Piecing Us Together

 acrylic on canvas

20” X 20”

2023

Oct 27, 2023

There’s a Jewish idea, that we have two coins in each pocket. On one, it says that “The whole world was created for me”, that every person is a universe, that we were meant to exist and be in this miraculous, unbelievable, unexplainable place called Earth at this exact moment in history. In the other pocket, is the verse that “I am but dust and ashes”. 

And both are true. Both are true, at the same time. We are nothing, and we are everything. We are incredibly powerful, we are incredibly insignificant. 

I feel like most of my psychological problems come from getting the balance wrong. Putting pressure on myself to be more powerful or “important” than I am. Or not seeing the greatness of what I am already doing and being. 

I often, most of the time, feel like Teyve in Fiddler on the Roof, when he’s observing two of his fellow neighbors arguing. He hears the argument of one and says, “He’s right”, then he hears the argument of the other and says “He’s right”. And then another person responds, “They can’t both be right” to which Teyve admits, “You’re also right!”

I am a listener, I try to be. I try to watch people and hear what they say, what they don’t say, and who they are. And I do give my own thoughts, what I’ve dug up from this life as well, of course, at times. Especially in places like my newsletter. 

With the war going on in Israel and Gaza, it’s brought up so much for me. 

The thing with chronic health issues is that you deal with a lot of avoidance. Your brain is trying to understand why your body is responding a certain way, so it tells you- It’s gluten. Or- it’s exercise. Or -it’s this chemical . And so you avoid that certain thing. But then the pain keeps coming, in a different way, for a different reason. So then you add on more things to avoid. Your brain is always scanning and trying to protect you. 

So part of the work I do is reassuring myself when I get scared, and building up strength to not avoid. After my dance class, I started telling myself, “See brain and body, you can handle this”, and like a baby you coax your brain into slowly slowly feeling safe and believing it can. 

So I generally avoid the news and scary things happening in the world. 

But with this, I can’t anymore. I don’t want to. Not knowing feels worse. It feels like a betrayal, an abandonment of my friends and family in the Middle East. It feels like a betrayal of my being a Jew.

I barely even know all the gruesome details about the attacks on Oct 7. I don’t want to go on social media and hear people’s random opinions spouted off. I don’t want to see the visuals and have them imprinted in my brain. But I also want to know and I want to understand, at least understand more. 

I stumbled across a podcast with people talking about their experiences living in Israel during this time, and this felt right. 

The slowness of the information, the way that people were just offering their experiences with the heaviness and the care and the thought in their voices. And then I found another podcast with people talking about what’s going on with people in Gaza on the ground. Not a news broadcast or a war analyst or any of that. Just people. Talking about their lives and their fears and what they see around them. And why this moment feels different than other moments, and how they understand and create the narrative of their lives. 

Not so that I can take this information and proclaim “This is what it is!”  to the world. Or so that I can even tell myself what I believe. I don’t know if I will ever stop walking around in a haze of confusion of not knowing how to congeal many different narratives into one ultimate truth. I really don’t know. I don’t think that is my role, really. I kind of think I will always be that person that’s like “Wait, what the hell is going on? Are we actually people with little brains and pulsating bodies walking around and talking? To what end?” and “You’re right, and he’s right, and they’re also right…” 

So I’m not putting on myself the weight of saving the world or educating the world or knowing what the next right step is. I am listening to the voices of good people who want to make the world a better place, who also cannot save the world or put the weight of that on themselves,  listening to their experiences . I wish I could take away pain and solve crises and understand everything, but for now, all I will do is listen to people tell their stories. And tell the stories I know from my own body and life.

That’s all I can do. And that humility is healthy for me. Step by step. It’s allowing me slowly, to stop avoiding that pile of dead Jewish bodies and to look. To hear the stories. It allows me to listen to the fear of Jews and Muslims in America, who are being harassed and profiled, without having my body jerk into “No, don’t tell me, I want to pretend it isn’t true because I don’t want to feel fear.”

I don’t want to feel fear. And I’m finding out how to exist with realities and hear people’s fear while also reminding my body that I am safe, safe, safe. Our brains can do that, I do believe.

I wish I could be more powerful than I am. But sometimes I am just a person in this world, walking down the street. And maybe I can find some safety in that as well. 

