Two Roads to Remembrance

There are (at least) two ways to enter peronally into a community’s corporate memory, sot hat it can renew itself in you:

• Contemplative remembrance is clean and simple, driven by the mind, when the eyes focus on something in an unhurried way, in isolation from the ordinary business of life. Icons are windows into heaven, to be gazed through as well as on. To switch on to the icon, you switch out of the distractions.
  
  
• Resonant remembrance is messy. You put yourself through a routine with your wits around you, but floating on the surface, so that a stray thought or impression can resonate against something in you, and bring you up against something you thought you had forgotten all about, but can now be understood in a new light.

So, today, I visited an extraordinary place of Contemplative remembrance, Yad Vashem’s extraordinary museum — a place to spend weeks, not days. It stores in the most moving ways the remembrance of the Holocaust and its victims, giving names to the nameless, and guiding you through the story with a small number of token objects, which you have to focus on in an unhurried way to get the best out of the experience.

Compare and contrast the discipline of doing the Via Dolorosa. There is no reflective space, but only the bustling life of a middle eastern street, distracyions all round, tourists snapping away, horns blaring, people selling their wares. It could not be less conducive to contemplation. Yet if you throw yourself into the flow with your wits around you, what connects you to Jesus’ sufferings is not the place (wehich has largely changed), but the whole ambience. Do we suppose, for one moment, that the first Good Friday was different from any other business day in Jerusalem? The bustling crowds, the children running, the animals, the smell, the noise. Nobody cleared those out the way, then or now.

Here’s a process of Messy resonance, told me by a good and much respected friend yesterday. She found herself at a small on-street station on the Via, hemmed in on every side, with blaring commerce and life going by, noise, smell and bustle. And she thought of Jesus falling for the second time. And what floated to the surface was a memory of the pain of childbirth and hearing a dustcart in the street outside, and wondering how they could carry on regardless, as though nothing significant was happening. And perhaps such a thought entered Jesus’ mind — Is it nothing to you who pass by?

Actually no — and that unwitting rejection in itself becaomes an emotional footprint connecting us to Jesus even more surely than if the street looked the same. Indeed if it did look the same that could make this kind of remembrance harder, because it would be too easy to rubberneck it, or sentimntalise it, or turn it into a movie in the mind. The shaft of pure recognition is too piercing and poingnant for any of those things. And that, roughly is how this kind of pilgrimge works — not high class rubbernecking, but allowing oneself to be carried along in a stream of experience that allows for sympathetic resonance. You come back with a new view, not of the buildings, but yourself.

That’s the difference between being a Pilgrim and a Tourist. And it’s been a true privilege to travel for ten days with such an engaging, open, thoughtful company of fellow pilgrims.

Joy and Jerusalem

Leaving Ramallah by way of a jolly but rather solitary red volkswagen beetle, we cut and run to avoid the major queues at major checkpoints, taking an easy rural route through the wall, manned by nice cheerful kids with who waved their ouzis in a mostly welcoming way, and seemed as mellow as you can be when your office window is riddled with bullet holes. This brought us down to the Holy City of Peace, and the Western Wall, where Mondays are a good day for Bar Mitzvahs. This has been amazingly developed in the past 27 years.







For me the highlight was to be swept up in the song and dance around one boy’s Bar MItzvah. With joy and freedom in the air, a very proud family seemed relaxed and generous about sweeping up a C of E bishop into the fun. Raucous Hebrew singing and dancing is a great stress reliever and could, perhaps, be turned into a marketable fitness concept like step aerobics. Video snip of the moment of reading the scroll follows — Vicars who experience anxiety about people taking photos during family ceremonies take note — Never in the field of human initiation has a lens that large been that close to a small boy.


Afterwards, back in the non gender-segregated section at the back, we swept together a circle of people near this holiest of sites for Jews, and prayed for peace and justice for all — Shalom and Tsedeq — simply, holding hands, in French, English and Hebrew. Why not?

Suburban Captivity of a Schlemiel

It’s 1967. Woodstock is two years off, and Betty Crocker is still queen of the ’burbs. Larry Gopnik is a schlemiel, a loser, a junior professor of math at an inconsequential midwestern college, who lives with his mutton-dressed-as-lamb wife and teenage kids in a banal suburban bungalow, lost in the flatlands of Minnesota. The wife takes up with a cloyingly deeper local widower, his daughter rifles his wallet to pay for a nose job at 14, his spotty inconsequential son, a chip off the old block, starts getting into trouble at Hebrew school. His brother Arthur, an embarrassing deadhead, moves into his bedroom as his wife moves out. The Book of Larry, in some ways, mirrors the Book of Job, but shallower. Larry is paralysed by his own conservatism, pinned to a card in his own safe zone but too fearful to flap his wings, let alone fly away.

Our hero manages to add troubles to his inconsequential life without adding depth as a student tries to bribe him and hate mail starts rolling in to the tenure committee, along with lawyers bills, and an undertaker's account for his wife’s lover. Yet Larry cannot even get it together with his nude sunbathing next door neighbour. Time for a bit of wisdom. This is a job for a half decent rabbi: but all poor Larry can find is a fresh-faced stripling mini-rabbi as shallow and inconsequential as himself. The local sage is too busy thinking to help little losers like Larry. This film demonstrates the extent to which most religion is about framing and articulating, rather than answering, life’s questions.

