On Balance - the power of good and evil, A Yizkor Sermon

[I opened the sermon talking about walking through the cemetery and wondering whether the forces of death are indeed stronger than the forces of life, or indeed if the forces of good, in the world, are indeed stronger than the forces of darkness.]

 

After all it’s not even so clear to us down here that there is a heavenly court.

It’s not so clear that there is anything beyond the maggots that are the eventual fate of all mortal flesh, even back in Biblical times .

 

It’s an argument our tradition has engaged in over time and across distance.

 

When Jacob hears that his favoured son, Joseph has been devoured by wild animals he is bereft.

He speaks of his death, he speaks of going down to Sheol.

It’s the first time the Bible has spoken of what happens in the death, the first time this word has appeared in the Bible, and it prompts rabbinic comment.

Rashi says – Sheol is a grave – dark, closed, over.

Ibn Ezra castigates one of the great early translations of the Bible into Aramaic for suggesting Sheol could be understood as some kind of after-life.

He cites a verse from Isaiah^[1]

 

For Sheol cannot praise you, death can not celebrate you; they who go down into the pit cannot hope for your truth.

 

This is death as a pit, dark, hopeless, beyond the reach of life and of love.

The end.

 

But there are whispers of something other than the utter bleakness of Sheol that begin to emerge in the prophetic books – elsewhere in Isaiah the prophet suggests,

 

Thy dead shall live, awake and sing you who dwell in the dust, for your dew is as the dew of light and the earth shall bring to life the shades.^[2]

 

By the time of the Talmud, a panoply of differing views present themselves. At one point the Rabbis paint a picture of a great feast in the world to come where King David himself will take the cup of wine for grace.^[3]

 

Elsewhere more rational voices have articulated less corporeal images.

Maimonides, basing himself on a different section of the Talmud, suggests the world to come will be marked by the righteous basking in the radiance of the divine presence, void of body with [nothing surviving death but] the disembodied souls of the righteous, just like ministering angels.^[4]

 

Through time and space we Jews have argued about whether, after our death, we are to be involved a physical resurrection or just a survival of the spirit,^[5] whether any resurrection will be permanent or temporary,^[6] whether we have but this life in which to perfect ourselves or whether we will be granted with, or punished by another gilgul ­– reincarnation.^[7] We have argued about the nature of Heaven and about whether there will indeed be a hell with punishments or merely the deprivations of the heavenly.^[8]

 

Maimonides suggests that our ability to understand what happens after death can be compared to a blind person’s ability to appreciate colour,^[9] it’s perhaps his only non-controversial utterance on the whole subject of what happens after we die.

 

But for all the argument, and disagreement it wouldn’t be correct to say that Judaism just throws up her hands and shrugs in the face of this unknowable beyond. Modern Jews of every theological and denominational hue have largely divested ourselves of what Will Herberg called the ‘pseudo-biological fantasies’ of some of our earlier and more graphic predecessors, but we can’t let go of a belief in something that conquers death, something that stands on the other side of the end of our mortal reach.

 

We refuse to allow this world, these lives, the lives we remember, most especially on this day

We refuse to allow their deaths to be The End.

We refuse to give up on those who have passed away.

We refuse to let go when we stand and commemorate, when we light candles, when we give tzedakah, when we cry, when we call our loved ones zichrono l’vracha – may their memory by a blessing.

We refuse to let death conquer life.

What is it that binds us so tightly to this refusal to give the death the last laugh?

I think it is a position we take as a matter of faith.

 

This is our founder Rabbi, Louis Jacobs, in his tour-de-force survey of Principles of The Jewish Faith,

 

The strongest argument for [something existing beyond death] is that God is good and will not allow His creatures to spend their lives in efforts at attaining goodness and perfection only to be snuffed out like a candle. Men may work at improving the conditions of life here on earth and earn the blessings of posterity, but posterity itself will die. The earth itself will one day become inhospitable to life and all man’s dreams and achievements will vanish like smoke. Shakespeare’s vision of the ‘cloud-capped towers’ is true. Of what use is man’s elevated soul if this life is all there is? For all Judaism’s teachings on the values of this life can we believe that God, who created this wonderful world, will allow man to die forever with his spiritual powers at the best only just beginning to develop? Judaism never tires of assures us of the justice of God, but how can this justice be realised unless all who have striven for the good eventually find it?^[10]

 

For Rabbi Jacobs this conviction that something outlasts death is predicated on the belief that God is indeed good and kind.

If God is indeed ultimate good then, indeed, there must be something other than Sheol and its attendant maggots.

But we should be brave enough to ask the question that Louis’ articulation begs.

But who is to say God is good, who is to say that justice will, in the end, win out over the powers of chaos or destruction? Looking at the devastation and the heartbreak, the loss and the fear, bearing the memories we bear on a day like this, it’s not so clear cut.

 

And this brings me to where I left off last night.

Last night I spoke about faith – I spoke about what a person can rely upon when there is no material, corporeal substance on which to lean.

And I think we are in the same place today.

When faced with the question of what is there that is capable of competing with death we ultimately come back to a question of belief not so much in the precise nature of an afterlife we can never see, but rather a belief in the nature of the Divine.

 

I suggested that faith whispers its truths to us in a place beyond the material.

And I shared two of faith’s whispers with those who were able to join us last night.

And this is the third whisper, the third credo of my belief.

 

Hodu ladonai Ki tov, ki leolam hasdo

Praise God for God is good, God’s loving kindness is eternal.

 

The verse appears a number of times in the Book of Psalms, but I have in mind its appearance as the first and last lines in Psalm 136. Indeed the second half of the verse – the piece about God’s eternal loving kindness appears in every line of the Psalm. Every line adumbrates one great success of God or another and then in comes the chorus ki leolam hasdo.

 

For God brought Israel out of Egypt; ki leolam hasdo;

With a strong hand, and an outstretched arm; ki leolam hasdo

For God who parted the Red Sea ki leolam hasdo;

And lead Israel through it; ki leolam hasdo.

And on we go until we end were we began

Praise God for God is good, ki leolam hasdo

 

I don’t think it is supposed to be theologically complicated. I don’t think this is a Psalm forged in the furnace of the attempt to square a belief in a good, just and kind God with our experience of death, brokenness and loss.

But, nebach, I encounter this Psalm torn. Because too often when I sing it, or hear it, there is another psalm ringing around inside my mind; an unwritten Psalm –heretical, dark and desperately sad.

 

Hodu L’Adonai ki tov Ki leolam hasdo

For all the parents who passed away before their children were ready to let go

For all the loved ones who passed away leaving their lovers behind

 

And the worst line of all

 

For all the children who passed away in the lives of their parents.

 

And it’s hard, bitterly irreducible hard, to end this unwritten psalm

 

Hodu L’Adonai ki tov Ki leolam hasdo

Praise God for God is good, God’s loving kindness is eternal.

 

And I’m scared to measure up the respective load-weights of good and bad in this world.

I’m scared to put on one side of the scale all the miracles and goodness which the Lord my God has performed for my ancestors and I, and then set on the opposing scale all the loss and the heartbreak.

I can’t sing Psalm 136 as a function of my experience of the material world.

And so I don’t.

I sing the Psalm as an act of faith.

As an act of faith I proclaim that God is good and just and fair and all the rest of it.

And as an act of faith I refuse to believe that this world is the only stage on which our lives, our essence, will be played out.

This third whisper of faith provides something on which I can build not only a relationship with God, but also a relationship with my own life – and its aftermath, as well as a relationship with the lives of those I have loved and lost.

 

Again, it’s not a claim that bears proof.

But in a world of faith the belief in the power of the good and the kind in the face of the experience of loss and destruction underpins the belief in a world to come – a life beyond. It underpins a notion that some things are indeed more powerful than death.

It’s possible, I suppose, to believe in the power of good above experience of destruction without giving the label of ‘God’ to that belief, but I think that is merely semantic. To believe in the power of goodness and meaning over the power of death is, I think, to believe in the goodness of the Holy Blessed One.

 

I don’t know what happens when we die, when I will die.

I can’t count the number of angels on the pin, or the levels of heaven or hell.

I can only lean on a belief that there is something beyond this.