What I did get from multiple podcasts, listening to people grapple with feeling helpless, was that it helps to be helping. 

There was a story a man gave of meeting a woman in Israel who was raising money for the poor. After he talked with her for a while, he found out that she is actually a mother of a child who has been kidnapped, being held hostage in Gaza. And she found that being out on the streets, raising money for others, was a way to get herself out of her own misery and fear. 

So that’s another thing I’m thinking about. What does it look like for me to be helping right now, outside of my own misery and fear?

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November 9, 2023

As Mr. Rogers famously said, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

I’m looking to the helpers. I’m looking to the many, many, many good people in the world who are listening and caring and have been doing and cultivating for years a better world. 

I’m rethinking, remembering, reimagining, reunderstanding who I am looking to, who I identify with, who inspires me. 

I’m rethinking what it means for me to be a Zionist. 

The events of October 7th, or as Jews have started calling it, Shabbat Shachor the Black Sabbath, shook me and so many Jews down to our core. Seized my bones and whirled me around. My brain struggled and continues to struggle to piece together what happened, how it fits into the narrative of being a Jew in the past and the present, and it feels, very much, like we are living history, that this is something that will be lodged into the consciousness of our people from now until, well, the end, I suppose. And we do not know the end of the story, what happens next, so each day is walking through that unknown, terrifying, hopeful history. 

I’m rethinking what Israel means to me. 

When I went to Israel, when I was 12, and 19, and 20, and 21, and 22, and when I spent a year a half there when I was 25, pregnant and having my first baby there, I felt something very strong. Something different. Something that stirred some deep, heartstrings joy. Not just in the history of the streets I walked, but in the culture around me. The way Israelis talked with each other, argued, loved, helped. Cared. Something that was missing, something I needed to bring back with me. Something I needed to carve into my heart and never forget. 

And when we moved to Brooklyn, part of our vow was that we would bring the energy of Israel with us. What it had taught us. 

But you know how culture is. It envelops you and you forget that there was anything different. You get stuck and your brain starts just trying to survive, keep up. So we spent so many years in Brooklyn and we got so enveloped in the culture of Hasidic Brooklyn, and then when we left that, all I could remember when we moved to sunny Long Beach was that I wanted to bring some of the beauty of Hasidic Brooklyn with me. So that’s what we got busy doing. Setting up informal, noisy, spiritual gatherings. Healing and integrating. 

And I knew something was missing. But I was giving it time. 

But then, Shabbat Shachor, the Black Sabbath. 

The shaking. 

This past weekend, I went on a five day conference, first with a Jewish intentional communities org Hakhel, and then with z3, a conference onthe Diaspora/Israel relationship, I started hearing from a bunch of Israelis, straight from the Land. Israelis who didn’t have time or desire to put on the cloak of American professionalism and just spoke from the heart. Spoke in a way that cut through and reminded me. Reminded me of a song buried deep in my heart, a lesson I was supposed to carry with me, that I completely forgot. 

I’m thinking about what it means again, why Jews would want to have their own land in the first place. And I’m not going the path of “so they won’t kill us”. That is not it. That cannot be the core, the substance, the reason. I’m thinking about the desire for so many Jews to build a just society in their own way, rethinking what it means to reimagine society in a way that destroys hierarchies and promotes what was the core of the kibbutz movement, of figuring out a way for humans to live together and thrive, better. I’m thinking about how this is the heart of so many Jewish dreams, this great, human experiment.

At the conference, I was reminded of all of this while listening to the thoughtful and firm peace activist Prof. Yuli Tamir, the former Israeli Minister of Education and now President of Beit Berl College.

As she was talking about how horrified she was by memos she was getting from the school telling her to treat Arab students in a harsher way right now during the current conflict, how she refused, how she will always treat all students as her students, what her community is doing to support and support, I started to remember. 

As I listed to Saul Singer talk about how the dynamics of Israel’s much more collectivist-focused society, how they lean on each other and love each, I started to remember. 

What has been eye-opening for me in the years since Brooklyn, is also my deeper learning about racism and colonialism and all of the ways in which the history and narrative we have been taught might not be the greater, deeper, painful reality after all. Might not be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, at all. 

