Author: gal

israel, my heart

/ gal / Leave a comment

You know when you carve out a Halloween pumpkin with that special spoon that has the rough edges? That’s how I feel inside right now. Utterly and completely carved out. My heart feels jagged, wounded, not smooth. Cracked into a million pieces. Gutted. Weary.

On October 9th, I made my first word cloud of the words that had been swimming around in my head since October 7th. Making word clouds felt like the most concrete thing I felt capable of doing with my thoughts, my feelings, with the headlines I was reading and what they brought up inside me. Some were entirely of sentences from the headlines. Others were things I had thought or said to or heard from people in my life. I made one word cloud with the names and ages of all of the hostages, taking the time to look at each of their photos, to look into their eyes. One word cloud focused on the suffering of the children, both Israeli and Palestinian children. God, that one hurt. All I could do was feel. And make word clouds. Sometimes only feel.

It’s day 55 since October 7th and this is the first time I have been able to sit down and really write. This is scary to share. I feel vulnerable and frayed. But I can’t keep it inside anymore.

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While I certainly didn’t start from zero, I have spent a lot of the past 55 days learning – filling in the gaps in my knowledge and understanding of the history of Israel, the history of the conflict between Jews and Palestinians, between Jews and Arabs, between Israel and the countries and people all around her. I have done what I can to understand the history and cultures and politics to try and make sense of what happened on October 7th and since. For me, it feels like a critical obligation, as a Jew and as a human, to understand and to stay connected.

I have really missed my father especially these past 55 days. He was the one who gave me my love for history because it was also his own love. He taught me about the long arc of history and the big picture, about nuance and the grey areas, about geopolitics, about migration and integration and being an insider and an outsider at the same time. He told me our family’s story as refugees from so many parts of the world over so many centuries since their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula. He had a way of helping to make sense of the most confusing stories – when I was in elementary school and had to write an essay about a current event and I chose the Iran Hostage Crisis, when I was in high school and had just come back from a peace mission to the Soviet Union during the final years of the Cold War, or when I was in college trying to understand the U.S.’s role in eliminating leftist movements in Latin America. My father would add his personal experience as a citizen of the world who had lived in six countries, including Israel, and who spoke as many languages, including both Hebrew and Arabic. And he would throw in just the right amount of sentimentality, wistfulness and nostalgia, the kind you feel when you’re reading historical fiction or watching a movie about a family’s saga through time and place.

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I can’t take my eyes off of the videos and photos of the hostages that have been released by Hamas and returned to Israel in the past week. The little boy named Gal who shares my name. The little girl named Alma who reminds me of photos I have of myself when I was young. The Thai and Philippino nationals leaving the hospital accompanied by song as they head to the airport to return home. Yaffa, the 85-year-old Holocaust survivor. The 13-year-old girl named Gali running with relief to hug her mother, their bodies absorbed one with the other. The brother and sister, Maya and Itay, who had both been held hostage but who were released at different times, reunited in the hospital. Mia sobbing in her mother’s arms after Mia’s release today, day 55. 4-year-old Avigail, reunited with her aunt and uncle and grandparents, the people who will raise her because her parents were murdered by Hamas on October 7th.

How can I see these without becoming every single one of them? I feel like I am every single child. Every single mother. Every single sister. Every single aunt.

How do these children, these families move forward from this trauma? How does a country? A people?

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The city of Oakland, California, where I used to live, held a city council meeting a few days ago to decide on making a statement about the war between Israel and Hamas, as a city that “loves life.” I don’t know how many people spoke at the four-hour meeting, but I heard some of those who chose to make statements against Israel, against Jews. Those statements were disgusting, ignorant, hateful, false, lies, and/or completely absurd. The 1200+ people massacred by Hamas on October 7th were actually killed by the IDF?? Seriously? I don’t have a TikTok account and I’ve been out of college for 30 years so I don’t know if either of those spaces are where they got their information, but I shudder for the fate of humanity if this is the kind of garbage people believe so deeply that they choose to scream about it at a city council meeting. And don’t get me started on the “this is simply armed resistance by the Palestinian people” narrative. If that’s how you justify or dismiss the monstrous slaughter and kidnapping of innocent people for the sole reason that they are Jewish, then your heart is a cold, cold place and I have nothing to say to you.

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A few weeks after October 7th, someone I didn’t know personally but whom I had followed on Instagram posted some social media memes essentially saying the same thing, images and words of parachuting terrorists representing armed resistance fighting white capitalism and settler colonialism, all of those simplistic, unnuanced, and antisemitic tropes that are everywhere right now. I wrote her a DM, asking her not to forget the massacre of Jews, not to ignore our generational traumas that also matter, not to completely dismiss an entire people as she supports another. She wrote me back, and her response took me time to process because it was the most vile, hateful, nasty, angry message I have ever received from anyone ever. She made all kinds of assumptions about me, about my whiteness, about my family, about Jews, about my views, about what I care about. To her, I was not a person with feelings, I was a representation of something she felt superior to, and the language she used was arrogant and abusive. I took the time to reply to her reply, thoughtfully and with vulnerability, even though what I wanted to write to her was a lot more angry and mean and filled with profanity. Afterwards, I tried to make one of those elimination poems from her words, where you black out most of the words from a paragraph and leave a few remaining words that form a poem that completely changes the energy of the original message – but I couldn’t do it. There weren’t enough gentle or even neutral words in her message to turn her hatred into love and compassion.

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Since October 7th, I have unfollowed almost every Instagram account of people I had previously admired and learned from. Progressive thinkers who had resonated with the values of social justice I have stood for and worked for since my teens. Leaders in social justice spaces, racial justice spaces, gender and LGBTQ+ and reproductive justice spaces. They, like this woman I had written to, repeatedly dismissed the massacre of Jews, completely ignored any nuance or understanding of the complexity of this conflict, justified the murder and kidnapping of Jews as Palestinian resistance, threw out messages such as “Israel is responsible for what happened to them on October 7th,” thoroughly dismissed (my) Jewish existence, and shared memes as a form of their protest against Israel’s right to exist and defend her people.

My Instagram now consists of Israelis and other Jews, cute animals, a GenEx mom who makes parodies about being a GenEx mom, and potters who make ceramics that inspire my own.

“Who are my heroes now?” I asked one of my oldest friends on the phone last night. Who are my heroes now? And how do I resist the urge to go tribal and close myself off to connection with anyone outside my tribe? I am an empath and a connector, and this is not an easy time for either.

