Purim and The Zone Of Interest

 The festival of Purim is the Jewish Mardi gras. A time for carnival, fancy dress, masks, revelry. This is a strange, paradoxical turn of events: Jews recall an ancient story of survival in the face of persecution – the story is told in the Biblical Book of Esther, where Jews in Persia fall victim to the annihilatory antisemitic rage of the king’s minister, Haman – and retell the story each year by turning darkness into light-heartedness, and fear into frivolity. The celebration of Purim is an opportunity for fun, for the mocking of sacred cows, for the subversion of the pieties of Jewish life.

One could say this is about using humour as a psychological defence against pain – Jews do a lot of that – but I suspect that the way Purim is celebrated has a deeper purpose at its heart. Take the role of alcohol in promoting the mood of levity, of ‘taking the piss’, that accompanies the celebrations. As early as the 4^th century, rabbi Rava decreed that the mitzvah, the religious obligation, is to drink until you cannot distinguish between the phrases ‘Blessed is Mordechai’  [the hero] and ‘Cursed is Haman’ [the villain].  

Later rabbis weren’t happy with this invitation to drunkenness. They interpreted Rava’s injunction to mean: well, you should drink more than usual so that you fall asleep – because then you won’t/can’t know the difference between these opposite sentiments.  

But I wonder if there is some deeper rabbinic intuition in play in Rava’s thinking. Is not this blurring of the distinction between saviour/hero and destroyer/aggressor asking us to question the nature of good and evil?  On every other day of the year the rabbis were keen to keep these impulses very separate: the whole of Jewish ethical life depended on keeping them apart. We were to engage in acts of goodness - and keep far from evil and evil-doers, as the liturgy tells us. That’s the Jewish project every day of the year: finding ways for human goodness, our goodness, to outweigh the forces of destructiveness that lurk in the human heart.

Both the rabbis of old and the psychologists of today acknowledge that this is an ongoing human struggle – this work (inner and outer) of ensuring ‘good’ triumphs over ‘evil’. And it is a struggle because the lived boundaries between the two are not as obvious as we might wish them to be. Once a year, on Purim, the simple splitting of life into absolute realms of good and evil seems to be called into question. On Purim you are encouraged to engage in an experiment – it is elevated to the realm of a mitzvah – the task is to find a way of blurring, slurring, subverting, the boundaries. And you find out how easy it is: a couple of drinks and good and bad are not so clear cut, nor so far apart.

We might wish this were the case but in the so-called real world – not in some religious fantasy picture of the real world – the dynamics around good and evil can be very disturbing. Evil can arise out of good intentions, as Einstein and Oppenheimer and others realised about splitting the atom. And sometimes good can arise from, or emerge from, evil: from the ashes of the Holocaust, the State of Israel was born - from the utter tragedy of victimhood to the miracle of continuity and self-determination. But, on the other side of the coin, because complexity is more true to life than the narratives we like to tell, when the Jewish state came into being, the Palestinian Nakba also came to pass. Life is much more complex, the boundaries between good and evil can often be more complex, than is comfortable.

We know it is always much more psychologically comforting for us to split the world into simple opposites – heaven and hell, right and wrong, goodies and baddies, the civilised (us) and the barbarians (them), heroes and villains, Mordecai and Haman. We feel we know where we are, how to orientate ourselves emotionally, if we can rely on these simple  dichotomies. And we do this both consciously and unconsciously.  But I think Purim – beneath the froth and the frivolity - opens us up to something quite disquieting.

Not only is it a story in which, notoriously, God does not appear (the only Biblical book in which this is so) but survival depends only on trickery and deceit. In the fable, Mordecai uses his niece’s sexuality (he weaponizes it, as the saying goes now) to manipulate the king; and Esther’ capacity to deceive – she hides her identity until the right moment – is seen as worthy of praise. The people are saved because of this subverting of simple boundaries between good and bad behaviour. Seduction and subterfuge not only make the story tick along quite nicely – they underpin the moral ambiguities of the tale.

And the moral ambiguities in the story are compounded by the way in which Jewish survival is accompanied by the death of those who wish to destroy them. The story tells it as an act of self-defence – 500 antagonists are killed in Shushan on the 13^th and 14^th of Adar, and another 75,000 in the rest of the Persian empire. You may hear uncomfortable echoes here in current events, which I won’t go into.

