Surrounded by death

Why do some people's lives and deaths matter more than others?

One of the [many, too many, too too many] people who were killed this week seems to have known dozens of people on my friends list. I did not know him, but his face is everywhere on my feed today, along with touching and tragic testimonies about who he was.

Tragic. Sad. So sad. Heartbreaking.

Again. That sense of enormous heartbreak seems to happen every day. Sometimes several times a day. Sometimes all day long. Especially if I allow myself to really think about the hostages.....

And also, I keep asking myself why some people's lives seem to matter more than others.

Why some people who die have names and faces, and their loss is mourned by the entire world, and others not so much.

I ask this from a few different angles. One question for me is about social justice and social hierarchies that find expression in death. How issues of race, capitalism, media, who our society puts on pedestals is reflected in who gets to be mourned. For example, I was reading recently about Columbus, we all know Columbus' name and life story, even though he was responsible for the butchery of millions of native American tribe members. But we know none of the names of those butchered, and not even the names of the tribes that were destroyed. That hierarchy over whose lives matter and whose don't often reflects skewed values imposed on us by people with power. After all, history is written by the victors, even if they don't deserve our reverence. So that's a thing I'm thinking about.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that this man who died this week who everyone seems to have known and loved is that. Chas v'halila. Clearly he was a very special human being. I'm just saying that the way he is being mourned triggered for me this question. Why some people's life and death matter more than others.

I also ask this question particularly about how we in Israel mourn. Our feeds are full of names and faces of Israelis who die, but never of Palestinians who die. Our media -- and then we -- assume that every Palestinian who dies deserves it. That they must have been terrorists. Or terrorist-lovers. Or antisemites. Or somehow deserving. Even the 15,000 or so children who have been killed in Gaza. They are cast as having deserved to die. Even the peace activists and scientists who have been killed are assumed by most Israelis to have deserved it somehow. I'm just saying, it pains me that for Israelis, for the most part, some people's lives matter and others don't. And it's all based on racial-religious types of hierarchies that have been planted in our brains. An en masse dehumanization of 2.2 million Gazans. Stereotypes that end up justifying some people's death. That practice pains me a great deal.

And I also have very selfish, narcissistic thoughts that come up from this. What will happen when I die? Will anyone think that my life mattered? I know it's a very self-absorbed navel-gazing question. But I think it's also a function of being surrounded by all this death. Like, you can die any day, really. It's hard to have an experience of playing in the park when suddenly the sirens go off and dozens of rockets are flying overhead and you run to protect your kids and grandkids -- it's hard to go through that and not face the reality of death any day. Ok, are we all going to die now? Or tomorrow? Or the next day?

This is especially traumatizing when you realize that there is nobody in power anywhere who has any real plan for changing this reality. That nowhere is there a plan for peace being discussed by people in power. So, you know, there is no sense that there is anyone in a position of power who understands what real security looks like or what it takes to get there, or who is willing to do the courageous work of putting their own power needs aside and engaging in the work of peace. Nobody. This government knows only brute force. It thinks that endless escalation of violence will somehow end violence and bring security. That doesn't work. In all of human history it has never worked. The only thing that brings security is peace. Just peace. Doing the work of activating peace. And nobody in charge is doing any of that work. They are all busy just making everything worse. Every day.

So, yeah, I think about death a lot -- others' and my own. And I wonder if I matter. I wonder who among us really matters. Because I think, really, either all of us matter, or none of us matter. That's where I am at the moment.

What about you?

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