How do we go on, in the face of war?

Reflections on the grief of generational conflict.

This morning I turned off the radio as I broke down into tears. I wasn’t crying because of something I heard on the news, I was crying because the news confirmed what my heart was already processing.

Every day, since the October 7th attacks and the start of the Israeli war on Palestine, a part of my heart has been aching with the generational pain of my ancestors. But you see, for me, even though my ancestors are all Ashkenazi jews, the whole Arab world is part of my family.

This knowing is part of what allows me to carry an Arabic name, Hakim, even though I don’t yet speak the language. I’ve never even been to an Arabic speaking country, nor to Israel. But something in me breaks when I tune into what is happening between my ancestors.

Jews and Arabs, all children of Abraham, have been engaged in a mortal conflict for so long that the origins of the conflict have become obscured by so many ruptures and painful betrayals of the sacredness of life, that many people can’t even imagine reconciliation as a possibility. But I can. I know it’s possible, because I feel it in my heart as the only truth.

For me, it feels as if members of my own family are trying to kill each other. It’s a visceral pain, one that disallows me from taking “sides” and puts me only on the side of life, and protecting the innocent.

I’ve been holding this pain for years now, along with many others around the world, not knowing how to help, feeling totally powerless in the face of imperial interests and political polarization that prevents even a sane, human discussion of what’s actually happening.

When children’s lives become a political narrative, we know that we are very, very lost.

So today, when I broke down in tears after hearing testimony from Iranians experiencing air raids and bombings, it wasn’t disconnected for me. My heart registers their pain, their fear, the loss of their lives as members of my own family.

And yes, it is so complex. The Iranian criminal regime has been holding the Iranian people hostage for so many decades, and many people are happy that the U.S. is intervening. I hold that reality too.

But underneath, I feel a great grief for what my country has done. Not just here, but all over the world, in all the places where the Imperial forces of the U.S. military have a presence, like so many arms of a giant beast, one that I never asked to create yet whose power I benefit from each day.

The most painful part, is how so many lives — real, human children and mothers and fathers with real, human dreams and souls — become nothing more than casualties in these conflicts. An ‘unfortunate but unavoidable side-effect’ of the Empire’s constant need to feed itself with more death, more destruction.

Martin Prechtel says this colonial behavior is caused by the Empire “being eaten by all the ghosts it had created through all the killing wars waged on its own people.” He says that colonial empires “[seek] to fill the empty hole in their home caused by the erosion of their own nation’s soul due to self-violence.”¹

And so, this brings me to my final point. When I hear about the colonial wars being waged all over the world by “my” country, I don’t feel anger. I don’t feel rage toward “they” who are are the perpetrators, or the government, or any other “them” that has been manufactured by the powers that be. Instead, I just feel a profound grief because I know that the separation that allows people to feel justified in killing their own brothers, is also present in me.

I know that I have that capacity to feel immense separateness from the world. I know that I, too, have fallen victim to the feelings of righteousness that keep my heart closed, so that I don’t reach out a hand to help someone in need, or that keep me fearful of my own wellbeing, convincing me that I can’t make a difference anyway, that nothing I could do would matter…

So, what do we do? How do we go on in times like these?

We keep the hole in our hearts empty. We feel the pain of it, without trying to fill the hole with Nationalism or consumerism, numbing, or just plain indifference. We continue living, grieving, celebrating. Holding multiple truths within us at all times — the grief and the joy, together.

The grief is the way through. It’s the honest, broken, realness that creates the beauty with which we feed the universe, giving back to the Great Mystery through our tears, our heart’s longing, our constant yearning toward wholeness. And it is that constant movement toward wholeness, the praising of life itself, which breathes joy into existence.

I love you. Thanks for reading.

Hakim

1. Martín Prechtel, Long Life, Honey in the Heart: A Story of Initiation and Eloquence from the Shores of a Mayan Lake (New York: TarcherPerigee, 2004), Chapter 3.