Why Be Jewish - Thoughts on 'Good' by C.P. Taylor - A Sermon for Vayeitze

 

I went to see a particularly distressing play this week, Good at the Pinter Theatre. It’s a play about a man’s descent from being a debonaire German intellectual – an expert on humanism no less – into a suited and booted Nazi SS officer visiting Auschwitz to check on the progress of the Nazi Genocide of our people.

I did say it was distressing.

But it’s had me thinking about this question – what is it about being Jewish that would be lost from this world if we were to disappear? What is our unique possible contribution?

To be clear, I don’t need everyone in the world to be Jewish, I mean, if you aren’t Jewish, you go right ahead and work as hard on being the best version of who you are as you can possibly be. But if this is your gift, my gift, and my obligation, what exactly does it mean? Hi Noah, welcome to the adult part of all of this. What’s next after succeeding brilliantly at the task of reading from our sacred scriptures and sharing your insight from this podium.

In one particularly nasty – if affecting and effective - piece of writing, the Scottish Jewish playwright, C.P. Taylor, has his lead character give a lecture on the problem with the Jews. David Tenant, playing the lead role of John Halder addresses us, the audience, as if we were the potential recruits to the Nazi ideology he seeks to win over, or the smug already-Nazis he seeks to impress with his elocution and smooth patter.

Halder’s point is that the Jews are essentially individualists, looking out primarily for the self as opposed to the vision of a Nazi State – that looks out for its people as a collective – as long, of course as that collective is collectively Aryan of course. I paraphrase the speech, but Halfer cites an aphorism of Hillel, from Pirkei Avot.

“After all, it says in their Talmud,” says Halder, “That if I am not for myself who will be for me.”

Now Tenant is an affecting actor, and Taylor has written an affecting script and it’s part of the brilliance of the performance and the play that you find yourself, as a member of the audience almost nodding along as we are told that the central problem with Jews – with me, and so many of you – is that we are “for ourselves” above all. It takes a moment, even for me – sitting there with my Kippa on in the lofty heights of the upper circle to shake myself out of this.

But of course, it’s not true.

Or at least it’s as true as saying that a bridge is a supremely dangerous piece of engineering since it has only one side securely fastened to the ground while the other side dangles over a chasm.

The full aphorism or possibly our greatest ever Rabbi, Hillel, reads

“If I am not for myself who will be for me. And if I am only for myself, what am I?”

Don’t be misled by the rhetorical question. “If I am only for myself, what am I?” has a very clear assumed answer – unhuman, inhuman, failures at being human.

As I said, I was a little too destabilised by the theatrical moment to get up and heckle, and maybe that’s part of what went wrong in Nazi Germany – it’s hard to get up and heckle when one charismatic human being spouts nonsense about an entire class of other human beings – but I should have heckled, someone should have heckled, we all should have heckled.

No Halder – you only got half the quotation. It’s like saying a bridge is only rooted to one side of a chasm. The full quotation is “If I am not for myself who will be for me. And if I am only for myself, [I am unhuman, inhuman … a monster]. And the monsters are the Nazis. And the monster, Professor Halder is you. And the reason you are a monster is that despite you professing to care about the humanism of human behaviour you only really care about humans like you. You don’t care about the humanity of humans who are too ill to for themselves. You don’t care about Jews. You only care for people who can make your life more comfy and more powerful and …. Ach, you, Professor Halder are not Good. You, Professor Halder are bad, very bad indeed.

One of the advantages of being a congregational Rabbi who didn’t heckle in public a play demonstrating quite how seamlessly a person can be seduced into Nazism, is that you get to make your point on a Shabbat, in Shul.

Sorry, do I need to pause a second and ensure I say that the play is absolutely on the side of the entire human race. The fact that the Jewish C. P. Taylor and everyone else involved in the play wants to demonstrate how a person can be turned into the very worst kind of Nazi doesn’t, of course, mean they have a mote of sympathy for Nazi ideology. There I’ve said it.

But the more that I have been thinking about Halder’s bastardised citation of the Talmud and the way the deceitful claim that Nazi ideology is about a virtuous collective all working together crumbles through one’s fingers, the more I have come to think that these two issues are part of the same dialectic. They are a central part of the answer to the question what we, as Jews, are here for, part of the central answer of what we should be doing.

When Hillel passes sets his great aphorism rolling down through the ages, and it’s been almost two thousand years at this point, he’s sending two opposite tensions.

If I am not for me, who will be for me.

If I am only for myself, what am I?

On the one hand, and on the other hand.

