Last Saturday night my community, Finchley Reform Synagogue, held its annual late night Selichot service. This is always held the Saturday evening before the New Year, and I’d forgotten just what a peculiar service it is. It’s like a mini-version of the High Holy Days, or a dream-version, that passes in less than an hour. Ten days worth of - and several hundreds of pages of - liturgy and melodies and introspection compressed into 25 pages. It’s the Edited Highlights version – the one that cuts out all the boring bits and gets to the action. And yet it’s really just an overture, a prelude to the main thing. I suspect that I can’t be the only one who has a tucked-away thought that wishes it was the main event: that we could look into ourselves just for that one evening, assess the state of our souls – what we do well and what we fail in – and then move on, back to our lives, our ‘real’ lives (as we like to think of it).
I had an allocated slot in the evening , and when I spoke (and this blog mostly contains a slightly adapted version of my ‘sermonette’), I acknowledged the way in which those gathered for the service probably were there because they wanted to use the event as part of their own religious journey - an opportunity for religious reflection, or spiritual deepening, or just a space in the year when they had the luxury of concentrating uninterruptedly for an hour on their life: their priorities, values, strengths and limitations.
And I mused about the work of Teshuvah, of ‘turning and returning’, that is the focus of this period of the year. Who knows how that work is to be done? And how can we know what will work for us? Maybe by the end of that evening the inner work might have been accomplished. Or maybe, I went on,
‘your teshuvah will be done slowly and in an a cumulative way over the next weeks. Or maybe the whole elaborate process will all leave you cold or irritated until you get to Neilah – and then a word or a phrase in the book (or from a rabbi, halevei) will suddenly hit home, will suddenly illuminate something, or stir something in you, right at the end – and only then you will know that the High Holy Days still retain their power, their mystery...
‘None of knows, can know in advance, what will make the difference this year – what will speak to us, what will be helpful in this annual process of turning, returning, Teshuvah, turning our lives over and looking at them again. None of us knows, because if this process is going to be real for us it can’t be controlled – we can’t decide beforehand what prayers will speak to us, what words of wisdom, what melodies. We can’t know in advance, we can only open ourselves to the moment, each moment, and wait and listen and try to catch what effect that moment is having on us...
‘According to Martin Buber, God, ‘the divine’, never stops addressing us, never stops speaking to us (though when he uses the word speaking, he’s using a metaphor – as the Hebrew Bible does). To say that God never stops speaking, is a way of saying that the divine is present all the time, like a great ocean of being in which we are tiny waves. The wave can’t see the ocean but can only exist because of the ocean. To say that God never stops speaking puts the responsibility on us to attend, (shema, “listen” Israel), pay attention – don’t switch off, don’t put your fingers in your ears because you can’t bear the roar and rushing of your life as it sweeps by: stop and listen. Be still and listen. And you may be amazed at what you hear. Parts of yourself you didn’t know were there: courage, honesty, a capacity to sacrifice or let go of something, a calm knowledge of your own worth, a realisation of what you really value, what’s really important to you. Who knows what might be in there if you really listened in , as the Shema suggests? It could change your life – radically; or by just a millimetre - some new spark of understanding or feeling that didn’t exist before, or you didn’t think existed before. That’s how God speaks – in these perceptions, these insights, these fragments of knowledge and self-knowledge that we may never speak about, never even have the words to describe. But that just happen in us, to us, if we are quiet and listen....
‘The liturgy is supposed to help us with this process of listening. Though I know that often the liturgy does a very good job in stopping us listen. So many words, so much repetition, so much language that isn’t our natural language. A difficult theology and a sometimes alienating text. The liturgy can be a stumbling block to this real listening. And I say that knowing, and having often said, that I also think this book, this machzor, is the jewel in the crown of post-War liturgical creativity. But it isn’t going to work for everyone, or not every year. If you find that happening – that the language of the prayers isn’t helping you - then just leave it alone. Use something else – the study passages or the poetry. Or bring your own poetry to the service. There is no one way of doing these days...
‘But there is, I’d suggest, one aim, one overall aim – to listen in to the voice of God in whatever form it is speaking to you. And the music too can help us with this. Sometimes, like the traditional words, it may get in the way but it’s there to help us on the journey, to get at something in us that isn’t verbal, that is pre-verbal or beyond words, that bypasses the mind and all our clever thinking, all the ways we use our minds to protect us from deeper perceptions, to protect ourselves from the divine within us and around us, the music of the spheres. Music can percolate down through all that mental activity in us and seep into our souls, move us nearer to our true selves...’
And then I took a slight risk in a Reform synagogue – one never knows what one will say that can lead to a broygus – I mentioned something I’d come across from another Anglo-Jewish religious grouping, the Masorti movement. Of course we aren’t rivals or competitors, but colleagues - though I know not everyone sees things this way.
