Did Hitler “support Zionism”?

This week London is holding, for the fifth time, elections for the prestigious political job of Mayor of London.  Ken Livingstone won the first two of these elections: 2000 and 2004. A staunch left-winger, he stood twice more and was defeated on each occasion: 2008 and 2012. So this week is the first time he has not been involved, not been the intense focus of media and public attention and speculation. Except that he has found a way – the unconscious is such a devious vehicle for our hidden desires! – to ensure that he is still dominating the news.

In  a classic piece of unconscious attention-seeking he found himself on the radio defending Labour MP, Naz Shah, who had been suspended by the party for anti-Zionist remarks on social media (before she was a MP) that Israel should be “re-located”  and their people “transported” to the United States. It would save the US money, you see.

Now I don’t hold to the view that all anti-Zionist remarks are necessarily anti-semitic. By ‘anti-Zionist’ I mean: critical of, or antagonistic to, the policies and actions  - historically and in the present - of various governments of the State of Israel. But to my mind such anti-Zionist views shade into anti-semitism  when there is a wish to de-legitimise the very existence of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people: such a view makes Jews into the only people who are not permitted to have a  self-determining existence as a nation state. Thus the rhetoric of anti-Zionism can hide, or mask, anti-semitism. And such hiding or masking of deeper-seated anti-semitic feelings (i.e. anti-Jewish feelings) can be consciously done - or it may not even be conscious for the one holding ‘anti-Zionist’ views.

Naz Shah’s remarks are hard to defend as anything other than anti-semitic. Her use of the vocabulary of “transportation” is particularly chilling to Jewish ears. But Ken Livingstone, while admitting that her views were “over the top”, denied that Naz Shah was anti-semitic. This is actually an interesting test case as to what we mean by ‘anti-semitic’, for now that she is an MP, in Bradford, Ms. Shah apparently has very good relationships with the Jewish community. Can someone who can say, as it were and un-ironically, ‘some of my best friends are Jews’ still be anti-semitic? I suppose so, because while any of us might have warm individual relationships with other people we perceive as ‘other’ than us, we can still harbour prejudices and antipathies to whatever group they belong to; and that group could be an ethnic, sexual or national group. This is part of what it means to be human – to be contradictory, to be a composite of different, sometimes mutually opposing, views and feelings and impulses.

Part of the difficulty of discussing these issues of anti-semitism and anti-Zionism is that acknowledgement of the unconscious, and the tendency for all of us to be holding within us contradictory views and feelings, rarely figures as part of our public conversation. Psychological complexity goes by the board as everything is reduced to simplicities and essentialist formulations like ‘she’s an antisemite’, ‘he’s a monster’, ‘they are crazy’. But things – and people – are rarely that black and white.

Let me return to Ken Livingstone.  After defending Naz Shah, he seemed to become bewitched by his own rhetoric and proceeded to utter remarks that have stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy - and have led to his own suspension (not for the first time) from the Labour party. “Let’s remember”, he said, “when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism – this before he went mad and ended up killing 6 million Jews”.

Livingstone has subsequently defended these gratuitous remarks as “historical fact”. Which is bizarre, given that each of the separate parts of that sentence - other than the last phrase - is incorrect.

Let’s start with Hitler’s so-called ‘election’: there were in fact four major elections in Germany in 1932, none of which Hitler ‘won’ – there were 2 rounds of Presidential elections, in both of which Hitler was defeated by Paul von Hindenburg; in the Federal election of July 1932, the Nazi party gained more seats than other parties but didn’t have a majority, leading to a minority government led by Franz von Papen; in the Federal election of November 1932, the Nazi party saw a significant drop in both votes and seats. So Hitler never won an election in 1932. In January 1933 the weakened 84-year old President von Hindenburg made Adolf Hitler Chancellor. Following a systemic campaign of terror and suppression directed at other political parties, particularly the communists, Hitler then ‘won’ 43% of the vote in the subsequent March 1933 Federal election - which still necessitated a coalition in order to rule.  

Secondly, the statement that Hitler believed that “Jews should be moved to Israel” might be Livingstone’s  shorthand way of speaking, but is of course a historical absurdity as even he must know: Israel did not come into being until – following the UN’s Partition Plan for Palestine of November 1947 (Resolution 181) - the State of Israel was declared on 14^th May, 1948. 

But of course most controversial of all – a piece of polemic that he must have known would engage and enrage his audience (which these days, with 24/7 news, includes us all) – is the statement that Hitler “was supporting Zionism”. What on earth does Livingstone think is the “historical fact” behind that?  As he hasn’t said, I can only surmise.

 If you do a bit of digging in the history books you can read about the so-called ‘Ha’avara (Transfer) Agreement’ signed between Nazi Germany and the Zionist Federation of Germany on 25^th August 1933. This was designed to facilitate the transfer of German Jews to Palestine. German Jews gave up their possessions to the government before departing for Palestine,  having paid the equivalent of £1000 into the Anglo-Palestine Bank (which was under the direction of the Jewish Agency in Palestine).This money which could then be used to buy back their goods and have them transferred to Palestine as German export goods.

This agreement was, inevitably, controversial at the time: it was criticised by many Jewish leaders, both in the Zionist movement and outside it, and Hitler’s support of it seems unclear, veering from criticism at the beginning to support in the period 1937-9. Is this what Livingstone means when he said that Hitler “was supporting Zionism”?  If so, then by Livingstone’s confused and devious logic, Donald Trump’s call for 11 million unregistered Mexicans to be returned – ‘transferred’ – back to Mexico could be described as evidence for him being a pro-Mexico patriot and supporter. Or as commentator Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian in regard to Livingstone’s “garbled and insulting” version of history: it’s “as if there is any moral comparison between wishing to inflict mass expulsion on a minority and the desire to build a thriving society where that minority might live.”

Of course what underlies Livingstone’s bombastic and egregious comments is his wish to set up a moral comparison between Nazism and Israel (and its alleged ‘war crimes’). It could be argued that it is not overtly anti-semitic to make this comparison: I was shocked to read 25 years ago about the way in which soldiers in the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] routinely described their activities in the occupied territories by using - with bitter and self-knowing irony - Nazi vocabulary such as going out on an Aktion (see Ari  Shavit’s On Gaza Beach, New York Review of Books, July 18^th, 1991). But Livingstone’s tarring of Israel with the brush of Nazism is a regular and depressing trope of ideologically-rigid leftist rhetoric as well as some strands of Islamist-inspired Muslim prejudice.

What leads me to the last error in Livingstone’s polemical sentence. His belief that the murder of 6 million Jews happened because Hitler “went mad”. This betrays, sadly but significantly, a real blind-spot in Livingstone’s thinking. For it was not a mental aberration that led to genocide. It was the cold and calculated result of an ideology. The logic of Nazi Aryan ideology required the extinction of ‘inferior’ classes of people: Jews, the mentally handicapped, the disabled, and so on.  (Too rigid belief-systems are forms of cruelty – the one who suffers may be the believer themselves, but more often someone else has to suffer). That Livingstone can’t see that it was the pernicious effects of an ideology that led to mass murder – and not one man’s mental derangement – is a reflection of his own lack of insight about the destructive nature of so much ideological political thinking, including his own.

A final word. Livingstone’s reckless display of his own unconscious antisemitism may have damaged the chances of the Labour candidate for Mayor, the liberal Muslim Sadiq Khan, a decent man who has had to endure from some quarters a semi-racist and Islamophobic campaign against him. If it has, then Livingstone can enjoy his – what shall we call it? – perhaps schadenfreude is the necessary word in this context.  If he can’t be London Mayor, no other Labour candidate can be allowed to. That remains to be seen.

