Everything Is Illuminated

On Creating Safety for the Lunar Eclipse in Taurus

Anyone who tells you this moment in history is not complicated is lying to you. Cycles of violence are complicated. Cycles of karma are complicated. Unwinding layers and layers and layers of trauma and epigenetics and lies and propaganda and conspiracy theories — these things are complicated. Learning that the person or people you were told are your enemies are really just human beings who want to survive and protect their families — it shouldn’t be so complicated, but it is.

We live in a world that reviles nuance and increasingly leans into memefication of all human experience. This is forced fixity — and it is what we are leaving behind as we exit the last two years of Taurus-Scorpio eclipses. One way we can create safety for ourselves and our loved ones is by diving deeper, by probing and asking questions and interrogating what we’ve been told, especially when it’s hard to know what’s true. In the fog of war, this gets harder, but that doesn’t mean we should give up.

One thing that I do know is true even as I wade through the morass of lies and claims and carefully-constructed PR statements and threads and memes and well-considered long-form op-eds in papers of record: the fates of Israelis and Jews and Palestineans and Muslims are inextricably and forever linked. We must take care of each other or the people who hold power over all of us will continue to use us as cannon fodder — against each other.

I live in a liminal space now, on the left where I no longer feel safe unless I chant about settler colonialism, and where I no longer feel safe with some of my own landsmen unless I agree that Gaza should be leveled. It is a strange and precarious place, like a maze of tunnels built underneath hospitals and houses precisely to make sure innocent civilians are killed when the well-supplied, Western-backed army next door hits back against your terrorism.

I’m working on this post exactly 24 hours before the eclipse, and if you know me, you know I’m rarely at a loss for words. Some of my beloveds might even say “never” rather than “rarely.” I think, I feel, and I must talk or write about it or I sense I might implode. My 5th-grade teacher Mr. Baldasarri called me “The Talker.” That’s what having a Sagittarius stellium in your 3rd house (Moon-Jupiter-Neptune) does to you.

But during the last few weeks, although I’ve selectively posted on social media and wrote one post in this space, I have chosen not to speak more than I’ve spoken up. I have made and deleted at least 7 or 8 videos. I can’t seem to figure out how to convey what I’m thinking and feeling, in part because my voice cracks and I begin to cry. Do not doubt that I am constantly, churningly thinking and feeling until my brain and heart are raw. I wake up wanting to talk to you, dear reader. I just don’t know what’s safe to share out loud without being accused of betraying someone that I love or betraying my political siblings or betraying my own human values.

As I get up from my desk to make dinner on Friday night before the eclipse, to light candles for Shabbos, I see that all communication has been cut off in Gaza, and doctors are sending messages that say, “If I die, please remember me” to their friends and colleagues.

In the 24 hours before, the videos that Hamas shot during their pogrom were fully released with all their wanton horror and savagery accessible to anyone who dared to imprint such barbarism on their brains. I was not brave enough.

I often suggest that clients keep an eclipse journal, ideally starting at the beginning of an eclipse series, to be reflected on about two years later when that series completes. You can look at these cycles in so many ways — rewinding back to about 9 years prior when the nodes were reversed, and then all the way back to 19 years prior, when the eclipses were in the same parts of our chart that they’re in right now. You can begin to see the karma that you’ve purged and that which you can’t quite cleanse yourself of, issues you continue to struggle with, relationships and patterns that you just can’t quit.

The way people have lined up on “sides” of what is one of the most complicated, nuanced, dangerous, precarious events both globally and locally — it’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. It’s not like when I was in college and protested against the first Gulf War, and wanted to go march in DC but my dad forbade it because he thought I was going to get beaten up by an angry Republican.

It’s not like when I first learned what the occupation was in my early twenties, after only knowing Israel as that place where a lot of my friends went on teen tours, a place that I sold Hebrew school Passover candies to raise money for, never hearing about the Nakba or even that Palestinians existed at all.

It’s not like when I was at my boyfriend’s house for dinner in my early twenties and his mother’s boyfriend got drunk and started talking about how Jews were an evil force in the world, looking directly at me as he went on and on spewing Protocols of the Elders of Zion conspiracies as I sat trapped at the table until I thought to say I felt sick and fled from the house. This was the first time I saw evidence of what I felt in my body since I was a child: that as a Jew, I would always have to look for escape routes in every room I entered, just in case I needed to flee. This is one way I have learned to create safety across the arc of my life.

This moment is not like when I encouraged the college freshman in my critical thinking class to interrogate the media narrative around 9/11 and the war on Iraq. It’s not like when I joined one million other New Yorkers and additional millions around the world to oppose that devastating war on a cold February day. I know that the 9/11 comparisons are somehow apt, but it’s not like it was in that aftermath. It is much more complicated.

