#100 Sacred Solidarity with Palestine: Sounds of SAND Second Year

September 12, 2024

Welcome to our 100th episode of the Sounds of SAND podcast, marking two years since we launched on September 8, 2022.

As SAND grows and evolves with the changing times, we aim to integrate—not abandon—our foundational themes of spiritual awakening, embodiment, consciousness, and scientific wonder, while also confronting pressing global challenges such as environmental collapse, indigenous resilience, war, and societal upheaval.

In the past year, SAND released our latest film, Where Olive Trees Weep, which offers a powerful look into the lives and struggles of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation. This film explores themes of loss, trauma, resilience, and the quest for justice. Alongside the film, we hosted Conversations on Palestine, a 23-part series of discussions diving deeper into the experiences and stories shared in the film.

Throughout the year, the podcast shifted focus to complex conversations around intergenerational trauma, colonialism, and spiritual activism, with episodes hosted by SAND co-founders Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo, and co-host and producer, Michael Reiley.

Today, we revisit some of the most powerful moments from the past year, with a special focus on the voices that have shaped our "Where Olive Trees Weep" film and series.

Thank you for being part of our journey over these two incredible years. Let’s continue to engage with the profound conversations that shape our collective understanding and growth.

Topics:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:03:01 – #86 SAND’s New Film on Spirituality in the Face of Injustice: Zaya & Maurizio Benazzo
00:09:31 – #92 Gaza & the Bodhisattva Path: Dr. Gabor Maté & Tara Brach
00:18:55 – #60 Spiritual Warriors: Lama Rod Owens
00:24:00 – #91 Decolonizing Healthcare: Dr. Rupa Marya
00:31:14 – #84 Grieving in Community: Mirabai Starr & Mona Haydar
00:43:10 – #94 One Human Family: Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Rev. Deborah Lee, Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, Pir Zia Inayat Khan
01:00:46 – #75 Love-With-Justice: Omid Safi
01:17:42 – #89 Arab Jewish Mysticism: Hadar Cohen
01:27:48 – #58 On Extinction & Enchantment: Alixa Garcia
01:36:12 – #93 Feminine Resistance in Palestine: Ashira Darwish & V

Links:

Watch Where Olive Trees Weep
Purchase the and the full 23-video series Conversations on Palestine
Learn more about the SAND Community Gatherings

Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member.

Episode Transcript

10-093-defying-brutality-and-justice
===

Michael Reiley: Welcome to our 100th episode. And this marks two years since we launched this podcast on September 8th, 2022. My name is Michael Reiley and I'm the producer and co-host of this podcast.

In many ways this podcast has served as a bridge between SAND's past welcoming speakers from SAND conferences over the years. And a bridge to the future. Introducing the SAND community to new speakers, ideas and conversations. As San continues to evolve and grow with the landscape of these times. We've endeavored to integrate, not abandoned the past themes of spiritual awakening, embodiment, consciousness, and scientific wonder. As we move into new realms confronting the reality of environmental collapse. Indigenous resilience war genocide. Wealth inequality. Technological threats and societal upheaval.

All with the spiritual heart of compassion, openness and love. This past year, we saw San launch our latest film "Where Olive Trees Weep", offering a searing window into the struggles and resilience of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation. It explores themes of loss, trauma, and the quest for justice. And our Sounds of SAND podcasts.

Of course we shifted focus. To the complex conversations around intergenerational trauma. Colonialism, and spiritual activism. With episodes hosted by SAND co-founders Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo.

Michael Reiley: and our SAND Community Gatherings. And the "Where Olive Trees Weep Conversations on Palestine" series. And also some conversations hosted by me.

And you can watch many of the segments that you hear today as full length conversations as part of the series with 23 talks by visiting. "Where Olive Trees Weep".com or find a link in the show notes to the full. 23 talk series conversations on Palestine. So let's listen to some highlights from the past year with a special focus on the situation in Palestine in year two of the Sounds of SAND podcast presented by Science and Nonduality.

First, we start with the founders of SAND., And directors of "Where Olive Trees Weep" Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo talking about what they perceived as a gap between Western spirituality's talk of compassion and universal love, and the lack of action when it comes to social and global injustice, like we're seeing currently in Palestine.

Zaya Benazzo: What I have been seeing and I see more and more is that there's something about our Western approach to spirituality that, again, is based in individual, an individual that goes to workshops, that continues to learn and hopes one day I'm going to wake up as an individual. And okay, we're, we come to a place that eventually we realize that non dual essence of life, the non dual essence of consciousness and who we are.

And then what? Do we just continue going to workshops? I'm not saying that there is a recipe what you need to do afterwards, but from my own experience, the, what happens On the other side is deep desire to serve life, to serve, to fully embody and live and relate from that place of realization that I can't exist without you, without everything that is around me, breathes life into me.

So if I see life's sacredness being violated anywhere in front of my eyes or a thouSAND miles away, That brings a deep calling in my heart to, to stand for my deepest realizations that life is sacred and we are one. What's happening to the people of Gaza, in Gaza, is happening to us as well. It's not that we can put the violence in a little box and contain it and say, Oh, that, that doesn't concern me because it's far away and I can have my spiritual life here.

And no, this goes against. Any kind of spiritual realization that what's happening in one place is happening everywhere. And if we care, we have to do our part to stop, to bring to light places where there's violence. There's oppression, there's injustice, and it's been really hard to actually witness now for seven months, the silence of the spiritual community.

Yeah. The few voices that we've heard, but the majority have been silent, like it doesn't exist. This is it. Oh, it's happening somewhere far away. I'm just doing my spiritual practice here. Why would I care?

Maurizio Benazzo: Or they speak privately. They say, Oh, I absolute, which to me is even more appalling to do me. That is even more scary.

The privacy. No, I totally understand. I'm totally on the Palestine. And why don't you say anything out loud? So then we are making, they're making economical calculus. Yeah. It's a brand. Yeah. That's offensive to me. Yeah. Then you don't believe what you're saying. And you tell me I should follow you as a spiritual leader.

You don't have the courage to tell out loud what you believe. You are basically lying. So where else are you lying? I really lost respect for 98 percent of the spiritual teacher out there. In these

Zaya Benazzo: days, because where our spiritual realizations penetrate our lives. Okay. Many of people on the spiritual path have embodied it to a say,

"oh, I'm going to eat healthy". This is okay. I'm avoiding my spirituality because I buy organic food and eat healthy or I fast or I do exercise. I do yoga. I move my body. But how about going deeper? How about we go deeper? And so this is our invitation. Let's not close our eyes. Let's really, this is to embody fully our spirituality.

When we see injustice, let's bring the light of consciousness, this awareness that penetrates all the places of life. That feel right now very dark and maybe it's a bit naive, but then what else do you do? What else? Do you sit quiet? And yeah, of course, contemplation has to continue. We, it's, I'm not saying every spiritual person has to become an activist.

You continue spiritual practice, but you also make an offering back to life with your gifts. And if your gift is to play music or to If prayer is your language, organize a prayer circle and pray for peace or go on a demonstration or bring food to the students on the campus or bring them a tent or donate to Gaza or go bring volunteer in the West Bank or ask your city to pass a ceasefire resolution.

Anything. There's so many ways that we can offer.

Maurizio Benazzo: But horrors like this, like the Holocaust happened, they can only happen when you have a bunch of crazy people up there and 90 percent of silent population who refuse to take a, to make a step. And this is the, that's the recipe of it for disaster historically.

We have to rise. We have to wake up. We have to respond. This is not acceptable. The child are. killed like that, hurt like that, grandmother, grandparents, mothers, father, it's not acceptable by any standards. There is no one religion that can tell you that is acceptable to treat other human being like that.

So you cannot call yourself a spiritual being unless you, you have a response to when you see this horror in front of you, because before it was, Oh, I didn't know. You cannot say you didn't know. Now you cannot say that you didn't know. And if you still play, I don't know, give me a call. Let's have a conversation.

Watch the movie. Then at this place,

Zaya Benazzo: we should use our spiritual inquiry and say, let me see what I'm actually not willing to look at. Yeah. That's what I would use. That is uncomfortable. It feels uncomfortable. I am in denial of something. What is it that I'm in denial of? What is it that feels threatening here?

That's spirituality at practice.

