When people hear you have received that awful phone call to say your child has died, they respond with deep empathy, care, and compassion. Few know what to say or what to do, though even in their shock they express their support, offering to help in any way they can. Those thousands of phone calls in Israel were felt around the world. The emptiness left by one death magnified exponentially, creating a black hole of suffering, that drew in families, friends, and communities. Collectively we felt, and continue to feel, the pain. Collectively we feel powerless, but want to help. In that awful moment, as you clutch your heart and gasp for breath, human care, empathy, and solidarity offer a lifeline for the broken hearted.
Life is normal until we get the call telling us our child has died, plunging us into an abyss of anguish, a howling pit of grief. Life is now lived in and with grief, divided into those moments before the call and that interminable time after. In Israel the phone rang, and rang again. Over and over and over. And over. Each call unleashed a new wave of sorrow, accumulating into a torrent of grief that rose to the skies. Thousands of people now live in the grip of grief, putting one heavy foot in front of another, while all around is death. The weight is crushing, and seems unbearable. You are not alone.
Life is normal until we get the call telling us our child has died
I have seen too much death this year, and have no emotional bandwidth for more. And yet, it is here, it is upon us, crashing into my consciousness and bursting into my heart, just as it violently upended the lives of unsuspecting mothers and fathers and families as they quietly went about their day. Behind every headline, behind each statistic, there is a person: a life, a story, a dream, and a future unfulfilled. Remember, we are all someone’s sister, mother, brother, father, friend, colleague, and companion.
The moral fault line is within
The reality of death and conflict forces me to confront my own contradictions, hypocrisies, and double standards. I must grapple with the unsettling fact that silence is support that lets evil flourish. Even more troubling is the recognition that malevolence, that tendency toward outright wrong, lies within me. I, too, want my beliefs, perspective, my worldview, to prevail.
Israel is us. Palestine is us. Palestine is me. Israel is me. Not because of shared DNA, but because of our common heritage in the family of humanity. We all share that universal yearning for lasting peace, for agency and self-determination, for a land called home, and a home in which to find sanctuary. We all dream of a better future for our children, and a life of contentment, free from existential stress.
We all harbour a deep desire for an end to suffering and violence. Yet, in moments of raw honesty, we recognise how easy it is to blame the absence of peace, or personal fulfillment, on someone else, on some elusive other: that nebulous ‘they’ to whom we attribute responsibility for our challenges and grievances, our strife and setbacks. They don't like me. They stopped me from getting what I want. They control the media, the money, and the systems. They are out to get me. Such generalised blame absolves us of personal accountability.
There is no they
We can also feel within us that urge to push back, to cancel, to stop, or in some way neutralise what we perceive as their oppression of us. In more than 30 years travelling to the US I have seldom met an American I did not like. Yet now I meet so many Americans who do not like one another—an unfortunate trend that is repeated around the world. It is often us who do not like others, and us who wants to exclude the other from conversation and community because they hold a different view to us. Closing our eyes, stopping our ears, and raising our defences, is a precursor to conflict.
What we see in Israel is the tapestry of our own psychology laid bare: the intricacies of human nature and the tension between our better angels and our darker instincts, starkly revealed for all to see. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, like many complex geopolitical issues, is both a revelation and a microcosm of these broader human struggles.
we all have a proclivity for wrongdoing
We like to think we are good people, who may occasionally make a little mistake or exhibit a moral weakness. At the same time, we have intense clarity about where others can improve. Their moral missteps appear as a headline in a news report, like a Times Square ticker running across their forehead. Yet, the reality is, we all have a proclivity for wrongdoing. We all hear that whisper within that advocates selfish indulgence at the expense of another, or justifies retribution for perceived slights and affronts. If we let this go unchecked, or worse, allow it to be fanned into flame by manipulating influences, it can spiral into malevolence.
The road is long
The journey toward moral virtue, to what is true and beautiful and good, and ultimately to the holiness of self-sacrificial love for others, can be long and arduous. It brings us face to face with this proclivity and the complex fabric of our humanity. It is frighteningly simple to yield, just a little at a time, to immoral vice, to lies and ugliness and evil, and ultimately to the horror of sacrificing others in our own immoral cause and hatred.
This war lays bare the moral fault line that runs deep in our own heart, inviting a decisive response. That response reveals who I am and shapes who I am to become. We can acquiesce to atrocity, or transcend our biases and prejudices and respond with nobility and grace to the tears of humanity. And humanity must stand against evil. Standing with Israel and the Jews at this moment, that relives the trauma of the Holocaust, against a foe who intends their annihilation, is such a stance.
This is no time for equivocation or lack of moral clarity. “Never again” is not some pithy slogan. Rather it has moral content and moral meaning, and represents our moral imagination. To borrow from John Donne: “ask not for whom the phone rings, it rings for thee.”
If only words alone had the power to change. From afar the situation in Israel and Palestine is hard to fathom. I struggle listening and watching their plight. Let’s hope that humanity prevails here for a peaceful solution.