"A Plot Against America" - a Creative Response.

So now we know. After an epic journey of lies, insults and threats, in 2017 there will be a racist, sexist demagogue in the White House. The populist violence-in-the-human-heart  that led to Brexit has another victory. These are sad – and fearful – times for those who value reflection, the ethics of civilised debate, and a compassionate approach to our shared problems.

It seems it could be time to re-read Philip Roth’s prescient novel ‘The Plot Against America’ (2004), which imagines a fascistic US government suspending civil liberties and persecuting minorities deemed to be a threat to security. It’s  a book that had a predecessor in American literature, Sinclair Lewis’s  ‘It Can’t Happen Here?’ (1935) about the takeover of the American government by an unstable mix of far-right and populist forces. Imaginative literature might be the most useful resource we have right now to help us deal with feelings of helplessness, anger, or fear about our shared future on this planet.

I am reminded of Salman Rushdie’s words in 1989 when he went into hiding after he became the victim of the fatwa against him - and the populist violence it unleashed - following publication of ‘The Satanic Verses’: “Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope not to find absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.”

The rabbis of old also took this stance. They called their imaginative literature ‘midrash’. In this spirit I’d like to offer, in relation to this week’s Torah portion, Lech l’cha (Genesis 12 onwards), a creative midrash on the early life of Abraham. It re-works a text I've composed and offered before, but I hear the injunction lech l'cha (12:1) - 'go for your own sake, go into yourself, go towards yourself' - as giving permission, and encouragement, to keep on working at the things that matter, on the journey towards that impossible destination: a place of truth, a space that offers another perspective and antidote to a demagogue's lies, insults and threats.

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It’s when they attack my father for what he believed in, that I grow really angry. He was a good man, Terach, a true believer in the old gods. Without his wise counsel and strength of character I would not here today, here to tell my story - even though my story, my beliefs, differ so markedly from his.

His gods, my father’s gods, were gods that failed: they were the gods he’d come to know during his long life, learned to trust from early on, the gods of nature and of death, of the harvests and the seas, of fertility and the seasons; in Ur of the Chaldees where he was born he was ruled by the sun and the moon, and his gods were close to him: he found them living in the earth and he saw them daily in the heavens and in the patterns of the night sky, and he trusted in them, for they gave him life and they gave a meaning to death, they structured the rhythms he lived by, they were all he needed. And he took them with him on his great migration - it is described in the books (Genesis 11:31).

He took us all - myself, Abram; my wife Sarai; my cousin Lot – he took us away from what he’d known, and settled in Haran, on his way to Canaan, where we were always meant to go. Canaan was his Promised Land, before it became mine. But he died there, in Haran, and was buried with his gods around him:  gods that the next generation  (or at least me, in the next generation) could see the limitations of, even though he believed they would always sustain a man and his family, in this world and the world to come.

And when the lazy, the vicious or the ignorant attack his beliefs - when they disparage him, as people do, with the immense condescension of posterity - that’s when I feel aggrieved. 

For although I don’t believe in his gods, and their powers to determine life, he taught me the values of faith, the importance of belief, of holding on to what one feels is true in the face of scorn and derision, of cynicism and fear. He taught me that to have a vision was important - if it is rooted in something other than one's ego: to live one’s vision was life-affirming, and would give life to others. Without that vision of his he would not have left his homeland and planted himself in alien soil.

And I learnt from this courage he possessed– so that when I was called to move on, I was able to listen, to follow where I was led (Genesis 12:1-4). I learnt that gift from him, my father Terach. So when they attack him for his beliefs, they attack me. Even though what I believe is different from what he believed, when the gods were near at hand and seemed to help him every day.

For I was called – as is every youngster, in every generation – to build on the past, to forge a new vision, informed by new situations, new realities, and not to rely, not to put my faith in, the old ways and the old gods. I was called into something new – but it took me a long time to understand what it was all about. I’m not sure I ever really understood. I’m not sure it’s understandable. All that talk of blessing and sacrifice, of ‘being a blessing’ (12:2) and being the bearer of an ‘everlasting covenant’ (17:7). What does it really mean?

I am not sure I ever understood who or what was calling me away from the old ways, calling me on into the unknown – it always came out of the blue, unexpectedly, randomly, the relentless unforeseen, like a message written into the sand beneath my feet:  ‘open your eyes, see what is there, look into yourself, and look up from yourself, look at the stars: they are your family written into the future, your descendents, constellations of faith...’

And every step of the way there was fear - fear and trembling. The fear of the unknown, the dread of what would be demanded next. And the deep dark vision of future suffering, the shadows haunting the blessing: that we would be strangers in a strange land, yidden, not just once, but over and again through the generations, carrying that blessed/cursed covenant seared to our souls.

People forget how painful this process was for me, how hard it was to let go of our old ways of thinking. But gradually it dawned on me - or it was forced on me, sometimes it came like a revelation, a sudden vision, a clarity of seeing, of insight – that all those old gods, different gods for different parts of life, separate gods for separate parts of reality (El and Baal, mot and Shaddai ), I realised that they just couldn’t all be split up, the gods – the elohim -  they couldn’t all have an independent life of their own, but they had to be connected, they had to belong together, they had to One, Echad. The divine couldn’t exist sometimes here and sometimes there, but the divine was in everything - it really was Echad, One - and that meant it embraced me as well.

This is why I lived in fear, trembling before the mystery of Being. The mystery that past and present and future is just our way of seeing, our way of being, but in essence all is One, Ethad. Who could live with this? It demands too much. And yet I found myself bound into a relationship with the One, the Eternal One, bound into a covenant with a new way of seeing, a new way of believing, a new way of being alive where my being resonated with the Being of the universe. Who wouldn’t be frightened of seeing the world this way? 

And it changed me, this new way of seeing. I started off as Avram ben Terach - Avram, son of Terach. And I became Avram ha-Ivri, Avram the ‘one who crossed over’ – for I did cross a border, not just a geographical one but a border of belief. I crossed over from the old gods of my father to a new intuition about divinity: that everything was connected, everything was One. I became Avram ha-Ivri, whom you know as ‘Avram the Hebrew’.

