Burning Bridges, Skipping Stones
- Uriel
- Aug 3
- 10 min read
Updated: Nov 3
Fire, air, earth, and water. The four elements still await their unifier—the Stone that could transmute our rage to grace. If anyone holds it, it is the children. In a world ablaze with war, we must shield them, before we are all swept away into the Ether.
Some catchphrases are wrongly right. Most criminals do not return to the scene of their crime; they know it’s too dangerous. But true enough, some can’t resist the temptation. And interestingly enough, arsonists lead the bunch, often returning to where they played god, speeding up the ashes-to-ashes cycle of life. While very few of us are pyromaniacs, many more ignite with delight (one in 100 Americans reports setting fire at least once in their life).
I suspect even more occasionally harbor that burning desire, not for the psychopathological gratification of seeing things aflame, but for their mounting frustration: seeing their needs and demands unmet. As with fear’s 4F (fight, flight, freeze, and feign), we can chart frustration’s 4A reactions: abandon, adjust, alternate, and attack. Facing frustration, we can give up, shut down, and stop caring, opting for avoidance and learned helplessness (Abandon). Or we may recalibrate our expectations, reinterpret the situation, and accept our limitations (Adjust). We can also pivot to a different method, goal, or approach (Alternate). Or we may Attack the obstacle through protest, confrontation, or assertion – and sometimes through incendiary annihilation.
We mostly turn to fire metaphorically; the little arsonist within us awakens as we angrily “burn bridges” behind us. At such frustrating moments, we may recall that when Prometheus gave us fire, humanity was but a toddler, and realize that perhaps we still are. Indeed, it seems hardly incidental that arson is the only crime more commonly perpetrated by juveniles than adults. Can Thanatos’s tantrum fulfil Frost’s prophecy, who tasted enough of desire to see the world end in fire?
With or without global warming, this is where we may be heading. From Forst’s to Baldwin’s forewarning, citing in 1963 a Negro spiritual: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time.” Two years later, Magnificent Montague, a trailblazing disc jockey, arrived from NYC in LA with a catchphrase: “Burn, baby, burn!” Soon thereafter, the phrase caught fire, becoming the rallying cry of the 1965 Watts riots. Facing police brutality and systemic racism, Black people in LA took to the streets with that fiery desire for a change.
And today, our entire world feels flammable. Poll after poll shows people, worldwide, frustrated and furious with the “system,” seeking a dramatic change, often “complete” change, yet doubt very much it can happen. It’s enough frustration to make anyone reach for the match.
Fire can cremate, but it takes so much more to care, to cure, to create – to transform for the better. If we want to append frustration’s 4As with a fifth, it may be Alchemize: turning frustration into gold, transmuting pain into beauty, ache into art, hurt into humor. The ancient alchemists, in their splendid mad search for the philosopher’s stone, sought to amalgamate the four elements – fire, air, water, and earth – into a whole that could transform soul and all. The modern wo/men that we are, we pride ourselves on mental progress, dispensing with such antiquated follies. But a closer look may reveal: we are still searching for the stone.
I recently returned to my favorite crime scene. Arriving in Ithaca from Israel on July 4th, I ventured out to see the fireworks, a fake fire that melts patriots’ hearts.
I like fireworks and wonder why. Maybe it’s our Promethean rebuttal to Icarus: yes, getting close to our searing star can drown us, but look at us creating these countless explosive stars! We’re godlike, toying with our own tiny bangs.
I like how fireworks brighten up the sky, then swiftly fade, and how, upon Cayuga Lake, in their alchemist reflection in the water, they send us a memento mori. However adept we are at conjuring fire without, I’ve long learned that we can hardly control the flame within.
At sunset, as we hit the road for the loyalist delight, a light surprise awaited. I should have anticipated, from my incriminating Ithacan summers, the opening act of the fireworks: a festival of fireflies. These magnificent little creatures emit “cold light” through bioluminescence – all light, no heat. While one glowing beetle visited the car, my friend told me about wanting to see the fireflies of Japan.
We looked it up. One such famous fireflies festival takes place in Kamakura, near Hasedera Temple. I remember reading about that temple years ago. It offers Mizuko Kuyo, a memorial service for “water child” (Mizuko), a Japanese term for an aborted, stillborn, or miscarried baby. In the ceremony, the parents place small stone statues of Jizo, the deity guardian of children.
