Hope in Gloomy Times

It seems to be becoming harder for me to find some words, some sentences, to string together, to talk about what matters, what matters to us in our own lives. It is of course – sadly but seemingly inevitably - not that difficult to speak from a place of regret, or concern, a place of foreboding or apprehension, even of desperation, about what occurs in our world.  

Anyone who keeps their eyes and ears open – let alone their hearts – can see why this might be.

For example, I have just caught up with Sir David Attenborough’s recent 6-part series on the BBC, Frozen Planet ll, which built up over the weeks to an awe-evoking but painful finale. Although he’s spent a lifetime making a series of award-winning programmes on our natural world in all its profusion, diversity and grandeur, he’s been criticised – particularly over recent years - for not utilising his influential position as an authority on the natural world in order to highlight environmental issues.

But now, in this series, he hasn’t held back. Watching him watching the stunning footage shot around the globe, it was as if he was holding the whole vast, devastating beauty and fragility of the planet in his hands, and saying:  “Look at this, look at it, wonder at it, be in awe of the complexity and vulnerability of this planet we all inhabit…see how it is changing in front of our eyes, as we speak, changing in ways that can be, and will be, devastating not only for the creatures you see on your screens, but for us too, humanity, for we are all part of a complex web of interconnectedness, and that melting ice you see doesn’t just affect the polar bears and penguins, but will be impacting us in the forthcoming years, in the near future.”

And what he doesn’t say is: “And I won’t be here to see this destruction” – he’s 96 – “but you will be, and your children will be”. He alludes, with a tender melancholy, to the way in which if current trends continue, future generations will be flooded out of their cities, they will become migrants because of heat, or lack of food, or lack of water. ‘Here it is’, he says, ‘it is happening now, but’ – he always is careful to add this, I noticed – ‘but’, he says, ‘it is not yet too late, there are people working to mitigate some of the effects of this, action is possible, but it depends on you’. No, actually he doesn’t say ‘you’; he says ‘it depends on us’.  He includes himself.

So this has been painful but necessary watching. It is, by the way, what the BBC does brilliantly, living up to its Charter: “to inform, educate, entertain”. (This is part of the reason why I find the regular, ideologically-driven attacks on the BBC by Tory MPs and the Jewish press so small-minded and self-defeating. The BBC doesn’t get everything right, for sure, but no institution does. In an era where there is a global battle to defend the principle of public truth-telling, undermining the basic integrity of the BBC is an invidious attack on one of the pillars that support our public well-being).  

Speaking about the things that matter to us might often mean speaking about difficult and painful subjects.

The environment of course is the largest, but what about this dementing war that is going on in Europe, in Ukraine? Putin’s brutal barbarism shows no sign of abating. His flirtation with a nuclear power station accident is terrifying. The bombing of a civilian population into submission - which won’t happen – is an ongoing war crime. Another humanitarian crisis is brewing: no heat, no water, sub-zero temperatures, more refugees are inevitable. The Holodomor was Stalin’s genocidal attempt in 1932-33 to starve Ukrainians to death; Putin’s Kholodomor is the equivalent: the attempt to freeze a population to death.

We are seeing authoritarian brutality unleashed not only by Russia - it has its echoes in China, In India, in parts of Africa. And who knows how the American drama will unfold over these next few years – the threat of civil war is not hyperbole or fantasy any longer. All this is part of the fabric of our world now.

So pessimism is easy to access. It’s hard to be optimistic (to put it mildly) about humanity’s social progress, about our emotional progress as a species.  So where does that leave Jews, who nurtured a sustaining vision for so many generations that they were to be – they had the potential to be – “a light unto the nations”? Jews clung to Isaiah’s words (42:6; 49:6) in spite of centuries of persecution and oppression – and what has become of that sustaining hope for us as a Jewish people?

