The Sense of an Ending
I have just caught up with Julian Barnes’s 2011 novel The Sense of an Ending and, somewhat to my surprise, a week after finishing it I still find myself turning it over in my mind. Not so much the plot, which is rather thin, but some of his treacherously simple sentences and some of his subtle reflections on memory, history, loss, and storytelling. Particularly the stories we tell ourselves as our life unfolds – and how we may have to revise them, re-vision them, in the second half of our lives:
“We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.”
The novel illustrates – as many novels do – the law of unintended consequences: how small actions that we might forget about have larger ramifications that we may never (perhaps fortunately) know of; and how we see only one small fragment of the enormous web of being in which we are held. We spin our lives in one direction but the impact that might have on others is always unpredictable, and to a certain degree unknowable. This could be frightening if it weren’t so mysterious, and so filled with the possibility that the consequences we never know about could also be benign, life-enhancing, life-changing: that our capacity for unintended goodness is a large as our capacity for unintended harm. Of course we want to think that our capacity to be a blessing to others is larger than our potential to hurt them – but one of the things Barnes’s novel shows is that this may be based more on wishful thinking than on reality.
Near the beginning of the novel there are a marvellous couple of sentences as the narrator tells us what he is plotting to do - take us back to his schooldays, not out of nostalgia, but because in order to tell his story he needs “to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can’t be sure of the actual events anymore, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That’s the best I can manage.”
The novel illustrates the quietly devastating effect of this casual-feeling attempt at recall, with the hesitancy and diffidence of ‘briefly...approximate...can’t be sure...impressions...best I can manage’ set against the unexpected and stinging harshness of ‘deformed into certainty’, a phrase that brings us up short as we reflect on its wider provenance.
What aspects of our lives has time ‘deformed into certainty’? Stories we tell ourselves, and others, about how things were – but how do we really know? Often our memories are composed of old photographs, bits of cine film, or other people’s stories about us that we have taken on as a true account of ourselves. But as Barnes shown in the novel, memory is one of the most elusive aspects of our humanity. We remember things the way we want to remember things – not how they were. We have our secret agendas about how we want to tell the stories of our past – and sometimes the secret is not even known by us, (in other words, it is an unconscious process): we don’t even know we are misrepresenting, misconstruing, our past as we become more of a victim, or less of a persecutor, or some other ‘deformation’ of the truth of that irretrievable density of experience we call our past.
But it is not only personal histories that are ‘deformed into certainty’. National histories too become told in a particular way that bears only a partial relationship to the complexity of how things were: whether it is the Battle of Britain, the birth of Israel as a State, or the current political and economic crisis in Europe, competing and complex narratives have a habit of congealing into a fixed and definitive ‘certainty’. Facts are twisted into a shape that suits the teller; so, as one of Barnes’s characters puts it, “we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us”.
And it occurred to me too that this concept of “memories which time has deformed into certainty” is a wonderfully suggestive phrase in relation to the Bible, that repository of memory-transformed-into-language. The texts are crafted composites of memory and myth, legend and law, history, story, poem and song, twisted in certain directions – directions of certainty – by the narrators themselves, and then again by later readers. Though the narrators often allowed in more uncertainty in their storytelling than later readers could, and can, bear. But that is another story, for another time.
Meanwhile, Julian Barnes has written a short novel of deceptive simplicity that will play in your mind, and allows your mind to play. And what else do we want from a story?
Saturday, 16 June 2012
Saturday, 19 May 2012
Ill-winds from Greece
I watch the news each day. I see the scene from the Temple of Hera in Greece where the Olympic torch goes out moments after it is lit, all the calculated and rehearsed ceremony at the mercy of larger forces, as if those ancient Greek gods are still at play, reminding us poor mortals of the hubris of imagining we can control events...After some moments of panic and uncertainty it is lit again and the whole charade resumes.
And then I see how that other ill-wind from Greece is sweeping its way across Europe trailing financial turbulence and anxiety in its wake. As the flame arrives, stock-markets plunge. But this time there are no quick fixes and the systemic problems in the home of democracy exposes our powerlessness in the face of the modern incarnations of those ancient gods: the financial markets, whose whims and wishes determine all our fates.
And we in the UK, as well as other member states of the European Union, are told we have to make sacrifices to the gods: and so we offer up our livelihoods, our pensions and jobs, our libraries, hospitals, schools, sometimes our homes, the welfare state that has protecting the vulnerable, as cut follows cut deep into the flesh and sinews of our social body. Because the markets must be appeased, we must keep them happy, at all costs. And we will be counting the costs for generations.
But meanwhile let’s distract ourselves with the Olympics, let’s celebrate the arrival of the flame onto our shores - that ancient ceremony that dates back to...well, Berlin in 1936 actually, when it was dreamed up as a way of connecting the capital of the new German Reich with the original games of classical Greece, whose culture Hitler so admired. Never mind, let’s not distract ourselves with history, let’s focus on the ‘Olympic spirit’: the way in which the original cost of the Games, forecasted seven years ago as £2.37billion will end up costing us between £12 and £24 billion – who knows? who cares? it’s the Olympics, don’t spoil the party spirit...
No, let’s not distract ourselves with the finances, let’s focus on the ‘Olympic spirit’: the ground-to-air missiles mounted on London rooftops; the fighter-planes on constant alert above the city of London; the warship patrolling on the Thames; the UK's biggest mobilization of military and security forces since the second world war including 1000 armed American diplomatic and FBI agents patrolling an Olympic zone partitioned off from the wider city by an 11-mile, £80m, 5,000-volt electric fence.
But never mind, let’s not distract ourselves with security concerns, let’s focus on the ‘Olympic spirit’: the steely grip of the corporate sponsors who have enlisted Parliament to issue legislation banning any non-official advertising from Olympic venues and surrounding areas - better not go there with a Nike T-shirt when Adidas are the official sponsors, you’ll have to strip off - as well as ensuring it will be illegal for a member of the public to broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings from Olympic events “ including on social networking websites and the internet." In other words the ‘Olympic spirit’ ensures it will be a crime to post your pictures to Facebook. And so it goes on, everywhere we turn we see the corruption of an ideal and the brave/foolhardy British determination to carry on regardless. And let’s not start on athletes and drugs...
I do love watching sport – but forgive my cynicism about the Olympics. Will I be watching this ridiculous, and in some respects scandalous, distraction from what really matters? Probably I will succumb in part – but I will do so knowing that I am guilty of a hypocrisy I find hard to bear. For this is true ‘bread and circuses’ (panem et circenses), ‘bread and Games’, that Roman expression for the diversion and distraction of the public through the satisfaction of their shallowest desires. As a political strategy it is associated with the frivolity of the Roman Republic prior to its decline into autocracy. As the ill-winds from Greece presage the disintegration of the European dream, we can only pray – to gods old or new, it will matter not – that our democracies are strong enough to withstand the malevolent social forces waiting in the wings.
And then I see how that other ill-wind from Greece is sweeping its way across Europe trailing financial turbulence and anxiety in its wake. As the flame arrives, stock-markets plunge. But this time there are no quick fixes and the systemic problems in the home of democracy exposes our powerlessness in the face of the modern incarnations of those ancient gods: the financial markets, whose whims and wishes determine all our fates.
And we in the UK, as well as other member states of the European Union, are told we have to make sacrifices to the gods: and so we offer up our livelihoods, our pensions and jobs, our libraries, hospitals, schools, sometimes our homes, the welfare state that has protecting the vulnerable, as cut follows cut deep into the flesh and sinews of our social body. Because the markets must be appeased, we must keep them happy, at all costs. And we will be counting the costs for generations.
But meanwhile let’s distract ourselves with the Olympics, let’s celebrate the arrival of the flame onto our shores - that ancient ceremony that dates back to...well, Berlin in 1936 actually, when it was dreamed up as a way of connecting the capital of the new German Reich with the original games of classical Greece, whose culture Hitler so admired. Never mind, let’s not distract ourselves with history, let’s focus on the ‘Olympic spirit’: the way in which the original cost of the Games, forecasted seven years ago as £2.37billion will end up costing us between £12 and £24 billion – who knows? who cares? it’s the Olympics, don’t spoil the party spirit...
No, let’s not distract ourselves with the finances, let’s focus on the ‘Olympic spirit’: the ground-to-air missiles mounted on London rooftops; the fighter-planes on constant alert above the city of London; the warship patrolling on the Thames; the UK's biggest mobilization of military and security forces since the second world war including 1000 armed American diplomatic and FBI agents patrolling an Olympic zone partitioned off from the wider city by an 11-mile, £80m, 5,000-volt electric fence.
But never mind, let’s not distract ourselves with security concerns, let’s focus on the ‘Olympic spirit’: the steely grip of the corporate sponsors who have enlisted Parliament to issue legislation banning any non-official advertising from Olympic venues and surrounding areas - better not go there with a Nike T-shirt when Adidas are the official sponsors, you’ll have to strip off - as well as ensuring it will be illegal for a member of the public to broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings from Olympic events “ including on social networking websites and the internet." In other words the ‘Olympic spirit’ ensures it will be a crime to post your pictures to Facebook. And so it goes on, everywhere we turn we see the corruption of an ideal and the brave/foolhardy British determination to carry on regardless. And let’s not start on athletes and drugs...
