6 Thoughts Before Shabbat
Starting my mental preparation for Shabbat, I have so many disjointed and conflicting thoughts.
1. I am grateful for all my elected officials who have spoken out about Yaron and Sarah's murders. I think it is important for elected officials to use their voices to stand up — loudly and unequivocally — against hate and terror.
2. I am grateful for all my friends who have reached out or spoken up in solidarity with the Jewish community.
3. I am constantly fighting the urge to lash out in unproductive directions. There are important conversations that have been had and need to continue about how to best fight antisemitism and other forms or hatred, violence and terrorism. But today it is hard to be rational or productive and it is so easy to give in to fear and anger.
4. I have seen a theme in Jewish friends' posts and outreach that they feel abandoned by many of their non-Jewish friends in these moments. While I also have an urge to be angry (see #3), I am trying to remember something Yehuda Kurtzer articulated about the silence after October 7th.
Perhaps rather than being mad at those who were silent, we need to speak up and explain to our friends why this events impacts us deeply. How for us — as a minority targeted by hate and violence — violence against any member of the Jewish community whether we know them or not feels like violence committed to a neighbor or extended family member.
Even if we do not have a personal relationship, we inevitably know someone who is grieving and feel that trauma. We feel less safe in our homes, in our places of worship, in our very skin.
Perhaps you felt this way after 9-11? Even if you were not impacted, you were impacted. You grieved. You felt the world shift.
When a member of the Jewish community is murdered because of their place in our community, we feel that whether the murder occurs in France, or Pittsburgh, or Poway or Washington DC.
5. I am grateful that the sun was shining and encouraging me to get out of bed this morning and go to minyan. There is something comical for me about going to a conservative minyan. Even when I know the prayers, it is hard to keep up with the pace. Even when I could read the Hebrew, I read too slow. But being there, surrounded by words of prayer, gave me comfort on a morning when I needed to feel comfort.
6. I am grateful for all those Jewish communal professionals who help keep us together in community even at the most difficult moments.