Michael Reiley: Continuing this theme of silence about Palestine. We hear from trauma and addiction expert. Dr. Gabor Maté.

And meditation teacher, Tara Brach the collective silence of the suffering of Palestinians from spiritual leaders.

Dr. Gabor Maté: I was going to bring, come to that issue of the What, to me, has struck me as the conspicuous silence of spiritual leaders, whether of a Jewish background or whether not, or whether even of a Buddhist background or other spiritual paths. Let me come to the spiritual argument, as I understand it, if it's an argument, the point of view.

And I'm certainly no spiritual adept, but as I understand it, some people say, I haven't spoken out because I don't want to take sides. I haven't spoken out because we're in favor of peace and unity and not creating more division. And as soon as you bring politics into it, you're creating division.

We're all about unity and togetherness. Now, is that a fair characterization of how some people might think about it and why they don't speak?

Tara Brach: There's a lot of different, I would, there's, that's one. And people spoke up a lot about Ukraine and spoke up a lot with Black Live Matter and spoke up a lot with the Rohingya, the oppression of the Rohingya.

So it wasn't so hard to take sides on those. I think that the real thing going on is that so many of the students of these teachers would experience any sense of calling for a ceasefire, saying that we don't want to spend our tax dollars on weapons to kill children, that kind of a statement as being, you don't care about me.

And that's just to say, Gabor, that I've gotten a huge amount of email after saying those kind of things. This is what love calls me to say that we to fight and work for permanent ceasefires and this that translated as a hateful post that they interpreted as meaning I didn't care about their suffering and I think that's the fear that in some way anything you say will be interpreted by some as I don't care about your suffering.

I think that may come up, but I don't think that's enough of a reason not to speak, but I think that's the concern.

very statement of the Dharmapada, basically everything is mind in the lead, everything is thought in the lead, and he's implying, I think, is that basically with our minds and with our mindsets we create the world that we live in and if you have a certain mindset, then it doesn't matter what somebody says, you're going to interpret it a certain way through your particular perspective.

And from a certain perspective, any criticism or what strikes people as criticism of Israel is an attack on Jews. And, but That's right, but that's one Please go ahead, yeah. That's on the side of the recipient, their mindset totally filtered. If you ask, what does the Buddhist Dharma teach us in terms of what's wise speech?

And it's to say what's true and to say what's helpful, and that takes a huge amount of wise discrimination. So I think for some teachers they are, Assuming it's not going to be helpful. That's their judgment call. That they can serve more by teaching people how to find an inner refuge in the midst of a chaotic and violent and incredibly cruel world.

But that's what they can do. They can teach people to find some inner balance and then hopefully people will act out of that in a wise way. I think that's Probably the best summary of how it's being interpreted by teachers who are being silent. That it's not for them wise speech. And one can certainly salute anybody who helps other people attain a state of inner peace and balance.

But I found, I'm just speaking for myself, and I'm not standing behind this point of view. Because I let go of it now. But for the first months, I was just enraged. I was just enraged. Now, my rage is my own problem. My rage is my own not dealing with my own mind. But I was very judgmental. And I was very disappointed.

And, frankly, angry. What you just said is probably, it seems, An accurate explanation of what people think, but it's also the most charitable explanation and there's less charitable ones Which is that people are just afraid of losing followers or people are afraid of losing face I'm not gonna ask you to comment on that one unless you want to.

I do actually yeah No, I like being as real as possible. I think that's true I think people want to preserve their standing, their image, and their student numbers. And if we, and I just also want to name that like you, I have had to process my own judgment. I think it reflects something really deep, which is that there's a kind of narrow interpretation of what is the spiritual path and that it, in that the spiritual path is meant to focus on our inner work.

And To me, the hope for the world is that we do this inner work of waking up our hearts and caring more for the benefit of our people. shared belonging for the world that we're part of, and that without that peace, what is there to hope for in terms of any real evolution? To me, a very evolved spiritual perspective is one where you don't separate the inner and the outer, but it takes a lot more courage and it forces you to face a lot of vulnerability.

I know I've been having to work a lot with, I'm not super thin But it hurts to have people that I care about feel like I don't care about them. So I've had a view with that. The thing I do get is that the change people changing and opening and taking more risk isn't going to come out of me judging them but more me having the capacity to be in communication in a way that they trust that I basically love them and respect them even if I don't agree with the stance they have and that's the only way that at least in my little circle of different teachers it's going to emerge that people take more of a step out

Dr. Gabor Maté: what's really difficult is To get across to people that by speaking truth, you're not taking sides.

You're actually just taking everybody's side. Because the people that might believe that by speaking out, you are not recognizing their suffering, what they don't get is what I'm sure you believe, certainly I believe, that the path that they're following is going to increase their suffering. So that it's not that you don't care about their suffering, it's that You see that they're going down a path that's going to create more suffering, not just for the other, but also for themselves.

So by speaking the truth, it's not that you're being a partisan. It's that you're saying, people, this is going to create more suffering in the world. You and I agree. And I don't think it's about sides either. I think the real healing comes when you truly, authentically, in your heart, care about the well being of all.

The problem is that's a nice idea, but many people that feel they're speaking the truth also have energetically some bad othering of a side. And I feel like that's part of our work collectively, those of us that really care about what's going on is to do the inner work that helps us to disarm our hearts, where we, even though we're saying the right things, are angry, blaming, or feeling hatred towards those we feel are the oppressors.

And that's really hard work. It takes a real dedication, but I don't feel like it's enough to stand up and speak the truth of what's going on. It requires a kind of heart energy. That conveys, that really conveys that it's rooted in caring and that's my attraction to the Bodhisattva path, which is, it's fully dedicated to the inner work that becomes the roots of transformational activism, and I think we have to have all of it.

Michael Reiley: Next we hear a clip from Buddhist writer and teacher Lama, rod Owens about the energies of trauma, grief and rage. During such devastating times of genocide.

And how to find a balance between political activism and spiritual self care.

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, it's a mountain of trauma, of grief, of rage, of hopelessness, right? On top of that, there's this collective disembodiment as well, which is, has been going on for a long time. And so when all that kind of comes up all at once, then we can feel really disempowered and really helpless. And so much of my work. Regardless of what's happening, no matter what is really happening in the world and on the ground, there has to be space for us to turn attention back to our own experience. I can't really be in the world helping and disrupting and abolishing systems of violence if I haven't done part of that work for myself first.

How can I actually, really promote an ethic of love and compassion if I actually have no idea what that means for myself? And I think it feels really counterintuitive to say, yeah, there are people dying. Not just in, in the Gaza Strip, but like all over the world, in the Congo, for instance, at this moment that no one's talking about, right?

There's always this level of violence happening, right? And at some point, I have to understand that if I really want to see the change that I need to see, I have to start embodying. These principles, these ethics, right? Because that's going to guide me to actually doing transformative work, right? You know where it needs to be done, right?

Whatever change that I want to see in the world, I have to experience it first for myself. And I think this is what all our great change makers have done. They just didn't show up. They had been training, they had been planning, they had been going through their own practice so they could actually initiate the change that for someone to change the world, change our countries and cultures, right?

This is why we love them. So this is really important for all of us. I have to take care of myself in order to take care of the world.

Michael Reiley: Yeah, a lot of that resonates with me, but I think, I don't know, it just feels like self indulgent or something to even think about self care when there is all of these polycrisises basically unfolding.

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, it's, I think self indulgence is definitely an issue. And I think self indulgence is when we engage in care with no thought or no intention of trying to help. If I don't sleep. Then I can't help, right? I shut down, right? If I don't take care of my trauma, then the trauma gets in the way. And I started reacting to it, creating more harm for people around me.

I think when we really approach self care in times of crisis the emphasis is I'm doing this thing for myself because I want to be resourced. Enough to show up to help others because if I am not resourced enough and try to show up to help others, then likely I become work for other people. I become part of the crisis,

Michael Reiley: right?

Lama Rod Owens: And this is what I was looking at in Love and Rage, which was my last book. book that came out during the pandemic, right? I have a tendency to drop books during world crisis, but like unconsciously, this is the whole thing about love and particularly rage. I have to take care of my anger or else I start reacting to it, creating more harm.

for everyone, right? So I know it's really count. It feels counterintuitive. It feels really uncomfortable, right? I work with a lot of activists who say the same thing. This feels self indulgent, right? But I also say that you're working harder than you realize as well. And there are these experiences that don't register with us consciously that start showing up in other ways.

