I have a confession to make. It feels shameful to admit this, but here goes. If I were asked to name one of Michael Jackson’s songs I wouldn’t have a clue. There – it’s said. It’s out there – my distressing ignorance of an apparently worldwide cultural phenomenon. How sad is that. Not ‘sad’ as in ‘sad’ of course. ‘Sad’ as in its newer meaning of ‘contemptuously pitiable’ – you see, I’m not totally culturally autistic, in fact I have a pretty lively interest in a broad swathe of cultural phenomena, what the Zeitgeist throws up, what is newly emerging, what the wondrous complexity of the human spirit is able to create, produce, dream into being.
I know about Twitter and cloud-computing, the CERN particle accelerator and Jimmy Choo handbags, Madonna’s adoption travails, the leader of the Tour de France and the principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic (Simon Rattle – didn’t you know that? How sad. Where have you been all these years?). So I do know, and enjoy knowing, about a lot of stuff. It’s just that - to my family’s astonishment (and my embarrassment, which I am trying to unravel here) – I couldn’t name a single Michael Jackson song. So where have I been all these years?
The answer to that seems to involve a larger set of questions: how is it that at various stages of our lives we take an interest in some things and not in others? Why is it that I have an interest in east European poets and you have an interest in butterflies, shoes and jazz? Why do you feel passionately about politics and I feel passionately about sport? How do our affinities grow in us? What influences our choices of where we find our pleasures? How much is about being encouraged to nurture our individuality when young, how much is about parental interests (which we might follow, or rebel against), or peer interests growing up? Are we born with predispositions towards visual stimuli, or verbal stimuli, or aural stimuli, or physical stimuli? So we might find ourselves drawn to mountains rather than books, or music rather than conversation, or jogging rather than meditating?
Of course we might find ourselves drawn to multiple sources of stimulation. We might be fortunate in having a curiosity about the world that is benignly promiscuous: allowing ourselves to inhabit, to taste, to explore, as much of the wide world as we can get our hands on and our teeth into. Or we might find areas of life that leave us indifferent, or frightened, when something about the overwhelming superfluity and diversity of being will cause us to retreat into what is safe and ordered and (in imagination, anyway) controllable.
My own interests in, amongst other things, psychology and religion seem to allow me to be interested in almost anything. Psychology/psychotherapy allows one to be interested in what goes on inside us, moment by moment – thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, an endless array of material about ourselves, how we think and behave and what we believe, a dizzying panoply of emotional and mental life that is like a kaleidoscope in constant ever-changing motion. Nothing in the world within us can be lacking in interest – if we give it the time and space and have the courage to look. And reflect on what we see.
And religion, in the widest sense, is all that writ large: how we come to believe what we do, the cultural forms it takes, the rituals we create, the stories we tell, the meaning we try to wrest from the chaos of being. If one believes that there is something which animates existence, that keeps everything going, that creates life in me and in the farthest reaches of the universe moment by moment – so that there is something rather than nothing – if one believes this (and it is in a way a belief, not quite a ‘fact’), then this belief in the unfolding creative spirit of all being is a belief that can’t help then keeping us interested in everything that exists (except life is too short to be interested in it all, so I guess we end up being selective).
And this belief in the spirit of creation implanted in being – ‘being’ which is always ‘becoming’ because it is never static, it can never stop – this belief can be given a label if you want (or need) labels. ‘God’ is one of the labels the Western world has used. Though I personally prefer to leave my ‘ being-becoming’ unlabelled – because it gives my imagination room to breathe. But I’ll use the old labels from time to time, and will even be happy to do so – for I’m interested in what those labels have been, over the millennia and in various societies; and how humanity has used those labels, and also misused them (being judgmental for a moment). I’m interested in what those old labels can still do for us, and to us, for good and ill. But I never forget that ‘God’ and ‘God’-words are just labels – and not the thing itself.
I take my cue for this from one of those old stories - from what we call the Bible, the Torah, etc - the story of Moses asking the peripatetic divine presence he has encountered in the desert, in a vision of a burning bush, asking this presence, this voice: ‘What am I going to tell people You are called? Because they are going to ask me. And they’ll never believe me, or in me, unless I give them a name, a label. So what do I call You?’.
And with a divine insouciance, the storytellers – in a moment of creative genius (otherwise known as inspiration) – have this presence/voice say “Ehyeh asher ehyeh: ‘I will be what I will be’, ‘I am what I am’ - that is who/what I am. If you need to give them a name, a label, then tell the people : “’I am and will be’ - ehyeh - has sent me to you”.” (Exodus 3: 13-14)
Well, that seems a long way from Michael Jackson - and my ignorance. But I do have a picture in my head of a man dancing, dancing with an uncanny lightness, a preternatural litheness - a quality of being present in the music and in his body that seemed to have stirred the souls and the imaginations of millions (even if I missed what it was all about). And the man who danced into the minds of so many brings to mind Nietzsche’s quixotic words: ‘I would believe only in a god who could dance’ (Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1883).
I’m sure Nietzsche would have known at least one of Michael Jackson’s songs. Surely the author of ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ and ‘The Will to Power’, immersed in his culture yet able to dissect it with a steely scalpel, would have heard of ‘Bad’. And possibly ‘Dangerous’. And maybe even, given his tragic last years of mental breakdown, he might well have been sadly familiar with ‘Off The Wall’.
Wednesday, 8 July 2009
Thursday, 25 June 2009
‘Waiting for God and Godot’
Vladimir: It’s the start that’s difficult.
Estragon: You can start from anything.
Vladimir: Yes, but you have to decide.
I was invited to Westminster Abbey this week for the ordination and consecration of a bishop into the Church of England’s Diocese of Salisbury. I’d never been to an event like this - I’d never even visited Westminster Abbey. So it was too good an invitation to turn down.
As might be expected it was a very formal occasion: ceremonial processions of clergy and bishops in full regalia, red for bishops, yellow and white for others, jewel-encrusted crosses on long staves, the Abbey choir in full voice, all the dignity and solemnity of a church confident of its traditional role in England’s history, preserver of continuity and faith, representatives of - as the liturgy proclaimed - ‘a royal priesthood, a holy nation’.
The Archbishop of Canterbury takes pride of place in this ceremony, bringing up the rear of the opening procession in his white mitre and full ceremonial gown (I’m Jewish, what do you want, the technical terms for all this stuff?). It’s fancy dress for grown-ups, playing their allocated roles. I noted, with wry amusement, how Rowan Williams, as soon as the opening procession had ensured that all the participants reached their designated spots, swept off his mitre with what seemed to be palpable relief – it revealed his curiously back-sprouting shock of grey hair (springing from his head as if he’d been struck by lightning), which he left for a moment or two before attempting to smooth it down with a worldly sweep of his hand.
Estragon: Nothing to be done
Vladimir: I’m beginning to come round to that opinion
I’d been to see Samuel Beckett’s play at the weekend – and during the long ceremony in the Abbey I couldn’t help contrast the two occasions, both choreographed with theatrical precision, both in love with language, both speaking about the most profound of human concerns (love and hope and service), and both using the technique of dialogue to explore the mysteries of what we are here on earth to do.
