On Pride - 6/16/2024

Today marks the 253rd day since October 7th. According to Al - Jazeera, close to 38,000 people have been killed, including 15,000 children, more than 90,000 people have been injured and over 10,000 are missing in the West Bank and Gaza. I pray that the injured get the care they need, that the missing are found, and the memories of the martyrs live on and are a blessing to those who knew them.

Last night, I cried at the pride parade. I was watching it from a little ways back while doing community defense for an alternative pride event. I was quite cynical about the parade and found that all I wanted to do was scream, which I did do a little as politicians, many of whom are at least partially responsible for the on going genocide in Palestine, walked by. 

After some politicians, and banks and health insurance companies, all of whom profit off of the suffering of queer and trans people, were a number of different groups who maintained the spirit of protest in Pride. There was a group of people led by PSL who had Palestine flags and marched with signs that tied queer liberation to Palestinian liberation. Following them,  was a group of people who marched through the streets in the same kinds of outlandish outfits and make up that we imagine are at a pride parade. But unlike the typical display, they bore stoic expressions. They each carried a picture of a trans person who was murdered in the past year.

I could not help myself, but I started to cry and one of my fellow organizers turned to me and offered a hug. As we were hugging I said to them: I hate living in a world where people are killed just for being trans. I hate living in a world where people are killed for being Palestinian. I hate living in a world that is so cruel and treats lives as expendable.

We live in a country and in a world where the systems of power are upheld through violence. Where we kill those who are different and stand in opposition to hegemonic ideas of who should hold power. This is true in a country where queer and trans lives are sacrificed so that neo-nazis can win elections, and in a country who uses tax dollars to maintain a Zionist regime that wants unilateral control of land that isn’t theirs.

 I keep coming back to these questions: how can people be so cruel? How do we live in society with people who either cheer on this violence, or are able to ignore it? How are so many people comfortable living in what feels like a death cult? How do we navigate the day to day and find the pockets of joy when so much evil happens around us?

I have no answers to these questions and it feels futile to find text to help me grapple with these big and heady questions because what the Talmud presents as antidotes to violence feels overly simplistic. 

There are many stories throughout the vast catalog of Jewish wisdom that seem to suggest that we can fast and pray our way out of cruelty and out of bloodshed. But it isn't that easy. If it were, we would have done it already. We know that no amount of piety or yelling to some god will stop humanity’s penchant for violence. In fact, no amount of yelling at the people directly responsible for this bloodshed seems to make an impact either.

In talmud Shabbat, we read the following teachings from Rabbis Yoxanan and Yonatan who were said to have lived between 180 and 279 CE: Anyone who had the capability to effectively protest the sinful conduct of the members of his household and did not protest, he himself is apprehended for the sins of the members of his household and is punished. If he is in a position to protest the sinful conduct of the people of his town, and he fails to do so, he is apprehended for the sins of the people of his town. If he is in the position to protest the sinful conduct of the whole word, and he fails to do so, he is apprehended for the sins of the whole world. 

It feels daunting. In today’s world, it only takes a matter of seconds to get a live stream of global injustice, from the US-Mexico border, to Palestine, to the Congo and Sudan and Yemen, and the list goes on. Is it fair or even realistic that 2,000 years later we are told to take on responsibility for the sins of the world? It feels egotistical to think that this is possible at an individual or even communal scale.

The idea that we are responsible for the sins of the whole world feels like a really unfair burden to place on all of us, and at the same time, I do wonder what would happen if we as a society thought of our actions in this way. What if we all decided to take on this responsibility for speaking out against the injustices committed against everyone? Afterall, we know that the murder of queer and trans people in the US and globally is deeply connected to the war machine and imperialist regimes that hold up Zionism. Protest feels too small of an act when the scale of systematized violence globally is just so big and the capacity for individual harm is not something I can understand.

It seems that in times like these, when the breadth of iniquity feels like too much, the only thing we can do is cry, be present with one another. This is not something that any one of us can solve or even carry alone. I am grateful that this group exists and comes together to hold loss and grief.