Even with many of the broadcast TV shows returning after the long hiatus (because of the writers and actors strikes in Hollywood) there are still a lot of empty spaces in my TV watching schedule that need to be filled. For a while there, I was happily ensconced in episodes of the Murder in (France) series, on Hoopla (though seasons 6 and 7 are missing for some reason), but I only have a certain number of monthly views, so I keep having to go back to the other streaming services, like Netflix, to fill the empty hours.
Murder In (France)
I started, of course, with One Day, the constantly-advertised-on-social-media-limited-British-series about a two-decades-long-bittersweet-love-story. Eh. It was okay. But when I finished watching that, I found a Spanish movie called Diecisiete/Seventeen, about two brothers and a dog and a grandma and a camper. Did I mention that there’s a dog? And that it’s really a love story about brothers finally figuring out how to be there for each other? It was wonderful! There was also a limited series, also from Spain, called Un Cuento Perfecto/A Perfect Story, about the romance between two (gorgeous) people with low self-esteem, who finally realize that in order to find love you have to risk being known for who you really are, with all of your imperfections. It almost ended badly, but Thank God, in the form of a Deus Ex Machina, it all worked out in the end.
Diecisiete, and a dog!
Then there was a Korean romantic comedy series, and a Croatian/German movie about mid-life love, and then I went through Chaiflicks, one of the Jewish streaming services, where I watched some episodes of Soon by You, an American show about young orthodox Jewish singles in New York City, and Yidlife Crisis, a Yiddish language show by two comedians from Montreal, and Checkout, an Israeli comedy set in a small supermarket, and The New Black, about misfits at a yeshiva in Israel, and Cupcakes, a silly, sweet movie about a group of friends who are accidentally chosen as Israel’s representatives at a Eurovision-type competition show. I finally landed on Unchained, an Israeli show set in the Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox Jewish) community, about the difficulty of getting a religious divorce if the husband doesn’t want one; it was uncomfortable and enraging to watch at times, and not much of a break from the news, but it was definitely interesting.
The problem with watching all of these foreign language shows, though, is that I can’t get my typing done, or scan social media, or play video games, while the movies are on; I actually have to pay attention and read the subtitles in order to follow what’s happening, so it’s a more intense experience than just watching American broadcast TV. And the fact is, sometimes I just want the TV on in the background to remind me that the world still exists, while I focus on other things.
So, I gave in, and watched a handful of Hallmark-lite movies on The Great American Family Channel, and found myself unable to sit through a bunch of them, even with only half an ear paying attention. It’s as if someone came up with a list of plot points and then forgot to write the actual scenes. There are millions of good, heartwarming, reassuring stories to tell, and I really don’t mind repeating tropes or unreasonably happy endings, but I do care if I can relate to the people in the story, so that I can buy into their romance and live vicariously through them for a couple of hours.
Even if I only have my TV on in the background to remind me that the world still exists, I’ve discovered, some part of me is still paying attention and needs to be respected. It’s the same with junk food; I’m not eating French fries for their nutritional value, but, at the very least, they need to taste good.
So, I’m back to the foreign language films, mixed with some returning broadcast shows like Will Trent (there’s a dog!) and The Rookie and Law & Order SVU. But I’m craving something more hopeful, and believable, that will lift my spirits and block out the news; just for a little while. Oh, and I really think my cable and streaming bills should be covered by my health insurance. Because it’s medicine.
Will Trent and Betty
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
I was both thrilled and a little trepidatious when I heard that Jon Stewart would be coming back as host of The Daily Show one day a week; thrilled because he was always a voice of reason for me back when he was the host of the show, and worried because in the intervening years he’s said a few odd things, about Covid, about Israel, about comedy, that I haven’t agreed with. And he’s been wearing these weird grey jeans on every appearance he’s made on The Late Show with Steven Colbert that are just not flattering.
First and foremost, thank God, he’s back to wearing a suit on the Daily Show. That deserves a grateful paragraph all on its own.
Second, as soon as he returned to The Daily Show, the critics had a lot of things to say about his tendency to both-sides-ism (both Trump and Biden are really old), and about his age (not a Millennial), and whiteness (after Trevor Noah), and maleness (after a lot of the frontrunners to host the show after Trevor were female). For me, though, none of those things was a deal breaker, but the topic of Israel, which is always in the news lately and on which I know we disagree, was the big test, and on Jon’s third episode back, he started with a segment he called The Futile Crescent, about Israel/Palestine. Oh boy.
And, yes, he did simplify certain issues too much for my taste, and repeat some of the tropes about Israel that I disagree with, but even with all of that, it became clear to me that he is still the Jon Stewart I remember: vulnerable, funny, snarky heart intact. He ended that third episode with a moment of Zen dedicated to his dog, Dipper, a three legged brindle-coated rescue dog who had died the day before. He cried, and I cried, and I mourned Cricket and Ellie (and Butterfly and Dina) all over again, and I finally felt the relief that I used to feel every night when Jon Stewart was the regular host of The Daily Show, way back when. My buddy was back.
Miss Cricket in full flight
Miss Ellie ready for a snack
Miss Butterfly resting on my dog-walking shoes
Dina on her way to the beach
It took me a few weeks, but I finally realized that the fact that Jon Stewart and I disagree on some things is actually a feature, rather than a bug in the program. His willingness to accept that, of course, his viewers won’t agree with him on everything, is what makes him Jon Stewart. He doesn’t expect everyone to agree, in fact, his goal seems to be to have difficult conversations with people who can respectfully disagree on a wide range of important issues (as long as he can find a joke in it). Sometimes he makes me angry or uncomfortable, and sometimes he makes me laugh, or cry, but most of all he somehow creates this space that allows me to breathe more deeply, and feel less alone. And given the rigidity of opinions that has become the norm for both political parties in the United States, and the replacement of actual discussions with Tiktok videos and memes and mantras and marches, I really appreciate how Jon Stewart looks around at all of us, laughs, and says, uh, no.
I remember learning about the bell curve in college, in relation to IQ scores at first, but then with almost everything else, and the lesson was basically that even though some small amount of people live at the extremes, of beauty and intelligence and wealth, the majority of us are somewhere in the murky middle. So, why aren’t we actively listening to the variety of opinions that make up the wide political middle, and trying to find common ground and even reasonable compromises, and instead we’re required to pledge allegiance to Alexandra Occasio Cortez on one side or Donald Trump on the other when they don’t really represent who we are?
There’s so much to learn, and so much nuance and complexity to each one of us, and all of that gets steamrolled when we’re told what we’re allowed to say before we even open our mouths.
