The shadow I see in you, I see in me
My world has become fairly provincial since the fake news pandemic blurred my vision. NPR panders to an imagined reality of the left wing conscience, a world of haves and have nots, of entitled and repressed. Fox panders to an imagined reality of right wing protectors, a world of battle formation lagers being circled by a faceless enemy. As for me, I imagine reality as a man typing on a keyboard trying to form his thoughts and eventually share them.
In this ultra narrow present, I received news of the world, from people whose reality I love to share. My brothers. They live in Tel Aviv. The messages came a few nights ago.
“We are under fire..from Gaza. And there are now riots and lynchings between extremist Arab and Jewish Israelis within Israel in many towns. Arabs have been burning synagogues and attacking Jewish citizens, while the same is occurring from the Jewish extremists. The hatred runs deep and has suddenly surfaced with a vengeance. Very sad situation. Curfews in some towns. The cycle of violence with Gaza is familiar but we have never seen this level of street violence. It may have taken years to build a fragile co-existence but only hours to destroy.”
Limbic alarm bells. I go primal and tribal. My people are under attack. From Pharaoh to the Masada, from the expulsion of the Jews from Spain to blood libel pogroms, from Hitler's final solution to the Ayatollah's sick nuclear threats, here we go again. And I am gungho to remove the 'imagined' from my Jewish identity and stand loud and proud for my beloved country and people. OK, where do I sign up?!
My brother and his wife are caught on the road when the siren blares and they take shelter under a highway bridge. “The Palestinians suffer from chronic and nearsighted maximalist leaders” says sis-in-law, to which my niece responds “And for the past few years, we do too”.
Now you may have guessed that I am partial to Israel. I won't be mistaken for a UN bystander. Yet I am all about earth and human justice. My bumper stickers read 'Immigrants Welcome' and peace spelled with the symbols of the world religions. I mean it. So what is happening here? Why so defensive, Laurance? Are not Palestinians and Israeli Arabs (no offence meant bundling them) living deprived of their independence and alien from their ancestral land? Are they not traumatized from birth, not their individual birth but from the biblical birth, the father of their nation rejected, tricked, shamed and cast out. Were they not cast out of Spain like us Jews, the Moriscos expelled a couple of years later? Were they not occupied by the Ottomans and the British, are they not stereotyped as a blood lusting jihadist mob, have they not been relegated to a fragmented land and a stifling city, in exile from a dream, under the authority of another?
There is a famous Sun Tzu saying (from the Art of War) - and we are at war - “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.” Arabs and Jews trail long shadows. Our stories of victimhood and survival are woven behind us for eons and often overlap. We both find good reason for shoring up the citadel, for lashing out and tearing down when the perceived threat comes within range. But how can I make sense of this and still keep my bumper stickers? This man, writing this blog. Do nations and states get emotional? Can knowing something about human nature be useful for decisions of armies, states, collectives?
I have dug into my frustration and anger, into my occasional lashing out. Not in relation to my identity as a Jew but rather as a stressed father, an invisible husband, a shamed employee. Underneath the rage and after the explosion, a tenderness reveals itself. The pointing finger circles back to me and the core emotion that I am left with is … sadness.
Digging down a little further, occasionally my reveal of sadness has been depression, stuck in a life where nothing has meaning. And on other occasions my reveal to sadness is anger, where everything has meaning and I am jolted into action. Could Jews and Arabs be acting out their deepest secret grief and sadness with the fire of fear and rage right now?
What I do know is when friend or stranger reveals her heart, and sadness or grief shows up, I am disarmed, I am drawn into our shared humanity, I feel privileged to be allowed to see them, I can do no harm.
What would our world look like, what would my Israel and Palestine look like if we had the courage to expose that underbelly of sadness to one another? I wonder. Perhaps that's what Sun Tzu meant when he wrote that “Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.”
The shadow I see in you, I see in me.
