“Well, we were good together, but we never had that click” my neighbour at The Locker sighs into her Chai Latte. I imagine myself two puzzle shaped humans clicking into one piece. Click. The English Language often lacks onomatopoeias. Not this time. Click clicks perfectly into its meaning.

When Godard died last month I thought that what fascinated me often about his films was the nonchalant indifference with which his characters would slip into their relationships, carrying throughout the films apathetically mismatched, odd and even horrible relationships without much meta thought about why they happen to be their in the first place. Maybe they had that click. Probably not. They just found a person and rolled along with it.

And it is a terrifying social ability to have but also terrifying to lose. In an age in which dating options flicker throughout your phone, why would you linger on someone who does not seem the perfect click? And then again, I sigh in turn into my coffee-fumed mug, I would rather be alone than with any male Godard protagonist. Maybe the death committed monogamy is not necessarily wrong.

'What about the death of God'

And what about the death of God? I think the next day, trying to underline a sentence in my scribbled “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight “Sir Gawan on Godes halves” the line breaks into a caesura. Interesting, I note, God’s behalf halves the line in two.

To do something on behalf of someone sometimes breaks the unity of the self, as it morphs you to fit into your part of that idea, divine or human, makes you into a piece of something. You carry duties towards it, but it also gives you a moral gravity pull outside of yourself. 

Why would you linger on someone who does not seem the perfect fit?

Spirituality today tends to focus once again on the self. What is your birth chart; what do the cards read for you? You become one with something larger. A sensation I rarely feel. Maybe because of an inner apathy, or hopefully because it is a sensation history has taught us can be terribly dangerous.

But when do I feel it? I wonder, I ask my friends and their responses pleasantly vary. When cheering a football match, when playing in a team, when working on a project, when laughing together from a joke.

Groups and belonging

I find my own answer walking the street in Yom Kippur, for the first time in my life seeing cars drive on that day. Growing up in Israel, I knew the sense of belonging to a community brought out the most beautiful in peoples, but also often brought them close to nationalism, violence, racism and a lack of empathy towards the outsiders of their specific group.

I never defined myself through groups in Israel, as I feared becoming blind to the complexities around me, but suddenly looking at a car driving by, my communal identity, lacking the shared space it usually experienced, found a very present weight in me. I started thinking of Forgiveness.

Blocking and Forgiveness

People don’t forgive much in my new home. And maybe it is as sign of the time. Or a sign of the place.  Things are more easily documented in our days, the past is laid out for the digging. And in a culture which admires proper behaviour, the digging is severe. Whilst I do often see why we try and remove public figures who we believe have acted wrong, I started thinking of the local cancel culture that I have been seeing amongst my friends. Blocking people out, out of sight out of mind. It has its justifications, for sure, but must it become too much of a habit?

We cannot actually block people out of life (luckily) but in a world in which our virtual presence seems at least as living and breathing as us, blocking, unfollowing and muting seem to have granted us the illusion of disinfecting life from any interaction that is unpleasant.

And as in relationships and communities, also in friendships loyalty is not bound by law. It is fine to grow apart, and it is fine to draw boundaries. But when we eliminate people and their opinions from our lives we also deprive ourselves from seeing how those contacts might change us and them. How the mind can limber up into new ideas and new perspectives, and as we learn only to hear voices who echo are own, we find ourselves quite lonely.

“We have incurred guilt, we have betrayed, we have stolen, we have spoken falsely,” millions of Jews pray every year on Yom Kippur, listing our sins one by one. And hopefully someone forgives every year.