The Movement for Reform Judaism

So: is this how it is going to be now? The taped-off streets; the nervous glances; the avoidance of the first tube carriage and the back seat on the bus; the heightened alertness; and checking the colour of your fellow-traveller’s skin? A life of suspicion, anxiety, random inconvenience, moments of panic and paranoia, we Londoners alert and in fear - for ourselves and our children - for the rest of our lives?

Is this how its going to be now? Discovering what artists we are, how imaginative we can be: picturing what’s inside that padded jacket, that green rucksack, that bus we’ve just missed? and inside the heads of those we pass on the streets, do we paint murder and mayhem - or merely the same worries and cares as the rest of us? Now that we know, we Londoners, that it was not a one-off, now our imaginations can really get to work. Who ever talks of a ‘two-off’? It doesn’t exist. The second wave of bombs did not have to go off to do their work. They destroyed something else: they killed off some innate hopefulness in us, our lingering hope that July 7 was our own small-scale 9/11 - one act, on one day, seared in the memory forever. And that if on that day, bayom hahu , that very day, you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, then that would be it. A terrible tragedy - but then life would go on for the rest of us. One-offs create bad memories. But two times - and our imaginations go into overdrive. This is how virtual terrorism works - it seeps into our skulls and colonises our minds and explodes our hopefulness, our capacity to believe that goodness and generosity and love can triumph over evil.

Back in December - already so long ago, but let’s try to go back that far - back at the end of the old year, the secular year, as 2004 was fading, we thought the tsunami had shown us terror, the randomness and contingency of life, of who would live and who would die. It touched the lives of many of us here, directly and indirectly, people we knew were missing, or travelling on holidays that had suddenly become disrupted by the indifferent cruelty of nature: seaquakes and floods of Biblical proportions. But back then, in the dying days of the old year we thanked our God - or what was left of our belief in God - that such terrors would never be visited on us, and we dug our hands in our pockets and gave our thanksgiving offering of money: and this was genuine generosity and compassion and empathy as well as a secret, atavistic, propitiatory sacrifice - we give something of what we have and hope, imagine, that by giving it will pacify the gods so that it never happens to us. For we, we consoled ourselves, we lived in the safety of Europe, far away from sudden random disasters. Natural disasters that are often described - unironically, as if oblivious to the blasphemy they articulate - described as ‘acts of God’. The tsunami, terrible and terrifying as it was, still kept the terror far enough away. Or so we thought. We with our insurance policies and pension plans and health care schemes and our grumbling about the speed bumps on the roads and the price of petrol and the 1001 daily concerns that define the quality of the lives we lead with such unremarkable ease.

And this is what we have been wont to do, historically, as we console ourselves about our lives. We tell ourselves stories, comforting fictions, as if to the child within us who needs a reassuring bedtime tale the better to sleep at night, the better to ward off the nightmares that disturb our nights and the terrors that haunt our days. Bad things, bad people - they happen somewhere else. They aren’t sitting next to you on the bus or the tube. But Al-Qa’eda is an idea more than it’s an organisation, and ideas can never be destroyed. They mutate. They travel, like a virus, on the internet and in the streets and in people’s heads and slowly, slowly the nightmares become real. And the question we, a London community, cannot help but ask now, as the New Year begins (though we can hardly bear to ask it) is this simple one: So is this how it is going to be now, till the end of our days?

For when we hear that future terrorist horrors are ‘inevitable’ - and let’s leave aside the bird flu pandemic that could come this year, or maybe next, and then we would truly be sick to the heart with fear, 50,000 UK deaths forecast, and that’s a conservative estimate, I’ve also read non-scaremongering predictions of 500,000 or even up to 2million - when we hear about inevitable terrorism horrors that will come upon us, we all become unwittingly like freelance authors and dramatists, writing scripts and scenarios in our heads: how, when, where, to whom - on train or bus, or perhaps Brent Cross, or coming to a cinema near you; by day or by night, will it be the young or the old, grandparents, babies, tourists, traders or tramps? Who of us is not at some stage of the day or week, alone or with others, who is not scriptwriting like mad, processing the terror in our heads? Never mind that a hundred people die or are seriously injured every week on our roads and we still get into our cars and cross the road with blithe innocence, this new virtual terrorism defeats rational risk-assessment hands down every time. So we all have our CCTV cameras on all the time, our inner eye scanning the future, sweeping the horizon, watching, watching, waiting to catch villainy at work, steeling ourselves against an invisible enemy, and praying we will return to our homes again safe and sound. ‘In one piece’ as we say, so nonchalantly.