Does this dark side of the Biblical tale – which we narrate in the midst of the accompanying jollity - give us pause?  How many deaths are acceptable? How many deaths are inevitable? How many are rationalised as - in that ugly phrase - ‘collateral damage’? How many deaths are necessary that we survive and those who abhor us don’t? Maybe God was wise to steer well clear of this story. He gets compromised enough by those on all sides who call on him to this day to vindicate their murderousness. Or use him to justify it.

Liberal Judaism 50 years ago also steered well clear of this part of the story – they cut the reading of the megillah [the Biblical story of Esther] so that congregants didn’t have to hear about all this blood shed by Jews. They have stopped this censorship in more recent years – maybe because it doesn’t really do anyone any favours, to collude with our wish to avoid the darkness in the human heart, to avoid attending to the moral complexities that attend our humanity.

Although many people want their religion to help them feel more comfortable in life, honest religion can – hopefully - also provoke us into feeling less comfortable in ourselves.

But I can understand why those who edited the Biblical text did it. Because who really wants to think about all this? Maybe drunkenness has its value, lest we feel the full horror, the shock, the confusion, the disgust, the triumphalism, that such battles for group survival seem to produce; blurring with drink the distinction between blessing our heroes and cursing our enemies means we don’t have to think for too long  about what people are capable of doing to each other. It means we don’t have to reflect too much on the truth of the poet W.H.Auden’s words that “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return”.  

Drunkenness is one of the ways humanity has found whereby we don’t have to know what is really going on. (In the Bible it goes back to Noah, that survivor of the destructiveness and trauma of the Flood). But there are other ways too, not just alcohol, ways to ensure we don’t know – don’t have to feel, or think about – some of the horrors that go on around us.

Which takes me to The Zone Of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s extraordinary double Oscar-winning film.

I hope to return to this film at a later date. This is just to commend it to you if you haven’t yet seen it. It is not untrue to describe it as a ‘Holocaust film’  - as you may know, it is set in the family home and garden of Rudolph Höss and his wife Hedwig who lived literally next door to Auschwitz. Höss was the commandant of the camp - and the wall of their back garden was the wall of the death camp. 

So this is a film about the Holocaust, about evil. You never see into the camp, you only hear it – the soundtrack is remarkable, uncanny, unheimlich: the ominous dull grinding as of a huge industrial machine (which it was), that you hear throughout the film, off stage as it were - it is literally obscene, from the Greek, ob-skeen (‘offstage/out of sight’); you hear shots ringing out and shouts and human cries, and on the horizon you see smoke arising from tall thin chimneys, but this is all behind the wall, ob-skeen. So this is of course a Holocaust film – about how ordinary people, who come home to read their children a bedtime story, who tend their gardens lovingly and teach their children the names of the flowers and plants, ordinary people like you and me, who have goodness grafted to their hearts can also have evil grafted to their souls.

But it is, as the director has asserted, not only a Holocaust film, a film about the past, but a film about the present, about now. And that now can be any ‘now’,  not only a now that contains the knowing and not wanting to know around the ongoing traumas of both Israelis and the people of Gaza. The film was conceived and made, long before October 7^th. In every age it would be a film that challenges one’s complacency, the ways in which we all live walled off from terrible things that we hear about and sometimes see, things we know about and don’t want to know about. Because if we did face them it would be too unbearable.

“Too long a sacrifice/ can make a stone of the heart/ Oh when may it suffice?” – W.B.Yeats (Easter, 1916). 

I hope to return at some stage to The Zone of Interest. Because it is a piece of art, like  the Biblical stories of old, that is timeless, that raises profound moral questions, that provokes us into reflections about our lives, our compromises, our shadiness, our capacity for goodness and our capacity for evil. Each scene is worthy of attention – each scene asks questions, each scene demands a commentary: such a Jewish film!

Meanwhile Purim allows us to appreciate that gift for the paradoxical that Judaism relishes - in this case getting us to reflect on questions of survival in a world where God might seem out of the picture and we are left to our own all-too-human resources, where the Mordecai and the Haman within us battle it out for the upper hand. Who will bow down to whom? Will evil bow to good? Or good to evil?

Is life all in the end ‘Purim’ – a lottery? When Haman casts lots – purim in Hebrew - to find the date to kill the Jews, the story gestures to the elements of chance, randomness, the vagaries of fate. It is as if Haman is disavowing his own evil by pretending that what is to happen is guided by chance - that he is ‘just following orders’, as it were, just following how the lots fall. But we know that this isn’t the whole picture – that he is the active perpetrator undermined in the end by his own vanity as much as by Mordecai’s wiliness.

