Mourning is Timeless

 "The only reason to be an artist…is to bear witness” (Philip Guston)

There are some Biblical verses – well, many, if truth be told - that lie dull and lifeless on the page for us modern readers. They no longer speak to us – if they ever did. That’s probably our limitation, not theirs. But over time we might recognise that they are not lifeless, they are just dormant – as if they are biding their time, as if they’re awaiting their moment to reveal something to us, waiting patiently for their opportunity to illuminate an aspect of where we are now, what we might be wrestling with now.

So this week my eye was caught by a verse from our weekly sedrah [Torah reading] that describes a stage in the journey that Joseph took with the embalmed body of his father Jacob (Genesis 50). Jacob had spent his last years in Egypt, a bitter old man, an exile far away from his homeland; and before he dies, having given each of his sons their own blessing, Jacob requests that they bury him in the ancestral burial site back in der heim, in Mamre – today we call it Hebron (where Jews, assault rifles in one hand and siddurim, prayer-books, in the other, will be reading this text in very different ways to me).

We read how Joseph calls his brothers together and gets permission from Pharoah to make the journey back to Canaan to bury their father. The brothers leave their children and their herds and possessions behind, and set off accompanied by a huge retinue of Egyptian dignitaries and chariots and horsemen – it’s like a state funeral, Joseph being second only in prestige and power to Pharaoh himself.

And then our storytellers do something which has that quintessential Biblical narrative quirkiness one comes to recognise, and wonder over: they give us a short scene that disturbs the narrative flow, that seems superfluous to the story - yet it apparently has some significance for the authors, but a significance they don’t spell out. They leave it planted in the text – and there it waits for centuries, millennia, awaiting its moment.

I’m talking about verse 10 of chapter 50:

“When they came to Goren Ha-atad…they entered into a deep, heavy-hearted lamentation, and Joseph observed a seven day mourning period for his father” - this is the origin of the shiva tradition, by the way [the seven-day Jewish mourning period] – and then in the next verse the scene is described again from the outside, as it were, “And when the Canaanites living there saw this…they said: This is a grievous mourning time for the Egyptians”. 

This is a form of literary Cubism by the way, two perspectives of the same thing fused together in the picture, one superimposed on the other. And we are left in no doubt by the storytellers that whether you are a participant in this collective mourning, or merely observers of it like the Canaanites who see everyone involved as Egyptians, what’s being portrayed is a time filled with deep grief.

And then the text picks up its narrative thread: “And his sons carried him to the land of Caanan and buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field near Mamre that Abraham had bought…”

So what was it about this that particularly caught my eye? Well, it might surprise you but it was the name of the place where the mourning takes place. It’s in a spot called Goren ha-Atad.  ‘The threshing floor of/for thorns’. So what? The name adds nothing to the story being told. But this place of mourning is a real geographical location: it is identified as a site called Tell el-Adjull - which just happens to be in the southern sector of present day Gaza. Where, as I speak, grievous mourning is again taking place. As we know. Although we don’t want to know.

It is as if there is an aperture in time through which the past illuminates the present. The Torah takes us into Gaza. As this whole section of text makes clear, Jews are a people who know about mourning, about loss, about grief, about  how close to the heart the death of a loved one can be – and Jews know too how significant it is to have time to honour the dead. I sometimes think there is a way in which we are a faith tradition more bound up with death and mourning our losses – personal and collective - than of being enamoured by life and its manifold and rich possibilities.

On Yom Kippur, for example, I am always amazed in my community how, after the Yizkor service in late afternoon [the annual memorialising roll-call of those who have died in the past year] - which is rightly significant and moving for so many, and people come especially for it - as soon as it is over, half the community disappears. Yes, I know that the Neilah service that follows it is another hour and we repeat a lot of the liturgy -  but the conclusion of Yom Kippur is very much about life: it is about our future, our personal future, our collective future; yet it carries less weight - less emotional and spiritual value it seems - than our mourning, our sadness, our remembering our losses. This isn’t a criticism – it’s just an observation.

We are a strange, quixotic people, us Jews. We mourn our losses, we are good at that, we have had a lot of practice over the years as a people, and of course individually we have all lost loved ones. Maybe because we do, on the whole, love life, treasure life, we are, paradoxically, connoisseurs of loss. If life was not so precious, loss would not mean so much to us.

But back to the text. I want to ask a simple question. (No questions are of course simple, there is complexity at the heart of this question, but it is the question that jumps out of the text for me, jumps at me, won’t let me go). Are we able, when we read of this legendary mourning in Gaza, when we read these verses within our great mythic narrative of the Torah, are we able to really mourn the losses in Gaza? The losses now. Are we allowed even to ask this question? Too soon? But if not now, when?

Will there be a time? Will there ever be a time when we can enter into a period of deep mourning for what has transpired over these weeks? What continues to unfold in these days of trauma in Jewish history? And Palestinian history? Will mourning be allowed? Mourning for  others, as well as ourselves? Because those who see this from the outside, as it were – like in the Torah text – they can see, they can acknowledge: “this is a grievous time of mourning”. The world – the non-Jewish world - can see this. But our Torah text encourages us to see it too, to have a dual perspective. To be moral Cubists. To see events not just from our subjective Jewish point of view, but to see suffering from the outside too, to look with a sense of empathy such as those Canaanites are described as showing: “this is a grievous time of mourning for them”.

Goren Ha-Atad: Gaza has become a threshing floor. And as Jews we can be in mourning for that too.  Threshing, as you know, is about crushing, it is about separating the grain from the chaff, it is a demanding and, yes, brutal activity, necessary for grains - but when your threshing is of a people, the separating out the wheat from the chaff, as it were, becomes a crude operation – and we see the thorny, painful consequences that unfold.

Scholars tell us that the historical significance of this spot mentioned in the Torah, Tell el-Adjull, is that it was the ancient site of a burial ground for high-ranking Egyptian dignitaries. This helps explain why Joseph’s cortege stopped there for their seven days of mourning, en route to the family plot in Mamre. But the Torah is not primarily interested in that kind of background history. It is interested in moral history and emotional history and spiritual history, the kind of history that transcends its specific time and place and speaks into the future, that speaks to those open to hear it today.

So I share with you what I hear it saying to us, how this heavy-hearted mourning, this lamentation at the threshing floor for thorns, is calling out to us - to reflect on, to join with, however we might do that. We have been given this torat emet - this ‘teaching of truth’ as our liturgy calls our sacred literature - and sometimes the truth is very painful; actually truth is often too painful to bear, and maybe at the moment we feel we can’t bear it. Okay -  but whether we like it or not, as Jews we are bound up with these texts, these teachings. It is who we are, for better or worse. We who know what it is to mourn – and are learning, tragically (and yes, unbearably), how much we cause mourning for others. 

I want to dedicate what I am saying today to a group of people in this community who aren’t here today. I know that sounds strange but let me explain, just to finish. There is a cohort of younger people in and around our synagogue who have been feeling that since October 7^th their views, their ways of seeing this current conflict, their moral and spiritual perspectives on this traumatic turn in Jewish history – well, there hasn’t been much space for a range of heartfelt views to be expressed. The dominant mantra of solidarity with Israel hasn’t left much space for dissent, or even nuance – this is what they have felt. I am reporting what I hear. So when I spoke a month ago , and what I’ve said today – I say for all those present, of course. But I also say it, for what it’s worth, for all those who are not here with us today.  

