Like many members of the Jewish Community, I felt grief and sadness on hearing last week that six additional hostages taken in the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 had been found murdered. And yet, I felt uncomfortable with how much attention people paid to mourning these particular individuals. Their names and pictures continue to be posted widely in major news outlets and social media, while the lives of more than 40,000 Palestinians — mostly civilians, and many of them children — have gone largely unnamed and unseen.

In acknowledging deaths within a political context, activists often invoke the rallying cry, “say their names.” When we acknowledge the death of an individual, we make them real. But every life lost is real: someone’s child. Someone’s sibling. Someone’s parent. Someone’s beloved.

The losses of those we feel connected to cuts at our hearts. But because there’s so much loss in the world — more than the heart can handle — we often numb ourselves from feeling grief over the deaths of those who are different from us in ethnicity, religion, geography, race, or ideology. Or because we feel threatened by people on “the other side” of a conflict.

While this may be an understandable human survival instinct that can prevent us from drowning in grief, it can also be dangerous. When we polarize, turning a conflict into “us” vs. “them,” we minimize the deaths of “others” (whoever these others might be), while amplifying the importance of the deaths on “our side.”

Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has an important TED talk about the danger of a single story. And there are so many “single stories” about the Israel/Palestine conflict that paint one side as totally in the right, and the other side as pure evil. This allows us to see the dead on “the other side” as nameless and the dead on “our side” as martyrs.

But in reality, the histories of the Jews and Palestinians and their relationship to their homeland are nuanced, tangled, overlapping, disparate, and often contradictory. Finding a pathway through the knot of this conflict involves learning and embracing all the stories, and mourning all the dead with the full weight of our hearts until we no longer see one side as the “enemy.”

As we approach the Jewish New Year, a time when people reflect on their shortcomings and resolve to “return” to a path that’s more in line with whatever one’s concept may be of “the Divine,” I’m looking at the ways that I fall into this trap of othering people to the point where I can ignore their pain and whatever direct or indirect role I might have in causing it. This is hard in a culture that thrives on minimizing the humanity of our “so-called” enemies and making them faceless and nameless.

In the Iraq and Vietnam wars, dead civilians were referred to as “collateral damage,” their names unspoken. In World War I and World War II, the humanity of so-called enemies was trivialized by using racial slurs. And when white settlers forced Indigenous people from their ancient lands, murdering many in the process, they referred to those inhabitants as “savages.”

I hope all of us can look at the ways we label and separate our supposed “enemies” from our friends and allies, and find a way to hold each life lost in the Gaza war with equal attention and sacredness. As Rabbi Hillel said, “If I am not for myself, who will be, and, if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”

D. Dina Friedman is a writer who lives in Hadley.