A prayer for Thanksgiving

What I’d really be grateful for: A humanitarian ceasefire, the release of the hostages, and less hate swirling around us all.

As Thanksgiving approaches each year, I try to put some effort into reflecting on gratitude — on trying to appreciate the blessings in my life more than I do in my usual day-to-day.

Over the past decade, I’ve hit many barriers in this effort — Hurricane Sandy, the election of Donald Trump, the pandemic, my friend Ady Barkan’s diagnosis with ALS, and now his death a few weeks ago. Still, I try to heed Ady’s reminder that “the antidote to being sad about everything I don’t have is to be grateful for all that I do.”

This year, the barrier to finding gratitude feels larger still: The war, with its horrors and misery in Israel and Palestine, and its reverberations all around us.

There are a set of prayers that Jews say when we wake up in the morning — and I’ve found myself waking up every morning (or, too often, many times in the night before that) with a pit in my stomach praying that, somehow, while I was sleeping, no more Palestinians were killed in Gaza or the West Bank, and all of the hostages were returned.

Grimly, every morning, it has been going against my prayers. I had been hoping that Vivian Silver, a lifelong peace activist who in her 70s was still helping Palestinians in Gaza get access to health care, and who we thought was taken hostage, might come home alive. So I was crushed to learn last week that her remains were discovered at Kibbutz Be’eri, where she was instead cruelly murdered in Hamas’ terror attacks on October 7.

And each morning has brought new horrors in Gaza — babies dying in incubators without power, tens of thousands of pregnant women amidst a collapsed health care system. The bombings of the Jabaliya and Khan Yunis neighborhoods, and of schools operated by the UN. So many whole families killed, so many kids being killed in Gaza every day, that it is becoming a graveyard for children.

So what I’d really be grateful for this Thanksgiving would be days without more dead Palestinian families, and for the remaining Israeli hostages to return home alive.

Of course, neither Israelis nor Palestinians observe American Thanksgiving, but many of the weapons are funded with American dollars. So they could call it a Thanksgiving truce. But there are lots of words and names to choose from — “ceasefire,” “cessation of hostilities,” “multi-day humanitarian pause.”

The International Rescue Committee has a good description of what would be required to reduce death and suffering of the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza and help avert further humanitarian emergency. They call it a “humanitarian ceasefire” during which the fighting would stop to allow aid to flow, the injured to leave, hostage negotiations and release to take place, and civilian protection measures put in place to curb unacceptable levels of civilian harm and suffering.

I am praying so urgently today that the news that they are close to such a deal is true.

A ceasefire doesn’t end the conflict, of course. Hamas cannot be allowed to stay in governance of Gaza. Israel has the right and the need to defend its citizens, and no country would allow a terrorist organization (which has made clear from its founding charter that it will commit random acts of terror against Israeli civilians over and over again, with the goal of completely eliminating Jews) to remain next door.

So for a truce to turn into anything more than a blessedly death-free long weekend, more would be required — of Hamas, of Israel, of Palestinians, of Arab states, of the United States, of the international community.

But maybe if it begins there, with a humanitarian ceasefire and a return of hostages, maybe it would open up some space for that process to start. Some alternative, with less death and suffering than the IDF moving next into the south of Gaza, where millions of civilians are now packed into refugee camps.

Ultimately, there is no military solution to this conflict. Israelis and Palestinians will need to find a way to share the land these two peoples have long called home, since neither of them is going anywhere.

I know, of course, this future feels very far away. But it really is what I’d be grateful for.

And if gratitude can serve as an antidote, we urgently need it closer to home, too, as an antidote to the hate that is swirling around us in the wake of the war. It has been deeply depressing how ungenerous many of us have become. We’ve seen an upwelling of antisemitic vandalism and hate crimes against Jews, Palestinians, Muslims, and even those who are perceived to be.

Well beyond what’s criminal, there’s just so much anger and fear, so much shouting without listening, so much difficulty for people in finding generosity across the lines of suffering. Like many of you, I’m frightened by it in a way I really have never been before.

And I really understand why, in that fear, it feels like what makes sense is to demand that more attention be paid only, or primarily, to the threats against one’s own people. That feels like a big part of why it seems so hard for people to genuinely see and mourn lost lives on both sides, or in many cases even just to be decent with each other. (I found Ezra Klein’s conversation with Rabbi Sharon Brous to be a moving dialogue about this challenge).

But I’m pretty sure the way out of this hateful loop will not come by only demanding more loudly that people stop hating or attacking us (though certainly that is required, whichever us it is). It will also require listening more compassionately, even amidst trauma, to other voices.

And thankfully, there are powerful ones to listen to — to Israelis and Palestinians who, like Ady, manage to find room for gratitude and hope, despite immense suffering and grounds for despair.

So part of my prayer this Thanksgiving includes asking people to listen to voices across those lines.

Listen to the family members of many of the hostages, who marched across the country to the Knesset to raise their voices for urgently prioritizing their release (where, alas, some right-wing members of Netanyahu’s government mocked and screamed at them). Like Neta Heiman, whose 84-year-old mother was taken hostage, full of fury for Hamas but still pleading with her government not to destroy Gaza, who wrote: “When the moment for negotiations on a cease-fire arrives, take advantage of that moment to also bring about an agreement between the two sides.”

Listen to the voices of family members of 10/7 victims like Hayim Katzman, wracked with grief, who don’t want vengeance in the name of their loved ones. Listen to one of our Brooklyn neighbors, Alana Zeitchik, who spoke to the UN about the six family members she has among the hostages, pleading with the world not to forget them.

Listen to young Palestinians in Gaza talking about how the war has upended not just their lives, but reality itself. Listen to Ahmed Abu Artema, a journalist and organizer whose 13-year-old son Abdullah, adored by his father for his “innocence, kindness, compassion, mercy, and…self overflowing with goodness,” was killed on October 24. Listen to Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian Member of Knesset who has forthrightly condemned Hamas and mourned the Israeli lives lost on 10/7. Listen to one of our Brooklyn neighbors, Sousan Hammad, as she raises her daughter Lila here, while her cousins in Gaza raise theirs with bombs falling all around.

One Palestinian in Gaza sent a note to Vivian Silver’s funeral, even though the war meant she could not attend. Israeli Jews remembered their friend Khalil Abu Yahia, a Palestinian human rights organizer killed on October 30th.

Here in New York City, we had a chance to meet Sally Abed and Alon Lee Green, of Standing Together, an organization of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel working for human rights, for an end to the Occupation, for a path to co-existence — because they know their futures are irrevocably intertwined.

All these voices teach us that it’s possible to find gratitude even in the deepest darkness, to leverage that gratitude into hope, and that hope into work for change, and toward peace.

My prayer this Thanksgiving is for a break in the fighting, and for sacred homecomings, that open up some space for all of us to hear those voices, and to try to follow their lead.