Wrestling with God - 2/4/2024

Hello everyone, thank you for coming to our first gathering to say Kaddish for all of those who have been killed in the on-going genocide in Gaza. For the past 120 days, we have watched as the Israeli military have committed atrocities far beyond comprehension.  We are here together as Jews and non-Jews because we cannot carry this grief alone. 

So today, we will work to carry this grief together. I will provide some grounding to this space and this ritual. I will then pass it to Ilana who will do a reading, and we will close out by saying Kaddish together. 

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with this prayer, the Mourners Kaddish is an Aramaic prayer that was originally written 2,000 years ago. It is always said in groups of 10 or more because rabbis understood that we should never have to hold grief alone.  

Though this prayer pre-dates Zionism you will notice at the end of the prayer, that the word “yisrael” is invoked. Traditionally, this word literally means “he who wrestles with god” and has been used as another name for the Jewish people. I can say that right now, I am in fact wrestling with god as I think many of us are. 

I find it impossible to imagine that there is a god who would ever support the genocide in Haza, the destruction of a society, the desecration of places of holy worship, the pollution of the land. Throughout my Jewish education, I was taught about tikkun olam (repairing the world). I was taught that to save a life is to save the world. And I was taught that we have to be stewards to the land that we live on and protect the environment. 

I have always felt so proud to call myself Jewish, yet as I watch the Israeli government, and military and settlers using Jewish themes to justify atrocity after atrocity, I just want to scream about how little any of these people understand Judaism, its rituals, its teachings and its philosophies. So though it feels that adonai, el rahoom v’chanoon, our compassionate and gracious god is missing, we cannot lose hope in God being found.

A number of years ago, I read an essay called “From God to Godliness” by Rabbi Irving Shulwies written in 1975. In this essay, Shulwies dives into the theology and grammer of prayer.  He explains how most Jewish prayer places God as the subject. We pray for god to give us rain, to give us the strength that we need to reach each day, for the food that we eat, and the roofs we still have over our heads. 

Shulweis wonders, what if we treated God as the predicate, what if we were the subject of our prayers? In plain language, Schulweiss asks: What if we acted in the ways that we ascribe to God? What if we were the ones to act in kindness and compassion, what if we were the ones to take the attributes we ascribe to whatever God we worship and act out those values and deeds in our day to day life. When I cannot find God, in times like these where God feels absent, when I cannot understand the sheer levels of atrocity going on in Palestine, or around the world, my way of wrestling with God is to try thinking of God as the predicate.

In gathering to say Kaddish together, we can think of ourselves in this way as relating to God as a predicate, instead of a subject. We are here in sadness, and in mourning and in grief and in rage, much like the version of God that appears in the Torah. 

We all are gathering to reify our commitments to fighting for Palestine, to end the oppression of occupied people. We are gathering in mourning because every life is sacred and deserves to be mourned. We are gathering because we cannot hold the weight of genocide alone. We are gathering because we as Jews say never again to us or to anyone else. And these are all values and actions that are attributed to God throughout Jewish text. 

We can, and must, think of God as the predicate. Even if you do not believe in God, which I have never been sure of myself, I still think there is value in drawing on the idea of God as a predicate and figuring out how we can bring in the values that we ascribe to God in our everyday life. 

ILANA SPEAKS

SAY KADDISH

Before we disperse, I wanted to plug a few events going on in Providence today and this week in solidarity with Palestine.

• First, is at 2 pm right in the Innovation Park, PSL is hosting a noise rally
• Starting on Friday the 2nd and going through Friday the 9th, 19 Brown University Students are on a hunger strike for the univerity meet three demands: 1) President Christine Psxson and Chancellor Sam Mencoff put divestment on the Corporations meeting calendar for this Friday when they meet. 2)the administration permit representatives from Brown Divest Coalition to present the case for divestment to the Corporation, 3) the University must commit to hold a formal vote on this resolution as a full body of the corporation for divestment

•  There is programming from 9:30-7 at the campus center throughout. Today, there will be a concert at 3 called “Odes to Palestine”, and a film screening at 6 of a film called Foragers. Please go to the Brown Divest Coalition’s instagram page to keep up with their events 
• Additionally Jews for Ceasefire now will be holding open office hours to discuss Palestine on campus, you can also find that at jewsforceasefirenow on instagram

Any other announcements of events?