The-Six-Hundred-And-Something-Day-Year
A Midnight Reflection on a Year of Midnights
(Untitled, Marc Chagall)
To Whom It May Concern:
I’m tired. I’m so, so tired.
But I can’t sleep.
I’m so tired, but I can’t sleep.
Haven’t been able to sleep right all week.
Maybe I haven’t been able to sleep right all year.
All year?
Has it really been a year?
Six hundred and something days.
The-six-hundred-and-something-day-year.
If this year was a movie, that’s what I would call it.
But this six-hundred-and-something-day-year hasn’t been a movie – it’s been a marathon.
And there’s no end in sight.
Just more and more days, more and more days to add to this endless year.
Even when the hostages come home, this endless year still won’t be over.
Because this year didn’t start on October 7th. It started before, way before.
When people ask me, I tell them, “May 12, 2021.”
May 12, 2021 – that’s the day the third intifada began.
That’s when the intifada really went global. When it started to appear on everybody’s social media feeds, when you started to see which of your friends started sharing which slogans at which times.
That was when marchers started vandalizing buildings and terrorizing Jews in Europe.
It wasn’t long before then that there were the people driving around the Orthodox neighborhoods of London, screaming, “Kill the Jews, rape their wives, rape their daughters!”
Those people were eventually found, by the way.
And they were acquitted last week.
And last week was so exhausting I had completely forgotten about that until just now.
That’s how long this week has been.
And this year has been full of weeks like this.
But the truth is that I’m not telling the truth when I tell them that the third Intifada started in 2021 – I just do that for convenience.
The truth is that the third intifada started in 2014, that’s when it truly went global.
Only, we didn’t know it then.
If this past year has taught us that the universities have been completely captured by the the global intifada, then 2014 taught us that the media had been.
In 2014, three innocent Jewish boys were kidnapped and murdered, precipitating the war between Israel and Hamas.
However, no one would have ever known that watching the mainstream media.
I was only 15 at the time, but I remember the television screen so clearly: Israel, 50 – Palestinians, 2000.
The media covered the war like Israel was the Dream Team and Palestine was Angola – covering war casualties like the score in a basketball game.
At the time, I just thought it was the classically bad coverage that we have come to expect from the media.
But maybe it was something else.
Because it was not long after the war began that people were marching in Paris chanting, “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.”
It was not long after that a kosher super market was attacked in France.
Shortly after October 7th, the universities completely changed the narrative from the kidnapping and murder of innocent young people to the amount of devastation caused by Israel’s response.
Shortly after that, Jews were getting attacked at school.
Shortly after the 2014 War, the media completely changed the narrative from the kidnapping and murder of innocent young people to the amount of devastation caused by Israel’s response.
Shortly after that, Jews were getting attacked at kosher supermarkets.
The third intifada, the global intifada, has been going on for over a decade – it just went digital.
The way I understand the intifadas is that they were random acts of civilian violence in order to terrorize the Jewish nation into capitulating territory.
The first intifada killed hundreds of Jews and rewarded the attackers with the Oslo Accords and land in the West Bank.
The second intifada killed hundreds of Jews and rewarded the attackers with Gaza.
How many Jews will die in this intifada?
This intifada, the intifada so many of my former friends, classmates, and colleagues of mine have called for.
And the assassination and firebombing of Jews in broad daylight isn’t even headline news.
Oh G-d, it is dark.
So dark, and yet still I cannot sleep.
Over and over in my mind go my fears.
And over and over again once more.
I have enough faith to know that good will always prevail over evil, but I know enough history to know that that won’t be for a long time.
So we will add another day to this six-hundred-and-something-day-year, and then another, and another.
Until eventually, we will wake up one morning and realize we forgot to count the days, and a new year has begun.
That’s why the sages say – I shall await the coming of the Moshiach, every day, and, though he may delay, I shall wait for him everyday.
So what’s one more restless night in the six-hundred-and-something-day-year?
So Spread Some Love,
And Spread Some Light —
Am Yisrael Chai
~