And then there was war. Again.

My idealism and hope have taken a beating this past week.

Hamas attacked Israel, killing hundreds and kidnapping over 200 civilians. Israel responded. Now there are over 3,000 dead in Israel and in Gaza. This is now a war. Jews everyhere are nervous, anguished. Even I, who has spent a lifetime keeping Jewish community at arms length in some ways, have been forced to reckon with my long-held idealism.

Here's a sneal-peek of a drash I'll be giving this Friday at an online Shabbat service.
We are reading parashat Noah, and I was asked to offer something that ties into the parsha.

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“Tie whatever you want to do into parashat Noam,” I was told.

My head was nowhere near Noah.
I was still recovering from my High Holy Days work.
Then I came down with a nasty bug.
Then, Hamas attacked Israel.
And I knew what I would bring here.

If each human soul is a whole world, and each human experiences a sudden, violent change and resulting loss — of home, of family and friends — then each soul is experiencing something very much like what happened to Noah.
The only difference is that Noah got notice, enough time to build the lifeboat that would save him, his family and the animals.
The Torah tells us that the preparation was hard. Noah’s friends laughed at him and his family.
Knowing what lay ahead for them only made him feel more isolated and sad.
But he carried on with the work, and just as the last seam was sealed with pitch and the last tiny window fitted in place and closed, the rain began. Everyone clambered into the boat, closed the doors and waited. And the rain grew harder. And it rained solidly for over a month. The world filled up with water, and while the boat was lifted up on the water everyone outside the boat drowned, people and animals alike.

The journey was hard, challenging, at times frightening. The inhabitants of the boat held on as it rocked wildly back and forth, Did Noah hear someone banging from the outside, begging to be let in? He never knew for sure, but the thought of that sound would haunt him for the rest of his days.

Still more time waiting for the water to recede enough to reveal someplace firm to stand on again.
Still more uncertainty: what would Noah and his family  do when they could leave the ark? How would they live?

When the ark finally landed and there was finally a piece of ground to step on, they found out.

Nothing would ever be the same.
The world they’d known was completely gone.
Nothing left but bare ground, with a little bit of waterlogged foliage here and there.
It may well have been more than they could understand, or even bear.
What would you do if you woke up one morning and the world you knew was gone, and in its place was — well, signs of devastation and emptiness?

That is the big question Jews have had to confront each time we’ve survived a crisis.
Something terrible has happened to our people.
We’re still here, though others are no longer.
How do we cope?
What do we do?

Noah, still stunned, no doubt, by his experiences, did what he knew how to do. He slaughtered some of the animals for sacrifices and for food. He set about creating some kind of shelter for himself and his family. They planted seeds and tended them until they grew. And little by little, their lives resumed a rhythm and a way and they moved forward.

But it was not the same rhythm as before. It couldn’t be. They had all seen and heard far too much. In the days before we talked about how people process trauma, Torah doesn’t tell us how Noah and his family dealt with their trauma and their grief, but rest assured they did experience both. (Our only real clue is when Noah drinks of his vineyard, gets drunk and is humiliated by one of his sons.)

Grief is real. Trauma is real.
What happened last week in Israel and Gaza has touched every Jew I know, including me. That’s a surprise because I didn’t grow up connected to Jewish community and even now I tend to hold it at arm’s length in some ways. But this week, I found that difficult to do. Between the postings and re-postings of the faces of Israelis missing and murdered, and the posts from my friends expressing their grief and anguish, I’ve been forced to admit that I, too, have been affected by all of this. The world I’ve lived in for so long has been changed. I find that I have lost at least some of my idealism, some of my hope. As a result, I’m walking through a different landscape than before. I am still figuring out how engage with this new landscape. I am still figuring out how to be in the world as a human being, and as a Jew. I don’t have many answers at this point. But I know that the hard tangibles of my Jewish life — prayer, companionship and a hunger for peace — continue to inform the way forward. I don’t know where I will end up, where any of us will end up. I don’t know how long the violence and warfare will last. I’m certainly a LOT safer here in Portland, Oregon, a place where really important things seldom happen. But am I really safer? I don’t know. All I know is that the only thing to do is to keep moving forward, with good companions and with as much hope as we can muster on any given day.

I must admit that my hope in humankind’s ability to create large-scale peace is pretty much broken right now. There is no cure for human nature, as much as I’d sometimes like there to be.
BUT — and it’s an important but — we can choose not to give in to our human nature so easily. We can, though it is very hard, choose hope over cynicism. We can find good companions with whom to do the demanding work. We can each play to our strengths to make our pieces of the world more fair, and more peaceful. And we can hope and pray that in this moment, it will be enough, or at least better than nothing.  

Because at the heart of each of us, the roof may be leaking and the walls cracking a bit here and there, but the house still has “good bones”, as they say. The wood is still fine, and will hold up for awhile yet. And while we're walking through whatever comes, I believe we won't be alone.

(Video: "Gam ki Eilech" by Beth Hamon)