I do love watching sport – but forgive my cynicism about the Olympics. Will I be watching this ridiculous, and in some respects scandalous, distraction from what really matters? Probably I will succumb in part – but I will do so knowing that I am guilty of a hypocrisy I find hard to bear. For this is true ‘bread and circuses’ (panem et circenses), ‘bread and Games’, that Roman expression for the diversion and distraction of the public through the satisfaction of their shallowest desires. As a political strategy it is associated with the frivolity of the Roman Republic prior to its decline into autocracy. As the ill-winds from Greece presage the disintegration of the European dream, we can only pray – to gods old or new, it will matter not – that our democracies are strong enough to withstand the malevolent social forces waiting in the wings.
Monday, 16 April 2012
‘Why did you do that?'
I am haunted by the story. I can’t let it go, or rather it won’t let me go. This is what literature can do to you sometimes, great literature – the kind that tries to speak about how life is, in all its complexity and mystery, in all its unexpected moments of joy and pain, of sudden reversals of fortune, life in its shabbiness and its grandeur, the life that poets and novelists keep evoking and describing – arranging and re-arranging words on pages in the attempt to pierce the mystery of our being, the mystery of there being anything at all: it is the poets and the storytellers that keep reminding us that what makes human beings a unique aspect of the created universe is our capacity for language, for words, for using speech to communicate and to try to conjure up new ways of talking about who we are, what we are, why we are...
And this story in Leviticus, these few verses of an ancient text, seem to speak of something just out of our grasp. We feel that if we could really understand what is going on we’d hold in our hands, in our hearts, we’d hold in our consciousness, a moment of enlightenment. It we understood this text it would be like a revelation, a holy moment. We’d know the truth of something, how something really is and not just how it seems. We’d somehow know how the world really works – if we could but understand this simple story.
“And Nadav and Abihu, sons of Aaron, each took a fire-pan, and fire, and incense, and offered ‘strange fire’ before the Eternal, which they had not been instructed to do. And fire came forth from before the Eternal and consumed them and they died before the Eternal. And Moses said to Aaron: ‘This is what the Eternal says, these words: Through those near to Me, I will be sanctified; and before all the people I will be honoured’. And Aaron was silent.” (Leviticus 10: 1-3)
Two young men offer aysh zara – strange fire, alien fire, something that is burning and out of the ordinary, something unexpected and unpredicted and out of the range of what is known, something that runs counter to the rules set down from on high, from their parents and their God. They are not feeling constrained by what has to be, what should be done, what shouldn’t be done - there is a rebelliousness in them, a zeal, an enthusiasm, a passion – they want to connect with the divine in their own way, but what is it really that motivates them? Is it attention-seeking? Is it a prank? Is it anger at being part of a system that always tells them what to do, that demands obedience, that is filled with prohibitions and punishments and threats of more punishments? Is it a premeditated act, plotted together in secret for ages before? Or is it a sudden impulsive moment of dare-devilry – ‘I’ll do it if you do it, no you do it, no you do it, hell, let’s just do it...’
Who knows? – our storyteller isn’t going to tell us. Our storyteller is going to keep us dangling – for generation after generation – our storyteller knows that when they place this word next to that word, in this order, and create this sentence then that one, that we are going to be captivated till the end of days with a curiosity, with a desire to know, to understand, to delve beneath the surface of this brutal and dumbfounding story, to find out: why did they do it? Which is to say: why do any of us do the things that we do? What is the story we tell ourselves, or each other? What is the story we told our parents, or our siblings, that we tell our partners, or our lovers, or our teachers , or our friends – or whoever wanted to know: ‘why did you do that? How could you have done that? Couldn’t you see what would happen? Why did you do it?’
And we might have a story ready, or we might make one up, or we might have no words to offer – but that question ‘why?’ can have a dozen answers, a dozen so-called reasons, but they are only stories, more stories: ‘I did it because I was angry, I did because I was bored, I did it because I was tired, I did it because I was upset, or hurt; I did it without thinking, I did it because I thought you’d like it, or you’d be pleased with me, or you would love me, or you would stop loving me if I didn’t do it, I did it because it felt good, I did it because no-one was looking, or everyone was looking’... stories we make up, stories we believe in (or not), that try to answer that simple-sounding question: why did you do that?
Two young men offer aysh zara – strange fire, alien fire, something that is burning in them and it has to come out. And fire symbolises both what is creative and transformative – and what is destructive. And when these two men in this story offer their strange fire, and fieriness, there is no explanation, because no explanation is ever sufficient - because we are strangers to ourselves, aliens who think we know why we act but rarely take into account that actions are often prompted by the unconscious in us. We think we are rational and conscious and coolly calculating beings – but this story reminds us that this is just a fiction, another story, one we like to tell ourselves, a soothing fairytale of a story: ‘Oh, I did this because of that’, as if we were a mathematical formula, x plus y = z. I did z because of x and y. ‘I left him because he snored and always left the toilet seat up’. ‘I married her because she had beautiful eyes, and a father who was a millionaire.’ What a consoling fiction this is, that human motivation can be tracked down in this simple way, as if the mind and the heart and consciousness itself is just a refined computer-type programme waiting for us to de-code, or load up with more programmes that we can then act out. But what this short story reveals is that we are essentially a mystery: to ourselves, let alone to other people.
There were plenty of things I could have addressed this week, other than this nagging mysterious story, the one that won’t let me go. What about the sinking of the Titanic, 100 years ago? What an extraordinary story this has become in the British psyche: it’s become mythic, a story about class, and fate, and hubris and arrogance and bravery and cowardice and the randomness of who will live and who will die, and how the story the makers of that ship told about it in 1912 - and the captain and crew and passengers believed - that this was a ship that was unsinkable, what a story that was, what a fiction that was, how naive to believe in the stories we tell ourselves about how things are and have to be.
Or I could have addressed what’s happened to another storyteller, the grand old man of German letters, Nobel laureate Gunter Grass, 84 years old, for whom reading and writing – the habit of looking intensely at words – became the work of a lifetime, and now he’s been banned from entering Israel, to which he has a strong and loving bond, because he wrote a poem – in truth, not a very good poem – a poem in which he spoke about both Iran and Israel as having the potential capacity to act in ways “endangering/Our already fragile world peace”. Following which rather uncontroversial sentiment ,a huge storm of controversy has erupted around him – with knee-jerk reactions from the predictable sources : that Grass has voiced “deep-seated prejudice against the Jewish people” (i.e. he’s an anti-Semite) – that’s from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in the States; and from Netanyahu a helpful, diplomatic response that Grass is just an unreconstructed Nazi because he was drafted into the Waffen SS at the age of 16 towards the end of the War, and we aren’t going to take moral lessons from Germans anyway.
The power of words – they can explode in your face – a storyteller poet can offer his own alien fire and the next thing you know the wrath of the gods (or those who set themselves up in God’s place) falls upon him.
The power of words, of stories, of language – and who the stories are told to, and where they are told. What about the Habima theatre company of Israel, founded in 1905 and Israel’s oldest theatre group, who are due to visit London in May but are facing a boycott campaign? They perform all over Israel and they’ve done some performances in Ariel, in the West Bank; they have sponsorship from the government of Israel and a contractual obligation to go, but no actor is forced to perform there if their conscience dictates not to, and actors who choose not to face no sanctions from the company. They are due to perform their Hebrew language version of The Merchant of Venice, at the Globe during the London Shakespeare Festival. And as another storyteller Howard Jacobson has said in defence of their visit: "If there is one justification for art… it is that it proceeds from, and addresses, our unaligned humanity. Whoever would go to art with a mind made up on any subject misses the point of what art is for”. (Though I note that Jacobson has remained silent, as far as I know, about Grass).
Which stories are we allowed to hear? which poems are we allowed to read? which words are too strange, too alien, too fiery, too filled with burning indignation, too dangerous, to be offered up on the altar, in full view of the public?
In Leviticus, the story is told that something is offered, strange, alien, of burning intensity – and it is followed by death, and more words, as Moses tries to rationalise what has happened: he offers his own story, which you can take or leave. (It’s what you’d expect from a religious leader, a bit of pious gobbledygook to cover up the outrageous unpredictability of what life throws at us).
But the most eloquent response, the most poignant, the most pregnant with meaning and feeling is that of Aaron, who is suddenly a survivor: a survivor of the unaccountable way in which life unfolds, bringing death in its wake; and he stands there, in the presence of the non-rational, the awesome irruption of chaos into the order of the day, vayidom Aharon : and Aaron was silent.
And there is a gap in the text, a moment of suspended action: as we wait, as we join Aaron in his silence. Sometimes there are no words. Sometimes there is a moment when we realise that words are a cover-up, that there is something unutterable about life, underneath words, between words, and our storyteller gives us a glimpse into that larger silence in which we are held, beyond language, from which we have come and into which we will go. And we stare - with Aaron, through Aaron - into the abyss. And we hear the silence. And it is heartbreaking, this silence.
