PHOTO: Singer-songwriter Adam Stockman peforms in this undated photograph. (Courtesy Adam Stockman)

By BRUCE SHUTAN
For The Jewish Review
As a Portland-based Jewish singer-songwriter and creative media professional, Adam Stockman has long considered peace, love and understanding the best ways to slay hate. 
The Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel put that sensibility to the test. His connection to the holy land runs deep. Stockman has visited about a dozen times, including a half year of schooling there when he was 17. 
His parents, who became Modern Orthodox when he was six years old, made Aliyah to Israel in recent years with his two much-younger siblings – a brother who had been stationed in Gaza with the Israel Defense Forces but is now based outside Jenin and sister who is an IDF medic at the Tel Aviv central headquarters. He also has aunts, uncles and cousins who’ve resided there since the early 1950s. 
His Jewish journey has been a meandering one. Born in Las Vegas, he attended a Jewish community day school, Chabad day school and briefly a yeshiva before moving away from studying Talmud and deciding to no longer live an observant Jewish lifestyle. Instead, he found solace and refuge in making music. 
Music became a calling for him at an early age and is now a side hustle. “My grandma told my parents when I was three that if they put me in piano lessons, she’d give me her piano,” he says, also recalling early memories of being in a recording studio when several cousins produced an album. He wrote his first song at age 10 after his grandmother passed away, then four years later he taught himself to play guitar. 
Torn between staying in Israel or returning to Las Vegas, he reconnected with a great aunt and uncle in Portland where his family had grown used to observing Passover. Stockman appreciated Portland’s artistic side and greenery. So, he moved in with them and attended Lincoln High School in his senior year in 2011, then attended the Actors Conservatory in Portland where he was active as a songwriter and often performed at coffee shops. He also earned a marketing degree and received multimedia certificates from Portland State University.
For nearly a decade in his 20s, he didn’t write any songs – stifled by a challenging relationship he was in during that time – and instead, focused on filmmaking, which led to a business specializing in videos marketing website design called Objectively Good Media.  
When that relationship ended, the music began flowing out of him again. He connected with the Atlantis Underground, a community of songwriters in the Pacific Northwest who gathered once a week for six months of the year to share original works. “It really raised the bar for me as a musician and songwriter,” he notes. He did that for about a year before the horrific events of Oct. 7, 2023 unfolded. Nearly a month later, he flew to Israel to visit his family. 
Healing through travel
His immediate reaction to Oct. 7 was one of fear and concern for his family in Israel but also the Jewish people as a whole. His brother hadn’t checked in for more than two months after the attacks and was only available for a two-hour visit at a park outside Gaza while dug in with his combat unit.
As a teenager who rebelled against being religious, Stockman suddenly felt galvanized as a Jew to help shed light on the atrocities and conflict as well as promote mutual understanding and heal deep wounds on both sides. “Even though I’d never really used my social media presence in any way politically, I was making videos and giving people who didn’t know that Israel was the size of New Jersey or the only [national] home for Jews on the planet the context they needed,” he says.
Stockman got busy, releasing an EP with three original songs about the deepening conflict in Israel. He wrote most of the title track, “Garden,” in Portland right before flying to Israel in November 2023 and the rest of it in Jerusalem shortly after arriving. Conceived as a gentle prayer, standout lyrics include: “Your side’s wrong and my side’s right/That kind of talk won’t end this fight/We’re people all people/All brainwashed and blood soaked/And all in our grief/We’re looking for enemies/But talk to me, talk to me/I’ll listen, I’ll listen/I’m always a student to moldable mind/And in the fury of passion/We might lose our reason/ That’s reason enough to stay kind.” 
He also included a line inspired by a Tel Aviv resident who, upon hearing his hope for Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli collaboration, cooperation and empathy for a more beautiful future, told him, “I’ll write on your tomb: ‘He tried!’” Another song called “Definitions,” which he wrote in the attic at his parents’ home in Zikhron Ya’akov, Israel, was the most coded of the three tracks. The opening line is “Wandering light/How does it feel/Thrown into quarrels over what’s even real.”
Having just returned to his family’s town from Tel Aviv where he experienced for the first time multiple alarms, rockets and sirens, Stockman remembers being in a field when he ran for cover under a concrete awning upon hearing and seeing conflict in the sky above.
Each time he traveled to Israel, it was seen only through a Jewish lens. But this time he wanted to make sure he interacted with others, including Palestinians. “Jerusalem is a really incredible place for that because everyone lives on top of each other, even if they’re in their own little insular communities,” he explains. 
The first person he met who became a good friend was a second-generation Palestinian shopkeeper in the Old City in Jerusalem named Khaled. He also met a French photographer named Sasha. “The three of us would walk 12 or 13 miles a day talking big as if we could fix things, how would we fix them?” he recalls. 
