Learning How To Talk

Rabbi's Notes - September 2001

by Rabbi Margaret Holub

In the last Megillah I wrote a long "megillah" describing my own agonizing about what I think are excesses committed by Israel in continuing the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. And this month, if you'll bear with me, I'd like to continue my little story. Obviously my own experience is tiny and peripheral to the much more immediate and extreme experiences of Jews and Palestinians living in the center of the cyclone. But if I have learned anything in the past month-plus since my Megillah column came out around here, it is that the struggle in Israel and Palestine affects us here in Mendocino County in strong and personal ways. We're not in the center of the cyclone of the Middle East. But we're in the center of our own stories wherever we are, and events from across the globe really do shake us off our axes even here.

I wrote last month about how frightened I have felt talking about Israel with other Jewish people in our community, how somehow the diversity of opinion and experience among us felt personally scary and upsetting to me. Since my column came out I have had easily thirty conversations with many of you, people with many points of view and many varieties of passion about the current situation. The amount of response to what I wrote has really been amazing! Every person and every conversation is unique, of course. But, if I were to generalize very broadly, I could describe the many conversations as subsets of two points of view. Many, surprisingly many, people -- including people whose politics I thought were quite to the right of mine on this issue -- said that they too agonize over the tactics that Israel is using presently and that this horror they feel has consequences for their own experience of Jewishness. They are embarrassed, upset, don't know what to do to respond, or feel alienated from the Jewish world which seems to accept Israel's actions uncritically, or they feel like they have to keep quiet to not rock the boat of our nice Jewish community here, or they try not to think about it, or they wish someone would offer some clean, clear way to protest, or they feel upset when non-Jews confront them about Israel's actions and don't know how to be both loyally Jewish and still politically honest.

The other set of conversations I have had have centered around the equal agony that these speakers feel about the death of Jews, the atmosphere of terror in Israel today, the spectre of the hatred of Jews bleeding beyond the borders of Israel to threaten us all, horror at the tactics of terror against civilians and especially youth, the apparent willingness of Palestinians to commit suicide as long as they take Jews down with them, the sense that Palestinians have refused even deep concessions from the Jewish state because they really want to destroy us entirely, the valorization of murder in the Palestinian press, the terrible observation that something of what happened fifty years ago in Europe feels like it could begin again.

In terms of my own personal oddyssey in the midst of all of this, I can now report that, to my surprise, I have been able to listen to all of these many thoughts and feelings with none of that inner fear that I used to have. I think it has to do with having finally spoken my own passion out loud. As usual, I am finding that people in my world are well capable of disagreeing respectfully, of trusting and liking me even if our opinions differ, of continuing to be in relationship with me even if they don't trust or like what I say or do. For my part, I am finding my own heart more open to those whose horror is as great as my own, but in response to different aspects of the situation than those which so arouse me. I can now understand the person shaken to the core by the bombing of a pizzeria in Jerusalem full of Jewish families, as shaken as I am by the shooting of a Palestinian baby by a Jewish soldier. I am no longer scared by this person's response; I am moved by it. My own beliefs are not necessarily changed by this understanding. But my ability to warmly be in community with the person who expresses it has changed quite a bit -- to the better, I think.

This column isn't really about Israel or Palestine at all. It is about our own ability to listen to each other speak our hearts and minds and still be in community together. I think that many of you are way ahead of me on this one. I've certainly learned a lot from Claire Ellis and Chuck Greenberg, who went to the embattled center of the cyclone on a "Compassionate Listening" tour last year. While there, they met with Israeli settlers, Hamas members and people from many points in between. The task of the listeners was simply (!) to listen without arguing, belittling or dehumanizing the speaker, whatever his or her message. Many of us heard Chuck's (Claire's too, but the night of their presentation at the shul, Claire was ill...) remarkable rendition of the statements of over a dozen people from radically different points of view, to whom they listened carefully enough to be able to speak in their words. The Compassionate Listening project, or movement, was started by Leah Green, a Bay Area activist who believes that the capacity to listen with empathy -- not to agree or to change one's position, but simply to witness a position different than one's own without attack -- is a key to addressing this and any conflict.

I agree -- and I'd like to suggest that this is a good place for us to begin the new year together. For many of us, our area of passionate concern is about Israel/Palestine, and 5762 will be a good year for us if we can sit together and speak our minds and hearts, knowing that others who may disagree are listening compassionately. For others it may be about the school board or about cell towers or salmon fishing, or about our family life or our faith or our past or our Jewish community or... I am glad that I took the plunge in the last Megillah and spoke my mind and heart about Israel (it wasn't the first time for me, but it was the most personal and heartfelt I think I've allowed myself to be on the subject.) And I am truly grateful to all of you who have taken the time to talk with me, or write to me, about how you think and feel -- to those of you who agree with me and perhaps even more to those of you who disagree, but took the time to speak your own minds and hearts with me nonetheless.

We all spend our whole lives, and not just our first two years, learning how to talk. It's not easily to talk clearly but spaciously when you know your audience will not all agree. It takes practice, and I appreciate, as ever, all the years I've had to practice on all of you! And it takes a lifetime as well to learn how to listen and hear and understand. But all these efforts -- to say what we mean in a way that does not alienate those who think differently, and equally so our efforts to listen with compassion when someone isn't speaking gently -- all this effort builds loving community, the failures as well as the successes.

So my wish for all of us for 5762

Copyright 2001 Rabbi Margaret Holub

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