Imagination and the Jewish New Year

As this Jewish New Year is born, I want to talk about imagination: our capacity for imagination. Because a New Year is an invitation to us to be imaginative, to extend our thinking, our mental wondering and wandering, to stretch our thinking beyond its habitual grooves and routines.

But as soon as I start to talk about our imaginations I feel I’m entering dangerous territory. Because we know what our imaginations can do: how our minds can become filled with fears, anxieties, apprehensions about everything from our bodily health to the health of the planet, everything from the material and mental well-being of ourselves and those whom we love, to the well-being of our Jewish community, or the very future of our country. Our imaginations can wrap themselves around these issues and cause us sometimes to feel anything from vaguely ill-at-ease to acute distress.

As we enter a New Year, tentatively, hesitantly, and think of – imagine – what these  next 12 months might bring, it’s easy for our imaginations (as we project forward) to run riot, but not in ways that are advantageous to our well-being. We can already, and do, let our minds run amok amidst the bewildering complexities of the world we live in; our imaginations become polluted – it’s not only that our brains become contaminated, literally, from the toxins in the very air we breathe - but metaphorically and just as perniciously, our minds and imaginations become polluted from the poisonous miasma that arises from that quagmire of news and information and opinion and analysis and rumour and scaremongering and recrimination and suspicion that fills the airwaves and the social media – and we inhale that stuff whether we want to or not.

None of us can insulate ourselves from the toxic vapours of the contemporary social environment in which we live and breathe – well, you have to work very hard  to keep yourself uncontaminated by these toxins, and by what passes for thinking in the communal and national and international spheres we inhabit.

The novelist Saul Bellow once described this hyped-up modern world of ours as a ‘moronic inferno’, and that was before the age of the internet and Twitter, and all the rest of our dementing 24/7 culture was even dreamed of.  

So if I’m going to talk about imagination, this remarkable dimension of what it means to be human, I’m very aware of its double-sidedness. And yes, I’m starting by acknowledging, as the New Year begins, the way our imaginations already gravitate towards worry, concerns, paranoia sometimes: about our personal lives, our health, our relationships, our financial situation, as well as our lives as Jews, and our lives as citizens of this precious kingdom, and world citizens on this fragile planet.

But I want to turn, deliberately, defiantly, almost counter-intuitively, I want to turn – a turn that is also a return -  to consider our imaginations as a source not of fear and suspicion and accusation, but our imaginations as a source of wonder, a space within us not of dread but of hope, a source not of anxiety but of playfulness and creativity and inspiration. Imagination not as a source of nightmare but of vision, and opportunity, and glorious possibilities.

Do you remember a time, when you were very young, when you would get fascinated by something in the world around you: it might be watching an insect move - an ant, or a butterfly; or how the sun refracted into the colours of a rainbow in a puddle; or wondering how the new baby got into mummy’s tummy – or how it would get out – or you’d be fascinated by the hairs on your grandmother’s chin, or by how exactly the microwave heated up your pudding,  or where snow goes when it melts. It’s the stage we all go through, if things go well for us growing up, the stage of ‘why’, (the bane of a parent’s life sometimes), ‘why’ this, ‘why’ that, ‘why..how..what’, question after question, that endless curiosity, fascination, about the world around us.

It’s the stage of life when our imaginations really get going, not only around the things we observe, but around ‘imaginary’ things that we encounter in books and in stories, on TV and in films, and in conversations we overhear. Our imaginations become populated by realities that we create, and by the creations of others. We enter into a world of ghosts and giants, talking animals, cartoon characters that change shape, superheroes that fly, a world of magic spells and elves and angels and God and Mad Hatter’s tea parties.

One of the most problematic things you can say to a child is “stop imagining things” – when we should be interested in expanding a child’s capacity for imagination and wonder, because the world is a mystery and a constant source of wonder - but as life goes on we may well become dulled to the mystery and wonder and aliveness of this period of our development. Something of that capacity for imagination and wonder and curiosity becomes blunted in us, ground down by what we come to think of as ‘reality’; something in us that responded to the newness and exciting strangeness of what we saw and heard and thought gets calloused over. We learn to be ‘sensible’ – God help us. The glory fades, and the light can go out of our eyes.

And maybe as time goes on we vaguely feel that there’s something’s missing in our lives, but we don’t know what it is, we can’t pin it down. And then we one day, if we are lucky, or have some help, we find something, or something finds us, that puts us back in touch with these early glimmers of everyday wonder and helps us recollect and reconnect with something precious we have lost.

Maybe we find Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” where he recalls a time:

When meadow, grove, and stream,/The earth, and every common sight,/to me did seem/Apparelled in celestial light,/The glory and the freshness of a dream.

Or we discover William Blake’s poetic vision, a state of mind and imagination in which we can “see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower”.  Or we watch again that extraordinary moment in cinema history when Stanley Kubrick in ‘2001:A Space Odyssey’ shows us our ancestor the ape beating the ground with a stick, breaking up bones, and one bone flies up into the air and the slow motion of movement into the skies cuts to the vehicle in space somersaulting over and over - and our heart leaps in amazement and awe: ‘oh, this is us now, this is how far we have travelled in the blink of an eye, aeons long’. We are opened up in these moments to something beyond, or within, a way of seeing, a way of feeling.

Or we recall that last interview with that rascally playwright Dennis Potter, knowing he was dying, talking to Melvyn Bragg for Channel 4, and speaking about the blossom he could see from his window in Ross-on-Wye:

“…the blossom is out in full now…it’s a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white, and looking at it, instead of saying ‘Oh that’s nice blossom’…last week looking at it through the window when I’m writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There’s no way of telling you, you have to experience it, but the glory of it…the comfort of it, the reassurance…not that I’m interested in reassuring people, bugger that. The fact is, if you can see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it…”

This is what Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, can be for us: the time in the year we have been given to ‘cleanse the doors of perception’ – that’s Aldous Huxley’s phrase, borrowed from William Blake - and see the world anew. The High Holy Day machzor [prayer book] often refers to that text from Isaiah that precedes by two millennia all those other writers and artists I’ve mentioned: ki hinneni voray shamayim hadashim va’artez hadasha… – “For behold, now, I create new heavens and a new earth…be glad and rejoice in what I am creating” (65:17-18). “What I am creating…”– if you can “see the present tense……boy, can you celebrate it”.

Rosh Hashanah is our celebration of the present tense. So as we move into the New Year, and the new moon appears in the sky, and we are reminded through that – even if only subliminally - how our Jewish cycle of the year revolves around the ‘heavens’, we have this opportunity in these days, these ten precious days, to begin again this journey which depends upon our capacity to use our imaginations benignly, creatively. Can we regain some of that wide-eyed innocence and curiosity of childhood, that sense of wonder?

Entering these days is like entering some sacred space, separated out from that toxic environment I spoke about before, that is all around us. We can choose not to be contaminated, polluted, by what chokes that everyday world we also live in, we can choose to use our inner faculties of imagination and resourcefulness and really see what is there within us - and within our tradition, with all its dark richness.

And what’s in us, and what we need our imaginations to nurture, are things like our capacity for kindness, our capacity for compassion, our passion for justice, our ability to give of ourselves, our capacity to be honest with ourselves, and others, our capacity for self-sacrifice, and generosity (generosity of heart and our pockets), our capacity for tolerance, for tolerating difference, for not getting swept away by populism and cheap rhetoric, whether it’s in the Jewish community or the wider community.

