How do you represent an absence? When something has disappeared, how do you portray its non-existence? When people have ceased to be, how do you remind yourself of their former presence?
The U.S-born, British-based artist Susan Hiller found herself in Berlin in 2002. Walking around the city she came across a street named Judenstrasse: Jews’ Street. This led her on into a three-year project - a kind of pilgrimage - to photograph and film all the street signs in Germany that incorporate the word Jude. She found 303 signs in streets, lanes, alleys and avenues scattered throughout the country. These were the reminders, still present, of an absence.
Her 67 minute film, The J.Street Project, is showing at Tate Britain until May 15. If you haven’t had the opportunity to see this extraordinary work, I urge you to visit the Tate and have a look for yourself. In this week when the Jewish world has marked Yom HaShoah – the memorial day that commemorates the deaths associated with the Holocaust – I would suggest that this piece by Hiller is one of the profoundest meditations on the Shoah that has yet been produced.
What makes her documentary record - 303 scenes long - so extraordinary? As the film unfolds we see a series of static camera shots, each of which contains somewhere on screen one street sign containing the word Jude: Judendorf, Judenhof, Judenweg, Judengass, Judenberg, Judennam...
Each shot records - for a few seconds or for a minute and more - life going on. Everyday life. ‘Ordinary’ life. Sleepy villages, noisy urban centres, rural locations. Children play, church bells ring – the sounds are mesmerisingly enmeshed with the visual images - lorries thunder past and an old man loses his hat, and his balance (so, there’s almost an ‘accident’, someone almost dies, you can see it about to happen) - birds sing, the sun sets over empty fields, a road-drilling punctures silence, rain drips from closed shutters, businessmen hurry, shoppers wander, tourists point, the wind picks up, a graveyard is in the background, lovers embrace, trees rustle: and slowly you see the artfulness with which Susah Hiller has composed this threnody for a disappeared people. The ‘Jew’ is always present - in the street sign. And the signs signal an absence. This is Germany, and life is going on, everyday life, and the past haunts the present.
The film does not offer any ‘meaning’ to the events of the Holocaust – no ‘meaning’ can ever be generated, only a reflection on the limitations of ascribing ‘meaning’ to events – but the cumulative effect of watching these images unfold in real time is to create a disturbing, poignant sense of loss: it is like watching a story unfold, a story without words - except the reiterated Jude – a story that seems random and discontinuous but that one senses is built up in phases, in sections and selections of images and sounds, like a visual poem that flows into stanzas, that echoes and re-echoes. The piece is like a meditation, it is slow and reflective, and you think nothing is ‘happening’. But there is an underlying plan, a purpose, a shaping, controlling hand at work – hidden, but in open view.
In the blurb outside the room where this film is shown, the Tate suggests that ‘For this factual, indexical project Hiller employed a neutral seriality in her approach’. But there is nothing ‘neutral’ about this collage of 303 clips of film: each one is loaded, each one triggers thoughts, feelings, associations in the viewer. Each one is a meditation on death, and life, and how closely they are woven together, and how life always goes on and how wondrous and how desolate that experience can be.
Thursday, 5 May 2011
Sunday, 24 April 2011
Thoughts on freedom
They say that satire died the day they gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger. (For those too young - or maybe too old - to remember, Kissinger was responsible for the secret carpet-bombing of Cambodia in 1969-70 during the Vietnam War). Well, for me, irony died a little death the other week when I read that prior to his recent concert in China, Bob Dylan had been asked to submit a list of songs he intended to sing; and the government had vetted this list and agreed to the concert as long as he didn’t sing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘The Times They Are A’ Changing’. He also, apparently, had to sign a pledge promising "not to hurt the feelings of the Chinese people" during his performances.
We all make compromises, I suppose, in regard to our own freedom to speak our mind, express ourselves, speak truth to power...that Dylan did so in the very week that the Chinese government arrested and ‘disappeared’ the activist and artist Ai WeiWei – he of the million porcelain seeds in the Tate Modern exhibition – that just compounded my sense of the demise of irony. I suddenly, and rather inexplicably, felt very old.
It’s not that I felt critical of Dylan – I recognize that compromises on our independent-mindedness for the sake of some greater good are sometimes necessary. Or at least that’s how we like to think of it. After all, we say, isn’t it part of our freedom that we accept that there are limits to our freedom? In order to do his job, Dylan agreed to a limitation on his repertoire. And he didn’t mention Ai WeiWei, even though he had the freedom once there on stage to do that. He could have said no at any point but he didn’t.
Like one of my rabbinic colleagues who was invited to write an article for the Jewish Chronicle on Pesach and freedom - but on condition she didn’t mention the Palestinians. Or like me, who signed an agreement a few years ago that if I was going to work for a particular congregation I would “respect all the decisions” of Council, colleagues but also all members of the community “at all times” – whatever that was supposed to mean.
We all have to make these choices at some stage in our lives. Maybe we grow used to making these compromises to our higher values, to our understanding of what is right and true and godly, because if we didn’t…well, that’s an interesting question: we figure we’d probably end up an outcast, or out of a job; either that, or we’d end up a saint or a zaddik - and who could bear that for very long?
These thoughts on freedom and its limitations arise of course out of the Pesach/Passover season – and in particular out of the Torah text read in Reform synagogues this Shabbat: Exodus, chapter 13. The text contains a striking play-on-words, a transparent piece of punning. ‘You have come out of Egypt, which was your beit avadim, house of slavery/servitude...’, it says (13:3). And then it goes on to describe how the people will journey towards a promised land, flowing with milk and honey, and that when they arrive there, ‘v’avadata et ha-avodah ha-zot : you shall serve this service...seven days of unleavened bread...’ (13: 5).
Slavery is behind you, the text says - so you have a kind of freedom. But this is a freedom in which one kind of avodah is to be replaced with another. Slavery to Egypt is to be replaced with servitude to something else – the laws of Pesach, the laws surrounding hametz, leaned bread. You may no longer be slaves, the text says, you may be freed from avodah , but a new kind of avodah, of service, will be required of you: service of God, service of God’s laws, service in order to remember your story, your history. The paradox around the word avodah (slavery/service) is precise, fine-tuned: you are to submit to a new kind of servitude in order to remember that you are not slaves.
So on Pesach we celebrate our freedom from servitude, yes – but this freedom is seen in the Biblical narrative, and in subsequent Jewish thinking, in a very particular way. Freedom from bondage to Pharaoh does not mean you are free to do whatever you want. That kind of freedom is an illusion. The only freedom you have is about who and what you are going to serve: are you going to serve Egypt, the state; and Pharaoh, the powers that be? Or are you going to serve God, the divine, the highest ideals and values that exist? It’s a stark choice, maybe an unwelcome choice. Do you serve man, human authority – or do you serve God, the Holy One of Israel? Do you serve the cause of oppression - or the cause of holiness?
Freedom is such a simple word – it’s a bit like ‘love’: everyone’s for it, it’s just that the devil is in the detail.
One of the 20th century’s leading thinkers about the complexities of the theme of freedom was Sir Isaiah Berlin, the Russian-born but echt-British Jewish writer, social and political theorist and philosopher who taught how freedoms are inevitably plural and often incompatible. He accepted that ‘the fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement to others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor...’ This was the base-line of his thinking, but it quickly developed into the basic paradox that ‘Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted’.
And this recognition became a refrain in his thinking and writing: ‘Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep. The bloodstained story of economic individualism and unrestrained capitalist competition does not today need stressing...’ Well, he died in 1997 - more than a decade before the current debacle - so perhaps it still, and always, needs stressing.