‘Do you accept the Holy Scriptures as revealing all things necessary for eternal salvation...’
‘I do accept them’
‘Will you be diligent in prayer...and in all studies that will deepen your faith...’
‘By the help of God I will’
‘Will you be gentle and merciful for Christ’s sake to those who are in need...’
‘By the help of God I will’
And so on – an antiphony of call and response, interspersed with psalms, scriptural readings, and prayers by the community, culminating in the ordination itself, the ‘laying on of hands’ where the 30 or so bishops form a bright red swooping crowd, like a flock of exotic birds, and descend on the ordinand until he disappears beneath a host of outstretched hands as the Archbishop intones: ‘Send down the Holy Spirit on your servant...’
Beckett’s play contains a memorable portrait of a master-servant relationship: that of the silent , ironically-named Lucky tethered by a rope to his master, Pozzo, who treats his servant as an uncomplaining beast of burden and form of entertainment, ordering him at whim to dance, then ‘Stop!...Turn!...Think!’. Perhaps this is how Beckett sees humanity, labouring under its servitude to authorities human and divine. The Bible does contain images of a ‘God’ ordering us around, often in arbitrary-seeming ways, and it seems significant that in the single long speech that emerges from the hapless Lucky – his only words in the play – what we hear when he is ordered to ‘Think!’ is a stream of words that sound like a parody of religious argumentation:
Lucky: Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann [Beckett had a genius for names as signposts] of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension Who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambit divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown...
And so on and on for several uninterrupted minutes, a logorrhoea of sense and senselessness, mirroring our human attempt to construct meaning out of silence and the void.
Does Beckett’s text at this point make any more or less sense than the reading from Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians which the Abbey ceremony included? Before faith came we were imprisoned and guarded under the law [like Lucky?]until faith would be revealed therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith...’
The motif within the ordination of the need for help, God’s help, to carry on with life is echoed in Godot – except that in Godot the only help we can draw on is the help we give to each other:
Estragon: What’s the matter with you all?
Vladimir: Help!
Estragon: I’m going.
Vladimir: Don’t leave me! They’ll kill me!...Help!
Estragon: I’m going.
Vladimir: Help me up first. Then we’ll go together.
For Beckett, companionship, human connectedness, our dependence on each other – these are the antidote to oblivion. Rowan Williams would agree, I’m sure. Yet Beckett’s masterpiece, first produced in 1955 and written in the shadows of the death camps and Hiroshima, speaks of a post-religious world where the only faith that exists is in our human capabilities, our potential for concern for each other:
Vladimir: Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!
Sir Ian McKellen delivers the lines with great pathos, and urgency: I see this speech as the religious/spiritual core of Beckett’s play, the author’s own declaration of the necessity for human values in the face of a world in which ‘God’ is absent - in which ‘God’ may be spoken about, and waited for, but never arrives.
The ordination was formal, and moving in its own way. But it was curiously impersonal – to my mind the sermon-giver (a Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge) listed the ordinand’s achievements and qualifications, gave us his CV as it were, but never really said anything personal about him, or to him. Nor did Rowan Williams: all his lines spoken to the ordinand were scripted in advance and printed neatly in the order of service given to us in the congregation. There was more human life, human warmth, on the stage between Vladimir (McKellen) and Estragon (beautifully played by Patrick Stewart), than in the ceremonial drama in the Abbey.
Perhaps that’s the way it needs to be when you are representing the Church, the Body of Christ on Earth, during such a ritualised occasion. But maybe there’s a clue here as to why our theatres are packed and the Church of England is in decline. Maybe the Spirit has migrated from formal religious structures (synagogues too?) into other, more ‘worldly’, places. Places that have the possibility of mixing laughter with a sense of the serious, places where laughter and tragedy can both be accommodated and embraced. (I had never understood until this last weekend why ‘Waiting for Godot’ is described by Beckett as a ‘tragicomedy’. But this production taught me that it is in fact very funny, with both an Irish (and Jewish) gallows humour together with the innate humour that flowers between human beings bound together in absurd situations).
‘Waiting for Godot’ is a profound, religious work: like all the best religion it is open-ended, searching, inquiring after meaning, allowing a full expression of human creativity and compassion without avoiding our capacities for cruelty and destructiveness. It is a text filled with what used to be called – and still is called in some places – ‘the Holy Spirit’. That is, the spirit of life that animates existence and us poor creatures who struggle with existence, the spirit of being that enables us to wrestle meaning out of the chaos of being, the spirit of being that helps us bear the frustrations of waiting, waiting for clarity of understanding to arise, waiting for our inevitable end, waiting for our waiting to end, for Godot to arrive, for the curtain to fall.
Pozzo: They give birth astride the grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more...
Oh, but what the light reveals! While it’s there, while it’s here: what the light reveals!
Estragon: You can start from anything.
Vladimir: Yes, but you have to decide.
I was invited to Westminster Abbey this week for the ordination and consecration of a bishop into the Church of England’s Diocese of Salisbury. I’d never been to an event like this - I’d never even visited Westminster Abbey. So it was too good an invitation to turn down.
As might be expected it was a very formal occasion: ceremonial processions of clergy and bishops in full regalia, red for bishops, yellow and white for others, jewel-encrusted crosses on long staves, the Abbey choir in full voice, all the dignity and solemnity of a church confident of its traditional role in England’s history, preserver of continuity and faith, representatives of - as the liturgy proclaimed - ‘a royal priesthood, a holy nation’.
The Archbishop of Canterbury takes pride of place in this ceremony, bringing up the rear of the opening procession in his white mitre and full ceremonial gown (I’m Jewish, what do you want, the technical terms for all this stuff?). It’s fancy dress for grown-ups, playing their allocated roles. I noted, with wry amusement, how Rowan Williams, as soon as the opening procession had ensured that all the participants reached their designated spots, swept off his mitre with what seemed to be palpable relief – it revealed his curiously back-sprouting shock of grey hair (springing from his head as if he’d been struck by lightning), which he left for a moment or two before attempting to smooth it down with a worldly sweep of his hand.
Estragon: Nothing to be done
Vladimir: I’m beginning to come round to that opinion
I’d been to see Samuel Beckett’s play at the weekend – and during the long ceremony in the Abbey I couldn’t help contrast the two occasions, both choreographed with theatrical precision, both in love with language, both speaking about the most profound of human concerns (love and hope and service), and both using the technique of dialogue to explore the mysteries of what we are here on earth to do.
‘Do you accept the Holy Scriptures as revealing all things necessary for eternal salvation...’
‘I do accept them’
‘Will you be diligent in prayer...and in all studies that will deepen your faith...’
‘By the help of God I will’
‘Will you be gentle and merciful for Christ’s sake to those who are in need...’
‘By the help of God I will’
And so on – an antiphony of call and response, interspersed with psalms, scriptural readings, and prayers by the community, culminating in the ordination itself, the ‘laying on of hands’ where the 30 or so bishops form a bright red swooping crowd, like a flock of exotic birds, and descend on the ordinand until he disappears beneath a host of outstretched hands as the Archbishop intones: ‘Send down the Holy Spirit on your servant...’