I intend to address in a couple of days the theme of antisemitism, that everyone is grappling with at the moment (it appears) – but right now I’m talking about how to use our imaginations not for fearfulness and hysteria but for righteousness and reflection: reflection on our remarkable human capacity for recognising wondrousness and transforming what isn’t working, what isn’t right in our lives, transforming it into something more life-enhancing and life-giving.

And that work of transformation requires us to be imaginative, to use this divine strand of creativity within us, our imaginations. We have that capacity grafted to our souls and as the New Year begins we remember it again, we rejoice in it again, we renew our commitment to it again.

It may be true that, as John Keats wrote in a letter to his younger brothers exactly 200 years ago, “There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music”– that may indeed say something true about 2018 as well as 1818: so on one level nothing much has changed since then; but it is also the case that Keats was on to something vital for us today when he wrote in another letter: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination”.

So as we move into and through these days, let’s remember and renew and rejoice in the holiness of our ‘heart’s affections’ – all that sacred work we do are capable of doing, in our relationships with each other and with the world around us. And let’s remember and renew and rejoice in our own personal and collective connection to ‘the truth of the imagination’. What a gift it is. 

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, Sunday evening, September 9th 2018]

On Being Found By What We Need

In the period leading up to the Jewish New Year I feel like an explorer who first has to set up base camp, as it were, in preparation for the expedition ahead of him. On a good day I think of what will follow as an annual adventure into the spiritual and psychological terrain of the so-called ‘Days of Awe’, the Yomim Noraim - an opportunity for reflection and re-evaluation during the ten days between Rosh Hashanah (the New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).  It’s a time of potential renewal. But on a bad day, I’m reminded of the myth of Sisyphus, condemned to push the same boulder up the mountain over and over again: a thankless task.

The Selichot service, that takes place during an evening preceding the New Year itself, is an opportunity to check the route ahead, discover if we have the right provisions - even if we don’t quite know what provisions we might need – and maybe have a look at the maps drawn by those who have gone before us (which also seems to involve questioning whether their maps will be of any help for us). Some of us intuit that our journey – if we wish to take it - will require us to draw our own map rather than relying entirely on the routes that others have taken.

So, the questions for the evening circle around: what’s our route looking like this year? what provisions do we need? what resources can we draw on? This expedition is fraught work, filled with uncertainty and insecurity. At least initially. And who amongst us can claim to be an expert? At best we may feel like a willing amateur. And sometimes not so willing - for the resistance to this work can be strong.  

Over the years I’ve found it helpful to find a text to start me off – usually a text that might not seem an obvious starting place for a Jewish journey of inwardness: it might be something from Waiting for Godot, or King Lear, or a few lines of Seamus Heaney; even something from Alice in Wonderland has provided the springboard. I’m seeking out help to get myself deeper into the themes of the season. 

Now I say that I ‘find a text’ but that isn’t strictly accurate; it’d be more true to say that it often feels that the texts find me. If I’m working in a congregational setting I don’t go looking for good texts to bring to the community, like a mother bird searching out some juicy worms for her fledglings; but something will come my way, randomly, unexpectedly, unplanned, in the days or weeks leading up to the Selichot service; and it’ll get me thinking, and it won’t let go of me until I’ve done something with it, until I’ve used it as a building block in the flimsy construction of words (otherwise known as ‘a sermon’) which I offer as a starting point as the community sets off on its religious expedition.

This year it occurred to me that the process I’m describing – of being ‘found’ by a text – might offer a clue to one approach to the themes and the work of the High Holy Days. Those themes are the same every year: teshuvah - returning, seeking forgiveness, repentance, renewal. This is the heavy-duty religious baggage Jews grapple with over these weeks. And this stuff comes with so many expectations, that we may need something that helps to subvert these expectations.

The expectations may come from community, or family, or the liturgy, or are just expectations we put on ourselves, about change and transformation. We are weighed down by beliefs about what we ‘should’ be doing, or ‘should’ be feeling: and these expectations can get in the way of just experiencing what happens to us (and in us) during these weeks. Our prior expectations and beliefs about what we ought be doing, or feeling, or thinking, can block us being open to what actually happens, moment by moment: what happens naturally, we might say.

So when I talk about texts ‘finding’ me I’m offering a model that might be helpful in a wider sense:  that the things we need (the words, the ideas, the hope, the confidence, the resolve, the ability to forgive ourselves, the ability to forgive others: whatever it is we need) - they find us. They find us if we are open to them. So what  I’m describing, struggling to describe - because it’s hard to put into words – what I’m talking about is a stance in relation to the spiritual and religious work of these days.

Maybe I can describe it as ‘wandering attentiveness’ – even ‘distracted attentiveness’; it’s akin to what Shakespeare described, incomparably, in the words he put in Polonius’s mouth in Hamlet: “By indirections find directions out”.

So, if I had to summarise what I am saying, it’d be something like: ‘What you need to help you on this expedition through the High Holy Days is waiting for you - but you don’t need to work too hard to search for it, or seek it out, because it will arrive, it will come to you – your job, the job of each one of us, is to wait and be open to see it or hear it when it comes, to receive it into our hearts, our souls’. But when I say it like that, it makes it sound almost too easy, or inevitable: too deterministic.

So I want to say it tentatively, hesitantly, because, as Franz Kafka understood and described, in our times there is no longer a “broad…smooth road” leading from, or to, “Mount Sinai”[i]; there are no straight paths to religious revelation, no certainties, no programmes that will automatically get you there, no practices or rituals guaranteed to lead to enlightenment or inner change.

There’s no single Jewish text or prayer that will open up a failsafe surefooted pathway to heaven. (Although it’s also the case that there’s no single Jewish text or prayer that might not, on one unforeseen occasion, suddenly speak to you in a new, unexpected way: a word, or a phrase, or an idea, can pop out of the text and offer you a new thought about some aspect of your life).    

But I know that for many people now, it’s not usually the texts and prayers of tradition that light the way. As Rabbi Lionel Blue helped us understand, what is revealed to us that we need on our own journey through life can come from all sorts of places undreamt of by formal Jewish tradition: it may be a conversation that we overhear in the supermarket, or a headline on a stranger’s paper on the tube, it may be something a grandchild says, or a remark from a neighbour we bump into in the street, it may be an act of kindness we witness that highlights how we’d like to be, or an act of cruelty that we see that reminds us of, maybe shames us about, what we too are capable of, and makes us resolve to live from our better selves.

It may be a piece of music we hear that is new to us that we experience like an oasis in the desert - or music that we hear as if for the first time after hearing it a 100 times before. It might be a scene from a film, or a moment in the garden, or a sentence from a book that’s been lying around at home and that we decide to pick up and we open it up and there’s a thought or a phrase that penetrates some outer layer of indifference in us, that stirs something in us, that makes us realise something about ourselves – that we are a better person than we judge ourselves to be in our harshest moments, or that we have hurt someone and we need to do something about it, or any one of a thousand small revelations that can piece us, and change us, just a millimetre. But that millimetre is everything. This is teshuvah, the teshuvah of small moments – which are huge.  

But the thing is that we can’t search out these unexpected moments of revelation in everyday life: they find us; they arrive; they are for us; it can even feel that they are aimed at us – like the call of the bugle in Kafka’s parable that he hears but the servant doesn’t. We can’t make these experiences happen - but we have to be open to hear them, see them, feel them, to think about them. That’s down to us. That’s our work: we are receivers of revelation, we are given glimpses into a deeper reality, signs of deeper truths about life: about our life.

