The recent appointment of Carol Ann Duffy as the new poet laureate generated a flurry of publicity. Most of this, of course, was about the person, not the poetry: first woman to hold the post, first lesbian, first born in Scotland to take up the role...and so predictably on. We could not expect anything different – the cult of personality is the dominant national trope and has the media in its clammy, celebrity-fixated grip.
This media response, as well as a new film, Little Ashes - concerning the life and execution (aged 37) of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca - has set me wondering about the ways in which poets have mattered (or not) in recent times. (And I suppose that, for me, ‘recent’ stretches back a hundred years or so).
The film, directed by a friend of mine (Paul Morrison), revolves around the relationship between Lorca and Salvador Dali - their early careers overlapped and each was an inspiration for the other - and as well as being beautifully photographed the film contains a sensitive and nuanced portrait of the poet by the Spanish actor Javier Beltrán.
Hearing some of Lorca’s poetry within the film returned me to my bookshelves – and the realisation that I had never taken the time to become acquainted with his work. Which has meant that I’ve missed out on a poet of rare sensibility, and that great gift of capturing in words those fleeting, tangled, half-thoughts and evanescent moods that lap on the furthest shores of our consciousness but which we may never fully dwelt upon, or even recognise as part of us – until we come upon them unexpectedly, written on the page, and then, with a gasp of recognition, feel we’ve known about forever.
Every Song
Every song
is the remains
of love
Every light
the remains
of time.
A knot
of time.
And every sigh
the remains
of a cry.
But does poetry matter? Shelley wrote that poets are the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the World’ for they ‘actually advance the interests of Liberty’. And how do they achieve this extraordinary effect? (For if it were true we surely need to know, and pay heed). Akin to the belief of the sixties’ radical that the personal is the political, for Shelley the psyche of the poet acts as a conduit for larger forces at work in society : ‘They measure the circumference or sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit at which they are themselves perhaps most sincerely astonished, for it is less their own spirit than the spirit of the age’ (all quotations from ‘A Defence of Poetry’, 1821).
There is a way in which this Romantic notion that poets exert some exemplary moral power through their capacity to be alert - even if not consciously so - to the deep currents of their time and place sounds hopelessly naive to my 21st century ears. That is, until I recall my own youthful idealism; and remember that Shelley died at 29; and recognise that in his defence of the primacy of the imagination over ‘reason’ he was articulating a visionary belief that I lose sight of over and over again – and need to be reminded of over and again lest this occlusion within me becomes permanent. This vision insists that the spirit that animated the prophets of my own Jewish tradition is still available to those who attune themselves to its Presence.
Poets, wrote Shelley in that same electric essay, ‘are the priests of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.’ Poets, in other words, are the inheritors of the prophetic mantle of old – even if, like Shelley, they deem themselves ‘atheists’.
So from this perspective, poetry, it seems, does matter. And yet, on the other hand, who would be able to contradict W.H. Auden’s blunt disavowal in 1939 that ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’ ? In the so-called ‘real world’, poetry is just words. And as we all were taught, actions speak louder than words.
The pragmatist in us will insist, reading the daily news, that poetry can hardly matter in the face of the harshness of life. Yesterday (May 12) I read that ‘An estimated five [US] soldiers in Iraq try to kill themselves each day .’ Five? A day? And today (May13) I read the report of someone working in a temporary medical facility shelled in the supposedly safe ‘no-fire zone’ in Sri Lanka: ‘The most terrible thing that I have seen was when a mother had a bullet go through her breast and she was dead and the baby was still on the other side of the breast and the baby was drinking her milk...I was at that place where it happened.’
Does poetry matter? If poetry could emerge from the trenches of the Great War, from the gulags, from Auschwitz, then perhaps it still does. The wrestling with language for new ways of seeing, the salvaging of the human from asphyxiation by the forces of dehumanisation – poets go on working with words to see what they can do. (Except when the poet too is defeated by the task – let Paul Celan and Sylvia Plath be called as witnesses, let them remind us of that desperate host of 20th century poet suicides...)
So are we with Shelley – or Auden? Or both? Perhaps paradoxically, communist dictators and fascists alike seem to agree more with Shelley than Auden. Why else during the Spanish Civil War kidnap and execute the poet Lorca in 1936? Why else did Stalin hound his country’s greatest poet, Osip Mandelstam , to a premature death in a labour camp (1938)? And imprison and execute the great novelist Isaac Babel (1940)? And arrange the ‘Night of the Murdered Poets’ on August 12 1952, when thirty Yiddish writers and poets were executed by firing squad? Peretz Markish, Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister...men who only had words to offer, their murders confirming Mandelstam’s bleakly ironic words: ‘Only in Russia is poetry respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?’
Think of the BNP rounding up Seamus Heaney and Benjamin Zephaniah and Ruth Padel and Bernard Kops and Arnold Wesker and Elaine Feinstein and Simon Armitage and Paul Muldoon – and Carol Ann Duffy. And dispensing with them in one night.
To murder a poet for his or her words is a perverse form of honour. The totalitarian mind seeks to define and dominate reality: everything and everyone must be subservient to the Leader’s vision. But art – and perhaps poetry in particular – offers us an alternative reality, another angle of vision, another world to inhabit. That’s why , for dictators, it is so dangerous. It gives one room to breathe. It gives one room to think. And dictators cannot abide anyone having thoughts of their own, thoughts different from the Leader. (Twenty years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie was a contemporary variant on this theme).
Well, this is a long way from Carol Anne Duffy and her new role of nurturing our interest in poetry in all its capacity to move and inspire and provoke us, its capacity to offer us webs of words in which we see our lives anew, words which offer ‘an intense and impassioned power of communicating intense and impassioned impressions’ (Shelley). A bit, I suppose, like prayer used to do.
So, for all those for whom traditional liturgical prayers no longer work (or are no longer sufficient) - no longer help us connect our mortality and helplessness and impoverishment with our potential and our indebtedness and our creativity, no longer give us the strength to transform what we are into what we could be, no longer help us both to celebrate what we have and acknowledge the inevitability of loss – for all who, nevertheless, still look to words arranged on a page as sources of inspiration and comfort and hope, here is another form of prayer: a poem by our new poet laureate.
Prayer
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray for us now. Grade I piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.
Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.
(C.A. Duffy, 1993, Mean Time, London, Anvil Press)
Thursday, 14 May 2009
Friday, 1 May 2009
Berlin and memory... and the enigma of walls
Before last week I’d only spent a few hours in Berlin. In 1969, on a school trip to the Soviet Union, we passed through the divided city en route to Moscow by train. All I recall from that brief encounter with the city was a visit to the Olympic stadium, eerie-because-deserted that day, yet familiar from those grainy black-and-white sequences from the 1936 ‘Jesse Owens’ Olympics; Leni Riefenstahl’s chillingly beautiful 1938 film of the Games, Olympia; and those triumphalist rallies in which Hitler bewitched his people into uncritical adulation of their nation and its leaders (and which of course involved the demonization of Jews, communists and other deviants) – staged mass gatherings that have left me with a permanent disquiet about the potential for crowds to be thrilled and manipulated by rhetoric and emotional appeals to lofty causes.
And although I’ve been to Germany on several dozen occasions in the intervening years - mainly to Jewish-Christian conferences and Jewish-Christian-Muslim gatherings - and have long admired the work that has gone into the deep, prolonged and painful process of German post-War self-examination, restitution and renewal, I had never had the opportunity for a visit to Berlin.
Of course, as a tourist, my impressions of the four days spent there are inevitably those of an outsider, an observer – but I console myself with the thought (the rationalisation) that sometimes one has a better view from the margins than from the centre.
And my abiding impression after this fleeting encounter with this great European capital is that Berlin is still a death-haunted city. Let me be clear – I loved the city, its cosmopolitan culture, its cafes, its coffee, its integrated (and cheap) transport system, its bold new architecture, its leisurely Sunday afternoon strolling by the river and sunbathing in the Tiergarten, its weekday sense of vibrant busyness yet without London’s aggressive pushiness. Indeed, although I have no German forebears, I felt curiously at home there.
Maybe this was in part because I could see how my spiritual heritage is partly rooted there: here was the seminary building (the forerunner of my own rabbinic college) where Leo Baeck taught until 1942; there, in the renovated Oranienburger synagogue which originally held 3,200 Reform-minded congregants, is a picture of Rabbi Werner van der Zyl (who ended up at West London Synagogue) preaching in 1937; and round the corner is the home of Rabbi Regina Jonas, the first woman to be ordained as a rabbi (in 1935), who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944.
So the city felt as if it has been part of my internal Jewish map for decades. Yet what I’m calling its ‘death-haunted’ quality came at me from unexpected angles.