I can only have faith in the notion that despite all the loss, the power of good, and decency, the power of love and kindness are stronger.

Even despite all this, I believe.

---

^[1] 38:18

^[2] 26:19

^[3] Pes 119b

^[4] MT Tesh 8, based on Ber 17a

^[5] Jacobs, Principles of the Jewish Faith suggests that Maimonedes, Seliger (with an approbation of Rav Kook) and Hertz can be counted among those who, at the very east, are deeply uncomfortable with notions of physical resurrection, preferring instead the Aristotelian notion of spiritual immortality. Hertz suggests that Ha-Levi can be counted in this group too, though Jacobs isn’t convinced.

^[6] Maimonedes Maamar Tehiyat HaMaetim vs Nachmanides Shaar Ha Gemul

^[7] Luria, see Vital Shaar Ha-Gilgul

^[8] Nachmanides Shaar Ha Gemul vs Maimonedes Maamar Tehiyat HaMaetim. See also Jacobs’ discussion of Dessler’s use of images of hellish flame and fury. (loc cit p.431)

^[9] See Jacobs p.451 and sources cited there

^[10] Principles p. 449

Narrowness, Mourning and hope

We are deep in the ‘Three Weeks,’ the period which commemorates the destructions of the Temple and other Jewish national catastrophe (there is much to commemorate). The Rabbinic term is ben hamitzarim – between the narrow places. Meitzar being connected, of course to mitzrayim – Egypt.

 

And this is how our succour comes. Egypt was harsh, horrid, but led to redemption. It’s not an unredeemable suffering. Caught in a narrow places one doesn’t have a choice as to which way to turn, one simply has to move forward. The liturgy of the 9^th Av can be read as one long dirge, bitter and sorrowful, but there is a beauty in the tunes and tremendous beauty in the kinnot – the poetry associated with this time, and tight structure. Kinnot are written to specific literary conventions, a sort of Hebrew equivalent of a sonnet, as all around there are disasters and calamity these kinnot hold the pain, give it a shape, a construction, a way to head forward through the narrow places.

 

Perhaps the most well known kinnah – Eli Zion – contains yet another prod to assist us forward out of our narrow spaces. ‘Wail O Zion and her cities, like a woman giving birth.’ That’s an extraordinary image. Of course childbirth is intensely painful, but it’s not an unredeemable pain. On the contrary it’s a pain which brings, following it, the promise of tremendous joy. It’s something I have written about in the recent Quest journal (copies still available from the Synagogue office), our ritual serves to hold us, lead us, at the pace we are able to travel, from darkness to light and from mourning to hope.

 

For those of us carrying sorrow at this of  year – and it should be all of us – my blessing is that the pain should be the pain of childbirth, as intense as it may be, so shall it be, that after it should bring joy, hope and celebration.

 

Our Synagogue commemoration of Tisha B’Av is this Wednesday evening at XX and Thursday morning at XX. All are welcome, as it says in the Talmud (Taanit 30b), ‘Those who mourn for Jerusalem and its destruction will merit rejoicing over Jerusalem rebuilt.’

 

Shabbat shalom

 

 

Thoughts on a Road Accident

 

As many of you will know my son, Carmi, took one look at a cat playing on the pavement and followed the cat into the road where he was hit by a passing, and thankfully not a speeding, car.

 

He’s fine, he’s broken his leg and is not sleeping so well.

But considering how much worse it could have been – we’ll take a broken leg and not sleeping so well.

 

Language, of course, reveals so much.

What do you say about a three year old who chases a cat into the road and breaks his leg, ‘thank God.’ ‘baruch hashem’?

Is it good news or bad news?

Is it a blessing from God, a curse or a stark warning? Or just chance.

 

And how do you handle sitting in a hospital chair at three in the morning looking around the scarily named ‘paediatric high-dependency ward,’ knowing that, in the other three beds and on the other chairs, are three sicker kids and three more desperate parents.

 

I know only too well that we are a community with a member who was hit in a road traffic accident over a year ago, whose recovery is proving far, far more painful and troubling than Carmi’s green-stick fracture and a loss of sleep.

