Posts Tagged ‘God’
Unity and Disunity: my New Year Resolution
1: So I come home from synagogue after an intense three days of Rosh Hashanah plus Shabbos, with the New Year liturgy endlessly reverberating around my head, sharply focused on humanity and universalism, on examining the human condition and human potential, and on yearning for a world in which every human being comes together in recognition of a universal siblinghood under the reign of a single God whose core values are compassion, understanding and mercy.
2: And I reopen my computer and look at the news and my social media feeds: and everything is about taking sides – and I’m not on your side unless I hate everyone else as much as you do. I cannot see your right unless I see everybody’s else’s wrong: any attempt at shade, nuance or balance is seen as disloyalty to your fundamentalism.
3: And an enormous amount of this hatred and division is in the name of unity: show your solidarity with this group by condemning that group; stand with this group by condemning that group; take up this cause by denouncing that cause. Everywhere I look I see experts (most of them self-appointed) in politics, military strategy, international history, statecraft, diplomacy and every other area of expertise imaginable – and in each case their knowledge or lack of knowledge points inexorably in one direction: sectarian hatred and intolerance of one kind or another.
4: So I close my eyes and try to recapture the message of the last three days in synagogue. Abraham brought two things to the world: belief in a single God, and kindness (chessed). And the connection is obvious: if there are lots of Gods, I want to know whose is most powerful and can “beat” the others: if there is one God who created us all, we are all siblings, and we have the most powerful possible reason to show care and compassion for all humanity.
5: The sound of the shofar is the purest form of prayer possible: the unrefined cry of a lost and bewildered child. And the enduring images of the Rosh Hashanah liturgy are of Yishmael crying out and being heard by God simply because he is a child in distress; of Hannah being listened to by God and having her prayers answered simply because she is a person in distress; of Noah’s ultimate moral failure because of choosing self-righteous certainty over compassion for the weak who lack in moral direction; and on and on and on until the Messianic promise of peace on earth and a Third Temple which is “My house which shall be known as a house of prayer for all peoples”.
6: And so I come to my New Year’s resolution. This year I will try to show unity (achdus) with every group that needs my support: but I will not show you support if it requires me to hate others, or even if it requires me to exclude others.
7: No orphan’s cry pierces the Heavens less powerfully than any other’s. No widow’s or widower’s tears arouse more compassion in the Heavens than any others’. No captive dragged from their home and family, not because of what they have done in the eyes of the law but because of who they are in the eyes of those who hate, deserves more pity than any other.
8: So I will rally to any banner that shows humanity and pity, if it does not lead to hate: but if you want me to hate in the cause of unity, whoever you are, you are the problem and not the solution.
9: My solution this year will be to try to focus on others’ loss, pain and suffering as widely and as universally as possible: to ask myself each time I listen to one person’s cry: “Who else is experiencing the same or similar suffering?” I will try to balance my concern and compassion so that I am seeing the widest possible picture: not strengthening sectarian walls between groups however defined or classified, but simply building bridges between human beings.
Christmas without God – the Jewish Objection to Harry Potter
- As soon as I had recovered from denouncing Harry Potter as derivative tripe (ie as soon as I stopped talking about it and started reading it) I found it a powerful and absorbing work, with a moral tone that generally made it ideal escapist literature to fill the odd hour or two in the bath. But after a while something started to bother me, and as the bubble bath subsided I worked out what it was.
- Harry Potter is the ultimate secular novel. It sanitises moralilty and attempts to divorce it entirely from any kind of religious tradition. It is, in fact, the second important literary work which is all about good and evil and manages to avoid all mention of God. We have Christmas scenes – without God. We have a portrayal of the after-life – without God. We have all kinds of ethical and moral issues – without God.
- The other major literary work that studiously avoids the G-word is the Book of Esther in the Bible. But rabbinic tradition has it that although the name of God is absent, every time the word “The King” (one word in Hebrew) appears it is to be read as referring both to King Achashverosh and also, in some way, to God. The point is that while the story operates at a secular level, God is never far away. He is hovering underneath every line of the story, and challenging the characters to find Him in their everyday lives. And the characters seek Him out through prayer in the dark times and acknowledge His kindness by showing kindness to each other in the good times.
- Jewish thought teaches us to trust in humans only in so far as their moral instincts derive from the imagery of God in which we were created. To guide and fashion those instincts we need to look for God all the time, trying to find different ways of uncovering His influences in the world and enhancing His influence on our lives. We should not try to write Him out of the story, abandoning long-standing religious traditions for pure secular self-reliance.
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