Finding Hope

Hamas’s barbaric attack on October 7^th cracked open Israel’s defensive shield – the shield that enabled many of us to live as though there was no conflict. We feel shock and pain and rage and fear and hopelessness. But as Rabbeinu L. Cohen reminded us, cracks let the light in and lately, I’ve been finding light. As another of my favorite wise people, the Israeli psychologist, Tamara Melnick, says, energy follows attention.* If more of us paid attention to these points of light, maybe the energy generated would grow and make a different future possible for Israelis and Palestinians.

What is giving me hope:

• Sharone Lifschitz, daughter of Yocheved and Oded, taken hostage by Hamas on October 7^th, writes in Haaretz that Palestinians are not her enemy; that this conflict is not between Israelis and Palestinians, but between extremists on both sides.
• In his November 8, 2023 New York Times op ed, “Meet the Champions of Nuance and Empathy We Need,” Nicholas Kristof shines a light on the Bereaved Families’ Forum, an NGO of Palestinian and Jewish families who have been inspired to work for peace by the death of a loved one in this protracted conflict. Kristof quotes forum member Meytal Ofer, whose father was murdered by terrorists: “You cannot stop violence with violence. We tried it for 100 years and it’s not working.” Elsewhere, he quotes the Chinese writer Lu Xun who more than a century ago, wrote: “Hope is like a path in the countryside. Originally, there is nothing – but as people walk this way again and again, a path appears.” (Caveat: I take issue with Kristof’s avoidance of stating that it is impossible to avoid killing civilians in a war in which the ruthless enemy hides and functions within a civilian population.)
• Khaled Abu Awwad is the founder of Roots, an NGO that brings together Jewish and Palestinian youth in the West Bank. A friend who heard him speak told me he said that when the Jews began returning en masse to the land of Israel, the Arabs living here should have welcomed their cousins, who had suffered for 2,000 years, back with open arms. There was enough room here for both peoples, he said.
• The young Palestinian Israelis, Ibrahim Abu Ahmad and Amira Mohammed, started an increasingly popular podcast called Unapologetic: The Third Narrative after October 7^th. Like Lifschitz, Abu Awwad and Kristof, they see the conflict clearly rather than through lenses colored by ideology. They are against violence. They don’t take sides. They are refreshingly on both sides.
• My daughter and others like her give me hope. While my heart is hard and numb toward civilian casualties in Gaza, she cries. And she acts. Between being a nurse and the mother of two small children, she stubbornly carves out time to help West Bank Palestinians in various ways; to drive Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals with Road to Recovery and to volunteer with Standing Together and the Hostage Families Forum, among other actions.

After October 7^th, we kept reading the word hitpakchut, disillusionment, in the Hebrew press. People who believed in peace and reconciliation were now disillusioned. My architect friend who used to believe in the one state solution, was disillusioned. A former Palestinian colleague who would wish him a Shabbat shalom and chag sameach now was writing “from the river to the sea” slogans on her Facebook profile. There are no Palestinians who want us here, he said.

I told him he was wrong and sent him the link to the Unapologetic podcast in which both the hosts and their guests say the opposite.  I don’t know if he’ll change his mind. People seem to want to believe what they believe. And I know that these points of light are tiny in the vast darkness that surrounds us. But what choice do we have other than to grow them? To live by the sword forever? To watch more and more beautiful young men die, their families forever broken?

If you feel like me that these points of light need to be strengthened, I hope you’ll share the links above and click on them to see how you can help.

*Google attributes the original quote to both C. Otto Scharmer and James Redfield.