I am haunted by the story. I can’t let it go, or rather it won’t let me go. This is what literature can do to you sometimes, great literature – the kind that tries to speak about how life is, in all its complexity and mystery, in all its unexpected moments of joy and pain, of sudden reversals of fortune, life in its shabbiness and its grandeur, the life that poets and novelists keep evoking and describing – arranging and re-arranging words on pages in the attempt to pierce the mystery of our being, the mystery of there being anything at all: it is the poets and the storytellers that keep reminding us that what makes human beings a unique aspect of the created universe is our capacity for language, for words, for using speech to communicate and to try to conjure up new ways of talking about who we are, what we are, why we are...
And this story in Leviticus, these few verses of an ancient text, seem to speak of something just out of our grasp. We feel that if we could really understand what is going on we’d hold in our hands, in our hearts, we’d hold in our consciousness, a moment of enlightenment. It we understood this text it would be like a revelation, a holy moment. We’d know the truth of something, how something really is and not just how it seems. We’d somehow know how the world really works – if we could but understand this simple story.
“And Nadav and Abihu, sons of Aaron, each took a fire-pan, and fire, and incense, and offered ‘strange fire’ before the Eternal, which they had not been instructed to do. And fire came forth from before the Eternal and consumed them and they died before the Eternal. And Moses said to Aaron: ‘This is what the Eternal says, these words: Through those near to Me, I will be sanctified; and before all the people I will be honoured’. And Aaron was silent.” (Leviticus 10: 1-3)
Two young men offer aysh zara – strange fire, alien fire, something that is burning and out of the ordinary, something unexpected and unpredicted and out of the range of what is known, something that runs counter to the rules set down from on high, from their parents and their God. They are not feeling constrained by what has to be, what should be done, what shouldn’t be done - there is a rebelliousness in them, a zeal, an enthusiasm, a passion – they want to connect with the divine in their own way, but what is it really that motivates them? Is it attention-seeking? Is it a prank? Is it anger at being part of a system that always tells them what to do, that demands obedience, that is filled with prohibitions and punishments and threats of more punishments? Is it a premeditated act, plotted together in secret for ages before? Or is it a sudden impulsive moment of dare-devilry – ‘I’ll do it if you do it, no you do it, no you do it, hell, let’s just do it...’
Who knows? – our storyteller isn’t going to tell us. Our storyteller is going to keep us dangling – for generation after generation – our storyteller knows that when they place this word next to that word, in this order, and create this sentence then that one, that we are going to be captivated till the end of days with a curiosity, with a desire to know, to understand, to delve beneath the surface of this brutal and dumbfounding story, to find out: why did they do it? Which is to say: why do any of us do the things that we do? What is the story we tell ourselves, or each other? What is the story we told our parents, or our siblings, that we tell our partners, or our lovers, or our teachers , or our friends – or whoever wanted to know: ‘why did you do that? How could you have done that? Couldn’t you see what would happen? Why did you do it?’
And we might have a story ready, or we might make one up, or we might have no words to offer – but that question ‘why?’ can have a dozen answers, a dozen so-called reasons, but they are only stories, more stories: ‘I did it because I was angry, I did because I was bored, I did it because I was tired, I did it because I was upset, or hurt; I did it without thinking, I did it because I thought you’d like it, or you’d be pleased with me, or you would love me, or you would stop loving me if I didn’t do it, I did it because it felt good, I did it because no-one was looking, or everyone was looking’... stories we make up, stories we believe in (or not), that try to answer that simple-sounding question: why did you do that?
Two young men offer aysh zara – strange fire, alien fire, something that is burning in them and it has to come out. And fire symbolises both what is creative and transformative – and what is destructive. And when these two men in this story offer their strange fire, and fieriness, there is no explanation, because no explanation is ever sufficient - because we are strangers to ourselves, aliens who think we know why we act but rarely take into account that actions are often prompted by the unconscious in us. We think we are rational and conscious and coolly calculating beings – but this story reminds us that this is just a fiction, another story, one we like to tell ourselves, a soothing fairytale of a story: ‘Oh, I did this because of that’, as if we were a mathematical formula, x plus y = z. I did z because of x and y. ‘I left him because he snored and always left the toilet seat up’. ‘I married her because she had beautiful eyes, and a father who was a millionaire.’ What a consoling fiction this is, that human motivation can be tracked down in this simple way, as if the mind and the heart and consciousness itself is just a refined computer-type programme waiting for us to de-code, or load up with more programmes that we can then act out. But what this short story reveals is that we are essentially a mystery: to ourselves, let alone to other people.
There were plenty of things I could have addressed this week, other than this nagging mysterious story, the one that won’t let me go. What about the sinking of the Titanic, 100 years ago? What an extraordinary story this has become in the British psyche: it’s become mythic, a story about class, and fate, and hubris and arrogance and bravery and cowardice and the randomness of who will live and who will die, and how the story the makers of that ship told about it in 1912 - and the captain and crew and passengers believed - that this was a ship that was unsinkable, what a story that was, what a fiction that was, how naive to believe in the stories we tell ourselves about how things are and have to be.
Or I could have addressed what’s happened to another storyteller, the grand old man of German letters, Nobel laureate Gunter Grass, 84 years old, for whom reading and writing – the habit of looking intensely at words – became the work of a lifetime, and now he’s been banned from entering Israel, to which he has a strong and loving bond, because he wrote a poem – in truth, not a very good poem – a poem in which he spoke about both Iran and Israel as having the potential capacity to act in ways “endangering/Our already fragile world peace”. Following which rather uncontroversial sentiment ,a huge storm of controversy has erupted around him – with knee-jerk reactions from the predictable sources : that Grass has voiced “deep-seated prejudice against the Jewish people” (i.e. he’s an anti-Semite) – that’s from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in the States; and from Netanyahu a helpful, diplomatic response that Grass is just an unreconstructed Nazi because he was drafted into the Waffen SS at the age of 16 towards the end of the War, and we aren’t going to take moral lessons from Germans anyway.
The power of words – they can explode in your face – a storyteller poet can offer his own alien fire and the next thing you know the wrath of the gods (or those who set themselves up in God’s place) falls upon him.
The power of words, of stories, of language – and who the stories are told to, and where they are told. What about the Habima theatre company of Israel, founded in 1905 and Israel’s oldest theatre group, who are due to visit London in May but are facing a boycott campaign? They perform all over Israel and they’ve done some performances in Ariel, in the West Bank; they have sponsorship from the government of Israel and a contractual obligation to go, but no actor is forced to perform there if their conscience dictates not to, and actors who choose not to face no sanctions from the company. They are due to perform their Hebrew language version of The Merchant of Venice, at the Globe during the London Shakespeare Festival. And as another storyteller Howard Jacobson has said in defence of their visit: "If there is one justification for art… it is that it proceeds from, and addresses, our unaligned humanity. Whoever would go to art with a mind made up on any subject misses the point of what art is for”. (Though I note that Jacobson has remained silent, as far as I know, about Grass).
Which stories are we allowed to hear? which poems are we allowed to read? which words are too strange, too alien, too fiery, too filled with burning indignation, too dangerous, to be offered up on the altar, in full view of the public?
In Leviticus, the story is told that something is offered, strange, alien, of burning intensity – and it is followed by death, and more words, as Moses tries to rationalise what has happened: he offers his own story, which you can take or leave. (It’s what you’d expect from a religious leader, a bit of pious gobbledygook to cover up the outrageous unpredictability of what life throws at us).
But the most eloquent response, the most poignant, the most pregnant with meaning and feeling is that of Aaron, who is suddenly a survivor: a survivor of the unaccountable way in which life unfolds, bringing death in its wake; and he stands there, in the presence of the non-rational, the awesome irruption of chaos into the order of the day, vayidom Aharon : and Aaron was silent.
And there is a gap in the text, a moment of suspended action: as we wait, as we join Aaron in his silence. Sometimes there are no words. Sometimes there is a moment when we realise that words are a cover-up, that there is something unutterable about life, underneath words, between words, and our storyteller gives us a glimpse into that larger silence in which we are held, beyond language, from which we have come and into which we will go. And we stare - with Aaron, through Aaron - into the abyss. And we hear the silence. And it is heartbreaking, this silence.
And it is also, potentially, heart-mending, this silence.
But that’s another story.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, April 14th, 2012]
Monday, 16 April 2012
Wednesday, 4 April 2012
On Demagogues and 'God': some Pesach thoughts
He thought people had witnessed “something miraculous” – in the biblical sense of the word. “As a religious man I have to believe that there is some divine intervention in this...something sacred. Justice has been done.”
No, not Moses after the exodus from Egypt, standing exhausted on the far shore of the Sea of Reeds in awe at how events had unfolded, some combination of nature and the historical moment that would enter a people’s collective memory to become a legend told and re-told, elaborated upon, mythologised over the generations, each telling a re-collection of fragments of memory, each telling an elaboration, each telling adding weight and significance to that initial sense of freedom, freedom gained who knows how? who knows why? but freedom gained - and awaiting its narrators, its storytellers, its making-sense-of-it-all mythographers and poets...
No, this was Friday March 30th, in the early hours of the morning at the prosaic Richard Dunn Sports Centre in Bradford - and God’s intervention is claimed with a raucous and aggressive immediacy: “All praise to Allah!”, then the response, “Allah, Allah” - like a football chant - then the crowd-pleasing seduction of “Long live Iraq! Long live Palestine!”, and the jubilation spills out onto the streets as the ‘miracle’ is proclaimed. No, not Moses, but George.
