A year can feel like forever and it can go by in a flash. This has been a forever year. With a grim anniversary upon us, an end to what has made it feel so awfully endless seems very far away with only more ahead: escalation, displacement, death. Fear, of the existential variety.
On Oct. 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas attacks, it seemed inevitable that Israel would retaliate and things would be terrible. But this terrible? A year terrible? This-many-thousands-of-deaths terrible? Now war on several fronts? Not even I, glass-half-empty doomsayer with intergenerational trauma in my bones, would have predicted this.
Nor would I have predicted the extent to which the horrors of that day have rippled, affecting Canadian schools, universities, hospitals, sporting events, film festivals, bookstores. Boycotts, vandalism, infighting.
I never thought I would have to call my son’s beloved former principal to ask about social media posts regarding Vancouver elementary school children taking part in a pro-Palestinian protest. (He never responded.)
I never thought I would need to send emails to a local theatre about antisemitic “jokes” made on its stage. (They never responded.)
Our pain is barely acknowledged – or worse.
I would not have predicted that my camera roll would turn into a jumble of screenshots; upsetting things shared, liked – or written – by politicians, artists, academics, union leaders, progressives. Rape denial, antisemitic tropes. And then that Jews would be told that what they are experiencing was not actually antisemitism. The gaslighting has been something else. If such things were said about any other community, they would never be tolerated.
I never would have predicted that to mark the anniversary of the brutal murders in Israel – of small children and elderly Holocaust survivors and everyone in between, the kidnappings, rapes, burnings of homes and possessions – people in this country would hold events celebrating the “resistance.” The absolute gall.
Incidents of antisemitism and Jewish-targeted hate crimes have soared in Canada, where Jews are a tiny percentage of the population. On a Toronto Jewish Facebook group, a woman shared a story about the protest targeting the Giller Prize and wrote: “Please. Leave us alone.”
That’s how it feels – the protests outside Jewish restaurants, synagogues, community centres, including one across the street from a Jewish seniors’ home in Ottawa last month. Please, leave us alone.
I am no fan of Benjamin Netanyahu and I am anti-war. I am for peace. And yet, the cold hostility directed my way has been palpable. Why? Because I believe that a State of Israel has a right to exist. From the other “side,” I have been charged with betraying the Jewish people for calling out a catastrophic war. Because I believe Palestinians deserve safety and security, and their own country.
I am pro-Palestinian, and Jewish. This is not an oxymoron.
I could write a million words on the politics – how proxies for Iran are targeting Israel, how frightening this should be for a democratic world, how Mr. Netanyahu has put Israel under threat in part to protect his own interests – but I am stuck on the grief. This anniversary is not reigniting the fear and the heartbreak, the anguish and bitterness; these have become our consistent companions.
We are in the High Holiday period of the Jewish calendar – Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, was last week, followed by Yom Kippur, which begins Friday evening. We usually wish one another “a sweet year.” How to do that as bombs are falling? Outside synagogues across Canada, congregants are greeted by heavy security and police. What is sweet about any of this?
I can’t imagine the pain of the hostages who have been held for 366 days in this, the longest leap year. The pain of their families. Of friends and families of those who have been killed in Gaza, Lebanon, Israel.
Safely out of the line of fire, diasporic communities – Jewish, Muslim, Israeli, Palestinian – have been living with this heaviness. The pain has become familiar, a baseline. Now, we welcome our Lebanese brothers and sisters into this unwanted fold. Grief, everywhere.
A rabbi I know shared a graphic that has been circulating in Israel this Rosh Hashanah: the yellow ribbon, a symbol for the release of the hostages, twisted into the Hebrew word shana (year). It says: “A year without words.”
I wish I could write my heart’s demand: “No more lives lost!” and make it so. Alas, nobody has this power. Even the powerful don’t seem to have this power, or desire that particular outcome.
There are no words. And yet, the only thing many of us can do, is use them: to write, to talk to one another. And to express hope for peace, in spite of it all.