It is an incredibly tiring time to be a Jewish person. To have to defend your right to exist in the face of this kind of hatred, this kind of madness. Israel is brutally attacked, and within 48 hours, antisemitism surfaces from its never so hidden place and communities around the world turn against the Jewish people. “The world,” I said to my husband some weeks ago, “is completely upside-down.”

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The last time I was in Israel was in February of 2008. I left with my family just before Valentine’s Day, 4 months earlier than we were supposed to return home. I was pregnant with my second daughter, and we had found out a few weeks before that she had a life-threatening birth defect that would require intense care and the support of our family and friends. I was scared of what was ahead, but I was relieved to be leaving Jerusalem.

The 7 months we spent there had been hard on me. I spent 6 weeks of them in excruciating pain with shingles, and recovered just before we found out about our daughter’s condition at her ultrasound. We lived across the street from a massive construction site, and the sound of impact hammers was constant and wore through every last nerve in my body. I struggled to find my footing and purpose in the city of my birth. Where my husband was finally finding his purpose as he began rabbinical school. Where my older daughter was beginning to learn Hebrew in the most organic way at her Israeli preschool. I remember when our plane took off from Ben Gurion Airport, and I exhaled with relief in spite of the unknowns ahead.

Since February of 2008, I have often said to myself and others, “I have a complicated relationship with Israel, even though it is where I was born.” I got tired during those 7 months there of arguing with the aggressive vendors at the market who wouldn’t accept that I had brought my reusable bags and would force plastic bags on me every single time I went to buy hummus or vegetables. Why does everyone here have to be so intense and high strung? Maybe I am just way too sensitive for this place, I remember thinking time and time again. It pained me to see the separation wall between Jerusalem and the West Bank in the distance from the main street near our apartment. I cried at a Jewish Film Festival screening several years later at the end of a film about the Religious Zionist settler movement that has for years contributed to preventing a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinian people. I have struggled along with so many Israelis who spent the 11 months before October 7th protesting against Netanyahu’s right-wing government, afraid of what Israel would look like in the future under this government in the same way I fear what the U.S. will look like if trump becomes president again.

I was born in Jerusalem. I was a toddler in Israel during the Yom Kippur War. I have a lot of family and friends who are Israeli, some of whom are fighting in Gaza right now, all of whom are so deeply impacted by October 7th and the weeks since. When I visited Israel with my father when I was 9 years old for my cousin’s wedding, I remarked to him in awe, “Everybody here looks like me!” I saw myself in their faces, in their thick unruly hair. I spent 6 weeks in Israel when I was traveling in the mid-1990s. I turned 23 there. I spent time with all of my family, with my parents’ oldest friends, people who had known me as a baby. I learned about our history, my history. I traveled all the way to the north where you can see the Golan Heights, and all the way to the south, through the Negev desert, to the beaches of Eilat. I visited Chagal’s stained glass windows of the Twelve Tribes of Israel in the chapel of the hospital where I was born. I found a painting at Yad Vashem signed by an artist who shared my grandfather’s last name, a Holocaust survivor who turned out to be a distant relative by marriage. At Yad Vashem I added the name of my mother’s half brother, a child who was murdered by the Nazis, to the hall where children’s names are recited through speakers as you see their names and faces on the walls.

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I am married to a public Jewish person. My husband is a rabbi, and since October 7th, he has been living and sleeping and breathing Israel, the horrific events of that day, speaking out against antisemitism in our community, holding his congregation while also carrying his own pain and generational trauma. As I write this, he is in Israel, a witness to her people’s pain and grief, their resilience and fortitude, their solidarity and coming together. His grandparents were also Holocaust survivors, our families came from the same corner of Poland. Since October 7th I have been holding him, and I have been holding my own pain and generational trauma, the pain and trauma of my Jewish family and friends all over the world, and the pain and trauma of Israel and her people.

That’s how it is when you are Jewish – none of this is separate from any of us, we are all connected. When you ask if I have people there, how do I explain that we all have people there?

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I am the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors on one side and of Sephardi Mizrachi refugees on the other. My husband once told me, years before we were married, that I couldn’t not be Jewish even if I tried. He’s right. My Jewishness is in my core. It has always been in the water of my upbringing, of my sense of who I am. It’s in the food I grew up eating, in Shabbat candles lit when my mom felt like making roast chicken and rosemary potatoes in butter on a Friday night, in the transliteration of the words to Maotzur that was on the back of the box of Hanukkah candles we would get for free every year from Chabad, in the Egyptian haroset my father would make from his grandmother’s handwritten recipe. Of course I found community with other Jewish students when I began college. Where else would I find my people, my tribe, my easy and generous welcome?

My relationship with Israel is no longer complicated. In the days since October 7th, I realize that it is indelible. Israel is a part of me, even as I wrestle with feelings that aren’t simple, that exist in the grey areas. Israel is where I come from. It is where my people are. It is where I could return if I wanted, if it became more dangerous for me here than there. It is where I so easily could have grown up and lived my life, had my parents not made the decision to move when I was little.

I often wonder what I look like, how I behave, who I am in a parallel reality where I have never been anything other than Israeli… Would I be hardened and intense like the Israelis in the market in Jerusalem; less hypersensitive maybe? Would I be mighty and strong, a badass, having completed my military service? What kind of work would I do? Would I have taken my empathic self and become a trauma psychologist or a social worker? Who would my partner be, my children? Where in Israel would I live? How would I feel when my children went to fight?

Who would I be, having grown up with this reality of constant threat in my day-to-day, for my entire life? Would I even notice if I didn’t know anything different, or would it just be as much in the water as my Jewishness?

What would I believe – about the world, about people, about life – as an Israeli in Israel? What would have changed for Israeli Gal, in that parallel reality, on October 8th?

ukraine, my heart

/ gal / 1 Comment

In 1988, just three years before the fall of the Soviet Union, I traveled with a group of American teens to Moscow and throughout the Ukraine. We came from all over the U.S. and we were part of a theater group. Because it was still the Cold War, we carried a message of peace between our two countries. In Kyiv, we met a group of Ukrainian teenagers. Together we spent five weeks creating a musical about peace, and we traveled along the Dnieper River performing in cities from Kyiv to Odessa. We were 14-18 years old, 30 teenagers whose daily lives were starkly different during the remaining 47 weeks of 1988; yet we were also so much the same. That was our message as we performed on stages in theaters and Communist Party youth summer camps. 

