Max Stearns
In Jewish law we are told every life is a universe. This concept, however vital, is also difficult, at least for me. And I suspect I’m not alone.
Yesterday, six lives were discovered murdered by Hamas, in Gaza, as part of the absolute horrors that followed unimaginable occurrences in Israel on October 7. I know they’re unimaginable because although I wasn’t there at the time, I joined a mission trip this summer that brought me to the Nova Festival site, Kibbutz Nir Oz, the car cemetery, an attacked military base, and other sites. There are images from that harrowing trip that, try as I might, I cannot shake.
Here are a few:
We watched a film prepared by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) that combined clips primarily drawn from Hamas fighters documenting their “victories”—mass murders, rapes, and other unspeakable brutalities. I chose to watch, but I covered my eyes as Hamas fighters set about undressing a young woman, and later, when beheading a man with a shovel.
At the car cemetery, I witnessed thousands upon thousands of blown up, burned out, shelled out vehicles used to escape from Nova and other sites. (There were multiple festival locations that night.) This included an ambulance used to take in victims who had been attacked, only to then be blown up inside the equivalent of an oven. The imagery, though not creative, was unmistakably deliberate—the Shoah.
At Kibbutz Nir Oz, we saw burned out homes, bloodstained carpets, and bullet ridden walls, and we heard stories by a woman of two elderly relatives who had been taken hostage, only one of whom had been released. The part I couldn’t stay for was the cafeteria. It had been used to store dead bodies, and it wreaked of the stench.
At the military base in the Gaza envelope, we saw the small, enclosed room where young women were trapped, some managing to escape through a window, the rest brutally shot and killed.
Yesterday we learned that six young women and men, including one American, had been alive but were murdered before a possible Gaza tunnel rescue operation. This has dominated the news for the past 24 hours. It has led to protests in Israel with over half a million people. It has also led to countless vigils and protests in the United States and across the globe. It has led to calls—repeated ad infinitum—for Bibi Netanyahu to find a way to end this tragic war and bring home the remaining hostages. This despite frank understandings that the likely numbers of hostages who remain alive—each a universe—is almost certainly growing smaller and smaller.
Amid all this is a tragic alternative narrative. Although the numbers are disputed, by any estimate tens of thousands of Gazans have been killed. The lives of those residing there have been turned into a hellish nightmare.
Here’s the simple fact: The families of these six recently murdered Israeli and American hostages have received and will continue to receive overwhelmingly greater international attention than their numbers multiplied even by thousands on the other side. For one thing, we know their names: Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Ori Danino. Hersh’s parents were even given center stage—with millions of viewers around the globe—at the DNC convention. On the other side, at best we know the tragedy of contested numbers.
Every life is a universe.
The human capacity to grapple with tragedy is itself tragically limited. One way to think through this Jewish tradition is that each life has the potential to effect a universe. A baby might prove to be Marie Currie, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela. And the list of those who changed the world is itself limitless. Or we might recall God promising Abraham children as numerous as the grains of sand on the sea.
But as for me, I’ve come to think of this admonition a bit differently. The human mind—soul, if you will—can only comprehend so much pain. If we feel a universe of pain upon the loss of a loved one—with an emphasis on one—does that imply we must feel endless multiplied universes as tragic losses multiply. Is feeling such impossible pain our personal moral obligation? Is our inability to achieve it our personal moral failing? If every life is a universe, what of the countless lives we can never even know about? How can we experience a magnitude of suffering no human being can even possibly begin to comprehend?
Those of us mourning intensely the loss of six individuals we didn’t personally know, but who since October 7 have become our family—lives we’ve read about, understood even in our most limited ways, and viscerally connected with—need not explain, nor apologize for, our sense of abject tragedy. Pain is pain. Suffering is not and should never be zero sum. My tears at the images of six beautiful young men and women—people I feel I’ve come to know—does not, cannot, and should never diminish my understand that although each is a universe for me, others I’ll never know are universes for others.
I pray this war ends. I pray the suffering stops. And more than anything, I pray that those whose sympathies lie on one side have the humanity to appreciate the endless pain at the loss of so many universes that the other side inevitably bears.
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