on this suffering
October 15, 2023
This is not a statement, or an analysis. This is a keening, a screaming, a giving way. If you find, sweet friend, that you’re in a rush as you read these words, I’d encourage you to put this letter aside for later (I’ve attached a word doc of the text, too) — or don’t read it at all. There are enough words floating around the ether, many of them more eloquent and intelligent than mine will be. I don’t know exactly what these words are meant to be, to do. May they be for the benefit of all who are suffering right now, for the benefit of all beings, for the benefit of all of us.
So first, and last, the suffering.
The weight, the waves. For much of this past week, I have felt almost wordless, clinging to the small life rafts of reading and writing poems, to WhatsApp messages of “I love you and hope the people you love are safe” sent to beloved ones in Gaza City and in Jerusalem and in Ramallah and Haifa and Tel Aviv and Bethlehem and in Jaffa and Ein Iron and Deir al-Assad other towns and villages (and the answer has not consistently been “they are”; my own closest circle is physically safe as of the time of this writing, Sunday morning, October 15th, 2023, but people I love have loved ones who have been killed or kidnapped).
Small life rafts like my friend Sahar Vardi’s call for “Dual Loyalty”: “It’s that moment when you talk to a friend who doesn’t know whether their relatives are dead or kidnapped and what they should even hope for, and to see the helplessness, the fear, the deep pain. And a moment later, it’s talking to a friend from Gaza who can only say that every night is now the scariest night of his life; that he calculates his chances, and those of his daughters, of waking up alive the next morning.”
Early last week, I did a text study of Sahar’s piece, alongside Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab’s “Kindness,” with my 14-year-old niece in Tel Aviv, part of the call taking place from their apartment’s bomb shelter:
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
And god, the cloth is so big right now. Bigger than usual? Probably not. My brother told me last night of the catastrophe that began in Armenia in late September, and that I hadn’t heard about until we spoke. But from my little vantage point of the world, and the cloth seems bigger than usual. I know that always, there is suffering, and sorrow, and cruelty, torment, excruciation taking place. I’ve just never experienced so much of it, all at once, happening to so many people I love.
Then, the thoughts, last Saturday, as I took my kiddo out for hot chocolate and a chocolate croissant, turning my phone on to pay, starting only then to read: the Israeli child murdered by a gunman—a few tweaks of personal history and circumstance, and that could have been my child, my Nahari. The people murdered and tortured and kidnapped from the festival: even fewer tweaks of circumstance, and that could have been me. I love dancing. I’ve found real solace and joy in recent years in dancing with others. My closest friends weren’t there, but some of their beloveds were. I do not believe that anyone, in the depth of their heart, is actually indifferent, or even joyful, over these deaths—even if they claim to be, as many have. They say it, they tweet it, whatever, and I do not believe them. I cannot, and I will not. I believe that there is a part of everyone on this earth that wants me and my child to live, to be safe, to breathe, to argue about tooth-brushing, to play magic-spy-moon-unicorn, which is what we played yesterday morning.
But here, then, is where I swerve from those who seek to forge this molten, scorching suffering into a weapon of death. Because a few more tweaks of random circumstance, of what body I was born into and when, and I could have been the young Hamas gunmen who carried out these murders, these young men whose, as Fadi Abu Shammalah wrote, “entire experience has been Israeli military occupation, siege and devastating military assault upon assault in an enclave of 140 square miles, with unemployment and poverty rates of approximately 50 percent.” And similarly, I could have been the Israeli teenagers now being amassed to carry out an ethnic cleansing in Gaza that —and here language strains against itself— could transmute into a larger-scale genocide. All of us could have. We don’t want to see it, because we want to think that there are different categories of human in this world, the real humans, who we love, and who just want to play magic-spy-moon-unicorn with their children, and the fake humans, who we don’t know, and who carry out atrocities. This is what I tried to squeeze into a poem early last week:
WHY I CANNOT SPEAK IN FULL SENTENCES
I am the child
whose parents
were shot dead
in front of her
and the young
man who shot
them, who picks
his nose in the
evenings, who
still dreams at
night that he
is a Pokémon
catcher—I am
him too. I am
the girl who is
afraid to walk
near windows
so she pees
in her bed as
the warplanes
fly above her
like imaginary
monsters, there
to burn up her
home, and the
young man in
that cockpit,
pimples near
his nose and
a weird ability
to remember
the lyrics to
many foreign
pop songs—
I am him too.
I press down
on the button,
on the trigger,
as I was told
to and I kill
my children,
my siblings,
I kill my own
grandparents,
knowing eyes,
teeth loose in
their mouths
as they murmur
about god—
I am the news
pundit, social
media jouster,
all the leaders
of this blood-
effort, beneath
my cheering or
my edicts I am
mumbling, help
me, I try to say
but I cannot
speak because
my mouth is
is packed full
with the bitter
and familiar
taste of my
own flesh.
And now, a week’s worth of days into this chapter of the nightmare, I am choking on my own breath, sobbing at my kitchen counter after putting Nahari to bed next to the scarf R. sent us from Gaza City after she was born; R., who, just a few months ago, was over at my place in Philly, and we went out to a weird, overwrought little diner near Media, PA, and drank milkshakes and ate fries and smoked cigarettes under a low Pennsylvania sky; R., whose voice cracks as he tells the reporter that there is not enough food, not enough bread.
/
I say this to my Jewish and Israeli siblings, still reeling from “our” unspeakable catastrophe, and now looking away, or taking part, as more of “their” universes are being extinguished. But there is no other. There is no “ours” and “theirs.” I say this too to my siblings whose support for Palestinian freedom — which I pray only grows and deepens around the world — has slipped into a sickly, self-mutilating mathematics, in which the equation is “Israeli Jewish lives = worthless or worth very little, because of what their regime has done.” I don’t need to elaborate much on the absurdity of this calculation; everyone intelligent enough to read the quadrisyllabic words in the first clause of this sentence can also do the moral-ethical-logical expansion of this equation (or, more simply: if we are all deserving to be put to death because of what our purported leaders and representatives have done, then there is no person on this planet not deserving of execution). And yet, we are able to trick ourselves into believing it, or some version of it, at least long enough to snarl or burp something onto “X,” or whatever… and now I’m slipping into snark. I’ll stop in a moment, or I’ll try. It’s not the tone I want to stay in for long. On the deeper, more pained level, then: It’s hard not to feel sickened by how good all of this suffering is for the bottom-line of “X” and “Instagram” and “The New York Times.” (I didn’t mean, at first, to continue the scare-quotes after “X,” but I think it feels right to leave them around all of these entities). It is gross: not gross what “they” are doing, for there is no they, here, either — it is gross what we are doing. And it’s okay if we’ve done it, I know I have collaborated in these sorts of mathematics at many points in my life; we can also climb down from the ledge, change our course at any moment: the past does not determine the future).
What am I talking about? Where have I gone with this? I want to return to the heart. And I feel my mind pulling this way and that, clamoring to make another point, while we’re on the subject of points, to share another thought. Useful? I’m not sure. This outpouring is not polished, not coherent, probably contradicts itself, certainly contains blind spots and failings —and it feels right keep it thus. I’m not a wise-sagacious-neutral observer. I’m a flailing, myopic, agonized, self-contradictory human part of this catastrophe. But so the thoughts, to give a sampling: remembering that in Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, they too murdered infants with fence posts; remembering that there is always context. Remembering that torment and imprisonment and mass murder warps people. Remembering that Jews were slaughtered and tormented by the European and Christian world, survivors among us shepherded into an outpost in the Middle East, taught how to uphold their empire, and now some observers have the gall to cluck their tongues at “those inhuman Jews.” Or the gall to stuff more weapons down our torn-open throats, and call, from afar, for us to use them against the “savage, barbaric Arabs.” Just like we taught you.
But there is no we, I remind myself, and no you. Just like we taught ourselves. There is no other. Everyone who cares about Israeli Jewish lives — not the brutal apartheid state, the regime, the concept, but my life, my family’s, my child’s — should be in favor of complete freedom for every single Palestinian. It is not altruism — there is no other: it is for all of us.
And now, and always, Gaza. Oh god. Abdallah, one of the sweetest children I’ve known in my time on this planet. Huge brown eyes, knobby elbows, a superb sense of wry humor, very weak lungs. A few of us started a campaign to fundraise for his healthcare back in 2015. I think about him constantly these days, am trying to get updates when I can.
Here’s Abdallah, back when he was 6. And here’s Nahar, who is approaching five and a half. They haven’t met yet. Inshallah, they will one day.
Look at these faces. I do not believe that there is anyone in the world whose indifference is pure. I do not. My politics aren’t feeling nuanced, right now, or smart, or sophisticated. I don’t even know if I have “politics.” I just want these children, who I happen to know and love, and all children, to be able to live lives of safety and freedom.
We need help. Help us all.
