Galileo's Legacy: Looking out, Looking in, at the Jewish New Year

In 1609 the Italian mathematician Galileo Galilei built his first telescope. He was using newly developed Dutch lenses, and within a few years his observations of the moon, the planets and the stars enabled him to confirm what Copernicus had worked out many decades before: the earth was not the centre of the universe, it was one planet among many that revolved around the sun. What Galileo saw through his telescope sparked a revolution in science and human thought.  And we still gaze in awe at the pictures of unimaginably distant phenomena that astronomy reveals to us.  

A decade after that first telescope, Galileo made a new discovery. By inverting the order of those same lenses he found that he could magnify not the world outside him, but the world of the very small. For the first time in human history it became possible to see the building blocks of human life, and to begin to discover the causes of diseases. But Galileo wasn’t particularly interested in looking down, and into the world around him – he was preoccupied with looking out.

He’d draw detailed pictures of tiny fleas - but he ignored the possibility that they might have anything to do with the plague that was ravaging Italy. For another 300 years countless millions died of the plague and preventable diseases across Europe because the cutting edge of science lay in observations through the telescope rather than the microscope. Perhaps this human tendency is understandable, it’s certainly historically and culturally very ancient: to look up and out, to try to penetrate into what’s beyond - rather than to look down , or deeper in, to look more closely at what’s beneath our feet, literally and metaphorically. So there was a cost to Galileo’s preoccupation with what lay beyond this world - humanity paid a price for focusing on the outer reaches of the skies rather than that interior world much closer to home. 

Nowadays, of course, the technology exists to look deeper into and explore the ‘nanoverse’ as well as the universe. And maybe that’s where cutting edge science is going in our era, with the Large Hadron Collider and the Higgs boson, and all that particle physics stuff that we’re told will lead through nano-technology (and also genetic engineering) to transformations in our world as enormous as those the Galilean revolution set in motion.

But meanwhile - suspended between the hidden vastness and remoteness of the universe and the hidden sub-microscopic particles of which we and everything are made up - here we are, on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year: the time in our calendar when the symbolism of our tradition encourages us to look in both directions at the same time. Maybe it’s a lost art, to look in two directions at once  – it sounds like a recipe for dizziness, or maybe a crick in the neck - but that’s what Rosh Hashanah is about. The liturgical poetry of the day reminds us ‘today is the birthday of the world’, and we celebrate a New Year with this strange counting we do in the Jewish calendar using both the moon and the sun to measure time.

The symbolism of this theme, the ‘birthday of the world’, sensitizes us to our small existence here on the planet, this mere speck in the universe, a cosmic dot that has come into being over aeons of time, evolving in all its chemical and physical and biological complexity, evolving life, infinitely slowly, from the primal soup through plant life, animal life, human life, evolution in all its mystery and grandeur, from protoplasmic slime evolving into us, in all our glory, in all our transient fragility. Each of our brains – that ‘three pounds of  jelly’ as the late Oliver Sacks once described it – each human brain contains 100 million neurons and 100 trillion synapses. That’s some awesome evolution we have gone through.

Today is the ‘birthday of the world’ – and we celebrate creation  and our ongoing existence in creation. We do look up, we look around, we look out – and we glimpse, we sense, that there is something incomprehensible about our being here, about anything so complex as us being here at all. And the imagery of the Jewish New Year encourages us to think about this mystery: our smallness, our insignificance within all of creation. It helps us to feel a humility in the face of the majesty of being. So that’s one direction we look at this time of the year.

But of course we also look in another direction. We not only look out, we look in. It’s the time of the year for the microscope as well as the telescope. The New Year also asks us to direct our attention inwards, it prompts us towards self-examination. It’s as if it says:  ‘given that we are here, alive, now, given that we extraordinary creatures do exist on this extraordinary planet in this extraordinary universe, how are we getting on with this job of being human:  what are we making of our lives?’

It asks us to put ourselves under the microscope and see what’s there: it asks us to look at our human qualities – how are they developing, where are they atrophied, which ones are healthy, where do they need treatment? Is our capacity for kindness flourishing? Is our capacity for love in need of repair? Is our capacity for generosity wearing thin?

In the poetry of our tradition, alongside the motif of  the ‘birthday of the world’, Rosh Hashanah is also called Yom Ha-Din, the Day of Judgement. For each of us. We adjust our inner lenses and look at the state of our souls and hearts. And this is private work, personal work, that we each do during these days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur  - we do it on our own, though we also do it in a collective setting, and gain strength from each other in doing so. We recognise that our fates are intertwined with each other, as a community, as a people, the Jewish people – who are guests on this planet along with every other people. Although the process of  self-examination is personal, we acknowledge that we are all in this human predicament together.

