The Art of Interpretation

A quiz question for you: what connects these three people? The artist David Hockney, the actress Gwyneth Paltrow and the novelist Ian McEwan? I’ll give you some time to think about. 

This is the time of the year when the newspapers are full of quizzes, puzzles, games – I suppose they reckon that people have more free time on their hands and want a bit of fun, although I suspect the hidden reason is that it’s to stop families cooped up together over the holidays from killing each other.

Family life, as we know, is the space where all the passions of the human heart play themselves out, all the blessings of love, companionship, nurture, dependability – as well as all the painful antagonisms: warring partners, fractious children, all the rivalries, enmities, and inter-generational mental derangements that family life also gives rise to.

This is of course an old story, a universal story, the ways in which the dynamics of family life can promote both tenderness, intimacy and a joyful sense of well-being - and yet can also be a crucible for violence and cruelty: disabling, disfiguring eruptions of jealousy, envy, competitiveness, even murderousness.

We read today in the synagogue from chapter 45 in the Book of Genesis - we’ve nearly reached the end of Genesis in our annual cycle of readings – and as a piece of literature, a piece of ancient storytelling, we can see the way in which, because the book is cast in the form of a multi-generational fable of family life, it contains an extended exploration of these themes: human themes, personal themes, everyday themes. The writers of the Hebrew Bible were some of the earliest exponents of the art of narrative storytelling. They were writing about the complex dynamics of family life two and a half millennia before it became a staple of modern fiction. George Eliot, Thomas Mann, Isabel Allende and the rest are all writing in the wake of the narrative artists of Genesis.

The story of Cain and Abel shows rivalry turning murderous, Abraham and Sara deals with marital discord, in the next generation Isaac and Rebekkah each have their favourites, which generates hostility and estrangement between their sons, Jacob and Esau, and the effects of this dysfunctional family dynamic spill over into the next generation where the character at the centre of the story we read about today, Joseph, becomes Jacob’s favourite – remember that coat of many colours? – and as the saga unfolds the traumas of family life are played out in full view.

Joseph is only in Egypt because his brothers first plan to kill him, then he's sold instead to a passing band of merchants. Out of sight, out of mind. Or so they thought. As people do. But the text portrays with great psychological acuity how life doesn’t work like that: the past is always haunting the present, even if we try to shut it away. Maybe particularly when we try to shut it away (thank you, Professor Freud). The brothers’ guilt reverberates through the narrative; and, deceived by his sons into believing that Joseph is dead, Jacob in particular bears the cruel pain of that imagined loss for decades.

The chapters that speak about Joseph are actually a brilliant piece of narrative art, they form a kind of novella in themselves within the larger arc of Genesis: Joseph is portrayed as unpleasantly self-obsessed as a young man – ‘up himself’ in today’s idiom – and he’s filled with unconscious aggression towards both his siblings and his parents; the tears of Joseph that we read about this week are the culmination of years of suppressed emotion.

But what I want to highlight here – and this should take us straight to Gwyneth Paltrow – is a small scene (Genesis 37: 12-17) near the beginning of these 14 chapters of the Joseph novella. It’s a scene that any self-respecting novelist today would probably cut in a later draft because it seems to have no purpose. Jacob has sent his sons to feed the sheep in the next valley, Shechem; they go off; Joseph doesn’t go with them; then Jacob calls Joseph and says, ‘Go and find out how they are getting on, then come back and let me know.’ So Joseph sets off but he can’t find them. The storyteller describes him wandering around in a field. And then a man, a stranger, sees him and asks what he’s looking for. Joseph explains he’s looking for his brothers who are shepherding the family’s flocks. Oh, they’ve left here, the man says, they’ve gone on to Dothan. And off goes Joseph to Dothan, where he finds them - and the narrative continues with the brothers deciding to get rid of him.

But what’s the point of this? The stranger doesn’t have a name, he doesn’t get a thank you from Joseph - you don’t need this scene. It seems irrelevant to the story, this mini-drama. The narrator could have taken us straight from Joseph going off to find his brothers to just meeting up with them. We wouldn’t have missed anything. And yet we sense at the same time that this piece of everyday co-incidence – he just happened to meet this man, who just happened to have seen the brothers go off to Dothan – is somehow vital: the rest of the story depends on it. If he hadn’t met this random stranger, then Jewish history would have stopped there, so to speak.   

I think the deeper purpose of this scene is its randomness. This is how life is, we sense, a series of random events, one thing after another, along with the choices we make about them, and  how we interpret them. In the Gwyneth Paltrow film ‘Sliding Doors’ you see this theme played out. Catching the train leads to one outcome, missing the train to a very different outcome.  Part of the popularity of the film, I suppose, lies in it dramatizing something we all do recognise from our own lives: how small moments in our lives can have huge consequences, small decisions can alter our destiny. You go to a party even though you are tired and you meet the love of your life. It was meant to be, you say, when reminiscing. But was it? You could have gone to bed, had a good sleep and met someone else who could also have transformed your life in a different direction. Or who could have been a disaster. Who is to say?

Or it’s raining and you can’t be bothered to go out and meet your friend, but you know they are lonely so in your kind-heartedness you get in your car and you’re involved in a life-altering accident. Each moment in life, every choice we make, every situation we find ourselves presented with, a chain of events can unfold, for good or for ill, and we can’t predict which way things will turn out.

In his latest novel, Lessons, Ian McEwan has illustrated at some length how we all live at the intersection of a web of large and small events. He juxtaposes major events in world history, like the Cuban missile crisis, with personal events like his protagonist’s relationship with a predatory piano teacher, and  shows how we are always living at this intersection. As McEwan puts it: “In settled expansive mood Roland” – that’s the novel’s central character – “occasionally reflected on the events and accidents, personal and global, miniscule and momentous, that had formed and determined his existence. His case was not special”, says McEwan, “all fates are similarly constituted”.

How do we manage all this randomness? We meet a stranger in a bar, fall into conversation, and something they say sticks in our mind and determines a decision we make, which leads our lives in a direction we would not otherwise have taken. But what if we had ignored them?  How might our life have unfolded then? Might we have had more fun, or success, or satisfaction in our lives if we hadn’t been so susceptible to the musings of a stranger? Both Ian McEwan’s ‘Lessons’ and Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘Sliding Doors’ speak about this: how the circumstances we face, and the decisions we make in response, determines our destiny, and just how much is down to chance, or luck, or what we later come to think of as fate.

And that’s the essence of the Joseph narrative: that when he re-meets his brothers after twenty years, twenty years in which he’s developed from being a spoilt brat to being the most powerful man in Egypt, Pharoah’s right hand man, Joseph offers them an interpretation of what has happened between them – ‘You thought you’d got rid of me, sold me into slavery - but actually all this was meant to be, it was God’s plan, it was so that you could be saved, the whole family could be saved, from this famine that is raging in our lands’. (There it is: the small scale family drama intersecting with the large scale political drama being played out in the region).  

When you first hear Joseph’s words, you might be tempted to think the storyteller is offering you a conventional piece of religious thinking – one you do still hear, and it sort of drives me mad -  ‘oh, it’s all in God’s hands, what’s happened (whether it’s good or bad); it was meant to be, it’s part of the divine plan, ours not to question’.  But what I find most remarkable about this Genesis text is the literary artfulness of the narrator: one needs to note how  the storyteller puts this conventional theological interpretation into the mouth of his character, Joseph – all the pain Joseph has endured, all the pain he knows his father has gone through, Joseph explains it, rationalises it, as having a higher meaning. But I think we are meant to notice that this is the character’s interpretation, not the narrator’s.

It’s as if our anonymous author, when he gives those lines to his character, is sort of winking at us: ‘You may think this is how life works, but this pious interpretation is my character’s view – it has no more authority than that’.  

It reminds me of the fictional politician Francis Urquhart in the TV series, ‘House of Cards’:   “You might very well think that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.” The art of plausible deniability.

