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Sunday, 11 October 2015

On Creation, Chaos and Boredom

The Italian Jewish writer
Alberto Moravia, born in 1907, had the dubious distinction of being singled out
for abuse first by the Fascist newspapers - after the passing of Mussolini’s
anti-Semitic racial laws in 1938 - and then, after the War, by having his novels
placed on the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books. The Vatican disapproved of
the sexual content of his fiction – but they also disapproved of passages like
this, from his novel La Noia
(‘Boredom’): “In the beginning was boredom, commonly called chaos. God, bored
with boredom, created the sky, the waters, the animals, the plants, Adam and
Eve...”

The Roman Catholic Church may
have found such sentences and sentiments objectionable – a bored God!, how scandalous, how subversive of faith, the words
almost have the mark of the devil on them; but then his father was, after all,
a Jew – but to Jewish ears such a playful fictional account is really quite
unexceptional. Indeed it is almost normative – it is part of the concentric circles
of imaginative response to the sacred texts that go by the name of ‘midrash’. And ‘midrash’ – expanding upon, playing with, responding creatively to,
reading creatively into, the Torah is itself a holy activity.

What Moravia picks up from
the Genesis myth is not only the creator God who creates the heavens and the
earth, the animals and plants and humanity itself; in addition to this he
alludes to the way that creation in B’reshit
(Genesis 1:2) comes out of the midst of chaos, tohu va’vohu: ‘chaos and confusion’, ‘welter and waste’, ‘the
unformed and void’ - this wonderful echoing, alliterativephrase, untranslatable really, that evokes
the act of creation as coming not out of nothing (ex nihilo) but out of some pre-existing space filled with
potentiality but as yet without form, without coherence, without fixity,
without boundaries, without formal content. A bit like any artist’s mind, any
writer, any composer, anyone who creates something out of the flux and chaos of
her or his inner world.

Everything creative could be
said to emerge out of unformed ‘chaos’. The traditional Jewish midrash contains one extraordinary story, fable, that talks about how
creativity, God’s creativity, is essentially an act of improvisation, an
experiment - an on-going experiment in which we, humanity, are participants,
whether we like it or not. It tells of how God made 26 attempts to create this
world, this universe : but all those attempts were doomed to failure. He tried
and tried and tried again. The world as we now know it, says this midrash,came out of the chaos of this earlier error-strewn wreckage (Genesis Rabbah 9:4). This might sound
like the stuff of primitive science fiction. Or like a child trying to
build a tower of bricks that keeps
crashing down. But what this midrash
is pointing towards -the fragility and
impermanence of creation – is, I think, psychologically and spiritually
significant.

It’s suggesting, the rabbis
are suggesting, that in regard to us and the world we live in, it could all end
in failure. It could all – our so-called civilisation, and us, and this fragile
planet – it could all collapse back into chaos and confusion, tohu va’vohu. At the end of the midrash, God is allowed a voice. He
looks around and cries out, in hope, in anxiety: ‘If only this time it will
last’. Of course this is our hope, and our anxiety, that the rabbis are giving
voice to, projected onto the Holy One of Israel - that our lives, and the life
of humanity, are part of a scheme of things that will last.

But in the midrash, which contains this profound
awareness of provisionality, nobody knows if it will last; we don’t know what
will endure, or how long, not even God knows. This midrash is deeply subversive: the rabbis are giving us a God that isn’t
omnipotent or omniscient; this God is a participant with us in the not-knowing
how things will turn out. Is life on earth a doomed project? We don’t know, we
can’t know, nobody knows:this is a
picture filled with fear and trembling, with hope and wishfulness, but no
certainty.

Of course what this ancient midrash gives us is actually a portrait
of life as it is: individual life, collective life. This is where we are. Our
everyday lives unfold within this crucible of uncertainty as to where it all
will lead. What an adventure it is, life. What an experiment that we are part
of. And none of us knows how it is going to turn out: for ourselves, for the
world. ‘If only it will last...’

I fell in love with that
sentence when I first came across it: “In the beginning was boredom, commonly
called chaos. God, bored with boredom, created the sky, the waters, the
animals, the plants, Adam and Eve...”

Boredom is such an
interesting theme. I often hear people talking about being bored. And children
often complain they are bored. ‘Boring!’ is one of the most effective arrows a
child – or a teenager - can shoot out from their quiver of insults. But what do
they mean really? What do we mean? If you dig a little, you might discover that
contrary to what many people think, ‘boredom’ is not a feeling: it’s a kind of
mood, a mood filled with frustration. It’s a suspended state of waiting for
something to happen; a waitingfilled
with frustration, or anger, that something/anything hasn’t happened yet. It’s a
kind of restlessness of the spirit, a waiting for something to turn up that’s worth wanting.

In Moravia’s fictional
portrait, God gets so fed up with waiting for something to happen that will
interest him that he decides to take matters into his own hands, so to speak,
and create something that will enliven him. I find that a useful model for
ourselves – let me give a personal example.

One of the things that
happened to me over the years was that I became bored with conventional synagogue
services. And by bored mean frustrated. To sit in a service and wait for
something to happen – for something to turn up that’s worth wanting – was, in my
experience, hugely frustrating. Why would you put yourself through that? Why
would anyone? We know that many hundreds of thousands of Jews – but it is the same
in Christianity – have decided it’s not worth putting themselves through the
ordeal of waiting for something to turn up in services that’s worth wanting.

What was I waiting for, and wanting? I
suppose this waiting was for some new insight to be born, or some transformation
of feeling, or some fresh insight into myself or life or holiness or God; or waiting
for some moment of stillness, some space where an answer or response might
arrive within that endless sea of words flowing around me.

Well, like the God character
in Moravia’s fable, I got bored with being bored,frustrated with so much frustration of the
spirit, a spirit that wants to come alive, or more alive; and I realised I had
to create something, something more expansive – if not ‘the sky, the waters,
the animals, the plants, Adam and Eve...’, then at least something that
embraced and could speak about anything under the heavens and on the earth,
something that had human beings within it, something that had people at the
heart of it. Not the texts of the tradition at the heart of our divine service
but the texts of our own lives at the heart of divine service. A form of
service that recognises and celebrates that our lives are a form of divine
service, can become a form of serving the divine. Our lives.

Over the last twenty years or
so at Finchley Reform we have been experimenting with ‘Alternative’
services. But like God in the midrashic fable, who is aware that the project of
creating a world is provisional, and always at risk of failure, that is how it
is with Alternative services: one never knows how it will turn out, what the
unique combination of this group of people, at this hour, on this day, will create
together, because each service is a new creation.

We always start afresh,
there’s always a sense of beginning, beginning anew each time - in hope, in
anticipation, in an awareness of our own wanting (we don’t always know what for),
but a holding ourselves open to the new, the unexpected, what reveals itself
moment by moment, as we engage with ourselves, with each other, with the texts
of tradition and the texts of our own lives - and with the silence that holds
us in its tender embrace. And this new 'creation' seems to work – whatever ‘work’
means – some of the time.

Of course what I also want to
do, what I want to know, is how do we create this in our more conventional,
traditional services - this spirit of creative aliveness? How do we create a
form of religious service that is an antidote to boredom? I am open to
suggestions.

[based on themes explored in a sermon given on Shabbat B’reshit at Finchley Reform
Synagogue, London, on October 10th, 2015]