Four Poems for the End if the Year

 

1. Nature’s Secret Shame

 

Beneath the soil where stately trees stand tall,

Their branches reaching to the sky, as though

They were waiting to return to godly status, all

Appearances to the contrary, there flow

Strange messages between the roots, as thirst

And compassion, cooperation and curiosity;

While fungi breathe deeply and heave, their thrust

Of gases billow in the darkness, like a heavy sea

That caresses seaweed and shelters damaged shells;

So from species unto species, under our perception

The things that seem to stand unrhymed, or undermine

The oceans when they seek to crack the shore,

Live other lives between themselves, no oak

Espies this act of kindness, nature’s secret shame.

This Darwin never learned, nor Wallace, while Hobbes

Would have bobbed in his grave and Huxley croaked.

 

 

2. Raglan Summer, Black Sand Beaches and Crabs

 

In Raglan the pohutakawa are out in force,

the surfers crowd the waters on Ocean Beach,

and for the first time in decades elephant rocks

are fully exposed, down to the letters of love

gouged out a hundred years ago. I toss

a handful of seashells into the wind; they reach

the yellow foam of the breakers. Someone locks

his childish dreams on the dunes, and will not move

again until the tides wash them away.

I take another handful of sand to test the wind,

And all is flat and silent; only insects

And tiny crabs scurry, while the distant bay

Awaits the whales that never come. Who sinned

That we are cursed today in all respects

With sights and sounds that have no other meaning

Than vague memories and indecipherable scheming?

I let the black granules filter through my fingers

And hope a flower grows where my grief lingers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. Aaron’s Laughter

 

I still hear his voice up there screaming out in pain

no longer coming down to chat and sip some tea

and tell me jokes; now something in his brain

was growing which made his life a misery.

When he was gone and the house grew silent,

he was there still, even as the years passed,

and when too the house was gone I spent

long hours listening for the jokes, but at last

I knew that nothing was funny anymore:

his wit was intellectual, his laughter deep,

He taught me something secret. I am poor

now and across too many oceans. I cannot weep

when whole worlds have disappeared. The door

has shut on that other place, the place of peaceful sleep.

 

 

4. Sun Fish Need No Hooks

 

How clear the lakes were then. We could watch the fish

Dancing round the strings we dipped into the water

And wait for some to swallow the worms. I wish

There were times and places like that now, but greater

Evils swirl around our lives than anyone imagined

In those dreamy unreal days, and none of us could see

What lay ahead through the murky future. We pigeon-

Holed our expectations foolishly.

Like sunfish, we were caught without any hooks.

We glided unreasonably towards the bait, were blind

To the anglers on the little pier, read books,

Too many with titles of naive hope. We were kind

Without caution and dared not debate our choices.

When we were caught, no one heard our voices.

Review of Jonathan Sacks, Morality

 

Jonathan Sacks, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times. London: Hodder & Stoughten, 2020. xv + .  M365 pp.

 

With great prescience just prior to the earth-shattering events of the Corvid-19 pandemic which is still-reshaping the way we look at ourselves and the world we have made for ourselves, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who passed away in November 2020, former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, evaluates the morality that needs to be restored. He is much lauded by many inside and outside of the Jewish community as a great theologian of our age and moral leader for all time.

 

From the perspective of what has happened to culture, learning and social responsibilities both in the United Kingdom and the United States over the last half century, the descent into selfish, foolish, bigoted and ignorant trumpism has been going on for quite a while and is no sudden moral lapse exposed in 2016. Rabbi Sacks’ Morality is about the need to strengthen our commitment, deepen our sympathy and extend our empathy, to conceive of society in terms of mutual respect and love, and to do so with a sense of justice and moral responsibility, and not out of sentimentality or superficial spirituality.

