What Don't We Want to See? - Dysfunctional Families, Blindness and Blessing

What a story!  A story* filled with the drama and dysfunctionality of family life, any family; a story at once both ancient and mythic/archetypal, and also completely up-to-the minute, the stuff of modern fiction, soap opera even, with its portrait of intergenerational conflict, parental favouritism, sibling rivalry, deceit between wife and husband – and if you throw in the motif of characters in disguise, as well as how the story dramatizes the working out of a larger destiny through the interactions of the human characters, we could also recognise the narrative as Shakespearean in its ability to speak to some of the deepest and most complex aspects of the human condition.

*(Genesis 27 – the text appears at the end of this blog)

And the Torah - that text so easily dismissed by the misinformed or those too lazy or self-opinionated to actually read it with unblinkered eyes – the Torah revels in the intrigues and character flaws it lays bare for us to see. This is how we all are, it seems to say, in our flawed humanity, our moral blindness, our competitiveness, our aggression, our deceptiveness, our hiding the truth from others and ourselves, our confusion between wanting to do the right thing and wanting to gain the upper hand, or be proved right.

All of that is in the text of Genesis 27: the storytellers – and what great storytellers they were, we could almost call them inspired – they show it all; and they show it within the family life of Judaism’s foundational figures, the patriarchs, the matriarchs – who came to be revered over the generations, but who our narrators don’t blush from portraying in all their small-mindedness and self-preoccupation.

That’s a great gift they have left us with – narratives and characters who are just like us, sometimes like us at our worst, and yet who are bound up in a tale, a story, larger than themselves, about which they, the characters, know very little. But if we are like them, then we can ask: is there any larger story, a sacred story, that we might feel we are bound up with, knowingly or unknowingly?

When I say that the Torah story is ‘our’ story, I don’t just mean it’s our ancient text, the Torah, part of our Jewish heritage. It is that of course, but it’s also our story because it talks about us. It talks to us and about us. It’s like a mirror sometimes – if we look closely enough at the text, into the text, we see (with a shock of recognition sometimes), we see ourselves. As we engage with this chapter we see, uncomfortably, problematically: well yes, we can lie, we can hide the truth about things, we can deceive, we can harbour aggressive and hateful  feelings to others – sometimes (say it quietly) to others in  our own family, for heaven’s sake.

Aye, there’s the rub. In the Torah, all of this intrigue, the narrators suggest, is ‘for heaven’s sake’ – there is a divine plan, unfolding in the background, rumbling along, sort of hard-wired into the unfolding drama. But can we say the same? Would we want to say the same? That our lives are held inside a larger, holding, story, in which unwittingly - in our folly and in our grandeur - we are playing a part?

The Torah text implicitly opens up this question for us. Are these stories just about what has been, about the past, about our mythological roots, our mythic ancestors? Is our sacred history just that – history?   Or is this Tree of Life (as the Torah is called) still growing? – is our life one of the still growing multitudinous branches of the ever-renewing, ever-flourishing, Tree of Life?

What would it mean to see our own small lives as still part of an unfolding sacred drama, a drama of the enactment of holiness in everyday life, a drama where we are expected to enact holiness in everyday life? Would we even want to see our lives this way? Wouldn’t we prefer just to be left alone?  How often have Jews wanted to say to the Holy One of Israel: ‘leave us alone, choose someone else for a change’. How often we might wish not to be carriers of this sacred story, a story still being written. How we might wish for our character in the sacred drama  to be written out of the script – retired to the Costa Brava, or killed off by the divine storyteller. But like characters in a Beckett play we are trapped, no way out: “You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.”

The chapter we read this week opens with the focus on Isaac, and we hear that ”his eyes were dimmed, failing to be able to see” (27:1), and the whole drama revolves around this image, the old man who can’t see. And maybe we are happy to be literalists and read the text in a plain sense – this is about blindness, and so he really can’t tell the difference between Jacob and Esau except by touch and smell – he can hear that the voices are different, his ears don’t deceive him (27:22), but he doesn’t trust that, he keeps asking for reassurance from his sons, as if he doesn’t know what to do with his doubts.  This is painful, and poignant. We know what it’s like to deceive – and to be deceived.

