Anatevka Lives

 

I see that the show ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ is back in town: if you want to catch it, it’s on at Regent’s Park Open Air theatre in London. Sixty years old now, it once held the record for the longest running musical on Broadway: 10 years, 3,000+ performances.   

Adapted from the Yiddish tales of Solomon Rabinovitch from Kiev, perhaps better known to you and I as Sholem Aleichem, this piece of musical theatre – the brainchild of three Jewish artists each of whom contributed to its success,  with the book (Joseph Stein), the music (Jerry Brock), the lyrics (Sheldon Harnick) – has retained its appeal over the decades. It’s been revived every decade or so and I am sure there’s no one reading this who can’t hum, or sing, some of its famous tunes. “If I were a rich man”, “Sunrise, sunset”…One way or another it’s become part of our psyches. And yet, if not exactly panned by the critics when it came out, it was met with remarkable condescension by some reviewers who saw it when it premiered in 1964.

Philip Roth called it “shtetl kitsch” and  Cynthia Osick, then – like Roth – at the beginning of a stellar literary career - called it an “emptied-out, prettified, romantic vulgarization” of the Yiddish original. I get that, and if I am being high-minded about these things, I might even agree with them. Though high-minded might be just another word for snobbish.   And yet something about the show hit a nerve with audiences, whether they saw it on stage or in its 1971 film version: not just the singalong melodies but the drama of resilience demonstrated by a cultural group in the face of dark times – “horrible things are happening all over the land” is one line that resonates for audiences in different times and places, in different cultures, and the drama addresses a universal dilemma about how families are to survive difficult times: times of oppression, persecution, prejudice, the hostility of others in a society or the antipathy of governments.

Do you adapt, do you compromise, do you hold on to traditions, do you let go of them? How do you survive in a rapidly changing world: it’s not just a Jewish question but it’s been a question for many cultural groups within modernity, and a question still very much alive today  whether you’re Muslim or Ukrainian or Palestinian or white English working-class.   

When the group you identify with, the group you feel you belong to, feels threatened – and that’s regardless of whether the threat is real or not, this is all about subjectivity – if you feel threatened, how do you stay true to who you feel yourself to be collectively?

For Jews in the 20^th century, the primary solution to this problem was of course supposed to be Zionism. Only Jews living autonomously in their own land and not feeling beholden to others would solve, it was said, the dilemmas of being an unwelcome minority in other people’s lands. Well, we have seen how well that’s turned out. Becoming a semi-pariah state in the eyes of much of the world has replicated the problem rather than solving it.

As a few prescient Jewish thinkers recognised prior to the establishment of the State – Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Franz Rosenzweig, Henrietta Szold, Gershom Scholem – unfettered Jewish nationalism, a nationalism unanchored in the highest ethical standards of the spiritual heritage of Judaism – could only lead to trouble. They foresaw how the existence of the Jewish people within a land to which they may have had a historical claim but that happened to be a land long-settled in and claimed by others would mean that Jews would yet again be a problematic provocation to the non-Jewish world - just as they had been in fictional Anatevka and its real life counterparts in pre-revolutionary Russia.

But let me stay with 'Fiddler on the Roof' for a moment, this very Jewish and yet universal piece of storytelling. Its original investors, by the way, particularly Jewish investors, were worried the show was “too ethnic”  (by which of course they meant ‘too Jewish’); but perhaps because the show was rooted in a family drama, an inter-generational family dynamic of  children wanting to break free of inherited cultural ways, particularly when it came to marriage partners, the show’s ethnic particularism didn’t seem to detract from its popularity; and indeed, when it came to casting the lead (the role of Tevye) for the film version in 1971, the actor most keen to do it – any guesses? - was Frank Sinatra who seemingly didn’t feel that being an archetypical goy was any bar to stepping into the shoes of Zero Mostel.

Actually my thoughts about 'Fiddler on the Roof ' were sparked a few weeks ago. They came to me via a circuitous route - but let me lead you down the rabbit hole of my thinking here: bear with me.

When the recent rioting erupted up and down the UK, it was of course really shocking and frightening but as I watched the news each day and read about what was going on, I saw how this outbreak of toxic nationalism was competing for airspace with another form of nationalism, the benign kind, the nationalism of the Olympic Games. So you had the bizarre phenomenon of two opposite expressions of nationalism going head to head: the racist aggression of white Englishness attacking black, brown and Muslim ‘foreigners’ – and on the other hand the countrywide support for Team GB, a team filled with representatives of all those apparently unwelcome ‘others’. And the irony, if that’s what one wants to call it, was of Team GB  being cheered on by many of those same people who were firebombing immigrant hostels and homes and mosques.

Yes, people are strange. They don’t add up. But then maybe none of us do. Maybe we all have our inner contradictions: it’s just easier to see the contradictions in others. And condemn hypocrisy in others, while turning a blind eye to our own.

So – I am coming to Fiddler on the Roof – I was watching how the UK government got to grips with the situation with a sense of real urgency, this was grown-up political leadership, using  the police and the courts and the apparatus of law, and I felt very thankful for living in a country that was able to offer such robust protection to those being victimised, and with a government intent on safeguarding our collective well-being  from thuggery and racism.

It brought to mind the wisdom of Rabbi Hanina’s statement in the Mishnah two thousand years ago:  “Pray for the welfare of the government; for without the fear and awe it inspires, people would swallow each other alive” (Pirke Avot 3:2). But that down-to-earth pragmatism also brought to mind Fiddler on the Roof’s commentary, as it were, on the Mishnah: Tevye’s refrain – you may remember it -  “May God bless and keep the Czar – far away from us!”

Dark humour has always been a Jewish defence against pain, and fear, but there’s also an emotional depth to that line as well: you hear in it, I think, the authentic Diaspora voice of ancestral Jewish ambivalence. On the one hand, Jews have felt gratitude to the secular powers-that-be of the lands in which they lived, an attitude traceable back to the prophet Jeremiah who wrote to the Jews exiled in Babylon: “Seek the welfare of the city to which you have been delivered, and pray to God on its behalf, for in its prosperity, you shall prosper” (29:7). And on the other hand, Tevye is voicing an awareness - “May God bless and keep the Czar – far away from us!” – that not all governments are going to be kindly disposed to the minorities in their midst. Protectors can become persecutors in the twinkling of an eye. Or from one generation to the next.

In the UK, of course, prayers for the government still figure in our Jewish liturgy, during the Torah service, along with prayers for the Royal family: it’s a tradition – “Tradition!” – that goes back to Cromwell’s re-admission of the Jews into England in 1656. Samuel Pepys records in his diary hearing a prayer for the King when he visited a synagogue in 1663.  British Jews wanted to demonstrate their loyalty then to the wider society in which they lived – and they still do. And I suppose we still retain this prayer not to impress any visiting non-Jew, but to remind ourselves we are part of a larger society that we remain committed to. And maybe subliminally the prayer acts as a reminder that our well-being as a community ultimately depends on the laws of the land and their benign application by the government of the day.

So, some final thoughts on Anatevka, and ‘shtetl kitsch’. I think what Roth was offering was a critique of how the show’s dramatists created an upbeat version of the original’s more historically-accurate darkness: Sholem Aleichem’s fictional Anatevka was lorded over by a brutal, cruel, antisemitic Russian official, but on stage he’s turned into a sympathetic friend of the Jews; and in the original source material, Tevye  is left alone at the end, his wife is dead, his daughters scattered. Whereas in the show they are still together - and off to America for a new start. In that sense the show was a betrayal of the fictional reality; and of the historical reality of Czarist Russian antisemitism.

But my additional thought – this is not Roth, I am building on Roth – is that this kitsch betrayal was, remember, perpetrated in 1964, when the awareness of the Holocaust was just entering fully into American consciousness (the word ‘Holocaust’ to describe what had happened only entered into public awareness in the early 60s) and it may be that this Broadway version went some way to unconsciously soothing the trauma of Jews and the guilt of non-Jews, enacting, as it did, a counterfactual narrative of persecution with a happy ending.

