Sometimes I use a sermon to explore themes that trouble me, religious themes. Here is something I offered today, at Finchley Reform Synagogue:
How are we to read the Torah today? What is our relationship to it? What role does it play in our thinking about ourselves as Jews?
For 1800 years the texts of Torah were at the centre of Jewish life: they were seen as holy, inspired, having come to the Jewish people directly from Ha-Kadosh Baruch Hu, the ‘Holy One of Israel, Blessed be He’. Jewish lives were guided by the words of Torah, controlled by their teachings, regulated by the instructions they contained and the concentric circles of commentary upon them that radiated outwards, endlessly, through the generations, interpreting, expanding, amplifying the godly purposes inscribed in the original holy words. For 1800 years these texts we read every Shabbat morning were at the epicentre of Jewish consciousness – and Jewish lives were lived, as Franz Rosenzweig suggests, as enacted commentaries upon the Torah, that ever-beating heart of Judaism.
The teachings of the Torah pulsed through the daily, the hourly, lives of Jews, wherever they lived, from Asia to the Yemen, from Bialystock to Berlin to Baltimore, for Torah min-Hashamayim meant Torah that was divinely inspired - and therefore had a commanding presence at all times, in every era and in every place where Jews found themselves in their long wanderings across the world and through the generations.
But can we say the same today, for us? Even to ask the question brings in its wake its own answer: I don’t think we can say the same is true for us. Nor has it been true for most Jews for several generations now. Our relationship to the Torah (if indeed we have a relationship at all) has surely become, I would suggest, radically different – and has become so because of what we think of as modernity, those multiple ways of thinking that have transformed our consciousness over and again during the last two centuries. Secularism with its distinctive ways of describing and interpreting our everyday realities has taken hold in our hearts and minds, and affects everything we do and are. The ways of thinking about human relationships and history, psychology and language and law, the ways of thinking about our planet and its evolution, about nature and human nature, the centrality of scientific and critical modes of thinking and the place of reason and rationality in how we think about ourselves and our society – our mental world view now is irrevocably different from 200 years ago, let alone 2000 years ago. And this of course includes the ways we think about religion and so-called ‘holy’ texts.
And all this – and obviously I’m only offering here an almost cartoonishly abbreviated, shorthand version of this process of modernity – all this huge transformation in thinking has profound implications for those opening questions: ‘How are we to read the Torah today? What is our relationship to it? What role does it play in our thinking about ourselves as Jews?’
I’ve been prompted to pose these questions today for two reasons. The first is historical: next weekend is the 200th anniversary of the beginnings of what was, in 1810, a new, progressive approach to Judaism. Next Shabbat commemorates the first progressive Jewish Shabbat service. It was held in Seesen, Westphalia – in present-day Germany. There was an organ and a boys' choir, and texts in German as well as Hebrew. The service was led by Israel Jacobson, the so-called ‘father of Reform Judaism’.
But of course questions about Jews’ changing relationship to Torah had been around for decades before that: they’d surfaced in the previous century’s Enlightenment era and a century before that Baruch Spinoza in Holland was already offering a philosophical critique of contemporary views about God and Torah. So that first progressive service 200 years ago was a milestone – but within a larger unfolding challenge to traditional thinking. And whether we know it or not, in the midst of the multiple transformations in Jewish life that have happened since then, we are the inheritors of that impetus that started in Germany to look for new directions in Jewish life, congruent with the times and the thinking of the times.
And the second direction from which I am asking how we are supposed to relate to Torah today comes from having to wrestle directly with the kind of text we heard today. For example, what do we do with a sentence like ‘Adonai spoke to Moses saying...Tell the children of Israel: When you cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan you shall dispossess/uproot all the inhabitants of the land; you shall destroy all their images, and all the images of their images, and you shall destroy all their religious sites, and you will take possession of the land and settle in it...’ (Numbers 33:51-3).
When in March 2001 the Taliban dynamited the two great 6th century Buddhas of Bamyan in Afghanistan there was, justifiably, international outrage at the desecration and destruction of a religious site, and it was seen as evidence for the atavistic medievalism of their form of Islam. But as we see, that kind of religio-cultural destructiveness is not rooted in medievalism but in Biblical texts such as the ones we still read today from our Torah.
And here you will probably want to protest that this is a bit unfair of me. That we are not responsible for the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam; and that we are not of a mind-set that would read these holy texts of ours literally, as telling us what to do today; that we are part of a tradition that always read our texts through the eyes of commentators - who would read the texts figuratively, or allegorically, or symbolically. So that, for example, when we read – in several passages in the Torah, in Exodus and Leviticus and Deuteronomy - that we should take ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, we understand this as the Talmudic rabbis understood it: that this principle is there to provide equitable financial compensation for an offended party, indeed that it restricts acts of retribution. Because in ancient times the punishment often far exceeded the crime, the Torah – says the rabbis – is not instructing us in retribution, but in mercy. It is asking us to transmute our natural aggression and wish for revenge into a passion of a different kind, a passion for justice.
So is this the approach we need to take when reading the Torah today – not to take it literally, but maybe symbolically or metaphorically or in some other way that goes against the grain of its plain meaning? So that when we read about dispossessing and uprooting inhabitants from the land, and acts of cultural desecration and religious contempt, are we supposed to interpret that as teaching the importance today of Jewish cultural distinctiveness, of taking pride in one’s own traditions and values, or the importance of uprooting alien ideas and values from one’s own Jewish world view? Or do we concentrate on thinking of it as a text to justify Zionism as a divine enterprise? I suppose if you were a certain kind of rabbi, or a certain kind of Jew, you might feel attracted to these kinds of interpretation. But even as I suggest these possibilities, I recognize how inadequate these kinds of interpretations are, how fraught with difficulties they are. That kind of interpretative approach towards a problematic text involves a reading against the grain of the text that’s going to leave some very nasty splinters of aggression in one’s soul, and possibly in other people’s lives.
Or maybe we moderns would prefer to see the text merely as a document that reflects its historical context, as a product of its own time and place in which life was nasty, brutish and short, and a tribe’s survival did require the utmost ruthlessness? Are we supposed to rationalize it like that? And in doing so insist that it in no way offers religious or spiritual guidance to us today – in Israel or the West Bank for example? But if we do that, what do we say to those who do want to read the texts more literally and less symbolically – that still want to settle and dispossess, and still despise others with the same vehemence as the God-figure portrayed here, still despise the other inhabitants of the land?
A new report out this week from the leading Israeli human rights group B’Tselem says that more than 42% of the West Bank is now under the control of Israeli settlers. Settlements take over private Palestinian land far beyond the settlements’ notional boundaries, in breach of an Israeli supreme court ruling that is blatantly ignored by those who will be reading these same texts today with, no doubt, a self-justifying smile on their faces. (I know that not all the settlers are religious, but I am making the point about how these texts still resonate today in powerful ways in certain parts of the Jewish world).
But to come back to us: can we still read these texts today in our progressive communities, in any non-literal, non-fundamentalist way, and feel content with our reading? Feel that we retain our integrity - and our humanity – by reading the texts psychologically or homiletically as I tried to do before? Or by contextualizing them, placing them in an ancient historical framework, and thereby de-fanging them of their poisonous and (let’s be honest) genocidal invective? Does that work for us?