And it is also, potentially, heart-mending, this silence.
But that’s another story.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, April 14th, 2012]
And this story in Leviticus, these few verses of an ancient text, seem to speak of something just out of our grasp. We feel that if we could really understand what is going on we’d hold in our hands, in our hearts, we’d hold in our consciousness, a moment of enlightenment. It we understood this text it would be like a revelation, a holy moment. We’d know the truth of something, how something really is and not just how it seems. We’d somehow know how the world really works – if we could but understand this simple story.
“And Nadav and Abihu, sons of Aaron, each took a fire-pan, and fire, and incense, and offered ‘strange fire’ before the Eternal, which they had not been instructed to do. And fire came forth from before the Eternal and consumed them and they died before the Eternal. And Moses said to Aaron: ‘This is what the Eternal says, these words: Through those near to Me, I will be sanctified; and before all the people I will be honoured’. And Aaron was silent.” (Leviticus 10: 1-3)
Two young men offer aysh zara – strange fire, alien fire, something that is burning and out of the ordinary, something unexpected and unpredicted and out of the range of what is known, something that runs counter to the rules set down from on high, from their parents and their God. They are not feeling constrained by what has to be, what should be done, what shouldn’t be done - there is a rebelliousness in them, a zeal, an enthusiasm, a passion – they want to connect with the divine in their own way, but what is it really that motivates them? Is it attention-seeking? Is it a prank? Is it anger at being part of a system that always tells them what to do, that demands obedience, that is filled with prohibitions and punishments and threats of more punishments? Is it a premeditated act, plotted together in secret for ages before? Or is it a sudden impulsive moment of dare-devilry – ‘I’ll do it if you do it, no you do it, no you do it, hell, let’s just do it...’
Who knows? – our storyteller isn’t going to tell us. Our storyteller is going to keep us dangling – for generation after generation – our storyteller knows that when they place this word next to that word, in this order, and create this sentence then that one, that we are going to be captivated till the end of days with a curiosity, with a desire to know, to understand, to delve beneath the surface of this brutal and dumbfounding story, to find out: why did they do it? Which is to say: why do any of us do the things that we do? What is the story we tell ourselves, or each other? What is the story we told our parents, or our siblings, that we tell our partners, or our lovers, or our teachers , or our friends – or whoever wanted to know: ‘why did you do that? How could you have done that? Couldn’t you see what would happen? Why did you do it?’
And we might have a story ready, or we might make one up, or we might have no words to offer – but that question ‘why?’ can have a dozen answers, a dozen so-called reasons, but they are only stories, more stories: ‘I did it because I was angry, I did because I was bored, I did it because I was tired, I did it because I was upset, or hurt; I did it without thinking, I did it because I thought you’d like it, or you’d be pleased with me, or you would love me, or you would stop loving me if I didn’t do it, I did it because it felt good, I did it because no-one was looking, or everyone was looking’... stories we make up, stories we believe in (or not), that try to answer that simple-sounding question: why did you do that?
Two young men offer aysh zara – strange fire, alien fire, something that is burning in them and it has to come out. And fire symbolises both what is creative and transformative – and what is destructive. And when these two men in this story offer their strange fire, and fieriness, there is no explanation, because no explanation is ever sufficient - because we are strangers to ourselves, aliens who think we know why we act but rarely take into account that actions are often prompted by the unconscious in us. We think we are rational and conscious and coolly calculating beings – but this story reminds us that this is just a fiction, another story, one we like to tell ourselves, a soothing fairytale of a story: ‘Oh, I did this because of that’, as if we were a mathematical formula, x plus y = z. I did z because of x and y. ‘I left him because he snored and always left the toilet seat up’. ‘I married her because she had beautiful eyes, and a father who was a millionaire.’ What a consoling fiction this is, that human motivation can be tracked down in this simple way, as if the mind and the heart and consciousness itself is just a refined computer-type programme waiting for us to de-code, or load up with more programmes that we can then act out. But what this short story reveals is that we are essentially a mystery: to ourselves, let alone to other people.
There were plenty of things I could have addressed this week, other than this nagging mysterious story, the one that won’t let me go. What about the sinking of the Titanic, 100 years ago? What an extraordinary story this has become in the British psyche: it’s become mythic, a story about class, and fate, and hubris and arrogance and bravery and cowardice and the randomness of who will live and who will die, and how the story the makers of that ship told about it in 1912 - and the captain and crew and passengers believed - that this was a ship that was unsinkable, what a story that was, what a fiction that was, how naive to believe in the stories we tell ourselves about how things are and have to be.
Or I could have addressed what’s happened to another storyteller, the grand old man of German letters, Nobel laureate Gunter Grass, 84 years old, for whom reading and writing – the habit of looking intensely at words – became the work of a lifetime, and now he’s been banned from entering Israel, to which he has a strong and loving bond, because he wrote a poem – in truth, not a very good poem – a poem in which he spoke about both Iran and Israel as having the potential capacity to act in ways “endangering/Our already fragile world peace”. Following which rather uncontroversial sentiment ,a huge storm of controversy has erupted around him – with knee-jerk reactions from the predictable sources : that Grass has voiced “deep-seated prejudice against the Jewish people” (i.e. he’s an anti-Semite) – that’s from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in the States; and from Netanyahu a helpful, diplomatic response that Grass is just an unreconstructed Nazi because he was drafted into the Waffen SS at the age of 16 towards the end of the War, and we aren’t going to take moral lessons from Germans anyway.
The power of words – they can explode in your face – a storyteller poet can offer his own alien fire and the next thing you know the wrath of the gods (or those who set themselves up in God’s place) falls upon him.
The power of words, of stories, of language – and who the stories are told to, and where they are told. What about the Habima theatre company of Israel, founded in 1905 and Israel’s oldest theatre group, who are due to visit London in May but are facing a boycott campaign? They perform all over Israel and they’ve done some performances in Ariel, in the West Bank; they have sponsorship from the government of Israel and a contractual obligation to go, but no actor is forced to perform there if their conscience dictates not to, and actors who choose not to face no sanctions from the company. They are due to perform their Hebrew language version of The Merchant of Venice, at the Globe during the London Shakespeare Festival. And as another storyteller Howard Jacobson has said in defence of their visit: "If there is one justification for art… it is that it proceeds from, and addresses, our unaligned humanity. Whoever would go to art with a mind made up on any subject misses the point of what art is for”. (Though I note that Jacobson has remained silent, as far as I know, about Grass).
Which stories are we allowed to hear? which poems are we allowed to read? which words are too strange, too alien, too fiery, too filled with burning indignation, too dangerous, to be offered up on the altar, in full view of the public?
In Leviticus, the story is told that something is offered, strange, alien, of burning intensity – and it is followed by death, and more words, as Moses tries to rationalise what has happened: he offers his own story, which you can take or leave. (It’s what you’d expect from a religious leader, a bit of pious gobbledygook to cover up the outrageous unpredictability of what life throws at us).
But the most eloquent response, the most poignant, the most pregnant with meaning and feeling is that of Aaron, who is suddenly a survivor: a survivor of the unaccountable way in which life unfolds, bringing death in its wake; and he stands there, in the presence of the non-rational, the awesome irruption of chaos into the order of the day, vayidom Aharon : and Aaron was silent.
And there is a gap in the text, a moment of suspended action: as we wait, as we join Aaron in his silence. Sometimes there are no words. Sometimes there is a moment when we realise that words are a cover-up, that there is something unutterable about life, underneath words, between words, and our storyteller gives us a glimpse into that larger silence in which we are held, beyond language, from which we have come and into which we will go. And we stare - with Aaron, through Aaron - into the abyss. And we hear the silence. And it is heartbreaking, this silence.
And it is also, potentially, heart-mending, this silence.
But that’s another story.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, April 14th, 2012]
Wednesday, 4 April 2012
On Demagogues and 'God': some Pesach thoughts
He thought people had witnessed “something miraculous” – in the biblical sense of the word. “As a religious man I have to believe that there is some divine intervention in this...something sacred. Justice has been done.”
No, not Moses after the exodus from Egypt, standing exhausted on the far shore of the Sea of Reeds in awe at how events had unfolded, some combination of nature and the historical moment that would enter a people’s collective memory to become a legend told and re-told, elaborated upon, mythologised over the generations, each telling a re-collection of fragments of memory, each telling an elaboration, each telling adding weight and significance to that initial sense of freedom, freedom gained who knows how? who knows why? but freedom gained - and awaiting its narrators, its storytellers, its making-sense-of-it-all mythographers and poets...
No, this was Friday March 30th, in the early hours of the morning at the prosaic Richard Dunn Sports Centre in Bradford - and God’s intervention is claimed with a raucous and aggressive immediacy: “All praise to Allah!”, then the response, “Allah, Allah” - like a football chant - then the crowd-pleasing seduction of “Long live Iraq! Long live Palestine!”, and the jubilation spills out onto the streets as the ‘miracle’ is proclaimed. No, not Moses, but George.