We became the best of friends, and almost 35 years later, I remain connected with so many of them, these Ukrainian and American friends I dropped in so deeply and so quickly with that summer. Some of my Ukrainian friends still live there. Others who have since moved to other countries have family and friends who remain there. When I heard about bombings in the city of Cherkasy, my heart skipped a beat and then sank. We had performed together there, and I have photos of the children who surrounded us with smiles, hugs and flowers afterwards. I remembered that Kyiv had reminded me of Paris, with its broad avenues and romantic architecture, bisected by a river of its own. The striking difference was the ten story tall statue of Lenin at the center of the city. 

That summer changed my life. Barely a year and a half after my parents’ divorce, I found home, community, confidence, and deep connection with these 15 Ukrainian and 15 American teenagers and our adult chaperones and directors. I remember the details like it was yesterday, the images and feelings still so vivid in my mind and heart. Massive statues, tapestries and murals of Lenin in every city where we performed. Standing on a bridge with our Ukrainian friends as they pointed far into the distance to where Chernobyl was. Sparse department stores, the opposite of our overflowing ones, yet still places where I managed to find treasures to bring home. I still have the small watch on a chain that needs to be wound daily to keep the time. 

We visited Babyn Yar, where Jews had been shot and buried in mass graves by the Nazis; for the first time I learned that the Holocaust had reached Ukraine too. My grandparents were Polish Holocaust survivors who had lost nearly everyone and everything they had known before. My grandfather fought in the Polish army and was taken prisoner by the Russians at the beginning of WWII. I think about how they escaped Poland after the war, non-Jewish Poles who had taken over their homes pushing them out, and how today Ukrainians are escaping into Poland. Poland is now a safe haven, Polish mothers leaving strollers in train stations for Ukrainian refugees arriving with children. I don’t even know how to think about that… Is that bitter irony? A message of hope amid darkness?

I can still hear the camp counselor we called James for his James Dean-like hair, who couldn’t have been more than 20, playing a tragic folk song on his guitar about the loss of young life in the Soviet-Afghan War…… which was still being fought in 1988. I think about the first time I heard the protest songs of Tracy Chapman, on a cassette I borrowed from one of the other American teens, which I think she left with our Ukrainian friends when we returned home. We left all of our remaining toiletries and some of our clothing with our Ukrainian friends, too, because this was the Cold War and there was still so much they couldn’t get in the USSR. I try to remember where I was during college when the Berlin Wall came down and young people from both sides danced and sang to that Scorpions song, Wind of Change, to celebrate the end of the Cold War. I remember wondering how my Ukrainian friends would fare in that moment and the years that followed, if I would be able to see them again more easily now. This was still so long before social media. 

My father always helped me understand history, geo-political conflicts, diplomacy and war. He taught me about the long arc of history, and all the events before that led us to each moment. I wish he were still here to explain this moment to me. I wonder if he could, or if even for him this would be incomprehensible. Is the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war, on again? Is this where we’ve returned after all these years? Is this just another cycle of war and fragile peace, over and over again, past, present and future?

I know I’m not the only one feeling the whiplash. I turn my attention towards the global pandemic we are now all living through for the third year. Before I have a chance to integrate the meaning of this current stage of Covid-19, my head spins in the other direction towards a cover photo in the New York Times of a mother and two children in Irpin, Ukraine, shot dead as they tried to escape, their rolling suitcases laying flat beside them. Last night my husband asked me, “Remember the hostage situation at the synagogue outside Dallas? That wasn’t even two months ago.” I looked outside our window at the Black Lives Matter flag that hangs from our flagpole, which we put up in the summer of 2020 after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police. How do I tell my nine-year-old son that everything isn’t awful, that things are going to get better? How do I apologize to my eighteen-year-old for the mess we have made of her world? 

As I washed the dishes from dinner last night, I thought about all the places I’ve lived and traveled in my 50 years. I thought about being an immigrant and living on three continents by the age of seven, and how much a part of my identity that has always been. That feeling of separateness and oneness at the same time, because if I don’t completely belong anywhere I have lived, in a way I can belong everywhere I have ever gone. Like my Ukrainian and American friends in 1988, are we really that different? If I were evacuating my home with my children in a war, what would we pack in our rolling suitcases, which stuffed animals would we bring? Would we make it to safety, and where? Will there be more visits to new countries in my future, or is the world always going to feel this unstable, this chaotic?

I woke up this morning thinking of women in Ukraine who are preparing food and making camouflage nets for Ukrainian fighters with the other women in their communities. I read an update from a female rabbi from Odessa who found safety in Israel. I thought about the Iraqi, Syrian, Afghan, Congolese and Somali refugees I worked with several years ago, everything they had been forced to leave behind in their home countries, and the different ways we view refugees and immigrants when their skin is not white. The way in which people are scattered throughout the world because of the wars we are insistent on continually waging on each other, and the colonialism that has defined human history. I think of my Polish grandparents who ended up making their post-war life in France and then Israel. I think of my Sephardic Egyptian family, including my father, who emigrated all over the world in the late 1950s when their home for over 100 years, this British colony they had thrived within, became its own nation again. Had they felt like they belonged in Poland and in Egypt during the generations those countries were their homes, or were they always other there as Jews? 

Who gets to belong in a world so divided by invisible borders and conflicts waged in the name of money and power?

We asked this same question in our performances on those stages in Ukraine in 1988, 30 idealistic teenagers who hoped with all our hearts that our time together would help to bring about peace. I love every single one of those teens so much – for our hopefulness, our connectedness, our determination to be part of the change. That’s what I want my children to trust in themselves. That’s what I want us all to remember. 

At our core, we are all the same, after all. Aren’t we?

the in between space

/ gal / Leave a comment

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When I wake up at 3:00 am nowadays, which isn’t necessarily a new thing, it’s as though I can feel all of the others who are awake with me. Our restless sleep-addled minds negotiating panicked thoughts, now-rational fears, and worries, so many worries. Trying to comprehend the unknown we are all swimming in. Trying to settle into liminality, the in-between space that follows one thing but precedes the next.

Generalized mild anxiety a constant companion, not just in the middle of the night but also in the morning before coffee. And after coffee (is the caffeine making me more anxious?), after lunch (how many English muffins is too many?), after a walk (did I keep enough distance when that jogger ran by?), after a shower, after changing from my black leggings into my grey ones, so as not to feel like a complete sloth in this bizarre new normal.

I’ve been keeping a strange kind of diary on my phone, little notes about what happened each day, including the number of confirmed Coronavirus cases (170) and COVID-19 deaths (1) in my city. Watching the progression here as I track the pandemic everywhere else.

Questions we ask each other now:

How is home schooling going? (My son prefers his real teacher, and misses learning and playing with his friends. I never once before contemplated home schooling my children. Today’s learning consisted only of watching silly Smithsonian Museum of Natural History videos on YouTube with my seven-year-old. Teachers are amazing humans.)

