New Year Thoughts: Being Human - the ‘Moronic Inferno’ - Living with a Dual Focus

I’d like to share a light-hearted experiment I conducted over this last weekend – light-hearted but aiming at something serious.

It was first day of Rosh Hashanah – the Jewish New Year – and I was given the opportunity of speaking to the community in what is known as the ‘sermon slot’.

I started by asking them: are you in the mood at this point in our service for something a bit different? A bit of light relief maybe?  I hope so. I want to try something out with you. I’m going to talk to you a bit about Rosh Hashanah, the New Year - but I’m going to ask you to do something, something participatory, if you can.

What I want you to do as I talk is to stop me, interrupt me, if you think there’s something wrong with what I am saying - not factually wrong, I try to get that stuff right - but something strange about what I’m saying, or the way I’m saying it, or just how I’m talking to you. You’ll have to put your hand up, or call out, or get my attention somehow - I’ll try and keep attentive to what’s happening - so catch my attention and tell me what’s wrong. This is an experiment, go with me on it. Stop me when you are ready and tell me what’s wrong. 

Because “Rosh Hashanah is not merely a turning of the calendar page; it is a profound spiritual opportunity to pause and take stock of our lives…as we gather today on this sacred occasion our hearts are filled with both anticipation and reflection. Just as the sun sets and rises again, so too does the cycle of time bring us to this moment of renewal and introspection.

In the Jewish tradition, we greet the New Year with a mixture of joy and solemnity. Our joy stems from the knowledge that we are given the chance to begin anew, to mend relationships, to rekindle our spirits, and to aspire to be better versions of ourselves. Our solemnity comes from the recognition that the choices we make bear consequences, not only for our own lives but also for the world around us.

The shofar's call pierces the air, and it is as if God's own breath is reminding us to awaken from the slumber of routine, to awaken to our higher purpose. This is a time when we stand at the crossroads of the past and the future, contemplating the path we have walked and the journey that lies ahead.

As we dip apples in honey, we are reminded of the sweetness that life holds. Each apple slice becomes a metaphor for our aspirations: the hopes, dreams, and intentions we carry into the coming year. The honey, a symbol of abundance and delight, reminds us that even in times of challenge, there is sweetness to be found. Yet, just as we savour the sweetness of the honey, we are also aware of the underlying bitterness of life's struggles. The two are intertwined, each enhancing the other…

…In this season of reflection, we engage in the spiritual practice of teshuvah – returning to our true selves and to our Divine Source. Teshuvah invites us to confront our mistakes with humility and to turn toward a path of growth and healing. It is a courageous act, acknowledging our imperfections while recognizing the boundless potential for change that resides within us.

As we stand on the threshold of a new year, let us remember that the journey of transformation is ongoing. It requires effort, intention, and the courage to face both our light and our shadow. May we embrace the teachings of our tradition, finding inspiration in the stories of our ancestors, and may we be guided by the values of compassion, justice, and love.

Let us use this sacred time to deepen our connections – with ourselves, with each other, and with the Divine. As we hear the shofar's call, may we heed its message and step forward with purpose and hope. May this New Year be one of blessing, growth, and renewal for us all.

Shanah Tovah u'Metukah – a Good and Sweet Year to you all.”

This part of the service was interactive, to a degree, with people making suggestions, but nobody quite twigged what was going on.

So what was wrong with what I’ve been saying?, I asked. It was quite informative, thoughtful after a fashion, maybe a bit bland, innocuous, it had a smattering of the usual rabbinic cliches and platitudes, but on the whole it was pretty inoffensive. I’ve heard a lot worse sermons. For some reason it reminded me of custard, it had a certain warm glutinous smoothness, but how nourishing was it really?

It didn’t touch the heart or quicken the spirit, it lacked any real moment of illumination, it lacked the unpredictable, it certainly lacked humour - all of which is to say that it lacked ‘soul’ (for want of a better word). Why? Because it was a  “500 word sermon in the style of Rabbi Howard Cooper, generated by ChatGPT”.

