I want to share a dream I had back in the Spring and share
some of the things I’ve been reflecting on since.
I don’t think it’s a particularly complicated dream to
understand, but there are a couple of pieces of background that will help. The
first is that there’s a house, just across the road from my own, where they are
doing a renovation that involves ripping out the kitchen, bathrooms, windows
and floorboards and dumping the rubble in-front of the property until the skip
shows up. So far, so North-West London.
Several months ago, I dreamt some indistinct person was ripping
apart, not the house across the road, but the room on the other side of the
wall at the foot of my bed, and, in my dream, the rubble wasn’t dumped in the
front of their property, but was somehow being stuffed through the windows
of my bedroom. In my dream, I had this clear sense of the very wall
between my neighbours and I – and in my waking hours, I’ve nothing against my
neighbours – being simultaneously ripped back and shoved forwards through my
bedroom window. And, in my dream, I’m trying to push the rubble out of my
bedroom window screaming, “What are you doing, this isn’t your house.” And then
I woke up.
The second piece of background, that will help you understand
my dream, and I don’t think it’s a particularly complicated dream to
understand, is that I dreamt this dream during that run of attacks that
stretched from the streets of Golders Green to the Synagogues of Finchley and
Pinner, a few months after the Yom Kippur attack in Heaton Park – we are days away
from marking the Yartzheit of Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby of blessed
memory. And in my unawake mind, just a moment away from the attacks of October
7th 2023.
So here we are, on this day of Rosh Hashanah, when I want to celebrate
HaYom Harat Olam – the very birthday of the world, and instead, I’m
reflecting on a nightmare.
And those murderous antisemitic incidents, as awful as they
are, have barely registered on a scale of the things that I’ve spent time on,
pastorally, this last year. I’ve spent hours with members who are experiencing
antisemitism in ways inconceivable four years ago;
Doctors with Jewish names being told they are not welcome to
treat patients with Islamic names.
Therapists losing clients, because patients don’t want a
Jewish therapist, or sculptors losing out on commissions, or students at
university or barristers or …
Battles we imagined long fought to a successful conclusion – battles
to exist, in peace, treated like just another human being, in contemporary
society - turn out not to have been won, but merely gone temporarily quiet.
And I’m angry and I’m hurt and I’m stunned to be addressing
modern antisemitism. I’m really sorry that this is, for now, again, part of
what it means to be a Jew.
And for those of you who had to weigh up whether to walk
through the doors of a Synagogue today because you are concerned about antisemitism
attack, I salute you for being here.
And for those of you who have found the capacity to celebrate being
Jewish or find quiet moments of spiritual reflection in Jewish prayer, I salute
you, I stand with you. And I think, if I might be so bold, that we are all due
some more points in that Divine credit ledger this year, for being here today
and for making this a space for celebration and prayer.
So where now?
My wife, as many of you will know, is a theatre director. She
was invited to attend an event hosted by Arts Council England on antisemitism. You
can imagine it; an august organisation is accused of failing to act against antisemitism
and brings together a bunch of Jews to work out what they should be doing
differently. My wife attended, came home and shared this.
“The thing is,” she remarked, “everyone
feels attacked, everyone feels insecure, everyone feels unsafe.”
My wife, you see, has been working with all kinds of groups in
the past year; people of colour, the neurodiverse, women in prisons, the deaf
community and everyone has a story of being traduced as a human. Everyone is
feeling that ‘them’ – some external locus of power – is conspiring against ‘us.’
And on the one hand, she’s right – I mean, she’s always right
– about everything, she’s my wife. But on the other hand, her observation pulls
at me in a way that makes me want to argue with her.
The issue is that when I feel unsafe, and I know atrocities have
been perpetrated against my people, I find it harder to remember that others
are hurting too. I feel drawn into a place of wanting to compete for centrality
of my suffering, Jewish suffering. I want ‘our’ suffering to be ranked as worse
than ‘their’ suffering. As if the empathy available to address the pain in the
world is a fixed sum and any taken by anyone else comes at the expense of that available
for me and my pain.
Rowen Williams, in his recent book, Solidarity, appropriates
the phrase incurvatus in se –curling into ourselves – for this condition.
His book is an attempt to find “an alternative to a winner-takes-all” approach
to responding to being reminded of the suffering of others when we are so
occupied with our own pain.
“There is a vicious circle at
work in this” [Williams writes]: I hold on to my rights because the aggressive
wills of others menace my liberties; I cling on to my firearms because the
world is full of people with guns. Literally or metaphorically, the default
setting for my social location is a state of siege.”
This is the thing I want to explore today; how to find a way
out of the default setting for our social location – the state of siege.
Williams argues we should turn towards the concept of solidarity,
which he calls, “a movement of the imagination that brings home to us a
vulnerability in our own situation that is made more vivid by the immediacy of
another’s pain.”
