Could you have located Haiti on a map two weeks ago? No, neither could I. I knew where it was vaguely, but had no knowledge of it other than it being one of those desperately poor nations of which our world has an abundance: one of those places that comes to mind occasionally when I say or sing that familiar repeated line in the Jewish liturgy: Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom... – ‘May the One who makes peace/wholeness on high bring this peace/wholeness to us, to all of the community of Israel...’ – Then we sometimes add - in a spirit of all-embracing tolerance, optimism and naive hopefulness that allows us to feel good about ourselves as having a universalist dimension to our faith rather than a narrow ethnic particularism – ‘and to the whole world.’
Well there is no peace in Haiti. No wholeness. And no prayers of ours that can help (can they ever?). Of course the notion that these kind of natural events – like earthquakes and tsunamis - are so-called ‘acts of God’ is an absurd left-over from a pre-modern form of fear-based religious thinking. That ‘God’ is some kind of capricious external entity whose ‘hand’ intervenes wilfully in our history and in our natural world – like a child who builds a palace of toy bricks then sweeps them away with a tearful swipe of its angry hand – this image of ‘God’ is the one that Richard Dawkins so relentlessly and humourlessly dismisses. And in that respect I am with Dawkins – though I find that a sprinkling of humour as one demolishes the worn-out pieties of old usually does no harm. You can be an assassin with a smile on your face.
A smile not of mockery, or glee, but of camaraderie: ‘We are in this together – these questions of faith and doubt – let’s not pretend we believe when we don’t, let’s abandon worn-out thinking and what we are told we should believe, let’s grow up and explore these questions in a spirit of lightness of being, not heaviness of heart, let’s enjoy the adventure, the venturing into new ways of thinking, new ways of connecting to faith, new ways of exploring the profoundest questions about what we are doing here in the world, how it all hangs together, if it all hangs together in some way always beyond our comprehension: maybe there are ways we can glimpse the underlying mystery, maybe not – but it is the journey that counts, the journey wrestling with faith and doubt in a spirit of intoxicated gravity, good-humoured seriousness, where it matters infinitely, and it matters not a jot...’
So: no 'act of God' then. But a combination of how this planet is made – geology, and how it operates, neutrally, impersonally – and what we make in the human realm: economically, politically, socially. For what I have discovered in these last two weeks, between the tears at the torn-off limbs and my naive astonishment at the lack of basic resources – how could it be that Haiti had a grand total of just two fire stations in the whole island? – is that the island contains a people so poor (living on $2 a day on average), so lacking in leadership and basic infrastructure and material resources, that when a catastrophe like this occurs the society simply ceases to function - but that it needn’t have been like this.
I’ve learnt about – I’ve finally understood the context of – the decades of dictatorship (remember the Duvaliers, sponsored by the US?), the foreign-backed coups and American invasions to undermine leaders like the former Catholic priest Jean-Baptiste Aristide who, inspired by liberation theology, tried to bring in social justice and economic development that wasn’t beholden to the International Monetary Fund’s own dictatorial neo-liberalism.
I’ve learnt that in 1980 Haiti was self-sufficient in its staple crop, rice, but once America dumped its surplus on the island the rice-farmers had to move from the countryside to the flimsy slums of Port-au-Prince (we know, tragically, what that means for them now) and that in the last decade Haiti has been forced to import rice to feed itself.
It is surely a human outrage - a human-constructed tragedy of a different dimension – when we realise what has gone on over these last decades. As we send our money to help now - as we appreciate that whatever the history of the island, targeted donations are still vital - we can nevertheless still feel the outrage : that it need not have been as devastating as this, the earthquake. How many deaths there have been we will never know. How many deaths there would have been if different principles of economics and governance had been in place we will never know. But it would have been far less: in last year’s hurricane Haiti lost 800 people while neighbouring Cuba lost four. (Haiti’s infant mortality rate is around 80 per 1,000; Cuba’s is 5.8 – makes you think, doesn’t it?).
Anyway it makes me think that when one hears the old question ‘How could God allow such a tragedy?’ that the questioner is looking in the wrong place, and that the question itself is a symptom of a profound avoidance. Questioning ‘God’ is a child-like mistake. It is a category error. But questioning the greed and destructiveness immured in the human heart, questioning the way the human mind constructs abstract and inhuman theories of what is ‘best’ for other people, questioning the ways certain versions of the capitalist ethic can be destructive of human well-being, questioning our multiple collusions with the structures of Western geopolitics where they are false to the values of justice and compassion – this is where the questioning needs to be.
Compassion after the tragic event is all very well, but it's the easy option, sad to say. The response is wonderful, this generosity of the human heart - and yet, secretly, we know that the hypocrisy stinks to the heavens. We are our own worst enemies.
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
Sunday, 10 January 2010
Kafka, the snow, the decade to come
So, the new decade has begun with a northern Europe-wide breakdown of the rhythms and routines of everyday life: snow, ice, abandoned vehicles, frozen fields, panic buying, power cuts, a threat to gas supplies – and in Germany, co-incidentally, a quarter of credit/debit cards malfunctioning, unable to adjust to the numbers ‘2010’, so unable to let people take money from ATMs. One way or another, a renewed awareness of our vulnerabilities, how much we are dependent on those weather gods and the vast hidden infrastructure of technology, as powerful and omnipresent as any of the invisible deities of old.
The weather might have a certain harsh beauty to it, even moments of inhospitable grandeur – dazzling modernist white on white, blurred edges of field and sky blending into each other, puffy laden hedges, careful wrapped-up walkers, carefree sledding children out of Breughel, defamilarised paths that are suddenly no-paths. Yet these, for me, are passing wonders. I’d already been musing on what this decade ahead might bring – so this week’s chaos seems almost too convenient a metaphor for thoughts about the decade to come, almost too apt a symbol with which to speak about my deeper concerns about these coming years.
Of course this notion of a ‘decade’ is a kind of fiction – a construct we use to stop time past dissolving into an undifferentiated pile of slush. We use the concept of a ‘decade’ to try to impose order on events, to generate meaning and gain perspective. And yet as artificial as it is to divide up history into chunks, as if it were a bar of chocolate, as long as we are aware of the artifice involved then the ‘decade’ can be a useful prism through which we can look back (or forward) as we try to create a narrative out of the confusion of events that slip by us, hour by hour, then suddenly year by year...
I’ve been reflecting on what it was like a century ago, in 1910 – and how unimaginable it would have been in Edwardian England, or Germany, or czarist Russia, in any part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, or the United States, to imagine what their new decade would bring to pass. Technological excitement was growing by the day: the aeroplane was still in its infancy, with Charles Rolls - he of Rolls Royce - making the first return flight over the Channel in April 1910 (and crashing to his death a few months later); then the first ascent to over 1000 metres that same year; and the first female aviator. On the roads, Henry Ford was producing 10,000 cars a day as the automobile industry began its imperious colonisation of the planet. The ‘kinema’ was still a relatively new wonder, still in the infancy of a revolution in mass entertainment and collective entrancement. And the 15 million European dead of the ‘Great War’ – the so-called ‘War To End All Wars’ – were youngsters dreaming of all these new possibilities of a world transforming itself in front of their hungry, eager eyes...
A truism to remember that the future is ever unknowable. Though still we scan the skies for what might come to pass. But the history of a whole decade is too much to imagine. Better to focus on the individual, an individual.
This year, 2010, I have decided on a project of my own devising: my own act of homage to slow reading ; and to the value of seeing the world through another’s eyes. I have decided to re-read - my first reading was as a teenager – my falling-to-pieces Penguin paperback edition of The Diaries of Franz Kafka (edited by Max Brod). The Diaries begin in 1910 and end with his death in 1923. But I intend to read them, and reflect on them a century on, in parallel to the date they were written, month by month, year by year. So, a thirteen year project - inshallah, deo volente, b’ezrat HaShem.
Why bother with such a quixotic meshuggeneh venture? Who can ever really say? Maybe I will find out as it proceeds...I am not so wedded to the notion of having to understand things beforehand.
Meanwhile, the beginning of the journey is easy: I can see that 1910 occupies only 25 paperback pages out of 487. So, lots of gaps, plenty of time to get into the journey of accompanying this singular and extra-ordinary man.
The early pages are undated, which is a bit disorientating for my project. How many do I read at a time? The first dated entry, some pages in, is May 1910. So I have a few months grace, some time to burrow into the text and see what is there to be uncovered.
The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past. First sentence in the diary. A line drawn beneath it. (This pattern is repeated throughout this first page, later pages have entries accompanied by squiggled line-drawings).
‘If he should forever ahsk me.’ The ah, released from the sentence, flew off like a ball on the meadow. Second sentence. A line drawn beneath it.
What are these sentences? Observations, apparently at random: things that Kafka has seen, or heard, that have struck him as worthy of recording (and thinking about). Why these in particular? (And not those, over there?) What strikes us each day that we then ignore? What does it mean to pay attention to what we see, or hear? The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past. Why? What is frightening? Is it the speed? The technology? We think about our response when a speeding train hurtles through the station. Do we go ‘rigid’? Kafka seems to observe the contrast between the movement of the train and the frozen response of the onlookers. He shows us this scene through his own onlooker’s eyes. Vision is refracted: we see him seeing them seeing the train. Does this sentence, this word picture, have any other meaning than the literal? I turn it over in my mind. I'm looking at the world through his eyes. Yes, it’s an everyday observation - but as so often in Kafka, the words hint at something beyond themselves, something hidden and unsaid.
The decade begins with a moment of fear. Yet there is no reason to be afraid. Or is there? The train goes past, time moves on - and we, watching and waiting, our bodies are tense, motionless, as if something might happen. What might happen? No choice but to wait, and watch - onlookers ourselves - wait and see what comes to pass...
Listen to how people talk. The inflections of their words. ‘If he should forever ahsk me.’ The ah, released from the sentence, flew off like a ball on the meadow. Language seems to have a life of its own, as solid as a ball flying through the air. Words have their own autonomy, they move beyond us as we speak. Writers know this, fleetingly – but Kafka catches it. The tiny moment that speaks a larger truth.
As 1910 progresses through the mind and pen of Franz Kafka, I will look forward to reporting back from time to time. As 2010 progresses, beyond the frozen now, I am hoping its opening weeks symbolise nothing, augur nothing, hint at nothing. The shelves of the shops this morning were almost empty, the newsagent did not look up as I left my money: I could have been a ghost, from the past, or even the future.
The weather might have a certain harsh beauty to it, even moments of inhospitable grandeur – dazzling modernist white on white, blurred edges of field and sky blending into each other, puffy laden hedges, careful wrapped-up walkers, carefree sledding children out of Breughel, defamilarised paths that are suddenly no-paths. Yet these, for me, are passing wonders. I’d already been musing on what this decade ahead might bring – so this week’s chaos seems almost too convenient a metaphor for thoughts about the decade to come, almost too apt a symbol with which to speak about my deeper concerns about these coming years.
Of course this notion of a ‘decade’ is a kind of fiction – a construct we use to stop time past dissolving into an undifferentiated pile of slush. We use the concept of a ‘decade’ to try to impose order on events, to generate meaning and gain perspective. And yet as artificial as it is to divide up history into chunks, as if it were a bar of chocolate, as long as we are aware of the artifice involved then the ‘decade’ can be a useful prism through which we can look back (or forward) as we try to create a narrative out of the confusion of events that slip by us, hour by hour, then suddenly year by year...
I’ve been reflecting on what it was like a century ago, in 1910 – and how unimaginable it would have been in Edwardian England, or Germany, or czarist Russia, in any part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, or the United States, to imagine what their new decade would bring to pass. Technological excitement was growing by the day: the aeroplane was still in its infancy, with Charles Rolls - he of Rolls Royce - making the first return flight over the Channel in April 1910 (and crashing to his death a few months later); then the first ascent to over 1000 metres that same year; and the first female aviator. On the roads, Henry Ford was producing 10,000 cars a day as the automobile industry began its imperious colonisation of the planet. The ‘kinema’ was still a relatively new wonder, still in the infancy of a revolution in mass entertainment and collective entrancement. And the 15 million European dead of the ‘Great War’ – the so-called ‘War To End All Wars’ – were youngsters dreaming of all these new possibilities of a world transforming itself in front of their hungry, eager eyes...
A truism to remember that the future is ever unknowable. Though still we scan the skies for what might come to pass. But the history of a whole decade is too much to imagine. Better to focus on the individual, an individual.
This year, 2010, I have decided on a project of my own devising: my own act of homage to slow reading ; and to the value of seeing the world through another’s eyes. I have decided to re-read - my first reading was as a teenager – my falling-to-pieces Penguin paperback edition of The Diaries of Franz Kafka (edited by Max Brod). The Diaries begin in 1910 and end with his death in 1923. But I intend to read them, and reflect on them a century on, in parallel to the date they were written, month by month, year by year. So, a thirteen year project - inshallah, deo volente, b’ezrat HaShem.
Why bother with such a quixotic meshuggeneh venture? Who can ever really say? Maybe I will find out as it proceeds...I am not so wedded to the notion of having to understand things beforehand.