It wasn’t me: it was a simulacrum, a facsimile, of me, it was literally Artificial Intelligence, created to sound like me, to mimic me in a way, it was not human - it had no soul - it just bore a spooky resemblance to my living, breathing, human, idiosyncratic self.

ChatGPT - and there are others like it, programmes of information, misinformation and disinformation, programmes that blur the boundaries between truth and falsehood, programmes that can inform but can also fabricate, programmes that can assemble information but also dissemble and falsify - I think we need to talk about ChatGPT. There’s going to be a lot of it coming our way in the months and years to come - when we contact companies, when we seek health care, it’s going to be in schools and our homes and inside our lives - and it raises some real questions about what it means to be human, and how we connect to one another.

In the last twelve months it’s become omnipresent: it’s all around us, for good and for bad - it’s double-edged, as so many technological developments have been in our history. It’s going to do away with the core work of many professions - accountancy, law, financial planning, insurance, some forms of therapy; if you can get a half decent sermon from ChatGPT, maybe clergy can be phased out too.

Who knows? We are on the cusp of the new, and of dizzying changes in how we live: it’s not just technological of course, these changes - it’s in the weather we endure, it’s in the global financial insecurities, it’s the erosion of liberal democracies and the growth of racist and illiberal authoritarianism, it’s the continental war on our doorstep that enters our living rooms, it’s the mass migration of millions of peoples. The tectonic plates are shifting - and our small lives are caught up in this. It’s hard to keep up.

On the one hand, we carry around in our pockets a machine of immense power that gives us access to all the information in the world (useful and useless), it keeps us connected to others in ways both simple and outlandish, it’s been transformative in ways both benign and malign in how we live. It’s certainly expanded what is possible. On the other hand a lot of daily life seems for many to become more and more of a struggle: try getting a GP appointment, try contacting HMRC, try renewing a passport or a driving licence. Try changing your email address with companies. Try negotiating the scams and frauds directed at us. You can add your own experiences. How many hours of time, how much frustration, it’s daily, hourly, it’s endless.

First world problems, you might say - and they are. Yes, what a blessing it is to live in the relative security and relative comfort of the first world - but the shadow side of this technologically-saturated life is our immersion in the dense entanglement of just manging our lives on a daily basis. “I spend so much of my life just managing my life”, a friend said to me recently. Yes, it can be so demoralising, dementing - and it can take us away from what might be more productive and joyful ways of living.

But if we can’t get off this juggernaut, maybe the New Year gives us an opportunity to pause a while, just to look around us and reflect on what’s happening to us, where we are in life, where life is going, where our life is going?  Time perhaps to recalibrate.

For Jews these are days of reflection, of introspection, these so-called ‘Days of Awe’ - here I worry about sounding like my Chat avatar - but nevertheless there’s no getting round the fact that these Days of Awe, Yomim Noraim, are a longstanding part of our tradition. And one of the reasons Jews gather at this season is that - as well any sense of duty or obligation, or in memory of parents, or out of a residual nostalgia, as well of course as seeing each other and celebrating together – is that as well as all that, Jews might also retain a residual faith, or an inkling, that this period has a potential for something new, in our personal life, our spiritual life, our emotional life, the life of our souls, what makes us human.

We’ve been given this gift, this opportunity, once a year, to look inwards as well as outwards, to remind ourselves that the state of our souls is significant: they do become atrophied, numbed, exhausted by life; and they need - we need – to be given attention. We need time to breathe, time for inspiration. Time to consider how we are living, and how we want to live.

And when we look inwards we know: we are not robots, though we might act automatically, even robotically. We are not automatons, but we are programmed - by our genetic makeup, our background, our education, our class, our parental environment, how we were brought up, how free we were to express ourselves growing up, how frightened we were of expressing emotions - anger, aggression, possessiveness, love, timidity, sexual feelings. Both nature and nurture have programmed us to an extent, and we can spend a lifetime trying to de-programme ourselves and discover and express our deepest, truest self, or selves, for we are incorrigibly plural, like the Torah, which tradition says has seventy faces, seventy aspects (B’midbar Rabba 13:15): we mirror that in our own unique multiplicity. As the poet Walt Whitman said “I am large, I  contain multitudes”.

