The Skunk At The Garden Party
Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, March 21, 1965
You know how some family members will tell you the unfettered truth? Well, after reading my last blog post my brother said, “I've read your email twice. I don’t feel inspired... I feel sad, scared and left without a clear direction to move toward.”
Oooof. That really hurt my heart. It’s never my intention to leave anyone in a state of hopelessness or despair… especially when I feel so hopeful! I feel hopeful, not because I have answers about Israel/Palestine, antisemitism, Jihadism, democracy, climate change, or anything else for that matter, but because my prayer life is burgeoning.
“When you see the world, and you see the laws of brute necessity which govern it, you realize that the only way that you can reconcile this veil of suffering, the only way you can reconcile it to sanity, is to glue your soul to prayer.” —Leonard Cohen
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel also spoke about prayer. Heschel, who escaped the Nazis, but lost numerous family members, friends and colleagues in the holocaust, was a passionate supporter of the civil rights movement. He famously wrote in his diary after marching with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama, “I felt my legs were praying.”
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I feel like what my brother was saying, to quote Tevya, “Send us the cure, the disease we’ve already got!”
Just so you know, I am over here trying to find solutions, and to share what I am discovering along the way. I am not trying to be polite or win a popularity contest. I am willing to be the skunk at the garden party, a term I learned from Bari Weiss during her incredible speech at the Federalist Society’s Barbara K. Olson Memorial lecture. I am also willing and available to clean up messes when I am unskillful in my articulation.
Titration Comedy Break
I am sure many of us are in need of some comic relief so here’s a video of Sacha Baron Cohen in his incarnation as Bruno trying to mediate the Israel/Hamas conflict.
Another thing that Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel shared was moral clarity. I am calling on them now to help guide our way. I am praying with those righteous men who knew what it meant to be unequivocal and to walk a prayer.
That same brother once called me a self-hating Jew. My reply: “I don’t hate myself, I just hate Jews.” I was joking! But I am seeing a lot of internalized antisemitism among the Jews of the diaspora, and it breaks my heart to see this profound distortion and twisted self-hatred.
“Antisemitism turns ‘the Jew’ into the symbol of whatever it is that a given civilization defines and its most loathsome qualities. Under Christianity, before the holocaust and Vatican II, the Jew was the Christ killer – ‘his blood be upon us and upon our children.’ Under communism, the Jew was the capitalist. Under Nazism, the Jew was the ultimate race polluter. Now, we live in a civilization where the most loathsome qualities are racism, colonialism, apartheid. And lo and behold, [it is claimed that] the greatest human rights offender in the world today is the Jewish state.” Source: Zioness
Antisemitism is a shapeshifting virus. People hate Jews for being poor, then they hate Jews for being rich. They hate Jews for not integrating, then they hate Jews for integrating. They hate Jews for their religion, and when they’re told that it’s not okay to hate people for their religion, they hate Jews for their race. They hate Jews for being stateless, then they hate Jews for having a state. It is a sneaky mother fucker, and it needs coyote-owl-quicksilver level tracking.
Also worth knowing that the Israel/Hamas war is not happening in a vacuum. Many people don’t care about antisemitism because it doesn’t directly affect them, but if they understood why this war (and the survival of the state of Israel) is so important and what it has to do with their own freedoms, I imagine they would be more inclined to take action.
I started this post with the topic of prayer, so that’s what I’ll end with… Right now I am working with various prayers, including this one below by St. Francis of Assisi. It is not easy. Sometimes it takes everything I’ve got to say the words. Sometimes my righteous rage bumps up against my desire to diffuse intensity in favor of something more life giving. I wrestle and I reckon. Sometimes the chasm between how I feel and my “higher impulse” seems impossible to bridge. Sometimes I protest and tantrum and recoil, other times I feel my heart soften and yield. Hunter Reynolds wrote, “Few things are more productively humiliating than an earnestly uttered prayer. To stand in the stink of our somebodyness and let words of devotion turn us over like rotting compost—ah, now that’s praying.” I guess that’s what I’m doing… standing in the stink of my somebodyness and letting the words transform me.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.