Because of course it was all the real Anatevkas that were wiped out a mere generation after Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish stories. Maybe part of Fiddler on the Roof’s popularity is the way it acts as a psychic defence against the traumas of genocide. Then - and now. Amazing to make a record-breaking show out of that.

And if you want a final twist in the tail/tale of this show, you might be interested that  – and here’s life imitating art – there is now a real village, community, called Anatevka.  It’s on the outskirts of Kyiv, and it was established in 2015 on a plot of empty land after the first Russian invasion of Ukraine, Crimea, led to tens of thousands of people being displaced, including thousands of Jews. It was set up to supply food, medicine, housing and education for the refugees. And who set it up? HaRav Moshe Reuven Azman, the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine; he deliberately named the community after the fictional shtetl, and it has, since 2022 , become a leading operational centre for humanitarian efforts in the current war.

So Anatevka lives – not just in the pages of Yiddish fiction, and not just on the stage, but as a living example of tikkun olam, Jewish ethics in action. As so often, history is even stranger than fiction.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, August 24th, 2024]

 

 

Reflections on Peace In a Time of War

How does one speak about peace in a time of war?

The question is prompted by the appearance within the weekly cycle of readings from the Torah of the familiar three-part blessing:

“May the Eternal bless you and keep you; may the presence of the Eternal be with you and be gracious to you; may the Eternal bestow favour upon you and give you peace” (Numbers 6: 24-26).

In its context this is a blessing originally bestowed by the Israelite priests on the people, and it has entered Jewish liturgical contexts in a variety of ways. And it is also present in Christian worship. So this wish for ‘peace’ – shalom in the Hebrew – has been repeated, uninterruptedly, in one context or another, for more than two and half millennia.

Clearly, it’s a longstanding wish, this hope for shalom, peace. And Jews wish for it so fervently, pray for it so insistently, repeat it so frequently – it comes a dozen or so times in every service – we bring it into our consciousness so often (more than any other wish or hope we give voice to), we keep on coming back to it over and over again – but why?

Why this emphasis, this hypnotic vehemence? Could our preoccupation with it perhaps be connected with its absence? As if because we are missing out on it, we have the fantasy that by repeating it enough times we can make it happen? As If speech can conjure up what remains stubbornly, forlornly, elusive?

Shalom, peace. And this is not just peace as an absence of war. The Hebrew word contains much more than that. Something more personal.  When one says the traditional Sabbath greeting Shabbat shalom, for example, one is saying more than ‘let today be a day without war, without violence’. We are using shalom in its deeper Hebraic sense of harmony, integration, the healing of feelings of fragmentation and dividedness. We sense that we may be divided from others, as well as suffering from an inner dividedness, estranged from our deeper, truer selves. So this is shalom as – to use our current jargon – wholeness, wellbeing; shalom as  connectedness with our selves, our souls. It is about an inner state of being  at one with ourselves – which is so easy to say, so difficult to feel, or achieve, except perhaps in moments.

Maybe shalom is more a destination than an achieved state; more a signpost on the journey towards a deeper intimacy with ourselves and others - if only for a moment. As if shalom  contains a profound wish to be in tune with who we really are, and in tune with others in all their profuse and wondrous individuality. For we know hard it can feel to be at peace with ourselves, let alone with others. (Although we also intuit that the latter might depend upon the former).

But to speak in this way about shalom and what it might mean for us – to speak about it as a subjective experience we might desire, wish for, hope for, pray for – shalom as an end to feeling in conflict with ourselves, with others, shalom as pointing to feelings of wholeness, harmony, shalom as a spiritual or psychological state – yes, shalom is all that, of course it is. But to speak of it as only that, to focus only on that, is (I think) a kind of avoidance, however much we might want to focus on its inner meaning.

Because what it avoids – and this is what makes it an unavoidable topic at the moment  – is that shalom also does mean literal peace. Not just inner peace but outer peace as well. And can we really experience deep inner peace when there is such an absence of shalom in the world? Maybe we can - we are narcissistic enough. We are self-preoccupied enough. Our horizons might be narrow enough.

This is ‘Zone of Interest’ territory: as Jonathan Glazer’s profound mediation on denialism suggests, we can seal ourselves off from what is happening beyond the wall, over the seas, in other places and lands, or just along the road from where we live; we can focus on our own personal shalom, and maybe there are times when we need to do that. Maybe for Jewish communities, Shabbat morning is one of those times. When we can allow cognitive dissonance to do its work, and just focus on the world which is ourselves.

But all the time we know – a part of us knows, and this can disturb our sense of our own shalom - all the time we know we are living in a world that is so lacking in shalom, so far from being healed, whole. All the time we can hear a voice, insistent, unrelenting: ‘How can one speak about shalom, peace, in a time of war?’ Isn’t it a sort of obscenity? At the very least, isn’t it a huge failure of imagination? A kind of fundamental dishonesty?

Maybe there is so much insistence on shalom in Jewish liturgy because we want to drown out the cries of war, the pain, the deaths, the suffering, the losses, the grief, the horrors, the senselessness of it all. Maybe shalom becomes the mantra we repeat to try to blot out the images, and the knowledge, of human aggression and human hatred and human savagery. These have always been part of the human condition but I sense a new urgency in some parts of the Jewish community to find an emotion distance  from all the war crimes and ‘collateral damage’ and self-justifying belligerence, all the agony of conflict.  This pain can be too much to bear.

This is not just about Israel and Hamas. Do you know how many wars and situations of armed violence are taking place right now? I’m talking about situations of armed violence that meet the definition of armed conflict under international humanitarian law. The Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law is currently monitoring and recording casualties in more than 110 conflicts around the world. Can you imagine doing that for a living – monitoring human aggression from continent to continent, keeping a tally of the dead and the injured, mapping out the malign patterns of human destructiveness? I take off my hat to them and wonder how they sleep at night, where they get their shalom within the demonic inferno. It’s endless – as it always has been.

But to return to Jewish prayers at this time, Jewish hopes, all the self-soothing involved in Jewish liturgy’s bright-eyed wishfulness: at its best I suppose the repetition of shalom is a reminder that something else is possible, even if it is so hard to achieve. It does keep hope alive, which – if it works - is no small achievement. Because the sparks of hope can get extinguished – for any of us – faced with the maelstroms of daily life. Hope does get snuffed out – sometimes for moments, sometimes for long hours or even days – hope is a very fragile inner experience. Almost like a gift. Almost like it comes to us, rather than we find it by grasping after it. As if it arrives, sometimes unexpectedly, from elsewhere.  

Although Jewish liturgy occasionally gestures towards an awareness that peace is something that is in our own hands to make, to fashion, to allow to come into being – in other words that we have the responsibility to bring it into being – most of Jewish liturgy, along with the texts of Torah, is quietly insistent that if peace comes, if it does arrive, it’s as if it comes from the outside.

We recall the verse we started with: ‘Yisa Adonai panav el’echa ve’ asem l’cha shalom’ – literally “May the Eternal turn to you/face you, and give you peace/set up peace for you/cause you to have the experience of peace”. In the Talmud, Shalom is one of God’s names - as if the rabbis intuited that our experience of peace is like glimpsing something divine and beyond our power to control.  As if it’s there all the time but we have to wait for it to arrive, we wait for it to be granted, as if it is indeed a gift. A gift we receive – and which we can then bestow.

Unsettlingly, this is a picture of dependence. We can be open to receive shalom but we can’t control it. Like babies waiting to be picked up and soothed, like children waiting to be comforted, like adults waiting to be embraced. We are dependent. ‘May God’s face be turned to you’, ‘May the One who is Peace let this peace settle on you, settle into you’ - the Torah pictures moments when we are the recipients of a kind of grace.

We have all experienced moments of reverie,  moments when the world around us holds us, nourishes us, comforts us. Gives us ‘peace’. No wonder we repeat it so often: the longing for the creation of these moments, the re-creation of these moments, is deep within us. Balm for the soul. 

So if we are foolhardy enough to speak of peace in a time of war, maybe the humbling recognition of how limited are our capacities to enact this desired way of being is one place to start. We need so much help. And yet we are stranded - in a world where the traditional religious picture of a ‘bestower of peace’ may no longer speak to us, where do we turn?