How many Zoom birthday celebrations have you been part of so far? (Three. I wonder if we’ll still be having birthdays over Zoom in a few months when it’s mine.)

What is one of the hardest things? (Guilt. That an autoimmune condition keeps me from being able to even go grocery shopping for my family. That I am safe in a comfortable home while there are people living on the street or in shelters, incarcerated, in ICE detention, unsafe living with their abusers, unsure where their next meal will come from, out in the world fighting for lives in hospitals, picking our food, packaging and delivering the things we need, stocking our shelves, picking up our trash, driving our buses and subways… Guilt that sitting here with my computer on my lap is the most helpful thing I can do for the world right now. I know that even this guilt is a privileged emotion, and completely unproductive, but I’m human, so it’s there.)

We are all so deeply and intricately interconnected, one shared humanity.

What has been an unexpected blessing? (Family dinners happen almost every evening now. And I love the dozens of supportive text threads I have going with my people across the country and around the world, the opportunity to send them love when I’m thinking about them, which is a lot. Also, the beauty of spring, which is unhindered by all this.)

How are you doing? (As well as can be expected under the circumstances. Moments of anxious intertwined with strange moments of zen. Thankful for a zillion comforts. Scared for my father who lives in a nursing home across the country; grateful for the amazing humans who care for him. Heartbroken for our world. Inspired by the goodness of humans.)

How about you? How are you doing?

 

 

tikva’s quilt

/ gal / Leave a comment

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A month before Tikva was born, our community of family and friends surrounded us with the most incredible love, circling around David, Dahlia and me – and Tikva still in my belly – blessing us with everything we would need to welcome our second daughter when she was born. All together in that giant circle, they gave us the strength to take on the unknowns the future held, and the 58 days that unfolded of Tikva’s mighty life, days spent entirely in the critical bay of the intensive care nursery at UCSF.

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For that day, my sister had prepared blank prayer flags that people could write on, sharing their messages for Tikva. We planned to hang the flags above her tiny bed in the hospital.

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Tikva was born 11 years ago today, in the wee hours of the morning while it was still dark outside. Just as I arrived in the labor room, I looked out the window at the eucalyptus trees that surrounded the giant mountain where the hospital sat and a red tail hawk swept by just a few feet away.

Tikva was past her due date, showing no signs of being ready to come out on her own. She knew she had a good thing going inside me, where my body breathed for her, fed her, held her safe and warm. They broke my amniotic sac to induce labor, and as soon as she came out, she was intubated because she couldn’t breathe on her own.

She was beautiful. My Baby Girl.

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Her prayer flags did indeed hang in her little corner, surrounding her with our community’s love and holding. Above the machines attached to the wires that monitored the oxygen saturation in her blood. Above her ventilator and C-Pap and IV bags and the hospital baby blankets with the little footprints and the pictures Dahlia drew for her sister.

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58 days later, the morning after Tikva breathed her final breaths outside in the hospital garden, held by David and me, surrounded by her two primary nurses, Allyson and Elaine, and her two doctors, Roberta and Tom, Dr. Tom wrote to me, For all of her difficult moments, we always felt Tikva’s bed space had a special aura of love and tranquility. It was no wonder that so many of us became attached to your family and that she touched so many lives.

If you ever want to meet an angel on earth, spend time with the nurses and doctors who work in the neonatal intensive care unit. They are high souls.

After she died, I wanted to do something with Tikva’s prayer flags, something lasting that held her story, her meaning, and the hope she brought with her. My friend Elizheva helped me begin to turn them into a quilt. I wanted it to be circular, like a mandala, because for me Tikva is infinite.

We began to sew, by machine and by hand. I never made a quilt before this one, and mostly I sewed by hand.

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Tikva’s nurse Elaine asked me for a piece of the yellow fabric that would become one of the corners on the quilt. This is Elaine playing with Dahlia and me in Golden Gate Park, sometime during the year after Tikva died. I’ll never lose touch with the special people who cared for my daughter.

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Onto the yellow fabric, Elaine quilted a red tail hawk – the animal spirit that followed us before, throughout, and since Tikva’s life. Red tail is a divine messenger, bringing messages from the spirit world.

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As we drove cross-country for our move to Cincinnati, I sewed circles and spirals onto the quilt. Infinite.

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And in Cincinnati I connected with another quilter named Barb, and she helped me continue my project. I added the corners, Elaine’s hawk and pieces of baby onesies friends had made or gotten for us. Barb sewed the checkerboard back side of the quilt.

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Four years later, just before moving to Atlanta, our son Judah was born and became a part of our family through adoption. I didn’t do very much work on the quilt in the five years we spent in Atlanta – my plate was full with caring for a new baby, supporting Dahlia through her bat mitzvah and middle school, working, and being the partner of a newly ordained rabbi.

But as soon as we moved to Alexandria, I saw the wall in my new sunroom where I would hang Tikva’s quilt, and I knew I had to finish it. So I asked around for a quilter at the synagogue that was our new home, and I met Sandi. And she helped me to finish Tikva’s quilt.

When I traveled west last fall to say goodbye to my beloved mother-in-law before she died, I brought the quilt with me. I wanted her to see it, and I finished sewing it there, quilting little spirals throughout the quilt.

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When I got home, I sewed a crystal bead onto the quilt for my mother-in-law, imagining her holding Tikva, their spirits now intertwined.

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I spend a lot of time in my sunroom, on the couch under my bookcases, surrounded by two of my most favorite things in the world – Tikva’s quilt and my books. It feels as though this wall was built for Tikva’s quilt, and I know I finished sewing it at exactly the right time, even if it took me ten years.

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I feel a strange kind of peace, 11 years later. Or maybe it’s more acceptance. Grief is no longer a sharp and jagged thing, edges smoothed by time and space. And yet I think a lot about the sliding doors that closed and opened, a parallel universe in which Tikva survived. I could be sitting on this couch with my 11-year-old Tikva, the quilt above us as I tell her the story of her beginning. Or a time and a place in which she was never diagnosed with a birth defect and was just born healthy and well like her sister – no quilt at all. Probably in a different city. In a life where we may never have met her brother.

Strange how life unfolds. Complicated and mysterious, far beyond my grasp. I’ll get cupcakes today, as I do every year, and with my husband and my children, we will celebrate the day Tikva was born. The day she changed everything.

Happy birthday, my beautiful Baby Girl. I love you forever.

The Best Picture of Tikva - Rudi Edits

hope and a heart in tatters

/ gal / 1 Comment

HOPE

Do not be daunted by

the enormity of the world’s grief.