 

But the text offers itself to us with a different question bound up in its telling. We can’t only read it literally: it invites us to read it (as the rabbis of old would have done) symbolically, metaphorically. What is this ‘failure in seeing’? How much is this a story about Isaac not wanting to see, refusing to see? Maybe he doesn’t want to see that his wife and son are prepared to trick him, maybe he doesn’t want to see that he does actually prefer Esau, a man after his own heart, earthy and straightforward - prefer him to his other son Jacob, who is not only a heel and a trickster but is also Rebecca’s beloved (thus, perhaps, keeping wife and husband apart). Maybe he doesn’t want to see that he’s the author of a fractured and fractious family. Not seeing, not wanting to see, wishing to avoid seeing what is going on within families, is a psychologically true reality that transcends time and place and culture. 

That Isaac couldn’t see, didn’t want to see, speaks to us all and makes us ask the question: and what do we not want to see? What can’t we see, or refuse to see, that’s unfolding in front of our turned-away eyes? 

Each of us will want to answer that question in our own way. If we can bear it. It can be a painful, troubling - certainly disquieting - question. What are you choosing not to see, ‘turning a blind eye to’, as we say?

This week I think I caught a glimpse of something that I maybe didn’t want to look at, at least not look at too closely. And it was about family - not personal family, but the collective family. The Jewish family in the larger sense:  Jewish peoplehood and our history and the passing on of the vision from generation to generation.

And what I saw that was an eye-opener – but disturbing to look at - was what’s happened to European Jewry in the last 50 years.

When I was a young man, thinking of training to become a rabbi, more than a quarter of the Jews in the world lived in Europe. That was already a huge drop compared to before the War, when Europe and the Soviet Union accounted for fully 60% of world Jewry. But in the early 1970s, a quarter of world Jewry was still a significant number of Jews, and the work of reconstructing a Jewish life in Europe was something being taken on by the generation of progressive rabbis who were already at, or had graduated from, the Leo Baeck College. This post-Shoah work felt a powerful, and historically-necessary, and in its way sacred, task. And I wanted to be a small part of it.

So the shock of what I saw last week, that I didn’t want to see, is that actually the Jewish population of Europe has fallen by 60% in the last 50 years. Only 9% of the global Jewish population now lives in Europe. The centre of gravity of Jewish life is now overwhelmingly  in Israel and in America.

From the bubble of northwest London, where Jewish life is flourishing, and I am involved in a synagogue that is about to invest major funds and energy in rebuilding and renewing our own community building for the next 50 years – as if we are in some way isolated from larger historical currents -  maybe these figures and the bigger picture, the larger narrative that is unfolding around us, doesn’t matter. Maybe, like Isaac, we have to turn a blind eye to what’s happened to the European Jewish family of which we are a part. After all, life has to go on where we live it.

Maybe blindness to certain realities is a necessary attribute within an unfolding sacred drama. Is that the lesson of Isaac’s so-called blindness that I need to learn in our current context? The role of a strategic ‘failure to see’  in the service of a larger story? Maybe it is.  Indeed, maybe that is what the Torah text itself shows us in its own subversive way.

Because this whole drama we read of who will receive the blessing from Isaac - all the shenanigans and psychologically-fraught tension of the story between the brothers and involving the parents, is both addressing real human dilemmas and it’s a kind of charade, an elaborate piece of play-acting in which Isaac, the inheritor of the special Abrahamic blessing about the destiny of the people, is complicit.

If we read the text carefully - as I have tried to learn to do from my Bible teacher Rabbi Jonathan Magonet, whose understanding I am following here - what we discover as we read on into the next chapter of Torah, is that all the rivalry and battles over who will get the blessing in chapter 27, with all the frenzy and distress it stirs up in the protagonists, is in the end completely beside the point. They are squabbling over an ordinary patriarchal family blessing, a blessing of material prosperity and well-being. And that matters on a human level. It’s a life and death matter, yes, on a personal level.

