On the 80th Anniversary of VE Day

 I spent a chunk of Thursday, the 8^th of May, VE Day, in a car, listening to Radio 2.

Much of the day was turned over to callers, sharing memories, letters and stories from their families.

 

There was the remarkable and remarkably sprightly 98-year-old veteran of the Bletchley Park Enigma cracking team of heroes. And another memory of a, then, young girl, dancing in the streets among the bonfires of no-longer needed black-out curtains.

 

Then there were the awful stories. A letter from a soldier writing from the front-line asking if his wife had given birth yet. The man was killed before he ever met his daughter. The daughter never met her father.

There was a moment when a journalist, sent out to some anniversary gathering, waved a microphone before a nonagenarian veteran and asked excitedly what he was thinking on such a special day, the man responded, “War is awful, just bloody awful.” And as he said it, you could feel the images he must have seen, and must still be seeing so many years later.

 

The great Israel poet, Yehuda Amichai, wrote this in 1976.

 

The Diameter Of The Bomb

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making a circle with no end.

 

War is awful, just bloody awful.

But my freedom, my very existence, depends on the willingness of those who served, on front lines and away from the front lines.

I’m thinking of one of my great-uncle, who was killed manning anti-aircraft guns and another killed in the Blitz.

I’ve been really touched by several of the members here – some of you here today – who have shared stories of your families. Joe Carlebach wanted to share the story of his father, a refugee from Nazi Germany who served in the Allied Forces who found our on or around VE day that his own parents had been murdered by the Nazis.

Rabbi Natasha shared the story of her grandmother, Parmjit, who was held as a prisoner by the Japanese in Singapore. VE Day, of course, didn’t mark the end of the war.

Our member Margo Schwartz reached out to make sure I didn’t forget the contributions made from across the Commonwealth. She’s Candian and wanted to share the story of “the 8 members of [her] family came across the ocean to do their duty and three made the ultimate sacrifice while serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force- bomber command. Just wondering,” she wrote, “after all the national celebrations if you might be remembering those in our community who fought to keep us free too.”

 

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard.

 

I’m committed to that act of memory. I think we all should be.

We should all be telling the stories of that generation. We should all be committed to that act of memory.

 

80 years ago, the Chief Rabbi of UK Orthodoxy, Joseph Hertz, responded to VE Day by calling for the Jews of this country to Bentsh Gomel.

Gomel is an unusual but beautiful blessing.

It’s a blessing that acknowledge great things done for us, despite our not being quite sure we are worthy.

The response, unusually, isn’t an Amen, but rather an acceptance that all of us, hearing someone Bentsch Gomel, coming together in freedom because of sacrifices we can never fully deserve, acknowledge a humility before what has been done for us, to allow us to be here and celebrate and live at all, in the face of the evil that swept Nazi Europe 80-plus years ago.

 

That’s my first, of three, thoughts on this special anniversary.

A commitment to remember and express gratitude for those who sacrificed their lives to defend a freedom I so enjoy and so quickly take for granted.

 

My second thought is this.

Please, please, please can we turn towards a different way to solve disagreement and balance the competing claims of our human difference.

Heartbreakingly and horrifically not even the War to End All Wars has really ended all wars. There’s a piece of my heart broken in Ukraine, and another in Israel, and Gaza too.

I was listening to the tale of Israeli prisoners taken hostage in the War of Attrition, that bubbled along between 1967 and 1973 – the little talked about מלחמת ההתשה. There were ten Israelis held in an Egyptian Prisoner of War camp, eventually held in reasonable conditions – Red Cross parcels, they translated the Hobbit into Hebrew while they were there. But initially tortured and mis-treated, one murdered. On their eventual release, for some after three years, they tried to get back to so-called normal life, but, for many, the scars never healed. And then there are new victims, the new hostages, the new deaths, in Amichai’s language, “the new larger circles of pain and time.”

 

There’s an exquisite prayer for peace culled from the writings of Rebbe Nachman by Rabbi Jules Harlow, in the Siddur of the American Conservative Movement.

