How can I talk about
repentance, and false consciousness, about the need for personal change,
transformation, when there are hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing war
and persecution and deprivation, when we see these images of trains packed with
men and women and children, in stifling heat, setting off towards the West,
anywhere in the West, then taken off trains by men with guns for processing in
camps? No Jew can see this without a shiver of recognition. Of knowing: ‘they’
are us. So how can we have these images in our minds and at the same time talk
about the journey of the Yamim Noraim,
the Days of Awe, and the role of prayer and inner change? How can we talk about
‘journey’ as a metaphor, when these families are journeying in rickety boats,
and locked trucks, and now on foot, into Europe, across Europe? How can I do
this?
Samuel Beckett comes to mind.
The end of The Unnameable, and the last words of the novel: “where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence
you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.” Beckett – the
indispensible guide to our human condition now, in all its fragility and
vulnerability: “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
So at this
fraught time in European history, I’ll go on. At this time when the real moral
voice in Europe is offered by Germany, who have already taken in 300,000
refugees and will be taking in a million refugees, maybe more, I will go on. For
here we see how change is possible, collectively, nationally - when you see how
Germany has transformed its collective ethos, has over many decades worked
through its guilt and its shame, has engaged in heart-searching, soul-searching
teshuvah so its leadership can, when
history calls again, speak the voice of humanitarian empathy with the stranger,
the outsider – and in doing so put our nation’s leaders to shame – when you see
that change is possible, we glimpse something profoundly hopeful.
Change is
possible, empathy is possible, the vision of the sacredness of life is possible
to articulate - and enact, practically. This is what Germany is teaching us – along with
all those local initiatives that have sprung up this week in the UK to offer
practical help. That gives us hope, should give us hope, individually and as a
community as we approach this time in our calendar when we focus on what needs
to change in us, individually and as a society.
In Judaism
action and reflection go hand in hand. And there is much practically we can do
in response to this crisis (please visit www.wjr.org.uk
).
But none of
this is easy. Our emotional lives are finely balanced. Beckett’s see-sawing
reflection says it, the competing voices in us are always in motion: “you must
go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
In these
difficult times – in the midst of this crisis which, in all honesty, we know has
been going on now for some years, but has reached a tipping point over the
summer, maybe even in this last week – ‘going on’ with some kind of hopefulness
isn’t easy. False hopefulness is easy. Pious words are easy. Pseudo-empathy is
easy. But facing up to where we are in a world where 60 million people have
been displaced by war, conflict or persecution, this can make talking about the
High Holy Days and personal teshuvah
just sound crass. It risks making all ‘spiritual’
/’religious’ talk sound crass, or maddeningly beside the point.
I am reminded
of the German poet Bertolt Brecht’s 1938 poem, ‘To Posterity’ – Brecht was a
refugee of course, from Germany. His poem
begins:
Truly, the age
I live in is bleak.
The guileless
world is foolish. A smooth brow
Denotes insensitiveness.
The laughing man
Has only not
yet received
The dreadful
news.
What times are
these when a conversation
About trees is
almost a crime.
Because it
includes a silence about so many misdeeds!
That one there
calmly crossing the street,
Hasn’t he
ceased to be at home to
His friends in
need?
So, to speak
with too much hopefulness in times like these feels ‘almost a crime’. But maybe
it is a crime only if it colludes with our silence about ‘so many misdeeds’? This is the time of the year when we do focus,
allow ourselves to focus, on our silence, and on our misdeeds: on when we
remained silent when we should have spoken out, on when our deeds, our actions,
did not come from the better parts of ourselves; or when we failed to act, when
we ceased to be at home to ‘friends in need’. When we failed to live up to the
generosity and compassion and sense of justice that is grafted into us but
which is hard sometimes (maybe often) to live out and express.
At this
time of the year we return to our awareness that we have these deep moral
impulses within us: our generosity of
spirit and of action, our compassion to those who have less than us, our inner
sense that tzedakah - right action,
righteousness - is something we can enact, that these divine qualities are
grafted into our humanity. But it’s the time of the year in our calendar when
we recognise too that we are often blocked from releasing these capacities
within us: feeling them, living them. That they get atrophied, shrivelled up.
And we are reminded that in the language of our tradition we call this blocked-upness 'sin' : this
failure to live up to our vision, the failure to let the innate moral voice in
us express itself - this is what Judaism calls ‘sin’.
Personal
reflection and the hard psychological work of examining the state of our souls is
something Judaism calls on us to do in these days ahead. We do it alone, but
for some of us we also do it in community. That adds a dimension: we recognise
that we not alone in having difficult stuff inside us that stops us expressing
our better selves. We are all in this together, the drama of being human. We each
have our own stuff to work on; but while we do this alone, we do it while also
being held by something larger than ourselves. We do it in solidarity with
others.
Can the
personal spiritual work we do at this season make a difference? A
last thought in response to this. After Beckett and Brecht, a third B - a Jewish one this time, Joseph Brodsky, a
Russian-Jewish Nobel-prize winning poet and essayist who lived through dark
times, and huge hardships: born in 1940, he was forced out of the Soviet Union
in 1972 (- another refugee -) because his poems were considered by the authorities to be too dangerous. This is the power of the word. The power of writing. The power of
putting thoughts down on paper. Thankfully his words are still with us. And
there’s one sentence of his that I think is relevant to our current situation: “The
comprehension of the metaphysics of personal drama betters one’s chances of
weathering the drama of history.” This is a sentence to chew over, to savour: it’s a hope, it’s a kind of a prayer.
What’s he
saying? Comprehending, understanding, the dynamics of our personal drama – all
that unique complexity of how we think and feel, all that personal stuff we
struggle with, and glorify in, or feel degraded by - focusing on that,
understanding that, ‘betters our chances of weathering the drama of history’.
The dramas of history can sweep us away in the twinkling of an eye. Jews know
that better than most. The dramas of history are the big events in which our
little lives are held: the waves can crash over our heads at any time, we can
drown at any moment; and yet, Brodsky intuits, paying attention to the dynamics
of our personal, individual dramas, can make a difference, can make all the
difference.
Note though
that it only ‘betters our chances’: there are no guarantees. Reflection,
prayer, introspection ‘betters our chances’ of weathering what’s thrown at us.
It’s a hope, a modest hope - that is, nevertheless, a real prayer for our
beleaguered times.
[extracted from a sermon given at the ‘Selichot’
service at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on the night of September 5th
2015]
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