If It's Unethical, Don't Trust Us
Written by Rabbi Dr. Tony Bayfield Wednesday, 12 September 2007
This sermon was given at Wimbledon and Hendon Reform Synagogues on Rosh Hashanah 13th September 2007/1st Tishri 5768. To read more Rosh Hashanah sermons, click here
Don’t trust me. Whatever you do, don’t trust me.
A few weeks ago the Chairman of the Movement, Mike Grabiner, walked into my office and noticed that there were two books on my desk. His face lit up. “What an amazing coincidence”, he said, “Jane and I had Charles Clarke round to dinner last night and Charles said to me that there was one new book I must read: ‘The Islamist’ by Ed Husain.’
This sermon is about the dangers of patriarchal certainties but there is one certainty that I will persist with – the certainty that I’m much more impressed that I was reading the same book as the former Home Secretary than any of you are. [The answers to your two questions are: (1) He was Mike’s best man and (2) No, he isn’t - though David Miliband, of course, is.]
I’ve somewhat ambivalent feelings about what we as a Movement have done with our Rosh Hashanah Torah readings, now that we’ve returned to the path of tradition and restored the second day. When I was growing up in Ilford and when I was a young congregational rabbi in Weybridge, it was one day only and the traditional second day reading, the Akedah, the binding of Isaac was what we read. Some Reform synagogues have now returned the Akedah to the second day and brought back , as you have, Abraham, Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael to the first. Others persist with Akedah first day and Hagar/Ishmael second day.
It’s a problem for me using the same sermon first day and second day. OK, so I’m lazy! But it’s a serious problem for me because we now have, whatever the order, two terrifying Torah readings, not just one.
Sarah is worried that Hagar’s son, Ishmael, will displace her son Isaac. So she sends them off into the wilderness, to probable death. Abraham questions God about it and God tells him to listen to his wife and not to interfere.
God tells Abraham to take Isaac to Mount Moriah and sacrifice him there. This time Abraham asks no questions, acquiesces, is prepared to do it, to kill his much loved, completely innocent son and is praised for his obedience. I’ve always found that deeply troubling. I now find it terrifying.
Ed Husain is a man in his 30s who was born in Mile End of parents from the Indian sub-continent, his father was born in British India and his mother in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. It’s a lovely family, very heimish. They’re practicing Muslims, members of the Stepney Green mosque and deeply attached to Islam as a spiritual tradition. Indeed, Mr Husain senior is a devotee of an Indian Muslim teacher who visits from the heim from time to time. Grandpa, as young Mohammed calls him, seems to me to be derived from the Muslim sufi tradition of pious men crossed with the Indian guru tradition, and very reminiscent of an old style Hasidic rebbe.
Problems come when Mohammed leaves his comfortable primary school and enters a secondary school in which he feels a loner and an outsider. In his teens he gets drawn into the world of the East London mosque, much more political, and thence into an organisation called Hizb ut-Tahrir. Hizb ut-Tahrir is a truly terrifying organisation. It has its roots in early 20th century Jordan and is outlawed in most Muslim countries. Why? Because it’s committed to the overthrow of all existing Muslim countries, the supposed restoration of the Caliphate, the Muslim empire that emerged soon after the death of the prophet Mohammed, the imposition of Islamic law, war against all non-Muslim countries, their incorporation into a global caliphate in which non-Muslims are offered the choice of conversion or inferior status.
One of the leading figures of Hizb is a Syrian–born man called Omar Bakri, whom the Sun called ‘Pal of the Bombers’ and who openly supports Bin Laden.
The autobiography charts how Husain gets quickly absorbed into Hizb ut-Tahrir, how he buys into its ideas, how he becomes a significant student leader. It documents his estrangement from his family. But then, very unusually, come the developing glimmers of realisation that this ideology is wrong, that it’s truly evil. He writes at length of his desperate struggle over an extended period of time to escape – not physically in the sense that other members won’t let him go but intellectually, from the angry and violent ideas, the stereotypes and the prejudices with which he has been infected to the core. Ironically, it’s only because he has an unusually strong religious sense that he’s able finally to escape and become Ed Husain, a concerned, committed and deeply humane, traditional British Muslim.
The book is absolutely horrifying, fascinating, riveting and there are a large number of themes one could explore:
Husain’s conviction that Islamic fundamentalism has its roots in 19th century western thought, not in mainstream Islam at all.
His highlighting of the fact that Britain and British governments since the beginning of the 1990s have contributed to the revival of Hizb and its re-export to much of the Muslim world which banned it - because of our insistence on freedom of speech and refusal to intervene or take sides in the unequal struggle within the Muslim community.
The book underlines the power of the cult, the way cults seize people and exploit them with an utter ruthlessness that is the total antithesis of the respect for humanity that lies at the heart of real religion.
It illustrates the use of dress and vocabulary to enable people to mark themselves out and assume a special, superior identity outside the rest of humanity.
It highlights the illusory belief in a past golden age, the Caliphate, that must be recreated and re-lived, whatever the cost.
