To be a
religious leader at this moment in history seems to me to be a strange business
– (it’s a strange business at the best of times) – but when, unprecedentedly,
community buildings are shut down, when people are self-isolating, and not meeting
other congregants (or friends, or family) face-to-face, and fear of contact
looms in the imagination, and anxieties about the future are all around – what
is one to say that can offer both comfort, and maybe hope, but is also rooted
in realism about where we find ourselves?
When I have
been called upon to speak over these last months in the congregation where I
work part-time, I have said, well, yes, maybe I can say a few words. ‘Words’
sounds innocent enough.
This week, I
started by reflecting on the difficulty in these times of finding the right
words. What can be said about where we are right now? I do have, I said, a
sense about what words the community (meeting on Zoom) might want to
hear in this suspended reality (and unreality) we are living through. You might
understandably want something reassuring, I said, something to calm anxieties,
something hopeful, something which acknowledges that we are all going through a
situation that is testing our resilience, our patience, our tolerance about a
more reduced life with its more limited possibilities; a situation that is
testing us to find ways to manage the losses, big and small, that we are having
to bear, and the sacrifices we are making.
You might
want something, I continued, that acknowledges what’s difficult – but that also
says that if we are able to hold at bay our fears and disappointments
and frustrations, then we will get through this together, that the ‘wilderness’
that our Torah portion spoke about today [Numbers chapter 1 was our allocated
text] will be followed – hopefully in less than 40 years – by our emerging
again into, if not the ‘promised land, flowing with milk and honey’, then at
least a land of promise recognisably similar to the one we left just a couple
of months ago.
I’d love to
be able to feel confident about offering you this kind of confidence, I
remarked, this kind of hopefulness, of cheery optimism about the future.
The problem
is that I’m not actually feeling that, I went on. If you want cheery optimism
about where we are heading then I guess the Prime Minister and his crew can
give you that. You don’t need me for that.
What words I
have are probably a bit more modest than that; a bit more, dare I say,
realistic - because when I look around me at what is unfolding around us, in
London, in the UK, what I’m hearing (whether it is in casual conversation or in
the mouths of politicians) are various forms of wishful thinking.
What I’m
finding hard to come to terms with is what it means to live through a genuine
world-historical turning point, where one world is lost and another world has
to be rebuilt, painfully and painstakingly, from the rubble of the old.
A few of
you, the oldest members of our community, know what it is to do this; but most
of the rest of us, three generations now, those born after World War II, have
no lived experience of this: we are going to have to make it up as we go along.
For if
there’s one thing we can say in these uncertain times with any degree of
certainty, it’s that whatever ‘normal’ meant for us in January of this year,
‘normal life’ will never return. And that is hard to get our heads round.
But the
pandemic itself - and the economic and social consequences of it - are ensuring
that that will be the case. It’s not just the real and painful losses of lives
that we are having to come to terms with, but other kinds of losses too:
millions of jobs will go, and businesses, and cultural sites – along with the
freedoms we took for granted to meet, to gather, to celebrate, to shop, to fly,
to go to galleries and theatres and cinemas. These personal freedoms won’t ‘go
back to normal’. Some of these ways of life will return, in one form or
another, but they will have changed; and we will have changed because of the
virus we carry now inside us, in our head: the mental virus, the
psychological virus, won’t just go away when – if – a vaccine is found.
We are going
to have to learn to live with more fearfulness, more doubt about our
well-being, more suspicion of others – none of which will make our lives more
fulfilling or enjoyable. And if this seems bleak it is because in a way it is
bleak. These are wilderness months we are entering, maybe wilderness years.
Any vaccine
is, by the most optimistic scientific estimates (i.e. guesses), maybe 18 months
away, minimum. So for the foreseeable future – in spite of the political
narrative of opening up the lockdown in stages – as we make minor and major
adjustments to our lives, the unnaturalness and discomfort (at some basic level
of our selves) will continue.
But – and
this is a big but – this is not only a gloomy prognosis, because we also
glimpse that something else could happen - should happen, we have to
make happen - as we rebuild from the ruins of the old. Even in these recent
weeks, we’ve glimpsed the opportunity for future transformation: less pollution
in our cities as roads are closed and streets are pedestrianised; less
international business travel and co2 in the atmosphere as Zoom meetings
replace what are suddenly seen as unnecessary journeys; less
homelessness as new ways are found of providing housing for those who have
struggled to own or even rent a roof over their head; maybe less
inequality in society as previously denigrated occupations in care homes and
delivery and nursing and cleaning and a host of others forms of earning a
living are newly seen as deserving
better wages and conditions: less of all that, and more focus on what really
matters in a society – which is our well-being as human beings.
Can the
National Health Service really become pivotal in a new and expanded and
adequately funded way to embrace physical health and psychological/mental
health and end of life care, and social and nursing care for the elderly, and
for people struggling with disabilities? A National Health and Welfare Service
that brings together physical health and mental health and social health care.
Is it just a fantasied ‘promised land’ to imagine that personal well-being,
all-round personal care, could become the primary target of social and economic
policy?
What an
opportunity we have for a reordering of priorities! The air we breathe, the
wages that citizens earn, the education our children receive, the jobs that are
valued – that old ‘normal’ had deep fissures in it, huge injustices, major gaps
in provision and care. Systemic inequality can never be ‘normal’. Were we
really content for ‘normal’ life in London to mean that life expectancy in
Kensington and Chelsea’s Grenfell ward is 22 years shorter than in that same
borough’s Harrods ward? ‘Normal’ life was/is often a social and political
scandal.
This
epidemic, beyond the personal inconveniences it has and will put us through,
offers us a chance of changing parts of what is rotten in our society. That one grim statistic about the gap of 22
years represents the scale of the task. The task is a political one, but the
task that falls on all citizens of goodwill – and I know this community is
filled with people of that kind of goodwill and
Jewish (and Christian and Muslim) commitment to the values of compassion
and generosity and justice – the task falls on all of us to be talking about
these necessary changes now, while we are still suffering our own losses and
diminishments. We need to talk about it with each other, within our larger
Jewish community, and in our local communities, with local counsellors and MPs.
Cheery
optimism about getting used to the so-called ‘new normal’ isn’t good enough. If
that ‘new normal’ is just a
shadow-version of the old normal, a replay of all the old failures but with
social distancing on top, that’s not an optimistic prospect. Real optimism is
linked to the possibility of real change, where the fundamentals of what makes
life worth living are re-ordered so that human growth, human flourishing, is
the aim and the focus of our society.
We have a
long way to go on this journey: it could take 40 years. But the next 40 weeks,
and certainly the next 40 months, will tell us if this once-in-a generation,
once-in-three generations, life-giving opportunity in the UK is going to be
grasped or squandered. I’m not holding
my breath, but I am trying to find the words.
Yes – words
are innocent. But words can also be weapons. Let’s hope that enough of us can
find our voices, find the words, speak truth to power. We’ll have to see.
And so it
goes on: the struggle to find the right words for a time out of joint.
[based
on words offered at Finchley Reform
Synagogue, May 23rd, 2020]
