Moments in Israel, After October 7th

In the morning and the evening Tel Aviv is still Golden.

The beach is busy with runners, bikers and surfers wading in the water for some of the world’s smallest waves. The sound of balls hitting rackets. But when you take a step closer and look at the faces or ask a question just below the surface you can see all is not well. Actually, nothing is well.

The Nova festival was in an open field with skinny trees. When you are there you realize how naked they were. There was no place to hide. You stand among the makeshift graves and the wind whips and the sand covers it all.

 

It was the end of Succoth. Throughout the Kibbutz the Succah still stands, paper rings garlanded from side to side, wind comes through the bullet holes.

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The hostage families worry the world is forgetting:

-- A man on dialysis has two sons in captivity: “My kidney donors are in Gaza”

-- Another says, “how dare I eat soup or take a nap when my kids haven’t or can’t.”

Another man spoke to his brother on the phone as the terrorist broke into his house: “This is the end,” the brother said.

Once he realized what was happening a partygoer at the Nova festival called his mother to say: “The party is over.”

“This is not my personal story, it’s our story,” a hostage relative said. “We are representative of the problem for the world, the Jewish world.”

            “Israel was a shelter of the Jew, but not anymore.  We are at zero square and can’t do it alone.”

            “Israel and America have the same goal,” another said. “We just do things differently because we are closer to the flame.”

            “Trust in everything is challenged, except the future of the state of Israel.”

Trust in the Land of Confusion

 Trust is not a word you often hear in the Middle East. But many of the people who lived in Israel near the Gaza border trusted their neighbors to the West.

Even the Israeli government was convinced Hamas was deterred and focused on civil and domestic affairs.

But Hamas spent its money on tunnels and weapons, the time was used planning a raid to cause what they hoped would be an uprising from all corners of the Middle East, including the Israeli Arabs. This has not happened.

On the morning of October 7^th there was confusion across Israel. One person said they thought it was thunder, others assumed it was a “typical” siren call.

Most learned of the severity of the problem by seeing a short video on WhatsApp of a truck of terrorists driving through Sderot, a city just a few miles from Gaza.

It was Saturday. It was a holiday. They were inside our borders.

October 7^th broke a pillar of David Ben-Gurion’s philosophy. He said that when Israel fights she must do it in enemy territory to protect civilians and shorten the conflict. He said if they cross into Israel, we lose.

While Israel slept, Hamas rampaged through the streets killing indiscriminately.

“WhatsApp is their Yad Vashem” someone said, indicating that their phones are filled with memories and memorials to that day.

We were unprepared. Perhaps the best illustration is the Mammad.

Since the 1990s every house in Israel is required to have a Mammad, a safe room to protect them from bombs that regularly fall. But these rooms often don’t lock, why should they, they are built to protect against objects from the sky. They never expected a terrorist at their door.

Many Israelis tried saving their families by holding the door of their “safe” room shut.

As usual the citizens of Israel have risen faster than the government. As one Israeli said: “Governments don’t know how to swallow such a situation, civil society has acted faster and worked better. We are very good a reacting.”

And what’s next?

As one man noted: It will take a year to win the fight, ten to rebuild and a generation to de-radicalize.

What Did I Come For?

 

So what did I come for?

I came to Israel to bear witness.

So when the world says these things didn’t happen I can be one of the many to say I saw the scars. I felt the bullet holes in the walls of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, saw the rust on the burned-out cars from the NOVA festival. Saw the videos of Hamas gunning people down in the streets, in their cars, in open fields.

 I can tell them about the fresh plots at the Mt Herzl cemetery filling up fast. Or about the teacher we saw that day telling us about the four students he has buried since October.

To show solidarity with the people. Never have I seen people feel so collectively isolated in a world they thought they knew. I want to tell them that despite what they read in the US papers, or see on the college campuses or hear in the halls of Congress, they have friends. And we are strong.

And to learn. To understand what’s happening on the ground so I can be a better advocate in a world where no one seems to listen.

These are the things I came for.

What else did I get?

