"IF": Seeking Moral Clarity on Israel/ Gaza

The recent events on college campuses across the U.S. are alarming and deeply disturbing.  As a Jew and a parent of Jewish teens who will be of college age in a couple years, I am-for the first time ever in this country– afraid for their safety.  As a Jew, I know all too well what happens when a country embraces antisemitism on a large scale.  

On the one hand, the complexity of everything going on is overwhelming; on the other hand, the need for moral clarity in the face of all this Jew-Hatred is urgent.  I’ve been struggling for weeks to figure out what I might say that illuminates this moment in ways that are productive.  Here’s what I’ve come up with, offered with gratitude to Rudyard Kipling, whose poem “If” inspired this in clear ways.

IF you are saying “Free Palestine”, and you are calling for peace and security for both Jews and Palestinians co-existing on land on which they both have ancestral roots, I stand with you.

IF you are saying “Free Palestine”, and you mean Palestinians dominating land “from the river to the sea”, you are calling for either ethnic cleansing or genocide of millions of Jews who are indigenous to that land, and you are advancing the vision of antisemitic terrorists.

IF you are saying “Let Gaza Live” and your dream includes the wish to see Palestinians living free from the murderous oppression of Hamas, who have exploited and oppressed Gazans for decades while seeking constant war with Israel, I stand with you.

IF you are saying “Let Gaza Live” and you see Israel as the irredeemably evil oppressor and Hamas as noble warriors for liberation and justice, you are amplifying the narrative of a terrorist organization.

IF you are calling for “Ceasefire Now”, and you understand that to mean that Israel will end military actions in Gaza AND Hamas will release all the hostages that it has held since October 7th, I honor your call for peace.

IF you are calling for “Ceasefire Now”, and you understand that to mean that you call on Israel to end its military actions but you make no demands of the terrorists who initiated this war on October 7th, than you are letting Hamas and other terrorists around the world know that they can do anything–LITERALLY ANYTHING- to Jews and they will get a pass, even as you call on Israel to uphold the values of human rights. 

IF you believe that “Free Speech” demands calling for justice while taking full responsibility for the impact that your words and deeds have on the beloved community, I support you fully.

IF you believe that “Free Speech” is your opportunity to don a mask to disguise your identity while you spew hate speech and harass and physically attack Jews with abandon, then you cannot be trusted to be in community with others.  You are either blind to or don’t care about  the ways that your energy of Jew-hatred and aggression is destroying the norms that make shared society and productive dialogue possible.

IF you are calling for liberation, and your vision of liberation is about collective liberation in which relationships of oppression are transformed into relationships of equality, dignity, and peaceful co-existence then I join you in that call for liberation.  It’s a vision that sounds like this: 

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

(MLK’s “I Have a Dream” Speech”)

IF you are calling for liberation, and your vision involves murdering Jews wherever you find them, then you are in league with a nihilist death cult that spreads murder and destruction rather than liberation.  That vision sounds like this:

The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,' except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews. 

(Hamas’s Original Charter)

IF you claim to stand against racism, hate, and violence, and recognize that that struggle involves confronting those forces within ourselves and within our own tribe as well as with “the other”, then I am with you in that struggle.

IF you claim to stand against racism, hate, and violence and believe that “they” are pure darkness and “we” are pure light, then you are projecting your own unclaimed darkness outwards in ways that amplify and perpetuate hatred and violence in the world.

These are complex times.  May we learn to be with this complexity with wisdom and insight so that we find our way to collective liberation, justice and peaceful co-existence in the years ahead.

Resources for Difficult Times

In recent weeks, I’ve heard a lot of folks talking about the fact that the level of trauma we are currently encountering in the world around us is beyond what human beings have evolved to manage.  This notion really landed for me when I heard about the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that occurred just days after the horrifying mass murder of Black Americans at a supermarket in Buffalo.  All of this senseless killing of innocents evokes intense feelings of rage, fear, and despair.

Through conversations with friend and colleagues, I know that I am not alone in finding it hard to process all of the pain and trauma of all this uniquely American wave of carnage.  Over the course of the past few years, however, I have encountered several books that I have found to be helpful in working with these difficult emotions.  I have decided to write up a brief blog post highlighting some of those resources, offered in the hopes that they might be helpful to others who find themselves struggling to stay resilient through all this. 