Of course there are the Jewish deaths. But these aren’t hidden away. On the contrary – this is a city fully engaged in acts of memorialisation: from the names of streets recalling Jewish figures; to the plaques on walls where Jews lived, or worshipped; to the sculptured memorials in parks; to the extraordinary ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’, built by the American architect Peter Eisenman between 1999 and 2005 – a memorial site the size of Trafalgar Square in the very heart of Berlin, filled with 2711 slabs of grey concrete, into which you can wander, at first (when seeing it from the outside) imaging it as a graveyard of flat slabs, then entering into the midst of the site with its dipping, uneven ground, where pillars rear up 13 feet tall, and disorientation and dizziness dazes the senses...Berlin is recalling, is choosing to remember, that an enormous crime emerged from this land, this ground, this soil. The absent dead are everywhere.
And then there are the deaths of other Germans, victims of communism in its East German guise: the wooden crosses one finds in parts of the city memorialising those who died trying to escape into the West. Shot while attempting to cross the Wall, a Wall that divided neighbour from neighbour, brother from sister, parent from child – from 1961 to 1989 this city lived with its brokenness and the visitor can still see the ways in which the city’s two ‘halves’ have not yet healed together.
Only now, 20 years later - after the initial euphoria at reunification and then the years of amnesia, wanting to forget this wound - comes the growing need to remember the past, to build a memorial site that honours the dead, and tells the story, and allows the whole city to keep in mind the suffering that rigid ideologies will always cause.
People gather in groups, and singly, in front of the crosses, each plain white cross with a name, a brief story, and a date of death. Lives cut short by the need to escape from ‘here’ to ‘there’. And the larger story they symbolise is written invisibly at these sites – the power of the human spirit wishing to cross borders, to move freely, to re-connect with family or friends, or just re-connect to the hope for a better life. And the forces that nations regularly marshal against these human needs.
As the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall approaches – and of course Jews recall the curious game that history plays, for the Wall fell on November 9th, the anniversary of the 1938 pogroms of Kristallnacht – there is the sense that Berlin is actively facing and integrating this other tragic element in its recent history. This city, once again in thrall to a dominant ideology – corporate capitalism in all its (now rapidly fading) glory – is nevertheless able to keep in mind a higher truth : in the midst of life there is death. The space given over to memory and memorials is a mature and responsible acknowledgement of how death may be inevitable but killing is not.
Death comes anyway, but that we are the dealers of premature death for others is a hard knowledge to bear. But I know of no other city in the world that has done more to keep in consciousness this painful knowledge – that leaders, governments, fellow citizens have murderousness and brutality written into their souls.
It happened to be Yom Ha-Shoah while I was in Berlin, the day we Jews recall what was done to us. As always, It falls the week before Yom Ha-atzmaut, which we’ve celebrated this week, the day we Jews recall the ‘miracle’ of Israel’s (re)birth in 1948.
There are walls we build to keep people in. And there are walls we build to keep people out. But eventually all walls are defeated by the tides of history (let Hadrian’s wall, and China’s ‘Great Wall’, stand in for all the rest). As I stood in front of the decorated relics of Berlin’s twenty-eight year Wall, I could not help but think of that other Wall, ‘over there’.
And I recalled Professor Sari Nusseibeh of Al-Quds University, as quoted in the playwright David Hare’s recent ‘Wall: A Monologue’ (for full text see www. nybooks.com/articles/22611) :
It’s like sticking someone in a cage and then when he starts screaming, as any normal person would, using his violent temper as justification for putting him in the cage in the first place. The wall is the perfect crime because it creates the violence it was ostensibly built to prevent.
A polemical and provocative observation, but one that I feel honour-bound to listen to, even while I want to argue with it (“But there was violence before...”). And I recall too the Israeli novelist David Grossman’s plangent and humane words about his country and its Wall:
Of course at the foundation of the state there was a tremendous sense of purpose, of building something together. But we squandered our chance to make the state permanent in 1967. Instead of using the conquered territories as leverage in negotiation, instead we became addicted to occupation. When a people have suffered as much as we have it’s not a bad feeling to be masters for once. And we became addicted to that feeling, like a narcotic.
Now we have terrible trouble imagining any other reality than the one we live in. You become habituated, you cannot believe there is another possible way of life. And so effectively you become a victim of the situation. And here, again, is the central paradox, the idea of Israel was that we would cease to be victims. Instead we hand our fate over to the security people, we allow the army to run the country, because we lack a political class with a vision beyond the military. Survival becomes our only aim. We are living in order to survive, not in order to live.
I want to begin to live. I want some gates in the wall.
Berlin was a reminder, is a reminder, that there is always ‘another possible way of life’ – if we have the imagination (and courage) to grasp it.
And although I’ve been to Germany on several dozen occasions in the intervening years - mainly to Jewish-Christian conferences and Jewish-Christian-Muslim gatherings - and have long admired the work that has gone into the deep, prolonged and painful process of German post-War self-examination, restitution and renewal, I had never had the opportunity for a visit to Berlin.
Of course, as a tourist, my impressions of the four days spent there are inevitably those of an outsider, an observer – but I console myself with the thought (the rationalisation) that sometimes one has a better view from the margins than from the centre.
And my abiding impression after this fleeting encounter with this great European capital is that Berlin is still a death-haunted city. Let me be clear – I loved the city, its cosmopolitan culture, its cafes, its coffee, its integrated (and cheap) transport system, its bold new architecture, its leisurely Sunday afternoon strolling by the river and sunbathing in the Tiergarten, its weekday sense of vibrant busyness yet without London’s aggressive pushiness. Indeed, although I have no German forebears, I felt curiously at home there.
Maybe this was in part because I could see how my spiritual heritage is partly rooted there: here was the seminary building (the forerunner of my own rabbinic college) where Leo Baeck taught until 1942; there, in the renovated Oranienburger synagogue which originally held 3,200 Reform-minded congregants, is a picture of Rabbi Werner van der Zyl (who ended up at West London Synagogue) preaching in 1937; and round the corner is the home of Rabbi Regina Jonas, the first woman to be ordained as a rabbi (in 1935), who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944.
So the city felt as if it has been part of my internal Jewish map for decades. Yet what I’m calling its ‘death-haunted’ quality came at me from unexpected angles.
Of course there are the Jewish deaths. But these aren’t hidden away. On the contrary – this is a city fully engaged in acts of memorialisation: from the names of streets recalling Jewish figures; to the plaques on walls where Jews lived, or worshipped; to the sculptured memorials in parks; to the extraordinary ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’, built by the American architect Peter Eisenman between 1999 and 2005 – a memorial site the size of Trafalgar Square in the very heart of Berlin, filled with 2711 slabs of grey concrete, into which you can wander, at first (when seeing it from the outside) imaging it as a graveyard of flat slabs, then entering into the midst of the site with its dipping, uneven ground, where pillars rear up 13 feet tall, and disorientation and dizziness dazes the senses...Berlin is recalling, is choosing to remember, that an enormous crime emerged from this land, this ground, this soil. The absent dead are everywhere.
And then there are the deaths of other Germans, victims of communism in its East German guise: the wooden crosses one finds in parts of the city memorialising those who died trying to escape into the West. Shot while attempting to cross the Wall, a Wall that divided neighbour from neighbour, brother from sister, parent from child – from 1961 to 1989 this city lived with its brokenness and the visitor can still see the ways in which the city’s two ‘halves’ have not yet healed together.
Only now, 20 years later - after the initial euphoria at reunification and then the years of amnesia, wanting to forget this wound - comes the growing need to remember the past, to build a memorial site that honours the dead, and tells the story, and allows the whole city to keep in mind the suffering that rigid ideologies will always cause.
People gather in groups, and singly, in front of the crosses, each plain white cross with a name, a brief story, and a date of death. Lives cut short by the need to escape from ‘here’ to ‘there’. And the larger story they symbolise is written invisibly at these sites – the power of the human spirit wishing to cross borders, to move freely, to re-connect with family or friends, or just re-connect to the hope for a better life. And the forces that nations regularly marshal against these human needs.
As the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall approaches – and of course Jews recall the curious game that history plays, for the Wall fell on November 9th, the anniversary of the 1938 pogroms of Kristallnacht – there is the sense that Berlin is actively facing and integrating this other tragic element in its recent history. This city, once again in thrall to a dominant ideology – corporate capitalism in all its (now rapidly fading) glory – is nevertheless able to keep in mind a higher truth : in the midst of life there is death. The space given over to memory and memorials is a mature and responsible acknowledgement of how death may be inevitable but killing is not.
Death comes anyway, but that we are the dealers of premature death for others is a hard knowledge to bear. But I know of no other city in the world that has done more to keep in consciousness this painful knowledge – that leaders, governments, fellow citizens have murderousness and brutality written into their souls.
