“Shana tova guys! I don’t know how much darker everything will get, but I’m happy to be submerged into the darkness by your sides 🫶”
Tongue in cheek new years wishes for my friends but the truth is, it’s the boiled down version of my ‘making aliyah manifesto’ from 22 years ago, which, foresightedly enough, was drafted while I was spending time in Europe.
Something that is universally true across human history – the sheer existing during the passage of time breeds wisdom. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a very common expression of middle age is a sudden or deepening interest in history – World War II, commonly, or the Roman Empire, commonly. There’s plenty of historic human turmoil to go around. Mine, for the current time, is World War I, and I’m lately I’m rolling back into the century before it.
History repeats, time tells, and myriad voices go silent over millennia, causing the loss of essential earned wisdom from forbearers near in ancestry, and very very far.
Oh well.
We’ll have to rely on our own morals, the glitchy history we have access to, and, perhaps most of all, gut feeling.
We are fucked, aren’t we?
I don’t think anyone I know is enthusiastic about Rosh Hashanah this year. If last year we were mostly consumed with ‘what just happened?!’ this year we are nervously looking around and asking ‘what comes next?’
We don’t even have the answer to the first question in full; I don’t think we will until the second question is resolved.
I’m terribly concerned with the violent gash rending through the Jewish people. I’m terribly concerned about the violent vacuum collapsing Western society.
Both lead me to the current conclusion we are headed down a long tunnel, to be submerged in a new dark chapter in a long dark book.
This is the part of the preamble where everyone still ordered cheap goods online while looking over their shoulders wondering how big the waves are going to get before they’re classified as a tsunami.
I’m a tiny, tiny person, who isn’t even close to 100% great at being a person, and all I can think is – the only way out is through, the only way out is in large groups acting together, and if I don’t make it out the tunnel, me, personally – will I leave here having done whatever I could? Will just existing in my core Jewishness, my everyday morality be enough? Will anything ever be enough? Chances are, I’ll be just another voice lost to history; but if enough of us do our part, maybe one will make it out to tell our story.
Whadya got: