On Ukraine and the Myths, Blessings and Curses of Nationalism

If you’ve been watching the news these last few weeks the scene will have become familiar: around a Soviet-era town hall you see a group of armed men in military fatigues and flak jackets, weapons in hand, cell-phones, walkie-talkies. Smiles for the cameras. And always ready to explain themselves to Western journalists.

The situation in eastern Ukraine seems to change from day to day, and this last ten days has seen an accelerating drama unfold, almost by the hour; but what really caught my attention was a report from one journalist who approached the group surrounding the town hall in Slavyansk, and asked the men who they were.

“We’re Cossacks”, one of the group explained. “It doesn’t matter where we are from.” ‘He declined to give his name’ – the article continues – ‘Instead, he offered a quick history lesson, stretching back a thousand years, to when Slavic tribes banded together to form Kievan Rus – the dynasty that eventually flourished into modern day Ukraine and its big neighbour Russia. “We don’t want Ukraine. Ukraine doesn’t exist for us. There are no people called Ukrainians”, he declared. “there are just Slav people who used to be in Kievan Rus, before Jews like Trotsky divided us. We should all be together again”.[Luke Harding, The Guardian, 15^th April 2014]

“We should all be together again” presumably means ‘all of us, except the Jews’. Three hundred and fifty years ago, in the mid 17^th century, a Cossack rebellion against Polish and Lithuanian rule in these lands, a rebellion led by the infamous Khmelnitsky, generated some of the worse pogroms against Jews since the medieval Crusades. It’s estimated that 100,000 Jews were massacred in 1648-9 alone, at the height of Khmelnitsky’s revolt.  

Maybe it’s worth remembering, in passing, that in 1919 and 1920, the new Soviet regime killed or deported up to half a million Cossacks from their ancestral lands - that’s out of an ethnic population of 3 million. The multiple ironies here can be noted: those pro-Russian Cossacks who’ve taken over Slavyansk town hall are the descendents of those massacred by the Russians less than a century ago; and in their modern version of an ancient hatred of Jews, there is the imaginative failure to recognise the similarity of both their situations as historically persecuted ethnic minorities. They should be making common cause with the Jews rather than scapegoating them. But that’s rarely how history unfolds.  

As we come to the end of our annual Jewish celebration of ‘national liberation’, I’ve been reflecting on the complexities surrounding this notion of ‘national liberation’ - which always seems to involve a re-writing of  history to suit the new story which is being fabricated to justify one nationalism or another.  We can raise our eyebrows at this Cossack version of history – “Ukraine doesn’t exist for us. There are no people called Ukrainians” – but do we remember Golda Meir’s statement, in an interview in 1969, when she was Prime Minister of Israel, that "There was no such thing as Palestinians. . . They did not exist"?  

Nationalism, whether it is Jewish, Cossack, American, or in India during their current elections – it doesn’t matter which, it’s across the board – always deals in myths, fabrications, distortions, half-truths and outright lies, any of which, if repeated often and vigorously enough, are taken as truths by audiences (no different from us, I guess) always happy to have our innate prejudices pandered to. Cultural forgetting, as well as cultural inventing and selectivity, is always at work when that strange construct we call nationalism is in play. 

Reliable estimates of the numbers of Jews now living in Ukraine are hard to come by. 80,000? 100,000? 200,000? Nobody really knows. This confusion is mirrored in my attempt to get a clear picture of how the recent turmoil is affecting them. After the Ukrainian president Yanukovych fled, back in February, those with seats in the new government included the far rightist anti-semitic group Svoboda, who have claimed in the past that the country’s  been ruled by a ‘Moscow-Jewish mafia’;  and there were reports of pro-Maidan paramilitary forces patrolling the streets of Kiev wearing swastika armbands and mouthing anti-semitic slogans.  

Before the Russian annexation of Crimea, vandals spray-painted swastikas and “death to Jews” on the only Reform synagogue in Crimea's capital, Simferopol. (Their rabbi, Misha Kapustin, a Leo Baeck College graduate, has now relocated to a post in Slovakia with his family). Last month another synagogue in Zaporizhiya was attacked by a mob who threw Molotov cocktails near the synagogue’s entrance.
 

These kinds of incidents led one of the three Chief Rabbis in Ukraine, Moishe Asman, to tell the Jews of Kiev to flee, there was no future for them in Ukraine; and it was said he himself left for Moscow. Meanwhile Putin cast himself as the defender of the besieged Jews of Ukraine. 
 

There are, it seems, three ‘Chief Rabbis’ because  the Ukrainian Jewish community is riven with communal politics (so no difference from other countries in that respect) - each so-called Chief Rabbi is seen as illegitimate by other groups. The politics of this is depressingly familiar: alongside Asman, there is an American-born Hasidic rabbi, Bleich, since 1992 often referred to in the foreign press as the Chief Rabbi; but there’s also the Russian-born Azriel Haikin, who was proclaimed chief rabbi in 2003 by the Lubavitch movement in Ukraine. He seems to be keeping his head down in the current unrest. Then there are also other figures, including another LBC graduate, Alex Dukhovny, head rabbi of the Ukrainian Progressive Judaism communities, who signed an open letter to Putin asking him to stop using the protection of Jews as a pretext for invading Ukraine.
 

So as February turned into March it did seem to me that anti-semitism was again on the rise - but there were also counter-indications. Because it was also clear that young Jews in Kiev had been actively part of the pro-Western Maidan protests, including forming their own combat group against the now-ousted government. And when Jewish leaders asked Kiev’s new authorities for protection for key community buildings they were quick to receive it. And many Jewish communal leaders dismissed the random acts of anti-semitic violence as attacks from pro-Russian provocateurs bent on discrediting the new government in Kiev.

And so it goes on. As Pesach began, there was the worrying news from the newly-declared ‘people’s republic’ in Donetsk in eastern Ukraine of a leaflet that had been distributed – with chilling historical precedents - calling on all Jews over the age of 16 to register as Jews as well as supply a detailed list of all the property they own. Failure to do so would result in their having their citizenship revoked, deportation, and the confiscation of their assets. To add insult to injury, a mandatory registration fee of $50 was also required. (There are 17,000 Jews in Donetsk).  