George Galloway’s stunning bye-election victory has received a fair amount of media coverage. His capacity to tap into local issues to do with poverty and unemployment, and the local disaffection about the system of political patronage that seems to dominate Bradford politics, were part of his appeal. But stirring up racial and religious tensions and utilising his reputation as an opponent of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan came in handy too – as did the literature from his ironically-named ‘Respect Party’ that claimed that this Scottish Catholic was more of an adherent to Muslim principles than his Muslim Labour opponent: “God KNOWS who is Muslim. And he KNOWS who is not. Instinctively, so do you. [So you the voter, and I, George Galloway, are ‘instinctively’ in the same camp as God]...I, George Galloway, do not drink alcohol and never have. Ask yourself if the other candidate can say that truthfully...”
Although there are rumours that Galloway has in fact converted to Islam – he does seem to have a polygamous series of wives married in Muslim ceremonies – there’s no doubt he’s found a useful campaign strategy here: align yourself with God and smear your opponent as less religiously devout than you are. Galloway’s whole sickening mis-appropriation of the language and principles of religion – and particularly his megalomaniacal, self-deluding claim that his success was due to ‘divine intervention’ – seems to me an extraordinarily disturbing event in British politics. The media coverage seems to have passed over in silence these claims about the ‘sacred’ nature of the event. Perhaps they are more interested in the political dimensions of the election – or perhaps, not confident enough to judge a person’s theology, they see this language as just part of Galloway’s idiosyncratic personality. But I think we should pay a bit more attention to what’s going on here.
In The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky put into the mouth of his character Karamazov the view – now much-quoted, and much-disputed – that “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted”. But it seems to me that the opposite is as relevant, and perhaps more dangerous. For we have seen on countless occasions that once you claim to have God on your side, then anything is permitted: whether it is the Crusades or the occupation of ‘holy’ land, honour killings or the burning of heretics, the suppression of women or beating the devil out of children, too-readily knowing what ‘God’ wants can lead to mayhem, cruelty and murder.
In the mouth of a demagogue like Galloway, the phrase “All praise to Allah” carries a vicious and frightening undertone. Galloway has paid court to some modern pharoahs, dictators like Sadaam Hussein and Syria’s Bashar al Assad – they offer him an image of his own perverse ruthlessness, so no wonder he finds himself in thrall to their power-hungry personalities – and this co-opting of Muslim religious language is his latest ploy in grabbing power for himself.
So as Pesach (Passover) approaches, I find myself reflecting on how we can liberate the language of ‘God’ and the ‘sacred’ and ‘divine intervention’ from those who cynically co-op it for their own selfish and egotistical needs. The Haggadah text famously downplays the role of Moses in the extra-ordinary Exodus events it describes: Moses only gets a glancing mention within the traditional ‘Grace after Meals’ – he is completely absent from the first half of the seder, where the people’s journey from slavery to freedom is described and celebrated.
This of course runs counter to the Biblical narrative itself, where Moses’ hesitant-but-crucial leadership is highlighted within the story. But on seder night it is as if the anonymous compilers of the liturgy are making a discrete bid to de-legitimize any cult of personality. ‘Our story of salvation’, they seem to be saying, ‘is a story without a human Saviour’ – so our story is unlike that of Christianity, for example, the rival faith one feels they must have had in mind as they assembled the elements of the Jewish salvation story.
Freedom happens, they suggest, because there is a salvific force that enters into human events, perhaps when people least expect it. It comes, this force, with a power and an authority that sweeps people up in its force field, sweeps people along with what gradually – or suddenly – is experienced as a force of inevitability, unsettling the status quo, and reversing the prevailing dynamics of power.
Later on we might call it - our bards and poets might hymn it as - ‘God’s divine intervention’. Though at the time it was a mad scramble for survival and escape and taking the chance that came, the chaos of events, the lack of time to think, not even enough time to bake a loaf of bread, just the rising up in one’s spleen of the will to break free, the opportunism of the moment, when the society was reeling from one damned thing after another and death was all around and the powers-that-be were mourning their losses, and the wild-eyed visionary stuttering one and his shadowy, smooth-tongued brother said Now is the Time, the End-Time, ‘Let’s go, my people’ – though we might have got the words wrong in the confusion of the hour – but something stirred in our souls and we realised that we were not yet crushed unto death, our hearts were beating, still beating with the pulse of justice and the knowledge of injustices done and suffered, and we took our unleavened cakes of dough and at midnight – or thereabouts – we left our homes and our slave-lives and our Egyptian overlords, and broke free of our humiliation and broke free of our slavery to ‘it can’t be done’ and ‘it can never happen’, we broke free of our despair and our hopelessness, and some ancient spirit of defiance and hope breathed itself into our nostrils, we discovered again an animating energy we had forgotten we ever possessed, we found new life, like a grace flowing in our veins, and before we knew it we were away, away from there, on the journey, the truly immense journey, the journey we still are on.
And call it ‘divine intervention’ if you like.
No, not Moses after the exodus from Egypt, standing exhausted on the far shore of the Sea of Reeds in awe at how events had unfolded, some combination of nature and the historical moment that would enter a people’s collective memory to become a legend told and re-told, elaborated upon, mythologised over the generations, each telling a re-collection of fragments of memory, each telling an elaboration, each telling adding weight and significance to that initial sense of freedom, freedom gained who knows how? who knows why? but freedom gained - and awaiting its narrators, its storytellers, its making-sense-of-it-all mythographers and poets...
No, this was Friday March 30th, in the early hours of the morning at the prosaic Richard Dunn Sports Centre in Bradford - and God’s intervention is claimed with a raucous and aggressive immediacy: “All praise to Allah!”, then the response, “Allah, Allah” - like a football chant - then the crowd-pleasing seduction of “Long live Iraq! Long live Palestine!”, and the jubilation spills out onto the streets as the ‘miracle’ is proclaimed. No, not Moses, but George.
George Galloway’s stunning bye-election victory has received a fair amount of media coverage. His capacity to tap into local issues to do with poverty and unemployment, and the local disaffection about the system of political patronage that seems to dominate Bradford politics, were part of his appeal. But stirring up racial and religious tensions and utilising his reputation as an opponent of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan came in handy too – as did the literature from his ironically-named ‘Respect Party’ that claimed that this Scottish Catholic was more of an adherent to Muslim principles than his Muslim Labour opponent: “God KNOWS who is Muslim. And he KNOWS who is not. Instinctively, so do you. [So you the voter, and I, George Galloway, are ‘instinctively’ in the same camp as God]...I, George Galloway, do not drink alcohol and never have. Ask yourself if the other candidate can say that truthfully...”
Although there are rumours that Galloway has in fact converted to Islam – he does seem to have a polygamous series of wives married in Muslim ceremonies – there’s no doubt he’s found a useful campaign strategy here: align yourself with God and smear your opponent as less religiously devout than you are. Galloway’s whole sickening mis-appropriation of the language and principles of religion – and particularly his megalomaniacal, self-deluding claim that his success was due to ‘divine intervention’ – seems to me an extraordinarily disturbing event in British politics. The media coverage seems to have passed over in silence these claims about the ‘sacred’ nature of the event. Perhaps they are more interested in the political dimensions of the election – or perhaps, not confident enough to judge a person’s theology, they see this language as just part of Galloway’s idiosyncratic personality. But I think we should pay a bit more attention to what’s going on here.
In The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky put into the mouth of his character Karamazov the view – now much-quoted, and much-disputed – that “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted”. But it seems to me that the opposite is as relevant, and perhaps more dangerous. For we have seen on countless occasions that once you claim to have God on your side, then anything is permitted: whether it is the Crusades or the occupation of ‘holy’ land, honour killings or the burning of heretics, the suppression of women or beating the devil out of children, too-readily knowing what ‘God’ wants can lead to mayhem, cruelty and murder.
In the mouth of a demagogue like Galloway, the phrase “All praise to Allah” carries a vicious and frightening undertone. Galloway has paid court to some modern pharoahs, dictators like Sadaam Hussein and Syria’s Bashar al Assad – they offer him an image of his own perverse ruthlessness, so no wonder he finds himself in thrall to their power-hungry personalities – and this co-opting of Muslim religious language is his latest ploy in grabbing power for himself.
So as Pesach (Passover) approaches, I find myself reflecting on how we can liberate the language of ‘God’ and the ‘sacred’ and ‘divine intervention’ from those who cynically co-op it for their own selfish and egotistical needs. The Haggadah text famously downplays the role of Moses in the extra-ordinary Exodus events it describes: Moses only gets a glancing mention within the traditional ‘Grace after Meals’ – he is completely absent from the first half of the seder, where the people’s journey from slavery to freedom is described and celebrated.
This of course runs counter to the Biblical narrative itself, where Moses’ hesitant-but-crucial leadership is highlighted within the story. But on seder night it is as if the anonymous compilers of the liturgy are making a discrete bid to de-legitimize any cult of personality. ‘Our story of salvation’, they seem to be saying, ‘is a story without a human Saviour’ – so our story is unlike that of Christianity, for example, the rival faith one feels they must have had in mind as they assembled the elements of the Jewish salvation story.
Freedom happens, they suggest, because there is a salvific force that enters into human events, perhaps when people least expect it. It comes, this force, with a power and an authority that sweeps people up in its force field, sweeps people along with what gradually – or suddenly – is experienced as a force of inevitability, unsettling the status quo, and reversing the prevailing dynamics of power.
Later on we might call it - our bards and poets might hymn it as - ‘God’s divine intervention’. Though at the time it was a mad scramble for survival and escape and taking the chance that came, the chaos of events, the lack of time to think, not even enough time to bake a loaf of bread, just the rising up in one’s spleen of the will to break free, the opportunism of the moment, when the society was reeling from one damned thing after another and death was all around and the powers-that-be were mourning their losses, and the wild-eyed visionary stuttering one and his shadowy, smooth-tongued brother said Now is the Time, the End-Time, ‘Let’s go, my people’ – though we might have got the words wrong in the confusion of the hour – but something stirred in our souls and we realised that we were not yet crushed unto death, our hearts were beating, still beating with the pulse of justice and the knowledge of injustices done and suffered, and we took our unleavened cakes of dough and at midnight – or thereabouts – we left our homes and our slave-lives and our Egyptian overlords, and broke free of our humiliation and broke free of our slavery to ‘it can’t be done’ and ‘it can never happen’, we broke free of our despair and our hopelessness, and some ancient spirit of defiance and hope breathed itself into our nostrils, we discovered again an animating energy we had forgotten we ever possessed, we found new life, like a grace flowing in our veins, and before we knew it we were away, away from there, on the journey, the truly immense journey, the journey we still are on.
And call it ‘divine intervention’ if you like.
Tuesday, 6 March 2012
Purim blog: ‘Who is Amelek?’
What would Judaism be without its prayers and its rituals? Would it be, as a Bar Mitzvah boy said recently in my community, ‘just a big social club’?
It’s true that without prayer and without ritual Jews would still be quite distinctive - we’d still be an ethnic and cultural group, we’d still have an identity. We’d be the people who invented the bagel. (And the people who decided to fill the bagel with smoked salmon and cream-cheese. We’ve exported that around the world). We’d still have our ethnic foods. We’d be the ‘chicken soup is as good as penicillin’ people. So there would be the food. And the humour of course. We do great jokes – because with our history we had to find some way of coping with the tears.
So we’d be a distinctive social club with great food – though everyone would always be on diets, because have you ever met a Jew who’s happy with their weight? Or for that matter how they look? Still we would be a great social club – though we’d have to have another social club nearby that we wouldn’t be seen dead in because they don’t do things the right way there.
OK. Enough Jackie Mason. He was also a rabbi who thought he was a comedian. (We can be quite bitchy too as people – quick to cast aspersions, to blame, to criticise – if kvetching was an Olympic sport, we’d win gold every time. We’re quick to criticise – and slow to admit we are ever wrong).
But of course it’s not just prayer and ritual that define Judaism. In fact some people might say, the prophets of Israel used to say, the essence of Judaism as a way of life isn’t prayer, and it isn’t Jewish rituals and ceremonies. It’s something else. It’s ethics. It’s how we act towards each other. It’s about righteousness and compassion and our passion for justice. It’s about giving to others – our time, our money (charity/tzedakah), giving our energy, our love, our empathy and care. We know all this.
So why does the Torah have to repeat 36 times the injunction to care about the stranger, the outsider, the ones who don’t ‘belong’? ‘That is your story too’, the Torah says, ‘you were once outsiders, strangers, in Egypt; you were once despised and abused because you didn’t seem to fit in, and you had come from somewhere else’. Is that so difficult to get our heads around? Our hearts around? It seems that it is.
Judaism is based on this extraordinary idea of human value, human worth, of uniqueness, preciousness, each person made (in that amazing phrase), b’zelem Elohim, in the ‘image of God’ (Genesis 1:27). It’s a beautiful and poetic image – the picture of human beings having divinity grafted into their souls. And therefore deserving of respect.
And it’s not just ‘us’, in our Jewish ethnic-cultural-religious club, it’s ‘them’ too – whoever the Others are, Poles or Pakistanis or Palestinians. Whether people love us or hate us, Judaism’s greatest challenge to us is: can we see the Other as b’zelem Elohim? In a sense we might say that hatred always involves a failure of imagination. And that includes self-hatred.
So this capacity to act with compassion and enact justice is the ethical and moral heart of Judaism – and without it we are just a big social club that’s given us Hollywood and Jewish humour and food that gives us heartburn. Of course you don’t have to be Jewish, or religious, to dedicate your life to acting with compassion and care, and fighting for justice. But Judaism as a way of life stands or falls on how well we can inhabit and live out its core ethical ideals. I repeat: we know all this.
So why is it so hard to keep on articulating it? And trying to live it out? I’m still mulling over, still stirred up by, what I saw and learnt on my recent trip to Israel with the British Friends of Rabbis for Human Rights (see February’s blog and www.rhruk.co.uk). On the one hand, Israel does receive a fair amount of critical attention in the media , and some of the perceptions sometimes seem unfair or inaccurate; and yet there are things going on there, within Israel itself and in the Territories, that don’t accord with the highest values of our Jewish tradition. When we hear about discrimination in Israel by the State against the Bedouin, or by Israeli rabbis against Orthodox women, or the authorities against Ethiopian immigrants, or Knesset legislation targeting NGOs and civil rights groups that are trying to defend human rights or promote ethical values, or we hear about the fire-bombing of mosques and the uprooting of Palestinian olive trees or the illegal building of settler homes on land to which Palestinians have documentary proof of ownership – when we hear about any of this we may (and probably should) feel uncomfortable, unsettled, disturbed.
And it matters to us not because we are ethically-sensitive people who might care equally about the bloodshed in Syria or the growing homelessness and poverty in the UK. It matters to us because we feel bound up in a particular way with the living out of Jewish life in Israel.
There is a rabbinic saying that " Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh " ‘all Jews are sureties for one another’ – we have a responsibility for one another, and one of the responsibilities we have is to stand up and say: ‘this act, this practice, this behaviour does not correspond to the highest values of our tradition, we can do better than that’.
That kind of ethical criticism and self-criticism has been in our tradition from the days of the prophets onwards. It’s not comfortable, either to do it or receive it, but unless we are just going to be a big social club, it is a religious responsibility. It’s much easier for us to see ourselves as the victims. We have generations and centuries of experience of that – real experience, tragic experience. It’s there in our minds, maybe at the back of our minds, maybe in the forefront - but unavoidable: the knowledge that hostility has been and is directed against us. That’s not news.
It’s even been grafted into our annual calendar: last Shabbat we read about Amalek, three verses from Deuteronomy (25: 17-19) which describe the way in which the children of Israel, wandering through the desert just after the Exodus from Egypt, were attacked in an unprovoked manner by the tribe of Amalek. These verses are always read on the Shabbat before Purim, our carnival festival when we read in the Book of Esther about the plan by Haman - described as a descendent of a later Amalekite king, Agag - to wipe out the Jews of Persia. A strange people we are – we commemorate an attempted genocide with a festival of frivolity, jokes and drink.
We call that pre-Purim Shabbat Shabbat Zachor , the ‘Shabbat of Remembering’. It reminds us of a grim reading of Jewish history : ‘there is always someone against us, remember that’. ‘Amalek’ is an archetype that is felt to exist in one form or another in every generation. And although this may be a necessary injunction – lo tishkakh, ‘Do not forget!’ (Deut 23:19), don’t forget there are always people who feel hostility towards us - it’s harder to remember something else: that ‘Amalek’ is not just the name for something outside us, but it is inside us too.
When I studied the Amalek text in Israel with some of the extraordinary rabbis and teachers who live there and are battling hard for an ethical Judaism to be enacted in daily life in that country they love, and many of us love, one of the things they all said, in different ways, and at different times, was that there is a battle going on, right now, for the soul of Israel and the soul of Judaism. There are forces around that go in the guise of nationalism or religion (or both), that are anti-democratic (their language, not mine) and contrary to Jewish ethical principles. The enemy, the 'Amalek', the one seeking to hurt and harm and destroy is not just the Other, it’s not about Hezbollah and Iran – that’s too easy to think, and react against. It deflects attention away from something else. No: 'Amalek', they suggested , is an internal experience, it’s part of us, it’s in us . It’s about the hatred and antagonism in Jewish hearts.
That’s hard to hear, hard to say. It’s like saying we Jews are our own worst enemy. We don’t want to know that, think that, hear that.
But it’s what the prophets of Israel kept on saying, and it’s what the modern inheritors of that vision, those brave men and women in Israel battling for civil rights and human rights, it’s what they are saying and putting their bodies on the line for, quite literally - because the aggression of not only Jew-on-Palestinian but Jew-on-Jew is a very real and present experience to them.
