The Pain of Inflicting Pain
Grayson expressing darkness through movement at our Windsor Terrace branch.
Dear friends,
At our Shabbat/Hanukkah concert last week I described how my father has been making us all nervous by insisting on spending some nights in Palestinian villages in the West Bank that are threatened by extremist Jewish settlers. He has been working with Ta’ayush: Jewish Arab Partnership for Peace for decades to work against the settlers’ attempt to ethnically cleanse certain parts of Area C, which makes up much of the Palestinian Authority. Usually this involves simply being there, since a Jewish presence tends to restrain the settlers. As soon as the war began, the settlers upped their antics and as a result several of those villages were abandoned. The activists sprang into action and have been taking shifts sleeping in some of the villages to help them withstand settler violence. Spending time there is not without risk. And yet, during this war, the only times in which my father has been at peace were those nights spent taking a shift in one of the villages.
He doesn’t explain exactly why this sense of peace manifests there, but I suspect that it has to do with what might be called “doing the right thing.” It is a way for the activists to get beyond all of the complicated questions of justice, self-defense, nationality, and touch upon a simpler driving ethic: people should be allowed to live peacefully.
This war has created an internal rift in every Israeli, and in most Jews around the world as well. We want to live by this simpler ethic, and yet virtually all Jewish Israelis and most Jews world-wide support the war to uproot Hamas, which has thus far claimed the lives of 18,787 Gazans, most of whom were not Hamas fighters. Tens of thousands more have been wounded. Hundreds of thousands have lost their homes for good. Millions are traumatized, trying to survive moving from place to place, living in tents that can’t stop the rain, with little to no food or clean water. No matter our reasoning, no matter whose fault we think this is, no matter our position on the war, we are living with the knowledge that we are inflicting tremendous pain on the people of Gaza. We are living the agony of that deep dissonance between who we want to be and what we are doing. This has been the story of the State of Israel from day one.
Receiving pain is worse. But inflicting pain is also incredibly painful.
Israeli media is incredibly sparse on news about Gazans. One of the reasons for this is that it is too painful to them to take that information in. They’re still processing the trauma of October 7th, and everyone has friends or family in the army, and they keep having to run to the bomb shelter, so taking in the details of a massive civilian catastrophe is beyond their capacities.
When I was at synagogue in Jerusalem two weeks ago, the rabbi spoke about Jacob’s great fear before returning to the land of Israel to meet his brother Esau, whom he had wronged two decades earlier. The Torah tells us twice that Jacob was afraid: one, says Rashi, denotes his fear of being killed. The other his fear of killing. He’s equally terrified of receiving and of inflicting harm, perhaps because he knows that when you inflict harm you have two options: acknowledge what you’ve done and suffer through a painful Teshuvah, or, more likely, deny it and live a compromised, angrier life.
This anger, fueled by the denial of harm you caused is one of the final things Jacob speaks to before he dies. On his deathbed he addresses each of his children. When he comes to Shimon and Levi, we learn that of his entire life, the one thing Jacob is most ashamed of is his sons’ “honor killing” of the sons of Shechem, when the two brothers brutally murdered an entire village in response to their sister’s rape. When explaining Jacob’s words at his deathbed, Rashi ties that vengeful act with the terrible deed of selling their brother Joseph into slavery.
“Shimon and Levi are brothers,” says Jacob, and Rashi explains: “brothers in the plot against Shechem and against Joseph.”
Rashi’s suggestion is that Shimon and Levi’s role in getting rid of Joseph led them, through denial and escaping accountability to an anger that drove them to commit murder.
אָר֤וּר אַפָּם֙ כִּ֣י עָ֔ז וְעֶבְרָתָ֖ם כִּ֣י קָשָׁ֑תָה
"Cursed be their anger so fierce,
And their wrath so relentless,"
Says their dying father.
On Monday evening my father will be giving a talk in New York about the situation in the West Bank, and the work of Israeli-Palestinian activist groups like Ta’ayush there. You’re all invited, sign up HERE. His work there is the work of seeing with your own eyes the suffering inflicted by Jews, and acting to prevent and repair it. It is the work of beginning to address the harm that Israel is causing to Palestinians, and to our aching Jewish hearts. If we stand a chance at making it all work over there, it might begin on Monday evening.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha