On Storytelling and Interpretation

This week, it began again: the old story, the ever-renewing story, the story of beginnings, one of the most significant pieces of imaginative literature in human history. Jews throughout the world began to read the Torah, the so-called Five Books of Moses, from the beginning of the book of Genesis. There are pieces of religious literature that are older – Indian Sanskrit texts for example – but the chapters of the Torah that we read at the beginning of our annual cycle are woven deep into Western culture, secular and religious. The faith traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all use the images and motifs of these stories in Genesis to create structures of meaning for believers to live within.  

These narratives offer myths to live by, stories which structure our lives – even the most devoutly secular believe in, live inside, a seven day week, for example.  Even the most ardent atheist telling a story to their children will begin ‘Once upon a time…’ This is what the Book of Genesis  does when it starts ‘In the beginning…’  The Biblical world view can still structure our thinking without us even being aware of it. The repetition of the same texts allows us to live within cyclical time while the content of Genesis and what follows tells us we live within chronological time, where events unfold with a linear, forward momentum.

The storytellers of the Hebrew Bible were poets, literary artists, mythographers, weavers of words aspiring to craft a narrative in which the Israelite community could find where they belonged and why they existed and what their purpose was within the community of nations. To get their national story going they started in pre-history, with universal questions about origins, and found a narrative mode, a mythic language of symbols and images and characters, that offered meaning but also waited to be interpreted.

The need for interpretation was a necessity once they committed themselves to choosing words to build sentences. Every writer knows this. That whatever words they choose people will impose their own understanding onto them. Writers can’t control what readers will do with their words – for good or ill. (I will come back to this later).

In the first chapter of Genesis those ancient storytellers conceived of a Conceiver – they gave birth to the idea of a divine energy that gave birth to the world and everything in it, a creative force bringing into being the heavens and the earth and all of the life that it contains, including us. And they conceived of this Conceiver in their own image, as a creative force that used language, words, to bring things into being: “And God said ‘Let there be light’ – and there was light” (Genesis 1: 3). Within their mythic thinking, God speaks the universe into being.

They, the storytellers of the Hebrew Bible, only had language, words, to create something out of nothing – to create a masterpiece of narrative that would last forever – and in that act of radical imaginative daring they fashioned a God who also spoke – spoke the world into being, stage by stage, “and God said…And God said…And God said…” culminating in humanity, us, who – in a deft twist of poetic paradox – they described as being “created in the image of God” (Genesis1:27).

‘Humanity created in the image of God’ is a piece of thinking foundational to the Torah - although we might now feel the freedom to say that it works the other way round too: that we created God in our own image. The Torah is full of that: a God of compassion, kindness, mercy, but also anger, jealousy, destructiveness. The storytellers’  multidimensional image of the divine, of God, was a mirror of who they were.

So: those inspired weavers of words, creating language worlds for people to live in, projected that language-generating  gift onto the God of Genesis.  It is an inspired piece of collective storytelling, a piece of literature in which every word counts, every word is part of an elaborate structure and pattern – words appear three times, seven times – it is all woven into a magnificent tapestry in which the final act of creation is human beings. The narrators’ artistry created a sublime portrait of divine artistry. All of nature matters: sun, moon and stars, land and seas, plants and animals, birds and fish – and humanity, with its special role, the responsibility of stewardship.

So in six bejewelled paragraphs the architecture of creation is laid out, stage by majestic stage, but the forward momentum of the narrative contains as its destination something beyond humanity. In the seventh paragraph, something radically different is described – not activity but rest. A time for the breath of all life to breathe out.

And this rest, this act of ‘shabbat’, is not just blessed like other aspects of creation but something else is added: this rest, the capacity to rest, is made sacred, kadosh, holy : the word appears here for the first time in the Torah (Genesis 2:3). We often talk about life being sacred, but this opening narrative doesn’t actually say that – what is says is that the ability to stop activity, the necessity to stop speaking worlds into being, the capacity for silence – this is sacred. Within the creation myth, it is stopping that is sacred. In other parts of the Torah it is activity that is sacred, but the story begins quite differently: the sacred is what happens after all the activity has stopped.  

And then the whole story of creation is given to us from another perspective, juxtaposed with the first, like a Cubist portrait. Genesis 2:4 tells us “This is the tale of the heavens and the earth when they were created…”  ele toldot hashamayim ve’ha’aretz  b’hibaram… And we get the whole story told from underneath as it were. The first seven paragraphs were seamless: each sentence is constructed in a continuous flow from the last, with the letter vav (‘v’) joining them up – the letter means ‘and’ - so it reads ‘and this, and then this, and then this’ .

But that unstoppable stream of narrative stops in verse 4 of Chapter 2, and the eighth paragraph of the Torah is a new beginning: ele toldot hashamayim ve’ha’aretz b’hibaram – “This is the story of the heavens and the earth when they were created” – and yes, we hear the echo of the first line of the Torah (the words ‘heavens, earth, created’ are repeated from Genesis 1:1) but in a different order; as if the storytellers are saying, okay we are going to tell you about this another way round now, not in terms of grand divine choreography but as a story told from a human perspective.

And the key word from the human perspective is that word ‘toldot’ – which means literally, ‘generations, begettings, acts of giving birth’, and this word ‘toldot’  takes on the meaning of ‘story’ and ‘history’. One generation’s narrative merges into the stories of the next generation and it adds up over the generations to become history.

So in this second telling of beginnings we find many images of fertility: a lush garden, four rivers, two mysterious trees offering knowledge and life, the imagery is grounded in water and the earth; and then, from the earth, an ‘earthling’ is formed – the play on words is in the Hebrew (adama, adam) – and the only characteristic of this creature that the storytellers choose to describe is its capacity for language: it names the creatures around it – this is the divine gift bestowed on humanity, the ability to find the words that matter.  

Our Torah storytellers were besotted with language, obsessed with language, both what it could do and the relationships it can build - but also the trouble it can cause when it fails, or fails to be honest and becomes manipulative. In the Garden of Eden everyone is suddenly talking, Adam, Eve, God, even the snake and its slippery dialogue with Eve. Dialogue becomes a generator of the story, but the absence of dialogue is also generative: Cain’s absence of words to describe his anger leads to the murder of his brother (4:8) – the text says that he speaks, but there is then a hiatus, a gap, and instead of words there is the murderous act.

You see in these early chapters of Genesis the storytellers wrestling with the power of words: too many words, the wrong words, the wrong kind of conversations, lead to the Tower of Babel. ‘This is what happens when everyone speaks the same language’ the narrators have their God say, ‘they think they can do anything’ (Genesis 11:6). The narrators are sensing here the shadow side of language - the way it can easily create a false consensus, a belief that whatever one says must be right because everyone else is saying it.

At Babel you see the storytellers describing the problematic nature of believing there is only one way of talking, one way of thinking, one way of using words; they show the hubris of that. So languages – plural - enter the Torah’s story. And once there exists this confusion of tongues, words needed to be translated, interpreted, and there’s not only one way to describe reality. And not only one way to reach heaven.

This is how the Hebrew storytellers generated the tradition Jews belong to – one where words don’t only have one meaning, where words are plastic and stretch in multiple directions, where you the reader have to do some of the work, maybe a lot of the work, to wrestle meaning out of the texts, recognising that there is no single interpretation, no final interpretation to any Biblical text, or midrashic text, or Talmudic text. Actually, to any literary text.  

The process of commentary and interpretation is the lifeblood of the people, this tradition has kept the Jewish people alive for millennia, because we have not reduced texts to single meanings, we have refused to read literally, or hardly ever literally, but we have also learned to read metaphorically, and homiletically, and symbolically, and in multiple other ways of responding with our creativity and imagination to the texts we are presented with. The greatness of Judaic culture is that it has taught the virtues of ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other hand’ – interpretation is polymorphous and endless; an antidote to the totalitarianism of certainty.  It enlarges and enriches us, it broadens our horizons, it lets in more life, more light. Only dictators, fascists and authoritarians believe there is only one truth.