 

His Jewish perspective also becomes increasingly evident as the book continues and once you pass the critical mass of his argument and enter the second half of the book, his renowned deep thought and profound learning kicks in, making this a sobering book loaded with mature discussions, so that cultured and educated readers will not be disappointed.  By Jewish perspective I mean, first of all, a using of the Torah , Talmud and other rabbinical legends, as well as his own experiences in his role of Chief Rabbi for Great Britain and the Commonwealth, to make points; and second, the deep analysis and discussion of the logical, philological and spiritual significance of current events so discussed; and third, his sense of fairness, justice and tolerance, respect  and love for all people. In these ways, too, Rabbi Sacks stands as the exemplary foil to the horrible egotistical, truth-mangling and moral indifference of Donald J. Trump.

 

Sacks has always read widely, far beyond theology and Jewish studies, and, now it seems also, popularly; and, though he has occasionally picked up the latest buzz words and jargon (“mindful”, “societal,” etc.) along the way, he masters the current notions of intellectual history and is thus able to criticise the faults that have developed within them, with particular emphasis on changes in American concepts of democracy, liberty, individuality, freedom and identity. In this way, he provides a good survey of the kind of transformation in Western Civilization over the past forty years, the radical shift to the religious right, the slide into know-nothing populism, and the dangerous loosening on the world of Trump and his supporters, those who, following the trumped up questioning of the November 2020 presidential election, seem like armed gangs of thugs–the so-called Proud Boys and other White Nationalist, anti-feminist, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic hate groups—roaming the streets of large and small American cities. Post-Brexit Britain, as well as fascist-type movements in France, Poland and Hungary also share in these anti-democratic trends.

 All of this madness has a method to it, to be sure, and Sacks tracks it down both in the short run, over the past four decades, and in the long run, over the last four centuries. Events have consequences that at first don’t rise to the surface of public consciousness and it may take a whole generation (thirty or forty years) for the effects to be felt: the vast slaughter of the Great War, the Holocaust during World War Two, the availability of birth con troll pills, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the terrorist attacks on 11 September and so forth.  Similarly thinkers who may have written in the seventeenth or eighteenth century do not become dominant until two or three hundred years later, when the situations and their ideological opponents are forgotten: Hobbes rather than Locke, Kant rather than Hegel, Nietzsche rather than Wagner. One generation grows up with film, another with radio, another with television, one with video, another with cell-phones, one with social media and so forth and so on.   

 The central theme adumbrated in the sub-title to this book, “Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times,” is that society works best when it centres a covenantal concern for We rather than the contractual divisiveness of I, where people care about one another and the larger entity of “we the people”.  For fifty years, he says, western societies have backed away from a sense of social responsibility and moderate balancing of diverse interests. He points out that various points in recent history the whole outlook of many western nations has shifted from I back to We, so that really is possible because it has happened many times. 

 What he doesn’t explain, though, is why the situation slips away again, sometimes because of devastating wars, dire economic catastrophe, far-reaching political collapse—yet these are the names of the changes, not reasons why the psychological props of covenantal communities don’t hold. Without such understanding—could it be, as psychohistorians suggest, from insidious changes in child-reading practices; mass trance-like delusions fostered on society by cynical and fascist elements in commerce,  industry and government?—much of what Sacks seeks to happen seems like pie in the sky.

His moving example of the way the citizens of Gander, Newfoundland came together as a whole to care for the scores of airliners forced to land at its international airport following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA admirably shows a collective impulse to work together for the good of the whole. But that was for less than a week. The splitting of the US voting public during the 2020 election, with some 70 million people favouring the insufferable nonsense of Trump and 80 million seeking to throw him out of office does not bode well for a lasting return to normality, civility and mutual toleration, given that things were still in the state of I-dominance that Sacks despairs of throughout this book.

The long Corvid-19 pandemic throughout the world may also be a test-case for how well societies in different nations put aside their selfish, competitive and stupid refusal to work together to control the disease. Some indications show that there is a desire to establish a better world order that can be fairer, more kind and gentle than the world has trended towards since the 1960s , but there is no sign yet of a real change. Too many people confound anarchy with freedom by refusing to self-isolate, maintain social distancing and wear masks; fall prey to snake-oil hucksters peddling empty dreams and magic cures; and anti-vaccine conspiracies that defy scientific testing and processing information.

