tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84570675609685975982024-03-18T09:18:57.644+00:00Howard Cooper's BlogJewish interest stuff from a rabbi and psychotherapistHoward Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.comBlogger214125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-32667064279004275742024-02-21T11:17:00.000+00:002024-02-21T11:17:46.938+00:00Two Kinds of Jew - A Sketch on Jewish Identity<p> <span style="font-size: 14pt;">Let me sketch
out a cartoon-like version of two kinds of Jews – or rather two forms of
feeling life within contemporary Diaspora Jews, two stances towards Jewishness
that animates or motivates (consciously or unconsciously) our everyday lives as
Jews.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There is the
‘Pesach Jew’ and the ‘Purim Jew’. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If you are a
‘Pesach Jew’ you will be stirred by the central themes of the story of
liberation as described in the book of Exodus: that an oppressed people were
freed from slavery and then went on to receive a moral vision about how to live
in the world. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The ‘Pesach
Jew’ will have imbibed the idea that the revelation at Sinai taught a
traumatised people that justice, compassion and lovingkindness were qualities
that resided in the human heart; and that the Jewish role in the world was to
enact these attributes and qualities both within their own community and in
relation to those who lived beyond their own tribe or nation. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In other
words, the ’Pesach Jew’ has internalised the symbolism of the Torah story, a
story that highlights and values freedom from oppression, and links it directly
to an ethical vision: that the Jewish people are to be a “light to the nations”.
The ‘Pesach Jew’ recognises that the oft-repeated Biblical idea <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that ‘you shall love the stranger and the
outsider because you were strangers in the land of Egypt’ is at the moral core
of what it means to be Jewish. The Jewish soul is one that is sensitive to the
sufferings of others and is determined that a central part of being Jewish involves
reaching out to express care for Jews and non-Jews alike. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">For the ‘Pesach
Jew’ this stance depends on memory - sometimes unconsciously inherited memory -
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the long arc of Jewish memory that links
the mythic past of the people<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>with their
continued existence now. We tell the story over and over to keep alive the memory
of where we came from; and to keep alive the ethical commitment stemming from that
memory. Inherited memory becomes a motivator for ethical and social action.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And the
‘Purim Jew’? What moves the heart of the ‘Purim Jew’? The Purim story – based on
the Biblical Book of Esther - contains one aspect of the Jewish story that has
never left us: that there exist in the world people who dislike us, hate us,
want to persecute us. In the story, the anti-hero Haman foments a plan, backed
by royal decree, to rid the Persian kingdom of its Jews. Over the generations,
Haman’s animus against the Jews, as outsiders in Persia, has been enacted time
and again. Although the narrative is historically unreliable, the anti-Jewish
legislation that it describes has a powerful historical resonance. The story is
an archetype of antisemitic hatred. It is a strand of Biblical literature that
still reverberates in the heart of our Jewish community. For the ‘Purim Jew’,
the experience of anti-Jewish antipathy – or the fear of it - is at the heart
of one’s Jewish identity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Remaining
Jewish becomes an act of defiance towards the antisemite. What the ‘Purim Jew’
learns from Jewish history is a stubborn refusal to leave the world stage. For
the ‘Purim Jew’ the Jewish soul is marinated in feelings of victimhood and in
the bloody-minded determination not to let Jewry’s enemies have the last word. Survival
is all. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Of course
the ‘Purim Jew’ is also keeping alive memory – memory of historical antipathy
to Jews, aggression towards Jews, persecution of Jews – but this is selective
memory. This is memory only able to - or only wanting to - hear this motif,
this melody, within the symphony played out over centuries of interactions between
Jews and non-Jews. For the ‘Purim Jew’ there is no creative or mutually beneficial
social and cultural intercourse between Jews and the inhabitants of the lands in
which they have resided – there is merely suspicion and worse. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This is the kind
of memory which is operating when Jews say they feel ‘existentially threatened’
by the current upsurge in reported antisemitism in the UK and abroad. That
upsurge is shocking and disturbing and needs to be monitored and prosecuted - and
vigilance is absolutely necessary for us Diaspora Jews. One can feel saddened by
this, or angry – or both – but it may be useful to try to keep a sense of
proportion about it. We aren’t in the 1930s Germany of antisemitic state
legislation and institutional persecution – we are dealing with small groups, and
lone individuals, emboldened to enact their prejudices online, sometimes in
person, and as horrible and frightening as this can be, in the UK we have the
backing of a legal system and police to help us contain this unpleasantness and
these threats when they come. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It can be
difficult to keep a sense of perspective about this here in London because the
kind of memory that gets triggered in us is the memory at the heart of the ‘Purim
Jew’: the selective memory of Jews as the ones who are eternally hated and
persecuted. And of course it is this kind of memory that is particularly operative
in Israel when people are saying they feel ‘existentially threatened’. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The October
7<sup>th</sup> barbarism has powerfully triggered this deeply-lodged strand of
feeling in the Jewish-Israeli psyche and one can see how traumatic the events
of that day have been, how they are resonating still in the psyches of the
people, and indeed how the excruciating pain connected with the hostage
situation is truly dementing. Our hearts do go out to those who are going
through this: there is no family in Israel unaffected by either the immediate connection
with hostages and their families, or those who lost loved ones on October 7<sup>th</sup>,
or those who have lost loved ones in the fighting that has ensued, or those
still displaced from their homes. All of these need support and solidarity in
whatever way it can be shown. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Even if I
have over these months offered a critique of certain aspects of Israel’s Zionist
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>story or its current political responses,
I have tried never to lose sight of the human drama that is ongoing for the
people going through this. It has sometimes been difficult to balance my
empathy for those who are going through this embattled saga, with my other
concerns about the meaning of these events within the longer arc of Jewish
history and its meaning for us Jews who sit here in the Diaspora, who are
realising that what happens over there is having a direct impact on us over
here. This ongoing drama can also feel dementing in the suburbs of London – not
least in the attempt to hold in mind and take to heart the anguish of
Palestinian suffering alongside that of Jewish suffering. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The categories
of ‘Purim Jew’ and ‘Pesach Jew’ are inevitably a bit simplistic – I said they
were cartoon-like, they are a kind of shorthand – because we can recognise that
the ‘Pesach Jew’ might value the themes of liberation and a commitment to
justice and equality and compassion, but the story – like the Purim story - is
also rooted in victimisation, that ancient antipathy towards us. It wasn’t called
antisemitism then, in Egypt, but the Biblical saga is about the oppression of an
alien people living in the midst of a majority culture. That’s the strand of ‘Purim’
in the Pesach story, and it lives inside even the most secular or humanitarian-minded
‘Pesach Jew’: the archaic memory, intergenerational memory, of being strangers
in strange lands, is still alive however securely integrated one now feels,
however culturally assimilated one is.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I have no
doubt we will get through this period of doubt, darkness, inner dividedness -
it’s going to take time for the external situation to be resolved, and of
course there are different pictures of what ‘resolved’ might look like. So we here
in the UK are going to have to live with heightened feelings of insecurity for
a while longer – this, one intuits, is going to be a long journey. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[<b>partially
based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, February 17<sup>th</sup>,
2024]<o:p></o:p></b></span></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-44167975419557279092024-02-12T14:43:00.000+00:002024-02-12T14:43:41.339+00:00'Everything Is Connected to Everything' - on Butterflies, Stalin and Visions that Fade<p> <span style="font-size: 14pt;">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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</span><i><span style="background: white; color: #202122; font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">
Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a
Tornado in Texas?</span></i><span style="background: white; color: #202122; font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span><span style="background: white; color: #202122; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: #202122; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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 <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>out into the ether, has
consequences beyond our reach, beyond our understanding, beyond our control. Surely
it would be paralysing to think like that? </span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Nobody
could live like that, with that degree of awareness. We would go mad. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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<sup>th</sup>
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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">And reading this extraordinary book –
about life and death and the randomness of history -<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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 <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">HG Wells, George Orwell, Camus, Sartre,
John Steinbeck, Simone de Beauvoir – I am not going to name too many names – they
gradually became disenchanted, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Second idea: from our Torah portion
this week, which contains the famous phrase <i>na’aseh ve’nishma</i> [‘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 <i>na’aseh ve’nishma</i>, we will do it and we will listen to it, we
will obey it, we will try to understand it” (24:7). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">There is an almost unanimous tradition
of reading this text that praises the faithfulness of the Israelite people in
saying <i>na’aseh ve’nishma</i>. 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 <i>before</i> they had understood what it meant, before
they had heard (<i>shema</i>) 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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">So there’s one passage in the Talmud
discussing <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>this phrase <i>na’aseh
ve’nishma</i> in which the Sadducees are recorded as being critical of the
Jewish people, calling them <i>ama paziza</i> – “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, <i>‘The Particulars of Rapture:
Reflections on Exodus’</i>, p.303). And this is the essence <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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 <i>a
priori</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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 <i>content</i> of actions <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- but the <i>process</i> of how hard it is to
question and then perhaps let go of the evocative vision that one might attach
oneself to). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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 <i>na’aseh ve’nishma</i>, 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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[based on a
sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, February 10<sup>th</sup>,
2024] <o:p></o:p></span></b></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-3960191813194369922024-01-14T15:59:00.000+00:002024-01-14T15:59:55.028+00:00"Evil Comes From A Failure To Think"<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18.0pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-font-kerning: 0pt;">Let’s start with a question: which book saw a 1000%
increase in sales in the 12 months following Donald Trump’s election as US president
in 2016?</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; text-align: center;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18.0pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; text-align: center;">First (small) clue: it was published in 1951.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18.0pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; text-align: center;">Second (larger) clue: a woman author.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; text-align: center;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-font-kerning: 0pt;">Born in Hamburg in 1906, brought up in Berlin. Arrested
by the Gestapo in 1933 for doing historical research in the archives (on
programmatic state antisemitism in Germany) after eight days she was released
and immediately fled the country, with her mother, crossing the border to
Czechoslovakia and from there eventually to exile in Paris.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-font-kerning: 0pt;">Let me put you out of your misery: I am talking about the
political philosopher, historian, essayist, Hannah Arendt. And the book - the
one that topped the Amazon lists for
months - was the book that made her name in the United States: <i>The Origins
of Totalitarianism</i>, her long, detailed exploration of 19<sup>th</sup>
century antisemitism, imperialism and racism and how these strands of 19<sup>th</sup>
and 20<sup>th</sup> century life had emerged into – woven themselves into –
totalitarian systems like Nazism and Stalinism.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-font-kerning: 0pt;">It’s probably not a book one would read for pleasure –
not least because Arendt’s prose style has
that clotted density characteristic of the academic tradition in which she grew
up and was trained. She was a precocious youngster, the doted-on only child of
assimilated, educated, secular-but- Jewishly-aware left-leaning parents. At 14
she was devouring the volumes of Immanuel Kant she found in her father’s
library; later she was expelled from school for challenging a teacher; and at
18 she enrolled to study philosophy at the University of Marburg with Europe’s
leading philosopher Martin Heidegger.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-font-kerning: 0pt;">She later studied under the tutelage of both Edmund
Husserl and Karl Jaspers – these names may not mean anything to you, but those
three male teachers were the central figures
of 20<sup>th</sup> century European humanist and existential philosophy. All of
them (and Arendt followed in that tradition) wrote with that heavy, convoluted,
abstract lyricism that was rooted in the German Romantic tradition. Anyone who
has read Martin Buber’s work might have had a taste of that. They aren’t beach
reading.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-font-kerning: 0pt;">So if it wasn’t her fluid prose style that made <i>The
Origins of Totalitarianism</i> such an unlikely must-read after sixty-odd years,
what was it? Well, I’d suggest it was possibly the way in which readers
discovered that Arendt had developed insights into political processes and
human nature – and how politics moulds and manipulates human nature – that suddenly
had a startling new relevance to what is going on in these early decades of the
21<sup>st</sup> century. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-font-kerning: 0pt;">Readers discovered that within that demanding prose style
there were some luminous jewels to be
found, thoughts that helped one think about, for example, what was going on in the White House. And not
only there. Sentences like :</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><i><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">“Totalitarianism
in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies,
with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is
still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” [OT, 1976, p.416]</span></i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">That’s
a sentence to keep close to hand when thinking about the recent American past –
and what is yet to come; as well as when we get our next UK Cabinet reshuffle. A
totalitarian mindset can exist separately from a totalitarian system.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">But why am I focusing on Hannah Arendt now? It’s partly
because I’ve become interested in her recently, and I’d like to share that enthusiasm
with you. It’s partly because I’ve just been reviewing a new biography of her
life and work – <i>We Are Free To Change The World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in
Love and Disobedience</i> by Lyndsey Stonebridge - and it’s made me realise how
little I have paid attention over the
years to her work and the deep originality of her thinking. It’s never too late
to discover a major thinker who has been hidden in plain sight all one’s life.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">I’d
always known about the mystique that surrounds Arendt – made up of all sorts of
things about her life, her biography: she was not only Heidegger’s star student
at Marburg but his lover for four years (he was twice her age, and married), and
although their affair had ended well before the advent of Hitler, Heidegger later
became – to Arendt’s horror - an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis and was a
member of the Party until 1945. Despite this, Arendt renewed contact with him
in 1949 and they remained close for twenty more years.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Arendt
managed to escape Europe in 1941 in spite of having been incarcerated as an
‘enemy alien’ in Vichy France in the concentration camp at Gurs near the
Spanish border: she walked out of the camp with forged papers provided by a
group of Austrian communists operating within the camp – soon after this the camp became a transit
point for Auschwitz. Survival was (is) so often a matter of luck or fortuitous timing
or the sheer randomness of life.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">When
she boarded the boat to America she carried with her a suitcase of papers and
writings – not her own but those of the great philosopher Walter Benjamin, who
had entrusted them to Arendt when they met by chance days before he committed
suicide on the French/Spanish border. You see what I mean by the mystique
around her – but that’s around her life. What about her writing? </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">The
text which really made her name - and promoted her to the status of leading
public intellectual - came in the 1960s
after she attended the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. She wrote
up her experience for <i>The New Yorker</i> and it was in that context that the
phrase with which Arendt is most often associated entered public consciousness –
<i>The New Yorker</i> lifted one phrase out of her text to publicise the piece:
that much misunderstood phrase ‘the banality of evil’. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">When
she wrote about the ‘banality of evil’ many Jewish readers felt she was
minimizing the horrors and evil of the Holocaust – but, on the contrary, what she
was emphasising was that in the flat, detached, bureaucratic verbiage that
Eichmann spouted in the dock, with all its circumlocutions which avoided naming
the crimes he was committing, a new form of banality was being laid bare, the
banality of thoughtlessness, a moral and imaginative blindness that had invaded
the human condition, Arendt thought, like a virus. He presented himself as a
mediocre functionary with no awareness at all of the monstrous nature of what
he had been involved with. That was the ‘banality of evil’.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Her
essays reporting her observations over the many weeks of the trial generated a
huge furore. She wrote with deeply etched irony and a kind of intellectual
detachment that did not endear her to many survivors. It may be that irony was
part of her emotional defence against the pain of what was being spoken about.
At any rate, she lost friends over it – people like Saul Bellow.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">But
what also alienated her readers was how she reported Eichmann’s attempts to
exonerate himself – he spoke in his defence about how he’d worked with Jewish leaders, in ghettoes and camps, and
with a rabbi like Leo Baeck in Theresienstadt (who did to some extent attempt
to protect his congregation within the camp by not spelling out everything he
knew of their ultimate fate). This could be construed as collaboration with the
enemy – and it was painful for Jews to hear her speaking about Jewish
leadership in such fraught situations in those kind of terms. So she was shunned by those who felt that she
was guilty of a lack of imaginative awareness of the impossible choices that
had had to be made within such extreme situations.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">So
Arendt was a complex personality. She never toed the party line on any subject
– she was dedicated to thinking for herself, and kept emphasising in her
writing that thinking is a moral activity, it is about values, it needs to be
done all the time and about every subject. She demands that you do the work for
yourself and not rely on second-hand thinking.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">But
sometimes she just seems to put her finger on the pulse of something and her
angle of vision just illuminates an issue or theme. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Let’s
just take one example that speaks to where we are now in the midst of this
horror show in Israel/Gaza – one of the other reasons I’m sharing thoughts about
Arendt here is that she can help us think about what is going on in that painful
and tragic land.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Take
this thought: </span><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-font-kerning: 0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-font-kerning: 0pt;"><a href="https://www.azquotes.com/quote/528587"><i><span style="color: #333333; font-size: 14pt; text-decoration-line: none;">Politically speaking, tribal
nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own people are surrounded by
'a world of enemies' - 'one against all' - and that a fundamental difference
exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique,
individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very
possibility of a common mankind long before [this idea] is used to destroy the
humanity of man.</span></i></a></span><i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">(<i>The Origins of Totalitarianism,</i> </span><span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-font-kerning: 0pt;">1968, </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">p.227)</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">And if that doesn’t speak to what is going on in the minds of Netanyahu,
his Knesset henchmen, and the fundamentalists on the West Bank, I don’t know
what does.</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">So we need Arendt – and she is everywhere. Her image is on coffee mugs
and postage stamps and T-Shirts: there are dozens of T-shirts for sale with
photos of her, quotes from her – my favourite is the one that says in large bold
letters: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Amasis MT Pro Black",serif; font-size: 20.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> WHAT
WOULD <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Amasis MT Pro Black",serif; font-size: 20.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">HANNAH ARENDT <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Amasis MT Pro Black",serif; font-size: 20.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">
DO?</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Amasis MT Pro Black",serif; font-size: 20.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "ADLaM Display"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">I wouldn’t wear it myself (except perhaps on Purim) but I have been
going round saying to myself ‘What would Hannah Arendt think?’</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">She was an early Zionist, she worked for Youth Aliyah in Paris in the
second half of the 1930s, but she was a committed bi-nationalist like Martin
Buber, Henrietta Szold, Judah Magnus who ran the Hebrew University, so when the
Zionist Congress meeting in the Biltmore Hotel in New York broke with tradition
in 1942 and demanded that “Palestine be
established as a Jewish Commonwealth” she was appalled, predicting – accurately,
of course – that such a state would
exist in endless tension with the other inhabitants of the land.</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">And she realised that it wouldn’t solve the underlying problem of human statelessness
– she had been stateless from 1938 when she was stripped of her German
citizenship until she became a US citizen in 1950. <i>“On the contrary”,</i>
she wrote in The Origins Of Totalitarianism<i>, “like virtually all other
events of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, the Jewish question merely produced a
new category of refugees…thereby increasing the number of stateless and
rightless by another 700,000-800,000people.”</i> [OT, Schocken, 2004, p368<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">And what would Hannah Arendt think about this week’s turning of the wheel
of history, and the opening of the case brought by South Africa (a rich
historical irony there) at the International Court of Justice, the case against
Israel’s so-called ‘genocidal intent’ in Gaza? The language is of course
emotive, and Israel will plead its cause, but it is hard to hear some of the
statements made by Israeli politicians and military leaders – I’m not talking
about actions but language – it’s hard not to hear some of the vengeful and annihilatory
language that has been used without feeling a moral revulsion at the
dehumanised and dehumanising rhetoric that has been used. </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">So what would Hannah Arendt think? About the way, after various wrong turns, it
has come to <i>this</i>, less than three generations after <i>that</i>? Would
she remind us about one of her acidic but penetrating observations, that “evil
comes from a failure to think”?</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; break-after: avoid; line-height: 15.75pt; margin-bottom: 11.25pt; text-align: left;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Aptos Display",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin; mso-ligatures: none;">[[</span><span style="color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather; font-size: 10.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">“Evil comes from a failure to
think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with
evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is
frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.” from <i>Eichmann in Jerusalem</i>]] </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Well, we will not see her like again, but we still need thinkers of the
calibre of Arendt to help us think in these fraught times. Not just to feel –
Jews are very good at that – but to think, to gain a clarity, a moral clarity
about how to act when all around are losing their heads. But thinking is hard
work. To do it we need all the help we can get, from Hannah Arendt or anyone
else.</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">[<b>based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, January 13<sup>th</sup>,
2024]<o:p></o:p></b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"> </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><o:p> </o:p></p></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-23612921629133301112023-12-30T17:10:00.000+00:002023-12-30T17:10:33.488+00:00Mourning is Timeless<p> <i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">"The only
reason to be an artist…is to bear witness”</span></i><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"> (Philip Guston)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There are
some Biblical verses – well, many, if truth be told - that lie dull and
lifeless on the page for us modern readers. They no longer speak to us – if
they ever did. That’s probably our limitation, not theirs. But over time we
might recognise that they are not lifeless, they are just dormant – as if they
are biding their time, as if they’re awaiting their moment to reveal something
to us, waiting patiently for their opportunity to illuminate an aspect of where
we are now, what we might be wrestling with now. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So this week
my eye was caught by a verse from our weekly <i>sedrah</i> [Torah reading] that
describes a stage in the journey that Joseph took with the embalmed body of his
father Jacob (Genesis 50). Jacob had spent his last years in Egypt, a bitter
old man, an exile far away from his homeland; and before he dies, having given
each of his sons their own blessing, Jacob requests that they bury him in the
ancestral burial site back in <i>der heim, </i>in Mamre – today we call it
Hebron (where Jews, assault rifles in one hand and <i>siddurim, </i>prayer-books<i>,</i> in the
other, will be reading this text in very different ways to me). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We read how
Joseph calls his brothers together and gets permission from Pharoah to make the
journey back to Canaan to bury their father. The brothers leave their children
and their herds and possessions behind, and set off accompanied by a huge
retinue of Egyptian dignitaries and chariots and horsemen – it’s like a state
funeral, Joseph being second only in prestige and power to Pharaoh himself. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And then our
storytellers do something which has that quintessential Biblical narrative
quirkiness one comes to recognise, and wonder over: they give us a short scene
that disturbs the narrative flow, that seems superfluous to the story - yet it
apparently has some significance for the authors, but a significance they don’t
spell out. They leave it planted in the text – and there it waits for
centuries, millennia, awaiting its moment. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I’m talking
about verse 10 of chapter 50: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">“When
they came to Goren Ha-atad…they entered into a deep, heavy-hearted lamentation,
and Joseph observed a seven day mourning period for his father”</span></i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> - this is the origin of the <i>shiva</i>
tradition, by the way [the seven-day Jewish mourning period] – and then in the
next verse the scene is described again from the outside, as it were, <i>“And
when the Canaanites living there saw this…they said: This is a grievous
mourning time for the Egyptians”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This is a
form of literary Cubism by the way, two perspectives of the same thing fused
together in the picture, one superimposed on the other. And we are left in no
doubt by the storytellers that whether you are a participant in this collective
mourning, or merely observers of it like the Canaanites who see everyone
involved as Egyptians, what’s being portrayed is a time filled with deep grief.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And then the
text picks up its narrative thread: <i>“And his sons carried him to the land of
Caanan and buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field near Mamre that
Abraham had bought…” <o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So what was
it about this that particularly caught my eye? Well, it might surprise you but
it was the name of the place where the mourning takes place. It’s in a spot
called <i>Goren ha-Atad</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘The
threshing floor of/for thorns’. So what? The name adds nothing to the story
being told. But this place of mourning is a real geographical location: it is
identified as a site called <i>Tell el-Adjull</i> - which just happens to be in
the southern sector of present day Gaza. Where, as I speak, grievous mourning
is again taking place. As we know. Although we don’t want to know. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It is as if
there is an aperture in time through which the past illuminates the present.
The Torah takes us into Gaza. As this whole section of text makes clear, Jews
are a people who know about mourning, about loss, about grief, about<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>how close to the heart the death of a loved
one can be – and Jews know too how significant it is to have time to honour the
dead. I sometimes think there is a way in which we are a faith tradition more
bound up with death and mourning our losses – personal and collective - than of
being enamoured by life and its manifold and rich possibilities. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">On Yom
Kippur, for example, I am always amazed in my community how, after the Yizkor
service in late afternoon [the annual memorialising roll-call of those who have
died in the past year] - which is rightly significant and moving for so many,
and people come especially for it - as soon as it is over, half the community
disappears. Yes, I know that the Neilah service that follows it is another hour
and we repeat a lot of the liturgy -<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but
the conclusion of Yom Kippur is very much about life: it is about our future,
our personal future, our collective future; yet it carries less weight - less
emotional and spiritual value it seems - than our mourning, our sadness, our
remembering our losses. This isn’t a criticism – it’s just an observation. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We are a
strange, quixotic people, us Jews. We mourn our losses, we are good at that, we
have had a lot of practice over the years as a people, and of course
individually we have all lost loved ones. Maybe because we do, on the whole,
love life, treasure life, we are, paradoxically, connoisseurs of loss. If life
was not so precious, loss would not mean so much to us. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But back to
the text. I want to ask a simple question. (No questions are of course simple,
there is complexity at the heart of this question, but it is the question that
jumps out of the text for me, jumps at me, won’t let me go). <i>Are we able,
when we read of this legendary mourning in Gaza, when we read these verses
within our great mythic narrative of the Torah, are we able to really mourn the
losses in Gaza?</i> The losses now. Are we allowed even to ask this question?