I feel humbled to belong to a tradition that has this relationship with words:  what they can do (when used carefully), what they can suggest, what they can create, how they can inspire - and how they can manipulate; how they can move the heart and how they can chill the heart. I enjoy trying to build words into sentences that help us think more deeply into subjects: they might challenge, entertain, stimulate, but they are always fuelled by a sense that I derive from Torah and Jewish tradition that language is a divine creation (so to speak) that we can borrow and play with and, on a good day, mould into something new. And the aim is always to enrich our experience, to give us more room to breathe in, to think with.

In the end though I know that whatever I say, everyone will hear it slightly differently, or will interpret it somewhat differently. Each of us listens through the prism of their own thoughts, beliefs, ideas, prejudices – we all do this all the time, even when we talk to each other (maybe especially when we talk to one another).  And if you read something I have written you will – I hope - have your own thoughts about it, you will project your own meanings onto it, your own associations to the words I use, sometimes you will hear it through your own preconceptions. Listening and reading is deeply subjective – ‘I thought he said this’, ’I thought he meant that’. I am not in control, ever, of how my words are heard, or read. And that is how it should be. Interpretation is always subjective and personal  and usually that is fine but sometimes, of course, it can be problematic.

I want to share with you something that happened after Yom Kippur this year because it both illustrates what I am talking about and is, I hope, instructive. I gave a sermon on Yom Kippur – it was a long day, we had the time – in which I spoke about a film I had found both thought-provoking and inspirational, Jonathan Glazer’s multiple Oscar-winning ‘The Zone of Interest’. And I used it in part to make certain points about our human capacity for denial and not wanting to see what is painful. This is a human, universal, psychological process, and we all do it. I made that clear – or thought I had made it clear. But someone who read my text online afterwards was deeply upset (and angry) about it. They felt it was ‘laced with the language of hate’, that it was ‘antisemitic’, that it ‘elevate[d] anti-Zionism to a moral imperative’, that it ‘posit[ed] that Jews have an inherent badness that must be purged’.

As someone who has spent a good part of his professional life speaking about, and working on, the benign, creative and life-affirming dimensions of Judaic culture - which has included speaking about the ways in which our vision can go into eclipse - this came as rather a surprise.

People who spoke to me afterwards – and people who read it afterwards - were rather grateful about how I’d opened up the themes I was exploring. But – self-evidently – not everyone felt that way. I don’t mind dissent, I belong to an argumentative tradition and people, and I am not in the business of putting thoughts into words with the expectation that everyone will agree with – or, God-forbid, submit to - my way of thinking.

But what I am learning is just how differently different folk can read texts. As they saw it, they reckoned that this Yom Kippur the ‘threat’ to Jews – their language - was coming not from outside the community but ‘from inside’. (The idea that the Jew is ‘the enemy within’ is of course an antisemitic trope – it began in the early Middle Ages - but I will let that pass. That’s just how their words struck me, my subjective association to the language they used to describe me).

So it is all about interpretation. Sermons and blogs are just another text. One person’s inspiration can be another person’s horror show. On the whole – there are exceptions - when I read the narratives of Torah I can feel inspired, enlivened, challenged, stimulated: they can fertilise my thinking and my imagination. When Richard Dawkins reads those same texts he is appalled, dismissive, scornful, sickened to the heart. We all read texts through the prism of our own story, our own personal ‘toldot’, history.

This experience has been sobering. As Jews begin a new cycle of Torah readings this year, I am hoping for an uplifting, inspiring, illuminating journey through the texts of my tradition, a journey which can help us glimpse new dimensions to the texts we’ve inherited and how they inform the texts of our own lives.  I am going to try not to let the prism through which I see this heritage become a prison: I don’t want to feel trapped into only seeing what I have already seen before. “Let there be light” spoke new hope into the darkness; who would want the darkness to stifle new ways of seeing?

 

[loosely based on thoughts shared at Finchley Reform Synagogue, October 26th, 2024]

 

THREE TEXTS FOR a TIME OF ATONEMENT

 1. On Love and Hate

I want to start with a simple question. Can we ever know how someone else experiences the world? I would suggest that we can know a person for a lifetime yet we can’t know what the felt experience is of someone else. We can listen as they describe it, we can be empathetic, we can imagine other people’s experiences where we live or across the world from us, we can read novels which get inside characters, but in some fundamental way we can’t know another person’s inner world. (Of course we may not know much about our own inner world, but that’s another story) . Our felt inner world, our deep subjectivity, is, in essence, known by no-one.

And yet there lives in us, I think, a deep wish to be known. As well as a deep fear. The wish to be known is I think a wish to be appreciated, understood, accepted, wanted. And maybe at root it’s a wish to be loved. Loved unconditionally. But, we worry, if everything about us is  known, would we still be loveable? So the wish to be known is in tension with the fear - the fear that there is, or might be, something in us that stops this happening, that there exists in us aspects of the self that someone else would not be able to accept, or be able to love, parts of our inner world, parts of us, they would not be able to embrace unconditionally.  

So: we contain (in two senses of the word ‘contain’) the wish to be known and the fear of being known. Although there is a wish to be known, we can spend a lifetime developing the art of putting up barriers to being known, truly known in all our complex and multifaceted humanity; it’s strange that the thing we think we want so much, we also spend such a lot of time, consciously and unconsciously, protecting ourselves from. Along with all the time we spend cultivating a persona, a false self, that we think might be more desirable, more acceptable, more loveable, than our real selves in all their quirky and turbulent splendour.   

So if this is how it is, and this is who we are – and now I am moving towards a specific Jewish relationship to this issue - what happens when we Jews come together on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) and are faced with a liturgy that contains the following:

 “What can we say before You…”, we ask, “and what can we tell You?” Here’s the traditional picture of a God figure, so far away, so distant, so remote, absent almost to the point of non-existence.  “And yet…”, we continue to read, disconcertingly, opening up a  religious paradox, “And yet You know everything, hidden and revealed. You know the mysteries of the universe and the intimate secrets of everyone alive…” So: here we are, looking into the mirror of our wish and our fear. “You see into the heart and mind. Nothing escapes You, nothing is hidden from your gaze”.

Again, the traditional picture of a God figure, but this time so close to us as to know us through and through, know us maybe better than we know ourselves, know us as no-one and nothing else can know us. All our idiosyncrasies and vulnerabilities, our foibles and peccadillos, our ugliness and our generosity, our cruelty and our kindness, our capacity for love and our capacity for hate. It’s all known – none of it is hidden, and none of it needs to be hidden.  Whether this so-called “gaze” feels threatening or a welcome relief will say much about us and our feelings about intimacy and  being known. 

We repeat this poetic text in each service through the day – it is at the spiritual heart of the Yom Kippur liturgy: the encouragement one day in the year, for a few brief hours, or minutes, to be open with ourselves about who we are, to admit our frailties and failings, to survey the landscape of our souls and make an account of what we have done and what we have failed to do, to admit how awful we might have been, how inhumane and callous – but also to recognise the ways in which we have managed to remain humane and caring, this too we bring to mind.

And Yom Kippur suggests that all this heart searching and soul reckoning can be done with a kind of confidence. Maybe no other person in the world can know us as we want to be known and fear being known - and yet by rendering an honest account of our intimate selves, our hidden selves, something in us will change. It will be as if we are truly known. The liturgy says: today you can, finally, be truly known – and the experience will be transformative. 

Laying ourselves open in this way – offering ourselves as best we can through deep introspection (without being persecutory towards ourselves) – will be like receiving a gift, a precious sense of being judged with unconditional love. We will come through Yom Kippur and out the other side mysteriously changed – the traditional liturgy calls it ‘cleansed’ – we will know that we are accepted, us poor humble flawed folk, we will feel that by reckoning with our guilt, our failures and foibles and falsehood, by looking honestly at ourselves, the verdict at the trial we are attending will be ‘not guilty’, you are loved, more than you know, more than you imagine. Maybe more than you strictly deserve.