On this occasion, in the Purim story, Jewish saichel defeated goyische arrogance – and maybe that’s why the story made it into the sacred canon. And we can drink to that while knowing, as The Zone of Interest testifies, that life for Jews does not always turn out like that.  Saichel can only take you so far – but perhaps goodness can take you further. Let’s hope so.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, March 23^rd 2024]

Two Kinds of Jew - A Sketch on Jewish Identity

 Let me sketch out a cartoon-like version of two kinds of Jews – or rather two forms of feeling life within contemporary Diaspora Jews, two stances towards Jewishness that animates or motivates (consciously or unconsciously) our everyday lives as Jews.

There is the ‘Pesach Jew’ and the ‘Purim Jew’.

If you are a ‘Pesach Jew’ you will be stirred by the central themes of the story of liberation as described in the book of Exodus: that an oppressed people were freed from slavery and then went on to receive a moral vision about how to live in the world.

The ‘Pesach Jew’ will have imbibed the idea that the revelation at Sinai taught a traumatised people that justice, compassion and lovingkindness were qualities that resided in the human heart; and that the Jewish role in the world was to enact these attributes and qualities both within their own community and in relation to those who lived beyond their own tribe or nation.

In other words, the ’Pesach Jew’ has internalised the symbolism of the Torah story, a story that highlights and values freedom from oppression, and links it directly to an ethical vision: that the Jewish people are to be a “light to the nations”. The ‘Pesach Jew’ recognises that the oft-repeated Biblical idea  that ‘you shall love the stranger and the outsider because you were strangers in the land of Egypt’ is at the moral core of what it means to be Jewish. The Jewish soul is one that is sensitive to the sufferings of others and is determined that a central part of being Jewish involves reaching out to express care for Jews and non-Jews alike.

For the ‘Pesach Jew’ this stance depends on memory - sometimes unconsciously inherited memory -  the long arc of Jewish memory that links the mythic past of the people  with their continued existence now. We tell the story over and over to keep alive the memory of where we came from; and to keep alive the ethical commitment stemming from that memory. Inherited memory becomes a motivator for ethical and social action.

And the ‘Purim Jew’? What moves the heart of the ‘Purim Jew’? The Purim story – based on the Biblical Book of Esther - contains one aspect of the Jewish story that has never left us: that there exist in the world people who dislike us, hate us, want to persecute us. In the story, the anti-hero Haman foments a plan, backed by royal decree, to rid the Persian kingdom of its Jews. Over the generations, Haman’s animus against the Jews, as outsiders in Persia, has been enacted time and again. Although the narrative is historically unreliable, the anti-Jewish legislation that it describes has a powerful historical resonance. The story is an archetype of antisemitic hatred. It is a strand of Biblical literature that still reverberates in the heart of our Jewish community. For the ‘Purim Jew’, the experience of anti-Jewish antipathy – or the fear of it - is at the heart of one’s Jewish identity. 

Remaining Jewish becomes an act of defiance towards the antisemite. What the ‘Purim Jew’ learns from Jewish history is a stubborn refusal to leave the world stage. For the ‘Purim Jew’ the Jewish soul is marinated in feelings of victimhood and in the bloody-minded determination not to let Jewry’s enemies have the last word. Survival is all.

Of course the ‘Purim Jew’ is also keeping alive memory – memory of historical antipathy to Jews, aggression towards Jews, persecution of Jews – but this is selective memory. This is memory only able to - or only wanting to - hear this motif, this melody, within the symphony played out over centuries of interactions between Jews and non-Jews. For the ‘Purim Jew’ there is no creative or mutually beneficial social and cultural intercourse between Jews and the inhabitants of the lands in which they have resided – there is merely suspicion and worse.  

This is the kind of memory which is operating when Jews say they feel ‘existentially threatened’ by the current upsurge in reported antisemitism in the UK and abroad. That upsurge is shocking and disturbing and needs to be monitored and prosecuted - and vigilance is absolutely necessary for us Diaspora Jews. One can feel saddened by this, or angry – or both – but it may be useful to try to keep a sense of proportion about it. We aren’t in the 1930s Germany of antisemitic state legislation and institutional persecution – we are dealing with small groups, and lone individuals, emboldened to enact their prejudices online, sometimes in person, and as horrible and frightening as this can be, in the UK we have the backing of a legal system and police to help us contain this unpleasantness and these threats when they come.

It can be difficult to keep a sense of perspective about this here in London because the kind of memory that gets triggered in us is the memory at the heart of the ‘Purim Jew’: the selective memory of Jews as the ones who are eternally hated and persecuted. And of course it is this kind of memory that is particularly operative in Israel when people are saying they feel ‘existentially threatened’.

