From Never Again to Right Now
A view from the Diaspora
Since this heartache began, I’ve been trying to find words. I want to tell you that the Jewish people know the story of what happened in Israel Saturday morning. It is etched in memory, handed down from generation to generation for a little over 5,784 years. We are weaned on these nightmares.
In a long series of disasters as far back as the exodus from Egypt, Jews have been in danger. I’ll skip ahead a few thousand years though. There was the Spanish Inquisition which scattered, or picked off their Jewry, and then the pogroms of Russia and eastern Europe that sent my people sailing into New York Harbor at the turn of the last century. Next up, the Nazi slaughter.
After the United Nations granted Israel its charter in 1948, every Arab country expelled each Jew that lived within their borders, no matter how long they’d been there. Israel took them in. When Russia jailed the Jews and sealed them in, Israel gave them a place to land. When the Ethiopians and Yemenites were starving and persecuted in a different desert, Israel, under cover of darkness, brought them home. Israel is the Jewish people’s place of last resort—one most of us have direct connections to.
I am an American, as proud as one can be. My family and I have deep roots here since the early 1900s. It’s as much mine as anyone’s.
“That’s what they said in 1930s Germany,” an Israeli shrugged at me one day.
In a world of increasingly frequent whirlpools of environmental and political strife, all you can do is hope not to get dragged under. I’d prefer a flood to this anti-semitic barbarism. This is again. In my lifetime.
You can say that it is about the innocent Palestinians as well, and you’d be right, but there is no other people that would be asked to leave Hamas to breach the border another time. Gaza also has a border with Egypt. Where is that outcry?
I won’t bog you down in Middle Eastern or even Jewish history. The crux of it? Everyone's right and everyone’s wrong.
This attack was not only the sheer number of people and the cruelty, it was the concrete walled crowding, random pot shots at those trying to escape, slaughtered babies, systematic killing of people because of who they are. A pogrom at home. More stories to share with future generations. It’s beyond what we can hold in our hearts.
Many of us are not doing well. We have people still hiding from rockets in bomb shelters, family serving in the army, friends taken hostage. We walk around wishing we could absorb some of the blow for them.
If the point was to remind us how unsafe we are in this world, well done.
I am far away from the action, if not the actors. The generation being asked, and dutifully going into the fire, are my kids’ age and I held them as babies. I can’t imagine this as a mother. It’s no fun for a cousin who adores every one of them.
If they’d just leave all the Jews alone, we’d fade away. In my entire generation, I was the only one who raised Jewish children. But every time we’re reminded of who we are, we rise to the occasion. There are only seven million Jews in Israel, and another 7 million scattered by the winds.
When the world takes up the drumbeat of anti-semitism, there is an alternative for us as long as Israel remains. Jews everywhere rely on her. Because of her we have been outlasting our usual 50 year cycle of horror. And now she is in tears.
Two weeks ago, we whispered about the problems in Israel, which were real and plentiful. The merciless terrorists of Hamas were at bay, but people were turning away from a corrupt Israeli government. Protests were happening all over the Holy Land, and I was proud of their turn out, from the oldest generations to the youngest.
That conversation is far from us now, swept out to sea in a debris strewn tidal wave. They no longer care beyond getting loved ones back and restoring a sense of security, no matter how false it can turn out to be.
Slaughtering over 1,300 people pogrom/Holocaust style, taking them hostage during a holiday, has only written another tragedy we will never forget.
Ask your Jewish friends if they’re ok, even if they haven’t practiced the religion in their lifetime. They will tell you, no. When I ask my family in the thick of it what I can do, they tell me to talk about it. Explain our side, how diabolically barbaric it was and what a trauma that raid set off. So here I am.
I don’t feel like I have too much choice. My alternative appears to be staying curled in a fetal position, phone in hand, desperately trying to make sense of an insane world. I am praying we make it to a better place soon.