In addition, Stockman met a girl in her 20s on the rooftops of the Old City wearing a hijab who was studying architecture at the Arab American University in Ramallah. They spoke for two and a half hours about school, music and art, then she trusted him enough to open up about the war. They agreed to meet for Friday lunch, which is a special ritual. “My dream would be that the Jewish villages go to the Arab villages for Friday lunch, and the Arabs go to the Jewish villages for Friday lunch,” he says. 
The girl, who he befriended, was born and raised in Jerusalem but never had a conversation with a Jewish person until him other than mundane encounters at a store or asking for directions. She helped him translate his powerful song of peace, “Shema,” into Arabic.
Stockman had been following Omdim B’Yachad, an organization run by Palestinians and Israelis that has been building dialog and organizing for mutual equity, empathy and understanding on a very grassroots level. The group, which translates into “standing together,” served as an inspiration for “Shema” – though most of it came from his upbringing as a modern Orthodox Jew. In the comments section in one of the group’s videos, he saw a beautiful peaceful message from a man named Yehya in Gaza with whom he messaged and began video chatting. 
Yehya was living in a tent with his wife and three children trying to raise enough money on GoFundMe to cross into Cairo, Egypt. Prior to Oct. 7, he made social media videos for a shawarma shop and played drums. While one minute Stockman would be video chatting with his brother on an IDF base in Gaza, the next moment he’d be video chatting with his new friend in a tent there those kids were crying hoping they didn’t die while bombs were going off all around them. 
Sitting on a couch at a friend’s apartment in Tel Aviv where he has a show the next day before returning to Portland, lyrics and music for his song “Shema” spilled out of him in about 15 minutes. It was the culmination of everything he had been absorbing during his post-Oct. 7 travels in Israel that he hadn’t yet articulated. His initial reaction was that he couldn’t really play the song about peace and love, which would just piss off everyone because it didn’t accuse, blame or antagonize anyone.
He shared it with his friend Shani who convinced him to play the song at his show the next night – a calculated risk that paid off when he noticed beaming and smiling faces reacting to his provocative lyrics. “This bald muscular Israeli dude said to me afterwards,’ I did not agree with everything you say, but I respect you for saying it. We need more people like this.’ And that was validation,” he says. Before leaving, he shot a music video of “Shema” and even recruited Yehya to play drums. 
When he first posted his new music on Instagram, half the likes were from Palestinians and half were from Israelis, including people in the IDF and Gazans alike. Stockman then knew he was on the right track with that messaging.
Stockman, a self-proclaimed progressive liberal, considers October 7 a wake-up call for Jews around the world. He quotes lyrics from “Shema” to sum up his thoughts and feelings: “Instead of this or that, instead of us or them/It’s the rockets and the famine and the rapes to condemn/And in the name of Allah and in the name of Hashem/Let’s build our kids the world that takes better care of them.”
Facing antisemitism 
His cry for peace took shape in Portland soon right after Oct. 7 when he had a pop-up shop for a few weeks at PSU to promote a party card game he developed for about five years with the help of a Kickstarter campaign. Students at that time sought to pass a resolution to boycott, divest and sanction Israel, a campaign known as BDS. His pop-up became a refuge for Jewish students and those who were actively involved in the Hillel on campus to gather and petition the student council on why it wasn’t in the school’s best interest to pursue that resolution and discuss their approach.
He’s clearly bothered by antisemitic protests seen on the far left of the U.S. political spectrum and believes Hamas cannot ever be put back in charge of Gaza. “I just don’t get down with anything that hateful or destructive,” he says.
Stockman references a Facebook group called Liberal Jewish Scientists whose members are progressive, liberal, queer Jewish folks mostly in the United States who found themselves ostracized from their communities after October 7 and suddenly faced with no-Zionists-allowed bans to events and communities and weaponization of the word Zionism in a derogatory context compared with evil ideologies throughout history. 
“It’s definitely a scary place to be,” he says. “One of the issues I’ve seen among progressive Jewish people, me included, is that they find themselves alienated in this current climate.”
Reflective and hopeful about a better future, Stockman cites the final line of his song “Garden:” “Trust is a garden/There’s a part in this for you.” That’s how he views this decades-old conflict. “It’s effort,” he says. “Gardens don’t happen by sitting back. It’s cultivated, and it’s intentional – and at the end, things bloom that are positive and beautiful – that sustain us and keep us going. That’s why I decided to call the EP “Garden.” 
The song features bells from an Armenian Church, a call to prayer from a mosque in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem and “Lo Yisa Goy,” an important song whose message is that nations shall not lift up swords against one another, sung at his family’s home during Shabbat. “There’s a beautiful little interlude between “Shema” and “Garden” where you hear all three of those sounds blended together,” he says.

Bruce Shutan is  a versatile journalist based in Portland, Ore., who has written for nearly 140 publications, corporate entities and individuals over four decades. He also ghostwrites independently published business books and memoirs and is an at-large member of the Cultural Synagogue Board of Directors. Find him online at bruceshutan.com/