Alas, Hineni

What other group has to share their location and promise to text their loved ones hourly as a matter of safety because they are going to a peaceful protest? Well, apparently, I, as a Jew, must, because that’s how my day began.

But I was lucky. I came in contact with nothing but peace and comradery from nearly a quarter of a million people who came together on the National Mall to call for an end to terrorism and the return of civilian hostages.

We heard from legislators like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, along with Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt who reminded us all we are strongest at our broken places.

We celebrated with actors like Brett Gelman who told us to be,” Forever proud, forever brave, forever excellent!” And Debra Messing who introduced the families of 3 of the over 200 hostages taken by Hamas. It would never be enough, but we chanted the names of their loved ones and cheered their bravery. “We all have third-degree burns on our souls,” Rachel Goldberg, whose son is missing, told us. Even those of us who were not murdered on October 7th or taken still suffer.

“For too many in the West the suffering of families like mine has become a footnote,” Alana Zeitchik said after speaking of her missing cousins. And she’s right.

Messing called it (the carnage of October 7th) a “tsunami of hate” that fell upon us and, after, all we heard was silence.

That silence ended for me when I got home this evening, originally full of hope and an energy of healing, to a comment on the Instagram photos I had posted of the rally. Someone I thought was a good friend of mine did not like that I had attended or, in their eyes held the “burns on our souls” over the burns on actual bodies.

This is the first this friend has reached out since the horror that was October 7th. While I mentioned in my reply that opinions differ and we are all doing our best to make a safer future, it was not until after this friend unfollowed me that I thought to even mention that other civilian bodies had been burned as well. That this first burning, of civilians on the Israeli side of the border, had led us to where we are now. I didn’t think I had to. But these losses, like the hostages, have also become a footnote in much of the conversation being heard here in the West. That is, if conversation is actually being heard, or had, instead of assumed, or written off. Heartbreak on heartbreak. Loss on loss.

But hineni. Here I am.