And When we start implementing plans of like care, then we start taking care, we start restoring ourselves in ways that are really important that we may not be able to name or talk about, but it's still really supporting us to show up and be present .

Michael Reiley: Our next guest was part of a panel of medical professionals. Discussing the genocide in Gaza through the lens of medical oppression and violence called "No Room for Neutrality: On the Frontline of Gaza's Health Catastrophe", presented as part of the, "Where Olive Trees Weep" 23 conversations on Palestine.

And in this follow-up episode, I spent the hour with Dr. Rupa Marya discussing her career with deep medicine as a model for global health justice. And here's an excerpt from that conversation.

Dr. Rupa Marya: So the medicine I learned in medical school, I would call shallow medicine. It's medicine that really focuses on individuals shorn of their historical and social and environmental context. As if we could do that and understand why someone is sick. It often looks at highly reductive ways of viewing the body, viewing illness, viewing systems of health.

And. Consequently, it's inadequate for addressing the problems that we face. So the rising scourge of chronic inflammatory disease around the world, a planet on fire, literally this heat dome that is just engulfed. North America and has engulfed different parts of the world already this year. And in our societies, as we're witnessing different kinds of social contracts and bonds, just unraveling with just outward manifestations of racist violence, the most egregious form of which is genocide.

So those are the kinds of things that we look at in our book is how has, if shallow medicine Is focused on the individual deep medicine looks at the systems and how we must operate on the order of systems To bring about the health that we want and the health that we want isn't just health of one person or health of one group It's health of a whole system and it understands that health is an emergent phenomenon It's a property that emerges when systems are in good harmony together.

So that is You know, a way of thinking that we aren't trained in and that the medical system itself is very resistant to because it will require understanding how Western medicine as it's practiced in our universities and our hospitals in the United States is actually Complicit in keeping this harm going is a part of the problem.

So how do we reimagine and build a health system that truly is healing for all?

Michael Reiley: This may be a little too simplistic, but do you think that the shallow medicine that's practiced is because it's more profitable?

Dr. Rupa Marya: I think it's easier to make a profit on it, yes. I also think that what it does when you have shallow medicine is it obscures Dynamics of history and power.

And when you obscure dynamics of power, you can just keep things moving forward without having to reckon with how those dynamics of power are causing certain people to get sick in certain patterned ways and how those dynamics of power actually need to be reimagined for health. So if we keep just looking at shallow medicine, then whoops, it's just too, just unfortunate that black and indigenous people have such poor health outcomes here in the United States.

That's dictated by dynamics of history and power and the structures of our society. And looking at what's happening in Gaza right now with the genocide, Israel's genocide, but over 75 years of this apartheid due to the British partition of Palestine. Just as the British broke up India, Pakistan, these areas, Kashmir, these inventions of colonial coloniality that were brought to bear as that manifestation of the British Empire was falling apart and the Ottoman Empire, these empires were falling apart.

We are now living with the consequences of those. So when we look at the medical apartheid in Palestine and the health disparities that we see in that society in Israel and Palestine, those are situations that are created through dynamics of power. So it doesn't really matter that when you're looking at these issues from a deep medicine perspective, we have to start understanding a language of power, an analysis of power.

And a reimagining of power and that is the level of what we call deep medicine It's not simply looking at giving you insulin and hoping that'll make things better Shallow medicine really focuses on band aids deep medicine is going as upstream as possible to get at the root of why people are sick

It's an evolution of the medical pathological understanding from Western medicine. So back in the day around The Roman Empire, there was a description of inflammation, a description of what is inflammation.

Then in the 1700s, there was the innovation of understanding that inflammation was being caused by things happening in the body. And it was a location of disease. So arthritis was inflammation of your joints and pericarditis was inflammation of the sac around the heart. It wasn't just nebulous humors that were circulating.

It was specific phenomenon happening in the body. And our work follows on the work of Verschow from the 1840s during the last major reaction to capitalism that was happening across Europe. And Verschow, a young German doctor, was arguing that German colonization of different parts of Europe were, was causing disease.

It wasn't back of specific bacteria that was causing these outbreaks. It was people's social. Environmental conditions caused by colonization that made them more susceptible to the harmful aspects of a bacterial infection. But we saw the same thing with COVID. It was the social, environmental, historical factors around people that made them more predisposed to poor health outcomes, which is why indigenous people in the United States were the highest mortality rate group of COVID, followed by black folks.

And so those historical Dynamics is actually sediment in our bodies and cause different kinds of health expressions. over time. And so we can keep giving people chemotherapy and insulin, but we're actually not going to stop or change the rising rates of cancer and diabetes until we start looking at that level of analysis.

And so that's a new level of diagnosis, which is an evolution of the medical pathological model to understand that disease is actually being caused outside the body and the body is responding. To those circumstances with actually it's very normal programmed evolutionarily conserved reactions so it's not reacting abnormal abnormally to the circumstances it's reacting the bodies reacting normally to highly abnormal circumstances.

That have been created through colonial capitalism. And in that way, if we understand the diagnosis of our pathology exists outside the body, we have to go outside the body to act as healers, whether we're doctors or lawyers or mothers or teachers, or all of us must participate in this work of deep medicine.

Michael Reiley: The next clip we hear from Muslim Syrian, American poet and musician Mona Hayder. And writer and interfaith translator, Mirabai Starr, on their shared story of grief from a SAND Community Gathering, released as a podcast episode.

Mona Hayder: I think it was 12 years ago. That I met Mirabai on a mountaintop in New Mexico at a place called the Lama Foundation, where I also found myself after grief. My best friend had just passed away. It was the day of my 24th birthday when I found and sought refuge at Lama Foundation. It had been four weeks.

Since my friend had passed away and here was this place that the divine saw fit to place me at. It was entirely a miracle. I shouldn't have been there. There's no reason. I should have arrived in that place and it was a truly transformational time in my life. And it was grief that drove me to a mountaintop.

It was grief that caused me to change my life radically. And so I know the power of grief. I know that its energy can be harnessed for good. For transformation, for expansion, if we allow it to, and my teacher was recently talking about this being the age of Aquarius, and everybody knows that. Everybody on this call probably knows that, and it's been anticipated.

Teachers have been talking about it for a long time, in anticipation of it, because of this idea that it would bring a chance for expansion, an opportunity for consciousness to grow us as a collective family. And the only difference is I think everybody, especially the Instagram teachers, I think they all thought it would happen via their Instagram meditations.

And instead we're seeing it happen through grief, through this immense moment of an opportunity to truly feel This event that is shifting our world politically, spiritually in every way. And for me as a Muslim specifically from that region,

I feel that I feel like it's fracking my soul, it's excavating It's going inside and it's changing things from the inside out. And I know from my own experience that it's an opportunity for awakening if I let it be. And for me, this call, I hope, this gathering, my hope for it is that it's an opportunity for us all.

to step into

that opportunity rather than just the emotion of grief, moving past the emotion into expansion because this could change all of us and it could change everything and I hope we let it.

Mirabai Starr: The broken open heart as this incredibly powerful opportunity for transformation. So what I'm inviting us to do. Is not navigate the stages of grief as psychological conditions that we're going to get over. If you do Kubler Ross's five stages of dying, which also is five stages of grieving, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, and check them all off the list, you'll be all better.

And you can go back to the way things were, because you got through all the stages of grief. Rather, What I'm inviting us to do is to enter into each of these kind of universal features of the landscape of loss. That so many of us, people of completely different cultural, economic, ethnic backgrounds, That there seem to be these kind of universal spaces that each of us inhabit along the journey of grief.

If we allow ourselves to be present for them, then we find that we connect with the whole of the human family and perhaps of all of creation. And when we Attempt or endeavor or agree to be present for each of the realities of the grief journey, like anger, outrage, rebellion. No, this is not okay with me.