But however programmed we might be, or feel, we still know we are not machines - though we can break down, we can and do wear out, our souls get weary, bruised, battered; which is why it seems important to remind ourselves of what it means to have a soul, even if we aren’t sure what that is, or whether it exists. But if it does have any meaning, to speak of the soul, maybe it’s a way we have developed to talk about - a way Judaism has developed to speak about - our human individuality and the awesome way those tens of thousands of genes are coiled into every molecule of our DNA and we each are universes, multiverses, of consciousness, and all that rich and messy profusion of personal history and neurological complexity adds up to the unrepeatable wonder of who each of is. Nobody like us has ever been, or will ever be.  

The New Year reminds us that being human is a mystery. How can it be that we are capable of such joy and creativity in life and also be capable of such destructiveness as well? How can our capacity for delight co-exist simultaneously with our experience of pain and suffering? Because we are not machines, pre-programmed, we have to develop our own human intelligence - and by intelligence I’m not talking about A-level and  PhD intelligence or smartphone intelligence - I’m talking about spiritual intelligence, for want of a better phrase. We have to develop and hone our own sensibility to what our unique purpose here in the world is. There’s no website for it. You can only find it inside yourself.

‘Today is the Birthday of the World’ - our liturgy offers us a poetic image, a symbol we can make use of, an invitation to celebration and to begin again to ask the most fundamental questions about who we are: what stops us becoming truer to our better selves, what blocks us, what prevents  our enjoyment of life, our productivity, our capacity for generosity, compassion, our passion for justice? We aren’t machines but we might find that something in us keeps coming up like a ‘system error’ and prevents us living in ways more congruent with our values, our idealism, our hopes for the future. Because we do lose touch with our vision. With our idealism. We become cynical, we do get defeated by life. We do end up saying, feeling, ‘there’s nothing that can be done’. But that can’t be the end of the story. The end of the story for us individually, or for humanity.

Estragon: Nothing to be done.
Vladimir: I’m beginning to come round to that opinion.

Yes, we may have moments when we might share Samuel Beckett’s bleak vision in Waiting for Godot - although the humanity of his characters, the humour in his characters, defy that bleakness. There is always ‘something to be done’. The symbolism of the New Year is a reminder that change is possible: our souls are still open enough to sense that through reflection or prayer or reaching out for help to others - or a combination of these things - change is possible. We aren’t machines. Machines might be efficient but they aren’t kind. They don’t care - only we can care, and only we are in need of that attention we call care.

We are vulnerable - and that means we can sense the vulnerability in others. We are dependent - and that means we need other people. Of course we have strength and courage too, a capacity for love, for self-sacrifice. But we need each other.  In our fragility and in our fortitude, we enter these days sensing that the stakes are high. These are Days of Awe - ‘awesome’ has become bit of a buzzword, it’s used by people who’ve been colonised by watching too many  reality TV shows or American movies. We need to redeem it, this notion of awe, because it is speaking of the power of teshuvah, of transformation, at this season: something new can open us for us, inside us.

What is awesome, awe-inspiring, is that as Jews we are bound up in cycles of time and history where we can discover that what we do matters: small acts of random kindness can change the world as much as large acts of fighting for justice, and struggling for societal change. Both the so-called ‘small’ and the so-called ‘large’ are radical investments in hope. We are a people who have been pounded and beaten down in the crucible of history, who have gone through innumerable traumas - yet on the whole we haven’t abandoned our tradition, our heritage. We come back time and again and say: we will not be defeated by the forces arraigned against us - by those who say that the crises we face, in the environment, or in our current European war, or in the vast structural injustices and deprivation in our own country, are too difficult to address, or are not our responsibility - we are not going to let cynicism have the last word.

