Responding to the Anti-Muslim Attack in New Zealand
Thank you, Davida [see previous article], for starting the conversation on the Jewish e-mail discussion list about the anti-Muslim attack in New Zealand. Because of your post, I had my regular Co-Counseling session this week about the attack. I moved through numbness to being able to feel and grieve about the lives lost. My counselor and I looked at pictures of the victims’ faces and spent time with each person, thinking about who they were and the universe that was lost with each of them. It felt important to connect with this heartbreak.
When Muslim people showed up powerfully as allies to Jews in the wake of the Pittsburgh shooting, it was an important and moving contradiction to internalized Jewish isolation. Remembering that helped me to choose to work on this anti-Muslim attack.
After the session I talked with my crew [group] of young adult Jews about what we could do. We ended up reaching out to a group of Muslim young people in a nearby town with gifts of food, including hamentaschen (a pastry associated with the Jewish celebration of Purim), and a letter about how we wanted to support them in the coming months in their grieving, and fighting racism and Islamophobia. They were excited to meet us and invited us to their Ramadan breakfast at the end of May.
Like you said, I wish it hadn’t taken such an incredible loss to make this happen, but I’m grateful for the beginning of a new connection. It’s also clear that there is much more work to do.
Millerton, New York, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail
discussion list for leaders of Jews