To Choose Our Own Way

My thanks to all who made our Rosh Hashanah services so special; from the main service where Chazan Stephen’s leadership was so appreciated to the hall and children’s services, it was a wonderful honour to celebrate 5779’s arrival with you all. Yom Kippur begins with Kol Nidrei on Tuesday evening.

This is my final reflection on Scott Samuelson’s Seven Ways at Looking at Pointless Suffering. Previous reflections are [here - It is a remarkable and warmly recommended book, combining both rigorous reading of philosophical masters and more personally grounded insights drawn from Samuelson’s experiences as a teacher of philosophy in prison. But the title ... I don’t like. I get that titles need a certain ‘snap.’ But that word, ‘pointless’ sticks. At one point in the book, Samuelson gives an example of the level of suffering he considers pointless. It’s a brutal narrative, his neighbour was born with a “broken brain” and lived her a scream ‘that was a pure siren of misery,’ It sounds awful and I wouldn’t dare presume to find in her suffering point and how much the more so reason or justification. But I’m nervous about imputing pointlessness on anyone’s experience from the outside.

Dr Ros Taylor, one of the country’s leading palliative care physicians, was a member of my previous Synagogue, SAMS, and we did a series of sessions together on end of life issues. She was strongly opposed to softening legal positions on euthanasia. Her experience was that while many people could come up with theoretical positions in which they would wish for euthanasia, for themselves or for a loved one, when - God forbid - these awful situations unfolded it was only very rarely that the experience of even a slither of what we call ‘quality of life’ was not cherished. The point is that the pointlessness of suffering is a decision that should not be made from the outside of a direct experience. It is a subjective call, one that can only be made by a person suffering, not by a book.

My most cherished heroic insight into this perspective on suffering comes from the Auschwitz survivor Victor Frankl, who lived through Holocaust and reflected on the single thing that can never be taken away from a sufferer; their ability to find purpose and value even in the most barbaric of circumstances;

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been a few in number, but they offer sufficient proof, that everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of freedoms – to chose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to chose one’s own way.”

May we all be spared suffering in this year and for many years to come. But - should it come, and frankly, of course, it will come - may we find the ability to chose our own way, even there.

This is Shabbat Shuvah, I’ll be sharing some of the great insights of Maimonides into Teshuvah on Shabbat. All welcome.