Freedom from ‘beit avadim, house of slavery/servitude’ led straight to Sinai and the revelation that if you are not going to be a slave to the material world and its values and hardships and oppressive character, what’s left is the freedom to submit to another kind of value system, which we called holiness, the sacred, the sense of the divine presence that permeates existence and leads to the prioritising of certain vales: compassion, justice, righteousness, generosity, self-sacrifice, the capacity to care for and value others not only one’s self.
That freedom to submit is an act, a choice – it turns what is in essence an abstract concept, ‘freedom’, into something alive and personal. This week I freely submit to the tradition of avoiding hametz – for seven days, as the text dictates. I am avoiding those foods that symbolise leavening, swelling, puffing up. I do it as an act of freedom that reminds me: try not to puff yourself up - with pride, with your so-called achievements, with your abilities and accomplishments, don’t get bigger than you are, remember your limitations, remember your fragility, you are like matza, easily broken, easily fragmented – and perhaps not always easy to digest.
This is part of what freedom from slavery means – the freedom to say no, to set limitations on desires, the freedom to embrace a tradition that sets limits on freedom. And the freedom to fail: ‘There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail’ (Erich Fromm). We are like the children of Israel, who had experienced what the texts call ‘the hand of God’, a liberating power that released them from oppression, but that they could never quite trust, not back then in the desert, nor when they came to the land: ‘Take us back to Egypt. It was safe there. Leave us alone – whoever you are...’
That is the Jewish story, to this very day: the failure to trust, the failure to be humble in the presence of the divine energy that animates the universe, the failure to listen in to the divine voice as it speaks. This too is what it means to be free : that we are free to respond to (or ignore) the miracle, the blessing, that Torat Adonai b’ficha (13:9), God’s teaching is in your mouth, it’s inside of you, it’s in what you say, and how you say it; and it’s in what you don’t say, and why you won’t say it.
If you are God’s hands, if you are God’s mouth – that’s an awesome responsibility, but it’s what our freedom is really all about.
[Freely adapted from a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, April 23rd 2011]
We all make compromises, I suppose, in regard to our own freedom to speak our mind, express ourselves, speak truth to power...that Dylan did so in the very week that the Chinese government arrested and ‘disappeared’ the activist and artist Ai WeiWei – he of the million porcelain seeds in the Tate Modern exhibition – that just compounded my sense of the demise of irony. I suddenly, and rather inexplicably, felt very old.
It’s not that I felt critical of Dylan – I recognize that compromises on our independent-mindedness for the sake of some greater good are sometimes necessary. Or at least that’s how we like to think of it. After all, we say, isn’t it part of our freedom that we accept that there are limits to our freedom? In order to do his job, Dylan agreed to a limitation on his repertoire. And he didn’t mention Ai WeiWei, even though he had the freedom once there on stage to do that. He could have said no at any point but he didn’t.
Like one of my rabbinic colleagues who was invited to write an article for the Jewish Chronicle on Pesach and freedom - but on condition she didn’t mention the Palestinians. Or like me, who signed an agreement a few years ago that if I was going to work for a particular congregation I would “respect all the decisions” of Council, colleagues but also all members of the community “at all times” – whatever that was supposed to mean.
We all have to make these choices at some stage in our lives. Maybe we grow used to making these compromises to our higher values, to our understanding of what is right and true and godly, because if we didn’t…well, that’s an interesting question: we figure we’d probably end up an outcast, or out of a job; either that, or we’d end up a saint or a zaddik - and who could bear that for very long?
These thoughts on freedom and its limitations arise of course out of the Pesach/Passover season – and in particular out of the Torah text read in Reform synagogues this Shabbat: Exodus, chapter 13. The text contains a striking play-on-words, a transparent piece of punning. ‘You have come out of Egypt, which was your beit avadim, house of slavery/servitude...’, it says (13:3). And then it goes on to describe how the people will journey towards a promised land, flowing with milk and honey, and that when they arrive there, ‘v’avadata et ha-avodah ha-zot : you shall serve this service...seven days of unleavened bread...’ (13: 5).
Slavery is behind you, the text says - so you have a kind of freedom. But this is a freedom in which one kind of avodah is to be replaced with another. Slavery to Egypt is to be replaced with servitude to something else – the laws of Pesach, the laws surrounding hametz, leaned bread. You may no longer be slaves, the text says, you may be freed from avodah , but a new kind of avodah, of service, will be required of you: service of God, service of God’s laws, service in order to remember your story, your history. The paradox around the word avodah (slavery/service) is precise, fine-tuned: you are to submit to a new kind of servitude in order to remember that you are not slaves.
So on Pesach we celebrate our freedom from servitude, yes – but this freedom is seen in the Biblical narrative, and in subsequent Jewish thinking, in a very particular way. Freedom from bondage to Pharaoh does not mean you are free to do whatever you want. That kind of freedom is an illusion. The only freedom you have is about who and what you are going to serve: are you going to serve Egypt, the state; and Pharaoh, the powers that be? Or are you going to serve God, the divine, the highest ideals and values that exist? It’s a stark choice, maybe an unwelcome choice. Do you serve man, human authority – or do you serve God, the Holy One of Israel? Do you serve the cause of oppression - or the cause of holiness?
Freedom is such a simple word – it’s a bit like ‘love’: everyone’s for it, it’s just that the devil is in the detail.
One of the 20th century’s leading thinkers about the complexities of the theme of freedom was Sir Isaiah Berlin, the Russian-born but echt-British Jewish writer, social and political theorist and philosopher who taught how freedoms are inevitably plural and often incompatible. He accepted that ‘the fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement to others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor...’ This was the base-line of his thinking, but it quickly developed into the basic paradox that ‘Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted’.
And this recognition became a refrain in his thinking and writing: ‘Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep. The bloodstained story of economic individualism and unrestrained capitalist competition does not today need stressing...’ Well, he died in 1997 - more than a decade before the current debacle - so perhaps it still, and always, needs stressing.
Freedom from ‘beit avadim, house of slavery/servitude’ led straight to Sinai and the revelation that if you are not going to be a slave to the material world and its values and hardships and oppressive character, what’s left is the freedom to submit to another kind of value system, which we called holiness, the sacred, the sense of the divine presence that permeates existence and leads to the prioritising of certain vales: compassion, justice, righteousness, generosity, self-sacrifice, the capacity to care for and value others not only one’s self.
That freedom to submit is an act, a choice – it turns what is in essence an abstract concept, ‘freedom’, into something alive and personal. This week I freely submit to the tradition of avoiding hametz – for seven days, as the text dictates. I am avoiding those foods that symbolise leavening, swelling, puffing up. I do it as an act of freedom that reminds me: try not to puff yourself up - with pride, with your so-called achievements, with your abilities and accomplishments, don’t get bigger than you are, remember your limitations, remember your fragility, you are like matza, easily broken, easily fragmented – and perhaps not always easy to digest.
This is part of what freedom from slavery means – the freedom to say no, to set limitations on desires, the freedom to embrace a tradition that sets limits on freedom. And the freedom to fail: ‘There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail’ (Erich Fromm). We are like the children of Israel, who had experienced what the texts call ‘the hand of God’, a liberating power that released them from oppression, but that they could never quite trust, not back then in the desert, nor when they came to the land: ‘Take us back to Egypt. It was safe there. Leave us alone – whoever you are...’
