Oct. 28th.
Today, and for the past several weeks, I have been feeling the deep waves of grief and despair rippling through my community from Israel/Palestine. I have many loved ones who grew up or currently live in Israel. Because of my Jewish heritage and having so many Israeli beloveds, naturally, the current events are heavily in my field; and the Hamas attacks, notably the largest mass killing of Jewish people since the holocaust, were a harsh blow to my internal and communal landscape. My heart has continued to break as I’ve witnessed a vengeful strike back by the Israeli government, decimating Gaza and leaving Palestinians stranded, with no safe exits and no place to shelter, with access to water and basic resources cut off as they are showered with bombs.
Of course you don’t need to be Jewish, Israeli, Muslim or Palestinian to feel the grief, rage and pain from witnessing such atrocities; you need only be human. Since first learning about the attacks on Oct. 7th, I feel like I’ve been walking around with an open wound. Anytime I have a moment to sense into my heart, images of all the children caught in the crossfires come rushing in and I begin weeping again. I want so much for us to turn towards each other. We need to turn towards each other, now more than ever. And I am acutely aware of the possibility that we may choose instead, to turn away.
These compounding events have transpired so quickly it feels as if there is no time to process or grieve. Many of us are reeling, struggling to keep up with daily reports of horrific violence. Those of us watching from afar are faced with doubts about whether we have any power to impact the situation, and with the choice to continue watching the horrors or to tune out. I understand why many of us stop looking at the news after such a devastating blow; why we fall into numbness or despair.
It’s important to understand that in the aftermath of these events, the fear of persecution and extermination and the reality of antisemitism has been fiercely activated within the collective Jewish body and psyche. Simultaneously, we are watching Netanyahu and his regime rain terror down on Gaza in the name of self defense. It is a painful paradox to hold. I am afraid that in the heaviness and emotional confusion of this moment, we will turn away from Gaza, somehow making Palestinian suffering separate from that of Israelis. I am afraid of how our pain and trauma can be weaponized to justify more killing. I also understand that grief is a titration process. I want to give grace to my loved ones who are overtaken with sadness, anger and fear; who have lost loved ones themselves; who are at capacity and who feel unable to keep engaging.
I do have the capacity to keep engaging. In fact, I feel a deep desire and need for it. I want to cry and sing and pray with my community. And I also want to grapple with concepts and talk it out. This is a critical way that I process collective suffering; it’s how I discern and define my principles and allow my feelings to find shape in action that feels aligned. The process of creating a loving politic is informed by my relationships and by the struggle to bridge the gaps in our mutual understanding. In fact, debate is valued within Jewish practice and culture, an orientation I feel a deep resonance with. Disagreement is considered healthy and argument is often welcomed, not avoided. In rabbinic studies, a chavrusa, roughly translated as ‘friend’ or ‘companion,’ is essentially an intellectual / spiritual debate partner with whom you discuss and contend with in your grappling with the meanings of the Talmud.
What is beautiful to me here is the honoring of debate without this being an inherent threat to our relationships, and the understanding that even in contention there can be collaboration, and that this can bring us closer to truth. I want to wrestle with different perspectives and to parse out what makes sense to me and what doesn’t. And I want communal spaces that feel safe to do so.
Creating safety in this context is about inviting discourse that may bring discomfort, about allowing non violent confrontation, about not policing or shaming anger, and most importantly about doing all this while remaining curious and open to hearing opposing views. It is not about staying comfortable or avoiding getting triggered, as it has come to mean in many circles. This is, unfortunately, difficult to find. In my need to question, discern and define, I’ve been spending time reading and watching on social media to see how others are responding and what resonates (I know, it’s a poor substitute).
For the past several years, I’ve decided not to engage with politics on social media. I was seeing the reactionary, dichotomous thinking that happens online and how social media is ripe for oversimplification and misunderstanding. I felt I wasn’t contributing anything useful by posting about social/political issues. I began to feel disconnected, in an echo chamber of virtue signaling. I decided my energy would be better used elsewhere — such as real life conversations with people in my immediate circles. However this time around I felt that it was more important to share publicly than to stay silent. That’s not a prescriptive statement. This feels true for me, and I have no judgments about whether others choose to share online or not. There are many ways to engage that go unseen, for which social media is not an accurate barometer.
