Remembrance

[liv]

Lots of my friends are taking against the wearing of poppies and the marking of Remembrance Day, on the grounds that the event is shifting from its original context to being an excuse for nationalism and unpleasant, pro-military politics. And horrible ostentatious displays of competitive patriotism. AngrySamPoet calls the two-minute silence a two-minute hate. I know people who refuse to wear a poppy and people who wear white poppies as well as or instead of the British Legion red poppy, as a protest against the militaristic distortion of the event. And people who like to rate charities on grounds of either efficiency or approved politics aren't great fans of the British Legion.

I definitely respect this attitude; I'm not at all pro-war and don't approve of either fetishizing of soldiers and military stuff, or the kind of "patriotism" which shades into xenophobia or positioning white middle class English values from a couple of generations ago as some kind of ideal. At the same time a lot of people I interact with genuinely desire to commemorate those killed in or by wars, and I do think that's much more in the spirit of what Remembrance Day is about. That includes older people who were personally affected by WW2 and whose parents were affected by WW1, and it includes veterans who are mourning relatives and comrades. (Actually I went to a party last week that was full of my contemporaries and a mostly liberal sort of crowd, so I didn't transfer my poppy when I got dressed for the party, thinking there would be more people there who would be offended by a poppy badge than its absence. In fact I was about the only guest not wearing a poppy, which I think implies I've misjudged the mood of my social group based on a small number of people who are very ranty against Remembrance Day.) Mostly though, I have been wearing a poppy for the past week or so, because I don't feel passionately enough anti Remembrance Day that I want to give insult to this group of people.

For similar reasons I agreed to lead a memorial service in synagogue at the weekend, within our Saturday morning service. This weekend was also the 75^th anniversary of Kristallnacht. I was a bit concerned that the two acts of remembrance don't combine very well, but there you go. I mentioned that Jews fought in both sides in the First War, which is much harder to cast as a clear-cut good versus evil sort of conflict. I connected the violence of Kristallnacht and everything else that followed from that with the dangers of excessive nationalism and xenophobia. I avoided painting a rosy picture of WW2 as unambiguously about rescuing people from Nazi genocide.

I was telling friends that I was quite pleased with the service I put together, and with my sermon which connected last week's Torah reading to the anniversaries, via a completely amazing midrash about Rachel and theodicy. And some people encouraged me to actually post the sermon. I should note that I always speak ad lib when I'm preaching (or lecturing, for that matter) so this isn't a verbatim transcript of what I said, but I think a fairly close reconstruction. For people not familiar with how Jewish liturgy is structured, what I did was that I read Genesis 28:10 – 30:13, not in the sonorous language of the King James Version, but with my own running translation into conversational English. Then I spoke a little bit about the two commemorations as I've described, and people recited the memorial prayer (God who bore us in your womb... grant perfect rest beneath the shelter of your wings to the departed souls...). Then we completed the ceremony of reading Torah, and after that came my sermon.

So I'm going to warn you, this sermon starts out fairly light-hearted and gets kind of heavy by the end. Thing is, I have to love Vayetze, don't I? Because it's the Rachel story, the bit where my namesake is shapely and good-looking. And not only am I a Rachel, I ended up married to a Jack, so I'm fond of the love story aspect too. I haven't been with my Jack for quite seven years yet, just about six, and I hope it hasn't felt like too much like hard labour to him!

The other thing about Vayetze, though, is that it's all about making deals. Jacob is the most amazing hustler and wheeler-dealer. I don't know how Jacob ever ended up with the epithet of tam, straightforward, because he's about the least straightforward character in the Bible. At the beginning of the parshe, God appears to him and renews the covenant that God made with Abraham and renewed with Isaac. But a vague promise of a blessing and greatness for his descendants just isn't enough for Jacob. His immediate reaction is to try for a better deal! And he wants something concrete, he wants food and clothing and physical protection. I mean, sure, Abraham argues with God too, for example about Sodom, but when God first chooses him, he simply accepts, he's the paradigm of perfect, unquestioning faith. Not Jacob, though, Jacob haggles for material benefit for himself. He does offer God something in return, though, he doesn't just demand: if God gives him the things he asks for, he will will make the place of his vision a house of God and he will give God a tenth of everything that comes to him.

