Shabbat Va'yishlach 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below.
Iryna is the Ukrainian lady who lives with her husband and 3 children in the family home my father-in-law vacated to give them a new chance in life when war broke out in Ukraine. They are doing brilliantly in terms of building their lives here. Both she and her husband are working, their two sons are doing fantastically at school and their daughter who arrived just months before she started in reception has such good English now that when she is playing by herself she defaults to speaking to her toys in English, having arrived with not a word.
A few weeks ago, Iryna left her husband and kids here for a few days and headed back to Ukraine for a visit. She was desperate to see her parents and siblings and as they had left their home in such a hurry she had the luxury of being able to go back, pick up some more of their things and tie up some loose ends which seem unimaginable to someone like me who lives two miles from my childhood home and only lives through wars through the protection of a TV screen and the pages of newspapers. When she got back to London I asked her how her trip had been, “how were your parents?” her words keep coming back to me, “the scariest thing is that they’ve started to think it’s normal. Their lives aren’t normal. They are living through hell but the awful thing is that they now think it’s normal and I find it unimaginable to return to.”
How quickly we do it, we normalise the unimaginably painful. Last Friday seems like a lifetime ago, the news playing out in my office as I waited poised to see if hostages would be released. The first videos of children running into the arms of their parents brought me to tears again and again and then we waited for the news in a different way, in an expectant, entitled way, day after day, night after night, knowing this is how it works, whose turn would it be? Maybe this week is even harder because we normalised the release then and now what? How can there still be so many still there? Are they alive or dead? Are they in the hands of Hamas or do they no longer even know? The mind-games are the evil element of power? How can time keep marching on, life continue with yet another Shabbat, another working week when those faces which we have come to recognise have not had their ceremonial pictures in the back of a red cross vehicle, in the corridors of an Israeli hospital, in the arms of their loved one? We can recount it, it’s no less beautiful now we’ve made it feel normal, but it is horrifying that it can become what we expect in just a couple of days.
The bombing and destruction of Gaza has resumed and all too quickly the images seem familiar. We’ve seen the destruction, the fear, the people fleeing from one tightly packed corner of the Gaza strip to the next. The problem with familiar is our hearts get hardened to it and when it stops causing us to question it, to mourn for their losses too we start to lose our humanity.
We cannot live permanently in the depths of fear, trauma or horror. Just like the people of Ukraine, the residents of Israel have to find a way of normalising their lives to keep living, to keep caring for their children, working to keep the economy alive and food on their tables, they have to find a way to get up in the morning knowing their husbands, sons, brothers and sisters are fighting in Gaza. So they try the business as normal approach but with strained, fraught interactions. With tears over spilt cereal because it's easier to be cross with your children, cross that your husband isn’t there to help clean up the mess, than it is to acknowledge where he is and what the tears rolling down your face are really all about. So the children who only ten minutes ago had normalised an isolated covid life and five minutes ago had normalised the run to bomb shelters and safe rooms are now normalising life in this “in it for the long haul” life at war existence of the Ukrainians, who we’ve normalised it on behalf of to the extent that they’ve dropped out of the headlines.
Yet I am left wondering what happens when we get numb to it, when we let it become part of life, part of who we are. We stop focusing on what could be, on the “what next”. We maintain a difficult narrative as if it is the only way, as this is how it is and therefore how it always will be.
I was struck by the difference in mine and Freddie’s take on the image in his Torah portion. I see two brothers who have been seething for more than 20 years. Hating each other, resenting each other, coming together still filled with the negativity they have been carrying for decades. I’ve normalised the hate and can’t see an option to kiss and make up. Filled with anger and sadness one last act of pain through the tears of anger and hate and then they never see each other again. Freddie refused to see it like that. Why? Because it’s luckily still unimaginable to him to carry that kind of hatred for someone for all those years, a youthful optimism that people change. I on the other hand know that people carry the narratives they have normalised. Family broigeses, broken relationships and assumptions about whole nations. We normalise hate in a way that infiltrates society. We don’t even know we are doing it.
As Michael Buerk summed up on the Moral Maze, “Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel, so for many Jews this is about survival. At the same time many Palestinians have come to see Israel as a brutal oppressor. Each side sees the other as an existential threat. Even those who refuse to define their neighbour across the border as “the enemy” may find themselves or have found themselves defined in those terms against their will and threatened with death.”
When you become so entrenched in a feeling towards a person or a people you read all their actions through that lens. When Jacob and Esau turn up surrounded by hundreds of people, whose first thought is “how lovely he’s brought the whole family to meet his long lost brother, he must be so excited to see me”, rather than “how terrifying he is surrounded by an army”.
Published on Slate.com, a group of women lawyers and advocacy workers published an article called: “The World’s Feminists Need to Show Up for Israeli Victims -
Solidarity for victims of sexual assault should trump other politics.” They conclude with the phrase: “To express moral outrage and legal horror at the offenses perpetrated on women in Israel is not tantamount to approving the governing Netanyahu coalition, nor does it signal support for the bombings in Gaza. It is simply to assert the long-standing feminist argument that our bodies are not to be weaponized in global conflicts. Acknowledging these atrocities does not diminish the suffering of Palestinian women in Gaza. It is essential to reaffirming our shared humanity.”
We all have to ask ourselves what have we normalised? What have we stopped questioning because it is simply how life is? Who or how do we respond to people based on our experiences of them in the past rather than seeing them for who they are in that moment. How do we ensure however much we have to keep going, keep living, we don’t allow ourselves to see the brutal, the inhumane, the simply not right as “normal” even if we are experiencing it over an extended period of time. It isn’t right and it’s no less painful just because it’s constant. When we say, this is how it is in situations which shouldn’t be like this, we do ourselves and everyone else a disservice. We have to keep moving forward, we have to keep an understanding of what better times could look like. We have to be the ones who can envisage peace to enable those who have to get through their reality to live the day to day. Perhaps that’s why our service sends us out with the Aleinu, forcing us to strive for better images than those we have accepted .
