Holiness : Then - and Now

In days gone by rabbis would use the Shabbat before Passover to deliver a long sermon on the importance of a thorough observance of all the many intricate details and laws of the forthcoming festival. (Traditionally they only gave sermons then, and on the Shabbat between the New Year and the Day of Atonement).

And these laws were almost endless: laws about cleaning the house of hametz (leavened food), laws about what foods can and can’t be eaten, laws about how the seder has to be done, laws about making everything adhere to the highest standards of kashrut. Holiness was in the detail – and the rabbi took it upon himself to instruct his community on how to enact that holiness in the home -  and then the men would go home and make sure their wives did it...

Well, those days are I think long gone, at least in non-Orthodox communities:  not just the patriarchal attitudes, but the stance of the rabbi in relation to the importance of strict adherence to the fine-grained details of the various laws that have accumulated around the festival about what must and mustn’t happen.

For progressive Jews, there has been a distinctive change of focus in relation to holiness. Traditionally, there are two categories of law. The first was called beyn adam la’makom – ‘between a person and their Maker’ – and they were all the ritual laws around food, Shabbat observance, daily practices of prayer-life, the clothes one wore, all the details of festival celebration: no aspect of life went unregulated in terms of ritual. And all rituals were designed to create a life of holiness. Progressive Judaism still pays attention to this category – through with less obsessionality than in the past. But a much greater emphasis is placed now on enacting holiness within that other traditional category of Jewish tradition beyn adam l’chavero – ‘between a person and their neighbour’, in other words in the realm of the inter-personal.

So those aspects of the divine that are connected with justice and compassion and generosity, that we have it in our power to do, to enact, to live, have come much more to the forefront of our thinking as a locus of holiness. How we relate to people – family, colleagues, community, the wider UK community we live in, the world community we live in – this is the forum where we make choices to follow (or not) Jewish teachings about righteousness and charity and care for others; where we try to follow the divine vision of how we are to relate to each other, neighbours and strangers alike, Jews and non-Jews alike.

The idea that holiness adheres to precise attention to ritual law, to doing specific and distinctive rites and practices that only Jews do, goes right back of course to Biblical Judaism. We are reading over these weeks,  in the annual cycle of readings from the Torah, from the book of Leviticus. The laws concerning the priesthood and the sacrificial cult take up a whole book of the five books of Moses - the middle book Leviticus - as if to say: this is the centre of religious life, holy living. And we still read those texts today, even though once the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in the year 70 CE, that  whole world disappeared, never – we hope! – to return. We are left to make of it what we can, to interpret it, or re-interpret it in ways that might connect to our lives today, even though the Temple is no more and Judaism  moved on, transformed by the rabbis into a far more inclusive religion where everyone has their own relationship to God unmediated by the hierarchy of priests with all their sacrificial rules.

Yet the dominance of that kind of religious practice - focused on the observance of precise details of ritual law - still acts as a gravitational force in our thinking about holiness. Consciously or unconsciously it makes us believe – or feel - that holiness is centred on Jewish ritual law of one kind or another. Priests and sacrifices may have gone, but the specific foods you eat still counts in God’s eyes, as does whether or not all the letters in the scroll can still be read clearly within the mezuzah on the doorposts of your homes.  

But what would it feel like, look like - our Jewish lives - if holiness was weighted in the other direction, the inter-personal domain?  If it was about our relationships to each other? If it was about ethics, how we spoke to and about each other, how we behaved with each other, how we acted towards those we lived with and amongst, and those who live far from us, whom we might never meet but who might be looking to us for support and aid and assistance?  

What if Pesach/Passover was a time when at seder night, or during the seven days of the festival itself, as we eat our unleavened bread, the bread of affliction we call it (Deuteronomy 16:3), we really took that message of affliction to heart and saw how the purpose of the festival was to sensitise us to those who are still afflicted, still oppressed, still living in situations of un-freedom?

Sure, this festival is one where the national narrative of the Jews is stressed – we were slaves and then we became freed from bondage, freed to serve God rather than human despots; with the exodus from Egypt the beginning of that extraordinary mythic narrative of a people bound together by a shared experience of liberation, followed by revelation, followed by the long journey into the promised land; this great story of peoplehood which we tell over and over again, as we forge one more link in this glorious chain of memory and history and survival of a tribe who became a people who became a nation, indeed a distinctive trans-national community of shared values – of course Pesach is about particularism, it’s about us, our particular Jewish identity and the celebration of that particular identity.

But Pesach/Passover is more than that. Because as we eat our bread of affliction, that symbolic food doesn’t just point inwards, to our past and our history, it points outwards, it points towards the vision of Judaism that says we Jews have a mission, a purpose in this world, and it is beyond ourselves. Jewish survival is not for its own sake. It’s not a destination for the Jewish journey. It’s  a means to an end. And the end, or the aim, is to bring the values and ethics of holiness into the world, the larger world. There is that traditional phrase, from the prophets, that Jews are to be a ‘light to the nations’ (Isaiah 42:6; 49:6). Our particularism is only one part of the story. The other part of the story is our universalism.

Particularism is about survival and continuity and distinctiveness. Universalism is about what it is all for, it’s about purpose. And our purpose is to model and enact holiness beyn adam l’chavero – ‘between a person and their neighbour’. And in our world today, everyone has become our ‘neighbour’. It is only in our own times that we can begin to glimpse the inter-connectedness of all of us on this fragile planet, where all our fates are inter-meshed, where poverty and affliction and slavery in one part of the world has knock on consequences for our lives (and all of these plagues are here in London, and the UK; I’m not naive about this, they aren’t split off from us in some far off lands we can’t even place on a map, they are literally round the corner). 

So when we eat our bread of affliction, instead of complaining about how tasteless it is, how bored we get with it, how it gives us constipation, or the opposite, maybe we can reflect on what the purpose of this act of holy eating is really about, what it’s message to us really is.

Which is to alert us to the need to enact, in our own small way, the mission and vision of Judaism. Which includes addressing those living with affliction, and oppression and lack of freedom. And you don’t have to look far to find causes to support, charities to give money to, issues where your voice can make a difference.  There are so many places where attention needs to go – it might be about the homeless in the UK , or contributing to food banks, it might be about supporting refugees here or abroad, it might be through London Citizens campaigns, or Amnesty, or World Jewish Relief, or Oxfam, or the New Israel Fund.

