Simon Schama and 'The Story of the Jews'

The historian Simon Schama’s 5-part series, ‘The Story of the Jews’, on the BBC promises to be a treat. Over the years I’ve seen these kind of documentaries come and go – I’ve even been involved in one – and I usually find them annoyingly superficial, or offering glib stereotypes of Jews, or just missing the point about the extraordinary richness and diversity of our 3000 year old culture and civilisation.

But what Schama managed to do, rather brilliantly I thought, was capture something of the essence of what it is to be Jewish. It is not, he insisted right at the beginning, the colour of our skin, or the languages we speak, it’s not the tunes we sing or the foods we eat; it’s not our opinions – for, he said, we are a ‘fiercely argumentative lot’; it’s not, he continued, the way we pray, assuming we do. No, none of these things are at the core of Jewishness according to Schama. What ties us together, he suggested, is  a story, a story we have kept in our heads and hearts, a story of suffering , of resilience, of endurance and of creativity.

I think this emphasis on story and storytelling is spot-on. In his opinion, there are two things special about the Jewish people: they have endured for 3000 years in spite of everything thrown at them. And they have an extraordinarily dramatic story to tell. And these two things, he thinks, are connected. These programmes seem to be exploring the ways in which we told our story in order to survive, so that in the end – as he put it – ‘we are our story’.

What I loved about this approach was the emphasis on story, and a tradition that lives with, engages with, is rooted in, the written word.  If you have a God who has no image or images attached to Him, to It, then what you have left is words. And once you have a religion that is based on words, and how words form stories, and how stories become the very fabric of the tradition – in other words once your identity as a people is fused with language and what we can do with it (and what it does to us), once a people is bound up with how words unfold on the page, or as we listen to them, then everything is open to interpretation, everything can be understood in various ways, in multiple ways. Because words are slippery and deceptive, they can reveal and they can hide, they can illuminate and they can obscure. They can point in several different directions at the same time. (And here Simon Schama is giving way to Howard Cooper).

I suppose if I had one quibble with Schama it would be his use of the singular and not the plural. ‘We are our story’ should really be ‘we are our stories’. Because I don’t think we have just one story that all Jews agree upon. In fact part of our fiercely argumentative nature is about just that: which story do we feel connected to? which of the many stories about Jewishness do we relate to? and which don’t we relate to? Indeed, can you combine stories? Or do they contradict each other? Let me open this out.

Is the story of Jewishness we choose the traditional religious story that takes  Abraham and his descendents through Egyptian bondage and liberation to the revelation of God’s word at Sinai and then on into the Promised Land? This is the Torah’s story – this grandiose, humbling vision of a chosen people with a mission to be a blessing to humankind through its commitment to living out a series of ethical principles revolving around justice and compassion and concern for the outsider and the vulnerable. And that a failure to do this does have consequences. This is one way of telling the story – with an unseen God, Creator of the Universe, King and Father and Judge for His people, a story that puts its faith in the Holy One of Israel as an abiding presence through the generations.

If you belong to a synagogue community then you are an inheritor of this way of telling the story: our liturgy is full of imagery and motifs taken from this story, it’s a way of telling the Jewish story that is rich and provocative - and often baffling to our modern sensibilities; and yet we are drawn to it, on Rosh Hashanah we return and plug in to it yet again, because something in us – however obscure – senses that there is something in this way of telling the Jewish story that touches our own lives, however far away we are in time and place from the texts and the world view that generated this story.

Telling the story this way creates a larger story in which our own lives, our own mini-stories, are lived out. It is like a container in which our own personal stories are held. Or a magnetic force field in which the fragments of our own lives create patterns formed by the unseen energy generated by the story. It reminds us that our own personal stories are part of a larger collective story.

But that isn’t the only story available, not by a long way. Because there is another story – what we might think of as the ‘secular’ story – that tells a very different story of Jewishness. This is a story that says: all this religious stuff is just mumbo-jumbo, it’s an illusionary fantasy story that isn’t backed up by any historical or scientific evidence.

Not only has science, through astrophysics and Darwin, given us a spectacularly different picture of how we got here than these old tribal legends, but there is no solid historical evidence for any of the legendary figures in the Bible, no evidence that the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt let alone had an Exodus, the whole story is a fiction based on wishful thinking; and this God-character is something that we can understand people wanting to believe in, like having a good parent to look after us, someone who has our best interests at heart, but it’s basically a product of our own fertile and child-like imaginations.

Indeed Schama starts his telling of the ‘Story of the Jews’ with the exiled Sigmund Freud, who was proud to call himself a ‘godless Jew’, a Jew who thought that religious belief was a neurotic product of unresolved psychological problems – but a Jew who was nevertheless obsessed with the question of what Jewishness was about, where it came from, what it meant, why it had endured. Even the so-called ‘secular’ Jew usually has very strong views on their Jewishness, feels passionately about some quality of their Jewishness, even if it is what they don’t believe in. There is hardly ever just indifference. It still matters. 

Secular Judaism tells a very different story from religious Judaism. It sees the Bible as  a human document, a compilation of texts bearing all the limitations of a worldview of 3000 years ago, with all the prejudices of that era about women,  all the prejudices about homosexuality, all the dismissiveness about people who are different from ‘us’. The secular Jewish story acknowledges that some of these old texts have some universal values in them – about justice and the importance of building a society based on concern for the poor and oppressed; social values, yes, but ones that certainly don’t need a God to sustain them.

And yet this secular story is just as vital and as fruitful and as essential to the story of the Jews as the religious story. Without the secular story our modern world would be, quite literally, unimaginable. Well, we can imagine it: it would be like Saudi Arabia. Because this secular and humanist Jewish story has fertilised the world as we now know it. It underpins contemporary thinking in every area of human endeavour. It isn’t just Freud, but Einstein and Marx and Kafka and Rosa Luxembourg and Oliver Sacks and Schoenberg and Hollywood –  but I don’t need to rehearse the multiple ways in which secular Judaism has for 200 years now flowed into the currents of modern life: politically, culturally, artistically, socially, economically, scientifically. The arts and the humanities, the sciences and the social sciences of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, rest upon the contributions of Jews who have departed from the first, earlier, religious story of Jewishness.

