The Letter While We Wait For Your Return ~via Gavriella Zahtz (Gail Klein)
Graviella and I connected 12 years ago via social media when she was known as Gail Klein. I wrote a post recently that upset her that led to this substack.
She sent me this message along with the substack post... "Ted Rubin I spent all day writing my emotional response to your post."
My response: Gavriella… thank you for sharing this heartfelt post, and the mention in the post (appreciated), although I believe you drastically misrepresent my outlook and perspective (clearly stated here in my post and replies)
Gavriella… I’m not attacking you, or Israelis, I’m attacking Netanyahu, who is responsible for all of this… right from the start.
Netanyahu’s goals, policies, and actions, are making Jews worldwide much less safe, not safer.
His agenda has never been to bring the hostages home, it is to continue the conflict as long as possible, to expand the conflict, and to kill as many as possible. I also truly believe he knew an attack was coming at some point, helped to empower it, and intentionally looked the other way and let it happen, because it helped his militaristic objectives, and kept him in power and out of prison. #SadButTrue /Ted
What is it like sitting under an Iron Dome beneath a David’s Sling and more than one arrow while somewhere in that airspace countries and leaders and bureaucracies and not a few well funded puppets- who desire nothing more than the total destruction of my people, the Jewish people, on or off of our ancestral land of Eretz Yisrael- are volleying missiles, interceptions, hostage names or who are alive or not or mostly in the first round. And as they volley we sit here with the most gaping, horrific, national pain while the world even now cannot even wait a breath before dancing on our graves and rejoicing at our sacrifices and missteps in petty and so big I’ll fall on this sword internal conflict that should be kept within the family - but we’re the Jews, those Jews who refuse to commit suicide on your RPG.
And the first three names come in. And I can’t breathe. I write a note:
The first three names. The first three daughters and sisters, granddaughters and I’ll-be-your-forever-persons have been released. Romi Gonen. Emily Damari. Doron Steinbrecher. Our girls are coming home after 471 days in H-LL. I can’t breathe. We are not okay. The greatest joy wrapped in such unimaginable loss. To be Israeli is to hold it all. At. The. Same. Time.
HaKadosh Baruch Hu- Our Gd in Heaven who holds answers that we cannot begin to understand. Please let us see the good. Your children are hurting.
Then I get a WhatsApp photo of just-planted flowers in Jerusalem. I can’t help but smile. I send back a link to the song
Three Little Birds by Bob Marley and the Wailers.
Rise up this mornin',
Smiled with the risin' sun,
Three little birds
Pitch by my doorstep
Singin' sweet songs
Of melodies pure and true,
Saying', ("This is my message to you-ou-ou:")
Singing': "Don't worry 'bout a thing,
'Cause every little thing gonna be alright."
And I smile. Then I realize…three little birds. Romi Gonen. Emily Damari. Doron Steinbrecher.
To be nearly Israeli is to hold it all.
At. The. Same. Time.
Of course we are in pain. Deep Pain. Searing Pain. The kind of pain whose overture is the symphony of cracking ice going on and on and on from that first break whenever and wherever that was. While we are in pain, we refuse to be victims. We reject the notion. This is one of the irreconcilable differences between Israelis and our Western friends and family. The woke infused Western Universities who have been able to take over entire cities, states, countries and regions with its industry of victimhood and graywashing of the realities of evil here on this earth.
We are setting free murderers and rapists with an absolute certainty that they will kill and rape again. We are releasing back to their jungle Palestinian terrorists who have killed our innocent babies on school buses and our elderly Holocaust survivors at bus stops. In exchange for this guarantee that we are today setting free the next Palestinian terrorist who will kill my sister or brother, my innocent baby riding a school bus or my elderly Safta who survived now twice watching their babies burn in the ovens….In exchange we are getting back three Bas Yaakov’s, daughters of Israel, who have spent 471 days being raped, tortured and terrorized while the world of feminists and liberal lovers unless it’s a Jew activists has not just forgotten them, but said they are casualties of a war that is ultimately their fault.
Leave no baby behind. Not living. Not dead. (Yesterday we recovered the remains of one of our boys they killed ten years ago and continued to torture the family by not allowing the body to be buried. A Jewish burial. Ten years). Leave no child behind.
And yet every one of us has a piece that will never return. A child killed or taken. An uncle saved, but never from the nightmares. A side casualty of October 7 whether from faith or fortune or love or hope….lost now, possibly never to be returned.
But our babies are coming home.