That is the Jewish story, to this very day: the failure to trust, the failure to be humble in the presence of the divine energy that animates the universe, the failure to listen in to the divine voice as it speaks. This too is what it means to be free : that we are free to respond to (or ignore) the miracle, the blessing, that Torat Adonai b’ficha (13:9), God’s teaching is in your mouth, it’s inside of you, it’s in what you say, and how you say it; and it’s in what you don’t say, and why you won’t say it.
If you are God’s hands, if you are God’s mouth – that’s an awesome responsibility, but it’s what our freedom is really all about.
[Freely adapted from a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, April 23rd 2011]
Thursday, 17 March 2011
Apocalypse Now
‘Apocalyptic’ – adjective: ‘forecasting the ultimate destiny of the world; foreboding immanent disaster; terrible’. Words bow to images. The scenes from Japan – waves of black sea, mud, debris, pouring ships onto houses, piling roads onto cars, crushing offices, shops, homes into a montage of mangled metal, a tohu va’vohu of destruction, devastation and loss – these scenes are both mesmeric and unbearable to look at for too long. They seem to both foretell a future and evoke a past.
Where have we seen pictures like these before? Towns flattened out into rubble and detritus, nothing standing, denuded of the familiar signs of collective life. A woman sitting alone by what was once a road, howling, only the ruins of a village for company. Where is this lodged in our memories? The association is too obvious, and yet it is impossible to avoid. Look at the photos taken in the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the same desolation, the same erasure of buildings, homes, roads, trees, everything crushed as if by a giant fist.
And as if the elemental activity of earth and sea in violent assault upon a nation’s lives is not enough, the radiation leak from the Fukushima nuclear plant makes the grim historical analogy with 1945 even more imaginatively compelling, and moves us beyond irony into the realm of existential helplessness – no wonder the voices coming from Japan are asking, with growing insistence, the timeless question: ‘What have we done to deserve this?’
Of course they have done nothing to deserve it – and so far we have been saved from religious fundamentalists (of different faiths) who jump on any such disaster to delight in ‘interpreting’ tragedies like this as the victims’ failures to live the ‘right’ way. I’ve not heard anything of this kind yet - but it is still early days. This sadistic picture of a controlling ‘God’ punishing so-called ‘sinners’ for religious failings is a regular feature of fundamentalist thinking.(Perhaps ‘thinking’ is too elevated a word for this kind of response). But it is the standard, off-the-peg, historical answer to that ever-present human question - which seeks meaning when there is no meaning - ‘What have we done to deserve this?’ Needless to say, I find the fundamentalist response nauseating. From a psychological perspective, it would have to be called psychotic. And, to use religious language for a moment, it is also blasphemous.
It so happens that my colleague Rabbi Jonathan Magonet is living and teaching in Japan at the moment, in the south of the country, far from the devastation we see on our TV screens. I asked him earlier in the week how he was experiencing the events and he responded with these thoughts, which I have his permission to share with you:
I asked my colleague here about how he viewed the reactions of the Japanese public. He said that at the moment we are all simply overwhelmed by the horror of the thing. Earthquakes are a given here, though never on such a scale and with such consequences. He thought people showed a remarkable calmness and stoicism, combined with a considerable practical approach to dealing precisely with the matters. He quoted a proverb to the effect that now was not the time for emotions but for practicalities, the emotional would have to be addressed later. Clearly, except for those who have immediate friends and family involved, this is felt to be best approach alongside collective efforts to provide funds and volunteers to help. What is missing, I suppose, is any theological evaluation - it simply does not belong to the Japanese 'religions'.
It may be that in the last 24 hours we are seeing more emotions being expressed. But whatever the feelings in Japan – and we have to remember that ‘What are you feeling?’ has become the default question of supposed interest for us Westerners in the last thirty or so years, as if our feelings define who we are - whatever the Japanese are ‘feeling’, the practical responses have been, for the most part, rather remarkable and indeed admirable. (Compare the response to Hurricane Katrina). I include here those battling within the Fukushima power stations to prevent a nuclear meltdown. One day the heroes of these hours will, one hopes, be named and honoured.
As for theology, I find myself more and more drawn to the religious humanism of those who turn such questions about meaning into an inquiry about how we construct meaning for ourselves. Rather than ponder on the purposes, or lack of purpose, of an abstract or absent deity, it seems more useful to think about our own fragility and our own fantasies of omnipotence – that we own and can exploit and control the earth and the seas – and to reflect on our own capacities to offer help and support and, if need be, self-sacrifice in the face of the often savage, and frequently unjust, phenomenon we call ‘life’.
Rather than seeing the sphere of religion as a vertical domain – God in His heavens set apart from us on earth – I find it more compelling, life-enhancing, and intellectually credible to think through the implications of Judaism being a human creation inhabiting the horizontal domain: religion is the sphere of our own human activity and invention and need and responsiveness; it is the place we can go to explore the mysteries of how life has evolved as it has, where we struggle for meaning in the face of meaninglessness, where we don’t know - can’t know - what we ‘deserve’, where we can experience moments of awe at the wonders and harmonies of nature and then collapse in fear and trembling in the face of those same natural forces; where we can celebrate what creativity and compassion human beings are capable of, but also despair at the cruelty and destructiveness that human beings are also capable of.
We don’t need a ‘God’ outside us to teach us about the double-sidedness of life – about our potential and our limitations, about our capacity to create worlds and our capacity to destroy them - but we may need to contact the godliness within us (our spiritual resources) to help us face our own mortality and to give strength to others when facing theirs.
The world is precarious and we are tightrope walkers always about to topple over. In Japan we see how disaster is always imminent, how apocalypse is part of the fabric of life: we glimpse what might lie ahead for any of us in our towns and cities, and we glimpse how apocalypse is also always now.
Where have we seen pictures like these before? Towns flattened out into rubble and detritus, nothing standing, denuded of the familiar signs of collective life. A woman sitting alone by what was once a road, howling, only the ruins of a village for company. Where is this lodged in our memories? The association is too obvious, and yet it is impossible to avoid. Look at the photos taken in the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the same desolation, the same erasure of buildings, homes, roads, trees, everything crushed as if by a giant fist.
And as if the elemental activity of earth and sea in violent assault upon a nation’s lives is not enough, the radiation leak from the Fukushima nuclear plant makes the grim historical analogy with 1945 even more imaginatively compelling, and moves us beyond irony into the realm of existential helplessness – no wonder the voices coming from Japan are asking, with growing insistence, the timeless question: ‘What have we done to deserve this?’
Of course they have done nothing to deserve it – and so far we have been saved from religious fundamentalists (of different faiths) who jump on any such disaster to delight in ‘interpreting’ tragedies like this as the victims’ failures to live the ‘right’ way. I’ve not heard anything of this kind yet - but it is still early days. This sadistic picture of a controlling ‘God’ punishing so-called ‘sinners’ for religious failings is a regular feature of fundamentalist thinking.(Perhaps ‘thinking’ is too elevated a word for this kind of response). But it is the standard, off-the-peg, historical answer to that ever-present human question - which seeks meaning when there is no meaning - ‘What have we done to deserve this?’ Needless to say, I find the fundamentalist response nauseating. From a psychological perspective, it would have to be called psychotic. And, to use religious language for a moment, it is also blasphemous.
