complete affirmation, complete negation, beyond all affirmation and all negation
on listening and refusing
It’s Monday, October 9th. Already two days late, I fear.
I text a Jewish coworker and dear friend.
“Thinking of you and your wife’s family. I’m so sorry. Do you know if they’re safe?”
I pained over the words and still it’s so lifeless. What else do you say? Across states and digital waves, what can stand in for the tenderness of touch and quiet presence? A few weeks ago we were sipping bourbon on my porch late into the night. His partner’s parents live outside Tel Aviv. I don’t know the geography well enough, but I’ve heard that’s where Hamas attacked.
“Thanks Nathan. Thankfully everyone is safe and accounted for. It’s been a devastating horrifying 3 days”
I text back three purple hearts “💜💜💜” praying they carry something more than the words I cannot find.
I will learn over the following week that I disagree with him on things that matter. I love him. My heart aches because his heart aches.
At my core, my longing is not so much to further a revolution of contemplative solidarity as to simply live it myself. But when I get to a week like these past two—a week when Hamas is murdering and raping Israelis, broadcasting footage of their atrocities, taking them hostage, and calling for further violence; a week when Israel’s far-right government is bombing the homes of Palestinians who have nothing to do with Hamas, starving them of food and water, plunging toward even greater atrocities; a week when dear friends with personal ties to these lands and peoples are suffering incomprehensibly; a week when the politics of people with whom I am in community and coalition are spilling out in the open and proving themselves to be sharply divided with enormous consequences—I do not know what to say.
I just do not know.
I have been broken by my lack of words. Ashamed not only by my lack of the “right words,” but by my lack of words, period. And even if I had words, I ask myself, what could they do in the face of such a long story of brokenness, pain, hate and violence?
Admitting we just don’t know and arriving at the end of speech can, if turned towards fully, become the beginning of mysticism. I believe that. Admitting we don’t know and arriving at the end of speech is also the beginning of any mature practice of social transformation. Find me an honest organizer and I’ll show you someone who knows they do not actually know how to get to the world we long for—otherwise we’d have gotten there already. Action and contemplation have to find one another at this tragic crossroads of unknowing.
In the tradition of early Christian theology this “not knowing” was called the apophatic in Greek. It is the thing in the face of which our capacity for language is stolen. The place where speech becomes impossible.
Apophatic theology was always first about God. That’s because the apophatic is what is left when we encounter the awesome in its most literal sense, whether beautiful or terrible or both (those who have attempted to describe encounters with God certainly seemed to have struggled to tell the difference). Before later philosophical theologians came in and began plastering Greek ideas onto God as though they were rationally knowable qualities (qualities like omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, etc.), the early church believed the beginning of worship lay in the celebration of God’s unknowability—God’s mystery.
A poet-theologian from the 5-6th centuries who wrote under the pseudonym Dionysius the Areopagite penned some of the highest expressions of this apophatic form:
[The universal Cause] is not anything accessible to our knowledge or to the knowledge of any being; it has nothing to do with non-being, but no more has it anything to do with being; that no one knows its nature…that it eludes all reasoning, all nomenclature, all knowing; that it is neither darkness nor light, neither error nor truth; that absolutely nothing can be asserted of it and absolutely nothing denied…
Mystical Theology, 1047-8- -
The mystery that is beyond God himself,
the Ineffable,
that gives its name to everything,
is complete affirmation, complete negation,
beyond all affirmation and all negation.
Divine Names, 3,641
Dionysius the Areopagite is pretty over my head and it’s probably a sign of how much I’ve struggled to know what to say that I’m quoting him here. But I’ve been thinking a lot about how little I know and understand these past two weeks and wondering if there’s anything of value in that humbled condition worthy of this sweepingly global, deeply personal catastrophe.
When children, grandmothers, and families are gunned down in their homes, murdered in the streets, shot to pieces in the midst of the joy of a dance party; when children, grandmothers, and families are bombed and whole cities teeming with embargoed millions are told to flee into the ocean or be annihilated—do these horrors not force us to attempt language which is either “complete affirmation, complete negation,” or “beyond all affirmation and all negation?”
Silence may be the consistent council of the contemplatives, but remaining silent is exactly what the prophets tell us we cannot do in the face of evil. Welcome to the paradox, sure. But just calling this a paradox and checking out clearly isn’t enough either. Pivoting to paradox is just more esoteric bullshit when people are dying, whole nations are convulsing, and your friends are broken with the trauma of grief and rage.
As soon as mystery and ignorance are brought to bear on the screaming crises of our times, sanguinity breaks down. As it should. All that’s left are terrible questions, piercing grief, and, God willing, some shred of hope to which we have to cling as our last resource for courageous compassion and solidarity.
