Autumn in and out of the War Zones

What to do about Israel, Gaza, and Ukraine while honoring the season at home

Welcome to PeaceLinks, a digest of web links about peace, cooperation, and common ground, currently on a monthly publishing schedule. Two awful wars claim our attention this month while for those of us fortunate to live outside the war zones, the quotidian demands of family, home, garden, and community rise as usual to our attention. I am grateful and appreciative of each one of the following posts in helping me to understand my relation to the violence in our world.

I recommend following the posts in order, whether you skim some links or open all of them. The sequence proceeds from the discomfort of this time to what we can be doing now.

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The Rafah border gate between southern Gaza and Egypt, pictured closed on October 19, 2023. Photo by Mohammed Abed, from The Times of Israel, Oct. 20 article on the organization of UN Aid to Palestinian people in Gaza.

Kim Van Bruggen

of

Life (un)Learned

considered yesterday how a North American without ties to Israel or Palestine might respond to the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by the terrorist group Hamas, and the aftermath. A passage that stood out to me from Kim’s research was this statement by Gershon Baskin, a longtime Israeli peace advocate, about the impossibility of negotiation with Hamas:

“After what they did on Saturday [October 7th], there’s no doubt in my mind that the end result of this war has to be the non-existence of Hamas as a governing body in Gaza and as a military threat to Israel.”

Peace talks require two (or more) cooperating sides. Kim looks for a humanitarian response to the current Israeli-Palestinian crisis that is not oversimplified:

When Choosing a Side is Dangerous

Malathi Raghavan

, a professor in the U.S. who writes

Ukraine Matters

, asks a similar question to

Kim Van Bruggen

: “What can I even say or write in this part of the world about what people in other regions are actually living through?” She connects the Russian invasion of Ukraine with the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel as two examples of state-sponsored terrorism. Her post includes a 15-minute uplifting audio story by Victor Levenstein, a Ukraine-born centenarian and former political prisoner of the Stalinist Soviet Union, whose story was published by The Moth Radio Hour. Levenstein was 99 when he made the recording embedded in Malathi’s post. One hears in his storytelling the complicated emotions of remembered trauma and full humanity, with room for humor and determination.

How to keep moving forward...

As usual

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

of

Life is a Sacred Text

answers readers’ yearning for both truth and hope. Her embedded video, “Blood Relations” is worth a complete watch (8 minutes):

a peacemaking lens

When PeaceLinks switched from a weekly to a monthly frequency, I added a spotlight feature on a PeaceLinks alum. This month,

Shmuel Chaim Naiman

of

The Healthy Jew

offers three strategies for coping with the present war. Anyone can adopt #2 (Live well, Take good care); some will also find #1 (Cry for help) appropriate to their situation. Shmuel’s third strategy, telling of Israel the land, kicks off a new series. “We are opening a second front,” he writes.

If only for a few moments each week, I invite you to exchange the images of pain and fear with pictures of purpose and hope.

Here is the post announcing these three strategies (featuring the view from his home looking west toward darkened Gaza):

Three Things Everyone Can Do to Help

Before Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, Shmuel had led a foraging walk in late September, as described in this earlier post:

Festival of Foraging

Keep an eye on

The Healthy Jew

for more posts about the land of Israel and the history of Jewish people on the land.

Shmuel Chaim Naiman

was previously featured on PeaceLinks here, for his post about teaching children to eat healthfully.

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It feels right to me, especially in light of Shmuel’s second piece of actionable advice to “Live Well” (not to let terrorism spread fear), to close this post with notes on what is commanding the attention and spreading peace outside the world’s war zones right now.

Tina B Shannon

of

Gathering our bones

has just revised a Substack that was formerly about creativity and the garden; now it is for midlife women facing change. After telling a story about a mythical figure who collects bones and forms them back into animal shapes, Tina writes,

We can spend a lifetime gathering the bones of who we think we should be, and fitting into a skin that isn’t ours. Gathering our bones is definitely for you if deep down you know that it is time to explore, rather than define, who you can be and who you desire to be. If you are ready to forage for and gather your own bones, slip into a skin that feels more ‘you’ and have some creative fun doing it, then do join me.

I can’t help but feel right now that the figurative practice of gathering, reassembling, and reanimating bones speaks not only to midlife women but to any of us shaken by the times. Nonetheless, Tina urges us to focus inward, to the inner territory each of us knows best. Here is Tina’s post just yesterday announcing her plans:

Changing seasons, new directions

Also inspiring from my recent Substack reading is

Rebecca Jones

’s journal of running her B&B in France, called

Between

. Her posts of the last month usher out the last paying guests of the year, return the house to the family for the off-season, and witness the beauties of the land she tends. We live in a large world, where each of us is responsible for only a narrow, local life, even as we intuit our connection to the suffering and hope beyond our personal gardens. If war touches all of us right now, so does Rebecca’s relief at serving her last breakfast of the season and turning her attention to herself, her family, and her garden. The good news belongs to all of us as much as the bad, ritual and stewardship as much as terror and war:

A change of pace

I am grateful to know that Rebecca’s family business exists right now in this troubled world.

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And finally:

I mentioned two months ago that my university students would be buying books to give to children in need this fall, and our fundraiser closed yesterday (click to view the students’ heartfelt 30-second project video). That included contributions I passed through from PeaceLinks and Enchanted in America paid subscribers. Thank you!

I promised to post readers here on our progress. We exceeded our original goal of $2,000 and came close enough to our higher “stretch goal” that we are now ordering books for 6 classes of children, ages 5 to 10. Later today, our class will reach out to our partner school for this term to arrange class visits in November. These are joyful occasions when the university students read aloud to small groups of school children and leave with gifts of new books.

I feel strongly the pull of my local responsibilities, the unabated demands of love here. I hope you also have ways to take comfort in actions that spread love and peace and make the world better, starting with your home place as the center of the world, and radiating outward from there. I know that other PeaceLinks alumni are doing exactly this, as we will see in future alumni check-ins.

May our efforts be felt where they are needed most.

Peace to all.

Tara