And it can be so frustrating that we can’t create these moments, we can’t plan for them, we can’t control them. Because we may have a real wish to change, to be the recipients of new insights, new understanding – and our tradition encourages us to strive in that direction – but it can end up with us empty-handed and feeling flat or disillusioned or angry. And if that happens – and it does - it’s probably because we are working too hard, too determinedly, too consciously, when what we need to do is wait, wait without hope (as the mystics said), “for hope might be hope for the wrong thing” (T.S.Eliot, Four Quartets). Often we are hoping for the thing we think we want, rather than the thing we need. So this year I’m suggesting that in this frenetic world maybe we can try to wait - patiently, without too much striving - wait with what I rather inadequately described earlier as a ‘wandering attentiveness’. 

For me this waiting – when I can bear to let it happen - is done in the spirit of that  wonderful short text from Kafka, which reads:

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.

That’s the promise of these Jewish ‘Days of Awe’, Yomim Noraim:  if we remain open and attentive, we will be given what we need.

[adapted from a sermon given on Selichot evening at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, September 1^st 2018]

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[i] Many people prowl around Mount Sinai. Their speech is blurred, either they are garrulous or they shout or they are taciturn. But none of them comes straight down a broad, newly made, smooth road that does its own part in making one’s strides long and swifter.

On Hatred

I want to talk about something difficult: hatred. It’s one of the most powerful emotions in the human heart, it is a universal experience, and as old as humanity, and it has the capacity to make toxic everything it touches: personal relationships, family relationships, communal relationships, national and international relationships, relationships between ethnic groups and within ethnic groups, relationships between religions and within religions, relationships between men and women, relationships between political groupings and within political parties – there is no area of human life spared the debilitating and destructive nature of hatred.

Even within an individual, hatred doesn’t need an external target, because we can experience hatred towards oneself, or parts of oneself: and that can be conscious – I hate the way I look, I hate the way my voice sounds, I hate myself when I fail to achieve what I set out to do, I hate myself for having so much hatred in me – or it can be unconscious.

But conscious or unconscious, directed at oneself or directed at others, it is a powerful spoiler of well-being, an inner aggression that we struggle to tame,  and sometimes give up trying to tame, because the expression of hatred has, dare one say this, it has its pleasures too: we might struggle to admit this,  but the expression of hatred can purge something inside us, temporarily maybe, like lancing a boil, like the emptying out of a seeming bottomless well of rage; but a well that gets filled up again pretty quickly and then needs and waits for another opportunity to spill out. In that sense hatred is a condition of psychic bulimia and unless we are able to get a grip on this basic human emotion, and understand it, and do the hard psychological and spiritual and mental work to contain it, it will destroy the world we know, and love.

Too dramatic a statement? I fear not. Wherever we look, if we have eyes to see, we can perceive hatred in play.  I am not going to rehearse here all the countless domains where we see hatred – you can construct your own anthology and it would no doubt embrace everything from wars and rape and knife crime to the renewed European hatred of immigrants to the strands of racial hatred in America towards the black community or towards scientific truth on evolution or climate change.

But it’s been on my mind recently particularly because of the way in which one of the youngsters in this community (Finchley Reform) has attracted (along with her family) the most vile abuse in social media concerning her participation in the recent ‘Kaddish for Gaza’ event. And whatever you think about the wisdom of that form of demonstration of concern about the Palestinian deaths on the Gaza border some weeks ago, the invective unleashed has been truly despicable. This is hatred from Jews against other Jews. You can Google all the background to this if you want to - it is too shameful for me to go into here, the hate-fuelled sewage that has emerged from our fellow religionists.

It's revealed a tragic irony about us Jews. Because we Jews often think that hatred is what the world – or groups in the world, or individuals  - feel towards us (and of course there is a reality to that, and to anti-Semitism), but when you see what happens within the so-called Jewish ‘community’, the kind of hatred that is expressed – and it’s not a new phenomenon, Jewish hatred of other Jews, but I think it is amplified now through the new channels that social media offer – when you see the levels of bile and misogyny and racist invective and ugly polemic that lie beneath the surface, in Jewish hearts and minds, one can genuinely fear for our collective well-being.

What I am saying here is far from being an original idea, though maybe I’m trying to say something about it with perhaps a new emphasis on the psychological complexity of this universal emotion. But it’s certainly not new in Jewish history for there to be an awareness of the destructive nature of Jewish hatred.  We are in the midst of Tisha B’Av, the annual day of memorialising the losses of Jewish history – focused on the destruction of the First then the Second Temple, but over the generations becoming a day when we recognise the cycles of loss and persecution that Jews have gone through, throughout the ages.  

But the remarkable thing about the way the rabbis of the time thought about the loss of the Second Temple, destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 - which marked the end of a whole era of worship and ritual life and the very ordering of society into priests, Cohanim,  and administrators of the cult, Levites, and then the mass of other Israelites - the way they came to understand the disaster that had befallen them was that it was due to one thing above all. They said, and I quote from the Talmud : “In spite of the Torah we studied, the commandments we kept, and the deeds of love enacted, the Temple fell because of groundless hatred: sinat chinam – hatred without reason” (Yoma 9b).  And they weren’t talking about groundless hatred by the Romans, they were talking about Jewish hatred of other Jews. This was our downfall, those Talmudic rabbis said.

They could have blamed the Romans, but they didn’t – they reflected on their experience and realised that there was something endemically self-destructive in the very fabric of the Jewish community: that in spite of adherence to study and practice, in spite of acts of compassion and kindness within the community, it wasn’t enough - because there was something else which undermined all that: it was the way that hatred exists within us and seeps out. Hatred which is groundless.

Another way of saying that might be: hatred which is felt and not reflected on, but acted out; hatred which is grounded in our inability to tolerate difference, our inability to bear someone having a different opinion to us, our incapacity to manage the feelings of envy of other people, our inability to prosper like them, or be as beautiful as them, or as visionary as them, or as lucky as them – a thousand reasons why in the fine-grained relationships in a family, a society, a community, we can’t bear the otherness of people, what they do, what they think, what they are. And hatred just arises in us, and we can’t manage it. And then it is acted out. And this is as old a story as humanity – it’s there in the mythic tale of Cain and Abel – and it’s as newly-minted as today’s newspapers and the omnipresent social media, which are full of it.  

Those Talmudic rabbis , in their wisdom, saw into the heart of something profound. What we value, they said, gets destroyed because we can’t contain our own hatred. In the past, when I have reflected on this Talmudic self-indictment, I tended to think about it in a different way. I thought of their response as being like the victim blaming herself, himself, themselves – an inability in the rabbis of that generation to own up to their rage at what had been done to them.  Jews do have a long history of turning  rage away from their persecutors and looking inside themselves to see what they as a community had done wrong. 

Over the generations, and particularly in the Middle Ages as a response to the Crusades and blood libels and massacres in Europe, there developed a whole theology around this – the theology of mipnei chata’einu: we were punished because of our own sinfulness. So the outrage at what was done to us is turned away from the goyim and it becomes our fault. And there have been relics of this thinking even today in some Orthodox circles – there was the extreme view that the reason for the Holocaust was that Jews had assimilated, or become Reform, so it wasn’t the Nazis and their acolytes that were to blame but we were to blame.

