The Hybrid Jew

So it seems that after all that kerfuffle,  I won’t now be able to apply for my Scottish passport.  My father was born and raised in Glasgow and that meant that I would have been eligible for one.  But we’ve had our nationally televised Great British Break Off – and it’s not to be.

 I remember that word ‘kerfuffle’ from my childhood, from when I was a ‘wee lad’. I heard it a lot growing up, and I suppose I always thought it was Yiddish: it often went with that other word that described those who were involved in kerfuffles: ‘meshuggenahs’. So my mistake isn’t that surprising. Actually it’s Scottish, ‘kerfuffle’, meaning  ‘disorder/agitation’ – but it’s in every dictionary of the English language, or should we say ‘British’ language, as an informal word  for ‘fuss’ or ‘commotion’. But in its onomatopoeic weirdness ‘kerfuffle’ is  so much more evocative to my ear than those very ‘English’ words. Kerfuffle:  a concocted, fluffed up argument over trifles...

It’s quite common in childhood to grow up with a mishmash of languages in our head – I’m sure I absorbed lots of words from my parents, from family, from school, as well as from what I read; nowadays it’s also from globalised TV programmes and music. We are all internationalists in our speech, in our everyday talking, we are all speaking hybrid sentences all the time. ‘Mishmash’ – you hear it every day from BBC correspondents and Eton-educated man-of-the-people politicians – it’s come into so-called ‘English’ via Yiddish from the Middle High German. I even heard Nigel Farage use it. None of us are national purists when it comes to how we talk.

When it comes to language we can see what a strange concept nationalism is, how artificial a construct it is – however rigorously we try to police the boundaries and borders of our national language, immigrant words just creep in, or are smuggled in, even when they are not actively embraced in acts of colonisation: pyjamas, juggernaut, loot, bungalow, cot, cushy - even dear old ‘Blighty’.  And you can’t get a more British word than that Hindi expression. We’re all mongrels when we talk.

Hebrew is the same – not just modern Hebrew , Ivrit, the most successful language revitalisation project in history, a revival led by Eliezer ben-Yehudah at the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century which took Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew and grafted into it Yiddish, Polish, English, German, Ladino and Arabic words – amongst others – to create a new language for a new nation-state, which has had to keep adding words as the years have gone by: so you have to use your intuitzia to sort out the informatzia you get from the televisia, for example,  because the compozitzia of a proportzia of it is - how to say it? – trivia.

You can never keep the field of language free from cross-fertilisation from alien imports. The wind of trans-national communication blows – like the divine spirit, the ruach Elohim fluttering over the face of the deep – and the seeds of language drift across boundaries and regenerate languages, keeping them creatively alive and fertile resources for us to use and misuse. Miscegenation is the norm, the name of the game.

It’s not just modern Hebrew. Classical Hebrew too is polyglot: God might have dictated the Torah  to Moses word by word, but if so then Ha-Kadosh Baruch Hu was quite a linguist: maybe it was just His wicked sense of humour but something was going on when He decided to use a foreign word, in fact several foreign words, as names for Himself: El, El Elyon, El Shaddai, all derive from pre-Hebraic  Canaanite and Ugaratic words for various gods. And the decision to call His people Yisrael was just inspired: you can still hear the old Canaanite god El planted within the name of our people, idling away, as if to subvert any atavistic wish for Jewish ethnic purity for ‘our people’. Whenever we say Israel, Yisrael, we are reminding ourselves – if we have ears to hear – that ‘otherness’ is part of us, innately.

The Jewish people have inherited a name – Israel/Yisrael - that is both a religious identity and now, latterly, the name of a state. But both echo with this subversive reminder that our membership of Klal Yisrael, the community of Israel, includes parts of the past we might have thought we’ve left behind.  Being a Jew means being a hybrid – there’s no escape. We’ve always been taking from and reacting against the non-Jewish worlds we lived in. Our Jewish psyches are like an archaeological site, layered by history: dig inside us and we find the triumphs and tragedies of bygone years, the pride and the fears, traces of all the cultures we lived in over the generations: where do you think we got hamentaschen from on Purim, or cheesecake on Shavuot, or twisted challah on Shabbat? We took them over from the cultures we lived in and made them our own. Like El in Yisrael.

Our souls are like a cliff face open to the elements and revealing the variegated strata of centuries, and geologists of the psyche can rejoice in seeing how we are filled with impure mixtures of Ashkenazi sediments and Sephardi fossils and Islamic and Christian and pagan minerals. Whether Jews by choice or Jews by fate, you join your own story to that of Israel/ Yisrael – and that identity, (with the old Canaanite god El lurking in the background) is gloriously impure, mongrel, rich in the blessings of multiplicity rather than the one-dimensional fanaticism that attaches itself to notions of purity.

Jews above all should know the importance of this theme of the hybrid - because we have been the victims of a mentality that believed the opposite, that a people’s culture was and should be mono-dimensional, monolithic: ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer’ (one people, one nation, one leader) – that was the fantasy of ethnic purity and we know where it led, and where it still leads. And I am not alone in detecting it in some of the more extreme voices in the Knesset and the West Bank. And when we hear it we must call it by its name. From the depths of our multi-layered mongrel Jewish souls we call into question, call to task, fantasies of national or ethnic purity.

This hybridity is threaded through the Jewish story from the earliest times, and it operates on the fundamental  level of language, as I’ve said, as well as within the stories of the tradition – remember that mixed multitude of people who left Egypt along with the Hebrew people and lived and journeyed  with them and had children with them and produced the next generations of Israel through that 40 years of desert wandering? A story that tells us, just as an aside, that Moses married Zipporah, daughter of a Midianite priest. It’s as if the storytellers want to keep reminding us that ethnic purity is a fantasy. That we are all hybrids.