It was only when I left the city for a few weeks in August that it became clear to me what we were now putting ourselves through here in London, how the events of July are lodged in us like shards of glass, like rusty nails. And as this New Year begins for us, we pause to take stock, to ask: is what is lodged in us turning septic? is the toxin of terror poisoning us inside? is it effecting us in ways about which we may as yet be unaware, or maybe have only a distant glimpse? Is it changing how we think? What we believe? Do we still retain our belief in goodness, in community, in religion as a force for good, in the Judaic hopefulness that individual human beings matter and that society can be transformed for the better? Or are the septic shards of fear turning us into sceptics? Because living with the pornography of violence running fearfully in our heads can not only taint our joy in life but corrupt our very souls.

So how do we retain our soul’s innocent grandeur? Our capacity to see the best in people? Our capacity to believe that love is stronger than hate? Our willingness to recognise that fragility and vulnerability and uncertainty are part and parcel of the human condition? That these feelings aren’t symptoms of weakness but rather the signature of our humanity. Almost every paragraph of our High Holy Day liturgy is making this point, albeit in an indirect, oblique way, using poetic language and symbols and metaphor to construct an alternative picture to the natural omnipotence that we can all feel if not all of the time, then for much of our waking lives: the fantasy that we are in charge of what happens to us in life. As anyone can testify who has woken up in the middle of the night with their head full of stuff and tried to get back to sleep and can’t, you’re not even in control of what happens in your head, never mind your lives. And then there’s our unexplained headaches, or neckaches, or stomach pains, the whole drama of our bodies ongoing sensitivity to stress, to strain, its capacity to break down and fail us - and we imagine we are in control of our lives?

I think there’s often something in us that hates to admit this, to face it full on. But our liturgy comes along to remind us. Its underlying message subverts the entrenched belief, conscious and unconscious, that our destiny is in our own hands. It says: you are not in control, you are limited and fragile and relatively powerless. It says that your life is like one wave in a vast sea, and that Sea of Being is infinitely more powerful than you, it can overwhelm you at any moment, crush you, or drown you; and this force or power is what our tradition calls Adonai and Elohim and dozens of other names; and it’s something that other cultures and religious traditions have called by literally hundreds of other names. Allah hu Akbar indeed: God is always greater. This is what our liturgy too is always pointing towards. Remember, it says, remember as you ride your wave, and enjoy your precipitous journey, and thrill to the energy it contains, remember, as you surf the zeitgeist, and sweep along on the current of life, remember the sea to which you belong and to which you will return.

Those of you who were here last night will have heard me talking about Ian McEwan’s latest novel Saturday , which I’m using as a sort of ‘set-text’ for these High Holy Days, and I want to read you a couple more paragraphs so we can take the themes I’m talking about today a little further, a liitle deeper. The central character of the novel is a happily married middle-aged neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne, who is wrestling with a growing disquiet that the world he’s grown up in is, after 9/11, changing in ways that he can’t quite grasp. But he is aware of a heightened sense of danger in everyday life, particularly living in London with its constant threats of terrorism (McEwan of course, wrote the novel before 7/7). In this passage, though, we see something else, something of the character’s - also the novelist’s - philosophy of life, what underpins his thinking and is shown in the book in tension with his unspoken sense of unease.