This inability to take responsibility for one’s anger and feel it in relation to the right object is a very common human trait but as an attempted explanation for Jewish victimhood it is woefully inadequate, misguided. It’s actually perverse. Or at least it is perverse when carried to an extreme: because it is still psychologically healthy to be able to reflect on what role one plays in one’s own victimhood. We have spectacularly lost this instinct for looking at what part we might play in our persecution – the tendency now is just to blame ‘the other’.

So I’m sketching this out because, as I say, in the past I might have thought about our Talmudic passage about sinat chinam along those lines: a failure of the rabbis of that generation to come to terms with their hatred of the Romans, their hatred of what had been done to them without reason. I might have thought: well, this is where it all begins, this problem the Jews have through history in dealing with their rage at the non-Jewish world - they turn it inwards, they blame themselves. The Temple was destroyed because of our groundless hatred.

Turning the blame inwards can be a psychological defence against outwardly-directed rage: this is certainly a problem in Jewish (and other) families today, and I think it is a collective problem historically; but I also now think that this Talmudic passage is on to something even more important: the way in which the hateful feelings in each of us that we don’t manage to deal with become destructive of the social fabric.

We are certainly seeing this all around us at the moment: in the Jewish community around the toxic debates and differences of view about Israel and its occupation; in Israel itself in - for example, in its new Nation-State law, although some of the more hateful proto-fascist aspects of it were fudged or dropped before it was passed this week; we see it in the Labour party as it wrestles with antisemitism, in the Conservative party as it wrestles with Islamophobia, in Parliament as it wrestles with the poisonous legacy of that self-destructive Brexit vote; we see it in the country as a whole as it struggles to keep afloat under the tide of hate speech and hate crimes that somehow have been released following the referendum, as if (consciously or unconsciously) the Leave vote was felt to have legitimised expressions of disdain and antipathy towards, and sometimes outright hatred towards, migrants and immigrants and asylum seekers, anyone who isn’t self-evidently one of ‘us’. And we see it in the rise of far-right groups across Europe.

And we see it in the hatred directed against our planet.

At a global level it might be helpful to think of this planet we all inhabit as if it were a Temple, a sacred space where the world community comes together: this fragile planet of ours is the site of everything we value in life, where we are dependent on the earth and the seas and the sky and the rain, on the natural world in all its miraculous abundance, on the delicate balance that exists to keep everything sustained for our well-being, our survival. And this sacred space we inhabit is at risk: it can be destroyed, we can destroy it if we don’t curb our hatred, which is evidenced in our casual disdain for it, our disregard of its animals and trees and plants, the whole ecosystems on which our lives depend. And we are all complicit in this low-level aggression against the Temple we inhabit.

So much is at stake, I fear, in all the multiple ways this question of what we do with our hatred is played out.

The Jewish tradition recognises the basic ingrained nature of hatred, it’s part of the fabric of our consciousness; our tradition even recognises that hatred is something that God experiences too, so to speak. You hear it in our prophetic reading this week, which included Isaiah 1:14: “Your new moons and fixed festivals fill me with loathing…” – sana nafshi, literally “my soul hates them”. The prophet intuits that from the ultimate point of view, the viewpoint of divinity, all this religious ritual stuff we do is hateful – not in and of itself, but if it is a substitute for what matters, which he goes on to talk about: “goodness, justice, helping those wronged, protecting the vulnerable and society’s outsiders” (verse 17, paraphrase).

The text suggests that God hates the way outer observance of so-called ‘religious’ traditions takes the place of certain core values. So, we might think, if even God has hatred enmeshed into God’s Being, what hope is there for us? We aren’t going to get rid of it. In which case  the work is to manage it better: which means to reflect on it, to think about why things are hateful to us, rather than reacting hatefully to them. And if we are going to feel hate – and we do feel hate - then at least let it be directed into channels that could be life-enhancing rather than life-destroying. There's a text from Amos that can help us here.  

At one point the prophet says: “Seek good and not evil, that you may live, and that God may truly be with you; hate evil and love good, and establish justice in your gates.” (Amos 5:14-15). So if you are going to hate – and you will – let it be directed not against people but against manifestations of evil: if you are going to hate, hate evil – ‘evil’, note, not ‘evildoers’. 

Now, there’s a challenge: learn to hate evil without hating those who are perpetrators of evil! Once we elide the distinction between acts of evil and those who enact evil, once we merge in our minds evil and evildoers, we are sunk. This is hard work but it’s the spiritual, psychological and mental challenge humanity is set. If we fail in this task we will, I fear, sooner or later destroy ourselves.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, July 21, 2018]

Lessons from Philip Roth

There is one sentence that I keep in mind when I’m thinking about sermons. I say ‘keep it in mind’ - but that’s not strictly true, it’s not a conscious decision. On the contrary, it’s more true to say that this  sentence haunts me, shadows me, nags at me, won’t let me go – and because it could end up persecuting me, I long ago decided I’d rather befriend it, have it as my travelling companion, to let it guide me (inspire me even), but also if need be to warn me.

Have I captured your curiosity? ‘What is this extraordinary sentence?’ I’m  giving it a big build-up, I know: like a storyteller, one might say. I will let you in on my secret – though it might come as a bit of an anti-climax. I’ll have to risk that.

First though, I want to put this sentence I’m talking about – it’s a Philip Roth sentence - in its context. Ever since some of his first stories were published in 1959 in the volume Goodbye, Columbus, Philip Roth’s work was (in his own words) “attacked from certain pulpits and in certain periodicals as dangerous, dishonest and irresponsible”. He was accused by various Jewish leaders, and rabbis, of creating “a distorted image of the basic values of…Judaism”, of “being anti-Semitic and ‘self-hating’”, “tasteless”, of “offering ‘fuel’ for the fire” of anti-Semites, and so on.  When he spoke at Jewish events at that time, he’s said that invariably there would be people who’d come up to him afterwards and say: “Why don’t you leave us alone? Why don’t you write about the Gentiles? Why must you be so critical? Why do you disapprove of us so?” “This last question”, he says, “asked as often with incredulity as with anger” (p.50).

I am taking all this from an essay Roth wrote in 1963 called ‘Writing About Jews’ [in Philip Roth, Why Write? Collected Nonfiction, 1960-2013] in which he describes some of these responses to his early short stories. He writes:

“It is difficult, if not impossible, to explain to some of the people claiming to have felt my teeth sinking in that in many instances they haven’t been bitten at all. Not always, but frequently, what such readers have taken to be my disapproval of the lives lived by Jews seems to have more to do with their own moral perspective than with the one they would ascribe to me: at times they see wickedness where I myself had seen energy or courage or spontaneity; they are ashamed of what I see no reason to be ashamed of, and defensive where there is no cause for defence. Not only do they seem to me often to have cramped and untenable notions of right and wrong, but looking at fiction as they do – in terms of “approval” and “disapproval” of Jews, “positive” and “negative attitudes toward Jewish life – they are likely not to see what it is that a story is really about” (p.51).

