Thoughts on 'Coming of Age' and Jewish Values

I don’t know how many of you know the Canadian film ‘The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz’? It was made in 1974 and based on the novel of the same name by the Jewish writer Mordechai Richler. 

Duddy Kravitz - played by a young Richard Dreyfuss in the film - is a young man desperate to make some money quickly. He decides that making films of Bar Mitzvahs would be easy money: after all, there’s an endless supply of ceremonies and everyone would want a  record of the special day. The only problem is he doesn’t actually know how to make a film. Of course these days it wouldn’t be a problem because anyone can buy a hand-held digital camera and be their own Steven Spielberg. But this is 1974. So our hero recruits an elderly, eccentric English film-maker, who is permanently drunk, and asks him to make a film of the Bar Mitzvah of a distant relative.  What Duddy hasn’t realised is just how eccentric this Englishman is - not just in his life but in his style of filmmaking. He’s what used to be called avant-garde.

So, the film is made and it’s eventually screened in front of an excited  audience of the whole Bar Mitzvah family, their friends and invited guests. The Englishman’s film begins conventionally enough – inside the synagogue, Torah scrolls, ark, bimah – but the music is odd, it’s Beethoven’s Fifth, and that’s a prelude to what’s to come. The film cuts to a circumcision ceremony, blood splatters the screen, then Zulu warriors appear in full tribal regalia and scenes of Zulu ceremonial rites are intercut with scenes from the Bar Mitzvah ceremony.

Watching this, the Bar Mitzvah boy’s father, cigar hanging out of his increasingly incredulous mouth, turns to the rabbi, who’s also been invited to the screening, and mutters: ‘That’s not what I saw in shul, [in the synagogue]’. And the Bar Mitzvah film comes to a dramatic climax with scenes of guests greedily stuffing their faces with food at the Bar Mitzvah party intercut with an Indian fakir in a loincloth swallowing down razor blades. The credits come up and there’s a stunned, embarrassed silence. Eventually the rabbi saves the day: ‘A most edifying experience’, he says hesitantly, ‘a work of art’. The boy’s father beams with delight. ‘See how nice you looked’, he says to the rabbi. And acknowledging the gathering applause of the guests he adds: ‘It costs plenty...don’t worry...it’s all paid for...’

Of course  - I hasten to add - Mordecai Richler’s wickedly funny parody of North American Jewish life 40 and more years ago bears no resemblance to the integrity and down-to-earth modesty with which our own Bar and Bat Mitzvah families celebrate these occasions. And yet, on another level, ‘Duddy Kravitz’ does have something interesting to say about the power adhering to the Bar Mitzvah rite of passage.

Because what Richler is acknowledging in his sly and provocative book, and what the film also points towards, is the tribal nature of Jewishness and Jewish identity; and the way in which these ceremonies are about young people taking their place as young adults inside the tribe, the culture, the traditions. Our youngsters say, by having some kind of ceremony in the synagogue to mark this transition into their teenage years, ‘I want to be part of something bigger than me called Jewish life, Jewish community, Jewish tradition. I want to acknowledge that I am one link in a chain, a chain that stretches back many generations, one more link in a chain that actually stretches back more than 2000 years. That chain has never broken, it’s never been broken – however hard sometimes the world has tried to break it – and today, as I move into my teenage years, I want to add my link to this chain: for another generation, for my generation, I am part of this tribe’. 

That’s what having a Bar Mitzvah symbolises. Our youngsters think of it as a ‘coming of age’ ceremony - but it isn’t only about growing up, it’s about taking responsibility as one grows up for what one believes in, what one is committed to. And part of that commitment is a commitment to continuity...

Jews historically have paid a lot of attention to the story of where they have come from, and what has happened to them. The history and memory of what the tribe has been through, and what the customs and traditions of the tribe have been, runs like a golden thread through the tapestry of each Jewish person’s  identity. For Jews the past is always woven into the present. That’s why we always go back to the original stories and texts of the tradition – it’s what the Torah is: a great fund of stories and myths and memories and images and symbols and rituals and laws which have kept the tribe going for two and a  half thousand years. That’s why the Torah, in one form or another, is the symbolic centre of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony.

Jewish tradition developed an elegant metaphorical image for the Torah:  it was called the ‘Tree of Life’ – because its roots go very deep, back in time, and because its branches spread out and blossom generation after generation. And each child who becomes Bar or Bat Mitzvah is like a new blossom on the Tree of Life. 

But Judaism isn’t only about the history and memory of the tribe. The Torah is also called the Tree of Life because it’s about what promotes life, the sanctity of life, the dignity of human beings - including the dignity of other human beings who are not like us, who might belong to different tribes, different cultures. Over and over again it promotes certain values, moral values, regarding the importance of care and concern and compassion for the outsiders in society, for the strangers, for the dispossessed, for the marginalised. Judaism’s horizon of care stretches beyond ‘us’ to embrace ‘them’.

More than 2000 years ago, the tribe of Israel, who grew into the Jewish people, developed a way of thinking about what values in life are important, what values are life-giving, what values are worth promoting and speaking about and living out day by day; and they wrote these values down in this unique document we call the Torah, and they said (as it were) ‘we haven’t just invented this way of thinking about living and what’s important if societies are to function well and people thrive in them, we have not just made this up out of our own heads, we have been guided to this, we have been given this wisdom, this knowledge, this understanding - we think there is some universal energy, some force, which has let us understand how to be human, fully human, and how people should live and treat each other. We call this energy, this force, God – Adonai, in Hebrew – which means the Eternal. Because we realise that certain values – justice and compassion and kindness and generosity - are eternal. They are good for all time and for all people’.

Judaism developed this original vision and of course it was then passed on into Christianity and Islam and adopted and adapted by these other great religions... 

I wouldn’t want to be 13 again (there’s no chance of that, I know, but still...): our Bar and Bar Mitzvah youngsters  are part of a generation in this country who are facing really difficult things in their lives as they are growing into adulthood. They are facing huge stresses at school, sometimes at home, stresses to achieve, and to look good; stresses in relation to bullying, stresses that lead to self-harming, and depression, stresses that have placed UK teenagers almost at the bottom of the World Health Organisation’s survey published this week about the happiness levels of youngsters in the 40 most economically well-off countries round the world. And that’s not all.

Our young people are being subjected in this country to a whole range of attacks on their future  well-being. They are facing huge debts if they go to university. Youth services are being decimated around the country. There’s a discriminatory minimum wage if they get a part-time job. There are cuts to social security.  They are concerned about whether  they will ever be able to get a secure, well-paid job. They don’t know if they will they ever be able to afford their own home.  

And they may well think – and even if they are generous enough not to think it, I think it – that my  generation and their parents’ generation have really screwed things up for their generation: economically, socially, environmentally, collectively as a society we have failed, and we continue to fail, to put the well-being of everybody before the well-being of a few.  That’s what used to be called a ‘sin’ – but of course nobody calls it that anymore. 

They see that we are faced as a society with a huge choice: it’s a political choice, and a moral choice, and a spiritual choice. Do you retreat from the world, or do you stay open to the wider world? Do you withdraw into your own tribe, or nation, and just try and look after your own – or do you stay connected with others in different tribes, cultures, countries? Do you try to look out for the interests of people like yourself – your class, your background, your education, your ethnic culture – or do you look out for the interests of others not like you? Do you build a wall to try and keep others out, and think you can manage on your own and live securely by turning inwards? Or do you recognise that we are all inter-connected and so work to ensure that your generosity and care and sense of justice reaches out to embrace others?

There are plenty of voices around, in this country – you can see it every day in the popular press – and in the rest of Europe, in Israel, in America, that are appealing to, arguing for, a narrowing down of our humane values, appealing to the tribal, the nationalistic, the fearful parts of ourselves. It’s not surprising that so many youngsters are cynical about what the so-called ‘adult’ world is doing. It’s not surprising that more than 80% of 18 year olds have a negative view of politics and politicians, and 66% feel that the government in this country isn’t trustworthy. When you are faced by a barrage of attacks on aspects of your well-being in life, and your generosity and idealism is derided as naive or unrealistic, it’s not surprising if you begin to think that injustice is inevitable, it’s easy to become resigned to feeling that you can’t make much difference...

But what impresses me about so many of the young people who have a Bar or Bar Mitzvah in this community is their belief that on a personal level acts of kindness and generosity do make a difference, they change how people feel. And they are more than aware that on a collective level you can learn from your history that the values lived out in a society are hugely significant: that great good can be promoted, that make societies function well and the people in them thrive; and great evil can be enacted that leads to hardship or persecution, and sometimes to death.

None of this is very new, none of this is revelatory, but what our Jewish tradition does is it keeps on reminding us about what matters. It keeps on reminding us through its texts and stories and traditions - because we can lose sight of what matters, it’s easy to do in the busy-ness and business of the world -  Jewish teaching keeps on reminding us: kindness, concern for others, care for the environment, a passion for justice, generosity of the heart and the spirit -this is what matters. The world depends on it. Each of us depends on it.

What our youngsters commit themselves to, as they go through the tribal rite of passage called Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah, is to keep that ancient vision alive, as best they can...  

[Extracted and adapted from a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, March 19^th, 2016]

There Will Be Blood

I’ve never been a very ideologically-minded Reform Jew. I have never seen myself as a ‘salesman’ for the Reform brand of Jewish self-expression. I think of Judaism as a three thousand years old religious and cultural civilisation, a rich and multi-coloured tapestry of belief and practice with complex theological and intellectual and emotional and spiritual threads woven into it: the ideology of Reform Judaism, progressive Judaism, might be a distinctive set of threads in the overall, ever-expanding weave of Jewish civilisation, but temperamentally I don’t feel myself motivated to keep pointing out the softness and sparkle of the red threads as opposed to the coarseness or dullness of the blue threads.

