The first Olympics I remember is the 1980 summer games in Moscow, the one where Alan Wells won gold for Great Britain in the men’s 100m .
Four years later, I was on
a school trip to Ireland during the LA Olympics. I sat up through the night
holding a tiny radio to my ear listening to table tennis.
I’ve even loved the winter
Olympics, even beyond the ice rink glory years of Cousins and Torvill and Dean.
I watched Eddie the Eagle in 1988 Calgary, again, staying up far too late. And
was furious when Elise Christie was disqualified in the short-track. I’m a bit
of an Olympic geek.
But I’ve never thought of
the Olympics as a safe space far from the cut and thrust of politics. In 1980,
in Moscow, the British competed, but under an Olympic flag with no God Save the
Queen anthem when Wells was presented with his Gold Medal. The USA boycotted the
event completely – without which it’s hard to imagine how Wells could have won.
I can’t remember how old I
was when I first started to read about Jesse Owens in Berlin in 1936 – a black man
proving himself faster, better, than the Aryans who were supposed to dominate
in Nazi Europe. And when I think of the 1936 Olympics in my mind’s eye are the
black and white images of the gleaming buildings, the Leni Riefenstahl shots of
the teutonic stadium.
But I do remember first
falling in love with Ai Weiwei’s extraordinary Birds’ Nest Stadium in 2008. I
was reminded of it looking at the photos of the stunning ski jump in the papers
this morning – the role of architecture as a bulwark, or as a herald to the greatness
of a nation is old. And Olympics provide opportunities to build impressive
buildings.
Of course Ai Weiwie the
stadium’s designer withdrew from the opening ceremony and at great personal
risk – he was imprisoned in solitary confinement for 81 days – spoke out
against the Chinese regime. In the run up to the London Olympics Weiwei wrote
this;
My
memory of the Beijing Olympics has not changed. It is a fake smile, an
elaborate costume party with the sole intention of glorifying the country. From
the opening to the closing
ceremony, from the torch relay to the cheers for gold medals – these all displayed the might, and the
desperation, of a totalitarian regime. Through authoritarian power a country
can possess many things, but it cannot bring joy or happiness to its people.
If it was bad in 2008, it’s
worse now. What we know about Uyghur oppression is appalling, and as a Jew, terrifying.
I watch the very same attitudes that resulted in the annihilation of millions
of our fellows play out in the face of a bullying surgent ruthless dictatorship.
There should be, surely there cannot be, any illusion as what makes the Chinese
so excited to host these new Olympics. It’s the same thing that makes the
Qataris so excited to host the next World Cup. And it’s appallingly unJewish. I
want to come back to that.
I want to acknowledge the
work of Rene Cassin and the Stop the Uygur Genocide Movement and so many others
who are standing up to the bullying might, and the shiny-baubled draw of these
Chinese Olympics, to acknowledge the call made on me to speak up, here and to
our political leaders, and the commercial sponsors whose financial support of
these tainted Olympics play to directly into the hands of the autocrats. And to
call on us all to donate our time and our money and even stick our heads above
the parapet to say that we do not accept that a sporting event is just a
sporting event, and we do not accept that it should be possible to genocidally
attack a people on the one hand, and open a hand towards the nations of the
world so we can all turn up and tune in and say how wonderful China is on the
other.
The 20th Century
teaching that haunts us as Jews when it comes to this issue is, of course, so
clear it bears only to be referenced.
I want to go back further,
much further.
To the key verse at the opening
of this week’s Torah portion
Taasu Li Mikdash V’Shechanit
Betocham.
Make for me a sanctuary and
I, says God, will dwell among them.
That last word comes as a
bit of a surprise. It’s out of keeping with the front of the verse. As if God
has said, bake for me a cake and I will eat salad.
A sanctuary, is a fancy
building, with gold and silver and drapes and leathers and all manner of
colourful pretty things. But, says God, I dwell in the people. I don’t dwell in
the building.
Don’t confuse the building
as the essence. It’s only a vehicle for the human relationship I, God, am
looking to build.
And when the relationship
with the people goes wrong, the building doesn’t offer any kind of protection –
that, of course, is the central prophetic message of so much of the Bible –
partic, of course the incredible Haftarah of Yom Kippur. Don’t tell me you are
building impressive buildings, says God.
There’s an interesting
series of portmanteaus in common parlance, greenwashing – where an environmentally
destructive organisation does something that is supposed to look impressive to
buffer their green credentials, while continuing their environmental destruction.
Or pinkwashing, or well you get the idea.
There’s a kind of humanwashing
that involved Olympics, and Olympic stadia and Olympic sports venues. Don’t
watch the people we are beguiled into accepting, look at how beautiful our
buildings are, and it’s so very unJewish.
The place of the human, in
Jewish thought, is theological. Created in the image of the divine in our
radical difference, man from woman, black skin from white skin, Uyguhr muslim
from London-based Jew. We are all equally in the image of God.
In Mishnah Sanhedrin the
rabbis ask why God created the world from one primordial Adam, one first human
being. To teach us that we all have the same father, so no-one can say my
father is better than your father.
As Heschel said, there is
only one human race. Don’t be humanwashed.
In fact the only guarantee
about the buildings is that the buildings will crumble. Prepared history unit
on a bunch of archaeological rubble. It’s the message that are passed on
between humans that have, despite all indications to the contrary outlasted the
ziggurats of Ur and the hanging gardens of Babylon.
Don’t be humanwashed by
impressive buildings.
--
What, say the Rabbis, is
the problem of the Tower of Babel? After all, if you read the Biblical verses, it
just looks like a tall building for the purposes of banding together, and what’s
the harm in that? With incredible insight into the way that big buildings can
so easily be connected to human suffering, Midrash when a brick fell and when a
human fell.
--
Don’t be humanwashed by
impressive buildings.
It’s the humans who count,
especially when they are hard to see.
Heschel, again, was the
one who noted that when we, as Jews, built out Temples out of brick and stone,
the Romans could come and destroy them, and in so doing almost destroy us. But,
instead, we built a cathedral in time, a way of treating one another by not
building, that has allowed us to outlast the Roman Empire also.
So I’m not going to get up early, or stay up
late to admire the buildings, and my sympathies with the remarkable athletes
who should be able to dazzle with their human achievements. But by such a
greater measure my sympathies are with the Uyghur. And I urge us to speak out.
Shabbat Shalom
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