Wednesday 21 February 2024

Two Kinds of Jew - A Sketch on Jewish Identity

 Let me sketch out a cartoon-like version of two kinds of Jews – or rather two forms of feeling life within contemporary Diaspora Jews, two stances towards Jewishness that animates or motivates (consciously or unconsciously) our everyday lives as Jews.

There is the ‘Pesach Jew’ and the ‘Purim Jew’.

If you are a ‘Pesach Jew’ you will be stirred by the central themes of the story of liberation as described in the book of Exodus: that an oppressed people were freed from slavery and then went on to receive a moral vision about how to live in the world.

The ‘Pesach Jew’ will have imbibed the idea that the revelation at Sinai taught a traumatised people that justice, compassion and lovingkindness were qualities that resided in the human heart; and that the Jewish role in the world was to enact these attributes and qualities both within their own community and in relation to those who lived beyond their own tribe or nation.

In other words, the ’Pesach Jew’ has internalised the symbolism of the Torah story, a story that highlights and values freedom from oppression, and links it directly to an ethical vision: that the Jewish people are to be a “light to the nations”. The ‘Pesach Jew’ recognises that the oft-repeated Biblical idea  that ‘you shall love the stranger and the outsider because you were strangers in the land of Egypt’ is at the moral core of what it means to be Jewish. The Jewish soul is one that is sensitive to the sufferings of others and is determined that a central part of being Jewish involves reaching out to express care for Jews and non-Jews alike.

For the ‘Pesach Jew’ this stance depends on memory - sometimes unconsciously inherited memory -  the long arc of Jewish memory that links the mythic past of the people  with their continued existence now. We tell the story over and over to keep alive the memory of where we came from; and to keep alive the ethical commitment stemming from that memory. Inherited memory becomes a motivator for ethical and social action.

And the ‘Purim Jew’? What moves the heart of the ‘Purim Jew’? The Purim story – based on the Biblical Book of Esther - contains one aspect of the Jewish story that has never left us: that there exist in the world people who dislike us, hate us, want to persecute us. In the story, the anti-hero Haman foments a plan, backed by royal decree, to rid the Persian kingdom of its Jews. Over the generations, Haman’s animus against the Jews, as outsiders in Persia, has been enacted time and again. Although the narrative is historically unreliable, the anti-Jewish legislation that it describes has a powerful historical resonance. The story is an archetype of antisemitic hatred. It is a strand of Biblical literature that still reverberates in the heart of our Jewish community. For the ‘Purim Jew’, the experience of anti-Jewish antipathy – or the fear of it - is at the heart of one’s Jewish identity. 

Remaining Jewish becomes an act of defiance towards the antisemite. What the ‘Purim Jew’ learns from Jewish history is a stubborn refusal to leave the world stage. For the ‘Purim Jew’ the Jewish soul is marinated in feelings of victimhood and in the bloody-minded determination not to let Jewry’s enemies have the last word. Survival is all.

Of course the ‘Purim Jew’ is also keeping alive memory – memory of historical antipathy to Jews, aggression towards Jews, persecution of Jews – but this is selective memory. This is memory only able to - or only wanting to - hear this motif, this melody, within the symphony played out over centuries of interactions between Jews and non-Jews. For the ‘Purim Jew’ there is no creative or mutually beneficial social and cultural intercourse between Jews and the inhabitants of the lands in which they have resided – there is merely suspicion and worse.  

This is the kind of memory which is operating when Jews say they feel ‘existentially threatened’ by the current upsurge in reported antisemitism in the UK and abroad. That upsurge is shocking and disturbing and needs to be monitored and prosecuted - and vigilance is absolutely necessary for us Diaspora Jews. One can feel saddened by this, or angry – or both – but it may be useful to try to keep a sense of proportion about it. We aren’t in the 1930s Germany of antisemitic state legislation and institutional persecution – we are dealing with small groups, and lone individuals, emboldened to enact their prejudices online, sometimes in person, and as horrible and frightening as this can be, in the UK we have the backing of a legal system and police to help us contain this unpleasantness and these threats when they come.

It can be difficult to keep a sense of perspective about this here in London because the kind of memory that gets triggered in us is the memory at the heart of the ‘Purim Jew’: the selective memory of Jews as the ones who are eternally hated and persecuted. And of course it is this kind of memory that is particularly operative in Israel when people are saying they feel ‘existentially threatened’.

The October 7th barbarism has powerfully triggered this deeply-lodged strand of feeling in the Jewish-Israeli psyche and one can see how traumatic the events of that day have been, how they are resonating still in the psyches of the people, and indeed how the excruciating pain connected with the hostage situation is truly dementing. Our hearts do go out to those who are going through this: there is no family in Israel unaffected by either the immediate connection with hostages and their families, or those who lost loved ones on October 7th, or those who have lost loved ones in the fighting that has ensued, or those still displaced from their homes. All of these need support and solidarity in whatever way it can be shown.   

Even if I have over these months offered a critique of certain aspects of Israel’s Zionist  story or its current political responses, I have tried never to lose sight of the human drama that is ongoing for the people going through this. It has sometimes been difficult to balance my empathy for those who are going through this embattled saga, with my other concerns about the meaning of these events within the longer arc of Jewish history and its meaning for us Jews who sit here in the Diaspora, who are realising that what happens over there is having a direct impact on us over here. This ongoing drama can also feel dementing in the suburbs of London – not least in the attempt to hold in mind and take to heart the anguish of Palestinian suffering alongside that of Jewish suffering.

The categories of ‘Purim Jew’ and ‘Pesach Jew’ are inevitably a bit simplistic – I said they were cartoon-like, they are a kind of shorthand – because we can recognise that the ‘Pesach Jew’ might value the themes of liberation and a commitment to justice and equality and compassion, but the story – like the Purim story - is also rooted in victimisation, that ancient antipathy towards us. It wasn’t called antisemitism then, in Egypt, but the Biblical saga is about the oppression of an alien people living in the midst of a majority culture. That’s the strand of ‘Purim’ in the Pesach story, and it lives inside even the most secular or humanitarian-minded ‘Pesach Jew’: the archaic memory, intergenerational memory, of being strangers in strange lands, is still alive however securely integrated one now feels, however culturally assimilated one is.

I have no doubt we will get through this period of doubt, darkness, inner dividedness - it’s going to take time for the external situation to be resolved, and of course there are different pictures of what ‘resolved’ might look like. So we here in the UK are going to have to live with heightened feelings of insecurity for a while longer – this, one intuits, is going to be a long journey.

[partially based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, February 17th, 2024]

Monday 12 February 2024

'Everything Is Connected to Everything' - on Butterflies, Stalin and Visions that Fade

 The Jewish mystics of old believed that everything in the world was connected to everything else, that we are all caught up in an immense web of being, with the energy of the universe flowing uninterruptedly through everything that lives. The breath of all life animating us, moment by moment, is part of the divine flow of energy animating existence. Everything is connected, in a constantly unfolding chain of being, with everything else.

Four hundred years or so after Rabbi Isaac Luria developed these mythopoeic ideas about the nature of reality (as he saw it), Professor Edward Lorenz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a paper entitled Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas? and thus, in 1972, so-called Chaos Theory was born. This was a paradigm leap in scientific understanding about how the universe works, how everything is indeed connected to everything else  in a vast web of being - and a small action here (the so-called ‘butterfly effect’) ripples out in a way that is ungraspable but real, and effects something else on the other side of the planet. 

And so the mystic’s understanding is mirrored in the advanced mathematical models of the scientist’s understanding. For us ordinary mortals – well, for me, anyway – there is almost no way to make sense of this ‘butterfly effect’. It is so outrageously beyond rational understanding. Because it’s not just about butterflies of course. To feel that every word you utter, every action you make, reverberates  out into the ether, has consequences beyond our reach, beyond our understanding, beyond our control. Surely it would be paralysing to think like that? Nobody could live like that, with that degree of awareness. We would go mad.