Some will find the Coen bros latest crazy trip to shul obscure and unedifying, lacking in ribticklers even, but if you’re still with me, you may discover it to be delicious loonery. The bros play deftly with absurdity, on a small canvas, admirably restrained but with flashes of crafted slickness reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. This is small scale tragicomedy, you understand, philosophical juggling with balls made by reconstituting the shavings of an inconsequential life.

Diehard Bros fans, like me, will give this one a special intimate place in their collections and occasionally pull it out on the long winter evenings to savour with a bottle of something. Shallow people will inevitably count this movie an oddity. In a way this is Woody Allen for the noughties, and like the more philosophical Woody Allen (Crimes and Misdemeanours), the trixical bit that barely comes off is landing the plane at the end of the flight. In its own understated register it’s their funniest outing since the Big Lebowski, even if it falls a bit short of Raising Arizona. It may be all too contorted and surreal for some. If you find it so, consult your rabbi... Four and a half out of five stars.

Culture & prejudice: Lifting Veils...

A joyful evening at the Oxford Jewish Centre, chairing a Film Evening for the Council of Christians and Jews. OJC is an interesting place, serving as home to both an Orthodox and a Reform congregation, who seem to enjoy life together. They regularly socialise with characteristic verve and panache, around times of worship even, when custard pies are genrally eaten not thrown. Combative Christians take note: Such things are possible.

And in that context, I was vastly impressed by our film— Veils, by Dan Susman, a young Jewish film-maker. It’s a witty, beautifully crafted short — indeed the quality of its cinematorgaphy left me longing to see it one day on a very large screen. It tells the story of a Jewish bride and Palestinian Arab Groom in North London, but as the IMDB says, it’s not the standard Romeo and Juliet story — not quite. Maureen Lipman heads a strong cast. Janie Booth’s stony-faced Meshugeneh is unforgettably nightmare-inducing.

Made by a typical team of Jews, Palestinians and Bengali Italians, Veils could have been a right old mix-up — but it isn’t. It has powerful intellectual foundations, in which anthropology buffs will recognise the influence of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. I don’t want to spoil the film’s twists and subtleties for anyone else who gets to see it, but it doesn’t half make you think of your own assumptions about other people, wherever you belong on the soggy liberal to hardball chauvinist scale.

Yom haShoah: Living Memory

International Holocaust Memorial Day has in recent years been observed on January 27, the date troops entered the camps. In Israel, Yom haShoah is timed around the anniversary of the rising in the Warsaw Ghetto of 1943, but its closeness to Pesach can lead to some variation. I was immensely honoured and moved to be a guest at the Council of Christians and Jews celebration of Yom haShoah yesterday in Oxford. The Oxford Jewish Congregation is a vibrant and extrordinary outfit which encompasses a wide range of expressions of Jewish practice under one roof.

Proceedings began with the simple but compelling voice of Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, played on the cello by Lynton Appel — music reflecting traditional chant from the eve of the Day of Atonement. Another unforgettable part of the evening was an address by Ruth Shire, a refugee from Nazi Germany, evacuated with other children in 1937. Ruth put everything in historical perspective, briefly, then told her story — of living with a family near Oxford, of the internment of her father during the war, and of the life she had built in this country.

Ruth’s story reminded us that amidst evil, the kindness of strangers and the resilience of the human spirit make for an everlasting remembrance. Her simple words reminded us that we all have stories that can bless us or curse us, by informing the decisions we make and the attitudes we take. Worst of all is to travel in ignorance of one’s own story. This being a Jewish community, there was, of course, a prodigious family party afterwards.

The memorial included the recitation together of the Kaddish, two minutes silence and the lighting of candles around which we placed stones. In Bible times graves were marked by cairns. Placing stones on them was a way of making them more permanent. Stones do not fade like flowers, and bear witness that others have visited and not forgotten. It was immensely significant to leave stones for those millions who were denied the basic dignity of a grave — an expression of the respect they were denied by their persecutors.

It is important to focus on the historical aspect of this, all the more as time passes. However it added a very special additional dimension to be a guest within a resonant community, in which memory is not a museum piece, but living consciousness. The evening was not simply about feeling sad, but also about identifying with those who died and those who suffer injustice and genocide in the world today:

We remember those who died in the Holocaust,
when madness ruled and evil dwelt on earth. We remember those of whom we know, and those whose very names are lost.

We cherish the memory of those who died as martyrs, those who died resisting, and those who died in terror.

We mourn for all that died with them; their goodness and their wisdom, which could have done so much to enoble and enrich humanity. We mourn for the genius and the wit that died, the learning and the laughter that were lost.

We stand in gratitude for their simple, decent lives. Their spiritual resistance remains an enduring testimony to a community where light persisted in darkness. Each person was unique, and we remember them all in love and compassion.

We salute those who had the courage to stand outside the mob, to save us, and to suffer with us. They too are God’s witnesses, and a source of hope when we are tempted to despair.

Because of the suffering, may such times never come again, and may their sacrifice not be in vain. In our daily fight against cruelty and prejudice, tyranny and persecution, their memory gives us strength.

In silence we remember those who sanctified God’s name.

Many thanks to Alison Ryde for the picture of candles and stones afterwards, and to the community of the Oxford Jewish Centre for their generosity and hard work.