When I wrote “Soul in a Bowl” a few weeks ago, I spoke of how simple are the ingredients for bread and then reeled them off. Only after publishing the piece in The Grapevine did I realize I’d neglected to include the salt. Oh my, the salt. I dismissed it at first, rationalizing that bread- makers just know that salt is an essential ingredient, but that tiny omission has continued to bug me.
What would bread be without salt? What would our world be without our tears?
We take pains to revere the sweet – sweet talk, sweet food, sweet rides, sweet times. We value the sweet. When have we ever heard: “Oh that was so salty of you to say that or do that”? We seem to be a culture addicted to the sweet, be it found in our ice cream or our narratives. We want things to be nice, to be good, to be happy. We don’t want pain or sadness to get in the way of the sweet times. Even more so during the Christmas season.
Salt is underrated. It’s true that too much salt, like too much sweet, is not a good thing.
We react against an overdose, our bodies reject it. Hearing the stories of health workers under siege in Gazan hospitals drinking intravenous solutions because they had no water to drink makes us cringe, knowing that IV fluids are saline solutions. We are not built to drink salt water.
Yet, salt is an essential part of our lives, and to me, it’s a good metaphor for the complex mix of life today. Like salt in our bread, inclusion of the painful aspects of existence is a necessary part of “full catastrophe living” (Jon kabat-Zinn).
Every day right now brings fresh tears, salty tears. Hearing that Christmas is cancelled in Bethlehem, the very home of Christmas, is a good reminder that this is not an ordinary year. We are witnessing ethnic cleansing in Gaza which is within the State of Israel. And we are witnessing a real genocide – not a “possible genocide” – facilitated by the US, unfolding before our very eyes. And yet our western media are mainly focused on excoriating the Mayor of Calgary because she refused to join a Hanukah candle-lighting ceremony that became recast as a “pro-Israel” event. (It is not lost on me that she is a woman, and a woman of colour at that.) Or publicly hammering the (again, women) Presidents of Harvard, MIT & Penn who got caught by a congressional committee in a trick question surrounding the Palestinian peace & justice slogan “From the River to the Sea”. The mendacious idea of naming that a call for genocide of Jews distracts from the real genocide on Palestinians in Gaza. The framing of all criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic continues, as does the smokescreen of vilifying people for not condemning Hamas atrocities “enough”. I don’t like Hamas or what Hamas did on October 7th. Journalist Jonathan Cook calls it “a slave revolt”. ALL warfare includes atrocities; ALL murder is bad; ALL lives have equal value. But for Israel and its supporters, all lives apparently are not of equal value, considering the vastly disproportionate number of people killed so far in revenge for October 7th. How many is “enough” to compensate?
Weeping for the dead and injured is a normal human reaction. If we stop shedding tears for the more than 18,000 Palestinians killed so far in the mad rampage on Gaza right now, if we don’t shed tears for the 1,200 killed October 7th and the hostages held in Israeli prisons and in Gaza, we lose a precious bit of our humanity. If we look away, knowing what we know, in favour of keeping things upbeat, “don’t bring anybody down”, we also kill off a part of ourselves.
Part of being fully human and having well-being in our dark blue world (Elizabeth Fischer, may she rest in peace) is being able to hold a whole range of emotions, and not be engulfed by them. It is to move away from blaming, denying, excusing, justifying, rationalizing, and instead, facing reality.
For the sake of our children, we need to try to make sense of insane militarism on our own time. Children aren’t equipped to hold the kind of grief a true reckoning stirs up. Because of our privilege, the accident of our birth and where we reside, it’s incumbent upon us to appreciate and be thankful for the immense natural beauty that surrounds us, especially at this time of Solstice, to be grateful for the safety & relative security of our families & communities, and for our very real freedoms compared to so many others.
And we can deepen our humanity by opening our hearts to the suffering in Gaza right now and taking action to demand an end to the killing and the beginning of the hard but necessary work of finding a way through to justice and peace. This we can do. Yes, there are Christmas lights to put up, baking to do, many distractions to keep us ever so busy, but can we not spare a few minutes each day to write/call/petition/protest our government and its complicity in ethnic cleansing, its cowardice at the UN? To truly savour life’s sweetness, we need to honour and include the salt. After all, Christmas is cancelled in Bethlehem.
