Once, before
Once, before, when it looked as if those times had passed, disappeared, been relegated to then, when there was optimism and joy in the world and when words made sense and life wasn’t upside down, then, then, I remember. I remember being young and watching my father, on the eve of Yom Kippur, at that edgy time of day before the Fast when the anticipation of the solemnity and awe of the day is beginning to get to you, I remember him going into a room on his own and reading letters the contents of which he never disclosed. We knew that they were letters from his family, the family who disappeared somewhere in that true genocide, not the imagined or made up one we read about today. The family who didn’t just ‘die in the war’ but who were murdered, barbarically, by those no less evil than those who butchered on October 7. The family about whom we knew so much, yet really so very little.
I look back now at those days and realise I am not so much younger than my father was when he died those 41 years ago. About 10 years, which is to say, not very much at all. And the older I get, the younger he becomes, in my mind, and I wonder how I would have coped, how I would have somehow carried on, if it had been me whose family had been butchered thus.
But I do know this: we cannot know how until the moment is upon us, until that test is made of us. Can you do it?
I haven’t had the kind of test that he had, then, but now we are facing a different kind of test. Who are we really? Will we stand up for what is right, or will we turn away and not see? Will we pretend that up is down and wrong is right? Will we seek to appease, not make a fuss, and just get on with it? Or will we, or I, not be that “good girl”?
I realise now that I can no longer be, and nor should any of us be, that good girl, the one not to make a fuss. That time is no more. That time. That girl, that woman, lives in the past, a past that no longer exists, as indeed no past does, but no longer can exist for the ingredients that comprise it were, in the hurricane of October, extinguished .
Memory plays tricks on your mind, or perhaps it is your mind that plays tricks on your memory. But some things are seared in. I can see as if were last Yom Kippur and the one before that and on and on and every year, my father reading those letters. Opening up that brown paper parcel and reading, and crying, alone, alone, alone. Then rewrapping them and putting them high up in a cupboard, not to be read for another year.
But then there was no other year, and it was up to me to read them. And so I did and I do. Not the same way, of course, and the meaning is somewhat hidden due to their being written in languages I do not speak, and some in some kind of a secret code. After having had them translated, I discovered family I never knew we had. Family hither and thither, in different countries, some speaking languages I spoke and some not at all.
However, there is no resolution , no “closure” of what happened to them. I have tried to find out, but to no avail. Many of us never know, never will.
Yom Kippur, a day when time seemingly stands still or moves at its own ordained time. The service, long and somewhat gruesome, it must be said, keeps us there. The stories that we read that have been read for millennia give us succour for the future. From the past comes the present, and then the journey forward opens up.
We read the story of Jonah and the whale on Yom Kippur. It is somewhat paradoxical that the “selfie boat” will apparently arrive in Israel on Yom Kippur. Will the waters be calm, or will they meet their whale? Who’s to know?
They won’t realise that their campaign to demonise and destroy us will fail, as all previous campaigns to destroy us failed. We read about the ancient temple practices, on our land, our land to which those ignorant and historical illiterates assert we have no claim or right.
Yom Kippur is a time for self-assessment, a personal accounting as it were. Who will live and who will die? Will we be written in the Book of Life? We make atonement for our sins, for the sins of omission and commission.
I know that from now on, I cannot be that silent good girl. I won’t commit the sin of not calling it out, for call it out we must. We have a positive duty to do so. We cannot allow ourselves any more to be the silent good ones, fearful of not fitting in or making a fuss. That time is gone, extinguished.
This year, the second year that our hostages, about whom most of the world cares not a hoot, lie tortured and starved in the tunnels of the barbarians. May they be released from that damnation.
From the fires and the floods of the past ,there will rise a greater fire, one that will burn upwards and illuminate the darkness and the chaos. Chaos will disappear and become a form, and the light will shine once more.
May we all be written in the Book of Life.
