I want to
share some thoughts about three remarkable women, each belonging to a different
generation, and draw attention to some of their thoughts about bringing up
children, and the world of children, and what children need and want.
Let’s start
back in the middle of the last century, in Italy, with Natalia Ginzburg,
author, publisher, social critic, parliamentarian. She had a Jewish father, and
with her Jewish husband Leone was part of the anti-fascist resistance to
Mussolini in the 1930s; during the War they were forced into internal exile
with their three children, sent to an impoverished village in Abruzzo, where he
was eventually arrested, tortured and executed.
But she survived
and began to write about everyday life, the experience of bringing up children
to have humane values, and the complexities of surviving with one’s moral
compass intact when times are difficult; in her fiction and in her essays she
focused on the small, practical and ethical components of domestic life, and
how to combine parenthood with a larger vision of building a better
society. She is representative of a very
20th century Jewish story.
In 1962 she
published a book of essays called, rather modestly, ‘The Little Virtues’, in
which she suggests what we should teach our children:
“I think they should be taught not
the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an
indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not
shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one’s
neighbour and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to
know.”
That’s a
powerful, even provocative, passage but uncompromising in its commitment to a
hierarchy of values – psychological, moral and spiritual. I don’t think it’s
necessary to agree with everything she says here - I think she underrates the
value of tact, for example - but I think it’s always worth listening to these
kind of texts, from women and men who have been tested in the crucible of
history and have been able to distil some personal wisdom about life and its
deepest values from circumstances that were so much harsher than our own more
relatively pampered times.
To survive
the painful dramas of history and still maintain the centrality of teaching
children generosity, courage, a love of truth, love of one’s neighbour,
self-denial, a desire not for success but ‘to be and to know’ – Natalia
Ginzburg is the first of my remarkable women.
She died in
1991 aged 75 - and by the way that essay collection, ‘The Little Virtues’, has
just been re-published in English, if you are interested.
In that
year, 1991, my second remarkable woman was working as Associate Dean of Student
Services at the University of Chicago and dating a dashing young civil rights
attorney soon to be appointed by the University to teach constitutional law. He
later went on to do…other things. And his wife tagged along with him. She,
Michelle Robinson Obama, has recently published her autobiography – ‘Becoming’.
It sold 3 million copies in the first month, so unless you have been living on
Mars for the last year you will probably have registered its existence. On the
very first page of her book she says
something really quite wonderful, but also in its own way provocative, about
children.
“One of the most useless questions an
adult can ask a child is – What do you
want to be when you grow up? As if at some point you become something and
that’s the end.”
Implicit here is an idea that the title of her book , ‘Becoming’, also hints
at. That life is an unfolding of multiple possibilities, and a life well lived
is one that is open to growth, change, development, changing one’s mind,
changing one’s circumstances. It is a profoundly optimistic vision - and in
that sense quite American - but the wisdom of that opening remark about what not to say to children (though we have
all probably done it) is striking in its wish not to trap children into a
cul-de-sac, a narrowness of thinking.
And it’s a
reminder to the rest of us to question how often any of us might get trapped in
one version of ourselves: we are a solicitor or a businessman or a mother or a
husband or retired, as if our lives cohere around one part of ourselves and
that is who we are. That way of thinking, Michelle Obama intuits, is a
spiritual and psychological diminishment of the opportunities inherent in being
human.
Any of you
who saw her visit London’s Elizabeth Garret Anderson school in 2009, or a
couple of months ago when she came back - and listened to the way she inspired
those children with the possibilities for their lives - will have seen the
importance of the message she carried to those youngsters about ‘becoming’
their best selves, in whatever shape that might be.
In her book
she says that there’s no real choice, morally and spiritually, about the
message she carries to youngsters:
“We have to hand them hope”, she writes, “Progress isn’t made through fear…It was possible, I knew, to live on
two planes at once – to have one’s feet planted in reality, but pointed in the
direction of progress…You got somewhere by building that better reality, if
only in your own mind…You may live in the world as it is, but you can still
work to create the world as it should be”.