But what do we do when personable compassion and liberatory solidarity appear in conflict? Can we not know what to say or do and still show up with love? Can it be a love that risks more than safe sentimentality? A love that dares make itself public and political?
I text a Palestinian friend. I almost don’t. She’s grown into a prominent public leader over the past few years. I don’t want to burden her. I know how much she carries. How hard she works to carry herself in a way that proves what should never need proving—that Palestinians are not “human animals” as one politician claimed this past week; that no one is.
“Thinking about you and with you in grief, rage, horror, prayer, solidarity 💜💜”
Later that evening she texts back.
Among her words is a statement of gratitude for “defending me when I’m not in the room. That means the world to me.”
I ask myself if I actually am.
A touchstone in my attempt at living in solidarity with the oppressed—particularly given that I pursue this way of life as a middle-class straight white man—has been a line Christena Cleveland shared at a conference almost ten years ago when Baltimore was still shaking with protests against police brutality.
“Listen. Believe. And follow.”
This has become my mantra. If you’re not sure what to do, listen to the oppressed. Listen to Black women. Believe what they have to say. Don’t mansplain it back to them. Don’t reinterpret to sanitize or fit it to your preconceived narrative. Don’t water down the implications. Believe them. Then follow. Move. Act on what you’ve heard. Follow the leadership of the oppressed. Join them in their struggle in the ways they’ve asked.
It should probably be obvious that this is the most fundamental response to not knowing: listening.
(As an aside — there are times when listening is enough by itself. At the bedside of a dying loved one, nothing is needed more than to stroke a hand and listen. Listening doesn’t ensure knowing will follow. It just means being willing to attend to the darkness, to sit in the opaque clouds of life and be, and in that murky being to find some form of loving connection. Contemplatives tend to get stuck here. Some of them believe all suffering is suffering you can simply be present to as though that is enough. That’s because they tend to collapse suffering into a single category instead of distinguish the forms natural to being human from the forms that emerge from structural injustice. But the thing is, sometimes when you listen, you hear a truth you’ve never heard before. And when you hear a truth you’ve never heard before, you have to get up and start acting in ways you’ve never acted before because you must if your life is to align with the truth. This is one way to describe conversion, which, as we’ll explore more someday, Gustavo Gutierrez calls the prerequisite to solidarity. A prophet is just a mystic who heard something in prayer and got up off the cushion to do something about it.)
Here’s the real catch, though, the place where this neat formula starts to get really messy.
If you attempt to live seriously by this phrase—listen, believe, follow—you quickly discover that not all of the “oppressed” are saying the same thing. It turns out (a revelation to you, oh sheltered and privileged one! you [me, I always mean me] who, even in your pivot to progressivism have once again collapsed real people into a collective caricature) that there are many different oppressed communities. That those oppressed communities differ in their stories and needs in ways that appear contradictory. That even within an oppressed community people have different stories, different answers, different demands, different levels of self-reflection and health, different politics, different wounds, different visions of healing.
Then what?
The first step is honoring that this discovery of pluralism is itself a meaningful portion of the battle. “The oppressed” are complex individuals in complex communities just like everybody else. Taking the time for generalized categories to become differentiated humans, with everything being human among other humans entails, is exactly what is needed if we are going to build local and global politics in which everyone is worthy and receiving of love.
There’s another thing on my mind that an apophatic approach to this moment might have to offer. These days apophatic theology sometimes goes by the name “negative theology.” The idea is that we may not be able to claim what God is, but we might be able to say some things that God is not and build from there.
I might not be able to say what love is in the context of building a just and sustainable peace in the Middle East or anywhere else. But I sure as hell can say a few things that love definitively is not. Maybe we can build something from there.
One of my board members messaged me last week. He grew up in Toronto the child of Holocaust survivors. He was supposed to fly to Israel last week to lead members from his synagogue on a trip deep into the West Bank to learn from Palestinians. He has long been angered and horrified by what Israel’s right-wing government is perpetrating.
When the attacks began his trip was canceled, another effort at peace that’s yet more collateral damage.
He tells me he wants to fill the lost time by joining an upcoming meeting with our co-op in DC. We discuss travel logistics.
“I am finding it difficult to focus on anything today other than what is happening in Israel and Gaza,” he texts.
“I can only imagine,” I send back, “hard to do anything ‘normal’ when something so horrible is happening.”
Shallow words for deep feelings in deeper time.
I’m coming up on a decade in progressive interfaith political spaces. I’ll let you in on an open secret. If you want to build an interfaith coalition and you want it to be big (or “inclusive”) then you know there are three issues on which you must remain silent. Adopt any one of them and another block of your base will splinter off. Those issues are abortion, LGBTQ rights and equality, and Israel-Palestine.1
We have entered a political era when those old silences are no longer tenable. These are not the silences of wisdom or even political pragmatism. They are silences that sustain violence. They are silences we must refuse.
