The path forward

August 30, 2024

Part 1: Setting the scene

The school year is upon us and with it, one of the most fundamental questions of childhood: What should you do when someone throws sand at you? 

Picture being on the playground. Maybe you’re 5 or 6 and it’s a nice day in the sandbox but then something turns and another kid gives you a solid fist-full of sand in your face. 

What do you do?

You may have been taught to brush the sand off. Appear calm and collected. 

You may have been taught to throw sand back. Appear strong and not-to-be-messed with. 

Even now, with all the maturity of an adult, we may not know the right reaction. What should a child do when another child throws sand at her?

This essential question of childhood, unsurprisingly, follows us our whole lives. 

How do you respond to harm? 

Do you cry? Yell? Storm out? Never talk to that person again? Retaliate?

Part 2: Why did it happen?

Maybe you’re wondering an important question: hold on, why did this kid throw sand at me in the first place?

The context here is everything. Maybe you threw sand at her last week. Maybe you ruined her sand castle when you running around. Maybe you didn’t do anything and she learned to throw sand from her older sibling. Maybe you’ve been bossing her around all year and she’s finally fed up with it. There are a lot of possibilities. 

At this moment in time, you can’t change any of that. The moment we are in is now. The post-context and the post-getting-sand-thrown-at-you. 

Part 3: Trusting the anger 

It’s taken me a while to trust my knee jerk reaction to harm. 

To trust that the urge to fight back is actually healthy, necessary, and protective. 

Not violent or irresponsible. 

Being angry is actually listening to myself and trusting that something was wrong if it felt wrong. 

I have a right to fight back. Full stop. 

So let’s just say you follow that instinct: you throw sand back. 

Amazing, you feel vindicated! Powerful! Justified!! 

But you also feel something else. 

Things feel worse than they were before. 

Maybe you feel dissonance: like your actions feel out of touch with who you are as a person, even though they also felt right. 

Part 4: Resolve this

From what I can tell, my knee jerk response needs to be validated. Yes, I know you want to fight back and that’s really fair… But maybe there’s another way. 

If we choose to go deeper than this instinctual response, we might just realize that desire healing more than we desire revenge. 

Part 5: What we’ve been taught

As Jewish people we have been taught that our only option is to appear strong. Strong against the weakness put forth by antisemitism. 

We were told our only option is not only to fight back but to start the fight. To be the aggressor, the oocupier, the oppressor. 

But we are here because know that there is another way. 

In fact, we are here because we know that the other way is the only way forward. Instead of around and around in circles.

Part 6: Dissonance

I want to return to that moment of dissonance. The dissonance that comes from reacting in a way that feeds the revenge instinct but ignores the deeper desire to heal. 

There is a glimmer of something core happening in this moment. It is a glimmer of: who am I?

If you come to think of yourself as a bully, perhaps you no longer feel any dissonance. Your identity shifts to reflect your violence. For this kind of a mindset, for Israel, there will never be safety and there will never be healing.

In our Bay Area Jewish context, we see something a little different. Communities and institutions who seem to be throwing sand without really knowing why. They stand, confused, full of dissonance, unsure of why they are doing a bad thing but not able to stop. 

We are tired of this lack of integrity, although we are not surprised. 

This moment demands something different from our Jewish spiritual lives. The dissonance has become so loud it is ear-shattering. 

We must recognize the harm that has been done to Jewish people, historically and recently. And we must even recognize the instinct to do more harm. 

But in that fraction of a moment, we must look within. 

Ask: Who do we want to be? How can we be those people? What does healing mean? How do we do the right thing? The true ethical questions of our lives. 

These questions are not easy to answer. I know that each of us are doing our best to answer them every day. 

Part 7: We need torah

I am here on Shabbat in this holy space to remind myself and all of us that we must not do this without our tradition. 

We need to reach deep into our connectedness to source the kind of moral integrity, strength, and clarity this moment requires. 

We need a profound depth of community to maintain vision in such a moment. 

We must not only reclaim but re-trust in our Jewish wisdom which has always sought to realize moral alignment, profound liberation, love for one another, and a rhythmic relationship with time ritual. 

Trusting that pausing for Shabbat will expand that fraction of a moment into a day to look within, look around, and know that we are held on this planet. Before we decide how to move forward. 

This is what choosing another way looks like.  

The scale of healing needed has never felt bigger. 

But we can heal and we will. 

It is the only path forward.

Even a child could tell us that.