And yet there’s something about that notion that things are connected to each other in ways that we can never know, never understand, never track, never discover, there’s something about that sense of being held within this great mystery of a web of interconnected energy, there’s something about that, about the poetry of it, that is beautiful and inspiring and humbling, at least for me.

One thing that this sense of interconnectedness allows me to do, encourages me to do, gives me permission to do, is play with ideas, play with connections, trace connections, follow lines of inquiry, of imagination, of intuition, to see how things could be connected. For example this week I have been playing with three themes – themes which at first glance might not seem particularly connected but that I feel can be productively connected.

Idea one: I have been thinking a lot recently about Stalinism. I ‘ve just finally finished the Soviet-Jewish writer Vassily Grossman’s monumental novel ‘Life and Fate’: it was banned in his homeland, but it’s one of the most significant novels of the 20th century. It is our era’s equivalent of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’, offering a vast panorama of life in central Europe, Russia and Germany, in the 1930s and 1940s. Set during the Nazi siege of Stalingrad during World War 2, Grossman compares the different kinds of horrors of two totalitarian states. He takes us into the concentration camps and the gulags and is unsparing in his portrait of the paranoia and cruelty of the Soviet system under Stalin, how it infiltrated family life and everyone’s mental life, how one word out of place, reported by a colleague, or neighbour, or family member could lead to persecution, torture, exile.

And reading this extraordinary book – about life and death and the randomness of history -  led me reflect on how Soviet communism, and the ideology of socialism the Soviet Union said it was enacting, captured the imagination of two, three, generations, world wide in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s and beyond. I have been to a fair number of funerals for an older generation (often parents of friends) who were members of the Communist party in the old East End of London. They were just part of a whole cohort of folk  who became enamoured of the experiment that was taking place in the Soviet Union to create a new kind of society that was to enact in a secular form the messianic dream of the ages, a society of equality and justice.

It was a noble, aspirational vision but it was a vision corrupted by Stalin and his henchmen and notions of ideological purity, and a gap opened up between the reality on the ground and the rhetoric of the state - and that gap was filled from the 1930s until Stalin’s death in 1953 with the execution of a million Soviet citizens, deliberate mass starvation in Ukraine, forced labour camps, deportations, detentions, interrogations, bloody massacres, show trails, antisemitic purges against Jewish doctors and writers…and all the while not only impoverished Jews in the East End but some of the great minds of European thought were fellow travellers with the communist vision, defenders of it, promoters of it.

And what fascinates me, and horrifies me, and makes be anxious (though I will come to that) is the question about when followers of this vision finally abandoned it.  When did they realise they had been seduced into a huge error of judgment by the rhetoric and propaganda of the Soviet State, and its emissaries, an error that was intellectual, emotional, spiritual? How long did it take for them to let go of their wishful thinking in the face of evidence of the evils of the actual system they were supporting?

HG Wells, George Orwell, Camus, Sartre, John Steinbeck, Simone de Beauvoir – I am not going to name too many names – they gradually became disenchanted,  but often it took decades for that disenchantment to really sink in, in spite of abundant evidence from very early on that this was an experiment that was not only persecuting its own people but was involved in what we would now describe as crimes against humanity.

So was it the show trials of 1937-8 that did it? Was it the annihilation of Jewish intellectuals in 1952? For many communist fellow-travellers it was the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. For some it wasn’t until the crushing of the Prague spring in 1968. People held on to their commitment to this ideology for decades, and nothing could force them to disconnect from their younger decades of enthusiasm. There is a real psychological issue here at the heart of this historical question. When we have become fixated on an ideology that gives us some kind of emotional satisfaction, some kind of vision of hope, what does it take to let it go and acknowledge our mistake, our naivety, our false thinking? It is actually very hard to do. If we are holding fast to an ideology, how long do we keep silent about crimes done in its name – or even find a way of justifying them? The story of the Soviet Union is a text case for this.

Second idea: from our Torah portion this week, which contains the famous phrase na’aseh ve’nishma [‘we will do and we will listen’]: this is the children of Israel’s response to Moses when he brings down from Sinai God’s teachings, God’s laws. “And all the people answered with one voice”, says our storyteller, “saying: Everything that the Eternal has commanded we will do” (Exodus 24:4). And then a few verses later, after Moses is described recording the obligations of the covenant and reading it aloud to the people, we hear “And they said: Everything that the Eternal has spoken na’aseh ve’nishma, we will do it and we will listen to it, we will obey it, we will try to understand it” (24:7).

There is an almost unanimous tradition of reading this text that praises the faithfulness of the Israelite people in saying na’aseh ve’nishma. It is seen as an acceptance of their role as God’s chosen people. ‘We will do what is required’. And the commentators point out that it is particularly worthy of praise that the people say they’d do whatever was required before they had understood what it meant, before they had heard (shema) what they were agreeing to. It is not clear if the Biblical phrase does mean a sequence or whether it is a combined ‘doing and hearing’ activity. But the traditional commentators tend to stress this was an unquestioning commitment to action – that was followed by thinking, reflecting on what it meant.

That’s how this phrase is always read nowadays by rabbis and Jewish teachers: ‘look how devoted the Jewish people were/are in following God, they agreed to do it even before they knew what was involved’. The only dissenting view I could find belongs to the Sadducees, the group who had religious and political power during the Second Temple period - but lost their authority once the Temple was destroyed in 70CE. Their opponents, the Pharisees, evolved into the rabbis who wrote the Talmud and developed Judaism into the forms that we have inherited.  The Talmud is uniformly hostile to the Sadducees, and as not a single line of Sadducean writing has survived, we are dependent on their adversaries to see into their thinking. A great example of how history is written by the victors.

So there’s one passage in the Talmud discussing  this phrase na’aseh ve’nishma in which the Sadducees are recorded as being critical of the Jewish people, calling them ama paziza – “a rash people, for whom the mouth precedes the ears …you should have listened in order to know whether you were able to accept”’ [cf. Aviva Zornberg, ‘The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus’, p.303). And this is the essence  of my second theme: I am becoming more and more sympathetic to the dissident view of the Sadducees here, against the overwhelming weight of the tradition.

And the reason is – and maybe you can begin to see how everything is connected to everything else – I have real doubts, about the wisdom of subscribing to any ideology (and religious faith is an ideology) that requires one to submit to its thinking, that asks for a priori obedience, whether it is obedience to the programme of a Stalin or a God or a religious tradition. Because obedience so often has a persecutory shadow side, an under-edge, that involves punishing those who don’t follow the party line. Or – as in Catholic guilt and Jewish guilt – punishing oneself for not being obedient enough.

To accept any ideology (political or religious of cultural or social) and not be free to question it is foolhardy, ‘rash’. To have to submit to received opinion can be soul-destroying. But to call into question what one has accepted voluntarily, what one has followed perhaps enthusiastically for decades, to call into question a belief system that might have sustained you for years - that is very difficult, painful. To say I have seen what this ideology, this system, this vision actually does, and I can no longer go along with it - that requires a kind of intellectual and emotional and spiritual bravery (or is it honesty? or is it objectivity?) which not everyone can muster. Not least because it might leave a huge gap where that belief once sat – and what does one replace it with?

Third idea, everything being connected to everything else. What about the chaos of feelings we Jews might be having about Israel/Gaza right now? The ever-present elephant in the room. And I feel reluctant to speak about it. So let me just name it by saying that the questions I was asking earlier about the fellow-travellers of  communism, those defenders of the system in spite of the evidence coming out of the Soviet Union – and at this distance it might seem hard to reconstruct just how powerful and seductive were the narratives woven by the defenders of the system – those questions I was raising are, I think, pertinent to the questions one might have about being a fellow-traveller and defender of the Zionist vision.

We each will have our own take on this - but although it is now relatively safe to talk about when the scales fell from one’s eyes about old-style Soviet communism, it can feel far from safe to talk about it in relation to contemporary Zionism. (Please note I am not comparing the problematic content of actions  - but the process of how hard it is to question and then perhaps let go of the evocative vision that one might attach oneself to).

