President's Column by President Amy Gerstein
Holding Two Truths
June/July 2024
I’ve been thinking a lot lately that during these days, these strange and sometimes painful days, I often must balance two (or more) competing and contradictory thoughts in my mind.
Like most members of Beth Am, I feel fully American. I am completely at home in this promised land. At the same time, like most congregants, I am fully Jewish, celebrating every aspect of that facet of my identity.
That duality, that challenge of simultaneously standing in two places, is intrinsic to living as a contemporary Jew, and especially as a progressive Jew. We learn how to keep one foot in the past, embracing ancient traditions, and one foot in the present, embracing the modern world.
Another example, one that is never far from the top of mind: I am a passionate ohevet Yisrael (lover of Israel). My heart shattered on October 7th, when Hamas terrorists attacked Israel and took more Jewish lives in any single day since the Holocaust. And every day it continues to break when I consider that over 130 Israelis are still being held hostage, kept in underground bunkers away from their families.
That same heart breaks for the children, and other civilians, of Gaza. They, too, are victims of Hamas, but they are also victims of my beloved Israel. How can one heart contain deep sympathy for both sides in a conflict? How can my ears take in the pleas of the hostages’ families, and, simultaneously, the cries of innocents killed in military actions taken to ensure that those who are holding the hostages are not able to take such actions in the future?
The answer is that we must develop the ability to hold and balance contradictory ideas in a dynamic system. We must find ways to realize the vision of perhaps the most American of poets, Walt Whitman, who wrote (in Song of Myself), “I am large, I contain multitudes.” I believe that each of us does indeed contain multitudes. Balancing making room for those multitudes is challenging. And it is in rising to that challenge that we are often at our absolute best.
We strive to live as a holy community whose study and practice of Judaism inspires and challenges us to "do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with our God" (Micah 6:8).