 

Odd really that this is community founded around a theological alleged blasphemy on the subject of how the Torah came to be written. All the words and all the pages and all the sermons stack up no taller than a pin on whose head some vague number of angels may or may not dance when you come face-to-face with this questions on the nature of pain and suffering.

 

It’s not an easy thing to speak about, but I want today, to share three reflections on this subject with you.

 

The first clear response finds it’s origins in the Talmudic tractate Brachot.^[1]

There is, we are told, a blessing to be said on hearing bad news. And a different blessing to be said on hearing good news.

How do you bless, asks the Talmud, if a flood sweeps across your land destroying all in its path. The good news is that the flood will bring increased fertility to the soil in the years to come, the bad news is that right now there has been destruction.

The answer is that you bless the blessing on hearing bad news.

As Jews we are not supposed to transcend the sufferings of the moment.

There is a Buddist notion that perceived suffering, perceived bad news need to be sublimated away into nothingness.

That’s not Jewish. We are allowed to weep, to cry, to cry out, to be scared, to feel loss. We are allowed, even more than this, we are commanded to experience suffering as suffering.

 

Again, in Talmud Brachot, we are told the Rabbis asked, what is suffering?

They said, losing the life of a child during the life of a parent. They agreed this was suffering.

They said, suffering from an illness. They agreed this was suffering.

They said putting your hand in your pocket expecting to find two coins and only finding one coin, They agreed this was suffering.

 

It’s a provocative text. How can one possibly equate the loss of a child in the life of a parent with putting your hand into a pocket to find less money there than one might expect?

 

The point, I think, is this; there is no experience of loss that the Rabbis are prepared to deny. None of us is, or should feel, commanded to get over our shock, our loss. None of us should feel we should, ‘get over it.’ This is a bold and quite counter-cultural Jewish insight. I’m not sure society at large allows for us to suffer unless some vague threshold of awfulness has been reached. I’m not sure the world out there allows us enough time to experience our individual suffering without chivvying us through our darker moments and dragging us from our experience of loss into normalcy.

 

I often feel this at funerals for those who have passed away at the end of a long life, perhaps a great life, a life full of achievement blighted only in its last years by illness or loss of faculties. So often I hear people expressing relief, which is of course understandable, but then, a month or so later they are in tears, they can’t work out why they are still in pain.  I often feel they’ve been dragged out of being allowed to suffer too quickly, dragged away from being able to be a mourner. We, those of us who suffer, shouldn’t be pulled out of our moments of darkness just because society might think we’ve probably cried enough because society moves too fast and cares too little for our private grief.

 

So this is the first Jewish insight into the nature of bad news.

Suffering and pain should be allowed to be bad, it should not be rushed into being deemed OK.

 

The second clear Jewish insight is this – we must reject the notion that our goodness is in anyway to be seen as cosmically significant in terms of the joys or pains we experience.

As we say in the morning service

Lo al tzidateinu anachnu mpalilim lifanecha – we don’t pray before you because of our righteousness dear God.

Who among us is worthy to suggest they are particularly blame-less, particularly worthy? Certainly not your Rabbi.

There is something in the way in which discourse on matters ecological connects to this idea. We are all, every time we flick on a lightswitch, get in a car, read a newspaper, eat or dress ourselves, chipping away at the resources of the planet. And no matter how hard we try to offset and recycle we are all making net debits.

This is the language, too, of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we don’t ask God to reward us according to our acts of decency and kindness. We ask God to carry away our transgressions, wipe away our sins, fix the scales – none of us could stand before the Great Throne of Justice proud of our successes – we all fail too frequently; Rabbi, congregant, Jew and non-Jew alike.

There is, of course, a blessing to be said when we survive an encounter with mortality – birkat hagomel

It’s an interesting response to being saved from disaster,

It is a blessing in which we thank God for saving us despite our failure to deserve being saved.

 

Carmi survived his run in with the car not because of his goodness, or mine, but because of a grace unknowable and unquantifiable and beyond.

 

Tell me oh God, asks Moses, in the minds of the Rabbis, why good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people.

And God dances away, refusing to be pinned down – like some kind of Victorian butterfly exhibit – by our desires to understand more precisely how the whole fabric of reward and punishment, cause and effect operates.

