Do we believe what we say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

Murder in the name of Allah

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

,

 

 

 

On Not Mourning Margaret Thatcher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leaving Egypt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obama and Holiness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Memory and Forgetting

‘After almost a lifetime as a painter, my thoughts begin to dwell on whether or not the Jews are a nation or a state of mind...’

The America-born artist R.B.Kitaj (born in 1932) spent almost 40 years of his life in England. That’s a Biblical stretch of time. And it wasn’t all wilderness. On his first day at the Royal College of Art – this is 1959, after some years in Vienna, Germany and France – this young man, brought up in a left-wing, intellectual, atheist home (I think those two words ‘intellectual’ and ‘atheist’ were probably synonyms in that generation – and possibly still are in many Jewish circles), on that first day at Art College, he met a callow Yorkshire lad, five years younger than him, a ‘little provincial from Bradford, never been abroad’ as this youngster said later in life, and they formed a deep and unbreakable bond that lasted the rest of their lives.

You can normally see Kitaj’s portrait of David Hockney at the National Portrait Gallery. But at the moment it is on loan to the Jewish Museum in Camden. Because the Museum are hosting a wonderful exhibition of Kitaj’s work, ‘intellectually fascinating and stunningly beautiful’ – to quote the words of the renowned architect M.J.Long at the show’s opening this week. (She was a friend of Kitaj’s and designed, co-incidentally, both the Museum and Kitaj’s London work studio, as well as the new British Library in Paddington). It is a relatively small exhibition – 21 works are there, a combination of canvases and sketches – but in them you see someone exploring - autobiographically, painfully, joyfully, profoundly - Jewish identity in the 20^th century and into the 21^st. He died in 2007.

The exhibition is called ‘Obsessions: The Art of Identity’ and the artist seemed to have discovered only when he was in his 40s that Jewishness was fundamental to who he was as a person. And this ‘Jewish obsession’ – his phrase – defined his work for the next 40 years, for the rest of his life.

That quote I started with - ‘After almost a lifetime as a painter, my thoughts begin to dwell on whether or not the Jews are a nation or a state of mind...’ – is taken from an extraordinary book he published in 1989: ‘First Diasporist Manifesto’.  

Let me quote from its opening, to give you a flavor of the book, of the man, of his preoccupations, ‘obsessions’ – and then we will see how this links with Shabbat Zachor, and Purim, that festival about Diaspora, about Jews who live amongst non-Jews, who are assimilated into a host culture, but still might be seen as outsiders, as 'other', and who can raise strong feelings - aggressive feelings - in those who don’t share this curious, complex, troubling identity we call ‘Jewish identity’.

He starts: ‘Painting is not my life. My life is my life. Painting is a great idea I carry from place to place. It is an idea full of ideas, like a refugee’s suitcase, a portable Ark of the Covenant...I am a dislocated pretender, I play at being a refugee, at studying, at painting. All this is pretence in the sense Picasso meant when he said: ‘The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.’           

‘I offer this manifesto to Jews and non-Jews alike, in the (fairly) sure knowledge that there be a Diasporist painting...I’ve been studying my Jews, and so you must forgive the emphasis on them, but painting beyond Jewish concern may just prosper thereby, because, as a wise man said, you delve into your own soul and wander through all the dimensions of the world. I believe there is a spirit or ‘ego’ in a people, as in a man, which compels the creativity of that people, which propels it and inspires it – openly, secretly, embarrassingly, even modestly...

The Jews have been called a lot of things in their four thousand off and on Diasporic years (mostly off). I keep a funny list to which  I add from time to time, a list of ‘traits’ attributed to Jews. Aggrieved, hated and admired are on my list...’ (pages11/13)

In our Torah portion for this week we read how Aaron, the High Priest, carried the names of the 12 tribes, literally on his shoulders. And as the text describes this, it emphasizes the word zikkaron/remembrance. It comes twice : there were stones set into his shoulder pads – avnai zikkaron: ‘stones for remembering; memory stones’ ;  and the names of the tribes are carried l’zikkaron, so that they will be remembered (Exodus 28:12). 

It is as if we as a people are haunted by the fear of being forgotten.  Or is it the Holy One of Israel, whom the Torah describes as commanding/instructing the people to do this, is it God who secretly fears not being remembered? Is it God who secretly fears being forgotten, who  projects this onto His people?  "Be a people of memory", the divine One keeps insisting, "Look, I’ll give you a whole day for remembering, Yom HaZikkaron, Rosh Hashanah: you will begin each New Year by remembering – remembering what you have done and what you have failed to do; oh, and by the way, remembering Me. Remember Me? You are the people of memory, the people who have to remember Me. And I will give you – in the course of time – a Shabbat specially named ‘Remember/Memory’ – Shabbat Zachor. I remember you, I carry you on My shoulders, but it’s only fair, you must remember Me, you must carry Me, inscribed in your hearts and on the doorposts of your house...Be a people of memory, have memories thousands of years old, keep your history alive, remember where you came from, remember what your purpose is, remember who you are, remember who I am..." – This is Jewish identity too, Jews as a nation and Jews as a state of mind.