In other words, Roth is saying that his Jewish critics misunderstood what he was doing when his stories contained Jewish characters: they were poor readers, in effect. “It is not my purpose in writing a story of an adulterous man”, he writes, “to make it clear how right we all are if we disapprove of the act and are disappointed in the man. Fiction is not written to affirm the principles and beliefs that everyone seems to hold, nor does it seek to guarantee the appropriateness of our feelings. The world of fiction, in fact, frees us from the circumscriptions that society places upon feeling; one of the greatnesses of the art is that it allows both the writer and the reader to respond to experience in ways not always available in day-to-day conduct…Ceasing for a while to be upright citizens, we drop into another layer of consciousness. And this expansion of moral consciousness, this exploration of moral fantasy, is of some value to a man and to society.” (p.51-2)

Let’s think about this for a moment. He’s saying that reading works of fiction allows an expansion of our “moral consciousness” – this is a very significant claim: that literature helps us imagine other people – their joys and struggles, their life dilemmas, their victories and defeats, their passions and heartaches. It helps expand our sense of what it is to be human. This is what fiction does. And poetry, one might add. Non-fiction can do this too of course, but I am focusing here, as Roth did in his career, primarily on the way that fiction can help sensitise us to complexity, and the emotionally and spiritually layered nature of moral issues; in other words stories, well-written, can make us larger moral beings rather than narrow ones.  

All of this essay, by the way, was written years before Roth became an international name with Portnoy’s Complaint (in 1969) – a novel which was in part his pent-up fictional riposte to all those years of being told how ‘tasteless’ he was, how he was portraying the Jewish community in such a  bad light to the goyim. It was if in Portnoy’s Complaint he was saying ‘You think the fiction I’ve been writing is tasteless? Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet…’ 

I came to Philip Roth’s work relatively late, in the mid-1980s, prompted by a friend who encouraged me to overcome any prejudices I had about him – and I did have some - and just read his Zuckerman books; and so I did read start reading them and I was captivated. He was writing about life - about desire and death and human folly and human vulnerability and human ambition - in a way I found compelling. And it was during this period that I came across the sentence that has steered me, and goaded me, ever since.

It’s at the very end of that 1963 essay ‘Writing About Jews’, which he concludes with this remark: “The question really is, who is going to address men and women like men and women, and who like children. If there are Jews who have begun to find the stories the novelists tell more provocative and pertinent than the sermons of some of the rabbis, perhaps it is because there are regions of feeling and consciousness in them which cannot be reached by the oratory of self-congratulation and self-pity.” (p.64).

That struck a deep chord with me; and there’s a lot packed into Roth’s words that have particularly stuck with me. Firstly – and this is actually the prelude to the sentence that I want to speak about - if you are going to offer your thoughts in the public domain, whether it is in writing or in speaking, you need to address people as adults, not as children: so you don’t talk down, you don’t patronise, or condescend, but assume that the audience is able to take your words and think about them. This may sound obvious but I’m not sure that it is. Addressing people as “men and women” means granting people a kind of basic respect: a belief that they, like you, are thoughtful beings, capable of holding two or more contrasting ideas in their minds, for example, and a belief that people are able to reflect with some degree of fairmindedness on what you are offering. Yes, they may well have feelings about what you say – people may not like what you say, but you don’t avoid saying difficult things for that reason.

‘Able to reflect’ of course is not the same as ‘prepared to’ – and one knows that people are not always able to listen open-mindedly or open-heartedly: that people listen with prejudice and judgment and criticism and envy and a whole range of emotional responses that can get in the way of listening to what you are saying; but in Roth’s terms, addressing them as “men and women” means speaking to the best selves you know people can be, not the worst selves – so, hopefully, not pandering to people’s prejudices and emotionality.  

By the way, I think you should also talk to children in the same way as to adults: that is, without condescending to them or patronising them. I don’t believe in hiding from children the complexities of life, they know that anyway: you might just as well validate their experience rather than deny it or over-simplify it or, worse still, cover over something because you might find it hard to talk about, things like sex or death (two of Roth’s major themes, by the way). So in that sense I  don’t go along with Roth’s splitting things into ‘you should talk to people like adults not like children’. But I get what he is saying, it’s a kind of shorthand way of talking – and dare I say, a touch of laziness on his part.  

But the next point Roth makes is the key one I want to focus on: that what draws people in is storytelling; people find stories “provocative and pertinent” - by which I understand him to mean intellectually thought-provoking, imaginatively thought-and-feeling provoking, and relevant to their own experience, pertinent to the joys and troubles and moral dilemmas of their own lives. And that when you are in the presence of a good storyteller, when you are engaging with well-written fiction, this is what people are drawn to – it reaches ‘regions of feeling and consciousness’ that, in Roth’s view, sermons can’t reach. Of course Philip Roth never heard one of my sermons but I forgive him for that: anyway, he was talking about the kind of sermons that were common fare in 1950s America, that he describes, in a somewhat provocative, and more-than-slightly condescending way as ‘the oratory of self-congratulation and self-pity.’

But if you read those sermons now, and such sermons are by no means unique to America, or to the 1950s, we can recognise what he’s talking about. “Self-congratulation” refers, to my mind, to all those sermons that tell us how wonderful the Jewish people are - all those Nobel prizes! – all that wonderful Jewish philanthropy and ethical high-mindedness; or how wonderful Israel is, making the deserts bloom, our cutting edge technology: you know - all that PR stuff. And ‘self-pity’ – well, we are good at that: Jews as eternal victims, the world hates us, poor little beleaguered Israel, all that anti-Semitism flooding through Europe or behind the chintz curtains of middle England: we almost take pride in our capacity for self-pity, the rich profusion of forms in which it comes. We certainly joke about it. ‘How many Jewish sons does it take to change a lightbulb? It only takes one, but don’t worry about it, I’ll just sit here in the dark’. If there was a Nobel prize for self-pity, we’d walk away with it every year.

I hope you can see what I’m doing now: I’m doing what I learned, one of the things I learned, from Philip Roth. I’m beginning to move into a narrative/storytelling mode; and also one of his gifts was in using humour to make serious moral points.

I do try to avoid “self-congratulation” in my sermons and writing, and “self-pity”. I don’t think I always succeed in this, because it’s very easy to slip into, like comfy slippers - it’s simple and tempting, but it’s also lazy and manipulative. ‘Look how wonderful we are’ is ‘feel good’ stuff for sermons, and sometimes we do just need to feel good about ourselves, individually and collectively: but it’s always only part of the truth of things, and sometimes only a very minor part. And ‘poor us’ is also, paradoxically, a kind of ‘feel good’ form of speaking, because self-pity is comforting, it’s like wrapping oneself up in a warm duvet on a cold winter’s night. To feel that the world’s against us, and that’s how it always was and is and will be, can offer a paradoxical form of pleasure - even if it avoids the complexity of how we are experienced, the huge range of responses through time (and today) to Jews and Jewishness. And maybe ‘poor us’ is perversely pleasurable because it avoids the messy complexity of real life, real experience.

Anyway, Roth has been a touchstone for me as I think about what I am doing when I write or when I speak. One of the things I learned from is that if you find the right ‘voice’ to speak in, you can explore even the most difficult ‘regions of feeling and consciousness’. He was the master craftsman of narrative art who acted as a guide to me in the moral seriousness of literature. He helped me understand story as argument, story as exploring moral dilemmas, commitment and betrayal, “uncontrollable longings, unworkable love…exhaustion, estrangement, derangement” , and the rest (p.381), and in his last decade of writing produced a series of works exploring in a profound and moving way the vital topics of the second half of life: ageing, illness and the inevitability of death.