And from there to Avraham, the ‘founder of faith’, the founder of faiths – who could have imagined?  It was a long journey for a boy born in Haran to a father who’d put his faith in the old elohim in all their dazzling multiplicity, a long journey to a new way of thinking about Elohim (same name, different way of seeing what it meant), a long journey to a new kind of faith, a faith not just rooted in nature but rooted in story, in history, filled with surprises, challenges, obligations, duties, a faith austere and joyful, fraught with uncertainty, shadowed by doubts, a faith my descendents began to think of as belonging to me - though it isn’t mine, it belongs to all of us.

And this journey continues, the journey of faith of Avraham Avinu – ‘our father Abraham’ . So if you attack my faith, or my faithful ones (who may not even believe that I ever existed) - if you attack them, then you attack me. 

I am Avram, son of Terach. Proud child of a father in whom I still have pride. As it should be.

 

 

 

On Rainbows and Other Moments of Wonder

What do you think when you see a rainbow? What do you feel? Do you say to yourself: ‘Oh, look at that fine example of the refraction and dispersal of light in water droplets?’. You may know that this is what you are seeing, but I doubt that you experience a rainbow in that way. I’ve noticed that people often stop what they are doing and look, gaze at it for a while. (Nowadays they also seem to instantly reach for their phones to take a picture if it). We stop and look at this natural phenomenon as if has some meaning. As if it is more than just an optical illusion (which it is) or a  temporary aesthetic experience of a beautiful aspect of the natural world. What’s going on?

There is a sense of wonder. Perhaps of awe. We are taken out of ‘ordinary’ life and feel as if something special is being offered to us – if only for a moment or two. Part of our response to a rainbow may have to do with its transience. We know it won’t last. Do we sense that we are being shown something important about life itself: its impermanence, its fragility?

We may in the end be unsure what it is about a rainbow that we delight in. But we know that it is hard to be indifferent. It’s as if something is addressing us through this fleeting experience. Like a dream we can’t remember, its meaning seems just out of reach.

Judaism has its own mythology around the rainbow. This week we read the story of Noah, the survivor of the primeval environmental disaster the Torah calls the mabbul, the Flood. And when humanity has been destroyed and only Noah and his family remain, the sign that divine destructiveness will never again wipe out the human race or the earth itself is - the rainbow.

In a daring piece of creative storytelling, the narrators suggest that even God needs to be reminded not to let destructiveness take over. Human life is precious. Life on earth is precious. The planet is precious. “And it shall come to pass...when the rainbow is seen in the clouds, that I will remember my covenant which is between Me and you and every living creature, and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. And the rainbow shall be in the clouds, and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature...” (Genesis 9: 14-16). 

So the rainbow becomes an aide-mémoire for God. And because of this piece of mythic storytelling, the rainbow becomes a reminder for us. The covenant, the promise, has been handed on to us. The battle between creativity and destructiveness is a an ‘everlasting’ struggle not only in the heart of God, as it were, but in the human heart. The fate of the planet is now in our hands.

We know that the environmental crisis threatens the well-being of many millions of people, along with the natural world, and the animal world – so the rainbow reminds us of the fragility of all of life on the planet. It’s now in our hands. Can we keep faith with the covenant, the promise?  That this precious jewel in the crown of the created universe must never be ruined or destroyed?

How can we keep ourselves sensitised to the spiritual task we have been set (which is also a social and political task), the sacred destiny we have taken upon ourselves – to preserve and nurture this precious life on earth (and the life of the earth) that we so enjoy? Perhaps we need to be encouraged to appreciate moments of wonder, moments like seeing a rainbow. Perhaps we need to be helped to develop an attitude of what Rabi Abraham Joshua Heschel called "radical amazement" at the extraordinary richness and diversity and abundance of life that exists at every moment. Perhaps we need to refine our sensitivity to how much is wondrous in the unfolding life of the world.

This may be less difficult than we imagine. For we all know these moments of wonder. Moments when we feel as if we are seeing the world – or something in the world, or someone – for the first time. Moments when we become finely attuned to the rhythm and pulse of life. Moments when life is filled with ‘nowness’.

Holding in your arms your new-born child. Gazing awestruck at the stars in the night sky. That first glance across a room - eyes meeting - at a party you didn’t want to go to. Watching the sun set over the ocean. Walking in the mountains - experiencing the grandeur of the natural world.  Or just digging over the earth, appreciating the gifts of your own humble garden.

Listening to certain kinds of music, Beethoven’s late sonatas;  or singing Handel’s Messiah in a choir. Celebrating a life event in your family, or with friends – sharing moments of joy. Confronting the death of someone we love, or a stranger: bearing with the process, offering comfort and support. These moments of ‘nowness’ – what the medieval German Christian mystic Meister Eckhart called Istigkeit ‘is-ness’ - can come in all sorts of situations.

Through sharing food, or in sex, or through silence. Through doing a piece of work with precise attention to what is happening at each moment, the nowness of creativity. Through being fully engaged in helping someone in need, simple acts of compassion or generosity. Speaking in depth with another person, or  listening in depth: creating moments of intimacy, of meeting, of what Martin Buber calls Begegnung/  ‘encounter’. Alles wirkliche Leben ist Begegnung – "all real living is meeting/encounter".

We know these moments, they are precious, life-affirming – but none of them depend necessarily on belief in a divine ‘Being’ or on being part of a religious tradition. The most supposedly secular of hearts can still experience these moments of wonder, of nowness. What is important is to recognise them, appreciate them - and appreciate too that we have a responsibility to support each other and protect the planet so that such moments can be available for generations to come.

A rainbow is like a mini-revelation of a different dimension of reality, that is always with us, but also outside our grasp, beyond us, uncontrollable by us. The poet William Blake captured this, the potential for each moment to reveal something to us: ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite’. Moments of wonder come to us unexpectedly - they can’t be forced. And yet we sense that can hold ourselves open to them.