The October 7^th barbarism has powerfully triggered this deeply-lodged strand of feeling in the Jewish-Israeli psyche and one can see how traumatic the events of that day have been, how they are resonating still in the psyches of the people, and indeed how the excruciating pain connected with the hostage situation is truly dementing. Our hearts do go out to those who are going through this: there is no family in Israel unaffected by either the immediate connection with hostages and their families, or those who lost loved ones on October 7^th, or those who have lost loved ones in the fighting that has ensued, or those still displaced from their homes. All of these need support and solidarity in whatever way it can be shown.   

Even if I have over these months offered a critique of certain aspects of Israel’s Zionist  story or its current political responses, I have tried never to lose sight of the human drama that is ongoing for the people going through this. It has sometimes been difficult to balance my empathy for those who are going through this embattled saga, with my other concerns about the meaning of these events within the longer arc of Jewish history and its meaning for us Jews who sit here in the Diaspora, who are realising that what happens over there is having a direct impact on us over here. This ongoing drama can also feel dementing in the suburbs of London – not least in the attempt to hold in mind and take to heart the anguish of Palestinian suffering alongside that of Jewish suffering.

The categories of ‘Purim Jew’ and ‘Pesach Jew’ are inevitably a bit simplistic – I said they were cartoon-like, they are a kind of shorthand – because we can recognise that the ‘Pesach Jew’ might value the themes of liberation and a commitment to justice and equality and compassion, but the story – like the Purim story - is also rooted in victimisation, that ancient antipathy towards us. It wasn’t called antisemitism then, in Egypt, but the Biblical saga is about the oppression of an alien people living in the midst of a majority culture. That’s the strand of ‘Purim’ in the Pesach story, and it lives inside even the most secular or humanitarian-minded ‘Pesach Jew’: the archaic memory, intergenerational memory, of being strangers in strange lands, is still alive however securely integrated one now feels, however culturally assimilated one is.

I have no doubt we will get through this period of doubt, darkness, inner dividedness - it’s going to take time for the external situation to be resolved, and of course there are different pictures of what ‘resolved’ might look like. So we here in the UK are going to have to live with heightened feelings of insecurity for a while longer – this, one intuits, is going to be a long journey.

[partially based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, February 17^th, 2024]

'Everything Is Connected to Everything' - on Butterflies, Stalin and Visions that Fade

 The Jewish mystics of old believed that everything in the world was connected to everything else, that we are all caught up in an immense web of being, with the energy of the universe flowing uninterruptedly through everything that lives. The breath of all life animating us, moment by moment, is part of the divine flow of energy animating existence. Everything is connected, in a constantly unfolding chain of being, with everything else.

Four hundred years or so after Rabbi Isaac Luria developed these mythopoeic ideas about the nature of reality (as he saw it), Professor Edward Lorenz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a paper entitled Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas? and thus, in 1972, so-called Chaos Theory was born. This was a paradigm leap in scientific understanding about how the universe works, how everything is indeed connected to everything else  in a vast web of being - and a small action here (the so-called ‘butterfly effect’) ripples out in a way that is ungraspable but real, and effects something else on the other side of the planet. 

And so the mystic’s understanding is mirrored in the advanced mathematical models of the scientist’s understanding. For us ordinary mortals – well, for me, anyway – there is almost no way to make sense of this ‘butterfly effect’. It is so outrageously beyond rational understanding. Because it’s not just about butterflies of course. To feel that every word you utter, every action you make, reverberates  out into the ether, has consequences beyond our reach, beyond our understanding, beyond our control. Surely it would be paralysing to think like that? Nobody could live like that, with that degree of awareness. We would go mad.

And yet there’s something about that notion that things are connected to each other in ways that we can never know, never understand, never track, never discover, there’s something about that sense of being held within this great mystery of a web of interconnected energy, there’s something about that, about the poetry of it, that is beautiful and inspiring and humbling, at least for me.

One thing that this sense of interconnectedness allows me to do, encourages me to do, gives me permission to do, is play with ideas, play with connections, trace connections, follow lines of inquiry, of imagination, of intuition, to see how things could be connected. For example this week I have been playing with three themes – themes which at first glance might not seem particularly connected but that I feel can be productively connected.

