A Declaration of Collective Atonement on the Part of Jews of Conscience

These snatches of Prophetic Vision sometimes agree and sometimes disagree with each other. For not even prophetic vision can adequately express the Infinite ways to seek deep healing and justice inherent in the Breath of life. 

A Declaration of Collective Atonement on the Part of Jews of Conscience:

A Call for Grieving and Healing

Authored by the Foundation for Ethics and Meaning, a Project of We the World dedicated to Michael Lerner and to the memory of Peter Gabel

We are heartsick to the core about all the tens of thousands of precious lives being lost right now in Gaza, so many of them children who had their whole lives in front of them. We despair as well over the precious lives of Israelis, brutally terrorized, murdered, and taken hostage on October 7th. We deeply bemoan all the countless losses, traumas, indignities, acts of dehumanization, humiliation, oppression, terror, and violence that Palestinian and Jewish people have suffered, not just since October 7th, but in the century since this far too long-standing conflict began.

To the Palestinian people specifically: words cannot adequately convey how profoundly sorry we are, as Jews, for the role our people have played in all the lands that you’ve lost, the houses you’ve had to involuntarily abandon or witness being bulldozed or otherwise demolished, the family members from whom you’ve been separated, the indignities you’ve experienced by being shamelessly insulted, the honor you’ve seen demeaned, the sovereignty over home, body and life that has been violated, the national identity you’ve seen denied, the limbs you’ve had severed, and, most of all, the far too many sacred lives of loved ones you’ve lost—all in the course of this unbearably costly struggle between our two peoples, who have both deserved so extraordinarily much more.

It has been a tragic, blood-filled irony that children of the very Abrahamic religions which emerged to declare that God-Allah is ONE, that all people are equally sacred members of ONE glorious creation, and that the key source of security in our world comes not from powerful empires but from the spirit that allows human beings to evolve beyond mere tribalism, have been agonizingly at one another’s throats time and time again on the very land that gave birth to them.

Jewish tradition teaches us to love the stranger, for we were strangers once ourselves, as slaves in Egypt. We have been taught that our house shall be a house of worship for all peoples, where none shall be strangers.

In this time of deep despair, all of us, religious and secular, must now come together to make this land holy, by learning to love one another with all our hearts–reflecting the love of all sacred creation. To make our peoples examples of the highest good of which human beings are capable, rather than of its basest evil, we must learn to grow together in new ways that can bring to all the recognition and peace we deserve and need.

There is a deeply moving image of this coming together in mourning in a hitherto obscure passage of the Torah that our times are now deeply illuminating. Abraham/ Ibrahim’s sons Ishmael and Isaac (Ismail and Ishak in the Qur’an), in two of Torah’s most moving stories, had been traumatized in different ways as children: Ishmael by being exiled to the desert after the birth of Isaac, then Isaac being nearly sacrificed as a burnt offering shortly after the exile of Ishmael. Yet, to this point in time, it has been little noticed that Ishmael and Isaac, upon their father’s death, mutually decide to reunite in mourning, seeing one another in their essential brotherhood. And, we can surmise, mourning together, not just for their father’s death, but also for their shared suffering.

Is not this just where we are now? Is not every death, every trauma, every failure of compassion that has taken place in this land—a land that is sacred both to the descendants of Isaac and to the descendants of Ishmael—the murder, the trauma, the misrecognition of a child of Abraham/Ibrahim? And is not our coming together again in this time as our ancestors once did exactly what we are all now called to do?

In our times, in the past century, the Shoah threatened Jewish existence like the knife-blade held over the bound Isaac. Then just a few years later the Naqba re-enacted the exile of Ishmael. These two catastrophes re-invoke the traumas underlying our common foundation. Isaac’s children continually banish the children of Ishmael, fearing they have only themselves to rely on in a world that will always threaten them. And Ishmael’s children, historically oppressed by colonial powers, periodically strike out in cycles of sacrificial rage, returned exponentially by the children of Isaac.