George Galloway’s stunning bye-election victory has received a fair amount of media coverage. His capacity to tap into local issues to do with poverty and unemployment, and the local disaffection about the system of political patronage that seems to dominate Bradford politics, were part of his appeal. But stirring up racial and religious tensions and utilising his reputation as an opponent of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan came in handy too – as did the literature from his ironically-named ‘Respect Party’ that claimed that this Scottish Catholic was more of an adherent to Muslim principles than his Muslim Labour opponent: “God KNOWS who is Muslim. And he KNOWS who is not. Instinctively, so do you. [So you the voter, and I, George Galloway, are ‘instinctively’ in the same camp as God]...I, George Galloway, do not drink alcohol and never have. Ask yourself if the other candidate can say that truthfully...”
Although there are rumours that Galloway has in fact converted to Islam – he does seem to have a polygamous series of wives married in Muslim ceremonies – there’s no doubt he’s found a useful campaign strategy here: align yourself with God and smear your opponent as less religiously devout than you are. Galloway’s whole sickening mis-appropriation of the language and principles of religion – and particularly his megalomaniacal, self-deluding claim that his success was due to ‘divine intervention’ – seems to me an extraordinarily disturbing event in British politics. The media coverage seems to have passed over in silence these claims about the ‘sacred’ nature of the event. Perhaps they are more interested in the political dimensions of the election – or perhaps, not confident enough to judge a person’s theology, they see this language as just part of Galloway’s idiosyncratic personality. But I think we should pay a bit more attention to what’s going on here.
In The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky put into the mouth of his character Karamazov the view – now much-quoted, and much-disputed – that “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted”. But it seems to me that the opposite is as relevant, and perhaps more dangerous. For we have seen on countless occasions that once you claim to have God on your side, then anything is permitted: whether it is the Crusades or the occupation of ‘holy’ land, honour killings or the burning of heretics, the suppression of women or beating the devil out of children, too-readily knowing what ‘God’ wants can lead to mayhem, cruelty and murder.
In the mouth of a demagogue like Galloway, the phrase “All praise to Allah” carries a vicious and frightening undertone. Galloway has paid court to some modern pharoahs, dictators like Sadaam Hussein and Syria’s Bashar al Assad – they offer him an image of his own perverse ruthlessness, so no wonder he finds himself in thrall to their power-hungry personalities – and this co-opting of Muslim religious language is his latest ploy in grabbing power for himself.
So as Pesach (Passover) approaches, I find myself reflecting on how we can liberate the language of ‘God’ and the ‘sacred’ and ‘divine intervention’ from those who cynically co-op it for their own selfish and egotistical needs. The Haggadah text famously downplays the role of Moses in the extra-ordinary Exodus events it describes: Moses only gets a glancing mention within the traditional ‘Grace after Meals’ – he is completely absent from the first half of the seder, where the people’s journey from slavery to freedom is described and celebrated.
This of course runs counter to the Biblical narrative itself, where Moses’ hesitant-but-crucial leadership is highlighted within the story. But on seder night it is as if the anonymous compilers of the liturgy are making a discrete bid to de-legitimize any cult of personality. ‘Our story of salvation’, they seem to be saying, ‘is a story without a human Saviour’ – so our story is unlike that of Christianity, for example, the rival faith one feels they must have had in mind as they assembled the elements of the Jewish salvation story.
Freedom happens, they suggest, because there is a salvific force that enters into human events, perhaps when people least expect it. It comes, this force, with a power and an authority that sweeps people up in its force field, sweeps people along with what gradually – or suddenly – is experienced as a force of inevitability, unsettling the status quo, and reversing the prevailing dynamics of power.
Later on we might call it - our bards and poets might hymn it as - ‘God’s divine intervention’. Though at the time it was a mad scramble for survival and escape and taking the chance that came, the chaos of events, the lack of time to think, not even enough time to bake a loaf of bread, just the rising up in one’s spleen of the will to break free, the opportunism of the moment, when the society was reeling from one damned thing after another and death was all around and the powers-that-be were mourning their losses, and the wild-eyed visionary stuttering one and his shadowy, smooth-tongued brother said Now is the Time, the End-Time, ‘Let’s go, my people’ – though we might have got the words wrong in the confusion of the hour – but something stirred in our souls and we realised that we were not yet crushed unto death, our hearts were beating, still beating with the pulse of justice and the knowledge of injustices done and suffered, and we took our unleavened cakes of dough and at midnight – or thereabouts – we left our homes and our slave-lives and our Egyptian overlords, and broke free of our humiliation and broke free of our slavery to ‘it can’t be done’ and ‘it can never happen’, we broke free of our despair and our hopelessness, and some ancient spirit of defiance and hope breathed itself into our nostrils, we discovered again an animating energy we had forgotten we ever possessed, we found new life, like a grace flowing in our veins, and before we knew it we were away, away from there, on the journey, the truly immense journey, the journey we still are on.
And call it ‘divine intervention’ if you like.
No, not Moses after the exodus from Egypt, standing exhausted on the far shore of the Sea of Reeds in awe at how events had unfolded, some combination of nature and the historical moment that would enter a people’s collective memory to become a legend told and re-told, elaborated upon, mythologised over the generations, each telling a re-collection of fragments of memory, each telling an elaboration, each telling adding weight and significance to that initial sense of freedom, freedom gained who knows how? who knows why? but freedom gained - and awaiting its narrators, its storytellers, its making-sense-of-it-all mythographers and poets...
No, this was Friday March 30th, in the early hours of the morning at the prosaic Richard Dunn Sports Centre in Bradford - and God’s intervention is claimed with a raucous and aggressive immediacy: “All praise to Allah!”, then the response, “Allah, Allah” - like a football chant - then the crowd-pleasing seduction of “Long live Iraq! Long live Palestine!”, and the jubilation spills out onto the streets as the ‘miracle’ is proclaimed. No, not Moses, but George.
George Galloway’s stunning bye-election victory has received a fair amount of media coverage. His capacity to tap into local issues to do with poverty and unemployment, and the local disaffection about the system of political patronage that seems to dominate Bradford politics, were part of his appeal. But stirring up racial and religious tensions and utilising his reputation as an opponent of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan came in handy too – as did the literature from his ironically-named ‘Respect Party’ that claimed that this Scottish Catholic was more of an adherent to Muslim principles than his Muslim Labour opponent: “God KNOWS who is Muslim. And he KNOWS who is not. Instinctively, so do you. [So you the voter, and I, George Galloway, are ‘instinctively’ in the same camp as God]...I, George Galloway, do not drink alcohol and never have. Ask yourself if the other candidate can say that truthfully...”
Although there are rumours that Galloway has in fact converted to Islam – he does seem to have a polygamous series of wives married in Muslim ceremonies – there’s no doubt he’s found a useful campaign strategy here: align yourself with God and smear your opponent as less religiously devout than you are. Galloway’s whole sickening mis-appropriation of the language and principles of religion – and particularly his megalomaniacal, self-deluding claim that his success was due to ‘divine intervention’ – seems to me an extraordinarily disturbing event in British politics. The media coverage seems to have passed over in silence these claims about the ‘sacred’ nature of the event. Perhaps they are more interested in the political dimensions of the election – or perhaps, not confident enough to judge a person’s theology, they see this language as just part of Galloway’s idiosyncratic personality. But I think we should pay a bit more attention to what’s going on here.
In The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky put into the mouth of his character Karamazov the view – now much-quoted, and much-disputed – that “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted”. But it seems to me that the opposite is as relevant, and perhaps more dangerous. For we have seen on countless occasions that once you claim to have God on your side, then anything is permitted: whether it is the Crusades or the occupation of ‘holy’ land, honour killings or the burning of heretics, the suppression of women or beating the devil out of children, too-readily knowing what ‘God’ wants can lead to mayhem, cruelty and murder.
In the mouth of a demagogue like Galloway, the phrase “All praise to Allah” carries a vicious and frightening undertone. Galloway has paid court to some modern pharoahs, dictators like Sadaam Hussein and Syria’s Bashar al Assad – they offer him an image of his own perverse ruthlessness, so no wonder he finds himself in thrall to their power-hungry personalities – and this co-opting of Muslim religious language is his latest ploy in grabbing power for himself.
So as Pesach (Passover) approaches, I find myself reflecting on how we can liberate the language of ‘God’ and the ‘sacred’ and ‘divine intervention’ from those who cynically co-op it for their own selfish and egotistical needs. The Haggadah text famously downplays the role of Moses in the extra-ordinary Exodus events it describes: Moses only gets a glancing mention within the traditional ‘Grace after Meals’ – he is completely absent from the first half of the seder, where the people’s journey from slavery to freedom is described and celebrated.
This of course runs counter to the Biblical narrative itself, where Moses’ hesitant-but-crucial leadership is highlighted within the story. But on seder night it is as if the anonymous compilers of the liturgy are making a discrete bid to de-legitimize any cult of personality. ‘Our story of salvation’, they seem to be saying, ‘is a story without a human Saviour’ – so our story is unlike that of Christianity, for example, the rival faith one feels they must have had in mind as they assembled the elements of the Jewish salvation story.
Freedom happens, they suggest, because there is a salvific force that enters into human events, perhaps when people least expect it. It comes, this force, with a power and an authority that sweeps people up in its force field, sweeps people along with what gradually – or suddenly – is experienced as a force of inevitability, unsettling the status quo, and reversing the prevailing dynamics of power.
