If you wander past my office, you may assume I’m an avid reader, and it may not surprise you that next to my bed at home is a very large pile of books. It is a pile some of you may also have; the pile that is ‘waiting to be read’. The pile grows far faster than I read, sadly. Having books doesn’t always equate to reading them! So I was very excited before heading off for my first proper Covid free break this summer, in which I had grand reading ambitions. In choosing what to take, I was a little unsure about one of my choices. ‘Hitler’s Canary’ by broadcaster and comedian Sandi Toksvig. Having visited Auschwitz for the first time this April, I didn’t really want to take a Shoah themed book on my holiday, but this one has been calling to me ever since that trip, and I am so glad it was among the books I packed. The story told is essentially that of Toksvig’s Danish father during the Second World War, told from his perspective as a child. It is a book that would be very accessible to older children, and while I vaguely knew the Danes had saved many of their Jews by smuggling them out on boats in the cover of night, the details shared in this sort-of-biography left me astonished.
The daring Danish rescue operation took place over the 10 days from erev Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur in 1943, 79 years ago. Around 300 fishing boats volunteered to help transport seven thousand, two hundred and twenty Danish Jews, as well as six hundred and eighty non-Jews to safety in Sweden. In contrast 447 Danish Jews were sent to concentration camps, where around 120 of them died or were murdered. As Toksvig notes, “In total, despite Hitler’s best efforts, less than 2 per cent of Denmark’s Jews died”. Three thousand members of the Danish resistance were killed during the same period.
It is a remarkable tale. But what really struck me in Toksvig’s telling of it, is a trope that is repeated several times throughout the book. Not all the Dane’s did the right thing, indeed some of them were fervent supporters of Hitler’s approach to Jews and minorities. On the other hand, she repeatedly demonstrates that not all the Germans obeyed their orders. In fact, as she writes in the notes at the end of the book, the German soldiers “[…] did not search the coastal trains taking refugees to freedom. Those who did stop refugee traffic often did so in a vague and half-hearted manner. When the German chief of shipping in Arhus, Friedrich Wilhelm Lubke, was told to prepare the ship Monte Rosa to transport Danish Jews, he made sure it had engine failure.”
People are complicated. Not all Danes were heroes, and some who were may also have done things we would consider shameful. And not all Germans serving in Hitler’s army were evil individuals, though they made up a cog in an evil machine of hatred and destruction.
It is often easy to talk about, even to write off, groups of people in broad, generalised terms. It is also too easy to assume the worst of individuals on the basis of one terrible bit of behaviour, or reports of it. Largely, I have found, people are much much more complicated than this. I know I am much more complicated than this.
An amazing educational charity, Facing History and Ourselves, creates curriculum for secondary schools helping teachers explore themes around genocide and racism. Their goal is to show how societies allow these atrocities to happen, and the small, incremental steps that take us all there as individuals. I have been reflecting a lot on their work over the last few weeks. We face increasing fear and real poverty in the face of a cost of living crisis, threats of nuclear war, energy prices beyond the capacity of many, and a climate crisis that we are still somehow ignoring day to day. Economic crashes and real poverty, as well as the aftermath of the First World War were all contributors to the ability of Hitler and his Nazi party to convince an entire nation to, initially, hand over for euthanasia their disabled and special needs relatives, in the name, essentially, of economic prosperity. This also helped the nation adjust to the idea that some people are more disposable than others are. I hope that this idea continues to appal us today, but I know disability campaigners have been talking for over a decade about how they have gone from being beaten up and called ‘spaz’ and other slurs, to being called ‘benefit cheats’ as they are attacked. Of course Nazi ideology has long troubling roots and goes well beyond any one type of persecution, but the hatred of minority groups, driven in part at the beginning by economic hardship, is something I think we can too easily fall into again.
And it doesn’t always stem from a place of evil – wanting to have an NHS that can care for us when we are sick isn’t wrong, but insisting immigrant groups are at the root of its collapse is part of what leads to the demonization of others, and oversimplifies a crisis that is deep and complicated.