But this week I have been thinking in particular about Reform Judaism’s relationship to blood. I saw that a motion was put forward to the Church of England’s synod to make blood donation (and organ donation) a specific responsibility incumbent on all Christians -  a ‘mitzvah’ so to speak.  Given that only 4% of the population give blood regularly and the NHS need another 200,000 donors a year, this is an important move by the Church, if they are proposing to actively promote it as a religious duty. 

In Judaism blood donation is usually seen as a mitzvah, and even in traditional halachic circles it is viewed as something between what is permissible and what is obligatory.

But Judaism has a curious, complex , ambivalent relationship to blood. And Reform Judaism more so. Most of the sections of Torah that Reform Jews in the UK read in its three-yearly cycle manage to avoid the blood – or at least the bloodiest parts of these sacred texts, where the writers describe the rituals that were a normal, regular part of the Temple cult.

Take this week’s sedrah, T’zaveh, which stretches from Exodus 27:20 to 30: 10. We never read the verses about the consecration of Aaron the High Priest and his sons, where a ram is killed ‘and you take of its blood, and put it on the tip of the right ear of Aaron, and on the tip of the right ears of his sons, and on the thumb of their right hand, and on the big toe of their right foot, and then you splash the blood against the altar and round about. And then you take of the blood that is on the altar, and the anointing oil, and sprinkle it on Aaron and his garments, and on his sons and their garments, so that he and his garments shall be kadosh, holy, and his sons and their garments along with him’ (Exodus 29: 19-21). That holiness was achieved through this blood-based ritual is not something that (for better or worse) Reform Judaism wants us to be exposed to, or have to think about.

Next year, when we reach this sedrah, we will hear about the first part of the ritual, before the ram, which involves killing two bulls ‘before the Lord, at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting’ (29:11), whereupon ‘you take some of the bull’s blood and put in on the horns of the altar with your finger, then pour out the rest of the blood at the base of the altar’ (29:12).  So even in the ‘edited highlights’ version of the Torah text that we read in Reform circles for this parashah, you can’t avoid the blood completely. But, on the whole, we omit these blood-soaked verses. Our tapestry of holiness has holes in it, so to speak.

Part of me approves of this. I do appreciate that Reform Judaism distances itself from some of these more problematic passages that the Torah contains: problematic in that they confront our modern sensibilities head-on.  Historically, this goes right back to the origins of Reform Judaism in Germany, 200 years ago in Seesen, then Hamburg, then Berlin. Cuts were made in the liturgy to edit out all the traditional references to the Temple, and all the prayers which hoped for the restoration of the Temple, and its sacrifices. Not all the ancient Temple sacrifices and rites involved blood, the slaughter of animals and birds – but a lot of them did. This was a clear ideological move  by the early Reformers : it wasn’t an evolution, it was a revolution - to drop the ancient hope for the rebuilding of the Temple.

And the Reform branch of Judaism has never deviated from this position, whether it was in Germany, or the United States, or here in the UK. Contrary to  traditional strands of Judaism, we don’t pray for there to be a restored, Third Temple – thank God, I want to say. In fact we might pray that we hope we never see a Third Temple - particularly (but not only) because it would have to be built on the site currently occupied by the Dome of the Rock. And if Jews started to demolish that sacred building because of these archaic texts we wouldn’t see a Third Temple, we’d see a Third World War.

So my Reform Jewish blood runs in opposition to that whole ancient cult of the Temple and its sacrifices and all that spilt animal blood. 

I am fine about studying these ancient texts as a part of the history of our people, I’m fine with finding ways – as the later rabbis always did – of interpreting them symbolically, but I’m convinced that our understanding of holiness has moved on, and the whole question of how an individual can be in a living relationship with God, with the divine,  and how a people can be bound into a covenant with Adonai, the Holy One, I’m convinced that this quest for holiness now lies in a different direction from the blood rituals that these Torah texts hold dear.

In other words I’m with Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, from the generation of rabbis that saw the Second Temple laid waste, who comforted his grieving colleague Rabbi Joshua. Joshua was distraught that ‘the place where the sins of Israel were atoned for is destroyed.’ ‘There’s no need to grieve’, said Rabbi Yochanan, ‘There’s another way to atonement and to be at-one with God as effective as the Temple: it is deeds of love and kindness. The prophet Hosea has already said’, says Yochanan, ‘that God tells us: “I desire mercy - and not sacrifices”’. 

Another way to holiness as effective as the Temple – deeds of love and kindness. Rabbi Yochanan  ben Zakkai – the first Reform Jew. He comforts his colleague by making the imaginative and spiritual leap – that ethical action is the way to serve God, to be close to God, to be bound into a covenantal relationship with God. Holiness doesn’t require blood to be spilled.

But blood, the theme of blood in Judaism, has a way of seeping out. The word comes more than 350 times in the Hebrew Bible, and it is as integral to Jewish life as is the circulation of blood to our own bodies. And this omnipresence is made beautifully clear in a remarkable little exhibition now on – you can catch it until February 28th – at the Jewish Museum in Camden. It’s called simply ‘Blood’ with a subtitle ‘Reflections on what unites us and divides us’ and it made me think about the extent to which Judaism is pre-occupied with blood, historically and to this day.

