To See Others, To Change Others - A Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Day One 5784

Here’s a cute thing little kids do. They’ll cover their eyes and assume that just because they can’t see you, you can’t see them. “Peekabo.” For a tiny child, the idea that anyone else sees the world differently from the way they see the world is so absurd you can get peals of laughter from playing along.

Adorable isn’t it. From a small child.

My concern, my fear and the driving force of my sermon, on this most holy of days, is that not enough of us have grown far enough beyond this development stage. Not enough of us care deeply enough about nurturing and loving and committing ourselves to understand the different ways the not-me-s of the world see the world. We are all so stressed and tired and so in fear of this divisive and fractured society, that we think the only way forward is to muster every resource we can to protect the way we see the world right now. And while we think this helps - while at a certain level we think that if I can’t see you then you can’t see me – we do know, don’t we, that peekaboo doesn’t really work.

But, despite its obvious flaws, this pre-occupation with allowing into our awareness only our own way of seeing the world, is compelling.

Lee Ross, the recently deceased sociologist, studied and engaged in conflict negotiation in, among other realms, Israel-Palestine. Not once, he wrote, in forty years’ experience, did anyone arrive at a conflict resolution seminar he was running eager to learn how the other side saw the matter at hand. When we call for empathy or gentleness in society, what we tend to mean is, “I deserve more empathy than you –  you better treat me gently,” and we forget that thing Hillel once said, “That which is hateful for you, do not do to others.”

When it comes to the way we engage with the great political challenges of this day; in this country, in Israel, in the States, we are quick to write off that vast part of society that doesn’t hold the same views as me as either a bunch of out-of-touch liberal elites or racist bullies. We consider our own position one of careful nuance and compassion, and the positions of those with whom we disagree as blunt and wilfully cruel. We’re all so busy being concerned about being unfairly cancelled by those with whom we disagree, that we end up cancelling them first. That helps, of course, at a certain basic level. If we get our cancelling in first, then we really don’t need to pay any attention to the way they see the world.

Somewhere between Kant telling us that the self is categorically important, and the algorithms that sensationalise and fracture the information we let into our brains, we’ve convinced ourselves that our version of truth is the ultimate destination of all ethics, good behaviour and value. And, as an approach, that will guide us towards an ever more divisive, angry and nasty society, a society that, given a moment’s true and deeper consideration, none of us would wish to inhabit.

We know it’s better to try a different way from our most intimate social spaces, from our families. Just suppose that I vote Tory and my brother votes Labour, or vice versa, it’s not the point. We’re going to hang on in there, fighting not to demonise each other in our differences, disagreeing, sure, but not barricading ourselves in and them out, because it’s my brother.

This isn’t, for what it’s worth, a call to meekly accept every position of every person who disagrees with me as equally acceptable. I’m definitely in favour of some positions, and definitely opposed to others, and I’m up for debate and up for changing minds. But the question is, how do we engage with others when we want to make change and we don’t want to add to the fractured, nasty culture of what sometimes passes for debate in this country?

How do I try and get my brother to change his opinion – and full disclosure, I’m not sure I’ve ever successfully persuaded my brother of anything – I take time, share love, listen hard, ask honest and open questions. That’s the way to change the world, with love and humility, not with shouts and barricades.

I like psychologist John Walen’s image, “You can’t move a string by pushing it, you have to pull it.” When it comes to families, we know, I think, most of us, of the need to pull together. We know, I think, most of us, that pushing apart doesn’t get us to where we want to be. We just need to carry that attitude with us when we encounter everyone else.

So, how do we pull strings in, how can we engage compassionately and pro-actively with each other?

I’ve been hugely moved by the tale of Megan Phelps-Roper and David Abitol, a Jew she met via Twitter. Phelps-Roper grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church, you might have heard of them; a particularly nasty organisation committed to demonising those who have different theological understandings – and among the long list of people they demonise are Jews. In one of those 10-million-people-have-viewed-this-presentation Ted Talks, Phelps-Roper explains why she left Westboro.[1] She was on Twitter, busy demonising, when this Jew, David Abitol, the founder of the blog Jewlicious, started to take her seriously and engaging with her reasonably. He seems a remarkable person. And at one point, Abitol heads to meet with Megan in New Orleans in person. As Phelps-Roper retells the story;

after several months of heated but friendly arguments online, he came out to see me at a picket. He brought me a Middle Eastern dessert from Jerusalem, and I brought him kosher chocolate and held a "God hates Jews" sign. There was no confusion about our positions, but the line between friend and foe was becoming blurred. We'd started to see each other as human beings, and it changed the way we spoke to one another.

