On Ukraine: What Can One Say?

 First he came for the Chechens but I did not speak out because I was not a Chechen.

Then he came for Crimea but I did not speak out because I was not from Crimea.

Then he came for the dissidents and journalists but I did not speak out because I was neither a dissident nor a journalist.

Then he came for the Ukrainians - like the mother of Ira, our traumatised cleaner, whose mum is moving to a different room every night, still with internet connection so her daughter can speak to her every hour, every fifteen minutes; and the family of another Ukrainian I know, who are fleeing west, right now, from the family home they rebuilt by hand from the rubble and losses of World War 2; and three rabbinic colleagues who, with their children, have left their Ukrainian communities to seek safety abroad - yes, now he has come for the Ukrainians and - never mind ‘speak out’ - what can I say?

Because what is one to say that isn’t platitudes and emptiness?

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words - so let me tell you about the picture on the front page of last Saturday’s Guardian. The headline was ‘Kyiv On The Brink’ in extra large font, but the photo that accompanied it was of a railway carriage window behind which you could see two children, a girl of around nine or ten, I guess, with wire-rimmed glasses, and a boy nestling next to her, fair-haired, who looked around six or seven, they were waiting for the train to depart, and there was the figure of an adult  behind them, but not the adult’s face: the focus of the photo was on the two children, both looking out the window onto the platform, anxiety etched into their features.

And this could have been a scene, I suppose, from any Western conflict zone of the last eighty years - at different times Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Sarajevo  - but what made this photo completely contemporary, unmistakably of this moment in the 21^st century, was that at the very centre of the photograph there figured - as large as the boy’s cherubic face - something the boy was holding horizontally, a shiny blue smartphone.

https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1497340896685301760?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

And there was something ever so ordinary about this but - it struck me - ever so extraordinary as well. For this is a new kind of war - as well as being eternally old in its brutality and senselessness.

It’s a new kind of war where the smartphone is a vital possession carried by victims as the flee, to keep in contact with family and friends, and a crucial  tool of those who remain, including a vast army of citizen journalists recording live from battle zones and basements and bedrooms, recording and transmitting into our homes, ensuring we the watching world know, hour by hour, what is unfolding.

It means the war is being fought in ways that we the bystanders become witnesses to, often in real time; it makes us, in a way, into participants; and looking away is possible of course, but that presents us with an emotional dilemma - to look can feel unbearable, but not to look feels equally problematic. On the one hand, can our souls bear to see? On the other hand, can they bear to turn away from seeing and knowing? Our souls are under bombardment either way.

For the first time in human history the reality of war and the ‘virtual reality’ of war are merging for millions around the globe. Through technological sophistication, the grotesque savagery of war is being brought into our homes at every hour of the day and night - and now we carry it around in our pockets too. We literally carry the war with us wherever we go. Our pockets, our handbags, are full of horror. 

Ukraine is one of the so-called ‘bloodlands’ [see historian Timothy D. Snyder, 2010] where Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union competed to exterminate people who, because of ethnicity or class, had no place in the fantasied societies they were building. A chilling image, ‘bloodlands’ - but the blood seeps into our pockets, onto our hands, into our comfortable living rooms and bedrooms. How does the soul endure?  And what can we say?

Then he came for Ukraine - and what did we say? What could we say? We are on the border of speechlessness. ‘Ukraine’ means ‘borderlands’: for centuries the land saw the intermingling of many cultures and languages - Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish, German, Yiddish - for borders were porous, cultures borrowed and blended their music and food and literature, and marriages took place across ethnic groups.

But we Jews have long memories - fortunately and unfortunately - which means it’s hard to romanticise Ukraine:  between November 1918 and March 1921, a time of civil war, there were  over a thousand anti-Jewish pogroms in over five hundred locations in Ukraine, over 100,00 deaths; 600,000 Jews fled abroad, millions more were displaced internally. And this is twenty years before the Shoah, where more than a third of all Jews murdered were killed close to home with the collaboration of people they knew: one million Jews were killed in Ukraine before the death camps were set up in 1942. And I’m not going to begin to speak about the Ukrainian fascists drafted into the SS death squads. 

But does any of this history matter now, eighty or a hundred years later? I speak of it only for the sake of a kind of emotional and/or intellectual honesty, and a resistance to amnesia, to acknowledge that there is complexity in the deep background of what is unfolding.

Yet on a human level it is a complexity that fades away when we see the faces of the children in the window of a train, when we hear the human stories, and see the devastation to a land recognisably part of our modern Europe. We may not know what to say, but we know what we feel: compassion lies deeper than words.

Of course helplessness too is part of what arises in us - but there are plenty of avenues for action: at this moment it appears that organisations working on the ground in Ukraine, and with refugees, are most in need of financial support - they know how best to spend the money we send. Charity, tzedakah, is a good antidote to helplessness - and speechlessness - as well as being a mitzvah in itself.

“Say little and do much…” was Shammai’s wise advice two millennia ago. And if one is moved to do more, one can always heed the words he added: “…and receive everyone with a trusting and hopeful expression on one’s face” (Pirke Avot: 1: 15).

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, March 5^th, 2022; with due acknowledgements to Pastor Martin Niemöller]