Who are my people?

At a time when the community is suffering, one may not say: “I will go home, and eat, and drink, and be at peace in my soul.” – Talmud Taanit 11a

I began studying this sugya in the immediate aftermath of October 7th and the subsequent war on Gaza. It was evident that people were seriously suffering, and I felt that I could not just sit at home and be at peace in my soul.

No matter where I went, the war was on my mind. I thought that, if I came here, at least my mind and body would be more aligned.

But the sugya prompted a question I did not expect: who is my community? The question of suffering and how to respond seemed already self-answered, but whose suffering ought to concern me? Who were ‘my people’?

Perhaps there was a time when ‘the community’ was just the neighbourhood. Those who lived in close proximity shared in times of trouble. The people on my street might well share with me in some suffering – missed bin collections and sewage in the river – but this suffering was specific.

I found, sometimes, I would talk to my neighbours and realise they were not obsessing about Gaza. They maybe had not thought about it for weeks. They were my community, but they also were far away from it.

In that sense, the Jews were my community. No matter their politics, every Jew was stuck in the same place of fear. Over different things, with different prescriptions, but certainly with the same neurosis.

Yet, in the weeks following October 7th, I heard people in “my” community call to flatten Gaza, and watched Netanyahu’s government heed them. I was sent the most bellicose memes, hungry for war. Most chillingly, a one sentence text from a person I previously respected: “you can’t give human rights to people who aren’t human.” How could I say these were my people? How could I claim them as my community when our values were so misaligned?

At a Friday night dinner, a friend suggested thet our community should be all oppressed people of the world. Jews, he said, were not an ethnic category, but a political one, and anyone who suffered under the burden of injustice was one of us.

Another gently chided him: “it’s too easy to only associate ourselves with victims. It stops us thinking about all the complex ways we are complicit in oppression too,” she said. “We can be both, and we need to face the problems in our own community.”

I wondered if I would find my people here among the international left, with those striving against occupation and war. There are people whom I love greatly here. I see them, beaten down in body and spirit, weary from fighting against a world that may destroy them, and destroy all they care about.

I am here to join them in struggle, but when this month ends, I know that I will go back to my own home in England, and tend to my own garden, and eat the foods I am used to, and drink that diluted squash you can only get in British supermarkets.

But my soul will not be at peace.

Perhaps all of these people are my people. Perhaps none of them are. But I will suffer on with them anyway.

Whoever they are, I know my soul will not be at peace while any of them are hurting.

And anyone who suffers with the community has achieved merit and will live to see the consolation of the community.