May this year bring the changes we all seek to make the world more fair, more humane, more sustainable and healthier.
I was thinking how I knew EXACTLY where I was sitting and what I was eating and who was in the room at the start of another New Year: The Jewish New Year of 1973 when the Yom Kippur war broke out. My grandfather was with us and we were all in the kitchen and I was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which is often what parents who are fasting feed kids, who do not fast, on Yom Kippur. I remember my parents and grandfather’s anxiety. I don’t really remember anyone taking the time to explain what was happening to me. It was just assumed I would pick it up from their conversations. I was 10 at the time. I think my brother, who would have been 13 was outside with friends because I don’t have a recollection of him being in the kitchen.
Later I was sitting in that same spot in the kitchen having dinner when I found myself debating my father about the Palestinian youth who were throwing stones. I was trying to get him to see that maybe the young men were throwing stones because they were oppressed (although I am suspect I did not use that word back then). I was in college and my brother had brought the women who would become his wife to meet us for the first time. We had only just met this woman but she felt emboldened to interject into the debate I was having with my father and said, “Jill does Judaism mean anything to you at all?” Hard to believe but she rendered my very chatty mother, my father and me speechless. Later we would wonder how a stranger could ask something so personal like that, especially in front of potential in-laws. My mother used to tell me that it was at that moment she knew her relationship with this woman, who my brother loved, was not going to be easy. And it wasn’t. And the same can be said of my relationship with her.
I was not a particularly political student. But something about Zionism and the Palestinians did not sit right with me. It is insane that it took me 40 years to learn about the Nabka or about the Massacres by Israeli Zionists in the mid-20th century. I was told a mythology about the creation of Israel that had nothing to do with the reality. Then again it meshes with the lies we were told about plastic, climate change, automobiles, mass produced food, pesticides and capitalism. The lies that end up serving a few while harming the masses. Some of my feeling despondent these days relates to feelings of betrayal by teachers, clergy, parents and those in authority who knew but did not feel compelled to speak out. It is the quiet acquiescence that ends up being dangerous.
And so as I enter the new year thinking about my art, feelings of abandonment as I see friends and family take positions I feel are abhorrent on issues I am passionate about, I am trying to find peace with the fact that I can not change people and grow my confidence in what I know is right. I must be like Greta and Mrs Rachel and not be afraid to speak out and stand up.