What they are saying, and it’s the message they wanted visitors like me to bring home, is that Judaism is not a social club – it’s a way of seeing the world that puts justice and compassion at its very centre. Nothing else can substitute for that. Not even bagels and smoked salmon.
[Extracted and adapted from a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, March 3rd 2012]
It’s true that without prayer and without ritual Jews would still be quite distinctive - we’d still be an ethnic and cultural group, we’d still have an identity. We’d be the people who invented the bagel. (And the people who decided to fill the bagel with smoked salmon and cream-cheese. We’ve exported that around the world). We’d still have our ethnic foods. We’d be the ‘chicken soup is as good as penicillin’ people. So there would be the food. And the humour of course. We do great jokes – because with our history we had to find some way of coping with the tears.
So we’d be a distinctive social club with great food – though everyone would always be on diets, because have you ever met a Jew who’s happy with their weight? Or for that matter how they look? Still we would be a great social club – though we’d have to have another social club nearby that we wouldn’t be seen dead in because they don’t do things the right way there.
OK. Enough Jackie Mason. He was also a rabbi who thought he was a comedian. (We can be quite bitchy too as people – quick to cast aspersions, to blame, to criticise – if kvetching was an Olympic sport, we’d win gold every time. We’re quick to criticise – and slow to admit we are ever wrong).
But of course it’s not just prayer and ritual that define Judaism. In fact some people might say, the prophets of Israel used to say, the essence of Judaism as a way of life isn’t prayer, and it isn’t Jewish rituals and ceremonies. It’s something else. It’s ethics. It’s how we act towards each other. It’s about righteousness and compassion and our passion for justice. It’s about giving to others – our time, our money (charity/tzedakah), giving our energy, our love, our empathy and care. We know all this.
So why does the Torah have to repeat 36 times the injunction to care about the stranger, the outsider, the ones who don’t ‘belong’? ‘That is your story too’, the Torah says, ‘you were once outsiders, strangers, in Egypt; you were once despised and abused because you didn’t seem to fit in, and you had come from somewhere else’. Is that so difficult to get our heads around? Our hearts around? It seems that it is.
Judaism is based on this extraordinary idea of human value, human worth, of uniqueness, preciousness, each person made (in that amazing phrase), b’zelem Elohim, in the ‘image of God’ (Genesis 1:27). It’s a beautiful and poetic image – the picture of human beings having divinity grafted into their souls. And therefore deserving of respect.
And it’s not just ‘us’, in our Jewish ethnic-cultural-religious club, it’s ‘them’ too – whoever the Others are, Poles or Pakistanis or Palestinians. Whether people love us or hate us, Judaism’s greatest challenge to us is: can we see the Other as b’zelem Elohim? In a sense we might say that hatred always involves a failure of imagination. And that includes self-hatred.
So this capacity to act with compassion and enact justice is the ethical and moral heart of Judaism – and without it we are just a big social club that’s given us Hollywood and Jewish humour and food that gives us heartburn. Of course you don’t have to be Jewish, or religious, to dedicate your life to acting with compassion and care, and fighting for justice. But Judaism as a way of life stands or falls on how well we can inhabit and live out its core ethical ideals. I repeat: we know all this.
So why is it so hard to keep on articulating it? And trying to live it out? I’m still mulling over, still stirred up by, what I saw and learnt on my recent trip to Israel with the British Friends of Rabbis for Human Rights (see February’s blog and www.rhruk.co.uk). On the one hand, Israel does receive a fair amount of critical attention in the media , and some of the perceptions sometimes seem unfair or inaccurate; and yet there are things going on there, within Israel itself and in the Territories, that don’t accord with the highest values of our Jewish tradition. When we hear about discrimination in Israel by the State against the Bedouin, or by Israeli rabbis against Orthodox women, or the authorities against Ethiopian immigrants, or Knesset legislation targeting NGOs and civil rights groups that are trying to defend human rights or promote ethical values, or we hear about the fire-bombing of mosques and the uprooting of Palestinian olive trees or the illegal building of settler homes on land to which Palestinians have documentary proof of ownership – when we hear about any of this we may (and probably should) feel uncomfortable, unsettled, disturbed.
And it matters to us not because we are ethically-sensitive people who might care equally about the bloodshed in Syria or the growing homelessness and poverty in the UK. It matters to us because we feel bound up in a particular way with the living out of Jewish life in Israel.
There is a rabbinic saying that " Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh " ‘all Jews are sureties for one another’ – we have a responsibility for one another, and one of the responsibilities we have is to stand up and say: ‘this act, this practice, this behaviour does not correspond to the highest values of our tradition, we can do better than that’.
That kind of ethical criticism and self-criticism has been in our tradition from the days of the prophets onwards. It’s not comfortable, either to do it or receive it, but unless we are just going to be a big social club, it is a religious responsibility. It’s much easier for us to see ourselves as the victims. We have generations and centuries of experience of that – real experience, tragic experience. It’s there in our minds, maybe at the back of our minds, maybe in the forefront - but unavoidable: the knowledge that hostility has been and is directed against us. That’s not news.
It’s even been grafted into our annual calendar: last Shabbat we read about Amalek, three verses from Deuteronomy (25: 17-19) which describe the way in which the children of Israel, wandering through the desert just after the Exodus from Egypt, were attacked in an unprovoked manner by the tribe of Amalek. These verses are always read on the Shabbat before Purim, our carnival festival when we read in the Book of Esther about the plan by Haman - described as a descendent of a later Amalekite king, Agag - to wipe out the Jews of Persia. A strange people we are – we commemorate an attempted genocide with a festival of frivolity, jokes and drink.
We call that pre-Purim Shabbat Shabbat Zachor , the ‘Shabbat of Remembering’. It reminds us of a grim reading of Jewish history : ‘there is always someone against us, remember that’. ‘Amalek’ is an archetype that is felt to exist in one form or another in every generation. And although this may be a necessary injunction – lo tishkakh, ‘Do not forget!’ (Deut 23:19), don’t forget there are always people who feel hostility towards us - it’s harder to remember something else: that ‘Amalek’ is not just the name for something outside us, but it is inside us too.
When I studied the Amalek text in Israel with some of the extraordinary rabbis and teachers who live there and are battling hard for an ethical Judaism to be enacted in daily life in that country they love, and many of us love, one of the things they all said, in different ways, and at different times, was that there is a battle going on, right now, for the soul of Israel and the soul of Judaism. There are forces around that go in the guise of nationalism or religion (or both), that are anti-democratic (their language, not mine) and contrary to Jewish ethical principles. The enemy, the 'Amalek', the one seeking to hurt and harm and destroy is not just the Other, it’s not about Hezbollah and Iran – that’s too easy to think, and react against. It deflects attention away from something else. No: 'Amalek', they suggested , is an internal experience, it’s part of us, it’s in us . It’s about the hatred and antagonism in Jewish hearts.
That’s hard to hear, hard to say. It’s like saying we Jews are our own worst enemy. We don’t want to know that, think that, hear that.
But it’s what the prophets of Israel kept on saying, and it’s what the modern inheritors of that vision, those brave men and women in Israel battling for civil rights and human rights, it’s what they are saying and putting their bodies on the line for, quite literally - because the aggression of not only Jew-on-Palestinian but Jew-on-Jew is a very real and present experience to them.
What they are saying, and it’s the message they wanted visitors like me to bring home, is that Judaism is not a social club – it’s a way of seeing the world that puts justice and compassion at its very centre. Nothing else can substitute for that. Not even bagels and smoked salmon.
[Extracted and adapted from a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, March 3rd 2012]
Thursday, 16 February 2012
'In Our Name?'
This is how it starts: ‘Purpose of visit?’ ‘A study tour with British Friends of Rabbis for Human Rights. Here’s the itinerary.’ ‘How long?’ ‘You can see on the itinerary – Sunday to Sunday.’ ‘What are you doing on the tour?’
Hesitation. I think of the ambiguity within the Security guy's question. English is not his first language. Is he asking what the tour will include? The details are all there, it’s laid out in black and white, a daily schedule, hour by hour: Jerusalem, South Hebron Hills, Tel Sheva, Sederot, Hadera, West Bank, meetings with NGOs, studying with rabbis, meetings with Bedouin and Palestinians and workers for RHR. Does he want me to repeat to him the itinerary? Or is the question more personal – ‘what are you doing on this tour?’ - how is it that I have decided to go and see for myself some of the human rights, civil rights and humanitarian projects that my rabbinic colleagues in Israel and Palestine are engaged with?
As I hesitate about what will be the simplest response at the El Al check-in at Heathrow – i.e. the response he wants to hear so that I can be processed through security and on to my flight – I realise that it has already started: the encounter with a country that is in a state of heightened suspicion and fear. Where everyone is a potential enemy. Where everyone who is ‘Other’ is threatening. And – as I learnt during an exhausting and revelatory week in Israel – the ‘Other’ is also within.
For Israel is in a state of undeclared war within itself, and with itself. And the battle lines are becoming clearer and clearer. Will Israel become a racist and theocratic state where the rule of law is continually over-ridden by interest groups like religious settlers and nationalists; or will it retain its original democratic ethos as inscribed in its Declaration of Independence? A Declaration that says that the State ‘will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants...it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture...’
