‘Apocalyptic’ – adjective: ‘forecasting the ultimate destiny of the world; foreboding immanent disaster; terrible’. Words bow to images. The scenes from Japan – waves of black sea, mud, debris, pouring ships onto houses, piling roads onto cars, crushing offices, shops, homes into a montage of mangled metal, a tohu va’vohu of destruction, devastation and loss – these scenes are both mesmeric and unbearable to look at for too long. They seem to both foretell a future and evoke a past.
Where have we seen pictures like these before? Towns flattened out into rubble and detritus, nothing standing, denuded of the familiar signs of collective life. A woman sitting alone by what was once a road, howling, only the ruins of a village for company. Where is this lodged in our memories? The association is too obvious, and yet it is impossible to avoid. Look at the photos taken in the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the same desolation, the same erasure of buildings, homes, roads, trees, everything crushed as if by a giant fist.
And as if the elemental activity of earth and sea in violent assault upon a nation’s lives is not enough, the radiation leak from the Fukushima nuclear plant makes the grim historical analogy with 1945 even more imaginatively compelling, and moves us beyond irony into the realm of existential helplessness – no wonder the voices coming from Japan are asking, with growing insistence, the timeless question: ‘What have we done to deserve this?’
Of course they have done nothing to deserve it – and so far we have been saved from religious fundamentalists (of different faiths) who jump on any such disaster to delight in ‘interpreting’ tragedies like this as the victims’ failures to live the ‘right’ way. I’ve not heard anything of this kind yet - but it is still early days. This sadistic picture of a controlling ‘God’ punishing so-called ‘sinners’ for religious failings is a regular feature of fundamentalist thinking.(Perhaps ‘thinking’ is too elevated a word for this kind of response). But it is the standard, off-the-peg, historical answer to that ever-present human question - which seeks meaning when there is no meaning - ‘What have we done to deserve this?’ Needless to say, I find the fundamentalist response nauseating. From a psychological perspective, it would have to be called psychotic. And, to use religious language for a moment, it is also blasphemous.
It so happens that my colleague Rabbi Jonathan Magonet is living and teaching in Japan at the moment, in the south of the country, far from the devastation we see on our TV screens. I asked him earlier in the week how he was experiencing the events and he responded with these thoughts, which I have his permission to share with you:
I asked my colleague here about how he viewed the reactions of the Japanese public. He said that at the moment we are all simply overwhelmed by the horror of the thing. Earthquakes are a given here, though never on such a scale and with such consequences. He thought people showed a remarkable calmness and stoicism, combined with a considerable practical approach to dealing precisely with the matters. He quoted a proverb to the effect that now was not the time for emotions but for practicalities, the emotional would have to be addressed later. Clearly, except for those who have immediate friends and family involved, this is felt to be best approach alongside collective efforts to provide funds and volunteers to help. What is missing, I suppose, is any theological evaluation - it simply does not belong to the Japanese 'religions'.
It may be that in the last 24 hours we are seeing more emotions being expressed. But whatever the feelings in Japan – and we have to remember that ‘What are you feeling?’ has become the default question of supposed interest for us Westerners in the last thirty or so years, as if our feelings define who we are - whatever the Japanese are ‘feeling’, the practical responses have been, for the most part, rather remarkable and indeed admirable. (Compare the response to Hurricane Katrina). I include here those battling within the Fukushima power stations to prevent a nuclear meltdown. One day the heroes of these hours will, one hopes, be named and honoured.
As for theology, I find myself more and more drawn to the religious humanism of those who turn such questions about meaning into an inquiry about how we construct meaning for ourselves. Rather than ponder on the purposes, or lack of purpose, of an abstract or absent deity, it seems more useful to think about our own fragility and our own fantasies of omnipotence – that we own and can exploit and control the earth and the seas – and to reflect on our own capacities to offer help and support and, if need be, self-sacrifice in the face of the often savage, and frequently unjust, phenomenon we call ‘life’.
Rather than seeing the sphere of religion as a vertical domain – God in His heavens set apart from us on earth – I find it more compelling, life-enhancing, and intellectually credible to think through the implications of Judaism being a human creation inhabiting the horizontal domain: religion is the sphere of our own human activity and invention and need and responsiveness; it is the place we can go to explore the mysteries of how life has evolved as it has, where we struggle for meaning in the face of meaninglessness, where we don’t know - can’t know - what we ‘deserve’, where we can experience moments of awe at the wonders and harmonies of nature and then collapse in fear and trembling in the face of those same natural forces; where we can celebrate what creativity and compassion human beings are capable of, but also despair at the cruelty and destructiveness that human beings are also capable of.
We don’t need a ‘God’ outside us to teach us about the double-sidedness of life – about our potential and our limitations, about our capacity to create worlds and our capacity to destroy them - but we may need to contact the godliness within us (our spiritual resources) to help us face our own mortality and to give strength to others when facing theirs.
The world is precarious and we are tightrope walkers always about to topple over. In Japan we see how disaster is always imminent, how apocalypse is part of the fabric of life: we glimpse what might lie ahead for any of us in our towns and cities, and we glimpse how apocalypse is also always now.
Thursday, 17 March 2011
Sunday, 13 February 2011
Egypt’s Revolution
‘In Egypt it was the moral force of nonviolence, not terrorism, not mindless killing...that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.’ Whoever writes Obama ‘s speeches is a maestro. Maybe Obama writes his own speeches, but whoever composes them, I find it remarkable that he so often manages to find a language that resonates in the imagination, that one wants to savour and reflect on. And how often do politicians manage to do that?
The notion of bending ‘the arc of history toward justice’ is of course part of a Judaic vision too. Perhaps that’s why it resonated so strongly with me when I heard the phrase. I imagine that few of us can have been following these last few weeks’ events in Egypt without at some point being moved by the sight of a people finding its voice to protest against decades of dictatorship, corruption, brutality and repression. Protests that were remarkably peaceful given the suppressed fury that must reside in the hearts of so many at the conditions they have had to endure.
As we know, Mubarak’s 30 year grip on his people was sponsored (financially and militarily) by the United States, who’ve been guided – as they so often are, as is the British government – by President Roosevelt’s famous comment in 1939 about the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza, that ‘he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch.’ So I’ve been stirred and heartened, as I was in 1989, by the tide of history that seems to be moving another part of our world away from brutality and impoverishment towards something more life-enhancing. And yet I’ve been disheartened - dispirited hugely, if truth be told – by so much of the response I’ve heard and read from the Jewish community, here and in Israel.
Because this response has been dictated - loaded word, I know – not by a recognition of the power of the human spirit to overcome oppression. It’s been dictated by fear. This fear has focused on the Muslim Brotherhood, who’ve been keeping a low profile over these last weeks, and the fear of a fundamentalist form of Islamism taking over in the region. As if Egypt is another Iran. Which for many reasons – historical and cultural and demographic and geographic – it isn’t. But the spectre of Israel once again surrounded by implacable annihilatory enemies haunts the Jewish imagination. It’s as if fear is soldered to our soul. And I find that hugely saddening, and actually rather ugly.
For our response to these events to be dictated by our fears rather than our hopefulness about the human spirit is a betrayal, I would suggest, of the religious vision of our Judaic tradition. In secular terms, it puts us as Jews on the wrong side of history – it puts us on the side of repression and brutality. It puts us on the side of Pharaoh rather than Moses.
In religious terms, it fails to understand that the phrase from Exodus we return to and cherish each year “Let my people go...” is the voice of the divine, of God, of the sacred principle that freedom from oppression is the right of every people. That’s the vision at the heart of Judaism: freedom from oppression, each person to have the opportunity to sit under their vine and their fig-tree where no-one shall make them afraid. Isn’t that what the people of Egypt want too?
