Fantasy, Faith, and Despair in the West Bank
These remarks were originally delivered at a community gathering on Tisha Ba’av to share grief about Israel/Palestine and in support of a ceasefire and hostage deal.
When I was asked to speak about hope, I thought of the words the Hasidic master Rebbe Nachman of Breslov repeated again and again: “It is forbidden to despair.”[1]
And yet, in one of his darker moods, the same Rebbe Nachman told his followers:
Everyone says that there are two worlds: the world-to-come and this world. Behold – we believe in the world-to-come. But as for ‘this world,’ it’s possible it exists somewhere, but here we seem to be in hell, for everyone is always full of great suffering.[2]
How could one person make both of these claims? What greater despair could there be than declaring that this world is actually hell?
I think that for Rebbe Nachman, a true refusal to despair can only come from confronting the hellishness of reality instead of seeking to escape it. A tzaddik, he taught, must stare into the abyss.[3] He once admitted to his followers that though he often preached about the necessity of being happy, it was obvious that he himself was deeply depressed. He explained, “It is only because I have been clearing a path through a place that was void and wasteland.”[4] Only one who stares into the abyss or walks into the wasteland can find a path through it.
If we cannot confront despair, we will inevitably take refuge in fantasy. We will try to prove to ourselves that things aren’t as bad as they seem, and if they are, then maybe they’ll take a turn for the better, and if they don’t – well, they still might. Such a fantasy might seem like hope, but it is merely a brittle optimism: when forced to confront reality, it will shatter, leaving in its wake an even deeper despair than that which it sought to flee.
For Rebbe Nachman, the most solid hope is one that is brave enough to dispense with illusions. It cannot be shattered by reality, because it has already accepted the world as it is. Such a hope does not need a justification. In fact, it cannot have one, because any justification can ultimately be undermined. A hope premised on a certain set of facts or a particular theory will falter as soon as the facts change or the theory proves wrong. Only a hope beyond reason and logic can carry us through catastrophe.
The past two years in Jerusalem have brought me face-to-face, again and again, with despair.
I felt despair watching a demolition of a Palestinian home for the first time for the simple crime of not having a building permit that Israel makes it nearly impossible to acquire. That morning, soldiers shoved Palestinians away from the home, yelling at them, dragged all of the family’s possessions onto the dirt outside, and then smashed the building with two bulldozers, leaving 11 people homeless.
I felt despair each time I visited the village of Um al-Khair in Massafer Yatta, seeing the residents of the settlement of Carmel only a few meters away peacefully hanging laundry, taking walks, eating in their spacious homes while Um al-Khair’s residents lived on seven hours of water once a week.
I felt despair on October 7th, listening to Iron Dome intercept rockets above me, hearing friends who were on their phones slowly report the body count beginning to rise – 50, 100, 200, 400, 600, 800, 1000, 1200, beginning to hear horror after horror.
I felt despair later that day, listening to a man down the street singing, “Death to Arabs!” as the F-16s droned overhead on their way to bomb Gaza.
I felt despair when the Jerusalem police cursed, shoved, and beat us week after week as we, Israeli and American Jews, protested the war, calling for a ceasefire and a deal to save the hostages.
I felt despair when I marched again and again in the hostage protests and so few people joined us. I felt despair when those protests to save innocent Israeli fathers, sisters, children, grandparents suffering in captivity almost never spoke about the innocent Palestinian fathers, sisters, children, grandparents being killed in Gaza.
“I think it’s time to reclaim despair,” writes David Shulman, a longtime American-Israeli activist, about his experience fighting the occupation. He continues:
One despairs: the wickedness is all too present and effective, we cannot stem the tide with our bodies or our words, we confront a faceless system embodied in the faces of the soldiers and bureaucrats and settlers that we meet on the hills. I recommend despair as a place to start.[5]
He concludes, “[My] despair… deepened and worsened over the years until I was forced from within to do something useful with it.” [6]
In the midst of despair at such wickedness, at a world that so often felt like a hell, I found a hope in the Palestinian communities and activists of Massafer Yatta fighting to stay on their land, and the Israeli, American Jewish, and international activists struggling alongside them.
In Jawaya, after that demolition, I saw how the entire village came to help the family sort through what remained of their belongings. In Um Durit, I spent many nights with a family who refused to leave their home even though settlers and soldiers attacked them each week, threatening them, setting fires, and building outposts on the hilltops around them. In Um al-Khair, I spoke with friends who couldn’t work because Israel would no longer let them leave the West Bank, couldn’t shepherd because the soldiers wouldn’t let them access their grazing land, and yet insisted that they wouldn’t leave and would fight as long as they could.