And eventually Phelps-Roper left Westboro, and the most important thing that shifted her was the humanity she found in David. She shares later in her Ted Talk

David, my "Jewlicious" friend from Twitter, invited me to spend time among a Jewish community in Los Angeles. We slept on couches in the home of a Hasidic rabbi and his wife and their four kids -- the same rabbi that I'd protested three years earlier with a sign that said, "Your rabbi is a whore." We spent long hours talking about theology and Judaism and life while we washed dishes in their kosher kitchen and chopped vegetables for dinner. I was astonished.

The thing that changed Phelps-Roper wasn’t the intellectual arguments, or the abuse directed at her, but the humanity of the human prepared to stand vulnerable before her.

It turns out the thing that changes other people is, to a great extent, the same thing as holds us together when we disagree with one another. If we treat other people, even people with whom we disagree as real human beings, not caricatures, if we hang on in there, even when conversations get difficult, if we pull in on the strings that bind us, rather than push away, we can achieve both. We can be part of a less divisive world and fight for the change we want to see in the world.

That’s a tall order, I know. I struggle with it too. But let me try and offer two gentle steps, as we set out in this new year to better ourselves and the society in which we find ourselves. Two steps that are, and forgive me, I’m a rabbi and it’s Rosh Hashanah, very Jewish.

The first is – stop digging; as in, if you are in a pit, stop digging. It’s monetised, you know, all those media groups who draw us in to watch one human being fighting another human being in a digital pit. They are making money, you know, off our inability to just say no. The real question is how do we allow ourselves to be shaped by our encounters with others? I send out a feedback form every year after Yom Kippur and every year I say something about God in my sermons and every year someone complains that they didn’t come to Shul on Rosh Hashanah to hear the Rabbi bang on about God. Sorry. But God is at the heart of this. Not the vindictive, bogus theology taught in places like the Westboro Church, but the kind of God we believe in here.

The kind of God we’ve spent this morning praying to; a God who is powerful at a level beyond human power, mysterious and unknowable beyond human knowledge, certainly, but, we believe merciful, slow to anger and willing to bear the weight of our transgressions if we can only find it in our hearts to change our ways. I’ll take that God above any of the social media influencers out there. It’s worth turning off the phones and re-centring our sense of what is important away from the bear pits that pass for debate, and towards El Rahum v’Hanun, a God of mercy and grace. It’s worth our prayers.

 

And the second is this - for a human being to change, we need to encounter other human beings. We need to be vulnerable human beings encountering other humans to change them, and ourselves. I think that’s part of why it’s worth being here, in a Synagogue, a Bet Kenesset – literally, a place for people to come together. There are different human beings here. Some older, some younger, some distracting because they pray too loudly, or chat too loudly, or snore too loudly.

But we need to be jostled up against different people with different levels of … well everything to grow and learn and heal. We’re a better community and a stronger community by being egalitarian, by having more members of colour, or of different sexualities or who are well … everything.

By the time we are done with the service today, I suspect we are all going to be too interested in lunch to want to have particularly deep conversations about the great matters of our time with our fellow Synagogue-attendees. We’re not even offering a proper Kiddush.

But we could take a moment now to look around this incredible room of incredible human beings, all of whom are created in the image of God, none of whom, despite the ways in which they might disagree with me, are worthy of being demonised or stereotyped or abnegated, all of whom, if I can just connect with them, human-to-human could teach me so much I could never understand just by myself.

We could take a second moment to embed that attitude into our heart, fixing this sense of the vital important of treating other people as valuable fellow wanderers, even if we disagree – perhaps most especially if we disagree.

And dare I request a third moment; to appreciate what it is to be part of a community, this special community, where there are so many different people to learn from?

With our prayers and with this remarkable assembly of human beings there might be everything we need to heal this world here, in this special space, on this special day. As Hillel said, that’s the very essence of the Torah, the rest is commentary, now go complete it.

