Reflections on a Regular Day

This won’t be long

I wasn’t really planning on writing anything today. I woke up with a heavy feeling in my heart, will move through the day with a sense of hyper-vigilance, check in multiple times on news from home, and always feel like a chunk of me is missing, or 48 of them. So not much different from any other day the past two years.

They say that the entire nation of Israel suffers from PTSD, but we haven’t reached the P part yet. We are all still very much there, despite the normalcy on the surface. Tel Aviv bars are full again, but many of the young people laughing with their friends are balancing a rifle over their shoulder. Weddings, birthdays, and other celebrations go on, but the guest list is always missing a few friends we’ll never see again. We live our lives, go to work, play games, though yesterday when I played “21 questions” with my 12-year-old niece (kids still play that!), she asked me if the person I was thinking of was a celebrity, a politician, or a hostage.

I have a highlight reel in my head from that day, maybe some of it was from the following days, because memory is a strange thing. I woke up to the sound of sirens and my parents’ house Tel Aviv, and like many Israelis my first thought was this is just another attack. We were celebrating my nephew’s Bar Mitzvah that morning, and left the synagogue periodically to check our phones and look up at the trails of rocket interceptions in the sky. For a long time (in Israel that means a few hours) it didn’t sink in. This may not have been a sophisticated coping mechanism, maybe just the inability of the brain to interpret being trapped inside a nightmare. I vividly remember thinking people were overreacting, scolding friends for sharing videos of terrorists driving through Israeli towns because anybody could see those were fake, and — I’m not proud of this one — thinking a woman was being dramatic when I saw her openly weep in the street, her teenage son in hand. My nephew’s cousins didn’t make it to the ceremony, they had just driven back from some rave down south and decided to just go home. We knew something that happened there, but couldn’t even believe it. Even today, after visiting the Nova site twice and meeting so many survivors, I still can’t believe it. The first feeling of pure horror I can think of was maybe around noon, driving home with the beautiful Tel Aviv coastline to my right, listening to regular people screaming at the radio host who was interviewing them from their bomb shelters, begging for someone to come save them.

I remember getting text messages from people in the US I hadn’t spoken to in years. I remember being heartened by celebrities posting their prayers for us on social media, even joking that at this rate we may win Eurovision next year (little did I know). I remember watching those posts fill up with thousands of hateful comments from regular people about resistance and decolonization. I remember a veteran Israeli news anchor choking on the words “100 dead”. I remember crying once that day (or maybe it was the second time, or maybe it was a few days after) when we got an alert that a drone had infiltrated Israeli air space (an almost daily occurrence now) and I wondered if this was that final blow. I remember standing quietly in line (!!!) at the pharmacy with hundreds of people to buy toilet paper and soap for soldiers, all collected in donation boxes organized by ordinary citizens who drove them in their private cares straight into the line of fire.

On days when I’m feeling charitable towards those who deny or downplay the atrocities of that day and our need to defend ourselves (rare), I tell myself we are asking for a lot by demanding people look at reality. All of us would like to imagine a world where people don’t kidnap, murder in cold blood, cut off organs and play with them like soccer balls, tie women to trees and rape them, take teenager’s phones and ask for their Facebook password so they can livestream their execution to their friends, joyfully shoot little kids at point blank and brag to their parents about it. Even when it’s in our face, we’ll find a way to say it’s an overreaction, a deep-fake, propaganda designed to serve a goal of a shadowy elite. This was true even of a nation like ours, that had lived through horrendous suicide bombings and whose enemies have always been brutal and bloodthirsty, but I guess we couldn’t understand that they were *that* brutal and bloodthirsty. As a young teen living through the Oslo accords, I frequently attended peace rallies and fought in my teenage way for a two-state solution, all while avoiding crowded buses and unattended packages. I couldn’t understand what the terrorists were telling us in their words and actions. The hope of a better future was just too strong.

I remember another time around mid 2024, when I realized I wasn’t that angry any more. I hated not being angry. I hated the idea that what happened that day and since was losing its punch, so to speak. Part of me thinks that every day we should each watch a few minutes from October 7th, listen to a testimony, memorize the face of a hostage. Another part still hopes - if there’s one person on the other side of the fence who wants to lay down their arms, maybe we’ll be ok. Both are human nature I guess.

There’s no neat ending to this essay, no punchline. Thank you to everyone who chooses daily, weekly, or even once in a while to never forget. Thank you to those around the world who see Israel’s fight as their own, because it is. My world has become in some ways a lot smaller in the last two years, but a lot fuller, with some amazing friends that share the tears, rage, and even laughter. When I visited the Nova site with my friend

Nancy Rommelmann

I remember thinking that the only way to honor these young people is a life well lived. They can’t kill us all, but they can kill our spirit. We’ll never let them

-Yael