This Does Not Tikkun The Olam

The summer of 2001 was one of the best summers in my life up to that point. It was also plagued with the worst insomnia I’ve ever experienced, before or since.¹ Over the whole summer– filled with friends, parties, temp work– I felt doom. Something was coming to New York, specifically. I waved it off, but then I went back to Rochester for the fall semester, and you know the rest.

Last year, I made a challah for Rosh Hashonah. It was a recipe I’d used before, but I guess it didn’t bake all the way through. The yeast was old, I noticed later. I made myself toast, and shortly after I ate, it made me sick. “What kind of omen?” I wondered, “What does it mean when your Rosh Hashonah challah makes you sick?”

And then I woke up on October 7th, 2023, and I found out.

Feelings of doom and bad yeast in underbaked bread don’t mean unrelated terrible things will happen. But unrelated terrible things did happen. And my pattern-seeking mind holds onto those as I try to make sense of the last year, the last 23 years, the last 76 years.

I posted this on the morning of 10/7, I realize now with a sick twist, at 9:11am, central time.

I posted this before I knew the breadth, the scope of what had just begun to unfold. It was flip, but it was sincere. When I posted it, I knew three things:

1. People who support Israel’s treatment of Palestine and its people would use this to excuse horror after increasing horror.
2. The support and activism behind Palestine would receive an influx of bad actors, ready to weaponize good intentions and Israel’s atrocities for all manner of ills.
3. Jews, both Israeli and of the Diaspora, who do not support Israel’s government, military, or its apartheid, were about to be scapegoated, isolated, and used as political footballs.

I said at the time, “This is a global scale ESH situation²,” and people said I was trivializing it.

The important words there are “global scale.” I’m not talking about frenemies or someone being nasty about their mean girl tactics mother in law.

I’m talking about a situation that was already close to 80 years old in 1948 when Israel was established. I’m talking about generations of people who’ve tried to tabulate how many of the other guy’s dead will be equal to how many of their own, haven’t figured it out, and kept on killing anyway.

“BOTH SIDES!” someone hurls at me.

Yeah, fuckin’ both sides.

A year ago, I couldn’t tell you specifics of who would say what, how many would be killed when. But I knew how the last year would play out, and it’s happened nearly beat for beat.

A few days into Israel’s barrage on Gaza, I found myself trying to tabulate how many of the Palestinian dead would be deemed equal to that of how many who were killed or kidnapped that day. I never figured it out, and the killing continued anyway.

Here’s one more story from college.

In 2003, in the run up to the US declaring war on Iraq, I remember playing pool with friends in the student union. I was 20, and knew I didn’t have anything close to the history or full contexts behind the shit Rumsfeld and Cheney and Rove were trying to make happen. Still, I said this:

“Look, Hussein’s a bad dude, and he probably should be gone. But I don’t think we should be the ones who do it. Worse, I think we’re going to go in there and make a big mess, and we’re not going to clean up after ourselves.”

I think about that conversation constantly. I was the epitome of “dumbass liberal arts kid who didn’t know shit from shit.” I couldn’t tell you the specifics of who would say what, how many would be killed when. But I said how it would play out, and it happened nearly beat for beat.

I’ve tried to write about this so many times over the last year, but I was never able to, for reasons both related and not.

This was my Rosh Hashonah post this year.

I’m disgusted what’s being done “in my name” as a Jew, being done with weapons paid for with my taxes as an American.

Both Naomi Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates have recently published works where they discuss the immediate memorialization and the weaponizing thereof that’s occurred. They discuss the conflation of 10/7 with both the Holocaust and 9/11, and how it’s formed a Voltron of Sacred Trauma (my words, not theirs). This mech of lions emblazoned with the Israeli flag is used to activate and radicalize people into vilifying anyone who dares question Israel in any capacity. I feel perversely proud of myself that I’ve had similar thoughts for months. That my brain is somehow on the same wavelength as such lauded authors.

But more than that, I keep ruminating on what I’ve wanted since I woke up that morning a year ago.

I want people who wear yellow ribbons and think only of the hostages and those killed on the day to stop and think about the scale of what they’re doing. They are focusing on the roughly 1200 who died, ignoring the tens of thousands of people killed, supposedly with the intent of “bringing the hostages home.” Tabulating how many of the other guy’s dead will be equal to how many of their own, not figuring it out, and continuing killing anyway.

I want people who insist every Israeli is cheering on genocide to think about how the Israeli government had to cancel their originally planned memorial event because of how many families of victims wanted nothing to do with it. Who said, in no uncertain terms, “Keep our families’ names out of your mouth.”

I want people to recognize that the Evangelical Christian Zionist movement outsizes the worldwide Jewish population exponentially. There’s 15.8M or so Jews, total, and John Hagee’s Christians United For Israel alone has 10M members.³

I want people to recognize that many of the people who emigrated to Israel in the 20th Century did so because there was nowhere else for them to go. The countries they lived in either no longer exist, or would not take them back if asked.

I want people to reckon with a military that insists it’s “the most moral military in the world” and acknowledge that carceral brutality and tiktoks of “Iron Chef: The Kitchen In Some House In Gaza We Found” are the farthest things from moral as can be.

I want people who argue that heinous acts can be committed if they’re in the name of resistance and liberation to acknowledge those heinous acts did, in fact, happen.

I want Zionist Jews to understand they don’t speak for the entire faith. It’s not “Three Jews, Five Opinions (Except About This One Thing).”

I want to stop feeling like Kassandra.

But I’ve been wanting that for much longer than just a year.

¹ This is not a challenge, whatever sleep demon is reading this

² ESH stands for “Everyone Sucks Here.” It describes a situation where the behavior of both parties, regardless of how it started, prolongs it.

³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism#Demographics