But I am still at the airport. ‘Why is there Arabic here?’ – he’s pointing to the paper that I’d hope would save a lot of time and tedious explanation but now has become a focus of scrutiny and concern. The organisation’s name, ‘Rabbis for Human Rights’, is in English, Hebrew and Arabic on the letterhead of the itinerary. And while I pause and consider what to say, another question arrives, or maybe it is a statement, I am not really listening any longer: ‘You are meeting Palestinians...’
What I want to say is that Arabic is still, the last time I checked, one of the official languages of the State of Israel, so it has a right to figure in the letterhead of an Israeli human rights organisation. But I don’t want to be sarcastic, or provocative, because I want to catch my flight - but I am aware of how easily aggression can be generated by the fraught and dense emotionality that is wrapped up in this beleaguered country.
So that was how it started. And that was how it continued. As several of the rabbis we met on the trip said, in a manner so casual that one could easily miss its significance, there is a battle going on ‘for the soul of Israel’, and that ‘the Jewish soul is threatened’ – but most Israelis are living in denial. Denial of the moral and spiritual costs of the Occupation, denial of discrimination and inequalities that are systemic in Israel itself, denial of how a critique of the government or the army can come out of love of Zion rather than anti-semitism or Jewish self-hatred.
Rabbis for Human Rights was established in Israel in 1988 by the American-born Reform Rabbi David Forman in order to give voice in the contemporary Israeli setting to the Judaism’s traditional concern for the ‘stranger’, the ‘outsider’ and the disadvantaged. Their initial focus was primarily on protecting the human rights of Palestinians in areas controlled by Israel; but they rapidly expanded their work to embrace the rights of vulnerable and minority groups throughout Israeli society.
During the week we met, studied with and travelled with a series of inspirational and charismatic RHR rabbis (from across the religious spectrum, including Rabbi Gideon Sylvester an ex-United Synagogue rabbi who now runs the RHR Human Rights Yeshiva) as well as hearing from and seeing in action their professional colleagues trained in law, education and civil rights.
Based in Jerusalem, we spent the first day gaining an insight into some of the grotesque consequences of the Separation Wall that now scars the landscape of Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside. Although the wall – built, ironically, by Palestinian workers with concrete bought from factories owned by President Mahmoud Abbas - has given Jewish Jerusalemites a much greater sense of security, its ugly presence is a constant reminder that Jewish security has been bought in exchange for increased hardship for east Jerusalem Arabs: hospitals that were once ten minutes away by car now require a 2 hour circuitous trip, around Jerusalem and through two checkpoints; livelihoods have been ruined, and families divided.
The shock of the aesthetic desecration of Jerusalem – and Bethlehem, now surrounded by a ‘sleeve’ of brutal concrete that enables pious Jews access to Rachel’s Tomb, but denies access to Muslims, for whom it is also a site of prayer - is mirrored in the moral collapse at the heart of the government’s policy: although Israel has the right and duty to protect its citizens from attacks, the Wall was the most extreme solution available. We witnessed the ways in which its route was designed more for future political purposes – to make territory easier to annex in any future settlement – than for security purposes.
Although one reads about these issues, it is not until one sees the reality on the ground that something of the human dimension to these actions becomes clearer. And it is the human costs that the RHR workers and rabbis are focussed on and helped us understand in some depth. Many of the projects we visited are working at grass-roots level on inequities that ordinary Israelis suffer: single mothers in Hadera who need help with economic and legal problems or domestic violence; Bedouin in the Negev whose civil amenities are far inferior to the Jewish neighbours, or whose land is appropriated for reforestation by the JNF; Orthodox women who suffer discrimination in their communities...the work of RHR embraces a bewildering variety of causes, often in partnership with other NGOs, some of whom – like the New Israel Fund, Yisrael Hofshit, and Citizens for Equality - we were also able to meet.
Bringing specific human rights grievances to the attention of the Israeli public while pressuring the appropriate authorities – from local courts to the Knesset - is an endless job. Visiting the RHR website – www.rhr.org.il/eng - is an experience both exhilarating and maddening: as I read it I am in awe of the dedication of those who are fighting injustices but enraged at the ways in which the State of Israel acts in ways contrary to humanitarian and ethical principles.
As a group we moved from being depressed, angry and perplexed at some of the glaring injustices – particularly on the West Bank where Orthodox settlers are currently engaged in a series or random attacks on Palestinian homes as well as the fire-bombing of mosques – to feeling stirred and inspired by some of the RHR workers who are battling for the soul of Israel, case by case, family by family.
One of the comments that struck me most was that of a lawyer for RHR who said that this work offers you a ‘one way ticket’ – once you have opened your eyes to the reality of the suffering and discrimination that the State and the army (and the two are entwined in a fatal embrace) inflict on people who are seen as ‘Other’ – like Palestinians in the territories, or Bedouin in the Negev, or Arab-Israeli citizens in east Jerusalem – there is no going back. It isn’t possible to un-know what one knows – or it isn’t possible to do so and keeps one’s soul alive (my words, not hers).
It so happened that while I was there I came across an article in Ha’aretz written by Amira Hass, a continual thorn in the side of the government for her exposure of injustices. After detailing some cases in the Territories in Israel proper where ‘the right to memory is presented as a security risk’, she went on to talk about the work of Rabbis for Human Rights in this way:
‘This organisation...takes part in dozens of campaigns, most of them Sisyphean, to rescue people from the civil jaws of the regime of Jewish privilege. They are, unintentionally, bold and painful attempts to save “Jewish” from being a synonym in Israel for racist, lordly, hard-hearted, hypocritical, shortsighted.’
And so it continues, day after day. Let nobody in the future say : ‘We didn’t know...we didn’t know what is being done in our name’.
***
For more information on – and details of how to join – the British Friends of Rabbis for Human Rights see www.rhruk.co.uk
Hesitation. I think of the ambiguity within the Security guy's question. English is not his first language. Is he asking what the tour will include? The details are all there, it’s laid out in black and white, a daily schedule, hour by hour: Jerusalem, South Hebron Hills, Tel Sheva, Sederot, Hadera, West Bank, meetings with NGOs, studying with rabbis, meetings with Bedouin and Palestinians and workers for RHR. Does he want me to repeat to him the itinerary? Or is the question more personal – ‘what are you doing on this tour?’ - how is it that I have decided to go and see for myself some of the human rights, civil rights and humanitarian projects that my rabbinic colleagues in Israel and Palestine are engaged with?
As I hesitate about what will be the simplest response at the El Al check-in at Heathrow – i.e. the response he wants to hear so that I can be processed through security and on to my flight – I realise that it has already started: the encounter with a country that is in a state of heightened suspicion and fear. Where everyone is a potential enemy. Where everyone who is ‘Other’ is threatening. And – as I learnt during an exhausting and revelatory week in Israel – the ‘Other’ is also within.
For Israel is in a state of undeclared war within itself, and with itself. And the battle lines are becoming clearer and clearer. Will Israel become a racist and theocratic state where the rule of law is continually over-ridden by interest groups like religious settlers and nationalists; or will it retain its original democratic ethos as inscribed in its Declaration of Independence? A Declaration that says that the State ‘will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants...it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture...’
But I am still at the airport. ‘Why is there Arabic here?’ – he’s pointing to the paper that I’d hope would save a lot of time and tedious explanation but now has become a focus of scrutiny and concern. The organisation’s name, ‘Rabbis for Human Rights’, is in English, Hebrew and Arabic on the letterhead of the itinerary. And while I pause and consider what to say, another question arrives, or maybe it is a statement, I am not really listening any longer: ‘You are meeting Palestinians...’
What I want to say is that Arabic is still, the last time I checked, one of the official languages of the State of Israel, so it has a right to figure in the letterhead of an Israeli human rights organisation. But I don’t want to be sarcastic, or provocative, because I want to catch my flight - but I am aware of how easily aggression can be generated by the fraught and dense emotionality that is wrapped up in this beleaguered country.
So that was how it started. And that was how it continued. As several of the rabbis we met on the trip said, in a manner so casual that one could easily miss its significance, there is a battle going on ‘for the soul of Israel’, and that ‘the Jewish soul is threatened’ – but most Israelis are living in denial. Denial of the moral and spiritual costs of the Occupation, denial of discrimination and inequalities that are systemic in Israel itself, denial of how a critique of the government or the army can come out of love of Zion rather than anti-semitism or Jewish self-hatred.
Rabbis for Human Rights was established in Israel in 1988 by the American-born Reform Rabbi David Forman in order to give voice in the contemporary Israeli setting to the Judaism’s traditional concern for the ‘stranger’, the ‘outsider’ and the disadvantaged. Their initial focus was primarily on protecting the human rights of Palestinians in areas controlled by Israel; but they rapidly expanded their work to embrace the rights of vulnerable and minority groups throughout Israeli society.
