Then Neither do I Condemn You: The Samaritan Woman and the Idol of Punishment
A Letter to the Men in my DMs during the Genocide in Gaza
“The air was thick with the war feeling,”goes the first line of Editha, a short fiction piece by William Dean Howells, first published in 1095. “Like the electricity of a storm which had not yet burst.”
The story is about a bride-to-be who gleefully sends her fiance off to to his death in the Spanish American War.
Last night I couldn’t sleep, along with millions of others, as Gaza experienced the worst bombardment in history, without electricity, water, or internet. In what is called the “Isreal-Gaza war,” the bombing was carried out in the dark. The only videos that were coming through were of the skyline aflame, and of screams of women and children from refugee camps being bombed.
I live in a small, heavily conservative Christian town. It used to be the hub of evangelism itself; Christians would come from all over the country to vacation here, and attend revivals. Billy Sunday, the famous preacher himself, grew up here.
No one is talking publicly about the unfolding genocide here, even as the death count rises over seven thousand.
So I asked the sky to cry with me, thought because the throat of my own city seems to be closed with complicity or fear. Outside my window the sky complies. “If the people are silent the rocks will cry out,” Jesus said. I think it’s true of the rain, too.
But let’s focus on me, and my own complicity.
I will never forget the first line of Editha because when I first read it in college, my heart swelled with the same excitement of the protagonist — I understood “the war feeling,” and I craved it.
Growing up I loved war. I devoured biographies about WWII, I watched season after season of Band of Brothers with my grandpa; and one long set of snow days in high school I studied every inch of the battle of Gettysburg, redrawing every map and memorizing the names of the generals. My muse woke up on the battlefield where Pickett’s charge took place — it’s there that I wrote my first poem.
I also grew up learning Zionist propaganda from my father and my church leaders, and every Memorial Day, I would attend the parades with my family, my heart swelling with the tides of patriotism. So when I say I can actually sense and feel the glee and the righteous celebration of the Israeli army right now — almost like a smell — I am not exaggerating. It feels like victory. It feels so proud. Part of me wishes I could taste it.
Editha was the first dose of emotional honesty that I experienced about the cost of romanticizing the idea of war. I had to pick my way through its battlefield ruins for years after that, slowly untangling my misguided, propaganda-fed patriotism, and scrabble for the threads of the root of the matter among the rubble. Sebastian Junger, a war journalist who studied PTSD in combat veterans, was one of the first to help connect the dots: a culture so insipid of the richness of real community, of good work, of ritual, that war is one of the places that men find it.
We are a culture sick with violence and bereft of love.
The only local people who have dared to have conversations with me about Palestine this last few weeks (before I realized that support for resistance to a sociopathic occupation was considered alignment with terrorism) have been almost entirely men, who, after wading through the initial few who told me I was projecting my mommy issues onto a people group experiencing a decades-long genocide, falsely assuming I was gloating over the deaths of settler colonialists, and that I look delusional for posting so confidently (these were friends, mind you), the takes got a bit milder — when a meme circulated exposing racist underpinnings in ChatGPT’s programming, one man took to my DMs to defend its fallibility. “Give it some grace, it makes mistakes,” he said. I asked him if he’d defended the fallibility of any Palestinians with the same appeals to humanity, and he did not reply. It’s okay for a machine to cause harm as a result of its situated context, but not a people occupied and tortured for seven decades.
“Genocides happen,” I was told by another. “You probably shouldn’t bother with that.”
And then a man tried to goad me into an argument in a public space. “Don’t you think –” he began.
I was silent in return, because I knew what was coming next — after stepping over the threshold out of the world of patriarchal Christianity and reaping the brutal consequences of my defiance several times over now, I can now predict every single angle that will come next — When you’re as hurt by patriarchal men as deeply as you love them, you learn a few things.
I’ve learned silence works best when no one is listening anyway. I refuse to walk into a rhetorical trap anymore. Questions asked like offensive strikes aren’t worth volleying back — not unless your freedom is on the line, and that is when you will be intentionally obliterated.
I had already dug with my teeth to be free, so I didn’t step back inside of those walls.
Silence, too, though, is often met with heightened aggression because it wasn’t a real question anyways, it was an opportunity to show dominance — to show their cards — cards that will not be questioned or doxxed or labeled hate speech or taken down or condemned because it is so codified into the very bodies of our people that it goes, unchecked, unquestioned, unmourned:
In the face of my silence, he said fiercely, defiantly, almost gleefully, “Well, anyways Gaza is going to be razed.”
The ultimate “gotcha.”