Beckett’s play contains a memorable portrait of a master-servant relationship: that of the silent , ironically-named Lucky tethered by a rope to his master, Pozzo, who treats his servant as an uncomplaining beast of burden and form of entertainment, ordering him at whim to dance, then ‘Stop!...Turn!...Think!’. Perhaps this is how Beckett sees humanity, labouring under its servitude to authorities human and divine. The Bible does contain images of a ‘God’ ordering us around, often in arbitrary-seeming ways, and it seems significant that in the single long speech that emerges from the hapless Lucky – his only words in the play – what we hear when he is ordered to ‘Think!’ is a stream of words that sound like a parody of religious argumentation:
Lucky: Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann [Beckett had a genius for names as signposts] of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension Who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambit divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown...
And so on and on for several uninterrupted minutes, a logorrhoea of sense and senselessness, mirroring our human attempt to construct meaning out of silence and the void.
Does Beckett’s text at this point make any more or less sense than the reading from Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians which the Abbey ceremony included? Before faith came we were imprisoned and guarded under the law [like Lucky?]until faith would be revealed therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith...’
The motif within the ordination of the need for help, God’s help, to carry on with life is echoed in Godot – except that in Godot the only help we can draw on is the help we give to each other:
Estragon: What’s the matter with you all?
Vladimir: Help!
Estragon: I’m going.
Vladimir: Don’t leave me! They’ll kill me!...Help!
Estragon: I’m going.
Vladimir: Help me up first. Then we’ll go together.
For Beckett, companionship, human connectedness, our dependence on each other – these are the antidote to oblivion. Rowan Williams would agree, I’m sure. Yet Beckett’s masterpiece, first produced in 1955 and written in the shadows of the death camps and Hiroshima, speaks of a post-religious world where the only faith that exists is in our human capabilities, our potential for concern for each other:
Vladimir: Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!
Sir Ian McKellen delivers the lines with great pathos, and urgency: I see this speech as the religious/spiritual core of Beckett’s play, the author’s own declaration of the necessity for human values in the face of a world in which ‘God’ is absent - in which ‘God’ may be spoken about, and waited for, but never arrives.
The ordination was formal, and moving in its own way. But it was curiously impersonal – to my mind the sermon-giver (a Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge) listed the ordinand’s achievements and qualifications, gave us his CV as it were, but never really said anything personal about him, or to him. Nor did Rowan Williams: all his lines spoken to the ordinand were scripted in advance and printed neatly in the order of service given to us in the congregation. There was more human life, human warmth, on the stage between Vladimir (McKellen) and Estragon (beautifully played by Patrick Stewart), than in the ceremonial drama in the Abbey.
Perhaps that’s the way it needs to be when you are representing the Church, the Body of Christ on Earth, during such a ritualised occasion. But maybe there’s a clue here as to why our theatres are packed and the Church of England is in decline. Maybe the Spirit has migrated from formal religious structures (synagogues too?) into other, more ‘worldly’, places. Places that have the possibility of mixing laughter with a sense of the serious, places where laughter and tragedy can both be accommodated and embraced. (I had never understood until this last weekend why ‘Waiting for Godot’ is described by Beckett as a ‘tragicomedy’. But this production taught me that it is in fact very funny, with both an Irish (and Jewish) gallows humour together with the innate humour that flowers between human beings bound together in absurd situations).
‘Waiting for Godot’ is a profound, religious work: like all the best religion it is open-ended, searching, inquiring after meaning, allowing a full expression of human creativity and compassion without avoiding our capacities for cruelty and destructiveness. It is a text filled with what used to be called – and still is called in some places – ‘the Holy Spirit’. That is, the spirit of life that animates existence and us poor creatures who struggle with existence, the spirit of being that enables us to wrestle meaning out of the chaos of being, the spirit of being that helps us bear the frustrations of waiting, waiting for clarity of understanding to arise, waiting for our inevitable end, waiting for our waiting to end, for Godot to arrive, for the curtain to fall.
Pozzo: They give birth astride the grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more...
Oh, but what the light reveals! While it’s there, while it’s here: what the light reveals!
Wednesday, 10 June 2009
On the BNP and Europe
I’m unsure how to think about the results from the European elections – in particular, what to think about the BNP’s capture of two seats in the European Parliament.
On the one hand, it seems a dark day for Europe. Two British racists, from a neo-fascist party, will have new access to funds and free publicity, along with a modicum of influence (together with like-minded groups) over policy-making in the European Union. They will join with other racist and xenophobic parties – the anti-Gypsy Hungarian party, Jobbik, who gained 15% of their vote, far-right groups from Romania and Italy (10% of each of their national votes), the anti-Muslim party in Holland (15% of the vote), as well as Austrian nationalists...an unlikely band of brothers-at-heart who in any other context would probably be at each other’s throats. So, from this point of view, the BNP’s success can be linked to a larger and worrying strain of intolerant, fear-fuelled nationalism that is rippling through Europe.
On the other hand, the BNP’s share of the UK vote was still only 6.26% (4.94% in London) – in the midst of this grim recession, and in spite of the tide of anti-immigrant prejudice spilling from the pages of the Daily Mail (and other papers) for the last few years. I’m not sure I have much faith in the alleged ‘tolerance’ and ‘common sense’ of the British public, but until the next election here in the UK there are as yet no BNP MPs (although there are a scattering of local councillors in specific deprived areas of the UK). In other words those who do bother to vote have, this time round, overwhelmingly rejected this hate-filled political party. (In 1930, Hitler won 107 seats out of 577 in the German parliament on 18% of the vote, having trebled their percentage of the vote in 2 years).
And even the news from the Continent seems contradictory. Jean-Marie le Pen’s National Front in France lost 4 of its 7 European seats. And in Belgium, the Flemish separatist-nationalists lost half their votes. Maybe other ethnocentric-rightist parties are picking up these votes: UKIP’s vote ended up larger than Labour’s – but it’s hard to know how to interpret all this anti-European voting.
As a passionate pro-European I know that I feel saddened by it. And as a cosmopolitan Jew – not rootless, but glad to be British and glad to be part of a larger European identity – I feel doubly saddened by it. That the Jews of Europe have traditionally celebrated their multiple identities – as Jew, as committed to their land of domicile, and as committed to a trans-national culture of creative human endeavour – is a theme I will leave for another time.
Jewish identity; patriotism; internationalism – these have existed in creative tension in Jewish lives and hearts for the last two centuries. This multi-dimensional sense of identity might cause, has caused, confusion, dismay, or worse, to the ‘outside’ world, the Gentile world. And to us Jews it has been, yes, sometimes problematic, and unsettling - this challenge of holding together disparate parts of our identity - but at its best this cross-fertilisation has been integral to Jewish creativity: in the arts, in music and literature, in the sciences, in philosophy, and religiously, and in the human and social sciences - across the whole spectrum of Jewish endeavour. Living our lives in different worlds , in different dimensions - material and spiritual and intellectual and emotional – this has been the ennobling, disturbing, (sometimes disruptive), Jewish diasporic contribution to European life over the last two centuries.