And nationalism, like religious ideology, can become an elaborate and sometimes, tragically, deadly serious game to hide this discomforting fact of life. Our world is filled with death-dealing in the name of nationalism, which becomes even more toxic when laced with religion – the Middle East is full of it self-evidently, and Russia and Ukraine come to mind, but they are only the tip of the iceberg - which is why for me, to return to the referendum, although I could see the emotional appeal of independence and Scottish nationalism, I am very happy still to be living in this ramshackle disordered disunited kingdom which is larger than the sum of its parts.

Perhaps part of what makes Britain ‘Great’ – in an era when that ‘greatness’ is much diminished, and much derided too in some parts (and I have some sympathy with critiques of our ‘Greatness’)  – but what makes it Great, I think, is that it implicitly recognises that these islands are home to many peoples, many tribes, and always have been: we are a cobbled-together nation that’s been able, historically, to absorb others - not just their languages, but their peoples, newcomers, immigrants, asylum seekers, century after century of them, including my Polish-born grandfather who found himself in Glasgow when he got off the boat – though I’m not sure he knew it has heading there.

It was more  for him a case, as for so many in those decades, of : we are just journeying ‘Away from Here. Away From Here: that is our destination’; ‘Away from Here’, Kafka’s words resonating into our contemporary world, when so many peoples from so many lands where there is ethnic strife and war and deprivation and hardship are making that perilous journey from fraught homelands towards the uncertain fate of a new life, ‘Away from Here’. And that our shambolic disunited kingdom can still welcome people of so many diverse lands and backgrounds and cultures is what confirms (if anything does any longer) this nation’s entitlement to still call itself ‘Great’.

But we Jews are going to have to fight for that, if we retain any belief in the importance of the notion of offering havens for the persecuted. We say it over and over, in the Torah, and in sermons you’ll have heard ad nausea:  ‘we have been strangers’ - so it is our duty, it is incumbent on us, to welcome the stranger. And if we have no vote when it comes to how our co-religionists do this in Israel, which is a whole other story, we do have a vote and a voice when it comes to this country. And this year we have an election coming up and we are going to be beaten over the head with the narrowing down, anti-immigrant, anti-European UKIP narrative, and other parties will tack to the foul winds blowing from that direction.

It’s at the New Year, in our liturgy, that we are exposed to this extraordinary part of the Jewish mythic narrative that says ‘This day all who enter the world pass before You...and you record, and count, and consider them’ :  what their fate, their life, will be in the year ahead. God is pictured as determining the destiny of every creature - that means Jews and non-Jews alike. This is part of the breathtaking chutzpah of Jewish life at this time of the year: we say, unashamedly, brazenly,  that the world revolves around us, what we do, what we fail to do, how we live, what vision we uphold, what vision we betray. The divine is involved, this story says, through the choices we make: our lives, and other people’s lives, are bound up with the process of reflection and prayer and renewed determination to live in certain ways, with particular ethical values, and with a morality congruent with our tradition. Questions of life and death, of who will live and who will die, are not only (of course) in our hands – but they are also in our hands. That’s the radical, discomforting claim of our tradition.

When I hear politicians of any kind trying to defend ethnic or national exclusivity – whether it is in Israel or in the UK – it’s then that I recognise the pluralism of identity in me. And how calls to promote an ‘us’ against a ‘them’ are OK for those who follow sport,  when it is literally a game - but are not OK when they are talking about the complexity of human beings.

You see, when I think about my own identity, part of me is British, and I enjoy that, my passport affirms it and there is a deep history behind that, much larger and richer than the relatively few generations my family has been here. And part of me is English – it wasn’t Britain whom I watched in 1966  winning the World Cup, it was the nation of William Blake and Turner and Jane Austen and Bobby Charlton. And part of me is a Mancunian and a Lancastrian who still feels connected to my roots in the north and finds southerners, North West Londoners, sometimes rather insular metropolitans living in a kind of bubble. And part of me is connected to my Scottish roots - but also to my mother’s hometown in the north-east, Sunderland. They are all parts of who I am - along with my sense of myself as a man with all the burdens and advantages that that brings; and a father; and a husband; and of course there’s my identity as a Jew, that’s close to the heart of me, but it sits alongside those other aspects of my hybrid self.

And as a Jew that means for me, inevitably through history and ‘elective affinities’ as Goethe called them, I’m a European in my guts, my kishkes; Europe - that trans-national disputed entity that I celebrate because it is larger than nationalism: so  there are textures of German culture, and French, and Polish, and Russian, that contribute to the tapestry of who I am, who I am in my hybrid Jewish self.

It’s why Dostoevsky speaks to me as much as, probably more than, Dickens. Kafka and Kierkegaard – Czech and Danish, Jew and Christian – seem to offer me a larger vision than the horizon-limiting Englishness of someone like Hilary Mantel, however lively and popular her prose. The broader perspective trumps the smaller one. “I am large, I contain multitudes” – that’s Walt Whitman, an American through and through. But still a sensibility I integrate into my own. What I’m trying to talk about here isn’t just about my personal identity; it’s, for want of a better word,  though I’m rather shy about calling it that, a moral position - it’s about seeing ourselves as bigger than the boxes our leaders, political or religious, want to put us in, broader in our horizons than national or ethnic cultures promote with their fantasies of superiority. I’m talking about trying to move away from the provincialism of national boundaries and tribal exclusiveness, working towards a sense of self that rejects a narrowing down, that is open to the global, the international.

And we need to be bigger than the national, than the tribal, than the ethnic, because the problems we face in this world are bigger than any nation can manage, any single nation can bear. The future of our planet is on the line, climate change is no respecter of national boundaries, and it’s laughable to think of nations protecting their own interests, their own businesses, their own economies, in the face of this trans-national challenge.

