MANNA 88 Editorial: Radicalism at Last!
Written by Rabbi Tony Bayfield Monday, 01 August 2005
adicalism at last! After 87 editorials in the traditional style – anonymous, impersonal and declamatory – the ‘I’ of the Editor is about to intrude.
Ten days ago, I came back from a week in Moscow. A week ago, more than 50 Londoners lost their lives in a terrorist attack.
They are a strange pair of events to couple. Yet my brain insists there is a connection. I’m one of those people who find it hard to come to instant conclusions and takes time to grasp things. I’m still in the process of sifting, listening to others and trying to make sense of it all. I’m convinced that this editorial needs to be about one or the other or both, but I can’t manage the impersonal and the declamatory. So what the heck.
Moscow.
It was an inspiring conference – the biennial gathering of 300 delegates from five continents to the World Union for Progressive Judaism plus a further 100 from all over the Former Soviet Union. It was a historic event. Remarkable things are being achieved by little more than a handful of rabbis, all from the Former Soviet Union but all graduates of the Leo Baeck College in London. Reviving Judaism after 70 years of atheist oppression across a huge land mass with few resources is about as big a challenge as anyone could imagine. Yet there are people prepared to take on the task.
But I hated Moscow.
It bore all the signs of totalitarianism – stark, featureless parks and vast, destructive roads consciously designed to make the individual feel insignificant and powerless. Stalinist apartment blocks which make battery farming look humane are everywhere. We arrived to find that forty delegates had had their rooms ‘requisitioned’ – President Putin was receiving a Chinese delegation and they took priority. The staff at the hotel were zombies, untouched by pride in the job or notions of service. Fifteen years on, the people-filled gardens in front of the Kremlin on a sunny Sunday afternoon were reminiscent of dazed individuals coming out into the light just after VE Day.
Alcoholism is the national disease and the cafes in Tsari Arbut were filled with women drinking beer at 10.30 in the morning.
Yet famous buildings were obscured by huge advertising hoardings for Rolex. Porsches and Mercs vied in the traffic jams with aged rust traps from the Communist era. Profitable businesses are developing and not everyone has stolen the money in the aftermath of de-nationalisation. But the average monthly wage is still somewhere between $200 and $300 a month.
Sex was very much in evidence. Not commercial sex but sex as an urgent recreational activity, one of the few opportunities for escape.
Family disintegration and gangsterism are the order of the day.
Communism has met unbridled free market economics to produce huge disparities of wealth and no values.
No values. The word miloserdiye, kind heartedness, chesed in Hebrew was marked ‘obsolete’ in the Soviet dictionary. Values were rendered obsolete by totalitarianism and don’t travel automatically with the free market.
London.
There was something deeply impressive at the way Londoners responded to the bombings. I find it hard to put my finger on it. Those who suggested that we immediately went back to the spirit of the blitz and enjoyed carrying on despite the adversity were harsh. Churches offering refreshment and refuge to those walking home and the drivers of the buses that were running refusing to take fares are not to be dismissed. The quiet sense of grief and concern, the relative absence of rushing to blame and condemn anyone except the perpetrators of the outrage denote a society with a sense of self capable of incorporating all citizens, with values of respect for human life and difference. Evidence of small acts of selflessness and concern was everywhere.
The Government’s reaction was neither a cynical ‘political’ one nor a self-justifying one. It was one not just of sorrow and revulsion but of deep concern – lest there be a backlash against the Muslim community.
There have been worrying signs – the BNP electioneering in Barking with posters of the bombings, daubings of mosques and abuse of Muslims – but the dominant theme is a desire to stand with the overwhelming majority of Muslims who are shocked beyond measure and affirm those same values of the sanctity of human life, revulsion at violence, respect and concern for others. They are values which have their roots in all the world’s great faiths. In this, we will not be divided and turned against each other.
But it would be simplistic to end there.
The pundits rushed to explain how four young British Muslims from decent homes could come to commit suicide in order to kill innocent people of all faiths. It only happened because of the invasion of Iraq, some said. It all goes back to the Israel – Palestine conflict, others said. It shocked me rigid to hear a Muslim leader on Newsnight distinguish between suicide bombings in London (unjustified) and suicide bombings in Israel (justified).
But an analysis more profound is beginning to emerge. We are being forced to face up to the power of evil ideologists to brainwash the marginalised and exploitable into executing their warped plans whilst the ideologists and preachers themselves slink away.
Religion is still the fundamental source of the values of altruism and concern, decency and respect. But perverted religion, which taps in to a power many of us have almost forgotten and uses that power for evil, is a potent force. Cults and belief in witches are still with us. Attached to the technology of the modern world and exploiting its vulnerability, the threat is terrifying.
I loathed Moscow. I am frightened for London. I cannot be impersonal or declamatory because I am being swept along by the emergent tide of the 21st century in which terrorism versus democracy, totalitarianism versus pluralism, cynicism versus values, contempt versus respect are the dominant themes.
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