May we go on to do just that, tomorrow, and beyond, and onwards into the year of sweetness, health and peace we wish for ourselves,

Shannah Tovah

---

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/megan_phelps_roper_i_grew_up_in_the_westboro_baptist_church_here_s_why_i_left/transcript?language=en

On Squirrel Hill and Kristallnacht - Memory and Plurality

Shabbat Shalom

Partic warm welcome to guests; family and friends of Felix in particular.

Usually, if there is a BM, I like to give a sermon that is a little warm and fuzzy and can have everyone going on their way with a spring in their step.

But this isn’t a normal weekend.

And I’m too angry, and too sacred and too in pain to give a warm and fuzzy sermon.

I’m still angry and scared and in pain from the news now two weeks old about the attack on the Synagogue in Squirrel Hill Pittsburgh - no longer the most recent atrocity perpetrated in the United States.
And, frankly, I’m still angry and scared and in pain on this Shabbat marking the 80^th Anniversary of Kristallnacht - a night of destruction of Jewish life and property from the darkest ages of our people - 1938 Germany.

I think I would be less angry and less scared about the attacks from two weeks ago and 80 years ago if I didn’t feel what I do about the world of politics.

There would still be pain. Of course, there would still be pain, about the lives lost, and the simple barbarity of destruction.

But I can deal with pain. The pain thing is somehow assimilatable.

It’s the fact that the destruction of 80 years ago and the destruction of two weeks ago resonate off one another, like some wave of energy bouncing between the past and present and threatening to bounce off again into the future.

That’s the thing that makes me so scared, and so angry.

How come we are here?

How come 80 years after we thought we would never again slide into a world of fascist intolerance, a fascism that stirs up and explicitly or implicitly gives a Heter to racist violence and offence, how come we seem to be back here?

How come instead of having reasoned debate and disagreement about the facts that before us we have - country after country - society after society - adopted as argumentative strategies personal abuse and humiliation, dehumanisation and deceit.

How come it’s acceptable to attack a person for their very existence when the thing they say makes us feel uncomfortable.

Yes, of course, I’m talking about President Trump, and Putin in Russia and Orban in Hungary and ah this list is too long.

And, forgive me, but somewhere on this list of political leaders who are prepared to inflame or permit societal hate to secure their own approval and treat opposition as something to be crushed, not something with which to engage, belongs politicians in this country also. And even politicians in the State of Israel.

And here’s the really bad news - imagine you are a political consultant looking to advise someone on how to get power in these febrile times what advice are you going to give? Actually, these wannabe-politicians don’t need consultants to tell them which way to go. They’ve got the message already.

And if it looked, in those hopeful days of the aftermath of Holocaust as if the UN with it Human Rights’ convention and the whole apparatus of international commitments to “never again” were going to work. It doesn’t feel that way today.

And if it looked, in those 8 years in which Obama served as President of the United States, and I don’t care if you are Democrat or a Republican, if it looked for those eight years as though the most powerful country the world has ever seen, had embraced Hope not Hate, it doesn’t feel that way now.

This week I’ve been reading and listening to Sarah Churchwell, author of a new book, Behold America. She points out how triumphalist nationalism, don’t mess with us patriotism and a racism that lurks only just below the surface has never really gone away in America.
American has always thought of itself as the land of the free and home of the brave, and it’s always behaved as a bully taking the lives and the land of whoever came in the way of those who had the might to enforce their sense of right.

I did warn that this was going to be a political sermon.

But the thing that really struck me about America - and America is Ground Zero for this international horror - is how surprised it gets at the same thing happening again. I lived in New York for the five years surrounding 9/11. I saw the stunned amazement of Americans at 9/11. They couldn’t believe they would be attacked. But what was Pearl Harbour? They couldn’t believe it would be so hard to destroy what George Bush called the Axis of Evil. But what was Vietnam?

And the same thing goes for my dear friends in the Jewish community. They couldn’t believe that a Synagogue could be the target of a raging wicked act of antisemitic murder. American Jews feel so at home in America, they can’t imagine themselves as victims of anti-Jewish hatred. They’ve forgotten that General Grant expelled the Jews from the States in 1862. They’ve forgotten the Klu Klux Klan’s invidious Jew-hatred - they should go and watch Spike Lee’s new movie - BlackkKlansman, we all should. I warmly recommend Philip Roth’s Plot Against the Jews. It’s a fiction only a hairs breath away from an entirely plausible past. And today it feels less like some apocalyptic horror show and more like reportage.