It’s like children protecting their own sandcastles against the advancing tide: ‘I’m the king of the castle, and you’re a dirty rascal’. We really have to grow up. That’s why for me, as a Jew, rooted in my own particular religious identity, I have to be an internationalist, I have to support the notion of being fully part of Europe, and the value of world bodies like the United Nations (whatever its faults) – I have to see the issues of the day through that extraordinary vision of the Hebrew Bible where we are given a divine voice that speaks the words of a universalistic vision from the midst of its particularism: “The Eternal One called to Moses out of the mountain, saying, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: You yourselves have seen what I did ... if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, because the whole earth is mine.” (Exodus 19:5). “For Mine is the land – and you are but resident aliens with Me” (Leviticus 25:23). “The earth is the Lord’s and all who are in it, the world and all who live in it” (Psalm 24). There’s never been a time in human history when this universalistic vision within Judaism has been more urgent.

That’s part of why I’m so resistant to those appeals to the Jewish community  - from the Jewish Chronicle or the CST (our unelected, unrepresentative, self-appointed guardians) to retreat behind the barricades of our tribal ghettoes, retreat in fear from that bigger world which we belong to, and have so much to contribute to. Yes, there are people who don’t like us, but they might like us more if we were more open, more able to articulate a larger vision, more able to say that Jewishness is not only about self-preservation, and protecting our own narrow interests,  but it’s about upholding certain values: of concern for the underdog, embrace of the outsider, empathy for the deprived and the dispossessed, care for those cast aside by the relentless march of globalised capitalism with its disregard for individual well-being. Judaism is about a passion for righteousness and a hunger for justice. It’s not inward-looking, it’s about something larger than us.

When we cling to tribe, and nation, it’s because we are scared. ‘The whole world is a very narrow bridge’ – yes, Nachman of Bratslav is right – ‘but the essential thing’, he says, ha-ikkar, ‘is not to be afraid, at all’. lo-lefached klal. Let’s approach this New Year without fear, with hope, with belief, with the knowledge that our vision, our large Jewish vision, will support us, and sustain us, and can make the world a better place. Kayn yehi ratzon- may this be God’s will.

[slightly expanded from a sermon given on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year, September 26th, 2014]

 

 

 

Hamlet and the Jewish New Year

"I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth” – Hamlet is responding to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. His friends are wondering why he is so morose.  And Hamlet goes on to describe how the world, and the people in it, can be viewed – but also his struggle to hold on to his optimism and delight with it all.

“What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!... and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me – nor woman neither...”

Over the last few years I have been utilising some literary texts - King Lear,  Beckett’s Waiting for Godot – as a way of approaching some of the themes of the New Year. This year Hamlet is my jumping off point - though I mused on opting, topically, for ‘the Scottish play’, Macbeth – ‘Present fears/are less than horrible imaginings...what’s done cannot be undone...’  But wherever we start, I feel we need all the help we can get.  And this year more than ever.

Because we’ve taken a battering over the year. Not only the personal stuff that afflicts us year in year out: illnesses, deaths, losses of various kinds, failures and frustrations and disappointments – all the stuff of daily life that we have to contend with, that cast shadows over our sense of well-being, that dent our optimism, that threaten to diminish our pleasure in life. That cause us to ‘lose all our mirth’. Stuff that reminds us of our fragility, our vulnerability, our mortality. And how our sense of meaning and purpose and the goodness of life is easily shaken. We are all at risk in the world.  And at this time of the year Judaism cajoles us into returning to this densely-textured stuff of daily life and reflecting on it.

But this year, in addition, we’ve had to contend with some larger themes: about Israel and the anguish of war, again; and deaths again, deaths of ‘us’ and deaths of ‘them’; and all that  wondering about the need for it, the needlessness of it, our helplessness in it, struggling to find a response to the threats and the suffering that isn’t a cry of anguish – or struggling to find a worthwhile response along with a cry of anguish.

And then realising that it’s not just about a struggle ‘over there’, but that it spills over into here -  our streets, our homes - with questions that we feel stirring within us, as we wonder about our security, people feeling threatened as Jews – though in truth there’s little real evidence for it, but a spurious Jewish Chronicle scare-mongering survey taps precisely into the Jewish nervous system, historical and atavistic, that many Jews carry deep within them.

We are actually living through a golden age of Jewish life in the UK – its vitality is amazing, there seems to be a Limmud every other week somewhere up and down the country, Jewish cultural life like we’ve not seen before, Jewish schools and restaurants opening and filled up, many synagogues are booming (OK, maybe not so much in the provinces), but charities and grassroots Jewish organisations, secular and religious, are flourishing, there’s music and books and arts and film festivals  – what a time to be Jewish here in the UK. 

But that visceral old anxiety creeps in, has crept in, over this last year, to various degrees: ‘I have of late...lost all my mirth’; and these gnawing anxieties, personal or communal, become part of what we suffer from, part of what goes into this picture of where we are now, part of what diminishes our capacity to enjoy the daily blessings of life, which are manifold. 

So this is where we are, as we return to our tradition, and a time in our calendar (Selichot) that asks us once more to reflect back on where we have been this last year, what we have done, and not done, what we have felt, and not felt, what we have achieved and what we have failed to achieve. It brings us back to ourselves: “What a piece of work is man” – yes, it is awesome (awe-inspiring and sometimes awful) to reflect on our humanity, our complexity.

We are ‘pieces of work’ – Shakespeare’s text is a kind of secular midrash on Psalm 8, which talks of human beings as aspects of God’s ‘handiwork’. What an extraordinary idea! What would it mean to live, to really live, fully alive to, alert to, being part of God’s handiwork in the world? Perhaps it’s too painful to keep ourselves aware that we are woven into the divine filigree of all creation? Each one of us. Each saint and sinner amongst us. Each frightened Israeli teenage soldier; each terrified Palestinian child. ‘What a piece of work is man.’