Idea one: I have been thinking a lot recently about Stalinism. I ‘ve just finally finished the Soviet-Jewish writer Vassily Grossman’s monumental novel ‘Life and Fate’: it was banned in his homeland, but it’s one of the most significant novels of the 20^th century. It is our era’s equivalent of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’, offering a vast panorama of life in central Europe, Russia and Germany, in the 1930s and 1940s. Set during the Nazi siege of Stalingrad during World War 2, Grossman compares the different kinds of horrors of two totalitarian states. He takes us into the concentration camps and the gulags and is unsparing in his portrait of the paranoia and cruelty of the Soviet system under Stalin, how it infiltrated family life and everyone’s mental life, how one word out of place, reported by a colleague, or neighbour, or family member could lead to persecution, torture, exile.

And reading this extraordinary book – about life and death and the randomness of history -  led me reflect on how Soviet communism, and the ideology of socialism the Soviet Union said it was enacting, captured the imagination of two, three, generations, world wide in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s and beyond. I have been to a fair number of funerals for an older generation (often parents of friends) who were members of the Communist party in the old East End of London. They were just part of a whole cohort of folk  who became enamoured of the experiment that was taking place in the Soviet Union to create a new kind of society that was to enact in a secular form the messianic dream of the ages, a society of equality and justice.

It was a noble, aspirational vision but it was a vision corrupted by Stalin and his henchmen and notions of ideological purity, and a gap opened up between the reality on the ground and the rhetoric of the state - and that gap was filled from the 1930s until Stalin’s death in 1953 with the execution of a million Soviet citizens, deliberate mass starvation in Ukraine, forced labour camps, deportations, detentions, interrogations, bloody massacres, show trails, antisemitic purges against Jewish doctors and writers…and all the while not only impoverished Jews in the East End but some of the great minds of European thought were fellow travellers with the communist vision, defenders of it, promoters of it.

And what fascinates me, and horrifies me, and makes be anxious (though I will come to that) is the question about when followers of this vision finally abandoned it.  When did they realise they had been seduced into a huge error of judgment by the rhetoric and propaganda of the Soviet State, and its emissaries, an error that was intellectual, emotional, spiritual? How long did it take for them to let go of their wishful thinking in the face of evidence of the evils of the actual system they were supporting?

HG Wells, George Orwell, Camus, Sartre, John Steinbeck, Simone de Beauvoir – I am not going to name too many names – they gradually became disenchanted,  but often it took decades for that disenchantment to really sink in, in spite of abundant evidence from very early on that this was an experiment that was not only persecuting its own people but was involved in what we would now describe as crimes against humanity.

So was it the show trials of 1937-8 that did it? Was it the annihilation of Jewish intellectuals in 1952? For many communist fellow-travellers it was the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. For some it wasn’t until the crushing of the Prague spring in 1968. People held on to their commitment to this ideology for decades, and nothing could force them to disconnect from their younger decades of enthusiasm. There is a real psychological issue here at the heart of this historical question. When we have become fixated on an ideology that gives us some kind of emotional satisfaction, some kind of vision of hope, what does it take to let it go and acknowledge our mistake, our naivety, our false thinking? It is actually very hard to do. If we are holding fast to an ideology, how long do we keep silent about crimes done in its name – or even find a way of justifying them? The story of the Soviet Union is a text case for this.

Second idea: from our Torah portion this week, which contains the famous phrase na’aseh ve’nishma [‘we will do and we will listen’]: this is the children of Israel’s response to Moses when he brings down from Sinai God’s teachings, God’s laws. “And all the people answered with one voice”, says our storyteller, “saying: Everything that the Eternal has commanded we will do” (Exodus 24:4). And then a few verses later, after Moses is described recording the obligations of the covenant and reading it aloud to the people, we hear “And they said: Everything that the Eternal has spoken na’aseh ve’nishma, we will do it and we will listen to it, we will obey it, we will try to understand it” (24:7).

There is an almost unanimous tradition of reading this text that praises the faithfulness of the Israelite people in saying na’aseh ve’nishma. It is seen as an acceptance of their role as God’s chosen people. ‘We will do what is required’. And the commentators point out that it is particularly worthy of praise that the people say they’d do whatever was required before they had understood what it meant, before they had heard (shema) what they were agreeing to. It is not clear if the Biblical phrase does mean a sequence or whether it is a combined ‘doing and hearing’ activity. But the traditional commentators tend to stress this was an unquestioning commitment to action – that was followed by thinking, reflecting on what it meant.