It happened to be Yom Ha-Shoah while I was in Berlin, the day we Jews recall what was done to us. As always, It falls the week before Yom Ha-atzmaut, which we’ve celebrated this week, the day we Jews recall the ‘miracle’ of Israel’s (re)birth in 1948.
There are walls we build to keep people in. And there are walls we build to keep people out. But eventually all walls are defeated by the tides of history (let Hadrian’s wall, and China’s ‘Great Wall’, stand in for all the rest). As I stood in front of the decorated relics of Berlin’s twenty-eight year Wall, I could not help but think of that other Wall, ‘over there’.
And I recalled Professor Sari Nusseibeh of Al-Quds University, as quoted in the playwright David Hare’s recent ‘Wall: A Monologue’ (for full text see www. nybooks.com/articles/22611) :
It’s like sticking someone in a cage and then when he starts screaming, as any normal person would, using his violent temper as justification for putting him in the cage in the first place. The wall is the perfect crime because it creates the violence it was ostensibly built to prevent.
A polemical and provocative observation, but one that I feel honour-bound to listen to, even while I want to argue with it (“But there was violence before...”). And I recall too the Israeli novelist David Grossman’s plangent and humane words about his country and its Wall:
Of course at the foundation of the state there was a tremendous sense of purpose, of building something together. But we squandered our chance to make the state permanent in 1967. Instead of using the conquered territories as leverage in negotiation, instead we became addicted to occupation. When a people have suffered as much as we have it’s not a bad feeling to be masters for once. And we became addicted to that feeling, like a narcotic.
Now we have terrible trouble imagining any other reality than the one we live in. You become habituated, you cannot believe there is another possible way of life. And so effectively you become a victim of the situation. And here, again, is the central paradox, the idea of Israel was that we would cease to be victims. Instead we hand our fate over to the security people, we allow the army to run the country, because we lack a political class with a vision beyond the military. Survival becomes our only aim. We are living in order to survive, not in order to live.
I want to begin to live. I want some gates in the wall.
Berlin was a reminder, is a reminder, that there is always ‘another possible way of life’ – if we have the imagination (and courage) to grasp it.
Tuesday, 7 April 2009
Pesach and the Joy of Questions
As I understand it, Judaism is a religion of questions.
Actually, I’m not sure why I say ‘As I understand it’ when this is a pretty commonplace observation. The Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, says it in his excellent commentary on the Haggadah (p.105) which I’ve been perusing this week. And you will find this notion - of the centrality of questions - affirmed by many Jewish teachers and authorities. So being Jewish means allowing and nurturing our capacity to inquire, to wonder, to ask questions. Which can be all fine and dandy – until you start to ask questions.
My last blog, raising some questions about the Community Security Trust (the CST) who do such sterling work on our behalf, seemed to rustle a few feathers (see Comments below the last blog entry). My questions seemed to elicit an intemperate and rather abusive response. But then questions can be unsettling. They can unsettle the status quo, they can risk revealing what others might want to conceal – or perhaps they merely provoke anxiety about where such questioning will end up.
Ironically, the questions I found myself asking were prompted by an initial misunderstanding on my part about a previous Comment left on this blog. (Skip this paragraph if this is becoming tediously self-referential – it’s just that I do believe in transparency). A suspicion was raised in my mind, and I found myself wondering about the CST and the role it plays within the Jewish community. Yet my misunderstanding - and the vituperative response it elicited - are a perfect example of how we live within a hall of fairground mirrors where traces of paranoia within us all become magnified and distorted and however well we monitor our own responses, we can never be sure what the reality is. We are continually projecting our own personal antagonisms outwards and experiencing them directed at us in amplified and malevolent forms.
I leave readers of this blog the freedom to read the interchanges in the Comments and come to their own judgement on my questions in relation to the CST. But I’m more interested here and now in the wider implications of the rage my questions provoked.
What we do know is that while anti-Semitism is real, our aggressive feelings towards the experience of being abused or hated means that we can never see clearly what is happening ‘out there’, because our view of ‘out there’ contains bits of our own disowned, unacknowledged hatreds - parts of ourselves that we might not even be conscious of, or would be shocked to discover are aspects of our psychological makeup. So the issue about the strength of alleged and real feelings directed against us as Jews is never simple. Or, to put it another way, it is certainly more complex than those who see things in black and white wish to know about.
And how does all this relate to Pesach?
Pesach, as we know, is about freedom. That’s our mantra, anyhow.
Freedom from fear and freedom to live in safety.
Freedom from injustice done to Jews and freedom to protest against injustices done by Jews.
Freedom from want and freedom to work towards a world aligned to our highest Jewish values.
Freedom from our slavery to the material pyramids we build and freedom to explore the spiritual richness of our tradition.
Freedom from worry about our planet’s survival, and freedom to recognise that the time is running out and our fate is in our own hands.
And all these freedoms rest on our freedom to ask questions. Indeed the Judaism I treasure is rooted in refining our questions, different kinds of questions.
Like the wise child’s question, ‘What are all these laws and customs we follow...?’ – wanting more information, more detail, more understanding about the wisdom of the tradition.
Like the wicked child’s question which gets such a harsh response, but is a genuine question: ‘What is this service, this work you are engaged in: what does it mean to you?’. What a great question! What an unsettling question - ‘What are you doing it for?’ It’s a question that disturbs the status quo, that shakes our complacency, that provokes the listener to examine themselves, to re-examine what they might have taken for granted, to ponder on their motivation, their assumptions, their unthinking acceptance of ‘well, it’s just what we do’. Such questions often provoke a rebuke – but only from those with a narrowness of mind and fear in their hearts.
Then there’s the straightforward child’s ‘What is this?’ – a question born of wonder, and curiosity, a question rooted in innocence and an openness to life, a question unafraid of exploring the as-yet unknown, the mystery of being unfolding moment by moment...
My Judaism is one in love with questions, enamoured by all the questions the Haggadah puts into the mouths of the four children, who are all within us.
Including the fourth child – the ‘one who does not know (how) to ask’. For sometimes we forget that we are allowed to ask; or we have forgotten how to ask; or perhaps we don’t know what we want to ask. And to such a child as this – and we all have this aspect within us, a part of ourselves that has become mute, or maybe has never been allowed to speak out - our Haggadah says, ‘ata patach lo', “you are to open yourself up (to this inner muteness)” – and give it a voice. Give voice to what you have not been able to give voice to before now.
Each year, Pesach opens up this possibility. So let’s find our voice this year – what are the questions we have never asked? What are the thoughts we have never given voice to? This is our inner freedom, this is what we celebrate. What a divine liberation this can be: the courage to discover our questions, the freedom to voice our hopes, our doubts, the freedom to discover how little we really know. And also how much we know, if we are given the chance. Hag Sam,e’ach
Actually, I’m not sure why I say ‘As I understand it’ when this is a pretty commonplace observation. The Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, says it in his excellent commentary on the Haggadah (p.105) which I’ve been perusing this week. And you will find this notion - of the centrality of questions - affirmed by many Jewish teachers and authorities. So being Jewish means allowing and nurturing our capacity to inquire, to wonder, to ask questions. Which can be all fine and dandy – until you start to ask questions.
My last blog, raising some questions about the Community Security Trust (the CST) who do such sterling work on our behalf, seemed to rustle a few feathers (see Comments below the last blog entry). My questions seemed to elicit an intemperate and rather abusive response. But then questions can be unsettling. They can unsettle the status quo, they can risk revealing what others might want to conceal – or perhaps they merely provoke anxiety about where such questioning will end up.
Ironically, the questions I found myself asking were prompted by an initial misunderstanding on my part about a previous Comment left on this blog. (Skip this paragraph if this is becoming tediously self-referential – it’s just that I do believe in transparency). A suspicion was raised in my mind, and I found myself wondering about the CST and the role it plays within the Jewish community. Yet my misunderstanding - and the vituperative response it elicited - are a perfect example of how we live within a hall of fairground mirrors where traces of paranoia within us all become magnified and distorted and however well we monitor our own responses, we can never be sure what the reality is. We are continually projecting our own personal antagonisms outwards and experiencing them directed at us in amplified and malevolent forms.
I leave readers of this blog the freedom to read the interchanges in the Comments and come to their own judgement on my questions in relation to the CST. But I’m more interested here and now in the wider implications of the rage my questions provoked.
What we do know is that while anti-Semitism is real, our aggressive feelings towards the experience of being abused or hated means that we can never see clearly what is happening ‘out there’, because our view of ‘out there’ contains bits of our own disowned, unacknowledged hatreds - parts of ourselves that we might not even be conscious of, or would be shocked to discover are aspects of our psychological makeup. So the issue about the strength of alleged and real feelings directed against us as Jews is never simple. Or, to put it another way, it is certainly more complex than those who see things in black and white wish to know about.
And how does all this relate to Pesach?
Pesach, as we know, is about freedom. That’s our mantra, anyhow.
