Thursday 10 October 2019

How To Break Out of Impasse




The story is told that the rabbis were arguing. Nothing unusual about that, of course, but this argument spirals out of control. Rabbi Eliezer is on one side, producing claim after claim while everyone else opposes him.
Rabbi Eliezer calls forth miraculous demonstrations of his positions, but these too fail to persuade. Eventually, Rabbi Eliezer calls for the walls of the very Bet Midrash to cave in to prove his point. And the walls begin to cave in.
And Rabbi Yehoshua rises to rebuke the very walls. ‘If scholars are arguing, mah tivchem, what’s in it for you to get involved?’ So the walls fall no further, out of respect for Rabbi Yehoshua, and refuse to rise, out of respect for Rabbi Eliezer - ועדיין מטין ועומדין  - and they still lean and stand to this day.

The last time I taught this famous Talmudic text was at the House of Lords at a reception for parliamentarians at the height of the impasse on Brexit. His excellency, the Israeli Ambassador, was there. Mr Ambassador, a pleasure to welcome you here tonight. We share our deepest wishes for a year of sweetness and peace to the country you represent on these shores.

For you, and for anyone else who wasn’t here on the first day of RH, I spoke then, of the danger of arguments in these strange times. I spoke about how easy it is for arguments to spiral to places where they damage the very structures of the society that we would most wish to protect. A look at either Brexit or indeed this Talmudic passage serves to illustrate how quickly society can be damaged if we can’t learn better how to disagree. Let me take the case of the Talmudic passage. I’m not sure you came here to listen to me profess expertise about Brexit.

In the aftermath of this stalemate of the walls, the majority take their frustration out on Rabbi Eliezer.

His legal decisions are deemed void – things he thought useful were burnt. And he is excommunicated. And Rabbi Eliezer cries and as his tears hit the ground a third of the harvests of the world are destroyed. Even dough in the hands of the bakers, we are told, becomes spoiled. The world spirals to the brink of collapse.

On Rosh Hashanah I suggested a new way of testing the quality of our arguments. I suggested that instead of focussing on whether we won or lost any particular debate we should, instead, focus on the quality of the relationship that emerges on the other side of disagreement. Any disagreement, even one in which we lost, which resulted in us feeling closer to our fellow disputant, we should count a success. And any dispute, even one we won – or at least thought we won – which resulted in us feeling further away from our disputants – we should count as a failure.

Go with me here. Let’s suppose that somehow that sermon touched some deep nerve within out broken society and right across every spectrum in our land, arguments began to shift, and we all started to take more care over relationships than winning arguments
(And, you know, I would take that. As a rabbi, that would make for a pretty good outcome for a sermon.)
Even if all of that happened, there would still be a problem.


Even supposing the Rabbis who so disagreed with Rabbi Eliezer did so gently and carefully, the walls would ועדיין מטין ועומדין – still be leaning and standing.
Even, and forgive me for sliding back onto the front pages, if the Brexiters and the Remainers and the Prime Minister and the EU and everyone else started listening to one another carefully and responding with decency and humanity, we would still be stuck with this problem of how to get a non-border border across the island of Ireland. And there’s another impasse in the aftermath of this second election in Israel. And it’s not just the front pages.
We are all living with impasses in our lives. There are certain blockages I can’t shift interpersonally – in my relationship with other people, and even impasses I can’t shift intra-personally – inside my own self. We are stuck, a lot.

And my first day Rosh Hashanah sermon isn’t going to solve any that. So tonight, I want to think about how we get beyond these points of impasse.

Let me start with the greatest impasse threatening the planet …. the very fabric of our planet.

Gus Speth is a veteran ecological activist. As an appointee of US President Jimmy Carter in the late 70s, he served as Chairman of the American Council on Environmental Quality. And this is his reading of the impasse facing us when it comes to the future of our very planet.

“I used to think,” Speth wrote, “the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought,” he continued, “that with 30 years of good science we could address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy and to deal with those we need a spiritual and a cultural transformation and we scientists don’t know how to do that.”[1]

Speth’s point is that the things that prevent our moving forwards when we get bogged down aren’t really factual disagreements. I know there are factual disagreements about exactly how well or how badly we are doing, or might be doing if we pursued one path or another. But the thing that bogs us down isn’t that. I don’t think the reason we are not taking more action to save our planet is that we can’t agree about the science. I think the same probably goes for any other area of our lives when we are at impasse. The problem is, to use Speth’s terminology, ‘spiritual and cultural.’

Our impasses have more to do with our faith than our scientific prowess or powers of logic.

I wonder if a little spiritual cultural history might help. For three hundred years or so, since the time of Immanuel Kant, we have become increasingly interested in the importance of human beings. Kant’s demanded, ‘that every human being should be considered an end in themselves, never to be treated as a means to another end.’ And as the Enlightenment went on we began to invest ultimate value in human beings. Simultaneously, we began to down-grade our fascination in God. Spinoza died less than 50 years before Kant as born. And that literal kind of theology that Spinoza attacked, has been on the wane ever since.

Certainly, treating every human being as deeply worthy is a good thing. But there’s a problem in trusting too completely in the wonderful thing that is the human being.

