Beloved Community? Land Community? Not in Israel and Gaza right now. The terrorist attacks by Hamas and others and assaults by Israeli soldiers and settlers kill ever more people, reaching a staggering number—the combined total in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza surpassing 15,000.
It is hard to grasp the amount of suffering, the scale of destruction.
So what do I do?
Yes, I call for a permanent ceasefire, including by terrorists, and an end to vigilantism on the West Bank. That is easy for me to do. I oppose the death penalty in my own country, even for the guilty, the lawfully convicted. I certainly oppose it for children and for thousands upon thousands of random individuals, guilty of nothing but location and ethnicity.
But in calling for a ceasefire and an end to terror am I doing anything more than adding my unheard voice to millions of others’ unheard voices?
And what if our calls are heard? I hope the four-day pause will be extended, despite Netanyahu’s promise to continue attacks in the south of Gaza.
But then what?
Who has a solution for lasting peace?
So…am I just supposed to go on with my comfortable life, dismissing the whole mind-numbing situation with a little tut-tutting that others in the world are not so fortunate?
No. The prospect of denial, of simply moving on, just makes the fate of thousands of my fellow humans cast an even larger pall over my world.
But what is the path forward?
How to live on?
In the midst of my questioning, two small items keep coming back to me, strangely, given that they are so minuscule compared to the massiveness of the suffering.
One is a little girl in Gaza who stands amid the rubble of bombed-out buildings holding a cat she has somehow rescued:
The little girl is smiling.
But so what? Are either the girl or the cat still alive? Are there food and water for the child? If people are having trouble finding food and water, what is happening to their pets? Surely the distress of not being able to protect their beloved dogs and cats is nothing compared to the grief they feel at losing their neighbors, colleagues, family, and friends.
Of what value is that smile?
The second item is the death of Vivian Silver, murdered by Hamas in the October 7 attack on Kibbutz Be’eri. Born in Canada, Silver emigrated to Israel in 1974, where she founded and joined organizations of Israelis and Palestinians working together for social services, equality, economic cooperation, and peace.
Jews and Muslims alike gathered at her funeral to mourn her murder.
When she was still thought to be held hostage, The Free Press re-ran a 2022 interview with her , in which she explained her advocacy. “The violence, no matter what it is, has to stop, and we have to start talking,” she said.
But again, so what? Advocates for peace didn’t stop terrorism and they didn’t prevent mass slaughter. Vivian Silver’s own son said that his mother tried to make the world better, but she “failed.”
Still, both items stick in my mind, mysteriously portentous.
But do they have meaning?
Medium’s Chrystal Rivers recently wrote an essay titled “Dying Pets Break Your Heart.” She compares her misery at losing her cat to her awareness of vastly greater amounts of suffering—both human and animal—in the world. She says, “It makes our whole situation with our beloved cat seem small. And yet somehow, larger.” She doesn’t explore what makes it “larger”—but I feel she’s onto something. There’s a paradox there that I am trying to figure out. How can the smaller be larger?
Of course I, as the author of a Substack sub-titled “Beloved Community,” identify with Vivian Silver. She was all about creating a Beloved Community of Palestinians and Israelis, Muslims, Christians, and Jews—just as we are trying to do with our own multiethnic organizations working together, here in Geary County, Kansas. If Vivian’s life work “failed,” is my own worthless too? What can possibly be the value of little local nodes of mutual cooperation in the face of massive violence and hate?
Nevertheless…I have noticed, as atrocities in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank loom ever larger, others wiser than I do reach for the small. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a supporter of Israel but a fierce critic of Netanyahu and Netanyahu’s bombing of Gaza, recently wrote a column devoted to interpersonal acts of kindness among Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews. He refers to these kindnesses as “seeds,” and he says the humane interactions “reveal enough seeds of coexistence scattered around that one can still dream the impossible dream — that we might one day have a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.”
Similarly, political commentator and professor of journalism Peter Beinart, in the face of what he calls “the greatest despair I have ever known,” reaches for a “germ” of hope. That “germ” is the persistence of small groups committed to the mutual well-being of Palestinians and Israelis. He says, “Small, beloved communities can be born, and grow. And perhaps one day, when it finally becomes hideously clear that Hamas cannot free Palestinians by murdering children and Israel cannot subdue Gaza, even by razing it to the ground, those communities may become the germ of a mass movement for freedom that astonishes the world, as Black and white South Africans did decades ago.”
Friedman’s and Beinart’s metaphors—”seeds” and “germ”—express a clear relationship between the small and the large: “Seeds” and “germ” start out tiny but grow into something a million times larger.
Indeed, in contrast to the despair of Vivian Silver’s son, hope lives on in some of her colleagues. For them, her legacy post October 7 is a “beacon of hope.”
Is her work for peace a “seed,” a “germ,” a “beacon?”
How about that child’s smile?
To ponder these questions, I turn to the small things in my own life that I find to be also paradoxically large. I do not think of them as “seeds” or “germs” or “beacons.” Instead a different metaphor comes to mind—that of a “portal”—a tiny opening through which a larger reality enters my too-constricted world.
But can tiny “portals” matter?
I can only search for answers to that question by looking at specific examples. This I will try to do in a subsequent Substack piece.
In the meantime, blessings to all, now at the end of this Thanksgiving weekend.