The moral imperative to show up anyway

What good will it do?

This is the question people ask upon learning I’m participating in a 40-day solidarity Fast for Gaza. I learned of the fast, organized by Veterans for Peace with 48 co-sponsor groups, just a day before it was set to begin on May 22. With little time to research, weigh the practicalities, or talk it over with friends, I committed immediately, impulsively. That is if it can be called impulsive when, like so many bearing witness to the horrific, entirely avoidable, and ever worsening suffering of Gazans, I have been anguished by my own helplessness, my own uselessness, for over 20 months now.

For me, the obligation to act is inextricable from my Jewishness — in two distinct ways. First, it resonates with the Judaism that nourishes me: from Rabbi Tarfon, of the 1st century, who taught, “It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it,” to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, of the 20th century, who taught, “in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.” Second, the fact that the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians — that’s according to UN human rights chief Volker Türk, B’Tselem, Israel's leading human rights organization, and others — is being carried out in the name of protecting Jews implicates me directly. I have no question that I am responsible for doing something.

Yet I do not have a good answer to the question of how voluntary fasting might help alleviate the suffering of others. Almost five weeks into the fast, I find myself pondering it daily.

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.”

Simone Weil

My mind goes to Simone Weil, the French philosopher, activist and mystic who, in 1943, at the age of 34, had a fatal heart attack. The coroner determined the cause of death to be self-starvation, writing, “the deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat.” Weil died in a sanitarium near London after months of refusing to consume more calories a day than the rations allowed her comrades in occupied Europe. Self-denial in solidarity with those suffering had been a felt imperative since childhood. At age 5, during World War I, she gave up sugar when told soldiers at the Western front had none. For Weil, these actions seem to have been less about their utility than about a profound, spiritual call to pay attention. “Attention,” she famously wrote, “taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.”

I am as moved by the stubborn fervor of her need to act as I am unsettled by the extremity of her actions. And I continue to puzzle over the questions raised by her life and death, among them: What good is self-deprivation?

I do know that numbness, whether caused by compassion fatigue or a sense that our efforts are futile, is of no use to anyone. As new horrors take over the headlines and competing tragedies mount, we must ward against the danger of letting ourselves go numb. One effect of fasting is that it keeps me constantly somatically uncomfortable. Although my hunger pangs are paltry beside the agony of those enduring forced starvation, they function as a quickening agent, a pricker keeping me awake. They are an antidote to numbness. An invitation to be creative, to lift up my head, to look to what others are doing.

For most of us, most of the time, it is a bitter fact that in the face of great suffering there is little we can do. When that suffering is human-wrought and inflicted by the mighty, how can those of us who do not individually wield much power respond?

We can join together, to march and donate and boycott and sing and write letters and give testimony and carry signs and hold hands and pitch tents and fill the public square — city halls, train stations, lunch counters, plazas, parks, intersections, bridges — with our bodies. For most of us, in the end, our bodies — our brains and our hearts, yes, but also the poor, rude matter of our sinew and blood and bones — are what we have to offer. It’s the one thing we all possess, the one thing we can all choose to put on the line to try to heal what’s broken.

Which leads to another question: What is the best way to put our bodies to use?

My mind goes to Noor Abdalla, the wife of Columbia University graduate student and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, who was held in ICE detention for 104 days. In a recent New Yorker profile, Dr. Abdalla, a dentist and a new mother, speaks about her past involvement in student activism, demonstrating as an undergrad against the Syrian war. “What can you do?” she is quoted as saying. “You go to protests, you plan vigils, you make sure that people keep talking about something that you care about and something that’s important.”

If “What can you do?” evokes a sense of helplessness, the rest of her quote underscores the moral imperative to show up anyway. “Make sure that people keep talking” chimes with a tactic encouraged by the organizers of solidarity fasts: “fast loudly.” Take photos, record videos, use social media, contact local press, spread the word, make one’s personal choice public, in hopes it will generate conversation around — in the eloquently humble phrase of Dr. Abdalla — something that’s important.

What the government of Israel, backed by the government to which I pay taxes, is perpetrating upon Gaza — it is essential not to use the passive voice here, obscuring who bears responsibility for the violence — meets the definition of something important. If I undertook the fast out of horror at my own uselessness, what might redeem the act itself from being useless is if it stimulates conversation.

The organizers of the fast suggest a variety of ways to participate: people could limit themselves to 250 calories a day (in line with the average caloric intake of many Gazans under Israeli blockade); partake in a time-based, dawn-to-dusk fast, like Ramadan; or initiate a chain in which a group of people share the 40 days, taking turns as the designated faster. I chose the last. The night before the fast began, I wrote to a circle of friends, inviting them to join me. One accepted, a few declined. Most didn’t respond at all. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed.

But here’s the thing. When we act on faith, when we ask for help, when we try oh so clumsily to be useful, there’s never any guarantee our intentions will translate, be understood, or bring about desired results. I can live with that. After all, what’s the alternative? To refrain from action?

I do know that numbness, whether caused by compassion fatigue or a sense that our efforts are futile, is of no use to anyone.

Then something unexpected happened. Over the ensuing weeks, word kept rippling out. More and more people joined the fast, both globally — the Fast for Gaza website shows a rolling count of those officially registered — and in my own little chain, which has grown from a lonely single link into three and then seven and now a dozen. A few of them I’ve never even met, and now we are in community together.

My mind goes to the No Kings demonstrations, where it’s estimated as many as 5 million people showed up, many of them first-time protestors. And to the growing numbers of people showing up at immigration court to accompany the vulnerable. And to the utterly unprecedented shift in Congress toward ending unconditional military support for Israel.

Cynics will scoff, “What good is a protest, a vote, a fast? They’re mere drops in the ocean.” But as the Pete Seeger song reminds us, “drops of water turn a mill.”

We don’t need to have answers to every question. We don’t need to know how they will be received in order to make our offerings. We just need to feel what we feel, to soften our eyes and our jaws and our shoulders, to remain. This is the work. To pay attention, to look and look and not look away. To make ourselves vulnerable, to show up, to employ whatever tools we have at hand — our bodies, our hearts, our fervor, our doubts, our anguish, our stubbornness, our humility, our clear-eyed understanding of our relative uselessness and our unshakable, irrational belief that what we do nevertheless matters, holds meaning, might even, in time, translate.

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