Of Memories We Grieve, As Life Chooses To Continue

“Not Dead Yet,” the caption above a black cat on a sticker I saw recently proclaims. Lately that has taken on greater and greater meaning.

The end of the secular 2012 began an era in my life where I grieved loss, stopped wanting to exist, and just may have embarked on some of my worst life choices in order to repair a past that had already broken me. I’ve spent more and more of that time grieving people I’ve cared about, over the years.

October 7th hit me in a different way. I wasn’t in Israel and anyone I’d know who was is someone I hadn’t talked to for years. That said, I know I have cousins and some of my aunt’s former in-laws, as well as people I have met in person years ago or known online at some point. None of that was the connection, nor was my recently rekindled connection with Israeli politics due to the judicial reform and ToI’s coverage of it, it was the music.

And maybe very specifically it was Avi Nissim and Lior Perlmutter, a DJ duo known as Astral Projection, even though I didn’t realize it yet. While my festival-attending former friends had been getting turned on to dubstep in the late 2000s, I’d introvertedly continued my lifelong journey with electronica by getting more into trance music, especially psytrance and related subgenres that all tend to connect Europe, Goa, and Israel in some way. Often Greece ends up in the musical mix.

It is unlikely that I knew anyone at Psyduck or Supernova, the two music festivals I know of in Israel that were attacked on October 7th. I believe fewer people know about Psyduck because of that yet it was not safe from the terrorist attack on nearby Kibbutz Nirim, which was a much smaller and more intimate festival. After October 7th, listening to and supporting Israeli trance musicians (and those who still viewed Israeli trance musicians as family) became a personal focus to me and maybe a way to cope with the guilt I felt.

I will write more about trance music another day, over the years since the advent of AI music has made music a fraught topic for me as has the unraveling of my own life after being utterly horrified by October 7th opened the door on years of personal trauma for me. And part of that was the guilt.

Not guilt for what I’d done, but guilt for being alive and physically safe while people who loved the same music as I did were hunted by terrorists while I was still sleeping. Unlike the Prime Minister, I was asleep due to the difference in time zones so by the time I woke up and found myself reading about Psyduck first by chance, my 6am news reading routine was late to a horror that had started hours earlier yet was still continuing.

Lately I’ve been thinking back to 9/11/2001 as so many people have. September 11th, a day that most Americans felt the way I felt the morning of 10/7/2023, yet I had responded bitterly to. I want to own that juvenile act of rebellion even as I recant it, as reflecting on it recently led me to discover why I really reacted so bitterly. It was not the years-earlier assassination of Yitzhak Rabin that had sent me down a path of cynicism and self-destructive paranoia. It was something that few non-Jewish Americans were aware of and my relatively-disconnected self only knew of through radio coverage on NPR and skimming the local newspaper’s sparse international coverage that was spared barely a page of stories.

For years later, if you asked me about the Second Intifada I would have stared blankly. Memory is much trickier than most people think, and when trauma compromises your memory from a young age there a things that vanish into it like third-grade homeschooled me forcibly learning to write words longer even than I tend to use now. Or an entire attempted genocide against Israelis, which is what the Second Intifada was. I used to joke that my memory was like swiss cheese, now I recognize those gaps as self-defense mechanisms even when it’s a defense against disappointment and disillusionment.

Raised to be skeptical yet still from a fairly peacenik-biased background, my idealism rebelled at the idea that Palestinians and Israelis couldn’t just make peace and join together in a nation that shared all the same land yet two governments; one government for each people. Then 9/11 and realizing that it was a blessing in disguise my math scores on the ASVAB meant I wouldn’t qualify for the military role I’d wanted, though ironically that portion of the test was redacted later.

I had decided that joining the military would be the way out of the town I had went to middle and high school in, yet I also felt deeply that what became the global war on terror was going to go badly. The blatant racism of many of my classmates in response to 9/11 also made me question if going to war was about safety or about hatred driven by a need for revenge or worse yet an excuse to be violent against people whose lives were allowed to have little-to-no value even if they were genuinely civilians. Watching a bootleg VHS of the 2002 documentary Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death only confirmed that perspective.

And frankly I blamed the US for 9/11 and even wondered for awhile if the government had know and let it happen, not unlike the equally-nonsensical conspiracy theories some on the Israeli right espouse in blaming anyone they can for October 7th to district from any kind of proper inquiry or potential blame of the PM and his cabinet. Unlike some people feel about Israel being attacked on October 7th, I never thought the US deserved 9/11, rather I couldn’t understand how it wasn’t anticipated.