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It’s heartbreaking we still need that prayer.

That’s the second thought. Peace.

 

I also looked back at the sermon I gave 10 years ago on the 70^th Anniversary of VE, I often get asked if I ever repeat sermons – I’m repeating this bit. Just for those of you who like to keep track. Once every ten years – a paragraph or two.

 

Ten years ago this week, I had been reading Martin Gilbert’s masterful (gevalt) 8-Volume biography of Winston Churchill.

Having given a speech announcing VE day in Parliament Square, Churchill, his voice cracking, as he makes final call, ‘Long live the cause of freedom, God Save the King,’ goes into the Chamber.

 

He gave thanks to the parliament that had supported his leadership. And he said this, “the strength of the Parliamentary institution has been shown to enable it at the same moment to preserve all the title-deeds of democracy while waging war in the most stern and protracted form.

“The liveliness of Parliamentary institutions has been maintained under the fire of the enemy, and for the way in which we have been able to preserve – and we could have persevered much longer if need had been.”

 

We live in a time of what David Runciman calls Dictator Envy. It’s easy to fall for the notion that strength comes from bullying, from squashing contrary voices or from simply demanding that my way is the best way simply because is it my way.

That’s wrong, dangerous and – the lesson of VE – ultimately weak.

It was wrong, dangerous and weak 80 years ago, it remains wrong dangerous and weak today. Strength, real strength, the strength required to defeat the Nazis, comes from wanting to learn from difference, valuing debate and a privileging a process that can lead to best outcomes above my own sense of my own right-ness.

 

To conflate my own opinion with what must be true is turn oneself into an idol, a dictator and a fool. To privilege and fight to ensure the voices of others are heard, even in difference and disagreement, is holy and, ultimately, the source of our strength.

 

It’s important, perhaps even more important today than ten years ago to remember the strength of democracy in the face of demagogy. It’s important to remind ourselves and remind those we vote for the kind of strength we wish for this country in these uneven times. Democratic strength takes a kind of strength.

 

 

 

To those who paid with their lives to bring us, in Europe, 77 years of peace, thank you.

May nation not lift up sword again nation, and let none still turn towards the fake promise of war.

And may we always resist the seductive, dangerous but ultimately weak charms of dictators.

 

Shabbat Shalom

A Thought on Signing the Jerusalem Program Declaration in Connection to the WZC Elections

 Shared anonymously, this is my response to a member who had some - very good - questions about whether they could sign the declaration given the position they take on Israel.

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The Program isn’t meant to be a rigid ideological litmus test — it’s meant as a broad articulation of values to which a broad range of those who support the free and safe thriving of the Jewish State can stand behind.

Explicitly – as can be seen by the slates standing for these elections across the world - it doesn’t dictate how you relate to these broad articulations. It’s not a vote of support of the current political leadership of Israel.

 

In particular, for me, and I suspect you and I are in quite similar places on this;

I’m delighted to see the commitment to democracy so firmly entrenched in the opening line.

It’s noteworthy that there is no ‘bad-mouthing’ of the Diaspora in the programme.

 

As for the plank, ‘Settling the country as an expression of practical Zionism,’ I don’t read this as either justifying illegality or settling as Jews to the exclusion of Palestinians and Arabs. I oppose illegal Jewish settlements in any part of the West Bank and I have no concerns signing the Program feeling that.

For me, and I don’t even think it’s a willfully generous read, I think the plank means that it’s not enough to theoretically believe that there ought to be a Jewish State. It means that someone needs to live there to make that desire so. I haven’t made that decision. I don’t think I ever will. But I respect those who have. Without them, there wouldn’t be a State.

 

Is that clearer?

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I hope this is helpful to others.

On Yom HaAtzmaut - Israel's 77th Independence Day - Timidity and Complexity

New London Synagogue was founded on the basis of a refusal to be timid and a willingness to communicate a complex idea rather than retreat into a self-willed blindness.