Judaism traditionally had a way of helping us keep ourselves open to moments of wonder, of nowness; of helping us nurture our ‘radical amazement’ about the grandeur and mystery of life. Of helping us feel gratitude. And therefore a sense of responsibility for the nurturing of life in all its forms. The rabbis of old developed  a series of b’rachot – ‘blessings’ – for such occasions: on seeing the wonders of nature; on smelling spices, or perfumes, or flowers; on eating fruit; on drinking wine; on hearing thunder; on seeing the sea; on seeing trees in blossom for the first time. And a blessing too on seeing a rainbow:

Blessed are You, our Living God, Sovereign of the Universe, You remember Your covenant and are faithful to it, and keep your promise.

 

 

[ This piece first appeared as one of a series of weekly 'Rabbi-in-Residence' pieces I am writing from September - November 2016 that are appearing in JEU, the online journal of Paideia: The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden https://en-gb.facebook.com/paideiaFB/ ]

 

 

Reflections on Order and Chaos in the Hebrew Bible - and the Shame of Calais

Watching, listening to and reading about the dismantling of the Calais refugee settlement this last week has been a disheartening, dementing experience. It seemed that chaos was the order of the day. Some brave souls on both sides of the Channel have been battling the callousness of the UK and French governments and insisting on the absolute priority of safeguarding the well-being of the children and youngsters gathered there – but that it is voluntary organizations and charities that are representing the necessary ethical commitment is a sad indictment of governments who can hide behind their assumption that many citizens have other priorities.  

In this they are aided and abetted by the raucous, demeaning aggression of the UK’s tabloid press towards these vulnerable youngsters, which allows the UK government to get away with shamefully small steps towards addressing the crisis. The hypocrisy of the right-wing press knows no bounds here – on the one hand children must always be kept away from harm, and danger and possible exploitation: the safety and well-being of children is regularly promoted as an almost sacred duty.  

On the other hand, this only applies to ‘our’ children. Other children – ‘foreign’ children – need to be left to fend for themselves and are not welcome here. There are times when the veneer of civilisation in which we paint our self-image is scraped mercilessly thin, and the ugly, raw blood and bones of our deeper, loathsome (actually, self-loathing) selves is exposed to full view.  

These thoughts this last week coincided with themes I’ve been reflecting on about order and chaos, and the relationship between these forces in our daily lives: our need for order, rhythms and the security of knowing how things might unfold – and the way in which these fundamental human wishes keep getting subverted by the forces of chaos and disorder that lie just below the surface of life; or indeed are present within the very flux of daily life.  

And I have been reflecting on these themes because this week Jews around the world began again the weekly cycle of readings from the Torah. And there, from the very beginning of this great mythic drama of Western consciousness, the Bible, we find a portrait of the dynamic tension between order and chaos.  

You know how the drama begins. ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’. It’s so familiar that we might not pause to wonder at it, this portrait of a Creator: a mysterious force giving purposeful form and imaginative shape to creation. An artist-designer-choreographer shaping and ordering a world which comes into being moment by moment. In a piece of magisterial story-telling the Biblical narrators offer us a picture of creation unfolding stage by stage in seven ordered and systematic stages. And we are the culmination of this divine activity: in this mythic, poetic story humanity is the purpose of creation. In this ancient text, in an act of extraordinary creative thinking, the Jewish people gave birth to the idea of something giving birth to the idea of us. 

Although we are now living – remarkably! - in an age that knows that the universe is 13.82 billion years old, the Judaic cultural imagination was never as interested in the question ‘when did it begin?’ as the questions ‘what is it for?’ and ‘how does it hold together?’ And these questions are revealed when we look carefully at the text – for this portrait of creation  is fraught with ambiguity. For how are we to read the opening sentences of the Torah?  

We immediately have a problem. The translation I offered above does not seem quite right: the influential Biblical commentator, the medieval scholar Rashi, looked at the grammatical form of the first word of this poetic text -- B’reshit -- and saw that it was not free-standing, but introduces a dependent clause: ‘In the beginning of ...’ . Rashi is reading close to the grain of the original Hebrew text, where there are no verse divisions: he suggests that the opening of the Bible should be read at one stretch, as a continuous thought. Something like: ‘In the beginning of God’s creation of heaven and earth -- the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the deep and an energy from God sweeping over the water -- God said: “Let there be light” and there was light’.  

So how did creation begin? According to this translation (and remember that every translation is an interpretation), the original creative process begins with God ‘speaking’: “Let there be...”  Rashi’s reading is thus in agreement with the author of the Fourth Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the word’. Existence is formed out of language. Here the Hebrew Bible distances itself from other contemporary Near Eastern creation myths. There are no divine genealogies or battles between the gods, no rituals to be re-enacted to ensure the supremacy of the national god. All of that is abandoned in favour of the ‘word’, the logos of John’s Greek text, the logic of the beginning - a beginning through speech. In this view of creation, time and chronology are subservient to language. ‘Time...worships language’, as the poet W.H.Auden once wrote.   

This view of creation as an ongoing act of articulation by ‘God’ resonates with the Jewish mystical tradition, which pictures the universe as being created out of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet: their continuing combination and re-combination makes up the substance of our being and that of the world. All of matter, including ourselves (our human ‘being’), flow from the original speech-act that emerged from the divine ‘Being’. Existence is the sum of the ongoing echoes, responses, reverberations from that original “Let there be light...”  (Genesis1:3).  

This is akin to the popular view of artistic creativity as occurring in a flash of inspiration, a moment of revelation. Suddenly everything is just there: the whole poem, the complete melody, the entire story. Yet although there are artists’ accounts which reinforce this view, they are in the minority.  More frequent are accounts of the creative process which suggest something very different takes place in the struggle to produce something out of nothing. And this takes us to a second, and radically different, reading of our creation story.  

Those who have come to the Bible through translations into English will perhaps be most familiar with the 1611 King James ‘Authorized’ Version. It begins with that familiar and bold declaration: 1) In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. End of sentence. That punctuation mark – not there in the Hebrew – creates a statement that stands as a kind of prologue, a headline, for the subsequent events. As if it were staying: ‘The following is the story of how, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.’  

