“Before October 7th, I might have simply noted the Jewish detail in King’s story and moved on. Now the mention of Judaism in literature feels charged in a way it never used to. The guard goes up. The scanning begins. You start looking for danger before danger has even presented itself.”
The siren goes off, and I imagine it: my family and friends rushing to their bomb shelters, waiting for the all-clear, hearing the explosive booms overhead, and praying that the walls hold and the building stays standing.
I thought I would be excited to move on. But my mixed emotions at changing the decor that has been my daily view for two years remind me that the street I live on can’t just go back to before October 7th.
That was just me not understanding technology.
We stood, 290,000 strong, in song and prayer, in tears and heartbreak, but most of all in our collective hope.
In my garden today, the dying sunflowers painfully reminded me of my friend Miriam and the gold that is fading in front of me echoes that larger loss.
It’s interesting what we attach ourselves to and the meaning we ascribe to objects that somehow, over years, become important not in functionality but just in being.
If we can find commonality in a lightsaber, a dragon, or a sorting hat, maybe, for that one moment, we can forget our differences.
I posted the video of Binny’s speech that he gave at the Team Lifeline Pasta Party on his Facebook page, but the sound quality was poor and people asked for copies of the speech. So with Binny’s permission, I am posting it here. I edited it a bit to include some of the lines he ad-libbed (though some I know I missed), but this is all his.
The following originally appeared on HuffPost. To read it there, click here. So I ran a half-marathon a few months ago, and when you do something like that the first question people ask is, “So are you a runner now?”… Read More ›