Israel & Me

Israel was supposed to save us.

All of my grandparents, I knew, had fled to the US from Poland/Russia/Ukraine/Belarus—wherever, the borders were always changing—to escape pogroms, conscription, and the impossibility of making a living. The impossibility of living. My grandfather’s mother, in Ukraine, died of hunger during the Stalinist famine—this I only surmised as an adult from a story told by my father: that my grandfather had sent her money to buy food, but she used it to buy a shroud. To my father, this illustrated the idiocy of religion—but perhaps it means instead that there was no food to buy, and that in her realism she knew she would shortly need the shroud. We never found out what happened to the remnants of my mother’s family, those who had stayed in Europe, but it’s not difficult to figure that out.

Did I ever not know about the Holocaust? It was always there.

My father always wanted to buy my mother jewelry, but my modest, unassuming mother refused it. “Jews need diamonds!” he would insist at the dinner table. “In case they have to flee,” he explained.

“Oh for god’s sake Daddy, we’re not in Russia!”

I imagined the tiny diamonds sewn into the hem of my coat—not my real coat, but some sort of long, black old-fashioned coat, worn and shiny at the seams.

He shook his head at our naivete.

So, Israel.

The whole family was zionist. My father’s parents belonged to the socialist-zionist group HaBonim, and there’s a sepia photo somewhere of their surprisingly huge, Buffalo, New York, chapter, the members arranged in long rows, my father and his sister posed on the floor in front of the adults, mascots. According to my father, his parents always voted the straight socialist ticket; the only Democrat they ever supported was Franklin Roosevelt. I myself was sent to HaBonim camp for a month when I was ten and my mother was pregnant with my sister Rebecca. At camp, as socialists, we all had to participate in maintaining the camp, but also as socialists, we went on strike. The work was boring: every morning I showed up to the Sisyphean job of endlessly pounding a big nail into a shelf in the bath house. The words to our color-war songs were in Hebrew and Yiddish, set to melodies like “On Wisconsin.” Most impressive to me, we were visited by a Freedom Rider, who taught us freedom songs on his guitar and told us his story of fighting segregation—the violence modified, I now realize, for children.

At home, we put pennies in a blue-and-white pushke, a charity box, decorated with a map of Israel, which stood on a window sill in the kitchen, and in Hebrew school, we made the desert bloom by filling the slots in a cardboard folder with our weekly nickels and dimes. Oddly, the trees pictured on the donation folders, as I remember them, were lollipop-like maples or triangular pines—hardly the kinds of trees that would thrive in the desert, although, never having seen the desert, we imagined a deciduous forest springing up to cover trackless dunes. At the end of the school year, when all the slots had been filled, we handed in our folder to the teacher, who sent it to Israel, where our contribution would be used to plant a tree. (Later I heard that the Israelis liked to laugh at the American tourists who approached them asking to see “my tree,” but was that really so stupid? That was exactly how it was presented to us—and who knew but that your own cardboard folder was even affixed to the tree, identifying ten-year-old you as enabling the planting.) With our Hebrew school class, we marched in the Salute to Israel parade in New York every spring, waving our miniature Star of David flags. (My first demonstrations! My Hebrew school teachers and my parents could have had no idea where their insistence that Israel was a land of justice and hope would eventually lead me, to all those years of marching against wars and for the union and abortion rights and gay pride and Black Lives Matter.) My father often recounted to us kids how Golda Meir herself used to crash at my grandparents’ house in Buffalo, on her trips around the country to raise money for the zionist cause. There’s a photograph—my grandparents, escorting Golda on her way.

Grandma Rose, Golda Meir, Grandpa Morris

We learned Hebrew—modern, decisive Israeli Hebrew, not the old Ashkenazi ghetto Hebrew with its “aw’s” and sibilants—although it was still prayer-book Hebrew, and as proficient as I eventually became I still couldn’t read a newspaper. We danced Israeli dances and sang the Israeli national anthem, “HaTikvah,” the Hope. Yiddish? We didn’t learn Yiddish. Yiddish was for the ancients, my parents and grandparents. Hebrew was for the new generation, coming up confident, strong, and healthy.

