Mourning is Timeless

 "The only reason to be an artist…is to bear witness” (Philip Guston)

There are some Biblical verses – well, many, if truth be told - that lie dull and lifeless on the page for us modern readers. They no longer speak to us – if they ever did. That’s probably our limitation, not theirs. But over time we might recognise that they are not lifeless, they are just dormant – as if they are biding their time, as if they’re awaiting their moment to reveal something to us, waiting patiently for their opportunity to illuminate an aspect of where we are now, what we might be wrestling with now.

So this week my eye was caught by a verse from our weekly sedrah [Torah reading] that describes a stage in the journey that Joseph took with the embalmed body of his father Jacob (Genesis 50). Jacob had spent his last years in Egypt, a bitter old man, an exile far away from his homeland; and before he dies, having given each of his sons their own blessing, Jacob requests that they bury him in the ancestral burial site back in der heim, in Mamre – today we call it Hebron (where Jews, assault rifles in one hand and siddurim, prayer-books, in the other, will be reading this text in very different ways to me).

We read how Joseph calls his brothers together and gets permission from Pharoah to make the journey back to Canaan to bury their father. The brothers leave their children and their herds and possessions behind, and set off accompanied by a huge retinue of Egyptian dignitaries and chariots and horsemen – it’s like a state funeral, Joseph being second only in prestige and power to Pharaoh himself.

And then our storytellers do something which has that quintessential Biblical narrative quirkiness one comes to recognise, and wonder over: they give us a short scene that disturbs the narrative flow, that seems superfluous to the story - yet it apparently has some significance for the authors, but a significance they don’t spell out. They leave it planted in the text – and there it waits for centuries, millennia, awaiting its moment.

I’m talking about verse 10 of chapter 50:

“When they came to Goren Ha-atad…they entered into a deep, heavy-hearted lamentation, and Joseph observed a seven day mourning period for his father” - this is the origin of the shiva tradition, by the way [the seven-day Jewish mourning period] – and then in the next verse the scene is described again from the outside, as it were, “And when the Canaanites living there saw this…they said: This is a grievous mourning time for the Egyptians”. 

This is a form of literary Cubism by the way, two perspectives of the same thing fused together in the picture, one superimposed on the other. And we are left in no doubt by the storytellers that whether you are a participant in this collective mourning, or merely observers of it like the Canaanites who see everyone involved as Egyptians, what’s being portrayed is a time filled with deep grief.

And then the text picks up its narrative thread: “And his sons carried him to the land of Caanan and buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field near Mamre that Abraham had bought…”

So what was it about this that particularly caught my eye? Well, it might surprise you but it was the name of the place where the mourning takes place. It’s in a spot called Goren ha-Atad.  ‘The threshing floor of/for thorns’. So what? The name adds nothing to the story being told. But this place of mourning is a real geographical location: it is identified as a site called Tell el-Adjull - which just happens to be in the southern sector of present day Gaza. Where, as I speak, grievous mourning is again taking place. As we know. Although we don’t want to know.

It is as if there is an aperture in time through which the past illuminates the present. The Torah takes us into Gaza. As this whole section of text makes clear, Jews are a people who know about mourning, about loss, about grief, about  how close to the heart the death of a loved one can be – and Jews know too how significant it is to have time to honour the dead. I sometimes think there is a way in which we are a faith tradition more bound up with death and mourning our losses – personal and collective - than of being enamoured by life and its manifold and rich possibilities.

On Yom Kippur, for example, I am always amazed in my community how, after the Yizkor service in late afternoon [the annual memorialising roll-call of those who have died in the past year] - which is rightly significant and moving for so many, and people come especially for it - as soon as it is over, half the community disappears. Yes, I know that the Neilah service that follows it is another hour and we repeat a lot of the liturgy -  but the conclusion of Yom Kippur is very much about life: it is about our future, our personal future, our collective future; yet it carries less weight - less emotional and spiritual value it seems - than our mourning, our sadness, our remembering our losses. This isn’t a criticism – it’s just an observation.

We are a strange, quixotic people, us Jews. We mourn our losses, we are good at that, we have had a lot of practice over the years as a people, and of course individually we have all lost loved ones. Maybe because we do, on the whole, love life, treasure life, we are, paradoxically, connoisseurs of loss. If life was not so precious, loss would not mean so much to us.

But back to the text. I want to ask a simple question. (No questions are of course simple, there is complexity at the heart of this question, but it is the question that jumps out of the text for me, jumps at me, won’t let me go). Are we able, when we read of this legendary mourning in Gaza, when we read these verses within our great mythic narrative of the Torah, are we able to really mourn the losses in Gaza? The losses now. Are we allowed even to ask this question? Too soon? But if not now, when?

Will there be a time? Will there ever be a time when we can enter into a period of deep mourning for what has transpired over these weeks? What continues to unfold in these days of trauma in Jewish history? And Palestinian history? Will mourning be allowed? Mourning for  others, as well as ourselves? Because those who see this from the outside, as it were – like in the Torah text – they can see, they can acknowledge: “this is a grievous time of mourning”. The world – the non-Jewish world - can see this. But our Torah text encourages us to see it too, to have a dual perspective. To be moral Cubists. To see events not just from our subjective Jewish point of view, but to see suffering from the outside too, to look with a sense of empathy such as those Canaanites are described as showing: “this is a grievous time of mourning for them”.

Goren Ha-Atad: Gaza has become a threshing floor. And as Jews we can be in mourning for that too.  Threshing, as you know, is about crushing, it is about separating the grain from the chaff, it is a demanding and, yes, brutal activity, necessary for grains - but when your threshing is of a people, the separating out the wheat from the chaff, as it were, becomes a crude operation – and we see the thorny, painful consequences that unfold.

Scholars tell us that the historical significance of this spot mentioned in the Torah, Tell el-Adjull, is that it was the ancient site of a burial ground for high-ranking Egyptian dignitaries. This helps explain why Joseph’s cortege stopped there for their seven days of mourning, en route to the family plot in Mamre. But the Torah is not primarily interested in that kind of background history. It is interested in moral history and emotional history and spiritual history, the kind of history that transcends its specific time and place and speaks into the future, that speaks to those open to hear it today.

So I share with you what I hear it saying to us, how this heavy-hearted mourning, this lamentation at the threshing floor for thorns, is calling out to us - to reflect on, to join with, however we might do that. We have been given this torat emet - this ‘teaching of truth’ as our liturgy calls our sacred literature - and sometimes the truth is very painful; actually truth is often too painful to bear, and maybe at the moment we feel we can’t bear it. Okay -  but whether we like it or not, as Jews we are bound up with these texts, these teachings. It is who we are, for better or worse. We who know what it is to mourn – and are learning, tragically (and yes, unbearably), how much we cause mourning for others. 

I want to dedicate what I am saying today to a group of people in this community who aren’t here today. I know that sounds strange but let me explain, just to finish. There is a cohort of younger people in and around our synagogue who have been feeling that since October 7^th their views, their ways of seeing this current conflict, their moral and spiritual perspectives on this traumatic turn in Jewish history – well, there hasn’t been much space for a range of heartfelt views to be expressed. The dominant mantra of solidarity with Israel hasn’t left much space for dissent, or even nuance – this is what they have felt. I am reporting what I hear. So when I spoke a month ago , and what I’ve said today – I say for all those present, of course. But I also say it, for what it’s worth, for all those who are not here with us today.  

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, December 30^th 2023]