 

A copy of these fliers was sent by a local Donetsk Jew to a friend in Israel, where it found its way into the Israeli press and within 24 hours John Kerry was using it during the talks in Geneva last Thursday to condemn what was going in eastern Ukraine.  Certain Jewish groups – always ready and willing to see Jew-hatred as endemic in the ‘non-Jewish’ world - had been convinced it was more evidence of the dangerous levels of anti-semitism in the eastern Ukrainian liberation movements. But it now turns out that these leaflets are almost certainly a hoax, an attempt to smear the separatist anti-Maidan groups in the east. The Donetsk Jewish community themselves have dismissed the leaflets as a ‘provocation’ – something fabricated by people aligned with the new government in Kiev to compromise the pro-Russian groups in the east. Apparently, even the Ukrainian secret service, the SBU, have told the Jewish community not to take seriously the contents of this leaflet.
 

I hope you are following all this. Because it is enough to make you dizzy with confusion. Jews are both pawns and scapegoats in all this - but they are also players. And as players they are divided about whom they are loyal to, politically, just as in any other country. A significant number have been active in the pro-Maidan movement in Kiev, but there seem to also be a significant number of Jews, particularly  in Crimea, who welcomed the Russian forces. 

I do not offer any political analysis here. But if you are interested in one, the interview with Princeton University’s Professor Stephen Cohen on the link that follows is particularly revealing (my thanks to Tony Rudolph for drawing this to my attention)

http://truth-out.org/news/item/23171-we-are-not-beginning-a-new-cold-war-we-are-well-into-it-stephen-cohen-on-russia-ukraine-crisis 
 

In the midst of this, some wise and poignant words from the Liberal Haggadah come to mind. ‘No liberation is easy...As tyranny brings death and evil to its victims, so the struggle to overthrow it claims its casualties. In the upheaval, persecuted and persecutor, innocent and guilty, all will suffer. There is no redemption without pain.’ And there follows on seder night that famous tradition in relation to the Ten Plagues of symbolically diminishing our joy about liberation by spilling one drop of wine for each plague. Which, as the years go by, increasingly strikes me as a fairly meagre response to the devastating, bloody and death-dealing story that lies at the heart of the Jewish people’s  own liberation story, the exodus from Egypt.

This is our foundational myth, this God-driven liberation from bondage, and it has inspired us for millennia, we tell it again and again, referring to it not only at Pesach but at all festivals and every Shabbat:  we are always blessing God and enacting one ritual or another zecher lizyiat mitzrayim – ‘in memory of the coming out of Egypt’. And far beyond the Jewish community, it’s been inspirational for freedom struggles around the world: for American civil rights, for anti-apartheid campaigns in South Africa, for South American liberation theology. Our story has a universal resonance for oppressed people. And while we may take pride in this, it can be easy to ignore the shadow side of the story, the side that the Liberal haggadah acknowledges, that in any struggle for liberation ‘all will suffer’.

Our problem is that nationalism, any nationalism, can be - is - both blessing and curse. It’s always double-sided, whether we think of Israelites fleeing an Egypt devastated by plagues and death, the foundation of the United States through acts of genocide of native populations, or the birth of Israel as a nation-State and the consequences for Palestine’s other natives. What always gets lost in the euphoria of one group’s establishing of a new and supposedly freer collective identity is the face of God in the ‘other’, Judaism’s astonishing claim that the divine spark resides in each human being, regardless of race, or religion, or gender, or tribe or nation. That the enemy you are desperate to be liberated from, the enemy who oppresses you, who may hate you, is a uniquely created reflection of the divine image, just like you – this is the unbearable, paradoxical, radically challenging insight that Judaism provokes us with, defies us to keep in mind.

Judaism sets the bar so high, ethically speaking, spiritually speaking, that we are probably always going to fail in this impossible project of seeing the other as infinitely precious.

Meanwhile what we don’t have to fail at is in supporting the Jews of Ukraine in practical ways during these unsettling times, supporting them for example  through the World Jewish Relief’s Pesach appeal  https://www.wjr.org.uk/where-we-work/ukraine/ these troubling and confusing times in the Ukraine, WJR are continuing their ongoing programmes of support on the ground for vulnerable individuals in the country, mainly Jews but not exclusively so. If you don’t know what to think about what’s happening there, that’s OK, we are all a bit lost with it. But you can still do something of value. Go online, donate, or make a call, donate: isn’t that what credit cards are for?  It’s like spilling the wine, having a bit less for ourselves – in recognition of the humanity and suffering of others, Jew and non-Jew alike.


 

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on the middle Shabbat of Pesach, April 19^th, 2104]

 

Some Thoughts for Seder Night

As we sit down to our Seders – with family, with friends, or in community – we in the UK in 2014 intuit that as Jews we are living, historically speaking, lives of immense privilege. While we speak of oppression in Egypt and celebrate the journey our people made from slavery to freedom, we acknowledge the freedoms we now enjoy, unprecedented in Jewish history: freedom to assemble as we want, free to celebrate without persecution, free to speak our minds without fear of a knock on the door, free to express our Jewish selves in whatever style we may choose.

But the challenge of Seder night is not just to remember the past, not just to recall the extraordinary longevity of our story with its roots in servitude and its mythos of ourselves as a people liberated into a different kind of servitude – servitude to a vision of how things could be, how freedoms of many kinds could be the inheritance of all peoples;  as Rabbi John Rayner z”l expressed it: ‘freedom from oppression, freedom from want, freedom from hunger, freedom from hatred, freedom from fear; freedom to think, freedom to speak, freedom to learn, freedom to love, freedom to hope, freedom to rejoice - soon, in our days’. The Seder night is, of course, all of that. But it is more than that.

For how can we celebrate these freedoms we have - and those we wish for - with integrity, wholeheartedly, when we live in an as-yet-unredeemed world?  A world of homelessness on our doorsteps and food banks around the corner; a world where women are sold into sexual slavery, and wage slavery in China, India and Pakistan underpins the technology we use, the clothes we wear, sometimes the food we eat; a  world where polio has broken out in Syrian refugee camps, where West Bank settlers uproot Palestinian olive groves, where militias are on genocidal marches in Africa, a world where the richest 85 people on the planet control as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population put together...dayyeinu.