And if you think what I’m saying is a bit exaggerated, or far-fetched, I’d just draw your attention to the rather remarkable fact that in the 14 chapters of this novella, from chapter 37 to the end of the book, you never have (as you do throughout the saga’s earlier chapters with the patriarchs and the matriarchs)  a single scene where God is shown speaking to Joseph. The storytellers show you Joseph referring to God, using God as a reference point, but not addressing God. And God certainly never intervenes and speaks to Joseph. This is all storytelling of a very sophisticated kind.

The narrators withhold narrative certainty about the one religious question that all readers, and all audiences, from then until today, wish to have certainty about. How does God work in the world, in events big and small? Does God work in the world at all, in events big and small? Or is life all ‘Sliding Doors’ randomness, and chance, to which we poor humans attribute meaning? Or don’t find meaning in at all.    

Joseph is portrayed as projecting meaning onto his experiences, in retrospect. In Yiddish we have this word  bashert - ‘meant to be’ - which is a comforting thought for some people, perhaps many people, and you don’t have to be Jewish to be comforted by the idea of bashert, that events in life can seem to fit in to some larger, harmonious pattern. I have been known to be comforted by this mode of thinking and feeling myself. But when I do allow myself to be comforted by it, I also remind myself that the millions-strong Jewish communities of Eastern and Central Europe who spoke Yiddish, and who did have religious faith in life as bashert, were also those who were annihilated in their millions, within living memory.

For survivors, bashert can always be a comfort. But not, I think, for victims.

I think our Hebrew Bible is a radical text, in parts, because it subtly undermines certainties – and our wishes for certainty – about how life is patterned, what meaning it contains. Those literary artists who created sacred literature for their people seemed to want to both promote particular ways of seeing and thinking and believing for their people, while at the same time withholding any  definitive perspective from which a reader can say they, we, have a solid understanding of, or grasp on, that enigmatic character the storytellers called the God of Israel, The Eternal One, Who Is.

Joseph, the great dream interpreter, seems to be their literary vehicle for the notion that it’s not just dreams that need interpretation, but life itself. And that just as dreams don’t come with their own interpretations, neither does life. We are required, like Joseph, to find an interpretation that works for us. 

And David Hockney? Reaching a Biblical age - he’s now 85 - with a new immersive show opening soon, he’s long been dedicated to interpreting life as he sees it in front of him. He shows us what is there, often the natural world,  through his own eyes, helping us to see anew. Asked if he was looking forward to this new venture he answered, as if he was some kind of a mystic: “I live in the now. It is the ‘now’ that is eternal”. That’s a profound interpretation of life - and it was said both straightforwardly, and with a showman’s twinkle in his eye. Which is perhaps the best way to offer one’s vision.

[based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, December 31st 2022]

Hope in Gloomy Times

It seems to be becoming harder for me to find some words, some sentences, to string together, to talk about what matters, what matters to us in our own lives. It is of course – sadly but seemingly inevitably - not that difficult to speak from a place of regret, or concern, a place of foreboding or apprehension, even of desperation, about what occurs in our world.  

Anyone who keeps their eyes and ears open – let alone their hearts – can see why this might be.

For example, I have just caught up with Sir David Attenborough’s recent 6-part series on the BBC, Frozen Planet ll, which built up over the weeks to an awe-evoking but painful finale. Although he’s spent a lifetime making a series of award-winning programmes on our natural world in all its profusion, diversity and grandeur, he’s been criticised – particularly over recent years - for not utilising his influential position as an authority on the natural world in order to highlight environmental issues.

But now, in this series, he hasn’t held back. Watching him watching the stunning footage shot around the globe, it was as if he was holding the whole vast, devastating beauty and fragility of the planet in his hands, and saying:  “Look at this, look at it, wonder at it, be in awe of the complexity and vulnerability of this planet we all inhabit…see how it is changing in front of our eyes, as we speak, changing in ways that can be, and will be, devastating not only for the creatures you see on your screens, but for us too, humanity, for we are all part of a complex web of interconnectedness, and that melting ice you see doesn’t just affect the polar bears and penguins, but will be impacting us in the forthcoming years, in the near future.”

And what he doesn’t say is: “And I won’t be here to see this destruction” – he’s 96 – “but you will be, and your children will be”. He alludes, with a tender melancholy, to the way in which if current trends continue, future generations will be flooded out of their cities, they will become migrants because of heat, or lack of food, or lack of water. ‘Here it is’, he says, ‘it is happening now, but’ – he always is careful to add this, I noticed – ‘but’, he says, ‘it is not yet too late, there are people working to mitigate some of the effects of this, action is possible, but it depends on you’. No, actually he doesn’t say ‘you’; he says ‘it depends on us’.  He includes himself.

So this has been painful but necessary watching. It is, by the way, what the BBC does brilliantly, living up to its Charter: “to inform, educate, entertain”. (This is part of the reason why I find the regular, ideologically-driven attacks on the BBC by Tory MPs and the Jewish press so small-minded and self-defeating. The BBC doesn’t get everything right, for sure, but no institution does. In an era where there is a global battle to defend the principle of public truth-telling, undermining the basic integrity of the BBC is an invidious attack on one of the pillars that support our public well-being).  

Speaking about the things that matter to us might often mean speaking about difficult and painful subjects.

The environment of course is the largest, but what about this dementing war that is going on in Europe, in Ukraine? Putin’s brutal barbarism shows no sign of abating. His flirtation with a nuclear power station accident is terrifying. The bombing of a civilian population into submission - which won’t happen – is an ongoing war crime. Another humanitarian crisis is brewing: no heat, no water, sub-zero temperatures, more refugees are inevitable. The Holodomor was Stalin’s genocidal attempt in 1932-33 to starve Ukrainians to death; Putin’s Kholodomor is the equivalent: the attempt to freeze a population to death.

We are seeing authoritarian brutality unleashed not only by Russia - it has its echoes in China, In India, in parts of Africa. And who knows how the American drama will unfold over these next few years – the threat of civil war is not hyperbole or fantasy any longer. All this is part of the fabric of our world now.

So pessimism is easy to access. It’s hard to be optimistic (to put it mildly) about humanity’s social progress, about our emotional progress as a species.  So where does that leave Jews, who nurtured a sustaining vision for so many generations that they were to be – they had the potential to be – “a light unto the nations”? Jews clung to Isaiah’s words (42:6; 49:6) in spite of centuries of persecution and oppression – and what has become of that sustaining hope for us as a Jewish people?

Over the last forty years, we see Israel lurching, election by election, towards the unspeakable: are we allowed to say that the rhetoric voiced by members of the present government sounds like ethnic cleansing of Israel’s ‘enemies’ (i.e. those who won’t submit without protest to oppression and discrimination) has become thinkable? Intoxicated by a sense of victimhood and grievance, the adherents of the rightward march of Israeli history bring shame on those of us Jews who still cling to the absurd and defiant vision of social justice, compassion, generosity - the vision we received at Sinai, the promise to Abraham that he and his descendants would be a “blessing to humanity (Genesis 22:18), the prophetic understanding of this heritage that spoke about that promise, that possibility, that demand, that we were to be that “light to the nations”.  

What a betrayal we are witnessing; and it is dementing and demoralising when we hear that the Israeli State’s enemies are now not only the Palestinians but the non-governmental organizations like Rabbis for Human Rights, and the New Israel Fund, and Breaking the Silence, and all those civil groups who are still holding to those old-time Jewish values in both religious and secular forms. The enemy within. This is the time to increase our support (and it may be just financial, but that matters) for those organisations that are standing against the tide of semi-fascistic rhetoric and activity in our so-called Holy Land.