‘I noticed that the Masorti movement this year in their advertisements have come up with an advertising headline that says : ‘The High Holy Days should open our hearts, challenge our values and extend our moral imagination’. And I reckon that’s pretty good as a framework to help us think about our work over these days. I take it as a kind of imaginative re-working of the traditional ideas of teshuvah, u’tephillah u’tzedakah being the key themes of this period : that teshuvah , our returning, is towards an open-heartedness that we know we are capable of but that gets battered and bruised in us, because we endure so many hurts along the way, so many disappointments, so many experiences of being let down or rejected, that our hearts shrivel, atrophy – without our being aware of it – and we lose our open-heartedness. So these days are an opportunity to discover again how to open our hearts...
‘And tephillah, prayer, is a challenge to our values because the language of prayer talks about the highest values to which we can aspire. It talks of a God who is just and compassionate with the power to transform - and this language challenges our de-valued values, our compromises and deceits and failures to live up to what we could and can be, it reminds us that these values we attribute to God are our values too – and that we are capable of being like God, of catalysing the divine in ourselves – our compassion and our capacity to fight for justice and our capacity to transform what is into what ought to be. This is who we are – and our tephillah can remind us about that...
‘And finally, ‘to extend our moral imagination’. That’s a great phrase. Tzedakah means ‘righteousness’, but here we can see the expanded horizon of what that could mean. Our moral imagination is the part of us that can embrace what it might be like to be another person, someone who is suffering or in need, whose situation may be very remote from us – and I don’t need to list the countless causes and world-wide issues (from poverty to oppression) where our money, our time, our letter-writing, can make a difference to the quality of life of another human being....
And I concluded by reflecting that
‘I’m sure there is more in this notion– ‘to extend our moral imagination’ - than what I’ve just outlined. But that’s the point of these days ahead: we have the time to reflect on all this, explore individually and in each other’s company, the power of these words and themes. I wish you a good journey over the next few weeks and look forward to sharing some of it with you in one place or another’.
And so, to all who have read this far (and even to those who haven’t , for it does no harm) I wish one and all a Shana Tova, a good New Year. I will be offering some more New Year thoughts, I hope, in the days to come.
Wednesday, 16 September 2009
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
24 hours in Prague, 70 Years On
I am writing this on the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. On September 1st 1939 Germany invaded Poland on three fronts and two days later Britain and France declared war. It is a truism to say that nothing was ever the same again - with approximately 60 million dead by the end of the war, how could it be? - and a cliché to reflect that we all still live in the long shadows of those devastating events: Jewish history, British history, European history recognises that the experiences of those war years, and their aftermath, are permanently fused into our consciousness.
As I grow older I find myself more and more aware of how decisively those six years in the midst of the last century have woven themselves into the fabric of my conscious and unconscious life: given time, I could trace the multiple ways in which the contours of my life - its intellectual, emotional and religious preoccupations and affinities, the professional work I do, the literature I’m drawn to, the art and cinema I value, the imagery of my dreams, the countries I visit – have lines of continuity with events that pre-date my birth by nearly a decade.
But I’m not going to indulge that autobiographical impulse here. Just offer one experience from this last Bank Holiday weekend, when I found myself in Prague conducting a tombstone consecration ceremony for a lady named Hana Kvardova , whom I’d never met.
In 1942, as a 12 year old girl, Hana had been incarcerated in Terezin (Theresienstadt), where she remained until the camp’s liberation in 1945. She was from the small town of Uhříněves, just south of Prague – and out of the several hundred Jews who’d lived in the town before the War, she was one of only five who survived the War to return home. (At the cemetery on Sunday was an elderly, stoutly-built woman, dressed in grey and holding a forlorn bunch of yellow carnations, who tearfully recalled the moment she waved goodbye to Hana as she was taken away on 12th September that year – the first day of Rosh Hashanah, as it happens).
As it happens.
During the late 1990s my community, Finchley Reform Synagogue – led by Rabbi Jeffrey Newman and some dedicated members of FRS - had established links with the town of Uhříněves. Some 30 years previously, a Torah scroll that had belonged to the pre-War Uhříněves Jewish community had been given to Finchley Reform, who had applied for a scroll to the Czech Memorial Scrolls Trust (see www.czechmemorialscrollstrust.org) at the Westminster Synagogue. (After the war, the Trust had rescued more than 1500 Torah scrolls from the Jewish Museum in Prague where they had been deposited by the Nazis during their occupation of Czechoslovakia. The obsessional rigour with which the Nazis set about collecting and preserving for the future Jewish artefacts while simultaneously pursuing their annihilatory project in relation to real existing Jews involves an unassimilable irony that assaults the imagination).
Following the end of the communist era, some of the devoted non-Jewish citizens of Uhříněves had worked with astonishing determination to find ways of keeping alive the memory of their pre-War Jewish fellow townsmen and women. In October 2000 a group of FRS members visited the Czech Republic at the invitation of the Uhříněves Town Council. While there, they attended the unveiling of a memorial plaque - the result of close collaboration between FRS members and Uhrineves - on the exterior of the former synagogue building (now a double-glazing showroom).
