The second October 7th vigil was led by Hillel House Board members and students in Central Park where lives lost in Israel were mourned.  At no time during the Central Park vigil was common ground offered for the lost lives of Palestinians, even as quotes from the Torah reiterated that “each life is a world." Speakers stood in front of large US and Israeli flags, and a big showing was made of public officials and local leaders in attendance.  

October 7th Central Park Vigil for Israel

Along with the love, solidarity, and loss expressed by the mostly Jewish attendees at the Central Park vigil was the use of inaccurate and harmful rhetoric such as: “Reports indicate that 80% of (October 7th) victims were tortured before they were murdered” and “Our community (Davis) erupted in explosions of antisemitism on our campuses, in our city, and in our schools.”

There were no counter-protestors at the Central Park vigil. I felt the hurt, and I felt the influence of the Zionist control and the mistrust of agency that is not conceived in its devotion to Israel.  It was a tearful and moving atmosphere, but no matter their stated motivations, those who carried questions about the treatment of Israel's Arab citizens and neighbors would have to wait.  It was recited that the will of Israel is the will of God. I left the Central Park vigil after a Hellil student member finished his personal account of a journey to Jerusalem and of how he had come to the epiphany that Jews were “superhuman." 

The Campus Jewish Voice for Peace group also read the Mourner’s Kaddish.  Standing on the grass of the UCD quad, the circle of Jewish students spoke in the dusk by candlelight and shared the difficult journey to find that only some of their Jewish friends recognized the destructiveness of systemic racism in Israel.

"I wanted to open this discussion by conversing about who is allowed to grieve (not Palestinians). Who is allowed to feel pain? What people we have extended enough humanity to listen to... and the tactic of avoiding discussions about grief, its deliberate, it's a deliberate exerted effort to divide the Jewish people against the world." “Sitting in that pain and sitting in that suffering and turning it against the world is not productive.  We need to recognize what is important and what is worth fighting for and to see past traumas that we have been conditioned into living and perpetuating.  Healing and collective liberation is the only way this ends.” 

They were there to pray and grieve as their announcement indicated. 

October 7th was an atrocity in a line of atrocities perpetuated by extremists on all sides that we, who are about “collective liberation,” have not found a way to quiet well enough. The Rabbis spoke about any child being a child lost to all of us, regardless of nationality. Hillel House spokespersons gave grievance and righteousness full voice, but do these speakers speak for all Jews in our community?  After these vigils, are we willing to allow Hillel to present all Jews as justifiably unrepentant about all of Israel's history and current execution of hostility toward Arab people in Palestine and the region?  Should we continue to censor Palestinian grief?

As part of the days of awe that begin with the new year, Rash Hashanah, we are reminded to sanctify God with Kadosh Atah; you are holy.  Are we not to understand that this means we are all holy and that some of us are Jews and some are not? Do we insist that Jews are set apart?  If not, how do we then continue to not look upon the grandfathers, grandmothers, moms and dads, brothers, sisters and babies in Palestine as our own?  Kadosh Atah, you are holy.

It is unbelievable that after a year of “war," of systematic annihilation, we see it grow worse, but after witnessing the vigils, protests, and counter-protests, I better understand, as others have probably long understood.  Modern Israel, born in violence, has no room for repentance; the Zionist factions of US Jewish institutions have made it near impossible for dissent within Synagogues, most Campuses, and Legislative Chambers.  For many in today's Israel, as for many in the United States, equality and reparations are avenues of lost identity and confessions of false premises.  

The cruelty we finance today, in Israel, around the world, and at home, is made possible by the belief (many times drawn from otherwise virtuous scripture) in the necessity of perpetual enslavement and "moral" thievery to assure the false necessity of complete control over others - over us consumers, citizens, and Palestinians. In the majority, our current political leadership kisses this enslavement ring, and we, all of us Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Europeans, Asians, Blacks, Latinos, Christians, Hindus, LGTBQ - all identities - will have to replace this machinery to be free. Let us pray and act for collective liberation, for we are all Kadosh.

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footnote: *Rape is abhorrent and has been perpetrated by rogue combatants on both sides, but the dehumanization campaign that the “Rape” chant evokes is an ugly echo of the false accounts of systematic rape and other exaggerations planted by Israeli operatives inside The New York Times in October last year.