I sometimes thought about what it would be like to move there—to make aliyah, to go up, the direction of Israel is always up, higher and higher. I’d learn real Hebrew, the kind you use to talk to people, not just to God. I’d live communally on a kibbutz and share everything with my comrades (although I already shared everything with my two brothers and three sisters—it wasn’t so great). My father, too, sometimes speculated about moving: why not leave here and start a new life? Escape this country with its wars and antisemitism, its draft—my brother could be drafted! He could be sent to Vietnam! But my brother said no way was he moving to Israel. They have an army too, Dad, haven’t you heard? And everyone has to serve. Even the girls. The girls, drafted! But that’s equality! There’s your feminism! Everyone, into the Israeli army! The Israeli army is different, reassures my mother. It is a humane army.

Then, I went there. Up there. It was 1969, the summer of my junior year in high school. I joined a group sponsored by Camp Ramah, the Conservative movement’s summer camp, recommended by our rabbi. I imagined I was being sent as an envoy from my family, the first to travel to the Promised Land. My parents hadn’t yet been there, and I would discover it for them.

Nineteen-sixty-nine was two years after the Six-Day War and the beginning of the Occupation. At that point, I couldn’t know, of course, what that would lead to. All I knew was that we encountered soldiers everywhere we went: on the street corners, with their guns slung over their shoulders; at the movies and museums and holy sites, checking your purse and knapsack. I was shocked by it–the way the military was everywhere. At home, I was protesting the war in Vietnam. I handed out antiwar leaflets in front of the high school before classes started. My homeroom teacher would see me there, but mark me late, every time. I took a bus from my New Jersey suburb to the next big city, Newark, and joined a demonstration. It was small, and the rock-and-roll band that entertained the rally didn’t seem to know how to play their guitars. I was finding my way politically. I wasn’t one of those who said, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty”: my parents, too, opposed the war. (Later, when I began marching in all those demonstrations and came out as a lesbian, my parents were baffled, but I thought, Why were they so surprised? I was simply acting on what they’d taught me. I took seriously their talk of social justice and civil rights and self-expression.)

The trip to Israel was amazing in so many ways. We did things I’d never done before: hiking, snorkeling, mountain climbing. The effect was ecstatic. That feeling of ecstasy, of marveling at each new experience, was surely enhanced by the fact that I had my first boyfriend, Eric. He was a big, fat guy, already heavily bearded, headed for rabbinical school. He was loving and kind to me, and took me under his wing so that I was suddenly accepted by the others in the group, who’d known each other for years at camp. I became friends with his friends. Eric wrote me poems and sang me songs on his guitar, and we made out for hours, kissing and kissing, Eric stroking my breasts. We became inseparable: sitting together on the tour bus, eating our meals together—although when I think of the things we did on the trip, the hiking and all, and later the visits to Jerusalem and the Holocaust memorial Yad V’shem, the experiences seem to be mine alone, not mediated or shared with Eric.

The high point of the trip was our visit to Jerusalem. Before 1967, East Jerusalem and the Western Wall, the Jews’ holiest site, had been off limits to Jews, but it was now ours. I must have prayed at the Wall, or at least stood before it with our group. The majestic blond stones were beautiful, and there were plants growing out of it—it was so ancient, yet alive. Traditionally, people wrote supplications to God on tiny pieces of paper, which they balled up and hid in the crevices of the Wall. This would have been far too superstitious for me—and what would I have prayed for?—but others in our group followed the tradition, and perhaps even wept. So amazing, such a privilege, we were told, to pray at the Wall, and to enter the Old City.