Later on we might call it - our bards and poets might hymn it as - ‘God’s divine intervention’. Though at the time it was a mad scramble for survival and escape and taking the chance that came, the chaos of events, the lack of time to think, not even enough time to bake a loaf of bread, just the rising up in one’s spleen of the will to break free, the opportunism of the moment, when the society was reeling from one damned thing after another and death was all around and the powers-that-be were mourning their losses, and the wild-eyed visionary stuttering one and his shadowy, smooth-tongued brother said Now is the Time, the End-Time, ‘Let’s go, my people’ – though we might have got the words wrong in the confusion of the hour – but something stirred in our souls and we realised that we were not yet crushed unto death, our hearts were beating, still beating with the pulse of justice and the knowledge of injustices done and suffered, and we took our unleavened cakes of dough and at midnight – or thereabouts – we left our homes and our slave-lives and our Egyptian overlords, and broke free of our humiliation and broke free of our slavery to ‘it can’t be done’ and ‘it can never happen’, we broke free of our despair and our hopelessness, and some ancient spirit of defiance and hope breathed itself into our nostrils, we discovered again an animating energy we had forgotten we ever possessed, we found new life, like a grace flowing in our veins, and before we knew it we were away, away from there, on the journey, the truly immense journey, the journey we still are on.
And call it ‘divine intervention’ if you like.
Tuesday, 6 March 2012
Purim blog: ‘Who is Amelek?’
What would Judaism be without its prayers and its rituals? Would it be, as a Bar Mitzvah boy said recently in my community, ‘just a big social club’?
It’s true that without prayer and without ritual Jews would still be quite distinctive - we’d still be an ethnic and cultural group, we’d still have an identity. We’d be the people who invented the bagel. (And the people who decided to fill the bagel with smoked salmon and cream-cheese. We’ve exported that around the world). We’d still have our ethnic foods. We’d be the ‘chicken soup is as good as penicillin’ people. So there would be the food. And the humour of course. We do great jokes – because with our history we had to find some way of coping with the tears.
So we’d be a distinctive social club with great food – though everyone would always be on diets, because have you ever met a Jew who’s happy with their weight? Or for that matter how they look? Still we would be a great social club – though we’d have to have another social club nearby that we wouldn’t be seen dead in because they don’t do things the right way there.
OK. Enough Jackie Mason. He was also a rabbi who thought he was a comedian. (We can be quite bitchy too as people – quick to cast aspersions, to blame, to criticise – if kvetching was an Olympic sport, we’d win gold every time. We’re quick to criticise – and slow to admit we are ever wrong).
But of course it’s not just prayer and ritual that define Judaism. In fact some people might say, the prophets of Israel used to say, the essence of Judaism as a way of life isn’t prayer, and it isn’t Jewish rituals and ceremonies. It’s something else. It’s ethics. It’s how we act towards each other. It’s about righteousness and compassion and our passion for justice. It’s about giving to others – our time, our money (charity/tzedakah), giving our energy, our love, our empathy and care. We know all this.
So why does the Torah have to repeat 36 times the injunction to care about the stranger, the outsider, the ones who don’t ‘belong’? ‘That is your story too’, the Torah says, ‘you were once outsiders, strangers, in Egypt; you were once despised and abused because you didn’t seem to fit in, and you had come from somewhere else’. Is that so difficult to get our heads around? Our hearts around? It seems that it is.
Judaism is based on this extraordinary idea of human value, human worth, of uniqueness, preciousness, each person made (in that amazing phrase), b’zelem Elohim, in the ‘image of God’ (Genesis 1:27). It’s a beautiful and poetic image – the picture of human beings having divinity grafted into their souls. And therefore deserving of respect.
And it’s not just ‘us’, in our Jewish ethnic-cultural-religious club, it’s ‘them’ too – whoever the Others are, Poles or Pakistanis or Palestinians. Whether people love us or hate us, Judaism’s greatest challenge to us is: can we see the Other as b’zelem Elohim? In a sense we might say that hatred always involves a failure of imagination. And that includes self-hatred.
So this capacity to act with compassion and enact justice is the ethical and moral heart of Judaism – and without it we are just a big social club that’s given us Hollywood and Jewish humour and food that gives us heartburn. Of course you don’t have to be Jewish, or religious, to dedicate your life to acting with compassion and care, and fighting for justice. But Judaism as a way of life stands or falls on how well we can inhabit and live out its core ethical ideals. I repeat: we know all this.
So why is it so hard to keep on articulating it? And trying to live it out? I’m still mulling over, still stirred up by, what I saw and learnt on my recent trip to Israel with the British Friends of Rabbis for Human Rights (see February’s blog and www.rhruk.co.uk). On the one hand, Israel does receive a fair amount of critical attention in the media , and some of the perceptions sometimes seem unfair or inaccurate; and yet there are things going on there, within Israel itself and in the Territories, that don’t accord with the highest values of our Jewish tradition. When we hear about discrimination in Israel by the State against the Bedouin, or by Israeli rabbis against Orthodox women, or the authorities against Ethiopian immigrants, or Knesset legislation targeting NGOs and civil rights groups that are trying to defend human rights or promote ethical values, or we hear about the fire-bombing of mosques and the uprooting of Palestinian olive trees or the illegal building of settler homes on land to which Palestinians have documentary proof of ownership – when we hear about any of this we may (and probably should) feel uncomfortable, unsettled, disturbed.
And it matters to us not because we are ethically-sensitive people who might care equally about the bloodshed in Syria or the growing homelessness and poverty in the UK. It matters to us because we feel bound up in a particular way with the living out of Jewish life in Israel.
There is a rabbinic saying that " Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh " ‘all Jews are sureties for one another’ – we have a responsibility for one another, and one of the responsibilities we have is to stand up and say: ‘this act, this practice, this behaviour does not correspond to the highest values of our tradition, we can do better than that’.
That kind of ethical criticism and self-criticism has been in our tradition from the days of the prophets onwards. It’s not comfortable, either to do it or receive it, but unless we are just going to be a big social club, it is a religious responsibility. It’s much easier for us to see ourselves as the victims. We have generations and centuries of experience of that – real experience, tragic experience. It’s there in our minds, maybe at the back of our minds, maybe in the forefront - but unavoidable: the knowledge that hostility has been and is directed against us. That’s not news.
It’s even been grafted into our annual calendar: last Shabbat we read about Amalek, three verses from Deuteronomy (25: 17-19) which describe the way in which the children of Israel, wandering through the desert just after the Exodus from Egypt, were attacked in an unprovoked manner by the tribe of Amalek. These verses are always read on the Shabbat before Purim, our carnival festival when we read in the Book of Esther about the plan by Haman - described as a descendent of a later Amalekite king, Agag - to wipe out the Jews of Persia. A strange people we are – we commemorate an attempted genocide with a festival of frivolity, jokes and drink.
We call that pre-Purim Shabbat Shabbat Zachor , the ‘Shabbat of Remembering’. It reminds us of a grim reading of Jewish history : ‘there is always someone against us, remember that’. ‘Amalek’ is an archetype that is felt to exist in one form or another in every generation. And although this may be a necessary injunction – lo tishkakh, ‘Do not forget!’ (Deut 23:19), don’t forget there are always people who feel hostility towards us - it’s harder to remember something else: that ‘Amalek’ is not just the name for something outside us, but it is inside us too.
When I studied the Amalek text in Israel with some of the extraordinary rabbis and teachers who live there and are battling hard for an ethical Judaism to be enacted in daily life in that country they love, and many of us love, one of the things they all said, in different ways, and at different times, was that there is a battle going on, right now, for the soul of Israel and the soul of Judaism. There are forces around that go in the guise of nationalism or religion (or both), that are anti-democratic (their language, not mine) and contrary to Jewish ethical principles. The enemy, the 'Amalek', the one seeking to hurt and harm and destroy is not just the Other, it’s not about Hezbollah and Iran – that’s too easy to think, and react against. It deflects attention away from something else. No: 'Amalek', they suggested , is an internal experience, it’s part of us, it’s in us . It’s about the hatred and antagonism in Jewish hearts.
That’s hard to hear, hard to say. It’s like saying we Jews are our own worst enemy. We don’t want to know that, think that, hear that.
But it’s what the prophets of Israel kept on saying, and it’s what the modern inheritors of that vision, those brave men and women in Israel battling for civil rights and human rights, it’s what they are saying and putting their bodies on the line for, quite literally - because the aggression of not only Jew-on-Palestinian but Jew-on-Jew is a very real and present experience to them.
What they are saying, and it’s the message they wanted visitors like me to bring home, is that Judaism is not a social club – it’s a way of seeing the world that puts justice and compassion at its very centre. Nothing else can substitute for that. Not even bagels and smoked salmon.
[Extracted and adapted from a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, March 3rd 2012]
It’s true that without prayer and without ritual Jews would still be quite distinctive - we’d still be an ethnic and cultural group, we’d still have an identity. We’d be the people who invented the bagel. (And the people who decided to fill the bagel with smoked salmon and cream-cheese. We’ve exported that around the world). We’d still have our ethnic foods. We’d be the ‘chicken soup is as good as penicillin’ people. So there would be the food. And the humour of course. We do great jokes – because with our history we had to find some way of coping with the tears.
So we’d be a distinctive social club with great food – though everyone would always be on diets, because have you ever met a Jew who’s happy with their weight? Or for that matter how they look? Still we would be a great social club – though we’d have to have another social club nearby that we wouldn’t be seen dead in because they don’t do things the right way there.
