...and being both constantly retraumatized throughout the weeks following the initial Attack, yet simultaneously reaching new depths and vitality in formal prayer, Tehillim, and my relationship with Hashem BECAUSE of these same experiences...
...it all liberated me from caring about those who don't really care about me or my Nation — even if those people are close relatives or decades-long friends.
The Unholy Mess of Assimilation Caused by the Non-Orthodox Movements
Just for knowing, my family consists of:
- fully assimilated Jews (mostly intermarried) who may or may not keep certain Jewish traditions (Leil HaSeder is a big favorite)
- non-Jews who think they're Jewish based on the wholly fake conversion they endured to marry a Jewish man or via adoption by Jewish parents
- non-Jews who know they're not Jewish
There is one more recently discovered very distant and not-blood-related relative who became totally frum and lives in the US with her husband and children as Chabad lite (which is a huge credit to them as she grew up with almost nothing of Torah).
Oh, but you should have seen the lovely emails I received!
I'll always remember that Sunday and most of Monday when the whole world loved and sympathized with us.
I knew, as far as the world went, it wouldn't last.
As far as family and friends went, it depends who.
My mother is totally dependable. She is quietly and non-confrontationally solidly on the side of Israel.
Her relationship with me has not changed one iota.
But everyone else changed.
Yet not immediately. It took a couple of days.
Please Tell Me How You're REALLY Doing — Oops, Didn't Really Mean It!
(Meaning, for some, their caring emails were just virtue-signaling and the way to tell others they'd contacted a relative or friend in Israel to see how she was doing.)
But because of taking Rav Miller's mussar seriously, I strive to be nice and encouraging to everyone, regardless.
After replying to one relative nicely, she wrote back saying:
Okay, now tell me how you're REALLY doing.
Isn't that nice?
Except that I knew that's just the way people in my region talk; they wish to feel caring rather than actually care.
(Actually caring about another person takes too much effort. Also, it's not always comfortable. That's probably also why she never bothered to have children either.)
It sounds really caring and authentic to insist you want to know how someone is REALLY doing. Actors say it all the time on TV and in the movies, so everyone knows the script.
So I replied again, thanking her for her caring words and opened up a little bit more.
Then Israel started fight back, and you could practically hear all the metaphorical doors slam shut.
As written in that post about being liberated, the world doesn't really like Jews unless they're burned (like after the Holocaust too, when all the burned Jews finally aroused enough global sympathy to let the surviving Jews immigrate to their countries and then to vote for the right to establish a so-called Jewish State in our own God-given millennia-old Homeland — though we never received ALL the Land traditionally ours).
The person who pretended to want to know how I was REALLY doing?
Haven't heard a peep from her since.
I even made sure to acknowledge her birthday, which came out only a week after the Great Horror, but received no acknowledgment, even though she has always written back in appreciation of my birthday greetings for the past 25+ years.
And this though she knew we still endured periodic rocket attacks and my son served active duty in a combat unit near Gaza.
In fact, everyone knew all that.
Yet no one really cares.
And that's because the Jews stopped being gruesomely burned and bloodied victims and started fighting back...and fighting back means that now the terrorists and their accomplices are getting killed.
And that's not okay with them.
Only Jews can be killed — not anyone else, no matter how evil and dangerous they are.
Progressive Jews Finally Feeling Abandoned by the Left
Yes, my mother had told me.
But I got distracted by rocket that slammed into the ground not far from our apartment building with a terrifying BOOM, shaking, and the loss of electricity for the rest of the day.
Also, more and more details kept coming out about how awful the attack really had been and the death toll from October 7th kept rising by the hundreds. (Remember how they initially reported around 250 dead?)
But she's older and the surgery is kind of scary, so I wrote her back with a nice apology and encouraging words.
She came through just fine and went to her wholly assimilated intermarried Jewish daughter's home to recuperate.
Her daughter has always been one of my favorite relatives, though we only contact each other occasionally. So I emailed her praising her goodness and generosity in caring for her mother.
I did not hear back from her for a while, and thought she had joined the rest of the anti-Israel crowd, but suddenly I got a message from her and this is some of what she wrote:
It’s been a complicated time for American Jews. Many of us who count ourselves as progressive Jews and have always been active in social justice movements feel abandoned by the Left at this moment in time. College campuses have become intensely polarizing places.
Initially in the weeks following 10/7, things were very intense on campus at Columbia and it was overwhelming. Although we raised the kids with both religions, our daughter tends to identify herself as Jewish. Columbia seems to have calmed down a bit, but on other college campuses, people seem to have lost their minds.
What has been most striking is the level of antisemitism that has risen to the surface. I feel safe in New York, but as we search for a college for our youngest, I'll be keeping in mind how each college responded. There are places I don't want my children to be.
I nearly fell off my chair.
After all, this relative has a photo of herself and Hilary Clinton in a one-armed hug and grinning at the camera.
(Yuck.)
Mostly, I couldn't believe she wrote:
Many of us who count ourselves as progressive Jews and have always been active in social justice movements feel abandoned by the Left at this moment in time.
I feel like saying: "Unfortunately, I think you ain't seen nothin' yet. The worst is still to come."