So at some stage we need to ask when did it happen to you? Has it happened to you? People like Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt drew attention to the fundamental problems of the Zionist endeavour in the 1940s, as the State was born; for others it wasn’t until after 1967 and the conquered territories were held on to rather than relinquished, and then gradually settled on, and it became clear that justice for the other inhabitants of the land, and the refugees, has being delayed, postponed, pushed out of the story. The mantra of na’aseh ve’nishma, we will do it and then reflect on it, was a powerful one in the Zionist story, and many Jews around the world became faithful followers of the ‘doing’, and set aside their misgivings, their ‘listening’ to the consequences. For some, those feelings of being enamoured by the original vision of a Jewish homeland began to sour with the Sabra and Shatillah massacres in 1982, or the Lebanon war in 2006, or the first Gaza war in 2012, or the declaration of ongoing Jewish supremacy in Israel codified in 2018 in the Nation State law. Or maybe it is this current chaos that is doing it, finally.

Everything being connected to everything, we can ask in relation to Israel: when was your 1956 Hungarian uprising moment? Or has it not happened yet? Are you with the Pharisees or with the Sadducees on this current tragedy? Is it ‘rash’ to be critical of Israel at a time like this when so many in the world are feeling hostile to both Israel and Jews? Or is it ‘rash’ to be uncritical, to be still enamoured of the ideology, the vision of Zionism as it defends its ‘we will do whatever it takes to prevail’ philosophy?

How many wings of how many butterflies will have to flutter, and how many will have to be torn apart, before the spirit of history declares a winner? Because at the moment there are no winners, just the cruelty of lives destroyed. And for that we weep, and have cause to weep.  

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, February 10th, 2024]

Sunday 14 January 2024

"Evil Comes From A Failure To Think"

Let’s start with a question: which book saw a 1000% increase in sales in the 12 months following Donald Trump’s election as US president in 2016? 

First (small) clue: it was published in 1951.

Second (larger) clue: a woman author. 

Born in Hamburg in 1906, brought up in Berlin. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 for doing historical research in the archives (on programmatic state antisemitism in Germany) after eight days she was released and immediately fled the country, with her mother, crossing the border to Czechoslovakia and from there eventually to exile in Paris. 

Let me put you out of your misery: I am talking about the political philosopher, historian, essayist, Hannah Arendt. And the book - the one that topped the  Amazon lists for months - was the book that made her name in the United States: The Origins of Totalitarianism, her long, detailed exploration of 19th century antisemitism, imperialism and racism and how these strands of 19th and 20th century life had emerged into – woven themselves into – totalitarian systems like Nazism and Stalinism. 

It’s probably not a book one would read for pleasure – not least because  Arendt’s prose style has that clotted density characteristic of the academic tradition in which she grew up and was trained. She was a precocious youngster, the doted-on only child of assimilated, educated, secular-but- Jewishly-aware left-leaning parents. At 14 she was devouring the volumes of Immanuel Kant she found in her father’s library; later she was expelled from school for challenging a teacher; and at 18 she enrolled to study philosophy at the University of Marburg with Europe’s leading philosopher Martin Heidegger. 

She later studied under the tutelage of both Edmund Husserl and Karl Jaspers – these names may not mean anything to you, but those three male teachers  were the central figures of 20th century European humanist and existential philosophy. All of them (and Arendt followed in that tradition) wrote with that heavy, convoluted, abstract lyricism that was rooted in the German Romantic tradition. Anyone who has read Martin Buber’s work might have had a taste of that. They aren’t beach reading. 

So if it wasn’t her fluid prose style that made The Origins of Totalitarianism such an unlikely must-read after sixty-odd years, what was it? Well, I’d suggest it was possibly the way in which readers discovered that Arendt had developed insights into political processes and human nature – and how politics moulds and manipulates human nature – that suddenly had a startling new relevance to what is going on in these early decades of the 21st century.   

Readers discovered that within that demanding prose style there were some luminous  jewels to be found, thoughts that helped one think about, for example,  what was going on in the White House. And not only there. Sentences like : 

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” [OT, 1976, p.416] 

That’s a sentence to keep close to hand when thinking about the recent American past – and what is yet to come; as well as when we get our next UK Cabinet reshuffle. A totalitarian mindset can exist separately from a totalitarian system. 

But  why am I focusing on Hannah Arendt now? It’s partly because I’ve become interested in her recently, and I’d like to share that enthusiasm with you. It’s partly because I’ve just been reviewing a new biography of her life and work – We Are Free To Change The World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience by Lyndsey Stonebridge - and it’s made me realise how little I have  paid attention over the years to her work and the deep originality of her thinking. It’s never too late to discover a major thinker who has been hidden in plain sight all one’s life. 

I’d always known about the mystique that surrounds Arendt – made up of all sorts of things about her life, her biography: she was not only Heidegger’s star student at Marburg but his lover for four years (he was twice her age, and married), and although their affair had ended well before the advent of Hitler, Heidegger later became – to Arendt’s horror - an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis and was a member of the Party until 1945. Despite this, Arendt renewed contact with him in 1949 and they remained close for twenty more years. 

Arendt managed to escape Europe in 1941 in spite of having been incarcerated as an ‘enemy alien’ in Vichy France in the concentration camp at Gurs near the Spanish border: she walked out of the camp with forged papers provided by a group of Austrian communists operating within the camp –  soon after this the camp became a transit point for Auschwitz. Survival was (is) so often a matter of luck or fortuitous timing or the sheer randomness of life. 

When she boarded the boat to America she carried with her a suitcase of papers and writings – not her own but those of the great philosopher Walter Benjamin, who had entrusted them to Arendt when they met by chance days before he committed suicide on the French/Spanish border. You see what I mean by the mystique around her – but that’s around her life. What about her writing?   

The text which really made her name - and promoted her to the status of leading public intellectual -  came in the 1960s after she attended the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. She wrote up her experience for The New Yorker and it was in that context that the phrase with which Arendt is most often associated entered public consciousness – The New Yorker lifted one phrase out of her text to publicise the piece: that much misunderstood phrase ‘the banality of evil’.   

When she wrote about the ‘banality of evil’ many Jewish readers felt she was minimizing the horrors and evil of the Holocaust – but, on the contrary, what she was emphasising was that in the flat, detached, bureaucratic verbiage that Eichmann spouted in the dock, with all its circumlocutions which avoided naming the crimes he was committing, a new form of banality was being laid bare, the banality of thoughtlessness, a moral and imaginative blindness that had invaded the human condition, Arendt thought, like a virus. He presented himself as a mediocre functionary with no awareness at all of the monstrous nature of what he had been involved with. That was the ‘banality of evil’. 

Her essays reporting her observations over the many weeks of the trial generated a huge furore. She wrote with deeply etched irony and a kind of intellectual detachment that did not endear her to many survivors. It may be that irony was part of her emotional defence against the pain of what was being spoken about. At any rate, she lost friends over it – people like Saul Bellow. 

But what also alienated her readers was how she reported Eichmann’s attempts to exonerate himself – he spoke in his defence about how he’d worked  with Jewish leaders, in ghettoes and camps, and with a rabbi like Leo Baeck in Theresienstadt (who did to some extent attempt to protect his congregation within the camp by not spelling out everything he knew of their ultimate fate). This could be construed as collaboration with the enemy – and it was painful for Jews to hear her speaking about Jewish leadership in such fraught situations in those kind of terms.  So she was shunned by those who felt that she was guilty of a lack of imaginative awareness of the impossible choices that had had to be made within such extreme situations. 

So Arendt was a complex personality. She never toed the party line on any subject – she was dedicated to thinking for herself, and kept emphasising in her writing that thinking is a moral activity, it is about values, it needs to be done all the time and about every subject. She demands that you do the work for yourself and not rely on second-hand thinking. 

But sometimes she just seems to put her finger on the pulse of something and her angle of vision just illuminates an issue or theme.   

Let’s just take one example that speaks to where we are now in the midst of this horror show in Israel/Gaza – one of the other reasons I’m sharing thoughts about Arendt here is that she can help us think about what is going on in that painful and tragic land. 

