On Saying Goodbye

Graduations and Protests

Photo by Cole Keister on Unsplash

About the author: Ed Watson is a PhD candidate at Yale University, focusing on questions of theology and conceptualization. He is currently working on a dissertation exploring the relationships between Christian talk of grace and racial difference.

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Being in school means saying a lot of goodbyes. Across the seven years so far that I have been connected with Yale Divinity School, I have known eleven graduating classes. I have been to three graduations in person, watched three online. Every year, hundreds of people say goodbye to classmates they will likely never see again, simply because the time of their coincidence has come to its proper end. Every year, I am flooded with the feeling of how lucky everyone has been to spend time with one another—even if they only spoke a couple of times, even if they only shared one classroom space together. Everyone who says goodbye has, at one point or another, made another person laugh, or reassured them in a difficult moment, or been kind to someone without obligation. This was true of my classmates in 2019. It is also true of the students who graduated last Monday. Everyone who received a diploma accrediting their academic achievements has at some point communicated joy to their peers. And now, most will never meet each other in person again. They have said their goodbyes.

There is, of course, a degree of sadness in saying goodbye. It is sad to think that almost all of the faces that have made up one's social world will soon be remembered rather than seen. For me, there is a sadness in remaining in place (for now!) while others move on, knowing that next year a new class will arrive and learn to make the school their own, repeating many of the same dynamics while also bringing something irreducibly new. 

This sadness is nonetheless set alongside the memory of joy, and the joy of memory. One of my deepest theological convictions is that the love of God is given in the love we give each other. Every time one student reminds another that they do not have to prove anything but only need to learn and find joy in that learning; every time a student makes another feel the lightness that comes with knowing one is in the right place at the right moment—every one of these times is a time of God's love made real. And one of the most beautiful things about God's love is that it is non-instrumental. Whatever our own intentions, this love is not given to bring about certain effects. It is given for its own sake, for no other reason than that it is good for creatures to love and to be loved. A kind word loses none of its value for being spoken by or to someone I will never see again. The value of this word carries the value of this single moment into eternity. The value of this word gives density to our goodbyes.

There has also been a strangeness for many students graduating this year, certainly for many of those I saw graduate this week. This strangeness was made visible by the Palestinian flags waved throughout the ceremony, carefully and forcefully incorporated into all the pomp and circumstance. It was made visible by caps decorated with “Free Gaza” or a Star of David. Among other things, this is the strangeness of celebrating in times of mass violence. In conversations both public and private, students have wrestled with what it means to go about the normal course of things when their peers across the world are being killed. Jewish students have spoken of the fear that followed October 7th, of the sense that if they were to be attacked, they could not rely on their non-Jewish neighbors for safety. Pro-Palestinian students (a significant number of whom are Jewish) have spoken of how wrong it feels to celebrate when the entire infrastructure of Palestinian society is being destroyed and when there are no universities left in Gaza. Some have wrestled with the fact that the universities conferring their degrees are the same universities that called the police on them just weeks earlier—and yet that this is the space they have for celebrating one another and saying their goodbyes. 

I am writing about this because I was struck this week by how the weight of saying goodbye illustrates why so many students have protested over the last few months. Whatever else may be the case, and no matter how many talking heads make appeals to complexity, the fact is that tens of thousands of civilians in Israel-Gaza have been robbed of the capacity to say goodbye. This is true for those killed on October 7th, as well as many of those taken hostage, who will never be able to say goodbye and who will never be met again. And it is true of every Palestinian whose community has been obliterated, whose home has been destroyed, who has been bombed, displaced, shot, and starved. All that is of inestimable value about life in community, everything that invested the goodbyes spoken this week with so much meaning, has been decimated in Gaza. 

I will not write in support of Hamas, nor will I write in support of Israel's government or military.¹ I also hold it to be non-controversial that (a) universities should not financially support or benefit from weapons manufacturers, and (b) it is abhorrent for university administrators to call militarized police, or any police, on their students. I will, however, speak and write in support of the students who have had the moral courage and conviction to stand for others halfway across the globe. These students have been castigated and slandered by every wing of the national media, as well as both Presidential candidates. They have been called violent and anti-Semitic, called “self-hating Jews” and dangerous criminals, arrested and expelled. Every student that I know who has protested, in any capacity, has borne witness to a different truth. At the most fundamental level, when talking about why they are compelled to protest, they have expressed a refusal to shy away from the sheer horror of the fact that for so many Palestinians, there will be no next year; that there is no possibility of saying goodbye, only the barely imaginable weight of loss and desolation, leaving no home to return to. These students have felt this loss as coincident with their own times of community and refused to accept this as a bearable state of affairs. They are driven by care for the kind words through which love is given, for the possibility of those moments that invest our time with eternal and unconditional significance. 

One of the heaviest class sessions I taught this year involved reading Lamentations and Song of Songs side by side. We read aloud a passage from Song of Songs expressing the divine delight of intimacy and passion. Then we read a passage from Lamentations, looking straight into absolute destruction and desolation. We wrestled with what it means that these books are made simultaneous by the canon—that the speakers in Song of Songs will always now live in the same time of God, and bear the same destruction, as the author of Lamentations. And we dwelt with the fact that the beauty expressed in Song of Songs is what makes the destruction of Lamentations so wounding. We dwelt with the fact that violent mass destruction is an attempt to destroy possibilities for intimacy, desire, kindness, joy, and closeness. 

In its own way, and taking into explicit account the number of times Jewish people have been targeted for annihilation, the simultaneity of destruction in Gaza and graduation in America manifests this same unbearable truth. Those same things that make saying goodbye to classmates so significant are what make the destruction in Gaza (as well as university and governmental support of this destruction) unconscionable. The students who protest know and feel this. They have been driven to act by this. Whatever else might be the case, this is true. Now many of them are going into the wider world, to try and work against the forces of death. Their witness places a burden of responsibility on those who would seek aloofly to judge or evaluate their protest. It is a responsibility not to shy away from how the unconditional value of joy and kindness throws into sharp relief the evil of destroying an entire people's possibilities for life. 

The love of God is given in the love we give each other. Every moment of this love is a moment of incalculable worth. And so when we say goodbye to one another, it is in the knowledge that the worth of the time we have shared cannot be qualified or diminished. So, too, the horror of the violence that destroys the possibility of this time cannot be rationalized away. It can only be borne witness to and fought, even and especially as we celebrate and say goodbye to one another half a world away.

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1. My reasons for this are not especially important, but since you deserve to know my commitments: allowing for the decades of violent history that has produced Hamas, the violence committed against Israeli citizens was an atrocity that showed vicious disregard for human life. It also seems clear enough that Hamas' strategy was to provoke Israel into responding with such indiscriminate force that (a) the conflict will be carried forward by the survivors for generations to come, and (b) both Israel and America's standing on the global stage will be severely undermined, meaning the conflict might be winnable in forty years. If this is right, then Hamas' military wing has treated the lives of its civilians as collateral damage for a long-term strategy. The Netanyahu government has murderously obliged Hamas in this strategy, showing just as vicious a disregard for life with far greater military power, wreaking a different order of untrammeled destruction entirely. Palestinian civilians have been afforded no weight in the calculus of global power, and the only long-term effects of this strategy will be continued destruction for generations to come. I will not broach any question of Zionism in this post, not because this question is not of fundamental importance, but because I believe that the unconditional value of human community holds true no matter what is true in this regard. Brenna Bhandar's The Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018) speaks most precisely, I think, to these questions. At the same time, I take fear of those who wish to visit absolute destruction on Jewish people seriously, and everything I write here would apply to an inverse situation.