Safety. Diaspora. Belonging.
+ Prayer of Mothers for Life And Peace
“Prayer of Mothers for Life and Peace • أغنية الحياة والسلام • תפילה למעמד המשותף”
The following prayer was written jointly by Sheikha Ibtisam Maḥameed – a Palestinian woman living in North Israel (more here) – and Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum – a Jewish woman living in Jerusalem (more here).
God of Life
Who heals the broken hearted and binds up their wounds
May it be your will to hear the prayer of mothers
For you did not create us to kill each other
Nor to live in fear, anger, or hatred in your world
Bur rather you have created us so we can grant permission
to one another to sanctify
Your name of Life, your name of Peace in this world.
For these things I weep, my eye, my eye runs down with water
For our children crying at night,
For parents holding their children with despair and darkness in their hearts
For a gate that is closing, and who will open it before the day has ended?
~
And with my tears and prayers which I pray
And with the tears of all women who deeply feel the pain of these difficult days
I raise my hands to you please God have mercy on us
Hear our voice that we shall not despair
That we shall see life in each other
That we shall have pity on each other
That we shall hope for each other
~
And we shall write our lives in the book of Life
For your sake God of Life
Let us choose Life
~
For you are Peace, your world is Peace, and all that is yours is Peace
And so shall be your will and let us say Amen.
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Safety.
A couple hundred years ago, amidst an aimless eternity of desert, a fertile oasis bloomed for war-weary Jewish European refugees. A slow, steady dispatch was beamed across spacetime from one wayward cousin who fled inevitable conscription into another continental war. He became a fugitive on the winds. He traversed a landmass, then an ocean, then another landmass and landed somewhere strange. A place that is now “El Paso, Texas”. From there he declared something to the effect of: “Come. I have found a place where we are safe (for now)”. For now. It was enough. Safety was always conditional, always precarious. Relatives heeded the call and began to trickle west, west, west, expanding the edges of diaspora into new territory. Along the banks of the Rio Grande that tenuous stream swelled with fertile promise. Soon, thousands of Jews established themselves in that little desert outpost thanks to the truth of one man’s reliable assessment. Safe enough. Safe enough to birth more than one generation. And more than one more generation after that.
My ancestors embedded themselves into a conflation of cultures thousands of years in the making while carrying their own cultures thousands of years in the making – leveraging portable technologies like their own hearts and minds and some books and instruments that remembered songs of a lineage through them and the combination of muscle memory and cell memory that kept the shabbes candles burning each week. They mixed and melded and preserved and protected. They were dis-placed from one land and re-placed upon another. They were annihilated there and assimilated here.
And who among us is unscathed from these migratory machinations of their own unique formation?
We are all always moving toward safety.
Diaspora.
Diaspora is a word that is asked to hold too much: promise, possibility, regret, longing, grief, persecution, privilege, righteousness, cruelty, clinging, desperation, reclamation, flexibility, resilience, devastation…
The Jewish people are a diasporic people. I was raised to take pride in that. We carry our home where we go. It is a duty that will bend your back toward the Earth with its weight.
Diaspora means nowhere is safe – not the home you left, nor the home you attempt to make where you are. Diaspora means you sleep with one eye open.
~
Diaspora feels more confusing with each passing generation. It was once easier to say “that was home” with clarity and conviction and connection. But human interactivity with this planet has become infinitely complex. Dueling legitimacies of indigeneity and migration are testing us as they swirl with colonization, gentrification, polarization. Are you superior if you are residing in your indigenous homeland and therefore not dispossessing someone of theirs? Are you superior if you return from your diaspora to displace someone of the land they’re on now? Does that make you a colonizer or a revolutionary? When someone says “go back to where you came from!” is that an invitation or a threat? Are you where you are meant to be?
~
Diaspora is an anthropocentric idea. Isn’t everything always moving?
Even trees are migrating toward safety.