I know that many women readers have found his work hard going, and some refuse to engage with it at all: accusations of misogyny have dogged him from the beginning. And it’s true that his female characters sometimes lacked the complex inner turmoil of his male characters – maybe that’s why he never received the one award that eluded him, the Nobel Prize for Literature – but many of his characters are wrestling with universal human concerns rather than solely male concerns, so if you have turned your back on him, for whatever reason, give him another try. Try ‘American Pastoral’ where Roth explores America’s political turmoil of the Vietnam years, a book which contains a beautifully loving evocation too of the Jewish Newark he grew up in. Or try ‘The Plot Against America’ with its counterfactual exploration of what happens in America in the 1940s when a right-wing demagogue captures the presidency and the fascistic takeover leads to the gradual exclusion and then persecution of one ethnic group: not Muslims but Jews. In the era of Trump, of course, this novel from 2004 has taken on an eerie prescience.

Roth had his finger on the pulse of our times like no other novelist. I’ll really miss him. But I will continue to re-read him, the ruthless intimacy of his fiction and the discursive intelligence of his essays. And I hope to be able to use the spirit of his gifts to continue to inform my own work with a minimum of self-pity or self-congratulation. 

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, June 9th, 2018] 

On 'Spiritual Adventure'

I want to share with you a text I came across this week from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s wonderful last book ‘A Passion for Truth’ - delivered to his publisher just a few weeks before his death in 1972. If I tell you that it is a parallel study of two towering religious figures of the first half of the 19^th century, the Hasidic leader Menachem Mendl of Kotzk, who lived in Poland, and the Danish Christian mystic and theologian Soren Kierkegaard, one of the forefathers of existentialism, (neither of whom knew of the existence of the other)  - well, hearing this it is possible you might feel yourselves having to work hard to stifle a yawn.

But I can assure you that such is the brilliance of Heschel as a writer that he creates a fascinating and very accessible drama out of the lives and ideas of these two figures, showing how they were each wrestling with similar religious questions and issues, though in completely different contexts.

What they were both aware of – and found themselves battling against – were the ways in which religious experience becomes institutionalised, how an individual’s possibility of engaging with the divine becomes bogged down in tradition and ritual and repetition, how religious formalism and religious institutions can become a barrier to religious experience, rather than a vehicle for it.

Heschel was accustomed in his books to divide his thoughts up into short sections, each with their own ‘headline’. The section I want to share is entitled ‘Against Trivialization’, and starts as follows:

The Kotzker apparently felt that overemphasis on strict adherence to patterns of religious behaviour tended to obscure the individual’s relationship with God. He never questioned the validity of the traditional pattern and regarded living by the Law as essential. Observance as a matter of routine, however, he considered odious.  

So: observance of the law and the traditions of Judaism is central, ‘essential’, for Reb Mendl, but observing as a ‘matter of routine’ is ‘odious’: strong language from Heschel. Although Heschel stresses that Reb Mendl is halachically observant, the emphasis of his religious stance is not on mere repetition of rituals or prayers, but something else.

Let’s see what else:

What appalled the Kotzker was the spiritual stagnation of religious existence, the trivialization of Judaism. He scorned praying by rote. In opposition to the traditional preference for verbose recitation, he pleaded for brevity, even taciturnity. He dared to teach that the preparation for prayer surpassed prayer itself in spiritual value and found a basis for this reformative principle in an ancient tradition: ”One should not stand up to say a prayer save in a reverent frame of mind. The pious of old used to wait an hour before praying in order to concentrate their thoughts upon their Father in Heaven.” (Berachot 5:1). One would expect the phrase “while praying” to appear at the end of the sentence, since the goal is concentration in prayer. The intention, however, is to teach us that concentration should precede the act of prayer. Preparation for prayer is valuable in itself, perhaps more so than prayer itself.

Let’s unpack this: first there are the powerful phrases Heschel uses to describe what the Kotzker set himself against – ‘spiritual stagnation’ and ‘the trivialization of Judaism’. And what’s an example of that? : ‘prayer by rote’. And then Heschel illustrates the radical nature of what the Kotzker was teaching by quoting how the Rebbe used a traditional text from the Talmud as the basis of his ‘reformative’ stance: the tradition of having a period of reflection or meditation before a service starts, a quiet personal time before the collective prayers. It’s interesting to see Heschel describe this as a ‘reformative principle’. Implicitly he is raising the question: Does our tradition, our prayer life, need “reforming”? Have we got our priorities wrong? Maybe we have. Because ‘preparation for prayer is valuable in itself, perhaps more so than prayer itself’, (i.e. the fixed prayers of tradition). How threatening an idea is that?!

He’s not saying we can or should dispense with the words of tradition. But Heschel is saying, following the Kotzker’s lead: maybe we have our priorities the wrong way round - that what we might do before the formal prayers begin has a spiritual value in and of itself and maybe, (and this is the radical note), maybe that quiet time is  more valuable ’than prayer itself’.  What would our services look like if we followed that approach? They would surely be different.

Although he’s focused here on prayer, I just want to note in passing how Heschel’s greatness as a teacher is evidenced in that subversive phrase he slips in en passant: the phrase ‘the trivialization of Judaism’. Because in using that language he is inviting you to think: ‘and what else goes on in Jewish life and practice that is  a trivialization? where else do we concentrate on stuff that misses the point about our religion? that avoids the essence of religious and spiritual life?’ And I imagine these questions might resonate too for other religions.

We can each create our own anthology of things that we might point to as the ‘trivialization of Judaism’.  My list would probably be a long one but off the top of my head I’d think about: obsessionism about aspects of kashrut, or frenzied pre-Pesach cleaning, or substituting Zionism for Judaism as the heart of religious life, or seeing the Bar/Bat-Mitzvah party as needing more attention than the ceremony itself, or anything that prioritises ritual obligations at the expense of the ethical vision and inter-personal dimension of Judaism with its focus on compassion and justice. 

He continues:

In the Kotzker’s synagogue one could see the disciples with prayer shawls over their shoulders walking up and down the room, their lips hardly moving. They gave the impression that they had not begun to pray yet and were still immersed in preparation. They prayed quietly. Suddenly they would stop, take of phylacteries and shawls, join one another at the table, and consume a little vodka together…

Heschel brings to life a lost world, with a charming (and seductive) picture of weekday prayer - quiet immersion in prayer, each individual alone in community, together in community, and then: tephillin off, and time for a different connection to the spirit, sharing a drink together…

And how does Heschel bring this theme to a conclusion?

Even piety will not sustain the tedium of unlimited repetition. To preserve one’s commitment with the intensity of its first ardour requires more than obedience. Surprise, spiritual adventure, the search for new appreciation – all these are necessary ingredients for religious renewal.

Judaism lived because it was both a religion of finality, conclusive and irrevocable, and a faith of commencement, of inauguration. To act as a Jew, thought the Kotzker, meant to make a new start upon the old road. (quotations from ‘A Passion for Truth’, pp.92-3, Farrer, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1973).

So here’s the Kotzker’s recipe for religious aliveness, channelled through Heschel. Another way of saying that might be: here we have Heschel’s 20^th century agenda for religious renewal – but a renewal programme utilising and  rooting himself in the spiritual tradition to which he was an heir. Heschel was of course born into a Hasidic heritage: his grandfather, Reb Abraham Joshua Heschel, who died in 1825, was the ‘Apter Rebbe’, the last great Rebbe of Mezbizh on the Polish/Russia border, who was buried next to Hasidism’s founder, the Baal Shem Tov, who came from that same village.