Nor are we going to let those who feel antipathy to us daunt us. We are a people who travel in defiance of despair, who carry this absurd commitment towards hope, towards change. We carry it in our souls, our psyches. Because we are Jews and human and not machines we know that the future is not programmed, but radically open. It is still unwritten and we will join in writing the script of what will come to be. We do it not with omnipotence but with humility.

This is our destiny, we whose spiritual intelligence is uniquely sensitised to both pointing to what is false in society, what is unjust, what lacks compassion, what lacks a moral core, what lacks humanity - and my God there is plenty of that to point to, to call out - but whose spiritual intelligence is also attuned to what we can do, what role we can play, individually, collectively, what ways we can enact our Judaic vision of justice, compassion and wellbeing.

This is our agenda – let’s hope these Days of Awe give us the space and time to take the next tentative steps forward on this journey of the ages.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on the first day of the New Year, September 16^th, 2023]

 

[On the second day of the New Year, September 17th, I shared the following thoughts]

Let me start with a question: how do you, we, keep track of what we go through every passing hour, the dense profusion of thoughts, emotions, intuitions, anxieties, confusions, that add up to our lives? How do we keep track of, how do we chronicle, the hidden regions of our hearts? Our secret fears and hopes and guilt, our inadequacies, our failures (real and imagined) -whatever it is we struggle with, that daily life throws at us? How do we manage life? As the poet said: “The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life” (Seamus Heaney).

And how do we keep track of, how do we chronicle, the dizzying complexity of our world, the events that cascade around us, that tsunami of news and images from across the globe, the ceaseless, relentless, overwhelming calls for our attention: earthquakes, floods, fires, Russian war crimes, political corruption, kisses that are not just kisses, civil wars, famines, bankruptcies of businesses, cities, ethnic nationalism stirring ancient hatreds, millions of people on the move - the reports inundate our waking hours, and maybe our sleep too, with every piece of unsettling news abruptly overtaken by another, creating narratives that have no end, storylines that have no plot and lose their focus in the presence of the next story, a tumult of stories that keep on exposing all the shades of human vulnerability? The vulnerability of others, the vulnerability of ourselves.

How do we keep track of both what we experience within the circumference of our own small lives - small, but of infinite significance to us - as well as what floods through us in our disordered times? How do we focus in and focus out at the same time? Just a small task that this period in the Jewish year sets before us. Looking within - what can we change? Looking outside - what can we change? This is the annual project of these days - an impossible project, of course. But Jews have always been drawn to impossible projects. Like working towards a Messianic age, like believing in an invisible God, like trusting that a small insignificant tribe in the ancient Middle East received a vision that was relevant for all time and for all humanity. Absurd projects, impossible projects - but they have drawn us in, these projects, these stories, they have seduced us for generations. The seductions of hope. We can look in - and we can look out. A dual focus. Our awesome, mind-bending project.

So how do we keep ourselves going? You can of course switch off from all that outer stuff, and focus, try to focus, just on getting though your own day relatively intact. That’s hard enough - the personal travails of the heart. With bodies and minds that let us down, with people around us who frustrate us or cause us grief, with personal disappointments and losses to manage, we might feel we have quite enough to be getting on with.

Why bother to add to it an awareness of the world around us and how it effects us? Yet we know that it does effect us: that the missile attacks on Kyiv are not unconnected with the price of food in our shops; that the exodus of a population in one war-torn part of the world effects the politics of our government; that the glass in your iPhone is made by Uigar Muslims forcibly transferred from their homes into concentration camps; that in London our non-Ulez compliant vehicles wreak havoc on children’s growing lungs and cause 4,000 premature deaths of year - of course we don’t know the actual children nor, probably, the actual people who die early, it’s just statistics, but we know about all this. Even if all this knowledge can feel unbearable, overwhelming, sometimes - we know that we live in a complex interconnected world where everything is connected to everything else.

So I do understand when people say they just don’t want to think about all that supposedly ‘outer’ stuff. One may just want to focus on what I called the hidden regions of our own hearts, and let the heart of the world succumb to its own arrythmia, it’s own deadly disorders.