So these are the days for looking inside, and making judgements about what we see. You don’t have to believe in some external deity who does the judging – you don’t have to take the liturgy’s imagery literally, in other words  – to see that there is an inner spiritual process being described in our tradition that has a relevance whatever we believe about the traditional imagery with its divine Being recording our lives in the great Book of Life. There is passion in this poetry - and like all great poetry it helps us sense that we live in two worlds: we live simultaneously not just in the physical, material world but also in another world, of spirit, of soul, of conscience, of intuitions and intimations, of  values and vision, a world of  meaning;  meaning that is not just dictated from on high but that we help create, help come into being.

The Jewish New Year asks the Jewish people to take upon themselves a self-questioning on behalf of all humanity. The chutzpah of this is breathtaking. The religious mythology of the day suggests that the well-being of the world depends on the self-reflective, self-judging efforts of the Jewish people. Arrogantly or not, humbly or not, we the Jewish people meet together on the New Year and insist on taking seriously a central spiritual and ethical question: how we are bearing up to this demanding task of being human? Fully human. Meaning: how well are we living our qualities of empathy, love, fellow-feeling, altruism, our sense of fairness and justice, all our finer, nobler qualities – are we expressing them as best we can, individually and as a people? or are we allowing ourselves to be dominated by those other qualities that are also part of who we are - our fearfulness, our possessiveness, our aggression, our cruelty, our meanness of spirit?

Judaism has long acknowledged that we are continually being pulled between these different sides of our being, between our creative divine potential and our destructiveness. And in these days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur , if we are honest it sometimes doesn’t take too long under the microscope for us to see what’s eating away at our souls and our better selves.  Souls can grow sick, souls can become cancerous, as well as bodies. We know this - though we perhaps don’t want to know this.

On these days we cast a net into the depths of the soul and see what we pull up, what we can glimpse there: and sometimes we are shocked or shamed by what is lurking there, and sometimes we are dazzled by the light that we catch sight of.

Perhaps this year there is no better litmus test of the state of our souls than our response to the refugee crisis, the greatest humanitarian and ethical challenge of our time. Suffice it to say that if you listen to three different European leaders – Germany’s Angela Merkel, open-hearted, bold, generous, compassionate; David Cameron, timorous, calculating, uncomfortably at odds with the perhaps surprising groundswell of public sympathy in the UK, the wish to respond practically and magnanimously to the crisis; and Hungary’s Viktor Orban, self-righteous, xenophobic, racist, callous – when we see these responses played out in front of us, we might find elements, traces, of all those stances inside us if we look closely enough.

But at this time of the year, as we Jews reflect on the tussle inside us between righteousness and selfishness, we hope, and trust, (and yes, pray), that we can find and live out the finer aspects of our being rather than the shabbier parts. The pressures and demands of life can sometimes squeeze us dry but we each have reservoirs of goodness within us, and we can draw upon our compassion and empathy and sense of justice as we respond to this crisis that isn’t going to go away. It is our new reality – and the need to seek refuge, to find new homes (for one reason or another, to do with war or economic deprivation or the effects of climate change), the need to build new lives in new places, will be the story of the 21^st century.  

A word about World Jewish Relief  - who are co-ordinating Anglo-Jewry’s response to the crisis. There are many different practical initiatives going on up and down the UK, but it may be that your response is financial - and that is just as important. You may not know what else to do but you shouldn’t underestimate the mitzvah of donating: a donation through World Jewish Relief  (www.wjr.org.uk) will provide food, shelter, medicines and hygiene kits to refugees in Turkey and Greece who are fleeing war and persecution. In Turkey the organization has partners on the ground working closely with the 275,000 children who have had to cross over the Syrian border to gain some kind of safety. And in Greece, World Jewish Relief are working through the Greek Jewish community to help those seen as particularly vulnerable, mothers with new-born babies, providing shelter, blankets and medical support.  

Some people think giving money is an easy response, a way of relieving one’s  conscience. But I suggest that one shouldn’t judge this response too harshly. Yom Ha-Din, the Day of Judgement, says that if you can save one life, it is judged as if you have saved the whole world, certainly a whole world. And what an amazing thing that is for any of us to do. You can send money with the click of a button – and save a life. What a world we live in! As Jacob said when he awoke from his dream-filled sleep: Ma nora ha-makom ha-ze (Genesis 28: 17) – how awesome this place is!  

The poet Seamus Heaney once wrote: “The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life” [from ‘Elegy for Robert Lowell’]. That gifted, convent-educated Roman Catholic Irishman, much missed, was never more Jewish than when he wrote that line: “The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.” It sums up the inner message of these Days of Awe.  

