Chaos in the Wild: Words Matter

Thinking about where hate comes from and whether we can be redeemed.

Oct 11, 2023

The following is an essay that was very hard for me to write. Writing about Israel — my homeland, the place where I was forged and formed — is the hardest writing I do. This isn’t everything I think about Israel and Palestine. It’s where I am now, at 4:00 pm on October 11, 2023. As all people, I am always learning and growing. If you have something to contribute to the conversation, I welcome it as long as you write from a place of kindness and compassion. I hope you read these words with an open heart.

The surface of my desk is cold, but I rest my hands on it anyway, closing my eyes, breathing. My breath is shallow, and I try again to fill the cavern of my chest. Slowly. Outside, the street is fading in muted tones. A watercolor bleeding into the indigo of evening.

My thoughts are a nonsensical jumble. They come in waves.

I keep scrolling through the images and clips and headlines, even though my heart is too weary and broken. I am so tired of reading about people killing people. I am so exhausted from the work of believing that most people are basically good, while the world tries so hard to prove me wrong. In an ocean of inhumanity, I’m treading water, choking on the salt of how bad things are.

I shouldn’t be surprised; this isn’t the first time the front page of every newspaper was soaked in blood. Not even close. Some say the Situation has been allowed to careen out of control. Was anyone ever in control, I wonder?

On both sides, a governing body intent on proving might. Each pretending (believing?) to have their nation’s best interests in mind, despite all evidence to the contrary. At night, do these naked emperors dream of the future? Are their visions only of vengeance? Do they cry out, wake in a sweat, as I and so many others do? Do they taste blood?

The flames these hateful men light lick at the walls of our only home. The fire blazes brightly, but the world remains dark.

Deep, ragged breaths. I close my eyes.

—

In August of 1995 my family moved to Israel from Baltimore. I was nine years old. Around the same time, a young, charismatic politician named Binyamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu was making waves in the opposition of the Israeli parliament. I didn’t speak Hebrew yet, so I didn’t understand the thundering speeches he made at the right-wing rallies. He had a steady voice and a powerful manner, and he used it to call the government antisemitic. They’re all criminals, according to Bibi, for considering a path to peace with Palestinians. The forgotten Oslo Accords.

This young man claimed the government should be punished in the harshest way possible. His followers screamed assent as they burned effigies of Prime Minister Rabin dressed in an SS officer’s uniform.

Saturday night, November 3, 1995, one of Bibi’s followers pulled a handgun out of his pocket, clicked the magazine into place, lifted his right arm, and shot the Prime Minister three times in the chest. At a peace rally. Later, us schoolchildren would be taught that he had refused to wear a bulletproof vest because he couldn’t fathom the death threats being credible. People believe in peace, don’t they?

He died early the next day.

The gaping hole in Israeli politics and society was promptly filled by the hate-mongering of Bibi, who assumed the office of the Prime Minister 18 months later, in June 1996. And, sure, there were certainly flaws in the Oslo Accords. But it didn’t even matter, because there went the peace process, down the drain in a whirlpool of tears and blood.

What I remember most about November 4, 1995 is my parents on the couch, staring at the TV news anchor, silent tears streaming down their faces. My dad took us to a vigil, one of so many spontaneous gatherings sprouting up everywhere. So many candles. So many flowers. Empty shells of people walking aimlessly on sidewalks, riding busses to nowhere. An assembly at my new school, where we all stood for a moment of silence.

I didn’t understand then, but I do now.

Words matter.

—

Yesterday, I was scrolling through an Instagram page dedicated to locating missing Israelis, folks who may have been abducted during the recent attacks in Southern Israel. From every tiny square a young face peered at me, emblazoned with the words Missing נעדרים and the person’s name. Some squares are death announcements; they say ת.נ.צ.ב.ה, which is what Jewish people write on gravestones. It’s an acronym, representing a line from the El Maleh Rachamim (G-d Full of Mercy), the traditional Jewish burial prayer.

תהיה נשמתו/ה צרורה בצרור החיים // May their soul be bound up in the bonds of life.

I was looking at these faces, hoping not to see anyone I know. Thinking how ironic that sentence from the burial prayer. These young people were bound up in the bonds of life. They were bursting with life, creativity, passion. To be clear, I don’t know any of the people on this page, but what 20-something isn’t full to the bursting with a zeal for life?

May they be bound up. In the bonds of life.

Then I noticed the rhetoric in the comments section. You know how they say never to read the comments on social media? They’re right, whoever the hell they are.

“Hahahahahaha” one person commented, under a death notice, with the hashtag #freepalestine.

“We will avenge her,” says a Jewish commenter, under another death notice “We will not forgive those animals.”

My breath stopped. Tears pricked my eyes.

I think a lot about words — the magic of them, the horror of them, the way they take you out of your body. Words are a powerful hallucinatory agent. Here, you are reading this somewhere and images dart across your mind. If I’ve done my job right, your body reacts — maybe your heart races or your breath quickens. Words make reality.

