Words With Which We'll Dance Again

How can words help us make sense of senseless and cruel violence? What is the role of ritual and liturgy in healing our hurting hearts?

This week’s video was filmed in one of the saddest locations I’ve been to in a long time — a somber spot where dancing turned into disaster on October 7th.

The Nova site, just a few miles from the Gaza border has become a makeshift memorial, co-curated by relatives and friends, a chaotic collage of pain and grief and hope for something better.

Everywhere there are quotes from the psalms, and small booklets, and pages with entire psalms dedicated to those who died here, or were taken hostage.

This both is and isn’t a religious place but loss of such scale brings out the oldest and most trusted tropes that people know - and these old psalms are often what they know to use, recite, remember.

I walked around this dusty and surreal place, inside the cement shelters that became the bunkers of assault, the red ceramic flowers everywhere, the flags and names and fragments of lives that will dance no more.

The war is going on, and we could hear the roar of weapons as we stood there, and also the birds, and the sounds of people singing, and praying, and standing in silence.

Whatever these psalms are about - they are about a lifeline to a world beyond despair and grief, beyond these brutal fears that rupture all this beauty.

Israelis and Palestinians, young and old, deserve so much better than this.

We all do. And we must do all that we can to change this cruelty and find another way.

Earlier this week we read the word of Psalm 72 - a hopeful future:

“Let abundant grain be in the land, to the tops of the mountains;
let his crops thrive like the forest of Lebanon;
and let the people sprout up in towns like country grass.”

May there be peace and may we dance again.

Thank you for joining me below the bible belt.

Shabbat Shalom