Reflections on the Holy Land, part 1.

This past May, I received an unexpected text from a woman who was deeply troubled because she and her daughter were on opposite sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She was pro-Israel, a Veteran and a mental health professional in the military. She was hoping I could offer her a bridge to speak to her daughter…

She wrote:

I want to ask your opinion on this Israel and Palestine issue. I support Israel and am saddened that our youth in college are getting caught up in a protest they don’t even understand. I have watched many historical documentaries, talk shows, podcasts on this issue. My 19-year-old daughter goes to a liberal college in California. She is caught up with the rest of them for Palestine. We had a conversation earlier and I was not able to summarize and articulate my support for Israel. Can you please guide me on a way to talk to her? If you are pro-Palestine and against Israel, then I want to understand why. Thank you for reading this and I hope to hear from you soon.

I replied:

Oh, gosh. This is such a tender and deep issue, and I so very much appreciate your asking me with so much sincerity and openness. 

I will do my best to express what I see, spiritually, as an ethnic Jew whose mother’s maiden name was Zion (which means House of God and the Embodiment of Divine Law) and who was raised, although non-religious, with quite a bit of ethnic pride and identity.

I was told we are the direct descendants of David and Solomon on my Mother’s Father’s side and Rebekah on my Mother’s Mother’s side. So, there is that. And then, on top of this, my Father’s Mother’s people built and led the Polish Underground and were instrumental in defeating Hitler’s regime while my Father’s Father, who was of pure Aryan descent, was an active Nazi sympathizer. Yes, all of that is true. When the Nazi’s invaded Poland, as my father described it, The Front was in his living room.

My feelings about my people’s relationship with the Palestinians run very deep. I understand the political issues, here, as well as the economic and military ones, and for me, the human and spiritual concerns are far more pressing, far more salient, than military, political, and economic agendas. From my perspective, it really is that simple—and that complex. 

As of the date of this writing, approximately 14,000 Palestinian children have been orphaned and approximately 10,000 have lost limbs. The levels of trauma and terror visited on the Palestinian population, moved out of their homes, farms, and fishing communities in 1948 to create Israel in a tragic and heartbreaking way, are already so high that I wonder if such prolonged violence and injustice can possibly breed anything but hate. 

The human spirit can be broken. Sometimes, when it is broken people collapse. At other times, people become so filled with hate and vengeance that violence is perpetuated in even more tragic ways. In a few miraculous circumstances great peacemakers and educators may arise from the rubble. One can only hope. 

And then there is the issue of what Judaism is as a philosophy and way of life—as a culture. Our ethnicity, our cultural identity, our Tanakh, our Torah, says we are not to kill and we are not to take the Lord’s name in vain. Setting aside how much killing we are doing, taking the Lord’s name in vain does not mean I may not exclaim, “Oh, God!” in a heated or emotional moment. It means I refrain, at all costs, from waging wars in the name of sacredness.

‘“Vengeance is mine,” sayeth the Lord’ does not extol us to embody the wrathful face of a vengeful God. It extols us to allow God, rather than people, to mete out Justice—and in God’s way. It extols us to have the faith, strength, courage, patience, and humility required to accept that human beings, all human beings, see things from a relatively limited perspective of time and space—to accept that we cannot see or know everything. 

So, for me, this goes beyond who is right and who is wrong, beyond whether the actions of the Israeli government (and the US and UK governments before that) are justified. It’s about what Zionist actions do, not only to the Palestinians, but to what is left of the moral fabric of the Jewish heart.

My daughter put it very well. She looked at me after studying the history of Zionism and reading about the creation of the Israeli State in 1948, and she looked at me, and said, “Mom, they are still exterminating us. They are not going to stop until there is nothing left of us at all.” 

This is what concerns me. My daughter was being literal. I am speaking of the integrity of the fabric of the collective Jewish heart. Indeed, if we lose ourselves in this way, it will, from my point of view, matter little that our physical bodies have survived. This is what concerns me most. 

Now, why do I say, “What is left of the moral fabric of the Jewish people”? Why do I speak of the living death of the lost? Because the ways in which we have been marginalized and shunned and tortured and imprisoned and socially and culturally and economically targeted for thousands of years have deeply affected us. IMHO, these events have not ultimately strengthened our moral fabric as a people—but weakened it. 