It can be
painful to read from the ex-First Lady this deep commitment to personal and
societal transformation - a commitment that of course she shared with her
husband – in the light of the aggressive bombast and self-serving fearmongering
that now issues forth from the White House. (But that’s another topic, I’m not
going into it now). Let me stay with the future-oriented optimism of Michelle
Obama’s ‘Becoming’.
By the way,
‘becoming’ is a good translation and understanding of one Hebrew word threaded through the Torah,
and that comes up all the time in our liturgy: Yud Hay Vav Hay, the four-letter
special name for God, the divine energy that permeates all being, is made up,
as I often remark, of parts of the verb ‘to be’: past, present and future tenses
of the verb ‘to be’ – ‘was, is, will be’: that was the revolutionary new understanding
that developed in Hebraic consciousness 2500 years ago, that God was not a
being, but ‘being’ itself.
You could
translate Yud Hay Vav Hay (that we
pronounce Adonai) as ‘being and
becoming’ – God as a verb, not a noun. Each one of us, even if we don’t realise
it, is a fragment of unfolding divine energy: while we are alive, we are always
‘becoming’. This is a way of saying that Michelle Obama’s moral vision of
hopefulness, a vision that circles around staying open to ‘becoming’, has a
deep spiritual core.
And the
third remarkable woman? Another woman, young woman, with a vision. On the 20th
August last year a 15-year-old schoolgirl started to sit every weekday outside
the Swedish parliament building with a placard ‘School Strike for the Climate’.
(It was in Swedish, but my Swedish is not what it used to be, so I’m
translating). After a series of heatwaves and wildfires, Greta Thunberg started a solo protest that her government
were not fulfilling their Paris Agreement commitments to reduce carbon
emissions. The rest of the story is becoming history: still-unfolding history.
She has
inspired school children across the globe to take to the streets for the sake
of their (and our) futures. By mid-February this year 70,000 youngsters in 270
cities around the world were joining in these weekly Friday strikes. And this
coming Friday, March 15th, will see up to half a million youngsters
out on strike around the world in a major co-ordinated day of action.
So far in a
few brief months she has spoken to the United Nations, to the European Union in
Brussels, at Davos – this young woman is not going away. Along with other new
groupings like Extinction Rebellion in the UK, with its campaign for
non-violent civil disobedience, we are witnessing an exponential change in
campaigning on the most important political and ethical issue of our times. And
when the story of these decades comes to be written – if there are people left
to record our history – Greta Thunberg’s name will be writ large.
She speaks in a simple, direct way,
but in a very different manner to Michelle Obama: in some ways she’s the
opposite of Obama. At Davos for example Thunberg said: “Adults keep saying we
owe it to the young people, to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope. I
don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear
I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a
crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.”
She’s a different generation from
Michelle Obama, and maybe she’s right, as the prophets of Israel understood,
that sometimes hope is not the message a people need to hear: sometimes it’s
fear that motivates, fear for the future if we don’t change. “You say you love your children above all
else and yet you are stealing their future in front of their eyes”. She’s
uncompromising, this remarkable young woman. And it’s exciting and scary what
might become of her. She exemplifies something that Natalia Ginzburg insisted
upon in relation to the upbringing of children: “What we must remember above all in the education
of our children is that their love of life should never weaken” (from ‘The Little Virtues’).
Ginzburg, Obama, Thunberg – three
different generations, all sharing a profound love of life. But what Thunberg
is challenging us with, we who also love life, is if there are to be future
generations whose love of life will not be overshadowed by a desperate fight
for survival and resources on a ravaged planet, then alarmism needs to become
the new realism: "To fail to be alarmed is to fail to think about the problem,
and to fail to think about the problem is to relinquish all hope of its
solution." (from Mark O’Connell’s review in the Guardian of David Wallace-Wells, ‘The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story
of the Future’, 2nd March 2019).
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform
Synagogue, London, 9th March, 2019]