But what is clearer is that in the presence of Livingstone-like hostility to the Jewish State, inflected with stands of antisemitic discourse, it becomes harder for Jews to continue undauntedly to express their loving concern about Israel’s ongoing failure to correct the historic injustices of the  nearly 50-year occupation of Palestinian lands, the systematic daily brutalisation of Palestinians that is a consequence of occupation, and their intransigence in relation to agreeing to a two-state solution and an independent Palestine.  Yet for Jews  the moral case for the existence of a Jewish State and the moral critique of the existing State will continue to go hand in hand.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

For those who are interested in these issues

there is an interview with me available from BBC London’s Sunday morning ‘In Spirit’ programme. Go to :

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03s8mty

You can find it at 02:11:10 into the programme. 

 

This may not be available outside the UK

Is Illness Linked to Moral Failings?

 There is a well-known rabbinic saying about the Torah – in Pirkei Avot [‘The Ethics of the Fathers’] it’s credited to Hillel’s disciple, Ben Bag Bag from the 1^st century – ‘Turn it and turn it again, for everything is in it’ (5:25). Well, I suppose it depends what you mean by ‘everything’.  You could think of a million things that aren’t in it, from the EU referendum to smart phones, from Mozart to Premier League football. So what he seems to mean, Ben Bag Bag, must be something rather different.

Maybe what he was trying to say was something like this : whatever  situation you face in life you can find it addressed in Torah, if you search long and hard enough. Family dynamics, between husbands and wives, or parents and children, or sibling relationships; social dynamics  - how you structure a society in terms of justice and equality and relationships between people, both neighbours and strangers; how you deal with creating a moral framework for living, learning to distinguish between good and bad actions; how you deal with psychological dynamics: guilt, forgiveness, envy, jealousy,  possessiveness, sexual desire, aggression...; how you deal with the structure of a life, one’s life cycle: birth, marriage, divorce, health and disease, ageing, death; how you form a collective identity as a people through festivals and celebrations and rituals, through singing and memorializing and story-telling.

From this perspective, the Torah is a set of texts that in one way or another speak about ‘everything’ you might experience: from the foods you eat to the clothes you wear to the money you spend to the historical memories you retain. And if it doesn’t seem to cover it, what Ben Bag Bag is intimating is that those who study these texts, the rabbis, will turn the texts inside out, and upside down, and dig and dig until they, the rabbis, will discover whatever they need to address a real-life situation.

He is suggesting that the text of the Torah and the Hebrew Bible as a whole is infinitely rich, and fertile - and our human ingenuity and creativity and imagination can make anything out of it, discover anything in it. The Torah becomes a kind of Rorschach test, a Rorschach text, where we will find in it whatever we want to find: we will see patterns and themes and ideas, we will see in it whatever we want to see, layer after layer of sacred truths. And although the rabbis of tradition would have said that they were discovering what was already implicitly there, we could also say that they were projecting onto the text their own contemporary views and values and needs. But whichever way you see it, this has been the Jewish way, for two millennia, to turn it and turn it, and keep on discovering new everythings that are in it, or suggested by it.

So when the rabbinic commentators through the ages were faced with the chapters we read this week, Metzorah (Leviticus 14+15), they were quick to dig beneath the original, primary meaning of its opening verses – how to re-integrate into society someone who was temporarily afflicted with a physical skin condition that made them unfit to remain in the body of the community. They diverted their attention away from the literal meaning – not least because the institutional setting of the Temple with the priesthood and the offerings  was no longer in existence, so the rituals described couldn’t be enacted in any case. The rabbis turned it into a text about something else - that appears to be quite different from outer skin conditions and fungus in houses. It became a text about malicious outbreaks of a different kind: gossip, slander, bad-mouthing others, talking in a hateful or destructive way.

So how did they get from outer afflictions, discoloration – of skin, or fabrics, or houses,  metzorah – to speech acts? First of all they looked at where else this word came in the Hebrew Bible and saw that it was used when Miriam spoke against her brother Moses (Numbers 12: 1-15) after which she suffered from tzara’at; and it is also used at the burning bush when Moses spoke ill of the Israelites by saying they wouldn’t believe him about God’s plans to redeem them, and his hand turned metzora’at and ‘white as snow’(Exodus 4:6). We find the same Hebrew word (in different variations) in all these places.

So with these precedents, the rabbis interpreted our sedrah’s texts as speaking not so much about adverse physical conditions that people or buildings might suffer, but about a moral issue - what people say: people expressing disparaging  thoughts, off-colour thoughts, about other people. And they backed up this interpretation by pointing to a play on words, a pun, in the Hebrew. They saw that metzorah sounds like and looks like motsi ra, short for motsi shem ra (literally: ‘putting out a bad name’ – bad-mouthing, slander, defamation).

So the link with slander is made on two levels – through looking at other texts where the word comes, and speaking badly about people is the context; and by using their own rabbinic theory of the plasticity of language: the words are there, they thought, to be read both literally and creatively - midrashically, imaginatively, homiletically. 

So the Torah text of Metzorah is turned over and dug into so that it could offer something of value that transcended its original setting and original meaning. It was made into something relevant for all times and all people and all settings: it was used to talk about l’shon hara – speaking ill of people. Because we can all relate to that: to the temptation, the impulse, the experience, of speaking badly about other people. And we can all relate, when we have done it, to the wish to find a way of recovering from it, dealing with the consequences of it, this kind of moral affliction.

The problem for us, now, is that we don’t have any rituals for this, or priests who help us – though people do go to their secular equivalents, therapists, to deal with the feelings that lead to this kind of stuff breaking out in us, or in our homes - outbreaks of verbal aggression (which is what gossip is, and slander, and other forms speaking abusively about others). We know how damaging this is on an individual level, when we do it, or when we are on the receiving end of it; how corrosive it is of good relationships, of trust, how it undermines the fabric of social relationships.

And we don’t have to look too far to see how destructive it is on a collective level, where we have no rituals to deal with outbreaks of metzorah, motsi ra: it spreads in a quite uncontained way and poisons public life and private life. The omnipresence of social media actively promotes unrestrained verbal aggression, trolling, hate speech. The tabloid press couldn’t exist without gossip and the denigration of individuals and groups. We have as a society a really profound problem with metzorah, motsi ra. And no rituals to contain it or help us recover from it.

What happens to our well-being as a society when individuals and groups are made into ‘lepers’ [the old translation], to be bad-mouthed and shunned? Immigrants, Muslims, Zionists, paedophiles, benefit claimants, old people, young people, politicians, trades unionists: any group can be demonised, any individual can be outed and abused, made into an outcast by a self-righteous group (or individual) who set themselves up as judge and jury.

Before we look down, with the vast condescension of posterity, on these ancient rituals and archaic beliefs that we think we are seeing in the Torah, and smile at how superior we are morally and intellectually to our ancestors, we just need to take a cool dispassionate look around us and wonder what the effects are, short-term  and long-term, of living with, and colluding with, the metzorah that is part of our daily reality.

Yet there is one way, I think, in which we moderns might have an insight into something that our ancestors didn’t fully appreciate. You see, these Torah texts, and the later rabbinic commentaries on them, sometimes give the impression – when they connect issues about physical well-being, health and illness with moral issues and moral failings - that there’s a cause and effect relationship. Although it never says in our Metzorah chapters why a person or a house might be afflicted, once you start to link that condition with a moral failing like slander, an association is set up in our minds - and it is sometimes spelled out specifically this way by the rabbis - that the affliction is caused by the moral failing.

