Never have I been so relieved for the timing of a flight home…
Back in Israel after another extended work trip, just in time to be woken at 3am with a warning about a potential attack from Iran. Since, after all, Israel had already started delivering blows to nuclear infrastructure, as promised, for… years. Years, and years, and years….
I remember 16+ years ago, laying in my new bed in my new room in my new town and wake up to hearing a fighter jet pass above us. “It’s Iran – they’re finally doing it,” I had half-joked, half-wondered, generally, if those growing Death to Israel threats were going to amount to something one day. Slowly, over the years, they did amount to things, in proxy attacks and wars and much, much grief. And, well. October 7th.
What I think about now – after the last ~12 hours of bomb shelter prepping, scanning updates, consuming news analysis and wondering how the hell our kids will turn out – is the paper tiger of it all. Back then, I truly assumed it meant bombs over my head, smoke rising around us, sitting in a bomb shelter living off crackers and tuna for a few weeks. And, hey, that may still happen. But this multi front war that resulted from October 7th – I never would have guessed in the years, the decades before, that the info war would be the one that would hurt the most. The war for truth. The war of truthiness.
Laying on my camping mattress, surrounded by the four kids we’ve brought in the world since those prehistoric Iran jet jokes, everyone with a bed or a mattress, everyone with a place in our bomb shelter room that used to be so empty when we moved in, and now is covered in evidence of a vibrant family life – I just can’t help feeling like boxes have been ticked. Plans have been executed. Throwing my hat in the ring philosophy of Jewish identity has been realized.
And actually, we, as in the nation, we’re doing what we always said we’d do. We’re engaged in the fuck-around-and-find-out of it all. The stand with us or stand against us, but we gotta do what we gotta do of it all.
The never again of it all.
Is that the right approach to fighting a to-the-death info war? Morality war? Who knows, but if we’re not alive, we can’t even try.
Many days, when I’m not stirring my anger with a melting paper straw, wondering where to store my fury while I go about my day, I have a different series of thoughts – about how the first half of my life was a shielded examination of the world, from behind glass, from behind NYTimes print on my finger tips, from the empty pages on which blissful poetry spewed forth. And it was a one time only gift, one our kids today don’t have and who knows how many generations it takes to formulate a blip in history like that.
And now, it’s go time, and it’s been go time for a while, and it’s just as well because none of us Jews have the luxury of living in a cocoon forever, most of us never even get a shot inside for a few years or months.
With everything going on in the US right now, I spent the last ten days on the east and west coasts in a kind of stunned silence. Now, so so many people who never had to face a “throw your hat in the ring” philosophy are faced with it. What conflict really looks like. What war actually is. What belief systems are worth fighting for, getting wounded for, dying for. What will they choose? Is this the return to community, to collective action, to living in a real world, with real pain, and real challenges? Will America and the frothy west finally catch up to what the real world looks like?
I’d bet on it. But I’m happy to have had a plane ticket on June 11th so that I can continue to ponder that from the safety and warmth of my packed-together shelter.
Whadya got: