HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN

Aaaahhh. To be home again. A wonderful feeling indeed. Known schedule. Back to the routine of one's niche in life. You fit perfectly and slide right into that ever so comfortable niche that you have carved for yourself. And then- Crash! Bang! Boom! Ouch! Triple that ouch. One's comfortable life has run headlong, headfirst, full speed ahead into a reality ugly and frightening. Ever present - media, print and online, streaming, the radio, TV newscasts and talk shows, the ubiquitous phones always in our hands or a convenient pocket.  

Reality is everywhere and cannot be avoided nor denied - not its presence and not its meaning nor its foreboding of the future. What can one say? What does one say? Even to oneself. Try as one might, the echoes are strong - of 1930s Germany and the hatred of Jews in Hungary and Austria and Poland, and Russia and France and England and America and Belgium and Netherlands etc. etc., etc.   Wherever one turns, these echoes resound, and their replications grow ever more visible and powerful. 

Why this ugly explosion? Why the vehemence? Why the almost wholesale adoption of this hateful philosophy?  The students at our universities are led and inspired by professors who claim to be teaching truths while actually teaching lies of caustic ability and burn holes in hearts, souls, bodies and minds. The authorities react with incompetence and lack of understanding, failing to recognize the blatant evil, what it foretells, and its attractiveness. The freedom to engage in mayhem and gain approval at the same time with no consequences. Joy indeed.

 I can easily see before me the hate and violence of Gaza in replication on our streets and campuses, in our very homes. Crazed mob participants, with bloodlust apparent and governing, cheer for the murderers of Hamas, the slaughter they perpetrated upon Israeli civilians, from infants to elderly, men, women, tortured and kidnaped, to die without seeing families again, ripped from life-and this urge is present in the university 'protesters'.  Led by misnomered professors who shame the teaching profession. Aided by activists and professionals funded by outside sources, from our enemies, and directed by them.   

Is this the bottom line for Jews in America, and by extension, the world? Are we Jews and those who support us, who believe in the right, to face this violence ad infinitum. Is the current growth of violence into street fighting, a la Brown and Black Shirts and Communists, of mob violence against Jews to be permanent, even approved? I just don't know what to say or what to think. I don't know whether to build a bunker high up in the Rocky Mountains someplace or the hollers of Appalachia or chuck it all and head off to Israel. At least I know who we are, who I am and why I die.    

This is an enormous intrusion into the fabric of my life, into my home, or what I thought was my home. Safe, assured but suddenly not so. Where       exactly is my home? Is it where I always thought it would be? Or is it now different? Relocated. Is that relocation voluntary or forced upon me? Has there always been that innate feeling that yes, I was a proud American, so lucky to live in such a country but always that niggling doubt as to permanence of welcome. The draw of my other home grows ever stronger, and should the possibilities be investigated?          

A very difficult proposition. Going home. Home to my ancestral land. Home to my people. Home to where I am welcome. Home to a home where I will not be challenged as to my right to walk into a university, to enter a school, a store, a movie.   Where jewelry of Judaic theme can be worn openly and safely. Home. The fulfillment of a 50-year dream. More than a dream. It has become a necessity.  

Does that mean that I give up on America? Does that mean that I give up generations of long connection to the United States of America? It gave refuge and hope to my grandparents and some great grandparents. It allowed for the continuation of my family line on both sides as those in America were safe even as their families were wiped out in the ugly course of the Holocaust. What is to be done? I am horrified. No, I am petrified. What to do?

Hamas uniformed creatures wearing hate on their faces and in their arms shout that I and my people must die, that Israel has no right to exist. This hate has blossomed in fetid swamps of the inner souls of people, once friends, now separated by this toxic hate.  Will this ugliness morph into Hamas American style?        

It is confusing to older people. It is soul traumatizing to Holocaust survivors. It is frightening and bewildering to the generations who follow for what has happened to their lives. Viral antisemitism never had any place in it. They walked in this world head high, with the same ambitions and the same dreams as everyone else. Those dreams and ambitions remain there. But they are being stamped and stumped and trod upon, crushed under the feet of hate and haters.  I look at the younger generations, the children, the brand-new little ones. What will be for you, little sweethearts? Our hearts overflow with love and worry and anxiety. Why?  Why, Lord Above, have you allowed this?

Have your people not suffered enough? Have we not paid enough of our dues to have earned membership in the club of safe, legitimate, recognized nations of the world? Why are we   consigned to the class of "outlaw” nations? Why are your people held to double standards, to benchmarks impossible to achieve and maintain if one is to live in the real world. Why are the sins of others their absolute crimes against humanity somehow attributed to us? Fighting a war we have been forced to fight, a war we did not ask nor want, all we want is the return of our hostages, the bodies of those killed in captivity, and an end to the evil of Hamas. Will this ever happen? Grave doubts in my mind. I can hope, but that hope is weakened and drained every day this continues in Gaza, in Israel, and in America and in streets round the world. Hate is contagious, is now a pandemic worse than any we have ever known.      

Where do we turn?  Many of us turn our heads up to the heavens. "I lift up mine eyes to the hills from whence will come my help." Will it? In time? I don't know anymore. Our strength as a people, as a family, will help us weather the crisis and survive but why, why, why?  The hurt, the sharpness of the cuts never fades. In fact, it only gets stronger. When will this end?  

Frankly, I see no end in sight until the world stands up and says to the terrorists of the world enough! We have had enough of this. We'll come down hard on you. We will eliminate you, extinguish your hate to the last one of you. No longer to perpetrate this horror upon the people of this earth. 

We will pick better representatives, those. who can understand the meaning of antisemitism and vote for a bill condemning it. We will elect other than two old men, one evil and demented who can barely string two words together and make sense, and the other so stupid as to think of allowing in more than 200,000 so called Gazan 'refugees' and God knows how many terrorists among them. We must look deep within our national conscience and find true leaders, presently AWOL.       

 We need to be tough with the mobs at universities. and the damage they are wreaking upon this nation. We must penalize them for their violence. We must suspend, expel whenever it takes to quell this before it gets out of hand and impossible to push back into the bottle. Will we? Grave doubts again. It is already quite late. Stop the foreign funding. Stop the mollycoddling and the stupidity. It is a time to stand firm and call in the authorities.  Stop the violence. Stop the destruction. Before it is too late in every which way one can think of. 

Is it too late already?  I hope not. I know not.

So, home again, home again. Far from the sea. Home again. Home again far from family. Home again. Home again. For how long will it be my home? Home again. Home again. Will it be a dream fading into the distance? Home again. Home again - for how long?  Home again. Where? 

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Yitzy, I miss you so. I can see the picture before me of you sitting on the couch as we place your new little nephew in your arms as you smile down upon him. The other arm curls around your other nephew as you voice your responsibilities, and your pride to be a mentor to them. That mentorship will never be, and we and the world are forever the worse for it. Be in their hearts and be in their souls and be their protection as they grow up in the world of uncertainty and danger. 

 Yitzy, sweet golden boy, always you are home in our lives. Always we will miss you. Always we will love you.

  Always. and forever.  Always and forever.