Tragedy Older Than Me

In July of 2021, in anticipation of the upcoming High Holy Days I purchased a copy of This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation by Rabbi Alan Lew, published in 2003. I was in fact completely unprepared to even read it. It sat in or on my nightstand for more than three years. I finally started reading it during the high holidays in October of 2024 (a few days before the one year anniversary of the events of October 7, 2023).

When I read the section excerpted here, I had to immediately flip back to check the publication date. 2003. In so many ways the ongoing tragedy today is in the same place it was over 20 years ago. Rabbi Lew died in 2009. We cannot ask him what he thinks of the world today, but in many ways there is no need. Little has changed. So, to emphasize one more time, let's go back to 2003:

I think that the great philosopher George Santayana got it exactly wrong. I think it is precisely those who insist on remembering history who are doomed to repeat it. For a subject with so little substance, for something that is really little more than a set of intellectual interpretations, history can become a formidable trap— a sticky snare from which we may find it impossible to extricate ourselves. I find it impossible to read the texts of Tisha B’Av, with their great themes of exile and return, and their endless sense of longing for the land of Israel, without thinking of the current political tragedy in the Middle East. I write this at a very dark moment in the long and bleak history of that conflict. Who knows what will be happening there when you read this? But I think it’s a safe bet that whenever you do, one thing is unlikely to have changed. There will likely be a tremendous compulsion for historical vindication on both sides. Very often, I think it is precisely the impossible yearning for historical justification that makes resolution of this conflict seem so impossible. The Jews want vindication for the Holocaust, and for the two thousand years of European persecution and ostracism that preceded it; the Jews want the same Europeans who now give them moral lectures to acknowledge that this entire situation would never have come about if not for two thousand years of European bigotry, barbarism, and xenophobia. They want the world to acknowledge that Israel was attacked first, in 1948, in 1967, in 1973, and in each of the recent Intifadas. They want acknowledgment that they only took the lands from which they were attacked during these conflicts, and offered to return them on one and only one condition— the acknowledgment of their right to exist. When Anwar Sadat met that condition, the Sinai Peninsula, with its rich oil fields and burgeoning settlement towns, was returned to him. And they want acknowledgment that there are many in the Palestinian camp who truly wish to destroy them, who have used the language of peace as a ploy to buy time until they have the capacity to liquidate Israel and the Jews once and for all. They want acknowledgment that they have suffered immensely from terrorism, that a people who lost six million innocents scarcely seventy years ago should not have had to endure the murder of its innocent men, women, and children so soon again. And they want acknowledgment that in spite of all this, they stood at Camp David prepared to offer the Palestinians everything they claimed to have wanted— full statehood, a capital in East Jerusalem— and the response of the Palestinians was the second Intifada, a murderous campaign of terror and suicide bombings.

And the Palestinians? They would like the world to acknowledge that they lived in the land now called Israel for centuries, that they planted olive trees, shepherded flocks, and raised families there for hundreds of years; they would like the world to acknowledge that when they look up from their blue-roofed villages, their trees and their flowers, their fields and their flocks, they see the horrific, uninvited monolith of western culture— immense apartment complexes, shopping centers, and industrial plants on the once-bare and rocky hills where the voice of God could be heard and where Muhammad ascended to heaven. And they would like the world to acknowledge that it was essentially a European problem that was plopped into their laps at the end of the last great war, not one of their own making. They would like the world to acknowledge that there has always been a kind of arrogance attached to this problem; that it was as if the United States and England said to them, Here are the Jews, get used to them. And they would like the world to acknowledge that it is a great indignity, not to mention a significant hardship, to have been an occupied people for so long, to have had to submit to strip searches on the way to work, and intimidation on the way to the grocery store, and the constant humiliation of being subject— a humiliation rendered nearly bottomless when Israel, with the benefit of the considerable intellectual and economic resources of world Jewry, made the desert bloom, in a way they had never been able to do. And they would like the world to acknowledge that there are those in Israel who are determined never to grant them independence, who have used the language of peace as a ploy to fill the West Bank with settlement after settlement until the facts on the ground are such that an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank is an impossibility. They would like the world to acknowledge that there is no such thing as a gentle occupation— that occupation corrodes the humanity of the occupier and makes the occupied vulnerable to brutality.

And I think the need to have these things acknowledged— the need for historical affirmation— is so great on both sides that both the Israelis and the Palestinians would rather perish as peoples than give this need up. In fact, I think they both feel that they would perish as peoples precisely if they did. They would rather die than admit their own complicity in the present situation, because to make such an admission would be to acknowledge the suffering of the other and the legitimacy of the other’s complaint, and that might mean that they themselves were wrong, that they were evil, that they were bad. That might give the other an opening to annihilate or enslave them. That might make such behavior seem justifiable.

I wonder how many of us are stuck in a similar snare. I wonder how many of us are holding on very hard to some piece of personal history that is preventing us from moving on with our lives, and keeping us from those we love. I wonder how many of us cling so tenaciously to a version of a story of our lives in which we appear to be utterly blameless and innocent, that we become oblivious to the pain we have inflicted on others, no matter how unconsciously or inevitably or innocently we have have inflicted it. I wonder how many of us are terrified of acknowledging the truth of our lives because we think it will expose us. How many of us stand paralyzed between the moon and the sun; frozen — unable to act in the moment — because of our terror of the past and because of the intractability of the present circumstances that past has wrought? Forgiveness, it has been said, means giving up our hopes for a better past. This may sound like a joke, but how many of us refuse to give up our version of the past, and so find it impossible to forgive ourselves or others, impossible to act in the present?

I don't have answers. In my childhood I was promised peace in the Middle East. I am still waiting. I wish I knew what was needed to get us there.

Pirkei_Avot Chapter 5, Verse 21 implies that I am perhaps old enough to have some Wisdom, but am not yet old enough to give Counsel. The only wisdom I have obtained so far is that in most disagreements, people can disagree about the "facts", be aproaching the situation with fundamentally different values, or both. I believe that to have any meaningful discussion on a topic as fraught as this one, first common values must be established. Only then can we approach reality side-by-side, examine our beliefs, find mutually trustworthy sources of information, and find agreement about the state of reality. When values are aligned and facts are agreed upon, we might have some hope of letting go of just enough bits of history to find a path through this mess.

Decades ago I was a child promised peace. Today I have children of my own. Today on both side there are children suffering from the choices of their parents and grandparents. All the children deserve better.

There are people on both sides with genocide in their hearts. I don't yet know what to do about that, but we cannot let them win.

I wish that those who should be wise enough to provide counsel, particularly those with power, would get their acts together.

I wish for the peace and safety of all the innocents.

I wish for peace. In my lifetime. This year. Tomorrow. Or even today.

I hope that these words of Rabbi Alan Lew will reach just a few more people thanks to this post being on the internet. I hope they have touched you. Thank you for reading.