Sight, Insight, Hospitality: Seeing the Divine in the Everyday

 

As a young man I was preoccupied - personally, and then professionally - with questions about God: the search for God, the experience of God, the centrality of God in Jewish religious life, other religious traditions’ views on God, the role of God and divinity in human life, how one might find God in everyday life. Inevitably too, and looming behind all these questions, there was the so-called ‘silence of God’ during the Shoah. 

Thinking it was part of the job of rabbis to talk about these things - and puzzled sometimes at how infrequently I heard colleagues talking about this stuff - I would often give sermons on these themes.  As if I thought I was some sort of expert on the topic.

I can now see, of course, how presumptuous this was. But it felt like a mission, of sorts, to keep on talking about God: to bring God under the spotlight, as it were, and try and illuminate all the issues and dynamics and problems and uncertainties surrounding this central character of our Jewish religious drama - although a phrase like ‘character…in our religious drama’ was not how I would have spoken about it in those days.  

But over the years something changed. I changed, I suppose - some people might call it maturing or growing up, though I’m not sure that’s quite the right language to capture what happened. But  gradually, over the decades, I  became aware that I was talking about God less and less - and often in sermons not at all. Certainly it wasn’t the focus of a sermon, as it had been in the past. If I was feeling particularly playful - or maybe it was just pious, or pseudo-pious, I don’t know - I might slip in a reference to God - almost as an aside to the themes I was exploring, a bracket as it were, but definitely not as the main topic.

So what happened? Why did God disappear, or fade from view, from what I found myself talking about? There were many reasons - psychological, theological, intellectual, spiritual, professional - but rather than open these up here. I want to focus on a couple of verses from this week’s Torah reading in the hope that through them I can cast a light on what changed in my approach to this youthful obsession of mine.

Our sedrah began with chapter 18 of Genesis. Va-yay’ra elav Adonai - “the Eternal One appeared to him…”, as Abraham sat at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day… (Genesis18:1).

And it continues Va-yisar aynav va-yar  - “and he lifted up his eyes and he saw…”. The text is subtle here, it separates off the verb ‘to see’ from what he sees. This suggests it isn’t just ordinary seeing, it’s more like ‘insight’ than ‘sight’. (The Hebrew doesn’t distinguish between these two).

The next word is ve-hinei, “and behold” - the word always acts like a  jump cut in a film, as the narrator ‘cuts’ to the subjective view of the character. So now the storyteller lets us find out what Abraham sees: shlosha anashim nitzavim alav, “three people are standing waiting above him” - he’s sitting, they are rearing up above him. (The word used for ‘standing’ n’z’v means ‘standing waiting/preparing for something’, a different word from the everyday Hebrew word for the physical act of standing a’m’d).

This is great storytelling: graphic, very precise, you can picture it in your mind’s eye, each word crafted to add a detail to the picture, so that you can see it (it’s like the specificity of individual words in a poem, or a Rembrandt painting where each brushstroke counts).

And what does Abraham do? The next word begins the second half of the sentence - but it’s not an action word, it’s a reflection word, the action is inwards: va-yar - again! - the word is repeated, it comes in each half of the sentence and Abraham has another moment of insight, where what he sees with his eyes joins up with what he’s seeing within himself, what he’s intuiting is happening. Va-yar va-yaratz...  “And he saw; and he ran out of his tent to greet them…”, and he bows low before them. Honour, respect, reverence, humility.

We are used to reading this ‘bowing down’ gesture in relation to Biblical characters, it comes dozens and dozens of times, it’s so familiar we stop even thinking about it. But it may be worth noting that this is the first time it is used in Tanach, the Hebrew Bible. In this scene, at this moment, this act of bowing down opens up a new way of people relating to each other. It’s an archetypal moment: respect, reverence in the face of the other, humility, making oneself smaller, giving space to the other. Abraham as an exemplar of a particular mode of being with the Other, of the ethics of interpersonal behaviour, the dynamics of I and Thou (to use Martin Buber’s language). Each Thou a glimpse of the Eternal Thou. This is his first impulse: he runs and prostrates himself.

This leads into the actions for which this scene is perhaps better know - and what’s talked about by the rabbinic commentators - his hospitality: water, food, shelter, provision. But what I’m wanting to focus on here is how the outer hospitality - the material hospitality and generosity - is preceded by another kind of hospitality, if we want to call it that, the hospitality to the lived experience of being in the presence of other human beings, souls like oneself, the hospitality of making space for a shared humanity with the other, with the stranger, the traveller, the ones who arrive from elsewhere, those who arrive out of nowhere - which is always somewhere.

Isn’t this a key aspect of the insight Abraham has? That these strangers are fellow travellers on the road through life, fellow human beings dependent on what provisions they receive on the journey - (we can also call it Kafka’s insight) - an insight into the way we all depend on each other to get through life, to get through the day?

But Abraham’s moment of insight is, remember, repeated: there are two moments of insight, two levels of revelation that follow on the heels of each other, as thoughts do - Va-yar…Va-yar - because Abraham also has a moment of insight not just into our shared humanity with the other, with the stranger, but even more profoundly, insight into this being one way that God is present in the world. It’s not just an awareness that, as we are accustomed to say in a rather abstract formulation, humanity is made “in the image of God/the divine”, b’zelem Elohim, as the beginning of Genesis puts it (1:27). But what Abraham realises in a more personal way - what the storytellers in their exquisite narration are signposting - is that in the encounter with another human being, God , Adonai, is present.

That’s how the narrative unfolds - Adonai appears to Abraham, verse 1. That’s the storyteller’s omniscient ‘objective’ perspective, as it were. The narrator is telling us what is going on, what we are going to see illustrated, illuminated. Va-yay’ra elav Adonai - “the Eternal One appeared to him”.  But what does Abraham actually see? What he sees are three people, people like him, three strangers. That’s his subjective experience - people awaiting a response. And the text dramatizes how what he sees with his eyes is linked to what he sees with his mind’s eye; and what he realises, what his insight is - and it is a theological insight and a spiritual insight - is that the divine appears in the everyday, the divine appears when you open your eyes to see what is in front of you, the divine is present in our interaction with others.  And that this experience is - for want of a better word - God. Or rather, this is also God.

We are not talking about a transcendent God here, something over and above us, beyond us, we are not talking about a creator God, separate from our lives, but an aspect of God here and now, present, waiting for us to see and to respond. Seeing with the eyes in this story isn’t enough, it is reflecting on what he sees and responding to what he sees, that makes Abraham into the exemplar, the model for Jewish lives, Avraham Avinu, the founding father of a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking about God.

If you look through all these chapters in which Abraham appears, he doesn’t seem to speak much about God - he doesn’t give sermons about God to his family, or to those the Torah describes him encountering. He mentions God to Isaac at the Akedah, but that’s just about it. But in our text today he introduces a way of thinking about God - or rather the storytellers use him to dramatize a way of thinking about God - that is ‘horizontal’ as it were, not ‘vertical’. (I’m borrowing Rabbi Arthur Green’s language here). It is a way of thinking about God as what is enacted on the human level; which is why - one of the reasons why - I stopped talking overtly about God and started talking more about compassion and justice, and generosity, and kindness, about human qualities and capacities, through which the divine enters into the world. God is revealed through us, through us inhabiting these so called ‘divine’ qualities and enacting divinity in our everyday lives. 'Horizontal' Judaism is a Jewish way of being and thinking in which God is present in and through the human, rather than God split off from humanity. 

