Day of Living

My baby is napping in his room (closet with a skylight) next to me as I write this letter. I know he is safe.

My oldest child is at preschool school at a synagogue a three-minute sprint from here. I believe he is safe.

Today is the “International Day of Rage” against Jews. If my grandmother were here she’d say today is the eighty thousandth International Day of Rage against Jews.

Last night the texts got more frantic. They closed the Jewish day school in Carroll Gardens, which is not one of the Hasidic neighborhoods. Its central place of worship is a Warby Parker next to an Aesop.

The preschool WhatsApp group lit up.

“We’re pulling Jasper from school tomorrow.”

“Margot is def staying home.”

My friend in my son’s class and I quickly sidebarred.

“This is crazy, right?”

“Definitely.”

We were both shaking. We sent our kids. Most parents did. But nobody can blame the ones who didn’t.

“There’s no right answer,” a judicious dad on the chat chimed in. “Do what makes you comfortable.”

What would make me comfortable is entwining my limbs around both my children until I engulfed them like an amoeba. What would make me comfortable is if I could stand in front of the school with the cops.

After drop-off (“I love you, I love you, I love you”) I asked the temple’s head security guard, a retired NYPD captain who loves every kid, “All good?”

The man had been asked this by two hundred Jewish mothers who hadn’t slept in 48 hours.

“Oh yeah!” he recited, “We got this.” He almost believed himself. I almost believed him.

As I walked from the school, I texted my friend who I could usually count on to meet me at the height of my worry. We were both raised in New York and were here for 9/11 and are wired for immediate flight or fight. We are the ones with the air purifiers. Her son is the year behind mine at the school.

“I’m so anxious C how are you?”

She wasn’t. She was calm.

She was more worried about the months ahead. Sending them into a building marked with Hebrew on the days that don’t come with a designated “WATCH OUT, JEWS OF THE WORLD!” warning.

A car slowed down next to me and my pulse staccato’d.

I heard a siren and my throat closed.

I bought a coffee and immediately flashed to dropping it on the sidewalk and sprinting back to the school into flames.

There is comfort in retreating. I could pull my son from the school - maybe people will. I could send my blonde, blue-eyed son to a school where his Jewish identity is as obscured as his features. A school with a Christmas pageant. But what is the lesson there? It’s the lesson faced by all Jews, throughout history.

The lesson “retreat from your Jewish identity” is more dangerous than the nonspecific threat of a terrorist group declaring that they hate us. Today is not different from all other days unless we decide it is.

It is 3:00. The school day is over as I write this, and my husband is on his way to pick up our boy.

And unlike so many boys just like him in Israel and Gaza, today he lived.