Jerusalem stays with me much more indelibly than the Wall. We entered through the Damascus Gate into narrow, cobblestoned streets. Markets filled the sidewalks, and the smell was like nothing I’d ever encountered. Vegetables, the dust of millennia, and the masses of tourists and sweltering haredi Jews in their black coats and brimmed hats. The entire throng pushed their way through the twisting alleys, as the Palestinian residents sat on their doorsteps, smoking, drinking tea, and watching us go by. I wondered what they thought of us. The proprietors of the market stalls yelled and grasped at passersby, but I didn’t have much to spend and was too shy to bargain. I bought a pair of poorly made sandals, fastened together with little nails that soon worked their way up through the soles and pierced my feet, and a dress with an embroidered bodice that was backed with paper, which crinkled and itched, and a pair of earrings with a missing bangle. I wished for a silver ring with my name embossed on it in Hebrew, like some of the other girls—but I didn’t have the money, or maybe just didn’t know how to have something made just for me, my name, fitted on my finger, soldered together in the market.

As we traveled the country in our bus, trucks and cars and army convoys passed us on the highway, and I thought, everyone in those vehicles is speaking a foreign language that I don’t understand. It gave me a terrible feeling.

Packing for my trip had been difficult. I didn’t have much room in my luggage for clothing, books, or other necessities. My suitcase was mostly taken up by a large box of sanitary napkins, because my mother believed that a virgin—which I was, although should she have been so sure of that?—could not use tampons. The other girls taught me, calling to me from outside my bathroom stall, so I was able to get rid of the humiliating box. But I also carried several large, wrapped presents for my grandparents’ relatives, whom I was to visit on our free weekend. The presents tormented me. I packed and re-packed them, as we traveled from place to place, the wrapping paper tearing and the boxes deteriorating. I never dared look to see what they contained. The free weekend was approaching, and I was terrified of having to spend days with some elderly relatives I’d never met, with whom I had no common language—who spoke Yiddish and Russian, a bit of broken Hebrew, a word or two of English. I was supposed to contact them to arrange the visit when I arrived in the country, but I constantly put off making the call. (Couldn’t my parents or grandparents have called in advance and arranged the visit for me, instead of leaving me to do it myself? Don’t you know how expensive that would be—an international call? Anyway, there it would be the middle of the night.) Every time I opened my suitcase I panicked. Eric had invited me to spend our free weekend visiting a friend of his, who was working on a kibbutz for the summer. Oh, if only! Finally, one of our counselors relieved my agony and helped me take the gifts to the post office.  I mailed them—it was so simple!—and went off with my boyfriend to visit his friend.

Sorry it didn’t work out, I told my grandparents when I got home, but I imagined them thinking, Feh! The girl, such a coward. They had endured endless hardship and suffering to travel in steerage to America, but I could not take a short bus ride—or even a taxi! Why not a taxi!— to pay a visit to the old people, who could die any minute. Such an opportunity, and she wastes it!

At the kibbutz of Eric’s friend, we met some Israeli kids our age. They were eager to do their military service. One of them brandished a gun, which belonged to their brother. I’d never seen a gun up close, much less held one, and I didn’t want to touch it, but they pushed it into my hands. They didn’t understand why we in America were protesting the war.

“The killing, the destruction,” I said.

But they shrugged. “It’s your government. You should defend it. Like us, we have to defend our land, from the Arabs.”

“Shouldn’t we be working for peace?”

They looked at me. “They bomb us every day.” They pronounced the second “b” in “bomb.” “You can’t understand unless you live here. These people, they have no value on human life. They kill us like dogs. You must make aliyah.”

I found them appalling—they were racist warmongers. I didn’t understand how people of my generation could have such opinions. We were supposed to be the ones who would change the world! I just hoped that not all Israelis were like them.

We went to see a film, interviews with soldiers who had fought in the Six Day War. It was in Hebrew, so I didn’t catch all of it, but from what I understood, the soldiers were traumatized by their wartime experiences of battles and killing. Yet, I suspect (I don’t remember) the conclusion was that the killing and trauma were necessary to preserve the state of Israel, which was surrounded by powerful enemies, as a haven for the Jews.