In his response to Mubarak’s departure, Obama also quoted Martin Luther King: 'There's something in the soul that cries out for freedom.' Fear is a great dictator – when will we be able to overthrow its tyranny within us? When will we be able to rejoice – beyond our fears –wherever we see the ‘arc of history’ bending towards justice? Yes, Egypt has a long way to go – the transition from military to civilian rule will no doubt be bumpy. But as a Jew I celebrate, as Obama was celebrating, the movement of the human spirit towards freedom. All that those crowds possessed was, as the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif put it, ‘words and music and legitimacy and hope’. We see what powerful weapons these can be when wielded with determination, courage and vision.
The notion of bending ‘the arc of history toward justice’ is of course part of a Judaic vision too. Perhaps that’s why it resonated so strongly with me when I heard the phrase. I imagine that few of us can have been following these last few weeks’ events in Egypt without at some point being moved by the sight of a people finding its voice to protest against decades of dictatorship, corruption, brutality and repression. Protests that were remarkably peaceful given the suppressed fury that must reside in the hearts of so many at the conditions they have had to endure.
As we know, Mubarak’s 30 year grip on his people was sponsored (financially and militarily) by the United States, who’ve been guided – as they so often are, as is the British government – by President Roosevelt’s famous comment in 1939 about the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza, that ‘he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch.’ So I’ve been stirred and heartened, as I was in 1989, by the tide of history that seems to be moving another part of our world away from brutality and impoverishment towards something more life-enhancing. And yet I’ve been disheartened - dispirited hugely, if truth be told – by so much of the response I’ve heard and read from the Jewish community, here and in Israel.
Because this response has been dictated - loaded word, I know – not by a recognition of the power of the human spirit to overcome oppression. It’s been dictated by fear. This fear has focused on the Muslim Brotherhood, who’ve been keeping a low profile over these last weeks, and the fear of a fundamentalist form of Islamism taking over in the region. As if Egypt is another Iran. Which for many reasons – historical and cultural and demographic and geographic – it isn’t. But the spectre of Israel once again surrounded by implacable annihilatory enemies haunts the Jewish imagination. It’s as if fear is soldered to our soul. And I find that hugely saddening, and actually rather ugly.
For our response to these events to be dictated by our fears rather than our hopefulness about the human spirit is a betrayal, I would suggest, of the religious vision of our Judaic tradition. In secular terms, it puts us as Jews on the wrong side of history – it puts us on the side of repression and brutality. It puts us on the side of Pharaoh rather than Moses.
In religious terms, it fails to understand that the phrase from Exodus we return to and cherish each year “Let my people go...” is the voice of the divine, of God, of the sacred principle that freedom from oppression is the right of every people. That’s the vision at the heart of Judaism: freedom from oppression, each person to have the opportunity to sit under their vine and their fig-tree where no-one shall make them afraid. Isn’t that what the people of Egypt want too?
In his response to Mubarak’s departure, Obama also quoted Martin Luther King: 'There's something in the soul that cries out for freedom.' Fear is a great dictator – when will we be able to overthrow its tyranny within us? When will we be able to rejoice – beyond our fears –wherever we see the ‘arc of history’ bending towards justice? Yes, Egypt has a long way to go – the transition from military to civilian rule will no doubt be bumpy. But as a Jew I celebrate, as Obama was celebrating, the movement of the human spirit towards freedom. All that those crowds possessed was, as the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif put it, ‘words and music and legitimacy and hope’. We see what powerful weapons these can be when wielded with determination, courage and vision.
Tuesday, 25 January 2011
Has Israel Become Morally Bankrupt?
So now we know. Confirmation of what our pessimism has been telling us for over two decades. The State of Israel has no real (that is, sincere) intention of reaching a peace settlement with the Palestinians.
The 1600 confidential Palestinian documents leaked to the al-Jazeera TV station – the details of which are being published this week in the Guardian newspaper (www.guardian.co.uk) – offer a forlorn portrait of increasing Palestinian desperation (more and more concessions, a preparedness to make do with less and less) and steadfast Israeli intransigence. The long-term game plan of the powerful – both cynical and humiliating – is laid bare: ‘The more settlements we build, and the more we drag out this process, the more impossible a Palestinian state will become.’ As one lead negotiator, Tzipi Livni, is quoted as saying (in 2007), this has been “the policy of the government for a really long time”.
The Guardian’s lead columnist Jonathan Freedland, commenting on these newly available (and truly sensational) documents, makes the depressingly telling point that they “blow apart what has been a staple of Israeli public diplomacy: the claim that there is no Palestinian partner. That theme, a refrain of Israeli spokesmen on and off for years, is undone by transcripts that show that there is not only a Palestinian partner but one more accommodating than will surely ever appear again.”
What were the Palestinian negotiators prepared to concede? Details are still emerging but so far we have been told that concessions include: that Israel be allowed to annex all Jewish settlements in Jerusalem (except Har Homa); also part of the predominantly Arab East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah (in exchange for an equivalent area somewhere else); a joint international committee could oversee the Temple Mount/ Dome of the Rock/Al-Aqsa holy sites; and - perhaps the most emotionally laden of all the issues of historical disagreement - a limit of a “symbolic” 10,000 over ten years to the number of refugees (out of 5 million) who would be permitted to return. (As well as being enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and UN resolution 194, this ‘right of return’ had a status in the Palestinian psyche of an almost sacred principle – to surrender it in this way would have been extraordinary. And yet it was offered as part of a negotiated settlement).
The Palestinian people may themselves have rejected these concessions as too far-reaching - but my concern here is on Israel's responsibilities and commitment to justice. And these documents offer up a damning indictment of a generation of so-called Israeli ‘leaders’. No doubt in the days and weeks to come these revelations will be fought over and disputed by all sides. But to anyone with a dispassionate eye, the willingness of those without power to surrender their land and their dreams, and the unwillingness of the Israeli negotiators to negotiate in good faith, is heartbreaking. Some of us long suspected it, but now we know what we hate to admit: the enthronement of injustice represented by the State of Israel’s stance towards the Palestinians renders Israel morally bankrupt.
How are we Jews going to be able to read the Torah text that we are due to read this Shabbat, a text enshrined in our hearts by dint of repetition through the generations: ‘You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt’ (Exodus 22:18)? How can we be so brazen as to say it with no shame in our voice?
Maybe this week , in the midst of our reading, in the midst of our proud evocation of our sacred story, when we come in synagogues to this verse we should drop our voices, mute our reading, whisper it sotto voce, open up a silence in the midst of our holy text, a space for reflection, a space to hear the words in our hearts that we are unable to live out in our land.
A space for our hearts to be pierced - so that as a people we may begin the long, long journey back towards truth and righteousness.
We know this won’t happen. But it should, it should, it should...
The 1600 confidential Palestinian documents leaked to the al-Jazeera TV station – the details of which are being published this week in the Guardian newspaper (www.guardian.co.uk) – offer a forlorn portrait of increasing Palestinian desperation (more and more concessions, a preparedness to make do with less and less) and steadfast Israeli intransigence. The long-term game plan of the powerful – both cynical and humiliating – is laid bare: ‘The more settlements we build, and the more we drag out this process, the more impossible a Palestinian state will become.’ As one lead negotiator, Tzipi Livni, is quoted as saying (in 2007), this has been “the policy of the government for a really long time”.
The Guardian’s lead columnist Jonathan Freedland, commenting on these newly available (and truly sensational) documents, makes the depressingly telling point that they “blow apart what has been a staple of Israeli public diplomacy: the claim that there is no Palestinian partner. That theme, a refrain of Israeli spokesmen on and off for years, is undone by transcripts that show that there is not only a Palestinian partner but one more accommodating than will surely ever appear again.”
