On Love & Darkness Since 10/7/23

I will never be the same again.

Today is one year since everything changed for me. I didn’t lose a loved one in the massacre, though many of my family & friends did. I am not running in and out of bomb shelters though many of my family & friends are. Some of you are still praying for the release of your loved ones from captivity. I pray with you.

In this past year, I turned 50. If on my 49th birthday, in April of 2023, you had called me naive, I would’ve laughed.

I would’ve pointed out all the personal horrors I’ve experienced and/or witnessed. I also would’ve summoned up some stories from my professional past. The ones that haunt me.

The structure of my psyche was never built upon denial or avoidance. Sure, I’ve got defense mechanisms. We all do. We need them. But I do not look away. So, I feel a lot. And in the break between waves of rage, I don’t rest well. I look for redemption. I really do.

But I always had a line. I’d constructed a mental barrier between good and evil. Good contains flaws. It’s imperfect. Evil, on the other side of my line, was more pure. That’s how I knew when to reel in my own empathy and time and investment.

What was my definition of evil? It was sadism: taking pleasure in other people’s suffering. (I’m not talking kink between consenting adults.) I’m talking absolute joy in watching other people’s misery.

October 7th taught me that there are worse things than sadism. There is support of sadism. It is harder to tolerate, more difficult to comprehend, and maybe more painful to witness.

Maybe an individual sadist is born with some structural anomaly in their brain. Maybe a Hamas terrorist who celebrates rape & murder of a Jew by phoning his family is determined by the ideological forces that have shaped his development. I could find an explanation. It didn’t relieve my anger. I didn’t erase my line. But things still made a kind of sense. A horrible sense.

Then came the global response to October 7th. This altered my entire perception of humans. I will never be the same.

I had to move my line. There are more people on the other side of it now.

Of course, there were some who denounced barbarism. Who supported Israel’s right to exist. Who expressed love & concern for Jewish safety in both Israel & the diaspora. Thank you.

But the majority of voices have shown me a new brand of evil. It is trickier because it hid until it didn’t. It is harder to detect because it was long silent. WOW, how silence finally roared like a wild surprise after 5 decades of life. It is so detestable because of its constellation of traits that are the very opposite of integrity: cowardice, conformity, & a total failure of curiosity.

I’ve lost friends. Some have defriended me. Some don’t know I’ve lost them yet. Or maybe they do. I don’t know if they care. Do I?

I don’t know if my new line is engraved or a rough sketch. I’d like to think I still have a capacity for hope & forgiveness, but October 7th taught me that I too am even more flawed than I ever knew.

If the offenses were personal, maybe I could hold on. But seeing all the ways in which hatred manifested against the people I love—I cannot forget that.

On behalf of my husband alone, I will never forget the ones who failed his heart. If you know Tomer, you know he is a far kinder person than me. I’ve often wondered how he loved so easily. Where I found fault, he looked for goodness. He is light. I have light too, but my light comes from fire. Not Tomer. He is light itself.

I once joked that maybe it would feel better to be loved by me than by him. Because Tomer’s capacity for love has more to do with who he is than with anyone else. If I love you, you better believe I really think highly of you! Because I do not have a capacious heart like Tomer’s.

I am changed by October 7th, but nothing has impacted me like watching the ways it has disillusioned my spouse. Whether in the general population or by way of a specific “friend,” I will never forget the harm. The double standards. The uneducated moral superiority. The utter arrogance.

I will never forget how the world spit into the souls of Jewish persons, including our family members, who’ve dedicated entire lifetimes toward a two-state solution. Toward peace and justice for all. People who continue to hold empathy & perspective for all persons impacted by forces beyond any individual person’s control.

I know I am lucky. We weren’t there. We are not mourning at a gravesite today. We are not watching our city explode.

I have also found much love and warmth in the community of Jewish writers who accepted me into their spaces. Having been part of Jewish community for three decades, the stakes of everything made me realize that I wanted to demonstrate my commitment to the Jewish people. I started my conversion journey a few months after the massacre.

Thousands of years ago, the Jews were a people before they shared a religion. Their community preceded Revelation at Sinai. Humans loved one another before G-D revealed a presence to them. And so it goes for me in this way too.

Will I be an agnostic Jew? A true believer? I don’t know. But in Judaism, I am encouraged to grapple. To doubt. To ask questions.

I never thought I’d find a spiritual home. And yet, I’ve been here all along. Thank you for welcoming me into your tribe.

Am Yisrael Chai