Because Jacob's response to the offered covenant is to cut a deal, he pretty much deserves to be stuck with Laban, who is like the anti-Jacob, matter and anti-matter. Laban constantly tries to make deals with Jacob, and he always cheats. He welcomes Jacob into his household and then just casually slips in, by the way you're going to have to work for your keep. And he tricks Jacob with the wrong daughter as a wife, and when he's in such a vulnerable position, making him agree to work another 7 years. The original deal was 7 years, but Jacob ends up working for 20, and the whole time Laban is changing the terms and trying to get out of his obligations to Jacob. And Jacob's trying to out-trick his father-in-law, doing magic and selective breeding so that the rare coloured sheep end up being the best sheep, all kinds of things. In the end he and Laban are so sick of all this bad faith dealing that they can't cope with eachother any more, and they build a heap of stones and agree to stay on opposite sides of it. And what happens then? Jacob is still trying to come out on top, he's such an incurable hustler that he swears on his beloved wife's life that nobody has stolen anything from Laban. He swears on her life without bothering to check the facts, so when it turns out she has stolen her father's household gods, she dies in childbirth, thanks to Jacob trying to use her as security for yet another dodgy deal.

But there's another aspect of this parshe, which is the relationship between Rachel and Leah. It all goes bad in the end, they become rivals over Jacob and there's all this bitterness and jealousy because Leah is fertile and Rachel is barren. And in fact more wheeling and dealing, with Rachel selling Jacob to Leah for some love-roots; it doesn't seem like Jacob gets much say in this deal! But before all that, it seems like the two sisters were once close, and indeed they're held up by the rabbinic tradition as the ideal of sisterly love.

How do we know this? Well, think about Laban's trickery with the two daughters. How on earth does he get away with fooling Jacob? He's been in love with Rachel for seven years, how could he not notice on the wedding night that it's the wrong sister? Some traditions say that he was very drunk from the wedding feast. And some that women in that era went about with full face veils, like modern Muslim women in some cultures. But even so, even if he'd never seen her face, even if he was drunk, surely Jacob would recognize the woman he's been in love with all this time, especially since we know that Rachel is beautiful and Leah is, well, funny-looking. So one tradition suggests that Rachel herself was in on the deal. She felt so sorry for her ugly older sister that she was willing to give up her husband, the man she was in love with. So she coached Leah in all the secret couple language and in-jokes that she and Jacob shared, so that Leah could convincingly pretend to be her. But the sisters realized this wasn't going to be enough to fool Jacob, because he'd recognize Leah's voice. (A bit like when Jacob himself deceived his father by pretending to be Esau, and his voice made Isaac suspicious.) The midrash goes into quite a lot of detail about how they managed to get round this problem, involving Rachel actually hiding under the bed on the wedding night and making appropriate noises while Leah kept quiet.

This story is told in Echah Rabbah, the midrash on Lamentations. The context is that God is going to destroy the Temple and send the Israelites into exile because of their sinfulness. All the patriarchs come to plead for mercy for their descendants, and they make eloquent arguments that God should spare the Israelites for the sake of all the good they did in their lives, for the sake of the sworn covenant. And God replies to each in turn that the Israelites have become so sinful that destruction is the only course. Finally Rachel puts her case. She leaps up from her crude roadside grave (because remember, she died in childbirth due to Jacob's careless oath-taking), and she tells God, what do you know about compassion? You never had a sister! And she tells this story about how she was willing to give up her beloved husband, because of her deep compassion for her poor older sister being left a spinster due to her ugly eyes. God doesn't have an answer for Rachel; the midrash says that God simply weeps and declares: Alas for the king, who prospered in his youth, yet in his old age no longer prospered!

I have this teaching from R' Sheila Shulman, who is currently very seriously ill. So I am passing it on to you in the name of hope for her full recovery to health, and I ask you to remember her when you say prayers for the sick.

We've just had a small memorial service for the anniversary of the terrible pogroms 75 years ago, when Nazi persecution of the Jews first erupted into major violence. Did the patriarchs ask God for mercy when the situation in Europe got this far out of control? Was it part of the covenant, in line with God's promise to Jacob that his descendants would be like the dust of the earth, spreading out west and east, south and north, that all the families of the earth would be blessed through Jacob's line. Kristallnacht and the years after it hardly seem like a blessing. And we can hardly argue that this degree of horror was a just punishment for our sins. Did Rachel leap up again to remind God of the real meaning of compassion? Did God perhaps weep: alas for the king, who prospered in his youth, yet in his old age no longer prospered!