What were the Palestinian negotiators prepared to concede? Details are still emerging but so far we have been told that concessions include: that Israel be allowed to annex all Jewish settlements in Jerusalem (except Har Homa); also part of the predominantly Arab East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah (in exchange for an equivalent area somewhere else); a joint international committee could oversee the Temple Mount/ Dome of the Rock/Al-Aqsa holy sites; and - perhaps the most emotionally laden of all the issues of historical disagreement - a limit of a “symbolic” 10,000 over ten years to the number of refugees (out of 5 million) who would be permitted to return. (As well as being enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and UN resolution 194, this ‘right of return’ had a status in the Palestinian psyche of an almost sacred principle – to surrender it in this way would have been extraordinary. And yet it was offered as part of a negotiated settlement).
The Palestinian people may themselves have rejected these concessions as too far-reaching - but my concern here is on Israel's responsibilities and commitment to justice. And these documents offer up a damning indictment of a generation of so-called Israeli ‘leaders’. No doubt in the days and weeks to come these revelations will be fought over and disputed by all sides. But to anyone with a dispassionate eye, the willingness of those without power to surrender their land and their dreams, and the unwillingness of the Israeli negotiators to negotiate in good faith, is heartbreaking. Some of us long suspected it, but now we know what we hate to admit: the enthronement of injustice represented by the State of Israel’s stance towards the Palestinians renders Israel morally bankrupt.
How are we Jews going to be able to read the Torah text that we are due to read this Shabbat, a text enshrined in our hearts by dint of repetition through the generations: ‘You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt’ (Exodus 22:18)? How can we be so brazen as to say it with no shame in our voice?
Maybe this week , in the midst of our reading, in the midst of our proud evocation of our sacred story, when we come in synagogues to this verse we should drop our voices, mute our reading, whisper it sotto voce, open up a silence in the midst of our holy text, a space for reflection, a space to hear the words in our hearts that we are unable to live out in our land.
A space for our hearts to be pierced - so that as a people we may begin the long, long journey back towards truth and righteousness.
We know this won’t happen. But it should, it should, it should...
Sunday, 2 January 2011
"On or about December 1910..." - Some New Year's Day Reflections
I’ve been wondering recently how to think – 100 years on – about Virginia Woolf’s attention-grabbing remark (from an essay written in 1923) that ''On or about December 1910 human character changed.''
Before we have time even to reflect on the apparent waywardness of her grammar – what is that curious ‘on’ doing, shouldn’t it be ‘in’? – Woolf goes on to explain as follows: “I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.”
So ‘on or about’ December 1910 slides quickly from suspicious precision into the ‘arbitrary’ choosing of a date ‘about the year 1910.’ It inevitably makes us wonder: what is Woolf up to here? What is she pointing towards? And what is this alleged ‘change’ in ‘human character’? She roots this change in human relationships, personal relationships. Relations changed between ''masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children, and when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.'' (Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 1923)
It is of course notoriously difficult - maybe impossible - to catch hold of deep and fundamental changes in our collective lives as they are happening. We know when something personal touches us that our lives can change, do change: a child is born, or a new relationship blossoms or a relationship breaks down, you lose your job or receive a diagnosis of cancer, or someone you love dies – all these mark changes in our lives, and may even have an impact on our character, sometimes in the short term (we may become more cheerful for a while, or more morose), and sometimes a life event can leave a deeper mark on our character, we might realize over time we have shifted from being sad or anxious towards becoming more reflective, or more at peace with life; or the change in our character may have been the other way round: we might have lived the first half of our life with cheerful optimism only for later years to cast a shadow on our hopes and moods. So we are use to thinking about changes in human character in a personal setting.
But Woolf was speaking of something else, something more elusive, something collective that she detected. Writing in 1923, she is of course looking back in time and trying to track something that she located – both precisely and yet ‘arbitrarily’ - at the end of the first decade of the century. She is looking back after the cataclysm of the Great War, and seeing that on or about December 1910, a definable world of Victorian followed by Edwardian morality and certainties was ending (Edward VII died in 1910), and a new, more chaotic era was emerging. In 1910 there were two General Elections in the UK and a Liberal government came to power as part of a decline in political consensus and the shared assumptions of the previous decades. There was violence on the streets – this was the era of the suffragettes and workers’ unrest – and the world was becoming more fragmented and anarchic. The smug certainties of the Edwardian era were giving way to something else.
In 1910 Stravinsky's ballet ‘The Firebird’ opened in Paris, and in London the critic Roger Fry assembled a controversial exhibition called ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ introducing to England what was already electrifying the Continent. The show included works by Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso – the radicalism of Cubism was about to call into question the popular bourgeois idea of realism. As Woolf put it in her 1923 essay, the ‘change in human character’ that she was pinning on this arbitrary date of December 1910 – 100 years ago, from us – meant amongst other things that people were being forced to learn to “tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure.”
These were the years when Einstein dissolved the traditional notions of fixed time and space, Picasso deconstructed visual perceptions and James Joyce in Ulysses undermined the traditional narrative order and sense of the novel. In a word, Woolf is talking about the birth of modernism.
1923 also saw the publication of a book in German that I can’t imagine Woolf knew about - but represents for the Jewish world a work that radically subverted all the traditional pieties and assumptions of the time about Jewish religiosity. It was Martin Buber’s Ich und Du (I and Thou), which put personal relationships at the centre of Judaism rather than halachah (Jewish law). How one relates to other people, and to the environment around you – with care and attention and openness, or with manipulation and the treating of people as objects – this became for Buber the essence of Judaism.
To relate to the divine through the everyday, not merely through the traditional rites and practices – this was a radical message, and seen now through the lens of Virginia Woolf we can recognise that Buber was the first mystic modernist of 20th century Judaism.
When we look around us at the beginning of 2011 it might feel too early to say that ‘human character’ has again changed, or is in the process of changing; it may only be in another decade or so that we will be able to, like Woolf, look back and recognise a fundamental shift in consciousness that is happening. But I do sense it more and more - that something is shifting within us, within our minds and psyches, within our consciousness.
I think it has been brought on by the great technological revolution we are still living through, which combines this extraordinary inter-connectability and instantaneousness, where time and space are eliminated, when you can Skype across the world, and read a million books without leaving your house, and have the knowledge of the world literally at your fingertips - which includes following your children’s lives without them knowing it (just look on Facebook) – so there are all these possibilities opening up for us while at the same time there is a sense of out-of-controlness, a sense of unrest on the streets, a great surge of discontent about the ordering of society yet a sense of helplessness to effect real change.
Old economic ‘certainties’ have been exposed as fraudulent, but no new sustainable model is yet emerging; and there is a growing sense (or is it just me?) that we – as in 1910 – stand at the possible edge of a cataclysm and that our Great War might still be to come, a war this time against want and deprivation and lack of resources, in which the underlying ethnic tensions in Europe might still end up with blood being shed as people fight for survival. Who knows? But not knowing doesn’t mean we should give up looking hard at what is going on and scanning the ether for what is happening.
As so often, the Torah texts that we read in the Jewish cycle of weekly readings offer a partial illumination. Exodus chapter 6, that we have read this Shabbat, dramatises the way in which oppression makes a people metaphorically blind and deaf, unable to hear and respond to something new that could free them from their enslavement to the status quo. Moses receives a radical message about the divine - but when he goes to the Israelites to tell them that there is a power in the universe that will free them from Egyptian slavery, the people’s spirits are so crushed that they can’t take it in. They can’t hear what is being said to them. And the message Moses brings them is so remarkable that it is no wonder they can’t take it to heart: because the message includes the statement that ‘God’ changes through the generations; or rather, that the way that we experience the divine changes from generation to generation.