Yes, dayyeinu, we sing, in thankfulness of all we have. ‘It would have been enough’. ‘It should be enough’. Dayyeinu. But the bitter herbs remind us of all we have not done, and all that remains to be done, as long as  bitterness remains the daily life of others created, like us, in the image of the Divine One, our Redeemer - who waits for us to continue the work of redemption, with our own ‘strong hands and outstretched arms’.

The challenge of the Seder night is its call to action. To take that Biblical image – the metaphor of power-filled hands and arms  - culled from Exodus and Deuteronomy, the image of a redeeming energy transforming the fate of a whole people, to take this part of the mythic narrative and incarnate it in our own lives. What a challenge! What an expectation! What a destiny! Dare we embrace the challenge, the expectation? Dare we live in alignment with our task, our destiny as the people of God?  

Purim's Subversive Vision

There’s a curious Purim-related story in the Talmud about two scholars, Rabbah and Rabbi Zera. One year they got together to celebrate the festival and they became – as is the custom, in fact the halachah, the religious requirement – completely drunk [rat-arsed is I think the technical term]. So drunk that Rabbah attacked Rabbi Zera and killed him. On the next day, the Talmud goes on, Rabbah prayed on Rabbi Zera’s behalf and brought him back to life. The next year, Rabbah went to Rabbi Zera and said “Will my honoured teacher come, and we can again celebrate Purim together.” To which Rabbi Zera replied: “A miracle doesn’t take place on every occasion”. (Megillah 7b)

Once bitten, twice shy is the expression that comes to mind. Just a couple of bits of biographical information about these two characters. Firstly, Rabba, a third century teacher in the Babylon religious academies, was famous for always starting his lectures with a joke, or a humorous story, to get his students in a relaxed frame of mind. (It’s one of the few useful practical tips that I ever picked up from the Talmud). And there’s one quotation in the Talmud from Rabbi Zera that is worth reflecting on: ‘One should never promise a child anything which one does not intend to give it, because this would accustom the child to untruthfulness’. (Sukkot 46b)

That’s a piece of difficult (but practical) child-rearing wisdom, the psychological importance of which it has taken us another 1700 years to really appreciate. Parental sadism comes in many guises, often unconscious, but here’s an example of everyday casual sadism that parents can try and do something about: don’t make promises to children that you know you aren’t going to keep. You may feel it makes  life easier now, but you are storing up trouble, for them and for yourself.

Let’s return to the story. Obviously, although the characters in it are real historical figures, it’s a fable - not quite a parable, but a piece of imaginative playfulness: we know that once they are dead, people don’t come back to life, whether you pray for them or not. So what is the story getting at? Is it a critique of the dangers of drunkenness? Is it an implicit acknowledgement – a  millennium and a half before psychoanalysis and Melanie Klein - that aggression, murderousness, is just below the surface of even the most educated or pious of human hearts?  And that it doesn’t take much, just a few drinks,  to loosen up inhibitions and for this innate and powerful energy in us to burst out in violent and destructive fashion?

Maybe this little Talmudic tale Is  dealing (in semi-humorous fashion, humour being one of the archetypal Jewish defenses against pain) with one of the complex strands of feeling that lies underneath the celebration of Purim. Perhaps it is addressing the darkness at the heart of the Book of Esther, a book which has as its anti-hero a genocidal character intent on the elimination of a whole people because he finds one of them, Mordecai, objectionable. You will recall how, in the Biblical story, Mordecai doesn’t bow down to King Ahasuerus’s right-hand man, Haman, who has been raised high above the other officials at the court.  In other words, Mordecai the Jew won’t give enough respect to Haman the Agagite.

What we need to remember (the text keeps pointing to this) is that they are both outsiders within Persia – the Jew and the Agagite. And Haman’s personal insecurity as an outsider is demonstrated when his feelings about the other outsider spill over into a wish to kill them all off. Haman can’t do away with, eliminate, his own outsider status, however high he rises in the Persian court. But he can project his own demons onto the Jew – as has been done countless times through history right up to the politics of Hungary (or Iran) today – and then Haman the Agagite attacks the person (and the group) whose difference mirrors his own. And in an instant, the personal has become the political. And so in this strange book of 10 brief chapters, set in the diaspora (the only Biblical book that is), we have a story filled with banquets  and drinking, dancing girls and Oriental opulence – and the beginnings of genocidal anti-semitism.

This is why this little festival, that’s over almost before it begins, is one we don’t really take seriously, maybe can’t take seriously. We have to make it for children, and concentrate on the fun and the fancy costumes, make it into a Jewish Mardi Gras, have a bit too much to drink maybe, but not so much that we, like Rabbah in the Talmud, discover the depths of our own aggression. And yet our brief Talmudic tale invites us to look at this dark core of Purim. After all, it tells of one rabbi killing another one: as if to say Jews can be murderous too, we are human too. And  this picks up the last chapters of the Book of Esther which tell us how the Jews were given permission to defend themselves against the pogroms that were, the story says, unleashed against them through the King’s decree, the decree that Ahasuerus agrees to, prompted by Haman’s murderous rage.

This permission to defend themselves comes in a second decree that the King issues, because once the first royal decree is spoken and sealed it can’t be unspoken, revoked. Once the knowledge is out there that genocide is conceivable as a policy of state, it can’t be unthought. All that can happen, the story illustrates, is that the people under threat are allowed to defend themselves. And this they do, and a bloody massacre ensues, as the story narrates how the Jews, the potential victims, become the aggressors  and kill 75,000 of their enemies. In Liberal synagogues they used to omit this part of the text – if they celebrated Purim at all - and one can understand why they had qualms about the story. But it is a text that needs to be read if we are to think about the universal nature of human aggression – and that Jews are not exempt from the most primitive of human emotions.