OK. Enough Jackie Mason. He was also a rabbi who thought he was a comedian. (We can be quite bitchy too as people – quick to cast aspersions, to blame, to criticise – if kvetching was an Olympic sport, we’d win gold every time. We’re quick to criticise – and slow to admit we are ever wrong).
But of course it’s not just prayer and ritual that define Judaism. In fact some people might say, the prophets of Israel used to say, the essence of Judaism as a way of life isn’t prayer, and it isn’t Jewish rituals and ceremonies. It’s something else. It’s ethics. It’s how we act towards each other. It’s about righteousness and compassion and our passion for justice. It’s about giving to others – our time, our money (charity/tzedakah), giving our energy, our love, our empathy and care. We know all this.
So why does the Torah have to repeat 36 times the injunction to care about the stranger, the outsider, the ones who don’t ‘belong’? ‘That is your story too’, the Torah says, ‘you were once outsiders, strangers, in Egypt; you were once despised and abused because you didn’t seem to fit in, and you had come from somewhere else’. Is that so difficult to get our heads around? Our hearts around? It seems that it is.
Judaism is based on this extraordinary idea of human value, human worth, of uniqueness, preciousness, each person made (in that amazing phrase), b’zelem Elohim, in the ‘image of God’ (Genesis 1:27). It’s a beautiful and poetic image – the picture of human beings having divinity grafted into their souls. And therefore deserving of respect.
And it’s not just ‘us’, in our Jewish ethnic-cultural-religious club, it’s ‘them’ too – whoever the Others are, Poles or Pakistanis or Palestinians. Whether people love us or hate us, Judaism’s greatest challenge to us is: can we see the Other as b’zelem Elohim? In a sense we might say that hatred always involves a failure of imagination. And that includes self-hatred.
So this capacity to act with compassion and enact justice is the ethical and moral heart of Judaism – and without it we are just a big social club that’s given us Hollywood and Jewish humour and food that gives us heartburn. Of course you don’t have to be Jewish, or religious, to dedicate your life to acting with compassion and care, and fighting for justice. But Judaism as a way of life stands or falls on how well we can inhabit and live out its core ethical ideals. I repeat: we know all this.
So why is it so hard to keep on articulating it? And trying to live it out? I’m still mulling over, still stirred up by, what I saw and learnt on my recent trip to Israel with the British Friends of Rabbis for Human Rights (see February’s blog and www.rhruk.co.uk). On the one hand, Israel does receive a fair amount of critical attention in the media , and some of the perceptions sometimes seem unfair or inaccurate; and yet there are things going on there, within Israel itself and in the Territories, that don’t accord with the highest values of our Jewish tradition. When we hear about discrimination in Israel by the State against the Bedouin, or by Israeli rabbis against Orthodox women, or the authorities against Ethiopian immigrants, or Knesset legislation targeting NGOs and civil rights groups that are trying to defend human rights or promote ethical values, or we hear about the fire-bombing of mosques and the uprooting of Palestinian olive trees or the illegal building of settler homes on land to which Palestinians have documentary proof of ownership – when we hear about any of this we may (and probably should) feel uncomfortable, unsettled, disturbed.
And it matters to us not because we are ethically-sensitive people who might care equally about the bloodshed in Syria or the growing homelessness and poverty in the UK. It matters to us because we feel bound up in a particular way with the living out of Jewish life in Israel.
There is a rabbinic saying that " Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh " ‘all Jews are sureties for one another’ – we have a responsibility for one another, and one of the responsibilities we have is to stand up and say: ‘this act, this practice, this behaviour does not correspond to the highest values of our tradition, we can do better than that’.
That kind of ethical criticism and self-criticism has been in our tradition from the days of the prophets onwards. It’s not comfortable, either to do it or receive it, but unless we are just going to be a big social club, it is a religious responsibility. It’s much easier for us to see ourselves as the victims. We have generations and centuries of experience of that – real experience, tragic experience. It’s there in our minds, maybe at the back of our minds, maybe in the forefront - but unavoidable: the knowledge that hostility has been and is directed against us. That’s not news.
It’s even been grafted into our annual calendar: last Shabbat we read about Amalek, three verses from Deuteronomy (25: 17-19) which describe the way in which the children of Israel, wandering through the desert just after the Exodus from Egypt, were attacked in an unprovoked manner by the tribe of Amalek. These verses are always read on the Shabbat before Purim, our carnival festival when we read in the Book of Esther about the plan by Haman - described as a descendent of a later Amalekite king, Agag - to wipe out the Jews of Persia. A strange people we are – we commemorate an attempted genocide with a festival of frivolity, jokes and drink.
We call that pre-Purim Shabbat Shabbat Zachor , the ‘Shabbat of Remembering’. It reminds us of a grim reading of Jewish history : ‘there is always someone against us, remember that’. ‘Amalek’ is an archetype that is felt to exist in one form or another in every generation. And although this may be a necessary injunction – lo tishkakh, ‘Do not forget!’ (Deut 23:19), don’t forget there are always people who feel hostility towards us - it’s harder to remember something else: that ‘Amalek’ is not just the name for something outside us, but it is inside us too.
When I studied the Amalek text in Israel with some of the extraordinary rabbis and teachers who live there and are battling hard for an ethical Judaism to be enacted in daily life in that country they love, and many of us love, one of the things they all said, in different ways, and at different times, was that there is a battle going on, right now, for the soul of Israel and the soul of Judaism. There are forces around that go in the guise of nationalism or religion (or both), that are anti-democratic (their language, not mine) and contrary to Jewish ethical principles. The enemy, the 'Amalek', the one seeking to hurt and harm and destroy is not just the Other, it’s not about Hezbollah and Iran – that’s too easy to think, and react against. It deflects attention away from something else. No: 'Amalek', they suggested , is an internal experience, it’s part of us, it’s in us . It’s about the hatred and antagonism in Jewish hearts.
That’s hard to hear, hard to say. It’s like saying we Jews are our own worst enemy. We don’t want to know that, think that, hear that.
But it’s what the prophets of Israel kept on saying, and it’s what the modern inheritors of that vision, those brave men and women in Israel battling for civil rights and human rights, it’s what they are saying and putting their bodies on the line for, quite literally - because the aggression of not only Jew-on-Palestinian but Jew-on-Jew is a very real and present experience to them.
What they are saying, and it’s the message they wanted visitors like me to bring home, is that Judaism is not a social club – it’s a way of seeing the world that puts justice and compassion at its very centre. Nothing else can substitute for that. Not even bagels and smoked salmon.
[Extracted and adapted from a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, March 3rd 2012]
Thursday, 16 February 2012
'In Our Name?'
This is how it starts: ‘Purpose of visit?’ ‘A study tour with British Friends of Rabbis for Human Rights. Here’s the itinerary.’ ‘How long?’ ‘You can see on the itinerary – Sunday to Sunday.’ ‘What are you doing on the tour?’
Hesitation. I think of the ambiguity within the Security guy's question. English is not his first language. Is he asking what the tour will include? The details are all there, it’s laid out in black and white, a daily schedule, hour by hour: Jerusalem, South Hebron Hills, Tel Sheva, Sederot, Hadera, West Bank, meetings with NGOs, studying with rabbis, meetings with Bedouin and Palestinians and workers for RHR. Does he want me to repeat to him the itinerary? Or is the question more personal – ‘what are you doing on this tour?’ - how is it that I have decided to go and see for myself some of the human rights, civil rights and humanitarian projects that my rabbinic colleagues in Israel and Palestine are engaged with?
As I hesitate about what will be the simplest response at the El Al check-in at Heathrow – i.e. the response he wants to hear so that I can be processed through security and on to my flight – I realise that it has already started: the encounter with a country that is in a state of heightened suspicion and fear. Where everyone is a potential enemy. Where everyone who is ‘Other’ is threatening. And – as I learnt during an exhausting and revelatory week in Israel – the ‘Other’ is also within.
For Israel is in a state of undeclared war within itself, and with itself. And the battle lines are becoming clearer and clearer. Will Israel become a racist and theocratic state where the rule of law is continually over-ridden by interest groups like religious settlers and nationalists; or will it retain its original democratic ethos as inscribed in its Declaration of Independence? A Declaration that says that the State ‘will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants...it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture...’
But I am still at the airport. ‘Why is there Arabic here?’ – he’s pointing to the paper that I’d hope would save a lot of time and tedious explanation but now has become a focus of scrutiny and concern. The organisation’s name, ‘Rabbis for Human Rights’, is in English, Hebrew and Arabic on the letterhead of the itinerary. And while I pause and consider what to say, another question arrives, or maybe it is a statement, I am not really listening any longer: ‘You are meeting Palestinians...’
What I want to say is that Arabic is still, the last time I checked, one of the official languages of the State of Israel, so it has a right to figure in the letterhead of an Israeli human rights organisation. But I don’t want to be sarcastic, or provocative, because I want to catch my flight - but I am aware of how easily aggression can be generated by the fraught and dense emotionality that is wrapped up in this beleaguered country.
So that was how it started. And that was how it continued. As several of the rabbis we met on the trip said, in a manner so casual that one could easily miss its significance, there is a battle going on ‘for the soul of Israel’, and that ‘the Jewish soul is threatened’ – but most Israelis are living in denial. Denial of the moral and spiritual costs of the Occupation, denial of discrimination and inequalities that are systemic in Israel itself, denial of how a critique of the government or the army can come out of love of Zion rather than anti-semitism or Jewish self-hatred.