I will be gracious to those I chose to be gracious to, says God

You can see my back, but my face cannot be seen.^[2]

 

Sure there are plenty of Biblical passages that suggest warn about impending disasters with a stark and simplistic ‘you had better do this or else’ kind of logic, but, and here I agree with my colleague, friend and teacher, Jonathan Wittenberg, these texts should be understood only as warnings before disasters occur. We are forbidden from using these texts, and the logic they might suggest, after a disaster to try and explain why one child or another did or did not survive, faculties intact. This is to claim a knowledge of the face of God that is beyond human grasp.

 

So this is the second clear Jewish insight into the nature of bad things.

We are to be inured against claiming an insight into why these things happen. We are to be prohibited from claiming that success is anything other than grace and we are to be prohibited from claiming that any suffering is deserved.

 

A third reflection – a reflection on our relationship with an unknowable and impossibly mysterious divinity

Dear God, it’s just not good enough.

I know all about the doctrine of freedom of choice and the Garden of Eden. And I know I, and the other 4.9something billion people on this planet need to take responsibility for our actions, we need to accept the responsibility for holding onto our kids so they don’t run into the road and other things too, but

Dear God, it’s just not good enough.

The doctrine of freedom of choice moves me not at all.

Not if I want to pray to a good and kind God.

A couple of years ago John Humphrys interviewed the Orthodox Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, as part of an short series.

Humphrys couldn’t get past the problem of the seemingly random nature of suffering and Sacks couldn’t find a way to justify a good and kind God and the sorts of experiences that haunted Humphrys.

 

Twenty years ago, [said Humphrys] I went up to Lockerbie on that terrible night when the Pan Am aircraft was blown up and the bits fell on Lockerbie, some bits fell on houses and some bits fell on fields, those people who were in the houses were killed. And the thing that struck you walking around that ghastly evening was the entirely arbitrary nature of it, number 17 survived, number 21 did not survive.

 

How could it be possible for a good and kind God to be behind such cruel randomness? And Sacks had no good answer, for he was not prepared to give the answer I feel compelled to give.

I don’t believe in a wholly good and kind God.

I believe in a God, if such human emotions can be ascribed to the God I believe in, who sometimes is good and kind, and sometimes is cruel, and sometimes is recklessly negligent in leaving us humans alone to do our worst. And sometimes walks away, and sometimes over-reacts, and sometimes is there for me and sometimes is not.

My images of God, drawn from throughout the massive, sprawling and uneven history of Jewish discourse can’t be subsumed into a single simplistic deity. There is too much variety in God’s behaviour, too much variety in the tales we tell of God.

 

But this theology prompts this problem – if I, if we, don’t believe in God as wholly good and wholly kind, what are we doing with our prayers?

Why bother with all this fulsome praise if a bit of a plane could fall on our house without warning, without reason, without justice?

 

I had an insight into the answer to this question while in Africa. I was spending six weeks in Ghana, in a very under-developed community with cockerels. And the cockerels crowed at 2am, 3am, 4am, 7am, 9am, midday…

It turns out that cockerels don’t only crow at dawn.

This came as a surprise to me, since the very first blessing we say as part of our Synagogue service is one praising God for giving the cockerel the ability to distinguish between day and night.

Now I might have been surprised, but the Rabbis wouldn’t have been. They would have known, far better than I, the nature of the cockerel.

So why would they institute a blessing, thanking God for giving the cockerel the ability to distinguish night from dawn when the cockerel crows all night and all day?

It must be that the Rabbis want us to pray, not for the world as it is, but for the world we want live in.

It must be that the Rabbis want us to pray, not about the God we experience, but the God we would wish to experience.

A God who orders the chaos of the world, waking us only at dawn with the crow of the cock, and rewarding our efforts and forgiving our trespasses.

It must be that the Rabbis want us to pray about a God who is good and kind in the hope that every time we open our lips and meditate on the praise of the Divine, we fill the earth and heavens with more praise, more kindness and decency and that this somehow helps.

Well I believe that.

 

How could it be, asks the great twentieth century theologian, Franz Rozensweig, that our pouring good and kindness into the world doesn’t result in the world being more full of good and kindness?