Moses comes to understand (Exodus 6:3) how the ancestral generations – Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - had their own understanding of the divine (El Shaddai – ‘God who bestows benefits’), but that something else was now present, Adonai – ‘the One who was, is, will be...’
And it is this Presence, active in each moment, who in a sense is each moment, that has the capacity to free the Israelites from their toil and their misery. This Presence links history, past promises, with the security of a grounded future. But for this to happen, the people have to be open to listening in to this voice of hope – but because they are immersed in their present misery they don’t have the emotional or mental space to bear this radical alternative voice, a voice which says, ‘Don’t think of Me as I used to be in the past, in tradition - think of Me metamorphosing in response to what is needed now’.
How do you think about an evolving God? How do you live with the idea that God-images are constantly evolving? That the divine isn’t static and fixed - but is fluid and provisional?
So in one sense the plagues were not just for the Egyptians and Pharaoh to have a change of heart, but they were for the Israelites, who would see them and wonder about them: 'If these things happen, what can it mean for us?’ is the question the plagues pose for the Israelites. ‘If these irruptions into the natural order are possible, what does that mean for our ways of thinking about what is possible? Perhaps our image of God - and God’s possibilities, and the possibility of God - needs to change’. Isn’t this the sense that underlies our narrative? That this whole saga of the Exodus involves an education into a different reality, the reality of the divine as a Presence that unsettles the status quo on behalf of the liberation of the human spirit.
How is our human spirit liberated in our times? How is the divine manifesting within our troubled times? The Jewish task is to live and think in the spirit of Moses, keeping our antennae tuned, listening out for what is going on, listening in to what is going on: what is changing? what new possibilities for the human spirit are there? How do we liberate ourselves, and each other? Perhaps we have to learn again to tolerate, in Woolf’s words, ‘the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure’?
In a culture that worships success, and is mistrustful of complexity, and enslaves us to consumption and materialism, we are going to have to work hard to avoid having our spirits crushed by what we are exposed to each day. The dominant narratives of our time – about what makes for happiness, about what doing well in life consists of – these narratives may need to be called into question by the spirit of Adonai that lives in us. We all have a part of us that doesn’t want to hear, that can’t hear, an oppressed part of our selves that keeps our noses to the grindstone and our minds enslaved to fixed ways of thinking. But we also have a Moses within us, that is open to the Voice, the eternal voice that speaks always, and yet whose words can be hard to hear, hard to decipher, hard to translate.
In 2011 let’s listen out for the Voice, let’s find the Moses within who is open to the new, who can hear the spirit of the divine hovering, never settling, never capturable, never already understood, (or never already dismissed) - but whose truth is revealed in fragments, in obscure intuitions, in glimpses half-seen, in whisperings and echoes.
Revelation is no longer through ‘outstretched arms and terrible chastisements’ (Exodus 6:6). It’s through the still small voice within, half heard, half-remembered, wholly mystifying. That is our homeland, our security - let’s listen out for it, listen in to it.
I wish you all a good year.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue on New Year’s Day, January 1st, 2011]
Before we have time even to reflect on the apparent waywardness of her grammar – what is that curious ‘on’ doing, shouldn’t it be ‘in’? – Woolf goes on to explain as follows: “I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.”
So ‘on or about’ December 1910 slides quickly from suspicious precision into the ‘arbitrary’ choosing of a date ‘about the year 1910.’ It inevitably makes us wonder: what is Woolf up to here? What is she pointing towards? And what is this alleged ‘change’ in ‘human character’? She roots this change in human relationships, personal relationships. Relations changed between ''masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children, and when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.'' (Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 1923)
It is of course notoriously difficult - maybe impossible - to catch hold of deep and fundamental changes in our collective lives as they are happening. We know when something personal touches us that our lives can change, do change: a child is born, or a new relationship blossoms or a relationship breaks down, you lose your job or receive a diagnosis of cancer, or someone you love dies – all these mark changes in our lives, and may even have an impact on our character, sometimes in the short term (we may become more cheerful for a while, or more morose), and sometimes a life event can leave a deeper mark on our character, we might realize over time we have shifted from being sad or anxious towards becoming more reflective, or more at peace with life; or the change in our character may have been the other way round: we might have lived the first half of our life with cheerful optimism only for later years to cast a shadow on our hopes and moods. So we are use to thinking about changes in human character in a personal setting.
But Woolf was speaking of something else, something more elusive, something collective that she detected. Writing in 1923, she is of course looking back in time and trying to track something that she located – both precisely and yet ‘arbitrarily’ - at the end of the first decade of the century. She is looking back after the cataclysm of the Great War, and seeing that on or about December 1910, a definable world of Victorian followed by Edwardian morality and certainties was ending (Edward VII died in 1910), and a new, more chaotic era was emerging. In 1910 there were two General Elections in the UK and a Liberal government came to power as part of a decline in political consensus and the shared assumptions of the previous decades. There was violence on the streets – this was the era of the suffragettes and workers’ unrest – and the world was becoming more fragmented and anarchic. The smug certainties of the Edwardian era were giving way to something else.
In 1910 Stravinsky's ballet ‘The Firebird’ opened in Paris, and in London the critic Roger Fry assembled a controversial exhibition called ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ introducing to England what was already electrifying the Continent. The show included works by Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso – the radicalism of Cubism was about to call into question the popular bourgeois idea of realism. As Woolf put it in her 1923 essay, the ‘change in human character’ that she was pinning on this arbitrary date of December 1910 – 100 years ago, from us – meant amongst other things that people were being forced to learn to “tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure.”
These were the years when Einstein dissolved the traditional notions of fixed time and space, Picasso deconstructed visual perceptions and James Joyce in Ulysses undermined the traditional narrative order and sense of the novel. In a word, Woolf is talking about the birth of modernism.
1923 also saw the publication of a book in German that I can’t imagine Woolf knew about - but represents for the Jewish world a work that radically subverted all the traditional pieties and assumptions of the time about Jewish religiosity. It was Martin Buber’s Ich und Du (I and Thou), which put personal relationships at the centre of Judaism rather than halachah (Jewish law). How one relates to other people, and to the environment around you – with care and attention and openness, or with manipulation and the treating of people as objects – this became for Buber the essence of Judaism.
To relate to the divine through the everyday, not merely through the traditional rites and practices – this was a radical message, and seen now through the lens of Virginia Woolf we can recognise that Buber was the first mystic modernist of 20th century Judaism.
When we look around us at the beginning of 2011 it might feel too early to say that ‘human character’ has again changed, or is in the process of changing; it may only be in another decade or so that we will be able to, like Woolf, look back and recognise a fundamental shift in consciousness that is happening. But I do sense it more and more - that something is shifting within us, within our minds and psyches, within our consciousness.
I think it has been brought on by the great technological revolution we are still living through, which combines this extraordinary inter-connectability and instantaneousness, where time and space are eliminated, when you can Skype across the world, and read a million books without leaving your house, and have the knowledge of the world literally at your fingertips - which includes following your children’s lives without them knowing it (just look on Facebook) – so there are all these possibilities opening up for us while at the same time there is a sense of out-of-controlness, a sense of unrest on the streets, a great surge of discontent about the ordering of society yet a sense of helplessness to effect real change.
Old economic ‘certainties’ have been exposed as fraudulent, but no new sustainable model is yet emerging; and there is a growing sense (or is it just me?) that we – as in 1910 – stand at the possible edge of a cataclysm and that our Great War might still be to come, a war this time against want and deprivation and lack of resources, in which the underlying ethnic tensions in Europe might still end up with blood being shed as people fight for survival. Who knows? But not knowing doesn’t mean we should give up looking hard at what is going on and scanning the ether for what is happening.