It so happens that my colleague Rabbi Jonathan Magonet is living and teaching in Japan at the moment, in the south of the country, far from the devastation we see on our TV screens. I asked him earlier in the week how he was experiencing the events and he responded with these thoughts, which I have his permission to share with you:
I asked my colleague here about how he viewed the reactions of the Japanese public. He said that at the moment we are all simply overwhelmed by the horror of the thing. Earthquakes are a given here, though never on such a scale and with such consequences. He thought people showed a remarkable calmness and stoicism, combined with a considerable practical approach to dealing precisely with the matters. He quoted a proverb to the effect that now was not the time for emotions but for practicalities, the emotional would have to be addressed later. Clearly, except for those who have immediate friends and family involved, this is felt to be best approach alongside collective efforts to provide funds and volunteers to help. What is missing, I suppose, is any theological evaluation - it simply does not belong to the Japanese 'religions'.
It may be that in the last 24 hours we are seeing more emotions being expressed. But whatever the feelings in Japan – and we have to remember that ‘What are you feeling?’ has become the default question of supposed interest for us Westerners in the last thirty or so years, as if our feelings define who we are - whatever the Japanese are ‘feeling’, the practical responses have been, for the most part, rather remarkable and indeed admirable. (Compare the response to Hurricane Katrina). I include here those battling within the Fukushima power stations to prevent a nuclear meltdown. One day the heroes of these hours will, one hopes, be named and honoured.
As for theology, I find myself more and more drawn to the religious humanism of those who turn such questions about meaning into an inquiry about how we construct meaning for ourselves. Rather than ponder on the purposes, or lack of purpose, of an abstract or absent deity, it seems more useful to think about our own fragility and our own fantasies of omnipotence – that we own and can exploit and control the earth and the seas – and to reflect on our own capacities to offer help and support and, if need be, self-sacrifice in the face of the often savage, and frequently unjust, phenomenon we call ‘life’.
Rather than seeing the sphere of religion as a vertical domain – God in His heavens set apart from us on earth – I find it more compelling, life-enhancing, and intellectually credible to think through the implications of Judaism being a human creation inhabiting the horizontal domain: religion is the sphere of our own human activity and invention and need and responsiveness; it is the place we can go to explore the mysteries of how life has evolved as it has, where we struggle for meaning in the face of meaninglessness, where we don’t know - can’t know - what we ‘deserve’, where we can experience moments of awe at the wonders and harmonies of nature and then collapse in fear and trembling in the face of those same natural forces; where we can celebrate what creativity and compassion human beings are capable of, but also despair at the cruelty and destructiveness that human beings are also capable of.
We don’t need a ‘God’ outside us to teach us about the double-sidedness of life – about our potential and our limitations, about our capacity to create worlds and our capacity to destroy them - but we may need to contact the godliness within us (our spiritual resources) to help us face our own mortality and to give strength to others when facing theirs.
The world is precarious and we are tightrope walkers always about to topple over. In Japan we see how disaster is always imminent, how apocalypse is part of the fabric of life: we glimpse what might lie ahead for any of us in our towns and cities, and we glimpse how apocalypse is also always now.
Sunday, 13 February 2011
Egypt’s Revolution
‘In Egypt it was the moral force of nonviolence, not terrorism, not mindless killing...that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.’ Whoever writes Obama ‘s speeches is a maestro. Maybe Obama writes his own speeches, but whoever composes them, I find it remarkable that he so often manages to find a language that resonates in the imagination, that one wants to savour and reflect on. And how often do politicians manage to do that?
The notion of bending ‘the arc of history toward justice’ is of course part of a Judaic vision too. Perhaps that’s why it resonated so strongly with me when I heard the phrase. I imagine that few of us can have been following these last few weeks’ events in Egypt without at some point being moved by the sight of a people finding its voice to protest against decades of dictatorship, corruption, brutality and repression. Protests that were remarkably peaceful given the suppressed fury that must reside in the hearts of so many at the conditions they have had to endure.
As we know, Mubarak’s 30 year grip on his people was sponsored (financially and militarily) by the United States, who’ve been guided – as they so often are, as is the British government – by President Roosevelt’s famous comment in 1939 about the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza, that ‘he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch.’ So I’ve been stirred and heartened, as I was in 1989, by the tide of history that seems to be moving another part of our world away from brutality and impoverishment towards something more life-enhancing. And yet I’ve been disheartened - dispirited hugely, if truth be told – by so much of the response I’ve heard and read from the Jewish community, here and in Israel.
Because this response has been dictated - loaded word, I know – not by a recognition of the power of the human spirit to overcome oppression. It’s been dictated by fear. This fear has focused on the Muslim Brotherhood, who’ve been keeping a low profile over these last weeks, and the fear of a fundamentalist form of Islamism taking over in the region. As if Egypt is another Iran. Which for many reasons – historical and cultural and demographic and geographic – it isn’t. But the spectre of Israel once again surrounded by implacable annihilatory enemies haunts the Jewish imagination. It’s as if fear is soldered to our soul. And I find that hugely saddening, and actually rather ugly.
For our response to these events to be dictated by our fears rather than our hopefulness about the human spirit is a betrayal, I would suggest, of the religious vision of our Judaic tradition. In secular terms, it puts us as Jews on the wrong side of history – it puts us on the side of repression and brutality. It puts us on the side of Pharaoh rather than Moses.
In religious terms, it fails to understand that the phrase from Exodus we return to and cherish each year “Let my people go...” is the voice of the divine, of God, of the sacred principle that freedom from oppression is the right of every people. That’s the vision at the heart of Judaism: freedom from oppression, each person to have the opportunity to sit under their vine and their fig-tree where no-one shall make them afraid. Isn’t that what the people of Egypt want too?
In his response to Mubarak’s departure, Obama also quoted Martin Luther King: 'There's something in the soul that cries out for freedom.' Fear is a great dictator – when will we be able to overthrow its tyranny within us? When will we be able to rejoice – beyond our fears –wherever we see the ‘arc of history’ bending towards justice? Yes, Egypt has a long way to go – the transition from military to civilian rule will no doubt be bumpy. But as a Jew I celebrate, as Obama was celebrating, the movement of the human spirit towards freedom. All that those crowds possessed was, as the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif put it, ‘words and music and legitimacy and hope’. We see what powerful weapons these can be when wielded with determination, courage and vision.
The notion of bending ‘the arc of history toward justice’ is of course part of a Judaic vision too. Perhaps that’s why it resonated so strongly with me when I heard the phrase. I imagine that few of us can have been following these last few weeks’ events in Egypt without at some point being moved by the sight of a people finding its voice to protest against decades of dictatorship, corruption, brutality and repression. Protests that were remarkably peaceful given the suppressed fury that must reside in the hearts of so many at the conditions they have had to endure.
As we know, Mubarak’s 30 year grip on his people was sponsored (financially and militarily) by the United States, who’ve been guided – as they so often are, as is the British government – by President Roosevelt’s famous comment in 1939 about the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza, that ‘he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch.’ So I’ve been stirred and heartened, as I was in 1989, by the tide of history that seems to be moving another part of our world away from brutality and impoverishment towards something more life-enhancing. And yet I’ve been disheartened - dispirited hugely, if truth be told – by so much of the response I’ve heard and read from the Jewish community, here and in Israel.
Because this response has been dictated - loaded word, I know – not by a recognition of the power of the human spirit to overcome oppression. It’s been dictated by fear. This fear has focused on the Muslim Brotherhood, who’ve been keeping a low profile over these last weeks, and the fear of a fundamentalist form of Islamism taking over in the region. As if Egypt is another Iran. Which for many reasons – historical and cultural and demographic and geographic – it isn’t. But the spectre of Israel once again surrounded by implacable annihilatory enemies haunts the Jewish imagination. It’s as if fear is soldered to our soul. And I find that hugely saddening, and actually rather ugly.