Freedom from fear and freedom to live in safety.
Freedom from injustice done to Jews and freedom to protest against injustices done by Jews.
Freedom from want and freedom to work towards a world aligned to our highest Jewish values.
Freedom from our slavery to the material pyramids we build and freedom to explore the spiritual richness of our tradition.
Freedom from worry about our planet’s survival, and freedom to recognise that the time is running out and our fate is in our own hands.
And all these freedoms rest on our freedom to ask questions. Indeed the Judaism I treasure is rooted in refining our questions, different kinds of questions.
Like the wise child’s question, ‘What are all these laws and customs we follow...?’ – wanting more information, more detail, more understanding about the wisdom of the tradition.
Like the wicked child’s question which gets such a harsh response, but is a genuine question: ‘What is this service, this work you are engaged in: what does it mean to you?’. What a great question! What an unsettling question - ‘What are you doing it for?’ It’s a question that disturbs the status quo, that shakes our complacency, that provokes the listener to examine themselves, to re-examine what they might have taken for granted, to ponder on their motivation, their assumptions, their unthinking acceptance of ‘well, it’s just what we do’. Such questions often provoke a rebuke – but only from those with a narrowness of mind and fear in their hearts.
Then there’s the straightforward child’s ‘What is this?’ – a question born of wonder, and curiosity, a question rooted in innocence and an openness to life, a question unafraid of exploring the as-yet unknown, the mystery of being unfolding moment by moment...
My Judaism is one in love with questions, enamoured by all the questions the Haggadah puts into the mouths of the four children, who are all within us.
Including the fourth child – the ‘one who does not know (how) to ask’. For sometimes we forget that we are allowed to ask; or we have forgotten how to ask; or perhaps we don’t know what we want to ask. And to such a child as this – and we all have this aspect within us, a part of ourselves that has become mute, or maybe has never been allowed to speak out - our Haggadah says, ‘ata patach lo', “you are to open yourself up (to this inner muteness)” – and give it a voice. Give voice to what you have not been able to give voice to before now.
Each year, Pesach opens up this possibility. So let’s find our voice this year – what are the questions we have never asked? What are the thoughts we have never given voice to? This is our inner freedom, this is what we celebrate. What a divine liberation this can be: the courage to discover our questions, the freedom to voice our hopes, our doubts, the freedom to discover how little we really know. And also how much we know, if we are given the chance. Hag Sam,e’ach
Tuesday, 31 March 2009
On Anti-Semitism and Jewish 'Security'
April 1st
I’ve noticed that this ongoing blog of mine is being monitored by the CST - the self-styled ‘Community Security Trust’ (see the anonymous Comment attached to my February 22nd blog). I’ve been wondering over the last few weeks what to make of this, and how to respond. And I’ve also been doing some casual research on who exactly these people are, who claim that this organisation ‘represents British Jewry to Police, Government and media on antisemitism and security’ (see their website www.thecst.org.uk . (Incidentally, I've found that you can tell quite a bit about someone's - or a group's - attitude towards authority from the words they choose to give a capital letter to in their writing).
I’m sure the CST do valuable and necessary work. They enjoy cross communal support and co-operation in their stated aim, to ‘provide physical security, training and advice for the protection of British Jews’. In addition, they assist ‘victims of antisemitism’ and monitor ‘antisemitic activities and incidents’. (By the way, and I’m sorry to be pedantic, it is actually ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘anti-Semitic’ – I know in these laissez-faire days, of texting and Twitter and email, almost anything goes in regard to language and spelling and grammar, but I happen to be attached to the outmoded view that language reflects the soul, and that imprecision of language reflects imprecision of thinking. And in these shriven times we need as much clarity of thinking as we can muster. And the so-called ‘people of the Book’ (capital letter) have a historic responsibility as guardians of language. But, as usual, I digress).
So the CST are significant players on the national scene. And increasingly so, as they are pleased to report. Their website boasts of an increased number of offices and staff. In other words ‘antisemitism’ [sic] is good for business. And that’s my problem (or one of them) with the CST. The ambiguity at the heart of their enterprise is that it’s security for us - and it’s jobs for the boys. The greater the perceived risks, the more they say they are needed. But who monitors the self-appointed monitors of anti-Semitism? To whom is the CST accountable? I just ask.
For there is a curious absence of such key information on the CST’s website, a slick affair that contains much practical and helpful information but is as revealing in what it doesn’t say as in what it does.
So just who decides – and how? – what constitutes an ‘incident’? Does a child who hears something in a playground and tells her mum, who then complains to the school, become another ‘victim’ of another ‘incident’? And does the fact that there’s a piece of graffiti scrawled on a wooden fence near my home (look away now if you are easily offended) – Gas Jews Cunts – mean that when I pass by it, as I have done nearly every day for the last five years , I too have become witness to another anti-Semitic ‘incident’? Again, I just ask.
The CST is a charitable trust. Established as such in 1994,they have been recording anti-Semitic incidents in the UK since (a nicely Orwellian touch, this) 1984. And anti-Semitism is real. And we can be thankful that there are those who are prepared to take that reality seriously (though I always thought that this is why we have a police force, and counter-terrorism units, and the rest of the privileges, paid for out of our taxes, of living in a security-conscious democracy). We know there are people who dislike Jews. We know there are those who even hate Jews. This isn’t paranoia, it’s just the grim facts of life.
But somehow it just isn’t good enough for my anonymous Comment-poster to add, as his (why do I know it is a ‘his’?) final words: ‘Just because one’s paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get one’. This genteel British variation on the old cliché - I do love that pseudo-refined use of ‘one’ – does rather give the game away. Because the problem with paranoia is that ‘one’ genuinely cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy, ‘one’ cannot distinguish between real aggression directed at ‘one’ and projected aggression that originates from inside ‘one’s’ psyche - yet feels as if it is coming at ‘one’ from another person or group. Particularly a group, an undifferentiated ‘they’ (as in his quote above). No wonder the ‘ blogosphere’ has to be monitored so scrupulously – who knows how many ‘they’ are?
Let me be clear here. The CST does important work for the Jewish community. They need our support, particularly financially. Do give them this support if you are so minded. (You can donate online). But don’t suspend your independent-mindedness, your critical thinking capacities in the face of the rhetoric of increased levels of ‘threat’.
I take to heart what the CST says on its website: ‘The ethos of the CST is that the Jewish community is responsible for its own security’ . But I happen to think that my security is also served by asking questions, raising concerns, voicing my hesitation before going along uncritically with unexamined notions of ‘threat’. If there are vested interests at stake in the promotion of a lurid picture of rising ‘antisemitism’ [sic] in the UK, then the issue of what threatens us becomes rather more complex than it might seem to the casual observer.
An over-zealous promotion of the notion of threat is bad for our mental health and our emotional well-being. We can get trapped in a hall of mirrors where we don’t know what is real and what is a mere reflection of our own aggression. And in the long run it could prove counter-productive to our physical safety – as our puffed-up self-assertiveness gives rise to real antagonism at our self-justifying stance and victim-mentality language and behaviour.
I’ve noticed that this ongoing blog of mine is being monitored by the CST - the self-styled ‘Community Security Trust’ (see the anonymous Comment attached to my February 22nd blog). I’ve been wondering over the last few weeks what to make of this, and how to respond. And I’ve also been doing some casual research on who exactly these people are, who claim that this organisation ‘represents British Jewry to Police, Government and media on antisemitism and security’ (see their website www.thecst.org.uk . (Incidentally, I've found that you can tell quite a bit about someone's - or a group's - attitude towards authority from the words they choose to give a capital letter to in their writing).
I’m sure the CST do valuable and necessary work. They enjoy cross communal support and co-operation in their stated aim, to ‘provide physical security, training and advice for the protection of British Jews’. In addition, they assist ‘victims of antisemitism’ and monitor ‘antisemitic activities and incidents’. (By the way, and I’m sorry to be pedantic, it is actually ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘anti-Semitic’ – I know in these laissez-faire days, of texting and Twitter and email, almost anything goes in regard to language and spelling and grammar, but I happen to be attached to the outmoded view that language reflects the soul, and that imprecision of language reflects imprecision of thinking. And in these shriven times we need as much clarity of thinking as we can muster. And the so-called ‘people of the Book’ (capital letter) have a historic responsibility as guardians of language. But, as usual, I digress).
So the CST are significant players on the national scene. And increasingly so, as they are pleased to report. Their website boasts of an increased number of offices and staff. In other words ‘antisemitism’ [sic] is good for business. And that’s my problem (or one of them) with the CST. The ambiguity at the heart of their enterprise is that it’s security for us - and it’s jobs for the boys. The greater the perceived risks, the more they say they are needed. But who monitors the self-appointed monitors of anti-Semitism? To whom is the CST accountable? I just ask.
