My synagogue had planned a big trip this spring – to Germany, Israel, and Jordan. It was originally planned for 2020, and then Covid hit; and it was rescheduled for this spring, and then October 7th happened. The plan for the trip was still up in the air for months, as the clergy watched to see how long the war would last, and what conditions would be like for tourism, but somewhere along the way the decision was made that they would just do the Germany leg of the trip this year, for the people who were still interested in going. A small group of congregants went to Berlin, with the same tour guide who was going to lead the big trip, to experience the different ways Germany has memorialized the Holocaust, and how they are dealing with Jews and anti-Semitism today.
I was not planning to go on the trip this Spring, even if October 7th hadn’t happened, because I wasn’t interested in the Jordan and Germany legs of the trip, and because it was going to take place during the school year and I hate missing time with my students if I can help it, and probably most of all because it was going to be expensive and I am still paying off steep medical loans and I feel guilty being in so much debt at one time.
But if the synagogue group had gone to Israel, in this post October 7th landscape, I would have been jealous of everyone who was able to go.
I have wanted to go to Israel for a long time now, and I’ve gone over and over all of my internal conflicts around the costs, the weather, the social issues, the health issues, and the security issues, without really coming to any conclusions. But post October 7th the drive to go to Israel has increased tenfold.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blind to the security issues, or to the parts of the country that are still off limits because they are under direct attack by Hezbollah; and I still have money issues, and health limitations, and I still worry about being lonely and feeling lost and alienated while I’m there. But the part of me that wants to be there, not to see the Western Wall or the Dead Sea or other touristy things, but just to be there in solidarity and offer my presence and compassion and love, feels newly strong. Maybe because, until now, I felt like I had nothing to offer my Israeli cousins; I even expected them to reject me, because of so many of the clichés about Israelis, that they feel superior and look down on weakness, be it emotional, or physical, or psychological.
But on and after October 7th it became clear to me that Israelis aren’t really the image they project to the world, or at least they’re not only that; they are human like the rest of us. Yes they are courageous, but they are also frightened. Yes, many of them are adventurous and confident, but a lot of their bravado is a defense mechanism against lives lived in a very small country surrounded by people who hate them and keep trying to kill them.
I wish, with all my heart, that this unveiling of their true selves had happened any other way, but I am truly grateful to feel more connected to them and to learn more about who they really are. There are, of course, some people who are so frightened and defensive, like Benjamin Netanyahu and his fellow politicians on the far right, that they never let the facade drop, even on October 7th itself.
I am also aware of, and overwhelmed by, the news about the war itself and how it is being conducted. It has been especially difficult to watch the news about the seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen who were killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. It’s painful and disheartening to see something so awful happen to people who are there only to offer help to those who need it. And I don’t understand how a mistake like this could have happened when the aid workers and the IDF say they had deconflicted their itinerary ahead of time to keep the workers safe. But it’s also heartbreaking to hear people insist that this was an intentional, rather than accidental, killing. I don’t believe that the Israeli army would target innocent aid workers intentionally, but, given the complications of managing a war in this territory, with so many voices pulling in different direction, I don’t understand how the army hasn’t become more and more careful over time, and I don’t understand why mistakes like this are still possible. At the beginning, when they were first trying to figure out how to fight a war like this, the mistakes in targeting and choice of munitions that led to so many civilian deaths was horrifying, but maybe understandable. But now? I don’t know what to think.
And yet, with all of my questions, and however conflicted I may feel about how the war is being waged, and interpreted, Israel and Israelis themselves are still very close to my heart. If I could plan the perfect trip right now I would want to visit my niece at her school and go with her and her friends to volunteer somewhere, picking clementines or folding uniforms or whatever volunteer activity the girls are doing now; and I would want to stay with my best friend from high school, and hear from her kids and their friends about what their lives are like right now; and I’d want to sit on trains and buses and listen to the conversations around me; and I’d also want to go to every concert in every venue possible; and visit my teachers in Tel Aviv, and finally taste real Chummus, since I’ve been told over and over that the Chummus I can get in New York is a pale imitation of the real thing.
Knowing me, though, I would be too shy to really talk to anyone, or to ask the questions I really want to ask, and I would spend half my time beating myself up for not having the courage to go and do and say what I want. But that’s still the trip I’d want to take, if I could. Those are the experiences I wish I could collect and bring back home with me.
