00:00:00.000To grieve together, and to grieve together in public, is also to love each other in public.
00:00:16.640People are indifferent, and many people are complicit, but also many people do care very deeply.
00:00:22.340And there is this profound empathy that what's happening now in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel is actually catalyzing among people of conscience.
00:00:34.020And I think that that empathy is really beautiful and I want to hold on to that.
00:04:00.600That might be preposterous for most of us to hear
00:04:04.020because we live in a world that is increasingly antagonistic to grieving.
00:04:14.200I'm a recovering psychologist, as I like to call myself,
00:04:17.480And I'm acutely aware about the pathology of grief.
00:04:26.480Only last year, I think in March 2022, the American Psychological Association designated
00:04:34.640prolonged grief disorder as pathological.
00:04:38.820So there is a sense in which grieving for extended periods of time could disturb grief
00:04:47.480one's claim to citizenry, to productivity, to being proper, to being a proper self.
00:04:55.180And yet it feels like the world and the events at large are inviting us into a space of grieving.
00:05:04.180And it feels our bodies want to do it, especially in a time when it feels politics isn't serving,
00:05:12.780isn't touching our yearning, isn't helping us meet each other in the ecstasy of encounter.
00:05:24.900So I insist on welcoming you. I say welcome. Welcome to this space of grieving where grieving
00:05:33.660is not just being sad. We perform grieving as mutiny against established patterns.
00:05:42.780We perform grieving inspired not only by beautiful insights emerging in the world today, indigenous insights as well.
00:05:51.340We perform grieving as a form of errancy, as a strain away from politics as usual, as a making space for our bodies to do different kinds of things in the world.
00:06:05.720And I welcome you, my siblings from around the world, wherever you're listening from, to the edges in the middle, to this Umbari.
00:06:15.260Now, I want to take, before I invite my siblings to speak with me, I want to take a few moments to say or remind you about what this space is trying to do.0.99
00:06:29.260the umbari is evil is an evil indigenous cosmological space it's an invitation to0.95
00:06:43.040have conversations differently our aim is not to arrive at a specific truth1.00
00:06:50.920our aim is not to reach consensus our aim is not to arrive at utopia
00:06:58.720Our aim is not to prove who's wrong and who's right.
00:07:04.980Those Western, seemingly impoverished ways of holding conversation,
00:07:12.020potentially argumentative, useful in some regard, aren't the focus of this space.
00:10:11.280that are not premised on the equation of violence?
00:10:14.900Are there other kinds of gestures that are alive in this time?
00:10:22.400If peace is a calculation of a geometric distance between A and Z,
00:10:29.700are there crossroads and diversions and other ways that we can move out of the violence of the highway
00:10:38.000so that we can do other things with the world and do other things with ourselves?
00:10:44.900Could it be that even justice seems limited and that there is a meeting wanting to happen?
00:10:55.880We come to you in the limitations and the playfulness of grief.
00:11:01.860We come to you not knowing the answer, not having even the right questions sometimes.
00:11:10.300But we're here to do it together in humility, with a profound sense of our limitation and our vulnerability, to weave a fabric of loss that might hold us where we fall together.
00:11:28.480And this is not an obscuration of the facts, but a noticing that even facts vibrate at the speed of mystery.
00:12:10.300And this is open-ended. I don't know where this might go. This isn't pre-planned. But I have a question to ask that is part of my welcoming you into the conversation. And I'll start with you, Saeed.
00:14:47.960There's so many different ways to answer that question. But I will say that at the beginning
00:14:53.920of COVID, within three months, I lost my father and my son, who was 18. And so my wife and I
00:15:04.600talk about having these PhDs in grief that we didn't sign up for. And it has helped me understand,
00:15:15.280And I mean, I would call that kind of grief for us personally, really initiation.
00:15:22.440It's annihilating in so many extraordinary ways, but also an inflection point.
00:15:28.580And so when you talk about grief as an invitation, within grief, there is joy.
00:15:34.100This may be obvious to some, but it was not obvious to me until I went through this personally, that grief is the most extraordinary expression of overwhelming love I have ever experienced.