For there is a curious absence of such key information on the CST’s website, a slick affair that contains much practical and helpful information but is as revealing in what it doesn’t say as in what it does.
So just who decides – and how? – what constitutes an ‘incident’? Does a child who hears something in a playground and tells her mum, who then complains to the school, become another ‘victim’ of another ‘incident’? And does the fact that there’s a piece of graffiti scrawled on a wooden fence near my home (look away now if you are easily offended) – Gas Jews Cunts – mean that when I pass by it, as I have done nearly every day for the last five years , I too have become witness to another anti-Semitic ‘incident’? Again, I just ask.
The CST is a charitable trust. Established as such in 1994,they have been recording anti-Semitic incidents in the UK since (a nicely Orwellian touch, this) 1984. And anti-Semitism is real. And we can be thankful that there are those who are prepared to take that reality seriously (though I always thought that this is why we have a police force, and counter-terrorism units, and the rest of the privileges, paid for out of our taxes, of living in a security-conscious democracy). We know there are people who dislike Jews. We know there are those who even hate Jews. This isn’t paranoia, it’s just the grim facts of life.
But somehow it just isn’t good enough for my anonymous Comment-poster to add, as his (why do I know it is a ‘his’?) final words: ‘Just because one’s paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get one’. This genteel British variation on the old cliché - I do love that pseudo-refined use of ‘one’ – does rather give the game away. Because the problem with paranoia is that ‘one’ genuinely cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy, ‘one’ cannot distinguish between real aggression directed at ‘one’ and projected aggression that originates from inside ‘one’s’ psyche - yet feels as if it is coming at ‘one’ from another person or group. Particularly a group, an undifferentiated ‘they’ (as in his quote above). No wonder the ‘ blogosphere’ has to be monitored so scrupulously – who knows how many ‘they’ are?
Let me be clear here. The CST does important work for the Jewish community. They need our support, particularly financially. Do give them this support if you are so minded. (You can donate online). But don’t suspend your independent-mindedness, your critical thinking capacities in the face of the rhetoric of increased levels of ‘threat’.
I take to heart what the CST says on its website: ‘The ethos of the CST is that the Jewish community is responsible for its own security’ . But I happen to think that my security is also served by asking questions, raising concerns, voicing my hesitation before going along uncritically with unexamined notions of ‘threat’. If there are vested interests at stake in the promotion of a lurid picture of rising ‘antisemitism’ [sic] in the UK, then the issue of what threatens us becomes rather more complex than it might seem to the casual observer.
An over-zealous promotion of the notion of threat is bad for our mental health and our emotional well-being. We can get trapped in a hall of mirrors where we don’t know what is real and what is a mere reflection of our own aggression. And in the long run it could prove counter-productive to our physical safety – as our puffed-up self-assertiveness gives rise to real antagonism at our self-justifying stance and victim-mentality language and behaviour.
Friday, 27 March 2009
On Sir Fred and the Blame Game
Is there a frisson of pleasure in hearing that the windows of Sir Fred Goodwin’s house and car have been vandalised ? Well, no, not really.
We have become addicted in recent years to a new sport here in the UK, the ‘blame game’, where after any disaster, or accident, or minor mishap, the first question asked (and you can hear it daily on the news) is ‘And who do you blame?’ And the answer you never hear is ‘Actually, I was responsible for what happened to me’ or even, ‘No, there is no-one to blame. It was an accident’. The acknowledgement that contingency is part of the fabric of life, that life unfolds in ways that we don’t and can’t choose, that misfortune and loss are part of the fluidity of how life is – this doesn’t make for a reassuring narrative of cause and effect, a reliable story with a narrative arc modelled on the fictional world of soaps, where someone else has to be to blame for the bad things that happen. It was her husband, or his mother, or them next door... or the bankers, or the EU, or Thatcher, or Gordon Brown, or the Muslims, or even (last resort for some, first port of call for others), the Jews.
Always someone else. Never us.
Of course this sport isn’t new. It is millennia old: the shifting of blame onto ‘the Other’ – and there is always a nearby group to carry the disowned feelings, the aggression and hatred. In the Biblical myth Adam blames Eve for his inability to follow God’s decree not to eat of the ‘Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad’. And although ‘God’ set him up, Adam’s failure initiates the ‘blame game’; and when Cain kills Abel, the texts illustrate this same propensity, the failure to take personal responsibility for what each one of us does, particularly what we do with our aggressive feelings, our envy and jealousy and hatred, our desires. The Bible’s early stories are a primer on how human beings fail – and then fail to take responsibility for their own failures. (This is why these stories are called ‘Torah’, ‘teaching’ – coz they teach us stuff. Stuff we think we know. Though we don’t. Not really.)
But I digress. (That’s the pleasure of blogs...)
So, whether it is witches to blame in the 16th century or communists in the 20th, human history contains a dismal record of the psychological difficulty of what Jungians call ‘owning the shadow’: accepting the dark, urgent wishes and desires we disown and disavow. We are never greedy – it was the bankers to blame. We never wanted to consume more than we earned – it was the advertisers that tempted us, the credit card companies that seduced us, the mortgage lenders that (as if they were the Mafia) made us offers we couldn’t refuse. Adam’s spurious defence, all over again.
This coming week London will see protests against the gathering of G20 leaders. Many people are angry, many more want someone to blame. We can understand this impulse – it is very human: ‘I feel insecure, I feel frightened, I feel helpless in the face of forces outside my control, I want you to do something to make me feel better, I’m angry that you don’t do anything to make me feel better, I’m going to shout and scream and smash things up until you pay attention TO MY PAIN...’
Incompetence and greed are never far away. But Sir Fred Goodwin has become too easy a scapegoat. We’ve all been addicted, in one way or another. We’ve forgotten the Talmud’s stark reminder: ‘When Death summons us to appear before our Maker, our money (which all of us love), cannot go with us’.
Or as the Yiddish saying puts it, more pithily, ‘Shrouds have no pockets’.
We have become addicted in recent years to a new sport here in the UK, the ‘blame game’, where after any disaster, or accident, or minor mishap, the first question asked (and you can hear it daily on the news) is ‘And who do you blame?’ And the answer you never hear is ‘Actually, I was responsible for what happened to me’ or even, ‘No, there is no-one to blame. It was an accident’. The acknowledgement that contingency is part of the fabric of life, that life unfolds in ways that we don’t and can’t choose, that misfortune and loss are part of the fluidity of how life is – this doesn’t make for a reassuring narrative of cause and effect, a reliable story with a narrative arc modelled on the fictional world of soaps, where someone else has to be to blame for the bad things that happen. It was her husband, or his mother, or them next door... or the bankers, or the EU, or Thatcher, or Gordon Brown, or the Muslims, or even (last resort for some, first port of call for others), the Jews.
Always someone else. Never us.
Of course this sport isn’t new. It is millennia old: the shifting of blame onto ‘the Other’ – and there is always a nearby group to carry the disowned feelings, the aggression and hatred. In the Biblical myth Adam blames Eve for his inability to follow God’s decree not to eat of the ‘Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad’. And although ‘God’ set him up, Adam’s failure initiates the ‘blame game’; and when Cain kills Abel, the texts illustrate this same propensity, the failure to take personal responsibility for what each one of us does, particularly what we do with our aggressive feelings, our envy and jealousy and hatred, our desires. The Bible’s early stories are a primer on how human beings fail – and then fail to take responsibility for their own failures. (This is why these stories are called ‘Torah’, ‘teaching’ – coz they teach us stuff. Stuff we think we know. Though we don’t. Not really.)
But I digress. (That’s the pleasure of blogs...)
So, whether it is witches to blame in the 16th century or communists in the 20th, human history contains a dismal record of the psychological difficulty of what Jungians call ‘owning the shadow’: accepting the dark, urgent wishes and desires we disown and disavow. We are never greedy – it was the bankers to blame. We never wanted to consume more than we earned – it was the advertisers that tempted us, the credit card companies that seduced us, the mortgage lenders that (as if they were the Mafia) made us offers we couldn’t refuse. Adam’s spurious defence, all over again.
This coming week London will see protests against the gathering of G20 leaders. Many people are angry, many more want someone to blame. We can understand this impulse – it is very human: ‘I feel insecure, I feel frightened, I feel helpless in the face of forces outside my control, I want you to do something to make me feel better, I’m angry that you don’t do anything to make me feel better, I’m going to shout and scream and smash things up until you pay attention TO MY PAIN...’
Incompetence and greed are never far away. But Sir Fred Goodwin has become too easy a scapegoat. We’ve all been addicted, in one way or another. We’ve forgotten the Talmud’s stark reminder: ‘When Death summons us to appear before our Maker, our money (which all of us love), cannot go with us’.
Or as the Yiddish saying puts it, more pithily, ‘Shrouds have no pockets’.
