A Gift In My Inbox

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

This morning I woke to a gift in my inbox that rocked me from the roots of my hair to the soles of my feet.

It was an email from a new paying subscriber to JUDITH. I write to every paying subscriber individually, to express my personal gratitude for their support. This man responded with warmth, telling me he was not Jewish, but had grown up with many Jewish friends and romantic interests. He attached a poem titled Roll Call that he’d written in response to this political moment. Here is an excerpt:

Every time I hear the news
I see their names
not the ones on television
but the names from my high school:
Cohen Schwartz Goldman
Katz Heldman Becker.
Dozens more parade through my mind
like floats on Thanksgiving Day.
I loved my Jewish girlfriends
even the ones who weren’t nice to me.
Now they are tumbling
down a snow-covered mountain
like a million rabbits
scrambling from a pack of wolves:
Ackerman Becker Doctrow come in.
Sometimes I see them
in the newspaper hiding
among the obituaries
others on plaques in parks
some are statues weeping
real tears for real people –
I gather all of them around me in one
overwhelming blanket of memory,
all those names so unlike my name.
When I was thirteen I learned two new words:
orthodox and reformed.
Both sounded like problems.
I can remember one yarmulke
in my entire graduating class of 750:
So reformed these Jews were -
but from what I never learned.

Reading this transported me to that song my kindergarten class sang back in the early 70s:

In a cabin in the wood
A little man by the window stood
Saw a rabbit hopping by
Knocking at his door.
Help me! Help me! Help me! he cried.
From the hunter, let me hide!
Little rabbit, come inside
Safely to abide.

That’s what came up from the depths when I read the lines:

Now they are tumbling
down a snow-covered mountain
like a million rabbits
scrambling from a pack of wolves…

I always loved that song and the pictures it conjured in my five-year-old mind. The remote cabin. The “little”, presumably lonely, man at the window. The frightened, fleeing rabbit begging for shelter, and the swift invitation to safety. I loved the warm cozy house conjured by the song, the ready protection, the gentle heroism.

Ackerman Becker Doctrow come in.

*

Yesterday morning, I sat down with a local Hasidic couple to talk about Israel. The moment I walked through their door, the woman embraced me with the most genuine warmth. We have spoken in person many, many times since the war began: an ongoing conversation that began in the immediate wake of the October 7th massacre. Our profound disagreements are not only acceptable to both of us, but they invariably yield the richest of conversations, none of which are ever tainted by anger at each other. How is this possible? To put it simply: we love Israel and we love each other.

She and her husband believe in G-d, and they take every word of the Torah literally. I’m not a believer and I cherish the Torah on an abstract and metaphorical level — as a series of coded messages, as a treasure trove of wisdom and insight, a mysterious source of sustenance rather than ironclad law to be followed to the letter.

These two take it as an absolute given that progressive ideology is a false religion. And in a world eternally crazed with Jew-hatred, they take it as an absolute given that the only way forward is to rely on a transcendent spiritual core that’s impervious to mob mentality. Never has this conviction been more seductive to me.

*

It was so bittersweet to be away from the news and this work for a week. It gave me a feeling I haven’t had since my time in Israel. The morning most emblematic of this feeling was the one I spent in the home of a poet and scholar who lives in the Druze village of Isfiya. She had a room with floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with nothing but poetry, which is my first love. A friend who lived in Haifa was picking me up in the early afternoon, but that morning was spent in that sanctuary of poetry, in conversation with my hostess. As we talked about this or that poet or poetic device, she would continually pull books from these shelves and flip open to a spot to illustrate her perspective. At one point, she wanted to show me how quietly a poem could deliver a knockout blow. She flipped open to Linda Pastan’s To A Daughter Leaving Home:

When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.

She was startled and very gratified when I — whose own daughter just happens to be on the verge of leaving home for college — burst into hard racking sobs of authentic devastation.

Here’s the point: in Israel, I didn’t have to keep fighting the way I have to fight here. I was out of America, surrounded by Jews. I was free to revert back to a much more holistic self: someone enraptured by poetry.

I don’t mean that I’m incapable of responding to a poem that way in the U.S., even with all that’s happening here. I mean that a block of hours spent dipping into one poem after another and talking about them for hours on end is a luxury unavailable to me in my current life. Not just the time — though that is forbiddingly scarce in my day to day work week — but the emotional space and safety necessary to deeply access a non-political facet of myself.

I had a similar feeling this week, in Olympic National Park with my extended family. In the forest, I had a spiritual epiphany as I stared at a tree shot through with holes, a tree that was no less beautiful for that — was perhaps even more beautiful for that.

Two weeks from my 56th birthday, I found myself thinking that a tree with the fortitude to be drilled and scarred was — in its willingness to just keep standing there unbowed in its pierced and wounded state — offering shelter to who knows how many sentient creatures. I thought, most uncharacteristically: I love every strand of my own silver hair; I love every line on my face, every divot on my thighs. I aspire to offer shelter; I am willing to be wounded, to be weathered. I’m grateful to age, to bear the ravages of life.

On another day, I spent a full hour sitting very still at the edge of a field and watching four coyote cubs romp and hunt and play. It was such a relief to have all the insanity recede. To be nothing but human, steeped in nature. In so many ways, it was excruciating to come back.

To me, the question has become: how do we hold onto our full humanity while under relentless siege? How do we transcend the hate and remain whole? I think the answer has something to do with holding on hard to every shard of beauty provided by life, by our community, and by the righteous. It’s true that most of the world is indifferent to our persecution but it isn’t true that everyone is. The man who sent that poem to my inbox this morning: his last name — ever so aptly — is Guard.

We have to be intentional about guarding our own convictions, our own consciousness, our own community bonds. We have to develop that untouchable spiritual core mentioned by my Hasidic friend, whether that’s an Orthodox core or a Reformed core. And at the same time, as our Guard’s poem warns us, we have to resist “reforming” by anyone else’s standards.

I have much more to say about where I think we go from here, and I’ll go there in the next newsletter within a day or two.

In the meantime, I’m glad to be back with you, and sending you all heartfelt sustenance and love.

Am Yisrael Chai.