It is obvious that the Catholic Church is currently immersed in controversy and soul-searching. Accusations that a small number of clergy, in several countries, have in the past been guilty of sexual abusing children and other vulnerable young people are serious sources of shame for the Church. And the extent of the cover-up of these crimes is also coming to light. But this material is hardly new. It joins a larger body of evidence that within hierarchical, authority-laden institutions – be they religious or secular, be it staff in care homes or teachers in public schools or adults in that supposedly benign institution we call ‘the family’ – violence and cruelty can be (and always has been) perpetrated by authority figures against the weak and the powerless.
Priests and nuns may have a vocation, or may be seen by others as having some special ‘sanctity’ attached to them – but they are (of course) as psychologically complex as any of the rest of us. In my experience, the battle in the human soul between our creative and destructive impulses, our loving and hateful feelings, is never over for anyone. And in spite of what people might want from their clergy, ‘religious’ figures are not exempt from instinctual human desires and conflicts.
So on the one hand this latest furore about the Catholic Church is part of a much wider picture about the corrupting nature of institutions where authority becomes authoritarian. And this is as relevant to Orthodox Jewish institutions and families as to Catholic ones. And I dare say there are Muslim equivalents. But abuse of power in religious settings seems to shock us more – perhaps because the rhetoric of monotheism is full of words like love and compassion and justice.
Yet we really shouldn’t be shocked. When a religion has at its centre an authority figure – otherwise known as ‘God’ – who Himself doesn’t like challenges to his authority – "You shall have no other gods before Me" – then we can predict trouble ahead. Those who see themselves as speaking in God’s name have a potent image to draw upon when they say ‘Do what I tell you’. To think you are speaking in the name of an all-powerful deity is a dangerous belief to hold. It can justify any action you take. If God is always right and I am acting as God’s representative here on earth then it is easy to find oneself caught up in an (unconscious) omnipotent fantasy that I am always right.
So this identification with a divine power who is uncompromising in saying what is right and what is wrong – and in dictating what is forbidden and what has to happen – this unconscious identification will be used to ‘justify’ cruelty and terror and transgression. Whether it is sexual violence or domestic violence or institutional violence, this enactment by individuals of their own instinctual need to exercise power mirrors – and draws upon - monotheism’s own strands of hostility, aggression, and intolerance of dissent . And all monotheisms contain plenty of that kind of stuff, mixed in with the more benign strands of faith that believers love to quote.
So I’m never shocked by evidence of crimes by so-called ‘religious’ people. It so happens that in his career the present Pope, Benedict XVI, has been rigorous in investigating cases of clergy who have been accused of sexual abuse. But what is new on this occasion is the way in which these current accusations – of crimes and the cover-up of crimes – has been taken up by the world’s press. They now have a perfect weapon with which to beat an institution that ‘preaches love but practices abuse’ – as if all priests are secret perverts. This is never stated openly but is the subtext to much of the reporting I have read. It’s as if there is almost a kind of schadenfreude at work: ‘You claim to be so holy and good, but look at what you are really like...now (about time!) it’s our turn to hold you responsible, to make you feel guilty ...’
Is this the revenge of the secular press (whose own authority is fading in the internet era) on the enviable religious authority of the Church? Is a secret, maybe unconscious, battle taking place – can the power of the print media bring down the power of the Church?
Take, for example, a recent article headlined ‘Pope’s preacher says attacks on Catholics are like antisemitism’(the Guardian, April 3rd) At an Easter service at St.Peter’s - attended by the Pope and other Catholic leaders - Father Raniero Cantalamessa had quoted a letter he’d received from a Jewish friend – note this, from a Jewish friend – which contained the remark that ‘The passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt reminds me of the more shameful aspects of antisemitism.’ This had caused, so it was reported, a storm of further controversy amongst Abuse Victims’ groups and Jewish representatives, particularly in Germany, whose shock and horror at this remark were duly recorded.
Now I may have some lack of moral imagination here, or a real failure of moral intelligence, but I am rather puzzled by this reported outrage. What the ‘Jewish friend’ seems to have been pointing out was that just as antisemitism is stereotyping and prejudice expressed against a whole group, so the current antagonism being expressed in the media towards the collective authority of Catholic priests and the hierarchy of the Church and the person of Benedict himself and the institutional practice of celibacy, etc , etc, is a form of prejudice - for it condemns the group, the collective institution and its ways of life, for the crimes (and sins) of some individuals.
So isn’t the analogy of antisemitism rather a useful one? Yes, it might be rather ironic from a historical perspective for a leading Catholic to use this particular analogy. But isn’t Father Cantalamessa’s inference a legitimate, benign and even illuminating perspective? - that a form of collective scapegoating is happening in the attacks on the Catholic Church that is similar in its psychological mechanism to attacks on Judaism as a religion or Jews as a collective group?
Sadly, a Catholic spokesman felt the need to issue a statement afterwards saying that the preacher wasn’t speaking as a Vatican official and that such comparisons ‘lead to misunderstandings and is not an official position of the Catholic Church.’ The problem is that for those who are so minded – the intolerant, the insecure, the paranoid, the self-regarding narcissist - anything someone else says can ‘lead to misunderstandings’.
Maybe silence is, after all, a virtue to be cultivated.
Tuesday, 6 April 2010
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
Pesach: Memories Are Made Of This...
It’s that time of year again. No matter how distant a Jew is from their heritage, no matter how secularised or alienated or acculturated, can there be anyone who does not recall, from the deepest recesses of their mind, those words of tradition that are sung or chanted, mumbled or muttered on this night: Ma nishtana ha-layla ha-ze - ‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’
Something about this festival of Pesach - Passover – has lodged itself in the Jewish psyche. Deeper than questions of religious belief or unbelief – did the exodus from Egypt really happen as the Bible says it did? does a God who is concerned with the fate of a group of immigrant slaves really exist? does any kind of divine force exist or is it all legend and superstition and infantile yearning? – deeper than these doubts and questions something else stirs up at this season. Family memories begin to arise from the hidden recesses of our consciousness.
Memories of grandfathers chanting the prayers in an alien tongue, white tablecloths and dishes brought out only for this night, the bitter-sweet taste of haroset, arguments round the table, benign bedlam, everybody with a different Haggadah, the over-excitedness of tired children, the gaps at the table of relatives no longer here, the displaced seders during the War, the silence about the Shoah in the post-War seders, celebrating the seder communally on Kibbutz at long tables with hundreds of others, the search for the afikoman, the rewards and treats and shushing, the waiting for the songs, the disputes over the tunes, opening the door for Elijah and the cat walks in, or a relative home from distant parts. Memories - sentimental or enraging, tear-laden or embittered – wrap themselves round the seder night.
This is the night when we tell our story, our history, our great mythic narrative of liberation from slavery – and this is the night when, in the midst of telling a collective story, our own personal link in the chain comes alive, as we recall seders gone by. Seder night is when Judaism comes home, literally.
At no other time of the year does Jewish tradition so take over our personal lives, as individuals and families. The New Year and Yom Kippur do have their home dimensions (as of course does Shabbat) but the High Holy Days are largely celebrated (if that's the word) in the synagogue – if they are marked at all: primarily inner and reflective, they are easy to avoid, to dip into, or opt out of altogether. But Pesach seems to resonate in a different way - partly because for those of us born Jewish it is part of our earliest layers of memory in a way that Rosh Hashanah and the Day of Atonement are probably not.
If this is so, it is a small victory for the tradition – because so much of the seder ceremony and Haggadah narration focuses on the need to instruct the next generation, to tell it to the children, to induct the younger generation into the collective mythic history of the tribe. The seder is in effect a psychodrama : you eat the symbolic foods which link you to the ancient tales, you drink the ritual four cups of wine, you keep hearing the motif of four (the Four Questions, the Four Sons/Children, the Four Cups) – as if even ordinary numbers have a deeper meaning, a deeper link to history and tradition – there is communal singing of songs that might not make much sense but cause laughter in the adults...It all adds up to an evening that enacts a group mystery into which the children are to be inducted, whether they want it or not, whether they understand it or not.
