I got a terrible jolt this afternoon as I looked at my past blog posts about this week’s Torah portion. On May 15, 2021, just over three years ago, I wrote that “rockets rain[ed] down on Israel and the responding bombs destroy[ed] entire buildings in Gaza.”

I continued: “The violence in Israel today is appalling. Hamas and Islamic Jihad are launching thousands of rockets from Gaza… The barrage is indiscriminate. Israel is indeed a Jewish state, but some 20 percent of her citizens are Christian, Bahai, Muslim, Druse, and yes, Arab… Normal, every-day people, no different from you and me, are on both sides of this conflict, are dying. Their homes are being destroyed, their children terrified, their lives disrupted.”

I’m sure my Israeli friends are not as surprised as I was at this memory; they remember all too well what happened three years ago. I had forgotten. 

It’s easy to forget when you’re not the one who ran to bomb shelters day after day, night after night. When it’s not your neighbors who are suffering, homeless, dying.

Today, as war rages yet again between Hamas and Israel, it has become impossible to forget. This war is burned into our psyches, and it’s not over. People around the globe are taking sides, many siding against Israel, claiming that Israel has no right to defend herself or to strike back against Hamas. They are outraged at the death toll in Gaza, the destroyed buildings, the displaced families. 

Me too. Like nearly every other decent human being, I am appalled at the destruction in Gaza and want it to end. But like other Jews, my memory is long. I remember what happened on October 7. And I hold the memory of 80 years ago, when no one stood up for us while millions of  innocent Jews were being indiscriminatingly slaughtered. College students did not rally to our aid, did not cry out for us, did nothing at all. 

Throughout our history, we have striven with neighbors large and small, each seemingly determined to destroy us. No wonder the first thing that happens in Bamidbar, the Biblical book called Numbers, is a census of men aged 20 and above, old enough to fight in an army.

I feel lost and alone, surrounded by a world that seems determined to once again leave the Jews to our own devices. But yesterday a stranger proved me wrong. I was in a café with a friend, and we were talking quietly about the current situation. A woman at a nearby table was eavesdropping, and interrupted us to say that she is Catholic and her church prays for the Jewish people every week, and that she wants to bless us with hope and her loving support.

Each of us is just one small person, tossed on the waves of history, a history of indiscriminate, unwarranted hatred. I have come to believe, perhaps cynically, that the hatred will never cease. We will always be at war. But we are not alone.

The ancient Israelites had the physical presence of God, a physical house for God that they carried with them.

And us? We no longer have the Mishkan, the tabernacle they carried through the desert. We no longer have an Ark that holds the tablets with the Ten Commandments. But we have each other, and we have friends and allies, and we have Israel, and we have our faith.

Like our ancestors, we too can carry the Divine with us by building a home for God in our hearts. Each person, holding space for the Divine, each shining forth with God’s Presence, each striving to be a light that dispels the dark.

I am not so naive as to believe that this will change the world. But it can change me, and maybe, just maybe, a few others around me.

I cannot end an endless war. But I will not succumb to the darkness.