This is what Yom Kippur offers Jews who engage with it and it has a mystery at its heart because even if you have no sense of, or belief in, the God figure of the liturgy, a merciful and compassionate divine presence, rachum v’chanun, even if you are a religious sceptic, if you harbour doubts, or you’re an honest  disbeliever in the literal or metaphorical language of our tradition, even if you struggle with or can’t subscribe to the pieties of old - that is all strangely beside the point.

Because the point is that by engaging with the psychodrama of the day, by spending the time reflecting on your life, you will experience some shift by the end of Neilah, the concluding service of this 25 hour marathon. You may not feel more loving by the end of the day – you will still have your irritabilities – but there will be a shift in your soul’s engagement with life.

There will be more life within you, more sense of the possibilities that life can offer, more hope that your life has got a meaning, or that you can make meaning out of it.  And although you might not think about this shift using the language of love, or – heaven forbid - the language of ‘God’, what matters is that something real will happen within you: you will glimpse what it means to be loved, valued and wanted. 

You can be loved because you have opened your heart to the truths about yourself. You can be loved because there is an indefinable goodness encoded within you. You can be loved because of your unique capacity for accessing the humanity within you, even if it gets battered and bruised by life, which it does; even if it goes into eclipse, which it does; even if your heart gets corroded by shame or guilt or anger or hatred, which it does. At heart you are infinitely precious, and loveable.

Why am I talking so much about love? Love and being loved?  Well, a couple of reasons. The first is to do with something my grandson said a while ago – he was four and a half – that I have been carrying around in my mind and hasn’t left me. From somewhere in him he came out with this: “The only thing that will always be true and never end is love”. 

And it struck me, when I heard about this, that not only was he giving voice to his experience of being loved, but he was voicing a deep and universal human wish. For that’s what it is - a wish that “The only thing that will always be true and never end is love”. But it happens to be a wish that is threaded through all of Jewish liturgy, which over and over again talks about God’s eternal love of the Jewish people, a love which survives the vicissitudes of history, a love that endures from generation to generation, despite Israel’s failures and stiff-neckedness and betrayals.

I don’t know what any of that really means, and I don’t believe it in any literal – or even metaphorical – sense, but it seems to me to be a very useful piece of religious storytelling that could still have some mileage in it. Meaning-generating stories that offer benign ways of holding us within the randomness, chaos and vicissitudes of life are not to be discarded lightly, I guess. 

Now you might call that child’s words - that sentiment, that proto-philosophy - about love ‘always being true and never ending’, you might call it naïve – that life just isn’t like that. But maybe ‘naïve’ is the jaundiced judgement of an adult world that has lost touch with the sense of undimmed wonder that children can have. Adults whose lives become enmeshed in all the shabbiness and sickness of soul that surrounds us become cynical, and maybe envious of a child’s uncorrupted vision. Maybe we had that innocence once, but it was knocked out of us by the cruelties of the world and the cruel-hearted we encountered.  Maybe we secretly long to believe it is true, not just a hope. 

 But I found myself wanting to speak on Yom Kippur about love because I am very aware of the fragility of love in a time of hate.

Hatred right now is all around us, everywhere we look, and it is exhausting. It corrodes our well-being, eats into our minds and hearts. It’s spiritually exhausting being exposed to all the hatred: all that rhetoric in the Middle East about retaliation and revenge, and the wave after wave of racism and neo-fascism and bigotry in so many countries, in Putin and Trump, in India, sweeping through Europe, the list goes on and on, no nation is free of it; and all the denigration we hear of the Other, whether women or immigrants or trans; all the animosity within religious groups, and between religious groups, so much invective, so much intolerance, so much anger. All the polarisation, and lack of nuance, and being unable to tolerate ambivalence – it’s exhausting, and it’s tragic. These endless varieties and manifestations of hate.

I don’t do social media at all because I don’t want to be exposed to even more hatred than I already encounter in the daily news on TV or in the newspapers. But when I hear from my clergy colleagues about being bullied online, even by people from their own congregation, I realise just what a mess we are in. People don’t like it sometimes when I use the word hatred, they deny it is within them: ‘oh I just get a bit irritated’, or maybe they admit to being ‘annoyed’ or even ‘quite angry’ - but hatred, it’s a strong word, and we shirk from it.

But it needs to be spoken about because it conveys an aspect of all our inner lives. And one denies it at one’s peril. I won’t begin to catalogue here the long list of my hatreds. That’s part of the secrets of my heart. But hateful feelings arise out of disappointments, and all the gaps between what we want or need, and the capacity of the world and the people around us to give us what we need. So if we speak of love we need also to speak of hate because they go together within the human psyche. 

Life will always let us down sometimes – and how then do we mange our frustration, our aggression, our rage? Our disappointments can tip into despair, or hopelessness, or depression. Our anger can be turned against those we love, but whom we feel never love us enough. Or it can be turned against ourselves - our bodies, or our minds. Or it can get projected out so we always feel under siege and threatened rather than seeing how threatening we can be. (This is a particular Jewish problem). Or it can be acted out so that we rage against those who don’t think like us, or look like us, or act like us.

Yom Kippur is not only about our capacity for love. It is also about our hatred, and rage and aggression - and what we do with it, personally and collectively. It is the problem of our age - hatred and its ramifications -the defining problem of our times. To say that our very lives depend upon finding ways of thinking about our hatred is not an exaggeration. Our planet itself is loved and treasured – a source of wonder and delight; and it is hated and abused, plundered and laid waste to. Will our love or hate have the final say?  

The Jewish vision on Yom Kippur is a refined form of chutzpa: it is grandiose and, in its way, arrogant. It says that we Jews belong to a people who have a responsibility to think about how to live. And this thinking about how to live is not just about ourselves as individuals and our own personal wellbeing; and it’s not just for us as a collective, Klal Yisrael, and the fate of our people; but it’s a global responsibility – to work out how to be “a blessing for all humanity” (Genesis 12:3) and the fragile planet we inhabit. Our task is to think about how to live, how to live well, how to help others live well. It’s an impossible task - but someone has to do it.

On Yom Kippur Jews try to embrace that task - and in embracing that task they will of necessity encounter the core human dilemma, the psychological and spiritual  and existential question I have tried to sketch out here: how are we to express our love, and what do we do with our hate?

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on the evening of October 11^th, 2024]

 

 

2. On ‘The Zone Of Interest’ 

Although I have written about Jonathan Glazer’s extraordinary Oscar-winning film The Zone Of Interest back in March, I want to return to it – the season of the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), a time of self-reflection and self-examination for the Jewish people, has prompted me into a re-engagement with the profound questions incarnated within it.

These questions have not left me since the day I saw it because I found the film emotionally compelling in the sense that it exerts an overwhelming pressure on the psyche. As I was watching it I knew I was in the presence of something that was important in ways I couldn’t immediately grasp, but felt - in my guts, my soul, wherever we feel these things, maybe the Yiddish word kischkes conveys it best – I felt it had significance far beyond its immediate context. 

To my mind it is the most important film, maybe the most important single piece of artistic creativity, of the 21^st century.

Why? Because it speaks directly to the human condition, our situation in the world now, it speaks to how our attention to the things that are going on around us – in our community, our society, our world – can be so uncomfortable, so unbearable that we find ways of not seeing and not hearing what is actually happening. It is a film of universal relevance about denial, the psychology and dynamics of denial, and how we protect ourselves from the consequences of our actions, and the consequences of our inactions.

Even if you haven’t seen the film, you may have heard about it or read about it, and so you might have heard it described as a ‘Holocaust’ film. Well, it isn’t untrue to describe it as a ‘Holocaust film’  - in the sense that it is set during the period of the death camps in Europe and it is constructed round the family home and garden of Rudolph Hӧss and his wife Hedwig who lived literally next door to Auschwitz.