The story contained in the Haggadah tells of the survival of a tribe, a people – the ‘miraculous’ survival of a people, through the generations, through history, a people who chose to gather each year to tell of their miraculous survival as a people. The Haggadah tells of a group of rabbis in Bnei Brack – five of them, so before the number symbolism was developed! - gathering in secret to tell the story two millennia ago. So far away in time - and yet already the need to tell the story, the miraculous story of liberation and survival. And we join with them on Seder night – telling the story of their telling the story – passing on to the next generation this story about storytelling, and the vital role of storytelling in the survival of the people.
It is a night when thankfulness is possible – and when other questions emerge. What is this survival for? Is it survival for its own sake - are we like the Armenians, or the Aborigines, with a collective identity and history and set of cultural traditions? - or does Jewish survival have a further purpose? The story we tell suggests that the answer, perhaps disquietingly, is yes: survival in and of itself is fine, we can appreciate what it means, but it is not the end of the story.
The story of our liberation from past oppression points towards a task, a responsibility. We know what this is. On this night we remember that we have a destiny as well as a history. Slavery and oppression are always with us – whether it is women and children sold into degradation and bondage or Palestinians oppressed by policies that humiliate and dehumanise, we live in a benighted world where the work of liberation is as urgent as ever.
May this Pesach help us recover our awareness that we belong to a people whose story only has meaning if it leads to action, to renewed commitment to others who still await their own liberation.
Something about this festival of Pesach - Passover – has lodged itself in the Jewish psyche. Deeper than questions of religious belief or unbelief – did the exodus from Egypt really happen as the Bible says it did? does a God who is concerned with the fate of a group of immigrant slaves really exist? does any kind of divine force exist or is it all legend and superstition and infantile yearning? – deeper than these doubts and questions something else stirs up at this season. Family memories begin to arise from the hidden recesses of our consciousness.
Memories of grandfathers chanting the prayers in an alien tongue, white tablecloths and dishes brought out only for this night, the bitter-sweet taste of haroset, arguments round the table, benign bedlam, everybody with a different Haggadah, the over-excitedness of tired children, the gaps at the table of relatives no longer here, the displaced seders during the War, the silence about the Shoah in the post-War seders, celebrating the seder communally on Kibbutz at long tables with hundreds of others, the search for the afikoman, the rewards and treats and shushing, the waiting for the songs, the disputes over the tunes, opening the door for Elijah and the cat walks in, or a relative home from distant parts. Memories - sentimental or enraging, tear-laden or embittered – wrap themselves round the seder night.
This is the night when we tell our story, our history, our great mythic narrative of liberation from slavery – and this is the night when, in the midst of telling a collective story, our own personal link in the chain comes alive, as we recall seders gone by. Seder night is when Judaism comes home, literally.
At no other time of the year does Jewish tradition so take over our personal lives, as individuals and families. The New Year and Yom Kippur do have their home dimensions (as of course does Shabbat) but the High Holy Days are largely celebrated (if that's the word) in the synagogue – if they are marked at all: primarily inner and reflective, they are easy to avoid, to dip into, or opt out of altogether. But Pesach seems to resonate in a different way - partly because for those of us born Jewish it is part of our earliest layers of memory in a way that Rosh Hashanah and the Day of Atonement are probably not.
If this is so, it is a small victory for the tradition – because so much of the seder ceremony and Haggadah narration focuses on the need to instruct the next generation, to tell it to the children, to induct the younger generation into the collective mythic history of the tribe. The seder is in effect a psychodrama : you eat the symbolic foods which link you to the ancient tales, you drink the ritual four cups of wine, you keep hearing the motif of four (the Four Questions, the Four Sons/Children, the Four Cups) – as if even ordinary numbers have a deeper meaning, a deeper link to history and tradition – there is communal singing of songs that might not make much sense but cause laughter in the adults...It all adds up to an evening that enacts a group mystery into which the children are to be inducted, whether they want it or not, whether they understand it or not.
The story contained in the Haggadah tells of the survival of a tribe, a people – the ‘miraculous’ survival of a people, through the generations, through history, a people who chose to gather each year to tell of their miraculous survival as a people. The Haggadah tells of a group of rabbis in Bnei Brack – five of them, so before the number symbolism was developed! - gathering in secret to tell the story two millennia ago. So far away in time - and yet already the need to tell the story, the miraculous story of liberation and survival. And we join with them on Seder night – telling the story of their telling the story – passing on to the next generation this story about storytelling, and the vital role of storytelling in the survival of the people.
It is a night when thankfulness is possible – and when other questions emerge. What is this survival for? Is it survival for its own sake - are we like the Armenians, or the Aborigines, with a collective identity and history and set of cultural traditions? - or does Jewish survival have a further purpose? The story we tell suggests that the answer, perhaps disquietingly, is yes: survival in and of itself is fine, we can appreciate what it means, but it is not the end of the story.
The story of our liberation from past oppression points towards a task, a responsibility. We know what this is. On this night we remember that we have a destiny as well as a history. Slavery and oppression are always with us – whether it is women and children sold into degradation and bondage or Palestinians oppressed by policies that humiliate and dehumanise, we live in a benighted world where the work of liberation is as urgent as ever.
May this Pesach help us recover our awareness that we belong to a people whose story only has meaning if it leads to action, to renewed commitment to others who still await their own liberation.
Wednesday, 10 March 2010
‘Colourless green ideas...’
Some fifty years or so ago the linguist Noam Chomsky famously conjured up a way of illustrating how language can be constructed into grammatically correct sentences – and yet be quite meaningless. ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ was the example he dreamed up. This is both funny and clever – and once you get the hang of it you could probably come up with your own examples.
I think often of this sentence. I think of it particularly when I listen to people speaking in public: politicians, economists, psychologists, religious leaders – anyone who puts themselves forward claiming to be able to tell us a truth, the truth, about how the world works, how human beings work, how God works, how high finance works...note how often someone is introduced as an ‘expert’ when real expertise may consist in knowing how little we know, how little we understand, how little sense there is in the unfolding and uncontrollable outpouring of life within which we are swept along like fallen leaves within a flooding stream.
There will be three 90-minute live televised debates in the next few months in the UK, featuring the three main political leaders who will be contesting the forthcoming General Election. I don’t know if I will be giving my attention to all - or any - of that torrent of words that will cascade over us. But I can tell you now that the one sentence you are most unlikely to hear within those debates is the simple and honest sentence ‘I don’t know’. Although most of us know that they don’t know – and they know we know they don’t know - they are not allowed to admit this. It would be (so we are told) political suicide.
Of course we can recognise in ourselves the deep wish for our self-styled ‘experts’ to ‘know’: it can make us feel secure that someone, somewhere , is in charge, that decisions taken in the political and economic realms will produce well-being and a sense of order, a sense that life is controllable, that randomness and chaos are not the forces that rule our unruly lives. This same regressed wish is part of what attracts people to certain dogmatic forms of religious belief – it can be comforting to believe that Someone is In Charge of the cosmos, and cares about us within it. Often no evidence to the contrary will shift this belief, so deeply embedded within us is the need to feel part of an ordered universe, one that does make ultimate sense – even if that sense is hidden from view.
I know from my own experience how easy it is – how seductive, and self-seducing it is – to construct sentences that seem to offer a glimpse of what is abidingly true. One can fall in love with one’s own rhetoric. And maybe there is no harm in such a love affair – as long as one holds in mind that it is but an arbitrary and subjective arrangement of words, spoken or written. A speech, a sermon, an article, a review – whatever the genre that my words take – I try to bear in mind that one’s artfully constructed philosophy or theology or psychology, however elegant, however becoming (and maybe particularly when it is elegant and becoming) is, in essence, a fiction, an artifice. Remembering this about myself helps me remember it when I listen to, or read, others. Call it benign distrust.
There is something quintessentially odd about language. It is our glory as a species – think of all the 5,000 and more languages we have concocted for ourselves over time. And at the same time – in a world in which if you could squeeze all the space out of atoms, the whole of the human race would fit into a sugar cube (see Marcus Chown’s Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You) – there is, alongside the glory of it all, the absurdity and indecipherability of it all.
