Yahrzeit

Despair and holding each other on a day of mourning

Our baby had a cough this morning. We heard him in the night, rattly and wet.

He is two. He is beautiful to me the way the first bud of spring is beautiful — a miracle and a joy. His cheeks have the texture and scent of freshly set custard. His eyes narrow like a little old man’s when he is thinking and go wide in astonishment when he’s figured it out.

His hair still smells like warm hay and his voice stops us in our tracks in its tiny delight. “Oh!” he’ll say out the car window. “There is so many everything!” My love for him is visceral, it is full body, and it takes the air out of my chest.

My baby is not going to preschool today because he has a cough and because his school is a synagogue and I am anxious about it. We told the teachers it’s the cough. I told myself it’s the cough. It is. Medically, he has a cough.

And it’s also our anxiety. I do not think anything bad will happen to his school. Intellectually, practically, statistically I know it is safe. He is safe. But the anxiety of marching my baby into an explicitly Jewish space today is more than my explicitly Jewish stomach will allow. If there is a protest, I can’t face it. Today, maybe I’m weak or awful for saying it, I can only mourn. I can quietly mute the friends who mark this anniversary as a year of resistance.

I can’t be away from my baby on the day the children were burned in their beds in the kibbutz or shot on sight in their bomb shelters or ripped from their parents’ arms and put into trucks, because the body shock of October 7th, 2023 feels too present.

And I can’t take him near a synagogue today because of what Netanyahu’s regime has done to Palestinian children exactly like him in the name of those murdered Israelis, and the rage against Jews it has awoken. The swastikas and slurs I’ve seen since that made me horrifyingly relieved two of my grandparents were dead before they could see them.

A year has gone by and my grief is bigger than it was last October. The magnitude of suffering has grown in ways that were only unimaginable to people who hadn’t heard Bibi speak before October 7th. The pain of Jewish mourning has widened to encompass the grief of the region, and the fear and isolation of how any Jewish grief has been eclipsed by something that has turned on it.

To look away is to isolate in an algorithm of increasingly unjustifiable echoes. Every day since the initial horror of the 7th, my phone has been a trauma periscope broadcasting the unimaginable horrors in Gaza since the war planes started dropping bombs on the hospitals and the schools and homes. I am on the subway, and I am watching a child scream wordlessly covered in the dust that used to be his house. I am in a waiting room, and I am watching the footage of burning tents full of families. I am waiting at Kindergarten pickup and there are the remains of a school, a tiny limb visible under the rubble.

It is unthinkable Netanyahu’s plan, for an entire year, has been to bomb the children.

There are still 100 hostages in captivity, and now there are over 16,000 dead children. There are still 100 living hostages who are not made safer by the IDF’s year-long strategy. My Israeli friends and family are shouting that the loudest.

On October 7th, 2023 my friends texted me their condolences. (I will always remember the non-Jews who reached out. My husband’s cousin, my friend M, my sister, my friend J. Four people. The loneliness was insane.) On October 7, 2024 the city is erupting in protests.

The reason is not latent antisemitism, although G-d knows antisemitism has horrifically spiked since the 7th, but it isn’t a shield against criticism of the IDF.

The reason is the 16,000 dead children. The mothers in labor. The babies in incubators. The mothers trying to shush their children to sleep in a tent. The mothers who identify their toddlers by their roller skates. If Hamas hadn’t perpetrated the pogrom of the 7th, would this have happened? Of course not. If Bibi hadn’t been given carte blanche to unleash ineffective hell would this have happened? I hope not.

I breathe in the smell of my son’s cheeks, and I think about Kfir and Ariel Bibas. I think about the 16,000 mothers in Gaza who held their babies cheeks to their faces as they died, or who died along with them. It is a number bigger than every scream.

I am praying for peace through empathy. I am praying for the wisdom Hersh Goldberg Polin’s mother has. I am praying for the deal to end the war. For Netanyahu to listen to the Israelis who march every day screaming for him to take a deal. And for Jews blinded by the pain of the 7th to not become exactly what we have always feared. To look outside our suffering as the way to honor the memories of the family we all lost this day last year.

If the year has taught us anything, this is not kill or be killed. The “or” is the fallacy. Mutual survival is the only way.

As we recite the mourner’s kaddish today, we remember the human soul is a light from God.

May we hold each other tight today.

I am going to rub Vicks on my child’s chest now, letting my hands pause, grateful for the tiny hope of his beating heart.