Friendships and connections were forged, including with Hana, and contact has been maintained – I was asked to join an FRS group in June 2008 as an accompanying rabbinic presence, and had the humbling privilege of leading a Shabbat morning service for the group, who were joined by invited guests from the town and the Prague Jewish community. The service was held in the office-cum-showroom, which still retains the pre-War architecture of a shul, with alcoves clearly visible as well as the space where the Ark once was (and ‘our’ scroll once rested). Desks and computers were pushed aside, a rough oval of ill-matched chairs was formed, and after a gap of sixty-six years the old melodies and prayers filled the unfillable space. “Blessed are You, Adonai, who chooses His people in love...”
I did not meet Hana Kvardova on that occasion, but did meet her childhood friend, Libuse Votavova, who had been instrumental in searching out her old Jewish friend, who was living in impoverished circumstances. Libuse had then contacted the Jewish community in Prague on her behalf and helped her find refuge in the Jewish Old Age Home in Prague. She had also been deeply involved in Uhříněves’s work of reparation for the crimes committed against its Jews during the Nazi times. These bare facts fail to convey the emotional resonance of this history: one human story that stands in for a collective story of loss, the death of thriving communities, the struggle of survivors for decades afterwards – and the integrity of some non-Jews in recognising the need to make restitution, to honour those who lived and those who died, and to keep memories and stories alive.
Last Sunday, as we gathered in the beautiful tree-shaded Jewish cemetery in Prague – not the old cemetery in the city centre that all the tourists visit, but the late 19th century one slightly further out in the Zizkov district – I made my way to the far end of the cemetery, past the 40,000 gravestones and the monumental slabs of ivy-strewn marble inscribed with assimilated Germanic names of bourgeois Czech Jewish families who must have imagined that their art deco tombstones and mini-mausoleums would be visited by family members for generations to come.
So much for our capacity to imagine what the future holds, for any of us.
Passing reverently by the grave of Franz Kafka, buried with his parents, (and his three sisters who died in the Shoah), I came to the spot where Hana Kvardova was buried last year. We had a simple ceremony in English, Hebrew and Czech, with my words of introduction and explanation ably translated by Libushe’s grand-daughter Klara. (Last year, Klara’s friend Iva had translated for me at our Shabbat service – and both had the gift of conveying to those assembled the spirit of my words as well as their outer meaning. Thus - as it happens - the Jew is dependent on the non-Jew to help bring fully into being what the Jewish soul carries. There is a mystery and paradox here that would need a Kafka to describe).
Klara’s grandmother spoke powerfully about her old friend Hana and it felt like a chapter was closing – for the participants and Uhříněves itself. Those there to witness this small (but huge) event included old friends of Hana from the town, members of the progressive Prague Jewish community with which Finchley has links, and representatives of Finchley Reform who had helped organize (and pay for) this symbolic yet very real event. At the small reception after the consecration, I approached an elderly lady who had been resting with her stick on the arm of a young woman some distance away in the shade while the ceremony had been taking place. I wondered who she was and why she had kept her distance. She was Hana Fuchsova, and this was her grand-daughter. As a Prague Jew – and she proudly told me she was one of the last remaining of that pre-War German speaking Czech Jewish community to which Kafka also belonged - this Hana too had been in Terezin; and she’d been present at the unveiling of the plaque in 1990.
As we talked – with her grand-daughter Helena translating – she told me fragments of her story: about the boy she’d met before the War, then re-met and married in Terezin. Married? – I wanted to make sure I’d understood this – Yes, married, with a rabbi performing the ceremony. She couldn’t remember his name (in my imagination I wondered if it could have been Leo Baeck, who’d been sent from Berlin in Terezin in 1942). Her husband had been transported to Auschwitz but had survived and returned to Prague after the war. They picked up their life together, had a family – including Helena’s father, who inevitably married a non-Jew and of course together brought up children with no knowledge of Jewish life. A not unfamiliar story in central European post-War families.
As an aside, I asked Helena if she knew all this, and she acknowledged that some parts of it were new to her. So, as it happens, I found that I was facilitating a conversation that helped transmit a family story, a history, a life. So many gaps. So many absences. So much silence. But at that moment I knew why I was there.
So it is that the non-Jewish world needs the Jew - has always needed the Jew - in order to bring to light, to make known, the full richness and complexity of being. The paradox of mutual dependence, and inter-dependence – and all the passionate feelings of attraction and hatred and envy, on both sides, that this unconscious dependence generates.
And in that Prague cemetery, and during that brief ceremony that I’d travelled to Prague for, just for the day, I had a sense that although in so many ways in our own technologically-saturated age we are impossibly distant from those war years, in other ways they are with us still, haunting us still. Nothing is ever over.
...Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night...
...Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return...
...Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out
The music must always play...
