The River and the Sea and the Tree of Life

I’ve been quiet the last couple weeks due to my tour schedule with The State and doing individual stand-up. My itinerary over the last two weeks: Savannah, New York, Boston, Winnipeg, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Washington DC. It’s been exhausting but mostly very fun. Now I am back in Savannah for about a week before heading off to Vegas, then back to Boston, then home for Thanksgiving, then off to Chicago with The State. So, yeah, it’s a lot. But that’s not why I’ve been quiet.

The other reason I’ve been quiet, I realize, is because of the situation in Israel. When the Hamas attack occurred on October 7^th, followed by the Israeli reaction and subsequent horrors, I felt – for lack of a better word – numb. Yes, I am a Jew, but I am an American Jew. I’ve never been to Israel (although I’ve long wanted to visit as a curious human, not necessarily as a Jew). I think the current Netanyahu government is corrupt and immoral. I believe in a two-state solution. In short, I’ve got all the run-of-the-mill liberal American Jewish attitudes. For all of that, I didn’t think the war overseas mattered very much to my life. Tragic yes, like Ukraine. And Yemen. And Sudan. And all the rest of the world’s various burn pits. Over the last two weeks, though, I’ve realized that the situation in Israel is taking a deeper toll on me than I had thought. Even though I don’t read most of the headlines or watch very much cable news, the war is with me in ways that are hard for me to quantify.

\I do believe in intergenerational trauma - how could any Jew not believe in feeling bad? That’s kind of our thing, baby. I do believe that our people’s history is an animating force – maybe the animating force – in Jewish identity. I don’t just mean the Holocaust, which remains ever present in the minds of every Jew I know. I mean the whole mishegaas of Jewish history. It’s five thousand years of dealing with people who basically want you dead for no real reason, and the attendant anxiety and neuroses that accompany that historical knowledge. We are a tiny people under threat. When 1,400 of us get murdered in a single day, with 200 more kidnapped, that familiar dread is reactivated, made worse when we see much of the world react with barely disguised glee. Once again, we feel the world’s unwelcome gaze on our entire population and shrink against the hatred.

So there’s that.

There’s also the profound disgust at the Israeli occupation and the profound confusion I feel about the appropriate response from Israel towards the massacre of its citizens. Of course Israel needs to respond. But did they need to respond in this way? Did they need to kill so many? Do they need to continue killing so many? How does one achieve peace when the leadership on both the Hamas side and the Israeli side does not seem interested in peace, only in the extermination of each other?

I have been quiet because I don’t have any answers. I am not on “one side.” I don’t know how one takes sides against an oppressed people, whether the Israelis beset by so many of their neighbors, or the Israeli Palestinians beset by Israel. How does one make sense of the victims of genocide seemingly hellbent on committing a genocide of their own? How much of this multigenerational trauma is inflaming passions on both sides, causing both to lose sight of their own humanity and, equally bad, the humanity of others? There are those who say “Never again,” and take it to mean “Never again to anybody” and those who take it to mean “Never again to my group.” I’m guessing you can figure out what I mean when I say those two words.

My mother’s father emigrated to the United States as a two-year-old boy. He arrived at the turn of the last century with his family to escape the discriminatory May Laws, meant to restrict the rights of Russian Jews. According to my mother, they lived outside of Kiev, in Ukraine. I don’t know how long they lived there – probably for hundreds of years; Jewish emigration to Eastern Europe began in the seventh century. What must it have been like for them to uproot their entire family and set sail for New York? What must it have been like for Palestinian families to live in a home for generations, only to be forcibly removed in 1948, along with hundreds of thousands of others, and resettled in camps, some of which have persisted to this day? What must it be like to live under Israeli rule, where your rights are curtailed, you are a constant source of suspicion and fear, your very existence depends on being subjected to endless humiliations at the hands of your occupiers? Of course, some people will turn to violence, and from violence to the kind of mass slaughter we saw on October 7^th, and the retaliatory slaughter in the days that followed.

I have been sick by the outpourings of hatred from both sides. These people who have been fighting over this rocky land for five thousand years have far more in common with each other than they do with the bloodthirsty masses who claim to support them. I don’t have an answer. I don’t have even a nuanced understanding. What I have, instead, is a quiet and sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that does not seem to dissolve. I also have enormous gratitude that I am not charged with fixing this problem. My gratitude also extends to the lack of desire I have for engaging with people on this topic. I am against nobody except those who wish for violence. I am for nobody except those who wish for peace.

It's been a tough two weeks. I’m tired. I’m worn down. And I needed to excavate my feelings a little bit to understand what’s going up here (taps head). Now I am home for a few days. My goal is to sleep, eat well, get some exercise, and stay away from the news. I have nothing to offer by way of solution. Nor do I have anything to offer by way of comfort to those who would seek my allyship. I am nobody’s ally in this conflict. I will not be marching or tearing down posters or making a stink in city squares or signing petitions. The human species is doing everything it can to reduce itself to X’s and O’s. I’m not going to play that game. Not in this particular instance. Both sides are wrong. Both sides are right. And I need a nap.