For our response to these events to be dictated by our fears rather than our hopefulness about the human spirit is a betrayal, I would suggest, of the religious vision of our Judaic tradition. In secular terms, it puts us as Jews on the wrong side of history – it puts us on the side of repression and brutality. It puts us on the side of Pharaoh rather than Moses.
In religious terms, it fails to understand that the phrase from Exodus we return to and cherish each year “Let my people go...” is the voice of the divine, of God, of the sacred principle that freedom from oppression is the right of every people. That’s the vision at the heart of Judaism: freedom from oppression, each person to have the opportunity to sit under their vine and their fig-tree where no-one shall make them afraid. Isn’t that what the people of Egypt want too?
In his response to Mubarak’s departure, Obama also quoted Martin Luther King: 'There's something in the soul that cries out for freedom.' Fear is a great dictator – when will we be able to overthrow its tyranny within us? When will we be able to rejoice – beyond our fears –wherever we see the ‘arc of history’ bending towards justice? Yes, Egypt has a long way to go – the transition from military to civilian rule will no doubt be bumpy. But as a Jew I celebrate, as Obama was celebrating, the movement of the human spirit towards freedom. All that those crowds possessed was, as the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif put it, ‘words and music and legitimacy and hope’. We see what powerful weapons these can be when wielded with determination, courage and vision.
Tuesday, 25 January 2011
Has Israel Become Morally Bankrupt?
So now we know. Confirmation of what our pessimism has been telling us for over two decades. The State of Israel has no real (that is, sincere) intention of reaching a peace settlement with the Palestinians.
The 1600 confidential Palestinian documents leaked to the al-Jazeera TV station – the details of which are being published this week in the Guardian newspaper (www.guardian.co.uk) – offer a forlorn portrait of increasing Palestinian desperation (more and more concessions, a preparedness to make do with less and less) and steadfast Israeli intransigence. The long-term game plan of the powerful – both cynical and humiliating – is laid bare: ‘The more settlements we build, and the more we drag out this process, the more impossible a Palestinian state will become.’ As one lead negotiator, Tzipi Livni, is quoted as saying (in 2007), this has been “the policy of the government for a really long time”.
The Guardian’s lead columnist Jonathan Freedland, commenting on these newly available (and truly sensational) documents, makes the depressingly telling point that they “blow apart what has been a staple of Israeli public diplomacy: the claim that there is no Palestinian partner. That theme, a refrain of Israeli spokesmen on and off for years, is undone by transcripts that show that there is not only a Palestinian partner but one more accommodating than will surely ever appear again.”
What were the Palestinian negotiators prepared to concede? Details are still emerging but so far we have been told that concessions include: that Israel be allowed to annex all Jewish settlements in Jerusalem (except Har Homa); also part of the predominantly Arab East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah (in exchange for an equivalent area somewhere else); a joint international committee could oversee the Temple Mount/ Dome of the Rock/Al-Aqsa holy sites; and - perhaps the most emotionally laden of all the issues of historical disagreement - a limit of a “symbolic” 10,000 over ten years to the number of refugees (out of 5 million) who would be permitted to return. (As well as being enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and UN resolution 194, this ‘right of return’ had a status in the Palestinian psyche of an almost sacred principle – to surrender it in this way would have been extraordinary. And yet it was offered as part of a negotiated settlement).
The Palestinian people may themselves have rejected these concessions as too far-reaching - but my concern here is on Israel's responsibilities and commitment to justice. And these documents offer up a damning indictment of a generation of so-called Israeli ‘leaders’. No doubt in the days and weeks to come these revelations will be fought over and disputed by all sides. But to anyone with a dispassionate eye, the willingness of those without power to surrender their land and their dreams, and the unwillingness of the Israeli negotiators to negotiate in good faith, is heartbreaking. Some of us long suspected it, but now we know what we hate to admit: the enthronement of injustice represented by the State of Israel’s stance towards the Palestinians renders Israel morally bankrupt.
How are we Jews going to be able to read the Torah text that we are due to read this Shabbat, a text enshrined in our hearts by dint of repetition through the generations: ‘You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt’ (Exodus 22:18)? How can we be so brazen as to say it with no shame in our voice?
Maybe this week , in the midst of our reading, in the midst of our proud evocation of our sacred story, when we come in synagogues to this verse we should drop our voices, mute our reading, whisper it sotto voce, open up a silence in the midst of our holy text, a space for reflection, a space to hear the words in our hearts that we are unable to live out in our land.
A space for our hearts to be pierced - so that as a people we may begin the long, long journey back towards truth and righteousness.
We know this won’t happen. But it should, it should, it should...
The 1600 confidential Palestinian documents leaked to the al-Jazeera TV station – the details of which are being published this week in the Guardian newspaper (www.guardian.co.uk) – offer a forlorn portrait of increasing Palestinian desperation (more and more concessions, a preparedness to make do with less and less) and steadfast Israeli intransigence. The long-term game plan of the powerful – both cynical and humiliating – is laid bare: ‘The more settlements we build, and the more we drag out this process, the more impossible a Palestinian state will become.’ As one lead negotiator, Tzipi Livni, is quoted as saying (in 2007), this has been “the policy of the government for a really long time”.
The Guardian’s lead columnist Jonathan Freedland, commenting on these newly available (and truly sensational) documents, makes the depressingly telling point that they “blow apart what has been a staple of Israeli public diplomacy: the claim that there is no Palestinian partner. That theme, a refrain of Israeli spokesmen on and off for years, is undone by transcripts that show that there is not only a Palestinian partner but one more accommodating than will surely ever appear again.”
What were the Palestinian negotiators prepared to concede? Details are still emerging but so far we have been told that concessions include: that Israel be allowed to annex all Jewish settlements in Jerusalem (except Har Homa); also part of the predominantly Arab East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah (in exchange for an equivalent area somewhere else); a joint international committee could oversee the Temple Mount/ Dome of the Rock/Al-Aqsa holy sites; and - perhaps the most emotionally laden of all the issues of historical disagreement - a limit of a “symbolic” 10,000 over ten years to the number of refugees (out of 5 million) who would be permitted to return. (As well as being enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and UN resolution 194, this ‘right of return’ had a status in the Palestinian psyche of an almost sacred principle – to surrender it in this way would have been extraordinary. And yet it was offered as part of a negotiated settlement).
The Palestinian people may themselves have rejected these concessions as too far-reaching - but my concern here is on Israel's responsibilities and commitment to justice. And these documents offer up a damning indictment of a generation of so-called Israeli ‘leaders’. No doubt in the days and weeks to come these revelations will be fought over and disputed by all sides. But to anyone with a dispassionate eye, the willingness of those without power to surrender their land and their dreams, and the unwillingness of the Israeli negotiators to negotiate in good faith, is heartbreaking. Some of us long suspected it, but now we know what we hate to admit: the enthronement of injustice represented by the State of Israel’s stance towards the Palestinians renders Israel morally bankrupt.
How are we Jews going to be able to read the Torah text that we are due to read this Shabbat, a text enshrined in our hearts by dint of repetition through the generations: ‘You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt’ (Exodus 22:18)? How can we be so brazen as to say it with no shame in our voice?
Maybe this week , in the midst of our reading, in the midst of our proud evocation of our sacred story, when we come in synagogues to this verse we should drop our voices, mute our reading, whisper it sotto voce, open up a silence in the midst of our holy text, a space for reflection, a space to hear the words in our hearts that we are unable to live out in our land.
