email #45 — get in loser, we're talking about our feelings

[Leon Kraiem]

Hi friends,

Last night, I wrote you my 'extremely first reactions' to a deal being reached to return the hostages and end the war. I was not jubilant; I was — in the true sense — pessimistic. (I often go on this rant, many of you have heard it from me before, but I may as well rehearse it in writing: I was taught the meaning of 'optimistic' and 'pessimistic' in 2005, in the little breakaway room at the back of the St. Bernard's library, in Mrs. Ketner's reading class. She taught us: optimistic means focusing on the positive. Pessimistic means focusing on the negative. And we were then introduced, of course, to the 'glass half full/glass half empty' idiom. Now, it's worth pointing out that the proverbial optimist and pessimist here don't disagree about how much water is in the glass. To the extent that they 'disagree,' it's not because one of them thinks it's 3/4 full, and the other one thinks it's 3/4 empty. They're in the same reality, just choosing to dwell on different parts of it. And yet, in common parlance, people constantly use 'optimistic' to mean bullish and 'pessimistic' to mean bearish, thus shooting both accurate prediction and healthy disposition in the foot. If things are going to work out, you don't need to be optimistic. If you want to be optimistic, you don't need things to work out, that's the whole point of being optimistic; and one thing you shouldn't do is start lying to yourself, pretending that things are working out more than they are, in a roundabout effort to maintain that state of mind; conversely, if you're in a bad mood, momentarily or just generally, it's worth recognizing that you're pessimistic, and that's totally fine, and also it's useful to remember, your lack of hope does not mean the situation is hopeless — situations, really, can't be hopeless or hopeful, only people can. See: a different St. Bernard's School lesson in proper English, this time courtesy of Mr. Demeny, four years later, in a lesson to Mr. Feldman's class.) 

The agreement reached in Egypt last night is, quite literally, a very big deal. (Actually, it's a pretty thin deal — the hard part comes later.)  It is bound to provoke a lot of emotions. Last night, the ones I had access to were the negative ones. That was interesting to me, at the time. But I didn't spend too much time probing it, because I really needed to sleep. And once I woke up — really, as I woke up — the answer came all on its own: the negative emotions were the easy ones. They were the containable ones. They were the ones I had the capacity to feel and still go to sleep afterward. 

All day today, by contrast, I was on the verge of tears. That's not so unusual, I should note. Since October 7, I've spent a lot of time right on that edge, occasionally slipping over it, and then sitting back down on it again. For months and months that was just what it felt like — not what this or that felt like, just it — that's just what it felt like. More recently, that feeling receded significantly, noticeably, worryingly, disturbingly, upsettingly, comfortably, healthily. I’d still cry sometimes when the hostages or the fighting came up, which happened not infrequently, including while working (I'm sometimes asked what I think the political slant of ToI is; We do our best to be objective, but reality is never neutral and if you're anchored to the truth you will inevitably find yourself against the current here and there; this might be as good a description as any: we are serious journalists, not apologists or propagandists; but we are writing from Israel, and we edit in tears.); but it had been a while since the overflowing emotion was just always right on the surface, the way it was today. 

I walked all around town, wiping a little tear here and there, having microbreakdowns as I waited to cross the street; I went to the Hostage Families Forum tent, outside the Prime Minister's Residence; there weren't thousands gathered to dance and hug and let it all out, like there were at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv;  but I took the daily piece of tape with the number of days on it — 734 — and when the nice lady handing them out told me 'happy holiday,' I told her 'finally, happy holiday,' and we laughed that way that you laugh when you're sort of crying, and she said 'yeah, well, we still have to be vigilant,' and I said 'that's very true,' and I kept walking. I got some rice and beans at the place I like to get rice and beans, and I went into the bookstore where I often browse away a day off, and just generally followed the tracks I've followed many times before in this almost-broken-down state. But the valence this time — to be low-resolution about it — was positive, not negative. It was — again, painting in primary colors here, but we'll get to mixing them shortly — good-crying, this time. 

I spent a lot of time quietly sitting in those feelings and trying to get the lay of the land, and I think I've been able to sort out four of them. 