Reform Jews have a modern prayer in their liturgy that asks for “a blessing on the State of Israel”. I have been uncomfortable with that prayer for quite a while, but something in me recently has snapped. I can no longer say those words. Not the words in the book as they stand. When using this text now I have taken to tweaking it: I have re-written it so I can say something that carries a modicum of integrity, that reflects the Jewish values I believe in. When it comes to the liturgical moment when we reflect on the role of Israel as a state, I can still speak about “a vision of peace, justice and compassion” and the wish “to build a society of dignity, with communities devoted to God’s truth”. It’s a small gesture, a tiny protest - meaningless in the larger scheme of things. I am under no illusion about that. Nevertheless, it’s my impotent diasporic protest against the huge betrayal of values I see going on over there.

So whether it’s the environment, the barbarism of war, the threats to democratic values around the globe, the curse of nationalism, or the ongoing class-war of the rich against the poor that’s being played out here in the UK, there are so many themes that matter to us, that affect us (in ways large and small) about which it’s hard not to feel apprehension or gloom.

But as well as all that – and there’s such a lot of ‘all that’ - there are  experiences in life that also matter to us. That deeply matter. Experiences that verge on the sublime, that make life infinitely worth living, whether it’s holding a grandchild’s tiny hand as they inspect a winter flower, or hearing a Beethoven sonata, or sharing a story or a smile or a joke with a friend, or a lover, or a stranger. Moments of intimacy, moments of connectedness,  of human warmth, of what Martin Buber called ‘Begegnung’/encounter -  moments of feeling blessed, moments of being a blessing,  moments of stillness or moments of intensity, moments when life is felt to be precious, fleeting moments that are also timeless.

Divine moments, when all that other stuff that matters – and it really does matter – goes into eclipse for a minute, an hour, and something else shines through: a line of poetry that lifts the spirit, an overheard remark that changes how we think of a problem we are wrestling with; or being in the presence of Sir Simon Schama’s informed imagination in his latest, vital, series The History of Now (also on the BBC),  watching his moving evocation of the power and potential of art to transcend human suffering, to transmit the values of freedom and generosity and compassion within dark times - and there have been so many dark times, and they continue. From Picasso’s Guernica to Orwell’s 1984, from Pasternak’s smuggled-to-the-west Doctor Zhivago to Vaclav Havel’s prison writings and Ai Weiwei’s protest-art, Schama traces the creativity within the human spirit that has enabled there to be protests on behalf of life, when all around seems blighted by destructiveness. I urge you to watch it.  

All of this is light to set against the darkness, it is the daily miracle of the oil that lasts, that nurtures the soul. It’s a bit early for Chanukah themes, I know, but here we are: light in the darkness. It’s what we all need -those of us who struggle with these things - what we all crave, light to keep us going so that gloom does not overtake us. The fragility of hope in the face of the forces of destruction. This is what we live for, it’s what we pray for, it’s what keeps us going, day by day, year by year, generation after generation.  Let’s keep talking about what matters – ‘out there’, in here – talking about what matters, keeping the flickering light of hope alive in dark times.

 

[adapted from a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, December 3^rd 2022]

Sodom: A Story for our Time?

We’d come to the city years before - even though it had a terrible reputation (Genesis 13:12-13). Everyone in the Valley knew about Sodom – it was violent, corrupt, lawless, everyone was out for themselves. There were no-go areas at night, and even during the day it wasn’t safe, certainly not for a woman – it was bad, like New York in the 70s, or parts of Jo’burg or Mexico City today...but there always have been places that bring Sodom to mind: godless, fear-filled cities where people struggle to survive with their humanity intact. God knows, what an impossible project it feels sometimes: to live with integrity when you are surrounded by greed and trickery, corruption and selfishness, with anger simmering on the streets, in cities that lack compassion, where hope is all burnt out.  

Our city felt it was living on the edge, life was harsh, chaos was always just around the corner - things, we felt, could break down at any moment – but did it deserve what happened? The fire and brimstone, the choking dust, the charred bodies.  Do cities perish through lack of goodness? Did Hiroshima? Or Dresden? Did Aleppo or Mariupol? Surely the innocent and the guilty die together?

Was Sodom different? I knew good people there, who perished with the wicked. No justice, even for the righteous: it is ever thus.  Would it have made a difference if there’d been even ten good folk in Sodom, people of principle, those who stood outside the crowds, who resisted the descent into self-centredness, manipulation, mass delusion? Were there not even ten, tender of heart, on the side of life, committed to their neighbours, caring for their environment, nurturing the society in which we lived? If just that handful had acted sooner, could they have saved us all? We’ll never know. 

My husband was a good man – and there were a few others like him, prepared to offer hospitality to strangers, to take in the immigrant, to protect those seeking shelter and asylum. Yes, there were some, but as it turned out there were not enough – not enough to stop the guiltless suffering the same fate as the guilty. Is this the iron law of life, that suffering comes to all, that a tipping point is reached in every society when the Messiah can no longer come, when the forces of greed, or indifference, overwhelm the good there is, sweep away the hope for better things?

How much brave, careless rhetoric does it take for a society to implode under the weight of its own contradictions?  The powerful flaunt their might with cold calculation, companies cynically eye the bottom line of the balance sheet, the politicians come and go as helpless and self-regarding as the rest, fearful of disturbing the status quo, the blameless are trampled underfoot, the poor live quiet lives of desperation: is Sodom always our future, as well as the past? God knows, I certainly don’t. 

I told him it was no place to bring up a family, but Lot wouldn’t listen. My husband was a good man, but he was a stubborn man. He’d chosen this place, his uncle Abraham had been very generous, had let him choose west or east, Canaan or the fertile Jordan valley (Genesis 13:10-11). And Lot – yes, a good man, I say it again, but a man of simple tastes who saw only what was in front of his eyes, who never saw the wider picture (I know, that’s always hard to do) - my husband Lot saw the well-watered plains and economic opportunities of the Jordan valley and he thought ‘Head east young man’, not having seen all those old movies that taught that west is always the way to go: you follow the sun, on, away from here, and over the horizon.

So he landed up there, in benighted Sodom, ‘Twin-Town: Gemorrah’.  God help us.  Though He rarely seems to. But yes, easy to blame God – though usually He’s blamed by those who fail to see that He’s given us the responsibility to make things work. ‘We, the people’, responsible for our fate, for better or worse.  

So Sodom it was, and we settled there and lived as people live, doing business, raising a family, struggling to make ends meet, helping each other out. We were close-knit as a family – we had children, and they grew, and they married young, and then my two youngest daughters came along:  I loved them more than words can tell, they came so late, you see. And it was a moment of madness I’m sure - but he could be impulsive like that, any of us can, but what with his stubbornness, his impetuous belief that he knew what’s right while others are always blind, and what with the strain of those hours when we were under siege in our own home and the mob was at the  door, baying for blood - those two strangers whom we’d taken in, given shelter to, they were under our roof, our protection, and that is a sacred responsibility, to protect the stranger and Lot believed in that, he really did, even though he wasn’t pious, but he believed in certain values - so that when the mob came to drag out the two visitors, our guests, my husband in that moment of madness told the crowd: take my girls, but don’t take my guests. As if that wasn’t also a sacred bond – his loyalty to our family.

 And I can’t forgive him for that moment, that gesture, that offering, I really can’t – though I can see how he felt he had to do something to keep the mob at bay, to keep them from entering our home: they would have raped us, killed us, it had happened before, it’ll happen again – so we were at their mercy and none of us would be here to tell this tale, I think my husband figured, if he didn’t do something, offer them something. But the girls, how could he do that? You see - you do see, don’t you? - in times of war and insurrection, in times of terror, in times when chaos is the only law, people sometimes have to make terrible choices, terrifying choices: pray you will never have to make such choices.

You who will face floods and fires, storms and drought, you who will face upheavals beyond imaging unless you can turn things round before it is too late – pray that your choices and the choices of your children and your children’s children will not be choices too heavy for the human heart to bear. 

