October 2024

In 2018, a group of Shul Orphans came together to solve the problem of where to go for Kol Nidre services. We gathered in a rented room at the old Sportsman’s Lodge with a borrowed torah scroll and a few dozen mahzors. I gave my first High Holy Day drash that night, and another the following year. Then Covid hit and our little community was forced to disband. But I continued to write, once a year, about some small moment of the liturgy that intrigued me or a prayer I wanted to know more about. I grew up with no religious education and around no Jews. This annual drash (“drash” literally means to seek, as in wisdom or learning) has become a tradition for which I am deeply grateful.

Growing up as the only Jews in the neighborhood turned out to be a double blessing: First, because I come to the study of Torah with no preconceived notions. I get to pick and choose, as an adult, how and with whom I study. Second, because I have never been shocked by antisemitism. I spent no time, after October 7th, beating my breast over the revelation of antisemitism in this country or this city or this industry. I spend very little time under the illusion that antisemitism can be eradicated or even beaten down. News alert: the world doesn’t like Jews. Some of the world even hates Jews. Most are just indifferent - and indifference turns out to be worse.

A childhood with no formal religious education didn’t make me less Jewish - for my 16th birthday my grandparents gave me two tiny charms - one Chai, one Star of David - and they lived safely in a little silk pouch in a drawer for many years. I wear both daily now and they are joined by a dog tag necklace for the hostages, a delicate gold charm representing a yellow ribbon for their freedom, the Nova dog tag in honor of those murdered at the Nova music festival and an armful of beaded bracelets demanding “Let Them Go”. I am the Taylor Swift fangirl of war merch. I wear my Jew Junk daily and everywhere. I am aggressively, visibly Jewish. Visible Judaism feels like an act of defiance in a world rife with antisemitism. But visible Judaism has also helped build and fortify a community - some old acquaintances and some completely new friends - all of whom have come together, unified by a common cause - freedom for the hostages, the defense of Israel, and the exposure of antisemitism wherever it persists. As I write this drash from a land a day ahead and miles away, I am struck by a deep gratitude for this community which has grown since October 7th to include new amazing friends - all of whom will come together on this most holy of days.

With love from New Zealand, 

L.

YK 5785

Kol Nidre for the Broken Hearted

“The future is the sphere of human freedom, because I cannot change yesterday but I can change tomorrow by what I do today...”

- Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

 

The Viddui, in many ways, is the centerpiece of Yom Kippur. Ten times over 25 hours we stand and engage in the repetition of the confessional, forming a fist with our right hand to beat our breast over our heart and confess aloud our sins. With each strike of our fist, we list a series of transgressions. All of them might apply to and weigh heavy on any one of us at any given time - we have slandered, lied, scoffed, disobeyed. One of them weighs heaviest on me this year: Sararnu “we have turned away,” we have ignored our responsibilities. The thought of turning away, the very real possibility that I have ignored my responsibility, weighs heavy every day since October 7th, 2023, the day on which we were all inevitably, inexorably changed. The day on which we became the broken hearted.

WhatsApp and texts began pinging on the evening of October 6th, 2023. It was Shabbat in Los Angeles. By the morning of the 7th, we heard hundreds were dead, several dozen taken hostage. Hour by hour the numbers grew, hour by hour more tears fell as the feeling of helplessness reached desperation. We’re thousands of miles away, we’re not powerful enough or rich enough or famous enough to make a real difference. But 24 hours of tears later, my wise husband challenged me - I may lack the wealth to donate millions or the fame to have high volume reach. But didn’t I know influential people, didn’t I have the passion to make the connections and the clarity to inspire action? Since that moment, every day begins with “what can I do,” and inevitably ends with “have I done enough?”

In the first few months it was easier to know WHAT to do - arrange events for friends and families of hostages - encourage others to get involved, host an event, donate to the Family Forum or Magen David Adom or the FIDF. As the months wore on it became more challenging, harder to tap the pool of the fatigued or disheartened. Harder to answer the question, “have I changed tomorrow for good by what I did today?” Did I turn away? I think about the remaining hostages, about the parents and children and friends and family of the surviving and the deceased. I think about families with no homes to return to, from the kibbutzim in the south to the families in the north, the children who haven’t returned to school, the children who will never return to their parents. I know I am not alone in asking the question “have I done enough”, or in the feeling of coming up short.

And now it is more than one year. I could not imagine on the eve of October 6th, 2023 - when we first heard news that something was happening in Israel - something bigger than the usual red alerts of rockets along the border - that one year later we would still be living with the reality of Israel at war, hostages still in captivity, antisemitism unmasked and raging. I hoped against hope that I would not have to write about the year anniversary because a year would have passed and the hostages would be free and the world would not look like it does. Just as I hoped against hope that all of our hostages would survive.