Who knows, maybe in these latter years of my rabbinic life I might return to my roots. There’s still a lot to say, to puzzle over, to explore and wrestle with, about Ha Kadosh Baruch Hu, the Holy One of Israel, Ribbono shel Ha-Olam, the ‘Master’ of the Universe, Avinu Malkenu, ‘Our Father, Our Sovereign’, there’s still quite a bit of life in the old dog yet - and I’m not just talking about me.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, October 23rd 2021]

 

When Is Enough, Enough?

The Jewish New Year started this week with our ‘new normal’ – and our ‘new caution’.  

You know what I mean by the ‘new caution’. That we’ve come to the end of something we were used to, and new questions and doubts have infiltrated our thinking: where do we feel comfortable going, out of the house? who do we meet? do we use public transport?  how close can we get to other people - even as the community gathered indoors this week, we were thinking : how close can I sit, is there enough space, enough ventilation, what is safe? Indeed, what does ‘safety’ really mean now? All this adds up to our ‘new caution’.

Something has been lost, we feel it. It’s as if our carefree days are behind us. They’re over. A sense of easygoingness in everyday life (if we ever had it), well, it belongs to a different era: B.C., as it were.

All those Rosh Hashanahs in the past, up to 2019 - that old B.C. era, Before Covid - we started the year with hopefulness; yes there were anxieties too, sometimes, but usually we had a sense of new beginnings where we could look forward with confidence, eagerness - and not too much apprehension. But my sense is that’s changed; that some deep, precious sense of the possibilities of carefreeness has gone. And the new caution has taken over.

Over this last year my mind has often turned to how, a century ago, in the 1920s, people in the UK looked back across the abyss of the Great War and started portraying the so-called  Edwardian period, pre-1914, as a golden age of long summer afternoons and garden parties, and they summoned up romantic, nostalgia-tinged memories (real and constructed) of basking in a carefree world (well, carefree if you had money), a world of Empire and national prestige and self-satisfaction. You’ve read the books, seen the films - Merchant-Ivory and the rest - things that evoke this period with its lives of hopefulness, excitement about the future, and optimism that although the world was changing rapidly, particularly technologically, it was obviously changing for the better. 

Living through those sun-drenched years, people just didn’t know they were coming to the end of something - that actually they were at the end of something - they could not imagine the devastation and the losses that 1914 and war inflicted on a whole generation, young and old alike; let alone imagine the horrors that were to come as the century unfolded. Carefree days indeed.

 

And here we are, a century later, not yet post-Covid (if we will ever be), taking these tentative steps into our New Year, but far - perhaps very far - from relaxed and care free. And the question is, where can we find what we need to help us navigate through these fraught and complex times? Emotionally complex, politically and socially complex, globally complex times. Where can we look for inspiration? For hope?  

There have been times during this pandemic when you will have heard it said that this worldwide event, in which there has been, and continues to be, so much distress and so many losses, could also be an opportunity. Not exactly a heaven-sent opportunity – that requires a faith, a theology, that’s a bridge too far for most of us - but an opportunity nevertheless. That although we need to acknowledge the suffering many, many people have gone through - and that isn’t over, the hardship – it’s also presented us with a chance, a welcome chance, to reconsider the status quo, to re-evaluate priorities – personal, communal, national, global; that it’s cracked open the carapace, the hard, shiny, dense complacency about how things have to be - economically, and how our societies are ordered, and the priorities we allow governments to choose for us.

For some, this last 18 months has opened us up to imagine a different kind of life, and different ways of promoting human well-being and human flourishing in society. Yes, the pandemic has revealed the scandals about existing inequalities and deprivations but it has - particularly in its early stages when so much previous thinking was turned upside down (imagine paying people not to work!) - it has, intermittently, created some space to think about other ways of living. Or so this upbeat narrative might suggest.   

And yes, so much has already changed - where you work from, how often you get on a plane, how you shop, how you hold a meeting, how religious services happen, how much you cycle or walk, even where you live, see a doctor - there’s an endless list of  everyday stuff that has been impacted by the pandemic and is in the process of changing; or where there’s been at least a glimpse of a different way of doing things, where perhaps a better quality of life might be possible. That’s not to deny the losses we have experienced, but to acknowledge some of the more hopeful developments and possibilities that have been opened up. Even if the opening up has only been in our thinking, our capacity to imagine a different future, this pandemic has catalysed some deep shifts in our consciousness.    

But a lot of these possibilities we’ve glimpsed, or have been spoken about, or have begun to be enacted, are linked to something much more difficult to think about, let alone accept. To put it as simply as possible: we are being forced by the circumstances in which this pandemic is occurring to think about something maybe we’d much rather not have to think about, something quite painful.

If changes are coming to how we live and how we organize things, and if a sense of carefreeness is to return, whatever transformations happen would need to be such that we don’t have to continue to fear devastating floods and famine-inducing droughts and unbearable heatwaves and out-of-control wildfires, when we wouldn’t have to worry that our children and grandchildren are being brain damaged from the womb onwards by chemical pollution from plastics or from the very air they breathe. If change is going to happen in the directions we all pray for – or if not pray for, then at least wish for – if we are collectively going to turn things round and shape a better world then we have to start thinking about the hard question, the fundamental question: whether we really need all the things we think we do.

And this is the hard part about what any positive changes this pandemic is catalysing has revealed. How much do we need? How much do we tell ourselves we need? It can pain our hearts to look inside and consider these things, but during these Ten Days set aside in the Jewish calendar it is - whether we like it or not - part of the spiritual challenge of these days to reflect on some of these difficult questions.

There may not be any shortcuts here, or easy answers, or in the end any effective ways of avoiding the painful choices that are going to need to be made. To repeat the question again – the question this pandemic has brought out into the open, the question for our times: Do we really need all the things we think we do: the objects we buy, the experiences we buy, the holidays we buy, the kind of food we buy (all that meat with its environmentally destructive consequences), do we really need it all, and more of it, and different, and the new, and the latest, and what others have, do we really need it all?

And remember ‘need’ is different from ‘want’. ‘Want’ is easy to feel, sure. Of course we want stuff. But do we need what we ‘want’? ‘Want’ is an emotion, a feeling. And our emotions are powerful forces within us and can often rule us, to our own detriment. But ‘need’ is something else. ‘Do I need this?’ is a different question from “Do I want this?” . “Do I want this?” is a subjective question about our feeling life. But “Do I need this?” is, I’d suggest, a different kind of question. At root it’s an ethical question.

And as we know, however reluctantly we might want to know it, being Jewish just happens to mean having a commitment to ethical questions. Otherwise what’s the point? Without the ethical questions we are just another tribe in the human family, just another club to belong to. I’m not knocking the fringe benefits of tribalism or club membership: ask any sports fan about the sense of belonging tied up as a supporter; ask any member of a gym or a golf-club and they’ll tell you of the health benefits or the social contact membership offers. These are all good things - but they aren’t at the heart of the Jewish endeavour in the world, which is ask the hard questions; and not just ask them but respond to them in action. And - I’ll repeat it - the question for our times is, I think: Do we really need all the things we think we do? or feel we do?

In a world running out of resources, at the edge of catastrophe, where glimpses of devastation are becoming unignorable and a helplessness can easily set it, or a pessimism, or a cynicism, or fearfulness, or just an angry indifference, the most important ethical and political and environmental and spiritual idea can be summed up in one word: enough. Dayenu – the springtime Passover/Pesach text belongs here too, during our Ten Days of Self-judgment. Dayenu. Enough. When is what we have, what we already have, enough?

Can we stop the unrelenting urge to have more long enough to feel we have enough? To appreciate what we have. We already have enough. We reading this blog - just like the community who heard these words earlier in the week - already have enough. There are many millions who don’t have enough and that’s a huge national and international challenge - but I’m not talking about them, right now. I’m talking about us.

How do we feel we have enough? How do we get to the point where we say to ourselves: stop, dayenu? The problem is that if we are empty inside we will always want more. Nothing will ever feel enough. Which is why the question about limiting our consumption – whether it is of holidays in the sun, or meat, or anything else – although it’s a psychological problem is at root a spiritual problem.

Appetites are endless, but if there’s an emptiness inside us – and we may or may not be aware of it – we will never be able to say: enough. We won’t be able to say stop, we won’t be able to clear a space to consider how those who genuinely do need more can be helped, what changes do need to be made, economically and socially. What sacrifices need to be made.

What is this emptiness? The word is shocking, easy to deny. But what I’m talking about by ‘emptiness’ is how painful it can be to feel some lack inside ourselves: whether it is friendships, or love, or self-esteem, the right body shape, educational success, financial reward, health, meaning, purpose – we can feel a lack, an emptiness about any of this.

Sometimes we are living from a place inside us where we know, or have a sense about, what our deprivation is about; sometimes we can’t even identify what that is; but either way, if we sense some inner emptiness – or even worse if the emptiness is there and we don’t sense it, just drive ourselves crazy trying to fill ourselves up anyway – if this is how we live in the world, if this is what is going on inside of us – and what I am saying is a reality for countless, countless people - if this is what is going on, we can never say enough, we can never say stop, we can never say - because we can never feel - “I have enough”, I am blessed. We can never think: “I am enough”, I am blessed, and grateful. As I said, this is a psychological issue, but it’s also a spiritual issue.  

Our spirits might be restless, our souls might feel ill-nourished, our inner selves may feel aching and unsatisfied, but what these Ten Days in our calendar offer us is an opportunity to look at this – and to do something about it. Even to look at it, to think about it, is the beginning of doing something about it. Because what the Jewish tradition has created – what the Jewish people have created – is a framework for hopefulness. We can change, we are not pre-programmed - or not pre-programmed in ways that can’t evolve and change and grow.

Teshuvah means we can turn to the questions that matter.  Teshuvah means we can return to what we truly need, not what we think we need. And what we truly need, is to be able to be in contact, in living contact, with the spirit of all being that is in us, and in others around us - that’s the great value of community, that the divine can be experienced through the person you are sitting beside - even if it’s not too close.

What we yearn for, what gives our lives real meaning and a sense of purpose, is to be in contact with the spirit of all life, which is inside us and in each other, and that flows through all creation. Feeling it, knowing it, experiencing it, communing with it, singing it, praying it, speaking it, holding it in silence within us - we yearn for it. To experience the fulness of life in us and around us and between us.  

We can have all the material goods and possessions in the world, we can have all the exotic adventures that life offers, but in the end it is something intangible that we really need, something that is elusive and uncapturable and sometimes fleeting, something that our millennia-old Jewish tradition circles round and plays with and hints at - and reveals in sacred moments in our lives. Moments when we discover that we are a part of the sacred, that a spark of the divine is in the depths of our being - and I know that means nothing and yet I  also know that it means everything.

Our hope, personally and collectively, our hope, renewed in every generation, is that this spirit of being can live in us, can be expressed through us. It’s a gift and a mystery and a destiny. That source of all life that the tradition has named Adonai [the Eternal One] can heal our emptiness, it whispers its blessing : “You have enough, you are enough, you are blessed, this is my gift, this is the mystery, this is your destiny”.

[based on a sermon given at the Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on the second day of the New Year, Rosh Hashanah, September 8^th, 2021]

 

 

 

'Sitting Here Stranded': Dylan at 80

 “We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it” (Visions of Johanna, 1966)

I guess that Zimmerman must have been a heavy overcoat of a name to bear for a teenage boy in Minnesota in the 1950s, and particularly a teenager with a guitar in hand who was in thrall to Little Richard and Elvis Presley. But in the ‘land of the free’ millions discarded the names of their ancestors and chose to re-invent themselves – or at least don a different, lighter name to wear in that brave new melting-pot world. Not only an American phenomenon of course: many of us here in the UK may have parallel stories of Jewish assimilation – or attempted assimilation.

All of which is to say ‘Happy 80^th  Birthday’ this week to Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman, Shabbtai Zissel ben Avraham, the grandson of refugees who fled the infamous pogrom in Odessa in 1905. “I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans/ I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard” (A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, 1962) – you can change your name to that of a dead Welsh poet, but your Jewish sensibility will keep coming though whatever coat you wear.

“We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it”

Dylan’s lyrics, his poetry, his songs, have become part of the backdrop to countless lives around the globe. I’ve never been a so-called ‘fan’ of his – from the Latin fanaticus, ‘inspired by a deity’ - but I have learnt over the years to recognise a literary craftsman when I come across one. As presumably did the committee awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature five years ago in recognition of a unique polyphonic oracular voice speaking over the decades of love and loss, hope and despair, and the wrestling of meaning from the chaos of life: all the normal stuff of a Jewish sensibility seeking a home amidst the dislocations and contradictions and vicissitudes of life; like an ancient bard weaving a web of tangled and knotted narratives out of, and in protest against, the fracturedness and indifference of the world he finds himself in.

“We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it” 

Yes, that’s us too right now, stranded in our Zoom boxes but making the best of it, doing our best to deny what our hearts and bodies truly yearn for. As we sit and appreciate what we have, and what we receive through the screen, and genuinely value the connectedness and sense of belonging that is possible even through the screen - even while all that is going on and we feel our gratitude that it is going on, we are simultaneously in a state of suspended animation, in part-denial of – holding at arm’s length, as it were - what we really want: which is to see each other in the flesh again, hug each other, feel the living presence of each other and experience our own aliveness through that. But we are getting there. Slowly.

Meanwhile, “We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it”

As I reflect on that line, “turn it over and over”, as the rabbis said of the texts of Torah, “for everything is within it”, I find it resonating with so much of what is happening around us. Have we not all felt a bit stranded in recent weeks as the latest chapter of violence and pain has unfolded in Israel and Palestine, and the now predictable upsurge in antisemitic rhetoric and activity is disgorged into the airways and streets around us? Yes, we sit here stranded, doing our best to deny the painful knowledge that our own wellbeing as diaspora Jews seems to be at the mercy of, and in a perverse symbiotic enmeshment with, Israeli politics. And we probably would prefer to deny that this is the dark mirror image of how it was supposed to be: Israel not an admired “light to the nations” (Isaiah 49:6) but the opposite - making it less safe to be Jewish around the world than it’s been for seventy years and more. 