It would be wonderful if large majorities in the population followed the arguments that Rabbi Sacks outs forward.  The dangerous prevalence of social media and other substitutes for face-to-face discussion and debate remains to be solved. The corporate structures are still, for the most part, predicated on managerial and share-holder profits, not on living wages and care of workers and their families, or for the production of useful goods and services which are properly shared through all of the community. Health services, education and safe housing are not yet considered basic human rights for everyone. In other words, what the world will look like after the pandemic ends remains to be seen. No one knows whether the improvements and good wishes promised by the sacrifice of so many front-line and essential workers—from doctors and nurses, cleaners and bus-drivers through to delivery people and supermarket check-out clerks—will continue; or whether, as happened in Gander in 2001, the indications of a long lasting We-society is a seven day wonder.

 

 

Four Cold Poems for Summer Memories

 

The Tundra

On the icy tundra of my life, no trees

Break the horizon, no boulders rise to shade

My passing, only mountains and frozen seas

Mark the ending of the world, though it is said

Reality has other continents to cross

And painful dreams can cut through the Antarctic block,

Where creatures lurk beneath the floes. Only moss

And broken branches that have floated from rock to rock

Obscure the endless blinding scene. I hear

The growling of the night under Aurora’s sway,

Undulations from distant suns, like the sneer

Of cynical deities who spy on children’s play.

They have no use for innocence or smiles

When darkness coagulates the hopeless miles.

 

 

The Road Home from Fort Garry, February 1966

 

We were told, on the flat frozen prairie, to beware

Of slipping into a ditch, so to keep a candle, and a match.

Along with a few candy bars, as you might be there

For many hours or days; the temperature would drop

Well below zero, forty or fifty degrees,

And you needed all your wits and some warmth, and hope,

Otherwise your mind would close and your arteries freeze.

So it happened one night as they had predicted, off

The road, the windscreens iced over, and snow a blanket.

I sat there stunned, afraid to sneeze or cough,

Wondering how to strike the light with unmoving fingers,

And eyes quickly darkening, while consciousness lingers

In strange dreams, of a rescuing stranger who would crank it

Out of the drift, my steel encasement, casket.

 

 

 

 

 

Twice-Dipped Tea

 

My word, I see they are having winter again in New England,

with snow drifts blocking the roads and roofs collapsing,

and yet in this season of pandemic, the world is ending,

and the climate has been ruined yet again  by men.

Huge cyclonic winds are ravaging Fiji

and firestorms break out in South Australia,

There’s hardly an atoll not inundated and gone;

like Lower Manhattan after a hurricane.                                                              

So, as I said long ago, when still naïve,

the weathers of the world are all wrong. So long,

Sweet dreams of paradise at the end of my life, and tea

comes with sodden bags twice dipped and tasteless,

and my last word can only be out of the grave:

adieu, fond memories , the mystery

has been solved—you were always restless ghosts and slaves.

 

 

When the River Melts

 

At the end of winter the Red River exploded

With a night of crashing crushing thunder, currents

Hidden for half a year shot up, and chunks

Of dark blue ice leapt out of the water, like dead

Horses after battles were lost, their riders sent

To enemy camps. Soon followed large stumps

Of trees strangled in the dying sweep of November’s

Storms, and all the detritus of summer floods.

By daylight we saw the piles stacked high shivering

Start to collapse, everything groaning, moaning—

then plunge under each other, like fleeing corpses,

when the Emperor left his armies behind to die

after the glorious race to Moscow failed. Now spring

arrives and the warm afternoon promises

us hopes that never will be fulfilled, and dreams dissolve.

 

When Birds Go Plum Loco in December

 

How many black birds gather under our plum tree

Now that Christmas is almost here, they are

Summoned by some invisible twittering to see

What the crop is like; they find the branches bare.

