Abraham, Refugees and the Madness of Ethical Action

A  family leave their country of origin, they leave behind parts of their extended family, they leave the security and insecurity of their homes – they make the journey from their familiar surroundings to an unknown and distant land. The reach a temporary resting place but there is no respite there, so they move on. But still there are no resources available  – in our Biblical text (Genesis 12:10) it’s called a famine – so this migrant family have to move on, keep on going, facing the dangers that arise along the way, they have to keep on journeying until they find some sanctuary, some asylum, somewhere to lay their heads and start to build a new life for themselves.  

It’s an ancient story, it’s a universal story, and it’s an absolutely contemporary story. The story of Abraham the refugee that we read this Shabbat (Genesis 12) is the story we see on our TV screens, the story that dominated the headlines over the summer months, the story that is still very much a present and growing reality across Europe; it is the story of our times that hasn’t gone away, isn’t going to go away – even if it has dropped down the news agenda in recent weeks.  

Such is our craving for new ‘news’, that both the press and the 24 hour cycle of rolling TV and digital news have to keep manufacturing different stories to feed our appetite for what’s new and different - ‘breaking news’ is sexier than ‘heart-breaking news’ that goes on day after day, week after week. The media know that we suffer from what one might call ‘attention deficit disorder’ – that’s not a medical condition, it’s a spiritual disorder, a dis-ease of the soul. It  means it’s almost impossible now to stay focused on what matters, what’s really important, for any length of time: for more than a few minutes sometimes - maybe a few hours - certainly no longer than a few days. How many times a day, an hour, do we check our phones? Maybe we’ve had an email, a tweet, a WhatsApp message, something new on Facebook or Instagram. Something new. Think how we greet each other when we meet: ‘Hi, what’s new’, we say.  

This craving for the new – and it can be material goods, or personal experiences, or relationships, or in relation to the daily news - is a symptom of some kind of  malaise of the spirit. Of course we may not think of it that way, we may not consciously experience it as an affliction at all. But one consequence of our living in thrall to the next new thing is that the ongoing crisis in Europe risks becoming yesterday’s news. 

The greatest humanitarian crisis that we have faced in Europe in 70 years is no longer new news. Even over the summer it wasn’t new. Truth to tell, we know it’s been going on for a number of years now, the exodus of multitudes of men, women, children, from war zones and from famine and floods, from poverty and deprivation, in Africa and Asia, and – since the Iraq war and then when the Syrian civil war began – from the Middle East too. Dangerous, haphazard journeys in boats that sink, and container lorries that suffocate you to death: people risking their lives, and their children’s lives, not because they want to live on benefits at someone else’s expense but because they are desperate, desperate for the things we take for granted – food, medicine, shelter, freedom from the fear of random bombs, bullets, machetes, freedom from the fear of  rape or torture or state kidnapping and disappearance. None of this has gone away. But none of this is new.  

What is new, perhaps, is the walking. Tens of thousands of families, just like us, are walking, right now, through rain and mud and freezing conditions, from one European country to the next, searching for which border is open, and for how long, trying to find somewhere to rest their heads, some hospitality, some sanctuary, some hope for the future. And I don’t think people in the UK are suffering from so-called ‘compassion fatigue’ – because many citizens in this country (not all, I know) have reservoirs of compassion for these migrants, these refugees, for these vulnerable strangers who are fleeing war and deprivation and persecution in their countries of birth. We have as a nation the compassion; but we seem to lack, individually and collectively, the capacity to sustain our attention and keep focused on this crisis and what we can do about it.  

And there are things we can do. We are not helpless. Even though the scale of this crisis is enormous, there are practical things that can be done. We might despair of the niggardly, pusillanimous minimalism of our government’s response – 20,000 refugees over 5 years is quite frankly shameful for a country like ours with historically (by and large) such a strong tradition of welcome for those fleeing persecution; we can compare the UK’s official response not just of course with Germany’s extraordinary generosity of spirit but with Sweden’s response, who have taken in 85,000 refugees this year – that’s into a country with a population smaller than London . But whether or not one feels outrage about the UK government’s response, if you experience your own human concern and compassion, there are actions on a local level that you can commit yourself to. That can make  a difference.  