I realized in horror, sitting there in my local coffee shop looking straight at yet another calm, upstanding citizen smirk at the obliteration of an entire people group, it dawned on me that it’s not about justice for them. It’s not even about revenge.
It’s about power.
But I already knew that.
The same words had already sprawled across the comment section of every single post about Israeli and Palestinian violence, and the words unapologetically voiced dehumanizing propaganda and genocidal intent from dozens of Israeli and US leaders in the last two weeks.
Expressing horror doesn’t make it go away. And I already knew that people who have let abusive power systems worm their way into their psyches will show it when others won’t capitulate to their superiority. It happened in my own life, too. Like I said, I’m here to talk about my own complicity.
Before October 7 I had already spent several years divesting from systems that value power over people, coercion over connection. I had peeled back layers and layers, renegotiating the lines of the territory, both in my own psyche and in my relationships with others. I already knew that the time I had spent trying to beg to be related to as real were often wasted on ears who could not hear. I already knew that true power comes from deep in the center of each person and that it cannot be stolen or exploited — and that people who try have given up a part of their souls, losing entrance the kingdom of god. I think this is what those darned Arminians meant when they said you could lose your salvation.
I’d already excavated the ruins of “the war feeling” in my own psyche, spiraling deep down into the root of the desire itself, finding something redeeming underneath, and so with the same confidence that I can shout Free Palestine, I will also say:
Owning the truth that I loved the idea of war was crucial to my divestment from it. Becoming aware of it, and honoring it, and deconstructing it, patiently, lovingly, and fiercely dedicated to the goodness of my desires, was a path out for me.
We’ve spent so much time the last few weeks condemning, if we speak at all. And demanding others to condemn.
But demanding condemnation is simply another version of wrestling for power without consent, mirroring smaller-scale, the response to resistance to occupation. Our very necessity to condemn violence feeds the monster of punishment and power that is currently raging unchecked across a city full of children.
As a parent, I had to divest from the idea of unconditional obedience: when my daughters told me no, at any level of defiance, my Christian upbringing told me it was righteous to punish them in return. Now I know the truth: hurting a child to exert your dominance is abuse. Couching it in rhetoric of obedience is just another patriarchal lie.
Ironically, condemnation, no matter how righteously we announce it, serves violence, in its very debasement of it, because condemnation itself is a form of violence. It comes from a word that means, to send to hell.
It is a distraction from any kind of holiness, which denotes wholeness: It is not grief, pinning us to the world of the real with its gravity. It is not action, intervening between harm and its victims. It is simply moral superiority that feeds the monster of domination that gives license to exert power over a dominated body, to march into an occupied land.
That monster was embedded in me, too. And I had to fight the hell of condemnation to get out.
The power to banish as punishment is a hierarchical one to its core. It has nothing to do with love. That truth, I’d excavated long ago, becoming a secret Universalist from the age of twelve, among evangelical Christians who cling to hell as an idol, worshiping condemnation as a god.
They worship hell as god.
The religious leaders in John 8, in the story of the Samaritan woman, were clamoring for condemnations, too. They clattered around Jesus, clicking their stones. Do you condemn this woman? Do you condemn this woman? they asked Jesus. They were obsessed with it.
He responded with silence too, and spoke directly to the accused instead.
Displaying the opposite of patriarchal power, he ignored the disembodied accusations forming the machine of punishing power against the body of a foreign woman and and went straight for the belly of the beast: he looked the “sinner” in the eye.
“Meanwhile, neither do I condemn you,” Jesus told her. You’ve heard her story as an adulterous woman, the religious leader’s version, minus the historical context of a patriarchal society, where men could discard their women on the streets, where five husbands would not denote a lascivious woman like they told us, but would denote a victim of repeat abuse.
Friends — men in my DM’s, men who I love and care for and respect, but whose words have made bile come up in my throat in the last three weeks because you are so blind to the decimation your unconscious agreements have wrought:
Instead of trying to argue with you aboue who is accuser and who is accused, who is oppressor and who is oppressed, I would like to invite a reversal of roles: What if it’s true that my words are the accusations, and they have you backed into a corner of your own complicity, your own apathy, your own violence, and I am holding stones of anger and of desperation and I have sat quietly until you have implicated yourselves and I have enough evidence to condemn you this time?
What if you are the Samaritan woman? Caught in your own obsession with power, words from your very mouth.
What if Jesus is writing in the dirt, and is glancing up at you. There is no glory in his expression, but you find you can still meet his gaze.
Go and sin no more, he says.
You can decide what it means for you.