“We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it”

And with Covid too, although of course we can be active in terms of vaccinations and the precautionary measures we take personally, we are still to a greater degree than we can sometimes bear to think about at the mercy of  forces beyond our control (new variants, government confusion, the irresponsibility of others hellbent on returning to pleasure-seeking of various kinds, whether its nightclubs or sun-soaked holidays). And what we might be most in denial of is that none of us will ever be safe again until the vaccination process - with its concomitant need for probably annual renewal - has become a truly global reality. And although there is a real acknowledgment of this in the scientific community, and the World Health Organization, and some more enlightened governments around the world, that line of Dylan’s about feeling stranded still resonates.

And it may feel similar too with the climate crisis: although activism and campaigning and pressuring for change can all counter that sense of being stranded, there may still be a part of us – large or small – that’s doing our best to deny how threatened we are, and/or how threatened we feel. I’m not going to open this theme out now, because it’s quite easy to switch off one’s attention around this – that’s how denial works – but for those who are interested I’ll put a link a bit later in the chat to a piece about a powerful new report from Imperial College, London,  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/26/climate-crisis-inflicting-huge-hidden-costs-mental-health about the worldwide mental health cost of the climate emergency: suicide, stress, depression, the debilitating effects of inequality, famines, floods, droughts, dislocation, we are talking about psychological trauma on a massive scale, and particularly in younger people when they see lack of action. 

Yes, “We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it” . And yet this isn’t set in stone, this isn’t inevitable: actions by individuals, governments, communities, have proven benefits to our mental wellbeing through an increased sense of agency and hope - as well of course as being vital in themselves to safeguard our futures, and our planet’s survival.

“I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans…

And I'll tell it and speak it and think it and breathe it
And reflect from the mountains so all souls can see it…” (A Hard Rain…)

Well, he’s done good, the Jewish youngster who wrote those words when he was just 21 – ridiculous! - the boy from Hibbing, Minnesota has spent a lifetime doing it. A hundred shows a year, from 1990 to 2019, around the world – just think about that, how a visionary and poet kept on ‘telling it and speaking it and thinking it and breathing it’, indifferent to public opinion or approval, like the prophets of old, finding his religiosity in the music, in the verses, in the words that came out of him, and the spaces between the words.

Happy 80^th, Shabbtai Zissel ben Avraham. Ad meah v’esrim, as the traditional Jewish blessing says, “May you live to 120”: ‘telling it and speaking it and thinking it and breathing it…so all souls can see it’.

[based on a sermon given on Zoom at Finchley Reform Synagogue, May 29^th, 2021]

The Silence at the Heart of Life

 At times when the collective Jewish vision goes into eclipse - and some might say that the Judaic enactment of compassion, justice and generosity has been in eclipse for many decades now in the so-called ‘Holy Land’ – I find myself reflecting not on politics or nationalism or even the vicissitudes of history. I find myself reflecting on Torah. On words of Torah.

Torah : ‘teaching, instruction, direction’ – the Hebrew root of Torah is from the verb ‘to shoot an arrow’. Today’s festival of Shavuot – which celebrates the revelation of Torah within the saga of a people’s journey away from slavery towards distant uncertainties of some far-off ‘promised land’ – offers the opportunity to reflect on one of the core themes of Jewish teaching. What – if anything - happened at Sinai?  

So this blog is a form of ‘D’var Torah’ – the traditional phrase for ‘a piece of teaching’. It literally means ‘a word of Torah’. So I’m going to speak about a word, one word. One word of Torah. We’ll come to it in a moment - but the arrow is now in flight.

I’m sure you know about Zeno’s paradox. Zeno of Elea, the Greek philosopher – a direct contemporary of the prophet Malachi, 5^th century BCE – came up with a puzzle about an arrow shot at its target. From one perspective, he realised that the arrow can never reach its destination. Because before it reaches its target it has to travel half the way there. When it reaches that point, it still has half the distance to go. Once it travels through half that remaining distance, it still has half that new distance to travel. And so on, to infinity. So from one point of view – that of strict logic - arrows can never reach their targets. This paradox of course didn’t help King Harold, shot through the eye in 1066.

But I wonder if Zeno’s paradox can help us illuminate something about our arrow in flight. We are en route towards Torah, a ‘word of Torah’. Torah is the direction of travel, a destination.  The texts are always in front of us, we aim to reach them, get hold of them - ‘understand’ them, as we so blithely say.

But if we are aiming to understand the revelation at Sinai how can we ever reach it, grasp it? Zeno rules. The text speaks about God speaking. The people are gathered, waiting. And then: Vayedaber Elohim et kol ha’dvarim ha’ele“ : “And God spoke all these words…” (Exodus 20:1). But what did the people hear? There are different traditions about this, different imaginative pictures.

Of course from the point of view of logic, rationality, there were no words to hear. The event is mythic not historical. It’s a literary construct. The writers are creating a foundational event for a faith community. There was in actuality no Voice, no speaker. So there’s nothing to hear.  And yet we live inside their construct – and we still listen out for what was heard, and what we can hear. Vayedaber Elohim et kol ha’dvarim ha’ele: Anochi Adonai Elohecha: “And God spoke all these words: ‘I am the Eternal your God…’” (Exodus 20:1-2).

A thousand years ago the rabbis created a word picture of how revelation happened. Here’s one midrash:  

 

Said Rabbi Abbahu in the name of Rabbi Yochanan: When the Holy One gave the Torah, no bird screeched, no fowl flew, no ox mooed, none of the ophanim (angels) flapped a wing, nor did the seraphim (fiery celestial beings) chant "Kadosh (Holy, Holy, Holy!)" The sea did not roar, and no creatures uttered a sound. Throughout the entire world there was only a deafening silence as the Divine Voice went forth speaking: Anochi Adonai Elohecha (I am the Lord your God) אָנֹכִי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ

 

אָמַר רַבִּי אַבָּהוּ בְּשֵׁם רַבִּי יוֹחָנָן, כְּשֶׁנָּתַן הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא אֶת הַתּוֹרָה, צִפּוֹר לֹא צָוַח, עוֹף לֹא פָּרַח, שׁוֹר לֹא גָּעָה, אוֹפַנִּים לֹא עָפוּ, שְׂרָפִים לֹא אָמְרוּ קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ, הַיָּם לֹא נִזְדַּעֲזָע, הַבְּרִיּוֹת לֹא דִּבְּרוּ, אֶלָּא הָעוֹלָם שׁוֹתֵק וּמַחֲרִישׁ, וְיָצָא הַקּוֹל: אָנֹכִי ה' אֱלֹהֶיךָ

(Exodus Rabbah 29:9)

They imagined all life on earth, and in the heavens, becoming silent. And into the profound silence - a silence that paradoxically can deafen (in other words a silence that deafens the listener to everything else that habitually goes on) – into this silence the words of the divine enter human consciousness.

And what is heard? The arrow is reaching its target.

One rabbinic tradition says that it was the 10 Commandments, assert dabrirot, the ten ‘sayings’, the ten sets of words, the foundational vision of religious and moral life. This is what was heard at Sinai.

Another tradition says, no it was only the first two commandments.