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, December 30^th 2023]

 

It Never Ends

 “It is better to be wrong by killing no one rather than to be right with mass graves” (Albert Camus, December 1948)

You remember how it began. It began with an outrage, an act of terror, shocking, completely unexpected; and it provoked a cataclysm of death and destruction, slaughter and desecration, horror and folly. It’s engraved on our psyches and features as the deep background to our everyday lives.

As the fog of war descends, regional powers get involved, death tolls pile up, dementing, senseless, and the bloodshed is entwined with a propaganda battle, fierce, relentless, creating information and disinformation, the battle for hearts and minds, with each side convinced of the righteousness of its cause. For God and country. The same old idols that require the same old sacrifices. It never ends, and when it does seem to end – in defeat or so-called victory – it always turns out to be a temporary respite, a pause to lick wounds, mourn the dead, prepare for next time. Because it never ends. The grieving hearts, the necessary justifications, rationalisations, about why it ‘had to be this way’, ‘we had no choice’. When there are always choices.

But you know all this. I often find myself saying that these days: you know all this, there’s nothing I’m saying you don’t already know, in your head or in your heart. Ayn hadash tachat ha-shemesh – There is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes1:9).

This weekend in the UK includes Remembrance Sunday – and synagogues on Shabbat have Remembrance prayers, for those who died serving their country. So you may have understood what I am referring to when I speak about the outrage, the act of terror, that sparks deadly mayhem between nations. Gavrilo Princip assassinated Franz Ferdinand and a madness  descended upon Europe, a nightmare, loss upon loss. And we remember it still.

And here we are more than a century later in a world utterly transformed  - but a world not so transformed that another act of terror, shocking, unexpected, doesn’t generate more bloodshed, more self-righteousness, more pain, loss upon loss. Because it never ends.

I’m not naïve. Dictators, tyrants, fascists, murderous ideologues need to be resisted, forcefully. The defence of freedoms might sometimes require violence, war might be the unwished-for last resort for a group, a people, a nation, all other avenues having been explored before blood is again shed and the innocent again have to suffer. Because, tragically, the innocent always do suffer. ‘Collateral damage’ is a grim euphemism – because then those sanctioning the bloodshed don’t have to speak about grieving hearts and severed limbs and hope abandoned. No, it never ends – not just the urge for revenge, or retaliation, or tribal battles over land, or resources, or honour, but battles over security, or against injustice, battles where the perverse logic is that others have to die so that our lives can continue.

And meanwhile God looks down and weeps. My children have learnt nothing. My children have turned my teachings into weapons. I wanted ploughshares and fertility and human flourishing – and they made swords and instruments of death. I wanted pruning hooks and the blessings of peace – and they made spears and rockets and the machinery of war (Isaiah 2:4). They have learnt nothing.

Jews are the inheritors of a three thousand year old civilisation and culture rooted in a vision of how people might be able to construct societies for the good of all, societies of compassion and justice, of care for the strangers, the marginalised, the vulnerable, of care for each other. And here we are, worried to have a mezuzah on our doors,  worried to send our children to school, worried about wearing a chai (or a Star of David) round our neck. Here we are, with historical fears stirring in our hearts as a worldwide tide of antipathy floods the polluted channels of social media, and Jewish communities around the world suffer the toxic consequences of what Jewish nationalism has brought down on our heads.

Can we bear the pain of this? On any level. On the level of our daily lives here in the UK and the need to keep constantly alert? Or on the level of seeing clearly into the heart of how we have arrived at this stage in our fraught history? Can we bear to see it? I can hardly bear to speak about it. I know it can be too painful to hear it. How Zionism, which was supposed to solve the problem of Jewish insecurity in the world, has resulted in this: endless bloodshed and oppression there, and endless anxieties here. One thing’s for sure: Jews are not in the world to increase the amount of suffering on the planet.

Understand me properly: I am not speaking about the historical and moral need for the Zionist project and the establishment of a State; I am referring to how it evolved, over time, and has ended up in this state of trauma that many people are feeling, I am referring to all the wrong turns on the journey from 1948 to today, that has led to antisemitic graffiti on local buildings round the corner and torn-down posters of the hostages, and Jews frightened to walk in the street, or sit on the tube wearing a kippah.

At some stage we need to ask: how has it come to this? Because it wasn’t inevitable. I don’t subscribe to the idea of the eternal hatred of Jews – that Jews always have been and always will be hated, collectively. We need to be able to look with clarity and with a degree of objectivity - however passionately we might feel about what is happening: we need to be able to look at the complex dynamics of cause and effect, of moral responsibility and choices made – and avoided - these last 75 years. There needs to a reckoning, an ethical audit.

Part of the task of the Jewish people has always been to use introspection and teshuvah (reflective self-judgment) to examine the choices made in life, personal and collective. To find ways to allow our better selves to dominate over our more corrosive impulses.  

Of course I am aware that in saying this now, it probably feels much too early to start to think about it. We are in a state of feeling besieged, hurt, wounded, under attack, vulnerable, outraged; for five weeks now we have had to bear with the excruciating pain of Hamas’s hate-fuelled barbarism and the agonies that it wrought (not just for fellow Jews) and continues to evoke. The Jewish people are feeling existentially insecure – whether this is objectively true or not is not the point, it’s a dominant strand of feeling. And when you are feeling insecure, being able to stand back and reflect on questions about how he have reached this point is very hard to do. The feelings flood our capacity to think and reflect. We feel defensive, we feel aggressive, or we just feel numb.

But reflection will need to happen – and it will require emotional and intellectual bravery, and moral leadership, and a careful nurturing of wounded souls. It will require painful soul-searching and a capacity to look beyond simplistic distinctions like innocent victims and guilty persecutors; it will need to look at the psychological complexities of how those who have been or are persecuted become persecutors in turn,  it will need to look at how inherited trauma is passed on and lived out, it will need to look at how injustices cannot be ignored for ever, it will need to look at how shame and anger and guilt get repressed or projected or acted out. This will be our Jewish work for years to come, decades to come. I am serving notice on it today.

Too early to start perhaps, but we also can’t afford to wait too long to engage in  this work – work for the State of Israel, work for the Diaspora, work for the Jewish people. Let’s just hope that we gain some respite, and speedily, from our current traumas – so that we have the space to do this work, to do it together. Because we will need not just visionary leadership to do it but we will need each other, the support of each other, if we are ever to truly get to grips with the task of re-assessing what is required – what compassion and generosity and imagination and commitment to justice; what it really means to live out the Jewish vision of how things could be, should be.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, 11^th November 2023]

New Year Thoughts: Being Human - the ‘Moronic Inferno’ - Living with a Dual Focus

I’d like to share a light-hearted experiment I conducted over this last weekend – light-hearted but aiming at something serious.

It was first day of Rosh Hashanah – the Jewish New Year – and I was given the opportunity of speaking to the community in what is known as the ‘sermon slot’.

I started by asking them: are you in the mood at this point in our service for something a bit different? A bit of light relief maybe?  I hope so. I want to try something out with you. I’m going to talk to you a bit about Rosh Hashanah, the New Year - but I’m going to ask you to do something, something participatory, if you can.

What I want you to do as I talk is to stop me, interrupt me, if you think there’s something wrong with what I am saying - not factually wrong, I try to get that stuff right - but something strange about what I’m saying, or the way I’m saying it, or just how I’m talking to you. You’ll have to put your hand up, or call out, or get my attention somehow - I’ll try and keep attentive to what’s happening - so catch my attention and tell me what’s wrong. This is an experiment, go with me on it. Stop me when you are ready and tell me what’s wrong. 