There was a moment when all went very still – like the moment of calm before the storm breaks – when Lot realised the end was near and that we had to flee because no good would come of this, it had all gone too far: this city had reached its point of no return. Zero hour. Lot just knew, or maybe the two strangers told him – I’ll never know for sure – but  the next thing I know we were packed and running, Lot and me and the two girls and we left the rest of the family there, they wanted to stay they said, and it all happened so quickly, there was no time to think and we had to leave them, it tore me apart, I had to leave my life behind, but I had the girls and we went, that night we went, in a rush, a panic, we just left, and the tears were burning my eyes and I couldn’t bear to go on, and I knew I had to go on – as women in war have always gone on, beyond the pain, beyond the calculations, into the fear, into the animal instinct to survive, to live while others die, you see others die and you have to go on, because there is breath in you still, and you can’t go on, but you must go on, and you want to die, but you want to live – and I had to turn and look, I had to see what I was leaving behind, my grown-up children, my family, my friends, and I loved them all so much: how could anyone bear to leave without looking back, looking to see what was happening even though I knew what was happening, how the city was aflame, how the sulphurous hearts of the inhabitants of Sodom had exploded into a raging inferno of destruction, that they were being destroyed, all of them, they had destroyed themselves really and now the city was aflame, and the fire and the smoke consumed them all, a conflagration like no other: it was a holocaust of suffering like no other. Though I’m told there have been others.

Wouldn’t you also have looked? A last glance, a last chance to see what had been, and how it all went wrong? 

It’s legendary, this epic place of self-centredness and terror. ‘The destruction of Sodom and Gemorrah’ – how easily it rolls off the tongue, but it should make our mouths bitter in the telling, we should taste the dust and the ashes, our tongues should shrivel in the heat of our rage that it ends like this. I stood rooted to the spot, watching, the end of my family, the end of an era, the end of my hopes for the future. Dust and ashes, and there I was – motionless, transfixed by all the suffering that we are heir to, motionless, like a pillar, all hope abandoned, emptied out like a salt-cellar bled of salt, a grieving heap of salt, spilled out, lifeless, no movement, no movement ever again, my eyes fixed on the devastation, long gone now, and still here, and still to come. God knows when it will ever end.

That’s it. That’s my story. (What are you waiting for? There’s no happy ending). You don’t need to know anything else. You don’t even need to know my name. I am Lot’s wife, that’s all. I am no-one. And I am every woman who has ever suffered the loss of what was once treasured but is forever gone. And I am every woman who has ever feared the loss of what we still possess, the beauty of the world, the beauty of family and friendship and community, the playfulness of  autumn leaves in their season, and the sensuous aroma of bread baking in our homes, and the unbearable lightness of being alive, the gift of life, and the blessings we share, and the fragility of it all – who does not fear the loss of what we still possess, all that is still precious under threat, the possibility of change always suspended just out of reach?

Don’t we want to grasp it all while we can, don’t we want to hold on to life while it is still worth living? The texts never gave me a name – but I need no name. For you know me: you are me, men, women, young, old, we are Lot’s wife, looking back at what we had, petrified of loss, holding the planet in our hands.   

 

[Based on a midrashic sermon on Genesis chapter 19: Finchley Reform Synagogue, November 12^th 2022]

What’s in a Rainbow?

The image of the rainbow is conventionally seen in Judaism as expressing hope: hope for the future of humanity and of nature itself. Its appearance in the Biblical text – Genesis 9: 12-17 – follows the well-known story of Noah’s survival of  forty days and forty nights of rain, a flood that overwhelms everything that God had created: flora, fauna, humanity itself.  The storytellers of the Bible portray the destructive aspect of divinity as co-existing with the creative element within the divine.

The character ‘God’ expresses a hope – it is described as a ‘covenant’ - that such innate destructive energy will never again win out over the life-giving creative aspects of ‘God’. This is what one might see as the pious hope of the storytellers – the rainbow is to be the reminder that destructiveness will not have the final say. Perhaps this is as much a hope about human destructiveness as so-called divine destructiveness – for the storytellers of Genesis certainly saw these energies as co-existing within the human heart as well.  

What is a rainbow? We now know of course that it is a refraction of light through water drops, which breaks up white light so that we see the various colours within it. And we might recall that we owe this understanding about the rainbow’s colours to Sir Isaac Newton who, from 1665, performed experiments with a prism which produced a spectrum in which he identified for the first time a full range of colours. (Actually a book was published the year before that, by the Anglo-Irish physicist Robert Boyle, describing the five colours of light). But we know how many colours Newton discovered - seven.

I don’t know if children still learn these colours as I did in school, with a mnemonic, Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. And I don’t know if similar mnemonics exist in other languages? But the seven colours of the rainbow is what used to be called common knowledge. However one of the problems with so-called ‘common knowledge’ – what we think we know, what we think of as true - is that, more often than is comfortable for us, it turns out to be wrong. Or at least, it turns out that our certainties are either false, or much more complex than we like to think.

In this example – the rainbow – what happened when Newton conducted  those experiments was that he did indeed discern a spectrum of colours within the water droplets - but there were only six of them. The colour he eventually called ‘indigo’ didn’t exist – there was a plant that grew in India  called indigo, from which a deep-blue dye could be produced, a plant that had just begun to be imported into Britain by the East India Company early in the 1660s, and Newton borrowed the word ‘indigo’ to describe a seventh colour existing between blue and violet – but it was a colour he wanted to see, not that he actually saw.

But why would he do that? Why would he make up, invent, a new colour? One might fleetingly imagine that perhaps he had shares in the East India Company: maybe he wanted to boost sales - ‘Here’s the rainbow, and look, we have my newly discovered  ‘indigo’ within it!’ – so perhaps a form of what we’d now call ‘product placement’?  Probably not.

But what I do know is that Newton needed a seventh colour because, and this is the point, he wanted to harmonise his new discovery with other aspects of harmony in the world around him: first, he wanted to link this natural harmony of the structure of light with the harmony of the classical musical scale of Western culture, the seven notes (do, ray, mi…) used in European and Mediterranean music; and, secondly, he wanted the structure of light to be in harmony with creation itself – because in his view seven was the great mystical number underpinning the creation of the world: in the Biblical story, the Biblical myth, that majestic piece of poetry that opens the Bible, God’s creation of all that exists unfolds in seven ‘days’, seven stages.

Newton was a mystic as well as what we now call a ‘scientist’ - the word ‘scientist’ by the way wasn’t coined early in the 19^th century; until then they were ‘natural philosophers’ – and his mystic philosophy held that the number seven had special and cosmic significance. (Remember that at that time only seven planets were known to exist in the solar system). Newton wanted his discovery to mesh with creation itself; and he believed he’d revealed something fundamental about the structure of nature itself, these seven colours within light. So he inserted a colour, indigo, that didn’t exist, into his spectrum; and this wonderful bit of creativity, grandiosity, chutzpah – call it what you want – became the basis for the way a whole culture then saw the rainbow, sees the rainbow.

And we, the inheritors of this piece of Newtonian scientific myth-making, mischief-making - call it what you want – still speak about (and see) what Newton thought he saw: the seven colours of the rainbow. In other words, we project onto the rainbow what our culture has taught us to expect to see there.

And we will insist when we look at a rainbow - and we do look because it is a kind of marvel, even though we know it’s only the sun on drops of water – we will insist: ‘oh, there it is, squeezed somehow between blue and violet, there’s indigo’. We do see it - or rather we create it in our mind’s eye and with our imagination - because we have been told it’s there.

That’s the power of suggestion - even though there are other cultures, in Africa, or amongst native Americans, who traditionally see four or ten colours when they look at a rainbow.  (I’ve noticed, en passant, that in the LGBTQ+ Pride flag, the rainbow only has six colours, that indigo is missing).  

But what’s the significance of all this?