“How noble in reason” – part of our nobility is that we have minds that can think, that can reason, that can discriminate between good and evil (at least theoretically), that can acknowledge that we are not only a prey to emotionality and knee-jerk reactions, that we – unlike all other parts of God’s handiwork – can reflect on our experiences, can reflect on our place in the scheme of things, can dream of better worlds, can build better worlds. ‘What a piece of work is man; how noble in reason’.

“How infinite in faculties”: yes, we are capable of love and compassion and generosity and self-sacrifice – these are our faculties of heart and soul. This is also what it means to be part of God’s handiwork – to have a ever-renewable wellspring of moral instincts within us. And at this time of the year we are called to return to them, to stir them up again within us, to find the courage to live them, these divine faculties  grafted to our souls.

“How infinite in faculties...in action how like an angel” – well, this Bard knows how to flatter us, comparing us to angels. Just like the Psalmist does, back in Psalm 8: ‘You have made humankind just a little less than the angels’. Here is poetry to seduce us into thinking the best of ourselves, and our potential: that we are created with an ability to join our thinking, our reasoning, our mental capacities, with our moral imagination, and our ethical faculties, so that they flow, we flow, into action : ‘in action how like an angel’. Like the Psalmist’s religious vision, Shakespeare’s humanism  sees us, reminds us, that we are the messengers of the Divine on earth.

“In apprehension how like a god” – ‘apprehension’ as in ‘powers of understanding’. It’s an amazingly elevated view of humanity from Hamlet’s creator, allowing himself the freedom, as does the Psalmist, to celebrate our special status in God’s creation, as the pinnacle of creation. We are god-like in our powers of perception, in the depth with which we can understand things, in the heights to which we can aspire, in the breadth of what we can achieve. It’s good to be reminded of this. It underlies the whole of the High Holy Days, which remind us over and over again, what we are capable of as human beings – even if we fail at it, over and again, this task of living true to our better selves.

And then, just when our minds and hearts are bursting with these glimpses of who we are and what our potential is, Shakespeare turns Hamlet’s paean of praise for humanity on its head: ‘and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me – nor woman neither...’ The bubble of human glory and potential is burst. Like a kick in the teeth. Because the other side of the story - and it goes back to the mythic opening of Genesis - is that ‘Man’, Adam, Humanity is dust. Adam, ‘The Human’, from Adamah, the ground, the earth: in Hebrew our generic name is always reminding us of how lowly we are. We might be ‘little lower than the angels’, but we are still creatures of flesh and blood who are as fragile as dust, as fleeting as the flowers of the morning that wither in the evening, as transient as shadows, as dreams that fade and die, a cup so easily broken – all the images of this New Year period flood back to remind us of our mortality, and the tentative, tentative hold we have on our earthly lives.

Here’s Shakespeare’s genius. Hamlet’s low mood, his melancholy, comes not because of his awareness of the double-sidedness of life – our god-like nobility in tension with our dust-like transience and insignificance. This is wisdom - to appreciate this double-sidedness. But his mood comes from his inability, his failure, to find in himself any delight in the people around him. ‘And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me – nor woman neither...’ Me, me, me – this is Hamlet, a thoroughly contemporary sensibility. Cut off from his capacity to take pleasure from the world, and to enjoy other people. He’s lost in his own narrow world of feelings. He’s stuck in the gap between his head and his heart. Even though he knows that the people around him are wondrous – he can’t relate to them. There’s no delight to be had in the company of others, men or women, no emotional or physical contact will do it, nothing can breathe life into his relationships.

It is a terrible thing to be stuck in that place. It can happen to any of us. It does happen to all of us, from time to time. We just hope and pray we don’t get too stuck in that place personally. It’s terrible when it happens individually - but more terrible perhaps (and we have seen it over and over in this last 12 months) is when this happens collectively, politically, when there’s a radical failure in one group of people to see the living, breathing humanity and vitality of another group: it’s in the Middle East, all over; in Ukraine and Russia, in Africa, in the ugly recesses of racism here, or in the rest of Europe. The curse of Hamlet – being cut off from a vibrant, living, life-affirming connection to those amongst whom we live. 

The High Holy Days give us the time to re-connect: with others, with our better selves, with our deepest values, with our tradition of reflection and hope and its vision of change, that we can change. Time to remember that – in ways we only glimpse out of the corner of an eye, if at all – the world depends on our changing, our teshuvah, our turning and returning. What’s always stressed at this time of the year is that it is a personal journey we make through these days. And that’s true. But for those of us who choose to do so, they are also days we share with others, with community. And we can take pleasure in that. We are not alone. We have our own unique experience of these days, of course  - but we are not alone.

For those who engage in the mythic narrative of Judaism, we share something over these days, over these weeks. There is great solidarity in this, to journey as a people. If we are feeling we have ‘lost our mirth’, lost our capacity for delight, then we can look around us, look at what a piece of work our neighbour is: filled with hope, like us, and anxiety, like us, filled with nobility, like us, with doubts, like us. We are in this together. I hope it is a good New Year for all of us, Jew and non-Jew alike.

[based on a sermon at the Selichot service Finchley Reform Synagogue, September 13th 2014]

Despair and Hope in a World without 'Cities of Refuge'

Let me start with the most immediate, the most obvious, the most unwelcome, the most disorienting, the most frightening of experiences, in this week when we read from the Torah (Numbers 35) about those six Biblical ‘cities of refuge’- places where anyone could go (Jew or non-Jew, resident or stranger) and seek shelter, protection from bloodshed or vengeance, places you could go where you could await justice, safely, await the processes of law to take effect and not be at the mercy of those who had a personal vendetta against you, or who wanted to take the law into their own hands. What an extraordinary concept those cities of refuge were, protected spaces where – whatever blood had been spilled unwittingly – you could still feel safe from the sudden arrival of someone or something  intent on revenge.