But the next chapter opens with what is actually important, in terms of scared history, in terms of the larger divine drama that is being played out. For after the deception of Isaac by Jacob, and as Jacob is about to flee from his brother’s murderous rage, Isaac quietly calls Jacob and gives him another blessing - the Abrahamic blessing, the transgenerational blessing of fertility and inheritance of the land, the pre-destined land.

This is the real deal, the blessing of the God of Abraham - the spiritual blessing one might call it -  passed by Abraham to Isaac, and now passed on to Jacob as he leaves home; it’s the blessing that binds the carrier into the burden and promise of sacred history rather than personal family drama. And Jacob, the heel, the deceiver, the fraudster - he gets this blessing gratis. It’s his destiny. And Isaac has to turn a blind eye to the here-and-now personal intrigues and family dysfunctionality because he’s got his eyes focused on what can’t be seen, what can only be known about, intuited - maybe with an inner eye, maybe only in rare glimpses, when his eyes catch sight of eternity and the Eternal One.

So maybe European Jewry is down to only 9%, and maybe it is destined to fall even lower, but maybe – I console myself – it’s not about the numbers: that’s about material blessings so to speak; maybe we should keep our eyes (if we can bear it) on the larger drama: that we – and this can be Jew and non-Jew alike, anyone who cares about justice and righteousness) are characters in a sacred history, like holy letters inscribed in a holy text that we may never read; for the text is still being written, it’s still unfolding, and we may not be here for the next chapter, we may never have the larger vision of how the story will turn out. Just the knowledge that the text in which we appear is indispensable.  

A single letter missing in a Torah scroll makes the text possul, null and void. Each letter counts, each letter is precious, each letter in the holy story, our sacred story, is significant, beyond words. 

 [Based on a sermon given via Zoom for  Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on November 21st 2020] 

Genesis 27

King James Version

1 And it came to pass, that when Isaac was old, and his eyes were dim, so that he could not see, he called Esau his eldest son, and said unto him, My son: and he said unto him, Behold, here am I.

² And he said, Behold now, I am old, I know not the day of my death:

³ Now therefore take, I pray thee, thy weapons, thy quiver and thy bow, and go out to the field, and take me some venison;

⁴ And make me savoury meat, such as I love, and bring it to me, that I may eat; that my soul may bless thee before I die.

⁵ And Rebekah heard when Isaac spake to Esau his son. And Esau went to the field to hunt for venison, and to bring it.

⁶ And Rebekah spake unto Jacob her son, saying, Behold, I heard thy father speak unto Esau thy brother, saying,

⁷ Bring me venison, and make me savoury meat, that I may eat, and bless thee before the Lord before my death.

⁸ Now therefore, my son, obey my voice according to that which I command thee.

⁹ Go now to the flock, and fetch me from thence two good kids of the goats; and I will make them savoury meat for thy father, such as he loveth:

¹⁰ And thou shalt bring it to thy father, that he may eat, and that he may bless thee before his death.

¹¹ And Jacob said to Rebekah his mother, Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man:

¹² My father peradventure will feel me, and I shall seem to him as a deceiver; and I shall bring a curse upon me, and not a blessing.

¹³ And his mother said unto him, Upon me be thy curse, my son: only obey my voice, and go fetch me them.

¹⁴ And he went, and fetched, and brought them to his mother: and his mother made savoury meat, such as his father loved.

¹⁵ And Rebekah took goodly raiment of her eldest son Esau, which were with her in the house, and put them upon Jacob her younger son:

¹⁶ And she put the skins of the kids of the goats upon his hands, and upon the smooth of his neck:

¹⁷ And she gave the savoury meat and the bread, which she had prepared, into the hand of her son Jacob.

¹⁸ And he came unto his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I; who art thou, my son?

¹⁹ And Jacob said unto his father, I am Esau thy first born; I have done according as thou badest me: arise, I pray thee, sit and eat of my venison, that thy soul may bless me.

²⁰ And Isaac said unto his son, How is it that thou hast found it so quickly, my son? And he said, Because the Lord thy God brought it to me.

