It has been nearly two weeks.
Somehow time has managed to crawl by and speed past.
We have been living in a weird alternate reality.
There isn’t any routine. School is still not functional.
Rockets are still falling. My kids discuss how many ‘booms’ they have heard each day.
The fighter jets still roar above us.
The funerals continue.
So many families are torn apart.
There have been some moments of light.
So many people have reached out to check in.
People I haven’t spoken to in a decade.
People I didn’t know were even aware I had moved to Israel.
A family on my street buried their daughter last Friday.
All week, they sat shiva in a small parking lot across the street from their apartment.
There were tents set up. Piles of chairs.
There was no parking on our street. Cars on the sidewalk, double parked.
That’s how many people, strangers who did not know them, traveled from all over the country to pay their respects to the family.
To sit and listen.
I may joke about the things that drive me crazy about this country.
But we sure do know how to show up for each other in times of tragedy.
For most of the past two weeks, Elan has volunteered with a group grilling food for the soldiers.
He comes home smelling like he sat inside the grill.
Thousands of soldiers are fed daily by that group of volunteers.
They stand outside grilling for hours.
And they’re not the only ones.
In every city, every town, people are spending all their time collecting supplies, cooking, and supporting the displaced families, the soldiers, and each other.
Plant nursery owners and florists from towns right outside Gaza reached out and shared their worries about their businesses.
Within minutes each one had a WhatsApp group of people from central Israel ordering flowers and plants.
Hundreds of bouquets of roses.
I can’t stop thinking about the moments before.
The people dancing at the music festival at 6:20 a.m.
The children asleep in their beds in the kibbutzim.
That first Shabbat morning, we knew there was a war.
But we were shielded from the depths of the news because our phones were off.
We danced outside our building singing Simchat Torah songs.
We thought we were bringing some light into the world, but we didn’t know how dark it really was.
An hour south of us, more than a thousand people were being murdered.
And the darkness continues.
The videos of American college campuses filled with people shouting “Death to the Jews.”
The immediate uproar about Israel bombing a hospital.
And then when it was clear that Israel did not bomb a hospital, no one cared.
It doesn’t matter if it wasn’t Israel’s fault.
Being Jewish in this world can be heavy. And hard.
We sing it every year during the Pesach seder.
“In every generation, they stood against us. But God saved us from their hands.”