The first mention of blood in the Bible is put into the mouth of God, and the context is an ominous one: ‘The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me’, says God to Cain after the murder of Abel. And blood keeps cropping up at key moments in the unfolding Biblical story – Joseph’s coat is torn off him and dipped in blood and taken back to the distraught Jacob, a symbol of its use to deceive; the blood of the paschal lamb smeared on the doorpost in Egypt is a sign of the Israelite homes, a symbol of its use to separate out the Hebrew people, and protect them. And then you have Sinai and all the laws of Judaism around blood. What areas of life does it impact on? Circumcision, kashrut, the laws of menstruation come immediately to mind. And there are sections in the exhibition devoted to all these.

And then there’s the way that Jewish identity has traditionally been passed on through the mother (at least until very recent  changes in Liberal and then Reform Jewish practice), which effectively makes Judaism a religion that follows the blood line. This notion of ‘Jewish blood’ is a powerful fiction – but a fiction that in the 19^th and 20^th centuries was given a veneer of pseudo-scientific  respectability through eugenics, and as we know it was a fiction that ended up in genocide. Ironically, Jewish scientists were as enthusiastic in promoting theories of race as everyone else.

One of the most chilling and provocative artefacts in the exhibition is the chart from 1935 of how the Nuremburg Laws, ‘For the Protection of German Blood and German Honour’ were to be implemented. It shows how marriages or sexual relationships between Germans and Jews were forbidden, but the chart shows how this question of racial purity through the blood line needed to be traced back to grandparents and great-grandparents in order to determine who was a kosher ‘German’, so to speak, and who wasn’t.

Nuremburg also features in the exhibition with a 15^th century woodcut  illustrating the medieval blood libel – one of the central themes of the exhibition is the way in which so much of the fraught relationship between Jews and Christians centres on blood. There is a real psychological drama within Christianity rooted in the experience of, as it were, drinking blood - through the wine’s transubstantiation, Christ’s blood is made present. This is a kind of horror story dressed up as religious ritual. Incidentally, I think that the blood libel is a projection of this horror onto Jews, who are accused of using blood, Christian blood,  in rituals like matzah baking. In a related crime, it is Jews who attack the wafers used in Mass and make blood come out of them – host-desecration - and the exhibition also illustrates this lesser-known part of the history of Christian hostility to Jews around the theme of blood.

So there’s lots to look at there, lots to ponder on – and I haven’t mentioned the section on vampires and Dracula and the Jewish connections to them, including the box of breakfast cereal produced in 1987 in the US called Count Chocula, with a jokey box illustration of Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula with a Magen David around his neck – the makers recalled the product after a threat of legal action from the Anti-Defamation  League. 

But the trope of Jewish blood-suckers goes back a thousand years: it takes in the history of usury and goes right up to the anti-Semitic cartoons of Der Stürmer which you can also see at the Museum.

Once you have been to this provocative and informative exhibition you can’t help but notice how central is this theme of blood to so many aspects of Judaism, Jewish history, Jewish ritual life, Jewish social life, positively and negatively. It’s integral to the tribal identity of Judaism – and it’s part of the rhetoric and iconography of anti-semitism through the ages.

Reform Judaism may shy away from some of its manifestations, it may edit out some of the Torah’s more difficult texts, it may have a more relaxed attitude to kashrut, menstruation rites, even circumcision – it may want to concentrate on the ethics and the spirituality – but I have a nagging suspicion that this is cheating us of some of the richness, the complexity, the ambiguity of our long and bloody history.

The Jewish story has blood running in its veins just as Jews have blood running in their veins.  Shakespeare , as so often, said it best: ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ The Merchant of Venice is a play about blood, Christian blood and Jewish blood, and what these phrases/concepts really mean, or if they mean anything at all.

Do you think there’s such a thing as ‘Jewish blood’? Even if you don’t, most of the world does.  I sometimes think that Reform Judaism would like to promote itself as a bloodless religion, a religion of ethical living and celebration and gentle religious observance , a religion of the mind and the soul, and the heart – as long as the heart is a metaphor. 

But if we turn away from the reality, the physicality, the oozing, flowing, coagulating viscosity of actual blood – human blood and animal blood - that courses through the veins  of Jewish life and Jewish texts and Jewish myth and Jewish history, I suspect it will come back, vampire-like, to bite us.

 [based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, February 20th, 2016]

Clinging On For Dear Life

Servitude to tyrants is always oppressive. Hardship after hardship, year in year out, the never-ending horizonless drudgery batters the body and scars the soul. Dictators come and dictators go, but for the ordinary person in a totalitarian regime, the story is always the same. Any regime where personal freedoms are rigorously circumscribed is interchangeable with any other regime where human freedoms are restricted or repressed. Across time, through history, the daily lot of what used to be called ‘the common man’ – that is you and me – was a matter of brute survival: you had to get to the end of the day, you needed some food to eat, somewhere to lay your head, in the endless rounds of birth, copulation and death that made up one’s life.