Because “Rosh Hashanah is not merely a turning of the calendar page; it is a profound spiritual opportunity to pause and take stock of our lives…as we gather today on this sacred occasion our hearts are filled with both anticipation and reflection. Just as the sun sets and rises again, so too does the cycle of time bring us to this moment of renewal and introspection.

In the Jewish tradition, we greet the New Year with a mixture of joy and solemnity. Our joy stems from the knowledge that we are given the chance to begin anew, to mend relationships, to rekindle our spirits, and to aspire to be better versions of ourselves. Our solemnity comes from the recognition that the choices we make bear consequences, not only for our own lives but also for the world around us.

The shofar's call pierces the air, and it is as if God's own breath is reminding us to awaken from the slumber of routine, to awaken to our higher purpose. This is a time when we stand at the crossroads of the past and the future, contemplating the path we have walked and the journey that lies ahead.

As we dip apples in honey, we are reminded of the sweetness that life holds. Each apple slice becomes a metaphor for our aspirations: the hopes, dreams, and intentions we carry into the coming year. The honey, a symbol of abundance and delight, reminds us that even in times of challenge, there is sweetness to be found. Yet, just as we savour the sweetness of the honey, we are also aware of the underlying bitterness of life's struggles. The two are intertwined, each enhancing the other…

…In this season of reflection, we engage in the spiritual practice of teshuvah – returning to our true selves and to our Divine Source. Teshuvah invites us to confront our mistakes with humility and to turn toward a path of growth and healing. It is a courageous act, acknowledging our imperfections while recognizing the boundless potential for change that resides within us.

As we stand on the threshold of a new year, let us remember that the journey of transformation is ongoing. It requires effort, intention, and the courage to face both our light and our shadow. May we embrace the teachings of our tradition, finding inspiration in the stories of our ancestors, and may we be guided by the values of compassion, justice, and love.

Let us use this sacred time to deepen our connections – with ourselves, with each other, and with the Divine. As we hear the shofar's call, may we heed its message and step forward with purpose and hope. May this New Year be one of blessing, growth, and renewal for us all.

Shanah Tovah u'Metukah – a Good and Sweet Year to you all.”

This part of the service was interactive, to a degree, with people making suggestions, but nobody quite twigged what was going on.

So what was wrong with what I’ve been saying?, I asked. It was quite informative, thoughtful after a fashion, maybe a bit bland, innocuous, it had a smattering of the usual rabbinic cliches and platitudes, but on the whole it was pretty inoffensive. I’ve heard a lot worse sermons. For some reason it reminded me of custard, it had a certain warm glutinous smoothness, but how nourishing was it really?

It didn’t touch the heart or quicken the spirit, it lacked any real moment of illumination, it lacked the unpredictable, it certainly lacked humour - all of which is to say that it lacked ‘soul’ (for want of a better word). Why? Because it was a  “500 word sermon in the style of Rabbi Howard Cooper, generated by ChatGPT”.

It wasn’t me: it was a simulacrum, a facsimile, of me, it was literally Artificial Intelligence, created to sound like me, to mimic me in a way, it was not human - it had no soul - it just bore a spooky resemblance to my living, breathing, human, idiosyncratic self.

ChatGPT - and there are others like it, programmes of information, misinformation and disinformation, programmes that blur the boundaries between truth and falsehood, programmes that can inform but can also fabricate, programmes that can assemble information but also dissemble and falsify - I think we need to talk about ChatGPT. There’s going to be a lot of it coming our way in the months and years to come - when we contact companies, when we seek health care, it’s going to be in schools and our homes and inside our lives - and it raises some real questions about what it means to be human, and how we connect to one another.

In the last twelve months it’s become omnipresent: it’s all around us, for good and for bad - it’s double-edged, as so many technological developments have been in our history. It’s going to do away with the core work of many professions - accountancy, law, financial planning, insurance, some forms of therapy; if you can get a half decent sermon from ChatGPT, maybe clergy can be phased out too.

Who knows? We are on the cusp of the new, and of dizzying changes in how we live: it’s not just technological of course, these changes - it’s in the weather we endure, it’s in the global financial insecurities, it’s the erosion of liberal democracies and the growth of racist and illiberal authoritarianism, it’s the continental war on our doorstep that enters our living rooms, it’s the mass migration of millions of peoples. The tectonic plates are shifting - and our small lives are caught up in this. It’s hard to keep up.

On the one hand, we carry around in our pockets a machine of immense power that gives us access to all the information in the world (useful and useless), it keeps us connected to others in ways both simple and outlandish, it’s been transformative in ways both benign and malign in how we live. It’s certainly expanded what is possible. On the other hand a lot of daily life seems for many to become more and more of a struggle: try getting a GP appointment, try contacting HMRC, try renewing a passport or a driving licence. Try changing your email address with companies. Try negotiating the scams and frauds directed at us. You can add your own experiences. How many hours of time, how much frustration, it’s daily, hourly, it’s endless.

First world problems, you might say - and they are. Yes, what a blessing it is to live in the relative security and relative comfort of the first world - but the shadow side of this technologically-saturated life is our immersion in the dense entanglement of just manging our lives on a daily basis. “I spend so much of my life just managing my life”, a friend said to me recently. Yes, it can be so demoralising, dementing - and it can take us away from what might be more productive and joyful ways of living.

But if we can’t get off this juggernaut, maybe the New Year gives us an opportunity to pause a while, just to look around us and reflect on what’s happening to us, where we are in life, where life is going, where our life is going?  Time perhaps to recalibrate.

For Jews these are days of reflection, of introspection, these so-called ‘Days of Awe’ - here I worry about sounding like my Chat avatar - but nevertheless there’s no getting round the fact that these Days of Awe, Yomim Noraim, are a longstanding part of our tradition. And one of the reasons Jews gather at this season is that - as well any sense of duty or obligation, or in memory of parents, or out of a residual nostalgia, as well of course as seeing each other and celebrating together – is that as well as all that, Jews might also retain a residual faith, or an inkling, that this period has a potential for something new, in our personal life, our spiritual life, our emotional life, the life of our souls, what makes us human.

We’ve been given this gift, this opportunity, once a year, to look inwards as well as outwards, to remind ourselves that the state of our souls is significant: they do become atrophied, numbed, exhausted by life; and they need - we need – to be given attention. We need time to breathe, time for inspiration. Time to consider how we are living, and how we want to live.

And when we look inwards we know: we are not robots, though we might act automatically, even robotically. We are not automatons, but we are programmed - by our genetic makeup, our background, our education, our class, our parental environment, how we were brought up, how free we were to express ourselves growing up, how frightened we were of expressing emotions - anger, aggression, possessiveness, love, timidity, sexual feelings. Both nature and nurture have programmed us to an extent, and we can spend a lifetime trying to de-programme ourselves and discover and express our deepest, truest self, or selves, for we are incorrigibly plural, like the Torah, which tradition says has seventy faces, seventy aspects (B’midbar Rabba 13:15): we mirror that in our own unique multiplicity. As the poet Walt Whitman said “I am large, I  contain multitudes”.

