When the gods lie shattered, only we can rebuild the sacred.
I dreamed I walked through Gaza after the bombs.
The air is thick with dust and the acrid stench of things that should never burn.
The ground crunches under my feet—glass, bone, twisted wire.
Men, women, children, and animals—shattered together, as if the blast cannot tell the difference.
But the blasts destroyed more than just bodies and homes.
In the rubble lie the broken symbols of every faith we have ever known.
Crosses splinter into jagged shards of wood.
Torah scrolls torn and sunk into the mud.
Qur’ans burn to ash.
Prayer beads scattered among the bones and pebbles.
Altars smashed, icons defaced, holy books shredded—scattered together, equal in their silence.
And this silence is not only the absence of sound, it is the absence of intervention, and the absence of mercy. Gaza is the graveyard of all the deities who are said to care.
And here, in this ruin, is proof—not in theory but in blood—that no god reaches down to stop the killing, that no heavenly justice strikes the murderers,
and no sacred hand gathers the children before the missiles come.
If mercy, if justice, if healing is to be found,
they will not come from the sky.
They will come only from us—
from human hands, human will, and human courage to name what is sacred and defend it with all we have.
In the rubble of Gaza, the divinities are gone.
Their absence is complete.
And in that absence, a truth rises like smoke:
If the sacred is to survive, it must live in us.
If meaning is to be found again,
we must work to emerge it—
from the bloody dust of Gaza,
from the shattered bones of our illusions,
from the courage to face the world as it is,
and the commitment to make life sacred
for everyone. No exceptions.