On Snakes, Encyclicals and Pope Francis's Vision

Is it possible that in these next six months the fate of our planet will be sealed? It won’t of course feel like that – life will go on into 2016 and beyond, much as before – but we are on the very edge of a cliff, with a dangerous and terrifying descent ahead of us if we slip over it. If this sounds dramatic, too dramatic, that can’t be helped.

Because the stakes are very high – nothing less than the future well-being of humanity on this tiny speck of dust in the cosmos, this precious, awesome, planet with its precious, infinitely-varied cargo: human and animal and plant, the seas and the skies and the meadows and the deserts and the mountains - all this superabundance of life and life-forms, all this complex inter-relationship between the natural world and the human natural world of living, breathing, struggling humanity: it’s in the balance.

And we sense this, because we are sensate human beings who appreciate, who glimpse, what it means to say: Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh – ‘holy, holy, holy, all of life is holy’ – m’lo kol ha’aretz k’vodo (Isaiah 6:3), ‘the teeming fullness of the earth is glorious’, the whole earth is full of glorious richness, it’s all glorious testimony to creation, ongoing unceasing creation. From the 12,000 species of ant to the 100 trillion synapses in each human brain to the unique patterning of each snowflake to the molten core of  smouldering volcanoes to the wondrous intricacy of the fertilisation of an egg by a sperm – creation never stops.

And even if you don’t believe in a Creator, you are still capable of being in awe of, in knowing the wonder of, the multiplicity and richness of the natural world and the miraculous complexity of individual human life and collective human diversity: m’lo kol ha’aretz k’vodo  - ‘the whole earth is suffused with something quite glorious’: us and nature, humans and human nature and the world of nature, all of it so substantial, and all of it so ephemeral, so fragile, so transient, ‘like grass that grows in the morning, that grows so fresh in the morning, and in the evening fades and dies’ (Psalm 90: 6).

And after tens of thousands of years of slow evolution on this planet, with the pace of human change speeding up in the last couple of millennia, and then the last two centuries, and exponentially in the last couple of decades, after all of this collective morning freshness and growth we suddenly face evening on the planet, and it’s come so soon, too soon, much too soon, and we are in denial that it is the evening, that evening is approaching, we don’t want to know, even though the evidence is all around us that it’s much later in the day than we’d ever realised.

We surely don’t want to know that “our common home” is being turned into a “pile of filth”. We wince at the words, the sentiment, but the Pope didn’t mince his words, he didn’t pull his punches – and we know this is a  Pope who can throw a punch. He didn’t hold back in his encyclical from saying it as it is. In spelling out the peril we face as we render the planet uninhabitable.

This encyclical was an extraordinary document. It wasn’t addressed – as I believe encyclicals usually are – only to Catholics. It wasn’t addressed only to Christians. It was addressed to humanity, to all of us. The Pope didn’t distinguish between Catholic and non-Catholic, between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Because what he was addressing involves all of us. And what he was speaking about – which had been rumoured to be an encyclical on the environment - wasn’t just an encyclical on climate change or a narrow understanding of the environment.

“When we speak of the ‘environment’”, he said, “what we really mean is a relationship existing between nature and the society which lives in it. Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live. We are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it.”

This is a very Jewish and holistic understanding – but you rarely hear it from religious leaders of any kind and Francis spoke of it with a rare and spirited passion: “We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.”

So his message was deeply moral, deeply spiritual and deeply political – all at the same time. And they were all of these because the religious perspective he was speaking from doesn’t see them as separate. Morality, spirituality and politics are indivisible in this Judaeo-Christian vision. So the care of the natural environment and the care of those who live within this environment are part of the same ethical command.

From this point of view the environment isn’t something ‘out there’ , separate from us. The environmental crisis is a crisis about relationships, relationships between nature and humans, about the inter-relationship between nature and human needs. And this is what makes it inevitable that he has to speak of politics and the “urgent need for politics and economics to enter into a frank dialogue in the service of life, especially human life.”

So the Pope held up a mirror to our current life here on earth and said: look at what we are doing, and look at what the results are of what we are doing. Look at how we fail to distinguish between needs and wants. We need medicines but want flat-screen TVs, we need clean water to drink but want long-haul flights to exotic destinations, we need arable land and birdsong and coral reefs but we want 4x4s and off-shore tax havens and free plastic bags in supermarkets.

Our appetites are potentially unlimited, though our human needs are limited and grounded in the basic prerequisites of life: nutritious food, fresh air, good relationships, good health, education, housing, freedom to think and speak and create. The rich, says Francis – and in a global context those who are reading this are all the rich – we have our appetites indulged. And the poor, the disadvantaged, the marginalised, those who struggle to stay alive, who suffer from want of a roof or a meal – they have their needs denied. And this is a painful message to hear - we will do anything to get distracted from the underlying moral and spiritual vision he has brought to bear on the greatest problem we have ever faced on this planet. Many Jews might disagree with him on the role contraception might play in limiting population growth, but that difference of perspective shouldn’t distract us.

For his message was crystal clear. There can never be a technological solution to the problems that arise in our world due to  unrestrained appetite because what we are faced with is at root, at heart, a moral problem. And while greed dominates over need we do nothing but violence to others and to the planet we inhabit, and there is no future in this. Or rather the future will be that our planet will become uninhabitable.

