Speech

I want to thank you all for coming to be here tonight. I want to make something clear, though I helped to organize this event tonight, and though I am speaking, what I say might not perfectly represent the views of the Global Union. What I say may not perfectly align with you. That’s OK. That’s good even. We’re all here because we want peace. None of us pretend that this is simple. Or that there is some magic consensus answer. But we all showed up, to be in community with each other, to engage with our discomfort or our sadness or our anger. And I want to thank you all for that. That said: I’d like to take a few minutes to talk to you all through the lens of my Judaism.

Tonight is the third night of Passover. Passover is the Jewish holiday that celebrates the Israelites’ escape from slavery in Egypt. We gather around the table and retell that story from a book called The Haggadah. We’re instructed not just to read the story, as something that happened long ago, but as something that happened to us. We’re instructed to grapple and reason with the text.

It says: “In each and every generation, a person is obligated to see himself as if he left Egypt, as it is stated, “For the sake of this, did the Lord do [this] for me in my going out of Egypt.” Not only our ancestors did the Holy One, blessed be He, redeem, but rather also us [together] with them did he redeem.”

The early Rabbis understood something inherent about humanity. We listen poorly. We forget easily. So we tell the story again, and again, and again. Every year. We ask ourselves: how does this story of liberation apply to me? How does it apply to the world around me?

In the story of Passover a man named Moses looked around and did not just the hard work toward liberation of his people, but the hard work of first imagining that something better is even possible.

Key to the retelling is the fact that we as Jews know what it is like to be oppressed. Have our families abused or killed, our freedoms taken, the light of the sunlight blocked out by the boot of our oppressor as it closes in on our neck. Part of the retelling asks us to turn outwards: “All who are hungry, let them come and eat. All who are in need, let them come celebrate Passover with us.” Key to the retelling has always been that we as Jews have learned something about what it means to create a better world. We learned from Moses that one has to be willing to imagine a better world, painful as that work may be, in order to build one. One with less suffering, less oppression, less hate.

This is a complicated Passover for many Jews around the world. As we turn outwards to what is happening in Israel and Palestine, it is impossible to ignore. As an American Jew looking at my own government’s involvement, it is impossible to ignore.

When I think about the people in Gaza today who have lost their loved ones to a senseless violence with no end in sight, and I think of the hostages, and their families who are spending this Passover apart, I am filled with a mix of sadness and rage. I am consumed with grief when I imagine the innocent civilians in Gaza who will take their last breath tonight, their life taken by an Israeli bomb dropped in my name as a Jew, and bought with my dollars as an American.

Every Passover we tell ourselves “we have known what it is like to be oppressed, to be subject to tyranny. We tell ourselves this story to make sure it does not happen again.” But today I look out and see the self-proclaimed “Jewish State” bombing civilians. Wiping out entire family trees, generations at once. Attacking aid workers. Shutting off water pipelines. I see all of this and fear that somewhere the plot has been lost.

Over 34,000 Gazans have been killed. Most of them were civilians. This came in response to the horrible killing of nearly 1,200 Israelis, many of them civilians. Violence begets violence, but it does not answer it. This is not justice. This does not make anyone safer.

I have family members, many of whom are from a different generation who are conflicted in this struggle. They see it through a lens of fear and generational trauma that I can not pretend to understand. They have a visceral memory of the holocaust, or grew up directly in its aftermath. When we call for a ceasefire there is a voice in their head that screams out fearful of what might happen next. But what we have to remember is that what we are calling for is not the end. It’s the beginning. We cannot start to imagine a better future while the bombs are still falling. We must have a ceasefire now!

This work is not easy. It is fraught with pain, and discomfort. But all of us today have shown up. The students who are in many ways just like us who are protesting and making their voices heard on campuses across the country, even when it gets them arrested or kicked out of their schools are showing up. All of the organizations in this country, all the organizations on the ground in Israel and Palestine, fighting on in spite of the pain and violence are showing up.

So what can we do? What is there to do in the face of such massive and powerful institutions that seem intent on perpetuating this war and this suffering. Is there anything useful to be done that can be done by us? I’d argue that some of the only substantive gains that have been made in this fight happen because of people like us applying pressure.

We need regional leadership that listens to the voices of their people. We need a bilateral ceasefire. We need a deal that releases all hostages.

We need the American government to condition aid to Israel. It is unconscionable that the US would send $26B of military aid to Israel without condition when we can see with our own eyes how those dollars are being spent to massacre innocent civilians. This is a direct pressure I can place on my government and our institutions. And I invite you to ask yourself: what can I do? What pressure can I place to bring about peace?

Those of you who know me know that I am not easily prone to fits of “hope.” I have, at times, been accused of being a pessimist, and those people haven’t always been wrong. That said, in between the fear and frustration of the past few weeks and months, seeing students like us coming out in force to put pressure on the institutions of power has made way to glimmers of hope in my mind. They are showing that we are capable of not just imagining that better future, but building it.