We Walk Sightless Among the Miracles

Matthew Lippman reflects on 10/7, the end of his faith in the Diaspora, and a love for Israel he cannot fully explain.

Matthew Lippman

Editor’s Note: As soon as I read this piece by Matthew Lippman, I knew I had to include it in Judith Magazine. It’s the closest I’ve seen to an explanation of the unexplainable—the pull Israel has on the Diaspora, both before and after 10/7. — Howard Lovy

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I don’t even know what Israel is. I have never been there. I keep saying, I gotta get to Israel. Once my crazy vile grandfather said that the first time he went to Israel he cried when the plane touched down at Ben Gurion Airport. I thought, That’s the sanest thing you will ever say, badman. Israel is far away for me but it’s right inside of me. Since 10/7 I find myself very emotional at the most interesting and mundane moments. There was the time when I stopped the car next to Sudbury Reservoir and thought of Eden Yerushalmi. I swear she was levitating over the water in the Lotus Pose and I had to slap myself in the face and say out loud, Marc Chagall, like there was something there for me to reason with. There has been nothing to reason with since 10/7 when whatever reality I thought existed about being a Jew is no longer a reality. It’s all just duck and weave, look over my shoulder and dance. What I know more than anything I have known is that the single most powerful passion I feel these days is that I am a Jew and I will stand up in your face and tell you at every intersection, dinner party, gas pump that I am a Jew.

My daughter was given a yellow ribbon decal for the car by her Israeli friend, one of her best friends, for the car. I put it on my Prius. Here’s my fantasy: That some ignorant antisemite will deface it, and I will go find them, hunt them, and do what I have never done in my life—hit someone in the face with my fist. I apologize for the violence of the sentiment as I have been a scared pacifist my whole life but, as I have noted, things have gotten real.

And this is a big thing for me, but it goes way beyond me or you or us. It’s history. Shit has become real.

I will say this: Once, on a warm spring day in Park Slope, 100 years ago, I walked up President Street towards Prospect Park with my dear friend Rose. For some reason we were talking about Israel, which was weird, because Rose and I never talked about Israel or being Jewish. Normal conversation for us was about love and Mick Jagger and the power of solitude and the joy of dumplings at The Excellent Dumpling House in Chinatown. We often held hands and watched the trees and loved the grime spit filth of Brooklyn. But on this day, we were having a conversation about whether or not Israel should be Israel. I had done some thinking on this question and the question of the state of The Jew, The Jewish People. I remember the sun on my face that day and the million-dollar granite brownstones of the neighborhood and said, with all my little Lippman hubris, I think that the natural and best state of the Jewish People is The Diaspora. There was something about nomadic presence that had always felt organic to me about being a Jew although I was just a cultural Jew, an upper West Side bagel eating Jew from the neighborhood with all the other Bob Dylan/Joan Baez singing Jews. I was born in 1965 to Carol and Mel who were not interested in the observant and ritualistic avenues and tide pools of being a Jew. So, who was I to say? In my naming of that wonder and beauty of The Diaspora, Rose responded with joy, agreeing, and it was a moment. One that I have thought about, one that has stayed deep inside my DNA, for all these years. The Diaspora. The wandering Jew. Rose and I wandering around Park Slope looking for something that was probably right there in front of us, but has always felt far away.

What is Israel?

I don’t know. What I do know is that it is most certainly not The Diaspora. At this point in my life, 40 years past that moment with Rose, I will say this, I am no longer interested in wandering. I understand that the whole experiment of Israel is kind of rotten now in the face of Gaza. Really, though, I am not smart enough to talk about the history of Israel or the geo-political machinations of the region. I am not sophisticated enough to comment on the Intifadas or the Oslo Accord or the nuances that make Israel’s place in The Middle East so complicated and textured. My knowledge of the Palestinians and their history, their claim on the land, is non-existent to minimal. But what I do know, unequivocally, is that I no longer believe in the power of The Diaspora. Israel must be. For whatever reasons that can be articulated and not, it must be for the Jew. For the Jews. For the Jewish people and for me, even though I couldn’t explain why. What I do know is that after 10/7 my whole modality shifted and, in this shift, I feel guilt, I feel bad, because it came at the expense of all that death and horror and murder and rape and hostage taking.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I was headed there anyway in my heart, if you want to get all sentimental about it, but it’s true. And maybe this is a love story, or, a romance story.

Here’s the thing. Rose and I were a kind of boyfriend and girlfriend thing back then but really, we were just tortured lovers. When the torture was over I met a woman from Greece named Helen and we fired up a romance and she moved in and we bought an expensive bed and cooked spaghetti and rosemary chicken on Thursdays and Tuesdays, got take out on Friday nights, went to The Angelika to see arty films, she smoked Marlboros in the staircase of our third floor walk-up, I drank martinis and red wine. One Sunday while she was at work and I was alone in our fancy bed in the apartment in Cobble Hill reading The New York Times, I came upon the wedding announcement page. There were all these couples with names like Singer and Goldblum and Rozenfeld and Bloom, and I fell off the bed. I wanted that. I wanted to marry a Jew. I wanted to stop fucking around with shiksas, with love, in whatever shape or form it took, and get hitched, settle down, be with, a Jewish woman. And that was that. Helen and I parted ways and my walk out of The Diaspora had begun.

Israel freaks me out. Israelis don’t. I am not sure what the difference is, but I do know this. I fell in love with Rachel a few years after Helen. Rachel is a rabbi. Rachel is the beginning of the love story or the end of the love story. Rachel loves Israel like Israel is a person. I understand this love. I feel it for New York. For Rachel, Israel is part of her body and her insides. It’s more than a place. It’s a constitution of being and whether she’s in The Whole Foods Market buying broccoli or sitting at our table with the kids, it’s always right there. It’s a blessing we are married, and I can say that with her, no matter the bumps, issues, wells of darkness, paths of goldenrod, there is always Israel, a place that is not The Diaspora.

The point is that I wonder how you hold Israel in your heart and body. For Israelis it’s just home. For two years I taught English at Maimonides School in Brookline, MA. Many of my colleagues were Israeli. One of them, whom I will call Ya’akov, worked in intelligence in Israel as a younger man. Ya’akov lost 25 brothers on 10/7, they were his friends. I don’t know the circumstances of those deaths, but I do know that Ya’akov did not talk much for three months after 10/7. Before 10/7, he was teaching me Hebrew. He told me: If you really want to learn Hebrew, think about being an athlete who runs up and down the empty steps of the stadium. He also said, If you really want to learn Hebrew, go to Israel.

Once I asked Ya’akov if he wanted to go back. He told me he couldn’t afford to return. He told me that if he went back, he’d move to the desert and make goat cheese in a cave. I did not quite understand how this process worked but it sounded beautiful. What I did understand was that the land was everything for him, that he wanted to be back inside of the land, with his people that were my people and not my people. It’s true, I will always have so much love for Ya’akov, and, at the same time, I will never know what to do with it even though we are that far apart and maybe that is what Israel is. Loving something so deeply because it has always been inside of you even though you’ve never been there.

It’s an Israel situation. Every day I think about going to Israel, of having that feeling that my insane grandfather had when he landed in Tel Aviv. Crying on that ground would be a beautiful thing for me and I have no idea why. There could be a thousand words I might say about it, write about it, but none of them would do the movement inside justice, like writing this rumination on what it means to feel the feelings about being a Jew. It is there the way it has always been there. It’s that thing that happens to me when I am in the sanctuary and we are all singing Avinu Malkeinu and my body lurches open, shakes in intervals, displaces and places, puts me in the middle of a thing that I can’t name. It’s a mystical vibration, maybe, and it’s grounded in the earth at the same time, maybe. It’s a love story with no players or partners and that’s the mystery of it—the unspeakable thing that is love.

Ahavat Yisrael.

And maybe all Israel is is a geographical place rooted in a deep history that puts a name and a face to that feeling. I don’t know. What I do know is that I always cry in synagogue whenever I go to synagogue. I honestly don’t know if I will ever get there. I honestly feel like it’s already inside of me. Perhaps I am afraid to land in Israel because of what might happen to my body and spirit. Perhaps it’s the fear of the feeling. Because it’s a lot easier to be in The Diaspora, with no home, wandering around the hills of Massachusetts and New York and Iowa. It’s a lot easier to be on President Street with Rose chatting about an idea or partnered up with Helen in Brooklyn who knows nothing of Avinu Malkeinu (no judgement). It’s certainly a lot easier to work at a school that is not named Maimonides because there are no ties that bind and that’s the thing. Rabbi Rachel speaks of this all the time, in many different ways, about her desire for that state, for the state of Israel, and to be in it all the time. She’s not afraid. There is no fear.

There is a line that I read every week in the Reform siddur that lives on the pages that house the Amidah. It reads, Days pass and the years vanish and we walk sightless among the miracles. It wakes me up in to Shabbat. Post 10/7 it rock-n-rolls me into Shabbat. I read it over and over again standing in front of the Torah. I am not a religious man, but I am a deeply felt man and the miracles are everywhere and they are the mystery. None of this makes any sense to me and perhaps that is the point. That none of it can be calibrated, put in boxes, talked about, whined about, whistled about. It’s the fire of history, of family, of deep horror and sorrow and equally deep joy and celebration. It makes me crazy and calms me down, being Jewish, and for the life of me, there is still no way to express this love story that is only thus-- a love story--that will lead me into the fear and soon enough, onto a plane, and this, dear friends, is why I will buy my ticket.

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Matthew Lippman is the author of seven poetry collections. His latest collection, We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On (2024), is published by Four Way Books. His
previous collection, Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful (2020), is published by Four Way
Books. It was the recipient of the 2018 Levis Prize. In 2027 his next collection, Cry
Baby Cry, will be published by Four Way Books.

Five tiny delights

• Iced tea

• New York Mets baseball

• Listening to the wind in the trees

• Silence

• Saturday morning walks with the dog

Five tiny Jewish delights

• Building the sukkah

• Hineni

• The Amidah

• Making challah

• Shabbat