Unveilings
Unveilings
Marking a year of unhealed trauma in the midst of unending violence
We Jews mark death first with an 8-day shiva, when we wear black, cover mirrors, sit on boxes, and receive friends and family at home. For 30 days the closest family members say the Mourner’s Kaddish (some do this for 11 months). On the first anniversary of the death, we hold an unveiling ceremony for our lost loved one, revealing the gravestone for the first time. On the anniversary of the death, we light Yahrzeit and say Yizkor. We pray and lay rocks on the stone to symbolize visiting our beloveds.
This is a beautiful, healing series of rituals that I’ve been through many times. As a child, I lost a lot of close relatives in a short period — a great-uncle during kindergarten, two great-grandmothers within a year in first grade, then three grandparents, two within six months of one another in 4th grade, and in between, a friend from my second-grade class who was hit by a car while riding her bike. My grandparents and great-grandparents lived close by and I saw them weekly, so these were deep losses for me.
Because of the way these deaths were compressed into a few short years of my childhood, I developed major trauma around death that has made my experience of grief — a normal, human emotion — into something fraught with additional layers of fear and trembling. Yet even if I hadn’t gone through that, simply being born into a Jewish body surely imparted its own kind of death trauma. Our generational traumas live both in our stories and in our genes, from pogroms to the Holocaust. The idea that anyone who is not us wants to kill us — it’s part of our origin story, informing every anxious inflection and every projection about the world and all the ways it's against us even during decades or centuries when we’re mostly safe.
I was six when at my beach club, I met a man with a series of blue numbers tattooed on his arm after he handed me back a shovel I was digging with in the sand. I asked him why there were numbers on his arm, and he said, “Because a long time ago, some bad men came and took me away and put me in a jail.” I asked why, and he said, in a thick German accent, “Because I am Jewish.”
“But I’m Jewish,” I said, “Are they going to take me away?” The man assured me they were gone, and that I was safe. I ran to my mother and told her, asking if she knew about the bad men who took the Jews away. She very rationally explained the origins of the Holocaust to me that day.
Growing up, I heard “never again” over and over again. Although my family, on both sides, arrived on American shores decades before the Holocaust, I began having nightmares set in German towns, where I’d hide from Nazis under bridges, or in closets, hearing them come for my family and take them away. In the past year, I’ve realized that Never Again is now, for both Jews and our Palestinian cousins. Because our fates are intertwined, and we cannot survive if we refuse to face this.
Digging into my own trauma here is a way to say that although I deeply, deeply disagree with some of my right-leaning Jewish friends about the last 75 years of occupation, about the past 11 months of need for an immediate and permanent ceasefire paired with a return of the hostages, about the horrors of the Nakbah, about the use of the word apartheid to describe the West Bank (for me, it is a simple and clear case of apartheid), about the two-state solution, about moving Israel back behind the Green Line, about the campus protest movement, and so much more: I understand why they’re stuck in a trauma response. Antisemitism is real and it is raging, mostly because Donald Trump and MAGA unleashed it upon the world anew in 2016. Nazis have been openly marching through the streets since Charlottesville, chanting “Jews will not replace us” and now, Elon’s Twitter is their safe space. Jews are being used as a pawns in the election, in Netanyahu’s attempt to reinstall Trump as President. It’s normal to feel terrified and a bit unhinged by it all.
One of the ways Jews deal with grief is by talking about it, because if we are good at anything, it’s talking. Yet we have forgotten how to talk to each other. We have cut ourselves off and into camps of opinion, and refuse to have these conversations, refuse to even engage with facts and history, living in our own silos built on algorithms. It’s as if the fence breached on 10/7 has hardened us into stone walls too thick to penetrate. Some, on one side, with an Israeli flag as their avatar, chanting Am Yisrael Chai, and on the other side, those with watermelon emojis, some who now see all Jews as perpetrators, not just the Israeli government and its army and the Christian Zionists who far outnumber American Jews in supporting Israel, only to get closer to their end times prophecy — one in which all Jews must go to Jerusalem to die, so that Christ can return.