As the brutality in Gaza continues, it’s challenging to make sense of it all and to speak with accuracy and sensitivity. And yet this is urgent. Lives continue to be taken and for those of us who oppose war and inhumanity of any kind, we must take a stand against the complete siege and unprecedented number of bombs that are decimating Palestinian people and homes, just as we must against the slaughter of 1,400 Israeli civilians in a single day. As a Jewish woman and as a US citizen whose taxpayer dollars are helping to bolster Netanyahu’s regime and their war crimes, I feel a responsibility to use my voice and to oppose such acts. Amidst the many narrative spins and barrage of news that must be finely combed for misinformation, I am doing my best.
One of the most troubling things I am seeing is the tendency to collapse people with governments and regimes, such as when we collapse Hamas with Palestinians at large or the Palestinian struggle for liberation, when we collapse the Israeli government with Israelis at large, when we collapse Zionism with all Jewish people, and when we collapse Islamic extremism with all muslims. Regimes don’t represent whole groups of people; religious extremism doesn’t represent whole religions. As a citizen of the US, I don’t support a majority of US politics and policy. Peoples’ politics are vast and varied no matter what their governments represent. I can’t take a side because I don’t believe in sides to begin with.
We also flatten the dynamics at play when we make broad sweeping statements that don’t account for important differences; like when we equate all violence as the same and say both “sides” are equally at fault. Yes, both Hamas and the state of Israel have perpetrated horrific violence. And this violence is situated within a history of European & American colonialism and imperialism bolstering Israeli occupation and apartheid. Netanyahu has seeded racist narratives and is now using those narratives to justify the killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians. Palestinians living in Gaza have been faced with the choice between religious extremists who claim to be fighting for their liberation, or to continue living as second class citizens, subject to displacement and violence. The election of Hamas as a governing body in Gaza is a result of desperation and a lack of choices.
What Hamas did to Israeli civilians was stomach churning. Remarks conflating Hamas’ actions with righteous revolution and celebrating it as a win from liberal US citizens feels ignorant at best, and heartless at worst. I do not see that kind of brutality as revolutionary, especially given that Hamas has done little to support the people of Palestine, and an attack like this, in my mind, would undeniably provoke a retaliation that would cost many Palestinian lives. However, to place all blame on Hamas is equally ignorant. There is a crucial power differential that provides necessary context. Violence has many faces.
Often the perpetrators of violence who have more political and material power enact violence in more insidious and palatable ways. Charred bodies dug up from under the rubble may not look as immediately gruesome. But consider that Israel has now dropped more bombs in less than a month in the concentrated and densely populated confines of Gaza than the US did in one year in Afghanistan, during its height of aggression. Over a third of those killed are children. What will happen when the traumatized children of Gaza who survive this decimation grow older and are given a gun and a choice to use it? What are we creating, and what are we denying, while we sit back and point at their violence and say “Israel would never do that; that is an entirely another form of barbarism.”
And then there is the issue of language. When there are disagreements and relational ruptures over our views and perceptions of the situation, how much of it is an actual difference in values and ideas, and how much of it is semantic misunderstanding? This is an important question to me, because language is powerful. It shapes how we think. Governments and media outlets strategically use language to shape our opinions and to engage or disengage us in specific ways. Large corporations and advertising use language to convince us that we want or need something we previously did not. Sensationalism is used to pit us against each other and stall real action and efforts to come together.
None of us are immune to this. I am human and therefore susceptible to being swayed by language that tugs at my heartstrings; that incites a fervor in me, even while it may not express the fullness of what I want to communicate or the conclusions I will eventually draw given more time to unpack it all. We need to question the language we are using and what it implies; to help each other become more creative and precise; to get closer to what we feel to be true in our speech. And when we miss the mark, we cannot let that become the end of the conversation or our faith in each other; we cannot let semantic mishaps or misunderstandings prevent us from searching for, and finding, our common ground. We also cannot wait to speak or to act until we are all understanding each other perfectly. In the necessary attempts to speak, we must always be searching for the common ground. The common ground being that the killing must stop, now.