But there’s something more that needs to be said about all this. And it’s linked to our Talmudic fable, or I am going to link it. It’s in the punch-line, Rabbi Zera’s wry, dry, sardonic response to Rabbah’s follow-up invitation to celebrate Purim with him the next year: “A miracle doesn’t take place on every occasion”, each time you need it. One of the things you might know about the Book of Esther is that – and it’s unique in the Hebrew Bible because of this – it does not contain within it the name of God. God is completely absent. The rabbis of the Talmud couldn’t quite cope with this and they hastened to show how although God’s name was missing, God was nevertheless hidden inside the story, hinted at  in particular phrases in the text, like “help will come from another place” (Esther4:14). And they pointed out that Esther’s name is closely related to the Hebrew word for ‘hidden’, ‘concealed’, ‘secret’, nistar.

For the rabbis of the Talmud, God is always present even when He seems to be absent. But I think that the writers of the Book of Esther were in a sense more radical than that, more daring. For they created a story, a fable – and it is a fable because these characters aren’t historical figures, the names Mordecai and Esther seem to be based on the names of the Middle Eastern gods Marduk and Astarte – they created a fable filled with a deadly diasporic seriousness.

And the seriousness is that it portrays how a whole people, the Jewish people, need to depend not on the Holy One of Israel, God, and his miraculous interventions into history on their behalf. That’s the Pesach story, the foundational story of national liberation. But that era has gone, say the authors of this subversive book: what the Jewish people have to depend on now is their native wit, their sechel, as Mordecai does when he reads the times right and decides how to intervene; and they need to depend on their personal courage, as Esther does, courage and self-sacrifice; and they need to use everything they have at their disposal, and in Esther’s case that includes her sexual allure. Anything and everything that is human needs to be brought into play, the authors of the Book of Esther show us, to ensure Jewish survival in an era in which God is no longer involved as it was thought He was in days of old. 

That’s why the Book of Esther is perhaps the most contemporary of Biblical books. It places Jewish continuity, Jewish survival, in our own hands; and it became a sacred book, part of the Hebrew canon, in a way which suggests that the authors thought: this is how holiness works now, through the human.

But I think they did something even more daring in their telling of the story, even more daring than illustrating how the divine now works through people, in what they do, what they say, how they behave, what they risk, what they sacrifice. The Book  also shows that this kind of human activity might not be enough to ensure our survival as a people. It may also be the case that our fate, individual or collective, also depends on luck, or chance. Because time and again in the story the events revolve around chance happenings – or what we think of as chance happenings.

Remember those two minor characters Bigthan and Teresh? They plot to assassinate the king, and Mordecai just happens to be there and overhear them when they are plotting, and he gives the information to Esther who reports it to the king in Mordecai’s name. It didn’t need GCHQ to listen in to all the conversations going on in the country: Mordecai just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Chance, luck, co-incidence, ‘beshert’? But the whole story revolves around this incident, this random, chance event. There’s nothing in this story like you find in the rest of the Bible: “And God said to Mordecai, ‘By the way there’s a plot brewing, and this is what you must do...’”. The miraculous – if that’s what we want to call it, though the story doesn’t – is all happening within the realm of the human, the everyday.

And chance keeps on turning up in the tale. So there is the night – and it is placed at the epicentre of the 10 chapters at the beginning of chapter 6, as if this is the hinge around which everything revolves – the night when the king can’t sleep. It could happen to any of us. What is more ordinary than that? A character can’t sleep and he wants something to distract him and he orders the court records to be brought to him, the recent chronicles of the times, and the page he turns to – chance, fate, luck, the sheer sacred randomness of life – the page he turns to tells about the plot against him and who gave the tip-off that saved him, Mordecai the Jew. And the story moves on, catalysed now by this new knowledge the king has and his decision to reward our man Mordecai.

He was told this before, by Esther, but he didn’t register it; but now he reads it and history turns on what he reads that sleepless night. And the lowly Jew is raised up and becomes the new right-hand man – and the high and mighty Haman is brought low – brought low by (ah, irony) being hung up on a tree,  a tree prepared (again, irony) for his mortal enemy. Everything is turned on its head – and in fact the verb ‘turned’, ‘overturned’ (hafach) keeps popping up in the text.  Nothing is as it seems. Everything can be turned into its opposite. This is life now, the authors intuit and hint at throughout their tale. You can use your native wit and your seductive charms and your bravery – and they can take you so far. But you also have to reckon on chance, contingency, luck, randomness – there is no divine Being controlling it all, the Biblical authors suggest.

This is a frightening, disturbing vision. And we might well want to hide from it. To put on our masks, to dress up as other than we are, to drink until we can no longer recognise the difference, as the rabbis of the Talmud decreed for us,  between ‘Blessed is Mordecai’ and ‘Cursed is Haman’. To recognise – if only on one day of the year - that murderers can become victims, and victims murderers; that the secure boundaries we imagine between good and evil are not so secure; that good and evil may be categories we need to construct for ourselves in order to exist in society but we shouldn’t assume too much about their solidity: they are liquid qualities, fluid as wine. So the good that Mordecai did required Esther to deceive the king by withholding her Jewish identity, untruthfulness here (pace Rabbi Zera) being a virtue – and all of this slippage between good and evil takes place in a world where God does not appear as He did in former times, or was said to do. We can no longer depend on miracles to save us – this is Rabbi Zera’s amused (?) but profound recognition.

What we poor, confused mortals are then left with on Purim – what anchors us within this elision of normal boundaries, and in the absence of miracles – is that other Purim tradition, that  is already spoken about in the Esther text, where  what is decreed is  a time ‘of feasting and gladness, a time for sending gifts to one another and presents to the poor’ (Esther 9:22). Misloach manot – small gifts of food for friends; and mattanot l’evyonim –financial donations to the impoverished, who are always with us, always in our midst.