How do we stay open to these texts – open in our hearts and minds? How can we stay open to hear the Holy One of Israel speaking still through these texts? That’s our challenge, our religious and spiritual challenge. This is what Judaism has always done, always tried to do, to stay faithful to a tradition of reading that says : through these texts, through these stories and narratives and laws, through the poetry and prose and legislation, through every sentence, every word, every letter, the divine Voice speaks to us if we have ears to hear and a soul attuned to eternity. Can we still do that, with texts like these?
I suppose we do have a choice.
We could just discard these texts, edit them out of our tradition, or out of our minds, and say: these are just human documents that betray the primitive mentality of their human authors, the limited moral and ethical imagination of their times, but we now have far outgrown these writers in moral and ethical imagination and the refinement of our sense of how to be human with each other - and particularly with those who are different to ‘us’. We can do that, turn our backs on all this uncomfortable invective and discard these texts as damaged goods and irrelevant to our lives.
But if we don’t want to do that, if we want to keep faith in some way with our history of engagement with Torah as containing inspiration and direction for our own lives, then we have to hold ourselves open, still, to these disquieting texts. Hold ourselves still and open.
And that might be a very uncomfortable, and a very unfashionable, thing to do. To stay open to listening in to the potential wisdom to be learnt and received from texts that on the surface strike us as utterly repellant. This is deeply unsettling – it means we have to dispossess ourselves of our prejudices, uproot our initial emotional responses. And it means we have to face something deeply paradoxical.
It is paradoxical to say on the one hand ‘These texts are hateful to me for what they seem to say and seem to imply, and hateful because there are those of my Jewish brothers and sisters who insist on reading them in ways that I find abhorrent; so yes, these texts seem to me truly noxious’ - to say that, and also to say ‘and I will still read them, and listen to them, listen in to them, await what they have to reveal to me, to us, in our days, await what the divine speaks through them, what the Holy One of Israel wishes to disclose now about land and possessiveness and images and otherness and uprooting and destructiveness ...’
To say both these things – 'these words are hateful to me and I need to keep on listening to them' – is, I would suggest, one of the central Jewish religious paradoxes of our times. But Jews have always loved paradox. And in wrestling in this way with these texts we remain true to the vision of old, the vision of Israel, Yisrael, the ‘one who struggles with and against and on behalf of the divine’. That is our job, our task, our destiny: the wrestling and the yielding and the resisting and the never-letting-go until the blessing arrives.
And then we limp away, carrying the woundedness within us.
Friday, 9 July 2010
Sunday, 20 June 2010
The Great Distraction
Here we go again. And by ‘we’ I mean ‘we English’ – but also ‘we citizens of a planet whose most unifying creative passion revolves around semi-controlled tribal kicking of spherical objects’. Here we are again in our four-year cycle of collective mania about an event that has no meaning - other than the one we attribute to it. Like art or music – and religion – football can move some of us to tears (of exaltation or despair, wonder or rage), while leaving others indifferent, or puzzling over what all the fuss is about.
The World Cup is of course a great distraction from other slightly more pressing concerns: poverty, malnutrition, totalitarian oppression, environmental concerns, the fragility of the world’s economy. (As Professor Terry Eagleton says of the global obsession with football: ‘No finer way of resolving the problems of capitalism has been dreamed up, bar socialism’). It is perhaps the most obvious example of Juvenal’s famous maxim in his Satires that rulers can distract the populace from pressing issues of public policy – and the populace long, it seems, to be distracted in this manner – if it can offer them ‘bread and circuses’: ... duas tantum res anxius optat, / panem et circenses. As a recent translation puts it: ‘...only two things does the modern citizen anxiously wish for: bread and the big match.’ No doubt we will have the same again here in two years time with the Olympics.
But – before I get carried away with my awareness of football’s essential triviality in the scheme of things – let me state unequivocally that football can offer us, at its best, moments of transcendence and intimations of immortality. This has been expressed most eloquently by a player whose club used to sell replica shirts combining his playing number, ‘7’, and the single word ‘Dieu’. Eric Cantona was able to do things on a football field that nobody else had done, could do, or would do. So he knew whereof he spoke when he once said:
‘An artist, in my eyes, is someone who can lighten up a dark room. I have never and will never find any difference between the pass from Pele to Carlos Alberto in the final of the World Cup in 1970 and the poetry of the young Rimbaud, who stretches “cords from steeple to steeple and garlands from window to window”. There is in each of these human manifestations an expression of beauty which touches us and gives us a feeling of eternity’.
(He was also, as this quotation illustrates – and rather unusually for a footballer, need it be said – a rather cultured individual. But then of course he was French).
‘We English’ have to make do with rather less thoughtfulness from our players, and – sadly, inevitably, repeatedly - rather less culture on the pitch. Hopes are raised, hopes are dashed, as the English propensity to transmute dreams of glory into nightmares of farce plays itself out in its recurring cycle. But – looking for ‘the positives’, as modern-day managers are taught to say - our national game (and especially our national team) does offer fans the possibility of experiencing (repeatedly) some important psychological truths about human imperfection and fallibility and the inevitability of confronting loss. (We should thank them for that, if nothing else).
The catharsis we experience when we are finally released from the inner tension generated in some games between the excitement and hope for victory and the fear of imminent defeat is salutary. And defeat is, naturally, by far the most common experience for players and fans alike. Defeat is built into the structure of competitive sports in a particular way: only one team can win the Cup, only one player can win the gold medal. The rest have to face the poignancy of loss, the pain of mourning, of waking up the next morning knowing what might have been, but isn’t. It’s gone. Like a death, like the failed dreams in our lives, defeat scars the soul over and over again with the awareness that failure and loss are unavoidable aspects of our shared human condition.
And yet the football fan – even ‘we English’ – lives with a resilient hopefulness that we might experience moments that can give us what Cantona called that ‘feeling of eternity’. If not from our players and our team then another team and other players. The goal from the impossible angle, the visionary pass that opens up the opposition’s defence, the goalkeeper’s agile athleticism where the body twists and flies through the air, the fragile moments of individual skill on the ball – the co-ordinated movement of body and eye and mind – all these offer up the grandeur of the human spirit incarnated in spontaneous action. The human body becomes – as it does in ballet or sex or yoga – a vehicle for transcendence. We glimpse the recurring mystery of our being human. And we give thanks for what we receive. For such giftedness transcends race or nation and gives us a living image of the numinous to inspire our daily lives.
Decades ago, when the American philosopher George Santayana was asked what he meant by the word ‘religion’, he replied ‘another world to live in’. But when he said that he could not have anticipated how, for hundreds of millions of men and women throughout the world, what he meant by ‘religion’ would one day be displaced in the most immediate sense by organised spectator sports, and football in particular. The gods of old have been reincarnated in a new form, and from the slums of Rio de Janeiro to the steppes of Siberia via the pubs and sitting rooms of towns across the UK, the contemporary fan (from the Latin fanaticus, worshipper, of course) pays homage to his and her divine representatives on earth - as remote and yet omnipresent as they ever were.
(If they play any sport in heaven it must be football - though cricket is another possibility: if you have an eternity to spend, then five-day Test match cricket is a perfect time-filler, with angels and seraphim always on hand to fetch the ball when it is hit over the boundary ropes into the ether, and God himself the all-watchful Umpire whose omniscient judgement cannot be overruled).