It was a technical issue, a theological question about how the Torah came to be.

On the one side the claim was made that the Torah was dictated by God to Moses in a 40-day spurt and done, rendered perfectly divine and immutable.

On the other side the claim was that the Torah was made up by humans, adding or subtracting based on their own values from one day to the next.

Into that polarity stepped Rabbi Louis Jacobs seizing, well, neither pole. Neither is it the case that the Torah has no history, and no humanity involved in its composition. But neither is it simply the product of human vicissitudes, devoid of any holiness.

And there were those, back then, who criticised Rabbi Jacobs for making public what many felt should have been kept private, for advocating for the complexity, rather the simple and obviously wrong. Rabbi Louis  Jacobs, the greatest Rabbi of the 350-year history of Anglo-Jewry, was excommunicated.

He used to say, I can still hear him say it, “that the advantage of being in hot water is that it keeps you clean.” I also have in mind a wonderful paragraph from Chaim Bermant, “One is always accused of 'washing dirty linen in public' and of 'giving ammunition to our enemies. … But if linen isn't washed in public, it isn't washed in private either and is generally allowed to accumulate until it stinks to heaven."

And so to Israel.

I mean the very name itself – the Biblical explanation for the origin of the Biblical name given to our ancestor Jacob - suggests wrestling – complexity and struggle.

But I mean the modern state.

In this week in which Israel has celebrated the Anniversary of Independence, I listened to a podcast which decoded the scrawled handwritten diaries of David Ben-Gurion – the man who declared Israel’s independence on the 5^th Iyyar some 77 years ago. David Ben-Gurion wrote of his conflict as he announced independence.

 “I mourn amidst the rejoicing,” he wrote, acknowledging that none of his Chiefs of Staff agreed with his decision. Complex. Nowadays, of course, the Day of Memory – Yom HaZikaron is the day that leads into the Day of Independence, it’s a Jewish trop, of course, that our tears and our celebrations go hand-in-hand.

But even then, back in 1948, there were divisions and complexities, not even just from the Arab League. Even within the nascent State, Socialist factions and Herut factions fought one another, I mean that quite literally. Following the lead of the two principal political factions of the day, Mapai and Herut, the pre-State militia of Mapai – the Haganah - fought the pre-State militia of Herut - Etzel. It resulted in disaster. 19 people died in a Jew vs Jew fight when a ship called the the Altalena was shelled in the very midst of the War of Independence.

This came against the backdrop of military invasion from beyond the newly created State, and also attacks from Arabs inside of Israel.

I don’t know if this is sounding familiar.

There was an invasion across a border – check.

There was politicisation of Israel’s defence establishment – check

And there was Arab on Jew, and Jew on Arab violence within Israel – check.

And there was even Jew on Jew violence within Israel – check.

Let me just do that last of these in a touch more detail.

This week, just as every Yom HaZikaron for the past 20 years, the Bereaved Families Forum and Combatants for Peace have held a joint Memorial service where all the losses of these past decades, of both Jews and Palestinians can be acknowledged.

 It’s a remarkable event. Hundreds of people gather in person, thousands more on-line in both Palestinian and Jewish homes, and brave, brave Jews and Palestinians speak of their awful loss and their refusal to see in the face of the other inhumanity. Brave, brave people speak of their insistence that there has to be a better way. My heart was broken, this year, particularly by Liat Atsili a survivor from Kibbutz Nir Oz, a woman taken hostage and subsequently freed, whose partner, the father of her three children, was murdered on the 7^th October.

Atsili, citing Levinas, said this “we don’t get to chose the others we face, we must accept the others we receive and the test lies in the extent to which I accept my responsibility.” That’s her response to the awful invasion of her home, her life and her loved ones – to acknowledge, as she put it, “This responsibility is the very embodiment of freedom.” Astounding.

And while that ceremony was going on, a group of Jewish thugs, encouraged by a Likud-affiliated mayor in Ranana, attempted to invade and break into a Synagogue – Jews breaking into a Synagogue – which was trying to screen the ceremony.