Back when I was at Seminary, in New York, we had a class on Mediaeval Jewish History, and the first class of semester was the expulsion of the Jews from England, and the second was the expulsion of the Jews from France, and the third was the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and one of my nice Americal fellow students said something witty about how great it was to be American. And the professor, Dr Benjy Gampel, with the withering scorn of someone who actually knows about history looked down on my colleague and said, ‘If you really think you are so safe in America, you have no understanding of the nature of history.’   

But it’s not just the Americans and not just the Jews.

Anyone else here remembers Gordon Brown announcing the end of the boom-bust cycle?

There is, in us all, a kind of willful amnesia. We don’t want to live in a world where hatred exists, so we imagine we don’t. We don’t want to imagine that it could get worse, so we suppress the knowledge that it ever did.

So what to do?

I want to share two things, two thing I commit myself to, and two things I need your assistance with.

The first thing is we must never forget, we must always memorialise, even as the names are too many and the eyewitnesses too few.

Last week I recited the 11 names of those murdered in the Tree of Life Synagogue. This week I want to recite the names of the 2,000 who were murdered, and the 1,000 synagogues destroyed.

I want to count aloud every Mark’s worth of damage that Nazi acolytes caused and Jews had to pay for, on that awful night 80 years ago.

I want to hold up and hand around photos of this destruction from 80 years ago this very weekend,

Together with photos of what German Jewry used to look like, back in the days when German Jews couldn’t imagine anyone othering them - so at home did they feel as full and equal members of German society.

I want to that term, ‘Never Again’ to sound like a question, a fearful and un-easy gnawing in the gut. Because for the term ‘never again’ to sound confident and secure shows, in that phrase of my Jewish history professor, no understanding of the nature of history.

That’s the first thing.

We need to remember and recount and retell so we don’t fall into selective amnesia.

The second thing we all need to do is make the case for the principle of decent society most under threat in this unstable world.

We need to make a much better case for the principle of plurality; the plurality of people and the plurality of ideas.

Too much of the proto-facism of contemporary society is based on an erroneous idea that there are proper members of society and then there are others. And the others don’t really count as full human beings and we would do well to make their life as tough as possible.

And that idea turns my stomach.

It should turn all our stomachs even if we aren’t Jewish ourselves, even if we can trace our ancestry on these isles back to the days of Angles and Saxons and Celts, because if we allow ourselves to drift into becoming a society which doesn’t respect otherness - the plurality of people,  if we allow ourselves to drift into becoming a society which doesn’t recognise that all human beings are equally made in the image of God, and all human beings deserve the same opportunities and chance for a decent life they will eventually come for us.

Eventually, we will all fall foul of being too dark-haired, or too blond or too tall or too short, or too fat or too thin, for we are all too much one thing or not enough another.

Pastor Niemoller wrote in the 1930s

First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

It’s that time already.

If we allow ourselves to slide into a society where difference is not celebrated and protected and promoted, they’ll come for us all.

That’s we plurality of people is so important.

The same thing goes for how we talk, how we debate, how we disagree. Debate, disagreement is good.

It’s how we learn, it’s how we discover things we don’t know. Disagreement isn’t to be disparaged. We need a plurality of ideas. People who take positions that are outside the mainstream are the people who most deserve our respect - they are the most important people in society. They aren’t to be threatened, abused, locked up. They certainly aren’t to be strangled, chopped up and boiled in acid in an Embassy in some foreign land. In what kind of world are we living?

So, do something to promote difference. Give some money to our Drop In Centre for Asylum Seekers, talk to me about getting involved in Citizens UK. Do something.

Promote disagreement, listen harder to those who disagree with you in the hope of learning something you don’t already know. Tell others also to see debate as a good thing.

A belief in plurality isn’t just being nice. It isn’t just a belief in human rights, it’s self-interest - it’s the thing that might, just, save us.

Just don’t forget, and don’t just watch on as decency slides away.

Here’s another thing we learnt 80 years ago.

It’s the bystanders who were, in the end, the people who made the difference.

Don’t be a victim, wrote the great Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer, Don’t be a perpetrator, but, above all, Don’t be a bystander.” — Yehuda Bauer

For as Simon Wiesenthal, camp survivor and Nazi hunter put it

“For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.”

Shabbat Shalom