The Hebrew people in Egypt are the archetype of this kind of servitude to the ruling powers – but their story, our story, has been endlessly repeated up until our own times: whether it is peasants in medieval Europe or serfs on vast Russian estates or pre-emancipation black slavery in the Americas or the victims of Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot or apartheid South Africa, or Assad’s starving victims today in Syria, ordinary human suffering has been the norm for the majority of humanity through the ages.

Much of this depth of pain is probably unimaginable to us, unless we choose to study history or read fictional representations of it in novels. Sometimes there’s a film that tries to evoke it – Twelve Years a Slave was a recent Hollywood effort. But most of these stories from the past have sunk into the vast abyss of silence that is time gone by. It is all lost: the pain, the humiliation, the meaninglessness of empty, abused lives, generation after generation, century after century, all of it swallowed up in the ruthless jaws of time. There are few written records of the inside history of human suffering through most of recorded time, and in truth little wish in many of us to know about the cruelty and callousness of the past. We have enough problems of our own to be getting on with – or so we feel.

So when we do read – as we are doing at the moment in the annual cycle of Torah readings - about the Israelite slavery in Egypt we both can and can’t relate to it. In one way it has the feel of fiction: it’s a legend of a people’s origins written generations later based partly on folk memory, and as we read it has the feel of an extended fable being constructed to conform to a specific ethno-religious worldview. It’s not ‘history’ as we now think of it.

We heard last week how the Egyptian god-king, the Pharaoh, responds to the request by Moses and Aaron that the people should be allowed to have three days off work to go and offer sacrifices to their god in the wilderness. The Torah text dramatises this with a direct ‘quotation’, as it were, from Pharaoh, speaking to Israel’s spokesmen: ‘Why are you distracting the people? Get them back to work!’ (Exodus 5:4). And he then instructs his minions to stop providing the Israelites with straw to make the bricks: ‘Let them gather the straw for themselves’, he orders, ‘but make sure they make the same quota of bricks as before...they’re shirkers/slackers nirphim’ (verses 7-8). Or as Iain Duncan Smith might translate it:  ‘Work-shy scroungers’ – those who have to be made to work for free in compulsory work-placements in order to get any benefits. It’s the same mentality, across time. The same language. (But I digress).  

We recognise that the random punitiveness of the powers-that-be in our Torah story is part of a literary saga; it’s not a verbatim account even though it’s told with dialogue in it. Yet it still has the ring of truthfulness because we can find exact parallels in history of such brutality: in Soviet Russia, in the Nazi labour camps, on the 19^th century cotton plantations, in Maoist collective farms in the 1950s and 60s. This has happened to people over and over again, people like us. On the one hand it’s just a story, in an ancient religious text – and we don’t believe these texts are actual historical records – but as we listen to it we realise we are reading something that transcends its time and place, that points towards something that isn’t just foundational to Jewish collective experience but is also universal. The narratives of degradation of what man can do to man is a universal story. And the Jewish people tell it and retell it, because it is our particular story - but also because it is our collective human story.

I wanted to write this week about something else. I looked at the allocated Torah text (Exodus 6:2 onwards), which starts:  I am Adonai – YHWH – but I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as El Shaddai; my name Adonai wasn’t known to them... And I thought: ‘I want to talk about the evolution of God, and how our thinking about God might be changing, is changing, in our own times’.

Don’t we see that process of evolution already at work in our text? The narrators have ‘God’ say, as it were: ‘In days gone by, those patriarchs you’ve heard about, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, they knew about the divine in their own way, they called me El Shaddai  – ‘God of Breasts’ – because they experienced me as nurturing them, like a mother, they felt me as intimately involved in their personal lives, their family lives, they felt me outside them yet closely enmeshed with their daily life...

They didn’t know me as Adonai, YHWH, the energy that animates all of being, they didn’t know me as the spirit of life itself, the power that generates life itself, all of life, including their life, moment by moment. They couldn’t think of me that way. They weren’t ready to think about me that way...

 But now they are. This is what they need to understand now. And it’s a quantum leap forward, it’s a paradigm shift in consciousness that is required of them. To move from slavery to freedom, from drudgery where you just try and survive the day, to the liberation of having lives of hope and purpose, lives that you can shape and that have meaning beyond sheer survival, this Israelite people need to connect to me as Adonai, YHWH, the energy that animates the universe and all of being, and that offers a vision of how people should live, could live, a moral vision...

 They need to take their noses off the grindstone, they need to be freed from the grindstone, and look up and out to what they could become as a people, they need to connect in a living way to that ancient promise that they are to become a blessing to others, a blessing to themselves. I, Adonai , am going to free them from their limited slave lives and mentalities and give them a real purpose, a task, a destiny - to be a holy people, a people attuned to the sacred nature of life, of all life.’

Anyway, I was going to talk about all this. And move on to describe the next quantum leap, and paradigm shift, that we are in the middle of. But what I found myself thinking about and writing about was not ‘God but suffering – about tyranny and hardship and how much of human history has been a tale of degradation and oppression and despair. And it still is. And in the light of that, to talk about ‘God’ and ‘the divine’ and ‘a sacred spirit that animates all of being’ seems just nonsense, a mockery of human experience, a kind of blasphemy against the felt realities of so much human life, in the past and in the present.

