My Anti-War Cry for October 7th
On the day I finally wailed for my people. How I got there. And why it matters.
I was sitting by the lake. I had needed to take a break because I just could not stop crying. I had tried to hold it in around everyone, but no matter what I did the tears just kept flowing. It was a reaction I had never had in my life, where crying was almost like breathing, it couldn’t be stopped even if I tried.
So I had stepped out, realizing I wouldn’t be able to share anything if I didn’t let out whatever I was trying to hold back.
I walked over to the lake, made sure no one was around, sat down, and sobbed.
It was a sob I am not sure I’ve ever quite experienced. Maybe when I was young, the time I had gone to my math teacher’s funeral.
It was almost like wail. An ache that came from deep within my chest and let out in its full glory. An ache that I had been unable to, or unwilling to, let out until that day.
I sat there and sobbed for what felt like twenty minutes or so. Every few minutes, the wails subsided and I’d feel ready to return. But then suddenly I’d get overwhelmed again.
It felt more bodily, like I had been wounded and it was finally getting healed.
And, in actuality, that was exactly what had happened.
I was crying because, for the first time since October 7th, I had let myself truly feel the trauma of it.
I had cried for it many times before, but not like this. As the son of Israelis with family and friends in Israel, as well as someone who had visited it many times as a child, and had lived in Israel for three years, and had started my writing career there as I covered things like the first Gaza war and settler evictions, October 7th hit me deep in my bones, in my soul. Like so many others, the images, the videos, the shock, everything… it was worse than any disaster or attack I had witnessed in my life.
And yet, despite the pain of it all, it was the trauma we also had the least time to process. In America especially, there was no large, communal grieving. Although at the scale of 9/11, this was in another country. There were no telethons. And a flag could be waved, but it represented many things to many people. And as someone who spends a lot of time covering the dangers of antisemitism on Twitter, it was clear that many people would be far more invested in denying the horrors that occurred.
Even in the Jewish world, the grief was fragmented. While I and others grieved in our synagogues and through home spun events we hosted in our homes, the larger public experience was charged. Most larger public displays of grief inevitably turned into tacit or overt support for the coming war. And those who were against the war spent much of their energies on organizing to fight against it.
For someone like myself who was deeply against the war and with deep ties to Israel, grief was a private affair.
And then, days later, the war. First the bombings, then the ground invasion. And everything that had come before was now heightened: we were not in grief, we were political actors. We were team players. We had to act. And for good reason: whether we were for or against the war, it was happening and we knew that in a war largely centered around public opinion, our voices mattered.
It wasn’t just that, though. That was all the public reality, not the private one. Because while, yes, I was grieving in private, as the war raged on I found myself unable to do even that.
In fact, I felt… nothing. Or rather, I knew I was in grief, I knew I was in pain. But I didn’t let myself access it.
Whether it was my more right wing pro-Israel past or simply the part of me that identified so deeply with Israel and Israelis, I found it impossible to hold the two realities of Israel and Gaza in my heart. In the brief times I tried, my heart seemed to shatter.
So some part of me made a calculation: I wouldn’t feel anything. It was easier that way. I could speak out for both sides this way. There was space in my heart for both once I hollowed it out.
It was the lake that changed all that.
I walked back from the lake and entered the room we were all in.
I looked around the room and I saw our group, a group of Jews and Muslims who were brought together by a program in Los Angeles called NewGround to discuss Israel-Palestine. A group that was brought together shortly before and after October 7th. I had applied on October 5th. Our first session was on November 8th.
It was now February. The retreat by the lake. And painful, difficult truths had been said.
But as I walked back to my seat, I saw a group of people who had committed to saying those truths in an empathetic and loving way. We were brought together by intertwined traumas.
Up until that day, I had largely seen the tragedies as separate. Jews and Israelis had suffered from October 7th. Palestinians and Muslims had suffered from the war.
It was for this reason that I cut them both out of my heart. They were sufferings in conflict with each other: I could only oppose the war if I tapped into my moral principles and strategic logic.
Two traumas. Two pains. Two people.
Opposed, but with our futures and safety intertwined. Connected but separate.
But now I was walking back to my seat, and as I felt the healing that had resulted from my wailing, it became very clear to me that I had misunderstood and misempathized.
Because it was clear now. I had cried this way, finally let myself truly feel the horrors of October 7th, because I understood the path to facing the horrors of the war fully, I had to fully face October 7th. It was a door I had to walk through to enter the next room. And, at least for me, that door was locked until the people on the other side unlocked it for me.
Because yes, we are peoples going through distinct traumas. But the healing simply can’t happen separately. Not emotionally and not on the ground.
Because now that they had let me through, I realized it was my job to do the same. To help unlock the doors of others. To face their traumas, hear them fully, deal with the consequences.
In the trauma we are distinct. In the healing, we are united.