What's love got to do with it?

Well. Everything.

Today, four newspapers in the UK including two that contributed to the status quo will print that the UK's antisemitism is worse than it's been in 40 years.

Today, a policeman in Scotland told a Jew to hide his Star of David to prevent any trouble, instead of dealing with the people promoting antisemitism and making it unsafe for this man to be outside.

Also today, in the US, congresswoman Rashida Tlaib voted against condemning rape by Hamas on the floor.

Today in Australia, the front cover of The Australian names a group of influential antisemites, including – finally – Clementine Ford, who have doxxed 600 Jewish people, and ruined their livelihoods. Some of these targeted Jewish people have abandoned their homes.

I guess tonight I'm supposed to write something about how people are now being targeted in Northern Israel by rocket fire from Hezbollah, and I truly want to do this because I visited the most dangerous parts of Israel two weekends ago and narrowly missed a barrage of rocket fire on both days. But I just can't do it right now. The heels of my feet are screaming. The lids of my eyes are burning. I cannot remember which number of head cold I’m currently fighting off. I feel guilty saying all this while thinking of the freezing IDF troops I met a few weekends ago on the Lebanon border, who can't afford to be tired or hungry or cold. But I’m saying it because I am a human.

I feel guilty all the time. I feel like I don't do enough. I feel like it's impossible to do enough. They're thousands of years ahead of us. There's not enough time or space in the world. But when – on Sunday night – a Super Bowl ad aired that cost $7m, I felt something worse than exhaustion. I felt anguish and shame. This advert was supposed to educate the masses about antisemitism. Instead it apologized for existing and featured a Jew helping a Muslim clean up the word “Islamophobia” on a wall. I realized that not only am I working against antisemites, I'm working against Jews who can't get the messaging right. Too embarrassed to tell people that we don’t deserve to be hate-crime’d without making it about everyone else’s hate crimes.

And what’s more: I can't do this night after night by myself. That's how they win. That is exactly how they win.

They win when we become what they want us to be; consumed by this to such an extent that we no longer recognize who we are, and we're torn from our own worlds, our own joys, our own people - Jewish or not. I cannot reconcile who I've become with who I once was – only a few years ago. The two realities are in such stark opposition to one another. My alarm on my phone used to say - “have fun today”. And I did. Every day. What's fun about this? Nothing.

They want us to be sad and distressed, so much so that we forget how to live, lose how to relate, and become so locked within our four walls that we can no longer imagine a future outside of them – and this. They want us to lose our identity to this. Our identities are a patchwork of a people. We are not all one and the same, designed to fight an onslaught of deplorable hate. We cannot just become Jews, and only Jews. We are Jews, and we are so much more than that. I am so much more than that. The more they force us into this one-dimensional mold, the more dehumanized we become, the less anyone will know our hearts. How can I be all of me, when I all I do is fight. Fighting for survival can rob us of years of our lives, and then when we wake up from it, we are too depleted to move forward, and too far away from who we once were before all we did was fight. It’s a recipe for breakdown.

This morning, I read Kristen Stewart's Rolling Stone cover story. She lives about a mile up the road from me. Sometimes I see her at a coffee store next to my apartment. I read about her life, which is enviable to any onlooker, for so many obvious dumb reasons that I don’t envy at all. No. The part I envied the most was the fact she wakes up with her best friend every day, and makes cool art with her. Art about anything. Stories about anything. Anything in the world. What freedom. I thought – Wow, that must be nice. It must be nice. And why shouldn't we have such simple freedoms too? Why can't we be just like everyone else? I’m not going to let my trending hate name prevent me from doing what I do best - writing about everything I know, not just this. It's been four months. Soon it will be five months, and then six, and then a year. That's a lot of time to be in a war, foregoing the fruits of life, forgetting the small joys that make a person smile, and the purpose we find for ourselves as individuals relating to a world much bigger than just us. It’s a lot of time to spend disintegrating every night into a puddle of tears. Olympic gold medal-winning puddles of tears.

We cry because we love. They laugh at us because they hate. That's the difference. But we have to feel love. We have to know love. We have to practice love. For each other and life. That is scary, especially now in our collective state of vulnerability. I'm terrified. It’s more comfortable to blame myself for where I find myself now and imagine connections some far way away out of reach and undeserved. Imagining it for 10,000 hours at least. Falling down rabbit holes and rooms of possibilities. Tastes of the unknown. Notes of honey and smoke and a new dawn. What a life – to be selected by a world of eyes and hands and souls. Well we deserve it. We deserve all of that life in our veins. We deserve to laugh again. We deserve to dance again. We deserve to have fun again. That's what's so incredible about being in Israel. Israelis haven't forgotten to live. Many of us in the Diaspora have. We have adopted a ghetto mindset. Break out of that ghetto mindset. Before the trauma traps you there, and your heart turns to stone.

When I met hostages in Israel and looked into their eyes, I saw no life. I saw their families reaching out to them and finding that strangers had snatched the bodies of their loved ones. I hate spelling out these words but some of the returned hostages died in Gaza. Their souls died there. The people who returned cannot communicate with the people they love like they used to, and it frustrates them too, because they don't even recognize who they are now. This is a tragedy for our people beyond words, and it cannot and will not be the collective tragedy of many more of our people once again. We cannot let our souls die on October 7. That's the biggest fight of all.

I wish I was an asshole who could be cold and short, and uncaring. But I'm not. And it takes a lot of energy to not be an asshole in this world. But the truth is that I can't be anyone's hero if I'm not my own. So I have to take some time to remember myself. I won't be long. I might be a week. I might be two weeks. I have no idea. But I hope that you'll wait for me. There’s one thing you can depend on with me: I always come back.