We know from our own lives the gap between our Jewish theology (for want of a better word) and the stuff of our own lives. When we are in pain, when we are facing death, or the death of someone we love, when we see tragedy in the world outside us, or face tragedy and loss close to home, then we wonder: what is this God-talk all about really? How can we believe in a loving, caring, nurturing God, a God who supports us, who has compassion as his middle name? Life can mock, cruelly, our wish to believe in this kind of a personal God, let alone a God who is a Creator, or a Revealer, or a Redeemer, a God who is part of the unfolding of history, as the story of Exodus suggests, a God who frees an oppressed people ‘with an outstretched arm and with mighty judgments’ (6: 6). Human suffering, individual and collective, is an ongoing rebuke to this kind of thinking about God. It is what turns many people off religion, and understandably so.

And yet what is remarkable when you look back through history, is the power this Exodus story has had specifically in the history of oppressed people. It has allowed millions and millions of people for a millennium and more to endure extreme hardship, individually and collectively - because it offers a story of hope: you might be living in darkness and desperation now, but God has saved a people from oppression in the past and can do so again; this is God’s nature – to be on the side of the weak against the strong, to be on the side of justice rather than siding with those who sustain systems of injustice.

This story in the Hebrew Bible has kept Jews going in dark times, of course, times of oppression and exile. But it’s also been inspirational for Christians: from Negro spirituals that defied the 19^th century slave-masters to the civil rights campaigners in the 1960s to the South American liberation theologians who helped people resist dictatorships to the secret Christian gatherings in Communist China, this story, our story, has been a spiritual resource for oppressed people through the generations, and it still is.

Ironically, Arab Christians look to this story as speaking of the inevitability that justice will one day overcome injustice in Israel and Palestine. And those medieval peasants and Russian serfs might have been deeply anti-Semitic but they still looked to the God who freed the Israelite people from bondage as  a direct and personal source of comfort and hope in the midst of their desperately impoverished lives. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a leader of the dissenting Confessing Church in Germany in the 1930s, part of the political opposition to Hitler, was hung in a concentration camp in 1945, but he never wavered in his teaching and preaching and belief that the Exodus story was a paradigm for the final triumph of goodness over the evil of Hitler’s oppressive regime.

All these examples are a testimony to the power of the story, the way it incarnates for all time the hope that tyranny and injustice do not last forever. And it is a story that lost its religious trappings but retained its spiritual core for all those hundreds of thousands of Jews who threw off the shackles, as they experienced it, of religious orthodoxy, but poured their inherited belief that there was  a power in history that was on the side of the oppressed, and that oppressive systems could be overthrown - they poured that faith, transformed it, into Marxism and messianic socialism at the end of the 19^th century. 

The history of 20^th century socialism is the history of Exodus theology metamorphosed into secular redemptive politics. And that so much of it turned sour is of course prefigured in the very Hebrew Bible those passionate Jewish rebels so eagerly rejected – the way in which in later Israelite history over and over again the people find themselves victims of new forms of oppression – from outsiders, or from their own kings or leaders. The failure to build the kingdom of God here on earth, stretches from the time of Solomon to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and on, and on.

And yet the Exodus story never stops spinning its web of hope over successive generations: its power comes from its insistence that there is, there has to be, a force in human history that helps us move from oppression to liberation, from tyrannies of suffering and lives of quiet desperation to societies of justice and individual well-being. There has to be some force, it says – and call it godly if you want, as the Bible does – that helps us move in that direction.

But whether that ‘God’ is outside us, or actually a part of ourselves, an energy in us, an inner force that gives us strength and helps form our vision and helps us transform the world around us - this is what we need to talk about in this paradigm shift that we are, in our generation, in the midst of. It’s where the conversation about God needs to go now (and the implications of this are huge) if we are going to make it through on this fragile planet we all cling to - cling on to ‘for dear life’, as we so fondly say.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, January 9^th, 2016]

 

 

Paris: 'Twixt Cup and Lip

My father was fond of proverbs, pieces of folk wisdom that served as substitutes for a more sustained conversation. ‘A stitch in time saves nine’. ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’. ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’. ‘A bad workman blames his tools’. And – the one that I woke up thinking about today - ‘There’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip’. For me as a child, these sayings took on an authority indistinguishable from his own. Yet looking back on them now, what strikes me is how they all, in varying degrees, encoded an attitude of caution in the face of the world. I never heard him say, for example, ‘In for a penny, in for a pound’ – which might have given permission for a more adventurous stance on life.

The climate change agreement signed in Paris is being hailed - by the politicians involved, and some environmental advocacy groups – as a ‘historic’ turning point in humanity’s use and abuse of fossil fuels. The intention of the agreement is clear: the commitment of all major nations – including for the first time China and India - to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions between now and 2030. But how will that translate into action? While every country is required to put forward a plan to cut emissions, there is no legal requirement as to how, or how much, each country must cut. What’s legally binding is that each nation enact legislation in relation to a low-carbon future, but what is voluntary seems to be the content of that legislation. ’Twixt cup and lip there’s an ocean of room for countries to slip away from the high ideals that have gained assent over these last few weeks.  

