May 6, 2024
Light
I have a file in my head I’ve started calling the “Really Important to Understand Even if (ESPECIALLY IF?) You Don’t Agree” file, and the latest addition to it is Zadie Smith’s New Yorker essay “Shibboleth.” It joins Naomi Klein’s “We Need an Exodus from Zionism,” a speech she made in New York City last month at a Seder during Passover, and the essay “Resigned,” by Dashka Slater, which I think was the piece that started it all. Someone I admire a lot posted that essay, and the weird thing about that was the people who reacted to it with comments like, “This!” and “So good,” which didn’t seem entirely to be in keeping with the spirit of the piece, but maybe I just think that because of the parts of the piece that I didn’t agree with. And certainly I’ve posted similar responses to other things often in my time, particularly during the years when I was very on Twitter, and I have a visceral recollection of the relief of finally having someone articulate a reasonable point of view when everybody else seems to be infected with some kind of mania or fever dream, all those posts that felt like a lone thing to cling to in a chaotic world. THIS. THIS. But that kind of certainty isn’t what that I’m craving anymore.
Today, a bunch of people I really like on Facebook are sharing a piece called “50 Completely True Things,” a pretty unobjectionable piece (I might even comment, “This!”) but what bothers me about it and really makes me feel for its author, mo husseini (a Palestinian-American, who clearly is caught in a bind here and has issues that I can definitely relate to about people-pleasing and feeling like he’s required to mediate conflicts that he’s in no way I provoked [I’m not saying it’s the same, but I once published a literary anthology in an attempt to mediate The Mommy Wars]) is this requirement for unobjectionableness. (Not unrelated, but also in my file: Roxane Gay’s “The Age of the Open Letter Should End.”) The idea that such a thing is even possible.
It’s been a weird time, during which I’ve been admonished by people I don’t respect very much for both being an enemy of the Jewish people AND aiding and abetting Palestinian genocide with my silence. And funnily enough, people scolding me, yelling at me, or trying to shame me have not done a lot to enhance my point of view, and I’ve given up altogether at trying to persuade other people by doing the same, not just because the tactic is so ineffective, but also because I’ve become vehemently opposed to righteousness and self-righteousness, want nothing to do with either.
I keep thinking of that line from a book I read two weeks ago: “Wisdom is valuable. But the ability to find understanding is a gift that all creation enjoys… In some ways, you can think of wisdom of light. But it is understanding that carries the light. Understanding is what wisdom travels through.” (The author is Michael Hutchison, and it’s a line of dialogue delivered by a Cree Elder.)
Understanding carries the light. I don’t want to to change your point of view, but I seek to understand it, and I want you understand mine too, even if those points of view are different. ESPECIALLY if those points of view are different. There is room enough for complexity, and nuance, and I hope that with the light that comes with understanding, we can all feel braver and more secure, less defensive and afraid, that light not a beacon in the distance, but instead a shine that lights up everyone, everywhere. A kind of common ground.
