ESSAY #11: Tribe of the Sun
If you're still in exile, too, we can find each other in the wilderness
“Every time I thought of anger, or fear or revenge, I breathed it out. I tried to think of what I was grateful for — the bush that hid me so well that even birds landed on it, the birds that were still singing, the sky that was so blue.”
– Maya Alper, survivor of the Tribe of Nova Sukkot rave massacre
I don't know what it would be like to dance all night high and half-naked at a rave in the desert with a thousand other brown-haired, brown-eyed Jewish flower children until, as the sun dawned on a bright and clear indigo and periwinkle day, Hamas warriors slipped over the horizon on motorcycles, and slid down from the sky on paragliders, and started killing everybody with their machine guns—but in this time of out-loud rehashing, once again, all the many dimensions and nuances of “Us” versus “Them,” getting ready, as most of us probably feel all of us need to, for global apocalyptic war, I wish to reach out to such people with my heart and feel as much “Us” with them as possible—knowing, of course, that not actually being with them in the flesh—either as another carcass like theirs, traced by asymmetrical halos of blood-carnations in the dust, or as a surviving shoulder to weep on back home in Ashkelon, Nazareth, or Tel Aviv—this will be an exercise in childish mythopoesis only, as perhaps it always must be, if absent in the body: We live inside our own inner worlds, inside fragile bodies of dust where the distance to the physical horizon just walking around on the vastness of Earth's surface is no more than three miles, even on a clear day, but where the circles of our empathy are even tighter—and in them, we've never seen the sun.