Category: My life

A Very Peculiar Hatred

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In his excellent little book Radical Then, Radical Now, the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks addresses the question: Why be a Jew? He wrote the book originally as a wedding gift for his son and daughter-in-law, but then enlarged and published it for a wider audience, both Jews and non-Jews. In the post-Holocaust age, in spite of the greater freedom enjoyed by Jews in many (especially Western) countries, most Jewish communities report an alarming decline in numbers of adherents. Jews are abandoning traditional practice, ‘marrying out’ and not creating the ‘Jewish home’ that used to be a central feature of Jewish life. They are not so much unaware of their Jewish identity, as rejecting it or trying to shed it.

At the same time, Sacks quotes statements of non-Jews who admire Judaism.

The British historian and writer A. L. Rowse described in his memoir written near the end of his life one of his unfulfilled dreams: “If there is any honour in all the world that I should like, it would be to be an honorary Jewish citizen.” Winston Churchill said, “Some people like Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are beyond question the most formidable and the most remarkable race that has ever appeared in the world.”

Jews make up only about half of 1% of the world’s population. Yet the contribution they have made to world civilization is out of all proportion to their numbers. Since the Nobel Prize was established in 1901, over one-fifth, 20%, of Nobel prize winners, have been Jews.

Yet in spite of all they have suffered through millennia of persecution, in spite of the horrors of the Holocaust, in spite of their achievements and contribution, they are perhaps the most hated people in the world. In every country there are reports of antisemitism growing more widespread, more violent, more extreme.

Why this extraordinary, irrational, peculiar hatred?

At some time during the second year of COVID lockdowns, in the spring of 2021, as I became increasingly aware of the news of growing antisemitism, I decided to read about it. After years of not wanting to believe there was antisemitism in the Labour Party, I eventually learned I was wrong. I began to read more widely about Judaism and the experience and beliefs of Jewish people. It turned out that it was fascinating and beautiful. In retirement I was allowing myself to re-examine the beliefs of Christianity, expecially the ones I had always found difficult or unattractive. Like Original Sin, ‘total depravity’, the excellence of the spiritual over the physical and material, so that virginity was often prized over marriage. Like the exclusiveness of ‘salvation’, only through Christ — which, if you push it to its logical conclusions, suggests that a loving God created the vast majority of human beings knowing that they would be condemned to eternal punishment. Like, all the theories of atonement which attempt to explain how ‘salvation’ works. Like, the relentless drive to convert anyone and everyone who isn’t a ‘born-again’ Christian, and make them just like us.

And I find that most of these are just not there in Judaism. Whatever its peculiarities — and of course it has many difficulties of its own, like every human religion — it is in so many ways more humane, more universalistic, more life-affirming. Its typical mode of prayer is largely blessing and thanking God, not begging to be ‘let off’ the punishment we justly deserve, and longing for God to bring the world, and with it the whole human Story, to a blessed End.

So what’s to hate, about it?

Perhaps one answer is, it’s easy for bullies and haters to hate the people they regard as weak and unable to fight back. No one makes a scapegoat of a lion, which might have its own ideas about what was happening. But I have come to wonder if the real, deeper reason for the irrational hatred that is antisemitism, is that bad people hate what is Good. In its very essence, Judaism is about Freedom. Moses brought the people of Israel out of their slavery in Egypt, and made of them a nation who would be God’s “treasured possession among all peoples… a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” The people of Israel are radically free. And that is what rulers and tyrants have hated more than anything through all the centuries. And it’s what the little people, who know that they themselves are not free but are slaves or victims, also hate passionately. They envy the Jews and so they hate them. They would admire them, but they cannot bear to admit that they are admirable, and so they hate them.

When God first called Abraham, God promised him,
“I will make of you a great nation,
And I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
And you shall be a blessing.
And I will bless those who bless you;
And curse him that curses you;
And all the families of the earth
Shall bless themselves by you. (Genesis 12.2-3)

Anyone who hates Jews, will be — already is — under God’s curse. No wonder they are such unhappy, unfulfilled, violent, hate-filled people.

