By Marisa Handler

It is early 2003. The Bush administration is pounding on the war-drums again, ululating and strutting for oil in Iraq. I attend rallies and marches against the impending war. I bring my friends and my homemade posters, and I look around me and see meticulously lettered signs reading "Zionism Is Nazism." Signs reading "Death to Israel" and "Sharon = Hitler." I see Israeli flags being burned, and it is like a kick to the chest. Up to now, I have rarely experienced anti-Semitism, but I am beginning to recognize it with regularity. It isn't obvious. No one calls me names. I do not think, most of the time, it is even conscious. But it is present in the flavor of the fury directed against Israel. I do not see such visceral hatred arising in discussions of other conflicts. No one gets nearly so enraged over the slaughter in the Balkans or Rwanda. But when it comes to Israel/Palestine, white kids who have no obvious affiliation to the region burn Israeli flags and hurl invective at Israel, at Israelis, at the Zionist bastards. Occasionally, if you are listening carefully, at Jews.

Meanwhile we in the middle, insisting that a middle exists, hold our ground. The Tikkun Campus Network takes root and flourishes. Our first conference is a success. The Tikkun Community, for which I go on later speaking tours, also grows. As much as my job exhausts me, as much as I complain that I work all the time, I also love it: I love being at the hub, feeling I am making things move, feeling needed, relied upon. I am a leader, it dawns on me in the middle of facilitating a conference call. People are looking to me for guidance, for inspiration. How did I get here again? It strikes me as comical, in a number of ways, that I am working for peace. Most of the time my work for peace feels far from peaceful. Most of the time there is a lot of ego involved. How effective am I, then, I wonder. How helpful is my leadership, when I am so flawed? Am I helping? The anger that arises in my work: I thought of it as a side effect, but the more I look, the deeper it lies. When members of my extended family or friends from Israel send out emails lambasting the Palestinians and defending Israeli aggression, I discover myself whipping up impassioned diatribes and then hitting "reply all." What are my motives here? How much is anger determining my actions? Anger is natural, given the current state of our world, and anger is powerful. Certainly anger carries a formidable energy with which to wrestle injustice. But social-change work that is driven by anger will only push us further apart.

A local Jewish group organizes a demonstration supporting the U.S. and Israel in their "battle against terrorism." Three thousand supporters, Jews, gather at San Francisco's Civic Center with placards and American and Israeli flags. I take it upon myself to organize a counter-rally, solely of Jews, calling for an end to both terrorism and the government-sanctioned terrorism of illegal war and occupation. There are about forty of us. We carry Israeli and Palestinian flags and signs reading "Jews for a Just Peace." As the larger rally marches down Market Street, the city's main thoroughfare, we move to the opposite curb. We stand in silence or sing peace songs in Hebrew and English.

Across the street many people ignore us, but some can't resist. They shout names at us, raise their fists and fingers and tell us we are betraying our own people. If this is indeed betrayal, then it is betrayal of a brittle and anemic dream. I see our activism as loyalty to a broader vision of our own potential. I have instructed everyone in our group on nonviolence, and we stand our ground--even my little brother, although he turns a worrying shade of purple at one point--and we keep singing. About halfway through, my co-worker's parents, who are Israeli and on the other side, catch sight of her in our line. They race across the street and try to drag her over to their side. "You are a disgrace," they tell her, and say they do not want to see her face. I am standing between my brother and my friend, our arms around each other. I am watching the expressions on the faces across the street, the disdain, the fury, the hatred, and I am recalling how I went to services recently, for the first time in ages. I held a prayer book and I sang the hymns and then I stood to say the Shema, the holiest prayer in Judaism. I held my right hand over my eyes and recited Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One, as I have countless times since I first learned to speak. But this time the force of the Hebrew words ricocheted into me like a bullet, knocked me over and back into my chair, reduced me to a shuddering sodden mess as my sister bent over me asking, "What's wrong, Mims? Are you okay? What's going on?"

Unlike most prayers in Judaism, the Shema is not a prayer that speaks to God. It is a prayer that speaks directly to the Jewish people. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. The Shema is an affirmation of the supreme unity of the divine. It is simultaneously a call to unity.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. All that we have suffered, all that we continue to suffer, flickering before my eyes in black-and-white eight-millimeter, the jumbled bones in yawning pits, the hills of gold fillings, the teenagers inside tanks, children sacrificed to soaring nails and chewing shrapnel, the habitual shattering of the mundane into the grotesque.

And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart. All the suffering that we grapple with, that we feel and run from and feel and run from, that eats away at our vision so stealthily we do not realize we are peering through a tunnel.

With all your soul. And then all that we do not see, will not see. Do not feel, will not feel.

And with all your might. The other film: the other lives twisted by the quaking black-and-white farce of tragedy. The spine smashed for a pebble, the homes wrecked and rebuilt and wrecked and rebuilt and wrecked, the dust that will not settle, ash that the wind refuses to lift, the children claimed by holy and unholy wars.

And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart.

Is that the reason I am on this side of the street? These words, the vision of unity I have chosen? The insularity, the dissociation of our suffering?

You shall teach them diligently to your children. You shall speak of them when you sit in your home.

Is that the reason? I am deafened by the vitriol of my kin, hemorrhaging at the navel, and I can't remember now. Is that why I am here, standing opposite my own people, with four lanes of traffic and a freighter of rage between us?

You shall speak of them when you walk by the way.

When you lie down.

And when you rise up.

Excerpted from Loyal to the Sky, by Marisa Handler. Available February 2007. Reprinted with permission of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

SPIRIT MATTERS contains selections from forthcoming books, articles, and talks that raise significant spiritual, religious, or social theory issues that connect to the Tikkun project of healing and transformation of the world. Authors or publishers who seek to have work included in this section must send us the material for consideration at least three months prior to the cover date of the issue of Tikkun in which they'd like to be included, and this date must be prior to the actual publication of the book. Email submissions to rabbilerner@tikkun.org.