When I did the NewGround Muslim-Jewish fellowship last year, and read a book from the Palestinian perspective of what happened in the years of 1917 to the present day, I was taken aback. I was taken aback that I had never heard any legitimate Palestinian perspective, taken very little if any Israeli guilt or responsibility. Seen why the way things are set up is simply not feasible. Seen how unfair power dynamics came into play, in what ways, from what sources, and from what external countries. I had siloed myself into a certain communal conversation, and did not take the time or emotional energy to learn otherwise. 

We cannot afford to tell history in such a simple way. It is not fair to anyone. It will never bring peace or safety. 

Just as hearing the simplified, unfair, retelling of history of Israel’s existence is unbearable for so many of us right now and always, so too, is it for others, for their history. 

So I sit now, in a place, with many feelings. I sit in the place of believing in the legitimacy of a Jewish dream, to fashion a society in their particular way, in the hopes of doing it better, and I also sit knowing that we cannot ignore the great injustices that have happened and continue to happen. We cannot survive with a simplified history. We can hold more than that. We must. 

I sit with the hope deep in my heart that things will be okay, because I am connecting myself to all the people who are inspiring me, who have been committed for years and generations, to listening and loving and working so, so hard, to cultivate a better soil.

I want to share a recent list from a Jewish and Israel educator Jared Goldfarb of things people are doing on the ground, many based in Israel, and also his recommendations for news sources.

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As he said: 

Here’s a list of the organizations and movements I am recommending to all my students and colleagues who would like to support the communities in Israel/Palestine by investing in our shared future.  I would encourage people to check out the links, read the mission statements and understand their activities, and then choose how to get involved with the specific initiative that speaks to their heart.  I can confidently say that these are the people who will eventually lead our communities beyond the conflict and bring peace to Israel/Palestine:

Arava Institute for Environmental Studies (https://arava.org/)

A Land for All (https://www.alandforall.org/english/?d=ltr)

EcoPeace Middle East (https://ecopeaceme.org/)

Givat Haviva (https://www.givathaviva.org/)

Interfaith Encounter Association (https://interfaith-encounter.org/en/)

Ir Amim (https://www.ir-amim.org.il/en)

Jerusalem Intercultural Center (https://jicc.org.il/)

Rabbis for Human Rights (https://www.rhr.org.il/eng?lang=en)

Rossing Center for Education & Dialogue (https://rossingcenter.org/)

Sikkuy (https://www.sikkuy-aufoq.org.il/en/)

Standing Together (https://www.standing-together.org/en)

Tag Me'ir (https://www.tag-meir.org.il/en/)

As he also shared, Here are a few media resources that, at a minimum, attempt to provide truthful, transparent and intelligent reporting onIsrael/Palestine:

Times of Israel (https://www.timesofisrael.com/) (primarily a Jewish-Israeli perspective)

+972 Magazine (https://www.972mag.com/) (joint Palestinian-Israeli

 media source)

Al-Monitor (https://www.al-monitor.com/) (primarily an Arab-Middle Eastern perspective)

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There is hope. There are so many good people, on the ground, doing the work. Not in the inane social media world spouting off their opinions. But on the ground. I’m tuning into them. I’m remembering. 

I’m remembering what it feels like to live in a place in which the care for others and the joy of life is felt more palpably than the desire to sound smart. I’m remembering what it feels like to open my heart and let the poetic rant of another come tumbling in. I’m remembering what it means to laugh and shrug even when there are so, so many reasons to cry. 

I’m reminded of a lesson by the great Rav Yosef Solovietchik, on the words gevurah and chesed, strictness and compassion. He compared gevurah to the feeling that we don’t have enough, whereas chesed is the feeling that we have enough to share. It is a feeling, he says, not a concrete reality. He gave a story of a man in a Holocaust concentration camp, who was starving but shared his last piece of bread that day with another in need. 

We may live our lives feeling like we never have enough, regardless of the quantity. Not enough time, not enough safety, not enough money. Or we can live always feeling like we will be okay, that we have what  to share with others.

I must choose to live from the heart. 

I’m praying for the Israeli hostages and all those on the front lines. I’m praying for the innocent lives in Gaza. 

And I’m looking to the helpers and the voices of wisdom to lead me through this dark, hopeful time. 

I’m trying to remember what it means to be a Jew, and trying to drink in daily in the wisdom offered by those living in that Jewish land.