Fall and the Samain Moon
Sunday gratefuls: My boy. A sweet man. Seoah in her cream outfit. Murdoch looking happy and fit. Zoom for the far away, a real gift of technology. Israel. Hamas. Hezbollah. Lebanon. Egypt. Iran. Saudi Arabia. Shiites and Sunnis. Jews and Christians. War. Jus in bello. Divided nations. A world on the brink of too much. Fighting. Warming. Fear mongering. Hatred. Let’s turn it around, make it a world overflowing with too much love. Blinken. Biden. Thousand and One Nights. Bereshit. A dawn coming.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Love
One brief shining: Those photographs burned out cars, children being carried into a Gaza hospital, the bloodied sheets in a kibbutz home, tanks cranking forward, bodies of Israeli’s and terrorists held in bags, missiles painting the air with white trails, and I sit here on Shadow Mountain watching the sun outline Black Mountain for another morning, a new day, a new life, another chance to live and love.
Sadness. Grief. For all of us. For Israelis and Palestinians. For the oh too delicate fabric of order, a thin veil now in the Middle East. What happens if Ukraine and the Middle East stay in conflict for weeks, months, years? How thin will that same veil become not only in the Middle East but in Europe, in the Far East? How long will it take for the veil to turn into a shroud? These are dangerous, dangerous times not only for those poor folks in Israel and Gaza and Kyiv, but for all of us.
What are the steps toward a world at war? Are we seeing them right now? With Russia and China standing with the Arab countries, against the Ukrainians? The world order, new or old, always bears the potential for large scale conflict.
Talked with my boy last night. Thank god he’s in a nation at war, but one with an armistice in place and a relatively calm current situation. Strange to think of Korea and the Far East as a safer place right now, but it is. Could change of course. And, in a moment, like Israel, but that seems unlikely.
As to my conversion. Which will not happen in Jerusalem this Samain. Made more real, more certain, more actual in spite of no ritual by the sudden immersion in what it means to be a Jew in the Middle East. And in the U.S., Europe. In an existential way new to me I feel the buzzing, blooming confusion of anti-semitism engaged by other Semites. Of the desire for a safe haven after the horrors of the holocaust so often challenged by vandalism, by speech, by acts of violence, by murder, by terrorists. This is not the first war Israel has fought. Nor, I’m sure, will it be the last.
What is new to me is not the moral bifurcation of Israel as victim and Israel as occupier, oppressor. No, that bifurcation a source of tension and uncertainty has existed since 1948 and the formation of the nation. What is new to me is the recognition that anti-semitism will not just die away with that political solution or that military intervention or that expression of good will. Which makes me see Israel’s defense of itself in a different light, a burden of strength in a world that still wants to kill Jews, does kill Jews for being Jews. How can it be both a bulwark against anti-semitism and a peaceful neighbor to folks who want to see it erased from the world map? No. Easy. Answers.
