Buddhist Palestinian

Hello out there! I didn’t write an essay in September. I was buried under life, our days a flurry of practices and homework and driving to and from and projects and an out of town trip that made the month go by in a blink. You know, the usual. I can’t believe it will be Halloween in a few weeks!

We are still going full steam, and I’m looking forward to shorter days, breaks between sports seasons, holidays to cocoon at home and slower weekends to sip coffee on the patio and have time to putter around my garden.

What to say during these trying times? It feels like the world is going insane. U.S. politics is a mess. Ukraine. Israel. Gaza.

I cried watching a video of a Palestinian baby, dead in a journalist’s arms with a bloody bullet hole on his temple and his body ashen and limp, the journalist struggling to hold his little head upright to give him the dignity of still looking like a baby.

I cried when I read an article about a father at the Be’eri kibbutz whose wife died of cancer a few years ago and now his 8-year-old daughter is dead. How do you go on after experiencing such tragedies in your life?

People are pointing fingers. The media is choosing sides and blowing up details, making people think that sweeping generalizations and staunch loyalty is the only course of action. Political leaders are saying stupid things, playing Russian Roulette with other people’s lives. We are all stuck in this perpetual cycle of suffering.

I’m upset when my Jewish friends don’t treat Palestinian deaths the same as when their own babies die, or when they don’t recognize the need for a peaceful resolution to Palestinian occupation. Or the fact that this has gone on for this long and we’ve now all become accustomed to doing nothing about it.

I’m upset when my Palestinian friends won’t consider the fact that there are people— Jews and Palestinians— living in this region and they just want to live their lives, to go to their jobs and feed their families and dance at music festivals, and they aren’t responsible for what their ancestors did, right or wrong. I’m upset when they don’t consider how unrealistic it is to turn back the clocks.

I’m upset that there are music festivals a kilometer away from the open-air prison of Gaza, where people can indulge in such frivolities while other human beings are literally being deprived of clean water and don’t have citizenship anywhere.

I’m upset that my country, the United States, keeps choosing sides and funding war instead of leading peace. I’m upset that they think they can just ignore the United Nations. I’m upset that I live in a country that was stolen too. I’m upset because I wrote to my congressman and I know nothing will come of it.

I’m upset that we all seem to live in echo chambers, so I haven’t blocked the Jewish writer in Jerusalem on social media who keeps writing with what I think is a biased perspective, holding on to hope that there may be value in hearing what others have to say.

I’m upset that a Palestinian social media friend passively let their other friends be rude to me on a post when I commented with something legitimate. I unfriended that person, and I was upset that I let it get to me. I’m upset that we resort to cannibalizing our allies.

I’m upset that I didn’t have any good answers to the distraught student who wanted someone to give him the right answer, but there are no right answers.

I’m upset that I heard a colleague spouting one-sided information to students, someone with no ties to the region. I’m upset that everyone does more talking and less listening. I’m upset that most people couldn’t point to Gaza on a map.

I’m upset that the Holocaust happened. I’ve cried my way through the Anne Frank house. I’ve sat next to a Holocaust survivor in Haifa on my cousin’s couch in 2006 when Hezbollah was firing katyushas, and I stared at the number tattooed on the elderly lady’s arm. I asked her, “Wasn’t that more scary?”

I’m upset my family got made to feel like they don’t belong in their homeland, as if my ancestors’ graves aren’t proof that our family have lived there for longer than anyone can remember. I’m upset that my family are treated like second class citizens.

I’m upset that nobody knew what a Palestinian was growing up in the United States. And when they did, their only reference was throwing rocks.

I’m upset when I hear stories like my grandmother breastfeeding her Jewish neighbor’s baby when the neighbor didn’t have milk, or the dad at soccer practice who told me a Jewish man named David was his Palestinian father’s business partner, and when his dad had to flee with his family to Jordan and abandon the business during the Six-Day War, David kept running the business and saving the money, and two decades later David delivered that money to his father in Jordan. I’m upset because I know Palestinians and Jews can be neighbors and love each other. We’re human, afterall. I’m upset that we let labels and history and resentment and misinformation keep us hopelessly at odds.

I’m upset that I’ve seen many of these problems arise in my 41 years of life, and there has yet to be a resolution. I’m upset that I am old enough to remember Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin and still we aren’t closer to anything being better. In fact, we may be worse off.

I’m upset that I was born here but my cousins in Israel are there, and I have the luxury of turning off the news while their homes need safe rooms and bomb shelters.

I’m upset that when I talk about it to people here, their eyes glaze over.

I’m upset that people who are constantly decrying the treatment of BIPOC in my communities aren’t saying a word on behalf of the Palestinians. Or the Jews. They’re just not saying a word. Not a peep.

Maybe they can’t find the words.

I had been talking about all of this with the dad from soccer. After a while, it all seems hopeless.

“Anyway, I’m a Buddhist now,” I told him after we had been quietly discussing the recent issues while our daughters kicked soccer balls around. I have a Japanese last name. I’m half-Palestinian. It’s easy to weave in and out of what I am.

“You are probably the only Buddhist Palestinian, ” he said, laughing. “There is no such thing.”

This makes me sad, because it has been so liberating in my life to break free of the bonds of what I was supposed to be. It’s changed my life for the better.