I’d heard this idea all my life. In Israel, my group visited the Holocaust memorial Yad V’shem, where it became clear to me that I still had not understood the scope of the genocide—and perhaps never would. Inscribed on the walls were the names not of individuals, but of entire slaughtered villages. On Tisha B’Av, the holiday commemorating the destruction of the Second Temple, we gathered in the dark with candles and sang prayers mourning the generations of Jewish martyrs.

Even in my group, we experienced the violence against us. On one of the last days of our trip, a bomb fell, close to the building where we were staying. The blast was terrifying, and the next morning when we went out, we saw a large crater. I never told my parents about the bomb. Only a few more feet…

The Israeli kids said that the old generation had marched off like lambs to the slaughter, and it was the job of our generation to make sure that never happened again. Yet this conclusion—that because of the Holocaust, we Jews had no choice but to fight and to kill before we ourselves were killed—troubled me more and more. The rationalization of racism and war, the soldiers in the streets—instead of reinforcing the zionism I’d learned from my family, my trip to Israel had the opposite effect. The beautiful story of a peaceful, fertile homeland had little to do with the reality I witnessed. I felt betrayed.

*

According to my father, when the state of Israel was formed, the Jews would have been happy to let the Arabs continue to live in peace in their villages. However, sadly, their leaders told them to flee. Thus, the Palestinians were made refugees, not by Israel, but by their own leaders, who then refused to take responsibility. The Palestinians, he claimed, were supposed to live in Jordan. But he was wrong: I learned that my father was wrong. In fact, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their land, many killed and raped, and their houses and farms destroyed. And the destruction has never ended. The expulsions and violence—the Nakba, the catastrophe—continue to this day, as Jewish settlers evict, shoot, and burn out the residents.

*

Noting that the word “Yerushalayim”—Jerusalem—is plural, the ancient rabbis spoke of two Jerusalems:  Yerushalayim shel mala—Jerusalem Above—and Yerushalayim shel mata—Jerusalem Below. Jerusalem Above is the world-to-come, a place of peace, lovingkindness, and justice. Jerusalem Below is this world, a place of chaos, violence, and suffering. When Theodore Herzl first suggested founding a Jewish state, some argued against it, noting that instead of a paradise, it would necessarily descend to the level of a nation-state, wielding its power like all others.

They were not wrong.

For a millennium, when we congratulated ourselves, at the conclusion of the Passover seder, “L’shana ha-bah bi’yerushalayim”—”Next year in Jerusalem”—we meant the ideal Jerusalem Above. At least, until 1948.

*

The Golem

In 1580, the great Talmud scholar Rabbi Judah Loew ben Mezalel of Prague, known as the Maharal, had a dream in which the recipe for the creation of a Golem, a humanoid creature who would obey his commands, was revealed to him. Waking, the rabbi realized he could use this Golem to protect the Jews of his city. They were constantly threatened by Christians who believed the so-called blood libel—the antisemitic lie that Jews abducted and killed Christian children in order to use their blood in their rituals, including baking it into the Passover matzo.

The Maharal took his students to Vlatava River, where they gathered mud at its banks for the Maharal to use as he sculpted a giant creature in the form of a man. They circled his creation seven times, chanting the special prayers that the Maharal had learned in his dream. In the final step of the ritual, the Maharal scratched the Hebrew word “emet”— “truth”—on the creature’s forehead and inserted into its mouth a paper inscribed with one of the secret names of God. The Golem opened his eyes! The Maharal instructed the Golem that he must always obey him without question, and immediately put him to work protecting the ghetto. He named the Golem, who could see and hear but could not speak, Yossele.

Yossele was immensely strong and powerful, and succeeded in warding off pogroms and attacks by Christians so that for once, the Jewish community was able to live in safety and peace under his protection. On the Sabbath, the Maharal would remove the sacred paper from Yossele’s mouth and rub out the first letter, the aleph, of “emet,” from his forehead, deactivating him by changing the word to “met”—“death”—so that the Golem, like everyone else in the community, could rest from his labors.