All of those seemingly difficult. Expressions of the grief journey, if we breathe through them and into them and write about them and pray about them, then they can open into something larger that contains the messages we need to carry to the human family so that everyone can be liberated, not despite the pain through it, through the fiery gate.

of loss. So what I guess what I'm saying is that my own experiences of loss, and I've had so many, it seems, for one lifetime so far, just so many deep, profound, dear, intimate losses through death, primarily, but also all kinds of other losses. That if I can harness the power of my pain to open my heart in living and lived compassion for the rest of creation, then these experiences are not in vain, but rather strengthen me to see how I can step up.

on behalf of all beings who suffer. It's just an obvious connection for me. So I've identified, I'm not going to talk about them all, but 12 kind of universal features in the landscape of loss that many of us go through. And if we can consciously navigate them on a personal level, my belief in my prayer is that.

enables us to help be living guides for the in community, for other people who are willing to allow that fire of anguish to melt the walls that separate us from each other and invite us into our shared humanity. And from that place, we cannot help but speak out and do whatever we can in action to alleviate suffering.

In other places besides our own lives. So I want to just end that little bit with a poem that I love from my friend, Naomi Shihab Nye, a Palestinian American poet,

"Those Whom We Do Not Know". And poetry for me is one of the portals for transformation personally and as community in community. So she begins with a quote by Pablo Neruda and it goes like this. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those we do not know is something still greater and more beautiful.

One. This was written 20 years ago, by the way. Because our country has entered into war, we can have no pleasant pauses anymore. Instead, the nervous turning, one side to another, each corner crowded. By the far but utterly particular voices of the dead, Of trees, fish, children, calling, Wearing the colorful plastic shoes, So beloved in the Middle East, Bleeding from the skull, The sweet hollow along the net.

I forget why it's been changed. For whatever it was, We will crush the vendor Who stacked sesame rings on a tray. Inside the steady gaze of stone, he will lose his balance after years of perfect balance. Catch him inside every sleep. He keeps falling, too. I support all people on earth who have bodies like and unlike my body.

Skins and moles and old scars. Secret and public hair. Crooked toad. I support those who have done nothing large. Sifter of lentils. Sifter of wisdoms. Speak. If we have killed no one in the name of anything bad or good, speak. May light feed our leafiest vein. I support clothes in the wash kettle. A woman stirring and stirring with stick, paddle, soaking out grime.

Simple clothes, the size of bodies, pinned to the sky. Three. What we learned left us. None of it held. Now the words ignite. Slogans knot around necks till faces bulge. Windows of SAND, doorways, sense of shifting each time you blink. That dune used to be a house and the desert soaking up echoed. Those whom we do not know think they know us now.

"Those Whom We Do Not Know" by Naomi Shihab Nye.

Michael Reiley: And next we hear from a powerful gathering of Buddhist, Christian Jewish and Sufi leaders, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche Reverend Deborah Lee, Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, and Pir Zia Inayat Khan. This was again, part of the talks on Palestine, around the, "Where Olive Trees Weep" premiere, and this was hosted by Zaya Benazzo. As a reminder, you can purchase this entire course and watch this particular full talk and 22 others. in the "Talks on Palestine" series available through SAND.

And here are the four esteem speakers exploring the complexity of the situation in Palestine from a global interfaith perspective, with Zaya Benazzo leading in with a question for the four of them.

Zaya Benazzo: And I wanted to bring the quote from Archbishop Desmond Tutu that says "if you're neutral in situation of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor". To bring that to awareness, and also one more quote, and you will feel who wants to respond to which part. This is from the Prophet, Pir Zia, you can correct me with the name, Allah's Apostle.

When people ask him about oppression and he answered, "Help your brother with whether he is an oppressor or he's an oppressed one". And people ask him, it's okay to help the oppressed, but how should we help him if he's an oppressor? And the Prophet answered, "By preventing him from oppressing others". If you, any of you want to comment or share on these two questions.

think Gandhi, the model of Gandhi is very important because in the tradition I come from the prophets were the first great interpreters of Torah and they took the message, do not stand idly by while bloodshed is occurring. That's a mitzvah, a religious protocol. An obligation from the Torah itself as they began with shifting the narrative.

Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb: First and foremost is to change the narrative because for my community, we were embedded. Up till recently in a traumatic narrative and also a narrative of denial that is we were denying our actions toward Palestinians and that culture of denialism created impunity of action. No one would intervene because there was a sense that in denial you feel like you have no choice if you don't do this.

If you don't take brutal action, it's either us or them. And so we don't have a choice. And there's a whole narrative constructed around survival. So the first piece is. Humanizing, going back to the basics of everybody's human dignity and humanizing the experience, the experiences of Palestinians, and also to articulate from our tradition, which is called the dei, truth telling and naming the anatomy of that oppression.

There are so many pieces of that oppression, but until we see them. We don't really know what we're dealing with. At the same time, there is a lot of soul tending that has to happen when a person is facing, trying to break free from the walls of denial that, that have been constructed. Even getting to a liberal point of view where you want to be helpful doesn't necessarily, Take us to the root cause of the harm and this is another very important construction, the root cause of the harm and not and developing the tools to be in non cooperation with that harm.

And to at the same time, as Gandhi said, construct the visions of peaceful community through real relationship building that can be an alternative place for people to come and get the spiritual strength they need to embolden, to take bold tactics. We're seeing this Whether people are trained or not, for instance, in the United States, they did a beautiful job.

Young people have done a beautiful job of encampments, and these encampments represent their vision of sacred community, where I had the Tremendous pleasure of leading Shabbat and having people from all over the world, encampments led by many students of color. There's a sense of rising justice and this feeling we're not going to cooperate with militarism and we want to divest.

These are all tactics that are built on this idea that we can create the alternative communities together in every place. And then Debra and I have worked together for almost a decade now and we can see in our relationships the power That we can actually affect Change we can move make things happen and we can also Be a sanctuary for the growth of leadership of people who are directly impacted as was seen so beautifully in the film where ashira and others if they have the opportunity to have a void to For their voices to be listened to by the larger world to have a power of healing to work with others to make change that in itself is a very powerful modality for operationalizing the transformation that we need.

And then, of course, we'll have to talk about reparations. Rebuilding, replanting. This is a work of many lifetimes. And so we have to prepare our young people to do this work.

Pir Zia Inayat Khan: Thank you. Thank you, Lynn.

Zaya Benazzo: Yes.

Pir Zia Inayat Khan: You pose a very interesting question, which is. Why is it in spiritual traditions, oftentimes, that there is a reluctance to address very challenging situations in the world? Speaking from the tradition that I belong to, the Sufi tradition, there is a practice or an aspiration which is called Husn i Zan, and Husn i Zan means beauty of thought, and essentially what it means is that you try to see the good in everything.

You look for beauty, and you celebrate the beauty, and you remember that everything comes from God, and so the intention is to avoid unnecessarily criticizing anything or anyone. And if you're going to criticize Begin with yourself and look at yourself and ask yourself, before I point a finger, am I faultless?

Am I blameless? Now, this is a very valuable teaching, I believe, and yet, if we do begin with ourselves, we are likely to find that Ourself is intertwined with many selves, and that we are, to use the rabbi's word, we are cooperating with harm in more ways than we know. And a deep application of the principle of beginning with looking at oneself would bring one to an understanding of the responsibility that one has toward others.

And one can approach this not from a frame of enmity toward any people or any intention of hostility or ill will, but by focusing, with immediacy on where there's pain, where there's suffering, where there is hardship, and then looking to see how we are all involved in this and seeking to bring healing there.

And this is implicit in words of a poem of Sheikh Saadi, a great Persian Sufi poet, and these words will be found in the United Nations hanging on the wall. There's Sheikh Saadi says the children of Adam. are parts of each other, for they are made of the same essence. When misfortune besets one part, the other parts cannot remain at ease.

One who isn't saddened by the suffering of others cannot rightly be called a human being. And it's the first phrase here that especially strikes me, Bani Adam Azayi Ekdigarand, the children of the claiming of the first human being. The children of the ancestor of all of us, we are all parts of each other.

Aza means limbs or organs, parts. We are all limbs. We're all organs of each other. I am your hand. You are my eyes. He has our ears. They are our feet. We all belong to one body. And if I drop a stone on my foot, the whole body hurts with one body, so it's impossible, really. If we would look with eyes of truth, it's impossible that anyone else's suffering can be separate from us or that our peace can be won at the expense of anyone else.

We're all totally in this together. We're totally united in this human and more than human project. And so the body doesn't end where the skin ends. Molecules flow from body to body. The mind doesn't end in that container that we call our personal self. Traumas cascade, but also healing moves from mind to mind, and our souls are all, in essence, one soul.

