If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,
May my right hand forget her skill.
May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth
If I do not remember thee. Psalm 137
I feel a deep sorrow these days, one deeper, perhaps, than I’ve ever experienced. It’s been haunting me since November of last year. I’ve tried to tamp it down, to push it so deeply inside me that it can’t touch me. But the student protests of the past few days have put an end to my campaign of self-deceit. The sorrow’s surfaced.
I don’t claim that the sorrow is worse than anyone else’s. In fact, I know that it can’t possibly be. But it’s my sorrow. It’s the one I live with, the one that’s up close and personal to me.
I’m not a Jew. But as a Christian I feel a deep kinship and gratitude to the Hebraic tradition. I love and reverence Eretz Israel. I’ve studied in the Holy Land. I’m steeped in Hebrew Scripture; truth to tell, I’m more comfortable with the Old than with the New Testament. I’ve studied Midrash for years. The rabbis’ insights never fail to leave me breathless. My own thinking about God is heavily indebted to both religious and secular Jews: Philo, Maimonides, the Safed School, the Hasidic tradition, Buber, Heschel, Levinas, Rosenzweig. I resonate with Jewish literature and Jewish theater. I ache for the centuries of diasporic persecution. I marvel at the tenacity and courage of the Jewish people to safeguard their identity.
I’m grateful for the way in which the Hebraic tradition is inextricably woven throughout and enriches the entire western tradition, especially my own Christian faith.
And yes, I celebrate the creation of the state of Israel.
If I ever forget thee, Jerusalem, may my tongue cleave to my palate, my right hand wither.
But now, after more than 30,000 deaths in Gaza, I’m profoundly disoriented. I feel a stranger in a strange land. I have a covenant with Eretz Israel—I think all Christians do—which is sacred and can never be repudiated. Yet I can’t deny that what’s happening in Gaza is anything but sacred, and that the God Who chose Abram to be the father of nations, the God who spoke through the prophets, the God who inspired Luria and Buber and the Baal Shem Tov, weeps at the carnage.
Maybe God feels in exile too.
My sorrow, then, is for the unspeakable suffering Israel is inflicting on Gaza, the suffering that the students are trying to do something about. But it’s also for the discombulating sense of spiritual dislocation into which this debacle has thrown me. I can’t reconcile my loyalty to the Hebraic tradition with awareness of what’s going on in Gaza. I can’t give up either, and I can’t live easily with their conjunction.
Perhaps the dissonance I’m experiencing is inevitable; perhaps no ideal ever lives up to reality, and I’m a chump for thinking it could be otherwise. After all, the very same psalm that records the heartbreak of exile concludes with a horrific prayer for vengeance.
But I can’t give up the ideal. May my tongue cleave. May my hand wither.
So I lie down by the rivers of Babylon, and weep.
I hope that you will leave a little room for a serious consideration of the idea that the creation of the state of Israel may have been a mistake in the first place. A nation predicated on the expuslion of the inhabitants cannot be moral or stable nation.