I started this post before Hamas’ massacre of Israelis on October 7th 2023. Just days before the most recent flare-up in this decades-old war, I was taking Yom Kippur seriously for the first time in twenty years.

I started dabbling in Judaism again in late 2022. A friend and his wife would make challah and bring over candles and wine and we’d celebrate Shabbat. I was rusty. I forgot the prayers and the way things were done. But reconstituting this tradition felt serious and meaningful for us and our young families. We’d sometimes bring friends, and I rather seriously wanted it to be only Jews. This particular desire felt out of character for me. In retrospect, I feel like my nervous system was preparing for a war I didn’t even know was about to happen. I just felt safe in the cocoon of my people.

What kind of Jew am I? I’m the did-a-bar-mitzvah-but-just-memorized-the-Torah-phonetically-rather-than-actually-learning-Hebrew kind; the rich kid kind; the kind of privileged Jew who got a fax from the Prime Minister of Israel on the day of my Bar Mitzvah because my grandfather and him were friends; the type of Jew that doesn’t believe the Holocaust can actually happen again on the same scale; the type of Jew that knows our traumatic past doesn’t disqualify us from committing genocide. I’m the kind of Jew who was raised Zionist, went to Israel multiple times, and was led to view the settlements as a kind of achievement.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theuseriscontent.substack.com