It's understandable that people on the path are hesitant to criticize and want to see beauty everywhere. But we need to not only see beauty, we need to enact beauty, we need to live beauty. There's a word in Arabic for this which is called Ihsan. Husnizan has the word husn meaning beauty, and Ihsan means doing beauty.

And what it means is, if there's a need, answering that need, going out, lending a hand, being a voice, so that everyone knows where the need is and how we can help.

Rev. Deborah Lee: Beauty. Wow. I wanted to, yeah, just to continue with the metaphor of the body, because that also is a in the Christian scriptures, we talk about that too, of being all part of one body. And I think just to go with the metaphor of like, when you drop something on your toe and it's bleeding, we have, we are one, one body and we have to put attention to the bleeding.

So it may seem like we're foc, we are favoring the toe, but we're favoring the toe because it's bleeding and it's in pain and in or, and if we don't tend to it, it will become infected. and will bring about, could bring about the destruction of the whole body. So in, in Christianity, I think that there's that idea of we are a one body and also God pays special attention to those most suffering.

to the parts that are in, in, in deepest need and in deepest pain or the poor, a preferential option of the poor from liberation theology. So I think when people say this idea of neutrality or not, or being afraid of favoring one or the other, I think it's so important that we talk about how do we have to go to where the pain and the suffering is and to center those who are most impacted.

by the harm that's created. We're all impacted by the harm, but some of us are very insulated from it. We're insulated by our class, by our nation, by, by how far away we are from the toe, all those things. And for us as Christians, it's the practice of how do we go to the place of suffering and how do we go to the margins, go to the place that is where we actually see the face of God.

So that's what I say to people who. claim, want to push towards not taking a stand. And it reminds me the quote you shared about, it was from Allah's Apostle on us, reminds me of Paulo Freire, who's the Brazilian educator, liberation educator, also about the historical task of the oppressed is not just to liberate themselves, but also to liberate their oppressors.

And so that When we are tending to the liberation of the oppressed, we are in fact tending to the liberation of everyone and of all. And so I think that putting that into practice is a commit, is a commitment and it's important to be able to make. take stances to be able to speak up. And the other piece is to make a commitment as people of faith that we promote solutions that do not create new harms, that we have to commit to not perpetuating ongoing harm and not creating new harm.

So to reject solutions that we see cause more harm and pain, that we are, have to use our creativity as the human race to find ways to resolve things in ways that don't harm others.

Pir Zia Inayat Khan: Thank you Deborah. Yes.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche: Okay, so

very interesting conversation. The example of the felling stone on the toe and taking care of it, I think it seems like a very good example. So sometimes I personally, coming from a different culture, find it that sometimes we over anxious, sometimes we over react, and sometimes we don't give enough space for the body to heal by itself.

And we're trying to or take care of it. And then sometime we mess up the rest of the body just by the name of taking care of it rather than leaving trusting that something natural has its own way of healing itself. So I think it's in the situation what we are talking about here in the war and the Palestinian Israel.

and or even Russia and Ukraine in a situation, any particularly any war, it seems like really complex. It's complex than probably we will ever know. Even different faith might have different ideas, different principles, different great intentions, beloved, wonderful practices, good philosophy, viewpoint.

There's so many interests are involved in there. There is a power struggles. There is a financial situation. There's a boundary, border boundaries. There is just cultural thing, identity things. So many things are involved there. That which is, which makes it really complicated to, in order to bring some sense of peace there.

But I think just generally it's same thing. It feels like from the Buddhist perspective, it feels like a whole idea of nonviolent. One can stand for something. One can speak up for something. As long as. That whatever one is doing, when it's not causing more suffering, when it's not, are not bringing more damages.

And then I think any solution, any ideas might have some place in the process of bringing some more peace. But whenever any response bring more suffering, then it's a cycle continuous. Yeah, so that's, I've just wanted to share that.

Michael Reiley: And from a SAND Community Gathering, hosted Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo.

Sufi scholar and writer, Omid Safi discusses the importance of love in these troubling times in our next clip.

Omid Safi: Love is the way. Love is not just the goal. It's not just a destination. It is the very path that we have to walk. This is the way. Can we, do we dare have the audacity of insisting on love for all and enmity for none? That begins in a moment of genocide, in a moment of conflict, by stopping the action that is bringing harm to others.

If you were walking down the street and you saw an adult beating a child, you don't just keep walking. If you have a heart and soul and a conscience, you walk over, you ask, honey, are you okay? And if needed, you grab the hand of that person who is hurting the child. I don't see any difference when that child is on the other side of the street or across the global village.

And here the Prophets have something to teach us. The blessed Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, he says at one point, Come to the aid of your sister and your brother, whither he is oppressed. Or the oppressor come to their aid and the people were very confused and they said, Oh, messenger of Allah, would that we could give our lives for you.

We totally get it of how we would come to the aid of someone who's oppressed, but pray tell, how do we help the oppressor? Why do we help the oppressor? And he says, you help the oppressor by stopping him.

It's one of my wishes, this sounds like a paradoxical thing to say when there is 27, 000 killed Palestinians, 70, 000 injured Palestinians, 2 million displaced Palestinians, where we are on the verge, if not already, in famine and perhaps worse plans for ethnic cleansing still to come from the deranged leaders.

of that country. It may sound like a strange thing to say, I wish and pray for the people of Israel to be free from the tyranny of oppression, to be free from the tyranny of occupation, indoctrination, and this fear based trauma that is inflicted upon them. It is to use that word that sometimes a little trendy nowadays.

It is weaponizing the history and the memory of a real Jewish trauma of anti Semitism

to legitimize and justify having held a people occupied and oppressed for decades and decades. There is a better way, come, I know you're tired, there is a better way and that way is a way of love, a way of justice and a way that insists. Where we're trying to get to is a promised land where every Jew, every Christian, every Muslim, man, woman, gay, straight, rich, poor, every faith and no faith can have exactly and identically the same set of rights, the same set of responsibilities, the same set of privileges.

Is that such a radical notion? I call it secular democracy. It's a good goal in many countries. I don't think we're doing all that great with that goal in my own country. But that's what I work on here, and if that's what the people of Palestine and the people of Israel would want to work towards, I would come to their aid.

Zaya Benazzo: Thank you. I have found myself many times in a place of righteousness, where I lose the love. How does one fight, I like to use the word fight, but maybe it's not the right word, but for justice. Well, still being in connection, still recognizing the primacy of love. What is the practice? What are the teachings that can help us?

Because that righteousness, oh, I know the truth. I, because I've seen the suffering. in West Bank. I've seen, I've been there. I've sat with women who have been tortured in prisons. I've seen the pain, mothers who've lost their children, boys that have been shot in the knees and on a wheelchair for the rest of their lives.

How do I let that not make me righteous, but be in connection with love?

Omid Safi: How about if we start by saying that maybe sometimes The most powerful, the most prophetic thing that we can do is to actually not speak, but to sit with someone and to assure them that we are a witness to their suffering, that they do not suffer alone. Savior Complex. And there's many versions of it.

There's the American savior complex. There's the white savior complex. I know there's the male savior complex where my wife sometimes comes to me and she's sharing things that she's struggling with. And my first response is if we just do this and this. It would get better and she's actually not sharing in order for me to offer the solution.

She wants me to witness and that's a really hard thing for a straight man to do is to shut up and be silent and witness and what I find. To be, and I'm even seeing this in some of the questions that we're getting coming in. Sometimes what we want to do is to have someone witness my suffering, our suffering, the suffering of the people that we identify with.

That's completely understandable. I think it would take an extraordinarily cruel. art to tell a human being or a community who is in pain to tell them your suffering is not real. And what we tend to see in our own day and age is a lot of what some people would call whataboutery. What about those people?

What about my people? What about, what if for one moment we could pause, I'm not saying dismiss, just hold it. And set it right here for a second, the names and labels associated with the suffering. This is Palestinian suffering, Israeli suffering, Jewish suffering, Arab suffering, white suffering, black suffering, and instead see us in that most human of places, human suffering.

This is the suffering of something that may no parent ever have to witness. of a parent burying their child.

I don't know if there's a worse pain than that in the world. I didn't think there was a worse pain than that until I saw the footage of a Palestinian father carrying a trash bag with what was left of his child. He was picking up body parts so that he could bury them.