As you taste that bread of affliction this year, as you crunch on it joyfully or resignedly, here is something else to chew over as it goes down. Are you going to put your money where your mouth is? Are you going to lend a hand practically? Are you going to commit yourself to something new this year as part of your holy living? Because that is where holiness is now, for us, and you can be enacted through tzedakah, money; or tzedakah, acts of tzedek, righteousness. You are free to choose what your new forum for holy activity is. What you are not free to do is pretend that the point of Pesach/Passover is just to make sure that you only eat foods with the right labels on them, and then you are done.

A last few words about one charity in particular that I have developed a  connection to this year. It’s partly for family reasons, but that’s not the point. If you want a new charity to become involved with, if only financially, and you can’t come up with something on your own, have a look at the work of World Jewish Relief  They have a campaign at the moment in relation to their ongoing work with  the Jews of Ukraine and on their website www.wjr.org.uk they have a message from their Chair who has just come back from a visit to Zaparozhye in eastern Ukraine where they have been working for the last 15 years. And his report is both heart-breaking and inspiring. They work with Jews and non-Jews there, though their priority is the Jewish community – they have been addressing poverty, repairing homes, finding jobs, helping build up a sense of Jewish community in a remarkable way. But the civil war has had disastrous consequences – there are now a million displaced people in Ukraine. And WJR is looking after 300 internally displaced Jews in Zaparozhye, housing them, making sure they have enough to eat, looking after their welfare, providing medicine (the cost of which is prohibitive), re-training them.

But they can’t address the fears of a young father for example, who fled his home and who is too scared to register for employment in case he is conscripted into the army. "We did not want this conflict. We can't believe it has happened. It was unthinkable...to fight against men who, a year ago, were your neighbours in a war for which you feel nothing – it’s intolerable”. Zaparozhye – a European city of 700,000 a couple of hours from Kiev - has received 100,000 refugees in this last 18 months, it’s put an unsustainable pressure on resources, the local currency has been devalued by 300%, and for WJR’s on-going clients life is becoming quite dire.

Pensions and disability allowances barely meet utility bills. Food, especially healthy food, is ever more expensive and, without help those who need medicine simply can’t afford it. These are the descendents of those Ukrainian Jews we are happy to read Hasidic stories about, those dead Jews safely confined to the pages of storybooks and nostalgia. But some of WJR’s clients - Jews in 21st century Europe - will die unless the charity supplements what they receive, which helps buy the medicines that keep them alive.

Anyway, it’s not my intention to create guilt feelings, and what I’ve said is only one side of the story because the Chair also reports on the extraordinary work being done by the inspirational leaders of the Jewish Community Centre there, which WJR built and supports, and is bursting with life and activity, with a strong sense of Jewish tradition and heritage; it’s involved in pioneering work with the disabled and other disadvantaged groups, and is also an active participant in civil society contributing expertise and commitment that others benefit from. The JCC is the only building in the entire region that has disabled access and they are active participants in campaigning to improve conditions for those with disabilities in a place where disability rights are, as the Chair says, in the dark ages.  This is what it means to be  a ‘light to the nations’.

So, in brief, if you are looking for a way this Pesach as you eat you bread of affliction, to do something from the heart, to do something heart-warming - rather than just suffering from heartburn – send them some money, take out a standing order. Or find another charity to support. Holiness isn’t in some remote realm away from daily life, it isn’t confined to the minutiae of Jewish ritual observance, it’s in the down-to-earth everyday choices we make to enact the vision of Judaism beyn adam l’chavero, between us and our neighbours, known and unknown, near and far, Jew and non-Jew alike.  

I wish you a healthy and productive Pesach.

[loosely based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, March 28th 2015]

Jealousy - Human and Divine

I want to think with you about jealousy. Can there be anyone reading this who hasn’t felt it? Anyone who hasn’t experienced the pain of feeling excluded, feeling that others have got something going on between them that you aren’t part of? That someone else is preferred, rather than you? ‘Jealousy in the heart makes one’s bones rot’ (Proverbs 14: 30) – jealousy is corrosive, once it gets inside you it’s hard to get rid of it.

Shakespeare, famously, created a  whole play around it: Othello. And a character, Iago, who sets up Othello to feel jealousy in relation to his wife Desdemona  - and then (and we are appalled and fascinated by the cynicism and irony of it) has the chutzpah to warn the Moor:  ‘Oh beware my lord, of jealousy. It is the green-eyed monster that doth mock the meat it feeds on’ : i.e. jealousy is a monster that makes vicious sport with the victims it devours...Of course it is Iago, as well as jealousy itself, that is such a monster.

And we see Othello tearing himself apart with jealousy, creating such murderous feelings in him that he ends up killing the woman he loves. It’s  a terrifying play, but one that we are drawn to and relate to because jealousy is a universal emotion, one we all can recognise has been at some stage roused in us, even if it isn’t a constant companion (though it might be).

Jealousy of course often comes up in couples, between partners about other relationships – jealousy is always about triangles. But it can be between siblings over who is a parent’s favourite, real or imagined. The Torah is full of those kind of stories of sibling jealousy, Genesis in particular. And feelings like this can last a lifetime.

Or jealousy can be between friends -  who is closer to who. In all sets of relationships jealousy is waiting , green-eyed monster that it is, to rear its ugly head. We so much want to be special, to be chosen, to be the one and only one – for someone, for anyone – it’s a desire of the heart from our earliest months and years, and the frustrations around this basic human instinct are always available to be stirred up in us, to ‘make our bones rot’ – to make us feel rotten, as we might say.

We are just built that way, it seems – some people feel it stronger than others, some people are more haunted by it than others, but for some it can feel unshakeable,  well nigh unbearable,  once we are in the grip of it. Because it is omnipresent in our natures, you can feel – should feel – very blessed if that monster is only a rare visitor to your heart and soul.

The fantasy of not having competitors for our love interest’s affections - a mother’s love, or a father’s love, or a partner’s love – is very powerful. We might profoundly wish that jealousy could be exorcised from our emotional lives – but ‘dream on’, as they say, because jealousy is here to stay, it’s part of our humanity. And it’s so powerful a psychic reality that – and this might surprise us – God also feels it, it seems. According to the Torah it is fully present as a divine reality as well as a human one.

