Isaiah 25:1–9
As we prepare for worship on Sunday, especially those of us who preach, I know that each one of us is wrestling with what word to offer regarding the war in Palestine. For anyone who speaks of good and evil publicly—and with social media, that is all of us—we can easily become overwhelmed with the anxiety of choosing the right words, anticipating the counter-arguments, and not disappearing into empty discourse.
This week my social media offered me a plethora of positions. First, the ‘stand with Israel’ crowd which itself ranged from ‘Israel has the right to self-defense’ to explicit calls for genocide. Second came ‘we grieve the violence on both sides,’ that ahistorical appeal to ‘peace.’ To the left of that are organizations and individuals trying to hold the grief and suffering of Israelis alongside a larger critique of the occupation and apartheid and/or Israel as a settler-colony. And finally, some have called for liberation by any means necessary, considering murdered Israeli civilians unavoidable collateral in the anti-imperial struggle.
How we talk about violence, resistance, colonialism, anti-semitism, anti-Arab racism, genocide, the US war machine, and Christian Zionism matters a great deal, but in times like this our words (and our infographics) feel deeply inadequate for the task of creating justice.
Instead of moral righteousness, mostly I feel grief and complicity. This past Sunday, I told my church that the blessing and burden of pacifism (we’re Mennonites) is that we grieve all violence, and we grieve our own complicity and our failure to prevent death and suffering.
This Isaiah passage is deeply disturbing and timely in its vision: ‘For you have made the city a heap…. you have been a refuge to the poor, a refuge to the needy in their distress…. And God will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever.’ I am wrestling with Isaiah, alternately moved and horrified.
I cannot read these words without picturing Gaza bombed. I cannot read these words without picturing the shroud of fear cast over children in Gaza, or my friends trapped in their homes in Al Khalil, or my Jewish friends grieving relatives in Israel who have been killed. I cannot read these words without wondering where this God of refuge was when early US settlers displaced and ethnically cleansed the Lenape people on whose land I currently sit. I cannot read these words without feeling the ties of complicity and solidarity that bind my body and heart to the white phosphorus being dropped by the Israeli parents, the grieving parents on both sides, or the Gaza children climbing over the broken prison walls to touch the dirt of a homeland they have only known in stories.
Hope is hard to come by right now. Rather than replacing it with righteousness, I am seeking out a God who will ‘wipe away the tears from all faces’ while still proclaiming the inbreaking end of settler-colonial violence. This God does not keep me passive—as I finish this, I am preparing to head downtown to a Palestine solidarity rally. But hopefully my wrestling with Isaiah and my seeking of God will lead me to humble action on the side of liberation for all people, that larger vision of God swallowing up death forever. May it be so.
Rev. Jay Bergen is a pastor at Germantown Mennonite Church in Philadelphia, and a volunteer organizer with the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CADBI), a campaign fighting to end life sentences and heal communities across Pennsylvania.