Rabbis for Human Rights was established in Israel in 1988 by the American-born Reform Rabbi David Forman in order to give voice in the contemporary Israeli setting to the Judaism’s traditional concern for the ‘stranger’, the ‘outsider’ and the disadvantaged. Their initial focus was primarily on protecting the human rights of Palestinians in areas controlled by Israel; but they rapidly expanded their work to embrace the rights of vulnerable and minority groups throughout Israeli society.
During the week we met, studied with and travelled with a series of inspirational and charismatic RHR rabbis (from across the religious spectrum, including Rabbi Gideon Sylvester an ex-United Synagogue rabbi who now runs the RHR Human Rights Yeshiva) as well as hearing from and seeing in action their professional colleagues trained in law, education and civil rights.
Based in Jerusalem, we spent the first day gaining an insight into some of the grotesque consequences of the Separation Wall that now scars the landscape of Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside. Although the wall – built, ironically, by Palestinian workers with concrete bought from factories owned by President Mahmoud Abbas - has given Jewish Jerusalemites a much greater sense of security, its ugly presence is a constant reminder that Jewish security has been bought in exchange for increased hardship for east Jerusalem Arabs: hospitals that were once ten minutes away by car now require a 2 hour circuitous trip, around Jerusalem and through two checkpoints; livelihoods have been ruined, and families divided.
The shock of the aesthetic desecration of Jerusalem – and Bethlehem, now surrounded by a ‘sleeve’ of brutal concrete that enables pious Jews access to Rachel’s Tomb, but denies access to Muslims, for whom it is also a site of prayer - is mirrored in the moral collapse at the heart of the government’s policy: although Israel has the right and duty to protect its citizens from attacks, the Wall was the most extreme solution available. We witnessed the ways in which its route was designed more for future political purposes – to make territory easier to annex in any future settlement – than for security purposes.
Although one reads about these issues, it is not until one sees the reality on the ground that something of the human dimension to these actions becomes clearer. And it is the human costs that the RHR workers and rabbis are focussed on and helped us understand in some depth. Many of the projects we visited are working at grass-roots level on inequities that ordinary Israelis suffer: single mothers in Hadera who need help with economic and legal problems or domestic violence; Bedouin in the Negev whose civil amenities are far inferior to the Jewish neighbours, or whose land is appropriated for reforestation by the JNF; Orthodox women who suffer discrimination in their communities...the work of RHR embraces a bewildering variety of causes, often in partnership with other NGOs, some of whom – like the New Israel Fund, Yisrael Hofshit, and Citizens for Equality - we were also able to meet.
Bringing specific human rights grievances to the attention of the Israeli public while pressuring the appropriate authorities – from local courts to the Knesset - is an endless job. Visiting the RHR website – www.rhr.org.il/eng - is an experience both exhilarating and maddening: as I read it I am in awe of the dedication of those who are fighting injustices but enraged at the ways in which the State of Israel acts in ways contrary to humanitarian and ethical principles.
As a group we moved from being depressed, angry and perplexed at some of the glaring injustices – particularly on the West Bank where Orthodox settlers are currently engaged in a series or random attacks on Palestinian homes as well as the fire-bombing of mosques – to feeling stirred and inspired by some of the RHR workers who are battling for the soul of Israel, case by case, family by family.
One of the comments that struck me most was that of a lawyer for RHR who said that this work offers you a ‘one way ticket’ – once you have opened your eyes to the reality of the suffering and discrimination that the State and the army (and the two are entwined in a fatal embrace) inflict on people who are seen as ‘Other’ – like Palestinians in the territories, or Bedouin in the Negev, or Arab-Israeli citizens in east Jerusalem – there is no going back. It isn’t possible to un-know what one knows – or it isn’t possible to do so and keeps one’s soul alive (my words, not hers).
It so happened that while I was there I came across an article in Ha’aretz written by Amira Hass, a continual thorn in the side of the government for her exposure of injustices. After detailing some cases in the Territories in Israel proper where ‘the right to memory is presented as a security risk’, she went on to talk about the work of Rabbis for Human Rights in this way:
‘This organisation...takes part in dozens of campaigns, most of them Sisyphean, to rescue people from the civil jaws of the regime of Jewish privilege. They are, unintentionally, bold and painful attempts to save “Jewish” from being a synonym in Israel for racist, lordly, hard-hearted, hypocritical, shortsighted.’
And so it continues, day after day. Let nobody in the future say : ‘We didn’t know...we didn’t know what is being done in our name’.
***
For more information on – and details of how to join – the British Friends of Rabbis for Human Rights see www.rhruk.co.uk
Hesitation. I think of the ambiguity within the Security guy's question. English is not his first language. Is he asking what the tour will include? The details are all there, it’s laid out in black and white, a daily schedule, hour by hour: Jerusalem, South Hebron Hills, Tel Sheva, Sederot, Hadera, West Bank, meetings with NGOs, studying with rabbis, meetings with Bedouin and Palestinians and workers for RHR. Does he want me to repeat to him the itinerary? Or is the question more personal – ‘what are you doing on this tour?’ - how is it that I have decided to go and see for myself some of the human rights, civil rights and humanitarian projects that my rabbinic colleagues in Israel and Palestine are engaged with?
As I hesitate about what will be the simplest response at the El Al check-in at Heathrow – i.e. the response he wants to hear so that I can be processed through security and on to my flight – I realise that it has already started: the encounter with a country that is in a state of heightened suspicion and fear. Where everyone is a potential enemy. Where everyone who is ‘Other’ is threatening. And – as I learnt during an exhausting and revelatory week in Israel – the ‘Other’ is also within.
For Israel is in a state of undeclared war within itself, and with itself. And the battle lines are becoming clearer and clearer. Will Israel become a racist and theocratic state where the rule of law is continually over-ridden by interest groups like religious settlers and nationalists; or will it retain its original democratic ethos as inscribed in its Declaration of Independence? A Declaration that says that the State ‘will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants...it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture...’
But I am still at the airport. ‘Why is there Arabic here?’ – he’s pointing to the paper that I’d hope would save a lot of time and tedious explanation but now has become a focus of scrutiny and concern. The organisation’s name, ‘Rabbis for Human Rights’, is in English, Hebrew and Arabic on the letterhead of the itinerary. And while I pause and consider what to say, another question arrives, or maybe it is a statement, I am not really listening any longer: ‘You are meeting Palestinians...’
What I want to say is that Arabic is still, the last time I checked, one of the official languages of the State of Israel, so it has a right to figure in the letterhead of an Israeli human rights organisation. But I don’t want to be sarcastic, or provocative, because I want to catch my flight - but I am aware of how easily aggression can be generated by the fraught and dense emotionality that is wrapped up in this beleaguered country.
So that was how it started. And that was how it continued. As several of the rabbis we met on the trip said, in a manner so casual that one could easily miss its significance, there is a battle going on ‘for the soul of Israel’, and that ‘the Jewish soul is threatened’ – but most Israelis are living in denial. Denial of the moral and spiritual costs of the Occupation, denial of discrimination and inequalities that are systemic in Israel itself, denial of how a critique of the government or the army can come out of love of Zion rather than anti-semitism or Jewish self-hatred.
Rabbis for Human Rights was established in Israel in 1988 by the American-born Reform Rabbi David Forman in order to give voice in the contemporary Israeli setting to the Judaism’s traditional concern for the ‘stranger’, the ‘outsider’ and the disadvantaged. Their initial focus was primarily on protecting the human rights of Palestinians in areas controlled by Israel; but they rapidly expanded their work to embrace the rights of vulnerable and minority groups throughout Israeli society.
During the week we met, studied with and travelled with a series of inspirational and charismatic RHR rabbis (from across the religious spectrum, including Rabbi Gideon Sylvester an ex-United Synagogue rabbi who now runs the RHR Human Rights Yeshiva) as well as hearing from and seeing in action their professional colleagues trained in law, education and civil rights.
Based in Jerusalem, we spent the first day gaining an insight into some of the grotesque consequences of the Separation Wall that now scars the landscape of Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside. Although the wall – built, ironically, by Palestinian workers with concrete bought from factories owned by President Mahmoud Abbas - has given Jewish Jerusalemites a much greater sense of security, its ugly presence is a constant reminder that Jewish security has been bought in exchange for increased hardship for east Jerusalem Arabs: hospitals that were once ten minutes away by car now require a 2 hour circuitous trip, around Jerusalem and through two checkpoints; livelihoods have been ruined, and families divided.
The shock of the aesthetic desecration of Jerusalem – and Bethlehem, now surrounded by a ‘sleeve’ of brutal concrete that enables pious Jews access to Rachel’s Tomb, but denies access to Muslims, for whom it is also a site of prayer - is mirrored in the moral collapse at the heart of the government’s policy: although Israel has the right and duty to protect its citizens from attacks, the Wall was the most extreme solution available. We witnessed the ways in which its route was designed more for future political purposes – to make territory easier to annex in any future settlement – than for security purposes.
Although one reads about these issues, it is not until one sees the reality on the ground that something of the human dimension to these actions becomes clearer. And it is the human costs that the RHR workers and rabbis are focussed on and helped us understand in some depth. Many of the projects we visited are working at grass-roots level on inequities that ordinary Israelis suffer: single mothers in Hadera who need help with economic and legal problems or domestic violence; Bedouin in the Negev whose civil amenities are far inferior to the Jewish neighbours, or whose land is appropriated for reforestation by the JNF; Orthodox women who suffer discrimination in their communities...the work of RHR embraces a bewildering variety of causes, often in partnership with other NGOs, some of whom – like the New Israel Fund, Yisrael Hofshit, and Citizens for Equality - we were also able to meet.