In this paragraph Heschel is teaching us what is required for an enlivened religious life: ‘Surprise, spiritual adventure, the search for new appreciation..,’ that is the search for new approaches to the tradition. These are the ‘necessary ingredients’ not just for one’s own spirituality and prayer life but for collective ‘religious renewal’. That’s what Heschel was after:  collective and individual ‘religious renewal’. And what a great trio of ideas he puts together here: ‘Surprise, spiritual adventure, the search for new appreciation…’.

Do the religious services we attend meet that demanding standard? Can they? Is religion even the best place to look? What is the antidote to what Heschel calls  ‘spiritual stagnation’? That’s a condition that might afflict any number of people - synagogue-goes, Church attenders, secularists, alike.  

Heschel speaks directly to some of my own preoccupations, including trying to keep on guard against the ‘trivialisation of Judaism’; and keeping myself (and others)on track, focused on, the elements of adventure, of surprise, of new approaches, in our eternal journey through the wilderness away from spiritual stagnation, towards spiritual richness, aliveness, new possibilities.

[adapted from a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, May 5^th 2018]

On Narrowness and the Resurrection of the Miraculous

I am emerging – trying to emerge – from my ‘narrow space’, my sense of constriction. Over the last few months some of you have contacted me: ‘Where’s your blog gone? We need something in these difficult times’ – so I realise I am not alone in feeling in Mitzrayim/Egypt, feeling the power of the mythic narrative of enslavement, the hard daily living of that existential condition that the etymology of Mitzrayim/Egypt evokes: narrowness, constriction, entrapment.

So the festival of Passover/Pesach arrives – and this year concurrently with  the drama of Easter: stories about suffering and despair followed by the miraculous transformation of life; when all appears lost, and yet new life, new possibilities, spring from the darkness. These stories offer the seductive framework of a narrative with which we can identify: they move us from  oppression and suffering to liberation, to a new sense of freedom. But is this what we experience? The undeserved arrival of the God of Surprises (as the Catholic spiritual teacher Gerard Hughes named it)? Are we that blessed? Are we that open? Is the myth still alive, and resonating?

I don’t know the answer to these questions. What I know is the narrowness – I have been trapped by my inadequacy in dealing with my dependence on technology (computer issues, internet and broadband issues, that world in which I am immersed and feels like an extension of my very self, so that my well-being depends on its smooth functioning); trapped by the body’s ageing, and the always present awareness of dependence on its own organic functioning, the taking-for-granted of physical well-being, until suddenly all is not well and although not serious, our common frail humanity is starkly revealed – and with it comes the helplessness, the powerlessness, and the question of who to turn to?

So I know the narrowness of living in Mitzrayim/Egypt. And I know too that we each have our own personal Mitzrayim/Egypt. But also that there is a sense that our personal entrapment and constriction and narrowing of horizons is mirrored in what we see around us: political and social forces that oppress people’s well-being – and the list can seem endless: the crises in the UK in the NHS and in social care and prisons and education, no area of life unaffected by the poverty of imagination, and the lack of generosity, and sometimes the systemic aggression, of the powerful and wealthy, as well as our ongoing national trauma of the narrowing of our future hopes because of Brexit.

And the concentric circles of concern, that ache in our bones, are known to us all: Europe’s increased populism and racism, and America’s; the destruction of species and natural resources and the air we breathe; Putin’s and Trump’s threatening grandiosity, and calculated (or impulsive) braggadocio, millions on the move, random terror, wars without end – our lives touched or not touched – but we can’t shut out what we know. The unthought known: Mitzrayim in us. The list is too painful to contemplate – but it all increases our sense of uneasiness, helplessness, fearfulness. It all adds up to our collective  Mitzrayim/Egypt.

In the mythic narrative that underlies the Pesach story of liberation, our storytellers took a bold gamble when they wrote: “And the Israelites were groaning under their slavery and they cried out, and their cries from the midst of their oppression rose up to God and God heard their groaning and God remembered his covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and God saw the Israelites and God knew.” (Exodus 2:23-4). Why was this a gamble? Because it means that every generation now wonder about their own oppression, their own inner experience of Mitzrayim/Egypt, their own “groaning” and “cries” (in whatever form they come), and they wonder: ‘What’s happened to the covenant? Does God any longer see and know what we poor struggling human beings go through?’.

Historically, Jews have often been eternal optimists that this story still contains a timeless message of hope: that somehow, in ways we don’t understand, the divine energy that animates the universe is still in operation and oppression can and will give way to renewed life and openness and well-being. But we Jews are also skilled in disillusion – skilled in asking difficult questions about salvation. For we ask: so how does liberation happen today? who takes responsibility for it? are we waiting passively for salvation from some divine force outside ourselves? or do we have to liberate from within ourselves our own powers, our own capacities to transform hardship into hope, our own compassionate ability to see and know, our own passion for justice?

Are we ready to take the mythic narrative of the Exodus seriously enough to internalise it and recognise that this divine energy that the storytellers of old projected outside themselves in the service of an inspirational narrative of how liberation from oppression happens – this divine energy is an energy within us?

Are we ready for that?

We all carry a wound, deep and scary and scarring. It’s part of our modern condition. Jews are not alone in bearing the scars of the 20^th century, the wounds of modernity. This wound is a universal spiritual trauma, barely recognised. That wound is being pressed on every day. We feel a pain, undiagnosed but present. From where, from whom, will healing come?

In 1965, in his poem ‘The Cave of Making’, the poet W.H.Auden wrote some lines – filled with wisdom and hope, shadowed with ambiguity - which are accompanying  me in these days that lead us into these shared festivals of pain and liberation, Pesach/Passover and Easter:

                                                                        More than ever

life-out-there is goodly, miraculous, loveable,

           but we shan’t, not since Stalin

               and Hitler,

trust ourselves ever again: we

          know that, subjectively,

    all is possible.

May this be a season when we resurrect the miraculous nature of being – in ourselves and for others.

Was the Balfour Declaration 'anti-semitic'? - an alternative view

The letter from Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s  Foreign Secretary to Anglo-Jewry’s leading representative was only three sentences long. But it set in motion a series of events which are still political dynamite today.  The letter from Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, dated  November 2^nd 1917,  is kept in the British Library. Little did they know that they were setting in play a conflict which seems more intractable now than at any time over the last 100 years.

On the surface the letter can seem uncontroversial. It starts with the sort of officialese language - formal and flowery - that is very much of its time: Dear Lord Rothschild, I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.

And then, the pleasantries dispensed with, the single sentence which has caused both celebration and dissent from the moment it was issued, containing as it does two promises, one theoretically backed by the British government, the other unenforceable because dependent on the good-will of the recipients of the first promise.

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

I want to look at the content of this famous/infamous sentence. But we should note first the concluding, third sentence, Balfour’s request to Lord Rothschild: I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation. And after these typed sentences, the author signs off in his own handwriting: Yours, Arthur James Balfour. Not ‘Yours sincerely’ or ‘Yours faithfully’, just the more honest, clipped ‘Yours’.

More honest because we know that Balfour was neither a faithful friend of the Jews; nor was he quite sincere in the sentiments expressed in this letter. He had been the Conservative Prime Minister at the time of the notorious Aliens Act of 1905, the legislation directly targeting Jews, restricting them from entering the country from Eastern Europe. So hardly faithful to the Jews. Nor sincere: what we don’t have in the letter is any hint about the background reasons why it was thought necessary to offer this declaration to the Zionist organisation at this particular point in time.

