On Silence

When I was in law school, I lived closer to the university’s affiliated seminary than I did to the campus where I took my daily classes. This enabled me to audit courses at the seminary when my schedule allowed. One evening, a graduate student offered a short lesson on the importance of perspective. As he returned to his seat, a professor leapt to his feet and exclaimed, “Wait!” Turning to the student, he said, “You’re right – we must always remember that as dark as things are, they could be darker. But that is something you only tell yourself - never to someone else. When your friend approaches to share his soul, that is the largest problem in the world. Telling him, ‘It could be worse’ isn’t helpful.” That is a lesson that has stuck with me for 30 years.

Today, I’ll share some things I’ve been telling myself. And then I’ll share what I need to hear from you.

We Jews have a lot of holidays. We joke about it sometimes. In addition to the well-known Rosh HaShanna and Yom Kippur, there is also a trio of three Biblical festivals – Passover (Pesach), Pentecost (Shavuoth), and Tabernacles (Sukkot). Passover celebrates our liberation from ancient Egypt; Pentecost commemorates the Divine revelation at Sinai; and Tabernacles recalls the temporary huts in which we lived while we traveled through the desert to the Holy Land. The liturgy recalls them, respectively, as the “season of our freedom,” “the season of our Torah,” and “the season of our happiness.”

Tabernacles, celebrated just a couple of weeks ago, is a holiday we observe experientially. We build sukkot, or huts. These are intentionally temporary structures, pulled together from sheets of plywood or canvas or tarp fastened to a rudimentary frame. They are intended to mirror the impermanent nature of a sojourner’s life. By law, they cannot have a complete roof. Instead, only material that grew from the earth can serve as a covering, and then only in specific measure: dense enough to offer more shade than sun, but sufficiently loose through which to see the stars.

The lack of a complete roof is consistent with the theme of the holiday. It demonstrates our faith in God’s protection. There is a reason why Tabernacles is not combined with Passover: As the weather cools and takes its autumn cues, we leave our houses to take our meals (and many people also sleep) in the sukkah. We observe the flimsy would-be-roof as the weather becomes less hospitable and acknowledge that only God’s protection, rather than a thatch of corn stalks or pine boughs or bamboo, guards us.

These were the thoughts I had last week when, closing out the season, I dismantled my sukkah. I rolled the bamboo mats; I removed the 2x4’s that brace the thin walls; and section by section slowly brought each piece into the garage.

The horrors of the preceding week. The bitterness that snapped our season of joy. The brutality that swiftly visited grief, and mourning, and agony (which continue), and then national resolve.

And above all, God’s protection.

That is what I told myself.

# # #

So, what do I need to hear from you?

Your voice.

I appreciate everyone who has checked in with me. I really do. But it’s not sympathy that I need.

I need voices to rise, an overwhelming wall of sound to call out evil for what it is. Barbarism for what it is. Murder, rape, torture, and kidnapping for what it is. Without equivocating. Without mealy mouthed, “In the greater context” or another feckless phrase that would seem to imply that something, anything, could even begin to justify the massacre that was inflicted two Saturdays ago.

And I need to hear it across the board, including from our vaunted universities: Georgetown. Harvard. NYU. University of Wisconsin-Madison. Every school that claims to embrace Western values, every school that has waffled, equivocated, offered some milquetoast statement but been unable to say or write the word “Hamas” in connection to this terror. Every school that effectively justifies barbarism and fosters an environment in which it seems that killing Jews is OK, even in the universe of relative morality.

These are the things I need to hear from you.

You see, in the absence of your voice, other voices fill the space. Silence creates a vacuum in which hatred breeds.

It’s wearying, I know, the constant images of the dead and fallen from southern Israel. 1,300 dead. More than 200 abducted. Those are big numbers.

So, let’s talk about some of the tactics that Hamas used in southern Israel. And then take that horror and ask whether we are so overwhelmed by it that we are incapable of speaking up against it in the face of the murdered and missing who cannot speak.

I hope that’s not the case. I hope voices speak.

Because right now, a professor at Cornell University spoke and declared that he was “exhilarated” by the attacks. Exhilarated by civilians taking cover in safe rooms only to be smoked out (literally, with Hamas igniting tires at the threshold of those rooms) into point blank range. Exhilarated by the abductions of children and elderly alike. Exhilarated by rape, torture, and the parading of broken and nearly naked bodies on the streets of Gaza. As onlookers cheered. Read this and raise a voice to respond.

Speak. Counter the silence of academia and others who have moral laryngitis.

Speak to counter the Hamas Covenant (1998):

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it" (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).” (Preamble).

?“Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.” (Preamble).

"’The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.’ (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).” (Article Seven).

"’But the Jews will not be pleased with thee, neither the Christians, until thou follow their religion; say, The direction of Allah is the true direction. And verily if thou follow their desires, after the knowledge which hath been given thee, thou shalt find no patron or protector against Allah.’ (The Cow - verse 120).” (Article 13).

“In face of the Jews' usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.” (Article 15).

Ask whether now is the time to speak.

A 2017 revision (not a renouncement) tried to clarify that Hamas does not have an issue with all Jews, just those in Israel. But even here they could not help but reveal themselves again:

“Palestine is a land that was seized by a racist, anti-human and colonial Zionist project that was founded on a false promise (the Balfour Declaration). (Preamable). . . Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.” (Sec. 16).

Speak.

Peggy Noonan found her voice in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal:

“We must start with what was done. Terrorists calling themselves a resistance movement passed over the border from Gaza and murdered little children; they took infants hostage as they screamed. They murdered old women, tormented and raped young women, targeted an overnight music festival and murdered the unarmed young people in cold blood or mowed them down as they ran screaming. They murdered whole families as they begged for their lives; they burned people alive; they decapitated babies.

“There is no cause on earth that justifies what these murderers did. There is no historical grievance that excuses or ‘gives greater context’ to their actions. Spare me ‘this is the inevitable result when a people are long abused.’ No, this is what happens when savages hold the day: They imperil the very idea of civilization. They killed a grandmother and uploaded pictures of her corpse to her?Facebook page. They cut an unborn child from a mother’s body and murdered both.”

Difficult to read? Yes. Unsubstantiated narrative? No. Watch just a few of the survivor statements here.

They spoke. Will you add your voice?