Hӧss was the commandant of the camp, and the wall of the back garden of his family home was the wall of the death camp. So this is a film about the Holocaust, about evil and about how we insulate ourselves, or try to, from the knowledge of evil taking place on our doorsteps. Part of the extraordinary way the film is made is that you never see into the camp, there are none of the conventional images of prisoners, or ovens, or piles of bodies, the film is tracking the everyday life of the family who lives next to the camp, who go on picnics, tend the flowers and vegetables in the garden, observe the butterflies. In parts  it has an almost documentary feel, or the atmosphere of so-called ‘reality’ TV, fixed cameras watching ordinary things happen. 

So the focus is on everyday life: the cooking, the cleaning, the children playing, swimming, visitors arriving. It is a beautiful, pastoral setting, almost idyllic (if it wasn’t for the broader setting). But the camp is never absent, it’s just over the wall, a space we never enter, except with our ears.

One of the film’s five Oscars was for best soundtrack – and the soundtrack is indeed remarkable: it’s almost another film, for the ears and the imagination, running in parallel to what is seen on screen. There is a dull, grinding, rumbling that you hear throughout the film, ominous and persistent – I thought for a while I was hearing traffic outside the cinema, or maybe the sound coming from another screen in the multiplex I was in – but no, it was the soundtrack to the film, uncanny, unheimlich, the background reverberation droning away like a huge industrial machine always in earshot but never visible in a scene.

What is going on beyond the wall is literally ‘obscene’ - from the Greek, ob-skeen (offstage/out of sight). And from time to time you can hear shots ringing out and shouts and human cries and screams - but this is all behind the wall, ob-skeen. And this  creates a radical discontinuity between what you are seeing and what you are hearing - and thus forced to imagine. 

So of course this is a Holocaust film – about how ordinary people, who come home to read their children a bedtime story, who tend their gardens lovingly and teach their children the names of the flowers and plants, ordinary people like you and me, who have goodness grafted to their hearts – can also have evil coiled into their souls.

But it is not only a Holocaust film, a film about the past: as the director Jonathan Glazer has asserted, it’s a film about the present, about now. And that now can be any ‘now’. The film was conceived and made long before last October 7^th but it is not possible to see the film and not think, for example, about its disturbing relevance to how some people have, and continue to, shut themselves away from knowing about the suffering of the people of Gaza or Lebanon. Jews too can be locked into their Zone of Interest.

As an aside, but an important aside  – I am aware too of the suffering of Israelis, the fears, the losses, the ongoing mourning, as well as the pain many are having to endure from having to shut themselves off from fully facing what is being done in their name by a government whom so many hundreds of thousands don’t support, can’t support, haven’t supported for years; in a different way they are trapped, bombarded psychologically by propaganda and actions they just have to endure, feeling helpless – although there have been many protests - trying not to let that helplessness tip into hopelessness, trying to recover from what one Israeli woman I listened to in the summer, a religious Orthodox woman committed to the end of the Occupation, committed to social action with Palestinians, committed to peaceful co-existence on a shared homeland, what this remarkable soul said – I was running a group with a Christian pastor at a Jewish-Christian conference in Germany (yes, the irony) – what she said she was finding it hardest to recover from was her experience after October 7^th 2023 that for the first time in her life “they made me feel hate for them”. She had never felt that before. Souls are being wounded in so many ways. 

But to return to the film: it is a film that challenges our complacency, the comfort zones we inhabit, any feelings of moral superiority we might harbour: none of us knows how we would act if our lives depended on perpetrating horrors, or pretending horrors weren’t happening a hair’s breath away. The film asks us to reflect on the ways in which in one way or another we all live walled off from terrible things that we hear about and see, things we know about and don’t want to know about. Because if we did face them it would be too unbearable.

“Too long a sacrifice/ can make a stone of the heart/ Oh when may it suffice?” – W.B. Yeats (Easter, 1916). 

Boat people drowning in the Channel. Millions of children in the UK in poverty, fighting hunger, cold, deprivation. Countless homeless folk within an hour of where I live in London (rough sleeping increased 20% in London in the last twelve months). We don’t have to look overseas to see the same dynamic at work much closer our homes – we all function with what the psychologists call cognitive dissonance: inconsistencies and gaps in our thinking, contradictions between what we believe and how we act. Jewish liturgy expresses the wish that “the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts” align; but we might also pray that the wishes for others’ well being might align with the actions we take on their behalf. 

I’ve now started to use The Zone of Interest as a reference point in my own thinking. It has become almost a shorthand for how our imaginations fail to be in sync with our actions. When we know something is happening but turn a blind eye. It can be bullying in the workplace, sexual harassment, abuse in the home – so many situations where we construct a mental wall so that we don’t have to think about what is happening right now, under our noses. I am sure you can all think of situations where you have done this, or do this. Where you just don’t want to know. Can’t bear to know.

The Jewish community at this season, days which culminate on Yom Kippur – the day when atonement/’at-one-ment’ is wished for - admit our shame about this, our failures, our weakness, our inability to live up to our ideals; we admit that our better selves do go into eclipse, our idealism fades. We acknowledge the painful truth that we only just have enough energy to get by, to survive each day. Because life is tough and who has the energy to get involved, to call out injustice, wrongdoing wherever we see it? We all have zones of Interest and zones of disinterest. I know that I do and it fills me with a kind of sadness and a sickness of spirit, as I recognise my inadequacies, my compromises, my weakness, my inability to let my actions truly express the empathy I have for those who struggle and suffer in so many ways. 

Like the Biblical stories of old, The Zone of Interest has moral and psychological complexity woven into every strand of the narrative - it is a piece of art that provokes us into reflections about our lives, our values, our blind-spots, our capacity for goodness and our capacity for evil. Each scene is worthy of attention. Each scene asks questions. Each scene demands a commentary – such a Jewish film!

A last thought, a footnote. And the thought is this: we are obviously living through one of the most fraught, jagged periods in the long arc of Jewish history. The Zone of Interest’s subject matter of persecutors and victims, bystanders and witnesses is all around us. The language that has emerged in relation to, and in the wake of, the Shoah - of ethnic cleansing, genocide, annihilatory intent, abuse of humanitarian law and human rights - this language fills the airways, newspaper columns, social media. It too penetrates the mind and heart. Who can hide from its gaze?

Questions of who will live and who will die (and how) – universal questions affecting Jew and non-Jew alike – press in on us each day. The questions are painful: are we victims or persecutors, bystanders or witnesses? Perhaps we can be more than one of those, perhaps we may occupy each of those roles at different times. It is, necessarily, confusing.

Our souls cower in the face of what we are living through. On Yom Kippur Jews have had – and they may feel it is a blessing or a curse (and maybe it’s both) - but on this day they have had the time and space to consider where  the Jewish community as a whole, and each individual, is in relation to these issues. Israel has managed to hijack Jewish history. We tremble to think about what this next year will bring.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on the morning of  October 12^th, 2024]

 

3. Cognitive Dissonance, the Pleasures of Life, and the Need for Stillness 

I spoke earlier today about cognitive dissonance and how we all use it to mange our lives. What I didn’t have time to share with you is the most dramatic example of cognitive dissonance I know.

There’s a photo taken in Eagle Creek, Oregon in 2017 by a photographer called Kristi McCluer –  you can google it, she won a ‘photo of the year’ award for it -  a photo in which there is a huge wall of flame dominating the whole of the horizon, devouring a forest, the trees creating an inferno, you can almost hear the roar of the flames, hear the cracking of the branches, feel the heat burning off the page as you look; and in the foreground there is a golf course, it can’t be more than 100 yards from the devastation happening in real time, and on the course three guys are lining up their putts as if nothing is happening. Now on the one hand this photo explains, portrays, cognitive dissonance far better than I can do with mere words.

