Biden and me
I don’t know how he did it. Brought me to tears. Broke down my resistance to feeling into the tragedy. Where can I turn to when the tears wont stop? Will the sobbing let me breath again?
It wasn’t only the list of atrocities wrought upon the villagers in Beeri, the dancers at the Nova Festival on Kibbutz Re’em, nor the parading of hapless captives in a bloodthirsty crowd. My immune system that protects me from being engulfed in that darkness was still active and allowing me to function. What opened me up was the remembering.
Joe Biden made a speech today that I will not forget. In it he remembered that this hatred is not about Hamas and the Zionist enterprise. It is about antisemitism, and that experience is embedded in my genes, woven into me from my parents and grandparents.
Not that I embrace it. No, if anything, I have grown up with it on repeat play and rejected it as a narrative of victim-hood. Living in parts of Africa where Jews are a rare curiosity or in affluent American suburbia where we are empowered and supported by the greater legal system, taught me that times have changed. Is the Geneva Convention, the UN Human Rights Charter, freedom of religion as protected in the First Amendment not enough for us all to move on? And if that is not enough, then surely the existence of the proud and formidable, democratic state of Israel as a home for the Jews is remedy, a preface to the final chapter of our anti-Semitic saga.
So, can I not choose to exorcise those narratives in this lifetime from our collective memory?
Incredibly, it took the compassion and stark reminder of a career politician, a non-Jew, but a man who has lived with his own personal tragedy, who knows the ‘black hole in your chest when you lose family’ to break me open and remember this is in my genes. How could I forget that so recently both my parents’ families fled Nazi Europe to recreate themselves in South Africa and survive another day?
I went back to listen to his speech again, to the point where I could no longer hold back. “Sadly for the Jewish people, it is not new. This attack has brought to the surface painful memories of the scars left by millennia of antisemitism, and genocide on the Jewish people. So in this moment we must be crystal clear, we stand with Israel.”
How is it that that simple acknowledgment is enough to break me down? I am this people who have had this happen before, time and again, and I survived, if not by force, by flight and assimilation.
Here in my beloved community we instinctively offer the underdog our first sympathy, our prayers are directed at all the victims of violence and the violators... for they have their reasons. We are removed enough in this verdant corner of America to be well-wishers come what may.
But enough of that.
Those young Hamas villains, brainwashed with hatred, are convinced that Jews are the reason for their struggles. I got nothing for you. You are an evil subset, representing the darkest side of humanity. Your actions can never justify your cause. You are not the Palestinian people and by grace, that kind of barbarism will never represent them. Got nothing for you but pity and loathing to be existing in such a vile soup of hate.
The next generation of men in my Israeli family have been called up to reserve duty.
My brother just returned from a funeral of his friends daughter, murdered on Saturday.
Powerful forces are rallying to draw the line.
Grateful to the most powerful man in our world as he touched into his own tragedy, he cracked open a flood of my tears.