00:15:51.220you have no control over your body over your reactions it is an opening to a kind of love that
00:16:00.800is astonishing in so many ways and that helped me also understand the experiences of grief that
00:16:10.940have shaped not only my life but i think of our culture i was thinking about petra if you've been
00:16:17.800de Petra, this incredible wonder in Jordan. And there is a very narrow canyon that you walk
00:16:26.280through. And it's wild because you go and it's the desert, but you can see that this canyon was
00:16:32.800shaped by water. But the water is long gone. And all of our landscapes are like that. They're
00:16:41.500deeply shaped by these oceanic, incredible forces of water. And I now understand grief,
00:16:49.120particularly when we talk about Israel, when we talk about Palestine, when we talk about
00:16:53.240certainly Jews, my own community, the ways that grief has shaped the contours of our identities,
00:17:00.380of our stories, of how we show up in the world and our traumas. And so,
00:17:06.660you know this has touched me very personally people I know and love are still in deep pain
00:17:15.760people on all sides of these borders and it pains me that even when I tell this
00:17:20.800I have to say on both sides yeah I've been to Gaza multiple times I've spent a lot of time
00:17:28.040in the West Bank a lot of time in Israel I have dear people in my life have someone in their
00:17:32.880family who's been kidnapped, multiple people. I was with someone as they found out that their
00:17:37.620cousin was killed. I have met people in Gaza who can't connect to their families.
00:17:46.840I mean, it goes on and on. So I'll just say that my grief and love for my child, when I say this,
00:17:56.900it opened up my heart so intensely i think this was true prior but it's times a million now
00:18:05.180that you know my spiritual understanding and my personal and lived understanding is all these
00:18:11.300kids are my kids like they all are they all are and including soldiers including hamas there has
00:18:23.400to be some understanding that doesn't mean in any way shape or form your kids and people that you
00:18:31.120love can do terrible horrific things but there is a broader understanding of connectedness
00:18:39.480that is really important for me to hold so
00:18:43.800thank you thank you sister i want us to to be courageous to not fear to make
00:18:57.920to take a courageous act deeper into its exquisite and promising ends and go deeper
00:19:09.660to touch those singular lives that have been the occasion of our grieving.
00:19:18.380A brother of mine says, those you love, you will lose.
00:19:48.460of posture that allows us to see differently, potentially.
00:19:53.580But let's not linger on the surface or at the edges. Let's go
00:19:56.340deep into it. So Sissi, I'll start with you again
00:19:59.400and then I'll move back to my brother.
00:20:02.020tell me this story of this singular life that that when you think about a story of loss
00:20:15.060in these times of war stands out as a testament to that loss
00:20:23.300this is may not be exactly what you're asking but i do want to share
00:20:32.080a story and you reminded me of this word that i had been searching for for a long time of ricochet
00:20:39.760ricochet yeah because i felt like every personal i think this is happening people all over the
00:20:49.820world. Every personal, ancestral, political, community, almost instrument, like a string of
00:20:58.840grief is being plucked and they are ricocheting off of each other in ways that people can't.
00:21:04.300And I just want to share, there was a moment early on where I was
00:21:09.420talking to a dear friend of mine who is Palestinian, who was crying and saying,0.85
00:21:19.820I feel like we're watching this unfold on television, and I feel as though the whole world is watching and doesn't care.
00:21:35.020And in that moment, it ricocheted off me so intensely, and I do feel comfortable talking about my own family and my own family's individual story and grief.
00:21:47.720I don't want to hold someone else's story for them.
00:21:52.180But my great-grandma, I have letters from the Warsaw Ghetto from my great-grandmother that have swastikas on them, got through in various ways to my family.
00:22:04.500And in one of those letters, she said the exact same words.
00:22:15.400And you can see where it's been censored and my grandparents tried to sort of erase it.
00:22:19.600But she said the whole world, essentially, and you could see what she was trying to say, the whole world is letting this happen and doesn't care.
00:22:28.960And the collapse of that grief and history and repetition was just an absolutely overwhelming moment.