But what on earth – or in heaven – does that mean? what are our Biblical storytellers getting at when they describe even God, the Holy One of Israel, as being consumed by this bone-rotting, dementing emotion?  Not just consumed by it but, as we read in our Torah portion today (Exodus 34), defined by this emotion of jealousy. It couldn’t be stated more clearly: ‘Don’t worship another god’, says the Holy One, ‘ki Adonai kana sh’mo, for the eternal One, his essence, his name, is Jealousy’ – and then as if you haven’t got the point already, it repeats it: ‘he is a jealous God’ - el kana hu (Exodus 34:14).  

This isn’t the first time we find God’s jealousy spoken about in the Torah. It’s there at the very beginning of the Ten Commandments.  God gets straight down to business: ‘I am the God who brought you out of the land of Egypt – you shall have no other gods but me, you shouldn’t make any graven images of them...’ And He goes on about this at some length – no images, no likenesses, nothing should remind you that I, Adonai, am in competition for your affection. It’s all slightly obsessive, as if there’s some kind of insecurity in  God that keeps bursting through: ‘...don’t worship other gods, or serve them, for...’ – and then it’s said straight out, ki anochi Adonai Eloheycha el kana’ (Exodus 20:5): ‘...for  I the Eternal your God am a jealous God’. This scene is set at Sinai, where God reveals Himself – but perhaps reveals more about Himself than He is consciously aware of, so to speak. (Does God have an unconscious?).

So by the time we get to our sedrah, we shouldn’t be that surprised to hear this repeated - about God’s jealous nature – though here it’s spelled out even more starkly. This jealousy is part of his very essence. So what are we to make of this? We rabbis in our sermons usually prefer to talk about those other qualities, earlier in the chapter: the God of compassion and lovingkindness, long-suffering  and merciful – Adonai, Adonai, el rachum v’chanun...(34: 6-7), all those emotions which we are encouraged to find within ourselves and live out from within ourselves, all those divine qualities that reside within the human heart.

But jealousy – what are we supposed to do with that divine quality? Can jealousy ever be benign? Something to cultivate in ourselves, like those other qualities? Bible translators are sometimes uncomfortable with this theme of jealousy: the one we use in our synagogue fudges it: ‘...you must not worship any other god, because the Lord (Adonai), whose name is Impassioned, is an impassioned God.’ (Etz Hayim p.542).

It’s true that kana can mean ‘zealous, ardent, passionately involved’ – but it’s main meaning is jealousy, the kind of jealousy that attaches itself to sexual possessiveness. And you can see that association in the text when three times in the next verses the narrators introduce the image of ‘whoring’: it’s a nakedly provocative image, metaphor. ‘You have a covenant  - brit - with Me, Adonai’, the text says (34:10), so when you enter your promised land you have to destroy all the altars and pillars and reminders of other gods and goddesses - otherwise you will form a relationship, a covenant – brit – with them, and whore after their gods (v.15); and it spells out the process whereby Israel’s God will be betrayed: your men will lust after the women of the land of Canaan who will be ‘whoring’ after the deities they know, who will make you Israelite men ‘whore’ after those local, pagan deities. (The casual misogyny of the text - the power of women to lead men astray – we just note in passing).

But this text shows what it means to have a jealous God: possessive, insecure, anxious that in His invisibility and His essentially enigmatic nature, He just isn’t going to have the presence, the reality, the attractiveness of all these other competing deities for His people’s affections. “You must have eyes only for Me. You must have ears only for Me. You must have hearts dedicated only to Me” – this is the lonely, demanding Voice we hear in this text. “I have chosen you. Now you have to choose Me, be faithful only to Me”. The God of Israel implicitly presents Himself – the narrators present Him – as if God were Israel’s husband and lover : it’s  a metaphor picked up and made explicit by both Hosea and Jeremiah later in the tradition.

The more you think about it, the more painful this relationship seems. This green-eyed monster within God torturing him with images and fantasies of betrayal. But I suppose we need to ask: is it only fantasies, imaginings, as it was with Othello? Or is God’s jealousy necessary? Is it understandable? Is it congruent with what goes on in the psyche of the people of Israel? Does the construction of and worship of the Golden Calf while Moses is away from the people on Sinai suggest that the Holy One of Israel has good cause to feel that He isn’t that special in the eyes of His people? That they have other gods they have their eyes on, other sources of authority they’d rather dedicate themselves to, prostrate themselves in front of? What other gods might the Israelite people prefer to follow, the Jewish people prefer to listen to, than their difficult, demanding, elusive God?

We know the idols we follow very well. We might not think of them as idols, but they are the modern equivalents of those old gods with their altars and pillars and sacred groves: what do we value, where do we put our faith, our belief? We’ll each have our own anthology of idols, and causes where idolatry is in play: we believe that money will make us feel secure, or the stock market, or a political party, or nationalism, or the State of Israel; we believe that science or technology will sort out the environment; that more CCTV cameras will make us safer, or more GCHQ hoovering up of communications data will protect us; that better laws on health and safety will help us to lead happier lives; that nuclear weapons make us able to sleep safely at night; we believe in inevitable social progress, or put our faith in medical advances, or ethnic identity, or the civilising value of the arts, or the practice  of religious traditions – so many gods we put our faith in, though we never think of them as gods, they seem real and here and this-wordly.

Whatever mix we construct for ourselves, we each have our pantheon that is in competition with Adonai – The One Who was, is, will be: the animating spirit of the universe. No wonder Adonai  is so jealous: His people are always chasing after security and meaning in one place or another - the names of the gods and idols change but the process is as old as the hills.  

For those who attend to the Torah’s challenging message, we hear how the Jewish people are bound into a covenant with a demanding, peripatetic, unseen divine Presence who won’t let them go, but who then has to suffer dementing levels of frustration, jealousy, at His beloved people’s inability to stay focused on that special relationship. We are so easily seduced, the other gods are so present, so attractive, they make emotional and rational and psychological claims on us. How can we resist?  We can’t resist – they have colonised our minds, our thinking, our believing. Who has the energy, the will-power, to say no to the easy truths and easy lies-masquerading-as-truths that we are daily bombarded with?

There are many, many wondrous and beautiful and uplifting and life-enhancing things in our world, that we can enjoy, that we can nurture, that we can help create – the godly is around us and within us. But we have to sort out which of the aspects of our world are godly, are fragments of Adonai incarnated in our world – and which aspects of our world are the old idols and other gods in new names and in new disguises. Does it matter whether we can do this work, be engaged in this never-ending spiritual and psychological work, of sorting out which is which?  We intuit that it does matter, somehow, to the well-being of our own lives to be involved in this spiritual journey;  and, as our Torah, shows, it seems too to matter to God, the Holy One of Israel, that we keep Him in mind.