But there is a big difference between saying that when you read text A it can make you think about theme B (you read about discoloration on skin or stones and you then link it imaginatively to bad-mouthing others) and saying ‘A is caused by B’. A might lead you to think about B, but that doesn’t mean ‘A happens because of B’ or ‘A is a punishment because of B’.  And I’m saying this because one very common belief people have, ancient and modern, is that physical illnesses happen to us because we are being punished.

Those brought up in a traditional religious framework – Catholics are almost as good at this as Jews – often believe that if they are ill, or something bad happens – that this is a punishment from God for something they have done wrong. And even if the belief doesn’t come in that religious form - ‘God is punishing me because I’m bad’ - there is a secular variant that takes God out of the picture but still says ‘I’m suffering this because I did that - and I shouldn’t have done that’: ‘I’ve got cancer because I cheated on my partner’.

I come across this a lot as both a rabbi and a therapist: the belief that suffering, physical or emotional, is a punishment. But, unlike the ancient texts and rabbis,  I just don’t think the world works that way. Although I’m sure that’s how it felt to us when we were very small. Because when we are very small we are hard-wired to think of things as being about us: ‘Mummy’s in a bad mood because I’ve done something wrong. Daddy’s angry because I’m bad.’ When we are 3, 4, 5 years old we don’t think, we can’t think, ‘Mummy’s in a bad mood because she’s just lost her job. Daddy’s angry because he can’t find his mobile phone, or his team has just lost.’  What the child believes is that something is going wrong - they are being ignored or punished or told off - because it is something they have done wrong. And that way of thinking – bad things happen to me as punishments for my misdeeds, illness happens because I’m bad – persists into adulthood, in both religious and secular forms. And that kind of belief really doesn’t serve us well. It’s basically anti-life.

But I want to add a further twist to this theme about the relationship between physical ailments and moral failings. And this may sound paradoxical after what I have just said. Every day in my psychotherapy consulting room I find that there is often a relationship between our body’s state and our behaviour and emotions. But it isn’t anything to do with being punished. It’s about the ways in which our bodies and minds, our physical state  and our emotional state, are completely inter-related.

So – to take an example directly linked to our Torah portion - skin complaints:  spots, boils, eczema, psoriasis, rashes, skin irritations of various kinds. These are often linked to what’s going on in our lives:  what we are feeling, or not feeling; what stresses and emotions we are aware of, but can’t express; or we might not even be aware of a range of feelings, that are unconscious. Very often skin complaints are to do with anger, unexpressed feelings that are translated into a symptom. We might be aware of the anger, but we might not. Either way, that anger has nowhere to go except into the body, where it produces an outbreak of one kind or another.

And we talk about it this way in our everyday speech, as if we intuitively know what the problem is: we speak about an ‘angry rash’ without realising that yes, the rash is there because we are angry. (I’m simplifying here to make my point, things are often more complex than this). But what I do know is that physical ailments are very often connected to something else - something that we can’t manage in our lives, or emotions that we have no access to, or we are ashamed of, or we can’t find an outlet for: back pain, headaches, stiff necks, heartburn, constipation, sore throats - our bodies are a theatre in which the stresses and strains and emotional dramas and psychological problems of  our lives are constantly played out.

Our Torah portion – and the rabbis who traditionally linked Metzorah to the envy and jealousy and fears in us that end up with us speaking ill of others – is intuiting a deep understanding that things are linked together in life in surprising and sometimes disconcerting ways. How we might long for a modern ritual as powerful as the ancient one to help us move on beyond our afflictions, our meanness of spirit, our spite, our tendency to make ‘lepers’ of others.

Consider the symbolism of the ritual. Two birds were taken, and one is killed. The blood is sprinkled on the afflicted person or building. The other bird is set free. Atonement is achieved. At-one-ment. The movement is from death to life. Something has to die, something has to be scattered, something has to be set free: that’s the process that leads to well-being. Don’t we need some modern rituals of transformation that can help us transform the destructive polemics of our lives and society into creative and life-giving forms of expression?

‘Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it’. This ancient text from the much-maligned Book of Leviticus gives as a kind of route map, a  symbolic pathway towards wholeness , to help us renew a sense of well-being in a society. Something has to die, to end; something has to be scattered, dispersed; something has to be released, set free. Zot Torat Ha’za’ra’at (Leviticus 14:57) – ‘this is the law concerning afflictions’: ‘this is the teaching concerning these deep ailments we suffer...’

I wonder what it is going to take before we really are ready to listen to this Torah, this teaching? 

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, April 16th, 2016]

Thoughts on 'Coming of Age' and Jewish Values

I don’t know how many of you know the Canadian film ‘The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz’? It was made in 1974 and based on the novel of the same name by the Jewish writer Mordechai Richler. 

Duddy Kravitz - played by a young Richard Dreyfuss in the film - is a young man desperate to make some money quickly. He decides that making films of Bar Mitzvahs would be easy money: after all, there’s an endless supply of ceremonies and everyone would want a  record of the special day. The only problem is he doesn’t actually know how to make a film. Of course these days it wouldn’t be a problem because anyone can buy a hand-held digital camera and be their own Steven Spielberg. But this is 1974. So our hero recruits an elderly, eccentric English film-maker, who is permanently drunk, and asks him to make a film of the Bar Mitzvah of a distant relative.  What Duddy hasn’t realised is just how eccentric this Englishman is - not just in his life but in his style of filmmaking. He’s what used to be called avant-garde.

So, the film is made and it’s eventually screened in front of an excited  audience of the whole Bar Mitzvah family, their friends and invited guests. The Englishman’s film begins conventionally enough – inside the synagogue, Torah scrolls, ark, bimah – but the music is odd, it’s Beethoven’s Fifth, and that’s a prelude to what’s to come. The film cuts to a circumcision ceremony, blood splatters the screen, then Zulu warriors appear in full tribal regalia and scenes of Zulu ceremonial rites are intercut with scenes from the Bar Mitzvah ceremony.

Watching this, the Bar Mitzvah boy’s father, cigar hanging out of his increasingly incredulous mouth, turns to the rabbi, who’s also been invited to the screening, and mutters: ‘That’s not what I saw in shul, [in the synagogue]’. And the Bar Mitzvah film comes to a dramatic climax with scenes of guests greedily stuffing their faces with food at the Bar Mitzvah party intercut with an Indian fakir in a loincloth swallowing down razor blades. The credits come up and there’s a stunned, embarrassed silence. Eventually the rabbi saves the day: ‘A most edifying experience’, he says hesitantly, ‘a work of art’. The boy’s father beams with delight. ‘See how nice you looked’, he says to the rabbi. And acknowledging the gathering applause of the guests he adds: ‘It costs plenty...don’t worry...it’s all paid for...’

Of course  - I hasten to add - Mordecai Richler’s wickedly funny parody of North American Jewish life 40 and more years ago bears no resemblance to the integrity and down-to-earth modesty with which our own Bar and Bat Mitzvah families celebrate these occasions. And yet, on another level, ‘Duddy Kravitz’ does have something interesting to say about the power adhering to the Bar Mitzvah rite of passage.

