Two themes have been on my mind this week - trauma and holiness - and I’ve been wondering whether they are linked. On the surface they seem quite distinct. But what we discover in life, perhaps, is that everything is connected to everything else: that’s one of the meanings of the Biblical and liturgical phrase Adonai Echad – “God is One” – that there is a fundamental unity to existence in which everything is linked in myriad ways to everything else; that there is a unity even if we only experience fragmentation.
Trauma – we
know what that is, or think we know. How best to define it? Severe emotional distress to psychologically
shocking events? The kind of distress inside that lingers, over time -
sometimes months, years, decades after the precipitating event or events. The
kind of distress that causes a sense of fracture
in our worlds, affecting how we think, how we sleep, how we form relationships,
whether we can find enjoyment in life. I know that the word is used
colloquially and loosely these days - anything can be described as a trauma
(getting a bad haircut, missing a bus, being ignored by a waiter, somebody not
texting you back) but these irritations - slights to our innate wish for the world
to go the way we want it to - aren’t what I’m talking about.
The kind of
thing I’m reflecting on – and this is what prompted me to start thinking about
it this week - is the experience of a seven year old German boy called Frank,
who in April 1939 was sent by his parents Max, a lawyer, and Charlotte, an
artist, on a train from Hamburg to England. Where he’s lived ever since, living
and working in one room, in Camden, painting and drawing, obsessionally, every
day of the year, year in year out, decade after decade, painting what he sees
out the window, or in the streets around him, or painting a few people who sit
for him, often for years, the same people, and he sits and paints, then scrapes
off the paint, and paints again, more layers, building a portrait of an
external scene, or of a living person whose life is what the artist seeks to
capture, to present, to re-present, to make come alive.
Frank
Auerbach never saw his parents again – another victory for Auschwitz – and as
he turns 92, one can only wonder about the relationship between the UK’s greatest
living artist’s way of living and working – solitary, monastic almost, devoted
to making things live on an easel, on a canvas, to hold them, capture that
aliveness – one can only wonder about how that unswerving endeavour is
connected to what we can accurately describe as the trauma of his early life.
Everything is connected to everything else.
I started
thinking about Auerbach this week because I read a recent interview with him in
which he said “…it’s possibly true that our deepest experiences are other
people. And it seems the only thing worth using for one’s art is one’s deepest
experiences.”
“Our deepest
experiences are other people” – is that the same as ‘Our deepest
experiences are with other people’? I’m not sure. But the notion that “the
only thing worth using for one’s art is one’s deepest experiences” touched me
in different ways. It touched me personally because when I write, or speak, I
do think of it as a form of artistic endeavour – and I hope that doesn’t sound
too grandiose, but I’m sharing my experience right now, how I think and feel
about what I do, what I am doing right now. So it touched me personally,
But what he said
also touched me because of what it made me think about his deepest experiences
- of loss, of disjuncture, of rupture, of disorientation, of bereavement, of
not being able to hold on to the living presence of others, his parents. And it
left me wondering, as you can hear, about those deep experiences of his - that
trauma, for want of a better word (though it suddenly sounds like an
impoverished word to describe losing a world) and how it is related to his way
of making art.
And it was
interesting that he went on to say, “People say they are expressing themselves
– but I’m not expressing myself at all. I’m trying to make an image”. That’s
the conscious wish of course: to make an image, to capture something and keep
it alive, for itself, and for the one who looks at it. But of course something
else is going on, is always going on, because
he went on in the interview to add the comment that years later he might
look at a work “and see how I felt at the time, but wasn’t aware of then”. So
the unconscious is always in play. You think you are making an image - but you
find later that in doing so you are
revealing a feeling. But you don’t notice that at the time.
So here I
am, adding layer on layer to this portrait - in homage to Auerbach, as
it were - adding, reflecting, scraping away, all in the name of speaking about
trauma – which is all around us, all the time. I’ve just read that the oceans
have had a sudden unprecedented rise in temperature in recent months, and
scientists are baffled and extremely concerned (I want to say traumatised),
about what the consequences will be for sea levels and the marine ecosystems
and flooding, and everything is connected to everything, so this will affect us
all, is affecting us all, the low level trauma we have to mange somehow in our
daily lives, though it isn’t manageable and just seeps into the crevices of our
souls.
So much for
my first theme: trauma.
So what
about holiness? The sedrah this week was Kedoshim. “You shall be
holy…” (Leviticus 19)– it feels almost absurd to speak about that in the same
breath as trauma. Are they linked? Can we link them? We know the themes of
holiness – they are well rehearsed. The injunction at the heart of the Torah
for the Israelites to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy people”. This is the
vision we have carried for millennia. In the midst of the Levitical chapters
filled with all the details about ritual holiness, texts focused on the priests
and the sacrificial cult, comes this startling code of moral and ethical
conduct, a quite different definition and detailing of what holiness means.
For the
Torah, of course, everything is connected to everything – so ritual
purification (holiness) is integrated with, connected seamlessly to, the
actions of every individual in everyday
life (personal holiness): respect your parents; leave
part of your harvest for the poor and the stranger (an early example of food
banks); do not steal or embezzle or lie; don’t oppress each other (that one’s
for Dominic Raab, amongst a million others); don’t delay payment to your
employees and ensure they have reasonable hours; don’t curse the deaf or trip
the blind; don’t pervert justice; don’t go around gossiping or bearing tales;
don’t nurse a grievance, take revenge, or hold a grudge; respect your elders; protect
the stranger; don’t cheat in business; and, a culminating way of being holy,
almost a one line sound-bite to this guide to holiness: “you shall love your
neighbour as yourself” (19:18) - that radical call to identify with the Other
as if he or she is as valuable a human being as you are. And as deserving of
care as you are.
And when we list these
requirements, these imperatives, for holy living – the stuff of everyday life,
valid for all people and for all societies, a timeless code that is millennia
old, at the heart of our Jewish vision - maybe we can glimpse its relationship
to trauma. Although some traumatic events are beyond human control, earthquakes
for examples, many forms of trauma in the past and in the present are linked to
failures to live attuned to this holiness code.
Whether it is the traumas
of war, of rape, of slavery, of all the forms of abuse that people can inflict
on each other, the psychological scars that are carried are a direct result of
humanity’s inability to live in the light of holiness, to be guided personally,
socially, nationally, by holiness. When
holiness fails, trauma comes into being. When holiness goes into eclipse, trauma
creeps into view. When holiness is
abused or mocked, trauma seeps into the soul.
Kedoshim tihiyu says the Torah: ‘You will be
holy’, ‘you must be holy’; but also we can hear in Kedoshim tihiyu
: “you are made to be holy” – this is your purpose in life. Without
that, expect only trauma, in all its endless varieties. If you spend seventy years
in a room painting, drawing, sketching, you can make great art out of trauma.
That is a kind of holy living, the holiness of the Zaddik, the saint, the
mystic – but for the rest of us, we struggle towards holiness lest trauma
overwhelms us.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, 29th April 2023]