God needs to feel special, just like we need to feel special. So maybe our spiritual work is to give Him a bit more attention; the Torah’s promise is that it will probably do us good to do that; and it will do God good too, as it were, so that his jealousy doesn’t end up destroying the ones he loves - out of a mistaken Othello-like belief that we are no longer faithful.  

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, March 7^th 2015]

 

 

 

 

Howard Jacobson Thinks I’m Mad

In the light of the recent events in France, according to one of our ‘leading’ Anglo-Jewish novelists Howard Jacobson, “any Jew who is not frightened is mad...”  Well, the events of recent weeks - first in Paris, then the various reactions to them in the Jewish community here in the UK - have provoked in me various emotions from outrage and compassion to confusion and cynicism; but I haven’t felt frightened.  I have felt though an anxious concern about what the current swirl of Jewish paranoia- verging-on-hysteria will do to our sense of ourselves as a community in the months, and maybe years, ahead.

So, I’m not feeling personally frightened. (Or not more so than my normal ongoing fears about everything from what ageing might mean for my health, to what the crude pan-European scapegoating of immigrants might mean for their health and well-being, to the environmental catastrophe that threatens everyone’s well-being in the decades ahead). So does this lack of fear mean that I am indeed, as Jacobson insists, ‘mad’? Mad not to feel frightened by the nihilistic grudge-bearing murderousness of pockets of Islamist publicity-seeking martyrs-in-waiting? Mad not to fear some inevitable outrage in the UK, in spite of all the sterling work the police and intelligence services are obviously doing to track these disaffected youths caught up in these Islamist death cults?

It’s not that I think it is delusional to think an attack could happen – it could, of course – but does that mean I have to avoid taking public transport, or walking around the streets of North London, or avoid recognisable Jewish buildings or shops? or only do so in a state of perpetual fear? I feel sorry for those who are feeling afraid –  I can sympathise with such fearfulness, but I don’t find I have very much, if any, empathy for it: empathy in the sense of sharing the feelings being expressed.  I find myself thinking of Nachman of Bratzlav’s wisdom: ‘The whole world is a very narrow bridge – but the essential thing is not to be afraid, at all’. A tall order, that ‘at all’, but a salutary one.

That 'very narrow bridge' speaks to the fact that life is inherently uncertain, it's immersed in unpredictability. Tragedies can – and do – strike us without warning and in spite of all the precautions and insurances we take out in our vain attempts to feel in control. Am I ‘mad’ in our current climate to refuse to be dominated by fear, ruled by fear, held emotional hostage to fantasies of aggression directed towards me from unknown assailants? That way does madness lie, I would suggest, rather than it being ‘mad’ not to feel it.   

Am I mad to think that – in President Roosevelt’s resonant phrase at his 1933 Inauguration - ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’? Am I mad not to take seriously some spurious survey that suggests that 45% of British Jews believe Jews may not have a long term future in the UK? Jacobson says that after the killings in Paris his feeling was of ‘cold fingers at your heart...dread’. (Cold fingers at your heart, Howard ? Mixed metaphor, surely, – but maybe that’s what fear does, it scrambles your thinking).

An inner chill is what I do feel when I read the Jewish Chronicle whipping up the anxiety levels in our community, because I dread our becoming a community that acts as if we are under siege, and I loathe the mentality of ‘they are all out to get us’, and I dread the contagious nature of fear when it is stirred up by communal institutions or the Community Security Trust (who are having a field day). The visible extra security on display – this ratcheting up of overt ‘protection’ – is actually stimulating the fear it is meant to allay.

And I feel some of those cold fingers reaching out to grip me when I see our Home Secretary Theresa May, and our Secretary of State for Communities Eric Pickles, solemnly holding up placards saying ‘Je Suis Juif’. The cynic in me says there’s an element here of pre-election courting of Jewish votes – it’s good politics to put on a show of concern about our concern. But there is something fundamentally askew – though maybe absurd would be a better word - about those placards. ‘No, you’re not’, I want to say, ‘and I don’t want you to be’. I wonder if the placards they held had said ‘I am a Jew’, would more Jews have seen through it? Or at least questioned what was going on?

The issue we face within the UK is about working with differences between peoples and faiths, about finding ways to live together: native born and immigrant, Muslim and Jew and Christian, many cultures, many faiths, many ethnicities, all the complex multiplicity of identities that citizens inhabit. It’s not about merging differences, pretending we are all the same. That ‘Je Suis Juif’ act of pseudo-identification may seem well-meant – but it is conceptually flawed. I found that acted-out show of solidarity rather nauseating. Maddening. But then after all, according to Jacobson, I am just ‘mad’ anyway.  

"All is Forgiven"?

I felt a degree of concern when I heard that this week’s edition of Charlie Hebdo would once again feature a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed. Was this to be a further provocation, a gesture of angry defiance, another barb aimed at the heart of Muslim sensibilities?  See it for yourself:

http://tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/188320/the-charlie-cover

I have spent the last week reflecting on the almost impossible balance that needs to be maintained between our hard-fought  freedoms for literary and artistic self-expression – which includes the freedom to subvert conventional pieties (religious or secular), the freedom to dissent against majority opinions or those of the powerful (secular or religious) through polemic, satire, drama, whatever non-violent weapons are at hand – and the desirability on a human level of avoiding unnecessary distress to those one is opposing.  

Empathy towards another person’s (or group’s) sensitivities is a noble quality. Seeing the world through the eyes of others is meant to help us towards a larger vision of the human, a more refined  understanding of our shared (but multifarious) humanity. But if you believe the other’s  world-view is detrimental to your well-being, how best to convey one’s hurt, or one’s outrage, without provoking their hurt, or outrage, in response? Is it possible to profoundly challenge another’s view of the world while maintaining an attitude of respect for the integrity of the other’s view? What if the other is a believer in slavery? Or an anti-Semite? Or a misogynist? Or a dyed-in-the-wool racist? This dilemma is complex enough when we are talking about individual relationships – me and you. But when we are talking about group sensibilities the difficulties multiply exponentially.  