My mom was born in Israel, in the seaside city of Haifa where Jews and Arabs live peacefully as neighbors. My grandmother is from Nazareth, where they say Mary grew up. Our family are Christian Arabs, a minority within a minority. My mom came to the United States when she was 10, and by the time she was 19 she married my white guy dad. We didn’t really fully belong anywhere— not exactly American white, and not Arab enough. I made it worse when I married a Japanese American man.

This weekend I became a certified minister’s assistant. I received a Buddhist name: Shaku Kaku Sho. It means, “the shining light of enlightenment.” I received short robes and a fancier okesa to wear around my neck, and I recited vows given by the Bishop of the Buddhist Churches of America. I will be able to perform regular services and give Dharma talks under the supervision of a resident minister. I came to Shin Buddhism because the Dharma provided a refuge from my suffering. In the throes of my grief, Buddhism’s answers to life made sense to me. It gave me hope and a path to continue living a meaningful life. Now I stare out at a world filled with suffering and wonder how I can make it a better place. How I can be the light. The task seems daunting, yet I know it begins with ourselves.

I had once been Melkite Catholic. I even became somebody’s godmother, but by my early 20s I had strayed away, never feeling like it was a good fit for me. I thought I had sworn off religion forever.

And then my husband unexpectedly died, and my life went into a different trajectory. One day I was a married wife of three and we had goals and hopes and dreams together. Then, I became a widow at 34-years-old, and my entire conception of who I thought I was shattered. I had to pick up the pieces and figure out who I was on my own.

The late Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, wrote that “without suffering, you cannot grow. Without suffering, you cannot get the peace and joy you deserve…embrace your suffering, and let it reveal to you the way to peace.”

In Buddhism, there is the concept of non-self. There is no fixed identity. Personal identity is considered delusional. Our attachment to these conceptions of who we think we are will inevitably lead to our suffering. The reason is because so many variables go in to any given day that we are alive. If I define my identity as a teacher, who am I when I retire? If my identity is wrapped around who I am as a wife, and then my husband dies, who am I? If my existence is all about being a mother, and then my children grow up and go on to live their own lives with me waiting by the phone for them to call, who am I? What does it even mean to be a Palestinian or a Jew, an American, a Californian, an Angels fan or a Dodgers fan? Aren’t these socially constructed identities? Surely we have more overlapping associations than we want to admit. Surely we are more alike than different.

I think about how much labels and alliances and history shackles us to suffering. How easy it is for us to read about the loss of life because it’s “them,” and how it all changes when it happens to “us.” We never think bad things will happen to us. It’s always other people. Until it does. Why does it have to happen to us to matter?

October has been a sad month for the past 7 years since it is my late husband’s birthday month. On Monday he would have turned 60, and it seems unbelievable that I would have been married to someone retiring. I remember his 50th. He was so insistent on having a birthday party, Star Trek themed. I thought it was kind of lame and annoying that he was pestering me to organize a themed birthday party as if he were our 4-year-old. But I’m glad he insisted, otherwise we wouldn’t have pictures of us dressed up. We wouldn’t have had a reason for him to invite all of his loved ones over. He didn’t get many more of those before he died.

I’m reading the book, “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life” by Dacher Keltner. He wrote, “Our minds are relational: we see life patterns through our shared experiences with others…with his passing [author’s brother], I felt aweless. And my companion in awe was no longer around to help me make sense of the vastest mystery I had encountered in my fifty-seven years of living. A loud voice called out: FIND AWE.”

I think about how I can be driving and suddenly think, “Kenneth, I wish I could tell you about this or that.” I yearn to share that awe.

Or staring out into the audience of my temple as I received my certification— so happy to see my kids and sister and nephew cheering me on—but also feeling that tinge of sadness wishing he could have seen me. You always walk around with a hole in your heart. You’ll always be plagued by “what if.” You’ll always know who is missing from the table.

And it’s easy to fall into this trap of thinking because our minds cling to what is familiar. We pine for the comfort of what we know. We want what we had. We even convince ourselves that it was better than what we have now.

But it just doesn’t work that way.

This version of me grew from my suffering. It isn’t all rainbows and unicorns, but I like this version of myself better than who I used to be. I am trying to get better each day. I’m trying to find reasons to smile. I’m trying to look for “awe,” to learn and be curious and find glimmers of joy and happiness everywhere I go. I’m trying to have a positive impact on the world and to make a difference in whatever way I can.

In the end, we do what we can with what we can control. That can be a hard pill to swallow.

I think about what I can offer the world as a Buddhist Palestinian.

There is so much you can control about the uncontrollable by just shifting your perspective. Buddhism taught me this. We can change our personal ratio of talking to listening. Choosing to react less. Letting things go. Embracing impermanence. Being grateful. It’s a lot, and we spend our entire lives trying to be better at it.

But we have to try. We have to do better.

I end with a loving kindness metta meditation from the Palo Alto Buddhist Temple Reading:

May all beings be happy and well,
May no harm or difficulties come to them,
May they live in peace and harmony.

May I be happy and well,
May no harm or difficulties come to them,
May they live in peace and harmony.

May my family be happy and well,
May no harm or difficulties come to them,
May they live in peace and harmony.

May my teachers be happy and well,
May no harm or difficulties come to them,
May they live in peace and harmony.

May my friends be happy and well,
May no harm or difficulties come to them,
May they live in peace and harmony.

May strangers be happy and well,
May no harm or difficulties come to them,
May they live in peace and harmony.

May my enemies be happy and well,
May no harm or difficulties come to them,
May they live in peace and harmony.

May all beings be happy and well,
May no harm or difficulties come to them,
May they live in peace and harmony.