And what is most disturbing, most disillusioning, most damning, most dementing, about the world we live in and we see unfolding on our TV screens and in our newspapers every day more than two and a half millennia since those texts were written, is that in reality there are no places of refuge. The Torah is like a dream. And then we awaken from it - and the nightmare is that there is nowhere that is safe from death’s sudden arrival, however guilty or innocent one might be. You can get into a plane to fly off on holiday or to a conference - and be blown out of the sky. As those of us living in London remember, you can get onto an underground train or a bus on a sunny July morning  – as in 2005 – and you find out that nowhere in our modern world guarantees a refuge from acts of human destructiveness.

As I wrote those words a couple of days ago I heard that 15 people had been killed and more than 200 injured in a United Nations-run school in Gaza that was being used as a shelter by people fleeing the fighting. And we have seen throughout this last week or so that nowhere is safe in that benighted land, no matter how many leaflets are dropped, how many text messages are sent, how many phone calls the IDF make telling people to move:  nowhere is safe. And nowhere is safe either in Israel, we know, although the Iron Dome missile defence offers some protection, as does the decades-old system of nation-wide bomb shelters once more pressed into service. 

The Hebrew word miklat ‘shelter’ has migrated from our Biblical text – arey miklat, cities of shelter (Numbers 35:6,11-15) – to refer now to bomb shelters. We can note the irony:  what was once the word for a space related to holiness - for it was as if God could not bear to be present in a land where premeditated acts of blood vengeance were allowed to take place, so there needed to be institutionalised places of refuge, safe havens as a legal requirement -  what started in this sacred context has become desacrilized, is now part of a God-free system of self-defence;  it’s what happens when your ancient, prayed-for, longed-for, not unanimously believed to be essential, and yet somehow historically necessary, national home has been founded in ways that lead your neighbours to hate you.

How can it be that the place that was celebrated by almost the whole of the Jewish people two generations ago as a finally-achieved place of refuge – not just a city but a ‘land of refuge’, after those millennia of wanderings  – is now the most dangerous place on earth for Jews to live? And has managed to export that sense of danger around the globe to wherever Jews gather together in communities?

Last week, under-reported even in Europe, there were anti-Semitic riots in France, the firebombing of synagogues, and crowds of youths looting Jewish shops and shouting ‘Death to the Jews’. This mirrors the Jewish marches through Jerusalem in the last few weeks with the cry being ‘Death to the Arabs’. We aren’t inside a story here with clear-cut goodies and baddies. We see hatred, aggression, violence and madness on all sides.

Jewish history has become a horror story. It always had its bleakness, its insecurity, its pain – alongside its creativity and its joy and its capacity to endure with undiminished hopefulness and, miraculously, its vision intact – but now one wonders how much of that vision remains? How much do the unfolding horrors – and the fears they bring and the fears they produce – how much does the horror story now obscure the vision and the hope?

Even the most sensitive of our friends begin to despair. There was a heartbreaking article in the Observer last weekend by the Arab-Israeli author Sayed Kashua who lives in West Jerusalem with his family - his daughter is 14, his sons are 9 and 3.  Educated in a Jewish boarding school there – where he’d been sent from his village because his Palestinian  teachers had recognised how gifted he was – he became a novelist, writing in Hebrew, his books translated into 15 languages. I am going to quote a few paragraphs of this because – well, because we need to hear this voice.

“I began to write, believing that all I had to do to change things would be to write the other side, to tell the stories that I heard from my grandmother. To write how my grandfather was killed in the battle over Tira in 1948, how my grandmother lost all of our land, how she raised my father while she supported them as a fruit picker paid by the Jews.

I wanted to tell, in Hebrew, about my father who sat in jail for long years, with no trial, for his political ideas. I wanted to tell the Israelis a story, the Palestinian story. Surely when they read it they will understand, when they read it they will change, all I have to do is write and the Occupation will end. I just have to be a good writer and I will free my people from the ghettos they live in, tell good stories in Hebrew and I will be safe, another book, another movie, another newspaper column and another script for television and my children will have a better future. Thanks to my stories one day we will turn into equal citizens, almost like the Jews.

Twenty-five years of writing in Hebrew, and nothing has changed. Twenty-five years clutching at the hope, believing it is not possible that people can be so blind. Twenty-five years during which I had few reasons to be optimistic but continued to believe that one day this place in which both Jews and Arabs live together would be the one story where the story of the other is not denied. That one day the Israelis would stop denying the Nakba, the Occupation, and the suffering of the Palestinian people. That one day the Palestinians would be willing to forgive and together we would build a place that was worth living in.

Twenty-five years that I am writing and knowing bitter criticism from both sides, but last week I gave up. Last week something inside of me broke. When Jewish youth parade through the city shouting "Death to the Arabs," and attack Arabs only because they are Arabs, I understood that I had lost my little war.

I listened to the politicians and the media and I know that they are differentiating between blood and blood, between peoples. Those who have become the powers that be say expressly what most Israelis think, "We are a better people than the Arabs." On panels that I participated in, it was said that Jews are a superior people, more entitled to life. I despair to know that an absolute majority in the country does not recognise the rights of an Arab to live”.  (For the full text see http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/sayed-kashua-why-i-have-to-leave-israel)

When he says that last week he ‘gave up’, what he means is that he has just left Jerusalem, with his family, on one-way tickets, for a new life in America.