And this will happen because, he says, “we cannot claim to have a  culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint”.  His call for what he terms “sobriety” is not going to be a message that will go down well in Wall Street or in the homes of Rupert Murdoch and his friends. And we will have to wait and see how it is received when Pope Francis meets with President Obama, and addresses Congress and the UN General assembly in September, all in the lead up to those crucial negotiations in Paris at the UN-sponsored Climate Change Conference there at the end of the year.  

What the Pope has done in this encyclical is the equivalent of what God told Moses to do in that strange text we read this week from the Book of Numbers. It’s one of the most wonderful and terrifying parables in the Torah (Numbers 21:4-9): the Israelites are portrayed as a people complaining because their wants  were larger than their needs – they had the daily miracle of manna but it wasn’t good enough, it’s just “miserable bread”; no, they wanted variety – and their punishment is that they are bitten to death by serpent-snakes. And these snakes are a brilliantly apposite metaphor for the insatiability of human desires, gnawing away inside us, attacking us, biting into us with their toxic fury, ‘I want, I want, I want...’, endless, insatiable wants (wants not needs), making us miserable when we can’t have more, or better, or different, or something new. These snakes are deadly – they can kill us, literally, or they just kill off our liveliness, our well-being.

And God tells Moses that the only antidote to this plague is to look at it clearly. Take a bronze serpent, he says, and put it on top of a pole, hold it above the people so that they can see clearly what is causing them the pain. When they are bitten, the only cure is to look at a representation, a picture , an image of what has done the damage. The psychology of this is spot-on. Only by looking at what you fear can you be healed. Look at it, keep looking at it – clear-sightedness is what you need to keep you alive. Don’t turn away, don’t refuse to look, look at what is doing the damage. That’s what the text of the Torah says, and that’s what Francis is saying. He has given us the picture - he has presented, represented, the problems we face, held them aloft and said: ‘We need to look, clear-sightedly, at this. This is what is killing us. But it can be different.’

And that it can be different – if enough people look, with enough clarity of vision, and with enough humility and with enough sober commitment to self-restraint, personally, collectively – this gives us a glimmer of hope. That ‘what is’ does not have to translate into ‘what has to be’ is a source of hope. It’s maybe why the Pope, courageously in the circumstances,  called his encyclical Laudato Sii – ‘Praised Be’.  That’s Hallelu!

In these next six months we will see who can bear to look and who can’t, who can face the need to change and who can’t, who can face the idea of less, and who can’t, who can accept the limits to appetites, and who can’t. Praised be the clear-sighted ones for they shall inherit the earth. Praised be the restrainers of growth, the limiters of untrammelled exploitation of natural resources, for they shall enable us and our children and our grandchildren to have an earth to inherit. Praised be! Hallelu!

 [based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, June 27^th, 2015]

On Forgiveness

I expect you may have seen, either on TV or in the newspapers, that recent historic 13 second encounter between Prince Charles, his ever-so-English cup of tea balanced precariously in his non-outstretched hand, shaking hands with Gerry Adams the current President of Sinn Féin.  I wonder what you made of it, this handshake, this moment of – what was it? was it reconciliation? – at the very least, a moment of what appeared to be a convivial tête-à-tête rapprochement  between the symbol of the British monarchy and the symbol of Irish Republicanism.

As well as the word ‘reconciliation’, the word ‘forgiveness’ was floating in the air amongst the commentariat – but I felt rather confused by the talk of forgiveness and found myself wondering, puzzling over, who was supposed to have forgiven who, and for what exactly?

What we know is that Gerry Adams had requested the contact with Charles, prompted by the Prince’s four-day visit to Ireland and Northern Ireland, and the meeting took place the day before Charles attended and spoke at the church in Country Sligo near to where his godfather and great-uncle Lord Mountbatten had been murdered by the IRA in 1979.

What we know too was that in 1979 Adams had been an open apologist for the murder – even if he has always denied the allegations of former comrades that he was on the IRA’s decision-making army council when the Provisionals put a bomb on Mountbatten’s boat which killed not only their intended target but Mountbatten’s 14 year-old grandson as well as another local teenager and an additional guest.

Apparently, in the private conversation that took place after the public handshake – and we only have Gerry Adams’ account of this – Charles (who is still, we recall, nominally Colonel-in-Chief of the Parachute Regiment responsible for the deaths of Bloody Sunday in Belfast in 1972) had expressed ‘regret’ over the lives lost in the Troubles. In a rather syntactically convoluted sentence that Adams shared with the press afterwards, the former terrorist stated: ‘Both he and we expressed our regret for what happened from 1968 onwards. We were of common mind and the fact that the meeting took place, it obviously was a big thing for him to do and a big thing for us to do.’ (Note the royal ‘we’ in the anti-monarchist Adams’ mouth – maybe this is Irish humour, I don’t know, but the irony shouldn’t be lost).

Well, ‘big thing’ or not, thirty-five years on from the murder, something significant did occur in this meeting, but it is hard to say exactly what it was. The situation is complicated by Adams’ steadfast refusal to detail his precise role in the Troubles. It makes talk of acts of forgiveness hard to swallow. Particularly if you come at this from a Jewish perspective.

Because there’s a basic  principle in Jewish ethics which says: ‘If a wrong-doer makes amends – confesses their sin and asks for forgiveness – it is the duty of the injured party to forgive them.’ This is the halacha – Jewish law. Forgiveness is dependent upon the person who has done wrong taking responsibility for what they have done – that’s what ‘confessing their sin’ implies – and having the humility and the courage to ask for forgiveness. If this happens, then it is the duty of the injured party – in other words it’s their responsibility (whatever they might feel about it) - to offer forgiveness to the wrong-doer.