One of the sticking points I am noticing is the use of the word “genocide” to describe what is happening in Gaza. I have been told that this word is inaccurate and harmful to Jews, that the holocaust was a genocide, and that this is different. I understand that for many Jews this language is deeply activating. I’m wondering: what is the benefit of calling what we are witnessing a genocide instead of calling it war crimes? Strategically, is this wise? If that word triggers people and makes it more difficult to unify, is it necessary? Is this an issue of semantics or is it actually about recognizing the gravity of the situation in Gaza and calling it what it is? I’m inclined towards the latter but I am really trying to understand other arguments without jumping to self righteousness. I am interested in communication that is effective and that is humanizing to everyone.
It feels important to investigate what this question is churning up. I think the reason it’s so triggering for Jewish people is that it feels like it’s laterally equating Israel’s bombing of Gaza with the holocaust, and in doing so causing some kind of erasure of the violence Jewish people suffered under Nazism. Clearly, these are vastly different situations, both in sheer numbers, in methods and in the severity and centrality of racism and ethnic cleansing. The holocaust was carried out with explicit narratives and intent around ethnic cleansing, whereas Israel’s government is, in the eyes of many, simply reacting out of self defense. Of course, we are coming to understand that far right members of the Israeli government and military are, in fact, openly using the language of genocidal warfare. However, I can understand that using the same word for both of these situations feels confronting, and even insensitive. Whether we call it genocide or not, many of us can agree that war crimes do not justify more war crimes.
But to me, it’s a question worth taking a courageous look at. We are all capable of standing by and allowing extermination to take place, like many people in Europe and abroad did during holocaust, regardless of the numbers or methods. Genocide can and has, historically, looked different and been carried out in different ways. We can acknowledge how the holocaust is very different from what we are now witnessing, and still posit that what we are witnessing is also genocide. Based on the UN’s definition of genocide, what is happening in Gaza does technically qualify. More than the conclusions we eventually draw about which words are most accurate, the question points to one of the core issues here for me.
Over and over, I hear people say something along the lines of “it’s unthinkable; incomprehensible.” And the conversation is left there. And yet here we are; we must try to comprehend it, to hold it in our minds and hearts. I think what feels so impossible to acknowledge about this kind of violence is that it is a part of us, collectively. Each of us has the ability to sever ourselves from our humanity, and we are witnessing the consequences of doing so. I believe this is what is being asked of us: to witness that severing as a very real possibility, not just “over there” or for “them,” but within ourselves. We must be able to remember this; to recognize it when it begins, and to resist its numbing pull.
I am seeing Jewish people marching alongside Muslims in the streets of Washington holding signs that say “Never again, for anyone!” This inspires in me deep gratitude, solidarity and hope. I owe it to my ancestors and to future generations to not repeat this dehumanization. To not numb the part of me that feels pain. Crimes of war and senseless killing on a massive scale are made possible by appealing to our desire for vengeance, or even self preservation. They are made possible by refusing our pain, casting it back onto those who caused it, or anyone we believe to be our enemies. We lose the ability to discern our enemies. We become them.
We need to turn towards each other and build bridges, and we can begin by practicing this in our immediate communities — right here, right now. Our communities are the microcosm that mirrors conflict and resolution on a wider scale, and are the grounds to practice what we wish to see in the wider world. We have the most impact in our immediate communities. There is no future in taking sides, in nationalism, religious fundamentalism or war. The only future that doesn’t breed more hate and destruction is in forging alliances that work towards peace and building resilient communities that are multicultural, multi-ethnic, inter-religious (and there are wonderful organizations who have been working steadfastly towards this future in Israel / Palestine).
So ours must be here in the US and around the world. These events, while utterly heartbreaking, are also a strange opportunity; a crossroads. They reveal to us how we are in the face of crisis, and confront us with questions around how we want to be. They help us become more resilient and they teach us how to come together. We need to reach across the gaps in our mutual understanding, across the pain and the ruptures, and grapple with the most challenging topics, together. We need each other to hold our broken hearts, to face the seemingly unfathomable, to preserve and return to our humanity in the face of its destruction.