Let’s hope that Chicago, his temporary new home, becomes his ‘city of refuge’, at least for now. Jews have always sought – and found – cities of refuge from generations of hostility directed against them: this is a deep part of European Jewish experience. Jews fled Russian pogroms and oppression for the safe haven of Paris, or New York, London, Vienna, Berlin...Later they fled Berlin for the safe haven of Manchester or Los Angeles or Rio de Janeiro...We know in our souls how hard it has been to find these places of refuge.

And the State of Israel was supposed to put an end to all that. But it hasn’t; and now others need to escape and find their own cities of refuge from Jews. Even though nowhere is safe, some places seem – like Chicago - safer than others, at least to be getting on with. But of course those who live in Gaza can’t ask their travel agents to book them one-way tickets out of the hostilities, as Sayed Kashua has just done.

We are in the three weeks that lead up to Tisha B’Av, that day in the calendar when Jews mourn, reflect on, give imaginative consideration to, the destruction of the Temples - those symbolic centres of Jewish life in the first millennium of our collective history. As part of how we reflect annually on this destruction of a whole way of Judaic life,  and consider exile and dispersal and the beginnings of scattered diaspora life, we find that in our calendar the rabbis place a series of Prophetic readings - as a warning and a rebuke; for these prophetic texts are uncompromising in their message - and part of the message is that history repeats itself. Listen to the words we read this week:  

“The priests never asked themselves ‘Where is God, the Eternal One?’/ the guardians of Torah ignored Me/ the powers-that-be rebelled against Me/ the prophets prophesied by fake deities and followed what can do no good...Be appalled, O heavens, at this/ be horrified, utterly dazed’, says the Eternal One..Let your misfortune reprove you/ let your afflictions rebuke you/mark well how bad and bitter it is that you forsake the Eternal your God,/that awe for Me is not in you...” (Jeremiah 2:8, 12, 19).  

Prophets like Jeremiah lived through experiences of war and oppression, political and national alliances and enmities, no less complex than those of our own days, and they found themselves reflecting with anguish on how their people’s failures to live up to the vision of how we are to live with each other - in society and between societies - rebounded over and over again against their own beloved people. ‘Israel’, they said, ‘you are your own worst enemy. If you don’t live in ways that are congruent with the moral and ethical vision given to you - an inherited vision that is your sole justification for existing - nothing good can ever come of you. You sow the seeds of your own destruction’ – this was Jeremiah’s message. We read this - but we don’t want to hear it. We really don’t.

But then we come across – and it was the wisdom of the rabbis who constructed our annual readings to put them there – we come across small cities of refuge, cities made of words for us to live in, that they tacked on to the prophetic readings for these three sombre weeks in the calendar. There is the refuge of Jeremiah chapter 4 that we end our synagogue reading with this week: “If you return, O Israel, declares the Eternal One, If you return to Me, and remove your abominable practices from My presence...in sincerity, justice and righteousness/ Nations shall bless themselves by you/ and praise themselves by you” (4:1-2).

It is a refuge of hope, hope that change of heart is possible, and change of abominable actions, and hope that these kinds of changes in Israel as a people can and will affect how others see us. That what is cursed can become a source of blessing.

We need these cities of refuge, ‘word cities’ that we can live in lest the aggression of our despair gains the upper hand and squeezes the life out of us. David Grossman, the Israeli novelist, spoke recently about the role of despair in the Israeli psyche, how in his view it had taken over the psyche of the people, and their leaders - the despair that the situation in the Middle East is intractable, that nothing can change because ‘they’ will always hate ‘us’. That victimhood is the Jewish condition. That the trauma and pain of Jewish history and memory is the existential condition for the people of Israel.  In a quite wonderful and moving and important speech in Tel Aviv a couple of weeks ago, Grossman spelt this out, diagnosing the soul of his people: he really is an heir to those ancient prophetic interventions in Israel’s history, for his words come out of a passionate love of his people and a deep sense of the ongoing betrayals of what his people, our people, are capable of. Betrayals of their moral heritage, vision and destiny.

And one of the many remarkable things about this speech – and I urge you to read it in full (http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/israel-peace-conference/1.601993#! ) – is the way it offers hope in the face of the bleakness of Israel’s situation. He refuses - like the prophets of old - to give despair the last word.

“We cannot afford the luxury and indulgence of despair. The situation is too desperate to be left to the despairing, for accepting despair amounts to an admission that we have been defeated. Defeated not on the battlefield, but as human beings. Something deep and vital to us as human was taken away, was stolen from us, the moment we agreed to let despair have a dominion.

He whose policy is essentially a thinly veiled profound despair is placing Israel in mortal danger. He who behaves thus cannot pretend to speak about being “a free people in our land.” He may sing Hatikva “The Hope”, our national anthem but in his voice we hear: our despair is not yet lost, the despair of two thousand years.

We insist upon hope. A hope that is not wide-eyed, a hope that won’t give up. A hope that gives us – Israelis and Palestinians both – our only chance to resist the gravitational pull of despair.” (speech on July 8^th, 2014).

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, July 26^th, 2014]

Chance, Fate, Luck – How the History of the World Turned on the Randomness of a Sunny Morning, 100 Years Ago

I want to take you back to just before 10 o’clock in the morning, exactly 100 years ago: 28^th June 1914. What happened in the next hour affected every one of us alive today. A series of quite random incidents, chance moments, that unfolded that morning has meant that if any part of that hour had gone differently, some of us might be living in a different country, some of us might not have been born, some of us might be part of a very different family. Our world might look very different.

Because although it was an ordinary morning, 28^th June 1914, it was also an extra-ordinary morning - and its anniversary  gives us the opportunity to think about chance, randomness, fate, contingency, luck: the awesome and awful reality of how our lives are bound up with forces much larger than our own individual will. The events of that hour, that morning, show us - transparently - that nothing in life is predictable, or even inevitable: we are all bound up in something larger and out of our control. We might not like this idea, but it just happens to be the case.