Take this thought:

Politically speaking, tribal nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies' - 'one against all' - and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before [this idea] is used to destroy the humanity of man. (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1968, p.227) 

And if that doesn’t speak to what is going on in the minds of Netanyahu, his Knesset henchmen, and the fundamentalists on the West Bank, I don’t know what does. 

So we need Arendt – and she is everywhere. Her image is on coffee mugs and postage stamps and T-Shirts: there are dozens of T-shirts for sale with photos of her, quotes from her – my favourite is the one that says in large bold letters:

  WHAT WOULD

HANNAH ARENDT

          DO?

I wouldn’t wear it myself (except perhaps on Purim) but I have been going round saying to myself ‘What would Hannah Arendt think?’ 

She was an early Zionist, she worked for Youth Aliyah in Paris in the second half of the 1930s, but she was a committed bi-nationalist like Martin Buber, Henrietta Szold, Judah Magnus who ran the Hebrew University, so when the Zionist Congress meeting in the Biltmore Hotel in New York broke with tradition in 1942  and demanded that “Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth” she was appalled, predicting – accurately, of course – that such a  state would exist in endless tension with the other inhabitants of the land. 

And she realised that it wouldn’t solve the underlying problem of human statelessness – she had been stateless from 1938 when she was stripped of her German citizenship until she became a US citizen in 1950. “On the contrary”, she wrote in The Origins Of Totalitarianism, “like virtually all other events of the 20th century, the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees…thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000-800,000people.” [OT, Schocken, 2004, p368

And what would Hannah Arendt think about this week’s turning of the wheel of history, and the opening of the case brought by South Africa (a rich historical irony there) at the International Court of Justice, the case against Israel’s so-called ‘genocidal intent’ in Gaza? The language is of course emotive, and Israel will plead its cause, but it is hard to hear some of the statements made by Israeli politicians and military leaders – I’m not talking about actions but language – it’s hard not to hear some of the vengeful and annihilatory language that has been used without feeling a moral revulsion at the dehumanised and dehumanising rhetoric that has been used.  

So what would Hannah Arendt think?  About the way, after various wrong turns, it has come to this, less than three generations after that? Would she remind us about one of her acidic but penetrating observations, that “evil comes from a failure to think”? 

[[“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”  from Eichmann in Jerusalem]]

Well, we will not see her like again, but we still need thinkers of the calibre of Arendt to help us think in these fraught times. Not just to feel – Jews are very good at that – but to think, to gain a clarity, a moral clarity about how to act when all around are losing their heads. But thinking is hard work. To do it we need all the help we can get, from Hannah Arendt or anyone else. 

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, January 13th, 2024]

 

 

Saturday 30 December 2023

Mourning is Timeless

 "The only reason to be an artist…is to bear witness” (Philip Guston)

There are some Biblical verses – well, many, if truth be told - that lie dull and lifeless on the page for us modern readers. They no longer speak to us – if they ever did. That’s probably our limitation, not theirs. But over time we might recognise that they are not lifeless, they are just dormant – as if they are biding their time, as if they’re awaiting their moment to reveal something to us, waiting patiently for their opportunity to illuminate an aspect of where we are now, what we might be wrestling with now.

So this week my eye was caught by a verse from our weekly sedrah [Torah reading] that describes a stage in the journey that Joseph took with the embalmed body of his father Jacob (Genesis 50). Jacob had spent his last years in Egypt, a bitter old man, an exile far away from his homeland; and before he dies, having given each of his sons their own blessing, Jacob requests that they bury him in the ancestral burial site back in der heim, in Mamre – today we call it Hebron (where Jews, assault rifles in one hand and siddurim, prayer-books, in the other, will be reading this text in very different ways to me).

We read how Joseph calls his brothers together and gets permission from Pharoah to make the journey back to Canaan to bury their father. The brothers leave their children and their herds and possessions behind, and set off accompanied by a huge retinue of Egyptian dignitaries and chariots and horsemen – it’s like a state funeral, Joseph being second only in prestige and power to Pharaoh himself.

And then our storytellers do something which has that quintessential Biblical narrative quirkiness one comes to recognise, and wonder over: they give us a short scene that disturbs the narrative flow, that seems superfluous to the story - yet it apparently has some significance for the authors, but a significance they don’t spell out. They leave it planted in the text – and there it waits for centuries, millennia, awaiting its moment.

I’m talking about verse 10 of chapter 50:

“When they came to Goren Ha-atad…they entered into a deep, heavy-hearted lamentation, and Joseph observed a seven day mourning period for his father” - this is the origin of the shiva tradition, by the way [the seven-day Jewish mourning period] – and then in the next verse the scene is described again from the outside, as it were, “And when the Canaanites living there saw this…they said: This is a grievous mourning time for the Egyptians”. 

This is a form of literary Cubism by the way, two perspectives of the same thing fused together in the picture, one superimposed on the other. And we are left in no doubt by the storytellers that whether you are a participant in this collective mourning, or merely observers of it like the Canaanites who see everyone involved as Egyptians, what’s being portrayed is a time filled with deep grief.

And then the text picks up its narrative thread: “And his sons carried him to the land of Caanan and buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field near Mamre that Abraham had bought…”

So what was it about this that particularly caught my eye? Well, it might surprise you but it was the name of the place where the mourning takes place. It’s in a spot called Goren ha-Atad.  ‘The threshing floor of/for thorns’. So what? The name adds nothing to the story being told. But this place of mourning is a real geographical location: it is identified as a site called Tell el-Adjull - which just happens to be in the southern sector of present day Gaza. Where, as I speak, grievous mourning is again taking place. As we know. Although we don’t want to know.

It is as if there is an aperture in time through which the past illuminates the present. The Torah takes us into Gaza. As this whole section of text makes clear, Jews are a people who know about mourning, about loss, about grief, about  how close to the heart the death of a loved one can be – and Jews know too how significant it is to have time to honour the dead. I sometimes think there is a way in which we are a faith tradition more bound up with death and mourning our losses – personal and collective - than of being enamoured by life and its manifold and rich possibilities.

On Yom Kippur, for example, I am always amazed in my community how, after the Yizkor service in late afternoon [the annual memorialising roll-call of those who have died in the past year] - which is rightly significant and moving for so many, and people come especially for it - as soon as it is over, half the community disappears. Yes, I know that the Neilah service that follows it is another hour and we repeat a lot of the liturgy -  but the conclusion of Yom Kippur is very much about life: it is about our future, our personal future, our collective future; yet it carries less weight - less emotional and spiritual value it seems - than our mourning, our sadness, our remembering our losses. This isn’t a criticism – it’s just an observation.

We are a strange, quixotic people, us Jews. We mourn our losses, we are good at that, we have had a lot of practice over the years as a people, and of course individually we have all lost loved ones. Maybe because we do, on the whole, love life, treasure life, we are, paradoxically, connoisseurs of loss. If life was not so precious, loss would not mean so much to us.

But back to the text. I want to ask a simple question. (No questions are of course simple, there is complexity at the heart of this question, but it is the question that jumps out of the text for me, jumps at me, won’t let me go). Are we able, when we read of this legendary mourning in Gaza, when we read these verses within our great mythic narrative of the Torah, are we able to really mourn the losses in Gaza? The losses now. Are we allowed even to ask this question? Too soon? But if not now, when?

Will there be a time? Will there ever be a time when we can enter into a period of deep mourning for what has transpired over these weeks? What continues to unfold in these days of trauma in Jewish history? And Palestinian history? Will mourning be allowed? Mourning for  others, as well as ourselves? Because those who see this from the outside, as it were – like in the Torah text – they can see, they can acknowledge: “this is a grievous time of mourning”. The world – the non-Jewish world - can see this. But our Torah text encourages us to see it too, to have a dual perspective. To be moral Cubists. To see events not just from our subjective Jewish point of view, but to see suffering from the outside too, to look with a sense of empathy such as those Canaanites are described as showing: “this is a grievous time of mourning for them”.

Goren Ha-Atad: Gaza has become a threshing floor. And as Jews we can be in mourning for that too.  Threshing, as you know, is about crushing, it is about separating the grain from the chaff, it is a demanding and, yes, brutal activity, necessary for grains - but when your threshing is of a people, the separating out the wheat from the chaff, as it were, becomes a crude operation – and we see the thorny, painful consequences that unfold.