And in and of this longer perspective, and within this larger perspective, the BNP know nothing, and are nothing.
But we will keep an eye on them.
(June 10th 2009)
On the one hand, it seems a dark day for Europe. Two British racists, from a neo-fascist party, will have new access to funds and free publicity, along with a modicum of influence (together with like-minded groups) over policy-making in the European Union. They will join with other racist and xenophobic parties – the anti-Gypsy Hungarian party, Jobbik, who gained 15% of their vote, far-right groups from Romania and Italy (10% of each of their national votes), the anti-Muslim party in Holland (15% of the vote), as well as Austrian nationalists...an unlikely band of brothers-at-heart who in any other context would probably be at each other’s throats. So, from this point of view, the BNP’s success can be linked to a larger and worrying strain of intolerant, fear-fuelled nationalism that is rippling through Europe.
On the other hand, the BNP’s share of the UK vote was still only 6.26% (4.94% in London) – in the midst of this grim recession, and in spite of the tide of anti-immigrant prejudice spilling from the pages of the Daily Mail (and other papers) for the last few years. I’m not sure I have much faith in the alleged ‘tolerance’ and ‘common sense’ of the British public, but until the next election here in the UK there are as yet no BNP MPs (although there are a scattering of local councillors in specific deprived areas of the UK). In other words those who do bother to vote have, this time round, overwhelmingly rejected this hate-filled political party. (In 1930, Hitler won 107 seats out of 577 in the German parliament on 18% of the vote, having trebled their percentage of the vote in 2 years).
And even the news from the Continent seems contradictory. Jean-Marie le Pen’s National Front in France lost 4 of its 7 European seats. And in Belgium, the Flemish separatist-nationalists lost half their votes. Maybe other ethnocentric-rightist parties are picking up these votes: UKIP’s vote ended up larger than Labour’s – but it’s hard to know how to interpret all this anti-European voting.
As a passionate pro-European I know that I feel saddened by it. And as a cosmopolitan Jew – not rootless, but glad to be British and glad to be part of a larger European identity – I feel doubly saddened by it. That the Jews of Europe have traditionally celebrated their multiple identities – as Jew, as committed to their land of domicile, and as committed to a trans-national culture of creative human endeavour – is a theme I will leave for another time.
Jewish identity; patriotism; internationalism – these have existed in creative tension in Jewish lives and hearts for the last two centuries. This multi-dimensional sense of identity might cause, has caused, confusion, dismay, or worse, to the ‘outside’ world, the Gentile world. And to us Jews it has been, yes, sometimes problematic, and unsettling - this challenge of holding together disparate parts of our identity - but at its best this cross-fertilisation has been integral to Jewish creativity: in the arts, in music and literature, in the sciences, in philosophy, and religiously, and in the human and social sciences - across the whole spectrum of Jewish endeavour. Living our lives in different worlds , in different dimensions - material and spiritual and intellectual and emotional – this has been the ennobling, disturbing, (sometimes disruptive), Jewish diasporic contribution to European life over the last two centuries.
And in and of this longer perspective, and within this larger perspective, the BNP know nothing, and are nothing.
But we will keep an eye on them.
(June 10th 2009)
Thursday, 4 June 2009
Truth & Tiananmen, Truth & Obama in Cairo
June 4th
I’ve been catching up this week with what happened twenty years ago in Tiananmen Square. Today is the 20th anniversary of the massacre – but I have realised over the last few days that my knowledge and understanding of what occurred in Beijing in 1989 has been negligible, restricted to a memory of an iconic image of a man with a bag (or was it a briefcase?) standing alone in front of a tank. [It has been brought to my attention after I posted this that he had a bag in each hand - the unreliablity of memory!] Who was he? What was he doing there? What happened to him? What were the tanks doing there? What was this ‘massacre’ about, in a far-off place about which I know almost nothing?
Of course I knew that China’s political system was oppressive and dictatorial – 9 men control the lives of 1.6 billion people – and that China’s attitude to dissent is typically totalitarian: imprisonment for speech-crimes and for any writing that questions the State’s values, systemic human rights abuses, and all the grim apparatus of State repression that the Soviet Union and China developed and made their speciality in the last century.
This was why I was opposed to the granting of the Olympic Games to Beijing – and why I believed that all the promises made by the Chinese government about an easing of restrictions on individual or collective dissent were worthless. Their reassuring words were lies - manipulative deceptions of a staggeringly naive Olympic movement, and those sponsoring Western businesses who sought to profit from this once-in-a-generation exposure to new markets; businesses that were happy to be deceived because, after all, it’s money that makes the world go round. And what are human rights compared with profit margins. It’s almost too easy to award the gold medal for cynicism to Western banks and corporate capitalism. (Though it’s since been established that those noble institutions were drugged up to their eyeballs with toxic substances and mainlining on consumerist greed, making addicts of us all).
When I spoke about China in April last year, before the Games, I drew the obvious parallel with the shameful Berlin Olympics in 1936 (cf. sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcqwj2sv_7g3cn5ddx). But what has shocked me this week, as I have been reading about and watching programmes on the 1989 events, is both the ruthlessness with which the Chinese government murdered their own youthful citizens – crushing them with tanks, shooting indiscriminately into peaceful crowds, then removing bodies to destroy the evidence – and the ruthlessness with which knowledge of this bloody chapter of recent Chinese history has been suppressed. In their official histories and their museums, it is as if this event never happened.
In China you can’t Google it – Google have agreed to China’s censorship of certain areas within internet sites – and recently this year, right up to this week in the run up to the 20th anniversary of the massacre, China has blocked access to sites such as Hotmail, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Microsoft’s Windows Live, blogger.com, and message boards on more than 6,000 websites affiliated to colleges and universities. Knowledge is power. And so, knowledge is dangerous.
Nobody yet knows – and maybe nobody ever will – how many youngsters (and they were predominately young people in their teens and twenties who were gathered in the Square) were murdered by government troops in Beijing 20 years ago today. Estimates range from around a thousand to perhaps 3,000. (And nobody knows who the anonymous man in the photo is. Or rather, was). Throughout China there are parents alive whose children never came home. But who cannot talk about it. Cannot be allowed to mourn. Cannot be told the truth.
And part of the tragedy of those days – which are these days – is that so many in China have agreed to live with lies and self-deception and the erasure of memory. As the banned, exiled novelist Ma Jian (author of Beijing Coma) puts it: ‘The Chinese have made a faustian pact with the government, agreeing to forsake demands for political and intellectual freedom in exchange for more material comfort. They live prosperous lives in which any expression of pain is forbidden. When I talk to young Chinese about 1989, I am invariably accused of spreading false rumours and being a traitor to my nation. When I bring up the subject with my old friends, most of them laugh scornfully, as if those events are now irrelevant. But I know that behind this show of derision or apathy lies real fear. Everyone knows that attempts to break the Tiananmen taboo can still destroy a person’s life and the life of their families. The authorities, for their part, may have a monopoly of the nation’s resources, but they can never fully control the nation’s soul...’
