2nd day Rosh Hashanah 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Howard's sermon here or read it below
Let me start with a question: how do you, we, keep track of what we go through every passing hour, the dense profusion of thoughts, emotions, intuitions, anxieties, confusions, that add up to our lives? How do we keep track of, how do we chronicle, the hidden regions of our hearts? Our secret fears and hopes and guilt, our inadequacies, our failures (real and imagined) -whatever it is we struggle with, that daily life throws at us? How do we manage life? As the poet said: “The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life” (Seamus Heaney).
And how do we keep track of, how do we chronicle, the dizzying complexity of our world, the events that cascade around us, that tsunami of news and images from across the globe, the ceaseless, relentless, overwhelming calls for our attention: earthquakes, floods, fires, Russian war crimes, political corruption, kisses that are not just kisses, civil wars, famines, bankruptcies of businesses, cities, ethnic nationalism stirring ancient hatreds, millions of people on the move - the reports inundate our waking hours, and maybe our sleep too, with every piece of unsettling news abruptly overtaken by another, creating narratives that have no end, storylines that have no plot and lose their focus in the presence of the next story, a tumult of stories that keep on exposing all the shades of human vulnerability? The vulnerability of others, the vulnerability of ourselves.
How do we keep track of both what we experience within the circumference of our own small lives - small, but of infinite significance to us - as well as what floods through us in our disordered times? How do we focus in and focus out at the same time? Just a small task that this period in the Jewish year sets before us. Looking within - what can we change? Looking outside - what can we change? This is the annual project of these days - an impossible project of course. But Jews have always been drawn to impossible projects. Like working towards a Messianic age, like believing in an invisible God, like trusting that a small insignificant tribe in the ancient Middle East received a vision that was relevant for all time and for all humanity. Absurd projects, impossible projects - but they have drawn us in, these projects, these stories, they have seduced us for generations. The seductions of hope. We can look in - and we can look out. A dual focus. Our awesome, mind-bending project.
So how do we keep ourselves going? You can of course switch off from all that outer stuff, and focus, try to focus, just on getting though your own day relatively intact. That’s hard enough - the personal travails of the heart. With bodies and minds that let us down, with people around us who frustrate us or cause us grief, with personal disappointments and losses to manage, we might feel we have quite enough to be getting on with.
Why bother to add to it an awareness of the world around us and how it effects us - we know that it does effect us, that the missile attacks on Kyiv are not unconnected with the price of food in our shops, that the exodus of a population in one war-torn part of the world effects the politics of our government, that the glass in your iPhone is made by Uigar Muslims forcibly transferred from their homes into concentration camps, that in London our non-Ulez compliant vehicles wreak havoc on children’s growing lungs and cause 4,000 premature deaths of year - of course we don’t know the actual children nor, probably, the actual people who die early, it’s just statistics, but we know about all this. Even if all this knowledge can feel unbearable, overwhelming, sometimes - we know that we live in a complex interconnected world where everything is connected to everything else.
So I do understand when people say they just don’t want to think about all that supposedly ‘outer’ stuff. One may just want to focus on what I called the hidden regions of our own hearts, and let the heart of the world succumb to its own arrythmia, it’s own deadly disorders.
This may be a matter of temperament, how much we want to focus inwards, on ourselves, and how much we want to engage with the vicissitudes of the world around us. And we may move - in a lifetime, or in a single day - from one position to another, and then back again. I know that I want to try to keep track of both, the hidden regions of the heart and the struggles of the world, the struggles in the world. I want to keep an eye on - and chronicle, report back on - the inner and outer world. I want a dual focus, it’s foolhardy in a way, omnipotent maybe, but I want to see everything simultaneously.
I’m reminded of those lines by the great Jewish-American poet Charles Reznikoff that we find in our machzor:
“If only I could write with four pens between five fingers
and with each pen a different sentence at the same time -
but the rabbis say it is a lost art, a lost art.
I well believe it.”
That speaks to me as we gather today, in pursuit of the lost arts. How do we hold all that comes at us? How do we find our bearings? Today, almost at random, I am thinking, starting near to home: how do we find our bearings with the news that Miriam has shared with us, which means the community will be going through a period of change, transformation, evolution; how do we find our bearings within this European war that touches our lives in different ways; how do we find our bearings when Israel is going through such self-lacerating convulsions; how do we find our bearings with the waves of toxic nationalism and antisemitism and crazed conspiracy theories that swirl around the planet; how do we find our bearings and find some place of stillness within it all, to find some reassurance, or hopefulness, or comfort, or direction, within this life that sweeps us on relentlessly, remorselessly. How do you find your bearings when living in a maelstrom?
Decades ago the novelist Saul Bellow diagnosed our modern condition as living in what he called the ‘moronic inferno’. And he asked the key question - the religious question, the spiritual and psychological question - how are we supposed to live and remain fully human when all this goes on around us? And being fully human means be in touch with the good within us but also our capacity for destructiveness - and trying to ensure that the goodness within us wins out as it battles with the all the other stuff that lurks inside. So this is the question for the season we are in: how are we supposed to live now in our times? To live well, I would add. Not just to survive, but to thrive. How are we supposed to do it?
Well, I don’t know. Yes, that’s disappointing, I know. Aren’t rabbis supposed to know? Even if they can’t write with four pens between five fingers, aren’t they, we, supposed to know how we can retain our full humanity, our potential to enact the better parts of our nature, our kindness and compassion, our generosity, our passion for justice, aren’t we rabbis supposed to offer a road map of how we need to be, in our wondrous, wounded world?
The problem is my road map may not be the one that works for you. I can share the contours of my map but the work of these days is to seek out your own. Maybe the liturgy can offer clues. Maybe conversations with friends and family can offer clues. Maybe something you read or see or just overhear on the tube can point you in a direction. Maybe an amalgam of all these can help sketch out a map to guide you through the maelstrom.