But however programmed we might be, or feel, we still know we are not machines - though we can break down, we can and do wear out, our souls get weary, bruised, battered; which is why it seems important to remind ourselves of what it means to have a soul, even if we aren’t sure what that is, or whether it exists. But if it does have any meaning, to speak of the soul, maybe it’s a way we have developed to talk about - a way Judaism has developed to speak about - our human individuality and the awesome way those tens of thousands of genes are coiled into every molecule of our DNA and we each are universes, multiverses, of consciousness, and all that rich and messy profusion of personal history and neurological complexity adds up to the unrepeatable wonder of who each of is. Nobody like us has ever been, or will ever be.  

The New Year reminds us that being human is a mystery. How can it be that we are capable of such joy and creativity in life and also be capable of such destructiveness as well? How can our capacity for delight co-exist simultaneously with our experience of pain and suffering? Because we are not machines, pre-programmed, we have to develop our own human intelligence - and by intelligence I’m not talking about A-level and  PhD intelligence or smartphone intelligence - I’m talking about spiritual intelligence, for want of a better phrase. We have to develop and hone our own sensibility to what our unique purpose here in the world is. There’s no website for it. You can only find it inside yourself.

‘Today is the Birthday of the World’ - our liturgy offers us a poetic image, a symbol we can make use of, an invitation to celebration and to begin again to ask the most fundamental questions about who we are: what stops us becoming truer to our better selves, what blocks us, what prevents  our enjoyment of life, our productivity, our capacity for generosity, compassion, our passion for justice? We aren’t machines but we might find that something in us keeps coming up like a ‘system error’ and prevents us living in ways more congruent with our values, our idealism, our hopes for the future. Because we do lose touch with our vision. With our idealism. We become cynical, we do get defeated by life. We do end up saying, feeling, ‘there’s nothing that can be done’. But that can’t be the end of the story. The end of the story for us individually, or for humanity.

Estragon: Nothing to be done.
Vladimir: I’m beginning to come round to that opinion.

Yes, we may have moments when we might share Samuel Beckett’s bleak vision in Waiting for Godot - although the humanity of his characters, the humour in his characters, defy that bleakness. There is always ‘something to be done’. The symbolism of the New Year is a reminder that change is possible: our souls are still open enough to sense that through reflection or prayer or reaching out for help to others - or a combination of these things - change is possible. We aren’t machines. Machines might be efficient but they aren’t kind. They don’t care - only we can care, and only we are in need of that attention we call care.

We are vulnerable - and that means we can sense the vulnerability in others. We are dependent - and that means we need other people. Of course we have strength and courage too, a capacity for love, for self-sacrifice. But we need each other.  In our fragility and in our fortitude, we enter these days sensing that the stakes are high. These are Days of Awe - ‘awesome’ has become bit of a buzzword, it’s used by people who’ve been colonised by watching too many  reality TV shows or American movies. We need to redeem it, this notion of awe, because it is speaking of the power of teshuvah, of transformation, at this season: something new can open us for us, inside us.

What is awesome, awe-inspiring, is that as Jews we are bound up in cycles of time and history where we can discover that what we do matters: small acts of random kindness can change the world as much as large acts of fighting for justice, and struggling for societal change. Both the so-called ‘small’ and the so-called ‘large’ are radical investments in hope. We are a people who have been pounded and beaten down in the crucible of history, who have gone through innumerable traumas - yet on the whole we haven’t abandoned our tradition, our heritage. We come back time and again and say: we will not be defeated by the forces arraigned against us - by those who say that the crises we face, in the environment, or in our current European war, or in the vast structural injustices and deprivation in our own country, are too difficult to address, or are not our responsibility - we are not going to let cynicism have the last word.

Nor are we going to let those who feel antipathy to us daunt us. We are a people who travel in defiance of despair, who carry this absurd commitment towards hope, towards change. We carry it in our souls, our psyches. Because we are Jews and human and not machines we know that the future is not programmed, but radically open. It is still unwritten and we will join in writing the script of what will come to be. We do it not with omnipotence but with humility.

This is our destiny, we whose spiritual intelligence is uniquely sensitised to both pointing to what is false in society, what is unjust, what lacks compassion, what lacks a moral core, what lacks humanity - and my God there is plenty of that to point to, to call out - but whose spiritual intelligence is also attuned to what we can do, what role we can play, individually, collectively, what ways we can enact our Judaic vision of justice, compassion and wellbeing.

This is our agenda – let’s hope these Days of Awe give us the space and time to take the next tentative steps forward on this journey of the ages.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on the first day of the New Year, September 16^th, 2023]

 

[On the second day of the New Year, September 17th, I shared the following thoughts]

Let me start with a question: how do you, we, keep track of what we go through every passing hour, the dense profusion of thoughts, emotions, intuitions, anxieties, confusions, that add up to our lives? How do we keep track of, how do we chronicle, the hidden regions of our hearts? Our secret fears and hopes and guilt, our inadequacies, our failures (real and imagined) -whatever it is we struggle with, that daily life throws at us? How do we manage life? As the poet said: “The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life” (Seamus Heaney).

And how do we keep track of, how do we chronicle, the dizzying complexity of our world, the events that cascade around us, that tsunami of news and images from across the globe, the ceaseless, relentless, overwhelming calls for our attention: earthquakes, floods, fires, Russian war crimes, political corruption, kisses that are not just kisses, civil wars, famines, bankruptcies of businesses, cities, ethnic nationalism stirring ancient hatreds, millions of people on the move - the reports inundate our waking hours, and maybe our sleep too, with every piece of unsettling news abruptly overtaken by another, creating narratives that have no end, storylines that have no plot and lose their focus in the presence of the next story, a tumult of stories that keep on exposing all the shades of human vulnerability? The vulnerability of others, the vulnerability of ourselves.

How do we keep track of both what we experience within the circumference of our own small lives - small, but of infinite significance to us - as well as what floods through us in our disordered times? How do we focus in and focus out at the same time? Just a small task that this period in the Jewish year sets before us. Looking within - what can we change? Looking outside - what can we change? This is the annual project of these days - an impossible project, of course. But Jews have always been drawn to impossible projects. Like working towards a Messianic age, like believing in an invisible God, like trusting that a small insignificant tribe in the ancient Middle East received a vision that was relevant for all time and for all humanity. Absurd projects, impossible projects - but they have drawn us in, these projects, these stories, they have seduced us for generations. The seductions of hope. We can look in - and we can look out. A dual focus. Our awesome, mind-bending project.

So how do we keep ourselves going? You can of course switch off from all that outer stuff, and focus, try to focus, just on getting though your own day relatively intact. That’s hard enough - the personal travails of the heart. With bodies and minds that let us down, with people around us who frustrate us or cause us grief, with personal disappointments and losses to manage, we might feel we have quite enough to be getting on with.

Why bother to add to it an awareness of the world around us and how it effects us? Yet we know that it does effect us: that the missile attacks on Kyiv are not unconnected with the price of food in our shops; that the exodus of a population in one war-torn part of the world effects the politics of our government; that the glass in your iPhone is made by Uigar Muslims forcibly transferred from their homes into concentration camps; that in London our non-Ulez compliant vehicles wreak havoc on children’s growing lungs and cause 4,000 premature deaths of year - of course we don’t know the actual children nor, probably, the actual people who die early, it’s just statistics, but we know about all this. Even if all this knowledge can feel unbearable, overwhelming, sometimes - we know that we live in a complex interconnected world where everything is connected to everything else.

So I do understand when people say they just don’t want to think about all that supposedly ‘outer’ stuff. One may just want to focus on what I called the hidden regions of our own hearts, and let the heart of the world succumb to its own arrythmia, it’s own deadly disorders.