Football is ‘another world to live in’. Let’s enjoy it while - if - we can. It will invigorate us for what really matters: the struggles - and inevitable defeats – we still have to face.
The World Cup is of course a great distraction from other slightly more pressing concerns: poverty, malnutrition, totalitarian oppression, environmental concerns, the fragility of the world’s economy. (As Professor Terry Eagleton says of the global obsession with football: ‘No finer way of resolving the problems of capitalism has been dreamed up, bar socialism’). It is perhaps the most obvious example of Juvenal’s famous maxim in his Satires that rulers can distract the populace from pressing issues of public policy – and the populace long, it seems, to be distracted in this manner – if it can offer them ‘bread and circuses’: ... duas tantum res anxius optat, / panem et circenses. As a recent translation puts it: ‘...only two things does the modern citizen anxiously wish for: bread and the big match.’ No doubt we will have the same again here in two years time with the Olympics.
But – before I get carried away with my awareness of football’s essential triviality in the scheme of things – let me state unequivocally that football can offer us, at its best, moments of transcendence and intimations of immortality. This has been expressed most eloquently by a player whose club used to sell replica shirts combining his playing number, ‘7’, and the single word ‘Dieu’. Eric Cantona was able to do things on a football field that nobody else had done, could do, or would do. So he knew whereof he spoke when he once said:
‘An artist, in my eyes, is someone who can lighten up a dark room. I have never and will never find any difference between the pass from Pele to Carlos Alberto in the final of the World Cup in 1970 and the poetry of the young Rimbaud, who stretches “cords from steeple to steeple and garlands from window to window”. There is in each of these human manifestations an expression of beauty which touches us and gives us a feeling of eternity’.
(He was also, as this quotation illustrates – and rather unusually for a footballer, need it be said – a rather cultured individual. But then of course he was French).
‘We English’ have to make do with rather less thoughtfulness from our players, and – sadly, inevitably, repeatedly - rather less culture on the pitch. Hopes are raised, hopes are dashed, as the English propensity to transmute dreams of glory into nightmares of farce plays itself out in its recurring cycle. But – looking for ‘the positives’, as modern-day managers are taught to say - our national game (and especially our national team) does offer fans the possibility of experiencing (repeatedly) some important psychological truths about human imperfection and fallibility and the inevitability of confronting loss. (We should thank them for that, if nothing else).
The catharsis we experience when we are finally released from the inner tension generated in some games between the excitement and hope for victory and the fear of imminent defeat is salutary. And defeat is, naturally, by far the most common experience for players and fans alike. Defeat is built into the structure of competitive sports in a particular way: only one team can win the Cup, only one player can win the gold medal. The rest have to face the poignancy of loss, the pain of mourning, of waking up the next morning knowing what might have been, but isn’t. It’s gone. Like a death, like the failed dreams in our lives, defeat scars the soul over and over again with the awareness that failure and loss are unavoidable aspects of our shared human condition.
And yet the football fan – even ‘we English’ – lives with a resilient hopefulness that we might experience moments that can give us what Cantona called that ‘feeling of eternity’. If not from our players and our team then another team and other players. The goal from the impossible angle, the visionary pass that opens up the opposition’s defence, the goalkeeper’s agile athleticism where the body twists and flies through the air, the fragile moments of individual skill on the ball – the co-ordinated movement of body and eye and mind – all these offer up the grandeur of the human spirit incarnated in spontaneous action. The human body becomes – as it does in ballet or sex or yoga – a vehicle for transcendence. We glimpse the recurring mystery of our being human. And we give thanks for what we receive. For such giftedness transcends race or nation and gives us a living image of the numinous to inspire our daily lives.
Decades ago, when the American philosopher George Santayana was asked what he meant by the word ‘religion’, he replied ‘another world to live in’. But when he said that he could not have anticipated how, for hundreds of millions of men and women throughout the world, what he meant by ‘religion’ would one day be displaced in the most immediate sense by organised spectator sports, and football in particular. The gods of old have been reincarnated in a new form, and from the slums of Rio de Janeiro to the steppes of Siberia via the pubs and sitting rooms of towns across the UK, the contemporary fan (from the Latin fanaticus, worshipper, of course) pays homage to his and her divine representatives on earth - as remote and yet omnipresent as they ever were.
(If they play any sport in heaven it must be football - though cricket is another possibility: if you have an eternity to spend, then five-day Test match cricket is a perfect time-filler, with angels and seraphim always on hand to fetch the ball when it is hit over the boundary ropes into the ether, and God himself the all-watchful Umpire whose omniscient judgement cannot be overruled).
Football is ‘another world to live in’. Let’s enjoy it while - if - we can. It will invigorate us for what really matters: the struggles - and inevitable defeats – we still have to face.
Thursday, 3 June 2010
“Another Fine Mess...”
Israel used to pride itself on its saikhel – that special combination of ingenuity, wily intelligence, common sense and low cunning that is a hallmark of what used to be called a yiddisher kopf. Honed through the generations as Jews learnt to defend themselves in an inhospitable world, it was the display of this kind of native intelligence that used to gain the admiration of Jews around the world when they saw it demonstrated by the State of Israel. Even Israel’s enemies were grudging admirers of Israeli saikhel .
Those days are long gone. Certainly for Israel’s enemies. But also for many of Israel’s supporters, as we see over and again the ways in which the State seems to keep making choices to its own detriment. The latest fiasco over the Gaza flotilla has caused upset and disquiet not only in the Diaspora but in Israel too: ‘If [defence minister] Ehud Barak does not resign, Israel will be perceived in international public opinion as a country in which not only does no one ever resign from his ministerial post, but also a country...that ought to be given collective punishment as a sovereign entity.’ Not some left-wing fringe view but that of Yedioth Ahronot, Israel’s best-selling, populist paper.
Intercepting an aid convoy in international waters...failing to ensure sufficient numbers were on hand to deal with what they should have known would be stern, and potentially violent, resistance...the lack of proportionality in defending themselves, using lethal force so that at least 10 passengers died and scores were injured: whatever the hostile intent of a minority of those on the lead ship the Mavi Marmara (and that there was malign intent from some seems clear), this catalogue of Israeli errors lead to a catastrophe. Obviously so for those dead and injured. But it’s also another catastrophic failure of Israel’s capacity to react to provocations with anything approaching saikhel.
Of course the flotilla was provocative, with its shrewd combination of humanitarian relief and PR opportunity. But what did they expect Israel to do in response to the flotilla after such a tight 3 year blockade of Gaza’s waters? ‘Oh, look: Turkish boats, Irish boats, mothers and babies, film-makers, Nobel prize-winners, the author of Wallander noch! ... how can we say No to these good souls? Do please go ahead and deliver your largesse...’ The organizers of the flotilla must have known it was never going to be plain sailing – and that quite likely it would end in tears.
The situation in Gaza is dire. Aid is of course desperately needed and Israel’s intransigence in relation to what it allows in and what it refuses is part of their ill-considered game-plan of retaining a major stranglehold on the territory combined with minor concessions – though to what end it all is for, who knows? What we do know is the bitterness of blighted lives, the hatreds stored up year-by-year, and the maddening emotional and mental turmoil of those who once loved Israel with an almost religious passion – but now feel dismay at what Israel wreaks, and despair at what Israel has become.