The Maharal was a great sage, but he was not perfect. For reasons that are not recorded, one Sabbath he forgot to remove the paper and erase the aleph from Yossele’s forehead. The exhausted Golem, furious that he had been denied his day of rest, went on a rampage, desecrating the Sabbath by destroying everything in his path. Fortunately, before he was able to tear down the ghetto completely, the Maharal managed to get close enough to Yossele to rub out the aleph on his Golem’s forehead with his cane, in the process knocking out the paper from his mouth. The Golem collapsed.

According to the legend, the Maharal and his students then carried the remains of the Golem up to the attic of the Alteneushul, the Maharal’s synagogue and the oldest surviving one in Prague, where it rests to this day.

Or, maybe it is in a cabinet in an anonymous square in the city, where I encountered it…

Remembering the story of the Golem, I realized that the state of Israel is a Golem. Jews went up to Israel from all over the world—from Poland and Eastern Europe, from the Soviet Union, from Ethiopia and Iraq and Crown Heights—to live under its protection. But, never having been animated by the breath of God in its nostrils, as He animated Adam, the soulless Golem-state, with Jerusalem Below at its center, instead lost its mind, and believing it was protecting the Jews, instead desecrated our values, and went on an unstoppable rampage of destruction and death.

*

For a long time, I hated Israel. Yes, I hated it! I hated the Occupation, the violence and killings by Jewish settlers, their destruction of Palestinian villages and homes and olive trees—even olive trees, those symbols of peace, longevity, and fruitfulness. All of these terrible things, perpetrated by Jews! The idea that I shared an identity—that I shared anything—with these people felt like a knife twisted in my gut.

During the first Iraq War, in 1991, Saddam Hussein began bombing Israel with Scud missiles. Rumors flew that the missiles were armed with chemical weapons—why not? He’d used them before, against his own people. The Israeli government issued gas masks to its citizens, who hid in their homes. In Boston, I sat in a circle with a group of other antiwar Jewish feminists and we discussed, among other things, the rumor that Israel might retaliate with a nuclear weapon. I was horrified—Jews threatening to destroy the world. I said, “If Israel uses a nuclear bomb, I will have to kill myself.” My friends did not understand my feeling, and I myself couldn’t exactly explain it—I’d never been suicidal—except that in some distant way, I felt I would be responsible.

It’s absurd to hate a country, which after all is an abstraction, its boundaries arbitrary. A country doesn’t exist in nature—despite the Israeli government’s attempts to inscribe the country’s borders on the land, with walls. I hated the Israeli government—less of an abstraction, as it is filled with human beings–each right-wing prime minister more rabidly conservative and racist than the last. Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon, the despicable Benjamin Netanyahu, who looks on uncaring as tens of thousands of Palestinians are murdered in his war on Gaza because as long as the war continues, he stays in power. It ends, and he has nothing. He has no supporters. Even the Israelis blame him for the Hamas invasion of October 7 and for the hostages’ long, ongoing ordeal. The fact is, Netanyahu supported Hamas from the time of its inception, because he, like Hamas, opposes the two-state—or any—solution, and he did not want a negotiating partner. Bibi, such a cute name for a monster. Netanyahu, which means—can you believe it?—a gift of God.

But I didn’t only hate the government, I started to hate the people too. The haredi Black Hats, with their exhausted wives and multitudes of children, who throw stones at those driving on Shabbes through the Old City of Jerusalem. These children are somehow not jailed, not beaten and tortured like the Palestinian children who throw stones at heavily armed Israeli soldiers but are sent home with barely a reprimand (although surely picking up a stone, carrying it from one place to another, heaving it at passing strangers, is a violation of the Sabbath). The settlers, with their legend of Judea and Samaria, which they imagine entitles them to take and take the land, to displace and destroy the people whom they find there. They drive on their exclusive roads, they take what they want, they say God gave it to them. The New Yorkers, exercising their Right of Return. The Sabras, contemptuous of Diaspora Jews. They’re indoctrinated during their military service, where, it seems, their souls are leached out of them, so they can harass and even shoot some poor woman just trying to get across the border to a job. I even hated the peaceniks—my people!—who broke bread with their Palestinian neighbors and sent their kids to camp together. They were ineffectual. Pathetic. A spark of hope, constantly extinguished.

