© 2023 John Pavlovitz
© 2023 Urantia Association of Quebec
John Pavlovitz
Article translated into French by John Pavlovitz
From the Blog: Stuff that need to be said.
A dear friend recently posted the words “I Stand With Israel” on her social media account.
Honestly curious, I asked her to clarify what she meant by that:
Was she expressing solidarity with the innocent victims of the Supernova music festival, violently ripped from the planet as they celebrated a welcome respite from lives forever shrouded in the shadow of a violence they never asked for?
Was she standing in front of millions of innocent Palestinians who will be slaughtered in response to an atrocity committed by Hamas extremists, an atrocity they may not have supported or even known about?
Was she stating a theological position on the value of one religious tradition over another?
Was she precisely demarcating the borders of a country on the other side of the world that she will probably never set foot in?
Was she placing herself opposite the unhinged extremists of one faction and alongside another?
She had a hard time expressing exactly what she meant, but I told her I understood. This is something beyond the comprehension of any of us. These are vast horrors that have been festering for thousands of years.
How can any of us really claim to be able to make sense of it all, let alone sum it up in a few feeble words? I know we wish we could.
Whenever we are faced with unfathomable things, human beings crave simplicity: something that soothes our psyche and makes us feel as if we have dealt with the situation adequately and completely. We want a simple platitude that spares us from diving into the complicated, terrifying, bloody abyss of humanity’s capacity for inhumanity, and admitting how overwhelmed we are.
As a person of faith, morality and conscience, I don’t know where to stand in these moments, except in relation to the life wasted and brutalized.
It means I don’t get off so easily that I can make a little statement and walk away feeling good about myself.
This means I must leave the shallows of ambiguity and enter the deep waters of nuance, history, and human nature.
This means I have to read and learn, listen and think, pray and struggle. This means I will end up with fewer answers and more questions, and I may end up with a stomach ache.
But that’s where I find myself, where many of us find ourselves, that’s where I look at the horrible unfigurable.
I am disheartened to see the blanket, all-or-nothing statements so many people make in response to what is happening in Israel and Palestine, as if it can all be reduced to the confines of a two-inch square on a screen.
This is not a cheap, loose equivalence between the two camps, but an admission that both camps simply do not exist in the way we need them to.
History is far too complex and human beings are too unique to be reduced to any platitude or any neat, imagined morality.
The only thing good people can do when experiencing nightmares like the one we are currently witnessing is to mourn the disparate nature of suffering.
We must condemn terrorism wherever it occurs.
We must denounce brutality, whatever the source.
We must oppose ignorance and intolerance wherever we find it.
We must be outraged every time someone is silenced, dehumanized or violated, regardless of where they live.
We must see and defend humanity under attack wherever it strives to struggle or even exist.
Above all, we should admit that our minds fail to comprehend all that we see and our hearts fail to contain the magnitude of the grief.
All words, like these, ultimately fail us.
Humanity is our common tribe.
Let’s stay with her and fight like hell for her.