Still Breathing

It used to be simple. Either that or I was woefully ill-informed and naive.  The good guys and the bad guys were clearly defined and stayed in their own corners. Now I’m overwhelmed by the flood of events and the chaotic feelings that have followed. Last week I was speechless with shock and despair. All I could do was witness the killing in Israel and try to breathe through it. But nothing stays the same and even though the horror of what has happened and continues to unfold is forever, my experience of it changes from moment to moment. Please know that I am aware that this isn’t about me. Still in the face of the catastrophe in Israel and Gaza, the young people slaughtered at the music festival, the patients in the hospital bombing, I can only consider events through the filter of my own experience. I am Jewish and I was not brought up on Zionism and my family was secular and coming of age in New York everyone I knew was Jewish so we didn’t feel self-protective and didn’t make all that much of it. We assumed it. Being Jewish was the cozy norm. We never talked about the Holocaust. We never talked about the war of independence in 1948 and we certainly never talked about the Nakba. 

Today the FBI is on the alert for possible hate crimes against Jews and Muslims. I don’t remember ever reading that sentence before. We are all vulnerable. One minute, people in my bloodline are the victims, the next minute we are the perpetrators. It’s dizzying and deeply painful. I remember a time when people wondered why the Jews didn’t defend themselves when the Nazis came after them. On the other hand, a post appeared on my Facebook feed this morning that said “they only feel sorry for us until we fight back.” Notice the “us/we” and the “they,” the toxic Othering. Who are the “they” referenced in this post? Antisemites? Non-Jews in general? Me because I mourn for the starving in Gaza as well as for the Israeli dead? What is to be done?

Photo by Sage Friedman on Unsplash

I have carried a very deep, very heavy, sense of helplessness. But in the last day or two, I feel in my blood, in my gut, the surfacing of a belief that is foundational for me. And this is what I want to say as a woman, as an American, as a Jew. We’ve only got one world, one global organism that lives in all of us. Its structure and meaning are engraved on us. In the language of scripture we say human beings are made b’tzelem elohim, in the image of God. My devotion as a human being is to further peace and wellbeing in that world as best I can. All responses to events arise from that insight. So just as the wildfire smoke earlier this year travelled everywhere without respecting political boundaries, so the toxicity of hatred and violence and retribution has a life of its own and enters the collective bloodstream much like covid. If I do nothing else in my remaining time, I must resist contributing to global violence in my speech, in my way of thinking. I must try to look at all the world with compassion and I must accept the reality that I won’t always succeed. I don’t know how to solve the problems on the ground. I only know how to refuse to make them worse by furthering bloodlust. 

We are made in God’s image and the tradition imagines that God has seventy faces. No one of us can encompass the sacred in all its forms, but each of us reflects a face and together we create the many-faceted jewel that is all of life. The jewel will not shine without all of its facets, all of its human responses. Here in this country, so central to all of what’s happening, every voice must be heard. The voices of the descendants of Holocaust survivors, the voices of people with family members in the Israeli military, the voices of Palestinian-Americans. The worst thing we can do is to shut each other down, refuse to listen to each other. The worst thing we can do is to shrink the bandwidth of acceptable responses. Today, as we confront the catastrophe of the Hamas attacks on Israel and the retaliatory siege of Gaza, the face of hurt is necessary. The face of fear is necessary and yes, the face of rage is necessary. But in the midst of this ocean of anguish, let’s please keep an eye out for the face of peace-visioning. It may be the most necessary of all.

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. This month, Many Voices will feature an essay by woman’s empowerment and intimacy coach, ordained inter-spiritual minister, counselor, and educator, Mary Campbell. Beginning in October, all subscribers will be able to read Many Voices posts. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething, have access to the archives, and become a contributor to Many Voices. Your ideas are always welcome.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.

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