As so often the Book of Proverbs seems to capture - sadly,aptly - the mood of the moment: “A person is commended for their saikhel – but a twisted mind is held in contempt” (Proverbs 12:8).
Those days are long gone. Certainly for Israel’s enemies. But also for many of Israel’s supporters, as we see over and again the ways in which the State seems to keep making choices to its own detriment. The latest fiasco over the Gaza flotilla has caused upset and disquiet not only in the Diaspora but in Israel too: ‘If [defence minister] Ehud Barak does not resign, Israel will be perceived in international public opinion as a country in which not only does no one ever resign from his ministerial post, but also a country...that ought to be given collective punishment as a sovereign entity.’ Not some left-wing fringe view but that of Yedioth Ahronot, Israel’s best-selling, populist paper.
Intercepting an aid convoy in international waters...failing to ensure sufficient numbers were on hand to deal with what they should have known would be stern, and potentially violent, resistance...the lack of proportionality in defending themselves, using lethal force so that at least 10 passengers died and scores were injured: whatever the hostile intent of a minority of those on the lead ship the Mavi Marmara (and that there was malign intent from some seems clear), this catalogue of Israeli errors lead to a catastrophe. Obviously so for those dead and injured. But it’s also another catastrophic failure of Israel’s capacity to react to provocations with anything approaching saikhel.
Of course the flotilla was provocative, with its shrewd combination of humanitarian relief and PR opportunity. But what did they expect Israel to do in response to the flotilla after such a tight 3 year blockade of Gaza’s waters? ‘Oh, look: Turkish boats, Irish boats, mothers and babies, film-makers, Nobel prize-winners, the author of Wallander noch! ... how can we say No to these good souls? Do please go ahead and deliver your largesse...’ The organizers of the flotilla must have known it was never going to be plain sailing – and that quite likely it would end in tears.
The situation in Gaza is dire. Aid is of course desperately needed and Israel’s intransigence in relation to what it allows in and what it refuses is part of their ill-considered game-plan of retaining a major stranglehold on the territory combined with minor concessions – though to what end it all is for, who knows? What we do know is the bitterness of blighted lives, the hatreds stored up year-by-year, and the maddening emotional and mental turmoil of those who once loved Israel with an almost religious passion – but now feel dismay at what Israel wreaks, and despair at what Israel has become.
As so often the Book of Proverbs seems to capture - sadly,aptly - the mood of the moment: “A person is commended for their saikhel – but a twisted mind is held in contempt” (Proverbs 12:8).
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
The Poetry of Revelation
In 1880 Matthew Arnold published an essay - The Study of Poetry - in which he wrote: ‘Most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry...’
Although in one way I find this statement rather absurd – with its grandiose assumption that the traditional truths incarnated in religious and philosophical ways of thinking would somehow fade away to be replaced by newly-revealed truths born of the human imagination in play with language – I nevertheless find Arnold’s thought quite seductive. It chimes with my own gradual religious and spiritual evolution from someone interested in the truth-claims of religion - the objectivity of religious ideas about God and goodness and sin and redemption and so on – into someone who is now far less interested in doctrines and dogmas and so-called ‘religious identity’ , and far more interested in the subjective nature of spirituality and personal religious experience.
This week we celebrate the fleeting early-summer festival of Shavuot – the day in the Jewish calendar when we recall the revelation of Torah to the assembled Israelites at Sinai. I admire and enjoy the narrative power of the Exodus texts which describe this ‘event’ – even though I don’t think of it as an ‘event’. For me this is not about history, not about facts. It is about the mythic dimensions of saga, a way of speaking about certain abiding truths understood by a particular people over time.
I appreciate the symbolic resonances, images and metaphors of a story that describes Moses separating himself from everyone, ascending a mountain and receiving new understanding, new ways of thinking about how to live and act, individually and collectively: how to be in the world. He receives ‘Torah’ – teaching, direction – ‘min Ha’shamayim’ – from out of the “heavens”, out of the ether, from that eternal Voice that reveals what is to be revealed.
And I have always cherished those teachings from later in the Jewish tradition that move us away from literalism about this ‘event’ towards an existential appreciation that revelation is always available, if we are prepared to listen (Shema, Yisrael...’listen, pay attention people!’). Martin Buber offers us the Hasidic thought : ‘Everyone of Israel is told to think of themselves as standing at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. For us there are past and future events, but not so for God: day in, day out, God gives the Torah’ (from Ten Rungs: Hasidic Sayings). In other words: revelation is ongoing and always happening now.
And part of the way in which I believe we can listen into revelation now is - back to Arnold - through poetry. As the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney has said: ‘Poetry...is a ratification of the impulse towards transcendence’. My heart sings to hear that – how often as a congregant in a service I find my thoughts moving away from the traditional language of devotion and towards the anthologised material (and particularly the poetry) that we are so fortunate to have in our various books of Reform liturgy, for Shabbat and Festivals and High Holy Days.
What a good poem does, for me, is offer a space to explore ideas, to play, to wrestle with the fullness and plasticity of words, a place to discover new ways of thinking, new forms of truth-telling. As the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has put it: ‘A poem...is a place where language is most truthful. In the poem, more than any other literary form, you can’t lie.’ And we know that in the Rabbinic tradition one of God’s many names is Emet – Truth.
So, as I reflect on revelation, on where in the world truth is to be found, discovered, fashioned, re-fashioned – where on earth, or in heaven, we are now to listen in to the revelation of what is and can be – I find myself turning to a poet I have only recently discovered, Samuel Menashe, born in New York in 1925 to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, and still mining a rich seam of spiritual ore/awe.
He offers us miniature poems, polished diamonds to treasure and handle and turn over in our minds. ‘Turn it and turn it’ - as the Rabbis once said of the Torah – ‘for everything is within it’:
Reeds Rise From Water
rippling under my eyes
Bulrushes tuft the shore
At every instant I expect
what is hidden everywhere
Although in one way I find this statement rather absurd – with its grandiose assumption that the traditional truths incarnated in religious and philosophical ways of thinking would somehow fade away to be replaced by newly-revealed truths born of the human imagination in play with language – I nevertheless find Arnold’s thought quite seductive. It chimes with my own gradual religious and spiritual evolution from someone interested in the truth-claims of religion - the objectivity of religious ideas about God and goodness and sin and redemption and so on – into someone who is now far less interested in doctrines and dogmas and so-called ‘religious identity’ , and far more interested in the subjective nature of spirituality and personal religious experience.
This week we celebrate the fleeting early-summer festival of Shavuot – the day in the Jewish calendar when we recall the revelation of Torah to the assembled Israelites at Sinai. I admire and enjoy the narrative power of the Exodus texts which describe this ‘event’ – even though I don’t think of it as an ‘event’. For me this is not about history, not about facts. It is about the mythic dimensions of saga, a way of speaking about certain abiding truths understood by a particular people over time.
I appreciate the symbolic resonances, images and metaphors of a story that describes Moses separating himself from everyone, ascending a mountain and receiving new understanding, new ways of thinking about how to live and act, individually and collectively: how to be in the world. He receives ‘Torah’ – teaching, direction – ‘min Ha’shamayim’ – from out of the “heavens”, out of the ether, from that eternal Voice that reveals what is to be revealed.