Family Christmas/New Year Gathering

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Back row: Sephy, Esther, Paul, David, Naomi, Alex, Tom
Middle row: Martha, Dodie, Bethan, Lotte, Libby, Tilly, Annie
Front row: Jeremy, Owen, Alison, Tony, Elsie, Aurelia

Another New Year, and on the last-but-one day of the Old Year we had our one and only whole-family get-together of the year. When there are 20 of us, it gets more difficult to have these occasions very often. Thanks to Tom and Annie having a bigger house now, and being the most centrally located of the families, we are able to meet at their place. A bring-and-share lunch with each family contributing a course, and a lot of (too much) drink. What could be nicer?

It was a noisy, beautiful, fun event, often too much for various of us in turn, so that everyone needed an ‘escape room’ at different times. The cousins are all close enough in age (2 to 12 years) to get on really well.

We feel wonderfully blessed to have such fine children, grandchildren, and children-in-law. I’ve recently been reading the stories in Genesis of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs. Looking at this picture makes me feel a but like Jacob. We haven’t got 70+ descendants, but what the children of Alison and Tony lack in quantity, they make up for in quality.

A Testament, a Prayer

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When I am gone I would like it to be remembered
that I took pleasure in the common things of life
delighted in the joys of Everyday
waking in the morning to life and breath and sound
and sight and smell, and the taste of bread
and the human voice and touch of those I love.
That everything is Gift — and more than this —
that there’s a Giver to whom one may give thanks.

That Everyday brings news of discoveries
fresh adventures of learning and knowing
words to hear and read and chew on, and minds to meet,
music to charm the ear and people I love
with whom to share the things that I have found
who’ll share with me what they have found also

I’d like it to be remembered —
that I was kind to others and myself
that I would smile at people (not at cameras)
laugh when I caught myself being over serious
that truth and beauty made my spirit soar
that I was wise with the wisdom of my years
yet innocent as the child who still, somewhere,
plays in my soul
that I loved questions more than answers
stories to tell, yet better, to inhabit —
that I dreamed that there could be a better world
yet never hated this one that isn’t so
nor gave up hope of how it all might be.
At day’s end never closed my eyes in sleep
without I blessed the Author of my life.

If this is what I’d like remembered when I’m gone
let it become my habit while I’m still here.

Having a go at Shakespeare

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I haven’t recorded a poem for over two months. I’d been asked to read something by Shakespeare and was too afraid to try: how could I dare to do what the greats of acting and speaking have done? But hey – life’s too short to be a coward for long. And I took courage from the remembrance of things past about my classmate Judith, who recited this in our English Verse Speaking.

Little, Big

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I’ve been wanting to write this blog post for 35 years. What? You’re telling me blog posts hadn’t even been invented 35 years ago? No, of course not: back then this would have been an article or an essay. But you know what I mean…

In 1984 I was a young curate with a struggling wife and three young children, serving a tiny church in an industrial village in Bedfordshire. I had felt a strong call to take the post, but my ministry there turned out to be not what some might call ‘successful’ in terms of making converts and growing the church. I didn’t see much noticeable fruit of my ministry, and although the people of the church loved us and we had some good friends there, it often felt there was little to support or encourage my wife and me in our own spiritual life.

Then I read a book which I thought at the time, and have often thought since, ‘changed my life’. It wasn’t a book you might have expected to change the life of a minister in that kind of situation.

It was Little, Big by John Crowley.

How can I describe this book, or explain (or perhaps, even, remember) how and why it changed my life? It’s a complex fantasy novel – Ursula K. Le Guin called it ‘a book that all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy’. It’s a love story – or better, a whole collection of love stories. It’s a family saga spanning generations. It’s a nature book, with beautifully written descriptions of field and forest, river and lake, birds and animals. It’s about architecture and literature and ideas – over and over again you want to mark sentences and whole paragraphs you think you must remember and quote. It’s full of mysterious events that you don’t understand the significance of until much later in the Tale – if indeed you ever do. It’s about the nature of Story itself: how stories are told and if they ever can have an ending. It’s a political thriller about the End Of Civilization As We Know It, when the failing democratic republic is taken over by a charismatic populist leader, whom the elite powers of the Establishment, the bankers and the media think they will control for their own purposes – but they are mistaken. (Remembering that this book was published in 1981, you have to ask yourself: How did the author come to be so prescient? What could have greater contemporary relevance for us?)

But above all, it is a fairy story. And the secret of how and why this book changed my life is tied up with this, and the old question we all remember from our days of watching Peter Pan: Do you believe in fairies? As I read this book in 1984, a time of struggling with and trying to make sense of questions of faith, again and again it helped me to learn more about just what faith means.

The Drinkwater family, around whom the whole Tale revolves, are said from the outset to be ‘very religious’. But this is not Christian or any other kind of mainstream religion: it is about knowing and living and walking with ‘them’, the inhabitants of another world, the world of Faerie. Into this family marries a young man who doesn’t share their ‘faith’, who is introduced to us in the very first wonderful paragraph of the book:

On a certain day in June, 19–, a young man was making his way on foot northward from the great City to a town or place called Edgewood, that he had been told about but had never visited. His name was Smoky Barnable, and he was going to Edgewood to get married: the fact that he walked and didn’t ride was one of the conditions placed upon his coming there at all.

Smoky is aware of and respects the beliefs of his bride and her family, but he cannot share them. He never sees or hears or speaks to ‘them’: so he simply cannot believe in them. Yet out of courtesy he keeps quiet about his lack of faith, never speaks of it, seems almost to pretend that he does share it. Suspects, sometimes, that many of the other members of the family are also ‘pretending’ because they also are too reticent to speak of it. One of the most moving moments in the book describes the conversation, many years later, between Smoky and his grown-up son Auberon, when Auberon finally asks him, “Do you believe in fairies?” And it transpires that each of them has thought that the other knew Something all along that remained a Mystery to him. What is the difference between believing, and pretending we believe, because we think that all the people around us believe something we cannot, and yet they expect us to share their faith, and imagine that we do?

In the end (SPOILER ALERT! – or maybe not?) They all withdraw into the smaller world within their one, which turns out to be far far bigger, while all the characters in our world journey into that inner world that They have vacated, and take Their places. (I think.) All of them except Smoky who cannot make that journey. But it doesn’t matter, because

how could he desire another world than this one?

and

He couldn’t go where all of them were going, but it didn’t matter, for he’d been there all along.

His life, and all their lives and the things that have happened to them, are part of the Tale. Which is now ended; and yet it’s a Tale that never ends.

I have always been most fully convinced of things not by reasons or proofs, but by imagination. It’s why the moment I came to believe was when I read the Gospels and realised that this was a Story that I could, and wanted to, inhabit. It’s why the stories of C. S. Lewis, Narnia and the were so helpful on my spiritual journey.

And Little, Big helped me too, because it taught me to imagine the truth that “There is another world, but it is in this one.”1 Some of the most important discoveries of my own spiritual journey have been deepening insights into this truth. The ‘other world’ that we believe or aspire to believe in is ‘in’ this world, or touches it at every point, or is separated from it by only the thinnest of veils. And we come to know that ‘other world’ most fully as we learn to love and know this world. If we hate this life, we will never enjoy the life of Heaven. Or whatever.

You may not like Little, Big at all, it may leave you completely cold. But I hope that, if you do read it, you catch a glimpse of the same mysterious, wonderful truths that so captivated me and continue to do so.

  1. Variously attributed to W. B. Yeats, Paul Eluard, and even Rilke ↩︎

The Day of Shoulda Beens

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Sometimes the cancellation of events because of the Covid-19 pandemic has the very slightest of upsides. It would have been so tough to decide what I would have done today, with two events both of which I really wanted to go to.