Back when Jon Stewart hosted The Daily Show full time, which feels like a million years ago now, there were always things he said that I didn’t agree with, or sex jokes I really didn’t want to hear, and yet I loved him anyway, because he made me laugh and think and feel just a tiny bit less overwhelmed by the news of the day. And that hasn’t changed.
I don’t know how long he’ll stay at The Daily Show this time, maybe just long enough to get us through the 2024 presidential election, and if that’s the case then I’m going to work hard to be grateful for whatever time he can give us, and treasure the chance to disagree with him in good faith, knowing that our differences are part of what makes him worth watching. Unless he becomes a cat person. Then we’re done.
“Oh come on. I’m adorable.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
In my adventures through Israeli music I’ve found one song title coming up over and over again: Lo Levad, or, Not alone.
At first, I thought they must all be covers of the same song, because Israeli music is filled with covers and mash ups and duets, in a way that makes it feel like the whole country is one big Glee club. But when I listened to each recording, I realized that, no, they were all different songs, with different lyrics and musical styles and intentions.
Since loneliness is a feeling I’m very familiar with, I wanted to understand why Israel in particular would have so many songs on this topic, not just referenced in the lyrics but in the titles themselves. So, I chose three songs that I found particularly powerful, maybe only because they are “my” kind of music, to examine further.
Jane Bordeaux’s Lo Levad (written by Doron Talmon) was posted on YouTube soon after October 7th and is set at a kibbutz overrun by Hamas. A lone, burned tree is the first and enduring image of the song, but the roots of the tree are still strong, because of the people who are coming together to remember those they lost, and to rebuild. The melody is sad, but the message of community coming together is hopeful, and that melancholy contrast lingers long after the song is over. It’s not a big, banging rock song, or a cry for help; maybe it’s more like a folk song, the kind of thing you’d sing at a campfire, after a long day of cleaning up or picking clementines, to remind yourself that the effort is worth it. The basic message of Jane Bordeaux’s Lo Levad: some limbs of the tree may have been burned, but the roots are strong and with help the tree will heal and grow again.
The second Lo Levad I chose was posted just before October 7th this year, and is performed by Aviv Alush and Omer Adam, and written by a collective of artists called Veteyn Chelkaynu, as part of a yearly project leading up to the Jewish high holidays, to inspire secular Israelis to return to religious study in some small way. The message of this Lo Levad is that you can always go home again, by which they mean return to God and to Torah (the Hebrew bible), which is very much in sync with the message of Rosh Hashanah, and the month of Elul that leads up to it. This is my favorite of all of the Lo Levad songs I’ve heard, and did the most to genuinely make me feel less alone each time I heard it, maybe because the idea of prayer and study, as part of a community, actually does resonate for me, a lot; though I wouldn’t limit it to religious study, because in my experience almost any group studying together, or singing together, and willing to acknowledge weakness and the need for comfort, creates this same powerful energy. I also like the contrast of the two voices, one gruff (Aviv Alush, a popular Israeli actor) and one sweet (Omer Adam, maybe the most famous and certainly the most prolific of Israel’s singers), and I like that in both the lyrics and the music, this song champions both crying out for help and reaching out to help someone else; there’s no sense that one role has more value or respect than the other. The basic message of Aviv Alush and Omer Adam’s Lo Levad: life is a difficult journey for everyone, with lots of choices along the way, but you don’t have to go on this journey alone, and you can find your way home, with help.
The third Lo Levad I chose is from Hanan Ben Ari (co-written by Roi Chasan), a popular Israeli singer/songwriter who sings a kind of pop/religious hybrid that really seems to crossover well. His Lo Levad, which is actually from seven years ago, is anthemic, built like an uphill climb, both in the music and in the lyrics (or what I understand of them, because the Hebrew here was hard for me in certain places). It’s written in third person, so it has that distance of speaking about someone else’s pain (even though it could be about him, who knows), and there’s a choir that jumps in when the song builds. The basic message of Hanan Ben Ari’s Lo Levad: even if you fall into the dark cavernous pit of loneliness, you can find the light and even the wings to fly.
Together, all of these songs feel like puzzle pieces in the larger picture of how loneliness feels and how we try to combat it. Loneliness is certainly not unique to Israelis, but maybe their willingness to acknowledge it, and their focus on combatting it in community fits the Israeli ethos in particular. In the United States, where our most insistent value is independence, we have mixed feelings about acknowledging loneliness as a problem. We, maybe, see loneliness as a necessary price for the kind of rugged individualism we are supposed to strive for. But in Israel, where collectivist kibbutzim played such a big role in its beginnings, and mandatory army service brings people together from all walks of life, community is the key to survival.
The loneliness theme also resonates in the physical isolation that is inherent in where Israel is located in the world, surrounded by Muslim majority countries that have, historically, seen Israel as a cancer that needs to be excised; and it responates with the long history of Jewish wandering that has led to being seen as the other by the majority populations of pretty much every place in the world.
Wherever the loneliness comes from, though, it’s a relief to have it expressed, in music and in words, in so many ways; just the chance to hear about someone else’s struggle, and their attempts to find comfort, helps me fight off at least the bitterest edges of the loneliness.
I didn’t include translations for these songs, because I wasn’t happy with my inability to really capture the magic of the words, and because I think it’s the music that is most powerful in these songs. There are, of course, other songs that have helped push away the loneliness, even when loneliness wasn’t even mentioned in the titles:
Shleimim/Complete is performed by Idan Rafael Haviv (written by Avi Ohayon, Akiva Turgeman, and Matan Dror) and is a gentle love song about the kind of love that grows with every year together. https://youtu.be/kRy0xSsly_o?si=DKlSPPCyykkSRcdU
Am Echad/One nation is written by Eli Keshet, Ben Tzur, and Omri Sasson and performed by a bunch of different Israeli musicians, and it’s a call for national unity in response to the current war, but also manages to capture the sweetness of coming together, even in hard times. https://youtu.be/u7CeOuIrxBM?si=8dtFFim9SZTnF9Bk
Im Hayah Lanu Zman/If we had time, performed by Elai Botner and Noam Kleinstein and written by Elai Botner and Oren Jacoby is a re-recording of a song from a movie I never saw, about a different war, but Noam Kleinstein’s voice, even if I never understood the words, cracks me open every time I hear this song. https://youtu.be/mwPAlYxqLqE?si=uXKDfSQDW7xHKIXD
As usual, I’ve been reading and listening to lots of voices about the war, and I found two people who were especially helpful in explaining the difference between the media coverage of the war in Israel and internationally:
It still feels pretty lonely to be Jewish right now, but all of these resources have helped in different ways, and writing the blog and hearing from my readers and fellow bloggers, helps immensely. I don’t need everyone to see things the same way I do, but I do need to feel like I’m part of the picture, part of the community of voices that are hearing and being heard.