A new friend of mine, I learned this weekend, lost seventeen members of his family in a single moment. They were sheltering in place in their home in Gaza. Seventeen universes. Seventeen pure, beautiful, perfect constellations. Seventeen holy fragments of God. Wouldn’t those children, sweet, goofy, wild ones, have wanted to play moon-spy-unicorn with me and Nahar? Wouldn’t those elders, tired and weighed down and brimming with secrete knowledge, have wanted to listen to another song, with a good beat, and a sweet melody, as this evening falls? Are they not all our children, our siblings, our elders, our beloved ones? They are, they are, they are.
Help.
I’m still stuck in my mind; the mind as a refuge from the agony, “X” as a shield against feeling the weight of so many of our children murdered in a single week, while dancing, while sheltering in their home, while hiding in a closet, while sleeping in their beds, in Gaza City, in Kibbutz Be’eri — and also in Qusra, in the West Bank, where the attention is averted, but where a six-year-old girl was shot and wounded, three people killed, by our children, rampaging, brainwashed. Help.
I cannot stop weeping, I pray not to be able to stop.
The mindfulness teacher Ram Dass, to whose talks I have been turning almost daily this past week, was once asked whether our world is on the brink of a new, better era, or on the edge of a sort of Armageddon. (I’ve heard versions of this question, in both directs, floated this past week: will this be a collective awakening for freedom and justice, for an end to this killing — as Zak Witus quoted Edward Said, “Perhaps it is now possible to speak of a new cycle opening in which the dialectic of separation and separatism has reached a sort of point of exhaustion, a new process might be beginning, glimpsed here and there within the anguished repertoire of communitarianism which by now every reflecting Arab and every Jew somehow feels as the home of last resort”; or will this be another Nakba, another Holocaust?). Ram Dass responded, first off, that he didn’t know. (No one knows what the future will contain; the future is, of course, a fiction, a fantasy, and talking too surely of it can be a tactic that all of us use for trying to escape the present). But if we are on the brink of a new, better era, he said, I’d want to quiet my mind, open my heart, and see if there was something I could do to alleviate suffering.
And if we’re on the brink of an Armageddon of sorts? Then I’d try to quiet my mind, open my heart, and see if there was something I could do to alleviate suffering.
It resonated for me, maybe it will for others among us, too (no others, of course, only an us). How to alleviate suffering? Each of us has to follow our own intuition on this one. I think each of us has a voice, a still small voice, deep inside us, that does know how to do this, at each moment, and I think all of our voices will sound different. But here are some sketches I’ve come up with.
If by money, we could consider giving to Donkeysaddle, Jen Marlowe’s organization that has supported Abdallah’s healthcare, and other children in Gaza. As Jen wrote to me, “We don’t know what needs Abdallah, Mohammed and the other families we support in Gaza will have when all this horror ends, but we know it will be acute.”
If by spoken words or sounds, I’ve found it powerful — my tears have told me that it is thus — to call or leave voice notes for friends and loved ones, connected and also not-as-directly-connected to this current round of human-induced suffering, and to tell them how much I love them, so so much, and that I am there for them, that we are all, no matter the version of “themness” that animates their human form. (You can see why I’m off “X.”)
If it is by prayer, praying for my beloved’s families, for my families, for our family.
If by the power of attentive silence, or by silent attention — amen, amin.
If by more words, then may they be for the benefit not of a media corporation or corrupt state or group of self-destructive war leaders, but rather for all of us.
And: I don’t know anything.
I’m asking for help because I am suffering, and my loved ones are suffering, and I am afraid, and my loved ones are afraid.
Hold your hearts open, dear ones, as much as you can, patience, continued attention, without looking away as “The New York Times” and “Instagram” grow bored of this, in coming days or weeks.
Another poem, before I end this letter:
THE OCEAN
When the veil lifts
from your eyes
and you see that
there are no demons
in this world, only
humans, then there
is no relief from
the suffering, the suffering
becomes an ocean
and there is no shore.
We watch our siblings—
siblings, not demons—
celebrate as our siblings
are hurt and killed,
and they do this because
they are suffering
and they want relief
and we cannot cheer
with them but nor
can we wish them
anything but relief, so
we hesitate to extend
the invitation for them
to join us out here
in the middle of the ocean
of suffering from which
there is no exit, but
we extend it anyway:
join us out here.
Maybe together we will
discover that being
human also means
having gills, shimmering
fins, that maybe after
all we can breathe
better from within
this ocean of salt water,
and we will hold each
other’s hands and kick
our tails and follow
the dead where they lead us.
As my friend Antwan, in Bethlehem, texted me, guiding me once more to weep, and blessedly, bottomlessly weep:
Habibi love will win, I keep my faith
Love and grief and attention, efforts to alleviate suffering, may our quiet and our actions be for the benefit of all who are suffering, for the benefit of us all.
I love you all.
Moriel
The Leftern Wall 