Leakage

I’m leaking again.   

Some days everything holds together. Focused. Purposeful. Organized. Other days it feels like everything is leaking - or, to be more precise, like I’m leaking. Not the dramatic leakage of a burst pipe, sprouting geysers of water. It’s more like beads of sweat percolating up to the skin’s surface. Or tiftuf, the steady drip of water through thin cracks in pipes or from troubled skies. Or, sometimes, little rivulets, first hot then cool, on the cheek.

It’s happened a few times now, this odd sensation of leakage.

There was a day in mid-November, during the period when Hezbollah was still launching hundreds of missiles at Israel. On that day my oldest, a still new-ish driver, was supposed to take the car to drive to Tel Aviv. Rain was expected. He’d get stuck in traffic. He’d have to drive in the dark. I knew he hadn’t been sleeping enough. Awake with my anxieties early that morning, I allowed myself at breakfast to remind him to pump his brakes; be careful of big puddles; drive defensively. He barely hid his exasperated eye-rolling.

A typical teenage-parent dynamic of anxiety-pushback. But so much harder because of the war, and I also reminded him what to do if there are rockets and sirens while he’s driving, and (I can’t hold back) of the fact that some weeks prior a boy (17-years-old, just like him, but I refrained from mentioning the age) died in a car crash when sirens warning of incoming rockets had gone off. He nodded. This time he didn’t roll his eyes.

Would that my warnings were talismans able to ward off danger. All that day my wariness collected in pools on my skin until he was safely home.

That night a friend who lives in Tel Aviv, which has experienced far more sirens and rocket threats than we do in Jerusalem, told me how her son sent her a video of him and his friends sprinting through the park in frantic search of shelter when sirens had gone off while they were playing sports. Though she’s accustomed to sirens and stresses, the video – which she viewed after the fact, knowing full well that he was just fine - undid her.

These past few days have been days of steady leakage. Which is odd because earlier this week someone asked me how I was, and I was struck by just how fine I felt. Together. Calm. Normal, almost. But by evening, arriving at a community gathering of sorts, I felt less than fine. “How are you?” from people I don’t see regularly thrust an unexpected mirror in front of me, reflecting everything back to me, piercing pinprick holes in the thin membrane which conceals and contains - at least to some extent, most of the time - the raw ever-present pain pulsing just below the surface, so that it oozed up in pussy droplets which then clung to me. But I didn’t have to pretend that all was fine, because so many of us have felt some version of this for the last 440+ days.

And I felt it the following day when walking home from the train. My middle son and then a friend messaged me in rapid succession that it had just been reported that Bibi was on his way to Cairo for the hostage/ceasefire negotiations. For a few moments I envisioned how all the hostages would return, and the war would end, and we could start the work of repair and healing and re-building, because, after all, if Bibi was actually flying down there for these negotiations then it must signal something big.

Then my mind collided with the leaden fact that whatever might happen would never be in time to save Hersh or the others. And just then both my son and friend wrote to say that the media had issued a correction: Bibi hadn’t traveled to Cairo. I chastised myself for the foolishness of my hopes. Because it seems far more likely that this will drag on for too-much longer, without a decisive conclusion to any of it. The streets were dark and cold enough that no one paid attention to the inner turmoil now streaking my cheeks.

I stopped by at the shuk to pick up ground coffee. A framed picture of a young man was propped up by the cash register. Had he been a soldier who died? But there was no name or indications as such. Then I saw the thin faded yellow ribbon crisscrossing the upper right hand corner of the picture frame. “Who’s this?” I asked the worker when he handed me my coffee, gesturing towards the picture. “Oh… he used to work here... He’s hostage in Gaza,” he explained. He didn’t know the young man’s name - “I’m new,” he apologized – but he did know that there had been no news or sign of life about him since October 7. Neither of us needed to say more, and as I made my way through the chaos of the shuk back onto the street, I could feel the swelling in my chest push itself through the pores of my skin.

The next morning it happened again when I heard of a young man who had just taken his own life. His friend had been killed while fighting in Gaza; they had served together in the same army unit. He had been unable to contain whatever pain / fears / I-don’t-know-what emotions which had haunted him. Heartbreak ripping through another circle of family and friends over another victim of this war. But this time, as my fingers swiped at the tears, managing only to smear them so that the winter air felt like a thin sheet of ice flung across my whole cheek, I wasn’t alone, since this was over coffee with a friend at a café. (A new café actually, which is only worth noting because so many places have closed over the past year, due to the war of course).

Like birds making endless circles in the sky, my mind keeps looping back to the question of how on earth we will possibly be able to heal from all the traumas of this hydra-headed war? I see how broad and deep the impact is for Israelis. I can’t even begin to fathom how Gazans are getting through day by day, so many without even the semblance of true shelter or comfort. And there so many others in communities throughout the region, the world as this war ripples outward…

What therapeutic processes can conceivably be undertaken for all the pain flooding us? We’ll need engineers who can redirect these floods into reservoirs and resources for good. Plumbers who can somehow repair all the cracks and the brokenness. Doctors to probe, carefully, until the raw wound is identified, dressed and healed on the souls of so many millions and of our collectives. Teachers able to teach towards living together. And, most of all, leaders who comprehend the grave consequences of all this damage and will do what’s needed for all of us change course.