Bringing specific human rights grievances to the attention of the Israeli public while pressuring the appropriate authorities – from local courts to the Knesset - is an endless job. Visiting the RHR website – www.rhr.org.il/eng - is an experience both exhilarating and maddening: as I read it I am in awe of the dedication of those who are fighting injustices but enraged at the ways in which the State of Israel acts in ways contrary to humanitarian and ethical principles.
As a group we moved from being depressed, angry and perplexed at some of the glaring injustices – particularly on the West Bank where Orthodox settlers are currently engaged in a series or random attacks on Palestinian homes as well as the fire-bombing of mosques – to feeling stirred and inspired by some of the RHR workers who are battling for the soul of Israel, case by case, family by family.
One of the comments that struck me most was that of a lawyer for RHR who said that this work offers you a ‘one way ticket’ – once you have opened your eyes to the reality of the suffering and discrimination that the State and the army (and the two are entwined in a fatal embrace) inflict on people who are seen as ‘Other’ – like Palestinians in the territories, or Bedouin in the Negev, or Arab-Israeli citizens in east Jerusalem – there is no going back. It isn’t possible to un-know what one knows – or it isn’t possible to do so and keeps one’s soul alive (my words, not hers).
It so happened that while I was there I came across an article in Ha’aretz written by Amira Hass, a continual thorn in the side of the government for her exposure of injustices. After detailing some cases in the Territories in Israel proper where ‘the right to memory is presented as a security risk’, she went on to talk about the work of Rabbis for Human Rights in this way:
‘This organisation...takes part in dozens of campaigns, most of them Sisyphean, to rescue people from the civil jaws of the regime of Jewish privilege. They are, unintentionally, bold and painful attempts to save “Jewish” from being a synonym in Israel for racist, lordly, hard-hearted, hypocritical, shortsighted.’
And so it continues, day after day. Let nobody in the future say : ‘We didn’t know...we didn’t know what is being done in our name’.
***
For more information on – and details of how to join – the British Friends of Rabbis for Human Rights see www.rhruk.co.uk
Tuesday, 31 January 2012
Two Artists
You may know the work of Anselm Kiefer. You are unlikely to know the work of Gitl Braun.
Kiefer is the internationally-renowned painter-sculptor (born 1945) who has spent the several decades working on, and working through, themes embedded in, and provoked by, the land and history of his native Germany, producing monumental canvases and instillations layered with lead, plaster, acrylic, resin, terracotta, paint, charcoal, rubber, copper piping , ash, hair, bark, oil, steel wire...the dense physicality and materiality of his work evoking and interrogating what Germany has been and done and suffered and perpetrated over the centuries, and in particular, of course, (and like the writer W.G.Sebald, born 1944), what came to pass in the decade before his birth.
And Gitl Braun, born to Holocaust survivors in 1950 in Haifa and now a ultra-Orthodox mother-of-eight in Stamford Hill, north London, is an artist whose subject matter is informed by her parents’ experiences and silences, and by the stories and layered histories she finds in discarded photos and prayer-books, manuscripts and religious artefacts. A very different kind of artist to Kiefer – and yet her photography and sculpture mirror Kiefer’s preoccupations. And form a kind of midrashic commentary on his themes of loss, decay, memory and silence.
Their work is currently on display a few hundred metres from each other, Kiefer occupying an acreage of space in the new White Cube gallery in Bermondsey (www.whitecube.com) and Braun occupying a corner of a nearby bookshop-gallery (www.woolfsonandtay.com). The contrast in scale between the two exhibitions is enormous – the surface space of all of Braun’s work would fit comfortably (but uncomfortably) within a corner of one of Kiefer’s vast canvases. But the scale of their vision is comparable – and to visit one after the other is a revelation.
Braun’s photographs show sacred books and texts now discarded, yet retaining their numinous aura, their sense of a depth of knowledge and tradition that once lived and inspired the faithful – while Kiefer‘s work continually harks back to figures and motifs from Europe’s religious and spiritual heritage: the Golem of Prague, the alchemical tradition, Paracelsus, the philosopher’s stone, Rabbi Loew and the Jewish mystical tradition, the Knights Templar, Thor’s hammer, the description of God’s chariot in Ezekiel – this latter conceived of humorously as a four-seat bicycle with wheels within wheels, while at the same time being a wry comment on the way in which mystery today has become commodified, and reduced in imaginative scale...
The geographical proximity and juxtaposition of these two contrasting – but complementary – exhibitions is of course coincidental. But ‘coincidence’, as we know, is another way of talking – a secular way of talking – about what the religious adherents alluded to in both artists’ work always understood: that everything is connected to everything else, for all is One. And that meaning is grafted into Creation.
Kiefer is the internationally-renowned painter-sculptor (born 1945) who has spent the several decades working on, and working through, themes embedded in, and provoked by, the land and history of his native Germany, producing monumental canvases and instillations layered with lead, plaster, acrylic, resin, terracotta, paint, charcoal, rubber, copper piping , ash, hair, bark, oil, steel wire...the dense physicality and materiality of his work evoking and interrogating what Germany has been and done and suffered and perpetrated over the centuries, and in particular, of course, (and like the writer W.G.Sebald, born 1944), what came to pass in the decade before his birth.
And Gitl Braun, born to Holocaust survivors in 1950 in Haifa and now a ultra-Orthodox mother-of-eight in Stamford Hill, north London, is an artist whose subject matter is informed by her parents’ experiences and silences, and by the stories and layered histories she finds in discarded photos and prayer-books, manuscripts and religious artefacts. A very different kind of artist to Kiefer – and yet her photography and sculpture mirror Kiefer’s preoccupations. And form a kind of midrashic commentary on his themes of loss, decay, memory and silence.
Their work is currently on display a few hundred metres from each other, Kiefer occupying an acreage of space in the new White Cube gallery in Bermondsey (www.whitecube.com) and Braun occupying a corner of a nearby bookshop-gallery (www.woolfsonandtay.com). The contrast in scale between the two exhibitions is enormous – the surface space of all of Braun’s work would fit comfortably (but uncomfortably) within a corner of one of Kiefer’s vast canvases. But the scale of their vision is comparable – and to visit one after the other is a revelation.
Braun’s photographs show sacred books and texts now discarded, yet retaining their numinous aura, their sense of a depth of knowledge and tradition that once lived and inspired the faithful – while Kiefer‘s work continually harks back to figures and motifs from Europe’s religious and spiritual heritage: the Golem of Prague, the alchemical tradition, Paracelsus, the philosopher’s stone, Rabbi Loew and the Jewish mystical tradition, the Knights Templar, Thor’s hammer, the description of God’s chariot in Ezekiel – this latter conceived of humorously as a four-seat bicycle with wheels within wheels, while at the same time being a wry comment on the way in which mystery today has become commodified, and reduced in imaginative scale...
The geographical proximity and juxtaposition of these two contrasting – but complementary – exhibitions is of course coincidental. But ‘coincidence’, as we know, is another way of talking – a secular way of talking – about what the religious adherents alluded to in both artists’ work always understood: that everything is connected to everything else, for all is One. And that meaning is grafted into Creation.
Monday, 19 December 2011
Hoban, Hitchens, Havel
We can be sure that the three of them never met: Russell Hoban (born of Jewish parents, who died last Tuesday, 13th), Christopher Hitchens (born, he discovered late in life, to a Jewish mother, died on Thursday, 15th), Vaclav Havel (who died on Sunday, 18th). But they meet now, in the imagination – and wherever literary souls go after death. (That snort you hear is Hitchens’ derision – the author of God is Not Great who believed in neither gods nor an afterlife nor any journey of the human soul that wasn’t filled with opposition to the status quo, to false hopes and sentimental piety, to putting our trust in any authority other than our own hard-won, rigorous and sceptical intelligence).
The Grim Reaper has harvested a rich crop this week: Hoban, a writer whose visionary fictions lodge in the psyche - in Riddley Walker (1980) he created a fully-imagined post-apocalypse feral England where language itself had mutated into barely recognisable forms of self-expression; Hitchens, polemicist and contrarian, scourge of mediocrity and hypocrisy and all those enamoured of the certainty of their causes (Henry Kissinger; Mother Teresa; Islamic – and Jewish, and Christian – fundamentalists); and Havel, the Czech playwright, dissident and political prisoner who became President of his nation with a belief that the spiritual, moral and intellectual domain of human life was as significant for human well-being as our material and economic achievements.
All three knew how to live, to live well, that is to say to live fearlessly, open to the exploration of ideas -“Explorers have to be ready to die lost” (Hoban) - and language: what it can do to us and for us: “Language is an archaeological vehicle...the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history” (Hoban); “I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions” (Havel); “Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul”(Hitchens).
Part of living well for these three truth-seekers was knowing how to enjoy the ‘simple’ pleasures. They each knew how to drink, how to smoke - “when I don't smoke I scarcely feel as if I'm living. I don't feel as if I'm living unless I'm killing myself” (Hoban) – and how to make their personal relationships even more complicated; but also how not to take themselves too seriously: “Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not” (Havel), “Your favourite virtue? An appreciation for irony...The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind”(Hitchens).