And a third tradition homes in even further: what was heard was only one word, the first word of the first commandment: our very own d’var Torah, the word anochi :‘I – I am’

In this tradition, everything that follows about Torah flows out of that single word – anochi. That’s all the people heard. That’s all anyone can ever take in: the Spirit that animates the universe with its ‘I am’. So the revelation was – is – that the people were not alone. They were accompanied by, are accompanied by, anochi: I am.

Has the arrow reached the target? Is the target ‘I am’? But isn’t there always further to go? Zeno’s paradox. And, yes, the Jewish mystical tradition went further. What did the people hear at Sinai? Not even the first word. Just the first letter of the first word. The letter ‘Aleph’. They heard the mystery of the sound of that silent letter. An intake of breath. They heard the silence which is the origin of everything. The beginning of revelation was, is, silence.

When we can hear that soundless first letter, of the first word, of the first commandment at Sinai, we stand in the presence of the mystery of being.

So from one point of view there was - is - nothing to hear. But from another point of view everything pours forth from the silence at the heart of being. We just have to attune our ears to listen in. 

                                                                       

[based on a Shavuot ‘D’var Torah’ given on Zoom at Finchley Reform Synagogue, May 17^th, 2021]

                                                         **

Coda: George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch offers us a finely-tuned spiritual and humanist vision along similar lines.

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence”.

Thoughts on Not Remembering - and a Grim Anniversary

 Are you finding that you can’t remember as you used to? That something is happening to your memory, not so much distant events in the past but about what you experience currently? You have a conversation – on the phone, on Zoom, ‘live’ in person – but soon after (very soon after) it’s gone? You listen to a talk, or a sermon, or someone explaining an issue (personal or collective), but hours later – or even minutes later – it has somehow disappeared?

I know that as we get older some of us have lapses of memory about names, or some words don’t appear in our minds as quickly as they once did. But I’m not talking about that. That’s a well-known phenomenon – it even has a colloquial name: ‘senior moments’. I’m talking about something else that’s happening (or I think is happening) – and it’s transgenerational; and, also, it has nothing to do with dementia.

I suspect that the way our minds now absorb verbal information – I am not talking about images, but words – is undergoing a profound change. I would like to understand this phenomenon better, but I am trying here to make a preliminary start to thinking about it.

I had thought that this was maybe a Zoom-era issue, and that the artificiality and limitations of Zoom, the ‘glass life’ world we now live in, is generating this difficulty in remembering what we hear through Zoom, what we hear on Zoom. (Do we hear through the screen or on the screen? I don’t know). But what I’m trying to get at precedes Zoom; though, paradoxically perhaps, this last year on Zoom has brought it to the fore for me, and made it possible to think about.

To put it in a nutshell, I would suggest that we are forgetting what we hear because for the last twenty years and more our brains have changed, subtly but irrevocably. How has this happened? I am beginning to think that with the omnipresence and availability of knowledge systems outside ourselves – Google, of course, but also messaging and communications systems that hold our information and history for us, including through audio and video recordings - our immersion for decades now in this membrane of externally held and retrievable knowledge means we no longer have to remember. And we know it. We can look things up, we can retrieve what matters. Or what we think matters.

This has penetrated deep into us. We forget what we hear because our brains are becoming conditioned not to hold on to words - but to look them up. Our capacity to remember from inside of ourselves what we have just heard is becoming atrophied. We don’t have to be fully attentive to the moment, to really Shema (“pay attention”). Those days have gone, it’s just sort of happened to us. Our smartphones and laptops have become extensions of us – memory resides within their reach, so we don’t have to remember for our selves. And because we know we don’t have to hold on to what we hear, we increasingly can’t – even if we want to.

What we might be left with after we have listened to someone for a while is a sense-impression, a feeling – pleasure, irritation, frustration, indifference, puzzlement, excitement – these are the residues that stay around for a while, rather than the content.

I think I first began to sense that reliance on technology was changing how our brains function while watching football. (This isn’t to do with words, of course, but sight). I began to realise that when I went to a live game and a goal was scored I couldn’t recall it a moment later, except in a very fuzzy way: I had become so used to seeing a replay while watching on TV that my brain was waiting for this at an actual game; it had lost its capacity to stay focused moment by moment on what was unfolding in real time in front of me. My memory recall – the internal capacity to ‘replay’ what I had just seen - had become dulled. And sometimes it just wasn’t there.

When I realised I wasn’t alone in this, I began to wonder what it meant for other areas of our life, like listening to people speaking.

And gradually I heard, more and more often, people say something like: “Yes, I was there, I heard them speak, but I can’t remember anything they said”. Now of course this can be to do with lack of attentiveness in the listener – as well as any lack of dynamism (or having anything interesting to say) in the speaker. But I am now more and more of the view that the changes going on in us are more fundamental.

I have a personal stake in this because I do, from time to time, share some thoughts in public – they are called sermons, although I prefer to thin k of them as ‘sharing some thoughts’. But if what I’m talking about here has some truth to it, then the tradition of sermon-giving is coming to an end. People won’t remember anything I say afterwards. People have said to me: “Well, I know your sermon will be on the synagogue’s website, so it’s okay if I don’t remember”. And maybe that’s the way it will be from now on. We become dependent on external technology and stop holding others’ words close to our hearts. Maybe I’m alone in this, but this creates a great sadness in me as I think about the implications of in wider contexts.

The doyen of contemporary American novelists, Don DeLillo, hints at this in his latest novel ‘The Silence’ where an event – unspecified – disables all electricity and electronic communications worldwide. His characters are left with their own words, thoughts, personal communications – from moment to moment – with no technological backup, no smartphones, no information-holding systems: nothing. Nothing except what goes on in their heads and between real living, existentially-stranded, people.  

When you are faced with dead screens and silent phones what do you have left? As one of DeLillo’s characters says: “The current situation tells us that there’s nothing else to say except what comes into our heads, which none of us will remember anyway”.

 

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

 

I gave my first sermon about Covid almost exactly a year ago: on March 5^th the first UK death from Covid was confirmed , and there were then about 100 confirmed cases, and a year ago this weekend the Prime Minister, announcing the first tranche of funding in the search for a vaccine, told us:   "It looks like there will be a substantial period of disruption where we have to deal with this outbreak." (March 6^th, 2020)

That gets my prize for ‘Understatement of the Year’.

So as we move into March we are marking a rather grim anniversary. Year One of the new era. I’m not going to rehearse here the history of what we have gone through these past 12 months: you all know the ‘disruption’, to use Mr. Johnson’s word, that you have experienced. You know all about the multiple losses: to loved ones, and beloved activities, and loving contact; you know what you have suffered, what you have missed, what you have sacrificed, what you have lost out on.

And you know too that you’ve staggered on, through this past year, through this unfolding drama of history - though you might be unsure how you’ve done it, or what the cost has been, emotional and psychological; but you might glimpse from time to time the mental hardship below the surface, that’s tested your resilience, your robustness.

And you’ll know too what resources of generosity and compassion you’ve been able to summon up from inside yourself: what you have shared and offered to others; in what ways you’ve reached out and kept in touch, and sometimes created something new from out of the midst of this ‘disruption’.

Whether it’s been a surprise to you to discover how large your capacity is for change and adaptation, or been dismayed by how fragile you might have felt this year, it’s been a year that has really tested us.

