We Are Disappearing Into Ourselves

On Sept. 2, 2024, I drove with my younger son from Kibbutz Lehavot Habashan in the Hula Valley, six miles south of the Israel-Lebanon border, to Kibbutz Sufa to volunteer in agriculture and any other tasks needed to help rehabilitate the kibbutz. Sufa is located near the Israel-Gaza border across from Rafah. His draft date is in December. From Sufa, he can literally wave at his older brother when he is in Gaza, a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces.

I left him in good hands and began the drive northward over what is now known as the highway of blood, passing kibbutz after kibbutz on the Oct. 7 massacre list, as well as the site of the Nova music festival gathering until I reached Kibbutz Be’eri, where I spent a few hours with my new friend, Avivit Jon. Avivit, a pensioner and veteran protester against Benjamin Netanyahu, returned to her home on Be’eri a short time after the start of the war. We stood together at a demonstration at Be’eri Junction calling for the return of the hostages. I have been at lots of demonstrations where people hold up signs with pictures of hostages. But at Be’eri, you could recognize the family resemblance between the demonstrator and the hostage in the picture: mother of a son, daughter of a parent. I left Be’eri for a demonstration in Caesarea, passing the line of cars holding Be’eri residents coming in for Carmel Gat’s funeral. Carmel was one of the six hostages murdered by Hamas when the IDF soldiers got close, who might have come home alive if Netanyahu had not torpedoed yet another hostage deal. You can see from her picture that Carmel was a healer. In the words of her partner: She was everything that Netanyahu is not, but she is gone, and he is still here.

To mark Oct. 7 as a memorial day may sound like the event has ended. But we are still in the middle of a war being led by military leaders and a prime minister responsible for the massive failure of that Black Shabbat. Oct. 7 is a personal day of mourning for those tortured and murdered or killed in action by Hamas, and of particular pain for those whose loved ones will be (are) still in captivity. Of course, it is also a day of national trauma. But not all have buried their dead and can even begin the journey of mourning.

On my kibbutz, we will come together and try to just be, to sit together around a bucket for our tears.

Israel’s official ceremony to mark Oct. 7 was taped in advance in Ofakim, a Likud town, without an audience to prevent protesters from sabotaging the event. Minister of Jewish Heritage Amichai Eliyahu (Otzma Yehudit) scheduled a massive selikhot event in Jerusalem for Oct. 7 with the Forum of Heroism and Hope, a group of bereaved and hostage families who believe that hostages should be sacrificed, if necessary, for collective security. Otzma Yehudit (Itamar Ben-Gvir) and the Religious Zionist Party (Bezalel Smotrich) celebrate the Oct. 7 massacre as a miracle — the trigger to the war against Gog and Magog, the expulsion of Palestinians and the establishment of Greater Israel. Yitzhak Goldknopf (United Torah Judaism) is simultaneously pushing to escalate the war in Lebanon and pass a law against drafting the ultra-Orthodox. Agudat Yisrael party member Menachem Klugman published an article saying that the kibbutzim should hold ceremonies to request forgiveness for the disaster of Simkhat Torah that they caused due to their secular lifeways.

Some of us in the struggle for Israel’s democracy wanted to mark Oct. 7 by shifting from mourning to protest as the day moves into night. Netanyahu’s every decision is designed to keep him in power; he flouts the law, heading a government of messianists, racists and parasites who are destroying the country under the cover of war. Netanyahu believes that he is the state. He has abandoned the hostages, normalized death, evacuation and economic catastrophe, and convinced the masses that absolute victory is possible. But we were asked by bereaved families to refrain from all protest; they are holding an alternative ceremony on Oct. 7, beginning at 7:10 p.m.

I have decided not to try and wrap the commemoration in bookends of a quest for understanding or an attempt to please all sides. On my kibbutz, we will come together and try to just be, to sit together around a bucket for our tears. In the face of death,  silence is often best. For me, it will also be a time to enlarge the circle of those I see, which has shrunk to the active protest movement (which has shrunk considerably). During a radio Kan 11 interview about her exhibit opening of paintings of wild animals of Israel, titled “This is how I get close to them,” Artist Michelle (Michal) Littauer Gavrielov said: “We are disappearing into ourselves.” So true.

There is a lot of tragedy to bear, and I may never succeed in integrating it in thought and feeling. Most notably, that the world seems to be OK with the idea that Hamas tortured and murdered for the sake of torture and murder. So problematic because then you justify torture and murder everywhere, including the deaths of innocent Palestinians. For now, I try to keep moving (freeing oneself from inertia is a popular activity here). First in the struggle to remove the dictator. Then to shift energy to repair, particularly with those building a foundation of shared life. I find inspiration in Maoz Inon, an Israeli entrepreneur and peacemaker whose parents and childhood friends from Netiv HaAsara were killed by Hamas on Oct. 7. Maoz describes that he used to say that nothing can prepare you to respond to the trauma of Oct. 7, but he came to understand that his entire life was preparation to face his parents’ death, led particularly by their example. During the shivah for his parents, Maoz had a vision: He saw all of humanity wounded from the war and the tears of his family washing the blood-soaked ground to reveal a path to peace. Amen.