These ten days, these so-called ‘Days of Awe’, ask us to use, symbolically, our telescope and our microscope. We do need to look up, and out, and beyond ourselves – to really see this world, what it is and what it needs; and who is in it and what they need. We need to not be focused only on ourselves, individually, or even as a people, always asking ‘what’s best for the Jews’. We need to look out beyond the horizon of nationalism and people-hood. And we need to look in, to see the gifts and the creativity we have within us (and the harm we do when we fail to live out our better selves).  

There’s always a fluidity between these two positions, looking out and looking in. A dialectic. We move between introspection, which helps us see more clearly, and outer action, living more fully, more generously, in the world we see around us.  Looking in, looking out, looking out, looking in:  it’s as simple as breathing, as complex as breathing, in and out. This is our life, at every moment. The miracle of our being here, held in the being of the universe.  

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, 2015; and themes inspired by a New York Review of Books review (9/7/2015) by Tim Flannery of ‘Life’s Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable’ by Paul G.Falkowski]

 

 

 

Approaching the Jewish New Year at a Time of Crisis

How can I talk about the themes of the Jewish New Year in these days we are living through? How can I talk about  preparing ourselves inwardly for the High Holy Days when there are children drowning in the seas that we go on holiday to swim in? How  can I talk about the importance of reflectiveness, of returning to our vision, our true values, when we are in the midst of this humanitarian crisis, when it is action that’s needed – by communities, by local authorities, by governments?

How can I talk about repentance, and false consciousness, about the need for personal change, transformation, when there are hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing war and persecution and deprivation, when we see these images of trains packed with men and women and children, in stifling heat, setting off towards the West, anywhere in the West, then taken off trains by men with guns for processing in camps? No Jew can see this without a shiver of recognition. Of knowing: ‘they’ are us. So how can we have these images in our minds and at the same time talk about the journey of the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe, and the role of prayer and inner change? How can we talk about ‘journey’ as a metaphor, when these families are journeying in rickety boats, and locked trucks, and now on foot, into Europe, across Europe? How can I do this?

Samuel Beckett comes to mind. The end of The Unnameable, and the last words of the novel: “where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.” Beckett – the indispensible guide to our human condition now, in all its fragility and vulnerability: “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

So at this fraught time in European history, I’ll go on. At this time when the real moral voice in Europe is offered by Germany, who have already taken in 300,000 refugees and will be taking in a million refugees, maybe more, I will go on. For here we see how change is possible, collectively, nationally - when you see how Germany has transformed its collective ethos, has over many decades worked through its guilt and its shame, has engaged in heart-searching, soul-searching teshuvah so its leadership can, when history calls again, speak the voice of humanitarian empathy with the stranger, the outsider – and in doing so put our nation’s leaders to shame – when you see that change is possible, we glimpse something profoundly hopeful.

Change is possible, empathy is possible, the vision of the sacredness of life is possible to articulate - and enact, practically. This is what Germany is teaching us – along with all those local initiatives that have sprung up this week in the UK to offer practical help. That gives us hope, should give us hope, individually and as a community as we approach this time in our calendar when we focus on what needs to change in us, individually and as a society.  

In Judaism action and reflection go hand in hand. And there is much practically we can do in response to this crisis (please visit www.wjr.org.uk ).

But none of this is easy. Our emotional lives are finely balanced. Beckett’s see-sawing reflection says it, the competing voices in us are always in motion: “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

In these difficult times – in the midst of this crisis which, in all honesty, we know has been going on now for some years, but has reached a tipping point over the summer, maybe even in this last week – ‘going on’ with some kind of hopefulness isn’t easy. False hopefulness is easy. Pious words are easy. Pseudo-empathy is easy. But facing up to where we are in a world where 60 million people have been displaced by war, conflict or persecution, this can make talking about the High Holy Days and personal teshuvah just sound crass. It risks making all ‘spiritual’ /’religious’ talk sound crass, or maddeningly beside the point.  

I am reminded of the German poet Bertolt Brecht’s 1938 poem, ‘To Posterity’ – Brecht was a refugee of course, from Germany. His poem  begins:

Truly, the age I live in is bleak.

The guileless world is foolish. A smooth brow

Denotes insensitiveness. The laughing man

Has only not yet received

The dreadful news.

 

What times are these when a conversation

About trees is almost a crime.

Because it includes a silence about so many misdeeds!

That one there calmly crossing the street,

Hasn’t he ceased to be at home to

His friends in need?