And now I think we in the UK sense that we are in a new phase of the Great Disruption. Vaccines have been developed at miraculous, historically unprecedented, speed in a great collective transnational enterprise on behalf of humanity’s wellbeing. Although of course when the more small-minded politicians put their oar in, there have been, and continue to be, issues of nationalism and competitiveness in the roll-out and distribution of these vaccines. Nevertheless, the collective effort of the scientific community is surely a model of  how a global threat to wellbeing can generate a radical push to find solutions. This could act (though it may not) as a model for how to  address  the environmental crisis,  that other great threat to our wellbeing.  Not that science will help solve that problem – but global collective action could.

So the vaccines have led to the latest road map for opening up, here in the UK, and whether you are a member of a religious community or not I imagine you will be keen to see how this opening up will play out in your community, as well as the wider society in which we live.  

There are two ethical/religious principles in play as this opening up takes place. Whether it is a particular community or a national one I am hope two basic principles will guide us.

The first is that in a community – like in a country – we each have a collective responsibility to protect one another. Lives are at stake and whatever we decide we will keep in mind that the health and wellbeing of each of us is at the centre of our decision-making. There is a famous Jewish principle that “All Israel are sureties for each other” – in other words, we as Jews are responsible for the wellbeing of other Jews. But this particularistic teaching is a teaching we recognise is a gift to humanity for it has a universalistic dimension (and there are Jewish sources for this). We now know, and can say: “All human beings are sureties for each other”. The pandemic has re-enforced the wisdom of this: we each have a collective responsibility to protect one another. And that means, where possible, being vaccinated. Whatever the hesitations, prejudices, rumours that go around – vaccination is a moral responsibility.   

And the second principle to be guided by in decision-making relates to personal autonomy and freedom - which is valuable, and in a way sacrosanct, but we mustn’t make an idol out of it. (The Hebrew Bible is rather zealous in its attempts to persuade its readers not to make idols out of objects and ideas).

And this second principle is: your individual freedom does not include the right to potentially harm others. The classic example always given here is about one not having the right to shout “Fire” in a crowded theatre because of the panic it could set off. One implication of this is that if you refuse a vaccination you can’t demand to be part of a collective gathering.

So two ethical principles: collective responsibility and the sovereignty of, but necessary limits to, personal freedom.

[Based loosely on thoughts shared via Zoom for Finchley Reform Synagogue, March 6^th, 2021}

Freud, the Pandemic, and Our Emotional Well-Being

 One hundred and one years ago this weekend, on January 25^th 1920,  Martha and Sigmund, a bourgeois Viennese couple, received some devastating news. The phone call came at noon. Their pregnant daughter Sophie, mother of two young boys, a six-year old and a thirteen month old toddler, had died: Spanish flu (so-called) with pneumonia complications. She was the second youngest of the family’s six children, and her father’s favourite daughter.

The flu pandemic had swept through Europe in 1918 and 1919 - brought to Europe, ironically, by American troops who’d come over to fight, when America entered the fray, late in the war. The flu ended up killing more Europeans than the war itself. And 27 year-old Sophie Halberstadt, as she then was, would probably be just another statistic if it wasn’t for the fact that her father was then, and has remained, a rather significant figure in the history of ideas:  for Sigmund is of course - Sigmund Freud.

Because of Freud’s renown, all the correspondence to and from Freud, and between other family members, has been preserved and from it we can gain an intimate picture of the sadness, the grief, in one family, a century ago – but it could be yesterday, and will, for some, sadly, be tomorrow.

This Shabbat in the UK Jewish community was designated as ‘Mental Health Awareness Shabbat’. Freud spent a lifetime thinking about how the human mind works, and he was passionately – we might even say obsessionally - devoted to what wasn’t then called ‘mental health’.  One way or another we are all the inheritors, willingly or not, of the mapping of the human psyche that he pioneered. Many aspects of what later became a multi-faceted, psychotherapeutic and self-awareness and  psychological industry - much of which would be unrecognisable to Freud, and the self-indulgence of which he might well hate – nevertheless have their roots in that long-left-behind central European milieu.  

Having heard the painful news, the first person Freud wrote to was his mother. And he came straight to the point: 

Dear Mother, I have some sad news for you today. Yesterday morning our dear lovely Sophie died from galloping influenza and pneumonia… She is the first of our children we have to outlive. What Max [Sophie’s husband] will do, what will happen to the children, we of course don’t know as yet…I hope you will take it calmly; tragedy after all has to be accepted. But to mourn this splendid, vital girl who was so happy with her husband and children is of course permissible.

I greet you fondly. Your Sigmund.

There is a lot one could say about this letter: its tender yet austere tone, both compassionate and dispassionate, both empathetic and fatalistic: ‘tragedy after all has to be accepted’. And its concluding sentiment - that although the reality of the loss has to be accepted,  to mourn this splendid, vital girl …is of course permissible - what of that?

That word ‘permissible’ might sound strange to our ears now, a century later, maybe even slightly chilling. What do you mean it’s ‘permissible’ to mourn!? Who could ever doubt that? Who needs to be given ‘permission’ to mourn? And yet what Freud intimates here is worth reflecting on, because what he’d discovered after 25 years of working with patients with all kinds of mental and emotional distress, was the vital importance of mourning, of being given permission – and giving oneself permission – to grieve fully and deeply and truly, to feel and express the pain of loss. 

One has to remember that 19^th century emotional repression – active suppression of tears, the ethos of the ‘stiff upper lip’ - was not only a Victorian, British phenomenon, but a bourgeois belief throughout Europe. Particularly for men, but not only for men. Freud was one of the first to systematically explore the detrimental consequences of keeping a whole range of innate human feelings at bay, out of sight, suppressed: feelings that might be judged by oneself, or one’s society, or one’s religion,  or one’s parents, to be wrong; or to make you into a ‘bad’ person.

In that little word ‘permissible’ Freud is signalling to his mother something that he made the cornerstone of his revolution: it was permissible, indeed vital, to accept one’s deepest human feelings. Because every day of his professional life he was working with people who were blocked from doing that and were suffering from everything from depression to hysteria, neurotic anxiety to medically-undiagnosable bodily symptoms, psychosis to melancholia. And  a thousand other ‘mental health’ issues in between. Freud gave permission, gave space, for people to own up to, to own, their own feeling life. If this all seems simple and obvious now, it was a revolution then. But the journey that we have travelled in the last one hundred years so that this insight does now seem obvious is testimony to Freud’s contribution to our everyday lives.

The day after he wrote to his mother, on January 27th 1920, Freud wrote to a close friend, the Swiss pastor, Oscar Pfister, that our sweet Sophie in Hamburg had been… snatched away in the midst of glowing health, from a full and active life…all in four or five days, as though she had never existed. Although we had been worried about her for a couple of days, we had nevertheless been hopeful; it is so difficult to judge from a distance. And this distance must remain distance, we were not able to travel at once, as we had intended…there was no train, not even for an emergency. [This was post-War central Europe where transport links were still infrequent]. The undisguised brutality of our time is weighing heavily upon us. Tomorrow she is being cremated, our poor Sunday child!

So Sigmund and Martha aren’t able to be at the funeral of their daughter. We recognize distant echoes in our own times of how circumstances have forced us to lose out on so much - whether it is funerals and shivas, or hospital visits, or care home visits – there are so many losses we are suffering. I know that many people are feeling their own version of Freud’s sentiment: “The undisguised brutality of our time is weighing heavily upon us.”

