Thinking Out Loud

For better or for worse...

Among many memorable lines in The Hazards of (Unconditional) Love (September 13, 2024), Mo Husseini writes: "It's a trap."

The link to this piece on Medium sat in my inbox for nearly six weeks before I finally clicked on it last night.

Was I simply too busy before? Too tired? Too focused on things I can actually do something about? Too immersed in the High Holidays? Too sad? Too outraged? Too reactive? Too much email? Too many things to read and follow and keep up with (or not)? Was there just too much to hold alongside loving and supporting my people, sustaining a livelihood, not to mention tending to myself?

Quite possibly, all of the above. I already knew Mo Husseini's writing has a way of grabbing hold and not letting you go, not if you're being honest and reading with an open mind. This requires a significant degree of trust as a reader, both of the writer and oneself.

So it's no big surprise I didn't make time.

It's a long piece, worth reading the whole thing. I highlighted several passages. "It's a trap" is the one I keep rereading.

Every day, I check myself. Where am I entrapped? It would be the ultimate hubris to think myself somehow above such a predicament, one of the most human conditions.

Every day, I grow a little clearer and bolder on the one hand and a little more bewildered on the other. With each infinitesimally small step in those directions, I continue to reckon with what I don't know I don't know.

One of my concerns is that my views are being shaped in reaction to something. But then again, of course, they are. How could they not be? Does that make them less legitimate?

There are so many things I don't share or write about, every single day, things that are mind-blowingly and blatantly antisemitic in a flimsy guise of anti-Zionism. (Which does not mean Israel bears no responsibility. Do we really need to keep saying this? It feels like we do.)

What I do know is that the black-and-white reductionist tone of what I see coming out of the Free Palestine movement continues to alarm me, to put it so very mildly. I know I am not alone in this.

There continues to be no acknowledgment of the barbarism of October 7 or empathy for the *ongoing* trauma for Israelis. Or if there is, it too often feels tacked on and rings hollow.

Exhibit A: A trailer for a new documentary, "October H8te," that distills in a succinct four minutes what has me, and many people I love, losing our damn minds. (I learned of this from

Eve Barlow

today.)

I believe in certain incontrovertible facts, such as Israel exists and is home to half the world's Jews, a phenomenally diverse population. As a country, it is wildly imperfect and the government has devastatingly moved further and further to the right, something many Israelis will be the first to point out and actively protest.

Another fact: Sinwar was not a victim or a hero. Anyone presenting him as such, or spreading rhetoric that does– ubiquitous in anti-Israel spaces – has bought into a narrative that manipulates anti-oppression stances into doing the bidding of those who have zero interest in anyone's liberation, including their own people.

True liberation cannot happen this way unless, by liberation, one envisions eradicating the only Jewish state in the world. (Which does not mean Israel bears no responsibility. Do we really need to keep saying this? It feels like we do.)

I remain gobsmacked by the hypocrisy I see left and right, pun very much intended.

GOBSMACKED.

What does any of this mean in terms of where I am in my own entrapped thinking, seeing, and understanding?

That is a question I cannot answer simply. But the fact that I'm asking it gives me a modicum of reassurance that I'm here, engaging in conscious and critical thought, grounding into my love of my people, and from that place, working to not fall for the many traps all around me, around us all.

Acknowledging complexity is not an avoidance tactic or an excuse. It's a responsibility and a heavy one at that. I am increasingly worried that it's one of the biggest casualties of these times.

I've been criticized and blocked for "thinking out loud" in this way, especially by people who insist on seeing this war through the lens of oppressor/oppressed, a lens that conveniently erases whole chapters of history and picks only the parts that uphold it.

This, in turn, can push someone (me) into an equally simplistic stance, which is the entire point of my sharing these thoughts. There isn't one. And I am trying my damnedest to resist how easy that would be.

The pro/anti way of viewing this nightmare isn't helping bring the hostages home from terror tunnels, it isn't helping innocent Gazan or Iranian or Yemeni or Syrian or Lebanese civilians, and it isn't helping Israelis and Palestinians toward any peaceful, or even tolerable, co-existence.

As we approach Simchat Torah, the joyful Jewish holiday that became a day of terror one year ago, I’ll close with these words by Rabbi Hanna Yerushalmi. Sometimes a poem says more than all the thinking out loud in the world. 

---