At home

For the last two weeks, ever since Saturday, October 7, I have felt more at home than at any moment since 1995. Ever since I sat on the streets in Jerusalem, hundreds of burning candles around me, crying for the recently assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, I hadn't felt that collective anxiety, that neurotic feeling of belonging and clinging to each other I so easily recognise in every Israeli I meet, in Israel or elsewhere. November 95 was the first time I felt that collective, the Israeli people, crystallising and emerging from my everyday reality in a way that was clearly defined and almost tangible, embracing and including me in our shared agony. Both for myself and for my age group as a whole, those weeks after the assassination were the end of an era, a pivotal moment, a constitutive event. In that joint grief, amidst the sea of candles around us and the shattered remains of dreams we had inherited from our parents, our generation was truly born. They called us נוער הנרות, “the candle youth”.

Today, staring in horror at my screens, I am thrown back to those painful moments of birth.

Grieving for Rabin

And no, no worries. This is not a nostalgic text. I have actively done everything in my power in order to put as much distance between myself and that sticky feeling of being “part of”, a feeling that had muted my own thoughts and hardly let me breathe. I deconstructed my Israeli identity and found a Jewish one, right beneath it. I embraced life in the diaspora, moving from one country to the other, finding my home in books and thoughts and art and music and relationships. I learned to breathe freely on that fine line between the cosy but suffocating familiar and the alienated but liberating foreign. I built a place for myself within me, a place quiet enough for me to hear my own voice, my own thoughts, my own steps. And I found the resemblance of roots in the country of my ancestors, among the sons and daughters of those who tried to eradicate them, under the trees my grandparents and their ancestors had smelled, climbed on, eaten from, hidden beneath, for a few dozen generations at least.

On Saturday, a decade and a half since I was last registered in Israel, all this was in one moment wiped out and replaced with a script I didn’t write nor choose. 

None of it feels comfortable, none of it is comforting. I can't sleep in it, I can't breathe in it, I can't hear my own genuine thoughts in it, all of which have been overwritten by collective PTSD, an automatism I know I was above, just a moment ago. Any single moment I don't vigorously concentrate, my most intimate feelings are being taken over by the IDF spokesperson. And a raging, Holocaust waving Jabotinsky has been put in charge of my dreams, my letters, my creativity, the fog in my head and the taste in my mouth when I, again, wake up alert and paralysed at 4AM. 

I’ve become a grotesque, cartoonish version of who I’d be, had I never left Jerusalem.

This is not an nostalgic text. This is not a text about the relief in surrendering to the warmth of a harsh, but ultimately inevitable home to rest in. 

No. 

There’s not rest in this home. Nor enough air or space. 

I will look for the door, once I manage to get up on my feet again.