by Joelle Novey

Photo attribution: Al Zawaydah, in the south of Gaza on December 23rd, 2024. Photo by Abood M Almadhoun and posted by Gaza Soup Kitchen

When I was a kid we listened to a cassette tape in the car, from the Baltimore Board of Jewish Education (in the days before PJ library). I think it was in that tape’s telling of the Hanukkah story that the narrator described the Maccabees returning to the Temple and finding it defiled grotesquely, covered in pigs’ blood.

That image made a strong impression on me as a kid. The Temple that had once been the most holy and pure place to connect with God, destroyed and treifed up beyond recognition, smeared with blood.

Some of these Jewish stories told to kids embellish a bit. I got curious about that detail this week, and don’t see it in the Book of Maccabees I. But the text does describe Judah’s return to the temple: “they saw the sanctuary desolate, and the altar profaned, and the gates burned up, and shrubs growing in the courts as in a forest, or in one of the mountains, and the priests’ chambers pulled down; They rent their clothes, and made great lamentation, and cast ashes upon their heads, And fell down flat to the ground upon their faces, and blew an alarm with the trumpets, and cried toward heaven.” (I Maccabees 4:36)

I have been scared to say out loud what has been going on for my spirit this year. I wanted to wait to take stock until the war was over. But I’m realizing that holding the devastation of my spiritual life inside me is making me sick. I need to try to write it down.

The bombardment of Gaza and its human toll have been live streamed from the beginning. Basically every day for over a year I’ve seen images on X and other social media that shatter my heart. Smiling holiday and family portraits with names, flinching again and again as I realize every one depicted has been killed.

I could see, even in the early days after October 7, when Israel started dropping bombs on entire buildings, that this could not possibly be a mission of restraint, that was sparing civilians with care, or even had a goal of rescuing the hostages. How could it? It just wasn’t plausible given what I was seeing. Why would an army trying to preserve life or show care bomb Gaza until it looked like the moon, destroying universities, hospitals, mosques, and burying so many families with children in the rubble of their own homes? Why would IDF soldiers loot homes for sport and pose with the things they found if the mission had a defensible and limited purpose? 

I don’t have an unusual amount of access to Palestinian voices on the ground in Gaza. But when I found voices speaking out, I listened and followed. The Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha, now living in Egypt, posts almost every day, sharing the names of former students, writer friends, family acquaintances as they are killed. He sometimes posted that a particular family was trapped under rubble after their home had been bombed, trying to direct emergency responders there.

I read an article by two American doctors – one of them Jewish, Mark Perlmutter – who returned from Gaza saying they had treated one child after another who had been shot in the head – not something that could plausibly happen by accident.

I watched parents wailing over the white-shrouded bodies of their dead children. I watched footage from tent encampments on fire. I saw photos from inside hospitals after days under siege. 

We’re not allowed to kill people. We’re not. I’m totally clear on this. We’re not allowed to kill people when we think those people don’t like Israel, or don’t like Jews. We’re not allowed to kill people to make it absolutely impossible that they could conceivably hurt us later. We’re not allowed to kill people because we are angry about some other harm done to us. We’re not allowed to kill children, or their grandparents. We’re not allowed to kill doctors. We’re not allowed to kill journalists. We’re not allowed to kill people because we believe we are indigenous, and we’re not allowed to kill people because we believe they aren’t indigenous. Goodness knows we’re not allowed to kill people because our racism makes us feel like they’re not quite as human as we are – we of all people have been warned our whole lives to be vigilant about where demonizing a certain people leads. WE’RE NOT ALLOWED TO KILL PEOPLE. Why do I feel like a crazy radical for saying this out loud in Jewish spaces? 

I walk into shul on Shabbat, like normal. Normal friends say kindly – Shabbat shalom. How are you doing?

This used to be easy. Now it is work. How am I? 

This week I saw photos of a round-faced little boy named Osama, a two year old, who was killed along with the green parakeet perched on his shoulder, and his mother. I’ve been really upset about it. No. Can’t say that.