Scholars tell us that the historical significance of this spot mentioned in the Torah, Tell el-Adjull, is that it was the ancient site of a burial ground for high-ranking Egyptian dignitaries. This helps explain why Joseph’s cortege stopped there for their seven days of mourning, en route to the family plot in Mamre. But the Torah is not primarily interested in that kind of background history. It is interested in moral history and emotional history and spiritual history, the kind of history that transcends its specific time and place and speaks into the future, that speaks to those open to hear it today.

So I share with you what I hear it saying to us, how this heavy-hearted mourning, this lamentation at the threshing floor for thorns, is calling out to us - to reflect on, to join with, however we might do that. We have been given this torat emet - this ‘teaching of truth’ as our liturgy calls our sacred literature - and sometimes the truth is very painful; actually truth is often too painful to bear, and maybe at the moment we feel we can’t bear it. Okay -  but whether we like it or not, as Jews we are bound up with these texts, these teachings. It is who we are, for better or worse. We who know what it is to mourn – and are learning, tragically (and yes, unbearably), how much we cause mourning for others. 

I want to dedicate what I am saying today to a group of people in this community who aren’t here today. I know that sounds strange but let me explain, just to finish. There is a cohort of younger people in and around our synagogue who have been feeling that since October 7th their views, their ways of seeing this current conflict, their moral and spiritual perspectives on this traumatic turn in Jewish history – well, there hasn’t been much space for a range of heartfelt views to be expressed. The dominant mantra of solidarity with Israel hasn’t left much space for dissent, or even nuance – this is what they have felt. I am reporting what I hear. So when I spoke a month ago , and what I’ve said today – I say for all those present, of course. But I also say it, for what it’s worth, for all those who are not here with us today.  

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, December 30th 2023]

 

Saturday 11 November 2023

It Never Ends

 “It is better to be wrong by killing no one rather than to be right with mass graves” (Albert Camus, December 1948)

You remember how it began. It began with an outrage, an act of terror, shocking, completely unexpected; and it provoked a cataclysm of death and destruction, slaughter and desecration, horror and folly. It’s engraved on our psyches and features as the deep background to our everyday lives.

As the fog of war descends, regional powers get involved, death tolls pile up, dementing, senseless, and the bloodshed is entwined with a propaganda battle, fierce, relentless, creating information and disinformation, the battle for hearts and minds, with each side convinced of the righteousness of its cause. For God and country. The same old idols that require the same old sacrifices. It never ends, and when it does seem to end – in defeat or so-called victory – it always turns out to be a temporary respite, a pause to lick wounds, mourn the dead, prepare for next time. Because it never ends. The grieving hearts, the necessary justifications, rationalisations, about why it ‘had to be this way’, ‘we had no choice’. When there are always choices.

But you know all this. I often find myself saying that these days: you know all this, there’s nothing I’m saying you don’t already know, in your head or in your heart. Ayn hadash tachat ha-shemesh – There is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes1:9).

This weekend in the UK includes Remembrance Sunday – and synagogues on Shabbat have Remembrance prayers, for those who died serving their country. So you may have understood what I am referring to when I speak about the outrage, the act of terror, that sparks deadly mayhem between nations. Gavrilo Princip assassinated Franz Ferdinand and a madness  descended upon Europe, a nightmare, loss upon loss. And we remember it still.

And here we are more than a century later in a world utterly transformed  - but a world not so transformed that another act of terror, shocking, unexpected, doesn’t generate more bloodshed, more self-righteousness, more pain, loss upon loss. Because it never ends.

I’m not naïve. Dictators, tyrants, fascists, murderous ideologues need to be resisted, forcefully. The defence of freedoms might sometimes require violence, war might be the unwished-for last resort for a group, a people, a nation, all other avenues having been explored before blood is again shed and the innocent again have to suffer. Because, tragically, the innocent always do suffer. ‘Collateral damage’ is a grim euphemism – because then those sanctioning the bloodshed don’t have to speak about grieving hearts and severed limbs and hope abandoned. No, it never ends – not just the urge for revenge, or retaliation, or tribal battles over land, or resources, or honour, but battles over security, or against injustice, battles where the perverse logic is that others have to die so that our lives can continue.

And meanwhile God looks down and weeps. My children have learnt nothing. My children have turned my teachings into weapons. I wanted ploughshares and fertility and human flourishing – and they made swords and instruments of death. I wanted pruning hooks and the blessings of peace – and they made spears and rockets and the machinery of war (Isaiah 2:4). They have learnt nothing.

Jews are the inheritors of a three thousand year old civilisation and culture rooted in a vision of how people might be able to construct societies for the good of all, societies of compassion and justice, of care for the strangers, the marginalised, the vulnerable, of care for each other. And here we are, worried to have a mezuzah on our doors,  worried to send our children to school, worried about wearing a chai (or a Star of David) round our neck. Here we are, with historical fears stirring in our hearts as a worldwide tide of antipathy floods the polluted channels of social media, and Jewish communities around the world suffer the toxic consequences of what Jewish nationalism has brought down on our heads.

Can we bear the pain of this? On any level. On the level of our daily lives here in the UK and the need to keep constantly alert? Or on the level of seeing clearly into the heart of how we have arrived at this stage in our fraught history? Can we bear to see it? I can hardly bear to speak about it. I know it can be too painful to hear it. How Zionism, which was supposed to solve the problem of Jewish insecurity in the world, has resulted in this: endless bloodshed and oppression there, and endless anxieties here. One thing’s for sure: Jews are not in the world to increase the amount of suffering on the planet.

Understand me properly: I am not speaking about the historical and moral need for the Zionist project and the establishment of a State; I am referring to how it evolved, over time, and has ended up in this state of trauma that many people are feeling, I am referring to all the wrong turns on the journey from 1948 to today, that has led to antisemitic graffiti on local buildings round the corner and torn-down posters of the hostages, and Jews frightened to walk in the street, or sit on the tube wearing a kippah.

At some stage we need to ask: how has it come to this? Because it wasn’t inevitable. I don’t subscribe to the idea of the eternal hatred of Jews – that Jews always have been and always will be hated, collectively. We need to be able to look with clarity and with a degree of objectivity - however passionately we might feel about what is happening: we need to be able to look at the complex dynamics of cause and effect, of moral responsibility and choices made – and avoided - these last 75 years. There needs to a reckoning, an ethical audit.

Part of the task of the Jewish people has always been to use introspection and teshuvah (reflective self-judgment) to examine the choices made in life, personal and collective. To find ways to allow our better selves to dominate over our more corrosive impulses.  

Of course I am aware that in saying this now, it probably feels much too early to start to think about it. We are in a state of feeling besieged, hurt, wounded, under attack, vulnerable, outraged; for five weeks now we have had to bear with the excruciating pain of Hamas’s hate-fuelled barbarism and the agonies that it wrought (not just for fellow Jews) and continues to evoke. The Jewish people are feeling existentially insecure – whether this is objectively true or not is not the point, it’s a dominant strand of feeling. And when you are feeling insecure, being able to stand back and reflect on questions about how he have reached this point is very hard to do. The feelings flood our capacity to think and reflect. We feel defensive, we feel aggressive, or we just feel numb.

But reflection will need to happen – and it will require emotional and intellectual bravery, and moral leadership, and a careful nurturing of wounded souls. It will require painful soul-searching and a capacity to look beyond simplistic distinctions like innocent victims and guilty persecutors; it will need to look at the psychological complexities of how those who have been or are persecuted become persecutors in turn,  it will need to look at how inherited trauma is passed on and lived out, it will need to look at how injustices cannot be ignored for ever, it will need to look at how shame and anger and guilt get repressed or projected or acted out. This will be our Jewish work for years to come, decades to come. I am serving notice on it today.

