“I’ve been experiencing the last months of disastrous war and massacre among Israelis and Palestinians as this cloud of unknowing. A time, a space, where I did not know where to move, how to act as the fire of the burning bush would once have shown me. For months, what I am used to as my own creative impulse, knowing what would be most just and compassionate action to take next, has shriveled up. I found myself almost untongued. At an annual venue for my best and strongest thoughts about ‘What is freedom for me now?’ — the Freedom Seder revisited at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia — I found myself able to say only ‘Two peoples safe and free / From the River to the Sea.’
“Not a word of my true feelings: that the present government of the State of Israel threw in the garbage pail every principle of justice and compassion that ancient Torah and modern Jewish philosophers had taught the world. That the Netanyahu government was made up of Jews but could not be called Jewish. Just as the governing of the military wing of Hamas could not be called Muslim. Both warped by fear, greed, rage, trauma.
“I took some action — sharing information on gatherings for peace, signing demands for a multilateral ceasefire. But I knew that the Israeli public was too traumatized to pay attention, and the Israeli government was too greedy for more land and more power for them to care about Palestinian suffering. The months from October 7, 2023, to the present (as I review these pages for the last time, in June 2025) have felt not like the falling of the Spirit, but like the Spirit’s abandonment of us.
“It has been a deep unmooring of my self. A loss of the identity, the consciousness, the past/present/future that has lit the way for me since I started writing The Freedom Seder in the fall of 1968.
“But I am also beginning to feel as if the Spirit is groping to recover from their own trauma. The cloud of unknowing has hesitantly begun to lift. It has begun to renew the active fire of the burning bush. It has begun to show us where next to move. My own creativity in this crisis
has begun to percolate.”
