The Shape We're In

Photo by Ian Betley on Unsplash

A friend of mine who I haven’t seen for many months is here in Jerusalem for a wedding. We met for coffee and he asked me about the mood of the country. He said he expected to feel something different when he was out and about in the city. More joy maybe. More serenity. Something.

Here’s how I understand the mood here, the shape we’re in these days.

A few weeks ago, on Shabbat morning after services, a friend told me that he had heard from a friend of a friend that Trump had ordered Israel to stop the war. That’s all this guy knew. Someone who had left their phone on for Shabbat had told this friend of a friend that he saw a notification that Trump was telling Israel to stand down.

We analyzed this cryptic bit of information as if it were a challenging piece of talmud to decipher. Was it good news? Absolutely—it meant a deal had been reached and maybe the hostages were coming home. Or maybe it was bad news. Maybe Trump was pressuring Israel in hopes of improving the chances of some kind of deal from Hamas or Qatar. But was that likely from Trump? Maybe. Maybe not. We went back and forth.

The news was tantalizing. Might the hostages actually be coming home? My wife and I were invited out for lunch that Shabbat. She was already there so I walked alone in silence for 20 minutes alert for any clues about what was going on in the wider world, looking into every face I passed trying to gather data. I saw a couple getting out of their car, struggling with a car seat and a baby, bickering. That means bad news. People who drive on Shabbat would be all over their phones if there was good news.

And if there was good news, if the war really might be over, if the hostages were really coming home, would you actually bicker with your spouse? (I know—that sounds ridiculous but it made sense to me that morning. I felt like I was floating above the pavement just on the possibility that Trump’s message meant good news.) I passed the Smadar Cinema, open on Shabbat. As I walked by, I scanned the faces of the people in the lobby—surely it would be buzzing with excitement if a deal was truly imminent. Nothing. They all looked no different than they did on any other day.

This weird out-of-body experience of hoping beyond hope for some sign of optimism, trying to read the tea leaves on the faces of the world around me reminded me of a winter night in 1980. I was in graduate school at the University of Chicago and the weekly seminar I attended conflicted with the Russia-US Olympic hockey game. I couldn’t tell my advisor who ran the seminar and required my attendance that I had better things to do. I wasn’t even sure he knew the Olympics were going on.

So I set up my VCR to record the game, knowing that by the time I got home, the game would be over and I could watch it, in theory without knowing the outcome. When the seminar ended, I raced out of the room and avoided people, just in case someone, even in those pre-smartphone days, might have information about the game and ruin the drama.

Walking quickly, it seemed I would make it home in blissful ignorance of the outcome. Then suddenly a roar erupted all around me, the sound of people cheering loudly enough from inside their apartments behind closed windows on a winter night to be heard on the street. I pretended it meant nothing—who knows why people might be cheering? Could be anything, right? I knew I was trying to fool myself. I was pretty sure that roar meant that the United States had won the game.

Walking that Shabbat in Jerusalem I was listening for cheers. Or jubilant faces. But nothing. I half expected someone who wasn’t Sabbath observant to see my kippah and knowing that I would not be looking at my phone, tell me that there was good news. No one did. Their faces gave nothing away.

That Saturday night, we learned that yes, a tentative deal had been reached. From Saturday until that Monday morning, most of us here held our breath. Would it really happen? And until I saw the hostages united with their families, I wasn’t sure the deal would hold and just to reduce the possibility for disappointment, I pretended that maybe it wouldn’t actually work. I’m sure I wasn’t alone. There had been so many false starts, so many false reports over the months that some kind of deal was in the works. Like many people here, I just started ignoring them, tired of having my hopes punctured time and time again.

But this time was the real thing and events moved quickly. Trump arrived early Monday morning. And then shortly before Trump was scheduled to address the Knesset, we saw on television the hostages in white vans, leaving Gaza, coming home to Israel. It felt like the moon landing of 1969—a nation glued to their televisions in awe and disbelief. We wept with joy and relief.

A confession. I had never expected the last 20 hostages to come home alive. I never spoke that fear out loud. The fear haunted many of us. It seemed that Hamas would always keep some hostages for leverage. To see the hostages, all of the hostages, walking from the vans and into the arms of their families was surreal and produced a giddy mix of jubliation and relief. It was also mixed with a somber realization that these ghosts coming out of Gaza had a long road ahead of them. And at the same time our hearts broke because we could not forget those who would not come home. It was a very intense day. It was a privilege and a blessing to be here and be part of it.