As so often, the Torah texts that we read in the Jewish cycle of weekly readings offer a partial illumination. Exodus chapter 6, that we have read this Shabbat, dramatises the way in which oppression makes a people metaphorically blind and deaf, unable to hear and respond to something new that could free them from their enslavement to the status quo. Moses receives a radical message about the divine - but when he goes to the Israelites to tell them that there is a power in the universe that will free them from Egyptian slavery, the people’s spirits are so crushed that they can’t take it in. They can’t hear what is being said to them. And the message Moses brings them is so remarkable that it is no wonder they can’t take it to heart: because the message includes the statement that ‘God’ changes through the generations; or rather, that the way that we experience the divine changes from generation to generation.
Moses comes to understand (Exodus 6:3) how the ancestral generations – Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - had their own understanding of the divine (El Shaddai – ‘God who bestows benefits’), but that something else was now present, Adonai – ‘the One who was, is, will be...’
And it is this Presence, active in each moment, who in a sense is each moment, that has the capacity to free the Israelites from their toil and their misery. This Presence links history, past promises, with the security of a grounded future. But for this to happen, the people have to be open to listening in to this voice of hope – but because they are immersed in their present misery they don’t have the emotional or mental space to bear this radical alternative voice, a voice which says, ‘Don’t think of Me as I used to be in the past, in tradition - think of Me metamorphosing in response to what is needed now’.
How do you think about an evolving God? How do you live with the idea that God-images are constantly evolving? That the divine isn’t static and fixed - but is fluid and provisional?
So in one sense the plagues were not just for the Egyptians and Pharaoh to have a change of heart, but they were for the Israelites, who would see them and wonder about them: 'If these things happen, what can it mean for us?’ is the question the plagues pose for the Israelites. ‘If these irruptions into the natural order are possible, what does that mean for our ways of thinking about what is possible? Perhaps our image of God - and God’s possibilities, and the possibility of God - needs to change’. Isn’t this the sense that underlies our narrative? That this whole saga of the Exodus involves an education into a different reality, the reality of the divine as a Presence that unsettles the status quo on behalf of the liberation of the human spirit.
How is our human spirit liberated in our times? How is the divine manifesting within our troubled times? The Jewish task is to live and think in the spirit of Moses, keeping our antennae tuned, listening out for what is going on, listening in to what is going on: what is changing? what new possibilities for the human spirit are there? How do we liberate ourselves, and each other? Perhaps we have to learn again to tolerate, in Woolf’s words, ‘the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure’?
In a culture that worships success, and is mistrustful of complexity, and enslaves us to consumption and materialism, we are going to have to work hard to avoid having our spirits crushed by what we are exposed to each day. The dominant narratives of our time – about what makes for happiness, about what doing well in life consists of – these narratives may need to be called into question by the spirit of Adonai that lives in us. We all have a part of us that doesn’t want to hear, that can’t hear, an oppressed part of our selves that keeps our noses to the grindstone and our minds enslaved to fixed ways of thinking. But we also have a Moses within us, that is open to the Voice, the eternal voice that speaks always, and yet whose words can be hard to hear, hard to decipher, hard to translate.
In 2011 let’s listen out for the Voice, let’s find the Moses within who is open to the new, who can hear the spirit of the divine hovering, never settling, never capturable, never already understood, (or never already dismissed) - but whose truth is revealed in fragments, in obscure intuitions, in glimpses half-seen, in whisperings and echoes.
Revelation is no longer through ‘outstretched arms and terrible chastisements’ (Exodus 6:6). It’s through the still small voice within, half heard, half-remembered, wholly mystifying. That is our homeland, our security - let’s listen out for it, listen in to it.
I wish you all a good year.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue on New Year’s Day, January 1st, 2011]
Thursday, 16 December 2010
‘Any Human Heart’
“Never say you know the last word about any human heart”. The words belong to Henry James, and that last glowing phrase was borrowed by the novelist William Boyd for the title of his 2002 novel, ‘Any Human Heart’. I haven’t read the book but I have been watching the TV adaptation of it over the last few weeks (it’s out on DVD later this month if you missed it).
I won’t spoil the story for those who don’t know it, but its interweaving of the themes of memory and desire, regret and appreciation, betrayal and commitment, through seventy years and more of the protagonist’s life was portrayed with great delicacy, pathos and humour in the TV adaptation. It’s rare to see a work that manages to capture visually the way in which fragments of our life from childhood onwards are still alive and resonant as our lives move on - how memories from decades ago can be as vivid as (or even sometimes overlay) our experiences in the present, how past and present can merge as we look out at the world. And the drama of the central character negotiating his way through the vicissitudes of history and chance, love and loss, had something profound too to say about the role of luck in our lives – good luck and bad luck.
But essentially the story speaks of the mysterious, unanalysable nature of what it means to be a human being. Thus the simple, complex, power of Henry James’ words “Never say you know the last word about any human heart”. That sentence is the antidote to any tendency we might have to think we can really know other people, that we can sum them up, define them, be certain about who or what they are. They are always more than we know. Just as we are always more than we know. For we are more than our means to know gives us to know.
I love Walt Whitman’s great burst of sentiment, wonderment, and pride (perhaps arrogance) in his triumphant poem ‘Song of Myself’ when he cries out at one point ‘I am large. I contain multitudes.’ This notion of a plural self, a self of multiple parts and attributes, a self of internal dissention and concatenation and creative interplay between the strands of thinking and feeling and physical liveliness that we all contain – this is an idea central to my understanding of why working in depth with people as a psychotherapist is one of the most privileged professions that exists. The possibility of discovery of hidden parts of the self we didn’t know about, or the freeing up of trapped parts of our self that have got stuck, or the rescuing of discarded or abandoned threads of our lives – all this emerges from the notion of the ‘human heart’ being large, capacious, multiple.
Just as it emerges too from the Jewish and Christian notion of us being made b’tzelem Elohim ‘in the likeness of God’ – for what does that mean other than that we (like ‘God’) are multiple and made up of countless aspects of ‘what is’? From compassion to rage, from a sense of justice to outbursts of hatred, from a capacity for deep love to a silent withdrawal from any more involvement, and so on and so on...we mirror the divine Being with the multiplicity of our human Being.
The WikiLeaks saga has reminded us of what we already intuitively knew: there’s always another story going on that we don’t get to hear about. But what’s true in the world at large, the world of politics and global events, is also true more personally, of our own lives. “Never say you know the last word about any human heart” – not your own, not another person’s. Until our last breath, there may still be surprises in store...
I won’t spoil the story for those who don’t know it, but its interweaving of the themes of memory and desire, regret and appreciation, betrayal and commitment, through seventy years and more of the protagonist’s life was portrayed with great delicacy, pathos and humour in the TV adaptation. It’s rare to see a work that manages to capture visually the way in which fragments of our life from childhood onwards are still alive and resonant as our lives move on - how memories from decades ago can be as vivid as (or even sometimes overlay) our experiences in the present, how past and present can merge as we look out at the world. And the drama of the central character negotiating his way through the vicissitudes of history and chance, love and loss, had something profound too to say about the role of luck in our lives – good luck and bad luck.
But essentially the story speaks of the mysterious, unanalysable nature of what it means to be a human being. Thus the simple, complex, power of Henry James’ words “Never say you know the last word about any human heart”. That sentence is the antidote to any tendency we might have to think we can really know other people, that we can sum them up, define them, be certain about who or what they are. They are always more than we know. Just as we are always more than we know. For we are more than our means to know gives us to know.