So, to speak with too much hopefulness in times like these feels ‘almost a crime’. But maybe it is a crime only if it colludes with our silence about ‘so many misdeeds’?  This is the time of the year when we do focus, allow ourselves to focus, on our silence, and on our misdeeds: on when we remained silent when we should have spoken out, on when our deeds, our actions, did not come from the better parts of ourselves; or when we failed to act, when we ceased to be at home to ‘friends in need’. When we failed to live up to the generosity and compassion and sense of justice that is grafted into us but which is hard sometimes (maybe often) to live out and express.

At this time of the year we return to our awareness that we have these deep moral impulses within us:  our generosity of spirit and of action, our compassion to those who have less than us, our inner sense that tzedakah - right action, righteousness - is something we can enact, that these divine qualities are grafted into our humanity. But it’s the time of the year in our calendar when we recognise too that we are often blocked from releasing these capacities within us: feeling them, living them. That they get atrophied, shrivelled up. And we are reminded that in the language of our tradition we call this blocked-upness 'sin' : this failure to live up to our vision, the failure to let the innate moral voice in us express itself - this is what Judaism calls ‘sin’.

Personal reflection and the hard psychological work of examining the state of our souls is something Judaism calls on us to do in these days ahead. We do it alone, but for some of us we also do it in community. That adds a dimension: we recognise that we not alone in having difficult stuff inside us that stops us expressing our better selves. We are all in this together, the drama of being human. We each have our own stuff to work on; but while we do this alone, we do it while also being held by something larger than ourselves. We do it in solidarity with others.

Can the personal spiritual work we do at this season make a difference? A last thought in response to this. After Beckett and Brecht, a third B -  a Jewish one this time, Joseph Brodsky, a Russian-Jewish Nobel-prize winning poet and essayist who lived through dark times, and huge hardships: born in 1940, he was forced out of the Soviet Union in 1972 (- another refugee -) because his poems were considered by the authorities to be too dangerous. This is the power of the word. The power of writing. The power of putting thoughts down on paper. Thankfully his words are still with us. And there’s one sentence of his that I think is relevant to our current situation: “The comprehension of the metaphysics of personal drama betters one’s chances of weathering the drama of history.” This is a sentence to chew over, to savour:  it’s a hope, it’s a kind of a prayer.

What’s he saying? Comprehending, understanding, the dynamics of our personal drama – all that unique complexity of how we think and feel, all that personal stuff we struggle with, and glorify in, or feel degraded by - focusing on that, understanding that, ‘betters our chances of weathering the drama of history’. The dramas of history can sweep us away in the twinkling of an eye. Jews know that better than most. The dramas of history are the big events in which our little lives are held: the waves can crash over our heads at any time, we can drown at any moment; and yet, Brodsky intuits, paying attention to the dynamics of our personal, individual dramas, can make a difference, can make all the difference.

Note though that it only ‘betters our chances’: there are no guarantees. Reflection, prayer, introspection ‘betters our chances’ of weathering what’s thrown at us. It’s a hope, a modest hope - that is, nevertheless, a real prayer for our beleaguered times.

[extracted from a sermon given at the ‘Selichot’ service at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on the night of September 5^th 2015]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oliver Sacks's Gift (In Memory:1933-2015)

The strain was beginning to show. In a smart London hotel suite, surrounded by a chaos of scattered papers, books, empty whisky glasses, Oliver Sacks was decidedly grumpy. No, more than grumpy: he was angry. January 1990: at the end of a week immersed in round-the-clock interviews about his latest book (Seeing Visions, on deafness), Sacks was faced with yet another publicity chore. I felt I was sitting with a man ready to explode.

He’d already spoken to the Jewish press in Bristol, he told me – I’d been commissioned by the Jewish Chronicle to interview him – and he didn’t know why he needed to speak to me. Neither did I. Maybe my helplessness touched him. Or maybe when I said I wasn’t a journalist, but a therapist and rabbi, something in him shifted, mellowed.

He spoke about (I asked about) his formative years – until the age of six he existed within the security of a north London medical family, his father a Yiddish-speaking G.P. in Whitechapel, his mother the first Jewish woman elected to be a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. In this Orthodox household “the Sabbath bride was welcomed in”, he said, “I always felt there was  a sense of mystery when I saw my mother’s hands hovering about the candles.”

War came, and evacuation to boarding-school, which  “cut me off from family and community and Judaism”. This “awful traumatic period in the countryside between ’39 and ’43” seemed in retrospect - this is a man who chose from the mid-1960s to spend 50 years of his life in twice-weekly psychoanalysis – to have generated in Sacks a great capacity for empathy with his patients, particularly those “subjected to forces and deprivations which threaten to overwhelm them. I think I had something of this myself...’evacuation syndrome’ is second only to ‘concentration camp syndrome’ in its capacity for severe psychic damage.”

