Erev Rosh Hashanah Sermon 5769
Written by Rabbi Dr. Tony Bayfield Monday, 29 September 2008
Between Two Extremes: Who Is It Who Punishes The Innocent?
The words of the prophet Avraham son of David:
Thus says the Lord. You are a people driven by greed. You lend other people’s money to those that cannot repay it. You package worthless securities. You have been wilful gamblers with other people’s shares and exploited other people’s property. Your pounds have ceased to be honest pounds and your dollars are toxic.
You are a people driven by greed. You gouge coal, oil and gas out of the earth. You uproot forests without regard. You burn fossil fuels, pollute my planet and destroy its atmosphere.
You are a people driven by greed. You subsidise your rich farmers at home so that the poor of sub-Saharan Africa cannot sell their crops, even the pitiful crops their soil will yield. You are arrogant, selfish and greedy. Your gift-aided handouts are pathetic; your pious green policies empty gestures.
Therefore, says the Lord, I will send punishment upon you for your wicked ways. Your seasons shall cease to be seasons and it will rain from winter to winter. Your land will be sodden and your crops will rot in the ground. I will send floods so that the possessions of those who have built their homes on flood plains will be ruined and nowhere find recompense or insurance. I will send hurricanes to destroy the islands whence come your out of season fruits and threaten your oil platforms and your low lying cities. I will melt the ice caps and drown you as I drowned the wicked of Noah’s generation, innocent and guilty alike. There will be no end to my wrath and my fury upon a people driven by greed who ignore my justice and compassion and even call me Delusion.
I wake up early and anxious. I used to deal with my anxiety by setting my radio alarm for 6.15 on Radio 4. For ten minutes, I would listen to the news of rising house prices and congratulate myself on my financial shrewdness. At 6.25, the sports headlines would reassure me with news of Carlos Tevez’s wondrous saving power for West Ham. Then I would get up if not with enthusiasm, at least with limited anxiety about the important things in life.
Today, the first economic news bulletin of the day sends me into paroxysms of anxiety and this continues – both the economic gloom and the desperate anxiety – into the sports news where the only team not to have been bought by Arabs rich beyond the dreams of avarice or almost-as-wealthy Americans teeters on the brink of collapse along with its hapless, once-rich Icelandic banker chairman. Only his financial exposure is XL. Carlos Hamashiach. Anyone got £30m to spare?
I go to draw the curtains to alleviate the gloom and realise that the curtains are already drawn and the gloom is inside, outside, everywhere. These are scary times.
Thus says the Lord. You are a people driven by greed …. Therefore I will send floods and melt ice caps. It’s not difficult to see the weather as a metaphor for our present condition – gloomy, sodden and tossed in the air like un-recylced rubbish by the winds of recession. But there’s something more than metaphor but less than literalism that’s worth exploring.
Let’s start with the literalism. It’s absolutely clear that there is a connection between the weather we are experiencing – the disturbed patterns, the increasing number of hurricanes, the melting of the ice caps. The Governor of Alaska is, I believe, the only person left in the entire world who denies global warming and cannot see the connection between the de-forestation of the Himalayas and the monsoon disasters in India and Bangladesh or the rising levels of C02 in the atmosphere and the remorseless expansion of the Sahara desert into land that once provided for people and animals.
But is it divine punishment? I’m never quite certain whether the authors of our Torah and the Prophets of the Hebrew Bible were as mechanistic as some now read them. I’m pretty sure not. But today’s fundamentalists – Christian, Muslim and Jewish – all adopt that trite literalistic approach. There’s been a disaster. Check your mezuzot for errors or illegibility. Flooding – divine punishment for other people’s wickedness. Always other people’s wickedness.
It’s horrendous stuff. What kind of God would God be who drowns little children because their parents bought houses close to a river? What kind of God inflicts deserts on the people of sub-Saharan Africa because their leaders collude with the Chinese whilst the West subsidises its own farmers and renders what little can be grown in Sudan uneconomic. What kind of God is it who shakes the capitalist system to punish greedy bankers and leaves thousands of ordinary workers unemployed whilst those who invented securitisation packages creep away to feathered nests and comfortable obscurity.
The old theology – or at least the old theology as it is interpreted in certain churches, mosques and synagogues – lacks not only credibility but justice and compassion. And if God is not at the very least a metaphor for justice and compassion, most of us simply wouldn’t want to know.
But there is another extreme abroad. On the one hand, we have this vengeful God wreaking havoc through the mechanisms of the natural world and on the other hand we have the world as a cold, empty lump of geology and biology, bereft of any transcendent values. For me personally Richard Dawkins is at his arrogant silliest when he tries to explain the roots of morality. He claims that there are four good Darwinian reasons for individuals to be altruistic, generous or moral towards each other. First, we’re motivated to be good to our children because we want to protect the future of our genes. Second, we’re programmed to give favours in anticipation of pay back. Third, there is a benefit to us for acquiring a reputation for generosity and kindness. And fourth, we assert our dominance by advertising ourselves as the best source for handouts. He goes on that in ancestral times we had the opportunity to be altruistic, generous, moral only towards our close kin. Nowadays the restriction no longer applies but, he writes: “We can no more help ourselves feeling pity when we see a weeping unfortunate (who is unrelated and unable to reciprocate) than we can help ourselves feeling lust for a member of the opposite sex (who may be infertile)”. Both, he says, are the result of genetic programming, the product of evolution. “Both”, he says, “are misfirings, Darwinian mistakes”.
So, according to Dawkins, when your heart goes out to all these innocent people losing their jobs with Lehman Brothers or losing their homes as a result of greed within the leadership of the banking and financial services industry; or when you feel an overwhelming urge to do something for the victims of international politics in Darfur; when you’re horror struck at people flooded out of their homes in Tewkesbury or Hull; or weep for the starving and homeless in Bangladesh monsoons or Burmese cyclones – it’s only chance genetic programming, not transcendent values which give you worth and dignity and provide your life with meaning.
Both the religious fundamentalists and the secular fundamentalists are wrong and what our Torah and our prophetic writings grasped with aastonishing clarity is much, much closer to the truth. Simple common sense tells us that there is no God directly manipulating the weather. But simple common sense also tells us that when we feel anger at the starvation of the poor in drought ravaged Africa, compassion for families destroyed by flood, responsibility for those in need both here and around the globe, it isn’t just the fortuitous legacy of evolution, a ‘misfiring’, a ‘mistake’.
The prophets articulated values which we know with every fibre of our being to be the meaning and purpose of our lives. Since Judaism gave those values to the world, developed them and honed them in endless discussion over 3,500 years – to throw them away in favour of some contrived, secular, Darwin-based construct would be vandalism of the same proportions as our physical vandalism of the planet. Our narrative, our story, gives them such power and it also authenticates them.
For they are not just what we mean by God but the commanding metaphysical values embodied by God and disregarded by so many.
The Jewish journey – and the human journey – have entered yet another difficult, scary stage. This is a new year pregnant with foreboding and anxiety. But continuing the journey and maintaining the values is what we’re about. It’s the journey that makes us who we are – but that’s for tomorrow’s sermon when I’m assistant to the principal rabbi of Finchley.
You are a people driven by greed. Until you live by my values, says God, you will suffer – innocent and guilty alike. It’s a harsh message but that Avraham son David just occasionally stops trying to be the nice guy and tells it how it is.
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