I would hope that we can begin with some notion of witnessing each other's pain and understanding All you have to do is to watch some of the presentations from, I've seen presentations from the mothers and from the brothers of Israeli hostages, perhaps

still held by Hamas, perhaps some of them have also been killed by this. genocidal bombing of the Israeli military.

But if you listen to those grieving parents and brothers presenting on Israeli TV, there's both broken heartedness, anger,

witness it, sit with it. See them as human beings. We would be no different if it was my brother, my son, my daughter, my wife, and

then expand your circle of compassion beyond yourself. None of us have a monopoly on love.

I might think that my daughters are the most beautiful daughters in the whole world, and I'm right, and I recognize that father the mother of every other daughter in the world It's entitled to think the same way. It doesn't make me less of a lover of my children to grant that other people also love their children.

So here's what Rumi says about how our brokenness comes out of only caring about the suffering of our people. So here's what he says. And he says, you're clutching with both hands to this myth of a you and an I, this notion, this fiction of a you and an I. Our whole brokenness is because of this. Our whole brokenness is not just because of a notion that I am an I and you are a you.

There's actually something really beautiful about people having distinctions and particularities. I sometimes give the analogy that I really like Persian food and I like sushi and I like Mexican food, but I wouldn't want to put Persian food and sushi and Mexican food in a blender and blend them together.

I like the distinctness of the flavors and I like the distinctness of the languages, the musical tradition, the clothing, the customs, the poetry. So we're not talking about the erasure. Of what makes us you and I, but we're talking about that notion of the clutching to it, where we think that only Our people ultimately are worthy.

Only our suffering fundamentally counts.

I've been fortunate enough to travel to about 40 countries around the world. That's one of the few true universals that I've seen. Everywhere I've gone, people love their babies, and they want a good future for them, and they want a roof over their head, and enough food for them, and most of the time, they want them to marry someone just like them.

These are some of the only true universals that I've seen. And it's very hard to ask people to identify with not just the neighbor, but the person that they've come to see as the enemy. As long as we're living in that fear culture, as long as we treat love as if it is somehow a commodity of scarcity.

And I think instead our teachers are telling us that love is in a great abundance, that by you extending love to the neighbor and the stranger, it does not diminish you, it might actually expand you. And there's a caveat, and that caveat is one that I think is also important. It's also worthy of being taken into consideration. And I'm very deeply enamored of the black prophetic tradition, the tradition that gives us not just a Martin Luther King and a Malcolm X, but a Vincent Harding and a James Baldwin and a Tracy Chapman and others. And Jimmy Baldwin says at one point, we can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.

I think that's a really powerful and beautiful point. We can disagree and still love each other provided you're not actively trying to kill me. At that moment. Actually, the most radical revolutionary loving thing that I can do is to protect myself, protect my community. And we've been talking a lot about Palestine and Israel, but I would just love to zoom back a little bit and to say that If you start scanning around our little tiny planet, we're seeing in so many countries, including in our own United States of America, the rise of these fear based popular movements, which are no longer fringe movements.

Yes, this is about Trump, but it's not only about Trump. He's a beneficiary as opposed to just a creator. But we're seeing these kinds of movements in France, in the Netherlands. Not to mention India and many other places around the world, where politicians are using this language of fear and intimidation and anger towards an oppressed minority to come to power.

And this is really one of our great challenges as a human community, right up there with our environmental challenges and other ones. But we have a way, and we do have a remedy, and that remedy is love, and I never want us to lose sight of that.

Michael Reiley: The next segment is from my conversation with Arab Jewish mystic teacher writer and artist, Hadar Cohen, about how intergenerational trauma and the Jewish Holocaust is exploited, in the Zionist narrative currently at work in Palestine and finally a vision for new hope of a new Palestine.

Hadar Cohen: Yeah, and a certain level of fear mongering, of actually wanting to keep Jews in a traumatized, fearful space forever. And I think that's also for me, my journey against Zionism, that's actually where I had my awakening, because if you really take it down to the root, part of the Zionist ideology says that Jews should basically live in fear forever, and Jews are fundamentally unsafe in this world.

And. To me, that's actually quite antisemitic to say that we don't belong to this earth, just like all other humans, and that everyone just hates us, and there's nothing to do about it, and I think it's, honestly, it's just, there's so much I could say, but just to watch the Israeli media, and just how so much of the narrative is this fear mongering of this, just, they hate us without even saying who the they are, without even saying any part of the story, any part of the narrative.

And I think that the Israeli media is really doing a huge job. disservice to its own citizens. It's a huge disinformation campaign. They're not actually providing Israeli citizens with the actual truth of what's happening. And they've been shielding them from it for a really long time and purposefully distorting information.

And this is part of how the genocide has been. Is continuing to go on, but not just this genocide in the last eight months, but for the last 75 years, is that there's been a huge disinformation campaign that is just keeping Israeli citizens and constant fear and providing them. Not accurate information about the reality about Palestinians, about everything that's been really going on and it's infuriating.

It's really infuriating to witness that.

There's the trauma of Jewish oppression and Jewish pain and all of that. And then there's the whole industry. about how to weaponize and how to manipulate that trauma. And those almost feel like two separate things to me because in two separate conversations, because I'm Jewish and I love Jewish people are obviously my family, my community, and I deeply desire freedom, being, liberation.

I want our story as Jewish people to be, understood, to be heard, to be, to belong, just like everyone else does on this planet. But part of what makes that impossible is the industry of Jewish trauma that deliberately wants to keep Jews isolated and separated and somehow convinces Jewish people that it is for our own good.

And the propaganda campaigns and the educational systems that, it's always so heartbreaking for me because Judaism, one of the core things that we're taught in Judaism is that it's really about asking questions and being critical. And if you study the Talmud, it has almost 50, 000 arguments in it and only 50 of them are resolved.

So this whole question asking is a vital piece of what it means to be Jewish. But when it comes to Palestine, that is where we're supposed to abandon our Jewish values and our Jewish principles and stop asking questions. And to me, that feels like a betrayal to ourselves and to our lineage and to our tradition.

And it's it leaves us vulnerable. To empires and to the state of Israel, but as you said, also the U S and Germany and all of these countries that really actually have imperialistic interests. They do not have Jewish safety interest at heart. And I would really love for Jewish people all over the world to really wake up.

That when we're talking about Zionism, we're not actually talking about Jewish safety. We're talking about. Jewish people being used for colonialism and for imperialism and Using them against Palestinians. And yeah, I think that there, there needs to be two different conversations because there's one thing if it's like a Jewish body has trauma that wants to be processed and then it's okay.

We need to find the healing communities. We need to find the healing spaces, but that's another thing for that trauma to be on repeat and on loop. And. To not, to turn into a machine almost. I think this is part of what's happening with Israeli society and especially with the military. There's really no end to the viciousness of it because it's turned into a sort of machine consciousness.

It's not even, Oh, I have this trauma from this time and I want to talk about it and I want to process it and I want to reintegrate back into the human family, right? That's not the discourse. The discourse is let's kill as many Palestinians as possible. To me, the trauma is not. It's not actually at the heart of it, it's the industry that is.

Michael Reiley: It's a very interesting perspective, not one that I've thought about, this sort of, , I guess I use the word the weaponization of trauma, same idea, the machinery behind exploitation of trauma as a way to keep the machine, like you said, going. Like for example the chant and slogan song "from the river to the sea", when that's uttered, it's, that's anti Semitic and it's this empire, war industrial complex machine.

That's it. It's completely decimating and burning people alive and all the horror that we're seeing in Gaza, but saying, no, those words, that slogan, that's dangerous for us. We need to make sure people don't even say these words. It's just, it's,

Hadar Cohen: yeah. And that's actually a good example because that's almost to see the, from the river to the sea as an antisemitic slogan is to deliberately Not understand and not want to hear Palestinian perspective, because for Palestinians, when they say that part of what the desire for freedom is unity from the river to the sea, because Palestinians have been so fragmented on the way that Gaza and the West Bank have been separated and the way that Palestinian 48ers have been separated from the there's been so much separation across families, communities, and people are put in such complex situations because of These separations on this tiny plot of land and that call from the river to the sea is a call for the whole community to reunite again and to miss that call and to miss the occupation and the checkpoints and, The apartheid wall and the siege on Gaza and to not actually consider any of those things as part of the conversation, to me, is to deliberately not want to look at the reality on the ground.