Actually one of the glories of the liturgy we use in our Reform synagogues is that through the vision of its editors it has assimilated into its pages of our religious story the insights of so many people who would not themselves share the religious version of the story; who in fact turned their back on it – often with huge relief. Maybe even converted from Judaism. I don’t think Reform Jews have always appreciated what a radical thing this was, the incorporation of so-called ‘secular’ voices within the pages of our prayer books. But we undervalue at our peril this amalgamation, this creative synthesis; and in an era of increased particularism where Jewish identity is being pressed into narrower and narrower shapes, this open-minded, integrative, pluralistic vision of Jewishness is at risk from the ethnic purists, the guardians of how the Jewish story should be told, those who would police what is ‘kosher’ Jewish self-expression and what is beyond the pale, and needs to be excluded from the traditions of the tribe.

You may already be thinking – based on the way I’m describing the ‘religious’ story of Jewishness and the ‘secular’ story of Jewishness - that this is much too simplistic a way of thinking about the reality of our multiple stories of being Jewish. Because the boundaries, as you suspect, are much more blurred. So we know, for example, there are so many Jews over these last generations up until today, all around the world, who have taken the key ethical message of religious Judaism about social justice, and the dignity and integrity of every human being, and they have built lives and careers around this ancient message. Because the Jewish passion for social justice does not depend upon belief in a liberating God, or a belief on the concept of a chosen people, chosen to bring this vision to the world.

Millions of Jews have over the last two centuries rejected all that – yet lived and died in order to keep faith with this vision: whether as Communists, as organisers of social action projects in London or in Africa, whether working for equality of blacks in the US in the 60s, or Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank in our own times. Over and over again, when you read the obituaries of seminal figures from  the world of economics and sociology and history and psychology and education and welfare you see that they came from Jewish families. Often religious families - but the religion has been rejected. Yet something has prompted them, impelled them, to follow the vision of the betterment of the world, or the improvement of human well-being, or the advancement of knowledge so that our lives can be enriched by new discoveries or inventions.

It is as if the ethical spirit of religious Judaism has infiltrated into their psyches unbeknownst to themselves, and the core Jewish values are then lived out in completely ‘secular’ lives. There is a mystery here, particularly this survival of the Judaic ethos of care and compassion in so many who have rejected the package from which it came, a mystery that gives us  pause, should give us pause, about our too easily labels – our superficial labels – about so-called ‘religious’ and so-called ‘secular’.

I’d venture to say that all those who gather in my own community, Finchley Reform Synagogue, think of ourselves as in part, or in whole, ‘secular’ Jews. That is to say they/we see the world through Enlightenment eyes which are educated in rationalism, scepticism, evidence-based thinking. We might be aware of the limits of these ways of thinking about the world - but they are still at the core of us. They are foundational. We might build onto them, graft into them, other ways of seeing, so-called religious or spiritual perspectives on life; but none of us , I would wager, sees the world through that ancient archaic religious prism of faith in an unseen power that has created the world, revealed the true way to the world, and will send a redeemer at the end of days to free us, the Jewish people, from our suffering. Secularism, thank God, is here to stay.

We could not survive without it, the world endures and thrives because of it. With our I-phones and Facebook pages and football devotion and TV habits we are secularists - and our Jewish story makes room for all of that. The glory of assimilation is that we can have all that and it seems – on the surface at least - entirely unproblematic. (What might be problematic  at a deeper level I will leave for another day).

So there is the religious story, and there is the secular story – with all the complications and crossovers I have sketched out. But they are essentially very different stories. And then there is another ‘story of the Jews’ I haven’t yet mentioned. And in our days it has become as compelling a story as the first two stories. And sometimes it is promoted as if it should be more compelling, more significant. And that, of course, is the story of the Jews in relation to the land of Israel. You can call it, in shorthand, the Zionist story. And when you tell the story of the Jews that way, you might ignore the religious story, you might ignore the diasporic secular story, and what you concentrate on is the Jews as a people who had no land of their own for two thousand years, Jews thriving and suffering wherever they found themselves scattered among the nations, until finally they achieved their goal, the aim of Jewish existence, possession of a land they could call their own - even though it wasn’t their own, even though it meant the dispossession of a native population (like in Bible times, paradoxically).

This story of the Jews is very well known. It is now inconceivable to think of Jewishness without it, even though it’s a story that has arrived relatively late on the scene, emerging glorious and blood-laden from the ashes of the Holocaust. It is, in its way, an experiment in how to tell the Jewish story, an experiment that is ongoing – ‘Jews belong in one land’, this version goes, ‘the so-called Holy Land, even if we reject the concept of holiness’, as the founders of the State did.

This experiment in telling the Jewish story, an experiment less than a century  young, is an experiment that says Jewishness is about geography - not spirituality, not ethics, not mission, not chosenness, but nationalism: being the same as everyone else.  About this experiment, maybe one can say - as Zhou EnLai said of the French Revolution when asked in the 1970s how he viewed it - about this Zionist experiment in telling the story of the Jews we too could say ‘it is too early to tell’ . Depending on whether you wear rose-tinted spectacles or not, you can say it’s going well, it’s the best, maybe the only, authentic Jewish story in town; or you might look a little closer and wonder a bit more: is this really where the 3000 year story of the Jews is to end up? Wasn’t Zionism supposed to put an end to the lachrymose Jewish story, the story that said that Jews would always end up hated and despised amongst the nations? That being Jewish would always end in tears?  Wasn’t the Zionist story supposed to displace the religious story and the diasporic secular story and create a new life-enhancing story: a homeland for Jews so they could be whatever they wanted to be - and live at peace with their own choices? This is a powerful way of telling the ‘The Story of the Jews’ – I’m sure it has a lot of mileage still in it, even though it seems a long way from Simon Schama’s vision of what it means to be a Jew, for his is a story (at least on the evidence of the first programme) in thrall to the word in all its intricate possibilities for the imagination and the spirit.

