Mourner

Embedded deep in the Jewish soul is the mourning one. For thousands of years, being a Jew has been synonymous with knowing how to grieve your people. We shape our calendars around it, we sit low during shiva and we all share that collective but familiar ache even at the happiest of times. 

The times change, they tell you, new skies are bright with opportunity and never-before-seen chances, and the crowds of optimists beneath them tell you to keep faith in ‘times like these’. For too long, we have lived in ‘times like these’. It happens again and again. Almost like clockwork, they shape shift, find new excuses, blame us for the same tragedies under new guises. It is terrifying, dear reader. At school, we ask our history teachers with desperate eyes and cracks in our voices: how did they let it happen? The ordinary people. I wish I didn’t see it, but I do. For it is the ordinary people that we must be most wary of. We sit impatiently in classes, or in traffic as lists of names emerge, and before we can even memorize them, another list comes out. And another. So many now that it is hard to keep track. Even harder to visualize. 

More of our people, gone. Lost to the hatred and evil of a world that knows we bleed each time. Drop by drop, and soon we learn to mourn as we sleep. As we struggle through the day, pushing scraps around on plates passed down from generations who hoped the mourning would end with them. But it never does. There is great joy in Jewishness. But at any given time, we are on edge, wondering when we will be able to exhale fully, and not worry for our loved ones, for ourselves, for our hostages. I wonder often when our holidays will outlive that trope of “they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.” When Jewish children are not born into homes of fear, their parents pray each night that they are not raising the last generation. Events like this remind me of that fear. I am so well-versed in mourning now that I seem to be doing it passively each day. I am out of faith, out of the capacity to hear an outsider’s prayer, out of patience. 

Yet, out of this despair each time comes a glimmering thread of strength. We weave this into the fabric of our very being, and we take the hand we have been dealt and blow the whole house of cards right down. It is our community that will get us through this all, remembering names and faces and stories. Knowing that, looking in one another’s eyes, we are all as burned down as each other. It is not the mourning that defines us, dear reader, it is our ability to rebuild and endure. To continue, taking the legacies of those we have lost with us, never forgetting them, and just as importantly, never forgetting ourselves. The truest form of defiance is our persistence. It is knowing that we are not the last generation, simply because we cannot be. It is remembering to light a candle for those we have lost, and then taking that light out into the world with each passing breath. The mourning soul will never go away, of course, but the Jewish soul will never give in to a grieving definition.