Remember it is 1917, the ‘war to end all wars’  has been rumbling on for 3 years and thoughts were beginning to turn in the Government to what would happen afterwards, and particularly in the Middle East, once the Ottoman empire had crumbled. A year before the Declaration, Britain and France had come to a secret agreement – the Sykes-Picot agreement - to carve up Turkey , Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq into separate spheres of influence, although they left undecided who would control Jerusalem and its surrounding territory.

Previous to that, Balfour had made a secret pledge to the Hashemite Arab leader, Hussein ibn Ali, that Britain would support Arab independence in Palestine once the Ottomans had been defeated. But the need to outsmart the French was paramount - and this included using Palestine’s strategic centrality to ensure smooth passage through the Suez canal en route to India. So the 3 sentences of the Declaration are just the tip of a rather large and irregularly-shaped iceberg. Britain’s post-war national interests are what the Balfour Declaration hides.

Plus there was the need to keep the Jews on side during the War. Balfour hoped that by making a promise of a Jewish national home in Palestine, the Jews of America and Russia, Britain’s wavering allies, would put pressure on their governments, in Washington and St.Petersburg, to stay with the war until total victory was achieved. Balfour’s words to his Cabinet are worth hearing: “If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal [i.e. Zionism], we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and in America”.

What’s fascinating about this is the fantasy of Jewish power and influence on foreign governments. As if Jews have some secret network of international influence with each other and thereby on the governments of the countries where they live. Do you recognise this fantasy? It’s a standard anti-Semitic trope, the most notorious example in that same period of history being the Russian ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ (1903), a fabricated text which described a Jewish plan for world domination. I’m not saying of course that the Balfour Declaration is some spooky shadow twin-sister of that Russian anti-Semitic text, but that behind the Declaration not only is there all that British diplomatic intrigue and political national interest manoeuvrings but also this fantasy that by offering British support for a future Jewish national home, Jews in the lands of Britain’s Allies would be able to exert pressure on their governments.

Balfour could have looked closer to home to see how odd this fantasy was. For the only person in the Cabinet who opposed the Declaration was himself Jewish, the Liberal MP Edwin Montagu. He thought Zionism was "a mischievous political creed", and that the Declaration was itself anti-Semitic. His concerns resulted in a change to the text, which added that last part of the sentence, that nothing should be done that would prejudice “the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”.

In a memo to the Cabinet – entitled Memorandum of Edwin Montagu on the Anti-Semitism of the Present British Government – he outlined his dissenting views on the forthcoming Declaration. It includes these paragraphs, which are worth dwelling on for they represented a real Jewish concern about Zionism, and indeed some of his thoughts remain remarkably prescient:

...I assume that it means that Mahommedans [Muslims] and Christians are to make way for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine. Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test...

...When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants, taking all the best in the country, drawn from all quarters of the globe, speaking every language on the face of the earth, and incapable of communicating with one another except by means of an interpreter. I have always understood that this was the consequence of the building of the Tower of Babel, if ever it was built, and I certainly do not dissent from the view, commonly held, as I have always understood, by the Jews before Zionism was invented, that to bring the Jews back to form a nation in the country from which they were dispersed would require Divine leadership. I have never heard it suggested, even by their most fervent admirers, that either Mr. Balfour or Lord Rothschild would prove to be the Messiah...

...I claim that the lives that British Jews have led, that the aims that they have had before them, that the part that they have played in our public life and our public institutions, have entitled them to be regarded, not as British Jews, but as Jewish Britons. I would willingly disfranchise every Zionist. I would be almost tempted to proscribe the Zionist organisation as illegal and against the national interest. But I would ask of a British Government sufficient tolerance to refuse a conclusion which makes aliens and foreigners by implication, if not at once by law, of all their Jewish fellow-citizens... 

...I can easily understand the editors of the Morning Post and of the New Witness being Zionists, and I am not in the least surprised that the non-Jews of England may welcome this policy. I have always recognised the unpopularity, much greater than some people think, of my community. We have obtained a far greater share of this country's goods and opportunities than we are numerically entitled to. We reach on the whole maturity earlier, and therefore with people of our own age we compete unfairly. Many of us have been exclusive in our friendships and intolerant in our attitude, and I can easily understand that many a non-Jew in England wants to get rid of us. But just as there is no community of thought and mode of life among Christian Englishmen, so there is not among Jewish Englishmen.

More and more we are educated in public schools and at the Universities, and take our part in the politics, in the Army, in the Civil Service, of our country. And I am glad to think that the prejudices against inter-marriage are breaking down. But when the Jew has a national home, surely it follows that the impetus to deprive us of the rights of British citizenship must be enormously increased. Palestine will become the world's Ghetto. Why should the Russian give the Jew equal rights? His national home is Palestine. Why does Lord Rothschild attach so much importance to the difference between British and foreign Jews? All Jews will be foreign Jews, inhabitants of the great country of Palestine...

[For the full text of this remarkable document see: www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/montagu-memo-on-british-government-s-anti-semitism ]  

Of course, things have not turned out quite like that. Nevertheless I think it is worth recording, amidst all the celebrations in some sectors of Anglo-Jewry, a dissenting British Jewish voice who foresaw some of the complications attendant upon a national home for the Jews. Of course too, the events in Europe a generation after the Balfour Declaration made the moral, spiritual and political case for a Jewish national home incontrovertible. (The relationship between the Shoah and the establishment of the State of Israel is a topic in its own right, but I’m not going to dwell on it here). 

What I am going to highlight though is the tragic element within the Balfour Declaration, the element which spells out that the British Government supports the Zionist project “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. [Note too the absence of 'political' rights]. The British Government have had no power to enforce that understanding. And it is an understanding that I think we can recognise has not been honoured by either the waves of Jewish immigrants that came into Palestine in the 1920s and 30s or after 1948 by the State itself. One can see why, from an Arab or Palestinian perspective, this British commitment is a source of mourning and protest rather than celebration. It doesn’t even give those indigenous Arab  Palestinian communities the dignity of a name – they are just “non-Jewish communities”.

And this gap between high-minded declarations of intent and the reality on the ground is also there within Israel’s own Declaration of Independence when the State was established on 14^th May 1948. The Declaration contains this uplifting moral claim:

The State of Israel will be open  for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development off the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights of all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will grant freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

Apart from that first clause – it will be open  for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles – who can put their hand on their heart and say that any of the other proud aims of that paragraph have been enacted or achieved? When we measure all the undoubted achievements of the State, we are duty-bound too to measure the failures. We do this with a heavy heart – because it affects us as Jews wherever we are. Why should we in the UK have to build walls round our synagogues? Why do we need to employ security teams:  security for synagogues, security for Jewish schools and buildings?

Do we think any of this paraphernalia of security would be necessary now in 2017 if either the moral intent of the Balfour Declaration or the moral intent of Israel’s foundational document had been adhered to with steadfast faith and belief and commitment? A homeland for the Jewish people was supposed to normalise the Jewish condition in the world. Instead the State, sadly, tragically, has become a pariah amongst nations and we have to have CCTV cameras fixed to the walls outside our own building here in suburban Finchley. 

Let us hope, let us pray, that by the time the Jewish community celebrates the 150^th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration we can truly celebrate not just the resilience and survival of the Jewish people, but their capacity to enact in Israel, in Palestine, the “freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel”.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, November 4^th, 2017]

You may be interested in a film I contributed to on alternative perspectives on the Balfour Declaration: https://youtu.be/a2Y3Pllutjo