Do justly, now.

Love mercy, now.

Walk humbly, now.

You are not obligated to complete the work,

but neither are you free to abandon it.

~ The Talmud

My husband came home from leading Shabbat services yesterday, walking into our home more quietly than usual. His voice barely more than a whisper, he called me into our bedroom to tell me something out of earshot of our children. I thought he was going to tell me that his mother had died, since he was flying out that afternoon to see her.

“There was a massacre in a synagogue in Pittsburgh this morning,” he told me. I looked in his eyes and wrapped my arms around him, and he began to sob as I held him. This strong, calm man who is a leader in our Jewish community; who has a way of maintaining equanimity through the most difficult times. My husband who is a head taller than me and at least one and a half times my weight let me do the only thing I could do in that moment – hold him. Cry with him.

His phone buzzed in his pocket and he began exchanging messages with his colleagues, conversations about security, about protecting our children at religious school the next day, about how we come together as a community in spite of, or perhaps to assuage, our fear. He was still sending these messages as I drove him to the airport, and when I dropped him off.

Then I went to run an errand before heading home to our children. Roaming stunned and aimless through the store, I found this little sign, one small but tenuous word: HOPE. This small thing was suddenly the most important thing in the store to me, and I held it as I continued on to get what I had come for. I brought it home and put it on the bookcase in my sunroom.

HOPE

This morning I drove our children to Sunday school at our congregation, the one my husband leads. I reminded my teenager to be aware of her surroundings and to let an adult know if she saw anything suspicious. I let my five-year-old remain unaware of how cruel people and the world can be, for a little while longer.

I parked my car behind one of the two police cars in the parking lot, the one with red and blue lights blinking. The parking lot was full. Parents and children streamed into our synagogue. Our emeritus rabbi and our cantor and a member of our board welcomed families as they arrived. We exchanged hugs.

THE PARKING LOT WAS FULL.

FAMILIES STREAMED IN.

Unintimidated, undaunted, even amid our collective fear and the weight of our sorrow.

Police officers patrolled the area, ensuring our safety. Everybody was talking about Pittsburgh. About antisemitism, about nationalism, about racism and discrimination and fear and fear and fear.

So much fear.

Of the other.

Of each other.

I am proud to be Jewish; I always have been. And today I am scared to even write this, to declare so publicly, in this space that anyone can read, that I am a Jew. Today in America, and in our world that feels like it is on a collision course with nationalism and authoritarianism, that is terrifying to declare.

But…

I am the grandchild of Holocaust survivors and so is my husband. My family on both sides were forced to leave their homes in Poland and in Egypt as refugees in the late 1940s. I work with and on behalf of today’s refugees; today’s immigrants and victims of violence who are here seeking refuge. I have a black son; his ancestors came to this land in chains.

We are Jewish.

This is personal.

And my silence only helps to let them win. But darkness can’t win, and neither can fear. That is not what my grandparents survived for.

So until my heart feels less in tatters and hope feels less tenuous, I’ll keep looking at the little sign on my bookshelf and I’ll remember this:

In my heart, LOVE WINS.

 

all of time in this moment

/ gal / 1 Comment

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In the front row of the sanctuary, seated in the center so that my eye looks right at the Torah in its arc, I listen to the cantor singing the blessing over the wine. In a flash of my mind I am 18 years old again, at a Shabbat dinner at UCLA surrounded by new Jewish friends who know the entire full blessing so well that I can hear they have sung it every Friday of their lives. I only knew the beginning of the blessing then, and just the words, not the melody; it’s all we had recited in my home growing up, on those occasional Fridays when my mom decided to make chicken and rosemary potatoes for a special dinner and we lit the Shabbat candles. At that dinner during the beginning of college, I tried following along with the long prayer, mostly listening. Now, in the sanctuary of the synagogue in Atlanta where my husband is concluding a five-year tenure as one of its rabbis, preparing to move to a new congregation in a new city in a new state where he will lead a Jewish community, I easily sing along with the familiar words and melody.

All of time coalesces in this moment and I think about what it means to me to be Jewish, to have Judaism as my sanctuary. I remember the first day of freshman orientation, when I walked through a courtyard at UCLA towards the table marked with a sign that read, Jewish Student Union. I unexpectedly found my people that day, and in those years I connected with my Judaism on a new level. I think it was then that I knew without doubt I would marry a Jewish man and raise Jewish children one day.

I didn’t grow up a synagogue kid, but I went to Jewish summer camp for three years, and had come back from one of those summers to tell my parents I wanted to have a bat mitzvah. They hired a retired cantor and every Wednesday of 8th grade, he came to my house and taught me to read Hebrew, taught me all of the prayers in the Shabbat morning service, taught me my Torah portion, and helped me write my dvar Torah. Before our meetings he would sit in his car and smoke a pipe, and his breath smelled like cloves and cinnamon while we studied together. I had my small bat mitzvah at the library of the JCC, where there was a Torah I read from before 40 family members and friends, and we had a party in the garden of our home. My maternal grandmother had died just a few months before, and I felt her presence deeply on that day. My paternal grandmother had come from Italy, and prepared all of the food for the party.

I didn’t do much Jewishly after that, but at UCLA I connected again with this piece of myself that I had never questioned. I am the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and Sephardic refugees who were forced out of Egypt in the 1950s for being Jewish. My Judaism growing up was in the fact that I was born in Jerusalem to parents who had met on a beach in Eilat. It was in the Sephardic and Ashkenazi food my grandmothers made when they came to stay with us from Italy and Israel. It was in stories I heard of relatives who had been rabbis, in my great uncle who prayed daily at the Sephardic Egyptian synagogue in Paris. It was in my cousin’s wedding in Tel Aviv, where I had been a bridesmaid when I was nine years old and danced with IDF soldiers who had come dressed in their fatigues to celebrate their friends. It was in my memory of putting a tiny piece of paper into the Western Wall in Jerusalem with my nine-year-old’s prayer that my great grandmother live forever. It was in the stories I heard of how grand life had been for Jews in Alexandria before Nasser came to power. Stories of my Polish grandmother sewing clothing out of potato sacks in Auschwitz to trade for eggs she could eat.

She would have been so proud of my husband, my maternal grandmother. Proud to know that I had married a man whose family came from the same part of Poland. Proud to see the humility and grace with which he holds the responsibility of being a rabbi, of leading a Jewish community.

