Brave new world

Now that the living hostages are home, what do we do next? What should we feel now? Has the world come back any closer to normal, or hasn’t it?

The hostages are home, but they have endured pain and fear and deprivation and horror in ways that the rest of us are lucky not to be able to begin to imagine. Their families and friends are still suffering too. The victims of October 7 are still dead. And the bodies of some of the hostages murdered or allowed to starve to death in Gaza are still there, although part of the terms of the ceasefire agreement was that they be brought back home.

It’s been an odd dilemma for those of us who wore the dogtag necklaces that reminded us of the hostages, and announced our allegiance to Israel — without making clear our politics — to the outside world.

Do we take them off now, as many of us have, or do we leave them on until the bodies, too, are returned, allowing their families at least to try for the probably vain goal of closure?

Not to put it on in the morning is to feel vaguely undressed and therefore borderline uncomfortable, and there probably is a deeper truth in that mild but constant feeling.

Meanwhile, the world continues to go crazy around us.

My husband and I went to see the Israel Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall last Saturday night. Getting in involved the kinds of searches and bag-openings and metal detectors that recall the aftermath of September 11, and largely have gone away except in Jewish venues or for Jewish performances.

There were rows of silent protesters outside, holding stark black-and-white signs asserting the usual — Israel as a genocidal state, supporters of Israel as supporters of genocide, the Israel Philharmonic as doing a Nero while Israel committed genocide.

I stared at them and they stared back at me. None of them blinked, I didn’t blink either, and I realized that I wanted to kill them.

It’s not something I would do, of course, and to be realistic it’s not something I could do even if I really wanted to, which I didn’t. But to have felt even a momentary flash of a feeling that deep, that atavistic, and that wrong was petrifying. But I also think that many people in this ghastly new world of ours, on all sides of every issue, get flickers of such disgusting emotions.

And then we went into the theater. Not everyone there was Jewish, but an overwhelming majority were, and there probably wasn’t anybody in the vast room who knew nobody else in it. The Jewish community is far tighter than that.

Hatred’s run amok in this world, along with a kind of vulgar, casual cruelty that would have been jaw-dropping just a few years ago. The art of savage politeness seems entirely dead, replaced by infantile insults and virtual poop-slinging.

But we can do better than that, right? Right? Right??

Let’s try.

—JP