in which I attempt the impossibility of articulating the language of my cells

I am standing in the kitchen.

I am standing in the kitchen over a sink full of dirty dishes.

I am standing in the kitchen over a sink of dirty dishes and under the spaghetti sauce that has been drying there for hours there is a chip on a ceramic plate.

I am standing in the kitchen over a sink of dirty dishes and under the spaghetti sauce that has been drying there for hours there is a chip on the ceramic plate that I never realized was there until I stood here standing over the sink.

On the plate is a woman holding a phone. I got it (the plate) on sale because I thought it was funny. This beautifully painted plate with a woman on it holding… a phone. A phone isn’t beautiful. It is perhaps the least poetic thing I can think of. The least human. The most complicated tool. A dichotomy of connection and separation, of peace and war, love and hate, truth and fabrication. Of violent rhetoric, projection, blame — social media algorithms pitting friends against each other. It is also a place where we can explain what it feels like to exist within the events that will change us. And to help each other feel less alone.

I am thinking of these things in the kitchen with the dish and the phone. How I have not been able to turn it off. My phone. How I have not been able to turn them off. The alarms in my body that have been going off since the news first broke of the attack by Hamas in Israel. Not since the Holocaust had so many Jews been slaughtered.

Not since the Holocaust.

The Holocaust.

Holocaust.

How do I explain the language of my cells?

I can’t.

***

Every Jewish person grows up with the stories of the Holocaust. Every one of us is connected to it. Lost the majority of our families in the same way. With people — friends — colleagues — lovers, turning on us. With countries — including America — locking us out.

Abused people abuse people. It doesn’t absolve them of course, but it is always how I’ve felt about the Israeli government. How heartbreaking it is to see a traumatized people traumatizing other people. That as a Jew it is my responsibility to criticize the Israeli government and support a free Palestine in the same way I will always feel a specific kind of love and allegiance for the Israeli people.

Because I am and will always be a Jew. Ethnically. Culturally. Cellularly.

***

My fixation on the phone in the hand of the painted woman reminds me of myself — of how I have spent the last twenty years of my life feeling a responsibility to respond to every atrocity. Not because I care more than other people but because learning about my history as a young child meant hearing the stories of people who stayed quiet out of fear. Who said nothing and then said nothing and then said nothing for years until it was too late. My activism has always been connected to my Judaism. A recognition of what it feels like, to be part of a community that most people were not brave enough to protect.

How does one describe what it feels like to REMEMBER something you never personally experienced? How do I explain to people whose cells did not become screaming alarms this week that suddenly I smell fire?

That my Jewish children smell fire.

That my Jewish friends all smell fire.

***

I look away from the plate. I cannot do the dishes right now, I say out loud. I will do them tomorrow. I have not been able to eat but I feel hungry but I also feel sick but I also feel hungry but I also feel sick.

I will hear my name in a moment and remember that I promised Revie I’d pick up an extension cord at the store so we could get the blow-up ghost to work outside.

I took her to Target earlier today because she had been begging for a Halloween blow-up thing. I promised her last year that I would get one for the yard this year and forgot so there we were trying to choose between splurging on the ghost that popped out from behind a headstone (funny!) or buying the reasonably priced skeletal unicorn that didn’t move. (Not as funny.)

We got the ghost. We needed the ghost. Had to have the ghost.

How do I explain the language of my cells?

***

All Jews are familiar with each other’s intergenerational trauma. It affects our whole lives. Our childhoods. Our relationships. Our marriages. The way we present and don’t present to the world. We are a tribe of people who have stuck together through centuries without assimilating out of survival. It is a beautiful thing to be part of a people that have held onto each other in that way. It is also a tragedy to be part of a people who have felt that the only way to exist is to only trust your own.

But in my grief — as I try to understand and articulate where it is coming from, I am struck by the overwhelming wave of criticism for my feelings.