‘If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction’ (Twelfth Night).
Our experts – be they political, economic or religious – make it up as they go along. Filled with passionate intensity they offer us their fictions as true beliefs, true descriptions of how the world operates. It may though be better for us – better for our well-being, our mental health – to turn to those who at least acknowledge that they are crafting fictions and who aren’t fooled into thinking (or fool us into thinking) that they are offering their audience anything but subjective narratives born out of the human imagination. As the Nobel prize winning novelist Orhan Pamuk put it in a recent essay:
It is by reading novels, stories, myths that we come to understand the ideas that govern the world in which we live; it is fiction that gives us access to truths kept veiled by our families, our schools, and our society; it is the art of the novel that allows us to ask who we really are’ (from ‘Other Colors: Essays and a Story’, 2007).
Note that key verb ‘ask’. For Pamuk, asking ‘who we really are’ - not answering the question - is what the artist does. Because answers have a deadening tendency – so often they shut things down – what we need (pace our political leaders) are stories that help us ask questions. Good questions can open us up to, maybe take us closer to, the heart of the mystery of being human. And that mystery may, in the end, defy language itself. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it: ‘Things aren’t so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered.’
Or as Samuel Beckett expresses it, with the poignancy of a secular mystic struggling towards the construction of what he called a ‘literature of the non-word’: ‘More and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it...’
Of course in that great mythic narrative we call the Kabbalah, ‘nothingness’ (Ayin) is the innermost ‘name’ of the divine. The rabbis of old knew both the power of language – and its limitations.
I think often of this sentence. I think of it particularly when I listen to people speaking in public: politicians, economists, psychologists, religious leaders – anyone who puts themselves forward claiming to be able to tell us a truth, the truth, about how the world works, how human beings work, how God works, how high finance works...note how often someone is introduced as an ‘expert’ when real expertise may consist in knowing how little we know, how little we understand, how little sense there is in the unfolding and uncontrollable outpouring of life within which we are swept along like fallen leaves within a flooding stream.
There will be three 90-minute live televised debates in the next few months in the UK, featuring the three main political leaders who will be contesting the forthcoming General Election. I don’t know if I will be giving my attention to all - or any - of that torrent of words that will cascade over us. But I can tell you now that the one sentence you are most unlikely to hear within those debates is the simple and honest sentence ‘I don’t know’. Although most of us know that they don’t know – and they know we know they don’t know - they are not allowed to admit this. It would be (so we are told) political suicide.
Of course we can recognise in ourselves the deep wish for our self-styled ‘experts’ to ‘know’: it can make us feel secure that someone, somewhere , is in charge, that decisions taken in the political and economic realms will produce well-being and a sense of order, a sense that life is controllable, that randomness and chaos are not the forces that rule our unruly lives. This same regressed wish is part of what attracts people to certain dogmatic forms of religious belief – it can be comforting to believe that Someone is In Charge of the cosmos, and cares about us within it. Often no evidence to the contrary will shift this belief, so deeply embedded within us is the need to feel part of an ordered universe, one that does make ultimate sense – even if that sense is hidden from view.
I know from my own experience how easy it is – how seductive, and self-seducing it is – to construct sentences that seem to offer a glimpse of what is abidingly true. One can fall in love with one’s own rhetoric. And maybe there is no harm in such a love affair – as long as one holds in mind that it is but an arbitrary and subjective arrangement of words, spoken or written. A speech, a sermon, an article, a review – whatever the genre that my words take – I try to bear in mind that one’s artfully constructed philosophy or theology or psychology, however elegant, however becoming (and maybe particularly when it is elegant and becoming) is, in essence, a fiction, an artifice. Remembering this about myself helps me remember it when I listen to, or read, others. Call it benign distrust.
There is something quintessentially odd about language. It is our glory as a species – think of all the 5,000 and more languages we have concocted for ourselves over time. And at the same time – in a world in which if you could squeeze all the space out of atoms, the whole of the human race would fit into a sugar cube (see Marcus Chown’s Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You) – there is, alongside the glory of it all, the absurdity and indecipherability of it all.
‘If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction’ (Twelfth Night).
Our experts – be they political, economic or religious – make it up as they go along. Filled with passionate intensity they offer us their fictions as true beliefs, true descriptions of how the world operates. It may though be better for us – better for our well-being, our mental health – to turn to those who at least acknowledge that they are crafting fictions and who aren’t fooled into thinking (or fool us into thinking) that they are offering their audience anything but subjective narratives born out of the human imagination. As the Nobel prize winning novelist Orhan Pamuk put it in a recent essay:
It is by reading novels, stories, myths that we come to understand the ideas that govern the world in which we live; it is fiction that gives us access to truths kept veiled by our families, our schools, and our society; it is the art of the novel that allows us to ask who we really are’ (from ‘Other Colors: Essays and a Story’, 2007).
Note that key verb ‘ask’. For Pamuk, asking ‘who we really are’ - not answering the question - is what the artist does. Because answers have a deadening tendency – so often they shut things down – what we need (pace our political leaders) are stories that help us ask questions. Good questions can open us up to, maybe take us closer to, the heart of the mystery of being human. And that mystery may, in the end, defy language itself. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it: ‘Things aren’t so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered.’
Or as Samuel Beckett expresses it, with the poignancy of a secular mystic struggling towards the construction of what he called a ‘literature of the non-word’: ‘More and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it...’
Of course in that great mythic narrative we call the Kabbalah, ‘nothingness’ (Ayin) is the innermost ‘name’ of the divine. The rabbis of old knew both the power of language – and its limitations.
Sunday, 21 February 2010
'Assassinations Inc.'
‘The machine’s on? Make sure it’s on. Tov Me’od. Good, now it’s on. Now I’ll talk. I’ll tell you what you want to know...
‘It’s 20 years ago, more, but I remember everything: the planning, the operation, the hotel, the room, we went up to the fourth floor, we knew the layout, he was in the shower – have you ever killed a man? – no? - of course not, tipesh, stupid to ask. We always did your dirty work for you. Every country needs its operatives, those of us who do the things no government ever talks about – the removal of those in the way, quickly, efficiently – that’s the skill, the training. And we were the best, everyone knew it then, even you Brits admitted it, Mossad, we had the intelligence, the know-how – my God, we trained half the world: in surveillance techniques, infiltration, intercepts, how to use informers, how to leave no marks...
‘Do you know how to kill a man and make it look like he’s had a heart attack? It’s an art, like a surgeon’s – it needs precision, delicacy, the hood and the rope – we call it the ‘golem’, it’s our joke, how to snuff out life till the body becomes inert and all breathe is gone, Yossi and Hagai held his arms, he had no chance, he was naked from the shower, he struggled but they forced him down, and I slipped the hood over his head, like a tallit, like I’d seen my grandfather do, and you take the ends and you pull, and he thrashed around because he knew – what was his name? I forget, it’s a long time ago...What? al-Mabhouh? Are you sure? The one in Dubai? Well he wasn’t the first...
‘It doesn’t take long. We were in the room, what, ten minutes? Less. It’s like a dream. You imagine it all – in advance, you do the work so there are no surprises. Like you have seen it all in a film. There was a mirror on the wall, bronze frame, heavy, cracked, flecks of shaving foam smeared across, an empty bottle of mineral water on the table, papers, a passport. Two passports. I had his head cradled in my hands as he struggled for breathe, he was strong but we were stronger, and you grip like this, see?, and you put pressure here, and here, like this, can you see?, and there’s pleasure in knowing you are doing a good job – it’s professional pleasure, pride, sure, why not? – and in the back of your mind you know he has killed and will do it again, and then there’s the cause, that justifies all things, the sacred duty, Am Yisrael Chai, the people of Israel will live...