00:28:20.640But as far as I can tell for the years that I have been paying attention to work around peace
00:28:26.820and in this part of the world, it's all, all simmering emotions, all simmering and often
00:28:34.340untended to. And in fact, and I noticed this in myself, when my amygdala is sort of activated my
00:28:41.700fight or flight, I go and I think it's, it's a more masculine quality that I have, like I go to
00:28:46.880that i'm just going to be really super smart i'm going to use really big words and i'm going to
00:28:51.060show them that they don't know what they're doing so so even this illusion but it's motivated
00:28:55.120by this fight or flight that the need to be right the need to annihilate intellectually
00:29:01.440and so so i do think that's so much of what's going on and and we're not tending to
00:29:08.160the trauma reactions the sort of survival reactions and i'm going to put this in the
00:29:15.060most optimistic way that I actually deeply think this is true. When I first started going out and
00:29:21.040talking about Israel and Palestine and doing peace work, those of us who are Jewish, and I
00:29:25.780would go out with friends who are Israeli and former IDF soldiers, all kinds of folks, and it
00:29:29.960didn't matter who we were, we knew we would get yelled at by people who seemed like our grandparents,
00:29:35.200like really yelled at. There was always going to be that trauma reaction. But one of the things I
00:29:39.980was not prepared for, and this would be familiar to you, I think, but I would meet elder Palestinians
00:29:47.780quite frequently who would just come up and give me the hugest hug and say, you know, before 47,
00:29:58.300before we used to live together, you know, historic Palestine was something around 5%,
00:30:03.620And I think Jewish and and people. And what I felt from them literally was this pain and grief at the separation that happened and this incredible relief at being greeted by and being able to greet their Jewish brother or sister and that that loss.
00:30:27.020And so I do think what is not tended to when we have moved to the place of sort of the, you know, the policy intellect, A, it's an area of annihilation and vanquishing your enemy by being right.
00:30:41.900We see it over and over and over again. So it's a vanquishing energy. And that's not what we need. We need to attend and understand that our grief and our rage, no matter what side of this issue you're on, it doesn't matter.
00:30:57.020comes from a reaching for love. I really, truly believe that. That's what it actually is.
00:31:04.860And the reaching for belonging and the reach, because it's like, what I hear you saying is
00:31:09.960you want to annihilate my people, whichever side you're on, that you don't love me. You want to
00:31:15.040eject me and my people from the human domain. And so we have to tend to that. That is what's
00:31:22.940going on underneath and we don't at all and we keep going around it and we also have to tend to
00:31:28.860our incredible wounds and i you know my grandparents were part of that zionist movement i understand
00:31:36.580completely you know there are maze makers in the world the european powers they were in the maze0.94
00:31:42.020i would have been in the maze that was a choice that made sense to them it was completely as it
00:31:47.020turned out at the expense of another people. But I do think that being able to hold each other's,
00:31:53.100hold that complexity as well, the grief. And I think 75 years of oppression and ethnic cleansing
00:32:01.420and pain and all the things that happened in Palestine is a really important frame to hold.
00:32:06.900And I also really want to expand it. I want to expand it. I want to expand it to include
00:32:15.280the grief and pain and what happened in the context of nazism and what happened and the
00:32:23.400grief and how that was inspired by how settlers eradicated indigenous people in the land where i
00:32:30.960am right now and so on and so forth and you know the con it can go on and on so i do think that0.91
00:32:38.220This, we see in what's happening, I can speak at least in my sense, of Israel and Zionism is profoundly unhealed trauma and grief and the reenactment of it.0.86
00:33:00.100Yeah, that really resonates very deeply with me.
00:33:03.460And as I consider this, I also realize that the sense of urgency and the sense of the need for action, for practice, as well as the importance of talking and silence and meditation and dealing with pain and dealing with the trauma and actually letting it flow through one's body,
00:33:29.980that both of these forces are important
00:33:33.320and that both of these forces actually reinforce and support one another.
00:33:40.600So, you know, there are these calls now for a ceasefire.
00:39:15.320Well, we made a trip to his village to bury him.
00:39:19.620He was a high-powered diplomat, and he died in his station in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is then called Zaire, and his body was brought back in a coffin, and we drove with people to the village, and I was raised in a city.
00:39:42.040I was raised, you know, I've often told people that to be educated in the context where I come from is to be educated out of your world, is to be taken out of your context.