When I reflect on Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of - invention of - the seven colour rainbow I find that it raises for me a large question. It’s a psychological question, a political question, an interpersonal question about relationships, it’s a spiritual question, a social question – in fact it’s a question which is relevant to almost every aspect of our lives: how often do we see what we expect to see, and not what is actually there? How often does what we are conditioned to see dictate what we see? How often does what we are taught to see – by our teachers, our leaders, our rabbis (dare I say it)  – how often does what others say is the case blot out, or obscure, or distort what is actually there?

To see the world as it is, rather than as we’d like it to be, is not straightforward – it can be too painful to see what’s in front of our eyes: to see the foodbanks, the homelessness, the systemic injustices and discriminations, the vast disparity between the wealthy and the impoverished in our society, to see Antarctica melting and the sea levels rising and the empty reservoirs. We may well not want to see what is in front of us.

But I believe that Judaism tries to help us, it encourages us, to see what is there, in front of our eyes – at their best all the major religions are a lifelong education in helping us towards seeing truly and deeply, helping us not to be fooled by, or seduced by, illusions and delusions and falsehoods: economic thinking, political thinking, social attitudes, popular culture, are filled with false ways of seeing or thinking. And there are plenty of falsehoods spun by religions as  well.

But there’s one phrase that comes up time and time again in Jewish liturgy and in the psalms of the Bible – “Open our eyes” – we say it over and over in one form or another because it’s a profound and abiding human wish to be able to distinguish between truth and falsehood, truth and propaganda, truth and lies.  And maybe we say it so often because there’s a recognition that it’s so hard to do - to see clearly.

And now the paradox. Yes, Judaism is an ongoing project of helping us to see life more clearly, more truly - Freud called this the ‘reality principle’ - to see what is really there, what’s really going on, to strip out false-seeing; but Judaism also teaches us to try to see what is not there, what we wish to be there, like Isaac Newton. It teaches us to see, to imagine, to create – first in our mind’s eye and then in reality – what does not yet exist: a world of justice, a world of compassion, a world of peace, a world of generosity and mutual respect. So Jewish seeing is a dual project – to see what actually is, and to see what could be.

Indigo represented Newton’s profound wish for a world of harmony. He helped us to see it, to imagine it, in nature even if it’s not actually there. What Judaism teaches is analogous to that: it teaches us to shine light, yes, on what is actually there, including the flaws and the failures; but it is also teaching us to see, to keep alive, the picture of what could be there. You can’t build a better world unless you can see both what is in front of your eyes and what is not yet in front of your eyes. ‘What is’ can be transformed into ‘what ought to be’ – that is how Jewish hopefulness works, it’s a Messianic hopefulness. The world can be changed for the better – creativity can win out over destructiveness - but it can’t be changed until we look clearly at what actually exists in front of our eyes.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on 29^th October, 2022]

On the New Year: How Do We Keep Our Hearts Open?

 A snail walks into a police station and says to the desk sergeant, “Two turtles attacked me!”. The desk sergeant opens up a file and says “Okay, describe exactly what happened”. The snail says, “I don’t really remember, it all happened so fast”.

It all happened so fast. We’ll come back to that.

That’s not a great joke actually, if truth be told; in fact, I’m not sure it makes sense. After all, both snails and turtles are slow creatures, so in terms of relative speeds it wouldn’t be slow to a snail if it was attacked by a turtle; but we needn’t get all Einsteinian about it. It might have made you laugh - and thus I’m following the Dalai Lama’s wise words: ”You  have to always start with playfulness. With a joke. Make people laugh to open their heart, and then you can tell them terrible truths after, because they are ready”. (Who knew? The Dalai Lama’s a secret sadist).

Anyway, I digress. Are you ready? Are your hearts open? How do we keep our hearts open? How do we keep our hearts open when it all happens so fast. What a year we’ve had, what a time to test our capacity to keep our hearts open:  to each other, to life, to the daily assault from the ‘moronic inferno’ around us - Saul Bellow’s peerless phrase.  Temperatures rise, the world burns, ice melts, whole countries flood, populations are homeless, famine rages, pandemics sweep across our land, loved ones go. It all happens so fast. You shake hands with a new prime minister on Tuesday and take your last breath on Thursday. It all happened so fast.

Each year we come together in the synagogue and repeat the same words. B’Rosh Hashanah yikatayvun  ‘On Rosh Hashanah it is written’ … U’v’Yom Kippur y’chat’aymun ‘And on Yom Kippur it is sealed’… ‘for all who live and all who die…’ and we modern Jews, who probably no longer believe in this Book of Life imagery literally, nevertheless might still wonder about what it all symbolises; we wonder how things are connected, we wonder about cause and effect, we wonder about how the way we live effects the world around us, effects our own destiny; we wonder if the way we live – what we buy, what we eat, what car we drive – does it make any difference to our personal fates, to our nation’s life, to our planet’s life?  

 

And even though we have moved beyond reading much of our liturgy literally, don’t we still feel - in our hearts, when they are open - that the texts of these prayers are still speaking of vital questions about life? B’Rosh Hashanah yikatayvun – the translation in our Reform machzor (prayerbook) doesn’t actually say that our future is ‘written’ on Rosh Hashanah: it interprets the Hebrew by opening up the image, to reveal a truth at its heart.

Our translation says: ‘On Rosh Hashanah we consider how judgment is formed…’ – which is what we are doing today, and in the days between now and Yom Kippur. We are considering, judging, how the choices we make in life, the way we live our lives, effects what unfolds next – for ourselves, for our families and neighbours, our country, our bruised and battered earth.

Jewish tradition calls today Yom Ha-Din: ‘the Day of Judgment’. So today is about judgment, and self-judgment. The judgment is not coming from some deity on high but it is coming at us nevertheless. Fire and flood, starvation and disease are the responses - indirectly and directly - to what we do, and what we don’t do, they are in part the disturbing consequences of how we live, the judgments on how we live, individually and collectively in our interconnected world.

So these are days of judgment, times of judgment. And this year, as we sweltered in that 40 degree heat just a couple of months ago, we didn’t just have a glimpse into the future. What dawned on many of us was the terrifying realisation that the future has already arrived. This is the future: cataclysmic climate change, interacting with growing global economic inequality – in the UK it’s a dozen years of faith-based economics that nobody is allowed to call wicked, or sinful, or even shameful – with environmental disruption and economic deprivation embedded within systemic political dysfunction and the worldwide retreat into populist nationalism – this is the future, now, and it’s a dementing, toxic environment in which to have to keep one’s heart open.

This is the world we live in now and I don’t need to spell it all out for you because you know it anyway, you are living with it every day, and you might wake up at four in the morning inexplicably anxious - and yes, we’ve seen the  shattering of liberal optimism and belief in the inevitability of social progress and it has all happened so fast - and now a  European war is on our borders, and our sleeplessness is haunted by paranoid thoughts (or are they paranoid?): where will that first tactical nuclear device fall? and what will the fall out of that be, on the skins of our bodies and our children’s and grandchildren’s bodies and lungs? and how will the West respond? It happens so fast.

There’s an extraordinary couple of sentences in our High Holy Day liturgy – they only come once (which is quite a refreshing change from a lot of what we say, and repeat, over and over). But these two sentences are planted right at the end of these Ten Days, in the final Neilah service on Yom Kippur, when the mood is shifting, from solemnity and inward-lookingness to something more upbeat, hope-filled, as we start to turn back towards the world outside with renewed optimism and energy.  

They come immediately after we’ve sung, for the umpteenth and last time, those consoling, stirring, faith-filled words: “Adonai, Adonai, el rachum v’chanum…” – “God, the Eternal, merciful and compassionate …forgiving sin, wrong, and failure, who pardons”’. It’s a familiar text. And then, a heartbeat later, comes this. The text is nearly a thousand years old, but it could have been written yesterday: “When I think of the cities and communities which seemed so firmly based, and which are now ruined or have disappeared without trace, I am shaken” – and each year when I read it I do feel shaken, I feel like the liturgy has caught me out with a sucker punch, it’s below the belt really, because it comes so late on in the day, as Neilah is drawing to a close.