The photos are terrifying – Rabbi Gilad Kariv MK called it a "pogrom." Jew launched against Jew.

For the sin of what exactly, refusing to see every Palestinian as evil. For insisting that, as another speaker put it, “pain is pain, pain doesn’t discriminate.”

There are those who look at what is going on today, what has been going on for the past 77 Years of the life of the Israeli State through a lens of polarity and simplicity – Israel is either simply right, or simply wrong.

And those who refuse to clutch wholeheartedly to one pole or another can be pilloried, excommunicated in the language of the Jacobs Affair, or, perhaps better in today’s parlance, cancelled. And here we are.

It’s not great. It’s not going to get better. And it’s certainly not going to get better by pretending there are simple truths to this complexity. It’s not going to get better by being timid.

The only way to get better is to keep insisting that different truths can be true at the same time.

It can be true and it is true that an awful attack was waged against Israel, not just on 7^th October, but time and time and time again.

It can also be true and it is also true that Israel has caused great pain to innocent Palestinians.

It can also be true that Israel is a victim of malicious falsehood and held to standard above what could ever be expected to be just. It can be true that the Palestinian leadership has failed, again and again, to seize the opportunities to build towards peace.

But it can also be true that terrible things have been done in the name of Israel, particularly by far-right nationalists who have been allowed to get away with criminality by supposedly more mainstream political leaders. And it can be true that Israel has also sought to block pathways towards rapprochement and Palestinian self-determination.

It can be true that Israel has a right to exist in safety. It can also be true that Israel can never find safety without all the people inside and across her borders believing that they should also be invested in that peace.

I’m not suggesting that’s easy. In fact that’s precisely the point. If it was easy, it would already be wrong.

So where to go? What is our role, as British citizens, living so far away from the awful harsh realities of terrorist attacks and existential threat.

In March, Rabbi Natasha and I were in Israel. We travelled to the Gaza Envelope and met with hostage families, indeed we welcomed to this very Bimah last Shabbat Itay Shabi who survived the attack on Kibbutz Beeri.

And we also met with Rabbi Tamar Elad Applebaum. Rabbi Tamar is a native Yerushalmite, whose fallen brother is remembered every year on Yom Hazikaron. And she shared with our group a famous verse from Psalms, recited, of course, at Jewish weddings.

 אם אשכחך ירושלים תשכח ימיני

 תִּדְבַּק-לְשׁוֹנִי, לְחִכִּי--    אִם-לֹא אֶזְכְּרֵכִי:

אִם-לֹא אַעֲלֶה, אֶת-יְרוּשָׁלִַם--    עַל, רֹאשׁ שִׂמְחָתִי.

Citing a 17^th C Turkish Rabbi I had never heard of she shared that the verse couldn’t, Ha’as V’Shalom, be about picking on right-handed people above left-handed ones, rather it had to be about the two principle seats of the psychological self in Jewish thought – rigour – Gevurah – understood to be archetypally connected to our left hand side, and love – Chesed - on the right.

To forget about Jerusalem, therefore becomes to lose the side of ourselves which is about love. To forget about Jerusalem is to walk away from the mess, to cease to care and to become an uncaring person.

תִּדְבַּק-לְשׁוֹנִי, לְחִכִּי

Our tongue becomes cleaved to our palate, we lose the ability to speak.

Our role can’t be to forget, or to lose the ability to speak.

We have to lean in.

Show we care, we count.

We have to – she was speaking to a bunch of Rabbis – but I’ll share the responsibility with you all today – we have to lean into the possibility of care, of kindness. We see these things all the time, in Israel, amongst Jews, amongst Palestinians, even in Gaza. People who love and care, even despite all the pain and fear. People who see the pathway of violence, and refuse to be seduced by the surface attractiveness of a false belief – the belief that there is a wall high enough, or a military response terrifyingly violent enough to bring peace and security to the region.

I’m not suggesting that’s easy. In fact that’s precisely the point. If it was easy, it would already be wrong.

