This is a volume to savour. To read slowly and deliberately, over several Shabbats, or on winter evenings. Read carefully, for I cannot not think there will ever be a better or more satisfying secular Jewish writer.
Recovering the sacred command to love the stranger by Simon Eder As Joe Moran has argued recently in an article in the Guardian “Covid has shone an unforgiving light on our already strained relationship with strangers1”. Surveys indicate a decline in social trust and intensified feeling of enmity towards outsiders. George Floyd’s line played out before the world spoke in so many ways to our troubled age and for all of us when he said; “I can’t breathe!” As post-lockdown life resumes and etiquette towards others needs to be relearned we are more wary as we eye passers-by with suspicion and question what were the basics of human interaction – how should we stand? Is hand-shaking now over? In fact relations with strangers have changed significantly as the sociologist Norbert Elias contends since the rise of the nation state. In pre-modern times strangers were much more likely to eat together at long communal tables, share a bed for reasons of space rather than sex and even urinate and defecate in front of each other. All this is a far cry from the token ways that we have come to acknowledge strangers in our modern world with the kind of benign indifference that led sociologist Erving Goffman to coin the term “civil inattention” referring to our fleeting looks and tiny nods of the head as we pass others. So much of our contemporary life is even faceless altogether as apps,
1
Joe Moran, The Lost Art of Living With Strangers, The Guardian Review, Saturday 10th July
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