Granted, suffering has strengthened individuals. I am not saying there are no Jews with strong moral character. I am saying we are morally injured—as a  people, as a group with an ethnic identity. And as any VA social worker will confirm, and as you well know, there is a terrible cost to Moral Injury. 

Governments will do what governments feel they must do. 
I have no interest in that. My concern is the condition of the human heart. 

If you want to gain more insight into these ideas about the impact of prolonged marginalization and genocide upon the Jewish people, please read Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”. Frankl was a psychologist imprisoned in the camps who wrote about his experiences. He observed that any people subjected to extraordinary tyranny will tend to split into two groups.
One group will become determined to create a world of so much compassion that tyranny ceases to exist. One group will become determined to become such terrible and terrifying bullies that no one will ever bully them again. 

My people are now split in this way, and our terror and unhealed intergenerational trauma is leading us to visit tyrannies upon the Palestinians that are also splitting the Palestinians. And so, to paraphrase the brilliant spiritual intellectual, Joshua Schrei, in a recent episode of his podcast, The Emerald, the wounded thrash around in agony and, in that thrashing, wound others. 

So, where does it end? 
Governments will do what governments feel they must do. 
I have no interest in that. My concern is the condition of the human heart. 

Our community used to do very vibrant and beautiful peace work in the Holy Land. Since the bombings of 2014 this work has been losing a foothold. Hearts are so raw, so reactive that I would not be surprised if this continues until both Israel and Palestine are bombed out of existence. 

Except, of course, that Israel is significantly better prepared and defended so it is very unlikely Israel can be physically annihilated. This simply isn’t anywhere close to a fair fight. Good for US and UK interests, of course. Not so good for the Palestinians. In my humble opinion, it is the unbalanced nature of the power in the conflict that is the most heartbreaking aspect of what is happening, and it is this unbalanced aspect that has penetrated the hearts of the world and the young people in our universities, inspiring their uprisings.

I cannot not see these uprisings as profoundly good—for the human spirit itself. 

And, at an even deeper and more disturbing level, it is this same unbalanced aspect that is most utterly terrible for the Jews. 

Why do I say this? 

Because, as Pema Chodron has brilliantly observed, when one is the target of oppression and tyranny, one may at least have the chance to find a pathway through, a purification process in which the heart may soften and expand into forgiveness, returning to joy and peace. But when one is the tyrant, when one hardens into that, there is very little hope for softening into anything. 

And so, I am concerned that even if Israel as a State survives this—which, IMHO, it is very likely to do—Israel as a people may be scarred beyond recognition.

Unless enough Jews refuse to participate purely on the grounds that we cannot, in good conscience, visit upon others any versions of the horrors that have been visited upon us, I am deeply concerned that every lost limb of every Palestinian child will become another rupture in the tattered fabric of the Jewish heart. 

Meanwhile, I pray there will come a Day of Awakening when we shake off the chains of conditioning and awaken to the realization that (please forgive me: I am aware you are retired military) war cannot make this world a safer place for our children; that each and every one of us has, within us, the power to choose a world at peace; and that every child in this world belongs to all of us—that we are collectively accountable for the welfare of ALL children.

And, of course, this implies that we are also collectively accountable for protecting the welfare of All Our Relations, for without  the vibrantly fruitful bounty of Creation, our human lives here will cease to exist. 

So, at a human emotional, psychological, and spiritual level, I feel your daughter is instinctively doing a very beautiful, brave, and valuable thing — made all the more brave because the choices she is making are opposed to the choices her own mother would want her to make. 

But you are a brave human being, after all. Your children would hardly be cowards. :)

I hope there will come a day when you feel genuinely proud of your daughter for the stance she is taking in relation to this conflict, a day you will see:

Protesting genocide can simply never be Anti-Semitic.

Insh’Allah, God Willing, it shall be so. 

Amain. Amen. Amin. Ya Hu.

May All Beings Be Well.
May All Beings Be Happy.
Peace. Peace. Peace.

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