²¹ And Isaac said unto Jacob, Come near, I pray thee, that I may feel thee, my son, whether thou be my very son Esau or not.

²² And Jacob went near unto Isaac his father; and he felt him, and said, The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.

²³ And he discerned him not, because his hands were hairy, as his brother Esau's hands: so he blessed him.

²⁴ And he said, Art thou my very son Esau? And he said, I am.

²⁵ And he said, Bring it near to me, and I will eat of my son's venison, that my soul may bless thee. And he brought it near to him, and he did eat: and he brought him wine and he drank.

²⁶ And his father Isaac said unto him, Come near now, and kiss me, my son.

²⁷ And he came near, and kissed him: and he smelled the smell of his raiment, and blessed him, and said, See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the Lord hath blessed:

²⁸ Therefore God give thee of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine:

²⁹ Let people serve thee, and nations bow down to thee: be lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother's sons bow down to thee: cursed be every one that curseth thee, and blessed be he that blesseth thee.

³⁰ And it came to pass, as soon as Isaac had made an end of blessing Jacob, and Jacob was yet scarce gone out from the presence of Isaac his father, that Esau his brother came in from his hunting.

³¹ And he also had made savoury meat, and brought it unto his father, and said unto his father, Let my father arise, and eat of his son's venison, that thy soul may bless me.

³² And Isaac his father said unto him, Who art thou? And he said, I am thy son, thy firstborn Esau.

³³ And Isaac trembled very exceedingly, and said, Who? where is he that hath taken venison, and brought it me, and I have eaten of all before thou camest, and have blessed him? yea, and he shall be blessed.

³⁴ And when Esau heard the words of his father, he cried with a great and exceeding bitter cry, and said unto his father, Bless me, even me also, O my father.

³⁵ And he said, Thy brother came with subtilty, and hath taken away thy blessing.

³⁶ And he said, Is not he rightly named Jacob? for he hath supplanted me these two times: he took away my birthright; and, behold, now he hath taken away my blessing. And he said, Hast thou not reserved a blessing for me?

³⁷ And Isaac answered and said unto Esau, Behold, I have made him thy lord, and all his brethren have I given to him for servants; and with corn and wine have I sustained him: and what shall I do now unto thee, my son?

³⁸ And Esau said unto his father, Hast thou but one blessing, my father? bless me, even me also, O my father. And Esau lifted up his voice, and wept.

³⁹ And Isaac his father answered and said unto him, Behold, thy dwelling shall be the fatness of the earth, and of the dew of heaven from above;

⁴⁰ And by thy sword shalt thou live, and shalt serve thy brother; and it shall come to pass when thou shalt have the dominion, that thou shalt break his yoke from off thy neck.

⁴¹ And Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing wherewith his father blessed him: and Esau said in his heart, The days of mourning for my father are at hand; then will I slay my brother Jacob.

 

Finding Hope in Unsettling Times

 It’s a truism to say that these are strange times, disturbing times, vexing times: if you are not feeling destabilised in some fundamental part of yourself - somehow on edge, unable to fully relax, fully let go and enjoy life in all its abundant richness - if you are feeling you have lost some essential inner calmness of spirit, or hopefulness about life, if you are finding yourself unable to get to sleep at night, or waking unnaturally early and then unable to get back to sleep – if you are feeling any of that, or just unaccountably ill-at-ease, if this is how it is for you at the moment, I have two things to say.

First: you are not alone. You may not have a context in which you can talk about this, or get to grips with it,  you may not even have the words to pin down these unsettled and unsettling feelings: you just know things aren’t right. But I know that you are not alone in responding like this to what we are living with, and living through.

Secondly: I think this unsettledness you might be feeling, the edginess, the unpindownable sense of being ill-at-ease is entirely congruent with the external circumstances we are living through. What is going on is like a psychic – psychological and spiritual -  earthquake; for the tectonic plates beneath our feet are shifting. Things which have been stable in our lives are becoming – more rapidly than we can adjust to – unstable. Things feel out of control, we feel out of control – because things are out of control.

