On Winter - 12/8/2024

Hello everyone and thank you for joining me for today’s community kaddish. It has been 427 days since the start of the genocide in Gaza. This week, we saw more videos of tents being burned, this time in Beit Lahia, and with Biden’s final days in office, he has promised to send even more weapons to the Zionist Entity. Instead of ending the violence, Biden is doubling down on a genocidal legacy.

This last week has felt like winter. We have two very small snowfalls which made me both incredibly giddy and incredibly sad. Every time it snows, I have the exact same thought: I love the snow, and there are people sleeping outside who have nowhere to go. I get to enjoy the snow, or a brisk walk in the cold and know that warmth is around the corner. I have never had to worry about finding a place to stay and that is not the case for so many people in Rhode Island, in the US and across the globe.

Somewhere between 66-80% of homes in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed and as of late August, 90% of all people in Gaza, somewhere around 2 million people have been displaced and forced to live in makeshift tents that are not suitable for the winter. While the winter in Gaza is certainly more temperate than it is in Rhode Island, temperatures have dropped into the 50s and the rainy season has started. 2 million people have no other option than to live in tents that will flood, and fall apart. 2 million people will be drenched, and have their remaining possessions drenched, and not be able to dry off. 2 million people, who are being needlessly threatened by respiratory illnesses, skin infections, malnutrition, starvation, diarrheal diseases, because of the false genocidal ideology that their death will make Jews safer. 

Jews have a religious obligation to house those who do not have it. In Deuteronomy, 15:7-8, the text reads as follows: If, however there is a needy person among you, one of your fellows, in any of your cities in the land that your God is giving you, do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your brother. Rather, you must open your hand and surely pledge to them according to what the lack.” The rabbis then have many discussions of what this means literally, but in all cases, they agree that we as Jews are obligated to give to each person in accordance to what they need. Instead we are living in a different reality.

Jewish Zionists, and the colonial powers that backed them, drove Palestinians out of their homes, and have been doing so for a century. And even before October 7, the Zionist entity limited Palestinians from building on their own land. I remember a conversation with Ala’a Aksareh. He was driving my friend Zane and I to Hebron from Bethlehem. He and Zane had known each other for a while, and so we all were chatting for the hour plus ride, a ride that would have been shorter except that Palestinians are not allowed to drive the direct route because of all of the illegal settlements.

One of the many things that we talked about was housing. Ala’a  pointed to plot after plot that had houses demolished. He also told us about how even though he owned his land, he was not allowed to build an addition to his house. He talked about how settlers violently seized homes of houses that we passed. 

Despite being a “Jewish state” the Zionist entity has never felt the need to maintain basic Jewish values or obligations. Instead of housing a person who needs it, they have systematically and murderously seized or destroyed housing in mass. 

Not that I need to tell any of you this, but Palestine is a magnifying glass for so many intersectional fights for justice. The same political and corporate powers that back encampment raids, and rent increases, luxury housing and paid for the lobbies that criminalized homelessness in the recent supreme court case, are the same ones funding the genocide in Palestine.

I mourn the Palestinian martyrs, just as I mourn the unhoused martyrs who were killed by our government in their inaction and greed.