“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, 11th November
2023]