Let’s look at just a few areas where this is true. Obviously, close to home, there is Covid-19, with all its ongoing uncertainties and disruptions and questions. We are having to wonder not only about whether we and our loved ones will survive this next 12 months, but about what aspects of our lives will ever return to some semblance of – that dread word – normality. Nobody’s in control of this disease, anywhere in the world; and there’s no need for me to describe the UK government’s shambolic attempts to get a grip on the situation. We are having to manage daily anxieties about our own health, while at the same time adapt to how our everyday lives have been altered: in small, and sometimes large, ways we’ve had to leave behind a world with which we were familiar. 

How we met people , how we greeted people, where we travelled, how we travelled, where we prayed, where we played bridge, how we saw the doctor, how we planned for the future - so confidently, with such lightness of being – it’s all gone. We’ve had to leave it all behind, though we keep hoping we are going back. But we are not.  We can never re-set the  time button, however profoundly we might wish we could.  

In the annual cycle of readings from the Torah, we have reached the beginning of the Abraham saga (Genesis12). Abraham – not in the prime of his life, but in the second half of his life, and after a settled life in one territory - is told/commanded to leave behind his land, his birth community, his family roots, all the security of his life, and move on.

And our Torah text dramatizes how he seems to have been able to do this: he submits his own will, his own needs, his own ties of affection and rootedness in what was familiar and secure, he lets go of all that everyday human clutching at what he had, and submits to a call he hears, experiences:  an inner voice, urgent, insistent, unwelcome: Lech – Go. Lech – Let go. L’cha – it’s for you, for your own sake (12:1).

How are we think about that? We who can’t bear to let go, we who are feeling so destabilised, so ill-at-ease in our souls, as the ground shifts beneath our feet. I said back in March, when Covid first came over the horizon and we were preparing for the UK’s first national lockdown – just as we are now preparing for the second one  - I said that we already had the virus, all of us. It was in our heads, it was infiltrating into how we saw what was going on, how we felt about everything. And we still have that virus inside us. All those symptoms I described earlier are part of the virus we are still carrying.

And none of us have Abraham’s gift, or courage, or madness, to just ‘let go’, move on, leave behind what gives us our security and stability. But the tectonic plates are shifting and they are forcing us to let go and move on from the world we have grown accustomed to, and believed would last forever.

For example: who thought that American democracy might come to an end before our eyes?  These last four years have exposed - and in the weeks to come I fear we will see it confirmed – how thin is the fabric of America’s rootedness in democratic norms and conventions. And although that’s taking place 3000 miles from us, we are destabilised by what we see: the stoking of paranoid conspiracy theories, the assaults on truth, the championing  of hatred and divisiveness, the undermining of a scientific worldview, the undermining of public trust in the election itself. All of these spill over in one form or another into our own body politic: in our globalised world, the medical virus and the virus that corrodes social wellbeing are transnational.

When the word ‘fake’ is used as a code for ‘something I don’t like to hear’, where ‘reality’ becomes ‘what I decide it is’, where the dictatorship of feeling trumps rational thinking, we are in the world of psychosis. How can we remain unaffected by being witness to this? Even to say ‘witness’ is a distortion: we aren’t only witnesses; we are, willingly or unwillingly, participants in the world’s unfolding. The world’s unravelling.

What is being shaken – in the US, in India, in Turkey, in Brazil, in Poland and Hungary – is democratic solidity, and the rule of law; and the reverberations of this penetrate our psyches too. Around the world, autocratic governments, authoritarian  governments, xenophobic governments, are on the rise – and I guess if you are Andy Burnham or another  civic leader in the North of England, you might have a thing or two to say about autocratic government closer to home.  

So we know some of the factors causing us to feel destabilised. Along with Covid and this forthcoming inescapable collision between fantasy-based politics and democracy  in America, we know about the third huge tectonic plate that is shifting beneath our feet: the environmental crisis, and how we are no longer rooted in a secure way, in the way we all grew up, our homeland belief, that the natural world around us would somehow go on unfolding in all its David Attenborough-tinged wondrous profusion, its miraculous multiplicity, for ever and ever. As the planet chokes and microplastic particles enter our lungs and the brains of unborn infants, how can we not feel ill-at-ease? We are porous – physically, emotionally, psychically.