We’ve just been lulled into the comfort of that familiar mantra listing those Godly attributes and there it comes, unannounced: the six o’clock news thrust in our faces – cities destroyed, communities that disappear (fire, floods, starvation, disease), lives that seem so “firmly based” – and don’t we go around believing that our cosy lives are firmly based, more or less? – and it can all disappear, this text says, from one year to the next, from one hour to the next. Who knew last Rosh Hashanah that by this Rosh Hashanah we’d all be able to write an MA thesis on the geography of Ukraine? It all happened so fast.

But then comes a second sentence. Seamlessly the text continues – and here Judaism’s radical chutzpah is on full display: having laid us low with the brutal reminder of the unpredictability and fragility of life it then says, the very next words, U’v’chol zot – ‘But, despite all this’ – that’s the most provocative, defiant, breath-taking swerve, segue, in the whole of our liturgy – ‘But, despite all this’, it says, ‘we still belong to God, and still we look to the Eternal One’.

It's madness really: ‘But, despite all this’ – all this destruction and chaos, all this upheaval, displacement, savagery, heartbreak and loss – ‘we still belong to God…we still look to the Eternal One’ – it is a kind of madness this love affair the Jewish people have with God. Love affairs do derange the senses - but, yes, it’s true, the Jewish people do still look to, bind ourselves to, Adonai, the divine energy threaded through our history, and that animates all of life.

And then we are off again, the text doubles down, moves into, or retreats into, familiar territory: “Adonai, Adonai, el rachum v’chanum…” – “God, the Eternal, merciful and compassionate …forgiving sin, wrong, and failure, who pardons’. That’s the very last time we say this in the High Holy Days.  

That gut-wrenching description of the whole deeply disturbing world we inhabit – and we do recognise it, and it does shake us, because it is our reality:  Grozny, Darfur, Aleppo, Mariupol - it speaks a truth, those words, and we aren’t used to such plain-speaking in the liturgy. But the liturgists of old smuggled in those two subversive sentences nevertheless, sandwiched between that repeated mantra of God’s infinite capacity for love, compassion, forgiveness.  

And maybe one of the reasons why we repeat so often those sentences about God’s compassion and lovingkindness is not that the liturgy is trying to soothe us, or hypnotise us, into believing something we may find it hard to believe, or experience, but to remind us of something else: that actually it’s we who contain these qualities, these so-called ‘divine’ qualities, within us. We know what it is to love, we know what it is to feel and act compassionately, with kindness, with generosity. The liturgy keeps reminds us what is inside us, because we forget, we forget so easily.

We are so bound up with our faults, our failures, our lacks, our difficulties, our struggles, our guilt, that we can lose touch with our better natures: our capacity for care, for empathy, for generosity. We forget, so the liturgy keeps harping on about this stuff to remind us who we are. It’s disguised in all this language about God - but actually we don’t know anything about how God is, so we make it up. We made it up, historically - it’s part of our unique gift for Jewish storytelling, for Jewish mythological thinking:  we created a whole world view, reflected in our liturgy, about the divine presence and divine qualities.

And when we listen to it now - sing it, whisper it, in faith or in scepticism - we need to remember that in essence it’s not telling us about something out there, but telling us something, reminding us about something, in here: in our souls, in our hearts; if we keep them open, we can show love to thousands, we can be generous, we can learn to be slow to anger, we can learn to fill ourselves with love and compassion, we can pardon those who hurt us, we have this potential incarnated within us. But we need to be reminded: ‘Look who you are, look who you can be, look what you can do’ - the liturgy is like a mirror reflecting back on us: ‘You can do this, you can be this’.

On Rosh Hashanah we consider how these qualities are formed in us, inscribed in us - and how they become atrophied in us, how they become erased, these divine qualities in our hearts.

Can we keep our hearts open when so much chaos and disturbance reigns around us? And within us? When disasters strike – we saw it with Covid and the Ukrainian refugees – it is so often amazing how generously people respond: food, shelter, clothes, money, hospitality, communities forming for practical and emotional support.  This is being open hearted. But it can be hard to sustain when life is tough, when times are tough, when you feel your own well-being is precarious, when you know that in the UK there are 3000 food banks, and millions of children and adults dependent on charities and faith communities for basic necessities.

But let’s leave political failures of vision, and moral obtuseness, and the sins of systemic injustice for another day. This is our Jewish new year, our opportunity for a new beginning, a new realisation that in spite of so little being in our hands, there is still so much in our hands, and in our hearts, that we can do to make a difference.

And as we reflect on our lives, our choices, which is what we are called to do at this season, we can hold in mind how Seamus Heaney once put it, incomparably:

“The way we are living,/ timorous or bold,/ will have been our life.”  This is it. The future is now. And it all happens so fast.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, September 27^th, 2022]

On the Death of the Queen

 

These are days when Jews in the UK become aware of what it means to be hyphenated Jews. We are part of that strange phenomenon known as ‘Anglo-Jewry’; we send representatives to the ‘Board of Deputies of British Jews’. In other words, we are hybrids: our sense of ourselves is multiple. This must surely be true of other minority groups, and indeed anyone who feels the pull of other allegiances – to culture, ethnicity, gender, birthplace, language - within themselves.  But here I can only speak of what I am familiar with: an awareness of living in two parallel realities, one Jewish and one deeply connected to the country in which I was born, raised and educated and where I have lived all my life – a life almost exactly overlapping the years in which Queen Elizabeth II was on the throne.

As we begin to feel our way into this transition in national life, it is as if the ‘British’ aspect of ourselves as Jews comes to the fore and although there are plenty of republicans amongst the Jewish community, many UK Jews have a deep and abiding affection for the institution of monarchy (however problematic or intellectually indefensible it might be); or at least – not the same thing – many UK Jews have a deep admiration for the ways in which the Queen lived out her destiny within that role, a role she of course inherited and did not choose.  

The Queen’s death touches us in personal and specific ways: we each will have our own memories and associations in relation to our monarch (I was an excited twelve-year-old with specially polished shoes standing in line – for ages - with the other boys when she visited our school on the 450^th anniversary of its founding). And of course her death links us to the collective mourning that is taking place nationally and internationally.

So we find ourselves reflecting back on the text and texture of a life, a long and historically remarkable life, a life of duty and service, about which many words of tribute have already been spoken. To pick just one aspect of what she represented: she was able, when necessary, to provide the nation with a sense of hopefulness (a very Jewish quality, but one that I imagine came from her abiding Christian faith). For example, during the height of the first wave of Covid (April 2020) she addressed the nation with simplicity and directness: as the seriousness of the pandemic was becoming apparent, she offered words of encouragement and calm reassurance: “Better days will return again; we will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again.”

Such a beautiful touch that last phrase, “we will meet again”– I thought she must have great speechwriters, until I read that she scripted her Christmas and other addresses herself – with its nod to Dame Vera Lynn, whose wartime song evokes a nation that survives what history throws at it; but used in 2020 it was also an acknowledgement of the Queen’s own longevity and  continuity over the decades, of herself as a living link to this county’s past – she was there on the balcony of Buckingham Palace with her father at the end of the War, and her first Prime Minister was Winston Churchill: all of that was implicit within that address, while still being focussed, aged 94 (as she then was), on continuity into the future - we will emerge from dark times, collectively we will get through this.  

This is what she did, this was her job, this was her vocation - what she’d been called to do: called by life, called by God, according to the curious mythology about monarchy that she represented. And it was a job she did, a public role  – and the same words keep coming up as you listen to the commentators, and those who’d met her – a job she did with warmth, compassion, humility, wisdom, empathy, self-restraint, dignity, dedication, and a sense of humour (guest starring with Daniel Craig, James Bond, during the 2012 Olympics; sharing marmalade sandwiches with Paddington Bear only this year for her Platinum Jubilee).

