A Very Particular Grief

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

Shavua tov. I hope you had a restorative Shabbat, as I did.

I believe this newsletter will be a little bit of a departure from my usual fare — much more personal and intensely emotional as I’m writing it in the wake of a very potent experience I had yesterday.

It involved the memorial service of a local man who was wildly and rightly beloved by his wide community. His widow is a very public literary figure and also an extraordinary person by any measure. Theirs was an otherworldly partnership and love story, and I felt her inexpressibly powerful eulogy in my bone marrow.

Hers was the final tribute of seven that day, and the most indelible, but they were all incredibly moving and affecting.

The departed man was described as a saint and a mystic, a man who was kind and gentle in every interaction; a man who loved everyone, saw the best in everyone, and judged no one.

And the deeply-felt and thorough account of his goodness and equanimity stirred a deep and ancient ache within me. A wistful ache. An ache that said: I wish I was more like that.

And oh, I am not. I am not like that. I do not see the best in everyone. I do not love everyone. I judge countless people, and harshly at that.

Never more so than at this cultural moment, where I’m beside myself nearly every day, feeling forced to choose — in terms of my electoral support — between MAGA and Jihadist Chic.

Feeling that a staggering number of incandescent artistic figures have been irreversibly tainted for me.

Feeling intensely cynical toward societal “heroes” like the owner of my own city’s Heretic Coffee, who preens daily about his own virtue on social media while self-righteously smearing an utterly benevolent Jewish institution and its “blood money” — sent to help feed the hungry, but proudly declared too filthy and evil to accept. (If you’re unfamiliar with this story, look up his Facebook post — on Heretic Coffee’s page — about the Jewish Federation a few days ago; I’d link to it but can no longer access it since they blocked me.)

It’s an understatement to say I don’t like walking around with this much resentment and rage.

There are no words for how much I miss the version of myself that I inhabited during Trump 1.0.

I was angry and scared nearly every day then too, but I still loved half the country with a fierce blazing protective love that galvanized me into action on an ongoing basis. In fact, I was so angry at the government and its 70 million supporters that I very consciously felt I had to love the other half of the country — the vulnerable half, the half under siege — ten times as hard just to hold onto my own humanity.

I fought like a wildcat to get Trump out of office. I donated all the b’nei mitzvah money received by both my kids (specified for this purpose in advance, in lieu of gifts) to the fight to oust him. I devoted very strenuous efforts to flipping the Senate. I hand-wrote upwards of a thousand letters to voters on behalf of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s initiative, Swing Left. I posted constantly on behalf of every vulnerable community.

I went to great lengths to feed a homeless Hispanic immigrant daily, to have his broken car fixed for free, and to get him permanently off the winter streets.

I sent flowers to an elderly Black donor I’d read about in the paper, who waited for hours in the blistering sun to vote, while MAGA voters breezed through their ample voting sites in minutes. It was an anonymous delivery; the card said only: Thank you for being an American hero. But she called the florist and uncovered my identity and asked them to connect us, and we became friends who still exchange holiday cards to this day.

I donated a kidney to a young Jewish mother, a total stranger, but I also tested for a Black man, an Asian doctor, and a Muslim child — and had I matched any of them, I would have given just as readily to any one of them. I explicitly asked to test for people who generally receive kidneys last. I pulled out of donating through the Orthodox Jewish org Renewal because of the likelihood of my kidney going to a Trump supporter if I gave through them.

I did everything I could think of for the vulnerable members on the other side of our national divide.

I feel intensely uncomfortable writing about my own mitzvot during that time but I don’t know how else to paint the picture of who I was then vs. who I am now.

I hate how much daily fury I now feel toward the left as well as the right.

I hate leaving all the local political groups I used to feel such camaraderie with, because it literally feels as if — during this fascist administration’s tenure and all the domestic and international horror it is wreaking — they post about Israel 90% of the time.

I hate being asked to accept Jewish Trump supporters in my community.

I hate the very fraught feeling of reading work by writers I used to love unequivocally, whose writing I still love, knowing they signed a letter calling for a cultural boycott of Israeli intellectuals and artists when they’ve never considered the idea of boycotting American artists and intellectuals for the infinitely worse things the Trump administration is doing, and they are certainly not exempting themselves from such events because of their own American citizenship and the tax dollars they’ve sent our government.

I walked into the memorial service still seething over Heretic Coffee and the 11,000+ fawning responses they got to their Jew-smearing and -ostracizing post — literally more than 100 times the attention they generally get for the benevolent aspects of what they do. Feeding the hungry is admirable, but apparently it can’t compete — in the hearts of the virtuous public — with going after the Jews.