So.
I stand with those who seek to resist the toxic virus that is antisemitism. It is a repugnant hate, a corrupter of everything it touches, a social sickness that has led to the most abominable dehumanizations in western history.2
It is very clearly a fact that there are people whose the critique of the state of Israel, both toward its politics and its right to exist, is motivated by antisemitism. As antisemitism, it must be called out and not given a shred of social-political legitimacy. But here’s the thing about equating being pro-Israel with being an ally to Jewish people. I grew up in a place where nearly everyone was hawkishly pro-Israel. Almost all of those people were also antisemitic and you didn’t have to scratch hard to find it.3 Our fundamentalist misreading of the Book of Revelation convinced us that a reestablished Israel was the clearest prerequisite for the Second Coming of Christ. Damn the Jews to the Apocalypse (minus the 144,000)—we just wanted an Israel so we could hurry up and get raptured off this sinking ship. Which is to say the argument that you must be pro-Israeli state policy in order to prove your support of Jews has never made sense to me since clearly supporting Israel has never lined up with actually loving Jewish people in real life.4
I am not an expert on the definition of apartheid but there are people who are experts on that subject who have documented the human rights violations which Israel has perpetrated against the Palestinians blockaded in Gaza and the West Bank for decades who credibly use that language. What’s more is my Palestinian friend with whom I was texting earlier and millions like her have spoken for themselves of the injustice they have suffered and the horror of what they are enduring as a dehumanized people. I have listened and I believe them. What Israel’s radical right wing government has been doing and is doing right now is terrible beyond my capacity to describe and must be resisted. Many Jews here and abroad, even with hearts still broken over the evils done to their own people, are doing exactly that. I stand with them.
And while I condemn Hamas’ actions I stand with Palestinians resisting the Occupation, resisting the massacre of their people, resisting the attempted erasure of their existence in this very moment, and standing for their right as a human community to co-exist and determine its own future.
wrote this week, in one of the best pieces you can read right now, that “a lot of things are true. The refusal to grasp this is a non-trivial amount of the problem.”Because if you listen, a lot of things are false right now, but a lot of things are true. These truths demand from us a higher level of love made public. They call us to words and actions that press beyond complete affirmation or complete negation, beyond all affirmation and all negation, into the uncertain terrains of relentless compassion and unflinching solidarity.
Statements have been made. By myself and others. Actions need to follow. But the listening must continue. We always go back to the listening if we are to get beyond ignorant quietism and violent dichotomies. It is our dim mirror into the mystery of the other. Statements and policies are not first order things. People are. Listening brings us back to our own humanity and the humanity of other people. In that spirit, I want to emphasize that I know what I’ve said here fell short. I’m sorry if these words harmed you. I want to hear about that and learn from it. I hope you’ll share your feedback which I’ll take to heart. I’m still listening.
Let me close here. All week I’ve been thinking about a line of
’s from his most recent podcast:“You are not required, whether to be a good leftist or to be a good Jew, to harden your heart to the suffering of innocent people. Whether they are Israeli or Palestinian. I actually think your humanity requires the opposite.”
You can do both of those things. You must do both of those things unless you want to lose your humanity.5
And losing your humanity is exactly what they want—all of them that callously take part in violence and urge you to look approvingly upon it. In every age this is the essential refusal: to never give up your own humanity or take it from anyone else.
I’m talking “progressive” spaces here, not leftist, so outright opposition of capitalism unfortunately isn’t even enough of a framed or formulated issue to be worth consciously avoiding—though pressing it would obviously sheer off significant swaths of participants.
I’m obviously talking about the Holocaust here, but far more. If this sounds too sweeping and you think I’m leaving out colonialism and slavery, I’m not. The antisemitism of Medieval Christianity provided Europeans with the models of rationality and social control they would reconstitute in their violent takeover of the Atlantic basin into the white racial hierarchies and racial capitalism. For starters, see Willie J. Jennings The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race.
My wife encouraged me to caveat that this was antisemitism primarily of the prejudiced comments kind, not the hate crimes kind, to be clear. But both are bad and the former enables the latter.
Know Your Enemy’s Jewish cohost Sam Adler-Bell put out a phenomenal podcast a few weeks ago with a panel of Jewish Currents writers on this complex conflation of antisemitism and the critique of Israel in American politics, specifically how the ADL figures into setting and policing these political lines. I highly commend it to you, particularly for its insistence on a moral politics of solidarity that transcends these lines and proves how many thoughtful Jews care deeply about Palestinian lives and liberation.