This may be a matter of temperament, how much we want to focus inwards, on ourselves, and how much we want to engage with the vicissitudes of the world around  us. And we may move - in a lifetime, or in a single day - from one position to another, and then back again. I know that I want to try to keep track of both, the hidden regions of the heart and the struggles of the world, the struggles in the world. I want to keep an eye on - and chronicle, report back on - the inner and outer world. I want a dual focus: it’s foolhardy in a way, omnipotent maybe, but I want to see everything simultaneously.

I’m reminded of those lines by the great Jewish-American poet Charles Reznikoff :

“If only I could write with four pens between five fingers

and with each pen a different sentence at the same time -

but the rabbis say it is a lost art, a lost art.

I well believe it.”

That speaks to me as we gather at the New Year, in pursuit of the lost arts. How do we hold all that comes at us? How do we find our bearings? Today, almost at random, I am thinking: how do we find our bearings within this European war that touches our lives in different ways; how do we find our bearings when Israel is going through such self-lacerating convulsions; how do we find our bearings with the waves of toxic nationalism and antisemitism and crazed conspiracy theories that swirl around the planet; how do we find our bearings and find some place of stillness within it all, to find some reassurance, or hopefulness, or comfort, or direction, within this life that sweeps us on relentlessly, remorselessly? How do you find your bearings when living in a maelstrom? 

Decades ago the novelist Saul Bellow diagnosed our modern condition as living in what he called the ‘moronic inferno’. And he asked the key question - the religious question, the spiritual and psychological question -  how are we supposed to live and remain fully human when all this goes on around us? And being fully human means being in touch with the good within us but also our capacity for destructiveness - and trying to ensure that the goodness within us wins out as it battles with the all the other stuff that lurks inside. So this is the question for the season we are in: how are we supposed to live now in our times? To live well, I would add. Not just to survive, but to thrive. How are we supposed to do it?

I don’t know. Yes, that’s disappointing, I know. Aren’t rabbis supposed to know? Even if they can’t write with four pens between five fingers, aren’t they, we, supposed to know how we can retain our full humanity, our potential to enact the better parts of our nature, our kindness and compassion, our generosity, our passion for justice? Aren’t we supposed to offer a road map of how we need to be, in our wondrous, wounded world?

The problem is my road map may not be the one that works for you or anyone else. I can share the contours of my map but the work of these days is to seek out your own. Maybe the liturgy can offer clues. Maybe conversations with friends and family can offer clues. Maybe something you read or see or just overhear on the tube can point you in a direction. Maybe an amalgam of all these can help sketch out a map to guide you through the maelstrom.

My road map of how I try and keep my finger on the pulse of life, the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, will probably, possibly, be rather different from many of you for one simple reason: I keep away from social media. I don’t use Twitter, Tiktok, Instagram, Snapchat, Telegram - I know the names and to a degree I know what they are - but I see them as distractions rather than opportunities for enhancing my life. You may feel very differently. But I am easily distracted and I don’t want my attention diffused in a thousand directions, or saturated with what other people want me to be interested in.

I know that for some people these things are a blessing, so yes, build them into, or keep them in, your roadmap. All I know is that I value the freedom non-engagement gives me to have my own thoughts, and develop my own direction, and pursue the richness in the world in other ways.  

I’m not even on Facebook, though - somewhat reluctantly - I do use WhatsApp, which is of course owned by Meta/Facebook. And I say reluctantly not because I don’t want the connection to others it offers - I crave real connection, real intimacy - but for quite another reason. We use, maybe have to use, a huge amount of what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’ to get through our lives. There are things that we know, that we have to pretend to ourselves we don’t know, in order to get on with our lives.

So you must know, if you use Facebook, the ways in which Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has a malignancy curled inside its beating but sclerotic heart that is deeply problematic.  I hear stories every day in my therapy consulting room in which it’s clear that social media is having a detrimental effect on people’s mental health - Instagram is toxic in the ways it promotes fantasies of beauty and body desirability and young women are particularly vulnerable here. And when you are immersed in images of what other people have, or are doing, or who they are doing it with, it generates envy, jealousy, feelings of missing out, worthlessness, unlovability.  It draws out, and draws on, these feelings.

But these apps are addictive - who doesn’t want to be ‘liked’?  And then I think a bit wider about the way Facebook fanned ethnic violence in Africa; was used by the military in Myanmar in their campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority, which led to murder, rape, and dispossession; we saw its poisonous role in the 2016 US presidential election leading to Trump’s election, as well as in feeding lies into the Brexit debates. Yes, I know it can be used for good as well - but the pernicious aspects of the Meta empire are transparent. You don’t have to dig deep to reveal the underbelly of the beast. And like the tobacco industry before it, there’s a deep denial of the evidence that its product can be detrimental to our health.

We use, maybe have to use, a huge amount of what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’ to get through our lives. There are things that we know, that we have to pretend to ourselves we don’t know, in order to get on with our lives.

I really don’t want to moralise all this, I just want to try and describe it, chronicle it, and say that I am caught up in this too. I might not use Facebook, or any social media, in my attempts to manage this maelstrom of a world but I do engage with - another huge distraction from what matters - I do watch a lot of sport. Sport can, along the way, teach us about dedication, endurance and how to mange disappointment and the inevitability of loss - but I know, all sports fans know, how often professional sport is now tainted by its association with human rights abuses, corruption, sexism. It hasn’t yet stopped me watching - that’s my cognitive dissonance - but In my heart I know it should. Aren’t we all complicit? As I say, I am trying not to be too moralistic about this - though there is a moral question at the heart of it - I’m just trying to describe it, where we are. One pen, two fingers.

So this is the question I am posing for these days of reflection: what does your road map look like, what changes might enhance your life, what could you do without, what do you want to add in? ‘Choose life’ is one of the great mantras of Judaism - we are a people enamoured of the possibilities of life, not just surviving in life, but sharing and enacting a vision of the possibilities of fulness of life, a life of compassion, kindness, justice, empathy, a life of caring for the wellbeing of those close to us and those far from us. 

Some of us are going to be more drawn to focus in on our own lives, some of us are going to be more interested in that world out there. One artist who manages the trick, it’s a gift really, of keeping a dual focus is the writer Ian McEwan. His recent book ‘Lessons’ is a masterclass in dual focus: its hero, Roland, one of the so called ‘baby boomer’ generation, struggles to make sense of his life - he is in turns complacent and baffled, loving and lost, indecisive and engaged, his personal life is in many ways a mess, but he has - McEwan gives him - his moments of intimacy, his capacity to show love and to feel loved. In other words, in his complexity and uncertainties and mistakes, in his small triumphs and his disappointments  - he is us.

But McEwan’s pre-eminence as a novelist is in showing us this life interacting with a wider backdrop: the Cuban Missile Crisis, Thatcherism, the Aids crisis, perestroika, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Europe, New Labour, the Iraq war, Brexit, the pandemic, the storming of the American Capitol - the book, and it is long, was finished just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, otherwise I am sure it would have included that. But if you want a text that illustrates, illuminates, the grandeur and complexity of living both looking in and looking out at the same time - which is our situation - McEwan is incomparable. Here he is:

The three [friends] spoke and listened easily, intimately. It often happened like this, Roland thought, the world was wobbling badly on its axis, ruled in too many places by shameless ignorant men, while freedom of expression was in retreat and digital spaces resounded with the shouts of delirious masses. Truth had no consensus... Parts of the world were burning or drowning. Simultaneously, in the old fashioned glow of close family, made more radiant by recent deprivation, he experienced happiness that could not be dispelled, even by rehearsing every looming disaster in the world. It made no sense.