Too early to start perhaps, but we also can’t afford to wait too long to engage in  this work – work for the State of Israel, work for the Diaspora, work for the Jewish people. Let’s just hope that we gain some respite, and speedily, from our current traumas – so that we have the space to do this work, to do it together. Because we will need not just visionary leadership to do it but we will need each other, the support of each other, if we are ever to truly get to grips with the task of re-assessing what is required – what compassion and generosity and imagination and commitment to justice; what it really means to live out the Jewish vision of how things could be, should be.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, 11th November 2023]

Tuesday 19 September 2023

New Year Thoughts: Being Human - the ‘Moronic Inferno’ - Living with a Dual Focus

I’d like to share a light-hearted experiment I conducted over this last weekend – light-hearted but aiming at something serious.

It was first day of Rosh Hashanah – the Jewish New Year – and I was given the opportunity of speaking to the community in what is known as the ‘sermon slot’.

I started by asking them: are you in the mood at this point in our service for something a bit different? A bit of light relief maybe?  I hope so. I want to try something out with you. I’m going to talk to you a bit about Rosh Hashanah, the New Year - but I’m going to ask you to do something, something participatory, if you can.

What I want you to do as I talk is to stop me, interrupt me, if you think there’s something wrong with what I am saying - not factually wrong, I try to get that stuff right - but something strange about what I’m saying, or the way I’m saying it, or just how I’m talking to you. You’ll have to put your hand up, or call out, or get my attention somehow - I’ll try and keep attentive to what’s happening - so catch my attention and tell me what’s wrong. This is an experiment, go with me on it. Stop me when you are ready and tell me what’s wrong. 

Because “Rosh Hashanah is not merely a turning of the calendar page; it is a profound spiritual opportunity to pause and take stock of our lives…as we gather today on this sacred occasion our hearts are filled with both anticipation and reflection. Just as the sun sets and rises again, so too does the cycle of time bring us to this moment of renewal and introspection.

In the Jewish tradition, we greet the New Year with a mixture of joy and solemnity. Our joy stems from the knowledge that we are given the chance to begin anew, to mend relationships, to rekindle our spirits, and to aspire to be better versions of ourselves. Our solemnity comes from the recognition that the choices we make bear consequences, not only for our own lives but also for the world around us.

The shofar's call pierces the air, and it is as if God's own breath is reminding us to awaken from the slumber of routine, to awaken to our higher purpose. This is a time when we stand at the crossroads of the past and the future, contemplating the path we have walked and the journey that lies ahead.

As we dip apples in honey, we are reminded of the sweetness that life holds. Each apple slice becomes a metaphor for our aspirations: the hopes, dreams, and intentions we carry into the coming year. The honey, a symbol of abundance and delight, reminds us that even in times of challenge, there is sweetness to be found. Yet, just as we savour the sweetness of the honey, we are also aware of the underlying bitterness of life's struggles. The two are intertwined, each enhancing the other…

…In this season of reflection, we engage in the spiritual practice of teshuvah – returning to our true selves and to our Divine Source. Teshuvah invites us to confront our mistakes with humility and to turn toward a path of growth and healing. It is a courageous act, acknowledging our imperfections while recognizing the boundless potential for change that resides within us.

As we stand on the threshold of a new year, let us remember that the journey of transformation is ongoing. It requires effort, intention, and the courage to face both our light and our shadow. May we embrace the teachings of our tradition, finding inspiration in the stories of our ancestors, and may we be guided by the values of compassion, justice, and love.

Let us use this sacred time to deepen our connections – with ourselves, with each other, and with the Divine. As we hear the shofar's call, may we heed its message and step forward with purpose and hope. May this New Year be one of blessing, growth, and renewal for us all.

Shanah Tovah u'Metukah – a Good and Sweet Year to you all.”

This part of the service was interactive, to a degree, with people making suggestions, but nobody quite twigged what was going on.

So what was wrong with what I’ve been saying?, I asked. It was quite informative, thoughtful after a fashion, maybe a bit bland, innocuous, it had a smattering of the usual rabbinic cliches and platitudes, but on the whole it was pretty inoffensive. I’ve heard a lot worse sermons. For some reason it reminded me of custard, it had a certain warm glutinous smoothness, but how nourishing was it really?

It didn’t touch the heart or quicken the spirit, it lacked any real moment of illumination, it lacked the unpredictable, it certainly lacked humour - all of which is to say that it lacked ‘soul’ (for want of a better word). Why? Because it was a  “500 word sermon in the style of Rabbi Howard Cooper, generated by ChatGPT”.

It wasn’t me: it was a simulacrum, a facsimile, of me, it was literally Artificial Intelligence, created to sound like me, to mimic me in a way, it was not human - it had no soul - it just bore a spooky resemblance to my living, breathing, human, idiosyncratic self.

ChatGPT - and there are others like it, programmes of information, misinformation and disinformation, programmes that blur the boundaries between truth and falsehood, programmes that can inform but can also fabricate, programmes that can assemble information but also dissemble and falsify - I think we need to talk about ChatGPT. There’s going to be a lot of it coming our way in the months and years to come - when we contact companies, when we seek health care, it’s going to be in schools and our homes and inside our lives - and it raises some real questions about what it means to be human, and how we connect to one another.

In the last twelve months it’s become omnipresent: it’s all around us, for good and for bad - it’s double-edged, as so many technological developments have been in our history. It’s going to do away with the core work of many professions - accountancy, law, financial planning, insurance, some forms of therapy; if you can get a half decent sermon from ChatGPT, maybe clergy can be phased out too.

Who knows? We are on the cusp of the new, and of dizzying changes in how we live: it’s not just technological of course, these changes - it’s in the weather we endure, it’s in the global financial insecurities, it’s the erosion of liberal democracies and the growth of racist and illiberal authoritarianism, it’s the continental war on our doorstep that enters our living rooms, it’s the mass migration of millions of peoples. The tectonic plates are shifting - and our small lives are caught up in this. It’s hard to keep up.

On the one hand, we carry around in our pockets a machine of immense power that gives us access to all the information in the world (useful and useless), it keeps us connected to others in ways both simple and outlandish, it’s been transformative in ways both benign and malign in how we live. It’s certainly expanded what is possible. On the other hand a lot of daily life seems for many to become more and more of a struggle: try getting a GP appointment, try contacting HMRC, try renewing a passport or a driving licence. Try changing your email address with companies. Try negotiating the scams and frauds directed at us. You can add your own experiences. How many hours of time, how much frustration, it’s daily, hourly, it’s endless.

First world problems, you might say - and they are. Yes, what a blessing it is to live in the relative security and relative comfort of the first world - but the shadow side of this technologically-saturated life is our immersion in the dense entanglement of just manging our lives on a daily basis. “I spend so much of my life just managing my life”, a friend said to me recently. Yes, it can be so demoralising, dementing - and it can take us away from what might be more productive and joyful ways of living.

But if we can’t get off this juggernaut, maybe the New Year gives us an opportunity to pause a while, just to look around us and reflect on what’s happening to us, where we are in life, where life is going, where our life is going?  Time perhaps to recalibrate.

For Jews these are days of reflection, of introspection, these so-called ‘Days of Awe’ - here I worry about sounding like my Chat avatar - but nevertheless there’s no getting round the fact that these Days of Awe, Yomim Noraim, are a longstanding part of our tradition. And one of the reasons Jews gather at this season is that - as well any sense of duty or obligation, or in memory of parents, or out of a residual nostalgia, as well of course as seeing each other and celebrating together – is that as well as all that, Jews might also retain a residual faith, or an inkling, that this period has a potential for something new, in our personal life, our spiritual life, our emotional life, the life of our souls, what makes us human.

We’ve been given this gift, this opportunity, once a year, to look inwards as well as outwards, to remind ourselves that the state of our souls is significant: they do become atrophied, numbed, exhausted by life; and they need - we need – to be given attention. We need time to breathe, time for inspiration. Time to consider how we are living, and how we want to live.