I can’t stop thinking about the photos of Tala, a 9 year old who was killed by an airstrike with her pink roller skates still on. It broke me. No.

There’s this little boy Ahmed in Gaza, his father posts videos on Instagram – this little guy has my son’s smile and mannerisms and he made a video of how he is planting a garden and he reminds me so much of my son it breaks my heart open. No, no, no.

They just said Shabbat shalom. This isn’t hard. Say something normal. (Flash of panic. Breathe.) 

“… We’re doing ok, thanks. How are you?”

I am not a theologian. But I believed in the Judaism I was raised in with my whole heart. I’m maybe 11 years old when an author of a book about Jewish spirituality speaks at our Conservative synagogue. He opens by asking a room full of adults about how we know that the Torah is holy, or maybe it was how we know that the promise God made to Abraham was holy, or something like that. People kept saying, because it was passed down, because our teachers taught us, because the rabbis transmitted it, because our parents told us – it wasn’t the answer he was looking for. Little serious me raised my hand and said we know it is holy because we can feel that it is holy. We experience that it is holy ourselves. That’s how we know. (The man took my father aside to say I should go to rabbinical school someday. I did not.)

But I did experience the holy, over and over again, when Jews sang together in prayer, when we stood together silently during the Amidah, whispering to God. Starting from early childhood, we were asked to think about the consequences of our actions as important – and important to God. We cast off our “sorries” before Yom Kippur. We were taught that our tradition puts the saving of life above all the other commandments. That everyone is made in the image of God. That saving even one life is like saving an entire world. I spent a lot of my volunteer time over the past two decades helping to support Jewish prayer spaces that felt redemptive, where that holiness was made real. We learned new melodies, set up and took down chairs, organized spreadsheets of volunteer roles, all for moments that felt redemptive and sacred.

Suddenly, in the past year, no one in Jewish institutions seems to want to talk about responsibility. We won’t even acknowledge deaths in Gaza. We save seats for the hostages or pray for the Israeli soldiers but don’t name even one of the tens of thousands of human beings killed in Gaza, with American weapons, under the flag flying in front of our building. We say kaddish and honor our own mourners and grieve our own dead by name, individually. But surely the grotesque horrors being live streamed from Gaza are worthy of our attention, particularly in the United States where the President says he is arming Israel for all Jews’ safety, where it is our American weapons being dropped on children every day?

I am 5 years old, in Mechina Sunday school, and the teacher is explaining that we cover our eyes to say the Shema so that nothing can distract us from the Oneness of God. Just as she prepares to do so, she notices the line of styrofoam cups on the windowsill, where we had planted parsley seeds on Tu Bishvat – “look! Your plants sprouted!” We all go over to look and forget about the Shema. I will never know if she staged that moment to teach us about the importance of covering our eyes, or if she just spontaneously got distracted. But I always cover my eyes ever since to say: God is One. 

Hey, Shabbat shalom, how are you?

On my phone this week, I saw video of people pulling two dead children out of the rubble of their home, embracing each other – still in their flannel pajamas. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about their terror, hearing bombs falling from the sky on them, holding onto each other until the end. My kids wear pajamas like that. NO, no. No.

14 pages of babies. They published a list of the people killed in Gaza so far by age, and the document began with 14 pages of infants under 1. No. Of course not. No.

The Israeli human rights report on the torture of Palestinian prisoners – I couldn’t get past the first page. They’re torturing and humiliating people just because they can, with no due process and no consequences. It makes me want to scream. Is this who we are? Absolutely not. 

“… Tired, it’s been a long week. How are you all?”

