Only A Yiddish Word Here Will Do
I miss October 6th, 2023. I miss its banality. I’ve gone back and looked at my calendar that day- nothing remarkable at all to remember it by. Apparently a few calls and meetings. Went out that eve. Purely routine. Nothing out of the ordinary to linger beyond the moment. Nothing there to rewire my synapses entirely.
Oct 7th, 2023. Woke at a normal time, what appeared to be a normal Saturday. Ambled to the kitchen, picked up phone to check notifications idly. (Back then, in the before-times, I kept my phone in a whole different room from where I was sleeping. Since that day, I can’t be so far. In case something happens. In case someone needs me. In case I get a message of urgency: bubelah, time to leave. It’s in my genes.)
News alerts allcaps’ed “ISRAEL AT WAR”. Instinctive dread, physically. Israel wasn’t at war with anybody when I’d gone to sleep. Something bad must have happened. I had no idea how bad, because… how could anybody. It still eludes me, the sadism and close-range brutality. I didn’t (and don’t) want to know humans can be this way, this century.
Normally, I flick through my screen, walking the dog first thing… this derailed me, sheer horror of images I’ll never unsee. When night fell over lower Manhattan and lights came on in the city, I realized I’d never moved all day. Just been sitting. State of shock. Scrolling, clicking. Absorbing, permutating. I’d never walked the dog lying patiently at my feet. Never made coffee, never eaten anything. Never changed clothes, even washed my face. Disrupted from normalcy entirely, I lost all sense of time passing, while I just kept refreshing for wider understanding. Not able to stop watching. I didn’t (and don’t) have that luxury.
Shani Louk’s broken body. I will remember when I’m 190. I immediately understood when I saw her, the world and my understanding of it had changed irrevocably. Revulsion, horror, deep, primitive fear, chilled me. (For weeks after, her mother was on tv thinking maybe Shani still lived, because no one specifically said “died”. Her hope, eviscerating.) The petrified child no more than 4 or 5 shrieking “IMA! IMA!” while terrorists struck him repeatedly, mocking his panic and confusion, laughing as he screamed. Murders, rapes, beheadings livestreamed. I saw the entire journalist footage of depravity. I’d like to obliterate that part of my brain. I had nightmares 6 months after. I kept dreaming it was me in every scene, that everything was happening to me. Because it would have, if I’d been there. I am Jewish.
—
Now might be a good time to say, this is I guess a weird sort of ode to everyone since who’s come into my life, because I am Jewish. And everyone who exited my life because I am Jewish. Then too, everyone who just continued loving me at whatever level, even-keeled, for whom my Jewishness is not a factor in seeing me as a human being. It started with BDS boycotting Israeli products. Now Jewish people everywhere are being boycotted as a race and species, told we’re responsible for our pain and victimizing. When will it stop? We haven’t solved this in any century and we’re not close to solving it now, eternally.
All I guess I can say is: I’m exceedingly grateful for my extended community. Mishpacha interconnectedness- and vitality. Grateful for myriad new connections that let me know I’m not alone in whatever I’m feeling. Grateful for non-Jewish friends who show up emotionally, and try, really try to understand what I’m experiencing, even if they have no idea what I’m saying, understandably lacking context and history.
Everything’s changed/nothing’s changed since I wrote my note and left it in the Wall, early Spring. I know by now my written prayer has been removed and buried underground, as is custom. So I am resuscitating it here obliquely, to remind whomever/ whatever is out there I was and am still hoping for something. A lot of us are hoping for something. My prayers are not unique.
There’s quiet beauty in the poetry of people trust-fall backwards walking, somehow knowing everyone will watch out for them and clear way. I wish the world worked more like that, maybe. That we looked out for each other’s blind spots, gave latitude and grace, when walking a slightly different way.
I’m tired.
People think I up and got religion recently. I am no more religious than I’ve ever been. Which is to say… not very. I am — have always been, and remain — a secular Jew. I’m fine with that identity. I’m Jewish enough already, ethnically, culturally. But when the survival of my tiny group of people is threatened perpetually, I’ve only got so much room to think I’m not religious, this isn’t about me. It is absolutely about me, about all of us, however we identify on the whole broad panoply. Every day since Oct 7 has been about survival for our entire community. Will I write a prayer? Yes. Do I know if anyone “up there” reads it? I don’t. Not really. It’s called “Pascal’s Wager”. Look it up while learning all the rest of the things.
I’m tired immensely.
I had coffee with a local Rabbi’s wife not long after this, and asked her, genuinely, how do we believe in Hashem if this could happen to our community? She answered honestly, head shaking involuntarily, “I don’t know.” She was tired, too. Already.
2 years of war. Actual… and then war of public perception, we seem unable to sway. That may ultimately be more dangerous than armaments. Bizarrely.
Tired of attacks, tired of hate. Tired of virulence from people with no skin in the game. Tired of people who aren’t Jewish explaining to me who Jews are, and why my whole life history isn’t as valid as their YouTube understanding. Tired of (only) Jews posting about our continued slayings. Tired of having to defend and explain myself daily to people who seem doomed to repeat history.