‘What you Brits never understood was that we were at war. You think ‘Never Again’ was just another slogan? They murdered us then, and they’d do it again. We knew that. We knew it in our kishkes. And nobody would care. They may even be glad. Killing Jews is what goyim do. No? You look shocked. But you don’t know your history, you youngsters. Jews are the bad conscience of the world – we gave them ideals, we dreamed up dreams of justice, of caring for the oppressed, of loving even those who didn’t love us. Impossible dreams. They go against the grain of human nature, human selfishness. But we insisted on those ideals, that killing was wrong, that coveting was wrong, that there’s a duty of compassion. Who can live like that? That’s why they hate us. Always have, always will. We said we were chosen - and expected them not to envy us? That we had a special destiny – and expected the goyim to kiss our feet? We expected too much – and now we have finally learnt our lesson: expect nothing, except contempt and more contempt...
‘You know what Sharon said about our chief, Meir Dagan? “Meir’s speciality is in separating the head of an Arab from his body.” He knew his job, inside out. And he taught us well. And we had a tradition to maintain, a reputation. Remember Munich? For years we tracked down the murderers of our children. A debt of honour. And if we made a few mistakes on the way, so what? Life is cheap. If you don’t die one day, you die the next. We learnt that in Auschwitz. So we hunted them down, across Europe. It took years, but we have long memories. And we did it well. And don’t think we are the only ones. Your country has its hit squads, and the Americans, the Russians, the Germans, they all do – and whether you kill by drones from the air, by poison at night, a bullet to the head, or a car bomb as your target sips his cappuccino in a sunlit cafe, assassinations happen as they must. The law of revenge. The law of retribution. The law of elimination. We all have enemies. And Israel has more than most...
‘And don’t tell me you didn’t feel a twinge of pride as we went about our business. Don’t tell me you just held up your hands in horror at what we did with such intelligence and efficiency. Such prowess – like David against the Philistines. Outnumbered but devastating. You admired us, secretly, didn’t you? - our ruthlessness, our determination, our ingenuity, our refusal to be intimidated by our enemies. Your mouths said it was wrong, but in the hidden crevices of your soul you cheered us on...
‘Yes, enemies come and enemies go. Now we’re friends with Iran - you now the story, how we engineered regime change there, after we got the green light to bomb their nuclear facilities - but then, back in ’10 or whenever it was, they were supplying arms and rockets to Hezbollah and Hamas, and the guy we took out, al-Mabhouh, he was in the middle of it all, so it’s a long game we’ve been playing and we don’t play by the rules – there are no rules, rules are for losers, and you Jews who sit on the side and profess your shock, your moral qualms, you’re hypocrites, you’re worse than them, the goyim who hate us...
‘Remember our old motto? “Through deception we make war”. You liberals always think peace will come through compromise. Yes, we talk to Hamas now, we’ve done it for years, we always knew we would – some of our best agents are in Hamas – but what has it brought us? It’s bought us time, that’s all. But that’s enough. Peace is a dream for the innocent. And we are not innocent. No more Jewish innocence...Are we out of time? Is the machine still on? Good. They are coming soon to take me back... They’ve let me talk to you – it’s rare, I’m kept here against my will, you know. The nurses hate me, you know? - they give me medication but I don’t take it, it’s easy to hide the pills, the blue ones, the white ones, it’s all in a day’s work for someone like me, they forget who I was, who I worked for, how we learnt to deceive. A way of life. Deception...
'What? Self-deception? No, no. It’s reality. Enemies. They’re real. Aren’t they? There are others here who are paranoid. I keep away from them...Thank you for listening. Time’s up. Better keep quiet now. Switch off the machine. You never know who is listening. Thank you for listening. Thank you.’
‘It’s 20 years ago, more, but I remember everything: the planning, the operation, the hotel, the room, we went up to the fourth floor, we knew the layout, he was in the shower – have you ever killed a man? – no? - of course not, tipesh, stupid to ask. We always did your dirty work for you. Every country needs its operatives, those of us who do the things no government ever talks about – the removal of those in the way, quickly, efficiently – that’s the skill, the training. And we were the best, everyone knew it then, even you Brits admitted it, Mossad, we had the intelligence, the know-how – my God, we trained half the world: in surveillance techniques, infiltration, intercepts, how to use informers, how to leave no marks...
‘Do you know how to kill a man and make it look like he’s had a heart attack? It’s an art, like a surgeon’s – it needs precision, delicacy, the hood and the rope – we call it the ‘golem’, it’s our joke, how to snuff out life till the body becomes inert and all breathe is gone, Yossi and Hagai held his arms, he had no chance, he was naked from the shower, he struggled but they forced him down, and I slipped the hood over his head, like a tallit, like I’d seen my grandfather do, and you take the ends and you pull, and he thrashed around because he knew – what was his name? I forget, it’s a long time ago...What? al-Mabhouh? Are you sure? The one in Dubai? Well he wasn’t the first...
‘It doesn’t take long. We were in the room, what, ten minutes? Less. It’s like a dream. You imagine it all – in advance, you do the work so there are no surprises. Like you have seen it all in a film. There was a mirror on the wall, bronze frame, heavy, cracked, flecks of shaving foam smeared across, an empty bottle of mineral water on the table, papers, a passport. Two passports. I had his head cradled in my hands as he struggled for breathe, he was strong but we were stronger, and you grip like this, see?, and you put pressure here, and here, like this, can you see?, and there’s pleasure in knowing you are doing a good job – it’s professional pleasure, pride, sure, why not? – and in the back of your mind you know he has killed and will do it again, and then there’s the cause, that justifies all things, the sacred duty, Am Yisrael Chai, the people of Israel will live...
‘What you Brits never understood was that we were at war. You think ‘Never Again’ was just another slogan? They murdered us then, and they’d do it again. We knew that. We knew it in our kishkes. And nobody would care. They may even be glad. Killing Jews is what goyim do. No? You look shocked. But you don’t know your history, you youngsters. Jews are the bad conscience of the world – we gave them ideals, we dreamed up dreams of justice, of caring for the oppressed, of loving even those who didn’t love us. Impossible dreams. They go against the grain of human nature, human selfishness. But we insisted on those ideals, that killing was wrong, that coveting was wrong, that there’s a duty of compassion. Who can live like that? That’s why they hate us. Always have, always will. We said we were chosen - and expected them not to envy us? That we had a special destiny – and expected the goyim to kiss our feet? We expected too much – and now we have finally learnt our lesson: expect nothing, except contempt and more contempt...
‘You know what Sharon said about our chief, Meir Dagan? “Meir’s speciality is in separating the head of an Arab from his body.” He knew his job, inside out. And he taught us well. And we had a tradition to maintain, a reputation. Remember Munich? For years we tracked down the murderers of our children. A debt of honour. And if we made a few mistakes on the way, so what? Life is cheap. If you don’t die one day, you die the next. We learnt that in Auschwitz. So we hunted them down, across Europe. It took years, but we have long memories. And we did it well. And don’t think we are the only ones. Your country has its hit squads, and the Americans, the Russians, the Germans, they all do – and whether you kill by drones from the air, by poison at night, a bullet to the head, or a car bomb as your target sips his cappuccino in a sunlit cafe, assassinations happen as they must. The law of revenge. The law of retribution. The law of elimination. We all have enemies. And Israel has more than most...
‘And don’t tell me you didn’t feel a twinge of pride as we went about our business. Don’t tell me you just held up your hands in horror at what we did with such intelligence and efficiency. Such prowess – like David against the Philistines. Outnumbered but devastating. You admired us, secretly, didn’t you? - our ruthlessness, our determination, our ingenuity, our refusal to be intimidated by our enemies. Your mouths said it was wrong, but in the hidden crevices of your soul you cheered us on...
‘Yes, enemies come and enemies go. Now we’re friends with Iran - you now the story, how we engineered regime change there, after we got the green light to bomb their nuclear facilities - but then, back in ’10 or whenever it was, they were supplying arms and rockets to Hezbollah and Hamas, and the guy we took out, al-Mabhouh, he was in the middle of it all, so it’s a long game we’ve been playing and we don’t play by the rules – there are no rules, rules are for losers, and you Jews who sit on the side and profess your shock, your moral qualms, you’re hypocrites, you’re worse than them, the goyim who hate us...