There is one exemplary painting in the exhibition, from 1975/6, entitled, enigmatically, ‘If Not, Not’ – the title doubling back on itself, cancelling itself out, a painting dominated by the gatehouse of Auschwitz in the top left, and a landscape, ominous in mood, in colour, in motifs - there is a small, blossoming tree, and a lamb, a crow, broken pillars, a severed head, a pair of lovers (or are they? the man is turned towards and turned away from her), this is an inner landscape but also a portrait of creation, heavens and earth, sea and space, a glimpse of far-off pastoral - but over it all, hovering, a cloud, or smoke, and the solid red bricks and grey roof and black mouth, open and aghast, of gate of the place that has come to symbolize one aspect of Jewish identity, human identity, that can never be forgotten – and can never be remembered, not really, not fully.

And on Purim we read the Book of Esther and tell the story of genocide, attempted genocide, and we stamp and cheer and jeer, we drink and jest, and drink and weep, and drink to blot it out:  ‘you shall blot out the memory of Amalek’ – your enemy, your eternal enemy – ‘from under the heavens: Do not forget!’ (Deuteronomy 25:19). Do not forget to remember to forget... Blot out remembering to forget to remember...Drink until you can’t tell the difference between remembering and forgetting. Or drink until you realize that you are always remembering what you need to forget. And always forgetting what you need to remember. (There is no such thing as memory without forgetting; and no such thing as forgetting - because something in you will always remember).

Is this why the Jews cause such mixed feelings in others? That the non-Jewish world  keeps on remembering who the Jews are – God’s people, with a mission to bring a blessing, be a blessing to others? Who wants to know that? Who wants to know the Jewish story, the Jewish purpose, the Jewish belief that they are to be a light, a 'light to the nations'? No wonder we are hated. We keep reminding people of this, just by our being here, our sheer bloody survival, we haven’t gone away.

Even if we have forgotten who we are and what our purpose is - others remember it. And won’t let us forget it, one way or another – philo-semitism or anti-Semitism. They can’t forget about us. If Not, Not. If we aren’t going to carry the memory of who we are on our shoulders, you can be sure the non-Jewish world will. It’s engraved – it’s there for all to see. It’s the world’s obsession: the Jews. It’s our obsession: the Jews. We are linked together for all time, a passionate embrace, like lovers, like wrestlers, a fatal embrace, a story about a nation and a state of mind. 'Aggrieved, hated, admired.' This is our story. I hope you have a good Purim.   

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, Shabbat Zachor, February 23rd 2013]

'Drawing near' - pathos and tears

Vayigash alav Yehudah: ‘And Judah draw near to him...’ (Genesis 44:18). How can three Biblical words hold so much pathos? They come as we approach the culmination of the ‘novella’ of Joseph and his brothers.

Joseph has manipulated his brothers into bringing down to Egypt their youngest sibling, Benjamin, and has then sent them away laden with food but with his silver drinking-cup hidden in Benjamin’s sack – the perfect pretext to have the brothers hauled back in front of him and accused of theft. They can return to their homeland, he says, if they leave Benjamin with him as his slave.

When Judah then steps forward to can imagine the situation from his perspective: Benjamin is about to be detained by the powers-that-be, the mighty Pharoah’s right-hand man, Zaphenath-Paneah (41:45)  - it means ‘God speaks and lives’ or ‘ Creator of life’. This is the nightmare scenario that their father Jacob had feared: the loss not just of his beloved Joseph, all those years ago, but the loss too of the other child of his favourite wife Rachel, the youngster Benjamin. The loss of children being a painful and tragic theme in our minds in these recent weeks.

Though are we allowed to say, when we see President Obama’s tears, when we feel our own tears, when we feel moved by the human response of the most powerful leader on the planet, when we see the pain transparently there, heart-felt - are we allowed to say, are we allowed to think, ‘and what about the other children’:  the dozens and dozens of children killed in Pakistan by the drone strikes ordered by the President. ‘Collateral damage’ of the war against terrorism. The ugliness of the phrase, the euphemism, hiding the lack of tears for those families, the lack of a press-conference for those children, death arriving for them out of the clear blue morning skies, the world ending with a bang and a whimper. Can we ‘draw near’ to this, to compassion for these families, to tears for these children?