And it is easy to read this photo as a powerful metaphor for indifference to a catastrophe waiting to engulf us – not just fire or floods or hurricanes or drought or any of the threats to the planet’s well being that are the backdrop to our lives. It is that, and in a way it is astonishing that more people are not crying out and screaming about the looming disaster – although some brave souls, here in the UK, and around the word, are doing that and taking whatever actions they can to protest this suicidal journey humanity is on.

But as we approach the end of our Day of Atonement my thoughts turn in another direction in relation to that scene. It’s a generous reading, interpretation, but I hope you can bear with me as I try and open it up.

In our own lives we all need opportunities – in spite of what is going on around us – just to focus on ourselves: we need to find how life can offer us pleasures, satisfactions, whether it is from companionship with others, from art, or music or poetry or meditation, tapestry-making or marathon running, theatre, gardening, swimming - activities we pursue on or own or with others, yes, even playing golf, or watching sport, ways of engaging with life in all its unfolding splendour.

On Yom Kippur Jews reflect a lot (supposedly) on their failures, avoidances, weaknesses:  this can be painful to do, and painful to glimpse the enormity of the work of transformation that we need to make as a people. Of course we don’t know what this next year will bring. Some Jews are feeling trepidation at the blowback here in the UK of the larger tragedy being played out in the Middle East– I never mentioned antisemitism once throughout the day and I know that is what worries some people the most. But as the day draws to a close what I want to focus on are the possibilities that exist for living well in spite of any fears for the future.

Life is precious. It contains real opportunities for an intense engagement with others, opportunities for an intensity of being, being together, sharing, laughing together and, yes, sometimes crying together, but moments of intensity when we know that we are really and truly alive and we wouldn’t have life any other way: it has its losses and sadnesses but it also has a treasure house of experience that we come across, or create. Those moments of intensity can be with others or just private moments by oneself. I think Kafka got this right, as he got so much right with his finely tuned intuition to what matters:  

“You do not have to leave the room, remain standing at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you, to be unmasked, it has no choice. It will writhe in ecstasy at your feet.”

This is the spirituality of a so-called secularist who understood (though TB was corrupting his lungs as he wrote) that the divine was present at every moment. “Be quite still”, he says: what is available in the world has no choice but to offer itself to you, here and now.

“We declare with gratitude…”  Jews say at the heart of their central prayer “…the signs of Your presence that are with us every day. At every moment, at evening, morning and noon, we experience your wonders and Your goodness.” This is what Kafka is alluding to. Divine goodness is present, present in the wonders of daily life, the ones that reveal themselves to us, and the ones we create for ourselves. After the rigours of the penitential Day of Atonement we will have done our work, we can return to life again. We may wish for one another a year full of new life, a year filled with the blessings life can bestow.

[based on thoughts shared towards the end of the Day of Atonement as a prelude to the final service of the day, Neilah, October 12^th 2024]

 

 

 

 

Remembering our Vision

On Wednesday evening Jewish communities around the world crossed the threshold. Into the New Year. The old year is behind us – though it isn’t really. It might be fading, but it hasn’t gone. It feels like this last year will never go, will never leave us. The New Year is beginning – but before we can move on into the new that opens up before us, perhaps we do need to pause and remember. The first day of the New Year is, after all, Yom Ha-Zikkaron, our liturgy says, ‘the day of remembering’.  

But what are going to remember from this past year? I imagine each of us in the Jewish community will have their own take on what we want to remember, what we need to remember - but that might be complicated by what we can’t help but remember, that we might prefer to forget. We can’t necessarily control what we remember.  Some images of this past year – if we chose to look, and not everyone did – became indelible: ineradicable traces of what humanity is capable of. For good and ill.

I know that if one was Israeli-born, or have family in Israel, or friends there, this last year has been an agonising time, a time of heart break, of fear (which is ongoing), of being profoundly shaken up by this latest chapter in the fraught saga of a Jewish homeland. This conflict – and this is the case even if a person had no immediate personal connection with those in Israel who have been living through this traumatic year on a daily, an hourly, basis - this conflict has effected us all.

It’s been about identity, and history, and belonging, it’s involved soul and feelings, it’s been about anger and guilt,  hatred, humiliation - and a terrible sense of vulnerability. It has been, in a way, unbearable – but it has had to borne, lived through, survived.

We’ve had no choice, this last year, but to go through and witness these events, in Israel, in Gaza, with as much of our humanity intact as we have been able to muster. This last year will never go, will never leave us. It has scarred the Jewish people collectively – in multiple ways. Scarred and scared. It’s awoken ancestral memories, and re-activated hidden wounds. There’s been so much hurt, and so much need for others to know our hurt - and, sometimes, for them in turn to feel the hurt. 

So as we cross the threshold into the New Year, Jews acknowledge all this. I work in a Diaspora community - which means our ties to Israel vary from person to person: for some in the community those bonds are as strong as steel, as deep as life itself; and for others the ties have felt different, sometimes looser, more like chords of silk, entangling us, reminding us that we are bound together in ways that might not always be welcome, but that can tie us in knots, emotionally, intellectually, morally, spiritually.

For some in my own community - and this is of course true of the wider Jewish community in the UK - it has been a year of pride, and resolve; for others it has been a time of troubling self-questioning, or shame, a year of wondering what our Jewish identity is rooted in, what values do we hold dear, and why. Sometimes, sadly, disturbingly, it’s also been a year of self-censorship for those who felt they were not being sufficiently ‘on message’. All this has happened to us.

And whatever one’s stance on what has unfolded this last year, and what is still unfolding hour by hour, Jews have all watched, sometimes appalled, at how the outside world conflates Zionism and Jewishness as if they are the same thing. Which they are not.  And whether it’s been in the workplace or at school or on a university campus, or just on the street, on public transport, in shops, Jews have all had to manage this latest turn in the long, jagged arc of Jewish history.

There has been a lot of suffering this last year, this year that is now past, but has not passed. We have suffered as a people – and we have caused suffering as a people.

The Jewish people are historically used to suffering, we know it in our souls; but we are not so used to thinking of ourselves as causing others to suffer. And this is something else we have had to bear this last year. Please understand me here – I am not making a political point, I am not talking about the necessity or otherwise of the suffering we have caused. I am talking about what our souls have had to bear, I am talking about the emotions we have had to go through, I am talking about the spiritual cost to our psyches, our minds, our hearts.

So, yes, the old year is still inside us – but now the year is turning, the New Year is opening up and Jews come together to celebrate that opening up, and what it offers us. This day in the Jewish year is a great gift, along with the ten day period they open up – they’re ‘Heaven sent’, so to speak  – they are an extraordinary opportunity because they offer us the chance to exorcise some of our pain, our confusion, our doubts; and to question our certainties. Certainties are psychic retreats – they make us feel safe.

Professor Eugene (‘John’) Heimler survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and thirty years later wrote a verse drama, ‘The Storm’, in which he said:  “Uncertainty is our only certainty”. He worked with people as a psychologist, helping people discover where hope lay in the journey ahead, not by looking back but by looking forward, looking around at community, at family, at friendship, at what life could offer now. At the gifts that life offers every day.

So in spite of all the uncertainties with which Jews are faced, the New Year offers us the chance of a re-set. There’s a Biblical verse that is sometimes quoted on the morning of Rosh Hashanah, our New Year. A verse of radical hopefulness.

It’s the voice of Isaiah channelling the divine consciousness within him: “For now I create new heavens and a new earth, and the past need not be remembered, nor ever brought to mind” – Wow, what an idea! – “Be glad and rejoice in what I can create” (Isaiah 65:17-18).

This is extraordinary, this prophetic vision – that whatever we have gone through, we can move on, we can move into the new, we can celebrate a new beginning.  We acknowledge that yes, everything is in a state of flux, of change, of chaos – all predictions you hear by all the so-called experts about these next few days, or this next year, are just fairy stories, to comfort us or scare us, but they are fictions because none of us knows what the next day will bring, never mind the next year.