After the War, “friends and science were crucial for holding me together. I developed a  strong passion for science – which seemed to be in a realm above human caprice and uncertainty.”

The scientist who kept, he said, a Bible by his bedside peered at me through his gold-rimmed spectacles and smiled, then shrugged half-apologetically: “I – alas! – am the only member of my family who is illiterate in things Jewish...I don’t feel particularly Jewish, or English, or white, or particularly anything else.” I didn’t comment that this self-disclosure about Jewishness sounded conventionally, familiarly, ‘Jewish’ to me. Yet something about his sudden diffidence didn’t ring quite true.

Looking back, I wonder if it was what he wasn’t speaking about that gave rise in me to that doubt: his homosexuality, such an important dimension of his emotional life but in 1990 not yet acknowledged publicly. In his recent memoir On The Move: A Life Sacks recounts how his mother reacted when, aged 18, he confessed that he preferred boys: “You are an abomination. I wish you had never been born.” For the rest of her days she never again mentioned his sexual orientation. Nevertheless – or maybe one can say ‘therefore’ – “her words haunted me for much of my life”, he writes.  

Sacks’s reputation as a writer-neurologist was built on a series of books, case-histories, combining careful observation, extraordinary empathy and a translucent prose style: Awakenings – on patients ‘awakened’ by drug treatment from decades-long trance states, his autobiographical A Leg To Stand On, chronicling the psychological after-effects of a broken leg; and The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, where, like Freud, he transformed clinical descriptions into literary art. All these texts explored the margins of human experience: they were “narratives of survival and transcendence of the soul battling against terrible odds. The imprisoned and pressurised – but battling and triumphing – soul is something which inspires me”, he said, “and makes it possible for me to work in the depths of chronic hospitals.”

But this sense of a man who knew about the soul’s inner struggle was also palpable in the room: “I feel I have to struggle to survive myself” he said, disarmingly, “I’m conscious of...” – and he hesitated – “...terrible forces in me...Clinically, personally, politically, one is confronted with monstrous impulses and destructive forces, and it is very dangerous to underestimate their strength”. The history of the 20^th century – and the on-going barbarism in the daily news – is testimony to the sobering reality of Sacks’s words.

But his writings didn’t venture into the overtly political. His life’s work – his gift – was to find a way of entering into his patients’ inner worlds not as a detached clinician but as a fellow human being, and to find a form of words to describe the experiences being suffered or endured or just lived with. His patients weren’t interchangeable ‘patients’ – they were people, no two alike, even though a diagnosis might make them seem to be suffering from the same condition. “Medicine is in danger of treating the patient as an ‘it’ rather than a ‘Thou’”, he told me: Sacks was the Martin Buber of the medical world. He wasn’t interested in a patient’s diagnostic ‘conditions’ but in the unique lived experience of each person and the core of creative potential that each particular person might be able to unearth within themselves.

The human brain – “this three pounds of jelly”, he once described it  – was a source of endless wonder to Sacks. And as I sat there with him on a wet January morning in a swanky London hotel room, watching him impatiently fingering his dazzling striped braces worn over a T-shirt proclaiming (in Norwegian) support for Tourette Syndrome sufferers, Sacks suddenly burst out laughing: “Being alive and being conscious is fucking extraordinary”, he said, and this sensitive and passionate and spiritually alert Jewish doctor seemed to relax into his deeper self: “The central feeling for me, and the motivating feeling, is wonder and the sense of the mysterious. Beyond all the problems there’s always a sense of the immeasurable and the immense. The sense and concept of eternity is something which I sometimes have, and often need – and which all of us need. The spirit is undervalued and forgotten in a way that impoverishes life. The need for praise and gratitude and thanksgiving and appreciation seems to me central. I don’t know whom to give thanks to, but I have an impulse to praise.”

As my time with Oliver Sacks drew to a close he found himself reminiscing about childhood: “A feeling of peace, and relief from the quotidian and the daily, would come on Friday evening. I used to have a vision that the Sabbath was not simply terrestrial, but a cosmic event, that the universe rested and paused every so often. The feeling of peace is essentially a religious one – certainly something which is easy to lose – especially when you have twelve interviews a day...”

Sacks was a humanist endowed with a profound religious sensibility. A secular Jewish mystic. His gift was to find a way of making real, in his writing and his clinical work, what it means that human beings are created ‘in the image of God’ (b’zelem Elohim: Genesis 1:27).

Zichrono livracha - may his memory be a blessing.  

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]