And I have always cherished those teachings from later in the Jewish tradition that move us away from literalism about this ‘event’ towards an existential appreciation that revelation is always available, if we are prepared to listen (Shema, Yisrael...’listen, pay attention people!’). Martin Buber offers us the Hasidic thought : ‘Everyone of Israel is told to think of themselves as standing at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. For us there are past and future events, but not so for God: day in, day out, God gives the Torah’ (from Ten Rungs: Hasidic Sayings). In other words: revelation is ongoing and always happening now.
And part of the way in which I believe we can listen into revelation now is - back to Arnold - through poetry. As the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney has said: ‘Poetry...is a ratification of the impulse towards transcendence’. My heart sings to hear that – how often as a congregant in a service I find my thoughts moving away from the traditional language of devotion and towards the anthologised material (and particularly the poetry) that we are so fortunate to have in our various books of Reform liturgy, for Shabbat and Festivals and High Holy Days.
What a good poem does, for me, is offer a space to explore ideas, to play, to wrestle with the fullness and plasticity of words, a place to discover new ways of thinking, new forms of truth-telling. As the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has put it: ‘A poem...is a place where language is most truthful. In the poem, more than any other literary form, you can’t lie.’ And we know that in the Rabbinic tradition one of God’s many names is Emet – Truth.
So, as I reflect on revelation, on where in the world truth is to be found, discovered, fashioned, re-fashioned – where on earth, or in heaven, we are now to listen in to the revelation of what is and can be – I find myself turning to a poet I have only recently discovered, Samuel Menashe, born in New York in 1925 to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, and still mining a rich seam of spiritual ore/awe.
He offers us miniature poems, polished diamonds to treasure and handle and turn over in our minds. ‘Turn it and turn it’ - as the Rabbis once said of the Torah – ‘for everything is within it’:
Reeds Rise From Water
rippling under my eyes
Bulrushes tuft the shore
At every instant I expect
what is hidden everywhere
Friday, 7 May 2010
Election Blues
Rabbinic cynicism is as old as the hills. There’s a maxim from the second century text Pirke Avot – the ‘Sayings of the Fathers’ – that runs: ‘Be careful of those in power! For they do not draw anybody near to them except in their own interest: they seem like friends when it is to their own advantage, but they do not stand by a person in their hour of need’ (P.Avot 2:3).
So is this rabbinic warning cynicism – or realism? I’ve found myself – somewhat to my own surprise – rather gripped by the lead-up to this week’s General Election here in the UK. I haven’t followed in detail all the acres of newspaper coverage, nor have I watched much of the commentary on TV. But I tuned into the three live TV debates, and while lamenting the Americanisation of our culture (and the triumph of style over substance) that they represented, found them fascinating events as political spectacle – mini dramas of personal ambition and competitiveness masquerading as caring, compassionate expressions of concern for the collective well-being of the nation.
What confidence these men needed to display! Confidence that they alone can lead the country into a brighter, fairer, more prosperous future. Confidence that they alone have the answers to the complex problems besetting the country. Confidence that we will not think about the inevitable gap between rhetoric and the harsh realities of the policy choices that any party will need to make in these next few years.
These men depend upon what the social psychologist Leon Festinger (1919-1989) termed ‘cognitive dissonance’: our inability to tolerate inside us conflicting beliefs, thoughts or feelings so that we end up rejecting or devaluing one or more of these perceptions. So we may know in our heads that crime rates have fallen dramatically over the last decade – but if someone we know has been burgled, or we feel unsafe for any other reason, we will insist that the Government hasn’t done enough to cut crime. Or we may know that immigration has huge economic benefits to the county, and fills a variety of essential skilled and unskilled jobs in the UK, but if we resent the way the Polish shop on the high street has displaced our favourite cafe, then we will insist the Government must do something to stop immigrants ‘flocking’ here in unlimited numbers.
Yet a moment or two of sustained thinking will help us acknowledge that whoever is in power will face problems the magnitude of which daunts the imagination. The two most serious are environmental (about which we have heard almost nothing in the run-up to this election) and economic. Although we are not in the euro zone we see in Greece a society whose social cohesion is unravelling because the ‘financial markets’ – like the unseen amoral gods of old, indifferent to the suffering of real human beings – continue to determine our destinies wherever we live. And no major party has the courage to tell us that the only way we are going to reduce carbon emissions as a nation is through the draconian introduction of individual carbon rationing.
As the results still come in this morning it is possible that the tectonic plates beneath British politics are shifting – and a new era where co-operation and compromise prevail will have to emerge. Meanwhile it is going to be messy and fractious and somewhat inconclusive. Both major parties will claim the moral high ground and that they have a mandate to rule - and no doubt we will now be told by those parts of the media that like the pseudo-clarity of clear storylines (and obvious winners and losers) that Britain cannot tolerate such uncertainty.
But what I fear more than uncertainty is the self-righteousness of certainty. The rabbis of the Talmud knew that what really counts is who will ‘stand by a person in their hour of need’. What I fear is that as we teeter on the brink of further financial meltdown, we might be entering into another period of Government when entrenched ideology damns a further generation to economic and social despair, and that those in need – and it could be any one of us – are again neglected or abandoned.
So is this rabbinic warning cynicism – or realism? I’ve found myself – somewhat to my own surprise – rather gripped by the lead-up to this week’s General Election here in the UK. I haven’t followed in detail all the acres of newspaper coverage, nor have I watched much of the commentary on TV. But I tuned into the three live TV debates, and while lamenting the Americanisation of our culture (and the triumph of style over substance) that they represented, found them fascinating events as political spectacle – mini dramas of personal ambition and competitiveness masquerading as caring, compassionate expressions of concern for the collective well-being of the nation.
What confidence these men needed to display! Confidence that they alone can lead the country into a brighter, fairer, more prosperous future. Confidence that they alone have the answers to the complex problems besetting the country. Confidence that we will not think about the inevitable gap between rhetoric and the harsh realities of the policy choices that any party will need to make in these next few years.
These men depend upon what the social psychologist Leon Festinger (1919-1989) termed ‘cognitive dissonance’: our inability to tolerate inside us conflicting beliefs, thoughts or feelings so that we end up rejecting or devaluing one or more of these perceptions. So we may know in our heads that crime rates have fallen dramatically over the last decade – but if someone we know has been burgled, or we feel unsafe for any other reason, we will insist that the Government hasn’t done enough to cut crime. Or we may know that immigration has huge economic benefits to the county, and fills a variety of essential skilled and unskilled jobs in the UK, but if we resent the way the Polish shop on the high street has displaced our favourite cafe, then we will insist the Government must do something to stop immigrants ‘flocking’ here in unlimited numbers.
Yet a moment or two of sustained thinking will help us acknowledge that whoever is in power will face problems the magnitude of which daunts the imagination. The two most serious are environmental (about which we have heard almost nothing in the run-up to this election) and economic. Although we are not in the euro zone we see in Greece a society whose social cohesion is unravelling because the ‘financial markets’ – like the unseen amoral gods of old, indifferent to the suffering of real human beings – continue to determine our destinies wherever we live. And no major party has the courage to tell us that the only way we are going to reduce carbon emissions as a nation is through the draconian introduction of individual carbon rationing.
