I’ll been wondering where to start – how to think – in the immediate aftermath of this awful election result in the UK?
And I decided to start where Jews traditionally start, with the Torah, with this text that has sustained us through the generations, through triumphs and tragedies. It’s where we root ourselves, steadying ourselves as we are buffeted by the winds of fortune and misfortune that assail us, individually and collectively.
When I saw that this week’s allocated sedrah was all about the consequences of sibling rivalry – the archetypal tale about Jacob and Esau, and the fraught reverberations of that drama in the unfolding of the Jewish story - I couldn’t help think, ruefully, how our current political mess is directly linked to exactly this theme. By ‘directly linked’ I mean symbolically and thematically linked.
You know the Biblical story. In brief: how Jacob’s second-born status led him to manipulate Esau into selling his birthright, then cheat his way into getting the family blessing from his blind father Isaac.
But let me take you back in time to a previous era in British history, a previous General Election. Let me take you back all the way to 2010. I know it’s remote now, lost in the mists of time. Gordon Brown – remember him? - was Prime Minister: he called an election, lost the election, and resigned as leader of the Labour party.
Who would succeed him as Leader of the Opposition? Six candidates put themselves forward: Diane Abbott, Ed Balls, Andy Burnham, John McDonald, David Milliband, and his younger brother Ed Milliband.
I met David Milliband once, it was (I think) before 2010: he came to the launch of a Jewish environmental group and when he walked into the room he had that rare quality, a natural and relaxed authority, a presence, a bearing that was at same time both self-assured and modest, almost self-deprecating. His short speech, made without notes, was fluent, intelligent, completely to the point. It had moral authority and gravitas and a winning humour. He was a natural leader.
In the Labour leadership campaign that followed Gordon Brown’s resignation, David Milliband had far more MP nominations than the other candidates. And then in the second stage, in the knock-out system the Labour party use to narrow down the choices, he was consistently ahead in the first 3 rounds of voting. By the time the final, fourth round, came, the choice had narrowed to the two Jewish brothers, David and Ed. In the final voting, David, the elder, had a clear majority of both Labour MPs and Labour party members. But Ed had the support of the big unions, and when all the votes were tallied, he had 50.7% and David had 49.3%. So the younger had supplanted the elder, as the deep imprint, the gravitational force, of Jewish history, appears to dictate.
It was a shock result, and our tragedy, our current British tragedy, has emerged directly from that sibling rivalry. Because - if we can indulge in a moment of counterfactual historical thinking for a moment - most thoughtful commentators agree that with David Milliband as leader of the Labour party there was no way he would have lost to David Cameron in the 2015 election. Cameron was leading an unpopular Conservative-dominated coalition that was enacting the ideologically-driven cruelties of austerity - but he was still able to defeat charisma-less Ed Milliband. And you all know what happened next: the ill-conceived referendum and this story of national self-harm that we are still immersed in.
There’s a book to be written – and a PhD thesis or two, no doubt – about how the psychological dramas of family life, particularly the rivalries between siblings, can become enacted in the public domain, often to disastrous effect.
For example: you may not have heard of the American 19th century actor Edwin Booth - he was a superstar in his day, the Al Pacino of his times, touring the country with his Shakespearean performances. He was incredibly in demand; and nobody had heard of his younger brother, who struggled for years in his acting career – his brother was John Wilkes Booth, and if that name rings a bell now it’s not for his acting, but because he finally manged to outdo his older brother for public attention by assassinating Abraham Lincoln. In a theatre, you might recall – John Wilkes Booth’s finest performance.
Sibling rivalries – from Cain and Abel onwards – can be deadly. The book of Genesis is full of these stories: we’ll soon be reading in Genesis how Joseph’s brothers leave him for dead in a pit because they can’t stand the hatred he aroused in their hearts at their young brat of a brother’s presumption to superiority, a sense of superiority fostered – and this is one of the Bible’s beautiful ironies – by their father Jacob’s favouritism.