There is an actual site where Ishmael and Isaac reunited: the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron (in Arabic, named Ibrahimi Masjid). We hereby propose eleven global days of mourning, spiritually centered at this site, but also commemorated at sites around the world via concomitant vigils. It will start on Yom Ha Shoah (Holocaust Memorial Day), from sundown May 5th to sundown on May 6th. And it will end on the 76th anniversary of the Naqba on May 16th, one day after the 76th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel. We call for the families of Palestinian and Israeli war dead—not just in this but in all prior conflicts over the past century—to come together, if possible, in this time at this historic site.

In re-enacting the coming together of Ismail/Ishmael and Isaac/Ishak at this site and elsewhere, to mourn our common dead—all children of Ibrahim/Abraham—our intent is to sanctify these deaths in the most real way possible. To finally begin to heal both our peoples’ formative traumas. To, thereby, lay the foundation for a new state of consciousness, freedom, connection and peace. And through our mutual mourning, start to create a new birth of holiness in the Holy Land.

In so doing, we will also unite Ishmail’s and Yitzchak’s descendants, the prophets Isaiah and Jalaladin Rumi, both of whom foresaw a time when we would “study war no more” and call one another to meet in a field “beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing.”

We, Jews of conscience from around the world, now make that call, echoing the long-ago calls of Isaac and Isaiah in the hopes that those calls will be answered by echoes of the calls of Ishmael and Rumi. We must remember and deeply internalize these soulful messages in these soul-trying times. “Without vision the people shall perish,” it is prophesized in the book of Proverbs. Without a vision of peace as a light at the end of the dark tunnel of war, our souls are already dead.

In a world lacking in visionary leadership it is up to the people ourselves to come forward to assert a vision of hope and healing. By mourning in common for our common dead, we aspire in these terrifying times, to lay a deep, shared foundation for a lasting peace.


 

Isaac’s Prayer to Our Times

(by Bruce Hirsch with edits and additions by Bruce Novak)

And so the ancient voice of Isaac now cries out through all of us. He has appeared as our long lost leader in mourning for all the dead of Abraham. Let us hear his prayer for our times. Let us listen closely to him, in his prayer to make us One:

“Ishmael, my brother, you who are named for God’s hearing, can you hear me? If so, hear my cry to my offspring:

“‘Hear, o Israel, hear the sobs of sufferers, the mourners and bereft of all Abraham’s nations. YHVH—the holy name that we repeat with each breath of life—is our God. Our God is far, far more than a real estate agent for the privileged and the powerful. Our God bestows real agency of being on each and every living soul. Each of us is created in the image of God. But it is only as we see each of our images as pieces in a divine jigsaw puzzle—not as complete and divine in ourselves—that we do our part in making the world a divine place. And in doing that, we enact the divine, whether we believe or don’t believe in a God.’

“Ishmael, we are siblings in suffering. We have wronged and hurt each other. Ishmael, please forgive me. I am diminished by our violence. Please forgive my moral blindness when, after the Holocaust of my people, I went on to banish you again: took your homes and treated you as strangers, exactly as I had been taught not to do, and exactly as had so recently been done to me. Can you forgive me for failing the challenges of my traumatization and stigmatization, through which I have raged against, injured, and murdered you and your innocents? I confess and seek to atone for my guilt. And I yearn with all my being for our reconciliation, and for us to seek a new and deeper holiness than we have known before: through our joint mourning, both for our collective dead and for our continuing mutual traumatizing.

“We are mandated by the Divine to love the stranger, for we are all strangers in this harsh world except in those moments we are able to see the Divine in each other. Over the corpses of our origin, let us, therefore —children of Isaac, children of Ishmael, offspring of Abraham—recognize our essential kinship, precisely by acknowledging and atoning for how we have traumatized one another. Only as we repent and tend to one another’s fraternal wounds is there any chance that this harsh world can ever be made into a regular fraternal meeting house for the Divine in us all. So let us meet again in Mamre, in a river of shared tears, flowing together in shared holiness, in a newly shared Holy Land.”