Thank you for helping me feel less alone.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
I had this past week off, like most teachers in the United States, for Presidents’ week, and I really needed the break. But one week of vacation was just long enough to remind me of all of the things I wanted to get done, and not long enough to actually do them. Especially since the first thing on my to-do list really took over.
My to do list: SLEEP; put the new rugs down; think through all of the requirements for our next dog(s), and look for rescue organizations that will let us adopt without a fenced in yard; finish three novels and start two more, though one or more may end up being a memoir instead of fiction; read through my ten boxes of Therapy Pages notebooks and plan how to use them; start exercising again (for the fiftieth time); clean the kitchen and get back to cooking (instead of microwaving); read all of the books on my bedside table and piled haphazardly on my shelves; buy more bookcases; finish translating another ten Israeli pop songs and try not to add more to the list right away; work on lesson plans for the rest of the school year; get a haircut (or find a good excuse for why I shouldn’t have to ever cut my hair again); read through my hundred-page-plus draft of an “essay” on the history of the modern state of Israel, and see how many more books I will need to read before I can convince myself that I’m in over my head; watch every webinar I’ve downloaded from YouTube, on writing and therapy and music and Israel and whatever else; oh, and don’t fall into a deep depression as a result of the isolation and loneliness, if possible.
One nice thing happened before the actual vacation started which gave me hope: we had another birdie visitor. This time it was a young white-throated sparrow who either had ADD or a panic disorder and kept flying and pacing relentlessly around the apartment. Mom got some great pictures of him in the few moments when he was able to remain still.
But then, right after the bird left, I heard from my pharmacy that the FDA is clamping down on off label prescriptions for Ozempic (anything other than a type-two diabetes diagnosis), and then my doctor told me that my insurance won’t cover any of the other weight loss medications (Wegovy, etc.), so if I wanted to keep taking weight loss medication it would cost at least $1,000 per month. So, after six months of slow weight loss, the experiment is suddenly over. There’s a bill in the US congress to try to get weight loss medications covered by health insurance, but who knows how long it will take to get it approved; relying on the smooth workings of the United States government has never been a good life strategy.
If the weight I’d already lost had improved my overall health, then maybe I would feel better about stopping here, but, if anything, I’m more exhausted now than I was six months ago. Which is why the first thing on my to-do list overwhelmed everything else I wanted to accomplish this week, and most of my vacation was spent sleeping, or at the very least, lying down. I also watched a bunch of webinars (and managed to download even more), and got some reading and writing and typing done. But vacation is almost over and my to-do list is, if anything, longer than it was at the beginning of the week. How is that even possible?
Here’s hoping that the rest I’ve been able to get this week will help me get through until the next short vacation, and that somewhere along the way some more birdies will come along to remind me that all of this is worth the effort – even if my to-do list never, ever, gets done.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
I’ve been obsessively listening to Israeli music for a few years now, but the obsession went into overdrive after October 7th, when I needed to feel a connection to Israel that wasn’t all about the news. And as the months have passed, Israeli musicians have been creating more and more music, and finding new meaning in songs that came out before October 7th, as performers have crisscrossed their small country singing at soldiers’ last minute weddings, at hospital bedsides, for evacuees from the south and the north of Israel, and really for whoever has needed comfort. David Broza and Hanan Ben Ari and Shiri Maimon and Ishai Ribo and Sarit Hadad and Omer Adam and Keren Peles and Benaia Barabi and so many others have been singing at small parties and huge vigils and everything in between with a generosity and humility that’s hard to imagine in American superstars. It’s as if the whole music industry in Israel has mobilized to try to help people put their feeling into words, and to fight off the isolation of grief.
I wish the outside world could hear what I’m hearing, but because most of the songs are in Hebrew, they just don’t reach across the divide. And, despite listening to all of this music out of a desire to connect, I’ve actually felt even more isolated, because so few people around me are listening to the same music. Even at my synagogue, where the situation in Israel is top of mind, there are very few people who understand enough Hebrew to listen to this music and enjoy it. So, a few weeks ago, I started trying to translate some of the songs into English, in the hopes that I could close some of that divide.
My goal was to try to make the music accessible to people who don’t know Hebrew and for me to understand the songs better myself. I’m certainly not the first person to feel called to do this; there are multiple sites online where amateur translators can upload their translations of songs from other languages (my favorite is lyricstranslate.com).
Some Israeli pop songs have been professionally translated: there’s a popular video on YouTube of Tamir Greenberg on Kochav HaBah singing an English version of Hanan Ben Ari’s Shvurei Lev/The Broken Hearted. And there’s a lovely half English/half Hebrew version of an Ishai Ribo song (with the Solomon Brothers) that manages to capture something of the original magic.
But more often than not, the English translations are awkward. The problem is that Hebrew has so many internal rhymes and rhythms, and English is so chaotic and free form that you can’t make the songs sound alike. So, when I approached my own translations I didn’t even bother trying to rhyme, and focused instead on capturing the rhythm and the emotion of the original Hebrew, to the best of my ability.
The first song I chose is called Zeh Beseder/It’s Okay and it was a collaboration between an Israeli singer named Benaia Barabi and survivors of the Nova Music festival. It’s written in simple Hebrew, so I didn’t have to spend too much time on Google Translate, and it’s all about survivor’s guilt and needing to heal at your own pace, so it felt pretty universal.
Zeh Beseder/It’s Okay – Written and performed by: Benaia Barabi, et al.
(My Translation)
It’s okay that we’re not okay now
It’s okay to sing when it hurts
It’s okay to cry every morning
And even then to choose to rise
It’s okay to not feel normal
It’s okay not to say a word
It’s okay to dance ‘til morning
In a darkness full of hope
It’s easier to hide my face
To keep the pain in for a thousand years
The voices that keep screaming in my head
To pray for those small moments
When life is normal and we start to change
Only for my broken heart, I’ve tried to keep the faith
I want most of all to be together
To never have to be alone
To choose to sing at the top of my voice
And to reach out for your hand
We want most of all to live without fear
It’s okay to laugh just like that
Most of all I want to hug you close
Is it okay for me to love?
Most of all I want to hug you close
It’s okay for me to love
It’s okay to put on make-up and dress well
It’s okay to start to lose direction
Life keeps moving forward
So who am I not to go along?
It’s okay not to find the answer
It’s okay to need to pray for faith
It’s okay to ask a thousand questions
Of whether to be or not to be
It’s easier to hide my face
To keep the pain in for a thousand years
The voices that keep screaming in my head
I want most of all to be together
To never have to be alone
To choose to sing at the top of my voice
And to reach out for your hand
We want most of all to live without fear
It’s okay to laugh just like that
Most of all I want to hug you close
Is it okay for me to love?