And then verse 2 provides, quite literally, a pro-logue: what existed before the logic of God’s speaking-the-world-into-being. This is not a creation out of nothing (ex nihilo), but creation out of the midst of a dark, primeval void: 2) Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. 3) And God said: “Let there be light”.  And there was light.’  

Suddenly we see the huge reservoir of potentially destructive forces that exist before God speaks. We have the ‘unformed and void’: tohu va’vohu  (‘chaos and confusion’ is perhaps a better translation). And ‘darkness’. And ‘the deep’ (or ‘the chasm’, ‘the abyss’). In our second reading we discover - with surprise? with anxiety? - that God does not create everything. For example, the ‘darkness’ exists independently, before the light. In this reading of creation there is drama, struggle, even a sense of improvisation. There is a deep insecurity about the whole enterprise.  

According to one fifth-century rabbinic homiletic commentary (midrash Genesis Rabbah 9:4), the world did not spring forth all at once from God’s omnipotent will, but 26 attempts preceded the creation. All of them were doomed to failure. The world as we now have it came out of the chaotic midst of this earlier wreckage. Does this sound like the stuff of primitive science-fiction? Perhaps. But this midrashic tradition of the fragility and impermanence of the creative process is spiritually and psychologically significant.  

For here humanity is an experiment. There is always the risk of failure and the return to chaos and nothingness. The uncertainty of every aspiring artist reverberates within this stream of mythic thinking. God’s anxious cry of hope at the end of the midrash - ‘If only this time it will last!’ - accompanies human history, and our own lives within in. 

Our first reading of the opening of Genesis invited us into a harmonious world of language, logic and ordered inevitability. Our second reading opens up the possibility that insecurity and impermanence is built into the makeup of the world and the fabric of our consciousness. Our first reading offers us a world  where things should make sense; where there is order and security. Our second reading offers us a world of ‘chaos and confusion’ – a world in which ‘darkness’ is the starting point and a sense of provisionality accompanies the unfolding of everyday life.  

The genius of the Biblical narrators lies in how they manage to suggest - in the few opening verses of their story, in the guise of an evocation of Creation - such diverse readings, interpretations, of life. They somehow intuited that we would spend our lives, individually and collectively, stretched out between our wish for order, rhythm, logic, security – and our awareness of how close is the ‘abyss’, how powerful are the forces of ‘chaos and confusion’, how ‘darkness’ is part of the fabric of life, how near we always are to a collapse back into tohu va’vohu. Calais this last week has revealed how close we are to this.  

That midrash is deeply subversive: the rabbis saw deeply into the ambiguity in the text and gave us a God that isn’t omnipotent or omniscient. Their God is a participant with us in the not-knowing how things will turn out. Is life on earth a doomed project? We don’t know, we can’t know, nobody knows. This is a picture filled with fear and trembling, with hope and wishfulness - but no certainty. It is suggesting that in regard to the world we live in, it could all end in failure. It could all – our so-called civilisation, and us, and this fragile planet – be sucked back into the depths of  tohu va’vohu.  

When at the end of the midrash God is allowed a voice and looks around and cries out, in hope, in anxiety, ‘If only this time it will last!’, of course this is our hope, and our anxiety, that the rabbis are giving voice to - projected onto the Holy One of Israel. The hope that our lives, and the life of humanity, are part of a scheme of things that will last.  

So this is how the Torah begins – opening up for us existential insecurity inside a supposedly ordered creation. How we manage that innate insecurity is a test of our humanity – do we bring ‘light’ into the world? Or do we let ‘darkness’ reign? We contain both, the potential for both. Which force, which energy, will win the day? For us, for our world.  

[developed from some thoughts shared at Finchley Reform Synagogue, October 29^th, 2016]

 

 

 

Reflections on Simchat Torah and a Kafka Parable

And so we come to the close of the spiritual year. But this is a paradoxical closure – for it’s a closure in which the door to new beginnings is left wide open. On Simchat Torah – added to the end of the festival of impermanence, Sukkot - the slow, regular, week-by-week progression of the Jewish liturgical year, based on the cycle of weekly readings from the Torah, comes to an end.

We read the last verses of the Torah where Moses, a legendary 120 years old, goes up the mountain overlooking the so-called ‘promised land’, the land of Canaan, and before he dies he is allowed to look at the inheritance which has been promised to his people. ‘You can look at it, but you can’t touch it, eat from it’ – the message to humanity at the beginning of the Torah about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil finds its symbolic echo at the end of the Torah in God’s refusal to allow Moses more than a glimpse of what the whole wilderness journey has been leading to. He cannot enter the land. It is the next generation who will inherit the land. It is always the next generation whom we believe will fulfil our dreams of a better tomorrow. So the Torah ends on this bitter-sweet moment of loss – and hope deferred.

But on this festival of Simchat Torah, the pain of unfulfilled longing immediately segues into a new beginning. The opening verses of the book of Genesis follow on straight away and the holy drama begins again. ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...’ Moses has died, but creation is renewed. The journey is over, we have failed to reach our destination. And the journey is beginning again, and all lies before us, waiting. “In my end is my beginning” (T.S.Eliot, Four Quartets).

When we dance with the Torah on Simchat Torah we are celebrating the return to the beginning, we are celebrating the renewal of our quest for a story that can give meaning to our lives. We are rejoicing in the unending journey of our people towards a destiny which can never be fulfilled. As Franz Rosenzweig puts it: “this close of the spiritual year is not permitted to be an actual close but must flow back into the beginning...the last word in the Torah gives rise to the first.” In the liturgical year, the spiritual year, we never reach the ‘promised land’. We are always journeying. The spiritual journey itself  – personal and collective - is our destination, our homeland.

The Jewish people, a people who have survived the vicissitudes of history, are a people on an endless journey through time,  a people whose sense of journeying is evoked in Franz Kafka’s incomparable parable:

I gave orders for my horse to be brought round from the stable. The servant did not understand me. I myself went to the stable, saddled my horse and mounted. In the distance I heard a bugle call, I asked him what this meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing. At the gate he stopped me, asking: ’Where are you riding to, master?’ ‘I do not know’, I said, ‘only away from here, away from here. Always away from here, only by doing so can I reach my destination.’ ‘And so you know your destination?’, he asked. ‘Yes’, I answered, ‘didn’t I say so? Away-From-Here, that is my destination.’ ‘You have no provisions with you,’ he said. ‘I need none,’ I said, ‘the journey is so long that I must die of hunger if I don’t get anything on the way. No provisions can save me. For it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.’

