Pause for Thought - World Poetry Day

My Pause for Thought for BBC Radio 2, broadcast 21^st March is available on-line at

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ddb7c#synopsis

 

It’s World Poetry Day and though there’s much wonderful poetry out there I find myself irresistibly drawn to the poetry of the biblical Book of Hosea.

 

Hosea has the roughest assignment of any of the Hebrew prophets. He is told to marry and told in the very next breath that his wife will be unfaithful to him. His wife will chase after other men, Hosea’s warned. God wants Hosea to experience God’s own sense of frustration with a people who have been running off after other gods.

 

In one verse Hosea is told to ‘Love a woman who loves another lover, like God’s love for Israel who look to other gods, and love raisin cake.’

 It’s this last piece – the love of raisin cake – that seems so heartbreaking. It’s as if God is a jilted schoolboy whose girlfriend’s been snatched from him by the class heartthrob whose dad runs the sweet shop.

 

‘Doesn’t she know,’ says God, ‘that I gave her gold and silver that she uses for earrings and necklaces to go after other gods.’

 

Here God is cuckolded, lonely and miserable while the wife runs off in search of better looking models. The whole book of Hosea paints the relationship between God and Israel in these graphic poetic terms.

Of course it’s not supposed to be read as theology. It’s poetry.

Of course God doesn’t get married. Hosea, like so much of the Bible isn’t putting itself forward as a historical record. It’s as true as the claim that Wordsworth’s daffodils danced or the claim that our heart breaks when we’re hurt.

 

Poetic images don’t work like precise reportage. Poetry touches us, it makes us feel, makes us empathise – it’s not scientific analysis, it’s more powerful than that.

 

The poetic truth of the Book of Hosea is that we are too easily given to chasing after seductive false gods of gold and silver.

 

We are too easily led astray from truer relationships by something new that glitters prettily. The poetic images of Hosea make the point better than more rigorous language ever could.

 

Enjoy Pesach

My first serious study of the Halachot of Pesach took place in the Conservative Yeshivah fourteen years ago. The teacher, Menachem Pitkowsky, handed out a faded sheaf of notes, clearly at least a tenth generation of photocopies and we made our way through the note’s detailing of what needs to be disposed of, what needs Kosher supervision and how to Kosher a Pesachdik kitchen. The notes were taken from a talk given in the 1980s, by Rav Chaim Pinchas Scheinberg, who passed away this week at the age of 102! A graduate of the pre-war Mir Yeshivah Rav Scheinberg founded the Torah Ore Yeshiva first in New York and then Jerusalem.

 

The notes are incredibly touching. Headed, ‘Clean for Pesach and Enjoy the Seder,’ they are driven by a concern that cleaning for Pesach shouldn’t be too oppressive. The document is of wonderful historic interest, you can see a man who grew up a century ago, but also a little anachronistic. Nonetheless the sweetness and the concern shines through.

‘In former times, wealthy people who had large houses also had many servants who did their every bidding, while poor people, who could not afford servants, lived in small homes with one or two rooms. Understandably, the pre-Pesach chores of the rich were performed by the servants, while the poor, who had only their one or two rooms to clean, a few pieces of furniture a minimum of utensils, and some clothing, took care of their needs themselves. In those days, the cleaning was hard. Tables were made of raw wood, requiring them to be scrubbed or even to be shaven to ensure that no pieces of food were hidden in the cracks. Earthen or wooden floors also needed to be thoroughly scrubbed and cleaned.

Today, we seem to be caught in a trap. The average modern home is larger than formerly. Furniture, utensils and clothing are much more plentiful. The average home today could compare with the more affluent homes of previous generations. However, we do not have the servants that they had, so that today, all the chores fall on the housewife. At the same time, she still feels obligated to clean and scrub as they did formerly, even though she has laminated furniture and tiled floors, making this type of cleaning unnecessary.’

The command to enjoy the Seder weighs heavily. So he sets out standards that are some way below what many in the Haredi world would expect. A full copy of the notes – now somewhat sadly freshly typed up and uploaded, can be read at;

http://www.anshe.org/parsha/palm-pesach.htm and my own guide to Pesach is at at,

http://tinyurl.com/pesach5772  

But I can’t do better than to conclude with the Rav Sheinberg’s parting words. May his memory be blessing.

