One of my favourite autobiographies is Bruce Springsteen's recent offering where he candidly discusses his struggles with depression and the darkness that threatened to subsume his life throughout his career.
Part of my attraction to rock n roll is the urgency, the primal attempt to express something without restraint. The result is not always clear, but it is damn effective. Those chords hit home. I think people expect me to be a classical music snob who pretends he can talk about wines and whiskeys. But since my first exposure to Dire Straits' debut album in 2005, only one genre has truly captured my heart.
My favourite Springsteen album is probably 'Darkness on the edge of town' because it wonderfully presents the dichotomy between a toiling working life and the satisfaction it can bring, and the fragility that is ever-present, threatening to break it all apart.
You see, despite every success, despite turning points, breakthroughs, realisations that have been had, there's always a certain darkness on the edge of town. A certain edginess, a certain darkness to ourselves and our lives that we dare not ignore. What a wonderful image that evoked.
The thing is, I've become increasingly fascinated by this concept - the evil that resides within society and human beings themselves. Again, Jordan Peterson I salute you.
On Tisha b'av I briefly reflected on the image of Jeremiah engulfed in sorrow and utter confusion upon witnessing the destruction of Jerusalem and his own life.
Contrast after contrast in the text points to a feeling of being thrown out of a comfort zone and not being able to cope. And from this darkness he calls and finds God.
Then I returned to the T.V.
Some people, I reflected, have lived lives where they have seen and lived terrible things and been consumed in darkness - thick, bleak misery. Some deep recess of every human being's experience contains the potential for horrors and terror. Makes you wonder.
The other day, I finished Christopher Browning's Ordinary men about the German police battalion 101, where dull middle class bureaucrats could be transformed into genocidal killers with a combination of factors that are not so exceptional amongst people who were not terribly coerced, nor particularly pathological. The darkest of darkness penetrating western civilisation.
And this is where I return to my usual subject.
The greatest trick the devil ever played was pretending that he didn't exist - Usual Suspects.
Tish'a B'av is generally either used to focus on trying to imagine the temple as a spiritual utopia or the lack of unity within the Jewish people. Or an attempt to evoke sadness with the holocaust followed by a message of hope.
But it, like nearly everything else, it becomes very predictable and usually bypasses what most people might consider to be of any relevance to their inner selves. One day more, finished, return to usual.
One thing that differed for me this year was that image of Jeremiah in a state of utter bleakness. And I wished for a moment that this stark reality of the saddest and hardest elements of life could sometimes be addressed properly by our religious leaders on this day. The madness of it all. Because haven't we all seen it at some place and some time? Doesn't its spirit pervade elements of our society with a frequency that we sometimes don't like to admit?
The thing is, you see, darkness is real. In seemingly sterile, law-abiding societies, large groups of people can gather in mobs and lose inhibitions they would have as individuals. Reckless, chaotic and destructive behaviour is not restricted to the dregs or some blissfully amorphous 'right wing'.
And his heart is laughing, screaming, pounding
The poem across the tracks rebounding
Shadowed by the exit light
His legs take their ascending flight
To seek the breast of darkness and be suckled by the night
Simon and Garfunkel, 'Poem on the Underground Wall'.
Luckily I have met very few individuals capable of mobilising the worst element of human nature. There is still one person, however, whose image haunts me to this day as the embodiment of evil.
And the truth is there are times within myself where I can reflect on a certain darkness to my own character. Or at least a desire to be reckless to break the monotony of daily life.
On the subject of law-abiding societies, welcome to Hendon, my hometown. One of the dullest places on earth, I enjoy telling people.
I don't want to simply slag it off, there is nothing wrong with it. Many of my friends live there. It all works, people all get by there, do well for themselves. But when I return there I feel this huge urge to do something crazy simply to break the shackles. The whole place seems to be structured along a line that encourages absolute, blissful conformity.
'Let's take a ride, and run with the dogs tonight in Suburbia...'
Jews in England (and probably America too) tend to be very suburban. Solid jobs, decent values, general acceptance of authority. Job - finance, law or medicine. Religion - ask the rabbi a question. Holiday - Israel, preferably Netanya. And so it goes for forty years. 'It's where the community lives' 'It's not perfect but it's good for raising kids'. And those who move to Israel tend to go to little Hendon and New York.
But There's a darkness on the edge of town. In private, people do all sorts of things but in public it's a nice obedient face they put on.
And in my experience of conformist societies, the stricter the obedience that is required, the crazier the things that go on behind the scenes.
The Joker is probably my favourite villain of all time because of his sheer nihilism, a desire to destroy for the sake of destruction, mocking attempts to psychoanalyse his state. He destroys for its own sake. And whilst he is obviously an extreme psychopath who luckily is not representative of the population at large, there is a grain of truth there that most of us don't simply want to obey the rules and get by ok.
Challenge, adventure and greatness fall dead beside the tedium of dependable daily life. So we try to break it sometimes, well, just coz.
Reading Crime and Punishment recently, the idea of Napoleon not being Napoleon if he had kept to normal rules is a wonderfully poignant one.
Don't get me wrong, we need boring structures in society, it's what law is all about and I have abandoned my socialist utopian fantasies long ago as delusional nonsense, but one thing I reflect upon when it comes to religion in particular is that it is meant to speak to and activate a deeper part of your being, which aspires and dreams and perhaps is more utopian than mundane existence requires.
And by and large, those individuals who can harness it are a rarity. We need something more.
Discovering Jordan Peterson was something of a religious epiphany for me as it was one of the rare occasions where I began thinking new thoughts and hearing something unexpected.
As we saw recently with Rabbi Dweck, the first toppling of the cart when someone actually spoke to people on a level that cut through the BS, which penetrated the bland doldrums of community life, he was silenced.
And there is this huge gap between the monster inside many of us, be that a creative or dark creature that needs transforming or cultivating, and the life they must lead.
Be sensible, do the right thing, everything will be ok.
But occasionally, a glimpse into the thick darkness of history, or simply the hazy darkness on the edge of town, illuminates the need to go beyond that. And maybe the need to leave the edge of town.