That’s how this phrase is always read nowadays by rabbis and Jewish teachers: ‘look how devoted the Jewish people were/are in following God, they agreed to do it even before they knew what was involved’. The only dissenting view I could find belongs to the Sadducees, the group who had religious and political power during the Second Temple period - but lost their authority once the Temple was destroyed in 70CE. Their opponents, the Pharisees, evolved into the rabbis who wrote the Talmud and developed Judaism into the forms that we have inherited.  The Talmud is uniformly hostile to the Sadducees, and as not a single line of Sadducean writing has survived, we are dependent on their adversaries to see into their thinking. A great example of how history is written by the victors.

So there’s one passage in the Talmud discussing  this phrase na’aseh ve’nishma in which the Sadducees are recorded as being critical of the Jewish people, calling them ama paziza – “a rash people, for whom the mouth precedes the ears …you should have listened in order to know whether you were able to accept”’ [cf. Aviva Zornberg, ‘The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus’, p.303). And this is the essence  of my second theme: I am becoming more and more sympathetic to the dissident view of the Sadducees here, against the overwhelming weight of the tradition.

And the reason is – and maybe you can begin to see how everything is connected to everything else – I have real doubts, about the wisdom of subscribing to any ideology (and religious faith is an ideology) that requires one to submit to its thinking, that asks for a priori obedience, whether it is obedience to the programme of a Stalin or a God or a religious tradition. Because obedience so often has a persecutory shadow side, an under-edge, that involves punishing those who don’t follow the party line. Or – as in Catholic guilt and Jewish guilt – punishing oneself for not being obedient enough.

To accept any ideology (political or religious of cultural or social) and not be free to question it is foolhardy, ‘rash’. To have to submit to received opinion can be soul-destroying. But to call into question what one has accepted voluntarily, what one has followed perhaps enthusiastically for decades, to call into question a belief system that might have sustained you for years - that is very difficult, painful. To say I have seen what this ideology, this system, this vision actually does, and I can no longer go along with it - that requires a kind of intellectual and emotional and spiritual bravery (or is it honesty? or is it objectivity?) which not everyone can muster. Not least because it might leave a huge gap where that belief once sat – and what does one replace it with?

Third idea, everything being connected to everything else. What about the chaos of feelings we Jews might be having about Israel/Gaza right now? The ever-present elephant in the room. And I feel reluctant to speak about it. So let me just name it by saying that the questions I was asking earlier about the fellow-travellers of  communism, those defenders of the system in spite of the evidence coming out of the Soviet Union – and at this distance it might seem hard to reconstruct just how powerful and seductive were the narratives woven by the defenders of the system – those questions I was raising are, I think, pertinent to the questions one might have about being a fellow-traveller and defender of the Zionist vision.

We each will have our own take on this - but although it is now relatively safe to talk about when the scales fell from one’s eyes about old-style Soviet communism, it can feel far from safe to talk about it in relation to contemporary Zionism. (Please note I am not comparing the problematic content of actions  - but the process of how hard it is to question and then perhaps let go of the evocative vision that one might attach oneself to).

So at some stage we need to ask when did it happen to you? Has it happened to you? People like Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt drew attention to the fundamental problems of the Zionist endeavour in the 1940s, as the State was born; for others it wasn’t until after 1967 and the conquered territories were held on to rather than relinquished, and then gradually settled on, and it became clear that justice for the other inhabitants of the land, and the refugees, has being delayed, postponed, pushed out of the story. The mantra of na’aseh ve’nishma, we will do it and then reflect on it, was a powerful one in the Zionist story, and many Jews around the world became faithful followers of the ‘doing’, and set aside their misgivings, their ‘listening’ to the consequences. For some, those feelings of being enamoured by the original vision of a Jewish homeland began to sour with the Sabra and Shatillah massacres in 1982, or the Lebanon war in 2006, or the first Gaza war in 2012, or the declaration of ongoing Jewish supremacy in Israel codified in 2018 in the Nation State law. Or maybe it is this current chaos that is doing it, finally.

Everything being connected to everything, we can ask in relation to Israel: when was your 1956 Hungarian uprising moment? Or has it not happened yet? Are you with the Pharisees or with the Sadducees on this current tragedy? Is it ‘rash’ to be critical of Israel at a time like this when so many in the world are feeling hostile to both Israel and Jews? Or is it ‘rash’ to be uncritical, to be still enamoured of the ideology, the vision of Zionism as it defends its ‘we will do whatever it takes to prevail’ philosophy?

How many wings of how many butterflies will have to flutter, and how many will have to be torn apart, before the spirit of history declares a winner? Because at the moment there are no winners, just the cruelty of lives destroyed. And for that we weep, and have cause to weep.  

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, February 10^th, 2024]

"Evil Comes From A Failure To Think"

Let’s start with a question: which book saw a 1000% increase in sales in the 12 months following Donald Trump’s election as US president in 2016? 

