This opinion essay is by Elliot Kukla, a rabbi, author, artist, and activist. He has been tending to grief, dying, and becoming (more) ill or disabled since 2007 and has been engaged in justice work since 1996. He is currently on the faculty at Svara: a traditionally radical yeshiva, where he is also the founder and director of the Communal Loss and Adaptation Project (CLAP). He was a rabbi at the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center from 2008 to 2021; there, he co-directed Kol Haneshama, the multiple award-winning volunteer spiritual care hospice program.
Recently, I sat amongst a crowd on the cold marble floor of the Federal Building in Oakland, California, chanting “Ceasefire now!” and “let Gaza live!” Our voices echoed through the high rotunda, as tears poured down my face and rage stirred in my belly. I was part of a group of more than 700 Jews and our allies who were there as a peaceful act of civil disobedience to demand a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and an end to U.S. aid for the bombardment. As I looked around the circle, I saw that I was not the only one weeping.
Right now, my heart is shattered for the more than 14,000 Palestinians (almost 40% of whom are reportedly children) who have reportedly been killed by the Israeli government in the past month. I am devastated that many experts believe that what is unfolding in Gaza is genocide. And I am anguished knowing that this atrocity is being perpetuated in the name of Jewish security.
As a rabbi, I have offered bereavement spiritual care for the past 20 years. Many of my clients, family members, and friends, are also mourning right now. Some are grieving dead loved ones in Palestine or Israel. Many others are mourning the loss of people they didn’t personally know, and doubting that they “deserve” to be sad. We all have a right to our grief.
Many of us were raised to believe that expressing grief for too long or too wholeheartedly is self-indulgent and we should quickly “carry on” after loss. However, I learned from my Jewish and my queer ancestors that we must hold onto our grief in the face of injustice because it is a way to show that no life is disposable.
Right now, we need to let our hearts break every 10 minutes, because that’s about how often a child has died in Gaza since October 7, according to the World Health Organization. In the face of this horror, it would be easy to grow numb with despair. But that would be a path toward accepting mass civilian death as normal. Mourning can, and should, lead us to protest, to write letters to our representatives, and to keep confronting our families and co-workers who support this bombardment.
It was grief that led me to activism back in 1990 when I was 15 years old and freshly out as queer at my first Pride. Back then, Pride was not a parade of buff bodies gyrating to thumping music on corporate floats like it is today; it was still a protest. We were in the depths of the last global pandemic and people ill with AIDS walked slowly and rolled in wheelchairs down the street, supported by lovers and friends.
Eric Sawyer was one of the activists who founded the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, better known as ACT UP, in 1987. In a 2020 interview, Sawyer said: “Every ACT UP general meeting began with an announcement of who died that week… the rage and the anger from seeing all of our friends die and from being ill and not having the government care [fueled our work.]”
This lesson from my queer ancestors holds me in this moment as I mourn for families in Gaza that I have never met. There is a name for this experience: “disenfranchised grief,” which refers to the pain we feel for losses that are not socially validated, such as the pain we feel over the loss of abilities, autonomy, and queer chosen family members, or the grief we feel for people we don’t know personally.
I am also deeply grieving the Israeli government’s actions in my name as a Jew, as well as my relationship to colleagues and friends who are supportive of this siege. This type of grief is not just disenfranchised, but also suffocated. “Suffocated grief,” a term introduced by Black grief expert Dr. Tashel Bordere in the early 2000s, refers to grief that is not only stigmatized, but socially punished. Bordere explains this distinction through the example of the 2020 uprising for Black lives, which was triggered by grief for the murder of George Floyd: “Protests really are our expressions of grief,” she said in a 2020 interview. “It’s one thing to walk by and ignore the protest; that’s disenfranchised grief. ‘I’m not going to acknowledge it.’ But, when we decide to tear gas people who are grieving, then we’re punishing people for that.”
I am proud to be surrounded by a thriving group of Jewish peace activists from organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now, who helped organize the community I gathered with at the Federal Building. That day and beyond, we called for a ceasefire despite knowing there are real punitive consequences for criticizing Israel in many corners of the Jewish and American world, and these penalties have intensified after October 7. To offer just one example, Michael Eisen, a Jewish genetics professor at UC Berkeley with relatives in Israel, was fired from his post as the editor in chief of the leading science journal eLife after he posted an Onion article on October 13. Eisen posted on X: “The Onion speaks with more courage, insight and moral clarity than the leaders of every academic institution put together,” along with the satirical Onion headline, “Dying Gazans Criticized For Not Using Last Words To Condemn Hamas.”
The dangers of expressing our grief in public are real. However, there are also real dangers in suffocating grief. Genuine grieving evokes feelings of helplessness, because no one can bring back the dead. And that is a hard emotion for many of us to tolerate. Back in September 2001, instead of facing these scary feelings of loss of control, America turned to the hard certainties of Islamophobia and revenge. Now once again, since October 7, tender feelings of grief and fear have been co-opted by violence. Then and now, mourning was manipulated to justify racialized attacks, as a way to regain a sense of being in charge of our destiny. If we are going to retain our humanity, we must resist the temptation to soothe our pain through brutality.
In fact, traditional Jewish grief practices that pre-date the rise of modern Zionism by millenia offer tools for integrating loss without retaliation or avoidance. After the second Temple was destroyed by the Roman Empire, nearly 2000 years ago, there were Jewish militants who wanted to take up arms and retake Jerusalem with military might.
The sages of the Talmud, who were shaping what came to be known as modern-day Judaism, were not interested in fighting to go back to the Land of Israel. They also didn’t just tell the people to “move on” and forget the past. Instead, they recommended small ritual absences to honor the grief of this loss in an ongoing way. They instructed the people to build new homes, but leave a corner unpainted; host feasts, but leave out an appetizer to mark loss. In this ancestral practice, “getting back to normal” and leaving the past behind are not valued; what matters is honoring the past, while building a new kind of future that includes room for grief.
We can all learn from these ancestral grief practices today. We can honor the losses that our community suffered on October 7 while resisting the urge to use our sorrow to fuel the violent massacre of Palestinians in Gaza. The death of other people will never bring back the dead. But we can actually use our grief to save lives. It can fuel our organizing against the indiscriminate killing of entire communities in Gaza.
My great-grandmother Rivka survived pogroms in Poland as a young person, and the Holocaust in Belgium in middle-age. After the camps were liberated, Rivka moved to England with my father. Before she died, she took my dad out to the coal heap behind their home and said: “Swear on this mountain, that you will mourn for me.”
To me, this command has always felt like more than a vow to an individual. I believe she was asking us to mourn for all those who risk being forgotten. More than seven decades after Rivka’s death, I still feel held by this promise made to this woman I never met, whose face looks so much like mine. Last week, at the Federal Building, I cried for Rivka and for all the Palestinian grandmothers who, unlike my great-grandmother, never found peace. They were displaced from their homes in 1948, and are now facing a horrible reenactment of this trauma as elders in Gaza.
It would be easy to look away as we see hospitals and clinics in Gaza turned into graveyards for children. However, Jewish people’s and queer people’s deaths have been met with indifference throughout history; we know how life-saving it is to mourn for other people. Grief keeps us connected to our humanity during inhumane times, and nothing could be more human right now than demanding a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
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