Michael Reiley: You're describing, your early life in Jerusalem, where you felt that. There was this kinship between Muslims and Jews. When we think about from the river to the sea and a free Palestine, do you think that could and should include Jewish people as well? And they're just integrated, just like in the U S there's no distinction.

If you're Jewish or Christian or Muslim or Buddhist, we all live in the same city and it's just the melting pot in some ways, religiously at least.

Hadar Cohen: Yeah, a hundred percent. For me, a free Palestine is one, I say secular, multi religious, which might confuse people. A certain way in which all religions are protected, all religious sites are protected.

There's freedom of worship for every religion. Sometimes we talk about Jews, Christians, Muslims, but we forget about the Baha'i community, which is also very integral to Palestine. And yeah, I think that a free Palestine for me is a multi religious society where actually all people are welcome. Even if it's.

Someone who's never from there and wants to come visit. That's, to me, part of the tragedy of Jerusalem is that it's been, it's supposed to be a city of God, a city that's open to the world, a city that's open to anyone who wants to pray, anyone who wants to connect to the divine essence of that city, of that land.

I believe that there is spiritual potency. of that whole land. And yeah, I think sometimes speaking about these things, it feels so ridiculous because it's like, yeah, it almost feels like no question. Why would God's land be an apartheid regime? It just makes no sense. To go back to your question is that, yeah, to me, the end of Zionism also means the beginning of reintegrating Jews Into the Arab world and into the Middle East and into the region and to Cairo and to Baghdad and to all of these cities that were also actually our cities.

We have deep history. We have deep roots there. And I think that this is actually where I think the narrative shift is really important because so often It is seen that Zionism is this Jewish liberation movement, but I actually feel that Zionism is keeping Jews from being liberated. It's actually a block and a barrier to our liberation.

And to me, part of being anti Zionist is actually reaffirming Jewish belonging to the world, to humanity, to the earth. Just because we're Jews doesn't mean were any different than any other human. And I think that Zionism created this whole supremacy vortex that then sits on the whole victimization. So there's superior, inferior, and all these dynamics.

And what we're really fighting for is just equality.

Michael Reiley: In episode 59, last autumn, I had a wide ranging conversation with artist and ,activist Alixa García, on extinction, art, healing, and the power of enchantment with a quote "world on fire".

Here's an excerpt from that conversation.

Alixa Garicia: And it's a practice. It's a practice for these times, because that which causes wonder in us is also, it also causes curiosity. And I find it essential that we get curious enough to see what's behind the breaking of the climate crisis. What's behind the breaking of the climate crisis? What's through the wreckage of extinction?

What's inside the burning of a world on fire? Imagination is the weaver of wonder. And It is most easily achieved by creating a sense of enchantment in the other. And that's where service comes to play. As an artist, I'm always seeking to enchant the other with an image, a word, a painting, a song, in order to unearth curiosity and to be of service.

To create room for wonder in our lives during times of collapse is to make room for awe amidst the horror. It's a way of honoring the ecstatic mystery that brought us here. It is a conscious return to beauty beyond our calculations. So enchantment is to be in the chant, it's active, encantamiento es estar en el canto.

It is to be in the song of it all. Surely we can identify many things that we have commodified. The selling of water. The selling of land, the monopolization and monochromization of seeds, war is one of the biggest commodifications of life. It is also one of the most powerful rituals we can enact, pouring human blood on land for ideologies, right?

Putting money in Amazon stocks while the Amazon is at the brink of its tipping point. And the list goes on. So when we talk about liberation, when We are talking about healing the world and We heal the world by healing ourselves. I want to also make a clear distinction between the world and the earth, which oftentimes are used interchangeably, but they are absolutely not.

The world is of our making. It's us. And the earth is our home. We do not need to save the earth. We need the world or rather the world needs to realign itself with the earth so that she can save us. And we heal the world by returning to the ceremony of life. With intention in the words of Robin Wall Kilmer ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention ceremony focus attention so that attention becomes intention through this process of attention turned intention we re sacralize our beingness and enter into conspiracy with life and we thwart all efforts from this dying capitalist empire that wants to keep us separated.

This is futurist thinking. We recenter life by un centering humanity. We recenter life by sacrificing our conveniences, right? The etymology of the word sacrifice is to make something sacred. And sometimes it's to make it sacred again. Where can we sacrifice our conveniences to, for the re sacralization of life?

Where can we sacrifice our conveniences for the re sacralization of life? That is a futurist question. To be a wisdom holder in these times is to lean into the great unknown. While we sacralizing to the best of our abilities, the miracle of life, we have turned mundane or of the world when it was never ours to subdue such magic, right?

To be human is to live in this paradox, right? And turning bewilderment, which is the feeling of being perplexed and confused into wonder. which is to be with awe, requires a conscious act of intention setting. It is a process of making sanctuary through intention and accountability, so that the mundane can become extraordinary again.

For example, water is extraordinary. And we've made it mundane. Literally people wash their dishes and let the water run while they're soaping their dish. I'm like, why are you just letting the water run? Only 2 percent of water is drinkable. It's not salty water on this blue marble. 2 percent that's it.

Air is extraordinary, but we take it for granted. We think is mundane. Fire is extraordinary land and all the abundance of generously. Provides is extraordinary that we are positioned 0. 95 million miles away from the sun at the exact location where life is possible is extraordinary. It is not mundane.

What if the thirst that we wish to quench can't be filled by just the things of this world. And enchantment is a practice where the sacred and the ordinary come together to bring delight, to enhance beauty, despite a world on fire. How can we use the everyday to enchant and bring wonder to those around us?

Opening small glimpses into other worlds, into other possibilities, into inner possibilities, into what I call the imaginal expanse. So there is, there are a lot of cultural myths in one of your questions that you sent to me, you were like, what are the cultural myths of this time? So just like the cultural myths that perpetually that perpetual slavery needed to be upheld.

In order for society to not collapse was eventually dispelled. I like to believe that the current day cultural myths of perpetual growth without consequence is starting to shift the myth that we are walking on the earth instead of being of the earth is starting to transmute, I pray. I strongly believe that we are the earth thinking out loud.

In most ecstatic thought, we are the earth thinking out loud. That's all we are. And the cultural myth of ignoring trauma so that it will disappear is no longer on stable grounds. The cultural myth that we can buy our way out of every problem. That capitalism put us in, I think is slowly starting to choke on its own lie.

I hope now I don't know if these myths will be relinquished in time. I believe that those of us alive now are most likely the last generations to see the earth in its current state of abundance. We are moving into the heart of the sixth mass extinction and much will change in the next 25 to 50 years.

Unless a miracle comes to pass, right? The cultural myth that we are the masters of the earth and therefore cannot be relinquished will also disappear with our extinction. And I believe in miracles. I believe in star beings. Many things can happen, but how do we learn to die with dignity? I keep coming back to that.

How do we learn to die with dignity as a species? That's at least my deeper inquiry these days. Beautiful. Yeah.

Michael Reiley: In our final clip of the episode, we listen to a conversation between Tony award winning playwright, V, and star of "Where Olive Trees Weep" and Palestinian journalist and activist Ashira Darwish, on the inspiring stories of Palestinian resilience, despite the pain, sorrow, and grief of this genocide.

V: I think the picture you're painting is, it's so massive, and I wonder, how do we even think of, how do you think to begin to heal this trauma? What is your vision of healing? Where does it begin? You said something so brilliant in the movie, you said, I can't even begin to deal with my trauma until the knife is removed from my throat.

And I, that really stayed with me because I think we can't even begin to think of people healing in Gaza. And I think, Until the war is that until this, until the genocide is over, how can you just barely surviving and keeping your children alive? But I, what is a vision of survival? What is your vision of healing?

Ashira Darwish: So for us right now, the only thing that we can do is to continue on surviving and resisting and in a way staying in the land and trying to protect the children, trying to protect the woman. But for when I tried to go in as catharsis to try and support the family the children, the patients who came out of Gaza and were stuck in the West Bank.

It was impossible to talk about healing because I was like, I'm not going to try to work here in therapy or do even though the modalities that we've created are very powerful and they work in continuous trauma. This situation was different in the sense that every time I would come to talk to somebody, what are we going to talk about?

