The Latest From Rabbi Zach, A Voice To Be Listened To

Entitled: Lessons of Mourning

"Dear Friends,

The violence of the last weeks, the horrors of the Hamas attacks on Israel, and the immediate response of the Israeli army, the siege and annihilation of Gaza, has crushed the hearts of all people whose being is tied up in that place, we are trembling in our bones, it is hard to see, to feel, to eat, sleep, it is difficult to breathe, knowing human beings choose to do this to one another.

I wonder what it would have been like for the Israeli army to pause, after the horrific attacks of October 7th. Had the army stopped, collected the dead in silence, tended to the wounded, the traumatized, those whose beloveds were murdered, in silence, took time to gather the names of the kidnapped, gathered to mourn and attend burials, before sending all of the soldiers to the front. How would that have changed the experience of those horrific events, for Israelis, for Jews, for justice fighters the world over? I imagine the pain, suffering, and brokenness of Israel would have been more clear. I imagine that dwelling in grief and mourning, before violence, might have changed the instincts of first response. The rush to war, covered over the loss, and reminded those trying to make sense of this violence from the outside, why the voice of justice must call the name of Palestine. To lose 1400 Israelis in horrific violence, and then to respond by terrorizing for weeks without end, to kill civilians and children – the very thing which was so horrible and shocking, the very thing you are condemning in your enemy, their brutality – the Israeli army is showing its capacity for unfathomable cruelty, each day that this continues. And by rushing to war, the humanity of Israelis was lost, their mourning, their grief, their horror, is covered over by the willingness of the army to repeat the horrors Israel saw.

We must remind ourselves of the values to which we aspire, what it means to live and walk in goodness, righteousness, compassion. Each day as the image of a human being is desecrated by the history we are witnessing, we must remind ourselves of the values to which we aspire, justice, compassion, truth, mercy, kindness, love, peace. We are mourning all of the dead, no matter the place of their birth, the language of their name, the name by which they refer to G*d, G*d who themselves is a reflection of the humanity to which we aspire. 

In their essay Precarious Life, The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Judith Butler writes about the essential role of grief and mourning in politics. They speak of grief as an experience that reminds us viscerally that we are not each unto ourselves, when a beloved dies something in our own being is lost, we are composed of each other. They ask, “Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability and not endeavoring to seek a resolution for grief through violence? Is there something to be gained in the political domain by maintaining grief as part of the framework within which we think our international ties? If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another? Could the experience of a dislocation of First World safety not condition the insight into the radically inequitable ways that corporeal vulnerability is distributed globally? To foreclose that vulnerability, to banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense of every other human consideration is to eradicate one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearings and find our way …

To grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself. The disorientation of grief – “Who have I become?” or, indeed, “What is left of me?” “What is it in the Other that I have lost?” – posits the “I” in the mode of unknowingness.”

One of the essential mentalities by which this degree of violence is allowed to continue, is the dehumanization of people. We should be especially mindful of rhetoric, true or false, which is used for the sake of dehumanizing people. The Israeli dead are named, as they should be, there are photos of them which accompany the name. The Israeli hostages are named, there are photos of them posted across the cities of the world, these are humanizing efforts, to remind us that behind the number of hostages there are people, individuals, a person with heart, love, fear, stolen from their families, trembling, unsure if they will live or die. But the Palestinian dead are not humanized in the same way. What are their names?  The 5,000 who have been killed in only the first weeks of this annihilation.  Where are their photos? What were the dreams of the prisoners of Gaza, who yearned as all human beings do, for goodness, for peace, for love, for accomplishment, for change?

It was not something immediate, the act of lifting the veil, which uncovered the stories and mythologies of Israel which I had been taught as a young American Jew, an ideology of Zionism, given over to all Jewish children, Israelis, and Jews not living in Israel. In the earliest days of playing concerts with the Epichorus, our singer, Alsarah, said to me at some point, “Zach, I can’t play anymore gigs in synagogues with Israeli flags.” And I wasn’t even aware enough of outside perspectives, to understand how the Israeli flag could be that offensive to another person. The atrocities of the state of Israel, the horrors committed in the war of its founding, and even more importantly, the daily injustices of Palestinian life under occupation, are not explained in Hebrew school, or on birthright trips to Israel. The wall which separates Israel from the West Bank and Israel from Gaza, is accompanied by a wall of stories, which selectively shares the beauties of Israel’s people and their accomplishments, and hides the stories of injustice, which some claim as necessary, to protect Israeli safety.