When I’m failing to read the giant pile of books next to my bed, I try to make time each week to read a magazine called ‘The Week’. The Week attempts to draw together the stories of the last 7 days by reporting what a range of papers and commentators have said about it. In an article from August, Martin Fletcher was quoted as saying there is a ‘last days of the Roman empire’ feel to Britain this summer. Some commentators agreed, others opined that we are in the middle of a transition not a collapse, and that change can be painful, but doesn’t have to mean total decline. Bad news alone can be bad for the soul – I’m not suggesting we hide our heads in the sand, quite the opposite, but things are always more complicated than our own thoughts on the matter, or one commentators take on it. The Rabbis of old seem to agree. After years of arguments between the Houses of Hillel and Shammai, with both adamant that they were right, a voice from heaven called out ‘Eiloo v Eilloo divrei Elohim Chayyim’ – These words AND these words are the word of the living God. But, the voice continued, the law always agrees with Hillel. This episode in the Talmud (Eruvin 13b) continues by explaining exactly why the law sides with Hillel:
Since, however, both are the words of the living God’ what was it that entitled Beth Hillel to have the halachah fixed in agreement with their rulings? Because they were kindly and modest, they studied their own rulings and those of Beth Shammai, and were even so [humble] as to mention the actions of Beth Shammai before theirs
In other words, life is complicated, there is often truth and goodness on more than one side, but actions matter. How we treat those with whom we disagree matters. That is not to say that we shouldn’t care passionately and work hard to change things for the better in the world around us. Anger at the injustice and environmental devastation we see around us is normal, at times even helpful, but how we express that anger can be a part of how we change the world in the year to come.
I recently began another book from that giant pile next to my bed, ‘Cultural Warlords’. It is by a New York based Jewish journalist, Talia Lavin. She wanted to explore the world of American White Nationalism, and in order to do so she spent a year, often undercover, going into online spaces and in person conferences, where she heard hatred, violence and anger spew forth like nothing she had expected. As I imagine it would do to me, the experience has left her angry. She admits she started out pretty angry.
But, she says in the introduction to the book:
As I write this now, I feel myself incandescent with the kind of anger that doesn’t just last an evening. […]
It’s not that I discovered that members of the racist far right are inhuman, or monsters beyond comprehension. They’re not some entirely new species of being that requires forensic analysis and the dispassionate gaze of the scientist. They’re not uniquely stupid or uniquely mired in poverty or uniquely beset by social problems or even members of any specific socioeconomic class. They’re not monsters. They’re people. Just people, mostly men and some women, all over this country and this world, who have chosen to hate, to base the meaning of their lives on hate, to base their communities of solidarity on hate, to cultivate their hate with tender, daily attention. They are just people, people with an entire alternate curriculum of history, who operate within an insular world of propaganda, built to stoke rage and incite killings and for no other purpose at all. There are rich men and poor men, tradesmen and office workers, teenagers and men cresting middle age. They eat and sleep and sometimes drink too much and sometimes are sober. They’re lonely, some of them; […] sometimes depressed and sometimes confused and sometimes joyful. They’re people, just like you and me.[1]
They’re people. Just like us. Who do the school run and have dinner with their friends. But they have allowed hate to be their unifier. We cannot say ‘these too are the words of the living God’. Though the people holding those views are also made in the image of God, just as those they hate are.
The world we live in today is very different to the one of Sandi Toksvig’s father 79 years ago. And yet, we are also seeing the rise of far right nationalism, and war in Europe for the first time since World War Two. But I don’t intend this as a message of doom, though I know many of us are feeling pessimistic about so much in the world at the moment. Talia Lavin, similarly to the work of Facing History and Ourselves, reminds us that we all have choices, every day. Choices to choose hatred and exclusion, or care and listening.
Tomorrow night, as the services of Yom Kippur are coming to an end, there is a little line, after the Tekiah Gedolah, that I’ve never noticed until my husband showed it to me yesterday in his Machzor. ‘Go on your way, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a good heart [I don’t recommend wine after 25 hours of fasting], for already God has accepted your labour’. Or so our Machzor translates the Hebrew from Ecclesiastes 9. But Hebrew being what it is, the sentence could also read ‘Eat your bread, drinks your wine, for God wants your action’. These hours of prayer and reflection are precious. But when they come to an end, God wants us to get out there, in the world, and to be filled with joy and good hearts so that our deeds beyond the walls of our EHRS sanctuary bring joy and good heartedness into the world. Every day, in every choice we make, we are asked to choose to turn away from hate, to disagree well, and to passionately bring our good deeds to form the world in the coming year. Our fear is real. Our anger at those who hate is real. But let us be forces for hope, for care, for love.
May this be God’s will, and more importantly, may it be the will and the success of all of us in the year ahead. Gmar Chatimah Tovah, may we all be inscribed for good, and may we inscribe our own goodness on the year to come.
[1] Lavin, Talia. Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy (p. 4). Octopus. Kindle Edition.
