Original post May 15, 2021
I have plans to write about some things, but I can’t ignore consensus reality and the prevailing discourse. Even without encountering physical violence myself, repeated expressions of verbal violence are hard to witness. Israelis allow themselves (ourselves?) to give their opinion on any subject to anyone anywhere. It rarely occurs to them that this perception is limited in any way.
The inability to listen to others is clearly evident here as well (this was originally posted on Facebook) – inability to hear anything different from the expected and familiar, to open even a crack to the possibility of challenging the known narrative. What can be made of people’s intense need to repeatedly inform every passerby of their own righteousness and the other’s wickedness? Maybe if I ask here, quietly alone in the privacy of my own keyboard, some valid answer might present itself?
I understand that those who feel the need to announce to everyone how fine they are and the other is not, feel threatened. They voice opinions in places that feel safe to get approval, because they are not so sure that they will receive it in other places, maybe including in their own hearts. They dismiss what I or others have to say without checking, maybe because they are not ready to bear the results of that investigation.
In my view, it’s all the same thing: cutting down trees, destroying the biosphere, war. They all reflect an inability to hear the other and their needs, an inability to see them as legitimate, a rejection of the very possibility that there is a benevolent way. It’s living out of a sense of lack and threat instead of a sense of home. A fatal lack of awareness of relationship.
Self-perception as a righteous victim is also a sign of a terrible lack of self-awareness. This is not surprising: not only don’t we teach self-awareness, we teach its opposite. Otherwise, how would anyone cooperate with an education system like ours at all, or with the wretched and destructive way of life that we are sold?
It’s difficult this week to end with an optimistic message, but here it is: this round will end, the survivors will bury the dead, lick the wounds, and move on, and we can only hope that some of us will draw conclusions and strengthen our ability to live as if our lives are embedded and dependent on many and varied relationships, as they really are. In the end, either the fungi and the lichens and the microbes and the plants will supplant this unhappy episode of humankind and preserve it as only a strange layer in the world that will start anew for the seventh time, or we will learn and become worthy to inherit this wonderful world.