Meanwhile, the beginning of the journey is easy: I can see that 1910 occupies only 25 paperback pages out of 487. So, lots of gaps, plenty of time to get into the journey of accompanying this singular and extra-ordinary man.
The early pages are undated, which is a bit disorientating for my project. How many do I read at a time? The first dated entry, some pages in, is May 1910. So I have a few months grace, some time to burrow into the text and see what is there to be uncovered.
The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past. First sentence in the diary. A line drawn beneath it. (This pattern is repeated throughout this first page, later pages have entries accompanied by squiggled line-drawings).
‘If he should forever ahsk me.’ The ah, released from the sentence, flew off like a ball on the meadow. Second sentence. A line drawn beneath it.
What are these sentences? Observations, apparently at random: things that Kafka has seen, or heard, that have struck him as worthy of recording (and thinking about). Why these in particular? (And not those, over there?) What strikes us each day that we then ignore? What does it mean to pay attention to what we see, or hear? The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past. Why? What is frightening? Is it the speed? The technology? We think about our response when a speeding train hurtles through the station. Do we go ‘rigid’? Kafka seems to observe the contrast between the movement of the train and the frozen response of the onlookers. He shows us this scene through his own onlooker’s eyes. Vision is refracted: we see him seeing them seeing the train. Does this sentence, this word picture, have any other meaning than the literal? I turn it over in my mind. I'm looking at the world through his eyes. Yes, it’s an everyday observation - but as so often in Kafka, the words hint at something beyond themselves, something hidden and unsaid.
The decade begins with a moment of fear. Yet there is no reason to be afraid. Or is there? The train goes past, time moves on - and we, watching and waiting, our bodies are tense, motionless, as if something might happen. What might happen? No choice but to wait, and watch - onlookers ourselves - wait and see what comes to pass...
Listen to how people talk. The inflections of their words. ‘If he should forever ahsk me.’ The ah, released from the sentence, flew off like a ball on the meadow. Language seems to have a life of its own, as solid as a ball flying through the air. Words have their own autonomy, they move beyond us as we speak. Writers know this, fleetingly – but Kafka catches it. The tiny moment that speaks a larger truth.
As 1910 progresses through the mind and pen of Franz Kafka, I will look forward to reporting back from time to time. As 2010 progresses, beyond the frozen now, I am hoping its opening weeks symbolise nothing, augur nothing, hint at nothing. The shelves of the shops this morning were almost empty, the newsagent did not look up as I left my money: I could have been a ghost, from the past, or even the future.
Monday, 28 December 2009
Jews and Christmas
I find this is a strange time of the year if you are Jewish. What are we Jews to do on Christmas Day and Boxing Day? As Diaspora Jews we are obviously a minority within a larger culture: a culture which is nominally Christian but is also devoutly secular and devoted (with a fundamentalist’s fervour) to our dominating belief-system, the cult of consumerism.
So what stance do we take up to what is going on around us? Is it Christmas lunch with kosher turkey? Is it a day to be with family, like any other yomtov of our own? Is it a day to be one of the millions going on-line to buy a little happiness in the sales? Do we have a tree, for decorative purposes, and tell ourselves that it is after all just a Victorian invention? Is it a day to volunteer to help others, eg ‘Crisis at Christmas’, helping out so that others can have a break? Perhaps we flee the country, to get away from it all? Or do we just ignore it? How do we locate ourselves on these days?
Inevitably our response to this is personal, and it may change from year to year. We discussed this on Shabbat morning during the service at Finchley Reform Synagogue, and it was interesting to hear that , with a couple of exceptions, there was a general feeling of rather laid-back good cheer about these north London Jews’ response to Christmas. Almost as if it was the most natural thing in the world that Jews should feel at home in this celebratory holiday period.
It may be that Christmas time for Jews illustrates just how much we are fused into the larger culture of our native land: Christmas lunch has become as little to do with Christianity as Santa Claus - so if we do have some kind of gathering we are illustrating that our identity is mixed, complex, mongrel. This now is who we are: Jews who are far removed from the intolerance of those in the yeshivah world of Jerusalem whom I studied with many years ago who were very denigratory of Christmas day – they had a contemptuous and derogatory phrase for it (yoshkie’s birthday), and they wouldn’t even say the word ‘Christmas’; in that world it’s the custom to study specific extra texts on December 25th as a kind of psychic counterweight to the alien religious forces at work. So it was clear from our discussion on Shabbat morning that we aren’t like that.
But nor are we so secularised that we partake of all the jollity and celebrations without a second thought: we probably don’t see ourselves, in Jonathan Miller’s celebrated phrase, just as ‘Jew-ish’ and able to join in with it all like the millions of non-Christian secularists.
It is a curious vocation being Jewish. It is made up of so many strands of feeling and memory, of choices made and choices rejected, and whether it is something we were born into or have freely adopted, our sense of Jewishness in each of us is, I’m sure, large and capacious, filled with conscious and unconscious material, some of it rich and nurturing, some of it probably shabby and worn-out. We are, in Walt Whitman’s wonderful phrase, ‘stuffed with the stuff that is coarse and stuff with the stuff that is fine’ (from Song of Myself). And we can enjoy that, our multifaceted, hybrid Jewish identity.
This multi-layeredness is, after all, rooted in our history. Just think of our many names. Our Biblical texts illustrate how we started off as ‘Ivri/m – Hebrew/s – a word meaning ‘outsiders, nomads, strangers, wanderers’. The root is the word avar, meaning ‘to cross over’ – Abraham the first Hebrew in our mythic tales (Gen 14:13) crossed over the Jordan (and the Euphrates) on his way from Nahor to Canaan, impelled by his divine mission. And this is who we became: wanderers though history, through countries; and crossers of boundaries, not just geographical, but also cultural and intellectual. Jewish creativity and innovation, in the sciences and social sciences, in economics and psychology, in art and music and literature, is a testimony to some almost innate psychological capacity for thinking ‘outside the box’, as we say it now - crossing over and beyond the established thinking into new areas of thought and discovery. This is Jews as ‘Ivrim’- boundary-crossers.
But we are also bnei Yisrael – the children of Israel – and we know the folk etymology of that word Yisrael: the patriarch Jacob renamed as a ‘wrestler with God’, a ‘struggler with the divine and for the divine’. And we carry this name in our soul as well. The spiritual struggle to enact the values of our tradition and faith – this is also who and what we are.
And then we are Yehudim, Jews, named after the character we focused on in this week’s Torah sedrah, Judah (Yehudah). (Genesis 44:18 – 45:14, from sedrah Va’yigash). We aren’t called ‘Josephites’ – in spite of Joseph being the key character who carries the story of the people from Canaan into Egypt, linking the patriarchs with the Exodus narratives where the group of families become a real people. Without Joseph the divine mission would have reached a dead-end. And Joseph would have been the perfect character to give us a collective name because it is Joseph who is the first real Diaspora Jew, living as a stranger in a strange land yet achieving great prominence in the secular world – second only to Pharaoh in power and influence, he was chancellor of the exchequer, prime minister and minister for agriculture all rolled into one. He could have taught how to remain true to one’s religious roots yet integrated into one’s adopted culture. I’d have been happy to be called a ‘Josephite’.
But it’s Judah, the fourth oldest of the brothers, who becomes the one to give his name to our people. His older brothers are written out of the picture, de-legitimizing themselves from taking on the mantle of peoplehood. Reuben sleeps with his father’s concubine; Simeon and Levi commit a massacre at Shechem – the text is unsparing in showing how incestuous desire and murderous revenge are endemic human qualities. Jacob’s offspring are an unruly and unbecoming bunch.
And it is left to Judah, the one who was originally averse to killing Joseph and suggested he was sold into slavery instead, to redeem the situation. He becomes the brother who is prepared to sacrifice himself for Benjamin – in order to protect his aging father from the devastation of losing Benjamin as well as Joseph. ‘It’ll kill him’ says Judah, several times over – a statement of real imagination and empathy. This transformation in the character of Judah is an extraordinary piece of storytelling. "Callousness is replaced with concern. Indifference is replaced with courage and self-sacrifice." (Rabbi Jonathan Sacks)
And so he takes his place in the psychic structure of our people when we are later named Yehudim – ‘Judahites’, as it were. Historically, it was the tribe of Judah that dominated the southern Kingdom after the Assyrians conquered the north of Israel, and they who survived the Babylonian exile. We get our other name, after Ivrim and Yisrael from him: Yehudim, Jews.
So we are multiple in our Jewishness, even in our names. And it is this multiplicity that we bring to these strange days in our calendar, our calendar which is not our calendar. During these days it is as if we are suspended between two worlds, or rather have a foot in two worlds. Maybe that is true the rest of the year as well, but at Christmas time it can really come home to us as we negotiate a pathway through the sentimentality and inanity of the festivities and all that bullying bonhomie that is forced upon us through the airwaves and the newspapers and the shops.
I feel sorry for real Christians in a way – they have their noble and rather wondrous story colonised by all the kitsch and the consumerism. But that assault on the real spiritual core of a religious festival is something I recognise too at Jewish festivals: do multiple presents for the children and scoffing doughnuts really sum up the essence of Hanukkah? Are the new hats and outfits really the spiritual meaning of Rosh Hashanah? Are the debates on the correct consistency of the matza balls what Pesach now symbolises? Silly examples, I know, but they point towards a more serious issue: how to find a language with which we can now talk about the things that matter in our own religious tradition.
So what stance do we take up to what is going on around us? Is it Christmas lunch with kosher turkey? Is it a day to be with family, like any other yomtov of our own? Is it a day to be one of the millions going on-line to buy a little happiness in the sales? Do we have a tree, for decorative purposes, and tell ourselves that it is after all just a Victorian invention? Is it a day to volunteer to help others, eg ‘Crisis at Christmas’, helping out so that others can have a break? Perhaps we flee the country, to get away from it all? Or do we just ignore it? How do we locate ourselves on these days?
Inevitably our response to this is personal, and it may change from year to year. We discussed this on Shabbat morning during the service at Finchley Reform Synagogue, and it was interesting to hear that , with a couple of exceptions, there was a general feeling of rather laid-back good cheer about these north London Jews’ response to Christmas. Almost as if it was the most natural thing in the world that Jews should feel at home in this celebratory holiday period.
It may be that Christmas time for Jews illustrates just how much we are fused into the larger culture of our native land: Christmas lunch has become as little to do with Christianity as Santa Claus - so if we do have some kind of gathering we are illustrating that our identity is mixed, complex, mongrel. This now is who we are: Jews who are far removed from the intolerance of those in the yeshivah world of Jerusalem whom I studied with many years ago who were very denigratory of Christmas day – they had a contemptuous and derogatory phrase for it (yoshkie’s birthday), and they wouldn’t even say the word ‘Christmas’; in that world it’s the custom to study specific extra texts on December 25th as a kind of psychic counterweight to the alien religious forces at work. So it was clear from our discussion on Shabbat morning that we aren’t like that.
But nor are we so secularised that we partake of all the jollity and celebrations without a second thought: we probably don’t see ourselves, in Jonathan Miller’s celebrated phrase, just as ‘Jew-ish’ and able to join in with it all like the millions of non-Christian secularists.
It is a curious vocation being Jewish. It is made up of so many strands of feeling and memory, of choices made and choices rejected, and whether it is something we were born into or have freely adopted, our sense of Jewishness in each of us is, I’m sure, large and capacious, filled with conscious and unconscious material, some of it rich and nurturing, some of it probably shabby and worn-out. We are, in Walt Whitman’s wonderful phrase, ‘stuffed with the stuff that is coarse and stuff with the stuff that is fine’ (from Song of Myself). And we can enjoy that, our multifaceted, hybrid Jewish identity.
This multi-layeredness is, after all, rooted in our history. Just think of our many names. Our Biblical texts illustrate how we started off as ‘Ivri/m – Hebrew/s – a word meaning ‘outsiders, nomads, strangers, wanderers’. The root is the word avar, meaning ‘to cross over’ – Abraham the first Hebrew in our mythic tales (Gen 14:13) crossed over the Jordan (and the Euphrates) on his way from Nahor to Canaan, impelled by his divine mission. And this is who we became: wanderers though history, through countries; and crossers of boundaries, not just geographical, but also cultural and intellectual. Jewish creativity and innovation, in the sciences and social sciences, in economics and psychology, in art and music and literature, is a testimony to some almost innate psychological capacity for thinking ‘outside the box’, as we say it now - crossing over and beyond the established thinking into new areas of thought and discovery. This is Jews as ‘Ivrim’- boundary-crossers.
But we are also bnei Yisrael – the children of Israel – and we know the folk etymology of that word Yisrael: the patriarch Jacob renamed as a ‘wrestler with God’, a ‘struggler with the divine and for the divine’. And we carry this name in our soul as well. The spiritual struggle to enact the values of our tradition and faith – this is also who and what we are.