This moment is not like when I was thrilled and relieved to discover there were other groups of Jews like me. It’s not like when I joined Jews for Racial and Economic Justice when they were first founded. It’s not like when I discovered Tikkun Magazine and a theory against the occupation that resonated deep in my soul, and became a student of anti-occupation politics and a lover of Peace Now. It’s not like when ten or so years ago I began using the hashtag #notinmyname to unequivocally declare that the actions of the Israeli government were cruel and becoming crueler - and that I, as an American Jew, did not stand with that brand of cruelty.

It’s not like when I was in Prague after the Velvet Revolution and the woman who invited me to stay at her pension in the suburbs fed me cookies and tea in her living room and proudly handed me her guestbook. She told me about all the people who came from around the world and then pointed to a name and said, “And this one, this one was a dirty Jew.” I suppose my blond hair and blue eyes and German-sounding last name confused her. I was miles from central Prague but left at 6 am the next day without telling her, my heart in my throat, somehow finding my way back to the metro on foot, creating safety by running in the cold dark morning into something unknown, but surely better than the room I barely slept in the night before.

It is not like the time on that same trip, as the only Jew in a group of 20 or so travelers, when I taught all my new backpacking friends how to do the Horah on the deck of a ferry between Brindisi, Italy and Corfu, Greece. The oddity of being the only Jew in any space was new to me, but those friends made me feel safe, safe enough to dance instead of looking for an exit.

American Jews have often ghettoized ourselves for safety, because we know that when we dare to let our guard down they might come and burn down our village or make us wear a Juden star and put us behind barbed wire and gas us. I think this, in part, is why Israel surrounds itself with fences and domes. Yes, it’s to stop very real rockets and invasions, but it’s also a kind of psychic protection from that intrinsic, epigenetic fear that they are coming for us, because they have always been coming for us. They will never stop coming for us, no matter how much we assimilate or how many American presidents promise us protection. The anniversary of the Tree of Life massacre was earlier this week.

I’ve lived in New York my entire life. I grew up on Long Island in a town on the South Shore that was probably 97 percent Jewish when my family lived there, and is now mostly Orthodox. What a blessing and an immense privilege to have lived across a bridge of two centuries in a place that is safe for me, as a Jew with memories of pogroms built into my cells, but where I can walk out of my home any day through the streets of the West Village, free from fear, for now.

We are in Scorpio season, when the Plutonic, chthonic depths are calling us while at this Lunar Eclipse on the opposite axis of Taurus, our nervous systems resist the plunging, preferring to hang out in the safe grooves of the known.

When I was six I was at the beach, playing in the sand with a green plastic shovel I accidentally flung it a few feet away. An old man picked it up and handed it to me, and when he did, I saw blue numbers tattooed on the inside of his upper arm. “What’s that, mister?” I asked him. He said, “A long time ago some bad men came to take me away and put me in a jail, and they used these numbers to keep track of me, because they didn’t want to learn my name — they thought I wasn’t a person.” I asked him why they did that to him. “Because I’m Jewish,” he told me. I looked up at him, my lips trembling, and said, “But I’m Jewish — are the bad men going to take me away?” He assured me that all the bad men were gone now, and told me that he got free. He told me that I was safe. But the nightmares I began to have at that time were a signal that the nervous system of my tiny body did not believe him, because my ancestors had already told me in soft genetic whispers that I was not safe.

The last two weeks, since the previous New Moon in Libra Solar Eclipse, have kept us in an intensely liminal space. All eclipse seasons do this in their way. But the tunnels under Gaza offer us such a precise metaphor for this moment. Hamas stays protected in this underground maze they built while keeping the hostages they stole as leverage, all while thousands of Gazans above die under bombs raining down. They do not protect those people. They protect their positions. Just as Netanyahu protects his position by propping up the very terrorists that savagely killed the people he is pledged to protect.

As the last eclipse of 2023 and the final eclipse in this series illuminates the Taurus house of our our chart, we must ask ourselves if there is an escape from this frenzied ritual of relentless death and trauma. Can we stop harming ourselves? Can we choose to acknowledge and give love to our genetic inheritances and say no to another thousand years of creating safety only by fleeing? What if we ask the person who hates us how they learned to hate? Is there an escape from wars within and without, an escape from the karma that we’re ready to purge?

Today’s Lunar Eclipse shows us how we can create safety by descending into the tunnels we’ve built in our psyches, the mazes we’ve constructed to be safe from our fears. Excavate those tunnels and make maps of them now, even if you first dug them to keep yourself safe from an enemy who built their own tunnel system to be safe from you.