On the New Year - 1/5/2025

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining me today for our community kaddish, the first of 2025. Today marks the 457th day of the ongoing genocide in Palestine. As it stands now, we still have no idea how many Palestinians have been killed and will not know until the Zionist Entity ends the violence. This week has been one of many new and somehow familiar horrors including the bombing of hospitals, the targeting of journalists, more Israeli violations of the ceasefire in Lebanon, more “peace talks” with disingenuous commitments to end the genocide, and a new US arms package. The death toll stands somewhere between 46,000 and 300,000. It is impossible for us to be able to understand all of the suffering Palestinians are facing at the hands of the Zionist Entity and for this, I mourn.

We have experienced another rotation around the sun and as with every January, I find myself thinking about what has changed for the better or worse, and what I want to change in the next year. There is a large discordance between my life personally, and the larger, global landscape. At least at the global scale, in many ways, the start of this year feels no different than last year. Tents in Gaza are flooding like they did last winter. The IOF continues their campaign of terror across Gaza and the Occupied West Bank and the US is getting ready to send billions of dollars to the Zionist Entity again. While people are still taking to the streets, demanding that the genocide must end, our politicians globally remain complacent or actively genocidal. All of this feels worse knowing that the Trump administration will surely be more zionist and more violent.

There is something that feels really unnerving in the discrepancy I am experiencing around how things can change personally, versus watching what feels like never-ending, cyclical violence and genocide. It is a discrepancy that I want to figure out how to close in some way.  It feels selfish to be able to celebrate the good that exists in my personal life, and identify ways that I want to personally change while also understanding that we live in a time of great violence that feels intractable. This is true not just in Palestine, but in the Congo, and Sudan where genocides are ongoing. A record number of migrants have died crossing the Mediterranean Sea. There is record homelessness in Rhode Island and across the country. All of these are violences that I cannot change personally, as much as I might try.

Despite belonging to a religion that has a strong emphasis on collective responsibility, I am of the mind right now that we are failing at collective responsibility. And by this “we” I mean people living under governments that are supporting genocide, or those of us living safely while others are not. Yes, many of us are involved in work or organizing projects that have positive impacts on those around us. I know many of us do mutual aid work, unions, or anti-imperialist organizing, but all of that has limits. I am not saying this to punch down on the things that we have undertaken, because what we are doing matters. Any time that we can make someone’s life just a little better, and fill in for what the state should be doing is good and powerful. But in thinking about how we can make more collective resolutions, I want to pose this question: how do we expand our reach? How do we get the full collective to care? How can we take a fuller, collective responsibility?

I was on a long drive with a friend over the weekend and we spent considerable time talking about this question. My friend was talking about a tendency that some or many of us have engaged in: we hear someone say something problematic, and immediately jump down their throats, yell at them for saying something bad, and castegate them for their words and actions. Our response will surely harden their position. I know that I wouldn;t be amenable to changing my mind in those conditions. Cancel culture and blame do not bring new allies into community and action.

What if we approached these conversations with curiosity and patience rather than defense and anger? What if instead of talking in social-justice jargon, we reframed global struggle in plain language. For example, instead of using the term climate change, you can relate to someone about how they have seen the weather change over the past 10 or 20 years. You can talk about how crops are dying, or how the trees in your neighborhood are diseased. You find the thing that that other person cares about and join them in their anger and provide them with space to ask questions. 

In terms of Palestine, you absolutely can and should talk about the mass suffering and violence that Palestinians have endured since 1948, but you can also talk about outsized military spending at the cost of things like affordable housing, roads, and schools. You can talk about thousands of children who have been killed, or who are now orphans and how this is being done with US supplied bombs. Find the value you both share, and connect it to why we need to fight for Palestinian liberation.

While I have not done the best at talking with my family about the wrongs of Zionism, I was able to make really substantial in-roads with my sister-in-law when I allowed her to ask questions and focused on what most mattered to her: she is a parent of two young kids, a pharmacist, and is scared about right-wing extremism and anti-Semitis. So, I talked about the differences between anti-semitism and anti-zionism, the fact that I was safe in Palestine as a Jewish person. As a parent, she must also understand how horrible it would be to 1. Give birth in Gaza right now, 2. Fear losing her kids to a bomb, 3. Not be able to guarantee them any sort of safety. We talked about the healthcare system and how children could not even get access to polio vaccines because healthcare centers were bombed as vaccine campaigns were deployed.

While it feels cathartic to scream, and while I want to pick people up by their shirts and yell and shake them, extolling all of the ways in which they are wrong, this will never work if we want to end Zionism and the Zionist Entity. Collective responsibility and collective change are the only ways that we get through the next years and the only ways that we end the genocide in Palestine.

So for this year, and in this time when people are making all kinds of resolutions about change, my goal is to approach people with curiosity rather than cynicism in hopes that I can bring them into a shared vision of the future. This cannot and will not be where the work stops for me, but it feels important to try. May 2025 be the year of a free Palestine and liberation for all people throughout the world.