As romanticism has died away we’ve learnt, from Freud and others, of our unconscious predilections towards violence. In the last century, we’ve narrowly survived the genocidal destruction of our people. And right now, we might be living through human-caused destruction of our planet. It’s hard to champion human beings as the ultimate locus of ethical value when we are proving ourselves so unworthy of this crown. Maybe, rather than placing all our efforts in the inalienable rights of individuals, it would be wiser to develop critical concern regarding the human – particularly the human with any kind of power.

Actually, that’s exactly what we are doing. Jonathan Boyd, of the Jewish Policy Research Institute, recently surveyed[2] how trust in more or less every authority figure is in decline. We don’t trust politicians, doctors, teachers, police officers, academics, journalists … on the list goes.

No wonder we tend to get stuck in impasses. “We stopped believing in God long ago.” Boyd writes, “But now we’re struggling to believe in the one thing with which we replaced God. Ourselves. Modernity compelled us to throw God out. But now” he continues, “we find ourselves adrift, unable to rely on ourselves, unable to turn [anywhere else.]” I think that’s right. As a society, we gave up on faith in the Divine and now find ourselves without faith in humanity. No wonder we don’t trust one another very much. No wonder we are wary of the sorts of concessions that offer a way out of impasses.

If we are going to find ways to move forward, we are going to have to find something in which to believe. Let me suggest this – religion.

I know religion has picked up its fair share of knocks in this don’t-trust-anyone-in-power world. But I don’t mean that kind of religion. Go with me. There is a notion of religion, let me take the case of Judaism, that is deeply concerned with revelation – Sinai; Kashrut and Tefilin and the like.

I don’t mean that side of religion. I love Kashrut and Tefilin and the like, but that’s not what I am talking about today. I’m almost talking about a very different kind of religion; the kind of religion we talk about on Yom Kippur; “who will live and who will die, who by fire and who by water.” In our greatest prayer of this season, the Unataneh Tokef we acknowledge ourselves;

“Forged from dust and destined to dust, like a shard of pottery, withering grass, a fading flower, a passing cloud, a fleeting dream.”

I know that religion, even Judaism, has overplayed its hand in the past. But somewhere in our great faith, somewhere, I think, in every great faith, are these these central conceptions of who we are and how we come to be. To religion teaches that there is a power that is above us, that we exist as a result of an unjustified gift of creation, that our wisdom and power aren’t something to rely upon, but rather a mystery. Great religions teach humility, not hubris, they teach us to doubt our own inerrancy.

Great religions teach that our own point of view isn’t going to be the most important thing in the universe.

This kind of view on the world creates a space in which creativity, in the face of an impasse, can grow. It creates a possibility for finding in the opposite view something which could indeed improve our own self-centred sense of what right must be. In its deepest place, faith is the opening which can free us from the prisons of the present to encounter different futures.

It’s the thing that I think can break an impasse – the humility that comes with knowing that we are not the most important thing in our own worlds. If we think we are each the masters of our own worlds we’ll back ourselves into intransigence at every opportunity. On the other hand accepting that we don’t know everything, that there is knowledge beyond our reach might just open up the possibility of finding new ways to encounter old problems. You can’t learn anything new if you think you already know everything there is to know.

And the spiritual approach of a great religion is a great immunisation against the notion that I, or you, or any of us can know all there is to know.

So that’s my message to any political leaders out there, trying to work a way out of an impasse – the less you claim for your own inerrancy, the greater the chance you have of finding new solutions unseen and unknowable when we are committed only to our own power. What about the rest of us? What about our personal impasses? Here’s a way to access the sort of spiritual solution to the impasses of the world personally. Pray.

Prayer is the experience of standing before something greater than yourself. It’s a training in absolutely the kind of humility I’m describing. To pray is to open up in one’s self the possibility of a path towards the future that reason cannot find.

Again, when I’m talking about faith or prayer, tonight, I don’t mean the specifics of the words of our Machzor, as much as I love the specifics of the words of our Machzor.

I mean the kind of prayer that involves standing before one’s sense of how we come to be here; aware of how little we know, and seeking to become worthy of the gift of our existence. How do we become the people we dare dream we might become? The night is still young.
We’ve a long way to go.

So try this, with me, with Chazan Stephen.
Try prayer, try faith. Let your mind settle on a problem, an impasse, and turn towards something greater than yourself with humility. Just in case it’s not completely clear, I’ve no interest in whether you say you believe, or you don’t believe in God as you do this.
Try to stand this way, sensitize the heart and allow yourself to reach for something new. Yom Kippur is a great day to turn towards the new. This service began with a prayer Kol Nidrei that allows us to take a risk with our promises about tomorrow. Take that risk.

I mean, if you feel you’ve got all the possibilities for your life ready to go, if you feel you need to assistance turning your today into the tomorrow you would wish for yourself, go for it.
But if you are feeling trapped or stuck. And I know I am, try having a little faith. Try, even, prayer.

For there is something beyond our reach. And I have faith that it can help. And I hope it can help us all.

May this year come with new possibility, health and happiness for us all.

Chatimah Tovah



[1] It’s hard to trace the origin of this quote. It’s on this Wikipedia page, but the link no longer functions. This says the quote came in a ‘BBC Radio interview in 2013’

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