Because what Richler is acknowledging in his sly and provocative book, and what the film also points towards, is the tribal nature of Jewishness and Jewish identity; and the way in which these ceremonies are about young people taking their place as young adults inside the tribe, the culture, the traditions. Our youngsters say, by having some kind of ceremony in the synagogue to mark this transition into their teenage years, ‘I want to be part of something bigger than me called Jewish life, Jewish community, Jewish tradition. I want to acknowledge that I am one link in a chain, a chain that stretches back many generations, one more link in a chain that actually stretches back more than 2000 years. That chain has never broken, it’s never been broken – however hard sometimes the world has tried to break it – and today, as I move into my teenage years, I want to add my link to this chain: for another generation, for my generation, I am part of this tribe’. 

That’s what having a Bar Mitzvah symbolises. Our youngsters think of it as a ‘coming of age’ ceremony - but it isn’t only about growing up, it’s about taking responsibility as one grows up for what one believes in, what one is committed to. And part of that commitment is a commitment to continuity...

Jews historically have paid a lot of attention to the story of where they have come from, and what has happened to them. The history and memory of what the tribe has been through, and what the customs and traditions of the tribe have been, runs like a golden thread through the tapestry of each Jewish person’s  identity. For Jews the past is always woven into the present. That’s why we always go back to the original stories and texts of the tradition – it’s what the Torah is: a great fund of stories and myths and memories and images and symbols and rituals and laws which have kept the tribe going for two and a  half thousand years. That’s why the Torah, in one form or another, is the symbolic centre of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony.

Jewish tradition developed an elegant metaphorical image for the Torah:  it was called the ‘Tree of Life’ – because its roots go very deep, back in time, and because its branches spread out and blossom generation after generation. And each child who becomes Bar or Bat Mitzvah is like a new blossom on the Tree of Life. 

But Judaism isn’t only about the history and memory of the tribe. The Torah is also called the Tree of Life because it’s about what promotes life, the sanctity of life, the dignity of human beings - including the dignity of other human beings who are not like us, who might belong to different tribes, different cultures. Over and over again it promotes certain values, moral values, regarding the importance of care and concern and compassion for the outsiders in society, for the strangers, for the dispossessed, for the marginalised. Judaism’s horizon of care stretches beyond ‘us’ to embrace ‘them’.

More than 2000 years ago, the tribe of Israel, who grew into the Jewish people, developed a way of thinking about what values in life are important, what values are life-giving, what values are worth promoting and speaking about and living out day by day; and they wrote these values down in this unique document we call the Torah, and they said (as it were) ‘we haven’t just invented this way of thinking about living and what’s important if societies are to function well and people thrive in them, we have not just made this up out of our own heads, we have been guided to this, we have been given this wisdom, this knowledge, this understanding - we think there is some universal energy, some force, which has let us understand how to be human, fully human, and how people should live and treat each other. We call this energy, this force, God – Adonai, in Hebrew – which means the Eternal. Because we realise that certain values – justice and compassion and kindness and generosity - are eternal. They are good for all time and for all people’.

Judaism developed this original vision and of course it was then passed on into Christianity and Islam and adopted and adapted by these other great religions... 

I wouldn’t want to be 13 again (there’s no chance of that, I know, but still...): our Bar and Bar Mitzvah youngsters  are part of a generation in this country who are facing really difficult things in their lives as they are growing into adulthood. They are facing huge stresses at school, sometimes at home, stresses to achieve, and to look good; stresses in relation to bullying, stresses that lead to self-harming, and depression, stresses that have placed UK teenagers almost at the bottom of the World Health Organisation’s survey published this week about the happiness levels of youngsters in the 40 most economically well-off countries round the world. And that’s not all.

Our young people are being subjected in this country to a whole range of attacks on their future  well-being. They are facing huge debts if they go to university. Youth services are being decimated around the country. There’s a discriminatory minimum wage if they get a part-time job. There are cuts to social security.  They are concerned about whether  they will ever be able to get a secure, well-paid job. They don’t know if they will they ever be able to afford their own home.  

And they may well think – and even if they are generous enough not to think it, I think it – that my  generation and their parents’ generation have really screwed things up for their generation: economically, socially, environmentally, collectively as a society we have failed, and we continue to fail, to put the well-being of everybody before the well-being of a few.  That’s what used to be called a ‘sin’ – but of course nobody calls it that anymore. 

They see that we are faced as a society with a huge choice: it’s a political choice, and a moral choice, and a spiritual choice. Do you retreat from the world, or do you stay open to the wider world? Do you withdraw into your own tribe, or nation, and just try and look after your own – or do you stay connected with others in different tribes, cultures, countries? Do you try to look out for the interests of people like yourself – your class, your background, your education, your ethnic culture – or do you look out for the interests of others not like you? Do you build a wall to try and keep others out, and think you can manage on your own and live securely by turning inwards? Or do you recognise that we are all inter-connected and so work to ensure that your generosity and care and sense of justice reaches out to embrace others?

There are plenty of voices around, in this country – you can see it every day in the popular press – and in the rest of Europe, in Israel, in America, that are appealing to, arguing for, a narrowing down of our humane values, appealing to the tribal, the nationalistic, the fearful parts of ourselves. It’s not surprising that so many youngsters are cynical about what the so-called ‘adult’ world is doing. It’s not surprising that more than 80% of 18 year olds have a negative view of politics and politicians, and 66% feel that the government in this country isn’t trustworthy. When you are faced by a barrage of attacks on aspects of your well-being in life, and your generosity and idealism is derided as naive or unrealistic, it’s not surprising if you begin to think that injustice is inevitable, it’s easy to become resigned to feeling that you can’t make much difference...

But what impresses me about so many of the young people who have a Bar or Bar Mitzvah in this community is their belief that on a personal level acts of kindness and generosity do make a difference, they change how people feel. And they are more than aware that on a collective level you can learn from your history that the values lived out in a society are hugely significant: that great good can be promoted, that make societies function well and the people in them thrive; and great evil can be enacted that leads to hardship or persecution, and sometimes to death.

None of this is very new, none of this is revelatory, but what our Jewish tradition does is it keeps on reminding us about what matters. It keeps on reminding us through its texts and stories and traditions - because we can lose sight of what matters, it’s easy to do in the busy-ness and business of the world -  Jewish teaching keeps on reminding us: kindness, concern for others, care for the environment, a passion for justice, generosity of the heart and the spirit -this is what matters. The world depends on it. Each of us depends on it.

What our youngsters commit themselves to, as they go through the tribal rite of passage called Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah, is to keep that ancient vision alive, as best they can...  

[Extracted and adapted from a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, March 19^th, 2016]

There Will Be Blood

I’ve never been a very ideologically-minded Reform Jew. I have never seen myself as a ‘salesman’ for the Reform brand of Jewish self-expression. I think of Judaism as a three thousand years old religious and cultural civilisation, a rich and multi-coloured tapestry of belief and practice with complex theological and intellectual and emotional and spiritual threads woven into it: the ideology of Reform Judaism, progressive Judaism, might be a distinctive set of threads in the overall, ever-expanding weave of Jewish civilisation, but temperamentally I don’t feel myself motivated to keep pointing out the softness and sparkle of the red threads as opposed to the coarseness or dullness of the blue threads.

But this week I have been thinking in particular about Reform Judaism’s relationship to blood. I saw that a motion was put forward to the Church of England’s synod to make blood donation (and organ donation) a specific responsibility incumbent on all Christians -  a ‘mitzvah’ so to speak.  Given that only 4% of the population give blood regularly and the NHS need another 200,000 donors a year, this is an important move by the Church, if they are proposing to actively promote it as a religious duty. 

