I've been sick (not Covid, thankfully) since the day before Thanksgiving. I don't feel eloquent or wise. But saying nothing is all too often understood as its own statement, so I am trying to find words. The release of each individual hostage during these fragile days has made me weep with gratitude. The Jewish daily blessing for God Who frees the captive has landed differently these last seven weeks.

Until now, I've had the luxury of understanding that blessing metaphorically, spiritually. I have davened it thinking of how God has freed me, continues to free me, from my own life's narrow places. But there's a reason it's been in our liturgy for many centuries. I experience it in a different way, now. Now when I pray it I also mean: may every hostage be released. May everyone who grieves be comforted. 

To the best of my heart's capacity I grieve for and with every Israeli and Palestinian parent who has lost a child, or child who has lost a parent, or anyone who has lost anyone, in these terrible last seven weeks. Grief is not zero-sum. Compassion is not zero-sum. Trauma also is not zero-sum: it compounds. I pray for everyone who carries trauma across that beloved land. I pray for everyone. 

I pray for a just and lasting peace. I worry that those who currently wield power aren't capable of forging one. I find hope in Standing Together, a Jewish-Palestinian-Arab organization that Micah Sifry wrote about recently. But grassroots change is slow. I remind myself: Mariame Kaba teaches, hope is a discipline. I remind myself: Jews know something about long, slow cultivation of hope. 

I pray: Please God, lift up wiser, more compassionate, and more creative leadership who can move beyond this vicious cycle of tragedy. Please God, I don't have words, I need You to turn my cry into the prayer You know is underneath. Please God, out of the rubble and ashes of these days may something better be built. Please God, help us to dream our way to a better future for all of Your children.