00:39:56.040The more educated you are, the more dissociated you are.
00:40:00.920And so this was some kind of a homecoming, some kind.
00:40:04.360we made our way home and my father was buried and the people that came out to mourn him you know
00:40:15.700at some point I was getting really pissed off because it was this sweltering festival of
00:40:23.540mourning that just erupted out of nowhere and we all felt me and my sisters felt
00:40:36.000You know, they were crying and some people would join the party of mourners
00:40:40.580that probably didn't even know him, but they just were there together, mourning him.
00:40:47.540It wasn't until later in my career as an academic and psychologist
00:40:53.420that I got to learn about the indigenous practices of grieving,
00:40:58.300that grief is not a private affair, like you say. Grief is a public event, right? And what it does
00:41:05.780is that it breaks down the usual neoliberal boundaries with which we establish selfhood.
00:41:14.280It's your grief or my grief. I'm a greater victim than you are, or you're a greater victim than I
00:41:23.180It breaks down categories. There's something very piercing about grieving together that dislocates the ideas with which we establish and calculate correctness, right?
00:41:40.760so what i'm hearing from us is that there's a spaciousness here there is there is an exquisite
00:41:53.660maybe call it a sensuous solidarity that grieving is a performing of sensuous
00:42:00.820solidarities of some kind that we're weaving our bodies together in some way
00:42:06.980but the stories that we are living and laboring under are very resilient stories one of those
00:42:17.920stories is that this is a battle between good versus evil right we're in a civilizational
00:42:26.260battle of some kind of good versus evil. What is, in your sense of grieving, what is the spaciousness
00:42:38.980allowing us to notice about that story that has so far enveloped and captured and incarcerated
00:42:49.100our conversations about this crisis, what is emerging in your experience and insights
00:42:57.100about the impoverishment of that store?
00:43:02.500And this is to any of my siblings here.
00:44:01.660The notion of competitive memory. So there's this competitive memory. We feel that if we grieve, if we mourn publicly, especially join the other in their grief and in their pain, and we recognize that this will take away from the recognition of our own narrative and our own wounds to be heard and to be healed and to be addressed.
00:44:27.300But instead, instead of this competitive approach, this multidirectional approach is much more ethical and much more productive because it expands the public domain for us to hold in the light all of our voices.
00:44:43.920It's not a zero sum game. So I think that this sense of solidarity that emerges when we move in that direction, I think allows us to move closer toward healing and ultimately towards this sort of justice.
00:48:34.380The loss of one, let alone the kinds of numbers and scale and nature of what's happened and what's happened over the last month, what's happened over 75 years, what's happened over 100 years.
00:48:49.200I mean, we all need accompaniment in our grief, and when we feel, when we sense that note of dehumanization, someone's inability to accompany us in some way in our most profoundest of grief,
00:49:15.140that is this line that becomes a chasm and so i see much of the you know i see much of the the
00:49:28.660so i so the other thing i just want to say about that is for myself and this may be obvious but
00:49:36.000this was the most profound learning through through grief which is because we live in that
00:49:40.860kind of a culture. You know, I, for a long time, I could not watch movies because every third
00:49:46.000character, they would introduce a character who was alone, cranky, a total jerk, like intolerable.0.98
00:49:53.580The backstory always was that they lost their child. It's the, it's the quickest way to tell0.98
00:49:58.700a story about someone who's broken. And, and of course I had to go, am I broken? And, and what I
00:50:05.260learned from dear dear friends of mine was the grief will never kill you but we think that it
00:50:11.560does we think it will kill us to express it in this culture anyway it's trying not to feel it
00:50:20.020that's what makes you broken trying to stuff it trying to contain it a refusal to let it take
00:50:25.660over your body and and and we call it the river to just let the river take you so i think that
00:50:32.500We do have incredible, and if you let it take you, it actually does the opposite.
00:50:42.640It expands your capacity for compassion and love and care.
00:50:48.860But if you fight it, you fight it, like the culture tells us.
00:50:52.100You run a very high risk of a kind of brokenness.
00:58:16.860And of course, I want to know how you think about this.