The agreement seems to be designed to shame countries into action through peer pressure: countries have to legally monitor, verify and report on what they are doing, reconvening every five years to publicly report on progress towards lowering emissions. One can only hope that that this agreement – ‘Climate Change Agreement In Our Time’ – is not looked back on in decades to come, as temperatures continue to rise, albeit marginally slower, as the equivalent of Neville Chamberlain’s infamous ‘Peace in Our Time’ agreement with Hitler in 1938.

As the festival of Hanukkah comes to an end, and one by one the last of the candles flickers and dies, the fable of the Temple oil sufficient for one day that miraculously lasted for eight days comes to mind. Jews have often used this legend as a symbol of the triumph of Jewish continuity in the face of forces that have sought to extinguish it. But maybe a more apposite reading of the story for our time would be to recognise that what would be truly miraculous – and worthy of celebration – would be if the nations of the world could find a way of consuming less and making what we have go further. But this would be a model – self-sacrifice in the service of a common good - that would overturn capitalism as it's always been practiced.

As long as the nations that are celebrating in Paris today are wedded to consumerism and growth – and as long as electricity, gas and oil companies have such a dominant place in the world’s stock markets – it is going to be very much business as usual. The Paris agreement is a triumph of presentation over reality. There is no pleasure in saying that, and it is probably better to have reached this agreement than to have repeated the failures in Copenhagen in 2009. But it is a consoling fable for our times, and in the depths of winter we cling to such fables, light in our darkness.

Our planet is still vulnerable and dependent – like the infant in the Christmas story which also speaks a universal truth at this season. Over these next decades we are going to find ourselves  ’twixt cup and lip – between the good intentions of Paris and the complex actions that are still needed, and which will have to be maintained over decades when the impact of already-existing higher temperatures will be leading to greater and greater devastation. This will require faith of a very high order. Until less becomes the new more, I am letting caution be my guide.    

 

 

Art as a Response to Terror

The murderous attacks in Paris remind us – as if we don’t already know – that while 20^th century secular ideologies spawned the death cults of Stalin, Mao and Hitler, 20^th century religious fundamentalism has spilled into the 21^st century with a technologically-savvy nihilistic death cult masquerading as a version of Islam.

Today I want to turn away, very deliberately, from this assault on the civilised values I treasure and share something uplifting for the spirit, something that speaks en passant of creative responses to war and terror and hatred. Every generation faces the challenge of making something beautiful, and of lasting value, in the face of the upheavals and horrors that are always with us.

If you haven’t already seen it, can I recommend a gem of an exhibition that’s on right now in Somerset House on the Strand in London? It is sponsored by the Ben Uri Gallery & Museum, and closes on 13^th December, and it’s certainly worth an hour or so of your time. I want to say a few things about it because if you do visit it I can guarantee (I think) that you will come out of it feeling, in several ways, blessed. It’s called ‘Out of Chaos’ and celebrates a century of Jewish émigré life through some of the key works of the Ben Uri collection. 

The Ben Uri was founded as an arts society in Whitechapel in 1915 – so it is 100 years old and they are celebrating that through this exhibition. In just  half a dozen smallish rooms you journey through the last century of Jewish artistic engagement with British life and European history - and the whole of what the 20^th century brought into being, for good and ill.

At the end of the 19^th century there were already Anglo-Jewish artists here in the UK, exploring the themes of integration and identity; and they were joined at the turn of the century by European Jewish artists, men and women who came as immigrants to the East End of London and wanted to preserve and record Jewish traditions and Yiddish-speaking identities within this new environment. Out of this rich mix there arose the so-called ‘Whitechapel Boys’ – a group of Jewish artists who were at the cutting edge of new developments in artistic modernism. Jacob Epstein, David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, Isaac Rosenberg (who was also a poet, and died aged 27 in the trenches) were responding to the artistic and technological revolutions that were going on throughout Europe (especially in Paris), an era which overlapped with the traumas of the First World War.

I want to share with you a couple of paintings you can find in the exhibition in the second room which focuses on the themes of this period. One is Bomberg’s Racehorses (1913)

 

which was met with incomprehension and hostility when it was first seen. The Jewish Chronicle, then as now an occasional  bastion of unreflective prejudices, dismissed Racehorses as  ‘opposed to all that is rational in art’ because it displayed  ‘horses that could never possibly win races’. That’s true: the subject is as conventional as you can get, but the artist strips it of conventional detail and gives you the animals in a mechanistic whirl of frozen movement, a rush of stiff-jointed angles; these horses haven’t got four legs they have 20 legs.

Almost like a woodcut, one sees the influence of Cubism and Futurism, and of those famous photographs of horses in motion by Edweard Muybridge. What Bomberg produced here, as a precocious 22 year-old, is a dazzling avant-garde experiment in an age coming to be dominated by machines, the spirit of which suffuses the work.