All of time coalesces in this moment and I look up at the majestic sanctuary of this historic synagogue in Atlanta, this beautiful Southern city that has been our home for five treasured years. I feel gratitude and love for its people, its history, the way it has held us. I think of my daughter’s bat mitzvah in this sanctuary last year, of the four years of preschool here that have given my son the unquestioned conviction of his Jewishness. I think of the work I have been able to do to connect the Jewish community to the refugee families I worked with professionally. I think how much I am going to miss the Southern hospitality and genteel welcome we have received from everyone here, the sweet lilt in how words are spoken, wondering if Northern Virginia can still be considered the South.

Then, after the senior rabbi has spoken, after others from the community have spoken – all so graciously, so lovingly, so generously towards my husband and our family – my husband goes to the bimah to speak, from this pulpit that is now so familiar to him that it has been strange until this moment for him to sit with me in the front row. From my seat in the center of that front row, I watch him, I hear his words, and tears stream down my face, boundless love and pride burst from inside me.

In words spoken and unspoken, he says to me, We did it. This thing we set out to do together at the very beginning of our relationship 18 years ago, when I first told you I wanted to become a rabbi… We did it, and look how beautiful it is! All of time coalesces in this moment and I feel my grandmothers sitting on either side of me, agreeing with me as I reply silently: Yes we did, babe. Yes we did. And yes, it is beautiful. So beautiful.

After he spoke to the congregation, a standing ovation from our community showered him with the kind of love that fills every well of reserve our family is going to need as we take this next step forward in time.

The entire evening was a life-giving moment. My well is full.

I am going to miss this place, these people, so much. The 18 years leading to this moment have not all been easy. But they have all been so important. Our five years in Atlanta have been our best. I leave here deeply satisfied and grateful. I am so proud of my husband. I am proud of us. I am proud of our family. I can see how every single moment before this one is the moment that brought us here. To this precious place in time where we could pause …Well full. Deep breath. Here we go… before our next adventure together.

 

unwanted attention

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I don’t go places alone at night. I haven’t for a few decades. I live in a quiet, safe neighborhood where women sometimes walk their dogs or go running alone at night. Even here it’s hard for me to understand how they don’t feel fear… alone… at night. The only time I feel safe and at ease out in the world at night is when I’m with my husband. Because I know he could – and would – beat the shit out of anyone who might try to hurt us, to hurt me. Because he is fearless in a way I could never be. I’d love to live in a world where women feel safe, but that isn’t the world I live in.

In my early twenties I was more fearless. Or maybe just more stupid. During a college semester in Paris, I rode the subway alone at night and then walked home the few blocks from my stop, through my quiet neighborhood, to my apartment. Once I made the mistake of barely smiling politely at the middle aged man in a business suit who opened the door for me that led out of my stop to the street. The middle aged man who… What? Misread my signals? The middle aged man who started following me home, a short distance behind me, and who didn’t stop following me until I spun around suddenly, looked him in the eye and yelled, “Go fuck yourself, asshole!” I yelled in French, unaware until that moment that I knew how to swear with such vulgarity in another language.

Unwanted attention.

That same semester, a decade before cell phones and internet, I would walk the block from my apartment to make a calling card call to the U.S. on a pay phone in a phone booth that was missing its door. I called at night, Paris time, when I knew I would reach my best friend between her classes in California. One night as I was telling her a story, I saw a man walking toward me. He stopped two feet away from the open booth where I stood and just stared at me – a quizzical look on his face – for what felt like an eternity. I told my friend that I might have to drop the phone and make a run for it, trying to summon up my courage while paralyzed with fear. The worst possible scenario, my greatest fear, flashing through my mind. I could almost swallow my racing heart in my throat. Then he turned around and walked away, and I ran home still trembling, imagining how things could have gone, how trapped and helpless I would have been. I comforted myself – barely – thinking that he must have not been 100% well in the head; as if a mentally fragile man could be any less terrifying than one with a plan to actually pursue me.

Unwanted attention.

When I was in first grade I was terrified of the moment each morning and afternoon when recess would end and we would have to line up to go back into class. That was when two little boys would rush me, one on either side, and kiss me on each cheek before running away laughing to the end of the line. Twice a day they would make me cry. I don’t remember how or when it stopped, or if my teacher took it seriously. I think my parents did.

Unwanted attention.

In my early thirties I spent a night comforting a friend as she took the morning after pill. She had been raped by a man she knew while another man laughed and helped to hold her down. I held her hand as her uterus contracted and she relived the experience, doubting and questioning herself at every turn, wondering if she had led them on, if she had asked for it. As if she could have changed the story if she’d done something, anything, different. “Please don’t blame yourself for what those fuckers did to you,” I said over and over to her.

Unwanted attention.

The summer I turned 20, I went to Club Med on vacation with my family. The hyper Brazilian activities director with the bad perm went by the name of Doodoo. Doodoo wouldn’t leave me alone, kept nagging me to come do water aerobics or some other activity with him and a bunch of middle aged women; I think he thought we were lonely. I kept asking him to just let me read in peace under my umbrella on the beach. One night at the bar, where I could get virgin (and sometimes real) pina coladas with the payment beads I kept around my wrist, Doodoo sat himself down next to me and told me that I should lose weight. Because then I would meet some feminine standard he’d decided he was the arbiter of. Because I should give a shit what he thought of my body. I told him to fuck off. In English.

Unwanted attention.

I spent a good part of high school and college carrying more weight than I felt comfortable with. It was hard to feel good in my body when I didn’t meet the standards of beauty ascribed to me by whom… Men? Society? The media? I craved attention that I didn’t get. I was every guy’s friend, but never anything more. In a crowd of skinny California blondes, nobody notices a chubby brunette.

What does that mean, to want the attention and not get it?

Then to start getting it,

but it’s not me who’s in charge of

when and

why and

from whom,

but someone else?

within the discomfort

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I’m sitting in the sukkah on our back deck. Poles of PVC tubing hold up three walls of plastic tarps, while the fourth side of the square structure remains open. The “roof” is wooden lattice, we didn’t get around to covering it with fallen branches from the trees in the woods across the street before it started raining. The rain stopped yesterday but it still smells wet, clean and fragrant. And it’s still humid from the hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico that caused devastation in Nicaragua but was only a storm by the time it reached northern Georgia.

The sukkah reminds me of when I first went to the Burning Man festival, where friends and I constructed a geodesic dome – also from PVC – covered by a translucent white parachute. I can’t remember how many rolls of duct tape it took to put that thing together so that it created some semblance of shelter and shade from the hot desert sun. But I do remember the massive high desert dust storm that blew off the parachute and almost blew away the structure itself and everything that was inside while we kept cover inside our cars.

Everything is temporary.

