We came together today in a time of beauty and destruction – spring is burgeoning in all her bright colors, it’s also Pesach, our holiday of liberation, and the genocide in Gaza grows ever worse and hopes the Israeli hostages are still alive grow ever more unlikely.
Our liturgy today moved between these three elements, praising the yellow of forsythia, naming how impossible words are in the face of genocide, and touching on symbols and stories from Pesach re-cast in the devastation of this year. You can find our liturgy here.
Music included:
Batya Levine, Ani l’dodi
Susan Rothbaum, Remember
and we ended the service with Ed McCurdy’s folk classic “Last night I had the strangest dream” set to the melody of Adon Olam
For torah study we learned about the terrifying new AI tools the IDF is using to identify and target Gazans: Lavender, The Gospel, and Where’s Daddy. To frame this, Elliott discussed the history of how women at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in England and Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice in New York state came to realize that we were being used to test a new kind of crowd control weapon that we called “zapping” and that, eventually, we learned was a new kind of sonic weapon, one that is now used for “crowd control” by militaries and police departments around the world. Because the peace camps were under constant surveillance, the weapons developers could hear us experience and discuss the effects and symptoms in real time. We then connected that to Gaza, where a totally captive population has been used to develop terrifying tracking and identification tools. All that data is new feeding into AI targeting systems which allow bombing and murder at a pace and a scale beyond human capacity.
The information for this came from Israeli journalists who have interviewed IDF members who are horrified by what they’ve been asked to do. Read the full investigation at +972 Magazine. Watch an interview on Democracy Now with the journalist Yuval Abraham.
With this (awful) knowledge we talked about how we handle the responsibility that comes with knowing. To pull out of this intense conversation, we listened to Sara Thomsen’s cover of Pete Seeger’s My Name is Lisa Kalevelage, the testimony of a German-born woman who became an anti-Viet Nam War organizer.
