Finding Hope in Unsettling Times

 It’s a truism to say that these are strange times, disturbing times, vexing times: if you are not feeling destabilised in some fundamental part of yourself - somehow on edge, unable to fully relax, fully let go and enjoy life in all its abundant richness - if you are feeling you have lost some essential inner calmness of spirit, or hopefulness about life, if you are finding yourself unable to get to sleep at night, or waking unnaturally early and then unable to get back to sleep – if you are feeling any of that, or just unaccountably ill-at-ease, if this is how it is for you at the moment, I have two things to say.

First: you are not alone. You may not have a context in which you can talk about this, or get to grips with it,  you may not even have the words to pin down these unsettled and unsettling feelings: you just know things aren’t right. But I know that you are not alone in responding like this to what we are living with, and living through.

Secondly: I think this unsettledness you might be feeling, the edginess, the unpindownable sense of being ill-at-ease is entirely congruent with the external circumstances we are living through. What is going on is like a psychic – psychological and spiritual -  earthquake; for the tectonic plates beneath our feet are shifting. Things which have been stable in our lives are becoming – more rapidly than we can adjust to – unstable. Things feel out of control, we feel out of control – because things are out of control.

Let’s look at just a few areas where this is true. Obviously, close to home, there is Covid-19, with all its ongoing uncertainties and disruptions and questions. We are having to wonder not only about whether we and our loved ones will survive this next 12 months, but about what aspects of our lives will ever return to some semblance of – that dread word – normality. Nobody’s in control of this disease, anywhere in the world; and there’s no need for me to describe the UK government’s shambolic attempts to get a grip on the situation. We are having to manage daily anxieties about our own health, while at the same time adapt to how our everyday lives have been altered: in small, and sometimes large, ways we’ve had to leave behind a world with which we were familiar. 

How we met people , how we greeted people, where we travelled, how we travelled, where we prayed, where we played bridge, how we saw the doctor, how we planned for the future - so confidently, with such lightness of being – it’s all gone. We’ve had to leave it all behind, though we keep hoping we are going back. But we are not.  We can never re-set the  time button, however profoundly we might wish we could.  

In the annual cycle of readings from the Torah, we have reached the beginning of the Abraham saga (Genesis12). Abraham – not in the prime of his life, but in the second half of his life, and after a settled life in one territory - is told/commanded to leave behind his land, his birth community, his family roots, all the security of his life, and move on.

And our Torah text dramatizes how he seems to have been able to do this: he submits his own will, his own needs, his own ties of affection and rootedness in what was familiar and secure, he lets go of all that everyday human clutching at what he had, and submits to a call he hears, experiences:  an inner voice, urgent, insistent, unwelcome: Lech – Go. Lech – Let go. L’cha – it’s for you, for your own sake (12:1).

How are we think about that? We who can’t bear to let go, we who are feeling so destabilised, so ill-at-ease in our souls, as the ground shifts beneath our feet. I said back in March, when Covid first came over the horizon and we were preparing for the UK’s first national lockdown – just as we are now preparing for the second one  - I said that we already had the virus, all of us. It was in our heads, it was infiltrating into how we saw what was going on, how we felt about everything. And we still have that virus inside us. All those symptoms I described earlier are part of the virus we are still carrying.

And none of us have Abraham’s gift, or courage, or madness, to just ‘let go’, move on, leave behind what gives us our security and stability. But the tectonic plates are shifting and they are forcing us to let go and move on from the world we have grown accustomed to, and believed would last forever.

For example: who thought that American democracy might come to an end before our eyes?  These last four years have exposed - and in the weeks to come I fear we will see it confirmed – how thin is the fabric of America’s rootedness in democratic norms and conventions. And although that’s taking place 3000 miles from us, we are destabilised by what we see: the stoking of paranoid conspiracy theories, the assaults on truth, the championing  of hatred and divisiveness, the undermining of a scientific worldview, the undermining of public trust in the election itself. All of these spill over in one form or another into our own body politic: in our globalised world, the medical virus and the virus that corrodes social wellbeing are transnational.

When the word ‘fake’ is used as a code for ‘something I don’t like to hear’, where ‘reality’ becomes ‘what I decide it is’, where the dictatorship of feeling trumps rational thinking, we are in the world of psychosis. How can we remain unaffected by being witness to this? Even to say ‘witness’ is a distortion: we aren’t only witnesses; we are, willingly or unwillingly, participants in the world’s unfolding. The world’s unravelling.

What is being shaken – in the US, in India, in Turkey, in Brazil, in Poland and Hungary – is democratic solidity, and the rule of law; and the reverberations of this penetrate our psyches too. Around the world, autocratic governments, authoritarian  governments, xenophobic governments, are on the rise – and I guess if you are Andy Burnham or another  civic leader in the North of England, you might have a thing or two to say about autocratic government closer to home.  