“Everything, everywhere is always moving. Forever. Get used to it” – Brian Cox, playing Logan Roy, barked it out to his daughter Shiv in that great TV drama Succession. The character is a monster and a bully – but he is given some great lines. We can recognise the truth of the lines, as we do with Shakespeare: “Everything, everywhere is always changing, forever” and yes, we better find a way to “Get used to it”.

And yet, maybe there are some things that don’t change, some values that endure, some truths that endure, from generation to generation. Our Jewish liturgy points the way to that. Something in it remains unchanging. It offers us a different frequency of existence to tune in to, a different world to live in, for a few hours, a few days - a different angle of vision that focuses us on what is unchanging in a world of uncertainties. It reminds us of our vision, our ancient vision that is the justification for our existence as a people.

The liturgy reminds us that kindness matters, compassion matters, justice matters. It reminds us that Jews have not been put in the world to create more suffering. Our task remains unchanging: to alleviate suffering, to avoid harm, to struggle with our innate destructiveness and allow our gifts for creativity and goodness to shine through. 

We have this potential grafted to our souls – this is the radical hopefulness of the Jewish story. Whether it is in our own lives - at home, in our families, in our communities, in our society - or on the world stage, the relationship we have with others allows us to express our divine potential for making a difference for the better.

Our New Year summons us and reminds us – this is also what Yom HaZikkaron means – we are reminded that the potential for making a difference is our Jewish task and our destiny.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, October 2^nd, 2024]

 

Torah For Our Times?

On Saturday night, at the Selichot service, we took our first tentative steps, collectively, to edge towards our Jewish New Year. It feels like it’s been a long time coming. The vagaries of our calendar mean that  this year it’s very late, our New Year, it’ll be October already when it begins – it’s been a leap year, so an extra month was added, but still, something about the waiting this year feels different to me.

I think it’s due, perhaps inevitably, to the way this last 12 months in Jewish history have played out, are still playing out, how much has changed, how much we have lived through, how much we have suffered, how much we have been burdened by, how much are hearts have been divided, how much our souls have been squeezed – and we know that the New Year is a time of reflection, of inward-looking, of a re-alignment in our souls towards our core values, a time of teshuvah, of recognition of wrongdoing, of accounting for what we have done and what we have failed to do – and how are we going to do all that at the end of this tumultuous, history-defining, history-defying year?

Have we been more sinned against than sinning? Some may well feel that. Others may feel that whatever the opprobrium heaped on our heads this last year, whatever the aggressions directed against the Jewish people here and in Israel, there is still a burden of guilt on our shoulders too, collectively: I know that some in the Jewish community are feeling that guilt keenly along with a sense of shame at every child buried under the rubble of Gaza. And some in the community, not so much. This has not been an easy year and these are not easy things to talk about. These are not easy things to carry with us into our New Year and the soul-reckoning that this period of the year asks of us.

So all of this makes this New Year now approaching feel different from any other. And, for me, in addition to what I feel like as a fellow Jew with all of you, there is also the added question, which others are perhaps fortunate not to have to consider, the feeling of responsibility to talk about all this in the community, to the community. How to speak what is true to a divided community, for there are very different constituencies here in our synagogue communities and the wider Jewish community - all of them hurting in various ways. And how will I find the words to speak to that divide, across that divide, on Rosh Hashanah and on Yom Kippur? I don’t know yet how I will do it. 

But when I don’t know how to speak, or what to say, I often turn to the writers and poets of the past, to see if I can glean any clues about how to speak in such difficult times as these. Not what to say, for they did not face our situation, but how to say it, how to think about articulating what matters in words. This week I came across a line from a lecture by the Italian novelist Calvino, Italo Calvino, from 1976, in which he said “What we ask of writers is that they guarantee the survival of what we call human in a world where everything appears inhuman”.

Twenty years after the Shoah every writer - novelist, playwright, poet, essayist – every writer of worth, was facing this question: how to keep on speaking of the ‘human in a world where everything appears inhuman’. As his fellow Italian writer, Primo Levi, said “I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man” (If This Is A Man). But I am wondering at this season : Do we remain amazed? Do we remain astonished, astounded, dumfounded, by humanity’s capacity for inhumanity? And that can be in the home, in society, on the world stage.

Because if we can bear to look – and many of us cannot bear to look for we fear looking and going mad – but if we do look, if we do expose ourself to acts of inhumanity, which are reported on a daily basis from somewhere near or far, what is evoked in us? Can we give it a name? Maybe we can’t – being ‘amazed’ is not what I experience, it’s more a deep disquiet, a horror, a soul-sickness, a revulsion at what being human can mean, being human but not humane.

How do we ‘guarantee the survival of what we call human in a world where everything appears inhuman’? – for this is surely the task not only of the artist but of all of us. But when we are bombarded by the inhumane it takes its toll on us – of course we can shield ourselves, just not look, we can remain indifferent, or cynical, or even (God-forbid) defenders of acts of inhumanity: ‘They deserved it…they had it coming to them…they are just animals’.

But for anyone who wants to feel that they value the survival of the ‘human in a world where everything appears inhuman’ those responses will feel like failures. But still, what we are do, what are we to feel, when faced with something like the amazing technological ingenuity entwined with the moral barbarism of exploding pagers and walkie talkies? Do we feel ethnic pride – or do we feel human horror? And what do each of these responses say about us? This is the season for these questions.

Can we find a language, can we find the words, to speak of what happens to us, to our souls, when exposed to acts like these? I am not sure I have the words, can find the words, although, as I say, I feel a responsibility to find some words. But if I can’t as yet craft my own words I can at least share with you the words of others, like Primo Levi, who survived the inhumanity and returned to speak of what he had seen and what he had learnt in it and from it. Words like this:

“Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which marks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.” (The Black Hole of Auschwitz)

Before he died, Moses wrote down the story of what he had experienced with his people – we read the text this week - the events, the lessons, the laws, the failures, the struggles of the journey his people had taken. This story – this ‘Torah’ our storytellers call it (Deuteronomy 31:9), this ‘teaching’ - was to be read to the community every seven years: this is your story, Moses says, you need to know it, it was written not for those who had gone through it personally (almost all those had died on the journey through the desert) but for the next generation, who hadn’t. But it was still their story. And it is still our story.

We remain faithful to the story of the need to re-tell the story.

But we moderns have other words too, words created in our more recent past that have become part of a Torah for our times, a teaching, a kind of revelation that speaks to us of  truths that transcend our own times – you can call them ‘eternal’ truths if you are so minded - and Primo Levi is, I think, a foundational voice within the Torah of our times. We read his texts  and re-read him, for everything is within it. 

He offers us an angle of vision to help us look at the human and the inhuman in every society on our fragile planet - and when he discerns that the bacillus of dehumanisation is still alive within the human heart, we might do well to pay attention. He knows whereof he speaks when he calls out the “Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which marks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.”

Torah for our times.

 

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, 28^th September 2024]

 

Anatevka Lives

 

I see that the show ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ is back in town: if you want to catch it, it’s on at Regent’s Park Open Air theatre in London. Sixty years old now, it once held the record for the longest running musical on Broadway: 10 years, 3,000+ performances.   

Adapted from the Yiddish tales of Solomon Rabinovitch from Kiev, perhaps better known to you and I as Sholem Aleichem, this piece of musical theatre – the brainchild of three Jewish artists each of whom contributed to its success,  with the book (Joseph Stein), the music (Jerry Brock), the lyrics (Sheldon Harnick) – has retained its appeal over the decades. It’s been revived every decade or so and I am sure there’s no one reading this who can’t hum, or sing, some of its famous tunes. “If I were a rich man”, “Sunrise, sunset”…One way or another it’s become part of our psyches. And yet, if not exactly panned by the critics when it came out, it was met with remarkable condescension by some reviewers who saw it when it premiered in 1964.