 

‘Try to make the Pesach chores easy for yourself Don't do unnecessary hard work. Don't do unnecessary cleaning. You must enjoy your Pesach!’

And Now for Pesach

Two events for the attention of NLS members and friends.

 

This Monday I will be looking at the history of the Seder ritual. Why are there four cups, what were the original Four Questions and where did the Four Sons come from?

8-10pm at the Synagogue, more information below. All welcome.

 

And the following Sunday, 24^th March, we will be holding our Flagship pre-Pesach event, a roundtable on freedom. I’m delighted that we are going to be welcoming Rev Nadim Nasar who was born in Syria. In the months since he first agreed to join life in Syria has become ever more fraught and I am most keen to hear his reflections and concerns. The other speaker, Lord Glassman, is a good friend and co-founder of the Masorti community in Stoke Newington. He’s also a leading political theorist whose been ruffling feathers in and beyond his own party on issues around immigration and communities. These are important issues of our time – with the offer of added richness to infuse your seder with the true taste of Freedom. I hope you will be able to join me.

 

Shabbat shalom

 

Rabbi Jeremy

 

Pause for Thought on Radio 2 - Mothering Sunday

I’m presenting Pause for Thought on Radio 2 for the next five Wednesdays at the bright and early time of 5:45am. This week’s script is on-line at

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01d5w1m#synopsis

 

As you know, it’s Mothering Sunday this weekend; a time for children of all ages to buy cards, chocolate boxes and floral bouquets for our mothers.

Mothering Sunday is a post-biblical phenomenon, but the Bible certainly stressed the importance of honouring parents. It’s one of the Ten Commandments. As a Rabbinical student I remember feeling genuine shock as I realised how the great collection of Rabbinic teaching known as the Talmud understands this command.

I’d assumed honouring your mother had something to do with being an obnoxious teenager and I knew a lot about being an obnoxious teenager. But it turns out that the Talmud has in mind adult children honouring aged mothers.

‘How far do you have to go to honour your mother?’ the Talmud asks.
Take the case of Dama ben Netina, Mayor of the ancient city of Ashkelon. Dama was presiding over the City Council when his mother came up to him and beat him over the head with her slipper and he didn’t embarrass her. She beat him so hard the slipper fell from her hand and Dama picked it up and handed it back to her. That, the Rabbis say, is honouring one’s mother.

Or another story – this one of a man who stood by and watched his mother fan money off the back of a ship, money he had presumably been imagining would come to him as an inheritance.

These tales, 1500 years old or more, feel starkly contemporary. To me Dama’s mother seems to be suffering some kind of dementia, she’s not fit for civilised company, but what’s Dama supposed to do – drop her off in a care home?

And the man who watches his inheritance be frittered away reminds me of many in my community who struggle as the costs of providing care for elderly parents eats up the value of homes and savings they might have thought would come to them.

In the Jewish tradition the real test of honouring one’s parents comes when honouring comes at a cost, it might be embarrassing, it might be expensive, it might be distressing. Caring for the mothers who in our earliest days cared for us so completely brings many challenges but these are the women who brought us into the world and we need to be prepared to do better than a card, a box of chocolates and a floral bouquet.