Too soon? But if not now, when? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Will there
be a time? Will there ever be a time when we can enter into a period of deep
mourning for what has transpired over these weeks? What continues to unfold in
these days of trauma in Jewish history? And Palestinian history? Will mourning
be allowed? Mourning for<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>others, as well
as ourselves? Because those who see this from the outside, as it were – like in
the Torah text – they can see, they can acknowledge: “this is a grievous time
of mourning”. The world – the non-Jewish world - can see this. But our Torah
text encourages us to see it too, to have a dual perspective. To be moral
Cubists. To see events not just from our subjective Jewish point of view, but
to see suffering from the outside too, to look with a sense of empathy such as
those Canaanites are described as showing: “this is a grievous time of mourning
for them”. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Goren
Ha-Atad</span></i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">: Gaza has
become a threshing floor. And as Jews we can be in mourning for that too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Threshing, as you know, is about crushing, it
is about separating the grain from the chaff, it is a demanding and, yes,
brutal activity, necessary for grains - but when your threshing is of a people,
the separating out the wheat from the chaff, as it were, becomes a crude
operation – and we see the thorny, painful consequences that unfold. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Scholars
tell us that the historical significance of this spot mentioned in the Torah, <i>Tell
el-Adjull</i>, is that it was the ancient site of a burial ground for
high-ranking Egyptian dignitaries. This helps explain why Joseph’s cortege
stopped there for their seven days of mourning, en route to the family plot in
Mamre. But the Torah is not primarily interested in that kind of background
history. It is interested in moral history and emotional history and spiritual
history, the kind of history that transcends its specific time and place and
speaks into the future, that speaks to those open to hear it today. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So I share
with you what I hear it saying to us, how this heavy-hearted mourning, this
lamentation at the threshing floor for thorns, is calling out to us - to
reflect on, to join with, however we might do that. We have been given this <i>torat
emet</i> - this ‘teaching of truth’ as our liturgy calls our sacred
literature - and sometimes the truth is very painful; actually truth is often
too painful to bear, and maybe at the moment we feel we can’t bear it. Okay
-<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but whether we like it or not, as Jews
we are bound up with these texts, these teachings. It is who we are, for better
or worse. We who know what it is to mourn – and are learning, tragically (and
yes, unbearably), how much we cause mourning for others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I want to
dedicate what I am saying today to a group of people in this community who
aren’t here today. I know that sounds strange but let me explain, just to
finish. There is a cohort of younger people in and around our synagogue who
have been feeling that since October 7<sup>th</sup> their views, their ways of
seeing this current conflict, their moral and spiritual perspectives on this
traumatic turn in Jewish history – well, there hasn’t been much space for a
range of heartfelt views to be expressed. The dominant mantra of solidarity
with Israel hasn’t left much space for dissent, or even nuance – this is what
they have felt. I am reporting what I hear. So when I spoke a month ago , and
what I’ve said today – I say for all those present, of course. But I also say it,
for what it’s worth, for all those who are not here with us today. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[based on
a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, December 30<sup>th</sup>
2023]<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p> </o:p></b></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-18865025503248677602023-11-11T18:37:00.003+00:002023-11-11T18:37:21.364+00:00It Never Ends<p> <i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">“It is
better to be wrong by killing no one rather than to be right with mass graves” </span></i><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">(Albert Camus, December 1948)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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. <i>Ayn hadash tachat ha-shemesh</i> – There is nothing new under the sun
(Ecclesiastes1:9). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>descended
upon Europe, a nightmare, loss upon loss. And we remember it still. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And here we
are more than a century later in a world utterly transformed <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- 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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>mezuzah</i> on our doors,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>worried to send our children to school, worried about wearing a <i>chai</i>
(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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>kippah</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Part of the
task of the Jewish people has always been to use introspection and <i>teshuvah</i>
(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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Too early to
start perhaps, but we also can’t afford to wait too long to engage in <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[based on
a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, 11<sup>th</sup> November
2023]<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-63470146597969992822023-09-19T16:20:00.001+01:002023-09-19T16:20:45.053+01:00New Year Thoughts: Being Human - the ‘Moronic Inferno’ - Living with a Dual Focus <p><span style="font-size: 14pt;">I’d like to share a light-hearted experiment I
conducted over this last weekend – light-hearted but aiming at something
serious.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">It was first day of Rosh Hashanah – the Jewish
New Year – and I was given the opportunity of speaking to the community in what
is known as the ‘sermon slot’. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">I started by asking them: are you in the mood
at this point in our service for something a bit different? A bit of light
relief maybe? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hope so. I want to try
something out with you. I’m going to talk to you a bit about Rosh Hashanah, the
New Year - but I’m going to ask you to do something, something participatory,
if you can. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">What I want you to do as I talk is to stop me,
interrupt me, if you think there’s something wrong with what I am saying - not
factually wrong, I try to get that stuff right - but something strange about
what I’m saying, or the way I’m saying it, or just how I’m talking to you.
You’ll have to put your hand up, or call out, or get my attention somehow -
I’ll try and keep attentive to what’s happening - so catch my attention and
tell me what’s wrong. This is an experiment, go with me on it. Stop me when you
are ready and tell me what’s wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Because <a name="_Hlk144815719"><i>“Rosh
Hashanah is not merely a turning of the calendar page; it is a profound
spiritual opportunity to pause and take stock of our lives…as we gather today
on this sacred occasion our hearts are filled with both anticipation and
reflection. Just as the sun sets and rises again, so too does the cycle of time
bring us to this moment of renewal and introspection. <o:p></o:p></i></a></span></p>
<div style="border: solid #D9D9E3 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-element: para-border-div; padding: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm;">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 15.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">In the Jewish tradition, we greet the New Year
with a mixture of joy and solemnity. Our joy stems from the knowledge that we
are given the chance to begin anew, to mend relationships, to rekindle our
spirits, and to aspire to be better versions of ourselves. Our solemnity comes
from the recognition that the choices we make bear consequences, not only for
our own lives but also for the world around us.<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 15.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">The shofar's call pierces the air, and it is
as if God's own breath is reminding us to awaken from the slumber of routine,
to awaken to our higher purpose. This is a time when we stand at the crossroads
of the past and the future, contemplating the path we have walked and the
journey that lies ahead.<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 15.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">As we dip apples in honey, we are reminded of
the sweetness that life holds. Each apple slice becomes a metaphor for our
aspirations: the hopes, dreams, and intentions we carry into the coming year.
The honey, a symbol of abundance and delight, reminds us that even in times of
challenge, there is sweetness to be found. Yet, just as we savour the sweetness
of the honey, we are also aware of the underlying bitterness of life's
struggles. The two are intertwined, each enhancing the other…<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 15.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">…In this season of reflection, we engage in
the spiritual practice of teshuvah – returning to our true selves and to our
Divine Source. Teshuvah invites us to confront our mistakes with humility and
to turn toward a path of growth and healing. It is a courageous act,
acknowledging our imperfections while recognizing the boundless potential for
change that resides within us.<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 15.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">As we stand on the threshold of a new year,
let us remember that the journey of transformation is ongoing. It requires
effort, intention, and the courage to face both our light and our shadow. May
we embrace the teachings of our tradition, finding inspiration in the stories
of our ancestors, and may we be guided by the values of compassion, justice,
and love.<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 15.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Let us use this sacred time to deepen our
connections – with ourselves, with each other, and with the Divine. As we hear
the shofar's call, may we heed its message and step forward with purpose and
hope. May this New Year be one of blessing, growth, and renewal for us all.<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Shanah Tovah u'Metukah – a Good and Sweet Year
to you all.”</span></i></span><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-family: Aharoni; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><b>This part
of the service was interactive, to a degree, with people making suggestions,
but nobody quite twigged what was going on. </b><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">So what was wrong with what I’ve been saying?, I asked. It was quite informative, thoughtful after a fashion, maybe a bit bland,
innocuous, it had a smattering of the usual rabbinic cliches and platitudes,
but on the whole it was pretty inoffensive. I’ve heard a lot worse sermons. For
some reason it reminded me of custard, it had a certain warm glutinous smoothness,
but how nourishing was it really? <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">It didn’t touch the heart or quicken the
spirit, it lacked any real moment of illumination, it lacked the unpredictable,
it certainly lacked humour - all of which is to say that it lacked ‘soul’ (for
want of a better word). Why? Because it was a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“500 word sermon in the style of Rabbi Howard Cooper, generated by
ChatGPT”. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">It wasn’t me: it was a simulacrum, a
facsimile, of me, it was literally Artificial Intelligence, created to sound
like me, to mimic me in a way, it was not human - it had no soul - it just bore
a spooky resemblance to my living, breathing, human, idiosyncratic self. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">ChatGPT - and there are others like it, programmes
of information, misinformation and disinformation, programmes that blur the
boundaries between truth and falsehood, programmes that can inform but can also
fabricate, programmes that can assemble information but also dissemble and
falsify - I think we need to talk about ChatGPT. There’s going to be a lot of
it coming our way in the months and years to come - when we contact companies,
when we seek health care, it’s going to be in schools and our homes and inside
our lives - and it raises some real questions about what it means to be human,
and how we connect to one another. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">In the last twelve months it’s become
omnipresent: it’s all around us, for good and for bad - it’s double-edged, as
so many technological developments have been in our history. It’s going to do
away with the core work of many professions - accountancy, law, financial
planning, insurance, some forms of therapy; if you can get a half decent sermon
from ChatGPT, maybe clergy can be phased out too. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Who knows? We are on the cusp of the new, and of
dizzying changes in how we live: it’s not just technological of course, these
changes - it’s in the weather we endure, it’s in the global financial
insecurities, it’s the erosion of liberal democracies and the growth of racist
and illiberal authoritarianism, it’s the continental war on our doorstep that enters
our living rooms, it’s the mass migration of millions of peoples. The tectonic
plates are shifting - and our small lives are caught up in this. It’s hard to
keep up. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">On the one hand, we carry around in our
pockets a machine of immense power that gives us access to all the information in
the world (useful and useless), it keeps us connected to others in ways both
simple and outlandish, it’s been transformative in ways both benign and malign
in how we live. It’s certainly expanded what is possible. On the other hand a
lot of daily life seems for many to become more and more of a struggle: try
getting a GP appointment, try contacting HMRC, try renewing a passport or a
driving licence. Try changing your email address with companies. Try negotiating
the scams and frauds directed at us. You can add your own experiences. How many
hours of time, how much frustration, it’s daily, hourly, it’s endless. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">First world problems, you might say - and they
are. Yes, what a blessing it is to live in the relative security and relative comfort
of the first world - but the shadow side of this technologically-saturated life
is our immersion in the dense entanglement of just manging our lives on a daily
basis. “I spend so much of my life just managing my life”, a friend said to me
recently. Yes, it can be so demoralising, dementing - and it can take us away
from what might be more productive and joyful ways of living. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">But if we can’t get off this juggernaut, maybe
the New Year gives us an opportunity to pause a while, just to look around us
and reflect on what’s happening to us, where we are in life, where life is
going, where our life is going?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Time perhaps
to recalibrate. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">For Jews these are days of reflection, of
introspection, these so-called ‘Days of Awe’ - here I worry about sounding like
my Chat avatar - but nevertheless there’s no getting round the fact that these
Days of Awe, <i>Yomim Noraim</i>, are a longstanding part of our tradition. And
one of the reasons Jews gather at this season is that - as well any sense of
duty or obligation, or in memory of parents, or out of a residual nostalgia, as
well of course as seeing each other and celebrating together – is that as well
as all that, Jews might also retain a residual faith, or an inkling, that this
period has a potential for something new, in our personal life, our spiritual
life, our emotional life, the life of our souls, what makes us human. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">We’ve been given this gift, this opportunity,
once a year, to look inwards as well as outwards, to remind ourselves that the
state of our souls is significant: they do become atrophied, numbed, exhausted
by life; and they need - we need – to be given attention. We need time to
breathe, time for inspiration. Time to consider how we are living, and how we
want to live. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">And when we look inwards we know: we are not
robots, though we might act automatically, even robotically. We are not automatons,
but we are programmed - by our genetic makeup, our background, our education,
our class, our parental environment, how we were brought up, how free we were
to express ourselves growing up, how frightened we were of expressing emotions
- anger, aggression, possessiveness, love, timidity, sexual feelings. Both nature
and nurture have programmed us to an extent, and we can spend a lifetime trying
to de-programme ourselves and discover and express our deepest, truest self, or
selves, for we are incorrigibly plural, like the Torah, which tradition says has
seventy faces, seventy aspects (<i>B’midbar Rabba</i> 13:15): we mirror that in
our own unique multiplicity. As the poet Walt Whitman said “I am large, I<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>contain multitudes”. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">But however programmed we might be, or feel,
we still know we are not machines - though we can break down, we can and do
wear out, our souls get weary, bruised, battered; which is why it seems
important to remind ourselves of what it means to have a soul, even if we
aren’t sure what that is, or whether it exists. But if it does have any meaning,
to speak of the soul, maybe it’s a way we have developed to talk about - a way
Judaism has developed to speak about - our human individuality and the awesome
way those tens of thousands of genes are coiled into every molecule of our DNA
and we each are universes, multiverses, of consciousness, and all that rich and
messy profusion of personal history and neurological complexity adds up to the
unrepeatable wonder of who each of is. Nobody like us has ever been, or will
ever be. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">The New Year reminds us that being human is a
mystery. How can it be that we are capable of such joy and creativity in life
and also be capable of such destructiveness as well? How can our capacity for
delight co-exist simultaneously with our experience of pain and suffering? Because
we are not machines, pre-programmed, we have to develop our own human
intelligence - and by intelligence I’m not talking about A-level and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>PhD intelligence or smartphone intelligence -
I’m talking about spiritual intelligence, for want of a better phrase. We have
to develop and hone our own sensibility to what our unique purpose here in the
world is. There’s no website for it. You can only find it inside yourself. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">‘Today is the Birthday of the World’ - our
liturgy offers us a poetic image, a symbol we can make use of, an invitation to
celebration and to begin again to ask the most fundamental questions about who
we are: what stops us becoming truer to our better selves, what blocks us, what
prevents<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>our enjoyment of life, our
productivity, our capacity for generosity, compassion, our passion for justice?
We aren’t machines but we might find that something in us keeps coming up like
a ‘system error’ and prevents us living in ways more congruent with our values,
our idealism, our hopes for the future. Because we do lose touch with our
vision. With our idealism. We become cynical, we do get defeated by life. We do
end up saying, feeling, ‘there’s nothing that can be done’. But that can’t be
the end of the story. The end of the story for us individually, or for
humanity. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="background: white; color: #131313; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .25pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><i>Estragon: Nothing to be
done.</i></span></span><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="color: #131313; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .25pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><i><br />
</i><span style="background: white;"><i>Vladimir: I’m beginning to come round to that
opinion.</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="background: white; color: #131313; font-size: 14.0pt; letter-spacing: .25pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Yes, we may have moments
when we might share Samuel Beckett’s bleak vision in Waiting for Godot -
although the humanity of his characters, the humour in his characters, defy
that bleakness. There is always ‘something to be done’. </span></span><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">The
symbolism of the New Year is a reminder that change is possible: our souls are
still open enough to sense that through reflection or prayer or reaching out
for help to others - or a combination of these things - change is possible. We
aren’t machines. Machines might be efficient but they aren’t kind. They don’t
care - only we can care, and only we are in need of that attention we call
care. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">We are vulnerable - and that means we can
sense the vulnerability in others. We are dependent - and that means we need
other people. Of course we have strength and courage too, a capacity for love,
for self-sacrifice. But we need each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In our fragility and in our fortitude, we enter these days sensing that
the stakes are high. These are Days of Awe - ‘awesome’ has become bit of a
buzzword, it’s used by people who’ve been colonised by watching too many<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>reality TV shows or American movies. We need
to redeem it, this notion of awe, because it is speaking of the power of <i>teshuvah</i>,
of transformation, at this season: something new can open us for us, inside us.
<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">What is awesome, awe-inspiring, is that as
Jews we are bound up in cycles of time and history where we can discover that what
we do matters: small acts of random kindness can change the world as much as
large acts of fighting for justice, and struggling for societal change. Both
the so-called ‘small’ and the so-called ‘large’ are radical investments in
hope. We are a people who have been pounded and beaten down in the crucible of
history, who have gone through innumerable traumas - yet on the whole we haven’t
abandoned our tradition, our heritage. We come back time and again and say: we
will not be defeated by the forces arraigned against us - by those who say that
the crises we face, in the environment, or in our current European war, or in
the vast structural injustices and deprivation in our own country, are too
difficult to address, or are not our responsibility - we are not going to let cynicism
have the last word. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">Nor are we going to let those who feel
antipathy to us daunt us. We are a people who travel in defiance of despair,
who carry this absurd commitment towards hope, towards change. We carry it in
our souls, our psyches. Because we are Jews and human and not machines we know
that the future is not programmed, but radically open. It is still unwritten
and we will join in writing the script of what will come to be. We do it not
with omnipotence but with humility. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">This is our destiny, we whose spiritual
intelligence is uniquely sensitised to both pointing to what is false in
society, what is unjust, what lacks compassion, what lacks a moral core, what
lacks humanity - and my God there is plenty of that to point to, to call out -
but whose spiritual intelligence is also attuned to what we can do, what role
we can play, individually, collectively, what ways we can enact our Judaic
vision of justice, compassion and wellbeing. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">This is our agenda – let’s hope these Days of
Awe give us the space and time to take the next tentative steps forward on this
journey of the ages. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform
Synagogue, London, on the first day of the New Year, September 16<sup>th</sup>,
2023]<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 15.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #D9D9E3 .25pt; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 0cm 0cm; padding: 0cm;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[On the second day of the New Year, September 17th, I
shared the following thoughts]<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Let me start with a question: how do you,
we, keep track of what we go through every passing hour, the dense profusion of
thoughts, emotions, intuitions, anxieties, confusions, that add up to our
lives? How do we keep track of, how do we chronicle, the hidden regions of our
hearts? Our secret fears and hopes and guilt, our inadequacies, our failures
(real and imagined) -whatever it is we struggle with, that daily life throws at
us? How do we manage life? As the poet said: “The way we are living, timorous
or bold, will have been our life” (Seamus Heaney). <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And how do we keep track of, how do
we chronicle, the dizzying complexity of our world, the events that cascade
around us, that tsunami of news and images from across the globe, the
ceaseless, relentless, overwhelming calls for our attention: earthquakes,
floods, fires, Russian war crimes, political corruption, kisses that are not
just kisses, civil wars, famines, bankruptcies of businesses, cities, ethnic
nationalism stirring ancient hatreds, millions of people on the move - the
reports inundate our waking hours, and maybe our sleep too, with every piece of
unsettling news abruptly overtaken by another, creating narratives that have no
end, storylines that have no plot and lose their focus in the presence of the
next story, a tumult of stories that keep on exposing all the shades of human
vulnerability? The vulnerability of others, the vulnerability of ourselves. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">How do we keep track of both what we
experience within the circumference of our own small lives - small, but of
infinite significance to us - as well as what floods through us in our
disordered times? How do we focus in and focus out at the same time? Just a
small task that this period in the Jewish year sets before us. Looking within -
what can we change? Looking outside - what can we change? This is the annual
project of these days - an impossible project, of course. But Jews have always
been drawn to impossible projects. Like working towards a Messianic age, like
believing in an invisible God, like trusting that a small insignificant tribe
in the ancient Middle East received a vision that was relevant for all time and
for all humanity. Absurd projects, impossible projects - but they have drawn us
in, these projects, these stories, they have seduced us for generations. The
seductions of hope. We can look in - and we can look out. A dual focus. Our
awesome, mind-bending project. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So how do we keep ourselves going?
You can of course switch off from all that outer stuff, and focus, try to
focus, just on getting though your own day relatively intact. That’s hard
enough - the personal travails of the heart. With bodies and minds that let us
down, with people around us who frustrate us or cause us grief, with personal
disappointments and losses to manage, we might feel we have quite enough to be
getting on with. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Why bother to add to it an awareness
of the world around us and how it effects us? Yet we know that it does effect
us: that the missile attacks on Kyiv are not unconnected with the price of food
in our shops; that the exodus of a population in one war-torn part of the world
effects the politics of our government; that the glass in your iPhone is made
by Uigar Muslims forcibly transferred from their homes into concentration camps;
that in London our non-Ulez compliant vehicles wreak havoc on children’s
growing lungs and cause 4,000 premature deaths of year - of course we don’t
know the actual children nor, probably, the actual people who die early, it’s
just statistics, but we know about all this. Even if all this knowledge can
feel unbearable, overwhelming, sometimes - we know that we live in a complex
interconnected world where everything is connected to everything else. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So I do understand when people say
they just don’t want to think about all that supposedly ‘outer’ stuff. One may
just want to focus on what I called the hidden regions of our own hearts, and
let the heart of the world succumb to its own arrythmia, it’s own deadly
disorders. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This may be a matter of temperament,
how much we want to focus inwards, on ourselves, and how much we want to engage
with the vicissitudes of the world around<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>us. And we may move - in a lifetime, or in a single day - from one
position to another, and then back again. I know that I want to try to keep
track of both, the hidden regions of the heart and the struggles of the world,
the struggles in the world. I want to keep an eye on - and chronicle, report
back on - the inner and outer world. I want a dual focus: it’s foolhardy in a
way, omnipotent maybe, but I want to see everything simultaneously. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I’m reminded of those lines by the
great Jewish-American poet Charles Reznikoff :<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">“If only I could write with four pens
between five fingers <o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">and with each pen a different
sentence at the same time - <o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">but the rabbis say it is a lost art,
a lost art. <o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I well believe it.”<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">That speaks to me as we gather at the
New Year, in pursuit of the lost arts. How do we hold all that comes at us? How
do we find our bearings? Today, almost at random, I am thinking: how do we find
our bearings within this European war that touches our lives in different ways;
how do we find our bearings when Israel is going through such self-lacerating
convulsions; how do we find our bearings with the waves of toxic nationalism
and antisemitism and crazed conspiracy theories that swirl around the planet;
how do we find our bearings and find some place of stillness within it all, to
find some reassurance, or hopefulness, or comfort, or direction, within this
life that sweeps us on relentlessly, remorselessly? How do you find your
bearings when living in a maelstrom?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Decades ago the novelist Saul Bellow
diagnosed our modern condition as living in what he called the ‘moronic
inferno’. And he asked the key question - the religious question, the spiritual
and psychological question -<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>how are we
supposed to live and remain fully human when all this goes on around us? And
being fully human means being in touch with the good within us but also our
capacity for destructiveness - and trying to ensure that the goodness within us
wins out as it battles with the all the other stuff that lurks inside. So this
is the question for the season we are in: how are we supposed to live now in
our times? To live well, I would add. Not just to survive, but to thrive. How
are we supposed to do it? <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I don’t know. Yes, that’s
disappointing, I know. Aren’t rabbis supposed to know? Even if they can’t write
with four pens between five fingers, aren’t they, we, supposed to know how we
can retain our full humanity, our potential to enact the better parts of our
nature, our kindness and compassion, our generosity, our passion for justice? Aren’t
we supposed to offer a road map of how we need to be, in our wondrous, wounded
world? <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The problem is my road map may not be
the one that works for you or anyone else. I can share the contours of my map
but the work of these days is to seek out your own. Maybe the liturgy can offer
clues. Maybe conversations with friends and family can offer clues. Maybe
something you read or see or just overhear on the tube can point you in a
direction. Maybe an amalgam of all these can help sketch out a map to guide you
through the maelstrom. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">My road map of how I try and keep my
finger on the pulse of life, the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, will
probably, possibly, be rather different from many of you for one simple reason:
I keep away from social media. I don’t use Twitter, Tiktok, Instagram,
Snapchat, Telegram - I know the names and to a degree I know what they are -
but I see them as distractions rather than opportunities for enhancing my life.
You may feel very differently. But I am easily distracted and I don’t want my
attention diffused in a thousand directions, or saturated with what other
people want me to be interested in. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I know that for some people these
things are a blessing, so yes, build them into, or keep them in, your roadmap.
