Sit Shiva with Me

A couple of days ago, I opened up a form on my website to Sit Shiva with Me for Israel. It’s an invitation to anyone who was raised in a community with Zionist beliefs and is now contending with how the narratives they were told about Israel relate to their identity as a Jewish person.

My goal in doing this is to create a space that I don’t think exists anywhere else: a gray area. Everyone reading this article is familiar with the date October 7, 2023. Some people reading this will use the word “genocide” and others will use the words “conflict.” What I noticed since that date was the virtue signaling through language. If you say this word, you’re one of us. If you say that word, you’re one of them.

Then came the other phrases: self-hating Jew, anti-Zionism vs anti-semitism, indigenous vs colonizer. I found myself even more confused and afraid and unable to hide behind any of the terms.

I found myself in the middle, trying to land somewhere that felt authentic. I grew up using the phrase “Israel-Palestine Conflict” because everyone around me used that phrase and every teacher who taught me anything I knew had used that phrase. I genuinely engaged with the concept of conflict, too. I had attended seminars, and sessions. I had met with people on both “sides.” I thought I had deeply engaged with the topic. It wasn’t until I had a conversation with a new friend in 2024 who asked, “you keep using the word conflict. Why do you consider this a conflict and not a genocide?” that I realized I had no answer. I blubbered an apology and quickly refined my language.

With my Jewish friends who were defending Israel, while I related very much to the pain they felt, I found myself unable to engage with them at all. I couldn’t force them to grieve because I was too focused on managing my own pain. I did not understand how a symbol of family, community, heritage, safety, and belonging could be considered by others as propaganda or terrorism. I was raised to consider all anti-Zionist Jews as self-hating Jews, but then I was also being told that anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-semitism. It didn’t make sense, and I couldn’t grieve with the people who were focused on protecting themselves.

When I say grief I mean grieving the concept of Israel — of home. Growing up in a religious community, Israel did not only mean the biblical concept but the real, actual place. The State of Israel. Growing up in San Diego, Israel felt closer to me than New Jersey. It was a hop, skip, and a jump. I had family and friends who lived there. It was like a piece of me was there, always.

So, when I saw my friends defend the State of Israel even when the news and facts clearly depicted a modern-day genocide, I understood why they’d stand their ground and why they’d defend their concept of home. I understood, and I felt unable to engage, because my own grief stood in the way.

And so I felt separated, fragmented. A piece of me left behind with my Jewish community and a piece of me in the hands of activists fighting for the freedom of innocent people. I started to get better at having conversations about Israel with pro-Palestine friends, and it started to get easier to hide my background.

In one conversation with a friend, they shared “to me, there is no Israel,” and my immediate response was to apologize for even using the word, but inside I felt a piece of me clam up in pain. The dissonance of meeting a new friend and hearing those words and knowing that there is a part of me that can’t live in the black and white because the feelings can’t be explained — they simply need to be seen.

Over the last few years I have refined what it meant to be out in the world: to chameleon depending on who I was around. To some, Israel is not top of mind. To others, advocating for Palestine is at the forefront. To me, the pain was internal and persistent. I would wake up having dreamt about Israel or I’d sit and watch the sunset crying tears of anger and despondence. Yet, I rarely found people with whom I could honestly share the complexities of my experience.

Don’t mistake me for saying the complexities of the situation. Because on either side, I hear that it’s not “complex.” I mean the complexities of my situation. The fact that I had Holocaust survivors speak to me before I was allowed to drive a car or that I had Israeli flags in my hand before I had ever worn a pair of pants. My entire sense of safety and belonging, of ancestral and generational stability, all hinged on signaling to my people that I was with them. But if I wasn’t with them, was I against them?

So, I’m starting a new chapter, and I’m making space for a new kind of conversation. In true, life-coaching fashion, I’m taking this long-held conversation and I’m giving it a flair: going deeper into the whole person. Getting out of the facts and into ourselves. We already know enough. We know about “nuance,” we know all the catch phrases. What we haven’t talked about is the doubt and confusion and how our intuition is acting up and telling us that something is fundamentally wrong. We haven’t talked about our Inner Critics who are trying to keep us safe by calling us self-hating Jews.

I want to sit Shiva, the Jewish practice of mourning. Shiva is a time where the person who mourns sits and talks about what they lost. And I think for people who were raised Zionist in America to truly be free, we need to sit and talk about what we’ve lost.

Whether that’s a part of our identity, our sense of belonging, or our own integrity in ignoring atrocities for the sake of keeping our place in our community. Whatever it is, I invite you to Sit Shiva With Me. Submit an essay, a poem, a piece of art, and I’ll post it on my Instagram. Give others the chance to open themselves up in the gray area. I think we’re ready to hear each other.

If you’d like to go deeper into what reconnecting with your intuition looks like and navigating a change in identity, check out my offerings or book a discovery call.