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]