All I know is that I value the freedom non-engagement gives me to have my own
thoughts, and develop my own direction, and pursue the richness in the world in
other ways. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I’m not even on Facebook, though -
somewhat reluctantly - I do use WhatsApp, which is of course owned by
Meta/Facebook. And I say reluctantly not because I don’t want the connection to
others it offers - I crave real connection, real intimacy - but for quite
another reason. We use, maybe have to use, a huge amount of what psychologists
call ‘cognitive dissonance’ to get through our lives. There are things that we
know, that we have to pretend to ourselves we don’t know, in order to get on
with our lives. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So you must know, if you use
Facebook, the ways in which Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has a malignancy curled
inside its beating but sclerotic heart that is deeply problematic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hear stories every day in my therapy
consulting room in which it’s clear that social media is having a detrimental
effect on people’s mental health - Instagram is toxic in the ways it promotes
fantasies of beauty and body desirability and young women are particularly
vulnerable here. And when you are immersed in images of what other people have,
or are doing, or who they are doing it with, it generates envy, jealousy,
feelings of missing out, worthlessness, unlovability.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It draws out, and draws on, these feelings. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But these apps are addictive - who
doesn’t want to be ‘liked’?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then I
think a bit wider about the way Facebook fanned ethnic violence in Africa; was
used by the military in Myanmar in their campaign against the Rohingya Muslim
minority, which led to murder, rape, and dispossession; we saw its poisonous
role in the 2016 US presidential election leading to Trump’s election, as well
as in feeding lies into the Brexit debates. Yes, I know it can be used for good
as well - but the pernicious aspects of the Meta empire are transparent. You
don’t have to dig deep to reveal the underbelly of the beast. And like the
tobacco industry before it, there’s a deep denial of the evidence that its
product can be detrimental to our health. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We use, maybe have to use, a huge
amount of what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’ to get through our
lives. There are things that we know, that we have to pretend to ourselves we
don’t know, in order to get on with our lives. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I really don’t want to moralise all
this, I just want to try and describe it, chronicle it, and say that I am
caught up in this too. I might not use Facebook, or any social media, in my
attempts to manage this maelstrom of a world but I do engage with - another
huge distraction from what matters - I do watch a lot of sport. Sport can, along
the way, teach us about dedication, endurance and how to mange disappointment
and the inevitability of loss - but I know, all sports fans know, how often professional
sport is now tainted by its association with human rights abuses, corruption,
sexism. It hasn’t yet stopped me watching - that’s my cognitive dissonance - but
In my heart I know it should. Aren’t we all complicit? As I say, I am trying
not to be too moralistic about this - though there is a moral question at the
heart of it - I’m just trying to describe it, where we are. One pen, two
fingers. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So this is the question I am posing
for these days of reflection: what does your road map look like, what changes
might enhance your life, what could you do without, what do you want to add in?
‘Choose life’ is one of the great mantras of Judaism - we are a people
enamoured of the possibilities of life, not just surviving in life, but sharing
and enacting a vision of the possibilities of fulness of life, a life of
compassion, kindness, justice, empathy, a life of caring for the wellbeing of
those close to us and those far from us.</span></span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Some of us are going to be more drawn
to focus in on our own lives, some of us are going to be more interested in
that world out there. One artist who manages the trick, it’s a gift really, of
keeping a dual focus is the writer Ian McEwan. His recent book ‘Lessons’ is a
masterclass in dual focus: its hero, Roland, one of the so called ‘baby boomer’
generation, struggles to make sense of his life - he is in turns complacent and
baffled, loving and lost, indecisive and engaged, his personal life is in many
ways a mess, but he has - McEwan gives him - his moments of intimacy, his
capacity to show love and to feel loved. In other words, in his complexity and
uncertainties and mistakes, in his small triumphs and his disappointments <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- he is us. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But McEwan’s pre-eminence as a
novelist is in showing us this life interacting with a wider backdrop: the
Cuban Missile Crisis, Thatcherism, the Aids crisis, perestroika, the fall of
the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Europe, New Labour, the Iraq war, Brexit,
the pandemic, the storming of the American Capitol - the book, and it is long,
was finished just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, otherwise I am sure
it would have included that. But if you want a text that illustrates,
illuminates, the grandeur and complexity of living both looking in and looking
out at the same time - which is our situation - McEwan is incomparable. Here he
is: <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The three </span></i></span><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[friends] <i>spoke and listened easily, intimately. It often happened
like this, Roland thought, the world was wobbling badly on its axis, ruled in
too many places by shameless ignorant men, while freedom of expression was in
retreat and digital spaces resounded with the shouts of delirious masses. Truth
had no consensus... Parts of the world were burning or drowning.
Simultaneously, in the old fashioned glow of close family, made more radiant by
recent deprivation, he experienced happiness that could not be dispelled, even
by rehearsing every looming disaster in the world. It made no sense.</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And there you have it - that’s a
truly great piece of writing, bringing to the surface what is deep inside. The
outer world in all its messiness and threat, side by side with the inner world,
that can still experience the joy of living. ‘It made no sense’, the author
says. No, it makes no sense. And yet it’s true. <i>Emet</i>. True to how we
live. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk144815719;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It’s another almost lost art: of
making sense of what makes no sense. </span></span><o:p></o:p></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-15388513532606361872023-09-03T13:23:00.002+01:002023-09-03T13:57:53.991+01:00Two Artists: Blessings & Curses<p> <span style="font-size: 14pt;">This week I
watched Melvyn Bragg’s Sky Arts programme on the life and work of David
Hockney. Hockney’s 86 now - Bragg’s not far behind that, there were 170 years
worth of experience on screen together as they talked in Hockney’s studio near
the village of Beuvron-en-Auge. These last few years Hockney’s</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">been living and working in Normandy, where
the skies are open, the light intense, the colours rich and vivid, and he’s
been painting what he sees each day and what he experiences through the seasons
of the year - mostly the fields and trees around him. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;">His work is
filled with a kind of luminous joy and a lightness of being that the landscape
is evoking in him. ‘Yorkshire it ain’t’, as he ruefully acknowledged. This late
stage of his work floats free of history, of politics, of environmental threats
to the nature he paints - and just celebrates what is there, illuminates what
is present in the natural world in the here and now. It has a simple and
timeless quality. And he’s made hundreds of paintings there, including a 90
metre wall of a painting of springtime that has to be walked along to be seen
and experienced. It’s art on a heroic scale, in the spirit of Monet, but
entirely his own, it’s where his idiosyncratic evolution as an artist has taken
him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;">And when
Melvyn Bragg asked him at the end of the interview: “what are the public
responding to in your work, do you think?” he paused. “I don't know” he said
slowly - either with diffidence or feigned diffidence, hard to tell with a
showman like Hockney - “I don’t know…but I like to think it might be…space”.
“Space?” prompted Bragg, trying to coax out a bit more. “Yes, the depiction of
space. These paintings all have space in them” - which sounded at first like a
bit of a cliché; but then he continued (and I’d had this thought so I was taken
aback when he went on): “My sister said she thought space was God - which I
thought was an interesting notion”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;">In the
Talmud one of the names the rabbis gave to God was ‘<i>Makom</i>’ - space.
Moving away from the Biblical and gendered picture of God as a personality that
rewards and punishes, the rabbis of a later generation were developing a
non-anthropomorphic understanding of God as an energy that animates the
universe, that is the space of the universe, that God is what is present in
each place, in each space, in the here and now - not an actor in the story but
a dynamic within life itself. Divinity not as personality but as potentiality. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;">Back to
Hockney. Because he then developed this idea in a significant and quite
poignant way. “I mean”, he said, “I'm going to have no space soon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I'm going to die…somewhere in the next five
years or so…and that will end my experience of space - and time”. He smiled. “I
think about this a bit - but then I stop, because it might drive me mad” and
then with a wry smile he reached out beside him: “I'll just have a cigarette”.
And he lit up. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;">Space. We
exist in space. And then we don’t. Many people say that if they do have any
sense of the divine, or the numinous, or a sense of awe, it is connected with
certain spaces and places linked to nature: parks, gardens, seas, open skies,
rainbows, stars at night, deserts, wilderness, sunsets, spaces where we
experience our lives in a different perspective perhaps, see our smallness,
feel our transience, in the presence of places, spaces, that open us up to
something bigger than ourselves - they might be fleeting moments but they link
us to the timeless. “These paintings all have space in them” - we respond to
space. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;">Where do we
find space? Do our religious services offer us space? Do we have space for our
selves? Where do we have inner space, space to be with our inner nature, the
wonder of our particular being in the world, as unique, as distinctive as every
tree that Hockney paints? “They are all different, trees, aren’t they?” he
said. “Like people”. We need space, but it can be hard to find: our world is
very cluttered, so much external stuff demanding our attention every day, every
minute of every hour. The tyranny of the smartphone, of social media, of
everyday life crammed with demands. You know how it is. Where is the space,
outside us, inside us? We yearn for it - is this what people see when they look
at Hockney’s late work : the space we crave? The blessing of space. A moment of
godliness here and now. <i>Makom</i>. Space is God. God is space. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;">So far so
good. We could leave it there. But I think there’s something missing. What
about the randomness of the world?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Because the space of the world gets filled with stuff that isn’t a
blessing, that seems far from godly. Even nature is double-sided. We can stand
in awe at the side of a waterfall or a Scottish loch, or on a seashore, but
sometimes the power of nature is <i>awful</i> not <i>awesome</i>: tides can
turn into tsunamis, the sun can wither the harvests, cause forests to burst
into flames, rivers can flood, destroying land and people alike, avalanches and
earthquakes can extinguish us in a moment. Nature is ruthless, amoral and we
romanticise it at our peril. And this is even before we address our role in the
destructiveness of climate change. These are the curses we live with. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;">The section
of the Torah we read this week in synagogues addresses this double reality:
Deuteronomy 28. It sets side by side what it calls blessings and curses. The
promise of abundance and health and wellbeing if God’s commandments are
followed; and the threat of disaster and hardships if they are not - the shadow
side of life, the tragic darkness of what can unfold. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;">The latter
50 verses of the chapter show us images of the land blighted, of heat and
drought and the death of animals and nature, images of disease and devastation,
exile and death, madness, abuse, cannibalism, despair, helpless suffering,
populations powerless to resist degradation, persecution, occupation. It’s a
piece of extraordinary and terrifying apocalyptic literature, a brilliant and
stunning piece of narrative art - Cormac McCarthy eat your heart out - but it’s
unbearable to read. Yet we see it starkly unfolding in the daily news. I don’t
share the Biblical view that this is God’s punishment for not following the set
commandments. But the Torah does suggest that there are consequences we have to
face collectively for failures to live ethically: consequences for individuals,
for societies, for the planet. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;">So, as much
as Hockney has to offer us, this divine space we need, and images to
contemplate and enjoy, perhaps we need another contemporary artist to fill out
the picture, an artist who speaks (to my mind incomparably) of consequences,
who speaks not of the timeless wonders of nature, but the vicissitudes of
history and the fraught impact of the 20<sup>th</sup> century on our psyches.
His work is also awesome in scale, and if you are drawn to it, it’s not because
it offers space for dreaming but because it offers a mirror in which we can see
who we are in all our confusion and helplessness and moral darkness. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;">I am
speaking of the great German artist Anselm Kiefer whose sculptural and painted
work is filled with the detritus of civilisation, abandoned shopping trolleys,
lead books devoid of writing, axe heads, giant wilting sunflowers, scorched
earth, human hair and ash mixed into his canvases, scenes of devastated forests
and deserted landscapes, broken branches, fragments of glass, weapons of war,
skeletal outlines of people, ghosts haunting the present. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;">His work
over the decades has been rooted in the apocalypse of German history - but he’s
wrestled it into a body of work (also on a heroic scale) that speaks to
universal themes: of loss and devastation and hubris and human destructiveness.
He’s the antithesis of Hockney’s ahistorical evocation of the simple goodness
and joyfulness of life around him. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;">And yet, in
his latest exhibition - and you can still see it online though its just
finished at the White Cube in Bermondsey </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;"><a href="https://www.whitecube.com/gallery-exhibitions/anselm-kiefer-finnegans-wake">https://www.whitecube.com/gallery-exhibitions/anselm-kiefer-finnegans-wake</a></span><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;"><a href="https://www.whitecube.com/gallery-exhibitions/anselm-kiefer-finnegans-wake "> </a>- his last room (after you walk
through the wreckage of consumerism and the shadows and failures of modernity,
arranged with artful randomness) is a room<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>containing shimmering works of nature - rivers, woods, fields, golden
light, a dense profusion of colour, giant canvases completely different from
Hockney - the antithesis of Hockney - but also inducing in the viewer a sense
of space, of timelessness, of something that we can appreciate and celebrate
and feel blessed by. Life goes on, triumphantly. With us, or without us. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;">Kiefer’s
work will never have the popular appeal of Hockney. But just as the Torah’s
vision contains the juxtaposition of blessings and curses, each set of images
recognisable, truthful, necessary, in order to invoke the messy, contradictory
complexity of life, so we in our own lives are fortunate to be able to be
inspired and taught by two such different artists. They each give us space - to
think, to breathe, to reflect on life’s meaning, life’s preciousness, and our
place within it. </span><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;"><b>[based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, September 2nd 2023]</b></span></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-34553389264252813632023-08-27T14:59:00.002+01:002023-08-27T14:59:27.905+01:00On Our Human Vulnerability <p> <span style="font-size: 14pt;">It is often
said - I have said it myself - that Judaism is an inherently patriarchal
religion. The texts of tradition - the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, midrashim, medieval
law codes, and so on - were written by men (as far as we know) and they often
read as if they are addressed to men, with women as ‘other’. In the last fifty
years some brilliant feminist scholarship has helped re-read these texts ‘against
the grain’, as it were, but the patriarchal core remains. And yet there are
also moments - or more than moments - when a very different sensibility in the
Torah comes into play.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Take the
text which occurs in the section of Deuteronomy we have reached in our annual cycle
of readings: Deuteronomy chapter 24, verse 17<i> <o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You shall
not subvert the rights of the stranger or the fatherless; you shall not take a
widow’s garment in pawn/as a pledge. <o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This is one
of those texts that contains a Biblical theme so familiar that we hardly
register how startling its message is - how radical it is not only for its
time, but also how compelling its moral weight is even today, in our vastly
different situation. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Stranger,
orphan, widow - this trilogy of groups to be protected is repeated in the next
verses. During harvesting, any grain that is left behind inadvertently must be
left for “the stranger, the orphan, the widow” (verse19); and similarly with
olives and grapes - what you don’t gather the first time is left for “the
stranger, the orphan, the widow” (verses 20-21).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This
legislation may emerge from a patriarchal culture, but there’s a clear recognition
here that certain women are, potentially, particularly vulnerable: if they have
been in a family unit with a husband, and that support system changes, and they
are left on their own, then they need special provision. It is a very specific
awareness of female vulnerability. The text links this with other non-gender-related
examples of vulnerability: children/youngsters who have been orphaned (again,
deprived of the security of a family unit, they are particularly vulnerable); and,
alongside the widow and the orphan, there’s that existentially-present category
of “the stranger”, the outsider, the immigrant, the one who is not part of ‘us’
but who arrives into, or joins themselves to, a community from the outside. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">They are
vulnerable too - because they don’t innately ‘belong’ to the collective. Either
they don’t see themselves as belonging; or, more often perhaps, and more
universally, they are not seen as belonging to ‘us’: our tribe, our group, our
nation, our society. Now, as then, if you don’t belong to the majority - if you
are an outsider - you are vulnerable. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It is
remarkable that this injunction in the Torah is repeated so often: 36 times. A
constant drumbeat is sustained, of keeping this reality in mind: that it is the
ongoing responsibility of the Hebrew community, the Jewish community, to have
this fine-tuned sensitivity to the stranger, the outsider. A sensitivity that
isn’t just a vague fellow feeling of human connectedness - but involves a demand
to translate the feeling into action. The vulnerable need something active from
us. Not just sympathy. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And more
often than not when we read about this demand, the text - as in our portion (verses
18 and 22) - reminds us that our alertness to human vulnerability is rooted in our
historical experience. The foundational <i>mythos</i> of the community is the
inherited memory of slavery in Egypt. This part of our story became an archetype
in Judaic consciousness about one particular people’s vulnerability - but
thereby it became the prototype of humanity’s innate vulnerability. The image
of slavery speaks directly about the dynamic of who has power and who is powerless.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">To be a
slave is to be dependent and vulnerable, with radically reduced agency. And this
is your history, the Torah says, this is at the heart of your story. The Jewish
people’s story began in helplessness - you must never forget that trauma, the
Torah insists. Is this why it is repeated so often - because there is an
unconscious wish to forget, to repress, to ‘not know’ the pain of powerlessness?
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It’s an
extraordinary message, really, to give to a people. Your story doesn’t begin
with glory, it begins with degradation, powerlessness. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And in many
ways powerlessness and vulnerability have been integral to the whole of the
Jewish story up until modernity, and even into it. I don’t want at all to
suggest that Jewish history is a story only of eternal victimhood - what the historian
Salo Baron called, disdainfully, “the lachrymose view of history”. Of course it
isn’t: there was so much wit and wisdom, creativity and genius and joy along the
way. But what I am focused on right now is the recognition that outsiderdom,
vulnerability, and helplessness has been a transgenerational theme in our story
for a very long time. All the way to the gates of Auschwitz.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Of course Zionism
was supposed to have solved that problem for us. But one of the tragedies of
Jewish contemporary life is that actually it hasn’t helped us collectively to
feel less vulnerable. Perhaps controversially, I would say that because of the
way the Zionist enterprise has turned out, it’s made our collective Jewish
lives more vulnerable - or at least just as vulnerable as we have always been
as Jews in the world. You can have the most high-tech army in the world and the
most sophisticated surveillance systems and security services, but once your
Jewish state forgets the moral vision of Judaism then, at a fundamental level,
it just adds to the historic vulnerability that Jews have always felt. (Look no
further than the grey gates that surround our synagogue buildings and the
security set-up that everyone has to go through to get into any Jewish institution). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We are still
slaves ‘up here’, in our minds - slaves to a skewed reading of our history,
past and present. Vulnerability has become part of our psyches, unfortunately. Like
a scar on the soul. But who knows - just a question - might that scar be a price
worth paying if it keeps us alert to our shared vulnerability with others? That’s
what the Torah seems to want us to do - keep remembering that vulnerability is
built into the human condition and that we Jews have a special moral
responsibility to remember this, to acknowledge this, and to act on it. The
Torah texts even call it a ‘commandment’ that we remember and act on it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In unstable
times - socially, politically, financially, environmentally - we may feel our
vulnerability more immediately. Each of us will feel this differently -
feelings of vulnerability differ widely from person to person; and we might feel
more or less vulnerable at different times of our lives. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">How do we
live with this vulnerability? One of the things that can sometimes help is community.
Our individual vulnerability or fragility or insecurity can be held within the
fabric of the collective, the experience that there is something we are (or can
be) part of that is stronger than we ourselves may feel individually. And part
of the fabric that makes the Jewish collective stronger is that we are rooted
in a tradition that is sustained by its immersion in texts and traditions and
spiritual themes that say there is a power in the universe that sustains us and
nurtures us, that holds us and maintains us, even if we don’t see it, even if
we can’t feel it, even if we don’t believe in it. That there is a source of
strength and security underpinning our existence. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I would
never suggest that the dynamics of this are simple. To feel a sense of security
in life can be a hard business. But as the High Holy Days approach, Jews have
the time to reflect on these themes, and see if strength can be derived by
working on these rhemes collectively. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Yes, there’s
our personal vulnerability, and our need to protect others who are vulnerable.