‘Fortunately’ – ‘es ist ja zum Glück’ – what a wonderful sense of celebration, anticipation, hopefulness is evoked! That concluding phrase, and indeed the whole parable, is one of the great religious commentaries on the story of the Jewish people. A contemporary midrash to stand alongside the midrashim of old.

What thoughts come to mind as we ponder on Kafka’s parable? We have the destiny of the Jewish people not to be understood; and to have to rely on themselves. They are attuned to a call, a summons, that they alone can hear – Kafka’s bugle (Trompete) is a close relative of the shofar, present at the revelation at Sinai when the people learn of the moral and ethical vision they are to enact; the shofar that in the tradition also announces the coming of the Messianic age and the redemption of humanity. And the journey is always ‘Away-From-Here’,  away from the compromises and disappointments, defeats and suffering of everyday personal life, away from the empty promises and false solutions and unending conflicts of social and political life.

And if there are ‘no provisions’ that can be prepared in advance to help us cope with the dramas of life, then we are like the children of Israel in the wilderness who depend on receiving manna from the Eternal One - their lesson in dependence, their lesson on the hubris of believing that we can be masters of our own fate.  Nothing can save us, Kafka intuits – channelling his innate understanding of the Judaic story as portrayed in the texts of old – unless we are open to receive what life offers us day by day. This is the daily miracle – we receive what we need to keep us going. And we do keep on going – day after day, generation after generation. ‘For it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.’

The Hebrew word torah is from the root y’r’h – ‘to point in a direction’. It’s used of an archer shooting arrows. Torah is not only ‘Law’ – forbiddingly revealed for all time, static and unchanging. Torah is about the direction we are called upon to move. It is the lightning flash of insight when we see the way ahead. It is what we hear when we listen in deeply to the call to our better selves, to enact moments of messianic hopefulness through our compassion, our generosity, our passion for justice. It is the moment of knowing how we have to act. On Simchat Torah we celebrate both the Torah of tradition – that creative wellspring of stories and legends, ethical teachings  and social responsibilities - and the ‘Torah’ of our own times, the teachings and wisdom of voices like Kafka, sometimes far from the mainstream of traditional Jewish texts, that nevertheless flow towards us and nurture our souls.

 

[This piece is one of a series of weekly 'Rabbi-in-Residence' pieces I am writing from September - November 2016 that are appearing in JEU, the online journal of Paideia: The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden https://en-gb.facebook.com/paideiaFB/ ]

 

 

Challenging our Assumptions about Learning and Liturgy - and What We Need to Help Us to Fly.

A few years ago a team of psychologists set up an experiment with some pre-school children. They gave the children a toy made of lots of plastic tubes. Each tube had something different about it. One tube squeaked when you touched it. One lit up. One tube made music. One had a mirror hidden inside it. With half the children, one of the psychologists came into the room and – as if by accident – bumped into the tube that squeaked. “Oops!”, she said as the tube squeaked. The children were then left alone to play with the toy. The psychologist-team watched to see what happened next. What do you think they observed?  

The other half of the children had a different experience. The psychologist came into the room and acted more like a teacher, picking up the toy and saying enthusiastically “Look at my great toy! Let me show you how it works” and then pressing the tube that squeaked, which of course it did. The children were then left alone to play with the toy, with the psychologist-team  watching to see what happened next in that group of children.

Although Rosh Hashanah is the time of the year when we are asking ourselves ‘what will happen next? how will our next year unfold?’, we don’t usually have any window, any vantage point, from which we can observe the action. We are in that sense like the children being tested to see how we respond to what life presents us with.  We are still as a people, the children of Israel, caught up in something bigger than we know, larger than we understand. Part of the religious work, the spiritual work, of this time of the year is to see if we can get a different vantage point onto our daily lives.

But back to the experiment. What do you think the psychologist team saw happening in the first group of children, the one where there’d been this ‘accidental’ bumping into the toy, which then squeaked?  That group, they found, began playing with the toy in all sorts of random ways, pulling, pushing, prodding, until  gradually they discovered all the functions of the tubes: the light, the music, the mirror. And the other group? Those children who’d been enthusiastically shown how the squeaking part of the tube worked – those who’d been deliberately taught, had their attention directed, by the experimenter – they played with the tube in a much more limited and repetitive way. ‘Squeak, squeak! Squeak, squeak!’ – they hardly ever discovered all the other things the toy could do. 

When I came across this piece of research – it’s from Alison Gopnik’s  book The Gardener and the Carpenter, she’s a Jewish professor of both psychology and philosophy at Berkeley, California - I have to say that I found it quite unsettling, disquieting. It seemed at first quite counter-intuitive.

Surely if you are just left to find things out for yourself, randomly, you could end up lost, bored, frustrated, distressingly all-at-sea. And if you are directed in your learning, your discovery of what’s in the world, by an enthusiastic teacher – can’t they open up things for you that you might never find by yourself, hidden wonders you’d never otherwise come across on your own? So this research seemed to undermine some basic assumptions of mine.

It is quite destabilising to think: have I got something fundamentally  wrong? will I have to think again about how I see the world, build it up again with different foundations? These are High Holy Day questions, I suppose – certainly they are pertinent to the self-examination we are encouraged to undertake -  but they weren’t questions I welcomed when I came across this peer-reviewed research.

But the more I thought about this experiment, the more I realised the truth embedded within it, and the more significant, profound, I found it. And still find it.

