On Saturday night, at the Selichot service, we took our first tentative steps, collectively, to edge towards our Jewish New Year. It feels like it’s been a long time coming. The vagaries of our calendar mean that this year it’s very late, our New Year, it’ll be October already when it begins – it’s been a leap year, so an extra month was added, but still, something about the waiting this year feels different to me.
I think it’s
due, perhaps inevitably, to the way this last 12 months in Jewish history have
played out, are still playing out, how much has changed, how much we have lived
through, how much we have suffered, how much we have been burdened by, how much
are hearts have been divided, how much our souls have been squeezed – and we
know that the New Year is a time of reflection, of inward-looking, of a
re-alignment in our souls towards our core values, a time of teshuvah, of
recognition of wrongdoing, of accounting for what we have done and what we have
failed to do – and how are we going to do all that at the end of this
tumultuous, history-defining, history-defying year?
Have we been
more sinned against than sinning? Some may well feel that. Others may feel that
whatever the opprobrium heaped on our heads this last year, whatever the
aggressions directed against the Jewish people here and in Israel, there is
still a burden of guilt on our shoulders too, collectively: I know that some in
the Jewish community are feeling that guilt keenly along with a sense of shame
at every child buried under the rubble of Gaza. And some in the community, not
so much. This has not been an easy year and these are not easy things to talk
about. These are not easy things to carry with us into our New Year and the
soul-reckoning that this period of the year asks of us.
So all of
this makes this New Year now approaching feel different from any other. And,
for me, in addition to what I feel like as a fellow Jew with all of you, there
is also the added question, which others are perhaps fortunate not to have to
consider, the feeling of responsibility to talk about all this in the
community, to the community. How to speak what is true to a divided community,
for there are very different constituencies here in our synagogue communities
and the wider Jewish community - all of them hurting in various ways. And how
will I find the words to speak to that divide, across that divide, on Rosh
Hashanah and on Yom Kippur? I don’t know yet how I will do it.
But when I
don’t know how to speak, or what to say, I often turn to the writers and poets
of the past, to see if I can glean any clues about how to speak in such
difficult times as these. Not what to say, for they did not face our situation,
but how to say it, how to think about articulating what matters in words. This
week I came across a line from a lecture by the Italian novelist Calvino, Italo
Calvino, from 1976, in which he said “What we ask of writers is that they
guarantee the survival of what we call human in a world where everything
appears inhuman”.
Twenty years
after the Shoah every writer - novelist, playwright, poet, essayist – every
writer of worth, was facing this question: how to keep on speaking of the
‘human in a world where everything appears inhuman’. As his fellow Italian
writer, Primo Levi, said “I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man”
(If This Is A Man). But I am wondering at this season : Do we remain
amazed? Do we remain astonished, astounded, dumfounded, by humanity’s capacity
for inhumanity? And that can be in the home, in society, on the world stage.
Because if
we can bear to look – and many of us cannot bear to look for we fear looking
and going mad – but if we do look, if we do expose ourself to acts of
inhumanity, which are reported on a daily basis from somewhere near or far,
what is evoked in us? Can we give it a name? Maybe we can’t – being ‘amazed’ is
not what I experience, it’s more a deep disquiet, a horror, a soul-sickness, a
revulsion at what being human can mean, being human but not humane.
How do we
‘guarantee the survival of what we call human in a world where everything
appears inhuman’? – for this is surely the task not only of the artist but of
all of us. But when we are bombarded by the inhumane it takes its toll on us –
of course we can shield ourselves, just not look, we can remain indifferent, or
cynical, or even (God-forbid) defenders of acts of inhumanity: ‘They deserved
it…they had it coming to them…they are just animals’.
But for
anyone who wants to feel that they value the survival of the ‘human in a world
where everything appears inhuman’ those responses will feel like failures. But
still, what we are do, what are we to feel, when faced with something like the
amazing technological ingenuity entwined with the moral barbarism of exploding
pagers and walkie talkies? Do we feel ethnic pride – or do we feel human
horror? And what do each of these responses say about us? This is the season
for these questions.
Can we find
a language, can we find the words, to speak of what happens to us, to our
souls, when exposed to acts like these? I am not sure I have the words, can
find the words, although, as I say, I feel a responsibility to find some words.
But if I can’t as yet craft my own words I can at least share with you the
words of others, like Primo Levi, who survived the inhumanity and returned to
speak of what he had seen and what he had learnt in it and from it. Words like
this:
“Auschwitz
is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died
away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it.
Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering
of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of
authority, and above all at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of
cowardice, a colossal cowardice which marks itself as warring virtue, love of
country and faith in an idea.” (The Black Hole of Auschwitz)
Before he
died, Moses wrote down the story of what he had experienced with his people –
we read the text this week - the events, the lessons, the laws, the failures,
the struggles of the journey his people had taken. This story – this ‘Torah’ our
storytellers call it (Deuteronomy 31:9), this ‘teaching’ - was to be read to
the community every seven years: this is your story, Moses says, you need to
know it, it was written not for those who had gone through it personally
(almost all those had died on the journey through the desert) but for the next
generation, who hadn’t. But it was still their story. And it is still our
story.
We remain
faithful to the story of the need to re-tell the story.
But we moderns have other words too, words created in our more recent past that have become part of a Torah for our times, a teaching, a kind of revelation that speaks to us of truths that transcend our own times – you can call them ‘eternal’ truths if you are so minded - and Primo Levi is, I think, a foundational voice within the Torah of our times. We read his texts and re-read him, for everything is within it.
He offers us
an angle of vision to help us look at the human and the inhuman in every
society on our fragile planet - and when he discerns that the bacillus of
dehumanisation is still alive within the human heart, we might do well to pay
attention. He knows whereof he speaks when he calls out the “Rejection of
human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others,
abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority,
and above all at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a
colossal cowardice which marks itself as warring virtue, love of country and
faith in an idea.”
Torah for
our times.
[based on
a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, 28th September 2024]