So striking – and humbling – when you are in the middle of a vast empty desert, in a temporary “city” that only exists for a week. This was back when very few people came to the festival in RVs and most people slept in tents or domes like ours.

That’s one of the lessons of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, one of the reasons we build this “temporary dwelling” and spend time within it each fall. We’re also supposed to invite people into the sukkah, including the spirits of our ancestors.

Everything is temporary.

I feel incredibly uncomfortable right now. Last night I couldn’t fall asleep, my body was restless, my skin felt itchy and dry, my belly rumbled, my mind swam with unsettledness, and I was annoyed that I was so tired but still awake.

My beloved California – where I grew up, where I come from – is burning and I am so far away. One calamity follows another right now, before we are able to catch our breath, before there is time to recover. No time to heal, no space to hope.

Everything is temporary.

I think about all of the people in the world for whom this is their always. The constant worry about where their next meal will come from. The loss of babies from malnutrition. The temporariness of homes and jobs when there is income insecurity or no jobs at all. The fragility of health. Fear of violence. And even the ability to summon up hope for something better, perhaps, one day.

Somehow the discomfort feels like my responsibility right now, like this dwelling I need to sit in and stay connected with. Especially as someone whose actual home is intact, whose family is safe and well, whose pantry is full, whose job is secure, whose car runs well, whose children get to go to school, whose skin is white.

Are most of us feeling this right now, or are there people, maybe entire communities out there that remain untouched, that don’t feel troubled, that are not concerned? Is it business as usual for anyone, or is this now our new business as usual? Is there anyone who doesn’t feel like we have fallen into an irreversible dystopia fit for fiction? Because I’ve read a lot of those books and it doesn’t feel as though we’re headed there, it actually feels like we may well have arrived. Dystopian fiction is written as a warning. What we need now are prescriptions…

for resolution

for answers

for unity

for justice

for healing.

Please tell me that everything – even our collective discomfort and all of this pain and destruction – is temporary.

capacity & tears

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“Well some say life will beat you down
Break your heart, steal your crown…”

~ Tom Petty (1950-2017)

I cried at my desk today. The tears fell quietly as I was reading…

About Las Vegas.

Puerto Rico.

The Virgin Islands.

Mexico.

Houston.

Florida.

West Coast wildfires.

About the genocide against the Rohingya people in Mianmar.

The violence inflicted on innocent people by Spanish police during Catalonia’s elections for independence.

The relentless disease of racism in our country.

The brutality and militarization of American police.

The mass incarceration of black and brown people on American soil.

About our national addiction to the right to bear arms over the right to live free from the fear of violence.

The destruction of the EPA because who cares about climate change when there’s money to be made.

Last night I cried into my daughter’s belly as we listened to Tom Petty, who may have, in that moment, been breathing his final breaths. I remembered details of when I’d seen him in concert in 2009, on one of the most beautiful spring nights I have ever experienced, watching the most gorgeous sunset over the San Francisco Bay. Quite possibly the most incredible live performer I have ever seen and heard.

Last night it felt as if all of the rock stars of my childhood and teen years in the 1970s and 1980s were being taken away, one at a time. Last night I felt every single one of my years, hyper aware that when you’re in your forties, the people around you start to die more steadily. Should I be getting used to this by now?

Today I learned that a childhood friend had died of cancer in the past year. That was the piece that got me in that deepest place in my gut, and then the tears fell more quickly, less gently.

A dear friend recently told me that she thinks my “heart and mind have tremendous capacity.” Most of the time I think I can hold all this, the deep pain that is all around me.

The wounds I know my refugee clients hold from their experiences escaping war and losing everything they had known before.

The brokenness and injustice, in plain view or hidden, in every corner of my city, my state, my country, my world.

The image of the two black people who were pulled over by two white cops a few weeks ago when my family and I turned a corner in our car and we pulled over to film what was going on, just in case things went south and somebody with dark skin ended up dead. Thankfully they didn’t this time, but the imprint of the potential injustice that was happening before my eyes as the cops searched the car for what…? An excuse to lock up – or kill – two more black people for a broken tail light? For driving while black?

When I was younger I used to feel like a sponge, super sensitive to all that was around me. But I’ve learned with age that it’s possible to connect with the pain all around without being quite so absorbent. How to hold the pain without it getting stuck inside. Still, though… Last week I took Facebook off my phone, with no regrets. I needed the reminder that I am the one in charge of what information I take in, and when.

* * * *

Last Friday night and Saturday was Yom Kippur. For the first time in many years, I felt moved to actually fast completely. I still drank water so that I wouldn’t get a three-day headache, but this year it felt good not to put anything else in my body. I also powered off my phone for the day, which felt amazing. During breaks from the services I read and wrote in my journal. I walked around and talked to people. I sat with two very tiny babies and their moms whom I’d just met.

I cried a lot. Not just during the Yizkor memorial service, but at other moments too. While the most incredible cellist played the Kol Nidre melody, accompanied by organ and choir and cantor, and even more magically, when he played the melody solo. While I closed my eyes and connected with each of my relatives who have died, picturing each of their faces in my mind’s eye, feeling them close.

The veil between life and death feels thin at Yom Kippur, and I held both the humbling awe of that understanding and the comfort of feeling held by my ancestors and even my tiny baby daughter who died before me.

I don’t take any of it for granted. I’ve been through hardship, tragedy, loss and struggle. I know how incredibly lucky I am for the stability and goodness of my life. For all of the people I get to love and hold dear. For my health. For my home.

For my life.

It feels like an incredible responsibility, to hold that gratitude along with the awareness that things are so bad and so hard and so incredibly messed up in so many places outside my safe little cocoon.

The awareness that there is so much work to be done, so much light I need to summon up and magnify to help balance out the dark.

And the awareness that it is all so temporary and fleeting. And so precious and beautiful. Even the tears.

 

cracked

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Family at Brown AME church

Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, AL, central to the movement for Voting Rights

During my senior year of college I wrote my honors thesis about my family’s history in the Lodz Ghetto in Poland during the Holocaust. A year later, during a mostly solo seven-month journey through Europe and Israel, I traveled to Lodz, and went on to Warsaw, Krakow and the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camps. It was 1994 and I was 23 years old, and I traveled this piece of my trip with my best friend. I wouldn’t meet my husband for another five years, but I remember feeling unexpectedly victorious as I walked the tracks into Birkenau, toward the crumbling brick remains of the crematoria, dreaming of the Jewish man I would one day marry and raise Jewish children with. Another generation. I thought about how happy that would make my grandmother, a survivor of Auschwitz and Theresienstadt concentration camps, who had died when I was 13. (I know she smiled the day my husband was ordained as a rabbi.)

