'Everything Is Connected to Everything' - on Butterflies, Stalin and Visions that Fade

 The Jewish mystics of old believed that everything in the world was connected to everything else, that we are all caught up in an immense web of being, with the energy of the universe flowing uninterruptedly through everything that lives. The breath of all life animating us, moment by moment, is part of the divine flow of energy animating existence. Everything is connected, in a constantly unfolding chain of being, with everything else.

Four hundred years or so after Rabbi Isaac Luria developed these mythopoeic ideas about the nature of reality (as he saw it), Professor Edward Lorenz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a paper entitled Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas? and thus, in 1972, so-called Chaos Theory was born. This was a paradigm leap in scientific understanding about how the universe works, how everything is indeed connected to everything else  in a vast web of being - and a small action here (the so-called ‘butterfly effect’) ripples out in a way that is ungraspable but real, and effects something else on the other side of the planet. 

And so the mystic’s understanding is mirrored in the advanced mathematical models of the scientist’s understanding. For us ordinary mortals – well, for me, anyway – there is almost no way to make sense of this ‘butterfly effect’. It is so outrageously beyond rational understanding. Because it’s not just about butterflies of course. To feel that every word you utter, every action you make, reverberates  out into the ether, has consequences beyond our reach, beyond our understanding, beyond our control. Surely it would be paralysing to think like that? Nobody could live like that, with that degree of awareness. We would go mad.

And yet there’s something about that notion that things are connected to each other in ways that we can never know, never understand, never track, never discover, there’s something about that sense of being held within this great mystery of a web of interconnected energy, there’s something about that, about the poetry of it, that is beautiful and inspiring and humbling, at least for me.

One thing that this sense of interconnectedness allows me to do, encourages me to do, gives me permission to do, is play with ideas, play with connections, trace connections, follow lines of inquiry, of imagination, of intuition, to see how things could be connected. For example this week I have been playing with three themes – themes which at first glance might not seem particularly connected but that I feel can be productively connected.

Idea one: I have been thinking a lot recently about Stalinism. I ‘ve just finally finished the Soviet-Jewish writer Vassily Grossman’s monumental novel ‘Life and Fate’: it was banned in his homeland, but it’s one of the most significant novels of the 20^th century. It is our era’s equivalent of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’, offering a vast panorama of life in central Europe, Russia and Germany, in the 1930s and 1940s. Set during the Nazi siege of Stalingrad during World War 2, Grossman compares the different kinds of horrors of two totalitarian states. He takes us into the concentration camps and the gulags and is unsparing in his portrait of the paranoia and cruelty of the Soviet system under Stalin, how it infiltrated family life and everyone’s mental life, how one word out of place, reported by a colleague, or neighbour, or family member could lead to persecution, torture, exile.

And reading this extraordinary book – about life and death and the randomness of history -  led me reflect on how Soviet communism, and the ideology of socialism the Soviet Union said it was enacting, captured the imagination of two, three, generations, world wide in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s and beyond. I have been to a fair number of funerals for an older generation (often parents of friends) who were members of the Communist party in the old East End of London. They were just part of a whole cohort of folk  who became enamoured of the experiment that was taking place in the Soviet Union to create a new kind of society that was to enact in a secular form the messianic dream of the ages, a society of equality and justice.

It was a noble, aspirational vision but it was a vision corrupted by Stalin and his henchmen and notions of ideological purity, and a gap opened up between the reality on the ground and the rhetoric of the state - and that gap was filled from the 1930s until Stalin’s death in 1953 with the execution of a million Soviet citizens, deliberate mass starvation in Ukraine, forced labour camps, deportations, detentions, interrogations, bloody massacres, show trails, antisemitic purges against Jewish doctors and writers…and all the while not only impoverished Jews in the East End but some of the great minds of European thought were fellow travellers with the communist vision, defenders of it, promoters of it.

And what fascinates me, and horrifies me, and makes be anxious (though I will come to that) is the question about when followers of this vision finally abandoned it.  When did they realise they had been seduced into a huge error of judgment by the rhetoric and propaganda of the Soviet State, and its emissaries, an error that was intellectual, emotional, spiritual? How long did it take for them to let go of their wishful thinking in the face of evidence of the evils of the actual system they were supporting?

HG Wells, George Orwell, Camus, Sartre, John Steinbeck, Simone de Beauvoir – I am not going to name too many names – they gradually became disenchanted,  but often it took decades for that disenchantment to really sink in, in spite of abundant evidence from very early on that this was an experiment that was not only persecuting its own people but was involved in what we would now describe as crimes against humanity.

So was it the show trials of 1937-8 that did it? Was it the annihilation of Jewish intellectuals in 1952? For many communist fellow-travellers it was the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. For some it wasn’t until the crushing of the Prague spring in 1968. People held on to their commitment to this ideology for decades, and nothing could force them to disconnect from their younger decades of enthusiasm. There is a real psychological issue here at the heart of this historical question. When we have become fixated on an ideology that gives us some kind of emotional satisfaction, some kind of vision of hope, what does it take to let it go and acknowledge our mistake, our naivety, our false thinking? It is actually very hard to do. If we are holding fast to an ideology, how long do we keep silent about crimes done in its name – or even find a way of justifying them? The story of the Soviet Union is a text case for this.

Second idea: from our Torah portion this week, which contains the famous phrase na’aseh ve’nishma [‘we will do and we will listen’]: this is the children of Israel’s response to Moses when he brings down from Sinai God’s teachings, God’s laws. “And all the people answered with one voice”, says our storyteller, “saying: Everything that the Eternal has commanded we will do” (Exodus 24:4). And then a few verses later, after Moses is described recording the obligations of the covenant and reading it aloud to the people, we hear “And they said: Everything that the Eternal has spoken na’aseh ve’nishma, we will do it and we will listen to it, we will obey it, we will try to understand it” (24:7).