And then we are Yehudim, Jews, named after the character we focused on in this week’s Torah sedrah, Judah (Yehudah). (Genesis 44:18 – 45:14, from sedrah Va’yigash). We aren’t called ‘Josephites’ – in spite of Joseph being the key character who carries the story of the people from Canaan into Egypt, linking the patriarchs with the Exodus narratives where the group of families become a real people. Without Joseph the divine mission would have reached a dead-end. And Joseph would have been the perfect character to give us a collective name because it is Joseph who is the first real Diaspora Jew, living as a stranger in a strange land yet achieving great prominence in the secular world – second only to Pharaoh in power and influence, he was chancellor of the exchequer, prime minister and minister for agriculture all rolled into one. He could have taught how to remain true to one’s religious roots yet integrated into one’s adopted culture. I’d have been happy to be called a ‘Josephite’.
But it’s Judah, the fourth oldest of the brothers, who becomes the one to give his name to our people. His older brothers are written out of the picture, de-legitimizing themselves from taking on the mantle of peoplehood. Reuben sleeps with his father’s concubine; Simeon and Levi commit a massacre at Shechem – the text is unsparing in showing how incestuous desire and murderous revenge are endemic human qualities. Jacob’s offspring are an unruly and unbecoming bunch.
And it is left to Judah, the one who was originally averse to killing Joseph and suggested he was sold into slavery instead, to redeem the situation. He becomes the brother who is prepared to sacrifice himself for Benjamin – in order to protect his aging father from the devastation of losing Benjamin as well as Joseph. ‘It’ll kill him’ says Judah, several times over – a statement of real imagination and empathy. This transformation in the character of Judah is an extraordinary piece of storytelling. "Callousness is replaced with concern. Indifference is replaced with courage and self-sacrifice." (Rabbi Jonathan Sacks)
And so he takes his place in the psychic structure of our people when we are later named Yehudim – ‘Judahites’, as it were. Historically, it was the tribe of Judah that dominated the southern Kingdom after the Assyrians conquered the north of Israel, and they who survived the Babylonian exile. We get our other name, after Ivrim and Yisrael from him: Yehudim, Jews.
So we are multiple in our Jewishness, even in our names. And it is this multiplicity that we bring to these strange days in our calendar, our calendar which is not our calendar. During these days it is as if we are suspended between two worlds, or rather have a foot in two worlds. Maybe that is true the rest of the year as well, but at Christmas time it can really come home to us as we negotiate a pathway through the sentimentality and inanity of the festivities and all that bullying bonhomie that is forced upon us through the airwaves and the newspapers and the shops.
I feel sorry for real Christians in a way – they have their noble and rather wondrous story colonised by all the kitsch and the consumerism. But that assault on the real spiritual core of a religious festival is something I recognise too at Jewish festivals: do multiple presents for the children and scoffing doughnuts really sum up the essence of Hanukkah? Are the new hats and outfits really the spiritual meaning of Rosh Hashanah? Are the debates on the correct consistency of the matza balls what Pesach now symbolises? Silly examples, I know, but they point towards a more serious issue: how to find a language with which we can now talk about the things that matter in our own religious tradition.
Sunday, 13 December 2009
'Whose Oil Is It Anyway?'
It started as an old soldiers’ holiday. They’d gather year after year, at the darkest time of the year, winter solstice time, and tell their stories, speak of their heroism. They were a group of religious zealots, fiercely nationalistic – and they had waged a guerrilla campaign against their enemies, the Graeco-Syrians, who were occupying their land. Much blood was spilt, on both sides, but they were tough, ruthless – they’d had a cause, a cause they were prepared to kill and die for. Eventually they took the Temple in Jerusalem back into their own hands and re-dedicated it to their God, the God of Israel.
And even though their victory was short-lived and the land was eventually re-occupied - this time by the Romans - the memory of that famous victory against the odds lived on. The stories were told and re-told, passed on, elaborated and embellished along the way. And the message was clear, passed on from generation to generation in those early years, 22 centuries ago: with enough faith and guile and bloody-mindedness – anything is possible.
And this is Hanukah, which of course we celebrate now in a way that goes to some lengths to suppress its original message. Because we aren’t going to be very comfortable with a holiday that commemorates an uprising by a bunch of religious terrorists who refused to accept the dominant assimilated culture of the day, with all its decadent values, its worship of the body and the material world, all those naked statues and philosophic discourses about how to build democracy. We aren’t keen to glorify religious fanatics who are prepared to kill in the name of their faith.
We’d rather think of Hanukah as basically a children’s festival, a time for jollity and presents and greasy foods, a rather sentimental festival of candle-lighting and dreidels and doughnuts. A bit like Christmas but spread out over 8 days and with baby latkes rather than baby Jesus.
But it isn’t only us who might want to downplay the origins of the festival. The rabbis in the Talmud were exactly the same. We are in an honourable tradition of repressing the truth. They too were deeply uncomfortable with celebrating a short-lived military victory – even if it was done in the name of God. They were so uncomfortable with it that they showed their own ruthlessness by suppressing in their writings any mention of the fighting and the force of arms. We reconstruct the history from external sources and the historian Josephus not from mainstream Jewish religious texts.
The Talmud has almost nothing to say about the festival. It just asks – in a tractate about Shabbat observance - the slightly anxious question: ‘Mai Hanukah? What is Hanukah?’ – as if there is some doubt or confusion about it: which indeed there was, if only in their own minds about how to talk about it. And they answer the question by recounting the story which we are familiar with – about the re-dedication of the Temple after it had been defiled by the Greeks, with the single cruise of oil lasting miraculously for 8 days.
This was ‘creative’ of them. It takes a kind of brilliant imaginative chutzpah to turn a military victory into a Festival of Lights based on a fable; and then link the celebration to the prophetic text from Zechariah that we still read, with its key refrain, the declaration in the name of God that the Jewish nation, the Jewish people, will succeed ‘Not by might, nor by power – but by My spirit..’ (Zech 4:7).
And in a parallel kind of sleight-of-hand the rabbis of old eventually instituted the prayer that we read after the candle-lighting: ‘Hanerot hallallu...’ . See if you can spot the subtle revisionist spin: ‘We kindle these lights to commemorate the wonders, the heroic acts, the victories, and the marvellous and consoling deeds which You performed for our ancestors through Your holy priests in those days at this season...’ (Soferim 20:6, mid-8th century). Do you hear the manipulation of history here? It is classic PR spin. (Alistair Campbell, eat your heart out).
The rabbis here are doing two interlinked things: the first is familiar from Seder night, where Moses is never mentioned throughout the whole story of the exodus from Egypt. It is all done by God. So here too it says that these were marvellous deeds ‘which You performed for our ancestors...’ – how? – ‘through Your holy priests’. And this is the other aspect of their creativity. The phrase ‘Your holy priests’ might be correct in a narrow sense – Matthathias was a priest, which means that his sons were also priests, so Judah the Maccabee (who led the guerrilla forces with his brothers and is the main Hanukah hero) was also technically a priest too, all of them were - even though they couldn’t act as priests because the Temple wasn’t in Jewish hands. They were a priestly family – but without a Temple to practice in. Like the titled English landed gentry who lost their country estates and ended up living on relatives' handouts.
So when our liturgy praises this victory in high-flown language as one that was achieved by God through his ‘holy priests’, it’s a bit like saying that peace came to Northern Ireland through the democratic endeavours of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. (It puts me in mind of the American satirist and songwriter Tom Lehrer’s comment that political satire was made obsolete the day they gave the Nobel Peace prize to Henry Kissinger).
But still, this is a kind of inspired genius, this eternal Jewish creativity to reformulate the past in the light of current needs and preoccupations. And Hanukah has become a festival where the symbolic and metaphorical resonances now dominate the imagination. It has become a time to focus on the faith needed, individually and collectively, to persevere against the odds; a time to reflect on the motif of light in our lives (an archetypal theme) as we hope for the victory of ‘light’ over the forces of ‘darkness’.
The problem of course is that we always think our cause represents the ‘light’ – and those opposed to us are the forces of ‘darkness’.
As the world leaders gather during these fateful days in Copenhagen we can see this being played out powerfully in front of our eyes. The facts of climate-change as a human-made catastrophe in the making – like watching a deadly car-crash in slow motion – these facts have achieved an overwhelming scientific consensus. But the forces ranged against this ‘inconvenient truth’ are very powerful: the climate denial industry, which has no interest in establishing the truth about global warming, comes in many guises. PR companies and hired experts, representing the business interests of oil and coal, can and do co-opt scientists and politicians – mainly in the States but also here – to systematically cast doubt on the scientific consensus (see, for example, www.exxonsecrets.org).
This consensus – and I hear people every day hedging their bets about it under pressure from the media onslaught of the deniers - this consensus is as clear in its evidence-based view that global warming is man-made as is the scientific consensus on the link between smoking and lung cancer. Or HIV and Aids. Yet each side see themselves as representing the light – and the others as dwelling in darkness.
In Copenhagen they aren’t arguing the facts – they are arguing like Joseph and his brothers in this week's sedrah (Genesis 37): arguing over who will rule over whom, ‘we’re not going to bow down to you’, arguing over how much they have to gain and how much they have to lose. Copenhagen reveals the global sibling rivalry, all the envy and jealousy writ large, these never-changing human attributes. Will effective action be agreed? We don’t know. We can hope so – even if our hopes are shadowed by the knowledge that it all might be too little, too late.
But I think we can understand psychologically the arguments we hear in our newspapers and TV and radio, casting doubt on the evidence. Although behind the scenes these doubts are promoted for sound business reasons ('sound' in their own terms), they can touch a chord in us because - well, because the facts are all too painful to contemplate, too frightening to think about, too potentially disturbing of our settled and relatively comfortable lifestyles to come to terms with. Things will have to change. We will have to change. And we will need a kind of miracle to see us through. A miracle that this time round we hold in our own hands, a miracle we will have to nurture in our own hearts.
‘[we]spoke softly about disasters,
about what lay ahead, the coming fear,
and someone said this was the best
we could do now –
to talk of darkness in that bright shadow
(from Adam Zagajewski’s ‘At the Cathedral’s Foot’)
It is perhaps ironical that our festival of Hanukah is about oil. And how long it lasts. As if in a completely unconscious way, in an almost uncanny way, the rabbis of old had a revelation that even they did not understand the significance of. We have to learn to make do with less, they intuited. And they found a symbolic way to express this. We think we need a lot to survive - but we can manage with an eighth of what we imagine we need. That does require faith, and trust: what we truly need is with us already. It’s in us, this precious gift, ‘the light of God’ our tradition calls it, in the human soul, the spark of the divine in us, and generated between us in community.
It gives us the courage to face the darkness, to face the truth about our world, to see its fragility – our planet is like a flickering candle in the slipstream of time. Less is going to have to mean more. Less comfort, less security, less recklessness, less denial, less waste, less holding on to what we have, less accumulating what we don’t need. Hanukah teaches the lesson of less – one day’s worth of oil is enough to last. The miracle is not that it lasts. The miracle is when we believe that it can last, what we have. The miracle is that we can depend not on might or power but on the Spirit - and that we are given what we need day by day.
(Sermon FRS , Hanukah, 11 December 2009)
And even though their victory was short-lived and the land was eventually re-occupied - this time by the Romans - the memory of that famous victory against the odds lived on. The stories were told and re-told, passed on, elaborated and embellished along the way. And the message was clear, passed on from generation to generation in those early years, 22 centuries ago: with enough faith and guile and bloody-mindedness – anything is possible.
And this is Hanukah, which of course we celebrate now in a way that goes to some lengths to suppress its original message. Because we aren’t going to be very comfortable with a holiday that commemorates an uprising by a bunch of religious terrorists who refused to accept the dominant assimilated culture of the day, with all its decadent values, its worship of the body and the material world, all those naked statues and philosophic discourses about how to build democracy. We aren’t keen to glorify religious fanatics who are prepared to kill in the name of their faith.
We’d rather think of Hanukah as basically a children’s festival, a time for jollity and presents and greasy foods, a rather sentimental festival of candle-lighting and dreidels and doughnuts. A bit like Christmas but spread out over 8 days and with baby latkes rather than baby Jesus.
But it isn’t only us who might want to downplay the origins of the festival. The rabbis in the Talmud were exactly the same. We are in an honourable tradition of repressing the truth. They too were deeply uncomfortable with celebrating a short-lived military victory – even if it was done in the name of God. They were so uncomfortable with it that they showed their own ruthlessness by suppressing in their writings any mention of the fighting and the force of arms. We reconstruct the history from external sources and the historian Josephus not from mainstream Jewish religious texts.
The Talmud has almost nothing to say about the festival. It just asks – in a tractate about Shabbat observance - the slightly anxious question: ‘Mai Hanukah? What is Hanukah?’ – as if there is some doubt or confusion about it: which indeed there was, if only in their own minds about how to talk about it. And they answer the question by recounting the story which we are familiar with – about the re-dedication of the Temple after it had been defiled by the Greeks, with the single cruise of oil lasting miraculously for 8 days.
This was ‘creative’ of them. It takes a kind of brilliant imaginative chutzpah to turn a military victory into a Festival of Lights based on a fable; and then link the celebration to the prophetic text from Zechariah that we still read, with its key refrain, the declaration in the name of God that the Jewish nation, the Jewish people, will succeed ‘Not by might, nor by power – but by My spirit..’ (Zech 4:7).
