‘Stand With Israel’ prayer service at Congregation Emanuel, sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Ulster County

The Gaza strip is 36 miles long, the same distance as from Newburgh to Kingston. It’s just three miles wide in its center. One could walk across the narrowest section of the slender strip to the Mediterranean and back from Israel in an hour and half.

An estimated two million people live within this Palestinian territory freshened with the breeze of the sea. They inhabit the 139 square miles of land. You could fit eight Gazas into Ulster County.

It’s said that the land adjacent to the border is being bombed by Israeli airplanes and rockets. Photographs and video prove it. The Israeli government does not deny it.

It’s said a full-scale ground offensive is in the works, that the water and electricity have been cut off, and that the Palestinian inhabitants, unable to leave, have hunkered down in the Gaza strip. In the last eleven days, more than 2800 Palestinians have been killed, double the number of innocent Israeli civilians slaughtered indiscriminately on October 7, the Jewish holiday of Shemini Atzeret.

Hamas, a Sunni Islamist political and military organization, has been responsible for governing the Gaza Strip since it won elections in 2006. It has claimed responsibility for the attack.

An article of the group’s original charter states that no negotiated settlement with Israel is possible: “Jihad is the only answer.” In this context, Jihad is to be understood as an armed struggle against non-believers. To declare jihad is to declare a holy war.

What would become the tragedy of October 7 began with Hamas firing thousands of rockets from the Gaza strip into Israel. They did not care who or what they hit. Well-armed militants crossed the borders into Israel.

The assault’s only goal was to spill Israeli blood.

At least 260 Israeli citizens, women and children among them, were gunned down at an outdoor festival. Some 200 have been taken hostage.

The leader of the military wing of Hamas, Muhammad Deif, said the group had decided to launch an “operation” so that “the enemy will understand that the time of their rampaging without accountability has ended.”

Retaliation was swift. Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, declared that the nation was at war.

Eleven days later, members of the Jewish community gathered 5676 miles away in Kingston on Wednesday, October 18 at Congregation Emmanuel to seek the support of one another. Rabbi Yael Romer, state senator Michelle Hinchey and lieutenant governor Anotonio Delgado spoke.

Lieutenant governor Delgado too was coming to grips with the dimensions of the tragedy. Known for his oratorical prowess in front of a crowd, Delgado spoke haltingly before settling on the topic of the difficulty of explaining to his own children what had happened in Israel. His children are Jewish.

“Talking to them about hate and the concept of hate, the idea of hate. It’s a window into our innocence as human beings. When you have those kinds of conversations they don’t understand. No one comes into the world hating,” Delgado said. “It’s learned behavior, passed down from one generation to the next. Hate is what has brought all this to bear. Hatred of Jews. And hate is the enemy of life. It is the enemy of peace, the enemy of love, it is ignorant, it is diabolical, it is destructive, and it has been unleashed.”

He quoted Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever rising tides of hate,” Delgado recited. “History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued the self-defeating path of hate. Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil.”

Rabbi Yael Romer called to the source of creation from the depths. “There are no adequate words,” said she, “to speak to the horrific and barbaric acts of terror and destruction unleashed upon our people. Our prayers reach across oceans of pain.”

Romer emphasized the solidarity that all Jews must feel for the state of Israel, and she spoke for her people when she promised to stand with that nation-state.
With no amount of words sufficient to bring the dead back, with acceptance still years away, here in this moment is left only bargaining, death, depression and anger.
Anger transforms itself into the desire for revenge. But how to identify those responsible and surgically pluck them out from among the innocent? The weeds hide among the flowers and need wear no uniform. The question itself threatens to slow the momentum, and bloodshed must be answered in kind, geopolitically speaking. So the decision was made on high to spread the pain around.

“Fierce, burning pain cries out, seeking revenge over our completely infuriated flesh,” acknowledged the rabbi to her flock even while she attempted to pacify the instinct. “I pray that you, my people, will not stumble or falter beneath the threats of hatred … may you never lose sight of the best Jewish values, the ability to see the spark of the divine in every human being. Have mercy on us in a time of destruction and tragedy, terror, death and panic, please may our compassion be revealed. May the love within us overwhelm the harsh judgment, vengeance and evil within us.”

She defended the innocent lives lost on both sides. We must find our shared humanity, she said.

“My heart breaks for my Jewish peers,” said state senator Hinchey. “We are bonded in that shared trauma, and it begs the question around the world, where is our humanity? From the murder of a six-year-old Palestinian boy in Illinois to the swastika in an antisemitic vandalism found today at the beloved Second Avenue Deli in New York City, our society must be better than this.”

All three speakers had pursued the idea of love as the unifying theme with which to contend the harrowing reality inaugurated by evil men, still in the process of unfolding along both sides of the border in the Gaza strip like a diseased flower.

“The world I believe in is one where we respect support and love one another,” Hinchey said. “And yet we find ourselves grappling with the dehumanizing notion that we can still be blinded by hate, and we can still be led by fear. As a Jewish person, that’s not the world I want to live in.”