A space for our hearts to be pierced - so that as a people we may begin the long, long journey back towards truth and righteousness.
We know this won’t happen. But it should, it should, it should...
Sunday, 2 January 2011
"On or about December 1910..." - Some New Year's Day Reflections
I’ve been wondering recently how to think – 100 years on – about Virginia Woolf’s attention-grabbing remark (from an essay written in 1923) that ''On or about December 1910 human character changed.''
Before we have time even to reflect on the apparent waywardness of her grammar – what is that curious ‘on’ doing, shouldn’t it be ‘in’? – Woolf goes on to explain as follows: “I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.”
So ‘on or about’ December 1910 slides quickly from suspicious precision into the ‘arbitrary’ choosing of a date ‘about the year 1910.’ It inevitably makes us wonder: what is Woolf up to here? What is she pointing towards? And what is this alleged ‘change’ in ‘human character’? She roots this change in human relationships, personal relationships. Relations changed between ''masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children, and when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.'' (Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 1923)
It is of course notoriously difficult - maybe impossible - to catch hold of deep and fundamental changes in our collective lives as they are happening. We know when something personal touches us that our lives can change, do change: a child is born, or a new relationship blossoms or a relationship breaks down, you lose your job or receive a diagnosis of cancer, or someone you love dies – all these mark changes in our lives, and may even have an impact on our character, sometimes in the short term (we may become more cheerful for a while, or more morose), and sometimes a life event can leave a deeper mark on our character, we might realize over time we have shifted from being sad or anxious towards becoming more reflective, or more at peace with life; or the change in our character may have been the other way round: we might have lived the first half of our life with cheerful optimism only for later years to cast a shadow on our hopes and moods. So we are use to thinking about changes in human character in a personal setting.
But Woolf was speaking of something else, something more elusive, something collective that she detected. Writing in 1923, she is of course looking back in time and trying to track something that she located – both precisely and yet ‘arbitrarily’ - at the end of the first decade of the century. She is looking back after the cataclysm of the Great War, and seeing that on or about December 1910, a definable world of Victorian followed by Edwardian morality and certainties was ending (Edward VII died in 1910), and a new, more chaotic era was emerging. In 1910 there were two General Elections in the UK and a Liberal government came to power as part of a decline in political consensus and the shared assumptions of the previous decades. There was violence on the streets – this was the era of the suffragettes and workers’ unrest – and the world was becoming more fragmented and anarchic. The smug certainties of the Edwardian era were giving way to something else.
In 1910 Stravinsky's ballet ‘The Firebird’ opened in Paris, and in London the critic Roger Fry assembled a controversial exhibition called ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ introducing to England what was already electrifying the Continent. The show included works by Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso – the radicalism of Cubism was about to call into question the popular bourgeois idea of realism. As Woolf put it in her 1923 essay, the ‘change in human character’ that she was pinning on this arbitrary date of December 1910 – 100 years ago, from us – meant amongst other things that people were being forced to learn to “tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure.”
These were the years when Einstein dissolved the traditional notions of fixed time and space, Picasso deconstructed visual perceptions and James Joyce in Ulysses undermined the traditional narrative order and sense of the novel. In a word, Woolf is talking about the birth of modernism.
1923 also saw the publication of a book in German that I can’t imagine Woolf knew about - but represents for the Jewish world a work that radically subverted all the traditional pieties and assumptions of the time about Jewish religiosity. It was Martin Buber’s Ich und Du (I and Thou), which put personal relationships at the centre of Judaism rather than halachah (Jewish law). How one relates to other people, and to the environment around you – with care and attention and openness, or with manipulation and the treating of people as objects – this became for Buber the essence of Judaism.
To relate to the divine through the everyday, not merely through the traditional rites and practices – this was a radical message, and seen now through the lens of Virginia Woolf we can recognise that Buber was the first mystic modernist of 20th century Judaism.
When we look around us at the beginning of 2011 it might feel too early to say that ‘human character’ has again changed, or is in the process of changing; it may only be in another decade or so that we will be able to, like Woolf, look back and recognise a fundamental shift in consciousness that is happening. But I do sense it more and more - that something is shifting within us, within our minds and psyches, within our consciousness.
I think it has been brought on by the great technological revolution we are still living through, which combines this extraordinary inter-connectability and instantaneousness, where time and space are eliminated, when you can Skype across the world, and read a million books without leaving your house, and have the knowledge of the world literally at your fingertips - which includes following your children’s lives without them knowing it (just look on Facebook) – so there are all these possibilities opening up for us while at the same time there is a sense of out-of-controlness, a sense of unrest on the streets, a great surge of discontent about the ordering of society yet a sense of helplessness to effect real change.
Old economic ‘certainties’ have been exposed as fraudulent, but no new sustainable model is yet emerging; and there is a growing sense (or is it just me?) that we – as in 1910 – stand at the possible edge of a cataclysm and that our Great War might still be to come, a war this time against want and deprivation and lack of resources, in which the underlying ethnic tensions in Europe might still end up with blood being shed as people fight for survival. Who knows? But not knowing doesn’t mean we should give up looking hard at what is going on and scanning the ether for what is happening.
As so often, the Torah texts that we read in the Jewish cycle of weekly readings offer a partial illumination. Exodus chapter 6, that we have read this Shabbat, dramatises the way in which oppression makes a people metaphorically blind and deaf, unable to hear and respond to something new that could free them from their enslavement to the status quo. Moses receives a radical message about the divine - but when he goes to the Israelites to tell them that there is a power in the universe that will free them from Egyptian slavery, the people’s spirits are so crushed that they can’t take it in. They can’t hear what is being said to them. And the message Moses brings them is so remarkable that it is no wonder they can’t take it to heart: because the message includes the statement that ‘God’ changes through the generations; or rather, that the way that we experience the divine changes from generation to generation.
Moses comes to understand (Exodus 6:3) how the ancestral generations – Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - had their own understanding of the divine (El Shaddai – ‘God who bestows benefits’), but that something else was now present, Adonai – ‘the One who was, is, will be...’
And it is this Presence, active in each moment, who in a sense is each moment, that has the capacity to free the Israelites from their toil and their misery. This Presence links history, past promises, with the security of a grounded future. But for this to happen, the people have to be open to listening in to this voice of hope – but because they are immersed in their present misery they don’t have the emotional or mental space to bear this radical alternative voice, a voice which says, ‘Don’t think of Me as I used to be in the past, in tradition - think of Me metamorphosing in response to what is needed now’.
How do you think about an evolving God? How do you live with the idea that God-images are constantly evolving? That the divine isn’t static and fixed - but is fluid and provisional?
So in one sense the plagues were not just for the Egyptians and Pharaoh to have a change of heart, but they were for the Israelites, who would see them and wonder about them: 'If these things happen, what can it mean for us?’ is the question the plagues pose for the Israelites. ‘If these irruptions into the natural order are possible, what does that mean for our ways of thinking about what is possible? Perhaps our image of God - and God’s possibilities, and the possibility of God - needs to change’. Isn’t this the sense that underlies our narrative? That this whole saga of the Exodus involves an education into a different reality, the reality of the divine as a Presence that unsettles the status quo on behalf of the liberation of the human spirit.
How is our human spirit liberated in our times? How is the divine manifesting within our troubled times? The Jewish task is to live and think in the spirit of Moses, keeping our antennae tuned, listening out for what is going on, listening in to what is going on: what is changing? what new possibilities for the human spirit are there? How do we liberate ourselves, and each other? Perhaps we have to learn again to tolerate, in Woolf’s words, ‘the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure’?