As climate change makes their habitats unsurvivable, they are steadily transiting north to more hospitable conditions. I wonder, are they displacing existing trees from their present habitats, even if it is happening on geological timelines? Are there subterranean conversations happening to navigate this shuffling of accommodations? Are they making more room to inhabit narrower realms of safety on a warming, suffocating, dehydrating planet?
~
What if there is no diaspora? What if diaspora is itself a colonial framework? What if all land was no one’s and everyone’s? And while we dream into that utopic world, what if we could reckon with present geopolitical realities with pragmatism? What if we could acknowledge it takes slow, steady steps to become increasingly less tolerant to sociopathic war-mongering which is making the world arbitrarily unsafe for all of us, including the trees?
There is no need for diaspora when home is everywhere.
Belonging.
For years I bemoaned my upbringing in El Paso. But now, it all makes sense. I get it. I feel it in my bones. It is not so unusual. We’ve been wandering the desert for thousands of years. It is perhaps the truest thing we know. Add the particularities of Borderland Judaism and the picture coheres more clearly.
Borderland Judaism offered me simultaneously diasporic and indigenous relationships to place. Both were true: we belong here, and we are strangers. We are home, and we are guests.
Borderland Judaism meant that our most sacred tenant - Tikkun Olam - involved embodied activism that was specifically designed to transcend the very borders that carved home into a hostile place of un-belonging, of anti-belonging.
“The U.S-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country — a border culture.
Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Borderland Judaism meant being raised by two community organizers who didn’t even see themselves as such, they simply did what needed to be done. My mother engaged in consistent activism efforts in the colonias – unincorporated settlements within the United States where residents were deprived of basic human rights, lacking potable water, electricity, heat, paved roads, proper drainage, and waste management. Meanwhile, my father has devoted thirty+ years to collaborating with an incredible team to provide pro-bono medical care to thousands of patients in Juárez, refusing to allow inhumane border bureaucracies to prohibit them from fulfilling their duty to fellow humans.
Borderland Judaism did not buffer me from enormous, intersecting geopolitical realities nor the complex, lengthy histories of various peoples cohabiting across spacetime. Borderland Judaism exposed Israel as a complex place with a complicated, entangled history. Instead of perpetuated propaganda demanding either unwavering defense or rejection of “Israel” as a nation-state, my elementary + middle school exposed me to an elevated and nuanced conversation oriented around peacekeepers/builders/dreamers committed to coexistence.
When the dialogue is centered on peace-building individuals and organizations, you can’t make any quick conclusions about Israel, you can’t settle for the reductivism of Zionist versus anti-Zionist or Israeli versus Palestinian or Jew versus Muslim or Jew versus Arab, just like you can’t do that in the borderland. Israelis are Palestinians, Jews are Arabs, Muslims are Israelis // Mexicans are Americans, Natives are Mexican, Jews are Mexicans, Catholics are hidden Jews (see: conversos). When peace is the center of the conversation, everyone is striving to coexist within the realities of that place - that diasporic and indigenous place. Everyone is a multitude, everyone is a world, and none of that fits easily into fracturing frameworks.
~
Today, I’m thinking about my mother. My mother did not hide the world from us. She trusted our young, developing minds with the responsibilities of nuance and contradiction and complexity. The world was not sanitized nor constrained into convenient narratives. It was messy and honest and through that we were meant to humbly and devotedly grapple with the cruelties all around us while keeping our hearts open to the sacred also all around us, and the commitment to constantly work toward creating conditions for collective wellbeing.
There was a deeper prayer threaded through my childhood, carried by my ancestors through deserts and across oceans. It was the prayer of mothers, it was the prayer with the tears of all women who deeply feel the pain of these difficult days. It was the prayer to re-belong ourselves to a world through Tikkun Olam, through loving, healing action.
That we shall see life in each other
That we shall have pity on each other
That we shall hope for each other
…
Let us choose Life.
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