I was walking the sands of Pakiri Beach on the north island of New Zealand when I heard about Hersh. I say his name, “Hersh,” like he was a friend or my own son. Hersh, Eden, Carmel, Alexander, Almog, Ori: young men and women whose stories I’ve heard and memorized for over a year, young men and women murdered at the hands of Hamas in tunnels under Rafah. This is the paradox of our time: with each breath I felt anger and rage and deep sorrow for the families, and with each breath I appreciated the sun on my face and the community built out of the pain and fear and outrage of the past year. Every day, we say their names aloud - names of strangers who feel like friends - names of friends whose families are now like our own. We believed in our souls that saying their names and telling their stories was doing something to save them, that their names and the energy the letters that spell them could keep them alive. But news comes of these six, and we feel the efforts may be in vain. Too many days of tears, too many days of a constriction around our lungs and heart and stomach and guts. Too many days of feeling completely hopeless - of feeling the extraordinary ache we call broken hearted.

How often, over the past year, have we said we are broken hearted? How often have we heard it said to us? The heart is the only muscle in the human body that does not get sore from exercise. You go for a run or do an intensive workout. The rest of your body may be stiff with pain, but your heart feels just the same. The muscle that just worked double its normal rate is pumping along, doing its job. The heart, despite what it endured on the treadmill or out on the road, continues to beat. Hearts keep beating. That’s what they do, adjusting to the rhythm of your day, doing their job when you’re awake or asleep or even unconscious. Hearts fail for other reasons, be they hereditary or from abuse. But genetic anomalies notwithstanding, hearts, very rarely, actually break. My heart aches in a different way after October 7th, some days more and some less, but it is an ache I don’t want to live without - not while so many are still unsafe in Israel - not while the hostages remain in Gaza.

It is hard to feel so much day in and day out for so long - hard to know how to find balance between the shock and grief we feel day to day. How are we supposed to take a walk on a beach on a sunny day and not feel the crippling existential gravity of the war in Israel? This question was answered for me on the evening of April 14th after dinner with friends in Tel Aviv. It was the night after Iran sent hundreds of missiles toward Israel, all of which were deflected or destroyed. Close to midnight, I left the restaurant and walked from Neve Tzedek to Jaffa. Though the country had been at a standstill just 24 hours before, the streets were bustling - couples holding hands, young people spilling from bars onto the sidewalks and kids doing homework and skateboarding without a parent in sight. Despite threat of full scale attack just 24 hours before, Israelis were living their lives - Jews and Arabs, young and old, men and women out on the street as though nothing had happened. Because life marches forward and sometimes the act of getting out of bed and living a normal life is the act of defiance. Sometimes, simply moving forward is enough. We survive and we thrive - to curl into a ball and stop moving forward is to give up, to allow those who would wish us dead a victory. Sometimes changing tomorrow is as simple as living a full life today. Living a full life means something very different to me after October 7th. A full life is endless news of war and grief AND everyday gifts - a victory at work, a cuddle with a dog, an evening out with friends that includes laughter and love and the unbelievable joy of the wedding of a child. I’ve learned since October 7th that it is not only okay to cry a little every day, it is appropriate. And it is just as appropriate to enjoy the gifts of life, health, a sunny day on a beach, a ridiculous joke, friends we cherish, family we love. Two things can be true. Two things are true. Our hearts ache. Our hearts are full. Being alive is hard. Being alive is an extraordinary privilege to cherish every day. Terrible things happen to people we care about, and sun-baked sand feels amazing on bare feet. I am awake to the world in a way I don’t think I understood before October 7th.

Two months ago, Kaley married Joe in our garden. My inspiring, gorgeous stepdaughter became a wife to her beloved. There are a lot of things to worry about when you’re hosting a wedding in your backyard: did we order enough glassware, will the food be good, what about parking, bathrooms, music and the weather? But none of those things kept me up at night. What kept me up at night was this: Will I be present? Will I be able to bring my full self to the day? How can we celebrate in a time of so much suffering? If I enjoyed myself would I feel guilty? Would I be able to experience the pure thrill of the day unburdened by thoughts of war and hostages and injustice?

The answer is that I didn’t have to - it turns out I could be present, I could feel the joy of their union AND remember the hostages and the war and the hatred - in many ways, my joy was greater because of the awareness of how lucky we are, how special it is to be able to have a Jewish wedding in this time, how meaningful to be surrounded by friends and family. Witnessing the union of two young people in love - two young Jewish people willing to hold hands and walk into the future together with a commitment to keeping a kosher home and upholding the traditions of the Torah - was the ultimate experience of positivity and revolution in a world torn apart by war and antisemitism. To Kaley & Joe, getting married wasn’t an act of defiance at all. It was the next obvious step in a life to be lived together in love. And those of us who love them are invited on their journey. We are blessed.

Changing tomorrow by what we do today is the essence of Judaism and the essence of this moment - we have this moment to be present for one another, this moment to look honestly at our selves and ask, have we done enough or have we turned away. As much as Yom Kippur is about the personal relationship between us and God, a personal confession and atonement not between each other but between us and Adonai, so too is this our opportunity - to be better, to do better, to remember that on this day we ask if we have done enough, but on every day we have to ask ourselves the same question.