As 10 o’clock drew near, a royal couple arrived by train in a distant European town – Sarajevo. A town that has seen, during the 20^th century, more than its share of drama, and bloodshed. Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Duchess Sophie – the William and Kate of their days  – had come to Sarajevo to open a hospital. That’s what royalty do, then and now. At the station, which was just outside the town, they got into a car and were driven into the city centre. Those were innocent times, as they still were in Dallas fifty years later, and the golden couple were driven in an open-top car: the top was rolled back in the sunshine so that the crowds could get a good view of its special occupants. So, first random factor: the weather. If it had rained that day, history would have gone in a different direction.

Amongst the crowds of excited spectators there were six dissident figures, five Serbs and one Bosnian Muslim. They were spread out along the route. Outside of Sarajevo’s Austro-Hungarian Bank, the Bosnian lost his nerve, the bomb he’d been aiming to throw remained in his bag, and the royal car passed him by as the crowds cheered. Second random factor: an emotion we all recognise, fear – and how it took over at a key moment. There’s often a gap between aggressive fantasies and murderous thoughts, and the reality of enacting them – however enraged we may feel by injustice or oppression. But sometimes the harm an individual imagines doing to another person flows into what is then enacted. What makes one person act out their aggression, but causes someone else to refrain?  (In this week’s Torah portion, why did Moses strike out at the rock, twice, and not speak to it as he’d been told to do? Numbers 20: 11). There’s  a randomness, a mystery, to how the human heart and mind works – whatever the psychologists might tell us.

It’s now 10.15 a.m. The procession of cars is passing the Sarajevo police station, and one of the Serbs, 19 years old, and with the fearlessness of youth, hurls his grenade at the Archduke’s car. But the driver sees it coming and accelerates: the grenade hits the fourth car in the procession, wounding its occupants, with shrapnel injuring several bystanders – but the Archduke’s car has sped away unscathed. European history is proceeding at its own determined pace. Third random factor that morning: missing the target. It can happen to anyone, from Wayne Rooney to England’s distraught cricketers who aim at the stumps but can’t get the opposition out to save their lives. So to speak. 

After this attack on the Archduke’s convoy, less than half an hour passes and Franz Ferdinand, a good soul, changes his itinerary and decides to go to the hospital to visit the victims of the failed assassination attempt. Fourth random factor: generosity of spirit, compassion, concern for others. History turns on this decision by the good-hearted Archduke. As Oscar Wilde once said: No good deed goes unpunished.

General Oskar Potiorek, who is in charge of the whole visit, then decides that if his Royal Highness wants to visit the hospital then he should be driven straight there, on a route that avoids the crowds in the city centre. It’s 10.45. But the General, in all the confusion, forgets to tell the driver about the proposed route so the driver takes a right turn into Franz Joseph Strasse back towards the city centre. Fifth random factor: human initiative, thinking we know what’s best in a particular situation. It can be terrifying to realize how little we know of the consequences of our actions, how little we can control the future. You turn right rather than left and your world can be turned upside down. Or someone else’s.

Meanwhile, one of the original plotters has slunk away and is sitting in a cafe – the Maxim Schiller cafe (it’s also a delicatessen) – he’s brooding on his fate and the missed opportunities. He finishes his coffee, and his cigarette, then – hearing some cheering – he steps outside to see what’s going on. Sixth random factor: Gavrilo Princip’s addiction to coffee and tobacco. He needed a fix – and had found somewhere to indulge.  And it meant – in what we nonchalantly call ‘fate’, or ‘just a stroke of luck’ – that he happens to be in the right place at the right time. Or the wrong place at the wrong time – if you are the Archduke.

Because at that moment Princip sees Franz Ferdinand’s car as it approaches, having taken the wrong turning.  Naturally, we’d never think of it as ‘the wrong turning’ if what happened next hadn’t happened. At that moment - outside Schiller’s cafe – the driver suddenly puts his foot on the brake and starts to reverse the car. Why? He doesn’t know it’s the wrong way – he’s taking the best route he knows and nobody has told him different. Seventh random factor: the mystery of why we do one thing and not another when there’s no apparent reason.

As he reverses the car – it’s a Gräf & Stift open sports car; the Double Phaeton model for those of you who are aficionados of early 20^th century Austrian luxury cars, and no I hadn’t heard of the company either, though it existed up until 2001 when it was taken over by the German MAN company, a historical irony I don’t need to amplify upon – as the driver reverses the car, its engine stalls and the gears lock. Just there, outside the cafe, where Princip just happens to be. Eighth random factor: the apparent meaninglessness of why things happen when they do. Your car breaks down on the wrong day, at the wrong time, and it usually doesn’t matter that much - though you may react as if your whole well-being, your very life, depends on it. It really doesn’t. Except when it does.

Princip, a Bosnian student caught up in the nationalist cause as youngsters have been from David the Israelite shepherd to British Muslim students fighting for Isis in Syria, seizes the moment, steps forward, draws his pistol, and from around five feet fires, twice, into the car. Ninth random factor: Princip is no marksman, on another day he would have missed, but on this day his bullets find their target. Franz Ferdinand is hit in the neck, and Sophie – who instinctively covers Franz’s body with her own after the first shot, à la Jackie Kennedy – is shot in the abdomen. They both die within minutes – it’s not yet 11 o’clock.

Tenth random factor: in one hour, exactly 100 years ago, the 20^th century is deflected into a pathway of crisis and revolution, death and destruction,  war after war, slaughter and desecration, holocaust and horror, barbarism and folly. We live in the wake of – the long aftermath of – that hour in Sarajevo with its series of inscrutable events unfolding randomly moment by moment, any one of which - if it had been missing from that chain of events - could have led history off into another direction.