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good...
...Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie...
...We must love one another or die...
(from W.H. Auden’s September 1, 1939)
As I grow older I find myself more and more aware of how decisively those six years in the midst of the last century have woven themselves into the fabric of my conscious and unconscious life: given time, I could trace the multiple ways in which the contours of my life - its intellectual, emotional and religious preoccupations and affinities, the professional work I do, the literature I’m drawn to, the art and cinema I value, the imagery of my dreams, the countries I visit – have lines of continuity with events that pre-date my birth by nearly a decade.
But I’m not going to indulge that autobiographical impulse here. Just offer one experience from this last Bank Holiday weekend, when I found myself in Prague conducting a tombstone consecration ceremony for a lady named Hana Kvardova , whom I’d never met.
In 1942, as a 12 year old girl, Hana had been incarcerated in Terezin (Theresienstadt), where she remained until the camp’s liberation in 1945. She was from the small town of Uhříněves, just south of Prague – and out of the several hundred Jews who’d lived in the town before the War, she was one of only five who survived the War to return home. (At the cemetery on Sunday was an elderly, stoutly-built woman, dressed in grey and holding a forlorn bunch of yellow carnations, who tearfully recalled the moment she waved goodbye to Hana as she was taken away on 12th September that year – the first day of Rosh Hashanah, as it happens).
As it happens.
During the late 1990s my community, Finchley Reform Synagogue – led by Rabbi Jeffrey Newman and some dedicated members of FRS - had established links with the town of Uhříněves. Some 30 years previously, a Torah scroll that had belonged to the pre-War Uhříněves Jewish community had been given to Finchley Reform, who had applied for a scroll to the Czech Memorial Scrolls Trust (see www.czechmemorialscrollstrust.org) at the Westminster Synagogue. (After the war, the Trust had rescued more than 1500 Torah scrolls from the Jewish Museum in Prague where they had been deposited by the Nazis during their occupation of Czechoslovakia. The obsessional rigour with which the Nazis set about collecting and preserving for the future Jewish artefacts while simultaneously pursuing their annihilatory project in relation to real existing Jews involves an unassimilable irony that assaults the imagination).
Following the end of the communist era, some of the devoted non-Jewish citizens of Uhříněves had worked with astonishing determination to find ways of keeping alive the memory of their pre-War Jewish fellow townsmen and women. In October 2000 a group of FRS members visited the Czech Republic at the invitation of the Uhříněves Town Council. While there, they attended the unveiling of a memorial plaque - the result of close collaboration between FRS members and Uhrineves - on the exterior of the former synagogue building (now a double-glazing showroom).
Friendships and connections were forged, including with Hana, and contact has been maintained – I was asked to join an FRS group in June 2008 as an accompanying rabbinic presence, and had the humbling privilege of leading a Shabbat morning service for the group, who were joined by invited guests from the town and the Prague Jewish community. The service was held in the office-cum-showroom, which still retains the pre-War architecture of a shul, with alcoves clearly visible as well as the space where the Ark once was (and ‘our’ scroll once rested). Desks and computers were pushed aside, a rough oval of ill-matched chairs was formed, and after a gap of sixty-six years the old melodies and prayers filled the unfillable space. “Blessed are You, Adonai, who chooses His people in love...”
I did not meet Hana Kvardova on that occasion, but did meet her childhood friend, Libuse Votavova, who had been instrumental in searching out her old Jewish friend, who was living in impoverished circumstances. Libuse had then contacted the Jewish community in Prague on her behalf and helped her find refuge in the Jewish Old Age Home in Prague. She had also been deeply involved in Uhříněves’s work of reparation for the crimes committed against its Jews during the Nazi times. These bare facts fail to convey the emotional resonance of this history: one human story that stands in for a collective story of loss, the death of thriving communities, the struggle of survivors for decades afterwards – and the integrity of some non-Jews in recognising the need to make restitution, to honour those who lived and those who died, and to keep memories and stories alive.
Last Sunday, as we gathered in the beautiful tree-shaded Jewish cemetery in Prague – not the old cemetery in the city centre that all the tourists visit, but the late 19th century one slightly further out in the Zizkov district – I made my way to the far end of the cemetery, past the 40,000 gravestones and the monumental slabs of ivy-strewn marble inscribed with assimilated Germanic names of bourgeois Czech Jewish families who must have imagined that their art deco tombstones and mini-mausoleums would be visited by family members for generations to come.
So much for our capacity to imagine what the future holds, for any of us.
Passing reverently by the grave of Franz Kafka, buried with his parents, (and his three sisters who died in the Shoah), I came to the spot where Hana Kvardova was buried last year. We had a simple ceremony in English, Hebrew and Czech, with my words of introduction and explanation ably translated by Libushe’s grand-daughter Klara. (Last year, Klara’s friend Iva had translated for me at our Shabbat service – and both had the gift of conveying to those assembled the spirit of my words as well as their outer meaning. Thus - as it happens - the Jew is dependent on the non-Jew to help bring fully into being what the Jewish soul carries. There is a mystery and paradox here that would need a Kafka to describe).
