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livI recently realized that Passover this year is going to be a month after the Brexit date, and depending what happens with the ongoing-as-we-speak debate about the deal, we may very well end up with the entire infrastructure of the country collapsing by then. So one of my (non-Jewish) partners suggested that maybe we could celebrate the festival in Jerusalem, since I always pray for that. I had to explain that
I felt a bit silly that I'd never really talked about my ideas of the Messianic redemption before. It's partly that
I think the "next year" part is probably fairly literal: if the prophet Elijah returns this Pesach, announcing the arrival of the Messiah, then by next year we should be ready to establish God's kingdom, which presumably includes being able to celebrate the pilgrim festivals in a restored Jerusalem somehow. We had a kind of interesting discussion about whether a year is enough to fix everything that's wrong with the world, and I am somewhat optimistic that it is if seven billion people all work together for a shared and noble goal with no hatred or fear holding us back. I usually decline to have an opinion about whether that goal includes rebuilding the Temple in the actual geographical location of current-day Jerusalem, but if pushed I'll say that when the Messiah comes rebuilding the Temple will be politically and religiously acceptable to everybody who currently fights over the region: For My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.
It happened that the next day I went to a brilliant talk at Limmud with some relevance: the artist Jacqueline Nicholls talking about her piece Jerusalem dreams. Now, I don't normally go to talks by artists describing their work, but I've come across really insightful stuff from Nicholls before and this talk was completely full of mindblowingly cool things.
Nicholls was invited to contribute to an exhibition commemorating the 2017 centenary of the Balfour Declaration, when the UK agreed in principle to establish a Zionist state in then-Palestine. She wanted to make something about her experience of being a British Jew; I think she must be about my age or a fraction older, so she's talking about stuff that's quite familiar to me. She used to sing the hymn Jerusalem in her secular / CoE school, like practically everybody does. She felt there was never any conflict between being British and being Jewish, and she liked the hymn because although it's obviously Christian, it doesn't explicitly mention Jesus, and she felt that the sentiment
The thing is that Jerusalem has a really weird place in British culture. As Nicholls pointed out, everybody sings it in school, even secular schools. It gets sung at football and rugby matches. The Labour party sing it at conferences, while it's also associated with a certain kind of Tory nationalism and nostalgia for the British Empire. Nicholls started her talk by playing us this video; we have an annual cultural ritual called The last night of the Proms where thousands of people gather in the Albert Hall to sing this hymn.
But Jerusalem a strange choice for a bombastic hymn celebrating nostalgic jingoism (at the Proms it's usually paired with Rule Britannia), because the actual lyrics are a quite ambiguous 1808 poem by William Blake. So Nicholls really interestingly traced the history of how this happened: 1917, three years into WW1, young British conscripts are being slaughtered in unimaginable numbers, and the government wants to restore morale and raise money for the war effort. So they publish an anthology of patriotic poems, including Jerusalem, which had never previously been published standalone, only as an introduction to a long epic ode to Milton. And the composer Parry was asked to set the poem as a hymn. Nicholls said that Parry's music resolves the ambiguities of the poem and makes it upbeat and patriotic, though she thought that might be partly Elgar's orchestration of Parry's setting that really went OTT in that direction.
So in 1917, exactly when Chaim Weizmann was lobbying Parliament to support a Zionist state, this hymn was being played all over the place. Nicholls thinks that Weizmann and Balfour, (also Lloyd George the then Prime Minister and Churchill who was War Secretary at the time), must have had the idea of the Albion myth in their heads because of Jerusalem, the concept that Britain has some mystical connection to the Holy Land. Apparently by the twentieth century people were claiming that Joseph the father of Jesus had visited England, not just Joseph of Aramethea as per the earlier legends. Maybe that had a subliminal influence on Balfour's willingness to support the Zionist state, thinking somehow that it was Britain's legendary mission to restore the Holy Land. Now, Weizmann was working as a chemist in Manchester at this time, and his invention of TNT which was highly useful to the war effort meant that he was popular with senior politicians like Balfour, so that's the usual chain of reasoning around how the Declaration got signed. If you're not aware, Weizmann went on to become the first President of the newly formed State of Israel in 1948. But it's interesting to speculate that Jerusalem might have played a role.
