On Being “In Great Danger”

 Let me start with a piece of Hasidic thought, and see what we can make of it.

“Let all cry out to God and lift our heart up to God, as if we were hanging by a hair, and a tempest were raging to the very heart of heaven, and we were at a loss for what to do, and there were hardly time to cry out. It is a time when no counsel, indeed, can help us and we have no refuge save to remain in our loneliness and lift our eyes and heart up to God, and cry out to God. And this should be done at all times, for in the world a person is in great danger”

When I encounter a traditional Judaic text – whether it is a part of Jewish liturgy, or from the Bible, or from another Jewish literary source – what stance do I take up in relation to it? I don’t feel the texts of tradition are there to be submitted to, or to be accepted unquestioningly – when I am teaching I usually try and make this explicit - they are thoughts that Judaic culture has valued, to which we bring our own experience and thoughtfulness, our own perhaps hard-won authority (if we feel we have any).

As we engage with the texts - hopefully in a spirit of openness, of willingness to both question and to receive what the words offer us – I think of these texts of tradition, whether ancient or contemporary, as being like presents given to us to unwrap, to play with, to see if they are emotionally stimulating, or thought-provoking, or just useable in some way. Maybe we will discard them, maybe we will learn to treasure them, maybe one time that we engage with them they will speak to us, and other time not - we can never know in advance.

What we receive from any text may just depend on what kind of mood we are in. Sometimes we are tired, or fed up, or preoccupied with something – and the words lie listless on the page. At other times we may find that we can hear what is being said and we might be moved by it, or it might trigger our own ideas and fertilise our imagination. Something comes through to us.

{I think this understanding about how sometimes texts speak to us and sometimes they don’t is particularly relevant to experiences we have with liturgy during religious services: all sorts of factors are in play as we encounter the words of our texts, week by week. This seems to be obvious – but is rarely spoken about, in my experience, so probably is worth saying now).

So here, now, what do we make of this Hasidic text? Does it speak to us, can we relate to it?

Where to start? Maybe we should start at the end – often a good place to start, I find. It’s what first caught my eye. All this crying out, lifting up our hearts, should be done, the text says, “at all times, for in the world a person is in great danger” – Are we? Are you? Can you relate to that? Do you feel you are “in great danger?”

Maybe that doesn’t speak to you - but if we feel there might be some truth in it,  that we are in “great danger”, what might that danger be? Well, we can start close to home – our bodies, our health: maybe we have an illness, a long term condition, an underlying vulnerability, we don’t know how long we have in this world. Of course that’s true of all of us, but some of us may feel it more keenly than others - about ourselves, or someone we love (the danger might be about losing someone). If it is about our own well-being, this danger we can feel is existential, it is part of the human condition: anything , we know, can happen to us at any moment.

Because we are embodied beings we are vulnerable, we are fragile, accidents can happen, our lives can be snuffed out in an instant. We know this - in our heads. But we don’t necessarily feel it in our hearts. We are lucky enough to live with cognitive dissonance, because if you did feel at every moment that your life was “in great danger”, that would be unbearable, wouldn’t it? we couldn’t live like that, with that degree of anticipatory awareness that each moment might be our last.

Which links with our emotional health - our ‘mental’ health, as it is so popular to call it these days, as if our minds were quite separate from our bodies, from our ‘selves’; yet they are completely integrated, psyche and soma, inner world and physical world - they are Echad, like God, One. (Big topic, not for now). 

So: this theme of being “in great danger” could also speak to our emotional well-being as well as our physical well-being. We can easily feel unstable, adrift, persecuted, ‘in danger’ of a disturbance to our feelings of well-being. We might know quite well how fragile, how unsettled, our inner states of mind and being are. Nobody else may know, but we know. The pharmaceutical giants selling their industrial-scale stockpiles of  anti-depressants are not multi-billion dollar businesses for no reason. We are vulnerable, we are fragile, in our emotional life as well as our physical life - which are, as I said, in essence, Echad, One.