And, yes, this was her life of duty: a sense of duty she saw through to the very end. Earlier this week (Tuesday, 6^th) we saw what we did not know then, but now know, are the last pictures of her - our last glimpse of her that will remain etched in our minds forever - fulfilling her constitutional duty in relation to yet another prime minister, her 15^th. Those pictures will long remain as a symbol of her legacy of service to the nation. It was almost as if she kept on going until she’d fulfilled this last responsibility entrusted to her - and then she could let go.

People do that: determined to get to the family wedding, to the Bar Mitzvah, to see the new grandchild – and then able to let go of life. But now I’m straying into the realm of mythologising or sentimentalising her, which I’d rather not do. Let’s just say that she was steadfast in fulfilling her responsibilities until almost her dying breath. 

Perhaps the most resonant words I have encountered since her death are those of the commentator Jonathan Freedland, who wrote that “She was woven into the cloth of our lives so completely, we stopped seeing the thread long ago”. I think that captures, poignantly and precisely, the way in which she was both an invisible part of our sense of ourselves as British and an aspect of the fabric of our lives from our own earliest days. She has accompanied us, in the background, and has become part of our psychic life, personally and collectively.

So: a real life has come to an end, it leaves a hole in our lives, small or large; a link with our past, personal and collective, has gone and we shall not see a monarch like her again.

But of course she will have an afterlife: literally - on banknotes, on coins, on postage stamps, on post-boxes – all of which will remain in our midst for some time, until gradually becoming mingled with (or replaced by) images of King Charles; and symbolically, where her afterlife will be in the ways she will remain inside us both as a reminder of others whom we have held dear in our lives who are no longer with us, and as a reminder of something much rarer - what a lifetime’s devotion to duty looks like.

[based on reflections shared at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on Saturday September 10th, 2022]

Saying Kaddish for Peter Brook

He was a man of amazing vitality and influence and since his death a few weeks ago, aged 97, I have been wondering about what it means to possess that quality of the soul, that aliveness; and wondering too about what remains alive and present when the person is gone. When we say Kaddish for someone who is gone we aren’t of course keeping them alive, literally, but we are keeping something alive - what they meant for us, maybe. ‘May their memory be a blessing’, we say. People enter eternity when we keep alive the sparks their soul, their presence, generated in us.

So in this last few weeks I have been wondering : who is saying Kaddish for Peter Brook?  Quite possibly no-one – the director, internationally renowned,  was a defiantly secular Jewish atheist: like many of his generation he threw off the last, inherited vestiges of Judaism very early on, disdainful of all that archaic Jewish thought and practice and ritual. Who would want the unsophisticated primitivism and bloodshed of the Bible when you could have the sophisticated bloodshed of, say, Hamlet – aged seven he acted out a four-hour version of the play for his parents, on his own. Such stuff are legends made of.

He was of course too young to appreciate the lines of continuity between Shakespeare and those ancient texts he rejected; too young to appreciate that the greatest writer in the English language shared with those ancient storytellers a parallel quest for meaning: “The great eternal question that we ask ourselves”, as Brook put it, “How are we to live?” (There Are No Secrets, 1993, p.62)

I’ve always been fascinated by Peter Brook’s distinctive approach to theatre, his almost Kabbalistic emphasis on the experience of immediacy, of aliveness, of presentness, that he tried to create with and through his actors; the way he mines the present moment for deep insights into the fabric of reality, the way he distils actions and speech to their essence. 

There is of course an irony in the way he devoted his life to creating in a theatrical context the spiritual intensity, the sense of ever-emergent possibilities and interconnections, that seem to have been absorbed - as if by osmosis, or alchemy - from the traditions and practices of Jewish mysticism. He spoke often about the centrality of myth and ritual for the nurturing of the human imagination, and the exploration of life’s core values. And so every culture in the world became available to be investigated and expressed and distilled – except the culture that was his birthright. So, yes, ironical; but also kind of sad.

His loss, I suppose, and ours too, I’m sure. One can only wonder what a nine hour production of the five books of Moses, the Torah, would have looked like analogous to his production of the Indian epic cycle the Mahabharata?  It would have been a thing of wonder, I’m sure, a true “holy theatre” - his term for theatre which recognises that, in his words, “there is an invisible world that needs to be made visible” (p.58).

One of the reasons why Peter Brook has mattered to me is that, to my mind, he was trying to get at something through his work that I connect directly to the activity we Jews engage in during our liturgical services.  Now those services aren’t theatre and if I lead such a service I am not an actor on stage  - nevertheless, something is being performed when we meet together. We could say that we too are involved through prayer, through assembling together at a fixed and place, and taking our seats, and entering into the ritual drama – we too are  exploring how, yes, “there is an invisible world that needs to be made visible”. So I have found that it’s worth listening in to what Brook was teaching about this mysterious process. 

“The problem is”, he wrote, “that the invisible is not obliged to make itself visible. Although the invisible is not compelled to manifest itself, it may at the same time do so anywhere, and at any moment, through anyone, as long as the conditions are right”. He could be talking (in a secularised way, he is talking) about how the ruach ha’kodesh becomes present, the divine spirit.  And the mystery of that. 

"I don’t think there is any point in reproducing the sacred rituals of the past…”, he continues, “The only thing which may help us is an awareness of the present. If the present moment is welcomed in a particularly intense manner…the elusive spark of life can appear within the right sound, the right gesture, the right look, the right exchange. So, in a thousand unexpected forms, the invisible may appear”. This is gold dust for anyone (of any faith tradition?) who lead services.

He's trying to put into words something which is hard to describe in language, but which nevertheless can be experienced.  And on the stage the key seems to be – and here I am condensing radically Brook’s discussion about this – the key seems to be, he says, if an actor can find this invisible presence “in a certain silence within himself. What one could call ‘sacred theatre’, the theatre in which the invisible appears, takes root in this silence…Theatre is always both about a search for meaning and a way of making this meaning meaningful for others. This is the mystery.” (p.76).

That seems to me to be a great definition of what is at the heart of Jewish prayer life in our services: it’s “always both about a search for meaning and a way of making this meaning meaningful for others.”

You might be able to see why these thoughts are so compelling for someone like me who leads services. Nobody in my experience has written so helpfully, so deeply, so perceptively about the challenges of leading communal worship, - of ‘doing tefillah’, as we say these days - as Peter Brook. Of course he never knew that’s what he was doing, unwittingly. Perhaps he’d be horrified, but I like to think he would be flattered. He should be. Some of those old-style Jewish atheists have a lot to teach us, still.

A final vignette about this. About thirty years ago I went to see a production of ‘The Dybbuk’, the play by the Yiddish writer, S. Ansky: it was on in Hampstead (I think) and although I don’t think it was a Brook production, the male lead was taken by Bruce Myers, a Jewish member of Brook’s Paris-based ensemble. He worked with Brook off and on for fifty years.

At one point in the play, the family are preparing to light the Shabbat candles, and as they prepare to do so the everyday hectic energy fades away and there was a stillness on stage, the actors were very quiet, very contained and there was a silence – it pervaded the whole theatre – nothing was happening (although something is always happening), but it wasn’t an empty silence, Myers was generated a silence from within himself, and one knew in that moment that here was a world in which the spiritual was real, the invisible was being made visible, the divine moment of Shabbat’s coming-into-being was being made present through attention, through devotion, it was being brought into being, on a stage in Hampstead.

And the words of the blessing were chanted, flowing out of the silence, and it was as if I had never really heard them before. And I have never heard them like that ever again. They spoke of something true and real and sacred and unchanging and always available and yet hardly ever experienced.

It was a revelation, to me – this is what prayer could be. This is what blessing meant. I try to hold this moment in mind when I am in the synagogue, gathered together for prayer – isn’t this the experience we want? To know that there is meaning? To know that there is purpose? To know that we are part of a sacred story?