I’m not a theologian. But when so many Jews and Jewish institutions get into arguments about the words that people use to describe the carnage in Gaza, it makes me feel like I wasn’t in the same religion I thought I was. If we believe in any kind of transcendent Anybody, it is Someone Who knows the truth about the violence in which we are complicit. We can’t tell the Master of the Universe that it’s antisemitic to expect us to look directly at how some of the worst things humans can do to each other are happening in Gaza, with our tax dollars and even our blessing. Any God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is in the rubble with people suffering. How could it be otherwise? Their blood cries out from the ground. Every one made in the Divine image. God knows what Israel’s soldiers are really doing, whether the New York Times headline uses the passive voice or not. God knows what the real casualty numbers are, God knows the horrors. Isn’t this why we wear kippot, to be mindful we are always operating in view of heaven? Shouldn’t it be the reverent thing for every person in every synagogue in America to do a cheshbon hanefesh, an accounting of the soul, of every way we helped create the conditions in which this horror is now possible?

Hani Almadhoun founded the Gaza Soup Kitchen, where teams prepare food and feed hundreds of people every day. Most days they post a dozen photos on Facebook, portraits of the children who came to receive food. I try to look in every face. I pray a little prayer for them to be okay. I want to take them away from all this violence Israel is raining down on them with American weapons. Many of these children would not look out of place at Tot Shabbat in any synagogue or at Ramah Day Camp, or on the bimah reading Torah as a bar or bat mitzvah. These are children like our children, so much like our children that I often think, “She looks like this Jewish child I know; he reminds me of so-and-so.” 

I have to imagine them into our Jewish communities in order to imagine their lives being honored and valued in our Jewish communities. In any synagogue, I know these same children would be cherished, and loved, and fed as much as they could eat, and even their boo-boos attended to – let alone allowing them to come to bodily harm. But these children in Gaza, who have been living under relentless bombardment for hundreds of days in a row, cannot be mentioned in our Jewish communities. To do so would be intolerably controversial. 

I no longer think of myself as praying in the direction of Jerusalem. I pray facing Gaza. I try to imagine explaining to the father of Tala, the girl killed in her roller skates, why I continue to pray in so many rooms that are flying the Israeli flag, the state that killed Tala for roller skating outside. I try to think of the excuses, sentimental ideas I was raised with about it being a symbol of pride and refuge for my people. I imagine trying to explain that the flag has to stay there on account of certain important donors to the synagogue. I try to explain why our religious and spiritual leader, the rabbi, can’t take the political risk of taking the flag down. I could not make any of these excuses to the parent of a child killed in Gaza. Long before I said any of these things, I would be devoured by shame. In matters of uncertainty, we set aside all other considerations to save even one life. We cherish and honor children. If Tala’s father would not accept my explanations, why do I think God would? Why, once again, am I still standing here praying to the One God of eternity who does not slumber, the God of the heavens and the earth, to the One who formed us in the womb and breathed a pure soul into every human being, under this fucking flag?

As a child I sat next to my Dad in synagogue, fingering the fringes of his tallit, feeling safe and connected to the sacred. Today I try to pray in my own tallit, knowing that the Israeli flag and its Jewish star mimic the same kind of prayer shawl. I am so angry that anyone would turn these wings of God’s protection into a war banner. (Is it a “war” though? Is relentlessly bombing a trapped civilian population that is already under your military control, people who are citizens of no other nation, a “war”?)  I am so disgusted that anyone thinks it does me or my Dad any good to kill Tala and destroy her father’s dreams. I try to convince myself that these places where American Jews gather to pray are still holy, that God still attends to our prayers in these places, as the IDF continues to bomb hospitals in Gaza, assassinates one of the beloved chefs of the Gaza Soup Kitchen, continues destroying encampments people evacuated to – by burning them alive. I tell myself that it is I who am disgusted and ashamed, while God’s lovingkindness is forever, ki l’olam hasdo, beyond my imagining. I try and try to feel that I am still in a holy community, praying holy words in a holy space. I usually end up just crying instead. Sometimes I leave and walk around outside.

