Yesterday I wrote about seeing time in a Jewish way. I realized I only scratched the surface of the idea, mentioning for one the general who described the current situation as “Biblical.” Traditional Judaism doesn’t have a problem with seeing things in a biblical perspective. It’s central to the metier of Jewish belief. But for us western assimilated “educated” Jews? We have as much trouble with “Biblical” time as we do with ideas of “Good and Evil,” don’t we?
When we visited Israel in May 2023, only six months before evil descended on us, we met Dina at Tel Megiddo. Now Megiddo is a World Heritage Site like many of the ancient ruins around Israel, many of them dating back to the Bronze Age and earlier. And as much as we love Megiddo (it was the first place Sam spent time in Israel in 1971) we kind of well…poked fun at the bus loads of Christians lining up at the site of “Armageddon.” Seems THEY understood something we “educated” couldn't quite grasp. That is, the significance of biblical time.
Things changed on October 7. Immediately on the heels of Hamas’ bloodthirsty invasion the WORLD joined as one gigantic chorus and CHEERED THEM ON! All of a sudden we, Israel and the Jewish people, found ourselves stranded on an island in the middle of a hostile ocean of evil. If this reminds you of the Psalms, of King David pouring his heart out against his myriad enemies, it’s no surprise.
I can’t say that Jews all over the world came to this revelation all at once. There are still plenty of us who think this will blow over. And shamefully, plenty of us who insist on doing evil, of Israel as an oppressor, an occupier, some kind of evil entity. The mind boggles. Yet does it?
In the early days of October, which I alluded to in yesterday’s post, Sam and I looked for a sign, anything that would guide us out of the deep depression we felt. Anything to stop the triggering, the overwhelming feeling of isolation and vulnerability, anything to offer solace. The “signs” were few and far between, but when we saw them WE KNEW. One was a wild horse sent by our grandson Isaac a few days before, who had woken up, he told his mother, “talking to the horses.” Another was literally a sign next to an ancient Anasazi ruin that read, “Don’t climb the walls.” Sound desperate? We were.
I’m reminded of the days before the Iraq war, which fell right on another Jewish holiday…Purim! During that war Dina and her young family sat in a taped up room with gas masks, while rockets from Iraq crashed into the neighborhood. Something we safely cushioned American Jews could barely comprehend. But at the same time the Amalek Saddam Hussein attacked us, Sam, who was at Harvard at the time, came home in a panic over demonstrations that had erupted on campus…just like this time….in support of the “Palestinians” (maybe you can tell me what connection they have to Iraq???) and against the evil Zionist entity.
Was that just a practice run?
So when we started to digest the events of October and their aftermath, if “digest” is actually the word for something that will never be conceivable, we found that time had taken on a new meaning.
We found ourselves, like King David (who we kind of used to like to characterize as a little paranoid), surrounded by enemies. We found ourselves at a moment where good vs evil, or if you will godly vs. ungodly were suddenly in full resolution. With apologies to our Christian brethren at Tel Megiddo.
And we weren’t alone. My sister in law Barbara, who is not particularly attached to Jewish life, told Sam she dreamt she was at the parting of the Red Sea a few nights ago. Maxine’s rabbi, a less unlikely source, likened this time to the giving of the Torah in a recent drash. We all sense, or many of us do, that we are walking across a valley of dry bones. We are at a portentous moment of awakening, trembling. “Something” apparently made 300,000 of us come alive at the March for Israel in Washington in November. And even the most “educated” among us, though we might not be Torah educated, hear the words of the Haggadah, “in every generation” reverberating. When we let them in.
Sam has been involved in a weaving project to commemorate the fallen of October 7. The other day he came over from the studio and asked me to look at a new sculpture he made that he’s calling “Swords into Plowshares.”
In the sculpture he depicts time, raw time, as a planar surface twisted in struggle and pain. Out of it, or into it, a whirlwind of the most powerful dimensions, suggesting the bending of steel into a new dimension, a new usage. Sam told me it looks to him like a slow motion explosion, perhaps taking years, decades, millennia, longer. Who knows where we find ourselves now, in this Biblical moment, the one we find ourselves in today?
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