CITIES OF SLAUGHTER

SERMON - Shabbat after Hamas Massacre  October 13, 2023

From Cities of Slaughter, Hayim Nachman Bialik:

Rise and go to the cities of the slaughter and you’ll come to the yards

And with you eyes and your own had feel the fence

And on the trees and on the stones and plaster of the walls

The congealed blood and hardened gore of the dead. 

And you’ll come from there to the ruins and stop before the destroyed homes

And pass by the pierced walls and shattered ovens

Where the axe’s head bit deep, to burst and deepen holes

Baring the black stone and shears of brick all burned

And they’ll look like the open mouths of black and mortal wounds

That have no remedy, that have no cure…

And from all the dark holes and the shadows in the destruction

Eyes, see them eyes silently watch. 

Ghosts of the murdered they are, bent and desolate

To one corner under a roof they are crammed, and they too keep silent…

Here the axe found them and to this place they come

To stamp here the look of their eyes in that last moment,

All the sorrow of their pointless death and all the curse of their lives

And they cling here together, trembling and terrified, and from where they hid

Silently raise their eyes to protest their disgrace and ask: why? 

And who is like God on earth and can bear this in silence? 

And who is like God on earth and can bear this in silence?  

This poem was written by Bialik immediately after the Kishinev Pogrom in 1903, the pogrom that led to many of our grandparents and great grandparents leaving Eastern Europe to come to America.   

And who is like God on earth and can bear this in silence? 

How can we bear this in silence?  What a toll that takes on Jewish hearts and spirits.  It takes great effort to act like you are ok, to be cordial, to answer annoying phone calls politely, to enter data, or see patients.  Or write sermons.  

The recent pogrom, the massacre in Israel, is so brutal, and so horrifying, that I couldn’t find words to express it and so I relied on Bialik.  How do we hold this?  We should not have to go through this over and over and over, generation after generation, century after century, millennium after millennium.  It is so hard to be part of such a beautiful, powerful tradition and a resilient, brilliant people and be hated so violently for it.  It takes a toll and as angry as I am, and as worried as I am, I wanted first to simply acknowledge the maddening grief, the loss from what has happened.  

We are a small people, and half of us live in Israel, so when an attack like this happens, we feel it in our bodies. The scenes we have been flooded with bring us back to the pogrom Bialik was writing about, or even more, the brutality of Nazis toward us.   

Then, when we hear the voices of people around you celebrating it, or justifying it, or saying you deserved it, organizing rallies and protests that support what just happened to you, it brings up the worst memories from our past: when the people around you that you thought were friends and allies start to turn on you, or almost worse: say nothing.  

When I met with the teens this week, several of them said that it was weird that nothing was being said to them from teachers or at assembly, when they usually do when something like this happens.  It is surreal that people around you go on as usual while your world is being turned upside down. 

Bialik continues in his poem: 

…and you ask the spiders;

They are living witnesses, on the scene, they’ll tell you all the facts;…

The Spider tells you things that poke holes in the brain and are enough to kill your spirit and your soul to an eternal death  

And you refrain and stifle in your throat the scream

And bury it in the depths of your heart before it breaks

And you leap from there and go out- and here the earth is as it is every day,

And the sun like the day before yesterday throws its light to the earth. 

In the Torah, we read about the Amalekites who attacked Israel from the rear, killing the sick, the old, the children. The Torah tells us that we must wipe out their memory, which we do in a humorous way on Purim. But the Torah was joking: the ancient codes of justice required wiping out the Amalekites in every generation.  

As modern people, who have lived through genocide, we know that wiping any people out is unconscionable, but these days, I have had moments where emotionally, I understood exactly what the Torah was saying.  

We try to live in the “better angels of our nature,” but we have many angels in our nature and some of them are rageful and want justice and revenge.   If we don’t acknowledge those feelings, they will come out somewhere. 

Rabbi Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev, the Kedushat Levi, a Hasidic master in the late 1700’s, wrote, 

“Not only are Jews commanded to wipe out Amalek, who is the descendant of Esau, but each Jew has to wipe out that negative part that is called Amalek hidden in her heart. So long as the descendants of Amalek are in the world – and each of us is also an "Olam Katan", a small world, so when the power of evil in each of us arises (that which leads us to sin) Amalek is still in the world – the reminder (to wipe out Amalek) calls out from the Torah.”

In other words, the seed of Amalek, of inhumanity, of brutality, is in each of us and we have to do our own work to try and temper that impulse toward violence and revenge, but first we must recognize that it is there, and this week, I found it hard to ignore the Amalek within.  

But sadly, Amalek doesn’t only live within us. There are really brutal people in the world that don’t see us as human beings, that see us as vermin, whether the word they use is vermin, Jewish-dog, Zionist, colonizer or occupier. We want so badly to believe that people aren’t really like that anymore but they are. We read it every Passover: 

V'hi she’amda v’hi she’amda    For not just one enemy has risen against us to destroy us, but in every generation someone they rise up to destroy us but the Holy One saves us from their hands.  

And after the Holocaust, we know that sometimes nothing saves us, and we have to save ourselves, which is one of the reasons Israel is so important to us and the attack on it feels so existentially threatening. 

And like at Passover when we take drops of wine out of our cups, we are angry but also deeply conflicted about what is unfolding in Gaza.  One can understand why Israel must do what it is doing if it wants to eradicate Hamas or at least make it highly unlikely  that another attack like this will happen in the future, with them hiding arms in mosques, hospitals and UN schools, and tunnels with arms for 20,000 fighters, including advanced weapons from Iran.  One can understand it - and support it - but also be horrified by it.   

Living with grief, fear, and anger, while living with heartbreak at the consequences of protecting our people is a lot of dissonance for anyone or any community to hold at once.  And that is on top of the trauma we carry that gets triggered when these attacks happen and when there is a noticeable silence from people and groups that we would have spoken up for, we would have called if the same thing had happened to them. As Martin Luther King said :

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

So where can we find solace and comfort? 

In this community, and with our Jewish friends and family.  It keeps us sane to know that we aren’t the only ones feeling what we are feeling and to talk to mishpacha.  I know that during the last Gaza War, I was in India and seeing the Jew-hatred going across my social media feed, I was a mess.  I lost friend after friend, got unfriended by people I had known and been an activist with for decades, and I felt like maybe I was losing my grip.   Here, and at the Hillel vigil last night, it was so important that people could share stories and know that we are not alone.  

Another source of comfort and grounding is spirituality.  While I believe that equanimity at a time like this is immoral, I don’t think it helps any of us or the world for us to feel unmoored and freaked out.  Prayer, meditation, walks in nature are all crucial to reminding us that the world is good, we are good, and that this too shall pass.   As the Psalm said, feeling held by God when we are rejected by humans is a great comfort. 

And finally, it is healing to act instead of stew.  It is a great relief to speak up, or to organize a rally, or to write letters, or organize teach-ins or meet with your school principals.  While we can’t change what is happening there, the American Jewish Community does have agency and power and this is a time to use it.  Let’s not give in to defeatism.   Israel shouldn’t have survived but it did.  We should not still be here, but we are.   Jews of all people know that history takes many turns and we don’t know what the outcomes of this will be, but we do know our silence, our fear will not protect us.  

Judaism is a tradition of both prayer and action.  It is a tradition with much experience with wars, suffering, and massive changes in society.  This is a time to choose to hide or stand up, to slink away from the community as so many have in the past, or reach your arms around this community. 

I pray you will take care of yourself by taking care of your community.  Am Yisrael Chai