Jacob acted out with his children the very trait that had caused such disruption in his own family of origin. And if you think it’s only men who are afflicted with this kind of sibling rivalry, we have Rachel and Leah competing with each for Jacob’s affection. And so it goes on, generation after generation, with the Biblical mythic narratives forcing the reader to confront how intergenerational family tensions, and sibling hostility, are written into the larger history of a tribe or a nation.
The Biblical storytellers knew that human history is the story of the psychodynamics of personal life, through the generations. They used the same word, toldot, for ‘history’ and ‘generations’. Life in families - between parents, between parents and children, between children and children – all this complex stuff constitutes the building blocks of a society. And they showed us the ways in which all the basic passions of emotional life come spilling out at some stage – within an extended family, or later on, on a larger stage. Themes of envy and jealousy - who has more, who has less; themes of resentment and rivalry - who is owed what, who deserves what, who is entitled to what benefits or what status, or what rights, or what attention; these are all emotional issues that become societal issues and political issues.
Ed’s younger-brother rivalry with his older, most charismatic brother had to be acted out – he was urged to stand aside, but refused. Just as the rivalry between Labour and the Lib-Dems in this election was too intense for them to agree on a joint strategy to step aside in certain seats for the good of the country.
I would suggest - and I am sure this is a minority view, a view you will never hear discussed in the public domain – that only politicians who have worked through their own personal and family issues, including sibling rivalries, have the psychological strength and insight to make decisions in the political realm that are truly for the larger good. Unless you have come to terms with certain psychological dynamics in your own life, you will act them out in one place or another to the detriment of others. We see this all the time in politics.
A final thought about this. It is one of the wonders of Biblical literature that our storytellers show you the naked truth about their characters, our mythic ancestors: they don’t disguise the murderous feelings, or the envy, or the jealousy, or the lust or possessiveness or anger of the characters. On the contrary, they insist on it, showing us how these feelings play themselves out through the generations for good and bad, with consequences that can be hurtful or benign, damaging or fortunate. You can’t predict as any story unfolds – just like with ourselves - how things will play out in a lifetime, or in the next generation. They emphasise the lived human reality in all its complexity and murky depths. But they also insist on something else.
The Biblical authors are not just painting psychological pictures, they are also painting theological pictures. In these stories they are saying, overtly or in hints: ‘this is the way that God works in history’. God works through the toldot, the generations. God works through the characters’ own actions, or inactions, their own rivalries and jealousies; through whatever is played out on the human level the Bible dramatizes that something else is working itself through which is divine, godly, even if that isn’t known about by the characters.
Often unbeknownst to themselves, the characters in the Bible are carriers of a divine story working itself out in history, through the generations. The Jewish story is carried that way, generation after generation. This is the Bible’s greatest, most chutspadik, most grandiose, claim: God is working out the Jewish story through human beings, through people like us. With all our flaws and defects, our lack of consciousness, our lack of self-understanding.
But the question now is: that may be how the Bible views things, the interrelationship between humanity and divinity – but is it still real for us, as a way of thinking? Is it helpful still to think that there may be a bigger story working its way out through us? Are we still the vehicles, unbeknownst to ourselves, of a larger scheme of things? Or has that story run its course? Is God no longer present for us in that way?
When one brother refuses to step down and let the older brother take over – when a kiss turns into a bite [rabbinic commentary on Genesis 33:4, based on a play-on-words between the Hebrew words for ‘kiss’ and ‘bite’] - history turns on that moment. In a secular age maybe this is how it now is – it’s all hard-biting politics and ego-driven showmanship, bread and circuses, deception and self-deception.
Has the divine spirit fled the stage, withdrawn into itself until it can find a human host to act through? A Mandela or an Obama or even an Angela Merkel, politicians (or a non-politician like Greta Thunberg) who can accommodate within their hearts and minds something of that eternal spirit that takes new forms in each generation but that we recognise through the traces that eternal spirit leaves behind: the compassion, the kindness, the generosity, the selflessness, the passion for justice - the hallmarks of the sacred within the realm of the human.
As the UK drives off a cliff edge, we still have a job to do, we People of the Book. “Turn it and turn it”, as the rabbis of old said, “for everything is in it” - if you know where to look, how to look.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, December 14th 2019]