“This is a battle of spirit,” an Israeli woman said to me. “Our hearts are sad, but our spirit is strong.”

She tells me this standing over her brother’s grave. He was school teacher and in the reserves. He leaves a wife and four children.

Israeli flags are everywhere, draping the landscape, every window and every door. They wave from cars, offices, and apartments. The only equivalent was being in a foreign country during the World Cup. Their faith in their government is broken, faith in their friends is splintered, but their commitment to each other and their country goes unquestioned.

What did I not get? Good news on how this ends, what the day after looks like, when a lasting peace might come.

Take Your Father to Work Day

 

One afternoon ten years ago we were living in London and on my way back from a lunch meeting I found myself near my daughter's school. I thought it was my opportunity to catch my kid in action, to see her life up close, but from a distance. I knocked on the school's front door they escorted me to a hallway outside her classroom where I watched her, just for a moment in her natural habitat. 

Maybe it was her age, or mine, but I had been lamenting all the experiences, all this life, she was having that I was no longer privy to.

Once the kids start school we see them briefly in the morning before the action of their day and then in the exhausted after. Once they go off to college we only get holidays and weekends. Post-college it's whenever they can fit us in.

Peering through that glass slice of her sixth grade classroom door I watched them raise their hands, speak out of turn, make mistakes, laugh. Until one of the students spotted me, the pointing began, the gig was up. My daughter march to the door, her face the color of fresh tomatoes.

"What are you dooooingggg?"

She was 12, I was 45. 

Cluelessly I thought we would make a memory. In the midst of a regular day there would be that time I showed up to her class and made it special.

But later than evening I learned what I had done. Talking with her older brother and sister she explained the day from her vantage: 

"Everyone saw this guy looking in the window...and it was dad!!" she said.

My other daughter confirmed, "He's so weird."

"They all asked if it was my dad," she said. 

"And what did you say?" my son asked.

"I told them no."

So this is the backdrop of our interactions, this is the lens through which I calculate how to connect with our third child who doesn't like surprises and is private about the things she wants kept quiet.

Last week I found myself in her city, it was my birthday, we are now 56 and 22. I thought enough time had passed. 

No I didn't surprise her at work, Instead I asked if she wouldn't mind if I joined her on her commute. Door-to-door or whatever, through the New York City subway systems and into Queens, just to be a fly on the wall for one of her days.

To my surprise, she texted me back, "sure."

My birthday morning is usually a time for leisure, but this day was hectic. I wanted to be at the subway before her, I needed coffee, my phone failed to charge overnight.

I kept looking down the subway steps...did I miss her, did she forget?

And then like a movie star she made her entrance onto the sidewalk where I looked like either a paparazzo or a pervert. But I was just an adoring dad.

 

She was smiling, and now so was I.

Down into the bowels.

A crowded sweaty subway.

Through to Grand Central, then over ground.

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And then a 20-minute walk through the neighborhoods until we reached the building. 

"Thanks," I said, ready to leave.

"Do you want to see the office?" she asked.

"I don't want to embarrass you I just wanted to see part of your day."

"Nobody is here yet, so you can come up," she said without irony.

I was reminded of a time last year when I bumped into my other daughter at a New York City WeWork. Her boss asked if I wanted to come see the rest of their space. My daughter intervened..."It's not take your father to work day."

So when I got the green light I pressed the accelerator, I climbed the stairs to a bustling office and then to a small well-lit space with a series of desks. She sat down, logged on and began to work. She told me how to let myself out. I left the office with wings on my feet, perhaps that's why I boarded the wrong subway and ended up in Forest Hills before switching trains.

I figured it out and long hauled it back to Soho where the rest of my birthday commenced. 

I remember when they were babies wondering if I would view them differently when they grew up. I'd never experienced someone's entire arc. Would I remember their babyface, their voice, their cry? But you forget. An old picture or video reminds you, but it's like seeing another person. That's not them any more.

You cannot remember the baby when you see the adult. I cannot hear the laugh of that child in this full-grown human. And it will happen again, the photos from today will fade and she will shed this life for another, and so will I.

