Let me start with a piece of Hasidic thought, and see what we can make of it.
“Let all
cry out to God and lift our heart up to God, as if we were hanging by a hair,
and a tempest were raging to the very heart of heaven, and we were at a loss
for what to do, and there were hardly time to cry out. It is a time when no
counsel, indeed, can help us and we have no refuge save to remain in our
loneliness and lift our eyes and heart up to God, and cry out to God. And this
should be done at all times, for in the world a person is in great danger”
When I
encounter a traditional Judaic text – whether it is a part of Jewish liturgy,
or from the Bible, or from another Jewish literary source – what stance do I
take up in relation to it? I don’t feel the texts of tradition are there to be
submitted to, or to be accepted unquestioningly – when I am teaching I usually
try and make this explicit - they are thoughts that Judaic culture has valued,
to which we bring our own experience and thoughtfulness, our own perhaps hard-won
authority (if we feel we have any).
As we engage
with the texts - hopefully in a spirit of openness, of willingness to both
question and to receive what the words offer us – I think of these texts of
tradition, whether ancient or contemporary, as being like presents given to us
to unwrap, to play with, to see if they are emotionally stimulating, or thought-provoking,
or just useable in some way. Maybe we will discard them, maybe we will learn to
treasure them, maybe one time that we engage with them they will speak to us,
and other time not - we can never know in advance.
What we
receive from any text may just depend on what kind of mood we are in. Sometimes
we are tired, or fed up, or preoccupied with something – and the words lie
listless on the page. At other times we may find that we can hear what is being
said and we might be moved by it, or it might trigger our own ideas and fertilise
our imagination. Something comes through to us.
{I think
this understanding about how sometimes texts speak to us and sometimes they don’t
is particularly relevant to experiences we have with liturgy during religious
services: all sorts of factors are in play as we encounter the words of our texts,
week by week. This seems to be obvious – but is rarely spoken about, in my
experience, so probably is worth saying now).
So here,
now, what do we make of this Hasidic text? Does it speak to us, can we relate
to it?
Where to
start? Maybe we should start at the end – often a good place to start, I find. It’s
what first caught my eye. All this crying out, lifting up our hearts, should be
done, the text says, “at all times, for in the world a person is in great
danger” – Are we? Are you? Can you relate to that? Do you feel you are “in
great danger?”
Maybe that
doesn’t speak to you - but if we feel there might be some truth in it, that we are in “great danger”, what might that
danger be? Well, we can start close to home – our bodies, our health: maybe we
have an illness, a long term condition, an underlying vulnerability, we don’t
know how long we have in this world. Of course that’s true of all of us, but
some of us may feel it more keenly than others - about ourselves, or someone we
love (the danger might be about losing someone). If it is about our own
well-being, this danger we can feel is existential, it is part of the human
condition: anything , we know, can happen to us at any moment.
Because we
are embodied beings we are vulnerable, we are fragile, accidents can happen,
our lives can be snuffed out in an instant. We know this - in our heads. But we
don’t necessarily feel it in our hearts. We are lucky enough to live with
cognitive dissonance, because if you did feel at every moment that your life
was “in great danger”, that would be unbearable, wouldn’t it? we couldn’t live
like that, with that degree of anticipatory awareness that each moment might be
our last.
Which links
with our emotional health - our ‘mental’ health, as it is so popular to call it
these days, as if our minds were quite separate from our bodies, from our ‘selves’;
yet they are completely integrated, psyche and soma, inner world and physical
world - they are Echad, like God, One. (Big topic, not for now).
So: this
theme of being “in great danger” could also speak to our emotional well-being
as well as our physical well-being. We can easily feel unstable, adrift,
persecuted, ‘in danger’ of a disturbance to our feelings of well-being. We
might know quite well how fragile, how unsettled, our inner states of mind and
being are. Nobody else may know, but we know. The pharmaceutical giants selling
their industrial-scale stockpiles of
anti-depressants are not multi-billion dollar businesses for no reason.
We are vulnerable, we are fragile, in our emotional life as well as our
physical life - which are, as I said, in essence, Echad, One.