Maybe we return to the familiar, words worn smooth as pebbles over the centuries, words which may help, sometimes, to keep our fragile hopes alive: “May the Source of peace in the highest bring this peace to us, to all Israel, and to all the world.”

[loosely based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, 15^th June, 2024]

Franz Kafka: In Memoriam

“What do I have in common with Jews?  I have hardly anything in common with myself, and really ought to go stand myself perfectly still in a corner, grateful to be able to breathe.” (Diary, January 8^th, 1914)

One hundred years ago this week, Franz Kafka, just shy of his 41^st birthday, lay dying in a “small, friendly sanitorium” (his words) near Vienna. I say ‘his words’, but he could hardly speak – he wrote about the sanatorium in a letter to his parents in Prague. He was suffering from tuberculosis of the larynx, was finding it to difficult to eat, to drink, to swallow, to breathe. “Grateful to be able to breathe” was not, it turned out, just a turn of phrase.

Perhaps he already knew in 1914, proleptically, something in him already saw the future – about this, as about so much else. Kafka teaches us, amongst many other things, to pay close attention to our intuitions.  They contain a special kind of knowledge about ourselves - which is to say they can contain a special kind of knowledge about the human condition.

“Grateful to be able to breathe “ – not only an intuition about his future, maybe our common future, but teaching us not to take the everyday for granted. For that is where the miraculous lies. The everyday miracles in a world where the old pieties of religion no longer hold sway. “The ordinary is itself a miracle”, he once said, in conversation, “All I do is record it. Possibly I also illuminate matters a little, like the lighting of a half dark stage. And yet that is not true! In fact the stage is not dark at all. It is filled with daylight. Therefore people close their eyes and see so little” (CWK 44/5)

As we listen in to Kafka’s words we hear a mind at work, a consciousness shifting moment by moment as new thoughts arise. The quotation offers a luminous insight into Kafka’s thinking as it unfolds. First the spark of an idea, simple but profound, maybe even verging on a cliche: “The ordinary is itself a miracle”. And then his relationship to it, slightly self-deprecating:  “All I do is record it”. As if that were completely straightforward - as if writing, finding the right words, is as natural as - well, as breathing.

And then an elaboration of the thought, hedged with characteristic caution, hesitancy, maybe self-deprecation again: “Possibly I also illuminate matters a little”. Followed by a simile that brings alive the idea in our mind’s eye: “like the lighting of a half dark stage”. 

That would have been sufficient – the point is made, illustrated, we feel we can grasp the simple grandeur of Kafka’s thought:  “The ordinary is itself a miracle. All I do is record it. Possibly I also illuminate matters a little, like the lighting of a half dark stage”. Many writers, thinkers, would have been happy to leave it at that.

But then - and this illustrates Kafka’s fidelity both to emotional truth-telling, and to the complex zigzagging of his mind at work moment by moment, revising, editing, amplifying – he then doubles back on himself as a new, contradictory thought arises:  “And yet that is not true! In fact the stage is not dark at all. It is filled with daylight”. What he thought was the case – that his writing was recording the ‘ordinary miracle’ of living, to which he added some extra illumination, while leaving some things in the shadows as if on a half-lit stage – that thought is itself only one provisional version of what he does, just a momentary grasping after what feels like a truth. But there is another completely opposite truth, he now realises: that the stage is filled with light but people just don’t see what’s there in front of their eyes – i.e. he doesn’t see what’s there – indeed the problem is there’s just too much to see:   “Therefore people close their eyes and see so little”.

Such a familiar move, this, in so much of Kafka’s work, in his parables and longer fiction: the working through of an idea, and images that comes to mind about it – and then the ending on a down-beat note. (One exception is his magisterial parable ‘My Destination’ which ends with the hope-filled paradox that that in spite of their being no provisions available for the journey ‘Away From Here’, “…it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey”). But here it’s the resigned realisation that although there is so much to be seen, we nevertheless end up seeing so little - as if we are dazzled by the superfluity of what the world reveals to us, as if we can’t quite bear to see and know the full glory (but sometimes horror) of what is present at every moment.

Implicit in what I am doing here, spending this time unpacking a few words of his, is sharing with you, illustrating for you, why for me Kafka remains an indispensable companion.  He both illuminates the human condition and makes it strange -  or, rather, he reveals to us the strangeness hidden in plain sight.  He shows how the familiar, the everyday, is often more quirky, idiosyncratic, than we at first realise, or more packed with potential meaning, or more puzzling, or more disturbing.  

And, as we know, (and don’t want to know), the everyday can be very disturbing. The benign nestles so uncomfortably close to the sinister.  A sense of estrangement is always lurking, just around the corner:

“Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”  

The opening of Kafka’s ‘The Trial’, written in 1914, pre-empts our daily news. It not only points towards Nazi and Stalinist times, but speaks to own benighted land where  asylum seekers are scooped up from their lodgings, just as it describes a reality for Covid scientists in China, for poets and journalists in Russia, for Palestinian shopkeepers and academics in the West Bank. Arbitrary unwarranted arrests on fine mornings. Impossible for Kafka to see into the future - and yet the words came, the stories emerged, a literature of scrupulous sensitivity, sometimes humorous, sometimes tortured, but always pregnant with meaning.  

So ‘The Trial’ is also a narrative of a psychological state, that strange condition in our inner world where we can be captured by feelings of being in the wrong, or feelings of being misunderstood, or feelings of guilt - even if we aren’t sure what we have done wrong, or even whether we have done anything wrong at all.  

The critical and persecutory forces within the human psyche are real – even if we have very little insight into them. It’s as if our psyches were a dimly lit stage (which they are): shadowy forces can emerge, can  haunt us, can arrest us ‘one fine morning’. Arrest us, derail us, lay siege to us. Kafka knew this only too well in his own life; and yet managed to transform, to give literary shape, to what he experienced in ways that compel our attention.  For example, he knew that sometimes these inner forces can distort the image we have of ourselves: they can make us grander than we are, more self-important, but they can also make us seem more monstrous than we are.

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect”.   

This is no longer ‘one fine morning’ but just an ordinary morning following ‘uneasy dreams’ – already a ominous note, foreshadowing the waking realisation that all is far from well.  Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’  (written in 1912, published in 1915) is not a novella about body dysmorphia, although it might give as a particular angle of vision into that state of mind, but it does speak about how alienated someone can feel from themselves and the world around them.

Generations of readers have recognised in the story – in Gregor’s feelings about no longer belonging to the respectable everyday world he is accustomed to, and being treated by his parents and others with prejudice, dismissiveness and emotional cruelty – they have recognised themselves in this disturbing portrait of feeling like an unwanted outsider. Yet although the drama allows for multiple interpretations, no single interpretation ever fits, for as so often with Kafka’s enigmatic creativity, the text hovers in front of us, just out of our grasp. His texts, his images, don’t ‘stand for’ something else, they are not symbols of something that need to be, or can be, deciphered, decoded  – they are just what they are (like God’s enigmatic self-description – ehyeh asher ehyeh, “I am what I am, I will be what I will be”).

But for a Jewish reader it is hard to ignore the fact that Kafka – writing as he always did in German - describes Gregor in that first sentence (in spite of our translations) not as ‘an insect’ but as ‘Ungezeifer’, which means ‘vermin’ – a word that of course was to take on a darker, annihilatory dimension within a generation. That people could turn into ‘vermin’ overnight was not only a dystopian literary fantasy, or drama of personal alienation, but just another example of Kafka’s uncanny, unsettling gift for seeing further, seeing deeper, sensing the as yet unthought about emerging contours of contemporary life. He had intimations of the 'unthought known’: he saw what he saw, and recorded it, without knowing fully what he was seeing, and how it would speak into our lives.

So often I find that Kafka’s texts reverberate like a shofar blast summoning us into greater awareness of life’s double-sideness, how heaven and hell are always here and always now and always within us, and always just beyond our understanding.  “There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe…but not for us”  was one of his more memorable paradoxes.  

