The Empty Chair

There is a bench overlooking the sea that bears a simple instruction: Please, no empty chairs.

I have always liked memorial benches. Perhaps it is the rabbi in me. I read the little plaques and I wonder about the lives behind them. A name, a date, a line of poetry, a private joke. Tiny fragments of a story that mattered…

This week I found myself thinking about that bench and its instruction. Not because I was reflecting on grief or memory, but because I was angry and perhaps a little sad.

There are moments when something happens and you discover that what you thought was solid ground was less solid than you imagined. Relationships that felt reciprocal turn out to be more conditional. Friendships that seemed robust prove surprisingly fragile. Years spent building trust, making introductions, creating opportunities, showing up when things were difficult and staying in relationship across disagreement suddenly appear to count for less than somebody else’s title, somebody else’s status or somebody else’s claim to authority.

Adrienne Rich wrote that “when someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into the mirror and saw nothing.”

Rich understood that power is rarely exercised only through decisions. Power shapes narratives. It determines who gets described as authoritative and who gets described as troublesome, who is representative and who is divisive, whose presence is regarded as essential and whose absence can be accommodated without too much difficulty. One of the oldest tricks in public life is to mistake familiarity for legitimacy. A voice becomes authoritative because it has been treated as authoritative so many times before. Eventually nobody remembers who granted the authority in the first place.

I think what I am wrestling with is the difference between authority and contribution. We often assume they are the same thing. They are not. Some people spend years contributing to communal life and are treated as though their place remains conditional. Others acquire a kind of unquestioned legitimacy that seems detached from what they have actually done. The danger comes when communities stop making their own judgements and begin outsourcing them to whoever already possesses the loudest voice, the grandest title or the greatest symbolic power.

Perhaps women recognise this dynamic more quickly because we have lived alongside it for so long. Most women learn early that contribution and recognition are not always measured by the same scale. We learn that relationships are not necessarily reciprocal. We learn that a man’s status often enters the room before he does, that authority is frequently assumed rather than earned and that the same qualities which make a man influential, can make a woman difficult.

What unsettles me is not the behaviour of powerful people. Power has always sought to preserve itself. History offers very few surprises on that front. What unsettles me is how readily others adapt themselves around it. How often people who speak eloquently about inclusion, partnership and dialogue decide that these principles are less important than keeping somebody influential happy.

The most painful moments are rarely acts of open hostility. They arrive dressed as pragmatism. They are accompanied by shrugs and apologies and explanations about circumstances. Nobody says that one voice matters more than another. Nobody needs to. The outcome communicates the message perfectly well.

There is a passage in the Book of Samuel that I have always loved. David cannot attend the New Moon feast because Saul’s hostility towards him has become impossible to ignore. Jonathan tells him: “Tomorrow is the New Moon feast. You will be missed, because your seat will be empty.”

What moves me about that verse is not David but Jonathan.

Jonathan is the son of the king. He understands exactly where power resides. Remaining silent would be easier. Accommodating himself to the prevailing reality would be safer. Yet he refuses to participate in the fiction that David’s absence does not matter. He notices. He says something. He acknowledges that a room is changed by who is not in it as much as by who is.

The older I get, the less interested I become in the people who remove chairs from the table. Every generation produces them. Perhaps that is why I keep returning to the image of the empty chair. Not because it represents exclusion, but rather raises a different question altogether.

Where are the Jonathans?

Where are the people willing to risk a little discomfort, a little access, a little approval in order to say that somebody belongs in the room? Where are the people prepared to challenge a version of reality that diminishes another person’s contribution? Where are the people who understand that relationships are tested not when they are easy but when they become costly?

The empty chair is never really the story. The story is what everyone else decides to do when they notice it.

(I should note that I am ever grateful to those in my life for all the Jonathans, at home - my partner, father and son - and at work - my Co-Lead, Chair to name a few… and particularly this week to Rabbi Charles Middleburgh who made a point of noticing. Thank you)