The struggle between truth and lies is a spiritual battle within each human soul. We may seek the truth, about ourselves and the world around us, but our capacities for self-deception and for hiding from the facts of life are endless. And the wish to be deceived - for the sake of a quiet life, or material security, or supposed emotional stability – is deeply ingrained. The truth can set you free – and that’s why it is so desirable, and that’s why it is so frightening.
******************************************************************************
‘Be conscious of God and speak always the truth’ – when President Obama spoke those words today in his long-awaited speech in Cairo, quoting from the ‘holy Qur'an’ (and you could hear that his Arabic pronunciation of ‘Qur'an’ was spot-on) there was generous and spontaneous applause from his invited audience at Cairo University. And that was what he was here in the Middle East to try to do, he said, ‘to speak the truth as best I can’.
It was, as one can expect from Obama, a masterful speech: clear, intelligent, both humble and robust, and embodying the principles of dialogue – respect for and a willingness to listen to the other, and a reciprocal attentiveness to the truth of one’s own position and a willingness to articulate it as openly as one can.
The fact that Obama was speaking in a country ruled (like China) by an oligarchic, authoritarian elite – a country ruled by means of a permanent state of emergency in which human rights abuses are systemic – cannot escape our attention. But at least this was a beginning. ‘A new beginning’, as Obama put it, in relations between the US and the Muslim world. And one where Obama was able ‘to speak the truth’ as best he could about the Palestinian situation, giving voice to the truth that the ‘situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable’ , while also reiterating that ‘resistance through violence and killing is wrong.’ And affirming the self-evident truth - evident that is to most honest-minded observers - that ‘Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s.’
Obama is having to play a complex game with Israel’s leaders, in particular with Netanyahu – who was once described by Avi Shlaim, Professor of International Relations at Oxford University, as ‘devious, dishonest and completely unreliable’ in his dealings with King Hussein of Jordan when Netanyahu was prime minister last time round, in the 1990s. And can a leopard change its spots? And is the Pope a Catholic?
Obama has his work cut out in relation to Israel but so far seems to be playing a canny yet resolute hand. If he can continue to be guided by his understanding of ‘Be conscious of God and speak always the truth’, there may still be a glimmer of hope in that desperate, dusty patch of God’s good earth.
I’ve been catching up this week with what happened twenty years ago in Tiananmen Square. Today is the 20th anniversary of the massacre – but I have realised over the last few days that my knowledge and understanding of what occurred in Beijing in 1989 has been negligible, restricted to a memory of an iconic image of a man with a bag (or was it a briefcase?) standing alone in front of a tank. [It has been brought to my attention after I posted this that he had a bag in each hand - the unreliablity of memory!] Who was he? What was he doing there? What happened to him? What were the tanks doing there? What was this ‘massacre’ about, in a far-off place about which I know almost nothing?
Of course I knew that China’s political system was oppressive and dictatorial – 9 men control the lives of 1.6 billion people – and that China’s attitude to dissent is typically totalitarian: imprisonment for speech-crimes and for any writing that questions the State’s values, systemic human rights abuses, and all the grim apparatus of State repression that the Soviet Union and China developed and made their speciality in the last century.
This was why I was opposed to the granting of the Olympic Games to Beijing – and why I believed that all the promises made by the Chinese government about an easing of restrictions on individual or collective dissent were worthless. Their reassuring words were lies - manipulative deceptions of a staggeringly naive Olympic movement, and those sponsoring Western businesses who sought to profit from this once-in-a-generation exposure to new markets; businesses that were happy to be deceived because, after all, it’s money that makes the world go round. And what are human rights compared with profit margins. It’s almost too easy to award the gold medal for cynicism to Western banks and corporate capitalism. (Though it’s since been established that those noble institutions were drugged up to their eyeballs with toxic substances and mainlining on consumerist greed, making addicts of us all).
When I spoke about China in April last year, before the Games, I drew the obvious parallel with the shameful Berlin Olympics in 1936 (cf. sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcqwj2sv_7g3cn5ddx). But what has shocked me this week, as I have been reading about and watching programmes on the 1989 events, is both the ruthlessness with which the Chinese government murdered their own youthful citizens – crushing them with tanks, shooting indiscriminately into peaceful crowds, then removing bodies to destroy the evidence – and the ruthlessness with which knowledge of this bloody chapter of recent Chinese history has been suppressed. In their official histories and their museums, it is as if this event never happened.
In China you can’t Google it – Google have agreed to China’s censorship of certain areas within internet sites – and recently this year, right up to this week in the run up to the 20th anniversary of the massacre, China has blocked access to sites such as Hotmail, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Microsoft’s Windows Live, blogger.com, and message boards on more than 6,000 websites affiliated to colleges and universities. Knowledge is power. And so, knowledge is dangerous.
Nobody yet knows – and maybe nobody ever will – how many youngsters (and they were predominately young people in their teens and twenties who were gathered in the Square) were murdered by government troops in Beijing 20 years ago today. Estimates range from around a thousand to perhaps 3,000. (And nobody knows who the anonymous man in the photo is. Or rather, was). Throughout China there are parents alive whose children never came home. But who cannot talk about it. Cannot be allowed to mourn. Cannot be told the truth.
And part of the tragedy of those days – which are these days – is that so many in China have agreed to live with lies and self-deception and the erasure of memory. As the banned, exiled novelist Ma Jian (author of Beijing Coma) puts it: ‘The Chinese have made a faustian pact with the government, agreeing to forsake demands for political and intellectual freedom in exchange for more material comfort. They live prosperous lives in which any expression of pain is forbidden. When I talk to young Chinese about 1989, I am invariably accused of spreading false rumours and being a traitor to my nation. When I bring up the subject with my old friends, most of them laugh scornfully, as if those events are now irrelevant. But I know that behind this show of derision or apathy lies real fear. Everyone knows that attempts to break the Tiananmen taboo can still destroy a person’s life and the life of their families. The authorities, for their part, may have a monopoly of the nation’s resources, but they can never fully control the nation’s soul...’
The struggle between truth and lies is a spiritual battle within each human soul. We may seek the truth, about ourselves and the world around us, but our capacities for self-deception and for hiding from the facts of life are endless. And the wish to be deceived - for the sake of a quiet life, or material security, or supposed emotional stability – is deeply ingrained. The truth can set you free – and that’s why it is so desirable, and that’s why it is so frightening.
******************************************************************************
‘Be conscious of God and speak always the truth’ – when President Obama spoke those words today in his long-awaited speech in Cairo, quoting from the ‘holy Qur'an’ (and you could hear that his Arabic pronunciation of ‘Qur'an’ was spot-on) there was generous and spontaneous applause from his invited audience at Cairo University. And that was what he was here in the Middle East to try to do, he said, ‘to speak the truth as best I can’.