What we are left with are small acts of kindness, beyond good and evil. The dramas of history can sweep us away, the rulers of the world can issue decrees that destroy our lives; and then build them up again. But meanwhile, while the wheels of history turn, on the ground, what we are left with, humbling and holy, is friendship and generosity. It’s all we have to rely on. Let’s treasure it.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, March 15^th 2014]

"The Last Temptation of Noah" (1988)

Recently, discussing the floods that have inundated parts of the UK, some friends reminded me about a sermon I'd once given at the Jewish New Year. What they remembered though was that as I was sharing this story-sermon, a thunderstorm had broken out and water started to pour through the synagogue roof. I'd like to claim that this was a cleverly-orchestated special effects stunt that I'd managed to engineer. (Alas, it was just a leaking roof).  But in the light of the current travails the country has been suffering, I've dug out the story/sermon and thought I'd share it here. I must have done a fair bit of background research because I can see that it weaves together motifs from both the Biblical narrative of Noah and traditional midrashim, as well as trying to address contemporary concerns. I guess that, in spite of its somewhat gauche tone, it could be said to have stood the test of time. So for those who are interested - as well as those who only remember the special effects - here it is. (The title was pinched - or 'adapted', as we writers say - from Martin Scorcese's "The Last Temptation of Christ", which had come out that year).

 

                                    Even before the Disaster I felt misunderstood. I only wanted a quiet life. To come home after work, relax and rest. After all - and this used to be my private joke, though it feels pretty grim now - that's what my name Noah means: rest. 

                                    Apart from my work and my family I couldn't really be bothered with anything else. I didn't have many interests, not even much ambition. I used to sit in the office during the day and dream of the journey home, opening the door, playing with the kids (when they were smaller), or, later on, helping them with their homework. In the evening I'd switch on the TV in order to switch off my thoughts, those terrible thoughts that kept coming, waves of them, more and more insistently over the years. All I ever really wanted was a rest - from the pressures that we all suffered. Just a rest from it all: the bills, the relatives, the dinner parties. Rest: it was all I wanted. Honestly. 

                                    Oh yes, I was known for my honesty. Even those who didn't like me said I had integrity. They used other words too, which sounded good, words like 'upright', 'blameless', even (God help me) 'righteous'. But I never trusted them - not the words, nor the people. Words had lost their solidity, their truthfulness, long before. In those days words meant their opposite.  

                                    When that TV presenter interviewed me (near the end this was, after I'd made all the fuss), he was the one who called me 'righteous'. But I could hear in the tone of his voice how he really meant 'self-righteous', how the compliment disguised the attack. And who knows, maybe he was right, maybe I did begin to feel a bit self-righteous. Because I did know what was going to happen. I wasn't taken in by all those words: freedom of opportunity, economic growth, individual choice...I could see what was going on, all that heartbreak beneath the surface, and what was going to happen if we didn't change. I did know it would end in disaster; but I didn't know just how bad it would turn out. I didn't, honestly...I can tell you don't believe me. It's all right - I'm used to that. Nobody ever believed me then, either. Before.  

                                    You see, I worked in industry, middle-management. Yes, of course I was a professional - all our friends were. The firm made agricultural and forestry equipment. When it expanded we went into animal feed, fertilisers, that sort of thing - quite a broad spread - even livestock eventually. We were successful too: public company, safe investment, high annual returns, particularly good Third World market, what with all the problems they kept having. I was responsible for overseas sales. Quite an irony really when you think about it, considering what happened.  

                                    I was able to laugh more in those days too. Earlier on that was. I used to enjoy having fun: a good party, that sort of thing. I don't think I ever entirely lost my sense of humour - but I kept noticing things I'd prefer not to have known about. I'd read a report here, hear a programme there, bits and pieces of knowledge on the periphery of my consciousness. I tried to keep the knowledge at a distance, but it became harder. Things kept happening, kept forcing themselves on my attention. 

                                    First we had that string of warm years: '80, '81, '83, '87, '88 - the hottest since records began they said. It didn't bother me really: I was only worried about getting a bit of sun on our holidays. And where I went it rained anyway. But the statistics were global ones: it was beginning to warm up rather dramatically. Only a few degrees over a century didn't sound so much, but researchers in one country began to see the changes in plants and trees, and then another group at the other side of the world discovered that the world's beaches were eroding. These were just a couple of the warnings of the impending crisis.  

                                    I did mention it to a few people at work - after all it could have had implications for our sales - but they just shrugged and said that these kinds of reports are not reliable, they come and go, you know how it is... 

                                    And although I didn't really know how it was, it was easier at the beginning to change the subject and ask what home computer they thought I should buy. It felt safer ground.  

                                    But then the dreams started. All that water imagery, all that flooding, swimming, drowning, seas and swimming pools, struggling to keep afloat - every night a new variation on the theme. My analyst told me that this was ‘archetypal symbolism’: the struggle of the Self to emerge from the Sea of Consciousness. I changed my analyst. The next one told me it was about separation from mother.  

                                    And all the time I knew that something else was going on. It's not that they were wrong - but something else was going on, much bigger than me. Everyone had heard about the 'greenhouse effect', how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere acts like glass in a greenhouse, letting the sun's rays through to the earth but also trapping some of the heat that would otherwise be radiated back into space. We were burning all that coal and oil and gas, more and more of it, year after year - and the planet was heating up. Then there were those other gases: like the ones in those take-away cartons. Some firms changed them, others said the evidence was inconclusive (though of course it ‘merited further study’). But that still left aerosol sprays and even fridges - and I liked ice in my gin and tonic. 

                                    I really didn't know what to do. But I soon knew all the responses I'd get. The Chairman of the Board put it to me with his usual delicacy: what do you want us to do - grow our own vegetables? bicycle to work? light the office with candles? 

                                    The problem was that I didn't have any answers. I only had fears and questions and intuitions - and they wouldn't go away. But it was that presentation I did at the shareholders meeting that finally wrecked me. I spoke about the rainforests we were destroying (indirectly of course: our firm only sold the equipment); I gave them all the facts and figures, how the earth was such a fragile interconnected ecosystem (oh yes, by then I'd learnt the jargon), that what the inhabitants of planet earth were doing was quietly conducting a giant environmental experiment. Were it to be brought before any responsible local council for approval it would be firmly rejected as having potentially disastrous consequences.  

                                    At the meeting there were a variety of responses: anger and boredom mainly, though a few people seemed rather subdued afterwards. Perhaps it was naive to expect anything more - after all I'd just bought a new car as well. I didn't want to change my lifestyle either. I was comfortable, I admit it. But we all were then - at least in the circles I mixed in.  