Relief

It's hard to communicate just how not-on-the-horizon "post-war" has been ever since this all started. When people ask, "Do you think you'll stay in this job?" I say, "At least until the end of the war." When people ask, "Do you think you'll stay in Israel?" I say, "At least until the end of the war." When I try to imagine career, marriage, children, retirement, the world with artificial general intelligence, literally anything longer term than a couple of months, there's a sort of 404 Error: Not Found Until After the War. And there's a problem of language here, that I've already run into several times in this email — my apologies, if some of these sentences were hard to stumble through on this account — which is that I say "the war," and I mean "the war," but I also, uniquely mean "the hostages." I of course mean having people I love on the front lines of a deadly armed conflict, and having missile sirens rouse me from my sleep every couple days, and waking up to faces of young guys who are already being buried, and the anxiety of my parents that I feel through the phone when a new think-piece has come out about how this or that group is doggedly working to kill me. But I also, uniquely mean the awareness at every moment that there are people going through hell, going through the absolute extreme end of the worst sort of treatment possible, Holocaust level, Medieval level, unimaginable cruelty because Hamas abducted them and dragged them into those tunnels and they're still down there while I do whatever it is I'm doing. The awareness, too, that everyone around me is thinking the same thing. Our collective, tacit acknowledgment that something is deeply horribly wrong, and also that there is no obvious thing to do about it, and the sun will rise tomorrow even if the hostages won't see it down there, and it is still a mitzvah to make Shabbat dinner plans. 

The deal was reached on October 8. I was walking around today, thinking about that. What is beginning to end now — what will really get ending, according to the current estimates, on Monday, on Simchat Torah, on the precise two-year anniversary of the attack — is one very, very long day. There are the prisoners we will release, there is the partial withdrawal we will perform, there are the aid trucks and the negotiations and the this and the that — but the essence of the deal was: the hostages return, and there is evening, and there is morning, the next day. 

Einav Zengauker — the mother of Matan Zengauker, among the guys still captive — who has been ubiquitous for two years, at every demonstration, on every news show, a voice you instantly recognize, even to the point of annoyance, for which you're quickly, appropriately, ashamed — said to the people at Hostages Square, "You're going to need to help me learn how to breathe again." Of course, her experience is miles away from the average Israeli's; and the average Israeli's is miles away from mine; but there's no one in this entire country who hasn't forgotten, to some extent, what oxygen feels like. 

Joy

Then there is, on a very simple level, the impossible joy of people coming home. It's not just Einav and Matan that everyone in the country knows; you know all of these faces, these names; I've had the news on basically nonstop for two years — I recognize most of their parents by now. It's impossible to imagine being taken captive, and it's impossible to imagine it happening to a loved one. But there's no one who hasn't imagined it, a lot, over the last two years, not least because it's happened to a lot of people. I'm thinking of two people off the top of my head who personally know hostages slated for release in the coming days; I'm thinking of two other people off the top of my head whose loved ones were already returned, dead, in the last deal. I'm thinking about Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose face, as I've written about many times before, you literally can't go a block in my neighborhood without seeing, every corner his very recent stomping-ground. 

The minyan I go to on Shabbat mornings made little slips of paper, early on, with all of the hostages' names on them. For the Jews, it's all their Hebrew names — Him, son of his Mother — and for the non-Jews, their regular names, first and last. When the haftarah is being read, they come around and distribute the slips of paper. So that, when the reading is over, and the Torah is out, and we've said the prayer for the congregation, and the prayer for the state, and the prayer for the soldiers, and we're saying the prayer for the captives, we can add: and among them, and ensure that each hostage is davened for individually, just as we daven for them all together. 

As I've written about before, I've avoided wearing the dog-tag on the outside of my clothes, because I don't make political statements like that, and it was a political statement; I've never, until today, walked around with the piece of tape; I'm still jarred by that one, every time. I have friends, of course, who have adopted one or the other of those practices, and kept to it, through day 734 and counting. But I've been wearing the dog tag underneath my shirt fairly often, feeling it cold against my chest, playing with it like a rosary when I'm lost in thought, saying a blessing over it in the morning — who has obligated man to free the bound, is the formulation I settled on — and placing it on my bedside before I go to sleep. 

I remember in January, when the hostages were coming home — this week Romi, Emily, and Doron, next week Karina, Daniella, Naama, and Liri — recognizing that it was a miracle, and being struck by the follow-up conclusion that my definition of 'miracle' was going to have to change. This wasn't a 'miracle,' in the 'scientific' sense — it was the product of human actions, pretty well understood — and even more to the point, those actions were courageous and difficult and performed by people, and decisions matter, and attributing their achievements to God doesn't just gift Him stolen valor, it also dodges His draft, because it's our job to get this done, for Him — and so it felt downright wrong to call it a miracle; and yet each hostage's' return was unmistakably, clear as day, a miracle.

My friend Noah, who writes on Substack as The Angry Young Man, wrote something after the first Iran attack about this question, when people were saying the success of our air defenses was a miracle. He wrote about the pitfalls of crossing religious and political wires that way. He also compared the Iron Dome "miracle" to another,  more recognizable miracle, in this case the birth of a child to a couple he knows, who had tried and tried and finally didn't expect one ever to come — that’s probably the one thing we can safely say fits squarely within the definition of a miracle, given every other chapter in Genesis. Anyway, I'm directing you to that thing he wrote, because it was good and thoughtful, and I don't have an answer to this question. 

I just know that this is a miracle, too, and it's one we've all been praying for, and protesting for (which is sort of a secular Israeli version of praying, especially when it comes to this), and hoping desperately for, and it's a source of enormous joy to believe we'll actually live to see it. 

