#IDEVAW2018

I doubt there is a single one of us who feels we have managed all our relationships perfectly, or even three quarters as well as we could and should. If there is such a person, he or she should be the first to see a therapist.

Rabbinic tradition names the strange figure with whom Jacob wrestled all night as the guardian angel of Esau. It’s the Esau in his conscience, whose cry and tears Jacob hears now, twenty years later, as he crosses back over the physical and emotional border to re-enter the landscape of his childhood.

Jacob has had many opportunities to learn to listen better over the intervening years. He’s experienced for himself what it’s like to be on the wrong end of deception. He’s witnessed, disturbingly aloof, the pain each of his wives has felt, Leah unloved, Rachel long unable to conceive a child. Only now, at last, his conscience is open.

Most of us don’t intend to inflict suffering on those we love. But over years of family life, the whole of our self inevitably comes into play. Few of us have a perfect grip on our temper, always. Our vulnerabilities, especially those of which we are not conscious, make us defensive. Defensiveness easily becomes aggression. Trying to compensate for aspects of our upbringing we didn’t like, we lean the other way and inflict different wounds. Philip Larkin has a strong line about what parents do to their children, only it’s not one a rabbi can repeat.

That’s why the best qualities we can bring to our relationships, with friends and colleagues as well as family, are appreciation, humility, the readiness to acknowledge we may be wrong, forgiveness, kindness and openness of heart. Most of the time, these attitudes see most relationships through the downs as well as the ups.

But there are also crueller, deeper hurts, leaving scars which never heal. In her poem about her new dog Benjamin, Who Came From Who Knows Where, Mary Oliver describes how she only has to reach for brushwood or the broom for the animal to rush away. When he returns, she strives to comfort him, telling him not to worry:

I also know the way
the old life haunts the new.

 Sunday is International Day for Elimination of Violence against Women.

I’ve listened to the fear, distress, humiliation and destruction of self-esteem domestic violence can leave. Sometimes it involves physical brutality; sometimes it includes financial manipulation; often it takes the form of emotional bullying and coercive control; frequently it is exercised in subtle and cunning, but no less powerful, demeaning and cruel, ways.

I’ve learnt of the impact of abuse on children, ongoing decades after it took place. I know that whatever I’ve heard is only a tiny fraction of what takes place. I feel nervous even trying to bring words to this hidden, taboo subject, for fear they might cause further hurt. I tried to do so in Things My Dog Has Taught Me; perhaps the book’s overt topic gave cover:

There exists something even worse than depriving a person of love: to rob him or her of the feeling of being worthy of receiving love, of being lovable and capable of giving love at all. We are born with the capacity to respond to love; as it grows we develop the ability to love others in return. It is a sin is to starve that faculty for love in another person, especially a child. It is an even greater sin… to punch holes in the fragile membranes of the heart where those experiences are stored and garnered which nurture inside us the feeling that we ourselves are lovable and able to give love, kind and able to show kindness, good and capable of altruistic goodness.

We must do everything we possibly can to make safety and support accessible to everyone who is suffering bullying and abuse, be it behind closed bedroom doors, at work, or wherever. I know to my horror that too many bullies get away with it. Too many people whom they hurt are left to suffer and go on suffering.

This responsibility is even more urgent when bullying and contempt for women are expressed from the highest places, and the victims ignored or jeered at.

We must all also try to learn from the sore places in our own hearts, and from our own potential angers and capacities to bully. We are at our most truly human when we are not hurters but healers.

In this week of Armistice commemorations I feel saddened, touched, bewildered and concerned.

Last week I walked slowly past the sixty thousand poppies in the grounds of Westminster Abbey, so many young lives calling to the heart:

Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world…     (Wilfred Owen: Strange Meeting)

I hear in my mind how Helen recalled her final parting from her husband, the poet Edward Thomas, when he climbed the country path away from their house, calling out to her as he always did ‘coo-ee; coo-ee’ through the thickening mist. Her searing account formed part of the ceremony in Glasgow Cathedral to mark a hundred years since the outbreak of the war.

I see my English teacher looking over our class and saying: ‘If this was 1910, half of you would die in the trenches’.

Then yesterday I stood at the graves of the Jewish soldiers of Frankfurt am Main and lit the memorial lamp for the 447 Jewish sons of the city who died for their Fatherland. The shadow of my grandfather stood beside me, – except that I felt that he was truly present, and I was the shadow. I imagined him, a chaplain for the duration with the 5^th German Army, speaking at the dedication of this site in 1923. I opened my address with his words:

‘Kameraden!’ Heute begruessen uns die Tote: ‘Comrades!’ Today the dead hail us: ‘Do not abandon us to the grave. Let us live in your hearts…’

The old Jewish cemetery was beautiful. All around among the tall trees were graves with familiar family names. I felt I stood among my people. In 1932 Nazi threats forced an end to all official commemorations. Until 2008 the soldiers lay forgotten by the country for which they had died.

I was asked to speak afterwards at the general military cemetery. ‘Accept’, my Jewish contact advised me, but know that some SS may be buried there too. In that vast arena level grey gravestones stretched away, row after row.

The General who spoke before me was frank about the past, and forthright about the rise of race-hate today. I was blunt about the bitter, murderous fate meted out with merciless thoroughness to Germany’s Jews, and the return of race hatred once again stalking the streets of the cities of so many states.

But I also remembered how the English war poet Keith Douglas, himself killed soon afterwards in Normandy, had looked with pity at the body of a Wehrmacht soldier in whose he found a tattered note from his girlfriend: ‘Steffi; Vergissmeinnicht’.

What a waste and destruction of life.

That evening after I’d spoken about my grandfather’s life a kind elderly gentleman took me aside. He’d grown up in the post-war ruins of the city. His father, a survivor, dealt in groceries. ‘Father’, he’d asked him one day, ‘Why do you buy your potatoes from that miserable small store? Why not get them somewhere decent?’ ‘No’, his father had replied. ‘That man threw potatoes over the fence when we were rounded up for deportation. The others from whom I buy gave us bread in those terrible times. Now it’s my turn to help them.’

‘My father’, he explained further, ‘Ran a soup kitchen for destitute Jews in the 30s. Your grandfather gave him money. An SS man used to come secretly, after dark, bringing food. When the war began, he brought all his money, then shot himself. I found the man’s SS insignia in a box my father bequeathed me’…

Why did he join the SS in the first place? – My new friend had no answer…

Why do so many succumb to hatred? Why do we surrender our conscience to populists and hate-mongers? How is it that, despite everything, some still obey the heart’s law of loving kindness? Why do millions follow the madness fanned by the few? Why do millions more have to die, who had only wanted to live their peaceful lives, with their family, their farm, their walks across the hills?

I wish these questions belonged only to the past. I wish, preach and pray for us all to speak out, before we too are devoured in the horrors.