First (small) clue: it was published in 1951.

Second (larger) clue: a woman author. 

Born in Hamburg in 1906, brought up in Berlin. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 for doing historical research in the archives (on programmatic state antisemitism in Germany) after eight days she was released and immediately fled the country, with her mother, crossing the border to Czechoslovakia and from there eventually to exile in Paris. 

Let me put you out of your misery: I am talking about the political philosopher, historian, essayist, Hannah Arendt. And the book - the one that topped the  Amazon lists for months - was the book that made her name in the United States: The Origins of Totalitarianism, her long, detailed exploration of 19^th century antisemitism, imperialism and racism and how these strands of 19^th and 20^th century life had emerged into – woven themselves into – totalitarian systems like Nazism and Stalinism. 

It’s probably not a book one would read for pleasure – not least because  Arendt’s prose style has that clotted density characteristic of the academic tradition in which she grew up and was trained. She was a precocious youngster, the doted-on only child of assimilated, educated, secular-but- Jewishly-aware left-leaning parents. At 14 she was devouring the volumes of Immanuel Kant she found in her father’s library; later she was expelled from school for challenging a teacher; and at 18 she enrolled to study philosophy at the University of Marburg with Europe’s leading philosopher Martin Heidegger. 

She later studied under the tutelage of both Edmund Husserl and Karl Jaspers – these names may not mean anything to you, but those three male teachers  were the central figures of 20^th century European humanist and existential philosophy. All of them (and Arendt followed in that tradition) wrote with that heavy, convoluted, abstract lyricism that was rooted in the German Romantic tradition. Anyone who has read Martin Buber’s work might have had a taste of that. They aren’t beach reading. 

So if it wasn’t her fluid prose style that made The Origins of Totalitarianism such an unlikely must-read after sixty-odd years, what was it? Well, I’d suggest it was possibly the way in which readers discovered that Arendt had developed insights into political processes and human nature – and how politics moulds and manipulates human nature – that suddenly had a startling new relevance to what is going on in these early decades of the 21^st century.   

Readers discovered that within that demanding prose style there were some luminous  jewels to be found, thoughts that helped one think about, for example,  what was going on in the White House. And not only there. Sentences like : 

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” [OT, 1976, p.416] 

That’s a sentence to keep close to hand when thinking about the recent American past – and what is yet to come; as well as when we get our next UK Cabinet reshuffle. A totalitarian mindset can exist separately from a totalitarian system. 

But  why am I focusing on Hannah Arendt now? It’s partly because I’ve become interested in her recently, and I’d like to share that enthusiasm with you. It’s partly because I’ve just been reviewing a new biography of her life and work – We Are Free To Change The World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience by Lyndsey Stonebridge - and it’s made me realise how little I have  paid attention over the years to her work and the deep originality of her thinking. It’s never too late to discover a major thinker who has been hidden in plain sight all one’s life. 

I’d always known about the mystique that surrounds Arendt – made up of all sorts of things about her life, her biography: she was not only Heidegger’s star student at Marburg but his lover for four years (he was twice her age, and married), and although their affair had ended well before the advent of Hitler, Heidegger later became – to Arendt’s horror - an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis and was a member of the Party until 1945. Despite this, Arendt renewed contact with him in 1949 and they remained close for twenty more years. 

Arendt managed to escape Europe in 1941 in spite of having been incarcerated as an ‘enemy alien’ in Vichy France in the concentration camp at Gurs near the Spanish border: she walked out of the camp with forged papers provided by a group of Austrian communists operating within the camp –  soon after this the camp became a transit point for Auschwitz. Survival was (is) so often a matter of luck or fortuitous timing or the sheer randomness of life. 

When she boarded the boat to America she carried with her a suitcase of papers and writings – not her own but those of the great philosopher Walter Benjamin, who had entrusted them to Arendt when they met by chance days before he committed suicide on the French/Spanish border. You see what I mean by the mystique around her – but that’s around her life. What about her writing?   

The text which really made her name - and promoted her to the status of leading public intellectual -  came in the 1960s after she attended the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. She wrote up her experience for The New Yorker and it was in that context that the phrase with which Arendt is most often associated entered public consciousness – The New Yorker lifted one phrase out of her text to publicise the piece: that much misunderstood phrase ‘the banality of evil’.   

