Recently, while returning home on a flight from Toronto, I re-read my copy of Daybreak in Gaza. It is a collection of writings, reflections, laments, art, and culture from people who live there—some of them died within days of sharing.
The following is a brief, heartfelt reflection I wrote on the plane.
Sara Roy is a senior research scholar on the Middle East at Harvard University. In an article shared in the collection of narratives in Daybreak in Gaza, she reflects on a fundamental need to see parallels between the suffering of Jewish people and the present situation in Gaza.
Her perspective is that of one who has parents and family members who survived Auschwitz. Her parents made sure that the sharing of their narrative came with life lessons, the most important being: “The Holocaust is not a shield beyond which you cannot look, my mother and father taught me; rather, it is a mirror with which to reflect and examine your actions, a mirror you must always carry with you.”
That truth and wisdom have enabled many people, Jewish and Palestinian alike, to grieve in spirit, if not together, over the destruction of beautiful, vibrant Gaza and the West Bank, and the disablement of culture and any hope of secure, hopeful, and fruitful lives for the people who long for a home.
Sara teaches that while there can be no assumptions that there are equivalents between the Holocaust and the present occupation, there are indeed parallels that must be acknowledged for the sake of understanding and peace—and for any hope for the future.
What might these parallels even look like?
Palestinians struggle to see any hope for the future. They cry for compassion and help. Many Jewish people have felt this from the past.
Palestinians cry out for human dignity: “Will not someone see that we, too, are mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, artists and poets, professors and lawyers, fishermen, builders, and workers?” Jewish people also have a narrative of such suffering. The narrative is important—essential, is it not? Palestinians too “are human beings with individual histories and stories that must be recounted by the living, not only buried with the dead.”
Sara speaks of her Palestinian friends and their children, who have always welcomed her as a Jew into their homes in Gaza, as being among those who are now being bombed.
It should break our hearts.
We pray God to help all people consider these words from Sara, who writes from a Jewish legacy and heart: “How can I not think of the innocents murdered in Gaza, alongside my relatives? Refusing any such association or bond, as I have been told I must do, is not only the end of Holocaust consciousness, it is the end of Jewish ethical history—shattering the mirror I promised my parents always to use.”
Plant this in our hearts, Creator.
Amen.
