Remembrance
Nov. 11th, 2013 10:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livLots 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. ![[twitter.com profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
AngrySamPoet calls the two-minute silence a
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 75th 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 (
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
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:
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.
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 75th 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.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-13 09:55 am (UTC)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.