All of these thoughts have been in play as I have pondered on the events of this tumultuous week. ‘Group think’ has been everywhere: it was in the massed crowds showing solidarity with the victims of the tragedies in Paris; and it was in the well-meaning and I am sure heartfelt ‘not in my name – this is not Islam’ responses of the majority of Western Muslims to their co-religionists’ outrages. But was I alone in feeling uncomfortable at the role played this week by the Prime Minister of the State of Israel in the events in Paris? Solidarity with French Jews, OK. But playing so prominently the ‘You can always come to Israel’ card to a shocked and grieving diaspora community – as if they didn’t know this? - seemed insensitive rather than supportive: a piece of political rhetoric compounded by the strange nationalistic  appropriation of those who died in the supermarket.

 

Why were their funerals – and not the two Jews who died in the Charlie Hebdo attack - in Jerusalem? Were the supermarket victims all ex-pat Israelis? I don’t think they were.  I don’t think any of them were - but what they shared was that they died in a ‘Jewish’ supermarket. So Israel claimed them. (It was left to Israel’s President, Reuven Rivlin – not for the first time in recent months - to provide, en passant, the necessary rebuke to Netanyahu: Jews should come to Israel , he said, not out of fear, but ‘We want you to chose Israel because of a love for Israel’). 

If the four  who died in the supermarket weren’t Israelis, then what we saw so prominently exhibited to the world was a problematic elision by Netanyahu of the distinction between Jew and Israeli. We rightly complain when diaspora Jews are attacked or abused because of the actions of the State of Israel – but these funerals  fed right in to the more-common-than-we-like-to-think non-Jewish failure to distinguish between diasporic Jewry and the Israeli state. It played straight into the homogenising group think that says all Jews, wherever they live in the world, are the same. A mirror image of the unthinking anti-Muslim polemic that pontificates that  ‘all Muslims’ are deluded fanatics – or terrorists in waiting.    

Back to the cartoon. One of the dominant motifs over this last week has been the much voiced Muslim response that the hallmark of Mohammed was his empathy, his patience, his tolerance, his gentleness – his capacity to forgive:  We should, through our actions and deeds, display the sublime character of the Prophet (peace be upon him). The Prophet faced many great challenges but he exhibited impeccable beauty of character in his actions. He did not react inhumanely or violently. He was attacked verbally and physically in Taif but he forgave the people. His uncle and companions were murdered but he reacted peacefully and in a humane manner. And there are many such examples from the life of the Prophet (peace be upon him) we must display (see the statement by leading imams at https://www.facebook.com/JosephInterfaithFoundation).  

So I found it rather moving – and exhibiting a touch of inspiration – for the figure on the cover to be tearful, empathising with the victims, and to appear below the headline ‘Everything is Forgiven’. It is a response both profoundly religious and profoundly humanistic: it fuses religiosity and secularism in a powerful vision of shared human values. Rénald Luzier – ‘Luz’ – has created a timeless image that both subverts the stale boundaries between what is ‘religious’ and what is ‘secular’ – and belies the proud, self-confessed atheistic stance of the journal’s editorial board. The image offers us a reflection on the role of compassion and forgiveness in the face of fear and terror and death.  

Yes, it does this through an image of a bearded man in a turban – and no doubt many will project the notion of the Prophet Mohammed onto this picture. But it is no more a representation of the reality of the Prophet whom Muslims reverence than are those analogous imaginative gestures towards a shared cultural reference point found in the dozens of images of ‘God’ drawn by cartoonists for the New Yorker  over the last several decades. It is a sort of category error to confuse the image with what it points towards.  

 

Cartoons are not icons: eastern Orthodoxy created devotional objects for Christian meditation – spending time reflecting on the image of Christ could lead to a greater sense of piety, of the need to mirror the attributes of the Christ figure in one’s daily life.  And western art is of course unthinkable without its religious imagery – though representations of God are rare. It is strange perhaps that Islam has borrowed the Judaeo-Christian tradition of not representing God and extended it to the Prophet – this extension of the prohibition about image making is like the Judaic ‘fence around the Torah’, an additional circle of protectiveness lest one stray too near what the core prohibition is: idolatry. The problem always comes when a religious tradition makes an idol out of the law designed to keep one from making idols. And we are not to make idols out of divinity/God in any monotheistic tradition because, as it is said, Allah Hu-akbar – ‘God’ is greater/bigger/more incomprehensible than any image can ever capture.

 

But one of the things I have learnt this week has been that there was a longstanding tradition of Islamic artistic representation of the Prophet. One 16^th century example, of Mohammed on Mt Hira, with a veiled face and halo, can be seen in the link below (scroll down, right hand side image) :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depictions_of_Muhammad

A fuller discussion can be found at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/10/drawing-prophet-islam-muhammad-images 

This tradition of figurative representation of Mohammed may have fallen out of fashion – and be unknown to adherents of Islam. But ignorance of one’s own multi-dimensional  faith tradition is not of course restricted to Islam. And of course cartoons are not usually devotional material.  

But Luz’s front cover does allow us to contemplate some of the core values of Islam, Judaism and Christianity as well as humanism: our capacity for regret, empathy, forgiveness, compassion. It leaves open the question who is doing the forgiving, and who is being forgiven. If the cover is an act of defiance – though I’m not so sure it is – then it is the defiance of the sorrowful:  not an act of aggression but an act of humility, of hurt, of vulnerability, of solidarity with those who suffer. And which of us does not suffer in these days of turmoil and fear?

 

"Je Suis Charlie"

In 1821 the English poet Shelley wrote a critical essay, ‘In Defence of Poetry’, in which he argued that the value of poetry was that it acts on us in a way that "awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought".  This is what the written word – and satirical cartoons - can do for us. And to us. His essay ends with the well-known Romantic thought that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. Religious texts too can ‘awaken and enlarge the mind’ – and when read in a certain spirit they do, be they Jewish, Muslim or Christian texts  - but they can also deaden and shrink the mind. The problem is not (usually) the texts themselves – the problem resides in those who read them.

Today’s murders in Paris are an attack on the freedom of all writers, all artists, to express themselves in ways that might offend others. I share the general sense of outrage, shock and horrified condemnation: it is an attack that goes to the heart of what we think of as ‘civilized’ values. But when what we hold sacred is attacked, or mocked, what can we do? This is not straightforward. When Der Stürmer published its articles and cartoons attacking Jews and Judaism in Germany in the 1930s, Jews did not take up arms to kill the offenders. But should they have done? Would we have wanted them to?

