Never again

On the march on Washington and trauma begetting trauma

To the Marchers for Israel,

I hear you. I’ve wept over the same thing. My bones feel what your bones feel, my grandmother made sure of that, and her mother before her, and hers before her. That instinct is lodged deep in every Jew who exists today because someone got out just before it was too late.

“I hope they’re safe,” I prayed as they assembled. “I hope they’re clear about what they’re asking.”

Release the hostages.

Decry antisemitism.

But I watched the interviews and read the signs and the overwhelming consensus was Israel needed to stay the course.

This was an IDF pep rally.

I ask: In your smallest, quietest place, in the very deepest back of the furthest reach of the last room of your mind, is there a barely perceptible hum, asking you, telling you “Maybe the annihilation I fear is happening to me, is happening to someone else?”

Here are some more questions that are so tempting to ignore. I know this because I ignored them, too:

How many hostages have been safely returned since the IDF’s siege?

How have the negotiations progressed?

How is Israel’s moral standing in the world?

How are you cropping out “Fox News” from the news articles you share?

How are you nodding your heads at an evangelical pastor who wants you dead?

While Hamas’ funders and orchestrators sip poolside cocktails somewhere in Beirut and Tehran — a Mossad-poisoning away — why the people of Gaza are paying for it?

How has our pain wrought the hell we vowed to never forget?

My son gets angriest when he knows he is wrong. He learned it from me. There is a particular furor to the sense of embattlement while battling.

You post the picture of an Israeli soldier holding a pride flag, standing on rubble. On the flag he wrote, “In the name of love.” I ask: Who is under the rubble? How little were their cries? How big was the love that filled their hearts?

You post footage of IDF tanks standing guard while civilians flee. “Look at these heroes!” you caption it. Would your daughter find it comforting, as she ran shoeless behind you, dragging her doll through the dust as her bedroom was bombed behind her? The “civilian corridor” is a harrowing admission of Netanyahu’s strategy - to turn civilian homes into dust.

I can’t kiss my children goodnight without thinking of October 7th. I can’t wash their tiny bodies in the bath without thinking of the babies in Gaza. This dual haunting is isolating. It’s living in an Aronofsky. It’s asking for empathy from my Muslim friends and mercy from my Jewish friends in an impossible cross tide. There is no room for discussion when both sides are certain the other is calling for genocide.

Our trauma tells us to flee, to protect, to flail wildly at the whisper of a question about Israel. “If there is no Israel, there is no Judaism,” our Hebrew school teachers told us. In preschool at the JCC, they had us fly the flag and pretend we were “going on a trip” on a day we wore white and blue. It’s the holy mothership.

Israel is a place where my family lives and where so many of my relatives can’t return out of fear they’ll be called into the fight. Israel is the place my own mother lived on a kibbutz in the south - it’s where she decided to become a doctor. I believe it has a right to exist and its inhabitants deserve safety. I believe they will be less safe when the survivors in Gaza wipe the blood off their faces and emerge more radicalized than before.

When I hear “from the river to the sea,” the hair on the back of my neck stands up. “Where do the seven million Jews who live between the river and the sea go in that scenario?”

Bloomingdales, my grandmother tells me from her place in my head.

I think of her mother fleeing the pogroms at thirteen. Of her mother’s mother watching her sons drafted to the front lines of the Czar’s army. “Cannon fodder,” they called the Jews.

I think about my uncles tortured or erased, my little brother bearing their names “William” for Willie, a baker who died in the camps after watching his family lined up and shot. “Shmuel,” his Hebrew name, for the brother who made it out, but never left.

The hardest lesson of Jewish trauma is to not inflict greater suffering.

I want to crumble Hamas into dust. In my darkest rage, I think about what I would do to someone who took my children, but it never once involved killing his neighbor’s child.

If Hamas were hiding under your child’s school, would you bomb it?

If Hamas were hiding under your baby’s NICU, would you bomb it?

If Hamas made you into their greatest recruitment tool, would you see it?

In my great grandmother’s name, I will never cheer for a pogrom. I pray for leadership that does what Hamas did not - designates between enemy combatants and civilians. Restores justice and peace to our shared holy land.

“From green lands of palms to land all white with snow,” the surviving Jews sang after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

“We come with our pain and our woes.

And from where a spurt of our blood falls.

Will sprout our strength and our courage.”

Strength is not bombardment. Courage is not blind parroting of a right-wing talking point.

Turning our pain and our woe into more innocent blood is not honoring the survivors who came before us.

I pray for sanity and safety. I stand with the families of the hostages who marched from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem demanding the government changes this horrific and useless and self-defeating course. I pray for an Israel that honors the dead from October 7th, and makes their memory a blessing, not a bloodbath.

Never again.

Release the hostages. Ceasefire.