I love Walt Whitman’s great burst of sentiment, wonderment, and pride (perhaps arrogance) in his triumphant poem ‘Song of Myself’ when he cries out at one point ‘I am large. I contain multitudes.’ This notion of a plural self, a self of multiple parts and attributes, a self of internal dissention and concatenation and creative interplay between the strands of thinking and feeling and physical liveliness that we all contain – this is an idea central to my understanding of why working in depth with people as a psychotherapist is one of the most privileged professions that exists. The possibility of discovery of hidden parts of the self we didn’t know about, or the freeing up of trapped parts of our self that have got stuck, or the rescuing of discarded or abandoned threads of our lives – all this emerges from the notion of the ‘human heart’ being large, capacious, multiple.
Just as it emerges too from the Jewish and Christian notion of us being made b’tzelem Elohim ‘in the likeness of God’ – for what does that mean other than that we (like ‘God’) are multiple and made up of countless aspects of ‘what is’? From compassion to rage, from a sense of justice to outbursts of hatred, from a capacity for deep love to a silent withdrawal from any more involvement, and so on and so on...we mirror the divine Being with the multiplicity of our human Being.
The WikiLeaks saga has reminded us of what we already intuitively knew: there’s always another story going on that we don’t get to hear about. But what’s true in the world at large, the world of politics and global events, is also true more personally, of our own lives. “Never say you know the last word about any human heart” – not your own, not another person’s. Until our last breath, there may still be surprises in store...
Thursday, 25 November 2010
On Being (Feeling) Posthumous
In a recent conversation I suddenly heard myself say that I was feeling ‘posthumous’. It just came out – as words do – and it puzzled me, surprised me, and in a way upset me. I’m not sure what I meant – though that isn’t an unusual experience – but it did feel on the one hand a bit melodramatic and maudlin, and on the other hand somewhat understated.
‘Posthumous’ – ‘occurring after death’; ‘published after the author’s death’; ‘born after the father’s death’. None of these three definitions seems to fit what I was thinking, feeling, intuiting. And yet I won’t give it up, this glancing knowledge of something I don’t yet fully know - as if glimpsed through the corner of my eye, or at the edge of a mirror, or in a dream. You try to look, to see it full on, but it’s already gone. Do we dismiss that moment of elusive knowing – put it down to imagination, or tiredness, or melancholia, or however we are accustomed to rationalise away our intuitions – or do we pursue it, track it, let it lead us where it wants us to go?
I pull down a few books from my shelves and find that the Roman lyric poet Horace has the line Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume,/ labuntur anni in Book 2 of his Odes: speaking of the futility of hoarding up treasure, he has his narrator lament ‘Alas, Postumus, Postumus, the fleeting years are slipping by...’
So this - it appears - is what is going on, alas. It’s about growing older. (And I seem to have needed a two-thousand year old poem to help me understand it.) And together with this now immediately mundane bit of self-knowledge, there’s the suggestion that it’s time to distribute the treasure – or at least not to save it up for some mythical future...
Feeling posthumous is about having lived a certain number of years and having had a certain range of experiences and having gained a certain amount of understanding – and yet recognising that the world has moved on, is moving on, will move on, and all that treasure inside becomes redundant (or I fear it will) in the light of what that transformed world seems to value. I don’t watch all those popular TV shows with dancing celebrities and avaricious home-improvers and super-chefs and royal weddings and aspiring wannabes competing for fame. That’s not the ‘reality’ (so-called) that moves or intrigues me. And I don’t do Facebook or Twitter or own an iPad (or even an iPod) and my mobile phone doesn’t let me go online or pick up my emails on the go. I still use a camera with the sort of film inside that needs to be sent away to be processed. I can’t keep up, in other words, with the 21st century.
I seem to be more interested in what went on a century ago than what happened last week. For example Kafka’s Diary entry for ‘10 o’clock, 15 November [1910]’ which reads, in its entirety, ‘I will not let myself become tired. I’ll jump into my story even though it should cut my face to pieces.’
I suppose that blogs have replaced diaries in the 21st century. But ‘jumping into my story’ is still an aspiration for any writer. Kafka’s self-lacerating prose is heart-rending, arresting, unsurpassed in its precision of feeling and its capacity for observation and self-observation.
16 December [1910]. I won’t give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can. I would gladly explain the feeling of happiness which, like now, I have within me from time to time. It is really something effervescent that fills me completely with a light, pleasant quiver and that persuades me of the existence of abilities of whose non-existence I can convince myself with complete certainty at any moment, even now.
All the energy and glow and dizzy speediness of youth, all the media-driven drawing-to-our-attention of the ephemeral and superficial, all that ersatz immediacy and manufactured relevance – it leaves me far behind in its breathless rush away from what is deeper, truer about our human situation: our personal fragility, our inner richness, our only-ever-partial self-knowledge, our lack of control over our destinies, our dependence on each other – in other words, the stuff of poetry, and literature, the stuff of the Bible, all that wisdom that can only be gleaned, if at all, over time and with experience.
All that stuff the irrelevance of which I can convince myself with complete certainty at any moment, even now. A conviction that leads me to feel posthumous.
‘Posthumous’ – ‘occurring after death’; ‘published after the author’s death’; ‘born after the father’s death’. None of these three definitions seems to fit what I was thinking, feeling, intuiting. And yet I won’t give it up, this glancing knowledge of something I don’t yet fully know - as if glimpsed through the corner of my eye, or at the edge of a mirror, or in a dream. You try to look, to see it full on, but it’s already gone. Do we dismiss that moment of elusive knowing – put it down to imagination, or tiredness, or melancholia, or however we are accustomed to rationalise away our intuitions – or do we pursue it, track it, let it lead us where it wants us to go?
I pull down a few books from my shelves and find that the Roman lyric poet Horace has the line Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume,/ labuntur anni in Book 2 of his Odes: speaking of the futility of hoarding up treasure, he has his narrator lament ‘Alas, Postumus, Postumus, the fleeting years are slipping by...’
So this - it appears - is what is going on, alas. It’s about growing older. (And I seem to have needed a two-thousand year old poem to help me understand it.) And together with this now immediately mundane bit of self-knowledge, there’s the suggestion that it’s time to distribute the treasure – or at least not to save it up for some mythical future...
Feeling posthumous is about having lived a certain number of years and having had a certain range of experiences and having gained a certain amount of understanding – and yet recognising that the world has moved on, is moving on, will move on, and all that treasure inside becomes redundant (or I fear it will) in the light of what that transformed world seems to value. I don’t watch all those popular TV shows with dancing celebrities and avaricious home-improvers and super-chefs and royal weddings and aspiring wannabes competing for fame. That’s not the ‘reality’ (so-called) that moves or intrigues me. And I don’t do Facebook or Twitter or own an iPad (or even an iPod) and my mobile phone doesn’t let me go online or pick up my emails on the go. I still use a camera with the sort of film inside that needs to be sent away to be processed. I can’t keep up, in other words, with the 21st century.
I seem to be more interested in what went on a century ago than what happened last week. For example Kafka’s Diary entry for ‘10 o’clock, 15 November [1910]’ which reads, in its entirety, ‘I will not let myself become tired. I’ll jump into my story even though it should cut my face to pieces.’
I suppose that blogs have replaced diaries in the 21st century. But ‘jumping into my story’ is still an aspiration for any writer. Kafka’s self-lacerating prose is heart-rending, arresting, unsurpassed in its precision of feeling and its capacity for observation and self-observation.