And in a parallel kind of sleight-of-hand the rabbis of old eventually instituted the prayer that we read after the candle-lighting: ‘Hanerot hallallu...’ . See if you can spot the subtle revisionist spin: ‘We kindle these lights to commemorate the wonders, the heroic acts, the victories, and the marvellous and consoling deeds which You performed for our ancestors through Your holy priests in those days at this season...’ (Soferim 20:6, mid-8th century). Do you hear the manipulation of history here? It is classic PR spin. (Alistair Campbell, eat your heart out).
The rabbis here are doing two interlinked things: the first is familiar from Seder night, where Moses is never mentioned throughout the whole story of the exodus from Egypt. It is all done by God. So here too it says that these were marvellous deeds ‘which You performed for our ancestors...’ – how? – ‘through Your holy priests’. And this is the other aspect of their creativity. The phrase ‘Your holy priests’ might be correct in a narrow sense – Matthathias was a priest, which means that his sons were also priests, so Judah the Maccabee (who led the guerrilla forces with his brothers and is the main Hanukah hero) was also technically a priest too, all of them were - even though they couldn’t act as priests because the Temple wasn’t in Jewish hands. They were a priestly family – but without a Temple to practice in. Like the titled English landed gentry who lost their country estates and ended up living on relatives' handouts.
So when our liturgy praises this victory in high-flown language as one that was achieved by God through his ‘holy priests’, it’s a bit like saying that peace came to Northern Ireland through the democratic endeavours of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. (It puts me in mind of the American satirist and songwriter Tom Lehrer’s comment that political satire was made obsolete the day they gave the Nobel Peace prize to Henry Kissinger).
But still, this is a kind of inspired genius, this eternal Jewish creativity to reformulate the past in the light of current needs and preoccupations. And Hanukah has become a festival where the symbolic and metaphorical resonances now dominate the imagination. It has become a time to focus on the faith needed, individually and collectively, to persevere against the odds; a time to reflect on the motif of light in our lives (an archetypal theme) as we hope for the victory of ‘light’ over the forces of ‘darkness’.
The problem of course is that we always think our cause represents the ‘light’ – and those opposed to us are the forces of ‘darkness’.
As the world leaders gather during these fateful days in Copenhagen we can see this being played out powerfully in front of our eyes. The facts of climate-change as a human-made catastrophe in the making – like watching a deadly car-crash in slow motion – these facts have achieved an overwhelming scientific consensus. But the forces ranged against this ‘inconvenient truth’ are very powerful: the climate denial industry, which has no interest in establishing the truth about global warming, comes in many guises. PR companies and hired experts, representing the business interests of oil and coal, can and do co-opt scientists and politicians – mainly in the States but also here – to systematically cast doubt on the scientific consensus (see, for example, www.exxonsecrets.org).
This consensus – and I hear people every day hedging their bets about it under pressure from the media onslaught of the deniers - this consensus is as clear in its evidence-based view that global warming is man-made as is the scientific consensus on the link between smoking and lung cancer. Or HIV and Aids. Yet each side see themselves as representing the light – and the others as dwelling in darkness.
In Copenhagen they aren’t arguing the facts – they are arguing like Joseph and his brothers in this week's sedrah (Genesis 37): arguing over who will rule over whom, ‘we’re not going to bow down to you’, arguing over how much they have to gain and how much they have to lose. Copenhagen reveals the global sibling rivalry, all the envy and jealousy writ large, these never-changing human attributes. Will effective action be agreed? We don’t know. We can hope so – even if our hopes are shadowed by the knowledge that it all might be too little, too late.
But I think we can understand psychologically the arguments we hear in our newspapers and TV and radio, casting doubt on the evidence. Although behind the scenes these doubts are promoted for sound business reasons ('sound' in their own terms), they can touch a chord in us because - well, because the facts are all too painful to contemplate, too frightening to think about, too potentially disturbing of our settled and relatively comfortable lifestyles to come to terms with. Things will have to change. We will have to change. And we will need a kind of miracle to see us through. A miracle that this time round we hold in our own hands, a miracle we will have to nurture in our own hearts.
‘[we]spoke softly about disasters,
about what lay ahead, the coming fear,
and someone said this was the best
we could do now –
to talk of darkness in that bright shadow
(from Adam Zagajewski’s ‘At the Cathedral’s Foot’)
It is perhaps ironical that our festival of Hanukah is about oil. And how long it lasts. As if in a completely unconscious way, in an almost uncanny way, the rabbis of old had a revelation that even they did not understand the significance of. We have to learn to make do with less, they intuited. And they found a symbolic way to express this. We think we need a lot to survive - but we can manage with an eighth of what we imagine we need. That does require faith, and trust: what we truly need is with us already. It’s in us, this precious gift, ‘the light of God’ our tradition calls it, in the human soul, the spark of the divine in us, and generated between us in community.
It gives us the courage to face the darkness, to face the truth about our world, to see its fragility – our planet is like a flickering candle in the slipstream of time. Less is going to have to mean more. Less comfort, less security, less recklessness, less denial, less waste, less holding on to what we have, less accumulating what we don’t need. Hanukah teaches the lesson of less – one day’s worth of oil is enough to last. The miracle is not that it lasts. The miracle is when we believe that it can last, what we have. The miracle is that we can depend not on might or power but on the Spirit - and that we are given what we need day by day.
(Sermon FRS , Hanukah, 11 December 2009)
Thursday, 3 December 2009
Bearing the unbearable beyond Copenhagen
The topic is well nigh unbearable. It is omnipresent, unavoidable, inescapable. Except I suspect we do everything we can to avoid it. Even to write these words – or read them? – grips one with dread. Or boredom – the defence against the dread. A curious dread that slides away. I want to distract myself, with anything. With anything that will take me away from the headlines, nestling next to each other on the inside page of the Sunday paper like spiteful twin embryos wrestling in the womb of our future: ‘Western lifestyle unsustainable, says world’s top climate expert’ and ‘Warning over faster fall into new Ice Age’.
The chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that we need a radical change in values if we are to avoid the worst effects of climate change. ‘Yes, yes', we think, ‘so tell us something new’. Well how about this? My eyes scan left on the page. The latest discovery by a team from Saskatchewan University that the last great disruption to the Gulf Stream - 12,800 years ago – took less than three months to trigger a massive plunge in temperatures across Europe. Melted Arctic glaciers from the end of the last Ice Age overflowed into the north Atlantic, blocking the Gulf Stream which regulates our temperatures - and Europe froze, suddenly.
Well it may be new but it’s probably not enough to convince climate change sceptics; or wipe the smirk off the face of Melanie Phillips on a recent BBC Question Time as she showed her contempt for the audience and their sheepish acceptance of the scientific consensus, which for her is just a huge scam, a secret conspiracy against us perpetrated by thousands of scientists around the world all falsely analysing their miniscule packages of data, all bound up in some fantasy world they have constructed, a science fiction world in which they are networking together to peddle us a story that has no basis in the evidence. So there we have it: it’s a mirror image of the Jewish World Conspiracy – this one is the Scientists’ World Conspiracy.
But this latest reported work from Canada reminds me of something I discussed as the financial meltdown was taking place last year: that maybe we were seeing - in the rapidity of the unravelling of the economic consensus, the speed with which banks went from secure institutions to toxic repositories of unregulated loans – maybe we were experiencing a foretaste, in this sudden global economic collapse, of what is to come in relation to climate change. That the foundations on which we build our daily lives and that seem so secure can be swept away in the twinkling of an eye. That transformations that shatter our accepted ‘reality’ can take place in weeks and days – not just in decades. And who can bear to live with that thought?
And we know that with climate change there is nobody inside or outside the system who can bail us out if that were to happen. Money can be printed and loaned. Temperature can’t.
But if you have read this far you will also know that there is nothing revelatory here. And nothing much new to say. We’ll all muddle along as best we can.
Meanwhile I want to share with you – hesitantly – something I wrote in 1988. I recently retrieved it from an old floppy disc (remember them?) and was shocked (and, perversely, sadly amused) to re-read it now. It is a sermon I gave that year at Finchley Reform Synagogue for the New Year. (I feel sorry for the community sometimes, having to bear with this kind of thing – so much easier for all concerned to be bland, anaemic , unthreatening).
The title was borrowed from Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ which had come out earlier that year. And the idea for a ‘fictional’ mode of story-telling sermon had been growing in me for a while - I was beginning to realise then (and I still think it), that ‘fiction’ can tell us truths in revealing and challenging ways that are both enlivening and memorable. They can lodge in us in ways that even the best-crafted 'normal' sermon cannot.
I offer you the sermon unadulterated, copied off my disc, complete with the bits that I now find a bit gauche. It draws on various sources, biblical, rabbinic and literary – and it is my commentary, my midrash as it were, on the events around Copenhagen.
Sometimes a commentary can precede a text, awaiting its occasion.
The Last Temptation of Noah
(Second Day Rosh Hashanah sermon, Finchley Reform Synagogue, September 1988)
Even before the Disaster I felt misunderstood. I only wanted a quiet life: to come home after work and relax and rest. After all - and this used to be my private joke, though it feels pretty grim now - that's what my name Noah means: rest.
Apart from my work and my family I couldn't really be bothered with anything else. I didn't have many interests, not even much ambition. I used to sit in the office during the day and dream of the journey home, opening the door, playing with the kids (when they were smaller), later on helping them with their homework. In the evening I'd switch on the TV in order to switch off my thoughts, those terrible thoughts that kept coming, waves of them, more and more insistently over the years. All I ever really wanted was a rest - from the pressures that we all suffered. Just a rest from it all: the bills, the relatives, the dinner parties. Rest: it was all I wanted. Honestly.
Oh yes, I was known for my honesty. Even those who didn't like me said I had integrity. They used other words too, which sounded good, words like 'upright', 'blameless', even (God help me) 'righteous'. But I never trusted them - not the words, not the people. Words had lost their solidity, their truthfulness, long before. In those days words meant their opposite.
When that TV presenter interviewed me (near the end this was, after I'd made all the fuss), he was the one who called me 'righteous'. But I could hear in the tone of his voice how he really meant 'self-righteous', how the compliment disguised the attack. And who knows, maybe he was right, maybe I did begin to feel a bit self-righteous. Because I did know what was going to happen. I wasn't taken in by all those words: freedom of opportunity, economic growth, individual choice...I could see what was going on, all that heartbreak beneath the surface, and what was going to happen if we didn't change. I did know it would end in disaster; but I didn't know just how bad it would turn out. I didn't, honestly...I can tell you don't believe me. It's all right - I'm used to that. Nobody ever believed me then, either. Before.
You see, I worked in industry, middle-management. Yes, of course I was a professional - all our friends were. Agricultural and forestry equipment the firm made. When it expanded we went into animal feed, fertilisers, that sort of thing - quite a broad spread - even livestock eventually. We were successful too: public company, safe investment, high annual returns, particularly good Third World market, what with all the problems they kept having. I was responsible for overseas sales. Quite an irony really when you think about it, considering what happened.
I was able to laugh more in those days too. Earlier on that was. I used to enjoy having fun: a good party, that sort of thing. I don't think I ever entirely lost my sense of humour - but I kept noticing things I'd prefer not to have known about.
I'd read a report here, hear a programme there, bits and pieces of knowledge on the periphery of my consciousness. I tried to keep the knowledge at a distance, but it became harder. Things kept happening, kept forcing themselves on my attention.
First we had that string of warm years: '80, '81, '83, '87, '88 - the hottest since records began they said. It didn't bother me really: I was only worried about getting a bit of sun on our holidays. And where I went it rained anyway. But the statistics were global ones: it was beginning to warm up rather dramatically. Only a few degrees over a century didn't sound so much, but researchers in one country began to see the changes in plants and trees, and then another group at the other side of the world discovered that the world's beaches were eroding. These were just a couple of the warnings of the impending crisis.
I did mention it to a few people at work - after all it could have had implications for our sales - but they just shrugged and said that these kinds of reports are not reliable, they come and go, you know how it is...
And although I didn't really know how it was, it was easier at the beginning to change the subject and ask what home computer they thought I should buy. It felt safer ground.
But then the dreams started. All that water imagery, all that flooding, swimming, drowning, seas and swimming pools, struggling to keep afloat - every night a new variation on the theme. My analyst told me that this was archetypal symbolism: the struggle of the Self to emerge from the Sea of Consciousness. I changed my analyst. The next one told me it was about separation from mother.
And all the time I knew that something else was going on. It's not that they were wrong - but something else was going on, much bigger than me. Everyone had heard about the 'greenhouse effect', how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere acts like glass in a greenhouse, letting the sun's rays through to the earth but also trapping some of the heat that would otherwise be radiated back into space. We were burning all that coal and oil and gas, more and more of it, year after year - and the planet was heating up. Then there were those other gases: like the ones in those take-away cartons. Some firms changed them, others said the evidence was inconclusive (though of course ‘it merited further study’). But that still left aerosol sprays and even fridges - and I liked ice in my gin and tonic.
I really didn't know what to do. I soon knew though all the responses I'd get. The Chairman of the Board put it to me with his usual delicacy: what do you want us to do - grow our own vegetables? bicycle to work? light the office with candles?
