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]

 

 

On Ukraine: What Can One Say?

 First he came for the Chechens but I did not speak out because I was not a Chechen.

Then he came for Crimea but I did not speak out because I was not from Crimea.

Then he came for the dissidents and journalists but I did not speak out because I was neither a dissident nor a journalist.

Then he came for the Ukrainians - like the mother of Ira, our traumatised cleaner, whose mum is moving to a different room every night, still with internet connection so her daughter can speak to her every hour, every fifteen minutes; and the family of another Ukrainian I know, who are fleeing west, right now, from the family home they rebuilt by hand from the rubble and losses of World War 2; and three rabbinic colleagues who, with their children, have left their Ukrainian communities to seek safety abroad - yes, now he has come for the Ukrainians and - never mind ‘speak out’ - what can I say?

Because what is one to say that isn’t platitudes and emptiness?

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words - so let me tell you about the picture on the front page of last Saturday’s Guardian. The headline was ‘Kyiv On The Brink’ in extra large font, but the photo that accompanied it was of a railway carriage window behind which you could see two children, a girl of around nine or ten, I guess, with wire-rimmed glasses, and a boy nestling next to her, fair-haired, who looked around six or seven, they were waiting for the train to depart, and there was the figure of an adult  behind them, but not the adult’s face: the focus of the photo was on the two children, both looking out the window onto the platform, anxiety etched into their features.

And this could have been a scene, I suppose, from any Western conflict zone of the last eighty years - at different times Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Sarajevo  - but what made this photo completely contemporary, unmistakably of this moment in the 21^st century, was that at the very centre of the photograph there figured - as large as the boy’s cherubic face - something the boy was holding horizontally, a shiny blue smartphone.

https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1497340896685301760?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

And there was something ever so ordinary about this but - it struck me - ever so extraordinary as well. For this is a new kind of war - as well as being eternally old in its brutality and senselessness.

It’s a new kind of war where the smartphone is a vital possession carried by victims as the flee, to keep in contact with family and friends, and a crucial  tool of those who remain, including a vast army of citizen journalists recording live from battle zones and basements and bedrooms, recording and transmitting into our homes, ensuring we the watching world know, hour by hour, what is unfolding.

It means the war is being fought in ways that we the bystanders become witnesses to, often in real time; it makes us, in a way, into participants; and looking away is possible of course, but that presents us with an emotional dilemma - to look can feel unbearable, but not to look feels equally problematic. On the one hand, can our souls bear to see? On the other hand, can they bear to turn away from seeing and knowing? Our souls are under bombardment either way.

For the first time in human history the reality of war and the ‘virtual reality’ of war are merging for millions around the globe. Through technological sophistication, the grotesque savagery of war is being brought into our homes at every hour of the day and night - and now we carry it around in our pockets too. We literally carry the war with us wherever we go. Our pockets, our handbags, are full of horror. 

Ukraine is one of the so-called ‘bloodlands’ [see historian Timothy D. Snyder, 2010] where Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union competed to exterminate people who, because of ethnicity or class, had no place in the fantasied societies they were building. A chilling image, ‘bloodlands’ - but the blood seeps into our pockets, onto our hands, into our comfortable living rooms and bedrooms. How does the soul endure?  And what can we say?

Then he came for Ukraine - and what did we say? What could we say? We are on the border of speechlessness. ‘Ukraine’ means ‘borderlands’: for centuries the land saw the intermingling of many cultures and languages - Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish, German, Yiddish - for borders were porous, cultures borrowed and blended their music and food and literature, and marriages took place across ethnic groups.

But we Jews have long memories - fortunately and unfortunately - which means it’s hard to romanticise Ukraine:  between November 1918 and March 1921, a time of civil war, there were  over a thousand anti-Jewish pogroms in over five hundred locations in Ukraine, over 100,00 deaths; 600,000 Jews fled abroad, millions more were displaced internally. And this is twenty years before the Shoah, where more than a third of all Jews murdered were killed close to home with the collaboration of people they knew: one million Jews were killed in Ukraine before the death camps were set up in 1942. And I’m not going to begin to speak about the Ukrainian fascists drafted into the SS death squads. 

But does any of this history matter now, eighty or a hundred years later? I speak of it only for the sake of a kind of emotional and/or intellectual honesty, and a resistance to amnesia, to acknowledge that there is complexity in the deep background of what is unfolding.

Yet on a human level it is a complexity that fades away when we see the faces of the children in the window of a train, when we hear the human stories, and see the devastation to a land recognisably part of our modern Europe. We may not know what to say, but we know what we feel: compassion lies deeper than words.

Of course helplessness too is part of what arises in us - but there are plenty of avenues for action: at this moment it appears that organisations working on the ground in Ukraine, and with refugees, are most in need of financial support - they know how best to spend the money we send. Charity, tzedakah, is a good antidote to helplessness - and speechlessness - as well as being a mitzvah in itself.

“Say little and do much…” was Shammai’s wise advice two millennia ago. And if one is moved to do more, one can always heed the words he added: “…and receive everyone with a trusting and hopeful expression on one’s face” (Pirke Avot: 1: 15).

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, March 5^th, 2022; with due acknowledgements to Pastor Martin Niemöller]