We met on our usual second Saturday, today the 8 month anniversary of the assault on Gaza. We met on a day when 4 families in Israel know their beloveds are coming home, and that dozens of families in Gaza will be mourning their beloveds, killed in the air strikes, with no home now to go back to. And on the day of parsha Bamidbar, when we read about how “all the Children of Israel” are lovingly counted only to discover one line later that “all” means only “men of fighting age.”
As is our custom, our June service is built around images of bees. Originally these services were all about bees and honey’s sweetness, but have slowly moved away from liturgy that values only the honeybee and only for what we can harvest from it. We honor the old folk custom of “telling the bees,” where we have to inform the bees about our losses and our celebrations so that they don’t abandon us – a ritual from a time when human and natural world weren’t separable things.
Download our June liturgy here.
Our torah study started with the opening of the parsha, in which only men of fighting age were important enough to count, then moved to explore the news in May about a change in the way the dead in Gaza are counted. Understanding that, we moved to an urgent issue – the way that the emphasis of the number of “women and children killed” hides a horrible assumption that all men are combatants. This allows men and boys in Gaza to be targeted, killed, kidnapped, and tortured under the assumption, same as it was in bamidbar, that all men of a certain age are soldiers. For our discussion, we talked about how each of us is dealing with the numbers and stats and death counts and polling results that overwhelm all of us – how do we find a center, how do we judge, how do we insist on counting what really matters? Torah study closed with Kathleen Hannen’s “Count My Heart,” which is below.
Music today included:
Kathleen Hannen, “Count My Heart”