And when we look inwards we know: we are not robots, though we might act automatically, even robotically. We are not automatons, but we are programmed - by our genetic makeup, our background, our education, our class, our parental environment, how we were brought up, how free we were to express ourselves growing up, how frightened we were of expressing emotions - anger, aggression, possessiveness, love, timidity, sexual feelings. Both nature and nurture have programmed us to an extent, and we can spend a lifetime trying to de-programme ourselves and discover and express our deepest, truest self, or selves, for we are incorrigibly plural, like the Torah, which tradition says has seventy faces, seventy aspects (B’midbar Rabba 13:15): we mirror that in our own unique multiplicity. As the poet Walt Whitman said “I am large, I  contain multitudes”.

But however programmed we might be, or feel, we still know we are not machines - though we can break down, we can and do wear out, our souls get weary, bruised, battered; which is why it seems important to remind ourselves of what it means to have a soul, even if we aren’t sure what that is, or whether it exists. But if it does have any meaning, to speak of the soul, maybe it’s a way we have developed to talk about - a way Judaism has developed to speak about - our human individuality and the awesome way those tens of thousands of genes are coiled into every molecule of our DNA and we each are universes, multiverses, of consciousness, and all that rich and messy profusion of personal history and neurological complexity adds up to the unrepeatable wonder of who each of is. Nobody like us has ever been, or will ever be.  

The New Year reminds us that being human is a mystery. How can it be that we are capable of such joy and creativity in life and also be capable of such destructiveness as well? How can our capacity for delight co-exist simultaneously with our experience of pain and suffering? Because we are not machines, pre-programmed, we have to develop our own human intelligence - and by intelligence I’m not talking about A-level and  PhD intelligence or smartphone intelligence - I’m talking about spiritual intelligence, for want of a better phrase. We have to develop and hone our own sensibility to what our unique purpose here in the world is. There’s no website for it. You can only find it inside yourself.

‘Today is the Birthday of the World’ - our liturgy offers us a poetic image, a symbol we can make use of, an invitation to celebration and to begin again to ask the most fundamental questions about who we are: what stops us becoming truer to our better selves, what blocks us, what prevents  our enjoyment of life, our productivity, our capacity for generosity, compassion, our passion for justice? We aren’t machines but we might find that something in us keeps coming up like a ‘system error’ and prevents us living in ways more congruent with our values, our idealism, our hopes for the future. Because we do lose touch with our vision. With our idealism. We become cynical, we do get defeated by life. We do end up saying, feeling, ‘there’s nothing that can be done’. But that can’t be the end of the story. The end of the story for us individually, or for humanity.

Estragon: Nothing to be done.
Vladimir: I’m beginning to come round to that opinion.

Yes, we may have moments when we might share Samuel Beckett’s bleak vision in Waiting for Godot - although the humanity of his characters, the humour in his characters, defy that bleakness. There is always ‘something to be done’. The symbolism of the New Year is a reminder that change is possible: our souls are still open enough to sense that through reflection or prayer or reaching out for help to others - or a combination of these things - change is possible. We aren’t machines. Machines might be efficient but they aren’t kind. They don’t care - only we can care, and only we are in need of that attention we call care.

We are vulnerable - and that means we can sense the vulnerability in others. We are dependent - and that means we need other people. Of course we have strength and courage too, a capacity for love, for self-sacrifice. But we need each other.  In our fragility and in our fortitude, we enter these days sensing that the stakes are high. These are Days of Awe - ‘awesome’ has become bit of a buzzword, it’s used by people who’ve been colonised by watching too many  reality TV shows or American movies. We need to redeem it, this notion of awe, because it is speaking of the power of teshuvah, of transformation, at this season: something new can open us for us, inside us.

What is awesome, awe-inspiring, is that as Jews we are bound up in cycles of time and history where we can discover that what we do matters: small acts of random kindness can change the world as much as large acts of fighting for justice, and struggling for societal change. Both the so-called ‘small’ and the so-called ‘large’ are radical investments in hope. We are a people who have been pounded and beaten down in the crucible of history, who have gone through innumerable traumas - yet on the whole we haven’t abandoned our tradition, our heritage. We come back time and again and say: we will not be defeated by the forces arraigned against us - by those who say that the crises we face, in the environment, or in our current European war, or in the vast structural injustices and deprivation in our own country, are too difficult to address, or are not our responsibility - we are not going to let cynicism have the last word.

Nor are we going to let those who feel antipathy to us daunt us. We are a people who travel in defiance of despair, who carry this absurd commitment towards hope, towards change. We carry it in our souls, our psyches. Because we are Jews and human and not machines we know that the future is not programmed, but radically open. It is still unwritten and we will join in writing the script of what will come to be. We do it not with omnipotence but with humility.

This is our destiny, we whose spiritual intelligence is uniquely sensitised to both pointing to what is false in society, what is unjust, what lacks compassion, what lacks a moral core, what lacks humanity - and my God there is plenty of that to point to, to call out - but whose spiritual intelligence is also attuned to what we can do, what role we can play, individually, collectively, what ways we can enact our Judaic vision of justice, compassion and wellbeing.

This is our agenda – let’s hope these Days of Awe give us the space and time to take the next tentative steps forward on this journey of the ages.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on the first day of the New Year, September 16th, 2023]

 

[On the second day of the New Year, September 17th, I shared the following thoughts]

Let me start with a question: how do you, we, keep track of what we go through every passing hour, the dense profusion of thoughts, emotions, intuitions, anxieties, confusions, that add up to our lives? How do we keep track of, how do we chronicle, the hidden regions of our hearts? Our secret fears and hopes and guilt, our inadequacies, our failures (real and imagined) -whatever it is we struggle with, that daily life throws at us? How do we manage life? As the poet said: “The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life” (Seamus Heaney).

And how do we keep track of, how do we chronicle, the dizzying complexity of our world, the events that cascade around us, that tsunami of news and images from across the globe, the ceaseless, relentless, overwhelming calls for our attention: earthquakes, floods, fires, Russian war crimes, political corruption, kisses that are not just kisses, civil wars, famines, bankruptcies of businesses, cities, ethnic nationalism stirring ancient hatreds, millions of people on the move - the reports inundate our waking hours, and maybe our sleep too, with every piece of unsettling news abruptly overtaken by another, creating narratives that have no end, storylines that have no plot and lose their focus in the presence of the next story, a tumult of stories that keep on exposing all the shades of human vulnerability? The vulnerability of others, the vulnerability of ourselves.

How do we keep track of both what we experience within the circumference of our own small lives - small, but of infinite significance to us - as well as what floods through us in our disordered times? How do we focus in and focus out at the same time? Just a small task that this period in the Jewish year sets before us. Looking within - what can we change? Looking outside - what can we change? This is the annual project of these days - an impossible project, of course. But Jews have always been drawn to impossible projects. Like working towards a Messianic age, like believing in an invisible God, like trusting that a small insignificant tribe in the ancient Middle East received a vision that was relevant for all time and for all humanity. Absurd projects, impossible projects - but they have drawn us in, these projects, these stories, they have seduced us for generations. The seductions of hope. We can look in - and we can look out. A dual focus. Our awesome, mind-bending project.

So how do we keep ourselves going? You can of course switch off from all that outer stuff, and focus, try to focus, just on getting though your own day relatively intact. That’s hard enough - the personal travails of the heart. With bodies and minds that let us down, with people around us who frustrate us or cause us grief, with personal disappointments and losses to manage, we might feel we have quite enough to be getting on with.

Why bother to add to it an awareness of the world around us and how it effects us? Yet we know that it does effect us: that the missile attacks on Kyiv are not unconnected with the price of food in our shops; that the exodus of a population in one war-torn part of the world effects the politics of our government; that the glass in your iPhone is made by Uigar Muslims forcibly transferred from their homes into concentration camps; that in London our non-Ulez compliant vehicles wreak havoc on children’s growing lungs and cause 4,000 premature deaths of year - of course we don’t know the actual children nor, probably, the actual people who die early, it’s just statistics, but we know about all this. Even if all this knowledge can feel unbearable, overwhelming, sometimes - we know that we live in a complex interconnected world where everything is connected to everything else.

