Continuing Her Way
Dear friends,
Late one night, Rabbi Israel Salanter walked past the rickety shack of an old shoemaker. The rabbi noticed that, despite the late hour, the man was still working by the light of a dying candle.
“Why are you still working?” asked the rabbi. “It is very late and soon that candle will go out.”
The shoemaker replied: “As long as the candle is still burning, it is still possible to make repairs.”
The rabbi went out into the street and yelled out over and over: “As long as the candle is still burning, it is still possible to make repairs!”
This is one of the many stories shared at the funeral of Canadian Israeli peacemaker and activist, Vivian Silver, who was murdered on October 7th in her home in Kibbutz Be’eri.
Vivian’s funeral itself, which you can watch HERE was such a candle. It was filled with a profound sentiment of continuing her work, and spreading her ideas far and wide, even as we mourn the death of the Tzadeket, or righteous woman that she was.
Her son, Yonatan said in recent interviews that “I now have her optimism. It feels like a relay race; she passed something onto me.”
Like any funeral, this one reminds us of the tremendous devastation of the loss of a life. Her children spoke. Her brother. Her friends. That simplicity echoed the clarity of her words from 2018 : “Enough! We cannot continue without a diplomatic horizon. We cannot accept as routine operations and wars that bring only killing, destruction and pain.”
It was especially moving to hear Vivian’s Palestinian friends and partners commit themselves to continue her path with even greater urgency. Some were from the organization she co-founded, Women Wage Peace. Others were friends from neighboring Palestinian villages that Vivian worked to support. One of the women, Radir Hani said through her tears: “Vivian, I want you to know that Hamas did not murder your vision. It is impossible to kill compassion, humanness, solidarity, the striving toward a safe life.”
And it was incredible to hear this extraordinary woman’s life story, coming from Winnipeg to New York to Kibbutz Gezer to Kibbutz Be’eri, tirelessly working to promote women’s equality, human equality and friendship.
Often our instinct is to shy away from difficulty, from hard conversations, from unpopular positions. If we are to take up the mantle of a person like Vivian we would do the opposite. This is a woman who lived in the most dangerous part of one of the most dangerous countries in the world. The safe room in her house was well used. She spoke of the need for peace out of a place of danger and intimacy with the problems the lack of peace deepened and produced.
Vivian came to Israel out of a deep belief in Zionism, which like many Israeli humanists was seriously challenged over the decades of occupation and political inaction. The full-throated Zionism that led her to make Aliyah in the Seventies was replaced with what she called Conditional Zionism. “I believe in the right of the Jewish people to have a state, as long as we give the same right to the Palestinian people,” she said. If Zionism necessitates subjugation, oppression and any form of inequality, Vivian tells us, she - who devoted her life to it - was not interested in it. I wonder whether she believed that out of a moral standpoint or a practical one. Did she say that because her Jewish and humanist values demanded that, or simply because she saw clearly that a Zionism that prevents Palestinian freedom and dignity does not allow Jews to live there safely? Probably both.
This terrible tragedy, which goes along with so many other tragic deaths and kidnappings of peace activists on both sides of the fence separating Gaza and Israel, calls on us to dive into the fray. I thought of Vivian during my trip to DC this week to march among hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom didn’t seem to share my views. I took courage from her as I held up my double sided sign: "End the cycle of violence" on one side, "The occupation is killing us all" on the other. I thought of her when I heard a report from a friend from the ceasefire march in Brooklyn last week, who said she felt comfortable speaking Hebrew in the presence of the mostly Arab marchers. Despite fearing she would be in a crowd of people who see her as the enemy, she went to stand for what she believed in. If we want to find peace between Jews of different opinions, between Jews and non-Jews here in the US, which we know has to do with what happens in Israel/Palestine, and even more so if we want to move toward peace in the Holy Land, we have to engage. We have to suffer discomfort. We have to imagine peace and enact it in our circles.
“This could be such a haven to both of our people here,” Vivian said recently, “I know what life could be like if we put down our arms.” Revenge, in the case of Vivian Silver looks like giving our all for the sake of peace. Let’s keep that candle burning.
Please join us for a virtual Shabbat gathering this evening at 6:30pm with meditation led by Michael Posnick and music by Ellen Gould.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha