While a terrorist group attacked innocent civilians at a concert in Israel, I was probably sleeping. At seven weeks pregnant – the size of my first baby when she was discovered lifeless in my womb at eleven weeks – I was dealing with a fair amount of personal anxiety. And nausea. On a progesterone supplement this pregnancy, I was sick for nearly the entire first trimester.
I heard the news of what was happening, and knew I should be paying attention, as both an ethnic Jew and a human horrified by senseless violence. Especially since I have family living outside of Jerusalem.
When I was awake, I panicked over whether my new baby would live. I was sickened by her growth and the latest onslaught of brutality. I fought for peace just to keep my head afloat. Often, that meant lying on the couch to read, but falling asleep instead. I lived on mostly saltine crackers for two weeks straight.
People told me not to trouble myself by keeping up with the news. Surely, hearing about the slaughter of babies is hard for any person with a conscience, let alone a mother. Even my therapist gave me “permission” to tune it out and focus on taking care of myself. What good would it have done to dump fresh panic on top of panic?
I’m not very good at tuning out bad news, however. I imagined this same scenario happening back in, say, 1940s Europe: a pregnant woman, still grieving the early loss of her first baby, hearing about death camps not so far away, where innocent babies like her own were being disposed of like vermin. Fresh panic on top of already existing panic. Exhausted, she tunes it out, committing herself to focusing on her and her baby’s health.
Whether the cause is noble or purely selfish, the end result is the same: doing nothing. Not that there’s much to be done, anyway, living thousands of miles away and being just one helpless person against a centuries-old conflict. The UN can’t even arrange a ceasefire, so what are ordinary citizens supposed to do?
Still, it bothered me to look away, and still does. I’ve managed to read a few reports of the atrocities as some sort of duty to my ancestral people, and it made me sick all over again. I could barely finish the article, but shared it on Threads anyway. Even if I can’t stomach it, the truth needs to be known. I’m glad that someone has borne witness and documented the suffering. But I feel like a hypocrite.
My pregnancy survived the first trimester, with Baby looking healthy and thriving. As I’ve struggled to do several times in life, I managed grief and joy together, knowing that keeping myself from enjoying the present does nothing to help anyone, but feeling guilty about it anyway. These are my people, after all, in culture if not in faith. I know they owe me nothing, but I feel like I owe them my attention, at the very least. I cannot save them – no solitary person can – but I can offer an imperfect witness.
I feel the first flutters of movement in my belly and wonder about the generational trauma I’m passing down to my little girl. She may have an easy childhood if I can help it, but she may not escape the ancestral gifts of depression and anxiety (and I will know to be on the lookout for signs of that). I wonder about the ways she will suffer later on, in ways that cannot be helped. She will inevitably encounter disappointment, loss, broken hearts from friendships and other relationships that didn’t prosper as she hoped. There is only so much I can do, as her mother, to protect her.
All that pales in comparison to the reality of bereaved mothers burying their murdered young in shallow graves. Mothers perishing with their young, found by Israeli officials in a position of embrace, because that was all they had left to offer at the moment.
Suddenly my thoughts of “suffering” feel ridiculous. I am starkly aware of my comfort, my privilege. I grieved my own dead baby in a comfortable suburban house, not from under rubble. She died of natural causes, not human cruelty. I feel hopelessly inadequate.
Many people comfort themselves with the assurance that they are good, that their hearts are generally in the right place. I can’t do that. Even without the doctrine of Original Sin, I am all too aware of the human inability to see beyond the rim of our own full containers, as we bustle from work to home to school and back again, horrified but distracted. Empathetic but numb. Wanting to help, but unable or unwilling because we all have someone we love in our intimate lives who demands that full attention.
There is not much left to offer overseas names and faces we see in a doomscroll on social media, but will never meet.
We are all hopelessly inadequate. All I know how to do is point to the Savior who promises to redeem every wrongdoing, knowing that this feels like an empty hope to those currently suffering. But that is all I have. It is everything. But in this moment, it too feels inadequate.
Photo by Benjamin R. on Unsplash
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