As this week comes to a close, I am sitting with both the excitement of the presidential campaign, the inspiring possibility of electing a powerful woman of color to lead this country, and with very real fears about the escalation of violence in the Middle East. The people of Gaza continue to suffer in unspeakable conditions, with ongoing bombing from Israel and now the threat of a polio outbreak. Inside Israel, we witnessed the terrible bombing of the Druse community in Israel’s north, as well as the ongoing suffering of the families of the hostages, who feel their government has abandoned them. On top of all of this, the assassination of Hamas’ political leader in Iran threatens any attempt to bring this war to an end, and makes much more likely a larger regional conflict.
Last week, I went to Washington on the eve of Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress with a delegation organized by the Friends of Combatants for Peace. Along with Israeli- and Palestinian-Americans and American supporters, I (and our very own Janet Penn) met with staff in the offices of Katherine Clark, Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey. Our “ask” was that the representatives boycott Netanyahu’s talk and instead go to alternative programming featuring Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers. We talked with the staff about how to get the U.S. to do more to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza, as well as sanctioning the leaders of the settlement movement in the Israeli government.
Sadly, despite the fact that a majority of Israelis as well as Palestinians urgently want a ceasefire, and despite pressure coming from a majority of nations around the world, the Netanyahu government continues to do all it can to foster the flames of division and violence, whether inside Israel, in Gaza, or in the West Bank. It is imperative that our own government hear from us about doing all that it can to achieve a ceasefire and to keep this situation from escalating out of control.
These three weeks leading up to Tisha b’Av are traditionally a period of semi-mourning, and that feels consistent with the general state of the world. The haftarah associated with this Shabbat is a “haftarah of admonition” preceding Tisha b’Av, a prophetic reading that warns of destruction and exile. In it, the prophet Jeremiah imagines God feeling abandoned by the people, unappreciated for the bounty they have, God’s teachings ignored. In God’s voice, the prophet exclaims: “They have forsaken Me, M’kor Mayim Chayim/The Fount of Living Waters, and made for themselves broken cisterns, which cannot hold water.”
I have always been struck by this imagery, both the beautiful God-name “Fount of Living Waters,” and the human failure to be nourished by those divine waters, and to instead make “broken cisterns that cannot hold water” into our gods. We humans create so many “broken cisterns” that we mistakenly think will nourish and protect us—whether rampant materialism, divisive nationalism, militarism, and more—and we neglect the real sources of our wellbeing. As we head into Shabbat, we have an opportunity to remind ourselves of, and to connect to, those sacred sources, to nourish ourselves from wellsprings of nature, of family and friends, meditation and song and prayer. And we have the opportunity to remember the Source of it all, the Creative Power of the universe that instructs us to do acts of love and justice, to end war, to love the stranger, to feed the hungry.
May this Shabbat bring us all an opportunity to drink deeply from M’kor Mayyim Chayim.