So I’ve sketched out three stories for us, which I hope has undermined Simon Schama’s brilliant take on ‘The Story of the Jews’. I’m sure you could add others. On another day I might say that this whole idea of ‘The Story...’ goes against something fundamental in Jewishness: the belief that there is always another interpretation; dvar acher, the Talmud says when it introduces yet another rabbi’s view: ‘here’s another way of looking at things...’

Because Judaism is plural. Jewishness is plural. Maybe there as many ‘Stories of the Jews’ as there are Jews. We will each tell the story in our own way, combining different aspects until we weave our own unique tapestry – multicoloured, filled with detail and texture.

“I am large, I contain multitudes” Walt Whitman the 19th century American poet once wrote, and that could be - should be? - the motto of the contemporary Jew.

Simon Schama is a beguiling and informative guide - and I am sure he is going to take viewers on a memorable educational journey. What he’ll give you though is his story of the Jews not ‘The Story of the Jews’ because, fortunately, there is no such thing as ‘The Story of the Jews’.

I wish Jewish readers of this blog a year when you can make your own discoveries about your ‘story of the Jews’ - and add your unique threads to this living tapestry which is still being woven after 3000 years. And for those readers of the blog who aren’t Jewish – I hope something in what I have said has illuminated why we are such a disputatious and contradictory people...

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, on the second day of Rosh Hashanah/New Year, Friday September 6^th 2013]

 

 

 

King Lear and the Jewish New Year

In the midst of King Lear, the homeless and demented king finds himself wandering in the wilderness, an outcast battling the hardships of the heath in a raging storm. He stumbles upon  a wretched figure, ‘poor Tom’ -  it’s Edgar, son of Gloucester, in disguise – and Lear addresses him, in a moment of extraordinary empathy and self-recognition:

“Is man no more than this? Consider him well...Thou art the thing itself...unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare, forked animal  as thou art” (Act 3, scene4).

I have been haunted by this text over the summer, and I am taking it with me into this New Year, and the annual period of reflection and self-examination that this season in the religious calendar prompts in us. I find this text wondrous - and yet it fills me with apprehension. And maybe wondrous because it fills me with apprehension. For as these Days of Awe approach, I feel I come to them ‘unaccommodated’ – not unaccommodated like Lear, without a home,  without a roof over my head; but in some deeper sense. I know I am - fortunately, blessedly  - accommodated in the plain sense of the word, unlike the 2 million and more people who have now left their homes in Syria as refugees, or the 45 million forcibly displaced people around the world who are literally ‘unaccommodated’.  

But still I am, I feel, ‘unaccommodated’, perhaps in the sense that Shakespeare is pointing towards: for what does it really mean  to feel ‘at home’ in the world? Do we feel  ‘at home’ in the world? Relaxedly, casually, gracefully, ‘at home’ in this fractious, tempestuous world? Do we feel we live in a world that gives us warmth and security and protection?  We recognise that we need our clothes, our homes, our heating, our beds, we need to be part of a society in which these can be available – but needing these things makes us dependent, it makes us vulnerable, we work so hard to ensure we have these kinds of security, but out the corner of our eyes we glimpse the fragility of it all, how it can be taken away by forces out of our control.

Stockmarkets crash, or illness strikes, or death claims someone close to us and we are left suddenly alone in the world, and if it doesn’t happen to us but to someone else, we may count our blessings - but we also might shudder at the randomness of it all, the ways (so many ways) in which our lives are not in our own hands. If Lear can be reduced to homeless nothingness, it can happen to any of us. The play makes us feel the storm raging against the paper-thin walls of what we construct around us as we try to feel secure and contained and content.

The tides of history may have been kind to us – but in our hearts we know they are tides. One moment you can be secure, ‘accommodated’ in the world, and the next day your world can be turned upside down. This is the ageless human story, and it is certainly the Jewish story. Feeling ‘accommodated’ in the world is often contingent on circumstances quite out of our control. It might happen more by luck than by any good judgement or cleverness from us.

So where are we ‘at home’? In our families? In our work? In our local community? In our religious/synagogue community? All these have the capacity to make us feel at home – but also the potential to make us feel unsettled or alienated. None of them have the quality of ‘at homeness’ as a given. All can let us down, just as the material world can let us down.

But maybe looking outside ourselves to feel at home is looking in the wrong place. Maybe we should be asking: do we feel ‘at home’ in ourselves? Can we rest inside ourselves? How often do we  feel distracted, on edge, ill-at-ease? We know so well how fragile things are inside us. Not just our body’s state, but our emotional state, and our psychological state. We know how prone we are to swings of mood, to pettiness, to irritation, to anger, to jealousy, possessiveness, envy... Are we ever really ‘at home’ with ourselves and in ourselves?

At this season I ask these questions of myself – or rather the liturgy of our tradition asks us these questions, sometimes in language we embrace and sometimes in language we flinch from. How often it reminds us in almost exactly Shakespeare’s words: “Is man no more than this? Consider him well” – and then offers us a  list: ‘a cup so easily broken... like grass that withers, like flowers that fade, like passing shadows and dissolving clouds, a fleeting breeze and dust that scatters, like a dream that fades away...’.  And we do approach these days as “poor, bare” creatures – ‘empty of good deeds’ we say in the liturgy. The dominant motifs of the prayer book are of our impoverishment, our inadequacy, our incapacities in the things that matter.

Of course this is only part of the story of what it is to be human, because we are also capable of the most extraordinary good deeds, we all have the potential for compassion and love and dedication and a sense of justice and altruism and sacrifice. This is also part of the human story, the Jewish story, and it is important that we hold on to the knowledge of these parts of ourselves as well at this season - even though the emphasis in the High Holy Days is on the other sides of our nature: our failures and wrongdoing and perversions of what we know to be right. We are innately two-sided, pulled between opposites.

This is what I think Shakespeare is alluding to when he describes us as “unaccommodated, poor bare forked creatures...”. Maybe this is my own imaginative reading, or creative mis-reading, of ‘forked’, but I hear, see, in that expression the reflection of what in rabbinic Judaism is termed the yetzer tov and the yetzer hara, normally translated as our capacity for good and our capacity for evil, or our ‘good inclination’ and ‘bad inclination’. But I think of that duality in a more expanded sense: as our ‘creative’ capacities in tension with our ‘destructive’  impulses.

