Reflections on Gaza on the October 8 Anniversary
By Dan Cohen
I placed a Jaffa orange candle on my altar for the upcoming Science, Myth & Magic masterclass. My father, Henry, brought it home from Israel decades ago as a souvenir. In 1946, when he was the Director of the UN’s Camp Föhrenwald near Munich, he helped to feed, heal, and resettle Jewish survivors of the Nazi Concentration Camps. Later, he supported many of them migrating to Palestine to help build a new Jewish nation.
The Jaffa Orange and Its Shadow
The candle represents both my Zionist father, and the many generations of Arab farmers who grew world-famous Jaffa oranges on the Lydda plain in historic Palestine. In 1948 – 1949, these families fled or were deported en masse from their ancestral homes to refugee camps in desolate Gaza. Nearly 80 years later, their descendants remain stateless refugees kept alive by the same United Nations agency that employed my father in Germany.
October 8 is the two-year anniversary of the morning after the horrendous event in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. To assert that the war began that day is to inflict collective amnesia. The Hamas attack and the Israeli response were the most recent of a long chain of disastrous exchanges in a war that began when World War II ended.
Nothing ever begins; everything is a continuation.
The Education of the Good Son
Reflecting on the feeling of this morning after, highlighted how the stripe of Jewishness I was born into and grew up with is nearly dying out with my generation. Like all Jewish boys, my education into the Traditions began on the eighth day of my life. The Patriarchs introduced me to the facts of life when a scalpel was placed on this most tender part and a piece cut out. “Welcome to our world, little man.”
The education of the good son continued. Each Holy Day celebrates the failure of everyone else to exterminate us, demonstrating our resilience despite many attempts. When extermination was industrialized, an entire army, together with the nations of Europe—not just the Germans, but the Lithuanians, the Croatians, the Poles, the Hungarians, the Romanians—did their utmost to complete the job. Once more, they failed.
Holocaust and Gaza Connection
In the lifespan of Jewish people born after 1945, Yiddish Judaism has been supplanted by Hebrew Judaism. Gone is the bullied wandering Jew. Come is the fiercest of defenders, a warrior made of the hardest alloy forged in the furnaces of Nazi crematoriums. The barrel of the gun now points the other direction, away from the Jewish people toward their newest enemy. The children of the Holocaust didn’t want to exact their vengeance on the Germans, so they replaced them with a more representative opponent: unarmed civilians, which is who they themselves had always been in other times.
The Fear Rewritten
Here is a personal story about how the bred-in-bone fear of Nazism was grafted onto a new narrative:
In 1984, after walking to Bethlehem as a pilgrim and living there for four months, I left Israel and flew to Frankfurt. Just before leaving, I stayed for Purim at Moshav Modi’im, the religious psychedelic community founded in the 1960s by the “Singing Rabbi,” Shlomo Carlebach. Upon arrival, a yarmulke was placed on my head, and it was still there when I landed in Germany. At the luggage carousel, an Israeli woman approached me and whispered, “You’re not safe.” Dumbfounded, I asked what she meant. “The kippah (Hebrew for yarmulke or skullcap). It’s not safe to wear in Germany.” Assuming she was referring to Germany’s rising neo-Nazi movement, I asked her to say more. She spelled it out for me. “Don’t you know? There are many Arabs here.”
Circles of Displacement
Like the fleeing Arab farmers, Reb Carlbach’s family fled from Berlin when he was a child, eventually settling in New York. When he came to Israel in the 1960s to found his spiritual community, the government allowed him to use seized land in Modi’im, land that had long been Jaffa orange groves until its farmers were displaced to Gaza.
Today, after two years of bombardment and annihilation, a cease fire plan was announced. I wish it well, however, it seems that at its best, the Gazan refugees will become hotel workers when wealthy developers reclaim the shoreline.
The Equal Weight of Tears
A Palestinian life is exactly equal in value to a Jewish life. The tears of Palestinians and Israelis carry the exact same measures of grief. Their mothers love their children as much. Their fathers want only what other fathers want. Their children are just as frightened.
Systemic Constellations and Healing
In Systemic Constellations, when we open to the deeper structures of human consciousness, we see that love both heals and harms, that innocence, unexamined, can become a force of destruction, and that the acknowledgement of guilt can become a source of healing and benevolent strength. This is what is on my mind this morning on the anniversary of October 8, the morning after, the day before.