On his show yesterday, Ali Velshi beautifully addressed how we might soften into conversations that take us forward, even as we know the endless complexities of the Middle East will not soon be solved. I hope you’ll watch it.
Today I mourn the dead, the endless dead, those who were murdered in their beds and houses on 10/7, those savagely killed in the early morning hours dancing at a party for peace, and those who’ve been killed since, by drones, by 2000-pound American-made bombs, and by IDF snipers. The dead in my feeds, the broken bodies, the babies with decapitated heads, the old men and women who did nothing to deserve such violent death but be born on the wrong side of a fence.
Jewish trauma is real, centuries-old, and deeply rooted in our bodies and culture. Yet for the past year, this pain has been weaponized against us by an ultranationalist government bent on total domination, with a leader at the helm who will do anything, LITERALLY ANYTHING, to stay in power. Jewish safety does not require genocide against our cousins, the Palestinian people, no matter how many lies this man and his extremist, fascist right-wing flank tells us.
1200 Israelis were murdered on 10/7, nearly 250 were taken hostage, and the fates of 101 are still unknown — they’re likely somewhere in the tunnels under Gaza, starving, just like the surviving Palestinians above ground, with nowhere to hide from bombs. The exact number is unclear, but around 45,000 Palestinians have been killed in the last 12 months, most of them women and children. The reason the number is unclear is that so many are still buried under the rubble — entire communities ravaged and razed. As I type this, Beirut is under siege, and in the last two weeks, 1000s have been killed in Lebanon.
Why? Because a few select men in power refuse to cede it in any form. Even as the hostage families plead — they have been pleading since last year — to have their loved ones returned, to Bring Them Back in the parlance of the movement, Netanyahu has outright refused so he can stay in office. Millions of Israelis have been in the streets screaming for a ceasefire. Netanyahu and his vile right-wing flank are holding millions of Israelis hostage while the remaining hostages gasp for air. Sinwar, holding Palestinians hostage in ever-tinier “safe” zones in what remains of Gaza by refusing a ceasefire. Men clinging to power and throwing the rest of us — including the entire world and the American election into chaos, putting us on the brink of a wider regional war.
We meet this first anniversary of 10/7 right in the middle of the Days of Awe, the holiest time in the Jewish calendar. Between Rosh Hashanah (our celebration of the new year) and Yom Kippur, our day of atonement, we partake of my favorite Jewish ritual, Tashlich, casting our sins or regrets into a body of water as we throw bread. Our aim during this ten-day period is to get written into the Book of Life for another year. I’ve written about it before.
I will do my Tashlich at the Hudson River late today, to mark my atonement for all the ways in which I’ve failed to talk about our shared traumas with compassion. I have lost my temper, talked over people, and gotten frustrated with ahistorical takes. I have to remember that not everyone is as steeped in the history of Israel and Palestine as I am, and have been since I first visited in 1994 and began asking questions, because what I saw did not make sense. That’s when I started reading and learning. Many have just started in the last 12 months — I need to be more patient with them.
I’m what can best be described as a secular humanist Jew, but I do love these rituals dearly, and this is the time I most look forward to. I am a fierce, proud Jew, and nothing and no one can make me feel anything but big love for my people and my culture, even as I am called alternately a “Hamas-lover” for having compassion for Palestinian humans, and “Zionist shill” when I uplift Jewish trauma or mention antisemitism. But to all of this, I repeat again and again: NOT IN MY NAME, and no one can call me any name that will make me forget how trauma has been weaponized against me and my family.
My mishpocha (the Yiddish word for family) consists of my actual blood relatives, ones who thankfully mostly agree with me on these issues, many of my real-life friends, and my friends in the movement (in groups like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and If Not Now and Standing Together) and with my Muslim friends who want the same kind of peace, security, and safety I seek for my people.
May we meet again next year with our candles lit in a world safe enough to heal and repair our trauma together, as a collective misphocha across culture, religion, belief, political party, and across the fences that divide us.