Let my right hand wither

Made by author.

The Tuesday after labour day weekend is always a big deal for educators; after a summer away, we go back to school. Everyone highly anticipates meeting their students, getting the year started right, wanting them to know how excited you are to learn with them all year. Which made this year’s first of school particularly awful for me, as I was unable to move my right arm. 

The previous Saturday night, we got the news about the six hostages. That night, I lay awake until the middle of the night, sometimes weeping, sometimes raging, sometimes feeling literally paralyzed by helplessness. Which made the next morning even stranger when I woke up and found that I was in a tremendous amount of physical pain. The next day it was even worse. By Tuesday, I couldn’t turn my neck and couldn’t move my right arm. I was diagnosed with a compressed nerve, but the reason remained somewhat elusive — from ideas that it was a slipped disc at first, to a severe muscle spasm. Whatever it was that was causing it, I was paralyzed by more than just grief, and my right hand was withering. 

In Jewish liturgy, there’s a line: If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither. It comes from the first exile, in Babylon, from the 6th century BCE. The strange thing is, even if you wanted to forget Israel and Jerusalem at this point, it would be nigh on impossible to. The Toronto Jewish community, it has transpired, has put together their own security force. Social media was rife with images of said Jewish security force strolling down a pedestrian area of the University of Toronto with everyone you would expect to be upset about it predictably upset. And yet, simultaneously, that same campus was filled with literal rioters with smoke bombs and red Hamas targets and masked faces. In the middle of the campus that I once proudly strode, where I graduated from. As Aviva Klompas puts it, it’s “so shocking” that Jews felt that they needed an extra level of security here. 

This same Toronto has throbbed with barely-concealed antisemitism since October 9th, when the first “ALL OUT FOR PALESTINE” rally was held, in Nathan Phillips Square (our centre of government), when people literally celebrated the massacre of our family and friends. I had to take time off of work last year because I was so broken, so terrified, after numerous threats against my school — entirely for the sin of happening to be Jewish. 

Which brings us back to Hersh. For so many people, the death of those hostages — now we know a death that came in a tunnel where they could not stand up, with little ventilation, with little food and water, where they were so weak of body but strong of spirit that they fought unsuccessfully to protect Eden and Carmel at the end — fundamentally broke a lot of people. It brought everyone right back to October 7th, with the feeling of helplessness and hopelessness. I woke up the morning of first day of sitting Shiva, and was literally paralyzed on my right side. The day that they got up from Shiva, I was able to move my arm again. Is this the result of excessive amounts of pain medication and daily physio? Probably. But in retrospect, it feels like something else. 

We here in the Diaspora are in a different kind of pain than our brethren in Israel, but not different “better.” Are we being targeted by Hezbollah and Hamas rockets? No. Are our husbands marching off to war, leaving us raising children by ourselves for long stretches of time? No. Thank God. And yet. The State of Israel represents the end of the 2000 years of Jewish helplessness, and while it has been under existential threat from the moments of its creation, it has created the military strength necessary to deal with that. My Israeli family is under physical threat, but they have a state and an army to protect them. We too are under threat in some way here, but we don’t have any of those protections. We have the Toronto police, which are amazing, but we don’t really have any other organs of power looking out for us. From our Prime Minister to our Mayor, there’s a strong messaging of “well, you can’t be overly antisemitic I guess but up until that line is 100% fine and an expression of democracy and free speech and ehhhh it’s the Jews they don’t vote for me anyway, so I’m not going to go out of my way to trouble myself.” We are confronted regularly with people who have no compunction in attiring themselves in Hamas iconography and using Hamas targeting symbols unironically. We are afraid. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t fear that this isn’t all building towards something much bigger and much scarier — at which point our PM and our Mayor will say “oh well that is a problem” but by that point it will be too late. 

My doctor looked at me, kindly, last week, and told me that all of this was a trauma response. That with everything building with the return to school and the return of protestors, the news about the hostages was just too much. But maybe it’s the Jewish neshama inside that wants my body to remember Jerusalem, to remember the hostage families, to be as physically incapacitated, as physically paralyzed as they are while they sit Shiva, not only for their children but over the hope that we all had that they would one day return to us. 

I don’t know if I believe in God. I never have been able to figure that one out completely. As a scholar of history, it can be hard to reconcile a benevolent God with the trauma of 2000 years. But from the rain last weekend in Tel Aviv, to the literal withering of my right hand, I cannot deny that I feel something else at work. We are all bound together, maybe by God, maybe by history, maybe by trauma. If nothing else, I believe in the Jewish people. I believe in our ability to survive this. And for right now, maybe that’s enough.