Wandering and Wondering

 I recently revisited some films about British Jewish identity that I was involved with thirty years ago: A Sense of Belonging, a four part series commissioned by Channel 4, dreamed up and directed by Paul Morrison.

Paul and I worked on the structure of the films, and the book that accompanied the series, and on re-watching the films now one theme struck me as still particularly relevant to the Anglo-Jewish community. This is the question of whether Jews want to be seen - to stand up and be counted, literally and figuratively - and recognised in our group identity by the powers that be. Or whether we wanted to be quiet, to slip under the radar as it were - not to be hidden from sight, but just not to draw attention to ourselves, individually as Jews (for example in the 2021 UK census) or collectively.

Obviously this is not a new theme in Jewish life. It’s probably as old as Jewish history, or at least Diaspora Jewish history, when Jews have been minorities in whichever countries they lived in. At the beginning of the 1990s, when the films were made, the question of putting one’s head over the parapet was still a live issue. There was an older generation who had been brought up to keep their heads down, assimilate outwardly - Jewish in private, English in public  - a very deliberate post-War stance (though it was true pre-War as well) of not drawing attention to one’s Jewishness.

But alongside those traditional Anglo-Jewish attitudes, Paul interviewed  a younger generation who were not feeling so constrained, who wanted to be able to be Jewish publicly, to campaign as Jews, to go on demonstrations as Jews - Jews against apartheid, Jews against Nuclear weapons - a generation who were feeling more confident that they belonged in the country of their birth, in the UK, and wanted the freedom to express their Jewishness wherever it was: at school, at work, at university, to feel free to wear a kippah on the street or on the tube; to show pride and openness about being Jewish.

One can see, looking back, that this was part of  larger trends that were changing, in the UK and elsewhere, about identity: that in liberal democracies around the world, one was allowed to be, one could honour, who one felt oneself to be - whether it was gay or lesbian, or Black, or part of the woman’s movement, your experience of yourself, who you were, who you identified as, needed expressing; that you could be ‘out’, out and proud, and not have to shield yourself, hide yourself, when out in the world. 

For a younger generation today this might all seem amazing, that Jews lived with a  double identity, a private identity and a public persona: amazed because it might feel that these things are not even a question now - if you are transitioning, it you have autism, if you have a disability, if you are survivor of abuse, if you are an eco-warrior, a goth, a white witch - whatever is part of what makes you ‘you’ (your so-called ‘identity’) - of course it can be out there, it’s part of the rich tapestry of our collective life.

But for those of us with longer memories, we might recognise how much has changed in the last 30 years, often in some fundamental ways, around this recognition of difference in our society: that there’s an acceptance that there’s room for all sorts of differences from one another; and that both from a legal point of view and an emotional point of view contemporary society not only accepts diversity, but celebrates its diversity. This is social progress of a particular kind, and Jews have benefited from that wave of change - and quite often have been at the forefront of campaigns to ensure that such tolerance of difference has become the norm.

And yet, that impulse in liberal democracies to accept and celebrate diversity is not the only show in town. Jews are still carrying an anxiety - and you can call it paranoid or you can call it justified by two thousand years of history - anxiety about being Jewishly out, or Jewishly counted. The 2021 UK census, when people were invited to declare their ethnicity, brought this to the fore. Many Jews, anecdotally, are said to have declined to say they were Jewish on the forms. This anxiety about being on a list somewhere is part of Hitler’s grim legacy. Nazism may have been defeated 75 years ago, two or three generations ago, but many Jews still have persecutory anxieties inside them.

There’s two kinds of persecutory anxiety - one bit is that antisemitism is still real, and Jews can be on the receiving end of it. We recognise that strand of anxiety quite easily.

But less easy to get hold of is how sometimes internally - and it varies from Jew to Jew - we are also persecuted. That we are our own persecutors: always fearing the worst, never able to relax inwardly, always vigilant - we might suffer from a form of internal persecution that doesn’t allow us to relax and be ourselves in public, or at work, and sometimes still inhibits us in private.  This is Hitler’s long term victory over us - he’s still up here, in our heads, whether we want it or not. So we become our own persecutors. (I think David Baddiel suffers from this a bit).

