Instead of Depression

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

Since October 7^th and Trump’s reelection, I’ve consistently had intermittent spurts of manic industry where I literally somehow don’t even really sleep, followed by more than occasional bouts of paralysis, where I sink into a corner of the living room sofa and feel not only unable to move but barely able to think. I read all the news from Israel and can’t find a shred of comfort. I read all the news from the U.S. and the rest of the world and can’t find a shred of comfort. I say to myself: for God’s sake, you have so much work piling up and threatening to bury you -- get up and do something! and then I go on sitting there. A poem by the recently departed Andrea Gibson has offered me some measure of comfort around this.

Instead of Depression

try calling it hibernation.
Imagine the darkness is a cave
in which you will be nurtured
by doing absolutely nothing.
Hibernating animals don’t even dream.
It’s okay if you can’t imagine
Spring. Sleep through the alarm
of the world. Name your hopelessness
a quiet hollow, a place you go
to heal, a den you dug,
Sweetheart, instead
of a grave.

To get going again, I’ve been turning to a trick I learned from Jena Schwartz, who led a writing workshop for JUDITH Magazine readers not long ago. When she’s stuck, she does an exercise she invented called 11 Things. The number 11 has a lot of personal significance to her, and her writing jumpstart is just to list 11 random thoughts, impressions or reflections. I love this idea, but because the number 11 is not personally meaningful to me, I’ve adapted it to 7 things, since 7 has a lot of significance in Judaism and it seems like neither too many items to be daunting, nor so few that I won’t be transported to a different place by the end. Here are the first three:

1. Yesterday I walked by a house on my street where an old man is often sitting on his porch with several dogs. They erupt into a frenzy of barking every time I walk by (even though I walk by multiple times a day and have for more than 10 years), whereupon he yells at them, without rancor, to knock it off.
   

   It’s a busy yard. There are lots of knickknacks and kitsch and bird feeders and nautical yard decorations such as a replica of a lighthouse that’s taller than I am and often decked out with colored lights. At its base is a circle of gravel dotted with abalone shells.
   

   His adult son shows up from time to time in the form of a car parked out front, a car packed with what are presumably his possessions, but it just looks like a car full of trash. It seems clear that the son is an addict of some sort, allowed to live in his car just outside the house but not allowed to come in.
   

   The old man sits out on his porch nearly every sunny day, and lately he’s had a breathing tube in his nose and his spirited flirtatious calls to me are a little less raucous, but yesterday no one was on the porch. The front door was open. It was dark inside the house, and chaotic. A giant TV was on and visible from the door. What looked like a hospital bed was folded into a giant U shape and was also idling near the door.
   

   At a passing glance, my impression was that their living room was in shambles. But on the wall was a wooden display rack where rows of silver spoons were mounted: evidence of a gentler, more hopeful and orderly time. Somehow the sight of them was even more annihilating to me than the huge-screen TV on in the middle of a summer day, the homeless son’s stalled-out car, the hospital bed, the mess, the darkness.
   

2. A couple of days ago, Israel’s people staged the most massive protest in the nation’s history. Countless loved ones of mine were in the streets, fighting to bring the hostages home and end the war. Countless other loved ones of mine didn’t participate and felt that the protestors were helping Hamas, giving them leverage against the Israeli government, and actually worsening the chances of reaching a deal by making Netanyahu’s position seem perilously desperate. When asked my own opinion by several people, I could only say that I would not dream of second-guessing any Israeli citizen’s actions during this impossible time. That I love all the protestors, and I love all the people who refused to join them.
   

3. Some time ago, a friend of mine angrily confronted a group of Palestinian activists demontrating on a street corner, and the incident was caught on video. He sent me the clip over the weekend and I had such a strange mix of emotions while watching him snatch the Palestinian flag a man was waving and snap its spine.
   
   At first I was exhilarated by the sight of this and then, strangely and suddenly, it was as if I were pulled back from a hot sense of partisanship, and instead of seeing this scene as my side striking a blow against their side, I felt as if I were watching one child grab another child’s flag and break it. Or one child grabbing another child’s toy and breaking it.
   
   I could see that the protestors were afraid of him, even though they outnumbered him by a factor of four or five to one, and this was very gratifying and also a little bit heart-mangling. Too, they might have been taken aback by the fact that even as they were clinging to a narrative of white colonial oppressors vs. brown indigenous natives, they were all white and he was a person of color. I could almost see them experiencing a sense of cognitive dissonance in response to this.
   
   I could also see a point where he seemed to hit a kind of invisible wall, where he lost some steam, heat, momentum… and I thought I could see a twinge of sheepishness set in. But by then, there was no way to backpedal. He was stuck.
   
   It occurred to me in the midst of watching that I’d let my anti-depressant prescription lapse a couple of weeks before, and it suddenly seemed to me that I could have watched this altercation with nothing but satisfaction were I still on the pills, but as it was, the whole scene was washed in a kind of useless sadness. I’ve had a lot of such moments lately, where I just think: this world is too sad to live in. This is not suicidal ideation; I have never gone there and am nowhere near that now. But the moments where all the defenses we mount against the everyday terrible have fallen away and the fire is too close: they are coming hard and fast these days, for me, and occasionally I feel like the best offering I have for our community is just to name them, acknowledge them, in case that can make anyone feel less alone.
   

   I’ll try to be back here tomorrow on a more uplifting note.

   In the meantime, heartfelt love and sustenance.
   
   Am Yisrael Chai.