First: the Haddenham Beer Festival. Over the years this has been taking place, always on the first Saturday in July, it’s become far more than just (just?) an opportunity to enjoy a huge choice of real ales and craft beers. It’s become a real family fun day, with music, bouncy castles and other activities for the children, and a range of street food from fish and chips to burgers to Scotch eggs to South African bunny chow. There’s cider or gin, prosecco or Pymms for them as wants it. But chiefly there are the 130 or so varieties of beer from real ale breweries far and wide.

We’ve been going for several years with as many of the family as have been able to be with us. A growing number as the children have more children of their own; a declining number as some of the children decide it’s too far or too difficult for them to travel in a day, with the numbers or age of their children, and the ‘decisions’ about who’s going to be the designated driver. We don’t have that problem: we can get there and back by bus.

Scenes from the Haddenham Beer Festival

But then there is also the School Reunion. This year it’s 60 years since I started at secondary school, aged 11. It’s not an occasion I go to every year, but 5 years and 10 years ago it seemed important, and today would have been just as important to meet up with my cohort of the 1960 intake. It’s an opportunity to meet old friends and classmates we may hardly have spoken to for years, to wonder “What am I doing here with all these old people?!”, to look at what’s changed and what hasn’t changed in the buildings, to ask “Do you know what happened to so-and-so?” (Increasingly with the sub-text, Is he/she still alive?) And we get to gather in the Great Hall and sing the deeply loved and loathed School Song.

This was filmed in 2015, when I didn’t know anyone was filming. If you look carefully, at about 0:31, you might spot me. It seems there are always some of the younger old boys or girls who mocked the venerable ode instead of respecting its true dignity…

This year, of course, both have been cancelled. I’m not aware of any plans for a virtual beer festival. Even if I could drink my can or bottle of beer while looking at other people drinking theirs, it wouldn’t be the same as a half a pint of Tiffield Thunderbolt or Bad Kitty or Bishop Nick’s 1555. Today the pubs are re-opening after over three months; but I don’t want to be part of whatever unsafe excess I’m afraid may ensue when their doors open.

There is, however, a virtual class reunion of Latymer 1960, being set up by one of the old classmates. I’m planning to ‘be there’, and I may even take a sip from my can of Brew Dog — with a tear in my eye? — while I do so. We’re told there won’t be any singing of the School Song. Shame.

Five years ago I met up with these two lovely ladies, Chris Humphries and Christine Budd, who were actually part of the 1961 intake. (As an August-born I was closer in age to many of that year group than my own.) I worked with both of them at the local library where the three of us had weekday evening and Saturday jobs. As a 17-year old I loved Christine B. from afar. She grew up to be a Maths teacher. Very much like the even lovelier lady I actually married. (What is it about maths teachers?)

Being tested for Covid-19

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Ever since the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown, we’ve been reporting daily to the Covid Symptom Tracker. There are now nearly 4 million people who have signed up to the app, and it’s been producing enormously valuable data in understanding the virus and the pandemic. For example, they were the first people who were really able to test and confirm that loss of taste and smell were symptoms of the illness. If you are not using the app, please do download it and use it. It only takes a minute a day to report if you’ve been tested for Covid-19, and if you’re feeling well or have any symptoms. If you do report symptoms, there are a few extra questions to answer.

Last week, Alison was feeling unwell with something that felt like migraine attacks, from which she’s never (hardly ever) suffered. So she reported this, and got an email in reply asking her to arrange for herself and all members of her household (that’s me, folks) to be tested for Covid-19. I don’t know if they’ve had any other evidence that migraine-like symptoms might also occur with Covid-19, but this is presumably what they might be wanting to look for.

Our nearest testing site is at Thornhill Park and Ride, where half the large car park has been converted for this purpose. Before you go there there you have to fill in an online form for the NHS, with details of name, date of birth, NHS number, and they send a QR code to your phone which is your passport to the testing area.

A Covid-19 testing site. Somewhere in England.

