Will You Carry Me?

I look at the calendar with dread. The first anniversary of October 7^th is upon us, sandwiched between the Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, which follows only a few days later.

Our hostages still aren’t home, our sons and daughters serving in the military (including mine) are exhausted, many of us have attended more funerals in one year than we ever imagined, more than 60,000 residents from our northern border remain evacuated from their homes (to the extent that they have homes left at all), and we are on the brink of a widespread regional war after months of proposed diplomatic solutions have failed.

As if that wasn’t enough, there is another front line with Jews around the world facing record levels of antisemitism.

Most Jews around the world commemorate the upcoming Days of Awe in some fashion. Some lean into more cultural traditions and others veer toward prayer and liturgy that is thousands of years old.

I come from a family of faith and I have often drawn on it in my darkest moments. But since October 7^th, God and I have been on a break.

I have a feeling I am not alone. Perhaps we are all afraid that speaking out will ostracize us, remove us in some way from our friends, family, and community.

Who will be brave enough to tell me that I can take a step back this year?

Please don’t tell me to double down and work harder to find meaning in the words. I understand them quite well. Simply put, the liturgy that for so many years led me to tears doesn’t move me today.

Yet the Israeli songs in my “War” playlist, those written over the last year along with the hundreds of songs that characterize all of our wars, have me weeping in the streets.

The crescendo of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur liturgy is “Unetanneh Tokef,” a prayer that gives voice to divine decree, listing many ways in which one can die.

I don’t need to recite it. We were killed by gunshot and grenades, beheading and burning, rape, torture, kidnapping, and sometimes our own fire. I’d rather hear Hanan Ben-Ari’s song Homeland; “Someone fell asleep on the job. Where is the dream? There is no truth, no justice, only fissures.”

There is the Kol Nidrei prayer that ushers in Yom Kippur, more of a legal formula that annuls vows, promises, pledges and oaths that we failed to keep in the last year.

Which promises did the orphans or the Holocaust survivors from the south fail to keep? Instead, I’d recite the words from the Odeya Azoulay’s Winter ’23: “Someone above fell asleep on the job (note the theme). I remember my brother asked me where was God? Did you try to teach me some lesson?”

As I write, many Israelis are reciting “Selichot,” prayers of repentance said in the early morning hours or at midnight for a month before Rosh Hashana. The central theme is the thirteen attributes of God, among them “God the compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation.” I’d rather ask the question posed by Ariel Zurayev in “One Nation;” “If we are the chosen people, how was such a cruel fate carved?”

The most symbolic sound of this time period is the shofar, a rams horn that is blown daily for a month and again 100 times on Rosh Hashana itself.

The tone and pitch of that sharp, blaring, piercing, repetitive sound are more closely aligned with the howls inside of me.

What is normally a call to repentance is instead in perfect harmony with the cries of protest on the streets of Israel every Saturday night.

One of my earliest childhood memories is sitting in synagogue with my mother and my grandmother who found deep meaning in words that are thousands of years old.

Today, those words ring hollow. For now, my prayer book is my war playlist with songs that are more reverent than anything previously written.

The faith of others will have to speak for me at a time when mine has fallen silent.

Who will carry me not only with strength, but with the belief that I’ve momentarily misplaced?