But we are not on our own with this. That’s the value of community. Human
solidarity is a powerful resource. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><b>[based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, August 26th 2023] </b></span></span></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-62022878944344224722023-07-02T13:58:00.002+01:002023-07-18T14:29:44.484+01:00"Stop the Boats!"<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Let’s start
with an image, a picture - a celebrated, iconic image from March 1965.</span></p><h2 class="post-subtitle-excerpt" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #555555; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 1.15rem; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; margin: 0px 0px 1.8rem; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., center, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, second from right, march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, March 21, 1965. Courtesy of Susannah Heschel" class="attachment-post-thumbnail size-post-thumbnail wp-post-image keep-img-sizing" loading="lazy" sizes="(max-width: 625px) 100vw, 625px" src="https://religionnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/webRNS-King-Heschel1-021121-801x640.jpg" srcset="https://religionnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/webRNS-King-Heschel1-021121-801x640.jpg 801w, https://religionnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/webRNS-King-Heschel1-021121-427x341.jpg 427w, https://religionnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/webRNS-King-Heschel1-021121-768x614.jpg 768w, https://religionnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/webRNS-King-Heschel1-021121-500x399.jpg 500w, https://religionnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/webRNS-King-Heschel1-021121-800x639.jpg 800w, https://religionnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/webRNS-King-Heschel1-021121-624x498.jpg 624w, https://religionnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/webRNS-King-Heschel1-021121-300x240.jpg 300w, https://religionnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/webRNS-King-Heschel1-021121-600x479.jpg 600w, https://religionnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/webRNS-King-Heschel1-021121.jpg 1024w" style="border-radius: 2px; border: 0px; font-size: 16.5px; height: auto; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; pointer-events: none; vertical-align: baseline; width: 728.632px;" /></h2><div><span style="font-size: 14pt;">There in the
middle is Martin Luther King, Baptist minister and civil rights campaigner, on
an interfaith civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery along with - to his
left, our right - his</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">colleague and
friend Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (with his distinctive prophetic-looking
white beard).</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It’s a
wonderful<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>picture - I love the fact that
they are all wearing the Hawaiian <i>lei</i>, symbol of friendship, honour,
celebration. It was after this march for social justice and voting rights that
Heschel is memorably quoted as saying that, “as we walked, I<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>felt that my feet were praying”. So a
wonderful moment in history captured - but the picture also feels that it
belongs to a long lost era: a time when there was an active Black-Jewish
interfaith alliance in the United States which brought together Black Americans
suffering from continuing social and legal discrimination and Jews, both
religious and secular, who as a people had only a couple of decades before that
experienced in Europe the discriminatory, dehumanizing and murderous
consequences of another form of racism. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In the early
1960s King came to see Jews as “the most consistent and trusted ally in the
struggle for civil rights”: he came to value the friendship and support of, for
example, a young Reform rabbi, Israel “Sy” Dresner, who recognised that, as he
put it, “silence has become the unpardonable sin of our time”. Dresner’s
activism frequently led to him being jailed for his non-violent anti-racism
activities: four times between 1961 and 63, once together with MLK.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But, as I said, it’s a long gone era because
such solidarity between these two groups - whose histories contained parallel
narratives of systemic denigration, oppression, and often deadly victimization
- fractured in later decades. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Questions of
identity politics came along with their competing hierarchies of victimhood;
then after 1967 and the occupation of the West Bank the Israel-Palestinian
conflict gradually loomed larger; and then what’s come to be known as ‘white
privilege’ emerged as a theme: and all this came to overshadow what these two
historically-victimised peoples might have had in common, and how they might
have been able to support each other in the face of deep-rooted societal
strands of anti-black and anti-Jewish prejudice. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">That’s very
much an American story, but there are parallels to it here in the UK, the
fragmenting of shared solidarity into silos where every group starts to feel
they have to look out for themselves in the face of institutionalized
injustice. This is not the whole story of course - we now have London Citizens
which brings different groupings together, there’s the Jewish Council for
Racial Equality (JCORE), and there’s active Jewish-Muslim co-operation - but
something has changed since those times when that inspirational picture was
taken. A competitive embitterment has set in. And of course inspirational
leadership is in short supply. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It takes a
rare form of leadership to see what kind of pain those outside one’s own tribe
might be suffering, one’s own group, one’s own class. To see what one might
share as human beings with those who don’t belong to ‘us’. It’s always easier
to focus on what differences there might be. It can be important to acknowledge
differences, but a sense of solidarity with those who are different is one of
the things that the Torah portion read today in our synagogue highlights. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The text of
Numbers chapter 22 contains a comedy masterpiece - it’s straight out of Walt
Disney. A man, Bilaam, is sent on a mission - but the success of the mission
depends on a fantasy talking donkey who is able to see more clearly than the
human character.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bilaam’s a kind of
sorcerer, who is supposed to have this so-called prophetic gift - he can bless,
he can curse. But the point is he’s for hire. He’s freelance. You pay him
enough and he’ll cast a spell on your enemies, you pay him a bit more and he’ll
praise you to the heavens, or promise you the earth. He’s smooth talking - he
might not quote Latin or Greek like our late unlamented prime minister, but he’ll
tell his audience what it pays for him to say. Or what he’s paid to say. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">You might be
surprised we have a comic sequence in the middle of the Torah, but that’s what the
text gives us. You have sorcerer Bilaam, the PR guru, who knows how to use
words, and you have the sorcerer’s apprentice, the donkey, who can see God’s
messenger each time it appears. Yet Bilaam can’t see what’s in front of his
eyes. The donkey first wanders off the path and has to be dragged back, then
the donkey manages to crush Bilaam’s foot against a wall, then the third time
the donkey just collapses in a heap - because Bilaam again refuses to see
what’s staring him in the face. The Biblical storytellers invented this
cartoon-like interlude as a counterpoint to the more serious themes. Just as Shakespeare
did in his dramas: one recalls the doorkeeper in Macbeth, in the midst of the bloody
mayhem: “Knock knock, who’s there?”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(The
first ‘knock, knock’ joke). It is the storyteller’s art to juxtapose the
lightness of being with its seriousness. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And the
themes in this text not only highlight serious issues but they are surprisingly
contemporary ones as well. Political ones. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The story
shows how Balak, king of Moab, is worried about what the Israelites might do to
his land as they continue on their journey through the desert. That’s why he
hires Bilaam to curse them. You can see what’s going on here because it’s in
the news every day. Balak sees all these potential immigrants on his border. He
doesn’t know they are only passing through, that they are en route to a
supposed better life. So he panics. He thinks “Stop the Boats!”, as it were. He
thinks these foreigners are going to consume all his<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>resources, his benefits, his hospital beds
and houses:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“this multitude will eat up
everything around us <a name="_Hlk139031327">as an ox devours the grass of the
field</a>”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Numbers 22:4).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is brilliant storytelling: the Torah
describes these foreigners, through Balak’s eyes, as being like greedy animals
- “as an ox devours the grass of the field” - the rhetoric is a classic case of
dehumanizing strangers who arrive at our borders. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The Torah is
haunted by the future. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So what does
Balak do? He didn’t have the tabloid press to do his dirty work, but he did
know a man who could make a good speech, Bilaam, who was always for hire. Balak
hoped Bilaam could use his way with words against those threatening to ‘swamp’
the land, ‘flood’ over the borders. You see, that’s the power of words - that
they can be used<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to denigrate and curse
as well as support and bless. Words can be used to make people hate each other,
or have compassion for one another. It’s the power of language. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And as the
Torah text unfolds it shows that Bilaam is a poet, a wordsmith, a conjurer with
language: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that was his gift, his power,
the slippery arts of the soothsayer, the leader writer, the speechwriter,
anyone paid to sow fear, spread distrust. And as the Torah text shows, that’s particularly
easy to do against the stranger, the traveller, the immigrants<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>arriving at a nation’s borders. Words slip,
slide, they don’t stand still, they can be used - then or now - to curse, to
manipulate, to denigrate; or they can be used to bless, to heal, to comfort. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And the
power of this story - and it is a timeless narrative, up to the minute in its
significance - is that it illustrates how the most gifted speakers can be more
stupid than donkeys, just unable to see what is in front of them - whether it
is divine messengers (as in this text) or fellow human beings (who are also, in
the Jewish mystical tradition, agents of the divine, carriers of the divine
spark). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In the end,
Bilaam’s rhetorical gifts are used to benefit life - the life of the Israelite
community - rather than to bring to fruition Balak’s fear-driven hatred of the
outsider.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it is solidarity with the
outsider that Bilaam gives voice to: “How good are your tents o Jacob, your
dwelling places, O Israel” (Numbers 24:5); and, amazingly, we begin every
prayer service with just these words, which means we begin each service with a quietly
crafted irony. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The Hebrew
storytellers created a character who was not a Hebrew -<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he’s an outsider, he’s not one of ‘us’, the
Hebrew people, the Jewish people - but we’re told he has access to God, to the
divine dimension of life. And this outsider can see that there is something
special about this people, our people. He’s not one of ‘us’ yet he can see
something special about us - the storytellers make him into a character who
blesses Israel. And then the rabbis came along and lifted those words out of
the Bible and said: Yes, that’s how we will begin our services! Each service
will start with a blessing, a quote from the Torah - but from someone the Torah
says was outside our tribe, our group, our people. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Each service
will be a reminder that although we are (or like to think we are) a special
group, a distinctive group, we live in a world where not everyone is like us: we
live in a world of difference - but let’s try and remember that difference is a
blessing, can be a blessing, if we see each other as we really are, not as a
threat, but from a perspective of solidarity.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In the end
we are all outsiders. We are all outsiders to someone else, some other group,
or nation or religion. Actually there is no central group, no core group: we
are all spokes on the wheel of life. But our work - spiritual work,
psychological work, political work - is to appreciate that what makes us
different from each other is not a curse for humanity but a potential blessing.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">As we
journey on, in whatever community we belong to, as we journey on like
Israelites through the desert, we can develop, practice, the art of bringing a
blessing to each other, of seeing the best in others and not always fearing the
worst. Is it a lost art? Let’s hope not. Let’s imagine we can be bearers of the
prophetic spirit, like Bilaam in the end, like Martin Luther King, like Abraham
Joshua Heschel: let’s imagine we can be carriers of hope not hate. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">[based on
a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, July 1<sup>st</sup>, 2023]
<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-48874744169853034442023-05-22T13:41:00.001+01:002023-05-22T13:41:36.221+01:00Wandering and Wondering<p> <span style="font-size: 14pt;">I recently
revisited some films about British Jewish identity that I was involved with
thirty years ago: A Sense of Belonging, a four part series commissioned by
Channel 4, dreamed up and directed by Paul Morrison.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Paul and I
worked on the structure of the films, and the book that accompanied the series,
and on re-watching the films now one theme struck me as still particularly relevant
to the Anglo-Jewish community. This is the question of whether Jews want to be seen
- to stand up and be counted, literally and figuratively - and recognised in
our group identity by the powers that be. Or whether we wanted to be quiet, to
slip under the radar as it were - not to be hidden from sight, but just not to
draw attention to ourselves, individually as Jews (for example in the 2021 UK census)
or collectively. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Obviously
this is not a new theme in Jewish life. It’s probably as old as Jewish history,
or at least Diaspora Jewish history, when Jews have been minorities in
whichever countries they lived in. At the beginning of the 1990s, when the films
were made, the question of putting one’s head over the parapet was still a live
issue. There was an older generation who had been brought up to keep their
heads down, assimilate outwardly - Jewish in private, English in public <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- a very deliberate post-War stance (though it
was true pre-War as well) of not drawing attention to one’s Jewishness. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But
alongside those traditional Anglo-Jewish attitudes, Paul interviewed<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a younger generation who were not feeling so
constrained, who wanted to be able to be Jewish publicly, to campaign as Jews,
to go on demonstrations as Jews - Jews against apartheid, Jews against Nuclear
weapons - a generation who were feeling more confident that they belonged in
the country of their birth, in the UK, and wanted the freedom to express their
Jewishness wherever it was: at school, at work, at university, to feel free to
wear a kippah on the street or on the tube; to show pride and openness about
being Jewish. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">One can see,
looking back, that this was part of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>larger trends that were changing, in the UK and elsewhere, about
identity: that in liberal democracies around the world, one was allowed to be, one
could honour, who one felt oneself to be - whether it was gay or lesbian, or Black,
or part of the woman’s movement, your experience of yourself, who you were, who
you identified as, needed expressing; that you could be ‘out’, out and proud,
and not have to shield yourself, hide yourself, when out in the world.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">For a
younger generation today this might all seem amazing, that Jews lived with a <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>double identity, a private identity and a public
persona: amazed because it might feel that these things are not even a question
now - if you are transitioning, it you have autism, if you have a disability,
if you are survivor of abuse, if you are an eco-warrior, a goth, a white witch
- whatever is part of what makes you ‘you’ (your so-called ‘identity’) - of
course it can be out there, it’s part of the rich tapestry of our collective
life. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But for
those of us with longer memories, we might recognise how much has changed in
the last 30 years, often in some fundamental ways, around this recognition of
difference in our society: that there’s an acceptance that there’s room for all
sorts of differences from one another; and that both from a legal point of view
and an emotional point of view contemporary society not only accepts diversity,
but celebrates its diversity. This is social progress of a particular kind, and
Jews have benefited from that wave of change - and quite often have been at the
forefront of campaigns to ensure that such tolerance of difference has become
the norm.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And yet, that
impulse in liberal democracies to accept and celebrate diversity is not the
only show in town. Jews are still carrying an anxiety - and you can call it
paranoid or you can call it justified by two thousand years of history - anxiety
about being Jewishly out, or Jewishly counted. The 2021 UK census, when people
were invited to declare their ethnicity, brought this to the fore. Many Jews,
anecdotally, are said to have declined to say they were Jewish on the forms. This
anxiety about being on a list somewhere is part of Hitler’s grim legacy. Nazism
may have been defeated 75 years ago, two or three generations ago, but many
Jews still have persecutory anxieties inside them. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There’s two
kinds of persecutory anxiety - one bit is that antisemitism is still real, and Jews
can be on the receiving end of it. We recognise that strand of anxiety quite
easily. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But less
easy to get hold of is how sometimes <i>internally</i> - and it varies from Jew
to Jew - we are also persecuted. That we are our own persecutors: always
fearing the worst, never able to relax inwardly, always vigilant - we might
suffer from a form of internal persecution that doesn’t allow us to relax and
be ourselves in public, or at work, and sometimes still inhibits us in private.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is Hitler’s long term victory over us -
he’s still up here, in our heads, whether we want it or not. So we become our
own persecutors. (I think David Baddiel suffers from this a bit). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I would
suggest though that we don’t have to be victims of this internal persecutor. We
can push back against it. That’s a job of work, a psychological and spiritual
piece of work, not to let our souls be haunted by our past, our history. It’s inner
work we need to do - so that we don’t stay oppressed by our own thoughts, but
are really free to be Jewish as openly and enjoyably as we’d like to. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But when I
talk about this celebration of diversity not being the only show in town in
liberal democracies, I’m not thinking just about Jews being relaxed about being
Jewish, I am talking about the threats to that very notion of diversity -
because there are some powerful countervailing forces around the world in
so-called democracies. You better not be a Muslim in India under the current
Hindu nationalist regime; you better not be part of the Traveller community in
Hungary, or indeed anything other than conservative Christian; you better not
be black, or Mexican, or a woman wanting an abortion, in many parts of the
United States; you better not be Arab in parts of Israel, or - if current
trends continue there - gay and Jewish, or a member of a NGO who gets funds
from the Diaspora to monitor military and legal abuses, civil rights abuses. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Genuine
pluralistic democracy is under threat in many places - and it is not just other
nations who are suffering these attacks from within. In the UK we see <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>attacks on the right to protest in public, the
rights to assemble, the rights to roam, the rights to asylum, the rights to
take collective action, the rights to having a private identity in public space
without being tracked or filmed or being under surveillance, i.e. the right to
live without being under suspicion for being a citizen within this allegedly
democratic nation. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It is not
just Jews who have worries about being seen, in other words - it is part of
wider and deeper trends in modernity in societies that have political narratives
of personal freedom, that on the one hand suggest that we have autonomy to
express ourselves in all our complex diversity - but then find, across the
globe, ways of monitoring, suppressing and persecuting those same sovereign
rights. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">As Jews we
have learnt the art of being able to be both self-expressive about our
Jewishness - and to self-regulate, hold back. We walk a kind of tightrope
between these two experiences, expressing ourselves and being quiet, showing
and hiding: I think there are ways each of us do this all the time, it has
become maybe second nature to us. Perhaps this is what it now means to be
Jewish in the world, to live with these two impulses inside us, it has become
part of our Jewish identity. Proud of who we are - self-protective about who we
are. Telling the world who we are - keeping <i>shtum</i> about who we are. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This is what
it means to be in the wilderness, <i>B’midbar</i>: we began to read from the
book of Numbers this week. This part of the Jewish saga begins with a census of
the people. And then the people start their journey through the wilderness. ‘Wilderness’
is about being between two spaces. We are not in Egypt - we aren’t slaves. But
we haven’t reached the Promised Land. We are in-between. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I would say
we are always in between, in every generation: that what the Torah describes in
the book of Numbers and the book of Deuteronomy, this journey through the
wilderness, is existential. In other words it is an imaginative act of
storytelling about what life is like in-between, what it feels like in-between
complete oppression on the one hand, and promises of a transformed life on the
other hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The children
of Israel journeyed that mythic 40 years waking up every day with the miracle
of manna, of having their lives sustained for them - but also with the
uncertainty of what that day would bring. Would they stay camped around a
watering hole, or would they have to move on? Where were they going, where were
they headed? They had no idea, just vague rumours and stories that circulated, Moses
was always too busy to ask and anyway he had his head in the clouds; and what
was this promised land anyway, and how long would it take to get there? They
didn’t know it would take forty years - it might be over next week - all they
knew was that they were in the wilderness and they had to face the uncertainty
of being on a journey into the unknown. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Well that’s
us too, we Jews who don’t know where we are going, what will become of us as a
people; we who have to wake up each day and decide: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>how do we express our Jewishness today, how ‘out’
are we going to be, how much do we hide, how much are we afraid to be ourselves?
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So we wander
and we wonder - and this is what it means to be Jewish. It’s our destiny: to
wander and to wonder. The wilderness is where it’s at, where life is lived.
Even if you live in Israel, it’s still the wilderness - the space between slavery
and the imagined promised land. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are a
wilderness people, wandering and wondering what will become of us all. And for
me, that’s worth celebrating. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[based on
a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, May20th, 2023]<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-38862353913584563742023-04-30T18:06:00.002+01:002023-04-30T18:06:18.942+01:00Trauma and Holiness<p><span style="font-size: 14pt;">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 </span><i style="font-size: 14pt;">Adonai Echad</i><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> –
“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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Trauma – we
know what that is, or think we know. How best to define it? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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 <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">“Our deepest
experiences <i>are</i> other people” – is that the same as ‘Our deepest
experiences are <i>with</i> 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, <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that in doing so you are
revealing a feeling. But you don’t notice that at the time. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So here I
am, adding layer on layer to this portrait - in <i>homage</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So much for
my first theme: trauma. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So what
about holiness? The <i>sedrah</i> this week was <i>Kedoshim</i>. “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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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 </span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">everyday
life (personal holiness): <span style="color: black;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">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, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>nationally, by holiness. When
holiness fails, trauma comes into being. When holiness goes into eclipse, trauma
creeps into view.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When holiness is
abused or mocked, trauma seeps into the soul. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a name="_Hlk133588533"><i><span style="color: black; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Kedoshim tihiyu</span></i></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk133588533;"></span><span style="color: black; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> says the Torah: ‘You <i>will be</i>
holy’, ‘you <i>must be</i> holy’; but also we can hear in <i>Kedoshim tihiyu</i>
: “you are <i>made to be</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b>[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, 29th April 2023]</b></span></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-11929454593000416842023-03-20T19:43:00.000+00:002023-03-20T19:43:32.167+00:00On Being “In Great Danger”<p> <span style="font-size: 14pt;">Let me start
with a piece of Hasidic thought, and see what we can make of it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">“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” <o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">{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). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So here,
now, what do we make of this Hasidic text? Does it speak to us, can we relate
to it? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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, <i>“at all times, for in the world a person is in great
danger”</i> – Are we? Are you? Can you relate to that? Do you feel you are “in
great danger?” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Maybe that
doesn’t speak to you - but if we feel there might be some truth in it, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>Echad</i>, like God, One. (Big topic, not for now).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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<i>, Echad</i>, One. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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: <i>“…as if we were hanging by a hair, and a tempest were raging to the
very heart of heaven…”</i> – 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 <i>“at a loss for what to do, and there [is] hardly time to cry out”</i> –
isn’t that how we feel sometimes, at a loss for what to do?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and maybe it is later than we can bear to
think, maybe there is now<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>“hardly
time to cry out”.</i> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>feel</i> sometimes just as the text puts
it<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>“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”.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This text is obviously not about the
environmental crisis - and yet is also about it, now, for us. Texts can be
timeless, sometimes. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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”. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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’? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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: <i>“Let all cry out to God…”</i>
And look how that urgency is conveyed in two long sentences, ending in <i>“and
cry out to God”</i> – it loops back to that - before the coda tacked on, that it
should be <i>“done at all times”,</i> because each person, all of us, are “in great
danger”. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">(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). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Let all cry out…hardly have time to cry
out….cry out”, followed by the coda. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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 <i>we</i> 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? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Maybe too
may feel we live in a time <i>“when no counsel…can help us, and we have no
refuge save to remain in our loneliness”</i>? But perhaps we don’t have to
remain stuck like that. For some, it may still be possible to <i>“lift our eyes
and hearts up to God”</i>;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but also – spoiler
alert: theology coming up - we might now want to say that we can lift up our
eyes and hearts <b><i>to each other</i></b>, 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; <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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’. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">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. <i>“And this should be done
at all times”, </i>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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[loosely
based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, March 18<sup>th</sup>, 2023] <o:p></o:p></span></b></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-14084730748345375552022-12-31T17:13:00.001+00:002023-01-01T10:38:00.482+00:00The Art of Interpretation <p><span style="font-size: 14pt;">A quiz
question for you: what connects these three people? The artist David Hockney, the
actress Gwyneth Paltrow and the novelist Ian McEwan? I’ll give you some time to
think about.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This is the
time of the year when the newspapers are full of quizzes, puzzles, games – I
suppose they reckon that people have more free time on their hands and want a
bit of fun, although I suspect the hidden reason is that it’s to stop families
cooped up together over the holidays from killing each other. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Family life,
as we know, is the space where all the passions of the human heart play
themselves out, all the blessings of love, companionship, nurture, dependability
– as well as all the painful antagonisms: warring partners, fractious children,
all the rivalries, enmities, and inter-generational mental derangements that
family life also gives rise to. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This is of
course an old story, a universal story, the ways in which the dynamics of
family life can promote both tenderness, intimacy and a joyful sense of
well-being - and yet can also be a crucible for violence and cruelty:
disabling, disfiguring eruptions of jealousy, envy, competitiveness, even murderousness.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">We read
today in the synagogue from chapter 45 in the Book of Genesis - we’ve nearly
reached the end of Genesis in our annual cycle of readings – and as a piece of
literature, a piece of ancient storytelling, we can see the way in which,
because the book is cast in the form of a multi-generational fable of family
life, it contains an extended exploration of these themes: human themes,
personal themes, everyday themes. The writers of the Hebrew Bible were some of
the earliest exponents of the art of narrative storytelling. They were writing
about the complex dynamics of family life two and a half millennia before it
became a staple of modern fiction. George Eliot, Thomas Mann, Isabel Allende and
the rest are all writing in the wake of the narrative artists of Genesis. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The story of
Cain and Abel shows rivalry turning murderous, Abraham and Sara deals with
marital discord, in the next generation Isaac and Rebekkah each have their
favourites, which generates hostility and estrangement between their sons,
Jacob and Esau, and the effects of this dysfunctional family dynamic spill over
into the next generation where the character at the centre of the story we read
about today, Joseph, becomes Jacob’s favourite – remember that coat of many
colours? – and as the saga unfolds the traumas of family life are played out in
full view. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Joseph is
only in Egypt because his brothers first plan to kill him, then he's sold instead
to a passing band of merchants. Out of sight, out of mind. Or so they thought.
As people do. But the text portrays with great psychological acuity how life
doesn’t work like that: the past is always haunting the present, even if we try
to shut it away. Maybe particularly when we try to shut it away (thank you,
Professor Freud). The brothers’ guilt reverberates through the narrative; and,
deceived by his sons into believing that Joseph is dead, Jacob in particular
bears the cruel pain of that imagined loss for decades. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The chapters
that speak about Joseph are actually a brilliant piece of narrative art, they
form a kind of novella in themselves within the larger arc of Genesis: Joseph is
portrayed as unpleasantly self-obsessed as a young man – ‘up himself’ in
today’s idiom – and he’s filled with unconscious aggression towards both his
siblings and his parents; the tears of Joseph that we read about this week are
the culmination of years of suppressed emotion. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But what I
want to highlight here – and this should take us straight to Gwyneth Paltrow –
is a small scene (Genesis 37: 12-17) near the beginning of these 14 chapters of
the Joseph novella. It’s a scene that any self-respecting novelist today would
probably cut in a later draft because it seems to have no purpose. Jacob has
sent his sons to feed the sheep in the next valley, Shechem; they go off; Joseph
doesn’t go with them; then Jacob calls Joseph and says, ‘Go and find out how
they are getting on, then come back and let me know.’ So Joseph sets off but he
can’t find them. The storyteller describes him wandering around in a field. And
then a man, a stranger, sees him and asks what he’s looking for. Joseph
explains he’s looking for his brothers who are shepherding the family’s flocks.
Oh, they’ve left here, the man says, they’ve gone on to Dothan. And off goes Joseph
to Dothan, where he finds them - and the narrative continues with the brothers
deciding to get rid of him. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But what’s
the point of this? The stranger doesn’t have a name, he doesn’t get a thank you
from Joseph - you don’t need this scene. It seems irrelevant to the story, this
mini-drama. The narrator could have taken us straight from Joseph going off to
find his brothers to just meeting up with them. We wouldn’t have missed
anything. And yet we sense at the same time that this piece of everyday
co-incidence – he just happened to meet this man, who just happened to have
seen the brothers go off to Dothan – is somehow vital: the rest of the story depends
on it. If he hadn’t met this random stranger, then Jewish history would have
stopped there, so to speak. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I think the
deeper purpose of this scene <i>is its randomness</i>. This is how life is, we
sense, a series of random events, one thing after another, along with the
choices we make about them, and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>how we
interpret them. In the Gwyneth Paltrow film ‘Sliding Doors’ you see this theme
played out. Catching the train leads to one outcome, missing the train to a
very different outcome.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Part of the
popularity of the film, I suppose, lies in it dramatizing something we all do
recognise from our own lives: how small moments in our lives can have huge
consequences, small decisions can alter our destiny. You go to a party even
though you are tired and you meet the love of your life. It was meant to be,
you say, when reminiscing. But was it? You could have gone to bed, had a good
sleep and met someone else who could also have transformed your life in a
different direction. Or who could have been a disaster. Who is to say? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Or it’s
raining and you can’t be bothered to go out and meet your friend, but you know
they are lonely so in your kind-heartedness you get in your car and you’re involved
in a life-altering accident. Each moment in life, every choice we make, every
situation we find ourselves presented with, a chain of events can unfold, for
good or for ill, and we can’t predict which way things will turn out. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In his
latest novel, <i>Lessons</i>, Ian McEwan has illustrated at some length how we all
live at the intersection of a web of large and small events. He juxtaposes major
events in world history, like the Cuban missile crisis, with personal events
like his protagonist’s relationship with a predatory piano teacher, and <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>shows how we are always living at this
intersection. As McEwan puts it: “In settled expansive mood Roland” – that’s
the novel’s central character – “occasionally reflected on the events and
accidents, personal and global, miniscule and momentous, that had formed and
determined his existence. His case was not special”, says McEwan, “all fates
are similarly constituted”. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">How do we
manage all this randomness? We meet a stranger in a bar, fall into
conversation, and something they say sticks in our mind and determines a
decision we make, which leads our lives in a direction we would not otherwise
have taken. But what if we had ignored them? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How might our life have unfolded then? Might
we have had more fun, or success, or satisfaction in our lives if we hadn’t
been so susceptible to the musings of a stranger? Both Ian McEwan’s ‘<i>Lessons</i>’
and Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘Sliding Doors’ speak about this: how the circumstances
we face, and the decisions we make in response, determines our destiny, and
just how much is down to chance, or luck, or what we later come to think of as fate.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And that’s
the essence of the Joseph narrative: that when he re-meets his brothers after
twenty years, twenty years in which he’s developed from being a spoilt brat to
being the most powerful man in Egypt, Pharoah’s right hand man, Joseph offers
them an interpretation of what has happened between them – ‘You thought you’d
got rid of me, sold me into slavery - but actually all this was meant to be, it
was God’s plan, it was so that you could be saved, the whole family could be
saved, from this famine that is raging in our lands’. (There it is: the small
scale family drama intersecting with the large scale political drama being
played out in the region). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">When you
first hear Joseph’s words, you might be tempted to think the storyteller is
offering you a conventional piece of religious thinking – one you do still
hear, and it sort of drives me mad -<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘oh,
it’s all in God’s hands, what’s happened (whether it’s good or bad); it was
meant to be, it’s part of the divine plan, ours not to question’. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But what I find most remarkable about this Genesis
text is the literary artfulness of the narrator: one needs to note how <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the storyteller puts this conventional
theological interpretation into the mouth of his character, Joseph – all the
pain Joseph has endured, all the pain he knows his father has gone through,
Joseph explains it, rationalises it, as having a higher meaning. But I think we
are meant to notice that this is the character’s interpretation, not the
narrator’s. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It’s as if
our anonymous author, when he gives those lines to his character, is sort of winking
at us: ‘You may think this is how life works, but this pious interpretation is
my character’s view – it has no more authority than that’. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It reminds
me of the fictional politician Francis Urquhart in the TV series, ‘House of
Cards’:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You might very well think
that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.” The art of plausible deniability. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And if you
think what I’m saying is a bit exaggerated, or far-fetched, I’d just draw your
attention to the rather remarkable fact that in the 14 chapters of this novella,
from chapter 37 to the end of the book, you never have (as you do throughout
the saga’s earlier chapters with the patriarchs and the matriarchs) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a single scene where God is shown speaking to
Joseph. The storytellers show you Joseph referring to God, using God as a
reference point, but not addressing God. And God certainly never intervenes and
speaks to Joseph. This is all storytelling of a very sophisticated kind. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The
narrators withhold narrative certainty about the one religious question that
all readers, and all audiences, from then until today, wish to have certainty
about. How does God work in the world, in events big and small? Does God work
in the world at all, in events big and small? Or is life all ‘Sliding Doors’
randomness, and chance, to which we poor humans attribute meaning? Or don’t
find meaning in at all. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Joseph is
portrayed as projecting meaning onto his experiences, in retrospect. In Yiddish
we have this word<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>bashert </i>- ‘meant
to be’ - which is a comforting thought for some people, perhaps many people,
and you don’t have to be Jewish to be comforted by the idea of <i>bashert</i>, that
events in life can seem to fit in to some larger, harmonious pattern. I have
been known to be comforted by this mode of thinking and feeling myself. But
when I do allow myself to be comforted by it, I also remind myself that the millions-strong
Jewish communities of Eastern and Central Europe who spoke Yiddish, and who did
have religious faith in life as <i>bashert</i>, were also those who were
annihilated in their millions, within living memory. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">For
survivors, <i>bashert</i> can always be a comfort. But not, I think, for
victims. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I think our
Hebrew Bible is a radical text, in parts, because it subtly undermines
certainties – and our wishes for certainty – about how life is patterned, what
meaning it contains. Those literary artists who created sacred literature for
their people seemed to want to both promote particular ways of seeing and
thinking and believing for their people, while at the same time withholding any
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>definitive perspective from which a
reader can say they, we, have a solid understanding of, or grasp on, that
enigmatic character the storytellers called the God of Israel, The Eternal One,
Who Is. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Joseph, the
great dream interpreter, seems to be their literary vehicle for the notion that
it’s not just dreams that need interpretation, but life itself. And that just
as dreams don’t come with their own interpretations, neither does life. We are
required, like Joseph, to find an interpretation that works for us.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And David
Hockney? Reaching a Biblical age - he’s now 85 - with a new immersive show
opening soon, he’s long been dedicated to interpreting life as he sees it in
front of him. He shows us what is there, often the natural world, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>through his own eyes, helping us to see anew.