I responded to her with validation and warmth, and haven't heard from her since that exchange, but I'm willing to assume (based on that email & the previous) she's facing an inner struggle with everything, and anyway, we never corresponded with any kind of frequency, just friendliness.
The Capricious "Caring" of Secular Leftists
Be safe! And I will keep checking in - let me know if I start to bug you...
Isn't that nice?
She will keep checking in on me! She cares!
Years ago, actually visited me a couple of times in Eretz Yisrael and even spent 2 Shabboses with me, once as a single and once when I was married with 2 kids.
And we've had all sort of deep personal conversations about hard topics over the decades.
The thing is, she reached out to me just after my son informed me of his friends who were forced to deal with the corpses of around 40 Jewish babies who'd been flung on the ground and lying there for a long time in the heat.
These friends had grown up in charedi homes and one had been in yeshivah until he'd enlisted.
So I was still in shock and trauma about this most recent horror, and deeply enraged at the all the high mucky-mucks in the army and government who not only allowed this to happen, but forced these young vulnerable religious guys to deal with it and with no support or preparation.
It really wasn't their job to do it.
(The details appear in this post: The Price is Already Too High to Pay — and It's Only Rising.)
So I very briefly wrote about this to her, and included how I avoid the news, but this I heard straight from my son who heard it from his friend who endured it, so it felt very personal to me.
And again, she's someone with whom you can have intense conversations about difficult topics.
She wrote back:
I couldn't agree more — there is nothing to be gained by watching the horror.
I hope you and yours are well, in spite of everything.
Please note she acknowledged nothing of what I described, did not empathize with nor validate my feelings in any way, nor did she offer any encouragement about what I actually wrote.
(Mentioning my avoidance of news and disturbing images took up 1 sentence of my original email. She literally ignored everything else.)
I responded nicely, then did not hear from her for the next 2 months.
(What about checking in with me so much, it might start bugging me? Whatever happened to that?)
And just to emphasize, I did not just walk up to her and pour out my feelings on the spot to her face.
It was an email.
She had time to read, absorb, compose herself, discuss it with her man or therapist, and then respond to me.
And that's all she could come up with to such a horrifying revelation and how it affected me.
Anyway, as stated above, she finally wrote in 2 months later to let me know she was thinking of me and hoped we were well, and that she and her man were touring Bulgaria.
I suppose she felt 2 months was enough time for me to have dealt with the constant stream of disturbing reports and atrocities affecting my people and my country and myself.
I started to write her back as I usually did with such people, carefully maintaining a certain tone I use out of consideration for these types of assimilated Jews.
But it felt all wrong.
It had actually felt wrong for years.
But now it was like trying to play a violin which simply would not catch the right tune no matter how I tried to play it.
I deleted everything and started anew, but this time for real.
I started going on about the little-known yet highly regarded Sarajevo yeshivah of yore and Rav Eliezer Papo, author of the Pele Yoetz and chief rabbi of Bulgaria in his time, plus the importance his burial place still held among Am Yisrael two centuries later.
No more feeling concerned about coming on too strong or seeming weird or dilemmas of did I say too much or too little? Am I approachable?
After all, I've been in contact with her for decades and like I said, she even spent Shabbos with us. She really likes frum people.
She doesn't care about becoming frum herself. She's not interested and it matters not one whit anything I say or do.
How liberating!
So I just decided to be me — the authentic Torah-oriented me.
She responded in the way you respond to someone you prefer to avoid, but don't wish to offend, and I have not heard from her since. (That was almost a month ago. So much for checking in to the point of bugging me.)
When Being the Family Pariah is the Best Way to Go
I thought of all that too.
But based on the personalities involved and having known them all for either my entire life or most of my life, I understand what's going on (and can read between the lines of the emails from this former best friend).
And at the end of the day, they don't care.
In fact, with the non-Jewish ones (including nearly all the non-Jewish ones who live under the delusion they're Jewish), it's more than a lack of caring.
They're actively "anti," but they won't come out and say it, likely out of not wanting to appear politically incorrect to themselves and their society.
(Although I can imagine what they're saying about Israel, and my son having been in army service, and all that. I know they feel like me and everyone else here are terribly immoral for wanting to defend ourselves against an entire society of truly gruesome barbarians. Please see these for more on that: yet-another-expose-on-the-innocent-civilians-of-gaza-attacking-a-red-cross-vehicle-filled-with-elderly-and-child-captives.html and the-phone-call-that-acted-as-my-personal-wake-up-call.html.)
And it's nice to finally be completely and utterly rejected by nearly my entire family because, halachically speaking, they were never really my family anyway.
And I no longer need to concern myself with tone, or remembering birthdays, or quandaries of whether I'm making a kiddush Hashem, and blah, blah, blah.
And it's all very much connected to what Rav Avigdor Miller always discussed regarding Parshat Bo: All Rav Miller's Divrei Torah to Date for Parshas Bo.
It's all about disconnecting from anti-Torah culture.
And being a pariah in the eyes of that anti-Torah culture (just as the Jews trapped in Mitzrayim were) is the best way to disconnect and embrace the authentic Jewish "you."