‘Remember our old motto? “Through deception we make war”. You liberals always think peace will come through compromise. Yes, we talk to Hamas now, we’ve done it for years, we always knew we would – some of our best agents are in Hamas – but what has it brought us? It’s bought us time, that’s all. But that’s enough. Peace is a dream for the innocent. And we are not innocent. No more Jewish innocence...Are we out of time? Is the machine still on? Good. They are coming soon to take me back... They’ve let me talk to you – it’s rare, I’m kept here against my will, you know. The nurses hate me, you know? - they give me medication but I don’t take it, it’s easy to hide the pills, the blue ones, the white ones, it’s all in a day’s work for someone like me, they forget who I was, who I worked for, how we learnt to deceive. A way of life. Deception...
'What? Self-deception? No, no. It’s reality. Enemies. They’re real. Aren’t they? There are others here who are paranoid. I keep away from them...Thank you for listening. Time’s up. Better keep quiet now. Switch off the machine. You never know who is listening. Thank you for listening. Thank you.’
Thursday, 11 February 2010
First anniversary: Listening to what’s there...
This blog is now a year old. A baby blog, crawling its way - I find I’ve just written ‘scrawling’ - into homes near and far. I hope the scrawling - ‘to write awkwardly, hastily or carelessly’ my dictionary says, so some truth there from my unconscious - has nevertheless been enlivening for you who read it.
I’m told these postings go on too long, sometimes: we are not used to reading at length on the screen. I can only empathise, and apologise. Thought is discursive – my thought is discursive – it seems not to like straight lines with neat building blocks of well-honed ideas that assemble themselves into definitive statements. I can write like that, if need be. But I prefer the organic, associative, free-floating form of narrative, that unfolds idiosyncratically and ‘By indirections find directions out’ (Hamlet, act2, scene1). Expansiveness of narrative discourse as a metaphor for the rich inner world – ever-expanding, bifurcating, alive to the impulses of the moment – that each one of us contains.
From Obama to Samuel Beckett, from Israel to Haiti by way of Berlin and Prague, the blog has led a peripatetic life these last 12 months, wandering from sermons to poetry to politics via films and plays, anti-semitism and climate change – and looking back I see no unifying theme or abiding preoccupation. No more than a wish to let you eavesdrop into one man’s confusion about how to make sense of life when there is a superabundance of stimuli straining to make themselves heard within the din of daily living.
I hope you keep posting your Comments where there is space at the bottom of each blog. Other views lend vitality to the enterprise. Emails too are welcome. We are, or have become, a kind of ‘virtual’ community – by courtesy of Google, and by virtue of your shared interest in (or passing curiosity about) my stumbling attempts at crafting sentences which try to offer a personal perspective on stuff that comes into my line of vision.
And in that attempt to generate meaning from amidst chaos and randomness, there has been (from time to time) the wish to bring in a Jewish angle of vision. I see the Judaic tradition as containing certain resources that offer another point of view, another perspective on events in the present. ‘Unless one has the past in the present, one can’t understand oneself’ the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris has said. That resonates for me: I think that’s true individually and collectively.
And I feel fortunate in having access to a way of seeing that is rooted in that ancient mode of knowing that suggests we are held within a form of being, a form of life, that unfolds moment by moment within us and around us, an immanent ‘presence’ (for want of a better word) that both sustains us and cajoles us towards ways of being human in which our creativity, our compassion, our sense of justice and mercy can outweigh our destructiveness.
In the language of the tradition, this is the realm of the ‘divine’, of ‘God’ – the force that generates all that is and sustains it in being, that is being. Jewish tradition personifies this as a Being. As if ‘being’ is a personality, a character in a cosmic drama being played out here on earth. But once we start to think of it in this way – the numinosity of being as, in essence, a personality - we are falling away from the tradition’s own revelatory understanding of ehyeh asher ehyeh – the words that the storytellers in the book of Exodus put into the mouth of the character they call Adonai. This ‘God’ character says that ‘His’ name is ehyeh asher ehyeh : ‘I will be what I will be’. So if you have to have a name for the unnameable fluidity of being and becoming in which we are all bound up – and Moses is portrayed as saying, astutely, ‘Look, the people need a name, they think concretely not abstractly!’ – then ‘I am what I am and I will be what I will be’ is as good a ‘name’ as you are ever likely to get.
The prophets of Israel tried to articulate their hopes for the people from this perspective: a vision of how people should treat each other, grounded in the seemingly impossible-to-enact hope that one’s care for others should become as important to you as one’s care for oneself. It is not out of arrogance that one places oneself in that line of tradition. For me, it feels that developing this perspective on life is almost an existential necessity, a grounding in something more substantial than my own passing whimsy or the latest modish intellectual fad or theory. It may mean a life of constant failure – but at least it has the consolation of being a failure rooted in a vision that matters, that offers a stay of execution from nihilism and meaninglessness.
The Hebrew Bible is (for me) a unique repository of fragments of wisdom, often contradictory, often baffling, often disagreeable, but still texts filled with insights into the nature of being human – and ways of telling the story of being human, with all its vicissitudes – that I value above all other texts. It allows me to listen in to contemporary events with ears attuned to eternity (as Abraham Joshua Heschel might express it).
And it allows me to read the most supposedly ‘secular’ of modern texts – poetry, prose, sociology, psychology, anthropology, scientific literature – and trace connections between the angles of vision of the Jewish tradition and the angles of vision of the present. One can read Samuel Beckett - ‘Fail. Fail Again. Fail Better’ - with eyes thousands of years old. Moses was not allowed to finish his task. His was an education in failure: leading a ‘stiff-necked’ and constantly complaining people on a journey into the unknown. The promised land is always over the horizon – utopia is endlessly deferred - and life has to be experienced and lived now, attuned to the present moment. And the Judaic task came to be understood as listening to the present moment with ears attuned to eternity.
This last Shabbat I spoke in my community about a verse from Exodus we’d just read:
‘Now! If you listen very carefully, really listen, attend to My voice (V’ata, im shamo’a tish’m’u b’koli ) and keep my covenant, then you will be a treasured possession to Me... and a kingdom of priests and a holy people’ (Exodus 19:5-6). Jewish distinctiveness, purpose, destiny - it all depends upon learning to pay attention to the Divine Voice. (The Hebrew uses the verb shema, in a doubled, intensified form). That kind of listening is, as they say, a big ask. First inwardness – then action. First reflection, mindfulness – then outer behaviour. First attentiveness - then the covenant of practice and the commitment to holy living.
And to do this knowing that no promised lands are achievable. But the journey - ah, the journey, that ‘fortunately, is a truly immense journey’ (Kafka) - that’s where our all our consolations and satisfactions are to be found, and where our innate rebelliousness is played out: the journey in the wilderness, and the stories we tell about it. Or the journey in Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’:
They spent the day there, sitting among boxes and crates. You have to talk to me he said.
I’m talking.
Are you sure?
I’m talking now.
Do you want me to tell you a story?
No.
Why not?
The boy looked at him and looked away.
Why not?
Those stories are not true.
They don’t have to be true. They’re stories.
I’m told these postings go on too long, sometimes: we are not used to reading at length on the screen. I can only empathise, and apologise. Thought is discursive – my thought is discursive – it seems not to like straight lines with neat building blocks of well-honed ideas that assemble themselves into definitive statements. I can write like that, if need be. But I prefer the organic, associative, free-floating form of narrative, that unfolds idiosyncratically and ‘By indirections find directions out’ (Hamlet, act2, scene1). Expansiveness of narrative discourse as a metaphor for the rich inner world – ever-expanding, bifurcating, alive to the impulses of the moment – that each one of us contains.
From Obama to Samuel Beckett, from Israel to Haiti by way of Berlin and Prague, the blog has led a peripatetic life these last 12 months, wandering from sermons to poetry to politics via films and plays, anti-semitism and climate change – and looking back I see no unifying theme or abiding preoccupation. No more than a wish to let you eavesdrop into one man’s confusion about how to make sense of life when there is a superabundance of stimuli straining to make themselves heard within the din of daily living.
I hope you keep posting your Comments where there is space at the bottom of each blog. Other views lend vitality to the enterprise. Emails too are welcome. We are, or have become, a kind of ‘virtual’ community – by courtesy of Google, and by virtue of your shared interest in (or passing curiosity about) my stumbling attempts at crafting sentences which try to offer a personal perspective on stuff that comes into my line of vision.