It turned out that Parry was so repulsed by the excessively jingoistic use of his music that he banned any further public performances after 1917. But then, in an amazing plot twist, the Suffragist Milicent Fawcett wrote to Parry asking for permission to sing his hymn at a Votes for Women rally. Parry was much happier with the idea of his music being used to support women's suffrage than to support the "Right to Fight" [sic] pro-war propaganda, so he not only gave permission but signed over the rights to the Women's Suffrage Society in perpetuity. This kept the hymn in the public arena when it might otherwise have been lost, and when the Suffragist movement later on morphed into the Women's Institute, Jerusalem continued as their anthem.
So, Nicholls' sleeping figure represents the Utopian dream, both political and religious, of restoring Jerusalem. She wanted to restore Blake's ambiguity and questions (rather than Parry / Elgar's bombastic certainty):
Also, there's a connection between the hymn Jerusalem, which is a kind of alternative national anthem in Britain despite its ambiguous words, and Naomi Shemer's song ירושלים של זהב, Jerusalem of gold, which is a kind of alternative national anthem for Israel. Even though it's very ambiguous, being connected to the Six Day War, like Jerusalem it can sometimes be a patriotic song about how Israel is the greatest country and sometimes a lefty song about how it's all more complicated. Another new thing I learned from Nicholls is that the phrase
Nicholls built her woman out of clingfilm and sticky tape, so that it was light enough to be carried to Israel in hand luggage, and transparent to the airport scanners so nobody would ask her why she was carrying dismembered limbs through security. At the last minute she was told her work was to be displayed in the British Mandate prison, where in the 40s Zionist resistance fighters were imprisoned and executed. And the work was set up opposite the reconstruction of the military commander's office, with a giant Union flag behind the commander's desk and a fine china teacup and other symbols of Britishness. Which adds a kind of dark twist to an artistic response to the identity complexities of being a British Jew, no?
Anyway, she had to abandon her original design of suspending the figure from the ceiling, and instead had the bed mounted on a central plinth so it still looked somewhat as if it were floating (the draped cloth hides the structural part). When people saw a reclining figure covered by a white cloth, it turned out they often thought of death rather than sleep, a shroud rather than a bedsheet. So although Nicholls hadn't intended the ambiguity between sleep and death, the exhibited work acquired some of those connotations. (Interesting discussion in the Limmud session where someone said that the threads deliberately left hanging from the embroidered words – Nicholls hand embroiders her work over her own handwriting – were reminiscent of a tallit, a fringed prayer shawl. An audience member said, that's strange because it's a female figure but a tallit is a male garment, and Nicholls said, not to her it isn't, and apparently it was this audience member's first encounter with the idea that some women wear a tallit. He wasn't an arse about it, just he'd never come across that concept before. Which is the sort of thing that only happens at Limmud, really.)
And Nicholls covered the floor of her prison cell / gallery room with salt, which was left over from another installation. She wanted to use white sand to represent the physical ground of geographical as well as the floating dreamer of the yearned for Messianic Jerusalem. But since salt was available, it has all the interesting connotations of sacrifice (the bed on a plinth also resembles an altar), and tears, and preservation and so on. She assumed that people would follow the British etiquette of not walking on an artwork, and would therefore not damage the rather fragile central figure. But Israelis don't take symbolic barriers as a hint, and felt free to walk all over the salt. So Nicholls would come to her work in the morning and find the salt was tracked with footprints. Just like in the Talmudic story about detecting demons by putting a ring of salt round one's bed and seeing if there are footprints there in the morning.
So yes, that was extremely educational!
next year in Jerusalemdoesn't mean that next year, I want to go on an overpriced Passover Experience package tour to the physical city of Jerusalem. I mean, no criticism of people who do find that kind of tourism spiritually fulfilling, but it's not the point of the prayer.