I thought back to my own childhood and realised just how self-directing my learning had been. I’d go to the local library and just take out whatever books captured my imagination. There were lots of books at home too, but I never remember being told, by either of my parents, ‘you really must read that’. They just left me to it - a sort of blessing in disguise, I now realise.  At secondary school  there were some texts that were set - novels to read, poems to learn - and I am grateful for those because, perhaps fortunately, they didn’t narrow my focus but made me realise how much there was to discover. But on the whole I can now see how free I was both as a child and then an adolescent to find my own way – and not just in literature and poetry, but in music and art and films as well. Looking back, I can see that I was embarked on a lifetime of exploring what interested me, allowing  randomness and serendipity and chance to do its work.

That lack of external direction has, I think, allowed me to be relatively eclectic and wide-ranging in following my own enthusiasms and not anyone else’s. (It has also meant that I have vast areas of ignorance). But what about studying to become  a rabbi? Obviously at  Leo Baeck College there was a huge amount of directedness that went on; historically, traditionally, there’s a strong voice of authority that says, like the one directed to that second group of kids, ‘Look over there, those are the texts that matter: Torah, Talmud, commentaries, collections of midrash, liturgical texts’.  In the past Jews – not just rabbis – were clearly directed where to go for wisdom. Certain texts were solid links in a chain of tradition stretching back millennia.

But again, I was fortunate - another blessing in disguise - in that the teachers that I had at and around the College were not quite like that. Or it may be the other way round – that the teachers I found were not like that. The rabbis and teachers I gravitated towards seemed to have been the ones who, each in their own way, represented that first kind of psychologist-experimenter.

I am thinking of Rabbi Lionel Blue and Rabbi Jonathan Magonet and Rabbi Jeffrey Newman, each in their own very different-from-each-other idiosyncratic ways teaching how Jewish religious life is, in essence,  about exploration, about a journey of discovery in which the answers aren’t always given by the past; where in fact the asking of a good question, and the exploration of where it takes you, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, is central what it means to be Jewishly religious.

I had other teachers at rabbinical college, but they didn’t enthuse me in the same way. In retrospect I can see that perhaps  my mind-set had already been formed – a pre-disposition towards a certain stance in relation to learning, how we learn, where we learn, who we can learn from. Where you bump into things – “oops!” – and learn from that, rather than have your learning focused by someone else.

So I leant that wisdom could be found in engaging with Christian pastors and Scottish shepherds, Dominican fathers and atheist artists, displaced poets and Sufi mystics; and that the traditional advice given at the beginning of Pirke Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, asay l’cha rav – ‘Get yourself a rav, a teacher’ (1:6), was fine – and maybe important – as long as you didn’t restrict yourself to a too-narrow definition of who a teacher might be, or where new insights might come from.

All of which is to say that by looking back at my own journey I can now see that Alison Gopnik’s research experiment – and there’s a lot of other work that she and her colleagues have done that confirm her conclusions – seems to me to be on to something extremely significant about how learning takes place, what kind of direction is needed, and what gets in the way and limits a person’s development. But I still find her conclusions unsettling. Because I think the implications are far-reaching. I want to speak about two very different areas where the implications challenge, very directly, how we do things, how we think about things.

The first is parenting – which is a large part of the focus of her book ‘The Gardener and the Carpenter’. Gopnik puts it very clearly – in a sentence that might make many middle-class parents apoplectic with rage, and maybe fear : “Our job [as parents] is not to shape our children’s minds; it’s to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows.”

Explore all the possibilities – what, go to the local park unsupervised? choose for themselves what school they go to? what subjects to study? decide for themselves whether they do really want extra music lessons, or ballet, or to complete their Duke of Edinburgh awards? “A parent’s job is to help youngsters explore all the possibilities that the world allows”?!  What about exploring drugs? exploring sex? exploring the vast regions of the internet?  This woman needs to be locked up, we might be thinking, encouraging us to think about our parenting in the affluent West as too restrictive, as not conducive to our children’s well-being.

But if we can resist giving in to our knee-jerk reactions, we might create some space to think about the deep wisdom of what she is saying: that we might be getting in the way of our children’s overall well-being by eliminating the random, the serendipitous, by not letting them discover things for themselves - through their mistakes, and what hurts them, as well as what they might thrill to by being allowed to follow their own desires and passions. 

You can see all around us the results of the way children are often now being parented, and it is very painful.  I see it and hear about it every day in my therapy consulting room: an epidemic of self-harm, eating disorders, mental health problems, in girls especially; but boys too are much more fragile than their bravado would let us know about. All that educational emphasis on outcomes and test scores and all that parental emphasis on achievement and success – along with peer pressures and the relentless presence of social media sites – has created a perfect storm of un-wellness, of dis-ease.

As parents we might want to protect our youngsters from dangers, of various kinds, but what Alison Gopnik’s book does is provoke us into thinking about the ways in which unknowingly we become collusive with and part of the problem - rather than offering a viable alternative to it. Parenting should be more like gardening than carpentry, Gopnik argues – it is about creating the best conditions for what is there to be allowed to grow, rather than hammering away at our children to shape them into what we think they need to be.

We never think about it as hammering away of course, we think it’s ‘being sensible’, ‘getting ahead’, ‘getting the most out of the opportunities you’ve been given’ - all sorts of rationalisations which our youngsters buy into, or react against, to their own detriment. Sometimes their problems appear at the time as they are growing up, sometimes it take years and then breaks out at college or university: counselling services in tertiary education are being overwhelmed with young people unable to cope.

We could widen this a bit. Beyond the current debates in the UK about grammar schools or the merits of faith schools there is a more fundamental malaise within the educational system in this country. Did you know that in Finland, which leads the world in terms of both academic achievements and reported well-being amongst school-leavers, they don’t begin to teach maths, reading and spelling until the children are seven years old?  Prior to that  classes are structured around creative play, storytelling, interpersonal and social skills and the role of the imagination in personal development. The UK has a lot to learn: to unlearn and to learn. (Gopnik’s work is a good example of the historical role of Jews in society – to offer a critique of the status quo, to challenge the prevailing idolatry in a culture). 

But I want to finish by bringing this back to ourselves as Jews on the High Holy Days. Because the other thing that unsettled me about Gopnik’s fascinating and passionate arguments is the implications for what we do in our synagogue services. She doesn’t talk in her book about the implications of her ideas for religious belief or practice, but it led me to think about it. That’s an example of her philosophy at work. I bumped into her work and then, in exploring it, I was  led to into quite other areas.

