Hi all,
This has been a rough week on earth. I got more than the usual amount of mail in response to my Monday post and I didn’t have it in me to deliver good news on Tuesday.
Last week, I happened to write a little bit about my extended family. I have quite a few cousins in Israel — they are the leading lights of the Membership Committee (lots of kids!). Yesterday, I was relieved to hear from them. They have been inundated with calls and emails, and in some cases, rocket attacks.
My cousin Susan — my closest cousin, in spite of the miles that separate us — sent me a link to our cousin Liz’s latest blog post. Liz is part of our generation even though she is 20 years younger than I am, and moved to Israel almost 20 years ago; I don’t really know her. Janet, Liz’s mom, is one of my mom’s favorite young cousins.
Janet, was supposed to fly home to New York from her visit to Israel on Saturday, 10/7. Janet was in Liz’s bomb shelter instead.
Liz’s blog post details the dissociated calculus she conducted this weekend.
At some point you tell your son that what’s happened is the first pogrom in a long time; he asks, what’s a pogrom and you weep because whatever vacation from Jewish reality we’ve all been living in for decades is now, brutally, over.
Your big task is to make sure your mother gets on her flight back home to the US, yes, this very night, because it’s about to get much, much, much worse and you’re grateful that her induction into terror life was only a succession of bomb shelter disturbances.
Hostages.
That’s a word you can’t scrub from your mouth, from your ears, from your children’s questions. You had to, you see, explain to your eldests about the hostages, because they grow up in a world where 3-5 second videos are easily shared to handheld computers in their tiny little innocent pubescent palms; 3-5 second videos weaponized in such a way as to give nightmares that would put my accidental seeing Silence of the Lambs at age 13 to shame.
Janet emailed to tell me that she made it home safely. Liz and her family are okay. Susan’s middle daughter left her home in Tel Aviv to stay with a friend out of the city to get away from the rocket attacks for a few nights. She is home again and back at work.
War is only good for learning geography. Susan reported that she and two daughters, one son-in-law, and a passel of grandkids are in the north, where they feel safe. Her son was called up for reserve duty in Haifa (also in the north).
There are human beings on both sides of the war and the bloodshed has been shocking. Thousands of people have died. Hundreds of thousands have been displaced from their homes. Susan wrote of the “horror and confusion” they feel. I have no doubt that those are feelings shared by Jews and Palestinians alike.
The best response I got to Monday’s post is here:
To your question, 'How do we “foster a world that is built on a foundation of justice and equity for all people and the planet?’ I find that you have provided the answer. Teach children the truth to the best of our abilities, teach that hate always undermines progress, prepare them for the difficult choices to come, and have them ready to accept love and joy when they can.
Our words — yours and mine and everyone’s — have power. It is never too soon or too late to plant seeds of love, compassion, and peace.
Peace, Salaam, Shalom,
L