Not Nothing

I don’t know how to write about the only thing I want to write about.

My friend sends me a flyer announcing another Saturday night protest. The bold text calls for urgent action on behalf of the hostages and an end to the war.

“I don’t know if I’ll go,” I tell her. I’ll feel guilty either way. Sunday is the beginning of the week in Israel. I worry that a late night out will make the morning chaotic. I worry that choosing to stay in is an act of selfish apathy.

Political action demands hours, strength, and most of all, emotional energy. The time I spend going to marches and meetings is time I don’t have to prepare dinner, to make up bedtime stories for my kindergartener, to process friendship drama with my tween, to hang out quietly with my teenagers. You never know when they’ll feel like talking.

I used to take my little kids to demonstrations. I’d make an outing of it, strapping the youngest into a carrier, coloring in the lettering on protest signs with the older kids. Now that they’re growing up, I can see how this early training impacted them. My kids are opinionated and informed. Each of them has their own unique activist spirit and social justice convictions.

Bringing them to protests might have been good parenting, or perhaps not. Either way, it didn’t resolve the tension between the needs of my family and the needs of the world around me. I meet with the same set of dilemmas repeatedly—which commitments I will honor, which calls to action I will answer, which obligations I will put off momentarily or indefinitely.

My time is precious. I know what I choose to write about matters. I don’t know how to write about the only thing I want to write about.

As a child, I kept a journal. I still have these journals, which chronicle my life from elementary school through my early twenties. I wrote in vivid detail about friendships and crushes, teen culture in Tucson, Arizona, my first year of college and my gradual religious awakening. These diaries are a detailed record of all my summer adventures, my first visit to Israel, the thrill of starting a new grownup life in New York, and my first impressions of the man I would eventually marry—after running into him at a political protest, of course.

Some important things are missing. For example, I rarely referenced my mother’s alcoholism and emotional volatility, or the conflict in our home. There’s not much about my struggle with depression and undiagnosed ADHD. I wrote all about what I wore, the bands I saw and the boys I liked. I remained mostly silent about the shame of disappointing people who believed in me.

I was only a kid. Maybe I didn’t know how to write about the current of pain that ran underneath my daily life. Maybe I still don’t.

How can I sit here in Jerusalem and keep writing about chance encounters and interesting strangers and lizard gardens and hope? I write about everything except the only thing I want to write about: the endless, aimless, brutal and devastating war being waged by my government.

I write about other things while my friends are called back to reserve duty, their families asked to sacrifice again and again with no realistic end in sight. I start to write about the challenges of summer break and I can’t, because hostages are still languishing in Gazan tunnels.

I try to focus on my writing, but my son needs me to give him a bath. On the other side of the border, someone else’s son has no clean water. I open my laptop to work, but my daughter needs my help renting her first apartment. Close by, someone else’s daughter has nowhere safe to sleep.

I sit down to edit, and meanwhile, ceasefire negotiations start and stutter and resume and fail again. Politicians make brazen and callous statements that shock the conscience and bring shame to our nation. War-stricken civilians are gunned down trying to access food. Famine takes hold, and the world bears witness.

I don’t know how to write about the only thing I want to write about. I don’t know how to fit my mind around the complexity. I don’t know whom to trust. I don’t want to cause pain to those who risk their lives to protect mine.

I wonder if safety can only be obtained at the expense of our core mission as a people. I wonder what survival even means under those conditions.

It would be easier to acknowledge my own limitations, to stay silent under the weight of confused loyalties and convictions. I fear that speaking up and acting out will not accomplish much, and may come at a personal cost.

I believe this war is corroding our nation from within. It’s all I want to write about, and I don’t know how.

I tell my friend I won’t be joining her at the Saturday night protest. She calls the next day to fill me in.

“I’m glad I went,” she says. “Though I’m not sure how much any of this matters. We go out and we protest, and nothing changes.”

Nothing changes.

A few weeks ago, I was on a video call with a fellow activist who came to Jerusalem for the day to attend a conference. Through the lens of his shaky phone camera, I watched him exit his granddaughter’s dance recital with his wife. They set off on foot to join yet another protest in front of the Knesset. We chatted as they walked.

“I’m going because I’m concerned about the way our country is straying from its founding values,” he told me. “My wife is more concerned about the Occupation.”

It moved me, encountering these politically-engaged grandparents with their overlapping spheres of activism. They were in the capital for the day, so they went to go make the government hear their voices. As simple as that.

How do we keep speaking up, even at the expense of other obligations, even when we are not sure if it will make any difference?

Here is an exercise I use: Think of a historical injustice or atrocity. Not that one. There are others. There are many. There are enough. Think of another one.

History judges the bystanders. But why? What were they supposed to do in the face of confused loyalties and convictions? How could they know what was really going on, whom to trust? They had every reason to stay silent. Individual acts of resistance accomplished little, and came at a personal cost.

When I stand in judgment of people who were complicit in the horrors of past eras, what standard am I judging them by? What is it that I wish they would have done instead? The only answer I can think of is: Not nothing.