What I’m about to say is extraordinarily dangerous and open to misunderstanding – all I need is a Jewish Chronicle headline: “Bayfield compares Aish to Hizb ut-Tahrir”. But there are echoes, there are parallels – in the techniques, in the use of distinctive practices, words and clothing; in the summons to retreat into a past world that never quite existed; in the rejection of contemporary sexual morals stereotyped and exaggerated; and in the utter certainty that there is one truth which is God’s truth which the group alone possess and others must have. But of course, with Jewish fundamentalist sects, there is no parallel to the anger, hatred and aspiration to world domination. To the violence. And to the complete lack of values, of ethics.
One of Husain’s many alarming passages goes as follows: “We were not the ummah (the mass of the people, ummah Arabic, am Hebrew), we were the elite. We had to remember that there was nothing moral or immoral in life, only God’s commands. Our own [ethical] feelings had nothing to do with it. Based on that premise, our responses would deem us either intellectually sound [good] or emotional [bad]. You are not required to grapple with ethical issues, only to surrender to the intellectual dictates of the leadership.”
There was a second book on my desk which I suspect Charles Clarke has not been reading, but which I think he would enjoy. It’s called “The Death of Sigmund Freud” and is subtitled “Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism”.
Written by an American Professor of English, Mark Edmunson, it begins, “In the late autumn of 1909 two men who would each transform the world were living in Vienna … One was Sigmund Freud, the creator of psychoanalysis, who would become the most renowned and controversial thinker of the 20th century … The other man, whose impact on humanity would be greater, was young [at the time]”. The book then moves to 1938 and juxtaposes the stories of Sigmund Freud and Adolph Hitler through the Anschluss, the invasion of Austria, through Freud’s reluctant escape to London and his death from cancer on Yom Kippur, 1939.
What Edmundson emphasises is Freud’s acute awareness – from even before Hitler’s rise to power – of the terrible danger of patriarchal leadership. For Freud, all human beings are beset by profound and powerful instinctual drives and the struggle with them is difficult and painful. The only escapes are the intoxications of drink and love so the appeal of an all-powerful, certain figure or doctrine, the seduction by authoritarian politics or patriarchal religion is not, according to Freud, the exception but the norm. What the Fuhrer brought was “an elixir with no rival or alternative. He healed the fragmented psyche – provided one did not wish to think for oneself, make one’s own ethical judgements – and he healed the broken polis, so long as one was not a Jew or a gypsy or a Christian who took too seriously the teachings of Jesus.”
Freud suggested, unlike most religions and most philosophies, that there is no escape from the tensions, inner-conflicts and uncertainties of life. He rejected God – or at least the infantilising, patriarchal God which he found at the heart of religion and, secularised, at the heart of modern life. And he urged people to resist the flight into the seductive anaesthetic of the powerful voice offering truth, certainty and triumph – and, rather, to struggle painfully and with difficulty to attain such self- insight and self-understanding as individuals are capable of.
Freud, lived, thought and taught as 20th century Europe was succumbing to the fascist, fundamentalist, final solution to its ills. Freud lived, thought and taught that the self - aware person is continually in the process of deconstructing various God replacements, surrendering neither to The Great Dictator in the sky, nor to the Great Dictator on earth, nor to nothingness, nihilism, constantly aware of the danger that our instinctual drives and wounded psyches present to our fellow human beings.
Edmundson presents Freud as the greatest prophet and teacher of ethics of our time, urging us through self-examination and self-awareness to resist the temptations to inhumanity that are everywhere, always with us and in us.
According to our ancestors, Abraham heard a seductive voice confirming Sarah’s intention to expel his first born son, Ishmael, and his mother Hagar. According to our ancestors, Abraham heard a seductive voice which told him to sacrifice his son Isaac and he submitted to that voice.
In our days we have witnessed the power of the seductive voice, releasing people from moral constraints and offering them fulfilment for their most powerful urges. We seem utterly unable, despite what the Shoah revealed, to break the pattern – Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Rwanda, the Balkans and now, fundamentalist Islam.
Freud, recognising the awesome, seducing power of a patriarchal God, abandons God in an almost heroic way.
But I can’t. Despite my profound discomfort with some of the notions of God that are present even in our Torah, despite the lessons of history, despite the unprecedented dangers exposed by Ed Husain and despite Freud’s heroic, prophetic humanism – I, like Ed Husain incidentally – cannot abandon God. Yes, I can try to resist my own patriarchal tendencies to articulate a patriarchal God, but I cannot abandon God, because God won’t let me.
Yet so chastened am I by human experience and our inability to learn from it, so fearful am I of the seductive nature of simplistic truth in fulfilment of subconscious desires, so moved am I by Freud’s insistence that unease, uncertainty and inner conflict are who I am as a human being and what I have to live with – that I will try to live by the great aphorism of the Kotzker rebbe; “Take care of your own soul and another person’s body, not another person’s soul and your own body”. The only sure test for behaviour is, does it respect the humanity of others, does it promote the good, is it clearly ethical?
Beware of the seductive voice even in, particularly in, Torah. If someone tells you anything else, however persuasive, don’t believe them. If someone tells you that God requires you to ride roughshod over or deny the humanity of others, don’t listen. If someone tells you that God’s laws require you to offend or shame your fellow human being, don’t believe them. If I, or Rabbi Steven, if Reform Judaism ever tells you that God wants anything other than the pursuit of the good and absolute respect for the humanity of others, don’t trust us. If your inner voice tells you that it’s perfectly OK to deface the image of God in another person – don’t trust yourself.
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