olive trees

I caught the phrase just before it left my lips and was covered in shame. It was a happy thing, said to me for my whole childhood, a hopeful thing with the concrete meaning squeezed out--something to say whatever it is, it'll be better soon, we have something better laid out for us.

Every year, over dinner, we would say this. Every year, lighting candles, we would say this. In high school, we even sang it.

But looking my Palestinian sister in the eye as she recounted the uncountable sufferings of her people, the enormity of that phrase, and what it meant, punched me in the gut.

When I was a child in Torah school--I went to Sunday school at my father's synagogue, and often Mass at my mother's church--they passed the collection can every week to plant trees in Israel, on farms--settlement farms. They tried to recruit us to visit and work on the settlements, as students, as tourists, as residents invoking a mystical "right of return." They never mentioned that the land was stolen. They erased the people who lived there--our cousins!--their greatness, their pushing-aside, their murder. They committed the ultimate genocide: erasing even the truth that the dead and the living pushed out of that homeland had ever existed. And all the while we lit candles for Yom ha-Shoah and ate "Israeli food" for lunch, which was Palestinian food appropriated, repackaged, renamed.

Hearing the pain of my Palestinian sister covered me in shame for not knowing. I had supported her cause, I thought, before. But the enormity of that phrase--that hopeful phrase--had never come home before. I had been so close to saying it out loud, forgetting what it meant, forgetting its bloody conclusions, forgetting the lie of an empty land ready to walk into that it encapsulated. Forgetting that the hope it presented was the hope of stealing a home from breathing families and taking part in their brutal subjugation. Forgetting all that I had read and heard and seen of a racist, colonialist regime that used my name to justify a thousand indignities and vicious wounds to a people who never asked for it, who never did anything to us. What happened to my Jewish people in the last century, what still happens in places, is unacceptable. What we have done in return is not only inexcusable, it is, in light of our own history, incomprehensible.

I almost said it aloud, and I am covered in shame that I never saw it clearly before, that I had let it go unexamined, that I could be so insensitive on such a towering level.

I was this close, before I caught myself and thought better, my lips frozen just in time.


"Next year in Jerusalem."

the heart of the matter

(for my sisters)

I'm learning to live without you now
But I still miss you sometimes

With every tear I shed with you I learned a new way to hope.
I found nourishment for a hunger I accepted for so long I forgot I had it.
I pushed myself further and harder, and, though I cringed, I trusted my voice because you trusted it, because, surrounded by you, I felt invincible in my vulnerability.
It was your grace and hospitality and openness that opened me all the way up, open in a way I had never shown even most of my lovers, open in a way I may never be with the family I was born to.
As we mothered ourselves, I learned sisterhood.
And as we looked war in the eye, I learned peace.
Hand in hand with you, I remembered how to dream, without faithlessness or embarrassment or apology.
And this hunger, this isolation, is no longer enough, no longer acceptable. My heart full of you, my sisters, I refuse to let it fall neglected again. And while I count the hours until we are all together again, I know I need something here, far away from you, to change. If the whole world has to change to make this community happen, we will change it.

You are family to me, and my home is open to you.

It was a joy and an honor to speak together with you.
Because of you, I have evolved beyond survival.


and I think it's about forgiveness