Save Our People

Photo courtesy of Hadassah.

I’m confused, upset, confounded and in deep conflict. I grew up with skeletons rattling in my closets and at my table. Although my mother was born in America, she was the daughter of Jews from Kyiv. I was, therefore, a child born in the shadow of pogroms, with the ghosts of the Holocaust and antisemitism hovering over me. My mother wouldn’t let my brother or me reveal our Judaism outside the home. No signs of it were to be displayed.

My mother’s floors had to be the cleanest so when the Cossacks came — and she was sure they would come — they would not be able to call her a dirty Jew. She even convinced my father, whose family members had been in America since the Civil War and hardly knew anything about their religion, that we should live on Long Island among the Society of Friends (the Quakers).

So, I grew up in the safety of a benevolent America and a deeply nonviolent community that had become very Jewish by the time I graduated from the little one-room schoolhouse that was my elementary school.

Navigating my formative years in the turmoil of the 1960s, I was a happy, hippy-leaning pacifist. I believed in non-violence: “Get out of Viet Nam now!”; “Make love not war.” Simultaneously, I was taught that America, our host country, was only ours but for the grace of G-d and politics. I was always aware of the Jewish people’s post-Holocaust commitment to “Never Again.”

It’s clear we have enemies. As Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote in The Charge of the Light Brigade, “There are guns to the left of me. Guns to the right of me. Forward!” Sadly, this must be part of the Israel Defense Force’s cry. We must support the right of Israel to exist and the right of Israelis to live.

Jews must support Jewish causes. We must support our own. So, send money to Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of American, which has been working nonstop since the war began to respond to the crisis in Israel. The money will help Hadassah’s medical center in Jerusalem, the Hadassah Medical Organization, which has treated almost 200 soldiers and civilians with traumatic injuries and whose doctors and other staff members are working around the clock. And it will help Hadassah’s youth villages, which are caring for hundreds of at-risk Israeli children as well as teenaged refugees from Ukraine and now, Israeli families who have had to flee their homes.

Send letters to loved ones, to friends and to strangers who need a kind word. Support mental health centers, infrastructure rebuilds. Support a family, a home, a community and a country. Support a people.

As this excerpt from the well-known Israeli song Ein Li Eretz Acheret (I Have No Other Country) goes: “I have no other country even if my land is aflame. Just a word in Hebrew pierces my veins, my soul, with an aching body, with a hungry heart … I will not give up reminding her, and I will sing into her ears, until she opens her eyes … Ein li eretz acheret. I have no other country.”

On a recent Wednesday evening, my rabbi read part of a powerful poem to his congregants. The author, who wishes to remain anonymous, recently immigrated to my community, had written it on Sunday and sent it to my rabbi, a friend of his. The names and events are real.

Hoshia Nah (Please Save Us)

We left the embrace of the sukkah
for the shelter of Shabbat
Hoshana*
And they blasted away the wall
Hoshana
Please reopen Your gates of salvation
Hoshana
Can anyone pick the lock?
Hoshana
For Your sake and
Hoshana
For ours
Hoshana
For fathers gunned down in front of daughters
Hoshana
For mothers shielding the bodies of sons
Hoshana
For elders with caregivers at their bedside
Hoshana
For Amit who bandaged wounds in the infirmary, who never made it out alive
Hoshana
For Rachel who served the terrorists coffee and cookies
Hoshana
For Avital who carried babies Eshel and Negev on her back from Gaza
Hoshana
For Adi, their mother, nowhere to be found
Hoshana
For Tamar Kedem Simon-Tov, light of Eshkol
Hoshana
For Johnny, Shachar, Arbel and Omer
Hoshana
For Chayim, his wells of knowledge, unwritten guidebooks for ways out of war
Hoshana
For Noa forced away on a motorcycle
Hoshana
For her father Yaakov begging it not to be so
Hoshana
For Shani who came to dance, braids swiveling in the open air
Hoshana
For Doron, little Aviv, little Raz, gone
Hoshana
For their father Yoni aching to bring them home
Hoshana
For the thousands filling city squares and sandwiches and boxes for the soldiers called
Hoshana
For the thousands giving beds, giving blood
Hoshana
For the ones who circled with Torahs in bomb shelters
Hoshana
For 260 motionless dancers draped in white like Torahs in rows
Hoshana
Holy, Holy, Holy
Hoshana
For the earth screaming and soaked
Hoshana
For Darom Adom
Hoshana
For whole worlds swallowed back to dust
Hoshana
For the missiles tearing (kriyah) through the sky
Hoshana
For the fliers of the missing
Hoshana
For the fliers for the dead
Hoshana
For the words that fall flat
Hoshana
As too many souls ascend
Hoshana
Hoshana
Hoshana
When will you lie us down in peace?
When will these hakafot* of violence end?

*Save us
**Circles

Ronnie Katz Gerber is a member of the Hadassah Educators Council.