This was recorded by his longstanding friend (and literary executor) Max Brod, from a conversation in 1920, and captures the way Kafka’s optimism and his ability to gain pleasure from the world – he was a natty dresser, enjoyed the theatre, the cinema, European literature, swimming, vegetarianism, Yiddish theatre, Hebrew scholarship (he attended lectures at the Berlin Hochshule and corresponded for many years with Martin Buber) – all of this enjoyment of life and its opportunities was real for him; and yet in the end, we hear that familiar note of loss, of incompleteness, of the elusive nature of what is wished for. It’s not despair that has the last word, but a rueful recognition that life’s pleasures are transient, and something darker (or maybe just sadder) must inevitably be reckoned with: “There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe…but not for us”.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know Kafka, I think I started reading him in my mid-teens and he has accompanied me ever since. But you can know his work - his novels, diaries, parables, aphorisms, letters - you can know all this, feel close to his soul, his spirit, his very special consciousness – and yet one still never knows him; you can come close to the biography of the man but his texts retain an elusiveness, however often you read them. They offer themselves up, but like the canonical scriptures of old they are endlessly suggestive, tantalising, seductive, enigmatic. They ask to be interpreted, but in the end they defy interpretation. They are what they are.  

My own sense is that if one wants to live with a developed Jewish sensibility in our own times one has to live alongside Kafka, in dialogue with Kafka, in the illuminating shadows of Kafka: his texts have become – for me – part of the very fabric of my understanding of what it is to be Jewish, they are  a sort of secular Torah, a holy literature that will be read for as long as humanity survives on this planet, offering us intimations of immortality although we know immortality is only another fable, another story to live by. Kafka made storytelling a sacred act, a spiritual discipline: “Writing as a form of prayer” he once said.

In the Austrian sanatorium where he lay one hundred years ago this week, this relatively unknown and mostly unpublished Czech-speaking, German-writing, Jewish accident insurance investigator was looked after by the medical staff along with Dora Diamant, his final girlfriend/lover – Kafka had never married. She was 25 and they had known each other for a year. In that last week or so, he could talk only in whispers, so he communicated mostly in written notes. He was a writer, after all. A completely secular writer with the Jewish spiritual sensitivity of the Hebrew poets of old. “Writing as a form of prayer”.

This is prayer as devotion and – as the Hebrew for prayer,  tefillah, literally means – prayer as self-judgement, self-reflection. Kafka’s devotion to writing – and to writing as a form of devotion – have been indispensable, foundational, for my own religious/spiritual sensibility. And I don’t imagine I am alone in this. I’ll finish with one short numinous text that I return to over and over again. It returns me to myself and to an awareness of living in a world where revelation happens at each moment, if we can allow ourselves to remain open to it.

“It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.”

Franz Kafka died on June 3^rd 1924. Zichrono Livracha: may his memory continue to be a blessing.  

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, May 25th 2024] 

Reflections on Being ‘In Between’

The seder nights with which Pesach (Passover) starts commemorate an ancestral exodus from slavery: the Biblical saga tells of oppression, a hard-hearted Pharaoh and a series of plagues that strike the Egyptians but miraculously spare the Hebrew people. The end of the seven day festival focuses on the drama at the Sea of Reeds, with the hosts of Pharoah’s armies pursuing the Israelites and the people having to trust that the way to freedom lay through the waters.

Between the oppression of Egypt and thoughts of drowning in the sea, the narrative sets up a scene crafted with much literary skill. The waters open up – but only by dint of what the text describes (from the participants’ point of view) as a “strong east wind” and the omniscient narrator’s point of view as “caused by Adonai, the Eternal One” at the behest of Moses, whose role – “stretching out his hand” – is also seen to be a vital element (Exodus 14:21). The natural event is the vehicle for the miraculous. A strip of dry land appears, a very narrow ridge of dry land – but for how long would it last?  And who would venture in when all was so uncertain?

The middle days of this festival – the in-between days – set us up as inheritors of the textual drama. Those that left Egypt were ‘in-betweeners’ too. They were in between slavery and death, between slavery and the desert, between slavery and the possibility of a new kind of life. But first they had to go in between the walls of water. The story dramatizes in-between-ness.

And for Jews following the traditions of old, this in-between-ness sees us between the beginning of Pesach and its end, between that renewed experience of the taste of the matza with all its associated memories of seders of the past, and matza of the past – in between the experience of that, and the waiting for the festival to be over. I mean how much matza can you eat? Don’t you get fed up with it quite soon and long for the taste of a good bit of sourdough, or a bagel, or just a Pret a Manger sandwich (other makes of sandwiches are also available)?

Like the children of Israel we are also in between - when the appreciation of the tastes of the seder and what they represent gives way to the feeling of deprivation, when we begin to have a heightened awareness that part of the way we celebrate this journey from slavery to freedom includes relinquishing the pleasures of the foods we normally eat. It is not exactly oppression, but we are still choosing to be bound up with servitude to an idea, a tradition.

Why is this notion of being in-between resonating for me this year? Maybe because I sense that this year we are also in-between in other more intangible or hard to articulate ways.

There can’t have been many sederim this year when the historical moment we find ourselves in wasn’t present, perhaps very present. And it is a moment when I would suggest this experience of being ‘in-between’ may have been very emotionally demanding. Emotionally and spiritually challenging.

Because, most obviously, we are living In between a profound concern for the citizens of Israel, with sons and daughters at war, with hostages still unredeemed,  with the traumas of the last six months tearing at the heart - in between those feelings of identification (and even if you don’t have family there or friends, your Jewish heart might beat in time with the hearts of those going through this tragedy) – so, many have told me of feeling in between those feelings, and other feelings about what has been happening in Gaza: other sons and daughters lost, other children killed, and not just firstborns, feelings that the Jewish heart might also respond to about the victims of famine and displacement and loss of homes and fear for one’s survival every moment of the day. If Pesach teaches anything it teaches us sensitivity towards all those who experience oppression, ‘because you were subject to oppression in Egypt’.

So this is also an experience, a painful existential experience, of being in-between : of being pulled by a concern for the Jewish people who have chosen a homeland as a solution to the so-called ‘Jewish problem’  - and a concern for the cost of this for other people, citizens of Gaza, and for those terrorized, killed, displaced, in the West Bank by Jewish vigilantes. This is a concern that one might also have been sensitive to for decades, a concern about the lack of justice that has been ongoing for 75 years or so. We are pulled in between contrasting, conflicting realities. Between ethnic identification and concern and compassion - and a larger human connectedness and concern and compassion.

And here in London, we might also be in an additional and strange psychological state of in betweenness. On one level we just get on with our lives, our own important and mundane everyday living – family, community, friends, holidays, shopping, work, studying, dealing with illnesses and losses, celebrating the good stuff, having to manage the difficult stuff, all the stuff of everyday life. We live between that and something else that over this last 6 months or so has threatened to destabilise our everyday lives: an awareness of antisemitism, both real and imagined, both anecdotal and exaggerated, both experienced and feared. We have been living between getting on with our lives and an awareness that something intimidating is happening around us, and not only here in the UK, but around the world.

We might be feeling our own feet are, amazingly, on dry land, but out of the corner of our eyes we might also glimpse (or wonder if we see, maybe it is all a mirage) the walls of water that could come crashing down on us at any moment. Though miraculously they don’t.

And being in between means the Egyptian armies haven’t caught up with us, but when we turn back towards where we have come from we glimpse those who seek our harm. Or we think we do - because the antagonists we fear in the present are always overlaid in our mind’s eye by the antagonists of the past, who are always behind us, so to speak, pursuing us. Traumas of the past will always effect, distort, what we see in the present. It’s a problem. How does one learn to see clearly what is going on? Or is that a fantasy - a wished for state of clear-sightedness?

So we are always in between – between Egypt and the wilderness ahead; between the pursuers who seek our harm and the freedom to live without fear; between the giant waves that could drown us - no longer only a long-rehearsed metaphor from an ancient saga - and the powerful natural forces flowing through the world that sustain us. We are always in between.

