We are our words' matter

Yesterday, in my kitchen, cooking lunch, I listened to Democracy Now’s coverage of the Jewish Voice for Peace protest in Grand Central, and I sobbed. 

I cried because of the horror; I cried against the hate; I cried with the powerless millions around the world who can’t prevent a genocide from occurring under our eyes, pouring into our kitchens, at the hand of people who call themselves our own. I cried to hear the eloquent rage of Jews for whom Never Again does not mean Never Again the Victim, but Never Again for Anyone. 

I cried for people bombed hundreds of miles from my kitchen and my solitude. Every part of me – my desires, my loves, my safety – as a French-American Jew, is complicit. I asked myself the same question so many have asked: how the fuck do I go on with my little, tidy days? It was a choice, to live this small life honoring humble joys with people I respect. How can I look at any of them and say: “Yes, go on.”

All my meanings are obliterated. And yet, even voicing this seems laughably, disgustingly trite compared to the real annihilation at hand. All my actions are crushed under the scale of a present beyond my reach. Impotence and guilt eat the days’ heart with a spoon. 

I believe in organizing. I believe in pacifism. I was one of thousands at the Place de la République chanting for a ceasefire, condemning Biden and Macron with the rest. I’ve made lists of orgs to join or support, articles and books to read, potential actions to plot. I can’t count how many dinners or walks with friends and fam have ended in a shared, silent confusion. None of it is enough. 

We are lost, but speaking our solitude, our sadness, feels self-serving. I applaud those posting and sharing yet have refused to do the same. “If I had a platform, then I’d say something.” But I’m alone in my kitchen in rural France. What use is it, reaching people who already share my anger and impotence? I think social media inflicts more harm than it heals, so I’ve been silent. Still, I scroll through the days’ horrors. I listen to people in Grand Central giving eloquence to their rage, and I cry with them. And, hearing their voices above the chants in the packed station, I think: this too is an echo chamber; there is power in communicating what you believe with those who agree with you. It’s called recognition, and it’s called communion. Every voice matters, and everyone is called to speak through their pain, with their own borrowed words. Receiving their words yesterday, I felt proud to be a Jew. 

Yesterday, my maternal grandfather would have turned 102. He died before I had a chance to ask him how he felt about Israel. He died before it became impossible for American Jews to ignore they’d been fed intentional lies about the land where their own had “turned the desert green.” I’ve wondered how he would have felt to know his younger brothers and sisters, escaped across a different sea, were murdering under the banner of a shared past, in the name of a single future. 

Is hatred our inheritance?

It hurts me, physically, to think that Jews are trapped in a cycle of trauma and organized horror. Today we witness the perpetuation of a hatred and violence that will by force outlive all of us. It will live on in the children of the children who survive the annihilation of their homes, and it will haunt the world like the 1940’s haunt the children of the children who survived then, some of whom are so scarred, and scared still, they see Nazi revenants in children’s shadows. (I know that Hamas has vowed to wipe Jews off the face of the earth. I’m not looking away. But did you look away when Jews cheered at the deaths of Palestinian children, long before October 2023?)

My grandfather was born in the Bronx, the sole son of a widowed father who cut all ties to their history. We don’t know where in Europe they’d fled from. Hilton grew up poor. I think he sold phone books from doorstep to doorstep. He died successful enough to give me and my siblings the safety and stability we’ve always known. 

He taught me how to wriggle out of the side of the bed, from under the sheets, so that you don’t have to tidy it again behind you. When I asked him if I could have a cookie from above the fridge, he answered: “Can you?” and watched me slide a chair across the kitchen, climb up, and grab one myself. No one ever saw him angry. He gave me the first book I remember falling in love with, and once asked me: “Do you want to be a writer?” It’s a question I’m only today having the courage to answer. I was 13 when he died. My mom didn’t let me see him on his hospital bed. She said it was to preserve my memory, and she was right. 

Now I think of all the kids forced to witness the unseeable, for whom memory will always be a knife. 

There was a chance to be greater than the tormentor. Instead, we shrank into its rotten prison. I want to cut the stupid, selfish, puny hatred from the guts of all those complicit in this violence. Like a withered organ, the hate will jiggle on a plate, and together we’ll laugh. I suppose that’s what these words are doing to me now: gutting the hate from my body. 

