Homeward Bound

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

It feels unreal to type this, but I leave for Israel tomorrow.

I’m not going straight there — I’ll be in London for two days first.

But I’ll be in Israel from early to mid-May, volunteering on an IDF base for a considerable stretch of my stay. Security is so tight that I have no idea which base it will be, and there will be no wifi there.

For this reason and several others, I’ve decided to leave my laptop at home. I want to travel as light as I can and I also need two weeks of reprieve from being glued to the news and trying to decide what to make of it during my every waking hour. On some trips, I have maintained the same rigid schedule I follow at home for this newsletter, and there are definitely some advantages to translating my experiences more or less in real time. There’s an immediacy, intimacy and timeliness to that practice, which I appreciate.

But there are other times when I just want nothing more than to refill my own well, be fully present where I am without thinking ahead about how I’ll curate and present it, and that’s the kind of time I need right now.

This morning, I posted on my own Facebook page about the anguish-tinged beauty of the current spring. I wrote:

T.S. Eliot said that April is the cruelest month and while "cruelest" isn't the word I would use, I will say this April has been unlike any other I can remember.

It's pink tree season in Portland, always the most beautiful time of the year, but this year the splendor has taken on an otherworldly intensity. Every single day has slain me. The colors and textures are almost unbearably beautiful. The whole world has taken on that extra heart-mangling edge of beauty that surfaces in things you're on the verge of losing.

So many layers of grief have accumulated over the last couple of years. I can’t look at a child anymore without the sharpest sense of sorrow over the world we are leaving the next generation. And I know there are many who share this emotional response with me.

Last month, I was in Chicago for my twin nephews’ bar mitzvah, where I found myself talking — during the cocktail hour before the reception — with my cousin Steve, who has become a grandfather in the last few years. Steve is a stoic and reserved kind of person, so what happened during our conversation startled me mightily.

He said, “You know, I’ve been meaning to tell you, I appreciate what you’re doing in response to this political moment,” and then very suddenly and without warning, he was weeping. Until this moment, I had not only never seen him cry but I would not have even been able to imagine him crying. But I imagine that becoming a grandfather during this time has made the death of America as we know it a much more laden and emotional prospect for him than it otherwise might have been.

As counter-intuitive as it might sound, people like him console me beyond measure, make me feel so much less alone in my own grief.

Another inexpressibly deep source of comfort has come to me in the form of notes and letters from some of you. Soon after Pesach, I received a beautiful missive from a reader, in which she wrote:

Elissa, I am a reader and admirer of yours from Australia.

Here in this country, we are facing a federal election in two weeks and we Jews are caught in the cross hairs. None of the major political players offer a convincing sustainable position to both combat rampant antisemitism (in all of its sickening guises) and at the same time, support healthy democratic processes. The same ruses and inconsistencies that you describe in your country are occurring here.

I don't know if you particularly follow the Hebrew calendar, but after reading your latest missive about the horrifying events at Coachella, and feeling both sickening dread and rising rage in my belly, I realised that today is the 11th day of the Omer. It has the spiritual quality of Netzach (determination/resilience/persistence) within Gevurah (strength/boundaries/judgment).

Today I was so grateful for Rabbi Yael Levy's take on the particular energy valence of this day of Netzach she'b Gevurah, which she describes as the strength to go forward, the ability to see beyond ourselves, beyond our immediate circumstances, knowing that our actions unfold beyond anything we can ever see or know.

Perhaps these words might help steady and strengthen you as well.

And then the very next day, I received a card in the mail from a different friend — a friend who is Jewish and Black and gay, which is to say a friend who’s an old hand at weathering destruction wrought by the powers-that-be of any given hour.

Here is a passage from that card which I read over and over, and which she also gave me permission to share:

"It's easy to believe we're watching the last lights go out. But even in darkness -- especially in it -- you are not alone. I'm still here. We're still here. And they cannot erase us, not with fear, not with force... Our ancestors survived worse with less, and they still laughed, loved, rested, and built futures they'd never live to see. We are their futures. That's not nothing."

It was amazing to me how her words seemed to echo and affirm the ones the other reader had sent, the ones about the way our actions unfold beyond anything we can ever see or know.

And those in turn seemed to echo and affirm the perspective of Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, my Jew Of The Universe last week, who told me:

I do believe in some ultimate redemptive arc to the universe but I don’t know the timeline for that. I don’t know the end game. Because I’m not G-d.

All these perspectives have helped me ease back from focusing on the outcomes I desperately want — Trump deposed, his regime imprisoned, democracy in the U.S. restored; Bibi ousted and imprisoned, democracy in Israel restored — to focus instead on who I will choose to be against this apocalyptic backdrop, because while I can fight like a wildcat for what I want, who I’m going to be is all I can ultimately control.

I’ll be back with you, kayn ahora, on May 14th.

Heartfelt love to all of you in the meantime. Please send prayers for my safety on this journey.

Chazak v’ematz.

Am Yisrael Chai.