Sermon: The Chilean Miners, A Jewish Story – Lech L’cha 2010
Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 19 October 2010
The Jewish Chronicle has many special features which give it life as the main newspaper of our community. One which is always rather fun is its ability to find the Jewish angle in every major news story. Why is the X Factor show relevant the JC? Because of the Jewish contestants, Why is there half a page on the Apprentice show? Because the most recent contestant to be fired, Joy Stefanicki’s father is Israeli.
The JC of course is cock a hoop about Howard Jacobson winning the Booker Prize with his book the Finkler Question because he is clearly and obviously Jewish – and so by the way is Alyth as Howard Jacobson is speaking here at our Synagogue in conversation with Rabbi Laura on Wednesday December 8th.
But there was one story dominating the news which was missing completely from this week’s Jewish Chronicle – the moving saga of the Chilean miners. Thirty three men rescued from a black hole 700 metres below the ground in a capsule called Fenix the diameter of a bicycle wheel. Thirty three men and not one of them was Jewish. Nor was the President of Chile, Nor the designer of the capsule. Nor the head of the drilling operation. And so the Chilean miners were missing entirely from this week’s Jewish Chronicle.
But yet the story of what the miners have been through was absolutely a Jewish story, but one with an angle for Rabbis to explore rather than journalists. Our Torah portion on this Shabbat begins as a signal of enormous hope as God summons Abraham from his father’s house to found a people, our Jewish people, to go to a land which will remain ever part of our identity, the Land of Israel, to begin Judaism.
But then in the part of the portion which Sammy read for us this morning the story takes an ominous turn. God said to Abram, “Know for a certainty that your seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years. (Genesis 15:13)” The oppressive nation is Egypt of the Pharaohs where the Children of Israel would be slaves for many many years, with the four hundred being counted from this prediction. Mitzrayim, Egypt in Hebrew, is a word that means narrow straits – narrow and constricting like the underground chamber in which the miners found oppressive refuge before leaving the mine in a narrow capsule.
Not a great start for Judaism to know that future oppression would be the fate of Abraham’s descendants – yet the very next verse turns God’s prediction around. God continues: “And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge; and afterward shall they come out with great wealth.” The children of Israel will be redeemed, freed, brought into a better future, and through the wealth that is mentioned, using their own hands to make their redemption a success.
These words, three short Biblical chapters on from the foundation of Judaism begin an essential historical pattern for our people and set up a state of mind for a people whose history is full of times when we might have folded up, assimilated into the people around us, however oppressive, and finished the story of the Jewish people.
Zygmunt Bauman, who was Professor of Sociology at Leeds University puts this motif of Judaism like this : “Is there a future for the Jewish people? Who else but the Jews would ask such a question? Who else would feel the need to ask it?” Simon Rawidowicz, a Polish, then British and American Jewish Philosopher who had lived this experience, called Jews the ever dying people who, generation after generation fear that they will be the last Jews. – to be concerned with Jewish survival is to continue a great and productive tradition. “If we are the last- let us be the last as our fathers and forefathers were. Let us prepare the ground for the last Jews who will come after us and for the last Jews who will rise after them, and so on until the end of days. If it has been decreed for Israel that it go on being a dying nation – let it be a nation that is constantly dying, which is to say: incessantly living and creating.”{[1]}
Hyam Maccoby, of Leo Baeck College and then also Leeds University, used to say that the whole Book of Genesis is just there to set the Jews up for the situation of being slaves in Egypt. The story from Abraham to Joseph leads us to slavery in Egypt. Then God can redeem us – and the Jewish story begins its familiar cycle of oppression and redemption, disaster and relief. His historical analysis of the Torah suggests that the final narrative of the Torah that we read was composed by a Jewish people who were in exile in Babylonia, or who were enduring impending disaster at the hands of conquering Assyrians and others and whose religious narrative needed to be that of a people heading towards oppression and then, through the hand of God, being redeemed from it into responsibility for a better future. The Torah ended up as it is because that was just what they needed in their own time.
This is what happens to Jews and Judaism, again and thank God, again. When Israel’s President of the time, Ezer Weizmann, addressed the German Parliament in 2006 he said: “ I was a slave in Egypt. I received the Torah at Mount Sinai. Together with Joshua and Elijah, I crossed the Jordan River. I entered Jerusalem with David, was exiled from it with Zedekiah, and did not forget it by the rivers of Babylon. When the Lord returned the captives of Zion, I dreamed among the builders of its ramparts. I fought the Romans and was banished from Spain I studied Torah in Yemen and lost my family in Kishinev. I was incinerated in Treblinka, rebelled in Warsaw and emigrated to the Land of Israel, the country whence I had been exiled and to which I return. I wander in the footsteps of my ancestors. As I accompany them through their times and places, they are with me here, today”
How have Jews and Judaism survived such a history, even if it is our inevitable history, revealed to Abraham in the founding moments of our people and our religion?
Let’s return to the miners. In Santiago and Valpariso in Chile there are Reform synagogues just like ours. Their inspirational Rabbi is Roberto Feldmann. This week he wrote the D’var Torah for the World Union for Progressive Judaism. How did the miners survive? In the words of Rabino Feldmann: “Some of the experts…calculated what a human being needs to survive in exactly the heat and humidity conditions to be found down there, and made sermons about the geology of the mountain, reduced hope to naught, mixing their petulance with what they call “realism”. One day (though) one of the five or six catheters reached just the outside of the refuge almost a kilometre down the earth. The 33 miners were exultant, the whole country exploded in confirmation: hope is more realistic that experts’ percentages. The first papers with loving messages, water, food, and medicine were sent. We are alive, we love you, we haven’t abandoned you. The response from underneath was immediate: we love you too, we are OK: We knew lately you were drilling towards us, we heard (Elijah’s kol dmama daká), a soft, subtle sound of the drilling machines, we knew we were not forgotten. After two weeks, we knew you were coming. We rationed the scarce food, we made routines not to get mad in the darkness, and we sang, we prayed, we even exercised. We had water from the springs, and it was pure to drink, and with hunger we held strong.”
We Jews too made routines so and not to get mad in the darkness of points of our history, we too sang and prayed, lit Shabbat candles, celebrated our festivals and put enormous effort into our responsibilities in the world even when it did not want us, or to continue the miners’ metaphor, when not even the slightest lifeline had reached us. And then again and again, g’al Yisrael, God has redeemed us.
Returning to Rabino Feldmann: “This is not just as “story” like the media loves to call life evolving. This is a deliverance made out of the combination of everything that is good and positive, all the potentials of strength, patience, and the wisdom of the heart, which is not taken away by downgrading experts and their arrogant certainties. They hid like mice at the glaring light of another truth. When I watched each and every miner entering the Fenix cabin, and start his ascent, I pronounced “Lech Lechah”…Off you go to your new life, reborn from the depths of depths of the kiln! Initiated with knowledge we can only slowly begin to understand and drop by drop, begin to learn.”
We surely wish each of the Chilean miners a peaceful return to their loved ones and to life, just as we celebrate our past redemptions and look forward to a day when we will be redeemed to an ever better future