Noticing the Unimaginable
Weeping Camellias
This morning I offer this short film about Gaza that my friend Lexine sent to me as a way of taking notice of the unimaginable. While the Camellias remind us of the infinite beauty we can enjoy when gardens are nourished and tended, the film reminds us that other human beings have had everything that was once sustaining and nourishing in their lives destroyed. What was once a place to live is now a wasteland, and one wonders how long it will take for the tiniest of plants to break through the thick layers of rubble. We live in a hyper-charged world where evil-doing is being everyday aided and abetted by our war-making policies and our chosen ignorance and silence.
The other night at a Baptist Church in Oakland, my daughter Aarti and I heard a conversation between the Rabbi Cat Zavis and Hamze Awawde about what it was like for Hamze to grow up in Dura, a city south of Hebron in the West Bank (see Rabbi Cat Zavis’s website for more information about her Synagogue Without Walls and their wonderful work for peace: https://beyttikkun.org). Hamze seeks to foster dialogue and break cycles of violence, and he gives talks in the Bay Area and beyond. He has funded his trip to the United States with the aim of helping American citizens to understand the desperation in his homeland and what it was like to grow up being terrorized, demonized and dehumanized, which eventually leads to, and has led to, ethnic cleansing.
Learning how to navigate the environment of his childhood was a matter of survival for Hamze. Now he and his people grieve continuously the friends and family members that have been lost, a kind of loss beyond some of our imaginations. He asks for one thing: “Palestinians,” he writes on his Instagram feed, “deserve to be recognized, to exist freely on their land, to be who they are without fear.” “What we want is simple,” he continues, “not heroism, not survival against all odds, but ordinary life. A life with quiet days, with small worries, with the freedom to dream beyond just making it to tomorrow” https://www.instagram.com/hamzeawawde/. When one woman at the talk asked about how she could help, as a teacher, he had to reply that the schools in Gaza have been destroyed. This is all the more poignant, as Hamze described Palestinians as devoted to education. Absent external power for generations, they have focused on academics, a luxury they no longer have. This short film is an indication of the depths of despair that has been created in this tiny region.
I hope that we take time away to notice the unimaginable, be it the beauty that surrounds us or be it the unimaginable scenarios humans create when we shun the better angels of our nature. Notice the depth of love the father in this film shows for his family members. It is so powerful that it renders him capable of imagining, with no resources at his fingertips, the transformation of rubble into a home once again.
How can each one of us do something small to send love into this cauldron of suffering? If you wish to support Hamze, you can join his social media feed cited above or contribute to his ongoing work for peace and a better future for Palestinians and the region at large, which is now on the brink of an even wider war: https://gofund.me/2cb191f7. And we wonder, we wonder (?), why people become refugees?
I imagine that most of us face internal resistance(I know that I do) to acknowledging the unimaginable, but we can’t co-create a better world, one that recognizes the humanity of every human being, unless we choose to notice.
Here is the ten minute film: https://zeteo.com/p/if-you-only-watch-one-thing-today?utm_medium=ios