I saw a documentary a few weeks ago at The Museum Of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial To The Holocaust. When the screening was over, I left the museum and looked around me carefully to see who was nearby. Were there crowds of people of any kind, Free Palestine graffiti or t-shirts or anything else I would need to be careful navigating on my way to the garage. Then I checked myself... could anyone immediately tell I was Jewish? Could they tell by my clothes or jewelry or by anything I might be carrying? I had a lot of thoughts about this very post and I started recording them into my phone, but never within earshot of anyone else.
It’s three years since life as I knew it changed. I haven’t gotten to that part of my story on here yet. It’s harder to tell than I first thought.
I happen to be on a flight with strangers today, feeling myself to be in a metaphorical world with strangers too in which people are actually celebrating today or others just have no idea what others of us are experiencing. An entire tribe in mourning and others just living their lives or dancing.
I found the following video on one of my Whatsapp feeds. Its message is basically to speak up on behalf of Jews because if you don't, the bad guys will come for you next.
The problem I'm having with this is that the message they are going for is a no-brainer. You should show up for people who are crying out for help. And just in case you're not a nice enough person to do that, here's a warning that if you don't, you're in danger yourself.
I've previously mentioned my March of the Living trip in high school. This trip to Jewish sites and concentration camps in Poland coincided with and enhanced a developmentally normal but very intense period of my life of Holocaust obsession. I simply couldn't learn enough.
And then some time after that, I turned away from the obsession. One of my memories of the trip was when Deborah Lipstadt (one of my now heroes) spoke to our group and said, "Many of you here today will now embrace your Jewish identity because of the anti-Semitism that you've learned about here. I want to encourage you to embrace it despite that."
This post was drafted on July 29 but revised on August 10.
I'm sitting in Ben Gurion airport, wired with caffeine to help me through the time zone shift and distracting myself from the complicated feelings about leaving by writing this blog post.
LN read my previous post, appreciated it, and then we started up a back and forth about some of what she appreciated about her trip here. The word she used again and again was "connectedness." She used this word to describe both the way people communicated with each other on Shabbat as well as our everyday interactions with strangers. She also said she felt a sense of joy permeating wherever we went. It might be surprising to see that in a country at war, but I think she's onto something.
