Opinion: Tension. Feeling the effects of Antisemitism (Surigao City)

THE REVELATION came while I lay leveled on the pavement. Thirty seconds earlier, I’d been speeding home on my motorcycle, looking forward to a hearty dinner. Now I lay sprawled beneath it, thanking God for being alive. The revelation was that it might just as easily have gone the other way.

“Jesus,” I thought, “I could have died.” 

And that’s when I reflected on Israel. The place where, not long before, families enjoying leisurely breakfasts had been interrupted by terrorists who cut off their heads. The country wherein young people dancing their hearts out had suddenly been mowed down like overgrown grass.

That’s also when I first made the connection between those events and the extreme tension I’d felt ever since. A deep sadness, of course, had been apparent from the start. Tears spawned easily by the pictures of slaughtered children and terrified young women forced into cars. Or a heartbroken man wailing over the lifeless bodies of his two baby boys.

What I hadn’t realized, though, was how angry I’d become. How preoccupied with the fragility of life. How suddenly aware of the reality we all face; that everything can change in an instant. That love can become grief, and joy turns into rage.

And how, as a Jew, those realities are especially ever present. It’s a feeling my ancestors must have known well. They, who died in Europe of the 1930s, felled by hate. Those whose lives were permanently altered and twisted irrevocably out of shape.

Growing up in postwar America, I was only dimly aware of that vulnerability. I could clearly see, of course, my German mother’s seemingly irrational fears. How she would panic whenever I, or anyone else, ran unexpectedly late. How uncannily certain she always felt that things would somehow go terribly awry.

Though aware of the unimaginable pain she’d experienced before my birth, I never felt connected to it, never believed that it affected me directly. I was an American, after all, and a member of the new generation destined to remake the world. Antisemitism, it seemed, was a relic of the distant past.

All that changed for me on Oct. 7, the most horrific day for Jews since World War II. The weird thing, though, was that I didn’t even realize it. What I was aware of was a feeling of tension. Enough tension to provoke my snapping at several housemates and helpers over nothing. Enough to incite arguments with my wife about unimportant things like how and when to fix our broken water system and what month to schedule a vacation. Some of our discussions grew uncharacteristically heated, leaving both of us with scowls.

All of it came together for me at that moment on the pavement.

“Are you alright?” an alarmed passerby inquired, pulling the downed bike upright to free me from its weight. “Do you need an ambulance?”

Shakily, I stood up, slowly brushing the dirt from my badly torn jeans. “I think I’m ok,” I muttered. “I just slipped in the mud. Thank you for your help.”

As I cautiously made my way home, though, a new level of consciousness welled up inside. I’m still feeling tense. At least now, though, I understand why. (David Haldane)