The problem was that I didn't have any answers. I only had fears and questions and intuitions - and they wouldn't go away. But it was that presentation I did at the shareholders meeting that finally wrecked me. I spoke about the rainforests we were destroying (indirectly of course: our firm only sold the equipment); I gave them all the facts and figures, how the earth was such a fragile interconnected ecosystem (oh yes, by then I'd learnt the jargon), that what the inhabitants of planet earth were doing was quietly conducting a giant environmental experiment. Were it to be brought before any responsible local council for approval it would be firmly rejected as having potentially disastrous consequences.
At the meeting all this earned a variety of responses: anger, boredom, though a few people seemed rather subdued afterwards. Perhaps it was naive to expect anything more - after all I'd just bought a new car as well. I didn't want to change my lifestyle either. I was comfortable, I admit it. But we all were then - at least in the circles I mixed in.
Getting the push after that speech was actually a blessing in disguise. I devoted myself more and more to trying to get people to see what was going on around them all the time. I got involved with political groups, environmental groups. I started writing letters to The Guardian. I even spoke to religious groups (strange: the Christians were always more interested than the Jews).
I gave the same speech wherever I went. 'The climate that has allowed the growth of civilisation and agriculture - and to which all our crops, customs and structures are adapted - is virtually certain to disappear. The world will become warmer than at any time since the emergence of humanity on earth. This threatens to take place over the next forty years. Humanity will find it hard to adapt, particularly in a world fragmented by national boundaries and competing interests. Harvests will fail more drastically. the cities we live in will go under water.'
People began to hate me for what I was saying. They used to avoid me, fear me: fear what I was saying, I suppose. A poet had written 'Human kind cannot bear very much reality' and it was true. I didn't blame people - I couldn't bear it either. My wife began to catch me talking to myself. I was trying to keep myself sane, keep myself from the madness of knowing that something was inevitable - that was the word the experts used - unless we worked together. Funnily enough, I did have faith in humanity then. I believed that people could change, with help and encouragement. And groups of people working together - communities - could do a lot. But first we had to realise we'd taken a wrong direction, we had to turn from what's best only for ourselves, our family, our community, our nation.
Near the end I realised that we needed to pray too - though at first I was more sceptical about that. Religion had always felt a bit too cosy and comfortable: too much security was on offer. And I certainly had no security to offer anyone. I used to take myself off for long walks and look at the mess around me - the squalor, the poverty, the drugged ones, the violence, the neglect, the corruption, the decay.
I saw the goodness too, in people I met, the beauty in small things. I could see infinity in a grain of sand and feel eternity in an hour. But over all, on these walks, I felt the inferno, the 'moronic inferno' one of those clever Jewish novelists called it: the levelling down of contemporary life where people found themselves in that chaotic state, overwhelmed by all kinds of outer forces - political, technological, military, economic - which carry everything before them with a kind of disorder in which we were supposed to survive with all our human qualities. Who really had sufficient internal organisation to resist, let alone to flourish?
It wasn't possible to go on that way. And in their hearts and souls, people knew it. It wasn't just me: I really was just an ordinary person. In my generation I was nothing special. I knew it. Later on, long after the Disaster, when they told those stories about me, things got changed somehow. It was true that I became wholeheartedly committed to speaking the truth I experienced, sharing my vision of what I knew was going to happen. But if I'd lived in a less corrupt time, nobody would ever have heard of me. Even the rabbis acknowledged that, later.
I could never explain properly those intuitions I'd have when I was off walking. I just knew in the end that I had changed and that others could change too. It was very simple. I had an inner voice I just had to trust. Everyone had that voice deep inside them. It was obvious. But in those days so many temptations drowned out that knowing voice, so many possibilities of seduction away from our still and silent truth.
I once made a list, half-jokingly, of what I thought we needed to remember to be fully human, to be what we ought to be in this world. I jotted down seven things - it surprised me there were so few. I sent them on a postcard to a friend and she wrote back saying I sounded like some kind of religious nut. It sounded, she said - she was very cynical though - as if I was walking with God when I went off on my expeditions round town. I wasn't hurt by this. Well, not really. It stayed in my mind though, that phrase, 'walking with God'.
Later on, when they told those stories about me, they seemed to think it was a compliment: that somehow this was an uplifting, desirable experience for a person to have. Actually it was hell.
I'll tell you the list, but before I do I want to say that I've gone against most of them in my time. There were so many temptations then, not even a saint could have resisted them. And I was no saint. But I do know there are some things that just have to be. If we're going to make it through this time. And call it walking with God if you like.
First, there has to be a system of justice. Real justice allows a society to function and the individual to retain dignity. And a system of political and legal justice means that the disadvantaged are protected from abuse - the abuse from power, money or class.
Secondly: murder - it's not on. We have to deal with our violent feelings in some other way. And leading on from there, thirdly: robbery, theft, is out too. We have to find an alternative way of channelling our greed, and our envy of what others have.
Nor can incest be allowed. That wise professor from Vienna eventually uncovered just how much we do secretly want to express our sexuality inside our family. But we just can't have our mummy or daddy or children or siblings in that way. We've got to find someone else to do it with. And that reminds me of what happened after the Disaster. We were in such chaos. There was just our family, and my middle boy Ham did something to me which I can never forgive him for, that bugger, God damn him! But that's another story.
Yes, the fifth on the list is blasphemy. It's no use my letting rip like that. I still have to find a way of getting rid of this anger.
The sixth thing I listed I called idolatry. It was a handy word, it covered a lot of things. Actually I was thinking of all those adverts on TV, and all those colour supplements offering me happiness on every page. We were drowning in luxury in those days: so many divinely decadent choices. We knew it couldn't go on for ever but we worshipped production and consumption. I loved buying things - it made me feel so secure, so good about myself. Crazy, really, looking back.
Last on my list, number seven, sounds strange now, though at the time it made sense. I called it 'not eating flesh cut from a living animal'. You see I wanted something on my list that captured the essence of evil: that degraded the one who performed it and caused pain and terror to the victim. I suppose I could have chosen another image, another way to express this. Towards the end people came up with worse things, believe me.
Anyway, I thought out these seven things during my walks. Afterwards - after 'it' happened I mean - people saw them as the natural religious basis vital to the existence of any human society. I suppose I'm rather proud of that. They even called them after me: 'the seven laws given to the descendants of Noah'.
Right. I'm nearly finished now. I just want to tell you what happened in the end, when the Disaster came.
I saw it all so clearly: we'd reached the point where the rate of environmental change in my lifetime was going to be many times the maximum that our planet's eco-system could endure. There was no escaping this fate unless a radical transformation took place. One day I saw it all so clearly that I grew really desperate. I felt more hopeless than I'd ever done before. I felt closed in, with this great weight around me. I'd built it myself, this mental structure I'd constructed from all the evidence I'd gathered. It was like a vessel of doom I lived in. I was going crazy inside it. I was in complete despair.
I just wanted to be left alone. The understanding I had was too much for me. I felt hundreds of years old. It felt completely hopeless. I felt overwhelmed by...helplessness, that's the word: I was completely helpless, like a baby. I couldn't do anything more. I had no strength left.
And I started to cry. It'd never happened before. After all I was a man. But I did, I broke down, in front of my family: all of them were there - my wife and my sons and their wives. And I wept and wept. Tears of bitterness. Tears of remorse. Tears of anger. Tears of grief. I cried and I cried and I just...floated away.
It's hard to describe now. The sadness just flooded out of me. It went on and on, all those years and years of frustration and pain trapped inside - it all welled up and spilled out. The tears just seemed to pour out of me - it felt like days - for the sadness of it all, and the pity.
The rest you know of course. It's history - of a sort. It's in the books, though I know people argue over the details. Nothing ever was the same again.
Though there was one helpful moment: when I saw that rainbow. Yes, I know it's only the reflection of the sun in moist atmosphere, but I'd never really looked at one before. Really looked, I mean. That one time though, soon after the Disaster, I saw those seven colours arched above me, translucent and glorious and shimmering. And I suddenly remembered the seven laws I'd jotted down on that card, and it was my conceit, I know, but I felt there was some connection between those seven basic norms for how we are to live together and those seven basic colours in which the world is enveloped.
There was a harmony at that moment: seeing how the natural world and our human world reflected each other's inner grace. And at that moment I knew, I knew as clearly as if I heard a voice speak it in my ear, I knew that this disaster could never be again. Not ever. It felt like a promise. If I were a religious man I'd call it a blessing. Never again - such relief, I can't tell you.
'While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest and cold and heat and summer and winter and day and night shall not cease'. The words just formed themselves in my head. It would never happen again. That's all there is to say.
Oh, I almost forgot. The last temptation of Noah. You want to know the very last temptation? It was after it was all over and we had to pull ourselves together and start again. That was hard. We didn't know where we were, where we were going, what we were doing. Everything had gone. We survivors felt so helpless so much of the time. And the hardest part was that we kept remembering how it'd been before: so comfortable, so secure - you'll never know. That was the worst part: I couldn't help but remember it.
I became very morose, self-pitying. I just wanted to forget, to forget how it'd been. And, I admit it, I started to drink. They never tell the story this way, but this is how it was. They always make me out as the father of vineyards and winemaking, but I'm telling you: soon I was drinking all the time - I just wanted to blot it all out.
And that was the last temptation: the temptation to blot it all out, to forget the knowledge I carried, the understanding I had, the lonely experiences I'd been through, the intuitions I'd borne all these years. I tried to drown myself in drink: another flood.
But it wasn't to be of course. It seems that my destiny is to remember, to remain aware. I never did get my rest. I learnt that death is the only release from the burden of consciousness. And that while I lived, my work was just given to me to do. It was wherever I happened to be.
I even wrote a poem about it towards the end. Someone else later took the credit for it of course - but then none of us is perfect. Are we?
To open eyes when others close them
to hear when others do not wish to listen
to look when others turn away
to seek to understand when others give up
to rouse oneself when others accept
to continue the struggle even when one is not the strongest
to cry out when others keep silent
to be a Jew
it is that
it is first of all that
and further
to live when others are dead
and to remember when others have forgotten.
The chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that we need a radical change in values if we are to avoid the worst effects of climate change. ‘Yes, yes', we think, ‘so tell us something new’. Well how about this? My eyes scan left on the page. The latest discovery by a team from Saskatchewan University that the last great disruption to the Gulf Stream - 12,800 years ago – took less than three months to trigger a massive plunge in temperatures across Europe. Melted Arctic glaciers from the end of the last Ice Age overflowed into the north Atlantic, blocking the Gulf Stream which regulates our temperatures - and Europe froze, suddenly.
Well it may be new but it’s probably not enough to convince climate change sceptics; or wipe the smirk off the face of Melanie Phillips on a recent BBC Question Time as she showed her contempt for the audience and their sheepish acceptance of the scientific consensus, which for her is just a huge scam, a secret conspiracy against us perpetrated by thousands of scientists around the world all falsely analysing their miniscule packages of data, all bound up in some fantasy world they have constructed, a science fiction world in which they are networking together to peddle us a story that has no basis in the evidence. So there we have it: it’s a mirror image of the Jewish World Conspiracy – this one is the Scientists’ World Conspiracy.
But this latest reported work from Canada reminds me of something I discussed as the financial meltdown was taking place last year: that maybe we were seeing - in the rapidity of the unravelling of the economic consensus, the speed with which banks went from secure institutions to toxic repositories of unregulated loans – maybe we were experiencing a foretaste, in this sudden global economic collapse, of what is to come in relation to climate change. That the foundations on which we build our daily lives and that seem so secure can be swept away in the twinkling of an eye. That transformations that shatter our accepted ‘reality’ can take place in weeks and days – not just in decades. And who can bear to live with that thought?
And we know that with climate change there is nobody inside or outside the system who can bail us out if that were to happen. Money can be printed and loaned. Temperature can’t.
But if you have read this far you will also know that there is nothing revelatory here. And nothing much new to say. We’ll all muddle along as best we can.
Meanwhile I want to share with you – hesitantly – something I wrote in 1988. I recently retrieved it from an old floppy disc (remember them?) and was shocked (and, perversely, sadly amused) to re-read it now. It is a sermon I gave that year at Finchley Reform Synagogue for the New Year. (I feel sorry for the community sometimes, having to bear with this kind of thing – so much easier for all concerned to be bland, anaemic , unthreatening).
The title was borrowed from Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ which had come out earlier that year. And the idea for a ‘fictional’ mode of story-telling sermon had been growing in me for a while - I was beginning to realise then (and I still think it), that ‘fiction’ can tell us truths in revealing and challenging ways that are both enlivening and memorable. They can lodge in us in ways that even the best-crafted 'normal' sermon cannot.
I offer you the sermon unadulterated, copied off my disc, complete with the bits that I now find a bit gauche. It draws on various sources, biblical, rabbinic and literary – and it is my commentary, my midrash as it were, on the events around Copenhagen.
Sometimes a commentary can precede a text, awaiting its occasion.