Philip Roth called it “shtetl kitsch” and  Cynthia Osick, then – like Roth – at the beginning of a stellar literary career - called it an “emptied-out, prettified, romantic vulgarization” of the Yiddish original. I get that, and if I am being high-minded about these things, I might even agree with them. Though high-minded might be just another word for snobbish.   And yet something about the show hit a nerve with audiences, whether they saw it on stage or in its 1971 film version: not just the singalong melodies but the drama of resilience demonstrated by a cultural group in the face of dark times – “horrible things are happening all over the land” is one line that resonates for audiences in different times and places, in different cultures, and the drama addresses a universal dilemma about how families are to survive difficult times: times of oppression, persecution, prejudice, the hostility of others in a society or the antipathy of governments.

Do you adapt, do you compromise, do you hold on to traditions, do you let go of them? How do you survive in a rapidly changing world: it’s not just a Jewish question but it’s been a question for many cultural groups within modernity, and a question still very much alive today  whether you’re Muslim or Ukrainian or Palestinian or white English working-class.   

When the group you identify with, the group you feel you belong to, feels threatened – and that’s regardless of whether the threat is real or not, this is all about subjectivity – if you feel threatened, how do you stay true to who you feel yourself to be collectively?

For Jews in the 20^th century, the primary solution to this problem was of course supposed to be Zionism. Only Jews living autonomously in their own land and not feeling beholden to others would solve, it was said, the dilemmas of being an unwelcome minority in other people’s lands. Well, we have seen how well that’s turned out. Becoming a semi-pariah state in the eyes of much of the world has replicated the problem rather than solving it.

As a few prescient Jewish thinkers recognised prior to the establishment of the State – Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Franz Rosenzweig, Henrietta Szold, Gershom Scholem – unfettered Jewish nationalism, a nationalism unanchored in the highest ethical standards of the spiritual heritage of Judaism – could only lead to trouble. They foresaw how the existence of the Jewish people within a land to which they may have had a historical claim but that happened to be a land long-settled in and claimed by others would mean that Jews would yet again be a problematic provocation to the non-Jewish world - just as they had been in fictional Anatevka and its real life counterparts in pre-revolutionary Russia.

But let me stay with 'Fiddler on the Roof' for a moment, this very Jewish and yet universal piece of storytelling. Its original investors, by the way, particularly Jewish investors, were worried the show was “too ethnic”  (by which of course they meant ‘too Jewish’); but perhaps because the show was rooted in a family drama, an inter-generational family dynamic of  children wanting to break free of inherited cultural ways, particularly when it came to marriage partners, the show’s ethnic particularism didn’t seem to detract from its popularity; and indeed, when it came to casting the lead (the role of Tevye) for the film version in 1971, the actor most keen to do it – any guesses? - was Frank Sinatra who seemingly didn’t feel that being an archetypical goy was any bar to stepping into the shoes of Zero Mostel.

Actually my thoughts about 'Fiddler on the Roof ' were sparked a few weeks ago. They came to me via a circuitous route - but let me lead you down the rabbit hole of my thinking here: bear with me.

When the recent rioting erupted up and down the UK, it was of course really shocking and frightening but as I watched the news each day and read about what was going on, I saw how this outbreak of toxic nationalism was competing for airspace with another form of nationalism, the benign kind, the nationalism of the Olympic Games. So you had the bizarre phenomenon of two opposite expressions of nationalism going head to head: the racist aggression of white Englishness attacking black, brown and Muslim ‘foreigners’ – and on the other hand the countrywide support for Team GB, a team filled with representatives of all those apparently unwelcome ‘others’. And the irony, if that’s what one wants to call it, was of Team GB  being cheered on by many of those same people who were firebombing immigrant hostels and homes and mosques.

Yes, people are strange. They don’t add up. But then maybe none of us do. Maybe we all have our inner contradictions: it’s just easier to see the contradictions in others. And condemn hypocrisy in others, while turning a blind eye to our own.

So – I am coming to Fiddler on the Roof – I was watching how the UK government got to grips with the situation with a sense of real urgency, this was grown-up political leadership, using  the police and the courts and the apparatus of law, and I felt very thankful for living in a country that was able to offer such robust protection to those being victimised, and with a government intent on safeguarding our collective well-being  from thuggery and racism.

It brought to mind the wisdom of Rabbi Hanina’s statement in the Mishnah two thousand years ago:  “Pray for the welfare of the government; for without the fear and awe it inspires, people would swallow each other alive” (Pirke Avot 3:2). But that down-to-earth pragmatism also brought to mind Fiddler on the Roof’s commentary, as it were, on the Mishnah: Tevye’s refrain – you may remember it -  “May God bless and keep the Czar – far away from us!”

Dark humour has always been a Jewish defence against pain, and fear, but there’s also an emotional depth to that line as well: you hear in it, I think, the authentic Diaspora voice of ancestral Jewish ambivalence. On the one hand, Jews have felt gratitude to the secular powers-that-be of the lands in which they lived, an attitude traceable back to the prophet Jeremiah who wrote to the Jews exiled in Babylon: “Seek the welfare of the city to which you have been delivered, and pray to God on its behalf, for in its prosperity, you shall prosper” (29:7). And on the other hand, Tevye is voicing an awareness - “May God bless and keep the Czar – far away from us!” – that not all governments are going to be kindly disposed to the minorities in their midst. Protectors can become persecutors in the twinkling of an eye. Or from one generation to the next.

In the UK, of course, prayers for the government still figure in our Jewish liturgy, during the Torah service, along with prayers for the Royal family: it’s a tradition – “Tradition!” – that goes back to Cromwell’s re-admission of the Jews into England in 1656. Samuel Pepys records in his diary hearing a prayer for the King when he visited a synagogue in 1663.  British Jews wanted to demonstrate their loyalty then to the wider society in which they lived – and they still do. And I suppose we still retain this prayer not to impress any visiting non-Jew, but to remind ourselves we are part of a larger society that we remain committed to. And maybe subliminally the prayer acts as a reminder that our well-being as a community ultimately depends on the laws of the land and their benign application by the government of the day.

So, some final thoughts on Anatevka, and ‘shtetl kitsch’. I think what Roth was offering was a critique of how the show’s dramatists created an upbeat version of the original’s more historically-accurate darkness: Sholem Aleichem’s fictional Anatevka was lorded over by a brutal, cruel, antisemitic Russian official, but on stage he’s turned into a sympathetic friend of the Jews; and in the original source material, Tevye  is left alone at the end, his wife is dead, his daughters scattered. Whereas in the show they are still together - and off to America for a new start. In that sense the show was a betrayal of the fictional reality; and of the historical reality of Czarist Russian antisemitism.

But my additional thought – this is not Roth, I am building on Roth – is that this kitsch betrayal was, remember, perpetrated in 1964, when the awareness of the Holocaust was just entering fully into American consciousness (the word ‘Holocaust’ to describe what had happened only entered into public awareness in the early 60s) and it may be that this Broadway version went some way to unconsciously soothing the trauma of Jews and the guilt of non-Jews, enacting, as it did, a counterfactual narrative of persecution with a happy ending.

Because of course it was all the real Anatevkas that were wiped out a mere generation after Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish stories. Maybe part of Fiddler on the Roof’s popularity is the way it acts as a psychic defence against the traumas of genocide. Then - and now. Amazing to make a record-breaking show out of that.

And if you want a final twist in the tail/tale of this show, you might be interested that  – and here’s life imitating art – there is now a real village, community, called Anatevka.  It’s on the outskirts of Kyiv, and it was established in 2015 on a plot of empty land after the first Russian invasion of Ukraine, Crimea, led to tens of thousands of people being displaced, including thousands of Jews. It was set up to supply food, medicine, housing and education for the refugees. And who set it up? HaRav Moshe Reuven Azman, the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine; he deliberately named the community after the fictional shtetl, and it has, since 2022 , become a leading operational centre for humanitarian efforts in the current war.