A final few words from Freud before I switch from January 1920 to January 2021. From a letter a few days later to a Hungarian colleague, Sandor Ferenczi :

Dear Friend, Please don’t worry about me. Apart from feeling rather more tired I am the same. The death, painful as it is, does not affect my attitude toward life. For years I was prepared for the loss of our sons [During the War, Freud’s sons were away fighting and one of them, Martin, went missing in 1918 - it was a month until the family heard he’d been taken as a prisoner-of-war and he wasn’t released until mid-1919]; now it is our daughter; as a confirmed atheist I have no one to accuse and realize that there is no place where I could lodge a complaint….Deep down I sense a bitter, irreparable narcissistic injury.”

Actually I think Freud was in denial when he wrote that this loss hadn’t affected his attitude to life. You can’t suffer an “irreparable injury” and think it won’t impact your “attitude toward life”. The devastating loss of Sophie was in fact only compounded when Sophie’s younger boy, the toddler Heinele, whom Freud doted on, himself died - of tuberculosis - three years later. Freud mourned for them both for the rest of his life.

So where does all this history  leave us?

It’s clear that in these lockdown and pandemic times – and we are fast approaching a year now since our world was turned upside down – the question of how we are managing our day to day life is a major preoccupation. The newspapers, radio, TV and social media are full of advice on how to manage our emotional well-being: tips for survival, guides to lockdown living, how best to look after our mental health.  

And yet, when it comes down to it, and you dig into how each of us is bearing up, you don’t have to dig very far to touch into just how distressing we are finding this, how disturbed we are feeling, how frightened we might be, how insecure and uncertain we are about the future – and that is regardless of whether we have had the vaccine injection or not. We might not have emerged from a World War – but nobody I know is manging well, sailing through this, however brave a face we are putting on it.

Our mental health, our emotional well-being is being challenged, perhaps as never before in our lifetimes. And that is separate from those of us who might have actually lost someone to Covid over this last year. When somebody dies, however painful that is, we can mourn the loss. The loss is real, the grief is real, yet we sort of know what we are dealing with. But with the pandemic, what we are struggling with is a different kind of loss - and because we have never gone through this kind of loss before we don’t know what we are dealing with.

We just know that there are a variety of symptoms: be it an edginess, an unsettledness, an irritability, maybe sleeplessness, feelings of hopelessness or despair,  a low level anxiety, maybe we find we are being forgetful or tearful or finding it difficult to concentrate.

If there is one thing I would highlight here, it is something we may never have realised was so vital for our mental health, our emotional well-being: the real tactile contact we are used to having with other people. Live connection, sharing physical space with others, touching other people, being touched by other people, bodies in space together. How much we are missing this: the living, embodied  presence of other people, people we know and love, or people we see only once in a while, but also strangers, people in the street and in shops and on the tube and at football. Real people whom we mix with and interact with and keep us ‘in touch’ – what a powerful phrase this turns out to be! - keep us in touch with our own being alive, in our bodies, in our selves.

Zoom and the phone does not touch some deeper human need for embodied, kinaesthetic presence, a need we have never been deprived of before, and so never realised – and we are only just realising now – helps us feel alive. Breathing, sweating, smiling, grimacing, glowing humanity. We go out and interact and other people mirror our aliveness. And a lot of was happening at a subconscious level. And we have largely lost it.

Our sense of being fully alive – heart, mind, body, soul – becomes atrophied, slowly, if we have no physical connection with others. Why is solitary confinement the ultimate punishment in prison? In certain regimes it’s used to drive prisoners into despair or madness.

So we need to acknowledge that if we are abiding with the guidelines we are experiencing a collective bereavement. And maybe at some fundamental level that is why, psychologically, people might not be complying – it’s not just being anti-social, or bloody-minded, or perverse, or dressed up as libertarian ideology - it’s because unconsciously we all know that connecting to others makes us feel more alive. And aren’t we all determined, in our own ways, to try and feel and stay alive?

As Freud’s family tragedy illustrates in a small way, we are of course not the first to experience traumatic loss: the disorientation, dislocation, bereavement, anxieties about separation and loss that have to be endured month after month, sometimes year after year. It is part of the human condition.

In our situations there is much that we can do to help ourselves – as I mentioned, everywhere you look there are suggestions about how to survive lockdown. I imagine some of the things you do will help, some won’t. Sometimes you will just feel low, sad, morose, upset, disconnected from others, disconnected from your deeper more alive self. But for our own mental health it can be important, I would say vital, just to be able to accept those feelings. This is easier said than done. But - using Freud’s word - it’s ‘permissible’ to feel low: that’s congruent with what we are having to live through. Those feelings won’t last forever, they don’t last forever, even though when we are in them we sometimes feel as it they will.

We have resilience fused to our souls. In these weeks in our annual cycle of readings from the Torah we have arrived at that archetypal event, the liberation of the Israelite slaves from Egypt. It’s a universal story, and one for every era:  we will see this pandemic through, we will be coming out of Egypt. We may not have a Moses - but we will be coming out of Egypt, in God’s good time.

[based on a sermon given on Zoom for Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, January 23^rd 2021]

2021: "Stop The Pain"

 The  bright yellow graffiti spray-painted on the bridge was new. The local Council regularly paint over whatever gaudy images and casual obscenities habitually adorn the stonework. But someone had marked the New Year with an eye-catching face in profile (that also looked curiously like a £ sign). Yet what caught my attention – demanded attention – were the words arched up and round the image: “Stop the pain”

So this is how 2021 begins. Some much pain, for so many people, for so many reasons. And none of it likely to stop, any time soon. Least of all the deleterious consequences of enduring life under the inequalities of capitalism as we know it – my fantasy about the pound sign.  

As we begin a new year I have been wondering if it feels like a new beginning, or just more of the same? Do we begin the year with hopefulness, or burdened by anxieties? Or both? The news about the Oxford/AstraZenica vaccine has lifted our spirits in the UK, for sure, while at the same time the infection continues to spread and – at least in London – threatens to overwhelm the capacity of hospitals to function. Daily life as this new year begins is still fraught and constrained. We are living with so much uncertainty.

One of the challenges I find myself facing is whether to focus my thinking on the larger picture, or the small scale? The larger picture is our collective setting, our national picture, and that of course contains the brilliant scientific creativity and the exhausted-but-persevering health professionals and the dedicated care home staff and much put-upon teachers; and the neighbourhood support schemes and people contributing to food banks…and these are things we can celebrate and be grateful for, maybe sometimes contribute to on a local level.

But of course the larger picture includes too what has been revealed about the disastrous inadequacies in our social fabric in the UK – not just the systemic failures directly relating to Covid (the lack of government preparation for an epidemic, the cronyism afflicting the purchase and provision of PPE equipment, the bungling of the track and trace programme, the flipflopping over closing down and opening up  of shops, schools, gatherings in public and private) – but what’s been revealed too about the underlying societal fractures that have made this pandemic so much harder for so many: the endemic poverty in the country, the job insecurity, the food and housing scarcities, the cuts to benefits, the underlying fragility in people’s mental health and physical health and social wellbeing that all predate Covid. The skeleton beneath the nation’s skin has become frighteningly visible over these last nine months. And we probably sense that none of that bleakness – that “pain” - will disappear in 2021. 