It’s early morning, Saturday February 15th 2003, the day of the anti-war demonstrations in London, and Henry’s wife Rosalind is up and getting ready to go to work, while he remains in bed:

There is grandeur in this view of life. He wakes, or he thinks he does, to the sound of her hairdryer and a murmuring voice repeating a phrase, and later, after he’s sunk again, he hears the solid clunk of her wardrobe door opening, the vast built-in wardrobe, one of a pair, with automatic lights and intricate interior of lacquered veneer and deep, scented recesses; later still, as she crosses and re-crosses the bedroom in her bare feet, the silky whisper of her petticoat, surely the black one with the raised tulip pattern he bought in Milan; then the business-like tap of her boot heels on the bathroom’s marble floor as she goes about her final preparations in front of the mirror, applying perfume, brushing out her hair; and all the while, the plastic radio in the form of a leaping blue dolphin, attached by suckers to the mosaic wall in the shower, plays that same phrase, until he begins to sense a religious content as its significance swells - there is grandeur in this view of life, it says, over and again.
There is grandeur in this view of life. When he wakes properly two hours later she’s gone and the room is silent. There’s a narrow column of light where a shutter stands ajar. The day looks fiercely white. He pushes the covers aside and lies on his back on her side of the bed, naked in the warmth of the central heating, waiting too place the phrase. Darwin of course, from last night’s read in the bath, in the final paragraph of his great work Perowne has never actually read. Kindly, driven , infirm Charles in all his humility, bringing on the earthworms and planetary cycles to assist him with a farewell bow. To soften the message, he also summoned up the Creator, but his heart wasn’t in it and he ditched Him in later editions. Those five hundred pages deserved only one conclusion: endless and beautiful forms of life, such as you see in a common hedgerow, including exalted beings like ourselves, arose from physical laws, from war of nature, famine and death. This is the grandeur. And a bracing kind of consolation in the brief privilege of consciousness.
Once, on a walk by a river – Eskdale in low, reddish sunlight, with a dusting of snow – his daughter quoted to him an opening verse by her favourite poet. Apparently, not many young women loved Philip Larkin the way she did. ‘If I were called in/ To construct a religion/ I should make use of water.’ She said she liked that laconic ‘called in’ – as if he would be, as if anyone ever is. They stopped to drink coffee from a flask, and Perowne, tracing a line of lichen with a finger, said that if he ever got the call, he’d make use of evolution. What better creation myth? An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex living beauty out of inert matter, driven on by the blind furies of random mutation, natural selection and environmental change, with the tragedy of forms continually dying, and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with them mortality, love, art, cities – and the unprecedented bonus of this story happening to be demonstrably true.

This is an extraordinary and, I find, very moving piece of writing. First we have the rich, sumptuous, lovingly-described detail of the domestic setting: the visual images (‘the plastic radio in the form of a leaping blue dolphin’), the sounds (‘the silky whisper of her petticoat’), the smells (of the ‘deep, scented recesses’ of the wardrobe; the ‘perfume’). And through the accumulation of ordinary details the growing sense of significance: ‘there is grandeur in this view of life’. McEwan is evoking here what I’ve come to call the spirituality of everyday life. The attention to the detail, to the smallest things - ‘the business-like tap of her boot heels on the bathroom’s marble floor’ - are intimations of something transcendent, the grandeur of ‘that which is’, of ‘being’ unfolding moment by moment. And then the shift the text performs, from the domestic details to Darwin and his appreciation of ‘endless and beautiful forms of life’, everything from ‘earthworms’ to ‘planetary cycles’ and including ‘exalted beings like ourselves.’

Darwin, whose work transformed our thinking about ourselves (we human beings, also human creatures), and whose work, as McEwan poignantly describes, wrestled with the shift in consciousness from the traditional Biblical mythology of a Creator God to the new paradigm of creation through evolution, a story - a ‘creation myth’ - which, as the novelist says, ‘happens to be demonstrably true’ (whatever the Christian, and Jewish, fundamentalists want to think).