There is an almost unanimous tradition of reading this text that praises the faithfulness of the Israelite people in saying na’aseh ve’nishma. It is seen as an acceptance of their role as God’s chosen people. ‘We will do what is required’. And the commentators point out that it is particularly worthy of praise that the people say they’d do whatever was required before they had understood what it meant, before they had heard (shema) what they were agreeing to. It is not clear if the Biblical phrase does mean a sequence or whether it is a combined ‘doing and hearing’ activity. But the traditional commentators tend to stress this was an unquestioning commitment to action – that was followed by thinking, reflecting on what it meant.

That’s how this phrase is always read nowadays by rabbis and Jewish teachers: ‘look how devoted the Jewish people were/are in following God, they agreed to do it even before they knew what was involved’. The only dissenting view I could find belongs to the Sadducees, the group who had religious and political power during the Second Temple period - but lost their authority once the Temple was destroyed in 70CE. Their opponents, the Pharisees, evolved into the rabbis who wrote the Talmud and developed Judaism into the forms that we have inherited.  The Talmud is uniformly hostile to the Sadducees, and as not a single line of Sadducean writing has survived, we are dependent on their adversaries to see into their thinking. A great example of how history is written by the victors.

So there’s one passage in the Talmud discussing  this phrase na’aseh ve’nishma in which the Sadducees are recorded as being critical of the Jewish people, calling them ama paziza – “a rash people, for whom the mouth precedes the ears …you should have listened in order to know whether you were able to accept”’ [cf. Aviva Zornberg, ‘The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus’, p.303). And this is the essence  of my second theme: I am becoming more and more sympathetic to the dissident view of the Sadducees here, against the overwhelming weight of the tradition.

And the reason is – and maybe you can begin to see how everything is connected to everything else – I have real doubts, about the wisdom of subscribing to any ideology (and religious faith is an ideology) that requires one to submit to its thinking, that asks for a priori obedience, whether it is obedience to the programme of a Stalin or a God or a religious tradition. Because obedience so often has a persecutory shadow side, an under-edge, that involves punishing those who don’t follow the party line. Or – as in Catholic guilt and Jewish guilt – punishing oneself for not being obedient enough.

To accept any ideology (political or religious of cultural or social) and not be free to question it is foolhardy, ‘rash’. To have to submit to received opinion can be soul-destroying. But to call into question what one has accepted voluntarily, what one has followed perhaps enthusiastically for decades, to call into question a belief system that might have sustained you for years - that is very difficult, painful. To say I have seen what this ideology, this system, this vision actually does, and I can no longer go along with it - that requires a kind of intellectual and emotional and spiritual bravery (or is it honesty? or is it objectivity?) which not everyone can muster. Not least because it might leave a huge gap where that belief once sat – and what does one replace it with?

Third idea, everything being connected to everything else. What about the chaos of feelings we Jews might be having about Israel/Gaza right now? The ever-present elephant in the room. And I feel reluctant to speak about it. So let me just name it by saying that the questions I was asking earlier about the fellow-travellers of  communism, those defenders of the system in spite of the evidence coming out of the Soviet Union – and at this distance it might seem hard to reconstruct just how powerful and seductive were the narratives woven by the defenders of the system – those questions I was raising are, I think, pertinent to the questions one might have about being a fellow-traveller and defender of the Zionist vision.

We each will have our own take on this - but although it is now relatively safe to talk about when the scales fell from one’s eyes about old-style Soviet communism, it can feel far from safe to talk about it in relation to contemporary Zionism. (Please note I am not comparing the problematic content of actions  - but the process of how hard it is to question and then perhaps let go of the evocative vision that one might attach oneself to).

So at some stage we need to ask when did it happen to you? Has it happened to you? People like Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt drew attention to the fundamental problems of the Zionist endeavour in the 1940s, as the State was born; for others it wasn’t until after 1967 and the conquered territories were held on to rather than relinquished, and then gradually settled on, and it became clear that justice for the other inhabitants of the land, and the refugees, has being delayed, postponed, pushed out of the story. The mantra of na’aseh ve’nishma, we will do it and then reflect on it, was a powerful one in the Zionist story, and many Jews around the world became faithful followers of the ‘doing’, and set aside their misgivings, their ‘listening’ to the consequences. For some, those feelings of being enamoured by the original vision of a Jewish homeland began to sour with the Sabra and Shatillah massacres in 1982, or the Lebanon war in 2006, or the first Gaza war in 2012, or the declaration of ongoing Jewish supremacy in Israel codified in 2018 in the Nation State law. Or maybe it is this current chaos that is doing it, finally.

Everything being connected to everything, we can ask in relation to Israel: when was your 1956 Hungarian uprising moment? Or has it not happened yet? Are you with the Pharisees or with the Sadducees on this current tragedy? Is it ‘rash’ to be critical of Israel at a time like this when so many in the world are feeling hostile to both Israel and Jews? Or is it ‘rash’ to be uncritical, to be still enamoured of the ideology, the vision of Zionism as it defends its ‘we will do whatever it takes to prevail’ philosophy?

How many wings of how many butterflies will have to flutter, and how many will have to be torn apart, before the spirit of history declares a winner? Because at the moment there are no winners, just the cruelty of lives destroyed. And for that we weep, and have cause to weep.  

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, February 10^th, 2024]