For now, accepting my own limitations and the state of the war, my plan is to take another online class through the Hebrew language school in Tel Aviv, where I’ve taken classes in the past. That way I can continue to build my confidence in speaking Hebrew and listening to Israelis, for when I’m ready to go in person. And, through the zoom screen at least, I will still be able to make some of the connections I’ve been looking for, with my teachers and classmates, and through the music and stories and culture of Israel.
As always, I’m listening to podcasts and music to try to understand what’s going on. The latest podcast episode of For Heaven’s Sake, hosted by Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevy, is an honest accounting of how things feel for Israelis after six months of war.
And I’ve been listening to a lot of music by Idan Amedi, an Israeli musician who was injured while serving in the reserves in this war. He wrote a song twelve years ago about how hard it is to talk about the pain and memories of life as a soldier, even to the ones you love most, and the song still resonates.
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?
We had our usual Purim Spiel at synagogue this year – a musical version of the Purim story, set to Taylor Swift’s music, performed by adult congregants and synagogue school kids. In the past we’ve had a Wizard of Oz themed Purim Spiel, a Star Wars version, and a Billy Joel version, for example, and the dialogue and new lyrics are written to tell the story of Queen Esther, while also making jokes about our modern world and local and national news stories and whatever else can make people laugh.
Artwork depicting a Purim celebration(not my picture)
The kids love doing the Purim Spiel, because they get pizza at all of the rehearsals, and then they get to dress up and be on stage and sing and dance. The adults, who do it year after year, are often really talented singers and actors who love the chance to ham it up once a year as a break from their day jobs.
Given the news of the day in Israel and Gaza, though, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Purim Spiel this year. I, personally, was not in the mood for it, but four of my current students were in the play, so I had no choice but to go and support them. And it was just as outrageous and funny and zany as usual, and the kids and adults had just as much fun as usual, and people shook pasta boxes (instead of groggers) each time the name Haman (the villain of the story) came up, and then we ate Hamantaschen (triangle shaped cookies with jam or chocolate or poppy seed fillings), and after it was over the pasta boxes were donated to a local soup kitchen. It was all very much as it usually is on Purim, and I was surprised.
Homemade hamantaschen cookies, noise maker and mask, for Purim party. (not my picture)
For some background, the Purim story is about a man named Haman who is second in command to the king of Persia (Achashverosh) some time before the birth of Christianity. Haman decides that he wants to kill all of the Jews and asks the King for his stamp of approval, and gets it. Why? Because, the King is sort of an airhead and easily swayed, because antisemitism has existed forever, because Haman was angry that Mordechai, the Jew, wouldn’t bow down to him (because a Jew is only allowed to bow down to God). But what the King doesn’t know is that his new wife, Esther, is really a Jewish girl named Hadassah (and Mordechai’s niece). In the end, in the Book of Esther itself, Haman’s genocide plan can’t be undone but the King gives the Jews the right to fight back, and orders the death of Haman and all of his children (the spiel usually tempers the ending so that there is no obvious violence or loss of life).
It’s a dark story to read, even in the most peaceful of times, but a bit too on-the-nose for the current situation, especially given the bizarre coincidence that Hamas is only one letter away from Haman, at least in English.
It’s important to say that the Purim story is fiction. It is, as far as I know, the only acknowledged fiction in the Hebrew Bible, though it is inspired by many real life stories in the seemingly endless history of anti-Jewish violence. The point of the book, and the holiday, is to celebrate one time when Jews were able to thwart a genocide against them, and to celebrate the power of being able to stand up and say I am a Jew.
Artwork depicting a Purim parade (not my picture)
The trappings of Purim – the party atmosphere and the costumes and the drinking and the spiel – are more modern developments, likely inspired by Carnival and Mardi Gras, but the Purim story itself was written before the Common Era, and the holiday used to be celebrated in a more serious way, and still includes a fast day before Purim itself, to mirror the fast done by Esther, the heroine of the story, when she is praying and hoping for the survival of her people. And I guess I thought that, this year, with the Hamas attack on October 7th and hostages still being held in Gaza, and the death toll and imminent state of famine in Gaza, there would be some attempt to change the tone of the holiday back to the original seriousness, or at least to make a point of the deeper resonance of the themes this year. And from what I understand, that was true in Israel. The mood of the holiday was muted and the celebrations were somewhat altered. But not here. Or at least, not in my community.