To be clear, this list is not meant to be comprehensive, nor does it reflect a professional expertise in the treatment of trauma and grief.  This is simply a list of books that I’ve found to be helpful to me as a parent, citizen, and emotionally sensitive human being whose encounter with current events has sent me on a search for guidance, wisdom and solace on how to be with the world at this time.   I offer this list in the hopes that it might be helpful to others seeking resources that might help them understand and process the challenging emotions evoked by the world we live in today.

It's OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture that Doesn’t Understand
By Megan Devine and Mark Nepo

Megan Devine is a trained therapist whose young, healthy husband died unexpectedly in a freak drowning accident just months before his 40th birthday.  She was plunged into an experience of excruciating and overwhelming grief that lasted for years; in the process, she gained a first-hand understanding of just how woefully ineffective our culture is at supporting individuals experiencing intense grief. Again and again, friends and family said and did things that left her feeling even more alone, misunderstood, angry, and in pain.  As she found her way through that unimaginably difficult time, she learned a lot about what actually helped her tend to her grief in ways that were productive and helpful.  She went on to found a remarkable community called “Refuge in Grief” that has helped thousands of people dealing with intense loss.  She wrote this book to share all she has learned, and I found it be a source of tremendous wisdom and solace.

Healing Through the Dark Emotions:  The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair

By Miriam Greenspan
Miriam Greenspan is a daughter of Holocaust survivors who went on to become a therapist.  As a result of her parent’s experiences with trauma, she grew up in a home infused with dark emotions like guilt, anger, and despair, and has made working skillfully with those emotions her life’s work.  She makes an eloquent argument that avoiding these dark emotions can lead to depression, anxiety and psychic numbing. When we learn how to work with them skillfully, however, these dark emotions contain valuable lessons for those who are willing to open their hearts and minds to these difficult experiences.  In chapters devoted to grief, fear, and despair she offers ways to understand each of these dark emotions that infuses them with meaning and the possibility of growth and transformation.

Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger

By Lama Rod Owns

As a result of his identities as a Black and gay man, Lama Rod Owens has a spent years grappling with feelings of anger and rage evoked by his experiences with oppression and marginalization.  He was and still is an activist seeking to confront and transform the unjust systems that continue to harm so many BIPOC and non-binary people in this country.  He came to Buddhism as an adult and went on to become a Buddhist monk.  It was a journey that took years, and that challenged him to find ways to hold and work with the anger that animated so much of his work in the world.  He wrote this book to share all he has learned, and it is a powerful mix of spiritual wisdom and practical exercises for those struggling to work skillfully with intense feelings of anger and rage evoked by living in unjust systems.

Active Hope:  How to Face the Mess We’re In with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power

By Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone

Joanna Macy is a lifelong activist, writer, and wise elder who has spent her life confronting overwhelming challenges like nuclear proliferation and the climate crisis.  She is the creator of a movement called The Work that Reconnects that is designed to support activists working on these existential crises to remain resilient, empathic, and grounded in love and compassion.  She, too, offers an invaluable mix of profound spiritual wisdom and practical exercises that make it possible to be with the pain and suffering of the world without shutting down or giving up on working for change.   More than any other author on this list, I have found her work to be indispensable to my efforts to be with the challenges of this moment we are living through. 

While there is much more that could be said about each of these resources, my intention here is to provide a brief introduction to books that I’ve found to be helpful.  If you find yourself struggling with grief, rage, guilt or despair, I invite you take a look at anything here that feels relevant and intriguing.  My heartfelt wish is that this brief list of resources might bring some solace, wisdom, and insight to readers in these challenging times.

Latest Developments with My Book

My book, Race and Social Change: A Quest, A Study, A Call to Action was published in 2017 (and was based on research conducted much earlier, in 2002-2003). It’s the first book I’ve published, and I didn’t know what to expect in terms of interest and impact. As it turned out, the book didn’t seem to generate much interest when it was first released. Even after working with a publicity firm that got me about 20 interviews on public radio stations across the country, the energy around the book seemed very minimal.

In recent months, that has begun to change. One of the responses to the massive wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the nation sparked by the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and too many others has been a growing number of reading resource lists compiled by educational institutions across the country. It has been meaningful to see my book appear on a growing number of these lists alongside other highly influential books addressing issues of racial injustice and anti-racist activism.