As the results still come in this morning it is possible that the tectonic plates beneath British politics are shifting – and a new era where co-operation and compromise prevail will have to emerge. Meanwhile it is going to be messy and fractious and somewhat inconclusive. Both major parties will claim the moral high ground and that they have a mandate to rule - and no doubt we will now be told by those parts of the media that like the pseudo-clarity of clear storylines (and obvious winners and losers) that Britain cannot tolerate such uncertainty.
But what I fear more than uncertainty is the self-righteousness of certainty. The rabbis of the Talmud knew that what really counts is who will ‘stand by a person in their hour of need’. What I fear is that as we teeter on the brink of further financial meltdown, we might be entering into another period of Government when entrenched ideology damns a further generation to economic and social despair, and that those in need – and it could be any one of us – are again neglected or abandoned.
Friday, 23 April 2010
Ashes and Dust, Dust and Ashes
Once again we see how fragile it all is. A volcano erupts in a far-off land – and the disruption to our well-ordered lives is immediate. Hundreds of thousands of UK citizens are stranded away from home, the skies of Europe empty, anxieties take off about the toxicity of the air we are breathing, schools and hospitals are unable to function, families are separated and lives are inconvenienced, there is annoyance and sometimes distress – and the vulnerability of our casual dependence on air travel is revealed in stark and discomforting ways. But nobody has died – this is not a tragedy.
The fantasy of omnipotence that modern life promotes – that it’s possible (within reason) to do anything we want, any time we want it – has been challenged over this last week. Through air travel and the internet and satellite communications technology we come to rely on the experience of inter-connectivity: that we live within a vast web of being in which we can be anywhere at any time, connecting to anyone, that goods and ideas and news and we ourselves can transcend the boundaries of locality and space. That we can (in effect) be like the gods of old - all-knowing, all-seeing, ever-present, not restricted by inhabiting a physical body that sets limits to what is possible. (Yet simultaneously we also become more and more dependent on basic resources like oil and electricity to keep the whole illusion going).
These last 20-30 years of extraordinary technological development is affecting our psyche in ways we still barely comprehend. As ‘virtual reality’ becomes integrated into our everyday down-to-earth reality, the boundaries of who we and what the limits are on what we can do are become blurred. This leads to deep inner confusion and disorientation – for our consciousness of what it means to be a human being is changing, subtly, indefinably.
Yet in the midst of this rapid transformation into new ways of living, old ways of thinking remain. I’ve been fascinated by the language used to describe the volcano’s activity. A few days into these events, I heard the journalist for Channel 4 News – usually the most solid and unmelodramatic of news outlets – open his report of the still-erupting volcano with a description of how "angry" the volcano still was; and then immediately his voiceover went on to talk about the effects this "act of God" was having on stranded tourists. And in the Observer this past weekend one commentator who had recently visited the volcano wrote of the privilege on a recent visit to Iceland of being in the presence of the volcano where he could "feel the breath of the beast and hear it stir".
Now of course all this anthropomorphism is on one level just journalistic colour – a reaching for a familiar metaphorical language to describe what is happening or being experienced. And yet it harks back to a way of thinking that suggests to me how thin is the carapace of rationality in which we wrap our consciousness.
We know volcanoes are not angry beasts and we know that they aren’t controlled by a vengeful (or playful )‘God’ – but perhaps we turn so quickly to this atavistic language because when a volcano does erupt, and the smooth ordering of our lives is radically disrupted, we glimpse how little control we have over the deep life of the planet; that the movement of mountains and seas and tectonic plates defies all our collective ingenuity as a species, that all our conquering of time and space and all our great civilisational achievements in science and technology fade into insignificance (and impotence) in relation to the random and meaningless activity of the planet’s own continual going-on-being.
At an unconscious level an event like this eruption puts us back in touch with an infantile helplessness that exists dormant within us all. And our language starts to reflect that mode of thinking – that our deep wishes for a safe and well-ordered, well-contained life are somehow under threat from powerful but arbitrary forces around us.
***
One of the unexpected consequences of the suspension of air travel was that many world leaders were unable to attend the funerals in Poland of those who had died in the catastrophic plane crash - this was a tragedy – near Smolensk on April 12th. The terrible echoing irony of the disaster hardly needs spelling out: the Polish President and nearly 100 senior figures in Polish society were on their way to Katyn to commemorate the Soviet massacre there of 22,000 Polish military officers and intellectual leaders during the Second World War. (The Soviets hid the crimes of Stalin’s secret police by blaming the Nazis for the murders, a lie that British and American governments colluded with after the War).
One of the deaths that I found particularly haunting to hear about was that of the sculptor Wojciech Seweryn who had campaigned for years for increased official awareness of Russian responsibility: his father had been murdered at Katyn in 1940 and he had joined this flight alongside the other Polish dignitaries in order to pay homage to his dead father’s memory.
Only silence is a suitable response to this. Or maybe - in extremis – Shakespeare’s extraordinary words from King Lear; ‘As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport'.
Let me finish by sharing with you parts of a letter sent by Rabbi Burt Schuman from the Progressive Jewish community in Warsaw, which offers a personal perspective on what this tragedy has meant:
Not only did we lose President Kaczynski and his wife on that fateful plane crash yesterday … but much of Poland’s political, economic, military, and diplomatic and religious leadership, including the chiefs of all branches of the military, the presidential chaplain and army chaplain, the deputy foreign minister and other foreign ministry staff, the president of the National Bank, the head of the National Security office, leaders of the Institute for National Memory, the head of the Olympic Committee, the civil rights commissioner, officials of the Ministry of Culture, the Deputy Speaker of the parliament, several presidential aides and former three members of parliament. In addition, the leaders of veterans’ groups, the last President of the Polish Government in Exile and several heroes of the Polish resistance also perished in that flight. Many of these individuals were people that I either I had met and conversed with or had seen at official functions, adding to my own personal sense of shock and grief.
… these leaders were en route to the Katyn forest at the invitation of the Russian government to observe the 70th anniversary of the hideous massacre of tens of thousands of Polish officers, among them approximately 900 Jewish officers … As Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has eloquently stated this is the greatest tragedy t o befall post-war Poland… Many in our community lost close personal friends. Moreover, the Jews of Poland have lost a great friend and advocate in President Kaczynski’s who not only spoke often and eloquently about the Jewish contribution to Polish history, on many occasions, including commemorations at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial and this past summer at the 65thanniversary of the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto this past summer… Moreover, he demonstrated that support in deeds as well as words as in his financial support for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews and his visit to Israel on the heels of the Second Lebanon War…
A bit of perspective on evennts does not, I suppose, do us much harm.
The fantasy of omnipotence that modern life promotes – that it’s possible (within reason) to do anything we want, any time we want it – has been challenged over this last week. Through air travel and the internet and satellite communications technology we come to rely on the experience of inter-connectivity: that we live within a vast web of being in which we can be anywhere at any time, connecting to anyone, that goods and ideas and news and we ourselves can transcend the boundaries of locality and space. That we can (in effect) be like the gods of old - all-knowing, all-seeing, ever-present, not restricted by inhabiting a physical body that sets limits to what is possible. (Yet simultaneously we also become more and more dependent on basic resources like oil and electricity to keep the whole illusion going).
