The year after I graduated from college, I lived in Zamalek, a small island neighborhood in the middle of the Nile River that is home to many embassies and also the offices of the Anglican diocese of Egypt, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa. My boss had just joined the diocesan staff; he had previously managed a Catholic nursing home. One day he took me across town to a Christmas bazaar associated with that community where he was hailed as a returning hero and I sort of trailed behind, looking at the booths and trying not to get lost. (I got lost a lot that year.)
I decided to buy a ring from one of the vendors– a thick and sort of masculine one, a quarter inch wide with Arabic calligraphy that says lakin nahhwak il ainha– which translates very literally to “but toward you the eyes of us.” I thought maybe I’d give it to Nathan, whom I was dating at the time, but I didn’t, and I’ve worn it occasionally over the last ten years. Sometime in mid-October I pulled it out of my jewelry box again.
I have worn it almost every day since.
The phrase is from 2 Chronicles (NRSV):
O our God, will you not execute judgment upon them? For we are powerless against this great multitude that is coming against us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.
I think a lot every day about Gaza, and I feel helpless and angry, and I turn over and over in my head all the strategic questions of humanitarian aid and deescalation and international diplomacy and activist strategies to pressure our defiant government toward just action. I think a lot every day about American politics, and the very frightening contours of the Republican Party right now, wherein every day more ground is ceded to a faction that does not believe in governing and believes even less in the rights of the American “minorities.” I think a lot about apathy and disillusionment and isolation as a feature of American life facilitated by American infrastructure, this world that we’ve built for cars instead of people, and the real and present dangers of climate change which are in so many ways a result of our persistent desire for autonomy and control. And I think a lot about the trends in American religion, which are not unrelated to all the above. The latter is, of course, an occupational hazard.
One of the temptations of both those academic circles and social media is this: because we study and speak about ideas, because writing and speaking is the currency of online platforms, it becomes very easy to believe that the solution to any problem is finding the right way to talk about it. I have become very aware of the temptation to alleviate my own discomfort in this way: in the face of fear and profound suffering, I redefine the problem from a crisis of human suffering to a crisis of discourse.
This is a neat trick. The problem then becomes not so much the IDF is killing thousands of civilians with American weapons and support but people have bad takes about this online, and/or people are misinformed about rhetoric and the effectiveness of social media activism. The latter is my own area of expertise. It becomes something about which I can safely have an opinion that feels like it matters. It becomes something about which I can be right. And being right insulates me from the fear and grief.
I don’t mean to disregard the importance of language, which is my first love, nor the importance of political talk online and the study of it, to which I have devoted three years of my life. They both matter hugely. And yet if that endless ruminating has given me anything, it is the ever useful question: who benefits?
Who is benefitting, financially or otherwise, from my attention being spent on this platform, or directed to these sympathies?
Who is benefitting from my fear or my anger or my irritation, and the targets to which it has been directed?
Who is benefitting from the stories I have been offered about what is happening?
As a general principle, the fact that someone stands to profit from the framing of a news story doesn’t necessarily then mean they are acting maliciously; many of these stories circulate independent of our individual intent. But understanding what at stake and for whom makes me smarter about the ways my attention is co-opted. It helps me to choose with whom I want my sympathies and solidarity to lie.
So I have been asking those questions of myself, when I skim the New York Times homepage from bed in the morning (a bad habit). Who benefits from my fear? Who benefits from making me heartsick or angry? Who benefits from persuading me that nothing can be done, or even that I alone can or must respond?
I do that. And I put that ring back on my finger, and I run my thumb over the calligraphy, and I remember that all my knowledge an critical thinking and media literacy and my savvy will not, on its own, save me or any child in Gaza, and I think to myself once again that I do not know what to do.
I don’t know who made the ring, or why they chose to excerpt that verse. To be honest, I don’t know a great deal about 2 Chronicles, and I’m aware that some readers would interpret the story in chapter 20 as evidence of God’s endorsement of the state of Israel and its military actions. I’d apply the above questions to that reading. But it is a small comfort to me to wear those words, and to remember the kindness and vitality of the people I met in my year in Cairo, and to know that generations of people have prayed the same words I’m praying now.
Our eyes are on you.
Things I’m thinking about:
We’re Beginning to Learn How the War on Terror Shaped a Generation, Suzy Hansen for the New York Times
This sermon from Munther Isaac, pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem. Nathan quoted it in his own sermon a few weeks ago. It’s also quoted here, in a reflection on the Mennonite Central Committee website– which ends with links to call your congresspeople and donate to relief funds.
This stunning Kelly Latimore icon, titled “Christ in the Rubble,” is so apt for this Christmas. May it be, for all of us, a day of miraculous peace.
Grateful for your wisdom, as always. I will always remember when Bill McKibben came to the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing and described a moment in his own career, after writing at least a dozen books, when he realized that books weren't "moving the needle." That's when he became an activist. Like you, I still believe books and words matter. But they're only part of the picture. When "being right" gives moral permission for passivity, that's a problem.