On the Capacity for Change - 5/19/2024

Hello and thank you for joining us today as we grieve all of those who have been killed over the past 225 days in Israel’s unrelenting genocide in Palestine. We are here to mourn the close to 36,000 people who have been killed in the West Bank and Gaza. Each of these people is more than a number, and has a name and a community. As we say in Judaism, may their memories be a blessing.

Last week, I spent my time wondering out loud how people can have such capacity for violence and evil and I still have no answers to this question. I cannot fathom how people wake up every day with the mission of inflicting horrors on Palestine (or Sudan, Congo or Haiti for that matter). And while I have been ruminating on this question, and deeply burdened by it, I have also been continuously amazed by people, their ability for good and their ability to change and grow.

Just yesterday, I joined a group of anti-war Veterans and others for a two mile walk or 0.3% of the Peace Walk, a pilgrimage run by Veterans for Peace where people are walking from Maine to Washington DC. I had a few conversations that I have been chewing on and feel nourished by. I was talking with one of the through-walkers.  As we were walking, I asked him when he joined Veterans for Peace. He told me that he joined on September 12, 2001. He realized that the attacks of the day before were going to be used to justify invading Iraq - a senseless war that destroyed the country and killed thousands. He has since been on countless peace walks, immersed himself in Buddhism and has taken on ending militarism as his life’s work. 

I spoke with someone else who decided to join the two mile walk just the day before. He drove past the weekly anti-war demonstrations happening at the Capitol on his way out of work for the past few months and did not pay them much attention. This week, as he was getting ready to drive home, he turned his car around and decided to stop and talk to them. He joined the Friday night Peace Walk event as well as the walk yesterday morning. He explained that something in him clicked and he found that he wanted to take action. 

These are just two instances, but point to something more universal.People are constantly changing. This is not something that an individual does in isolation, but does so through the strength of a community. And as people of conscience, we must take on the communal responsibility of helping people turn toward peace. 

In Judaism, we talk alot about teshuvah. Though this word is understood to mean repentance,but  it actually means to return. Implicit in this idea is that people are good, people have elements of the divine in them and always have an ability to turn back toward their capacity for good. Each year, Jews observe a season of repentance and return every late-Summer/early fall, but really tishuvah is not time bound. As part of tishuvah, we look inward to find the ways ways in which we have turned away from the divine and make amends for it. Though there is certainly an individual component to this, there is also a communal responsibility. Let me explain.

In the Torah, we read a chapter called Mishpatim or laws. In this torah portion, we get the laws on everything from homicide, to assault, to damage of crops, and corrupt lending practices. In the end, the people at Mount Sinai make a pledge to follow these laws with the words na’aseh - vnishma which translates to “we will do and we will understand” which means that the people at Sinai promise to first observe the laws, and then take the time to understand them thus codifying the priority to act over the priority to study. In commentary, a 19th century rabbi, Rabbi Yosef Dov Slovoveitchik writes the following:

Each person should have said “I will do and I will understand”, but instead they answered in the plural, “we will do and we will listen” because each person accepted two obligations - first, that each individual would themselves keep the commandments, and the second that each person will help their fellows keep the commandments.

From Slovochiechik, we learn that the process of following the laws is a communal responsibility and we can extrapolate further that the process of teshuvah - of returning to ourselves and our community after breaking the laws also has to be something that is communal.  

I very much agree that it takes a community to hold and maintain values and actions of goodness. When faced with the sheer horrors of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, it can be really impossible to want to act right and do things out of a place of good. While rage is important, and we should all be feeling rage, we also need to channel that, and any other intense feeling that we are holding into the liberatory fight for a free Palestine and liberation for all. There is a duty on us to act morally in this work even when we don’t want to. And one thing that keeps me accountable to acting from a sense of morality is the fact that I stand side-by-side with people of strong consciousness and resilience. 

One of the many things to draw strength from and one of the things that I try to hold when sitting in despair is the fact that people engaged in the work of protest and action want to build a better world.. We take action because somewhere, we believe that things can change, and that we can all play a part in ending the occupation and ongoing genocide in Gaza. We take action because we believe the world can somehow return to a better state. And within that, we have to understand the role that we can each play in getting the people in our lives to return to their own goodness. 

So in addition to mourning, right now, I am praying for change. Maybe this is naive or overly optimistic, but also necessary. I am praying  that our decision makers abandon the weapons companies that pay for their reelections. I pray that members of the IOF pull an about face and abandon the genocidal conquest. I pray that the people who believe in Zionist propaganda are able to see through the smoke. I pray that we all have the strength to guide the people in our lives to change, to understand why we stand for Palestinian liberation and to have them join us in this work.