I’m not  -  in case you have entirely misunderstood everything I’m trying to say today, I’m not an apologist for Hamas or anything like that. I’m trying to say something entirely different. I’m trying make a case for the necessity of admitting multiple truths in order to allow for the co-existence of multiple peoples.

I’m tired of trying to hold a middle ground where alternate claims can both be true – and indeed can both be false. I’m sacred of being pilloried or cancelled or excommunicated for speaking out on this issue. And I’m thousands of miles away from where the pain of this situation is felt most bitterly.

But we can’t forget Jerusalem.

In fact, I think it’s our responsibility, humbly and aware of our distance and privileged Western existence, to speak up and out into this nasty atmosphere where difference is weaponized and epithets and worse are hurled, to try and make the case that there are innocent, decent, brave, non-violent actors on all sides.

They need us to magnify their voices. They need us to seek to lower the polarised narratives. They need us to say that their bravery is heard. It’s going to be on us to speak a with a cooler voice from outside the crucible that is the Middle East. Not because we are naïve but because distance affords and obliges us to see multiple things can be true at the same time. We, in this country, are not needed to be one-eyed when facing the desperate complexity of what it means to believe in and pray for and work for the safety of all of those living in Israel, Jew and Arab alike.

If you feel the need to steel yourselves to understand more to do this work – I recommend watching the Joint Memorial Service –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIW-9Xakca4 

Or look for the web sites of organisations such as Standing Together, or A Land for All.

https://www.standing-together.org/en

https://www.alandforall.org/english/?d=ltr

Israel’s survival for 77 years is a remarkable achievement in the face of so much aggression and violence. Just think what she could achieve if a path out of violence could be found.

Shabbat Shalom

 

Elephants on the Seder Plate

  

It’s going to be a crowded Seder Plate; elephants aplenty.

 

What follows is drawn from a superb article by Rabbi Mishael Zion available here https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/how-do-we-celebrate-seder-with-the-elephant-in-the-room/  (those of us who know the Different Night Haggadah, he is the son of its lead author, Noam).

 

Rabbi Zion wrote about the elephants that will be at his own family Seder, and at the Sedarim of so many of those he has been teaching this year.

‘I travelled,’ wrote Rabbi Zion, ‘from Israel to Boston for four days of pre-Passover teaching. Everyone seemed to be asking different versions of the same question: “How can I celebrate freedom when there are hostages still in Gazaa?,” “My daughter has told us that she won’t come to the seder if we mention Israel. What should I do?” or “I want to do seder with my parents in New Jersey, but I can’t go if my Trump-supporting cousins are there.” Back in Israel,’ Rabbi Zion continued, ‘families are dreading gathering around the seder table with relatives who don’t share their views on the war in Gaza or differ greatly in their opinions about Israeli politicians or government decisions.’

At first glance, Rabbi Zion doesn’t seem to be listing different versions of the same question, but rather radically different questions. The different reports are certainly driven by different pains, fears and, even loves. But Rabbi Zion has to be right, they have to be seen as the same question.

 

The question is – “How can we do this together?”

 

At this point in the life of the Israeli State, in this current global geo-political climate, in a world where our opinions and emotions and even our brain chemistry is being drawn into positions of difference and radical opposition, this is the elephant; “How can we do this together?”

 

Rabbi Zion considers the place of the Wicked Child, still invited to the Seder, still afforded a place in the Haggadah. “The text of the Four Children,” he writes, “invites us to recognize that each child responds differently to the story of our people.” 

He then shares an insight into the Haggadah which was, for me, new.

“But what of the parental response? It is commonly understood that the Haggadah tells us to hit the wicked child’s teeth for betraying the Jewish collective. But a careful reading reveals that the Haggadah does not say הכה את שיניו – hit his teeth. Rather, the Hebrew text says הקהה את שיניו – blunt his teeth, take the bite out.

“How do we take the bite out of sharp, morally misguided or offensive questions? Under every sharp question asked by a family member lies a legitimate concern or a shared value. Recognizing the shared value takes the edge off.”