Yesterday in the full daylight of Shabbat, in the middle of a busy, modern, thriving secular city of Tel Aviv, a 19 year old Palestinian terrorist stabbed an Israeli. The man was “seriously wounded.” In other words: not dead, but close. No reason- just another Jew with the audacity to live as a Jew in a Jewish country. The terrorist was killed. If he had lived he certainly would have been set free in a future swap for 0.01733193277 of a girl stolen in the very beginning of her life for the crime of being a Jewess in a Jewish country. That is the math. We release up to 1,904 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, including several serving multiple life sentences for deadly terror attacks and murder, in return for 33 Israeli hostages. Mostly alive. We do not know.
In 471 days the International Red Cross has been unable to verify who is alive. And today, as the lists with our babies names float between truths and fantasies of socially bankrupt media, still, we do not know: are we releasing the murderer of the one and only son of our next door neighbor who we’ve known since grade school in exchange for a lifeless body, knowing that the cost was a guarantee of another baby taken, mutilated, killed.
And what of the soldiers? These beautiful beautiful boys and girls whose parents and brothers, whose sisters and grandmothers and aunts and uncles and I’ll-be-your-forever-persons gave all. For victory? Of course we will keep giving. But what is victory?
To be able to tell the parents of the children who live around the Gaza border and the Northern border- to look them in the eye and say, “When you tuck your children in at night and say, ‘You are safe. You are home.’ You can mean it.”
How can we do that when the missiles have never stopped, not in Sderot and not in Metula?
In the middle of this balagan, after ten years alone, I am dating. Israeli men. Beautiful. Exotic. Unbelievably injured. Remarkably alive.
After ten years I asked the sheilah- the spiritual question answered via an ancient system of legal rulings on the application in my life of the Laws of Moses- and I uncovered my hair so I can date. And from this high protein smoothie of living for the first time in the land of my inheritance that happens to be in the middle of a war when I am mid way in a life that’s really the second or fifth chance of a life I didn’t earn or deserve and uncovering my hair after decades and losing a lot of weight both actual and metaphorical… I am like a fusion painting if Georgia O’Keefe met Yaakov Agam.
I am open. I am new. Different from every vantage point. I am planted. I am stretching towards the sun every day. Some days too close.
This week is my six-month anniversary of landing in Israel on a one way ticket from JFK international airport in Queens without irony New York.
Rega, Wait….I thought I just heard an interception. Hold my breath. No it was construction. Or a backfiring. Or I do not know. But my heart is still racing even though I’m an old pro nearly Israeli who takes missiles on the beach and laughs, I tell you laughs HA HA HA at those Iranian missiles whether or not they are ballistic.
While I regain my breath, I am drinking my last cup of coffee. Whatever financial off ramp I had coming to Israel on a one way ticket is so far back in the rear view mirror that I’m wondering if it was a mirage all along. So I’m eating the last of the lentils, and having the last coffee and leaning into bitachon knowing Hashem has a plan because there is no way no how that He brought me through my own gehenim to leave me actually homeless in my homeland. This particular trust fall takes an enormous amount of effort to stay completely in the moment and know that broken into this exact moment Hashem has come through (of course!) and I have everything I need.
The person I really want to consult with on this current bitachon flight is busy….using all his time and his energy up against a different terrorist: Stage Four Small Cell Lung Cancer with under a 3% survival and these banner failure rates starting before 90 days and here we are more than two months from the week when we waiting together connected by whatsapp telephone across an ocean and another half a country for the biopsy results that confirmed the worst. So together we work on bitachon and love and purpose of course- but it’s his time. His time to face death and come to the intersection and maybe take the road most travelled and go home to the Creator who of course loves him. Or maybe come join me in the #NotDeadYet club.
The thing is: I don’t know how to construct a world without him. He’s been my guide and mentor, my Rebbe and teacher, my brother and best friend and the one person who I gave the Guardianship of my four most precious souls because he’s been the one person who has showed up and loved us all - unconditionally….Without obligation. I’m on the community tehillim chat made up mostly of people who left me for dead and then were angry when I both refused to disappear and then was so darn noisy about my problems…It is meant to make me feel part of something perhaps. Instead I feel very alone. He’s my forever person who I shared with a world that has been deeply impacted by his teachings. I am one of many. I am alone.
And of course I can not go to his side even if I had the funds while I sit betwixt and between no longer with any ties to the United States but not an Israeli citizen. An ExPat in my own land. And I am neither here nor there. No longer an American, as I realize how very much I have been one for 54 years, and certainly not an Israeli. Stumbling in a language that’s been a long ago struggle in ways that are sometimes charming and sometimes infuriating to both Israelis born here and to those who immigrated well before me. I celebrate small victories daily of finding just the right word or even a good enough word in between being made fun of and barely tolerated. Holding it all on my tip of my tongue at the same time.
Of course we are barely a quarter of an hour from when the Israeli government could confirm receiving three names of three living daughters of Am Yisrael when the streets of Gaza are a literal parade of armed terrorists, no longer afraid to come above ground in their green bandannas and machine guns received by mercenaries disguised as aide workers. It’s another party. And they’re gearing up in Judea and Samaria, ready to party party with their breatherns whose families have been on the pay-to-slay payrolls for decades, legitimized by the Sometimes-It’s-Completely-Appropriate-to-Speak-Ill-Of-The-Dead former American President Jimmy Carter.
And a full sixteen hours before we received this tiny little list of three Jewish princesses, little birds soon to come home Please Gd, we were being condemned on Facebook by the Liberal American Jews who of course don’t hate themselves they just hate any Jew who will refuse to commit Hari Kari on a RPG brought in under the tarmac of an international aide agency that held very loud prime time interviews to share the outrageousness of the death of their workers who turned out to be verified terrorists and then they were (much more quietly) astounded that such terrorists were on their payrolls and in their clearly marked humanitarian jeeps.
My Facebook friend (did we meet at the Big Pharma sponsored rooftop invitation only party at that overpriced but fun! fun! fun! health conference? Or was it when we both judged yet another venture capital competition- who wins these things anyway? Or maybe we never met. Maybe I was just taken in by our 44 mutual friends or your clear human compassion announced on the Tshirt of your profile pic “Be Good To People!” or your socks- such socks!- worn completely unironically in your First Class photo opps ending in your VC shoes….how I love VC shoes and skinny pants….)
But whether we’ve ever met or not, regardless of whether you know anything about me or my people, despite our shared Ancestry.Com DNA as Ashkenazi Jews born on the fair and sometimes sort of welcoming shores of the United States of America…a full 16 hours before Hamas had even kept the very first requirement of three little names living or dead to be released for dozens or hundreds of murderous terrorists- you were sure to tell me and your other 4.8 thousand closest friends- that I and the rest of Israel should feel #shame #shame #shame for refusing to start our side of a cease fire when the other side was violating the very first requirement. So thank you. I needed your post as much as I needed another empty cardboard roll from the toilet paper. Not even useful to clean up the poo.
As I am writing I keep checking my Chrome tabs for 124 News and Times of Israel - are there helicopters? Lines of flag-holding friends and family given notice a few moments ago- on the ready to greet their forever person who is coming back from H-ll a miracle- the redemption of the captives. The latest: the IDF still has no idea what time any of our girls will be set free. First they will be given to the Red Cross- those bastions of compassion who haven’t been bothered to deliver a bottle of medicine or provide proof of life for millions of hours of H-LL- practically the girls’ besties. Then these not-really-human-itarians will hand the girls to IDF special forces currently inside the Gaza Strip. Each one someone’s child, each one currently risking their life for hours and hours while waiting to receive the package of joy wrapped in a package of sorrow. Each one hoping they can be the one to tell the story for years.
Then the girls will be taken, likely by helicopter, to the closest army facility near the Gaza border for an initial checkup, and then to a hospital to meet with their families. And then we will get the photo or maybe the video taken on a shaky iPhone of her hugging her mother, or the selfie in the hospital, but sometimes none at all- the worst when they can’t even share a momentary photo opp with a nation on the edge of hope and joy and longing and loss and pain but not victimhood, of fierce, fierce love for this country that is ours and all we have, a love we hold at exactly the same time that we hold a profound disappointment in its’ failures.
Every day that we read the Torah publicly, together we pray these ancient words:
אַחֵינוּ כָּל בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל, הַנְּתוּנִים בְּצָרָה וּבַשִּׁבְיָה, הָעוֹמְדִים בֵּין בַּיָּם וּבֵין בַּיַּבָּשָׁה, הַמָּקוֹם יְרַחֵם עֲלֵיהֶם, וְיוֹצִיאֵם מִצָּרָה לִרְוָחָה, וּמֵאֲפֵלָה לְאוֹרָה, וּמִשִּׁעְבּוּד לִגְאֻלָּה, הַשְׁתָּא בַּעֲגָלָא וּבִזְמַן קָרִיב. וְנֹאמַר אָמֵן
Our family, the whole house of Israel, who are in distress, or in captivity — who stand either in the sea or on dry land — may the Omnipresent have mercy on them and take them out from narrowness to expanse, and from darkness to light, and from oppression to redemption, now, swiftly, and soon!
As we all sit on the brink, may all of Am Yisrael be taken into the expanse of the light and to the ultimate redemption. Amen.
Gavriella