During the week we met, studied with and travelled with a series of inspirational and charismatic RHR rabbis (from across the religious spectrum, including Rabbi Gideon Sylvester an ex-United Synagogue rabbi who now runs the RHR Human Rights Yeshiva) as well as hearing from and seeing in action their professional colleagues trained in law, education and civil rights.
Based in Jerusalem, we spent the first day gaining an insight into some of the grotesque consequences of the Separation Wall that now scars the landscape of Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside. Although the wall – built, ironically, by Palestinian workers with concrete bought from factories owned by President Mahmoud Abbas - has given Jewish Jerusalemites a much greater sense of security, its ugly presence is a constant reminder that Jewish security has been bought in exchange for increased hardship for east Jerusalem Arabs: hospitals that were once ten minutes away by car now require a 2 hour circuitous trip, around Jerusalem and through two checkpoints; livelihoods have been ruined, and families divided.
The shock of the aesthetic desecration of Jerusalem – and Bethlehem, now surrounded by a ‘sleeve’ of brutal concrete that enables pious Jews access to Rachel’s Tomb, but denies access to Muslims, for whom it is also a site of prayer - is mirrored in the moral collapse at the heart of the government’s policy: although Israel has the right and duty to protect its citizens from attacks, the Wall was the most extreme solution available. We witnessed the ways in which its route was designed more for future political purposes – to make territory easier to annex in any future settlement – than for security purposes.
Although one reads about these issues, it is not until one sees the reality on the ground that something of the human dimension to these actions becomes clearer. And it is the human costs that the RHR workers and rabbis are focussed on and helped us understand in some depth. Many of the projects we visited are working at grass-roots level on inequities that ordinary Israelis suffer: single mothers in Hadera who need help with economic and legal problems or domestic violence; Bedouin in the Negev whose civil amenities are far inferior to the Jewish neighbours, or whose land is appropriated for reforestation by the JNF; Orthodox women who suffer discrimination in their communities...the work of RHR embraces a bewildering variety of causes, often in partnership with other NGOs, some of whom – like the New Israel Fund, Yisrael Hofshit, and Citizens for Equality - we were also able to meet.
Bringing specific human rights grievances to the attention of the Israeli public while pressuring the appropriate authorities – from local courts to the Knesset - is an endless job. Visiting the RHR website – www.rhr.org.il/eng - is an experience both exhilarating and maddening: as I read it I am in awe of the dedication of those who are fighting injustices but enraged at the ways in which the State of Israel acts in ways contrary to humanitarian and ethical principles.
As a group we moved from being depressed, angry and perplexed at some of the glaring injustices – particularly on the West Bank where Orthodox settlers are currently engaged in a series or random attacks on Palestinian homes as well as the fire-bombing of mosques – to feeling stirred and inspired by some of the RHR workers who are battling for the soul of Israel, case by case, family by family.
One of the comments that struck me most was that of a lawyer for RHR who said that this work offers you a ‘one way ticket’ – once you have opened your eyes to the reality of the suffering and discrimination that the State and the army (and the two are entwined in a fatal embrace) inflict on people who are seen as ‘Other’ – like Palestinians in the territories, or Bedouin in the Negev, or Arab-Israeli citizens in east Jerusalem – there is no going back. It isn’t possible to un-know what one knows – or it isn’t possible to do so and keeps one’s soul alive (my words, not hers).
It so happened that while I was there I came across an article in Ha’aretz written by Amira Hass, a continual thorn in the side of the government for her exposure of injustices. After detailing some cases in the Territories in Israel proper where ‘the right to memory is presented as a security risk’, she went on to talk about the work of Rabbis for Human Rights in this way:
‘This organisation...takes part in dozens of campaigns, most of them Sisyphean, to rescue people from the civil jaws of the regime of Jewish privilege. They are, unintentionally, bold and painful attempts to save “Jewish” from being a synonym in Israel for racist, lordly, hard-hearted, hypocritical, shortsighted.’
And so it continues, day after day. Let nobody in the future say : ‘We didn’t know...we didn’t know what is being done in our name’.
***
For more information on – and details of how to join – the British Friends of Rabbis for Human Rights see www.rhruk.co.uk
Tuesday, 31 January 2012
Two Artists
You may know the work of Anselm Kiefer. You are unlikely to know the work of Gitl Braun.
Kiefer is the internationally-renowned painter-sculptor (born 1945) who has spent the several decades working on, and working through, themes embedded in, and provoked by, the land and history of his native Germany, producing monumental canvases and instillations layered with lead, plaster, acrylic, resin, terracotta, paint, charcoal, rubber, copper piping , ash, hair, bark, oil, steel wire...the dense physicality and materiality of his work evoking and interrogating what Germany has been and done and suffered and perpetrated over the centuries, and in particular, of course, (and like the writer W.G.Sebald, born 1944), what came to pass in the decade before his birth.
And Gitl Braun, born to Holocaust survivors in 1950 in Haifa and now a ultra-Orthodox mother-of-eight in Stamford Hill, north London, is an artist whose subject matter is informed by her parents’ experiences and silences, and by the stories and layered histories she finds in discarded photos and prayer-books, manuscripts and religious artefacts. A very different kind of artist to Kiefer – and yet her photography and sculpture mirror Kiefer’s preoccupations. And form a kind of midrashic commentary on his themes of loss, decay, memory and silence.
Their work is currently on display a few hundred metres from each other, Kiefer occupying an acreage of space in the new White Cube gallery in Bermondsey (www.whitecube.com) and Braun occupying a corner of a nearby bookshop-gallery (www.woolfsonandtay.com). The contrast in scale between the two exhibitions is enormous – the surface space of all of Braun’s work would fit comfortably (but uncomfortably) within a corner of one of Kiefer’s vast canvases. But the scale of their vision is comparable – and to visit one after the other is a revelation.
Braun’s photographs show sacred books and texts now discarded, yet retaining their numinous aura, their sense of a depth of knowledge and tradition that once lived and inspired the faithful – while Kiefer‘s work continually harks back to figures and motifs from Europe’s religious and spiritual heritage: the Golem of Prague, the alchemical tradition, Paracelsus, the philosopher’s stone, Rabbi Loew and the Jewish mystical tradition, the Knights Templar, Thor’s hammer, the description of God’s chariot in Ezekiel – this latter conceived of humorously as a four-seat bicycle with wheels within wheels, while at the same time being a wry comment on the way in which mystery today has become commodified, and reduced in imaginative scale...
The geographical proximity and juxtaposition of these two contrasting – but complementary – exhibitions is of course coincidental. But ‘coincidence’, as we know, is another way of talking – a secular way of talking – about what the religious adherents alluded to in both artists’ work always understood: that everything is connected to everything else, for all is One. And that meaning is grafted into Creation.
Kiefer is the internationally-renowned painter-sculptor (born 1945) who has spent the several decades working on, and working through, themes embedded in, and provoked by, the land and history of his native Germany, producing monumental canvases and instillations layered with lead, plaster, acrylic, resin, terracotta, paint, charcoal, rubber, copper piping , ash, hair, bark, oil, steel wire...the dense physicality and materiality of his work evoking and interrogating what Germany has been and done and suffered and perpetrated over the centuries, and in particular, of course, (and like the writer W.G.Sebald, born 1944), what came to pass in the decade before his birth.
And Gitl Braun, born to Holocaust survivors in 1950 in Haifa and now a ultra-Orthodox mother-of-eight in Stamford Hill, north London, is an artist whose subject matter is informed by her parents’ experiences and silences, and by the stories and layered histories she finds in discarded photos and prayer-books, manuscripts and religious artefacts. A very different kind of artist to Kiefer – and yet her photography and sculpture mirror Kiefer’s preoccupations. And form a kind of midrashic commentary on his themes of loss, decay, memory and silence.
Their work is currently on display a few hundred metres from each other, Kiefer occupying an acreage of space in the new White Cube gallery in Bermondsey (www.whitecube.com) and Braun occupying a corner of a nearby bookshop-gallery (www.woolfsonandtay.com). The contrast in scale between the two exhibitions is enormous – the surface space of all of Braun’s work would fit comfortably (but uncomfortably) within a corner of one of Kiefer’s vast canvases. But the scale of their vision is comparable – and to visit one after the other is a revelation.
Braun’s photographs show sacred books and texts now discarded, yet retaining their numinous aura, their sense of a depth of knowledge and tradition that once lived and inspired the faithful – while Kiefer‘s work continually harks back to figures and motifs from Europe’s religious and spiritual heritage: the Golem of Prague, the alchemical tradition, Paracelsus, the philosopher’s stone, Rabbi Loew and the Jewish mystical tradition, the Knights Templar, Thor’s hammer, the description of God’s chariot in Ezekiel – this latter conceived of humorously as a four-seat bicycle with wheels within wheels, while at the same time being a wry comment on the way in which mystery today has become commodified, and reduced in imaginative scale...
The geographical proximity and juxtaposition of these two contrasting – but complementary – exhibitions is of course coincidental. But ‘coincidence’, as we know, is another way of talking – a secular way of talking – about what the religious adherents alluded to in both artists’ work always understood: that everything is connected to everything else, for all is One. And that meaning is grafted into Creation.
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