Voicing our confusion and anger and grief to God is a legitimate and long-respected part of our tradition, from the Bible onward. In a recent personal piece about what’s happening in Gaza, Ori Hanan Weisberg writes that “The great Jewish historian Amos Funkenstein read Job as teaching that we don’t always deserve answers, but we have the right, and even obligation, to demand a hearing. Especially in extremis. Even if we are wrong or lost or broken or…angry.”

So I encourage you, if you want or need to, to bring your struggles about Israel and Gaza to God. Pray the Psalms if you don’t know what else to say. Pray for all of the people overseas, and pray that the leadership there is moved to pursue peace and to protect the noncombatants. Pray for the grieving, and the injured, and for those living in terror. Our holy text invites us to bring it all before God. Pray.

I’ll see you in church—

Becky

Prayer

A Blessing After A Loss, by Kate Bowler

God, we are heartbroken

in the face of so much grief.

What could we possibly call blessed?

Could we try?

Blessed are we

who allow ourselves to feel it—

the impossibility

of what was possible a second ago—

the light decision, the casual stroll,

the easy exchange and ordinary duty,

a decent choice or a nothing one,

the sweep of hours on a day

that was like any other.

until it wasn’t.

This is the place where

nothing makes sense.

This is the place where

tears show up without permission.

Blessed are we

who allow our hearts to break,

for it will be some time

for brittle unreality to release us

Back into the land of the living.

We have seen and lost

what we never should have.

Blessed are we even in the moments

when we are convinced,

absolutely sure,

that there is nothing untouched

by the ashes of loss.

God, you are an architect

and everything I have is in ruins.

Promise me that someday

something will stand

after so much fell.