Judaism acknowledges that we are ‘forked’ creatures, we human animals, and the whole of our High Holy Days revolves around that central drama of the two sides of our natures. We look back and wonder: where have we failed in this last year to live out the more benign aspects of ourselves? We look forward and wonder  - and pray - will this next year be one where we can transform stubbornness into openness, callousness into generosity, self-possessiveness into righteousness, a year where we can turn our hearts, inch by painful inch, towards the finer qualities we have incarnated in us?

(Forks in the era of Shakespeare were of course two-pronged: a beautiful example of one was excavated recently from the site of the Rose Theatre on London’s South Bank, dated exactly to Shakespeare’s times, 1592. You can see it at  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01g62pm).  

Over these next days between the New Year and Yom Kippur I’m going to be reflecting on this marvellous humbling description -  “unaccommodated, poor bare forked creatures such as we all are” – and looking at how often it is reflected in our liturgy. And not least in the image of Adonai  - the Eternal One - as our home, our only true home:  “Return to Me, and I will return to you” (Malachi 3:7). The prophet intuits God’s promise that the Holy One is our ultimate home - origin and home - an energy that animates all of being, including ourselves, a presence that accommodates us, that has room for us, that wants us nestled, housed, within its embrace, the wings of the Shechinah. This is the spiritual vision of ‘home’ that our Days of Awe offers us, the only home that is constant from age to age, from generation to generation.

I wish all of you reading this a good journey of return, of homecoming, in these days ahead.

[adapted from some thoughts shared at Finchley Reform Synagogue during the Selichot service on the evening of August 31^st]

Do we believe what we say?

I often find myself musing on what a strange business organised religion is. I only know Judaism from the inside - and then only from one particular angle - but I guess it might be the same for other faiths too. I lead services from time to time – and read from the Torah from time to time – but I’m always aware of the question: what does this look like from the outside?  

Regular ‘insiders’ might not really be aware  just how odd some of the things we talk about are. But someone coming from the outside - and that means people who aren’t Jewish and people who are Jewish but may have left it all behind after childhood, or perhaps never had a Jewish education at all – when you come in and experience what a Jewish congregation says and does and takes for granted, then you may well notice just how weird some of it is, how unsettling, how baffling, how disturbing, how puzzling. It may also be inspiring or illuminating; but whatever your experience, you are probably going to have lots of questions about what it all means, and how we have come to believe some of it, or whether we do believe some of it... 

But  I would say, and I want to turn this round, unless we notice and feel just how strange some of the words and ideas and themes are, just how unsettling it is to talk (for example) about a God  who, on the one hand, we say is to be thanked and praised, and yet who is characterised in our Torah portion today (Deuteronomy chapter 9) as a figure who gets angry, is punitive, who gets in an ‘almighty strop’, a character who is so fed up with the lack of gratitude from this tribe wandering through the desert, moaning and groaning and complaining everywhere they go, a God-character who is portrayed as being so enraged by the Israelites’ rebelliousness that he wants to wipe them off the face of the earth (the anti-Semite's fantasy). Moses goes off for 40 days and nights to commune with the divine and the people are so feeble-minded, so lacking in commitment and belief in the project at hand that they build themselves a golden calf, and start bowing down to that as if it is going to save them, love them, care for them. I mean how ridiculous is that: to put one’s trust in objects – we would never do that, would we put our trust in what we humans make with our own hands? - computers, technology, insurance products, banks - but I digress; unless we notice how disturbing this story is about this God-character getting so filled with destructive thoughts that he wants to annihilate his own people, whom he has just rescued from slavery, whom he has just schlepped out of Egypt with great and miraculous energy, unless we are disturbed, unsettled, provoked by all this – we aren’t taking it seriously.  

Would it be too much to suggest that unless we recognise just what a challenge to our conventional rational Western thinking many of these Biblical and Jewish themes actually are, we aren’t living our religious life fully, maturely, authentically. If we just take these texts for granted then we aren’t engaging with our tradition in the way that it  actually demands of us.   

The Bible is the foundation stone upon which the whole of Judaism is built. Judaism is a 3000 year old evolving civilisation, with an extraordinary history of endurance and stubbornness – it’s just as well we are a ‘stiff-necked people’ or we would have disappeared long ago – a civilisation and culture build around loyalty to certain ideals and values, all of which we can trace back, one way or another to the Bible, to Torah. The Talmud, that huge multi-generational anthology of legend and law that was created in the centuries after the Bible was written, and that helped formulate how Jews were to live day by day, hour by hour, wherever they were scattered – that whole body of literature is rooted in, and develops out of, ideas and themes within the Bible. As does our prayer books, through the generations:  our liturgy always refer back to Biblical texts, themes and personalities. As does Jewish philosophy and Jewish ethical works, and Jewish poetry and Jewish storytelling from midrash right up to Amos Oz – always the Biblical tradition is underneath it all, the foundation stone upon which the great edifice of Judaism is built.  

Which is why we come back to it each week, reading from the first five books, in an endless cycle of readings. Judaism is a religious civilisation built on texts: on reading them, interpreting them, thinking about them, questioning them, arguing with them, dissenting from them. And sometimes we read about things we don’t understand, or don’t like, in the original texts...  

Take the Torah portion we read this week, where we find this character called God/Adonai - who after all does have a pretty starring role in the drama of the Bible (though there are books where he doesn’t appear at all as well as long tracts where he is absent from the scene). But the remarkable thing about the portrait of God in the Hebrew Bible is just how multidimensional it is, and this was the genius of the storytellers and writers of the Bible:  that they never allowed us as readers to settle in to one stereotyped image of divinity, of divine energy. They were quite unafraid of portraying God – who has no emotions because God isn’t a person - as experiencing all the human emotions: love, anger, jealousy, care, compassion, involvement, aloofness, indignation, regret, sadness, destructiveness, generosity, patience, lack of patience...or, as in the passage we read today, the storytellers portray God as a character filled with murderous fury, whom Moses can shame into changing his mind. 