My road map of how I try and keep my finger on the pulse of life, the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, will probably, possibly, be rather different from many of you for one simple reason: I keep away from social media. (No sharp intake of breath, so maybe not too shocking for you). I don’t use Twitter, Tiktok, Instagram, Snapchat, Telegram - I know the names and to a degree I know what they are - but I see them as distractions rather than opportunities for enhancing my life. You may feel very differently. But I am easily distracted and I don’t want my attention diffused in a thousand directions, or saturated with what other people want me to be interested in. I know that for some people these things are a blessing, so yes, build them into, or keep them in, your roadmap - Kol haKavod - all I know tis hat I value the freedom non-engagement gives me to have my own thoughts, and develop my own direction, and pursue the richness in the world in other ways.
Look, I’m not even on Facebook, though - somewhat reluctantly - I do use WhatsApp, which is of course owned by Meta/Facebook. And I say reluctantly not because I don’t want the connection to others it offers - I crave real connection, real intimacy - but for quite another reason. And I am aware we are on Facebook live right now and it seems FRS is quite wedded to it in so many ways. So I feel very hesitant talking about this, but I want to illustrate a point. We use, maybe have to use, a huge amount of what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’ to get through our lives. There are things that we know, that we have to pretend to ourselves we don’t know, in order to get on with our lives.
So you must know, if you use Facebook, the ways in which Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has a malignancy curled inside its beating but sclerotic heart that is deeply problematic. I hear stories every day in my therapy consulting room in which it’s clear that social media is having a detrimental effect on people’s mental health - Instagram is toxic in the ways it promotes fantasies of beauty and body desirability - young women are particularly vulnerable here. And when you are immersed in images of what other people have, or are doing, or who they are doing it with, it generates envy, jealousy, feelings of missing out, worthlessness, unlovability. It draws out, and draws on, these feelings. But these apps are addictive - who doesn’t want to be ‘liked’? And then I think a bit wider about the way Facebook fanned ethnic violence in Africa, was used by the military in Myanmar in their campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority, which led to murder, rape, and dispossession; we saw its poisonous role in the 2016 US presidential election leading to Trump’s election, as well as in feeding lies into the Brexit debates. Yes, I know it can be used for good as well - but the pernicious aspects of the Meta empire are transparent, you don’t have to dig deep to reveal the underbelly of the beast. And like the tobacco industry before it, there’s a deep denial of the evidence that its product can be detrimental to our health.
And this is how our cognitive dissonance works - we know all this, but we also don’t want to know it.
I really don’t want to moralise all this, I just want to try and describe it, chronicle it, and say that I am caught up in this too. I might not use Facebook, or any social media, in my attempts to manage this maelstrom of a world but I do engage with - another huge distraction from what matters - I do watch a lot of sport. Sport can, along the way, teach us about dedication, endurance and how to mange disappointment and the inevitability of loss - but I know, all sports fans know, how often professional sport is now tainted by its association with human rights abuses, corruption, sexism. It hasn’t yet stopped me watching - that’s my cognitive dissonance - but In my heart I know it should. Aren’t we all complicit? As I say, I am trying not to be too moralistic about this - though there is a moral question at the heart of it - I’m just trying to describe it, where we are. One pen, two fingers.
So this is the question I am posing for these days of reflection: what does your road map look like, what changes might enhance your life, what could you do without, what do you want to add in. ‘Choose life’ is one of the great mantras of Judaism - we are a people enamoured of the possibilities of life, not just surviving in life, but sharing and enacting a vision of the possibilities of fulness of life, a life of compassion, kindness, justice, empathy, a life of caring for the wellbeing of those close to us and those far from us.
Some of us are going to be more drawn to focus in on our own lives, some of us are going to be more interested in that world out there. One artist who manages the trick, it’s a gift really, of keeping a dual focus is the writer Ian McEwan.
I want to round off what I have been saying by commending to you his recent book ‘Lessons’. It’s a masterclass in dual focus: its hero Roland, one of the so called ‘baby boomer’ generation, struggles to make sense of his life, he is in turns complacent and baffled, loving and lost, indecisive and engaged, his personal life is in many ways a mess, but he has - McEwan gives him - his moments of intimacy, his capacity to show love and to feel loved. In other words, in his complexity and uncertainties and mistakes, in his small triumphs and his disappointments - he is us. But McEwan’s pre-eminence as a novelist is in showing us this life interacting with a wider backdrop: the Cuban Missile Crisis, Thatcherism, the Aids crisis, perestroika, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Europe, New Labour, the Iraq war, Brexit, the pandemic, the storming of the American Capitol - the book, and it is long, was finished just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, otherwise I am sure it would have included that. But if you want a text that illustrates, illuminates, the grandeur and complexity of living both looking in and looking out at the same time - which is our situation - McEwan is incomparable. Let me show you, and I’ll finish with this:
The three [friends] spoke and listened easily, intimately. It often happened like this, Roland thought, the world was wobbling badly on its axis, ruled in too many places by shameless ignorant men, while freedom of expression was in retreat and digital spaces resounded with the shouts of delirious masses. Truth had no consensus... Parts of the world were burning or drowning. Simultaneously, in the old fashioned glow of close family, made more radiant by recent deprivation, he experienced happiness that could not be dispelled, even by rehearsing every looming disaster in the world. It made no sense.
And there you have it - that’s a truly great piece of writing, bringing to the surface what is deep inside. The outer world in all its messiness and threat, side by side with the inner world, that can still experience the joy of living. ‘It made no sense’, the author says. No, it makes no sense. And yet it’s true. Emet. True to how we live. It’s another almost lost art: of making sense of what makes no sense.