So Anatevka lives – not just in the pages of Yiddish fiction, and not just on the stage, but as a living example of tikkun olam, Jewish ethics in action. As so often, history is even stranger than fiction.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, August 24th, 2024]

 

 

Reflections on Peace In a Time of War

How does one speak about peace in a time of war?

The question is prompted by the appearance within the weekly cycle of readings from the Torah of the familiar three-part blessing:

“May the Eternal bless you and keep you; may the presence of the Eternal be with you and be gracious to you; may the Eternal bestow favour upon you and give you peace” (Numbers 6: 24-26).

In its context this is a blessing originally bestowed by the Israelite priests on the people, and it has entered Jewish liturgical contexts in a variety of ways. And it is also present in Christian worship. So this wish for ‘peace’ – shalom in the Hebrew – has been repeated, uninterruptedly, in one context or another, for more than two and half millennia.

Clearly, it’s a longstanding wish, this hope for shalom, peace. And Jews wish for it so fervently, pray for it so insistently, repeat it so frequently – it comes a dozen or so times in every service – we bring it into our consciousness so often (more than any other wish or hope we give voice to), we keep on coming back to it over and over again – but why?

Why this emphasis, this hypnotic vehemence? Could our preoccupation with it perhaps be connected with its absence? As if because we are missing out on it, we have the fantasy that by repeating it enough times we can make it happen? As If speech can conjure up what remains stubbornly, forlornly, elusive?

Shalom, peace. And this is not just peace as an absence of war. The Hebrew word contains much more than that. Something more personal.  When one says the traditional Sabbath greeting Shabbat shalom, for example, one is saying more than ‘let today be a day without war, without violence’. We are using shalom in its deeper Hebraic sense of harmony, integration, the healing of feelings of fragmentation and dividedness. We sense that we may be divided from others, as well as suffering from an inner dividedness, estranged from our deeper, truer selves. So this is shalom as – to use our current jargon – wholeness, wellbeing; shalom as  connectedness with our selves, our souls. It is about an inner state of being  at one with ourselves – which is so easy to say, so difficult to feel, or achieve, except perhaps in moments.

Maybe shalom is more a destination than an achieved state; more a signpost on the journey towards a deeper intimacy with ourselves and others - if only for a moment. As if shalom  contains a profound wish to be in tune with who we really are, and in tune with others in all their profuse and wondrous individuality. For we know hard it can feel to be at peace with ourselves, let alone with others. (Although we also intuit that the latter might depend upon the former).

But to speak in this way about shalom and what it might mean for us – to speak about it as a subjective experience we might desire, wish for, hope for, pray for – shalom as an end to feeling in conflict with ourselves, with others, shalom as pointing to feelings of wholeness, harmony, shalom as a spiritual or psychological state – yes, shalom is all that, of course it is. But to speak of it as only that, to focus only on that, is (I think) a kind of avoidance, however much we might want to focus on its inner meaning.

Because what it avoids – and this is what makes it an unavoidable topic at the moment  – is that shalom also does mean literal peace. Not just inner peace but outer peace as well. And can we really experience deep inner peace when there is such an absence of shalom in the world? Maybe we can - we are narcissistic enough. We are self-preoccupied enough. Our horizons might be narrow enough.

This is ‘Zone of Interest’ territory: as Jonathan Glazer’s profound mediation on denialism suggests, we can seal ourselves off from what is happening beyond the wall, over the seas, in other places and lands, or just along the road from where we live; we can focus on our own personal shalom, and maybe there are times when we need to do that. Maybe for Jewish communities, Shabbat morning is one of those times. When we can allow cognitive dissonance to do its work, and just focus on the world which is ourselves.

But all the time we know – a part of us knows, and this can disturb our sense of our own shalom - all the time we know we are living in a world that is so lacking in shalom, so far from being healed, whole. All the time we can hear a voice, insistent, unrelenting: ‘How can one speak about shalom, peace, in a time of war?’ Isn’t it a sort of obscenity? At the very least, isn’t it a huge failure of imagination? A kind of fundamental dishonesty?

Maybe there is so much insistence on shalom in Jewish liturgy because we want to drown out the cries of war, the pain, the deaths, the suffering, the losses, the grief, the horrors, the senselessness of it all. Maybe shalom becomes the mantra we repeat to try to blot out the images, and the knowledge, of human aggression and human hatred and human savagery. These have always been part of the human condition but I sense a new urgency in some parts of the Jewish community to find an emotion distance  from all the war crimes and ‘collateral damage’ and self-justifying belligerence, all the agony of conflict.  This pain can be too much to bear.

This is not just about Israel and Hamas. Do you know how many wars and situations of armed violence are taking place right now? I’m talking about situations of armed violence that meet the definition of armed conflict under international humanitarian law. The Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law is currently monitoring and recording casualties in more than 110 conflicts around the world. Can you imagine doing that for a living – monitoring human aggression from continent to continent, keeping a tally of the dead and the injured, mapping out the malign patterns of human destructiveness? I take off my hat to them and wonder how they sleep at night, where they get their shalom within the demonic inferno. It’s endless – as it always has been.

But to return to Jewish prayers at this time, Jewish hopes, all the self-soothing involved in Jewish liturgy’s bright-eyed wishfulness: at its best I suppose the repetition of shalom is a reminder that something else is possible, even if it is so hard to achieve. It does keep hope alive, which – if it works - is no small achievement. Because the sparks of hope can get extinguished – for any of us – faced with the maelstroms of daily life. Hope does get snuffed out – sometimes for moments, sometimes for long hours or even days – hope is a very fragile inner experience. Almost like a gift. Almost like it comes to us, rather than we find it by grasping after it. As if it arrives, sometimes unexpectedly, from elsewhere.  

Although Jewish liturgy occasionally gestures towards an awareness that peace is something that is in our own hands to make, to fashion, to allow to come into being – in other words that we have the responsibility to bring it into being – most of Jewish liturgy, along with the texts of Torah, is quietly insistent that if peace comes, if it does arrive, it’s as if it comes from the outside.

We recall the verse we started with: ‘Yisa Adonai panav el’echa ve’ asem l’cha shalom’ – literally “May the Eternal turn to you/face you, and give you peace/set up peace for you/cause you to have the experience of peace”. In the Talmud, Shalom is one of God’s names - as if the rabbis intuited that our experience of peace is like glimpsing something divine and beyond our power to control.  As if it’s there all the time but we have to wait for it to arrive, we wait for it to be granted, as if it is indeed a gift. A gift we receive – and which we can then bestow.

Unsettlingly, this is a picture of dependence. We can be open to receive shalom but we can’t control it. Like babies waiting to be picked up and soothed, like children waiting to be comforted, like adults waiting to be embraced. We are dependent. ‘May God’s face be turned to you’, ‘May the One who is Peace let this peace settle on you, settle into you’ - the Torah pictures moments when we are the recipients of a kind of grace.

We have all experienced moments of reverie,  moments when the world around us holds us, nourishes us, comforts us. Gives us ‘peace’. No wonder we repeat it so often: the longing for the creation of these moments, the re-creation of these moments, is deep within us. Balm for the soul. 

So if we are foolhardy enough to speak of peace in a time of war, maybe the humbling recognition of how limited are our capacities to enact this desired way of being is one place to start. We need so much help. And yet we are stranded - in a world where the traditional religious picture of a ‘bestower of peace’ may no longer speak to us, where do we turn?

Maybe we return to the familiar, words worn smooth as pebbles over the centuries, words which may help, sometimes, to keep our fragile hopes alive: “May the Source of peace in the highest bring this peace to us, to all Israel, and to all the world.”

[loosely based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, 15^th June, 2024]