What in the world are we talking about?
Perhaps we focus on other people's stories because it's easier than developing and living our own.
Yesterday, an old friend sent me an invitation to this book event:
I wasn’t able to attend this book event last night, but it got me thinking…
Imagine that a hundred people, including you, attended this presentation by Brian Barber, who eloquently describes the struggle and heartbreak of three young Palestinian men. Next week, you join the same hundred people at a similar event for a book about three Israeli families slaughtered on October 7th. The narratives in both books are gut-wrenching, with bloodshed and tragedy on both sides. These people are all so innocent, you think. Killing begets more killing. Why can’t we all get along?
But do these dueling narratives bring us closer to a resolution of the war in Gaza, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Do they shed any new light on the fact that war is hell? Most important: Do these stories shape whatever story you are telling about yourself, your life, and your place in the world? If so, how?
One answer might be: We’ve been telling similar stories of death and destruction for decades, and they have made no difference. These tragedies bring us no closer to resolving the conflict or identifying its root cause. And: One reason I immerse myself in other people’s stories is that I don’t like thinking about my own. So, instead of looking in a mirror, I stare at my phone.
I hope that doesn’t sound callous or flip because I do believe that individual stories matter. Every human being is created in the image of G*d. “Anyone who destroys a life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed an entire world; and anyone who saves a life is as if he saved an entire world.” Problem is, these values and general sentiments lack the punch and persuasiveness of a good, old-fashioned story — a drama filled with sympathetic characters who confront adversity but then find a way to overcome those challenges to triumph in the end. Stories such as…
Stories vs. Statistics
I’m in a mixed marriage. My wife is a demographer and believes in the power and primacy of data and statistics. I’m a (semi-retired) journalist who has long believed in the power and primacy of a good story.
Data and Story are not mutually exclusive, of course. But they each require a different way of thinking:
Data describes things in general; Story focuses on the specific.
Data can reveal broad trends or patterns; Story makes narrower observations.
Data can capture the dynamics of a system; Story zooms in on particular cogs within the machine.
Data is clinical; Story is emotional.
Data requires us to think somewhat abstractly (e.g., distributions, patterns, trends); Story doesn’t.
Data is about the forest; Story is about a tree.
Which leads me to Wendy Kaminer, a lawyer and social critic who writes about liberty, feminism, religion, and popular culture — and who shares some of my wife’s suspicions about the value of anecdotes and stories.
Many years ago at a panel discussion titled “Talking About Narrative Journalism” (Nieman Reports, Fall 2000), Kaminer stood up during the Q&A and said:
I have a comment, not a question, but I would like to hear the panel react to it. I think there is a downside to storytelling and to journalistic storytelling that hasn’t been addressed and that is the creation of an anecdotally driven public policy. I’m not saying that there’s no important role for such stories, even in political writing. …
But there are a lot of places where this becomes kind of dangerous. We have sex offender registration laws that are named after children who are killed. It’s much easier for a legislator to vote against a sex offender registration law, if he thinks there are some inequities in it, if it’s called a sex offender registration law than if it’s called Megan’s Law. Suddenly, he’s voting against a little girl and against the family of a little girl. There are a lot of examples of this. You can take a story and use it to help people understand or think about a larger issue, or you can take a larger issue and reduce it to a story or an anecdote.
And I think that’s one of the dangers of this.
Exactly right.
When you tell the tragic story of three Palestinian families in Gaza, an “objective” observer might draw certain conclusions about the larger issue and rage against the Zionists (and the Jews).
When you tell the tragic story of three Israeli families slaughtered on October 7th, that same observer might rage against Hamas, the Palestinians, and the Iranians.
But then what? How do these dueling narratives and all that rage help illuminate the “larger issue”?
Again: Kaminer makes a distinction between stories, which are small and focused, and issues, which are large and abstract. Between the world of narrative particularity (e.g., the murder of Megan Kanka) and the world of issues and public policy (e.g., the problem of sex offenders and the creation of Megan’s Law). Between drama and data, narrative and ideas, the particular and the universal.
Still with me?
If so, here’s what I keep thinking: What if there’s a third way? What if Story vs. Statistics is a false binary? What if we can find a story that is both particular and universal, and that also embraces the facts of history (aka the data)? Perhaps there’s a way to think about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so that we honor individual narratives while framing them inside a larger Story?
Alan Alan Alan, you say. That Story already exists! It’s called Christianity — a narrative about one man who came to save not only the Jews from their laws, ideas, theories, rituals, data, and sin, but to save the whole world, too. Christ is particular and universal, and his life, death, and resurrection, as described in the New Testament, is Story, all the way down.
Yes, I understand. I truly do. Two billion people have embraced Christianity, partly because it’s a story unlike any other. But for a variety of reasons, the Jesus narrative hasn’t found an enthusiastic audience in the Middle East. There’s something about Christianity that never quite connected with Muslims and Jews.
Maybe there’s a narrative frame we haven’t yet fully explored.
Maybe there’s a fourth way.
Rabbi, paratrooper, settler, peacemaker
Menachem Froman (1945-2013) was an Israeli Orthodox rabbi, a former Israeli paratrooper, a leader of the Israeli settler movement, and a peacemaker and negotiator with ties to controversial Palestinians such as the late PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat (1929-2004), and the late founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin (1936-2004).
Rabbi Froman’s vision, Yossi Klein Halevi writes in a remembrance, was that “however improbably, it was religious Jews who were best positioned to make peace with the Palestinians and the Muslim world generally.” The peace process as we have known it, Froman argued, has been largely driven by political actors who tend to be liberal or non-religious. In the Rabbi’s mind, that’s why the peace process has failed. Klein Halevi continues:
He taught me that, in order to make peace with the Muslim world, one needs not only to honor Islam but to love it — cherish its fearless heart, the power of its surrender, the wisdom of its frank confrontation with human transience. Once we went together to a mosque in Nusseirat, a refugee camp in Gaza. It was the time before the second intifada, when such adventures were still possible. We’d been invited by a community of Sufi mystics to join their zikr, the dance that combines chanting and breathing with vigorous movement. For nearly an hour we danced together with our Muslim fellow believers in God. “Allah!” Rav Menachem repeatedly cried out in devotion.
After the zikr, we sat with members of the community, and Rav Menachem explained why he had come here. Two thousand years ago, he said, my people sinned and were expelled by God from this land. But now God has brought us back, and I want to learn from my Muslim brothers who didn’t leave here how to worship God in this land.
It was an extraordinary moment: A rabbi — from a West Bank settlement! — was telling Palestinian refugees that God had brought us back to this land. And they listened to him because he had come to learn from them, because he was speaking to them as one religious person to another, because he made no apology for Jewish indigenousness.
Given the ongoing bloodshed in Israel and Gaza, and the absence of any clear path to peace, I thought now would be a good time to remember Rabbi Menachem Froman, his voice and his vision, and the Story he was trying to live.
"it was religious Jews who were best positioned to make peace with the Palestinians and the Muslim world generally"
Religious Jews, or any Jews, aren't in a position to address much of the problem.
1) Israelis are widely seen throughout the region as just the latest in a long line of European invaders going back 1,000 years. Justly or not, Israelis will be forever burdened with that history.
2) Israel's great success as a nation presents an existential threat to all the corrupt inept despotic regimes in the region. Not a military threat, but a political threat. Arab and Persian citizens can see for themselves that their governments have been incapable of delivering what the Israelis have clearly proven to be possible.
I can no longer highlight or copy/paste anything in any Substack comment section, so I think I'll end it there, as I'm getting kind of fed up with the primitive nature of this platform.