The Last Temptation of Noah
(Second Day Rosh Hashanah sermon, Finchley Reform Synagogue, September 1988)
Even before the Disaster I felt misunderstood. I only wanted a quiet life: to come home after work and relax and rest. After all - and this used to be my private joke, though it feels pretty grim now - that's what my name Noah means: rest.
Apart from my work and my family I couldn't really be bothered with anything else. I didn't have many interests, not even much ambition. I used to sit in the office during the day and dream of the journey home, opening the door, playing with the kids (when they were smaller), later on helping them with their homework. In the evening I'd switch on the TV in order to switch off my thoughts, those terrible thoughts that kept coming, waves of them, more and more insistently over the years. All I ever really wanted was a rest - from the pressures that we all suffered. Just a rest from it all: the bills, the relatives, the dinner parties. Rest: it was all I wanted. Honestly.
Oh yes, I was known for my honesty. Even those who didn't like me said I had integrity. They used other words too, which sounded good, words like 'upright', 'blameless', even (God help me) 'righteous'. But I never trusted them - not the words, not the people. Words had lost their solidity, their truthfulness, long before. In those days words meant their opposite.
When that TV presenter interviewed me (near the end this was, after I'd made all the fuss), he was the one who called me 'righteous'. But I could hear in the tone of his voice how he really meant 'self-righteous', how the compliment disguised the attack. And who knows, maybe he was right, maybe I did begin to feel a bit self-righteous. Because I did know what was going to happen. I wasn't taken in by all those words: freedom of opportunity, economic growth, individual choice...I could see what was going on, all that heartbreak beneath the surface, and what was going to happen if we didn't change. I did know it would end in disaster; but I didn't know just how bad it would turn out. I didn't, honestly...I can tell you don't believe me. It's all right - I'm used to that. Nobody ever believed me then, either. Before.
You see, I worked in industry, middle-management. Yes, of course I was a professional - all our friends were. Agricultural and forestry equipment the firm made. When it expanded we went into animal feed, fertilisers, that sort of thing - quite a broad spread - even livestock eventually. We were successful too: public company, safe investment, high annual returns, particularly good Third World market, what with all the problems they kept having. I was responsible for overseas sales. Quite an irony really when you think about it, considering what happened.
I was able to laugh more in those days too. Earlier on that was. I used to enjoy having fun: a good party, that sort of thing. I don't think I ever entirely lost my sense of humour - but I kept noticing things I'd prefer not to have known about.
I'd read a report here, hear a programme there, bits and pieces of knowledge on the periphery of my consciousness. I tried to keep the knowledge at a distance, but it became harder. Things kept happening, kept forcing themselves on my attention.
First we had that string of warm years: '80, '81, '83, '87, '88 - the hottest since records began they said. It didn't bother me really: I was only worried about getting a bit of sun on our holidays. And where I went it rained anyway. But the statistics were global ones: it was beginning to warm up rather dramatically. Only a few degrees over a century didn't sound so much, but researchers in one country began to see the changes in plants and trees, and then another group at the other side of the world discovered that the world's beaches were eroding. These were just a couple of the warnings of the impending crisis.
I did mention it to a few people at work - after all it could have had implications for our sales - but they just shrugged and said that these kinds of reports are not reliable, they come and go, you know how it is...
And although I didn't really know how it was, it was easier at the beginning to change the subject and ask what home computer they thought I should buy. It felt safer ground.
But then the dreams started. All that water imagery, all that flooding, swimming, drowning, seas and swimming pools, struggling to keep afloat - every night a new variation on the theme. My analyst told me that this was archetypal symbolism: the struggle of the Self to emerge from the Sea of Consciousness. I changed my analyst. The next one told me it was about separation from mother.
And all the time I knew that something else was going on. It's not that they were wrong - but something else was going on, much bigger than me. Everyone had heard about the 'greenhouse effect', how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere acts like glass in a greenhouse, letting the sun's rays through to the earth but also trapping some of the heat that would otherwise be radiated back into space. We were burning all that coal and oil and gas, more and more of it, year after year - and the planet was heating up. Then there were those other gases: like the ones in those take-away cartons. Some firms changed them, others said the evidence was inconclusive (though of course ‘it merited further study’). But that still left aerosol sprays and even fridges - and I liked ice in my gin and tonic.
I really didn't know what to do. I soon knew though all the responses I'd get. The Chairman of the Board put it to me with his usual delicacy: what do you want us to do - grow our own vegetables? bicycle to work? light the office with candles?
The problem was that I didn't have any answers. I only had fears and questions and intuitions - and they wouldn't go away. But it was that presentation I did at the shareholders meeting that finally wrecked me. I spoke about the rainforests we were destroying (indirectly of course: our firm only sold the equipment); I gave them all the facts and figures, how the earth was such a fragile interconnected ecosystem (oh yes, by then I'd learnt the jargon), that what the inhabitants of planet earth were doing was quietly conducting a giant environmental experiment. Were it to be brought before any responsible local council for approval it would be firmly rejected as having potentially disastrous consequences.
At the meeting all this earned a variety of responses: anger, boredom, though a few people seemed rather subdued afterwards. Perhaps it was naive to expect anything more - after all I'd just bought a new car as well. I didn't want to change my lifestyle either. I was comfortable, I admit it. But we all were then - at least in the circles I mixed in.
Getting the push after that speech was actually a blessing in disguise. I devoted myself more and more to trying to get people to see what was going on around them all the time. I got involved with political groups, environmental groups. I started writing letters to The Guardian. I even spoke to religious groups (strange: the Christians were always more interested than the Jews).
I gave the same speech wherever I went. 'The climate that has allowed the growth of civilisation and agriculture - and to which all our crops, customs and structures are adapted - is virtually certain to disappear. The world will become warmer than at any time since the emergence of humanity on earth. This threatens to take place over the next forty years. Humanity will find it hard to adapt, particularly in a world fragmented by national boundaries and competing interests. Harvests will fail more drastically. the cities we live in will go under water.'
People began to hate me for what I was saying. They used to avoid me, fear me: fear what I was saying, I suppose. A poet had written 'Human kind cannot bear very much reality' and it was true. I didn't blame people - I couldn't bear it either. My wife began to catch me talking to myself. I was trying to keep myself sane, keep myself from the madness of knowing that something was inevitable - that was the word the experts used - unless we worked together. Funnily enough, I did have faith in humanity then. I believed that people could change, with help and encouragement. And groups of people working together - communities - could do a lot. But first we had to realise we'd taken a wrong direction, we had to turn from what's best only for ourselves, our family, our community, our nation.
Near the end I realised that we needed to pray too - though at first I was more sceptical about that. Religion had always felt a bit too cosy and comfortable: too much security was on offer. And I certainly had no security to offer anyone. I used to take myself off for long walks and look at the mess around me - the squalor, the poverty, the drugged ones, the violence, the neglect, the corruption, the decay.
I saw the goodness too, in people I met, the beauty in small things. I could see infinity in a grain of sand and feel eternity in an hour. But over all, on these walks, I felt the inferno, the 'moronic inferno' one of those clever Jewish novelists called it: the levelling down of contemporary life where people found themselves in that chaotic state, overwhelmed by all kinds of outer forces - political, technological, military, economic - which carry everything before them with a kind of disorder in which we were supposed to survive with all our human qualities. Who really had sufficient internal organisation to resist, let alone to flourish?
It wasn't possible to go on that way. And in their hearts and souls, people knew it. It wasn't just me: I really was just an ordinary person. In my generation I was nothing special. I knew it. Later on, long after the Disaster, when they told those stories about me, things got changed somehow. It was true that I became wholeheartedly committed to speaking the truth I experienced, sharing my vision of what I knew was going to happen. But if I'd lived in a less corrupt time, nobody would ever have heard of me. Even the rabbis acknowledged that, later.
I could never explain properly those intuitions I'd have when I was off walking. I just knew in the end that I had changed and that others could change too. It was very simple. I had an inner voice I just had to trust. Everyone had that voice deep inside them. It was obvious. But in those days so many temptations drowned out that knowing voice, so many possibilities of seduction away from our still and silent truth.
I once made a list, half-jokingly, of what I thought we needed to remember to be fully human, to be what we ought to be in this world. I jotted down seven things - it surprised me there were so few. I sent them on a postcard to a friend and she wrote back saying I sounded like some kind of religious nut. It sounded, she said - she was very cynical though - as if I was walking with God when I went off on my expeditions round town. I wasn't hurt by this. Well, not really. It stayed in my mind though, that phrase, 'walking with God'.
Later on, when they told those stories about me, they seemed to think it was a compliment: that somehow this was an uplifting, desirable experience for a person to have. Actually it was hell.
I'll tell you the list, but before I do I want to say that I've gone against most of them in my time. There were so many temptations then, not even a saint could have resisted them. And I was no saint. But I do know there are some things that just have to be. If we're going to make it through this time. And call it walking with God if you like.
First, there has to be a system of justice. Real justice allows a society to function and the individual to retain dignity. And a system of political and legal justice means that the disadvantaged are protected from abuse - the abuse from power, money or class.
Secondly: murder - it's not on. We have to deal with our violent feelings in some other way. And leading on from there, thirdly: robbery, theft, is out too. We have to find an alternative way of channelling our greed, and our envy of what others have.
Nor can incest be allowed. That wise professor from Vienna eventually uncovered just how much we do secretly want to express our sexuality inside our family. But we just can't have our mummy or daddy or children or siblings in that way. We've got to find someone else to do it with. And that reminds me of what happened after the Disaster. We were in such chaos. There was just our family, and my middle boy Ham did something to me which I can never forgive him for, that bugger, God damn him! But that's another story.
Yes, the fifth on the list is blasphemy. It's no use my letting rip like that. I still have to find a way of getting rid of this anger.
The sixth thing I listed I called idolatry. It was a handy word, it covered a lot of things. Actually I was thinking of all those adverts on TV, and all those colour supplements offering me happiness on every page. We were drowning in luxury in those days: so many divinely decadent choices. We knew it couldn't go on for ever but we worshipped production and consumption. I loved buying things - it made me feel so secure, so good about myself. Crazy, really, looking back.
Last on my list, number seven, sounds strange now, though at the time it made sense. I called it 'not eating flesh cut from a living animal'. You see I wanted something on my list that captured the essence of evil: that degraded the one who performed it and caused pain and terror to the victim. I suppose I could have chosen another image, another way to express this. Towards the end people came up with worse things, believe me.
Anyway, I thought out these seven things during my walks. Afterwards - after 'it' happened I mean - people saw them as the natural religious basis vital to the existence of any human society. I suppose I'm rather proud of that. They even called them after me: 'the seven laws given to the descendants of Noah'.
Right. I'm nearly finished now. I just want to tell you what happened in the end, when the Disaster came.
I saw it all so clearly: we'd reached the point where the rate of environmental change in my lifetime was going to be many times the maximum that our planet's eco-system could endure. There was no escaping this fate unless a radical transformation took place. One day I saw it all so clearly that I grew really desperate. I felt more hopeless than I'd ever done before. I felt closed in, with this great weight around me. I'd built it myself, this mental structure I'd constructed from all the evidence I'd gathered. It was like a vessel of doom I lived in. I was going crazy inside it. I was in complete despair.
I just wanted to be left alone. The understanding I had was too much for me. I felt hundreds of years old. It felt completely hopeless. I felt overwhelmed by...helplessness, that's the word: I was completely helpless, like a baby. I couldn't do anything more. I had no strength left.
And I started to cry. It'd never happened before. After all I was a man. But I did, I broke down, in front of my family: all of them were there - my wife and my sons and their wives. And I wept and wept. Tears of bitterness. Tears of remorse. Tears of anger. Tears of grief. I cried and I cried and I just...floated away.
It's hard to describe now. The sadness just flooded out of me. It went on and on, all those years and years of frustration and pain trapped inside - it all welled up and spilled out. The tears just seemed to pour out of me - it felt like days - for the sadness of it all, and the pity.
The rest you know of course. It's history - of a sort. It's in the books, though I know people argue over the details. Nothing ever was the same again.
Though there was one helpful moment: when I saw that rainbow. Yes, I know it's only the reflection of the sun in moist atmosphere, but I'd never really looked at one before. Really looked, I mean. That one time though, soon after the Disaster, I saw those seven colours arched above me, translucent and glorious and shimmering. And I suddenly remembered the seven laws I'd jotted down on that card, and it was my conceit, I know, but I felt there was some connection between those seven basic norms for how we are to live together and those seven basic colours in which the world is enveloped.
There was a harmony at that moment: seeing how the natural world and our human world reflected each other's inner grace. And at that moment I knew, I knew as clearly as if I heard a voice speak it in my ear, I knew that this disaster could never be again. Not ever. It felt like a promise. If I were a religious man I'd call it a blessing. Never again - such relief, I can't tell you.
'While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest and cold and heat and summer and winter and day and night shall not cease'. The words just formed themselves in my head. It would never happen again. That's all there is to say.
Oh, I almost forgot. The last temptation of Noah. You want to know the very last temptation? It was after it was all over and we had to pull ourselves together and start again. That was hard. We didn't know where we were, where we were going, what we were doing. Everything had gone. We survivors felt so helpless so much of the time. And the hardest part was that we kept remembering how it'd been before: so comfortable, so secure - you'll never know. That was the worst part: I couldn't help but remember it.
