience those who live in the area or work in the area or who have businesses in the area. It was all curiously tidy – not a scrap of litter and large recycling bins at the very centre of the encampment.
And the talk was of a range of issues – political and environmental and economic – and the commitment to try and create a particular form of community. And to my surprise there seemed a lot of respect, praise, for the church officials and workers who have been involved with them this last fortnight – this was even before Canon Giles Fraser’s principled resignation on Thursday – and, again surprisingly, what seemed a mutual respect (muted but apparent) between the police and the protesters. Though they say they are not protesters, but ‘resisters’.
And what they are resistant to is encapsulated in one of the largest banners on the site: ‘Capitalism is Crisis’ it reads; which as a slogan is rather simplistic, and makes it easy for us to be sceptical. But as propaganda for a cause it is quite effective, because it can provoke us to think more deeply, more rigorously, about what is going on in relation to the values we live by; and how we organise ourselves in societies; and the systemic failures we have to endure.
I don’t agree that ‘Capitalism is Crisis’: it might be in crisis but Judaism traditionally didn’t disparage wealth creation – it just insisted (regularly and rather boringly) that when wealth had been generated it needed to be distributed fairly, equitably, that spreading justice was a higher value than accumulating wealth, that charity was an obligation, that with wealth comes responsibility; that a society that neglected the poor, the widow, the orphan, the outsider, that deprived them of the means to live with dignity, that refused to listen to their cries for help, their needs, their well-being – that such a society where wealth was generated but not used for the good of all, that kind of society was – to use a traditional word – sinful. And, as both the Torah and the prophets intuited, such societies were doomed, would in the end be destroyed (from the outside), or destroy themselves.
I was very impressed by what I saw this week. More than impressed, I would say I was rather inspired. It is easy to poke fun at this gathering, it’s easy to be a bit scared (as I felt for moments) by the otherness of people, the way they look, the way they sound - you inevitably get people at these kind of open gatherings with a variety of mental health problems - but what was inspirational was the tolerance I saw, the kindness, the commitment to a laborious form of collective decision-making: meetings open to everyone at 1 pm and 7 pm each day with a slow process of listening and speaking and respecting different views until some coherent consensus was achieved – that’s a commitment to a particular kind of inter-personal respect; it’s a commitment that unites a secular belief in the dignity of the individual with a religious belief in the holiness of each human being.
And percolating through it all, what is inspirational is the passion on display for a different model of living together in community. And yes it is easy to be sceptical and dismissive of this as naive – or to condemn it, as a lot of the media and Tory MPs have done, as hypocritical because some of these people have a coffee at Starbucks, or charge their mobile phones there. But this smug moral point-scoring quite misses the point.
And the point is that all around the world this year, starting in Spain with the los indignados protests, there have been groups coming together, for one-off events or day after day – 400,000 in Tel Aviv in August on the streets demanding of the Israeli government a fairer ordering of society, prioritising jobs and homes and education and care of the elderly – people gathering in 900 cities world-wide this month, and they are not all saying ‘Capitalism is Crisis’ but they are all responding to global capitalism being in crisis.
This Shabbat we read the mythic Tower of Babel story, Genesis 11: 1-9. But a myth can contain powerful truth if you know how to read it right, if you listen in to its message, to what is hidden inside its fairytale-like exterior. And the Tower of Babel is a story that speaks about what is happening now, it tells us about a society that ‘had the same language and the same words’ and the people said ‘Come on, let’s all build a city with a tower that reaches to heaven’ – literally a skyscraper – ‘and let’s make a name for ourselves...’
And this is what we have done, more powerfully than ever before in the history of this planet – the same language, the same words, whether you in London or Berlin, New York or Brussels or Beijing: ‘globalisation, economic growth, free-market turbo-capitalism, deregulation, consumerism based on the manufacture of desire’ – this is what we have built over the last fifty years or so. This is the name of the game – and what a ‘name we have made for ourselves’.
You can go up to Hampstead Heath and look out over the city, this wonderful, awesome, awful city of ours, London, and you survey the thrusting Canary Wharf-Gherkin-Shardification of our skyline, all that glitter and glass and phallic cold steel – and you don’t have to be the God of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, to think: no good will come of all this, the omnipotent building and the idolisation of growth; and you don’t have to be the Holy One of Israel to think: who do these people think they are, playing god with people’s lives?
There is an extraordinary story in the Jewish tradition, a midrash about the Tower of Babel, where the rabbis said that the Tower had seven levels on its east side and seven on its west side: builders brought the bricks up one side and then came down the other. And if a person slipped and fell down and died, nobody paid any attention and the work went on. But if a brick fell down, everyone stopped working and wept: ‘OMG, they said – Woe is us! How, when, are we going to get another brick to replace it!’
So you don’t have to be a Marxist critic of capitalism to see what is going on in this story. Two thousand years ago the rabbis were aware that people were quite ready to put the projects of empire-building before care for people, for individuals. Building the brand becomes more important than the conditions of the workers. Profit margins take precedence over alleviating poverty. It’s a universal story and it has led us in our own times into a profound crisis.