Sometimes I encounter Israeli families in the supermarket, their children shrieking, “Abba! Ima!” and I resist greeting them with the rudimentary Hebrew I still remember. I turn my back on them.

I sound like an antisemite.

*

With my Jewish feminist group, Women in Black, I used to participate in a regular silent vigil against the Occupation. We chose to gather in Coolidge Corner in Brookline because it is the center of a Jewish neighborhood. Some members of the group would offer leaflets explaining our position to passersby, most of whom refused to take one, although occasionally someone would read it and ask a question. Or read it and ostentatiously throw it in the trash. I never volunteered to hand out the leaflets, although I helped to write them. I didn’t think it was possible to have a rational discussion—or any sort of discussion—about Israel, not after all the awful conflicts I’d had with my parents. Although I’m usually articulate, I was afraid I would sound uninformed and tongue-tied. Instead, I’d hold up my sign and gossip with the other demonstrators until someone would reprimand us, “Shh, Shh! This is supposed to be a silent vigil!” But we were Jews; we didn’t like to be silent.

One time, a man pulled up and jumped out of his car, abandoning his elderly mother in the back seat, in order to shout at us, complete strangers, that we were apostates and self-hating Jews. He drove away, circled the block, and returned to shout at us some more, so repelled by us that—ironically, absurdly—he couldn’t stop himself from coming back. Obviously, discussion is impossible.

*

After the Hamas invasion of October 7 (a terrible date that now needs no explanation, like September 11), I had to question my hatred. It felt like I was forcing open a door in my mind. The scale of Hamas’s indiscriminate, person-to-person, point-blank killing horrified me. Some of the people who were killed were friends of the Palestinians, working for reconciliation and peace. They were kibbutzniks, slaughtered in their homes, and young fans attending a music festival. Some were poor Thai farmers, who had been brought to the country to work the land. Mystified by the conflict, they suddenly found themselves in the middle of it. Faceless people in black helmets and black balaclavas forced hostages onto the backs of motorcycles and sped away with them, to who knows where. I mourned the deaths, and I worried every day about the hostages, whom I was sure would also die. I didn’t see how they could survive; under whatever circumstances they were being held.

One friend posted pictures of them every day for months on Facebook, and I couldn’t bear to look at them. Another put up a post, on October 8, calling Hamas “freedom fighters,” and I felt I could never speak to her again, when until then I had so respected her intelligence, her humor, and her creativity. (Months later, she sent out a fundraising appeal for humanitarian aid to Gaza, and I sent a contribution. Maybe her initial post had been a mistake, an impulse before she knew the whole story? I hoped.) Few of the dead were soldiers, combatants—Hamas insisting that no one in Israel could be considered a civilian.

But then, although the Israeli government claimed to be offended by Hamas’s position, they took essentially the same one in relation to the people of Gaza: one of the ways they rationalized their genocidal response to Hamas’s attack. Hamas, they said, hid among the people, and it was impossible to root them out without—so unfortunately!—destroying hospitals, schools, mosques, houses, thousands of children, everything. They claimed the people of Gaza were used as “human shields.” But what does that mean? An urban war is not as unusual as they make it out to be. Mao said that the guerilla swims among the people like a fish swims in the sea—whether the people like it or not.

