It’s the season

Now that Thanksgiving is over, we are full-on bombarded by what’s called the holiday season — red-and-white and green-and-red and candy-caned all over.

This year, though, Chanukah falls on Christmas (or should that be the other way around?) so although we might be increasingly othered as Jews in other parts of the culture, our gift-giving schedule is entirely in synch with the rest of the country’s.

Progress, right? Right?

Meanwhile, I’ve been struck this week by the heroism of seemingly ordinary people, and the fears of people who in a normal world would have nothing (other than death or illness, to be sure) to worry about.

Dr. Esi Sharon-Sagie has seen things that most of us can’t imagine seeing — horror and pain and death and fear and pure evil. She goes back, day after day, to see more of it, because by using her skills she can help mitigate some of that horror.

We need our dentists — we depend on our dentists — but we rarely think of them as heroic. They’re just, well, dentists, highly educated professionals who spend their days in other people’s mouths. But Esi has been able to use her experience and skills to identify hideously and purposely damaged bodies. She cannot give parents back their children, children back their parents, or lovers back their beloveds, but she can at least provide them with knowledge, and with that, possibly, some closure.

And then there are the Jews in Millburn who protest ugliness, who see the threatened violence in slogans turned into posters and hung on gallery walls. They’re able to stand outside and rally, peacefully and appropriately, but they’re not comfortable attaching their names to their actions.

The problem is that they’re not wrong. They feel threatened. They know that the threat may never materialize, may in reality be more in their minds than outside them, but our circumstances have changed enough that decisions that we all once made nearly unthinkingly no longer are as easy.

We thought that antisemitism was dead, but it just was breeding underground. That doesn’t mean that it will reach the levels that it’s gotten to at other times, in other places, but it does mean that history doesn’t move only forward. It sometimes also comes back. It goes round and round and round in the circle game.

—JP

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