Missing Posters and Dead Jews: My October 7th

“Don’t do it, Harleen… Writing about this is asking for misunderstanding; posting this will lead to judgment and conclusions being jumped to before context is given. Writing and posting this will just make people assume things about you and build narratives around your opinions.”

Ok and?

And what?

Since when does Harleen Zaftig hold Herself back from Her truth because other people may misunderstand Her?

Since when do I keep silent?

Since when do I just sit down and let things happen around Me?

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October 7th, 2023

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Where were you when the towers fell?

In 2001, September 11th, where were you?

I don’t remember when I first heard the explicit news that the towers were hit and were falling, but I do remember the look on My teacher’s face when she returned after being called out to talk with the principal.

I finally understood what “she looked like she’d seen a ghost” looked like, and I knew… I knew, even as a young girl of just eight, that something was dreadfully wrong, and that there would be a “before” and “after” in My life from that moment.

—

The weeks after October 7th, 2023 hovered around that color of existence.

Life happened, people went to work, you smiled when you saw your neighbor, you made and ate breakfast…

But still, there was smoke and ash in the air, and the missing posters were everywhere.

—

I’ve never been to Israel.

In fact, I have kind of built Myself this rule, one I built for Myself when I was rather young.

When I was still religious, I looked at the government and state of Israel, and I said to Myself “That is not Mine”.

I looked at the state of Israel, and I looked inside of Myself at the land that I knew I came from.

I saw what I saw, I read what I read… And when time confronted Me with choices to visit or stay back, I decided to remain in the US for the time being.

Why?

Because the people were not the government, and the government was not the land, and that land… My land… My land was being defiled, and I did not want to see it in that way.

—

As I grew older and less religious, I am proud to say that My approach to and relationship with the land of Israel has been pretty much consistent.

Now, though, I have more context about the tunnels, the suicide bombers; I have more context for the violence.

I have more context for the conflict, for the war, for the genocide.

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Yes, genocide.

Regardless of how you feel about the word, the origins, the claims to it, or the exact definition and qualifiers…

—

I wish I could explain how I feel about the usage of the word in this case, so I’ll try My best.

—

In 1944, a Jewish lawyer from Poland named Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” in relation to his familiarity with the Holocaust and the investigation into the Armenian genocide.

It is understandable, then, that many Jewish people feel that they have a claim to the word and what constitutes a genocide, when their/our recent history has been so colored by the origins of the term.

—

I have uncles I’ve never met.

Well, half-uncles.

And a half-aunt, I think?

My grandfather had a family before the war (there have been wars before, wars since, but until really recently, the language about the holocaust was simply “the war”).

He lived in a small village in what was Czechoslovakia, a town small enough that, if I named it, would lead directly to My family of origin.

—

When My father traveled through Europe a few years back, to visit the graves of pre-war family, and to mourn the ones who don’t have graves, their bus took a stop in that small dirt-road village.

As they were walking through the village, still so remarkably “old”, even in the 2010s, they were blown away at how “frozen in time” it was.

The group was talking with an old man, someone who said he had been a barber for the village.

As they were talking, getting a story from him about what the village had been like when the Jews still lived there, the man suddenly looked directly at My father, pointed a finger, and said a name that was remarkably similar to My father’s name.

The interpreter shared what was going on, and there is something so deeply painful about this story to Me, and I can’t nearly communicate that to you, the reader, right now other than telling you this:

My father was named for his father’s father… A man who lived in the village.

The man saw him, saw My father, saw the grandson of someone he’d cut the hair of years and years prior, and called him by his name.

In a place where there were no remnants of there having been Jewish people other than graves and graveyards, an old man remembered someone he once knew.

—

I have half-uncles that I’ve never met, and the only known image of My great-grandfather remains in the mind of a man who has probably since passed.

Genocide is something that wipes something from the map.

Genocide doesn’t leave graves; it doesn’t leave urns; it doesn’t leave a home to return to in any real sense of that word.

My mother’s mother’s home is still standing, somewhere in Lvov/Lviv/Lemberg, now in Ukraine.

I think it is still standing, at least.

Time moves on, and there is a war there too.

—

In the mid 2000s, one of My brothers was attending yeshiva in Israel, and it felt to Me that we would hear about rockets perhaps every other week.

There were suicide bombings at bus stations, rockets hitting civilian centers, all of these things happening indiscriminately to locations or innocent bystanders.

I believed My brother when he told Me that the necklace with My name on it in Hebrew letters had been formed from a rocket’s debris.

I think I still do.

I can see the resilience of the Israeli artist, walking down a demolished street and picking up a piece of metal, his Jewish soul seeing the ashes that he could bring into a pile for the phoenix to rise from.

I will never forget that necklace, even if it’s highly likely that the metal did not originate from a rocket.

—

There are women and children in Gaza.

There are adults with developmental disabilities in Israel.

There are young mothers, newborn babies, and there are people who just had workplace accidents and are just re-learning how to walk.

There are people the world over who do not deserve to be targeted or hurt for who they are and where they’re from.

—

Someone asked Me yesterday, “How do you separate October 7th from the atrocities of the conflict as a whole?”

I just stared at them for a moment before the words came out, just… The most basic words that I could use, because I was so stunned.

“Because… Jew? Dead Jews? Thousand dead Jews? Dead? Jews?”

—

I posted on one of My social media feeds that I was hurting.

I had woken up and just felt off from pretty much the moment I slipped out of bed.

Sitting in front of My laptop, feeling the emptiness in My chest, the ache of My body keeping the score of what day it was before I put the two and two together, I put My words out there in search of some support.

Maybe a like, maybe another Jew seeing Me and sharing in the ache.

What I got, instead, was a like and three people calling Me a genocide apologist in many more words than that.

—

I have half-uncles I’ve never met.

I think that Palestinians deserve the right to their homes and safety.

I believe that Hamas is a danger to everyone they reach, Jew and Muslim alike.

I know that there are innocent citizens of Israel, people who are in the IDF, who would rather be at home holding their youngest child on their lap and reading them a bedtime story.

I feel that the young Palestinian girl on her way to get food and water for her family deserves a safe and thriving environment, a place to grow up in peace and to flourish.

—

The world isn’t easy.

The world isn’t categories.

The people “on the other side” are still people, individuals with dreams and lives they want to lead to the best of their abilities.

Everyone wants to think that they’re doing the right thing; everyone wants to support the right cause.

But it’s not that easy.

There’s so much nuance.

There’s so much there if you stop zooming out with numbers and words.

Zoom in.

See the mother.

See the child.

See the dust.

See the ash.

—

See the missing posters.