June,2021 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
The first—and undoubtedly most difficult—step in thinking about any political struggle is to remember that every person involved feels pain, feels fear, loves whom and what they love, and longs for safety.
As well, every plant and animal in every place wants to go on living. To start here, before story, before analysis, before blame, seems essential.
Maybe getting to this first step is accomplishment enough for a moment. I made a partial list of the parties to destruction in the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
Israelis
Palestinians
residents of the West Bank
residents of Gaza
settlers
Jewish citizens of Israel
Palestinian citizens of Israel
residents of East Jerusalem
refugees seeking sanctuary in Israel
refugees fleeing Israeli violence
soldiers
militants
children
teachers
doctors
political leaders
vegetable gardens
citrus orchards
birds
bees
house plants
goats
sheep
olive trees
wheat fields
rivers
aquifers
Maybe it’s hard enough to think of each of these beings and to remember that they feel in common with all that feels. Maybe it’s hard enough to imagine the terror that each experiences when facing harm. Maybe it is hard enough to remember that each being has had a life before being under threat.
They have memories, preferences, personalities, relationships. (A stalk of wheat, maybe, but all the rest for sure.)
Maybe it’s too hard to contemplate the beings on this list, and all the others who should be on it as well, without leaping immediately to who is innocent and who is guilty, to who deserves respite and who deserves destruction. I think it is probably important to get to that place of analysis and opinion in order to plan and strategize and form alliances and endeavor to minimize further destruction and to repair what has already been damaged or destroyed.
But before we make this leap, I hope we can stop a moment to just remember that whoever is still alive is still alive, that they are breathing and reacting and feeling and thinking.
As I was making this list, I spent a weirdly long time thinking about house plants. People across all kinds of divisions like to put a plant near them, indoors or out. Even homeless people sometimes keep house plants near their tent or cardboard box. When I think of those apartment buildings that have been demolished in the 11 days previous to my writing these notes, I imagine that inside a lot of them there must have been pots of herbs or spring bulbs. This saddens me very much.
Maybe that’s enough to say here. This is a starting place and not a conclusion. I have much more to say, and many of you must as well. I don’t even know if we need to say everything we think to each other, all our story and analysis and blame. But whether we do or don’t, I believe that it is important that we move in whatever way we move, with regard to Israel and Palestine and any other place of conflict and division, by reckoning that we share existence with all of these beings, and we have things in common. May we formulate our opinions and take our actions from that beginning place. May the world move towards peace.