In Judaism blood donation is usually seen as a mitzvah, and even in traditional halachic circles it is viewed as something between what is permissible and what is obligatory.

But Judaism has a curious, complex , ambivalent relationship to blood. And Reform Judaism more so. Most of the sections of Torah that Reform Jews in the UK read in its three-yearly cycle manage to avoid the blood – or at least the bloodiest parts of these sacred texts, where the writers describe the rituals that were a normal, regular part of the Temple cult.

Take this week’s sedrah, T’zaveh, which stretches from Exodus 27:20 to 30: 10. We never read the verses about the consecration of Aaron the High Priest and his sons, where a ram is killed ‘and you take of its blood, and put it on the tip of the right ear of Aaron, and on the tip of the right ears of his sons, and on the thumb of their right hand, and on the big toe of their right foot, and then you splash the blood against the altar and round about. And then you take of the blood that is on the altar, and the anointing oil, and sprinkle it on Aaron and his garments, and on his sons and their garments, so that he and his garments shall be kadosh, holy, and his sons and their garments along with him’ (Exodus 29: 19-21). That holiness was achieved through this blood-based ritual is not something that (for better or worse) Reform Judaism wants us to be exposed to, or have to think about.

Next year, when we reach this sedrah, we will hear about the first part of the ritual, before the ram, which involves killing two bulls ‘before the Lord, at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting’ (29:11), whereupon ‘you take some of the bull’s blood and put in on the horns of the altar with your finger, then pour out the rest of the blood at the base of the altar’ (29:12).  So even in the ‘edited highlights’ version of the Torah text that we read in Reform circles for this parashah, you can’t avoid the blood completely. But, on the whole, we omit these blood-soaked verses. Our tapestry of holiness has holes in it, so to speak.

Part of me approves of this. I do appreciate that Reform Judaism distances itself from some of these more problematic passages that the Torah contains: problematic in that they confront our modern sensibilities head-on.  Historically, this goes right back to the origins of Reform Judaism in Germany, 200 years ago in Seesen, then Hamburg, then Berlin. Cuts were made in the liturgy to edit out all the traditional references to the Temple, and all the prayers which hoped for the restoration of the Temple, and its sacrifices. Not all the ancient Temple sacrifices and rites involved blood, the slaughter of animals and birds – but a lot of them did. This was a clear ideological move  by the early Reformers : it wasn’t an evolution, it was a revolution - to drop the ancient hope for the rebuilding of the Temple.

And the Reform branch of Judaism has never deviated from this position, whether it was in Germany, or the United States, or here in the UK. Contrary to  traditional strands of Judaism, we don’t pray for there to be a restored, Third Temple – thank God, I want to say. In fact we might pray that we hope we never see a Third Temple - particularly (but not only) because it would have to be built on the site currently occupied by the Dome of the Rock. And if Jews started to demolish that sacred building because of these archaic texts we wouldn’t see a Third Temple, we’d see a Third World War.

So my Reform Jewish blood runs in opposition to that whole ancient cult of the Temple and its sacrifices and all that spilt animal blood. 

I am fine about studying these ancient texts as a part of the history of our people, I’m fine with finding ways – as the later rabbis always did – of interpreting them symbolically, but I’m convinced that our understanding of holiness has moved on, and the whole question of how an individual can be in a living relationship with God, with the divine,  and how a people can be bound into a covenant with Adonai, the Holy One, I’m convinced that this quest for holiness now lies in a different direction from the blood rituals that these Torah texts hold dear.

In other words I’m with Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, from the generation of rabbis that saw the Second Temple laid waste, who comforted his grieving colleague Rabbi Joshua. Joshua was distraught that ‘the place where the sins of Israel were atoned for is destroyed.’ ‘There’s no need to grieve’, said Rabbi Yochanan, ‘There’s another way to atonement and to be at-one with God as effective as the Temple: it is deeds of love and kindness. The prophet Hosea has already said’, says Yochanan, ‘that God tells us: “I desire mercy - and not sacrifices”’. 

Another way to holiness as effective as the Temple – deeds of love and kindness. Rabbi Yochanan  ben Zakkai – the first Reform Jew. He comforts his colleague by making the imaginative and spiritual leap – that ethical action is the way to serve God, to be close to God, to be bound into a covenantal relationship with God. Holiness doesn’t require blood to be spilled.

But blood, the theme of blood in Judaism, has a way of seeping out. The word comes more than 350 times in the Hebrew Bible, and it is as integral to Jewish life as is the circulation of blood to our own bodies. And this omnipresence is made beautifully clear in a remarkable little exhibition now on – you can catch it until February 28th – at the Jewish Museum in Camden. It’s called simply ‘Blood’ with a subtitle ‘Reflections on what unites us and divides us’ and it made me think about the extent to which Judaism is pre-occupied with blood, historically and to this day.

The first mention of blood in the Bible is put into the mouth of God, and the context is an ominous one: ‘The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me’, says God to Cain after the murder of Abel. And blood keeps cropping up at key moments in the unfolding Biblical story – Joseph’s coat is torn off him and dipped in blood and taken back to the distraught Jacob, a symbol of its use to deceive; the blood of the paschal lamb smeared on the doorpost in Egypt is a sign of the Israelite homes, a symbol of its use to separate out the Hebrew people, and protect them. And then you have Sinai and all the laws of Judaism around blood. What areas of life does it impact on? Circumcision, kashrut, the laws of menstruation come immediately to mind. And there are sections in the exhibition devoted to all these.

And then there’s the way that Jewish identity has traditionally been passed on through the mother (at least until very recent  changes in Liberal and then Reform Jewish practice), which effectively makes Judaism a religion that follows the blood line. This notion of ‘Jewish blood’ is a powerful fiction – but a fiction that in the 19^th and 20^th centuries was given a veneer of pseudo-scientific  respectability through eugenics, and as we know it was a fiction that ended up in genocide. Ironically, Jewish scientists were as enthusiastic in promoting theories of race as everyone else.

One of the most chilling and provocative artefacts in the exhibition is the chart from 1935 of how the Nuremburg Laws, ‘For the Protection of German Blood and German Honour’ were to be implemented. It shows how marriages or sexual relationships between Germans and Jews were forbidden, but the chart shows how this question of racial purity through the blood line needed to be traced back to grandparents and great-grandparents in order to determine who was a kosher ‘German’, so to speak, and who wasn’t.

Nuremburg also features in the exhibition with a 15^th century woodcut  illustrating the medieval blood libel – one of the central themes of the exhibition is the way in which so much of the fraught relationship between Jews and Christians centres on blood. There is a real psychological drama within Christianity rooted in the experience of, as it were, drinking blood - through the wine’s transubstantiation, Christ’s blood is made present. This is a kind of horror story dressed up as religious ritual. Incidentally, I think that the blood libel is a projection of this horror onto Jews, who are accused of using blood, Christian blood,  in rituals like matzah baking. In a related crime, it is Jews who attack the wafers used in Mass and make blood come out of them – host-desecration - and the exhibition also illustrates this lesser-known part of the history of Christian hostility to Jews around the theme of blood.

So there’s lots to look at there, lots to ponder on – and I haven’t mentioned the section on vampires and Dracula and the Jewish connections to them, including the box of breakfast cereal produced in 1987 in the US called Count Chocula, with a jokey box illustration of Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula with a Magen David around his neck – the makers recalled the product after a threat of legal action from the Anti-Defamation  League. 