 

‘God’ says he wants to destroy the Israelites. And the narrator (9:28) shows Moses seducing God out of his divine strop by saying: ‘Look,  imagine what the Egyptians will think of you if you destroy the Israelites now! They are going to think you couldn’t hack it, this liberation project, you were too weak to carry it off, or just too sadistic – you brought them out just to kill them off – this isn’t going to look good on your C.V, is it?’ And whether we think of this as shaming God, or seducing him, or humiliating him - or cajoling him like a child, ‘come on, let’s be friends’ says Moses – however you read it, there’s an extraordinarily dramatic role reversal as Moses acts the grown up, the adult, to this sulky, angry, God figure who is throwing another tantrum.  

The rabbis who commented on this text in later generation were sometimes a bit sharp, even derogatory, about Moses in this story. They thought that the way Moses is telling the story to the people puts himself rather too much in the spotlight – ‘you know, you Israelites, you owe everything to me,  it was me wot won it, I won God over, if it hadn’t been for me you would all be goners, you wouldn’t be here, the Jewish story would be over’. Not much modesty there in a religious leader, those later commentators suggested. I suppose Moses’ behaviour – or rather, how he is characterised - raises for us questions like: when do we need to fight our cause? and when do we need to submit to our fate? how much humility do we need in life? and how much self-promotion? when is it OK to tell our own stories with ourselves as the stars? And is it alright to rewrite history? (the details Moses gives in the Deuteronomy text are different from how the story is told in Exodus – we all edit the past, sometimes knowingly,  sometimes unconsciously, so which is it here?). 

The greatness of the Torah, and of the Bible as a whole, is that it implicitly makes us think about these questions, real life questions, human questions – but it doesn’t give us the answers. The Bible doesn’t tell us how to read this story of God and Moses, how to interpret it. And it doesn’t tell us how to answer the questions it raises about our own lives. But by its very existence, and by our engagement with it each week, the Torah  encourages us to take these questions seriously: the questions about the stories; and the questions about how the stories reflect on the stories of our own lives. 

 

And the Torah keeps the biggest question we can ask - the biggest religious question - alive every week: what on earth, or in heaven, is this God-character about, who appears in so many emotional states that we recognise from our own lives? That list I gave before is endless, and it is so often contradictory: a passion for justice (like us) and then actions that appear quite harsh or arbitrary or callous (like us); compassion that is boundless (just like we can be) and then withdrawal and silence (just like us). And so it goes on. I think there is a secret here, a mystery hidden at the heart of these texts. The Bible was of course written by men (and probably women) who had all these human feelings , and lived with contradictions between their feelings, just like us. They were people of immense creativity - who knew they were also capable of hatred and destructiveness. And this is how they pictured their God. They sensed there was an energy that animated the universe, all of life - human, animal, plant, the earth itself - some kind of ongoing, animating presence that filled all of being, was all of being; they sensed that this energy was outside them and inside them, and this energy connected everything to everything else. All was One.  

They called this energy by a myriad names, often portraying this energy as a personality, like themselves, with a thousand feelings. They had feelings, so it was understandable to think of God having feelings. So the divine energy that animates all of being, that is Being, was created in our image. But at the same time they realised, as they were telling this story, that  all these human emotions could change the world, that they could create a world of love and compassion and justice and generosity – or they could destroy the world, through rivalry, jealousy, greed, hatred. And they sensed that being human meant having all these divine attributes grafted into their hearts and souls.  “We are created in the image of the divine” they said early on in the Torah, in Genesis (1:26-27).

 

And gradually, as they told their story, through the Bible, these two perspectives became one. It was like the double helix of DNA – which they knew nothing about – the two inseparable strands of life inscribed in every verse of Torah. We are created in God’s image. And God is created in our image.  This is Jewish DNA – it is not genetics, it’s spirituality. It’s how we tell our story, the two perspectives threaded together. We have divinity within us. And God has all these human attributes projected onto him. And, as we remind ourselves every day, twice a day, morning and evening, Adonai Ethad  - it is all One.

 [based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, 27th July 2013]

 

Murder in the name of Allah

Wednesday’s murder of a British off-duty soldier on a south London street is of course shocking. I have nothing to say about it that has not already been said in relation to this savage act as contrary to the ethics of contemporary Islam.

But what captured my attention – and what I want to reflect on here – is what I saw on film, taken by the mobile phone of someone in the street who was there when the murder took place. First, this was a murderer who waited for someone to arrive who would record for the world his bloody hands, his bloody knife, the murder weapon, and his blood-soaked words of hatred for a country’s actions (his country) against his co-religionists. This was the theatre of the macabre that needed spectators – the killers waited, did not run away – and someone passing by obliged, recording his words to broadcast to the country, to the world.

Murder as spectacle, murder as political message, murder as sermon:“As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all....No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." (Metaphysical poet John Donne, from his meditation ‘Devotions upon emergent occasions’ - 1624).

So firstly, the transformation of religiously-motivated murder into an act to be broadcast. The mobile phone as minaret, calling to the nations: Allah hu akbar. If there had been mobile phone cameras in 1994 when Baruch Goldstein went into the mosque in Hebron and murdered 29 Muslims at prayer he would have held his gun in one hand and his mobile in the other. It is not sufficient now to desecrate God’sname through murder, it needs to be witnessed – and by as many as possible. And the technology is at hand. It is, literally, in our hands.

And the second thing I saw – and I watched it a few times to make sure I’d seen it properly – was that at one point when the murderer is shouting his message into the camera with blood-drenched hands and waving his knife in the air, a woman pushing a shopping trolley comes along the pavement from behind him and, without missing a step, walks past him.

Maybe she is used to seeing street incidents like this in her neighbourhood in south London. People enraged, people shouting abuse, people at the end of their tether – and beyond. She isn’t going to let her day be disrupted. So she walks past, ignoring him, almost brushing against him as she goes. Or maybe she is just lost in her own world – we might all have had the experience of walking down a street and realising when are near our destination that we were inwardly preoccupied and can’t remember how we got from A to B.