It was, as one can expect from Obama, a masterful speech: clear, intelligent, both humble and robust, and embodying the principles of dialogue – respect for and a willingness to listen to the other, and a reciprocal attentiveness to the truth of one’s own position and a willingness to articulate it as openly as one can.
The fact that Obama was speaking in a country ruled (like China) by an oligarchic, authoritarian elite – a country ruled by means of a permanent state of emergency in which human rights abuses are systemic – cannot escape our attention. But at least this was a beginning. ‘A new beginning’, as Obama put it, in relations between the US and the Muslim world. And one where Obama was able ‘to speak the truth’ as best he could about the Palestinian situation, giving voice to the truth that the ‘situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable’ , while also reiterating that ‘resistance through violence and killing is wrong.’ And affirming the self-evident truth - evident that is to most honest-minded observers - that ‘Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s.’
Obama is having to play a complex game with Israel’s leaders, in particular with Netanyahu – who was once described by Avi Shlaim, Professor of International Relations at Oxford University, as ‘devious, dishonest and completely unreliable’ in his dealings with King Hussein of Jordan when Netanyahu was prime minister last time round, in the 1990s. And can a leopard change its spots? And is the Pope a Catholic?
Obama has his work cut out in relation to Israel but so far seems to be playing a canny yet resolute hand. If he can continue to be guided by his understanding of ‘Be conscious of God and speak always the truth’, there may still be a glimmer of hope in that desperate, dusty patch of God’s good earth.
Monday, 25 May 2009
‘Trust In The Wilderness’: a few thoughts on religion and politics
I see that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has followed my lead this weekend. Together with the Archbishop of York he issued a statement on Sunday urging people not to "shun the ballot box" in the forthcoming European and local elections because of their disillusionment with the state of politics in the UK – and thereby hand a greater percentage of the vote to the BNP.
My own thoughts on this are included within a sermon, below, which I gave this past Shabbat at the Finchley Reform Synagogue (www.frsonline.org) in London. (I say 'sermon', but it is more in the nature of an extended riff on the section of the Torah we began to read this weekend).
Predictably, Nick Griffin of the BNP has responded to the Archbishops' expression of Christian values by saying that "the Church should stay out of politics" – which is a radical failure to understand that ‘true’ religion is always political because it speaks of how people should, or could, live together; and the kinds of relationships between individuals and between groups that are desirable; and how you cannot claim to be in a relationship with God-oriented values and ‘truth’ unless those values are reflected in the inter-personal human domain.
The people who worry that clergy are stepping outside of designated or permitted areas on which they are allowed to speak - stepping outside of ‘religion’ – don’t realise that to hold a ‘religious’ world-view means that everything and anything is open to be thought about and commented on, because there is no area of human thought or human activity which lies outside of the arena of the divine.
There are always those, in every generation and in every culture, who want clergy to stay in their box, keep their remarks focused on safe subjects (that don’t effect anyone). This isn’t the Jewish way – or at least it’s not my understanding of the Jewish way. I take my cue from, amongst other places, the second paragraph of the Aleynu prayer, recited in every service. It is forward looking, utopian, impossible to imagine becoming a reality – but as an aspiration towards a transformed society, a society pursuing values of integrity, justice and compassion, it offers daily inspiration in the politico-religious work of building a better society: it hopes for a time when ‘All shall accept the duty of building Your kingdom, so that Your reign of goodness shall come soon....’
‘Building Your kingdom’ translates for me into the politico-religious work outlined above, a society pursuing values of integrity, justice and compassion. What a daunting vision to have! No wonder that those in power, or seeking power, may quake when religious leaders speak of what might need to happen to move from here to there.
Sermon FRS 23rd May 2009
‘Anyone who doesn’t make themselves open to all, like a wilderness, cannot acquire wisdom and Torah’. (Midrash, Bemidbar Rabbah, 1:7).
Bemidbar – ‘In the Wilderness’: a year and a bit out of Egypt and the old ways of life are fading memories, there’s bitterness but also nostalgia for how it used to be (in spite of the hardships, and the bruises to body and soul that never go away); there is also the experience of new freedoms, and there have been some extraordinary events participated in and witnessed – the thunder and lightning at Sinai was dramatic but it has come and gone (and with it that glimpse into another reality, another way of being together as a people, another way of thinking and feeling and believing); oh, and that nasty incident with the Golden Calf has been conveniently forgotten. But, most of all, overwhelmingly, the rigours of the desert are beginning to feel like fate. What are they doing in this wilderness? Where are they going? How long will it take? Whom can they trust, when all is doubt and uncertainty?
Can they trust their leaders? Or rather, their leader? The man with the stutter, born of the tribe of Levi, who has led them thus far in his self-appointed task: the shepherd who became a freedom fighter, claiming to be appointed by his unseen God, that ancestral memory and present reality, food comes every day, as if by magic, or is it just nature? (the manna, tasting like coriander, appears with the morning dew) and Moses says this is evidence that the Holy One of Israel is present, the Eternal One who is taking care of us every day, though we never see him, we never hear him – though there is a Cloud by day and a Pillar of Fire by night and Moses tells us that these are signs of his presence, that we can trust this peripatetic divine force who leads us though the wilderness, but for how long? And where are we going? And how long will it take? And who can we trust, really?
Can we trust this man, Moses, and what he says to us? For he is the Speaker. He claims to speak to God. He claims God speaks to him. He is the authority for the House of Israel. He holds in mind the laws, the practices, the collective history of the tribe, the House of Israel. He is the voice of tradition and the voice of memory and the voice of what it is permitted to do and what it is forbidden to do. And all defer to him. For he is the Speaker : to the people and for the people. But if we can’t trust him, this Leader, this Speaker, whom can we trust?
Incidentally, if you want to have a tiny picture of the kind of ceremonial and ritual life that the Torah describes in such achingly elaborate detail - in the book of Leviticus especially, but also in parts of the book of Numbers – the details of a highly structured cult organized around the repetition of rituals which must be done in precise and regular and ordered ways – if you want a window into that role of elaborate symbolic ritual in the life of a culture, then you could do worse than watching something like the annual State Opening of Parliament or just the daily ritual of the Speaker of the Commons in the procession that starts each parliamentary day as the Speaker makes his way into the Chamber of the House (it’s our national Tent of Meeting, but not portable), and he is preceded by a badge messenger (wearing a badge), who is followed by the serjeant at arms, who is bearing a mace, who in turn is followed by a train bearer, who – yes, who guessed this – has the role of bearing the train of the serjeant in arms. (I know this sounds like Gilbert and Sullivan). And they are followed by the chaplain to the House and others with predetermined roles and responsibilities, all is special clothes just like the priests in days of old.
(I don’t know if the columnist Jonathan Freedland was conscious of the links to our Torah texts or not when he wrote this week: ‘All the flummery and archaic language should be banished...it shrouds parliament in a cloud of mystique, opaque to all but a select priesthood’).
