On Duality - 12/15/2024

Hello everyone, thank you for joining me today for our community kaddish. The IOF has been perpetuating genocide in Palestine for the past 435 and it looks like there is no sign of slowing down. With more shipment of weapons heading toward the Zionist Entity, it seems certain that no amount of international condemnation will stop the US’s genocidal participation. This week has been another of massacres across Gaza. Bombings in Syria

Like many of you, being alive feels like a constant exercise in handling duality. We wash dishes while Palestinians are dying of thirst. We prepare holiday feasts while Palestinians are experiencing famine. We take walks or go on runs while Palestinians are either trapped in Gaza, or have to carefully navigate blockades and road closures and do not experience anything close to freedom of movement. 

In fact, I was talking about this yesterday, while a friend and I were on a run and she asked me if she could talk about something heavy. She asked me if I felt guilty for experiencing joy over the past 435 days. I told her that while Palestine is never far from my mind, that I also felt that joy was necessary. We recounted videos and stories showing Palestinians resisting Zionism with joy. I went on to say that imperial forces want us to be miserable, isolated, and forget that there is more to a person than their suffering. The duality of joy and pain is actually the point. We are actually required to hold both as we dream what other worlds can exist. 

So yes, there are moments where I do feel guilty and remember just how much privilege I have as a white American. I can go for a run and not worry about American bombs, or getting gunned down by a cop. I own a house at a time when most houses in Gaza have been destroyed and we have record homelessness in the US. I have access to food, clothing, a car, and a network of care. The should not be luxuries and empire has made them scarce in Palestine and elsewhere on earth. However, there is still an obligation to experience joy and to help others find it as well. 

Rabbi Nachman of Breslov lived in the late 18th century in the Russian Empire and was the founder of the Hasidic movement. He was known to teach in parables and folk tales. In his famous parable about simhah (joy), Rebbe Nachman of Breslav dissected the assumption that we need to push aside suffering in order to find joy. He writes this:

Sometimes, people are happy and dance, they grab someone standing outside the circle who is depressed and gloomy. Against his will they bring him into the circle of dancers; against his will, they force him to be happy along with them. It is the same with happiness. When a person is happy, gloom and suffering stand aside.  Yet, it is greater to gather courage to actually pursue gloom, and to introduce it into the joy. Rabbi Nachman goes on to explain how this introduction is holy. 

We learn from this that we cannot have joy and sorrow as separate isolated feelings. The two of them do exist and have to exist together and it is in fact courageous to have the two feelings meet each other and stand together. And this makes sense, even as people who are not being impacted as directly by the ongoing genocide. While there is a great amount of responsibility that we all have to have to witness the horror that is the ongoing genocide in Gaza and all of the consequences of American backed militarism, we also have to find the thing that keeps us going. The thing that helps us stay in community and fight for a better future. 

I have been known to be cynical and feel that joy is superfluous to movement work and to ending, but it isn't. We actually have to live in the duality of joy and suffering - this is much harder to do than to just exist in one or the other. In this fight for Palestine, in this fight for the liberation of all peoples everywhere, I pray that we all can find the ways to hold the tremendous loss and grief and horror with at least a touch of joy.