Bruce Myers died at the beginning of Covid, of the virus. He was 78. I don’t know if anyone is saying Kaddish for him either. But that evening in Hampstead he offered one response to Brook’s eternal question: ‘How are we to live?’

If we can make space in our lives for the sacred to be present – in whatever form it takes, in whatever way it presents itself to us,  through whoever it makes itself known  -  isn’t this how we are to live? Isn’t this how we want to live?

[based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, July 22nd, 2022] 

 

A Month Like No Other

Since February 24^th my mental world has subtly shifted on its axis. As the BBC correspondent Lyse Doucet put it on Thursday, with her customary clarity and concision: “It’s been a month like no other - for Ukraine, for Europe, and for the world.”

A cliché it may be to say it, but we are seeing history in the making. We’re seeing images we haven’t seen in Europe for generations: we lucky ones, who never lived through war, might have been brought up on grainy black and white footage of ruined cities and populations on the move, but did not seriously think we’d ever see that kind of ‘history’ again, at least not so close to home. Yes, we’ve had Aleppo, and Grozny and Sarajevo - but they were not quite on our doorsteps: they were just far enough away not to penetrate our lives every day as this war has done, and is doing, bursting into our living rooms night after night.

‘A month like no other’ in a world of continuous change. We are being taken on a journey: destination unknown and unknowable. And, yes, that’s the human condition: the “only certainty is uncertainty” as Professor Eugene Heimler used to say, born in Hungary, survivor of Buchenwald, writer and therapist, friend of the Finchley community of which I am a part.

So given that all is flux, turbulence, chaos, uncertainty, what struck me this week, was whether or not it was possible to imagine that those involved in Jewish life have a kind of antidote to all that? Maybe not an antidote exactly, but we do have the possibility of a perspective, an angle of vision, at odds with all that unpredictability that’s part of the human condition.

Because we live with another cycle of life, a seasonal cycle - of predictability and regularity and engagement with what is unchanging in an changing world. And that is due to our connection to something that never changes - the Torah.

Whatever is going on outside us - however history is unfolding in all its drama and grandeur and degradation - when Jews meet at the Shabbat service we encounter something unchanging: this week it was the chapters of Torah called  Shemini, the third section of the third book in our unchanging, unchangeable foundational text. This never changes. As if it’s eternal. When the Torah has been read we recite a blessing that acknowledges, with gratitude: chayai olam nata betochaynu - “You have planted eternal life within us”.

Is it the Torah that is eternal? Or the experience of engaging with it that puts us in touch with something eternal? Or both? However we understand these words, we sense we are guests invited into a mystery. Something timeless is planted within time - and within us who live, moment by moment, in time.

In other words we live, as Jews. in two worlds at once. Here we are rooted in a specific place, at a specific time in history, in our everyday world where wondrous and terrifying things happen, to us and around us. And we live in another world, the unchanging cycle of reading from Torah, week by week, year by year, century by century. It’s a cycle we connect to that never changes.

So we live in a world where everything changes, everything is uncertain - and in a world where nothing changes, just the chapters we read week by week, repeated year in, year out, a world where we know where we are and we know where we will be next week and the week after. This is our other world, unchanging, stable, consistent, reliable, reassuring, ‘eternal’.  This is a gift: it allows Jews to live in two worlds at once.

It’s good to know this, or be reminded of it. And we shouldn’t take it for granted. Because it’s precious - and not everyone has it. It could help give us some kind of anchoring when we, or the world, feel adrift, in peril, tossed around by the storms and vicissitudes of history.

Yet living in this other world certainly doesn’t solve any problems for us. It doesn’t solve our problems because it’s not like magic or medicine. Indeed the perspective from this other world  might highlight the complexity of the issues we face, here where we stand. It can make us giddy to view the world from the standpoint of the Torah, it can destabilise us as often as steady us.

This week’s chapters are a good example. They are part of that complex detailing of priestly rituals that fill the book of Leviticus. Chapter nine describes acts of purification and elaborate rituals for both the priests and the people: much blood is spilled as the animals are slaughtered in the prescribed manner, and many of us feel thankful that this is a world long gone. Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in the year 70CE, we read these texts now only for their symbolic value (if we can find it). The chapter narrates how, when all the rituals were enacted, God was made present: “Moses and Aaron went inside the Tent of Meeting and when they came out they blessed the people va’yayrah chavod- Adonai el-kol-ha’am - and the presence/the substance/the glory of the Eternal appeared to all the people” (Leviticus 9:22-23).

But how do we understand that? Is it a one-off event? Or a promise? That through purity, through ritual actions - whether it is of a priestly tribe, or a kingdom of priests (the Israelite community) - God’s presence becomes manifest? What does that mean? What would that look like? How would we know? “The glory of the Eternal appeared to all the people”. How are we supposed to get our heads round that?

In the text it says that what the people actually saw was fire bursting forth and consuming the offerings on the altar. Is this the “glory of the Eternal”? Or a glorified barbeque? The people are told the former. We might just see the latter. What is going on? How are we to understand this fragment of eternal truth planted in our midst?

I am asking the questions in this to illustrate how we might have the Torah, our unchanging text, but the questions it raises are difficult and sometimes troubling. Because although we read them and ponder them, we don’t really understand what on earth, or in heaven, is going on. There are plenty of commentaries that seek to explain these texts - but I don’t trust anyone who tells me they do understand these texts. Because there is  a mystery at the heart of them.

Reading this text this week, I puzzle over it (as usual) - but when we step back and draw breath, and look out around us, aren’t we tempted to say: how can we even speak about God’s presence and the glory of the divine when the bombs are dropping, at this moment, indiscriminately destroying, and “who will live and who will die” (as our Yom Kippur text puts it) is just an accident of fate? Random, arbitrary, unpredictable, macabre. Children escape and children are trapped underground, or perish in the rubble - isn’t it offensive to talk at all about God’s presence, or God’s glory?

And yes, clergy (of all denominations) and theologians will come up with all sorts of rationalisations and platitudes to supposedly explain the inexplicable. But I am guided here - in relation to these profound challenges to religious belief and traditional pieties - I’m guided by Rabbi Irving Greenburg, Brooklyn-born rabbi and Orthodox scholar, who has written extensively about matters of faith after the Shoah, and about how Jewish life and thinking have to be radically reformulated and reworked and re-thought after the trauma of the Holocaust. He once wrote “No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children”.

That for me is the most important religious statement of our times - it cuts through all the garbage - and I return to it today because it’s a touchstone of humanity and decency and Jewish faith in our times.  And, yes, it sets the bar very high, but it says to me that probably the most honest response, from a religious perspective, to Mariupol and the barbarities inflicted on Ukraine is silence. For no religious statement is credible in the presence of another generation of murdered children.

The only religious response is through action, not words, through forms of giving and doing: money, hospitality, campaigns to influence the UK government’s tortuous refugee policy - the bureaucracy for Ukrainians trying to get to the UK is still the ‘hostile environment’ of the last ten years.

You know the actions we can take - whether Jewish or Christian we draw upon the ethics of our unchanging texts: the compassion, the generosity to strangers and the dispossessed, and all the rest. We draw strength and inspiration from the vision of what is possible - while at the same time finding ourselves silenced by all that narrative exuberance about God’s presence and divine glory and ritual purification.

And, yes, I could say that the ‘rituals’ we now do involve us making our own ‘sacrifices’ - different kinds of ‘sacrifice’, of time and money and what we give of ourselves, and that this is how God is now brought into the world. Not from on high but through us. And I believe that is true, and I believe it necessary to say it, and to repeat it to our children - this is how Jews make God known in the world: through the fire in our hearts sparking us into life and action. Without that fire within, the Torah turns to ashes.

Maybe that’s as much as we can say. And the rest is silence.

[based on a sermon give on Zoom for Finchley Reform Synagogue, March 26th, 2022]