But the trope of Jewish blood-suckers goes back a thousand years: it takes in the history of usury and goes right up to the anti-Semitic cartoons of Der Stürmer which you can also see at the Museum.

Once you have been to this provocative and informative exhibition you can’t help but notice how central is this theme of blood to so many aspects of Judaism, Jewish history, Jewish ritual life, Jewish social life, positively and negatively. It’s integral to the tribal identity of Judaism – and it’s part of the rhetoric and iconography of anti-semitism through the ages.

Reform Judaism may shy away from some of its manifestations, it may edit out some of the Torah’s more difficult texts, it may have a more relaxed attitude to kashrut, menstruation rites, even circumcision – it may want to concentrate on the ethics and the spirituality – but I have a nagging suspicion that this is cheating us of some of the richness, the complexity, the ambiguity of our long and bloody history.

The Jewish story has blood running in its veins just as Jews have blood running in their veins.  Shakespeare , as so often, said it best: ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ The Merchant of Venice is a play about blood, Christian blood and Jewish blood, and what these phrases/concepts really mean, or if they mean anything at all.

Do you think there’s such a thing as ‘Jewish blood’? Even if you don’t, most of the world does.  I sometimes think that Reform Judaism would like to promote itself as a bloodless religion, a religion of ethical living and celebration and gentle religious observance , a religion of the mind and the soul, and the heart – as long as the heart is a metaphor. 

But if we turn away from the reality, the physicality, the oozing, flowing, coagulating viscosity of actual blood – human blood and animal blood - that courses through the veins  of Jewish life and Jewish texts and Jewish myth and Jewish history, I suspect it will come back, vampire-like, to bite us.

 [based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, February 20th, 2016]

Clinging On For Dear Life

Servitude to tyrants is always oppressive. Hardship after hardship, year in year out, the never-ending horizonless drudgery batters the body and scars the soul. Dictators come and dictators go, but for the ordinary person in a totalitarian regime, the story is always the same. Any regime where personal freedoms are rigorously circumscribed is interchangeable with any other regime where human freedoms are restricted or repressed. Across time, through history, the daily lot of what used to be called ‘the common man’ – that is you and me – was a matter of brute survival: you had to get to the end of the day, you needed some food to eat, somewhere to lay your head, in the endless rounds of birth, copulation and death that made up one’s life.

The Hebrew people in Egypt are the archetype of this kind of servitude to the ruling powers – but their story, our story, has been endlessly repeated up until our own times: whether it is peasants in medieval Europe or serfs on vast Russian estates or pre-emancipation black slavery in the Americas or the victims of Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot or apartheid South Africa, or Assad’s starving victims today in Syria, ordinary human suffering has been the norm for the majority of humanity through the ages.

Much of this depth of pain is probably unimaginable to us, unless we choose to study history or read fictional representations of it in novels. Sometimes there’s a film that tries to evoke it – Twelve Years a Slave was a recent Hollywood effort. But most of these stories from the past have sunk into the vast abyss of silence that is time gone by. It is all lost: the pain, the humiliation, the meaninglessness of empty, abused lives, generation after generation, century after century, all of it swallowed up in the ruthless jaws of time. There are few written records of the inside history of human suffering through most of recorded time, and in truth little wish in many of us to know about the cruelty and callousness of the past. We have enough problems of our own to be getting on with – or so we feel.

So when we do read – as we are doing at the moment in the annual cycle of Torah readings - about the Israelite slavery in Egypt we both can and can’t relate to it. In one way it has the feel of fiction: it’s a legend of a people’s origins written generations later based partly on folk memory, and as we read it has the feel of an extended fable being constructed to conform to a specific ethno-religious worldview. It’s not ‘history’ as we now think of it.

We heard last week how the Egyptian god-king, the Pharaoh, responds to the request by Moses and Aaron that the people should be allowed to have three days off work to go and offer sacrifices to their god in the wilderness. The Torah text dramatises this with a direct ‘quotation’, as it were, from Pharaoh, speaking to Israel’s spokesmen: ‘Why are you distracting the people? Get them back to work!’ (Exodus 5:4). And he then instructs his minions to stop providing the Israelites with straw to make the bricks: ‘Let them gather the straw for themselves’, he orders, ‘but make sure they make the same quota of bricks as before...they’re shirkers/slackers nirphim’ (verses 7-8). Or as Iain Duncan Smith might translate it:  ‘Work-shy scroungers’ – those who have to be made to work for free in compulsory work-placements in order to get any benefits. It’s the same mentality, across time. The same language. (But I digress).  

We recognise that the random punitiveness of the powers-that-be in our Torah story is part of a literary saga; it’s not a verbatim account even though it’s told with dialogue in it. Yet it still has the ring of truthfulness because we can find exact parallels in history of such brutality: in Soviet Russia, in the Nazi labour camps, on the 19^th century cotton plantations, in Maoist collective farms in the 1950s and 60s. This has happened to people over and over again, people like us. On the one hand it’s just a story, in an ancient religious text – and we don’t believe these texts are actual historical records – but as we listen to it we realise we are reading something that transcends its time and place, that points towards something that isn’t just foundational to Jewish collective experience but is also universal. The narratives of degradation of what man can do to man is a universal story. And the Jewish people tell it and retell it, because it is our particular story - but also because it is our collective human story.

I wanted to write this week about something else. I looked at the allocated Torah text (Exodus 6:2 onwards), which starts:  I am Adonai – YHWH – but I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as El Shaddai; my name Adonai wasn’t known to them... And I thought: ‘I want to talk about the evolution of God, and how our thinking about God might be changing, is changing, in our own times’.

Don’t we see that process of evolution already at work in our text? The narrators have ‘God’ say, as it were: ‘In days gone by, those patriarchs you’ve heard about, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, they knew about the divine in their own way, they called me El Shaddai  – ‘God of Breasts’ – because they experienced me as nurturing them, like a mother, they felt me as intimately involved in their personal lives, their family lives, they felt me outside them yet closely enmeshed with their daily life...

They didn’t know me as Adonai, YHWH, the energy that animates all of being, they didn’t know me as the spirit of life itself, the power that generates life itself, all of life, including their life, moment by moment. They couldn’t think of me that way. They weren’t ready to think about me that way...

 But now they are. This is what they need to understand now. And it’s a quantum leap forward, it’s a paradigm shift in consciousness that is required of them. To move from slavery to freedom, from drudgery where you just try and survive the day, to the liberation of having lives of hope and purpose, lives that you can shape and that have meaning beyond sheer survival, this Israelite people need to connect to me as Adonai, YHWH, the energy that animates the universe and all of being, and that offers a vision of how people should live, could live, a moral vision...

 They need to take their noses off the grindstone, they need to be freed from the grindstone, and look up and out to what they could become as a people, they need to connect in a living way to that ancient promise that they are to become a blessing to others, a blessing to themselves. I, Adonai , am going to free them from their limited slave lives and mentalities and give them a real purpose, a task, a destiny - to be a holy people, a people attuned to the sacred nature of life, of all life.’

Anyway, I was going to talk about all this. And move on to describe the next quantum leap, and paradigm shift, that we are in the middle of. But what I found myself thinking about and writing about was not ‘God but suffering – about tyranny and hardship and how much of human history has been a tale of degradation and oppression and despair. And it still is. And in the light of that, to talk about ‘God’ and ‘the divine’ and ‘a sacred spirit that animates all of being’ seems just nonsense, a mockery of human experience, a kind of blasphemy against the felt realities of so much human life, in the past and in the present.