And there you have it - that’s a truly great piece of writing, bringing to the surface what is deep inside. The outer world in all its messiness and threat, side by side with the inner world, that can still experience the joy of living. ‘It made no sense’, the author says. No, it makes no sense. And yet it’s true. Emet. True to how we live.

It’s another almost lost art: of making sense of what makes no sense.

Two Artists: Blessings & Curses

 This week I watched Melvyn Bragg’s Sky Arts programme on the life and work of David Hockney. Hockney’s 86 now - Bragg’s not far behind that, there were 170 years worth of experience on screen together as they talked in Hockney’s studio near the village of Beuvron-en-Auge. These last few years Hockney’s  been living and working in Normandy, where the skies are open, the light intense, the colours rich and vivid, and he’s been painting what he sees each day and what he experiences through the seasons of the year - mostly the fields and trees around him. 

His work is filled with a kind of luminous joy and a lightness of being that the landscape is evoking in him. ‘Yorkshire it ain’t’, as he ruefully acknowledged. This late stage of his work floats free of history, of politics, of environmental threats to the nature he paints - and just celebrates what is there, illuminates what is present in the natural world in the here and now. It has a simple and timeless quality. And he’s made hundreds of paintings there, including a 90 metre wall of a painting of springtime that has to be walked along to be seen and experienced. It’s art on a heroic scale, in the spirit of Monet, but entirely his own, it’s where his idiosyncratic evolution as an artist has taken him.  

And when Melvyn Bragg asked him at the end of the interview: “what are the public responding to in your work, do you think?” he paused. “I don't know” he said slowly - either with diffidence or feigned diffidence, hard to tell with a showman like Hockney - “I don’t know…but I like to think it might be…space”. “Space?” prompted Bragg, trying to coax out a bit more. “Yes, the depiction of space. These paintings all have space in them” - which sounded at first like a bit of a cliché; but then he continued (and I’d had this thought so I was taken aback when he went on): “My sister said she thought space was God - which I thought was an interesting notion”. 

In the Talmud one of the names the rabbis gave to God was ‘Makom’ - space. Moving away from the Biblical and gendered picture of God as a personality that rewards and punishes, the rabbis of a later generation were developing a non-anthropomorphic understanding of God as an energy that animates the universe, that is the space of the universe, that God is what is present in each place, in each space, in the here and now - not an actor in the story but a dynamic within life itself. Divinity not as personality but as potentiality.

Back to Hockney. Because he then developed this idea in a significant and quite poignant way. “I mean”, he said, “I'm going to have no space soon.  I'm going to die…somewhere in the next five years or so…and that will end my experience of space - and time”. He smiled. “I think about this a bit - but then I stop, because it might drive me mad” and then with a wry smile he reached out beside him: “I'll just have a cigarette”. And he lit up.

Space. We exist in space. And then we don’t. Many people say that if they do have any sense of the divine, or the numinous, or a sense of awe, it is connected with certain spaces and places linked to nature: parks, gardens, seas, open skies, rainbows, stars at night, deserts, wilderness, sunsets, spaces where we experience our lives in a different perspective perhaps, see our smallness, feel our transience, in the presence of places, spaces, that open us up to something bigger than ourselves - they might be fleeting moments but they link us to the timeless. “These paintings all have space in them” - we respond to space.

Where do we find space? Do our religious services offer us space? Do we have space for our selves? Where do we have inner space, space to be with our inner nature, the wonder of our particular being in the world, as unique, as distinctive as every tree that Hockney paints? “They are all different, trees, aren’t they?” he said. “Like people”. We need space, but it can be hard to find: our world is very cluttered, so much external stuff demanding our attention every day, every minute of every hour. The tyranny of the smartphone, of social media, of everyday life crammed with demands. You know how it is. Where is the space, outside us, inside us? We yearn for it - is this what people see when they look at Hockney’s late work : the space we crave? The blessing of space. A moment of godliness here and now. Makom. Space is God. God is space.

So far so good. We could leave it there. But I think there’s something missing. What about the randomness of the world?  Because the space of the world gets filled with stuff that isn’t a blessing, that seems far from godly. Even nature is double-sided. We can stand in awe at the side of a waterfall or a Scottish loch, or on a seashore, but sometimes the power of nature is awful not awesome: tides can turn into tsunamis, the sun can wither the harvests, cause forests to burst into flames, rivers can flood, destroying land and people alike, avalanches and earthquakes can extinguish us in a moment. Nature is ruthless, amoral and we romanticise it at our peril. And this is even before we address our role in the destructiveness of climate change. These are the curses we live with.

The section of the Torah we read this week in synagogues addresses this double reality: Deuteronomy 28. It sets side by side what it calls blessings and curses. The promise of abundance and health and wellbeing if God’s commandments are followed; and the threat of disaster and hardships if they are not - the shadow side of life, the tragic darkness of what can unfold.

The latter 50 verses of the chapter show us images of the land blighted, of heat and drought and the death of animals and nature, images of disease and devastation, exile and death, madness, abuse, cannibalism, despair, helpless suffering, populations powerless to resist degradation, persecution, occupation. It’s a piece of extraordinary and terrifying apocalyptic literature, a brilliant and stunning piece of narrative art - Cormac McCarthy eat your heart out - but it’s unbearable to read. Yet we see it starkly unfolding in the daily news. I don’t share the Biblical view that this is God’s punishment for not following the set commandments. But the Torah does suggest that there are consequences we have to face collectively for failures to live ethically: consequences for individuals, for societies, for the planet.

So, as much as Hockney has to offer us, this divine space we need, and images to contemplate and enjoy, perhaps we need another contemporary artist to fill out the picture, an artist who speaks (to my mind incomparably) of consequences, who speaks not of the timeless wonders of nature, but the vicissitudes of history and the fraught impact of the 20^th century on our psyches. His work is also awesome in scale, and if you are drawn to it, it’s not because it offers space for dreaming but because it offers a mirror in which we can see who we are in all our confusion and helplessness and moral darkness.

I am speaking of the great German artist Anselm Kiefer whose sculptural and painted work is filled with the detritus of civilisation, abandoned shopping trolleys, lead books devoid of writing, axe heads, giant wilting sunflowers, scorched earth, human hair and ash mixed into his canvases, scenes of devastated forests and deserted landscapes, broken branches, fragments of glass, weapons of war, skeletal outlines of people, ghosts haunting the present.

His work over the decades has been rooted in the apocalypse of German history - but he’s wrestled it into a body of work (also on a heroic scale) that speaks to universal themes: of loss and devastation and hubris and human destructiveness. He’s the antithesis of Hockney’s ahistorical evocation of the simple goodness and joyfulness of life around him.

And yet, in his latest exhibition - and you can still see it online though its just finished at the White Cube in Bermondsey https://www.whitecube.com/gallery-exhibitions/anselm-kiefer-finnegans-wake - his last room (after you walk through the wreckage of consumerism and the shadows and failures of modernity, arranged with artful randomness) is a room  containing shimmering works of nature - rivers, woods, fields, golden light, a dense profusion of colour, giant canvases completely different from Hockney - the antithesis of Hockney - but also inducing in the viewer a sense of space, of timelessness, of something that we can appreciate and celebrate and feel blessed by. Life goes on, triumphantly. With us, or without us.