Walking on those tracks that the Jews in cattle cars had ridden toward their imminent deaths felt like the most powerful vindication to the evil forces and hateful humans who had tried to exterminate my family and my people. I found myself laughing because they had failed, because I was alive, two generations later, and my line would continue. I married a man whose family were also survivors, who came from a town just 30 kilometers from Lodz, where my family had lived for generations before the war. I like to think we might have met in a different way, in a different place, regardless of Hitler. Besheret. Meant to be.

Those two experiences – unraveling the untold stories of my family as I researched my thesis, learning about those who were killed by the Nazis and those who survived, and returning to the places where they had lived and where so many had died – were cathartic and healing. They were also infuriating and disheartening, because I knew I could never recover so much of what had been lost, and because I saw the way the Holocaust had inflicted a sharp and jagged crack in my family, one that has become a profound part of its legacy. One that still impacts who we are.

What I didn’t know that day walking down the tracks of Birkenau at age 23 was that I would, almost 20 years later, adopt a black son. And that the sharp and jagged crack of my family story would intersect with the sharp and jagged crack of his own history – one he is still, at age four, too young to comprehend.

Edmund Petus Bridge

Named for a Confederate general, the Edmund Pettus Bridge was the beginning of the march for Voting Rights from Selma to Montgomery, AL, in 1965, and also the site of Bloody Sunday, when nonviolent protestors were violently assaulted by police.

We just returned from a family trip to Alabama to visit the Civil Rights Trail between Birmingham, Selma and Montgomery. We’ve been living in the South, in Atlanta, for four years, touching Civil Rights and the country’s dark history of racial injustice against black people a little more closely than we did during our years growing up in California. But I wanted to know more, to touch more, to face more, to understand more about my son’s story – about my country’s story. So we set off with intention for all four of us – not just our black son, who is just starting to see the difference in the color of our skins, but our biological teenage daughter and ourselves, their white parents.

Foot Soldier

The Foot Soldier statue at Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, AL. There is a fascinating podcast about the statue at http://www.revisionisthistory.com.

I am filled with images from our journey, of the Civil Rights sites we visited and the stories we heard about the Voting Rights March between Selma and Montgomery in 1965. Of the juxtaposition of Civil Rights and Civil War that is ever present in the South – Confederate flags honoring the fallen soldiers buried in the cemetery in Selma, monuments to Confederate heroes celebrated for their valor in the struggle for “states’ rights,” (or the right to own other humans). Heroes who went on to don white hooded robes and lynch those who had recently been “freed.”

Confederate Monument

Monument to Nathan Bedford Forrest, Civil War hero and grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Old Live Oak Cemetery, Selma, AL

But this is the image that remains with me: We are in Cahawba, the ghost town that remains of what was the original capital of Alabama in the 1800s. A few fallen down houses remain, surrounded by barbed wire, one inhabited by the descendant of slaves as late as 1995. The slave quarters of a now-erased grand mansion remain, spookily boarded up but recently whitewashed with fresh paint.

Slave Quarters

Slave Quarters, Old Cahawba Ghost Town

We make our way through a field to what was the slave cemetery, and follow the guide on a piece of paper to the ten graves that are marked with numbers. We read that these ten are only the graves whose occupants are known, but that the cemetery has hundreds of other unmarked graves where people whose skin is brown like my son’s rest. You know you are passing one because the earth there is more sunken than its surrounding soil. It’s hot and damp because it is July in the South, and it is incredibly quiet. We are the only ones there.

Amelia Headstone

Celie Craig Headstone

Old Cahawba Slave Cemetery

My son runs ahead looking for the next marker, proud to show us he knows his numbers. My black son whose ancestors were abducted from their people and their homes and came to America on slave ships. My black son whose ancestors were sold at auction, enslaved. My black son whose ancestors labored their entire lives and were beaten mercilessly and separated from those they loved. My black son whose ancestors were raped by their white masters. My black son whose ancestors escaped bondage for freedom in the North, and who were recaptured by slave hunters. My black son whose ancestors labored as sharecroppers after they were told they were free. My black son whose ancestors were lynched on the town square surrounded by an audience of white spectators. My black son whose ancestors learned that separate was not equal, and that to stay alive it was best to look down when a white person walked by. My black son whose ancestors fought Jim Crow and marched for justice. My black son whose ancestors followed the Great Migration north into Ohio, seeking a better life, finding a different kind of discrimination and segregation in urban ghettos.

Lynching Jars

Soil collected from the sites of over 4,000 documented lynchings of black people in America, a project of the Equal Justice Initiative, http://www.eji.org

My black son whose history I don’t know and can only imagine; who only knows (for now) that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his sisters and brothers marched for justice because there was a time when things weren’t fair. My black son who grasped for the first time while we were in Alabama that black people – his people – were once slaves like the Jews in Egypt. This is his entry into understanding slavery, because for three years in Jewish preschool he has learned the story of Moses and Pharaoh at Passover.

He runs to the next marker and I walk toward him, wondering about those who came before him. In the same way I did about my own ancestors as I walked into Birkenau. My story and his story – our cracked histories intersecting – different stories with a shared experience of violation, of murder, of genocide, of a history and people exterminated. But our stories are different in one critical way: The violation against his people didn’t stop when slavery ended. It didn’t stop when Jim Crow was outlawed. It didn’t stop with the Voting Rights Act. (Especially as that is being unraveled today.) It didn’t stop when schools were desegregated. (Especially as schools resegregate today.) It didn’t stop when a man with the same color skin as his became President of the United States of America. The violation against his people keeps taking different forms, and racial discrimination is alive and well. That cracks my already cracked heart into a million pieces. Because these are the stories of his heritage and the reality of his present that I have a responsibility to explain to him as he grows older.

And I’m not sure how to tell those stories in a way that instills hope.

Tomb of Unknown Slave w Noose

Civil Rights Memorial Park, Selma, AL

I am the white Jewish mother of a black Jewish son. My ancestral story, my ancestors, will become his only if he chooses them. But even if he does, he has another critical story. His own ancestral story is a different one than mine. His roots originate in a different part of the world, and his path winds through other places in ways I don’t think I can ever claim to completely understand.

I want to give my son heroes; for now he has Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mrs. Rosa Parks. I want to give him ancestors, but I know so little about his roots that I can only put pieces together from a broader, painful story. I want to give him community, a sense of belonging to his own people – both black and Jewish.

I want to give him his own story, but I know it will be his to write, his to tell, and his to claim.

Kids at monument 2

Civil War Memorial, Montgomery, AL