October 3, 2024
The Possibility of Sweetness
It’s been almost a year now since unimaginable horror was unleashed, and members of my community put up different flags in response, divisions calcified. “I’ve already lost friends to this, and I’m not afraid to lose another,” somebody warned me on Facebook a few weeks later, and thankfully this person wasn’t actually my friend, see you later, but their comment made me reflect about how I want to respond in this moment that has stretched into a near-unbearable year. A year in which people have celebrated and/or shrugged indifferently at massacre and murder, extremism begetting extremism, monstrous disregard for human life, for international law, for the world order. I have seen photos of pieces of children. I have seen photos of pieces of children. I have seen. And I have felt discomfort with my reluctance to not stand with. I’ve felt conflicted about my decision to sign no open letters. I’ve been implored to be sure I’m on the right side of history, to perform it, but history has never been as tidy as that, and neither have I, and what I’ve really felt is that anything I do in such a wretchedly divided world to deepen divisions in my own community is to take a terrible thing and make it even worse, although making a terrible thing worse does seem to have been the main response of anyone with meaningful power at every turn this year, seizing the opportunity for hardening, hatred, and the impossibility for any other story.
It’s just that when I see peoples pitted against either, the endless human story, a thing I’ve never thought is, “We sure need more of that.” A line I can’t stop thinking about: “Both sides brought large speaker systems and screamed duelling chants at each other.” I don’t want to be part of that. I can’t be hard and resolute, not with my friends. Not with my neighbours. Which is not the same as making nice just to get along. Annoyingly, I can argue with every side of this issue, AND I HAVE, except maybe the side that declares that all human life is precious (every one a universe) and that if your politics is turning people into refugees, you’re doing it wrong.
This morning I saw a post from a journalist explaining that during the Jewish High Holidays, checkpoints are closed in the West Bank, which means that the people who live there are effectively under a curfew for three days. And I think of those people as I eat my apple and honey cake, the cake I bake every year because I am culinarily impressionable, and also because I enjoy celebrating a new year (which is to say: POSSIBILITY) anywhere I can, whether it be Persian, Lunar, Jewish. I think of people I admire (many of them Jewish) who have spent this year showing up for Palestinian freedom in loud, powerful and necessary ways. I think of my Jewish friends who have shown up in ways that are quieter and more personal, but no less essential. I think of everybody who has spent the past year with an aching heart, with a voice that’s sore from screaming, whose well of empathy has not yet run dry, all those people who can hold space for the mess of experience and reality and so many awful feelings.
A new year means faith, and hope, the possibility of sweetness.
I believe in this. I believe in us.