But where were we? Yes, Bemidbar – ‘In the Wilderness’. Those years of wandering and wondering that the Torah describes offer us several themes which intersect with our own lives and our own situation. Because the questions of the Torah text are our questions too: Where are we going? How long will it take? Whom can we trust, when all is doubt and uncertainty? Questions of trust are very much around in the news this week – the publication in Ireland of the Ryan report into the decades-long systematic abuse of children in the Catholic church and Catholic orders has given a devastating insight into the ways in which power corrupts and religious authority turns perverse, and destructive of human well-being.
And closer to home, these failures in trustworthiness of those on whom we rely, often necessarily rely – whether it is MPs or governments or bankers or financiers around the world – these individual and systemic failures are not just dispiriting, they are disturbing, anxiety-provoking. Who of us can really say they feel more secure now, more hopeful about the future, than we did a year ago? We are in the wilderness, and the journey ahead is unknown and frightening.
The Book of Numbers goes on to describe the growing rebelliousness of the people against their leaders – the figure of Korach, who led a rebellion against Moses and his leadership, is the great symbol of this defiance of authority and authority figures. And I imagine we will see aspects of this here in the UK – there will be revolts in the Labour party, there will be revolts against all the major political parties in the European elections next month - because there is a spirit of anger that has been released by this fiasco of the MPs' expenses, combined with the global economic turbulence, and some of the feelings released are quite ugly (you only had to watch Question Time 10 days ago, or listen to phone-ins, to hear Korach alive and well and living in Grimsby and Basingstoke and, no doubt, Barnet: ‘Who do you think you are? Are you better than us?’).
I’m not of course saying that any questioning of authority figures nowadays is like Korach – that would be ridiculous – for authority (secular or religious) always needs to be open to question . But when Moses stands up against Pharoah’s authority we all cheer – a revolution is around the corner and history is written by the victors. But Korach is a different kind of symbol of defiance of authority – the texts show how he is motivated by personal issues, envy and competitiveness and a lust for power, but also fear. Korach is a symbol of the ways in which, when times are uncertain and there is no clarity about the collective journey a group are on, authority figures do get attacked. And often out of unconscious fear.
When the wilderness is barren and leaders don’t seem to know how to take us into our promised lands, and no short cuts are evident, and the way ahead seems fraught with dangers – it’s at uncertain times like these that scapegoating becomes prevalent (there’s a way in which Michael Martin has been a scapegoat, a ritual sacrifice offered up to the wrathful gods of public opinion); it’s at uncertain times like we are going through now that witch hunts begin, and the blame game speeds up, and a nation’s dormant bloodlust begins to stir. The holier-than-thou finger-pointing at others, for their greed, their dishonesty, their fudgings of the truth, their hypocrisies – which are real, but it makes us feel so much better about ourselves if we can attack others’ failures, ‘out there’, because it saves us the effort and the pain of some introspection and self-examination to look at our own failures ‘in here’, our own failures to live up to the ideals we have about how to live and how to behave.
And this spirit of angry blame-seeking is dangerous. It degrades the texture of our society, its capacities for tolerance and harmony – and it is potentially dangerous (if I’m going to be ethnocentric for a moment) for us as Jews here in the UK. I don’t need to remind you to use your vote at the June 4th European election coming up: it’s been well-publicised, by the Board of Deputies amongst others, that the BNP are seeking to gain a foothold (and the money that goes with it) in the European Parliament, through their percentage of the forthcoming vote . And whatever disillusion you feel about any of the parties you might usually vote for, your vote on the 4th will make a difference. (Vote Green if you are fed up with the others!).
We are in a situation where we can – through the blessed freedom of living in a democracy and having a vote – be an active participant in a small way to the Talmudic statement: ‘Happy the person who performs a good deed: that may tip the scales for them and the world’. Is it a mitzvah to vote? I don’t know, but it is an act of holiness to act in a way that keeps at bay, tries to keep at bay, the forces of destructiveness in the world. And the BNP are a nasty and hate-filled mob. And they aren’t going away.
In unstable times it may not take much to reach a tipping point where the forces of brutality and envy and vindictiveness find room to express themselves in our society. The children of Israel were organized for battle as they prepared to cross the desert, as they faced the wilderness. There were real enemies there and real battles they had to face – Og king of Bashan, Sihon the Amorite, Amalek. It would be best to be forewarned: our story is not over, and our history and Jewish mythology and texts still have much to teach, precious resources, giving us much food for thought, like manna every day, nurturing us in the wilderness as we face the future in the only way we can, walking backwards looking at where we have come from, where our journey has led thus over the generations, searching the past for clues to the future.
My own thoughts on this are included within a sermon, below, which I gave this past Shabbat at the Finchley Reform Synagogue (www.frsonline.org) in London. (I say 'sermon', but it is more in the nature of an extended riff on the section of the Torah we began to read this weekend).
Predictably, Nick Griffin of the BNP has responded to the Archbishops' expression of Christian values by saying that "the Church should stay out of politics" – which is a radical failure to understand that ‘true’ religion is always political because it speaks of how people should, or could, live together; and the kinds of relationships between individuals and between groups that are desirable; and how you cannot claim to be in a relationship with God-oriented values and ‘truth’ unless those values are reflected in the inter-personal human domain.
The people who worry that clergy are stepping outside of designated or permitted areas on which they are allowed to speak - stepping outside of ‘religion’ – don’t realise that to hold a ‘religious’ world-view means that everything and anything is open to be thought about and commented on, because there is no area of human thought or human activity which lies outside of the arena of the divine.
There are always those, in every generation and in every culture, who want clergy to stay in their box, keep their remarks focused on safe subjects (that don’t effect anyone). This isn’t the Jewish way – or at least it’s not my understanding of the Jewish way. I take my cue from, amongst other places, the second paragraph of the Aleynu prayer, recited in every service. It is forward looking, utopian, impossible to imagine becoming a reality – but as an aspiration towards a transformed society, a society pursuing values of integrity, justice and compassion, it offers daily inspiration in the politico-religious work of building a better society: it hopes for a time when ‘All shall accept the duty of building Your kingdom, so that Your reign of goodness shall come soon....’
‘Building Your kingdom’ translates for me into the politico-religious work outlined above, a society pursuing values of integrity, justice and compassion. What a daunting vision to have! No wonder that those in power, or seeking power, may quake when religious leaders speak of what might need to happen to move from here to there.
Sermon FRS 23rd May 2009
‘Anyone who doesn’t make themselves open to all, like a wilderness, cannot acquire wisdom and Torah’. (Midrash, Bemidbar Rabbah, 1:7).
Bemidbar – ‘In the Wilderness’: a year and a bit out of Egypt and the old ways of life are fading memories, there’s bitterness but also nostalgia for how it used to be (in spite of the hardships, and the bruises to body and soul that never go away); there is also the experience of new freedoms, and there have been some extraordinary events participated in and witnessed – the thunder and lightning at Sinai was dramatic but it has come and gone (and with it that glimpse into another reality, another way of being together as a people, another way of thinking and feeling and believing); oh, and that nasty incident with the Golden Calf has been conveniently forgotten. But, most of all, overwhelmingly, the rigours of the desert are beginning to feel like fate. What are they doing in this wilderness? Where are they going? How long will it take? Whom can they trust, when all is doubt and uncertainty?
