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“Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.” Etty Hillesum

Good morning, beautiful human, 

Wednesday, January 15th was Dr. King’s birthday. Did you know it also is the birthday of Etty Hillesum? There is overlap between their lives - people who chose love and resistance in a time of hate and complicity. She was a young Dutch Jewish woman living in Nazi-occupied Holland. Similar to Anne Frank, we knew her mostly through diaries and letters, written from 1941 to 1943. They include the thoughts and experiences of a young woman, with the early entries focusing on her family, relationships, inner thoughts, philosophical musings. Her openness to life, her humanness, and her commitment to both contemplation and action are elements that draw me to her. In her inaugural diary entry, she writes that she was “accomplished in bed” and should be “counted among the better lovers.” Each of us are full human beings.

As the diary progresses, the Nazi stranglehold on Dutch Jews tightens and figures more prominently in Hillesum's writings. She worked for the Jewish Council, which had been set up to mediate between Jewish citizens and the Germans, in the department of ‘Social Welfare for People in Transit’ at Camp Westerbork, a Dutch transit camp where people were before being sent to death camps. [Whenever I read the sentence, my throat constricts at the horrifying orderliness, the level of complicity required for it. And the question - how would I choose to act when faced with that?]

For the year before she was sent to Auschwitz, she moved freely between Amsterdam and the camp, writing about her experiences, including, “I still made a short detour to seek out a flower stall, and went home with a large bunch of roses. They are just as real as all the misery I witness each day.” Though given opportunities to go into hiding, she stayed, determining it would be futile and that she would rather devote her energies to helping the people around her. 

She is a person I think about often. Her reflection about what is mine to do in a given moment and when facing the horrors of the world is one the lights I try to be guided by. Not surprisingly whenever I hear her name, I pay attention. So, about 5 years ago, when I learned about two peace activists, one Palestinian, one Israeli, connected to each other through an event about Etty and started working together, I paid attention. (https://www.ettyhillesumcards.com/)

When they put out a call last month to join them and other peace activists to be part of an online ritual where people read the names of the children who have been murdered since October 2023, in Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon and Israel. The ritual will begin on Sunday, 26 January 2025 at 7:00 am (Palestine/Israel time) and will end on Monday, 27 January 2025 around midnight (Palestine/Israel time) - 40 hours of ritual. Forty hours of names of murdered children. We are living in a horror of our own making. Whether it is genocide, climate catastrophe, oppression, violence, or any other of the seemingly innumerable disasters. 

We can (and should when we are able) take time to grieve and rest. We need community; we must be in community. And we must resist being overwhelmed. Each of us is not responsible to do something about each thing. We must ask ourselves, “What is mine to do?” We will have many opportunities to answer this question. We can answer it in many ways. Let each of us answer it from a place rooted in love. And let us remember to see the beauty around us and in us at the same time. 

“Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths.”― Etty Hillesum

I will leave you with a different kind of breath.

Breathe, Rev. Dr. Jane Ungar

Breathe, said the wind
How can I breathe at a time like this,
when the air is full of the smoke
of burning tires, burning lives?
Just breathe, the wind insisted.
Easy for you to say, if the weight of
injustice is not wrapped around your throat,
cutting off all air.
I need you to breathe.
I need you to breathe.
Don’t tell me to be calm
when there are so many reasons
to be angry, so much cause for despair!
I didn’t say to be calm, said the wind,
I said to breathe.
We’re going to need a lot of air
to make this hurricane together.

[originally written on 1.17.2025]