Kiefer’s work will never have the popular appeal of Hockney. But just as the Torah’s vision contains the juxtaposition of blessings and curses, each set of images recognisable, truthful, necessary, in order to invoke the messy, contradictory complexity of life, so we in our own lives are fortunate to be able to be inspired and taught by two such different artists. They each give us space - to think, to breathe, to reflect on life’s meaning, life’s preciousness, and our place within it.

[based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, September 2nd 2023]

On Our Human Vulnerability

 It is often said - I have said it myself - that Judaism is an inherently patriarchal religion. The texts of tradition - the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, midrashim, medieval law codes, and so on - were written by men (as far as we know) and they often read as if they are addressed to men, with women as ‘other’. In the last fifty years some brilliant feminist scholarship has helped re-read these texts ‘against the grain’, as it were, but the patriarchal core remains. And yet there are also moments - or more than moments - when a very different sensibility in the Torah comes into play.

Take the text which occurs in the section of Deuteronomy we have reached in our annual cycle of readings: Deuteronomy chapter 24, verse 17

You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the fatherless; you shall not take a widow’s garment in pawn/as a pledge.

This is one of those texts that contains a Biblical theme so familiar that we hardly register how startling its message is - how radical it is not only for its time, but also how compelling its moral weight is even today, in our vastly different situation.

Stranger, orphan, widow - this trilogy of groups to be protected is repeated in the next verses. During harvesting, any grain that is left behind inadvertently must be left for “the stranger, the orphan, the widow” (verse19); and similarly with olives and grapes - what you don’t gather the first time is left for “the stranger, the orphan, the widow” (verses 20-21).

This legislation may emerge from a patriarchal culture, but there’s a clear recognition here that certain women are, potentially, particularly vulnerable: if they have been in a family unit with a husband, and that support system changes, and they are left on their own, then they need special provision. It is a very specific awareness of female vulnerability. The text links this with other non-gender-related examples of vulnerability: children/youngsters who have been orphaned (again, deprived of the security of a family unit, they are particularly vulnerable); and, alongside the widow and the orphan, there’s that existentially-present category of “the stranger”, the outsider, the immigrant, the one who is not part of ‘us’ but who arrives into, or joins themselves to, a community from the outside.

They are vulnerable too - because they don’t innately ‘belong’ to the collective. Either they don’t see themselves as belonging; or, more often perhaps, and more universally, they are not seen as belonging to ‘us’: our tribe, our group, our nation, our society. Now, as then, if you don’t belong to the majority - if you are an outsider - you are vulnerable.

It is remarkable that this injunction in the Torah is repeated so often: 36 times. A constant drumbeat is sustained, of keeping this reality in mind: that it is the ongoing responsibility of the Hebrew community, the Jewish community, to have this fine-tuned sensitivity to the stranger, the outsider. A sensitivity that isn’t just a vague fellow feeling of human connectedness - but involves a demand to translate the feeling into action. The vulnerable need something active from us. Not just sympathy.

And more often than not when we read about this demand, the text - as in our portion (verses 18 and 22) - reminds us that our alertness to human vulnerability is rooted in our historical experience. The foundational mythos of the community is the inherited memory of slavery in Egypt. This part of our story became an archetype in Judaic consciousness about one particular people’s vulnerability - but thereby it became the prototype of humanity’s innate vulnerability. The image of slavery speaks directly about the dynamic of who has power and who is powerless.

To be a slave is to be dependent and vulnerable, with radically reduced agency. And this is your history, the Torah says, this is at the heart of your story. The Jewish people’s story began in helplessness - you must never forget that trauma, the Torah insists. Is this why it is repeated so often - because there is an unconscious wish to forget, to repress, to ‘not know’ the pain of powerlessness?

It’s an extraordinary message, really, to give to a people. Your story doesn’t begin with glory, it begins with degradation, powerlessness.

And in many ways powerlessness and vulnerability have been integral to the whole of the Jewish story up until modernity, and even into it. I don’t want at all to suggest that Jewish history is a story only of eternal victimhood - what the historian Salo Baron called, disdainfully, “the lachrymose view of history”. Of course it isn’t: there was so much wit and wisdom, creativity and genius and joy along the way. But what I am focused on right now is the recognition that outsiderdom, vulnerability, and helplessness has been a transgenerational theme in our story for a very long time. All the way to the gates of Auschwitz. 

Of course Zionism was supposed to have solved that problem for us. But one of the tragedies of Jewish contemporary life is that actually it hasn’t helped us collectively to feel less vulnerable. Perhaps controversially, I would say that because of the way the Zionist enterprise has turned out, it’s made our collective Jewish lives more vulnerable - or at least just as vulnerable as we have always been as Jews in the world. You can have the most high-tech army in the world and the most sophisticated surveillance systems and security services, but once your Jewish state forgets the moral vision of Judaism then, at a fundamental level, it just adds to the historic vulnerability that Jews have always felt. (Look no further than the grey gates that surround our synagogue buildings and the security set-up that everyone has to go through to get into any Jewish institution).   

We are still slaves ‘up here’, in our minds - slaves to a skewed reading of our history, past and present. Vulnerability has become part of our psyches, unfortunately. Like a scar on the soul. But who knows - just a question - might that scar be a price worth paying if it keeps us alert to our shared vulnerability with others? That’s what the Torah seems to want us to do - keep remembering that vulnerability is built into the human condition and that we Jews have a special moral responsibility to remember this, to acknowledge this, and to act on it. The Torah texts even call it a ‘commandment’ that we remember and act on it.

In unstable times - socially, politically, financially, environmentally - we may feel our vulnerability more immediately. Each of us will feel this differently - feelings of vulnerability differ widely from person to person; and we might feel more or less vulnerable at different times of our lives.

How do we live with this vulnerability? One of the things that can sometimes help is community. Our individual vulnerability or fragility or insecurity can be held within the fabric of the collective, the experience that there is something we are (or can be) part of that is stronger than we ourselves may feel individually. And part of the fabric that makes the Jewish collective stronger is that we are rooted in a tradition that is sustained by its immersion in texts and traditions and spiritual themes that say there is a power in the universe that sustains us and nurtures us, that holds us and maintains us, even if we don’t see it, even if we can’t feel it, even if we don’t believe in it. That there is a source of strength and security underpinning our existence.

I would never suggest that the dynamics of this are simple. To feel a sense of security in life can be a hard business. But as the High Holy Days approach, Jews have the time to reflect on these themes, and see if strength can be derived by working on these rhemes collectively.

Yes, there’s our personal vulnerability, and our need to protect others who are vulnerable. But we are not on our own with this. That’s the value of community. Human solidarity is a powerful resource.  

[based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, August 26th 2023] 

"Stop the Boats!"

 

Let’s start with an image, a picture - a celebrated, iconic image from March 1965.

There in the middle is Martin Luther King, Baptist minister and civil rights campaigner, on an interfaith civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery along with - to his left, our right - his  colleague and friend Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (with his distinctive prophetic-looking white beard). 

It’s a wonderful  picture - I love the fact that they are all wearing the Hawaiian lei, symbol of friendship, honour, celebration. It was after this march for social justice and voting rights that Heschel is memorably quoted as saying that, “as we walked, I  felt that my feet were praying”. So a wonderful moment in history captured - but the picture also feels that it belongs to a long lost era: a time when there was an active Black-Jewish interfaith alliance in the United States which brought together Black Americans suffering from continuing social and legal discrimination and Jews, both religious and secular, who as a people had only a couple of decades before that experienced in Europe the discriminatory, dehumanizing and murderous consequences of another form of racism.