Your kids are still in Gaza and you're stuck here. What am I? There's nothing you can tell these people to fake happy or to fake emotional to give them support. So the main thing is you need people to stop. You can't tell a mother, let's talk about your emotions or let's build resilience when your child is starving to death and there's nothing you can do.

So we have to deal first with the starvation, the basic needs of the people need to be met. And then we can talk about the healing. And whenever I talk to therapists, they're like, yeah, we were ready to go and support. And I'm like, I would, we really want to have a delegation that goes from catharsis and we do our, we do therapy there, but I will not let anybody go walk in there until we at least have food and clean water for the people.

It just doesn't, what are you going to do? So I ended up, instead of actually working on the mental health, I ended up just being there as a support because that is what I know the basic that we need. So we would bring the community together, try to eat together, try to have funerals together. We had one of the children, two of the children who were from Gaza who were in the West Bank died.

while they were in Ramallah. So to bring people to the cemetery, to make sure that the woman feels held and that she has the community. So it's just trying to build the resilience, which we already have the tools, eating together, coming together as a community to do that. Okay. Trying to support and help each other in whichever way, volunteering, offering support, offering food for those who can trying to get money into that.

They're trying to do all sorts of things to just support this Support people to still be Able to withhold what they're what is happening And it's the same situation with the prisoners right now, because we have 9, 500 Palestinians inside jail. That means 9, 500 Palestinian families destroyed and in distress.

How do you go and support them? Because every time one of the prisoners comes out, we hear the horror stories of torture, rape, malnutrition. We've had 29 Palestinians killed. So how do you calm down a mother of a 16 year old who's in prison? Let alone an 11 year old who's now in detention in Al Far, where we see the images coming out of them using dogs to bite the children and terrify them.

The only thing you can do is hold on. We have a song in Arabic, Shuddu ba'adkom, and it means hold each other tightly. So it's about just holding each other and coming together so that we can just keep holding on until there's a chance that this knife lifts a little bit with a ceasefire. So that we can look and see who we lost and start, you can't grieve right now.

There's no chance for grief. And I talked to friends of Ghazal Bashirah, what do you mean? Tell me about who died. I don't know who died. We don't know what's missing. We don't know where. Let the debris

And then we are going to have a massive task ahead of us to try and heal. Just looking at people in the diaspora, Palestinians in the diaspora, the nervous system. I've been meeting with my family members. People are getting illnesses. People are going to the hospitals. People are unable to function, unable to work.

And they're supposed to work normally here in the U S because you know what? They deserve to be killed back there in, in Palestine. They did it. So why are you sad that your family is like suffering? There is this notion around the world that we have to keep going normally and working for these corporates and working for this unfair, unjust system while this is all happening.

So people are pushing themselves to the limit and this is taking a toll on the bodies. So also after we finish the war, we're going to have a situation that this aggression, the cleansing stops and we're still alive. Inshallah. There's, we're going to have an increase in all the types of forms of diseases that we already had in Gaza.

You have diseases that I've never heard of before, something called Bahjat, for example, which was identified by an Egyptian doctor, where your whole body eats itself and collapses. There's so many different rare diseases that are born there because of the trauma. And already most of the people that I met from Ghazni have problems with the kidneys because of the excess blood.

It's the production of cortisol and adrenal fatigue and cancer in multiple places, like children, not one, like one type of cancer, like three, four types of cancers in one body. And their bodies are war bodies. And you can see what happens not only mentally, but to the physical body. So we have years

of work.

V: I think related to that and it's so devastating everything you're talking about Is we were talking before about both of our allergy in some ways to the word resilience because it seems That the onus is always on women and particularly Black and brown women to be resilient, right? That somehow it doesn't matter what is done to you or what is done to us or what we will somehow survive and we will keep going because we can.

And you were making the distinction with a word in Arabic called Samud, which is very different than that kind of quote resilience. And I think it would be very good to talk about your understanding of that concept and how we can. women can release that burden of quote being resilient and pushing themselves forward and always being there in the face of all these atrocities being done to them.

But how do they instead be vulnerable? And you were talking about that. So can you share that? Because I think in the film you talk about the fact That you shut down for so long and you didn't cry for 20 years and you didn't have your feelings and that made you sick and that made you depressed as you're talking about this just now.

So yeah, there's this expectation that we can handle more and that we can survive regardless of what happens. And because we also, there's this feeling that we don't want them to break us. And that's the thing that I had very strongly. I don't want them to see me as a weak person. And I still, every time I can't watch the movie.

Because to me, it still looks like I, there's a bit of weakness there that I'm not ready to like share with the world, even though it's being shared across the world. But I'm like, every time I sit and I'm like trying to bite my head because we are taught to be a fighter. You need to like always be strong.

And in order to be resilient in the face of the occupation, you're not, you need to never show them weakness. And with Israelis, if you do show weakness, they eat you up alive. So there's always that. Also in the interrogation room, if they can sense a bit of weakness on you, they can smell it, you're going to be experiencing much more torture.

So having that shield of being completely frozen, which is also a trauma response, is what protects us in so many of these cases. And the problem we have with resilience is this I've been into so many funerals of my friends and other people where you're not allowed to cry. And we tell the mothers, don't cry.

And I keep seeing these images sometimes from Gaza now and it's, don't cry. You're a big, they also say to our boys, don't cry. You're a man, you're a boy. Don't cry. Just be strong. They went, they're martyrs and they're gone. This is not the mood. This is not the mood because this is taking away the innate.

It's not the mood. God given belief, which is tears, which is weeping and crying and grieving, and we need to go past that in the sense that we need to be able to cry, at least so that we have some form of release. Emotional release for what is going on in our bodies and like having to deny that is not the mood because it breaks us down.

So mood is when we come together in the community. And I feel that's what Nabi Saleh, for example, when I looked at the kids from Nabi Saleh versus the kids that I was working on who had different difficulties, and they came to me for therapy, I would find that actually the kids in Nabi Saleh and the kids have been to prison have more.

Yeah. More built in a Samud in their mental health as well, so they wouldn't be affected with the trauma the same way as a child would be affected by a teacher beating them in school, and that would be the problem they had different. There was different chemistry going on, and I didn't. I wanted to understand it.

And when I went back to, like my story when every protest in Nabi Saleh, we would come back to Nadi man's house, We in the film, we would eat together. We would cook food. Everybody's injuries. Like I would always get skunked by the shit truck where the Israelis spray you with this horrific toxic sewage when you smell like it.

And I would immediately be taken into an 80 man's house. I would get a bath and sometimes it's a milk bath. We always used to identify different things. Sometimes it was chlor and horrible toxic so that we could try to get rid of the smell until we mastered the milk bath. But there was this mama, who was Nariman, who was taking care of us.

There was Nariman's mama, who was always there, also guiding. There was the women from the village, who were always there. And then all of the women together, we would sit and we would make this big meal. And the boys would also help. Bassem was also, is beautiful in that sense. He doesn't know how to cook.

He can only do shrimps. But he would sit. There was this feeling of community that I missed at home. So it wasn't only a trauma. It wasn't only healing my trauma from the, from being beaten or being arrested that day, it was healing my trauma also from home because we come from very individualized families where you very nuclear Western mind families, my family versus that community in the beside everybody comes together.

And it was just so beautiful. And we would sing, we would do Depke, we would check who has injuries, we would put plasters, we have the medic, we have music going on. And it was this feeling that every time, at every end of the protest, we were together and we were alive, even during the funerals when our friends were killed, we would come together.

So we were never alone. You were never alone in the grief. You were never alone with the injuries. You were never alone with any sensation. And we would diffuse together. This is so much for me, this fabric, this community coming together and being held physically being touched and cradled after the injury.

And I think this is the main thing that should happen because that's all we need to be held right now together. And I can see it in the communities. You can see people coming. There's beautiful initiatives, like people coming to teach the kids, they have this school, road school now they call it, and the kids come to this woman and she teaches them.

The mothers are sitting together in the Rafah and making the food for Eid and making the cookies together. It's things that our grandmothers gave us that we lost with this society, this like very colonialist society that we need to go back to. And this is our essence of Samud, the woman coming and crying together, bathing together, helping each other.

#100 Sacred Solidarity with Palestine: Sounds of SAND Second Year

Join Our Free Trial