So: I’ve just named three of the tectonic plates shifting – and I haven’t even mentioned the economy here in the UK, or our imminent falling off the Brexit cliff, or the toxic levels of collusion between government and private companies to the detriment of social wellbeing. How do we find our feet in it all? Where is the solid ground?

Where do we find our hope?

Of course there are many places we can find it – though we may each have to construct our own anthology of sources of hopefulness. Many in the UK have been stirred by the campaigning vigour of our unofficial ‘leader of the opposition’, the footballer Marcus Rashford, in his battle to end food poverty in a country where 1.4 million children qualify for free school meals. Thousands of local businesses and many hundreds of thousands of individuals have marshalled their generosity and compassion and scarce financial resources in the face of the moral abyss of government cruelty, and have joined his campaign to ensure that Britain’s disadvantaged children have food to eat. There is hope in the deep wellsprings of  empathy and goodwill still alive in a nation battered by austerity and pandemic and government indifference.    

For those who belong to a religious community – like Finchley Reform Synagogue, where I speak from time to time – hope has arrived this week following a historic decision to move on, like Abraham: to create (after 60 years in one building) a brand-new synagogue/community centre/ multi-functional, environmentally-sustainable building. On Shabbat Lech l’cha – when we read of our mythic ancestor’s journey of moving on, following the divine call to leave behind the old and bring a blessing into the wider world - this communal decision was a celebration of hopefulness.

Yes, it’s in the time of Covid and we have no idea how long it’ll be before we can ever meet together in that new space; yes, it’s in a time of huge economic chaos and worldwide political uncertainty, and we have no real idea what the challenges of tomorrow will be for religious communities – we might have to become a neighbourhood food bank for the next 60 years or more; and yes, we don’t know whether the very air we breath will make life in the cities liveable for our children and grandchildren. But in spite of all these uncertainties - and they are real uncertainties - a decision of hopefulness was made this week.

And it takes religious courage to make that kind of decision. Religious courage, spiritual courage, Abrahamic courage even: leaving the old behind in order to bring the Judaic blessing on into a new era.

Yet I doubt that this kind of symbolic and practical adventure will make us sleep any more easily at night.  Jews have learnt to distrust the material world as a source of hope. A Judaic sense of hopefulness comes – (if it comes at all) – from our rootedness in another realm. A Jewish sense of hopefulness comes from an engagement with other dimensions of reality.

So when I engage with the language and themes of Torah - for example, exploring the dramas of Abraham’s life - I am provoked by the words, stirred by the dilemmas, inspired by the hope that is incarnated in the text. When God changes Abram’s name (Genesis 17:5) and then Sarai’s name (17:15), they aren’t asked if it was okay, they weren’t asked how they ‘felt’ about it. Our storyteller portrays these mythic progenitors of the Jewish people being  renamed by a divine force. Something is added to each of their names. This symbol of transformation acknowledges that change is possible.

Abram left behind his certainties and opened himself to following and listening to the divine – that gives me hope, it gives me inspiration that listening in, as deeply as is possible amidst all the distractions, listening in to what is going on around and within, listening in to the unfolding spirit of all being (otherwise known as Adonai), this kind of listening opens us to a reality that can guide and underpin - and provoke and sometimes, yes, destabilise - our lives. But it is filled with hope, that reality: to be the bearer of blessing is real. We can add something to someone else’s life – like God added a letter to Abram’s name - and it’s a blessing. Change is possible.

The poetry of Torah endures from generation to generation: it is our strength, it offers hope, over and over; we can bear the vicissitudes of life because we are caught up in a drama that is bigger than ourselves. It’s the only thing that is unchanging, that endures, as solid as rock in our lives, even though it is also as fluid as water, for it flows and ripples and is never still: we dip into it and it is never the same from moment to moment, for we are never the same from moment to moment, and yet we can always draw upon it, endlessly deep, ever-flowing, feeding the spirit, nurturing our souls, which are thirsty for meaning and for hope.

[loosely based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, October 31^st, 2020]