Tired of hostages not being home. Tired of the pain of ever-new stories from that day. From the weeks, months, and 2 years later… still more pain surfaces constantly.
Tired of living in a parallel universe from most people.
Tired of every new attack, then automatically as if sleepwalking, checking in with people whatever place. Always one degree of separation, at most. We are all connected. If I don’t know you, a friend does, surely. What happens to one of us happens to all.
Tired of reading the comments. Under news of every attack, people think slaughtering Jews is hilarious — or valid. We have lost our sense of humanity. Where… has it all gone so awry that this is normalized, rationalized and celebrated? We haven’t moved far from handing out sweets on the street, over butchered bodies.
I do my work, get through each day. Put one foot in front of the other, pay bills, take vitamins, work out, be healthy. Keep varied online Scrabble games going. Do crossword puzzles in ink to calm my mind after new headlines. Celebrate small wins, that… feel more fatuous, steadily.
I am tired. Did I already say.
I miss the person I was before all this. She was undoubtedly more fun. (Sorry.)
It’s not popular to say “I am afraid”. But I am. Regularly. We’re supposed to bravely brilliantly go shine. Be louder, take up space, refuse to dim our light any way. Sure, fine, love that journey, on board entirely. Just… also very much aware I am not a soldier. I don’t know how to fight anybody. I wouldn’t even win in a thumb wrestle. I calculate how much space I physically take, when I walk down the street. I am petite. What do I do if someone comes for me? Throw down big words as a strategy? My defense, my therapy, has always been writing. Words, communicating, speaking, getting it out on a page. I have been asked now by multiple sources to edit myself… or say nothing. For my safety. Just hold it in, my whole complicated identity. Not sure I can, without losing myself entirely.
Tired of the skin I am in being politicized by people who would harm me.
When I meet other Jews lately, talk inevitably turns to “Where would we go”. One part make-believe fantasy, rest of the parts ugly pragmatic reality.
I forget how to have normal conversations, that don’t pivot around Israel, isolation, peril and instability. I feel sometimes I’m faking, when I speak of other things. It’s all always going on in my mind, movie’s always playing.
I miss the world before I knew what the world was capable of excusing. I miss not worrying every day for my safety. None of this makes sense, except same as it ever was, really. I understand a lot of things now… more clearly. I’ve given up trying to understand Hate.
2 years of losing people I thought were unlosable. But that’s ok. True colors. Blah blah, x infinity. I now realize the acceptance I had from some was always conditional, predicated upon me behaving, in line with what makes them most comfortable. Arbiters of my proscribed behavior/ mentality.
Grateful for Jews I now know, and didn’t 2 years ago. Instant family. Brilliant beings in so many countries. Friendship and belonging, our currency. I don’t know how to know all I know; I don’t know how to see all I’ve seen. It helps that anyone else in the world knows and sees these same things; we who all wear invisible kriyah daily.
Update Oct13: They’re home! Praise everything! But – with extreme sensitivity.
I wrote the above, plus 3000 or so more torpid words recently, then didn’t publish. Whole thing made me too sad, re-rereading. I’m elated today to change the ending. But also it feels reckless to only celebrate, when we’ve lost so many. And continue to lose more weekly, in aftermath of what’s left to sustain. A fragile time. For the country, for Jews globally. Yet of course, we rejoice! Hostages home and alive has always been the aim. Also… tread lightly, please. Not everyone’s back, or will be. Everyone lost somebody.
To have mixed feelings (about everything, really) is Jewish. We come by it honestly: sadness while happy, bits of joy while suffering. Our saddest holidays still contain sparkles; our happiest moments hold shards of pain. We wait for the other shoe to drop proverbially, for good to turn bad, for bad to become a miracle. It’s how we are made, innately. How we developed after centuries being hunted every lifetime, cells imbued by centuries of Hate.
We will always come for our people. But came too late for many. It’s a sad day, it’s a happy day. To be Jewish is to feel everything, simultaneously. Happiness to have hostages home still contains sorrow for those we lost. Sorrow likewise contains jubilation – as we together rise on 6 continents to meet the Returned and Living.
I am emotionally wrung out after the past two decad–years. In case I forget how the world made us feel since 2023: a vast majority believe we deserve our victimization and brutalizing. I will never forgive the world what it showed me. We aren’t so far as we thought, from the 1930’s. Likewise (same duality of feeling) I will never forget friends who showed up with support and empathy. It’s never the popular move for social acclaim, being a Jewish ally. I asked, I received. I am grateful people cared what I was feeling, and maybe also that we are nearly extinct – which even in the best of times is kind of terrifying existentially.
When I see newly returned (former) hostages sing, play with their children, embrace those who were waiting- I remember who we are: people who seek light always. In everything. Love. Food. Music. Comedy. Whatever our contribution – this is how we survive, endure, and live.. to go on living. This is how we keep dancing.