Here’s an overview of the institutions that have included my book in their list of resources to date:

Duke Law School: Race, Oppression and Social Change Resource Guide

University of Richmond Law School, Anti-Racist Reading

Rutgers University: Anti-Racism Resources

Suffolks University, Boston: Examining Structural Racism Book List

Johnson & Wales University: Black Lives Matter and Anti-Racism Resources

Loyola University: Resources of Race and Anti-Racism

Drake Law School: Anti-Racist Work

University of San Francisco: Anti-Racism Resources

Bentley University

Oswego State University of New York: Anti-Racism Research Guide

College of Southern Idaho: Race and Racism Resources

Pima Community College: Black Lives Matter Resource List

University of Alberta (Canada): Black Lives Matter Resources

Boston Latin School: Families for Equity and Diversity

Choate Rosemary Hall: Summer Reading—Black Lives Matter and Social Justice Titles

It’s exciting to see this growing interest in the book, and—as always—my hope is that it might bring some insight, light, and positive change to this painful moment of reckoning with our nation’s long history of racial injustice.

I’ll be sure to keep the list updated in the months ahead.

Copernicus and Race

For tens of thousands of years, humanity believed that the earth was at the center of the universe.

It was in many ways an understandable belief.  Our ancestors watched as the Sun rotated around their seemingly fixed and immovable location by day and watched by night as the moon and stars did the same.  Eons passed in which humanity could scarcely imagine viewing images of Earth and other planets taken by man-made satellites hurling through outer space.  From our limited, landbound, inescapably personal perspective, the notion that the entire cosmos revolved around us was understandable.

With the publication of his book On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres in 1543, Copernicus challenged that notion, initiating one of those most significant paradigm shifts in the history of human consciousness  It was an era when humanity had brought an entirely new level of rigor and focus to its observations of the natural world and was devising ever more complex and convoluted theories to explain the surprising movements of various celestial bodies while keeping the earth at the center of the universe.  Eventually, Copernicus offered a theory that explained all these confusing movements with simplicity and elegance.  Once you embraced the understanding that the earth revolved around the sun—not the other way around—everything fell into place.

From a scientific perspective, it was a major breakthrough representing a giant leap forward in our attainment of an accurate understanding of the workings of the universe.  From a psychological perspective, however, it was a wrenching, existentially disorienting shift met with resistance that endured for centuries.  The recontextualization of the self from the entity at the very center of all existence to a small and decidedly uncentral element of a vast and impersonal system is not easy on the ego or the soul.   Psychologically, we are forced to internalize the sense of humility demanded by the realization that the universe does not, fundamentally, revolve around us.  Spiritually, we are challenged to attain a consciousness we are but a small aspect of an immense creation that includes but vastly transcends us all.  It’s not only the case that we are no longer personally at the center; it’s also that in this new understanding, the very concept of “center” may no longer be useful. 

So what does the Copernican revolution have to do with matters of race and social change?

It turns out that a recognition of the systemic nature of racism demands a similar wrenching shift in consciousness for those who have not yet awakened to this reality.  In the current frequently dysfunctional dialogue around matters of race in America, it is not unusual for white people to respond to critiques of racial inequalities and injustices by proclaiming, “I’m not racist!”  These are individuals who aspire to treat others with respect, and who believe that as long as they are not actively, personally discriminating against people of color, then they are uninvolved in our nation’s racial injustices.  In a meaningful sense, it’s an attitude grounded in the assumption that our own inner lives exist at the center of the moral universe.  Our personal attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors are the central forces around which all matters revolve.  If our intentions and actions are benign, there is nothing more to understand or discuss. 

To awaken to the systemic nature of racism is to become unmoored from this comforting illusion.  As with the Copernican revolution, an understanding of systemic racism demands a radical recontextualization of the self.  We are forced to confront a similar truth that rather than existing at the center of the moral universe, we are but a small and decidedly uncentral element of a vast and impersonal system that includes but vastly transcends us all.  It’s not that our personal attitudes and behaviors are irrelevant; it’s that we play an infinitesimally limited role in a system that is far larger than the self, and that system discriminates against others despite our own personal best intentions. 

In my own experience, I have found the journey to this consciousness to involve the sort of wrenching, existentially disorienting shift that I imagine accompanied the Copernican revolution.  In place of the comforting illusion that my moral responsibility for matters and race and social change begins and ends at the boundaries of my personal attitudes and behaviors, I have had to internalize a deep humility that recognizes that these injustices are embedded in a system that vastly transcends myself.  Spiritually, I have been challenged to decouple myself from the center of my own universe and see myself as just a small part of an incomprehensibly large and complex web of life defined by levels of vulnerability and interdependence that are in important ways scary to contemplate.  To confront the injustices embedded in this system, it is not enough to focus on my own inner life.  Their must be a complementary focus on joining with others to confront systemic forces far larger than myself. 