The second song I chose is called Habayta, which literally means, “Towards Home,” about wanting the hostages to come home. The performance of the song, by Raviv Kaner, captures everything, even if you don’t understand any of the words, honestly. And if it were a song in English, about Americans being held hostage, it would probably be on American radio 24/7.
HaBayta/Return Them Home – Written by: Raviv Kaner and Elnatan Shalom
(My translation)
My father’s up, he’s already awake
My mother’s here, her pain just never ends
Mom and Dad go back to sleep again
Maybe it’s Shabbat and not Sunday
Surrounded by the noise and the chaos
There’s nothing left, there’s no point
Return him home to me right this moment
There’s nothing left, there’s no point
Return her home to me right this moment
Return them home
It’s dark now, turn off all the lights
Maybe for a day or two, at least
Because between despair and hope, I dream
When it’s over, I will breathe again
Surrounded by the noise and chaos
There’s nothing left, there’s no point
Return him home to me right this moment
There’s nothing left, there’s no point
Return her home to me right this moment
Return them home
There’s nothing left, there’s no point
Return them home to me right this moment
There’s nothing left, there’s no point
Return them home to me right this moment
Return them home
Maybe, in the end, I’m just doing these translations as a way to spend more time with music I love, but it would be really nice to share it with other people.
Let me know what you think.
Bonus: Two versions of a Jewish prayer (that didn’t need translation) that has become popular for months now, because it asks for the release of captives:
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
On October 7th, 2023, when I started to see media reports of the Hamas attack on southern Israel, I was at a loss – I had no frame of reference for what I was seeing. I knew this was something different from previous terrorist attacks or rocket strikes, but I didn’t know what to compare it to. Early on, I heard some people reference the surprise of the Yom Kippur War, because the fiftieth anniversary of that war had just passed, but those comparisons faded quickly. Then there were the voices calling October 7th Israel’s version of September 11th, but 9/11 didn’t involve hand to hand combat, or rape, or children, and, fundamentally, the world wasn’t as horrified by October 7th as they were by 9/11. And then people said, over and over again, that this was the worst loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust, as a way to capture the overwhelming shock and grief of the attack; but comparing October 7th to the prolonged and systematic killing of six million Jews (and many millions of others), over the course of years, and across many borders, just didn’t seem helpful to me, and didn’t offer me any idea for how to cope with the horror, or how to respond to it.
And then the word pogrom started to be used, but it didn’t resonate for me at first, either. The word pogrom came originally from Russian, meaning “to destroy, to wreak havoc, to demolish violently,” but historically it has referred to acts of anti-Jewish violence perpetrated by civilians and supported by the military, in Eastern Europe, between about 1880 and 1920. And, at least in my mind, a pogrom was supposed to be about the dangers of being a minority in a world where the majority hates you. Except, for a lot of Jewish people, and not just Israelis, this did feel like a pogrom, and I wanted to understand why.
The thing is, while Jews are the clear majority population in Israel, they are surrounded by an Arab world that is majority Muslim, and the Palestinian cause has often been supported financially, politically and militarily by the surrounding Muslim countries, so the question of who is in the minority and who is in the majority depends on how closely you focus in or how widely you zoom out.
Some Jewish media outlets mentioned the 1903 Kishinev pogrom in particular, early on in the coverage of October 7th, so I decided to do more research to see if I could understand the comparisons.
The Kishinev pogrom took place on April 19-21, 1903, Easter day, in Kishinev, then the capital of Bessarabia in the Russian Empire (now Moldova). The attacks began after church services on Easter Day, which was also, maybe more significantly, the last day of the Jewish holiday of Passover. During the pogrom, 47 to 49 Jews were killed, 92 were severely injured, 700 houses were damaged, hundreds of stores were pillaged, and 600 women were raped; while the police and army did nothing.
Leading up to the attacks, the most popular Russian language newspaper in Kishinev was regularly publishing headlines like: “Death to the Jews!” and “Crusade against the hated race!” So that when a boy was found murdered in a town twenty-five miles away, and a girl committed suicide by poison and was declared dead at a Jewish hospital, the newspaper had a ready audience for its insinuations that both children had been murdered by the Jews so that their blood could be used to make matzo for the coming Jewish holiday of Passover (a bizarre blood libel that keeps coming up throughout history to incite violence against Jews, despite the fact that matzo is made of only water and flour, and blood is strictly forbidden in Jewish dietary laws).
On April 28th, the New York Times reprinted a Yiddish Daily News report smuggled out of Russia that described the pogrom:
“The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, ‘kill the Jews’ was taken up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep…babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded.”
Many pogroms had taken place before this one, but the graphic descriptions, and especially the photographs, of the Kishinev pogrom were sent around the world and made a deep impression, especially on American Jews who began organizing financial help for the Jews of Kishinev to emigrate to America and Palestine. The danger to the Jewish population of Europe was convincing to most people, though the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time tried to deny that the attacks had anything to do with anti-Semitism, blaming it on Jewish moneylenders upsetting the local peasants with their corrupt business practices.
But even more than the news reports and the photographs, the biggest impact the Kishinev pogrom would have on Jewish history came in the form of a poem.
Chaim Nachman Bialik, a journalist, poet, and publisher, was commissioned by the Odessa Jewish Historical Commission to travel to Kishinev and collect testimonies from the survivors of the pogrom. Bialik, who later came to be seen as Israel’s national poet, with his poems taught across the Israeli school system, was an early advocate for Zionism and the need for a new kind of Jew, a stronger, bolder Jew who wouldn’t be so vulnerable to antisemitism.
As he walked through Kishinev and listened to the survivors of the pogrom he began to form an idea for a long poem in Hebrew that would be published in 1904, meant to wake Jews up to the impossibility of life in the diaspora, called “In the City of Slaughter.”
“Do not fail to note, (he wrote)
In that dark corner and behind that cask,
Crouching husbands, bridegrooms, brothers peering through the cracks,
Watching their wives, sisters, daughters struggling beneath their bestial defilers,
Suffocating in their own blood,
Their flesh portioned out as booty.”
Bialik’s vision of the diaspora Jew’s weakness, and his willingness to blame the Jewish men for the rapes of their wives and daughters, became a rallying cry to find a place where Jews could be in the majority and therefore able to defend themselves. He, significantly, left out any references in the poem to the fact that local Jews had tried to defend themselves, but had failed because police dispersed those Jews attempting to defend Jewish homes and businesses, while allowing the rioters to go unchecked (Russian courts later used those attempts at self-defense to suggest that it was actually the Jews who struck first, and were therefore responsible for the riots that killed them).
