Israel

I was having a pretty bad bout of anxiety last week. The horrors of this weekend didn’t help. But I’ll be fine. Probably.

It’s been hard to find the words to capture the feelings. Shock. Horror. Anger. Profound sadness. I certainly have nothing more to offer than anyone else who has tried. When I speak to my mother she just keeps repeating “what a catastrophe.” I’m not sure we have the vocabulary yet to articulate it.

Whatever my experience has been the last several days obviously pales in comparison to the experiences of those who lived through it and even more so, those who didn’t and those whose lives still hang in the balance. Beyond everything else, the level of personal tragedy is devastating. So many Jewish families destroyed.?

But growing up the way I did, it hits home on the most visceral of levels. I didn’t have to be there to be there. I was there in the same way I was there when I imagined myself in the stories my grandparents told me about Auschwitz. As in, not there. But there in the sense we command ourselves to be on Seder night, imagining ourselves as if we personally exited Egypt. As Jews, we celebrate and we mourn collectively. We don’t know any other way. Because we know that if we were there, they would have killed us too.?

The stories and the images from Saturday are too much to bear. Jews shot in cold blood in the street and butchered in their beds. Jews running for their lives and hiding in basements. It’s all too familiar. But bear them we must. To make sure we understand the brutality and depravity of what they did and what they would have done to us and our families if we were the ones there instead.

My sister happened to be in Israel celebrating the holiday with her family. They thankfully all got home safe. Safe but traumatized. When we spoke, she told me she never imagined she would live to see the mass slaughter of Jews. I called her naive. I was only half kidding.

The slaughter of Jews is a tale as old as time. What my grandparents lived through (and what the rest of their families did not) was the culmination of centuries of expulsions, forced conversions, witch trials and pogroms. But they survived the Nazis. And through them, so did we.

This past summer I participated in a program called WEDU (We Educate), a branch of 3GNY (3rd Generation Holocaust Survivors) that trains descendants of Holocaust Survivors like myself to become ambassadors for their families’ stories. Through the program, for the first time in a long time, I refocused on those stories. I listened to old recordings and dusted off old memoirs. I Google Mapped the towns they grew up in and the ghettos they were transported to. I studied the maps of the camps where they were held as prisoners and the gas chamber where they would have been murdered if they hadn’t been so lucky. I almost couldn’t believe they were real places. They’re on Google Maps!?

I never imagined I would be watching a pogrom unfold on Twitter this fall.??????

The survival and bravery of my grandparents’ generation offered ours a stunning choice for where to plant a Jewish future. The flourishing of American Jewry is a gift outdone only by the miracle that was the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in Israel. The yearning of centuries of Jews to be a free nation in our land was now a simple fact of life. Sure, there was the occasional hate crime, bus bomb or terrorist attack that reminded us that we remained ever more vulnerable than we cared to admit. Sure, Israelis had to go to work and school while rockets exploded over their heads, as if that normality was actually normal. But this was merely the price we paid to live in a dangerous world. The barbarism that my grandparents endured was a thing of the past. Besides, we had an Air Force now.??

We never could have imagined this. Seeing pictures of piles of bodies of murdered Jews is nothing new. Seeing them in color is. Something like this was never supposed to happen again. We even had a slogan that said as much,

It has truly been heartwarming to see the outpouring of love and support from pretty much all of the people who matter most. World and community leaders, American corporations and organizations, friends, colleagues and neighbors have almost uniformly said all the right things and did so genuinely. We really do have it very good here.?

Saturday was an attack not just on Israelis or Jews but on any right-thinking person who understands that the mass murder of civilians and the rape and torturing of hostages is always indefensible, no matter the cause in which it is ostensibly carried out. But as it turns out, a bunch of really smart kids at Harvard decided that actually there’s an exception to that rule and the exception is the Jews. Because they deserved it. How original. Before the body count could even be determined, people gathered in the heart of Manhattan to make clear that whatever the number of dead Jews ended up being, they supported it. In New York City in 2023.

The searing images from Saturday will haunt my nightmares, real-life clips seemingly plucked straight out of the stories my grandparents told me as a child. The pain of watching gatherers outside the Sydney Opera House chant “gas the Jews” will not recede soon. The cowardice of cable news hosts trying to put the mass execution of families in their homes and the mowing down of music fans at a festival “in context” will not be forgotten. Neither will the politicians who couldn’t race fast enough to use this calamity to score points in domestic politics or the online voices for diversity and equity who couldn’t be bothered to say anything at all.

Most of all, there is the helplessness, the same feeling Jews have experienced for millenia in the face of these onslaughts.

Tonight, I plan to attend a rally organized by the local county executive in support of our brothers and sisters in Israel. The details are below and if you find yourself in the area, your presence will be most welcome. We’ll sing together and cry together, mourn together and uplift each other. We will rally together to make sure our enemies know that they will be defeated and we will prevail. And to make sure we know it as well.

In the meantime, below is a list of charities and organizations that my family has chosen to support, each of which captures the urgency of the moment in various ways, with links to where you can help.

1. Magen David Adom - Israel’s Red Cross organization, responsible for emergency medical care and blood services
2. Friends of the Israel Defense Forces - Offering financial assistance, support, medical care and programs for IDF soldiers
3. UJA’s Israel Emergency Fund - Emergency cash assistance for victims of terror. Critically needed trauma counseling. Care for children in shelters. Burial expenses. Funds to relocate people to safer areas.
4. JGive -? Providing humanitarian aid to the affected residents in Southern Israel.?

The last few days have been dark. And the days to come may grow darker still. The scale of the tragedy is too painful to even grapple with right now. But we will survive. Like we always have. Together.

Eventually, we will be fine. Probably.

?? ????? ??

Am Yisrael Chai - The Nation of Israel Lives