Michael Gerson wrote in his famous essay on children heading off to college, that parenthood is ultimately a lesson in humility: "The very best thing about your life is a short stage in someone else's story. And it is enough."

I don't need more than this anymore. It's her life. I can't show up and watch her through a sliver of window anymore. So when she let's me in, the rest of the world can go away.

Long Live the Queen

On the Tube in London there are poems slated across the trains alongside adverts for indigestion meds and insurance. One that caught my eye thirty-five years ago, and I still have on my office wall, goes like this:

• I imagine the earth when I am no more:
• Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant...

I was drawn back to that line as I was sitting in a pub yesterday when they announced the Queen had died.

It was after six in the evening and a somber-looking BBC announcer came on the screen wearing a black tie and repeated the Buckingham Palace announcement. 

At that moment not much changed: The patrons kept talking, the bar men continued pulling pints, some grabbed their phones, no doubt at the buzzing the announcement caused.

Outside a garbage man continued collecting the trash, tourists asked for directions to the M&M store, and buskers in the middle of the Leicester Square continued their act.

I walked away from the noise of the square down Piccadilly and when I looked back this rainbow popped out as if to say, "Hey, look up from your phones...".

Late last night I headed to Buckingham Palace. As I left the hotel I heard singing coming from the kitchen. I peaked in a window through the swinging door where the cooks and staff were singing "God Save the Queen" at the top of their lungs.

On the way to the Palace the cabbie told me they were already beginning to print new money with King Charles' picture on it. He said when Elizabeth's father King George died they shut down theatres and other parts of daily life. The Queen made it clear she did not want another Bank Holiday.

"They wouldn't stand for that today," he said. 

At theatre earlier in the evening there was a two-minute moment of silence before the play began.

Operation London Bridge, the codename for the Queen's funeral plan, seemed to start quickly and quietly. They closed the Mall which leads to the Palace so I had to hoof it all the way down from Trafalgar Square, but I was joined by hundreds of people walking with beers, flowers, bottles of wine. It was past 11 and the pubs were closed but the people weren't done.

 

The media lined the lawn just outside the Palace in a long row of well-lit tents. They looked like invaders ready to storm the gates. But they spoke in muted tones about how almost everyone alive had only known one Monarch, how many Presidents she had met, her work ethic, how she'd welcomed the new Prime Minister just three days ago. 

 

The Palace looked empty, as it was, most of the inside lights were out, the flag was down.

Well after midnight another cabbie told me how his six-year old granddaughter had cried when she heard the Queen had died. 

”I knew why I was crying," he said, "but she didn’t. She’d just heard someone had died and knew it was sad.”

He continued: “It's not like a relative died, but it feels like a relative. You know what I mean?"

While Charles became King upon her death the country is not quite ready to move on. There will be 10 days of pomp and mourning, papers are sold out, a gun salute rang through the sky today, they postponed the weekend soccer matches, and many recognized that there will likely not be a Queen again in our lifetime with a string of men set to take the throne. So the British people will hold onto this Queen for a bit longer. Operation London Bridge is far from over. 

Still Going Back to School

I thought my relationship with the phrase “Back to School” had ended.

With the youngest child graduating from college the “Back to School” noise is just that and for the first time in almost 22 years we are going back to nothing.

No marketing phrase travels as far in the psyche of the American consumer as “Back to School.”

As a child it means new school supplies, re-setting the alarm clock, the pull of homework, uncomfortable clothes, and even more uncomfortable social situations. As you age antipathy rises as you come to realize it’s all marketing: “It’s not back to school, it’s the end of summer!”

Going off to college shifts the mind again, “Back to School” means the return to everything good in life: From friends and football to the disbelief that you only have 3 years, 2 years, 1 year left.

Then you walk off campus for the last time.

That first year out of college the wave of “Back to School” sales reach out from every media orifice, and you shrink from the shriek of marketing. Life and work and independence take on new meaning and rather than feeling left out, you realize you’ve escaped.

