1.
This week, Israel and around the world marked the month of Simchat Torah. These days, I live with conflicting emotions, even around the sense of time: sometimes it seems to me that it was only a few days ago, and sometimes it seems to me that we have been in this era for a year. What, a month has already passed? What, only a month has passed?
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A week and a half after the events, someone forwarded me a story told in an internal WhatsApp group of ZAKA volunteers: "Friends, I have to share with you something that happened to me just now. I stop with the ambulance at a gas station in a convenience store to buy myself a bottle of drink. At the checkout, a man, who looks to be in his sixties or so, approaches me and says, 'Excuse me, can I ask you something outside? Do you have a minute?' I told him, 'Honestly, I don't have much time.'.
""I was on my way to the funeral procession at the cemetery in Ashdod. And he tells me: 'No, not long. Just half a minute. I just want you to come with me to my car for a second.' Well, we go out to the car in the gas station parking lot, he opens the gas cap and shows me tefillin. He tells me: 'Do you see these tefillin? These are tefillin that my father, may his memory be blessed, bought for me when I was a boy at the age of 13. That was the first and last time I put them on. I haven't put on tefillin since. I don't remember how to put on tefillin.
""My father was a Jewish Holocaust survivor, and when I saw the Holocaust that was done there in the kibbutzim, I thought about going to some synagogue to put on tefillin, so I took the tefillin with me in the trunk of the car, and every time I stopped myself, no, I won't go, I will go... But when I saw you, a ZAKA volunteer, I said, 'Look, you were there, you remind me how to put on tefillin.' I stood with him, taught him to say the blessing, the man was moved in a way that is hard to describe... He told me: I want to start putting on tefillin every day.".
I heard this story. I was very excited and forwarded it on WhatsApp to a group of friends. At the end of the text I added a tag that I had a feeling I might still use: '#'Tefillin_in_Gaze.
Even then, a week and a half after the seminal event, amidst the initial shock, it was quite clear that this story was only the first in a series. Because since Simchat Torah, there have been many Jews here who have been walking around with tefillin in the gas station. Both real tefillin in the gas station, like that sixty-year-old man from the gas station, and also "tefillin in the gas station" as an image: tefillin as an image, the gas station as an image. In other words, they carry in their trunk a strong and deep Jewish point that has suddenly awakened.
It could be tefillin in a bag, it could be Shabbat candles in a bag, it could be a mezuzah, it could be a prayer, it could even be a song.
2.
And after all this, I must admit that I was surprised. I was surprised by the number of stories I've heard in the past month, and I was no less surprised by the intensity of the feelings. What we're seeing these days is not just a natural awakening of a connection to tradition. This unfortunately happens to many Jews in difficult times, both nationally and personally, when a major terrorist attack occurs or when a grandmother passes away.
But no, there was a big bang here, something that was released. I think the first to put it clearly was the stand-up comedian Eldad Sheetrit, who wrote: "I was wrong. I thought I had the option of renouncing my Jewish-national identity. I thought I had the privilege of living like an average Western person. I thought that anti-Semitism on the scale that is now being exposed was something that belonged to the past. Not anymore. I am proud of my Judaism and will fight for it on every possible front.".
It's amazing. Both the text and the person who wrote it. Eldad Sheetrit is a stand-up comedian. That is, someone who is here to make jokes. To entertain. To distract. Not to echo serious and compelling insights. But it turns out that yes, one rebuke repels a thousand hasty ones.
3.
And then came Omer Barak. It's a bit strange that I'm trying to recreate the beginning of the phenomenon minute by minute. It's clear to me that in a short time, and actually already now, it will be a crazy wave that is difficult to follow. And by the way, this is a global phenomenon. The Jewish awakening is really not only in Tel Aviv, it is also in Manhattan, California, Berlin and basically everywhere there are Jews.
But at this point in time, it is still possible to somehow put the events in chronological order.
Well, Omer Barak is a writer and screenwriter. He is 39 years old. His debut book, published five years ago, reached the top of the bestseller list within a week. It was later even made into a movie. I haven't read the book, nor have I seen the movie, but I can't stop reading the post he wrote last weekend. In fact, I don't read it, I study it. And this is what he wrote:
""In the context of soul searching and the things I thought and today I think differently, only two words come to mind, two words that I refused to say: I am Jewish.
Wow. How I hated those two words. In every lecture abroad I would say that I was Israeli, and if someone asked about my Judaism I would say that I wasn't. That I was born Jewish, but there is nothing Jewish about me.
And for the past week, this answer has been piercing my soul. And it won't give me rest.