So we know some of the factors causing us to feel destabilised. Along with Covid and this forthcoming inescapable collision between fantasy-based politics and democracy  in America, we know about the third huge tectonic plate that is shifting beneath our feet: the environmental crisis, and how we are no longer rooted in a secure way, in the way we all grew up, our homeland belief, that the natural world around us would somehow go on unfolding in all its David Attenborough-tinged wondrous profusion, its miraculous multiplicity, for ever and ever. As the planet chokes and microplastic particles enter our lungs and the brains of unborn infants, how can we not feel ill-at-ease? We are porous – physically, emotionally, psychically.

So: I’ve just named three of the tectonic plates shifting – and I haven’t even mentioned the economy here in the UK, or our imminent falling off the Brexit cliff, or the toxic levels of collusion between government and private companies to the detriment of social wellbeing. How do we find our feet in it all? Where is the solid ground?

Where do we find our hope?

Of course there are many places we can find it – though we may each have to construct our own anthology of sources of hopefulness. Many in the UK have been stirred by the campaigning vigour of our unofficial ‘leader of the opposition’, the footballer Marcus Rashford, in his battle to end food poverty in a country where 1.4 million children qualify for free school meals. Thousands of local businesses and many hundreds of thousands of individuals have marshalled their generosity and compassion and scarce financial resources in the face of the moral abyss of government cruelty, and have joined his campaign to ensure that Britain’s disadvantaged children have food to eat. There is hope in the deep wellsprings of  empathy and goodwill still alive in a nation battered by austerity and pandemic and government indifference.    

For those who belong to a religious community – like Finchley Reform Synagogue, where I speak from time to time – hope has arrived this week following a historic decision to move on, like Abraham: to create (after 60 years in one building) a brand-new synagogue/community centre/ multi-functional, environmentally-sustainable building. On Shabbat Lech l’cha – when we read of our mythic ancestor’s journey of moving on, following the divine call to leave behind the old and bring a blessing into the wider world - this communal decision was a celebration of hopefulness.

Yes, it’s in the time of Covid and we have no idea how long it’ll be before we can ever meet together in that new space; yes, it’s in a time of huge economic chaos and worldwide political uncertainty, and we have no real idea what the challenges of tomorrow will be for religious communities – we might have to become a neighbourhood food bank for the next 60 years or more; and yes, we don’t know whether the very air we breath will make life in the cities liveable for our children and grandchildren. But in spite of all these uncertainties - and they are real uncertainties - a decision of hopefulness was made this week.

And it takes religious courage to make that kind of decision. Religious courage, spiritual courage, Abrahamic courage even: leaving the old behind in order to bring the Judaic blessing on into a new era.

Yet I doubt that this kind of symbolic and practical adventure will make us sleep any more easily at night.  Jews have learnt to distrust the material world as a source of hope. A Judaic sense of hopefulness comes – (if it comes at all) – from our rootedness in another realm. A Jewish sense of hopefulness comes from an engagement with other dimensions of reality.

So when I engage with the language and themes of Torah - for example, exploring the dramas of Abraham’s life - I am provoked by the words, stirred by the dilemmas, inspired by the hope that is incarnated in the text. When God changes Abram’s name (Genesis 17:5) and then Sarai’s name (17:15), they aren’t asked if it was okay, they weren’t asked how they ‘felt’ about it. Our storyteller portrays these mythic progenitors of the Jewish people being  renamed by a divine force. Something is added to each of their names. This symbol of transformation acknowledges that change is possible.

Abram left behind his certainties and opened himself to following and listening to the divine – that gives me hope, it gives me inspiration that listening in, as deeply as is possible amidst all the distractions, listening in to what is going on around and within, listening in to the unfolding spirit of all being (otherwise known as Adonai), this kind of listening opens us to a reality that can guide and underpin - and provoke and sometimes, yes, destabilise - our lives. But it is filled with hope, that reality: to be the bearer of blessing is real. We can add something to someone else’s life – like God added a letter to Abram’s name - and it’s a blessing. Change is possible.

The poetry of Torah endures from generation to generation: it is our strength, it offers hope, over and over; we can bear the vicissitudes of life because we are caught up in a drama that is bigger than ourselves. It’s the only thing that is unchanging, that endures, as solid as rock in our lives, even though it is also as fluid as water, for it flows and ripples and is never still: we dip into it and it is never the same from moment to moment, for we are never the same from moment to moment, and yet we can always draw upon it, endlessly deep, ever-flowing, feeding the spirit, nurturing our souls, which are thirsty for meaning and for hope.

[loosely based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, October 31^st, 2020]