At Work at the Edges

4 days ago
3 min read

I've just finished reading a book called 'At Work in the Ruins' by Dougald Hine which explains and explores his evolving work around climate change - triggered upon his realisation a few years ago that perhaps he should stop talking about climate change...

He explains that there is a lot of work going on in the ruins, perhaps not even realising they're in the ruins, for example propping up unsustainable systems and lifestyles, by, for example, planting trees to offset the carbon footprint of a flight, when in fact it is actually the proliferation and ease of the whole airline industry that needs to be given attention, potentially dismantled, certainly addressed as it continues to pollute and take so much away from our environment and unbalance nature's harmony.

His book is a 'reckoning with the strange years we have been living through, the long history of asking too much of science .... It's also a book about how we find our bearings and what kind of tasks are worth giving our lives to, given all we know or have good grounds to fear about the trouble world is in."

And I feel like we could easily write a Jewish book on the same theme; the strange years we have been living through, and the history of asking too much of the current institutions that have a hold over how we think we need to live if we want to be living Jewishly.

I learned from Dougald that, for example, we are locked in a political framework of 'left wing' and 'right wing': Even with all the disruption and emergence of new parties beyond the 'traditional' Conservative and Labour, and if I've being generous, Liberal Democrats, we still think in terms of where on the binary of 'left' and 'right' these parties sit, to try to figure out if our political home is with them.

This 'left / right' framing originated in the early days of the French Revolution, derived from the seating arrangements in the French National Assembly where supporters of the revolution sat on the left, and defenders of the monarchy sat on the right.

So something that is so ingrained in our psyche, is, in fact, only 236 years old.

And so it is, with our current Jewish institutions. 'Orthodox' and 'Reform' are so ingrained in our Jewish psyche that it's hard to imagine a Judaism any other way than somewhere along this line. But here's the thing - both movements originated in the European Enlightenment - which is contemporaneous with the French Revolution.

And Judaism has been around way way longer than that... we could argue about the exact timings and origin of Judaism but we can call agree that it was around before the Common Era (CE) which makes it definitely more than 2025 years ago....

So what's happened and why are we so set (restricted) in our thinking?

Well, perhaps there's a sermon to answer that question; I definitely have my own thoughts on it - but not succinct enough for a blog post - and perhaps I have leave you with this thought for now:

What could Judaism be and look like, and create, and meet in this moment, if we imagine outside of these binaries?

And what is at stake if we don't?