The Movement for Reform Judaism

At the end of the film Manhattan, Woody Allen’s great cinematic tribute to the metropolis, he is lying on his couch in his New York apartment and he starts one of his trademark soliloquies. ‘Why is life worth living?’ he asks, and you sense his neurotic persona getting into gear as he goes on ‘…It’s a very good question…’, and there’s a pause while he thinks about it, and then – well, I’ll tell you what he says in a moment.

Why is life worth living?

is indeed a very good question to reflect on, for any of us, particularly at Rosh Hashanah, the new year, our annual opportunity to think a bit deeper about our lives, to think a bit deeper into our lives, than we may have had time for during the rest of the year. Because the rest of the year we live under a kind of dictatorship. There’s the personal tyranny of our routines, our busyness, our immersion in the everyday, all that getting-through-the-day stuff, the necessary stuff of life, as well as the things we tell ourselves ‘have to be done’ (which probably don’t), as well as the list of things we always put off, which only adds to the feeling of being tyrannized.

And then there’s the dictatorship of the anecdote and the sound-bite, the collective dictatorship of society with its endless cascades of invented reality, and opinion masquerading as truth, and the breathless 24 hour breaking news, hyperventilating with manufactured outrage and the culture of who’s-to-blame, and the newsreaders gliding effortlessly from Darfur to Kate Moss, from torture and terrorism to Tiger Woods. Who has the space, the time, to separate themselves from all that – the issues of substance and the trivia - and reflect on life itself, our lives, what we are doing here as individuals set upon this earth at this time, in this place?

But today we have the time to think about that question. So what would you answer?  ‘Why is life worth living?’ For you. (I’d love to do an interactive sermon really – take the microphone around, sort of Jerry Springer-like, and let you do the talking, but not about why you married your pet goat, or whatever, about something that matters - but today probably isn’t the time for that). But you can think about it, this question, ‘Why is life worth living?’  Maybe you’d talk about family, friendship, probably something about relationships. Your work? Maybe. What else? What would you have to say?

This is a great list, and a brilliant piece of writing. It sounds so simple but that’s deceptive; look what he covers: the creativity of cinema, starting with Groucho, that genius of wit and language and laughter - the capacity to laugh and make other people laugh being a touchstone of what it is to be human - then sport (the baseball player Willy Mays), and music (classical and jazz), then literature and more cinema and art and good food and the beauty of the face of someone you love. With this film text as our cue we could all construct a list of our own and we might add things like theatre or travel or walking in the mountains, the natural world, our relationship to animals, gardening, dozens of things we might list if we are blessed with some of this capacity to feel for ourselves the myriad ways in which life is worth living.

But one thing that may not figure on your list is what you are doing right now. I don’t imagine that high up on your list of responses to ‘Why is life worth living?’ is the answer ‘going to shul on Rosh Hashanah. ’  Which might be sad, but it isn’t surprising. Because what we are doing here may feel more like a duty, or a responsibility, maybe done unwillingly, or out of guilt, or just out of habit, or to keep someone off your back. And I can’t change that reality for you. I can’t manufacture a service, or a sermon, or say anything about this extraordinary and profound wisdom that Judaism has access to that could make anyone here feel ‘yes, being here today, opening out this new year in this way with these people – this is part of what makes my life worth living. There is something here so valuable, so life enhancing, so life affirming, so nurturing of my soul, that living a life without it  would be like living in a world without Mozart or intimate relationships or being able to watch the sun set over the ocean.’ 

Because in a community like ours, Jewish life today has become a sort of add-on option. It’s like a bit of software you might run from time to time but most of the time we have other programmes open and running, and they do the main work of our lives. This isn’t, by the way, a criticism, it’s just an observation. In the past – that mythical country – it may have been that Jews would have answered that question – ‘Why is life worth living? – in a different way. Our grandparents might have spoken about feeling part of a tight-knit community that shared certain values, that gave a high priority in their lives to the idea of mitzvah, the reality of mitzvah in their everyday lives:  the food you ate, the giving of charity, a regular prayer-life, the rhythm of Shabbat and the festivals, study of Torah, hospitality, visiting mourners in a Shiva house, celebrating weddings, brit milah, Barmitzvah, how you ran your business, how you treated your neighbours. Before the invention of our modern notion of  having a ‘lifestyle’, we had generations of Jews for whom Jewish life wasn’t an add-on extra but it was the hard drive itself. The Torah was at the centre and you lived your life as a commentary to it. Or tried to. And yes of course this portrait is partially a fiction – because we know that in Jewish families there was also broigus and brutality, cheating and suffocation and the wish to escape the restrictions and burdens of Jewish life, to break free of the yoke of the Torah, and Jews all over Europe assimilated in their hundreds of thousands, left the tribe, became communists or Zionists or Christians or artists and writers, just embraced modernity with a fervour that used to be devoted to serving the One and only Holy One, Blessed be He. And all that Judaic passion for engaging in life that had once produced lives of piety and holiness and learning, a dedication to the great ancient mission of chosenness, of acting as a ‘light to the nations’ through one’s own humility and patience and ethical service of God, avinu malkaynu, whom you talked to in intimacy and love and awe and trepidation – all that Judaic passion for life here on earth, a passion that was in itself an answer to the question ‘Why is life worth living?’, it’s worth living because we have a purpose here, all that Judaic passion dispersed itself, dissolved into modern society, western society. It’s not lost, that Judaic energy and drive, because it underpins much of our contemporary world – it’s in our science and medicine and economics and architecture, and in our psychology and politics and of course in the arts (it created Hollywood, after all). It’s not lost, but that Jewish passion diffused, it transmuted itself, it’s living now in disguise and under assumed names. So it hasn’t disappeared, but yes, the focus of that passion has diffused and it’s left us confused. The texts of our own lives have taken centre-stage, and the Torah – if it figures at all -  is a commentary we write around its edges.