The horrors there and my life here sometimes rhyme. The week last year when my dear friend gave birth to  long-wanted and much anticipated twins, my community buzzed with joy and organized itself to provide meals and plan naming rituals. On my phone, a video of a hijabi mother from Gaza wailed in grief at the death of her 10-year-old twins, who had just celebrated their birthday. She had not been able to provide a real treat – there is not enough access to food in Gaza – but had promised that next year, the war would be over and there would be cake. (It has been a year. The twins in my life are about to turn one. They lived to eat their cake.)

I have given what I can to relief organizations, to the Gaza Soup Kitchen, to the GoFundMes of Gazan families trying to survive until they can evacuate. I’ve attended rallies with IfNotNow, got arrested in the Capitol Rotunda, called my legislators to oppose further transfers of weapons for Israel to drop on more families in Gaza. (The weapons packages have all gone through anyway.) Twice, when my congressman and one of my senators voted against further weapons for Israel after I had called to ask them to do so, the local JCRC bemoaned that these legislators were no longer being “strong supporter[s] of the American Jewish community.” What is going on? If our children are entitled to roller skate and sleep in their pajamas in homes on which bombs are not being dropped, why aren’t theirs? Why isn’t this the “Jewish” position, being against, not for, continuing to drop bombs on the places children live and play? What the fuck is wrong with us? 

But I mostly just feel trapped and helpless in a nightmare, in which beloved teachers and elders have become monstrous. Former religious school teachers, leaders in local Jewish preschools, posting snarky memes about events I know killed real people in Gaza because I watched the carnage on my phone with my own eyes. People sharing the terror and fear of Israeli families having to go into shelters during rocket attacks, while failing to acknowledge that Gazan families have been under relentless bombardment for months, getting buried alive when their homes collapse on them, with nowhere to flee to and no way out. Safety for just us, absolute silence for them. God is One. I’ll be damned if I let anything distract me from this, the one thing I know for sure.

I keep up appearances but I may be losing my mind. I have been up in the middle of the night, trying to imagine bombs from the sky falling onto my home and the room where my children are sleeping. Some nights I drink, until the sadness overflows my body and fills the room. I have found myself bingeing Law & Order and crime shows. Why? Maybe I’m craving stories in which the killing of just one person is treated as a breach of justice so important that the whole rest of the show tracks down the perpetrator and holds them accountable. In these shows, we attend to people killed one at a time. Each person murdered is named, and honored, and justice demanded. Over the weeks and months, the death toll in Gaza grew from hundreds, to thousands, to ten thousand, to over 45,000. More children killed than all of the children killed in war zones over the past four years combined, or something like that. I can’t hold it in my heart anymore. It is more than anyone can bear. But if it’s really happening, I know we have to try.

I fantasize about running into the sanctuary during services, screaming, until they have to take me away. (For what? What good would that do?) One weird night I bargained with God that I would give up every single thing I loved about Judaism – every melody, every prayer I know by heart, my tallit, everything – I would give it all back if it could save even one of these beautiful children. I know one human being is more sacred than any of these things. It was a deranged prayer that made no sense. I prayed it anyway, sobbing. 

Oh hi! Shabbat shalom, how are you? 

I can’t process the piece in Haaretz this week, a soldier who said his commander assaulted and injured a 4 year old boy in Gaza in front of his soldiers and said “these kids need to be killed from the day they are born.” No do not say that

Oh my God, that article says they’re competing, the units of soldiers compete to shoot as many civilians in Gaza as they can, like it’s a video game.
NO

“I don’t – fine. I mean, we’re okay. Hanging in there. How are you?”

I never see an Israeli flag in a Jewish space anymore that I do not have intrusive thoughts about removing. I never see a pro-Israel banner outside a Jewish space I’m entering that I do not note how it is attached, and what might be required to take it down. The plain meaning of these symbols to most passers-by right now is that we support what the Israeli military is doing in Gaza and want it to continue. I enter buildings that say this regularly, often with my children – and so much shame. One big banner I pass when driving says “We support Israel in its struggle for peace and security.” I’ve started finishing the sentence in my head: “We support Israel no matter how many children it kills.” When I see another one of our buildings declaring that “We stand with Israel” I think “… all the way to hell.” 