00:58:19.940Um, but, you know, there are, one of the things I think that's really important, and it's certainly coming from, um, like a Jewish sort of, you know, peace and justice perspective, it's, you know, the layers of grief.
00:58:39.100I can tell you the layers of grief, ricocheting grief that so many Jews have.0.54
00:58:44.040I have had I've had I've had multiple breakdowns, but everyone I know, you know, the first time you you go to a place like Hebron, the first time you go to Gaza, the first you know, the first time you see somebody's.
00:58:55.040I remember being with the head of rabbis for human rights in Israel, and he said he had just taken a rabbi, another rabbi, to see a Palestinian home demolished and that the rabbi called it the worst day of his life.
00:59:10.360Um, there are so many, um, and that's happening to thousands of particularly young people right now. Um, this extraordinary level of grief and, and for so long, and I think for so long, it was always, well, we're allies in the movement. It's the Palestinian movement for liberation.
00:59:33.760But and I always would say, well, there's two movements for liberation.
00:59:36.860But now I met it's a co-liberation movement.
01:00:01.320And the history of genocide for, you know, European powers, I mean, the way I honestly
01:00:07.000think of it is almost the Hunger Games and European powers in the United States are the
01:00:11.520capital. And we have, you know, different districts. One is infinitely more resourced
01:00:16.980by the capital than the other, but they are being pitted against each other by a capital that
01:00:22.260doesn't actually care about either of them. So I see it in geopolitical terms that way.
01:00:27.180But by going to the place of grief and that we start to see a co-liberation, the need for, again, we are in it together. I think it's actually condescending and patronizing this idea that we shall help you or we will be your ally because we're nice people.
01:00:43.760No, we desperately need, we need to do this work in our own community and ourselves. And the other piece of, you know, I had a friend who called this the wound of the world, right? The way that it is reverberating for so many people.
01:01:00.140What you were talking about, about the kind of unprecedented real-time exposure to the actual horrors. I mean, you can see what happened to, you know, the people on Kibbutzim. You can see what's happening every day in the bombing in Gaza. We're being exposed to all of it.
01:01:22.620And I think particularly in the West, I think of the old Oscar Wilde story, the picture of Dorian Gray and, you know, the two sentence version was he was a young man who was sort of entranced with his beauty and essentially gave his soul away, traded his soul to be forever beautiful.
01:01:40.040But meanwhile, there was this hidden painting that grew older and also more distorted with his sins.
01:01:48.480And so that picture needed to stay in the attic.
01:01:50.960and when he encountered it, the trauma.
01:01:55.460And there's an element of that that's going on, I think,
01:01:58.260for so many people in the West, like our lives,
01:02:00.840and seeing it in Gaza, but it's everything.
01:02:04.260You know, we have this Faustian bargain0.76
01:02:05.980that our lives are purchased at the price of conflict minerals in Congo.0.62
01:02:12.040And, you know, I mean, I could go on and on the entire history.
01:02:49.120Thank you so much, and Syed. My final invitation to us is deeply experimental. I didn't know it was going to come up until it came up a few minutes ago as something that I want to invite us to do together.
01:03:10.780We have been speaking about radical accompaniment.
01:03:14.200I learned a new word a while ago called abai, which is Tagalog from the Philippines, and it means to follow together.
01:03:25.060It's basically radical accompaniment to travel alongside, which is, I feel, perhaps one of those powerful figures that helps me see and recognize that grieving is a choreography of some kind.
01:05:08.060But I want us to exchange bodies, if we can, in some kind of digital animism side between both of you.
01:05:20.360My dear, dear siblings, if you could offer a prayer, and this prayer doesn't have to be a prayer to, it could be a prayer with, but I'd like you to pray from the perspective of each other's supposedly neat sides, right?
01:05:48.020that we model this exchange of bodies,
01:05:52.720which life needs to proliferate itself.
01:05:56.920If we were kept in our independent silos,
01:08:07.300And I would like to offer a similar prayer in return to you and your loved ones and community in Berkeley, to all the people on the tibbutzes that you mentioned, that they too feel that their cry is heard and that their pain is acknowledged and that they are able to live lives of freedom and peace and stuff.