Support the Gaza Soup Kitchen

In my book Wounds into Wisdom, I wrote about soldiers in Israel and elsewhere who suffer from a kind of trauma that arises from witnessing, perpetrating, or failing to prevent acts that violate their deepest moral beliefs and values. It is known as moral injury.

These days I think most of us suffer from moral injury in some form. That is to say, the trauma of living with the deep sense of wrongness that permeates our lives, as Rebecca Solnit puts it. Wrongness in the daily snatching of innocent people of color from their schools, jobs or streets. Wrongness in the ripping of our social safety-net as we have known it. Wrongness in decreasing funding of food banks, public broadcasting, and environmental safeties, while spending billions to militarize our society. 

For myself and many Jewish people, moral injury arises from the betrayal of our ancient Jewish ethical system. There is a  wrongness that innocent Gazans starving for food, water and the most basic humanitarian needs, and are being killed and injured ongoingly at distribution sites due to Israeli government policies that are outlandishly un-Jewish.

Friends, there is so much to lament this year as we approach Tisha B’Av, the Jewish holy day designated for grieving, this year on August 2nd. But I would remind us of the wise rabbinic tradition that tells us to halt our mourning mid-day of Tisha B’Av to turn toward envisioning a new era.

The rabbis teach that at the very nadir of the year, amidst of our deepest disillusionment, the Messiah will be born—symbolic of a new era of possibility. But to bring it about, we must first imagine it! Don’t get lost in lamenting, the wisdom says—rather, start envision a whole new world. The architecture of the future is burgeoning within us! As my teacher Rabbi Arthur Waskow says: “From the darkness of our mourning comes the night vision, the dream welling up from our unconscious, of new life.”

This year, mourning the unbearable facts of our world that give rise to moral injury, let’s dream together of a possible world and believe in it. And not only believe in it, but plant the seeds to make it so.

One way I am planting seeds amidst the heartbreak is ongoing support to Hani’s Family Gaza Soup Kitchen. Join me in this worthy cause!