So McEwan is registering the move, which is the move of modernity, from formal religious thinking towards another kind of ‘religious’ thinking, a religiosity of wonder, of awe, at the everyday - the ‘low reddish sunlight, with a dusting of snow’, the ‘tracing [of] a line of lichen with a finger’, the humble, mundane act of stopping with one’s child ‘to drink coffee from a flask’. We have here the recognition that the so-called secular world, with its supposedly demythologised world view that can be explored through the lens of science, and described in terms of processes of, as McEwan says, ‘random mutation, natural selection, and environmental change’ - we have the recognition here that this mode of apprehending reality has a grandeur to it that is deeply spiritual, and that it is worth rejoicing in ‘the wonder of minds emerging’ out of this incredibly complex process of evolution, ‘and with them morality, love, art, cities...’

This is a great and wondrous text McEwan has generated, and today, Rosh Hashanah, the day our tradition calls, poetically, ‘the birthday of the world’, what better day to appreciate it? In fraught times we need the moral and poetic imagination of novels and literature more than ever. When we find the present becoming well-nigh intolerable in its constant bombardment of our souls with images and threats of terror and disaster, we need anchoring somewhere else, and poetry and art and the spiritual traditions of our own liturgy and faith - these are precious resources. Because our task now is, in Philip Larkin’s words, ‘to construct a religion’. McEwan quotes Larkin but gives the text a gentle, ironic twist: ‘If I were called in/ To construct a religion/ I should make use of water’ he quotes. Then adds: ‘She said she liked that laconic ‘called in’ - as if he would be, as if anyone ever is.’

And yet I think we are called in: called in precisely to construct a ‘religion’. This is what Rosh Hashanah reminds us. The shofar calls us to account. We each have a calling, a vocation. We are summoned to construct our own religious view of the world, and that view will evolve and grow and transform itself over the course of our lives. And it can embrace the earthly, the very worms in the humus beneath our feet, our final resting place, as well as the heavenly: our wonder at the stars in the sky, and the mystery of all that lies beyond our power of knowing. And we can utilise all sorts of texts and ideas as we create that personal religious world for ourselves, and each of us will do it differently for each of us will find an affinity with different sources of inspiration: you may love the Biblical stories of old, someone else may find inspiration from the dreams of the prophets, or the wisdom of the rabbis, or the insights of the mystics; but you may equally well love the poetry of William Blake, or Greek tragedy, or the nursery rhymes of childhood, or the teachings of the Buddah, or the novels of Ian McEwan. And any or all of these - and a thousand, thousand more - can become the building blocks you use as you construct a ‘religion’, a personal religious sensibility. We are called to be anthologists, collecting the stories and texts and songs and prayers that speak to us, and help us speak our truth, live our truth. Nobody can tell you what to put in your anthology - but, heaven knows, there’s plenty of material to choose from.

For almost three millennia now, Jews have loved language, and literature, and learning. Texts of all kinds: writing them , reading them, studying them. Not for nothing are we called ‘the People of the Book.’ Traditionally the Torah was the centre, and everything spread from that, like the rings in a tree, concentric circles of insight and inspiration, growing over generations. But God speaks in many voices and if we attune our ears, we can hear the spirit of Being speaking in all sorts of places and cultures - there is a veritable forest out there, and although we might choose to privilege our Tree, the Tree of Life, aytz chaim hi , why not celebrate the forest also?

Soon after he was liberated from Theresienstaat, a few months more than 60 years ago, Rabbi Dr. Leo Baeck spoke of the importance of Jewish learning: ‘Here we shall always find ground on which to stand safely’, he said. In our days, when the very ground beneath our feet sometimes seems so shaky, we can appreciate Leo Baeck’s wisdom. Engaging with language, liturgy, literature: this can be for us too ‘the ground on which to stand safely.’ This is our natural element, as natural as - and necessary as - the air we breathe, or the sea in which we swim.
Note: the metaphors I’m using change. They are fluid. ‘If I were called in/ To construct a religion/ I should make use of water .’ An invitation to fluidity. The ground on which to stand safely; the air we breathe, the ruach that animates all of life; the sea we swim in. This is the poetry of life. The poetry of everyday life. This is how we construct a religion for ourselves, a religious sensibility that can sustain us in uncertain times. Your life is one wave in a vast sea: and as you ride your wave, remember, celebrate, the sea from which you have come, to which you belong, and to which you will return.

Amen.

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