Then suddenly, after hours of watching the hostages and their families and the parade of speeches at the Knesset that ended with Trump’s speech, suddenly it was the holiday of Simchat Torah. One of the crazier aspects of that moment was that Simchat Torah was somehow again, Simchat Torah. Simchat Torah means “the joy of the Torah.” It comes at the end of Sukkot. We celebrate the completion of the annual cycle of reading the Torah. We dance with the Torah scrolls. We sing loudly.

Two years ago, Simchat Torah was cut short. We were sent home as rockets rained down from Gaza and air raid sirens howled. We ran to bomb shelters for the first time of many many trips to come over the next two years. Whether you kept the Sabbath or not, whether you looked at your phone that day or not, almost no one that day knew fully how bad the situation was. No one could have imagined that the war would rage on many fronts for two years and counting.

Then a year ago, Simchat Torah was a mix of pain and joy. For me, the pain won out. The memories of the year that had passed and all the tragedy and horror of what had happened in that year, took all the joy out of the day. Part of the sadness was knowing that the bastards in Gaza who had murdered, raped, and kidnapped had created an annual sadness that would probably linger on the Jewish calendar for the rest of our lives. And yes this sadness paled before the human costs of October 7th but it somehow made a dark cloud a little darker.

This year? We got our holiday back. For the rest our lives and maybe for all of Jewish history going forward, Simchat Torah will always be a mix of sadness and joy. But the joy of marking the return of the hostages will live alongside the sadness. It felt like a miracle. We get the hostages back on the eve of the very same tragic day two years before? Too good, too pat, maybe, for even the Scriptwriter of all scriptwriters. The mood that day was ineffable, magic. The singing and the dancing that night and the day that followed seemed more vivid and intense.

And now, two weeks later? When people ask me how I’m doing, I say “better.” Better than three weeks ago. Much better than a year ago. The leaden overcoat we’ve all been wearing without realizing that we had it on—the heaviness of not knowing what will happen with the remaining hostages—is gone. The hostages can try to rebuild their lives and those who held them in Gaza can no longer torment their families or the rest of us here with the cruelest of videos or by falsely raising our hopes.

So it’s easier to breathe. Here at Shalem College, the halls are full. Students are back from their reserve service in the war. Sadly, someone will probably have to return to fighting or whatever comes next—the future is uncertain. But to see the classrooms alive with curiosity and the halls thronged with students going to class makes my heart sing.

And what about Hamas, their supposed disarmament and disbanding? Well, I don’t know if anyone here is so naive to think that that would really happen. That part of the deal always felt like something of a sleight of hand. It doesn’t matter if Hamas lives on or dies. What matters is the view of some in Gaza, maybe most, that Jews don’t deserve to live or to have a land of their own. Recent polls still show a lot of support for Hamas both in Gaza and the West Bank. Are they real? Do people say what they really believe in a place where your opinions can get you killed? I don’t know. The only future for the Palestinians is to turn their back on Hamas and to give up the fantasy that Israel can be dismantled and the clock turned back to some date before 1948. De-radicalization worked in Japan and Germany after WWII. Can it happen again? I don’t know. It sounds nice but it’s easier said than done.

There are many other challenges ahead. The trauma of this generation may persist for a very long time. We haven’t gotten all the bodies back from Gaza. Our soldiers are still being killed in Gaza. The war’s not really over. Hamas is still in charge on the streets of Gaza not under Israeli control. So this point in the story is not the final act. But much of what has transpired since October 7th I could not have imagined. And much of it is good. So how are most of us doing here in Israel? Better.

“Better” doesn’t always lead to song and dance. One other thing about this country—as honest and forthright and no-nonsense that people are here in conversation and in their demeanor, their resolve and resilience are the main thing going on beneath the surface. I told my friend in town for a wedding that he might not notice “better” even though the hostages are home. Better lies under the surface. So does the pain and the uncertainty of what comes next in this neighborhood. “Better” is a very low bar to clear after the last two years. It’s complicated.

As Naomi Shemer wrote in her song “Al Kol Aleh,” life here in Israel is the honey and the sting, the bitter and the sweet. Sometimes the sweet outweighs the bitter. Sometimes it’s the other way around. But people here, at least on the surface, maintain the resolve to not let the bastards get us down. We endure and sometimes that is more than enough even if you can’t see it in our faces. Yes, the future is uncertain. But it seems a little brighter than it was a few months ago. You may not feel it in the air. But many of us are better.