But no: the driver took the wrong route, the car stalled outside just that cafe, and Princip managed to shoot the Archduke fatally, through the neck. And the rest of the story is in the history books, and on our TV screens, and engraved in our psyches and the deep background to our everyday lives.

The so-called ‘Great War’ saw 16 million deaths, 20 million wounded, that was ‘the war to end all wars’, they said; then just twenty years later six more bloody years of killing, still in living memory: 60 million souls perished in that War.  And the Jewish world assaulted, brutalized, traumatized, transformed – a story we know so well.

Mark Twain’s comment “Life is just one damn thing after another” comes to mind. Well, you can’t argue with that. But how things unfold, one after the other, is a source of endless speculation, endless questions, enduring mystery. Is there a pattern, is there a larger meaning? Rabbinic Judaism tries to convince us there is some higher purpose; but the Torah intuits that maybe there isn’t, it intuits that meaning is what we attribute to events - but that doesn’t mean that events do happen for some hidden reason.

This week we read from the Torah about the children of Israel reaching Kadesh: it’s the 40^th year of that seemingly endless trek around the wilderness (Numbers 20:1). But we are also told they stayed at Kadesh straight after they left Egypt (cf. Deuteronomy 1:46). And here they are, 40 years later, back again in the same place. It’s Groundhog Day. No wonder they complain, bitterly, to their leaders.

Nothing new about that: the complaints started when they were barely out of Egypt. In the face of the rigours of the wilderness journey, filled with uncertainty, filled with a hope endlessly deferred, parched from lack of water, lack of sustenance, lack of meaning in their daily life,  they turn against Moses and Aaron. And in one moment, a moment of - is it frustration with this always-complaining people?  is it frustration with God’s endless demands? is it a moment of forgetting what he’s been told to do, he’s 120 years old after all and allowed a moment of forgetting, surely? is it Moses’ tiredness about the whole endless project?  or his confusion, because last time 40 years before he had been told precisely to strike the rock (Exodus 17:6)? Or is it his grief at the death of his sister Miriam, unmourned in the text, but maybe leaving Moses with pent-up feelings which now get acted out? - we will never know, we can’t know, the text withholds meaning from us; but what we see is that in one moment, Moses’ life turns. He hits the rock, twice, rather than speak to it as he’d been instructed to. It’s  a puzzle. It’s  a mystery. Why did he do it?

But once it’s done, like the driver who takes the wrong road, who reverses his car outside that one cafe where Princip happened to have retreated (if you read these events in a novel, you’d say: well, too much co-incidence, life isn’t like that; but life is just like that), like the driver whose car stalls in just that spot, and history turns on the moment, so with Moses, once it is done, and the rock is struck, his fate turns on that moment. And the Promised Land becomes something for others, but not for him.

Fateful hours, fate-filled moments - maybe they are happening all the time. Maybe the decisions we make at each moment – or fail to make – nudge history imperceptibly into new directions. What an awesome fate it is for a people to realize, even to glimpse, just how true this might be, just how much may hang on each choice, at each moment: 100 years ago or today.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, June 28^th 2014]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Short Reflection on a Shavuot Paradox

Daniel Kahneman, the Israeli-born Nobel prizewinning psychologist, is the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), a book which challenges our innate belief that it is our rational or logical thinking that is determining our everyday decision making. Actually, as Kahneman shows in impressive and compelling detail, the "secret author of many of the choices and judgments” we make  is our  intuitive, associative, metaphorical, impressionistic, selves – a part of the brain that can’t be ‘switched off’.

In a famous experiment he conducted in New York (in the days before mobile phones) an accident was staged – someone dropped all her papers on the pavement – outside of a phone booth in which someone was making a call. Sometimes a single coin, a dime, (enough to make the call), had been left in the booth; and sometimes not. If there was no dime in the phone booth, only 4% of the exiting callers helped to pick up the papers. If there was a dime, no fewer than 88% helped.

Our ‘innate’ generosity, our capacity for caring for others, is not hard-wired into us. It is not even a constant in us. It comes and goes. It depends on our feeling-mood at the time. And, as we know, our feeling-moods go up and down, change all the time. This raises a large question, both psychological and spiritual: can we educate ourselves, train ourselves, to be more consistently generous, more compassionate, more considerate – i.e. not so much unconsciously at the mercy of our everyday feeling states?

Judaism offers us Torah – teachings for life, a moral/ethical vision of how to be as a people. On this fleeting summer festival we call Shavuot (Pentecost,  we celebrate this. We don’t have to make up everything anew – we are inheritors of guidelines, directions, provocations towards reflection and action.  

But this mythopoeic  vision rests on the assumption that we are totally free to consciously choose our behaviour; that following the ways-of-being, teachings and vision laid down at Sinai, or by the rabbis of the past, rests on free-will decisions we make moment by moment, season after season. But what Kahneman has taught us is that this assumption is deeply flawed. The “ secret author”/authority within us is writing us a subversive script that might well be at odds with our conscious wishes and intentions. So where does that leave ‘Israel’, as a people? And ourselves as individual Jews?

Maybe the rabbis of old intuited that things were more complex than they seemed. For, basing themselves on the Biblical narrative that shows how the patriarch Jacob’s name was changed over the course of his life to Israel, they suggested that this represents a struggle inside each human being: the struggle - that lasts a lifetime - for the ‘trickster’, the ‘heel’ in us (the root meaning of the name Ya’akov/Jacob), to be transmuted into some more refined aspect of our selves, Yisrael/Israel. Though even that name – to our glory – retains a reminder (the word can be understood as ‘the one who struggles with the divine’) that the struggle to live out the best part of ourselves is never completed. It is part of our essence.

Something to ponder as Shavuot flashes past us almost before we have time to reflect on the unsettling paradox of the human heart at the festival’s own heart.

 

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?