This week, for example, in the area where I live, Barnet Council have agreed officially to support the re-settlement of 50 Syrian refugees. That’s a pathetically small number – but it is something: 50 vulnerable human souls. This was after a campaign prompted by one of our local Progressive rabbis together with Barnet Citizens (part of  the charity Citizens UK), who together organized local GP surgeries and landlords and schools to commit themselves to working with and supporting 50 newcomers from those Syrian refugee camps. They did this together with other faith leaders, Christian and Muslim, and members of all three of the faith communities that acknowledge Abraham as a spiritual forebear.  

Religious leaders do have a role to play in this crisis. Back in September more than 80 bishops from the Church of England wrote privately to Mr. Cameron urging him to accept at least 50,000 refugees from Syria, and offering a range of services and support, including fostering children and finding accommodation – but in spite of stressing the urgent and compelling moral duty to act, they have basically been snubbed by the Prime Minister. But it was absolutely right that they wrote; and that they have made public their disappointment at the government’s refusal of their offer of practical assistance to help settle these refugees, assistance that would not have put a drain on the country’s resources. (Ironically, it would have been a fine example of the ‘Big Society’ that Cameron has said he’s so keen to promote. It’s hard not to be cynical when one sees such a blatant gap between political rhetoric and action, or the failure to act).  

Both the current Chief Rabbi and the last Chief Rabbi have also set out the moral case for action and both have encouraged the Jewish community to use World Jewish Relief (www.wjr.org.uk ) as a conduit for targeted financial relief on the ground, where the efforts are going into providing medical help, clothing and shelter for vulnerable women and children in Turkey and Greece in particular. 

Money can make a difference of course. But so can campaigning and volunteering – look at www.citizensuk.org/north_london to see local initiatives in London.  There are large reserves of good will and empathy around the country as well as an awareness that the response of politicians and the public will be judged by history. Winter is approaching and we can be bystanders to this unfolding humanitarian tragedy – or we can act.

If you feel you want to do something of real practical value then contact one of the members of Finchley Reform Synagogue, Holly Kal-Weiss (kalweiss@yahoo.com),  who two weeks ago went to Calais where there are several thousand men and women and children from war-torn countries – including unaccompanied children and pregnant women – crowded together in an unsafe camp on a small patch of wasteland. You may have seen the pictures on the news. But you won’t have seen the 1 toilet for every 70 people and the people boiling drinking water due to E.Coli. There are no major charities on the ground – just a grassroots movement of volunteers and some small local French charities. 

If you are someone who is more concerned that your Eurostar trip will be delayed by these unruly strangers, then you probably won’t be interested in this, but Holly is part of that grassroots network of volunteers (see www.calaidipedia.co.uk ) and she is going back there next weekend. She is looking for people to join her to help sort clothes in warehouses, to distribute supplies, to help build weather-proof structures – it is already cold and winter is on the way – she also needs doctors, nurses, first-aiders, people good at DIY, and anyone who feels they can offer the moral support just of being there in solidarity so that these desperate people do not feel completely abandoned. If you can spare a day, or two, next weekend she wants to get together four carloads of volunteers. 

She told me that people think she’s mad for being so passionate about this. Well these may be maddening times, it might feel dementing to see the UK’s feet-dragging response to this crisis, but we don’t as individuals have to collude with this. It’s far from mad to feel ‘I want to do something, I can make a difference, to one person, one family, one small group of fellow human beings in desperate circumstances.’ If this is madness then all of Jewish ethical teaching is a form of madness.

It would mean that all the talk in the Torah about love of the stranger, care for the outsider, compassion for the impoverished, the deprived, the marginalised, all that repeated emphasis on the Jewish responsibility to make a difference to the lives of others, all that prophetic pathos and rage on behalf of the disadvantaged and the poor and the vulnerable, that insistence on justice and righteousness, it would mean it’s all just an ongoing madness. Is that what we believe? Is that what we really think in our hearts? That ethical action is a form of madness?

Or do we think that enacting these qualities as best we can, however we can, is what it means to be Jewish, is the purpose of being Jewish? Isn’t this what it means in that sentence from the Torah we heard this week: that Abraham was told that his destiny, his family’s destiny, his tribe’s destiny, his people’s destiny was to be a blessing? (12: 2). This was to be their role in life, in history, through the generations. To strive to be a blessing, to bring a blessing to others, to act towards others so that, as the text goes on to say ‘through you all the families of the earth will be blessed’ (12:3).

The Jewish task of bringing blessing to others through our ethical actions is rooted in this text, the story of Abraham who left Haran - that happens to be in present-day Syria - and followed a voice, an inner sense of purpose, that started with those words that came to him as if out of nowhere: ‘Lech L’cha – get going!’ Can we still hear that voice today, the one that tells us ‘Lech L’cha, Get going...get on with it...’?

