​An Unnatural Disaster

Newsletter October 23, 2023 Together, we're #keepingitsacred...

Generally, I know how to respond to disasters. Natural disasters come on suddenly, wreak havoc, take lives, and cause agony. We send aid and sit with people in their lives human experience.

But over the past 17 days, and really if we’re being honest, for decades and millennia before that, we have been experiencing a devastating unnatural disaster. Human conflict in the Middle East. This conflict has escalated and daily we witness the weaponizing of religion, expanding upon ancient hatreds and tropes, and the politicized unleashing of horrific methods of brutality unlike we have seen on Prime Time News and social media before. It is an unbearable unnatural disaster. 

And it is the children who lose. They lose parents, grandparents, and siblings. They lose hope. And they lose their innocence. What’s more is they are being saddled with the burden of carrying these ancient divides into their future. This is the cycle.

And we know it because we are part of that cycle. We have been raised with love of our people, so much so that we have been taught explicitly or implicitly that sometimes, there is no room for the other. We are taught that they are a threat to our existence. And it is confusing because sometimes, they are. And we have been taught that the response to that is that “they” should be “neutralized.” 

So we are left striving to create safety and stability by appropriate, effective, ethical means and not give into our primal fears. But we are a people, flesh and blood, with a history of being be targets of hatred. Echos of our family’s and our people’s gruesome past consume us. Our ancestral trauma bubbling up from the past pulsing through our physical and/or spiritual DNA. Turning our stomachs. Sending waves of fear through our nerves. It is an unbearable position. 

How do we make sense of all of this? How do we find our way through? I, like many of you, turn to my rabbis for direction. 

I turn to the Sages and I keep thinking about Rabbi Hillel, the elder, the important sage who lived in the first century CE in Babylonia among various the ethnic and religious populations traveling through trade routes in Mesopotamia- in the Middle East. 

I turn to him in his wisdom for ethical guidance and I am not disappointed to see recorded in our sacred texts, two of his beautiful teachings that I hope leads us through. The first is Pirkei Avot 1:14:

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? 

And if I am only for myself, what am I? 

And if not now, when?"

He instructs us to love and protect ourselves but also insists that if we take that too far and leave no room for others, we lose a piece of ourselves—essential piece- our humanity.  Our tenderheartedness. Our ability to connect with others and thrive together. And, in case we think now is the time to concern ourselves with only ourselves, and later we can worry about others, we are wrong. He ends this statement with the famous line, “If not now, when?” There is no time like the present to do so and advocate for the humanity of others. 

Another text he famously taught was a recorded reply to someone who approached him wanting to convert to Judaism. The man asked Rabbi Hillel to teach him all of Judaism while he stood on one foot (quickly). So what did the wise sage boil the entire Jewish endeavor down to? The Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a tells us he replied:

“That which is hateful to you, do not do unto your fellow.

That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.

Now go and study."

In a sentence, Rabbi Hillel tells us to push aside hatred and instead act with love and kindness. To want for others what we want for ourselves. To wreak no havoc. How this all is operationalized is to be sorted and debated in study halls everywhere and recoded as commentary. But at the core, we should do no harm. 

In these grueling times, I find myself pondering these ideas, to find ways to balance everyone’s needs including those of the communities around, and to keep love and compassion for the other’s experience at the center. And every day we are writing the commentary. How do we do this online? How do we do this among friends and in the land itself?

Sorting through these questions is our sacred duty at this time. All the while keeping Hillel’s wisdom front and center: to not demonize or wall ourselves off from others but to, as much as is possible in these harsh times, remain balanced, compassionate, and to try with all our might to eliminate suffering. 

This is how Hillel kept it sacred. Together, we’re #keepingitsacred…

Rabbi Heather Miller

Founder, Keeping It Sacred

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