Israel itself, as evidenced by the protest movements there in the last months, and the Jewish community outside of Israel, is in the midst of a tremendous shift – this is my hope – that enough of us are coming to recognize that you cannot brutalize another people into safety, you cannot insure justice through an occupation wall, you cannot pretend you are living in peace, while your neighbors are living in prison next door. Everyone bound in this story is connected to others who do not see it the same way. And so our choice to be emissaries of compassion and justice, to live those values in the center of our chests when there are onslaughts of pain, and regular opportunities to be bumped off course, our steadfastness is essential to moving more of our human community out of the mindset of tribalism, into the ethos of uncompromising compassion, that reverberates with every human heart that suffers, at all times.

This is a futile “war.” Who really believes Hamas, an ideology can be wiped out?  Their leaders may be killed, their infrastructure may be destroyed. And how long will that last?  One generation?  Two at most?  And how much new hatred will have been sown in those who survive?  And even if you believe that terror must be destroyed – at what cost?  How many innocent Palestinians, mostly children, how many of their deaths are you willing to tolerate?  Children whose humanity you have taken away, by your willingness to make them numbers, acceptable consequences of war?  3,000 children, 5,000 children, 10,000 children?  At what number will you too begin to agree that what we are witnessing is genocide?  

While the Israeli army destroys what was left of the prison of Gaza, and innocent Palestinians there live in unceasing terror, trembling in every moment, waiting for death to come at a bomb from sky, or slowly beneath a crumbled building – politicians are told to be hush hush about the word ceasefire. Give us a few more weeks, give us a few months, the ground assault will be slow, keep the word ceasefire out of the mouths of senators. Are you waiting for a number?  At 20,000 will you be ready for a ceasefire? These are children, not terrorists. Skip the weeks of dehumanizing, they are being killed every night and every day, while we wait. The Israeli dead are dead, the terror of this war that was inflicted on children, the horror Israel saw, they are giving it to countless more. The violence being perpetrated on the people of Gaza is unimaginably cruel, and it is destroying the goodness of the Jewish people, it is a horrific stain on our tradition, and the teachings of our ancestors, the moral demand of kindness to the stranger, the knowing that every single human being, in an incarnation of G*d.

To be a human being is to hold a soul, something boundless, in a fragile bounded vessel, a body of blood and skin, easily fragmented. And the body grabs at the soul, stamps it with markers, squeezes it into boxes with labels, and says this is what you are, you are a Jew, these are your people, these are the teachings of your ancestors. But the soul is wider than any vessel that could contain it. At the hour of birth is was separated from a great pool of souls, all the souls of all the beings of all the world – and in that pool of soul there was no distinction between tribe, or people, or birthright, or language, there was only love, substance of togetherness, whose ethic knows that we are all responsible for one another. I don’t think we should fight the soul shattering its vessel – we are being shown, the container of love was too small, I’m breaking you open into a new being, new heart, new vessel, new way for souls to reside in human form.

The ethos of tribalism has reigned for all of human history until now. Those who have sacrificed all claim to preaching justice say love your neighbor as yourself, but not during the hour of war, not people outside the tribe. Has our moral compass not grown at all in ten thousand years?  There must be a new way. We will not watch as human beings do this to one another, and claim this is the only way. Ceasefire, stop killing, and begin speaking. Negotiate the return of the hostage. Begin speaking of a political solution that ends the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and lays the groundwork for a free Palestinian state beside the state of Israel. There is a constituency of souls yearning for justice, yearning for peace, for all people. A constituency of souls who recognize the humanity of every child, who see in their eyes the possibility of what we can become, if we allow love and her emissaries, an ethic of the soul, to become the material of our boundedness to one another."

Rabbi Zach Fredman

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