Strange then that Hitchens saw religion in such a literal, Dawkinsesque way. In recent years he became more and more resolute in his implacable opposition to it, claiming that it was the 1989 fatwa against his friend Salman Rushdie following publication of The Satanic Verses that “completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humour, the individual, and the defence of free expression”. (How is it, I wonder, that for me religion belongs in the latter grouping?)
In the last decade Hitchens became a leading voice in the so-called ‘new atheism’: “The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.” I find myself in sympathy with the ethical and emotional heart of this, but as I read it I find myself thinking that Hitchens is failing to see that he is indeed articulating another kind of ‘creed’, although he explicitly denies this – “Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith”.
I find it curious that such a rigorous and often sophisticated thinker should hold to a picture of religion that is so naively literal-minded. His rigid stance suffers from an internal contradiction, for it fails to meet the definition of what he characterises as his own intellectually free approach: “We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.” And yet my own post-theistic religiosity is built upon, amongst other things, ‘science and reason...free inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake...’
I suppose that for Hitchens, religious radicalism would be a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless my soul (to use the metaphor that even Hitchens finds himself calling upon) is stirred over and over by the bracing clear-sightedness of much of Hitchens’ writing : “The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has — from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness...We have the same job we always had: to say that there are no final solutions; there is no absolute truth; there is no supreme leader; there is no totalitarian solution that says if you would just give up your freedom of inquiry, if you would just give up, if you would simply abandon your critical faculties, the world of idiotic bliss can be yours.”
Hitchens didn’t do humility – he had no time for it, there was too much else at stake. No holding back. Just a constant outpouring of sinuous prose and impassioned speech to convey as lucidly as he could his brilliant (and sometimes foolish) thoughts. So, at 62, an untimely loss – and yet for me, the death of Havel is the saddest of this week’s sad losses.
On one level, Havel’s philosophy of life overlapped with Hitchens’: “The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility” – though the word ‘meekness’ marks out Havel’s own distinctive spiritual territory. And Havel’s wisdom - “There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side” – serves as an implicit rebuke to Hitchens’ decision to align himself with the Iraq war and the American neo-conservative jihad (or in George W. Bush’s terms “crusade”) against what Hitchens termed, with typical rhetorical relish, “Islamo-fascism”.
Havel’s vision never succumbed to the instinct to make humanity the pinnacle of all creation: “As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it...The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.” There is both humility and grandeur here.
I first came across Havel’s thinking when I read the remarkable series of letters he wrote from prison in the early 1980s to his then wife Olga, written at a time when his country was suffering from the bleakness of Communist oppression, and he was gaining some prominence as a leading Czech dissident. “The noble title of "dissident" must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement” (Hitchens). Reading these texts from one of the founders of Charter 77 I found myself in the presence of someone who seemed to emanate great spiritual resourcefulness and insight. Encountering them helped me clarify my own thinking about the spiritual and religious necessity of ‘living with questions’ rather than too quickly attempting to offer answers.
Here - 6 September 1981 - is an example of what resonated with me then, and still speaks of a rare sensibility, the loss of which I mourn today:
“For me, the notion of some complete and finite knowledge, that explains everything and raises no further questions, relates clearly to the idea of an end – an end to the spirit, to life, to time and to being. However, anything meaningful ever said on the matter (including every religious gospel) is remarkable for its dramatic openness , its incompleteness” – it is this that shows Havel is a more subtle reader of texts than Hitchens – “It is not a conclusive statement so much as a challenge or an appeal...which never...attempts to settle unequivocally the unanswerable question of meaning. Instead, it tends to suggest how to live with the question...The question of the meaning of life is not a full stop at the end of life, but the beginning of a deeper experience of it. It is like a light whose source we cannot see, but in whose illumination we nevertheless live – whether we delight in its incomprehensible abundance or suffer from its incomprehensible paucity.
“Ultimately, being in constant touch with the mystery is what makes us genuinely human. Man is the only creature who is both a part of being (and thus a bearer of this mystery) and aware of that mystery as a mystery. He is both the question and the questioner, and cannot help being so...”
I know that my own life has been enriched, enlivened, in multiple ways by my contact over the years with all three of these wise men. And that - though the Festival of Lights is upon us - the world seems suddenly smaller, less luminous, without them.
Zichronam livracha: may their memory be a blessing.
The Grim Reaper has harvested a rich crop this week: Hoban, a writer whose visionary fictions lodge in the psyche - in Riddley Walker (1980) he created a fully-imagined post-apocalypse feral England where language itself had mutated into barely recognisable forms of self-expression; Hitchens, polemicist and contrarian, scourge of mediocrity and hypocrisy and all those enamoured of the certainty of their causes (Henry Kissinger; Mother Teresa; Islamic – and Jewish, and Christian – fundamentalists); and Havel, the Czech playwright, dissident and political prisoner who became President of his nation with a belief that the spiritual, moral and intellectual domain of human life was as significant for human well-being as our material and economic achievements.
All three knew how to live, to live well, that is to say to live fearlessly, open to the exploration of ideas -“Explorers have to be ready to die lost” (Hoban) - and language: what it can do to us and for us: “Language is an archaeological vehicle...the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history” (Hoban); “I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions” (Havel); “Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul”(Hitchens).
Part of living well for these three truth-seekers was knowing how to enjoy the ‘simple’ pleasures. They each knew how to drink, how to smoke - “when I don't smoke I scarcely feel as if I'm living. I don't feel as if I'm living unless I'm killing myself” (Hoban) – and how to make their personal relationships even more complicated; but also how not to take themselves too seriously: “Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not” (Havel), “Your favourite virtue? An appreciation for irony...The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind”(Hitchens).
Strange then that Hitchens saw religion in such a literal, Dawkinsesque way. In recent years he became more and more resolute in his implacable opposition to it, claiming that it was the 1989 fatwa against his friend Salman Rushdie following publication of The Satanic Verses that “completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humour, the individual, and the defence of free expression”. (How is it, I wonder, that for me religion belongs in the latter grouping?)
In the last decade Hitchens became a leading voice in the so-called ‘new atheism’: “The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.” I find myself in sympathy with the ethical and emotional heart of this, but as I read it I find myself thinking that Hitchens is failing to see that he is indeed articulating another kind of ‘creed’, although he explicitly denies this – “Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith”.
I find it curious that such a rigorous and often sophisticated thinker should hold to a picture of religion that is so naively literal-minded. His rigid stance suffers from an internal contradiction, for it fails to meet the definition of what he characterises as his own intellectually free approach: “We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.” And yet my own post-theistic religiosity is built upon, amongst other things, ‘science and reason...free inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake...’
I suppose that for Hitchens, religious radicalism would be a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless my soul (to use the metaphor that even Hitchens finds himself calling upon) is stirred over and over by the bracing clear-sightedness of much of Hitchens’ writing : “The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has — from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness...We have the same job we always had: to say that there are no final solutions; there is no absolute truth; there is no supreme leader; there is no totalitarian solution that says if you would just give up your freedom of inquiry, if you would just give up, if you would simply abandon your critical faculties, the world of idiotic bliss can be yours.”
Hitchens didn’t do humility – he had no time for it, there was too much else at stake. No holding back. Just a constant outpouring of sinuous prose and impassioned speech to convey as lucidly as he could his brilliant (and sometimes foolish) thoughts. So, at 62, an untimely loss – and yet for me, the death of Havel is the saddest of this week’s sad losses.
On one level, Havel’s philosophy of life overlapped with Hitchens’: “The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility” – though the word ‘meekness’ marks out Havel’s own distinctive spiritual territory. And Havel’s wisdom - “There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side” – serves as an implicit rebuke to Hitchens’ decision to align himself with the Iraq war and the American neo-conservative jihad (or in George W. Bush’s terms “crusade”) against what Hitchens termed, with typical rhetorical relish, “Islamo-fascism”.
Havel’s vision never succumbed to the instinct to make humanity the pinnacle of all creation: “As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it...The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.” There is both humility and grandeur here.
I first came across Havel’s thinking when I read the remarkable series of letters he wrote from prison in the early 1980s to his then wife Olga, written at a time when his country was suffering from the bleakness of Communist oppression, and he was gaining some prominence as a leading Czech dissident. “The noble title of "dissident" must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement” (Hitchens). Reading these texts from one of the founders of Charter 77 I found myself in the presence of someone who seemed to emanate great spiritual resourcefulness and insight. Encountering them helped me clarify my own thinking about the spiritual and religious necessity of ‘living with questions’ rather than too quickly attempting to offer answers.
Here - 6 September 1981 - is an example of what resonated with me then, and still speaks of a rare sensibility, the loss of which I mourn today:
“For me, the notion of some complete and finite knowledge, that explains everything and raises no further questions, relates clearly to the idea of an end – an end to the spirit, to life, to time and to being. However, anything meaningful ever said on the matter (including every religious gospel) is remarkable for its dramatic openness , its incompleteness” – it is this that shows Havel is a more subtle reader of texts than Hitchens – “It is not a conclusive statement so much as a challenge or an appeal...which never...attempts to settle unequivocally the unanswerable question of meaning. Instead, it tends to suggest how to live with the question...The question of the meaning of life is not a full stop at the end of life, but the beginning of a deeper experience of it. It is like a light whose source we cannot see, but in whose illumination we nevertheless live – whether we delight in its incomprehensible abundance or suffer from its incomprehensible paucity.
“Ultimately, being in constant touch with the mystery is what makes us genuinely human. Man is the only creature who is both a part of being (and thus a bearer of this mystery) and aware of that mystery as a mystery. He is both the question and the questioner, and cannot help being so...”