We know from our own lives the gap between our Jewish theology (for want of a better word) and the stuff of our own lives. When we are in pain, when we are facing death, or the death of someone we love, when we see tragedy in the world outside us, or face tragedy and loss close to home, then we wonder: what is this God-talk all about really? How can we believe in a loving, caring, nurturing God, a God who supports us, who has compassion as his middle name? Life can mock, cruelly, our wish to believe in this kind of a personal God, let alone a God who is a Creator, or a Revealer, or a Redeemer, a God who is part of the unfolding of history, as the story of Exodus suggests, a God who frees an oppressed people ‘with an outstretched arm and with mighty judgments’ (6: 6). Human suffering, individual and collective, is an ongoing rebuke to this kind of thinking about God. It is what turns many people off religion, and understandably so.

And yet what is remarkable when you look back through history, is the power this Exodus story has had specifically in the history of oppressed people. It has allowed millions and millions of people for a millennium and more to endure extreme hardship, individually and collectively - because it offers a story of hope: you might be living in darkness and desperation now, but God has saved a people from oppression in the past and can do so again; this is God’s nature – to be on the side of the weak against the strong, to be on the side of justice rather than siding with those who sustain systems of injustice.

This story in the Hebrew Bible has kept Jews going in dark times, of course, times of oppression and exile. But it’s also been inspirational for Christians: from Negro spirituals that defied the 19^th century slave-masters to the civil rights campaigners in the 1960s to the South American liberation theologians who helped people resist dictatorships to the secret Christian gatherings in Communist China, this story, our story, has been a spiritual resource for oppressed people through the generations, and it still is.

Ironically, Arab Christians look to this story as speaking of the inevitability that justice will one day overcome injustice in Israel and Palestine. And those medieval peasants and Russian serfs might have been deeply anti-Semitic but they still looked to the God who freed the Israelite people from bondage as  a direct and personal source of comfort and hope in the midst of their desperately impoverished lives. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a leader of the dissenting Confessing Church in Germany in the 1930s, part of the political opposition to Hitler, was hung in a concentration camp in 1945, but he never wavered in his teaching and preaching and belief that the Exodus story was a paradigm for the final triumph of goodness over the evil of Hitler’s oppressive regime.

All these examples are a testimony to the power of the story, the way it incarnates for all time the hope that tyranny and injustice do not last forever. And it is a story that lost its religious trappings but retained its spiritual core for all those hundreds of thousands of Jews who threw off the shackles, as they experienced it, of religious orthodoxy, but poured their inherited belief that there was  a power in history that was on the side of the oppressed, and that oppressive systems could be overthrown - they poured that faith, transformed it, into Marxism and messianic socialism at the end of the 19^th century. 

The history of 20^th century socialism is the history of Exodus theology metamorphosed into secular redemptive politics. And that so much of it turned sour is of course prefigured in the very Hebrew Bible those passionate Jewish rebels so eagerly rejected – the way in which in later Israelite history over and over again the people find themselves victims of new forms of oppression – from outsiders, or from their own kings or leaders. The failure to build the kingdom of God here on earth, stretches from the time of Solomon to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and on, and on.

And yet the Exodus story never stops spinning its web of hope over successive generations: its power comes from its insistence that there is, there has to be, a force in human history that helps us move from oppression to liberation, from tyrannies of suffering and lives of quiet desperation to societies of justice and individual well-being. There has to be some force, it says – and call it godly if you want, as the Bible does – that helps us move in that direction.

But whether that ‘God’ is outside us, or actually a part of ourselves, an energy in us, an inner force that gives us strength and helps form our vision and helps us transform the world around us - this is what we need to talk about in this paradigm shift that we are, in our generation, in the midst of. It’s where the conversation about God needs to go now (and the implications of this are huge) if we are going to make it through on this fragile planet we all cling to - cling on to ‘for dear life’, as we so fondly say.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, January 9^th, 2016]

 

 

Paris: 'Twixt Cup and Lip

My father was fond of proverbs, pieces of folk wisdom that served as substitutes for a more sustained conversation. ‘A stitch in time saves nine’. ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’. ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’. ‘A bad workman blames his tools’. And – the one that I woke up thinking about today - ‘There’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip’. For me as a child, these sayings took on an authority indistinguishable from his own. Yet looking back on them now, what strikes me is how they all, in varying degrees, encoded an attitude of caution in the face of the world. I never heard him say, for example, ‘In for a penny, in for a pound’ – which might have given permission for a more adventurous stance on life.

The climate change agreement signed in Paris is being hailed - by the politicians involved, and some environmental advocacy groups – as a ‘historic’ turning point in humanity’s use and abuse of fossil fuels. The intention of the agreement is clear: the commitment of all major nations – including for the first time China and India - to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions between now and 2030. But how will that translate into action? While every country is required to put forward a plan to cut emissions, there is no legal requirement as to how, or how much, each country must cut. What’s legally binding is that each nation enact legislation in relation to a low-carbon future, but what is voluntary seems to be the content of that legislation. ’Twixt cup and lip there’s an ocean of room for countries to slip away from the high ideals that have gained assent over these last few weeks.  

The agreement seems to be designed to shame countries into action through peer pressure: countries have to legally monitor, verify and report on what they are doing, reconvening every five years to publicly report on progress towards lowering emissions. One can only hope that that this agreement – ‘Climate Change Agreement In Our Time’ – is not looked back on in decades to come, as temperatures continue to rise, albeit marginally slower, as the equivalent of Neville Chamberlain’s infamous ‘Peace in Our Time’ agreement with Hitler in 1938.

As the festival of Hanukkah comes to an end, and one by one the last of the candles flickers and dies, the fable of the Temple oil sufficient for one day that miraculously lasted for eight days comes to mind. Jews have often used this legend as a symbol of the triumph of Jewish continuity in the face of forces that have sought to extinguish it. But maybe a more apposite reading of the story for our time would be to recognise that what would be truly miraculous – and worthy of celebration – would be if the nations of the world could find a way of consuming less and making what we have go further. But this would be a model – self-sacrifice in the service of a common good - that would overturn capitalism as it's always been practiced.

As long as the nations that are celebrating in Paris today are wedded to consumerism and growth – and as long as electricity, gas and oil companies have such a dominant place in the world’s stock markets – it is going to be very much business as usual. The Paris agreement is a triumph of presentation over reality. There is no pleasure in saying that, and it is probably better to have reached this agreement than to have repeated the failures in Copenhagen in 2009. But it is a consoling fable for our times, and in the depths of winter we cling to such fables, light in our darkness.

Our planet is still vulnerable and dependent – like the infant in the Christmas story which also speaks a universal truth at this season. Over these next decades we are going to find ourselves  ’twixt cup and lip – between the good intentions of Paris and the complex actions that are still needed, and which will have to be maintained over decades when the impact of already-existing higher temperatures will be leading to greater and greater devastation. This will require faith of a very high order. Until less becomes the new more, I am letting caution be my guide.    

 

 

Art as a Response to Terror

The murderous attacks in Paris remind us – as if we don’t already know – that while 20^th century secular ideologies spawned the death cults of Stalin, Mao and Hitler, 20^th century religious fundamentalism has spilled into the 21^st century with a technologically-savvy nihilistic death cult masquerading as a version of Islam.

