My walls have crumbled

October 7 was the day I felt everything crumble

Without really knowing it, I had spent three years putting up walls. Somehow, this world which I had been thrust back into, my so-called ‘real life,’ was too lurid, too sonorous, too discombobulating. I needed to keep it at bay. There was such a thing as too much freedom, or so I felt. I needed defences.

The irony wasn’t lost on me of course. All those long and pointless days spent staring at physical walls- knowing their every crack and crevice, every swirl of their faux-marble tile, their every stain and smear. Longing for the world I imagined outside, a world of rapidly retreating memories. But the moment I finally arrived there I began to beat my retreat. I started erecting walls of the mental kind. There is comfort in building oneself a fortress, there is security in fencing in those parts of yourself which might shatter.

I had buttressed my fragility with illusions of stoicism, fortitude and resilience, convincing myself that I was strong, that I was healed. I went about my daily life and tried to put all thoughts of back there, of the Middle East and all it had given and taken away, firmly out of my head. I found a non-Jewish partner whose own background allowed him to understand what I had survived when so many others could not. I had a child. I rejoined the workforce. The walls were there, but if I felt them at all I would say they were more like a soft blanket, a soothing presence, more guardrail than razor wire.

Then, suddenly, the flood. Families herded together in their pyjamas. Young people frantic and zig-zagging through the desert. The pockmarked streets of Sderot. The unspeakable fate of too many children on both sides of the border fence.

As I clutched my own child tightly to my chest I felt tremors. For me it had all been too bright, an endless, sickening, 24-hour brightness. But for them there was no light at all. Where I had shivered in the winter chill that descended down from the Zagros mountains, there they were sticky and humid and choking. Desperate for oxygen, struggling to breathe, the smell of soil all around them. Was it a damp kind of soil, or was it sandy, or dusty? What sort of mental games did they play to pass the time, to blunt their fears? Did their narrow, bunker-like walls give them a perverse sense of comfort, as ‘real life’ twisted and shrunk and retreated with time? When they came out (if they came out) would they too build a fortress of the mind, and would that too come crashing down in the wake of some future unspeakable horror?

On October 6 they thought that walls would protect them. Now, as I scramble to re-erect my defences, I no longer find comfort in fencing off the turmoil inside my heart. Maybe, out of the suffering and the loss and the grief and the cruel and pointless violence there is something of a togetherness, and in our collective despair, we might glimpse an unwalled, meandering, yet hopeful path forward.