In a culture that worships success, and is mistrustful of complexity, and enslaves us to consumption and materialism, we are going to have to work hard to avoid having our spirits crushed by what we are exposed to each day. The dominant narratives of our time – about what makes for happiness, about what doing well in life consists of – these narratives may need to be called into question by the spirit of Adonai that lives in us. We all have a part of us that doesn’t want to hear, that can’t hear, an oppressed part of our selves that keeps our noses to the grindstone and our minds enslaved to fixed ways of thinking. But we also have a Moses within us, that is open to the Voice, the eternal voice that speaks always, and yet whose words can be hard to hear, hard to decipher, hard to translate.
In 2011 let’s listen out for the Voice, let’s find the Moses within who is open to the new, who can hear the spirit of the divine hovering, never settling, never capturable, never already understood, (or never already dismissed) - but whose truth is revealed in fragments, in obscure intuitions, in glimpses half-seen, in whisperings and echoes.
Revelation is no longer through ‘outstretched arms and terrible chastisements’ (Exodus 6:6). It’s through the still small voice within, half heard, half-remembered, wholly mystifying. That is our homeland, our security - let’s listen out for it, listen in to it.
I wish you all a good year.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue on New Year’s Day, January 1st, 2011]
Before we have time even to reflect on the apparent waywardness of her grammar – what is that curious ‘on’ doing, shouldn’t it be ‘in’? – Woolf goes on to explain as follows: “I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.”
So ‘on or about’ December 1910 slides quickly from suspicious precision into the ‘arbitrary’ choosing of a date ‘about the year 1910.’ It inevitably makes us wonder: what is Woolf up to here? What is she pointing towards? And what is this alleged ‘change’ in ‘human character’? She roots this change in human relationships, personal relationships. Relations changed between ''masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children, and when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.'' (Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 1923)
It is of course notoriously difficult - maybe impossible - to catch hold of deep and fundamental changes in our collective lives as they are happening. We know when something personal touches us that our lives can change, do change: a child is born, or a new relationship blossoms or a relationship breaks down, you lose your job or receive a diagnosis of cancer, or someone you love dies – all these mark changes in our lives, and may even have an impact on our character, sometimes in the short term (we may become more cheerful for a while, or more morose), and sometimes a life event can leave a deeper mark on our character, we might realize over time we have shifted from being sad or anxious towards becoming more reflective, or more at peace with life; or the change in our character may have been the other way round: we might have lived the first half of our life with cheerful optimism only for later years to cast a shadow on our hopes and moods. So we are use to thinking about changes in human character in a personal setting.
But Woolf was speaking of something else, something more elusive, something collective that she detected. Writing in 1923, she is of course looking back in time and trying to track something that she located – both precisely and yet ‘arbitrarily’ - at the end of the first decade of the century. She is looking back after the cataclysm of the Great War, and seeing that on or about December 1910, a definable world of Victorian followed by Edwardian morality and certainties was ending (Edward VII died in 1910), and a new, more chaotic era was emerging. In 1910 there were two General Elections in the UK and a Liberal government came to power as part of a decline in political consensus and the shared assumptions of the previous decades. There was violence on the streets – this was the era of the suffragettes and workers’ unrest – and the world was becoming more fragmented and anarchic. The smug certainties of the Edwardian era were giving way to something else.
In 1910 Stravinsky's ballet ‘The Firebird’ opened in Paris, and in London the critic Roger Fry assembled a controversial exhibition called ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ introducing to England what was already electrifying the Continent. The show included works by Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso – the radicalism of Cubism was about to call into question the popular bourgeois idea of realism. As Woolf put it in her 1923 essay, the ‘change in human character’ that she was pinning on this arbitrary date of December 1910 – 100 years ago, from us – meant amongst other things that people were being forced to learn to “tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure.”
These were the years when Einstein dissolved the traditional notions of fixed time and space, Picasso deconstructed visual perceptions and James Joyce in Ulysses undermined the traditional narrative order and sense of the novel. In a word, Woolf is talking about the birth of modernism.
1923 also saw the publication of a book in German that I can’t imagine Woolf knew about - but represents for the Jewish world a work that radically subverted all the traditional pieties and assumptions of the time about Jewish religiosity. It was Martin Buber’s Ich und Du (I and Thou), which put personal relationships at the centre of Judaism rather than halachah (Jewish law). How one relates to other people, and to the environment around you – with care and attention and openness, or with manipulation and the treating of people as objects – this became for Buber the essence of Judaism.
To relate to the divine through the everyday, not merely through the traditional rites and practices – this was a radical message, and seen now through the lens of Virginia Woolf we can recognise that Buber was the first mystic modernist of 20th century Judaism.
When we look around us at the beginning of 2011 it might feel too early to say that ‘human character’ has again changed, or is in the process of changing; it may only be in another decade or so that we will be able to, like Woolf, look back and recognise a fundamental shift in consciousness that is happening. But I do sense it more and more - that something is shifting within us, within our minds and psyches, within our consciousness.
I think it has been brought on by the great technological revolution we are still living through, which combines this extraordinary inter-connectability and instantaneousness, where time and space are eliminated, when you can Skype across the world, and read a million books without leaving your house, and have the knowledge of the world literally at your fingertips - which includes following your children’s lives without them knowing it (just look on Facebook) – so there are all these possibilities opening up for us while at the same time there is a sense of out-of-controlness, a sense of unrest on the streets, a great surge of discontent about the ordering of society yet a sense of helplessness to effect real change.
Old economic ‘certainties’ have been exposed as fraudulent, but no new sustainable model is yet emerging; and there is a growing sense (or is it just me?) that we – as in 1910 – stand at the possible edge of a cataclysm and that our Great War might still be to come, a war this time against want and deprivation and lack of resources, in which the underlying ethnic tensions in Europe might still end up with blood being shed as people fight for survival. Who knows? But not knowing doesn’t mean we should give up looking hard at what is going on and scanning the ether for what is happening.
As so often, the Torah texts that we read in the Jewish cycle of weekly readings offer a partial illumination. Exodus chapter 6, that we have read this Shabbat, dramatises the way in which oppression makes a people metaphorically blind and deaf, unable to hear and respond to something new that could free them from their enslavement to the status quo. Moses receives a radical message about the divine - but when he goes to the Israelites to tell them that there is a power in the universe that will free them from Egyptian slavery, the people’s spirits are so crushed that they can’t take it in. They can’t hear what is being said to them. And the message Moses brings them is so remarkable that it is no wonder they can’t take it to heart: because the message includes the statement that ‘God’ changes through the generations; or rather, that the way that we experience the divine changes from generation to generation.
Moses comes to understand (Exodus 6:3) how the ancestral generations – Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - had their own understanding of the divine (El Shaddai – ‘God who bestows benefits’), but that something else was now present, Adonai – ‘the One who was, is, will be...’
And it is this Presence, active in each moment, who in a sense is each moment, that has the capacity to free the Israelites from their toil and their misery. This Presence links history, past promises, with the security of a grounded future. But for this to happen, the people have to be open to listening in to this voice of hope – but because they are immersed in their present misery they don’t have the emotional or mental space to bear this radical alternative voice, a voice which says, ‘Don’t think of Me as I used to be in the past, in tradition - think of Me metamorphosing in response to what is needed now’.
How do you think about an evolving God? How do you live with the idea that God-images are constantly evolving? That the divine isn’t static and fixed - but is fluid and provisional?