The offices of Charlie Hebdo were firebombed in 2011 – anti-Muslim polemic has been part of their repertoire for a decade: they republished the Danish cartoons in 2006 that had caused much upset in the Muslim community. They are provocatively anti-authoritarian and anti-religious. Possibly some of the magazine’s content would not have been permissible in the UK, where we have the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, Section 4A of which states: (1) A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress, he— (a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour...or (b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting, thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress. In 2012, following a vigorous campaign, this Act was amended and the word “insulting” was removed.

However this legislation needs to be read in conjunction with the UK’s  Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006  which makes it a crime to stir up religious hatred - but protects freedom of speech by stating that the act does not ‘prohibit or restrict discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents...’

The idea is prevalent that I can or should protect you from feeling ‘offended’ – but this, along with the notion that I should be protected (by the law, if necessary)  from feeling offended – makes no sense. I feel offended by the government’s callous sado-monetarist austerity programmes; I feel offended by the anti-immigrant rhetoric of large parts of the press; I feel offended by many, many things I encounter every day – too many to list, but if you are sensate you will have your own list – but I also recognise that it is my own responsibility to channel these feelings, as best as possible, in ways that aren’t lethal to others. This too is not straightforward, psychologically, spiritually. But it is close to the heart of what it means to be a moral being. Yet it is a task, and not a given.

This latest outrage brings to mind the murderous response to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) – Ayatollah Khomenei’s fatwa called for his assassination; his Japanese translator was murdered, his Italian translator seriously stabbed, his Norwegian translator shot, the offices of his Indian publishers were threatened, and the fatwa remains in force even though Rushdie has come out of hiding.  

This is what happens when religious texts and religious traditions are related to literally as absolute vehicles for higher truth – rather than as vehicles for the human spirit’s poetic sensibility. When they become idols, rather than imaginative containers for a ‘thousand unapprehended combinations of thought’. 

The debate about what the limits of free speech might be in our contemporary world will go on. Meanwhile we mourn those who have lost their lives so senselessly in (and outside) the offices of a Parisian magazine that wished to provoke but could not imagine the power of hatred their texts could unleash.


 

 

 

 

Hope in Dark Times

When they rebuilt the main synagogue in Cologne after the War, there was much discussion about which Biblical text to use for the inscription on the outside of the building. In the end they decided to use the words from Zechariah that we read in our synagogues on the Shabbat in the middle of Hanukkah: ‘Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit, says the Lord of Hosts’ (4:6).  

It’s one of Judaism’s great prophetic sentiments – filled with the wishfulness, the hopefulness, that we could live in a world where force, aggression, warfare, violence do not penetrate into every crevice of our lives, are not the ill-fated routes through which change takes place, are not the deep background throb resonating through society, generation after generation. One can see how, after the destruction wrought both by force of arms and murderous brutality in the Second World War, that quotation might have appealed to those looking for a message to take into the future.

The quotation though does contain an irony. The prophet voices this semi-pacifist wish about how change might happen  - ‘Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit’ -  in the name of Adonai Tzeva’ot, the ‘Lord of Hosts’. But Tzeva’ot refers to battalions, battle line-ups: Adonai Tzeva’ot is the God of war, the God that inspires people to fight, to take up arms, the God that fighters often believe is on their side, because their side is right and godly and the enemy are godless evil-doers who refuse to see the light.  

So we are given a prophetic text that has a tension built into it. A God is associated with the fantasy that aggression is the way to solve problems is made to say, ‘No, no, it’s not through might, military aggression, or through mis-use of power, force, that you are to proceed, ki im b’ruchi, but through My spirit, through the breathe of life with which I animate you and all of being’. It is as if the prophet suddenly intuits that the God who has in the past sponsored aggression on His behalf is now dis-arming himself - is saying, as it were, ‘No, I’ve got this wrong: I need to draw on, and you need to draw on, something else within Me, within you, something on the side of life, something creative, the divine ruach that was there from the beginning of time, the spirit of life that the Genesis story talks about as being present as Creation itself takes place, ‘hovering’ over the waters as darkness is dispelled and light is brought into being.’ (Genesis 1:2)

This pivotal prophetic verse is planted in the middle of a dialogue between the prophet and the divine messenger, the malach, who prompts him throughout the Book of Zechariah into new understandings. On this occasion we have the imagery of the menorah, the gold candelabrum in the Temple, and its lamps, and – like ‘someone wakened from sleep’, the text says (4:1) – the prophet has his eyes opened, and he’s moved to wonder: ‘what is this symbol really about?’  

And in a moment of enlightenment, of illumination, he sees the menorah and its lights in a new light, a new realisation: ‘If God breathes ruach through all of life, all of humanity, including oneself, it can make no sense to attack or kill other human beings in the name of that God, for those others contain the spirit of God within them, just as you do.’ This is a breakthrough moment, a new religious consciousness, coming through the prophet, in the form of a dream or a vision or whatever it is that happens within the psyche of Zechariah. A moment of understanding about the divine that, more than 2000 years on, many so-called religious people just can’t grasp, or live in the light of.  

Here we are, in the middle of our Festival of Light; and here we are, in the middle of a world that can seem to get darker and darker, month by month, sometimes week by week: just this week we had the Sydney cafe attacks, and the Taliban’s callous slaughter of schoolchildren and their teachers; and over recent months we’ve had those tit-for-tat murders by Arabs and Jews in Israel and the West Bank; and then there’s been the barbarism of ISIS, not only the gory videoed beheadings, but the ongoing (largely unreported) murders of Kurds in Iraq, as well as Sunni civilians, and Sunni tribesmen – and these are their own Sunni co-religionists who are being killed, for not being God-fearing enough. Or devout in the so-called ‘right’ way.  And we light our candles and quote ‘Not by might, nor by power’ – knowing that we still live in world saturated in aggression, in which might and power, in the name of religion, in the name of a God who is thought of as going into battle for our point of view, is a frightening and toxic element in so many places.  

 And lest you think I’m concentrating mainly on Islamic aggression - and I've passed over the latest atrocities from Boko Haram, of mass murder and kidnapping  - we also saw this week – from the country which has ‘In God We Trust’ inscribed on its banknotes – the publication by the US Senate of the report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation programme after 9/11, which details the systematic torture of suspected terrorist detainees, in at least one instance to the point of death.