 ‘And Judah drew near to him’ – we read the words and we can marvel at the storyteller’s artistry, using language to open up our sensibilities, our sensitivities. Because yes, it is a portrait – we see it as if in a film, or a work by Rembrandt  – Judah steps forward and physically approaches the Egyptian prince, the brother in disguise, the brother he does not know is his brother. He approaches him. But in this ‘drawing near’ we also hear something else, an inner movement, because in taking this step forward Judah is also getting close to something else, something long buried, from his past: his role in the selling of Joseph. You remember that when the storyteller describes how the brothers tore off the coat of many colours from their much-hated younger brat-of-a-brother, Joseph, they threw him in a pit and wanted to leave him there to die, but it was Judah who had said:  no let’s not leave him to die, here are some merchants passing by, Ishmaelites, let’s not kill him, we can sell him – and that of course is how, in the story, Joseph reaches Egypt. 

So we realise this is also a metaphor, ‘And Judah drew near to him’, an image that is speaking about some psychological change in Judah:  for as he approaches the brother he does not know is his brother, the whole story about brotherhood comes tumbling out; the whole history of the failures in brotherhood is there in his long speech (verses 18-34), as he recognises – explicitly and implicitly - that the favouritism of his father was real, and that it had consequences not only for Jacob but for all of them; that their sense of solidarity as family had never been there at the beginning, that they had been consumed with jealousy and envy, and their hatred had been murderous; but faced now with the unfolding of time and a situation where another brother, Benjamin, could be sacrificed - they could have just left him and gone home and spun their father another story - Judah doesn’t repeat history, he changes it. Judah ‘draws nearer to him’:  he reaches a new understanding of the significance of family ties, family responsibilities, he’s protective towards his father and to his youngest brother; he is getting closer to living out brotherhood, where feelings of rivalry are able to be held in check and something else we might call empathy, or concern, or even love, are able to be felt and acted upon.

He ‘draws near’ to this new depth of maturity - and offers to exchange himself for Benjamin, to sacrifice himself. And we are moved to hear this, because we recognise the transformation in feeling of the character, of Judah, and we recognise in ourselves that such changes of heart can happen, such acts of self-sacrifice are possible, that this is something that we each have the potential for – the overcoming of destructive, hateful feelings in ourselves and the expression of our more generous natures, our better selves.

And this takes us into the heart of our text, and the beating heart of those opening three words of the sedrah: Vayigash alav Yehudah: ‘And Judah draw near to him...’  Because there is a Hasidic reading of this which realises that the word ‘alav/him’ doesn’t actually say who it refers to. We think of it as ‘him’, Joseph. But the Hasidic reading asks ‘To whom did Judah draw near? Whom did he approach? He approached, drew near, to himself, his real self, his potential as a self, as a human being.’ He reached into the person he was meant to be, could be, and stood forward and spoke openly, fearlessly, the truth he knew. This was what he ‘drew near’ to, got close to: his authentic self - reflective, compassionate, caring, self-sacrificing.  

And it is seeing this that undoes Joseph (45:1). He can no longer hide himself from his brother, his brothers. His pretence  of keeping them at a distance can’t be sustained, his manipulations, his long-term game of cat-and-mouse, his charade of acting the high-and-mighty overlord of Egypt, and he makes himself known to his brothers, and his grief is so strong, his sobs so loud, that they piece the very walls in which this meeting of brothers takes place. More tears, more grief - not about loss and death, but about loss and life. The losses within life: the lost opportunities, the lost love, the lost compassion, the lost family feeling, the lost companionship, the losses, the losses of life; the losses we are responsible for, and the losses we aren’t responsible for, but have to bear anyway.

The Torah tells its story of the family drama that underpins the whole collective saga of exile and Exodus and wandering and deliverance. The Jewish story. The story of the ‘family of Israel’. But when we read the extraordinary narrative in these later chapters of Genesis, we recognise that although it is telling a story about a particular family, it is not just our Jewish story, it is a universal story. That’s part of its power – as everyone from Thomas Mann to Andrew Lloyd Weber intuited - that it reaches beyond the tribe into the hearts of all who hear it. For the emotions are universal. The dramas of family life are universal. Rivalry and hatred and envy are universal. Loss and grief is universal. The tears of the Pakistani mother and the American mother, the Palestinian father and the Israeli father, are universal.

The Torah tells us our story, but tells it so that we have a vision that goes beyond ‘us’, beyond our tribe, our history, our nation, our suffering -  and helps us glimpse a world where brotherhood/ sisterhood is real – fraternité - and where reconciliation with the other, the one we used to hate, is seen not just as a pious wish but as an innate and universal possibility. 

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, December 22, 2012]