So in one sense the plagues were not just for the Egyptians and Pharaoh to have a change of heart, but they were for the Israelites, who would see them and wonder about them: 'If these things happen, what can it mean for us?’ is the question the plagues pose for the Israelites. ‘If these irruptions into the natural order are possible, what does that mean for our ways of thinking about what is possible? Perhaps our image of God - and God’s possibilities, and the possibility of God - needs to change’. Isn’t this the sense that underlies our narrative? That this whole saga of the Exodus involves an education into a different reality, the reality of the divine as a Presence that unsettles the status quo on behalf of the liberation of the human spirit.
How is our human spirit liberated in our times? How is the divine manifesting within our troubled times? The Jewish task is to live and think in the spirit of Moses, keeping our antennae tuned, listening out for what is going on, listening in to what is going on: what is changing? what new possibilities for the human spirit are there? How do we liberate ourselves, and each other? Perhaps we have to learn again to tolerate, in Woolf’s words, ‘the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure’?
In a culture that worships success, and is mistrustful of complexity, and enslaves us to consumption and materialism, we are going to have to work hard to avoid having our spirits crushed by what we are exposed to each day. The dominant narratives of our time – about what makes for happiness, about what doing well in life consists of – these narratives may need to be called into question by the spirit of Adonai that lives in us. We all have a part of us that doesn’t want to hear, that can’t hear, an oppressed part of our selves that keeps our noses to the grindstone and our minds enslaved to fixed ways of thinking. But we also have a Moses within us, that is open to the Voice, the eternal voice that speaks always, and yet whose words can be hard to hear, hard to decipher, hard to translate.
In 2011 let’s listen out for the Voice, let’s find the Moses within who is open to the new, who can hear the spirit of the divine hovering, never settling, never capturable, never already understood, (or never already dismissed) - but whose truth is revealed in fragments, in obscure intuitions, in glimpses half-seen, in whisperings and echoes.
Revelation is no longer through ‘outstretched arms and terrible chastisements’ (Exodus 6:6). It’s through the still small voice within, half heard, half-remembered, wholly mystifying. That is our homeland, our security - let’s listen out for it, listen in to it.
I wish you all a good year.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue on New Year’s Day, January 1st, 2011]
Thursday, 16 December 2010
‘Any Human Heart’
“Never say you know the last word about any human heart”. The words belong to Henry James, and that last glowing phrase was borrowed by the novelist William Boyd for the title of his 2002 novel, ‘Any Human Heart’. I haven’t read the book but I have been watching the TV adaptation of it over the last few weeks (it’s out on DVD later this month if you missed it).
I won’t spoil the story for those who don’t know it, but its interweaving of the themes of memory and desire, regret and appreciation, betrayal and commitment, through seventy years and more of the protagonist’s life was portrayed with great delicacy, pathos and humour in the TV adaptation. It’s rare to see a work that manages to capture visually the way in which fragments of our life from childhood onwards are still alive and resonant as our lives move on - how memories from decades ago can be as vivid as (or even sometimes overlay) our experiences in the present, how past and present can merge as we look out at the world. And the drama of the central character negotiating his way through the vicissitudes of history and chance, love and loss, had something profound too to say about the role of luck in our lives – good luck and bad luck.
But essentially the story speaks of the mysterious, unanalysable nature of what it means to be a human being. Thus the simple, complex, power of Henry James’ words “Never say you know the last word about any human heart”. That sentence is the antidote to any tendency we might have to think we can really know other people, that we can sum them up, define them, be certain about who or what they are. They are always more than we know. Just as we are always more than we know. For we are more than our means to know gives us to know.
I love Walt Whitman’s great burst of sentiment, wonderment, and pride (perhaps arrogance) in his triumphant poem ‘Song of Myself’ when he cries out at one point ‘I am large. I contain multitudes.’ This notion of a plural self, a self of multiple parts and attributes, a self of internal dissention and concatenation and creative interplay between the strands of thinking and feeling and physical liveliness that we all contain – this is an idea central to my understanding of why working in depth with people as a psychotherapist is one of the most privileged professions that exists. The possibility of discovery of hidden parts of the self we didn’t know about, or the freeing up of trapped parts of our self that have got stuck, or the rescuing of discarded or abandoned threads of our lives – all this emerges from the notion of the ‘human heart’ being large, capacious, multiple.
Just as it emerges too from the Jewish and Christian notion of us being made b’tzelem Elohim ‘in the likeness of God’ – for what does that mean other than that we (like ‘God’) are multiple and made up of countless aspects of ‘what is’? From compassion to rage, from a sense of justice to outbursts of hatred, from a capacity for deep love to a silent withdrawal from any more involvement, and so on and so on...we mirror the divine Being with the multiplicity of our human Being.
The WikiLeaks saga has reminded us of what we already intuitively knew: there’s always another story going on that we don’t get to hear about. But what’s true in the world at large, the world of politics and global events, is also true more personally, of our own lives. “Never say you know the last word about any human heart” – not your own, not another person’s. Until our last breath, there may still be surprises in store...
I won’t spoil the story for those who don’t know it, but its interweaving of the themes of memory and desire, regret and appreciation, betrayal and commitment, through seventy years and more of the protagonist’s life was portrayed with great delicacy, pathos and humour in the TV adaptation. It’s rare to see a work that manages to capture visually the way in which fragments of our life from childhood onwards are still alive and resonant as our lives move on - how memories from decades ago can be as vivid as (or even sometimes overlay) our experiences in the present, how past and present can merge as we look out at the world. And the drama of the central character negotiating his way through the vicissitudes of history and chance, love and loss, had something profound too to say about the role of luck in our lives – good luck and bad luck.
But essentially the story speaks of the mysterious, unanalysable nature of what it means to be a human being. Thus the simple, complex, power of Henry James’ words “Never say you know the last word about any human heart”. That sentence is the antidote to any tendency we might have to think we can really know other people, that we can sum them up, define them, be certain about who or what they are. They are always more than we know. Just as we are always more than we know. For we are more than our means to know gives us to know.
I love Walt Whitman’s great burst of sentiment, wonderment, and pride (perhaps arrogance) in his triumphant poem ‘Song of Myself’ when he cries out at one point ‘I am large. I contain multitudes.’ This notion of a plural self, a self of multiple parts and attributes, a self of internal dissention and concatenation and creative interplay between the strands of thinking and feeling and physical liveliness that we all contain – this is an idea central to my understanding of why working in depth with people as a psychotherapist is one of the most privileged professions that exists. The possibility of discovery of hidden parts of the self we didn’t know about, or the freeing up of trapped parts of our self that have got stuck, or the rescuing of discarded or abandoned threads of our lives – all this emerges from the notion of the ‘human heart’ being large, capacious, multiple.
Just as it emerges too from the Jewish and Christian notion of us being made b’tzelem Elohim ‘in the likeness of God’ – for what does that mean other than that we (like ‘God’) are multiple and made up of countless aspects of ‘what is’? From compassion to rage, from a sense of justice to outbursts of hatred, from a capacity for deep love to a silent withdrawal from any more involvement, and so on and so on...we mirror the divine Being with the multiplicity of our human Being.
The WikiLeaks saga has reminded us of what we already intuitively knew: there’s always another story going on that we don’t get to hear about. But what’s true in the world at large, the world of politics and global events, is also true more personally, of our own lives. “Never say you know the last word about any human heart” – not your own, not another person’s. Until our last breath, there may still be surprises in store...
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