In a way, maybe, this highlights the gap between American Jews and Jews in Israel; that in America we have so much distance from the recent traumas that we can continue with the regular patterns of the liturgical year, and continue to treat the Purim story’s antisemitic storyline as a distant memory, rather than as a page pulled from the news of the day. It’s possible that other American Jewish communities had more subdued Purim celebrations, or used their Purim celebrations to help them reflect on the situation in Israel in a new way. I don’t know.
But, for me, the easy victory of Esther and Mordechai over Haman in the story was jarring this year, and the violence of the response to Haman’s deadly genocidal intent was overwhelming too; not that it never bothered me before, but in the past it felt like a blood thirsty dream, a wish fulfillment story, rather than something that would actually happen in real life. The Book of Esther is written in the form of a court intrigue or a farce, with all of the exaggerated caricatures and deceptions and misunderstandings that come with that genre. It’s not meant to be naturalistic, or even realistic, in tone; it’s meant to be outrageous.
Artwork depicting the reading of the Book of Esther for Purim, with music and costumes and food (not my picture)
And, every year, I wonder how Purim became such a big holiday on the Jewish calendar, with all of the food and parties and drinking and costumes, when the story should have been shelved a long time ago, left to be read and studied with sober intention, if at all. Especially this year, I wanted some acknowledgement of how contrary this revenge tale is to our morality, and how simplistic the characters and plotting are compared to real life dilemmas like the ones we are facing, and how unhelpful it is to act as if heroes and villains are so black and white.
But Purim, like Halloween, has become a children’s holiday, at least here in the United States, and just like Halloween has lost most of its religious connotations in favor of fake gore and candy and fun, Purim has lost the seriousness of the original story in favor of big laughs and silly costumes and carnivals and food.
At the same time as these Purim celebrations were going on, the UN Security Council was debating ceasefire statements on the Israel/Hamas war, vetoing one by the United States and then passing an alternate version that didn’t tie the release of hostages to the ceasefire demand. And, by the next day, Hamas had, inevitably, refused the latest ceasefire deal authored by the United States, which Israel had accepted. And, as Israel and the United States and Jordan and Egypt and many other countries were trying to come up with new ways to safely bring aid into Gaza, despite complicated conditions on the ground and many different political perspectives, the world was branding Israel’s failures to solve these problems as an intentional genocide.
I kept thinking that an alternative Purim celebration could, maybe, have helped us deal with the simplistic characterizations and statements made at the United Nations, versus the complicated and messy reality on the ground; or it could have helped us acknowledge that simple answers may be morally satisfying, but often don’t actually work. A thoughtful Purim celebration could, maybe, have helped people who are feeling like it is dangerous to be Jewish right now, and are tempted, like Esther, to hide who they are; or it could have helped people look at the differences between justice and revenge, and to try to define where one ends and the other begins, or to acknowledge that there is no clear or obvious line between the two; or it could have addressed how people use exaggeration to tell a story and to make their arguments, in real life even more than in fiction, to the detriment of any real understanding or path to compromise.
All of these could have been helpful discussions, even cathartic storylines to address in a more serious Purim play, but maybe it’s all still too raw, or too frightening, or too easily misinterpreted, given the high stress of the moment we are living in, for us to handle right now as a community. There is so much outsized and overwhelming criticism of Israel, including criticism of its existence in the first place, that even the more subtle and nuanced criticisms become too hard to hear, because every criticism starts to feel like a domino ready to take down the whole country, or even the whole Jewish people.
There are truths in the Book of Esther that are important to face, despite its fictional format: one, anti-Semitism is and has always been part of Jewish life and the temptation to hide who we are in order to fit in has been felt in every generation; two, people who are constantly under threat will crave revenge against those who have hurt them, whether we are talking about Jews or Palestinians. Many people have called the Palestinians who celebrated Hamas’ massacre of Jews and others on October 7thinhuman, and others have used vengeful comments made by Israelis as evidence of genocide, but the Purim story tells us that we can all become so enraged that we crave and celebrate the death of the other. It’s part of human nature, rather than evidence that we are something other than human.
We need to be able to know all of these things about ourselves if we are ever going to truly make ourselves better, instead of just pretending to be better. My sense of the UN, and related humanitarian organizations, which were seemingly created for the specific purpose of preventing another Holocaust like what was done to the Jews during World War Two, is that they have become a performance of moral clarity rather than an attempt to reach real moral clarity. No one lives up to all of the Humanitarian statutes as written, but some people are called out for their failures, and others are not. We deserve an international organization that we can turn to in times of conflict and despair, but we need it to be an honest broker and not just another form of political power to be wielded against an enemy.