I know that my own life has been enriched, enlivened, in multiple ways by my contact over the years with all three of these wise men. And that - though the Festival of Lights is upon us - the world seems suddenly smaller, less luminous, without them.
Zichronam livracha: may their memory be a blessing.
Thursday, 15 December 2011
“Auf Wiedersehen, England”
Brentford Town Football Club have a German manager, Uwe Rösler. Last week they visited my local club and the match had the usual level of tedium and occasional drama and in the end ‘my’ team won (a penalty shoot-out). I should have left feeling suitably elated – but I didn’t. What I took away from the game was the shock of hearing the home supporters engage in a series of abusive comments at the opposition manager that ranged from the xenophobic to out-and-out racism.
Most of this invective was done under the habitual English guise of humour – ‘banter’ – but it seemed to me that the echo of those mock-German accents culled from decades of post-War UK cinema , TV and tabloid headlines – ‘ve have vays of making you play’ – and the crude barking of stereotypical phrases like ‘Jawohl’ when the manager shouted to his players, betrayed an ugly and unthinking anti-German malice that would not have been tolerated against players of any other ethnic origin, or indeed against managers of any other nation. Supporters can sometimes be rude – in a friendly or unfriendly manner – against opposition managers, but this was something else.
That it happened during the same week that Europeans – including the British - became even more aware that their collective economic fate now lies in the hands of Germany is probably just a co-incidence – anti-German feeling is a regular, sickening feature of populist English culture. But as I slowly digested the debacle of David Cameron’s performance in Brussels a few days later, my mind kept going back to that evening at Barnet Football Club where I witnessed this longstanding English prejudice in all its nakedness and shame.
I would suggest that this anti-German feeling is fuelled by deep unconscious envy. Germany’s post-War economic recovery and social transformation was impressive enough, and then in 1989 it took on the unprecedented financial, social and psychological task of integrating a divided nation. Its work ethic, its technological achievements, its ability to integrate several millions of immigrants with relative success, its capacity to make an honest accounting of, and restitution for, its national crimes – all this is evidence for the way in which Germany has become a stable, mature and self-reflective success as a nation and the dominant democracy in Europe. (And they are also rather good at football: much more successful over the years – in spite of 1966 – than England, and maybe it is this above all that, at least in the popular imagination, the English can’t stand, and leads to such crude mockery and contempt).
Contrast Germany’s success as a country with the UK story of post-War decline – the dissolution (and destruction) of our manufacturing industries, our loss of control over the old Empire, the contraction of our military capabilities, the perpetuation of class divisions and glaring inequalities, the coarsening of public discourse...add to the list yourself. It seems we have yet to make a true reckoning of our decreased stature and significance in the world. In place of this truth-telling (and generations of politicians of all parties have colluded in this) we have a distorted and false picture of our collective national identity.
Our relative impoverishment – materially and in the quality of life, in the capacity to devise integrated transport systems, in social and health care, in education – is palpable whenever one leaves these shores and travels or spends time in what we still quaintly think of as ‘the Continent’, or – more tellingly – we islanders still think of as ‘Europe’. We might have joined the European Union in myriad practical and beneficial ways – but the Brits still haven’t joined ‘Europe’ in their minds. David Cameron has just acted out years of this systemic psychological failure to re-configure ourselves as a European country.
I am – as might be evident from some of these remarks – passionately pro-European; and so I consider Cameron’s ineptitude a symbol of a basic fault-line that runs through the UK’s national psyche. The jokey tag that has become so popular in recent decades as a mark of this country’s pseudo self-assurance – ‘Two World Wars and One World Cup’ – has come home to roost. The fact is that, in spite of its current difficulties, ‘Europe’ will continue to thrive and prosper without us. But the UK won’t (can’t) thrive or prosper without ‘Europe’ – there is only so long that a nation can sustain itself with fantasies of past greatness, delusions of self-importance, and the unconscious omnipotence that in a transnational global economy we can steer and save one part of the ship while the other decks are overwhelmed by the tides of history.
Angela Merkel may not have the right formula for rescuing the European economy, but Cameron’s proud isolationism brings to mind George Orwell’s insight that ‘The insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time’.
Call me a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ if you like – the Soviet euphemism widely used during Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaigns in the 1950s as a way of accusing Jewish thinkers of lack of patriotism – but as a Jew whose soul is knitted to the historic vibrancy of life in Berlin and Vienna and Prague and Budapest, and all the rest of the countless places on ‘the Continent’ where Jews lived and thrived (and, yes, suffered) but contributed their unique intellectual heritage and giftedness to the general well-being of so many societies and nations, I have been hugely saddened by Cameron’s ‘little Englander’ stance. As a European British Jew in the second decade of the 21st century I still have a psychological and spiritual - existential - commitment to that transnational diasporic vision of the creative inter-connectedness of pan-European life.
And it is of course a rather extraordinary historical irony that it is Berlin (again) that must embrace its special destiny – this time round to lead Europe to a more hopeful future. But this time, if it fails, if the German-led European project fails, xenophobic nationalism (not just in the UK) is just itching to return. And who will history’s victims be, I wonder, the next time round?
Most of this invective was done under the habitual English guise of humour – ‘banter’ – but it seemed to me that the echo of those mock-German accents culled from decades of post-War UK cinema , TV and tabloid headlines – ‘ve have vays of making you play’ – and the crude barking of stereotypical phrases like ‘Jawohl’ when the manager shouted to his players, betrayed an ugly and unthinking anti-German malice that would not have been tolerated against players of any other ethnic origin, or indeed against managers of any other nation. Supporters can sometimes be rude – in a friendly or unfriendly manner – against opposition managers, but this was something else.
That it happened during the same week that Europeans – including the British - became even more aware that their collective economic fate now lies in the hands of Germany is probably just a co-incidence – anti-German feeling is a regular, sickening feature of populist English culture. But as I slowly digested the debacle of David Cameron’s performance in Brussels a few days later, my mind kept going back to that evening at Barnet Football Club where I witnessed this longstanding English prejudice in all its nakedness and shame.
I would suggest that this anti-German feeling is fuelled by deep unconscious envy. Germany’s post-War economic recovery and social transformation was impressive enough, and then in 1989 it took on the unprecedented financial, social and psychological task of integrating a divided nation. Its work ethic, its technological achievements, its ability to integrate several millions of immigrants with relative success, its capacity to make an honest accounting of, and restitution for, its national crimes – all this is evidence for the way in which Germany has become a stable, mature and self-reflective success as a nation and the dominant democracy in Europe. (And they are also rather good at football: much more successful over the years – in spite of 1966 – than England, and maybe it is this above all that, at least in the popular imagination, the English can’t stand, and leads to such crude mockery and contempt).
Contrast Germany’s success as a country with the UK story of post-War decline – the dissolution (and destruction) of our manufacturing industries, our loss of control over the old Empire, the contraction of our military capabilities, the perpetuation of class divisions and glaring inequalities, the coarsening of public discourse...add to the list yourself. It seems we have yet to make a true reckoning of our decreased stature and significance in the world. In place of this truth-telling (and generations of politicians of all parties have colluded in this) we have a distorted and false picture of our collective national identity.
Our relative impoverishment – materially and in the quality of life, in the capacity to devise integrated transport systems, in social and health care, in education – is palpable whenever one leaves these shores and travels or spends time in what we still quaintly think of as ‘the Continent’, or – more tellingly – we islanders still think of as ‘Europe’. We might have joined the European Union in myriad practical and beneficial ways – but the Brits still haven’t joined ‘Europe’ in their minds. David Cameron has just acted out years of this systemic psychological failure to re-configure ourselves as a European country.
I am – as might be evident from some of these remarks – passionately pro-European; and so I consider Cameron’s ineptitude a symbol of a basic fault-line that runs through the UK’s national psyche. The jokey tag that has become so popular in recent decades as a mark of this country’s pseudo self-assurance – ‘Two World Wars and One World Cup’ – has come home to roost. The fact is that, in spite of its current difficulties, ‘Europe’ will continue to thrive and prosper without us. But the UK won’t (can’t) thrive or prosper without ‘Europe’ – there is only so long that a nation can sustain itself with fantasies of past greatness, delusions of self-importance, and the unconscious omnipotence that in a transnational global economy we can steer and save one part of the ship while the other decks are overwhelmed by the tides of history.
Angela Merkel may not have the right formula for rescuing the European economy, but Cameron’s proud isolationism brings to mind George Orwell’s insight that ‘The insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time’.
Call me a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ if you like – the Soviet euphemism widely used during Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaigns in the 1950s as a way of accusing Jewish thinkers of lack of patriotism – but as a Jew whose soul is knitted to the historic vibrancy of life in Berlin and Vienna and Prague and Budapest, and all the rest of the countless places on ‘the Continent’ where Jews lived and thrived (and, yes, suffered) but contributed their unique intellectual heritage and giftedness to the general well-being of so many societies and nations, I have been hugely saddened by Cameron’s ‘little Englander’ stance. As a European British Jew in the second decade of the 21st century I still have a psychological and spiritual - existential - commitment to that transnational diasporic vision of the creative inter-connectedness of pan-European life.
And it is of course a rather extraordinary historical irony that it is Berlin (again) that must embrace its special destiny – this time round to lead Europe to a more hopeful future. But this time, if it fails, if the German-led European project fails, xenophobic nationalism (not just in the UK) is just itching to return. And who will history’s victims be, I wonder, the next time round?
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