For several years now, I have been involved with an organization called Women Wage Peace, a group of Israeli/Jewish and Muslim/Palestinian mothers promoting political understanding and including women in the conflict conversation. Many of these mothers on both sides of the conflict have lost children to fighting, and, even after the horrors of October 7, when many have lost hope for peace, Women Wage Peace continues to hold onto what now feel like tiny slivers of hope for safety and harmony in our beloved homeland.
Through my work with this organization, I was lucky enough to know Vivian Silver, a founding member. Vivian was committed to a two-state solution, to future generations of peaceful relations. And still, Vivian was murdered in her home at Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7. A friend to her Palestinian neighbors across the border with Gaza, Hamas terrorists still killed her indiscriminately.
I have read and re-read Jewish Theological Seminary rabbinical student Arielle Korman’s poetic tribute to Vivian dozens of times now and share it here:
I think of you,
leaning over your porch for years
as the sky over Gaza turned orange
and blue and then orange again.
I wonder when peace died
and fear it was long before
you were born. Lifetimes before
the sand and the sun
and the promise of a communal
way of life brought you
to the place where you died.
Maybe I’m lacking imagination.
I can’t see what you could.
There’s so much I’m unable to imagine.
I called your death unimaginable, too,
but then
the sun had gone down early,
New York was so cold and I’m sorry,
I pictured it.
Your scarves,
your posters, every thank you gift
from your friends, engulfed
as the southern air turned
wholly to flame.
You, crouching in your
safe room, every piece of your story
eating you from the inside.
And now it’s eating me, and
I just needed to tell you.
I never knew you but I have this feeling
I could have been you, long ago,
the North American sixties behind me,
the corporate, saccharine eighties
before me, looking for hope and finding it
in the place where you died.
Maybe, wherever you are now,
watching the sky turn black
from far far away, you can help us.
Maybe in that unimaginable moment
when you realized you were leaving this place,
something else dawned on you, something important.
Would you whisper it in the wheat fields?
In the shallow breath of a still-living child?
In the flutter of a small paper sign
in the middle of a thunderous rally?
Vivian, we’re listening.
May we find the strength to pick up Vivian’s torch, to carry the light of her legacy into this next chapter of our People’s history, with understanding of the past and still somehow, somehow holding onto hope for the future.
– Cantor Emma Lutz