So from this perspective it is clear that Gerry Adams – who has neither confessed to involvement in the crime, nor asked to be forgiven (because of course he’s done nothing wrong in his eyes) – hasn’t merited Charles’s magnanimous gesture. Maybe forgiveness was in Charles’ heart – it’s not of course for me to say – but somewhat mealy-mouthed joint ‘expressions of regret’ from Adams seem to miss the mark. I hope that’s not too jaundiced a view, but there just seemed to me something asymmetrical and askew in this supposed historic handshake.

Would it be too cynical to suggest that at the root of this meeting was Adams’ political concerns, an attempt to woo the Irish electorate prior to next year’s elections to the Dial, the Irish Parliament?  Particularly as they are falling behind in the polls to Fine Gail, trying to lay the ghost of the past can only help Sinn Féin win over sceptical voters. Prince Charles may have been demonstrating some true nobility of character but his open-heartedness also serves the political interests of Adams and his Sinn Féin colleagues.

But as we know, former terrorists who come to lead their countries are not exactly a rare species.  Israel has a rather undistinguished track record in this department. Menachem Begin was commander of the Irgun when they blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 96 people. Yitchak Shamir was the head of the Stern gang who carried out a string of assassinations prior to Independence. And Ariel Sharon was found indirectly, but personally, responsible for the Sabra and Shatillah massacres of Palestinians in 1983. None of this bloody history stopped these men becoming Prime Minister. Yasser Arafat made a parallel transition from terror to statesmanship.

The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was accompanied by multiple terrorist acts – including the murder of the royal family. And 25 years later Stalin – steeped in the blood of his own people – was the resolute ally of Churchill and Roosevelt in the fight against fascism. VE Day could not have happened without him. And of course, famously, we remember Nelson Mandela. It wasn’t until a vote in Congress in April 2008 that Mandela, then 90 years old and a Nobel Peace prize winner,  was taken off the US terrorist list so he could visit the country at the invitation of President Bush.

But what’s all this got to do with us? Whether the Prince Charles/ Gerry Adams meeting involved forgiveness or not, the theme of forgiveness is still a real issue much closer to home: anyone who’s ever been hurt in a relationship, anyone who’s ever been let down, or abused, or betrayed, anyone who’s suffered mockery or humiliation, anyone who’s been wronged in a relationship – and this must include all of us, whether it is as a child with their schoolmates, or at work, or in business, or in friendships, or in a marriage – all of us know what it is to be the injured party.

All of us know the pain, the distress, when we have been wronged – by our peers, or by strangers, by colleagues, by our parents, or our children, or our partners. The hurt can be physical, or it can be emotional, or it can be mental, psychological. Or it  can be all of these. This is the stuff of everyday life, the hurt we inflict and the hurt we endure, the hurt we receive. We know it well, too well. And we know too how hard it is – when we are feeling injured, have been  bruised, damaged,  have suffered through someone’s actions, or lack of actions – we know how hard it is to forgive.

Why should we forgive, we say, when they haven’t suffered too? Why should we forgive, when they haven’t acknowledged our hurt? Why should we forgive, even if they have admitted their wrongdoing? Why should we forgive, just because they ask us to? As if it’s the easiest thing in the world. When forgiveness is one of the hardest things in the world. One of the hardest.

I still haven’t forgiven some people, for some things. I know this. And I see myself as quite a forgiving person. But some hurts still stick stubbornly inside, and some angers and resentments, and I can’t forgive, or at least I haven’t managed it yet. And I don’t think I’m alone in this – the recognition that to forgive is very hard work. So although Jewish teaching says it’s our duty, if we are the injured party, to forgive – it doesn’t tell us how we are supposed to do that.

Of course it is easier when someone who has done us wrong admits that they have – ‘confesses their sin’ to use that old-fashioned language I quoted before. Or if someone actually has the courage to ask for forgiveness. But that doesn’t always happen. Maybe they can’t. Or maybe they are no longer here to do it. And then, we might want to forgive, we might want to be released from old hurt, an old grievance, an old wound we still feel – but we just can’t find it in us, how to do it, how to forgive.

And then, perhaps all we can do is try to forgive ourselves. Forgive ourselves for our inability to forgive others. Can we at least do that? Maybe that’s the clue to being able to forgive someone else for the hurt or wrong they have done us. We have to be able to forgive ourselves – for being so weak, so sensitive, so fragile, so uncaring. We have to be able to forgive ourselves for our common, shared human frailties; and inadequacies. We have to be able to forgive ourselves for all the times we fail to live up to our ideals, all the times we don’t act from our generous and compassionate selves, for all the times we are mean-spirited and selfish and cruel, we have to be able to forgive ourselves for all the times we fail to live from our better selves.

And if we can do this work, this inner work - and it is psychological work and spiritual work, and it never ends – if we can do this work as best we can, then we might be able to begin to forgive others who have also failed to live out their better selves and have caused us the hurt and harm in the first place.

The beginning of forgiving others is learning to forgive oneself. Both are hard work, but it’s what being human is all about.