I can't offer you much of a cheerful conclusion, in circumstances. I think the best I can say is that we are still here, still remembering in the traditional way. That's not much, but it's the happiest note I can manage to end on.

Comments

[kass]

I love that midrash from Eicha Rabbah.

[liv]

I love it very much, and the argument that persuaded me to self-indulgently post my sermon here was there might be people who are interested in this sort of thing but haven't seen it. (If I'd written a summary instead of just writing up my sermon, I was considering what kind of archive warnings the midrash would need, were it fanfic. At the very least dubcon and incest, and probably some kinks too.)

[lethargic_man]

AngrySamPoet calls the two-minute silence a "two-minute hate"

Ooh, that's nasty, and not at all I think justified.

[liv]

I agree with your assessment. But then, I mostly stay away from TV and tabloid news, so I could well believe that some people are in fact marking the two minutes in an unpleasantly jingoistic way, making it about our heroic soldiers gloriously defeating the evil foreigners.

[sunflowerinrain]

I gave up on red poppies many years ago when I found out that the local British Legion spent the money on its club, which was mainly about subsidised alcohol for members (who were not necessarily anything to do with any war). Then I went to white poppies.

In France, Remembrance Day isn't marked with poppies so I don't have to worry (there are two days, one for each of the last big European wars, and they are public holidays with ceremonies an' all; every year, not just for special anniversaries).

It's always been difficult for me to join in "Remembrance" without feeling the taint of jingoism and suppressed tribal aggression around it. Now the tribal aggression seems even less suppressed, and it's horrible and frightening.

A friend who is half-English, brought up in Devon, posted that she commemorated the day thinking of members of her family who died in WWII - civilians killed by Allied bombers. She it was who introduced me to Görlitz where the rest of the populace stopped the Nazis from attacking the Jews, and the annual ring of people holding hands around Dresden, and the Stolpersteine. Sometimes a beautiful thing comes from the slime and squalor.

[liv]

Yeah, I'm not all that interested in giving money to the BL myself. But I'm also not that obsessive about making sure every pound I give goes to the best possible causes, so I don't mind buying my poppy in order not to insult my colleagues and community who care about that kind of thing.

I think having separate days for the two wars probably has a lot going for it. Also I think not attending a ceremony is much less directly rejecting the remembrance than not wearing a poppy, so it's much easier for everybody to just get along without quarrelling over whether they support the cause or not.

I do think you're right that the jingoism and tribal aggression are getting worse. I don't spend a lot of energy being Outraged at politicians, but I'm pretty peeved at Cameron wanting to make the centenary of the start of WW1 into a big jamboree like the Queen's diamond jubilee.

And yes, it's good to remember the beautiful things where we can. Partly because it reminds people that humans are worth defending.

[marymac]

I think that kind of turning on Remembrance Day is opening the door to cheapen it further - I was extremely unhappy with the tabloidy nature of the BBC coverage of the services on Sunday.

There seems to be a forgetting of the solemnity and horror of the thing, of why this war, this one in particular, had the effect it did. But I don't think turning on the concept of Remembrance Day is the way to fix it. The idea is sound, but it needs to be dragged back from the politicians. I don't know how you do that, over here, it's barely baby steps made.

[liv]

When you say turning on Remembrance Day do you mean my kind of compromise approach of trying to be positive about victims and veterans while still basically anti-war, or do you mean people completely repudiating the whole thing? I do worry that the repudiating will make people who are mourning relatives and comrades feel really defensive. And yes, defensiveness could lead to more thoughtless xenophobic "patriotism".

I do think you're right that it's important to remember WW1 specifically and the impact it had, not just blandly talk about how war is bad in general. Being specific is maybe the way to drag it back from politicians who are sliding into thinking it was all about how Britain was great and heroic soldiers and that sort of nonsense. Which in fact WW1 poetry is extremely good for countering.

[marymac]

Partly the turning on the Poppy Appeal (yes there are issues, but you know, time and a place), partly some I've seen who really do turn on the whole idea - these are mostly those who don't really grasp what happened, or how directly it led to WWII.

I did have to turn off the Remembrance Sunday ceremonies at several points, though, because I do feel very strongly that the focus should be on the ceremonies and every cut away to random stories and especially the chit chatting in among the spectators made me furious. That is probably just me, I strongly resent manipulative broadcasting and the "constantly narrating how the presenter feels" style. Not quite as much as David Cameron's plans for the centenary do. Those send me straight to incandescent rage.