Asked if he was looking forward to this new venture he answered, as if he was some
kind of a mystic: “I live in the now. It is the ‘now’ that is eternal”. That’s
a profound interpretation of life - and it was said both straightforwardly, and
with a showman’s twinkle in his eye. Which is perhaps the best way to offer one’s
vision. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><b>[based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, December 31st 2022]</b></span></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-74443394689207143712022-12-04T17:45:00.001+00:002022-12-04T17:45:33.095+00:00Hope in Gloomy Times <p><span style="font-size: 14pt;">It seems to
be becoming harder for me to find some words, some sentences, to string
together, to talk about what matters, what matters to us in our own lives. It
is of course – sadly but seemingly inevitably - not that difficult to speak
from a place of regret, or concern, a place of foreboding or apprehension, even
of desperation, about what occurs in our world.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Anyone who
keeps their eyes and ears open – let alone their hearts – can see why this might
be. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">For example,
I have just caught up with Sir David Attenborough’s recent 6-part series on the
BBC, Frozen Planet ll, which built up over the weeks to an awe-evoking but
painful finale. Although he’s spent a lifetime making a series of award-winning
programmes on our natural world in all its profusion, diversity and grandeur, he’s
been criticised – particularly over recent years - for not utilising his influential
position as an authority on the natural world in order to highlight environmental
issues. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But now, in
this series, he hasn’t held back. Watching him watching the stunning footage
shot around the globe, it was as if he was holding the whole vast, devastating
beauty and fragility of the planet in his hands, and saying: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Look at this, look at it, wonder at it, be in
awe of the complexity and vulnerability of this planet we all inhabit…see how
it is changing in front of our eyes, as we speak, changing in ways that can be,
and will be, devastating not only for the creatures you see on your screens,
but for us too, humanity, for we are all part of a complex web of
interconnectedness, and that melting ice you see doesn’t just affect the polar
bears and penguins, but will be impacting us in the forthcoming years, in the
near future.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And what he
doesn’t say is: “And I won’t be here to see this destruction” – he’s 96 – “but
you will be, and your children will be”. He alludes, with a tender melancholy,
to the way in which if current trends continue, future generations will be flooded
out of their cities, they will become migrants because of heat, or lack of
food, or lack of water. ‘Here it is’, he says, ‘it is happening now, but’ – he
always is careful to add this, I noticed – ‘but’, he says, ‘it is not yet too
late, there are people working to mitigate some of the effects of this, action
is possible, but it depends on you’. No, actually he doesn’t say ‘you’; he says
‘it depends on us’. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He includes himself.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So this has
been painful but necessary watching. It is, by the way, what the BBC does
brilliantly, living up to its Charter: “to inform, educate, entertain”. (This
is part of the reason why I find the regular, ideologically-driven attacks on
the BBC by Tory MPs and the Jewish press so small-minded and self-defeating.
The BBC doesn’t get everything right, for sure, but no institution does. In an
era where there is a global battle to defend the principle of public
truth-telling, undermining the basic integrity of the BBC is an invidious
attack on one of the pillars that support our public well-being). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Speaking
about the things that matter to us might often mean speaking about difficult
and painful subjects. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The
environment of course is the largest, but what about this dementing war that is
going on in Europe, in Ukraine? Putin’s brutal barbarism shows no sign of
abating. His flirtation with a nuclear power station accident is terrifying. The
bombing of a civilian population into submission - which won’t happen – is an
ongoing war crime. Another humanitarian crisis is brewing: no heat, no water,
sub-zero temperatures, more refugees are inevitable. The Holodomor was Stalin’s
genocidal attempt in 1932-33 to starve Ukrainians to death; Putin’s Kholodomor
is the equivalent: the attempt to freeze a population to death. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We are
seeing authoritarian brutality unleashed not only by Russia - it has its echoes
in China, In India, in parts of Africa. And who knows how the American drama
will unfold over these next few years – the threat of civil war is not
hyperbole or fantasy any longer. All this is part of the fabric of our world
now. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So pessimism
is easy to access. It’s hard to be optimistic (to put it mildly) about
humanity’s social progress, about our emotional progress as a species.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So where does that leave Jews, who nurtured a
sustaining vision for so many generations that they were to be – they had the
potential to be – “a light unto the nations”? Jews clung to Isaiah’s words
(42:6; 49:6) in spite of centuries of persecution and oppression – and what has
become of that sustaining hope for us as a Jewish people? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Over the
last forty years, we see Israel lurching, election by election, towards the
unspeakable: are we allowed to say that the rhetoric voiced by members of the
present government sounds like ethnic cleansing of Israel’s ‘enemies’ (i.e. those
who won’t submit without protest to oppression and discrimination) has become
thinkable? Intoxicated by a sense of victimhood and grievance, the adherents of
the rightward march of Israeli history bring shame on those of us Jews who
still cling to the absurd and defiant vision of social justice, compassion,
generosity - the vision we received at Sinai, the promise to Abraham that he
and his descendants would be a “blessing to humanity (Genesis 22:18), the
prophetic understanding of this heritage that spoke about that promise, that
possibility, that demand, that we were to be that “light to the nations”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">What a
betrayal we are witnessing; and it is dementing and demoralising when we hear
that the Israeli State’s enemies are now not only the Palestinians but the
non-governmental organizations like Rabbis for Human Rights, and the New Israel
Fund, and Breaking the Silence, and all those civil groups who are still
holding to those old-time Jewish values in both religious and secular forms.
The enemy within. This is the time to increase our support (and it may be just
financial, but that matters) for those organisations that are standing against
the tide of semi-fascistic rhetoric and activity in our so-called Holy Land. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Reform Jews
have a modern prayer in their liturgy that asks for “a blessing on the State of
Israel”. I have been uncomfortable with that prayer for quite a while, but
something in me recently has snapped. I can no longer say those words. Not the
words in the book as they stand. When using this text now I have taken to
tweaking it: I have re-written it so I can say something that carries a modicum
of integrity, that reflects the Jewish values I believe in. When it comes to the
liturgical moment when we reflect on the role of Israel as a state, I can still
speak about “a vision of peace, justice and compassion” and the wish “to build
a society of dignity, with communities devoted to God’s truth”. It’s a small
gesture, a tiny protest - meaningless in the larger scheme of things. I am
under no illusion about that. Nevertheless, it’s my impotent diasporic protest
against the huge betrayal of values I see going on over there. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So whether
it’s the environment, the barbarism of war, the threats to democratic values
around the globe, the curse of nationalism, or the ongoing class-war of the
rich against the poor that’s being played out here in the UK, there are so many
themes that matter to us, that affect us (in ways large and small) about which
it’s hard not to feel apprehension or gloom. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But as well
as all that – and there’s such a lot of ‘all that’ - there are<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>experiences in life that also matter to us.
That deeply matter. Experiences that verge on the sublime, that make life
infinitely worth living, whether it’s holding a grandchild’s tiny hand as they
inspect a winter flower, or hearing a Beethoven sonata, or sharing a story or a
smile or a joke with a friend, or a lover, or a stranger. Moments of intimacy,
moments of connectedness,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of human
warmth, of what Martin Buber called ‘<i>Begegnung</i>’/encounter -<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>moments of feeling blessed, moments of being
a blessing,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>moments of stillness or
moments of intensity, moments when life is felt to be precious, fleeting
moments that are also timeless. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Divine
moments, when all that other stuff that matters – and it really does matter –
goes into eclipse for a minute, an hour, and something else shines through: a
line of poetry that lifts the spirit, an overheard remark that changes how we
think of a problem we are wrestling with; or being in the presence of Sir Simon
Schama’s informed imagination in his latest, vital, series <i>The History of
Now</i> (also on the BBC), <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>watching his
moving evocation of the power and potential of art to transcend human
suffering, to transmit the values of freedom and generosity and compassion
within dark times - and there have been so many dark times, and they continue. From
Picasso’s <i>Guernica</i> to Orwell’s <i>1984</i>, from Pasternak’s smuggled-to-the-west
<i>Doctor Zhivago</i> to Vaclav Havel’s prison writings and Ai Weiwei’s protest-art,
Schama traces the creativity within the human spirit that has enabled there to
be protests on behalf of life, when all around seems blighted by destructiveness.
I urge you to watch it. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">All of this
is light to set against the darkness, it is the daily miracle of the oil that
lasts, that nurtures the soul. It’s a bit early for Chanukah themes, I know,
but here we are: light in the darkness. It’s what we all need -those of us who
struggle with these things - what we all crave, light to keep us going so that
gloom does not overtake us. The fragility of hope in the face of the forces of
destruction. This is what we live for, it’s what we pray for, it’s what keeps
us going, day by day, year by year, generation after generation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let’s keep talking about what matters – ‘out
there’, in here – talking about what matters, keeping the flickering light of
hope alive in dark times. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[adapted
from a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, December 3<sup>rd</sup>
2022]<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-1519039756602235002022-11-14T15:42:00.001+00:002022-11-14T15:42:38.184+00:00Sodom: A Story for our Time?<p><span style="font-size: 14pt;">We’d
come to the city years before - even though it had a terrible reputation (Genesis
13:12-13). Everyone in the Valley knew about Sodom – it was violent, corrupt,
lawless, everyone was out for themselves. There were no-go areas at night, and
even during the day it wasn’t safe, certainly not for a woman – it was bad,
like New York in the 70s, or parts of Jo’burg or Mexico City today...but there
always have been places that bring Sodom to mind: godless, fear-filled cities
where people struggle to survive with their humanity intact. God knows, what an
impossible project it feels sometimes: to live with integrity when you are
surrounded by greed and trickery, corruption and selfishness, with anger
simmering on the streets, in cities that lack compassion, where hope is all
burnt out.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Our
city felt it was living on the edge, life was harsh, chaos was always just
around the corner - things, we felt, could break down at any moment – but did
it deserve what happened? The fire and brimstone, the choking dust, the charred
bodies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do cities perish through lack of
goodness? Did Hiroshima? Or Dresden? Did Aleppo or Mariupol? Surely the
innocent and the guilty die together? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Was
Sodom different? I knew good people there, who perished with the wicked. No
justice, even for the righteous: it is ever thus.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Would it have made a difference if there’d
been even ten good folk in Sodom, people of principle, those who stood outside
the crowds, who resisted the descent into self-centredness, manipulation, mass
delusion? Were there not even ten, tender of heart, on the side of life,
committed to their neighbours, caring for their environment, nurturing the
society in which we lived? If just that handful had<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>acted sooner, could they have saved us all?
We’ll never know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">My
husband was a good man – and there were<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a few others like him, prepared to offer hospitality to strangers, to
take in the immigrant, to protect those seeking shelter and asylum. Yes, there
were some, but as it turned out there were not enough – not enough to stop the
guiltless suffering the same fate as the guilty. Is this the iron law of life,
that suffering comes to all, that a tipping point is reached in every society
when the Messiah can no longer come, when the forces of greed, or indifference,
overwhelm the good there is, sweep away the hope for better things? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">How
much brave, careless rhetoric does it take for a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>society to implode under the weight of its
own contradictions?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The powerful flaunt
their might with cold calculation, companies cynically eye the bottom line of
the balance sheet, the politicians come and go as helpless and self-regarding
as the rest, fearful of disturbing the status quo, the blameless are trampled
underfoot, the poor live quiet lives of desperation: is Sodom always our
future, as well as the past? God knows, I certainly don’t.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">I
told him it was no place to bring up a family, but Lot wouldn’t listen. My
husband was a good man, but he was a stubborn man. He’d chosen this place, his
uncle Abraham had been very generous, had let him choose west or east, Canaan
or the fertile Jordan valley (Genesis 13:10-11). And Lot – yes, a good man, I
say it again, but a man of simple tastes who saw only what was in front of his
eyes, who never saw the wider picture (I know, that’s always hard to do) - my
husband Lot saw the well-watered plains and economic opportunities of the
Jordan valley and he thought ‘Head east young man’, not having seen all those
old movies that taught that west is always the way to go: you follow the sun,
on, away from here, and over the horizon. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">So
he landed up there, in benighted Sodom, ‘Twin-Town: Gemorrah’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>God help us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Though He rarely seems to. But yes, easy to blame God – though usually He’s
blamed by those who fail to see that He’s given us the responsibility to make
things work. ‘We, the people’, responsible for our fate, for better or
worse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">So
Sodom it was, and we settled there and lived as people live, doing business,
raising a family, struggling to make ends meet, helping each other out. We were
close-knit as a family – we had children, and they grew, and they married young,
and then my two youngest daughters came along:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I loved them more than words can tell, they came so late, you see. And
it was a moment of madness I’m sure - but he could be impulsive like that, any
of us can, but what with his stubbornness, his impetuous belief that he knew
what’s right while others are always blind, and what with the strain of those
hours when we were under siege in our own home and the mob was at the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>door, baying for blood - those two strangers
whom we’d taken in, given shelter to, they were under our roof, our protection,
and that is a sacred responsibility, to protect the stranger and Lot believed
in that, he really did, even though he wasn’t pious, but he believed in certain
values - so that when the mob came to drag out the two visitors, our guests, my
husband in that moment of madness told the crowd: take my girls, but don’t take
my guests. As if that wasn’t also a sacred bond – his loyalty to our family.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I can’t forgive him for that moment, that
gesture, that offering, I really can’t – though I can see how he felt he had to
do something to keep the mob at bay, to keep them from entering our home: they
would have raped us, killed us, it had happened before, it’ll happen again – so
we were at their mercy and none of us would be here to tell this tale, I think
my husband figured, if he didn’t do something, offer them something. But the
girls, how could he do that? You see -<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>you do see, don’t you? - in times of war and insurrection, in times of
terror, in times when chaos is the only law, people sometimes have to make
terrible choices, terrifying choices: pray you will never have to make such
choices. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">You
who will face floods and fires, storms and drought, you who will face upheavals
beyond imaging unless you can turn things round before it is too late – pray
that your choices and the choices of your children and your children’s children
will not be choices too heavy for the human heart to bear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">There
was a moment when all went very still – like the moment of calm before the
storm breaks – when Lot realised the end was near and that we had to flee
because no good would come of this, it had all gone too far: this city had
reached its point of no return. Zero hour. Lot just knew, or maybe the two
strangers told him – I’ll never know for sure – but<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the next thing I know we were packed and
running, Lot and me and the two girls and we left the rest of the family there,
they wanted to stay they said, and it all happened so quickly, there was no
time to think and we had to leave them, it tore me apart, I had to leave my
life behind, but I had the girls and we went, that night we went, in a rush, a
panic, we just left, and the tears were burning my eyes and I couldn’t bear to
go on, and I knew I had to go on – as women in war have always gone on, beyond
the pain, beyond the calculations, into the fear, into the animal instinct to
survive, to live while others die, you see others die and you have to go on,
because there is breath in you still, and you can’t go on, but you must go on,
and you want to die, but you want to live – and I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">had</i> to turn and look, I had to see what I was leaving behind, my
grown-up children, my family, my friends, and I loved them all so much: how
could anyone bear to leave without looking back, looking to see what was
happening even though I knew what was happening, how the city was aflame, how
the sulphurous hearts of the inhabitants of Sodom had exploded into a raging
inferno of destruction, that they were being destroyed, all of them, they had
destroyed themselves really and now the city was aflame, and the fire and the
smoke consumed them all, a conflagration like no other: it was a holocaust of
suffering like no other. Though I’m told there have been others. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Wouldn’t
you also have looked? A last glance, a last chance to see what had been, and
how it all went wrong?</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">It’s
legendary, this epic place of self-centredness and terror. ‘The destruction of
Sodom and Gemorrah’ – how easily it rolls off the tongue, but it should make
our mouths bitter in the telling, we should taste the dust and the ashes, our
tongues should shrivel in the heat of our rage that it ends like this. I stood
rooted to the spot, watching, the end of my family, the end of an era, the end
of my hopes for the future. Dust and ashes, and there I was – motionless,
transfixed by<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>all the suffering that we
are heir to, motionless, like a pillar, all hope abandoned, emptied out like a
salt-cellar bled of salt, a grieving heap of salt, spilled out, lifeless, no
movement, no movement ever again, my eyes fixed on the devastation, long gone
now, and still here, and still to come. God knows when it will ever end. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">That’s
it. That’s my story. (What are you waiting for? There’s no happy ending). You don’t
need to know anything else. You don’t even need to know my name. I am Lot’s
wife, that’s all. I am no-one. And I am every woman who has ever suffered the
loss of what was once treasured but is forever gone. And I am every woman who
has ever feared the loss of what we still possess, the beauty of the world, the
beauty of family and friendship and community, the playfulness of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>autumn leaves in their season, and the
sensuous aroma of bread baking in our homes, and the unbearable lightness of
being alive, the gift of life, and the blessings we share, and the fragility of
it all – who does not fear the loss of what we still possess, all that is still
precious under threat, the possibility of change always suspended just out of
reach? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Don’t
we want to grasp it all while we can, don’t we want to hold on to life while it
is still worth living? The texts never gave me a name – but I need no name. For
you know me: you are me, men, women, young, old, we are Lot’s wife, looking
back at what we had, petrified of loss, holding the planet in our hands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 10.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">[Based
on a midrashic sermon on Genesis chapter 19: Finchley Reform Synagogue,
November 12<sup>th</sup> 2022]<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-5332120610017488802022-10-31T17:35:00.000+00:002022-10-31T17:35:25.690+00:00What’s in a Rainbow?<p><span style="font-size: 14pt;">The image of
the rainbow is conventionally seen in Judaism as expressing hope: hope for the future
of humanity and of nature itself. Its appearance in the Biblical text – Genesis
9: 12-17 – follows the well-known story of Noah’s survival of </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">forty days and forty nights of rain, a flood
that overwhelms everything that God had created: flora, fauna, humanity itself.
</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">The storytellers of the Bible portray
the destructive aspect of divinity as co-existing with the creative element
within the divine.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The
character ‘God’ expresses a hope – it is described as a ‘covenant’ - that such
innate destructive energy will never again win out over the life-giving
creative aspects of ‘God’. This is what one might see as the pious hope of the
storytellers – the rainbow is to be the reminder that destructiveness will not
have the final say. Perhaps this is as much a hope about human destructiveness
as so-called divine destructiveness – for the storytellers of Genesis certainly
saw these energies as co-existing within the human heart as well. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">What is a
rainbow? We now know of course that it is a refraction of light through water
drops, which breaks up white light so that we see the various colours within it.
And we might recall that we owe this understanding about the rainbow’s colours
to Sir Isaac Newton who, from 1665, performed experiments with a prism which
produced a spectrum in which he identified for the first time a full range of
colours. (Actually a book was published the year before that, by the Anglo-Irish
physicist Robert Boyle, describing the five colours of light). But we know how
many colours Newton discovered - seven. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I don’t know
if children still learn these colours as I did in school, with a mnemonic, <i>R</i>ichard
<i>O</i>f <i>Y</i>ork <i>G</i>ave <i>B</i>attle <i>I</i>n <i>V</i>ain: red,
orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. And I don’t know if similar
mnemonics exist in other languages? But the seven colours of the rainbow is what
used to be called common knowledge. However one of the problems with so-called
‘common knowledge’ – what we <i>think</i> we know, what we <i>think</i> of as true
- is that, more often than is comfortable for us, it turns out to be wrong. Or
at least, it turns out that our certainties are either false, or much more complex
than we like to think. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In this example
– the rainbow – what happened when Newton conducted <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>those experiments was that he did indeed
discern a spectrum of colours within the water droplets - but there were only
six of them. The colour he eventually called ‘indigo’ didn’t exist – there was
a plant that grew in India <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>called indigo,
from which a deep-blue dye could be produced, a plant that had just begun to be
imported into Britain by the East India Company early in the 1660s, and Newton
borrowed the word ‘indigo’ to describe a seventh colour existing between blue
and violet – but it was a colour he wanted to see, not that he actually saw. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But why
would he do that? Why would he make up, invent, a new colour? One might fleetingly
imagine that perhaps he had shares in the East India Company: maybe he wanted to
boost sales - ‘Here’s the rainbow, and look, we have my newly discovered <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘indigo’ within it!’ – so perhaps a form of
what we’d now call ‘product placement’?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Probably
not. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But what I
do know is that Newton needed a seventh colour because, and this is the point, <i>he
wanted to harmonise his new discovery with other aspects of harmony in the
world around him</i>: first, he wanted to link this natural harmony of the
structure of light with the harmony of the classical musical scale of Western
culture, the seven notes (<i>do, ray, mi…</i>) used in European and
Mediterranean music; and, secondly, he wanted the structure of light to be in
harmony with creation itself – because in his view seven was the great mystical
number underpinning the creation of the world: in the Biblical story, the
Biblical myth, that majestic piece of poetry that opens the Bible, God’s
creation of all that exists unfolds in seven ‘days’, seven stages. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Newton was a
mystic as well as what we now call a ‘scientist’ - the word ‘scientist’ by the
way wasn’t coined early in the 19<sup>th</sup> century; until then they were
‘natural philosophers’ – and his mystic philosophy held that the number seven
had special and cosmic significance. (Remember that at that time only seven
planets were known to exist in the solar system). Newton wanted his discovery
to mesh with creation itself; and he believed he’d revealed something fundamental
about the structure of nature itself, these seven colours within light. So he
inserted a colour, indigo, that didn’t exist, into his spectrum; and this
wonderful bit of creativity, grandiosity, chutzpah – call it what you want –
became the basis for the way a whole culture then saw the rainbow, sees the
rainbow. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And we, the
inheritors of this piece of Newtonian scientific myth-making, mischief-making -
call it what you want – still speak about (and see) what Newton thought he saw:
the seven colours of the rainbow. In other words, we <i>project onto</i> the
rainbow what our culture has taught us to expect to see there. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And we will
insist when we look at a rainbow - and we do look because it is a kind of
marvel, even though we know it’s only the sun on drops of water – we will
insist: ‘oh, there it is, squeezed somehow between blue and violet, there’s
indigo’. We do see it - or rather we create it in our mind’s eye and with our
imagination - because we have been told it’s there. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">That’s the
power of suggestion - even though there are other cultures, in Africa, or
amongst native Americans, who traditionally see four or ten colours when they
look at a rainbow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(I’ve noticed, <i>en
passant</i>, that in the LGBTQ+ Pride flag, the rainbow only has six colours,
that indigo is missing). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But what’s the
significance of all this? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When I
reflect on Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of - invention of - the seven colour
rainbow I find that it raises for me a large question. It’s a psychological
question, a political question, an interpersonal question about relationships, it’s
a spiritual question, a social question – in fact it’s a question which is
relevant to almost every aspect of our lives: how often do we see what we
expect to see, and not <i>what is actually there</i>? How often does what we
are conditioned to see dictate what we see? How often does what we are taught
to see – by our teachers, our leaders, our rabbis (dare I say it) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>– how often does what others say is the case blot
out, or obscure, or distort what is actually there? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">To see the
world as it is, rather than as we’d like it to be, is not straightforward – it
can be too painful to see what’s in front of our eyes: to see the foodbanks,
the homelessness, the systemic injustices and discriminations, the vast
disparity between the wealthy and the impoverished in our society, to see
Antarctica melting and the sea levels rising and the empty reservoirs. We may
well not want to see what is in front of us. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But I
believe that Judaism tries to help us, it encourages us, to see what is there,
in front of our eyes – at their best all the major religions are a lifelong
education in helping us towards seeing truly and deeply, helping us not to be
fooled by, or seduced by, illusions and delusions and falsehoods: economic
thinking, political thinking, social attitudes, popular culture, are filled
with false ways of seeing or thinking. And there are plenty of falsehoods spun
by religions as<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>well. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But there’s
one phrase that comes up time and time again in Jewish liturgy and in the
psalms of the Bible – “Open our eyes” – we say it over and over in one form or
another because it’s a profound and abiding human wish to be able to
distinguish between truth and falsehood, truth and propaganda, truth and lies. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And maybe we say it so often because there’s a
recognition that it’s so hard to do - to see clearly. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And now the
paradox. Yes, Judaism is an ongoing project of helping us to see life more
clearly, more truly - Freud called this the ‘reality principle’ - to see <i>what
is really there</i>, what’s really going on, to strip out false-seeing; but
Judaism also teaches us to try to see <i>what</i> <i>is not there</i>, what we
wish to be there, like Isaac Newton. It teaches us to see, to imagine, to
create – first in our mind’s eye and then in reality – what <i>does not yet
exist</i>: a world of justice, a world of compassion, a world of peace, a world
of generosity and mutual respect. So <i>Jewish seeing is a dual project</i> –
to see what actually is, and to see what could be. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Indigo
represented Newton’s profound wish for a world of harmony. He helped us to see
it, to imagine it, in nature even if it’s not actually there. What Judaism
teaches is analogous to that: it teaches us to shine light, yes, on what is
actually there, including the flaws and the failures; but it is also teaching
us to see, to keep alive, the picture of what could be there. You can’t build a
better world unless you can see both what is in front of your eyes <i>and</i>
what is not yet in front of your eyes. ‘What is’ can be transformed into ‘what
ought to be’ – that is how Jewish hopefulness works, it’s a Messianic
hopefulness. The world can be changed for the better – creativity can win out
over destructiveness - but it can’t be changed until we look clearly at what
actually exists in front of our eyes. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[based on
a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on 29<sup>th</sup>
October, 2022] <o:p></o:p></span></b></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-83252925302121650532022-09-27T20:04:00.000+01:002022-09-27T20:04:49.298+01:00On the New Year: How Do We Keep Our Hearts Open? <p> <span style="font-size: 14pt;">A snail
walks into a police station and says to the desk sergeant, “Two turtles
attacked me!”. The desk sergeant opens up a file and says “Okay, describe
exactly what happened”. The snail says, “I don’t really remember, it all
happened so fast”.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It all
happened so fast. We’ll come back to that. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">That’s not a
great joke actually, if truth be told; in fact, I’m not sure it makes sense.