[based on  a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, May 30th 2015]

 

Re-thinking Blasphemy

Sometimes – perhaps more frequently than is comfortable (but why should we expect to be comfortable?) – the Torah texts we read in synagogue are rather daunting. They challenge our contemporary sensibilities. This week, for example, we read about the stoning to death of a ‘blasphemer’; and this leads to the famous injunction that a person who injures another should be able to seek restitution ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ (Leviticus 24: 10-23).

This is the kind of text that gives the Hebrew Bible such a bad press in some quarters. It’s the sort of text that when you first hear it – let’s say you’re Professor Richard Dawkins (I know, it’s hard to imagine, but have a go) – you say to yourself, or you publish a book and say, ‘What kind of a primitive religion is this, stoning to death someone for blasphemy? And what kind of vengeful morality is this that says if you kill someone, then you have to be killed, or that whatever has been done to you justifies you doing it back to them in exactly the same way, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”? What kind of God do you people believe in that says this is the necessary and right thing to do, that this is ethical ? How can you follow, and praise - how can you worship - a God who wants you to engage in this violence? Aren’t you just using your imaginary God in order to justify your own worst impulses?’

The problem with this kind of knee-jerk dismissiveness is that it prevents you entering any further, any deeper, into the text. It is a form of prejudice - prejudice as in ‘pre-judging’ what something might mean, or be trying to say, or symbolise, or point towards. It’s an easy option and involves the unthinking condescension that believes that we are somehow morally superior to those who crafted these ancient narratives, or that we inheritors of the Enlightenment, such proud possessors of a finely-tuned intelligence, obviously have superior insights into life than those crude, unsophisticated storytellers in the long-distant past...

Jewish creativity never stopped elaborating on, and imaginatively adding to, the narratives - in the recognition that all texts have an endless number of ways of being understood; and that no one single way is ever the only and correct way. Judaism as a religious tradition always looked at its primary texts and said: ‘You can read it this way, or/and you can read it that way, or/and you can read it this other way; and you don’t have to choose.’ You honour the text by keeping on reading it and opening out the innate undecidability of meaning inherent in written texts. 

It can sometimes be hard for uninformed readers of these texts to recognise the ways in which when we read the Hebrew Bible we are dealing with a literary tradition consisting of narratives that were probably never intended to be read literally, that were already written with allegory and metaphor embedded in them, with their symbolic meanings hinted at in various verbal clues and cues in the text. (cf.  A.J.Heschel: ‘As a report about revelation, the Bible itself is a midrash’ : p.185, God in Search of Man). So for example in relation to that famous phrase ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ – which has so often been used historically as a polemic against Judaism and Jews, that Jews believe in revenge, that the Hebrew Bible advocates acting out one’s aggression, measure for measure, that if someone hurts you and causes you loss you are permitted, required, to cause them the same loss – that kind of literal, reductive reading of the text was not how Jews over the centuries actually read and understood this text.

They read it with an alertness first of all to the way the storytellers chose to frame it in a story about ‘Shelomit, daughter of Dibri of the tribe of Dan’ – names which in Hebrew are a kind of play-on-words:  the woman’s name (as the Biblical scholar and anthropologist Mary Douglas has suggested) can be translated ‘Compensation, daughter of Law-suit, of the tribe of Judgment’. Of course you don’t get that in our translations - but when you know what these names mean it creates for the reader a knowingness, a resonance, that reverberates into what follows.

So when we come to the sentence that describes an ‘eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ we are already primed to understand that within a society the concept of retribution/recompense  can’t be based on a tit-for-tat acting out, a sort of Lord of the Flies morality of the playground; retribution is removed from the realm of personal vendettas and blood feuds and placed within a system of justice: within Judaism this text has always been understood as being about financial compensation, legal compensation – that the value of what someone had lost had to be thought about and then honoured in a corresponding material or monetary way. The text is not there to be acted out literally, it’s to be interpreted symbolically. And there’s a world of difference between the two.

The rabbis of the Talmud and midrash – who interpreted these texts in the thousand years after the Bible was written – were always perfectly clear about this. They paid great attention to creating a system of justice and legal processes in order to bring the vision of the Torah into daily life. They were trying to refine people’s moral sensibilities. So sometimes they developed clues and hints and ideas embedded in the text of the Torah itself. But at other times they read against the grain of a plain meaning of the text, guided by an evolving sensitivity to the underlying moral vision of the Torah: a concern for the sacred nature of all human life.  All of which is to say that Judaism as an evolving culture came to depend on not reading texts reductively. The rabbis, interpreters, commentators,  were not, in other words, fundamentalists.

Because they knew, as we know, that if you read sacred scriptures from a fundamentalist perspective – that there is only one meaning, unchanging through all time – if you read and live that way, the likelihood is that your religion turns toxic. And all religions historically can become, and have become, and do become, toxic – that is anti-life, anti-humanity, destructive of human potential rather than creating more possibilities for fuller human lives.

There is a straight line from some of these texts - if you read them literally, without any process of evolving interpretation - a straight line from their brutality to the brutality of ISIS, and to the murdering of the so-called ‘blasphemers’ at Charlie Hebdo, and to the savagery of parts of the contemporary legal codes of Saudi Arabia and Iran and Pakistan, where people do get stoned, and hands of thieves do get chopped off, and eyes do get blinded.