Until I set foot in Japan, I let my mind’s eye wander to that scene of time. There, between the airborne flickering lights of the fireflies, the earth’s permanent silence, and the memory of the water, I thought I caught a glimpse of that alchemy in the parent’s stone. But, of course, as Aristotle knew, and as PJ experienced, the four elements, however magically coiled, are supplemented with a fifth, quietly told by “that something’s inside… unborn and unblessed, that disappears in the Ether, this world to the next.” This world is the scene of reminiscence and evanescence.
I imagine that what makes the parent’s stone so powerful, and perhaps transforming, is that it’s not only a rite of mourning. It’s an act of care: the parents believe that through their offerings and prayers, Jizo will help their children’s conscious streams (hence “water”) achieve rebirth, maybe even reaching Jodo Shu (Pure Land), released from the sufferings of earthly life.
In the car, driving fireflies to fireworks, in that impure land of the free and the home of the brave, I’m thinking about my own impure land of milk and honey, and so much blood. I’m thinking how this land “between the river and the sea” shall never be free, for neither Palestinians nor Israelis, until enough of both peoples feel free to fight against “a war of no choice,” until we stop killing Jizo.
Easier said than even imagined. The evitable death of children turned from abomination to collateral damage to a necessary evil to a habit. Hamas has basked in that perversion for decades, believing “there are no innocent Israelis,” or Jews for that matter, that they all – men and women, adults and children – are villains in a Manichean war and thus deserve to die.
Now it’s everywhere, in Israel as well. In a recent poll, nearly two-thirds of Israelis (about 85% of Israeli Jews) largely agreed that “there are no innocent people in Gaza” and said they want to know no more about the suffering of the population there. The “no innocent” maxim was taken to its logical extreme in a recent TV interview. Stella Weinstein, former CEO of Naftali Bennet’s party Yemina, who is currently heading a green startup, chastised a Palestinian physician describing the horrors in Gaza. “He’s one of those cuties,” she repeatedly said, “who feeds a terrorist in an incubator.” Let these words sink in: “a terrorist in an incubator.”
Pause to shudder. Then let’s think. If we want to move past incendiary indignation to understand why Israeli Jews feel this way, we may want to start with the Hebrew phrase “חף מפשע,” which is usually read as “innocent.” Yet something is lost in translation. The phrase is composed of two words that together literally mean “crime-proof,” referring to someone who is sheltered from evil, sin, arguably from both within and without. And here’s the thing: none of us is sin-proof. We’re all, the flawed humans that we are, prone to err. Our world is one big crime scene.
Before Cain, the firstborn human, committed the first murder, God instructed him: “sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.” To no avail. Ecclesiastes (7:20) noted, “there is no one so righteous on earth who does [only] good and never sins.” And Jesus too, ever so stoned, famously admonished: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone” (John 8:7). This age-old realization is a double-edged sword; if none of us is thus “innocent,” we are all punishable, certainly by God, whose wrath fanatics are all too keen to carry out. They seem to forget, or could not care, that God himself protected Cain.
I sent the brief clip I took of the fireworks to my family, and they instantly thought of sirens and bombing. My compromised land is transformed nowadays through a pyromaniac’s stone, a coproduction of Hamas and Israel’s nightmare coalition. As if by drowning in Hamas’s Al-Aqsa Flood, we now enact Baldwin’s forewarning: no more water, the fire this time, turning to the destructive alchemy of scorching earth.
As with the original alchemists, with its dark flipside too, the transformation does not end outside; it creeps inside. Have we become Elliot’s Hollow Men in this “cactus land,” where “Lips that would kiss / Form prayers to broken stone”? We shall become hollow if we allow our hearts to turn to stone.
Have I? For weeks and months after October 7, I couldn’t find it in my heart to feel for the people of Gaza, children included. I was not oblivious of the devastation, though perhaps I should have learned more about it. I criticized, early on, Israel’s strategic failure and its disregard for the mounting humanitarian crisis. But I felt little sympathy for the suffering of Palestinian civilians. I thought, and still do, that Hamas is an atrocious organization, genocidal towards both Israelis and Palestinians. The extent to which Hamas basks in the misery of Palestinians, treating them as pawns, abusing them as “human shields,” is, to my knowledge, unprecedented in world history.