But however we are to think of what was going on for that woman at that time, the juxtaposition of these two people, each in their own world, yet side by side, within inches of each other but each one oblivious of the other – what are we to make of it? In one way, John Donne is wrong – each person is an island, entire of itself. No contact, just the sheer individuality of each person in their own world. No death diminishes me because I will carry on regardless. That’s what I saw in those filmed moments: in her and in him.

But as that woman walks by, within touching distance but resolutely undeflected in her own journey, I also saw a rather large metaphor being enacted in those moments. How much do we wilfully ignore what takes place around us? How much of the time do I live with my eyes wide shut? What response do I make, how deflected from my course do I go to turn aside and look, and respond? There are – we know, we can see - the daily horrors: of neighbourhood, of country, of living in an interconnected world, yet watching that woman walk by - though an extraordinary thing to see – led me to wonder about my own ‘not-wanting-to-know’ behaviour, when I turn the page of my newspaper from 120 dead in car bombs in Iraq, to the next page and 1.5 million refugees now displaced from Syria, to the next page and drug-related torture and murder in Mexico, to the next page and rapes in India, to the next page and – oh, blessed relief, a character in Downton Abbey is having a baby; and then – all bloodshed and horror brushed past - the sports pages, I can settle down with those, I can look away, I can pretend to be on my island.

Murder in the name of Allah. Nothing new there. But whether it is pogroms or Crusades, Hindu massacres of Muslims, Buddhist massacres of Hindus (yes), or Jews on the West Bank shooting Palestinians, religion can act as a powerful excuse - i.e. rationalisation - for the murderousness of the human heart to express itself in every age and every land.

Religion- so many blessings can come from it - and how dangerous it is! To know what God wants - this is a terrible and terrifying thing to know.

 

,

 

 

 

On Not Mourning Margaret Thatcher

As in her life, so in her death:  Mrs. Thatcher remains a deeply divisive figure. I have been searching inside myself this past week for elements of regret, or feelings of loss, or any of the sadness that is a normal part of mourning. But search as I have, there is nothing there – just a hard-heartedness that seems to mirror what I always thought was her defining quality: an imperviousness to feelings of concern, an absence of empathy, a failure to imagine the desperation of others who were affected by her actions.  

Whether as a mother to her own children or a ‘mother’ to her nation, she seemed indifferent to the pain she was causing. She was entirely wrapped up in her own convictions: how she saw the world was right – and everyone else was wrong. What she thought was to her, self-evidently, The Truth  – and other opinions were faulty thinking, errors, and could be dismissed with disdain. No wonder that to live through her years of premiership was an enraging experience for so many millions. And the feelings that have ben released this week, since the news of her death, seem to testify to the way in which some of those feelings linger on,  raw and alive in so many. I don’t share Ed Miliband’s politically-calculated  deference to her achievements.  As his Labour colleague Glenda Jackson - maybe freed to speak her mind by her decision to step down at the next election - said in the Commons, Thatcher was guilty of wreaking over a decade "the most heinous, social, economic and spiritual damage upon this country”.

Whether Mrs. Thatcher was consciously intending this, or whether it was a by-product of her conviction politics, is not the point. What matters is that her years as Prime Minister saw the destruction not only of communities throughout the land, particularly in the north of England and in Wales, but the destruction of a sense that community bonds matter – “there is no such thing as society”.  That a fulfilled life is sometimes more about service to others than what one can get for oneself was an ethic that was overridden by the individualistic ethos she promoted in the public domain. By appealing unashamedly to personal aspiration – always a vote-winner – rather than collective values involving care for others, compassion and generosity (the hallmarks of what makes life with others workable and worthwhile), the 1980s became the decade in which greed and selfishness came to be seen as virtues.

There was a rigidity in her thinking and in her manner that was frightening – as well as the lack of a sense of humour, which often suggests someone whose emotional or inner life lacks vitality. In the latter years of her premiership there were clear signs – if you had eyes trained to see these things – of mental disturbance: her long decline into dementia  came as no surprise.

Whether hard-hearted of me or not, whether I remain too attached to my own prejudices and beliefs or not, I cannot find it in me to mourn her passing. I wouldn’t ‘dance on her grave’, as that rather ugly sentiment puts it, and I would give her credit for being the first major politician anywhere to draw public attention to the potentially devastating effects of climate change (this was in 1988). But when I re-read the words she declared on the steps of Downing Street in 1979, in her carefully-tutored-for-the-cameras enunciation , words borrowed from Francis of Assisi (though probably not his either) – “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony...where there is despair, may we bring hope” – I can only shake my head in disbelief, and despair, at the gap between her words and her actions, and the consequences of her actions for so many millions of people in the UK. Perhaps the most telling statistic is this: in 1979, one in seven children in the UK lived in poverty; when she left office in 1990 it was one in three.

There are plenty around this week ready to hymn her praises, so I leave that to others.  From a traditional Jewish perspective there is no moral obligation to mourn for an ‘unrepentant sinner’  - that is, someone who has caused suffering and has not made material or emotional restitution (which can involve acknowledging ‘wrongdoing’ and asking for ‘forgiveness’). This seems to be a bit of arcane lore/law that has its own deeper wisdom. Thatcher never seemed capable of self-reflectiveness, nor was there ever a recognition of harm done to individuals, or to the fabric of the nation.

So I won’t be mourning on Wednesday, I won’t be watching on TV, I won’t be regretting her going – for many in the younger generation she was already history (as my son emailed me, “Was Thatcher cyrogenically frozen?! I thought she'd been dead for years. Next they'll be telling me JFK died”).

But those 1979 words still echo: “Where there is error, may we bring truth...”  - frightening it is when politicians pick up the rhetoric, the mind-set, of fundamentalism.  Killing off one’s enemies – those who see the world differently - is never far behind.