Klara’s grandmother spoke powerfully about her old friend Hana and it felt like a chapter was closing – for the participants and Uhříněves itself. Those there to witness this small (but huge) event included old friends of Hana from the town, members of the progressive Prague Jewish community with which Finchley has links, and representatives of Finchley Reform who had helped organize (and pay for) this symbolic yet very real event. At the small reception after the consecration, I approached an elderly lady who had been resting with her stick on the arm of a young woman some distance away in the shade while the ceremony had been taking place. I wondered who she was and why she had kept her distance. She was Hana Fuchsova, and this was her grand-daughter. As a Prague Jew – and she proudly told me she was one of the last remaining of that pre-War German speaking Czech Jewish community to which Kafka also belonged - this Hana too had been in Terezin; and she’d been present at the unveiling of the plaque in 1990.
As we talked – with her grand-daughter Helena translating – she told me fragments of her story: about the boy she’d met before the War, then re-met and married in Terezin. Married? – I wanted to make sure I’d understood this – Yes, married, with a rabbi performing the ceremony. She couldn’t remember his name (in my imagination I wondered if it could have been Leo Baeck, who’d been sent from Berlin in Terezin in 1942). Her husband had been transported to Auschwitz but had survived and returned to Prague after the war. They picked up their life together, had a family – including Helena’s father, who inevitably married a non-Jew and of course together brought up children with no knowledge of Jewish life. A not unfamiliar story in central European post-War families.
As an aside, I asked Helena if she knew all this, and she acknowledged that some parts of it were new to her. So, as it happens, I found that I was facilitating a conversation that helped transmit a family story, a history, a life. So many gaps. So many absences. So much silence. But at that moment I knew why I was there.
So it is that the non-Jewish world needs the Jew - has always needed the Jew - in order to bring to light, to make known, the full richness and complexity of being. The paradox of mutual dependence, and inter-dependence – and all the passionate feelings of attraction and hatred and envy, on both sides, that this unconscious dependence generates.
And in that Prague cemetery, and during that brief ceremony that I’d travelled to Prague for, just for the day, I had a sense that although in so many ways in our own technologically-saturated age we are impossibly distant from those war years, in other ways they are with us still, haunting us still. Nothing is ever over.
...Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night...
...Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return...
...Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out
The music must always play...
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good...
...Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie...
...We must love one another or die...
(from W.H. Auden’s September 1, 1939)
Thursday, 23 July 2009
‘Why Seamus Heaney? But not JFS?’
Over the last few weeks, several of you have asked me if I am going to blog about the recent Court of Appeal ruling that UK Jewish schools are in breach of the 1976 Race Relations Act when, as they currently do, they select children on the basis of ethnic descent (ie in relation to a mother or father’s Jewish status, either through birth or conversion).
My answer has been consistent : No, I’m not.
There have been plenty of thoughtful and eloquent rabbinic and lay responses, many of which express concern about the state’s involvement in - as Rabbi Tony Bayfield put it - an infringement of ‘the fundamental right of the Jewish community to decide for itself the criteria for being Jewish’. (See Tony Bayfield’s cogent analysis at http://news.reformjudaism.org.uk)
But I do want to say something about my disinclination to write about the issues this case has raised. And this means I have to start somewhere else.
At one point in his essay collection Preoccupations, the poet Seamus Heaney asks himself the following searching (and self-searching) questions:
‘How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice , his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world?’
When I read that I found myself reflecting on how similar those questions are to my own questions as a rabbi. Substitute the word ‘rabbi’ for the word ‘poet’ and you hear some of the big questions that preoccupy me.
What does it mean to live ‘properly’, as a Jew, as a rabbi? Is this about ethics and morality? Intellectual honesty? Emotional openness? Spiritual attentiveness? The search for existential meaning? The struggle for justice and righteousness in oneself, with others? The capacity to inspire? To care about others’ lives and struggles? It could be a thousand things - but it’s as if the ground shifts beneath my feet as I try to reflect on that question. It’s too big. I can’t hold on to it, it trickles through my hands like sand.
But whatever it means, Heaney connects it intimately, as a question, with writing. How should a poet properly live and write? As if the two are twin activities conjoined at the hip. And that linkage, I feel a deep affinity to. I suppose this blog, these last 6 months, has been testimony to that. I have found myself writing about many things I did not know I had any thoughts about – until I found out, through the act of writing for an unseen audience, that I did indeed have some thoughts, however haphazard (or hazardous) they might be.
And that leads to the question of ‘voice’. The quest to find a way of speaking – ie of writing – that is distinctive, and true to the deepest perceptions and intuitions that one finds lodged within oneself. A self-mining to discover what is there – be it gold-dust or fool’s gold. A dredging of the hidden knowledge and the quirky, idiosyncratic stuff of one’s life and preoccupations. Glimmers of meaning. Fragments of coherence from the midst of the chaos. If one is lucky.
