Thank You for not making me young. - Day 34

If this war had happened ten years ago, I'd have no friends left. The Israel wars hit on too many raw nerves, and whether online or in person I'd be yelling at everyone I see, both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel, for their various evils, because what it comes down to is my deep unhappiness with the tragedy of this situation, and perhaps too of my own situation.

Every time these periodic wars happen, we fear that this is 'the big one', but we all feared that 'the war' would be sooner rather than later, but for me at least, it is 'later.' I don't quite have the rage coursing through me I had ten years ago, I've reconciled myself somewhat to the idea that life is a far more tragic thing than people of my generation give it credit for being, and I even feel some small measure of gratitude that it has not been more tragic than it's yet been.

It's hard to explain to anybody who wasn't there, but it's impossible for a Jewish Day School kid of my generation to not feel a second self lived in this land to which most of us have been, maybe... four times by the time we're forty? However one feels about Israel, the conditioning is just too deep. Whether it provoked lifelong love of Israel, or lifelong hatred, or lifelong irritation, or a lifelong fascination that comes from a mixture of all three, there was just too much shouting about it, too much pressure, too many messages that we owed Israel our very survival, and whatever our reaction to it, from whatever angle, however rational we may seem or try to make ourselves, there is something far deeper than rationality in play. It's a mixture of conditioning and spiritual mystery, coupled the normal political discussions of which any ethnicity partakes, and even some measure of rationality by which most of us come to know that yes, without Israel being there, the lives of Jews would be a lot harder. You may not get it, but just as nobody truly understands what it is to be any sort of oppressed demographic without living it from the inside, we know what we know: Jews need Israel, and without Israel, we go back to the cycle of exactly what was until 1948: a minority even among minorities. The model minority cast aside by the powerful when things get tough, and the minority cast aside by other minorities because we need no help, our success is a stumbling block to their success, and then we are simply cast to the wolves.

If this war had happened ten years ago, I'd have no friends left.

I've said it before, but whether justified or not, I have always felt a Jew among Jews. A Jew who's life story and circumstances proves the whole community wrong: good and bad, right and left, and resolved to keep the faith, stay loving, keep believing in the goodness of people, even as sometimes I want to watch it b*rn as much as any antisemite.

Life is tragic, life is hard, maybe not for some of you, but for most of the world, most Jews of history, most life circumstances of any place and time. Billions of people look at that small peace of land and imagine a different situation if only their opposition were not the way they were. Some see left wingers as impediments to war properly fought, some see right wingers as impediments to peace properly sought. But it was always this way, it will always be this way, and it was always supposed to be this way.

Whether it's Hashem, or the forces of history, or the simple wiring of consciousness, human beings define themselves as much by what they're not as what they are: part of us defines ourselves in opposition to each other. The difficulties of life require a strategy and a plan. Take those difficulties for granted and we forget the necessity of a strategy and the impediments simply pile up, but see life as just a series of difficulties and we become the impediments placed in other people's way.

I envy the young even as I fear for them. Even as, from generation to generation, the difficulties stay the same, the glories of every time are different, and even as family friends and love will make them kvell from naches as every generation does, they will experience completely new joys, the likes of which we cannot fathom just as our generation experiences likes of which our grandparents could never dream.

They may be challenged on a level past which we dare not dream, but many of them will come out the other side, and even those who don't have opportunities to cover their life stories with glory, and those who come after them will honor who they were all the days of their lives.

Being a Jew is like being any other person, only moreso. In the great links of history we are the one people who know that our story will always be told, not of our person, but as a chapter in a connection that goes to the very foot of recorded time. We are the one people who can guarantee that whomever of us is left shall mark the times - our very persons a record of humanity's glory and shame. And as history expands to properly record the glory and shame of more peoples than simply the West, so too will we be their record as well.

So whatever Lord of the World sees us, thank You for letting me live to middle age, when time's arrow can let me see some purpose in the larger story. The world is dark and light, every day turns between them, and though the world is sometimes covered in darkness so too will the light come again.

If there is no place where dark yet becomes light, I demand You build that place where that glimmer grows into light for us all, and where it within us all, grow into light. If we cannot build it here, then YOU must build it. If Israel means "He Who Wrestles with God," then we've wrestled, and there is simply too much darkness in the world for us not to know that a great reckoning is coming. If dark times are ahead, then we must have equivalent rewards, and if not possible in this world, then the world to come.

There must be. There just must be. There simply must be.