I felt a bit silly that I'd never really talked about my ideas of the Messianic redemption before. It's partly that
Next year in Jerusalemhappens right at the end of a four-hour ceremony and mostly we don't have much energy left for complicated theological explanations, we want to sing the silly song about one little goat and get everybody to bed. (Also at the end of Yom Kippur, but I don't usually drag my non-Jewish partners to YK services.) And it's partly that I live up to the Jewish stereotype of mostly focusing on this reality and not the world-to-come. And we had that slightly awkward discussion that possibly should have happened at a slightly earlier stage in a relationship between a Jew and a Christian, where I explained that I expect the Messianic age to actually see all the problems with the world fixed, and also that I don't really have a clear idea of what the perfected world will look like or how we'll get there.
I think the "next year" part is probably fairly literal: if the prophet Elijah returns this Pesach, announcing the arrival of the Messiah, then by next year we should be ready to establish God's kingdom, which presumably includes being able to celebrate the pilgrim festivals in a restored Jerusalem somehow. We had a kind of interesting discussion about whether a year is enough to fix everything that's wrong with the world, and I am somewhat optimistic that it is if seven billion people all work together for a shared and noble goal with no hatred or fear holding us back. I usually decline to have an opinion about whether that goal includes rebuilding the Temple in the actual geographical location of current-day Jerusalem, but if pushed I'll say that when the Messiah comes rebuilding the Temple will be politically and religiously acceptable to everybody who currently fights over the region: For My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.
It happened that the next day I went to a brilliant talk at Limmud with some relevance: the artist Jacqueline Nicholls talking about her piece Jerusalem dreams. Now, I don't normally go to talks by artists describing their work, but I've come across really insightful stuff from Nicholls before and this talk was completely full of mindblowingly cool things.
Nicholls was invited to contribute to an exhibition commemorating the 2017 centenary of the Balfour Declaration, when the UK agreed in principle to establish a Zionist state in then-Palestine. She wanted to make something about her experience of being a British Jew; I think she must be about my age or a fraction older, so she's talking about stuff that's quite familiar to me. She used to sing the hymn Jerusalem in her secular / CoE school, like practically everybody does. She felt there was never any conflict between being British and being Jewish, and she liked the hymn because although it's obviously Christian, it doesn't explicitly mention Jesus, and she felt that the sentiment
'Til we have built Jerusalemmatched quite well with what she would sing at home at Pesach,
Next year in Jerusalem. So she wanted to make an artwork exploring that, and started from the idea of a reclining figure, draped with a white sheet on which Nicholls embroidered the text of the hymn in English, and the phrase
Next year in Jerusalemin Hebrew.
The thing is that Jerusalem has a really weird place in British culture. As Nicholls pointed out, everybody sings it in school, even secular schools. It gets sung at football and rugby matches. The Labour party sing it at conferences, while it's also associated with a certain kind of Tory nationalism and nostalgia for the British Empire. Nicholls started her talk by playing us this video; we have an annual cultural ritual called The last night of the Proms where thousands of people gather in the Albert Hall to sing this hymn.
But Jerusalem a strange choice for a bombastic hymn celebrating nostalgic jingoism (at the Proms it's usually paired with Rule Britannia), because the actual lyrics are a quite ambiguous 1808 poem by William Blake. So Nicholls really interestingly traced the history of how this happened: 1917, three years into WW1, young British conscripts are being slaughtered in unimaginable numbers, and the government wants to restore morale and raise money for the war effort. So they publish an anthology of patriotic poems, including Jerusalem, which had never previously been published standalone, only as an introduction to a long epic ode to Milton. And the composer Parry was asked to set the poem as a hymn. Nicholls said that Parry's music resolves the ambiguities of the poem and makes it upbeat and patriotic, though she thought that might be partly Elgar's orchestration of Parry's setting that really went OTT in that direction.