After all, both snails and turtles are slow creatures, so in terms of relative
speeds it wouldn’t be slow to a snail if it was attacked by a turtle; but we needn’t
get all Einsteinian about it. It might have made you laugh - and thus I’m
following the Dalai Lama’s wise words: ”You <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>have to always start with playfulness. With a
joke. Make people laugh to open their heart, and then you can tell them
terrible truths after, because they are ready”. (Who knew? The Dalai Lama’s a
secret sadist). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Anyway, I
digress. Are <i>you</i> ready? Are your hearts open? How do we keep our hearts
open? How do we keep our hearts open when it all happens so fast. What a year
we’ve had, what a time to test our capacity to keep our hearts open:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to each other, to life, to the daily assault
from the ‘moronic inferno’ around us - Saul Bellow’s peerless phrase. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Temperatures rise, the world burns, ice melts,
whole countries flood, populations are homeless, famine rages, pandemics sweep across
our land, loved ones go. It all happens so fast. You shake hands with a new
prime minister on Tuesday and take your last breath on Thursday. It all happened
so fast. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Each year we
come together in the synagogue and repeat the same words. <b><i>B’Rosh Hashanah
yikatayvun</i></b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b>‘On Rosh Hashanah
it is written’</b> … <b><i>U’v’Yom Kippur y’chat’aymun</i></b> <b>‘And on Yom
Kippur it is sealed’</b>…<b> ‘for all who live and all who die…’ </b>and we
modern Jews, who probably no longer believe in this Book of Life imagery literally,
nevertheless might still wonder about what it all symbolises; we wonder how
things are connected, we wonder about cause and effect, we wonder about how the
way we live effects the world around us, effects our own destiny; we wonder if
the way we live – what we buy, what we eat, what car we drive – does it make any
difference to our personal fates, to our nation’s life, to our planet’s life?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And even
though we have moved beyond reading much of our liturgy literally, don’t we
still feel - in our hearts, when they are open - that the texts of these
prayers are still speaking of vital questions about life? <b><i>B’Rosh Hashanah
yikatayvun</i></b> – the translation in our Reform <i>machzor</i> (prayerbook) doesn’t
actually say that our future is <b>‘written’</b> on Rosh Hashanah: it
interprets the Hebrew by opening up the image, to reveal a truth at its heart. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Our
translation says: <b>‘On Rosh Hashanah we consider how judgment is formed…’ </b>–
which is what we are doing today, and in the days between now and Yom Kippur.
We are considering, judging, how the choices we make in life, the way we live
our lives, effects what unfolds next – for ourselves, for our families and
neighbours, our country, our bruised and battered earth. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Jewish
tradition calls today <b><i>Yom Ha-Din</i></b><i>: </i>‘the Day of Judgment’<i>.</i>
So today is about judgment, and self-judgment. The judgment is not coming from
some deity on high but it is coming at us nevertheless. Fire and flood,
starvation and disease are the responses - indirectly and directly - to what we
do, and what we don’t do, they are in part the disturbing consequences of how
we live, the judgments on how we live, individually and collectively in our
interconnected world. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So these are
days of judgment, times of judgment. And this year, as we sweltered in that 40
degree heat just a couple of months ago, we didn’t just have a glimpse into the
future. What dawned on many of us was the terrifying realisation that the
future has already arrived. This is the future: cataclysmic climate change,
interacting with growing global economic inequality – in the UK it’s a dozen
years of faith-based economics that nobody is allowed to call wicked, or
sinful, or even shameful – with environmental disruption and economic
deprivation embedded within systemic political dysfunction and the worldwide retreat
into populist nationalism – this is the future, now, and it’s a dementing, toxic
environment in which to have to keep one’s heart open. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This is the
world we live in now and I don’t need to spell it all out for you because you
know it anyway, you are living with it every day, and you might wake up at four
in the morning inexplicably anxious - and yes, we’ve seen the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>shattering of liberal optimism and belief in
the inevitability of social progress and it has all happened so fast - and now a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>European war is on our borders, and our
sleeplessness is haunted by paranoid thoughts (or are they paranoid?): where
will that first tactical nuclear device fall? and what will the fall out of
that be, on the skins of our bodies and our children’s and grandchildren’s
bodies and lungs? and how will the West respond? It happens so fast. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There’s an
extraordinary couple of sentences in our High Holy Day liturgy – they only come
once (which is quite a refreshing change from a lot of what we say, and repeat,
over and over). But these two sentences are planted right at the end of these
Ten Days, in the final <i>Neilah</i> service on Yom Kippur, when the mood is
shifting, from solemnity and inward-lookingness to something more upbeat,
hope-filled, as we start to turn back towards the world outside with renewed optimism
and energy. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">They come
immediately after we’ve sung, for the umpteenth and last time, those consoling,
stirring, faith-filled words: <b>“Adonai, Adonai, el rachum v’chanum…”</b> –
“God, the Eternal, merciful and compassionate …forgiving sin, wrong, and
failure, who pardons”’. It’s a familiar text. And then, a heartbeat later,
comes this. The text is nearly a thousand years old, but it could have been
written yesterday: <b>“When I think of the cities and communities which seemed
so firmly based, and which are now ruined or have disappeared without trace, I
am shaken” </b>– and each year when I read it I do feel shaken, I feel like the
liturgy has caught me out with a sucker punch, it’s below the belt really, because
it comes so late on in the day, as <i>Neilah</i> is drawing to a close. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We’ve just been
lulled into the comfort of that familiar mantra listing those Godly attributes and
there it comes, unannounced: the six o’clock news thrust in our faces – cities
destroyed, communities that disappear (fire, floods, starvation, disease),
lives that seem so “firmly based” – and don’t we go around believing that our cosy
lives are firmly based, more or less? – and it can all disappear, this text
says, from one year to the next, from one hour to the next. Who knew last Rosh
Hashanah that by this Rosh Hashanah we’d all be able to write an MA thesis on
the geography of Ukraine? It all happened so fast. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But then
comes a second sentence. Seamlessly the text continues – and here Judaism’s
radical chutzpah is on full display: having laid us low with the brutal
reminder of the unpredictability and fragility of life it then says, the very
next words, <b>U’v’chol zot</b> – <b>‘But, despite all this’</b> – that’s the most
provocative, defiant, breath-taking swerve, segue, in the whole of our liturgy
– <a name="_Hlk114836512"><b>‘But, despite all this’, </b>it says, ‘<b>we still
belong to God</b></a><b>, and still we look to the Eternal One’. </b><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It's madness
really: <b>‘But, despite all this’ – </b>all this destruction and chaos, all
this upheaval, displacement, savagery, heartbreak and loss – ‘<b>we still
belong to God…we still look to the Eternal One’</b> – it is a kind of madness
this love affair the Jewish people have with God. Love affairs do derange the
senses - but, yes, it’s true, the Jewish people <i>do</i> still look to, bind ourselves
to, <i>Adona</i>i, the divine energy threaded through our history, and that animates
all of life. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And then we
are off again, the text doubles down, moves into, or retreats into, familiar
territory: <b>“Adonai, Adonai, el rachum v’chanum…”</b> – “God, the Eternal,
merciful and compassionate …forgiving sin, wrong, and failure, who pardons’. That’s
the very last time we say this in the High Holy Days. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">That gut-wrenching
description of the whole deeply disturbing world we inhabit – and we do
recognise it, and it does shake us, because it is our reality: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Grozny, Darfur, Aleppo, Mariupol - it speaks a
truth, those words, and we aren’t used to such plain-speaking in the liturgy. But
the liturgists of old smuggled in those two subversive sentences nevertheless, sandwiched
between that repeated mantra of God’s infinite capacity for love, compassion, forgiveness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And maybe
one of the reasons why we repeat so often those sentences about God’s
compassion and lovingkindness is not that the liturgy is trying to soothe us,
or hypnotise us, into believing something we may find it hard to believe, or
experience, but to remind us of something else: that actually it’s <i>we</i> who
contain these qualities, these so-called ‘divine’ qualities, <i>within us</i>. <i>We</i>
know what it is to love, <i>we</i> know what it is to feel and act
compassionately, with kindness, with generosity. The liturgy keeps reminds us
what is inside us, because we forget, we forget so easily. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We are so
bound up with our faults, our failures, our lacks, our difficulties, our
struggles, our guilt, that we can lose touch with our better natures: our
capacity for care, for empathy, for generosity. We forget, so the liturgy keeps
harping on about this stuff to remind us <i>who we are</i>. It’s disguised in all
this language about God - but actually we don’t know anything about how God is,
so we make it up. We made it up, historically - it’s part of our unique gift
for Jewish storytelling, for Jewish mythological thinking: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>we created a whole world view, reflected in
our liturgy, about the divine presence and divine qualities. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And when we
listen to it now - sing it, whisper it, in faith or in scepticism - we need to
remember that in essence it’s not telling us about something out there, but
telling us something, reminding us about something, in here: in our souls, in
our hearts; if we keep them open, we can show love to thousands, we can be
generous, we can learn to be slow to anger, we can learn to fill ourselves with
love and compassion, we can pardon those who hurt us, we have this potential
incarnated within us. But we need to be reminded: ‘Look who you are, look who
you can be, look what you can do’ - the liturgy is like a mirror reflecting
back on us: ‘You can do this, you can be this’. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">On Rosh
Hashanah we consider how these qualities are formed in us, inscribed in us - and
how they become atrophied in us, how they become erased, these divine qualities
in our hearts. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Can we keep
our hearts open when so much chaos and disturbance reigns around us? And within
us? When disasters strike – we saw it with Covid and the Ukrainian refugees –
it is so often amazing how generously people respond: food, shelter, clothes,
money, hospitality, communities forming for practical and emotional support. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is being open hearted. But it can be hard
to sustain when life is tough, when times are tough, when you feel your own
well-being is precarious, when you know that in the UK there are 3000 food
banks, and millions of children and adults dependent on charities and faith
communities for basic necessities. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But let’s
leave political failures of vision, and moral obtuseness, and the sins of
systemic injustice for another day. This is our Jewish new year, our
opportunity for a new beginning, a new realisation that in spite of so little
being in our hands, there is still so much in our hands, and in our hearts,
that we can do to make a difference. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And as we
reflect on our lives, our choices, which is what we are called to do at this
season, we can hold in mind how Seamus Heaney once put it, incomparably: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">“The way
we are living,/ timorous or bold,/ will have been our life.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This is it. The future is now. And it all happens so fast. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[based on
a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue on the second day of Rosh Hashanah,
September 27<sup>th</sup>, 2022]<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-13584282420387965092022-09-11T16:55:00.004+01:002022-09-11T16:55:42.671+01:00On the Death of the Queen<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">These are
days when Jews in the UK become aware of what it means to be hyphenated
Jews. We are part of that strange phenomenon known as ‘Anglo-Jewry’; we send
representatives to the ‘Board of Deputies of British Jews’. In other words, we
are hybrids: our sense of ourselves is multiple. This must surely be true of
other minority groups, and indeed anyone who feels the pull of other
allegiances – to culture, ethnicity, gender, birthplace, language - </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">within themselves. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">But here I can only speak of what I am
familiar with: an awareness of living in two parallel realities, one Jewish and
one deeply connected to the country in which I was born, raised and educated
and where I have lived all my life – a life almost exactly overlapping the
years in which Queen Elizabeth II was on the throne.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">As we begin
to feel our way into this transition in national life, it is as if the ‘British’
aspect of ourselves as Jews comes to the fore and although there are plenty of
republicans amongst the Jewish community, many UK Jews have a deep and abiding
affection for the institution of monarchy (however problematic or intellectually indefensible it
might be); or at least – not the same thing – many UK Jews have a deep admiration for the ways in
which the Queen lived out her destiny within that role, a role she of course inherited
and did not choose. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The Queen’s
death touches us in personal and specific ways: we each will have our own
memories and associations in relation to our monarch (I was an excited twelve-year-old with specially polished shoes
standing in line – for ages - with the other boys when she visited our school
on the 450<sup>th</sup> anniversary of its founding). And of course her death links
us to the collective mourning that is taking place nationally and
internationally. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So we find
ourselves reflecting back on the text and texture of a life, a long and
historically remarkable life, a life of duty and service, about which many
words of tribute have already been spoken. To pick just one aspect of what she represented: she was able, when necessary, to provide the nation with a sense of hopefulness (a
very Jewish quality, but one that I imagine came from her abiding Christian faith). </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">For example,
during the height of the first wave of Covid (April 2020) she addressed the
nation with simplicity and directness: as the seriousness of the pandemic was
becoming apparent, she offered words of encouragement and calm reassurance: “Better days will return again; we will be with our friends again;
we will be with our families again; we will meet again.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Such a
beautiful touch that last phrase, “we will meet again”– I thought she must have
great speechwriters, until I read that she scripted her Christmas and other
addresses herself – with its nod to Dame Vera Lynn, whose wartime song evokes a nation that survives what history throws at it; but used in 2020 it was also an acknowledgement of the Queen’s own longevity and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>continuity over the decades, of herself as a
living link to this county’s past – she was there on the balcony of Buckingham
Palace with her father at the end of the War, and her first Prime Minister was
Winston Churchill: all of that was implicit within that address, while still being
focussed, aged 94 (as she then was), on continuity into the future - we will emerge
from dark times, collectively we will get through this. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This is what
she did, this was her job, this was her vocation - what she’d been called to do: called by life,
called by God, according to the curious mythology about monarchy that she represented.
And it was a job she did, a public role <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>– and the same words keep coming up as you
listen to the commentators, and those who’d met her – a job she did with
warmth, compassion, humility, wisdom, empathy, self-restraint, dignity,
dedication, and a sense of humour (guest starring with Daniel Craig, James Bond,
during the 2012 Olympics; sharing marmalade sandwiches with Paddington Bear only
this year for her Platinum Jubilee). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And, yes, this
was her life of duty: a sense of duty she saw through to the very end. Earlier
this week (Tuesday, 6<sup>th</sup>) we saw what we did not know then, but now know, are the last pictures of
her - our last glimpse of her that will remain etched in our minds forever - fulfilling
her constitutional duty in relation to yet another prime minister, her 15<sup>th</sup>.
Those pictures will long remain as a symbol of her legacy of service to the
nation. It was almost as if she kept on going until she’d fulfilled this last
responsibility entrusted to her - and then she could let go. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">People do
that: determined to get to the family wedding, to the Bar Mitzvah, to see the
new grandchild – and then able to let go of life. But now I’m straying into the
realm of mythologising or sentimentalising her, which I’d rather not do. Let’s
just say that she was steadfast in fulfilling her responsibilities until almost
her dying breath. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Perhaps the
most resonant words I have encountered since her death are those of the
commentator Jonathan Freedland, who wrote that “She was woven into the cloth of
our lives so completely, we stopped seeing the thread long ago”. I think that
captures, poignantly and precisely, the way in which she was both an invisible
part of our sense of ourselves as British and an aspect of the fabric of our
lives from our own earliest days. She has accompanied us, in the background,
and has become part of our psychic life, personally and collectively.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span><span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">So: a real life has come to an end, it leaves a hole in our lives, small or large; a link with our past, personal and collective, has gone and we shall not see a monarch like her again.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But of
course she will have an afterlife: literally - on banknotes, on coins, on
postage stamps, on post-boxes – all of which will remain in our midst for some
time, until gradually becoming mingled with (or replaced by) images of King
Charles; and symbolically, where her afterlife will be in the ways she will
remain inside us both as a reminder of others whom we have held dear in our lives
who are no longer with us, and as a reminder of something much rarer - what a
lifetime’s devotion to duty looks like. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><b>[based on reflections shared at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on Saturday September 10th, 2022]</b></span></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-70861348601013303672022-07-23T14:37:00.001+01:002022-07-23T14:37:14.327+01:00Saying Kaddish for Peter Brook<p><span style="font-size: 14pt;">He was a man
of amazing vitality and influence and since his death a few weeks ago, aged 97,
I have been wondering about what it means to possess that quality of the soul,
that aliveness; and wondering too about what remains alive and present when the
person is gone. When we say Kaddish for someone who is gone we aren’t of course
keeping them alive, literally, but we are keeping something alive - what they
meant for us, maybe. ‘May their memory be a blessing’, we say. People enter
eternity when we keep alive the sparks their soul, their presence, generated in
us.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So in this
last few weeks I have been wondering : who is saying Kaddish for Peter
Brook?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Quite possibly no-one – the
director, internationally renowned,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>was
a defiantly secular Jewish atheist: like many of his generation he threw off
the last, inherited vestiges of Judaism very early on, disdainful of all that
archaic Jewish thought and practice and ritual. Who would want the
unsophisticated primitivism and bloodshed of the Bible when you could have the
sophisticated bloodshed of, say, Hamlet – aged seven he acted out a four-hour
version of the play for his parents, on his own. Such stuff are legends made
of. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">He was of
course too young to appreciate the lines of continuity between Shakespeare and those
ancient texts he rejected; too young to appreciate that the greatest writer in
the English language shared with those ancient storytellers a parallel quest
for meaning: <i>“The great eternal question that we ask ourselves”</i>, as
Brook put it, <i>“How are we to live?”</i> (<i>There Are No Secrets</i>, 1993, p.62)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I’ve always
been fascinated by Peter Brook’s distinctive approach to theatre, his almost
Kabbalistic emphasis on the experience of immediacy, of aliveness, of
presentness, that he tried to create with and through his actors; the way he
mines the present moment for deep insights into the fabric of reality, the way
he distils actions and speech to their essence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There is of
course an irony in the way he devoted his life to creating in a theatrical
context the spiritual intensity, the sense of ever-emergent possibilities and
interconnections, that seem to have been absorbed - as if by osmosis, or
alchemy - from the traditions and practices of Jewish mysticism. He spoke often
about the centrality of myth and ritual for the nurturing of the human
imagination, and the exploration of life’s core values. And so every culture in
the world became available to be investigated and expressed and distilled –
except the culture that was his birthright. So, yes, ironical; but also kind of
sad. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">His loss, I
suppose, and ours too, I’m sure. One can only wonder what a nine hour
production of the five books of Moses, the Torah, would have looked like
analogous to his production of the Indian epic cycle the Mahabharata? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would have been a thing of wonder, I’m
sure, a true “holy theatre” - his term for theatre which recognises that, in
his words, <i>“there is an invisible world that needs to be made visible”</i>
(p.58). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">One of the
reasons why Peter Brook has mattered to me is that, to my mind, he was trying
to get at something through his work that I connect directly to the activity we
Jews engage in during our liturgical services.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Now those services aren’t theatre and if I lead such a service I am not
an actor on stage<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- nevertheless, something
is being performed when we meet together. We could say that we too are involved
through prayer, through assembling together at a fixed and place, and taking
our seats, and entering into the ritual drama – we too are<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>exploring how, yes, “there is an invisible
world that needs to be made visible”. So I have found that it’s worth listening
in to what Brook was teaching about this mysterious process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">“The
problem is”,</span></i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> he
wrote, <i>“that the invisible is not obliged to make itself visible. Although
the invisible is not compelled to manifest itself, it may at the same time do
so anywhere, and at any moment, through anyone, as long as the conditions are
right”</i>. He could be talking (in a secularised way, he is talking) about how
the <i>ruach ha’kodesh </i>becomes present, the divine spirit.<i> </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the mystery of that. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><i>"I don’t think
there is any point in reproducing the sacred rituals of the past…”,</i> he
continues, <i>“The only thing which may help us is an awareness of the present.
If the present moment is welcomed in a particularly intense manner…the elusive
spark of life can appear within the right sound, the right gesture, the right
look, the right exchange. So, in a thousand unexpected forms, the invisible may
appear”.</i> This is gold dust for anyone (of any faith tradition?) who lead
services.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">He's trying
to put into words something which is hard to describe in language, but which
nevertheless can be experienced.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And on
the stage the key seems to be – and here I am condensing radically Brook’s
discussion about this – the key seems to be, he says, if an actor can find this
invisible presence <i>“in a certain silence within himself. What one could call
‘sacred theatre’, the theatre in which the invisible appears, takes root in
this silence…Theatre is always both about a search for meaning and a way of
making this meaning meaningful for others. This is the mystery.” </i>(p.76). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">That seems
to me to be a great definition of what is at the heart of Jewish prayer life in
our services: it’s “always both about a search for meaning and a way of making
this meaning meaningful for others.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You might be
able to see why these thoughts are so compelling for someone like me who leads
services. Nobody in my experience has written so helpfully, so deeply, so
perceptively about the challenges of leading communal worship, - of ‘doing <i>tefillah’</i>,
as we say these days - as Peter Brook. Of course he never knew that’s what he
was doing, unwittingly. Perhaps he’d be horrified, but I like to think he would
be flattered. He should be. Some of those old-style Jewish atheists have a lot
to teach us, still. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A final
vignette about this. About thirty years ago I went to see a production of ‘The
Dybbuk’, the play by the Yiddish writer, S. Ansky: it was on in Hampstead (I
think) and although I don’t think it was a Brook production, the male lead was
taken by Bruce Myers, a Jewish member of Brook’s Paris-based ensemble. He
worked with Brook off and on for fifty years. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">At one point
in the play, the family are preparing to light the Shabbat candles, and as they
prepare to do so the everyday hectic energy fades away and there was a
stillness on stage, the actors were very quiet, very contained and there was a
silence – it pervaded the whole theatre – nothing was happening (although
something is always happening), but it wasn’t an empty silence, Myers was
generated a silence from within himself, and one knew in that moment that here
was a world in which the spiritual was real, the invisible was being made
visible, the divine moment of Shabbat’s coming-into-being was being made
present through attention, through devotion, it was being brought into being,
on a stage in Hampstead. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And the
words of the blessing were chanted, flowing out of the silence, and it was as
if I had never really heard them before. And I have never heard them like that
ever again. They spoke of something true and real and sacred and unchanging and
always available and yet hardly ever experienced. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It was a
revelation, to me – this is what prayer could be. This is what blessing meant.
I try to hold this moment in mind when I am in the synagogue, gathered together
for prayer – isn’t this the experience we want? To know that there is meaning?
To know that there is purpose? To know that we are part of a sacred story? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Bruce Myers
died at the beginning of Covid, of the virus. He was 78. I don’t know if anyone
is saying Kaddish for him either. But that evening in Hampstead he offered one
response to Brook’s eternal question: ‘How are we to live?’ <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If we can
make space in our lives for the sacred to be present – in whatever form it
takes, in whatever way it presents itself to us,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>through whoever it makes itself known<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>-<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>isn’t this how we are to live? Isn’t this how we want to live? <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><b>[based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, July 22nd, 2022] </b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-56178221288852601632022-03-27T17:41:00.006+01:002022-03-28T09:11:38.536+01:00A Month Like No Other<p><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Since
February 24</span><sup>th</sup><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> my mental world has subtly shifted on its axis. As the
BBC correspondent Lyse Doucet put it on Thursday, with her customary clarity
and concision: “It’s been a month like no other - for Ukraine, for Europe, and
for the world.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">A cliché it
may be to say it, but we are seeing history in the making. We’re seeing images
we haven’t seen in Europe for generations: we lucky ones, who never lived
through war, might have been brought up on grainy black and white footage of
ruined cities and populations on the move, but did not seriously think we’d
ever see that kind of ‘history’ again, at least not so close to home. Yes,
we’ve had Aleppo, and Grozny and Sarajevo - but they were not quite on our
doorsteps: they were just far enough away not to penetrate our lives every day
as this war has done, and is doing, bursting into our living rooms night after
night. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">‘A month
like no other’ in a world of continuous change. We are being taken on a journey:
destination unknown and unknowable. And, yes, that’s the human condition: the “only
certainty is uncertainty” as Professor Eugene Heimler used to say, born in
Hungary, survivor of Buchenwald, writer and therapist, friend of the Finchley community
of which I am a part. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So given
that all is flux, turbulence, chaos, uncertainty, what struck me this week, was
whether or not it was possible to imagine that those involved in Jewish life have
a kind of antidote to all that? Maybe not an antidote exactly, but we do have
the possibility of a perspective, an angle of vision, at odds with all that
unpredictability that’s part of the human condition. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Because we
live with another cycle of life, a seasonal cycle - of predictability and
regularity and engagement with what is unchanging in an changing world. And
that is due to our connection to something that never changes - the Torah. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Whatever is
going on outside us - however history is unfolding in all its drama and
grandeur and degradation - when Jews meet at the Shabbat service we encounter
something unchanging: this week it was the chapters of Torah called <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Shemini</i>, the third section of the third
book in our unchanging, unchangeable foundational text. This never changes. As
if it’s eternal. When the Torah has been read we recite a blessing that acknowledges,
with gratitude: <i>chayai olam nata betochaynu</i> - “You have planted eternal
life within us”. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Is it the
Torah that is eternal? Or the experience of engaging with it that puts us in
touch with something eternal? Or both? However we understand these words, we
sense we are guests invited into a mystery. Something timeless is planted
within time - and within us who live, moment by moment, in time. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In other
words <i>we live, as Jews. in two worlds at once</i>. Here we are rooted in a
specific place, at a specific time in history, in our everyday world where
wondrous and terrifying things happen, to us and around us. And we live in
another world, the unchanging cycle of reading from Torah, week by week, year
by year, century by century. It’s a cycle we connect to that never changes. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So we live
in a world where everything changes, everything is uncertain - and in a world
where nothing changes, just the chapters we read week by week, repeated year in,
year out, a world where we know where we are and we know where we will be next
week and the week after. This is our other world, unchanging, stable,
consistent, reliable, reassuring, ‘eternal’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This is a gift: it allows Jews to live in two worlds at once. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It’s good to
know this, or be reminded of it. And we shouldn’t take it for granted. Because
it’s precious - and not everyone has it. It could help give us some kind of
anchoring when we, or the world, feel adrift, in peril, tossed around by the
storms and vicissitudes of history. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Yet living
in this other world certainly doesn’t solve any problems for us. It doesn’t
solve our problems because it’s not like magic or medicine. Indeed the
perspective from this other world<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>might
highlight the complexity of the issues we face, here where we stand. It can
make us giddy to view the world from the standpoint of the Torah, it can
destabilise us as often as steady us. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This week’s
chapters are a good example. They are part of that complex detailing of priestly
rituals that fill the book of Leviticus. Chapter nine describes acts of purification
and elaborate rituals for both the priests and the people: much blood is
spilled as the animals are slaughtered in the prescribed manner, and many of us
feel thankful that this is a world long gone. Since the Temple in Jerusalem was
destroyed in the year 70CE, we read these texts now only for their symbolic
value (if we can find it). The chapter narrates how, when all the rituals were
enacted, God was made present: “Moses and Aaron went inside the Tent of Meeting
and when they came out they blessed the people v<i>a’yayrah chavod- Adonai
el-kol-ha’am</i> - and the presence/the substance/the glory of the Eternal
appeared to all the people” (Leviticus 9:22-23).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But how do
we understand that? Is it a one-off event? Or a promise? That through purity,
through ritual actions - whether it is of a priestly tribe, or a kingdom of
priests (the Israelite community) - God’s presence becomes manifest? What does
that mean? What would that look like? How would we know? “The glory of the
Eternal appeared to all the people”. How are we supposed to get our heads round
that? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In the text
it says that what the people actually saw was fire bursting forth and consuming
the offerings on the altar. Is this the “glory of the Eternal”? Or a glorified
barbeque? The people are told the former. We might just see the latter. What is
going on? How are we to understand this fragment of eternal truth planted in
our midst? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I am asking
the questions in this to illustrate how we might have the Torah, our unchanging
text, but the questions it raises are difficult and sometimes troubling.
Because although we read them and ponder them, we don’t really understand what
on earth, or in heaven, is going on. There are plenty of commentaries that seek
to explain these texts - but I don’t trust anyone who tells me they do
understand these texts. Because there is<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>a mystery at the heart of them. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Reading this
text this week, I puzzle over it (as usual) - but when we step back and draw
breath, and look out around us, aren’t we tempted to say: how can we even speak
about God’s presence and the glory of the divine when the bombs are dropping,
at this moment, indiscriminately destroying, and “who will live and who will
die” (as our Yom Kippur text puts it) is just an accident of fate? Random,
arbitrary, unpredictable, macabre. Children escape and children are trapped
underground, or perish in the rubble - isn’t it offensive to talk at all about
God’s presence, or God’s glory?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And yes,
clergy (of all denominations) and theologians will come up with all sorts of
rationalisations and platitudes to supposedly explain the inexplicable. But I
am guided here - in relation to these profound challenges to religious belief
and traditional pieties - I’m guided by Rabbi Irving Greenburg, Brooklyn-born
rabbi and Orthodox scholar, who has written extensively about matters of faith
after the Shoah, and about how Jewish life and thinking have to be radically
reformulated and reworked and re-thought after the trauma of the Holocaust. He
once wrote “No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would
not be credible in the presence of burning children”. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">That for me
is the most important religious statement of our times - it cuts through all
the garbage - and I return to it today because it’s a touchstone of humanity
and decency and Jewish faith in our times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And, yes, it sets the bar very high, but it says to me that probably the
most honest response, from a religious perspective, to Mariupol and the
barbarities inflicted on Ukraine is silence. For no religious statement is
credible in the presence of another generation of murdered children. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The only
religious response is through action, not words, through forms of giving and
doing: money, hospitality, campaigns to influence the UK government’s tortuous
refugee policy - the bureaucracy for Ukrainians trying to get to the UK is
still the ‘hostile environment’ of the last ten years. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">You know the
actions we can take - whether Jewish or Christian we draw upon the ethics of
our unchanging texts: the compassion, the generosity to strangers and the
dispossessed, and all the rest. We draw strength and inspiration from the
vision of what is possible - while at the same time finding ourselves silenced
by all that narrative exuberance about God’s presence and divine glory and
ritual purification. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And, yes, I
could say that the ‘rituals’ we now do involve us making our own ‘sacrifices’ -
different kinds of ‘sacrifice’, of time and money and what we give of ourselves,
and that this is how God is now brought into the world. Not from on high but
through us. And I believe that is true, and I believe it necessary to say it,
and to repeat it to our children - this is how Jews make God known in the world:
through the fire in our hearts sparking us into life and action. Without that
fire within, the Torah turns to ashes. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Maybe that’s
as much as we can say. And the rest is silence. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><b>[based on a sermon give on Zoom for Finchley Reform Synagogue, March 26th, 2022]</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p><b> </b></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-84109315657525618352022-03-05T18:47:00.000+00:002022-03-05T18:47:45.219+00:00On Ukraine: What Can One Say? <p> <span style="font-size: 16pt;">First he came
for the Chechens but I did not speak out because I was not a Chechen.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Then he came
for Crimea but I did not speak out because I was not from Crimea. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Then he came
for the dissidents and journalists but I did not speak out because I was
neither a dissident nor a journalist. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Then he came
for the Ukrainians - like the mother of Ira, our traumatised cleaner, whose mum
is moving to a different room every night, still with internet connection so
her daughter can speak to her every hour, every fifteen minutes; and the family
of another Ukrainian I know, who are fleeing west, right now, from the family
home they rebuilt by hand from the rubble and losses of World War 2; and three rabbinic
colleagues who, with their children, have left their Ukrainian communities to
seek safety abroad - yes, now he has come for the Ukrainians and - never mind ‘speak
out’ - what can I say? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Because what
is one to say that isn’t platitudes and emptiness? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">They say
that a picture is worth a thousand words - so let me tell you about the picture
on the front page of last Saturday’s <i>Guardian</i>. The headline was <b>‘Kyiv
On The Brink’</b> in extra large font, but the photo that accompanied it was of
a railway carriage window behind which you could see two children, a girl of
around nine or ten, I guess, with wire-rimmed glasses, and a boy nestling next
to her, fair-haired, who looked around six or seven, they were waiting for the
train to depart, and there was the figure of an adult <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>behind them, but not the adult’s face: the
focus of the photo was on the two children, both looking out the window onto
the platform, anxiety etched into their features. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And this
could have been a scene, I suppose, from any Western conflict zone of the last eighty
years - at different times Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Sarajevo <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- but what made this photo completely
contemporary, unmistakably of this moment in the 21<sup>st</sup> century, was
that at the very centre of the photograph there figured - as large as the boy’s
cherubic face - something the boy was holding horizontally, a shiny blue
smartphone. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><a href="https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1497340896685301760?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1497340896685301760?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And there
was something ever so ordinary about this but - it struck me - ever so
extraordinary as well. For this is a new kind of war - as well as being
eternally old in its brutality and senselessness. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It’s a new
kind of war where the smartphone is a vital possession carried by victims as
the flee, to keep in contact with family and friends, and a crucial <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>tool of those who remain, including a vast
army of citizen journalists recording live from battle zones and basements and
bedrooms, recording and transmitting into our homes, ensuring we the watching
world know, hour by hour, what is unfolding. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It means the
war is being fought in ways that we the bystanders become witnesses to, often
in real time; it makes us, in a way, into participants; and looking away is
possible of course, but that presents us with an emotional dilemma - to look
can feel unbearable, but not to look feels equally problematic. On the one hand,
can our souls bear to see? On the other hand, can they bear to turn away from
seeing and knowing? Our souls are under bombardment either way. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">For the
first time in human history the reality of war and the ‘virtual reality’ of war
are merging for millions around the globe. Through technological sophistication,
the grotesque savagery of war is being brought into our homes at every hour of
the day and night - and now we carry it around in our pockets too. We literally
carry the war with us wherever we go. Our pockets, our handbags, are full of
horror.</span><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Ukraine is
one of the so-called ‘bloodlands’ [see historian Timothy D. Snyder, 2010] where
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union competed to exterminate people who, because
of ethnicity or class, had no place in the fantasied societies they were
building. A chilling image, ‘bloodlands’ - but the blood seeps into our
pockets, onto our hands, into our comfortable living rooms and bedrooms. How
does the soul endure?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And what can we
say? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Then he came
for Ukraine - and what did we say? What could we say? We are on the border of
speechlessness. ‘Ukraine’ means ‘borderlands’: for centuries the land saw the
intermingling of many cultures and languages - Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish,
German, Yiddish - for borders were porous, cultures borrowed and blended their music
and food and literature, and marriages took place across ethnic groups. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But we Jews
have long memories - fortunately and unfortunately - which means it’s hard to romanticise
Ukraine: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>between November 1918 and March
1921, a time of civil war, there were<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>over a thousand anti-Jewish pogroms in over five hundred locations in
Ukraine, over 100,00 deaths; 600,000 Jews fled abroad, millions more were displaced
internally. And this is twenty years before the <i>Shoah</i>, where more than a
third of all Jews murdered were killed close to home with the collaboration of
people they knew: one million Jews were killed in Ukraine before the death
camps were set up in 1942. And I’m not going to begin to speak about the
Ukrainian fascists drafted into the SS death squads.</span><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But does any
of this history matter now, eighty or a hundred years later? I speak of it only
for the sake of a kind of emotional and/or intellectual honesty, and a
resistance to amnesia, to acknowledge that there is complexity in the deep
background of what is unfolding. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Yet on a
human level it is a complexity that fades away when we see the faces of the
children in the window of a train, when we hear the human stories, and see the
devastation to a land recognisably part of our modern Europe. We may not know
what to say, but we know what we feel: compassion lies deeper than words. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Of course helplessness
too is part of what arises in us - but there are plenty of avenues for action:
at this moment it appears that organisations working on the ground in Ukraine,
and with refugees, are most in need of financial support - they know how best
to spend the money we send. Charity, <i>tzedakah, </i>is a good antidote to
helplessness - and speechlessness - as well as being a <i>mitzvah</i> in
itself.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: times;">“Say little
and do much…” was Shammai’s wise advice two millennia ago. And if one is moved
to do more, one can always heed the words he added: “…and receive everyone with
a trusting and hopeful expression on one’s face” (<i>Pirke Avot</i>: 1: 15). <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: times;"><b><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[based on
a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, March 5<sup>th</sup>, 2022;
with due acknowledgements to Pastor Martin </span></b><em><b><span style="background: white; color: black; font-size: 16pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 107%;">Niemöller</span></b></em><b><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;">] <o:p></o:p></span></b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></o:p></span></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-29292693688084366302022-02-19T18:18:00.001+00:002022-02-25T16:39:40.424+00:00A Traumatised People and Our Shared Heritage<p> <span style="font-size: 14pt;">One’s heart
goes out to those Israelites described in the saga of Exodus. In modern terminology
we might say they were a traumatised people: oppressed for generations, they
had just experienced the most tumultuous upheavals it’s possible to imagine.
The land they were living in, the only land they knew, Egypt, had suffered a
cataclysmic series of disruptions, disturbances, disasters natural and
unnatural, plague after plague of apocalyptic events; the whole country was beset
by chaos, turmoil, the breakdown of social order…and yet, </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">somehow, in ways they could not possibly
understand, those Hebrew slaves </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">had been
spared most of the horrors visited upon their Egyptian neighbours.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">How could
that be? Why them? Was it luck? Or magic? - how did daubing your doors with
blood mean that your children were spared, but the children next door died? (Exodus
12: 7, 13) Or was it somehow connected with that strange character, Moses, born
a Hebrew but brought up an Egyptian? Was that whole frenzied cataclysm of
events connected to the story that Moses was telling - that their ancestral god
was behind it all? Who could believe that? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And when the
braver among the Israelites had interrogated this strange stuttering figure and
asked him ‘Who sent you to do this, to be our representative, to provoke
Pharoah, on whom our lives depend - hard as they are already - who told you to
stir up trouble in the vain, vague hope this will somehow set us free?’, when
they asked him who had told him to do it, the old man had merely replied with a
name that nobody knew, more a sound than a name: ‘<b><i>Ehyeh</i></b><i> sh’lachani
aleychem’</i> (Ex 3:14) - “<i>I am</i> has sent me to you” . Or did this mean “<i>I
will be</i> has sent me to you”? Nobody could agree what he meant, all they
could agree on was it didn’t make sense: how could a <i>verb</i> be a God? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And even
when Moses had explained that this unfolding God-energy was continuous with the
ancestral God, the so-called ‘God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’, not only was
the theology too complicated for an exhausted and abused people to take in, but
anyway that ancestral God had been silent for generations, he was as good as
dead, it was just a folk-memory the people had retained in slavery, it was <i>bubameisers</i>
that you tell the children to help them to get to sleep. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But the
people had been freed, or at least they’d escaped: the Egyptian army had
pursued them (Ex. 14:9), and as they staggered towards the Sea of Reeds they
could hear the pounding of the horses’ hooves, but the tide was favourable and
they’d waded in, in their tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, beyond
counting, a vast crowd of panicked souls, breathless, desperate<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to get across before the slaughter began, or
the re-capture, and which would be worse? But the wind had blown and the tide
had turned, and - extraordinary to say - their enemies had drowned and they had
been saved (Ex. 14:28); and on the other shore, as the bodies of their defeated
foes began to be washed up, Moses and his sister Miriam had broken into song
and praised this newly-revealed divine energy, the ‘I was, I am, I will be’ (<i>Y.H.V.H</i>),
the saving power of Israel’s story, a story that became inscribed in the mythic
history of the Israelite people, “<i>Mi Chamocha ba’elim Adonai</i>?” - “Who is
like you amongst the gods, the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>godlings,
<i>Adonai</i>?” . “<i>Mi Kamocha</i> Who is, like You, <i>nedar ba-kodesh</i> wrapped
in holiness, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>norah tehillot</i> awe-inspiring<i>,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>oseh felle</i> working wonders like this?”. (Ex.15:11)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And at that
moment a traumatised people were swept up in a moment of wonder, of gratitude,
of consciousness-raising openness: yes, some new possibility of belief was born
- the old man and his family, Aaron and Miriam, were on to something, were into
something, the dry land beneath the people’s feet testified to it, the hugging
in joy with neighbours testified to it, the bodies of their oppressors left
behind to rot in the sun or be swept away on the tides, they too testified to
it. Something new was coming into being. But no liberation is free of pain. Relief
and joy can’t wipe out the painful memory of what has been endured. So as the
traumatised people marched off into the desert (Ex. 15:22) and left Egypt
behind, they might have thought they were leaving their pain behind. But they
were carrying it with them in the crevices of their souls. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">As soon as
Miriam’s song ends, Moses forces Israel on into the wilderness. And there’s no
respite there from the harshness of life - as our Torah storytellers unfold
their narrative, they tell of the first thing that happens in the wilderness: there
is no water - who would have known? - and then the water they found was bitter,
and “the people grumbled against Moses saying, “What shall we drink?”” (Ex.
15:24). Three days after the world-transforming, history-making,
gratitude-making moment of redemption at the Sea of Reeds - and the Israelites’
intimation that there existed an incomprehensible power behind events, within
events - within seventy-two hours, the pain is back and the long, long story of
bitterness and complaint begins. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Marching
through the desert they are still a traumatised people - and now they are a
thirsty people as well. And six weeks later they are wishing they were dead (Ex.
16:2-3), and it’s all Moses’ fault.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Trauma does not get healed overnight, trauma lasts - and for as long as
it lasts, somebody has to be blamed, somebody else has to be made to feel the
pain, the distress: this is human nature. Or rather human nature in its rawest,
regressed state. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In these
texts in Exodus we see the Biblical narrators showing us how human nature is. That’s
why we can recognise ourselves inside these texts. So we can understand how a
Golden Calf gets made in the absence of Moses; we can understand how, when he
disappears for days, then weeks, fear takes over: the absent leader creates a
vacuum of uncertainty, mistrust, disillusionment, despair; it’s just too
painful to bear uncertainty sometimes - where are we going? who is looking
after us? are we going to perish in this god-forsaken (so to speak) spot? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">They were
faced not only with a leader who vanishes without a word, without explanation -
a leader who abandons his primary role, to be visible and instruct and direct
and make people feel safe and offer a sense of collective purpose - not only
did that still traumatised people no longer have a leader to guide them and
listen to them and calm them. But of course they did not have a God who could
do any of those things either. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So: a leader
who goes AWOL, disappears from sight, and a God who is defined by his
invisibility. A God who can’t be seen, can’t be touched, can’t be heard - except
by self-appointed old men like Moses and Aaron, who claim to hear him, but what
good is that if <i>we the people</i> can’t hear him? A God who can’t be
experienced by any of our human senses - eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hands, none
of them are any use<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in getting hold of
God, getting connected to this supposed divine energy that animates life. What
good is ‘was, is, will be’ when your life is on the line? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And what
fills the space is a wish, a fantasy, that a Golden Calf can fill the gap - you
can make it yourself, a great collective project, you can fashion it, touch it,
see it, it doesn’t disappear. This is basic human nature at play - trusting our
five senses. And then you can project onto it whatever you want : “This is your
god, O Israel, that brought you up from the land of Egypt” (Ex. 32: 4). Who
wouldn’t want to create an idol, gather round it and have a <i>simcha</i> -
“they sat down to eat and drink and then they rose up to dance” (Ex 32: 6)? A
feast for their all their senses.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So, as I
said, my heart goes out to those Israelites with their traumatic wounds and
their need for certainty, for something to put their faith in that they can see
and touch. I wonder how much we have changed over the millennia? Just below the
surface of all our sophistication we are probably pretty much the same. We
still have an invisible God and we still rely on hearsay to keep us going - we
just call it ‘tradition’. When so much uncertainty is woven into our lives it’s
hard to trust in something our five senses can’t readily experience. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">We need a
sixth sense - and maybe even a further, seventh sense - to grasp the
ungraspable, and maybe we call the sixth sense our human spirits, or our soul,
or our intuition - different names may come to mind - but they all point to
something real about human experience: that we are capable of - and do -
experience awe and wonder and hopefulness and an awareness of both our
insignificance in the world and our deep individuality and significance. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our sixth sense gives us an awareness that a
mystery surrounds our life and that what ‘was and is and will be’ sustains us
and nurtures us and supports us till the end of our days. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And if we do
have a seventh sense - mirroring creation - it is that we too, collectively and
individually, are wrapped in holiness, <i>nedar ba-kodesh</i>, and that when we
act in that spirit of holiness we too <i>norah tehillot</i>, are capable of
inspiring awe and gratitude, because we too can <i>oseh felle</i>, work wonders.
We too can work wonders. It’s the gift we have been given, this divine-human potential.
It’s the gift we have been given through Torah, which tells us about ourselves
while purportedly telling us stories about our invisible, ungraspable God. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><b>[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, February 19th, 2022) </b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-60698630091154066912022-01-02T14:56:00.001+00:002022-01-02T14:56:37.046+00:00New Year - New Hope?<p> A<span style="font-size: 14pt;">s the New
Year starts, are we wishing we could hear a few words of encouragement? Some
words of hopefulness? As we move into 2022 we might be thinking of turning the
metaphorical page onto the next chapter of our lives -but are we ready yet for
hope, genuine hope that isn’t superficial, or Pollyannaish? Hope that isn’t
just putting a sticking plaster on our gaping wounds?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">In this week’s
Torah reading from the annual cycle of readings, we happened to have reached
Exodus, chapter 6. We are inside the narrative of Israel’s liberation from bondage:
but when Moses tells the enslaved children of Israel his message of hope - that
liberation was coming,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that redemption
was at hand, and goes on to speak of the ancestral promise of security in a
land in which they could thrive (Exodus 6: 4-8) - when Moses brought this
startling message of radical hope to the people, they couldn’t hear it. The
text says that they couldn’t absorb it <a name="_Hlk91173094"><i>mikotzer ruach
</i></a><i>u’mayavodah kasha</i> “because their spirits were crushed<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and their working lives were filled with
hardship” (verse 9). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">That’s a
powerful, psychologically-true, image the narrators offer us. The people
couldn’t hear about hope because their spirits were crushed and the conditions
they had to endure were harsh. Does this speak at all to where we are, as the
year turns? We know what we are living through now may not be backbreaking
slavery - but we know the hardships we endure, the forces that seek to crush
us. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">It sometimes
feels that we are in civilisational freefall: there’s a perpetual sense - that
we try to keep at bay - of a great unravelling, all our old certainties have
worn thin or have disappeared and we are bombarded by, on the one hand, vast
acres of escapist trivia and social nonsense, all the distractions of Instagram
and Twitter and memes and Strictly Come Love Island Bake Off; and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>then, larger scale, there’s the slide into
the quagmires of political corruption and anti-democratic malevolence and the
bottomless anxiety of ecological dread. How do we stay human when our spirits
are being crushed to extinction, and multiple forms of hardship are all around
us? What hope is there for a message of divine hopefulness getting through all
this grief and pain and fear?</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">The pandemic
is only part of this. But this pandemic is still and obviously with us, wave
after wave of it; and because we know that until vaccines are made available
globally, none of us will be safe, it’s just soul-destroyingly infuriating how
self-defeating is the stance of national governments who are privileged to have
the vaccines yet who nevertheless continue to fail to set up a system to get
these vaccines distributed fairly and equitably. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">As a former
Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, keeps on saying, and has been saying almost since
the vaccines arrived - this last year has seen not just a failure of empathy
and imagination, as well as a moral failure - “ a stain on our global soul” -
but it’s an ongoing pragmatic failure<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of
global significance: in the long run we can’t protect ourselves unless everyone
is protected. It’s a huge international challenge but it is do-able if
short-sighted national self-interest doesn’t sabotage the larger task at hand.