In the house I grew up in, there is contempt for Judaism, and even without the house I grew up in, I think I simply didn't want to believe that I was the kid with the hat. And I also wanted to believe that I was a man of the big world. A writer. A journalist. A screenwriter. My Judaism is not part of my identity. It's not even on my ID card.
And I was wrong about that too.
Because I may not be the kid with the hex, but I am Jewish. And this is the first time in my life that I realized that no matter how hard I try, I can't escape it.
And this is the first time in my life that I realized that I don't want to either.
I am proud of my Judaism. I am ashamed that I denied it. I will not walk around with a kippah now, and I don't think you will see me in the synagogue, but I will seek my Judaism. I will seek my God. I will seek the identity that so many years and ages have tried to destroy, and that I accidentally almost destroyed myself and with my own hands.
Today I lit candles with my children. For the first time in my life. I didn't even have any at home, I took them from them, but I wanted to. We didn't even know what blessings to say, so we said the blessings of Hanukkah. May it be so.
And I prayed. For the kidnapped. For the soldiers.
On us.
I don't know if I'll do this every week. I don't know where this journey will take me. I do know that I am Omar Barak. Writer. Journalist. Screenwriter. Israeli.
"And a Jew.".
Well, it's no longer tefillin in a bag. It's a thousand horsepower of Jewish identity under the hood. Give me a few more writers like that, a few more thinkers like that, with depth, with courage, with the light of clarity, and the whole discourse here could change.
4
The truth is, I wanted to enthusiastically share Barak's words, but I held back. I was afraid that if right-wingers like me hugged him too tightly, it might push him away. Who knows, maybe he'll convert to Christianity... But then I heard him being interviewed by Eldad Yaniv and Israel Fried on Galei Israel, and I realized that the guy was deep in the story. It seems to me that he's reached the point of no return. No amount of sticky hugs will bring him back to where he once was.
""In this era, these days, it's very difficult to find the words for everything," he began. "I've lectured a lot abroad about my work, and when you come to lectures, certainly abroad, you come to talk about your work, and everyone wants to talk to you only about Israel and Judaism. And you say: No, none of that defines me. Am I Jewish? I don't have a kippah, I don't eat kosher, I travel on Shabbat, what does that have to do with me? Listen, I've been thinking about this a lot lately. And I also want to say something more about this thing, and perhaps about the mechanisms of where it comes from.
""We all grew up on the stories of our grandparents, about the Holocaust and the Germans, and we really wanted to believe in the depths of our hearts that this thing no longer exists. This anti-Semitism and evil - no longer exists. And I think that even in some kind of very sophisticated defense mechanism, which I was not aware of, and I suggest this only for myself and not for an entire generation, just me, as if to say: If we don't be like our grandparents, we don't become diaspora, we don't walk around with the shtreimel and we don't stand out and project our Judaism outward, but we all wear the same Messi and Michael Jordan shirts and walk around with the same Apple devices, then we are like them.
""What does it matter if I'm in London, or Amsterdam, or Paris? I'm a human being and he's a human being, and what does it matter, my religion doesn't define me.".
5.
And Amit Barak continued: "You talked about the reality that is being thrown in the face... You can't say it's because of the territories, it's because of the occupation. These people murdered people for one reason only, and you can't tell yourself another story. You can't anymore. The Israeli left, Israeli secularism, can no longer tell itself this story. This story is over. And I say this not with anger or rage, I say this with terrible heartbreak, because this is a concept that I have been a part of most of my life. But this post came specifically to say that precisely in the face of this terrible wave of evil - we said there are no words, I don't know how to describe this darkness that arose from there - of all the emotions in the world, a kind of pride and strength arose in me, and to say: If they come to kill me, if they come to kill me because I am Jewish, then I am Jewish. So I can no longer deny this, I don't want to deny this anymore.
""I feel like I'm walking through a minefield here, because wherever you go, someone will get upset about this, so I do try to phrase it with a clarification that I have no desire to upset anyone. My grandparents were originally kibbutzniks from the time of Mordechai, and secularism dominates this area. There is nothing religious about kibbutzim, and these people were murdered as Jews for all intents and purposes. It doesn't matter to them whether they have a headscarf or not, and which commandments they observe or don't observe, precisely because it happened there, precisely because it happened in such complete bastions of secularism. You can't close your eyes and say: I'm not Jewish, my religion doesn't define me, I choose not to. There's nothing more... This thing is part of us and it defines us, and I'm sorry that I denied it.".
6.
A month to the Simchat Torah Massacre. Just a month? Already a month? The truth is, it doesn't really matter how much time has passed. What matters is what we've been through in that time.
