“Gaza dreams.”
The first prayer.
“One must remember to breathe,” a reader who goes by Unabiker wrote to us today. He elaborated, “All nuance, complexity, and all of perception has been compressed to an epistemological black hole. This is the world as it really is. It is as we say so. Someone, not you, decides what is. The creator of all things. One must remember to breathe.”
These sentiments, movingly expressed in very original terms, are also ours. Like countless many others, we are repelled and moved to extreme frustration as we witness Israel’s daily barbarities in Gaza and the incomprehensible suffering of the 2.3 million people who once lived there. This is humanity’s descent into a state of degradation beyond our imagining before the events of 7 October.
There are things to do in response. One bears witness in one or another way. One can, assuming the wherewithal, help make Palestinian voices heard. In this connection, The Floutist will shortly announce a modest fundraising campaign to support a journey to Israel and the West Bank, where Cara Marianna, our co-editor, will listen to and make heard as many Palestinian voices as she can.
In all of this one may also pray—an expression of our direct, unmediated relations with life, with existence, with “the creator of all things.” To pray is a way never to lose touch with our aspirations and our hopes (even if hope can prove the most treacherous of the cardinal virtues). We must remember to breathe, as Unibiker so well put it.
The Floutist publishes the following in this spirit.
—P. L.
21 FEBRUARY—Overhead, the sky. In an inky dome of Prussian blue, stars shimmer. Night noises fill the air. A breeze blows in from the Mediterranean, blessing the land. Palms rustle and sway. A slim crescent moon shines its cool light upon Gaza.
In the quiet of night people sleep. All is peaceful.
At dawn, Fajr, the first call to prayer, is sounded.
Later the children come, and the streets are filled with the sound of laughter as they skip and walk and run to school. The cities and towns of Gaza are awake. And like the people, they are beautiful—filled with gardens and fountains, cultural centers and museums, universities and hospitals, government buildings, businesses, and homes, magnificent mosques, churches, and synagogues where people work and live and learn and pray.
The markets are a sensuous riot of colors, sounds, and tantalizing aromas. They hum and bustle. Stalls are filled to overflowing with fruits and vegetables, herbs and spices, flowers and fabrics, every imaginable thing for sale or barter. The people haggle. They joke and laugh.
The land of Gaza has been transformed and the people along with it.
Gaza. It is a blessed land. It is a beacon of hope for the world in a new country called Palestine—one country, for one people, in which all of the original land has been restored to Palestine and the right of return has been honored.
In this new country Palestinian Muslims, Christians, and Jews have shown the world the meaning of justice, the power of truth and reconciliation, the necessity of reparations, the importance of historical memory, and the value of forgiveness.
The citizens of a Palestine reborn share equal rights. Everyone is valued and respected. All of the people are safe.
Above all: The children are cherished and protected.
May the legacy of the centuries of trauma and violence inflicted upon the Jewish people of the world be healed. May the scourges of religious and ethnic chauvinism, racism, and apartheid cease to exist. And may the descendent of Abraham live side by side, freely and without fear, in dignity and peace.
I dedicate this, my prayer, to the martyrs of Gaza and to the memory of the six million.
This piece originally appeared in Our Journey, Cara MariAnna’s Substack newsletter.