There are writers one reads that one recognises instantly within a sentence or two. They have their ‘signature’, as Jacques Derrida put it, inscribed within their words, their cadences, their themes, their thought processes incarnated in language. I think – off the top of my head – of writers in different genres, such as Kafka, George Steiner, Paul Celan, Abraham Joshua Heschel. Nearer to home: Rabbi Jonathan Magonet and Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg and Rabbi Lionel Blue. All these ‘voices’ are unmistakable. A stance, an angle of vision, incarnated in prose, just words on the page, but breathing into being a distinctive, living, inimitable pattern of meaning and belief. This, I think, is what it means to have a ‘voice’.
Can one recognise one’s own ‘voice’? I know how shocked I always am to hear my voice, literally – on a recording, a tape, the radio, and so on. I don’t know it from the outside. I can’t hear it. And so it is with my writing ‘voice’ – I can’t hear it clearly, only (if at all) in snatches, like an overheard whisp of conversation floating in the wind; not even a conversation, more a phrase or two that suddenly becomes audible as one passes talking couples on Hampstead Heath.
But whatever this rabbinic ‘voice’ of mine is, it is linked in my mind to those other words that Heaney uses: ‘place’ and ‘literary heritage’ and ‘contemporary world’.
And for ‘literary heritage’ let’s read, for me as a rabbi, ‘religious heritage’. Though of course there is a large overlap here, for such a major part of my ‘religious’ heritage is itself a distinctive ‘literary’ heritage: from the Hebrew Bible through the Talmudic literature (with its amalgam of law and lore), to the medieval poets and philosophers, and embracing the mystics of the Kabbalah, and the Hasidic masters, and the scholars and theologians and writers of modernity: concentric circles of ‘Torah’, teaching, a ‘literary heritage’ stretching from Genesis and Yochanan ben Zakkai to Spinoza and Kafka, Freud and Buber, Philip Roth and Yehudah Amichai. “Our homeland the text”, as George Steiner once expressed it. Thinking about my complex relationship to that ‘literary’ heritage helps me get close to the heart of what being a Jew means to me – and from there, to what I understand being a ‘rabbi’ is about.
Yet I know that my Jewish heritage is larger than the ‘literary’. For Judaism as I understand it is not only a civilisational heritage of textual and inter-textual learning, an intellectual and emotional and spiritual resource, but it’s also a heritage of living. For although the Judaic relationship to literature and language and ‘the word’ is fundamental, constitutive of who and what we are (who and what I am), I see myself too as an inheritor of a heritage that is not only about the texts in books but is also about the texts of people’s lives.
Jewish celebration and Jewish suffering, Jewish poverty and Jewish self-betterment, Jewish devotion to practice, and Jewish revolt against practice, generations of women and men struggling to keep the flame of identity alive, struggling to keep themselves alive (and their children, for that was always where hope lay, if not for us, then something better for the next generation), but meanwhile, in the absence of the always delayed, and maybe imaginary, Messianic age, struggling to create a society brimming with justice and compassion and righteousness : this was a multi-generational historical heritage lived out in faith and in escape from faith, springing from faith and sometimes in opposition to faith. My heritage is composed of the stories of countless lives, in many lands and many eras, an unbroken chain of 40 generations and more, living out the daily consequences of a destiny inscribed in the texts but incarnated in the fine-grained texture of personal lives like yours and mine.
And as for ‘contemporary world’: well, I look back on these last 6 months of blogs and see how much I have been trying to engage with what goes on here and now, the litany of the daily news, and how to bring a ‘rabbinic’ and/or a psychological perspective (and can there really be a difference between these two?) on what we experience happening around us: politics, Israel, the environment, anti-semitism...
And this takes me back to Heaney and an earlier statement by him that poetry should be ‘strong enough to help’. Which doesn’t mean ‘the kind of strength that is supposed to come from reading books of an uplifting nature’; but rather the potential help from poetry’s ‘response to conditions in the world at a moment when the world was in crisis’.
Heaney calls this ‘redress’, a state when ‘the poetic imagination seems to redress whatever is wrong or exacerbating in the prevailing conditions’, offering ‘a response to reality which has a liberating and verifying effect upon the individual spirit...tilting the scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium...This redressing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances.’
I’m not sure about transcendent ‘equilibrium’- maybe too static an image? - but that statement about the poetic imagination is as near as dammit to how I think about the rabbinic imagination; and I know how far and how often I fail to get anywhere near that perspective of ‘redress’, the ‘glimpsed alternative’, the ‘revelation of potential’. But that’s what this struggle for ‘voice’ involves, for me.