I became very morose, self-pitying. I just wanted to forget, to forget how it'd been. And, I admit it, I started to drink. They never tell the story this way, but this is how it was. They always make me out as the father of vineyards and winemaking, but I'm telling you: soon I was drinking all the time - I just wanted to blot it all out.
And that was the last temptation: the temptation to blot it all out, to forget the knowledge I carried, the understanding I had, the lonely experiences I'd been through, the intuitions I'd borne all these years. I tried to drown myself in drink: another flood.
But it wasn't to be of course. It seems that my destiny is to remember, to remain aware. I never did get my rest. I learnt that death is the only release from the burden of consciousness. And that while I lived, my work was just given to me to do. It was wherever I happened to be.
I even wrote a poem about it towards the end. Someone else later took the credit for it of course - but then none of us is perfect. Are we?
To open eyes when others close them
to hear when others do not wish to listen
to look when others turn away
to seek to understand when others give up
to rouse oneself when others accept
to continue the struggle even when one is not the strongest
to cry out when others keep silent
to be a Jew
it is that
it is first of all that
and further
to live when others are dead
and to remember when others have forgotten.
Friday, 20 November 2009
The White Ribbon
This week I saw a masterpiece. And I’m writing to urge you to see it. The German director Michael Haneke’s latest film, The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band), is a cinematic midrash rooted in the problematic Biblical verse about God ‘visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generations’ (Exodus 34:7).
I won’t describe the plot of the film. Just to say the following. It is a mystery story. It is shot in stark black-and-white. It is set in 1913, in Germany. And it is an extraordinary exploration, through visual and verbal storytelling, of the history of Germany in the 20th century – a history that is both specific, and yet has moral and spiritual resonances for every society and every age. Including our own.
I have not seen a film like this since I first saw Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’ (1957). (1957 is not, I hasten to add, when I saw it). Haneke’s film bears comparison with his Swedish predecessor’s masterly oeuvre of psychological, historical and family dramas. And fifty years from now, this film will bear witness – if films are still being seen – to the mental world that led to the Shoah.
This is not a film about the Holocaust – but it is like a hologram where you see through the narrative into the future. I thought I saw Auschwitz in one scene – but maybe this was my imagination. This is a drama where – as in life – indeterminacy reigns. The narrator’s voice-over at the beginning talks of the way in which he “could perhaps clarify some things that happened in this country”. The “perhaps” - Samuel Beckett’s favourite word - is telling. Hearsay and conjecture, the fallibility of memory, the self-serving nature of memory – all are at stake, and in play, as the film progresses.
Like a Kafka parable, like a Biblical narrator, Haneke reveals and withholds. Meaning evolves, is disguised, and finally (if at all) is created by us the viewers. This is storytelling unlike anything you will see from Hollywood. It’s soul - filled with love and brutality and the way they become confused - is European. The film may have won this year’s Palme D’Or at Cannes – but that isn’t why you should try to find time to see it. You should see it because you will be stimulated, provoked, enlivened – great art does that to us.
I don’t want to say much more about it – I know that my own experience when someone raves about something I ‘must’ see is that I’m invariably a bit disappointed. It never lives up the fantasy created by someone else’s excitement.
I won’t describe the plot of the film. Just to say the following. It is a mystery story. It is shot in stark black-and-white. It is set in 1913, in Germany. And it is an extraordinary exploration, through visual and verbal storytelling, of the history of Germany in the 20th century – a history that is both specific, and yet has moral and spiritual resonances for every society and every age. Including our own.
I have not seen a film like this since I first saw Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’ (1957). (1957 is not, I hasten to add, when I saw it). Haneke’s film bears comparison with his Swedish predecessor’s masterly oeuvre of psychological, historical and family dramas. And fifty years from now, this film will bear witness – if films are still being seen – to the mental world that led to the Shoah.
This is not a film about the Holocaust – but it is like a hologram where you see through the narrative into the future. I thought I saw Auschwitz in one scene – but maybe this was my imagination. This is a drama where – as in life – indeterminacy reigns. The narrator’s voice-over at the beginning talks of the way in which he “could perhaps clarify some things that happened in this country”. The “perhaps” - Samuel Beckett’s favourite word - is telling. Hearsay and conjecture, the fallibility of memory, the self-serving nature of memory – all are at stake, and in play, as the film progresses.
Like a Kafka parable, like a Biblical narrator, Haneke reveals and withholds. Meaning evolves, is disguised, and finally (if at all) is created by us the viewers. This is storytelling unlike anything you will see from Hollywood. It’s soul - filled with love and brutality and the way they become confused - is European. The film may have won this year’s Palme D’Or at Cannes – but that isn’t why you should try to find time to see it. You should see it because you will be stimulated, provoked, enlivened – great art does that to us.
I don’t want to say much more about it – I know that my own experience when someone raves about something I ‘must’ see is that I’m invariably a bit disappointed. It never lives up the fantasy created by someone else’s excitement.
Wednesday, 11 November 2009
Thoughts on Lying and Laughter
In a week when our thoughts have been returning to those wondrous days of November 1989, when something that had not been foreseen suddenly came to pass – 'appeared' almost like a modern miracle, with the human spirit triumphing over the forces of oppression – it may seem strange to dwell not on our recent shared history but on an ancient tale.
I would like to share with you a sermon I gave last week at Finchley Reform Synagogue.
The congregation was quite small but I wanted to speak about the sedrah of the week, Va’yera (Genesis 18-22) - the word means 'and there appeared...'.
Traditionally one reads several chapters each week, working our way through the Torah on our annual journey through this most extraordinary text we call the Torah. As we read, we know that congregations around the world are all reading these same chapters. And that these narratives have been studied and chanted, read and remembered , for millennia. We are one small link in the chain. And what can we add to this awesome heritage? What can we learn today from these timeless texts?
I can never manage more than to think about a small section, a few verses, of the appointed chapters. I like to read slowly, carefully, and see what is there – on the surface and beneath the surface – and what these words of old have to say (if anything) today. They may not have the drama, the immediacy, of contemporary events. But sometimes they have their own drama, their own immediacy, their own capacity to open us up to the mystery and unpredictability of life.
**
Recently, the papers have been full of it. Would you lie to get your child into a better school? Of course you may not think of it as lying – just stretching the truth, or finding a loophole in the system. Or consider an accountant who offers you advice on creative ways of saving money, avoiding tax: it would not be suggested that you actively lie, just act in ways that gave you an advantage.
We teach (or taught) our children not to lie – that ‘honesty is the best policy’. (How often we reach for a handy, ready-made, off the peg, phrase like that when an issue is actually quite complex and our own thoughts are maybe a bit confused). But at the very moment that we become so insistent that our children must tell the truth, the very forcefulness of our insistence should give us a clue that something else is up, something else is at stake. When we insist that honesty is best and that lying is bad and always wrong, are we not perhaps lying to ourselves?
Because who can say, hand on heart, that they have never gained an advantage in a situation through dissembling the truth? That’s why we talk about ‘white lies’ – it lets us say that we have lied, but we make it excusable, we let ourselves off the hook. Whitewashing our lie allows us to feel a bit better about ourselves. We can admit to a white lie, because it is as if in our mind the word ‘white’ cancels out the word ‘lie’.
One of the things I love about my Jewish tradition – and particularly the texts of the Bible – is how the stories we read illustrate and illuminate themes like these, ordinary human situations, in interesting and subtle ways. We can see ourselves in the narratives. Our sedrah is called Va’yera – ‘and there appeared’: it is about what appears, what is seen, it is about sight, and insight. (The Hebrew does not distinguish between the two).
And one of the things we see in our text is that even God lies, sometimes. This is God whose name is synonymous with truth. Indeed one of God’s names is ‘Truth’ – Emet. So if ‘truth’ is one of God’s 13 attributes for the rabbis of the Talmud (Ex 34:3) and ‘The Seal of God is Truth’ (Shabbat 55), how come in our text God lies?
Let’s look at the story a bit closer. And let’s read it carefully. We are going to approach this divine lie in a circuitous way, as does the text. We read how these strangers arrive and Abraham greets them and feeds them and during the meal one of them says to their host: ‘When I come back next year, your wife Sara will have had a son’ (18:10). And Sara overhears this and the storyteller then reminds us that both Abraham and Sara were old and that Sara no longer was menstruating. And then the text says:
Va’tizchak Sara b’kirba – ‘and Sara laughed inside herself’
And then, parallel to her listening in to the conversation of the men, the storyteller lets us overhear the voice inside of her: ‘and she said to herself: ‘Now that I am so old and worn out (v’loti), am I to have such delight/pleasure (edna) ? – va’adoni zakayn, with my master, my husband, being so old, past it?’ (18:12). This is a very daring sentence from our narrator, first in showing us Sara eavesdropping on the conversation; then revealing this intimate detail from Abraham and Sara’s sex life. The more you think about it, the more remarkable it is, for the storyteller gets us the readers, the listeners, inside of Sara: the verse penetrates her , symbolically, and we find out what this news does to her inside of herself.
It’s the first time in the Torah that we find this key word, tzachak, a word which is to echo and re-echo through the texts and the generations – tzachak, to laugh. It will of course become the name of the son, Yitzchak, Isaac – ‘the one who laughs’.
Except that, as usual with Hebrew, words are never simple, they are layered, they can have more than one meaning. They can even (and this is one example) have meanings which point in different directions, perhaps in opposite directions. Because tzachak does mean ‘laughter’, but it also means ‘mockery’ – and how we think about the word and translate it will depend on the context in which it comes and the assumptions we bring to our reading.
Of course ‘laughter’ and ‘mockery’ are related. We’d make a distinction these days between ‘laughing with’ someone and ‘laughing at’ them. And we know there is a big difference between them - when we do it, and when we are on the receiving end of it. And we also know that laughter is a very complex emotion: sometimes it can be genuine pleasure, but it can also be defensive, a way of expressing embarrassment, or fear, or anxiety. It can be spontaneous or contrived, it can make us vulnerable (helpless with laughter), or it can be a way of expressing aggression. And, to make it even more complicated: we may consciously imagine it is one thing (a bit of fun) - but actually unconsciously it can be something else, its opposite. How many times have we heard someone say ‘Oh I was only joking’, and they want to dismiss something said as humorous, only for us to feel upset or wounded by it, not because we are too thin-skinned but because we have picked up the hostility hidden in the laughter, or the joke.
So when we read our text, our supposedly simple Torah story, we realise that there may be more going on here than meets the eye. Va’tizchak Sara b’kirba – ‘and Sara laughed inside herself, and she said: When I’m so old, so worn out, am I to have such enjoyment - when my husbands as old as that?’ Is this laughter with pleasure in the anticipation – or is this ironic laughter, scepticism, cynicism even? ‘Chance would be a fine thing!’
How do we read it? How are we meant to read it? Are we meant to read it just one way? Or are we meant to keep these different possibilities in mind as we read on? As if the storyteller’s art is to create in us a frisson of uncertainty. As if, at this moment of penetration into the character, this letting us overhear her thoughts, we the audience are being played with (tzachak also means ‘to play’ of course) – as if the narrator is saying, ‘I’m going to take you right inside my character and tell you, let you hear, what is going on – and you still won’t know for sure!’ And maybe this game the narrator is playing with us teaches us something profound: that we can never really know what goes on inside another human being. And even if we ask them, they might not know either, not really.
Indeed the story goes on to dramatise that maybe Sara does not know what she really feels and thinks. It goes on, in the next verse – and here we come back to the lie, in case you were wondering where that theme had gone – ‘And Adonai said to Abraham, lama ze tzachaka Sara, why did Sara laugh/mock, saying, “Shall I really bear a child, being as old as I am?”’ (18:13). See how our text makes God into a liar. She says ‘he is too old’. But our narrator has God changing this, when he speaks to Abraham, into Sara saying ‘I am too old’.
And why does God tell this lie to Abraham? Well, why would you do it? To protect Abraham’s feelings – this is what the midrashic commentators in the Talmud say (Baba Metzia 87a). God did it so that Abraham wouldn’t feel offended or hurt. And from this verse the Rabbis derived a maxim, a rule of thumb, that one is allowed to dissemble, to tell the white lie, to avoid the full truth (however you want to put it) if it will hurt someone’s feelings to tell the truth straightforwardly and honestly (Ketubot 16b-17a). Because to hurt someone’s feelings was equated by the Rabbis with the shedding of blood - an extraordinary Judaic sensitivity to the individual, to the other flesh-and-blood human being with feelings just as real and sensitive as your own.
And if that attitude isn’t bold enough, truly attentive to the importance of inter-personal relationships and feelings, the Talmudic rabbis went even further than that. ‘When is lying acceptable?’ they asked. ‘Lying is also permissible’, they said, ‘if it is for the sake of peace’ (Yevamot 65a).