Bomberg’s work influenced that of a second of those Whitechapel Boys. Let’s look at Mark Gertler’s Merry-Go-Round (1916).

 

This work – now in the Tate Britain - was originally owned by the Ben Uri until it was sold by them in 1984 to guarantee the gallery’s future. It was completed in the third year of the War and captures the nightmare of the conflict: the carousel (modelled on the one on Hampstead Heath) is frozen in motion, the fairground horses carrying uniformed soldiers and sailors and their sweethearts whirls round and round, the mouths of the riders wide open in an unending scream. D.H. Lawrence called the painting ‘horrifying and terrible’ – which it is: there is horror and terror etched into the faces of these riders caught up in a dizzying endless circuit – and thought it ‘the best modern picture I have seen’; and said that Gertler had given us a ‘real and ultimate revelation’.

It stands comparison with Picasso’s Guernica as a defiantly anti-war protest – at the beginning of the War Gertler registered as a conscientious objector, though he tried to sign up later but was declared medically unfit - and in some ways it strikes me as even more powerful that Guernica because it captures the glee and helplessness with which the participants are caught up in the action. The carousel evokes both the jauntiness of the mood in which soldiers set off to do their bit for King and Country, but also the machine-like mechanical nature of the conflict. The horses’ back legs are shaped like raised rifles, the clouds are like shells falling from the sky, the red, white and blue of the British flag glow as the excitement of the War becomes the fearfulness of war and the whirligig jollity merges into the frozen screams from which no-one can escape.

As Lawrence intuited, something new is being revealed here, and it is perhaps no coincidence that the artist was Jewish. This has always been part of the Jewish ‘mission’ – to look into a society from the margins and offer a commentary on what is seen. This is not always, as you can imagine, a popular position to take up. Gertler’s painting was still unsold at the time of his death in 1939. But now we can see that it is a masterpiece.

One of the things this exhibition does is to remind us of the enormous contribution Jews have made over the last 100 years to the cultural life of the nation. At a time when issues of asylum and the UK’s role in offering a welcome to refugees is at the forefront of the political agenda, spending time with some of the glories of Anglo-Jewish art , often created by Jewish immigrants and émigrés,  is a salutary reminder of what so-called ‘outsiders’ can offer their host nation.

Further rooms at the exhibition offer key works by a range of British and European Jews – from Chagall to Frank Auerbach, Jacob Epstein to R.B.Kitaj, Leon Kossof and Joseph Herman to Max Liebermann – exploring issues of identity and migration during the era of Nazi Germany and the post-War period. And there is some very powerful contemporary photographs by Israeli and British Jewish artists towards the end of the exhibition. 

Let me talk about just one work from the middle section of the exhibition, Joseph Herman’s ‘Refugees’ from 1941.

 

Herman was born in Warsaw in 1911 into a poor, working-class family. He became a graphic artist and in 1938 fled the rising tide of anti-semitism – first to Brussels and then, when the Germans invaded, he was able to get to the UK, to Glasgow where he learned quite quickly through the Red Cross that his entire family had perished in the Warsaw Ghetto. He’d already started a series of works on Jewish themes and these portraits of a disappearing world darkened to include pogroms and the destruction of the Ghetto.  He moved to London in 1943 where he held his first London exhibition together with a little known Northern artist called L.S.Lowry.

This painting, ‘Refugees’, was thought lost for over 60 years, and was re-discovered only after his death in 2000. It’s a haunting work and although you can see the spires of a lost moonlit snow-bound Warsaw it evokes a much wider east European story of displacement and exile - and is of course utterly contemporary. A family is on the move, carrying their bedding with them: father , mother, child and baby, their eyes wide with fear and panic. A universal story of upheaval and flight. The threatening nature of their unknown fate is symbolised by the huge cat squeezing the life out of the bloodied mouse. The cold indifference of the moon’s eye, picked up in the cat’s eye, looks down on one family - which stand for so many, then and now. It’s powerful, poignant, frightening, moving – Herman has created a deeply human work of identification with the oppressed, a humanistic and of course deeply Jewish portrait of suffering and exile and loss.

This capacity for human fellow-feeling became a dominant motif in Herman’s work: he eventually made his home in a Welsh mining village and made his name with his dignified and empathetic portraits of miners, which remain some of his best-known works.

There are nearly 70 works on show, taken from the Ben Uri collection, and each one deserves its own time and space. The Ben Uri has recently re-defined its purpose: it recognises that these Jewish themes of identity and immigration, of forced journeys and necessary integration, are part of a larger conversation in this country in which the rich contribution of immigrant cultures needs to be exhibited and celebrated. They have hosted in recent years exhibitions by African, Korean and Caribbean artists and they have a real vision of being (though they don’t put it this way) a source of blessing to other peoples, using the special nature of Jewish experience to enlighten, to educate, to inspire. If you go along to Somerset House I think you will leave this current exhibition moved and exhilarated, humbled and inspired. Don’t miss it.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London on November 14^th 2105]

 

 

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]