Within parts of the ummah of Islam, the world community of Islam, there is a problem with literal interpretations of scripture; just as historically in Christianity the trial and persecution of witches, or pogroms against Jews, were based on ahistorical and literal readings of texts in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. And – because I’m an equal-opportunities critic of bad religion - lest you think I’m suggesting some kind of moral superiority for Judaism, I’m not. Because I can point in corresponding fashion to how the systemic mistreatment of Palestinians on the West Bank is rooted in, amongst other things, a literalist and highly selective reading of religious texts by Jewish fundamentalists.

All three of the monotheistic religions have strands of destructive thinking encoded in their DNA – they are all prone psychologically to splitting and projection, to attributing their darker impulses to the others, non-believers - or even people who believe differently within their own religion (think Wolf Hall) - they are all shadowed by fascistic impulses to dominate and suppress: women, homosexuals, those who believe differently, behave differently, think differently, who are not one of ‘us’...

People will ask: why should we trust these texts when they seem so antithetical to the values we hold dear? If by ‘trust’ one means ‘submit to’, then I’m on the side of the dissenters. We don’t have to ‘trust’ these texts, if trust means abdicating our critical faculties or our deeper human sensibility. When it comes to reading Torah, making Torah part of a living faith, we need to be trouble-makers, questioners of the status quo, disrupters of lazy assumptions about what texts ‘mean’.

When George Orwell in 1984 talked about ‘group-think’, and Henrik Ibsen in An Enemy of the People named as the real enemies of truth and freedom the ‘compact majority’ in any society with their unthinking repetition of the mantras of the hour, they were alerting us to the importance of the kind of independent thinking that characterises rabbinic Judaism at its best...

Try questioning in the UK today the alleged need for austerity and see what you get for your troubles. But blessed are the trouble-makers – as someone famous didn’t say, but should have – because inequalities and injustices go unchallenged when we stop questioning and start taking things on ‘trust’.

The Torah teaches that words have power – to hurt, and to heal. We know this from our own lives. I always think that the saying ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me’ is completely wrong. Physical injuries heal, but we probably all bear the mental and emotional scars of things said to us that were deeply hurtful at the time and have never left us.

And the words of Torah can be used to hurt, to oppress, to justify the unjustifiable, to excuse the inexcusable, they can be used to sanction callousness and murder and hatred. And when they are, that is blasphemy. Blasphemy is using one’s religious tradition in ways that are antithetical to that tradition’s emphasis on compassion and justice and righteousness and peace, on charity and love and concern for other human beings and for the planet itself. From a Jewish perspective God is present in those qualities. The Torah is full of descriptions of God as representing and advocating compassion and justice and righteousness and peace - so when we enact in our lives those virtues we are bringing the divine into the world.

But the words of Torah need to be lived, they need to move from words into actions. It’s through actions that the words come alive and the divine is made present. The Hebrew Bible talks a lot about justice and compassion and loving the stranger, the outsider, the immigrant, the asylum seeker. The text we read in our Finchley community this week just didn’t happen to mention any of these things. Though there was one line that was easy to skip over: that you have to create a society that has one law that embraces both outsiders, strangers, and citizens alike (Leviticus 24:22). Nobody is outside the reach of the law – or the protection of the law.

Which is why the inclusion of the Human Rights Act within the framework of British law was such a significant advance – though it is under threat from those who still haven’t caught up with the moral vision of the Hebrew Bible. From this perspective too, the cuts that have been made to legal aid in the UK are morally wrong. To see these cuts only as a financial issue is, from a Judaic religious perspective, an ethical failure.

So: words have power. Blasphemy is when we use words to diminish, attack, denigrate other human beings – because in doing so we are attacking God’s creation. In this  sense we are all caught up in blasphemy. Because it can be hard to see the face of God in the stranger, the immigrant, the homeless, those who depend on the state to get by, those who are disadvantaged by fate or impoverished by circumstances. 

And we have all thrown stones – verbal stones – at our enemies. We are surrounded by a culture that loves to throw stones – the media is full of it, the Daily Mail couldn’t survive without it, internet trolling is vicious – hurt and more hurt, and we revel in it. Let’s not judge the Bible’s stone-throwing crowds too quickly. They are us. Just as the blasphemers are us, attacking the presence of God in others not really any different from us. These ancient texts have still got life in them.

[loosely based on the themes of a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, May 2^nd 2015]

Death by Drowning

Drowning is a terrible, terrifying, fate: the panic clutches your throat, you lose your balance, you hit the water, there are screams, confusion, you’re choking, struggling for air, spluttering,  gasping for breath, grasping at hands, bodies, nothing to be done, this is the end, you’re fighting for life, choking lungs, churning helplessness, no air, everything you’ve lived for, gagging, retching, nothing left, can’t breathe, this can’t be how it ends, this can’t be how, this can’t be, this can’t, this... Can’t.

“Waves of millions of people coming from north Africa seeking a better life in Europe, if that links in...to a new common [European] migration policy then whilst on the one hand it may appear to be the decent thing to do, I think you’ll find overwhelmingly public opinion will say we simply can’t” (Nigel Farage, ITV News Ten, 20/4/15). ‘We simply can’t. Simply can’t. Can’t.’ Repeat it often enough and can’t begins to sound like cant.

Cant - ‘the insincere and hypocritical use of pious phraseology’. ‘We simply can’t’. Actually Farage in not insincere. He is sincere in what he believes. It just that what he believes happens to be toxic. Morally toxic.

I’ve been struck this last week about how many conversations I’ve had with people – or overheard people having – about last weekend’s boat disaster off the coast of Libya. There are not that many larger news events that actually penetrate our small daily worlds, our personal dramas and worries. But this one seemed to - that story and the pictures of 700, 800, 900 (we will never know) deaths. I’m aware that the phrase I just used, ‘boat disaster’, somehow anaesthetises the horror of the story. All those people drowned, terrified souls, men and women and children, many who’d paid their life savings to buy passage in a rickety wooden fishing trawler - out of their Egypt towards their Promised Land - and many others who were locked in the hold, being trafficked from their homelands to the fleshpots of Europe.

Somewhere inside us, this event has snagged on our imaginations. We haven’t been able to let it go – even though it’s been only one of several other boats that have sunk this last week, with scores more deaths, that have hardly been reported. The tides of news wash in and over us, and the tides wash out, but this incident is the one that sticks inside, that won’t leave us, flotsam snagging on our compassion, or our guilt, or our indifference, or our feelings of helplessness, or anger, or wish to blame someone for what happened.

Blame the boat owners fleecing their human cargo, blame the victims who wanted to better themselves at our expense, blame the Muslims who were rumoured to have been throwing Christians overboard, or blame those on the boat who rushed to one side of the vessel thus causing it to capsize (so it was their fault really), blame the European lawmakers and politicians who withdrew funds last year from maritime rescue missions: someone has to be to blame, we feel, and our righteous indignation gets stoked up – anything so that we don’t have to open ourselves up to the horror of death by drowning, anything so we don’t have to feel numb, wordless compassion, or (which is more difficult) act on our feelings of compassion.

Compassion – ‘feeling with’. How much impotent compassion can we bear to feel ? And how much shame can we bear to feel? Including the shame of it being our country’s Home Secretary who led the campaign to curtail the Mare Nostrum search-and-rescue mission last autumn with the extraordinary argument that if people know they will be rescued if they get into trouble at sea, it’ll only encourage them to come. Typical political cant, based on zero evidence. In reality numbers increased by 160% in the three months after the cancellation of this humanitarian programme.

Yet these are the strangers our Torah talks about, these strangers who seek our shores, who wish to live amongst us Europeans. And where is the generosity of spirit, where is the identification in this country with the outsider, where is this Judaeo-Christian ethic of concern for our fellow guests on this planet?

I have been wondering if one of the things this tragedy has stirred in us, and why it’s snagged in our psyches,  is the dim awareness – an awareness that we can’t quite articulate – that this horror story is not only about desperate Africans and others, whose names we don’t know, but that it’s carrying a message about all of our fates on this fragile planet. That our lives are far more interdependent than we realise. Certainly environmentally this is true, economically this is true, politically too, our telecommunications are global -  in so many ways we are bound together in complex ways with the world’s nations and economies and cultures. And one response to that interconnectedness – with all the problems it generates - is the retreat into nationalism and the little Englander xenophobic pieties of the UKIP-ers and those who swim in their wake. Let’s look after ourselves, and to hell with everyone else.

This attitude reminds me of the story told in the midrash of Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai who said: “Imagine a group of people in a boat and one person takes an iron awl and begins to drill into the deck below him. The people around him start shouting, ‘What are you doing?’ and the person responds ‘Why don’t you mind your own business? I’m only boring a hole under where I’m sitting’” (Leviticus Rabbah 4:6).

The fantasy that we should be able to do what we want in our part of the boat - it’s delusional. Because in this world we are actually all in one boat together, even though we don’t want to believe that we are.  Yet we sense in dark - but maybe it’s clear-sighted – moments, that the boat might be sinking. But that’s unbearable to think about. Meanwhile, each person’s needless death diminishes us, each person’s story of economic impoverishment, or of persecution, or of the struggle to bring up a family in safety, each story prematurely ended, implicates us: it is not just the sea which is cruel, the traffickers who are heartless; we will be voting soon in the UK for political parties whose lack of a moral compass can shipwreck us; parties that can act in ways - on our behalf - which are the antithesis of the values of compassion and justice that we want to see enacted in our world. Values which could keep us all afloat for more than a mere generation or two.

Immigration is obviously a hot topic right now, it’s been simmering away for years, and now with the forthcoming election it’s high up the agenda. You’ll have your own views and I’m too long in the tooth to imagine that anything I might say would make much difference to how anyone thinks. The Daily Mail and the Times and the Telegraph - with their non-domiciled and plutocratic foreign-based owners steering our political discourse - are far more powerful in bending minds than I will ever be.

But when it comes to immigration, and asylum, a Jewish ethical view is fairly straightforward – it comes a remarkable 36 times in the Torah, far more than any other religious and moral requirement: active care for, care about, the stranger is at the heart of the Judaic vision, because (as we heard again in our portion this week, Leviticus 19:34) ‘you were strangers in the land of Egypt’. And even though Egypt was a long time ago, far off in our mythic past, you don’t have to go that far back in time to understand our identification with the stranger, the immigrant. There can’t be a single person reading this in the UK, I imagine, who isn’t either an immigrant themselves, or the child of, or grandchild of, or (at a stretch) great-grandchild of an immigrant into this country. This is who we are. So our Jewish ethical vision is rooted not only in our texts but in our genes, and our own family history. Even if you have joined the Jewish people relatively recently, I’d bet this immigrant story is part of your not-too-distant past as well.