I met Israeli, American Jewish, and international activists who spent most, if not all, of their time sleeping in the West Bank, waking up at dawn to accompany shepherds in case of settler violence, hopping in cars and racing at breakneck speeds to the sites of violent attacks and arrests to make sure there was documentation.
There was little hope in the conventional sense: the violence and oppression the Palestinians faced from the army and the settlers had been steadily rising before the war, and it has exploded since. Village after village has been ethnically cleansed, and even the steadfast residents of the communities that remain wonder how long they will be able to do so.
The activists continue to document the violence in the hopes that it might influence a court case, deter soldiers and settlers, or bring international pressure to bear, but the documentation often feels less and less effective as the soldiers and settlers grow increasingly emboldened and vengeful.
But there was a deeper sort of hope born of the despair in the West Bank. Not a hope built on the belief that a savior will come, that things would get better, or that they would win. For the Palestinians, it was built on the very fact that they have no choice but to resist, and for both them and the activists it was a hope that was little more than the knowledge that the occupation is wrong.
As Shulman says, “[My] despair… deepened and worsened over the years until I was forced from within to do something useful with it .”
But what are we supposed to do with despair? How can we face it when it threatens to overwhelm us?
Rebbe Nachman teaches that “when one is sunk in the depths of overwhelming darkness…and there is no fix or stratagem through which to escape, one should draw oneself to truth.” [7]
What does Rebbe Nachman mean when he says that “truth” can help us escape the darkness? It cannot be the “truth” that things aren’t as bad as they seem, because Rebbe Nachman believes that this world is hell. For Rebbe Nachman, I think, “truth” means commitment: what allows us to walk through the darkness is the recitation, the incantation, the insistence on the beliefs and values we hold dear. They aren’t “true” in the sense of being provable: we can’t demonstrate that justice is worth fighting for, or that every life is precious. In this sense, perhaps these values, too, are a fantasy. But they’re true in the sense that we feel them in our gut and that instead of lulling us into complacency they force us to do something.
So often these past two years, especially since October 7th, I have tried and failed to escape my despair by searching for some fact, some op-ed, some book that would prove to me that things aren’t actually so terrible, or that there’s a guaranteed formula for fixing it all. I’m sure we’ve all read uncountable articles, scrolled through endless social media posts, all in the hopes of finding a way out of this horror.
I think it’s natural for us to seek comfort in moments of catastrophe, and I think it can be politically important, too – there may be movements and organizations we don’t know about, we may learn that we were wrong about a particularly depressing fact, or someone may help us imagine futures and possibilities we hadn’t considered. But this kind of hope is inherently fickle: the new, inspiring movement fails; we learn an even more depressing fact; we realize how much worse things are about to get. If we stick to that sort of truth, we might discover that we’re stuck in hell.
Just as dangerously, this search for hopeful truth – paradoxically – often prevents us from taking action. It requires that we wait or scroll until someone out there gives us a reason to keep fighting. If they can’t, we’ll be tempted to give up, and even if they do, it’ll only be a matter of time until we need a new reason. Inexorably, we’ll be led into an even deeper despair and sense of powerlessness.
If there is a way out of the abyss, I think it is Rebbe Nachman’s sort of truth: affirming and acting on the values upon which we stake our lives and for which we would risk them. This is the truth that sustains the Palestinian and Jewish activists in Massafer Yatta: the knowledge that even if things appear hopeless, even if the occupation grinds on, there are things we simply must do. It is true that oppression must be fought. It is true that every child in Israel/Palestine deserves to grow up. It is true that Palestinians and Israelis all deserve peace, freedom, safety, and dignity. We don’t need to wait for someone to give us a reason to fight on – we know that justice and peace are worth fighting for. No one can prove it to us – all we can do is try our hardest to live out those values here and now.
“[My] despair… deepened and worsened over the years until I was forced from within to do something useful with it.”
This despair, this hope, this truth, these values, this faith – that’s all we have. What are we going to do with it?
[1] E.g. Likutei Moharan II:78, Chayyei Moharan 49.
[2] Likutei Moharan II:119.
[3] See Likutei Moharan I:64.
[4] Chayyei Moharan 235.
[5] David Shulman, Freedom and Despair, 8.
[6] Ibid., 182-183.
[7] Likutei Moharan I:112.