SPIRIT WOW 007: Pete, Pizzaballa and Hesitation in Israel and Gaza
How do you Process an Endless Disaster?
Like everyone else, I’ve spent the last ten days speechless.
Members of Hamas tear through Israel, murdering and abducting people. Israel tell 1.1 million Palestinians to get out of the northern Gaza Strip within 24 hours, but then also bombing the exit roads.
Everything about the last 10 days has seemed like the Israel/Palestine conflict in a microcosm: the violence, the posturing, the horror. And for those of us at a distance, that stunned silence in which it all leaves us.
We want to have a thoughtful opinion on who is to blame or what needs to be done. But the situation of Israel and Palestine is like a natural disaster. There is no understanding it or thinking it out. There’s just this malignant destructive force that from time to time crashes down like a tsunami upon the people of those countries.
Probably the most thoughtful comments I’ve seen about the situation came from, of all people, former SNL star and body tattoo expert Pete Davidson, who hosted last week’s show. All week SNL ran ads on the joke that Davidson is basically a loser.
But in reality he started the show with a serious take on the situation in the Middle East, drawn from his own experience.
As a child whose father was killed by terrorist violence on 9/11, Davidson is able to reframe the conversation away from the political to the children and families on both sides whose lives are being devastated. His whole life actually embodies the cost of this conflict and so many others like it, their victims.
I keep thinking of this line I heard somewhere along the way, maybe from a spiritual director somewhere: “We can’t both be right, but we can definitely both be wrong.”
There was another story this week related to the Hamas attack that really touched me. My old friends at America presented the Catholic News report on it a few days ago; Religion News Service has a deeper dive.
This is Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa. That’s right, his last name is Pizza balls.
True story: In the beginning Italian pizza came in a small rounded form, like a hill almost. They were eaten kind of like we eat donuts, and they were called “pizzaballs.”
And the term “pizzaballa” became so synonymous with the food—like Kleenex is today for whatever Kleenex is, the Cardinal’s ancestors, who had invented pizzaballs, actually changed their name to “Pizzaballa” in order to capitalize on their success.
(None of this is true. Sorry, this ep is a rough one. I need a little moment of foolishness.)
Cardinal Pizzaballa is the most senior Catholic in the Jerusalem. Though he’s originally from Italy, where he became a Franciscan, he’s been in Jerusalem teaching and working with the Christians in Jerusalem for a very long time, by my count 33 years. Age 58, he was only just made a cardinal a week before the Hamas attacks.
This week, Cardinal Pizzaballa offered himself to the terrorists who attacked Israel on October 7th, in exchange for the 200+ children and adults currently being held captive by them. “I would do anything if it would ensure freedom to one of these children and bring them home,” he said in a press conference. And rather than some kind of benign dramatic gesture, his thinking is very practical. The only way to prevent Israel from basically destroying Palestine, he argues, is the release of the hostages. If the terrorists took him instead, it would slow everything down.
Are the terrorists likely to take him up on this? Probably not. But it so impressed me. Here’s a guy who understands that his position in the church doesn’t just give him, I don’t know, pretty frocks, the ability to go to the front of every line and a job telling people what’s right and wrong (aka “saving people”). It has the power to actually save people, in a tangible way. In fact that’s actually what it’s for, and so that’s what he’s going to try and do.
In that way he reminds me of Pope Francis. He’s one of those people that show you by their actions that you can have so much more impact on the the world than you think.
On 9/11, Rowan Williams, the Episcopal Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Anglican Communion—was in New York not far from Ground Zero. As was true for so many people around the world, the experience profoundly affected him. He ended up writing a little book about it called Writing in the Dust. His title came from the passage in the Gospel of John where the mob wants Jesus to help them stone the woman accused of adultery. (The text says she’s “caught” in adultery, but where is her partner in the crime? And what do we mean by “adultery”? And why is she surrouded by dudes? It all seems super sketchy.)
Rather than say anything, Jesus starts writing silently in the dust.
And what he wrote is never explained. The point, Williams said, is rather than in the face of this moment, Jesus basically forces everyone to take a beat. He “allows a moment, a longish moment, in which people are given time to see themselves differently precisely because he refuses to make the sense they want.”
It’s a classic Jesus move—no one loves to flip a script like the Big G and his posse, and always with the goal of making people confront their unseen assumptions and expectations. In that “longish moment” that he takes, I don’t know, doodling?, he gives people a chance to see what they’re actually about to do here and how fucked up it is. With hesitation comes the possibility of greater truth and new choices.
Pete Davidson’s monologue at the start of Saturday Night Live last week struck me as functioning very similarly. It invited us into a moment where we could breathe and consider things more deeply. Maybe feel things more deeply, too.
To quote Williams (who I love, and have quoted many times before), it’s all about “Holding the moment for a little longer, long enough for some of our demons to walk away.”
We can hope.
THE FISHBOWL
If you’d like to help Israelis struggling in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks, you might consider a donation to IsraAID, which generally focuses on providing aid to crises elsewhere, but it is now helping to coordinate humanitarian aid within Israel.
Cardinal Pizzaballa oversees Caritas Jerusalem, which does fund raising for the needs of Christians in Jerusalem. There’s over 1000 Christians in Gaza sheltering in churches because they have nowhere to go. (Caritas Jerusalem’s site is down, but that link will take you to Caritas International.) And UNICEF is working in the region to try and ensure the safety of Israeli and Palestinian children.
All of these organizations note that supplies in the region are running out. So anything you could offer would be a great help.
Thanks for reading. I’ll be back on Monday morning with the Wow, and Ryan Reynolds!
Great article Jim