In the early 1960s King came to see Jews as “the most consistent and trusted ally in the struggle for civil rights”: he came to value the friendship and support of, for example, a young Reform rabbi, Israel “Sy” Dresner, who recognised that, as he put it, “silence has become the unpardonable sin of our time”. Dresner’s activism frequently led to him being jailed for his non-violent anti-racism activities: four times between 1961 and 63, once together with MLK.  But, as I said, it’s a long gone era because such solidarity between these two groups - whose histories contained parallel narratives of systemic denigration, oppression, and often deadly victimization - fractured in later decades.

Questions of identity politics came along with their competing hierarchies of victimhood; then after 1967 and the occupation of the West Bank the Israel-Palestinian conflict gradually loomed larger; and then what’s come to be known as ‘white privilege’ emerged as a theme: and all this came to overshadow what these two historically-victimised peoples might have had in common, and how they might have been able to support each other in the face of deep-rooted societal strands of anti-black and anti-Jewish prejudice.

That’s very much an American story, but there are parallels to it here in the UK, the fragmenting of shared solidarity into silos where every group starts to feel they have to look out for themselves in the face of institutionalized injustice. This is not the whole story of course - we now have London Citizens which brings different groupings together, there’s the Jewish Council for Racial Equality (JCORE), and there’s active Jewish-Muslim co-operation - but something has changed since those times when that inspirational picture was taken. A competitive embitterment has set in. And of course inspirational leadership is in short supply.

It takes a rare form of leadership to see what kind of pain those outside one’s own tribe might be suffering, one’s own group, one’s own class. To see what one might share as human beings with those who don’t belong to ‘us’. It’s always easier to focus on what differences there might be. It can be important to acknowledge differences, but a sense of solidarity with those who are different is one of the things that the Torah portion read today in our synagogue highlights.

The text of Numbers chapter 22 contains a comedy masterpiece - it’s straight out of Walt Disney. A man, Bilaam, is sent on a mission - but the success of the mission depends on a fantasy talking donkey who is able to see more clearly than the human character.  Bilaam’s a kind of sorcerer, who is supposed to have this so-called prophetic gift - he can bless, he can curse. But the point is he’s for hire. He’s freelance. You pay him enough and he’ll cast a spell on your enemies, you pay him a bit more and he’ll praise you to the heavens, or promise you the earth. He’s smooth talking - he might not quote Latin or Greek like our late unlamented prime minister, but he’ll tell his audience what it pays for him to say. Or what he’s paid to say.

You might be surprised we have a comic sequence in the middle of the Torah, but that’s what the text gives us. You have sorcerer Bilaam, the PR guru, who knows how to use words, and you have the sorcerer’s apprentice, the donkey, who can see God’s messenger each time it appears. Yet Bilaam can’t see what’s in front of his eyes. The donkey first wanders off the path and has to be dragged back, then the donkey manages to crush Bilaam’s foot against a wall, then the third time the donkey just collapses in a heap - because Bilaam again refuses to see what’s staring him in the face. The Biblical storytellers invented this cartoon-like interlude as a counterpoint to the more serious themes. Just as Shakespeare did in his dramas: one recalls the doorkeeper in Macbeth, in the midst of the bloody mayhem: “Knock knock, who’s there?”.  (The first ‘knock, knock’ joke). It is the storyteller’s art to juxtapose the lightness of being with its seriousness.

And the themes in this text not only highlight serious issues but they are surprisingly contemporary ones as well. Political ones.

The story shows how Balak, king of Moab, is worried about what the Israelites might do to his land as they continue on their journey through the desert. That’s why he hires Bilaam to curse them. You can see what’s going on here because it’s in the news every day. Balak sees all these potential immigrants on his border. He doesn’t know they are only passing through, that they are en route to a supposed better life. So he panics. He thinks “Stop the Boats!”, as it were. He thinks these foreigners are going to consume all his  resources, his benefits, his hospital beds and houses:  “this multitude will eat up everything around us as an ox devours the grass of the field”  (Numbers 22:4).  This is brilliant storytelling: the Torah describes these foreigners, through Balak’s eyes, as being like greedy animals - “as an ox devours the grass of the field” - the rhetoric is a classic case of dehumanizing strangers who arrive at our borders.

The Torah is haunted by the future.

So what does Balak do? He didn’t have the tabloid press to do his dirty work, but he did know a man who could make a good speech, Bilaam, who was always for hire. Balak hoped Bilaam could use his way with words against those threatening to ‘swamp’ the land, ‘flood’ over the borders. You see, that’s the power of words - that they can be used  to denigrate and curse as well as support and bless. Words can be used to make people hate each other, or have compassion for one another. It’s the power of language.

And as the Torah text unfolds it shows that Bilaam is a poet, a wordsmith, a conjurer with language:  that was his gift, his power, the slippery arts of the soothsayer, the leader writer, the speechwriter, anyone paid to sow fear, spread distrust. And as the Torah text shows, that’s particularly easy to do against the stranger, the traveller, the immigrants  arriving at a nation’s borders. Words slip, slide, they don’t stand still, they can be used - then or now - to curse, to manipulate, to denigrate; or they can be used to bless, to heal, to comfort.

And the power of this story - and it is a timeless narrative, up to the minute in its significance - is that it illustrates how the most gifted speakers can be more stupid than donkeys, just unable to see what is in front of them - whether it is divine messengers (as in this text) or fellow human beings (who are also, in the Jewish mystical tradition, agents of the divine, carriers of the divine spark).

In the end, Bilaam’s rhetorical gifts are used to benefit life - the life of the Israelite community - rather than to bring to fruition Balak’s fear-driven hatred of the outsider.   And it is solidarity with the outsider that Bilaam gives voice to: “How good are your tents o Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel” (Numbers 24:5); and, amazingly, we begin every prayer service with just these words, which means we begin each service with a quietly crafted irony.

The Hebrew storytellers created a character who was not a Hebrew -  he’s an outsider, he’s not one of ‘us’, the Hebrew people, the Jewish people - but we’re told he has access to God, to the divine dimension of life. And this outsider can see that there is something special about this people, our people. He’s not one of ‘us’ yet he can see something special about us - the storytellers make him into a character who blesses Israel. And then the rabbis came along and lifted those words out of the Bible and said: Yes, that’s how we will begin our services! Each service will start with a blessing, a quote from the Torah - but from someone the Torah says was outside our tribe, our group, our people.

Each service will be a reminder that although we are (or like to think we are) a special group, a distinctive group, we live in a world where not everyone is like us: we live in a world of difference - but let’s try and remember that difference is a blessing, can be a blessing, if we see each other as we really are, not as a threat, but from a perspective of solidarity.

In the end we are all outsiders. We are all outsiders to someone else, some other group, or nation or religion. Actually there is no central group, no core group: we are all spokes on the wheel of life. But our work - spiritual work, psychological work, political work - is to appreciate that what makes us different from each other is not a curse for humanity but a potential blessing.

As we journey on, in whatever community we belong to, as we journey on like Israelites through the desert, we can develop, practice, the art of bringing a blessing to each other, of seeing the best in others and not always fearing the worst. Is it a lost art? Let’s hope not. Let’s imagine we can be bearers of the prophetic spirit, like Bilaam in the end, like Martin Luther King, like Abraham Joshua Heschel: let’s imagine we can be carriers of hope not hate.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, July 1^st, 2023]