We (Peg, Yehonatan, the Haredi activist, and I) spent a quiet night in the madafeh at Ras al-‘Ain.
There is an eerie quiet to a night there: in part, because we know that settler violence is brewing under the surface and can erupt at any moment; also because we know what is happening in Gaza: mass starvation, in the north and in the south; constant shelling and killing; whole families decimated or wiped out entirely; no place to take shelter, since all the buildings have been bombed and destroyed; summary executions of innocents; no escape; no hope. The voices reaching us now from Gaza say the Palestinians left in northern Gaza (tens of thousands of them) are just waiting to die. We know Israel is committing war crimes, including ethnic cleansing. We’re unable to stop them. I wake in agony, after midnight, in the silence of the stars and the desert. I want to scream.
Muhammad told us that earlier that day a particularly violent settler whom they know well, Avishai, broke into the house of a woman living alone with her children just next to the madafeh; she started screaming, and he left. Muhammad says, when I ask him how these days have been: “More of the usual.”
I learned something, as always, from Yehonatan. As we stopped by the water, he cited the following Midrashic story. When King David finished composing the Book of Psalms, he felt proud of himself. Some say he asked God if there was anyone else in the world who sang as beautifully as he sang. Just at that moment a frog happened by and said to David, “Don’t be so proud, since I sing more songs and praises than you. Not only that, but I am fulfilling a great commandment. On the shore of the sea there is a creature who survives only on what comes from the water. When it is hungry, it grabs me and eats me. That is the commandment, as the verse says (Proverbs 25.21), If your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him water. For you are placing hot coals on his head, and God will reward you. But, says, the frog, we should read not ‘reward you’ (yeshalem lakh) but ‘God will make make him complete for you’ or “will make peace for him with you’ (yashlimenu lakh).”
A Buddhist Midrash? When I got home and told Eileen about this passage, she said, “It speaks to Gaza and what we are doing to the starving people of Gaza.”
That huge, echoing silence. I feel a little better in myself when I’m in Ras al-‘Ain.
In the morning, one of the obnoxious settlers was walking by the stream, as if he owned it; he tried to block our way. We ignored him. We saw the schoolchildren safely onto the bus to their school. One joyful moment in a world rife with danger, even at dawn
Text: David Shulman © 2024; photographs: Margaret Olin © 2024 .
Margaret Olin and David Shulman, The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine 2024. Order from Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press or from an online or local bookseller.
