Coping with a Broken World
(Or, I succumbed to Nyquil to get some sleep)
A man whose sister and brother-in-law were murdered by Hamas, orphaning their 13-month-old twins. In an interview, the journalist said to the man, who will now raise his sister's children, "It seems like you're still processing what happened."
This was six days after his sister was shot point blank in her kitchen, having left the family's safe room in order to get bottles for her babies.
Six days. “Still processing.”
News cycles and social media do not move at a human speed.
It is impossible to keep up with the news, the images, the outpourings of horrific, wretched stories, the pain, the opinions, the analyses, the vigils, the protests.
That man, like countless others, will be "still processing" the horrors of October 7 for years, decades. For the rest of their lives.
To paraphrase Rabbi Ben Weiner’s d'var this morning about this week’s parasha, the creation story ends up being not about how we inhabit a perfect world, but how we cope with living in a broken one.
I have no answers.
I am at once overly saturated and strangely empty. Maybe it is a form of shock?
I am losing sleep over images coming out of Gaza. I am losing sleep over images coming out of Israel. I am losing sleep over responses to this nightmare that fail to recognize how anti-Israel sentiment right now is nearly indistinguishable from what feels like a painfully callous response to what was nothing less than a present-day pogrom.
These words are from a Facebook friend who lives in Israel. Tanya Mozias writes:
I don’t know if some of my friends outside of Israel need to hear this, but maybe someone does. We’re not fighting Arabs or Palestinians. We’re fighting against Hamas. And Hamas is not fighting for the liberation of the Palestinian people, they’re fighting for the destruction of the state of Israel.
I am not ashamed of embracing my Jewishness and standing with the Jewish people – nor does this negate my anguish for Palestinian suffering.
I had some Nyquil leftover from my recent Covid cases, and it allowed me to get a full night's sleep for the first time in a week. I will not make a habit of this, but oh, the relief of waking in the morning rather than on the hour.
How are you holding up, dear friends and readers?
How are you coping with living amidst so much brokenness?
oh yes. thank you being a voice during all this. tanya's quote says so much. i may need to print that out on a card and pass it out to people instead of speaking.
The silence in certain environments in this country might be the scariest part. By Thursday the lack of acknowledgment from the publicly traded corporation I work for had sunk in and I was literally shaky. Full on meltdown by 11am. A check in message on Friday from a friend. I was grateful. She was the only one.