                                    Getting the push after that speech was actually a blessing in disguise. I devoted myself more and more to trying to get people to see what was going on around them all the time. I got involved with political groups, environmental groups. I started writing letters to The Guardian. I even spoke to religious groups (strange: the Christians were always more interested than the Jews).  

                                                I gave the same speech wherever I went. 'The climate that has allowed the growth of civilisation and agriculture - and to which all our crops, customs and structures are adapted - is virtually certain to disappear. The world will become warmer than at any time since the emergence of humanity on earth. This threatens to take place over the next forty years. Humanity will find it hard to adapt, particularly in a world fragmented by national boundaries and competing interests. Harvests will fail more drastically. the cities we live in will go under water.'

 

                                    People began to hate me for what I was saying. They used to avoid me, fear me: fear what I was saying, I suppose. A poet had written 'Human kind cannot bear very much reality' and it was true. I didn't blame people - I couldn't bear it either. My wife began to catch me talking to myself. I was trying to keep myself sane, keep myself from the madness of knowing that something was inevitable - that was the word the experts used - unless we worked together. Funnily enough, I did have faith in humanity then. I believed that people could change, with help and encouragement. And groups of people working together - communities - could do a lot. But first we had to realise we'd taken a wrong direction, we had to turn from what's best only for ourselves, our family, our community, our nation. 

                                    Near the end I realised that we needed to pray too - though at first I was more sceptical about that. Religion had always felt a bit too cosy and comfortable: too much security was on offer. And I certainly had no security to offer anyone. I used to take myself off for long walks and look at the mess around me - the squalor, the poverty, the drugged ones, the violence, the neglect, the corruption, the decay. 

                                   

                                    I saw the goodness too, in people I met, the beauty in small things. I could see infinity in a grain of sand and feel eternity in an hour. But overall, on these walks, I felt the inferno, the 'moronic inferno' one of those clever Jewish novelists called it: the levelling down of contemporary life where people found themselves in that chaotic state, overwhelmed by all kinds of outer forces - political, technological, military, economic - which carry everything before them with a kind of disorder in which we were supposed to survive with all our human qualities. Who really had sufficient internal organisation to resist, let alone to flourish? 

                                    It wasn't possible to go on that way. And in their hearts and souls, people knew it. It wasn't just me: I really was just an ordinary person. In my generation I was nothing special. I knew it. Later on, long after the Disaster, when they told those stories about me, things got changed somehow. It was true that I became wholeheartedly committed to speaking the truth I experienced, sharing my vision of what I knew was going to happen. But if I'd lived in a less corrupt time, nobody would ever have heard of me. Even the rabbis acknowledged that, later.  

                                    I could never explain properly those intuitions I'd have when I was off walking. I just knew in the end that I had changed and that others could change too. It was very simple. I had an inner voice that I just had to trust. Everyone had that voice deep inside them. It was obvious. But in those days so many temptations drowned out that knowing voice, so many possibilities of seduction away from our still and silent truth.  

                                    I once made a list, half-jokingly, of what I thought we needed to remember to be fully human, to be what we ought to be in this world. I jotted down seven things - it surprised me there were so few. I sent them on a postcard to a friend and she wrote back saying I sounded like some kind of religious nut. It sounded, she said - she was very cynical though - as if I was walking with God when I went off on my expeditions round town. I wasn't hurt by this. Well, not really. It stayed in my mind though, that phrase, 'walking with God'. 

                                    Later on, when they told those stories about me, they seemed to think it was a compliment: that somehow this was an uplifting, desirable experience for a person to have. Actually it was hell. 

                                    I'll tell you the list, but before I do I want to say that I've gone against most of them in my time. There were so many temptations then, not even a saint could have resisted them. And I was no saint. But I do know there are some things that just have to be. If we're going to make it through this time. And call it walking with God, if you like.  

                                    First, there has to be a system of justice. Real justice allows a society to function and the individual to retain dignity. And a system of political and legal justice means that the disadvantaged are protected from abuse - the abuse from power, money or class. 

                                    Secondly: murder - it's not on. We have to deal with our violent feelings in some other way. And leading on from there, thirdly: robbery, theft, is out too. We have to find an alternative way of channelling our greed, and our envy of what others have.  

                                    Nor can incest be allowed. That wise professor from Vienna eventually uncovered just how much we do secretly want to express our sexuality inside our family. But we just can't have our mummy or daddy or children or siblings in that way. We've got to find someone else to do it with. And that reminds me of what happened after the Disaster. We were in such chaos. There was just our family, and my middle boy Ham did something to me which I can never forgive him for, that bugger, God damn him! But that's another story.  

                                    Yes, the fifth on the list is blasphemy. It's no use my letting rip like that. I still have to find a way of getting rid of this anger. The sixth thing I listed I called idolatry. It was a handy word, it covered a lot of things. Actually I was thinking of all those adverts on TV, and all those colour supplements offering me happiness on every page. We were drowning in luxury in those days: so many divinely decadent choices. We knew it couldn't go on forever but we worshipped production and consumption. I loved buying things - it made me feel so secure, so good about myself. Crazy, really, looking back. 

                                    Last on my list, number seven, sounds strange now, though at the time it made sense. I called it 'not eating flesh cut from a living animal'. You see I wanted something on my list that captured the essence of evil: that degraded the one who performed it and cause pain and terror to the victim. I suppose I could have chosen another image, another way to express this. Towards the end people came up with worse things, believe me.  

                                    Anyway, I thought out these seven things during my walks. Afterwards - after 'it' happened I mean - people saw them as the natural religious basis vital to the existence of any human society. I suppose I'm rather proud of that. They even called them after me: 'the seven laws given to the descendants of Noah'.  

                                    Right. I'm nearly finished now. I just want to tell you what happened in the end, when the Disaster came.  

                                    I saw it all so clearly: we'd reached the point where the rate of environmental change in my lifetime was going to be many times the maximum that our planet's eco-system could endure. There was no escaping this fate unless a radical transformation took place. One day I saw it all so clearly that I grew really desperate. I felt more hopeless than I'd ever done before. I felt closed in, with this great weight around me. I'd built it myself, this mental structure I'd constructed from all the evidence I'd gathered. It was like a vessel of doom I lived in. I was going crazy inside it. I was in complete despair.  

