Hey, beloved tribe.
So first, an apology.
I fully intended to launch Judith Magazine yesterday, but two daunting obstacles surfaced.
The first was that, after having all the material ready to go, I could not manage to format it all in a way I could live with.
I have absolutely beautiful poetry to share, and substack does have a poetry feature, but even when I tried to avail myself of that, it refused to preserve the spacing the poet had created — and spacing is very important to any poem’s structural integrity.
I won’t elaborate on the hours I spent trying to make the fonts consistent and the layout professional, but at some point I looked up and it was 6 pm in NYC and I felt it wasn’t fair to the poet to run her content so late.
And then another issue occurred to me. I travel to Salt Lake City this week, where my daughter will compete at Nationals (she’s a rock-climber). And I realized that the epic struggle of creating the kind of showcase I envision can’t be waged on the road — it’s much too complicated to manage with a laptop. Beyond that, having been to Nationals twice before, I know this much: it’s more psychologically and emotionally grueling than I can explain, and it’s ten interminable days long because she’s competing in two different disciplines.
And I don’t want to put the magazine on hold for 10 days the moment after I launch.
So I realized it makes much more sense to launch the moment I’m back in mid-July.
I will continue this newsletter from the road because I know what I’m doing here! But the magazine is more technically complex and I would much rather do it right than do it quickly, and in a way I feel is less than ideal.
So my new launch date is July 18th. I am very confident I’ll be able to do it competently and consistently if I begin then.
One quick shout-out before I go on: someone who’s providing me with wildly generous expertise and assistance is the lovely Amanda Kreklau. Heartfelt gratitude, Amanda!
(And this is probably a good place to reiterate that as I continue to write this newsletter, run a huge Jewish book club, build a new Jewish publishing house and launch a new Jewish magazine, I am gratefully accepting any and all offers of help. Please message me if you have a skill to offer, funds to contribute, or a role you’d enjoy in any of the aforementioned initiatives.)
*
Okay, now that I’ve issued an update on my piece of the domestic soft war, let’s take a look at the literal war in the Middle East. As of this very hour, many different outlets are reporting that Israel and Hamas are edging closer to a ceasefire deal that would return the hostages in Gaza to their homes and families, lives and loves.
I know I’m not alone in saying that while I support the IDF’s mission and decisions unequivocally, this can’t happen soon enough for me. We have seen the starkest examples of the difference even a day can make in the lives of the hostages and their families.
The father of Almog Meir Jan died just hours before he would have learned that his son had been rescued and was on his way home. Conversely, Liora Argamani’s dying wish to hold her daughter one more time before departing this world was granted when Noa was rescued just three weeks before her death.
Another advantage of achieving a ceasefire now is that Hezbollah has sworn it will stand down if a truce is established. And the Israeli economy would have a chance to recover a huge swath of its human resources.
There are two more very recent developments worth remarking upon in Gaza:
The first is an operation in the central part of the Strip wherein two kilometer-long terror tunnels were demolished and around 100 terrorists killed. Also destroyed were numerous weapons caches, storage facilities, and rocket launch pits.
The other is that, per Nadav Eyal in conversation with Dan Senor, the IDF spent part of this week connecting Israel’s electricity grid to Gaza so the water supply to the Strip could continue during the war.
Whereupon Dan responded, “This is unheard-of in the history of warfare, really — that the party fighting a defensive war would go to great lengths to re-power the electrical grid, or the electrical capacity, in the region it’s fighting against. It’s extraordinary.”
Without pretending the IDF can do no wrong, not a day goes by that I’m not floored by the impossible double standards people bring to their judgments about how Israel is conducting this war.
At any rate, I’m allowing myself to hope that the terms of a viable agreement can be reached to avert more bloodshed. It’s soul-crushing every time a young IDF soldier dies. It’s heart-mangling when Gazan children die. All the relevant jihadist groups participating in this wider conflict recruit child soldiers.
A few weeks ago, Hezbollah affiliate Sadek Al-Naboulsi openly defended this practice, saying in an interview uploaded to Tafasil on Youtube: “When we read the history of Germany and Hitler, they recruited children to be soldiers. They would train children before they came of age. Why shouldn’t we do the same?” (You can listen to the clip of this interview here. Naturally no progressive protestors around the world seem to have any issue with this.)
It’s my understanding, per yesterday’s Call Me Back podcast, that while Hamas has not been totally eliminated, its capacity to attack Israel has been reduced so dramatically that a Jew or two could drive a pickup truck from one end of Gaza to the other — north to south, or east to west — without anyone even trying to fire on them (a situation that would have been unthinkable just a few months ago).
Okay, fam. I’ll be back with you before Shabbat. If you find yourself tipping into despair, remember there’s so much work to do and there’s no better antidote to resignation and paralysis than committing to shoulder some of it. If you need help figuring out what to do, please hit me up! During the past few weeks, it’s been an honor and privilege to spend time with several different people and help them figure out what kind of necessary action would feel life-enhancing rather than depleting to them. Everyone is different. A task that suits you — intellectually and emotionally — is out there. I’d be thrilled to help you figure out what it is.
Huge love to you all. Chazak, chazak.
Am Yisrael Chai.
As a huge fan of your daughter and her athleticism, I am glad you are postponing the magazine. It sounds like the issues you discussed were also valid reasons to wait. In the meantime, we can not wait!