Waiting 1

acrylic on canvas

16 X 20”

October 2024

Oct 11, 2024

It’s been a year. 

It’s been a year since October 7. 

For the bereaved, it’s almost time for them to finish saying Kaddish, blessing the hovering, departed souls and giving them comfort as they transition to their next journey.

How do I understand all that this year has been for me? How do I capture it, how do I mourn it, how do I remember it? How do I take everything- all the lost souls, on all sides, all the rubble, all of the misery, all of the responsibility? How do I hold the continual suffering? 

This morning, as I tuned into The Times Of Israel podcast, something I listened to for weeks after Oct 7, and then stopped, I was struck by something. 

As they spoke about the two different memorial events- one given by the government, and one led by Hostage families, who vehemently opposed who the government official appointed to run the official ceremonies- I felt something. 

Listening to the news about who was killed and what border is being invaded and what missiles and which leaders, it scrambles my brain. It leaves me agitated, as if I have to know something for certain, as if I have to hold the solution. As if I have to know the Right thing and the Wrong thing, and to hold everyone’s stories and everyone’s fears. 

But the reason hearing about the cultural memorial events helped me is that is was about what people do to rebuild. It was telling the step by step tapestry of people and their creative measures to resew and recreate their lives. 

Perhaps the phrase Never Again is not helpful, for so many reasons. Because Again happens, for people, all the time, in different ways. And to hold on tightly, hands buckling to force a Never , only creates a delusion of what is. Only causes a psychic maladaptive hailstorm when threat returns. Perhaps we believed that if we told a bad story enough times, it would never come true again. But I don’t want to learn from death. I want to learn from the energy of rebirth. Maybe what we can take from the Holocaust is the lessons for how people dusted themselves off and chose to rebuild. 

That in every generation, we are rebuilding. And we can take inspiration from those who figured out how to take the next step and the next, and the next. 

To be builders is humbly, exhausting, but it is the truth of life. The existing structures will never stand forever. 

Show me how you rebuild. 

I have so much to say and I have waited too long between newsletters to say it, so it’s all blocked up and i cannot say it all. 

But I’ll say that I am taking steps, to reimagine a different life. 

A friend and I showed up at our mutual friends’ doorstep. Let’s call her Sarah. 

Sarah had been melting about the mess in her home, her difficulty in letting items go, the build up and the dysfunction. 

“So we will come”, my friend said to Sarah. “We will come to your house and we will go through your things and we will help you throw things out and we will reorganize and we will instruct your kids how to keep it in order.”

And we showed up and we spent two hours there combing the area and redoing the coffee section and piling things into her trunk to donate. 

And her husband came home and he gave Sarah a hug and he turned to us and said, “please, never leave.”

And the strangest thing happened to my heart. 

Helping Sarah make her home more livable made me feel like this wasn’t just her home, this was my home too. my body didn’t feel like it was coming into someone else’s space, it was now responding as if it also had connections and ownership to this space. It felt like it wanted to lovingly scold her kids because they were part of my responsibility and world now too. This place belonged to all of us. It wasn’t a belief, it was a feeling in my body. This, too ,was my domain. 

I’ve been thinking recently about how the Talmud refers to a woman as a Bayit, a house. I’ve been thinking about how my body absorbs the energy and the weight of home. 

I don’t have answers to the bigger questions. Why God created this world, why He created such horrors alongside such beauty, how to solve the Middle East crisis. I do not know and I cannot tell you. 

But my mind is primed and tuned to looking around me, to learning from others about how they deal with their challenges, how they rebuild. 

We’ve lost so many of our children this year. This home is all of ours. 

Teach me and I’ll teach you. That’s the only way I know how to lay those bricks down and build something to hold us.

I don’t know how long it will take and I don’t know what it will look like. All I know is that it requires me to be patient and get to work, heartbroken and inspired, all at the same time. 

Maybe that’s why I read American Jewish history for bedtime readings. 

Tell me how they’ve built in the past. Tell me it’s possible. Help my heart swell with belief that we can do it again, mixing up the modern day components, to build something even more remarkable, that future generations will look back at and smile. Remind me that it’s just as important to rebuild the small things, like the way we can listen about each others messes and then say, that’s not just your mess, that’s my mess now too. My brain and body doesn’t know the difference between that mess and the grander Messes of the World, anyways. 

There is too much carnage. There are too many lives lost. The daily suffering is intolerable. 

So spirits that have left us in this last year, we need you. Rain down ideas and inspiration, direct our eyes to the Builders. Open our ears to hear the stories that will crack our hearts open and show us paths of understanding we never noticed before in the heavy forest of our inner workings. 

We want to give you, departed souls, comfort on your journey forward to your next destination, but please turn around and send us comfort right back. 

May we rewrite our world this year. Give us the words to rewrite the Book. Word by word. Give us the patience to receive it. 

May your memory be a blessing.