It turns out the first day back to school is just a Tuesday for you and most of the world.

When you have children of your own “Back to School” rises again. You look forward to that first day, meeting their teachers, navigating the halls and lockers. By the time your children reach their teens your heart leaps at the phrase, you mark your calendar for the day they leave your house and return to the school’s guardianship. It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

And then they leave for college, and you undergo the familial earthquake, the push and pull of love, the emptying of the nest. As you approach the end of their four-year run it’s all about counting down the payments until that final one clears the bank.

And then it’s over.

Like the seasons of the year our perspectives bloom and fade. We may have hated the fall when we were kids because it meant the end of summer, but we learned to love it later in life when it meant cooler weather. Summer turned from the most important season of the year into a hot mess. Winter, beloved for those magical snow days turns into a season to avoid slipping on the ice.

And so it shifts again, but the noise still comes. No one told the marketers that I’m no longer their target. It now acts as a madeleine calling me back. I am transported to late August days, early mornings, the smell of pencil shavings, the spring in the seats of the yellow school bus, small chairs in small classrooms.

There is no back to school for this family. But it still calls me back.

3 Years, 3 Graduations, 3 Different Worlds

 

As a parent, college graduation comes with moments of pride paired with angst.

Pride in their big picture accomplishments, angst over the logistics.

Pride over this rite of passage, angst over making sure "everyone is happy.”

Leading up to graduation the student is finishing senior week, long days and nights of papers and parties, worries about packing up, sadness about leaving school, fraught about their next move, already missing their friends, unsure what to make of the fact that everyone keeps telling them these are the best days of their lives.

Eons ago in 2019 we went to Philadelphia with the usual graduation weekend challenges: finding a centrally located hotel, landing dinner reservations at the sought-after restaurants, transportation for the grandparents.

In 2020 we were spared the pleasure and the pain when it was canceled due to the emergence of Covid. A letter from the Dean stated in stark terms that they are canceling graduation and will “celebrate these seniors at a later date.” This was a gut punch at the time, it improved with age.

Our 2022 graduation felt normal with a hint of Covid sprinkled in. Worried about the logistics but the coronavirus still hung in the air like the remnants of a bad sneeze. Does the restaurant have outdoor seating, should the kids get near the grandparents, is Tipitinas really a good idea? 

It was on our minds, just not top of it. Maybe that’s why many of us returned from New Orleans with head-cold cases of the virus, typical of this vintage.

This year also brought a make-up graduation for the cancelled 2020 version, in what they appropriately called the “Comeback Commencement.” It felt a lot like a timely graduation with all the caps and gowns, pomp and circumstances of the original, but it was different. It was better...for the graduates.

The Comeback Commencement was equal parts reunion and victory lap. It was more comeback than prepare to check out.

There was still the need to land hotel rooms and dinner reservations, but the campus was emptier and more manageable. The kids were happy to be there, not stressed about leaving. They hadn’t spent the previous week staying up all night partying, they’d spent it working at their jobs, collecting a paycheck, making their own transportation plans.

At the make-up graduation they were enjoying this moment that had been taken away, made better by the distance and the delayed gratification. The comeback graduates better understood the need to enjoy the moment because on the other side of Sunday their adult lives were waiting, with projects to finish and emails to return.

The difference in perspective was laid bare by the calls and texts leading up to the two commencements. I heard excitement from one daughter and dread from the other. One felt like a commencement, the other like a termination:

“I’m so excited to see my friends” vs. “I’m so sad to say goodbye to everyone.”

“I can’t wait to get a Zingermans sandwich” vs. “I can’t believe it’s the last time I’ll have pizza at the Boot”

“I'm gonna walk through the Diag without having to go to the library” vs. “I just had my last walk in Audubon Park.”

In two years our daughter went from graduation apprehension to carefree commencement.

A suggestion: Let Seniors leave campus after final exams, get on with their lives and then bring them back for graduation. Let their lives commence before commencement.

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile you could miss it." F. Bueller