Perhaps it’s because my politics have always been progressive. Because evangelical Republicans see themselves in the mirror of the Israeli government and therefor conflation has occurred. To support Jews is to support the Israeli government is to support Republicans.

To equate Jews grieving with Jews being anti-Palestinian is to make an entire people explain themselves while we are simultaneously trying to metabolize a violence that is very personal to us. And yet, I have spent all week defending my humanity. So many Jewish people have spent all week defending their humanity.

I have been told repeatedly this week that I am on the wrong side when I have never taken one. I have only tried to articulate what it feels like to be Jewish in this moment. That is all I can ever do as a human who is as removed from Israel as I am connected to it.

The Jewish community is very small. Everyone I know knows someone who has lost someone last weekend. Who was kidnapped, slaughtered, missing…. We share a common humanity that is ancient and ancestral and baked into our DNA. We see ourselves in each other because of course we do.

American Jews and Israelis are connected. American Jews could have just as easily been born in Israel as America. Our countries are similarly armed to the teeth — justifying invasions and bombings. Brothers, really. And in the same way we protest our government, the Israelis fight theirs as well.

And yet.

I have never been blamed as an American citizen for the wars America starts. That is not the case for Israelis and it didn’t occur to me until this week, why.

Anti-semitism is so baked into the global experience. Justifying Jewish death for the greater good.

It has happened throughout history and it is happening now.

Not since the Holocaust have so many Jews been slaughtered.

Not since the Holocaust.

The Holocaust.

Holocaust.

How do I explain the language of my cells?

I am trying so hard to do that here and I fear that I am failing.

***

After Sandy Hook — the first elementary school of shooting of its kind — I drove straight to my kids school, even though it wasn‘t out yet because I had a child the same age as those who were slaughtered and I couldn’t separate myself — a mother in America — with the parents of slain children. When I arrived and saw how many parents had also dropped everything to drive to their kids’ schools early, I burst into tears. I wasn’t the only one who felt it — of course I wasn’t — and I thought about the commonality of mothers of school children in a country where nothing is safe.

I felt connected to every mother in the entire world in that moment, but mostly the mothers of seven-year-olds. I had a seven-year-old, too and he was alive, but had we lived in Connecticut, had he gone to a different school…

It is a naturally human thing to do — to recognize the similarities of those who are slaughtered to your own. Everyone else seems to be able to grieve their own people without being shamed for it. But Jews — who are still healing from their near extermination — (many of my friends parents are Holocaust survivors. THAT IS HOW RECENT IT WAS!) have been treated with malice for doing so. I have been treated with malice for doing so.

One can grieve with the Black community as an ally when the police gun down Black lives — and I have — will always — but I will never know what it feels like to be Black — to carry generations of trauma in my body in that way just like I do not carry the trauma that my Indigenous friends carry just like I do not carry the trauma of any group of people that my body couldn’t possibly physically understand.

My point: I would never question another person’s grief for their people. And yet I have spent the last week as swarms of people have questioned mine. Questioned the grief of all Jews. Blamed us for the attack on innocent Israelis. Typed from their couches, in apartments built on stolen land, calling us colonizers, for NEVER AGAIN-ing against the biggest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. Pogram style extermination of families, many of whom were fighting against their own government the same way we do when we disagree with ours.

I have been asked repeatedly — this week — whether I care about Palestinian families not because people don’t think I do but because they are angry and when people are angry and scared they dehumanize each other. This is happening on all sides of a debate that feels to me, undebatable. I know there are Jews calling for the flattening of Palestine and THEY DO NOT SPEAK FOR ME AND MINE! But the fact that my support of my people means the denial of Palestinian freedom is untrue.

There are terrible men leading innocent people to their deaths on both sides. Women and children. I am a woman with children.

How do I explain the language of my cells?

***

Last week I got an email from 23 and me to change my password. News broke days earlier that someone went into the database and stole the information for Ashkenazi Jews. A psychological warfare tactic, no doubt but it worked. I felt scared. Suddenly all of those comments in my DMS, the images I had seen, the celebrations discounting Jewish life — the stories from liberal college campuses where my friends’ childrens’ Jewish grief was scoffed at.