We’re the people who will be known in the United States for the rest of my life as the people who equivocated and defended the horrors the IDF is perpetrating in Gaza now. What is known only to God now will become known to the world. When Jewish leaders make space for “pluralism,” and assure me that people like me are still welcome, it treats defending the killing of 14 pages of babies as a normal difference of opinion that a moral community can tolerate. My head explodes. I know this war is not because of American Jews. But we need to reckon with why our own religious community, descended from generations of reverent ancestors who  never wavered from proclaiming the Oneness of God – why our religious leaders and institutions cannot say, with clarity, that the grotesque violence against a trapped civilian population in Gaza is indefensible and wrong. Starving people as a weapon of war is wrong. Torturing and humiliating people is wrong. This is the kind of thing that should be at the heart of what our communities exist to say in the world, not a marginal area of legitimate disagreement.

I’m not a rabbi. I’m not a theologian. I’m not an expert on international politics. But I know what is holy because I experience it myself, and I know for sure that we’re not allowed to kill people. 

I think about why I am bringing my children into these spaces, multiple times a week, into Jewish spaces that are continuing to wave Israeli flags and defend a nation that has killed thousands of children no less precious than they are. It’s because I want them to be good and gentle people. I want them to honor the dignity in everyone, to revere the holy in everything. I no longer remember why I am so confident that more time in these communities can be expected to have that outcome.

My brain has become a horror movie. At one point, haunted by all of the images of children in Gaza whose limbs have been blown off by bombs, I started to hallucinate about finding little bloody hands and feet under my pillow when I wake up in the morning. An Israeli air strike hit a group of people gathered for fajr (dawn) prayer, blowing everyone up so completely that the families had to bury plastic bags of body parts. What if one day someone got to shul early to roll the Torah before davening starts, and opens the ark to find those cursed bags? I imagine those rows and rows of shrouded bodies haunting us, haunting all of us who had the audacity to think we could pray to God every Shabbat for over a year without saying their names. 

It takes all of my energy to keep it all to myself and just be normal and shmoozy at kiddush. “Shabbat shalom,” I say, carefully, with a rock in my chest. “How are you?” 

Sometimes, I have asked myself if I am still going to be Jewish after this is all over. It’s a terrifying question that upends the rhythms and principles around which I have constructed my adult life. It has painful implications for every other member of my family. It’s worth asking because some of the pro Israel voices in our communities seem so eager to cast me out. Counter protestors have called us “fake Jews”. A former friend on Facebook described me as “anti-Jewish”. A rabbi disinvited me from speaking to his synagogue (on an unrelated topic) because my Facebook posts against the war were a “desecration of God’s name”.

But it’s a silly question. Of course I’m Jewish. The place in my body that was shaped from earliest childhood to experience God was in a Jewish idiom, through Jewish prayer and practice. I am the descendant of my biological Ashkenazi and my spiritual ancestors. I might leave shul in tears and walk around the building sometimes. But there’s no easy way out of what we’ve all watched happen to our sanctuaries. They’re ours, and what has happened to them is on us. If we want God to dwell there again, we would have to make them holy again.

On this Hanukkah, I’ll do the silent labor to act normal and go through the motions to participate. For eight crazy nights.

But if I’m being honest, the only place I can really find my way into Hanukkah this year is when the Maccabees come back to the sacred Temple and find it neglected, desolate, and covered in blood. The temple inside me where God once dwelled is defiled; our synagogue sanctuaries are, too. I don’t know how else to say it more gently: our once-sacred places are covered in blood.

The only way forward is to begin the hard spiritual work of cleaning up, taking stock, repairing, and maybe, sometime a long time from now, when the bombs stop, and after we mourn every loss, we might find our way to rededication. But in the meantime, I want to be the sort of Maccabee who is brave enough to face the desolation of our sanctuaries with integrity, and who are reverent enough to fall on our faces, rend our clothes in lamentation, and cry out toward heaven for help. 

Joelle Novey lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.