My heart is breaking again. And again. I pray that in the broken openness I will find a way to stay open. I know the hearts of my people, the Jewish people, have been broken millions of times, and I know the hearts of the Palestinian people have been broken and continue to break at our hands. At the hands of Western Imperialism. It feels at this moment that trauma is swallowing us up whole.
In her book, A Map to the Door of No Return, Dionne Brand offers that diaspora is a door. My door, the door of the Jewish diaspora, seems like a revolving one. Smacking us directly from victim to oppressor. How utterly maddening, and uniquely confusing to be both the victim and also the face of Western Imperialism in the span of a few generations. Brand writes, “Our inheritance in the Diaspora is to live in this inexplicable space.”
Uncapturability. Uncapturable heartbreak.
In her Nobel lecture, Toni Morrison wrote, “There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering . . . memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination . . . arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.” I pray with the delicate and powerful and glorious language of Toni Morrison that our hearts do not calcify. That the Jewish people do not make a home in this Pharaoh trope. That amnesia does not make us the villains of history.
And what about the rest of the West? The nations who allegedly support genocide in the name of Jewish safety? The Christian Zionists who have eagerly used my people as their kingpen? The United States’ bankroll? Germany’s rigid pro-Israel agenda? What about their hypocrisy? And what about the gentile American left? To those who are too happy to see us die and did not allow us space to grieve. To those who are too relieved that our mess is not in their backyard. What about their amnesia? Their ancestors?
I refuse to succumb to any false monolith assuming what it means to be Jewish. I refuse to keep my grief silent or to have my grief weaponized in order to justify needless death. I refuse to close my heart.
I need a poem full of vitamins to give me the strength to remember we have always survived atrocities. When we thought the world was ending, it was true, many worlds were ending, and too many worlds have ended too soon, but a new world was also beginning.
Morrison continues, “Whose heaven, she wonders? And what kind?” Heaven is not created from colonialism. Heaven does not arrive through occupation. Heaven cannot come after genocide. “Our inheritance is an affront…how dare you talk to us of duty when we stand waist deep in the toxin of your past?” I read this and think of all the young Palestinians, Israelis and diaspora Jews who grew up under the shadow of the Nabka and the Holocaust. As an Ashkenazi Jew, Israel was never my promised land.
I fantasize about a time before the Holocaust, before we went to a land that wasn’t ours. I fantasize about the renaissance of Jewish artists who were blossoming in Vienna. I reach back to hold the hands of my ancestors in Hungary who left in the face of pogroms and landed in Milwaukee. In Vancouver. In Los Angeles. Is Los Angeles not already the Holy Land? And what about New York? We were never a country. The diaspora goes too deep. Let us free back into the diaspora again.
As an American Jew living on stolen land in the heart of the empire, I follow the brave leadership from Palestinians and Israelis on the front lines of the anti-occupation movement. I follow the brave Palestinians and Israelis who loudly oppose the horrific violence that guarantees no one’s safety. I pray for the possibility of safety and livelihood for all Palestinians, Israelis and diaspora Jews. Our oppression and liberation are entwined. Ceasefire now. Free everyone. In solidarity, Palestine will be free.