How else might we be “in great danger”? Perhaps your first thoughts were not about your own physical or emotional wellbeing. You might have thought outside yourselves, perhaps to the danger of the environmental emergency - and actually those earlier lines in our text could almost be read as if they were addressing that crisis: “…as if we were hanging by a hair, and a tempest were raging to the very heart of heaven…” – yes, the crisis is about the air we breath, and the CO2 we pump out into the heavens, and yes, as the text goes on to say: we are “at a loss for what to do, and there [is] hardly time to cry out” – isn’t that how we feel sometimes, at a loss for what to do?  and maybe it is later than we can bear to think, maybe there is now  “hardly time to cry out”.

And although we know that there are things that can be done, that we have to collectively raise our voices to “cry out”, and we know that the script of life on this planet is not yet written, we might feel sometimes just as the text puts it  “as if we were hanging by a hair, and a tempest were raging to the very heart of heaven, and we were at a loss for what to do, and there were hardly time to cry out”.  This text is obviously not about the environmental crisis - and yet is also about it, now, for us. Texts can be timeless, sometimes.

Once one begins to consider this theme of “in great danger” we realise all sorts of ways it can speak to our present condition. Read this text in Ukraine - where it was written, by the way - and you know exactly the truth of what it is saying. Two hundred years old, this text - and it’s the six o’clock news, today.  But you don’t need to live in a war zone, or be cold and shivering in a rickety boat at the mercy of the waves in the Channel, to think about being “in great danger”.

In the UK, whether you are queuing 10 hours in Accident and Emergency to be see by a doctor, or queuing at a food bank, or have just had your benefits cut, again, or are in danger of losing the roof over your head, then being “in great danger” might ring unsettlingly, frighteningly true. Whether it’s knife crime or domestic violence or a host of other life situations, the list of dangers is long and painful. So many dangers - and let’s not start with antisemitism or systemic racism or rogue nuclear states – isn’t there often a feeling ‘there’s hardly time to cry out’?

But what this text of ours insists is that we do need to “cry out”. The text is actually structured around this image. See how it starts: “Let all cry out to God…” And look how that urgency is conveyed in two long sentences, ending in “and cry out to God” – it loops back to that - before the coda tacked on, that it should be “done at all times”, because each person, all of us, are “in great danger”.

(For those who are interested in these things, the text has a distinctive concentric structure: I learnt from my Bible teacher Rabbi Jonathan Magonet to look out for these things - chiastic structures, usually in poetry, but it can be in prose).

In our structured text the core theme of crying out is at the beginning, the middle and the end - we are taken on a journey: from wishfulness, through doubt, to hope:  “Let all cry out…hardly have time to cry out….cry out”, followed by the coda.

So – plenty in this text to unwrap, to turn and turn, for so much is in it. But what haven’t I addressed? You may have noticed that I haven’t spoken about what, for this Hasidic world view, is a self-evident reality. Where do you cry out to? What do you cry out to? It’s God. But can we do that, we moderns, we who are a mixture of believers, and non-believers, of secret believers and secret doubters, we who maybe don’t know what to believe, who don’t know how to believe, we who might not feel we know what belief even means any more?

Maybe too may feel we live in a time “when no counsel…can help us, and we have no refuge save to remain in our loneliness”? But perhaps we don’t have to remain stuck like that. For some, it may still be possible to “lift our eyes and hearts up to God”;  but also – spoiler alert: theology coming up - we might now want to say that we can lift up our eyes and hearts to each other, to the ‘God’ that dwells in our fellow human beings, to the divine in our loved ones, in our friends, our neighbours, in the people seated next to us at religious services;  reach out to the godliness incarnated in our synagogue and church communities. We can still do that - lift up our eyes and hearts to each other, to see each other: we are all struggling, mortal, fallible human beings; let us see each other in all our naked humanity and cry out to each other: ‘this is how it is for me, this is how I feel in the world, this is what I fear, this is what I struggle with’.

That’s the value of community, that we are not just alone with these questions: the ‘dangers’ we face are individual and they are collective - but we can offer each other support and encouragement as we face these things. “And this should be done at all times”, as the text says. We can face these dangers together. Solidarity with each other. Solidarity is not just for ‘Match of the Day’ commentators and presenters. We can show it, share it, with each other.

 

[loosely based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, March 18^th, 2023]