But I know - because I'm not completely naive - that you can’t make government policy, national policy, around the simple dazzling moral clarity of compassion towards the outsider. I know there are issues about jobs and housing and the strain on resources, schools, the NHS, questions of cultural cohesion. But what I know too – and I’ve learnt it from Ira my Ukrainian cleaning lady, and from Lukas my Polish handyman, and from Tori my Romanian hairdresser, and from Roshan my Sri Lankan IT man, and from Marek who does his job on security here at the Finchley synagogue with such wonderful good humour and grace - what I’ve learnt from them is that they are contributing their skills and talents to our country, and they are paying their taxes, and like a few million other immigrants are making a net contribution to the economic wellbeing of the UK.

Immigrants who arrived in the UK after 1999 were 45% less likely to receive state benefits or tax credits than UK natives in the period 2000-2011. But of course we mustn’t let boring old facts get in the way of any prejudices we might have. You don’t have to be a dyed-in-the wool Guardian reader to realise there is something about the immigration rhetoric in this country that is just pandering to the ugliest aspects of our natures: our selfishness, our fearfulness, our intolerance.

The polls suggest we are in for an interesting few months politically. But when it comes to the polls I just remember the text we read today: lo t’nachashu, v’lo t’onaynu – ‘don’t practice divination, and don’t trust soothsayers’ (Leviticus 19:26). For which I read: ‘pollsters and spin-doctors’. The Torah’s vision suggests that our task is to keep our minds free of the cults around us; holiness means keeping ourselves on this demanding and difficult path of compassion and justice as best we can.

Distrust of the outsider, the stranger, is as old as human nature - about what they might do to us, or take from us, or how they might change us: what we might lose. The feeling or fantasy that the stranger is a threat to our well-being is almost hard-wired into our genes. Which is why the Biblical vision was and is such an extraordinary challenge to received opinion: care for the stranger, love of the stranger, compassion for the outsider – this required (and still requires) a revolution in human consciousness. And few of us are revolutionaries. But it just happens to be the Jewish mission, to make revolutionaries of us all, in our minds and in our hearts. 

 

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, April 25th, 2015]

What's the Problem with a Ham Sandwich?

I grew up in a kosher home. Both my parents had come from traditional Orthodox backgrounds, so there wasn’t a question about this. We had separate dishes and separate cutlery for milchig and fleishig – milk and meat;  and the meat we ate came from a kosher butcher, though my mother would always wash it, salt it to remove the blood, then re-wash it, as was required by tradition, just one of that vast array of laws around kashrut that the rabbis of the Talmud, in their wisdom, developed as they took all the priestly legislation surrounding the sacrificial system that was no longer operative once the Temple had been destroyed, and transferred its stringencies onto the food laws in the home.

At mealtimes, we didn’t mix milk and meat, and although I can’t remember if we waited the full mandated 6 hours between eating meat and then eating milk products, there was definitely a gap. No ice-cream or custard after your Friday night chopped liver and roast chicken. It all seems a long time ago, that attention to the strict laws of kashrut. Over the years it gradually grew less strict:  I know that the separation of milk and meat crockery stopped at some stage; but my mother all her life would only buy kosher meat, though all that palaver over how to deal with the meat when it came home stopped, maybe when butchers began to sell it fully koshered, I don’t know.

For an early-onset fish-eating vegetarian like me the whole business seemed irrelevant, as well as archaic. Though I always retained, and still do, a recognition of the significance of the laws we read about in the Torah this week (Leviticus 11), about which animals and which fish are permitted and which aren’t. So I have never sampled the delights of a bacon butty, or pork crackling, or a ham sandwich, or oysters, lobsters, crab – in fact I feel some deeply lodged disgust for anything from the sea that doesn’t have those regulated fins and scales. It’s quite irrational that feeling, but it’s there. The atavistic belief, and feeling, that all those foods (and there’s no other way to say this) just aren’t Jewish.  And that to eat them, let alone enjoy them, is in some small but significant way a form of betrayal of one’s Jewish identity.

As I say, none of this is rational, and I am aware that it seems strange coming from someone who often speaks, as I did in my last blog, about the difference between laws beyn adam la’Makom, ‘between a person and their Maker’, and that other traditional category of Jewish tradition beyn adam l’chavero,  ‘between a person and their neighbour’ -  the realm of the inter-personal; and my belief that holiness resides much more in the latter than in the former, particularly for progressive Jews.

And the laws of kashrut, both Biblical and in their elaboration in the Talmud, are prime examples of laws between a person and their Maker. Nobody is harmed by eating a prawn cocktail or a McDonalds’ beef burger –these are Jewish laws that are described in the tradition as hukkim, laws/statutes, which have no explanation given (except ‘And God said...’) and no rational basis and don’t affect the social or moral fabric of society if they are ignored.

Yet the Torah is clear that these food laws are connected to holiness for the Israelite community. And the Talmudic rabbis clearly believed this and set out to regulate Jewish behaviour around food in an almost obsessionally behaviouristic way.

I suppose that if you think that the survival of your people as a distinctive and set apart community is itself a holy activity, then maybe it does make sense to put such an emphasis over the generations on these distinctive food laws. Because they have historically meant that Jews can’t mix with non-Jews in that most social of all communal activities, eating and drinking.

From the very beginning these laws have been bound up with a maintaining a separate ethnic and cultural identity. You only have to look at a well-known story in that early post-Biblical book, the Book of Maccabees – that’s the end of the second century BCE – where the Graeco-Syrians tried to force an old man, named Eleazer, to set a public example to his co-religionists by eating pork, or even pretending to do it, as a way of showing how integrated Jews could become to the dominant culture. But he refused, and died as a martyr.

