Grief, hope, and connection
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Editorial

Grief, hope, and connection

I’ve often written about the way that themes tend to echo thoughout an issue of the newspaper, although the stories it includes hadn’t been chosen to advance any particular idea.

This week, it’s not surprising that three themes are repeated: Grief and hope and connection.

Grief because October 7 was Monday, the hostages have been imprisoned in soul-crushing squalor, with extreme cruelty, for more than a year now, and not only has the war against Hamas not ended, Israel now may be on the brink of a larger, region-wide war. Its brilliance in what it’s done to Hezbollah — the kind of brilliance that brings back the idea of Israelis as extraordinary masters of tactical and maybe even strategic genius — has gone part of the way to redeeming its blundering stupidity in not realizing, despite warnings, and neutralizing the October 7 butchery.

Hope because life has continued for most Israelis, and most Jews, since October 7. That doesn’t bring any of the dead back to life and it doesn’t restore the grievously wounded to wholeness — something we always should remember when we talk about hope too glibly — but it does make the overwhelmingly important point that we are still here.

Weddings are celebrated, babies are born, toddlers learn to walk and then run with grace, small children learned to read, and most of us still laugh, at least occasionally. There still is the occasional flash of wild joy.

And then there’s the connection. The idea that no matter how different we Jews are from each other, still there is something that binds us to each other. It’s not ideology. It’s not theology. For some of us it’s DNA, but not for all of us. It’s the gut-deep knowledge that we’re all part of the Jewish people, and that kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh. We are all responsible for each other. We are all part of each other, in an undefinable but real way. It shouldn’t take grief and rage to make that clear, but certainly grief and rage have done that for many of us.

In the end, we know that we Jews have been here for millennia, and we’re not going away now.

G’mar chatimah tovah. May this year clear the very low bar that would make it be better than last year.

—JP

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