So I’m back to the Viddui - back to the issue of Sararnu - to thinking about the moment when we stand and strike fist against flesh over and over again, beating our chests in confession, pounding our hearts as though we could crack open an organ that carries on all of its own accord, beyond our control, for better and for worse. We face this most somber of holidays in community, standing for too long and starving for too long as we do every year, the same but also different. Each year, WE are different. This year, we are different in a new way, having been shattered by news of a war, by the loss of so many lives, by the naked display of pure hatred - mostly pointed at us - and the jarring lack of response from leadership worldwide. This year, every day of this year since October 7th, could be considered a marathon of the will. But somehow, our hearts keep beating. We pick ourselves up like Humpty Dumpty, we put the pieces back together and we go on, stronger in some ways for the adversity. As we stand on brink of this holiest of days - this pure 25 hours of prayer and reflection - I will take my right hand and strike my chest to remind myself not to crack open my heart but to keep it open - to stay awake to the pain and the joy of this past year - to keep reminding myself to not turn away - to keep my heart open to the possibility of what may come in the year ahead and how what I do today may change tomorrow.

G’mar hatimah tova.

Passover 2024

 The Fourth Child

For Marcy, with love and gratitude…

April 2024

I returned from Israel just before Passover so sick that I had to skip Seder and order in from a deli that sent matzo ball soup without the ball. I had a terrible cold I couldn’t shake and was forced to stay home for over a week.  This, I assumed, was why no one was asking about my trip.  I was experiencing Rhinovirus isolation. But it turns out to be something different.  It turns out that I can see it on someone’s face when I say I’ve just returned from Israel and they don’t want to hear about it. I can see it on someone’s face if they don’t know how to feel, or if they do know how to feel and they’re pretty sure that they way they feel is not the way I feel. 

For the past seven months, I’ve worn a dog tag for the hostages every day, and a giant star of David every day, and an arm load of bracelets to remind myself that 133 souls are still in Gaza every day.  In lighter moments I joke that I am the Taylor Swift of war merch.  I can see why it might seem like, with all that Jew junk on, I’d have a narrow, judgmental, ideologically intransigent point of view about the world in this fraught moment.  But really, I’m desperate for conversation. Really I’m bursting for the opportunity to share the stories that I’ve heard, to unpack them and understand them in the context of a world that is not so much binary, as riddled with paradox that we can only wrap our hearts and minds around by discussing over and over and over again. There is not enough conversation. We can not talk about this trauma and this problem and this moment too much. To not be asked leaves me feeling alone and unseen. 

And so on Passover, alone and without so much as a matzoh ball, I found myself thinking a lot about the meaning of the holiday, particularly this year.  I thought about not just the four questions, but more importantly, the four children.  The wise, the simple, the wicked, and the one who does not know how to ask.  The fourth child is not the wise child who doesn’t ask because he knows.  Nor is he the simple child, who doesn’t ask because he lacks intelligence.  The fourth child is avoidant - either because he knows the answer but lacks spiritual connection or because he is afraid to ask, afraid to embarrass himself or engage in confrontation.  We are, it seems to me, a world filled with fourth children at the moment.  

So let me now speak to the fourth children - the incurious, the embarrassed, the afraid, the exhausted.  You could have asked, “what was it like to be in Israel when Iran attacked?”  I would describe a night sky filled with aircraft, planes flying overhead as I lay awake, doom scrolling the news and WhatsApp, waiting for sirens and constantly checking the newly downloaded Home Front Command app on my phone.  I did a hundred mental check lists of the contents of the backpack by the door (water, nuts, phone charger plus power pack, flashlight, aspirin), the location of my shoes (next to the bed), and reminded myself to grab a pillow and blanket off the bed on the way to the shelter.  Beside me, my husband snored.

Just a few short hours before, we’d been at the weekly rally in Hostage Square when my friend Rebecca whispered, “Go back to your hotel - they’re shutting down the city by 11pm.”  By 10pm we were at the hotel restaurant, having stopped at a mini-mart for bottled water, nuts, gum, anything I thought we’d need in an emergency.  My husband ate a hearty meal.  I had a martini. I then had another as our phones lit up with texts from worried friends.  We played shesh besh in the lobby, I had my third martini.  By midnight, we learned the airport was closing in half hour, airspace over Jordan and Lebanon had closed and that the bombs were drones and would take 6-8 hours to arrive.  My husband announced he was going to sleep.  “Sleep?!  I can’t sleep,” I cried.  “You can,” he said, “Take a pill and sleep.  This is what we do.”  

For perspective:  from where I’m staying in Jaffa to Khan Younis in Gaza is 56 miles.  That’s pretty much the distance from my house in Beverly Hills to Ventura.  Its a little closer than Ojai.  The West Bank is as far from me at this moment as West Covina is to me when I’m home. Lebanon is just a bit farther from me now than Santa Barbara is to my backyard.  You get the point.  This is a tiny, tiny country.  Going to bed at night knowing that you are surrounded by countries harboring proxies for enemies, willing to fire at any moment, watching WhatsApp channels filled with news of an impending military retaliation on a country whose leadership’s stated mission is the annihilation of the land on which you rest, isn’t exactly a recipe for a good night’s sleep. But by 3am, I drifted off and awoke at 5am to read that the rockets had all been intercepted - some had hit the north and south - a few over Jerusalem - but Tel Aviv was unscathed.  

