About a month after October 7, my wife Caroline, stretching to find something with which to introduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and, more precisely, a pathway through it to a better future — to our daughters Lila, 4 (and a half, she would want me to say), and Nina, nearly 2, encountered this column by Yiddish professor Miriam Udel, leading her to the book Daniel and Ismail, by Juan Pablo Iglesias for readers “ages 3-6.”
And everyone else, too. The book, translated into English, Hebrew, and Arabic, opens right to left, containing each language on each page.
It is about two young boys, Daniel and Ismail, who live in the same city, but don’t know it. They share a birthday, each receiving the same presents. Each got a soccer ball (kadur regel in Hebrew; kurat alqadam in Arabic) as well as “something special to cover his shoulders.”
“Daniel got a tallit, a shawl with tassels like his father wears in Synagogue. Ismail got a keffiyeh, a patterned scarf like his Palestinian father wears.”
“What kid doesn’t want a soccer ball?” the book asks. “What parent doesn’t want their child to follow family traditions?”
They each proceed, the following day, to bring their new gifts to the park. They encounter each other, of course, and play soccer together until it’s too dark to see the ball. When they leave, they accidentally grab each other’s possessions, adorning themselves in the other’s shoulder garb—Ismail the tallit; Daniel the keffiyeh.
Along the way home, they feel as though people are looking at them strangely. When they arrive home, their parents’ respective responses are the same. “Where did you get that?” They shout. “Do you know what it means? Do you know who uses those?”
That night Daniel and Ismail “have nightmares about what they have seen on the news… and about what they have heard adults say.”
The next day, they find each other, exchanging possessions—and sentiments. “It is difficult to be you!” one says. “Not more than being you!” says the other. “If you knew what my people say about your people!” “And what my people say about yours!”
“Then Ismail asks: ‘Another penalty kick?’ ‘Of course,’ Daniel replies. And before they know it, the ball is already in the air.”
On the one hand, is this a facile presentation of the conflict, eliding the nuances of history, and past and present-day horrors? Yes.
On the other, is there something to the notion that we are all human beings, created in the same image of the divine, a child’s eyes looking upon another child with the same innocence as the other? Also, yes.
I don’t suggest that policy prescriptions flow from this book other than the notion that to pave a pathway forward, we will all have to see one another’s humanity.
Do you sometimes have to protect yourself from those who would seek to do you harm? Yes. And, recognizing that no one in the region is planning on leaving anytime soon, coexistence is going to have to be one of the central ingredients moving forward. Trust is going to have to be built, over the generations. Will it happen tomorrow? No. Could it be the proverbial day after that? Maybe. As always, it starts with the kids. Praying for children everywhere.
Here is my d’var this past Friday about the paradox that we can find God in alienation from God:
As part of trying to get better at the work of being rabbi of Society Hill Synagogue, I try to work my way through books that speak to the ongoing tasks of being the rabbi of a congregation. This week I read an essay entitled Complexity and Imperfection: A Theology of Jewish Pastoral Care by Rabbi Rachel Robbins.
Pastoral care, to define it simply, for those unfamiliar with the term, is, as Rabbi Dayle Friedman writes, offer[ing] a spiritual presence to people in need, pain, or transition.
The article Complexity and Imperfection: A Theology of Jewish Pastoral Care is written from the perspective of trying to help rabbis and pastoral caregivers better understand how the complexity of the Jewish understanding of God can help rabbis navigate moments where congregants or patients are experiencing spiritual challenges.
Specifically, the essay begins with a citation of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, better known as Rav Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of what would become the state of Israel. This Orthodox rabbi famously said that, “Even heresy — “belief or opinion contrary to orthodox religious doctrine” — Even heresy plays a spiritual role, challenging us to continually expand our concept of God.”
In other words, the perspective of challenging God is important to our communal relationship to God, because that perspective of challenging God pushes us to hone our own relationship to, and understanding of, the divine.
In other other words, our relationship to God can’t progress, develop, mature, deepen, without some push and pull; without someone in our community putting their cards on the table, and saying I’m not sure what I believe, questioning why God would do this or wouldn’t do that; why this person would live and this person would die; and the many other inexplicable features of the universe.
