On Jabalia - 10/20/2024

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our community Kaddish. It has been 379 days since the beginning of Israel’s genocide of Palestine. As some or many of you may know, I normally start each week by counting  how many people have been killed, how many worlds have been ended, by the Zionist Entity’s campaign of terror. Counting has always been an important practice within Judaism and is a ritual unto itself, and it feels important to try to grapple with the enormity of the ongoing genocide.

And at this point, it is impossible to do so. The official count in Gaza has fatalities around 42,500, however, given that the Zionist Entity destroyed all public health institutions months and months ago, we can generally understand that the death toll is likely much higher and is closer to 200 or 300 thousand. There is something truly horrifying about how much we do not know. 

Zooming outside of Gaza, close to 757 people have been killed in the West Bank, and it is estimated that 2,350 people have been killed in Lebanon. Millions have been displaced, and are injured and starving because of the Zionist entity and the US’ endless supply of weapons. 

Numbers will also never be able to capture the scope of the horrors that we are witnessing and will never account for the fact that each person is so much more complicated and immense than a number could carry. These are parents, children, siblings, friends, partners, teachers, students, artists, engineers and more. 

In both Judaism and Islam, there is a concept that is virtually identical. In the Quran, in Surah 5 verse 32, it reads: if anyone saves a life, it shall be as though he had saved the world. This quote is the same as a line in Sanhedrin 37a. I know that the Nakba and the lead up to it, and the ensuing occupation and genocide have never once been about religion. And also, in packaging ethnic cleansing under the guise of Jewish safety, Zionists have created the need for us to demonstrate all the ways in which we are alike. The imagined separations between us only exist for the weaponization of ideology and ethnic cleansing and not because there is validity to it.

In thinking about all of the worlds destroyed, I do not think I am alone when I say that the images from the past week have shocked me, and broken me in ways that were somehow new despitewatching horrors that defy words for 379 days. I am thinking of Shaban al-Dalou, a 19 year old software engineer who showed the world all that the Zionists wrought down on Gaza. The world pictures him not as a young person full of life and career aspirations and hobbies, but on fire, with an IV attached to his arm.

These last weeks, as we have watched the Zionsts campaign make its way to Lebanon, and as the genocide intensifies in Gaza (a clause that feels impossible to say), I feel so powerless and also desperate and have been lost trying to find any way of reckoning with the despair. 

One thing that has been helpful in a way is that the past weeks in the Jewish calendar have been really intense ritualistically and exist to do personal accounting and introspection. It is a time when we literally scream at God and beg to be inscribed in the book of life, in hopes that we get to live on earth for a year longer. 

I was taking a walk with a friend and we were trading stories of our holidays this year, and we came back to how these holidays felt when we were kids. Both of us had the experience of being children and being afraid that we wouldn’t say the right words in the right way and would somehow condemn us and our families to death. 

Now as an adult, I know that it doesn’t matter how you say the words or that you get them right. I know that these words do not have any power in a way. We do not have a God who will come to Earth and end the bloodshed, or stop the genocide. It feels like the words do nothing, but I have never felt more desperate that they do something. I find myself begging: please God, let my actions, let my community’s actions, let the world’s actions and let our prayers do something.

I know that we all wish that we knew what combination of words, or actions would end this genocide. And in trying to find that, we press on with our grief and rage and action. Hoping every day that this will be the last time that we need to protest, to yell, and to act to end this genocide.