The immediate threat was past.  But my seminar - the reason I’d come to Israel - was cancelled.  All El Al flights to LA were cancelled or full until Friday.  I’d come at the invitation of my brilliant, philanthropic friend who had put together an amazing group of women coming to Israel on a listening tour with a focus on combatting the denial of gender based violence on October 7th.  With a looming security threat and cancelled flights, the trip was postponed to a later date in May.  But I was here - on the ground - having lived through a direct attack from Israel’s greatest enemy.  And the sun was shining.   I sent a WhatsApp to my friend, “So, should we still go to Sheba today?”  We’d planned to visit wounded soldiers at the rehab center of the biggest hospital in Israel.

The Fourth Child might ask, “Why go visit wounded soldiers?  Wasn’t it hard to see them and why do they want to talk to you?”  Dar picked me up at a traffic circle near Sheba and we laughed in the car about her 2am stress-eating and waking up with Bamba in her hair and Oreos on her bed.  We made our way to the balcony of one of balcony of the rehabilitation center, which is really a place for families and friends to visit, a place for the injured to avoid their rehab appointments, share food, cigarettes, stories. There we met Didi and Ben and Shlomi and Mendel, each of them eager to tell their stories, the moment they fell recorded by body cams and played over and over on their phones.  Re-living the trauma, they tell me, is part of their therapy.  They range in age from 21 to 55.  Twenty-one year old Mendel, whose family made aliyah from Chicago when he was 7, shows off his scars and asks me if I think he could be a model.  He’s a handsome kid.  He could for sure, I tell him.  Ben was in the K9 unit.  A the lone soldier from South Africa, his gorgeous Dutch Shepherd was killed in Khan Younis, but saved all thirteen men in his unit with a warning bark.  Ben was injured later - shot seven times and nearly bled out.  He spent a month in an induced coma.  His recovery journey will be long and slow.  He says he has no hate in his heart.  And then tells me he wouldn’t think twice about killing the terrorist who almost killed him.  “That’s not hate,” he says, “its retribution.”  Didi has no feeling in his right inner thigh and left calf.  He fell ten feet from the vehicle his unit used to move refugees from Northern Gaza to the South.  His legs crushed as the truck backed over him.  “Like Pitas,” he tells me - both legs were flattened but somehow no bones were broken.  His ligaments and nerves were mixed like a bowl of spagetti.  He’s in a wheelchair, has no feeling in his left calf and right foot.  Every day brings something new.  Yesterday, after months in rehab, he lost feeling in his left forearm.  Shlomi is soft spoken, just out of a wheelchair and working hard for a future where he can walk unaided.  He tells me he’ll come to America next month to speak at a fundraiser.  His English is halting and I promise to help with his speech if he sends it to me.  Ben says he’s going too.  “I’ll help you, bru,” he says in heavy South African lilt.  

And then there’s Maya.  Maya Regev, whose story I know so well from months of hearing stories from family members of hostages.  Maya Regev, who was released as part of the first group of women and children who came home in late November.  Maya had been shot and her foot severed nearly off.  After eight days of heavy bleeding, her captors took her to a hospital where she received a botched surgery, her foot reattached at an angle from her leg.  The pain, she told me, was mitigated by her fear for her brother.  Small but fierce, Maya demanded of her captor that she get proof of life of her brother.  So she was allowed to write him a note.  And then she received a note back.  And in that way, the two communicated back and forth before their release.  Maya and Itay had gone to the Nova Festival with her best friend, Omer.  Omer Shem Tov, whose parents along with one other family started the Hostages and Missing Families Forum out of a desperate need to create order out of a chaos the government would not step into, to create action in a void.  Omer’s story I knew well from his brother, Amit, who was part of a delegation of families we worked with when they came to Los Angeles in December.  Omer with the piercing blue eyes.  Omer who took care of Itay, kept him calm while they were held together for the first 54 days.  Omer who still remains in Gaza and whose mother, Shelli, I met at the Forum headquarters.  Shelli walks through life shattered.  How could she not?  

“What was it like to go South,” a Fourth Child might inquire, “to be on one of those kibbutzes in the aftermath of October 7th?”  Two days after the attack by Iran, Rebecca and her husband, Gideon, picked me up.  I shared the backseat with Daniel Lifshitz who spent most of the drive on zooms, looking up only once when Gideon worried about a flat tire and Daniel said, “its the road - from the tanks.” We rolled on, towards Nir Oz, the kibbutz where Daniel was raised, the kibbutz his grandfather, Oded, founded; Oded, who fought for his country and then dedicated himself to taking care of others, including Palestinians in need of transportation from Gaza to Israeli hospitals for healthcare; Oded, who was shot and kidnapped on October 7th, at the age of 83, along with his beloved wife Yocheved, age 85.  Yochoved was released after 54 days as part of the first group of freed hostages.  Oded remains in Gaza, without his blood pressure medication, without his wife of so many years, without his children and grandchildren.  

