Torah For Our Times?

On Saturday night, at the Selichot service, we took our first tentative steps, collectively, to edge towards our Jewish New Year. It feels like it’s been a long time coming. The vagaries of our calendar mean that  this year it’s very late, our New Year, it’ll be October already when it begins – it’s been a leap year, so an extra month was added, but still, something about the waiting this year feels different to me.

I think it’s due, perhaps inevitably, to the way this last 12 months in Jewish history have played out, are still playing out, how much has changed, how much we have lived through, how much we have suffered, how much we have been burdened by, how much are hearts have been divided, how much our souls have been squeezed – and we know that the New Year is a time of reflection, of inward-looking, of a re-alignment in our souls towards our core values, a time of teshuvah, of recognition of wrongdoing, of accounting for what we have done and what we have failed to do – and how are we going to do all that at the end of this tumultuous, history-defining, history-defying year?

Have we been more sinned against than sinning? Some may well feel that. Others may feel that whatever the opprobrium heaped on our heads this last year, whatever the aggressions directed against the Jewish people here and in Israel, there is still a burden of guilt on our shoulders too, collectively: I know that some in the Jewish community are feeling that guilt keenly along with a sense of shame at every child buried under the rubble of Gaza. And some in the community, not so much. This has not been an easy year and these are not easy things to talk about. These are not easy things to carry with us into our New Year and the soul-reckoning that this period of the year asks of us.

So all of this makes this New Year now approaching feel different from any other. And, for me, in addition to what I feel like as a fellow Jew with all of you, there is also the added question, which others are perhaps fortunate not to have to consider, the feeling of responsibility to talk about all this in the community, to the community. How to speak what is true to a divided community, for there are very different constituencies here in our synagogue communities and the wider Jewish community - all of them hurting in various ways. And how will I find the words to speak to that divide, across that divide, on Rosh Hashanah and on Yom Kippur? I don’t know yet how I will do it. 

But when I don’t know how to speak, or what to say, I often turn to the writers and poets of the past, to see if I can glean any clues about how to speak in such difficult times as these. Not what to say, for they did not face our situation, but how to say it, how to think about articulating what matters in words. This week I came across a line from a lecture by the Italian novelist Calvino, Italo Calvino, from 1976, in which he said “What we ask of writers is that they guarantee the survival of what we call human in a world where everything appears inhuman”.

Twenty years after the Shoah every writer - novelist, playwright, poet, essayist – every writer of worth, was facing this question: how to keep on speaking of the ‘human in a world where everything appears inhuman’. As his fellow Italian writer, Primo Levi, said “I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man” (If This Is A Man). But I am wondering at this season : Do we remain amazed? Do we remain astonished, astounded, dumfounded, by humanity’s capacity for inhumanity? And that can be in the home, in society, on the world stage.

Because if we can bear to look – and many of us cannot bear to look for we fear looking and going mad – but if we do look, if we do expose ourself to acts of inhumanity, which are reported on a daily basis from somewhere near or far, what is evoked in us? Can we give it a name? Maybe we can’t – being ‘amazed’ is not what I experience, it’s more a deep disquiet, a horror, a soul-sickness, a revulsion at what being human can mean, being human but not humane.

How do we ‘guarantee the survival of what we call human in a world where everything appears inhuman’? – for this is surely the task not only of the artist but of all of us. But when we are bombarded by the inhumane it takes its toll on us – of course we can shield ourselves, just not look, we can remain indifferent, or cynical, or even (God-forbid) defenders of acts of inhumanity: ‘They deserved it…they had it coming to them…they are just animals’.

But for anyone who wants to feel that they value the survival of the ‘human in a world where everything appears inhuman’ those responses will feel like failures. But still, what we are do, what are we to feel, when faced with something like the amazing technological ingenuity entwined with the moral barbarism of exploding pagers and walkie talkies? Do we feel ethnic pride – or do we feel human horror? And what do each of these responses say about us? This is the season for these questions.

Can we find a language, can we find the words, to speak of what happens to us, to our souls, when exposed to acts like these? I am not sure I have the words, can find the words, although, as I say, I feel a responsibility to find some words. But if I can’t as yet craft my own words I can at least share with you the words of others, like Primo Levi, who survived the inhumanity and returned to speak of what he had seen and what he had learnt in it and from it. Words like this:

“Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which marks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.” (The Black Hole of Auschwitz)

Before he died, Moses wrote down the story of what he had experienced with his people – we read the text this week - the events, the lessons, the laws, the failures, the struggles of the journey his people had taken. This story – this ‘Torah’ our storytellers call it (Deuteronomy 31:9), this ‘teaching’ - was to be read to the community every seven years: this is your story, Moses says, you need to know it, it was written not for those who had gone through it personally (almost all those had died on the journey through the desert) but for the next generation, who hadn’t. But it was still their story. And it is still our story.

We remain faithful to the story of the need to re-tell the story.

But we moderns have other words too, words created in our more recent past that have become part of a Torah for our times, a teaching, a kind of revelation that speaks to us of  truths that transcend our own times – you can call them ‘eternal’ truths if you are so minded - and Primo Levi is, I think, a foundational voice within the Torah of our times. We read his texts  and re-read him, for everything is within it. 

He offers us an angle of vision to help us look at the human and the inhuman in every society on our fragile planet - and when he discerns that the bacillus of dehumanisation is still alive within the human heart, we might do well to pay attention. He knows whereof he speaks when he calls out the “Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which marks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.”

Torah for our times.

 

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, 28^th September 2024]