A Meditation on Israel/Palestine/Gaza for the High Holy Days
In spring of 2025, Rabbi Toba Spitzer convened the artists of Dorshei Tzedek, my congregation in West Newton, MA, for a few hours of study texts. We were there at her invitation to make art for our congregation’s High Holy Days, this time on the theme of the shofar. As we gathered, I wondered to myself: How can we make Jewish art in a time of Jewish genocide? My answer arrived slowly: a text-audio piece entitled “One Hundred Blasts, Two Women, A Single Cry of Grief: A Meditation on Israel/Palestine/Gaza for the High Holy Days.”
The content of this piece emerged from the juxtaposition and apparent contradiction of two rabbinic commentaries we read that afternoon and the stunning nature of one of them in particular. The first text describes Sarah watching as Abraham takes Isaac off to sacrifice him and tells how, hearing that Abraham was on the verge of slaughtering their son, “[Sarah] screamed six calls against six tekiot.” The second commentary tells how Sisera’s mother, upon hearing of her son’s death, sighed, cried, and gasped “and therefore the teru’ah should sound like shevarim, a gasping sound […or…] broken like uncontrollable crying.” Who was Sisera? A bloodthirsty Canaanite commander portrayed in the Book of Judges as gleefully slaughtering Israelite men, raping Israelite women, and pillaging Israelite villages.
In the midst of what B’Tselem, Israel’s main human rights organization, would call just a month or two later “Our Genocide,” the ancient understanding that grief of our people and the grief of our enemies are one and the same (or two sides of the same coin) seemed to me to be speaking directly to us in 5876 from across the millennia. That the shofar blasts at the center of our holiest days of the year might be understood by our ancient forebears to be at once the cries of grief of our first Matriarch and of the mother of one of our most merciless foes floored me. (It also reminded me of how on Passover we spatter drops of our own wine (blood?) in memory of the Egyptian soldiers who drowned when the Red Sea was closed again.)
What, I wondered, might it sound like to actually hear that equivalence on the holiest of Jewish days: the shofar blasts as both mothers’ cries of grief? I started to imagine recording the voices of two different women—Sarah and Sisera’s mother—sighing, sobbing, gasping, crying out—and then somehow combining them with the blasts of the shofar. But how? First, however, came the why. As I thought about the coexistence of these two, completely “opposite” understandings in Jewish thought of what the shofar blasts on the Rosh Hashanah represent, I realized that not only must this piece represent both possibilities but that key to creating this experience was that the listener wouldn’t know which voice was whose. My piece would offer an experience suggesting that the grieving of Palestinian and Jewish Israeli women—even the mothers of men who had slaughtered, raped, and pillaged residents in southern Israel on October 7 and the mothers of men who had slaughtered, raped, and pillaged Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank following October 7—equally merit and deserve our compassion and identification. On the holiest days of our year, we evoke and remember both women, their common, human grief embodied in our most essential rituals.
To experience this piece, read the text, put on a pair of (good) headphones, and listen to the 3 1/2-minute-long audio. Here’s the text and here’s the audio.