Daniel,former footballer turned wine merchant, father of an 11-year old girl, walked me through his childhood - where he slept in the kibbutz, where his first teacher lived, where he and his cohort built a fountain for their bar mitzvah project. It sits on the edge of the kibbutz overlooking the fields that separate the homes of Nir Oz from the border of Gaza.  We stopped in the cactus garden his grandfather cultivated from a tiny Haifa bulb to a world famous botanical miracle punctuated here and there with bicycle wheels and ironing boards - refuse transformed into art. Daniel took us from the garden to the house of his grandparents, the house that was his solace, his home, after his parents’ divorce.  We walked through a burnt out shell, heavy with the acrid stench of fire and desecration.  My eyes blurred with halo vision - that strange partial loss of sight - and thought “if I don’t sit, I will pass out, which will be embarrassing at the least and wildly inappropriate overall given the context.” I was overcome - panic, anxiety or maybe just the heat of the day.  I managed to stand as long as I did out of sheer embarrassment - what was my episode compared to what Daniel endured, what his grandparents suffered, what an entire country was feeling? Miraculously, an unburnt chair sat in the middle of the Lifshitz home and I asked Daniel if I might take a seat.  “Of course,” he said, and motioned to the chair - both of us acting, absurdly, as though proper etiquette for a host and guest applied.  I sat for a minute, angry at my weakness, thinking about Oded in captivity, Yocheved without her husband, the other victims of Nir Oz and beyond, families I knew now by name and photograph: Bibas, Gonen, Shem Tov, David and on and on…

Daniel asked if I had a pen.  We had walked a short distance and stood outside a house with a hostage poster hanging to the right of the door.  “This,” Daniel said, “is my best friend.”  Dolev Yahod was 35 years old on October 7th.  He was kidnapped from Nir Oz.  He has a wife.  He has children.  Daniel and Dolev grew up in Nir Oz, slept in the communal room for children, went to school together, were separated for being unruly together.  They are brothers in every way but blood.  I handed Daniel a pen and watched as he crossed out “35” on Dolev’s kidnapped poster and marked it as  “36”.   And then he wrote, “Love you brother.  We’ll keep doing everything to bring you back home 💗 Daniel Lifshitz”.   Daniel handed the pen back.  “There we sat, the weekend before,” he pointed at the plastic flowered cover on a picnic table on the front porch of the Yahod home.  A “Happy Birthday” celebration banner was strung from post to post, punctuation of a past with children and love and barbecue and hugs.  A loud BOOM rattled our bones, Rebecca flinched, we all stopped for a beat - ordnance fired not far away - a reminder that this war is far from over. 

Hours later, we returned to the car, parched and sweaty.  Gideon cranked the AC and we headed north, back to Tel Aviv.  Daniel pointed to bus stops as we drove.  They serve as bomb shelters along Route 232 - all are decorated with cheery murals - all are now riddled with bullet holes from October 7th.  We passed a sign for Re’im - the site of the Nova Festival.  We had no choice but to turn left off the 232, bumping along the dirt road to a parking lot with two buses, a dozen cars and us.  Walking toward the festival grounds - the place where 3000 peace-loving festival goers were targeted, leaving 364 massacred and 40 kidnapped - was surreal.  A voice boomed from beside one of the shelters - the very specific kind of voice that is easily identified as a midwestern pastor - in this case, Pastor Paul from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.  He asked if he could interview Daniel who graciously told his story - then Pastor Paul prayed with Daniel for the safe return of his grandfather and all the hostages in Jesus’ name.  Daniel said Amen.  The men hugged.  This must happen to Daniel a hundred times a week.  He tells the story of his grandparents.  Strangers hug him.  Daniel, Rebecca, Gideon and I walked the grounds of Nova in silence, going from one memorial to another, from one photograph to the next - this one murdered, that one kidnapped, flowers, flags, small personal items.  Most are decorated.  Some are bare sticks in the ground, waiting for a family member or friend to visit.  

Back in Tel Aviv, Gideon dropped me at Icholov Hospital in Tel Aviv.  I was there to visit a soldier.  “It must be hard to listen to these stories,” might say the one who does not know how to ask.  And I would answer, “it can never be harder than it is for them to tell them, or to have lived them.”  

Barak is one of five sons.  Three of his brothers were at the Nova Festival on the 7th of October.  Barak was sent to Be’eri where he was lightly wounded, but recovered quickly and was deployed with the first teams to enter Gaza.  There he remained until mid-December when he was part of a mission to rescue Noa Argamani.  But the IDF intel was a trap - he and his men walked into an ambush of twenty terrorists in a building.  They were only six.  Four fell back, one was shot immediately and Barak held off the twenty on his own.  A grenade blew up his legs and a barrage of fire knocked the rifle out of his hands.  He was left with one grenade of his own and a pistol.  Down on the ground, bleeding out, he decided he would throw the grenade, and then use the pistol to kill himself - death being preferable to being taken hostage.  He managed to toss the grenade just before passing out, and the next thing he knew he was waking up after five days of a coma, and what would become a year ahead of surgeries and rehab to put him back together - a heroic Humpty Dumpty of steel rods and pins and trauma he works out by telling his story over and over again.  We talked about his battle, we talked about politics in America, being Jewish out of Israel.  He asked about what was happening on college campuses and I told him the truth: I can’t explain it. We were silent for a moment and then Barak said, “I feel sorry for them.”  I was struck, as I had been at Sheba, by the sharp contrast between these young men who put their lives on the line for their country, who felt pride in being Israeli, and young men and women on American college campuses screaming support for Hamas, calling for the eradication of Israel.  

The next day was my last.  I ran the requisite errands in the shuk - bought white knit yarmulkes for my daughter’s upcoming wedding, gifts of local olive oil and a small bag of dates for myself.  I made a last journey to the headquarters of the Family Forum to say goodbye to Rebecca.  On my way out, I shared the elevator with a man who pulled out his phone.  He wanted to show me a video.  “This was pesach last year.”  The man was Gilad Korngold and, though I’d never met him, I knew his story well.  Six of Gilad’s family members were kidnapped on October 7th, including his son, Tal Shalom.  Tal and his entire family were taken from Kibbutz Be’eri.  Tal’s wife and children were returned after 54 days.  Tal remains in Gaza.  Gilad pointed out each family member and when the video ended, he put his phone away and said, “We will not have a seder this year.  We are not free.”  

Gilad is not the only person in Israel who told me they would have a seder. I heard the same from the manicurist who lives with the dread of her 16 year old’s son upcoming conscription.  I heard it from the cab driver who thanked me for coming from America and said aloud what I felt in the air: “The whole country is sad.”  I was surrounded by a nation of people who, whatever their political or religious or cultural differences, have been bound together by the collective trauma of October 7th, a nation of people whose freedom is inexorably cleaved to the plight of 133 hostages still held in Gaza.  

In the diaspora, even talking about the hostages is something many do not feel free to do.  In Israel, the community is held together by common pain.  In the diaspora, our community has been shattered by adversity and moral confusion.  Gilad Korngold is right in so many ways.  We are not free - no Jew is free unless all Jews are free.  In Israel, families are held in limbo, waiting for news of their father or son or grandfather or sister, waiting for news of a hostage or a soldier, many are refugees in their own homeland.  In the diaspora, we are simply not free to be Jews.  We are not free to send our children to university without fearing for their safety, we are not free to put on our Star of David necklaces without thinking twice about judgment, we are not free to talk about Israel and defend her without fear of retribution.  We are not free.  We are surrounded by the children who do not know how to ask.

YK 2023

When I was 22, I walked into temple for the first time for something other than one of my cousin’s bar mitzvahs. It was Kol Nidre and I found the service foreign and daunting and wildly compelling.  I was, at the time, what my husband would call a “deli Jew,” culturally aware and religiously ignorant.   But I wanted to know more, I wanted to be one of those Jews who knew the melodies and the prayers, who felt comfortable in a community on the most important holiday of the Jewish calendar.  Year after year of attending services and I still want the same thing, though I grow closer to feeling at home in my own religion with every rotation of the annual cycle.  Yom Kippur is known as the day of atonement, a day of fasting and self-reflection.  Its also a day very much about death.  And while I didn’t have much exposure to Judaism in my youth, I was exposed to death in 1981 when my father died.  The irony that I became more Jewish in response to the death of my very atheistic father is not lost on me and not without a modicum of guilt.  But its true.  My YK drash is usually about a particular prayer or portion of the liturgy.  But this year, I’m focused on a bigger picture.  And what better way to enter the exploration than with a quote from the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks:

 

​“Yom Kippur – when we do not eat or drink or engage in physical pleasure, and when there is a custom to wear a kittel like a shroud – is a dress rehearsal for death. It forces us to ask the ultimate question: what did I do in my life that was worthwhile? Did I waste time or did I share it, with my faith, with God, and with those in need?”

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On Yom Kippur we spend 25 hours engaged in this dress rehearsal.  We abstain from eating, drinking and showering.  We dress in the white that represents the shroud in which we will be buried.  In silent meditation and in communal atonement, we acknowledge that death is coming - today, tomorrow, sometime in the future, inevitably, painfully, sweetly, silently, it comes for us all.  So if that’s true - if we can all acknowledge that we live with the inarguable truth that ‘who by fire’ is an inalienable fact of life, how do we face it with more dignity, more bravery and maybe even more willingness to embrace its inevitability?  We.  All.  Die.  It is as true as the statement that we were all born.  Yet we spend significantly less time acknowledging or affirming that truth.  We know that we die as we were born - inelegantly, naked and afraid.  But we don’t know how or when. 