‘Leaving Egypt’ is a powerful image, metaphor. The story of the Jewish  people, whether you read it as history, or literary saga, folk memory or myth, the story we have inherited uses Egypt as the symbol of oppression, of narrowness. I imagine you know that the root meaning of Mitzrayim in Hebrew is tzr – narrow, constrained. It is as if the Biblical writers were already inviting us to be midrashists, to relate imaginatively to their language, to hear that the question of the liberation from Egypt is not just  a national saga, but a personal one.

We know this story is not just about our forerunners, the Israelites, but a saga relevant to all oppressed people – in the 19^th century and into the 20^th it inspired generations of African-Americans (we listened to Paul Robeson’s ‘Go Down Moses’ at our seder); it fed into 1960s and 1970s Catholic liberation theology in South America, and was used in the Protestant churches leading up to 1989 and the resistance to communist oppression in Europe. Yes, it has been part of many strands of collective history, Jewish and non-Jewish. But its potency also resides in the way that it talks to each individual about personal liberation.

 ‘Egypt’ is what keeps us narrowed down in our life, it’s about old habits, destructive guilt, small-minded thinking, false certainties we use to mange our helplessness, fears from the past that constrain our choices in the present, all the ways we stop ourselves having more life-enhancing, fulfilling, generous lives, more loving lives. So ‘to come out of Egypt’ is to come out of whatever confines me, traps me, shuts me in. Pesach also speaks about a personal, existential drama, psychological, spiritual. We long to be freer, but we oppress ourselves. There’s a Pharaoh within everyone, who won’t let us go, won’t let us live a fuller life.

And it is a struggle to leave Egypt. We are always caught in between: in between a wish to escape the burden and inhibitions and haunted memories of the past - and the regressive urge in the human psyche to stay in Egypt, because it is safe and familiar, it is the womb, it is home, it is a place of psychic retreat. We want to leave Egypt – and we don’t.

The Biblical text acknowledges this when the children of Israel, even before they have reached the Reed Sea, see the pursuing Egyptians and cry out to Moses: ‘why have you done this to us? Didn’t we already tell you, leave us alone, let us serve the Egyptians, better that than to die here in the wilderness’  (Exodus 14: 11-12). There it is, incarnated within the saga, the wish to get back to something familiar, to stick with what we are used to, however much it diminishes our potential  rather than face the daunting challenges of opening ourselves towards the unknown future.

Maybe that casts light on a strange midrash I came across recently:

‘Only one out of five of the children of Israel went out from Egypt. Some say one out of fifty. And some say only one out of five hundred. Rabbi Nehorai says: Not even one out of five hundred’ (Mechilta, Massekta de Piska 12).

It is as if the rabbis of old already intuited that within their ancestral story there was a recognition of just how difficult it is to leave the familiarity of what is known, safe and secure – even when what is known safe and secure is oppressive and constricting. Maybe leaving Egypt is only for the bravehearted, or the reckless, for the visionaries or for those who have got nothing left to lose. Would we have left Egypt? Can we leave it now?

You need a special kind of energy to keep going, to break through the waters in that symbolic birth into the new, the unexplored, the uncharted daunting territory ahead.  And you need a special kind of energy to keep going in this in-between place we find ourselves in today, in all the ways I have been outlining.

Do we ever leave Egypt? Maybe not.

Even if we have left Egypt, do we have the courage, the resources, the faith, to take the first step into the sea, which has not yet opened up a way through it. Again, the rabbis intuited that being ‘in between’ is a place where we can end up stranded, frozen by fear.

They created the midrash about the children of Israel standing at the edge of the sea, each person rooted to the spot saying ‘I won’t be the first one to go into the water’ and it wasn’t until Nachshon ben Aminadav stepped in to the sea that it began to part for the people.  And actually, continues the midrash, they had to wade in up to their noses before the sea became dry land (Sotah, 37a).

That took faith, that took a capacity for risk taking, that took bravery, which often looks like foolhardiness.

I sometimes think the Jewish people now have lost that faith, and particularly they have lost leaders with the courage to make that move – too much oppression, too much trauma in the soul, too much frozen fear, too much looking backwards.

The State of Israel needs new leadership, self-evidently – preferably with some form of Jewish moral compass; and the Jewish people need leaders with the courage to be guided by the ancestral vision that the community of Israel has a destiny (as Isaiah puts it in a passage we read on Pesach) of living where “Nothing evil or vile will be done/ for the land shall be filled with devotion to Adonai, the Eternal One of Justice, as waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11:9)

In these in between days – when we are far from the enactment of that vision – we still have to keep it in mind. That’s the goal, that’s the aim, beyond Egypt, beyond the wilderness, the creation of a space where the values of justice and compassion flood the land. Unless we keep this vision alive, unless we keep telling our story this way, unless we keep faith with the humanistic and universal wisdom of our tradition, we will remain in Egypt, suffering from what the text describes the children of Israel suffering:  ‘kotzer ruach’ (Exodus 6:9) – “anguish of spirit”.

Leaving Egypt means following the vision, leaving behind that ‘kotzer ruach’ - ‘shortness of breath’ and ‘narrowness of spirit’ - that we have been living with all these months. Only that vision will redeem us, only that vision will take us out of our narrowness, through our Sea of Reeds, through our fears and doubts and stiff-neckedness, through the wilderness. The destination is not in our hands – but, meanwhile, we can make this journey together, supporting ourselves, in the knowledge (as Rebbe Franz of Prague once said) “that it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.’

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, April 27^th, 2024]

 

Purim and The Zone Of Interest

 The festival of Purim is the Jewish Mardi gras. A time for carnival, fancy dress, masks, revelry. This is a strange, paradoxical turn of events: Jews recall an ancient story of survival in the face of persecution – the story is told in the Biblical Book of Esther, where Jews in Persia fall victim to the annihilatory antisemitic rage of the king’s minister, Haman – and retell the story each year by turning darkness into light-heartedness, and fear into frivolity. The celebration of Purim is an opportunity for fun, for the mocking of sacred cows, for the subversion of the pieties of Jewish life.

One could say this is about using humour as a psychological defence against pain – Jews do a lot of that – but I suspect that the way Purim is celebrated has a deeper purpose at its heart. Take the role of alcohol in promoting the mood of levity, of ‘taking the piss’, that accompanies the celebrations. As early as the 4^th century, rabbi Rava decreed that the mitzvah, the religious obligation, is to drink until you cannot distinguish between the phrases ‘Blessed is Mordechai’  [the hero] and ‘Cursed is Haman’ [the villain].  

Later rabbis weren’t happy with this invitation to drunkenness. They interpreted Rava’s injunction to mean: well, you should drink more than usual so that you fall asleep – because then you won’t/can’t know the difference between these opposite sentiments.  

But I wonder if there is some deeper rabbinic intuition in play in Rava’s thinking. Is not this blurring of the distinction between saviour/hero and destroyer/aggressor asking us to question the nature of good and evil?  On every other day of the year the rabbis were keen to keep these impulses very separate: the whole of Jewish ethical life depended on keeping them apart. We were to engage in acts of goodness - and keep far from evil and evil-doers, as the liturgy tells us. That’s the Jewish project every day of the year: finding ways for human goodness, our goodness, to outweigh the forces of destructiveness that lurk in the human heart.

Both the rabbis of old and the psychologists of today acknowledge that this is an ongoing human struggle – this work (inner and outer) of ensuring ‘good’ triumphs over ‘evil’. And it is a struggle because the lived boundaries between the two are not as obvious as we might wish them to be. Once a year, on Purim, the simple splitting of life into absolute realms of good and evil seems to be called into question. On Purim you are encouraged to engage in an experiment – it is elevated to the realm of a mitzvah – the task is to find a way of blurring, slurring, subverting, the boundaries. And you find out how easy it is: a couple of drinks and good and bad are not so clear cut, nor so far apart.

