"Timing is everything"

[Bliss Notes]

 

 

 

 

“Timing is everything”

Based on a sermon for Shabbat Bo, 28 January 2012

Rabbi Fred Morgan

Senior Rabbi, Temple Beth Israel, Melbourne

 

“Timing is everything” – how often have we heard that phrase?  We all know it’s true in humour.  This past week, watching the Australian Open, we have seen that it is true in tennis.  And it is famously true in politics.  Just this past Australia Day Tony Abbott, leader of the Opposition, in response to a journalist’s question made a few relatively innocuous remarks about the Aboriginal Tent Embassy and Aboriginal reconciliation.  He said nothing that hadn’t been said many times before, by all sorts of people; and he even included a glowing tribute to Kevin Rudd’s “Sorry” to the Aboriginal people.  Of course, Rudd’s timing had been spot on!  But Abbott’s timing was atrocious.  We now know that an informant had alerted the Aboriginal demonstrators at the Tent Embassy that Abbott and PM Julia Gillard were in a restaurant nearby, and the resulting mayhem provided the media with a dream moment.  Julia Gillard lost her blue suede shoe in the security fracas that followed.  If she were to fetch it personally from the Aboriginal elders at the Tent Embassy, using the opportunity to sit down with them and discuss their future, that might provide another example of good timing: “timing is everything.”

The question that Torah often raises is essentially the same: when is it the right time to act?  In Parashat Bo, timing is crucial.  We read about the timing of the Exodus (it is to happen at ‘midnight’ – the middle of the night – quite deliberately); the month of Aviv [now known as Nisan] is to be the first of the months, thus establishing the Jewish calendar and the timing of all the holy days; Pesach is to be celebrated every year in perpetuity in the middle of the first month; the mitzvah regarding tefillin is mentioned, and with it the Exodus from slavery to freedom that we are bidden to remember every single day of our lives.  According to Parashat Bo, timing is everything.

The timing of Australia Day has often been questioned.  Should it be linked to the white settlement of this country, as is currently done, or to some other event that draws us together?  The Aboriginal community understand Australia Day quite differently from the rest of the Australian people.  It has been suggested that we link our national day of celebration to the Gallipoli campaign; at least there were some Aboriginal people associated with Gallipoli, though it has been pointed out that the event is still connected with invasion – this time, the invasion of Ottoman Turkey by other countries.

Australia Day falls on 26 January.  27 January is also a special day, a special time.  It is the day declared by the United Nations about a decade and a half ago to for International Remembrance of the Holocaust.  The date is associated with the liberation of Auschwitz.  When the UN declared this day, it was quickly adopted in Britain as a significant commemoration.   Little happens in Britain in January, and timing is everything.  Every year the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations makes a major speech on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  Here in Australia, the timing is more problematic.  The UN’s Holocaust Remembrance Day follows immediately upon Australia Day, and the powers that be (I wonder who decides such things?) felt, no doubt correctly, that it wouldn’t work to follow a day of celebration with a sombre day of memorial. 

So much for the timing of Holocaust Remembrance Day itself.  But the meaning of such a day is something else; it is timeless, worthy to be remembered every day.  We should reflect on the meaning of the Holocaust every day of our lives, even as we should reflect on the Exodus from slavery to freedom every day of our lives.  We should remember the Shoah daily not for morbid reasons but as a spur to action; as a response to the question, When is it the right time to act? 

How long should we wait when faced with injustice, with overt threats to human dignity and human life, before we decide to act?  Many ordinary, unremarkable people waited too long during the Shoah before they decided to act, and so millions of lives were destroyed.  Many have also waited during genocides subsequent to the Shoah, and as a result millions of lives have been needlessly destroyed.  Rwanda is a prime example.  Rwanda has become a symbol in the post-Holocaust era of the failure to act when the time is right.

The great Canadian jurist and human rights activist Irwin Cottler, a vocal defender of Israel and an upholder of Holocaust remembrance, who has visited Australia in the past, does not limit his interests to ‘Jewish concerns’.  Cottler recently published an article on the genocides in the Sudan.  You will recall that several months ago the people in South Sudan voted in a democratic plebiscite to create an independent state.  It probably won’t come as a shock to you that this democratic vote for South Sudan has re-ignited genocidal activity by the Sudanese government forces.  There is a real risk that whole peoples in the region will be destroyed: the Nuba People in South Kordofan (I am embarrassed to admit that I’ve no idea at all what or where South Korofan is), the Dinka Ngok from Abyei (an oil-rich area – no surprise there), and other peoples in the Blue Nile region.  A UN investigative body called these government instigated actions “ethnic cleansing” – another post-Shoah, Bosnian-originated catch phrase.  Using ‘Rwanda’ as a modern symbol for genocide, Cottler remarks,

Despite protestations, remembrances and various declarations of resolve, Rwanda continues to stand as a grim reminder of the degree to which inaction and merely standing by can be as immoral as the unreasonable and illegitimate exercise of military power.  In Sudan, Darfur marked the failure of President Bush during his “Rwanda moment”; and now the border regions of Sudan appear to be marking the failure of president Obama during his own “Rwanda moment.”

Cottler goes in in his article to identify ten imperatives which, in his view, would contribute to stopping genocide in the Sudan.  All of these initiatives relate to intervention on the international stage.  But even we – you and I – can play our part.  In the first place, we can change things by educating ourselves about the ‘Rwanda moments’ in which justice and human dignity are threatened in these far-off places.  Simply to find them on a map, to visualise the lives of the people caught up in the atrocities, to listen to news reports and watch media videos on the region, - these things are a start.  As well as educating ourselves, we can compel ourselves to care about what is happening half a world away without turning our backs, desensitising ourselves to human misery and becoming cold and distant to these people who are suffering.  Out of our learning and caring may emerge other possibilities, including opportunities for practical action: writing government officials and MPs, supporting the work of NGOs and care agencies that play active roles on the ground in these places, publicly linking our own historical experiences as Jews with the experiences of the victims of genocide around the world (as the late Ron Castan did in explaining his work with Aboriginal people some decades ago), giving these people a voice from a far-away world and with that voice “a hope and a future” (to quote Jeremiah).

And when is the right time to do these things?  This is how Irwin Cottler concludes his article:

Simply put, we have already witnessed one genocide in Sudan in which the world did not act and are now watching multiple genocides unfold yet still turn our backs.  More time wasted means more lives lost – the time for action is now.

According to Cottler, timing is everything, and the right time to act is now.  But there should be no surprise in this.  After all, Cottler is a committed Jew, and he probably knows well the chain of tradition that goes back 2000 years to the sage Hillel, who famously said, “If I am not for myself, who is for me?  If I am only for myself, what am I?  And if not now, when?” [Avot 1.14]