protest
Often, at some point during high holy days services, someone sitting in the pews near me will turn around and compliment my singing voice. I am always flattered and embarrassed. The points of prayer is not to perform, and my voice is average-nice at best. Anyway, I’ve had some time to think about it, and increasingly I think that they’re responding less to actual vocal quality and more to the fact that I know the prayers, and that I sing them. That you can hear how much they mean to me when I do it.
Every time I go to a protest now we sing something: Oseh Shalom or Lo Yisa Goy, or sometimes just the simple refrain of ceasefire now. And I think about how many of the people who’ve given me those nice compliments would be horrified by the other things— Jewish things— that I choose to use my voice for.
This is not to say that all Jewish people are Zionists, only that many of us are, and especially many who belong to a temple, as I do. Our senior rabbi is in Israel at present; she sends regular email reports on things like the home cooking being done for Israel soldiers, so that they can eat well on the front lines. She does not mention what those soldiers do after they have eaten: mock the displaced, and celebrate the environmental and humanitarian destruction they wreak. Or shoot at starving people desperate to reach what little food is allowed into Gaza. Commit violence, and call it justice. Justice being done, apparently, on my behalf.
What Israel is doing and has done to the Palestinian people is an affront to me as a person, but particularly as a Jewish one. I will not be the first nor the last to observe that you cannot square the value of pikuach nefesh— that saving a life is sacred above all other duties— with the fact that Israel has now wantonly murdered nearly 30,000 people in Gaza, leaving another 70,000-some wounded and without access to adequate medical care. I went to a Jewish elementary school, and we had services twice a week, which gave me ample time to learn the prayers by heart. These are the obligations without measure whose reward too is without measure: To visit the sick. To console the bereaved. To make peace where there is strife.
I have been hungry for Jewish community ever since the morning of October 7. And also, I have never felt more alienated from most of the Jewish communities to which I belong.
So yesterday I drove across Los Angeles to Kamala Harris’ Brentwood mansion, to an event organized by a group called IfNotNow. When I got there, it was raining hard enough that rivers of water ran against the gutters, tumbling downhill to the intersection where we gathered. Fifteen, maybe twenty people: a shift of parents and children leaving, a shift of healthcare workers coming in. I am neither, but that was the time I had, so that was the time I came.
Organizers spoke into a megaphone covered in a ripped-up trash bag. People took turns sitting on rain-soaked shiva benches. We placed rocks on the ground as if it was a gravestone: to mark our mourning, and also our place. And finally, finally, I got to say kaddish. Kaddish is the Jewish prayer for the dead. I have never mourned without it, and it was a relief to give myself over to the ritual. Yitgadal v’yitgadash shmei rabah. This is what I do when I am heartsick and heartbroken. And I am heartsick, and I am heartbroken.
Afterwards I got into my car, and it was so dry and so warm. I had put a chocolate chip cookie in a Ziploc bag before I left the house, not thinking about it particularly, or thinking only that navigating LA in the rain could take hours, and I wanted to have a snack with me for the crossing. It didn’t occur to me until I was almost done eating it that I was enacting another funeral ritual: following devastation with the taste of something sweet. Reminding my body that it was alive, and could be blessed by pleasure, too.
But then, I think, of course I did. I was raised Jewish. Our beliefs and rituals are in my bones down to the marrow. Many people think what I did yesterday separates me from the tribe, and maybe they're right, but not in any way that matters to me. My Jewishness lives in my blood, and my body knows how to find it every time: in gathering in community, and a little sugar after standing in the rain. In able to raise my voice whenever I want to: in prayer and in mourning, in solidarity and song.
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