This may be a matter of temperament, how much we want to focus inwards, on ourselves, and how much we want to engage with the vicissitudes of the world around  us. And we may move - in a lifetime, or in a single day - from one position to another, and then back again. I know that I want to try to keep track of both, the hidden regions of the heart and the struggles of the world, the struggles in the world. I want to keep an eye on - and chronicle, report back on - the inner and outer world. I want a dual focus: it’s foolhardy in a way, omnipotent maybe, but I want to see everything simultaneously.

I’m reminded of those lines by the great Jewish-American poet Charles Reznikoff :

“If only I could write with four pens between five fingers

and with each pen a different sentence at the same time -

but the rabbis say it is a lost art, a lost art.

I well believe it.”

That speaks to me as we gather at the New Year, in pursuit of the lost arts. How do we hold all that comes at us? How do we find our bearings? Today, almost at random, I am thinking: how do we find our bearings within this European war that touches our lives in different ways; how do we find our bearings when Israel is going through such self-lacerating convulsions; how do we find our bearings with the waves of toxic nationalism and antisemitism and crazed conspiracy theories that swirl around the planet; how do we find our bearings and find some place of stillness within it all, to find some reassurance, or hopefulness, or comfort, or direction, within this life that sweeps us on relentlessly, remorselessly? How do you find your bearings when living in a maelstrom? 

Decades ago the novelist Saul Bellow diagnosed our modern condition as living in what he called the ‘moronic inferno’. And he asked the key question - the religious question, the spiritual and psychological question -  how are we supposed to live and remain fully human when all this goes on around us? And being fully human means being in touch with the good within us but also our capacity for destructiveness - and trying to ensure that the goodness within us wins out as it battles with the all the other stuff that lurks inside. So this is the question for the season we are in: how are we supposed to live now in our times? To live well, I would add. Not just to survive, but to thrive. How are we supposed to do it?

I don’t know. Yes, that’s disappointing, I know. Aren’t rabbis supposed to know? Even if they can’t write with four pens between five fingers, aren’t they, we, supposed to know how we can retain our full humanity, our potential to enact the better parts of our nature, our kindness and compassion, our generosity, our passion for justice? Aren’t we supposed to offer a road map of how we need to be, in our wondrous, wounded world?

The problem is my road map may not be the one that works for you or anyone else. I can share the contours of my map but the work of these days is to seek out your own. Maybe the liturgy can offer clues. Maybe conversations with friends and family can offer clues. Maybe something you read or see or just overhear on the tube can point you in a direction. Maybe an amalgam of all these can help sketch out a map to guide you through the maelstrom.

My road map of how I try and keep my finger on the pulse of life, the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, will probably, possibly, be rather different from many of you for one simple reason: I keep away from social media. I don’t use Twitter, Tiktok, Instagram, Snapchat, Telegram - I know the names and to a degree I know what they are - but I see them as distractions rather than opportunities for enhancing my life. You may feel very differently. But I am easily distracted and I don’t want my attention diffused in a thousand directions, or saturated with what other people want me to be interested in.

I know that for some people these things are a blessing, so yes, build them into, or keep them in, your roadmap. All I know is that I value the freedom non-engagement gives me to have my own thoughts, and develop my own direction, and pursue the richness in the world in other ways.  

I’m not even on Facebook, though - somewhat reluctantly - I do use WhatsApp, which is of course owned by Meta/Facebook. And I say reluctantly not because I don’t want the connection to others it offers - I crave real connection, real intimacy - but for quite another reason. We use, maybe have to use, a huge amount of what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’ to get through our lives. There are things that we know, that we have to pretend to ourselves we don’t know, in order to get on with our lives.

So you must know, if you use Facebook, the ways in which Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has a malignancy curled inside its beating but sclerotic heart that is deeply problematic.  I hear stories every day in my therapy consulting room in which it’s clear that social media is having a detrimental effect on people’s mental health - Instagram is toxic in the ways it promotes fantasies of beauty and body desirability and young women are particularly vulnerable here. And when you are immersed in images of what other people have, or are doing, or who they are doing it with, it generates envy, jealousy, feelings of missing out, worthlessness, unlovability.  It draws out, and draws on, these feelings.