Grief

Sometime after the relief and the joy, I was able to identify grief. 

Most people in this country have lost someone close to them over the last two years. That grief is immediate. They’ve felt it, they feel it, they will feel it. That is the primary story of the grief of this war, is every actual, very real loss, in hundreds and hundreds of homes, starting at 6:29 am on October 7, 2023 and ending, God willing, with the imminent return of the last of the captives in the coming days. 

And of course, it’s not just the dead; it’s the thousands of wounded, in body and in mind; the relationships that couldn’t bear the strain of hundreds of days of reserve duty, and the relationships that have borne it so far but will break in the months and years to come; all the kids who spent a year living in hotels with equally traumatized and dissociated parents, only returned to their body here and there by the need to run to the bomb shelter for the third time that day.

Each of those chasms is already there, I don’t mean to suggest that a deal somehow “unlocked” loss for the bulk of people in this country, who are already in literal, straightforward mourning. 

But for me at least, the ability to speak about the events of the last two years in the past tense will surely allow the scale of what’s been lost to sink in, in a way I’ve been staving off so long as the event’s been ongoing. And, maybe more importantly, it will create space, attention, resources, for the collective work — “to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations,” as Lincoln put it. 

And then, there are the families who are waiting for bodies. 

This is something I’ve written about and talked about a lot, especially over the last year or so, is the conflation of living and dead hostages. To release terrorists and endanger troops in order to rescue a person from hell is one moral calculus. To release terrorists and endanger troops and put civilians in long-term danger for the recovery of body parts is a different moral calculus. And the distinction between them is elided more often than I think is appropriate. (For example, at the weekly protest, the slideshow of every hostage and the cry of: Bring them home!, which does not even list all the living and then start listing the dead, but mixes the living and the dead together, with no indication of when we’re calling for people, vs. when we’re calling for remains.) 

But those bodies matter. They matter for the sake of the slain hostages themselves, in a sort of philosophically obscure, religious-imagination sort of way. But they also matter, in a very not-theoretical, not-ambiguous way, for their families who want to bury them. When Joseph’s brothers sold him, they brought Jacob his bloodstained coat. “All his sons and daughters sought to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted.” And lest you think the matter of the body wasn’t an important detail, remember that all those decades later, when Joseph died for real, he made those same brothers swear they’d take his bones with them to be buried in the Promised Land. And remember that four hundred years later, when everything else about the patriarchs had been forgotten, the Israelites rushing out of Egypt make good on their forefathers’ vow. 

Pride

This is the last feeling I was able to recognize, but it’s really the one I most wanted to write about. So naturally, I left it for last, and am finally getting started at 3 am, with my Vyvanse worn off. But I’ll write it, because it’s important. 

I am bursting at the seams with pride in this country. 

That’s a little silly, given how little I had to do with all this. But let’s set aside the question of my own claim to it, and just talk about why I feel this way. 

Nadav Eyal, on Call me Back tonight, noted the number of casualties in this war like this: He said, in return for each (living) hostage we’re releasing some 12 life-sentence prisoners and 85 Gazan detainees, sure; but also: for every one (living hostage), we’ve given twenty soldiers, who went into combat and fought and died to get them back. 

We could have brought Hamas to its knees in weeks. If this war were not, at its foundation, a war to return the hostages, it would not have taken anywhere near as long, it would not have been anywhere near as deadly, it just would not have been this war. They took 251 people, and this country went to war, and stayed at war, to get every last one of them back. 

Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and reservists mobilized. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum organized itself and gave its first press conference on October 8. The protest groups that had spent a year opposing the government’s judicial overhaul transformed themselves overnight into civilian war rooms, sending equipment to army units and finding housing for evacuees. 

That fact — that the government failed, and precisely the government’s opponents filled the gap — was well-covered, if I remember correctly, at the start of the war; it’s worth remembering. 

I wrote to a local acquaintance of mine this morning, whom I met when she was organizing the student contingent of the ‘democracy’ protests in ’23. She’s been leading the Hostage Families Forum protests in Jerusalem every week she’s been in town for two years. When she’s not in town, it’s because she’s in reserve duty. I wrote to say thank you — for the protests, and for the reserve duty, and for specifically that both/and, and everything it represents. 

Israel is not perfect. It has profound issues. I’ve written about some of them at length. But if Israel were a person, who had been through what Israel has been through, who came out on the other end in the sort of shape this country is in — something would have to be seriously wrong for you not to admire the hell out of her. 

There is more to say, but etc. etc., it’s 4am.

--

“Moadim l’simcha,” as the kids here say.

There is much to be optimistic about, and also it seems like there will be good news.

I am alive, and I am well, thanks to others, not all of whom are.

I will continue to keep you posted,

Leon