Adam Patric Miller: The Sound of a Teacher’s Silence

Is there a combination of words that would work like a spell to bolster the tenuous ceasefire, increase aid to those in dire need in Gaza, end Israel’s apartheid along with its colonial-genocidal project in Palestine, and empower the ICC to hold Israeli leaders accountable for their crimes against humanity? I don’t think so. But what does it say about me and what does it say about you if people like us don’t speak words to say to the United States government: stop funding this ongoing horror. I watched on my iPhone images of the No Kings protest. It looked like a massive dance of the mightily deceived. Pure self-deception. Millions marched. So? I met a lady at my son’s wedding in Las Vegas who said she brought her t-shirt with its words and wanted to join the protest. Then she asked me how I liked teaching where I did. Where I teach is possibly the best school system in the state, she added. I said, “It’s okay.” Then I explained how school board members, parents in the community, and two state legislators circulated a petition to fire this writer who is a high school English teacher. Before school started this year, administrators said it was my professional responsibility to resign because they couldn’t defend my public criticism of Israel’s genocide to people in the community. There might be protests at school. I deferred. No protests materialized.

I’m disgusted that my tax dollars and your tax dollars ignite in Gaza and have caused immeasurable harm and suffering to Palestinians who simply want to return to their land and be treated with human dignity. I tried to contact my Missouri legislator back when it was Cori Bush before AIPAC money helped Wesley Bell defeat her in the last election. The call to Bush was never returned. I get email from Bell all the time with “What do you think, Adam?” in the subject line. Shame on Bush for being so disorganized she didn’t return a message from a taxpayer. Shame on Bell for taking blood-soaked money. Shame on me for not following up with Bell. But I don’t trust him or our political system. I didn’t vote Democrat or Republican in the last election. Both parties are rotten to the core because both write billion dollar checks to support a genocide. As an American citizen, I’m complicit. You’re complicit. The focus on Trump wanting a crown is misdirection. It is sound and fury signifying nothing.

Look in the mirror. If you don’t see dead children wrapped in white who were trying to play soccer in the rubble of Gaza before they were killed, what do you see? If you look in the mirror and don’t see a mother wailing over the corpse of her son, or crowds weeping over the corpse of a beloved member of the press who was targeted by an Israeli sniper, or the image of a little girl jumping and writhing in flames in her decimated school, who or what do you see in the mirror? Is it a white Christian who loves thy neighbor as long as they’re not a brown or black person or a Muslim? Or is it a Jew who thinks Israel the country is your religion, so it’s fine to bomb and immolate anyone for any reason with American tax dollars if they question or attack Israel’s apartheid state of being? If you’re an American in 2025, you see a person whose hard-earned tax dollars has killed more than 20,000 children. That’s who we, the people, are. We think our right to life, liberty, and happiness trumps the same rights of those premature babies who died in incubators in Gaza’s Al-Shifa and Al-Nasr hospitals. You and I, Democrat and Republican, pulled those plugs.

As a person of Jewish heritage I can’t be silent about a genocide. Jews aren’t the only people who’ve been threatened with annihilation. The European holocaust doesn’t make people like me, people with Jewish ancestry, any more special than any other human being on this planet. And to watch the ethnostate Israel use American money and technology to attempt to wipe out Palestinians while using the argument that anyone who criticizes that squalid inhumane act is an antisemite, makes me disgusted and infuriated every time I look in the mirror. In Kabbalah or Jewish mysticism, it’s possible the combination of letters and words in a specific order contains the cataclysmic energy necessary to change the world—to heal a relationship with a divine presence in exile or what Jews call the Shekhinah. If you look at what’s happened in Gaza, if you were a divine presence, wouldn’t you exile yourself from those unspeakable crimes? The redemption to end the suffering—to borrow from Elie Wiesel’s book of surviving Auschwitz called Night—is linked to that of man. You and I can boycott. You and I don’t have to participate with our tax dollars. You and I can educate ourselves and each other about the Nakba.

A teacher’s job is to inspire students to want to know, to ask the right questions, so they may understand what it takes to make a good life. To be good citizens. To be compassionate. To heal the world. Where I teach in Missouri, I’m not allowed to talk in the classroom about Gaza, I’m not allowed to wear a keffiyeh on school grounds or at school events, I’m not allowed to organize a walk-out to protest a genocide or suggest that students walk out of school to protest the deadly mishandling of gun laws that endanger our lives every day. In the classroom, I’ve been forced into silence. But as a writer of Jewish heritage, it’s my duty to find the right combination of words to stop the murder of our brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and cousins and children in Palestine.

Copyright 2025 Adam Patric Miller

Adam Patric Miller has taught high school for 25 years in three states and currently teaches in St. Louis. He is the author of the book A Greater Monster, a collection of essays selected by Phillip Lopate to win the Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize. He’s won a Pushcart Prize and a Notable Essay Selection in The Best American Essay Series. Miller’s work has appeared in Agni Magazine, The Florida Review, Diagram, The Brevity Blog, The Normal School, and Vox Populi. His op-eds have appeared nationally in over 200 media outlets.