“What did they expect?”

“They deserved it.”

“Don’t cry over colonizers.”

I am paranoid for the first time in my entire life. I call Archer and he talks me down with geopolitical explanation. He understands the world so much more than I do that I feel like I’m his daughter on the phone.

A day later he will send me a picture of the leaves changing and I will finally allow myself to burst into tears.

It will be hours before I stop. It is a kind of grief I feel in my bones in a way I feel frustrated by my inability to explain. After everything, it was the leaves changing that finally did me in. It was my beautiful, open-hearted former Jewish Student Union (JSU) president-of-his-HS son, giving me hope.

How do I explain the language of my cells?

It is the sudden need to bring my son home for the Thanksgiving break.

***

October begins with my daughter’s birthday and ends with my husband’s death day — a month that will for as long as I’m alive hold every feeling I’ve had within its calendar. I have become somewhat of a master when it comes to complicated grief. I wrote an entire book about it and spend every moment of my life weighing the duality of my experience — my identity — unlearning every binary teaching I was taught — good vs evil, right vs wrong. I have learned that prioritizing my feelings does not mean I am discounting another’s. I have also learned that when a person prioritizes their feelings they are not discounting mine.

I feel the same way in this moment. Tenderness for everyone who is grieving. Frustration for those who are being shamed in all directions — for not taking sides. I will not take sides. You cannot take sides. But also, I see my children in the slain.

I see my son, who is now an adult. Old enough to be called to war. He is safe of course he is safe but I bought him a ticket home for Thanksgiving break anyway. He wasn’t supposed to come home until Christmas but I could tell after our last conversation that he wanted to come home sooner and he could tell by our last conversation that I was already planning on it.

***

I am standing outside with my daughter after just going to the store for an extension cord.

I am standing outside with my daughter after just going to the store for an extension cord and trying to figure out which light switch controls the outlet behind the chimney.

As soon as I find the switch, she calls to me. “It’s working,” she says! “It’s working!” I feel so accomplished with my phone flashlight and my working switch.

We watch the ghost come up from behind the blow-up grave and laugh about how slow it is.

Later that night, while I’m tucking my youngest two girls into bed, they will bring up Israel and Palestine and I will try to explain what I have tried to explain here and on Instagram and in conversations I’ve had all week.

That I stand with PEOPLE. That I have and will always be in support of a liberated Palestine. But that I will ALSO always support a Jews to exist. That I abhor Israeli leadership in the same way I abhor most American leadership. That my solidarity with the Israeli people does not mean I cannot also extend solidarity to the Palestinian people. That everyone deserves to be free. But also… I am Jewish. And that I cannot — nor would I want to — disconnect myself from the suffering of my people. Because within that suffering is so much beauty and humor and brilliance and SURVIVAL.

“I think I am so strong because of all of the people inside of me,” I explain.

“And I feel them all inside of me right now. All of the lives and stories and traumas and hope and love —I feel like I am their haunted house. That they are pulling at me like alarms. And I need to listen to them. I need to speak for them. I need to find a way to articulate this feeling for them. I need to make sure that I am safe. That you are safe. And that all Jews, regardless of where their families fled can remain safe.”

How do I explain the language of my cells.

Like that, I guess.

The next day one of my daughters will attend a JSU meeting at her school. And another daughter will wear her Star of David necklace.

Later that night we will light a candle for Israel and one for Palestine. We will comfort our ancestors. Put our hands over hearts that remember what our brains cannot.

Afterwards, I will finally do a week’s worth of dishes.

Meanwhile, outside of our house a blow-up ghost will move up and down behind a blow-up tombstone. Some people will walk past and smile. Some will not even notice.

And my phone, at least until tomorrow, will sit dark-screened on the kitchen counter with its notifications turned off.