                                    I just wanted to be left alone. The understanding I had was too much for me. I felt hundreds of years old. It felt completely hopeless. I felt overwhelmed by...helplessness, that's the word: I was completely helpless, like a baby. I couldn't do anything more. I had no strength left.  

                                    And I started to cry. It'd never happened before. After all I was a man. But I did, I broke down, in front of my family: all of them were there - my wife and my sons and their wives. And I wept and wept. Tears of bitterness. Tears of remorse. Tears of anger. Tears of grief. I cried and I cried and I just...floated away.  

                                    It's hard to describe now. The sadness just flooded out of me. It went on and on, all those years and years of frustration and pain trapped inside - it all welled up and spilled out. The tears just seemed to pour out of me - it felt like days - for the sadness of it all, and the pity.  

                                    The rest you know of course. It's history - of a sort. It's in the books, though I know people argue over the details. Nothing ever was the same again.  

                                    Though there was one helpful moment: when I saw that rainbow. Yes, I know it's only the reflection of the sun in moist atmosphere, but I'd never really looked at one before. Really looked, I mean. That one time though, soon after the Disaster, I saw those seven colours arched above me, translucent and glorious and shimmering. And I suddenly remembered the seven laws I'd jotted down on that card; and it was my conceit, I know, but I felt there was some connection between those seven basic norms for how we are to live together and those seven basic colours in which the world is enveloped.  

                                    There was a harmony at that moment: seeing how the natural world and our human world reflected each other's inner grace. And at that moment I knew, I knew as clearly as if I heard a voice speak it in my ear, I knew that this disaster could never be again. Not ever. It felt like a promise. If I were a religious man I'd call it a blessing. Never again - such relief, I can't tell you.  

                                    'While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest and cold and heat and summer and winter and day and night shall not cease'. The words just formed themselves in my head. It would never happen again. That's all there is to say.  

                                    Oh, I almost forgot. The ‘last temptation of Noah’. You want to know the very last temptation? It was after it was all over and we had to pull ourselves together and start again. That was hard. We didn't know where we were, where we were going, what we were doing. Everything had gone. We survivors felt so helpless so much of the time. And the hardest part was that we kept remembering how it'd been before: so comfortable, so secure - you'll never know. That was the worst part: I couldn't help but remember it.  

                                    I became very morose, self-pitying. I just wanted to forget, to forget how it'd been. And, I admit it, I started to drink. They never tell the story this way, but this is how it was. They always make me out as the father of vineyards and winemaking, but I'm telling you: soon I was drinking all the time - I just wanted to blot it all out.  

                                    And that was the last temptation: the temptation to blot it all out, to forget the knowledge I carried, the understanding I had, the lonely experiences I'd been through, the intuitions I'd borne all these years. I tried to drown myself in drink: another flood.  

                                    But it wasn't to be of course. It seems that my destiny is to remember, to remain aware. I never did get my rest. I learnt that death is the only release from the burden of consciousness. And that while I lived, my work was just given to me to do. It was wherever I happened to be.  

                                    I even wrote a poem about it towards the end. Someone else later took the credit for it of course - but then none of us is perfect. Are we?

 

                                    To open eyes when others close them

                                    to hear when others do not wish to listen

                                    to look when others turn away

                                    to seek to understand when others give up

                                    to rouse oneself when others accept

                                    to continue the struggle even when one is

                                   

                                    not the strongest

                                    to cry out when others keep silent

                                    to be a Jew

                                    it is that

                                    it is first of all that

                                    and further

                                    to live when others are dead

                                    and to remember when others have

 

                                    forgotten.

 

 

 

                    (Second Day Rosh Hashanah sermon, Finchley Reform Synagogue, 1988)

 

“The bells! The bells!” or ‘On the Wish to Ward Off Evil’

Nearly a thousand years ago, in the 1070s, a 70’ long piece of embroidered cloth we now call the Bayeux Tapestry was commissioned by William the Conqueror’s half-brother to depict the events leading up to the Norman Conquest. One section shows the funeral of Edward the Confessor, who died some months before the Battle of Hastings in 1066 (And All That). If you look carefully at that scene, you’ll find - down at the bottom  - two people carrying bells in each of their hands.

The use of bells in religious ceremonies goes back a long way, in the West at least to ancient Rome. And not just religious ceremonies. For many cultures around the world from time immemorial have used bells to ward off evil spirits: in India and China and Japan they used them alongside wind chimes.  And the scene in the Bayeux Tapestry might well be part of that tradition, the folk belief that evil could be averted by frightening it off, so to speak, with bells. Wedding bells too, in Christianity, belong in this tradition: they announce, and celebrate, the couple – but they also ward off the evil that was felt to lurk whenever joy is present.

These thoughts are prompted by a curious detail in this week’s Torah text. The robe of the High Priest, worn when he was performing his cultic duties, is described in elaborate detail in Exodus 28. It includes the instruction that his robe was to be adorned with bells on its hem (verse 35) – “and the sound shall be heard when he goes in to the holy space, before the Eternal One, and when he comes out, v’lo yamut”, (literally, ‘so that he does not die’). Archeologists in Jeruslaem have recently discovered such a bell near the Temple Mount.  

 

As so often in the Torah, there’s no explanation given for these mysterious bells. They can hardly be there out of a worry that the High Priest would get lost – it’s not the sort of bells we put round  a domestic cat, or the Alpine bells round the necks of cattle or sheep or goats.  A traditional explanation suggests that it could have been an announcing bell so that people would know when the High Priest was entering the Holy of Holies for the sacred business of communing with the Divine – a bit like the one that begins and ends that other sacred activity, the opening and closing of the New York Stock Exchange.  Or perhaps, like the pomegranates that also adorned the hem of his robe, a symbol of the fruitfulness of religious life, the bells were symbolic – representing connectedness with the divine, a connectedness that goes beyond words.  

