At the centre of this week’s Parsha there is a confusion. It is a confusion I share in these dark times, when loud and bellicose voices rise up, drowning out the voices of subtlety, uncertainty and moderation.
I find it hard to shape my own sense of self, what do I think? I still want to hold on to the possibility of multiple truths!
And yet, more than one week ago the people of Israel suffered their most catastrophic single day since the silencing of guns at the close of World War Two.
More than 1,300 murdered and more than 130 taken captive. Dark days for our people.
I feel an emotional confusion reign over, so many lives lost, so much blood yet to be spilled.
And yet, these times have evoked, in many communities a clear moral mission to offer support to our communities both in the UK and Europe, and in Israel.
In the story of the Tower of Babel, which appears this week, in our weekly parsha, we hear that the people decide to build a tower: “Come, let us build … a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world” ‘נִבְנֶה־לָּנוּ עִיר וּמִגְדָּל וְרֹאשׁוֹ בַשָּׁמַיִם וְנַעֲשֶׂה־לָּנוּ שֵׁם פֶּן־נָפוּץ עַל־פְּנֵי כׇל־הָאָרֶץ’ [Genesis 11:4]. It is a framing both of the beginning of a notion of nation and linguistic difference, it is a story that also presents the arrogance of humanity and its consistent inclination towards overcoming and overpowering God, nature and other human beings.
What is 2023 if it is not a year, following many others, during which humankind continues to capture and repurpose the resources of the world to wreak havoc against our environment and murder against its people.
And yet we also live in days of some moral clarity behind which we can find unity –
Murder – our community is in mourning – murdered babies, the most precious, our elderly, and many more. As mourners, our community must be permitted to mourn this loss and process this trauma. I have had hundreds of conversations in the past week and for the vast majority of Jewish people, just one step removed there is a story of murder or narrow escape from gruesome violence.
This slaughter inside the State of Israel is hard to process. Jews have been killed and harassed en masse across Europe and the Middle East and across the generations. The State of Israel was supposed to be different, a place where we would be protected, a place of safety. These scenes of murder and rampage are in our DNA; in every generation Jews have faced catastrophe, we thought this generation was different and yet it is not…
The trauma persists as up to 200 families await news for missing loved ones who are held captive, an unthinkable pain.
The aspect of safety is still more complex. In Europe in particular, the place where the most recent atrocities against the Jewish people were organised and orchestrated, we have seen mass protest in part seemingly celebrating the slaying of Jewish civilian life, not catching breath for one moment for the enormity of the human outrage. We have heard of doorways being daubed in Magen David, the star of David, in good times a symbol of Jewish strength, but in this context used as a mode of intimidation. And German marching music being played outside places of Jewish worship and meeting. All of these strands add up to a picture, in which many Jews worldwide are feeling fearful once more.
Humanity – our humanity is stretched in all directions at this time. Israel has called up hundreds of thousands of soldiers; these are our children, our cousins, fathers, brothers and sisters. We are a small nation and when Israel goes to war, there are very few who remain unscathed by this mass mobilisation. Whole families and communities hold out with bated breath, awaiting news of loved ones on the front lines.
And the Palestinian communities, there are many in our Jewish communities, including in Israel those that know well the cost of life in this war; there are few that shy away from this reality. The human suffering is incalculable and there seems to be little way to avert this bloodletting. In my years living in Israel, I worked with lots of people in Palestinian communities, people I cared for. In the years past the picture in Israel, East Jerusalem and the West Bank has got worse in many ways. Nevertheless, I never visited Gaza. Gaza was a different story and whilst civilians should not suffer at the hands of any government, the terrorist, totalitarian government that runs the Gaza strip has directed Gaza to suffering and doom since Hamas came to power in 2007. Perhaps Israel should have done things differently, certainly could have, but as I stand on the sidelines right at this moment, it is unclear to me if an Iran-backed extremist government could have directed the fate of Gaza to any other point.
So back to my confusion, our Parsha of confusion. The people were ultimately separated by nation and language, their communication because segmented and confused so that they could not achieve their ends to become more powerful than God. In 2023, people continue to mobilise exceptional resources to corrupt nature and kill one another. My hope in this week is that we can dig deeper into our own sense of humanity, finding new ways to support our respective communities and above all to show and share care and hope for our collective recovery.
One day I hope we will learn one of the lessons of Babel, that our human mission is not to conquer but to love.
Shabbat shalom x