But even if Bialik had acknowledged those attempts at self-defense, the lesson would still have been the same: life in the diaspora, in the minority, isn’t safe.
“Of murdered men who from the beams were hung,
And of a babe beside its mother flung,
Its mother speared, the poor chick finding rest
Upon its mother’s cold and milkless breast;
Of how a dagger halved an infant’s word,
Its ma was heard, its mama never heard.”
As a modern day Jew living in America, when I read this poem I got really angry, at Bialik, for the way he blamed the victims of the atrocity. It felt like identification with the abuser, in today’s therapy speak, but at the time it was galvanizing and convinced a lot of people that Zionism was the only answer for Jewish survival.
The word diaspora is often used as a stand-in for the Hebrew word Galut, which means “exile.” The idea is that after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem, in 70 CE, God exiled the Jews from the land of our ancestors, for our sins. This is how we are supposed to see our lives in the diaspora, as outside of God’s favor. But we don’t, or, I don’t. (This belief that we are in exile because that’s how God wants it, is why certain Chasidic groups are anti-Zionist. They believe we have no right to return to Israel until God brings us back there, in the time of the messiah). The Zionist cry was, let’s not wait for God’s permission to go home anymore, let’s not wait for the messiah, because if we wait too long we will be annihilated.
There was actually a second pogrom in Kishinev two years later, killing nineteen Jews, as part of a huge wave of pogroms across the Russian Empire during which 200,000 Jews were murdered in an estimated 600 different attacks on Jewish communities. But it was the first Kishinev pogrom that was remembered, and Bialik’s interpretation that lingered.
Interestingly, at the same time that Bialik was teaching the Jews about the power of a poem to inspire action, Pavel Krushevan, the publisher of that Russian newspaper in Kishinev that had incited the pogrom in the first place, had also learned an important lesson: incitement works. Within months he had published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fictional account of Jewish leaders plotting to control the world, presented as if it were true. This book later spread around the world, teaching anti-Semitism to an ever wider audience. Hamas even refers to elements of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in their charter.
As I continued to read Bialik’s poem, and the details of the Kishinev pogrom itself, it became clear that even though some of the circumstances of a pogrom didn’t fit what happened on October 7th, many of the victims of October 7thfelt the same powerlessness of the Jews in Kishinev, in large part because of the failure of the Israeli government to prevent the attacks, or to intervene to protect them in time, and, all over again, the lessons of Kishinev, especially the need for muscular self-defense, were back in the forefront of people’s minds.
The most penetrating message of the poem, for me, is Bialik’s anger at the Jews of Kishinev for not being angry enough.
“Turn, then, thy gaze from the dead, and I will lead Thee from the graveyard to thy living brothers, And thou wilt come, with those of thine own breed, Into the synagogue, and on a day of fasting, To hear the cry of their agony, Their weeping everlasting. Thy skin will grow cold, the hair on thy skin stand up, And thou wilt be by fear and trembling tossed; Thus groans a people which is lost. Look in their hearts, behold a dreary waste, Where even vengeance can revive no growth, And yet upon their lips no mighty malediction Rises, no blasphemous oath.”
The story of Kishinev, and the shame of it, had largely faded from the minds of American Jews by October 7th 2023, to the point that I don’t think it was even mentioned at my orthodox Jewish high school, where we studied Jewish history as part of our daily coursework, because it didn’t resonate for us, here, where, even now, despite growing antisemitism, and incidents of horrific violence, we feel at home in the diaspora. We feel safe. But in Israel, where the philosophies of Bialik and the other early Zionists are well-known, and where the population is largely the descendants of refugees from the diaspora, or the relatives of those who did not survive, feeling safe is more elusive.
To many, and maybe most, Israelis, the horror of October 7th was that even the new, strong, brave, well-armed Jew couldn’t prevent a Kishinev. And if the New Jew wasn’t enough, what would be?
Interestingly, while many Jews continue to see Israel through the lens of the Holocaust, and the pogroms of Eastern Europe, the Arab world has been taught to believe that these things never actually happened. Mahmoud Abbas, the “moderate” President of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, has consistently misrepresented, minimized and even denied the Holocaust. He has said that Hitler killed European Jews not because of anti-Semitism but because of the Jews’ “social functions” in society, such as money lending (just as the Russian Ambassador to the United States had said about the Jewish victims in Kishinev). In his doctoral thesis, written at a Russian University, Abbas argued that the Zionists had even colluded with the Nazis, agreeing to the extermination of the Jews of Europe in order to convince the world of the necessity for a Jewish state in the land of Israel. He has said that it’s possible that 6 million Jews were killed, but it’s also possible that it was less than a million. And, while he’s denying and minimizing the Holocaust on one hand, he’s also accusing Israel of committing “fifty holocausts” against the Palestinians on the other hand. And he’s not alone. Holocaust denial is rampant and normalized in the Arab world, where Mein Kempf and Protocols of the Elders of Zion have been widely published, and using the language of the Holocaust against Israel (calling them Nazis, accusing them of genocide, etc.) continues to be a common rhetorical tool.
And the thing is, if you’ve been raised to believe that the Holocaust was at the very least exaggerated, if not created from whole cloth, for the sole purpose of stealing Palestinian land in 1948, no wonder you would hate the Jews and think Israel has no right to exist. The fact that these ideas are so easily disproven is maddening. The Holocaust was minutely catalogued by the Germans themselves, similar to how Hamas documented the October 7th massacre with their Go-pros, and yet many Palestinians, and some of their supporters in the Arab world and in Europe and America, have even said they believe that October 7th was not only not as bad as it has been portrayed, but that it was perpetrated by the Israeli army itself.
The Kishinev comparison has been helpful for me in a lot of ways, especially in understanding the Israeli certainty that the right response to the attacks was overwhelming force, but there’s one overriding reason why the analogy doesn’t fit: the hostages. When Hamas militants and their civilian supporters took hostages back to Gaza with them, specifically to instigate a bloody ground war with Israel in order to turn world opinion against the Jews, they also, intentionally or not, created a double bind for Israelis that would create a whole new kind of horror; the choice between saving the hostages, by ending the war now and releasing all terror suspects along with all of the other Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, versus continuing the war so as to prevent future attacks and to prevent future hostages from being taken, is an impossible one.
The horror of knowing that so many hostages are still being kept in the tunnels of Gaza, and that the world stopped thinking about them a long time ago, is unbearable. It can’t be understood by a comparison to any other event; it refuses to be categorized or contained or ignored.
