I’m not just hurting. I’m angry. I’m furious. All of this makes me feel immensely powerless. And it’s utterly devastating that this horrible thing will only continue to divide and destroy. It has no natural stopping point, no return to normalcy. Nothing resets. We don’t reach a point where a bunch of folks with clipboards and referee outfits just call an end to this and assess that it’s over. This is the new normal and nothing about this is normal.
It’s also not any comfort to be outside of Israel. There’s little safety here. We still can’t go to shul on Rosh HaShana without cops standing by. People are still chanting for our destruction here — in Times Square! — and the voices of hatred only grow louder.
My relationship with Israel is complicated. I’ve only been there once, in 2006, for my best friend Pnina’s wedding, to show my love for the family she was stitching together with David’s family. I got to be there with friends from high school and crashed with my friend Avi in Jerusalem, and I got to see and spend time with my cousins and their tiny lemon grove in a little town outside Tel Aviv. I had a deeply spiritual experience involving my recently deceased grandfather, my “zayde,” and the place imprinted on me.
I haven’t been back, for a number of complex, complicated reasons — the kind of reasons that lead a fractured world to somehow bring us to Israelis and Palestinians being murdered by terrorists and governments and biblical-level hatred. The kind of reasons that make it scary to go to shul or Times Square or wear a yarmulka in public or hang a mezuzah on my front door.
Pnina and her husband and their three children keep running in and out of their safe room. Her parents live across town and keep running into theirs. Her brother is on alert. My relationship with Israel is complicated and yet I would give my right arm to fly there right now and grab them all, and my family, and my friends, and every Israeli and Palestinian who doesn’t represent terrorism or corruption or their governments, and wants to live a life of peace. I’m so mad as hell that I would rip a hole in the earth just to pull them all through if I could keep them safe. But I can’t.