We might wish this were the case but in the so-called real world – not in some religious fantasy picture of the real world – the dynamics around good and evil can be very disturbing. Evil can arise out of good intentions, as Einstein and Oppenheimer and others realised about splitting the atom. And sometimes good can arise from, or emerge from, evil: from the ashes of the Holocaust, the State of Israel was born - from the utter tragedy of victimhood to the miracle of continuity and self-determination. But, on the other side of the coin, because complexity is more true to life than the narratives we like to tell, when the Jewish state came into being, the Palestinian Nakba also came to pass. Life is much more complex, the boundaries between good and evil can often be more complex, than is comfortable.

We know it is always much more psychologically comforting for us to split the world into simple opposites – heaven and hell, right and wrong, goodies and baddies, the civilised (us) and the barbarians (them), heroes and villains, Mordecai and Haman. We feel we know where we are, how to orientate ourselves emotionally, if we can rely on these simple  dichotomies. And we do this both consciously and unconsciously.  But I think Purim – beneath the froth and the frivolity - opens us up to something quite disquieting.

Not only is it a story in which, notoriously, God does not appear (the only Biblical book in which this is so) but survival depends only on trickery and deceit. In the fable, Mordecai uses his niece’s sexuality (he weaponizes it, as the saying goes now) to manipulate the king; and Esther’ capacity to deceive – she hides her identity until the right moment – is seen as worthy of praise. The people are saved because of this subverting of simple boundaries between good and bad behaviour. Seduction and subterfuge not only make the story tick along quite nicely – they underpin the moral ambiguities of the tale.

And the moral ambiguities in the story are compounded by the way in which Jewish survival is accompanied by the death of those who wish to destroy them. The story tells it as an act of self-defence – 500 antagonists are killed in Shushan on the 13^th and 14^th of Adar, and another 75,000 in the rest of the Persian empire. You may hear uncomfortable echoes here in current events, which I won’t go into.

Does this dark side of the Biblical tale – which we narrate in the midst of the accompanying jollity - give us pause?  How many deaths are acceptable? How many deaths are inevitable? How many are rationalised as - in that ugly phrase - ‘collateral damage’? How many deaths are necessary that we survive and those who abhor us don’t? Maybe God was wise to steer well clear of this story. He gets compromised enough by those on all sides who call on him to this day to vindicate their murderousness. Or use him to justify it.

Liberal Judaism 50 years ago also steered well clear of this part of the story – they cut the reading of the megillah [the Biblical story of Esther] so that congregants didn’t have to hear about all this blood shed by Jews. They have stopped this censorship in more recent years – maybe because it doesn’t really do anyone any favours, to collude with our wish to avoid the darkness in the human heart, to avoid attending to the moral complexities that attend our humanity.

Although many people want their religion to help them feel more comfortable in life, honest religion can – hopefully - also provoke us into feeling less comfortable in ourselves.

But I can understand why those who edited the Biblical text did it. Because who really wants to think about all this? Maybe drunkenness has its value, lest we feel the full horror, the shock, the confusion, the disgust, the triumphalism, that such battles for group survival seem to produce; blurring with drink the distinction between blessing our heroes and cursing our enemies means we don’t have to think for too long  about what people are capable of doing to each other. It means we don’t have to reflect too much on the truth of the poet W.H.Auden’s words that “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return”.  

Drunkenness is one of the ways humanity has found whereby we don’t have to know what is really going on. (In the Bible it goes back to Noah, that survivor of the destructiveness and trauma of the Flood). But there are other ways too, not just alcohol, ways to ensure we don’t know – don’t have to feel, or think about – some of the horrors that go on around us.

Which takes me to The Zone Of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s extraordinary double Oscar-winning film.

I hope to return to this film at a later date. This is just to commend it to you if you haven’t yet seen it. It is not untrue to describe it as a ‘Holocaust film’  - as you may know, it is set in the family home and garden of Rudolph Höss and his wife Hedwig who lived literally next door to Auschwitz. Höss was the commandant of the camp - and the wall of their back garden was the wall of the death camp. 

So this is a film about the Holocaust, about evil. You never see into the camp, you only hear it – the soundtrack is remarkable, uncanny, unheimlich: the ominous dull grinding as of a huge industrial machine (which it was), that you hear throughout the film, off stage as it were - it is literally obscene, from the Greek, ob-skeen (‘offstage/out of sight’); you hear shots ringing out and shouts and human cries, and on the horizon you see smoke arising from tall thin chimneys, but this is all behind the wall, ob-skeen. So this is of course a Holocaust film – about how ordinary people, who come home to read their children a bedtime story, who tend their gardens lovingly and teach their children the names of the flowers and plants, ordinary people like you and me, who have goodness grafted to their hearts can also have evil grafted to their souls.

But it is, as the director has asserted, not only a Holocaust film, a film about the past, but a film about the present, about now. And that now can be any ‘now’,  not only a now that contains the knowing and not wanting to know around the ongoing traumas of both Israelis and the people of Gaza. The film was conceived and made, long before October 7^th. In every age it would be a film that challenges one’s complacency, the ways in which we all live walled off from terrible things that we hear about and sometimes see, things we know about and don’t want to know about. Because if we did face them it would be too unbearable.

“Too long a sacrifice/ can make a stone of the heart/ Oh when may it suffice?” – W.B.Yeats (Easter, 1916). 

I hope to return at some stage to The Zone of Interest. Because it is a piece of art, like  the Biblical stories of old, that is timeless, that raises profound moral questions, that provokes us into reflections about our lives, our compromises, our shadiness, our capacity for goodness and our capacity for evil. Each scene is worthy of attention – each scene asks questions, each scene demands a commentary: such a Jewish film!

Meanwhile Purim allows us to appreciate that gift for the paradoxical that Judaism relishes - in this case getting us to reflect on questions of survival in a world where God might seem out of the picture and we are left to our own all-too-human resources, where the Mordecai and the Haman within us battle it out for the upper hand. Who will bow down to whom? Will evil bow to good? Or good to evil?

Is life all in the end ‘Purim’ – a lottery? When Haman casts lots – purim in Hebrew - to find the date to kill the Jews, the story gestures to the elements of chance, randomness, the vagaries of fate. It is as if Haman is disavowing his own evil by pretending that what is to happen is guided by chance - that he is ‘just following orders’, as it were, just following how the lots fall. But we know that this isn’t the whole picture – that he is the active perpetrator undermined in the end by his own vanity as much as by Mordecai’s wiliness.

On this occasion, in the Purim story, Jewish saichel defeated goyische arrogance – and maybe that’s why the story made it into the sacred canon. And we can drink to that while knowing, as The Zone of Interest testifies, that life for Jews does not always turn out like that.  Saichel can only take you so far – but perhaps goodness can take you further. Let’s hope so.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, March 23^rd 2024]

Two Kinds of Jew - A Sketch on Jewish Identity

 Let me sketch out a cartoon-like version of two kinds of Jews – or rather two forms of feeling life within contemporary Diaspora Jews, two stances towards Jewishness that animates or motivates (consciously or unconsciously) our everyday lives as Jews.

There is the ‘Pesach Jew’ and the ‘Purim Jew’.

If you are a ‘Pesach Jew’ you will be stirred by the central themes of the story of liberation as described in the book of Exodus: that an oppressed people were freed from slavery and then went on to receive a moral vision about how to live in the world.

The ‘Pesach Jew’ will have imbibed the idea that the revelation at Sinai taught a traumatised people that justice, compassion and lovingkindness were qualities that resided in the human heart; and that the Jewish role in the world was to enact these attributes and qualities both within their own community and in relation to those who lived beyond their own tribe or nation.

In other words, the ’Pesach Jew’ has internalised the symbolism of the Torah story, a story that highlights and values freedom from oppression, and links it directly to an ethical vision: that the Jewish people are to be a “light to the nations”. The ‘Pesach Jew’ recognises that the oft-repeated Biblical idea  that ‘you shall love the stranger and the outsider because you were strangers in the land of Egypt’ is at the moral core of what it means to be Jewish. The Jewish soul is one that is sensitive to the sufferings of others and is determined that a central part of being Jewish involves reaching out to express care for Jews and non-Jews alike.