Or do I focus on what I called the ‘small scale’ – which isn’t small scale to each individual. I think about the individuals in the synagogue community in which I work, each an irreplaceable soul, each one of us with our own rich inner worlds, our own private lives and memories and sensibilities, our own idiosyncrasies and insecurities and worries, our own secrets, our own language of feeling, our own history, all that we have shared with others and all that we have never shared with anyone…I think about the innate mystery of our own fragile, precious, being-alive-in-the-world – and how can that be ‘small scale’?  

But when I am called upon to speak, I still wonder: do I speak about the world outside – or about the individual, each of us an entire world in her/himself? Nothing is closer to us than our own personal inner world, in all its multidimensionality. How do I speak to this, the closeness of our worlds (you and me) - but also the distance, the untraversable space, between your world and mine?  How do I ever reach out of my world and speak to you in your world? It’s impossible, and yet I still attempt it, every time I write like this, (or speak on Zoom) - these curiously intimate and yet distanced contexts.

Large scale or small scale? We share the large scale – we all are witnessing and participating in this ongoing disaster of the pandemic. And whether we have had the vaccine yet, or are waiting anxiously for it, I imagine that many of us might be recognising the extent of the disaster unfolding with Covid in the UK, and what it is laying bare about our society. (For friends in other countries, I know there will be variations on this). It is revealing who we are and what we value – it’s showing us our generosity and our selfishness, our concern for others and our inward-looking-ness,  our solidarity with strangers and our head-in-the-sands-ness; it’s showing us what we are willing to protect and what we are unwilling to protect, what we can sacrifice of what we have grown used to and what we refuse to give up. All of this is being revealed, day by day. And maybe this is where the large scale meets the small scale.

We might feel shame at what is going on in our land, or outrage, or fear; we might feel inspired to protest, we might be clear and articulate about what needs to be transformed – or we might remain silent, we might just be intent on personal survival, just getting through this, ourselves and those around us we love. I am not judging, just describing.

We are all having to make these decisions – large scale and small scale. We might see the systemic vulnerabilities in our society, what’s happening around us in the streets and the hospitals, let alone what’s happening in the environment and to the air we breathe, the disasters of storms and fires and floods, we might see the large scale beyond our own city and land and continent - but still cling to the small scale, to our tender, precarious personal lives, where we shut our ears to the howling urgent cries of a planet under threat, nature tarnished, human nature despoiled, maybe we turn away from the larger world and just cling on – for dear life, as we say, ‘dear life’, yes indeed – hoping that gam ze yavo, as the rabbis of old used to say, “this too shall pass”. (Jews historically grew very accustomed to this resigned response).

As I said, I’m not judging this stance to events, I’m just trying to vocalise our choices.  This is where we are: caught between our own ‘dear lives’, and life itself in our country and on our planet. Large scale and small scale - and us, suspended between them, suspended over the abyss.

I wonder how it would be if we attempt to tell the story of these days we are living through - these weeks, these months, and it may be years – holding the large scale and the small scale in one picture, in one narrative? It may not be a sacred drama we are living through, but I wonder how we would tell the story of our times if we were modern day storytellers like the narrators of old, those inspired creators of the Torah who in the Book of Genesis (that we finished reading this week) were able to tell a story for the ages, a story that embraced large scale and small scale.

Just recall how they began their story, with the largest scale of all: the Creation of the world, the heavens and the earth and everything within it, including us – that’s how they began their sacred story, with a portrait of the natural world unfolding in all its majestic, evolutionary glory, stage by stage. That’s how Genesis begins, we know it well, with the largest scale of all.

And from there they created a story that moves through the ages, and the generations, focusing down stage by stage onto the small scale: the drama of a single family, Jacob’s family; and they focus in, with more and more detail, on the dramas of family life - the envy and the jealousy and the sibling rivalry; they  focus on those human interactions between Joseph and his brothers, and as the Book of Genesis draws to a close they focus on the worries and the fears in the brothers when their father dies; and the camera gets closer and closer and they focus in on  – how small scale can you get? – on Joseph’s tears (Genesis 50:17).

You see Joseph crying - “and Joseph wept” - though you don’t know if he’s crying because he is moved by what he hears, the brothers’ genuine wish for reconciliation; or because he is saddened, pained, that they have had to fabricate a story because they are terrified of him. (The story has no scene where Jacob tells his sons to ask Joseph for forgiveness – yet that is what they tell him nevertheless). But that’s the beauty of the Bible’s literary artistry- that we don’t know why Joseph cries, just as we don’t always know why we cry, but the tears come anyway.

And Joseph’s response – whatever those tears mean – is to say, in essence: ‘look at the larger picture, beyond our personal family drama, because there is a larger picture, a larger story, playing out through us: God meant all this to happen; all your rage and jealousy and murderousness towards me - it’s been for our collective good’ (see Gen 50:20). Well, that’s the age-old religious get-out clause right there. That we never see the whole picture. And that what we think of as something bad happening is actually part of God’s divine plan, that we can never see.

I think that kind of pious rhetoric is deeply problematic for us moderns. It’s rotten (and sometimes pernicious) theology – but it’s clearly the view of the Biblical storytellers, at least in this part of their grand narrative. (Though it might be more accurate to say that the storytellers have created a character who articulates that theology, while at the same time telling their story with their major character - God - completely absent throughout the whole of Joseph's life. 'God' is mentioned by characters but never present from chapter 37 onwards - a very dramatic change from the first 36 chapters of the book). 

But we don’t have to buy into that pious worldview to appreciate the intellectual and spiritual creativity – and daring - of those Torah storytellers of Genesis. Because what they created in this book was a grand beginning – the Creation of everything – and then they risked a narrative arc that takes us from that to...what? What are the last words of the book? That Joseph dies, is embalmed and his bones are put in a coffin. That’s the last image of the book. Joseph’s bones in a coffin (50:26). What a movement that is, from the beginning to the end, binding together the largest imaginable scale to the smallest scale! We end in the grave. The darkness of the coffin. From the darkness before creation, penetrated by God’s ‘Let there be light, and let there be life’, all the way to a narrative destination: the darkness of death, bones in a coffin. No light. No life.

What a radical piece of storytelling, a story retold through the ages, the generations: it’s our own story too, of course, a personal story – from our own creation and coming into the light of day, to our own death, the silence of the grave. 

That might be the end of the book, that desolate image - but it’s not the end of Joseph’s bones. Because they are kept safe during the long, harsh slavery years in Egypt, and then accompany the people in their desert wanderings and eventually are buried in the so-called Promised Land (Joshua 24:32).  

They are reminders that the small scale is always connected to a larger picture, whether we see it or not. Before he dies, Joseph makes his own bones into symbols of hope: ‘keep them as reminders of God’s promise, keep them as reminders of the larger story. Carry me with you. Carrying me will help you carry your larger story close to your heart’ (see Genesis50:24-5).

Let’s hope, during this new year of 2021, that - although we may not be able to “stop the pain”- at least we won’t feel like embalmed bones enclosed in darkness, that we  can keep sight of our larger story. Because there’s always a larger story. 

[Based on thoughts shared on Zoom for Finchley Reform Synagogue, January 2nd, 2021]