So I do understand when people say they just don’t want to think about all that supposedly ‘outer’ stuff. One may just want to focus on what I called the hidden regions of our own hearts, and let the heart of the world succumb to its own arrythmia, it’s own deadly disorders.

This may be a matter of temperament, how much we want to focus inwards, on ourselves, and how much we want to engage with the vicissitudes of the world around  us. And we may move - in a lifetime, or in a single day - from one position to another, and then back again. I know that I want to try to keep track of both, the hidden regions of the heart and the struggles of the world, the struggles in the world. I want to keep an eye on - and chronicle, report back on - the inner and outer world. I want a dual focus: it’s foolhardy in a way, omnipotent maybe, but I want to see everything simultaneously.

I’m reminded of those lines by the great Jewish-American poet Charles Reznikoff :

“If only I could write with four pens between five fingers

and with each pen a different sentence at the same time -

but the rabbis say it is a lost art, a lost art.

I well believe it.”

That speaks to me as we gather at the New Year, in pursuit of the lost arts. How do we hold all that comes at us? How do we find our bearings? Today, almost at random, I am thinking: how do we find our bearings within this European war that touches our lives in different ways; how do we find our bearings when Israel is going through such self-lacerating convulsions; how do we find our bearings with the waves of toxic nationalism and antisemitism and crazed conspiracy theories that swirl around the planet; how do we find our bearings and find some place of stillness within it all, to find some reassurance, or hopefulness, or comfort, or direction, within this life that sweeps us on relentlessly, remorselessly? How do you find your bearings when living in a maelstrom? 

Decades ago the novelist Saul Bellow diagnosed our modern condition as living in what he called the ‘moronic inferno’. And he asked the key question - the religious question, the spiritual and psychological question -  how are we supposed to live and remain fully human when all this goes on around us? And being fully human means being in touch with the good within us but also our capacity for destructiveness - and trying to ensure that the goodness within us wins out as it battles with the all the other stuff that lurks inside. So this is the question for the season we are in: how are we supposed to live now in our times? To live well, I would add. Not just to survive, but to thrive. How are we supposed to do it?

I don’t know. Yes, that’s disappointing, I know. Aren’t rabbis supposed to know? Even if they can’t write with four pens between five fingers, aren’t they, we, supposed to know how we can retain our full humanity, our potential to enact the better parts of our nature, our kindness and compassion, our generosity, our passion for justice? Aren’t we supposed to offer a road map of how we need to be, in our wondrous, wounded world?

The problem is my road map may not be the one that works for you or anyone else. I can share the contours of my map but the work of these days is to seek out your own. Maybe the liturgy can offer clues. Maybe conversations with friends and family can offer clues. Maybe something you read or see or just overhear on the tube can point you in a direction. Maybe an amalgam of all these can help sketch out a map to guide you through the maelstrom.

My road map of how I try and keep my finger on the pulse of life, the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, will probably, possibly, be rather different from many of you for one simple reason: I keep away from social media. I don’t use Twitter, Tiktok, Instagram, Snapchat, Telegram - I know the names and to a degree I know what they are - but I see them as distractions rather than opportunities for enhancing my life. You may feel very differently. But I am easily distracted and I don’t want my attention diffused in a thousand directions, or saturated with what other people want me to be interested in.

I know that for some people these things are a blessing, so yes, build them into, or keep them in, your roadmap. All I know is that I value the freedom non-engagement gives me to have my own thoughts, and develop my own direction, and pursue the richness in the world in other ways.  

I’m not even on Facebook, though - somewhat reluctantly - I do use WhatsApp, which is of course owned by Meta/Facebook. And I say reluctantly not because I don’t want the connection to others it offers - I crave real connection, real intimacy - but for quite another reason. We use, maybe have to use, a huge amount of what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’ to get through our lives. There are things that we know, that we have to pretend to ourselves we don’t know, in order to get on with our lives.

So you must know, if you use Facebook, the ways in which Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has a malignancy curled inside its beating but sclerotic heart that is deeply problematic.  I hear stories every day in my therapy consulting room in which it’s clear that social media is having a detrimental effect on people’s mental health - Instagram is toxic in the ways it promotes fantasies of beauty and body desirability and young women are particularly vulnerable here. And when you are immersed in images of what other people have, or are doing, or who they are doing it with, it generates envy, jealousy, feelings of missing out, worthlessness, unlovability.  It draws out, and draws on, these feelings.

But these apps are addictive - who doesn’t want to be ‘liked’?  And then I think a bit wider about the way Facebook fanned ethnic violence in Africa; was used by the military in Myanmar in their campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority, which led to murder, rape, and dispossession; we saw its poisonous role in the 2016 US presidential election leading to Trump’s election, as well as in feeding lies into the Brexit debates. Yes, I know it can be used for good as well - but the pernicious aspects of the Meta empire are transparent. You don’t have to dig deep to reveal the underbelly of the beast. And like the tobacco industry before it, there’s a deep denial of the evidence that its product can be detrimental to our health.

We use, maybe have to use, a huge amount of what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’ to get through our lives. There are things that we know, that we have to pretend to ourselves we don’t know, in order to get on with our lives.

I really don’t want to moralise all this, I just want to try and describe it, chronicle it, and say that I am caught up in this too. I might not use Facebook, or any social media, in my attempts to manage this maelstrom of a world but I do engage with - another huge distraction from what matters - I do watch a lot of sport. Sport can, along the way, teach us about dedication, endurance and how to mange disappointment and the inevitability of loss - but I know, all sports fans know, how often professional sport is now tainted by its association with human rights abuses, corruption, sexism. It hasn’t yet stopped me watching - that’s my cognitive dissonance - but In my heart I know it should. Aren’t we all complicit? As I say, I am trying not to be too moralistic about this - though there is a moral question at the heart of it - I’m just trying to describe it, where we are. One pen, two fingers.

So this is the question I am posing for these days of reflection: what does your road map look like, what changes might enhance your life, what could you do without, what do you want to add in? ‘Choose life’ is one of the great mantras of Judaism - we are a people enamoured of the possibilities of life, not just surviving in life, but sharing and enacting a vision of the possibilities of fulness of life, a life of compassion, kindness, justice, empathy, a life of caring for the wellbeing of those close to us and those far from us. 

Some of us are going to be more drawn to focus in on our own lives, some of us are going to be more interested in that world out there. One artist who manages the trick, it’s a gift really, of keeping a dual focus is the writer Ian McEwan. His recent book ‘Lessons’ is a masterclass in dual focus: its hero, Roland, one of the so called ‘baby boomer’ generation, struggles to make sense of his life - he is in turns complacent and baffled, loving and lost, indecisive and engaged, his personal life is in many ways a mess, but he has - McEwan gives him - his moments of intimacy, his capacity to show love and to feel loved. In other words, in his complexity and uncertainties and mistakes, in his small triumphs and his disappointments  - he is us.

But McEwan’s pre-eminence as a novelist is in showing us this life interacting with a wider backdrop: the Cuban Missile Crisis, Thatcherism, the Aids crisis, perestroika, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Europe, New Labour, the Iraq war, Brexit, the pandemic, the storming of the American Capitol - the book, and it is long, was finished just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, otherwise I am sure it would have included that. But if you want a text that illustrates, illuminates, the grandeur and complexity of living both looking in and looking out at the same time - which is our situation - McEwan is incomparable. Here he is:

The three [friends] spoke and listened easily, intimately. It often happened like this, Roland thought, the world was wobbling badly on its axis, ruled in too many places by shameless ignorant men, while freedom of expression was in retreat and digital spaces resounded with the shouts of delirious masses. Truth had no consensus... Parts of the world were burning or drowning. Simultaneously, in the old fashioned glow of close family, made more radiant by recent deprivation, he experienced happiness that could not be dispelled, even by rehearsing every looming disaster in the world. It made no sense.

And there you have it - that’s a truly great piece of writing, bringing to the surface what is deep inside. The outer world in all its messiness and threat, side by side with the inner world, that can still experience the joy of living. ‘It made no sense’, the author says. No, it makes no sense. And yet it’s true. Emet. True to how we live.

It’s another almost lost art: of making sense of what makes no sense.