Sunday, 15 March 2009
'Independent Jewish Voices'
Last Sunday I was invited to speak as part of a panel at the ‘Independent Jewish Voices’ (see http://jewishvoices.squarespace.com/ ) day conference on Israel, Zionism, Jewish Identity and Human Rights. My co-panellists and I only had 5-7 minutes to offer some introductory thoughts before it was opened to the floor and to general discussion but the passion and thoughtfulness of my colleagues on the panel (Professors Jacqueline Rose and Gabriel Josipovici, Anthony Lerman and Eyal Weizman, and chaired by Professor Lynne segal) made for a stirring introductory session for the day.
All had contributed to a recently published volume ‘A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism And Jewish Identity’ (Verso, 2008), a book of essays written by a broad spectrum of thinkers who share a commitment to a self-reflective and informed public discussion of these themes - a discussion not predetermined by, or held captive by, Jewish institutional or ideological loyalties. My own essay in that volume, entitled ‘Living in Error’ (the phrase is taken from a Yehudah Amichai poem), started life as a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue ( www.frsonline.org ) on Rosh Hashanah 2002 then mutated in various stages into its current shape in the book. As the only rabbi of the two dozen or so essayists, I felt it an honour to be included with such illustrious co-writers.
The event last week had originally been scheduled for early February but had been a casualty of the snow that fell that day. We’d been asked to respond to the latest terrible events in Gaza, which in early February were still vividly alive in our minds. What I found extraordinary in the intervening month was the extent to which the sheer rawness of the experience of watching the daily news and the painfulness evoked by the images of bombing and destruction had become so rapidly assimilated by my mind, and my feelings dulled. It was as if it had all happened so long ago – so much more had happened since, so much ‘news’, so many other images and sights and thoughts had crowded in. Operation ‘Cast Lead’ had become just another past event. Life had moved on. New dramas had replaced the old ones.
This semi-amnesia on my part was shocking to experience. Is this how it always is? That so much stuff happens to us, we are so overwhelmed by experiences in the present, that the events of a mere couple of months ago fall away into some distant realm of past time? Of course it’s not always like this, but what stirs and excites or horrifies and repels us so viscerally at any one time can all but disappear as the next drama unfolds. This was sobering and I am still musing on it.
In relation to the IJV event, I decided to add to my remarks a small preamble– about forgetting and remembering - as a prelude to my original text composed for February. A few people have asked me what I said. Here it is.
The historian and essayist Tony Judt suggests that we live in an ‘age of forgetting’ – he was talking of the powerful imaginative appeal of Marxism across Europe in the 20th Century – but as a Jew I see ourselves as a people who treasure memory, for whom forgetting is a diminishment of our humanity.
We keep memory in mind – sometimes we celebrate what we remember, sometimes we mourn – but we are alive to the significance of remembering.
We even have days in the religious calendar symbolically dedicated to it – yesterday was Shabbat Zachor, the ‘Sabbath of memory’ before Purim, the archetypal story of Jews as the objects of hatred; and then at the New Year, we call Rosh Hashanah ‘Yom Ha-Zikkaron’ , ‘the day of remembering’, when we look not at what has been done to us, but at what we do to others: at our own hatreds, failures, inadequacies, individually and collectively - what used to be called our ‘sins’.
So: before the events of December and January fall completely out of mind, let me offer some words on what we have so recently witnessed.
*******
The New York Times described it like this: ‘At sunset the streets were piled high with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror...and the city is now practically deserted...’ 49 were dead, 500 injured, 700 houses destroyed, 2000 families left homeless.
The Easter pogrom in Kishinev in 1903 shocked the so-called civilised world. Haim Nachman Bialik, who would later become the poet laureate (as it were) of the Jewish national renaissance, went to Kishinev to interview survivors. Before leaving he wrote a 4-verse poem, Al Ha-Sh’chitah : ‘On the Slaughter’:
“My heart is numb, my prayer gone,
I’ve lost my strength and hope –
How long? till when? how long? (ad matai; ad ana; ad matai)”
He calls on heaven to exercise immediate justice; but, if not, he calls for the destruction of the world, spurning mere vengeance with the chilling lines: ‘Cursed is the one who says “Revenge” / vengeance for the blood of a small child/ Satan has not yet created...’
In these shriven times I commend the poem to you. As I do another 4-verse poem Bialik composed some decades later, a sentimental ditty ‘For Hanukkah’, written for children and still, I believe, sung during the festival in Israel. The word ‘cute’ might have been coined for lines like these, describing the candles, the foods, the presents...
“Teacher bought a spinning top for me
Solid lead, the finest known
In whose honour, for whose glory?
For Hanukkah alone”
‘Solid lead’, ‘cast lead’ – Operation Oferet Yetzukah, launched on December 27th, during Hanukkah, and named after this children’s verse from Bialik, led to the deaths of 250 children. There are times when words like ‘tragedy’ (and ‘irony’) seem impossibly inadequate, when no language can convey the sadness and horror of it all.
Lead, as we know, is toxic – it poisons, slowly, inexorably. Bialik’s image of the spinning solid lead dreidl will haunt us for years to come. You probably know too that the dreidl has four Hebrew letters inscribed on its sides, each letter standing for a word of a rabbinic phrase that grows increasingly bitter in our mouths: ‘A great miracle happened there’. Over time the spinning dreidl was converted into a light-hearted Hanukkah gambling game, with each letter representing whether you gained or lost.
In Israel’s deadly serious game the stakes are high. Yet each time she acts, why does the dreidl always seem to land on the same side? - the letter nun stands for nichts, nothing. Nothing is gained, nothing tangible in what really counts: justice, peace, the valuing of human lives above ideology.
We have reached a terrible impasse. Let me put it as simply as possible and end here : for Israel there can be no healing of the psychic trauma of the Shoah - the culmination of that historic experience of Jewish victimhood - until there is justice for the Palestinians; but there is no way Israel can create justice for Palestinians because of the Shoah, toxic as lead, still corroding the Israeli soul.
Ad matai; ad ana; ad matai - How long? till when? how long?
*****************
I could have added that ‘nun’ now stands, again, for Netanyahu. And with Avigdor Lieberman chosen as Foreign Minister by Netanyahu, maybe our only hope is the experience that bullies often end up bloodying each other’s noses. Israel has reached a new and shameful nadir in its history.
All had contributed to a recently published volume ‘A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism And Jewish Identity’ (Verso, 2008), a book of essays written by a broad spectrum of thinkers who share a commitment to a self-reflective and informed public discussion of these themes - a discussion not predetermined by, or held captive by, Jewish institutional or ideological loyalties. My own essay in that volume, entitled ‘Living in Error’ (the phrase is taken from a Yehudah Amichai poem), started life as a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue ( www.frsonline.org ) on Rosh Hashanah 2002 then mutated in various stages into its current shape in the book. As the only rabbi of the two dozen or so essayists, I felt it an honour to be included with such illustrious co-writers.
The event last week had originally been scheduled for early February but had been a casualty of the snow that fell that day. We’d been asked to respond to the latest terrible events in Gaza, which in early February were still vividly alive in our minds. What I found extraordinary in the intervening month was the extent to which the sheer rawness of the experience of watching the daily news and the painfulness evoked by the images of bombing and destruction had become so rapidly assimilated by my mind, and my feelings dulled. It was as if it had all happened so long ago – so much more had happened since, so much ‘news’, so many other images and sights and thoughts had crowded in. Operation ‘Cast Lead’ had become just another past event. Life had moved on. New dramas had replaced the old ones.
This semi-amnesia on my part was shocking to experience. Is this how it always is? That so much stuff happens to us, we are so overwhelmed by experiences in the present, that the events of a mere couple of months ago fall away into some distant realm of past time? Of course it’s not always like this, but what stirs and excites or horrifies and repels us so viscerally at any one time can all but disappear as the next drama unfolds. This was sobering and I am still musing on it.
In relation to the IJV event, I decided to add to my remarks a small preamble– about forgetting and remembering - as a prelude to my original text composed for February. A few people have asked me what I said. Here it is.
The historian and essayist Tony Judt suggests that we live in an ‘age of forgetting’ – he was talking of the powerful imaginative appeal of Marxism across Europe in the 20th Century – but as a Jew I see ourselves as a people who treasure memory, for whom forgetting is a diminishment of our humanity.
We keep memory in mind – sometimes we celebrate what we remember, sometimes we mourn – but we are alive to the significance of remembering.
We even have days in the religious calendar symbolically dedicated to it – yesterday was Shabbat Zachor, the ‘Sabbath of memory’ before Purim, the archetypal story of Jews as the objects of hatred; and then at the New Year, we call Rosh Hashanah ‘Yom Ha-Zikkaron’ , ‘the day of remembering’, when we look not at what has been done to us, but at what we do to others: at our own hatreds, failures, inadequacies, individually and collectively - what used to be called our ‘sins’.
So: before the events of December and January fall completely out of mind, let me offer some words on what we have so recently witnessed.
*******
The New York Times described it like this: ‘At sunset the streets were piled high with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror...and the city is now practically deserted...’ 49 were dead, 500 injured, 700 houses destroyed, 2000 families left homeless.
The Easter pogrom in Kishinev in 1903 shocked the so-called civilised world. Haim Nachman Bialik, who would later become the poet laureate (as it were) of the Jewish national renaissance, went to Kishinev to interview survivors. Before leaving he wrote a 4-verse poem, Al Ha-Sh’chitah : ‘On the Slaughter’:
“My heart is numb, my prayer gone,
I’ve lost my strength and hope –
How long? till when? how long? (ad matai; ad ana; ad matai)”
He calls on heaven to exercise immediate justice; but, if not, he calls for the destruction of the world, spurning mere vengeance with the chilling lines: ‘Cursed is the one who says “Revenge” / vengeance for the blood of a small child/ Satan has not yet created...’
In these shriven times I commend the poem to you. As I do another 4-verse poem Bialik composed some decades later, a sentimental ditty ‘For Hanukkah’, written for children and still, I believe, sung during the festival in Israel. The word ‘cute’ might have been coined for lines like these, describing the candles, the foods, the presents...
“Teacher bought a spinning top for me
Solid lead, the finest known
In whose honour, for whose glory?
For Hanukkah alone”
‘Solid lead’, ‘cast lead’ – Operation Oferet Yetzukah, launched on December 27th, during Hanukkah, and named after this children’s verse from Bialik, led to the deaths of 250 children. There are times when words like ‘tragedy’ (and ‘irony’) seem impossibly inadequate, when no language can convey the sadness and horror of it all.
Lead, as we know, is toxic – it poisons, slowly, inexorably. Bialik’s image of the spinning solid lead dreidl will haunt us for years to come. You probably know too that the dreidl has four Hebrew letters inscribed on its sides, each letter standing for a word of a rabbinic phrase that grows increasingly bitter in our mouths: ‘A great miracle happened there’. Over time the spinning dreidl was converted into a light-hearted Hanukkah gambling game, with each letter representing whether you gained or lost.
In Israel’s deadly serious game the stakes are high. Yet each time she acts, why does the dreidl always seem to land on the same side? - the letter nun stands for nichts, nothing. Nothing is gained, nothing tangible in what really counts: justice, peace, the valuing of human lives above ideology.
We have reached a terrible impasse. Let me put it as simply as possible and end here : for Israel there can be no healing of the psychic trauma of the Shoah - the culmination of that historic experience of Jewish victimhood - until there is justice for the Palestinians; but there is no way Israel can create justice for Palestinians because of the Shoah, toxic as lead, still corroding the Israeli soul.
Ad matai; ad ana; ad matai - How long? till when? how long?
*****************
I could have added that ‘nun’ now stands, again, for Netanyahu. And with Avigdor Lieberman chosen as Foreign Minister by Netanyahu, maybe our only hope is the experience that bullies often end up bloodying each other’s noses. Israel has reached a new and shameful nadir in its history.
Thursday, 5 March 2009
On Anti-Semitism and all that stuff ...
March 4th
I have finally caught up with the controversial playlet by Caryl Churchill ‘Seven Jewish Children’ that played recently at the Royal Court.
It is available at www.royalcourttheatre.com/files/downloads/SevenJewishChildren.pdf and it makes painful reading.
Painful not because I think it is anti-Semitic – that accusation is more a kneejerk defensive reaction than a measured response – but painful because it encapsulates in its less-than-ten minutes of dialogue the pain of 20th history for Jews, and the pain any parent or adult might feel when we know how little we can do to protect our children from the pain of the world. What is done to us and what is done by us.
The text offers us seven scenes, each a set of voices in tension. In tension with each other – “Tell her her uncles died/Don’t tell her they were killed/Tell her they were killed/Don’t frighten her” - and voices in tension within themselves, tense with the excruciating dilemma of how not to pass on to one’s children one’s own fears, and guilt, and uncertainties in life, and how to pass on to them an honest account of what has happened, what is happening, what might happen, beyond the confines of their own homes and families.
The scenes trace Jewish history in the 20th century from before the Holocaust, through the birth of the State of Israel, and the wars that followed, up to the latest incursion into Gaza (the play’s subtitle is ‘a play for Gaza’). The text, with its deceptively simple lines and dialectical movement between opposing or contrasting points of view, is poignant and compassionate and provocative. Poignant because there has been so much sorrow in the last century of Jewish history, compassionate because the voices continually return to the protective refrain “Don’t frighten her”, and provocative because the author builds her text towards an indictment of Israel’s actions in Gaza in December and January: “...tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? Tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her. Don’t tell her that..”
There is a psychological honesty here that sears the heart and does make painful reading. But how should our history be written? The history of the emotional dividedness of the embattled Jewish people, and the emotional dividedness inside each Jew sensitive to the conflicting feelings of love and support for ‘our’ people in Israel, and the horror at what is sometimes done in the name of the State we also care about and want to feel such pride in.
The accusations thrown at this play include the accusation that it presents Jews in a historically anti-Semitic stereotypical way as ‘uncaring’, ‘triumphalist’ and ‘brutal’. Some of the feelings on display are indeed uncaring, triumphalist, and brutal (while others are caring, gentle and empathetic) – but these emotions are what fearfulness can generate in any one of us when we feel threatened. And the author shows the pervasive fearfulness about survival that has threaded its way through our history and wrapped itself round our souls. For anti-Semitism has been real, all too real. But this isn’t it.
This is a play alive to the inner conflicts of a persecuted people – “Tell her there were people who hated Jews/Don’t tell her/Tell her it’s over now/Tell her there are people who still hate Jews/Tell her there are people who love Jews...” – and how those unresolved inner conflicts can spill over until the persecuted ones, the victimized ones, still feeling themselves persecuted from within and without, end up victimizing others and hating themselves for it and hating the victims for making them do it, and then hating themselves for feeling that hatred ... and so it goes on, ‘to the third and fourth generations’.
Read the play for yourself. See what you think. I imagine you will be moved, and disturbed, and confused, maybe angry, maybe sorrowful – (and all those feelings are in the text too) – which means that the text has worked. It’s brave and brazen and risks itself being misunderstood. That’s what good texts do, stimulating our imaginations, our indignations, stirring us into response, reminding us of the complexities of the human condition and the sometimes well-nigh unbearable dramas we carry within our hearts and minds.
**************************************************************
And while we are talking about anti-Semitism...here comes Purim, that fleeting wine-drenched festival where we are commanded to drink to excess, to obliterate the difference between ‘Blessed is Mordechai’ and ‘Cursed is Haman’, to annul the distinction between (as it were) ‘good’ and ‘evil’.
How come? How is it that when Jews are so resolute in making a distinction between good and evil, the tradition sanctifies its abandonment on this day? Why is it a day of carnival, a day of disguises, a day of mocking authorities and subverting the status quo we cling to, of toppling the pieties we hold so dear. How can we be so brazen in questioning the clarity of the boundaries between goodness and its opposite? What were the rabbis of old intuiting about these categories? That the boundaries are not as clear as we like to think? A shocking thought – that good and bad might not be clear cut choices, that our hard-won moral positions may be more relative than we thought, more fluid than we dare to know?
We read the Book of Esther, where the name of God does not appear (the only Biblical book where this is so); and as we read this archetypal story of Jew-hatred cast in a diasporic land where God is (apparently) absent, do we not glimpse out of the corner of an eye the way in which good and evil plays out in history at the whim of all-too-human human beings, with their loves and hates, their loyalties, their treacheries and their feelings of betrayal?
The fate of the Jews in the story is in human hands. Not God’s hands. And the story illustrates how all of our fierce commitment to maintain goodness in the face of evil can be undone at the whim of tyrants and dictators. Perhaps no-one is in charge – a frightening thought. Perhaps life comes to us in disguise, asking us to search beneath the surface, to find what lies hidden within the revealed (‘Esther’ means ‘hidden’).
There is a mystery here that we may not want to know too much about – about arbitrariness in life, how life and death can come in the twinkling of an eye, about contingency and randomness, about all that lies beyond our control. About how life involves mixedupness , where yesterday’s heroes can become tomorrow’s villains, how no-one is thoroughly good and no-one is thoroughly evil, how the rejected can become triumphant, and the victims become persecutors. At the end of the Book of Esther the Jews massacre their former persecutors. No wonder we need to be inebriated to read this text. ‘You think you are good? Could never hurt a fly? Just wait – just wait until the boot is on the other foot...’
This story has it all, this festival intuits a truth about the human condition that maybe it’s best we only glimpse once a year. While drunk. And while pretending it’s only just a bit of fun.
************************************************************************
And lastly, on this theme – although there is never an end to this accursed theme – the Jewish Chronicle offered us last week on its front page what for a moment I thought must surely be an early Purim spiel.
‘Wartime Pope’s secret heroism’ – Pope Pius XII, long condemned by Jews as an anti-Semite for his refusal to speak out against the Nazi persecution of Jews during the War, the man branded as ‘Hitler’s Pope’, and used by Jews to exemplify their sense of historic grievance against Christianity as innately anti-Semitic – this is the man who, it is now revealed by new documents found in the Vatican’s archives, secretly ordered convents, monasteries and Catholic churches to hide Jews from the Gestapo. And persuaded Brazil and the Dominican Republic to grant thousands of visas for ‘non-Aryans’.
The villain has become a hero. In the twinkling of an eye.
For this is no Purim jest. It turns out that Pope Pius was almost philosemitic, and pro-Zionist to boot. And another prejudice I hear from time to time – ‘the whole world hates us’ – bites the dust. Except it never does. The Catholic church under Pius may have saved between 700,000 and 850,000 Jews from the Nazis, an extraordinary story. Strange how history works.
So when we are tempted to imagine that the world is against us - and which Jew doesn’t feel that in their hearts at some moments of their lives? – let’s pause and recall how things are not always as they seem, not always as we are told, that life is often more complex and mixed-up than we want to know. And let’s this Purim raise a glass to our new ‘righteous gentile’ and former hate figure, Pope Pius XII, and offer a heartfelt toast ‘L’chaim’ – To Life!
To life in all its wondrous strangeness: ‘L’Chaim’.
I have finally caught up with the controversial playlet by Caryl Churchill ‘Seven Jewish Children’ that played recently at the Royal Court.
It is available at www.royalcourttheatre.com/files/downloads/SevenJewishChildren.pdf and it makes painful reading.
Painful not because I think it is anti-Semitic – that accusation is more a kneejerk defensive reaction than a measured response – but painful because it encapsulates in its less-than-ten minutes of dialogue the pain of 20th history for Jews, and the pain any parent or adult might feel when we know how little we can do to protect our children from the pain of the world. What is done to us and what is done by us.
The text offers us seven scenes, each a set of voices in tension. In tension with each other – “Tell her her uncles died/Don’t tell her they were killed/Tell her they were killed/Don’t frighten her” - and voices in tension within themselves, tense with the excruciating dilemma of how not to pass on to one’s children one’s own fears, and guilt, and uncertainties in life, and how to pass on to them an honest account of what has happened, what is happening, what might happen, beyond the confines of their own homes and families.
The scenes trace Jewish history in the 20th century from before the Holocaust, through the birth of the State of Israel, and the wars that followed, up to the latest incursion into Gaza (the play’s subtitle is ‘a play for Gaza’). The text, with its deceptively simple lines and dialectical movement between opposing or contrasting points of view, is poignant and compassionate and provocative. Poignant because there has been so much sorrow in the last century of Jewish history, compassionate because the voices continually return to the protective refrain “Don’t frighten her”, and provocative because the author builds her text towards an indictment of Israel’s actions in Gaza in December and January: “...tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? Tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her. Don’t tell her that..”
There is a psychological honesty here that sears the heart and does make painful reading. But how should our history be written? The history of the emotional dividedness of the embattled Jewish people, and the emotional dividedness inside each Jew sensitive to the conflicting feelings of love and support for ‘our’ people in Israel, and the horror at what is sometimes done in the name of the State we also care about and want to feel such pride in.
The accusations thrown at this play include the accusation that it presents Jews in a historically anti-Semitic stereotypical way as ‘uncaring’, ‘triumphalist’ and ‘brutal’. Some of the feelings on display are indeed uncaring, triumphalist, and brutal (while others are caring, gentle and empathetic) – but these emotions are what fearfulness can generate in any one of us when we feel threatened. And the author shows the pervasive fearfulness about survival that has threaded its way through our history and wrapped itself round our souls. For anti-Semitism has been real, all too real. But this isn’t it.
This is a play alive to the inner conflicts of a persecuted people – “Tell her there were people who hated Jews/Don’t tell her/Tell her it’s over now/Tell her there are people who still hate Jews/Tell her there are people who love Jews...” – and how those unresolved inner conflicts can spill over until the persecuted ones, the victimized ones, still feeling themselves persecuted from within and without, end up victimizing others and hating themselves for it and hating the victims for making them do it, and then hating themselves for feeling that hatred ... and so it goes on, ‘to the third and fourth generations’.
Read the play for yourself. See what you think. I imagine you will be moved, and disturbed, and confused, maybe angry, maybe sorrowful – (and all those feelings are in the text too) – which means that the text has worked. It’s brave and brazen and risks itself being misunderstood. That’s what good texts do, stimulating our imaginations, our indignations, stirring us into response, reminding us of the complexities of the human condition and the sometimes well-nigh unbearable dramas we carry within our hearts and minds.
**************************************************************
And while we are talking about anti-Semitism...here comes Purim, that fleeting wine-drenched festival where we are commanded to drink to excess, to obliterate the difference between ‘Blessed is Mordechai’ and ‘Cursed is Haman’, to annul the distinction between (as it were) ‘good’ and ‘evil’.
How come? How is it that when Jews are so resolute in making a distinction between good and evil, the tradition sanctifies its abandonment on this day? Why is it a day of carnival, a day of disguises, a day of mocking authorities and subverting the status quo we cling to, of toppling the pieties we hold so dear. How can we be so brazen in questioning the clarity of the boundaries between goodness and its opposite? What were the rabbis of old intuiting about these categories? That the boundaries are not as clear as we like to think? A shocking thought – that good and bad might not be clear cut choices, that our hard-won moral positions may be more relative than we thought, more fluid than we dare to know?
We read the Book of Esther, where the name of God does not appear (the only Biblical book where this is so); and as we read this archetypal story of Jew-hatred cast in a diasporic land where God is (apparently) absent, do we not glimpse out of the corner of an eye the way in which good and evil plays out in history at the whim of all-too-human human beings, with their loves and hates, their loyalties, their treacheries and their feelings of betrayal?
The fate of the Jews in the story is in human hands. Not God’s hands. And the story illustrates how all of our fierce commitment to maintain goodness in the face of evil can be undone at the whim of tyrants and dictators. Perhaps no-one is in charge – a frightening thought. Perhaps life comes to us in disguise, asking us to search beneath the surface, to find what lies hidden within the revealed (‘Esther’ means ‘hidden’).
There is a mystery here that we may not want to know too much about – about arbitrariness in life, how life and death can come in the twinkling of an eye, about contingency and randomness, about all that lies beyond our control. About how life involves mixedupness , where yesterday’s heroes can become tomorrow’s villains, how no-one is thoroughly good and no-one is thoroughly evil, how the rejected can become triumphant, and the victims become persecutors. At the end of the Book of Esther the Jews massacre their former persecutors. No wonder we need to be inebriated to read this text. ‘You think you are good? Could never hurt a fly? Just wait – just wait until the boot is on the other foot...’
This story has it all, this festival intuits a truth about the human condition that maybe it’s best we only glimpse once a year. While drunk. And while pretending it’s only just a bit of fun.
************************************************************************
And lastly, on this theme – although there is never an end to this accursed theme – the Jewish Chronicle offered us last week on its front page what for a moment I thought must surely be an early Purim spiel.
‘Wartime Pope’s secret heroism’ – Pope Pius XII, long condemned by Jews as an anti-Semite for his refusal to speak out against the Nazi persecution of Jews during the War, the man branded as ‘Hitler’s Pope’, and used by Jews to exemplify their sense of historic grievance against Christianity as innately anti-Semitic – this is the man who, it is now revealed by new documents found in the Vatican’s archives, secretly ordered convents, monasteries and Catholic churches to hide Jews from the Gestapo. And persuaded Brazil and the Dominican Republic to grant thousands of visas for ‘non-Aryans’.
The villain has become a hero. In the twinkling of an eye.
For this is no Purim jest. It turns out that Pope Pius was almost philosemitic, and pro-Zionist to boot. And another prejudice I hear from time to time – ‘the whole world hates us’ – bites the dust. Except it never does. The Catholic church under Pius may have saved between 700,000 and 850,000 Jews from the Nazis, an extraordinary story. Strange how history works.
So when we are tempted to imagine that the world is against us - and which Jew doesn’t feel that in their hearts at some moments of their lives? – let’s pause and recall how things are not always as they seem, not always as we are told, that life is often more complex and mixed-up than we want to know. And let’s this Purim raise a glass to our new ‘righteous gentile’ and former hate figure, Pope Pius XII, and offer a heartfelt toast ‘L’chaim’ – To Life!
To life in all its wondrous strangeness: ‘L’Chaim’.
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