Constellation of Pain by Starhawk
A Response to a Time of Murders
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Sunday night was the first night of Hanukkah. it was also a night that capped a weekend of horrors: the shooting a of a Hanukkah party on the beach in Australia, another mass shooting at Brown University, and the more personal horror of the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife.
And in the same week, as people in Gaza shivered in cold tents, Israel assassinated more Palestinians, and at least fourteen children in Gaza died of cold.
These events circulate around each other like random stars that seem as though they should be linkedIn some kind of discernible, awful pattern. Stars sprinkle the night skies, and depending on what lines we draw between them, we make different constellations. But what do we make out of all of this, at a time when in our various ways we yearn to celebrate the rebirth of light out of darkness?
It’s only human to want to draw lines of simple cause and effect. We yearn for clear meanings and moral lessons. And the lines we most love to draw are those that encircle one group or another, that we can then label ‘all good’ or ‘all evil’.
But people are complex and so are groups of people. A Muslim father and son shot into the crowd at the Hanukkah party on Bondi Beach. A Syrian Muslim immigrant risked his life and single-handedly disarmed one of the gunmen, taking two bullets in the process. Many Jews do support the assaults in Gaza, and this terrible attack will inflame their fear and sense of victimhood. Yet many, many Jews, including me, have spoken up, organized and stood up against the genocidal policies of the Israeli government.
Many years ago, when I had just returned from doing solidarity work in Gaza, I was trying to explain to a friend, and to her ultra-orthodox rabbi and his wife what I had seen and experienced there: the targeting of civilians by snipers, the bulldozing of homes, the daily restrictions and humiliations inflicted on the population, and at the same time, the warmth and welcome I had received from the people there. At the end, the rabbi’s wife looked at me in great confusion. “I don’t understand,” she said. “We’re good! So if we’re doing it, it must be good!”
But we are not all good or all evil. We carry within us the capacity for both.
And we do the worst evils when we forget that, when we label another group as evil or subhuman, when we taint all the members of one group with the actions of a few, and when we refuse to take responsibility for the actions we support or the ways we benefit from harm done to others.
Anti-Semitism is real and deadly as we have just seen. And the genocide in Gaza is real and continues to be deadly. Conflating opposition to that genocide with anti-Semitism simply opens the door to all Jews being blamed for every death in Gaza at a time when the Jewish community is deeply split and no longer unified in support of Israel’s every policy. And failure to condemn the murders on Bondi beach reinforces the callousness and cruelty that are fueling discrimination against Jews and Muslims both, against all targeted groups that someone has drawn a circle around and labeled ‘fair game’, and reinforces the lethal cultural idea, one that infects our politics and our uniquely personal moments of breakdown, that the gun or the knife or the act of violence is the ultimate way to relieve our deepest pain.
I believe we are capable of better. I believe our hearts are large enough to hold the pain for the children of Gaza and of Bondi, without constantly needing to compare the two or rate one against the other. We can hold the pain of the families of the students at Brown, and the many, many families who have lost children to violence, and the very personal pain of the Reiner family, and the vast, unfathomable pain of the hundreds of thousands who fell victim to the murderous DOGE cuts to food and medical aid in Africa and beyond, of the immigrants and trans folks and all those who’ve had targets painted on their backs. And we can turn that pain into action, to build a better world.
And if all that seems too much, if your heart is breaking under the weight, look up into the night sky. Find three stars in alignment: name them Empathy, Compassion, Courage. Draw a line between them, make it a laser beam to cut through false boundaries and carve a new circle, one big enough to include us all.
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And to echo my earlier post on joy:
"Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift" ~Robin Wall Kimmerer
