Never Is Now

Day One of the ADL conference, and more thoughts on staying sane

Hey, Tribe.

Today was the first day of the ADL conference and it was a wildly exciting, moving, exhilarating, and yet verrrry long and grueling day. Check-in was at 7:00 am and I left the Javits Center at 6:30 and then went to dinner with friends. I wasn’t back at the apartment I’m staying in until 10:30.

So many heroes of mine are at this event and I’ve taken a lot of photos and a lot of notes, which I will definitely be bringing to you in the next few days. My plan for this post was to go deeper into How Not To Go Mad In Your Attic, but there are a lot of different pieces to that, and since it’s now so late here and I have to get up so early again, I thought I would touch on just one of them tonight — one that ties into my favorite speech from today.

So many speakers were just electrifying, but if I had to choose the one that filled me with the most optimism, I would have to go with Nuseir Yassin of Nas Daily, an Israeli Palestinian vlogger and social media megastar whose life’s work is about promoting peace.

Here we are at a cocktail hour at the tail end of the day.

Nas was in his mid-twenties and working for Venmo, which he hated, when it occurred to him that if he lived to the age of 76, which is the average age of death for an American man, then 1/3 of his life was over. Somehow this realization shocked him into quitting that job and putting his energy into meeting a very ambitious goal of his own: to create a thousand videos in a thousand days.

As he tells it, for the first 270 days — and his first 270 videos — no one paid any attention; he had no audience to speak of. And then finally the next clip he created went viral, and he started to attract a real following, which today is many millions strong.

He has a deep and abiding love for both Israelis and Palestinians, which ironically has inspired a lot of hatred toward him from both sides. But it’s also been his superpower and he is a smashingly beautiful soul living a smashingly beautiful life.

He told the conference audience today that he grew up steeped in the fierce and ancient enmity between our two peoples, but even as a very young child, he could never get behind picking a side. Because he never lost sight of our common humanity, he was intuitively able to hold onto a kind of shining sanity even while living in the midst of madness.

Listening to him brought me back to a very intense encounter I had just a few weeks into the war. It was the first day that I myself was able to ease back from feeling crazed and into a place that was graced with a slant of light.

Immediately afterward, I described it in a Facebook post that I’ll cut and paste in below, and then I’ll say more tomorrow.

*

Today I had an experience so extraordinary that I can hardly imagine how to talk about it. I feel like it will take me days to process all the pieces of it. This post will only scratch its surface but I imagine I’ll go into it more deeply as time goes on and possibly even try to work it into an essay.

My friend L. was in town to play music last night and this morning we met for coffee. She’s a Sephardic Jew and we were at a table in a corner talking about the war. She’s a generation younger than me at 37, and she has also spent years living and working with Palestinians in East Jerusalem. In recent years especially, I have come to loathe Netanyahu and the far-right members of his cabinet, and of course I harbor fury and seething frustration toward extremist Jewish settlers, but L.’s loathing of them has been directly informed by her day-to-day experiences and it’s even more immediate, visceral and ardent than mine.

So we’re talking about the war, and by sheer surreal chance, sitting at the very next table is a Palestinian man. He cuts in and we start a 3-way conversation that becomes considerably heated. But the reason it stayed civil is that L. has an extraordinary ability to *deeply* empathize with both of us and she is quick to validate a lot of his testimony. And yet she also took issue with other things he said, such as characterizing Hamas as “revolutionaries” or “freedom fighters.”

Within a few minutes, the man was joined by his mother and adult sister. It’s now a 5-way convo that quickly overheats past any constructive exchange. The man walks out to the street, but L. wants to continue their conversation so she follows him to the sidewalk. Meanwhile my exchange with these two women devolves into fierce acrimony. They truly didn’t believe that Hamas committed atrocities like rape, dismemberment, and burning children alive. They told me that was just bullshit propaganda and it was all debunked. I said, “Okay, this is going nowhere good and I’m ready to join my friend.”

The nadir of our exchange was the sister then saying: “Leave! Get out right now!”

I said, “I already told you I’m going, very much of my own accord. But do you seriously think you have the right to order me out of a coffeehouse?”

She leapt up from her chair and got right in my face, screaming, “Get out of here right now!”

I stepped even closer to her, so there was barely a millimeter of space between us, and said: “What’re you gonna do?”

It was that far gone, unseemly and insane.

We stood staring at each other for many long seconds and then she dropped back into her seat and I went out to join L. and the brother. We stood talking as the rain came down.

Within a few minutes, we were joined by his mother. Then his sister emerged from the coffeehouse crying, and went to their car.

With L. as our simultaneous interpreter, so to speak – on an emotional level, anyway – the four of us just kept talking.

Eventually even the sister came over and we stood in the icy driving rain for literally 90 minutes to 2 hours, talking and talking and talking and talking and talking.

L. was the shining *sine qua non* of our group. She was the closest to occupying some emotional middle ground and she had a wildly attuned and intimate understanding of what each person was hearing in response to another person’s rhetoric.

She also *knew* in exactly which ways we each idealized our own side. One of them would say something, like how great JVP is, and she would wince and shoot me a knowing look and then say, “Here’s what Elissa is experiencing when you say X, Y, and Z.” But she also corroborated aspects of their experience of the Israeli government that I hadn’t known about and found hard to believe.

Listening to her was truly a master class in mediation because she even had the keenest awareness of the differences between herself and me. She would say things like, “Elissa is 17 years older than me, and she has been steeped in the impossibility and despair and darkness of this conflict for almost twice as long as I have. And unlike my generation, she grew up in the direct shadow of the Holocaust. She was raised in part by a survivor of Auschwitz.”

I have rarely felt so exquisitely understood and translated, and by the same token, she was able to translate certain aspects of their experience to me in a way I otherwise would not have been able to absorb.

The rain soaked through my coat, it soaked through my clothes and eventually I felt soaked to the bone, but still we all stood there and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked. It was striking how much emotional territory we shared – emotional territory that few, if any, white western liberals could ever approach.

They were mourning their dead. We were mourning our dead. They were appalled and aggrieved by our civilian deaths and we were appalled and aggrieved by their civilian deaths. They felt everyone sympathized with Israel and demonized Palestinians and we felt everyone sympathized with Palestine and demonized Israelis. At some point we realized that each of our social media feeds was a virtual inverse of the other’s and we were all practically laughing at this clusterfuck. We each shared fury at our own side’s violent extremists, and fury over the disinformation campaigns that seek to deepen our divisions. We saw and felt each other’s humanity, saw and felt how very much we shared at this moment.

At one point, the sister and I – who had nearly come to blows – were clutching each other’s hands. She was gripping both of mine with both of hers and vice versa. We were two women on a sidewalk – one wearing a keffiyeh and sporting fingernails painted to resemble the flag of Palestine, the other wearing a Magen David – passionately clasping hands and holding each other’s gaze as we talked and talked and talked.

By the time we were ready to go separate ways, each one of them embraced each one of us, holding on for a very long time. Everyone except the brother was crying but even his eyes were damp and he and I hugged each other not once but twice. All of us promised to hold onto the memory of each other’s faces and pain and humanity as we each go forward with our own activism.

It was one of the most beautiful and healing experiences I’ve ever had and it made me feel that so much is still possible.

*

I’ll have more to say tomorrow, on this topic and about this conference.

In the meantime, I sent my love to you all. Chazak v’ematz! Am Yisrael Chai.