Actually this great call to action that Abraham heard can also be read in a different way: ‘Lech L’cha: Go...to yourself, go into yourself...’ It’s a call to make a journey that isn’t just geographical but spiritual and psychological: go into yourself! And when you do journey into yourself, see if you can find the compassion and the courage and the empathy for others which lives within you. And then see if you can act on it.

Jews know, historically and culturally, in their hearts and souls and bodies, what it is to be a refugee, what it is to migrate, how hard this can be. Jews have been migrants and refugees from Biblical times onwards – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, all were forced to move: the book of Genesis is  a book about migration, about flight; then the Exodus from Egypt created a generation of refugees, of wanderers, of people walking through scorching heat and freezing nights towards a distant promised land.

This is our story, and it didn’t end with the settlement of that promised land, because that only led to exile and diaspora and a scattering around the globe; and in every century there were expulsions and migrations, new beginnings in new lands. The Jewish story is  a story of wanderings: we know the soul of the newcomer because we have been newcomers so often through the  millennia; we know what it is to encounter hostility and we know what it is to encounter hospitality. We know the difference between scapegoating and sanctuary. And because we know all this in our innermost being we can bring a blessing to others who now face upheaval and dislocation and migration. This is our responsibility, our purpose, our destiny.

Lech L’cha: Go into yourself, and find the beating heart of your better selves. And call it the voice of God that asks this of you, or the voice of conscience – it doesn’t matter. What matters is finding a way to overcome cynicism and indifference and fear.  What matters is finding the good that you can do, the godly things to do, not in five years time but now, in the weeks and months ahead. 

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, October 24^th 2015]

On Creation, Chaos and Boredom

The Italian Jewish writer Alberto Moravia, born in 1907, had the dubious distinction of being singled out for abuse first by the Fascist newspapers - after the passing of Mussolini’s anti-Semitic racial laws in 1938 - and then, after the War, by having his novels placed on the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books. The Vatican disapproved of the sexual content of his fiction – but they also disapproved of passages like this, from his novel La Noia (‘Boredom’): “In the beginning was boredom, commonly called chaos. God, bored with boredom, created the sky, the waters, the animals, the plants, Adam and Eve...”

The Roman Catholic Church may have found such sentences and sentiments objectionable – a bored God!, how scandalous, how subversive of faith, the words almost have the mark of the devil on them; but then his father was, after all, a Jew – but to Jewish ears such a playful fictional account is really quite unexceptional. Indeed it is almost normative – it is part of the concentric circles of imaginative response to the sacred texts that go by the name of ‘midrash’. And ‘midrash’ – expanding upon, playing with, responding creatively to, reading creatively into, the Torah is itself a holy activity.

What Moravia picks up from the Genesis myth is not only the creator God who creates the heavens and the earth, the animals and plants and humanity itself; in addition to this he alludes to the way that creation in B’reshit (Genesis 1:2) comes out of the midst of chaos, tohu va’vohu: ‘chaos and confusion’, ‘welter and waste’, ‘the unformed and void’ - this wonderful echoing, alliterative  phrase, untranslatable really, that evokes the act of creation as coming not out of nothing (ex nihilo) but out of some pre-existing space filled with potentiality but as yet without form, without coherence, without fixity, without boundaries, without formal content. A bit like any artist’s mind, any writer, any composer, anyone who creates something out of the flux and chaos of her or his inner world. 

Everything creative could be said to emerge out of unformed ‘chaos’. The traditional Jewish midrash contains one extraordinary story, fable, that talks about how creativity, God’s creativity, is essentially an act of improvisation, an experiment - an on-going experiment in which we, humanity, are participants, whether we like it or not. It tells of how God made 26 attempts to create this world, this universe : but all those attempts were doomed to failure. He tried and tried and tried again. The world as we now know it, says this midrash,  came out of the chaos of this earlier error-strewn wreckage (Genesis Rabbah 9:4). This might sound like the stuff of primitive science fiction. Or like a child trying to build a tower of bricks that keeps crashing down. But what this midrash is pointing towards -  the fragility and impermanence of creation – is, I think, psychologically and spiritually significant.

