Hey, beloved tribe.
First I want to express my gratitude to all of you who were so generous in response to my last post about this week with my daughter at Nationals. Your public and private comments were so wonderful to read.
To recap one aspect of Monday’s newsletter: I described how I was sitting with my daughter after a disastrous second qualifier route. We were in the parking lot next to the competition space, sitting on the curb in the shade, and she was sobbing her heart out, certain she would not make the cut for semi-finals.
From experience, based on her performance on day one, I thought she likely would make the cut, but it would be at least an hour before we knew. If you’re in the top 5 on day one, which she was, you have a whole lot of leeway the next day, and though she experienced her performance as an unmitigated catastrophe, the fact was that she had done perfectly respectably even if it was nowhere near what she hoped, landing in the middle of the pack rather than near the top.
I’ve seen kids make the cut with a worse qualifier disaster. Last year’s national champion, for instance, was called off the wall shortly after he began climbing because his foot went outside the black tape he was not allowed to cross. His incredibly strong performance the following day saved him from elimination.
But I couldn’t, at that moment, offer the reassurance that she would survive to fight another day — not with any certainty. We needed to see how 41 more girls would do before we’d know what was what. So instead I said the only true thing I could say with conviction at that moment. I told her: “You’ve been in this terrible place a hundred times before, without any way to know how many glorious things were just around the corner.”
And as it happens, this turned out to be an especially prescient statement this year.
As I posted on my personal Facebook page this morning:
There are moments in life so utterly surreal that it feels disorienting to report them.
Yesterday morning, after semi-finals, my daughter became a four-time national finalist.
Then last night, after placing 3rd in finals, she was offered a spot on the USA Youth National Climbing Team. She was on the national podium. She received a bronze medal, a beautiful plaque, an official Team USA Climbing jacket, and — most exciting of all — an invitation to compete in the Youth World Climbing Championships in Guiyang, China at the end of the summer.
There’s a line from a Whitney Houston song that’s always made me tear up: “I want one moment in time… when I’m more than I thought I could be…”
After the long, hard, and so often heartbreaking road she has traveled to get here, I am so deeply, achingly grateful that she experienced such a moment last night.
And I’m so grateful also to every single one of you — and there are many in this community — who encouraged, celebrated and cheered her along the way.
I have beautiful podium pictures from last night, but the one I want to share here is an image that’s just as representative of her climbing life as that long-awaited glory. Six years ago — very nearly to the day — I posted this photo to my Facebook page:
In fact, at least a thousand days — and I mean this literally — looked a lot like that.
And another fact is that this image could just as easily represent us right now. We’ve had a thousand days like this. It’s possible we’ll have a thousand more. Speaking personally, it feels to me as if we are being crushed right now under the endlessly accumulating weight of the awful.
Even in the face of a ruthless sociopathic thug who’s promised to turn our nation into a murderous dictatorship resembling Russia, and send our planet hurtling into accelerated climate collapse, the Democrats can’t seem to unite behind the only realistic path we have to victory. Israel is under siege from every direction and is internally divided again as well. American Jews are under a different kind of siege from every direction. And the world is burning beneath an ever-intensifying sun.
What can I say in the face of all this?
You likely already know that my favorite podcast is Dan Senor’s Call Me Back and my favorite regular guest is Haviv Rettig Gur. In a recent episode, Haviv too was voicing his own dark thoughts, which is somewhat uncharacteristic of him. Part of why he is so widely loved is that he finds a way to offer us hope and optimism almost all the time. He acknowledged this in a jokingly rueful way last week, saying: “I hate to be the bearer of bad news; I know I’m contractually obligated to be the bearer of good news.”
I’m no Haviv Rettig Gur, but I’ve also tried never to succumb to pure despair and — in the midst of so much bringing us down — I’ve wanted above all to be someone lifting us back up.
As with my daughter, I can’t say anything I don’t believe. There’s little in life that irritates me more than toxic positivity — a kind of despair-shaming, a bullying and tyrannical insistence on dismissing the very real darkness that so often surrounds us. I see it as a form of gaslighting. Nothing anyone says to offer me comfort can actually accomplish that unless what they’re saying is also true.
In that spirit, of course I don’t have a crystal ball, but this is genuinely what I believe to be true:
I might be wrong, and I might be in the minority, but I don’t think Trump is going to win again. And the reason for this is that I just don’t feel the same energy around his candidacy. At this time four years ago, there were Trump caravans stretching down the highway for miles, Trump trucks dripping with MAGA flags, Gadsden flags, Confederate flags, police flags and even the occasional Nazi flags, revving their engines, filling the air with exhaust, careening around with palpably violent energy. His rallies were stupefyingly huge. People were more fired up about him than I’d ever seen the masses be about a candidate. And he still didn’t win, because — having experienced the raging dumpster fire that was the Trump administration — there were even more people who had enough sense to fear and loathe him.
And at this time, I’m not seeing Trump flags in my neighborhood, where many houses had them before. I’m not seeing the Trump trucks. No one came to support him in court, not even his family. Democrats have over-performed in a historic way for the last several elections because people don’t want Roe to go away.
My American version of Haviv Rettig Gur — the pundit who keeps me sane within the American landscape — is Simon Rosenberg, who has made a lot of minority predictions that have turned out to be right. And something he is saying now that has the ring of truth is that “MAGA is a stone cold political loser.”
And the genuine truth is I also believe that Israel will — somehow, some way — prevail. In part because —kayn ahora — she always has, even against seemingly impossible odds. And also because I genuinely believe that a culture that loves and affirms and celebrates life is stronger than a death cult. I genuinely believe a country that is so innovative, so brilliant, so endlessly inventive, so indispensable to the rest of the world — and even to many of her enemies — is stronger than a group whose leaders’ overarching ambition and driving purpose is not a good life for their own people but the destruction of another people. I genuinely believe a tiny, endlessly beleaguered tribe who’s outlived the vastest empires this world has ever seen is capable of outliving Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran.
And I genuinely believe glorious things are around the corner for us, and we are building them now with our unity and pride and resolve.
I’ll be back with you on Friday.
Till then, I’m sending love and strength.
Am Yisrael Chai.
Oh, how I needed this today, Elissa. Thank you for not feeding into self-fulfilling prophecies. Thank you for moving beyond the usual circle of doom pundits for evidence of where the country might really be at. Thank you for linking our collective anxiety about Trump and Israel's future once more to the ways we move through our more private, intimate worlds, which teach us how to survive. Thanks to you and Charlotte, my heart is lifted.
Charlotte is amazing....as are you. Kol haKovd to both of you!