“What are you doing in Jerusalem?” Awdah asked me. It was a hot Friday morning in Um Al-Khair in the fall of 2022 , a small village in Massafer Yatta, an area in the southern West Bank. I’d met Awdah a few times before — once in 2018, when I’d first visited Um Al-Khair, and now that I was living in Jerusalem, I’d started coming to the village most Fridays to join their solidarity work days — but this was the first time, as far as I can remember, that we’d really spoken.

I didn’t want to say that I was living in Jerusalem for rabbinical school. Not when the Israeli settlers of Carmel, bedecked in kippot and tzitzit, lived in suburban homes only a few dozen feet from Um Al Khair’s wooden, metal, and concrete ones; not when Israeli soldiers, many of them obviously religious, could harass or shut down the village on a moment’s notice; not when nearly every aspect of Um Al-Khair — its land (much of it now under Carmel’s control), its minimal access to water, its lack of access to electricity, its inhabitants’ ability to travel — was dominated by an apartheid system designed and executed by a state claiming to act in the name of Judaism. “I’m here for school,” I said simply.

To my horror, Awdah, eternally curious and chatty, followed up. “What kind of school?”

Realizing that I couldn’t get out of the question — and beginning to feel like it was dishonest to try — I responded embarrassedly, “Rabbinical school.”

“Oh, I know lots of rabbis,” Awdah said, smiling. “But they’re all women!”

I don’t know how many times I’ve told that story. I know that it’s funny, and that people like hearing the inversion of the typical “So you’re a woman rabbi?” or other sexist comments that so many of my friends have encountered over the years. But on a deeper level, what’s stuck with me about it is Awdah’s kindness and generosity. That in spite of his constant exposure to a chauvinistic, violent, and racist Judaism, his image of what it meant to be a rabbi was of the many non- and anti-Zionist female and non-binary rabbis and rabbinical students — many of them my friends, role models, and teachers — who’d been in solidarity with Um Al-Khair over the years. That what mattered to him, above all, was who showed up.

He was not interested in or mollified by my shame. What he wanted me to know was that there were people like me who had struggled alongside him, and that I could choose to be like them if I wanted. If you stand with us, I can almost hear him saying, you are welcome here.

I’m sure that some of that welcoming-ness was strategic: Awdah was an incredible organizer, and he built a network of friends and comrades across the world. Um Al-Khair, with only a few hundred residents, surrounded on three sides by Carmel, and in Area C of the West Bank (which is under Israeli military and civil authority), has few resources in its struggle to stay on its land in the face of relentless violence, and Awdah, alongside his fellow activists, was able to draw a steady stream of solidarity activists to be present in Um Al-Khair, as well as international attention, which provided some limited support for the village.

But Awdah’s generosity and commitment to relationship also went, as Freud would put it, “beyond the pleasure principle” — it was not merely instrumental, but had something disruptive and immense about it. Awdah wanted material solidarity, but he also demanded and offered a spiritual solidarity. He wanted his comrades to be his friends, and he wanted them to take on the responsibilities that come with friendship: to stay for dinner, to sleep over, to come for celebrations, to play with kids, to get into arguments, to drink endless tea.

Last Monday, Awdah was shot and killed by an Israeli settler, Yinon Levi, who entered Um Al-Khair with an excavator, destroying olive trees and a water pipe, and knocking Awdah’s cousin, Ahmad, unconscious. When the villagers tried to stop the excavator from coming any further, Levi got out and started shooting.

When the Israeli army came, they stood smiling with Levi as he pointed out which Palestinians he wanted arrested. And though Levi was eventually arrested, he was soon released to house arrest, from which he was also since released. The night of Awdah’s murder, and the nights after, the army raided Um Al-Khair, arresting more than a dozen of Awdah’s family members, many of whom have not been released. When friends and extended family came on Tuesday to Awdah’s family’s mourning tent, the army came and expelled them. Most horrifically, the army is refusing to give back Awdah’s body unless his family agrees to bury him outside of the village, at night, with fewer than fifteen people present. In response, the women of Um Al-Khair have launched a hunger strike. Meanwhile, on Friday evening, the settlers of Carmel marched into the olive grove they planted on Um Al-Khair’s land to daven Kabbalat Shabbat.

It’s been horrifying and surreal to see all of this from so far away. I still can’t believe that Awdah’s actually dead — I keep thinking that there must have been a mistake, or that Awdah will show up at a protest demanding the return of his own body. And perhaps its naive, in light of the genocide Israel is carrying out in Gaza, to be surprised that its response to Awdah’s murder has been to arrest his family and hold his body hostage, or that Carmel would join so callously in the carnival of domination.

Since his murder, I’ve been thinking about the story of Cain and Abel. On the most basic level, perhaps, because it’s the story of a farmer (like Levi) who murdered a shepherd (which Awdah was). But also because of a midrash that imagines their conflict:

Cain [sought] to conquer the world… [Cain and Abel;] said to each other, “Let us divide the world.” Cain said, “You take moveable property and I will take the land.” They divided it – Abel took the movable property and Cain took the land, and Cain sought to remove Abel from the world. Abel went about the world, and Cain would pursue him, saying, “Leave what is mine.” Abel went to the hills, and Cain said, “Leave what is mine,” until he stood against him and killed him.

Levi, Carmel, and the entire state of Israel have tried, again and again, to remove Awdah and Um Al-Khair from the world, demolishing homes, denying the regular provision of water and electricity, allowing or encouraging settler attacks, stealing their land, repeating, “Leave what is mine.” Keep in mind that Um Al-Khair itself was established by refugees forcibly expelled from the Arad desert by Israeli forces during the Nakba.

What happened to Awdah was not a random act of violence: everything from Levi’s presence, to the army’s response, to Carmel’s reaction, is a reflection of the same violent, eliminationist chauvinism responsible for the genocide in Gaza, the attempt to remove all of Gaza from the world.

But I’ve also been thinking about the story of Cain and Abel because the Jewish mystical tradition teaches that Moses is a gilgul — a reincarnation — of Abel. Awdah never had, perhaps, the option that Moses had — to remain in a palace at a distance from his oppressed siblings. But Awdah, too, could have chosen not to become a leader in Um Al-Khair, not to put a target on his back by being one of the most prominent faces of the village’s resistance, not to publish uncountable articles and posts with his name on them when the settlers and army knew exactly where he lived, not to spend every single day fighting.

Or, perhaps, neither of them could have chosen differently. Moses, we are told, instinctively joins the Israelite struggle as soon as “he went out to his kinsfolk and witnessed their labors.” It was his inability to turn away — the same quality that led him to notice the burning bush — that made him who he was. So too, I can’t imagine Awdah as anyone other than he was; I’m not sure that he could have chosen, even if he’d wanted, not to have fought the way he did.

I don’t know how to tie all of this together or finish it. “I don’t want this poem to end,” as Mahmoud Darwish wrote. All I know is that we have to fight the way Awdah did: with love and generosity, with an insurmountable dedication to the freedom and dignity of every person, and with an endless commitment to each other. ▼

Rabbi Aron Wander is an organizer and writer living in Boston. More of his writing can be found here, where these words were originally published.