Purim is Coming

All are invited to the Shul’s Purim spectacular, beginning with a kids’ pizza party at 5:45 on Wednesday 7th March and concluding in a party for adults, with Maariv and Megillah at 6:30. More information below. We read this Shabbat the tale of the attack on the Israelites led by Amalek. We read this Wednesday the tale of the attack on the Israelites led by Haman and in a month’s time we read, at our Seder tables, of the attack on the Israelites led by Pharaoh. Ancient history. The contemporary destruction, which I read about day after day, is being visited by forces loyal to President Assad of Syria on his own people. The parallels are striking. First the forces opposed to Assad are assumed by those loyal to the regime to be plotting treacherous anti-Syrian activities – just as the Jews in the beginning of the Exodus narrative were assumed to be intent on joining Egypt’s enemies. Secondly the violence in Syria seems unutterably random, wrecking devastation among innocent children as well as attacking those who are genuinely waging aggression against the Assad regime. Just as, in the Purim narrative, it was man and woman, adult and child threatened. Thirdly the violence seems to be driven by the nothing more than a hunger for power that corrupts the powerful the closer they come to power; Haman’s hatred of Mordechai an Jews deriving from the affront perceived by Haman Mordechai refusing to bow to him. Through time, across nations innocents are defamed and murdered to allow bigots to retain power. It has always been thus but, the message from Jewish history teaches, justice will out, tyrants will fall. It takes courage and a willingness to stand firm in the face of bullying might. Happy Purim, Shabbat shalom.

Why & How Religion is Good

Religion has found its way to the front of the newspapers of late.

 

Baroness Warsi, led a British delegation to the Vatican to argue for the role religion has to play in the public sphere.

The National Secular Society won a case against Bideford Council outlawing prayers at meetings and Richard Dawkins’ Foundation for Reason and Science have produced evidence that not even Christians think of themselves as religious.

 

Actually the most forceful imposition into my consciousness of this recent flurry of religious newsworthiness came on Wednesday when I was spending my day off constructing IKEA wardrobes while the decorator was at work in the hallways. The decorator likes listening to talk-radio while he worked and there I was, power screwdriver in hand, listening to a presenter on LBC baiting religious listeners with a cascade of denials of the use, meaningfulness and sense of religion.

 

So what use is religion and should a space be made specially for it?

 

The piece about the phone in show on LBC that riled me so was the basic assumption, that I’ve heard too many times to mention, that religion is responsible for the great wars and battles of our time. And this is a claim that is made by people who claim to follow only matters of provable evidence.

Let’s take the last century as an example.

The First World War, let’s say 16 million – nothing to do with religion

Stalinist purges, let’s say 2 million - nothing to do with religion

Chairman Mao’s purges, let’s say 5 million - nothing to do with religion

The Second World War - nothing to do with religion, unless you blame religion for the Holocaust, which seems more than a little unfair.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki  1.5 million - nothing to do with religion

Vietnam War - nothing to do with religion.

I could go on – I found a web page^[1]

75000 in Sierra Leone - nothing to do with religion.

60000 in Nicaragua - nothing to do with religion.

80000 in Angola - nothing to do with religion.

 

What multi-million death horror committed in the name of religion could possibly compete?

And that’s even assuming that any outbreak of violence that could be associated with religion can truly be blamed on religion.

Perhaps there were 17000 who died in the Six Day War. That’s 17000 bereaved families, that’s horrendous, but I’m not sure I would blame the Six Day War on religion.

There are certainly several thousand who have indeed been killed in the name of a God mistakenly understood by foolish pseudo-religious devotees to want the death of others of different faiths – and perhaps we would have to count the 3,000 who died on 9/11 in this number – or less anyone would think I don’t have murder committed in the name of Judaism in mind the 30 murdered by Baruch Goldstein in Hebron in 1994, then surely a person who weighed up the evidence for religion would feel compelled to place on the other side of the scale the extra-ordinary acts of fighting for freedom, peace and liberty that have been profoundly and deeply rooted in religious faith.

 

Of course I have a soft spot for that pre-eminent act of overthrow of despotic tyranny, the original Exodus from Egypy, but let me again limit myself only to the last century.

 

You have the Reverend Luther King’s leadership of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

You have the Hindu inspired Satyagraha of Mahatma Ghandi.

You have the role played by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the overthrow of South African Apartheid.

You have the striving of the Tibet people led by the Buddist monk The Dalai Lama.

And that’s putting aside the simple acts of kindness.

The charitable work both inside and alongside the official charitable sector all committed in the name of faithful peaceful religion.

If you were indeed a person who paid attention to the data you should never blame religion for the ills of the world.

 

I needed to get that off my chest.

Let me make a more theoretical point.