That sounds like the opening of a Jewish joke, really any Jewish joke. It also sounds like the opening of Sugya of the Talmud, really any sugya. It sounds like the key to an understanding of a Jewish hermeneutic of the world. We don’t do one-sided arguments.

You can feel it throughout anything that gets run through a Jewish process – dialectic, tension, one the one hand and on the other hand. Just to take the example of this week’s Torah reading. You can feel a dialectical tension in the relationship between Jacob and father, Jacob and his mother, Jacob and his brother, Jacob and his first wife, Jacob and his second wife, Jacob and his daughter, Jacob and Shimon and Levi. I could go on.

The Jewish path to truth isn’t walked by smoothing out wrinkles and creating a pure pathway devoid of jagged complexity. It’s a pathway strong enough to sustain us as a people (for two thousand years at this point) because it entails understanding how complexity works, and tension and non-uniformity and variety and plurality.

Right at the heart of Judaism is the understanding that each of us, in our uniqueness and difference embody the singular Image of God – a God who has no form and no shape so instead can only be understood through acknowledging the different ways in which godliness is made manifest in our world.

 That’s why Hillel is so aghast at the inhuman fool who is only for themselves, they are prepared to imagine that they are God, when, in fact, God lives in the space between all of us, and not beheld and not beholden by any of us.

And the purpose of Jewish study, study of the Torah and the Talmud and all of that is to appreciate in ever more sophisticated and sensitive ways the interplay of complexity in the world and how to pass through that challenge with integrity and gentleness and holiness.

Is it important for a Jew to keep Kosher, for sure. You can get Rabbinic ordination for knowing the rules of keeping Kosher. But the rules of keeping Kosher appear to be blindingly simple – don’t eat this, and don’t eat that with this. The truth is it’s all in the detail and the interplay and the hope is that all this our understanding and our embodied living a life of observing so carefully the way in which we consume stops us from seeing our own dominion over the world.

I don’t want to make the case that we Jews have a monopoly on dialectical tension, but we’re really good at it. We’ve been doing it so long and do it in so many ways it’s profoundly part of who we are and who are, as Jews, supposed to be.

And then we enter into a broader society.

And we challenge. Reaching over the summer our member, Anne Summers book on Christian and Jewish Women Living in Britain 1880-1940. The subtitle is ‘Living with Difference.’ She makes the point that the Jewish women arriving on these shores in the nineteenth century were the first community to challenge the hegemony of Waspish Anglo society. We raised problems for those genteel Christian women’s organisations who thought that everyone would want to have Sunday as the Lord's Day.

The very tension we carry around ourselves in our own Jewishness is the way we manifest ourselves in a broader society that can too quickly lapse into thinking that their way is the only way. That was Halder, of course; in his version of the collective German Volk he forgot about the ways in which German Jews were both one thing – German – and the other – Jews – and should have been protected, not persecuted. Again, we’ve been doing this for a while and while there are, by now, so many other differences in contemporary Anglo society – there is still something particularly complex about Jewish differences. We still exist in a space between and in tension. We pass as ‘normal-ish’ but aren’t the establishment. We are protected as a minority but as David Baddiel and others are finding increasingly Jews Don’t really Count.

We exist as provocateurs, checks in the system. Can you handle difference, can you handle the way in which we don’t fit in.

As I wrote in my weekly words, a society that can handle this, can handle us, tends to do well facing the challenges of the day – the scientific achievements, the economic achievements, the cultural achievements all depend on a healthy attitude towards otherness and difference. After all, if we were all trained into being the same, and trying to be the same, none of us would ever do anything new or different at all.

Perhaps that image of the bridge, Halder’s mis-representation of Hillel’s aphorism as a bridge only secured on one side, is worth returning to. Bridges – of course – have strength because of their tension. I’m always nervous about getting too scientific when there are proper engineers around, but bridges aren’t strong because they are straight and strong in their straightness, they hang off themselves, they suspend, they lean into keystones, and they embody strength through tension.

Rebbe Nachman said, “The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be afraid.” It is perhaps one of the greatest truths about Jews and Judaism. We Jews are embodied bridges. I took Rebbe Nachman’s aphorism as a title for my blog – on which I’ll shortly be posting a copy of this sermon.

Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid Noah, and don’t be afraid, any of us. We should be proud to stick out oddly, in our difference, in our obsession over “on the one hand” and “on the other hand.” Our delight in complexity and strangeness, our protecting and nurturing of difference in the way we treat our fellow and our world, the food we eat and the way we spend our time, are part of how the narrow bridge on which we all travel is given strength.

That’s our job.

That’s our destiny.

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I”

“The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be afraid.”

Shabbat Shalom