The remembrance of war, and the Great War in particular, requires the broad focus I think - the personal stories are no use, you need the cold hard realisation that most of those boys never came back. And they were boys, so many of them. And after 1916, they were conscripts. They didn't volunteer, they were sent. And every war we've had after stems from that one. It's a huge, huge thing. I can understand why both politicians and broadcasters don't like to confront it - that's why we need to.

In terms of the conflation with current wars, I know my cousins, currently in the RAF, feel there's a very definite difference between their service, as volunteers, and any consequences thereof, and the service of those who did not have a choice in the matter. I don't know how widespread that kind of attitude is, they're both very thoughtful people by nature.

[liv]

I thoroughly agree with this comment. For me it's remembering almost uncountable of teenagers who were sent to the continent to be slaughtered, not brave heroes nobly sacrificing their lives for "our freedom". Really good point about mass conscription and the difference from volunteer armed forces.

And yeah, the whole thing of Remembrance Sunday as a jolly society occasion with lots of gossip about celebs and royals is revolting. The centenary thing enrages me too and if they go ahead with it I might well find myself actively boycotting anything poppy next year.

[hatam_soferet]

I like your sermons because they're interesting and thoughtful but you make it look effortless (like good dancers). Rabbi students who post sermons tend to post sermons which are trying too hard and taste of self-conscious, and those aren't interesting to read.

I'm back in poppy culture for the first time in, what twelve years? and I find it oddly reassuring. It feels like being in a culture that says "war sucks, and people die, and that's sad, and it keeps happening, and that is sad too." It's very different from the feel in the US, which is much more "people are fighting even now to keep us safe!!!! (so let us honour them by buying cut-price consumer goods!!!)" which I find pretty much repugnant.

[liv]

Wow, I have definitely never been compared to a dancer before! Thank you so much for your encouragement, best badger.

And yes, Armistice Day is much less unpalatable than Veterans' Day. (Has it really been 12 years?)

[green_knight]

I don't know how Jacob ever ended up with the epithet of tam, straightforward, because he's about the least straightforward character in the Bible.

The 'honest Jack' school of naming?

(Nothing to comment on the sermon, but read it with interest.)

[liv]

Thank you, I'm glad you found it interesting; I don't like to dump random Jewy stuff on an unwilling audience. I think the reason that Jacob is called straightforward is that the rabbinic view of Jacob is quite different from the literal reading of the Bible stories. But that doesn't really answer the question of why the tradition reads Jacob like that.

[angelofthenorth]

Good, interesting sermon, Thank you.

[liv]

*hug* Well, if you think it's good and interesting there must be something in it. It means a great deal to me that you commented appreciatively.

[mirrorshard]

I'm upset with the British Legion because their uniquely high public profile effectively turns "remembering the horrors of war" into "honouring soldiers". That poster of a child in a "Future Soldier" T-shirt was the last straw for me.

If they had an equal focus on civilian casualties, widows, orphans, devastated communities, displaced people, and support staff (I've been reading a really good book recently, Wounded by Emily Mayhew, which is all about the battlefield medical establishment in the Great War) and if they made an attempt to treat the cause of the problem rather than a very small subset of the symptoms, I'd be much happier with them.

[liv]

Seems entirely reasonable to me. I wasn't at all impressed with giving kids Future Soldier t-shirts, that's almost coming round full circle to the situation of the early 1910s when kids were encouraged to think of war as this fun adventure they were looking forward to when they grew up. Which is extremely depressing, it's the worst kind of forgetting what Remembrance is for.

I think there is something to be said for a charity with a specialist focus. I don't have a problem with the fact that the British Legion supports veterans rather than civilians harmed or bereaved by war and non-soldier military support staff. But I don't think that they're carrying out even that limited remit very usefully any more, they're mostly just a society for self-promotion these days. So maybe the answer is in fact those "designer" poppies that lots of people sneer at, wearing a badge of support to show you care about the war dead, without in fact giving money to a somewhat rubbish charity.

[mirrorshard]

Mm, that does make a lot of sense. I'm not sure what scope there is for non-licensed (open source?) red poppy badges... I've been considering making some white poppy ones, but haven't managed to get around to it yet.