There are a few red balls that fall, so they peck

And dance around the garden. In other years

The bounty was innumerable, they sickened

With repletion, round and unable to fly, like bears

Preparing for hibernation. Today the fare

Is meagre, though they are eager, someone fears

That the season will give out very soon

And all the juices of fermentation have run dry,

So the annual orgy will be annulled. The moon

Will lose her lovers’ ecstasy and the sky awry

Must dip below the horizon without her boon.

Review of Conversations with RBG

 

Jeffrey Rosen. Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty and Law, with a new Afterward. New York: Picador/Henry Holt and Company, 2020 (2019). viii + 286 pp.

Reviewed by Norman Simms

 

After the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, her body was laid in state in the rotunda of the Supreme Court Building in Washington, DC. A female rabbi recited Kaddish for this outstanding woman of valour, so many firsts in the history of the United States, something I never expected to see and hear in my lifetime.  Just a few weeks before that, my wife and I watched the film On the Basis of Sex  (2018) based on RBG’s early legal career, from the time she entered Harvard School of Law until she argued her first case before the Supreme Court. Then I found this book in a local bookshop in Hamilton, New Zealand.  It seemed well worth a review. So let me begin.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death in the closing months of 2020 led to the indecent haste with which her successor was appointed weeks before President Donald Trump was defeated in the national election of that year.  The funeral brought her role in the Supreme Court as an Associate Justice, and her influence on liberal and progressive thinking in the United States into the public eye as never before. Her death, which she herself hoped to put off for just a short while to save the country from the embarrassment that was inevitable with a politically-motivated appointment of Amy Coney Barrett , not just a conservative Catholic but who Umair Haque points out, “belong[s] to a religious cult with no separation between private and public life”,  and whose presence on the bench would not only certainly undo all RBG’s great work, most immediately with opposition to Roe v. Wade on abortion rights, the Obama Affordable Medical Care Act, and many other crucial, defining issues of modern America, but impede further  reforms in racial and social justice for generations to come. Unlike her successor, Amy Coney Barret, an avowed “Originalist” (that is, a strict literalist of the Constitution’s “original” intentions), RBG, in true Talmudic tradition, has always stood for a constant revisioning of the law to fit with changing circumstances and attitudes, maintaining bedrock principles while accommodating to the human and historical needs of persons appearing before the Supreme Court.

There are several passages in the book in which RBG takes up the concept of Originalism, and puts herself squarely into the camp of those who defend the intentions of the Founding Fathers, and she sees those basic principles of democracy, fairness and equality as fundamental to her philosophy of law.  On the one hand, for lawyers, legal pundits and others interested in history of the court system in the USA, there is much information to be gleaned. For those more interested in the personal, emotional side of RBG, the introductions and the chapters of conversation show her as a daughter, wife, mother and friend. She talks about how she was able to juggle being a mother and a law student, beginning clerk, lawyer and judge. In one anecdote, she is sitting at her desk studying, while one after another friends and relatives arrive to celebrate her birthday: and only after the room is full, does she realize anyone has come to see her.

In another series of anecdotes Rosen shows her tendency to argue in a rabbinic way, even though he or she doesn’t make mention of her Judaism or Jewish background. But the haymeshkeyt (homeliness and emotional intensity) is there nevertheless in her propensity to see clients, lawyers and judges as persons who deserve individual attention: she remembers who they are, what their backgrounds and private problems are, and she demonstrate real concern for them: remembering their birthdays, asking about recent illnesses, and offering private advice.

The other kind of Originalism seen in the voting of the newly appointed Justice Barrett is more inclined towards the Strict Constructionism of the Supreme Court in the early 1800s and then later in waves of conservative and reactionary states’ right (including the  post-Reconstructionist formation of Jim Crow laws) thinking that are anything but liberal. RBG sees herself as a judicial minimalist, to seek changes by small steps, allowing public opinion and legislatures to lead the way, and only stepping in when the fundamental principles of the Bill of Rights are under threat. Sometimes it seems that she has voted one way, only to go there then ten years later; but this because, she explains, the country has changed, i.e., ordinary people are and state legislatures are ready to act in ways they weren’t before.

