On the Word Martyr - 10/27/2024

Hello everyone and thank you for joining me for today’s community kaddish. Today marks the 386th day of the ongoing genocide in Palestine. And this has been another week in which Zionist violence has gotten even more extreme. I am not really sure how this happens, but everyday the Zionist Entity, fueled and funded by the US, finds new ways of doing something more horrible and more deadly. I always think I have seen the worst thing I can imagine, and then I am proved wrong. I am scared of all the ways that this violence will intensify, and that more and more people will be slaughtered innocently and inhumanely. 

For months, I have found that words have failed me and that I often feel like I cannot actually capture all of the feelings, all of the horrors, and all of the depravity in the languages that I know. Additionally, one of the ways that I feel that language has failed me most is in talking about grief and about the hundreds of thousands of people killed by the Zionist entity. How do you talk about all of these people who are so much more than a name or a statistic, people who existed in relationship to others, who were centers of their own worlds. Is there a way that we can even capture this in language? And without a way to talk about all of these people, how do we even begin to grieve them properly? 

In talking about the hundreds of thousands killed in the past 386 days (plus the preceding years of Nakba and Occupation), we often default to the word martyr, a word whose meaning is really immense and has different connotations in different languages and cultures. I have spent many months thinking about how English, Hebrew and Arabic treat this word, and I think they have something to say about the context of the word’s use and how the linguistic cultures value or emphasize different aspects of martyrdom. 

Before going into the specifics of the word martyr in English, Hebrew and Arabic, I did find out that all three languages do use the Greek work - martyras - which means witness - as its base.

The Oxford Dictionary defines martyr as: a person who is killed because of their religious or other beliefs. The emphasis of this definition is on the internal workings of the individual. And in thinking about all of those murdered in Palestine, is it true that they are being murdered for their own beliefs? Perhaps. They are being murdered because they exist. They are being killed because Zionists believe that they are entitled to the land from the river to the sea. And in order to accomplish these goals, Zionists are trying to wipe a population out of existence. 

But to go back to the actual language. English places the emphasis of the martyr on the person who was killed and what they believed in, who they were, and what actions they have taken in their lives. At least, in the way that English speakers tend to understand the word, I am not sure if the word “martyr” fully captures all of those killed in the past 76 years and 386 days.

In Hebrew, there are two ways of understanding martyrdom. One is through liturgy, and one is the world itself. During the Yom Kippur service, there is a section of text that in English is called martyrology, but in Hebrew is referred to as “Eleh Ezkerah” which translates to, “these I will remember.” The world martyr is never used. In the text, we read about ten rabbis that were killed for practicing their Judaism. In using the phrase “Eleh Ezkerah” the emphasis is on the person doing the remembering and remembering a person for their allegiance to Judaism. Which does in fact tie into the word that is used for martyr in hebrew - kadosh.

The word may sound familiar to all of you here because it comes from the same root word as Kadesh, the name of the prayer of mourning, and in both cases it means the same thing - holy.  Embodied in this is that the dead are holy and that it is our job to sanctify the dead. According to Jewish custom, someone becomes a kadosh because of an allegiance to God and Torah and being willing to die for it. In some texts, it also emphasizes that one can become a martyr if someones’ deaths are for a redemptive purpose, which can even mean for Zionism. 

So in calling martyrs - kadosh, we are putting the emphasis on a really particular kind of “holiness,” which at least traditionally is really limited to following a particular kind of Judaism and set of beliefs and it's not one I particularly like or am comfortable with. I would like to think that anyone of any or no faith tradition could embody the values of Torah - which are generally pretty universal: justice, kindness, reverence for all life. But, given that no one person gets to change the definition of a word, and that these concepts are thousands of years old, I would be generous for giving kadosh such an expansive definition. It is frustratingly limited and has Jewish supremacy baked into it.

In talking about Palestine, and also Lebanon, Syria and Iran, it also might be inappropriate to use the word martyr in either an English or Hebrew context, when the people using this word are coming from an Arabic and sometimes, but not always, Islamic tradition. The word for martyr is Shahid, and though it also means witness, it has a much larger and encompassing connotation.

The Prophet Mugammad (peace be upon him) said in Quran 22: 58-59:

There are seven kinds of martyrs besides those killed in wars, defending the cause of Allah: A person who is killed in an epidemic, a person who is drowned, a person who has bedsor=es causing fever and cough resulting in their death, a person who dies of stomach disease, a person who dies in fire, a person who dies under falling debris (also understood to be a person who dies in a disaster), and a person who dies in childbirth.”

This is by far the most expansive understanding of the word martyr because one of the things that underscores all of the ways that someone becomes a martyr in Islam is that the person died because of some force, whether natural or manmade, that is bigger than the person. In the case of Palestine, it is the word that most accurately captures at least the circumstances that made a person into a martyr.

Sure - there are absolutely Palestinians and others across the Middle East who have been killed because they are fighting and resisting. There are people who have been killed because they are writers, poets, journalists, and artists - all people who use their talents to share their beliefs, inform the public, and channel ideology and experience into public education and protest. But also, what the English and Hebrew do not capture is the fact that there are so many martyrs, who were just existing. There are thousands and thousands of people who may not have been seeking to make any kind of statement. Many just wanted to live safely and freely, which should not have to be any kind of political or religious statement or ideology. But instead lived under a Zionist occupation and were killed while fleeing the IOF, or getting treatment in a hospital, getting bread or playing outside. 

I still do not think that any word will connect us to the totality of our grief and to the totality of all of the people who Zionism has killed. But I do think that there is a need to think expansively about who it is that we are grieving and how we can do this.