Leaving Egypt

So, we have left Egypt, left it behind. Monday night, Tuesday, Tuesday night last week, we told it, narrated it, rehearsed it. We were in Egypt, we slaved for Egypt, we knew Egypt like the back of our hands, our weather-beaten, calloused, workers’ hands, it was bitter, bitter as midnight, we were lodgers in Egypt so long that Egypt was lodged in us, and we left, in a hurry, in a rush, in a mad exodus, all panic and mayhem around us, blood on the doors, the smell of sacrifices, the smell of death in every home but ours. We left it, we left it all behind - a plague on their houses! - no provisions for the journey, just a suitcase of memories, hardship, nothing in our hands except our children, grasping them tightly for the journey ahead, our treasures, our children, our hope for the future, for what will come to pass when we are gone, when we have passed over...

Bitterness, the soul’s sour lament, it’s what we know: our history, our slavery, noses to the grindstone in our daily toil, don’t look up, keep on going, hard-bitten, slaves to the job, slaves to our rulers, slaves to the markets, slave to those who control our daily bread, give us today our daily bread, we left in haste, no time to bake, no time to let the dough rise, no time to look back, no time to question, no time to leaven the conversation with yiddischer humour, or tales of  defiance, just urgent unleavened haste, no going back, we didn’t know where we were going, only away from this, away from here, away from here...

Would we have stayed if we had known? Would we have clung to what we knew, this everyday slavery, serving masters who held our lives in their hands, would we have stayed enslaved to the familiar drudgery if we had been told that after this was only wilderness, wandering, desert and death, so we could serve again, an unseen master, the ruler of all? Would we have left if we’d known that the choice is only who to serve, do you serve man or do you serve God?

Bitter-sweet freedom when this is the choice: freedom from slavery, yes, but no freedom from being caught up in another kind of service, bound into a history, fettered to a story and the telling of a story, chained to a tradition that won’t let us go, that claims us for itself, that holds us bound, spellbound, in its vision, that manacles us to a promise: you will be free to the extent you bind yourself to this story, remember this story, retell this tale, tell it to your children – ‘I am making you free so that you can bind yourself and your children and your children’s children to the wheel of  Jewish history’.

And you will never be liberated from this: the task of freeing those bent low – for you were bent low; and reaching out to the poor – for you were poorer than poor; and aiding the widow and the orphan, for your rulers made too many of you widows, your men-folk martyred under the lash; and too many of you orphans, your parents ground into the dust, their names never recorded; and centuries go by and the story is always the same...

And I the Eternal One am making you free so that you will never be free of this story, never be released from indebtedness, never be freed from the obligation of repaying Me by remembering the strangers, all strangers, in all lands, and in all generations, for there will always be strangers, and you will always need to be reminded, remembering where you came from, remembering that Egypt will always be with us, that slavery will always be with us  - slavery to ideas, slavery to hardship, slavery to the need to earn a crust of bread, slavery to people with power, slavery to isms, fascism, monetarism, consumerism, cynicism, idealism – slavery and Egypt are always with us. As are strangers: strangers who don’t belong, strangers not like us, strangers who seek asylum, strangers whose faces don’t fit, strangers who are new to our land, strangers who don’t know our ways, strangers seeking a better life – strangers like you through the ages.

Would you have left Egypt this week if you had known that you will always be strangers, always seem strangers to someone else who imagines you are different to them? Would you have left if you had known that the only way to be free is to live for the stranger your brother, the stranger your sister, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt? Ah, I the Eternal One,  bless Egypt for teaching you this lesson, for without this lesson in your souls, without this lesson in strangerhood bound like a sign upon your hand and like frontlets between your eyes, without this knowledge in your hearts of what it means to be outsiders, I would have no-one to be my hands in the world to reach out to, to look out for, those who live on the margins, who are neglected, impoverished:  the strangers who lead lives of quiet desperation, whose lives are of no account - really no account - to the new Pharoahs who arise, the new masters of the universe, the new rulers in their gated ministries and their boardrooms and their hushed corridors of power.

Would you have left Egypt behind if you knew this was your fate? Would you have walked out of the pain that was known into the pain that cannot be imagined? Would you have walked into the wilderness of millennia, yoked to this mission of memory, of telling the story of liberation in order to enact that liberation over and again for those who need liberation?

Would you have left Egypt, if you had know you had to leave Egypt again, again and again, every year when springtime comes - or even when springtime does not come, when the season freezes as if in chilling mimicry of the new Pharoahs’ austere and frozen hearts, cold, cold, like the desert at night?  Would you have left Egypt if you had know that Egypt is still here and now, and that you would have to struggle for your freedom every day of your lives, straining the bitterness of enslavement out of your hearts? would you have left Egypt way back then if you had known it may still be inside you wherever you go: your narrowness of perception, your limited vision, your constrained hearts, your embittered souls? Would you have left Egypt if you had known how hard the journey would be – when you have only Me to rely on, Me to trust, Me to guide you, Me in my unseen majesty, Me in my infinite and imminent presence, Me inside you, whispering in your ear, here I am, be still and listen, here I am, serve no-one else, be bound to nothing else, be bound only to my boundless lovingkindness, be bound only to Me so that you can be released from serving anything except Me.

This is your freedom, yetziat Mizraim, the leaving of Egypt:  here with Me you are free. Here is the promised land, here I am, here and now. Here it is. My promise. My promised land. Entwined with me, here you are free. Bound up with Me, this is what it means to be free. Bound into me, nothing to choose, nothing to lose, except your chains. I am what I am: your wilderness, your promised land. Here I am.

[This piece was inspired by Marge Piercy's extraordinary poem 'Maggid' and offered as a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue on Chol Ha'Moed Pesach, March 30th 2013]

Obama and Holiness

The prophetic text from Malachi that we read before Pesach (Passover) has an extraordinary sentence in it. The passage in which it appears speaks about the return of Elijah as the herald of a new age - a tradition that we still think about on seder nights with the cup of Elijah, that fifth cup of wine we never drink, the cup that symbolises all our unfulfilled hopes, personally and as a people. While we talk that night of how oppression turned into liberation for our mythic ancestors, Elijah’s cup is a powerful symbol that we live in an unredeemed world, a world where freedom is still sought by so many, where so many kinds of oppression – economic, political, social, individual – are so prevalent in so many lands.  ‘History could make a stone weep’ (Marilyn Robinson, Gilead). It symbolises what could be, what should be, but is not yet in being.