How else
might we be “in great danger”? Perhaps your first thoughts were not about your
own physical or emotional wellbeing. You might have thought outside yourselves,
perhaps to the danger of the environmental emergency - and actually those
earlier lines in our text could almost be read as if they were addressing that
crisis: “…as if we were hanging by a hair, and a tempest were raging to the
very heart of heaven…” – yes, the crisis is about the air we breath, and
the CO2 we pump out into the heavens, and yes, as the text goes on to say: we
are “at a loss for what to do, and there [is] hardly time to cry out” –
isn’t that how we feel sometimes, at a loss for what to do? and maybe it is later than we can bear to
think, maybe there is now “hardly
time to cry out”.
And although
we know that there are things that can be done, that we have to collectively
raise our voices to “cry out”, and we know that the script of life on this
planet is not yet written, we might feel sometimes just as the text puts
it “as if we were hanging by a hair,
and a tempest were raging to the very heart of heaven, and we were at a loss
for what to do, and there were hardly time to cry out”. This text is obviously not about the
environmental crisis - and yet is also about it, now, for us. Texts can be
timeless, sometimes.
Once one
begins to consider this theme of “in great danger” we realise all sorts of ways
it can speak to our present condition. Read this text in Ukraine - where it was
written, by the way - and you know exactly the truth of what it is saying. Two
hundred years old, this text - and it’s the six o’clock news, today. But you don’t need to live in a war zone, or
be cold and shivering in a rickety boat at the mercy of the waves in the
Channel, to think about being “in great danger”.
In the UK, whether
you are queuing 10 hours in Accident and Emergency to be see by a doctor, or
queuing at a food bank, or have just had your benefits cut, again, or are in
danger of losing the roof over your head, then being “in great danger” might
ring unsettlingly, frighteningly true. Whether it’s knife crime or domestic
violence or a host of other life situations, the list of dangers is long and
painful. So many dangers - and let’s not start with antisemitism or systemic
racism or rogue nuclear states – isn’t there often a feeling ‘there’s hardly time
to cry out’?
But what
this text of ours insists is that we do need to “cry out”. The text is actually
structured around this image. See how it starts: “Let all cry out to God…”
And look how that urgency is conveyed in two long sentences, ending in “and
cry out to God” – it loops back to that - before the coda tacked on, that it
should be “done at all times”, because each person, all of us, are “in great
danger”.
(For those
who are interested in these things, the text has a distinctive concentric
structure: I learnt from my Bible teacher Rabbi Jonathan Magonet to look out
for these things - chiastic structures, usually in poetry, but it can be in
prose).
In our structured
text the core theme of crying out is at the beginning, the middle and the end -
we are taken on a journey: from wishfulness, through doubt, to hope: “Let all cry out…hardly have time to cry
out….cry out”, followed by the coda.
So – plenty
in this text to unwrap, to turn and turn, for so much is in it. But what haven’t
I addressed? You may have noticed that I haven’t spoken about what, for this Hasidic
world view, is a self-evident reality. Where do you cry out to? What do you cry
out to? It’s God. But can we do that, we moderns, we who are a mixture
of believers, and non-believers, of secret believers and secret doubters, we
who maybe don’t know what to believe, who don’t know how to believe, we who might
not feel we know what belief even means any more?
Maybe too
may feel we live in a time “when no counsel…can help us, and we have no
refuge save to remain in our loneliness”? But perhaps we don’t have to
remain stuck like that. For some, it may still be possible to “lift our eyes
and hearts up to God”; but also – spoiler
alert: theology coming up - we might now want to say that we can lift up our
eyes and hearts to each other, to the ‘God’ that dwells in our
fellow human beings, to the divine in our loved ones, in our friends, our
neighbours, in the people seated next to us at religious services; reach out to the godliness incarnated in our synagogue
and church communities. We can still do that - lift up our eyes and hearts to
each other, to see each other: we are all struggling, mortal, fallible human
beings; let us see each other in all our naked humanity and cry out to each
other: ‘this is how it is for me, this is how I feel in the world, this is what
I fear, this is what I struggle with’.
That’s the
value of community, that we are not just alone with these questions: the ‘dangers’
we face are individual and they are collective - but we can offer each other
support and encouragement as we face these things. “And this should be done
at all times”, as the text says. We can face these dangers together.
Solidarity with each other. Solidarity is not just for ‘Match of the Day’ commentators
and presenters. We can show it, share it, with each other.
[loosely
based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, March 18th, 2023]