There are signs everywhere to keep your car windows closed until they say to open them. So you’re stopped at the entrance where a guy reads your QR codes, shouts through your window to ask if you want to administer the test yourself (which will be fairly quick i.e. take quite a while) or have someone else administer it (which will take even longer because they’re very busy and there’s a 15 minute wait. Probably.) We opt to do it ourselves, and are directed to the left to drive round the site to the self-administration area.

Here a guy holds up a piece of paper on which is written ‘Please phone this number 07* ****.’ We dialled the number, so that we can hear the instructions without him having to shout at us. This would be very helpful, except that our particular guy is Polish (?) so we have a few accent difficulties with the instructions. Use alcohol hand gel. Open the rear passenger window — just an inch — so they can post the kits through. Drive on and reverse park on the left. Now open the kits.

The first thing we see is the instruction leaflet: ‘Please read this carefully before using the test kit.’ But we’re not allowed to, because he is going to talk us through the procedure. Place the card and the plastic envelope on your dashboard. Open the envelope with the swab, holding it carefully at the end away from the swab itself. Take two samples: one from the back of the mouth (around the tonsils), one from a nostril. Open the plastic phial of testing liquid and place the swab inside, then break off the end of the stick and screw on the top. Place the phial inside the bag, squeezing out as much air as possible, then squeeze the air out of the envelope and seal it up.

That done, we are to drive on to the collection point where there is another number to phone to speak to the collector guy. Did we have any problems doing the test? Have we done everything we were supposed to do? When we’re ready, open your window — just an inch — and post the envelopes through into the box that is being held up to catch them. And that’s it. Hold on to the card with this QR code and they will email you the results within the next day or so.

In fact we get the emails within 24 hours, it’s in our Inbox when we get up the following morning. We’ve tested negative so we can go back to work (What?!) We never really thought we had it.

But at least we’ve got something different to tell the Tracker app today.

The Inbetweeners and Sex Education

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Here’s a reflection I’ve been pursuing about contemporary culture, sexual attitudes, mores, popular entertainment, and humour, inspired by two TV sitcoms. You could frame it as an essay question:

Compare, contrast and evaluate The Inbetweeners, (2008-2010) and Sex Education (2019-present).

See the source image
The Inbetweeners
See the source image
Sex Education

They are apparently similar in being British comedy dramas about teenagers coming of age, and especially exploring their sexual identities, doing their best to look cool to their contemporaries, and to get laid as often as possible.

I quite enjoyed The Inbetweeners when it was first aired. I can’t say the same about viewing it again on Britbox, where it is currently available. Each episode opens with the moral health warning: Contains strong language and adult humour. This isn’t exactly true. The humour is relentlessly adolescent, and I would add, aimed at adolescent males. In the ten years since it first came out, there has been a huge sea change in the way we (or at least, I) react to this brand of humour. Perhaps it has been the effect of revelations about the abuse of women perpetrated by men, the whole #Metoo phenomenon, the language used by Donald Trump and others that sets out to humiliate, degrade and objectify women. I can no longer listen to Will, Simon, Neil and Jay’s conversations with even the wry recollection, “Yes, that’s just what being a spotty adolescent was like, my body raging with lust and hormones.” Now it’s just repulsive and gross.

Sex Education is different. It’s still about teenagers at a sixth form college agonising about sex, identity and the rest. It’s still a jungle in there – why is it that teenagers are often so outrageously cruel to each other? But it’s so much funnier, cleverer, more adult in fact, but without repelling in the same way. You might say, perhaps, that it’s about what the title says it’s about: these young people know more about sex (well, not always – witness among other examples the chlamydia “plague” panic in series 2, episode 1), and it’s also, seriously, about how they learn more. It’s also much more inclusive: girls have sexual desires and experiences as well as the boys. There are lots of strong female characters in the comedy, and they are often shown in a better, more sympathetic light than the boys. Adults have sexual desires and experiences too, and they form an important part of the action. The adults elicit our sympathy but also our disapproval, as they mistreat their pupils or children.

I thoroughly enjoy Sex Education and can watch it again without that disgust that not only The Inbetweeners, but other more vintage ‘comedies’, arouse.

What do others think?