- completely assimilated intermarried Jews
- non-Jews who think they're Jews (due to fake deceptive conversions of themselves or their mothers, courtesy of the "Conservative" & Reform movements, and in one case, a burned-out quasi-Orthodox rabbi who couldn't care less that his "convert" continued to drive on Shabbat and regularly produced homemade cheeseburgers on her backyard grill)
- regular run-of-the-mill non-Jews (including those who used to think they were Jews, and felt quite relieved to discover they weren't)
(Now you can see why I find my Moroccan-Israeli husband's side of the family so attractive. Many run the gamut of the Orthodox streams and even the non-religious ones still have religious feelings and at least of smidgen of actual knowledge.)
And like the majority of assimilated Jews in the USA, my family all believe in the Democrat party and increasingly far-Left Liberal values.
As Democrats and Liberals have been drifting from pro-Israel to rabidly anti-Israel and passionately pro-Palestinian, so my relatives find themselves drifting in that direction too.
This leaves the older generation (70+) in an uncomfortable position because they tend to remain pro-Israel, remembering all the good ol' pro-Israel days with Israel winning miraculous wars, and their pride in Israel comprises a solid part of whatever Jewish identity they maintain.
The under-70 crowd, however, holds increasingly harsh views of the State of Israel.
I myself hold some harsh views of the government and the politicians who grabbed power in the early decades of the new State.
But my harsh views of the government & military leaders emanate from a deep love & appreciation of Hashem, Torah-true values, Am Yisrael, and Eretz Yisrael.
Their harsh views derive from media propaganda and lack of morality.
And some of them just plain have bad middot, so immorality proves a natural attraction.
Fake Sympathy
I heard from relatives who never even acknowledged a birthday greeting I regularly sent, including one close relative who never congratulated me on the birth of our last child, born a decade after the sibling before him. (That was over 8 years ago, BTW.)
At that point, I still suffered from shock incited by the horrific event.
I knew I didn't know all the gory details. But I knew approximately what happened: the bewildering invasion, the mass murders, the horrific depravities, and mass abduction (to conditions probably worse than death).
And I realized all these relatives saw horrifying images and read horrifying details that I hadn't, plus they knew we personally suffered an hours-long barrage of rockets, plus our 19-year-old had been called up.
They oh-so solicitously asked how I was doing and reassured me they were praying for me.
A couple of them had always seemed like atheists (one even said he was & got smirky about my belief in a Creator), so I was pleasantly surprised to hear they prayed.
(Yet one close relative still has not contacted me about this at all.)
And I tried to hold myself back, reminding myself that to make the world care about Jews, Jews need to be murdered in horrible ways by the hundreds or thousands (or millions).
And that's likely what inspired this outpouring of pseudo-sympathy & concern.
But the idea of them praying...well, I thought that was very good. And whether Jewish or not, wanted to encourage this.
So I wrote everyone back, thanking them nicely for their concern and their prayers.
To one who normally cares a tad more than the rest, I wrote a detailed yet brief account of our personal experiences. (This got passed around the entire extended family, so I know everyone knew these details.)
To another couple of relatives who, in addition to being actual Jews, also seemed genuinely concerned, I even wrote extra details about our experiences and my fluctuating emotional state.
To a couple, I included a very disturbing detail or two, heard from a son with soldier-friends dealing with the chilling aftermath of the massacre — meaning, I told them personal, eye-witness details with the very real aftereffects, NOT something read in a newspaper.
Yet the whole time, the seichel part of me kept niggling to can it — because my seichel knew they don't actually care.
They want to FEEL like caring sympathetic people without actual needing to care or sympathize.
One even wrote me back again, asking how I was "REALLY doing"— to show she genuinely cares.
(I managed to remember her birthday amid everything, and emailed her a lovely birthday graphic.)
Then the Jews started fighting back.
And the Jews started fighting back with gusto and passionate loyalty to each other.
Unified under the banner of Torah, mass teshuvah has been taking place, including secular-looking girls cutting up their immodest clothing and treif kitchens and restaurants going kosher so they can provide food to an increasingly religious military.
And I haven't heard from anyone since.
The Liberating Realization that No One Actually Cares
...but has since gone back to sending me slice-of-life cartoons downloaded from Facebook with the occasional photo of symbolically empty chairs to represent those kidnapped into Gaza.
And I received a polite 2-sentence response to a chilling detail experienced by my son's friend serving at the Gazan border.
And the one who wanted to know how I was REALLY doing, and whose birthday I managed to acknowledge during such a stressful time?
Haven't heard one peep from her. She didn't even acknowledge the birthday greeting (and she always has over the past decades).
As they say, the silence has been deafening.
In the meantime, I'm being constantly re-traumatized both by real threats of attack and a state of hyper-alertness (as described here the-perfect-poem-for-validation-chizuk-throughout-these-challenging-events.html) — though that hyper-alertness has since relaxed somewhat.
