It is almost a week since the worst pogrom in the last 80 years or so began. That is not a scientific number so don’t take it at face value but it is close enough for this story to begin.
I haven’t slept well since I got the news late Friday night and I have woken up on several mornings disturbed by what mental movies my mind played for me in my sleep.
While processing what I had seen and experienced against what is real I remembered my father coming to my room to tell me to go back to sleep.
I told him about whatever it was that bothered me and how it felt real and he suggested that maybe it was a bad dream and that if I went back to sleep it would go away.
That worked back then but it hasn’t worked particularly well this week because the bad dream is the news I read and though I find the odd story that can be considered miraculous or a win they don’t tamp out the heartache.
I have tried to put things into some sort of context and haven’t had much success.
You can’t say that you made a video for a woman explaining your feelings and were ignored. Nor can you talk about having written letters asking to spend time together and having faced silence or rejection.
Those don’t equate to kidnapping or murder. There is no relationship. No equivalency.
There is no framework to build to try and compare the horror to something as mundane as those things. Sure they are painful, but they aren’t anything like this.
I thought about how someone told me they didn’t want to find themselves chained to a bed and I said you know I would rescue you.
It was said with sincerity but no one ever expects such a thing to happen or to know people whose family have been kidnapped.
Ten Years Later
Facebook tells me it is 10 years since I began packing up my apartment in Fort Worth for a move back to Los Angeles.
I still have a few of the shirts in the box, the chair and a few other things. Sometimes I think about other items from that apartment and wonder where they are. I wonder if I gave them away, misplaced them or lost them.
Sometimes that really irks me because I did all I could to be organized and to prepare things so that I could find them when I got back.
I didn’t make a physical list because I knew what was really important and was certain I wouldn’t have any trouble finding those.
But some acted like they had a mind of their own and in spite of my best efforts they hid from me. Ten years later I sometimes wonder I am just a sock whose match was lost in the dryer or if I am going to find it inside the sleeve of a shirt.
Or maybe I’ll find it somewhere else in an unexpected place.
There were a few times I thought that I might have and got excited because I thought that maybe this would be the time.
Maybe I’d get to put that sock back on my foot and see if it still fit or if time had left it out of shape. That’s what I wanted to confirm.
Sometimes you find a shmata you haven’t had the opportunity to wrap around your body and you revel in how comfortable and familiar it is.
And sometimes you just look and wonder where it got to or what happened. Sometimes you have nothing but questions.
The kids tell me when I go tearing through boxes, the garage or closets that it is because I am having a senior moment and am old.
I always shake my head and tell them they’d be surprised by how much I remember.
Life Turns On A Dime
There is a picture of a young couple kissing each other while they hide from the terrorists who murdered 260 innocent people.
They said if they were murdered they wanted that to be the last picture the world saw of them. They survived and are here to tell the story of the day.
I thought about their shared trauma and wondered whether it would bring them closer together or further apart. I sent them and the other survivors my best wishes and prayers for recovery from the atrocities they survived.
And then I thought about the first stories I heard about the Holocaust, Cossacks chasing my relatives, and the Soviet refuseniks.
I remember the outrage I felt and how I declared I would fight. I was about seven but filled with all of the outrage a young boy can have.
In some ways the most painful part of the stories of pogroms and the Holocaust came from people telling them as if we never fought back or stood up for ourselves.
It was incomprehensible to me and I hated hearing it.
Remember I am the boy who when his father potched him turned around and said “I take this potch and throw it away!”
I meant it and I still mean it.
Through the years I learned there were more stories than just that of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and that made me feel slightly better, but not perfect.
Not that perfect would really be possible there, but you understand where I am going.
The idea that for 75 years we have had a state and army that could protect us if G-d forbid it was needed provided comfort.
When Israeli Jets flew over Auschwitz I smiled and silently told Hitler to go fuck himself because we won.
I believe we will win again because there is no other option but that doesn’t take away the pain and trauma of this time.
Doesn’t fix the ignorance of those who celebrate the actions of the terrorists or those who tell us how we ought to feel or respond.
I explained that to someone by asking them how they would feel if they saw a woman they cared deeply for with another man and I said they ought to just forget her, there a million fish in the sea.
It is a flawed analogy because there aren’t a million Israels but I was trying to find something he could connect to so that maybe he would begin to understand.
It is highly unlikely you’ll see me in uniform fighting for Israel but I can fight in other areas. I can help educate and inform and that is worth something.
I can’t sit in silence and watch. I can’t just sit back because we were shown again that life turns on a dime and my heart hurts.