But that’s a big ‘if’ - and how hopeful are we about it? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">We know that
the most deadly pandemic of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, Spanish flu, lasted
for nearly four years and went through wave after wave until it subsided into
ordinary seasonal flu.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And that’s
probably our best hope this time round as well. But we don’t know, and can’t
know. As one of our leading public intellectuals, Professor Jacqueline Rose,
has said about this year ahead: “Across the world, people are desperate to feel
they have turned a corner, that an end is in sight, only to be faced with a
future that seems to be retreating like a vanishing horizon, a shadow, a blur.
Nobody knows, with any degree of confidence, what will happen next. Anyone
claiming to do so is a fraud.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">That seems
to put it well, with a clear-sighted down-to-earth Jewish pragmatism: there is
a human wish/need to feel hopeful, yes, but it’s hard to see where that hope is
coming from, on so many levels; we don’t know what 2022 will bring; anyone
confidently claiming they do know is a fraud, a charlatan. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">The Biblical
story of a people too crushed and overwhelmed to hear a message of hope might
be psychologically true, as I said, but it isn’t a psychologically <i>nuanced</i>
text. It doesn’t speak - at least in this narrative - of the complexity
surrounding human hopefulness. Because the other side of the coin is that in
desperate times people are so much in need of hope, so hungry for it, that they
become vulnerable to hearing hope wherever it shouts loudest. People have ears
for and devour hope that comes in simple, neat packages, and in slogans - Make
America Great Again, Take Back Control of our borders, “Jews will not replace
us”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We need - personally and
collectively - to feel hope and we can see our tendency to clutch at it
wherever we hear it, however false or fabricated it is. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">Interestingly,
in the Exodus narrative the children of Israel didn’t do that. They seemed to
have experienced Moses as just another stuttering hope-merchant, a tongue-tied
religious eccentric claiming to speak in the name of an invisible ancestral
deity. How were they to know his hopefulness was credible? How are we to know
what forms of hopefulness are credible? As Jacqueline Rose wisely says, anyone
confidently claiming to know what will happen next is a fraud. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">So you
aren’t going to get any New Year forecasts here. But I am not sure I am ready
quite yet to give up on hope itself. In spite of it all, I do feel glimmers of
hopefulness, but it’s a low level everyday hopefulness that almost doesn’t
count as hopefulness - but maybe it can stand in for hopefulness. And it comes
in the usual places: it comes from observing the strength and resilience of
community; in witnessing the kindness of those around me in family and community
- and the kindness of strangers; in seeing the courage and dedication of carers
in many settings, and NHS staff, who keep on going in spite of hardships; I see
it in the vision of younger people who protest injustice, or discrimination, or
global threats to their very future; I see it in those who don’t succumb to
cynicism or defeatism or despair but say ‘I can make a difference’ and ‘we can
work together to make things better, to effect change, to shape our society for
the benefit of the majority and not the already privileged’. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">New
possibilities arise all the time, new growth emerges from the cracks, fresh
hope trickles up through the barren landscape. The human spirit, the <i>ruach</i>
in us all, is remarkably resilient. We just need to get started. January 1<sup>st</sup>
is a new start. We just need to get started, to get our uncrushed spirits
moving. That great Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney put it beautifully, in a
speech to young people many years ago, 1966 - yes, it was a year when hope for
the new was blossoming around the world, but his words still speak to us today,
in darker times, words which evoke something timeless about the human
condition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">“Getting
started, keeping going, getting started again - in art and in life, it seems to
me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival…[it’s]
the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives,
credibility to yourself as well as others.”</span></i><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">So, as we
search for sparks of hopefulness in the winter darkness, we recognise the
rhythms of our lives do involve “getting started, keeping going, getting
started again” - this is a moral achievement, a psychological achievement, a
spiritual achievement. Getting started - each year, each week, sometimes each
day - means we aren’t suffering from what our Biblical storytellers diagnosed
in the children of Israel, <i>kotzer ruach</i>, crushed/atrophied spirits<i> </i>:
the <i>ruach</i> in us, our spirits, is not crushed because the <i>ruach Ha-kodesh</i>
(Psalm 51:12) the divine spirit, is breathing itself into us, it animates us,
sustains us, even when we are not aware of it, even if we don’t believe in it.
It still happens, like a miracle. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">So, we’ve
got ‘started’ this year; and I guess we are going to ‘keep going’ - and in good
time we’ll see where we get to. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;"><b>[based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, January 1st, 2022]</b></span></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-78656777012685472952021-10-24T16:01:00.000+01:002021-10-24T16:01:21.221+01:00Sight, Insight, Hospitality: Seeing the Divine in the Everyday<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">As a young
man I was preoccupied - personally, and then professionally - with questions
about God: the search for God, the experience of God, the centrality of God in
Jewish religious life, other religious traditions’ views on God, the role of
God and divinity in human life, how one might find God in everyday life.
Inevitably too, and looming behind all these questions, there was the so-called
‘silence of God’ during the <i>Shoah</i>.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Thinking it
was part of the job of rabbis to talk about these things - and puzzled
sometimes at how infrequently I heard colleagues talking about this stuff - I would
often give sermons on these themes. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As
if I thought I was some sort of expert on the topic. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I can now
see, of course, how presumptuous this was. But it felt like a mission, of sorts,
to keep on talking about God: to bring God under the spotlight, as it were, and
try and illuminate all the issues and dynamics and problems and uncertainties
surrounding this central character of our Jewish religious drama - although a
phrase like ‘character…in our religious drama’ was not how I would have spoken
about it in those days. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But over the
years something changed. I changed, I suppose - some people might call it
maturing or growing up, though I’m not sure that’s quite the right language to
capture what happened. But<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>gradually,
over the decades, I<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>became aware that I
was talking about God less and less - and often in sermons not at all. Certainly
it wasn’t the focus of a sermon, as it had been in the past. If I was feeling
particularly playful - or maybe it was just pious, or pseudo-pious, I don’t
know - I might slip in a reference to God - almost as an aside to the themes I
was exploring, a bracket as it were, but definitely not as the main topic. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So what
happened? Why did God disappear, or fade from view, from what I found myself
talking about? There were many reasons - psychological, theological, intellectual,
spiritual, professional - but rather than open these up here. I want to focus
on a couple of verses from this week’s Torah reading in the hope that through
them I can cast a light on what changed in my approach to this youthful
obsession of mine. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Our <i>sedrah</i>
began with chapter 18 of Genesis. <b><i>Va-yay’ra</i></b><i> <b>elav Adonai</b></i>
- “the Eternal One appeared to him…”, as Abraham sat at the entrance to his
tent in the heat of the day… (Genesis18:1). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And it
continues<b><i> Va-yisar aynav</i></b><i> <b>va-yar </b></i><b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- “</b>and he lifted up his eyes and he saw…”.
The text is subtle here, it separates off the verb ‘to see’ from what he sees.
This suggests it isn’t just ordinary seeing, it’s more like ‘insight’ than
‘sight’. (The Hebrew doesn’t distinguish between these two). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The next
word is <b><i>ve-hinei</i></b>, “and behold” - the word always acts like a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>jump cut in a film, as the narrator ‘cuts’ to
the subjective view of the character. So now the storyteller lets us find out
what Abraham sees: <b><i>shlosha anashim nitzavim alav</i></b><i>,</i> “three
people are standing waiting above him” - he’s sitting, they are rearing up
above him. (The word used for ‘standing’ <b>n’z’v </b>means ‘standing waiting/preparing for something’, a different word from the everyday Hebrew word for the physical
act of standing <b>a’m’d</b>). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This is great
storytelling: graphic, very precise, you can picture it in your mind’s eye,
each word crafted to add a detail to the picture, so that you can see it (it’s
like the specificity of individual words in a poem, or a Rembrandt painting
where each brushstroke counts). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And what
does Abraham do? The next word begins the second half of the sentence - but
it’s not an action word, it’s a reflection word, the action is inwards: <b>va-yar
- </b>again! - the word is repeated, it comes in each half of the sentence and
Abraham has another moment of insight, where what he sees with his eyes joins
up with what he’s seeing within himself, what he’s intuiting is happening. <b>Va-yar
va-yaratz...</b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“And he <i>saw</i>; and he
ran out of his tent to greet them…”, and he bows low before them. Honour,
respect, reverence, humility. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We are used
to reading this ‘bowing down’ gesture in relation to Biblical characters, it
comes dozens and dozens of times, it’s so familiar we stop even thinking about
it. But it may be worth noting that this is the first time it is used in <i>Tanach</i>,
the Hebrew Bible. In this scene, at this moment, this act of bowing down opens
up a new way of people relating to each other. It’s an archetypal moment:
respect, reverence in the face of the other, humility, making oneself smaller,
giving space to the other. Abraham as an exemplar of a particular mode of being
with the Other, of the ethics of interpersonal behaviour, the dynamics of I and
Thou (to use Martin Buber’s language). Each Thou a glimpse of the Eternal Thou.
This is his first impulse: he runs and prostrates himself. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This leads
into the actions for which this scene is perhaps better know - and what’s
talked about by the rabbinic commentators - his hospitality: water, food,
shelter, provision. But what I’m wanting to focus on here is how the outer
hospitality - the material hospitality and generosity - is preceded by another
kind of hospitality, if we want to call it that, the hospitality to the lived
experience of being in the presence of other human beings, souls like oneself,
the hospitality of making space for a shared humanity with the other, with the
stranger, the traveller, the ones who arrive from elsewhere, those who arrive
out of nowhere - which is always somewhere. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Isn’t this a
key aspect of the insight Abraham has? That these strangers are fellow
travellers on the road through life, fellow human beings dependent on what
provisions they receive on the journey - (we can also call it Kafka’s insight)
- an insight into the way we all depend on each other to get through life, to
get through the day? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But
Abraham’s moment of insight is, remember, repeated: there are two moments of
insight, two levels of revelation that follow on the heels of each other, as
thoughts do - <b>Va-yar…Va-yar</b> - because Abraham also has a moment of
insight not just into <i>our shared humanity with the other</i>, with the
stranger, but even more profoundly, insight into this being <i>one way that God
is present in the world</i>. It’s not just an awareness that, as we are
accustomed to say in a rather abstract formulation, humanity is made “in the
image of God/the divine”, <i>b’zelem Elohim</i>, as the beginning of Genesis
puts it (1:27). But what Abraham realises in a more personal way - what the
storytellers in their exquisite narration are signposting - is that in the
encounter with another human being, God , <i>Adonai</i>, is present. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">That’s how
the narrative unfolds - <i>Adonai </i>appears to Abraham, verse 1. That’s the
storyteller’s omniscient ‘objective’ perspective, as it were. The narrator is
telling us what is going on, what we are going to see illustrated, illuminated.
<b><i>Va-yay’ra</i></b><i> <b>elav Adonai</b></i> - “the Eternal One appeared
to him”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But what does Abraham actually
see? What he sees are three people, people like him, three strangers. That’s
his subjective experience - people awaiting a response. And the text dramatizes
how what he sees with his eyes is linked to what he sees with his mind’s eye;
and what he realises, what his insight is - and it is a theological insight and
a spiritual insight - is that the divine appears in the everyday, the divine
appears when you open your eyes to see what is in front of you, the divine is
present in our interaction with others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And that this experience is - for want of a better word - God. Or
rather, this is also God. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We are not
talking about a transcendent God here, something over and above us, beyond us,
we are not talking about a creator God, separate from our lives, but an aspect
of God here and now, present, waiting for us to see and to respond. Seeing with
the eyes in this story isn’t enough, it is reflecting on what he sees and
responding to what he sees, that makes Abraham into the exemplar, the model for
Jewish lives, <i>Avraham Avinu</i>, the founding father of a new way of seeing,
a new way of thinking about God. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If you look
through all these chapters in which Abraham appears, he doesn’t seem to speak much
<i>about</i> God - he doesn’t give sermons about God to his family, or to those
the Torah describes him encountering. He mentions God to Isaac at the Akedah,
but that’s just about it. But in our text today he introduces a way of thinking
about God - or rather the storytellers use him to dramatize a way of thinking about
God - that is ‘horizontal’ as it were, not ‘vertical’. (I’m borrowing Rabbi Arthur
Green’s language here). It is a way of thinking about God as what is enacted on the human level; which is why - one of the reasons why - I
stopped talking overtly about God and started talking more about compassion and
justice, and generosity, and kindness, about human qualities and capacities,
through which the divine enters into the world. God is revealed through us,
through us inhabiting these so called ‘divine’ qualities and enacting divinity
in our everyday lives. 'Horizontal' Judaism is a Jewish way of being and thinking
in which God is present in and through the human, rather than God split off
from humanity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Who knows,
maybe in these latter years of my rabbinic life I might return to my roots.
There’s still a lot to say, to puzzle over, to explore and wrestle with, about <i>Ha
Kadosh Baruch Hu</i>, the Holy One of Israel, <i>Ribbono shel Ha-Olam</i>, the
‘Master’ of the Universe, <i>Avinu Malkenu, </i>‘Our Father, Our Sovereign’,
there’s still quite a bit of life in the old dog yet - and I’m not just talking
about me. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><b>[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, October 23rd 2021]</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-2238217083474996972021-09-11T22:46:00.002+01:002021-09-11T22:46:35.473+01:00When Is Enough, Enough?<p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">The Jewish New Year started this week with our ‘new
normal’ – and our ‘new caution’. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You know what I mean by the ‘new caution’. That we’ve come
to the end of something we were used to, and new questions and doubts have
infiltrated our thinking: <i>where</i> do we feel comfortable going, out of the
house? <i>who</i> do we meet? do we use public transport? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>how close can we get to other people - even as
the community gathered indoors this week, we were thinking : how close can I
sit, is there enough space, enough ventilation, what is safe? Indeed, what does
‘safety’ really mean now? All this adds up to our ‘new caution’. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Something has been lost, we feel it. It’s as if our carefree
days are behind us. They’re over. A sense of easygoingness in everyday life (if
we ever had it), well, it belongs to a different era: B.C., as it were. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">All those Rosh Hashanahs in the past, up to 2019 - that
old B.C. era, Before Covid - we started the year with hopefulness; yes there were
anxieties too, sometimes, but usually we had a sense of new beginnings where we
could look forward with confidence, eagerness - and not too much apprehension.
But my sense is that’s changed; that some deep, precious sense of the
possibilities of carefreeness has gone. And the new caution has taken over. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Over this last year my mind has often turned to how, a
century ago, in the 1920s, people in the UK looked back across the abyss of the
Great War and started portraying the so-called <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Edwardian period, pre-1914, as a golden age of
long summer afternoons and garden parties, and they summoned up romantic,
nostalgia-tinged memories (real and constructed) of basking in a carefree world
(well, carefree if you had money), a world of Empire and national prestige and
self-satisfaction. You’ve read the books, seen the films - Merchant-Ivory and
the rest - things that evoke this period with its lives of hopefulness,
excitement about the future, and optimism that although the world was changing
rapidly, particularly technologically, it was obviously changing for the
better.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Living through those sun-drenched years, people just
didn’t know they were coming to the end of something - that actually they were
at the end of something - they could not imagine the devastation and the losses
that 1914 and war inflicted on a whole generation, young and old alike; let
alone imagine the horrors that were to come as the century unfolded. Carefree
days indeed. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And here we are, a century later, not yet post-Covid
(if we will ever be), taking these tentative steps into our New Year, but far -
perhaps very far - from relaxed and care free. And the question is, where can
we find what we need to help us navigate through these fraught and complex times?
Emotionally complex, politically and socially complex, globally complex times.
Where can we look for inspiration? For hope? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There have been times during this pandemic when you
will have heard it said that this worldwide event, in which there has been, and
continues to be, so much distress and so many losses, could also be an
opportunity. Not exactly a heaven-sent opportunity – that requires a faith, a
theology, that’s a bridge too far for most of us - but an opportunity
nevertheless. That although we need to acknowledge the suffering many, many
people have gone through - and that isn’t over, the hardship – it’s also
presented us with a chance, a welcome chance, to reconsider the status quo, to
re-evaluate priorities – personal, communal, national, global; that it’s
cracked open the carapace, the hard, shiny, dense complacency about how things
have to be - economically, and how our societies are ordered, and the
priorities we allow governments to choose for us. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">For some, this last 18 months has opened us up to
imagine a different kind of life, and different ways of promoting human well-being
and human flourishing in society. Yes, the pandemic has revealed the scandals
about existing inequalities and deprivations but it has - particularly in its
early stages when so much previous thinking was turned upside down (imagine
paying people not to work!) - it has, intermittently, created some space to
think about other ways of living. Or so this upbeat narrative might suggest. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And yes, so much has already changed - where you work
from, how often you get on a plane, how you shop, how you hold a meeting, how
religious services happen, how much you cycle or walk, even where you live, see
a doctor - there’s an endless list of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>everyday stuff that has been impacted by the pandemic and is in the
process of changing; or where there’s been at least a glimpse of a different way
of doing things, where perhaps a better quality of life might be possible. That’s
not to deny the losses we have experienced, but to acknowledge some of the more
hopeful developments and possibilities that have been opened up. <i>Even if the
opening up has only been in our thinking</i>, our capacity to imagine a
different future, this pandemic has catalysed some deep shifts in our consciousness.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But a lot of these possibilities we’ve glimpsed, or
have been spoken about, or have begun to be enacted, are linked to something
much more difficult to think about, let alone accept. To put it as simply as
possible: we are being forced by the circumstances in which this pandemic is
occurring to think about something maybe we’d much rather <i>not</i> have to
think about, something quite painful. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If changes are coming to how we live and how we
organize things, and if a sense of carefreeness is to return, whatever
transformations happen would need to be such that we don’t have to continue to fear
devastating floods and famine-inducing droughts and unbearable heatwaves and
out-of-control wildfires, when we wouldn’t have to worry that our children and
grandchildren are being brain damaged from the womb onwards by chemical
pollution from plastics or from the very air they breathe. If change is going
to happen in the directions we all pray for – or if not pray for, then at least
wish for – if we are collectively going to turn things round and shape a better
world then we have to start thinking about the hard question, the fundamental
question: <i>whether we really need all the things we think we do. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And this is the hard part about what any positive
changes this pandemic is catalysing has revealed. How much do we need? How much
do we tell ourselves we need? It can pain our hearts to look inside and consider
these things, but during these Ten Days set aside in the Jewish calendar it is
- whether we like it or not - part of the spiritual challenge of these days to reflect
on some of these difficult questions. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There may not be any shortcuts here, or easy answers,
or in the end any effective ways of avoiding the painful choices that are going
to need to be made. To repeat the question again – the question this pandemic
has brought out into the open, the question for our times: <i>Do we really need
all the things we think we do</i>: the objects we buy, the experiences we buy,
the holidays we buy, the kind of food we buy (all that meat with its
environmentally destructive consequences), do we really need it all, and more
of it, and different, and the new, and the latest, and what others have, do we
really need it all? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And remember ‘need’ is different from ‘want’. ‘Want’
is easy to feel, sure. Of course we want stuff. But do we need what we ‘want’?
‘Want’ is an emotion, a feeling. And our emotions are powerful forces within us
and can often rule us, to our own detriment. But ‘need’ is something else. ‘Do I
need this?’ is a different question from “Do I want this?” . “Do I want this?”
is a subjective question about our feeling life. But “Do I need this?” is, I’d
suggest, a different kind of question. At root it’s an ethical question. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">And as we know, however reluctantly we might want to
know it, being Jewish just happens to mean having a commitment to ethical
questions. Otherwise what’s the point? Without the ethical questions we are
just another tribe in the human family, just another club to belong to. I’m not
knocking the fringe benefits of tribalism or club membership: ask any sports fan
about the sense of belonging tied up as a supporter; ask any member of a gym or
a golf-club and they’ll tell you of the health benefits or the social contact membership
offers. These are all good things - but they aren’t at the heart of the Jewish
endeavour in the world, which is ask the hard questions; and not just ask them
but respond to them in action. And - I’ll repeat it - the question for our
times is, I think: </span><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;"><i>Do </i></b><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">we really need all the things we think
we do</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">? or feel we do?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In a world running out of resources, at the edge of
catastrophe, where glimpses of devastation are becoming unignorable and a
helplessness can easily set it, or a pessimism, or a cynicism, or fearfulness, or
just an angry indifference, the most important ethical and political and
environmental and spiritual idea can be summed up in one word: enough. <i>Dayenu</i>
– the springtime Passover/<i>Pesach</i> text belongs here too, during our Ten Days
of Self-judgment. <i>Dayenu</i>. Enough. When is what we have, what we already
have, enough? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Can we stop the unrelenting urge to have more long
enough to feel we have enough? To appreciate what we have. We already have
enough. We reading this blog - just like the community who heard these words
earlier in the week - already have enough. There are many millions who don’t
have enough and that’s a huge national and international challenge - but I’m
not talking about them, right now. I’m talking about us. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">How do we feel we have enough? How do we get to the
point where we say to ourselves: stop, <i>dayenu</i>? The problem is that if we
are empty inside we will always want more. Nothing will ever feel enough. Which
is why the question about limiting our consumption – whether it is of holidays
in the sun, or meat, or anything else – although it’s a psychological problem is
at root a spiritual problem. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Appetites are endless, but if there’s an emptiness
inside us – and we may or may not be aware of it – we will never be able to
say: enough. We won’t be able to say stop, we won’t be able to clear a space to
consider how those who genuinely do need more can be helped, what changes do
need to be made, economically and socially. What sacrifices need to be made.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">What is this emptiness? The word is shocking, easy to
deny. But what I’m talking about by ‘emptiness’ is how painful it can be to feel
some <i>lack</i> inside ourselves: whether it is friendships, or love, or self-esteem,
the right body shape, educational success, financial reward, health, meaning, purpose
– we can feel a lack, an emptiness about any of this. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Sometimes we are living from a place inside us where
we know, or have a sense about, what our deprivation is about; sometimes we
can’t even identify what that is; but either way, if we sense some inner
emptiness – or even worse if the emptiness is there and we don’t sense it, just
drive ourselves crazy trying to fill ourselves up anyway – if this is how we
live in the world, if this is what is going on inside of us – and what I am
saying is a reality for countless, countless people - if this is what is going
on, we can never say enough, we can never say stop, we can never say - because
we can never feel - “I have enough”, I am blessed. We can never think: “I am
enough”, I am blessed, and grateful. As I said, this is a psychological issue,
but it’s also a spiritual issue. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Our spirits might be restless, our souls might feel
ill-nourished, our inner selves may feel aching and unsatisfied, but what these
Ten Days in our calendar offer us is an opportunity to look at this – and to do
something about it<i>. Even to look at it, to think about it, is the beginning
of doing something about it.</i> Because what the Jewish tradition has created –
what the Jewish people have created – is <i>a framework for hopefulness</i>. We
can change, we are not pre-programmed - or not pre-programmed in ways that
can’t evolve and change and grow. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Teshuvah</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> means we can turn
to the questions that matter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Teshuvah</i>
means we can return to what we truly need, not what we think we need. And what
we truly need, is to be able to be in contact, in living contact, with the
spirit of all being that is in us, and in others around us - that’s the great
value of community, that the divine can be experienced through the person you
are sitting beside - even if it’s not too close. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">What we yearn for, what gives our lives real meaning
and a sense of purpose, is to be in contact with the spirit of all life, which
is inside us and in each other, and that flows through all creation. Feeling
it, knowing it, experiencing it, communing with it, singing it, praying it,
speaking it, holding it in silence within us - we yearn for it. To experience
the fulness of life in us and around us and between us. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We can have all the material goods and possessions in
the world, we can have all the exotic adventures that life offers, but in the
end it is something intangible that we really need, something that is elusive
and uncapturable and sometimes fleeting, something that our millennia-old Jewish
tradition circles round and plays with and hints at - and reveals in sacred
moments in our lives. Moments when we discover that we are a part of the
sacred, that a spark of the divine is in the depths of our being - and I know
that means nothing and yet I <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>also know
that it means everything. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Our hope, personally and collectively, our hope, renewed
in every generation, is that this spirit of being can live in us, can be
expressed through us. It’s a gift and a mystery and a destiny. That source of
all life that the tradition has named <i>Adonai </i>[the Eternal One] can heal
our emptiness, it whispers its blessing : “You have enough, you are enough, you
are blessed, this is my gift, this is the mystery, this is your destiny”. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[based on a sermon given at the Finchley
Reform Synagogue, London, on the second day of the New Year, Rosh Hashanah,
September 8<sup>th</sup>, 2021]<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com4