So in 1917, exactly when Chaim Weizmann was lobbying Parliament to support a Zionist state, this hymn was being played all over the place. Nicholls thinks that Weizmann and Balfour, (also Lloyd George the then Prime Minister and Churchill who was War Secretary at the time), must have had the idea of the Albion myth in their heads because of Jerusalem, the concept that Britain has some mystical connection to the Holy Land. Apparently by the twentieth century people were claiming that Joseph the father of Jesus had visited England, not just Joseph of Aramethea as per the earlier legends. Maybe that had a subliminal influence on Balfour's willingness to support the Zionist state, thinking somehow that it was Britain's legendary mission to restore the Holy Land. Now, Weizmann was working as a chemist in Manchester at this time, and his invention of TNT which was highly useful to the war effort meant that he was popular with senior politicians like Balfour, so that's the usual chain of reasoning around how the Declaration got signed. If you're not aware, Weizmann went on to become the first President of the newly formed State of Israel in 1948. But it's interesting to speculate that Jerusalem might have played a role.
It turned out that Parry was so repulsed by the excessively jingoistic use of his music that he banned any further public performances after 1917. But then, in an amazing plot twist, the Suffragist Milicent Fawcett wrote to Parry asking for permission to sing his hymn at a Votes for Women rally. Parry was much happier with the idea of his music being used to support women's suffrage than to support the "Right to Fight" [sic] pro-war propaganda, so he not only gave permission but signed over the rights to the Women's Suffrage Society in perpetuity. This kept the hymn in the public arena when it might otherwise have been lost, and when the Suffragist movement later on morphed into the Women's Institute, Jerusalem continued as their anthem.
So, Nicholls' sleeping figure represents the Utopian dream, both political and religious, of restoring Jerusalem. She wanted to restore Blake's ambiguity and questions (rather than Parry / Elgar's bombastic certainty):
*Was* Jerusalem builded here?...
*Til* we have built Jerusalem, connecting back to the ambiguous prayer to be
Next year in Jerusalem. The figure is female because Jerusalem is always personified as female, for example the
daughters of Jerusalemin the Song of Songs who are repeatedly asked not to wake up love until the proper time.
Also, there's a connection between the hymn Jerusalem, which is a kind of alternative national anthem in Britain despite its ambiguous words, and Naomi Shemer's song ירושלים של זהב, Jerusalem of gold, which is a kind of alternative national anthem for Israel. Even though it's very ambiguous, being connected to the Six Day War, like Jerusalem it can sometimes be a patriotic song about how Israel is the greatest country and sometimes a lefty song about how it's all more complicated. Another new thing I learned from Nicholls is that the phrase
Jerusalem of goldoriginally referred to a piece of jewellery, literally of gold, given by R' Akiva to his wife to thank her for encouraging him to study and become a great scholar, even though it meant she only saw him once in seven years. It's sometimes used to designate the Mediaeval Italian Jewish wedding rings that had little houses or castles attached, and Shemer turned physical object which was a representation of Jerusalem into a metaphorical description of Jerusalem-the-city.
Nicholls built her woman out of clingfilm and sticky tape, so that it was light enough to be carried to Israel in hand luggage, and transparent to the airport scanners so nobody would ask her why she was carrying dismembered limbs through security. At the last minute she was told her work was to be displayed in the British Mandate prison, where in the 40s Zionist resistance fighters were imprisoned and executed. And the work was set up opposite the reconstruction of the military commander's office, with a giant Union flag behind the commander's desk and a fine china teacup and other symbols of Britishness. Which adds a kind of dark twist to an artistic response to the identity complexities of being a British Jew, no?
Anyway, she had to abandon her original design of suspending the figure from the ceiling, and instead had the bed mounted on a central plinth so it still looked somewhat as if it were floating (the draped cloth hides the structural part). When people saw a reclining figure covered by a white cloth, it turned out they often thought of death rather than sleep, a shroud rather than a bedsheet. So although Nicholls hadn't intended the ambiguity between sleep and death, the exhibited work acquired some of those connotations. (Interesting discussion in the Limmud session where someone said that the threads deliberately left hanging from the embroidered words – Nicholls hand embroiders her work over her own handwriting – were reminiscent of a tallit, a fringed prayer shawl. An audience member said, that's strange because it's a female figure but a tallit is a male garment, and Nicholls said, not to her it isn't, and apparently it was this audience member's first encounter with the idea that some women wear a tallit. He wasn't an arse about it, just he'd never come across that concept before. Which is the sort of thing that only happens at Limmud, really.)