I also thought, and still do, that Israel must take severe military actions to crush Hamas, but as with WWII against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, victory cannot be won militarily alone; it must be accompanied by helping civilians rebuild their lives in a viable polity. Israel should have thus collaborated with any potentially moderate ally, including the “lesser evil,” to make for a better future for both peoples. However, Hamas and Netanyahu, and their cronies, couldn't care less about their own people, let alone others. In their cruel alliance, which has become increasingly savage, both benefit from the misery of the people, while some self-serving and self-righteous politicians and “influencers” are having the time of their lives.
But you see, however ill- or well-reasoned my assessment is, it’s mostly just that: a methodical, cool-headed, reasoned position about both peoples – their past, present, and prospects. I kept my feelings almost exclusively for Israelis and their – our – pain. I fell emotionally into the same trap I identified intellectually in others: succumbing to an alluring mirage of an existential zero-sum clash. If I think the land between the river and the sea can be shared, why then can’t my heart? Is the heart such a scarce resource that I can only feel for some at the expense of others? Unwittingly, I answered in the affirmative. I shed no tears for the children of Gaza.
One evening, amidst a Jerusalem protest demanding a hostage deal, I saw a demonstrator holding up a sign, quoting: “I will remove the heart of stone from your body.” I later turned to the source. Ezekiel the prophet thrice spoke of the hearty transformation that the people of Israel should undergo (36:26): “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” The order of transformation is intriguing: the first step is a new heart, then a new spirit, and only then can the heart of stone be removed and replaced with a heart of flesh.
I found a glimmer of that treasured transformation when I sat with my kids to watch a Japanese film my son had been asking me about: Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies, a semi-autobiographical story about Seita and his little sister Setsuko, struggling to survive in the twilight of WWII.
I don’t remember exactly when it hit me. Perhaps it started when Setsuko assembled the fireflies to ignite a lost sparkle in his sister’s eyes, or maybe when she buried them the next morning, thinking about her mother. But by the time Seita, starving, turned to eat earth and hallucinated marble stones as candies, and as the salty fourth element streamed down from my eyes, I realized I wasn’t crying just for two animated Japanese children. I was also crying for the children in Gaza, who, like Seita and Setsuko, perhaps like children everywhere, must never, yet always, suffer for the faults of others – their people, their politicians, their parents. Children are the living scene of the crimes we commit, which we should not merely return to but revise. To remain human, we must also protect the children of our enemies.
I’m in my last summer day in Ithaca now, a month after arriving, over two months since the final class of Dugri (“open talk”), an academic initiative I took with my colleague and friend, Prof Youssef Masharawi, to bring together Jewish and Arab students to a course that seeks a deeper understanding of the conflict, the war, and ourselves. This third iteration of the course was the most tense and intense. And for our last meeting, we invited Maayan Yinon, a physiotherapist, and Youssef’s former student. Maayan, who lost both of her parents on October 7th, spoke openly about her path in life and how one’s heart may try to heal from such tremendous pain. As she told us her story, I saw transformation in our students’ faces; their eyes rekindled with curiosity and compassion, not just for her, but for each other and themselves. After the meeting, they turned their experiences into lucid words.
While Maayan told us about using painted stones from her mother’s art studio to bring people together in creating mandalas for peace, I thought of a Hebrew song with a refrain, “there are people with a heart of stone, there are stones with a heart of man.” Maayan did not find the philosopher’s stone, nor the parents’, and she never, I suspect, looked for the pyromaniac’s. But she may have found her own daughter's stone. Still more, by touching the lives of others by “warm light,” Maayan may have also found Ezekiel’s stone, helping the soul’s alchemy we all so dearly need.
I learned some valuable lessons about myself and others during my pandemic days in Ithaca; I also learned one useless trick: skipping stones. I’m pretty bad at it; I rarely get beyond eight skips. But now, looking back, I see the useless quite insightful: Life is skipping stones, and we should hope to hop as many times as possible (the record is 88), to have our ripples outlast our stone's final descent, and - if we're lucky - to beautifully converge with the ripples of others. And so, I spend my last hour at Cayuga Lake clumsily doing this…