It’s difficult to understand Rozensweig on hearing him read, but so beautiful.

 

Love cannot be other than effective [says Rozensweig]. There is no act of neighbourly love that falls into the void. Just because the act is performed blindly, it must appear somewhere, [and this is the effectiveness of prayer]. Prayer, though it has no magic powers as such, nevertheless, by lighting the way for love, arrives at possibilities of magic effects. It can intervene in the divine system of the world. It can provide love with direction toward something not yet ready for love, not yet ripe for endowment with soul.  Thus the prayer … is always in danger of - tempting God.^[3]

 

We pray in the direction we want the world to be.

Non-one could pray for the world in which we now live.

A world of comas and cancers, a breakages and loss.

We pray to tempt God and the world in which we live into becoming a more decent, kind and magical place.

Prayer works even if God doesn’t deserve every word of our unadulterated prayer.

Prayer works, as it were, even if it doesn’t snap us out of comas and cure us of cancers at that moment.

 

Three insights into a Jewish relationship with bad and scary news

The first truth is that suffering and pain should be allowed to be bad, it should not be rushed into being deemed OK.

 

The second is we are to be prohibited from claiming that success is anything other than grace and we are to be prohibited from claiming that any suffering is deserved.

 

And the third is that prayer works, even if God is not all good and all kind, even if we fear our words fall into the void.

 

So I should conclude these words with a prayer – the birkat hagomel I spoke of. The prayer to be said when a person has come into contact with the threat of great injury.

Siddur Page – response

Please rise

 

 

---

^[1] 60a

^[2] Ex 33

^[3] Star of Redemption

Colliding Memories and Yom HaShoah

It is the season for memories.

Last week we remembered as if we, personally, went forth, baking matzah on our backs, singing songs about goats etc. etc. All very jolly. The sufferings of Egyptian slavery have been through the wash-cycle and are bleached white and shiny. The focus of Passover is on redemption and freedom; the focus is forwards, towards Sinai, and entering the land of Israel.

 

This week we remember the Holocaust. And there is no jollity. As I write this my mind is drawn to the relationship between the march out of Egypt and the Death Marches of the last days of the Nazi era. Raizl Kibl marched from Auschwitz and later recalled;

 

‘In a frost half-barefoot or entirely barefoot, with light rags upon their emaciated and exhausted bodies, tens of thousands of human creatures drag themselves along in the snow. Only the great strong striving for life, and the light of imminent liberation kept them on their feet. [For] woe to them whose physical strength abandons them, They are shot on the spot. In such a way were thousands who had endured camp life up to the last minute murdered, a moment before liberation.’

 

So what are we doing when we commemorate Yom HaShoah? It’s not a ‘happy ever after’ kind of a story. There is, of course, a State of Israel, but there is no redemption. Nor can we rely on the oft-quoted slogan of my youth, ‘Never Again.’ There have been too many genocides, from Rwanda to Bosnia, for me to feel that there is a connection between the commitment to remember our own Holocaust and the safety of every people from this most heinous of offences.

Rather, I want to suggest two other reasons for memory.

When we remember we afford a scrap of dignity to those who were killed being told implicitly and explicitly that there lives counted for nothing, that no-one would remember. We remember to prove the Nazis wrong. Their lives did count and do count still.

And secondly, we remember to feel pain, feeling pain is good. We should expose ourselves to feeling pain, this is how we know we are alive, this is how we know we are compassionate, this is how we know we care. We remember the Holocaust because, as our own eyes prick with tears, we remind ourselves of our own humanity and our membership of the Jewish people. The Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto, Kalonymous Shapiro, suggested that when all doctrines of reward and punishment have crumbled away all that remains is the possibility of crying together, together with out fellow humans and together with a God who, Shapiro claims citing the Talmud, cries too. In this we remind ourselves that even if we cannot change the facts of the Holocaust, we refuse to accept them with a shrug of the shoulders and a flip to the back pages to check out the sports headlines.

 

We commemorate Yom haShoah at New London with a talk from Kitty Hart-Moxon, Auschwitz survivor, come to prove the Nazis wrong, come to be reminded of our shared humanity.

 

Shabbat shalom,

 

Rabbi Jeremy