October 2023 | #25

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Dear Friends:

Since the barbaric attack on October 7, like many of you here in diaspora, I’ve been frantically checking on relatives and friends in Israel, following the flood of news around the clock, looking for ways to help, and so on, while not sleeping, and not really functioning well. I teach 5 courses, and we’re approaching the midterms. I’d teach a class, and my mind would suddenly go blank; assign an assignment and then forget to write it.

A couple of days ago, I went to a community gathering at our local JCC, attended by hundreds of Jews and non-Jews. We listened, we sang, we prayed, and though I was still heartbroken and worried for what’s to come, especially to the hostages, I knew that I was not alone in this grief. Something shifted in me when I was physically among other people who felt the same.

I’m still a long way from OK, but I’d like to share with you some things that have helped me to get back to, at least, a surface-level of functioning.

• Stay close to your loved ones. Don’t push them away. Appreciate their closeness. You need them, and they need you.
• Don’t watch every video and read every story. There is a limit of how much pain you can take in before you become paralyzed. One way to manage it is to set a specific time once or twice a day to check in with your news sources or social media. Stay off it during other parts of the day.
• Give to the organizations that work directly with those affected by the tragedy. Off that list, I personally chose the understaffed, and overwhelmed from what I hear, Zaka, which searches for and buries the dead, and a hospital in the south serving a large number of wounded.
• If you meditate, check in with your body. Meditating with a group for the first time five days after the tragedy, I was astonished to notice the tightness, the clenching inside. My anger, fear, and other negative emotions bundled up physically within me, and I had no idea.
• Prayer works where meditation doesn’t. Earlier this week, I shared a traditional prayer for those in captivity, which I typed up from my siddur (I couldn’t find the full text anywhere online). There are words in it that give hope. And hope it what we badly need right now.
• The most important teaching for me personally came from our synagogue rabbi. On the day of the tragedy, my daughter and I were at the shul for the holiday of Simchat Torah, the joyous conclusion of High Holidays. Rav Yosef said that wounded, we would still honor it. We have made it through millennia of adversity by remaining a community that looks out for one another, prays to G-d, and celebrates our holidays in the face of the worst calamities. Our heritage has kept us alive.

No one can destroy our joy, our spirit. We’re like the Robinson’s Arch in the photo above: its ruins recall the Roman breach of the Temple walls, but beyond them lies our reborn, thriving, and impossibly beautiful Jerusalem. We are strong and resilient. Our roots are eternal.

-Lane

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