Can they trust their leaders? Or rather, their leader? The man with the stutter, born of the tribe of Levi, who has led them thus far in his self-appointed task: the shepherd who became a freedom fighter, claiming to be appointed by his unseen God, that ancestral memory and present reality, food comes every day, as if by magic, or is it just nature? (the manna, tasting like coriander, appears with the morning dew) and Moses says this is evidence that the Holy One of Israel is present, the Eternal One who is taking care of us every day, though we never see him, we never hear him – though there is a Cloud by day and a Pillar of Fire by night and Moses tells us that these are signs of his presence, that we can trust this peripatetic divine force who leads us though the wilderness, but for how long? And where are we going? And how long will it take? And who can we trust, really?
Can we trust this man, Moses, and what he says to us? For he is the Speaker. He claims to speak to God. He claims God speaks to him. He is the authority for the House of Israel. He holds in mind the laws, the practices, the collective history of the tribe, the House of Israel. He is the voice of tradition and the voice of memory and the voice of what it is permitted to do and what it is forbidden to do. And all defer to him. For he is the Speaker : to the people and for the people. But if we can’t trust him, this Leader, this Speaker, whom can we trust?
Incidentally, if you want to have a tiny picture of the kind of ceremonial and ritual life that the Torah describes in such achingly elaborate detail - in the book of Leviticus especially, but also in parts of the book of Numbers – the details of a highly structured cult organized around the repetition of rituals which must be done in precise and regular and ordered ways – if you want a window into that role of elaborate symbolic ritual in the life of a culture, then you could do worse than watching something like the annual State Opening of Parliament or just the daily ritual of the Speaker of the Commons in the procession that starts each parliamentary day as the Speaker makes his way into the Chamber of the House (it’s our national Tent of Meeting, but not portable), and he is preceded by a badge messenger (wearing a badge), who is followed by the serjeant at arms, who is bearing a mace, who in turn is followed by a train bearer, who – yes, who guessed this – has the role of bearing the train of the serjeant in arms. (I know this sounds like Gilbert and Sullivan). And they are followed by the chaplain to the House and others with predetermined roles and responsibilities, all is special clothes just like the priests in days of old.
(I don’t know if the columnist Jonathan Freedland was conscious of the links to our Torah texts or not when he wrote this week: ‘All the flummery and archaic language should be banished...it shrouds parliament in a cloud of mystique, opaque to all but a select priesthood’).
But where were we? Yes, Bemidbar – ‘In the Wilderness’. Those years of wandering and wondering that the Torah describes offer us several themes which intersect with our own lives and our own situation. Because the questions of the Torah text are our questions too: Where are we going? How long will it take? Whom can we trust, when all is doubt and uncertainty? Questions of trust are very much around in the news this week – the publication in Ireland of the Ryan report into the decades-long systematic abuse of children in the Catholic church and Catholic orders has given a devastating insight into the ways in which power corrupts and religious authority turns perverse, and destructive of human well-being.
And closer to home, these failures in trustworthiness of those on whom we rely, often necessarily rely – whether it is MPs or governments or bankers or financiers around the world – these individual and systemic failures are not just dispiriting, they are disturbing, anxiety-provoking. Who of us can really say they feel more secure now, more hopeful about the future, than we did a year ago? We are in the wilderness, and the journey ahead is unknown and frightening.
The Book of Numbers goes on to describe the growing rebelliousness of the people against their leaders – the figure of Korach, who led a rebellion against Moses and his leadership, is the great symbol of this defiance of authority and authority figures. And I imagine we will see aspects of this here in the UK – there will be revolts in the Labour party, there will be revolts against all the major political parties in the European elections next month - because there is a spirit of anger that has been released by this fiasco of the MPs' expenses, combined with the global economic turbulence, and some of the feelings released are quite ugly (you only had to watch Question Time 10 days ago, or listen to phone-ins, to hear Korach alive and well and living in Grimsby and Basingstoke and, no doubt, Barnet: ‘Who do you think you are? Are you better than us?’).
I’m not of course saying that any questioning of authority figures nowadays is like Korach – that would be ridiculous – for authority (secular or religious) always needs to be open to question . But when Moses stands up against Pharoah’s authority we all cheer – a revolution is around the corner and history is written by the victors. But Korach is a different kind of symbol of defiance of authority – the texts show how he is motivated by personal issues, envy and competitiveness and a lust for power, but also fear. Korach is a symbol of the ways in which, when times are uncertain and there is no clarity about the collective journey a group are on, authority figures do get attacked. And often out of unconscious fear.
When the wilderness is barren and leaders don’t seem to know how to take us into our promised lands, and no short cuts are evident, and the way ahead seems fraught with dangers – it’s at uncertain times like these that scapegoating becomes prevalent (there’s a way in which Michael Martin has been a scapegoat, a ritual sacrifice offered up to the wrathful gods of public opinion); it’s at uncertain times like we are going through now that witch hunts begin, and the blame game speeds up, and a nation’s dormant bloodlust begins to stir. The holier-than-thou finger-pointing at others, for their greed, their dishonesty, their fudgings of the truth, their hypocrisies – which are real, but it makes us feel so much better about ourselves if we can attack others’ failures, ‘out there’, because it saves us the effort and the pain of some introspection and self-examination to look at our own failures ‘in here’, our own failures to live up to the ideals we have about how to live and how to behave.
And this spirit of angry blame-seeking is dangerous. It degrades the texture of our society, its capacities for tolerance and harmony – and it is potentially dangerous (if I’m going to be ethnocentric for a moment) for us as Jews here in the UK. I don’t need to remind you to use your vote at the June 4th European election coming up: it’s been well-publicised, by the Board of Deputies amongst others, that the BNP are seeking to gain a foothold (and the money that goes with it) in the European Parliament, through their percentage of the forthcoming vote . And whatever disillusion you feel about any of the parties you might usually vote for, your vote on the 4th will make a difference. (Vote Green if you are fed up with the others!).
We are in a situation where we can – through the blessed freedom of living in a democracy and having a vote – be an active participant in a small way to the Talmudic statement: ‘Happy the person who performs a good deed: that may tip the scales for them and the world’. Is it a mitzvah to vote? I don’t know, but it is an act of holiness to act in a way that keeps at bay, tries to keep at bay, the forces of destructiveness in the world. And the BNP are a nasty and hate-filled mob. And they aren’t going away.
In unstable times it may not take much to reach a tipping point where the forces of brutality and envy and vindictiveness find room to express themselves in our society. The children of Israel were organized for battle as they prepared to cross the desert, as they faced the wilderness. There were real enemies there and real battles they had to face – Og king of Bashan, Sihon the Amorite, Amalek. It would be best to be forewarned: our story is not over, and our history and Jewish mythology and texts still have much to teach, precious resources, giving us much food for thought, like manna every day, nurturing us in the wilderness as we face the future in the only way we can, walking backwards looking at where we have come from, where our journey has led thus over the generations, searching the past for clues to the future.
Thursday, 14 May 2009
‘Does Poetry Matter?’
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)
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)
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.
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