For the ‘Pesach Jew’ this stance depends on memory - sometimes unconsciously inherited memory -  the long arc of Jewish memory that links the mythic past of the people  with their continued existence now. We tell the story over and over to keep alive the memory of where we came from; and to keep alive the ethical commitment stemming from that memory. Inherited memory becomes a motivator for ethical and social action.

And the ‘Purim Jew’? What moves the heart of the ‘Purim Jew’? The Purim story – based on the Biblical Book of Esther - contains one aspect of the Jewish story that has never left us: that there exist in the world people who dislike us, hate us, want to persecute us. In the story, the anti-hero Haman foments a plan, backed by royal decree, to rid the Persian kingdom of its Jews. Over the generations, Haman’s animus against the Jews, as outsiders in Persia, has been enacted time and again. Although the narrative is historically unreliable, the anti-Jewish legislation that it describes has a powerful historical resonance. The story is an archetype of antisemitic hatred. It is a strand of Biblical literature that still reverberates in the heart of our Jewish community. For the ‘Purim Jew’, the experience of anti-Jewish antipathy – or the fear of it - is at the heart of one’s Jewish identity. 

Remaining Jewish becomes an act of defiance towards the antisemite. What the ‘Purim Jew’ learns from Jewish history is a stubborn refusal to leave the world stage. For the ‘Purim Jew’ the Jewish soul is marinated in feelings of victimhood and in the bloody-minded determination not to let Jewry’s enemies have the last word. Survival is all.

Of course the ‘Purim Jew’ is also keeping alive memory – memory of historical antipathy to Jews, aggression towards Jews, persecution of Jews – but this is selective memory. This is memory only able to - or only wanting to - hear this motif, this melody, within the symphony played out over centuries of interactions between Jews and non-Jews. For the ‘Purim Jew’ there is no creative or mutually beneficial social and cultural intercourse between Jews and the inhabitants of the lands in which they have resided – there is merely suspicion and worse.  

This is the kind of memory which is operating when Jews say they feel ‘existentially threatened’ by the current upsurge in reported antisemitism in the UK and abroad. That upsurge is shocking and disturbing and needs to be monitored and prosecuted - and vigilance is absolutely necessary for us Diaspora Jews. One can feel saddened by this, or angry – or both – but it may be useful to try to keep a sense of proportion about it. We aren’t in the 1930s Germany of antisemitic state legislation and institutional persecution – we are dealing with small groups, and lone individuals, emboldened to enact their prejudices online, sometimes in person, and as horrible and frightening as this can be, in the UK we have the backing of a legal system and police to help us contain this unpleasantness and these threats when they come.

It can be difficult to keep a sense of perspective about this here in London because the kind of memory that gets triggered in us is the memory at the heart of the ‘Purim Jew’: the selective memory of Jews as the ones who are eternally hated and persecuted. And of course it is this kind of memory that is particularly operative in Israel when people are saying they feel ‘existentially threatened’.

The October 7^th barbarism has powerfully triggered this deeply-lodged strand of feeling in the Jewish-Israeli psyche and one can see how traumatic the events of that day have been, how they are resonating still in the psyches of the people, and indeed how the excruciating pain connected with the hostage situation is truly dementing. Our hearts do go out to those who are going through this: there is no family in Israel unaffected by either the immediate connection with hostages and their families, or those who lost loved ones on October 7^th, or those who have lost loved ones in the fighting that has ensued, or those still displaced from their homes. All of these need support and solidarity in whatever way it can be shown.   

Even if I have over these months offered a critique of certain aspects of Israel’s Zionist  story or its current political responses, I have tried never to lose sight of the human drama that is ongoing for the people going through this. It has sometimes been difficult to balance my empathy for those who are going through this embattled saga, with my other concerns about the meaning of these events within the longer arc of Jewish history and its meaning for us Jews who sit here in the Diaspora, who are realising that what happens over there is having a direct impact on us over here. This ongoing drama can also feel dementing in the suburbs of London – not least in the attempt to hold in mind and take to heart the anguish of Palestinian suffering alongside that of Jewish suffering.

The categories of ‘Purim Jew’ and ‘Pesach Jew’ are inevitably a bit simplistic – I said they were cartoon-like, they are a kind of shorthand – because we can recognise that the ‘Pesach Jew’ might value the themes of liberation and a commitment to justice and equality and compassion, but the story – like the Purim story - is also rooted in victimisation, that ancient antipathy towards us. It wasn’t called antisemitism then, in Egypt, but the Biblical saga is about the oppression of an alien people living in the midst of a majority culture. That’s the strand of ‘Purim’ in the Pesach story, and it lives inside even the most secular or humanitarian-minded ‘Pesach Jew’: the archaic memory, intergenerational memory, of being strangers in strange lands, is still alive however securely integrated one now feels, however culturally assimilated one is.

I have no doubt we will get through this period of doubt, darkness, inner dividedness - it’s going to take time for the external situation to be resolved, and of course there are different pictures of what ‘resolved’ might look like. So we here in the UK are going to have to live with heightened feelings of insecurity for a while longer – this, one intuits, is going to be a long journey.

[partially based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, February 17^th, 2024]

'Everything Is Connected to Everything' - on Butterflies, Stalin and Visions that Fade

 The Jewish mystics of old believed that everything in the world was connected to everything else, that we are all caught up in an immense web of being, with the energy of the universe flowing uninterruptedly through everything that lives. The breath of all life animating us, moment by moment, is part of the divine flow of energy animating existence. Everything is connected, in a constantly unfolding chain of being, with everything else.

Four hundred years or so after Rabbi Isaac Luria developed these mythopoeic ideas about the nature of reality (as he saw it), Professor Edward Lorenz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a paper entitled Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas? and thus, in 1972, so-called Chaos Theory was born. This was a paradigm leap in scientific understanding about how the universe works, how everything is indeed connected to everything else  in a vast web of being - and a small action here (the so-called ‘butterfly effect’) ripples out in a way that is ungraspable but real, and effects something else on the other side of the planet. 

And so the mystic’s understanding is mirrored in the advanced mathematical models of the scientist’s understanding. For us ordinary mortals – well, for me, anyway – there is almost no way to make sense of this ‘butterfly effect’. It is so outrageously beyond rational understanding. Because it’s not just about butterflies of course. To feel that every word you utter, every action you make, reverberates  out into the ether, has consequences beyond our reach, beyond our understanding, beyond our control. Surely it would be paralysing to think like that? Nobody could live like that, with that degree of awareness. We would go mad.

And yet there’s something about that notion that things are connected to each other in ways that we can never know, never understand, never track, never discover, there’s something about that sense of being held within this great mystery of a web of interconnected energy, there’s something about that, about the poetry of it, that is beautiful and inspiring and humbling, at least for me.

One thing that this sense of interconnectedness allows me to do, encourages me to do, gives me permission to do, is play with ideas, play with connections, trace connections, follow lines of inquiry, of imagination, of intuition, to see how things could be connected. For example this week I have been playing with three themes – themes which at first glance might not seem particularly connected but that I feel can be productively connected.

Idea one: I have been thinking a lot recently about Stalinism. I ‘ve just finally finished the Soviet-Jewish writer Vassily Grossman’s monumental novel ‘Life and Fate’: it was banned in his homeland, but it’s one of the most significant novels of the 20^th century. It is our era’s equivalent of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’, offering a vast panorama of life in central Europe, Russia and Germany, in the 1930s and 1940s. Set during the Nazi siege of Stalingrad during World War 2, Grossman compares the different kinds of horrors of two totalitarian states. He takes us into the concentration camps and the gulags and is unsparing in his portrait of the paranoia and cruelty of the Soviet system under Stalin, how it infiltrated family life and everyone’s mental life, how one word out of place, reported by a colleague, or neighbour, or family member could lead to persecution, torture, exile.

And reading this extraordinary book – about life and death and the randomness of history -  led me reflect on how Soviet communism, and the ideology of socialism the Soviet Union said it was enacting, captured the imagination of two, three, generations, world wide in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s and beyond. I have been to a fair number of funerals for an older generation (often parents of friends) who were members of the Communist party in the old East End of London. They were just part of a whole cohort of folk  who became enamoured of the experiment that was taking place in the Soviet Union to create a new kind of society that was to enact in a secular form the messianic dream of the ages, a society of equality and justice.