 

A few weeks ago, Matti and I and two dear friends were out to dinner when suddenly, one of them stood and gasped, hands over her mouth in shock.  Across the street, a dog had been hit by a car.  She saw it happen.  It took me a moment to register.  But next thing I knew I was cradling this dog, petting him as he lay in a liminal state, caught between life and death.  I don’t remember crossing the street or even getting down on the ground.  But there I was, in the middle of Sunset Boulevard, stroking the silky, noble head of this sweet dog and telling him he was a good boy.  Matti was all action - taking the dog’s collar so he could try to reach the owner. “Rowland” was the name on the tag.  Two strangers and I moved the dog onto a blanket and into the car of good samaritans who transported the dog to the nearest emergency vet.  As they drove off, I walked back across the street, washed the blood off my hands in the restroom and hugged my friends goodbye, eager to return home.  We were snuggling our own pups when the text came through from the owner telling us that Rowland didn’t make it and thanking us for taking care of him in his final moments.

 

“I think I should be a death doula,” I said to Matti the next day.  “Because you’re obsessed with death?” he asked.  “I’m not obsessed with death,” I replied.  And that’s true.  Nor was I traumatized by the death of that dog.  I was sad for the dog, upset for the owner and angry at the hit and run driver who was never caught.  But I was also grateful - grateful for the opportunity to be with that animal - to pet him and keep him calm.   I was sad for the owner that his dog died - but also sad that he wasn’t the one to hold him in his last moments.  Its not death I’m obsessed with as much as the process of dying, and of grieving.  Death and its consequences are an undeniable part of the life cycle, but one we spend too little time thinking about, much less discussing.  In his book, Being Mortal, Dr. Atul Gawande talks about how as a culture, we have become more and more removed from death - death has been medicalized and institutionalized.  We pawn death and dying off to professionals - professionals who are strangers.  We do this in the guise of doing the best for our loved ones.  But we are also trying to do the best for our own fears - as if to remove ourselves from death’s proximity will somehow stave it off.  

 

My father’s death at the age of 48 was a sudden blow, a shock to my 14 year old system.  I didn’t see him get sick, there was no ramp up, no rehearsal, no “cat’s on the roof.”  He was alive and vibrant.  And then he was dead.  So the idea of holding someone as they die, of being able to kiss them on the forehead, say goodbye, help them through their pain, seems to me an extraordinary gift.  To help a soul transition, to be present, to witness and maybe try to ease the transition from this life to whatever comes next - what a privilege.  

 

As a 14 year old kid, if asked I would say, “I don’t believe in God.”  I said that because my father didn’t believe in God.  And I loved my father.  His death was a great tragedy in my life.  It was also, in many ways, a great opportunity.  Because without his very powerful presence and great certainty, I had to figure shit out on my own - and ponder things like “do I really not believe in God?” “If I don’t believe in God, why am I so drawn to Judaism?  Why do I like talking to rabbis?” “And why do I care so much about Yom Kippur?”   I think my father called himself an atheist because he didn’t have the words for what he really was: an ethical humanist maybe, a naturalist perhaps.  Always a Jew - God or no God - my father would defend his identity as a Jew and fight against anti-semitism no matter what.  My father defied definition.  And I adored him.  

 

My father made only one grave mistake in his life, as far as I’m concerned.   And the mistake of his life was about his death.  As much as his death was a shock to us kids, it was clearly something he had thought about and discussed with my mother because she had very strict instructions: no funeral, no memorial, no burial.  He requested a simple cremation and that his ashes be spread in the Sierras by his family.  And that’s what was done.  One moment, I’m standing in my childhood kitchen when my mother answers the phone and received the news my father is dead.  A few weeks later, we hiked up a trail in the Desolation Wilderness to scatter his ashes.  I never saw his body, never had a reckoning with the idea that the vibrant, energetic man that was my father, was no more.  

 

My mother, an agnostic herself who left any formal Judaism behind the day she married, was only 46 when my dad died.  She had three kids and no idea how to be on her own - she’d gone from her parents’ home to the one she shared with my father.  Her grief was all consuming and manifested as alternating depression and anxiety.  She did the best she could, but it never occurred to her that we were grieving too.  Or at least that’s what it felt like.  She’d lost her husband, her first great love and the father of her children.  We had lost our dad.  With no one to guide me and no religious education or community to support me, my grief took on a decade long cycle of depression, loneliness and bad behavior.  

 

So in many ways, its the most obvious thing in the world that I would be compelled as an adult to dive into an exploration of death and grief in Judaism and that I would embrace Judaism’s strict guidelines for the end of the life cycle as being not just crucial but incredibly kind.  Death is not what scares me.  Grief is what scares me.  Grief with no boundaries - mourning without process - these are things that no child should have to encounter and no adult should have to endure.  As Jews, we have strict rules around death - how we are to prepare the body, how quickly it must be buried and that the burial is done by our own hands, not left to strangers.  I take seriously the obligation to wrap my hands around the crude wood of the shovel to scoop dirt into the gravesite of my grandfather, old friend, father-in-law, mother-in-law of my best friend.  There’s a term for this in Judaism: Chesed Shel Emet - compassionate concern and kindness of the living for the deceased. To me, Chesed Shel Emet is a great honor, one I did not have the privilege of bestowing on my own father.  