The author of the essay cites an example of a rabbi who runs into a congregant in a pharmacy, two years after the congregant’s mother has died, and one year after the congregant’s participation in a bereavement group which the rabbi had facilitated.
The rabbi asks how the congregant is doing, and the congregant says “frankly, rabbi, not good”—proceeding to explain how not only had she not been able to move past the grief of losing her mother, but that the grief had turned into anger at God for not bringer her a sense of comfort in relationship to what had happened with her mother, and further that she felt a sense of alienation from Judaism, because her Jewish therapist had told her that Jewish tradition would want her to move on—that this level of pronounced grief was excessive in relationship to the rabbinic prescription of one year’s worth of mourning and not beyond. So on multiple levels—personal, theological, her relationship to her Judaism—she was not doing well.
The best the rabbi could muster in response to being caught off by the need for a pastoral intervention in the pharmacy aisle next to the ibuprofen, was to cite this rav kook teaching that quote-un-quote “heresy” can play a spiritual role, expanding our concept of God.
The author of the essay, Rabbi Robbins, goes on to observe that the presence of God that can be brought into pastoral conversations, conversations around the journey of grief and sorrow, is far more multifaceted than we often assume. It does not need to rely solely on God as ever calming presence. As Rabbi Robbins writes, “In Jewish tradition, God is as intricate in personality and relationship dynamics as the rest of living creation. While it remains an essential goal for the Jewish pastoral caregiver to bring peace, a calming presence, and a prayerful manner into our professional encounters,” she says, “a Jewish pastoral theology requires us to view the human relationship to God in a complex light. In Jewish tradition, life’s trials, tribulations, suffering, and even evil itself are aspects of all of God’s creation, and potentially aspects of God’s self as well. Grappling with these aspects of the Divine can help us frame and contend with them in the human sphere.”
In other words, the world we encounter is a mess.
It’s also beautiful. Depending on the perspective you take, you can marvel at the symbiotic nature of an ecosystem— bees pollinate flowers, allowing them to reproduce; flowers produce a source of food for bees. It all works together.
Or your heart can break at the messiness of war, starvation, and sorrow.
One aspect of Jewish theology is that all of this comes from God. If it’s within the world, it is within God.
To expect only one pathway into God, to imagine that skepticism, heartbreak, confusion, moving one step forward and two steps backward, can’t also all be pathways to God is to underestimate, according to Jewish tradition, the multifaceted nature of the divine, and our pathways to it.
We human beings are messy, we are complicated. Why would we imagine that God would be more boring than we are? That’s one element of Jewish tradition at least, embodied, for example, in Kabbalah, in Jewish mysticism, whose palate is composed of the ten sefirot, the ten different godly spheres, godly manifestations, suggesting, as I’ve reflected before, echoing Whitman, that God, like us, contains multitudes.
Rabbi Robbins concludes her essay by coming back to the rabbi and congregant in the pharmacy.
Immediately after sharing the Rav Kook quote that “Even heresy plays a spiritual role, challenging us to continually expand our concept of God” the rabbi felt sheepish. “How could she have responded in such an esoteric and abstract way to this congregant in pain” she wondered.
But the congregant surprised her. It had helped. The congregant, Rabbi Robbins said “expressed intrigue and comfort in the idea that questioning God may not signify detachment from God.” “I can tell from the look on your face that you felt awkward responding to me with the quote from ‘Mr. Kook,’” the congregant said to the Rabbi but I want to tell you that even when you’re caught off guard and not feeling as if you can offer me the perfect rabbinic solution, you somehow picked up on my sense of inadequacy for not experiencing God in my pain. Right now, at this very moment, Rabbi, I’m feeling quite adequate in my ‘heresy.’ I never imagined that I could find God in my current state of mind.”
It can be hard to find God with the current state of the world. It can be hard to find God with the current state of ourselves.
And yet Jewish tradition imagines that there, too, in that difficulty is God. There, too, in our alternating feelings of pain and ambivalence, confusion and fatigue, God is able to be present. If it is in us, if it is in the world, it is in God. So says Judaism at least.
Now if a rabbi could just make it through the pharmacy aisle…
Wishing everyone here a peaceful shabbat, with whatever pathways and avenues they need to find the sacred.