And in that attempt to generate meaning from amidst chaos and randomness, there has been (from time to time) the wish to bring in a Jewish angle of vision. I see the Judaic tradition as containing certain resources that offer another point of view, another perspective on events in the present. ‘Unless one has the past in the present, one can’t understand oneself’ the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris has said. That resonates for me: I think that’s true individually and collectively.
And I feel fortunate in having access to a way of seeing that is rooted in that ancient mode of knowing that suggests we are held within a form of being, a form of life, that unfolds moment by moment within us and around us, an immanent ‘presence’ (for want of a better word) that both sustains us and cajoles us towards ways of being human in which our creativity, our compassion, our sense of justice and mercy can outweigh our destructiveness.
In the language of the tradition, this is the realm of the ‘divine’, of ‘God’ – the force that generates all that is and sustains it in being, that is being. Jewish tradition personifies this as a Being. As if ‘being’ is a personality, a character in a cosmic drama being played out here on earth. But once we start to think of it in this way – the numinosity of being as, in essence, a personality - we are falling away from the tradition’s own revelatory understanding of ehyeh asher ehyeh – the words that the storytellers in the book of Exodus put into the mouth of the character they call Adonai. This ‘God’ character says that ‘His’ name is ehyeh asher ehyeh : ‘I will be what I will be’. So if you have to have a name for the unnameable fluidity of being and becoming in which we are all bound up – and Moses is portrayed as saying, astutely, ‘Look, the people need a name, they think concretely not abstractly!’ – then ‘I am what I am and I will be what I will be’ is as good a ‘name’ as you are ever likely to get.
The prophets of Israel tried to articulate their hopes for the people from this perspective: a vision of how people should treat each other, grounded in the seemingly impossible-to-enact hope that one’s care for others should become as important to you as one’s care for oneself. It is not out of arrogance that one places oneself in that line of tradition. For me, it feels that developing this perspective on life is almost an existential necessity, a grounding in something more substantial than my own passing whimsy or the latest modish intellectual fad or theory. It may mean a life of constant failure – but at least it has the consolation of being a failure rooted in a vision that matters, that offers a stay of execution from nihilism and meaninglessness.
The Hebrew Bible is (for me) a unique repository of fragments of wisdom, often contradictory, often baffling, often disagreeable, but still texts filled with insights into the nature of being human – and ways of telling the story of being human, with all its vicissitudes – that I value above all other texts. It allows me to listen in to contemporary events with ears attuned to eternity (as Abraham Joshua Heschel might express it).
And it allows me to read the most supposedly ‘secular’ of modern texts – poetry, prose, sociology, psychology, anthropology, scientific literature – and trace connections between the angles of vision of the Jewish tradition and the angles of vision of the present. One can read Samuel Beckett - ‘Fail. Fail Again. Fail Better’ - with eyes thousands of years old. Moses was not allowed to finish his task. His was an education in failure: leading a ‘stiff-necked’ and constantly complaining people on a journey into the unknown. The promised land is always over the horizon – utopia is endlessly deferred - and life has to be experienced and lived now, attuned to the present moment. And the Judaic task came to be understood as listening to the present moment with ears attuned to eternity.
This last Shabbat I spoke in my community about a verse from Exodus we’d just read:
‘Now! If you listen very carefully, really listen, attend to My voice (V’ata, im shamo’a tish’m’u b’koli ) and keep my covenant, then you will be a treasured possession to Me... and a kingdom of priests and a holy people’ (Exodus 19:5-6). Jewish distinctiveness, purpose, destiny - it all depends upon learning to pay attention to the Divine Voice. (The Hebrew uses the verb shema, in a doubled, intensified form). That kind of listening is, as they say, a big ask. First inwardness – then action. First reflection, mindfulness – then outer behaviour. First attentiveness - then the covenant of practice and the commitment to holy living.
And to do this knowing that no promised lands are achievable. But the journey - ah, the journey, that ‘fortunately, is a truly immense journey’ (Kafka) - that’s where our all our consolations and satisfactions are to be found, and where our innate rebelliousness is played out: the journey in the wilderness, and the stories we tell about it. Or the journey in Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’:
They spent the day there, sitting among boxes and crates. You have to talk to me he said.
I’m talking.
Are you sure?
I’m talking now.
Do you want me to tell you a story?
No.
Why not?
The boy looked at him and looked away.
Why not?
Those stories are not true.
They don’t have to be true. They’re stories.
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
Haiti and Hypocrisy
Could you have located Haiti on a map two weeks ago? No, neither could I. I knew where it was vaguely, but had no knowledge of it other than it being one of those desperately poor nations of which our world has an abundance: one of those places that comes to mind occasionally when I say or sing that familiar repeated line in the Jewish liturgy: Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom... – ‘May the One who makes peace/wholeness on high bring this peace/wholeness to us, to all of the community of Israel...’ – Then we sometimes add - in a spirit of all-embracing tolerance, optimism and naive hopefulness that allows us to feel good about ourselves as having a universalist dimension to our faith rather than a narrow ethnic particularism – ‘and to the whole world.’
Well there is no peace in Haiti. No wholeness. And no prayers of ours that can help (can they ever?). Of course the notion that these kind of natural events – like earthquakes and tsunamis - are so-called ‘acts of God’ is an absurd left-over from a pre-modern form of fear-based religious thinking. That ‘God’ is some kind of capricious external entity whose ‘hand’ intervenes wilfully in our history and in our natural world – like a child who builds a palace of toy bricks then sweeps them away with a tearful swipe of its angry hand – this image of ‘God’ is the one that Richard Dawkins so relentlessly and humourlessly dismisses. And in that respect I am with Dawkins – though I find that a sprinkling of humour as one demolishes the worn-out pieties of old usually does no harm. You can be an assassin with a smile on your face.
A smile not of mockery, or glee, but of camaraderie: ‘We are in this together – these questions of faith and doubt – let’s not pretend we believe when we don’t, let’s abandon worn-out thinking and what we are told we should believe, let’s grow up and explore these questions in a spirit of lightness of being, not heaviness of heart, let’s enjoy the adventure, the venturing into new ways of thinking, new ways of connecting to faith, new ways of exploring the profoundest questions about what we are doing here in the world, how it all hangs together, if it all hangs together in some way always beyond our comprehension: maybe there are ways we can glimpse the underlying mystery, maybe not – but it is the journey that counts, the journey wrestling with faith and doubt in a spirit of intoxicated gravity, good-humoured seriousness, where it matters infinitely, and it matters not a jot...’
So: no 'act of God' then. But a combination of how this planet is made – geology, and how it operates, neutrally, impersonally – and what we make in the human realm: economically, politically, socially. For what I have discovered in these last two weeks, between the tears at the torn-off limbs and my naive astonishment at the lack of basic resources – how could it be that Haiti had a grand total of just two fire stations in the whole island? – is that the island contains a people so poor (living on $2 a day on average), so lacking in leadership and basic infrastructure and material resources, that when a catastrophe like this occurs the society simply ceases to function - but that it needn’t have been like this.
I’ve learnt about – I’ve finally understood the context of – the decades of dictatorship (remember the Duvaliers, sponsored by the US?), the foreign-backed coups and American invasions to undermine leaders like the former Catholic priest Jean-Baptiste Aristide who, inspired by liberation theology, tried to bring in social justice and economic development that wasn’t beholden to the International Monetary Fund’s own dictatorial neo-liberalism.
I’ve learnt that in 1980 Haiti was self-sufficient in its staple crop, rice, but once America dumped its surplus on the island the rice-farmers had to move from the countryside to the flimsy slums of Port-au-Prince (we know, tragically, what that means for them now) and that in the last decade Haiti has been forced to import rice to feed itself.