And Nicholls covered the floor of her prison cell / gallery room with salt, which was left over from another installation. She wanted to use white sand to represent the physical ground of geographical as well as the floating dreamer of the yearned for Messianic Jerusalem. But since salt was available, it has all the interesting connotations of sacrifice (the bed on a plinth also resembles an altar), and tears, and preservation and so on. She assumed that people would follow the British etiquette of not walking on an artwork, and would therefore not damage the rather fragile central figure. But Israelis don't take symbolic barriers as a hint, and felt free to walk all over the salt. So Nicholls would come to her work in the morning and find the salt was tracked with footprints. Just like in the Talmudic story about detecting demons by putting a ring of salt round one's bed and seeing if there are footprints there in the morning.
So yes, that was extremely educational!
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(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-14 11:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-14 11:52 pm (UTC)There is also a Christian hymn called Jerusalem the Golden -- though whenever I hear it I end up earwormed by ירושלים של זהב at some point later in the day.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-21 10:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-15 03:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-21 10:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-15 08:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-21 10:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-15 12:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-21 10:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-15 01:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-21 10:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-15 02:42 pm (UTC)If a British SF writer wrote a book called Clouds Unfold I would break my finger hitting the purchase button so hard. I'm not British, I would be very dubious of an American doing it--Commonwealth countries yes maybe--but that would be a very clear sign that I and the author at least had some serious purpose in common.
Speaking of Commonwealth countries, one of the moments of Star Trek: DS9 that is a throwaway that makes me weep is the moment when O'Brien and Bashir are drunk and singing Jerusalem. Hundreds of years in the future, quasi-utopian Federation...and colonized characters, Irish and Arab, are still reaching for the utopian impulse of Jerusalem. Waterworks from me.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-21 10:25 pm (UTC)It's interesting that you have strong associations with the hymn; I didn't mean to be patronizing by explaining it but because it's so English I wouldn't have guessed it to be part of American culture. Having it show up in Star Trek is a lovely piece of incidental world building, thank you for recounting that.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-21 10:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-15 06:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-21 10:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-16 04:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-18 07:04 pm (UTC)A few niggles:
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-21 10:47 pm (UTC)I don't think anyone's claiming the song is secular, just that it's sung in secular as well as Christian contexts. And Nicholls is recounting her experience as a child where she felt more comfortable singing a song that doesn't explicitly mention Jesus. I don't think, and I'm pretty sure she doesn't think either, that it's theologically appropriate for Jews to sing.
I am usually quite careful about whether I mean England or Britain, but I'm quoting Nicholls who was talking about Britain throughout. I mean, it's the British government that signed the Balfour declaration, and it's Britain that governed pre-independence Palestine by Mandate, not England. The Last Night of the Proms video has quite a few flags from the nations too, I spotted at least Scottish and Northern Irish, as well as the English and the obvious Union flag. It seems logical that only English people would find the song patriotic since, as you say, it mentions England by name, but I really don't know where it fits in culturally for the other nations.
When I was an Arthurian geek child I expect I could spell Arimathea, but nowadays I have no idea. I learn from Wikipedia that some people think it's Ramataim-Tzofim. Anyway I'm not sure Blake is in fact talking about the legend of J of A, he might be just pointing up the fact that the Gospel stories take place in Judea, not in England. But the redeemed Jerusalem, being an idea as much as a geographical place, could be in England. And the thing Nicholls mentioned as the myth of Albion had, apparently, by the late nineteenth century, mutated into a story where Joseph the (step)-father of Jesus planted the first yew tree here.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-26 07:05 pm (UTC)It seems your experience here of school assemblies is completely different to mine. I do not recall any Christian content in junior school, except on a very occasional basis. In senior school, there were secular assemblies on Monday and Friday, with no singing of anything; instead someone would give a talk on something. Assembly on Wednesday was Christian, but I never attended it, as there was provision for me to attend a small Jewish assembly instead.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-21 03:38 am (UTC)I regularly listen to both songs mentioned and knew a bit of the history, but this told me much more. And the description of the artwork sounded fascinating, especially the way the various unplanned aspects of it reacting to circumstances ended up contributing and adding even more layers of meaning.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-11-21 10:49 pm (UTC)