But this time no God is going to look down and destroy the project and scatter the people and confound their language. We are the gods now – or think we are. Co-incidentally this Shabbat, because it was a new moon, we also read another part of our mythic narrative from the Book of Genesis, about the fourth day of creation, which describes the creation of the sun and the moon and the stars: it’s a story wrestling with the mystery of how did they come to be here, these celestial bodies, how did they come into existence? how is it that we live just the right distance from the sun – 93,000,000 miles – not too hot, not too cold, that we can live at all on the fragile surface of this tiny planet in the middle of nowhere? how can that be, how can that possibly be?
And we, who have become the gods now – or think we are – we have a universal language now, just like in the story of the Tower of Babel, and with this language of science and technology (on which of course the global markets now depend) we can measure the heat of the sun, and we can land a man on the moon, and we can see pictures in wonderful colour and awesome detail of stars being born and stars dying: we can do all this miraculous stuff, we have build a civilisation brick by brick, with information added to information, a world solid and towering and magnificent – and I don’t decry it, because I wouldn’t want to live in a world without penicillin or be operated on with a carving knife - so we have build this world with towers of knowledge and expertise; but we can’t yet care, we still don’t care, for those who fall off the edge, who depend for their homes and their well-being, and their very lives sometimes, who depend on the politicians and wealth-creators to devise ways of sharing it – more equally, more justly, more compassionately. If we can put men on the moon and capture the birth of stars, surely we can use our ingenuity to prevent one fifth of the children in this country living in poverty?
And those protestors, resisters, are saying: We can do this, if there is the will to do it, we can do things better, we can pay attention to those who fall off the project. And around the world there are many, many who fall off, who slip out of sight, who are exploited and abused and used for the sake of the Babel projects of profit and consumption. We can do it differently, we need to do it differently, and the challenge for the younger generation growing up in this world – and the majority of those I saw at St Paul’s were young (but then most people look young to me these days) – the challenge is to do it differently, to do it better. They are not going to have any choice – because the Tower is tottering, and when it falls, who will have the energy, the experience, the wisdom, to re-build on more secure foundations, on more deep-rooted human values?
Those people in those tents may be gone by Christmas, by choice or by eviction; this may be an ephemeral, a transient occupation of the space around St.Paul’s. But they will be back, in one form or another, here and abroad, they will be back because they represent something eternal, something very Jewish actually, a belief, a hopefulness – what use to be called messianic hopefulness - that we can do better than this. We can build a society, brick by brick: dignity, justice, generosity, compassion, care, companionship - these are the building blocks of real community and a good, a godly, society where people are more valued than profit margins, where sharing what we have is more important than share options. We can do it better.
[Extracted and adapted from a sermon given on October 29th at Finchley Reform Synagaogue]
Sunday, 16 October 2011
Thoughts on Impermanence
How much insecurity can you bear in your life? How much awareness of the randomness, the sheer contingency and unpredictability of life? How much do we want to be reminded of the fragility of our bodies, our minds, our social structures, the innate vulnerability grafted into the carefully-constructed fabric of our daily lives?
Religious traditions can seem to offer some respite from the unsettling reality of inhabiting bodies that gradually fail us, and societies where our sense of well-being is dependent on social, political and financial forces outside any individual’s control. Religions attempt to create – through a rich interweaving of communal and personal rituals, ethical practices, sanctioned behaviours and elaborate theological gymnastics – a meaningful world for believers to inhabit. They seek to keep existential terror at bay – the terrifying fear that life has no inherent meaning; is, in Thomas Hobbes’ words, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’; and that we avoid this fate more by luck than our own good judgement.
I offer these thoughts during this week-long festival of Sukkot. I find it hard to get excited by Sukkot when it is thought about solely as a late autumn ‘nature’ festival with the waving of the traditional lulav and etrog akin to an act of primitive ‘sympathetic magic’ where one asks ‘God’, as opposed to the gods, to bring rain in sufficient quantities to ensure the survival of your crops, and therefore of yourself. This might have given the festival a real existential edge two millennia ago; but it doesn’t justify it now.
However there are other customs which do speak to me. The questions that surround The central symbol – the temporary shelter, the sukkah, constructed next to one’s home, where one eats and sometimes sleeps for the duration of the festival – seems to me to be is an antidote to religious certainty: it opens us to a range of questions about our personal and collective need for security, and our fragmentary awareness that genuine security may not be achieved through attachment to the material world.
Made of organic materials, branches and leaves, the roof of the sukkah must be such that one can see through to the stars at night: as one looks up, and out, there is a dawning realisation of the impermanence and fragility of all we build and hold dear. We recall the origin of these ‘booths’ in the mythic narrative of the Israelites’ forty year journey through the wilderness towards a distant ‘promised land’. The Biblical story describes the temporary homes the people built – sometimes for months, sometimes for years – and their education into the reality of following the peripatetic divine force that always moved them on in ways they could never predict or control.
