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]