It’s a remarkable suggestion. What if we canonise, even celebrate, the questions that seem to us unacceptable? What if we could accept the question that could drive us to a sharp response were we to be at any other table on any other night, and certainly if we were to be sat scrolling through the algorithmically curated social media feeds of our lives, and instead take the sharpness away; recognising the legitimate concern or shared value?

Can we meet one another across a Seder plate, even with an elephant – or four - in the room?

I hope so, for that is the only way in which healing, and freedom, will come.

Long Live Degenerency

My wife is doing some work on one of the fathers of modern Art Therapy, Hans Prinzhorn, who worked with patients in the psychiatric hospital of Heidelberg University in the 1920s and early 1930s. After his death, the Nazis murdered many of the artists but also included some of the art in an extraordinary exhibition – Entartete Kunst – Degenerate Art.

 

The Picasso Museum in Paris is currently hosting an exhibition of the same name, collecting together art that survived the Nazi attack on this so-called degenerate culture and telling the story of the Nazis’ relationship with Entartete Kunst. Josephine wanted to go, she invited me to go with her. I enjoy hanging out with my wife.

The exhibition is, I think, one of the most stunning and important I’ve ever seen. Partly because of the way it tells a story about what happened then, but principally because of what it tells us about what’s happening now.

Hitler, as we probably know, fancied himself as an artist. He wasn’t a good artist, he was rejected by the academy of Fine Arts in Vienna twice. And he never forgave … well millions of people. And by the time he’s become Chancellor of Germany – and it’s worth remembering he was indeed elected Chancellor of Germany in a democratic election – he’s prepared to take his revenge. And art and artists were denigrated, banished, destroyed, exiled and murdered. And in July 1937, the Nazis opened Entatete Kunst – more than 700 works were shown on walls painted with hate-filled slogans, “Revelation of the Jewish Racial Soul” or “Deliberate Sabotage of the Armed Forces.” 4 million people visited – it’s staggering really to imagine and amazing to see the grainy footage screened on the walls of the Paris exhibition of crowds of well-to-do German housewives and Nazi high officials wandering round the gallery.

The list of artists whose work was exhibited is a roll call of the greatest artists of the time. There were Jews – for Jews were among the greatest artists of the time – and the Nazis certainly saw the Jews as degenerate.

There was Chagall – this was included in the exhibition – it’s called The Pinch of Snuff or sometimes The Rabbi of Vitebsk and was acquired by the Kunsthalle in Mannheim – the Nazis dragged the art and the artist through the streets with a message attached saying, “Taxpayer, you should know how your money was spent.” I knew the art – I just, until I saw it on the wall this week, realised quite how large and powerful a piece it was.

There was Oskar Kokoshchka, whose work Alter Mann was exhibited – he lost his teaching position at the Dresden Academy in 1933 and fled to Prague and then Great Britain. In 1943, he became president of the Free German Legue of Culture, the organisation founded by Anti-Nazi cultural figures in exile.

But it wasn’t just the Jewish artists who were held to be degenerate. This is Picasso’s Seated Nude. This wasn’t in the original exhibition – it was looted by the Nazis in 1940 from the collection of the Parisian Jewish art dealer, Paul Rosenberg. But the photo of this piece was used in the book, “Art & Race” by the Nazi Paul Schultze-Naumburg and ridiculed – it was shown alongside photos of the disabled as a way of … what exactly, sneering and creating a kind of guilt-by-throwing-nastiness.

And then there were the cubists – degenerate.

And the fauvists – degenerate.

And the artists who like colour or abstraction or …

This one broke my heart a little.

This is Ernst Barlach – it looked to me like a weeping angel. It was exhibited, in the contemporary exhibition under a quote from its sculptor that read, “These times don’t agree with me, I’m not to its liking, I’m not all decked out in the nationalist fashion, my mode is unracist, noise frightens me, instead of cheering when the “Heil” sounds roar, instead of making arm gestures in the Roman style, I draw my hat down over my brow.”

