It’s three and a half thousand years, according to the traditional Biblical timescale, since God said to Abraham ‘lech lecha – Go!’ Go, God said, from a city tyrannised by power and violence and create a land ruled by justice and compassion. Thus began the Jewish journey, and the journeys of other faiths, and all our individual journeys in search of what is right and good, journeys full of inspiration, also sometimes misdirection, and which remain today far from their envisaged messianic goals.
The world is not in a good place on that journey just right now. This Armistice Day I shall light my candle and wear my poppy for all who gave their lives fighting for a more compassionate earth, and all whose lives, rich with hope, were squandered by tyranny and evil.
At this strange and difficult juncture on the path of civilisation we must not lose our vision or our values. This week I heard the word ‘post-factual’ several times. It frightened me. It also set me playing with other prefix combinations: post-truth; post-humanitarian; post-compassionate, and now, with the sad passing of Leonard Cohen, post-Halleluyah. I don’t want to live in a ‘post’ world.
So here are some key values.
Honesty matters; facts matter. Facts are not the measure of everything; one would hardly expect a faith leader to argue that they were. As Shakespeare wrote, sometimes ‘The heart has reasons that reason cannot know’. Facts, too, have always been mustered, configured and fingered to support one’s own argument. But, as battleofideas puts it: ‘Post-truth differs from traditional contesting and falsifying of truth by rendering it of “secondary” importance’. In a post-truth world Holocaust deniers hold equally valid opinions, and Judaism and Jerusalem need have no historical connection, if you choose to think so.
No; we must search for truth and listen to truths, even, and especially, inconvenient ones. Truth is our guide to integrity and justice.
Humanity matters. It consists primarily in the awareness that we share the privilege of existence with all other human beings; that we are all mortal, vulnerable and often afraid; that nevertheless we are endowed with creativity, conscience and the inexhaustible capacity for wonder and love. Such humanity is our guide to empathy, compassion and commitment to one another.
Faith matters. I don’t mean by faith that we know with absolute conviction what God said and whom God likes. I especially don’t mean that we know with absolute conviction whom God does not like. I mean the faith that everything has value, and not just ‘market value’; that life is imbued with a property which is hard to define but may be called ‘sacred’; and that there is a wonder and a oneness to the essence of all life. This is our guide to humility, awe and service.
Music matters; poetry matters. I doubt if anyone wants to live in a post-Halleluyah world. ‘Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord’, begins Leonard Cohen’s perhaps best-known song. Without it neither the heart of every culture nor the heart itself would be able to express the beauty of what the spirit knows but words alone cannot tell.
We must not desert these values, lest they desert us.