Because the model we have, in our liturgy and our services, is definitely the second route the experimenters took: ‘Look at this, children, see how interesting it is’ - that’s in effect what we who lead the services are saying to you. ‘Turn to page 31’, we say, ‘and we’ll sing this, or read that’. And you probably dutifully follow where you are directed. (Maybe I’m wrong and you are all secret explorers and drifters off. I really hope you are – and I am sure you’ll have heard me encouraging you to use this time to wander through the book, or follow where your mind takes you . But now I have Gopnik’s research to back up my intuitions!).

But if you do just feel an obligation to dutifully follow along, then  - if we think about that through the lens of Alison Gopnik’s work - what we are in effect doing is narrowing your choices and potential adventures  during these services, rather than expanding the possibilities of what you could find out and discover for yourselves if we took that different, first-experimenter approach. I think this is one of the underlying reasons why so many people are put off my formal religious services – and this may be true of Christianity as well as Judaism.   

So the question I want to leave with you with is this: how would Jews do services differently if we took a ‘Oops!’ approach to the liturgy? If we used the time to bump into things rather than be directed towards them? I’m sure our services would look very different and feel very different. Could we bear a service which wasn’t guided so rigidly from on high – and I’m not speaking about from heaven? A service where we left gaps of time for congregants to wander through the liturgy until they found something that caught their eye?  and then maybe, if they wanted to , have a conversation with their neighbour about what they had found significant in it? A service where we did just a fraction of the liturgy and then used it to see where our own thoughts, our own psyche, took us next?

Services like that might take us out of our comfort zone - but they would allow space for the unconscious to work, allow space for the ruach hakodesh, the spirit of divine energy within us, to breathe in us and enlighten us.  These would be services in the spirit of Shakespeare’s ‘By indirections find directions out ‘ (Hamlet, Act 2, scene1). They would be services where kavannah – inner attentiveness to what unfolds within us moment by moment - was given more space than keva, what is fixed and determined by tradition. They would be services that would - to use traditional language - allow God in.

Why don’t we try to wander, to digress, to use the words in our prayer books as springboards into deeper regions of our own soul and heart and mind. Can we make space for chance things to arise in our mind - random thoughts and associations – and follow them, see where they lead. See what can be discovered by bumping into words and images from these texts – allow oneself to be surprised , embarrassed, moved, gratified, ashamed, excited, whatever comes up. See what hurts, see what gives pleasure. Think of our services as an adventure playground and not a place where we have to dutifully tick the boxes of prayers read, songs sung, pages covered.

What kind of adventure playground do we want our services to be? At the moment we are too often like a butterfly pinned to a wheel: we are not only being cruel to ourselves, but we are stopping ourselves flying spiritually, religiously. I can’t believe that in our hearts we want that. But what do we want? What do our souls really need? I leave you with that question.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, October 4^th, 2016]

 

 

Preparing for the New Year with 'Alice in Wonderland'

...suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her. There was nothing so very remarkable in that: nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural)...

I guess you didn’t know that everything we need for the High Holy Days – spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, maybe even intellectually – everything we might need to guide us through these days, is on the opening page of Alice in Wonderland. Who would have imagined it?

As the story begins Alice is sitting on a river bank next to her sister who is reading a book ‘but it had no pictures or conversations in it’, writes Lewis Carroll, ‘ ”and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”’. Like the Anglican deacon Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who knew a lot about having to engage with books without pictures and conversations – books of hymns, and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer – Jews know what it means to be stuck with a book like that: the liturgy of the Jewish New Year and Day of Atonement is thin on pictures and devoid of conversations - the very stuff that might make it come alive imaginatively. Who over these High Holy Days hasn’t unknowingly echoed Alice’s disappointed complaint?

Of course the Jewish liturgy does have pictures of a different kind – word pictures. There’s some vivid imagery:  a Book of Life, a Court of Law, a Judge and King waiting and reaching out to a chastened community, a searching community seeking forgiveness, atonement, wholeness; the closing of the gates as the souls rush to be included in the gathering of life as the final Neilah service draws to a close: these are the word pictures we play and wrestle with each year. But as for the conversation, it is a bit...let’s say, one-sided. We do a lot of talking, praying,  singing,  beseeching, repeating,  rehearsing the familiar stories and themes and motifs - but it’s basically a monologue, not a dialogue. It’s not really, hand on heart, a conversation.

To have HaKadosh Baruch Hu as a dialogue partner, the 'Holy One of Israel', is always going to be a daunting task. It’s not conversation as we know it, the kind of conversation that enlivens us, or stretches us, or provokes us, or nurtures us, or inspires us, or consoles us. Or am I being too harsh? Could we make it that? What would that look like? What would that feel like? If our machzor (prayer book) was a place, a space, for that kind of conversation? If our word-pictures helped us into that kind of conversation, the kind that we cherish? If our machzor opened up for us an imaginative space where we experienced something alive, a presence animating the space and the words? This is something to think about for these forthcoming days – how do we engage with the liturgy as if it’s part of a dynamic conversation? Is that possible?

Alice gives up with the book her sister is reading. She turns aside, ‘considering [things] in her own mind’ as Carroll puts it. She turns aside, turns inwards and  – like Moses at the burning bush – when she turns aside and turns inwards, she suddenly sees something: ...suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her. High Holy Days is the time we turn aside, turn inwards, and try to see what’s there. We look around us and into ourselves and ask: What’s going on that we haven’t seen up till now? What’s the story that we are in? What’s the story our lives are part of? And who’s writing the story?

At this time of the year we are always encouraged to remember: “Days are scrolls, write on what you want to be remembered” (Bachya ibn Pakuda, 1050-1120). But there’s a partial illusion in this: I don’t think  we should get too carried away with thinking that we are the authors of our own lives. First of all it’s a statement that – like all the traditional liturgy itself – comes from an era that didn’t realise we have an unconscious, we have a part of ourselves that is out of conscious sight and control and can subvert our best intentions. Having an unconscious means that all this Jewish religious talk about free will and consciously changing ourselves through teshuvah needs to be treated with caution. Days may be scrolls - but a lot of the time the best we can do is write a few footnotes to the text that unfolds in front of us – I do love footnotes, mind you, they are sometimes the most creative part of a text.