 

This was a programme run not only by the perversely labelled ‘intelligence community’ but one that relied heavily (as Physicians for Human Rights put it) ‘on the participation and active engagement of various health professionals’ – doctors, psychologists – ‘to commit, conceal and attempt to justify these crimes.’ Men and women for whom that patriotic song ‘God Bless America’ presumably provides a suitably comforting background cover story to justify the unjustifiable. (That song, by the way, is one of the more ambiguous Jewish gifts to America – it was originally written by Israel Beilin in 1918, with the lyrics revised in 1938. You might know him better by the name he took on, Irving Berlin.)  

Why are we lighting our candles? What are we doing? What are we saying? Each night an additional flame is lit, and in our homes this archetypal celebration of the triumph of light over the forces of darkness is being enacted. We know that the symbolism is universal. Every culture has its rituals of renewal and regeneration, often embracing the motifs of fire and light. There is, it seems, a deep human need to witness to the renewal of hope – in spite of the darkness around us, literal and metaphysical and moral. And maybe to spite the darkness. Diwali has passed, and Christmas is upon us, and we sense this universal need, around the winter solstice, to celebrate light and renewal. We are drawn into, seduced into, this symbolic realm: we deeply want reasons to feel hopeful when there is darkness around us.  

Hanukkah does offer us this hopefulness – but you have to work hard to get at it. After all, this eight-day holiday originates in a historic memory of an ancient military victory in a guerrilla campaign fought against foreign (Graeco-Syrian) occupiers. Against all the odds, a group of zealous anti-assimilationist Jewish religious nationalists took back the Temple in Jerusalem and re-dedicated it to their God - Hanukkah means ‘Dedication’. We don’t like to think of Judah the Maccabee and his followers as religious terrorists, because terrorists are always ‘others’, not ‘us’. But we have to struggle with this uncomfortable historical knowledge, just as the rabbis in the Talmud in later generations struggled with it: that it was through armed raids on the occupying enemy that the Temple was re-captured. 

The rabbis knew that Hanukkah began as a sort of old soldiers’ holiday – like an IRA re-union – but they gradually shifted the emphasis away from the role armed rebellion had played and highlighted certain spiritual values and ideals. ‘Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit’ was their choice of text to be read in synagogues at this time of the year. And they promoted too the legend that we all now associate with Hanukkah, that when the Temple’s candelabrum (the Menorah) came to be re-dedicated, there was but a single flask of undefiled oil to be found, enough for one day only. And yet – a miracle! – it lasted for eight days, till fresh supplies arrived. 

So the Talmudic rabbis used this ‘wonder tale’ (German has an excellent term for these kind of stories: wundermärchen) to justify the continued celebration of the ‘festival of lights’. It’s a typical example of rabbinic creativity – they suppressed Hanukkah’s militaristic origins in favour of its symbolic and metaphoric resonances: they stressed the faith required to persevere against the odds and to resist a dominant culture which had different values and priorities; they promoted the belief that sparks of divine light in us can outshine the darkness grafted to our souls; they dared us to have the audacity to hope that human goodness is more powerful than human destructiveness.   

And of course there are times when that symbolic flask of oil, representing the human spirit, does spark into life - and we see the divine qualities of care and compassion shining out. We saw it is Sydney during the week when one woman tweeted a message to her Muslim neighbour while the siege was going on, ‘I’ll ride with you’, because of a concern that there might be an anti-Muslim backlash. And that tweet was re-tweeted – and within 4 hours 150,000 Australians had offered this under the hashtag ‘illridewithyou’. 

People want to believe in something hopeful in dark times. We need this in order to keep us going. Witness the prevalence of the story about the unofficial Christmas truce in the trenches in 1914, the sharing of carols, the fraternising with the enemy, that legendary game of football (which probably never took place) - but as the director John Ford has one of his characters say in ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ : "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”.  

Judaism is pretty good at that. We've been doing it for millennia. So let’s use the rest of Hanukkah – whatever its historical and legendary background – to enjoy its symbolism, and be inspired by its symbolism: let’s keep the divine sparks within us alight, living out the values that we know are God’s true values: compassion, care, love, generosity, righteousness. ‘Not by might, nor by force, but by My Spirit’. This remains our hope when all around seems dark.

 

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, December 20^th, 2014]

Israel, Racism & the Diasporic Imagination

Fifty years ago this weekend you could have heard a great sermon. You would’ve had to have gone to St Paul’s Cathedral to hear it, 6^th December 1964, and you would’ve been one of 3,000 people gathered there. You would have heard the preacher build up slowly, softly, a low drawl to his voice, but with gathering momentum; and, as The Times reported, you’d have heard the tempo increase and the words coming ‘tumbling out in a flood of oratory. Biblical quotations rolling off’ the speaker’s tongue, who ‘was actor, poet and preacher all at the same time’.  (Those were the days).

Martin Luther King took his text from the Book of Revelation, in the New Testament, and although it is not one of his most famous speeches it contains all his distinctive themes about justice and oppression and the quest for freedom, that renowned fusion in him of religious vision and political passion, or maybe we can say religious passion and political vision, because for him political and social action was the arena in which religious ideals were to be enacted – he had a profoundly Judaic understanding of how the two are intertwined, necessarily.

There is of course a private domain for religious feeling, and spiritual experience and yearning – but the ways in which the personal dimension of religiosity is then enacted in the outer realm of action has always been foundational for Judaism as a religious culture. As this week’s Torah text reminds us, Jacob doesn’t just mourn the loss of his beloved Rachel, he sets up a pillar on her grave:  a public memorial although it is a personal, private loss (Genesis 35: 20).

And in this week in which the State of Israel has teetered on the brink of a truly alarming decision to change its basic laws to declare that its national rights would be extended only to Jews, it is worth re-calling King’s message, repeated by him countless times in various forms; that, as he put it, ‘God is not interested in the freedom of white, black or yellow men, but in the freedom of the whole human race.’ And perhaps even more pertinent now to Israel’s historical situation were his words that ‘We must not seek to rise from a position of disadvantage to one of advantage, substituting injustice of one type for that of another.’ Although he wasn’t talking at all about Israel as a state, that’s a prescient encapsulation of the whole drama of Israel’s short existence as a nation state, born out of disadvantage but slowly, gradually, and now to many eyes, ‘substituting injustice of one type for that of another’. 

