In contrast to how easily I was able to channel my rage, grief, and bewilderment into writing this blog for the first month or so after October 7th, as you’ve probably noticed, I have been finding it harder to post regularly for the past couple of weeks. I’ve actually written a lot, but most of the posts are unfinished; I get partway through and something else happens to take my attention away, and I never post them. I’ve also had a bad cold, which – if you know me – is a rarity. I haven’t been sick like this in over a decade, maybe two. Not too surprising that it hits me now, given my mental/emotional state. As Juvenal said almost 2000 years ago, orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano – you should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body. If only I could pray. And the Bible scholar in me is reminded of Proverbs 18:14 – “the spirit of a person will nourish him in sickness; but a broken spirit, who can bear?”
I’m not broken. But I would say my spirit has rarely if ever been as damaged as it was October 7th, and certainly has never been as continuously trounced on ever since. The articles, the tv pundits, the opinion pieces, the government officials, the letters from faculty associations, the student organizations… there is no space to put myself back together.
The hostages are trickling out, which evokes joy and rage together, inseparable. I tear up at every photo of a family reunion, and then wonder, how many of those who have not been returned to Israel are still alive? And how many more horror stories of those who have come home will slowly emerge over the next few weeks? The 12 year old boy who saw his parents murdered before he was taken captive, and then was forced to watch videos of the massacres over and over, threatened at gunpoint if he cried or if the other children cried. The 9 year old girl who is still afraid to speak above a whisper, who lost her mother to cancer when she was young and then her step-mother to murder on October 7th, and who now cries herself to sleep under her covers at night and won’t allow her father to comfort her. The men who are still in captivity, being starved and beaten with electric cables. The haunting look on the face of the 21 year old woman who was brought back to Israel today, after surviving a gunshot wound at the desert party on October 7th and then receiving surgery in Gaza. And the helplessness of Israel to do anything beyond negotiate, and free more terrorists, and try to figure out what to do when the US inevitably stops backing the full eradication of Hamas.
Yesterday, the Jerusalem Post reported that one of the hostages was held by a teacher employed by UNRWA, and that another hostage was held by a Gazan doctor. The IDF found more terrorist tunnels found under kindergartens. I haven’t seen these things mentioned anywhere other than Israeli news sites and Fox News. Female hostages were kept in cages. I haven’t seen any of the North American media pick up this story either. This morning two men from East Jerusalem got out of a car at a bus stop and killed 3 Jews, injuring 6 others. This headline is also not crossing any major newsfeeds. Bassem Eid, a pro-Israel Palestinian peace activist who is on a speaking tour to warn that Hamas is a terror organization completely uninterested in Palestinian rights, gave a talk at the University of Ottawa yesterday; I haven’t found a single article on that, except an interview in the National Post with him that they published the previous day. What is making the news? Elon Musk’s photo op with Netanyahu as he tries desperately to get his advertisers back. The Spanish Prime Minister’s “serious doubts” that Israel is complying with international law. (Of course he would know.) 50-some days later, the UN thinks maybe it ought to look into “allegations of sexual violence” by Hamas on October 7th even as UN Women still won’t condemn what happened – they need some actual proof (like, beyond the videos, photos, and testimonies from the rapists themselves as well as the victims). And Blinken is warning Israel that there had better be far fewer civilian deaths when they resume their war in southern Gaza.
And the incessant calls for ceasefire, for peace. How is no one hearing what Hamas has explicitly said? And said AGAIN TODAY?!!! There is no peace; not for Israelis, not for Palestinians.
Oh, and these guys, the activist doctors helping to free Palestine by terrifying Jews in Toronto (and you’ve got to love the even-handed coverage here by CTV); right up there with the movement to reinstate the prof from York who was unfairly suspended from teaching duties while trying to help the Palestinians by spraying graffiti on an Indigo store.
So I’m finding it pretty difficult to write any sustained and in-depth pieces.
While I was at the conference in Chicago a couple of weeks ago, I spent some time on the phone with my daughter. She was usually either lying in bed doomscrolling or deleting her Instagram account yet again in frustrated and anguished tears. The tight community of friends in her program at her home university has been irreparably shattered for her. And as life goes on back at home, she is languishing here in limbo, alone. She told me that she was still getting regular messages from Ben Gurion University about volunteer opportunities for the international students who had remained there. She had paid for her dorm room for the whole year, and there were like-minded people her own age still there, who were actively doing things to help with volunteer efforts in southern Israel for the past 7 weeks. We talked at length a few times, and we came to a decision. While we may be physically safer here in North America, our mental health is suffering. Our spirits are being continuously stretched to the breaking point. We don’t know when the semester will start, but we decided we weren’t going to keep waiting. As soon as I came back to Florida from the conference, we booked our reservations: we will fly to Tel Aviv next Thursday. Then, once she’s settled into her dorm, and I’m settled back into an apartment in Haifa, I expect you’ll hear from me (on the new site, which I will have set up by then!) more regularly.