Israeli Women

This is a different kind of prayer. A wandering the city at night because it’s raining prayer. I can stay out here as long as I want and no one will know prayer. The mist makes me feel like I can go anywhere. So I do.

Dear G-d. We’re still here. They vandalized these buildings, because they are Jewish buildings. So we return here by the hundreds. They shout slogans that, at best, they do not understand. And so we parade with Chanukah music past street signs where they tore our photos of the captives down. We’re here.

I get drunk at the parties. But not so drunk that I forget to keep an eye on entryways and track the movements in the room. There were less people out tonight, not like last year. But we are proud, and stubborn still. We haven’t forgotten how to be stubborn. And we’re still here.

I flirt with strangers. Let them put their arms around my shoulders, just tonight. The music is loud enough, the lighting dim enough to let them put their arms around my shoulders. “You’re Israeli,” the first one asks me. It’s the second time a man who didn’t even know my name asks if I’m Israeli. The first was near the nakba riots. “Yes.” My Hebrew is shit, my headstrong Jewish mother was born in Petach Tikvah. So I’m Israeli now. “You’re tough, that’s how I knew.”

We’re here.

“You don’t have a care in the world,” my friend tells me. “Dancing like that.” Ha, if you only knew. I dance this way because it has to be both.

--

I find myself modeling people who have passed, sometimes. Even the ones who weren’t happy. And what right do I have, trying to live out their lives through my actions?

Wondering

When we began to look like our Polish grandmothers

In skirts shorter than they’d ever wear them, lipsticks in colors they would never purchase

And eyes that, like their eyes,

Put sorrow in its place in order to survive.

And you. Standing there with hate crimes in your eyes. Even G-d knows better than to fuck with Israeli women.

--

This is a different kind a prayer. A dancing through the darkness prayer. A bring the captives back home now prayer.

There are six hundred people sitting in this room. It should have been outside. We are all here chanting Bring Them Home among ourselves. It doesn’t do much good, in this gorgeous shul. We all want to bring them home. Perhaps this was part of G-d’s plan, in some untouchable way. For once, we are all on the same page about something.

--

So I dance through the streets, with as many people as I can get to dance with me.

Even still. Of course.

Hineni.