So here we stand, with the Palestinians in a constant state of Nakba, or catastrophe, ever since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, believing that their land was stolen by vicious invaders who constantly lie about their origins and intentions, and Israelis constantly afraid of another Kishinev and, inevitably, another Holocaust.
I don’t know how we move past these narratives to help us see a new way forward, but maybe a new poem could be written, one that addresses the narratives of both peoples, or rather of the many different people within the larger mosaic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and maybe that new poem could imagine a future where something other than violence prevails. I wouldn’t know how to write that poem, or who might have the skill and perspective and confidence to try, but I’d like to believe it will be possible. One day.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
About a million years ago, I read Julia Cameron’s TheArtist’s Way for the first time and committed to doing Morning Pages every day (writing three stream of consciousness pages as soon as you wake up). I didn’t always do them in the morning, and I almost never stopped at three pages, so instead of calling them morning pages I called them my therapy pages, and I have a stack of boxes in my closet filled with old notebooks to show for it. But at some point, I stopped the practice, in all but name. I kept the notebooks nearby – there’s also always a five subject college ruled spiral bound notebook on my bedside table, with the day and date at the top of the page, but some days I forget to write anything, and others I just write a paragraph or two about my day before going to sleep, like sending a postcard to a good friend to keep up the connection, but not sitting down for a good long chat.
I was actually proud of myself for taking longer to finish each notebook, because it seemed so self-absorbed to keep writing so much just for myself, and because I have no more room in my closet to stack boxes of notebooks.
There’s also the thing I did early on that is a big no-no in Morning Pages, according to Julia Cameron. I started writing my Therapy Pages around the same time as I started seeing my therapist, and when I got frustrated by how little I could tell her in forty-five minutes per week that I told her about my Therapy Pages and she asked if she could read them and I said yes.
On one hand, my therapist got to know me really well really quickly, because I didn’t go back to edit the pages before handing them to her, but inevitably, knowing that she would be reading them, my internal editor took over and stopped me from writing things I didn’t feel comfortable having her read. And one more thing happened: my therapist told me that my Therapy Pages were better than anything else I’d written, because I’d also made the mistake of giving her my short stories to read and she wasn’t impressed; just like she wasn’t impressed years later with my novels, or essays. But she loved my Therapy Pages and she wanted me to publish them – this was before Amazon self-publishing became a thing – and she would not listen to me when I said, a) no one would publish them and b) I wouldn’t want to publish them, because they were supposed to just be for me.
I built up the nerve to stop showing her my pages pretty early on (probably also because I felt guilty for giving her so much work to do outside of our regular sessions), but the feeling of having someone reading over my shoulder, and judging me, never went away. Neither did the feeling that I was an utter disappointment as a writer, and/or a coward, and/or ten other horrible things.
Recently, I found out that Julia Cameron had actually continued to write more books after The Artist’s Way, and I ordered one of them, called The Listening Path. I can’t remember why Julia Cameron came up as a recommendation on Amazon that day: maybe someone had mentioned her name to me, or there was some random confluence of events in the Amazon algorithm while I was looking for something else. But even then, I just put the book on my pile of books to read and went on with whatever else I was doing. I was kind of reluctant to open the book, honestly. I’m so tired of advice on how to be better and I’m tired of being told to do something other than what I’m already doing. I’m just really, really tired, full stop.
But when I finished the latest book on my reading pile – an odd little middle grade fantasy about kabbalah, set at a Jewish sleepaway camp, by Ari Goelman – the next book on the pile was The Listening Path and I couldn’t avoid the book without openly acknowledging, to myself, that I was trying afraid of it. So I started reading. And within the first few pages of the introduction, reminding the reader about Morning Pages and Artist’s Dates and other advice from previous books, some part of my brain perked up and said, hey, why am I not doing Therapy Pages anymore?
I won’t go through the whole grumpy internal argument that ensued, but, after a few more pages of reading, and grumping, I picked up my five subject spiral bound notebook and started to write again, telling myself that I couldn’t stop writing until I’d done three pages, instead of the three or four lines I’d gotten used to. And it felt right. Not easy, or comfortable, to be honest, but right.
I still haven’t finished reading the introduction to The Listening Path, so I can’t say anything meaningful about the book itself, and already her insistence on the magical power of Morning Pages to get you unstuck and help you hear your inner self and blah blah blah is annoying the crap out of me, because where does she get off telling me what to do and acting like everyone is the same and can follow the same prescription to a better life, and on and on and on. Except, I think, for me, for this, she’s 100% right. I need this kind of stream-of-consciousness/required writing in order to hear myself again.
I need it for me, not for my novels, though it could also help me get back on track with writing the damned novels. But I’m terrified of what will come up in these Therapy Pages of mine – which is probably the real reason why I started letting myself avoid them in the first place. I’m afraid of all of the crummy things I might say to myself, and all of the ways I will feel challenged, and not good enough, and pushed to do things I’m not ready to do; and I’m really worried about turning that spigot back on. But somewhere along the way I stopped listening to myself, and even if it has made me feel safer, it has also made me feel less, of everything.
So, we’ll see how it goes. If a week’s worth of three pages a day re-opens the hellmouth in my brain, at least I’ll know what not to do.
Wish me luck.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
Tu Bishvat is a Jewish holiday marking the New Year of the Trees, and this year it took place from sundown Wednesday January 24th to sundown Thursday January 25th. In ancient times, Tu Bishvat, or the fifteenth day of the Hebrew month of Shvat, was simply the day set aside as the birthday of all trees born in that year. This was important information to have, because it was forbidden to eat from a fruit tree in the first three years of its life, and in the fourth year you had to bring the fruit of the tree the Temple in Jerusalem. Only in year five did the fruit belong to the farmer.
Trees have always been important in Judaism: like the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the story of the Garden of Eden, or the Torah itself (the Hebrew Bible) being referred to as a tree of life. I read recently (on Ritualwell) that in ancient Israel a tree was planted when a child was born, and as the child grew he or she would care for their tree and then eventually use its branches for their wedding canopy. Even the Rabbis were tree-centric, with a quote from Rabbi Eliezer saying, “When a tree is wantonly cut down, its voice rings from one end of the earth to another,” which makes me think of my Pawpaw tree, which really did seem to set off communal keening among all of the trees in our backyard when it was cut down, and then sent out saplings to take its place.
Poor Pawpaw
Pawpaw saplings
But it wasn’t until the 16th century that Isaac Luria (a Kabbalist, or Jewish mystic) and his followers in Safed transformed Tu Bishvat from a date on the calendar into a festival celebrating the fruits of Israel. They believed that the spark of the divine was as present in trees as it was in people, and they believed that eating the fruits of those trees would release the divine sparks into the world (I’m pretty sure they did not use the same technique for releasing the divine sparks from people. We have our demons and dybbuks and Golems, but as far as I know cannibalism has never taken off in the Jewish tradition).