So if your partner says ‘Do I look good in this?’ – the answer is ‘Yes’
But that just illustrates what a can of worms the Rabbis open up through this permissive attitude towards truth-telling. Because ‘for the sake of peace’ can cover a broad spectrum: from international politics to personal convenience: ‘anything for a peaceful life’. Jewish teaching does offer insight and guidance, and ways of thinking about all sorts of everyday situations - but it can’t give us an answer for a specific situation we find ourselves in. Only we are responsible for that. We have to judge and decide how to act, how to be, what to say, each time, every day, and the decision of today may not be relevant tomorrow. That’s part of the God-given burden of being human.
But God’s lie in the text is not the end of the story. We have one more verse. For our heroine Sara has somehow been listening in again - and this time, remarkably, she seems to have overheard another conversation, she’s eavesdropped on God’s conversation with Abraham, because the next thing we read it’s as if she’s heard God asking Abraham ‘Why did Sara laugh?’. Because we read :
Va’t’hachaysh Sara laymor, lo tzachaki – ‘And Sara lied, saying “I did not laugh/mock”...’ (18:15).
That’s how it is often translated. But actually the text uses a word that means ‘deceived’ or even ‘cringed’. And the storyteller withholds from us who was deceived or what she was cringing from. There is no object for the verb. So we can read this in all sorts of ways.
Is the text saying ‘And Sara deceived herself...’ She thought she was laughing – but actually it was mockery? Or the opposite – that she thought she was mocking, being sarcastic – but deeper down she had felt real pleasure at what she had heard?
Or does it suggest that she cringed when she realised that God was being so protective towards her husband, more protective than she’d been in her own thoughts. We don’t know. We don’t know what is inside that lo tzachaki, ‘I didn’t do that, I didn’t tzachak’.
But we do know one thing: that she was frightened: ki ya’raya. She was frightened of all this talk about another child, at her age, at her impossible age. And none of it made sense, not the arrival of these strangers, nor the conversations she’d heard, nor the complicated feelings inside her, nothing made sense anymore. And at the moment of maximum confusion, where nothing made sense and fear fills her soul, she hears for herself, for the first time in her life, the divine voice addressing her directly. The end of the verse says ‘And He said: lo - No, no, no – ki tzachaka - it is all right, because you did have that experience - laughter, mockery, whatever it was - it is all right to have your feelings, inside you. There is no need to lie to yourself. There is no need to deny your inner experience.‘
What a gift this. The divine voice reassuring Sara about the acceptability of her experience. What a gift from our storyteller – to give us a text, so simple and yet so layered, so compact and yet so open, so clear and yet so undecidable. And to give us a God who cares about an old man’s feelings and the confusion in a woman’s heart. To give us a text and a God for whom lies and deception are acknowledged as part of the very fabric of life, and yet which leaves us to work out in our own lives where truth matters and where it matters less, where deception makes sense and where self-deception does not. A story of the generation of meaning within each generation.
I would like to share with you a sermon I gave last week at Finchley Reform Synagogue.
The congregation was quite small but I wanted to speak about the sedrah of the week, Va’yera (Genesis 18-22) - the word means 'and there appeared...'.
Traditionally one reads several chapters each week, working our way through the Torah on our annual journey through this most extraordinary text we call the Torah. As we read, we know that congregations around the world are all reading these same chapters. And that these narratives have been studied and chanted, read and remembered , for millennia. We are one small link in the chain. And what can we add to this awesome heritage? What can we learn today from these timeless texts?
I can never manage more than to think about a small section, a few verses, of the appointed chapters. I like to read slowly, carefully, and see what is there – on the surface and beneath the surface – and what these words of old have to say (if anything) today. They may not have the drama, the immediacy, of contemporary events. But sometimes they have their own drama, their own immediacy, their own capacity to open us up to the mystery and unpredictability of life.
**
Recently, the papers have been full of it. Would you lie to get your child into a better school? Of course you may not think of it as lying – just stretching the truth, or finding a loophole in the system. Or consider an accountant who offers you advice on creative ways of saving money, avoiding tax: it would not be suggested that you actively lie, just act in ways that gave you an advantage.
We teach (or taught) our children not to lie – that ‘honesty is the best policy’. (How often we reach for a handy, ready-made, off the peg, phrase like that when an issue is actually quite complex and our own thoughts are maybe a bit confused). But at the very moment that we become so insistent that our children must tell the truth, the very forcefulness of our insistence should give us a clue that something else is up, something else is at stake. When we insist that honesty is best and that lying is bad and always wrong, are we not perhaps lying to ourselves?
Because who can say, hand on heart, that they have never gained an advantage in a situation through dissembling the truth? That’s why we talk about ‘white lies’ – it lets us say that we have lied, but we make it excusable, we let ourselves off the hook. Whitewashing our lie allows us to feel a bit better about ourselves. We can admit to a white lie, because it is as if in our mind the word ‘white’ cancels out the word ‘lie’.
One of the things I love about my Jewish tradition – and particularly the texts of the Bible – is how the stories we read illustrate and illuminate themes like these, ordinary human situations, in interesting and subtle ways. We can see ourselves in the narratives. Our sedrah is called Va’yera – ‘and there appeared’: it is about what appears, what is seen, it is about sight, and insight. (The Hebrew does not distinguish between the two).
And one of the things we see in our text is that even God lies, sometimes. This is God whose name is synonymous with truth. Indeed one of God’s names is ‘Truth’ – Emet. So if ‘truth’ is one of God’s 13 attributes for the rabbis of the Talmud (Ex 34:3) and ‘The Seal of God is Truth’ (Shabbat 55), how come in our text God lies?
Let’s look at the story a bit closer. And let’s read it carefully. We are going to approach this divine lie in a circuitous way, as does the text. We read how these strangers arrive and Abraham greets them and feeds them and during the meal one of them says to their host: ‘When I come back next year, your wife Sara will have had a son’ (18:10). And Sara overhears this and the storyteller then reminds us that both Abraham and Sara were old and that Sara no longer was menstruating. And then the text says:
Va’tizchak Sara b’kirba – ‘and Sara laughed inside herself’
And then, parallel to her listening in to the conversation of the men, the storyteller lets us overhear the voice inside of her: ‘and she said to herself: ‘Now that I am so old and worn out (v’loti), am I to have such delight/pleasure (edna) ? – va’adoni zakayn, with my master, my husband, being so old, past it?’ (18:12). This is a very daring sentence from our narrator, first in showing us Sara eavesdropping on the conversation; then revealing this intimate detail from Abraham and Sara’s sex life. The more you think about it, the more remarkable it is, for the storyteller gets us the readers, the listeners, inside of Sara: the verse penetrates her , symbolically, and we find out what this news does to her inside of herself.
It’s the first time in the Torah that we find this key word, tzachak, a word which is to echo and re-echo through the texts and the generations – tzachak, to laugh. It will of course become the name of the son, Yitzchak, Isaac – ‘the one who laughs’.
Except that, as usual with Hebrew, words are never simple, they are layered, they can have more than one meaning. They can even (and this is one example) have meanings which point in different directions, perhaps in opposite directions. Because tzachak does mean ‘laughter’, but it also means ‘mockery’ – and how we think about the word and translate it will depend on the context in which it comes and the assumptions we bring to our reading.
Of course ‘laughter’ and ‘mockery’ are related. We’d make a distinction these days between ‘laughing with’ someone and ‘laughing at’ them. And we know there is a big difference between them - when we do it, and when we are on the receiving end of it. And we also know that laughter is a very complex emotion: sometimes it can be genuine pleasure, but it can also be defensive, a way of expressing embarrassment, or fear, or anxiety. It can be spontaneous or contrived, it can make us vulnerable (helpless with laughter), or it can be a way of expressing aggression. And, to make it even more complicated: we may consciously imagine it is one thing (a bit of fun) - but actually unconsciously it can be something else, its opposite. How many times have we heard someone say ‘Oh I was only joking’, and they want to dismiss something said as humorous, only for us to feel upset or wounded by it, not because we are too thin-skinned but because we have picked up the hostility hidden in the laughter, or the joke.
So when we read our text, our supposedly simple Torah story, we realise that there may be more going on here than meets the eye. Va’tizchak Sara b’kirba – ‘and Sara laughed inside herself, and she said: When I’m so old, so worn out, am I to have such enjoyment - when my husbands as old as that?’ Is this laughter with pleasure in the anticipation – or is this ironic laughter, scepticism, cynicism even? ‘Chance would be a fine thing!’
How do we read it? How are we meant to read it? Are we meant to read it just one way? Or are we meant to keep these different possibilities in mind as we read on? As if the storyteller’s art is to create in us a frisson of uncertainty. As if, at this moment of penetration into the character, this letting us overhear her thoughts, we the audience are being played with (tzachak also means ‘to play’ of course) – as if the narrator is saying, ‘I’m going to take you right inside my character and tell you, let you hear, what is going on – and you still won’t know for sure!’ And maybe this game the narrator is playing with us teaches us something profound: that we can never really know what goes on inside another human being. And even if we ask them, they might not know either, not really.
Indeed the story goes on to dramatise that maybe Sara does not know what she really feels and thinks. It goes on, in the next verse – and here we come back to the lie, in case you were wondering where that theme had gone – ‘And Adonai said to Abraham, lama ze tzachaka Sara, why did Sara laugh/mock, saying, “Shall I really bear a child, being as old as I am?”’ (18:13). See how our text makes God into a liar. She says ‘he is too old’. But our narrator has God changing this, when he speaks to Abraham, into Sara saying ‘I am too old’.
And why does God tell this lie to Abraham? Well, why would you do it? To protect Abraham’s feelings – this is what the midrashic commentators in the Talmud say (Baba Metzia 87a). God did it so that Abraham wouldn’t feel offended or hurt. And from this verse the Rabbis derived a maxim, a rule of thumb, that one is allowed to dissemble, to tell the white lie, to avoid the full truth (however you want to put it) if it will hurt someone’s feelings to tell the truth straightforwardly and honestly (Ketubot 16b-17a). Because to hurt someone’s feelings was equated by the Rabbis with the shedding of blood - an extraordinary Judaic sensitivity to the individual, to the other flesh-and-blood human being with feelings just as real and sensitive as your own.
And if that attitude isn’t bold enough, truly attentive to the importance of inter-personal relationships and feelings, the Talmudic rabbis went even further than that. ‘When is lying acceptable?’ they asked. ‘Lying is also permissible’, they said, ‘if it is for the sake of peace’ (Yevamot 65a).
So if your partner says ‘Do I look good in this?’ – the answer is ‘Yes’
But that just illustrates what a can of worms the Rabbis open up through this permissive attitude towards truth-telling. Because ‘for the sake of peace’ can cover a broad spectrum: from international politics to personal convenience: ‘anything for a peaceful life’. Jewish teaching does offer insight and guidance, and ways of thinking about all sorts of everyday situations - but it can’t give us an answer for a specific situation we find ourselves in. Only we are responsible for that. We have to judge and decide how to act, how to be, what to say, each time, every day, and the decision of today may not be relevant tomorrow. That’s part of the God-given burden of being human.
But God’s lie in the text is not the end of the story. We have one more verse. For our heroine Sara has somehow been listening in again - and this time, remarkably, she seems to have overheard another conversation, she’s eavesdropped on God’s conversation with Abraham, because the next thing we read it’s as if she’s heard God asking Abraham ‘Why did Sara laugh?’. Because we read :
Va’t’hachaysh Sara laymor, lo tzachaki – ‘And Sara lied, saying “I did not laugh/mock”...’ (18:15).
That’s how it is often translated. But actually the text uses a word that means ‘deceived’ or even ‘cringed’. And the storyteller withholds from us who was deceived or what she was cringing from. There is no object for the verb. So we can read this in all sorts of ways.
Is the text saying ‘And Sara deceived herself...’ She thought she was laughing – but actually it was mockery? Or the opposite – that she thought she was mocking, being sarcastic – but deeper down she had felt real pleasure at what she had heard?
Or does it suggest that she cringed when she realised that God was being so protective towards her husband, more protective than she’d been in her own thoughts. We don’t know. We don’t know what is inside that lo tzachaki, ‘I didn’t do that, I didn’t tzachak’.
But we do know one thing: that she was frightened: ki ya’raya. She was frightened of all this talk about another child, at her age, at her impossible age. And none of it made sense, not the arrival of these strangers, nor the conversations she’d heard, nor the complicated feelings inside her, nothing made sense anymore. And at the moment of maximum confusion, where nothing made sense and fear fills her soul, she hears for herself, for the first time in her life, the divine voice addressing her directly. The end of the verse says ‘And He said: lo - No, no, no – ki tzachaka - it is all right, because you did have that experience - laughter, mockery, whatever it was - it is all right to have your feelings, inside you. There is no need to lie to yourself. There is no need to deny your inner experience.‘
What a gift this. The divine voice reassuring Sara about the acceptability of her experience. What a gift from our storyteller – to give us a text, so simple and yet so layered, so compact and yet so open, so clear and yet so undecidable. And to give us a God who cares about an old man’s feelings and the confusion in a woman’s heart. To give us a text and a God for whom lies and deception are acknowledged as part of the very fabric of life, and yet which leaves us to work out in our own lives where truth matters and where it matters less, where deception makes sense and where self-deception does not. A story of the generation of meaning within each generation.
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