Last night I watched a heart-breaking Burlington City Council meeting in which the committee failed to pass a resolution calling for ceasefire in Gaza. First: I’ll name that I didn’t organize around this resolution. Strategically, my organizing is focused on a primary goal of getting our federal delegation to call for peace and withhold American tax money for violence, and second, on creating spiritual spaces for relationship and movement building outside of nationalism. (Though I appreciate that it takes all forms of organizing and narrative shifting to make change, so I am grateful for those who chose to spend their time this way.) But I think it’s worth paying attention to, as the public comment period offered a rare public dialogue space, in which unsettling ideas came to the fore in times two minutes speaking allowances.
Community members stated that while they support ‘peace’, calling for a ‘ceasefire’ is too divisive. Many rabbis in Burlington came forward to oppose the resolution, saying it was “a distraction” and again,“divisive.” I am troubled by this logic. How do we imagine peace begins? With steady bombing? We cannot move towards peace while children are starving, sick, and being killed, crushed under rubble. A basic fact, somehow harder to put into practice: in order to arrive at a different place than we are now, we have to do things differently.
I’m deeply troubled by the idea that to speak against violence is divisive. Or that conflict is so frightening, we can’t take any meaningful action at all. I’m longing for leadership that honors conflict as a necessary component of having integrity and speaking truth—that mahloket l’shem shemayim (disagreement for the sake of heaven) is holy work that we should lean into, not shy away from. Conflict can be generative and helpful.
I find myself longing anew for spiritual leadership that understands suffering as not a competition. Mourning the lives of the people lost in Israel is in no way in conflict with calling for a ceasefire and putting an end to the ongoing atrocities in Gaza (an idea that again came up at the City Council meeting on the resolution many times). I struggle with still having to clarify this point, but I draw endurance from elders I’ve seen at protests carrying signs that say “I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit.” Who does it honor to kill more children? How does this bring more safety? I see only further division, pain, and rifts as deep as a generation of children orphaned. I mourn every person’s life lost. I stay with my grief. I stay with the people hungry and sick and sleeping on the ground. I do not look away.
And critically— it happened rampantly last night in our own city council meeting: we must stop eliding support for Jewish people with support for any action by the state of Israel. We need to stop thinking nationalistically and start thinking humanistically. We need to be willing to speak truth beyond niceties. As we’ve seen following with mass shootings in our own country, “thoughts and prayers” don’t do it.
It turns out that being nice and being loving are radically different postures. Love is not passive; it is quite rigorous. Love requires that we leave the narratives we would prefer to cling to like safety blankets and face the reality of the world. Love requires once we see, we do something differently.
Many community members spoke at the meeting about feeling scared to go to synagogue as one reason why they opposed the resolution; others cited their terrible nightmares. All this testimony of feelings was offered as an argument for why to oppose a ceasefire resolution. Feelings and nightmares stem from real and valid trauma with which I honor and empathize. I, too, experience real fear when I leave my children in a Jewish preschool every day. I worked in a Jewish center when we were targeted with Nazi vandalism; I remember the real fear every time I heard someone enter the building. Antisemitism is truly on the rise, hand in hand with Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiments. When we tolerate hate and violence towards some, violence and hate become normalized and allowable, perhaps even state- sanctioned, and danger grows for everyone. It’s a dizzying cycle that makes all of us less safe. Instead of turning to some old story that gives carte blanche to a nation state to conduct unchecked violence against civilians, how might we turn instead towards solidarity with other humans, where we insist: we stand against violence, no matter who is doing it?
Feeling scared must not render us unable to take action for those who are getting shot on our streets. Who is literally getting shot in the streets of Burlington, Vermont? Palestinians.
Yet, even while many people seek to cling to the old ideas of safety, new leaders with more holistic understandings of solidarity and new ways of modeling activism are emerging. Just this morning, Andy Robinson, a board president (!) of a shul here in Vermont, authored this op-ed, articulating clearly how anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-Semitism. I am grateful for these new friends who are finding their voice and picking a new path through the woods together, realizing that staying quiet on the road we know will not keep us safe. I sense collective safety in the idea of a politic of love.
A politic of love is pacifist by nature. Violence will never beget peace. Dehumanization will never lead to reconciliation. (It bears saying that while I am focused on the profound murderous campaign in Gaza, because it is: 1) relentless and ongoing, and unspeakably atrocious, 2) paid for in large part by American tax dollars, while 3) being done in the name of keeping me as a Jew safe, I also denounce the horrible violence against innocent people living in Israel by Hamas, another incident of profound dehumanization. And even here locally in movement spaces: I call out any dehumanizing language when it creeps in to movement spaces through phrases like “Zionist pigs” that some people sloppily throw around. As we know, words lead to actions. No to dehumanization anywhere, yes to rigor and integrity in our values. We stay “ruthless to systems, kind to people.”)
I was recently on a nationwide organizing call on which Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (the only Palestinian- American rep in Congress) spoke. She asked us to imagine “ceasefire, comma.” She asked us to hold a vision of what comes after the ceasefire. Our goal cannot only be that bombs stop raining down on a majority- children population; that is a first step. What is the bigger vision, beyond the ceasefire?
The need for more bolder and more transformative vision is a repeat pattern across struggles. I work for a farming organization, where we work on food as a nexus of social and environmental justice. So often, in any movement work, we stand in a reactive position. This summer, Vermont experienced record flooding due to a changing climate, which had us scrambling, spending our time raising money just to make emergency grants merely to allow farmers to make it through the season. This is not transformative work -- this is harm reduction work.
The work we end up spending the vast majority of our time doing falls into the “reduce harm” category (a dairy farmer support bill after corporate consolidation completely abandoned these farmers; an effort to secure direct payments to farm workers when they were excluded from national covid-era support programs due to oppressive immigration law.) These goals are important. They are tactical steps we need to take to survive in the system as it is now. But they are not visionary nor transformative. We need to go upstream.
“Ceasefire” is a harm reduction goal. What is upstream from cease-fire? What is beyond it? We have to cultivate a vision that will take more than a lifetime to solve. These are the only questions worth asking.
Here are some of the questions I would like to spend at least my lifetime working on: -
what does a thriving peace look like, where people are not dehumanized no matter what side of a border wall they are born on?
how could we dissolve all borders and checkpoints?
How could we evolve beyond war, and solve issues through diplomacy and conversation?
How do we gather up all the guns and bombs to melt them down, to turn that metal into shovels for planting trees?
How do we begin to see our kinship not just to all humans, but to and with even in all non-human living beings in our world?
How could our economic systems shift to being about caring and thriving for all rather than extraction and profit for the few? (I’ve written before about how we might transition to an economy of care here.)
When we pull on one thread we start to see ‘the size of the cloth’ (Naomi Shihab Nye)—and how we all rest on the same foundation no matter what our work. After ceasefire, comma, the rigorous work of love.
Thank you for sharing. And thank
You for all you are doing in the name of peace.