I wish these were conversations we could have had during Purim this year, along with the laughs and the silliness and the cookies, but I think I understand why so many people needed distraction instead: the current reality is so painful and frightening and complicated that those of us who are far enough away from the immediate horror are looking for an escape, in whatever form we can find it.
I can only hope that a ceasefire will actually be possible soon, and that the hostages will come home, safe and sound, by Passover or soon after. Maybe then we can continue to have some of these difficult conversations, integrated with the regular prayers and holidays that make up our usual religious lives, to help us through whatever will come next.
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?
We had our yearly Women’s Seder at our synagogue recently (far in advance of Passover this year, because of scheduling issues), and the music was lovely, and I got a chance to sing with friends, but it was bittersweet because so many people I hadn’t seen in a while asked about the dogs. Some knew that Cricket had died, but not Ellie; most didn’t know about either one. And I found myself having to explain, over and over, that they’re gone and I’m heartbroken. Like a mantra.
The fact is, I’ve had to go over their deaths again and again, just for myself, to remind me why there won’t be a dog at the door when I get home, or to explain to myself how I managed to get through a whole day without going outside.
Kevin, the mini Goldendoodle in our complex, left a squeaky tennis ball on our steps the other day. I don’t know if he left it for Cricket, still hoping she would come out to see him, or if he just left it for me; either way, it felt like a gift.
I’ve started to have more memories of Cricket from before she got sick; just glimpses, of her standing on my chest to wake me up, or bouncing around the yard with Kevin, or flying like the wind when she was younger, fitting as many sticks as possible into her mouth at one time. But I’m still haunted by Ellie’s last days. It’s very hard to remember happy Ellie, for now. I just keep seeing her struggling to breathe, looking to me for help but I didn’t not know what to do. I hope this stage will pass soon and I will be able to remember her happy years, her joy, and her peace.
“I could’ve fit more in there.”
“I was so happy, Mommy!”
I’m trying to be patient with the grieving process, letting it unwind at its own pace, even though I wish it would hurry up. I’m still not ready to spread the dogs’ ashes and say a final goodbye. I think it took a year before I was ready to say goodbye to Butterfly, and back then we still had Cricket with us for comfort. Losing both dogs at the same time has been brutal.
One of the families at my synagogue has an emotional support dog who comes into the sanctuary for services. He’s basically a smaller version of Kevin: a poodle mix with curly reddish gold hair. He’s very well behaved and knows how to sit on a chair by himself; looking as if he’s listening attentively. A few weeks ago he came to services wearing his new blue satin Kippah, with a Jewish star on it, and the cuteness almost killed me.
I do my best to absorb my doggy vitamins from witnessing the joy of the dogs in my neighborhood whenever possible, and I watch a lot of dog videos on Facebook too, to take the edge off of the longing for another dog, because I’m not ready to start over again, yet.
There’s something about the Passover story, the escape from slavery to freedom, that seems to fit this stage of grief. We tend to see the Exodus from Egypt as an ecstatic, completely positive moment; but how can it be? There’s so much fear and grief in leaving a familiar place, even if it’s full of pain, and there’s so much anxiety in going somewhere new and unfamiliar. I like that the Seder encourages us to sit with all of those feelings, and I love that we go through this process every year as a way to practice these difficult skills so they will be there for us when we need them. It makes me think of how tennis players practice their forehands and backhands, or figure skaters run through their programs endlessly, or football teams practice different plays so that it can all be automatic under stressful conditions, when it’s impossible to really think it all through.
I like that the Passover Seder creates space for talking through the story of the Exodus, and asking questions and arguing about how the lessons of the past can apply today, but is also filled with physical experiences, like eating the maror, the bitter herb, with the Charoset, the sweet apple or date sauce, to remember that we can survive the bitterness, and this is how. I remember learning about a group of Sephardi Jews who would carry a pillow case filled with heavy books around the Seder table, to feel the burdens of slavery and then to experience the relief of letting the burdens go.
I’m trying to use all of this practice now, to remind myself that I can handle this transition better if I take the grief in small bites, and with the help of some sweetness to balance out the pain. I’m trying, but each day the grief turns again to a slightly different edge, and it feels like I have to learn all of the same lessons all over again. Maybe the point of all of the practice isn’t that it will make these difficult transitions easy or automatic, but that it will give me a memory of having made it through to the other side, so I can have faith that I will make it across the sea this time too.
“We’ll always be here.”
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?
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?
rachelmankowitz 