Over the last forty years, we see Israel lurching, election by election, towards the unspeakable: are we allowed to say that the rhetoric voiced by members of the present government sounds like ethnic cleansing of Israel’s ‘enemies’ (i.e. those who won’t submit without protest to oppression and discrimination) has become thinkable? Intoxicated by a sense of victimhood and grievance, the adherents of the rightward march of Israeli history bring shame on those of us Jews who still cling to the absurd and defiant vision of social justice, compassion, generosity - the vision we received at Sinai, the promise to Abraham that he and his descendants would be a “blessing to humanity (Genesis 22:18), the prophetic understanding of this heritage that spoke about that promise, that possibility, that demand, that we were to be that “light to the nations”.  

What a betrayal we are witnessing; and it is dementing and demoralising when we hear that the Israeli State’s enemies are now not only the Palestinians but the non-governmental organizations like Rabbis for Human Rights, and the New Israel Fund, and Breaking the Silence, and all those civil groups who are still holding to those old-time Jewish values in both religious and secular forms. The enemy within. This is the time to increase our support (and it may be just financial, but that matters) for those organisations that are standing against the tide of semi-fascistic rhetoric and activity in our so-called Holy Land.

Reform Jews have a modern prayer in their liturgy that asks for “a blessing on the State of Israel”. I have been uncomfortable with that prayer for quite a while, but something in me recently has snapped. I can no longer say those words. Not the words in the book as they stand. When using this text now I have taken to tweaking it: I have re-written it so I can say something that carries a modicum of integrity, that reflects the Jewish values I believe in. When it comes to the liturgical moment when we reflect on the role of Israel as a state, I can still speak about “a vision of peace, justice and compassion” and the wish “to build a society of dignity, with communities devoted to God’s truth”. It’s a small gesture, a tiny protest - meaningless in the larger scheme of things. I am under no illusion about that. Nevertheless, it’s my impotent diasporic protest against the huge betrayal of values I see going on over there.

So whether it’s the environment, the barbarism of war, the threats to democratic values around the globe, the curse of nationalism, or the ongoing class-war of the rich against the poor that’s being played out here in the UK, there are so many themes that matter to us, that affect us (in ways large and small) about which it’s hard not to feel apprehension or gloom.

But as well as all that – and there’s such a lot of ‘all that’ - there are  experiences in life that also matter to us. That deeply matter. Experiences that verge on the sublime, that make life infinitely worth living, whether it’s holding a grandchild’s tiny hand as they inspect a winter flower, or hearing a Beethoven sonata, or sharing a story or a smile or a joke with a friend, or a lover, or a stranger. Moments of intimacy, moments of connectedness,  of human warmth, of what Martin Buber called ‘Begegnung’/encounter -  moments of feeling blessed, moments of being a blessing,  moments of stillness or moments of intensity, moments when life is felt to be precious, fleeting moments that are also timeless.

Divine moments, when all that other stuff that matters – and it really does matter – goes into eclipse for a minute, an hour, and something else shines through: a line of poetry that lifts the spirit, an overheard remark that changes how we think of a problem we are wrestling with; or being in the presence of Sir Simon Schama’s informed imagination in his latest, vital, series The History of Now (also on the BBC),  watching his moving evocation of the power and potential of art to transcend human suffering, to transmit the values of freedom and generosity and compassion within dark times - and there have been so many dark times, and they continue. From Picasso’s Guernica to Orwell’s 1984, from Pasternak’s smuggled-to-the-west Doctor Zhivago to Vaclav Havel’s prison writings and Ai Weiwei’s protest-art, Schama traces the creativity within the human spirit that has enabled there to be protests on behalf of life, when all around seems blighted by destructiveness. I urge you to watch it.  

All of this is light to set against the darkness, it is the daily miracle of the oil that lasts, that nurtures the soul. It’s a bit early for Chanukah themes, I know, but here we are: light in the darkness. It’s what we all need -those of us who struggle with these things - what we all crave, light to keep us going so that gloom does not overtake us. The fragility of hope in the face of the forces of destruction. This is what we live for, it’s what we pray for, it’s what keeps us going, day by day, year by year, generation after generation.  Let’s keep talking about what matters – ‘out there’, in here – talking about what matters, keeping the flickering light of hope alive in dark times.

 

[adapted from a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, December 3^rd 2022]