Extremism –

by Rabbi Dr Charles H. Middleburgh

There is a midrash which says that when Jacob dreamed his famous dream of the stairway connecting earth and heaven what he actually saw were the guardian angels of the nations that would oppress his descendants going up and coming down. And he heard the voice of God saying to him - You climb up, Jacob, you climb up to the top, and you will stay there ... I promise that you will stay there. But Jacob was afraid, his faith faltered, and the rest we know.

There is another midrash which says that on the day that Esau returned famished and exhausted from the hunt to be enticed by the smells of his brother's lentil soup into selling his birthright, he had already committed theft, idolatry, murder, and the rape of a betrothed virgin; and in addition it was Shabbat, and not just any Shabbat but one that coincided with Yom Kippur!


These two examples of rabbinic folklore are typical of the midrashim that are linked to Jacob and Esau, the one a figure of respectability and faith, albeit at times weakness as well, the other a dyed in the wool villain. Every opportunity that the rabbis had to build Jacob up they took and every opportunity to blacken his brother's name they similarly used to its full advantage.


The demonisation of Esau is a fact that has always rankled with me, for it is monstrously unfair, as well as showing the rabbis themselves in a very poor light. Why did they do it?

Partly because they must have been aware that if you peeled away Jacob the hero's layers you would find something rather unpleasant underneath. But more specifically perhaps because they used Esau as a figure for Edom, the neighbouring tribe that oppressed the Judahites when the Temple was destroyed in the 6th century BCE and which itself become a figure for the Roman Empire and subsequently the Christian world that inherited much of the Empire's territory.


Whatever pressure the rabbis may have felt under to blackguard Esau, there is little evidence that they tried to resist it, on the contrary they seem actively to have embraced his character assassination. In addition there is a special quality about some of these midrashim because they are so extreme, so absurd, so hysterical, that you wonder how such learned men could have been diverted into something so trivial - and malevolent.

I cannot help feeling that this hysteric, this loss of control, this lack of proportion and common sense that is evinced by the midrashim on Esau has unfortunate echoes in late twentieth century British society.


Since the tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales in the summer of 1997, we have witnessed an accelerated erosion of those classic British virtues of self-restraint and self discipline, as well as a sense of proportion, which have stood us in good stead for so long.
No more do those once lauded British qualities of sang-froid and inner strength click into action when disaster looms or happens, instead we panic, fall apart, and call in the counsellors - today's greatest enterprise culture.

In addition to this disturbing new ethos of untrammelled emotion and ersatz compassion, is the apparent legitimisation of vicious behaviour, physical or verbal, against anyone who appears to challenge the majority feeling. When the former nanny, Louise Woodward, was convicted of murdering a baby in her care by shaking him to death, for from being shocked by what she was alleged to have done, the people in Elton, her home village, organised a yellow ribbon campaign, and those who refused to wear the ribbons were assaulted in the street. After Diana's death, sections of the public, encouraged by the media, criticised the Queen for not parading her feelings in front of them, as if their grief was more genuine and important then the grief of the families who had been directly bereaved.


What I increasingly wonder, is happening to our country? Is everything suddenly up for grabs? Are we becoming pray to the sort of shallowness and superficiality for which we have hitherto sneeringly condemned the United States? Are the traits of character that have, to all intents and purposes, stood us in good stead for so long to be swept away by a tide of mawkishness and an inability to stand on our own two feet? Surely it is one of the great ironies of our trans-millennial life that one of the hallmarks of the ludicrously over-hyped 'cool Britannia' is an emotional incontinence that is anything but!

And what are the implications for we Jews of this brave, new, 'cool' Britannia? They could be very negative indeed. I used to think that this country, my country, was the most stable in the world, that its democratic society was a rock which others could only envy - now I am not so sure. The behaviour to which I have referred is a form of extremism, and if that is to take root in the national psyche in a way it never has before then we are all in for a very uncertain future.


For if group psychosis and a susceptibility to manipulation is to become a trait of the British character then all sorts of things become less predictable, and the take-it for-granted security that minority groups like our own have always enjoyed is no longer what it was.

As intolerance grows, and fundamentalism of various kinds, religious and secular, becomes more not less mainstream, we cannot easily reassure ourselves with the phrase we would once have easily uttered never in Britain! And I could not even begin to tell you, as a passionate believer in the values that made us a great nation, how much pain that realisation gives me.


In his lost book published in 1998, Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse, the centenarian Indian academic Professor Nirad Chaudhuri analysed the changes that he saw in the world around him, particularly focussing on individualism, nationalism and democracy, which he believed acquired debased meanings in the contemporary world.


His prognosis was not encouraging; he believed that we live in a vulgar age, and that the hallmark of such times is that they not only create vulgarity but seek to persecute everything that is not vulgar. Of the future he said that though a great age may be coming he could not see how it would, especially as our world was vide et me'ant, empty with nothingness in it.


Whether you accept Chaudhuri's opinion or not (and if you did you would probably want to go home and drown yourself in your chicken soup), it is hard not to conclude, with the plethora of evidence and incident that we might adduce, that the tectonic plates of British society are on the move, and that the resultant changes to our way of life may well be negative, albeit not as dark as the good professor painted them.

For most of us, extremism of any kind is a source of anxiety, and as liberals what we desire is a level-headedness and tolerance within which each can live their lives in peace untroubled by others. We reject the relentless rabbinic fawning over Jacob just as we dismiss the unremitting hostility to Esau - neither is right, neither could possibly be a true reflection of a real human being.


There is a further midrash about Esau which is very short, but of which I am very fond. It must have been part of a debate about why the descendants of Esau, Rome or the Christian empire, enjoyed such power and worldly reward when the descendants of Jacob, the people of Israel, were so powerless and prey to the whims of others. How could this be when Esau had been such an utter cad and Jacob such a mensch?

A nameless rabbi provided the answer: Esau's strength and good fortune, and that of his descendants, may be explained by the respect that Esau showed for his father.


In other words, not only is there good in everyone, whether we are able to see it or not, not only should we try to be tolerant of those whose apparent behaviour or attitudes we do not understand, but there is room in society for all of us, and there is as much strength in diversity as there is in uniformity.

The tragedy for Jacob and Esau was not that they were different, but that one of them could not cope with the fact and find a constructive way for them to live together; and that, for Jacob and we, his descendants, was as big a loss as his momentary lapse of faith on the stairway of his dream.

Rabbi Middleburgh was Executive Director of the Union of Liberal & Progressive Synagogues when this sermon was given on Shabbat Va-yetze 20 November 1999 at Southgate Progressive Synagogue.