Identification with suffering

ELI PHILIP

The catastrophic tsunami that hit Japan, claiming thousands of lives, and the horrific murder of a family in Itamar have been the topics causing sighs at many a Shabbat table in the last two weeks. Personally, I did not hear about either the tsunami or the attack until that Motzei Shabbat and, therefore, had a completely different conversation at my Shabbat table.

Two weeks ago, another student and myself were taking part in a program called Encounter, which serves to bring groups of current and future Jewish leaders to the West Bank, in order to listen to Palestinians and digest their personal narratives together, as a Jewish group.

It was difficult for me as a person who grew up with the Israeli Zionist narrative to hear the immense personal pain and suffering on the tails side of the coin. Previously, I could justify dealing with the conflict on the grounds of security and protection but, after encountering the other people involved, the issue took on a different dimension for me. It isn’t so simple to wave them away.

Individual and collective anguish permeated the accounts of each speaker, whether they were university professors, businesspeople, United Nations workers or activists for nonviolence. When I heard Hijazi Eid, a 50-year-old boisterous and flamboyant tour guide, furiously describe the humiliation of being stuck in his car at a checkpoint, stalled for hours, and then being forced by a soldier to smile as if nothing happened, I couldn’t help but picture my Israeli friends at yeshivah, taking the place of that soldier. How do I deal with that?

On the one hand, my friends are going to serve our country, to protect our nation, yet, on the other, this lovely individual is humiliated like no person should ever be. Does my security justify such deeds? What happens when, in order to prevent my own pain, I cause so much pain to another? How much can another human suffer so that I don’t have to? Can I sympathize with such universal grief and still believe what I grew up with?

I returned, confused but optimistic, to West Jerusalem for a pleasant Shabbat. I took the time to recollect, think, pray and shmooze. I seized the opportunity to share the hopeful message that threaded through each of the Palestinian speakers, with little exception. Despite living under conditions of continuous daily misery, they keep the faith. The mere knowledge that Jewish people, who don’t share their particular angst (and may even stand in contradiction to it), could acknowledge and empathize with that same angst, drives the people in this group forward to keep fighting for a more tranquil future. I was surging with optimism; just a few more encounters like this, just the recognition of each other’s wounds and fears, and there is bound to be progress! I was sure of it.

And then, after Havdalah, I turned on the TV.

Devastated and even more confused than before, I returned to the yeshivah in time for Rav Shmuel Reiner’s parashat ha’shavua sichah (talk on the biblical portion of the week).

“Erev Shabbat, the land shook … thousands lost their lives, thousands more lost their homes. We all felt so small, so helpless. We all cringed from the unimaginable disaster, we all felt the terrible suffering, we all wanted to reach out our hand and help our human brothers and sisters.… And this past Friday night, the grief hit a lot closer to home. The land was shocked…. How can human beings, in the image of G-d, be capable of such cruelty, such terrible and disgusting acts? How do we respond? What can we do other than avenge?”

In parashat Zachor, Rav Shmuel continued, G-d commands us to wipe out the memory of Amalek. Rambam, in his Mishneh Torah, explains this commandment: “It is a positive commandment to destroy the memory of Amalek … [by] constantly remember[ing] their evil deeds and their ambush of Israel to arouse our hatred of them….” (Book 14, 5:5)

Amalek refused to recognize our suffering – the hardships and slavery in Egypt from which we had only just escaped. They saw us as a weak people and, instead of being compassionate, they were vicious and inhumane. It is this lack of sympathy, this refusal to acknowledge and identify with universal human suffering that the Torah commands us to hate. This is what we must eradicate.

“We cannot restrain our passion, we must avenge,” continued Rav Shmuel, “but how do we avenge? How do we fight back against inhumanity? By wiping out Amalek. By destroying evil and sowing good. By learning Mesilat Yesharim (The Path of the Just), which contains Jewish ethical teachings, instead of reading mishnayot in the memory of those killed. By facilitating positive actions, becoming better people, doing good deeds. This is how we avenge. This is how we remember.”

We must not let our personal grief distort the collective pain we share with all humanity and any being. We must have compassion for the agony and distress of all, even a strange nation in the desert. We must weep for Tamar Fogel, we must despair for the Japanese farmer and we must ache for the Palestinian at the checkpoint.

We must. Only then we can fulfil the commandment in Devarim: “... Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget.”

Eli Philip is a student at Yeshivat Maale Gilboa in Israel. This article originally appeared on the MiChayei Gilboa blog, ymgstudentjournal.blogspot.com.

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