For me, Sukkot is a reminder that permanence and certainty are antithetical to a spiritual sensibility. The great German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, scribbling a new theology on postcards in the trenches of the First World War, saw the festival as symbolising something vital both for his diasporic people and, he intuited, something with a universal resonance: it ‘serves to remind the people that no matter how solid the house of today may seem, no matter how temptingly it beckons to rest and unimperilled living, it is but a tent which permits only a pause in the long wanderings through the wilderness of centuries’ (from The Star of Redemption).
In sensitising us to our transience, the festival invites us to think of those for whom unsettledness and transient living are the norm, not merely an annual religious ritual. The invitation of guests, strangers, ‘outsiders’, into one’s home is a habitual part of Jewish social living that receives a special emphasis at this time of the year. Hospitality as an everyday virtue takes on a deeper religious significance. My own synagogue – Finchley Reform Synagogue (www.frsonline.org) - is making itself available this winter, along with local churches, as a host venue for Homeless Action in Barnet, offering a cooked meal, a warm place to sleep, washing and toilet facilities, fresh clothes, conversation and breakfast for the area’s homeless.
Our guests will help us understand what George Steiner has called ‘an arduous truth’ that emerges from the mystery of Jewish resilience: ‘that human beings must learn to be each other’s guests on this small planet.’
[This is an expanded version of an article that first appeared in The Guardian on October 15th: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/oct/14/sukkot-festival-transient-living-guests?INTCMP=SRCH]
Religious traditions can seem to offer some respite from the unsettling reality of inhabiting bodies that gradually fail us, and societies where our sense of well-being is dependent on social, political and financial forces outside any individual’s control. Religions attempt to create – through a rich interweaving of communal and personal rituals, ethical practices, sanctioned behaviours and elaborate theological gymnastics – a meaningful world for believers to inhabit. They seek to keep existential terror at bay – the terrifying fear that life has no inherent meaning; is, in Thomas Hobbes’ words, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’; and that we avoid this fate more by luck than our own good judgement.
I offer these thoughts during this week-long festival of Sukkot. I find it hard to get excited by Sukkot when it is thought about solely as a late autumn ‘nature’ festival with the waving of the traditional lulav and etrog akin to an act of primitive ‘sympathetic magic’ where one asks ‘God’, as opposed to the gods, to bring rain in sufficient quantities to ensure the survival of your crops, and therefore of yourself. This might have given the festival a real existential edge two millennia ago; but it doesn’t justify it now.
However there are other customs which do speak to me. The questions that surround The central symbol – the temporary shelter, the sukkah, constructed next to one’s home, where one eats and sometimes sleeps for the duration of the festival – seems to me to be is an antidote to religious certainty: it opens us to a range of questions about our personal and collective need for security, and our fragmentary awareness that genuine security may not be achieved through attachment to the material world.
Made of organic materials, branches and leaves, the roof of the sukkah must be such that one can see through to the stars at night: as one looks up, and out, there is a dawning realisation of the impermanence and fragility of all we build and hold dear. We recall the origin of these ‘booths’ in the mythic narrative of the Israelites’ forty year journey through the wilderness towards a distant ‘promised land’. The Biblical story describes the temporary homes the people built – sometimes for months, sometimes for years – and their education into the reality of following the peripatetic divine force that always moved them on in ways they could never predict or control.
For me, Sukkot is a reminder that permanence and certainty are antithetical to a spiritual sensibility. The great German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, scribbling a new theology on postcards in the trenches of the First World War, saw the festival as symbolising something vital both for his diasporic people and, he intuited, something with a universal resonance: it ‘serves to remind the people that no matter how solid the house of today may seem, no matter how temptingly it beckons to rest and unimperilled living, it is but a tent which permits only a pause in the long wanderings through the wilderness of centuries’ (from The Star of Redemption).
In sensitising us to our transience, the festival invites us to think of those for whom unsettledness and transient living are the norm, not merely an annual religious ritual. The invitation of guests, strangers, ‘outsiders’, into one’s home is a habitual part of Jewish social living that receives a special emphasis at this time of the year. Hospitality as an everyday virtue takes on a deeper religious significance. My own synagogue – Finchley Reform Synagogue (www.frsonline.org) - is making itself available this winter, along with local churches, as a host venue for Homeless Action in Barnet, offering a cooked meal, a warm place to sleep, washing and toilet facilities, fresh clothes, conversation and breakfast for the area’s homeless.
Our guests will help us understand what George Steiner has called ‘an arduous truth’ that emerges from the mystery of Jewish resilience: ‘that human beings must learn to be each other’s guests on this small planet.’
[This is an expanded version of an article that first appeared in The Guardian on October 15th: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/oct/14/sukkot-festival-transient-living-guests?INTCMP=SRCH]
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