I walked into the church angry, but the sheer force of the departed man’s goodness, invoked by all who knew him and permeating the space, left me in an entirely different state. It roused every soft and tender and wistful fiber in my body. Left me in a state of longing to possess some measure of his equanimity and his unconditional love for humanity.

I’ve felt this way before. Not long ago, I ended a friendship with a woman who was one of my two closest friends for almost a decade. Our friendship ended for a lot of reasons, but the final straw was her admiration and support for RFK.

We live in a blue state. What did it matter that she wrote in RFK on her ballot, when he had no chance of being elected? It mattered to me, it mattered immeasurably. RFK is a huge reason that Trump retook the Oval Office. He dropped out of the race and threw his own support — and that of his millions of followers — behind that sociopath. My mother worked 90 hours a week for 50 straight years on behalf of public health and she felt forced to step down from her leadership position in medicine due to a cancer diagnosis, and now she’s helplessly watching RFK undo so many of the hard-won achievements of herself and her colleagues during the last half-century. I can’t ignore my former friend’s admiration for and support of that. I can’t compartmentalize, and simply cherish all that’s good about her. I can’t respect her anymore; I can’t trust her judgment, I can’t feel close to her. It’s over.

My former friend differs from the departed man in many ways, but she aspires to that kind of enlightenment. She declares her love for all of humanity at every opportunity. She’s become a spiritual guru of sorts and she implores her followers to stop being angry, to stop fighting — fighting the government or anyone else. Don’t throw Trump supporters under the bus! she exhorted her followers on her podcast after he won the last election. They had reasons for voting that way! Trade judgment for curiosity. Cultivate your empathy. Accept what is. Lean into what is.

I can’t.

I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.

And I don’t mean that I won’t; I literally mean that I can’t.

I once read a description of myself by a man who loved much of what I write but he couldn’t abide my hard boundary around others’ support of Trump. He wrote a post on Facebook saying something like: she’s a very proud Jew with a lot of good things to say, but she’s simply, structurally, constitutionally incapable of tolerating Trump supporters — which he himself had become — and he was right about that.

I envied my former friend for her absence of rage, her ready empathy and unconditional acceptance of everyone around her.

But I knew then and I know now that I will never have it.

My most formative years in this world were spent listening to a Holocaust survivor cautioning against acceptance of, indifference to, inaction in response to, evil. I can’t unknow the perils of that. The downside of it. The message it sends to the oppressed when we embrace the oppressor, when we maintain those friendships. And I know at the age of almost 57 that I can’t be other than who and what I am.

This morning I poured my heart out to my deeply thoughtful and wise son, who’s nearly 18.

I told him I’d read a poem by Ocean Vuong (a signatory of that call for an Israeli cultural boycott) this morning. A poem that included the phrase:

Your dead friends passing
through you like wind
through a wind chime 

and I loved it helplessly, and wished for the thousandth time that I could still love him and so many others like him as whole-heartedly I used to. That the loss of that unequivocal love and delight in response to so many artists was one of the most profound and difficult losses of this terrible time.

I told my son this longing was especially sharp in the wake of that memorial service, and that I wished so much that I could be more like the man whose death we were mourning, whose life we were celebrating. I told him I was jealous of his capacity for unconditional love and wished I had it too.

My son himself, for that matter, is a very gentle soul who refrains from judging his fellow humans as often as possible.

And he asked me a very startling and penetrating question:

Would you trade your outlook, your lens, for his? he wanted to know.

The query brought me up short. I sat there in confusion for long minutes.

There are other situations in which I absolutely would trade my lens for someone else’s. I’ve said often — and I’ve meant it — that if I could have a microchip implanted in my head, one that would let me believe in God, I would do it in a flat second. I’m jealous of that spiritual conviction, and I want it for myself, and I fear and believe I will never get there.

But after struggling with the question for several long minutes, I finally said no — no, I wouldn’t trade my lens for his.

For better or for worse, I know what I know, and my loyalties are what they are, and I not only accept that, but I affirm it.

Then I asked the same question of him — not about himself, because he does not struggle in this way as I do, but about me.

Would you, my sweet mellow non-judgmental son, would you trade my lens for that saintly man’s? Would you have me be more like him?

And my son said, immediately and easily: Absolutely not. And I knew he was telling the truth. And I’ve rarely been more grateful for, or felt more absolved by, anything.

So again, I know this missive is out of keeping with the kind of thing I usually write here. But I felt compelled to record this aspect of my Jewish experience in America at this time. I know that others must share these conflicted feelings and this particular grief. And I want anyone who does to know how deeply I get it.

Okay, fam. Thank you for abiding with these very raw reflections. I’ll be back with you soon, and as always, I’m sending love and strength in the meantime.

Once more, a heartfelt Shavua Tov.

Am Yisrael Chai.