But we throw them away all the time, as though they don’t matter. Did the woman in my WhatsApp group of local Israeli moms think about her words as she typed that we should “flatten Gaza” and “spray them with bullets”? How about the commenter who responded to a video posted by a peace activist calling for a prisoner swap to save lives in Gaza, saying “Go back to your motherlands before you and your families came to live in the stolen and colonized lands and homes of Palestine”?

One commenter says that “the only one to blame here is the occupation leaders, all of them.”

Another calls for the wholesale destruction of Palestinians in the Gaza strip. “Forget innocents, not innocents, they’re all accomplices to the crime.”

Both commenters made their opinions known on the same video.

I wonder if they would consider themselves extremists? I wonder if they feel as wounded and hopeless as I do? Do they read Instagram comments and feel their hearts cracking open? The poison seeping in?

—

Two nights ago, our baby woke up around 11 p.m., as she tends to do. For the last few weeks she’s been going to sleep fine. Around 11, though, she wakes up in hysterics. She gasps for breath between cries, reaching her chubby hands out from between the bars of her crib. I’m not sure why this is happening. She has a world of pacifiers in there. And two bottles, one with formula and one with water. The room is dark. The house is calm.

I mean, the world seems to be burning down, but this specific room is quite cozy.

When she awoke on Monday night, it was my turn to go calm her. At first, I spoke to her in soothing tones, “Hey, metuka sheli, mama po1, you’re ok, my love,” I said, reassuring her that I was there. That wasn’t cutting it. I offered a pacifier, which she denounced, flinging it across the room. Somehow, she was now screaming louder.

So, I picked her up. Took her into our room, where I rocked her back and forth in my arms. I sang the little song I’d made up for her in the hospital, when she was born, “You’re ok, you’re ok, Mama v’Ima po2, you’re ok,” and the other song I made up a few months later, “Oy, oy, oy, Ay, ay, ay, at kimat chamuda midai3.”

Then I started to sob.

Images began flashing through my mind. Sounds. Somewhere, right now, the hysterical cries of Israeli toddlers in animal cages, reaching their chubby arms out through the bars and begging for their Ima, fall on hostile ears. Somewhere near them, the tiny hands of Gazan children poke out from under the rubble of their destroyed homes.

I can’t breathe. My baby is in my arms and I can’t breathe.

I lay down on the floor with her. She’s calmer now and I put one hand on her chubby belly. I pray to anyone who’s listening to save the children. The babies. Israeli toddlers left for dead in the desert, dusty Palestinian children with tearstained cheeks flash through my mind.

What the hell is wrong with this world?

—

Yesterday, attorney and writer Dylan Saba tweeted (X-ed?) “what is the ethical way to climb out of hell?”

I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Maybe I shouldn’t be allowed to attempt to answer. After all, despite surviving the second Intifada (and many of my classmates did not survive) and living through the second Lebanon War as a soldier (and many of my generation did not live through) I have never lived in hell. I have never been showered with bombs in a place with no bomb shelters. I have never been used as a human shield by those who should be looking after my safety.

And there is no doubt Gazans have lived —and continue to live — in that exact hell. Or, maybe, I shouldn’t attempt to answer because it’s a riddle that cannot be solved.

I have some follow-up questions, though. Can one live through hell and retain one’s humanity? If one’s divine spark is lost, can it be regained?

I worry about this. I worry, because the pain now is so great and the wound is so open it can easily be infected. And then what? Where will we go from here?

On Yom Kippur, we said the ‘Confession’ prayer over and over, pounding our fists on our chests and proclaiming all the categories of wrongdoing we have committed. There are 44 categories, two for each of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Of these, 11 have to do with sins of speech. One fourth.

Hateful speech, both overt and implied, have been poisoning the soil of my country for a long, long time. Soon, if we’re not careful, nothing will grow.

Hate is unwieldy.

Words matter.

—

Postscript

Here is some hope you may have missed. After all, we should at least try to end on a bright note.

On October 4, hundreds of Palestinian and Israeli women from the organizations Women Wage Peace and Women of the Sun came together to march and demand an end to the animosity.
According to the Israeli-Palestinian collaborative organization Standing Together, they have “begun to form groups of people in several cities in Israel, especially [desegregated] cities, to be ready to join initiatives aimed at strengthening the relationships between Jews and Arabs during these times. With 10 “solidarity watch” WhatsApp groups around the country, we have begun efforts to mobilize Jews and Arabs to go through this moment together.”
Despite being controlled by a completely ineffectual government, Israeli citizens have mobilized in incredible ways. While the government fails to even agree on who gets to be a part of recovery efforts, citizens have crowdsourced food, accommodations, and all other necessities for evacuated, traumatized citizens from southern kibbutzim and towns. Therapists are donating time for mental health treatment. Artists are providing entertainment for children. Lists have been compiled and shared so families can find their loved ones. The protest movement, now even more fed up with Bibi, has refocused its efforts on mutual aid for those whose homes and lives were decimated in the attacks.

Unfortunately, that’s it for now. I’ll keep you posted if something hopeful pops up.

Hey, my sweet, mama’s here.

Mama and Ima are here

Oy, oy, oy, Ay, ay, ay, You’re almost too cute"