4am and I still cannot sleep. Same as almost every night this last month. I think about the children tortured and murdered on 7 October. I think about the children kidnapped. Are they in an underground place with no windows? If we cannot find them for months, will they live all that time without seeing the sun?
Or are they dead already? Did Hamas kill them in Gaza? Or did they kill them before, near home, and we just haven’t found them yet? Are we about to identify them from the charred bone shards picked up so meticulously by ZAKA, waiting for DNA testing?
A numbness has taken charge of my mood, my actions. Every day by rote. I spend all my spare time reading the news or rewatching The Walking Dead. And I’m reading the original comic concurrently, as that’s something I’ve intended for years. It’s nice to follow an apocalyptic story about existential problems without any risk or fear of what’s on the screen or page.
Zombies have a straightforward solution: get ’em in the brain. Of course, zombies are part of the setting. The true story of The Walking Dead is the people changing in the face of trauma and terror and a total failure of society. The problems are human problems, almost always.
And in that, I feel it’s appropriate for our times. I watch society yelling at me every day, hating me every day, and I cannot help but think the world has failed us. That society is collapsing. I see very good people around me, yes. And for them, I’m so grateful. But I see so many monsters showing themselves these days. People I thought were trustworthy. People who are glad we are suffering. People who hope to grind us underneath their boot. Who hate us because we are Israeli, full stop. Who believe lies and revel in hatred.
And yet I am so grateful to be Israeli, and to be here in Israel. In Jerusalem. I feel even more strongly that I am meant to be here. Exactly here. Right now. To be anywhere else, I think, would be unbearable. Where do you go when the world is imploding but home? I am so grateful to be home. To be surrounded by Israelis.
I was listening to a podcast tonight and Yossi Klein Halevi said that after 7 October, Israelis broke. Our enemies expected us to break, and we did. But we did not break the way they anticipated. They thought we would shatter and be strewn apart. Instead we shattered and joined our broken pieces together, with pieces we haven’t been connected to for a long time, if ever.
It felt so truthful. I feel all my Israelis so much more acutely now than the entire decade I’ve lived here. I love them that much harder. I feel their pain and I know they feel mine. We’ve connected in ways that were nearly impossible before. We are holding each other tightly.
There is a reason we all knew, without any discussion, that the thing to say after 7 October is Am Yisrael Chai. We’ve said it all our lives and it’s never been more relevant to us here, right now. It was always there, embedded into our culture. The people of Israel live! We said it before like a happy, carefree motto. We sang it in our songs. We chanted it in summer camp. We brought it to Eurovision. Am Yisrael Chai was our joyful chant. We danced to it.
Now we say it as a pledge: Am Yisrael Chai.
We are alive. Monsters may come and they may break us as individuals. As a country. We may split apart. We may be nothing but unknown shards of bone, waiting for our name to be spoken again. But we are together.
And those of us who are not alive: If you cannot join with us again, if you have instead connected with something far greater than us, we will do our duty and remember. We will speak your name. And you will still be part of us.
Am Yisrael Chai. Od Avinu Chai.
Is it enough?
It’s what we’ve been given.
It’s what we will live with.
