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
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