I wonder if there is a counterintuitive lesson in a seemingly bizarre
Talmudic moment where the Rabbis ask, “What is the minimum amount of suffering
[that counts as essential suffering]?”
עַד הֵיכָן תַּכְלִית יִסּוּרִין?[1]
And in my mind, I’m expecting some awful traumatic answer,
maybe something from that Yom Kippur liturgical passage with its tales of tortured,
martyred Rabbis.
But the question gets answered this way;
אם הטיל ידו בכיס להוציא שני דינרים ועלה אחד וצריך להטיל ידו פעם
שניה
Essential suffering is when you put
your hand in your pocket to remove two coins, and you only bring up one coin
and you have to put your hand back in your pocket a second time.
It’s a staggeringly petty answer.
But I think the point the Talmud is trying to make is that
suffering is anything a person experiences as suffering. You can’t exclude, the
Talmud is saying, from the outside what does and what doesn’t count
subjectively for another human being. I’ve met people dying from cancer who
think they are the luckiest humans in the world and I’ve met people in
emotional turmoil caused by things I struggle to understand as painful at all.
But I acknowledge I’m on the outside of their experience of their
suffering.
I know I am at my best, as a Rabbi, a counsellor, a friend and
a husband and father, when I allow protestations of suffering from those around
me to be acknowledged as such.
And then there is this.
When I escape my incurvatus in se, my curling inwards,
to acknowledge the pain of others, I experience fellowship. I feel more human
as I acknowledge the humanity of another suffering person. In solidarity I find
company. It helps me too.
Rowan Williams again, “If we seek to act for ourselves alone,
we deny what actually makes us the selves we are – our entanglement with the
lives of others. Denying this doesn’t free us from these entanglements, it
simply means we handle them badly.”[2]
And one other reason to meet this wave of antisemitic ugliness
with a refusal to curve inwards; I refuse to let the bigots and antisemites bully
me into losing my humanity. I refuse to hand over my ability to be a person who
cares and has a capacity for love to their desire to make me fearful. Join me
in this act of resistance.
I’m not suggesting naivety. We face very serious threats. To
those of you who have volunteered to do a shift of security, thank you. I’m not
suggesting turning a cheek to those who would strike us. But in the face of this
“siege state,” the zero-sum competition about pain I am drawn into - I do
believe there is a way out.
Jan Patočka, the Czech philosopher who co-drafted the Charter
77 manifesto for reform with Vaclav, later President, Havel, wrote of a “solidarity
of the shaken.” He argued our tendencies to curl inwards, to focus exclusively on
our own suffering, are the “urges that condemn us to perpetual conflict.”[3]
A solidarity of the shaken is a way out.
Patočka encourages us to use our imagination – he calls us,
the shaken, to imagine a better future, a shared destiny, a shared human
possibility.
I was at an interfaith training seminar, a few years ago now,
when a young Somali came up to me and asked if he could ask me a question, “Sure,”
I responded. “Why,” he asked, “are there so many Jews running things in the
media?”
And I felt that thing so many of us have felt this past year –the
incurvatus in se – an inward curl at the whiff of antisemitism hanging
over the question. But, at least on that occasion, I imagined a different response.
We ended up having a conversation about the nature of immigration, the way immigrants
see society from the outside in ways that can be turned into stories to tell
back to that community. We talked about education and family values and his
possibility of getting a job in media. As we were parting, I asked where he lived.
In the East End, he said, on Brick Lane. My grandfather lived on Brick Lane and
his daughter, my mother, works in media. We laughed together. It felt my leap out
achieved more than had I followed my instinct to curl in.
This isn’t a call to go soft on those that hate us. It’s not a
call to dismantle our fences, but it is a call to imagine more, to try and
transcend the instinct to curling in on ourselves in our shakiness.
It’s not just about antisemitism, the same call to reach
towards a solidarity with the shaken goes for how we should deal with sibling
rivalry or professional unfairness or decisions we make about whether to
contribute to flood relief in Nepal.
The call to pursue solidarity with the shaken is a call to unfurl
and imagine we live, not in silos, but entangled among humans who both
challenge and give meaning to our existence. It is, ultimately a religious call;
a call to lean into the idea that all of humanity is descended from one Adam
HaRishon - a first human created BTzelem Elohim – in the image of God.[4]
It’s a call to believe that there are decent people, or at least people capable
of finding the decency within them if they are met with empathy, even now, even
after this last year.
One last thought about my dream, the one of the
building-rubble. It was only while drafting this sermon about solidarity that I
realised the other thing the rubble reminds me of – flattened buildings in
Gaza. It’s not easy, acknowledging my “entanglement with the lives of others.”[5]
But I think it’s the only way out.
Our dreams for the year to come should involve … dreaming,
taking imaginative leaps towards the world we want to live in. Without a dream
we are condemned to ever greater infolding and bitterness. We are human beings.
We deserve better than that. We are worth caring about. We are worth believing
in. And may good dreams, our high and holy dreams for this year, come true.
Shannah Tovah
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