Which is all a long way from JFS, and the travails that attend this recent ruling. But this blog today has attempted to articulate the background as to why I can’t respond to this case with the same fluency or intelligence as others. My affinities lie elsewhere, and while I admire and support those who are taking up the cudgels, I find myself letting those who have the interest, the ability, and the knowledge get on with it. They will articulate the issues far more cogently than I ever could.
Besides, I’ve never felt comfortable with the way Jews pressed to be included in the 1976 Race Relations Act. We aren’t a race. Nor are we an ethnic group. We are a people. A civilisation. A culture. Or rather: we are the product of many cultures, and have taken from, and outlived, many civilisations. We are hybrid and heterogeneous. In the Bible we are called Ivrim, Hebrews – literally, ‘those who cross over’: ie. ‘boundary-crossers’. Jews are a form of ‘faith community’, but it is a multi-faceted faith: of believers and non-believers, talkers and doers, machers and crooks (and of course,occasionally, machers who are crooks), held together by an indefinable inner sense of shared history, if not shared vision.
But we wanted the protection of the law in the UK, so we agreed to dim our stellar identity, truncate our complex mosaic of uniqueness, our essential boundary-crossing nature – and become an ethnic group. And no doubt we have benefitted from this over the years. But now the dormant, repressed truth is pushing its way back into consciousness. We never really belonged within the ambit of that Race Relations Act. And now we are having to deal with the consequences.
I'm expecting this to be my last blog for the moment – summer (so-called) approaches, normal service will be resumed in September, inshallah. Thank you for bothering to read thus far.
My answer has been consistent : No, I’m not.
There have been plenty of thoughtful and eloquent rabbinic and lay responses, many of which express concern about the state’s involvement in - as Rabbi Tony Bayfield put it - an infringement of ‘the fundamental right of the Jewish community to decide for itself the criteria for being Jewish’. (See Tony Bayfield’s cogent analysis at http://news.reformjudaism.org.uk)
But I do want to say something about my disinclination to write about the issues this case has raised. And this means I have to start somewhere else.
At one point in his essay collection Preoccupations, the poet Seamus Heaney asks himself the following searching (and self-searching) questions:
‘How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice , his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world?’
When I read that I found myself reflecting on how similar those questions are to my own questions as a rabbi. Substitute the word ‘rabbi’ for the word ‘poet’ and you hear some of the big questions that preoccupy me.
What does it mean to live ‘properly’, as a Jew, as a rabbi? Is this about ethics and morality? Intellectual honesty? Emotional openness? Spiritual attentiveness? The search for existential meaning? The struggle for justice and righteousness in oneself, with others? The capacity to inspire? To care about others’ lives and struggles? It could be a thousand things - but it’s as if the ground shifts beneath my feet as I try to reflect on that question. It’s too big. I can’t hold on to it, it trickles through my hands like sand.
But whatever it means, Heaney connects it intimately, as a question, with writing. How should a poet properly live and write? As if the two are twin activities conjoined at the hip. And that linkage, I feel a deep affinity to. I suppose this blog, these last 6 months, has been testimony to that. I have found myself writing about many things I did not know I had any thoughts about – until I found out, through the act of writing for an unseen audience, that I did indeed have some thoughts, however haphazard (or hazardous) they might be.
And that leads to the question of ‘voice’. The quest to find a way of speaking – ie of writing – that is distinctive, and true to the deepest perceptions and intuitions that one finds lodged within oneself. A self-mining to discover what is there – be it gold-dust or fool’s gold. A dredging of the hidden knowledge and the quirky, idiosyncratic stuff of one’s life and preoccupations. Glimmers of meaning. Fragments of coherence from the midst of the chaos. If one is lucky.
There are writers one reads that one recognises instantly within a sentence or two. They have their ‘signature’, as Jacques Derrida put it, inscribed within their words, their cadences, their themes, their thought processes incarnated in language. I think – off the top of my head – of writers in different genres, such as Kafka, George Steiner, Paul Celan, Abraham Joshua Heschel. Nearer to home: Rabbi Jonathan Magonet and Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg and Rabbi Lionel Blue. All these ‘voices’ are unmistakable. A stance, an angle of vision, incarnated in prose, just words on the page, but breathing into being a distinctive, living, inimitable pattern of meaning and belief. This, I think, is what it means to have a ‘voice’.
Can one recognise one’s own ‘voice’? I know how shocked I always am to hear my voice, literally – on a recording, a tape, the radio, and so on. I don’t know it from the outside. I can’t hear it. And so it is with my writing ‘voice’ – I can’t hear it clearly, only (if at all) in snatches, like an overheard whisp of conversation floating in the wind; not even a conversation, more a phrase or two that suddenly becomes audible as one passes talking couples on Hampstead Heath.
But whatever this rabbinic ‘voice’ of mine is, it is linked in my mind to those other words that Heaney uses: ‘place’ and ‘literary heritage’ and ‘contemporary world’.
