A lot and nothing to say

What has changed in a year?

I don’t even know how to share this part of myself – I’m drained, I’m exhausted, I’m surrounded by exhausted people, exhausted communities, exhausted institutions – but it’s important to try, so I’ll try.

Survival mode is relative to what we’re each surviving; some people are surviving the ultimate scenarios, some people are forced to shift their entire understanding of their lives and what they’re meant to be, many, many people are surviving the grief of losing people they thought they knew, most of us get by facing new and daily trauma, and then many, many people are surviving the unbelievable humanity of experiencing their loved ones’ deaths.

Many of us are living through a new understanding of what is real and what is imagined, what is important and what is vital, what is a friend and what is a foe, and what it means to carry on. We are dealing with new kinds of pain we’ve never before experienced, new dimensions of it, new dimensions of what society is, what trust is, what the world is about.

For thousands of men and women, they have been forced to give up one of the most precious resources – time. Time with their families, their kids. For thousands more kids, that loss of time feels eternal, insecure.

Me? So much has changed, but mostly – things I thought I knew, I now know. My heart has hardened. I’m not unfeeling, and I still bleed empathy, and it still hurts very, very much. And yet. The muscle is hardened by an increasing lack of patience, by an increased dose of mistrust. I peer around at peers and wonder if they are capable of critical thinking. I take a peek at people I’ve known for a long, long time and wonder if they have the skillset for nuance. Did they ever? Was it just better times?

The death of nuance is not new, and is not born of this war. But since October 7, 2023, the issue has become very, very personal.

And frightening.

Sometimes I scan the headlines and the only two words I can muster and mutter are – גדול עליי.

The last year has been a constant sensation that the walls are closing in.

The last year has been a constant, exhausting examination of who I am, what I think, what I can tolerate and who I can trust.

It’s been a renegotiation of what it means to be Jewish in this world, and an official burial of the ‘golden age’ I grew up in. A redefinition of the childhood my kids are experiencing, and a new worry as to the world within which they’re transforming into adults.

The ups and downs of being one of us today is exhausting. Scroll for updates, beware death notices, and walk into work and smile. Fire off friendly emails while dodging the nastiness of people around the world aggressively misunderstanding everything you are. Conference calls; funerals. Planning events for a few months from now; knowing they very much might be canceled. Or, sometimes worse – they will go ahead, with our plastered smiles. The economy, the economy.

The ask of Israelis couldn’t be more ‘keep calm and carry on’ and it couldn’t be more devastating on a cellular level.

There is hard-coded or physical proof to the changes of the last year. The way I approach security – my own personal, my family’s and my country’s, all tied up, one doesn’t exist without the other. The new lines etched in my face. The kinds of questions I need to answer from my kids. The bigger picture hanging as slogans and symbolism, from my windows or my neck. The way I jump at motorcycles; pause for a piercing beat. The way a white pickup truck has never looked the same. The soundtrack of planes, looping over and over and over and over and over and overhead.

The conundrum of being us. The paradox of valuing life while working so hard not to destroy it, but alas, slaughter. Wanting to help, being shunned. Craving a future, stuck with faulty leadership.

What else can I say – I’m angry. I’ve never known anger like this. Now I know it. I’m angry all over the place, all over the map. I’m filled with it and I don’t know where to put it. And I know I’m not alone. And it’s a dangerous place for us to be.

What’s changed in a year is everything. Every thing. Me, you. Us. Grief itself.

There’s so much to it, and there’s nothing to it. We give meaning to dust and with a simple pursing of lips, and the tiniest bit of air, we can make it all disappear.

But we won’t. We’re not built like that.

Show me a Jew who hasn’t changed this year.

It’s exhausting.

A lot and nothing to say. May we know a better 5785. May we know a better future. May we not fold from despair. May we know fact from fiction. May the world be listening. May it remain eternally natural for humans to recognize light from dark.


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