It Never Ends

 “It is better to be wrong by killing no one rather than to be right with mass graves” (Albert Camus, December 1948)

You remember how it began. It began with an outrage, an act of terror, shocking, completely unexpected; and it provoked a cataclysm of death and destruction, slaughter and desecration, horror and folly. It’s engraved on our psyches and features as the deep background to our everyday lives.

As the fog of war descends, regional powers get involved, death tolls pile up, dementing, senseless, and the bloodshed is entwined with a propaganda battle, fierce, relentless, creating information and disinformation, the battle for hearts and minds, with each side convinced of the righteousness of its cause. For God and country. The same old idols that require the same old sacrifices. It never ends, and when it does seem to end – in defeat or so-called victory – it always turns out to be a temporary respite, a pause to lick wounds, mourn the dead, prepare for next time. Because it never ends. The grieving hearts, the necessary justifications, rationalisations, about why it ‘had to be this way’, ‘we had no choice’. When there are always choices.

But you know all this. I often find myself saying that these days: you know all this, there’s nothing I’m saying you don’t already know, in your head or in your heart. Ayn hadash tachat ha-shemesh – There is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes1:9).

This weekend in the UK includes Remembrance Sunday – and synagogues on Shabbat have Remembrance prayers, for those who died serving their country. So you may have understood what I am referring to when I speak about the outrage, the act of terror, that sparks deadly mayhem between nations. Gavrilo Princip assassinated Franz Ferdinand and a madness  descended upon Europe, a nightmare, loss upon loss. And we remember it still.

And here we are more than a century later in a world utterly transformed  - but a world not so transformed that another act of terror, shocking, unexpected, doesn’t generate more bloodshed, more self-righteousness, more pain, loss upon loss. Because it never ends.

I’m not naïve. Dictators, tyrants, fascists, murderous ideologues need to be resisted, forcefully. The defence of freedoms might sometimes require violence, war might be the unwished-for last resort for a group, a people, a nation, all other avenues having been explored before blood is again shed and the innocent again have to suffer. Because, tragically, the innocent always do suffer. ‘Collateral damage’ is a grim euphemism – because then those sanctioning the bloodshed don’t have to speak about grieving hearts and severed limbs and hope abandoned. No, it never ends – not just the urge for revenge, or retaliation, or tribal battles over land, or resources, or honour, but battles over security, or against injustice, battles where the perverse logic is that others have to die so that our lives can continue.

And meanwhile God looks down and weeps. My children have learnt nothing. My children have turned my teachings into weapons. I wanted ploughshares and fertility and human flourishing – and they made swords and instruments of death. I wanted pruning hooks and the blessings of peace – and they made spears and rockets and the machinery of war (Isaiah 2:4). They have learnt nothing.

Jews are the inheritors of a three thousand year old civilisation and culture rooted in a vision of how people might be able to construct societies for the good of all, societies of compassion and justice, of care for the strangers, the marginalised, the vulnerable, of care for each other. And here we are, worried to have a mezuzah on our doors,  worried to send our children to school, worried about wearing a chai (or a Star of David) round our neck. Here we are, with historical fears stirring in our hearts as a worldwide tide of antipathy floods the polluted channels of social media, and Jewish communities around the world suffer the toxic consequences of what Jewish nationalism has brought down on our heads.

Can we bear the pain of this? On any level. On the level of our daily lives here in the UK and the need to keep constantly alert? Or on the level of seeing clearly into the heart of how we have arrived at this stage in our fraught history? Can we bear to see it? I can hardly bear to speak about it. I know it can be too painful to hear it. How Zionism, which was supposed to solve the problem of Jewish insecurity in the world, has resulted in this: endless bloodshed and oppression there, and endless anxieties here. One thing’s for sure: Jews are not in the world to increase the amount of suffering on the planet.

Understand me properly: I am not speaking about the historical and moral need for the Zionist project and the establishment of a State; I am referring to how it evolved, over time, and has ended up in this state of trauma that many people are feeling, I am referring to all the wrong turns on the journey from 1948 to today, that has led to antisemitic graffiti on local buildings round the corner and torn-down posters of the hostages, and Jews frightened to walk in the street, or sit on the tube wearing a kippah.

At some stage we need to ask: how has it come to this? Because it wasn’t inevitable. I don’t subscribe to the idea of the eternal hatred of Jews – that Jews always have been and always will be hated, collectively. We need to be able to look with clarity and with a degree of objectivity - however passionately we might feel about what is happening: we need to be able to look at the complex dynamics of cause and effect, of moral responsibility and choices made – and avoided - these last 75 years. There needs to a reckoning, an ethical audit.

Part of the task of the Jewish people has always been to use introspection and teshuvah (reflective self-judgment) to examine the choices made in life, personal and collective. To find ways to allow our better selves to dominate over our more corrosive impulses.  

Of course I am aware that in saying this now, it probably feels much too early to start to think about it. We are in a state of feeling besieged, hurt, wounded, under attack, vulnerable, outraged; for five weeks now we have had to bear with the excruciating pain of Hamas’s hate-fuelled barbarism and the agonies that it wrought (not just for fellow Jews) and continues to evoke. The Jewish people are feeling existentially insecure – whether this is objectively true or not is not the point, it’s a dominant strand of feeling. And when you are feeling insecure, being able to stand back and reflect on questions about how he have reached this point is very hard to do. The feelings flood our capacity to think and reflect. We feel defensive, we feel aggressive, or we just feel numb.

But reflection will need to happen – and it will require emotional and intellectual bravery, and moral leadership, and a careful nurturing of wounded souls. It will require painful soul-searching and a capacity to look beyond simplistic distinctions like innocent victims and guilty persecutors; it will need to look at the psychological complexities of how those who have been or are persecuted become persecutors in turn,  it will need to look at how inherited trauma is passed on and lived out, it will need to look at how injustices cannot be ignored for ever, it will need to look at how shame and anger and guilt get repressed or projected or acted out. This will be our Jewish work for years to come, decades to come. I am serving notice on it today.

Too early to start perhaps, but we also can’t afford to wait too long to engage in  this work – work for the State of Israel, work for the Diaspora, work for the Jewish people. Let’s just hope that we gain some respite, and speedily, from our current traumas – so that we have the space to do this work, to do it together. Because we will need not just visionary leadership to do it but we will need each other, the support of each other, if we are ever to truly get to grips with the task of re-assessing what is required – what compassion and generosity and imagination and commitment to justice; what it really means to live out the Jewish vision of how things could be, should be.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, 11^th November 2023]