But these apps are addictive - who doesn’t want to be ‘liked’?  And then I think a bit wider about the way Facebook fanned ethnic violence in Africa; was used by the military in Myanmar in their campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority, which led to murder, rape, and dispossession; we saw its poisonous role in the 2016 US presidential election leading to Trump’s election, as well as in feeding lies into the Brexit debates. Yes, I know it can be used for good as well - but the pernicious aspects of the Meta empire are transparent. You don’t have to dig deep to reveal the underbelly of the beast. And like the tobacco industry before it, there’s a deep denial of the evidence that its product can be detrimental to our health.

We use, maybe have to use, a huge amount of what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’ to get through our lives. There are things that we know, that we have to pretend to ourselves we don’t know, in order to get on with our lives.

I really don’t want to moralise all this, I just want to try and describe it, chronicle it, and say that I am caught up in this too. I might not use Facebook, or any social media, in my attempts to manage this maelstrom of a world but I do engage with - another huge distraction from what matters - I do watch a lot of sport. Sport can, along the way, teach us about dedication, endurance and how to mange disappointment and the inevitability of loss - but I know, all sports fans know, how often professional sport is now tainted by its association with human rights abuses, corruption, sexism. It hasn’t yet stopped me watching - that’s my cognitive dissonance - but In my heart I know it should. Aren’t we all complicit? As I say, I am trying not to be too moralistic about this - though there is a moral question at the heart of it - I’m just trying to describe it, where we are. One pen, two fingers.

So this is the question I am posing for these days of reflection: what does your road map look like, what changes might enhance your life, what could you do without, what do you want to add in? ‘Choose life’ is one of the great mantras of Judaism - we are a people enamoured of the possibilities of life, not just surviving in life, but sharing and enacting a vision of the possibilities of fulness of life, a life of compassion, kindness, justice, empathy, a life of caring for the wellbeing of those close to us and those far from us. 

Some of us are going to be more drawn to focus in on our own lives, some of us are going to be more interested in that world out there. One artist who manages the trick, it’s a gift really, of keeping a dual focus is the writer Ian McEwan. His recent book ‘Lessons’ is a masterclass in dual focus: its hero, Roland, one of the so called ‘baby boomer’ generation, struggles to make sense of his life - he is in turns complacent and baffled, loving and lost, indecisive and engaged, his personal life is in many ways a mess, but he has - McEwan gives him - his moments of intimacy, his capacity to show love and to feel loved. In other words, in his complexity and uncertainties and mistakes, in his small triumphs and his disappointments  - he is us.

But McEwan’s pre-eminence as a novelist is in showing us this life interacting with a wider backdrop: the Cuban Missile Crisis, Thatcherism, the Aids crisis, perestroika, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Europe, New Labour, the Iraq war, Brexit, the pandemic, the storming of the American Capitol - the book, and it is long, was finished just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, otherwise I am sure it would have included that. But if you want a text that illustrates, illuminates, the grandeur and complexity of living both looking in and looking out at the same time - which is our situation - McEwan is incomparable. Here he is:

The three [friends] spoke and listened easily, intimately. It often happened like this, Roland thought, the world was wobbling badly on its axis, ruled in too many places by shameless ignorant men, while freedom of expression was in retreat and digital spaces resounded with the shouts of delirious masses. Truth had no consensus... Parts of the world were burning or drowning. Simultaneously, in the old fashioned glow of close family, made more radiant by recent deprivation, he experienced happiness that could not be dispelled, even by rehearsing every looming disaster in the world. It made no sense.

And there you have it - that’s a truly great piece of writing, bringing to the surface what is deep inside. The outer world in all its messiness and threat, side by side with the inner world, that can still experience the joy of living. ‘It made no sense’, the author says. No, it makes no sense. And yet it’s true. Emet. True to how we live.

It’s another almost lost art: of making sense of what makes no sense.