The Kabbalists, being good obsessive compulsive Jews, decided to create a Tu Bishvat Seder, modeled on the Passover Seder, to celebrate four types of fruits (and four glasses of wine to go with them). There are many different versions of the Tu Bishvat Seder, but this is one of them: The first fruit is one that is hard on the outside and soft on the inside (like almonds, walnuts or coconuts), and they can remind us of the protection the earth gives us, or the ways we keep ourselves separate and protected from one another, hiding the divine spark within; the second fruit is soft, with a pit in the center (like olives, dates, peaches or cherries) and they can symbolize the spiritual strength within each of us, or the potential inside of us that has not yet been tapped; fruit number three is soft throughout and completely edible (like figs, grapes, blueberries and raspberries) and I’m not sure what mystical significance they have, but they are certainly yummy; the fourth fruit has a tough skin on the outside and sweet fruit within (like mangos, bananas, avocados and pawpaws) and they are all about the mysteries of our world and our hunger to uncover the juicy secrets.
The four cups of wine for the Tu Bishvat Seder are drunk in a specific order and in varying shades of red, pink, and white, to represent the cycle of life and the four seasons, but just like on Passover, you can get away with varying shades of grape juice, in case you need to drive home afterwards.
When I was in elementary school they never mentioned a Tu Bishvat Seder to us, but each class got a tray of fruits and nuts common in Israel, especially carob, which was almost impossible to eat but traditional, because it was one of the few fruits from Israel that could make the long trip to the European shtetls of my Ashkenazi ancestors without spoiling. Oranges and pomegranates were much harder to get.
A Tu Bishvat spread (not my picture)
Carob (not my picture)
Tu Bishvat changed again in the late 19th century, when Jews were able to buy land in Palestine (because the Ottoman Empire ended its ban on selling land to Jews), and European Jews established agricultural settlements and planted trees to re-green the land and plant deep symbolic roots. The Jewish National Fund was established in 1901 to buy property in Palestine, and Tu Bishvat tree planting ceremonies became an annual event.
Today, Tu Bishvat is celebrated in all of those ways, but also as a Jewish Earth day: a chance to celebrate nature and learn how to take care of the earth. It’s celebrated in Israel as a full holiday, with tree planting ceremonies and special ecological awareness programs and, of course, lots of food.
Recently, some of the families whose loved ones were killed by Hamas at the music festival in southern Israel on October 7th joined with the Jewish National Fund to plant trees on the concert site. Around a thousand people came together to plant 200 seedlings, both to celebrate Tu Bishvat, but more importantly to try to bring new life, and hope, to land suffused with death. And so the meaning of the holiday continues to grow and change, as we change.
When I asked my synagogue school students why we would have a special holiday to celebrate the birthday of the trees, they said that it would be very difficult to keep track of the birthday of each individual tree, remembering to send a card or bake a cake, so having one day to celebrate all of the trees is much easier. They took for granted that, of course, you should celebrate trees; that wasn’t even a question.
We also talked about why now? Why celebrate trees in the middle of winter? I told them that the date had been chosen because it was the end of the rainy season in ancient Israel, a propitious time to plant a tree in rich soil, but, really, maybe celebrating trees in winter, when they are at their most naked and vulnerable, and least beautiful, is the perfect time to throw them a party; just like we celebrate light in December when the days are at their shortest and the dark of night feels endless.
And maybe we can learn from this idea of celebrating trees when they are at their most fragile, or light when it is most rare; maybe that’s why we should keep praying for peace even when it seems most impossible. We need to believe that spring and light and peace can return in order for our faith to sustain us through the hard times, and through the hard work that needs to be done to reach peace.
My students have decided that Tu Bishvat should be celebrated by hugging a tree, or singing it a song, or knitting it a sweater to survive the coldest days, though I’m still a fan of eating as celebration myself. Let’s hope the trees feel all of our love this week, and that God hears our prayers, and that we all hear each other and our hopes for a peaceful future.
Pawpaw tree in summer
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
(A Note: A wild bird – a Junco – visited for a few very cold days recently and read the hard copy of my essay before publication, leaving a few responses)
“I have a few notes.”
As the nature of Israel’s war against Hamas changes, becoming more targeted and with fewer soldiers on the ground in Gaza, the conversation in Israel has been moving to the question of what happens the day after the war ends. (Of course there are a hundred other conversations going on at the same time, but my brain can’t process all of it. I can’t make sense of a genocide charge at The Hague, or continued terrorist attacks in Israel, or ongoing calls for Israel to stop fighting even as rockets are being fired at the north and south of Israel and the Houthis are firing on ships in the Red Sea. So, for now, I’m trying to focus on something hopeful.) Recently, I was able to watch a zoom call from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association called Holding on to Hope, which hosted leaders from three different Israeli organizations who have been working towards peace and coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians.
One message that came through consistently from these leaders is that the efforts that are most successful are the ones that address self-interest, rather than arguing for peace from a selfless altruism. Another theme was that what happens in Gaza impacts Tel Aviv, in terms of health, and air and water quality, as well as violence, and there are no walls high enough to change that.
“Walls? Pfft.”
One of the organizations on the zoom was a joint Jewish and Arab school in Israel called Hand in Hand. The public school system in Israel separates out Arabs and Jews into separate schools, in large part as a gesture to allow Arabs to maintain their own culture and language and not have to study Jewish subjects, but over time this separation has widened the divide between Jews and Muslims and Christians in Israel. The Hand in Hand schools bring these children together to help them learn to understand each other’s narratives and grapple with how to move society towards coexistence. There are six Hand in Hand schools in mixed Arab and Jewish towns so far: in Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, Kfar Saba, Wadi Ara, and Galilee. And the schools also work at building connections among the adults in the surrounding community.
The representative of the Hand in Hand schools on this zoom was a Palestinian citizen of Israel, with a background in film in particular and the arts in general. His sense of hope for the future came from his belief that education is what will create the next generation of leaders, able to speak each other’s languages and understand each other’s cultures and see each other as companions on the same journey.
“A feather in feather school would be nice.”
Coincidentally, I recently read about a new Israeli TV show (not yet available here) set in a Hand in Hand school (or something like it) in Jerusalem. The review I read in Kveller suggested that, because it’s a comedy, it often wraps up complex issues a little too quickly, but the fact that it can represent those complex issues in an entertaining way could make a big difference in what people begin to see as possible in the future.