After all not only was Israel already under siege, there had been little things like the tension over the Lockerbie bombing trial, the multiple US embassy bombings only three years earlier in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam that horrified my 13-year old self so much, and countless other heightening tensions that made it easy to project blame for what is obvious in retrospect. That shaped so many of my choices and the guilt I have over not being in Israel on October 7th is rooted in the guilt I have over not being in Israel after my bitterness over the failed Camp David “Peace” Summit.

My idealism made it impossible for me to see how the expectations placed on Israel were unfair. I still don’t agree that Israel is the tip of the point or the valiant shield of Western civilization. Western civilization, whatever that truly means, still is as clueless as America was on September 10th of 2001 and Israel had somehow become on October 7th 2023. And I while I have let go of the guilt I feel over what I know was a betrayal of my own people through an idealism that cost me more than it cost anyone else, something else has taken its place.

After having spent so many years in grief, despair, and hopelessness it was the absolute refusal of Palestinianists to allow Israelis to mourn in the wake of October 7th. The mourning of Arab Israelis was erased in the public narrative as well. And that woke up the anger in me that had been fueled by years of pain not just at home but in the places I’d lived, a purposeless anger that found consciousness like an angel of anger, wrath, or even destruction. For I knew the pain of having my own mourning denied repeatedly.

I still am fractured by my abnormal upbringing that was insufficient in some ways and too demanding in others, though I no longer mourn the childhood I never really had that made it so hard to grow out of trying to insulate myself from the world with the trappings of childhood that were my alternative to truly having close friends, a real community, or healthy family connections. Instead I see my life as a microcosm of my generation’s bereavement from the world, especially those close to me in age.

I still read about the people who were murdered in October 7th and find they had so much in common with me, even those who had so little in common with me. We cannot bring anyone back from any of the horrors I have mentioned here, yet we can remember and ensure that the victims of terror and hate continue to be of blessed memory. We can learn about the lives of people we know and try to do things in their merit, even if it is just trying to do something they loved in your own life, though adopting a cause they cared about is good too.

Returning to food security is a personal cause for me. The synagogue I plan to attend services at this Rosh Hashana neighbors the same city I was born in and regularly participates in food drives, which makes this more of a personal return for me as I grew up volunteering in the same food banks my family relied on to fill in the gap between food stamps and my dad’s wages.

So I had to pick a different cause, something I’m still working out. Part of it is just being honest about what I think and feel about Israel now, yet that’s my attempt at accountability for moral confusion. And trying to help with causes that help at risk youth is something that frankly should be a national priority.

So I come back to something that still hurts. The life of a friend who I mourned for years until she visited me in a dream. Someone who pushed me to write and was as frustrating as she was appealing. Until eventually we argued about something that was never as memorable as what came later, the obituary that I found in trying to find her. I know that she had an addiction to heroin, something she linked to chronic stomach problems.

I came to the conclusion that she had relapsed after getting clean. Maybe she had found her ex who was a partner in addiction too. I will never really know for sure, yet I know that if her family loved her then the tragedy of her loss was as big as everything else I have written about here. And that is something I know mattered to more than a few victims of October 7th: not just mourning the loss of the victims of addiction, but helping people survive and recover from it.

This is also why initiatives like Hersh’s Fridge, which continues to provide kosher food to people who are food insecure in Skokie, Illinois. This beautiful collaboration of tzedakah in merit of the memory of a young man whose memory is a revolution of love and caring, personally touches my heart having had a friend who I fell out of touch with that herself kept kosher, was a vegetarian, carried naloxone to help prevent people from ODing, yet was also food insecure and lived in a difficult housing situation. I often have hoped that the community stepped up to help my friend and I realize that the kavanah she carried to save a life connects to the friend who I dreamed of.

This comes back to the thing in life that Elul reminds us is that few of us are truly and fully righteous. Being a harsh judge is not for us or for God. It’s letting go of the grip we have on our past failures in order to let God take the burden of a past that is only now a story so we can try to save even one life in the year to come. Even if it is just our own life by setting down the guilt for not having stood between those who are of blessed memory and the deaths that took them from us.

We’re not dead yet, so we have the opportunity to choose better and to remember that we do not and cannot do this on our own.

May the new year bring repair and may the burdens in your lives be lifted.

Shana Tova