In the face of this paradigm shift, we are compelled to choose:  Ignorance or wisdom?  Illusion or truth?  Blindness or Insight?

We must each ask ourselves:  Which choice will I make?

Maybe It’s More Than Just a “Weird Trait”

In January 2016—deep in the election season for the 2016 presidential election—Politico ran a story with the title “The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter.”  Readers learned that the title referred to the trait of “authoritarianism”, which is a tendency to prefer authority figures who are strong, dominant, and controlling.  The article notes that this trait was assessed via four questions focused on child-rearing that were included in a political survey. Specifically, respondents were asked whether they think it is more important to have a child who is respectful vs. independent, obedient vs. self-reliant, well-behaved vs. considerate, and well-mannered vs. curious.  It turns out that if you believe that children should be respectful, obedient, well-behaved and well-mannered, you are an authoritarian. And when studied along with a host of other traits like race, gender, income, geographic location, etc, the authors found that authoritarianism was the one trait that proved to have statistically significant correlation with being a Trump voter.

The article notes that these four child-rearing questions were included on a survey with more typical questions asked in political surveys, including demographics, horse-race themed questions about the candidates (this was early in the primary season, when there were still many candidates in the race), and policy questions.  Given the title of the article, it’s clear that the authors were surprised by this finding and viewed it as a bizarre and unexpected discovery. There is a worldview implicit in their framing of the article: When it comes to presidential politics, parenting styles shouldn’t really matter. Policy stances, income, geography, demographics—these are factors that we usually use to explore and explain politics.  This finding about authoritarian child-rearing preferences is, well, weird.  

Perhaps it’s time rethink the worldview that leads to this attitude.

In my book Race and Social Change: A Quest, A Sudy, A Call to Action, I offer an analysis of matters of race and social change grounded deeply in the science of complex systems.  I note that living systems are organized according the logic of fractals, with similar patterns appearing across multiple scales of analysis, from the microcosm of the family to the macrocosm of global geopolitics.  I also note that that in human systems, the pattern that we see across all of these scales is that of the development away from simple hierarchy towards relational networks that are much more equal, interconnected, and interdependent.  It’s an underlying process that explains phenomena as diverse as transformations in women’s rights, movements towards racial equality, the rise of “flat” organizations, and global interconnectedness.

In the book, I also note that this process of development towards greater interconnectedness does not always progress in a smooth and unbroken trend; as with all processes of development, it often takes two steps forward followed by several steps back. Development progresses in jarring fits and starts. It’s a perspective that explains the movement towards greater equality for historically marginalized groups like women and people of color…and also the backlash against that movement.  It’s a perspective, grounded in science, that illuminates dynamics that we see all around us right now in important ways. (For a more complete review of these ideas, see the introduction and chapters 3 and 4 of my book).

From this perspective, the finding that authoritarian attitudes were the only trait that proved to have a statistically significant correlation with being a Trump voter is not at all weird; it is actually the factor that most directly and explicitly focuses on the essence of dynamics currently unfolding at all scales around the world right now.  Authoritarian parents have a clear and strong preference to operate within a simple hierarchy; they prefer dominant, controlling parents and obedient children in the microcosm of the family. It should come as no surprise that they prefer to call forth and co-create a similar authority arrangement at the macrocosmic scale of the nation. Similarly, egalitarian parents who prefer more independence, curiosity, and self-reliance in their children within the microcosm of the family seek to call forth and co-create similarly egalitarian, empowered dynamics at the macrocosmic scale of the nation.

Demographics, gender, specific policy positions, socio-economic status and other similar factors surely have exert some influence on people’s beliefs and actions,  but from this view they are relatively shallow, surface-level issues somewhat removed from the essence of what matters most in understanding recent events. “What kind of authority structure do I prefer to live in—and therefore co-create in the world around me?” is the unstated question at the center of both social change and the intense resistance to that change.  

It’s not a “weird trait”; it’s the heart of the matter, and we need to move beyond the worldview that fails to discern the centrality of this matter to dynamics of change unfolding at all levels of analysis from the micro to the macro.  If we are going to respond effectively to the challenges of this moment, we need to awaken to this higher consciousness regarding the nature of the change process in which we find ourselves immersed.