While this little book is not a biography of RBG, many personal details of her early and middle life, her childhood and marriage, before she became a member of the Supreme Court, are given in an introduction and then an explanatory preface to each of the selections from conversations Jeffrey Rosen held with her. Rosen provides a context for the decisions taken by this outstanding woman jurist, not because they let us see into the legal workings of her mind, but because each of her decisions takes into account the real people involved in the arguments—and RBG is personally interested in them; and she will keep in contact for years afterwards.  Rather than work out political or social agendas and choosing her cases as part of an organized programme of reform, she waits for real men and women to work their way through the legal pathways towards justice, find themselves needing help out of constitutional entanglements, and helping them by getting to know their individual lives. When she discusses her written judgments, for the majority or the dissenting opinion, she always talks about these real people, many of whom become her friends, and with whom she keeps in contact over many years. In the years when she would argue cases before regional federal courts and then the Supreme Court itself, she also addressed herself to the reality of who the judges were. Her extensive knowledge of precedents and her careful choice of words and examples were harnessed to appeal to the human side of the panel of (usually all male) judges.

Usually a voice of calm cautious moderation, in the last few years of her service on the highest court in America RBG became much strident and aggressive, to the surprise of many, but she explained that it was not so she who had changed as the court.  The #MeToo movement has particularly spurred her on to be more of an activist than ever before. In more recent years, under Donald Trump’s presidency and his appointment of politically-motivated right-wing judges to the Supreme and other federal courts she has found that the new appointees were less concerned with due processes and loyalty to the Constitution. Therefore, even though she should have slowed down because of old age and sickness, she pushed herself into more strident positions.

After the fiasco Senate hearings for Kavanagh and Barrett, and after four years of Trump’s attack on the impartiality of the judiciary, as well as of the objectivity of the FBI, CIA, the Department of Justice and anyone in Washington who did not toe his line, it became evident that things were not normal. The sense of collegiality and friendly differences of opinion was fast slipping away. Everything that she had believed in and worked so hard to achieve might disappear very soon. The feisty little woman from Brooklyn more than ever became a powerful voice to be reckoned with.

The conversations in this book, then, are a record of the kind of brilliant mind we may not encounter again for a long time. It is good to remind ourselves that such people like RBG once lived, even in our own life times. She is more generous about Trump’s political appointees than most of her supporters would be, and seems quite optimistic in the last months when, on the one hand, she is suffering from cancer, and, on the other, watching court decisions come closer and closer to nullifying her reforms.

A special addendum has been added for the paperback edition, with the conversation between Rosen and RBG continuing right up to the final months of 2020 and the tumultuous close of Trump’s presidency.  The questions put to RBG become more personal and she reveals many          things about her private life, as well as going into more detail about her philosophy of law.  Though she plays down the importance of her contribution to Feminism in the last three decades, claiming she was lucky to be in the right place and at the right time to make her voice heard in major aspects of the movement, she does hint that she has fears that the main advances may be lost. She tries to take heart in the strong young women coming through to prominence, such as Malala and Greta Thunberg, along with a whole new cohort of female students passing through the prestigious law schools. She also recalls her mother’s advice: not to submit to negative thoughts and to be strategically hard of hearing when attacked by her peers and opponents.

If there is anything wrong with this book, it is that many passages are repeated: it is not just that they appear first in the introduction to each chapter and then again in the conversations that follow. Because the conversations are not given as whole units in themselves, but cut up into thematic bits and sewed together, certain sentences, even whole paragraphs are repeated several times—and even in the same chapter. It is also likely that in the course of their discussions over a number of years, RBG made the same points about important cases she argued for and against, as well as family anecdotes and comments on the operas she has heard. The repetitions, however, often occur in Rosen’s essays (and at the end of the book there is a long list of places where the published sources can be found). Better editing could have cleared up these difficulties, though Rosen is profuse in his thanks to relatives, friends and professional editors who helped him compile this book and give it the shape it now has. More work with a red pen and a sharp scissors might have made for a shorter, more compact text, yet that is something the publisher may have wished to avoid.  These caveats aside, I highly recommend this book.