I am deeply sad and equally grateful to be a Jew today

I had the most profound experience of my Jewish life in the nine months following October 7.
I worked for the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies for about 12 years, until the beginning of 2022. On about October 8 or 9 the Board’s president asked me to ‘come back and support the community. That answered a need in me that was much deeper than the need I was being asked to address.
I helped again with the work of the Board, which was so extensive I don’t know how they managed to do it all. I dealt with students and parents and teachers facing antisemitic speech and violence in schools. I sat as the support person for Jewish employees facing harassment at work. I answered up to 10 calls a day from friends and acquaintances and total strangers who wanted counsel or just a shoulder to cry on. But the most important thing I did, for myself at least, was go into people’s homes.
I made it up as I went along. I just felt the need to be with people and give them the opportunity to be together, authentically ‘in community’. I didn’t want this to be ‘institutional’ either in venue or in feeling. I wanted it to be intimate and personal, so when people would call needing ‘help’ I’d say that if they wanted to bring 20 of their friends together at their place, I’d come, and we would talk.
At the start I had no idea how this would go, but I felt my way through what people told me and asked me and it evolved, more organically than anything I’ve ever done professionally.
For at least that first 6 months, 2, 3, 4 and sometimes 5 times a day I would go into someone’s home to run a 90-minute session. I’d find not 20 people there but 47 or 63 or 90. There would be people sitting on the floor and standing, lining the walls. Teenagers, octogenarians, three generations in the same room, people who hadn’t seen each other for years. People who hadn’t ‘been part of the community’ since their childhoods, or ever. I’ve worked for the Jewish community for almost 15 years and at least half of those people I’d never seen in my life before.
Every home was different. Some were tiny, some were enormous. Some were messy and some were immaculately ordered. Some were shabby chic and some so minimalist I couldn’t find the bathroom doorhandle. One was a time capsule of 1985. There was always food. Sometimes a morning tea like my grandma used to make and sometimes a catered dinner from Kepos Kitchen. Each host set up some space somewhere as a theatrette, I’d plug in my laptop and projector or HDMI into their flatscreen TV and off we’d go.
There was always crying. And every emotion in between. Anger. Sadness. Incredulity. Frustration. Fear. Sometimes my emotions mirrored theirs and sometimes I could complement and comfort. But I could never give answers. I would try to manage expectations at the beginning by saying that I had no answers, just maybe some navigation tools, and maybe not even those. I said “I don’t know” a thousand times. But somehow the demand kept coming because people were desperate; to be together more than anything else.
Over nine months I talked with and learned from and cried with over four and half thousand Jews in New South Wales, plus some in Perth and Melbourne and Brisbane and Byron and places I can’t even remember now. There are only 40,000 Jews in NSW, so that was over 10% of our population. It was incredible to me. Once-were-strangers still come up to me and they know me and I know them because we were in one of those rooms together.
The first three months were so intense I didn’t sleep. I really didn’t sleep because if I did I was dreaming it. Panic, falling dreams about girls in tunnels. Probably the same dreams you had. The demand for sessions in that period was so high that I’d be driven from one to the next. Some days my partner Howard would be my driver all day and other days complete strangers would ferry me around, as if I was the queen. It felt like I was moving through the world on a pillow of love and tears.
People gave me bathrooms to wash my face in and beds to lie down on in between sessions. People I’d only just met gave me keys and codes to their houses and Internet passwords so I could stop in any time I needed to and work or sleep, or sleep over, which I often had to do.
The sessions were free of course, but many hosts gave me gifts. A pair of pyjamas, from a rag-trader who hoped they’d help me sleep better. A set of instructions for voice care from a voice therapist. I was hoarse a lot of the time from talking and from crying and they really helped. Movie tickets for the far-off day when we’d be able to go to the movies on a Saturday night. Wine, Vodka, Food – so much food. I put on 5 kilos in those homes, damn Hamas.
I punctuated the nine months with two trips to Israel – one for 5 weeks to volunteer and one for another 5 to dance at my nephew’s wedding. Those trips were my sanity. Doing basic, mostly mindless labour in Israel for people who would never know I’d done it enabled me to breathe finally, and even sleep – after the first 3 sleepless months, ironically in Israel I slept solidly for the first time.
We’re now 12 months in, and up to the third iteration of the sessions. I updated them all the time, sometimes daily, incorporating every new terrible or slightly less terrible thing that happened. Once in a while a pinprick of hope and light. And the first iteration gave way to the second, and now we’re riding the third wave. Tomorrow maybe the fourth.
Today I was at a funeral and I looked around the Ohel at a group of people, at last half of whom I don’t know, and I thought: every single one of us in this room is living a different life from the one we lived a year ago, and it’s some version of the life Jews lived for millennia preceding us.
I thought I bet we’ve all lost someone we thought was a friend. We’ve all struggled with a family member we don’t want to lose but cannot talk to at this moment. We’ve all thought twice before saying something in public we’d never have hesitated to say before. We’ve all done a double take looking at a street scene in our own city . We’ve all had a moment of understanding the phrase ‘a people apart’.
But now we are a people together. As together as Jews can be under our huge tent, straining at its seams with all our different views and heated, pointless arguments. Pointless because we all know that even our brothers and sisters standing defiantly outside the tent will end up being forced back into it by the hate-blinded monsters who only see ‘Jews’ and nary a shade of grey among us.
I cannot thank those 4,500 people enough for what they gave me: the most rewarding experience of my professional life that I wish I’d never, ever had. I am so deeply, deeply, deeply sad and equally grateful to be a Jew today.