It is surely a human outrage - a human-constructed tragedy of a different dimension – when we realise what has gone on over these last decades. As we send our money to help now - as we appreciate that whatever the history of the island, targeted donations are still vital - we can nevertheless still feel the outrage : that it need not have been as devastating as this, the earthquake. How many deaths there have been we will never know. How many deaths there would have been if different principles of economics and governance had been in place we will never know. But it would have been far less: in last year’s hurricane Haiti lost 800 people while neighbouring Cuba lost four. (Haiti’s infant mortality rate is around 80 per 1,000; Cuba’s is 5.8 – makes you think, doesn’t it?).
Anyway it makes me think that when one hears the old question ‘How could God allow such a tragedy?’ that the questioner is looking in the wrong place, and that the question itself is a symptom of a profound avoidance. Questioning ‘God’ is a child-like mistake. It is a category error. But questioning the greed and destructiveness immured in the human heart, questioning the way the human mind constructs abstract and inhuman theories of what is ‘best’ for other people, questioning the ways certain versions of the capitalist ethic can be destructive of human well-being, questioning our multiple collusions with the structures of Western geopolitics where they are false to the values of justice and compassion – this is where the questioning needs to be.
Compassion after the tragic event is all very well, but it's the easy option, sad to say. The response is wonderful, this generosity of the human heart - and yet, secretly, we know that the hypocrisy stinks to the heavens. We are our own worst enemies.
Well there is no peace in Haiti. No wholeness. And no prayers of ours that can help (can they ever?). Of course the notion that these kind of natural events – like earthquakes and tsunamis - are so-called ‘acts of God’ is an absurd left-over from a pre-modern form of fear-based religious thinking. That ‘God’ is some kind of capricious external entity whose ‘hand’ intervenes wilfully in our history and in our natural world – like a child who builds a palace of toy bricks then sweeps them away with a tearful swipe of its angry hand – this image of ‘God’ is the one that Richard Dawkins so relentlessly and humourlessly dismisses. And in that respect I am with Dawkins – though I find that a sprinkling of humour as one demolishes the worn-out pieties of old usually does no harm. You can be an assassin with a smile on your face.
A smile not of mockery, or glee, but of camaraderie: ‘We are in this together – these questions of faith and doubt – let’s not pretend we believe when we don’t, let’s abandon worn-out thinking and what we are told we should believe, let’s grow up and explore these questions in a spirit of lightness of being, not heaviness of heart, let’s enjoy the adventure, the venturing into new ways of thinking, new ways of connecting to faith, new ways of exploring the profoundest questions about what we are doing here in the world, how it all hangs together, if it all hangs together in some way always beyond our comprehension: maybe there are ways we can glimpse the underlying mystery, maybe not – but it is the journey that counts, the journey wrestling with faith and doubt in a spirit of intoxicated gravity, good-humoured seriousness, where it matters infinitely, and it matters not a jot...’
So: no 'act of God' then. But a combination of how this planet is made – geology, and how it operates, neutrally, impersonally – and what we make in the human realm: economically, politically, socially. For what I have discovered in these last two weeks, between the tears at the torn-off limbs and my naive astonishment at the lack of basic resources – how could it be that Haiti had a grand total of just two fire stations in the whole island? – is that the island contains a people so poor (living on $2 a day on average), so lacking in leadership and basic infrastructure and material resources, that when a catastrophe like this occurs the society simply ceases to function - but that it needn’t have been like this.
I’ve learnt about – I’ve finally understood the context of – the decades of dictatorship (remember the Duvaliers, sponsored by the US?), the foreign-backed coups and American invasions to undermine leaders like the former Catholic priest Jean-Baptiste Aristide who, inspired by liberation theology, tried to bring in social justice and economic development that wasn’t beholden to the International Monetary Fund’s own dictatorial neo-liberalism.
I’ve learnt that in 1980 Haiti was self-sufficient in its staple crop, rice, but once America dumped its surplus on the island the rice-farmers had to move from the countryside to the flimsy slums of Port-au-Prince (we know, tragically, what that means for them now) and that in the last decade Haiti has been forced to import rice to feed itself.
It is surely a human outrage - a human-constructed tragedy of a different dimension – when we realise what has gone on over these last decades. As we send our money to help now - as we appreciate that whatever the history of the island, targeted donations are still vital - we can nevertheless still feel the outrage : that it need not have been as devastating as this, the earthquake. How many deaths there have been we will never know. How many deaths there would have been if different principles of economics and governance had been in place we will never know. But it would have been far less: in last year’s hurricane Haiti lost 800 people while neighbouring Cuba lost four. (Haiti’s infant mortality rate is around 80 per 1,000; Cuba’s is 5.8 – makes you think, doesn’t it?).
Anyway it makes me think that when one hears the old question ‘How could God allow such a tragedy?’ that the questioner is looking in the wrong place, and that the question itself is a symptom of a profound avoidance. Questioning ‘God’ is a child-like mistake. It is a category error. But questioning the greed and destructiveness immured in the human heart, questioning the way the human mind constructs abstract and inhuman theories of what is ‘best’ for other people, questioning the ways certain versions of the capitalist ethic can be destructive of human well-being, questioning our multiple collusions with the structures of Western geopolitics where they are false to the values of justice and compassion – this is where the questioning needs to be.
Compassion after the tragic event is all very well, but it's the easy option, sad to say. The response is wonderful, this generosity of the human heart - and yet, secretly, we know that the hypocrisy stinks to the heavens. We are our own worst enemies.
Sunday, 10 January 2010
Kafka, the snow, the decade to come
So, the new decade has begun with a northern Europe-wide breakdown of the rhythms and routines of everyday life: snow, ice, abandoned vehicles, frozen fields, panic buying, power cuts, a threat to gas supplies – and in Germany, co-incidentally, a quarter of credit/debit cards malfunctioning, unable to adjust to the numbers ‘2010’, so unable to let people take money from ATMs. One way or another, a renewed awareness of our vulnerabilities, how much we are dependent on those weather gods and the vast hidden infrastructure of technology, as powerful and omnipresent as any of the invisible deities of old.
The weather might have a certain harsh beauty to it, even moments of inhospitable grandeur – dazzling modernist white on white, blurred edges of field and sky blending into each other, puffy laden hedges, careful wrapped-up walkers, carefree sledding children out of Breughel, defamilarised paths that are suddenly no-paths. Yet these, for me, are passing wonders. I’d already been musing on what this decade ahead might bring – so this week’s chaos seems almost too convenient a metaphor for thoughts about the decade to come, almost too apt a symbol with which to speak about my deeper concerns about these coming years.
Of course this notion of a ‘decade’ is a kind of fiction – a construct we use to stop time past dissolving into an undifferentiated pile of slush. We use the concept of a ‘decade’ to try to impose order on events, to generate meaning and gain perspective. And yet as artificial as it is to divide up history into chunks, as if it were a bar of chocolate, as long as we are aware of the artifice involved then the ‘decade’ can be a useful prism through which we can look back (or forward) as we try to create a narrative out of the confusion of events that slip by us, hour by hour, then suddenly year by year...
I’ve been reflecting on what it was like a century ago, in 1910 – and how unimaginable it would have been in Edwardian England, or Germany, or czarist Russia, in any part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, or the United States, to imagine what their new decade would bring to pass. Technological excitement was growing by the day: the aeroplane was still in its infancy, with Charles Rolls - he of Rolls Royce - making the first return flight over the Channel in April 1910 (and crashing to his death a few months later); then the first ascent to over 1000 metres that same year; and the first female aviator. On the roads, Henry Ford was producing 10,000 cars a day as the automobile industry began its imperious colonisation of the planet. The ‘kinema’ was still a relatively new wonder, still in the infancy of a revolution in mass entertainment and collective entrancement. And the 15 million European dead of the ‘Great War’ – the so-called ‘War To End All Wars’ – were youngsters dreaming of all these new possibilities of a world transforming itself in front of their hungry, eager eyes...
A truism to remember that the future is ever unknowable. Though still we scan the skies for what might come to pass. But the history of a whole decade is too much to imagine. Better to focus on the individual, an individual.
