War Interlude

how the ongoing violence and state violence in Israel & Palestine is both informing and blocking my passage into adulthood

It’s no secret there’s a war on. I don’t know a person who has managed to block it out entirely, and for American Jews (which I am), there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t feel tormented by what’s happened & happening in the holy land.

Holy. Like a net. Actually, like a series of tangled nets, as I recently described the situation to a group of other Jews at a Shabbat potluck. We were discussing mystical interpretations of Torah around the portion that describes Jacob tricking Esau out of his inheritance. It had been years since I’ve studied Torah, but there’s nothing like the tangle of Israel-Palestine to drop me right back into the ancient text, remembering that (of course) these situations have been going on since Jews first found ourselves in the land of Israel, and our interlocking narrative webs have been weaving around and through us, connecting then to now and us to them, ever since.

I wish I could say I’ve been directing my grief, anger, love, and fear into Torah study and then into action, but the truth is that I’ve been on input mode with very little output. Basically: I’ve been online and in my mind more than I’ve been on-site or inside. While attending a sit-in at the Oakland federal building last week with over 700 other Jews and Jewish allies calling for a ceasefire, I realized that I felt like I could chant and pray forever: that’s how much energy and spirit was pent up in me at all this killing.

Today, while crying in therapy (as I’m often unable to cry while scrolling Instagram), I connected with a creative fire inside that needs to say something about how I got here: a left-wing American Jew, crying about something happening over 7,000 miles away. So as I sit here at my sunny kitchen table in Berkeley, surrounded by yellow chrysanthemums and bushy green rosemary (good for memory), I want to tell the story of when I first (and last) understood the emotional weight of a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel-Palestine.

**

My sister had come to visit me in Jaffa (Israel - Palestine) just after her engagement to my brother in law who is from Germany. She was excited and wanted to go dress shopping, which we did: first in a little boutique called P’nina Tornai in Jaffa, and then again in at a glitzy shop in Jerusalem where she found nothing she wanted but I found a bridesmaid dress I’d like to get married in someday. Wish I had a photo but maybe best I don’t: I don’t think that thing would come close to fitting (who and how I am), today.

While in Jerusalem, before heading to Ramallah to visit a friend, we paid a visit to Yad Va Shem, the Holocaust museum. My sister reminds me now that I was stung by a bee while walking barefoot out of the museum. I do remember getting stung, though I can’t recall the pain. I do however remember the pain of the stories we read inside.

The one that stood out most to me on this visit (I’d been at least once, maybe twice before), was a story of two sisters escaping Poland or Hungary in wintertime. It was snowing, and one sister succumbed to some combination of sickness, injury, and exhaustion and fell to the frozen ground. The other sister, refusing to leave her there, carried her sister on her shoulders until she could walk no more, and was forced to leave her sister behind. She survived to tell her story, which is written on one of the walls of Yad Va Shem, and now, also on my heart.

As a person indescribably close to my sister, I could not. I could not. I could not.

Many other stories and photos and videos followed this particular one. I don’t know how much I absorbed, beyond this, though I have an odd memory of the numbered names and boxes at the very end of the exhibit. Something about categorically counting the dead, and preserving the records, in a vast cylindrical hall where the weight of the emotions that have just been stirred up somehow is challenged to fall in line with some numerical system of accounting. Is it to make sense of our grief? Is it kabbalistic, numerological, in nature?

In any case, the exist of Yad Va Shem takes the now grief-laden person out onto a large balcony with sweeping vistas of: you guessed it, eretz Israel (the land of Israel). Dotted expanse of green and brown, as if on canvas, but real. This somatic experience is burned in my memory: in fact, I can’t actually distinguish between the first time I walked this gauntlet into Zion and this more recent, they blend together as one single experience of deep understanding, or bina, as the Kabbalists call it on the tree of life.

Israel, the promised land (this time, promised by theBritish, not G-d) as a sanctuary and home for the people whose lives and families were ripped apart by the Holocaust.

The problem, of course, being that a new (and longer-lasting) project of expulsion began. With Palestinian sisters walking on foot seeking safety and freedom in a world that offers them so little.

—

When I decided to go to the federal building sit-in, I was nervous. Very nervous. By the time I signed up for the action, there were only spaces left for “reds,” which were people willing to get arrested. I did not want to get arrested, though I wanted to participate. I’d been yearning for a chance to take action.

I thought of my friend Ohad, who had just a few mornings prior shared that he’d no longer be able to be in contact as he was “signing off for a while,” which I quickly understood to mean he was being sent into Gaza with his army unit. I wondered how my fear lined up to his, in scale. He believed in what he was doing, and was willing to risk his life for it (though believe me, I spent hours trying to convince him otherwise). I believed in what I’d be doing, but the only thing in danger for me was my pride, comfort, and sense of freedom associated with the privilege of having no marks on my record and no zip-tie handcuffs to stop me from scratching my nose. The action organizers encouraged us to purchase adult diapers, in case we found ourselves waiting for hours in police custody without bathroom access.

I attended the action and decided to not get arrested. It’s now been ten days since Ohad went offline and into combat (against what? is he destroying tunnels or homes? fighters or families? does it matter?) and though I worry daily about him and all the other Palestinian and Israeli people caught up in this net, I am safely sitting in my home with nothing but freedom and choice. And many days, while my hands are free, I feel paralyzed. Can’t seem to work, make art, or really do anything except read news online and discuss.

**

Another friend in Israel, the most left of Israelis I know, told me today that there are still rockets on Tel Aviv (with occasional people and buildings getting hit, when the Iron Dome fails to intercept them) but that they are less, now. Families in Gaza are living on raw eggplant in tent cities, if they are lucky. The hostages exist in some liminal space, in tunnels, or in the bardo. Like Schroedinger’s cat.

I get angry on social media when people post one-sided things, and then post one-sided things myself that I often delete after posting. I squabble about the credibility of the NY Post (what I consider a tabloid) claiming that Rashida Tlaib is in a secret Facebook group supporting Hamas. The family friend who posted it says that she’s no friend of the Jews. I wonder if he and I are any more related (in politics, in DNA) than myself and Rashida Tlaib. I doubt it.

My leftist friend in Israel says he feels very unsafe. That he’s locking his door at night, ever since October 7th. He says, “It’s hell in Gaza, but we have to win, and also we must be as gentle as possible while trying for peace.” I can’t make sense of this, but he sounds so pained and fragile that I don’t push. Instead, I ask if I can share my biggest fear. He says yes and. I tell him that because Israel has been attempting to control Hamas through military force for years and that each time, the response from Hamas (and other groups like Hezbollah, Iran) gets uglier. I’m afraid that after something this big, there will be a period of quiet and then something unthinkable. He says he shares my fear, but doesn’t know a way forward.

After we hang up, I think of how sad it is that my left-most friend in Israel is subscribing to war as an answer.

I reflect: Was that promising view at the exit from Yad Va Shem just a mirage? A beautiful idea? Are we as Jews destined to be running on a hamster wheel from oppressed to oppressor again and again in endless loops?

I know that Israel isn’t just an idea. That the people and culture and economy there are very real. But, like so many so-called nation-states, Israel is built on an unstable foundation of expulsion, murder, and dispossession, and the movement for healing and reparations has not yet caught on there.

My privilege offers ultimate freedom, while my ancestry and love for Israel-Palestine keeps me tied at the heart. Meanwhile, the war machine grumbles on.