I’d been too simplistic. As so many said, after the invasion, one had to simultaneously hold in one’s heart the pain of the Palestinians and the pain of the Israelis, both. In my case, I had to for once open my heart to Israel. I had to acknowledge the obvious, where my thinking had so often ground to a halt: the state of Israel exists. The historian Rashid Khalidi writes, in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020):

While the fundamentally colonial nature of the Palestinian-Israel encounter must be acknowledged, there are now two peoples in Palestine, irrespective of how they came into being, and the conflict between them cannot be resolved as long as the national existence of each is denied by the other. Their mutual acceptance can only be based on complete equality of rights, including national rights, notwithstanding the crucial historical differences between the two. There is no other possible sustainable solution, barring the unthinkable notion of one people’s extermination or expulsion by the other. (p. 246)

As Israel’s war against Gaza rages on and on, though, with its mass murder and torture and starvation and displacement, I feel my heart closing against Israel again. How can anyone believe that this endless Israeli-Palestinian cycle of revenge will solve anything? Actually, it’s not even correct to call it a “cycle,” it’s some sort of deformed ellipsis, since Israel has so much more weaponry and manpower, and the backing of the world’s most powerful ally, the United States—whose words calling for humanitarian aid, for cease fire, for return of the hostages, for peace and love and a handshake, for whatever, are sounds without meaning. Yaka-yaka-yaka-yaka. Blah-blah-blah. Action, there’s the meaning: the weapons keep flowing. Hey, it’s even good for our economy: US weapons mean US jobs. The Netanyahu government has no reason to care about the meaningless words, and it does not even make a pretense of having a purpose for its war beyond revenge and the maintenance of its power; it has no goal but annihilation—the solution Khalidi calls “unthinkable”: “extermination and expulsion.”

*

I, if anyone, should be fully aware that Jew does not equal Israel. And yet, last Hanukah, I was reluctant to display my menorah in the window, as tradition demands. I thought of doing it, and hanging above it a sign, Cease Fire Now. To show I wasn’t one of those Jews. But why the rationalization? Never deny that you are a Jew! It’s been ingrained in me since childhood; it’s part of my being. If you forget you are a Jew, a goy will remind you—and it won’t be so pleasant. I didn’t think I needed to be reminded. And yet, I was afraid of the meaning that passersby might take from my menorah. I myself don’t know what it means anymore. On a corner near my house, someone has hung a Star of David on the street sign. Does it mean Israel? Does it mean Jew? Does it mean genocide? Does it mean the Commandment Lo Tirtzach, Don’t Murder? There’s no telling.

A group of young Jewish-Israeli women (women!) gathers to block the road on which trucks carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza travel. They oppose sending food and water and medicine to sick, starving, wounded people, because they claim that if Hamas doesn’t have to provide these things, it will have more money and energy for fighting Israel. Or because they just hate Palestinians and wish they would die. Then, Israel causes an international outcry when it bombs a food convoy, killing seven aid workers. It investigates, and concludes this was a regrettable accident. But why wouldn’t the soldiers on the ground, holding the same ideas as the women blocking the road, decide to target the convoy? They’d already destroyed hospitals, schools, mosques, homes, and the tens of thousands of human beings within them. Why not the convoy? One of the meals it carries might fortify, god forbid, a Hamasnik.

These terrible people are my fellow Jews. For the first time in my life, this war, this slaughter, this false victimhood, makes me wish I could deny the part of myself that I share with them. I didn’t display my menorah; I don’t put on a star-of-David necklace like the ones my sister and niece have started wearing. I have become ashamed of being a Jew.

My parents would be horrified: it’s a good thing they didn’t survive to see this. I am horrified myself.

They always told me: Jews have a special responsibility to work for social justice and peace. Why? Because if you don’t, you get the Nazis. You must never be complacent; you must never stop. That’s how you know you are good. There’s that adage from Rabbi Hillel that people always quote—even those who have no idea who Rabbi Hillel was:

If I’m not for myself, who will be for me?

And if I am only for myself, who am I?

And if not now, when?

It’s a song; I learned it in Hebrew school. “Beat your swords into ploughshares” (What’s a ploughshare?) Another song.

I know. I don’t need to give in to shame. As a proud Jewish woman I can protest. I can march. I can boycott. I can call Congress and the White House and write letters to the newspaper. I can make a sign that says Cease Fire Now. I can send money. None of that feels like enough; it doesn’t feel like anything at all. There’s that other parroted phrase from the Talmud: “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” Even if it accomplishes nothing—or at least, nothing apparent—even if the Nazis come, the work must continue.

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