Editor’s Note: Following the events of October 7, 2023, the Jewish Community of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, held a 500-Day Vigil. The Rev. Canon Natalie Hall delivered this address as part of the conclusion.
In Lewis Carroll’s most memorable work, Through the Looking Glass, Alice sat down for breakfast with the Queen who asked her just how old she is.
Alice answered, “I’m seven and a half, exactly.” The Queen replied, “You needn’t say exactly … I can believe it without that. Now I’ll give you something to believe. I’m just one hundred & one, five months and a day.”
“I can’t believe that,” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone…
“There’s no use trying,” said Alice; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “Why, when I was your age … I’d believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
You have endured the surreal experience of believing impossible things yourselves—often before breakfast—in the last 500 days since October 7th.
You woke up on what should have been a festival day to impossible news. You wondered impossible thoughts about family, friends, colleagues, and fellows in Israel; thoughts that one might have reasonably considered left to pogroms in history books.
You have grasped at solutions to impossible political, military, social, cultural, economic, and religious puzzles while under the specter of local and international scrutiny.
You have known impossible grief over those taken captive. You have known impossible dismay at becoming targets of outrage and cynicism; accompanied by a sense that, you yourselves are presently suffering a kind of captivity, exiled at home.
After the largest organized pogrom of Jewish people since the Holocaust, there was astonishing silence. Yes, there were some statements released by religious, academic, and political bodies. Yet, most seemed incapable of acknowledging that the deadly massacre of Jewish civilians was consummately wrong as they accompanied statements with caveats.
I’m afraid these half-hearted equivocations remain and have shifted cruelly over these 500 days toward derision, contempt, threats, and violence, with those same religious, academic, political bodies, and more reasserting the ancient shape-shifting anti-Jewish tropes that cause you the impossible fear and grief of your ancestors. The lack of moral clarity to name evil as evil is worthy only of confession, repentance, and amendment of life.
It should go without saying: I have yet to meet a Jewish friend or colleague in Pittsburgh who seeks or celebrates the harm of a Palestinian person. As many of us here in the United States understand, governments and political leaders often make decisions that do not reflect our personal preferences. To vociferously support Jewish people here and in Israel even these 500 days later does not deny the humanity of Palestinians. Palestinian people are not a mere footnote to sufferings in the Middle East nor to our gathering this evening. God grieves the loss of life in all creation, including Israel, including Gaza; a grief which knows no political boundaries.
You remain in an impossible place, and I recognize and grieve the wounds you have suffered, seen and unseen. I remain a committed partner in healing existing places of intractable antisemitism together with people inside and beyond the Jewish community so that we might have life together.
Among the most reliable themes throughout Holy Scripture is the refrain, “Do not be afraid.” It is the first thing out of the mouths of angels. Why? Because there appears to be a terrifying quality about a personal encounter with God’s messenger. Perhaps because of what one sees or worse yet, in hearing the holy work that follows.
Yet, for those whom God calls, God places the same words on their tongues. We find them in the mouths of people like Joshua, Naomi speaking to Ruth, Samuel, David, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezra, and more. Prophets, judges, priests, military commanders, and civilians alike who had every reason to be afraid!
Each of them and more besides in the Christian scriptures saw impossible odds laid out before them: militaries, false prophets brutally misrepresenting God’s will and ways, evil rulers, famine, exile, and fundamentally bleak futures to contend with. Circumstances that would cause any reasonable person to become cynical at best, hopeless at worst. Yet, God’s words still come tumbling out, “do not be afraid.”
As we enter the next 500 days we are called to this sort of impossible future. We are called to step forward fearlessly into what God made of those who came before us: a people for whom death never gets the final word. A people full of spirit and life.
We in this room hardly have control over what will be in the Middle East. Yet, we have the gift to know and serve one another as neighbors, right here, right now in Pittsburgh. In this, we are all called to an impossible task: to connect with one another as people with names and faces, as we have come to know each name and each face of each hostage.
A person with a name and a face is not a project to change. A person with a name is not an object to protest. A person with a name and a face is not a referendum to ratify or reject. A person is a neighbor to know; to receive in all their complexities and particularities. A person to pray for and hold close now and in the future. A person who needs to hear “God is with you and God is for you; do not be afraid.”
Sharing this message is easier in places made comfortable by the reliable presence of agreeable friends and colleagues. But I suspect that the message is most needed in places made difficult by the presence of strangers and even enemies. Into this impossible fray, God calls each of us to take up the mantle of angels; of the prophets, judges, priests, soldiers, and ordinary people alike who learned to sing over one another God’s own refrain, “do not be afraid.”
We are called to the holy work of seeing about God’s business of life anyway, which is best accomplished here in the neighborhood. In daily life together with real people who have real faces in real life.
We are called to this local, impossibly slow work together. And as we know and hold one another in the griefs of the last 500 days and hope held tender in the 500 to come, we will find ourselves increasingly as those restored. A people like those who dream … at least six impossible things before breakfast.
The Rev. Canon Natalie Hall is a Guest Writer. She is rector at Church of the Redeemer in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, and pastor of St. Mary Magdalene Lutheran Episcopal Church, Pittsburgh.