These last 20-30 years of extraordinary technological development is affecting our psyche in ways we still barely comprehend. As ‘virtual reality’ becomes integrated into our everyday down-to-earth reality, the boundaries of who we and what the limits are on what we can do are become blurred. This leads to deep inner confusion and disorientation – for our consciousness of what it means to be a human being is changing, subtly, indefinably.
Yet in the midst of this rapid transformation into new ways of living, old ways of thinking remain. I’ve been fascinated by the language used to describe the volcano’s activity. A few days into these events, I heard the journalist for Channel 4 News – usually the most solid and unmelodramatic of news outlets – open his report of the still-erupting volcano with a description of how "angry" the volcano still was; and then immediately his voiceover went on to talk about the effects this "act of God" was having on stranded tourists. And in the Observer this past weekend one commentator who had recently visited the volcano wrote of the privilege on a recent visit to Iceland of being in the presence of the volcano where he could "feel the breath of the beast and hear it stir".
Now of course all this anthropomorphism is on one level just journalistic colour – a reaching for a familiar metaphorical language to describe what is happening or being experienced. And yet it harks back to a way of thinking that suggests to me how thin is the carapace of rationality in which we wrap our consciousness.
We know volcanoes are not angry beasts and we know that they aren’t controlled by a vengeful (or playful )‘God’ – but perhaps we turn so quickly to this atavistic language because when a volcano does erupt, and the smooth ordering of our lives is radically disrupted, we glimpse how little control we have over the deep life of the planet; that the movement of mountains and seas and tectonic plates defies all our collective ingenuity as a species, that all our conquering of time and space and all our great civilisational achievements in science and technology fade into insignificance (and impotence) in relation to the random and meaningless activity of the planet’s own continual going-on-being.
At an unconscious level an event like this eruption puts us back in touch with an infantile helplessness that exists dormant within us all. And our language starts to reflect that mode of thinking – that our deep wishes for a safe and well-ordered, well-contained life are somehow under threat from powerful but arbitrary forces around us.
***
One of the unexpected consequences of the suspension of air travel was that many world leaders were unable to attend the funerals in Poland of those who had died in the catastrophic plane crash - this was a tragedy – near Smolensk on April 12th. The terrible echoing irony of the disaster hardly needs spelling out: the Polish President and nearly 100 senior figures in Polish society were on their way to Katyn to commemorate the Soviet massacre there of 22,000 Polish military officers and intellectual leaders during the Second World War. (The Soviets hid the crimes of Stalin’s secret police by blaming the Nazis for the murders, a lie that British and American governments colluded with after the War).
One of the deaths that I found particularly haunting to hear about was that of the sculptor Wojciech Seweryn who had campaigned for years for increased official awareness of Russian responsibility: his father had been murdered at Katyn in 1940 and he had joined this flight alongside the other Polish dignitaries in order to pay homage to his dead father’s memory.
Only silence is a suitable response to this. Or maybe - in extremis – Shakespeare’s extraordinary words from King Lear; ‘As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport'.
Let me finish by sharing with you parts of a letter sent by Rabbi Burt Schuman from the Progressive Jewish community in Warsaw, which offers a personal perspective on what this tragedy has meant:
Not only did we lose President Kaczynski and his wife on that fateful plane crash yesterday … but much of Poland’s political, economic, military, and diplomatic and religious leadership, including the chiefs of all branches of the military, the presidential chaplain and army chaplain, the deputy foreign minister and other foreign ministry staff, the president of the National Bank, the head of the National Security office, leaders of the Institute for National Memory, the head of the Olympic Committee, the civil rights commissioner, officials of the Ministry of Culture, the Deputy Speaker of the parliament, several presidential aides and former three members of parliament. In addition, the leaders of veterans’ groups, the last President of the Polish Government in Exile and several heroes of the Polish resistance also perished in that flight. Many of these individuals were people that I either I had met and conversed with or had seen at official functions, adding to my own personal sense of shock and grief.
… these leaders were en route to the Katyn forest at the invitation of the Russian government to observe the 70th anniversary of the hideous massacre of tens of thousands of Polish officers, among them approximately 900 Jewish officers … As Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has eloquently stated this is the greatest tragedy t o befall post-war Poland… Many in our community lost close personal friends. Moreover, the Jews of Poland have lost a great friend and advocate in President Kaczynski’s who not only spoke often and eloquently about the Jewish contribution to Polish history, on many occasions, including commemorations at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial and this past summer at the 65thanniversary of the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto this past summer… Moreover, he demonstrated that support in deeds as well as words as in his financial support for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews and his visit to Israel on the heels of the Second Lebanon War…
A bit of perspective on evennts does not, I suppose, do us much harm.
Tuesday, 6 April 2010
'Crisis? What Crisis?'
It is obvious that the Catholic Church is currently immersed in controversy and soul-searching. Accusations that a small number of clergy, in several countries, have in the past been guilty of sexual abusing children and other vulnerable young people are serious sources of shame for the Church. And the extent of the cover-up of these crimes is also coming to light. But this material is hardly new. It joins a larger body of evidence that within hierarchical, authority-laden institutions – be they religious or secular, be it staff in care homes or teachers in public schools or adults in that supposedly benign institution we call ‘the family’ – violence and cruelty can be (and always has been) perpetrated by authority figures against the weak and the powerless.
Priests and nuns may have a vocation, or may be seen by others as having some special ‘sanctity’ attached to them – but they are (of course) as psychologically complex as any of the rest of us. In my experience, the battle in the human soul between our creative and destructive impulses, our loving and hateful feelings, is never over for anyone. And in spite of what people might want from their clergy, ‘religious’ figures are not exempt from instinctual human desires and conflicts.
So on the one hand this latest furore about the Catholic Church is part of a much wider picture about the corrupting nature of institutions where authority becomes authoritarian. And this is as relevant to Orthodox Jewish institutions and families as to Catholic ones. And I dare say there are Muslim equivalents. But abuse of power in religious settings seems to shock us more – perhaps because the rhetoric of monotheism is full of words like love and compassion and justice.
Yet we really shouldn’t be shocked. When a religion has at its centre an authority figure – otherwise known as ‘God’ – who Himself doesn’t like challenges to his authority – "You shall have no other gods before Me" – then we can predict trouble ahead. Those who see themselves as speaking in God’s name have a potent image to draw upon when they say ‘Do what I tell you’. To think you are speaking in the name of an all-powerful deity is a dangerous belief to hold. It can justify any action you take. If God is always right and I am acting as God’s representative here on earth then it is easy to find oneself caught up in an (unconscious) omnipotent fantasy that I am always right.
So this identification with a divine power who is uncompromising in saying what is right and what is wrong – and in dictating what is forbidden and what has to happen – this unconscious identification will be used to ‘justify’ cruelty and terror and transgression. Whether it is sexual violence or domestic violence or institutional violence, this enactment by individuals of their own instinctual need to exercise power mirrors – and draws upon - monotheism’s own strands of hostility, aggression, and intolerance of dissent . And all monotheisms contain plenty of that kind of stuff, mixed in with the more benign strands of faith that believers love to quote.