I would suggest though that we don’t have to be victims of this internal persecutor. We can push back against it. That’s a job of work, a psychological and spiritual piece of work, not to let our souls be haunted by our past, our history. It’s inner work we need to do - so that we don’t stay oppressed by our own thoughts, but are really free to be Jewish as openly and enjoyably as we’d like to.

But when I talk about this celebration of diversity not being the only show in town in liberal democracies, I’m not thinking just about Jews being relaxed about being Jewish, I am talking about the threats to that very notion of diversity - because there are some powerful countervailing forces around the world in so-called democracies. You better not be a Muslim in India under the current Hindu nationalist regime; you better not be part of the Traveller community in Hungary, or indeed anything other than conservative Christian; you better not be black, or Mexican, or a woman wanting an abortion, in many parts of the United States; you better not be Arab in parts of Israel, or - if current trends continue there - gay and Jewish, or a member of a NGO who gets funds from the Diaspora to monitor military and legal abuses, civil rights abuses.

Genuine pluralistic democracy is under threat in many places - and it is not just other nations who are suffering these attacks from within. In the UK we see  attacks on the right to protest in public, the rights to assemble, the rights to roam, the rights to asylum, the rights to take collective action, the rights to having a private identity in public space without being tracked or filmed or being under surveillance, i.e. the right to live without being under suspicion for being a citizen within this allegedly democratic nation.

It is not just Jews who have worries about being seen, in other words - it is part of wider and deeper trends in modernity in societies that have political narratives of personal freedom, that on the one hand suggest that we have autonomy to express ourselves in all our complex diversity - but then find, across the globe, ways of monitoring, suppressing and persecuting those same sovereign rights.  

As Jews we have learnt the art of being able to be both self-expressive about our Jewishness - and to self-regulate, hold back. We walk a kind of tightrope between these two experiences, expressing ourselves and being quiet, showing and hiding: I think there are ways each of us do this all the time, it has become maybe second nature to us. Perhaps this is what it now means to be Jewish in the world, to live with these two impulses inside us, it has become part of our Jewish identity. Proud of who we are - self-protective about who we are. Telling the world who we are - keeping shtum about who we are.

This is what it means to be in the wilderness, B’midbar: we began to read from the book of Numbers this week. This part of the Jewish saga begins with a census of the people. And then the people start their journey through the wilderness. ‘Wilderness’ is about being between two spaces. We are not in Egypt - we aren’t slaves. But we haven’t reached the Promised Land. We are in-between.

I would say we are always in between, in every generation: that what the Torah describes in the book of Numbers and the book of Deuteronomy, this journey through the wilderness, is existential. In other words it is an imaginative act of storytelling about what life is like in-between, what it feels like in-between complete oppression on the one hand, and promises of a transformed life on the other hand. 

The children of Israel journeyed that mythic 40 years waking up every day with the miracle of manna, of having their lives sustained for them - but also with the uncertainty of what that day would bring. Would they stay camped around a watering hole, or would they have to move on? Where were they going, where were they headed? They had no idea, just vague rumours and stories that circulated, Moses was always too busy to ask and anyway he had his head in the clouds; and what was this promised land anyway, and how long would it take to get there? They didn’t know it would take forty years - it might be over next week - all they knew was that they were in the wilderness and they had to face the uncertainty of being on a journey into the unknown.

Well that’s us too, we Jews who don’t know where we are going, what will become of us as a people; we who have to wake up each day and decide:  how do we express our Jewishness today, how ‘out’ are we going to be, how much do we hide, how much are we afraid to be ourselves?

So we wander and we wonder - and this is what it means to be Jewish. It’s our destiny: to wander and to wonder. The wilderness is where it’s at, where life is lived. Even if you live in Israel, it’s still the wilderness - the space between slavery and the imagined promised land.  We are a wilderness people, wandering and wondering what will become of us all. And for me, that’s worth celebrating.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, May20th, 2023]