(Though there's nothing like straining your ears while wondering: Is that an air-raid siren or just the wind blowing really hard? — and then hearing a massive explosion overhead as a Gazan rocket slams into the Iron Dome. That definitely snaps you back to a state of hyper-alertness.)
Plus our 19-year-old soldier experienced more danger and disturbing images than he initially let on (baruch Hashem, at least 2 terrorists still wandering free were liquidated during that dangerous experience), and I'm struggling with the fact that he is dealing with stuff a mother naturally tries to protect her child from (including struggling with the way it all has affected him).
From the moment he was called up on Shabbat/chag, his situation keeps changing as he finds himself in a different place every week, and sometimes dangerous, sometimes disturbing, and sometimes boring.
Nothing is consistent. Everything is unsettled and in transition for him.
Plus, I'll be listening to a shiur or overhear something, and they'll reveal a disturbing detail of the initial attack (previously unknown to me) and I'll be re-traumatized & shocked again, thinking, Huh? You mean they even did THAT too?
Now, after 3 weeks of silence, it has become clear:
No one really cares.
And that finally liberated me.
A Line was Crossed – There's No Going Back
I also used to believe a lot of the secular-based anti-Israel sentiment showed a lack of education regarding the topic, or simply brainwashing by the media.
Also my innate nature compels me to connect to others, which is often a positive quality, but can also be misleading.
But the sheer barbarism of this mass attack, the gore and cruelty, the ruthlessness against innocent pure Jewish babies, and the depraved reveling in their hands literally soaked with Jewish blood...
Any blinders left anywhere on even a millimeter of one's eyes — they just got ripped off to see with ruthless clarity exactly what we are up against (and I'm including the Leftist apathy & dissonance that saturated much of the government and highest echelons of the IDF, in addition to the actual barbaric terrorists).
My blinders were mostly off before this happened. But now, nothing remains.
Others who lived with blinders firmly patched to their eyes now spun into a complete turnaround in the traumatic aftermath.
The only Jew for whom most of the world can conjure up sympathy is a tortured, murdered, and burned Jew.
Oh, and it needs to be a LOT of tortured, murdered, and burned Jews. Just one such Jew isn't going to cut it for them.
(Just like in the Holocaust, when the world found out what happened and felt seriously bad for us.)
But my family members' apathy and apparent siding with such a viciously savage enemy?
It made me feel like I can completely let go.
I don't need to ever try again in even a small way to convince them or arouse their sympathies in any way whatsoever.
I never again need to make any friendly overtures, no matter how minor — EVER.
This bloodthirsty savagery forced us all to cross a line.
And we crossed a line we can never go back over again.
For those of us connected to Am Yisrael, we crossed an excruciatingly painful line that ultimately brought us closer to each other and to Hashem.
For those disconnected from and even disdainful of Am Yisrael, it enabled them to cross a line into the abyss of immorality and heartlessness.
They truly lack goodness.
They lack moral discernment.
No one needs to care about them or what they think.
If the only Jew worth their sympathy is a Jew who has been brutally terrorized in life and depravedly defiled in death, then what are these heartless degenerates worth?
Mi K'Amcha Yisrael?
That's what this has shown.
(Of course, there exist brilliant exceptions. Those exceptions remain a cherished minority.)
Yet we can care for each other — and we are.
I think this finally enabled us to care about ourselves instead of spreading our love so thin by investing emotional energy in caring about those who don't care about us (including trying to make care about us those who incurably despise us).
The outpouring of pure unadulterated chessed coursing through Eretz Yisrael right now is stunning.
It's like we've been freed to love the Torah and love each other, rather than wasting our capacity for love on those who either don't care or who actively hate us.
We've been liberated from the compulsion to sympathize with ideologies that aim for either our spiritual destruction or our physical destruction — or both.
The response of mass teshuvah occurring on ALL levels of Am Yisrael in Eretz Yisrael is unprecedented.
Leftists left Leftism, seemingly secular Jewish girls have taken scissors to their immodest clothing, many have taken on Shabbat, the elevation of davening for Jews of all streams...
Preceding the rescue of a young female hostage who'd served in the IDF, her secular mother carried out the mitzvah of hafrashat challah, arranged for 70 bachurim to daven for her daughter's release, and the family bought a sefer Torah, bringing it to the girl's room with the grandmother crying out that just as they're bringing in this sefer Torah, they will also be bringing in her granddaughter.
Two days later, the girl came home.
In the charedi world, Jews speak of how Tehillim and Shemoneh Esrei have come alive in a way they hadn't before. Charedi workplaces have instituted a daily learning session of bitachon and deveikut to Hashem.
There is truly nothing like our chessed, tzedakah, and teshuvah anywhere else in the world nor among any other nation.