I’m not going to make the claim that irreligious people are by definition immoral or that there is any marker of being a religious person that guarantees moral supremacy. That’s clearly nonsense

But I do believe that being religious helps.

 

If there is one central tenant that unites certainly the deistic faiths it is this – there is something more powerful than you.

It’s possible, clearly it’s possible to make mistakes about what this more important force wants from you but my claim is this – it helps to be in training, it helps to have an understanding that my grasp is not total. It helps to have a sense of humility.

I think that can make a person more moral.

The problem – and the place where religion is due its critique is the place where this sense of there being an exterior power becomes solved.

That’s the problem of fundamentalism.

But we are not a fundamentalist community and frankly I can’t understand how any Jew could confuse Judaism for a faith that would permit such hubris.

For me the will of God is a mystery.

Finite human with finite understanding stands before the infinite – it’s not even that I am not going to get everything, it is that my understanding is going to be qualitatively errant – if I make the potentially catastrophic error of confusing my understanding with God’s will.

The problem of ascertaining God’s will is that it is simply not a mystery that can be solved. It’s a mystery that one should engage in, but gently – and with the fear of getting it wrong.

It takes study, practice, standing on the shoulders of the great who have gone before us.

And it requires that we never lose a personal inbuilt sense of what a decent God would expect as acts of decency.

For me the central challenge that comes once one accepts a belief in God is what does that God want of me?

And that is a very different kind of challenge that the non-believer faces. The central challenge of the non-believer ought to be where to find a morality, where to find the limits on a self-centred creed.

 

It does seem to me that the religious person has an advantage over the believer even if the religious person can’t be sure what the infinite God wants, even if the non-believer thinks they can establish their own moral compass all on their own simply because of the will to posit the importance of something outside.

---

^[1] http://www.chacha.com/question/how-many-people-died-in-the-six-day-war

Of the Making of Books there is No End

 

 

It’s Jewish Book Week and I thought I would take the opportunity to share three of the books I’ve enjoyed this past year.

 

Sacred Trash – by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole – is really two stories. It’s the story of the detritus of a society dumped in an attic in a Synagogue in Cairo over hundreds of years, partly works of religious significance, but also scraps of poetry and receipts for oil purchases that when taken together paint the clearest picture we have of life in pre-Mediaeval Cairo Jewry. It’s also the story of the discovery of this bin, or ‘geniza,’ a story that begins over a hundred years ago when some Scottish explorers gathered some scraps from a street-seller and showed them to a Cambridge Professor. The tales of the scholars who have worked to piece together the morass of documents – told against the backdrop of a horrendous and then miraculous century for Jews of Europe and Israel is just as compelling. The book is written by poets, and it shows. It’s fabulously readable, beautiful and oddly moving. It’s published as part of a new collaboration between Nextbooks and Shoken which has also published Shimon Peres’ biography of David Ben Gurion and Elie Wiesel on Rashi, it’s a fabulous new series and I’ve read nothing in it that hasn’t been terrific.

 

Dead Funny – by Rudolph Herzog – is so dangerous it feels like it is about to combust. It’s a book about humour during the Third Reich. Jewish humour is covered, but it’s largely the humour of Germans, some of whom went to their death, for poking fun at a murderous vile regime. It asks this question – what difference does humour make, what power can humour wield in the face of jackboots and gas canisters? Some of the humour is staggering, you just can’t read it on the tube. I started it with tremendous trepidation but ultimately felt Herzog pulls off the tightrope walk in a way does no disservice to those who suffered horrors without laughter.

 

The Frozen Rabbi – by Steve Stern – would suit anyone who enjoyed Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – it’s the tale of a seventeenth century Chassidic Rabbi who meditating by a lakeside is frozen by flood waters. His carcass is excavated from the ice and becomes a talisman for a family over time eventually being transported to C20 Lower East Side. Eventually the family’s freezer fails and he emerges from his ice block to begin life as a wandering charlatan guru of the soul. It’s funny, brisk and a little too salacious for my rabbinic taste. But still well worth reading.

 

Happy Book Week to all,

Shabbat shalom,

 

Rabbi Jeremy