Today I want to turn away, very deliberately, from this assault on the civilised values I treasure and share something uplifting for the spirit, something that speaks en passant of creative responses to war and terror and hatred. Every generation faces the challenge of making something beautiful, and of lasting value, in the face of the upheavals and horrors that are always with us.

If you haven’t already seen it, can I recommend a gem of an exhibition that’s on right now in Somerset House on the Strand in London? It is sponsored by the Ben Uri Gallery & Museum, and closes on 13^th December, and it’s certainly worth an hour or so of your time. I want to say a few things about it because if you do visit it I can guarantee (I think) that you will come out of it feeling, in several ways, blessed. It’s called ‘Out of Chaos’ and celebrates a century of Jewish émigré life through some of the key works of the Ben Uri collection. 

The Ben Uri was founded as an arts society in Whitechapel in 1915 – so it is 100 years old and they are celebrating that through this exhibition. In just  half a dozen smallish rooms you journey through the last century of Jewish artistic engagement with British life and European history - and the whole of what the 20^th century brought into being, for good and ill.

At the end of the 19^th century there were already Anglo-Jewish artists here in the UK, exploring the themes of integration and identity; and they were joined at the turn of the century by European Jewish artists, men and women who came as immigrants to the East End of London and wanted to preserve and record Jewish traditions and Yiddish-speaking identities within this new environment. Out of this rich mix there arose the so-called ‘Whitechapel Boys’ – a group of Jewish artists who were at the cutting edge of new developments in artistic modernism. Jacob Epstein, David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, Isaac Rosenberg (who was also a poet, and died aged 27 in the trenches) were responding to the artistic and technological revolutions that were going on throughout Europe (especially in Paris), an era which overlapped with the traumas of the First World War.

I want to share with you a couple of paintings you can find in the exhibition in the second room which focuses on the themes of this period. One is Bomberg’s Racehorses (1913)

 

which was met with incomprehension and hostility when it was first seen. The Jewish Chronicle, then as now an occasional  bastion of unreflective prejudices, dismissed Racehorses as  ‘opposed to all that is rational in art’ because it displayed  ‘horses that could never possibly win races’. That’s true: the subject is as conventional as you can get, but the artist strips it of conventional detail and gives you the animals in a mechanistic whirl of frozen movement, a rush of stiff-jointed angles; these horses haven’t got four legs they have 20 legs.

Almost like a woodcut, one sees the influence of Cubism and Futurism, and of those famous photographs of horses in motion by Edweard Muybridge. What Bomberg produced here, as a precocious 22 year-old, is a dazzling avant-garde experiment in an age coming to be dominated by machines, the spirit of which suffuses the work.

Bomberg’s work influenced that of a second of those Whitechapel Boys. Let’s look at Mark Gertler’s Merry-Go-Round (1916).

 

This work – now in the Tate Britain - was originally owned by the Ben Uri until it was sold by them in 1984 to guarantee the gallery’s future. It was completed in the third year of the War and captures the nightmare of the conflict: the carousel (modelled on the one on Hampstead Heath) is frozen in motion, the fairground horses carrying uniformed soldiers and sailors and their sweethearts whirls round and round, the mouths of the riders wide open in an unending scream. D.H. Lawrence called the painting ‘horrifying and terrible’ – which it is: there is horror and terror etched into the faces of these riders caught up in a dizzying endless circuit – and thought it ‘the best modern picture I have seen’; and said that Gertler had given us a ‘real and ultimate revelation’.

It stands comparison with Picasso’s Guernica as a defiantly anti-war protest – at the beginning of the War Gertler registered as a conscientious objector, though he tried to sign up later but was declared medically unfit - and in some ways it strikes me as even more powerful that Guernica because it captures the glee and helplessness with which the participants are caught up in the action. The carousel evokes both the jauntiness of the mood in which soldiers set off to do their bit for King and Country, but also the machine-like mechanical nature of the conflict. The horses’ back legs are shaped like raised rifles, the clouds are like shells falling from the sky, the red, white and blue of the British flag glow as the excitement of the War becomes the fearfulness of war and the whirligig jollity merges into the frozen screams from which no-one can escape.

As Lawrence intuited, something new is being revealed here, and it is perhaps no coincidence that the artist was Jewish. This has always been part of the Jewish ‘mission’ – to look into a society from the margins and offer a commentary on what is seen. This is not always, as you can imagine, a popular position to take up. Gertler’s painting was still unsold at the time of his death in 1939. But now we can see that it is a masterpiece.

One of the things this exhibition does is to remind us of the enormous contribution Jews have made over the last 100 years to the cultural life of the nation. At a time when issues of asylum and the UK’s role in offering a welcome to refugees is at the forefront of the political agenda, spending time with some of the glories of Anglo-Jewish art , often created by Jewish immigrants and émigrés,  is a salutary reminder of what so-called ‘outsiders’ can offer their host nation.

Further rooms at the exhibition offer key works by a range of British and European Jews – from Chagall to Frank Auerbach, Jacob Epstein to R.B.Kitaj, Leon Kossof and Joseph Herman to Max Liebermann – exploring issues of identity and migration during the era of Nazi Germany and the post-War period. And there is some very powerful contemporary photographs by Israeli and British Jewish artists towards the end of the exhibition. 

Let me talk about just one work from the middle section of the exhibition, Joseph Herman’s ‘Refugees’ from 1941.

 

Herman was born in Warsaw in 1911 into a poor, working-class family. He became a graphic artist and in 1938 fled the rising tide of anti-semitism – first to Brussels and then, when the Germans invaded, he was able to get to the UK, to Glasgow where he learned quite quickly through the Red Cross that his entire family had perished in the Warsaw Ghetto. He’d already started a series of works on Jewish themes and these portraits of a disappearing world darkened to include pogroms and the destruction of the Ghetto.  He moved to London in 1943 where he held his first London exhibition together with a little known Northern artist called L.S.Lowry.

This painting, ‘Refugees’, was thought lost for over 60 years, and was re-discovered only after his death in 2000. It’s a haunting work and although you can see the spires of a lost moonlit snow-bound Warsaw it evokes a much wider east European story of displacement and exile - and is of course utterly contemporary. A family is on the move, carrying their bedding with them: father , mother, child and baby, their eyes wide with fear and panic. A universal story of upheaval and flight. The threatening nature of their unknown fate is symbolised by the huge cat squeezing the life out of the bloodied mouse. The cold indifference of the moon’s eye, picked up in the cat’s eye, looks down on one family - which stand for so many, then and now. It’s powerful, poignant, frightening, moving – Herman has created a deeply human work of identification with the oppressed, a humanistic and of course deeply Jewish portrait of suffering and exile and loss.

This capacity for human fellow-feeling became a dominant motif in Herman’s work: he eventually made his home in a Welsh mining village and made his name with his dignified and empathetic portraits of miners, which remain some of his best-known works.

There are nearly 70 works on show, taken from the Ben Uri collection, and each one deserves its own time and space. The Ben Uri has recently re-defined its purpose: it recognises that these Jewish themes of identity and immigration, of forced journeys and necessary integration, are part of a larger conversation in this country in which the rich contribution of immigrant cultures needs to be exhibited and celebrated. They have hosted in recent years exhibitions by African, Korean and Caribbean artists and they have a real vision of being (though they don’t put it this way) a source of blessing to other peoples, using the special nature of Jewish experience to enlighten, to educate, to inspire. If you go along to Somerset House I think you will leave this current exhibition moved and exhilarated, humbled and inspired. Don’t miss it.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London on November 14^th 2105]