Or perhaps it is evidence - to go back to the Bayeux Tapestry - of that ancient belief that ringing bells can ward off evil?  Don’t we all wish, profoundly wish, that we could keep ‘evil’ away - stop bad things from happening - just by ringing a bell? Whether it is ringing a bell, or spitting three times (p,p,p), or stroking a rabbit’s foot, or not walking under ladders, or wearing an amulet blessed by a wonder rabbi (or by the Kabbalah Centre), or any one of a hundred thousand folk customs that have arisen in all ages and all places on the planet – how amazing life would be if there could be a straightforward link between an action we take (something we do, or say, or wear, or pray) and the warding off of unpleasant, unhappy, upsetting, disturbing events,  things that are part of the weave  of life but cause us misery, pain, distress.

Beneath our rational selves, and our conscious, modern minds that might describe all of these things as superstitions, as attempts to control life in all its uncontrollable randomness, deep in us we can probably locate a primitive emotional need to believe that we might have some way of controlling our fate, of doing something that might prevent a disaster, or an accident - for ourselves, or those we love. Harm can be avoided, we believe (we desperately want to believe), if only I’m good enough, or pious enough, or superstitious enough, or careful enough.

What we humans can’t bear, don’t seem to be able to bear - and our culture colludes in this in all sorts of ways -  is the sheer contingency of life, its messiness, its unpredictability, its randomness, its haphazardness. You can get into your car and if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, you know that, through no fault of your own, that you can be in an accident. It can shake you up, it may even kill you – heaven forbid. And we say ‘heaven forbid’ – or p,p,p as my grandmother would do - as a prophylactic: as if just by saying those two words it could stop it happening. Or the parallel belief that if we don’t say it, it might happen:  because now we have thought it, it just could happen and we’d have brought it into being just by thinking it. We tie ourselves in knots because if, in the end, what happens to us is out of our control – that knowledge is unbearable, the feelings of helplessness are unbearable.  

We would all do anything to avoid  these kinds of random events happening. We would love to know how we can avoid distress and pain - but we  can’t, and some part of us knows we can’t, knows that life is not organized like that: even our bodies themselves are part of that contingency sown into the fabric of life. We know our bodies  are fragile, vulnerable, and we can look after them as much as we can, eat the right things, exercise them, take care of them - but they still let us down in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways.

Being an embodied human being is a daily lesson in the essential fragility of our humanness – and our mental  states too are equally as vulnerable, however much we might meditate, or medicate, or practice mindfulness, or however many years of therapy we might have had.

Bad stuff happens. And no bell ringing will make a difference. We are not that omnipotent – even though lodged in us is an irrational belief that we are: that we can manage our fate by just taking the right precautions; or having the right security systems in place, in our homes, or synagogues, or computers; or just following the right Health and Safety guidelines, or having the right child protection schemes in place. One very modern illusion – a deeply needed belief, but an illusion – is that we can legislate our way to happiness by removing distress, or just alleviating the possibility of distress; that we can have systems and laws to stop bad things happening to us, or to our children, or to ‘the vulnerable’ – although we are all vulnerable. That is of the essence of our humanity: our vulnerability, our mortality, – “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee” (John Donne, ‘Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions’, 1624).

So although we don’t know – can’t know – the purpose of the bells on the High Priest’s robe (the Talmud discusses whether there were 36 or 72 of them), what we read is that these bells, on this garment, were a matter of ultimate concern in the scheme of things. The Hebrew text intuits that what was going on in these arcane rituals was a matter of life and death. He was to wear these bells v’lo yamut, (‘so that he does not die’).

But maybe we can understand this phrase figuratively, and existentially. I prefer to think that the wearing of these bells was v’lo yamut  - ‘lest he stops living in the moment’. By which I mean that these bells kept him alert, kept him awake, moment by moment, every step of the way, every movement of his body, even as he breathed in and out, as we all breathe in and out, the bells kept him alive to the mystery, the awesome nature of being alive now, as we are alive now – though we have no bells to remind us that this is a thing of awe: human life, in all its fragility and vulnerability, all those cells, all that DNA, all that drama of heart and lungs, liver and kidneys and bones and brain, all that ‘three pounds of jelly’ (as Oliver Sacks, with well-tempered irony, describes the brain ) through which everything flows and filters...what are we to make of it all, this body of ours, this mind of ours, with its memories, its feelings, its knowledge, alongside its limitations, its failures, its fading powers? We have nothing as simple as a bell to remind us of the awesome nature of life, daily life, our life, our being here now.

The bells kept the High Priest attentive to the mystery of being, at every moment. Now and now and now. And this, I would suggest,  is the holy space he entered – this awareness of the present moment in all its kedushah, its unfolding holiness of being . The Torah text gives us a picture not just of an archaic ritual that has disappeared into the mythic past – but a picture of our inheritance, we ‘kingdom of priests’ (Exodus 19:6). When we read of these bells  we turn our inner ears to the music of the present moment - we are the priests whose task it is to enter into the presence of the sacred: this music of the sacred, in each moment, is sometimes so soft we can hardly hear it, it’s sometimes so quiet we forget to hear it, it’s sometimes so faint we think there is nothing there.

We need to be reminded, every day, twice every day – Shema Yisrael, ‘Hear O Israel, Listen out Yisrael’, when we go out and when we come in, the bells of the High Priest are still to be heard, each moment, reminding us of the holiness of life itself. And if we don’t attune ourselves to listening in – it is as good as being dead. This is the sacred drama of a kingdom of priests, our daily drama, life-giving, life-preserving: it is within the randomness of life, that holiness is to be found.

The more time we spend trying to control life to avoid bad things happening, the further we get from contentment. We can drive ourselves, and others, mad If we cannot embrace life as – in the final analysis – uncontrollable, as uncontrollable as those bells on the hem of the High Priest. Every moment he moved, they sounded. Every moment he moved they reminded him: you are alive now, and this is sacred. However still you are, you will hear the bells, faintly, the background to life. It’s when you stop hearing the bells, when the bells stop – that’s it, that’s the end of your life. The dead don’t hear the bells. They are for the living, and for life.  Shema Yisrael.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, February 8^th, 2014]