Every Jewish body is a scroll

Every Jewish body holds a history.

Not metaphor. Not myth.

Our bodies are archives:

Our bones remember the feel of desert sand — standing under the great howl at Sinai and wandering in the desert, yes, but also Rafah.

Our shoulders remember the weight of carrying our dead — in white shrouds, in olive-green stretchers, in body bags torn open in the sun on October 7.

We carry pogroms and massacres in our DNA, gas chambers in our lungs, the sound of the siren as part of our heartbeat.

Every scar is a signature. Every freckle could be a p tracing a village once burned. Every tendon remembers fleeing or being forced to leave — Egypt, Spain, Poland, Ethiopia, Baghdad, Lviv, and yes, Gaza in 2005.

Every breath is an act of resistance.

Every heartbeat echoes with the thunder of Sinai.

Every Jewish body is a scroll.

And on Simchat Torah 5784, we became scrolls torn open.

Babies burned in their cribs.

Women raped beside the very mezuzot that marked their doorposts.

Entire families slaughtered while still wearing their pajamas.

And some of us — soldiers and survivors and ordinary folk — are still pulling pieces of our lives from the ashes of Be’eri, Nir Oz, Kfar Aza.

We are still counting the hostages.

Still keeping their names safe in our mouths.

So of course, we are tired.

We are tired from the flood of funerals.

Tired from clutching phones at 3 a.m. waiting for that one-word WhatsApp: “Alive.”

Tiered from the missiles and the sirens and stockpiling water and comforting traumatized children.

Tired of trying to explain our grief to the world while they tally our dead like a ledger of legitimacy.

And we are tired that once again that age old hate has shambled from thick pools of rot and darkness — a horror that stinks like a Golgatham, a rank stench so insidious and vile that it has infected the minds of our once-allies and friends, making it impossible for us to feel safe and brave and generous in the face of every agonizing shard of complexity.

And we are also tired of what’s being done in our name.

We are tired of watching children pulled from rubble in Khan Younis and being told it’s the price of survival and the only way.

Tired of checkpoints that harden into walls.

Tired of a government more concerned with their own chairs than the empty chairs of he hostages — a government that speaks of divine mandate while demanding we trust the fate of our children to them.

Tired of Jewish terror — yes, terror — in the hills of the West Bank.

Tired of the settler who threw a Molotov cocktail into a Palestinian home and burn a family in their beds.

Tired of the politicians who looked the other way.

Tired of hearing the word “Jew” become synonymous with the wrong kind of power, with force, with silence in the face of thuggery, violence and death.

So yes, of course we are tired.

We carry not only the memory of the Shoah,
but the murder of Yitzhak Rabin.

Not only the cry of Shema Yisrael on the way to Treblinka, but the screams of a boy named Muhammad Abu Khdeir, burned alive by Jewish hands.

We carry the weight of the hostages still held in darkness, the weight of those murdered on October 7 — their lives torn from them in the worst moments of terror.

And we carry, too, the unbearable sight of the unseeing eyes of children killed in a war we did not start, whose names we may never know.

We carry it all — the grief, the guilt, the fury, the impossible questions — because we must. Because to set it down would be to forget, and forgetting is a luxury we cannot afford.

This is not a betrayal of our people to say this.
This is the work of being Jewish:

To hold both the wound and the weapon.
To remember that “Israel” means one who wrestles — to become who we are meant to be.

Because every Jewish body maps the future, too.
Not just an atlas of survival.
But a star map of Conscience.

We can choose vengeance or vision.
A bunker mentality, or a brittle, brave hope.
We can build a state with high walls, or a society with wide windows.

We are not just survivors anymore.
We are decision-makers.

And what we do next — in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem — and all over the world in our communities —
will be written on our bodies
and in the Book of Life.

If we are tired, let it be from wrestling — all night if we must —
with the angel of truth who was thrown to the ground and shattered in a zillion pieces for us to find.

Let us wrestle and pick up the shards,
until we emerge wounded, yes, but also blessed.