16 December [1910]. I won’t give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can. I would gladly explain the feeling of happiness which, like now, I have within me from time to time. It is really something effervescent that fills me completely with a light, pleasant quiver and that persuades me of the existence of abilities of whose non-existence I can convince myself with complete certainty at any moment, even now.
All the energy and glow and dizzy speediness of youth, all the media-driven drawing-to-our-attention of the ephemeral and superficial, all that ersatz immediacy and manufactured relevance – it leaves me far behind in its breathless rush away from what is deeper, truer about our human situation: our personal fragility, our inner richness, our only-ever-partial self-knowledge, our lack of control over our destinies, our dependence on each other – in other words, the stuff of poetry, and literature, the stuff of the Bible, all that wisdom that can only be gleaned, if at all, over time and with experience.
All that stuff the irrelevance of which I can convince myself with complete certainty at any moment, even now. A conviction that leads me to feel posthumous.
Sunday, 24 October 2010
“And she looked back...” (Genesis 19: 26) – A Woman’s Story
He was a good man, my husband, even if he did like a drink or two. He wasn’t a religious man – not like his uncle, Abraham (though , admittedly, Uncle Abraham was a one off) - but he cared about people, particularly outsiders, like himself. We’d come to the city years before - even though it had a terrible reputation (Genesis13:12-13). Everyone in the Valley knew about Sodom – it was violent, corrupt, lawless. There were no-go areas at night, and even during the day it wasn’t safe, certainly not for a woman – it was bad, like New York in the 70s, or parts of Jo’burg or Mexico City today...there always have been places that bring Sodom to mind, godless, fear-filled cities where men and women struggle to survive with their humanity intact. God knows, an impossible project it feels sometimes: to live the right way when you are surrounded by greed and trickery and the violence simmering on the streets, in cities that lack compassion, where hope is all burnt out.
Our city was brutal, life was brutal – but did it deserve what happened? Did Hiroshima? Or Dresden? Were there not 10 good people to save it from itself? Not even a minyan of innocence, of uncorrupted souls ready - like my husband – to offer hospitality to strangers, to take in the immigrant, to protect those seeking temporary shelter, asylum, for whatever reason? There must have been ten – or do the guiltless always suffer with the guilty? Is this the iron law of life, that suffering comes to all, that a tipping point is reached in every society when the Messiah can no longer come, when the forces of brutality (or indifference) overwhelm the good there is, sweep away the hope for better things? How much brave, careless rhetoric does it take for a society to implode under the weight of its own contradictions? The powerful flaunt their might with cold calculation, the blameless are trampled underfoot, the poor scatter like dust, and quiet lives of misery grow silent like the grave: is Sodom always our future, as well as the past? God knows, I certainly don’t.
I told him it was no place to bring up a family, but Lot wouldn’t listen. My husband was a good man, but he was a stubborn man. He’d chosen this place, his uncle had been very generous, had let him choose west or east, Canaan or the fertile Jordan valley (Genesis 13:10-11). And Lot – yes, a good man, but a man of simple tastes who saw only what was in front of his eyes - my husband Lot saw the well-watered plains of the Jordan valley and thought ‘Head east young man’, not having seen all those old movies that knew that west was best, west was the future – is always the future - over the horizon, beyond the vision of the moment. So – though I told him I was scared, for us, for the family – he landed up there, in god-forsaken Sodom, “Twin-town: Gomorrah” (which was worse, if truth be told, a real hell-hole if ever there was one).
So Sodom it was, and we settled there and lived as people live, doing business, raising a family, struggling to make ends meet, helping each other out. We were close-knit as a family – we had children and they grew and they married young and then my two youngest came along, girls: I loved them more than words can tell, they came so late, you see. And it was a moment of madness I’m sure - but he could be impulsive like that, any of us can, but what with his stubbornness , his impetuous belief that he knew what’s right while others are always blind, and what with the strain of those hours when we were under siege in our own home and the mob at the door, baying for blood - those two men whom we’d taken in, given shelter to, they were under our roof, our protection, and that is a sacred responsibility, to protect the stranger and Lot believed in that, he really did, even though he wasn’t pious and certainly didn’t hear voices telling him what to do like his Uncle did, but he believed in certain values, that he thought of as unconditional, and I believed in him believing in that - so that when they came to drag out the two visitors – and there was something strange, hallucinatory, about them that I can’t put my finger on, but that doesn’t really matter because they were our guests, you know, our guests – whoever they were, whatever they were – so my husband in that moment of madness told the crowd: take my girls, but don’t take my guests. As if that wasn’t also a sacred bond – his loyalty to the family.
And I can’t forgive him for that moment, that gesture, that offering, I really can’t – though I can see how he felt he had to do something to keep the mob at bay, to keep them from entering our home – they would have raped us, killed us, it had happened before, it’ll happen again – so we were at their mercy and none of us would be here to tell this tale, I think my husband figured, if he didn’t do something, offer them something - but the girls, how could he do that? You see - you do see, don’t you? - in times of war and insurrection, in times of terror, in times when chaos is the only law – people, sometimes, have to make terrible choices, terrifying choices: pray you will never have to make such choices. And don’t judge him for it, for you were not in his place and the rabbis said ‘Do not judge a person until you have been in their place’ (Pirke Avot 2:5) – or that’s what I have been told those rabbis said, later, much later. Only I can judge him, my husband Lot, because I was in his place, I was there, petrified with fear.
I was cowering behind my sons’-in-law - they were salt-of-the-earth types but useless lumps in a crisis - and somehow the moment passed when the two strangers whom we were holding in sacred trust as our guests, they did something - I couldn’t see what, they had this strange calm in their eyes, like the moment when all goes still before the storm breaks - and the crowd backed away, blind to how vulnerable we all were – and Lot realised the end was near and that we had to flee because no good would come of this, it had all gone too far: this city had reached its point of no return. Zero hour. Lot just knew, or maybe the two strangers told him – I’ll never know for sure – but the next thing I know we were packed and running, Lot and me and the two girls – and we left the rest of the family there, they wanted to stay they said, and it all happened so quickly, there was no time to think and we had to leave them , it tore me apart, I had to leave the others, but I had the girls and we went, that night we went, in a rush, a panic, we just left, and the tears were burning my eyes and I couldn’t bear to go on, and I knew I had to go on – as women in war have always gone on, beyond the pain, beyond the calculations, into the fear, into the animal instinct to survive, to live while others die, you see others die and you have to go on, because there is breath in you still, and you can’t go on, but you must go on, and you want to die, but you want to live – and I had to turn and look, I had to see what I was leaving behind, I had to see if I could see the rest of my family, the fruit of my womb, my other children, grown up now, but still my children, and their partners, my family, whom I loved: how could anyone bear to leave without looking back, looking to see what was happening even though I knew what was happening - because I knew what was happening – how the city was aflame, how the sulphurous lawless hearts of the inhabitants of Sodom had exploded into a raging inferno of destruction, that they were being destroyed, all of them, they had destroyed themselves really and now the city was aflame, and the fire and the smoke consumed them all, a conflagration like no other – though I see there have been others. It was a holocaust of suffering like no other – though I’m told there have been others.
Wouldn’t you have looked too? A last glance, a last chance to see what has been, and how it all went wrong, how it all got lost.
It’s legendary, this epic place of terror and violence. ‘The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah’ – how easily it rolls off the tongue, but it should make our mouths bitter in the burnt-out telling, we should taste the dust and the ashes, our tongues should shrivel in the heat of our fuming rage that it ends like this. I stood rooted to the spot, watching, the end of my family, the end of an era, the end of my hopes for the future. Dust and ashes, and there I was – motionless, transfixed by all the suffering that we are heir to, motionless, like a pillar, all hope abandoned, emptied out like a salt-cellar bled of salt, a grieving heap of salt, spilled out, lifeless, no movement, no movement ever again, my eyes fixed on the devastation, long gone, still here, still to come. God knows when it will ever end.