When she wrote about the ‘banality of evil’ many Jewish readers felt she was minimizing the horrors and evil of the Holocaust – but, on the contrary, what she was emphasising was that in the flat, detached, bureaucratic verbiage that Eichmann spouted in the dock, with all its circumlocutions which avoided naming the crimes he was committing, a new form of banality was being laid bare, the banality of thoughtlessness, a moral and imaginative blindness that had invaded the human condition, Arendt thought, like a virus. He presented himself as a mediocre functionary with no awareness at all of the monstrous nature of what he had been involved with. That was the ‘banality of evil’. 

Her essays reporting her observations over the many weeks of the trial generated a huge furore. She wrote with deeply etched irony and a kind of intellectual detachment that did not endear her to many survivors. It may be that irony was part of her emotional defence against the pain of what was being spoken about. At any rate, she lost friends over it – people like Saul Bellow. 

But what also alienated her readers was how she reported Eichmann’s attempts to exonerate himself – he spoke in his defence about how he’d worked  with Jewish leaders, in ghettoes and camps, and with a rabbi like Leo Baeck in Theresienstadt (who did to some extent attempt to protect his congregation within the camp by not spelling out everything he knew of their ultimate fate). This could be construed as collaboration with the enemy – and it was painful for Jews to hear her speaking about Jewish leadership in such fraught situations in those kind of terms.  So she was shunned by those who felt that she was guilty of a lack of imaginative awareness of the impossible choices that had had to be made within such extreme situations. 

So Arendt was a complex personality. She never toed the party line on any subject – she was dedicated to thinking for herself, and kept emphasising in her writing that thinking is a moral activity, it is about values, it needs to be done all the time and about every subject. She demands that you do the work for yourself and not rely on second-hand thinking. 

But sometimes she just seems to put her finger on the pulse of something and her angle of vision just illuminates an issue or theme.   

Let’s just take one example that speaks to where we are now in the midst of this horror show in Israel/Gaza – one of the other reasons I’m sharing thoughts about Arendt here is that she can help us think about what is going on in that painful and tragic land. 

Take this thought:

Politically speaking, tribal nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies' - 'one against all' - and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before [this idea] is used to destroy the humanity of man. (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1968, p.227) 

And if that doesn’t speak to what is going on in the minds of Netanyahu, his Knesset henchmen, and the fundamentalists on the West Bank, I don’t know what does. 

So we need Arendt – and she is everywhere. Her image is on coffee mugs and postage stamps and T-Shirts: there are dozens of T-shirts for sale with photos of her, quotes from her – my favourite is the one that says in large bold letters:

  WHAT WOULD

HANNAH ARENDT

          DO?

I wouldn’t wear it myself (except perhaps on Purim) but I have been going round saying to myself ‘What would Hannah Arendt think?’ 

She was an early Zionist, she worked for Youth Aliyah in Paris in the second half of the 1930s, but she was a committed bi-nationalist like Martin Buber, Henrietta Szold, Judah Magnus who ran the Hebrew University, so when the Zionist Congress meeting in the Biltmore Hotel in New York broke with tradition in 1942  and demanded that “Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth” she was appalled, predicting – accurately, of course – that such a  state would exist in endless tension with the other inhabitants of the land. 

And she realised that it wouldn’t solve the underlying problem of human statelessness – she had been stateless from 1938 when she was stripped of her German citizenship until she became a US citizen in 1950. “On the contrary”, she wrote in The Origins Of Totalitarianism, “like virtually all other events of the 20^th century, the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees…thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000-800,000people.” [OT, Schocken, 2004, p368

And what would Hannah Arendt think about this week’s turning of the wheel of history, and the opening of the case brought by South Africa (a rich historical irony there) at the International Court of Justice, the case against Israel’s so-called ‘genocidal intent’ in Gaza? The language is of course emotive, and Israel will plead its cause, but it is hard to hear some of the statements made by Israeli politicians and military leaders – I’m not talking about actions but language – it’s hard not to hear some of the vengeful and annihilatory language that has been used without feeling a moral revulsion at the dehumanised and dehumanising rhetoric that has been used.  

So what would Hannah Arendt think?  About the way, after various wrong turns, it has come to this, less than three generations after that? Would she remind us about one of her acidic but penetrating observations, that “evil comes from a failure to think”? 

[[“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”  from Eichmann in Jerusalem]]

Well, we will not see her like again, but we still need thinkers of the calibre of Arendt to help us think in these fraught times. Not just to feel – Jews are very good at that – but to think, to gain a clarity, a moral clarity about how to act when all around are losing their heads. But thinking is hard work. To do it we need all the help we can get, from Hannah Arendt or anyone else. 

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, January 13^th, 2024]