The Cleft; The Minyan

When I woke up to the war, my wife said, “I don’t want you to be upset.” I was still mostly asleep. “Uh oh,” I said. “Why would I be upset?” “Netanyahu has declared war.” I thought about this for a moment or two. “On who?” I finally ventured. “Palestine,” she said, as if it was natural, obvious, the most Netanyahu thing to do. I scoffed and rolled over, went back to sleep, muttering, “But he doesn’t think Palestinians exist!”

By the time I woke up for real, in my comfortable bed, it was late afternoon in Jerusalem on the 7th, and I didn’t know how many Jews were dead. This is the great comfort that I am accused of by Zionists when I protest the actions of the state of Israel. It’s all the same to you, they say, you comfortable Jew in your big fat bed. What would you do if rockets fell on you? If you had to hide in shelters and be kidnapped and send your children off to the army? And of course, I have no answer for them. I just don’t like guns, and I don’t see the point in Jews swinging them around like we know what to do with them.

I try to remind Zionists of the joke my Yiddish teacher taught me: the Jew who, having proven he’s a crack shot in rifle practice after being conscripted into the Tsar’s army, is sent to the front against the Japanese. He is told to raise the gun, he does. He’s told to aim, he does. He’s told to fire, and he refuses. Three times, this pantomime and insurrection goes through. When the sergeant says, “What’s wrong, soldier?” the Jew responds, “It’s just, there’s people over there.” The Zionists don’t like the joke. They laugh, sometimes, but they don’t really get it, like you and I do. 

So I woke up to the war and I was upset. I was upset all week, but I was always going to be. It was the week of my son’s surgery. My son was born with a cleft lip. Right down the middle, a bit to the left. When I held him, and looked him in the mouth, like one looks at a horse one is buying, I could see his little pink gum, and his lip reached up to his nostril in a jagged left leaning line and then back down. I thought about the old legend of the angel who presses a finger to the lips of the about to be born, and silences them from teaching all the Torah they learned from Hashem in the World Before This World. I thought about Moses’ speech impediment, his “uncircumcised mouth.” I loved that cleft. How could I not? It was my son’s. It was my son. I loved it, and I condemned it to becoming a lip, because the doctors told me he wouldn’t be able to eat or speak. Who needs to eat, I sometimes thought wildly. We have love. Who needs to speak? But we scheduled the operation anyway, so I spent the first week of the war preemptively mourning an absence of an absence, the loss of a split, the death of a cleft. It prepared me well for what was to come.

By the Friday he went in for the surgery, Israel had begun bombing Gaza, giving 1.1 million people 24 hours to flee to nowhere in particular. I kissed my baby and handed him to the surgical team, who if you think about it are just men with very sharp knives, and tried to ignore the television in the waiting room. But they got these things now, iPhones? You just look at them all day. So I knew what was happening. God help me, I was holding my son after major facial surgery and my heart was in Gaza, trying to hold children I’ll never meet. I suppose holding children is like that. You hold one, you want to hold them all. My mother had to scream at me to stop me from going to a protest of the genocide in Gaza that Friday night. I almost ignored her because we don’t agree about politics, but she was right. I held my son and sent my heart to Brooklyn to stand with the Jews on the streets.

The bombs fell. I practiced my Yiddish on the 2 year old Orthodox girl with hepatitis we shared the room with. The bombs fell. My son took oxycontin for the pain and slept, I can only hope, dreamlessly, painlessly. The bombs fell. We got discharged from the hospital. The bombs fell. My wife learned how to clean my son’s nasal stents. The bombs fell. I adjusted the way I hold my son so that he wouldn’t rub his face on my arm. The bombs fell. We held his hands from his face. The bombs fell. 

By Wednesday, my wife and her mother agreed they could spare me for the day. I went to DC to march on Capitol Hill. I thought about what to put on a sign. A line of Yiddish poetry? A piece of Talmud? Eventually time ran out, and I hadn’t even bought cardboard. I went to the Jewish Voice For Peace rally and took a sign that was being handed out, listened to the speakers, tried to shout along. I hate being at a protest, truly. I’m a shmoozer, I like to talk things through. Shouting? In a crowd? Sounds lonesome to me. But I went. I marched. I was part of a mass. There is more than one of me. There are thousands of Jews who say no more of this. Who say not in our name. Who say never again meant never again to anyone. Who say “There’s people over there.” I look at my son’s lip, and I miss something. A cleft. A split, right down the middle. Leans to the left. I hold my son and I pray for the people of Gaza. But like every Jew, I never pray alone.