So I’m never shocked by evidence of crimes by so-called ‘religious’ people. It so happens that in his career the present Pope, Benedict XVI, has been rigorous in investigating cases of clergy who have been accused of sexual abuse. But what is new on this occasion is the way in which these current accusations – of crimes and the cover-up of crimes – has been taken up by the world’s press. They now have a perfect weapon with which to beat an institution that ‘preaches love but practices abuse’ – as if all priests are secret perverts. This is never stated openly but is the subtext to much of the reporting I have read. It’s as if there is almost a kind of schadenfreude at work: ‘You claim to be so holy and good, but look at what you are really like...now (about time!) it’s our turn to hold you responsible, to make you feel guilty ...’
Is this the revenge of the secular press (whose own authority is fading in the internet era) on the enviable religious authority of the Church? Is a secret, maybe unconscious, battle taking place – can the power of the print media bring down the power of the Church?
Take, for example, a recent article headlined ‘Pope’s preacher says attacks on Catholics are like antisemitism’(the Guardian, April 3rd) At an Easter service at St.Peter’s - attended by the Pope and other Catholic leaders - Father Raniero Cantalamessa had quoted a letter he’d received from a Jewish friend – note this, from a Jewish friend – which contained the remark that ‘The passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt reminds me of the more shameful aspects of antisemitism.’ This had caused, so it was reported, a storm of further controversy amongst Abuse Victims’ groups and Jewish representatives, particularly in Germany, whose shock and horror at this remark were duly recorded.
Now I may have some lack of moral imagination here, or a real failure of moral intelligence, but I am rather puzzled by this reported outrage. What the ‘Jewish friend’ seems to have been pointing out was that just as antisemitism is stereotyping and prejudice expressed against a whole group, so the current antagonism being expressed in the media towards the collective authority of Catholic priests and the hierarchy of the Church and the person of Benedict himself and the institutional practice of celibacy, etc , etc, is a form of prejudice - for it condemns the group, the collective institution and its ways of life, for the crimes (and sins) of some individuals.
So isn’t the analogy of antisemitism rather a useful one? Yes, it might be rather ironic from a historical perspective for a leading Catholic to use this particular analogy. But isn’t Father Cantalamessa’s inference a legitimate, benign and even illuminating perspective? - that a form of collective scapegoating is happening in the attacks on the Catholic Church that is similar in its psychological mechanism to attacks on Judaism as a religion or Jews as a collective group?
Sadly, a Catholic spokesman felt the need to issue a statement afterwards saying that the preacher wasn’t speaking as a Vatican official and that such comparisons ‘lead to misunderstandings and is not an official position of the Catholic Church.’ The problem is that for those who are so minded – the intolerant, the insecure, the paranoid, the self-regarding narcissist - anything someone else says can ‘lead to misunderstandings’.
Maybe silence is, after all, a virtue to be cultivated.
Priests and nuns may have a vocation, or may be seen by others as having some special ‘sanctity’ attached to them – but they are (of course) as psychologically complex as any of the rest of us. In my experience, the battle in the human soul between our creative and destructive impulses, our loving and hateful feelings, is never over for anyone. And in spite of what people might want from their clergy, ‘religious’ figures are not exempt from instinctual human desires and conflicts.
So on the one hand this latest furore about the Catholic Church is part of a much wider picture about the corrupting nature of institutions where authority becomes authoritarian. And this is as relevant to Orthodox Jewish institutions and families as to Catholic ones. And I dare say there are Muslim equivalents. But abuse of power in religious settings seems to shock us more – perhaps because the rhetoric of monotheism is full of words like love and compassion and justice.
Yet we really shouldn’t be shocked. When a religion has at its centre an authority figure – otherwise known as ‘God’ – who Himself doesn’t like challenges to his authority – "You shall have no other gods before Me" – then we can predict trouble ahead. Those who see themselves as speaking in God’s name have a potent image to draw upon when they say ‘Do what I tell you’. To think you are speaking in the name of an all-powerful deity is a dangerous belief to hold. It can justify any action you take. If God is always right and I am acting as God’s representative here on earth then it is easy to find oneself caught up in an (unconscious) omnipotent fantasy that I am always right.
So this identification with a divine power who is uncompromising in saying what is right and what is wrong – and in dictating what is forbidden and what has to happen – this unconscious identification will be used to ‘justify’ cruelty and terror and transgression. Whether it is sexual violence or domestic violence or institutional violence, this enactment by individuals of their own instinctual need to exercise power mirrors – and draws upon - monotheism’s own strands of hostility, aggression, and intolerance of dissent . And all monotheisms contain plenty of that kind of stuff, mixed in with the more benign strands of faith that believers love to quote.
So I’m never shocked by evidence of crimes by so-called ‘religious’ people. It so happens that in his career the present Pope, Benedict XVI, has been rigorous in investigating cases of clergy who have been accused of sexual abuse. But what is new on this occasion is the way in which these current accusations – of crimes and the cover-up of crimes – has been taken up by the world’s press. They now have a perfect weapon with which to beat an institution that ‘preaches love but practices abuse’ – as if all priests are secret perverts. This is never stated openly but is the subtext to much of the reporting I have read. It’s as if there is almost a kind of schadenfreude at work: ‘You claim to be so holy and good, but look at what you are really like...now (about time!) it’s our turn to hold you responsible, to make you feel guilty ...’
Is this the revenge of the secular press (whose own authority is fading in the internet era) on the enviable religious authority of the Church? Is a secret, maybe unconscious, battle taking place – can the power of the print media bring down the power of the Church?
Take, for example, a recent article headlined ‘Pope’s preacher says attacks on Catholics are like antisemitism’(the Guardian, April 3rd) At an Easter service at St.Peter’s - attended by the Pope and other Catholic leaders - Father Raniero Cantalamessa had quoted a letter he’d received from a Jewish friend – note this, from a Jewish friend – which contained the remark that ‘The passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt reminds me of the more shameful aspects of antisemitism.’ This had caused, so it was reported, a storm of further controversy amongst Abuse Victims’ groups and Jewish representatives, particularly in Germany, whose shock and horror at this remark were duly recorded.
Now I may have some lack of moral imagination here, or a real failure of moral intelligence, but I am rather puzzled by this reported outrage. What the ‘Jewish friend’ seems to have been pointing out was that just as antisemitism is stereotyping and prejudice expressed against a whole group, so the current antagonism being expressed in the media towards the collective authority of Catholic priests and the hierarchy of the Church and the person of Benedict himself and the institutional practice of celibacy, etc , etc, is a form of prejudice - for it condemns the group, the collective institution and its ways of life, for the crimes (and sins) of some individuals.
So isn’t the analogy of antisemitism rather a useful one? Yes, it might be rather ironic from a historical perspective for a leading Catholic to use this particular analogy. But isn’t Father Cantalamessa’s inference a legitimate, benign and even illuminating perspective? - that a form of collective scapegoating is happening in the attacks on the Catholic Church that is similar in its psychological mechanism to attacks on Judaism as a religion or Jews as a collective group?
Sadly, a Catholic spokesman felt the need to issue a statement afterwards saying that the preacher wasn’t speaking as a Vatican official and that such comparisons ‘lead to misunderstandings and is not an official position of the Catholic Church.’ The problem is that for those who are so minded – the intolerant, the insecure, the paranoid, the self-regarding narcissist - anything someone else says can ‘lead to misunderstandings’.
Maybe silence is, after all, a virtue to be cultivated.
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