It’s suggesting, the rabbis are suggesting, that in regard to us and the world we live in, it could all end in failure. It could all – our so-called civilisation, and us, and this fragile planet – it could all collapse back into chaos and confusion, tohu va’vohu. At the end of the midrash, God is allowed a voice. He looks around and cries out, in hope, in anxiety: ‘If only this time it will last’. Of course this is our hope, and our anxiety, that the rabbis are giving voice to, projected onto the Holy One of Israel - that our lives, and the life of humanity, are part of a scheme of things that will last.

But in the midrash, which contains this profound awareness of provisionality, nobody knows if it will last; we don’t know what will endure, or how long, not even God knows. This midrash is deeply subversive: the rabbis are giving us a God that isn’t omnipotent or omniscient; this God is a participant with us in the not-knowing how things will turn out. Is life on earth a doomed project? We don’t know, we can’t know, nobody knows:  this is a picture filled with fear and trembling, with hope and wishfulness, but no certainty.

Of course what this ancient midrash gives us is actually a portrait of life as it is: individual life, collective life. This is where we are. Our everyday lives unfold within this crucible of uncertainty as to where it all will lead. What an adventure it is, life. What an experiment that we are part of. And none of us knows how it is going to turn out: for ourselves, for the world. ‘If only it will last...’

I fell in love with that sentence when I first came across it: “In the beginning was boredom, commonly called chaos. God, bored with boredom, created the sky, the waters, the animals, the plants, Adam and Eve...”

Boredom is such an interesting theme. I often hear people talking about being bored. And children often complain they are bored. ‘Boring!’ is one of the most effective arrows a child – or a teenager - can shoot out from their quiver of insults. But what do they mean really? What do we mean? If you dig a little, you might discover that contrary to what many people think, ‘boredom’ is not a feeling: it’s a kind of mood, a mood filled with frustration. It’s a suspended state of waiting for something to happen; a waiting  filled with frustration, or anger, that something/anything hasn’t happened yet. It’s a kind of restlessness of the spirit, a waiting for something to turn up that’s worth wanting.

In Moravia’s fictional portrait, God gets so fed up with waiting for something to happen that will interest him that he decides to take matters into his own hands, so to speak, and create something that will enliven him. I find that a useful model for ourselves – let me give a personal example.  

One of the things that happened to me over the years was that I became bored with conventional synagogue services. And by bored mean frustrated. To sit in a service and wait for something to happen – for something to turn up that’s worth wanting – was, in my experience, hugely frustrating. Why would you put yourself through that? Why would anyone? We know that many hundreds of thousands of Jews – but it is the same in Christianity – have decided it’s not worth putting themselves through the ordeal of waiting for something to turn up in services that’s worth wanting.

What was I waiting for, and wanting? I suppose this waiting was for some new insight to be born, or some transformation of feeling, or some fresh insight into myself or life or holiness or God; or waiting for some moment of stillness, some space where an answer or response might arrive within that endless sea of words flowing around me. 

Well, like the God character in Moravia’s fable, I got bored with being bored,  frustrated with so much frustration of the spirit, a spirit that wants to come alive, or more alive; and I realised I had to create something, something more expansive – if not ‘the sky, the waters, the animals, the plants, Adam and Eve...’, then at least something that embraced and could speak about anything under the heavens and on the earth, something that had human beings within it, something that had people at the heart of it. Not the texts of the tradition at the heart of our divine service but the texts of our own lives at the heart of divine service. A form of service that recognises and celebrates that our lives are a form of divine service, can become a form of serving the divine. Our lives.

Over the last twenty years or so at Finchley Reform we have been experimenting with ‘Alternative’ services. But like God in the midrashic fable, who is aware that the project of creating a world is provisional, and always at risk of failure, that is how it is with Alternative services: one never knows how it will turn out, what the unique combination of this group of people, at this hour, on this day, will create together, because each service is a new creation.

We always start afresh, there’s always a sense of beginning, beginning anew each time - in hope, in anticipation, in an awareness of our own wanting (we don’t always know what for), but a holding ourselves open to the new, the unexpected, what reveals itself moment by moment, as we engage with ourselves, with each other, with the texts of tradition and the texts of our own lives - and with the silence that holds us in its tender embrace. And this new 'creation' seems to work – whatever ‘work’ means – some of the time.

Of course what I also want to do, what I want to know, is how do we create this in our more conventional, traditional services - this spirit of creative aliveness? How do we create a form of religious service that is an antidote to boredom? I am open to suggestions.

[based on themes explored in a sermon given on Shabbat B’reshit at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on October 10^th, 2015]

 

 

 

 

 

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]