Yet there’s never been a time when this question has felt so urgent -  the question ‘Why is life worth living, and is there anything that makes it worth living that is connected to Jewish purpose?’ I have no hesitation in saying that all our futures, and our children’s futures depend on us grappling with this question. And if your answer to Jewish purpose now is, say, ‘to guard against anti-semitism’, or ‘support Israel regardless’, or ‘make sure our children have a Jewish education’, or ‘come to synagogue on the High Holy Days’, if these are our answers to the deep question about Jewish purpose – then we really have a lot of work to do.

Let me tell you why. If I had to respond to Woody Allen’s question I would definitely have a similar list, similar categories, (I’d probably have Kafka and Philip Roth rather than Flaubert, and it wouldn’t have baseball in it, though maybe watching Andre Agassi would figure). We could all come up with our own list. But I would add something in, something at the heart of what makes life worthwhile, something about Jewish vision. Without it, without developing and nurturing what I’m calling Jewish vision, it’s all just a game, a superficial and dangerous charade. Because we are faced with real threats to our survival – not our Jewish survival (I don’t belong to the paranoid Jewish Chronicle-sponsored wing of the Jewish world that always highlights how many enemies we have) but our survival as a species on this planet.

Today in our liturgy we have this poetic image of Rosh Hashanah as celebrating ‘the birthday of the world’. Our New Year celebrates that anything exists at all, that this fragile planet exists, that human beings have evolved on it, a humanity that has the capacity to see itself as it is, a tiny, insignificant chemical smear in the universe, a random one-in-a-billion-billion event that has resulted in a group of sentient beings capable, amazingly, of knowing this fact about itself - that we are completely and ridiculously insignificant in the scheme of things and yet that we are unique and infinitely complex, unique not only as a species in the cold, empty universe, but unique and complex as individuals – nobody like you or me has ever been or will ever be. ‘This is the birthday of the world, and one by one all creatures are questioned and examined’ – so reads the medieval text we will use later in the service (p.243). And we are being questioned and examined because this special species on this unique planet, that we rejoice in today, we are slowly, and not so slowly, engaged in a collective mass suicide, a self-strangulation, a throttling of the air we breathe, a poisoning of our water and land, a plundering of our natural resources, a long, merciless destructive attack on the earth and environment that we depend on. It’s suicide and  matricide rolled into one. (As if we hate ourselves because we are so needy and so dependent; as if we hate this planet because she is so bountiful, has so much that we need).

I hardly dare breathe these words about our environment, because we all know about it, and no wonder you feel you want to switch off listening now as I speak the words. And we want to switch off because it is unbearable. And we know we do this: when we are questioned - ‘Why are we engaged in this act of self-destruction? – and examined – ‘And why don’t we stop?’ - what do we do? We put our fingers in our ears, metaphorically, like children who don’t want to be told it’s time for bed, and think that if they don’t hear the bad news they won’t have to go to bed.  Yes, and I know the issues are complex and that it needs governments to act and the political will and bravery to do so, but the Judaic vision we need is the one that says: we are each responsible, we are each adding to this death cult by virtue of living the way we do in this vibrant terrifying new century of ours. But how many plane journeys a year does it take to destroy a planet? How many miles driven in how many SUVs and 4x4s? How many non-degradable batteries do you have to throw away, how much energy do you have to consume, to destroy a planet? You know the questions. And, being paid-up members of this death cult, we know the answers, sort of.

Being questioned and examined today, Rosh Hashanah, means being asked : ‘And what are we prepared to give up? What parts of our precious ‘lifestyle’ are we prepared to sacrifice, to sacrifice so that our children and grandchildren will be able to live their full span of years?’ The Judaic vision says: we are guests here, and guardians. How long will we continue to be vandals and wastrels?  In us all there is a struggle that goes on, endlessly, between our wish to enjoy our lives, to love life and people and ourselves - this great capacity we have for love – and another energy in us that is destructive, that is in the service of death. We know less about this death instinct than we know about our instinctive urges to celebrate and enjoy life, but this unconscious death impulse is now out of control in us as a species. And we are all a party to it. And thus we have the ironic and understated title of Al Gore’s film and book, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.

And it’s all very well thinking of al-Qaeda as an alien, death-enamoured suicide cult who are trying to destroy our precious way of life. They are that.. But don’t we glimpse in them a distorted, concentrated image of ourselves? Are we not also mini-terrorists, ready to hold the future hostage to our precious lifestyle choices?

When I joined the rabbinic team here at FRS – it was 1988 – that first year I gave a sermon on second day Rosh Hashanah, some of you may recall it, it was in the form of a story, ‘The Last Temptation of Noah’, and it was told by a character, a modern-day Noah, looking back after a contemporary disaster that he was the sole survivor of. And he told the story of what had happened to him and his world, and in the story he tells us about a speech he would give – to anyone who would listen, though hardly anyone would – a speech about climate change and the environment. ‘It was the same speech’, he says, ‘wherever I went: “The climate that has allowed the growth of civilisation and agriculture - and to which all our crops, customs and structures are adapted – is virtually certain to disappear. The world will become warmer than at any time since the emergence of humanity on earth. This threatens to take place over the next 40 years. Humanity will find it hard to adapt, particularly in a world fragmented by national boundaries and competing interests. Harvests will fail more drastically, the cities we live in will go under water.”’

And at the end of the story he quotes from a poem he wrote just before the end came, and he explains  how he was motivated to make this speech (that nobody wanted to hear) by his Judaic vision, he was an ordinary guy who loved his gin-and-tonic and putting his feet up to watch the football, but he also had this ancient Jewish passion moving in him, stirring him to speak as he did:

I wish you a good year.

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