Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement for the Jewish people.
As opposed to common thought, it is not a sad day but it is a solemn day, the most solemn in the Jewish calendar. For 25 hours we will not eat or drink, but pray and think about the year that was and the year to come. We pray that we will be written in the Book of Life. We pray that we will not be the ones to die too soon.
As I reflect on the year that was, I consider what has become of this country. The so-called Lucky Country. The so-called ‘one and free’ as is written in our national anthem. And for the life of me, I cannot see the ‘one’ or the ‘free’.
I read the statements made by our so-called leaders – our pernicious government – and I realise I feel like the betrayed partner who didn’t see the betrayal coming. The partner who thought all was fine and who thought her partner had her back only to discover, with shock and horror, that he did not. Rather, he had betrayed her trust again and again and that trust could never be reborn.
Like a survivor of family violence, I wanted to believe that he would change. I wanted to believe that the cycle of violence would not be replicated in this betrayal. To imagine that once again I could feel safe and that his words would comfort me.
That proved to be a false belief. There were no words of comfort. The betrayal was absolute. For me, after that, there would be no forgiveness and certainly I would never forget.
I listened and read in ongoing disbelief the statements made by the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. I read the hollow statements of blancmange support. I saw posters of the hostages pulled down. I saw the yelling and screaming mobs. I saw the keffiyeh-wearing useful idiots who, in my sleepless nights, turned into the baying crowds at Nuremberg.
Is there really any difference?
I saw the university encampments and the storming, this week, of a university professor’s office. They invaded because he is a Jew and a Zionist. Nothing to do with his physics classes. I see the police standing by and ignoring the mob like Kristallnacht when the police stood by while the mob destroyed Jewish businesses and homes and synagogues.
Are we there yet, I wonder?
I see the hand-wringing and the double-speak of our weak and spineless leaders. I see the endless bleating about a ceasefire and peace in our time. Oh yes, we have heard that one before. It did not end so well, as I recall. And I wonder who has the kishkes, as we Jews like to say, to see this through to the end? The ‘this’ is the end of the terrorist fronts that sit on Israel’s borders, in its streets, in its towns. Terror which murders and butchers its women children and babies. I see the so-called human rights and faux feminist voices extolling the principles of human rights and women’s and #MeToo rights, unless of course you are a Jew. I see language being corrupted until it becomes meaningless slogans and banners. I despair for the future of this once great country, now reeking of craven vote-catching and catering to a number greater than us. For we are few and they are many.
I watch and wonder what the others think? Those who do not march, yell, or pull down posters of babies… Where are they? Where are their voices? Will they wait until it is too late to raise their voices in a crescendo of clarity that we so dearly need? And so, I will go into Yom Kippur with a prayer book in my hand and a prayer in my heart. And I will pray, perhaps as never before, to be inscribed in the Book of Life, and for the end of speaking with a forked tongue as our government does, and for the eruption of the forces of good to ignite and to create a new and better pathway for the future, one that has moral clarity as its mantra. On Yom Kippur we are obliged to seek forgiveness from those whom we have wronged, knowingly or unknowingly. And so I do. But I am angry, very angry. I am not who I was a year ago. None of us is.
But I am not a survivor of family violence. I was not taken hostage or attacked on October 7. But I have been betrayed, like so many here, by those who are supposed to protect us. And that I can neither forgive nor forget.