 

Our tradition tells us that just as the burial ends, so does our cycle of grief begin.  We are commanded to grieve on a schedule and in stages: directly following burial is seven days of shiva, thirty days of shloshim and, for children mourning a parent, a year that ends with the setting of the headstone.  The schedule dictates that none of these things is done in isolation.  Shiva is with our community - a community encouraged to not deflect conversation away from the deceased but rather to talk about the dead and celebrate the dead in order to not forget.  Kaddish is with our community.  Our community is there to lift us up when our knees are too weak to support the weight of our pain.   

 

Just as we have the schedule of mourning, so too are we commanded to STOP mourning - after thirty days for a loved one, a year for a parent - and to return to our routines, to stop our period of mourning and to LIVE.  And, our tradition also allows that on very specific days of the year, we are to REMEMBER - remember our dead, say a prayer for our dead, honor our dead.  Yom Kippur is one of those days - Kaddish coming at the height of our hunger when we’ve been on our feet and praying and entering the beginning of the last phase of the most intense day of prayer of the year.  The traditionally packed synagogue yields to those in mourning, to those remembering a father, mother, son or daughter, husband, lover, friend.  Left standing in front of the altar, stripped of our inhibition, unadorned of perfume or jewels, hungry and ground down to our very essence, our voices join in shared mourning - supporting one another - once again in community.  And just like the cycle of mourning, when Kaddish is over the community comes back together to continue the prayers and rituals of Yom Kippur that take us to the 25th hour, to the very edges of our emotional and physical tolerance, to the highest of highs of our davening just before we have that one little bite of bread and sip of grape juice, so that we may begin the cycle of the year again.   

 

So maybe I am a little obsessed with death - death as part of the life cycle and which I’m beginning to understand includes being there for the dying because one day that will be someone I love dearly - and one day that will be me.  I will always believe that grief and the life cycle can never be discussed enough, felt enough or be enough of the fabric of our existence.  To live is to spend every day dying just a little - so how do we demystify and embrace that fact and the emotions around it in ways that become less taboo and less terrifying?

 

As we approach the end of these Days of Awe - the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when the gates to Heaven are open and we work to open our hearts, seek forgiveness and spend time in deep, introspective meditation - I think about what my interest in death means about my belief in God.  I’m reminded of my father-in-law, who turned to my husband a few days before his death and said, “Say Kaddish for me and get the rabbi.”  He hadn’t spoken for days before and he spoke almost no words again.  An atheist in life, he requested a Jewish burial as he neared death. Did this mean he felt God’s presence in some way?  Another friend told the story of her husband seeing an angel just days before he died.  She is not particularly religious, but the way she told the story made clear she was comforted by the presence of that angel, as was he. Both my father-in-law and my friend’s husband were men who likely spent quite a lot of time wrestling with the question of God’s existence in life, but who found themselves close to God or thinking of God as they approached death.   

 

I want to say I felt close to God as I held that dog in the street a few weeks ago.  I’m not sure what I mean by that except to say that I felt overwhelmed by love and responsibility and privilege and gratitude all at once.  I was reminded of being with my grandfather as he was close to death and of holding my Great Aunt’s tiny hand in mine as I sat on the edge of her hospital bed the week before she passed.  Its a feeling being entirely present and connected to another soul. It is a feeling devoid of fear.  

 

If we knew we could die with our hand held, our life honored by a loved one, or even by a stranger who cared enough to be present in the moment, to take account of the time spent here on this planet, would that make us less afraid?  If we knew our death would not inevitably be pawned off to a stranger in a nursing home would that give us comfort?  If we felt the inevitable degradation of sensory perception as part of the natural course of events, and if that decline were met with love and humor rather than shame and denial, would we feel differently, less alone on the path that leads to the end of the cycle of life - that thing we fear called death?  We’re all living longer.  And our longer lives simply give us more time to fear that which we all know is coming.  But if we had the courage to face what is coming and say it out loud - say I’m dying, someday, maybe not for days, weeks, months or years, but when it is my time, these are the things that matter - would that ease our fear and temper the anxiety of those who love us most?  

 

As much as Yom Kippur is sometimes referred to as a “dress rehearsal for death,” the truth is we don’t get a practice run.  Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote “If life is a pilgrimage, death is an arrival.”  We die once.  There are no do-overs.  That doesn’t make me afraid but it does make me want to do it right - for myself and for others.  So yes, maybe I am a little obsessed with death and maybe that does make me think more about God and my Judaism, maybe it does make me grateful for a tradition that understands that providing a framework for navigating the inevitable will never make it less sad or painful but can make it more tolerable.  Maybe it even makes me think about becoming a death doula.  

 

G’mar hatimah tovah and much love to all.