Legacies of War & Peace

This is the sermon I’ve been actively avoiding since I started here. Before I started here. I was candidating and one question that came up repeatedly was where I stood on Israel/Palestine. I’d been in ministry a good long time and no one had ever asked me that question but it came up several times that week. I could tell there was a lot of energy around the topic, so I had a plan. Here’s my plan. Avoid the question as long as I can.

But, here I am, entirely unable to avoid it, having been told too many times by both sides that my silence is complicity.

I’m starting with my own story because who I am has everything to do with what I think about this and every issue. We cannot separate our personal narratives from our belief systems since much of what we believe has to do with the cultural worlds we were born into.

I was born into a Jewish family. As you might remember, my mother is Jewish, although my father came from an Italian Catholic background. Both had long ago rejected religion, which means that my experience of religion was entirely cultural.

Part of that experience was Passover. That holiday was central to my upbringing. Every spring my mother, father, sister and I went to my Uncle Joe’s house. Uncle Joe was my grandmother’s brother. At Uncle Joe’s house were people from three or four generations, mine being the youngest, with as many as 30 people packed into his little Long Island home. My father would bring some Italian Kosher-for-Passover wine which everyone loved and made him indispensable, even as he found this tradition a little mind-numbing.

I, on the other hand, did not. Aside from Christmas, this was my favorite holiday. It was the only time I would see our cousin Gilda who was mesmerizing in her brash, bleach-blonde wig and loud, shrill voice that seemed to fill every tiny room, and Chaim, her husband, who sat nearly still the whole night making small talk so dull I couldn’t help but stare. There were endless what-we-did-on-our-vacation slide shows and the joyful moment of opening the door for Elijiah when some fresh air could finally be let in the overcrowded living room where we’d gather around a single table snaked through the room, cobbled together with bridge tables and folding chairs.

The seating plan was prearranged so people could spend time with those they saw less often. A few times, I was placed next to the cousins with numbers tattooed to the inside of their arms. They showed me the tattoos, told me about concentration camps, talked about the trauma of starving, of being taken from the people you love, of being entirely powerless and victimized by strangers who think the world is better without you or your parents or spouse or children.

Regardless of how young we were, we heard the stories of rape. Of being dragged from our homes. Of watching our babies killed, randomly, by state-sponsored thugs. Of losing everything until the only thing left is the decision to keep breathing, a choice made only to ensure that evil didn’t win. We stayed alive in defiance.

I switched to “we” there. I always do when I tell these stories. Most Jews do. “When they came for us.” “What they did to us.” It’s how the stories were told. I sat every year to hear my family, my people, tell the stories of what happened “to us”. It happened when we were slaves in Egypt, it happened over and over again around the world in ghettos and pogroms in ancient and

medieval and then modern times, and it happened again when we didn’t expect it, in 20th century Europe. It happened in Egypt, and we’re here to tell the story- that’s what Passover is. The telling of the story of our people from slavery to liberation. And it happened again. It started in Germany, it spread through Europe. Nazis had power in the US, too. 30,000 of them gathered in Madison Square Garden with a huge picture of George Washington flanked by swastikas.

We told the story. We told the story of our suffering, enslavement, victimization, the story of genocide. And when every Seder anywhere in the world ends, we all call out, “Next year in Jerusalem!”

Every year. Millions of Jews enact this same ritual. We tell the story, reminding ourselves and passing it to the next generation. We tell of our people, and we talk about resistance. We won’t let them do it to us again. We won’t take our eye off the ball again. We won’t be lulled into complacency again. We will protect ourselves, and take care of each other, at all costs. Never Again. Never Again.

This is generational trauma and it’s intentional. It’s what we do to stay safe. Most Jews I know have some basic information almost unconsciously in their minds at all times. I know I do, and mine wasn’t anything close to a religious household. But, I know where to run when they come for me. I know to have both cash and jewelry ready, in case. And, when I hear my Jewish friends right now saying, “I know who will hide me,” I’m sure that sounds hyperbolic to some people, but that’s exactly the kind of information we were all raised to track, even when it wasn’t ever said explicitly. How will you get out? Who will hide you if you can’t leave? Next year in Jerusalem.

Israel is where we will be safe. It’s where we went when we escaped from Egypt and where we ran when we couldn’t stay in Europe any more. It’s the one place on this otherwise inhospitable planet where Jewish people can gather together, protect each other, the one place from which we won’t have to run. Every citizen a soldier. Every Jew a citizen. Ours, then and now.

I know this story deep in my bones, and I know this story was triggered for every Jew all over the world when Hamas, swearing the end of Israel, massacred people, tore into their homes, separated people from their children, kidnapped and continues to hold people very young and very old, threatening not to stop until Israel is eradicated. I could feel all those stories come alive in me, and I knew what to do because they are coming for us, again. Gather with my people. Fight Fight Fight. Never Again. Next year in Jerusalem.

But Hamas isn’t the Nazi party. And we aren’t replaying stories from ancient or Medieval or even modern history. And this story isn’t nearly as simple as those of the past.

When Israel was gifted to the Jews in response to the trauma of the Nazi genocide, there were people there. Palestinians lived there. In our trauma, we couldn’t see that we were taking on the role of the oppressor. Because we were so frightened, because we were so desperate, because we wanted to claim our power in whatever way we could, we dismissed the possibility that anyone else might claim rights to the land we so frantically needed.

Jews were pushed to the outskirts of European society, made into 2nd class citizens, and ultimately denied basic human rights, including the right to life. Israelis then did the same thing to the Palestinians. Both native and European Israelis moved in and occupied Palestine, even though there was already an ancient people on that land.

Amnesty International has declared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to be an oppressive and discriminatory system of government, committing the crime of apartheid. There are arbitrary restrictions on freedom of movement including 175 permanent checkpoints in the West Bank designed to disrupt everyday life, checkpoints that have been the direct cause of human death when people can’t get through in time to seek medical care. Israelis also engage deliberate acts of collective punishment, administrative detentions, random acts of violence, denial of the right to work, and if that isn’t bad enough, they also withhold water, force evictions of entire neighborhoods, and according to the UN, there are many meaningful accusations of torture of Palestinian citizens. Last October, Israel started denying married couples in the West Bank with passports from different countries the right to live together, an act meant to destabilize families. Israeli forces have demolished entire villages, creating a constant sense of impermanence, ensuring no one ever feels safe, guaranteeing intentionally that people are not secure and will not thrive. For instance, a year ago August, Israel launched an offensive on the Gaza Strip that destroyed 1,700 Palestinian homes, displacing all those people. 49 were killed including 8 children.

And this kind of thing has been going on since 1948. Yet, what we’re seeing now is even worse. As I wrote this sermon, an alert came in that Israeli solders had surrounded a hospital, not the first to collapse under the weight of Israeli violence. This morning, that hospital has been abandoned, as have all the people inside who will not survive without care.

There are two sides to this conflict, and each side sees themselves as victims in a fight for their survival. In some way, I was raised to know who my people are, and to protect them with everything I have.

But it’s because of how I was raised, it’s because of the stories of Kristallnacht, of occupied Austria, of concentration camps, that I know the pain of being Palestinian. Never Again means Never Again. Not to us. Not to them.

The Jewish stand can’t just be one of self-protection, but of universal protection of the human right to life for all people. Freedom of movement, of housing, to marry, to raise children, to health care, to food and water for All.

I’m finally answering the question posed to me almost five years ago. Where do I stand? I stand with the people. I stand with the suffering, with the powerless. I stand on the side of distraught children whose parents were killed and grief-stricken parents who watched their children die. I stand on the side of the sick, the hungry, the elderly trying to find safe harbor when tanks are rolling down their streets.

I know it’s not that simple. Hamas has vowed the end of Israel and antisemitism is skyrocketing around the globe. Hundreds of people are still captive. Victims abound. Everybody’s right. And everybody’s wrong.

We need a third way. We need to step out of the binary us vs. them and instead think about what new can be created, what can we birth, what alternative idea, amalgam of solutions can we design? How can we put love at the center? Is there room even to ask that question?

Part of that love is the listening. Acknowledge the deep wells of pain, the anger, the fear of being erased from both sides. Too many of us can hear only our own, so that the response to this sermon is likely to be about “them”. What “they” did. Yes, what you are saying, what you are going to say to me, is true.

And none of that makes the continuation of violence, the leveling of city streets, the bombing of neighborhoods, the kidnapping of children, or massacres of anyone anywhere any more justified.

The only way forward is for Israeli troops to cease fire and for Hamas to return those they are holding captive. Israel has to withdraw and let people back to their homes. They have to allow humanitarian aid in and the US has to fund it. There is no peace without justice, but there is no justice without peace.

What happens next in the Middle East is for other people, but what happens next here is for us. Let’s learn to hold each other’s stories. Rather than responding with “what about” let’s respond in love. When a story is told in anger, we respond in love. When a story is told in fear, we respond in love. When a story is told in self-righteous indignation, in direct confrontation and accusation, let’s respond in love.

There is so much pain, histories of pain, generations of pain, ongoing, constant, regularly triggered pain, wounds open never allowed to heal. Let’s become the balm of peace, the soothing, comforting people who can hold that pain for each other. Rather than feeding into the divisions, let’s hold people together. See them and understand their fear and anger to be real.

It won’t be enough, but it’s what we have. Where spirits have been torn and shredded, where hope is struggling to stay alive, we can share our vision of freedom for all centered in love, holding the generations of trauma but not perpetuating them, ending the pain with our commitment to love, doing all we can in every one of our relationships to say Never Again. Not to you, not to anyone. Not ever.