Concerned friends want to know how I’m doing. Not because I’ve had a health crisis or a family crisis. Because I’m Jewish.
I appreciate their asking. They’re right to think Hamas’ wanton taking of lives and hostages on Oct. 7 was especially traumatic for their Jewish friends. And the more details that emerge, the more appalled I am at Hamas’ brutality.
But once Israel began to strike back, I was as bothered by the indiscriminate taking of Palestinian lives as I was by the indiscriminate taking of Jewish lives. Which to my way of thinking is as it should be.
It ought to be obvious that the taking of innocent lives is never justified. It ought to be obvious by now that our differences — racial, religious, ethnic, political — are superficial.
Yet our age is more obsessed with group identification than ever. Such self-sorting is understandable, to a degree. Members of the same “tribe,” however that’s defined, share frames of reference, ways of speaking, traditions, foodways, worldviews. Often, when I meet a fellow New York Jew, there’s a pleasurable shock of recognition and an instant rapport.
That sense of connection is particularly important when your group is a persecuted minority. Then there’s emotional support, a greater sense of safety, of being understood, of being “seen,” as it’s often expressed.
Such ties are lifelines, but I fear that an emphasis on what differentiates our group from other groups causes us to underappreciate the common humanity underlying those differences.
Though I don’t go to shul or believe there’s a God or keep kosher, Jewishness is a big part of my identity. But it’s still only a part.
I see us all as accidents of history. The same devout Christians who give out Bibles at the university gates would be just as fervently Hindu or Muslim if they’d been born in another part of the world. To grow up in any given culture is to be brainwashed, to an alarming degree.
We need to get past our grievances, however legitimate. As much as we talk about the importance of remembering, there may be times, as the anthropologist Lewis Hyde has written, when it’s more important to forget who did what to whom. We especially need to stop falling under the spell of narcissistic jerks who stoke our grudges and fears for their own political purposes.
I came away from my graduate studies in folklore with an appreciation both for cultural differences and the underlying unity of humanity. One way to think about it is that every culture addresses the fundamental problems of life in its own way, but that the fundamental problems of life are pretty much the same for all of us, so what we see when we compare cultures are variations on a theme.
Or as the Palestinian writer Mosab Abu Toha put it, echoing Shakespeare’s Shylock:
“Do they not know that we have the same number of eyes and ears, the same number of body parts? That we all came into this world after our mothers gave birth to us? That we laugh at the same jokes in different languages and curse when our favorite team loses? That we have fears and tears?”
To which I would add:
We all sing and dance.
We all play.
We all tell stories.
We all share meals.
We all mark the transitions from one stage of life to the next.
We all ponder the great questions Gauguin posed in one of his paintings: “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”
We all love.
We all celebrate.
And as Mosab Abu Toha says, we all grieve.
With that in mind, here are some quotes that have appeared in The New York Times since Oct. 7:
- “Bodies were burning.”
- “We are going to die.”
- “Please send help.”
- “The bullets were close, close, close.”
- “I’ve been traumatized since yesterday.”
- “I can’t sleep.”
- “We were sleeping, and all of a sudden the house was full of black smoke and window glass shattering over our bodies.”
- “I don’t know if he is dead or alive or if I will ever see him again.”
- “I want things to go back to how they were before Saturday morning.”
- “If he is still alive, how much longer can he survive?”
- “His wounds are grievous.”
- “They are treating us like stones.”
- “The bomb exploded a few hundred feet from where I was sitting.”
- “We were just one family, experiencing one terrifying close call.”
- “How many more families will be obliterated?”
- “How many children will be made orphans and homeless?”
- “Humanity is under the rubble.”
- “Dread grows inside me.”
- “Women and children from my extended family were killed.”
- “What will become of our collective humanity?”
Can you tell which quotes come from Israelis and which from the Palestinians?
I didn’t think so.