The second organization represented on the zoom was Standing Together, a political action organization that brings together Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, and secular and orthodox Jewish Israelis, to work on issues on which they have common cause, as a way to build consensus and community so that over time they can begin to work together on the bigger battles yet to come.
I’d seen a previous zoom, earlier in the Fall, that focused entirely on the Standing Together group, but I found it alienating, maybe because it was so soon after October 7th and everyone’s emotions were still so raw. This time around I heard a lot more acknowledgment of the pain and fear of both Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, and ideas for how to bring both peoples to the table in order to create a sustainable peace.
The third organization represented on the zoom was completely new to me, called A Land for All (previously called Two States, One Homeland). It’s a think tank made up of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Palestinians from outside of Israel, to problem solve the nitty gritty policy issues necessary for peace. The basic idea that they’ve come up with is a two state confederation, where a Jewish State and a Palestinian State live side by side, with open borders and some joint institutions. The specifics of the proposal weren’t discussed in this zoom, but the idea that some people are ready to sit together and seek workable plans for a peaceful future is encouraging.
Except, with Israel being accused of genocide at the International Court for Justice, and Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels attacking from the north and from the sea, and hostages still being held in Gaza, I don’t know how many people within Israel are up to hearing any of this right now, which is probably why this was a zoom for American Jews.
A final peace deal between Israel and a Palestinian state has been so elusive, in part, because the two sides can’t even agree on the preconditions for sitting down to talk. Palestinian leadership wants all new Jewish settlements in the West Bank stopped, and preferably for all of the existing ones to be removed as well, as a precondition for discussing peace with Israel. And Israelis have wanted reliable promises that the terrorism will stop before they discuss the settlements, let alone final agreements on where the borders of a future Palestinian state should be. Many Palestinians and their supporters seem to believe that terrorism is the only way their voices will be heard, by Israel and by the world at large, but every terrorist attack has pushed the Israeli public further away from any belief that peace is possible, and therefore from any willingness to make difficult compromises for that unreachable peace.
When I discussed the concept of peace recently with my synagogue school students, they weren’t thinking about Israel or even peace between countries, instead they looked at peace through the lens of family life, saying that there has to be a lot of room within peace and coexistence for disagreement, and even some bloodshed (their point of reference was fights with their siblings, so, hopefully not too much blood). They spend a lot of their time working towards peace in their daily lives, managing disputes with their friends and family, dealing with hurt feelings, and learning how to compromise, but all of that feels possible for them because they know they are safe in their homes and that people care about them and are listening to them.
In all of the coverage on the news, and in all of the opinion articles that I’ve read and international voices I’ve heard, no one has offered a workable plan for peace that addresses what is actually happening right now. No one has come up with a way to disempower Hamas and destroy the tunnels without causing unacceptable damage to the structures and the people above ground in Gaza. In fact, the UN refuses to call Hamas a terrorist organization, and since Gaza is not considered a state and has not signed agreements to follow international law, they can’t be held officially responsible for their actions, but Israel, which is an acknowledged state and has signed these agreements, is being brought to The Hague for fighting back against Hamas. The international community has not addressed this invisibility of organizations like Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthi rebels, who are acting as proxies for Iran’s interests in the Middle East, and Hamas has taken full advantage of its political invisibility to press its war against Israel, which certainly didn’t start on October 7th.
The fact that Israel is under attack from, basically, all sides, has not changed the rhetoric around the world that has portrayed Israel as a lone menace in the Middle East, causing all of the trouble.
All three of these Israeli organizations are working towards long term goals that will require consistent commitment and ongoing efforts and will not be put in place within the next few months, but the world, and the combatants on both sides, are too impatient for that slow growing peace process, and the extremists on both sides keep taking advantage of that impatience and offering apocalyptic solutions that will only work for one side or the other. Every time I watch the news I hear this ticking clock, and the absence of hope, but I know there are people out there who are thinking and breathing and working for peace, and that’s what I want to hear more about, because that’s where a livable future will come from.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
As expected, I spent the weeks leading up to Mom’s second hip replacement living in existential dread, afraid she would die on the table and I would be left alone in the world with no one to fight off the gardeners trying to cut down my paw paw tree. And then, as everyone around me seemed to know it would be, the surgery was successful and Mom came through with all of her humor and energy intact.
The days leading up to the surgery were full of worry, both because of the pre-surgical clearances coming down to the wire, but also because Mom’s hip was deteriorating incredibly quickly and she was struggling just to get from one room to the other, especially after the ban on NSAIDS was put in place five days before the surgery.
I filled the time preparing: filling the freezer and the pantry with prepared meals; organizing all of the random crap in the apartment that might get in her way when she came home with the walker; carrying boxes of books to the thrift store, and bags and cans of dog food to the animal shelter; and finally replacing the old crooked bookcase with a new, slightly crooked bookcase (put together by moi – which explains why its wonky), so that she wouldn’t be toppled by falling books and sent back to the hospital.
New bookcase, before the wonky drawers were put in.
We still have new rugs waiting to be put down, after we removed the un-cleanable rugs from the last months of Cricket and Ellie’s lives, but I’m going to wait on that until Mom’s walking is steadier and she doesn’t need the walker anymore; hopefully the neighbors will be patient with the uncovered floors for a bit longer.
The need to clean has been profound since losing Ellie. When both dogs were still here I didn’t mind a few extra boxes here and there, but in the quiet I keep wanting to clean and find order and make things neat, as if making the apartment more orderly will heal the grief (though it doesn’t really work).
My Ellie
It was so strange to be in the apartment alone. For two days it was just me, no Mom, no dogs, and I don’t know how to describe the stillness in the air. I kept hearing noises and thinking Ellie was coming back down the hallway after a midnight snack, or Mom was getting up in the middle of the night for a midnight snack (Mom and the dogs seemed to have a club I was not invited to). But no one was actually there.
Thank God, the surgery itself went well, and now that Mom’s back home, everything feels like its back to normal, where the noises around the apartment are real instead of phantoms, and even on pain meds and using a walker, she’s more energetic and busy than I am, always texting with someone or planning something. I think the lesson here is that I am a very boring person on my own.
Next up is physical therapy and occupational therapy and nurse’s visits and keeping track of all of the post-op medications and worrying about something else going wrong. But Mom is in a surprisingly good mood so far, and I’m feeling hopeful again.
Oh, and we got a note from the board of our co-op saying that from now on there won’t be a pet fee charged each month for each (or any) pet you own, so when the time comes I can clearly get as many dogs as I can fit into the apartment. Five sounds like a good number to me. It’s possible that Mom will disagree, so, shh, don’t tell her.
“One dog is always enough.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
rachelmankowitz 