That’s it. That’s my story. What you waiting for? You don’t need to know anything else. You don’t even need to know my name. I am Lot’s wife, that’s all. I am no-one. And I am every woman who has ever suffered the loss of what was once treasured but is forever gone. The girls understood, they knew what they had to do, they knew that they had to carry some hope into the future, that they had to give birth to the future, that it was about survival. They didn’t look back, they looked forward. You call it incest, and look askance. But they called it getting on with life, rebuilding, renewing hope, giving birth to hope. And they did it with wisdom and they did it with love and I bless them for it, for out of Moab there came Ruth; and out of Ruth there came David; and out David will come our salvation - but only God knows how it will ever end.
(Sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, October 23rd)
Our city was brutal, life was brutal – but did it deserve what happened? Did Hiroshima? Or Dresden? Were there not 10 good people to save it from itself? Not even a minyan of innocence, of uncorrupted souls ready - like my husband – to offer hospitality to strangers, to take in the immigrant, to protect those seeking temporary shelter, asylum, for whatever reason? There must have been ten – or do the guiltless always suffer with the guilty? Is this the iron law of life, that suffering comes to all, that a tipping point is reached in every society when the Messiah can no longer come, when the forces of brutality (or indifference) overwhelm the good there is, sweep away the hope for better things? How much brave, careless rhetoric does it take for a society to implode under the weight of its own contradictions? The powerful flaunt their might with cold calculation, the blameless are trampled underfoot, the poor scatter like dust, and quiet lives of misery grow silent like the grave: is Sodom always our future, as well as the past? God knows, I certainly don’t.
I told him it was no place to bring up a family, but Lot wouldn’t listen. My husband was a good man, but he was a stubborn man. He’d chosen this place, his uncle had been very generous, had let him choose west or east, Canaan or the fertile Jordan valley (Genesis 13:10-11). And Lot – yes, a good man, but a man of simple tastes who saw only what was in front of his eyes - my husband Lot saw the well-watered plains of the Jordan valley and thought ‘Head east young man’, not having seen all those old movies that knew that west was best, west was the future – is always the future - over the horizon, beyond the vision of the moment. So – though I told him I was scared, for us, for the family – he landed up there, in god-forsaken Sodom, “Twin-town: Gomorrah” (which was worse, if truth be told, a real hell-hole if ever there was one).
So Sodom it was, and we settled there and lived as people live, doing business, raising a family, struggling to make ends meet, helping each other out. We were close-knit as a family – we had children and they grew and they married young and then my two youngest came along, girls: I loved them more than words can tell, they came so late, you see. And it was a moment of madness I’m sure - but he could be impulsive like that, any of us can, but what with his stubbornness , his impetuous belief that he knew what’s right while others are always blind, and what with the strain of those hours when we were under siege in our own home and the mob at the door, baying for blood - those two men whom we’d taken in, given shelter to, they were under our roof, our protection, and that is a sacred responsibility, to protect the stranger and Lot believed in that, he really did, even though he wasn’t pious and certainly didn’t hear voices telling him what to do like his Uncle did, but he believed in certain values, that he thought of as unconditional, and I believed in him believing in that - so that when they came to drag out the two visitors – and there was something strange, hallucinatory, about them that I can’t put my finger on, but that doesn’t really matter because they were our guests, you know, our guests – whoever they were, whatever they were – so my husband in that moment of madness told the crowd: take my girls, but don’t take my guests. As if that wasn’t also a sacred bond – his loyalty to the family.
And I can’t forgive him for that moment, that gesture, that offering, I really can’t – though I can see how he felt he had to do something to keep the mob at bay, to keep them from entering our home – they would have raped us, killed us, it had happened before, it’ll happen again – so we were at their mercy and none of us would be here to tell this tale, I think my husband figured, if he didn’t do something, offer them something - but the girls, how could he do that? You see - you do see, don’t you? - in times of war and insurrection, in times of terror, in times when chaos is the only law – people, sometimes, have to make terrible choices, terrifying choices: pray you will never have to make such choices. And don’t judge him for it, for you were not in his place and the rabbis said ‘Do not judge a person until you have been in their place’ (Pirke Avot 2:5) – or that’s what I have been told those rabbis said, later, much later. Only I can judge him, my husband Lot, because I was in his place, I was there, petrified with fear.
I was cowering behind my sons’-in-law - they were salt-of-the-earth types but useless lumps in a crisis - and somehow the moment passed when the two strangers whom we were holding in sacred trust as our guests, they did something - I couldn’t see what, they had this strange calm in their eyes, like the moment when all goes still before the storm breaks - and the crowd backed away, blind to how vulnerable we all were – and Lot realised the end was near and that we had to flee because no good would come of this, it had all gone too far: this city had reached its point of no return. Zero hour. Lot just knew, or maybe the two strangers told him – I’ll never know for sure – but the next thing I know we were packed and running, Lot and me and the two girls – and we left the rest of the family there, they wanted to stay they said, and it all happened so quickly, there was no time to think and we had to leave them , it tore me apart, I had to leave the others, but I had the girls and we went, that night we went, in a rush, a panic, we just left, and the tears were burning my eyes and I couldn’t bear to go on, and I knew I had to go on – as women in war have always gone on, beyond the pain, beyond the calculations, into the fear, into the animal instinct to survive, to live while others die, you see others die and you have to go on, because there is breath in you still, and you can’t go on, but you must go on, and you want to die, but you want to live – and I had to turn and look, I had to see what I was leaving behind, I had to see if I could see the rest of my family, the fruit of my womb, my other children, grown up now, but still my children, and their partners, my family, whom I loved: how could anyone bear to leave without looking back, looking to see what was happening even though I knew what was happening - because I knew what was happening – how the city was aflame, how the sulphurous lawless hearts of the inhabitants of Sodom had exploded into a raging inferno of destruction, that they were being destroyed, all of them, they had destroyed themselves really and now the city was aflame, and the fire and the smoke consumed them all, a conflagration like no other – though I see there have been others. It was a holocaust of suffering like no other – though I’m told there have been others.
Wouldn’t you have looked too? A last glance, a last chance to see what has been, and how it all went wrong, how it all got lost.
It’s legendary, this epic place of terror and violence. ‘The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah’ – how easily it rolls off the tongue, but it should make our mouths bitter in the burnt-out telling, we should taste the dust and the ashes, our tongues should shrivel in the heat of our fuming rage that it ends like this. I stood rooted to the spot, watching, the end of my family, the end of an era, the end of my hopes for the future. Dust and ashes, and there I was – motionless, transfixed by all the suffering that we are heir to, motionless, like a pillar, all hope abandoned, emptied out like a salt-cellar bled of salt, a grieving heap of salt, spilled out, lifeless, no movement, no movement ever again, my eyes fixed on the devastation, long gone, still here, still to come. God knows when it will ever end.
That’s it. That’s my story. What you waiting for? You don’t need to know anything else. You don’t even need to know my name. I am Lot’s wife, that’s all. I am no-one. And I am every woman who has ever suffered the loss of what was once treasured but is forever gone. The girls understood, they knew what they had to do, they knew that they had to carry some hope into the future, that they had to give birth to the future, that it was about survival. They didn’t look back, they looked forward. You call it incest, and look askance. But they called it getting on with life, rebuilding, renewing hope, giving birth to hope. And they did it with wisdom and they did it with love and I bless them for it, for out of Moab there came Ruth; and out of Ruth there came David; and out David will come our salvation - but only God knows how it will ever end.
(Sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, October 23rd)
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