Judaism is filled with
backward-looking. We are encouraged to do this all the time. We even have a day
in the year dedicated to it: Rosh Hashanah, Yom
HaZikkaron, the Day of Memorial, the day for remembering the past year, and
looking back over it. Zikkaron,
memory, remembering, looking backward, is a huge element in Jewish life,
whether religious or secular. That is what the annual yahrzeit is for, keeping alive the memory of those we have lost; we
have the memorial service yizkor on
Yom Kippur and the pilgrim festivals; ritual life is structured round looking
back, keeping memory alive.
Jews are the great people of
memory, of looking back, of recording and counting and memorialising. It is
there at every turn in the liturgy: “God of our ancestors”, “the one who
redeemed us from slavery”, “renew our days, as of old”. Every Friday night when
we say kiddush over the wine we come
across that special phrase, inserted into many disparate liturgical texts, “zecher litziat mitzrayim”: ‘in memory
of the coming out of Egypt’. The 10 Commandments – which are part of our Torah
readings this week - begin with a call to look back: “I am the Eternal your
God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt”. This is a significant
difference from the first commandment in the Christian tradition, which starts
with our second commandment about not worshipping other gods. Our first commandment
– and it is not even framed in the form of a demand - is to root yourself in
the past, in the saga, the myth, the history, the multi-generational story of
the Jewish people. All this seems far away from Charlotte Bronte: “I try to
avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward”.
I’d go so far as to say that
Jews are obsessed with the past: it can be the far distant past of the
tradition, or the near distant past. The Holocaust is always sitting on our
shoulder, and the mantra ‘Never Again’ is the so-called lesson to be learnt
from that past: whether it is Jewish self-perception here in the UK, with the
constant anxiety about anti-semitism (in other words a repletion of the
past) or whether it is Israeli politics
which is deeply entrenched in a Shoah-dominated world view (or at least uses –
some might say misuses- the Shoah as a rhetorical tool in its armoury), Jewish
life is soaked in looking backwards, remembering its history.
Sometimes our view of the
past is that it is soaked in horrors; at other times the looking back might be
experienced almost as the opposite - as a golden age. People go misty-eyed at
the world of yiddishkeit, an era when
Jews were poor but happy; we are great nostalgists for lost worlds of community
gatherings, family simchas, frum grandparents - it’s all myth-making
but a lot of it still goes on, that harking back to earlier times. We are skilled
at retreating from the complex demands of the present into stories: fables
about Jewish life as it was, as we imagined it was, as we airbrush out the
cruelties, the sadnesses, the divorces and the affairs, the sitting shiva if someone God-forbid
married out, the domestic violence (physical and emotional), or those who
didn’t marry, or couldn’t conceive: painful lives far from the cosy fantasy of
generation following generation, each link in the chain filled with good
memories. Jewish nostalgia suffuses the past with a rosy glow. But it is a cover-up job. That kind of nostalgia is a
kind of backward-looking for the deluded. And I guess most of us Jews do it to
some extent, but I have learned to try to treat it with caution.
And what about looking
forward? Where does that figure for us? Where and how do we collectively look
forwards? The texts we are reading in the Torah cycle at the moment will be dominated
by one motif: the image of the journey to a promised land, the land flowing
with milk and honey - a sort of nostalgia projected into the future; the garden
of Eden renewed at the end of the journey, over the horizon, in the future,
always waiting for us beyond the wilderness - but always just out of reach. And
then there is the figure of the Messiah, who comes at the end of days, prayed
for every day by the devout - the Messiah and the Messianic age being the most
powerful myths in the tradition that
point us towards the future, keeping hope alive.