The reality of our lives is that most of the time we are responding to stuff that comes at us. Stuff happens – to us or to the ones we love and care about -  and often it’s painful stuff. The things that appear in our lives are not always the things we want: ill-health, loss of a job, loss of a parent, or a partner, or a child, loss of a relationship. We might write our response, but we are always being reminded that we are part of a bigger picture of events that happen to us without our asking for them. This is the time of the year when we reflect on all this, and how we respond to what life throws at us. Sometimes of course there are wonderful things that happen to us, unexpectedly, and we feel grateful, we feel blessed. We do know when it feels good to be alive. Sometimes we glimpse how the world is tinged with the miraculous. We have our White Rabbit moments.

But don’t we also recognise, deep inside us, what Alice hears the Rabbit say to itself? :  “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!”

I don’t think it is only a question of how old we are, that this question can be so powerful, so oppressive: the question of ‘too late’. I don’t think you have to be in your 60s, 70s, 80s to feel the force of this, I think you can feel it in your 20s and 30s, any age : ‘it’s too late’ – too late to find that special relationship, too late to have the family I want, or the friends, too late to have job satisfaction, too late to fulfil my ambitions, my hopes, too late to rid myself of my anxieties and fears, too late to learn a new language, a new skill, too late to exorcise the malign influence of my past, too late to heal that relationship, heal that old wound... “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” – we feel it as ‘it is too late’.

But what this period of the Jewish year that we are entering into says to us, promises us, is : it’s not too late. Not yet. That’s what the Talmud intuits when It tells us the story of Rabbi Eliezer, who says to his disciples ‘Repent one day before your death’ and they naturally respond to him: ‘Does that mean one is supposed to know when one will die?’ And Eliezer replies, in effect, ‘I think you get it: you don’t know how long you have in this world so you need to be attending to teshuvah – returning, changing - every day of your life.’  In other words: It’s never too late. It’s never too late for something to change – in us, to us.

Of course none of us lives each day as if it were our last – that would be sort of unbearable - but we have been gifted a period each year (these Yamim Noraim, Days of Awe) when we can focus on teshuvah, change: our capacity to change before it is too late. We may feel it’s too late – “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!”, but we are entering a period when we are reminded: it’s not too late. It’s never ‘too late’.

I am focusing on the personal here, because that is at the heart of these days: ourselves as individuals and our capacity to change in such a way that our better selves are allowed to emerge, or have more room to grow. We as individuals are at the heart of  this collective call for change, for return; but the High Holy Days remind us that this call to change – and this question of ‘too lateness’ – is also collective.

We know that our lives, fragile and vulnerable as they are, are held in a web of connections to community, and nation, and the community of nations that exist on this fragile and vulnerable planet: concentric circles of interconnection that bind us in to the fabric of life on this planet. And this dilemma of ‘too lateness’ haunts the imagination. It echoes through each of these concentric circles.

Think of the issues we face as a Jewish community. Is it too late to save our Jewish community from being overwhelmed by the toxic spillage that has seeped into so much of the discourse in the public domain around Israel and the Palestinians? We are coming up this year to 50 years of occupation and it has had an effect, for two generations now, on how Jews are seen throughout the world. This isn’t fair but it is a reality we are aware of, even if we hate it being the case. Is it too late to change the flow of history in the Middle East? It laps onto our shores we just see as natural – synagogues with heavy security, CCTV cameras, shut away behind high walls... “when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural...”  But it’s not natural. And we need to wonder at this. Occupation is not natural. Injustice is not natural. Security guards checking us in and out is not natural. But is it all too late?

And what about our country? Is it too late for the United Kingdom? This year we have had to face the possibility that it is. That act of national self-harm that was Brexit has happened. Too late to change it. We have to live with the consequences. And find out nationally what it is not too late for, what can still change for the better.

And is it too late for the larger issues to be addressed in ways that are on the side of life, rather than death? Is it too late to solve creatively and compassionately the European humanitarian crisis over refugees and displaced families and children? Is it too late to stop the poisonous xenophobia and racism that is stalking every country in Europe from gradually taking over? Is it too late, now that the Arctic ice (as we heard this week) has shrunk to its smallest ever size, is it too late to change the rising of tides, the flooding of cities, the droughts and the floods and the food shortages that will overtake the planet this century as the temperatures keep on rising? 

All these questions are in play as we enter our New Year. “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” Who knew that Alice in Wonderland was a prophetic text?

But lets’ come back to our little lives, our own hugely significant and insignificant lives. I have been asking: what should we be wondering at, that’s in front of our eyes in these concentric circles – but don’t wonder at, just grow accustomed to, just treat as natural, the way things are, even though they aren’t  natural. I want to end though by turning this marvellous sentence by Lewis Carroll in the other direction, closer to his intention perhaps: “when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural...” What should we be reflecting on that we take for granted - but should in fact be a source of wonder?

What do we fail to see in front of our eyes – Alice saw her White Rabbit, Moses saw his burning bush – but what do we fail to see that is an intimation of something exceptional, something made present that can inspire, can enlighten, can illumine, can transform, can enliven and stir us in our lives? These High Holy Days are a special opportunity for opening our eyes – to see something we have never seen before.

What is our White Rabbit going to be? Which direction will it come from? Who will bring it? What shape will it be? Who will be it? What will this new insight look like? This new understanding? What is going to be revealed to us, in us? The promise of these days, these weeks in front of us, is that something will occur, something will appear – only we as individuals will see it, only we will notice it, each one of us -  because it is only for us. If, like Alice, we turn aside, turn inwards, it will happened:  something new will be given to us, something that stirs our imagination, our hopefulness, our resolve, something that counters our deep fear “I shall be too late”  – no wonder the rabbis called this period the ‘Days of Awe’.

[based on a Selichot sermon given on the evning of September 24th 2016 at the Finchley Reform Synagogue, London]