This year, 2010, I have decided on a project of my own devising: my own act of homage to slow reading ; and to the value of seeing the world through another’s eyes. I have decided to re-read - my first reading was as a teenager – my falling-to-pieces Penguin paperback edition of The Diaries of Franz Kafka (edited by Max Brod). The Diaries begin in 1910 and end with his death in 1923. But I intend to read them, and reflect on them a century on, in parallel to the date they were written, month by month, year by year. So, a thirteen year project - inshallah, deo volente, b’ezrat HaShem.
Why bother with such a quixotic meshuggeneh venture? Who can ever really say? Maybe I will find out as it proceeds...I am not so wedded to the notion of having to understand things beforehand.
Meanwhile, the beginning of the journey is easy: I can see that 1910 occupies only 25 paperback pages out of 487. So, lots of gaps, plenty of time to get into the journey of accompanying this singular and extra-ordinary man.
The early pages are undated, which is a bit disorientating for my project. How many do I read at a time? The first dated entry, some pages in, is May 1910. So I have a few months grace, some time to burrow into the text and see what is there to be uncovered.
The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past. First sentence in the diary. A line drawn beneath it. (This pattern is repeated throughout this first page, later pages have entries accompanied by squiggled line-drawings).
‘If he should forever ahsk me.’ The ah, released from the sentence, flew off like a ball on the meadow. Second sentence. A line drawn beneath it.
What are these sentences? Observations, apparently at random: things that Kafka has seen, or heard, that have struck him as worthy of recording (and thinking about). Why these in particular? (And not those, over there?) What strikes us each day that we then ignore? What does it mean to pay attention to what we see, or hear? The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past. Why? What is frightening? Is it the speed? The technology? We think about our response when a speeding train hurtles through the station. Do we go ‘rigid’? Kafka seems to observe the contrast between the movement of the train and the frozen response of the onlookers. He shows us this scene through his own onlooker’s eyes. Vision is refracted: we see him seeing them seeing the train. Does this sentence, this word picture, have any other meaning than the literal? I turn it over in my mind. I'm looking at the world through his eyes. Yes, it’s an everyday observation - but as so often in Kafka, the words hint at something beyond themselves, something hidden and unsaid.
The decade begins with a moment of fear. Yet there is no reason to be afraid. Or is there? The train goes past, time moves on - and we, watching and waiting, our bodies are tense, motionless, as if something might happen. What might happen? No choice but to wait, and watch - onlookers ourselves - wait and see what comes to pass...
Listen to how people talk. The inflections of their words. ‘If he should forever ahsk me.’ The ah, released from the sentence, flew off like a ball on the meadow. Language seems to have a life of its own, as solid as a ball flying through the air. Words have their own autonomy, they move beyond us as we speak. Writers know this, fleetingly – but Kafka catches it. The tiny moment that speaks a larger truth.
As 1910 progresses through the mind and pen of Franz Kafka, I will look forward to reporting back from time to time. As 2010 progresses, beyond the frozen now, I am hoping its opening weeks symbolise nothing, augur nothing, hint at nothing. The shelves of the shops this morning were almost empty, the newsagent did not look up as I left my money: I could have been a ghost, from the past, or even the future.
The weather might have a certain harsh beauty to it, even moments of inhospitable grandeur – dazzling modernist white on white, blurred edges of field and sky blending into each other, puffy laden hedges, careful wrapped-up walkers, carefree sledding children out of Breughel, defamilarised paths that are suddenly no-paths. Yet these, for me, are passing wonders. I’d already been musing on what this decade ahead might bring – so this week’s chaos seems almost too convenient a metaphor for thoughts about the decade to come, almost too apt a symbol with which to speak about my deeper concerns about these coming years.
Of course this notion of a ‘decade’ is a kind of fiction – a construct we use to stop time past dissolving into an undifferentiated pile of slush. We use the concept of a ‘decade’ to try to impose order on events, to generate meaning and gain perspective. And yet as artificial as it is to divide up history into chunks, as if it were a bar of chocolate, as long as we are aware of the artifice involved then the ‘decade’ can be a useful prism through which we can look back (or forward) as we try to create a narrative out of the confusion of events that slip by us, hour by hour, then suddenly year by year...
I’ve been reflecting on what it was like a century ago, in 1910 – and how unimaginable it would have been in Edwardian England, or Germany, or czarist Russia, in any part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, or the United States, to imagine what their new decade would bring to pass. Technological excitement was growing by the day: the aeroplane was still in its infancy, with Charles Rolls - he of Rolls Royce - making the first return flight over the Channel in April 1910 (and crashing to his death a few months later); then the first ascent to over 1000 metres that same year; and the first female aviator. On the roads, Henry Ford was producing 10,000 cars a day as the automobile industry began its imperious colonisation of the planet. The ‘kinema’ was still a relatively new wonder, still in the infancy of a revolution in mass entertainment and collective entrancement. And the 15 million European dead of the ‘Great War’ – the so-called ‘War To End All Wars’ – were youngsters dreaming of all these new possibilities of a world transforming itself in front of their hungry, eager eyes...
A truism to remember that the future is ever unknowable. Though still we scan the skies for what might come to pass. But the history of a whole decade is too much to imagine. Better to focus on the individual, an individual.
This year, 2010, I have decided on a project of my own devising: my own act of homage to slow reading ; and to the value of seeing the world through another’s eyes. I have decided to re-read - my first reading was as a teenager – my falling-to-pieces Penguin paperback edition of The Diaries of Franz Kafka (edited by Max Brod). The Diaries begin in 1910 and end with his death in 1923. But I intend to read them, and reflect on them a century on, in parallel to the date they were written, month by month, year by year. So, a thirteen year project - inshallah, deo volente, b’ezrat HaShem.
Why bother with such a quixotic meshuggeneh venture? Who can ever really say? Maybe I will find out as it proceeds...I am not so wedded to the notion of having to understand things beforehand.
Meanwhile, the beginning of the journey is easy: I can see that 1910 occupies only 25 paperback pages out of 487. So, lots of gaps, plenty of time to get into the journey of accompanying this singular and extra-ordinary man.
The early pages are undated, which is a bit disorientating for my project. How many do I read at a time? The first dated entry, some pages in, is May 1910. So I have a few months grace, some time to burrow into the text and see what is there to be uncovered.
The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past. First sentence in the diary. A line drawn beneath it. (This pattern is repeated throughout this first page, later pages have entries accompanied by squiggled line-drawings).
‘If he should forever ahsk me.’ The ah, released from the sentence, flew off like a ball on the meadow. Second sentence. A line drawn beneath it.
What are these sentences? Observations, apparently at random: things that Kafka has seen, or heard, that have struck him as worthy of recording (and thinking about). Why these in particular? (And not those, over there?) What strikes us each day that we then ignore? What does it mean to pay attention to what we see, or hear? The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past. Why? What is frightening? Is it the speed? The technology? We think about our response when a speeding train hurtles through the station. Do we go ‘rigid’? Kafka seems to observe the contrast between the movement of the train and the frozen response of the onlookers. He shows us this scene through his own onlooker’s eyes. Vision is refracted: we see him seeing them seeing the train. Does this sentence, this word picture, have any other meaning than the literal? I turn it over in my mind. I'm looking at the world through his eyes. Yes, it’s an everyday observation - but as so often in Kafka, the words hint at something beyond themselves, something hidden and unsaid.
The decade begins with a moment of fear. Yet there is no reason to be afraid. Or is there? The train goes past, time moves on - and we, watching and waiting, our bodies are tense, motionless, as if something might happen. What might happen? No choice but to wait, and watch - onlookers ourselves - wait and see what comes to pass...
Listen to how people talk. The inflections of their words. ‘If he should forever ahsk me.’ The ah, released from the sentence, flew off like a ball on the meadow. Language seems to have a life of its own, as solid as a ball flying through the air. Words have their own autonomy, they move beyond us as we speak. Writers know this, fleetingly – but Kafka catches it. The tiny moment that speaks a larger truth.
As 1910 progresses through the mind and pen of Franz Kafka, I will look forward to reporting back from time to time. As 2010 progresses, beyond the frozen now, I am hoping its opening weeks symbolise nothing, augur nothing, hint at nothing. The shelves of the shops this morning were almost empty, the newsagent did not look up as I left my money: I could have been a ghost, from the past, or even the future.
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