If Jewish teachings, as I’m beginning to learn them, had to be summarized in a phrase, it might be an awe for the power of words. There’s a Qabalist interpretation of Noah’s parable, from the 18th century Jewish mystic known as the Baal Shem Tov, that says God did not drown humanity to cleanse the world of its violence, but rather because humans had forgotten the sacred charge of their words. Language, in this reading, is not fixed. Nor is the world. Word and World move through each other continuously, in a fluid molding that we have no choice but to partake in. But people, in Noah’s time, forgot. They forgot that the words they’d been given to give to the world around them described malleable relationships, not rigid identities. Humanity fooled itself into thinking “I” am this, “we” are so, and “they” are them. 

It is this ossification of language, this willful blindness to the worded world’s instability, this desire for fixed narratives and isolated enemies, that breeds hatred. We enact the fatal cut between “you” and “me,” words become their object’s casket, and all is drowned in violence. 

God saves Noah by instructing him to build an arc. The Hebrew text uses the word téva, which also means “word.”  The dimensions of Noah’s arc as dictated by God, 300 by 50 by 30, if converted through Hebrew numerology, make the word for “tongue.” In Hebrew as in English, French, and many other languages, tongue means both the organ and the language. The French rabbi Alain Ouaknine, sharing the Baal Shem Tov’s interpretation, concludes: “In order to exit the violence mentioned in the text (Genesis 6,18), one must not board a ship, but rather penetrate the ‘word’ in order to reclaim within it all its lost dimension and depth.”¹ 

In a dream, my grandpa and I walk along the shore. We sit on a bench facing the water. He says to me: “You know, this is not the last world, but it is the most imperfect.”

The Qabalist tradition values interpretation over unity. There is no single, stable reading of the original texts. The relationship to the divine is reshaped, again and again, in an echo across generations. Discussion is a sacred act. Conversation – the conversion of words into personal meaning and back – places us on the path of the holy. It is each person’s duty to speak again, with words we borrow and bend, what those before us have seen and understood. These are the tools we’re given to make sense of our senses. To paraphrase the physicist-philosopher Karen Barad, our memory re-members the world. 

Ouaknine, in his text on the Qabala, writes: “Man speaks the world and speaks himself with words. He is, according to Targoum’s phrase, rouah mellalela, talking breath, ‘man of words.’ For a living man, words themselves must continue to live, to dance, to sing…”² 

If I write today, it’s because I know my thoughts are not mine. Wording them to you allows me to perform a peculiar alchemy: from my anger and sadness, I’ve spoken a self that cries in solidarity with Palestine, in communion with all those who’ve spoken before, and in honor of those who no longer can. I hope that, if you haven’t already, you will allow yourself the same. 

There’s another Jewish myth that says: at any moment in time, there are 36 people alive who are responsible for the earth’s survival. These people, known as “the hidden righteous ones” (Tzadikim Nistarim in Hebrew), can never tell anyone they’re among the 36. Often they don’t even know that one day, a humble, anonymous act of theirs will allow humanity to avoid catastrophe, if only for a little longer. Perhaps they’ve already done what they needed to do. They die without ever knowing the weight of their passage on this earth. 

This is of course a fable about power and impotence, its shadow. It says: Who are you to assume you can distinguish between one or the other? Are you, who humbly walks for peace, not more powerful than all of hatred’s puppets? Who are you to say whose words will matter? 

1. “Pour sortir de la violence (hamass) dont fait mention le texte (Genèse 6,18), il ne faut pas monter sur un bateau, mais pénétrer dans le ‘mot’ et en retrouver toutes les dimensions et les profondeurs.” (Ouaknine, Concerto pour quatre consonnes, 64. Translation mine)

2.  “L’homme dit le monde et se dit avec des mots. Il est, selon la formule du Targoum, rouah mellalela, souffle parlant, ‘homme de paroles’. Pour un homme vivant, il faut que les mots eux aussi continuent à vivre, à danser, à chanter…” (ibid, 29)