And for ‘literary heritage’ let’s read, for me as a rabbi, ‘religious heritage’. Though of course there is a large overlap here, for such a major part of my ‘religious’ heritage is itself a distinctive ‘literary’ heritage: from the Hebrew Bible through the Talmudic literature (with its amalgam of law and lore), to the medieval poets and philosophers, and embracing the mystics of the Kabbalah, and the Hasidic masters, and the scholars and theologians and writers of modernity: concentric circles of ‘Torah’, teaching, a ‘literary heritage’ stretching from Genesis and Yochanan ben Zakkai to Spinoza and Kafka, Freud and Buber, Philip Roth and Yehudah Amichai. “Our homeland the text”, as George Steiner once expressed it. Thinking about my complex relationship to that ‘literary’ heritage helps me get close to the heart of what being a Jew means to me – and from there, to what I understand being a ‘rabbi’ is about.
Yet I know that my Jewish heritage is larger than the ‘literary’. For Judaism as I understand it is not only a civilisational heritage of textual and inter-textual learning, an intellectual and emotional and spiritual resource, but it’s also a heritage of living. For although the Judaic relationship to literature and language and ‘the word’ is fundamental, constitutive of who and what we are (who and what I am), I see myself too as an inheritor of a heritage that is not only about the texts in books but is also about the texts of people’s lives.
Jewish celebration and Jewish suffering, Jewish poverty and Jewish self-betterment, Jewish devotion to practice, and Jewish revolt against practice, generations of women and men struggling to keep the flame of identity alive, struggling to keep themselves alive (and their children, for that was always where hope lay, if not for us, then something better for the next generation), but meanwhile, in the absence of the always delayed, and maybe imaginary, Messianic age, struggling to create a society brimming with justice and compassion and righteousness : this was a multi-generational historical heritage lived out in faith and in escape from faith, springing from faith and sometimes in opposition to faith. My heritage is composed of the stories of countless lives, in many lands and many eras, an unbroken chain of 40 generations and more, living out the daily consequences of a destiny inscribed in the texts but incarnated in the fine-grained texture of personal lives like yours and mine.
And as for ‘contemporary world’: well, I look back on these last 6 months of blogs and see how much I have been trying to engage with what goes on here and now, the litany of the daily news, and how to bring a ‘rabbinic’ and/or a psychological perspective (and can there really be a difference between these two?) on what we experience happening around us: politics, Israel, the environment, anti-semitism...
And this takes me back to Heaney and an earlier statement by him that poetry should be ‘strong enough to help’. Which doesn’t mean ‘the kind of strength that is supposed to come from reading books of an uplifting nature’; but rather the potential help from poetry’s ‘response to conditions in the world at a moment when the world was in crisis’.
Heaney calls this ‘redress’, a state when ‘the poetic imagination seems to redress whatever is wrong or exacerbating in the prevailing conditions’, offering ‘a response to reality which has a liberating and verifying effect upon the individual spirit...tilting the scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium...This redressing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances.’
I’m not sure about transcendent ‘equilibrium’- maybe too static an image? - but that statement about the poetic imagination is as near as dammit to how I think about the rabbinic imagination; and I know how far and how often I fail to get anywhere near that perspective of ‘redress’, the ‘glimpsed alternative’, the ‘revelation of potential’. But that’s what this struggle for ‘voice’ involves, for me.
Which is all a long way from JFS, and the travails that attend this recent ruling. But this blog today has attempted to articulate the background as to why I can’t respond to this case with the same fluency or intelligence as others. My affinities lie elsewhere, and while I admire and support those who are taking up the cudgels, I find myself letting those who have the interest, the ability, and the knowledge get on with it. They will articulate the issues far more cogently than I ever could.
Besides, I’ve never felt comfortable with the way Jews pressed to be included in the 1976 Race Relations Act. We aren’t a race. Nor are we an ethnic group. We are a people. A civilisation. A culture. Or rather: we are the product of many cultures, and have taken from, and outlived, many civilisations. We are hybrid and heterogeneous. In the Bible we are called Ivrim, Hebrews – literally, ‘those who cross over’: ie. ‘boundary-crossers’. Jews are a form of ‘faith community’, but it is a multi-faceted faith: of believers and non-believers, talkers and doers, machers and crooks (and of course,occasionally, machers who are crooks), held together by an indefinable inner sense of shared history, if not shared vision.
But we wanted the protection of the law in the UK, so we agreed to dim our stellar identity, truncate our complex mosaic of uniqueness, our essential boundary-crossing nature – and become an ethnic group. And no doubt we have benefitted from this over the years. But now the dormant, repressed truth is pushing its way back into consciousness. We never really belonged within the ambit of that Race Relations Act. And now we are having to deal with the consequences.
I'm expecting this to be my last blog for the moment – summer (so-called) approaches, normal service will be resumed in September, inshallah. Thank you for bothering to read thus far.
Wednesday, 8 July 2009
‘Michael who?’
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’.
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’.
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.
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