Do you remember how you were as a child, when you only believed good things about the world, and you thought everyone was trustworthy and kind, and you felt you could achieve anything with the power of imagination? Come back to that. Just for a while. Come back to that.
Before the cynicism of adolescence set in and you realised your parents didn’t know everything and you started to question life’s meaning. Come back to that.
You can’t go all the way back. Years of experience have softened some pretensions and hardened some edges.
But try to reclaim a little bit of that optimism and wonder. The person who believed those things lives somewhere inside you still.
You don’t have to come back all the way. You don’t have to believe everything.
You don’t have to believe that God is perfect and created the world and will bring about the Messianic age any day now and will reunite us all with our loved ones.
You don’t have to have perfect faith. I don’t. I doubt many sincere people do.
But you have to hold onto some faith. You have to believe in something. You have to have hope, no matter how fragile it is.
Today is Shabbat Shuvah: the sabbath of return.
It calls on the words of our haftarah, Hosea, where the prophet beseeches us: “come back, O Israel, to the Eternal One your God.”
Return to the faith you once knew.
You have abandoned your self-confidence, says Hosea. You have accepted defeat by Samaria. Assyria will not save you, nor will its gods.
The prophet calls out: “You could blossom like a lily and be beautiful like an olive tree. You can live again.”
Reviving belief is a challenge. We have all suffered our defeats, personal and communal. They have embittered us with cynicism.
Shabbat Shuva is a calling back to faith. It is an invitation to try and remember what it was like to dream.
That is not easy. Some people had life’s harsh realities thrust upon them too young, and had to grapple with injustice too soon.
Primo Levi was such a man.
He was a Jewish chemist in Italy.
When I was a teenager and full of the arrogance that I’d got the world figured out, my dad gave me one of Levi’s books, The Periodic Table. Outside of religious literature, I think that is the only book I’ve finished reading and immediately restarted.
The Periodic Table tells of Levi’s story, through the prism of different elements.
From the noble gases of his Italian-Jewish heritage to the hard, grey metal of Vanadium in his old age, Levi talks us through his experiences of fascism in Italy, which began when he was an infant.
Italy was the first country to adopt fascism. Mussolini came to power on a platform of nationalism, tradition, corporatism, and dictatorial control. His slogan was “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”
In Primo Levi’s teenage years, the Italian fascists introduced their racial laws, directed primarily against Italian Jews and Africans. The Africans were placed in colonial concentration camps. The Jews were initially stripped of citizenship and assets, banned from the professions.
At the time, Levi was training as a chemist in a laboratory. His Christian classmates were civil, but withdrew from him, and regarded him with suspicion, and he became a loner. He took solace in chemistry, hoping that its solid truths could puncture fascist lies.
To survive the racial laws, Levi said, he needed to take advantage of his youth and turn a willing blindness to everything happening around him. He needed to imagine that the world was still fine, as he imagined it ought to be. In that naivety, he did not even realise he could actively resist fascism.
When he and his comrades decided to fight the fascists, they turned to the Bible. He saw in his own struggle the struggles the prophets had waged against empires. But he also looked up to the sky and felt that it was empty. God would not save them. They would have to save themselves.
Perhaps this is what it means to have just enough faith. Not so much that you blindly invest your hopes in a God who rescues, but enough that you can draw inspiration from others, past and present. Enough faith to believe that your cause is just and that fascism can, ultimately, be defeated.
Levi knew he had to get angry, and act. He filled his heart, more with desperation than hope, and took up arms.
In the snowy mountains, he fought as a partisan, and was captured by the fascists.
How did he survive the camps? Levi took pride that he went into the camps as an atheist and never wavered in his disbelief. But he refused to succumb to pessimism. He never allowed himself to become disheartened completely. He would not let the fascists take from him his hope.
Who could blame Primo Levi for not having ultimate faith in God’s redemption? But he had just enough faith. Just enough to stay alive and keep fighting and, afterwards, to testify to the truth.
You do not have to believe everything. But you must believe something.
You must come back to hoping, even if only slightly.
I think you already know why I am telling you this.
Precisely one hundred years after Mussolini marched on Rome, the fascists have returned to power in Italy.
In the days before the election result came through, an Italian friend of many years texted me, to say how scared he was. It looked like the far right’s victory was already assured before the polls.
When the results came, they were worse than expected. Giorgia Meloni, and her far right party, the Brothers of Italy, had trounced all other parties at the ballot box, and would not even need Berlusconi’s support to form a government.
In her election address, she promised to give back Italian national identity that had been stolen by “international financiers.” She said she would bring back the family, which had been eroded by LGBT people.
She immediately pledged to replace the post-war constitution, which had enshrined democracy and minority rights.
I do not want to be alarmist, but I am also unable to blindfold myself to experience. There was a generation who could wait and see how fascism would pan out in Europe. We do not have the pleasure of such naivety.
We have to be sober. We cannot allow ourselves to be blindfolded to what is happening.
But we cannot ever allow that to become despair.
Hosea does not just implore the Israelites to return, but promises that God will come back too.
The Holy One promises: “I will heal them. I will cause them to return to Me in love. I will turn away from My anger.”
If you take a small step towards hope, hope will step towards you too. Hope will carry you.
On this Shabbat Shuva, however much faith you have, try to have a little more.
Remember faith. Come back to hoping, even if only slightly.
Shabbat shalom.
Sim Lev 