The new laws which have been proposed – on hold now, maybe, because of the rebellion in the cabinet which has led Netanyahu to sack his dissenters and call an early election in March – are in direct contradiction to the democratic principles enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, that the state was to be ‘based on the principles of liberty, justice and freedom expressed by the prophets of Israel’ to ‘affirm complete social and political equality for all its citizens, regardless of religion, race or gender.’  The great irony of the proposed legislation is that it is being done in the name of Israel’s Jewish identity, but to deny national rights to the 20% of Israeli citizens who are not Jewish is in direct opposition to the Torah laws which state that you are to have ‘the same rules for yourself and the foreigner residing amongst you’ (Numbers 15: 15-16, 29). To promote the so-called Jewish character of the state in a way that is against both the letter and the spirit of Torah is breathtakingly hypocritical , to say nothing of morally crass.

We should be under no illusion that what will start by the downgrading of Arabic from its current status as an official language of Israel will not be the end of it. Although it is a historical analogy I am loathe to bring to bear here – because it can be misused by those who harbour a hatred of Israel - we do remember how the anti-Jewish legislation in Germany was instituted in stages during the 1930s: first of all came the barring of Jews from the civil service and various professions (1933); followed by quotas on Jewish students at universities and in the medical and legal professions; next came the Nuremberg laws prohibiting relationships between Jews and Aryans, and the holding by Jews of any public office (September 1935); in 1937 and 1938 Jews were forbidden to enter into Aryan areas – Rachel’s Tomb by the way is already in an Arab-free zone, it has a huge 12 foot concrete and barbed wire wall around the road leading to it in Bethlehem, and there is military security you have to pass through  to get anywhere near it (but I digress) - Jewish doctors couldn’t treat non-Jews, eventually Jews couldn’t own radios, go to public swimming pools... well, I don’t need to rehearse the way a country slips into racist and semi-fascistic legislation to manage ‘alien’ presences in its midst.  

One example of the pernicious atmosphere that is now present there is the recent arson attack, last weekend, on the Yad B’Yad bilingual school in Jerusalem, the only school in the city where Jews and Arabs learn together. On the wall, lest we are in any doubt about the mindset behind this, was spray-painted the slogans ‘Death to Arabs’ and ‘There is no co-existence with cancer’.

So those of us who have always believed that Israel was both a historical and moral necessity get more and more frightened, more and more disturbed, more and more angry, when we see the erosion of core democratic principles being enacted or mooted within Israel. Ethnic transfer is now openly suggested by some parliamentarians – and who knows who will hold the balance of power come March?  and what would we do then, we Jews in the diaspora? Are there no red lines for us?

Does there not come a point when we Jews in the diaspora who still have a wish for, a faith in, the Torah’s vision for Israel being a ‘light to the nations’, a model for how to live in the world, where justice and compassion and righteousness are the guiding principles of society, does there not come a point when the nation state that carries this numinous name ‘Israel’ so degrades its Jewish values that we say ‘Enough’? Enough injustice, enough apologetics, enough name-calling any criticism as anti-semitism (or Jewish self-hatred), enough legalist attempts to justify the morally unjustifiable.

When do we say that only if the Jewish national project is a project congruent with the messianic spirit of those prophets of Israel mentioned in the Declaration of Independence will it be a project worthy of our unyielding love and our unbreakable support? Are we allowed to think that? To say that?

When I read the texts of our tradition, a sedrah like the one we read today (Genesis 32:4 – Genesis 36), which reminds us that the patriarch Jacob metamorphosed through his life from being a trickster, a ‘heel’ (the root meaning of Ya’akov), to this ambiguous, numinous name of Yisrael, ‘the one who wrestles with the divine’, ‘the one who struggles to bring the divine into the world’; and when I read how he fought with his brother Esau but eventually becomes reconciled with his brother after a lifetime of deception; when I read how to gain the name ‘Israel’ he wrestles with something, internal and external (the text can be read in different ways), a wrestling that leaves him with an injury, a limp - he staggers away from this encounter with a wound that he carries for the rest of his life – when I read this narrative, I recognise its power as a story that applies to each one of us as we journey through life.

Do we not recognise ourselves, battling with our demons, wrestling to enact our visions, our deepest beliefs, carrying the scars, the pain,  of life’s journey? For we can’t avoid the pain: Jacob is bereaved here in our text - and he still has all the tragedy  to come of his loss of his favourite son Joseph, torn to pieces by a wild animal, or so he thinks when his sons bring back to him the bloody coat of many colours; though the wild animals are his sons, or some of them. In this sedrah, chapter 34, Simeon and Levi massacre the men-folk of Shechem after the rape of their sister - who would be a parent of this bunch, born of four different mothers, the mothers fraught with rivalry, and the sons too?

And we think dysfunctional families might be a modern phenomenon; but they are our ‘First Family’, our mythic ancestors.  What a mess they were, what a mess they made of their lives, the Torah doesn’t hide it from us – yet through it all something is working itself out, some vision of formulating a way of being as a people, ‘a nation and a company of nations’ (35:11), who will inherit a  land – and this is where the individual story becomes collective – a land on which they are to try to live ethically, try to live having learnt from mistakes, trying to live in ways that reflect the divine spirit which animates the whole story, that spirit of El Shaddai, God Almighty, who speaks to Jacob here (35:11) but evolves too as the characters evolve, evolves into Adonai, Adonai, El Rachum v’chanum, erech apayim v’rav hesed  (Exodus 34:6) – ‘the Eternal, the  Spirit that animates all of being with the potential for compassion and grace and the capacity to bear suffering without retaliation and filled with love and kindness’. I think of all this when I read these texts, they are the underpinnings of Jewish identity, complex and ambiguous, but truthful to life in their complexity and ambiguities.

This is the vision that we in the Diaspora, we Jews who inhabit the faith of Judaism without committing ourselves to live in the land of Israel, or the State of Israel, this is the vision we try to stay true to, to uphold, try to live out in our own lives; and it’s the vision that we have to unashamedly insist that those who speak in the name of Jewishness in the so-called Jewish national home also uphold, and commit themselves to. Their failure to do so, and the continuation of the path they have set themselves on, does not bear thinking about. Though thinking about it we have to: thinking and speaking about it - the unbearable being what the prophets of Israel did find themselves speaking about, and warning about, much good did it do them; though they didn’t do it for their own good, but for the sake of the integrity of their people, and their faithfulness to the Holy One of Israel and that divine vision of how people are meant to treat each other in the down-to-earth realities of everyday life.

‘Substituting injustice of one type for that of another’ cannot be the way forward. Let’s hope, and pray, and find ways of ensuring, that our darkest fears, born out of our historical diasporic memories, do not come to pass in this Promised Land that threatens to become another Egypt.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, December 6th, 2014]