It was a noble, aspirational vision but it was a vision corrupted by Stalin and his henchmen and notions of ideological purity, and a gap opened up between the reality on the ground and the rhetoric of the state - and that gap was filled from the 1930s until Stalin’s death in 1953 with the execution of a million Soviet citizens, deliberate mass starvation in Ukraine, forced labour camps, deportations, detentions, interrogations, bloody massacres, show trails, antisemitic purges against Jewish doctors and writers…and all the while not only impoverished Jews in the East End but some of the great minds of European thought were fellow travellers with the communist vision, defenders of it, promoters of it.

And what fascinates me, and horrifies me, and makes be anxious (though I will come to that) is the question about when followers of this vision finally abandoned it.  When did they realise they had been seduced into a huge error of judgment by the rhetoric and propaganda of the Soviet State, and its emissaries, an error that was intellectual, emotional, spiritual? How long did it take for them to let go of their wishful thinking in the face of evidence of the evils of the actual system they were supporting?

HG Wells, George Orwell, Camus, Sartre, John Steinbeck, Simone de Beauvoir – I am not going to name too many names – they gradually became disenchanted,  but often it took decades for that disenchantment to really sink in, in spite of abundant evidence from very early on that this was an experiment that was not only persecuting its own people but was involved in what we would now describe as crimes against humanity.

So was it the show trials of 1937-8 that did it? Was it the annihilation of Jewish intellectuals in 1952? For many communist fellow-travellers it was the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. For some it wasn’t until the crushing of the Prague spring in 1968. People held on to their commitment to this ideology for decades, and nothing could force them to disconnect from their younger decades of enthusiasm. There is a real psychological issue here at the heart of this historical question. When we have become fixated on an ideology that gives us some kind of emotional satisfaction, some kind of vision of hope, what does it take to let it go and acknowledge our mistake, our naivety, our false thinking? It is actually very hard to do. If we are holding fast to an ideology, how long do we keep silent about crimes done in its name – or even find a way of justifying them? The story of the Soviet Union is a text case for this.

Second idea: from our Torah portion this week, which contains the famous phrase na’aseh ve’nishma [‘we will do and we will listen’]: this is the children of Israel’s response to Moses when he brings down from Sinai God’s teachings, God’s laws. “And all the people answered with one voice”, says our storyteller, “saying: Everything that the Eternal has commanded we will do” (Exodus 24:4). And then a few verses later, after Moses is described recording the obligations of the covenant and reading it aloud to the people, we hear “And they said: Everything that the Eternal has spoken na’aseh ve’nishma, we will do it and we will listen to it, we will obey it, we will try to understand it” (24:7).

There is an almost unanimous tradition of reading this text that praises the faithfulness of the Israelite people in saying na’aseh ve’nishma. It is seen as an acceptance of their role as God’s chosen people. ‘We will do what is required’. And the commentators point out that it is particularly worthy of praise that the people say they’d do whatever was required before they had understood what it meant, before they had heard (shema) what they were agreeing to. It is not clear if the Biblical phrase does mean a sequence or whether it is a combined ‘doing and hearing’ activity. But the traditional commentators tend to stress this was an unquestioning commitment to action – that was followed by thinking, reflecting on what it meant.

That’s how this phrase is always read nowadays by rabbis and Jewish teachers: ‘look how devoted the Jewish people were/are in following God, they agreed to do it even before they knew what was involved’. The only dissenting view I could find belongs to the Sadducees, the group who had religious and political power during the Second Temple period - but lost their authority once the Temple was destroyed in 70CE. Their opponents, the Pharisees, evolved into the rabbis who wrote the Talmud and developed Judaism into the forms that we have inherited.  The Talmud is uniformly hostile to the Sadducees, and as not a single line of Sadducean writing has survived, we are dependent on their adversaries to see into their thinking. A great example of how history is written by the victors.

So there’s one passage in the Talmud discussing  this phrase na’aseh ve’nishma in which the Sadducees are recorded as being critical of the Jewish people, calling them ama paziza – “a rash people, for whom the mouth precedes the ears …you should have listened in order to know whether you were able to accept”’ [cf. Aviva Zornberg, ‘The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus’, p.303). And this is the essence  of my second theme: I am becoming more and more sympathetic to the dissident view of the Sadducees here, against the overwhelming weight of the tradition.

And the reason is – and maybe you can begin to see how everything is connected to everything else – I have real doubts, about the wisdom of subscribing to any ideology (and religious faith is an ideology) that requires one to submit to its thinking, that asks for a priori obedience, whether it is obedience to the programme of a Stalin or a God or a religious tradition. Because obedience so often has a persecutory shadow side, an under-edge, that involves punishing those who don’t follow the party line. Or – as in Catholic guilt and Jewish guilt – punishing oneself for not being obedient enough.

To accept any ideology (political or religious of cultural or social) and not be free to question it is foolhardy, ‘rash’. To have to submit to received opinion can be soul-destroying. But to call into question what one has accepted voluntarily, what one has followed perhaps enthusiastically for decades, to call into question a belief system that might have sustained you for years - that is very difficult, painful. To say I have seen what this ideology, this system, this vision actually does, and I can no longer go along with it - that requires a kind of intellectual and emotional and spiritual bravery (or is it honesty? or is it objectivity?) which not everyone can muster. Not least because it might leave a huge gap where that belief once sat – and what does one replace it with?

Third idea, everything being connected to everything else. What about the chaos of feelings we Jews might be having about Israel/Gaza right now? The ever-present elephant in the room. And I feel reluctant to speak about it. So let me just name it by saying that the questions I was asking earlier about the fellow-travellers of  communism, those defenders of the system in spite of the evidence coming out of the Soviet Union – and at this distance it might seem hard to reconstruct just how powerful and seductive were the narratives woven by the defenders of the system – those questions I was raising are, I think, pertinent to the questions one might have about being a fellow-traveller and defender of the Zionist vision.

We each will have our own take on this - but although it is now relatively safe to talk about when the scales fell from one’s eyes about old-style Soviet communism, it can feel far from safe to talk about it in relation to contemporary Zionism. (Please note I am not comparing the problematic content of actions  - but the process of how hard it is to question and then perhaps let go of the evocative vision that one might attach oneself to).

So at some stage we need to ask when did it happen to you? Has it happened to you? People like Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt drew attention to the fundamental problems of the Zionist endeavour in the 1940s, as the State was born; for others it wasn’t until after 1967 and the conquered territories were held on to rather than relinquished, and then gradually settled on, and it became clear that justice for the other inhabitants of the land, and the refugees, has being delayed, postponed, pushed out of the story. The mantra of na’aseh ve’nishma, we will do it and then reflect on it, was a powerful one in the Zionist story, and many Jews around the world became faithful followers of the ‘doing’, and set aside their misgivings, their ‘listening’ to the consequences. For some, those feelings of being enamoured by the original vision of a Jewish homeland began to sour with the Sabra and Shatillah massacres in 1982, or the Lebanon war in 2006, or the first Gaza war in 2012, or the declaration of ongoing Jewish supremacy in Israel codified in 2018 in the Nation State law. Or maybe it is this current chaos that is doing it, finally.

Everything being connected to everything, we can ask in relation to Israel: when was your 1956 Hungarian uprising moment? Or has it not happened yet? Are you with the Pharisees or with the Sadducees on this current tragedy? Is it ‘rash’ to be critical of Israel at a time like this when so many in the world are feeling hostile to both Israel and Jews? Or is it ‘rash’ to be uncritical, to be still enamoured of the ideology, the vision of Zionism as it defends its ‘we will do whatever it takes to prevail’ philosophy?

How many wings of how many butterflies will have to flutter, and how many will have to be torn apart, before the spirit of history declares a winner? Because at the moment there are no winners, just the cruelty of lives destroyed. And for that we weep, and have cause to weep.  

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, February 10^th, 2024]