Consider too those phrases we
read this week from chapter 19 of Exodus: “You shall be for Me a kingdom of priests and
a holy people”, a “treasured possession” (19:5/6) – they are thrilling,
daunting, challenging words. But they point forwards. Yes, they make us feel
special, wanted, important in the scheme of things; they are part of the
foundation of how Jews have thought of themselves over the generations, part of
that complex and fraught and disputed sense of ‘chosenness’, they speak about
Jews as distinctive, as incarnating something different from other peoples, a difference with a
meaning, a difference with a demand, a task, a requirement: ‘you have a job to
do in the world: to bring holiness into the world through how you live, how you
live with each other, how you act towards each other, and how you live with
others, who are not part of ‘you’, the strangers, the outcasts, the marginal:
how you live with those who are like you and how you live with those who are
different from you, and how you live with the rest of creation, with animal
life and with nature with the planet itself. All this – how you live, the
choices you make – make you into a ‘holy’ people’. Holiness isn’t a given: it’s work, it’s
something to be achieved, enacted, in everyday life.
In other words, ‘holiness’ is a movement towards the future.
It’s not about what you did yesterday, it’s not about congratulating yourself
on what has been achieved: it’s about now, and tomorrow, and the day after
tomorrow. It’s about something that is always just coming into being, that
waits to be brought into being, by us: it’s a restless, ceaseless, reaching into the
future – to the next thing that needs to be done – a striving after acts of
love and justice and kindness and compassion, a striving done in the sure and
certain knowledge - paradoxical knowledge - both that this is what is required and that you can never achieve it, you
can never rest on your laurels and say ‘job done’, ‘now we really are a holy
people.’
“Atem tihiyu li...you shall be
a holy people” the Torah says (Exodus 19:6) – not “you are” such a people – Jews face forwards, aware of what needs
still to be done, aware of incompleteness, of the task ahead. We are a people
who look forward, our faces turned towards the future - as well as a people
who, for better or worse, look backwards.
So what is Charlotte Bronte
getting at? What does it mean not to look back or forwards but upwards? I think
this is more than a simple expression of piety, a way of talking about that
traditional picture of looking to God, who is pictured as ‘above’ us. Because
she isn’t a using metaphor about space. She is talking about time: ‘looking back’ and ‘looking
forward’ is about time. So what might it mean to ‘look upwards’ as a way of
orienting ourselves in time?
Again, I turn to our Exodus
text. Because there a strange quirk in how Exodus 19 begins. This, we remember,
is the lead up to the moment of divine revelation at Sinai, when a whole people
are standing in the divine presence. And the text begins: In the third month (on the third new moon), after the children of Israel came out of
Egypt, ba-yom ha-ze, on this day, they came to wilderness of
Sinai. It doesn’t read ‘on that day’
– a day long gone, a day in history, a day that belongs to looking backward in
time. But ‘on this day’. This is when the revelation of the divine happens: it is not in the past, nor is it is not in
some far off day in the future; it is on this
day, today. I’m drawing on a Hasidic reading of this text, and Martin Buber’s
reading of the text, both of which draw our attention to the presence of God,
of the Eternal, here and now.
The promise of the Torah,
read in this way, is that if we hold ourselves open in the present moment to
what is unfolding now, on this day hold ourselves open to what occurs to us, and in us, and between
us – then there is a meeting, an intersection, of timelessness with time, and
the Eternal One whose name is “I am” – ehyeh
– is with us and in us and connecting us.
Exodus 19 verse 5 could be
said to continue this theme: If you
listen, listen and keep on listening [the verb is repeated for emphasis] to my voice, then you will be, become, my
special treasure... The call is for attentiveness,
listening. That’s why we need some silence in our lives, and in our services,
opportunities to listen to what is above us, around us, all the time – but that
we might miss if we are continually looking forwards or looking backwards. Too
much time spent in the past – or too much time seeking the new, looking for the
next new thing – both miss the drama of spiritual life, which is happening all
the time, at this moment. The revelation of the divine, of divinity, is always now, on this day. It is, so to speak, now or it’s never.
So thank you Charlotte Bronte
for pointing the way, giving us the clue, counter-intuitively, to avoid too
much forward looking and too much backward looking. And encouraging us to look
upward, and outward, and become aware of the wondrous nature of existence, the
dizzying tumultuous richness and grandeur of life on earth, unfolding moment by
precious moment.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue,
January 18th 2014]
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