Barlach’s degeneracy, it seems, is being too soft, to able to experience and present through art pain and loss – degenerate by Nazi standards indeed. I stood infront of this statue and this quote and I cried.

It turns out that to the Nazis, it wasn’t just the Jewishness of the artist, it was the richness of the use of colour, or line or shape, or sense of fun or – and this is the real point – the sense of an artist being an artist.

For the point of art to express that which cannot be otherwise expressed.

I remember Tracey Emin being interviewed and asked to explain her work.

“I can’t really,” she said, “because if I could have explained it, I wouldn’t have had to have made it.”

Art exists to say things that cannot be controlled or even expressed using what we already know. Art exists to say the things that we don’t know yet, to open up the possibility of, to those who see the art and are moved by the art, to experience something we don’t already know. Great art – and my, I saw some great art in Paris this week -  makes us realise things we somehow instinctively know are true, even we could never have expressed that truth before now – before the very moment of seeing and feeling the art in our soul.

Art doesn’t fit. To create art is to commit to a kind of iconoclasm – that word that literally means a breaking of idols. And when as a dictatorial fascist regime, a government – and I’m not just thinking of the Nazi government – demands that artists fit a pre-realised sense of what truth is, that will always fail.

And even if that dictatorial fascist regime destroys art and the first gallery in the exhibition contains half destroyed pieces of Degenerate Art – the art survives, the ideas survive.

And thank God they do.

Because if we just had the things we already understood – or thought we already understood – if we just had the science we understood at any given moment, we wouldn’t have a hope as human beings. We’d be stuck never growing, never developing. We would never have made it beyond smashing rocks together. It’s the art, it’s the iconoclasm that opens up the possibility of growth, of learning, of realising the things today we didn’t understand yesterday and realising too that there are new things to learn tomorrow.

It's artists who understand, perhaps better than us normal human beings the importance of that line from Sameul Beckett’s Waiting for Godot – “Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again, fail again, fail better.”

I think that’s why art and artists so distress the dictators and the fascists and the autocrats. Because they like things the way they are – when they are in power. And they don’t want to look beyond the things they know already. They don’t like being told they are failing.

That’s why, for what it’s worth, Jews no longer offer sacrifices. Because we are artists in our religious soul. And as much as there was beauty in that observance then, times changed and we changed and there was creativity and bravery and there arose from the rubble of the destroyed Second Temple a new idea even more beautiful than sacrifices – and certainly less bloody.

That’s why, for what it’s worth, New London was founded, because Rabbi Louis Jacobs just couldn’t bring himself to tow a party line of acceptable tings that acceptable Orthodox Rabbis were supposed to say.  He wanted to say the right thing, the thing that felt perhaps uncomfortable, made people feel uneasy. He wanted to speak truth. I think Louis Jacobs, if he had been to Paris to see this remarkable exhibition would have been proud to consider himself one of the degenerates.

I think we should all be proud to consider ourselves degenerates.

For, in truth, we are all degenerate in our way. Artists of our own lives, trying failing, trying again, failing again, failing better. All of us, a little too tall, or a little too short or a little too fond of bright colours or pastel colours of sharp lines or hazy lines or … in our idiosyncrasy and perfect individuality – we disturb and disrupt this awful notion that seems to powerful and so dangerous in our time and in the 1930s too – that we should all subscribe to some kind of prescribed appropriateness. Vive la difference.

Salute the bravery of those once did, and continue to, stand up to autocracy and fascism.

Salute the bravery of those who once did, and continue to, seek to try again, fail again and fail better.

Salute the incredible diversity of humanity in all of its forms and in its creativity most especially.

As Otto Dix, another of the great artists oppressed by the and exhibited in 1937 in Munichg and today in the Picasso Museum in Paris, as Otto Dix said,

 Restons donc ce queue nous sommes. Vive la degeneresence.

Let's be that which we are. Long live degenerecy.

Shabbat Shalom