Rosh Hashanah Morning 5772 The texters of today are our poets of tomorrow Rabbi Aaron Goldstein 29 September 2011

The texters of today are our poets of tomorrow. This seemingly counter-intuitive idea was offered earlier this month, by no lesser an authority than the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy (The Guardian, 06.09.11). She expressed her belief that children experimenting with mobile texting could provide the next generation of poets. “The poem is a form of texting…it’s the original text. It’s a perfecting of a feeling in language – it’s a way of saying more with less, just as texting is. We’ve got to realize that the Facebook generation is the future – and, oddly enough, poetry is the perfect form for them. It’s a kind of time capsule – it allows feelings and ideas to travel big distances in a very condensed form.”

The Akedah – the horrific account of the binding of Isaac - which we have just heard is not conventional poetry but it is one of the most powerful pieces of literature that I know. With an economy of language a plethora of issues, moral and otherwise are raised. Each word is so carefully weighed that they speak clearly, starkly and at the same time initiate in our imaginations numerous scenarios that reflect those words that we provide as embellishment. Perhaps Carol Ann Duffy might see the Akedah as a form of text message.

What might she see updated from Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited? A man whose hair was beginning to recede and turn white at the edges, dressed in SuperDry, Diesel and Converse. Every now and then he looks back at his son, jeans hanging off his bottom, Hollister t-shirt specked with wood bark, tangled with the lead from oversized headphones, tapping away on his phone. Feeling a vibration, the man sighs, pulls out his smartphone to reply to his son’s text before checking his e mail once more to see if he can fathom what God had sent him.

I am grateful to Helen Aron and Joshua Powell for providing their paraphrasing, with a hint of interpretation, of the speech contained in the Akedah that you might have found on the back of your service sheets (See appendix belowif reading this now). The majority of us, including me, will have found their language wholly or partly incomprehensible. How could they be tomorrow’s poets?

Yet their creativity with language is as genuine as the original Torah text, as valid as the Targumim - translations into Aramaic for our ancient ancestors to understand the words of the Holy Language – the Midrashim of the Rabbis who sought explication of the text, the Oral Torah, and your imaginations that I hope were vividly active through our Torah reading. What is different is only their mode of transmission and the understanding we glean from context.

When we consider the Akedah, we are often trapped in the revulsion of what God requests Abraham to do. The Torah text communicates to us with such simple eloquence that we are caught up in the worse possible scenario. This is a very valid form of understanding. The immediate, overwhelming response to the recent riots around London and other parts of the country, was revulsion. Quite rightly so as criminal acts are as they are. Yet when one provided the context, as Analysis on Radio 4 did, a key focus was not on the tiny minority who perpetrated these acts but on the majority who did not. Evidence was found - anthropologically speaking - of the marvel that in a relatively short period of time, human beings could become civilized. Put in the context of a time when child sacrifice was practiced, the religion of the Akedah symbolizes a core message of this and every New Year: life – for Abraham is forbidden to sacrifice his son.

Context helps us to think past the literal and find the core messages of our Torah text and our phone txt. We have been shown two faces of social media this year. The one, decried the invisibility from surveillance of blackberry messenger and other forms of mobile texting that were identified as key factors in organizing the riots, drugs rings and human trafficking. Whilst it is appalling that progress in communications technology has been used for destructive purposes, I think that it has ever been thus. Indeed, the organization of people power to clear-up after the riots, let alone its ability to support movements for change particularly in the Middle East provides a clear trump card. More people are using social media to live life and to seek the ability to do so in more equitable ways, to seek freedom, a core message that resonates with us as Jews. In context, dramatically more people are seeking life through social media and an enjoyment of it than those who seek to negate it.

However, my sense of context would rather highlight another use of social media that we now talk little about because it is assumed, but to my mind is far more significant. It has become so much a part of our everyday that we do not even think of it. That is the sense of connection, love and understanding that is communicated through skype, facebook, twitter, email and other media each second. Increasing numbers of our households have expressed to me their appreciation for connection to friends and loved ones who are physically distant or otherwise time distant. Thinking of all these connections criss-crossing the globe made me think of it as a ball of wool. A text can cross time-zones almost instantaneously. The delay on a phone line from Australia that I experienced as an 18 year old is a thing of the past.

The context of social media - and the telephone, letter and face to face contact is still a part of it - is not the tool itself but what it enables. The underlying message however communicated is our desire to live life, comfortably and in relation with others. It would be very easy to reject life at this time: The financial underpinning of our economy is frighteningly wobbly. Just when Al Qaeda is weakening, we hear about the Haqqani network, now the most feared faction among Taliban militants, who have assumed a new destructive mantel. Famine and natural disasters are increasingly frequent, constructive talks between Israel and the Palestinians, non-existent and…I could go on but I would do this sermon and this day of Rosh Hashanah a disservice. For put in context, the importance of this moment is our consideration of how we communicate with ourselves, those nearest to us, and with God, our appreciation and our love of life. For in true context, in real balance, life is good.

Our religious texts provide a context that is generally assumed: the moral basis to life. Legislation does not say, ‘you shall not kill,’ it just provides the penalties if one does kill someone else. It does not need to because an assumption is taken from the religious foundation of life. To love life is not just about living happily. For some their current context, sometimes their entirety, is not happy. This possibility is sometimes found in life, and very occasionally can be all consuming. The religious text in this sense of morality, even in our darkest moments, provides us with the guidance of how we can live the life we have.

We come back to the text of the Akedah annually for, in the words of Milton Steinberg, it establishes life and centres it in morality. “While it was a merit in Abraham to be willing to sacrifice his only son to his God, it was God's nature and merit that God would not accept an immoral tribute."

Our Sacred Text and the wisdom of past generations provide us with the foundation for a moral life. Today we explore our legacy in our own words, be they spoken in dialogue, written as prose or typed as a text. They provide the foundation for our future, the opportunity for this year to be a good one in our own context. Tomorrow there will be a poet born of the texting generation.  

If we hear no other religious message this year then may it be this one to which we can say Lechayyim – to life!

Appendix 1

The dialogue contained in the Akedah
God: Abraham
Abraham: Here I am
God: Take your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and go the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the hills which I will point out.

Abraham: Stay here with the ass while I and the boy go up to worship, then we will return to you.

Isaac: Father
Abraham: Here I am, my son
Isaac: I see the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt-offering?
Abraham: God will provide the lamb for the burnt-offering, my son.

Angel: Abraham, Abraham
Abraham: Here I am
Angel: Do not raise your hand against the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only one from Me.

Appendix 2

A txt interpretation by Helen Aron and Joshua Powell

God: Abe
Abraham: Yeh man? :s
God: Get ur son Isaac <3 + trek to de Moriah + sacrifice him 2 me on that hill
Abraham : :0

Abraham: L8s m8 i'll take Isaac stay wiv my donkey mans gunna b on a sacrifice ting

Isaac: dad
Abraham: Yeh boy
Isaac: No offence but WTH we need a lamb !!!?
Abraham: God’s gunna set us a lamb son.

Angel: Abe
Abraham: Yeee buddy
Angel: Don’t do anything that’s bare harsh 2 the kid, Mate I get u fearing G-d an' all that seeing u near shanked ur son :)