The word holiness, kadosh, does mean ‘set apart’. So this concept of set-apartness begins with the foods themselves, and is then transferred onto the people. Obedience to these food laws, in all their multiplicity and with all their arcane detail, became a kind of badge of honour for the Jewish people, setting apart this people from the other nations of the world. The elaboration and perpetuation of the laws of kashrut had this pragmatic cultural function.  For better or worse.

Of course, over the centuries other explanations for these laws arose. Philo of Alexander, the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who lived in the generation before Jesus, explained the dietary laws as being there to teach self-control. Moses didn’t teach self-denial, he wrote, but wanted to discourage excessive self-indulgence. Pork was forbidden, Philo suggested, because it was one of the most delicious foods. Once you started eating it, he suggests, you’d never want to stop. The Torah of course has none of these explanations - what you see is latter commentators projecting onto the laws their own reasonings and rationalisations.

Philo is particularly interesting because of the creativity with which he defended the tradition. So the ban on eating carnivorous birds and beasts, he suggested, was in order to teach us gentleness and kindness. In other words ‘You are what you eat’. The animal becomes a sort of symbolic model for your own behaviour. So why only animals that chew the cud and have cloven hooves? Because a person can only grow wise if they repeat and chew over what they have studied, and are able to divide and distinguish concepts into what is true and what is false. These explanations probably don’t convince us today, but they illustrate the ways in which from very early on Jewish commentators found themselves having to address the Torah’s silence on the reasons for these laws.

So what about the justification for the laws of kashrut that is most often trotted out by their modern defenders? The notion that they were given as health laws?  It was actually more than a thousand years after Philo that one begins to hear this argument, with Maimonides in the 12^th century – who was a physician – opening up this kind of explanation/ rationalisation. He also picked up the earlier idea that it was in order to teach Jews self-control – and this meant conquering our animal natures.

But when he talked about kashrut as being to do with health, Maimonides didn’t know that tapeworm can be transmitted through pork, that rabbits carry tularaemia, that shellfish are prone to infection and spoiling. So it’s not clear what the basis for his health rationalisation was. No doubt there are some health benefits resulting from abstaining from some of these foods, but that was never suggested by the Torah, or the Talmud, as their intent.

A word or two about ‘eco-kashrut’. The word was coined in the late 70s by the traditionalist Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi in the US, who went back to the original intention of kashrut – to do what is acceptable to God – and tried with his post-traditionalist community to think through what this might mean in our own contemporary world. So eco-kashrut asks whether an animal that has been slaughtered correctly  is eco-kosher if it has spent its entire life caged, or if it has been force-fed growth hormones. It might be slaughtered in the required ritual way, but does that make it kosher for us? Is ritual slaughter with a perfectly honed knife the only consideration that applies when it comes to holiness? That the animal has been slaughtered according to 2000 year old tradition?

Or take fruit and vegetables, that might be kosher in the narrow sense of the word, but are they eco-kosher if they have they been sprayed with chemicals that pollute the ground?  In relation to fish, I try to buy only sustainably-caught fish because the ecological issues around decreasing stocks of fish mean the religious questions today are not only about what kinds of fish are we Jewishly permitted to eat, but where they have come from and how they have been caught:  what is the larger picture of the marine environment that needs to be seen, within which my eating takes place?

This kind of thinking takes a much more holistic view of kashrut than the traditional view, but it is continuous with the tradition because, as Zalman Schachter intuited, if you believe that it is the Jewish task to try to attend to what God’s vision for humanity means today in terms of our attention to the details of everyday life, you have to expand your imagination, to think creatively, to seek out ways of living that are congruent as best as possible with compassion, and justice, and the avoidance of harm to animals, to people, to the planet itself.

So eco-kashrut extends outwards from food, in many directions. If you drink a cup of tea which may be kosher according to rabbinic law, is it kosher if it is served in a polystyrene cup that takes hundreds of years to decompose?  Is a household cleaning product eco-kosher if it pollutes when it flows down the drain? If the workers who have picked the coffee beans or the cocoa that end up in your moccachino have been underpaid, or exist in horrendous conditions in some far-off country about which we know and care nothing, is that coffee kosher? That’s where Fairtrade products at least help us feel we are eating in ways that might be at least a bit related to our ethical and religious values.

A rigorously thought-about progressive Jewish approach to kashrut ends up being every bit as demanding, paradoxically, as a strictly Orthodox halachic approach. Kashrut today involves much more than just checking the labels, or getting one’s meat from the right glatt-kosher shechitah authority. On which note: I heard recently about a  distinguished orthodox rabbi  from Stamford Hill who arrived in heaven and was greeted by an angel.

“Rabbi, we’ve prepared a special feast in your honor, with the best meats, and fish and cakes.”

“Who, may I ask, prepared the meat?” asks the Rabbi.

“Our finest chef, Elijah Manoshevksy.”

”And who, if I may ask, is the mashgiach, the rabbinic supervisor?”

“Why, it’s the Holy One, God himself,” replied the angel.

“Thanks very much,” said the Rabbi, “but I’ll just stick with the fish.”

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, April 11th 2015]

Holiness : Then - and Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wish you a healthy and productive Pesach.

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

Jealousy - Human and Divine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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