At the climax of the book – which is also the climax of all the prophetic literature gathered in the Hebrew Bible – the author-poet says that Elijah’s messianic role is not played out on the world historical stage, it is neither political nor economic, it is personal, it’s about family: ‘He will reconcile parents with children and children with parents’ (Malachi 3:24). Intergenerational reconciliation is seen by Malachi as at the heart of messianic hopefulness.

If destruction is to be averted, says the prophet - ‘so I do not strike the whole land with utter destruction’ - there has to be a change of heart: hayshev lev avot al banim – Elijah will ‘turn the heart of parents towards their children’.  And then ‘the heart of the next generation will turn towards their parents.’ Where there is conflict and argument, hostility and lack of understanding, there will be a new openness, new bonds of affection and care and understanding. This, says Malachi, is what the messianic age looks like - or rather, this is what needs to happen if anything else is to be transformed on a societal level. It begins with family life. It’s close to home, sometimes in the home. It’s a very Jewish vision, a down-to-earth, pragmatic vision. A change of heart at the centre of everything else.

That message was powerfully evoked during by Barack Obama, in his remarkable address to young people when he arrived recently in Israel. His talk embraced Jewish history and Jewish destiny and Jewish purpose. (He would have made a good rabbi – if he wasn’t a Muslim (joke)).

 “Over the last 65 years, when Israel has been at its best”, he said, “Israelis have demonstrated that responsibility does not end when you reach the promised land, it only begins....Israel has the wisdom to see the world as it is [this is Jewish pragmatism], but -- this is in your nature -- Israel also the courage to see the world as it should be [Jewish purpose/destiny/vision].  Ben-Gurion once said in Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles. Sometimes the greatest miracle is recognizing that the world can change. That’s a lesson that the world learned from the Jewish people” [Jewish ‘chosenness’].

He spoke of the story of Passover - “a story of centuries of slavery and years of wandering in the desert; a story of perseverance amidst persecution and faith in God and the Torah. It’s a story about finding freedom in your own land. And for the Jewish people, this story is central to who you’ve become” – and acknowledged that its themes had a resonance wider than the specific ‘Jewish’ story: “But it’s also a story that holds within it the universal human experience, with all of its suffering but also all of its salvation. ..it’s a story that’s inspired communities across the globe ...To African-Americans, the story of the exodus was perhaps the central story, the most powerful image, about emerging from the grip of bondage to reach for liberty and human dignity -- a tale that was carried from slavery through the civil rights movement into today. For generations, this promise helped people weather poverty and persecution while holding on to the hope that a better day was on the horizon. For me personally, growing up in far-flung parts of the world and without firm roots, the story spoke to a yearning within every human being for a home.”

And thus he was able to make the case for a Palestinian state and an end of occupation, he was able to make it in the name of Israel’s long term security, and of the need for peace - and justice. And in doing so he did something that politicians rarely do. He asked people to imaginatively inhabit the lives of others different from themselves. Speaking of the Palestinian people he said: “put yourself in their shoes. Look at the world through their eyes” - have you ever heard a politician ask people to imagine the world empathetically through the eyes of others? it’s usually naked self-interest that they are appealing to, even if it is dressed up differently -  “it is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of their own living their entire lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements, not just of those young people but their parents, their grandparents, every single day. It’s not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. It’s not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands or restricting a student’s ability to move around the West Bank or displace Palestinian families from their homes. Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land”

All of this was punctuated by cheers and applause from his audience. Some have criticized Obama for demonstrating in his speech such unfeigned admiration for the State of Israel, and for insisting on it as a ‘Jewish state’ (and thus calling into question the status of the 20% of the population who are not Jewish) but it seemed to me that this was still a brave speech. And it was one delivered by a politician attuned to holiness, to the need to translate holy living, Jewish holy living, into the realm of everyday life. It was about a change of heart - turning the hearts of the Israelis to the Palestinians, and the hearts of the Palestinians to the Israelis.

Sometime it is ‘outsiders’ who see most clearly what is that we have that is so special as we tell our collective story, our great mythic narrative of liberation from slavery. 

The story contained in the Haggadah tells of the survival of a tribe, a people – the ‘miraculous’ survival of a people, through the generations, through history, a people who choose to gather each year to tell of their miraculous survival as a people. One of my favourite passages in the Haggadah is the one that tells of a group of rabbis in Bnei Brack – five of them - gathering in secret to tell the story two thousand years ago. So far away in time - and yet already the need to tell the story, the miraculous story of liberation and survival. And we join with them on Seder night – telling the story of their telling the story – passing on to the next generation this story about storytelling, and the role of storytelling in the survival of the people.

It is a night when we are grateful to be able to gather together, as a people – in families, with friends, as a community – and when we allow our questions to emerge. And one question that it feels incumbent on us to ask is what is this survival for? Is it survival for its own sake - are we akin to the Armenians, or the Aborigines, with a collective identity and history and set of cultural traditions? - or does Jewish survival have a further purpose?  The story we tell suggests that the answer, perhaps disquietingly, is yes: survival in and of itself is fine, we can appreciate what it means, but it is not the end of the story. The story of our liberation from past oppression points towards a task, a responsibility. On this night we remember that we have a destiny as well as a history. And that destiny, as Obama reminded his audience, at the end of his bravura speech/sermon/vision , is timeless:

“as a man who’s been inspired in my own life by that timeless calling within the Jewish experience -- “tikkun olam” -- I am hopeful that we can draw upon what’s best in ourselves to meet the challenges that will come, to win the battles for peace in the wake of so much war and to do the work of repairing this world. That’s your job. That’s my job. That’s the task of all of us”.

He didn’t end with ‘Amen’ – he’s not, after all, a rabbi - but he could have done.     

The cynical dismiss Obama’s speech as rhetoric, lacking in practical suggestions, making all the right noises to seduce his hosts. But at least he articulated the vision, spoke of the moral need to transform ‘what is’ into what ‘could be’, what ‘should be’. On seder night we recall the journey our people have made from ‘what was’ to ‘what is’ – let us find ways to move the conversation on from ‘what is’ to what should be.

[loosely based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, March 23^rd, 2013]